Films this week 6/13/2025 to 6/18/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 13th June 2025 | Gary's Corner
New Plaza Cinema’s amazing run of the upper-west-side-set, dark comedy Bad Shabbos continues this weekend. Over the past two weekends, all twelve screenings that we’ve presented have been sell-outs; as always we strongly recommend advance online ticket purchases and early arrival at the theatre. At press time we were awaiting confirmation from director Daniel Robbins and co-screenwriter Zach Weiner for selected after-show Q&As – please check our website for updates.
With NYC’s primary elections just around the corner (June 24), we’ll be presenting next weekend Daniel and Zach’s earlier, documentary collaboration Citizen Weiner, about the latter’s run for an UWS city council seat, with its own brand of pitch-black comedy. We expect them to be ‘campaigning’ at both of its screenings.
Also continuing this weekend will be the erudite rom-com Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, and final shows of Francois Ozon’s When Fall is Coming and Vermiglio, the Italian heart-render.
The indefatigable French director Claude Lelouch, now 87, recently presented his latest film ‘Finalement’ at Film Forum, along with a restored version of his legendary, double-Oscar-winning A Man and a Woman (1966), which went on to run downtown for eight weeks and now joins our schedule. Some films that were huge hits in ‘their moment in time’ haven’t aged well, but I was surprised to see how well this one, with its incandescently charismatic performances by the late Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimee, has held up, lifted on wings as always by Francis Lai’s immortal theme music. Over nearly six decades, Lelouch’s work has varied wildly in quality and longevity, but this one’s a keeper. We may also show a couple of his later films worthy of rediscovery, in the months ahead.
On Saturday afternoon we’ll present our second and final encore of Woody Allen’s Bananas, hosted by its co-star Louise Lasser, along with her 2018 short film Did You Know My Husband?, written by Susan Charlotte and directed by Antony Marsellis. A few tickets are still available for this unique, revelatory ‘double feature.’
And coming later this month:
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June 22 – Make Me Famous – the downtown ’80s art scene doc celebrates ‘Year Two’ of its New Plaza Cinema residency, with its producer-director team Brian Vincent and Heather Spore, and some special guests.
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June 22 – A Place in the Sun – Fifties icon Montgomery Clift co-stars with Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters and Raymond Burr in director George Stevens’ multi-Oscar-winning gem, adapted from Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
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June 27 – A Photographic Memory– An intimate, genre bending portrait of the late journalist/photographer Sheila Turner Seed, constructed by her daughter Rachel, and hailed by the NY Times’ Alissa Wilkinson as “Reaching far beyond personal narrative, blooming into a moving meditation on memory, interpretation and the nature of photography itself. ” The filmmaker will be present at all three screenings, with various special guests including acclaimed doc-maker Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson, Dick Johnson Is Dead).