Films this week 3/24 – 3/26/2023
by Gary Palmucci | 24th March 2023 | Gary's Corner
With a new baseball season on the horizon, you might say that New Plaza Cinema is swinging for the fences this weekend, starting with Sunday afternoon’s screening of Marcel Ophuls’ epic 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has eloquently called it:
“One of the few movies that can rightly be said to have changed the course of history…(Ophuls) reconstructs the history of the Second World War as experienced in France, from the German invasion through the liberation, with an emphasis on daily life under the Occupation…by way of extensive interviews, which he films with a wide-ranging set of participants including French resistance fighters, collaborators with the Nazis, unrepentant former German officers…The movie’s prime audacity was to refute France’s self-serving myth of having been a nation of resisters. As a result, the film, though intended for broadcast, was barred from French television until 1981.”
Ironically, this week’s NY Times features extensive coverage of both France’s Resistance past and its current turmoil, to which The Sorrow and the Pity, in this digital reissue with upgraded picture and English subtitles, is an indispensable bookend.
A German drama, also new to our schedule this week, explores another corner of the vast WW2 canvas. In The Forger, a 21-year old Jewish man escapes the Berlin Gestapo and commences to save lives via his genius at forging passports. But his breathtaking sang-froid masks the mounting turmoil in his own soul. RogerEbert.com’s Monica Castillo wrote:
“Star Louis Hofmann (featured with Ralph Fiennes in New Plaza audience favorite The White Crow) is a charming lead, with the charisma to change gears mid-scene, alter his tone and body language within the same breath. When things inevitably get dark, he’s able to carry the film using his expressive eyes, bringing to the screen a character who looks as if he’s already seen too much in his young life. ”
This weekend will also feature encore screenings of the Julian Assange doc Ithaka (following last weekend’s sold out show); the Oscar-winning Telegu action-and-musical dynamo RRR, whose attendance keeps growing with each screening; and our perennially popular Living, Turn Every Page and The Quiet Girl.
As always, we recommend early, online ticket purchase…
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema