Gary's Corner

New Plaza Cinema jumps back into a full schedule this weekend at our Macaulay Honors College screening room -- with at least one damaged seat now repaired!   The recent documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise proved to be a sell out hit in its first New Plaza Cinema screenings last weekend. We've added additional shows this time around, but as always strongly suggest purchasing your tickets online and in advance.  Another, not so recent but equally fascinating doc will finally be making its Upper West Side theatrical debut this weekend. I'll let its longtime distributor Ken Eisen from Waterville ME, a friend -- and "friendly competitor" from my decades in the indie releasing biz -- tell us about it in his own words: "Twenty...

New Plaza Cinema jumps back into a full schedule this weekend at our Macaulay Honors College screening room -- with at least one damaged seat now repaired!The two new release additions to the line up are both NY Times Critic's Picks: Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is hailed as "a documentary with a gold mine of material: drawings, journal entries, concert footage, family videos and vintage photographs. Included in the mix is audio from one of her therapy tapes, setting the stage for her unflinching confessional about abuse....an eloquent meditation on making peace with the past."  And the Times' Amy Nicholson describes the heroine of the rousing biopic Nyad (Annette Bening) as "a record-breaking long-distance swimmer (with) the...

Due to both CUNY events and the NYC Marathon, we'll only be screening this weekend on Saturday. We'll be back to a full schedule next weekend. But we've packed the day with a quintet of outstanding films.  The Persian Version joins a group of diverse highlights, including Past Lives, Theatre Camp, Scrapper,  Shortcomings and The Eternal Memory -- which we've featured from this year's Sundance Film Festival. The Persian Version was awarded both the US Dramatic Competition Audience Award and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting prize. On RogerEbert.com, a forum for many of the nation's up-and-coming young critics, Nick Allen wrote, "Writer-director Maryam Kesharvarz's film is an ebullient rule-breaker, and it does so in the name of the...

On this slightly abbreviated weekend (we'll be closed Friday night for a CUNY event) we're adding one new film to the New Plaza Cinema lineup, from an up and coming Australian director, Kitty Green, whose previous, harrowing The Assistant made some waves in 2020.  In her NY Times "Critic's Pick" review, Jeanette Catsoulis lauds The Royal Hotel as a "keenly calibrated thriller...Place two young, attractive American female backpackers (Ozark's Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick) in a forlorn mining town somewhere in the Australian Outback; surround them with sex-starved, boorish miners; allow them no access to cell service or reliable transport.Their ensuing trials are a cyst that Green and her co-writer, Oscar Redding, take their...

Over the past two years New Plaza Cinema has collaborated with Netflix to bring some of their outstanding theatrical features to our screen, including Power of the Dog, The Lost Daughter, and All Quiet on the Western Front. There'll be more here from Netflix this fall, starting this weekend with the sizzling high-finance-workplace drama Fair Play.  Another highlight of this year's Sundance Film Festival (we've already played Past Lives, Miracle Club, and Scrapper), Fair Play spotlights Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in what Amy Nicholson, in her NY Times Critic's Pick review called "a superbly malevolent erotic thriller about two ambitious financial analysts who drink too much, sleep too little and cannot afford to bring...

Two classic films and their master directors are in the forefront of this week's New Plaza Cinema programming.  Although it's been nearly 25 years since Stanley Kubrick's sudden passing, his movies continue to draw enthusiastic, ever-analyzing audiences. In our October theme of "horrific goings-on in remote locations" that kicked off with Island of Lost Souls, we couldn't resist including Kubrick's The Shining, adapted from Stephen King's early novel about one dysfunctional family's terrifying unravelling in a dead of winter Colorado resort hotel. Jack Nicholson in one of his many iconic roles brings, among many other things, an immortal chilling twist to the familiar intro of a famous TV talk show host. Max Alvarez and I will...

Spanish master Pedro Almodovar, whose Parallel Mothers was one of New Plaza Cinema's biggest hits, and distributor Sony Classics (Living, Turn Every Page) this weekend bring us a unique double-feature. Strange Way of Life, direct from last week's NY Film Festival premiere, where hundreds of hopeful stand-by viewers were turned away, stars Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal in a western, as a hardened sheriff and his long-departed lover whose reappearance may mask some ulterior motives. On the website rogerebert.com, home to some of our best young film critics, Brian Tallerico has this intriguing assessment: "It makes perfect sense that a director who adores heightened emotion would be drawn to the Western...when one factors in that...

The fall movie season officially kicks off this weekend with the start of the New York Film Festival.  New Plaza Cinema will be getting into the act next Friday with a run of Pedro Almodovar’s latest, Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, direct from its sold-out Alice Tully Hall premiere. But before that, we'll be joining the NY Premiere runs of a new documentary on legendary guitarist Carlos Santana. In his Variety review last summer, my friend Owen Gleiberman reported:  "Built around an extended interview with Santana, who at 75 is spry and rueful and funny and confessional, Rudy Valdez’s documentary presents his life and career in a straightforward way, but that doesn’t explain why the film is so...

On Saturday afternoon, we're hosting an encore screening of the documentary Honoring Eric Bentley, whose U.S. premiere New Plaza Cinema presented in January. This tribute in both testimony and song to one of the heroes of 20th century American theatre. The late playwright, singer, translator, and often pungently perceptive critic Eric Bentley -- who enriched our appreciation of Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, O'Neill and many others -- features appearances and musical performances by a stellar cast of his admirers, including Tony Kushner, Philip Lopate, Karyn Levitt, and Austin Pendleton. After the screening co-producer (and exuberant performer in the film) Karyn Levitt will join Columbia Professor Michael Paller for a discussion...