Gary's Corner

There will be a lot of 'special activity' around New Plaza Cinema's screening schedule over the next three weekends, including shows on this Monday's holiday, extra ones on the next three Thursday evenings, and theatre closings, for student events on October 17 and 24-25. Let's get into it. This weekend's major addition - fresh from its boffo downtown premiere at IFC Center - is a new documentary from Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck, Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5. In her Critic's Pick review, the NY Times' Manohla Dargis rhapsodizes on this "...essayistic documentary from Raoul Peck that surveys its title subject’s life and work, using them as a lens to explore authoritarian power in the past and the present. Densely packed, the movie is...

This weekend’s New Plaza Cinema schedule includes a crowd of two-hour-plus ‘schedule busters,’ in film biz parlance, but we hope you’ll agree they’re all worth presenting. At the top of the list is the recent documentary Henry Fonda for President. In his NY Times ‘Critic’s Pick’ review, Glenn Kenny (an NPC friend) writes, "Henry Fonda was inarguably one of the greatest actors ever produced by the United States. The Austrian filmmaker Alexander Horwath pushes this self-evident truth further in his purposefully expansive documentary Henry Fonda for President. The movie convincingly posits that Fonda was, cinematically, the embodiment of America itself. Horwath has gathered a vast amount of archival material from film, television,...

Three new titles --- all from women directors -- grace this weekend's New Plaza Cinema lineup : The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival - we've been tracking this documentary from filmmaker Julie Rubio since its sellout debut last winter at the New York Jewish Film Festival. My colleague Abbe Harris reports: "The recent Broadway musical put the spotlight on this preeminent Art Deco painter, known for her high-gloss sensual nudes and portraits of high society during the Jazz Age. What's less known is her fascinating backstory. Bisexual, Jewish and prone to relationships with her subjects, Tamara fled the Bolsheviks in 1917 for Paris, where she began painting professionally to provide for her family....

There's just one new film on this weekend's New Plaza Cinema lineup, though it isn't even really 'new' - Warren Beatty's 1981 epic Reds. As this turbulent year in America has ground on, Beatty's audacious portrait of a generation of social political and adventurers ca 1915-20 seems to retain a peculiar, poignant resonance. Recently I've asked audiences here if they'd like to see it again, and a lot of hands have shot up... The NY Times' Vincent Canby, in his December 4, 1981 review - opening day at the cavernous Loews Astor Plaza (I was there) - raved: "Reds is an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.... a large, remarkably rich film that dramatizes - in a way that...

It's another packed weekend at New Plaza Cinema: nine movies on the program, from our ever-durable holdovers to new work from various corners of the filmmaking world that we think deserves your scrutiny. As many of you know, we like to occasionally present animated feature films from around the world, including the Oscar-winning Flow, celebrated --as website Indiewire noted this week - "for its use of the free-to-download software Blender, which enabled the film's animation team to craft a lush, human-free world of staggering beauty and rising water. " Indiewire goes on to report that "Practically at the other end of the spectrum of what's possible, director Julian Glander has created a distanced, painfully, poignantly pastel...

While our still-strong holdovers are dominating this weekend's schedule, we also have a new film - spotted on the film festival circuit by my programming colleague Abbe Harris - making its US theatrical premiere at New Plaza Cinema. The Blond Boy from the Casbah, a recent French-Algerian co-production shot in spacious widescreen, recalls Cinema Paradiso in its portrait of the Jewish quarter of Algiers when, in the late 1950s, Muslims and Jews co-existed peacefully. We all know The Battle of Algiers as the eternal classic of that period, but this film, with its warm, empathetic portrait of an extended family (including a movie-obsessed young son), also merits our patronage. Its director is Alexandre Arkady, a veteran French...

On this Fourth of July weekend, New Plaza Cinema patrons will have ample chances to catch up with the diverse lineup of films that’ve been packing our house in recent weeks: the uproarious dark comedy Bad Shabbos (including a couple of Q&As with co-screenwriter Zack Weiner, whose appearances here generate almost as many laughs as the movie itself); Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, the rom-com with an unusual twist or two; and the moving first-person documentary, A Photographic Memory, from much-honored distributor Zeitgeist Films. Also on the schedule this weekend is another new non-fiction title, described thusly by the NY Times’ doc specialist Alissa Wilkinson: "Actors in documentaries about their own lives rarely speak with...

New Plaza Cinema's amazing run of the upper-west-side-set, dark comedy Bad Shabbos continues this weekend. Over the past two weekends, all twelve screenings that we've presented have been sell-outs; as always we strongly recommend advance online ticket purchases and early arrival at the theatre. At press time we were awaiting confirmation from director Daniel Robbins and co-screenwriter Zach Weiner for selected after-show Q&As - please check our website for updates. With NYC's primary elections just around the corner (June 24), we'll be presenting next weekend Daniel and Zach's earlier, documentary collaboration Citizen Weiner, about the latter's run for an UWS city council seat, with its own brand of pitch-black comedy. We...