Films this week 2/16 to 2/19/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 15th February 2024 | Gary's Corner
New Plaza Cinema on this President’s Day weekend is offering a veritable cornucopia of international cinema — four new attractions and seven holdovers and reprises. Let’s get right to it.
New this weekend:
- La Ceremonie — Claude Chabrol’s masterful 1995 dark drama is back in American release after a long absence, with its turbulent trio: Sandrine Bonnaire (mysterious housemaid), Isabelle Huppert (her devious ally), and Jacqueline Bisset (a suspicious matron). In her rave, mid-90s NY Times review, Janet Maslin proclaimed: “La Ceremonie, which takes its title from the ritual that precedes execution by guillotine, shows off this film maker’s graceful way of building tension in slow, subversive increments until violence erupts as a natural outgrowth of his characters’ secret lives.” Max Alvarez and I will be on hand to welcome Chabrol’s spellbinder back to US screens and parse its many disturbing undercurrents.
- Pocketful of Miracles — Aviva Kempner, longtime chronicler of the 20th century Jewish-American experience (Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Yoo-Hoo Mrs Goldberg) documents the remarkable lives of two siblings, Holocaust survivors who emigrated to post-war America. Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf, a frequent New Plaza Cinema supporter, will join Aviva to introduce and discuss Saturday night’s screening, and Monday’s show will feature more special guests.
- Disco Boy — Franz Rogowski, breakout star of last year’s Passages, is again incandescent in this chronicle of a young French Legionnaire’s fateful mission to the Niger Delta: a striking debut film from a young Italian writer-director-film editor, Giacomo Abbruzzese.
- Amélie — a restored edition of the multi-Oscar-nominated 2001 French classic whose quicksilver trailer has graced our screen since Christmas week. Its teeming, captivating cast includes Audrey Tautou, Matthieu Kassovitz, Dominique Pinon and Yolande Moreau.
Our “holds” and bring-backs include:
- The Teachers’ Lounge — Oscar-contending for Best International Film, and now in its ninth week.
- The Crime Is Mine — This whirligig French farce is perhaps our biggest crowd-pleaser of the moment. Get your tickets online and early for Sunday’s screening.
- Occupied City — Steve McQueen’s epic documentary chronicle of the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews in 1940-45 is back after many audience requests: four-and-a-half riveting hours, with an intermission.
- Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest — This poignant doc on the first woman to climb Mount Everest will include a Q&A with Nepali educator and activist Lhakpa Gurung.
- Driving Madeleine — Our audiences have fallen in love with Line Renaud and Dany Boon’s performances in director Christian Carion’s Parisian heartrender.
- I Heard It Through the Grapevine — Producer Pat Hartley will join us for a Q&A after this restored 1982 documentary’s President’s Day screening; it follows author James Baldwin’s journey through a post-Civil Rights era Black America.
- Monster — Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest — as it did downtown — is starting to build an appreciative audience here on the Upper West Side…
And coming to New Plaza Cinema on the weekend of February 23:
- Io Capitano — Another Best International Feature Oscar nominee, from Italy.
- Household Saints — Director Nancy Savoca will join us for a screening of her newly restored, rediscovered 1993 American indie classic.
- Make Me Famous — after over 20 screenings, the “downtown art scene doc that could” is back for another encore, with (of course) its indefatigable filmmakers.
Gary Palmucci. Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema