We’re asking you, our loyal patrons and fellow lovers of cinema to pitch in, for us to be able to re-open The Plaza once the COVID-19 virus order is over.

We are offering private screenings for groups of less than 10 people currently! Email richard@plazaatlanta.com for more info.

We receive 100% of proceeds when people subscribe to Magnolia Selects, using the code MOVIE589.

Now Streaming

Danish film master Carl Theodor Dreyer’s homoerotic classic is a mature and visually elegant period romance decades ahead of its time. Michael takes its place alongside Dreyer’s better known masterpieces as an unusually sensitive and decorous work of art and is one of the earliest and most compassionate overtly gay-themed films in movie history.

One of the great masters of photography, Helmut Newton made a name for himself exploring the female form, and his cult status continues long after his tragic death in a Los Angeles car crash in 2004. Newton worked around the globe, from Singapore to Australia to Paris to Los Angeles, but Weimar Germany was the visual hallmark of his work. Newton’s unique and striking way of depicting women has always posed the question: did he empower his subjects or treat them as sexual objects? Through candid interviews with Grace Jones, Charlotte Rampling, Isabella Rossellini, Anna Wintour, Claudia Schiffer, Marianne Faithfull, Hanna Schygulla, Nadja Auermann, and Newton’s wife June (a.k.a. photographer Alice Springs), this documentary captures his legacy and seeks to answer questions about the themes at the core of his life’s work – creating provocative and subversive images of women. The film also features Newton’s own home movies, archival footage (including a pointed exchange with Susan Sontag) and, of course, scores of iconic Newton photographs. The result: a wildly entertaining portrait of a controversial genius.

In the heart of Chinatown, New York, an ornery, chain-smoking, newly widowed 80-year-old Grandma (Tsai Chin) is eager to live life as an independent woman, despite the worry of her family. When a local fortune teller (Wai Ching Ho) predicts a most auspicious day in her future, Grandma decides to head to the casino and goes all in, only to land herself on the wrong side of luck… suddenly attracting the attention of some local gangsters. Desperate to protect herself, Grandma employs the services of a bodyguard from a rival gang (Corey Ha) and soon finds herself right in the middle of a Chinatown gang war.

Director Sasie Sealy brings to life a dark comedy about immigrant life, the vulnerabilities of aging, and an unexpected friendship. Set in alleyways and underground mahjong parlors with a cast of richly drawn characters (including Taiwanese movie star Corey Ha), Lucky Grandma is a love letter to Chinatown and an homage to all the badass elderly women who inhabit it.

After discovering that her husband’s addiction to escorts has left their family penniless, Alice finds herself drawn into the world of high-end prostitution as a means of caring for herself and her child.

Abel Ferrara’s first dramatic feature since 2014’s Pasolini reteams the filmmaker and his frequent lead Willem Dafoe, who delivers a career-best performance as the title character, an older American expat living in Rome with his young wife and their daughter. Disoriented by his past misgivings and subsequent, unexpected blows to his self-esteem, Tommaso wades through this late chapter of his life with an increasingly impaired grasp on reality as he prepares for his next film. Tommaso is easily Ferrara and Dafoe’s most personal and engrossing collaboration to date, a delicately surrealistic work of autofiction marked by the keen sensitivity of two consummate artists.

‘In My Blood It Runs’ follows the life of ten-year-old Arrernte/Garrwa boy Dujuan and his family. The film charts the challenges Dujuan faces as he meets the overt and concealed prejudices still perpetuated against Aboriginal people/First Australians in Australia today: in school, at home and on the streets of Alice Springs. ‘In My Blood It Runs’ reveals the ways marginalised First Nations communities negotiate the colonial culture and keep their identities and cultures alive through self-determination, the revitalisation of languages and cultural practices. Ten-year-old Dujuan is a child healer, a good hunter and speaks three languages. Yet Dujuan is ‘failing’ in school and facing increasing scrutiny from the police. As he travels perilously close to juvenile detention, his family fight to give him a strong Arrernte education alongside his western education. We walk with him as he grapples with these pressures, shares his truths and somewhere in-between finds space to dream, imagine and hope for his future self.

Flailing thirty-four-year-old Bridget (Kelly O’Sullivan) finally catches a break when she meets a nice guy and lands a much-needed job nannying six-year-old Frances (played by a scene-stealing Ramona Edith-Williams). But an unwanted pregnancy introduces an unexpected complication. To make matters worse, she clashes with the obstinate Frances and struggles to navigate a growing tension between Frances’s moms. Amidst her tempestuous personal relationships, a reluctant friendship with Frances emerges, and Bridget contends with the inevitable joys and shit-shows of becoming a part of someone else’s family.

Produced in the final days of the Weimar Republic, this dazzling, gender-bending musical romance about a female singer posing as a man performing in drag received limited exposure in the United States, and is today best known by Blake Edwards’s 1982 remake and the 1995 Broadway production. Viewers will be delighted to discover that the original is every bit as charming and outrageous, reminiscent of the sly sex comedies of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder.

When you purchase a ticket to VASULKA EFFECT, fifty percent of the proceeds will directly support the Plaza Atlanta. Your ticket will let you view the film from now through May 31st. Pioneers of video art, The Vasulkas are lifetime hackers and grandparents of the “YouTube” generation. They are struggling in their retirement years to archive their body of work. By a fluke they are rediscovered by the art world that had forgotten them. People and institutions are all of a sudden fighting over who will represent them when they are gone.

The 1981 Academy Award-winning Best Foreign Language Film MEPHISTO, by Hungarian master István Szabó, concerns a passionate but struggling actor (Klaus Maria Brandauer) who remains in Germany during the Nazi regime and reaps the rewards of this Faustian pact by finally achieving the stardom he has long craved. Sparkling new 4K restoration by the Hungarian Film Fund.

As a new student at an all-girls boarding school, Manuela falls in love with the compassionate teacher Fräulein von Bernburg, and her feelings are requited. Experiencing her first love, lonely Manuela also discovers the complexities that come with an illicit romance. This artfully composed landmark of lesbian cinema – and an important anti-fascist film – was the first of just three films directed by Leontine Sagan.

Streaming 4/24. Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan paint a detailed and astonishing portrait of Pahokee, a rural village in the Everglades, Florida. Very close-knit, its inhabitants fight to face fragile financial situations and an uncertain
future. Through a precise observational approach, the film captures the daily life of this city restoring a rich palette of nuances. From sporting events to beauty contests at school, the filmmakers explore social and
community rituals, and how gender and identity are portrayed as new stories are created. Going well beyond the teaching of Wiseman, which Lucas and Bresnan have perfectly integrated, the film seems to bathe in the
singular atmosphere of a song of Gil Scott Heron, with lingering hints of rural blues tinged with urban echoes. A complex multi-faceted work that recalls both the raw social realism of the new American cinema and the
neorealist style. Pahokee is the powerful portrait of a forgotten America, absent from the current political discourse.

Spaceship Earth is the true, stranger-than-fiction, adventure of eight visionaries who in 1991 spent two years quarantined inside of a self-engineered replica of Earth’s ecosystem called BIOSPHERE 2. The experiment was a worldwide phenomenon, chronicling daily existence in the face of life threatening ecological disaster and a growing criticism that it was nothing more than a cult. The bizarre story is both a cautionary tale and a hopeful lesson of how a small group of dreamers can potentially reimagine a new world.

When world-famous conductor Eduard Sporck accepts the job to create an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra, he is quickly drawn into a tempest of sheer unsolvable problems. Having grown up in a state of war, suppression or constant risk of terrorist attacks, the young musicians from both sides are far from able to form a team. Lined up behind the two best violinists – the emancipated Palestinian Layla and the handsome Israeli Ron – they form two parties who deeply mistrust each other, on and off-stage alike. Will Sporck succeed and make the young people forget their hatred, at least for the three weeks until the concert? With the first glimmer of hope, however, the political opponents of the orchestra show them how strong they are…

In celebration of the release of the new documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century based on Thomas Piketty’s acclaimed book, The New Republic and Kino Lorber present a live, virtual roundtable discussion with Piketty, Gillian Tett, and Ian Bremmer, moderated by Chris Lehmann.

Several undocumented youths deliberately get detained by the Border Patrol to infiltrate a for-profit detention center.

This inventive, female-driven sex comedy follows college freshman Izzy Alden (Isabelle Barbier) and her two best friends, Anuka (Deeksha Ketkar) and Fiona (Sadie Scott), as they embark on a journey to get Izzy to a “crush party” so she can lose her virginity before the end of the semester. The acclaimed feature film debut of writer/director Emily Cohn, CRSHD tells a hilarious, unique story about navigating the messy ups and downs of life and love in the age of social media.

Todd is a hyper-articulate, obsessive compulsive gay twentysomething whose fear of dying alone leads him to a baffling conclusion: he might not be gay after all. When he meets Rory, a whip-smart struggling actress with her own set of insecurities, the two forge a relationship that’s all talk and no sex. Writer-Director-Star James Sweeney delivers a razor sharp rom-com that’s equal parts Classical Hollywood and distinctly 21st century, exploring just how elastic our definitions of love and sexuality can get.

“Explores star-crossed lovers from every angle of the Kinsey scale” – The Wrap

In the shadows of the bright lights of Las Vegas, it’s last call for a beloved dive bar known as the Roaring 20s. That’s the premise, at least; the reality is as unreal as the world the regulars are escaping from. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a mosaic of disparate lives, teetering between
dignity and debauchery, reckoning with the past as they face an uncertain future, and singing as their ship goes down.

Filmmaking duo Bill and Turner Ross (Western, 2015 Sundance Film Festival) return with an elegiac portrait of a tiny world fading away but still warm and beating with the comfort of community. Their beguiling approach to nonfiction storytelling makes for a foggy memory of experience lost in empty shot glasses and puffs of smoke.

José (magnetic newcomer Enrique Salanic) lives with his mother (Ana Cecilia Mota) in Guatemala City, where they survive on her selling sandwiches at bus stops and with him working at a local restaurant. It is a poor and sometimes dangerous country where, dominated by conservative Catholic and Evangelical Christian religion, living one’s life as an openly gay man is hard for José to imagine. His mother has never had a husband, and as her youngest and favorite child, though at the edge of manhood at 19-years old, she is determined to hold on to him. Reserved and private, José fills his free moments playing with his phone and random sex with other men arranged on street corners and dating apps. When he meets attractive and gentle Luis (Manolo Herrera), a migrant from the rural Caribbean coast, they pursue an unexpected relationship with more emotion than José has ever felt. He is thrust into new passion and pain, and self-reflection, that push him to rethink his life even as he is reluctant to take a leap of faith.