Princeton Adult School’s Second Chance Cinema Celebrates 20th Season

If you missed the film "Her" on the big screen, you can catch it at the Princeton Adult School this spring.
If you missed the film “Her” on the big screen, you can catch it at the Princeton Adult School this spring.

Second Chance Cinema, the Princeton Adult School’s annual winter semester movie course, will kick off its 20th season on Monday, Feb. 9th at 7:30 p.m. with the Princeton premiere of “Blue is the Warmest Color,” the first of ten course screenings.

All ten selections for this year’s series will be shown at the Friend Center Auditorium in the Computer Science Building on the Princeton campus.

The complete schedule for “Ten Films You Should Have Seen but Didn’t” will continue Monday evenings at 7:30pm through April 27th (no films March 9 or March 30) . The series will include releases from France, Palestine, Italy, Great Britain, China, Denmark, Japan, and the United States.

Second Chance Cinema is designed to showcase films which never reached Princeton-area movie theaters, or whose commercial engagements were so brief that audiences missed them altogether. The series is curated by William Lockwood Jr., special programming director for McCarter Theatre.

“Blue is the Warmest Color” was one of the most controversial and hotly debated films of 2013. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and based on the graphic novel by Julia Maroh, it was the winner of the grand prize at Cannes. The film is about is a French teenager and her relationship with another older woman. The film features two critically-acclaimed performances from Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux.

Two selections from France are featured next: “You Will Be My Son,” a character-driven melodrama directed by Gilles Legrand about wine and the families who make it, asks: which is thicker – blood or wine? “The Past,” from writer, director, and Oscar winner Asghar Farhdi revolves around a husband and wife whose lives are torn asunder by forces both internal and external.

England’s “Locke” invites the viewer to spend 85 minutes with a man driving a car while making a bunch of phone calls. As he drives across England in his BMW, he attempts to juggle several fragile pieces of his work and home life, both of which are on the verge of collapse.

Japan will be represented in the series by Wong Kar-wei’s “The Grandmaster,” a kung fu martial-arts movie. The film traces the rise of Ip Man, a kung fu legend who taught Bruce Lee between 1930 to the 1950s. Also from Japan is “Like Father, Like Son,” from director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Two Japanese families of different economic circumstances learn that their six-year old children were switched at birth for no apparent reason.

Mads Mikkelson won the best actor at Cannes last year for the Danish film “The Hunt.” He portrays Lucas, a mild mannered former teacher who becomes entangled in a Kafkaesque nightmare of denunciations, dread and danger when he returns to his hometown.

“Omar” is the second Oscar-nominated film from Palestinian director Hany Abu Assad, who puts the West Bank on the map with a story part thriller and part Romeo and Juliet-esque love story.

The Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty,” is next.  Director Paolo Sorrentino reveals his immersion in the great Italian cinema of the past through the eyes of a journalist who, at age 65, takes stock of his life as a long-time fixture in Rome’s literary and social circles.

“Her,” from America’s Spike Jonzes, stars Joaquin Phoenix and the voice of Scarlett Johansson. It’s a virtual romance focusing on impersonal alienation and our growing dependence on technology .

For more information or to register for the Second Chance series, visit  www.Princetonadultschool.org.

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Krystal Knapp is the founding editor of Planet Princeton. Follow her on Twitter @krystalknapp. She can be reached via email at editor AT planetprinceton.com. Send all letters to the editor and press releases to that email address.