Films this week 8/30 to 9/2/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 30th August 2024 | Gary's Corner
At New Plaza Cinema we are often “tracking” films entering the marketplace — usually at film festivals or via their sales agents — months before they reach opening day in NYC. The Sundance highlights Thelma and Ghostlight, now nearing the end of their runs, and a documentary traveling both the festival and word-of-mouth circuit, I Like It Here, each came to us by those routes.
I Like It Here, making its Upper West Side debut with three Labor Day weekend screenings, was first spotted by NY Times documentary specialist Alissa Wilkinson at the True/False non-fiction film festival in Columbia, MO. After its downtown premiere last weekend, she rhapsodized:
“Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck is a veteran documentarian, and I Like It Here is part memoir, part personal essay on aging and mortality, part portrait of his community and home in Hudson Valley. There’s no plot, per se. But I’ve seen the movie twice, and both times I found myself moved near tears…it feels like a cousin to Agnes Varda’s documentaries, particularly the curiosity and humor of Daguerreotypes (1975), in which she records the daily lives of her neighbors on Rue Daguerre. Arlyck also introduces us to several of his friends, most of whom he’s known for decades. They’ve grown old alongside one another, sharing lives that intersect and diverge. Most have started to recognize they’re the age their parents and grandparents were when they thought of them as ‘old.’ It’s a realization that’s equal parts unsettling and amusing.
Arlyck’s recollections of his own family history, his marriage and his career as a filmmaker are the part of the film. But they’re woven into the present narrative perfectly, without seeming at all self-indulgent. Instead, he’s doing precisely what great memoirists do: invite us into their stories as a way of making space for us to reflect on our own.”
I Like It Here’s producer Emmet Dotan will join us for a Q&A after the shows on Saturday and Sunday evening.
As the seasons start to shift and another New York Film Festival approaches, this weekend we’re reprising one of last year’s festival highlights, American-indie drama Janet Planet, starring in the title role the incandescent Julianne NIcholson. The NYT’s Wilkinson also fell hard for this one, writing in her Critic’s Pick review:
“A sharply funny film that captures the feeling of summer…Writing and directing her first film, playwright Annie Baker exhibits uncanny powers of observation. Not much happens in this mother-daughter movie, but something momentous seems to have taken place…”
New Plaza Cinema theatre buffs may recall Baker’s off-Broadway play The Flick, about a struggling small town movie house, which used to keen dramatic effect the opening credits music from Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 classic western The Wild Bunch; we’ll be screening that on October 6. We’ve also loaded up this holiday weekend with classics: Two shows of Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai, perfect for an overcast, late summer weekend matinee; another encore of Antonioni’s The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson, and commencing “Part 2” of our Ingmar Bergman survey, his lesser known but equally accomplished, sensual ’50s drama Summer With Monika (to be followed on September 15th by The Magician).
Also this weekend, more shows of the intense UK-French period drama, Widow Clicquot, and on Sunday, a special screening of documentary The Girls in the Band, chronicling the lives of many 20th century female jazz band musicians who deserve to be both better known and appreciated and two of whom, Deborah Weisz and Tomoko Ohno, will join peerless jazz historian (and dear friend of New Plaza Cinema) Wayne Winborne for an after-screening chat.