Year Five of Scarecrow Academy brings an ambitious discussion series titled “Women in Trouble: Great Melodrama in Film,” an in-depth look at an often-derided, but frequently glorious genre sometimes called “women’s pictures.” In these ten weeks of free online conversations, we explore the way imaginative filmmakers have put women at the center of their hothouse creative universes. David Lynch refuses to describe his films, but has sometimes summed them up with the phrase “A Woman in Trouble.” In this series we’ll see how potent that situation can be.

Discussions are led by National Society of Film Critics member Robert Horton, author of the Seasoned Ticket column at the Scarecrow blog and Scarecrow’s “Historian-Programmer in Residence.” The Zoom sessions are free and open to all; there’s no homework, but we ask that you register online in advance. We’ll be meeting on Saturdays at 2 p.m., beginning March 4, 2023.

May 6

THE SOUVENIR (2019)

Joanna Hogg – Honor Swinton Byrne

A young film student falls in with the wrong man, a familiar soap-opera scenario given fresh life in Hogg’s brisk, unsentimental style. Tilda Swinton—star of Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter and the real-life mother of this film’s leading actress—does her customary superb work in support.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

May 13

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (2020)

Emerald Fennell – Carey Mulligan

In this controversial modern take on vengeance, the gifted Mulligan plays a woman set on striking back at the men who destroyed her friend—a melodrama made tricky by the way Fennell (who won an Oscar for her screenplay) plays the material in black-comic mode.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.