Gary's Corner

Another headlong week… Apple on Monday morning informed us that this coming weekend would be the final one for their post-Oscar "victory lap" theatrical re-release of CODA. Some of you may have overheard me asking, as our many full-house audiences exited the theatre, “Does that get your vote for the Oscar?” The answer almost uniformly was "yes." So, just four more chances to see it with a rapt audience on the West End Theatre’s big screen… The Automat continues its "boffo," as Mel Brooks might say, run this weekend, including a Sunday night appearance at 7 pm by director Lisa Hurwitz, in conversation with Jay Shockley, Senior Historian at the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. Get your tickets online early! Last week's...

We're following up our phenomenally successful weekend at New Plaza Cinema at the West End Theatre (five sold-out shows!) with additional daily screenings of The Automat and Best Picture Oscar-winning CODA. Advance online ticket purchase is strongly recommended.  We'll also be adding multiple Oscar nominee The Worst Person in the World to the program and reprising Almodovar's 1999 classic All About My Mother, which I introduced last weekend. It has aged beautifully.    Two other hard hitting foreign films, Donbass from Ukraine and Ahed's Knee from Israel, will return next weekend, with special guest speakers.   New Plaza Cinema @ The West End Theatre is also presenting a Saturday-Sunday exclusive NYC premiere, a recent,...

A series of unexpected, last minute developments have led to a particularly bounteous program this weekend at New Plaza Cinema @ West End Theatre. Early Monday morning I received word that the distributor of the surprise Oscar-winning Best Picture CODA had gotten approval for additional play dates, including at New Plaza Cinema!  From the clips we saw on Oscar night it’s clear that this film’s deeply emotional "swell" is best experienced with an audience. A couple hours later we heard from filmmaker (and our Upper West Side neighbor) Lisa Hurwitz that her acclaimed documentary The Automat had completed its successful downtown run and was available to the West End. Lisa will join us on Saturday night for a Q & A. G et your...

Movie lovers far and wide are still processing Sunday night’s Oscar spectacle. History was made by several of the winners, as well as more than a jot of infamy. The distributor of the evening’s biggest triumph has apparently declined to make the film available for theatre screenings this weekend, so New Plaza Cinema has assembled the most reflective Oscar program that we could. My thoughts, in random order: Dune - Six Oscar wins including cinematography, score and sound: the latter being showcased in all its stentorian glory on the West End Theatre’s sound system. The Tragedy of Macbeth & King Richard - Denzel Washington reportedly told Will Smith in between The Slap and The Speech, “In your highest moments, be careful....

We’re going "all in" this Oscar weekend at the New Plaza Cinema @ West End Theatre with ten nominated titles. Two of them are new to our programs, from our recent association with Netflix: previous Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino’s Neapolitan family drama The Hand of God (a Best International Film nominee) and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (three nods including her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel).  To me, the main fascination with this year’s Oscars is how two of the main categories — Best Picture and Best Actress— seem to be utter "toss-ups. I can see scenarios in which three or four different films could win "Best Picture," and after seeming a complete free-for-all "Best Actress" seems to have come down to Jessica...

  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,...