Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 230: Sun Aug 18

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.30pm


This 35mm print is being screened on the date of the massacre.

Chicago Reader review:
Tobe Hooper's 1974 bloodbath cheapie acquired a considerable reputation among ideologically oriented critics, who admired the film's sneaky equation of middle-class values with cannibalism and wholesale slaughter. The plot, such as it is, concerns a group of teenagers who fall into the hands—and knives, and ultimately chain saws—of a backwoods family of homicidal maniacs. The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 229: Sat Aug 17

The Doom Generation (Araki, 1995): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.45pm


This 35mm presentation, which is also screened on August 4th (details here), is part of the Nineties season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Welcome to Hell': this 'heterosexual movie' by Gregg Araki is not for the faint-hearted. A couple-on-the-road movie, with a sexually voracious third party along for the ride, this is a highly stylised, luridly coloured provocation, aimed squarely at the moral majority (not that they'd be seen dead at a flick like this). Firing on all cylinders for the first time, Araki throws in decapitation, spunk munching, outrageous visual and structural puns, Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, and a running 666 gag, all in the service of American sexual liberation. Imagine Natural Born Killers with a sense of humour.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 228: Fri Aug 16

My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm


This film, which is also being screened on August 5th (details here), is part of the 90s season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Gus Van Sant's 1990 feature, his best prior to Elephant, is a simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating road movie about two male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in the Pacific Northwest. Phoenix, a narcoleptic from a broken home, is essentially looking for a family, while Reeves, whose father is mayor of Portland, is mainly fleeing his. The style is so eclectic that it may take some getting used to, but Van Sant, working from his own story for the first time, brings such lyrical focus to his characters and his poetry that almost everything works. Even the parts that show some strain—like the film's extended hommageto Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight—are exciting for their sheer audacity. Phoenix was never better, and Reeves does his best with a part that's largely Shakespeare's Hal as filtered through Welles.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 227: Thu Aug 15

My Favorite Wife (McCarey, 1940): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.30pm


This 35mm presentation, also being screened on August 23rd, is part of the Cary Grant season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Unsuspecting widower Cary Grant marries Gail Patrick, but runs into trouble when wife number one, Irene Dunne, shows up for the honeymoon. Garson Kanin directed this late, trivial screwball comedy (1940), and while it's pleasant enough, the freshness is definitely off the bloom. As always with Kanin, the fun is compromised by the faint sound of heavy breathing coming from somewhere off camera. Leo McCarey produced it and had a hand in the script; it seems safe to say that its more sparkling qualities come from him, passed down from his far superior The Awful Truth (made three years before with much the same cast).

Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 226: Wed Aug 14

The Night They Raided Minsky’s (Friedkin, 1968): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.25pm


This 35mm presentation is part of the ‘Once Upon a Time With Tarantino’ season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details of the season here.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 225: Tue Aug 13

Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979): Cinemas across London, 7.30pm


“It looks better than it has ever looked and sounds better than it has ever sounded.” Francis Ford Coppola. Forty years after it almost killed him, Francis Ford Coppola returns to the jungle one last time with a never-before-seen cut of his timeless masterpiece Apocalypse Now newly restored from the original negative materials. The result is a breathtaking realism and a truly visceral cinema experience. The screening is followed by an exclusive Q&A with Coppola and director Steven Soderbergh recorded at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 224: Mon Aug 12

Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm


Close-Up Cinema have programmed an intriguing season of 'Trilogies and Triptychs' for the month of August. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The mood of Kenji Mizoguchi's 1953 masterpiece is evoked by the English translation most often given to its title, "Tales of the Pale and Silvery Moon After the Rain." Based on two 16th-century ghost stories, the film is less a study of the supernatural than a sublime embodiment of Mizoguchi's eternal theme, the generosity of women and the selfishness of men. Densely plotted but as emotionally subtle as its name, Ugetsu is one of the great experiences of cinema.

Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 223: Sun Aug 11

Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor, 1935): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 3.30pm



This film (screening in 35mm) is part of the Cary Grant season (details here) and is also being shown on August 3rd (details here).

Chicago Reader review:For my money, this 1935 feature is the most interesting and audacious movie George Cukor ever made. Katharine Hepburn disguises herself as a boy to escape from France to England with her crooked father (Edmund Gwenn); they fall in with a group of traveling players, including Cary Grant (at his most cockney); the ambiguous sexual feelings that Hepburn as a boy stirs in both Grant and Brian Aherne (an aristocratic artist) are part of what makes this film so subversive. Genre shifts match gender shifts as the film disconcertingly changes tone every few minutes, from farce to tragedy to romance to crime thriller—rather like the French New Wave films that were to come a quarter century later—as Cukor's fascination with theater and the talents of his cast somehow hold it all together. The film flopped miserably when it came out, but it survives as one of the most poetic, magical, and inventive Hollywood films of its era. John Collier collaborated on the script, and Joseph August did the evocative cinematography.
Jonathan Rosenbaum



Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 222: Sat Aug 10

Day of Wrath (Dreyer, 1943): BFI Southbank. NFT2, 3.50pm


This film (screening in 35mm) is part of the Big Screen Classics strand (details here) and is also being shown on August 14th (details here).

Chicago Reader review:
Carl Dreyer made this extraordinary 1943 drama, about the church's persecution of women for witchcraft in the 17th century, during the German occupation of Denmark. He later claimed that he hadn't sought to pursue any contemporary parallels while adapting the play Anne Petersdotter (which concerns adultery as well as witchcraft), but that seems disingenuous - Day of Wrath may be the greatest film ever made about living under totalitarian rule. Astonishing in its artistically informed period re-creation as well as its hypnotic mise en scene (with some exceptionally eerie camera movements), it challenges the viewer by suggesting at times that witchcraft isn't so much an illusion as an activity produced by intolerance. And like Dreyer's other major films, it's sensual to the point of carnality. I can't think of another 40s film that's less dated.
Jonathan Rosenbaum


Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 221: Fri Aug 9

Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2.30pm


Notorious, one of Hitchcock’s most darkly romantic, disturbing and suspenseful thrillers is back on the big screen this summer in a dazzling new 4K restoration released by the BFI. I dare you not to root for Claude Rains in the achingly tense and dramatic finale. This screening is part of the extended run at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
'The Hitchcock classic of 1946, with Cary Grant as a charming and unscrupulous government agent and Ingrid Bergman as a woman of low repute whom he morally blackmails into marrying a Nazi leader (Claude Rains, in a performance that makes a sad little boy of him). The virtuoso sequences—the long kiss, the crane shot into the door key—are justly famous, yet the film's real brilliance is in its subtle and detailed portrayal of infinitely perverse relationships. The concluding shot transforms Rains from villain to victim with a disturbingly cool, tragic force.' 
Dave Kehr


Here (and above) is the new BFI trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 220: Thu Aug 8

Chinatown (Polanski, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm


This 35mm screening is part of the ‘Once Upon A Time with Tarantino’ season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Time Out review:
'The hard-boiled private eye coolly strolls a few steps ahead of the audience. The slapstick detective gets everything wrong and then pratfalls first over the finish line anyway. Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is neither - instead he's a hard-boiled private eye who gets everything wrong. Jake snaps tabloid-ready photos of an adulterous love nest that's no such thing. He spies a distressed young woman through a window and mistakes her for a hostage. He finds bifocals in a pond and calls them Exhibit A of marital murder, only the glasses don't belong to the victim and the wife hasn't killed anyone. Yet when he confronts ostensible black widow Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) with the spectacular evidence, the cigarette between his teeth lends his voice an authoritative Bogie hiss. Throughout, Gittes sexes up mediocre snooping with blithe arrogance and sarcastic machismo. It's the actor's default mode, sure, but in 1974 it hadn't yet calcified into Schtickolson, and in 1974 a director (Roman Polanski), a screenwriter (Robert Towne) and a producer (Robert Evans) could decide to beat a genre senseless and dump it in the wilds of Greek tragedy. 'You see, Mr Gits,' depravity incarnate Noah Cross (John Huston) famously explains, 'most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.' As is Chinatown. The last gunshot here is the sound of the gate slamming on the Paramount lot of Evans' halcyon reign, and as the camera rears back to catch Jake's expression, the dolly lists and shivers - an almost imperceptible sob of grief and recognition, but not a tear is shed.'
Jessica Winter

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 219: Wed Aug 7

Go Fish (Troche, 1994): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.45pm


This 35mm presentation, also being screened on August 26th (details hereis part of the Nineties season at BFI Southbank. Full details here

Chicago Reader review:
One of the delightful things about Rose Troche's stylish, low-budget, filmed-in-Chicago black-and-white lesbian comedy (1994) is that its characters all register as real people, even when bits of the dialogue are stiff or some of the lip sync is off. This isn't a movie about lesbians; it's a movie about these lesbians, and we're likely to think of them afterward as if they were people we knew. As in the better American underground movies of the 60s, which this sometimes resembles, the youthfulness and the footloose free spirit—evident in everything from the performances to Ann T. Rossetti's shooting style to Brendan Dolan and Jennifer Sharpe's jazz score to the breezy rhythmic stretches bridging narrative sequences—keep it bouncing along like a clear spring day. (And though the characters vary in age, there's a clear note of shared adolescent braggadocio in the way that sex and romance here only become real after they're talked about.) Written and produced by Troche in collaboration with Guinevere Turner, the younger of the two romantic leads (the other is V.S. Brodie), this movie dives into fantasy and stylized internal monologues with the same aplomb it brings to the buildup to a hot date.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 218: Tue Aug 6

The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm


This 35mm screening is part of the ‘Marlowe on Screen’ season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details of the season here.

Time Out review:
Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of the writer's work. Altman in fact stays pretty close to the novel's basic narrative (though there are a couple of crucial changes), but where he comes up with something totally original is in his ironic updating of the story and characters: Gould's Marlowe is a laid-back, shambling slob who, despite his incessant claim that everything is 'OK with me,' actually harbours the same honourable ideals as Chandler's Marlowe; but those values, Altman implies, just don't fit in with the neurotic, uncaring, ephemeral lifestyle led by the 'Me Generation' of modern LA. As Marlowe attempts to protect a friend suspected of battering his wife to death, and gets up to his neck in blackmail, suicide, betrayal and murder, Altman constructs not only a comment on the changes in values in America over the last three decades, but a critique of film noir mythology: references, both ironic and affectionate, to Chandler (cats and alcoholism) and to earlier private-eye thrillers abound. Shot in gloriously steely colours by Vilmos Zsigmond with a continually moving camera, wondrously scripted by Leigh Brackett (who worked on The Big Sleep), and superbly acted all round, it's one of the finest movies of the '70s. 
Geoff Andrew 

Here (and above) is the trailer. Here
 is the theme tune, sung by Jack Sheldon.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 217: Mon Aug 5

Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm


Chicago Reader review:
Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited action flick (2009) isn't a World War II movie—it's a movie about World War II movies and, by extension, how the Third Reich has become a beloved fixture of American pop culture. One story line riffs on The Dirty Dozen and its ilk, with Brad Pitt as a Tennessee cracker leading a squad of Jewish-American badasses on a search-and-destroy mission through Nazi-occupied France. The other stars Melanie Laurent as the secretly Jewish proprietor of a Parisian movie palace who's plotting to incinerate the German high command at the premiere screening of a Nazi propaganda epic. Tarantino has already caught some flack for daring to use the Holocaust as material for another of his bloody live-action cartoons, but of course the generation that experienced it for real has mostly faded away. In that sense Inglourious Basterds is a social marker as startling as Easy Rider
 was in its day.
JR Jones


Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 216: Sun Aug 4

Slacker (Linklater, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.15pm


This 35mm presentation, also being screened on August 16th (details here) is part of the Nineties season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight’s screening is introduced by film historian Rebecca Nicole Williams.

Chicago Reader review:
Richard Linklater's delightfully different and immensely enjoyable second feature (1991) takes us on a 24-hour tour of the flaky dropout culture of Austin, Texas; it doesn't have a continuous plot, but it's brimming with weird characters and wonderful talk (which often seems improvised, though it's all scripted by Linklater, apparently with the input of some of the participants, as in his later Waking Life). The structure of dovetailing dialogues calls to mind an extremely laid-back variation of The Phantom of Liberty or Playtime. “Every thought you have fractions off and becomes its own reality,” remarks Linklater himself to a poker-faced cabdriver in the first (and in some ways funniest) scene, and the remainder of the movie amply illustrates this notion with its diverse paranoid conspiracy and assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists, college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and layabouts (around 90 in all). Even if the movie goes nowhere in terms of narrative and winds up with a somewhat arch conclusion, the highly evocative scenes give an often hilarious sense of the surviving dregs of 60s culture and a superbly realized sense of a specific community.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 215: Sat Aug 3

Dance With A Stranger (Newell, 1985): Picturehouse Central, 2pm


Picturehouse Central introduction:
Birds' Eye View have curated a ‘Reclaim The Frame : Vintage’ season as part of the BFI FAN Film Feels: Obsession, on the theme of Women and Obsession. Join us for a double bill of two unique and under-screened female-made thrillers from the 1980s plus specialist talks and a creative writing workshop, tapping into one’s own obsessive capacities!


British noir Dance With A Stranger (1985) starring Miranda Richardson and written by Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey), is based on the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain following her conviction for the murder of her lover. Ellis's murder trial in the 1950s became a national obsession, later informing the debates leading to the abolishment of the death penalty in 1965. Dance With A Stranger explores what it means to commit a ‘crime of passion’ and how class and gender can inform the criminal justice system.

Smooth Talk (1985) directed by Joyce Chopra and featuring a young Laura Dern in her debut lead role as Connie, a teenage girl who is pursued by an enigmatic older man. Atmospherically crafted Smooth Talk won the Grand Jury prize in the dramatic category at Sundance Film Festival. It unsettlingly contracts two types of sexual obsession - a teenager's sexual curiosity and tendency to 'crush' and an older man's fetishisation and manipulation of innocence.

In addition, the audience are invited to an extended introduction from three specialist speakers, plus a post-screening discussion led by Mia Bays, Birds' Eye View's Director-At-Large and Oscar-winning producer. Following the films there will be a workshop in the Picturehouse central bar private Snug area, hosted by the award winning poet and creative writing facilitator Be Manzini where the audience can explore their own objects of obsession, through words and images.


Time Out review of Dance With A Stranger:
Newcomer Miranda Richardson is Ruth Ellis, peroxided 'hostess' in a Soho drinking club and the last woman to be hanged in Britain for the murder of her upper middle class lover. Not so much star-crossed as class-crossed, the affair has all the charm of fingernails on a blackboard, and it's filmed with a merciless eye for the sort of bad behaviour that Fassbinder made his own. But what the movie captures perfectly is the seedy mood of repression, so characteristic of austerity Britain in the '50s. Richardson gives full rein to the two things that British cinema has hardly ever had the guts to face: sexual obsession and bad manners. And, since this is England, it's the latter that finally sends her to the scaffold. It's shot, designed and acted with an imaginative grasp that puts it straight into the international class.

Chris Peachment


Here (and above) is the trailer.
 

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 214: Fri Aug 2

Une Femme Douce (Bresson, 1969): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

Robert Bresson's ninth feature film but his first made in colour, adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, A Gentle Creature (Krotkaya) (1876) but transposed to 1960s Paris, Une Femme Douce has been restored in 2K digital format, with thanks to Park Circus.
The film introduced audiences to budding young actress Dominique Sanda in her very first screen role, before she would go on to appear in more than 40 films. Sanda stars as Elle, a young woman with nothing and everything to lose. A meditation on shared loneliness, Une Femme Douce is a cinematic tragedy of great proportions. Returning to the big screen with greater potency than before, as viewed through a contemporary lens of social and cinematic gendered violence, Bresson's piercing and unforgettable film reveals the prescient impact of the male gaze. The film gets an extended run at ICA Cinema. Full details here.
Time Out review:
Bresson's first film in colour, a wonderfully lucid adaptation of Dostoievsky's enigmatic short story about a young woman who kills herself for no apparent reason. An elliptical intimation of the suicide; a shot of the husband staring at his dead wife's face in an attempt to understand; then in a flat, even monotone, his voice embarks on its voyage of exploration - part confession, part accusation - and a series of heart-rendingly non-committal flashbacks fill in the details of their story. By the end, in a sense, one is no wiser than before. Was it because he loved her too much or too little, because he gave her too little money or too much, because he felt she was too good for him or not good enough? The extraordinary thing about the film is that any or all of these interpretations can be read into it, still leaving, undisturbed at the bottom of the pool, an indefinable sense of despair. Time was when Bresson's characters could look forward to salvation as a reward for their tribulations; but around this time the grace notes disappeared, his world grew darker, and the people in it - like this haplessly unhappy husband and wife - seemed doomed to a pilgrim's progress in quest of the secret which would allow the human race to belong again.


Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 213: Thu Aug 1

Do The Right Thing (Lee, 1989): Barbican Cinema, 7pm


This special event opens with live poetry from Anita Barton-Williams, followed by a screening of the film and the creation and presentation of a unique mural, painted by street artist Triplezed on the evening, inspired by views on Spike Lee’s film submitted by the audience. Screens with: Melting (US 1965 Dir Thom Andersen 6 min) a short film, from the director of Los Angeles Plays Itself, showing the disintegration of a strawberry sundae.

Chicago Reader review:
With the possible exception of his cable miniseries When the Levees Broke, this 1989 feature is still Spike Lee's best work, chronicling a very hot day on a single block of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, when a series of minor encounters and incidents lead to an explosion of racial violence at an Italian-owned pizzeria. Sharp and knowing, though not always strictly realistic, it manages to give all the characters their due. Bill Lee's wall-to-wall score eventually loses some of its effectiveness, and a few elements (such as the patriarchal roles played by the local drunk and a disc jockey) seem more fanciful than believable. But overall this is a powerful and persuasive look at an ethnic community and what makes it tick—funky, entertaining, packed with insight, and political in the best, most responsible sense.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 212: Wed Jul 31

Beau Travail (Denis, 1999): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm


This 35mm presentation is part of the Claire Denis season at Close-Up Cinema. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A gorgeous mirage of a movie (1999), Claire Denis' reverie about the French foreign legion in eastern Africa, suggested by Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Foretopman, benefits especially from having been choreographed (by Bernardo Montet, who also plays one of the legionnaires). Combined with Denis' superb eye for settings, Agnes Godard's cinematography, and the director's decision to treat major and minor elements as equally important, this turns some of the military maneuvers and exercises into thrilling pieces of filmmaking that surpass even Full Metal Jacket and converts some sequences in a disco into vibrant punctuations. The story, which drifts by in memory fragments, is told from the perspective of a solitary former sergeant (Denis Lavant, star of The Lovers on the Bridge) now living in Marseilles and recalling his hatred for a popular recruit (Gregoire Colin) that led to the sergeant's discharge; the fact that his superior is named after the hero of Jean-Luc Godard's Le petit soldat and played by the same actor almost 40 years later (Michel Subor) adds a suggestive thread, as do the passages from Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. Most of all, Denis, who spent part of her childhood in Djibouti, captures the poetry and atmosphere—and, more subtly, the women—of Africa like few filmmakers before her. A masterpiece. 
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 211: Tue Jul 30

The Intruder (Denis, 2004): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm


This 35mm presentation is part of the Claire Denis season at Close-Up Cinema. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
Louis Trebor (Michel Subor) lives with his dogs in the forest, deep in the Jura mountains close to the Swiss border. A recluse, he seldom sees his grown son (Grégoire Colin), sleeps – occasionally – with a pharmacist from a nearby town, and lusts without success after a local dog-breeder (Béatrice Dalle). That he’s not the warmest of men is clear from how he treats an unwelcome visitor to his home. Still, in his own self-centred way this sexagenarian loves life – so much so that after a minor heart attack, he uses his (possibly ill-gotten) savings to fly to Korea for a somewhat shady transplant: the start of an odyssey of sorts. Be advised that this partial synopsis of Claire Denis’ latest impressionist cinepoem is tentative indeed. Little is spelled out in the elliptical, taciturn narrative; mostly we see faces in wordless close-up, long shots of land- and seascapes and obscure figures flitting through trees in the dark, all rapturously shot by Agnès Godard and mesmerically cut to a meticulous track that includes minimalist music by the Tindersticks’ Stuart A Staples. The ‘story’ is evanescent to the point of becoming a pipe-dream, albeit one grounded in corporeal matter; it’s also remarkably rich in resonance. That’s due to Denis’ unusually open-minded approach to inspiration and creation. Initially working loosely from Jean-Luc Nancy’s eponymous essay on his heart transplant (hence the themes of invasion, rejection and solitude) but also conceiving the movie as a ‘portrait’ of Subor (which in turn, through a few clips from the 1960s film ‘Le Reflux’, ties in with a decision to have Trebor sail to a South Seas paradise), she also inserts a purgatorial Pusan into his journey, presumably to facilitate the film’s funding. Potentially chaotic, this method somehow results in a haunting, enigmatic meditation on life, death, our fragile sense of identity and the wages of solipsism.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 210: Mon Jul 29

35 Shots of Rum (Denis, 2008): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm


This 35mm presentation, which also screens on July 16th, is part of the Claire Denis season at Close-Up Cinema. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A handsome black widower (Alex Descas) and his lovely college-age daughter (Mati Diop) inhabit a self-contained world of tranquil domesticity and affection in a gray suburban high-rise outside of Paris. A goodhearted but insecure woman down the hall (Nicole Dogué) lives in the abject hope of winning the widower's heart, and a sweetly melancholic young man upstairs (Grégoire Colin) harbors similar feelings for the young woman. It's a given that the father-daughter bubble must eventually burst, but the smart writer-director Claire Denis (Beau Travail) has other, subtler things on her mind than Electra-complex melodrama. This 2008 feature is beautiful but very quietly so, and definitely not for the ADHD set.
Cliff Doerksen

Here (and above) is the trailer.