Gary's Corner

In addition to our holdovers of Plan A and 1982, we’re adding four new titles this weekend to New Plaza Cinema’s lineup at Macaulay Honors College, one of which I previewed last week — Dead for a Dollar, rhapsodized by the NY Times’ Tony Scott as “Director Walter Hill’s lean, mean western (with an aces cast: Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe and Rachel Brosnahan) and a master class in the craft of the B movie…also a reminder that Hill — who at 80 has had a career including cult classics (The Warriors, The Long Riders) and smash hits (48 HRS) — is a master in his own right, whose artistry has often been overlooked and undervalued.”   

Those of us who still remember — and cherish — such masters of the western as Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah will know exactly what Mr. Scott and I are talking about. For the rest of us, this just might be a perfect introduction to a great American movie art form. 

We’ll be doing an additional screening of Dead for a Dollar on the weekend of Oct 21-23.  

Also new this week: 

• Riotsville USA, a scorching documentary that depicts the federal government’s responses to the violent activism of the 1960s. Per the NY Times’ Glenn Kenny, “the Riotsville of the title is the name of a fake town built as a training ground for law enforcement, in which riot story lines were enacted by soldiers.” The film’s intense mix of found archival footage, period talk shows and the chronicle of one very progressive public TV station paint a rich, disturbing, “plus-ca-change” portrait of an era.  
• Last Flight Home: Ondi Timoner, who previously gave us the first-rate documentaries Dig! and We Live in Public, turns to recording the final days of her 92-year-old father, Eli who chose to die under California’s End of Life Act. In his Critic’s Pick review, the NY Times’ Ben Kenigsberg calls it “moving, boundlessly humane…at once a memorial to Eli, the last of that generation of the family to die, and — almost incidentally — a philosophical argument about how death can be faced well.”
• Argentina, 1985: Director Santiago Mitre, whose The Student was a highlight of the 2011 NY Film Festival,  works on a bigger canvas in his new film. The NY Times’ reviewer wrote,  “Like a pair of old wingtips polished with wax, Argentina, 1985 spins a notable piece of history into an impassioned courtroom drama flecked with quaint humor. The movie centers on the Trial of the Juntas, a milestone Argentine case in which a civilian court tried former military leaders for brutal crimes committed while the country was under a right-wing dictatorship.” 

New Plaza Cinema is grateful to Amazon Studios for offering us some big-screen play on this movie ahead of its streaming premiere.

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema