Gary's Corner
Films this week 1/30/2026 to 2/5/26
Gary’s Corner
by Gary Palmucci | 30th January 2026 | Gary's Corner
Two more newly anointed Oscar nominees join this weekend’s New Plaza Cinema lineup: Cutting Through Rocks (Best Documentary Feature) and The Voice of Hind Rajib (Best International Feature).
NY Times film reviewer Sheri Linden wrote:
“Cutting Through Rocks unfolds over several years in a remote corner of northwestern Iran, its sense of place illuminating and the figure at its center as down-to-earth as she is heroic. This portrait of Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to the council of her village, is propelled by her no-nonsense resourcefulness…” Joining us on Saturday afternoon for a post-screening Q&A will be filmmakers Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki.
The Voice of Hind Rajib balances documentary detail and piercing reenactment in its depiction of the tragic attempt to rescue a 5-year-old Palestinian girl, trapped in an immolated car with several dead family members, in January 2024. Three-time Oscar-nominated director Kaouther Ben Hania presented her film Four Daughters at New Plaza in 2023 and achieves here, as NPR’s Bob Mondello describes, a melding of “the actors on screen reacting in real-time with the recordings of that harrowing day, and the effect is at once painfully direct, and profound.”
Elsewhere on this weekend’s schedule , curator Michael Jacobsohn’s latest edition of his NYC Short Filmmakers’ Showcase is sold out. His next program – marking the third anniversary of this lively bi-monthly event – will be on Friday, March 27.
Holdovers include Ralph Fiennes in The Choral; the expansive, six-decade-spanning Jordanian drama All That’s Left of You; Sentimental Value, with nine Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Director, and all four principal members of its cast, who appear in a lively bit of ‘extra content’ just added to the closing credits; and in its fifth month here, SHTTL with the usual ‘masterclass Q&A’ from lead actor Moshe Lobel.
This weekend’s classic screening is that great American film The Manchurian Candidate (1962), more relevant with each flaming week, from director John Frankenheimer and a cast for the ages: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, Janet Leigh and James Edwards.
My colleagues Max Alvarez and Dan Cahill will be on hand for some spirited after-discussion.
And, three more trenchant documentaries will arrive on our screen for the weekend of Feb 6-8: another Oscar nominee, Mr Nobody Against Putin; the turbulent chronicle of an Israeli hostage, Holding Liat; and in our ongoing social justice film series, Shuffle, per the NY Times’ Glenn Kenny
“a shocking and confounding new documentary which lays out in painstaking detail the collusion between moneymaking rehab treatment centers, double-dealing insurance entities and predatory social-media ‘scouts’ who make sure cash flows into corporate pockets while the sick and suffering never get well.”
Films this week 1/19 to 1/21/2024
Here at New Plaza Cinema we're eagerly awaiting next Tuesday morning's Oscar nominations, and rooting for our "short listers," The Teachers' Lounge and Four Daughters to make the final five in their respective categories. Next weekend we may also bring some newly minted nominees to our schedule. Fred Wiseman's epic documentary Menus Plaisirs - Les Troisgros will have its final screening on Saturday. On the weekend of February 2 we'll be featuring another mammoth doc, Steve McQueen's Occupied City, which WILL have an intermission. Also this weekend: Freud's Last Session nears the end of its month-long run, and our "filmmakers-in-residence," director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore will be back with...
Films this week 1/12 to 1/15/2024
New Plaza Cinema's holiday hits, Freud's Last Session and The Teachers' Lounge surged again in the first weekend of the new year, and we'll again feature them with additional shows over this MLK holiday stretch. The 12:15 pm show of Freud's on Monday will, per numerous audience requests, be an open-captioned version, and Teachers' Lounge will be joined on the schedule by another Oscar "Short List" candidate, this one in both the documentary and international feature categories. The film is Four Daughters, whose Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania is no stranger to Oscar competition. Her 2020 drama, The Man Who Sold His Skin was a nominee for Best International Feature. Her new film premiered in last spring's Official...
Films this week 1/05 to 1/07/2024
New Plaza Cinema patrons -- including many first-time visitors -- flocked to our holiday week "doubleheader" from Sony Classics in numbers nearly as large as last year's Bill Nighy-starrer Living.Freud's Last Session started strong (Anthony Hopkins turned 86 on New Year's Eve!), but by last weekend the German Oscar submission The Teachers' Lounge -- with its riveting young star Leonie Benesch -- was breaking out with a series of sellout shows. We'll have five screenings of The Teachers' Lounge this weekend to accommodate anticipated demand, plus more of Freud's Last Session. We're also very pleased to present a Saturday afternoon screening of master documentarian Frederick Wiseman's epic new work, Menus-Plaisirs: Les...
Films this week 12/29/2023
Our first-run engagements of Freud’s Last Session and The Teachers’ Lounge continue on this New Year’s holiday weekend. Anthony Hopkins (as Sigmund Freud) and Matthew Goode (as C.S. Lewis) continue their spirited battle of wits and emotions in Freud’s Last Session. Over the numerous screenings of the film I have introduced this past week, I’ve had the feeling that many in our audience who emerge afterward are feeling a mix of joy and melancholy in its depiction of both the psychiatrist and the actor — each at a later phase in their lives (Hopkins turns 86 on New Year’s Eve!) but still imbued with virtuosity. In her Critic’s Pick review on Christmas Day, newly minted NY Times film reviewer Alissa Wilkinson noted, “Taking on the...
Films this week 12/22/2023
Sony Pictures Classics, now in its fourth decade as one of the leading U.S. specialized film distributors, graced our holiday program last year with Oscar-nominated Bill Nighy in Living, and the inspiring saga of Robert Caro and the late Robert Gottlieb in Turn Every Page. This year they've offered us two more brand new releases for New Plaza Cinema's full time holiday residence (December 22 through January 1) at Macaulay Honors College: Freud's Last Session, opening on December 22, showcases two-time Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud and Matthew Goode (Brideshead Revisited) as C.S. Lewis engaging in an imaginary encounter; as Variety critic Peter Debruge puts it, "these two titans of 20th century thought meet at...
Films this week 12/15 to 12/17/2023
This abbreviated New Plaza Cinema weekend will offer the final screenings of music docs Joan Baez: I Am a Noise and The Stones and Brian Jones, as well as this diverse trio: Monster - The latest from Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose 2018 Cannes Palme d'or winner Shoplifting was a New Plaza Cinema audience favorite. His new film centers on a single mother, her son, and a fight that one day breaks out at his school and devolves into mystery and irony. In her NY Times Critic's PIck review, Natalia Winkelman wrote, "A master of family affairs, Kore-eda directs with a discerning but delicate style...accented by an aching score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, Monster is one of the finest films of the year..." Past Lives -...
Films this week 12/08 to 12/10/2023
On this holiday-event-abbreviated weekend, New Plaza Cinema will be offering just four screenings -- encores of Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, the award-winning Past Lives, Make Me Famous, with docmakers Brian Vincent and Heather Spore back for another Q&A, plus one new addition. The UK's Nick Broomfield has built an impressive portfolio of documentaries on star-crossed pop musicians - Leonard Cohen, Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain -- and other controversial public figures: Sarah Palin, Heidi Fleiss, and Aileen Wournos. His latest, The Stones and Brian Jones chronicles the short, tragic life of an original Rolling Stone whose mid-sixties musical innovations -- the marimba on Under My Thumb, woodwinds on Ruby Tuesday, and sitar on...
Films this week 11/30 to 12/03/2023
One of New Plaza Cinema's most popular films of this fast-receding year just had a triumphant week -- perhaps the first of many.Past Lives won "Best Film of 2023" at the Gotham Awards, then "Best First Film" for director Celine Song at the NY Film Critics' balloting. I was following the latter on Thursday morning, and got the Past Lives news in the nick of time, about five minutes before our NY Times ad deadline. We'll be doing two shows this weekend to celebrate, along with encore screenings of Joan Baez: I Am a Rock, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and David Fincher's kinetic The Killer. Plus, two very special screenings: On Saturday at 4:45 pm: Only in Theatres, with director Raphael Sbarge hosting an encore of his doc...
Films this week 11/24 to 11/26/2023
On this Thanksgiving weekend we're adding the latest from one of the most gifted American filmmakers of his generation -- David Fincher, whose body of work includes Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network, and my personal favorite, Zodiac. In The Killer, Michael Fassbender portrays a peerless hired assassin who himself becomes the hunted when a "job" goes awry. Tilda Swinton and Arliss Howard co-star. I was intrigued by the comments from former, longtime Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers: "It's Fincher's deliciously depraved conceit that his perfectionist process is not unlike the killer's. In his hands, and with a mesmerizing title turn from Fassbinder, what could have been a hitman cliche becomes a tangle of loose ends...
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You can reach him at films@newplazacinema.org