Films this week 4/19 to 4/21/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 19th April 2024 | Gary's Corner
Woody Allen’s acclaimed, French-language drama Coup de Chance sold out all its prime time shows last weekend — the most exciting, gratifying weekend we’ve had at New Plaza Cinema since the premiere of Bill Nighy in Living during the 2022 holiday season.
We’re very grateful to our hardworking theatre staff and volunteer ushers, as well as our partners at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, the film’s maverick distributor MPI Media, and our friends at Sawyer Studios who design and place those Friday NY Times ads many of you read every week. This was truly a team effort.
Coup de Chance will play four more prime time shows this weekend. As always we recommend early, online ticket purchases, and please keep an eye on our ongoing social media action on Facebook, Instagram, and X / Twitter.
Several films will be back this weekend following brief hiatuses — Remembering Gene Wilder, a fitting reprise after last weekend’s uproarious screening of Blazing Saddles, the Mexican Oscar-shortlisted drama Totem, and the rockumentary Heaven Stood Still: The Incarnations of Willy DeVille. That film is sold out and — at least for Saturday’s show — there won’t be a standby line, but it will be back for two more screenings next weekend.
Encoring will be Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days and Daniel Auteuil in Farewell Mr. Haffman (the latter with two showings). On hiatus will be The Taste of Things with Juliette Binoche and the Israeli Kiss Me Kosher, whose articulate American star John Carroll Lynch will return for another Q&A on Sunday, April 28.
And as we strive to do regularly, we have two new titles on the program:
- Love Lies Bleeding — in her NY Times Critic’s Pick review, Manohla Dargis hails this “neo-noir in a violent and winkingly nasty key…Kristen Stewart plays Lou, short for Louise, a small-town loner somewhere in New Mexico, yearning to escape a classic dead end. If this were a 1940s noir, Lou would be fixing jalopies in a dingy garage while waiting for a dame to stroll in to change his fate. That’s more or less what happens here, except that it’s the ’80s, and Lou works in a gym where she’s wasting away , unclogging toilets and slipping steroids to bulked-up juicers. Then, a beautiful stranger walks into the gym and changes her life, as sirens sometimes do in movies.” Katy O’Brian and Ed Harris are on hand to turn the temperature up…WAY up.
- Karaoke — in another Israeli drama whose release was postponed after last fall’s tragic events, a long-married couple (including Sasson Gabay from The Band’s Visit) becomes obsessed with their new, charismatic neighbor (Lior Ashkenazi, star of the Israeli classics Late Marriage, Walk on Water, and Footnotes) and his karaoke parties. This film got short shrift in its recent downtown premiere and deserves more attention.
Coming next weekend, another American classic in our tribute to the great movie year 1974, Terrence Malick’s Badlands with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, and A Life’s Work, a recent documentary fifteen years in the making, with filmmaker David Licata joining us on April 28 for a Q&A.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema