Films this week 6/21 to 6/23/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 20th June 2024 | Gary's Corner
An eclectic quartet of new programs join this weekend’s New Plaza Cinema program — we have plenty of options to escape the sweltering heat!
Filmmakers Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss have for over forty years been producing penetrating documentaries on the American social and political landscape. Last year they joined us for screenings of The Five Demands, about the momentous 1969 student strike at City College. Greta will be back on Saturday afternoon with their latest, Love Letters which, per their website Jezebel Films, “tells the remarkable story of feminist scholar Catherine Stimpson and musicologist Elizabeth Wood. Now in their 80s, they recall a time when living together and loving unapologetically was a radical act…Driven by their fierce desire to be together at all costs, Liz battled in Australian family court to be able to bring her children to New York and forge a life with Catherine.” Their eventual legal victory was a watershed for the rights of lesbian mothers in America. Also on the program will be Greta’s 1989 doc, Tiny and Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, about two jazz musicians and their decades-long musical and life partnership, and Greta will join us for what I know from experience will be a lively Q&A.
Max Alvarez and I will host our own Q&A on Sunday afternoon after a screening of Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three — his raucous 1961 comedy follow-up to The Apartment, which delighted our patrons two weeks ago. James Cagney pulls out all the stops as a harried Coca Cola executive in Cold War West Berlin who’s given the task of wrangling his boss’ socialite daughter. Wilder and his screenwriting partner I.A.L. DIamond’s rat-tat-tat dialogue here reaches new, hysterical heights.
Also this weekend — Italian master director Marco Bellochio, still excelling in his mid-eighties, delivers another riveting historical drama, Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, about a young Jewish boy who in the 1850’s was taken from his family by agents of Italy’s Papal States and raised as a Catholic. Kidnapped was a highlight of last year’s Cannes Film Festival. A “discovery” of last summer’s Telluride Film Festival, Tuesday, featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus in an unusual role, rounds out this weekend’s additions.
In her Critic’s Pick review, the NY Times’ Jeanette Catsoulis writes,
“In this fantastical first feature from the Croatian filmmaker Daina O. Pusic, striking special effects and a richly textured sound design lend a cosmic chill to a simple story of maternal grief. The mother in question is Zora (a very fine Julia Louis-Dreyfus), so deep in denial about her daughter Tuesday’s terminal illness that she can’t handle being alone with her.” But in fact, her daughter has some quasi-magically realistic remedies for that….
Back by popular demand this weekend: the visually and aurally striking Norwegian documentary Songs of Earth, Daniel Auteuil in Farewell Mr. Haffmann, director-actress Lee Grant’s Tell Me a Riddle (with her short, The Stronger), Wicked Little Letters (Rated R — “For language throughout.”) and Veselka, with director Michael Fiore again generously joining us for some after-discussion.
Coming next weekend, the NY theatrical premiere of Revival ’69: The Concert That Rocked the World, featuring John Lennon and Eric Clapton. We’ll have multiple screenings with Q&As, and guests including rock historian Robert Christgau.
And, our long running hit documentary Make Me Famous will, on Sunday, June 30 mark the first anniversary of its New Plaza premiere, with filmmakers Brian Vincent and Heather Spore once again joining us, with some special guests in the works!
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Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema