Gary's Corner

Hello everyone. We've added one new title to this week's Virtual Cinema lineup, the acclaimed Israeli drama Asia, in which tragic circumstances coax a single Russian emigre mother and her ailing teenage daughter to forge an intimate bond previously missing from their lives. The daughter is played by charismatic young actress Shira Haas, featured in the popular Netflix series Unorthodox and the superb Israeli feature Foxtrot. Check out her special "hello" to New Plaza viewers.    A headliner in last year's Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals as well as Israel's 'Best International Film' Oscar submission, Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney wrote,  "Asia will inevitably draw comparisons to Michael Haneke's Amour in its unflinching...

Hello everyone. We're continuing for another week with our current lineup of Virtual Cinema titles. We'll be adding at least one new film next week...the acclaimed, multi-award-winning Israeli drama Asia starring charismatic Shira Haas from the Netflix series Unorthodox. In the meantime, I recommend this Indiewire article from an old friend, art house film buyer turned industry analyst Tom Brueggemann. He reports on the complex set of factors surrounding the box office performance last weekend of In the Heights. Readers may recall my comments last week that a strong opening for In the Heights might be an important barometer signaling an overall uptick in national theatrical box office as we move toward the second half of the...

Hello everyone. This week's addition to our virtual cinema lineup currently holds a rare 100% Rotten Tomatoes score via 18 US and international critics. Recipient of a Special Jury Prize from the Rotterdam Film Festival — always a reliable incubator of  "new waves" — Take Me Somewhere Nice is the mercurial, neon-tinted work of Ena Sendijarevic, a Bosnian-born refugee raised in Holland who's now one of Dutch cinema's fastest-rising talents. Her debut feature follows a young woman, herself a Bosnian emigre, whose return to her home country to visit an ailing, long-estranged father devolves into a road-movie-like series of misadventures that she experiences with a growing devil-may-care detachment, and newfound maturity....

Hello everyone. This week New Plaza is adding a recent German drama, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit from Caroline Link, director of the enduring 2003 Oscar-winning Nowhere in Africa. The film is based on the first of a trilogy of best-selling children's books — and life experiences — of author/illustrator Judith Kerr, whose family in the early 1930s fled the Nazis first to Switzerland, then Paris, eventually returning to a battered Berlin after the war. Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday wrote last month: "In tone and approach, 'When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit' recalls "To Kill a Mockingbird." This is a very grown-up story couched in a coming-of-age tale of discovery and perseverance, the kind of child-centric narrative that...

Hello everyone. The double-Oscar-nominated Collective was withdrawn this week from virtual cinema release but another Romanian film, the dark comedy Two Lottery Tickets, passed across our radar via a smart, scrappy new distributor, Dekanalog, so we're giving it a shot. In a "Critic's Pick" last weekend, the NY Times reviewer wrote that this twisted tale of a down-on-his-luck mechanic whose jackpot lottery ticket is apparently stolen "comes to life when (he and his) friends start interrogating the colorful characters at an apartment complex, including fortune tellers, sex workers and a group of stoners — all ripe for hilarious vignettes driven by misunderstanding. Director Paul Negoescu... gives the film fresh zest with droll...

Hello everyone. We're carrying on for another week with our Oscar-centric titles and recent European feature films and documentaries, some of which will be departing on May 28th. We're also pursuing a couple of new releases for the Memorial Day weekend. I am continuing to venture out to the NYC art houses and repertory screens that have reopened this spring. In the coming weeks I'll be catching in various parts of town Monte Hellman's Two Lane Blacktop, Fellini's 8 1/2 and Kubrick's 70mm 2001: A Space Odyssey, all personal favorites. Many of you may recall that some of our most memorable New Plaza Cinema screenings have been with classic film reissues...Alain Delon in Monsieur Klein and the epic Christ Stopped at Eboli at NYIT,...

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...

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...

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...