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by admin | 12th May 2022 | Uncategorized
This weekend’s New Plaza Cinema @ West End Theatre screening schedule is packed with special presentations and personal appearances. In addition to our ongoing runs of Oscar-winners Drive My Car and Belfast, crowd-pleasing docs The Automat (special guest tba) and Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen and the fascinatingly eccentric drama Tale of King Crab, consider these:
On Thursday, two very different takes in our ongoing series of recent Jewish-themed and Israeli cinema. Irmi featured at closing night of the 2021 NY Jewish Film Festival relates the inspiring life story of Irmi Selver, a refugee who in the 1930s escaped her hometown of Chemnitz, Germany during the Nazi onslaught.
And on a completely different note, the provocative Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life probes the life of a young man who is both one of the world’s most well-known gay porn stars and also maintains an emotionally close — if unconventional — bond with his mother. Winner of top prizes at the prestigious Jerusalem Film Festival, as well as the 2019 “Israeli Oscar” for Best Documentary. Please note: this film is unrated by the MPA but contains some brief, explicit sexual content relevant to its narrative. For both features, filmmakers will be present for after-screening Q&As.
On Saturday at 2:45 pm we’re very pleased to present NY Times film writer Jason Bailey, author of Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies That Made It, to host a 50th-anniversary revisit of the Upper West Side classic The Panic in Needle Park, Al Pacino and director Jerry Schatzberg’s movie debuts. Jason will join myself and New Plaza Cinema publicist Abbe Harris in an after-screening discussion.
And on Sunday afternoon at 2:30 pm please join myself and Toby Talbot, film historian and widow of Lincoln Plaza and New Yorker Films’ founder Dan Talbot for a screening of the distributor’s classic Japanese comedy Tampopo, and an after-discussion of Dan’s recently published memoir In Love With Movies, lovingly edited by Toby and her daughter Sarah, which will also be on sale at the cinema.
Last but not least, we’re featuring another new French film this week. This one from provocateur Gaspar Noe whose Vortex chronicles, in tender yet merciless fashion, portrays the physical and psychological decline of an elderly Parisian couple. Played by a cinematic “odd couple” — Italian horror director Dario Argento and Francoise Lebrun, co-star of the classic Mother and the Whore nearly a half-century ago,— helmer Noe spares neither piercing emotions nor indignities in charting the pair’s demise. This story is one every one of us can identify with. As the NY Times’ A.O. Scott wrote last month in his Critic’s Pick review: “Among the comforts ‘Vortex’ refuses is the bittersweet balm of nostalgia. It’s a blunt reckoning with the inevitability of loss, including the loss of memory. We dream for a while, and then we sleep.”
Click here to get tickets to this weekend’s shows.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema