Films this week 9/29 to 10/01/2023
by Gary Palmucci | 28th September 2023 | Gary's Corner
The fall movie season officially kicks off this weekend with the start of the New York Film Festival. New Plaza Cinema will be getting into the act next Friday with a run of Pedro Almodovar’s latest, Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, direct from its sold-out Alice Tully Hall premiere.
But before that, we’ll be joining the NY Premiere runs of a new documentary on legendary guitarist Carlos Santana. In his Variety review last summer, my friend Owen Gleiberman reported:
“Built around an extended interview with Santana, who at 75 is spry and rueful and funny and confessional, Rudy Valdez’s documentary presents his life and career in a straightforward way, but that doesn’t explain why the film is so enthralling…Santana, we discover, had a very different arc than other rock stars.”
Opening with a deconstruction of the iconic first four organ-and-bass notes of “Oye Como Va” (which will surely test our venerable JBL speakers), and moving on to his other milestones including the legendary set at Woodstock — per Gleiberman: “the story he tells about that performance is one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll anecdotes I’ve ever heard” — here’s a chronicle that’s a treat for both our ears and a half century of memories.
Also new on the Macaulay screen this weekend:
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas – the singularly adventurous UK producer, whose dozens of credits include David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and Crash, Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and Bertolucci’s Oscar-sweeping The Last Emperor has a life story nearly as fascinating as his screen credits. Cinema history specialist Mark Cousins escorts us into it in this unique, excerpt-rich documentary portrait.
Passages-stalwart indie director Ira Sachs’ (Keep the Lights On, Sundance-winner Forty Shades of Blue) latest has been playing strongly around town for several weeks; we’ll be featuring it as our own bit of “Saturday Night Fever” – the first (I believe) NC-17 film we’ve had on a New Plaza Cinema program. The lives of a long-time male couple are disrupted when a young woman (Adele Exarchopoulos, star of Blue is the Warmest Color) enters their lives. Sachs is a skillful manipulator of the many eruptive equations of desire.
And, just added to our weekend Q&A schedule! Friday’s 4 pm screening of the briskly entertaining Radical Wolfe will feature an after-discussion with its director Richard Dewey and the late Tom Wolfe’s daughter, Alexandra.
Max Alvarez and I will parse the 1932 Paramount pre-code horror opus Island of Lost Souls, starring Charles Laughton in the first screen adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau. And director Brian Vincent and his wife, producer Heather Spore will again join us after Saturday’s show of Make Me Famous, now entering the fourth month of its robust run.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema