Gary's Corner

  As West End Theatre patrons know, we've mostly been focused on the various Oscar nominees in our first three weeks of programming. There's more of that to come — including, next weekend, Pedro Almodovar's Parallel Mothers with Penelope Cruz — but in this letter we're highlighting a quartet of recent outstanding work from a diverse group of nations. Three of them were featured in last summer's Cannes Film Festival, the other a triple award winner at Sundance. From Iran, A Hero by multi-Oscar winning director Asghar Farhadi tells the tale of an Iranian man's effort, upon his release from prison, to rectify a previous wrong that conversely spirals into a web of painful consequences. The NY Times' A.O. Scott wrote, “(Farhadi)...

As we move into our third weekend of screenings at the West End Theatre, we’re keeping the focus on female Oscar nominees past and present. This year’s Best Actress race is as "wide open" as any I can remember in recent years — any one of the five nominees could win. This week we’re featuring two of them, Nicole Kidman in Being the Ricardos and Jessica Chastain (recent winner of the SAG Best Actress award) in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s incandescent documentary RBG was a 2018 Oscar nominee, and we consider them among the "heroes of New Plaza" for their appearances with the film in the early days of our tenure at the NYIT Auditorium. We are delighted to welcome them back on the evening of...

It was an exhilarating Presidents’ Day weekend at our newly opened West End Theatre on 263 West 86 St. Seven diverse and beguiling films (including four Oscar nominees) screened to enthusiastic crowds, and one of them — the ebullient Summer of Soul — delivered our first sold-out house.  This weekend we’re offering an eight-film lineup (five of which have Oscar nods). Some of the highlights include: Compartment No. 6 & Nightmare Alley — the Cannes-awarded drama and Guillermo del Toro dark epic respectively, showcase the dynamic range of our five-speaker sound system and 20-foot-wide screen, which were built from scratch by theatre installation specialist Roger Getzoff and his son Steve.  Summer of Soul, the Oscar favorite...

As we move to live film screenings, we will be discontinuing our virtual film streaming programs. We started this venture nearly two years ago and since have presented over a hundred titles. As more venues are back up and running, our distributors are backing away from this channel, so it makes sense to step away for now. We're grateful for your support during this challenging epoch. Please know that we WILL continue with our popular New Plaza Cinema Classic Film Talk Backs and Lectures.  And, on Friday February 18 we'll be making our long-in-the-works return to "live" cinema, at the West End Theatre on 263 West 86 St, between Broadway and West End Avenue. After that long search you may recall me describing in a recent column,...

In addition to Sidney Poitier, we lost another of our cinema heroes this month — writer/director/movie historian Peter Bogdanovich. His 1971 masterpiece The Last Picture Show was featured in one of New Plaza Cinema's first Talk Backs, and we later heard through a friend of the director's that he had seen and enjoyed it — the sort of encouragement that Max Alvarez and I needed in those early weeks of the pandemic. In fact, Bogdanovich had a much longer "six degrees" connection with New Plaza — growing up on the Upper West Side he met Dan and Toby Talbot in the early 60s, writing program notes for their revival calendars at the New Yorker Theatre on Broadway at W. 88 St. Through much of that decade he intrepidly interviewed many...

Regular viewers of our "Talk Back" Zoom-cast on classic movies may have noticed that I sometimes use the phrase "Six degrees of New Plaza Cinema" when some inadvertent connection arises — as it often seems to — on a new program with actors and filmmakers whom we've celebrated on a previous one.   The passing last week of both Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich seemed to bring that home to me in an especially poignant way. Two of Poitier's early films were featured in our first year of the New Plaza Cinema Classic Talk Backs. No Way Out showcased his debut performance as a young doctor struggling against the dual burdens of social responsibility and withering prejudice, and we speculated how he must have felt those same...

This week's addition to our Virtual Cinema schedule showcases France's brightest (and hardest working) star of the decade, Léa Seydoux. In addition to being a magnetic Bond Girl this fall, she appeared in four films in last summer's Cannes Film Festival including — The French Dispatch — but was unable to walk the famous red carpet even once due to a bout of Covid. The Cannes movie new to our lineup today is titled France, after the character she plays, France de Meurs, a popular, often flamboyant television anchor and correspondent who hosts a nightly news show. Provocative director Bruno Dumont has made a number of films set in both contemporary and other times in France that, as NY Times critic Tony Scott accurately puts it,...

Happy New Year from all of us at New Plaza Cinema. We hope that in 2021 — one of the most challenging years in modern American history -— our Virtual Cinema programs, Talk Backs, Lectures, and special events like Max Alvarez' ongoing Film Craft series have enriched your life. Many of you have provided generous financial assistance and for these efforts, we are deeply grateful. As we close out this year we hope you'll consider one final round of support, this time for New Plaza's ambitious 2022 agenda.   You may be aware that "behind the scenes" we've been engaged in yet another project: Finding a new cinema home after the unfortunate watery demise of our beloved NYIT venue. All through this spring, summer ,and fall we have...

We're continuing our current lineup of Virtual Cinema through the holidays, including several titles that figure in various awards season conversations: Hive, Luzzu, and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. This Sunday's (12/19) "West Side Story New Plaza Talk Back" will focus on the 1961 Robert Wise-Jerome Robbins version — including a live appearance by Richard Barrios, author of 'West Side Story: The Jets, the Sharks and the Making of a Classic" — and I imagine some of our viewers will also weigh in on the new remake. I haven't yet seen it, but I'm concerned about how its opening weekend box office was widely interpreted in the press and on social media. As my old friend and astute industry analyst Tom Brueggemann wrote in...