Gary's Corner

Classic films are writ large on this week's New Plaza Cinema lineup, both established polestars and an aspiring 'newcomer.' Martin Scorsese's 1976 scorcher Taxi Driver, with indelible performances from Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel and others will screen on Wednesday night in a special presentation by film historian and NPC friend Steven C. Smith. Steven will focus in both his intro and Q&A on the film's unique score by legendary composer Bernard Herrrmann; he'll also be signing copies of his new biography of that irascible musical genius. A very few tickets may still be available on the day of the show. Saturday morning we'll encore Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause; some of you may remember our full-house...

This holiday weekend’s schedule at New Plaza Cinema is chock full of hold-overs, reprises, last-chance screenings....and a special quartet of films on Memorial Day Monday. Thinking about the 'state of the nation' as this special holiday approached, these four films, which we 've screened either just recently or over the past year, seemed to me to shine anew as chronicles of war-torn young heroes and heroines, the lingering ache of decades-long tragedy, and military men under crushing pressure. They include: The President's Cake, a young girl's journey through the chaos of early-nineties Iraq Amrum, from Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, following a young boy's painful maturation on a desolate North Sea island, in the waning...

A New Plaza Cinema 'experiment' that we tried out last weekend got off to a rousing start: Sunday's special 1015 am screening of The Christophers attracted a two-thirds-full house. When I mentioned in my intro that as a result, we'd be doing more of these, the audience spontaneously applauded. This will enable us to add a fifth screening on most weekends and holidays - fortuitous timing as we have some new films to catch up on, and holdovers that had temporarily been offscreen due to recent CUNY festivities. Here's the rundown:  Still going strong - Ian McKellen in Steven Soderbergh's The Christophers ;  Carmen Maura in Calle Malaga.  Back after hiatuses - Fantasy Life (with another Sunday evening Q&A from its bitingly...

New Plaza Cinema will be operating only on Mothers Day this weekend; on May 16-17 we'll begin our return to fuller operation. Appropriately enough, one of this Sunday's films will be the long-running Calle Malaga, with its luminous performance by Carmen Maura as a Tangiers widow (and mother) whose life takes a series of surprising turns. Our classic film series resumes with a rare theatrical screening of one of John Garfield's most memorably intense portrayals, in 1950's The Breaking Point, directed by Michael Curtiz, from Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not. Joining my colleagues, film historians Max Alvarez and Dan Cahill, will be Julie Garfield, John's daughter and a longtime friend of New Plaza Cinema. Two other...

We'll be continuing our 'partial schedule' of screenings during the next three weekends of CUNY commencement-related events; on Saturday night, a new film from Steven Soderbergh - enthusiastically recommended by three of my New Plaza Cinema colleagues - that prematurely 'got the hook' from one of our local multiplexes. In her Critic's Pick's review (well worth reading in its entirety) the NY Times' Alissa Wilkinson calls The Christophers "...a sparkling, funny, wise movie about two painters (Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel), both of whom consider themselves failures. Soderbergh rarely writes his own movies, but nearly every movie he makes is about how money manipulates all aspects of our lives: relationships, sports, technology,...

For the next few weeks here at New Plaza Cinema we’re in that annual cycle of partial operation to accommodate CUNY commencement-related events.This weekend we’re screening six films on Friday and Sunday: The President’s Cake - Iraq is still very much entangled in the current Middle East maelstrom, and this early-80s-set drama is, I think, as worthy of your attention as any of this past year’s Oscar nominees. YES - love it, hate it or in between (I’ve heard all three reactions head-on, from patrons coming out of our cinema) the fearless, often enraged but always compassionate gaze of Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid is a must-experience. Calle Malaga - Carmen Maura’s lit-from-within performance in this Tangiers-set drama has been...

The highlight of this weekend’s New Plaza Cinema lineup is a rare screening of French director Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 Round Midnight, featuring jazz legend Dexter Gordon -in an Oscar-nominated performance- as a saxophonist struggling with addiction in 1950s Paris. Tavernier partly based his screenplay on the experiences of American jazz masters Lester Young (tenor sax) and Bud Powell (piano), as well as casting real life musical greats as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and John McLaughlin. Rutgers University professor, jazz historian and all-around friend of New Plaza Cinema, Wayne Winborne, who provided us with an encyclopedic walk-through of the Sammy Davis Jr drama A Man Called Adam a few weeks ago, will be...

This weekend we're welcoming back director Sarah T. Schwab and producer Brian Long for the premiere NY theatrical screenings of s piercing new suspense drama, Crybaby Bridge. New Plaza Cinema regulars may recall their 2023 feature A Stage of Twilight, starring Karen Allen, who graced our cinema with a pair of extended Q&As. Brian specifically asked distributor Menemsha Films - one of our steady suppliers - if he could come back to NPC to present his new work, which follows an urban family's fateful decision to move to a rural enclave to escape its troubled past. The filmmakers and some other special guests will be on hand for discussion after both of this weekend's screenings. Saturday's show is already very close to...

I'm back from some salutary travels in lands Down Under, where among many other wonders I visited a 'distant relation' of New Plaza Cinema, the Classic Cinema in Melbourne, courtesy of its gracious owners Eddie and Lindy Tamir. This beautifully designed TEN-screen complex offers many of the same films we've been playing, and other things we can currently only dream about: some commercial fare like Project Hail Mary (in 70mm!), full-service bar and concessions, a cozy jazz club, and a thriving rooftop screen (it's now summer in Australia) hosting a long run of Marty Supreme. Not incidentally, the theatre also features an illustrated exhibit on the city's once-flourishing Yiddish theatre scene. The last leg of the trip was Fiji,...