Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 14: Saturday Jan 14

The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975) & Las Acacias (Giorgelli, 2011):
Riverside Studios, 2pm & 4.30pm PLUS 6.30 & 9pm

The Riverside regularly put on the best double-bills in London and this is a superb example, both being fine examples of road movies.

The Passenger is a revelation, the celebrated circular shot towards the end one of the most audacious in movie history. Here is the trailer.

Chicago Reader review of The Passenger:

A masterpiece, one of Michelangelo Antonioni's finest works (1975). Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider star as a journalist who trades one identity for another and the woman who becomes his accomplice (and ultimately the moral center of his adopted world). Less a thriller (though the mood of mystery is pervasive) than a meditation on the problems of knowledge, action for its own sake, and the relationship of the artist to the work he brings into being. Next to this film, Blowup seems a facile, though necessary, preliminary. By all means go. 126 min.

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Time Out review of Las Acacias:

'Those in need of a flab-free winter warmer should look no further than this hushed romance that takes place in the cramped confines of a cantankerous trucker’s cab. Rubén (Germán de Silva) has agreed to allow a local woman, Jacinta (Hebe Duarte), to ride shotgun as he hauls logs from a Uruguayan backwater to Buenos Aires. That she brings along her obscenely cute newborn initially raises hackles – there’s barely a word uttered in the first 30 minutes – but as they amble on down the road and the baby gurgles and ogles adoringly, the nervy pair begin to let down their guards. Delicately paced and deceptively slight, director Pablo Giorgelli (winner of the Camera d’Or for a debut film at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival) generates sweet truth and sexual tension by keeping the style clean, acting tight and edits sparse. The will they/won’t they climax is a tad trite, but it’s a superficial nick on the façade of the film’s overall loveliness.' David Jenkins

Here is the trailer.

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