Films this week 8/15/2025 to 8/21/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 15th August 2025 | Gary's Corner
There’s just one new film on this weekend’s New Plaza Cinema lineup, though it isn’t even really ‘new’ – Warren Beatty’s 1981 epic Reds. As this turbulent year in America has ground on, Beatty’s audacious portrait of a generation of social political and adventurers ca 1915-20 seems to retain a peculiar, poignant resonance. Recently I’ve asked audiences here if they’d like to see it again, and a lot of hands have shot up…
The NY Times’ Vincent Canby, in his December 4, 1981 review – opening day at the cavernous Loews Astor Plaza (I was there) – raved:
“Reds is an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia…. a large, remarkably rich film that dramatizes – in a way that no other commercial movie in my memory has ever done – the excitement of being young, idealistic and foolish in a time when everything still seemed possible.”
Beatty, as American journalist John Reed who witnessed America’s transformation in World War I, and concurrent revolutions in Mexico and Russia, also directed, co-wrote and produced the movie, enticing an extraordinary cast including Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton and Jerzy Kosinski, as well as a group of real-life interviewees who came to be known as The Witnesses, Americans who’d lived through that decade, who could still remember (at least much of) it, and give Reds much of its unique perspective.
We’ll be screening the film twice this month- this Saturday at 1215 pm, and next Saturday August 23 at 515 pm. For further reading, check out online the 2006 Vanity Fair article Thunder on the Left, and the 1975 John Reed bio, Romantic Revolutionary by Robert A. Rosenstone.
Elsewhere at New Plaza Cinema this weekend, we’re reprising another, very different classic, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, after it played to a near-full house last Sunday. We’re also giving another shot to two new titles whose filmmakers graced our cinema last weekend – the drolly funny animated feature Boys Go to Jupiter, and the beautifully, daringly filmed documentary chronicle, Sudan, Remember Us.
Also, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, which both captivated and stunned our audience in its debut here last weekend; The Blond Boy from the Casbah, in its fourth week; and of course our long-running Rebel With a Clause (hosted by director Brandt Johnson and his leading lady, the Siren of Syntax, Ellen Jovin), and Bad Shabbos, with Q&As from its ‘unfiltered’ co-screenwriter Zack Weiner.
And coming soon:
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Monk in PIeces – a new documentary exploring the life’s work, struggles and enduring legacy of composer and performer Meredith Monk, with its director present for a Q&A.
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The General and Me – this exceptional new documentary will be presented on August 24 by its director Tiana Silliphant and executive producer (and multi-Oscar and Tony-winner) Christopher Hampton. Watch our website for ticketing details.
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Sorry, Baby – a piercing highlight of this year’s Sundance Film Festival
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More Sunday afternoon classics: Paul Newman, George C. Scott and Piper Laurie in The Hustler (August 31), Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, scored by Miles Davis (September 14), and Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (September 28), and later in the fall, George Stevens’ Giant.