Films this week 9/01 to 9/03/2023
by Gary Palmucci | 1st September 2023 | Gary's Corner
As summer 2023 begins its curtain call over this Labor Day weekend, New Plaza Cinema has packed the four days with a diverse dozen, including European intimate epics and ingenious American indies, both feature and documentary, many of them making their final appearances on our program.
I’d like to make a particular pitch for Jean Eustache’s 1973 The Mother and the Whore, with its indelible trio of Jean-Pierre Leaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Francoise Lebrun, screening Saturday afternoon.
The great French director Olivier Assayas writes, it is “the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city (Paris), a time, a culture now all gone.”
New additions to the program include:
- Theatre Camp: In one of the most acclaimed titles of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, a team of collaborators including Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen) and Molly Gordon (The Bear) concoct what the NY Times’ Amy Nicholson in her Critic’s Pick review calls “a fizzy mockumentary about growing up Gershwin…these former youth performers remember everything: desperate auditions, capricious rejections…but the camp counselors they’ve created…disregard the trauma they’ve endured and now, inflict on others. Call it summer Stockholm syndrome. And call their group therapy session a treat.”
We’ve had numerous requests for this movie, including from one patron who called herself “one of three generations” of theatre campers!
- Our Father, the Devil: In another NY Times Critic’s PIck, Beatrice Loayza hails “not only an absorbing psychological thriller but a profound meditation on the ethics of immigration,” as a Guinean refugee living in France is confronted by a menacing figure from her past. Co-star Souleymane Sy Savane and writer-director Ellie Foumbi (a graduate of Columbia’s film program) will join us for Q&As on Saturday and Monday, respectively.
- Hester Street: We pay tribute this month to pioneering indie filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, whose 1975 recreation (on a budget) of the late 19th century Russian Jewish Lower East Side yielded an Oscar nomination for Carol Kane, as a young, struggling-to-assimilate spouse. On Sept 17th we’ll present her 1988 crowd-pleaser Crossing Delancey, with leading man Peter Riegert joining us in person for a discussion after the film. Tickets are going fast for that one.
Also holding over this weekend, many for “last calls,” Visconti’s The Leopard, Fellini’s 8 1/2, The Miracle Club, Past Lives (a frequent sell out), Shortcomings, Aurora’s Sunrise, Make Me Famous (with our usual producer- director Q&A), and top Sundance documentary prize winner, The Eternal Memory.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema