Gary's Corner

 

This year’s Cannes Film Festival is about a month away, and the first “Official Selection” titles will be announced next week. In the meantime, many of last year’s highlights are still making their way to American screens, and New Plaza Cinema is adding a pair of them to this week’s lineup.

“…like most of their films, it is a suspense thriller about moral conscience, one that takes place in and around a gray, Belgian city. There, two young African migrants are struggling to make a home in a world in which nearly every human exchange is transactional and carries the threat of betrayal.” 

And no less a world-class cineaste than Martin Scorsese recently wrote, “Tori & Lokita is one of the most devastating cinematic experiences I’ve had in a long time. I’ve always admired the way that the Dardennes brothers make movies – their mastery is inseparable from their spiritual and ethical commitment to their characters, trying to make their way through an unforgiving world.”  

After an ongoing, two-month run downtown (and an appearance on the Oscar International Film “shortlist”) we’re also bringing the acclaimed Return to Seoul to the Upper West Side. In another “Critic’s Pick,” the NYT’s Amy Nicholson described it as:

“a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house. The first-time actor Park Ji-Min delivers a full-bodied performance as Frédérique, a reckless 25-year-old adoptee born in South Korea and raised in Paris who books a flight to her birthplace on a whim.” Her return launches a years-long reckoning with both blood relatives and the many men she connects with – in encounters hard and wild – along the way.

By popular demand we’re giving final screenings to the 1970s French classics The Sorrow and the Pity, and Francois Truffaut’s transcendent Day For Night, augmented by our long-running Turn Every Page, The Quiet Girl, Ken Loach’s penetrating documentary The Spirit of ’45 and in the final two weeks of its historic run here, Bill Nighy in Living, in an open-captioned edition.

 

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema