Gary's Corner

We’re continuing this weekend with our long-running hits — The Automat, Drive My Car, Belfast — and some recent additions such as Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen, Irmi and Tampopo.

Three other diverse titles are joining the program:

• My Coffee With Jewish Friends was one of the very last titles to open at Lincoln Plaza in January 2018. In an over 60-year career documentarian Manfred Kirchheimer has specialized in portraits of (often Jewish) New Yorkers. The NY Times’ reviewer noted that “…in this film he speaks with more than 20 people and comes away with countless viewpoints, as well as some smiles and bittersweet tales…intercutting conversations that range from wistful to indignant to delighted.” 
• Francis Coppola’s 1974 The Conversation was released the same year as his Oscar-winning epic The Godfather Part II and was also nominated for Best Picture, with a no-less-stellar cast including Gene Hackman as the haunted surveillance expert, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Frederick Forrest, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, and Cindy Williams. Its picture and multi-layered soundtrack have been restored by master sound designer Walter Murch and will be shown to full advantage on the New Plaza Cinema at West End Theatre’s big screen and sound system.
• In The Duke master British thespian (and Oscar-winner) Jim Broadbent portrays a rumpled working-class dreamer, unsuccessful in various walks of life, who hatches an improbable scheme to filch a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery, sparking a series of tragi-comic consequences. The story and character are based on early-60s real life events (even referenced in the first 007 film, Dr. No) and the cast ably filled out by Helen Mirren, Matthew Goode and James Wilby. Director Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Venus) passed away some months after the film’s 2020 completion. Upon its US release last month, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane wrote,
  “The film confirms that one of Michell’s enduring themes was exasperation – an unglamourous emotion, familiar to us all but, unlike rage, seldom given its cinematic due. Hence, perhaps, his interest in autumnal characters; facing and fearing a wintry future, they take stock of what they have done thus far, or frustratingly failed to do.”

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema