Films This Week 3/04/22
by Gary Palmucci | 4th March 2022 | Gary's Corner
As we move into our third weekend of screenings at the West End Theatre, we’re keeping the focus on female Oscar nominees past and present.
This year’s Best Actress race is as “wide open” as any I can remember in recent years — any one of the five nominees could win. This week we’re featuring two of them, Nicole Kidman in Being the Ricardos and Jessica Chastain (recent winner of the SAG Best Actress award) in The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
Filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s incandescent documentary RBG was a 2018 Oscar nominee, and we consider them among the “heroes of New Plaza” for their appearances with the film in the early days of our tenure at the NYIT Auditorium.
We are delighted to welcome them back on the evening of March 4th after the 5:45 pm show for a Talk Back and before the 8:15 pm show for a special introduction of their latest film Julia, a portrait of immortal chef and author Julia Child. Please check the website for ticketing information.
An earlier film of Oscar nominee Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Best Director, Drive My Car) is on this week’s program. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy moves between three different stories in which, per NY Times critic Manohla Dargis — an early champion of this filmmaker — “the geometry of desire is elegantly plotted.”
Finally, a familiar face from our classic cinema Talk Backs, filmmaker and historian Dan Cahill will join us on Saturday evening for a dissection of Jean-Pierre Melville’s intricate 1970 heist classic Le Cercle Rouge, starring New Plaza Cinema favorite Alain Delon, Yves Montand, and Gian Maria Volonte.
Happy viewing!
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema