This 35mm presentation also screens on November 21st (details here) and is part of the BFI Southbank Japan season (all the films can be found via this link).
BFI introduction:
Kinuyo Tanaka, one of Japan’s greatest actors, was also the only woman to sustain a directorial career in commercial Japanese cinema at the time. Her protagonist (played by Masayuki Mori, Tanaka’s co-star in the same year’s Ugetsu Monogatari) works as a translator of love letters from Japanese women to American GIs, a topical theme just a year after the end of the postwar American occupation.
Here (and above) is a background feature on the film and the director.
This 35mm presentation also screens on November 15th (details here) and is part of the BFI Southbank Japan season (all the films can be found via this link).
BFI introduction: Though Mizoguchi was established as the greatest chronicler of the plight of women in Japanese society, he had never made a film as directly political as this. Inspired by the life of late 19th-century feminist pioneer Hideko Kageyama, this ferociously powerful drama stars the magnificent Kinuyo Tanaka as a woman who joins a liberal party, only to discover that her politician husband has feet of clay. A rarely screened masterwork.
This great Sam Fuller film (also screening on Nov 11 & 16) is part of the Big Screen Classics programme at BFI Southbank (full details here).
Chicago Reader review: One of Samuel Fuller’s best, a tough, sometimes nasty, but always exciting 1955 effort in ‘Scope and color that unites three of his favorite topics: military comradeship, the underworld, and the Far East. Robert Stack stars as an American undercover agent who dissembles his way into the good graces of a Tokyo protection racket headed by psychotic American hoodlum Robert Ryan.
This 35mm presentation also screens on October 31 (details here) and is part of the BFI Southbank Japan season (all the films can be found via this link).
BFI Southbank introduction: History is viewed as ‘her story’ in this unsung classic, a story of a Kyoto geisha house, which scholar Noel Burch calls ‘one of the most remarkable community portraits ever filmed’. It’s notable for director Ishida’s innovative style, in which shots are almost never repeated, and for its all-female on-screen cast – a phenomenon rare today, let alone in the 1930s.
This 35mm screening is part of the huge Japan season at BFI Southbank. Full details of the screenings in the season can be found here
BFI introduction: Sadao Yamanaka established himself as a master of jidaigeki (period dramas) before his prodigious career was cut tragically short: conscripted into the army, he died in China aged 28. Set among the downtrodden in claustrophobic Tokugawa-era Edo (today’s Tokyo), this film concerns a ronin (masterless samurai) who gets caught up in a risky kidnapping plot. Yamanaka’s masterly swansong is an enduring testament to the naturalism and humanity of his work.
This great French spy spoof movie, part of the Jean-Paul Belmondo tribiute season at Cine Lumiere, is also playing on November 25th. Full details here.
Time Out review: A delightfully preposterous thriller (the McGuffin is some stolen Amazonian treasure), wittier than any of the Bond spoofs that subsequently flooded the market and a good deal racier thanRaiders of the Lost Ark. Handsomely shot on location in Brazil, with Belmondo as the cheerfully indestructible hero who cliffhangs, climbs buildings, imitates Tarzan, parachutes almost into the jaws of a crocodile, and does his best to cope with the enchantingly unpredictable Dorléac (late lamented sister of Catherine Deneuve). Tom Milne
This 16mm screening is presented by the Cine-Real team.
Chicago Reader:A frightening and consistently inventive horror story (1973) that poses a none-too-original question—are things ever what they seem, or never what they seem?—and answers that both alternatives are perfectly true. Nicolas Roeg directs with a cameraman’s eye for eerie detail and cuts his baroque images into a bizarre montage of past, present, and future tenses. It’s busy on the surface and empty in the center, but somehow it works. With Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie; based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier. Dave Kehr
This screening is part of a Jean-Paul Belmondo season at Close-Up Cinema. You can find all the details of the season here.
Moderate and songlike” – a musical tempo, but also an apt descriptor of this moody, deliberate drama co-scripted by Duras from her novel. Jeanne Moreau won Best Actress at Cannes for her haunting portrayal of a wife and mother whose husband is the chief employer of their steel town near Bordeaux. Her life consists of little more than shuttling their son to piano lessons, until one day, mid-sonata, she hears a scream. Before long she’s conducting a murder investigation with one of her husband’s workers (Jean-Paul Belmondo), unleashing her own morbid impulses and perhaps a private death wish. Theatre giant Peter Brook’s restrained direction casts rare moments of intensity in relief, and Armand Thirard’s crisp cinematography conveys the desolation of life in a windswept town where “summer never comes.” – Film at Lincoln Center
This 35mm presentation is part of director Edgar Wright’s ‘London after Dark’ season (full details here) and is also being shown on November 9th (full information here).
Edgar Wright introduction: This film takes the centrepiece of Patrick Hamilton’s masterly London trilogy of novels, 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, updates it to the early 60s and then rattles through the turbulent events in a somewhat tidy 90 minutes. This simplification of the novel for maximum melodrama steers the film towards luridness, but it still has some queasily effective moments as it swan-dives into the stylings and attitudes of the period.
This 35mm presentation is part of director Edgar Wright’s ‘London after Dark’ season (full details here) and is also being shown on November 20th (more information here).
Edgar Wright introduction:Released in the very middle of the 1960s, this John Schlesinger film also feels like the very epicentre of the scene. Julie Christie’s Diana Scott seems like the girl who has it all, but being the life of the party isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just as the sixties were about to hit full swing, this sharp satire reveals the paper-thin reality of cover-story perfection.
This 35mm presentation is part of director Edgar Wright’s ‘London after Dark’ season (full details here) and is also being shown on November 19th (full information here).
Chicago Reader review:This turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film (1972), though there’s no sign of the serenity and settledness that generally mark the end of a career. Frenzy, instead, continues to question and probe, and there is a streak of sheer anger in it that seems shockingly alive. The plotting combines two of Hitchcock’s favorite themes: the poisoned couple (Marnie, The Man Who Knew Too Much) and the lone man on the run (North by Northwest, Saboteur); its subjects are misogyny and domestic madness. Too Much) and the lone man on the run (North by Northwest, Saboteur); its subjects are misogyny and domestic madness. Dave Kehr
This film (also screening on November 7th) is part of the Japanese film season at BFI Southbank. You can find full details of the season here.
BFI introduction: This is a rare example of humanist cinema emerging from Japan in the darkest days of WWII. Scriptwriter Mansaku Itami (father of Tampopo’s Juzo) crafted an elegant screenplay charting the affection of a humble rickshaw man (superbly played by Tsumasaburô Bandô) for the widow of an army officer. The focus on inflexible class distinctions makes this film subtly subversive as well as very touching.
This
35mm screening is part of the Female of the Species is More Deadlier Than
the Male season curated by Sophie Determan and presented in partnership
with the National Film and Television School. Full details here.
Dr. Jekyll (Ralph Bates) is obsessed with creating the elixir of life. Observing that women tend to outlive men, Jekyll believes the secret lies in female hormones ‒ which he obtains from bodies purchased from Burke and Hare. Dosing himself with his own experimental serum, Jekyll transforms into the sinister and seductive Mrs. Hyde (Martine Beswick). Not content to live her life by halves, Hyde wrestles with Jekyll for dominance. More and more female hormones are needed to create the serum now, and both personalities are prepared to kill for it.
Considered one of the jewels of Hammer’s extensive horror catalogue, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
Curated by Sophie Determan. Presented in partnership with the National Film & Television School.
Celebrating the release of “Dirk Schaefer : Peter Tscherkassky, All the Soundtracks (2005–2021)” by purge.xxx, Sonic Cinema presents Peter Tscherkassky & Dirk Schaefer’s four collaborations to date:Train Again(2021);The Exquisite Corpus(2015);Coming Attractions(2010);Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine(2005); as well as Tscherkassky’s classic of avant-garde cinemaOuter Space(1999). All films will be projected in their original 35mm format. Tscherkassky’s composer and sound designer Schaefer will be involved in a discussion with Stanley Schtinter (purge.xxx).
The films of Peter Tscherkassky have played a central role in the international reawakening of interest in avant-garde film. At the turn from a photographic to a digital culture of moving images, his work follows in the footsteps of Austrian masters Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, and Ernst Schmidt Jr. to create a thrilling filmic language that engages psychoanalysis and semiotics whilst exploring the physicality of the medium and its potential to overwhelm both visually and sonically. Tscherkassky’s working method – painstakingly hand printing found-footage material frame-by-frame in the darkroom – gives his films a deeply materialist sensibility, yet through the flickering fragments they also maintain cinema’s ability to shock and thrill. Dirk Schaefer’s sound design, which is intrinsically coupled to Tscherkassky’s images, constantly surprises with its chopped speech, repetitive musical refrains, arrhythmic noises, progressive buzzing and deep silences. The evening has been programmed by Oliver Dickens.
Here (and above is one of the shorts, Outer Space.
This 35mm presentation, which also screens (information here) on November 16th, is part of the Mike Leigh Choices season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Mike Leigh introduction:I’m not a fan of all Woody Allen’s films, but I love this one. It’s my go-to comfort movie. Savour its joyous kaleidoscopic cornucopia of characters and its feast of 1940s popular music. For me, it resonates with my lifetime in showbiz, as well as my post-war provincial Jewish childhood. Stanley Kubrick said it was like watching a home movie.
This 35mm presentation is part of director Edgar Wright’s ‘London after Dark’ season (full details here) and is also being shown on October 31st (full information here).
Edgar Wright introduction: A personal favourite of mine, this exposé of late 1950s Soho and the nocturnal world of beatnik coffee shops and illicit strip joints is filled with famous faces: Christopher Lee, Adam Faith, Oliver Reed, Shirley Ann Field, as well as a would-be Bardot in Gillian Hills (a 60s Zelig-like figure of many a cult movie). Most gloriously, John Barry’s first score is genuinely brilliant and much-sampled to this day.
This film (also screening on November 12th) is part of the Japanese film season at BFI Southbank. You can find full details of the season here.
Chicago Reader review:Akira Kurosawa’s remarkable 1957 restaging of Macbeth in samurai and expressionist terms is unquestionably one of his finest works—charged with energy, imagination, and, in keeping with the subject, sheer horror. Incidentally, this was reputed to have been T.S. Eliot’s favorite film. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This 35mm film is part of the Lost Vampires season curated by NFTS student Geoffrey Badger. You can find the full details of the season here.
MOMA review: A portrait of devouring passion, Trouble Every Day is Denis’s most troubling work, but its potency derives less from its explicit images than from the sincerity with which it pursues its carnal conceit. Léo (Alex Descas), a doctor, is both caregiver and captor to his wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle), who suffers from a strange and deadly sexual affliction. Meanwhile, in a Parisian honeymoon suite, American scientist Shane (Vincent Gallo) keeps his virginal bride (Tricia Vessey) at bay as he attempts to manage his own dangerous appetites. Juliet Clark
Time Out review: More of a clever comic parody than a jokey pastiche, this lively kiddies' horror pic delivers frights and laughs which are rooted in a sure and sympathetic grasp of Monster Movie mythology. To take advantage of a confluence of evil that occurs only once every hundred years, Count Dracula (Regehr) flies to America, then summons the Wolfman, Gill-Man, Mummy and Frankenstein's monster. Alerted to Dracula's evil plan, The Monster Squad - a gang of pre-teen kids and their slightly older tough-guy pal - fashion stakes in woodwork class, melt down their parents' cutlery to make silver bullets, and give the monsters hell. Confirming the promise of his debut feature Night of the Creeps, Dekker plays around imaginatively with the genre while delivering several nice touches. Nigel Floyd
This 35mm presentation is part of director Edgar Wright’s ‘London after Dark’ season (full details here) and is also being shown on November 13th (information here).
BFI introduction:
One of those rare B-movies that manages to live up to or even exceed the lurid promise of its title and poster. It finds an (American) London cabbie on a dangerous mission to rescue an innocent French girl tricked into prostitution, and also packs in Herbert Lom as a murderous pimp, Man Ray-style dream sequences and the first onscreen appearance of Michael Caine and Anne Reid (in a registry scene). Highly entertaining Soho hokum.
