Films this week 2/2 to 2/4/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 1st February 2024 | Gary's Corner
New Plaza Cinema is back in the “epic documentary” business this weekend with British director Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Occupied City, chronicling the chillingly systematic “cleansing” of Holland’s emblematic city that began in 1940. In her Critic’s Pick review, the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis wrote, “…so it goes in this intense, absorbing and epically scaled chronicle — it runs close to four and a half hours, including a 15-minute intermission — that charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews during the Nazi occupation, street by street, address by address. In total, the film surveys a staggering 130 addresses, a mapping that McQueen has realized, somewhat surprisingly, without the use of archival imagery. Instead, the director (whose earlier films include the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave”) explores the city’s past exclusively through images of quotidian Amsterdam life today — in and outside homes, in squares, on trams — that he shot over several years beginning in 2019.”
McQueen’s wife Bianca Stigler’s book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-45)” serves as a template for his cinematic investigation. She co-produced the movie, and also directed A Lengthening: Three Minutes — a film some New Plaza Cinema patrons may recall, which dissected the fate of a Polish village via a fragment of home movie shot in 1938.
Our monthly classics series will delve further into the French New Wave with Sunday’s screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 Masculine-Feminine, one of fifteen features he completed during an amazing run of creativity from 1960-67. Jean-Pierre Leaud — also featured on our screen this past year in Day for Night and The Mother and the Whore — portrays another fervent young Parisian in love with a pop singer: “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” as the opening credits note. An indelible snapshot of its moment in time; Max Alvarez and I will be on hand after the screening to dissect.
Sunday night we’ll be offering an advance preview of a spirited new romantic comedy, Love…Reconsidered, starring Sophie von Haselberg (Bette Midler’s daughter), filmed both locally and in the Hamptons. Sophie, who had a memorable role in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, will join us — along with other special guests — before and after the screening.
Back for an encore this weekend after last Saturday’s packed house is the documentary Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest. Our after-discussion will feature Columbia professor (and Nepali native) Prem Phyak.
The Teachers’ Lounge, Oscar nominee for Best International Feature, continues its very successful run, along with the Polish animated drama The Peasants, from the creators of Loving Vincent.
Francois Ozon’s raucous French farce The Crime Is Mine will be screened on Sunday; our other French “crowd pleaser,” Driving Madeleine is on hiatus this weekend, but will return over the next two weekends of Feb 9 and 16.
Gary Palmucci. Film CuratorNew Plaza Cinema