Films this week 7/25/2025 to 7/31/2025
by Alex M | 25th July 2025 | Uncategorized
Macaulay Honors College’s summer recess affords New Plaza Cinema another opportunity for a full week of eclectic programming. Our holdovers and encores include – of course – Bad Shabbos (with co-screenwriter Zack Weiner back for more Q&As),
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (final screening), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, the Palestinian drama To a Land Unknown, Rebel With a Clause (with its filmmaker/ grammarian team, Brandt Johnson and Ellen Jovin) and last weekend’s surprise sellout hit, The Blond Boy from the Casbah.
We were particularly gratified with your response to this lovely French-Algerian period piece – a very worthy film, but one with relatively little ‘profile’ in the US art house market. New Plaza Cinema audiences seemed to immediately ‘get it,’ and packed all three screenings. We’ll be offering six shows over this upcoming week of July 25-31, with more to come.
We’re also excited about this weekend’s premiere of All to Play For, showcasing rising French actress Virginie Efira, who beguiled New Plaza audiences in 2023 in Other People’s Children. She also won that year France’s Cesar Award for Best Actress in Revoir Paris – both pictures released by our friends at Chicago’s Music Box Films, In All to Play For, Efira moves us deeply as a single mother trying to keep her family together after one of her children is injured.
Also featured in this special, one-week ‘stand’:
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NYC Short Filmmakers’ Showcase – the latest, all-new program in our bi-monthly series, presented by Michael Jacobsohn
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Letter from an Unknown Woman – Max Ophuls’ visually exquisite 1948 romantic melodrama, starring Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan and the director’s peerless roving camera. Film historians Max Alvarez and Dan Cahill will again preside, with introductory remarks and an after-show Q&A addressing this month’s ‘classic film’ theme, German Emigres in Hollywood.
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Volver – after attending a sold out screening last month at the downtown Metrograph of Pedro Almodovar’s 2006 classic, it seemed to me appropriate to bring it uptown to our neighborhood, with its fabulous female cast including Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duerhas, among many others….
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Sinners – 2025’s most stylistically daring, voluptuously soulful big-studio release to date, from director Ryan Coogler and double-duty star Michael B. Jordan, minus the usual 30-minute pre-show.
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GoodFellas – Martin Scorsese’s on-endless-repeat classic, remembering its late stars Ray Liotta, Paul Sorvino, Frank Vincent and Catherine Scorsese, as well as cinematographer MIchael Ballhaus.
And, coming in August –
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Familiar Touch – beloved stage actress Kathleen Chalfant galvanizes this American indie drama of a woman’s journey through memory loss.
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A Photographic Memory: Encore Screening- – filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed will return on August 3 for a Q&A with her very personal, very moving documentary memoir
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Boys Go to Jupiter – from the cutting edge of indie film animation, a la Robot Dreams and Memoir of a Snail, a new feature described by a colleague as “…like Slacker with teenagers, strange fruits and adorable aliens who love take- out food, but set in Florida instead of Austin, with hook-laden music and 3D-style animation.”
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Tatami – a new drama set in the world of international wrestling, co-directed by an Israeli and Iranian filmmaker, and acclaimed by two ‘friends of New Plaza,’ historian Annette Insdorf and filmmaker Aviva Kempner
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Reds – two screenings of Warren Beatty’s consummate 1981 political epic (frequently requested by New Plaza regulars), co-starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton and Maureen Stapleton.