Gary's Corner

The British drama Scrapper joins New Plaza Cinema's first run film lineup this weekend. Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Scrapper recalls the late 50s to early 60s UK golden age of "kitchen sink realism" cinema -- films like A Taste of Honey, Saturday NIght, and Sunday Morning and Whistle Down the Wind. In her recent NY Times Critic's Pick review, Claire Shaffer writes, "Director Charlotte Regan's feature debut is as whip-smart as the 12-year-old girl at its center. Georgie (played wonderfully by newcomer Lola Campbell), lives alone in her apartment in London following the death of her mother...'Scrapper' is tender without falling into sappiness. Regan doesn't romanticize...

As we move inexorably toward the 25th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, many Americans are also mindful of another fateful day in modern world history: the violent overthrow on 9/11/1973 of the government of Chile and its president, Salvador Allende. To mark next week’s 50th anniversary of the tragedy, New Plaza Cinema will showcase four diverse films that examine from various angles both the events themselves and their ongoing, mournful reverberations. Costa-Gavras' Missing, nominated for 4 Oscars including 1982’s Best Picture, has -- in its chronicle of a young American's fate in the wake of the bloody Chilean military coup -- lost none of its power to shock and outrage. In his original NY Times review, Vincent...

As summer 2023 begins its curtain call over this Labor Day weekend, New Plaza Cinema has packed the four days with a diverse dozen, including European intimate epics and ingenious American indies, both feature and documentary, many of them making their final appearances on our program. I'd like to make a particular pitch for Jean Eustache's 1973 The Mother and the Whore, with its indelible trio of Jean-Pierre Leaud,  Bernadette Lafont, and Francoise Lebrun, screening Saturday afternoon. The great French director Olivier Assayas writes, it is "the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city (Paris), a time, a culture now all gone." New...

This Friday night New Plaza Cinema will be presenting the third installment of the NYC Short Filmmakers’ Showcase. Our tireless programmer Michael Jacobsohn has compiled another eclectic program of new talent, many of whom will join us for a "group Q&A" after the screening. This program always sells out -- order your tickets online early! Also joining this weekend’s schedule: The Eternal Memory — This piercing documentary, winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the  World Cinema Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, chronicles an aging couple’s struggle with the husband’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The NY Times’ Ben Kenigsberg wrote “An unusually intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease...

This is New Plaza Cinema's 'Late Summer Epic Movies Weekend,' with our continuing holdover of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard with Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale;  Federico Fellini's masterwork 8 1/2 with Marcello Mastroianni, the 'other' Italian Classic of 1963 from our monthly series including post film Q&A with Max Alvarez;  and Jean Eustache's 1973 The Mother and the Whore.    The latter is a personal favorite of mine, having finally been rescued from years of distribution limbo by Janus Films, the heroic entity that this year alone has lent our program a diverse slate of classics including Cleo from 5 to 7,  My Night at Maud's and Mulholland Drive.   Writer-director Eustache's semi-autobiographical...

Many of you have heard, in my introductions to The Miracle Club, now in its fourth robust week,  the story of how that movie abruptly came onto New Plaza's schedule due to a certain local multiplex's urgent need for more 'Barbenheimer' screens.   A film that experienced a similar scenario, and is a sure Oscar contender this year along with those two July mega-busters, joins our program this weekend. Past Lives seems to me a shoo-in for a Best Picture nod, along with writing and directing nominations for its creator Celine Song, and a perfect film to revisit, or see for the first time, in the bittersweet-romantic month of August. Aurora's Sunrise,  one of our more unusual NY premieres, uses a mix of vivid animation, interviews...

"I live with this movie every day of my life."  That's no less an authority than Martin Scorsese speaking of Luchino Visconti's 1963 Italian epic The Leopard, which he routinely includes in lists of his five or ten all-time favorites.   New Plaza Cinema will be showcasing it this weekend in our monthly classics series.  Film historian, Max Alvarez will lead a Q&A after the Sunday screening.Burt Lancaster stars as an aging aristocrat who is powerless to prevent the decline of his family's fortunes in the face of Garibaldi's invading armies, who've just landed in 1860's Sicily.   While Lancaster's familiar voice is dubbed in Italian in this original, uncut version,  his body language and gravitas never fail to convince us...

The Miracle Club, our surprise hit with a trio of poignant performers -- Maggie Smith, Laura Linney, and Kathy Bates -- continues its run with additional screenings this weekend. And the raucous "downtown art scene" documentary Make Me Famous will, on Saturday afternoon, be screening for a sixth weekend, accompanied as always by a Q&A with its inexhaustible creators -- director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore. Four new films will be joining our program: Umberto Eco: A Library of the World -- This portrait of the late bestselling author, now also enjoying a lengthy downtown engagement, reveals him as both a world class literary collector and pungent wit on the vicissitudes of modern life. The League -- Sam Pollard,...

Director Nancy Buirski joined us on Sunday evening for a beautiful Q&A following her new documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy. She'll be back after Friday's 6:30 pm screening, accompanied by Oscar-winning director John Schlesinger's nephew Ian Buruma. Other Q&As this weekend include the tireless producer-director team of Heather Spore and Brian Vincent following the 5 pm Saturday show of their doc Make Me Famous, and our in-house experts Max Alvarez and Dan Cahill dissecting Douglas Sirk's 1958 The Tarnished Angels (starring Rock Hudson, subject of a controversial new documentary, and the resplendent-in-white Dorothy Malone) after its Sunday, 12:15 presentation. Next month's...