Gary's Corner

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...

The British drama Scrapper joins New Plaza Cinema's first run film lineup this weekend. Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Scrapper recalls the late 50s to early 60s UK golden age of "kitchen sink realism" cinema -- films like A Taste of Honey, Saturday NIght, and Sunday Morning and Whistle Down the Wind. In her recent NY Times Critic's Pick review, Claire Shaffer writes, "Director Charlotte Regan's feature debut is as whip-smart as the 12-year-old girl at its center. Georgie (played wonderfully by newcomer Lola Campbell), lives alone in her apartment in London following the death of her mother...'Scrapper' is tender without falling into sappiness. Regan doesn't romanticize...

As we move inexorably toward the 25th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, many Americans are also mindful of another fateful day in modern world history: the violent overthrow on 9/11/1973 of the government of Chile and its president, Salvador Allende. To mark next week’s 50th anniversary of the tragedy, New Plaza Cinema will showcase four diverse films that examine from various angles both the events themselves and their ongoing, mournful reverberations. Costa-Gavras' Missing, nominated for 4 Oscars including 1982’s Best Picture, has -- in its chronicle of a young American's fate in the wake of the bloody Chilean military coup -- lost none of its power to shock and outrage. In his original NY Times review, Vincent...

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...

This Friday night New Plaza Cinema will be presenting the third installment of the NYC Short Filmmakers’ Showcase. Our tireless programmer Michael Jacobsohn has compiled another eclectic program of new talent, many of whom will join us for a "group Q&A" after the screening. This program always sells out -- order your tickets online early! Also joining this weekend’s schedule: The Eternal Memory — This piercing documentary, winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the  World Cinema Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, chronicles an aging couple’s struggle with the husband’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The NY Times’ Ben Kenigsberg wrote “An unusually intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease...