Gary's Corner

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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

Hello everyone. No new additions this week to our film lineup of virtual cinema titles. However, I have included below links to three trenchant pieces of journalism about the current raging debate on our state of movie watching as theatres and film festivals finally, fitfully start to rev their engines. Depending on your internet-carrier situation, one or two of these may require subscriptions to the linked publications. My friend and veteran film critic and journalist Todd McCarthy — joined by a colleague — reviews both the "vibe" and many provocative films unveiled in this year's Cannes Film Festival and despite some initial misgivings, finds the event to have been a surprising triumph. Many of the films discussed will be...

Hello everyone. We're augmenting this week's virtual cinema lineup with two recent documentaries. In Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland stitches together extensively researched archival footage of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, creating a lively conversation between two writers who clearly had a lot to say "to" and "about" each other.   Per Ben Kenigsberg of the NY Times, among many other topics "they express disappointment with films adapted from their work. Williams felt the censorship was so heavy you often needed to see the stage version for comprehension.  Capote says Paramount 'double-crossed' him by casting Audrey Hepburn (whom he nevertheless praises) instead of...

Hello everyone. We have no new additions this week to our virtual cinema lineup, but there are a couple in the works for next Friday. Many of you have no doubt read various reports on the opening of this year's Cannes Film Festival, delayed two months (after the 2020 edition was flat-out cancelled) by circumstances we know all too well. As someone who was very fortunate to attend a number of previous Cannes festivals, I've been canvassing the coverage and was particularly struck by a piece from a longtime journalist friend, Todd McCarthy, now patrolling the Promenade de la Croisette for the trade publication Deadline. His column, titled "It's Covid, Jake," (an immortal movie reference) can be read here in its entirety. For...

Hello everyone. I'm vacationing this week in Wellfleet, MA on Cape Cod where Henry Thoreau once said, "A man may stand and put all America behind him."     One can indeed stand, hypnotized, astride the other-worldly beauty of its ocean-side beaches currently teeming with seals — which also means predatory sharks are seldom far away. The local drive in theatre, in business since the late 1950s, (where I first saw The Dirty Dozen way back in '67), tonight features its annual screening of Jaws, this time double-billed with Jurassic Park.   Our own virtual screen today is adding two films that recently premiered downtown at Film Forum. I first encountered Iranian filmmaker Mohammed Rasoulof with his Iron Island at Cannes 2005, and...