Gary's Corner

  In addition to our "last chance" screenings of Plan A, Dead for a Dollar, and Last Flight Home, and a "holdover" of Argentina 1985, New Plaza Cinema has four filmmaker personal appearances on tap this weekend in our comfortable screening room at Macaulay Honors College. One of those filmmakers many of you know well — Lisa Hurwitz joined us several times last spring for Q&As following her warm-hearted, incisive documentary The Automat. On Sunday she's taking a quick break from early award-season campaigning to join us again, accompanied this time by composer Hummie Mann, a Mel Brooks collaborator (and Simpsons orchestrator) who scored the film. Get your tickets early! Julia Mintz's Four Winters is, like Lisa's, a...

  In addition to our holdovers of Plan A and 1982, we're adding four new titles this weekend to New Plaza Cinema's lineup at Macaulay Honors College, one of which I previewed last week — Dead for a Dollar, rhapsodized by the NY Times' Tony Scott as "Director Walter Hill's lean, mean western (with an aces cast: Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe and Rachel Brosnahan) and a master class in the craft of the B movie...also a reminder that Hill — who at 80 has had a career including cult classics (The Warriors, The Long Riders) and smash hits (48 HRS) — is a master in his own right, whose artistry has often been overlooked and undervalued."    Those of us who still remember — and cherish — such masters of the western as Howard...

  Thanks to everyone who turned up -- often in inclement weather -- to support our opening weekend at New Plaza Cinema's new venue, Macaulay Honors College on 35 W 67 St.   On this Indigenous Peoples' Day holiday weekend we'll be continuing with screenings of last weekend's movies, as well as presenting the exclusive US premiere of a new Israeli drama Plan A, from brother-directors Doron and Yoav Paz. Based on actual events, this film dramatizes an astounding piece of Holocaust history: a post-war plot by a small group of Jewish survivors (including August Diehl of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds)  to poison Nuremberg's water supply or, as another character puts it: "An eye for an eye. Six million for six million."  We're...

We are thrilled to announce a partnership with Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York (35 West 67th Street), exhibiting independent, foreign and classic films on weekends in their 72 seat screening room. The association aligns with New Plaza’s educational component and supplements its already robust virtual and in-person lectures and talkbacks. New Plaza Cinema at Macaulay Honors College will open on Friday, September 30th. Films will include the acclaimed documentaries Fire of love (both an Oscar contender and the top grossing doc of 2022) and Three Minutes – A Lengthening, as well as other outstanding new foreign titles including The Good Boss (Spain), Taming the Garden (Georgia), Hold Me Tight from French...

  New Plaza Cinema at the West End Theatre will be "on hiatus" in July and August due to the theatre's lack of air conditioning. We expect to be back after Labor Day, and you will know our exact plans and dates as soon as we do. We're very grateful to the Church of St Peter and St Andrew — Pastor K. Karpen, general manager Brent Ness and his dedicated staff — for hosting us during these five intensely gratifying months, along with our projection and big-screen "techs," Roger and Steve Getzoff.  It's been a lot of hard work and long hours, but the joyful support of you, our audience has made every day and every show worthwhile. We look forward to greeting you again in cooler, drier temperatures! For the final weekend of...

This long weekend observance of the Juneteenth federal holiday affords New Plaza Cinema the opportunity to present an unusually eclectic batch of films at the West End Theatre. In addition to hold-over screenings of Fanny: the Right to Rock, Petite Maman, West Side Story (2021), and of course The Automat, whose ebullient director Lisa Hurwitz will once again join us, consider these films. Crimes of the Future — As usual, in her Critic's Pick review the NYT's Manohla Dargis nailed it: "Few filmmakers slither under the skin and directly into the head as mercilessly as David Cronenberg. For decades, he has been unsettling audiences, derailing genre expectations and expanding the limits of big-screen entertainment with exploding...

This weekend's New Plaza Cinema at West End Theatre program features a special event we've been "teasing" for some time now in our pre-show announcements: A pair of back-to-back, separate admission screenings of the 1961 and 2021 adaptations of West Side Story. This is a unique opportunity to experience — for the first or umpteenth time — Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' groundbreaking adaptation of the legendary Broadway smash, winner of ten Oscars including Best Picture. And, to catch up with (or perhaps re-evaluate) Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner's kinetic update with its own Oscar winner, supporting actress Ariana DeBose. Our theatre's 10 x 22 foot screen and five stereo speakers will be shown off in all...

As many readers may recall from last week's "letter" (and our Friday NY Times ad), we listed three titles as having their "final screening" last weekend. Well, one of them, Drive My Car had such a bump in attendance that we couldn't resist doing yet another "final show" this Saturday. For any skeptics, please be assured this will indeed be the final show, as next weekend we'll be featuring the 1961 AND 2021 versions of West Side Story, both nearly three-hour films that will make it impossible to schedule additional titles of that length.   New additions to this week's New Plaza Cinema program include Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story, a documentary chronicling that venerable town's glorious, 50-plus-years-old annual spring...

On this Memorial Day weekend we'll be operating on a Friday through Monday schedule as we did on our opening Presidents' Day stanza in February, which now seems like many, many screenings and Q&As ago... Friday will be a special $10 admission for all shows.   This will be a transitional weekend as we prepare for various new films and special-event screenings in June. Fiddler's Journey to the Big Screen and the Oscar-winners Drive My Car and Belfast will each be having their final showings.   Both Belfast and The Duke (which we'll be offering five screenings due to last weekend's demand) will be presented in "open caption" versions, both for hearing-impaired viewers and for overall better clarity of their impassioned UK and...