Films This Week 4/02/31

by Gary Palmucci | 2nd April 2021 | Gary's Corner

Hello everyone. As we move forward into a second year of Virtual Cinema “exhibition” our highlights remain the trio of multiple Oscar nominees — Minari (our top ticket seller this past year), Another Round, and Collective.

Also, this week will be the final one for M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity from Zeitgeist Films.

Regardless of the pace of progress, the full reopening of New York’s arthouse cinemas ultimately takes, it’s clear from the recent comments of two of our colleagues — friendly competitors — MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center, that a Virtual Cinema option will remain in place even when their screens are back at full capacity. We expect that New Plaza will follow a similar path, as well as keeping our increasingly popular lectures and talk backs.

We’re curious to hear from any of our members who’ve recently ventured back to “live” NY cinema screenings. I had my own first experience last week after not having seen a film in a theatre since Claude Lelouch’s The Best Years of a Life back on March 7, 2020.

I opted for a matinee 70mm screening of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet at the Village East downtown. There were perhaps a dozen widely-spaced patrons in the 800-seat main auditorium. It had been completely full on my last visit — opening night of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood back in July 2019. How long ago that now seems.

Most of us have sat in near-empty theatres at some point, and before long I was getting comfortably re-acclimated to the big screen experience, with excellent projection and sound, despite director Nolan’s baffling predilection for muffling key lines of narrative dialogue in his dense sound mix.

I was happy to simply take in Tenet’s half-mad majesty on a familiar canvas. But afterwards, walking down Second Avenue something didn’t — at least yet — feel quite right. Perhaps it was the sadness I experienced at reading of the passing of beloved French director Bertrand Tavernier. But I think it was more likely a semi-conscious realization that the world had somehow changed in a year, and that it may take some time — and at least a few more screenings — to regain that old comfort level, that magical feeling of being in a room of fellow spectators with the lights going down.

I’m going back to another movie this Saturday night. I’ll let you know how it goes…

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema