Gary's Corner
Films this week 03/28/2025 to 04/3/2025
Gary’s Corner
by Gary Palmucci | 28th March 2025 | Gary's Corner
Here at New Plaza Cinema we have numerous ‘unsung heroes’ who work behind the scenes on our many special programs, occasionally appearing in person to introduce or discuss the work. Veteran independent filmmaker and newsfilm cameraman Michael Jacobsohn is the man behind our bi-monthly NYC Filmmakers Short Film Showcase, marking its second anniversary this Friday night. His tireless curation has allowed many local artists to see their films with an audience, and on a theatre screen for the first time. As always, this weekend’s program has sold out, but a few cancellations may be available at show time.
For the past few years Michael has also been working on a new feature documentary of his own, The Cornelia Street Cafe in Exile, a rueful history of the Greenwich Village landmark – forced to close after 41 years, in 2019 – and its owner Robin Hirsch. We’re pleased to offer its NY theatrical premiere with two screenings next weekend, and many special guests in attendance.
This Friday and Saturday we’ll be captivated by visiting West Coast film historian and author Steven C. Smith, a regular guest on our classic film webcasts and author of A Heart at Fire’s Center, the definitive biography of Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann. Renowned for his classic suspense scores for Alfred Hitchcock, Herrmann also did rapturous work for many other auteurs, two of which we’ll be presenting: Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground. Steven will introduce and host an after-discussion at both films, which are rarely screened in theatres.
Herrmann was a fascinating character, often remote and irascible; he once declined an offer from Martin Scorsese with “I don’t do pictures about taxi drivers!” Fortunately Marty persuaded him, and we hope to screen their legendary collaboraton later this year.
Also this weekend:
- A new documentary, Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, chronicling the transporting and turbulent life story of a remarkable singer-songwriter, now in the fifth decade of her inspiring career. Janis herself and the film’s director Varda Bar-Kar will be joining us for Q&As after our matinee screenings on March 29 and 30.
- The Oscar-winning No Other Land continues its run, with multiple screenings, as will the Italian crowd pleaser There’s Still Tomorrow and Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, with its heart-rending turns from Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.
- Also, our monthly first-Friday screenings of films on social justice issues will next week feature ace documentarian Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI, chronicling FBI monarch J. Edgar Hoover’s obsessive mid-60s efforts to denigrate Martin Luther King, via wiretaps and other ruthless forms of surveillance. In his prescient, 2021 Critic’s Pick review, the NY Times’ A. O. Scott wrote:
“….
it’s an exemplary historical documentary — unafraid of moral judgment but also attentive to the fine grain of ambiguity that clings to the facts. It doesn’t force the preoccupations of the present onto the past, but rather invites you to think about how what happened then might help explain where we are now. The story took place a long time ago, but it isn’t finished.”
Next Friday, April 4 is the anniversary of Dr. King’s 1968 assassination.
Films this week 7/14 – 7/16/2023
Released in June 1969 -- a pivotal summer in American life -- Midnight Cowboy has exerted an enduring fascination for generations of Americans, myself included. I first saw it at age fifteen, stayed up late to watch its Best Picture Oscar win, read the source novel, wore out the soundtrack, and over time showed it to friends and family. In a new documentary joining New Plaza Cinema's lineup this weekend, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy we hear testimony from a diverse group of its creators and others still struck by its heroic influence, including actors Jon Voight, Brenda Vaccaro, and Bob Balaban, as well as Brian de Palma, Jim Hoberman, and photographer MIchael Childers, long time friend of the...
Films this week 7/07 – 7/09/2023
After a whirlwind, extended Fourth of July holiday weekend New Plaza Cinema is back with several sturdy holdovers and a couple of newcomers. We're offering something special in our first two screening slots on Friday -- a single-admission David Lynch "double feature": the documentary Lynch/Oz, in which various actors and filmmakers muse on his apparent fascination with a certain 1939 Hollywood classic, and his own 2001 classic Mulholland Drive, voted Best Picture of that year by the NY Film Critics. Also on Friday night, director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore will return for another generous Q&A after their revelatory NYC-downtown-art-world doc, Make Me Famous. Many of you may recall the 2019 Italian feature...
Films this week 6/30 – 7/04/2023
On this unusually elongated Fourth of July holiday, our generous hosts at Macaulay Honors College have allowed us to create a five-day weekend of diverse film entertainment, including over a dozen separate programs. Holdovers will include Close to Vermeer, The Night of the 12th, Persian Lessons, Jacqueline Bisset in Loren and Rose, and Make Me Famous (with filmmaker Q&As at both the film's shows.) Following our very successful screening last spring, filmmaker (and New Plaza Cinema "visual historian") Michael Jacobsohn has compiled a second collection of NY-based short films which will screen on Friday night, accompanied by many of their creators. We'll be reprising two of our most popular documentaries: Turn Every Page,...
Films this week 6/23 – 6/25/2023
We have a veritable feast of actor and filmmaker personal appearances this weekend at New Plaza Cinema’s screen at Macaulay Honors College. Legendary actress Jacqueline Bisset -- seen over the years at New Plaza Cinema venues in Two For the Road and Truffaut’s Day for Night -- will join us for a Q&A after Saturday’s 12:15 show of her new film Loren and Rose, in which she plays an iconic actress whose series of encounters with an ambitious young filmmaker evolve into a moving series of life lessons and artistic epiphanies for each of them. Many Americans remember all too well the 2003 lead up to and tragic decade-plus consequences of the invasion of Iraq. The 2014 documentary We Are Many is having a "return engagement"...
Films this week 6/16 – 6/18/2023
New Plaza Cinema audiences have in recent weeks enthusiastically embraced a wide variety of recent releases, including Close to Vermeer, It Ain't Over, Chile '76, and Other People's Children. We holding these over for at least one more weekend to give those of you who haven't yet "caught up" another chance. Of course we're also adding some new titles: In The Night of the 12th, this year's winner of the Cesar (or French Oscar) for Best Picture, the NY Times' Nicolas Rapold writes, "a French investigator labors away at a murder case before reluctantly abandoning it. This is a refreshingly grounded, deceptively plain picture of crime-fighting...the movie (based on a nonfiction book by Pauline Guena) matter-of-factly avoids the...
Films this week 6/9 – 6/11/2023
Long time New Plaza Cinema devotees may recall legendary writer-director Paul Schrader joining us for a pair of riveting Q&As - one of which I moderated - at NYIT screenings of his Oscar-nominated First Reformed back in December 2018. His new film Master Gardener chronicles another of 'God's lonely men,' first assayed by Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver and later by Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke and others. This time he's played by Joel Edgerton - "like a clenched fist," as Manohla Dargis notes in her NY Times Critic's PIck review - a horticulturist toiling somewhere in the South whose fateful interactions with his employer (Sigourney Weaver, another New Plaza favorite) and her biracial grandniece propel the narrative forward....
Films this week 6/2 – 6/4/2023
We have two additions to New Plaza Cinema's program this weekend. Even for those of us who aren't Yankee fans, the career of catcher Yogi Berra-15 times an All-Star, 3 MVP awards, 10 World Series rings - has an irresistible appeal. The "lively, engaging and moving" (NY Times) new documentary It Ain't Over chronicles his phenomenal baseball skills and exemplary life (including D-Day service) along with, as the Times' Glenn Kenny wrote in his Critic's PIck review, "the inevitable trotting out of his folksy malapropisms known as Yogi-isms....the best of them, when you really turn them over, are as profound as Zen koans: 'If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.' Only an original like Berra could come up with that." Our...
Films this week 5/26 – 5/29/2023
We have a 'packed' Memorial Day weekend on tap at New Plaza Cinema: three new independent films, two classics, a trio of the best in recent European cinema and by popular demand, a reprise of our most popular film to date. That, of course, would be Bill Nighy in Living which, despite its four-month run here a number of our loyal patrons somehow missed, and have asked us for a return engagement. Voila. The three new indie releases include: --MONICA, in which a long- estranged mother (Patricia Clarkson) and her transgender daughter (Trace Lysette) rekindle their relationship in surprising, piercing fashion. In her NY Times 'Critic's Pick' review Teo Bugbee writes, "the director Andrea Pallaoro doesn't burden this delicate tale...
Films this week 5/19 – 5/21/2023
Penelope Cruz, one of New Plaza Cinema's "heroines" for her Oscar-nominated performance in Parallel Mothers, is showcased in the new Italian film L'Immensita, an addition to this weekend's program. Its director, Sicillan native Emanuele Crialese studied at NYU Film School and his previous US releases, Respiro (2002) and Golden Door (2006) provided vibrant starring roles for Valeria Golino and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively. In L'immensita, per NY Times reviewer Beatrice Loayza, "Cruz is a vision of tragic beauty when she first appears...the camera captures her in adoring closeup as it grazes over her eyes...Her character, Clara, is an ordinary upper middle class mother of three, but in the mind of her eldest, Andrew,...
Have a question or comment for Gary?
You can reach him at films@newplazacinema.org