Films this week 8/22/2025 to 8/28/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 22nd August 2025 | Gary's Corner
Three new titles — all from women directors — grace this weekend’s New Plaza Cinema lineup :
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The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival – we’ve been tracking this documentary from filmmaker Julie Rubio since its sellout debut last winter at the New York Jewish Film Festival. My colleague Abbe Harris reports:
“The recent Broadway musical put the spotlight on this preeminent Art Deco painter, known for her high-gloss sensual nudes and portraits of high society during the Jazz Age. What’s less known is her fascinating backstory. Bisexual, Jewish and prone to relationships with her subjects, Tamara fled the Bolsheviks in 1917 for Paris, where she began painting professionally to provide for her family. Drawing from firsthand accounts, her passionate love affairs and the cultural zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties, Tamara’s story is as much about the survival of the spirit as a portrait of the era’s tempestuous art scene.”
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Dear Vietnam– actress and filmmaker Tiana Alexandra-Silliphant’s career has been informed by both an upbringing in Vietnam and her family’s eventual flight to America. Her imdb biography makes for some fascinating reading; documentary buffs may recall her early 90s, autobiographical From Hollywood to Hanoi, executive-produced by Oliver Stone. In this film she takes on a portrait of one of the 20th century’s most controversial military figures – Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, who over three decades led his nation to eventual victory on the battlefield – at a staggering cost – over both France and the United States.
At our screening on Sunday afternoon, this film’s executive producer (and multi-Oscar and Tony-winner) Sir Christopher Hampton will join Tiana for a Q&A.
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Sorry, Baby– a piercing highlight of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. In her Critic’s Pick review, the NY Times’ inimitable Manohla Dargis wrote:
“In its intimacy and naked truth-telling, “Sorry, Baby” is the kind of independent movie that can seem like a gift. It’s an outwardly unassuming story of a woman, Agnes, grappling with the aftermath of an assault that has rearranged both her head and her world without destroying either. The movie has moments that can make you wince, but it’s often wryly and tartly funny because life is absurd and complicated, and people are, too.”
The film’s writer-director Eva Victor also plays Agnes; coincidentally, she was a featured voice-artist in the droll animated feature Boys Go to Jupiter, which we presented last weekend. Also in the sterling cast:
Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges and John Carroll Lynch, a friend of New Plaza Cinema.
Among our holdovers, last weekend’s rapturous response to Reds, heroically played by Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Maureen Stapleton and the various Witness, merited an encore, this time a bit later on Saturday afternoon.
Rebel With a Clause, hosted by director Brandt Johnson and his leading lady, overmistress of the Oxford comma, Ellen Jovin, will also be back, as will the beloved Blond Boy from the Casbah, and of course Bad Shabbos (still selling out – plan accordingly) with co-screenwriter Zack Weiner joining us on Sunday night.
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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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East of Wall (another Sundance highlight) & Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a reprise of actress Embeth Davidtz’ powerful directing debut, both from our friends at Sony Pictures Classics.
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Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 High and Low – Max Alvarez will present this AK suspense classic, starring Toshiro Mifune. We’re also hoping to screen, either right before or after this show, a new film that purports to be a ‘remake’ of Kurosawa’s white-knuckler, but that, as the saying goes, is “unconfirmed at press time.” Stay tuned.
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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), Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (September 28), and later in the fall, George Stevens’ Giant.