Films this week 5/15/2026 to 5/21/2026
by Gary Palmucci | 15th May 2026 | Gary's Corner
A New Plaza Cinema ‘experiment’ that we tried out last weekend got off to a rousing start: Sunday’s special 1015 am screening of The Christophers attracted a two-thirds-full house. When I mentioned in my intro that as a result, we’d be doing more of these, the audience spontaneously applauded. This will enable us to add a fifth screening on most weekends and holidays – fortuitous timing as we have some new films to catch up on, and holdovers that had temporarily been offscreen due to recent CUNY festivities.
Here’s the rundown:
- Still going strong – Ian McKellen in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers ;
- Carmen Maura in Calle Malaga.
- Back after hiatuses – Fantasy Life (with another Sunday evening Q&A from its bitingly funny – like his film – writer/director Matthew Shear;
- Billy Preston – That’s the Way God Planned It, with richly revelatory intervals and archival footage;
- The President’s Cake, from Iraq, a heartrender that more NPC-ers really need to see.
New additions:
- Omaha – my colleague Abbe Harris reports that this Sundance ‘road movie’ is one of the year’s best American indies to date, featuring John Magaro, an actor familiar to many of you from the long-running Past Lives, and Koln 75.
- I Swear – based on the true story of a young man’s struggles with Tourette’s syndrome, with a BAFTA-Best Actor-winning performance from Robert Aramayo, seen here recently as the ruthless British officer in Palestine 36.
- Amrum – the gifted Turkish-German director Fatih Akin (Head-On, The Edge of Heaven) returns with a rigorous portrait of a young boy, growing up on a remote North Sea island in the waning months of World War II, forced to confront inevitable circumstances…
- Blue Heron – in her Critic’s PIck review, the NY Times’ Alissa Wilkinson wrote:
“Small wonder filmmakers use movies to puzzle out their lightly fictionalized youth memories – Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun are just two recent examples. Blue Heron, an exquisite debut feature from director-writer Sophy Romvari, is another such exploration, delicately probing a wound in part drawn from her own family’s history that has never really healed.”
And a reminder, the gregarious grammarians, director Brandt Johnson and his muse Ellen Jovin will be back in person on May 24 for another screening of Rebel With a Clause, which always sells out.
Earlier that same afternoon, another classic – the mischievous 1949 dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, with Alec Guinness in eight ill-fated roles….