Gary's Corner

The recent documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise proved to be a sell out hit in its first New Plaza Cinema screenings last weekend. We’ve added additional shows this time around, but as always strongly suggest purchasing your tickets online and in advance.  

Another, not so recent but equally fascinating doc will finally be making its Upper West Side theatrical debut this weekend. I’ll let its longtime distributor Ken Eisen from Waterville ME, a friend — and “friendly competitor” from my decades in the indie releasing biz — tell us about it in his own words: 

“Twenty years ago, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Judy Irving’s funny, beautiful, charming, unique film, came out of left field — otherwise known as San Francisco — to become a favorite with audiences across the country, a word-of-mouth indie smash that wound up playing on over 500 screens, with engagements (many lasting for months) spiraling on for well over a year, Shadow Distribution’s greatest hit.

Now, Judy has made a sparkling, hand-restored new 4k digital restoration of this timeless film. We’ve taken it off all available other mediums, and are opening it in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and…your town? — in the coming weeks and months. Dance with the birds in the film’s trailer: https://vimeo.com/849992597.” 

Many of you have seen and laughed along with that drily hilarious trailer this past month. Filmmaker Judy Irving will join us for a Q&A after each screening this weekend.    

Saturdays have frequently been our day to offer up three hour epics of various nationalities — The Leopard,  The Mother and the Whore, Farewell My Concubine — and we’re traveling to Argentina this time with The Delinquents, a highlight of the recent NY Film Festival. Its drolly serpentine plot, commencing when a bank employee tells his colleague — over beers — that he’s just robbed their employer, is described further by the NY Times’ Ben Kenigsberg: 

“He hasn’t taken an unreasonable amount – merely what the two would earn in 25 more years of working there. Moran intends to turn himself in and go to prison for much less than that – with good behavior, he calculates he’ll spend three and half years behind bars. In the interim, Roman can watch the bag of cash, which they will split. If he refuses to cooperate, Moran could easily frame him as an accomplice anyway.” A mazelike saga of social and behavioral dark comedy ensues. 

Also this weekend: Our second Noirvember feature, Jules Dassin’s 1950 headlong classic Night and the City, with Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney. There will also be reprise screenings of Nyad, The Persian Version, and Make Me Famous, with our inexhaustible filmmakers Brian Vincent and Heather Spore back to report on their national tour…