Films this week 1/12 to 1/15/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 12th January 2024 | Gary's Corner
New Plaza Cinema’s holiday hits, Freud’s Last Session and The Teachers’ Lounge surged again in the first weekend of the new year, and we’ll again feature them with additional shows over this MLK holiday stretch.
The 12:15 pm show of Freud’s on Monday will, per numerous audience requests, be an open-captioned version, and Teachers’ Lounge will be joined on the schedule by another Oscar “Short List” candidate, this one in both the documentary and international feature categories.
The film is Four Daughters, whose Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania is no stranger to Oscar competition. Her 2020 drama, The Man Who Sold His Skin was a nominee for Best International Feature. Her new film premiered in last spring’s Official Selection in Cannes, a rare honor for a documentary. Its daringly ambitious subject matter and style merits, I think, quoting Richard Brody’s New Yorker review at some length:
“Family life and political history are connected through the power of imagination in Kaouther Ben Hania’s hybrid documentary-drama Four Daughters. The film is centered on a tough and devoted Tunisian woman, Olfa Hamrouni, who left her abusive husband around fifteen years ago and single-handedly raised the couple’s four girls (who were born between 1998 and 2005). After the Tunisian revolution, in 2011, Islamist ideology rose to prominence; Olfa’s two eldest daughters, who were teen-agers in the mid-twenty-tens, became devoutly religious, joined ISIS, and were arrested. Ben Hania tells the family’s story through interviews with Olfa and her two younger daughters, and through reenactments in which actresses play the absent daughters and also Olfa, when scenes are too painful for her to relive. The real-life subjects, taking the lead in the restagings, deliver a revelatory, poignant blend of drama, memory, and self-scrutiny.”
Director Kaouther Ben Hania will join us for a Q&A after Saturday evening’s 7:15 screening.
Other Q&A’s this weekend include:
- Our bi-monthly NYC Short Filmmakers Showcase will screen on Friday at 7:30 pm, with its directors appearing afterward for a chat. Tickets are currently sold out, but a few cancellations may be available on a “stand by” line just before showtime.
- Film historian Max Alvarez and I will introduce and host an after-discussion of Ingmar Bergman’s radiant 1955 Smiles of a Summer Night on Sunday at 12:15. Many patrons have asked us for a “Bergman classics” month, so… And after five decades of moviegoing I recently calculated that I had seen every Bergman film and TV episode, but was in dire need of a “refresher” on many key works like this one – I’m really looking forward to it, and hope you’ll join us.
We had a terrific turnout last weekend for Frederick Wiseman’s epic documentary Menus Plaisirs: Les Troisgros, so of course, an encore on Saturday afternoon. The film runs for four hours and there isn’t an intermission so please plan accordingly!
Perhaps inspired by Wiseman, several patrons have also requested Steve McQueen’s equally epic Occupied City — we shall see.
And last but not least, to compensate for some confusion on our part over its mid-December playdates, another show of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s beautiful drama Monster on Sunday afternoon.
See you as the lights go down…
Gary Palmucci. Film CuratorNew Plaza Cinema