Gary's Corner

New Plaza Cinema this weekend is joining the US Premiere of a new French drama, Farewell, Mr. Haffmann, starring the Gallic great Daniel Auteuil (Jean de Florette, Les Voleurs, The Well Digger's Daughter), and currently tracking at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.   Set in 1942 Paris, a talented jeweler faced with the realities of the Nazi occupation strikes up an agreement with an employee to keep his business running, one which over time will set in motion a series of fateful consequences. We've often worked with this film's distributor, Menemsha, a specialist in Jewish-themed period dramas including 1945, Plan A, and Those Who Remained.    Our spellbinding screening earlier this month of Rashomon will be bookended on Sunday by Akira...

Another New Plaza Cinema packed weekend of screenings and personal appearances awaits us. After last Sunday's rapturous debut screening of Remembering Gene Wilder, we'll be joined on Friday and Saturday afternoon by director Ron Frank. He'll be accompanied on Saturday by veteran SNL writer-producer Alan Zweibel. Also on Friday, in a special collaboration with the Latin American Film Center of NY, we'll be offering a very rare showing of the 1976 Mexican classic Canoa - A Shameful Memory, a fictional chronicle of the late-1960s deaths of a group of university employees, which tragically mirrors similar, more recent events in that convulsed nation. Oscar-winning Mexican directors Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro are both...

This will be an abbreviated New Plaza Cinema weekend due to some student events at Macaulay Honors College. Two of this weekend's programs are already sold out, though some standby tickets may turn up just before showtime.   One of them is our bimonthly NYC Short Film Showcase. The other is a recent rockumentary snared by my enterprising colleagues, Shawn Moore and Abbe Harris. It's titled Heaven Stood Still: The Incarnations of Willy DeVille, chronicling the life of an eclectic singer-songwriter whose band Mink DeVille was a mid-70s fixture at CBGB. He also left his mark on New Orleans R&B, among other musical genres, producing a series of critically revered LPs as well as hit singles like the immortal "Spanish Stroll."  ...

New Plaza Cinema is serving up a busy Oscar weekend menu including two 2024 nominees and a pair of previous winners, one of them a legendary classic. But first up, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon we'll be visited by beloved actress Karen Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Shoot the Moon, Starman, In the Bedroom), as we join in the NY premiere of her new film A Stage of Twilight, chronicling a married couple in their seventies who reach a turning point in their lives. Other key members of the production will join Karen for a Q&A after each screening. Check out the heartfelt trailer online, and get your tickets early.   Two very different films which played to sellout crowds last weekend will return for encores: the...

This is an abbreviated New Plaza Cinema weekend due to some CUNY special student events. Two of our five scheduled screenings -- a surreal, one-of-a-kind backwoods comedy, Hundreds of Beavers mixing silent movie grace and Road Runner insanity; plus Up from the Streets, a documentary that looks at the culture of New Orleans through the lens of its exuberant music -- are sold out or very close to it. A few standby-line tickets may be available at show time.  Our other three screenings -- all on Saturday -- feature either Oscar winners or current nominees. Germany's The Teachers' Lounge and Italy's Io Capitano, both Best International Feature candidates, continue their powerhouse engagements. On the latter film, the NY...

New Plaza Cinema on this President's Day weekend is offering a veritable cornucopia of international cinema -- four new attractions and seven holdovers and reprises. Let's get right to it.   New this weekend:  La Ceremonie -- Claude Chabrol's masterful 1995 dark drama is back in American release after a long absence, with its turbulent trio: Sandrine Bonnaire (mysterious housemaid), Isabelle Huppert (her devious ally),  and Jacqueline Bisset (a suspicious matron).  In her rave, mid-90s NY Times review, Janet Maslin proclaimed: "La Ceremonie, which takes its title from the ritual that precedes execution by guillotine, shows off this film maker's graceful way of building tension in slow, subversive increments until violence...

This is a New Plaza Cinema weekend where we give extra shows to some films that've been packing the house in recent weeks, as well as reprises to others that had to come off screen due to our ever-crowded award-season scheduling. One Oscar nominee, The Teachers' Lounge (Best International Feature, Germany) continues its sterling run; another, Four Daughters (Best Documentary Feature) returns to cast its unique spell of female emotion and enigma. Its Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania visited us last month for an unforgettable Q & A. We welcome Academy members at all screenings of these nominees, subject to available seating.    We'll have two prime-time screenings of Francois Ozon's darkly uproarious farce The Crime Is...

New Plaza Cinema is back in the "epic documentary" business this weekend with British director Steve McQueen's acclaimed Occupied City, chronicling the chillingly systematic "cleansing" of Holland's emblematic city that began in 1940.  In her Critic's Pick review, the NY Times' Manohla Dargis wrote, "...so it goes in this intense, absorbing and epically scaled chronicle — it runs close to four and a half hours, including a 15-minute intermission — that charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews during the Nazi occupation, street by street, address by address. In total, the film surveys a staggering 130 addresses, a mapping that McQueen has realized, somewhat surprisingly, without the use of archival imagery. Instead, the director...

We were very pleased to see that five of the films which snared Oscar nominations on Tuesday morning were showcased at New Plaza Cinema in 2023. As predicted, The Teachers' Lounge made the "final five" for Best International Feature and will continue with multiple screenings this weekend. In the coming weeks we plan to "encore" Past Lives (Best Picture/Original Screenplay),  Nyad (Best Actress & Supporting Actress), and Four Daughters, and The Eternal Memory (both Best Documentary contenders).   Joining our lineup this weekend will be an ambitious new animated drama from Hugh and DK Welchman, whose Loving Vincent was also an Oscar-nominee (and commercial hit) several years ago. The Peasants is based on an epic Polish novel...