The Cinematheque

“Irresistible … A bright, beautiful, and enchantingly childlike vision.”

Janet Maslin, New York Times

Mexican auteur Alfonso Cuarón, one of contemporary cinema’s most gifted and critically adored studio directors, had a banner year in 2018 with Roma, his masterpiece. The 10-time Oscar-nominated film was a culmination of the themes, styles, and humanist sensibilities the artist has been grooming over his diverse filmography, which includes not one, but two movies made for children—both among the genre’s absolute best! A Little Princess, based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s cherished novel, was Cuarón’s first Hollywood picture, and first foray into family entertainment. It tells of a plucky girl whose father, a widower and military man, is posted to France from India at the onset of WWI. Placed in a haute boarding school in New York, she forms a close-knit friendship with a young black servant, her lifeline when tragedy occurs. An extraordinary work of warmth, magic, and oodles of imagination—not unlike Cuarón’s other kids’ film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, screening in Film Club in April!