Films this week 2/27/2026 to 3/5/26
by Gary Palmucci | 27th February 2026 | Gary's Corner
New Plaza Cinema’s tribute to costume designer Ruth Morley concludes this weekend with a unique pair of ‘double-features.’ Saturday evening will lead off with My Knees Were Jumping: Stories of the Kindertransports; in her 1996 NY Times review Janet Maslin wrote:
“Melissa Hacker’s documentary is about the Jewish children who were saved by emigrating to Britain (from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia) 60 years ago. Since Ms. Hacker is the daughter of one such emigre — the costume designer Ruth Morley, an Academy Award nominee for The Miracle Worker—she approaches her poignant subject matter in a particularly earnest, intimate way.”
Melissa will do some Q&A after the screening, and then we’ll move on to a very rare theatrical showing of a feature her mother worked on, 1981’s The Chosen from the Chaim Potok novel. Jeremy Kagan (who’s generously provided us with a new intro) directs Maximilian Schell, Rod Steiger and Robby Benson in a coming of age story set in 1940’s Williamsburg. Melissa Hacker and production designer Stuart Wurtzel will discuss the film afterwards.
On Sunday afternoon, our own film historian Max Alvarez will join Melissa and I for a screening of The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel, and of course costumed by Ruth Morley. The 1940-50s Hollywood Blacklist portrayed in the film is a specialty – indeed, a passion – of Max’s.
We’ll discuss The Front before-and-after, then proceed to a screening of Melissa’s My Knees Were Jumping. This promises to be a pair of very special evenings.
We’re also pleased to be presenting the first upper west side screening of The President’s Cake, which has perhaps been a bit overlooked in an excellent year for international cinema. In his Critic’s Pick review, the NY Times’ Ben Kenigsberg describes this tale – set in 1990, the waning days of Saddam Hussein’s regime – of a young schoolgirl who’s given a very unusual, and fraught assignment under the watchful eyes of her teacher and relatives:
“While regional generalizations are probably unfair, The President’s Cake, written and directed by the Iraq-raised filmmaker Hasan Hadi, has already won comparisons to child’s-eye classics of Iranian cinema like Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, another portrait of a girl dealing with intransigent, sometimes frightening adults….it’s a striking, mature debut.”
We’ll be celebrating Black History Month on Saturday with two films: a reprise screening of Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round , the recent vivid documentary chronicling a mostly untold story of the early civil rights movement, with Q&A from its film editor Ann Collins; and A Man Called Adam, another rarely screened, 1967 drama starring Sammy Davis Jr (always underrated as a dramatic actor) as a jazz trumpeter struggling with personal and professional demons. The supporting cast includes Louis Armstrong, Ossie Davis, Cicely Tyson, Mel Torme and Peter Lawford, and we’ll be joined afterwards by jazz (and jazz-in-the-movies) historian Wayne Winborne.
For some time now our shorts film programmer Michael Jacobsohn has been talking up to me a doc called Jimmy in Saigon, about a filmmaker’s investigation of his older brother’s 1972 death in Vietnam, near the end of America’s decade-long immersion. It’s a story that traverses multiple continents, lifestyles and memories, and director Peter McDowell will visit us on Sunday to present it in person.
Michael’s own documentary, The Cornelia Street Cafe in Exile was an unfortunate ‘scratch’ in last Sunday’s snowstorm, but will be rescheduled—probably in May.
Holdovers this weekend include the Oscar nominees Cutting Through Rocks ( a remarkable word of mouth success here) and Sentimental Value; Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil in A Private Life (advance purchase strongly recommended) and now entering its sixth month, SHTTL with, of course a Q&A by its tireless leading man, Moshe Lobel. man, Moshe Lobel.