Gary's Corner
Films from 12/20/2024 to 1/5/2025
Gary’s Corner
by Gary Palmucci | 20th December 2024 | Gary's Corner, Uncategorized
New Plaza Cinema will be operating for seventeen consecutive days during the upcoming holiday stretch, from Friday December 20 through January 5, 2025.
Unlike previous years here at Macaulay Honors College where we offered just one or two new, first-run arthouse films, this year will feature a more diverse lineup of current specialty films, several classics and a sneak preview of an upcoming documentary.
Awards season watchers no doubt noticed this week the results of the first round of Oscar-related voting, the ‘short lists’ of documentaries, international features and various other categories that will each be whittled down to five finalists in mid-January balloting. Four of these titles are featured in our holiday lineup:
the beautifully animated Latvian feature Flow (international), the live action short Once Upon a Time in Ukraine from RBG filmmaker (and New Plaza friend) Betsy West, and the documentaries Soundtrack for a Coup d’etat and Porcelain War.
The latter film chronicles a Ukrainian couple’s daily struggles to survive in the midst of the ongoing conflagration. The NY Times’ reviewer describes them as:
“…Slava, who appears in the film, is both a ceramist and a member of a Ukraine special forces unit who gives weapons training to civilians turned soldiers. His partner, Anya, paints the whimsical figurines he creates, and the irrepressible couple weather the war in bombed-out Kharkiv…”
It’s nice to see Picturehouse, distributor of the Oscar-winning La Vie en Rose, Robert Altman’s swan song A Prairie Home Companion and many other quality titles, back in the game with this one.
Another film that seems certain to be in the thick of the Oscar chase joins our lineup this weekend: Conclave, from All Quiet on the Western Front helmer Edward Berger. In her Critic’s Pick review, the NYT’s Manohla Dargis sets the scene:
“Conclave, based on Robert Harris’s 2016 Vatican intrigue of the same title, centers on a British cardinal, Lawrence (a sensational Ralph Fiennes). A cleric of uncertain faith if unwavering convictions about everything else, Lawrence has droopingly sad eyes and refined sensitivities, and serves as the dean of the College of Cardinals, the group charged with selecting the pope, who’s just died. Lawrence is on the move when the story opens, hurrying through dark streets and into a brisk drama filled with whispering, scurrying men, one of whom who will be anointed as the new earthly head of the Catholic Church. There are women, too, though mostly there’s Isabella Rossellini (a supporter of New Plaza Cinema), giving great side-eye as Sister Agnes.”
Quicksilver French actress Isabelle Huppert periodically collaborates with director Hong Sang-soo, a sort of ‘Eric Rohmer’ of Korean cinema. In their latest, A Traveler’s Needs, Huppert plays Iris, an enigmatic French traveler passing through Seoul and leaving mysterious impressions with everyone she encounters. This unique director-actress collaboration is always worth watching.
Other movies holding over this week – Saoirse Ronan in Blitz, Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, Kate Winslet in Lee.
Our sneak preview, on December 26, will be The Catskills, a new documentary chronicle of the legendary upstate New York summer vacation haven.
NPC board member Susanne Rostock’s inspiring portrait of Harry Belafonte, Following Harry, will have an encore screening on December 30.
Classics will be represented this week by Stanley Donen’s Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant (hosted by my colleague Max Alvarez) , and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set, their late 50’s, CinemaScope ‘office comedy’ set in midtown Manhattan at Christmas.
Next weekend, classics continue with two very special screenings:
— the full-length, TV version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander : Parts 1 & 2 (165 mins) on Saturday December 28; Parts 3 & 4 (147 mins) on Sunday December 29.
Later that same afternoon : Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo and a Q&A with some special guests.
And last but not least, opening on January 2, the ravishing new French rendition of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Something for everyone?
Films This Week 05/21/21
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Films This Week 5/14/21
Hello everyone. We're continuing for a bit longer with our two Oscar winners: The Father (Best Actor Anthony Hopkins, through May 17), Another Round (Best International Film), and from Romania, Collective, a double nominee for best international feature and documentary. Many viewers may have noted New Plaza's long history of screening music-driven documentaries — recently Heartworn Highways, FTA, Changing Times of Ike White, and Jazz on a Summer's Day along with earlier in-depth looks at Aretha Franklin, Gordon Lightfoot, David Crosby, Linda Ronstadt, and the LA Canyon folk-rock scene. This week we're looking at another musical-moment-in-time, the mid-70s punk rock scene in an unlikely locale — Washington DC. The documentary is...
Films This Week 5/07/21
Hello everyone. We're continuing for a second week with the new film version of Berlin Alexanderplatz, acclaimed at last year's Berlin Film Festival. To clarify what last Friday may have seemed a bit unclear to some of our readers, this is the third adaptation of Alfred Doblin's classic Weimar Germany-era novel, following a 1931 feature film and the epic 1980 R.W. Fassbinder TV mini-series which I also recommended last week. Astute critic and film festival programmer Alissa Simon has written: "In this audacious, neon-lit reinterpretation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel, after surviving his perilous journey African immigrant Francis vows to be a good man, but he soon realizes how difficult it is to be righteous while...
Films This Week 4/30/21
Hello everyone. On this weekend following a singular Oscar ceremony — including a dramatic surprise at the very last moment — we're offering two of Sunday night's winners: The Father (Best Actor, Anthony Hopkins & Best Adapted Screenplay) and Another Round (Best International Film). If you haven't seen them yet, here's another chance to catch up. The week's new film is Berlin Alexanderplatz, a kinetic re-crafting of the classic Alfred Doblin Weimar-era novel, made decades later as German director R.W. Fassbinder's opus magnum, an epic TV miniseries. This topical new adaptation both telescopes and transposes the story to the modern day as an immigrant from Guinea-Bissau is drawn into Berlin's sex-and-drugs underworld, its...
Films This Week 4/23/21
Hello everyone. It's Oscar weekend and we're continuing to headline our five nominated films: Another Round, Minari, The Father, Collective, and Aida, Quo Vadis? We've also added a French drama that, had there been a 2020 Cannes Film Festival, would've been in the Official Selection. In Slalom, a teenage ski prodigy must navigate the patriarchal world of this uber-competitve sport, including a predatory coach (Dardennes brothers' frequent leading man Jeremy Rennier). Indiewire critic David Ehrlich writes, "(Slalom) snaps across your face like a blast of cold mountain air...Shot with the kineticism of bodies in motion and the sensitivity of an early Celine Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) film.” Some New Plaza members...
New Films 4/16/21
Hello everyone. With the 2021 Academy Awards ceremony just ten days away, we've managed to add two more nominees to this week's Virtual Cinema lineup. The Father showcases two Oscar winners -- Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman -- as a father and daughter struggling to deal with the parent's increasingly tenuous grip on reality and his daily circumstances. The film's six nominations include Best Picture, Director, Screenplay (helmer Florian Zeller co-adapting his own play, presented in 2016 on Broadway with Frank Langella) and nods for Hopkins and Colman. The NY Times' Jeannette Catsoulis wrote, "At once stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting...Zeller plays with perspective so cleverly that maintaining any kind of...
Films This Week 4/09/21
Hello everyone. We're continuing this week with our three Oscar nominees while still hoping to add one or two others next Friday as well as a few other venerable holdovers. Last Saturday night I headed back to another movie house after that rather unusual experience of seeing Tenet in 70mm in the cavernous (and near empty) Village East. This time it was Minari at the handsomely refurbished Nitehawk Cinema on Prospect Park West in, per one neighborhood wag, "the People's Republic of Park Slope." I had last been in this theatre some eighteen months ago, to see Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story flawlessly projected in 35mm. This time there appeared to be about 30 patrons in the roughly 300-seat house and a different vibe from...
Films This Week 4/02/31
Hello everyone. As we move forward into a second year of Virtual Cinema "exhibition" our highlights remain the trio of multiple Oscar nominees — Minari (our top ticket seller this past year), Another Round, and Collective. Also, this week will be the final one for M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity from Zeitgeist Films. Regardless of the pace of progress, the full reopening of New York's arthouse cinemas ultimately takes, it's clear from the recent comments of two of our colleagues — friendly competitors — MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center, that a Virtual Cinema option will remain in place even when their screens are back at full capacity. We expect that New Plaza will follow a similar path, as well as keeping our increasingly...
Films This Week 3/26/21
Hello everyone. With our three multiple Oscar nominees, Minari, Another Round, and Collective, still attracting plenty of attention, we're adding one new documentary this week. Francesco is a portrait of Pope Francis and his seemingly non-stop recent travels to every troubled corner of the globe. Director Evgeny Afineevsky was a 2016 Oscar nominee for his Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom. While this is a more straightforward portrait of the current pontiff than the feature film The Two Popes or Wim Wenders' doc A Man of His Word, it contains at least one indisputably historic moment showing on screen for the first time Pope Francis' 2019 public endorsement of same-sex unions, as well as his relentless focus on other...
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You can reach him at films@newplazacinema.org