Films this week 8/08/2026 to 8/14/2026
by Gary Palmucci | 8th August 2026 | Gary's Corner
This Saturday, New Plaza Cinema will be joining our gracious hosts at the Museum of Arts and Design in co-presenting a quartet of programs, about the art of film design (in this case, animated feature films), and also about iconic artists — and ‘would-be artists’ — themselves.
The first two shows of the day, curated by our friends at the Museum, are among the reigning classics of stop-motion animation, with their beautifully accurate displays of real-life movement and textures:
Chicken Run (2000) – Aardman Features’ first full length effort, and still the top-grossing stop-motion feature, partly inspired by the 1963 The Great Escape, and featuring the voices of Mel Gibson, Timothy Spall and Imelda Staunton.
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) – Director Wes Anderson concocted his own stop-motion classic, co-adapted with Noah Baumbach from Roald Dahl’s novel, with a voice-cast including George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe.
Later in the afternoon, New Plaza Cinema will contribute the second half of the day’s program, including:
Marcel duChamp: The Art of the Possible (2020)- With Moma’s retro drawing packed houses all summer, and new critical assessments and elevations of the artist’s influence seemingly appearing every week, screening this incisive recent documentary seemed like a no-brainer. Filmmaker Matthew Taylor eschews the straightforward biopic route, seeking to also elucidate the impact of Duchamp’s ideas on aesthetics, art and culture, from the early 20th, and well on into our current century.
F For Fake (1973) – A rare theatrical screening of Orson Welles’ whirling dervish of a documentary-essay about, among other things, Elmyr de Hory narrating his career as a consummate professional art forger; the nature –and often-careening values — of authorship and authenticity; hoax-biographer Clifford Irving, and of course, Welles himself, holding court (“another steak au poivre, s’il vous plait!”) across countries and continents, while cherry-picking some of his own infamous ‘hoaxes’ (War of the Worlds et al) as only he could.