Films this week 3/22 to 3/24/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 21st March 2024 | Gary's Corner
Another New Plaza Cinema packed weekend of screenings and personal appearances awaits us. After last Sunday’s rapturous debut screening of Remembering Gene Wilder, we’ll be joined on Friday and Saturday afternoon by director Ron Frank. He’ll be accompanied on Saturday by veteran SNL writer-producer Alan Zweibel.
Also on Friday, in a special collaboration with the Latin American Film Center of NY, we’ll be offering a very rare showing of the 1976 Mexican classic Canoa – A Shameful Memory, a fictional chronicle of the late-1960s deaths of a group of university employees, which tragically mirrors similar, more recent events in that convulsed nation. Oscar-winning Mexican directors Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro are both passionate advocates of this film. A discussion with our co-hosts will follow the screening.
The legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) has long had a secure perch in the pantheon of film scorers, with over 400 diverse features and TV series to his credit. As the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis put it in her recent review of the new documentary Ennio,
“If you’ve watched a movie in the last half century there’s a good chance that you’ve heard music by Morricone…who helped define films as we know and hear them.”
But this rich, teeming portrait — screening on Sunday — by Giuseppe Tornatore, whose Cinema Paradiso and many other features were scored by the Maestro, reveals even more of his huge body of life’s work — jazz, classical and pop music arrangements (including the legendary “Se Telefonando” by Mina Mazzini), original, atonal compositions, and ambitious classical suites.
His work has inspired countless movie lovers to dig deeper into cinema and its soundtrack history — including me. If we have time in my intro, I’ll relate a “Don Quixote” Morricone anecdote of my own.
This weekend’s encore screenings include The Teachers’ Lounge, the rollicking Hundreds of Beavers (family friendly!), Oscar-winners Anatomy of a Fall and 20 Days in Mariupol and the 2023 Cannes Camera d’or winner (and NY Times Critic’s Pick) from Vietnam, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.
Another Sunday encore, Heaven Stood Still: The Incarnations of Willy DeVille, is sold out, as is its upcoming April 20 screening. But don’t despair — we’re planning additional screenings on the weekend of April 26-28. Here’s a doc that shows every sign of becoming, as its director Larry Locke noted last weekend, “a residency title” — not unlike Make Me Famous, which is also returning (along with its filmmakers, of course) on April 7th.
Finally, we’ve had to again reschedule Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, this time to Saturday, April 6th at 12:15 pm. Tickets will go on sale next week. Indispensable Scorsese biographer — and consultant on the production — Mary Pat Kelly will join me for an after-discussion, which I”m certain will be worth the wait!
Gary Palmucci. Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema