Films this week 2/9 to 2/11/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 9th February 2024 | Gary's Corner
This is a New Plaza Cinema weekend where we give extra shows to some films that’ve been packing the house in recent weeks, as well as reprises to others that had to come off screen due to our ever-crowded award-season scheduling. One Oscar nominee, The Teachers’ Lounge (Best International Feature, Germany) continues its sterling run; another, Four Daughters (Best Documentary Feature) returns to cast its unique spell of female emotion and enigma. Its Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania visited us last month for an unforgettable Q & A. We welcome Academy members at all screenings of these nominees, subject to available seating.
We’ll have two prime-time screenings of Francois Ozon’s darkly uproarious farce The Crime Is Mine; the eruption from New Plaza Cinema audiences of both laughter and applause that greets this film’s closing credits is itself worth the price of admission. Another surprising French crowd-pleaser, Driving Madeleine is back after a brief hiatus (and many audience requests) with its quietly luminous duo, Line Renaud and Dany Boon.
We also want to give Upper West Side audiences another chance to experience
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s drama Monster, a new high point for the Japanese auteur of Shoplifting and other modern classics. It’s in the third month of its downtown engagement.
There are two new additions to our program:
- Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell – Winner of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Camera d’or (for best debut film) this intimate epic was praised as “an uncommonly strong feature debut from Vietnamese director Pham Thien An” by the NY Times‘ Alissa Wilkinson. A young man’s witnessing of a terrible motorcycle accident appears to prompt him to wander both his nation’s city and rural landscapes, meeting many people in what might seem a sort of spiritual quest but, as Wilkinson notes, “It’s to travel in contemplation, revisiting feelings and thoughts and doubts with new perspective, like the spiral of a shell. To that end, mirrors and reflected faces pop up constantly throughout the film, as if reminding us that nothing we are looking at is a simple surface – something always lies beneath.”
- I Heard It Through the Grapevine – Our other “new” title this week is actually a 40-year-old documentary recently restored by the Harvard Film Archive, and originally reviewed in 1982 by another NY Times film critic, the legendary Vincent Canby: “Twenty years after the tumultuous civil-rights struggles in Birmingham, Selma, Atlanta, and other parts of the South, James Baldwin, the novelist and playwright, revisited those cities as well as Washington, Jacksonville and Newark in an attempt to get a fix on those events and on the progress made, if any, since then. The result is I Heard It Through the Grapevine, a free-form documentary that hovers over its subject like a concerned parent who, not knowing quite what to make of things, expresses concern and sympathy. The film, made by Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, is full of feelings of loss. It records a journey that is sad, not necessarily because, as Hosea Williams tells Mr. Baldwin in Atlanta, blacks are worse off today than they were before, but because the heady enthusiasm, the sense of urgency and the revivifying excitement of the 1960s have passed into history.”
And here’s a quick snapshot of other new films which will be joining our program next weekend and beyond:
On President’s Day weekend:
- Amelie – A restored edition of the Oscar-nominated French classic whose quicksilver trailer has graced our screen since Christmas week.
- La Ceremonie – Claude Chabrol’s masterful 1995 dark drama is back in American release after a long absence, with its turbulent trio: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, and Jacqueline Bisset.
- Occupied City – Steve McQueen’s epic documentary portrait of the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews from 1940-45 returns for an encore screening.
- Pocketful of Miracles – Aviva Kempner, longtime chronicler of the 20th century Jewish experience, documents the lives of two siblings, Holocaust survivors who emigrated to post-war America.
- Disco Boy – Franz Rogowski, breakout star of last year’s Passages, is again incandescent in this chronicle of young French Legionnaire’s fateful mission to the Niger Delta: a striking debut film
And on February 23:
- Io Capitano – Oscar nominee for Best International Feature from A-list Italian helmer Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah).
Gary Palmucci. Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema