Films this week 9/22 to 9/24/2023
by Gary Palmucci | 21st September 2023 | Gary's Corner
On Saturday afternoon, we’re hosting an encore screening of the documentary Honoring Eric Bentley, whose U.S. premiere New Plaza Cinema presented in January. This tribute in both testimony and song to one of the heroes of 20th century American theatre. The late playwright, singer, translator, and often pungently perceptive critic Eric Bentley — who enriched our appreciation of Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, O’Neill and many others — features appearances and musical performances by a stellar cast of his admirers, including Tony Kushner, Philip Lopate, Karyn Levitt, and Austin Pendleton. After the screening co-producer (and exuberant performer in the film) Karyn Levitt will join Columbia Professor Michael Paller for a discussion and Q&A. Check out the informative trailer.
Director Michael Roemer, whose Nothing But a Man was one of the finest American Independent films of the 1960s, completed another feature at the end of that decade which went unseen — and undistributed — until a 1989 screening at the New York Film Festival. The Plot Against Harry then found its way into theatrical release via the late Dan Talbot’s (owner of our beloved Lincoln Plaza) New Yorker Films, and is back in cinemas again, including ours. The deadpan chronicle of small-time gangster Harry Plotnick’s release from prison into a changed urban milieu now has an impressive cadre of admirers, including The New Yorker magazine’s Richard Brody: “
A neglected masterpiece…Should have become an instant classic – of American Jewish cinema, of gangster movies, of film comedy and of bold creativity on a low budget.”
New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri calls director Roemer “One of the great unsung masters of American cinema.” Our intimate venue is a perfect place to discover (or revisit) it.
Also this week, Radical Wolfe, a new documentary portrait of master American stylist Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities) adapted from a renowned Vanity Fair profile by Michael Lewis (Moneyball), with voice-overs of many famous Wolfe passages by Jon Hamm.
Still holding over: Past Lives, The Miracle Club and the “sleeper” UK drama, Scrapper. Make Me Famous will return next weekend, and an encore screening of Crossing Delancey (after last weekend’s sell-out) will be announced later this fall, hosted by its screenwriter Susan Sandler and filmmaker Jenny Slate.
Coming Soon:
- Sept 29 — new documentaries on Carlos Santana and legendary British film producer Jeremy Thomas (The Last Emperor).
- Oct 6 — Pedro Almodovar’s new Strange Way of Life starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.
- Classic Films for October — Horror, of course: Charles Laughton in Island of Lost Souls, and Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I will tell the story of the scene I saw on that film’s opening night, May 23, 1980 — with Shelley Duvall and Barry Nelson — which was removed by the director after the evening’s final shows in NY and LA, and hasn’t been seen since.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema