Films this week 1/30/2026 to 2/5/26
by Gary Palmucci | 30th January 2026 | Gary's Corner
Two more newly anointed Oscar nominees join this weekend’s New Plaza Cinema lineup: Cutting Through Rocks (Best Documentary Feature) and The Voice of Hind Rajib (Best International Feature).
NY Times film reviewer Sheri Linden wrote:
“Cutting Through Rocks unfolds over several years in a remote corner of northwestern Iran, its sense of place illuminating and the figure at its center as down-to-earth as she is heroic. This portrait of Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to the council of her village, is propelled by her no-nonsense resourcefulness…” Joining us on Saturday afternoon for a post-screening Q&A will be filmmakers Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki.
The Voice of Hind Rajib balances documentary detail and piercing reenactment in its depiction of the tragic attempt to rescue a 5-year-old Palestinian girl, trapped in an immolated car with several dead family members, in January 2024. Three-time Oscar-nominated director Kaouther Ben Hania presented her film Four Daughters at New Plaza in 2023 and achieves here, as NPR’s Bob Mondello describes, a melding of “the actors on screen reacting in real-time with the recordings of that harrowing day, and the effect is at once painfully direct, and profound.”
Elsewhere on this weekend’s schedule , curator Michael Jacobsohn’s latest edition of his NYC Short Filmmakers’ Showcase is sold out. His next program – marking the third anniversary of this lively bi-monthly event – will be on Friday, March 27.
Holdovers include Ralph Fiennes in The Choral; the expansive, six-decade-spanning Jordanian drama All That’s Left of You; Sentimental Value, with nine Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Director, and all four principal members of its cast, who appear in a lively bit of ‘extra content’ just added to the closing credits; and in its fifth month here, SHTTL with the usual ‘masterclass Q&A’ from lead actor Moshe Lobel.
This weekend’s classic screening is that great American film The Manchurian Candidate (1962), more relevant with each flaming week, from director John Frankenheimer and a cast for the ages: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, Janet Leigh and James Edwards.
My colleagues Max Alvarez and Dan Cahill will be on hand for some spirited after-discussion.
And, three more trenchant documentaries will arrive on our screen for the weekend of Feb 6-8: another Oscar nominee, Mr Nobody Against Putin; the turbulent chronicle of an Israeli hostage, Holding Liat; and in our ongoing social justice film series, Shuffle, per the NY Times’ Glenn Kenny
“a shocking and confounding new documentary which lays out in painstaking detail the collusion between moneymaking rehab treatment centers, double-dealing insurance entities and predatory social-media ‘scouts’ who make sure cash flows into corporate pockets while the sick and suffering never get well.”