Films this week 1/26 to 1/28/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 26th January 2024 | Gary's Corner
We were very pleased to see that five of the films which snared Oscar nominations on Tuesday morning were showcased at New Plaza Cinema in 2023. As predicted, The Teachers’ Lounge made the “final five” for Best International Feature and will continue with multiple screenings this weekend. In the coming weeks we plan to “encore” Past Lives (Best Picture/Original Screenplay), Nyad (Best Actress & Supporting Actress), and Four Daughters, and The Eternal Memory (both Best Documentary contenders). Joining our lineup this weekend will be an ambitious new animated drama from Hugh and DK Welchman, whose Loving Vincent was also an Oscar-nominee (and commercial hit) several years ago. The Peasants is based on an epic Polish novel by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont. One of Reymont’s other works was the source for Andrezj Wajda’s 1975 classic film The Promised Land. Its protagonist is a young woman whose determination to forge her own path within the confines of a late 19th century Polish village puts her on a collision course with the tradition-bound community. Indiewire critic Christian Blauvelt wrote: “Bringing this thousand-page novel to animated life in this way isn’t just an adaptation, it’s an illumination. It makes real the heightened reality that exists in your mind when reading a particularly captivating book.”Also debuting at New Plaza Cinema this week will be the documentaryPasang: In the Shadow of Everest. Producer/director Lisa Hurwitz (The Automat) will host this portrait of Pasang Lharmu Sherpa, the first Nepali woman to summit Mount Everest. There’ll be a Q&A after both Saturday’s show and ata reprise next Sunday. Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal will cap off our “Bergman Classics Month” on Sunday afternoon — tickets have been selling fast for that one. And two recent French films, Driving Madeleine with Line Renaud and Dany Boon, and Francois Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine starring Isabelle Huppert and Fabrice Luchini, will be back for single screenings. Next weekend:
- Steve McQueen’s epic documentary Occupied City, on the block-by-block fate of Amsterdam’s Jews in World War II, will screen at Saturday’s first show (WITH an intermission).
- Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 Masculine-Feminine will kick off February’s salute to the French Nouvelle Vague.
- A new American indie romantic comedy, Love…Reconsidered, starring Sophie von Haselberg (Bette Midler’s daughter) and filmed partly on the Upper West Side, will have a special screening Sunday evening at 7 pm, with its lead actress and director Carol Ray Hartsell present for an after-discussion.
Gary Palmucci. Film CuratorNew Plaza Cinema