Gary's Corner

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...

We're continuing for another week with our current Virtual Cinema lineup, including Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy from Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose latest film, Drive My Car, was both a surprise "Best Picture of the Year" winner at last week's NY Film Critics' Circle awards, and #1 on NY Times reviewer Manohla Dargis' Ten Best List. While elaborating on her year-end list, Dargis also rhapsodized about the joyous sensations of returning to the cinema in mid-summer: being, as she wrote, "...back in the place that makes me supremely happy: I was at the movies. Since then, I have watched many new releases in person, including at two festivals where I gorged like a famished person. I had spent the first part of the year...

Greetings and Happy Hanukkah! Ninety-three nations have submitted an entry for Best International Film for the 2022 Academy Awards,  tying a previous record. While only about a dozen of these have so far seen U.S. theatrical release, one of the most critically acclaimed Hive, from Kosovo — is this week's addition to New Plaza's Virtual Cinema lineup. Winner of three top prizes at this year's Sundance Film Festival, this is the story of one woman's desperate search for her husband in the aftermath of the 1998-99 Kosovo War, which drove invading Yugoslav forces (with heavy participation from NATO airstrikes) from the tiny country, at a considerable cost of lives and displacement. This wife, Fahrije (Blerta Basholli), with steely...

This coming week may well be the most dramatic of the 2021 movie year with the theatrical releases of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, King Richard (with Will Smith, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, and Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Cannes prize-winner, Drive My Car. Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi's previous film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (lauded at this year's Berlin Film Festival)  joins our Virtual Cinema lineup today. In three separate episodes, this rising auteur explores the romantic trajectories of young men and women with dialogue and precise staging that recall such masters as France's Eric Rohmer and Korea's Hong Sang-soo. In her NY Times "Critic's Pick," my friend Manohla Dargis — always a perceptive...

We have two new additions to our Virtual Cinema lineup.  Director Radu Jude has been 'coming up' on the international film scene in this past decade.  His 'Romanian western'  Aferim! played at Lincoln Plaza ('picked' by the NY Times' A.O. Scott),  the black comedy I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians was featured in our NYIT programs and his new provocation, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was in this year's NY Film Festival and will soon open commercially. Today we're offering another recent film of his, described lovingly by Richard Brody in this week's New Yorker online:  "Documentary-fiction hybrids are having a major moment, and there’s another remarkable one now coming out in theatres : Uppercase Print, a...