Films This Week 6/11/21

by Gary Palmucci | 11th June 2021 | Gary's Corner

Hello everyone. This week’s addition to our virtual cinema lineup currently holds a rare 100% Rotten Tomatoes score via 18 US and international critics.

Recipient of a Special Jury Prize from the Rotterdam Film Festival — always a reliable incubator of  “new waves” — Take Me Somewhere Nice is the mercurial, neon-tinted work of Ena Sendijarevic, a Bosnian-born refugee raised in Holland who’s now one of Dutch cinema’s fastest-rising talents.

Her debut feature follows a young woman, herself a Bosnian emigre, whose return to her home country to visit an ailing, long-estranged father devolves into a road-movie-like series of misadventures that she experiences with a growing devil-may-care detachment, and newfound maturity.

Influenced both by cinema “itinerants” like Chantal Akerman, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch and the pitiless gaze of a David Hockney painting, this one introduces us to a filmmaker to watch.

And on that popular American moviegoing front that New Plaza is always keeping an eye on, this weekend marks the wide release of In the Heights, the delayed-by-a-year screen version of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s 2008 Broadway-debut musical, arriving with many rave reviews and the promise of a commercial studio movie not locked into a narrow genre — action, horror, family — like virtually everything else released since mutiplexes started to re-open. Will audiences nationwide respond with enthusiasm and fill those seats to their current capacity? It should be a fascinating barometer for the months ahead…

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema