Gary's Corner
Films this week 01/03/2025 to 01/09/2025
Gary’s Corner
by Gary Palmucci | 3rd January 2025 | Gary's Corner, Uncategorized
As we’re now looking over our shoulder at 2024, we at New Plaza Cinema would like to thank all our patrons for your support in this past year. Our attendance was up significantly from 2023, and the number and diversity of new customers discovering our programs was particularly evident over this holiday season, notably at packed screenings of Conclave, Flow and Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat. All three of these films will be back later this month following the January 17 Oscar nominations announcement.
I very much enjoyed – as perhaps you did, too- the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. We’re working on a special Bob Dylan screening of our own, and hope to have full details soon.
And, since Monday January 20, 2025 is both Martin Luther King Day and the date of certain events in Washington DC, we’re planning some relevant ‘counter-programming’ to mark that coincidence.
But first of all, front and center at New Plaza Cinema on Thursday afternoon Jan 2, we’ll commence an extended engagement of an exhilarating new French rendition of The Count of Monte Cristo, adapted from Alexandre Dumas’ immortal novel. In her NY Times Critic’s Pick review, Jeanette Catsoulis wrote,
“Adapting The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas’s voluminous adventure yarn, is not for the fainthearted. But the French filmmakers Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière prove lacking in neither heart nor style: Refusing to pander to restless derrières, they’ve given this big, bounding, beautifully cinematic swashbuckler almost three hours to breathe. Yet their pacing is so frisky — and the film’s editing so elegant — your derrière is unlikely to complain….stirringly acted and gorgeously filmed, this swashbuckler leaves the many previous versions in the dust.”
Since some customers have asked us…the film will play without an intermission, but as one Conclave patron who saw ‘The Count’ in France reported to me today, “It moves like a musket shot!”
Hope to see you this weekend….
Films This Week 9/24/21
We're continuing for another week with our current Virtual Cinema lineup of seven features and documentaries from around the world. Meanwhile, an annual ritual of the New York film world kicks off tonight - the 59th New York Film Festival, returning to cinemas on the Upper West Side and around the city after last year's nearly all-virtual edition. The opening night screening is The Tragedy of Macbeth adapted and directed by Joel Coen - sans his longtime writing-directing partner and brother, Ethan - and starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. Over three decades ago I attended the 1990 opening night screening of the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing - the dark (and darkly funny) gangster opus that I think still holds...
Films This Week 9/17/21
Tuesday night outside the Richard Rodgers Theatre, celebrating the return of 'Hamilton' -- along with 'Lion King' and 'Wicked' -- to Broadway after an 18-month absence. The theatres were once again packed, as was another Broadway show I attended last month. The joy and electricity is palpable. The recent documentary On Broadway serendipitously joins our Virtual Cinema lineup this week following its downtown theatrical premiere. In a NY Times 'Critic's Pick' reviewer Maya Phillips enthused, " 'On Broadway' sure knows how to work a theater-lover's heart...[and] provides a fascinating textbook chronology.... The story of these theatres' resilience and resurrection throughout the pandemic is already there in this film's account of...
Films This Week 9/10/21
Hello everyone. Every shot in the trailer for the Romanian crime melodrama Dogs — this week’s addition to our Virtual Cinema lineup (see below) — suggests a young filmmaker with a gifted compositional ‘eye.’ Veteran Variety critic Peter Debruge writes, “An austere, yet technically accomplished cross between the Coen brothers’ ‘Blood Simple’ and Cannes sensation ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’ — one that Romanian cinema devotees might call ‘Police, Noun’ — Mirică’s debut feature belongs to a tradition of cynical, almost nihilistic crime thrillers in which a relatively petty motive can leave dozens lying in pools of their own blood. Though we experience the film through the eyes of a naïve outsider, Roman (Dragoș Bucur), who...
Films This Week 9/03/21
Hello everyone. Our Virtual Cinema lineup is 'status quo' as we head into Labor Day and next week's holidays. I'm still recommending in particular the documentaries Searching for Mr. Rugoff and What We Left Unfinished. There's also a palpable sense of drama as we head into September and something we simply didn't have in 2020 - a bona fide fall movie season with a slew of artistically ambitious pictures on the horizon. Here are four I am eagerly awaiting: -- The Card Counter (Sept 10) -- venerable writer-director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), whose personal appearances with First Reformed were a highlight of New Plaza's first weekend at NYIT in 2018, is back with another intense drama. Oscar Isaac portrays a haunted, obsessive...
Films This Week 8/27/21
Hello everyone. Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska has been steadily building an international film portfolio over the past decade. Her ‘breakout’ film Elles premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival (I later supervised its US release) and featured Juliette Binoche as a Parisian journalist who finds herself immersed in a prostitution ring run by university students. Its abundant NC-17-rated couplings did not ensure commercial art house success, but marked Szumowska as a provocative ‘filmmaker to watch.’ Her latest, Never Gonna Snow Again, was Poland’s ‘official submission’ for Best International Film at last year’s Oscars and debuts today on our Virtual Cinema. The veteran (and venerable) Hollywood Reporter...
Films This Week 8/20/21
Hello everyone. Producer-director and industry eminence-grise Ira Deutchman has made his new documentary ‘Searching for Mr Rugoff’ available to New Plaza viewers just one week after its downtown theatrical premiere. He’s been just as generous to us (and to all participating US art houses) with the ‘deal terms’ – 100% of each ‘virtual ticket’ you purchase goes directly to support our ongoing programs. In his usual droll fashion The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane led off his review, “If you are a New Yorker with catholic tastes and a long memory, it may well be that your life was shaped by Donald S. Rugoff, though his name will ring no bells. Back in the day, whenever you took your seat at a movie theatre like the Plaza, the Paris,...
Films This Week 8/13/21
Hello everyone. With this week's beastly heat wave, even the subject (and the trailer) of our latest documentary addition to Virtual Cinema promises a cooling effect. In 'Usedom: A Clear View of the Sea,' filmmaker Heinz Brinkmann chronicles the history of the Baltic island of Usedom - where he was born -- from an early 20th century luxury destination for Berliners, with grand villas and Europe's longest beach promenade, to the expulsion of Jewish citizens by the Nazis and the island's being split into an East German and Polish half after World War II. Many decades and socio-political transitions later, a diverse population continues to relish the island, from tacky developers to relaxed nudists and cheery...
Films This Week 8/06/21
Hello everyone. As America's twenty-year ‘engagement’ in Afghanistan hurtles toward a seemingly inevitable tragic end, this week's new Virtual Cinema documentary ‘What We Left Unfinished’ takes on added disquieting dimensions. In today's NY Times critic Devika Girish writes “...five movies started and then abandoned during Afghanistan's 1978-92 Communist era form a dazzling time capsule of the nation's political and cultural history. The director (and now Brooklyn resident) Mariam Ghani - daughter of its current president Ashraf Ghani - digs into the archives of Afghan Film, a state-run company that endured the whims and demands of various regimes before the Taliban destroyed most of its holdings in the 1990s.” The films...
Films This Week 7/30/21
Hello everyone. We have no new virtual cinema titles scheduled this week, but two acclaimed documentaries will arrive in early August. One is coming from war-torn Afghanistan, and another from Germany. And with August being Alfred Hitchcock’s "birthday month," Max Alvarez will reprise his "most-popular-ever" lecture on the Master of Suspense (and other matters) on Wednesday, August 4th. In addition, Max, filmmaker Dan Cahill, and I will host a "Talk Back" on his underrated 1942 thriller Saboteur next Sunday (August 8th). If you’re traveling this week (as I am) or next, safe passage through this strange, ever-uncertain summer… Gary Palmucci, Film CuratorNew Plaza Cinema
Have a question or comment for Gary?
You can reach him at films@newplazacinema.org