Gary's Corner

On this unusually elongated Fourth of July holiday, our generous hosts at Macaulay Honors College have allowed us to create a five-day weekend of diverse film entertainment, including over a dozen separate programs.

Holdovers will include Close to Vermeer, The Night of the 12th, Persian Lessons, Jacqueline Bisset in Loren and Rose, and Make Me Famous (with filmmaker Q&As at both the film’s shows.)

Following our very successful screening last spring, filmmaker (and New Plaza Cinema “visual historian”) Michael Jacobsohn has compiled a second collection of NY-based short films which will screen on Friday night, accompanied by many of their creators.

We’ll be reprising two of our most popular documentaries: Turn Every Page, to commemorate legendary book editor Robert Gottlieb, who left us on June 14, and It Ain’t Over, because baseball and the Fourth are an irresistible combination.

Our recent screening of Shanghai Express went so well that we just had to bring it back, especially after NY Times critic Ben Kenigsberg wrote last weekend: “…in the NY Times in 2010, Dave Kehr, now a MOMA curator, cited a story -“probably apocryphal” — that director Josef von Sternberg had “once suggested his movies be projected upside down, so that audiences wouldn’t be distracted from the sublime play of light and shadow on the screen”…while 1932’s Shanghai Express, with Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Clive Brook aboard a train in war-torn China, lies a strong claim to being von Sternberg’s most purely entertaining film, it is also, like most of his work, a movie that demands to be watched as a physical object.” Our own cinema historian Max Alvarez will join us for an after-show discussion.

We’ll be offering on Sunday a special two-film tribute to one of America’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers, David Lynch. The recent doc Lynch/Oz makes a multi-chapter examination (hosted by various film critics and creators, including John Waters) of the fascinatingly interwoven themes which appear both in much of his work and that of a certain 1939 Hollywood classic. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wrote, “If The Wizard of Oz is one of your favorite movies, and if Lynch is one of your favorite directors, then watching Lynch/Oz is like seeing two old cinematic friends sitting around talking to each other.”

Following that will be a special screening of Lynch’s 2001 classic Mulholland Drive, winner of that year’s “Best Picture” award from the NY Film Critics, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Director, and an astounding 8th place finish in the esteemed 2022 Sight & Sound Magazine “best films of all time” poll.

Plus, two recent releases which have enjoyed long downtown runs, and deserve some Upper West Side exposure. In her NY Times “Critic’s Pick” review, Jeannette Catsoulis describes the BlackBerry screening, appropriately, on Canada Day weekend, as “a wonky workplace comedy that slowly slides into tragedy — the emergence of the smartphone isn’t greeted with fizzing fireworks and popping champagne corks. Instead, director Matt Johnson and his co-writer, adapting the 2015 book ‘Losing the Signal: the Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,’ have fashioned a tale of scrabbling toward success that tempers its humor with an oddly moving wistfulness.”

The melodrama Joyland was briefly banned in its home country, Pakistan, for depicting a turbulent romance between a married man and a transgender woman dancer. On rogerebert.com, Glenn Kenny called it, “A picture of considerable integrity, passion and bravery,” and The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane wrote, “Director Saim Sadiq is not lecturing us or trading in types; he is taking us by sensory surprise, and the tale that he tells is funny, forward and sometimes woundingly sad.”

We hope you’ll find one (or more!) of these films to enrich your holiday weekend…