Films this week 8/18 to 8/20/2023
by Gary Palmucci | 16th August 2023 | Gary's Corner
This is New Plaza Cinema’s ‘Late Summer Epic Movies Weekend,’ with our continuing holdover of Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard with Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale; Federico Fellini’s masterwork 8 1/2 with Marcello Mastroianni, the ‘other’ Italian Classic of 1963 from our monthly series including post film Q&A with Max Alvarez; and Jean Eustache’s 1973 The Mother and the Whore.
The latter is a personal favorite of mine, having finally been rescued from years of distribution limbo by Janus Films, the heroic entity that this year alone has lent our program a diverse slate of classics including Cleo from 5 to 7, My Night at Maud’s and Mulholland Drive.
Writer-director Eustache’s semi-autobiographical portrait of a young man and the two women in his turbulent life, each one adrift in the social and political disillusionment of post-1968 Paris, is a true ‘intimate epic,’ with performances-for-the-ages by Jean-Pierre Leaud (star of Day For Night, which bookended both Cannes and that whole French movie year) Bernadette Lafont and Francoise Lebrun. Once seen, never forgotten.
Leaping ahead a half-century in French film history, we’re also featuring this weekend the beloved Juliette Binoche in her latest release, Between Two Worlds, in which she plays Marianne, an investigative reporter posing as a cleaner to expose worker exploitation. The film has an intriguing pedigree, per NY Times’ critic Beatrice Loayza, as “an adaptation of The Night Cleaner, 2010 best seller by Florence Aubenas, a French journalist who went underground and lived a double life as a cleaner for an English Channel ferry. Co-writer-director Emmanuel Carrere – known primarily in Europe as an author of nonfiction books with a literary twist – applies a mood of cool journalistic sobriety to Marianne’s scandalous discoveries.”
Rounding out our packed schedule are the Armenian animated docu-drama Aurora’s Sunrise; the ever-popular downtown art-scene doc Make Me Famous, with another Q&A from its peripatetic director-producer team, Brian Vincent and Heather Spore; and the crowd-pleasers Past Lives (a sellout last weekend, order your tickets online!) and The Miracle Club.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema