Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 242: Thu Aug 31

Wild Side (Cammell, 1995): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

 
ICA introduction:
The perfect companion piece to Performance, Donald Cammell’s swan song is an edgy unpredictable pulp noir centred around crime, money, sex, power games and four outstanding acting performances. Bruno (Christopher Walken), the world’s most notorious money launderer, is being set up for a sting by undercover agent Tony (Steven Bauer) posing as his chauffeur. When Alex (Anne Heche), an international banker moonlighting as a call girl enters Bruno’s world, both Bruno and Tony see opportunity – as does Bruno’s estranged wife Virgina (Joan Chen). Masquerading as a crime thriller, Cammell’s final film shifts unpredictably between hard-bitten drama, sensuous lesbian love story and absurd black comedy to deliver an incendiary mix of mind games, sexual liaisons and ever-shifting loyalties as the four characters navigate an increasingly complex and irrelevant plot. The performances, particularly Walken’s as the nervy, eccentric Bruno are larger than life, and Heche, the emotional centre of the film, is outstanding as the intermittently tough, vulnerable, and uncertain Alex. On its UK release in June 2000, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote, ‘an original and exhilarating thriller, capriciously intelligent, with experimentalism and verve…an arresting work from an important and distinctive director.’Re-edited against his wishes by its American producers Cammell removed his name from the project and shortly after committed suicide, but a posthumous ‘director’s cut’ adding more than twenty minutes of material and restoring Cammell’s original vision was produced by Tartan Films in the UK screening to enthusiastic reviews. Thought to be lost, two 35mm prints of this director’s cut were recently uncovered, and this screening – the first for more than two decades – is from one of these two surviving prints.

Observer review:
Like William Burroughs, British film-maker Donald Cammell was the scion of an immensely rich family (the Cammell Laird shipbuilders) who reacted violently against his respectable background. Both lived outrageously unconventional lives of drugs, orgies and diabolical dabbling, and produced extravagant, deliberately provocative works concerned, often mystically, with bisexuality and the perverted exercise of power. Unlike Burroughs, who killed his wife, Cammell killed himself, dying in Hollywood in 1996 at the age of 62. Cammell's first film, Performance , co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, is one of the most remarkable to emerge from a British studio and encapsulates the culture of Swinging London at its most seductively corrupt. He was forced by Warner Brothers to re-edit it drastically and he only completed three more pictures - the SF curiosity Demon Seed (Julie Christie impregnated by a computer), the mystic thriller White of the Eye (serial killer loose in the Arizona desert) and Wild Side, which was chopped up by its producers and sent straight to cable TV in 1995. It was the contemptuous treatment of this last film that proved the last straw, as it were, for Cammell, but he was still hoping to regain control of it when he shot himself. Now his editor and friend, Frank Mazzola, with the help of Channel 4 and Tartan Films, has restored the director's cut, and it is being shown under the somewhat tautologous title of Donald Cammell's Wild Side. It could as easily be called 'Christopher Walken on the Wild Side', for in that most volatile of American actors Cammell found a perfect exponent of his dangerous art. Walken plays an out-of-control financial crook, Bruno, the world's biggest money launderer, on whom the federal authorities have planted a psychotic undercover agent, Tony (Steven Bauer), as his chauffeur. A beautiful Los Angeles banker, Alex Lee (Anne Heche), is moonlighting as a $1,000-a-night call-girl to pay off her mortgage. She services the sexually voracious Bruno, is raped by Tony and then blackmailed by the Feds. Walken sends his Chinese wife Virginia (Joan Chen) to Alex's bank as part of a gigantic scam and the two women fall passionately in love. The film is from start to finish absolutely crazy, full of baroque dialogue and over-the-top performances. On one level it's a power game between an unlikely unhinged quartet, on another it's an orgy in serial form. It is often queasily risible, as when the financier prepares to bugger his chauffeur in front of Alex to demonstrate his superiority, and makes the intended victim roll the condom on for him as he smokes a cigar. Yet like all Cammell's work, Wild Side is oddly compelling - riveting in the sense that you feel nailed to a post as you watch it. The editing is disconcerting, the interiors claustrophobic, and Cammell uses to considerable emblematic effect the township of Long Beach, where the immaculate three-funnelled Queen Mary is isolated in an industrial seaside wasteland. In a curious reference back to the London of the 1960s, the heroine's nasty boss is called Rachman, presumably after the property racketeer involved in the Profumo scandal.
Philip French

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 241: Wed Aug 30

No Home Movie (Akerman, 2015): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.45pm

Chicago Reader review:
Chantal Akerman’s final film (2015) shares some formal concerns with her earlier works; what sets it apart is a stream of love and yearning, regret and loss, from which painful memories resurface. Akerman (who died in 2015) said that she prepared for her 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by closely observing her homemaker mother, Natalia, for decades, and indeed this 2015 documentary about her mother’s last years reveals an extraordinarily warm, intimate bond between parent and globe-trotting daughter. Long takes of the Israeli desert, paralleled with long takes of empty rooms in Natalia’s apartment, suggest her sense of dislocation as a Holocaust survivor, a condition she struggles to verbalize in her kitchen with a daughter who probes for more. The combination of memoir and abstraction is both cerebral and heartrending.
Andrea Gronvall

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 240: Tue Aug 29

The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.50pm

Chicago Reader review:
Charles Laughton's first and only film as a director (1955) is an enduring masterpiece—dark, deep, beautiful, aglow. Robert Mitchum, in the role that most fully exploits his ferocious sexuality, is the evil preacher pursuing two orphaned children across a sinister, barren midwest; Lillian Gish is the widow who protects the children, in a depiction of maternal love worthy of her mentor, D.W. Griffith. Laughton's direction has Germanic overtones—not only in the expressionism that occasionally grips the image, but also in a pervasive, brooding romanticism that suggests the Erl-King of Goethe and Schubert. But ultimately the source of its style and power is mysterious—it is a film without precedent and without any real equals.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 239: Mon Aug 28

Sátántangó (Tarr, 1994): Prince Charles Cinema, 10am

ICA introduction:
This legendary film, running at 7 hours 12 minutes, deals with the collapse of a collectivised Soviet-era farm in rural Hungary. There is the scent of money in the air, and, in chaotic and changeable times, a yearning for meaning and salvation. At such times it is inevitable that prophets and Messiahs will be longed and waited for. The question is whether they will be false prophets, or mere charlatans. In the chilly, bleak rotten world of Sátántangó, who will follow who, and why, are left wonderfully uncertain. These are ordinary human concerns, but it is the vastness of the  landscape, the featureless plains and endless horizons, and a terrifying, unremitting wind from nowhere, and a rain that falls without end, that threatens to wash away all human hope. Signature long takes, often as long as the 10 minutes that a roll of film allows, combined with astonishing camera choreography offers a sublime cinema experience. To commit to Sátántangó is to commit to the unforgettable and life-changing: these are the outer limits of cinema. The screening is on 35mm.

Chicago Reader review:
How can I do justice to this grungy seven-hour black comedy (1994), in many ways my favorite film of the 90s? Adapted by Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr and Laszlo Krasznahorkai from the latter's 1985 novel, this is a diabolical piece of sarcasm about the dreams, machinations, and betrayals of a failed farm collective, set during a few rainy fall days (two of them rendered more than once from the perspectives of different characters). The form of the novel was inspired by the steps of the tango—six forward, six backward—an idea reflected by the film's overlapping time structure, 12 sections, and remarkable choreographed long takes and camera movements. The subject of this brilliantly constructed narrative is nothing less than the world today, and its 431-minute running time is necessary not because Tarr has so much to say, but because he wants to say it right. In Hungarian with subtitles.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 238: Sun Aug 27

Murder and Murder (Rainer, 1996): ICA Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the Yvonne Rainer retrospective at the ICA. Full details here.

ICA introduction:
Rainer’s last feature is also one of her most personal, inspired by the lows and highs of a breast cancer diagnosis in the early 1990s, and the surprise of a burgeoning lesbian relationship. The latter is playfully refracted here through the love story of two women from very different backgrounds: Yvonne’s sixty-something screen counterpart Doris (Joanna Merlin) and the younger academic she’s soon to move in with, Mildred (Kathleen Chalfant).A comic romance whose emotions are amplified by Rainer’s structural tomfoolery and signature intellectual rigour – with the director providing running commentary and appearing intermittently to address the camera – MURDER and murder probes the pleasures, and attendant questions, of late-in-life love affairs.

This is the UK Premiere of the 4K restoration of the work.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 237: Sat Aug 26

No 1 Body Double (De Palma, 1984): Rio Cinema, 11.30pm

One of the highlights of the year, a very rare screening from Movies Are Dead of Brian De Palma's cruelly underrated mid-1980s Hitchcockian thriller. Highly recommended.

Chicago Reader review:
It pains me to say it, but I think Brian De Palma has gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of this thriller represents the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he has ever done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences. Craig Wasson is an unemployed actor who is invited to house-sit a Hollywood Hills mansion; he becomes voyeuristically involved with his beautiful neighbor across the way, and witnesses her murder. Those who have seen Vertigo will have solved the mystery within the first 15 minutes, but De Palma's use of frame lines and focal lengths to define Wasson's point of view is so adept that the suspense takes hold anyway. De Palma's borrowings from Hitchcock can no longer be characterized as hommages or even as outright thievery; his concentration on Hitchcockian motifs is so complete and so fetishized that it now seems purely a matter of repetition compulsion. But Body Double is the first De Palma film to make me think that all of his practice is leading at least to the beginnings of perfection.
Dave Kehr 

If you want to read more about this movie there's Susan Dworkin's Double De Palma, an on-the-set account of the making of the film, plus a very thoughtful chapter in Misogyny in the Movies: the De Palma Question by Kenneth Mackinnon. Manuela Lazic has also written about the movie in a recent blog piece for The Film Stage. 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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No 2 Casino (Scorsese, 1995): Prince Charles Cinema, 8pm

Love the opening titles (here); love the cast; love the soundtrack ... 

This great film screens on 35mm as part of the Martin Scorsese 90s season. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Simultaneously quite watchable and passionless, Martin Scorsese's three-hour dissection of power in Las Vegas (1995), set principally in the 1970s, sometimes comes across like an anthology of his previous collaborations with Robert De Niro—above all GoodFellas, though here the characters are high rollers to begin with. By far the most interesting star performance is by Sharon Stone as a classy hooker destroyed by her marriage to a bookie (De Niro, in the least interesting star performance) selected by the midwest mob to run four casinos. There's an interesting expositional side to the film, with De Niro and Joe Pesci's characters both serving as interactive narrators, but the film never becomes very involving as drama, With James Woods, Don Rickles, Alan King, Kevin Pollak, and L.Q. Jones. 
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 236: Fri Aug 25

 Dick Tracy (Beatty, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This is a 35mm presentation. 

Time Out review:
Set in the '30s, Warren Beatty's film culls its villains - a gallery of grotesques with names like Pruneface, Flattop and The Brow - from the later '40s strips. As Tracy (Beatty) sets about foiling the plans of Big Boy and The Blank to take over the city, Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) introduces emotional conflict for the careerist detective, whose long-standing relationship with Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) is going nowhere fast. Beatty has rejected 'psychology and behaviour' (read complexity) in characterisation; this is old-fashioned, clearly defined morality, with literally no shades of grey (the use of colour is wonderfully imaginative and carefully modulated). Pleasing restraint is evident in the way Beatty allows his character to be outshone by his adversaries. As mobster Big Boy, a brash thug fond of misquoting Lincoln, Nietzsche and Plato, Al Pacino is virtually unrecognisable and hugely enjoyable; and Madonna gives confident renditions of the Stephen Sondheim numbers. A spectacular movie whose technical achievements - notably the sharp editing - will surely provide a gauge by which subsequent comic strip films are judged.
Colette Maude

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 235: Thu Aug 24

The Man Who Envied Women (Rainer, 1985): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This film is part of the Yvonne Rainer retrospective at the ICA. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
It’s strange to recall that as a modern dancer and choreographer, Yvonne Rainer was known throughout the 60s and early 70s as a minimalist. For the past 15 years, she has been making experimental quasi-narrative films of an increasing multitextual density, culminating in this angry, vibrant film of 1985, which, in her own words, takes on “the housing shortage, changing family patterns, the poor pitted against the middle class, Hispanics against Jews, artists and politics, female menopause, abortion rights. There’s even a dream sequence.” Working with the speech and writing of over a dozen figures, ranging from Raymond Chandler to Julia Kristeva, Rainer also confronts and parodies male theoretical discourse (Michel Foucault in particular, sampled and discussed in extended chunks) as a mode of sexual seduction. Politics have been present in all her features, but usually folded into so many distancing devices that they mainly come out dressed in quotes. Here she allows the politics to speak more directly and eloquently, and it charges the rest of the film like a live wire–rightly assuming that we could all use a few jolts.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 234: Wed Aug 23

The Plumber (Weir, 1979): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.20pm

This screening is part of the Animus Magazine season devoted to Peter Weir. Details here.

Cine Passion review:
Peter Weir in a jocular mood turns Hanging Rock into a high-rise complex, the oppressed return with tool belts. "You can tell a lot about people from their bathroom." The housewife-scholar (Judy Morris) lives surrounded by fertility masks and Kama Sutra posters, her thesis on a New Guinea tribe is written to native drums on a tape recorder. The surrealistic process has the witch doctor who once barged into her tent reflected in the shaggy plumber (Ivar Kants) who contemplates the perfectly organized lavatory and begins hammering away at the tiled walls. The tradesman is an insinuating physical presence ("The drains of this building are clogged with hair," he whispers as if telling a lewd secret), a playful lout, a wannabe balladeer, a trickster. He's also a reminder of class injustice, the client's status becomes her weapon—when she makes a point of correcting his grammar in front of a friend, he channels his fury into faux-Bob Dylan lyrics. The brain-eating malady and the vanished watch, theme and style, "pressure." A comedy of menace and control à la Pinter, where privileged guilt and fear unmoor the anthropological mind until it resembles the cracked plaster above the toilet. From within the jungle of tangled pipes and scaffolding the accusatory Other wails with guitar and harmonica, a matter of leakage. Weir calibrates this Last Wave offshoot with compressed technique (it was shot on the fly for Australian TV) and material from Polanski's The Tenant and Del Lord's A Plumbing We Will Go. "It's a wonder the place hasn't flooded!" The discourse continues in Pacific Heights, The Guardian, Funny Games.
Fernando F. Croce

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 233: Tue Aug 22

Journeys From Berlin (Rainer, 1971): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

 
This film is part of the Yvonne Rainer retrospective at the ICA. Full details here.

ICA introduction:
Yvonne Rainer’s fourth feature, inspired by her experiences living in West Berlin in 1976 and ’77, when the activities of right-wing terrorists were at their height, offers an audacious, collage-like meditation on state power, repression, violence and revolution. Vaulting between aerial images of British landscapes, intertitles, fragments of Rainer’s teenage diary and one unseen couple’s debate (voiced by Amy Taubin and Vito Acconci) over the demise of the RAF, the film is illuminated by a lead performance from the late art and film critic Annette Michelson as a patient undergoing psychoanalysis, whose every gesture was choreographed elaborately by Rainer over a nine-month period. This is the UK Premiere of the 4K restoration of the work.

Chicago Reader review:
‘Journeys From Berlin significantly furthers the political implications of (Rainer's) previous work while continuing the development of formal strategies that challenge audience expectation... and slyly subvert the attachment to character identification. In her willingness to enter into the zone of ambiguity and to dare to fix meanings within its delicate balance of style, Rainer has made... an indicator of a new development that could rescue avant-garde film from its current paralysis.'
B Ruby Rich

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 232: Mon Aug 21

Mulholland Dr (Lynch, 2001): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.55am

Mulholland Drive is the cinematic re-release of the decade so far. There was a terrific piece on the movie written to coincide with the re-release you can find here by Robert Bright in The Quietus. This presentation (also screening on September 10th) is on 35mm.

"Like Billy Wilder’s film named after another iconic Hollywood street, Mulholland Drive tells a sordid tale of the industry of illusion and its boulevards of broken dreams – but for David Lynch, these dreams fold into dreams within dreams within dreams. Originally intended as a pilot for a television series, Lynch’s möbius riddle was rejected by TV executives. In restructuring it for the silver screen, Lynch crafted one of his finest masterworks. When the perky, wholesome Betty Elms lands in Hollywood for what could be her big break, she meets “Rita,” an ostensible femme fatale who is rendered identity-less because of amnesia from a car accident. Lynch’s (and Hollywood’s) dazzling dream factory sets to work with mysterious objects, startling visions, amusing detours and revelatory alterations in acting styles and character identities. The noir cracks open and gives way to a multi-toned, terrifyingly beautiful hallucination that is as much a complex reflection on Hollywood as it is an endlessly transforming psychological puzzle. Cinematic archetypes – including all versions of the female presented or rejected by Hollywood – double, reflect and regenerate into uncanny metaphors in Lynch’s subconscious minefield where the fluid layers of identity, nostalgia, desire, deception and projection could be in the minds of the characters, the audience, or a complete fabrication by dark, unknown forces behind the scenes … or well beyond."
Harvard Film Archive

Here (and above) is the trailer for the re-release.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 231: Sun Aug 20

The Bad and the Beautiful (Minnelli, 1952): Castle Cinema, 1pm

This is a 16mm Cine-Real presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
Vincente Minnelli will always be known and loved for his musicals (Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon), but the melodramas he made in the 50s are no less accomplished and often more personal. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is superficially a typical Hollywood “inside story” chronicling the ruthless rise of an aggressive producer (Kirk Douglas), loosely based on Val Lewton. But under Minnelli’s direction it becomes a fascinating study of a man destroyed by the 50s success ethic, left broke, alone, and slightly insane in the end. Douglas is surprisingly good as Minnelli’s manic everyman and is well supported by (believe it or not) Lana Turner and Dick Powell.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 230: Sat Aug 19

Fail Safe (Lumet, 1964) & Juggernaut (Lester, 1974): Cinema Museum, 6pm

Lost Reels continues its series of classics, curios and forgotten gems on 16mm with two edge-of-your-seat suspense thrillers.

Time Out review of Fail Safe:
Eclipsed by its contemporary, Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe eschews the former's black humour and opts for a deadly serious mix of cold-war melodrama and rampant psychosis. Creeping unease builds up to terminal paranoia as the machines run away from their masters, the 'fail safe' fails, and the unstoppable 'Vindicator' bomber homes in on Moscow - all by accident. Lumet sensibly avoids pyrotechnics in favour of tightening the psychological screws, as Larry Hagman (the president's translator - nice looking kid) does nervy trade-offs on the hot-line, and everyone, from President Fonda down, starts drowning in a sea of cold sweat.
Chris Peachment

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Time Out review of Juggernaut:
Juggernaut has been stuck with a 'disaster movie' tag when in fact it bears little relation to the Hollywood crop of calamities. The potential catastrophe here is seven steel drums of amatol timed to go off and destroy 1,200 passengers unless a ransom is delivered to the mysterious Juggernaut. But Lester's movie is no glossy catalogue of modern living with a holocaust thrown in for the climax. On the contrary, it is a penetrating and sardonic commentary on a fading and troubled Britain, neatly characterised by the lumberingly chaotic ocean liner, 'The Britannic', in which everything is falling apart: newly fitted stabilisers rock the boat, the general facilities are shabby and run down, bombs keep exploding to the dismay of the stoical passengers. Anyone who's ever had to endure that peculiar form of torture, the luxury ocean liner, will find an exact description here with not a jot of misery omitted. The pace of the thriller aspect is unflagging, and the characters are unerringly drawn, from the perfect casting of Omar Sharif as the seedy, demoralised captain, to Richard Harris as the bomb expert (the film's research in this direction is painstaking). Without a doubt, one of the best movies of 1974.
David Pirie

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 229: Fri Aug 18

No1: Targets (Bogdanovich, 1967): Prince Charles Cinema, 1pm

This rare 35mm screening is also being shown on August 2nd. Details here.

Time Out review:
'Boris Karloff in effect plays himself as Byron Orlok, a horror star on the point of retiring, who suddenly confronts the reality of contemporary American horror in the form of a psychopathic sniper (Tim O'Kelly) picking off anyone he can see with a vast artillery of weapons. Peter Bogdanovich was given the money to make the film by Roger Corman, who also allowed him to use extensive footage from Corman's Poe movie The Terror in the sequences at the drive-in cinema where the confrontation takes place. The result is a fascinatingly complex commentary on American mythology, exploring the relationship between the inner world of the imagination and the outer world of violence and paranoia, both of which were relevant to contemporary American traumas. It was Bogdanovich's first film, and despite his subsequent success, he has yet to come up with anything half as remarkable.'
David Pirie

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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No2: Romance and Cigarettes (Turturro, 2006): Garden Cinema, 8.45pm

Time Out review:
John Turturro’s first film as a writer-director, ‘Mac’, was an impressive realist drama inspired by his construction-worker father. His second, ‘Illuminata’, was a more ambitious if slightly clumsy affair celebrating theatrical life. This, his third effort in the hyphenate role, is in many ways a blend of the two, in that it’s a blue-collar musical comedy-drama. So yes, it’s sometimes a little shaggy – the pacing, particularly, stumbles towards the end – but it’s also Turturro’s best yet, and one of the most personal, deliciously fresh American films of recent years. The theatricality, complete with characters breaking into dance and voicing their emotions loud and clear in tolerably tacky old tunes like ‘A Man without Love’ and ‘Delilah’ is appropriate, even though the protagonist, Nick (James Gandolfini), is a New York ironworker who shares his unremarkable suburban home with wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon) and three grown-up daughters. Appropriate because for Nick life has become all about performance: for one thing, when Kitty finds he’s having an affair and his family turn against him, there’s the matter of whether he’ll be able to act his way out of trouble; for another, if he’s to hang on to improbable paramour Tula (a physically voracious, foul-mouthed lass from the north of England played by an almost unrecognisable Kate Winslet), he needs to keep his end up in all sorts of other ways. It’s not as if he’s getting much help from his profoundly unreconstructed fellow-worker Angelo (Steve Buscemi); Kitty, on the other hand, can count among her cohorts family (Christopher Walken), friends (Barbara Sukowa), even a Holy Father (Eddie Izzard). The story’s the stuff of domestic melodrama, then, save that it’s played for laughs as well as emotional effect. Turturro pulls off a very tricky balancing act, by trusting in the expertise of his performers and by infusing the whole film with energy and affection. Even the very plentiful in-your-face bawdiness is liberating in the Chaucerian/ Rabelaisian tradition rather than sniggeringly, timidly puerile as it so often is in the movies. Indeed, it’s all part of a fond tribute to the vitality and passionate emotional integrity of a certain kind of working-class experience, rooted in the knowledge that goodness, real goodness, can be found in the unlikeliest creatures.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 228: Thu Aug 17

The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.30pm

This multi-Oscar winning movie is presented from 4K.

Time Out review:
This is probably one of the few great films of the Seventies. It's the tale of three Pennsylvanian steelworkers, their life at work, at play (deer-hunting), at war (as volunteers in Vietnam). Running against the grain of liberal guilt and substituting Fordian patriotism, it proposes Robert De Niro as a Ulyssean hero tested to the limit by war. Moral imperatives replace historical analysis, social rituals become religious sacraments, and the sado-masochism of the central (male) love affair is icing on a Nietzschean cake. Ideally, though, it should prove as gruelling a test of its audience's moral and political conscience as it seems to have been for its makers.

Chris Auty

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 227: Wed Aug 16

Stéphane (Hochet/Pastor, 2022): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This is the closing night gala at DukeFest 2023 and if those dudes tell you this is good it will be good.

DukeFest introduction:
Tim, an aspiring short filmmaker, is trying to finish his latest magnum opus but things keep going wrong: his actors are not committed enough, his budget is nonexistent and his locations keep canceling on him. And that’s when he meets Stéphane- a gruff, strange man who gives Tim the explosion effects he needed to finish the day’s shoot. Soon a grateful Tim offers Stéphane a ride home, not knowing that he’s about to start off on the wildest night of his life. To enjoy Stéphane, you need to take a risk. The risk is to know nothing. Suffice it to say if you enjoyed Mark Duplass’ ‘Creep’or ‘Behind the Mask: Leslie Vernon’ you are in very familiar territory but Stéphane may make you gasp more than you ever thought possible. Outrageous, uncomfortable and ultimately bombastic, catch what’s your future cult favorite on the big screen now. Also playing will be a mystery reel of 35mm trailers - what’s on them? Join us as to find out!

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 226: Tue Aug 15

The Last Wave (Weir, 1977): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Animus Magazine season devoted to Peter Weir.

Chicago Reader review:
Richard Chamberlain plays an Australian lawyer whose defense of a group of aborigines accused of ritual murder sparks dark dreams of the apocalypse. Peter Weir’s 1977 thriller isn’t free of the metaphysical baloney that buried his Picnic at Hanging Rock, but it’s a much more effective film in genre terms—Weir does manage to deliver the goods
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 225: Mon Aug 14

 Ride Lonesome (Boetticher, 1959): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film, part of the Ranown Series: Westerns of Budd Boetticher season at the Prince Charles, also screens on Setember 6th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
One of the best of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns, bleaker but not too distant in mood from the autumnal resignation of Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, as Randolph Scott's ageing lawman lets time catch up with him and foregoes (even as he achieves) the vengeance he had planned on the man who hanged his wife so long ago that the killer, taxed with it, says 'I 'most forgot'. It's deviously structured as an odyssey of cross-purposes in which Scott captures a young gunman (Best) and proceeds to take him in, ostensibly for the bounty on his head. Actually, Scott hopes to lure Best's brother (Lee Van Cleef), the man who killed his wife, into a rescue bid; two outlaw buddies (Roberts and Coburn) tag along, biding their time, desperate to collect the amnesty that goes with Best's capture; the presence of a pretty widow (Steele) stokes a measure of sexual rivalry; and there are Indians about. Beautifully scripted by Burt Kennedy, with excellent performances all round as the characters evolve through subtly shifting loyalties and ambitions, it's a small masterpiece.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 224: Sun Aug 13

On The Waterfront (Kazan, 1954): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.15pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
Superb performances (none more so than Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, the ex-boxer unwittingly entangled in corrupt union politics), a memorably colourful script by Budd Schulberg, and a sure control of atmosphere make this account of Brando's struggles against gangster Lee J Cobb's hold over the New York longshoremen's union powerful stuff. It is undermined, however, by both the religious symbolism (that turns Malloy not into a Judas but a Christ figure) and the embarrassing special pleading on behalf of informers, deriving presumably from the fact that Elia Kazan and Schulberg named names during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Politics apart, though, it's pretty electrifying.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 223: Sat Aug 12

Sideways (Payne, 2004): Garden Cinema, 9pm

Time Out review:
‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ wonders Miles (Paul Giamatti), our paunchy anti-hero, as he leans in towards Maya (Virginia Madsen), a friend he knows from his regular trips to California’s vineyards. ‘Why are you so into Pinot?’ What a chat-up line. Yet this and other crucial questions concerning wine, men, love and friendship are the lifeblood of this low-key road movie about two middle-aged men, Miles and Jack (Thomas Haden Church), who take to the highway to explore California’s vineyards in the week before Jack gets married. This odd, contrasting pair share little more than long-gone college days. Miles is a schoolteacher, aspiring novelist and divorcé with a near-desperate obsession for wine and a defeatist, hang-dog demeanour that indicates he is a depressed shell of his former self. Jack, meanwhile, is an out-of-work actor, fancies himself as a Casanova and still dines out on a long-gone, brief stint on a television soap opera. Their ideas of a holiday are very different: Miles just wants to drink wine and play golf, while Jack is determined to have one last fling before marriage and so engineers an evening with two local girls, Maya and Stephanie (Sandra Oh). Jack is in his element; Miles seems about to disintegrate. Depression, loss and disappointment are at the heart of this film, which grounds a simple story of mismatched friends and road-movie mishaps in serious, intelligent and affecting themes. In their different ways, Jack and Miles are the embodiment of male crisis. Payne, meanwhile, demonstrates immense confidence by holding back both the humour and the pace of the film so that it trips along maturely like the lazy Californian sun that he indulges so well. He and co-writer Jim Taylor also have great fun with Miles’ oenophile tendencies, allowing for such gems of dialogue as ‘quaffable, but far from transcendent’. Intelligent, funny and moving.

Dave Calhou

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 222: Fri Aug 11

Merrily We Go to Hell (Arzner, 1942): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This film, part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank, is also being shown on August 23rd when the film will be introduced by film journalist Helen O'Hara.

Time Out review:
Part voguish 'sophisticated' satire, part domestic melodrama, this film from the Lubitsch era at Paramount is a curious but highly entertaining hybrid. Frederic March, a journalist and would-be playwright with a heartbreak in his past and a liking for the bottle, woos and weds Sylvia Sidney's heiress, and we follow their 'matrimony modern style' through better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health, up to a dubiously happy ending of which Douglas Sirk would have been proud. As befits a film by Hollywood's foremost female 'auteur', all the male characters are hopelessly immature; yet the women rarely transcend movie types.
Paul Taylor

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 221: Thu Aug 10

Madame Sata (Ainouz, 2020): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation is also screened on August 20th (details here) and is part of the 'Be Gay: Do Crime' season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
João Francisco dos Santos was a cook, nanny, transvestite, con-artist, kickboxer and adoptive father to the kids of his various low-life friends in the Rio slums; he also attained some success as a cabaret drag-queen. Writer/director Aïnouz flashes back from his incarceration for murder to focus on his faltering rise to some kind of stardom. It's a small film, effectively exploring a Genet-like netherworld of gay criminality, while taking the time to let us get to know 'Satâ', so that his charm and perverse but distinctive sense of honour finally win us over too. Walter Carvalho's burnished camerawork oozes atmosphere, but in the end it's surely Lázaro Ramos' dazzling lead turn that carries the day.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 220: Wed Aug 9

The Bigamist (Lupino, 1953): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6pm

This screening features an introduction by Aga Baranowska, Events Programmer. The film is also being shown on August 4th (details here).

Time Out review:
One of Ida Lupino's sympathetic little problem pictures. Its weakness, perhaps, is that in trying to avoid the obvious of making a whipping-boy of the bigamous husband, it creates characters who are a shade too good to be true. But the three lead performances are terrific, movingly illuminating the impasse whereby Edmond O'Brien's travelling salesman finds himself in love with two women - Joan Fontaine as the outgoing career-woman who can't have children, Lupino as the quiet home-lover who has borne him a child - each of whom brings him something the other can't. The complex issues are sketched in with both tact and compassion.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 219: Tue Aug 8

Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996): Genesis Cinema, 6.40pm

This is a 35mm screening.

Chicago Reader review:
Danny Boyle's second feature (1996), a lot more stylish and entertaining than Shallow Grave. Far from nihilistic, though certainly calculated to butt up against various puritanical norms, this feel-good jaunt about young Scottish heroin addicts and their degradation and betrayals of one another draws a lot of its energy from Richard Lester movies of the 60s and 70s and from A Clockwork Orange (the novel as well as the movie). Adapted by John Hodge from Irvine Welsh's popular pidgin-English novel (which had already been successfully adapted for the stage), it floats by almost as episodically as 94 minutes of MTV.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 218: Mon Aug 7

Guelwaar (Sembène, 1993): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.35pm

This 35mm presentation, which also screens on August 17th, is part of the Ousmane Sembène season. You can find all the details here.

BFI introduction:
Here, Sembène continues to probe the theme of religious intolerance, previously explored in Ceddo, alongside a critique of neocolonial aid. Through biting satire, the filmmaker draws a rich and textured portrait of a community fractured between Muslims and Christians, through the tale of a Christian’s body mistakenly buried according to Muslim rites.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 217: Sun Aug 6

Camp de Thiaroye (Sembene, 1988): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3pm

This film, which also screens on August 20th, is part of the Ousmane Sembène season. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
In 1939, young men in French African colonies were recruited to fight the 'World's' war in Europe. Five years later, some returned to Camp Thiaroye to await back pay and demobbing. Tension between men and officers, complaints about chow, a misadventure in a brothel: staples of the basic training and/or prison camp genre are all present and correct. But although the influence of years in France is apparent (he fought in WWII himself), Ousmane Sembene's is an African sensibility; and the after-effects of the culture clash (literal and metamorphical) precipitated by Hitler is but one of the themes in a subtle and moving picture. Through a series of everyday incidents, we gradually realise the extent of the French (white) officers' racism; the hypocritical games they play seem ironic at first, but lead to a shameful and bloody end. This, in microcosm, is a story of colonialism, told from the receiving end and taken to a radical conclusion. Sembene and Thierno Faty Sow have made what is not only a humane, passionate film, but an honest and vital memorial to those men who died, after the war, at Camp Thiaroye.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 216: Sat Aug 5

Fight Club (Fincher, 1999): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.25pm

This 35mm screening presentation is also screened on August 4th, 8th and 17th. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
This exercise in mainstream masochism, macho posturing, and designer-grunge fascism (1999) is borderline ridiculous. But it also happens to be David Fincher's richest movie--not only because it combines the others (Alien 3, Seven, The Game) with chunks of Performance, but also because it keeps topping its own giddy excesses. Adapted by Jim Uhls from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, this has something--but only something--to do with a bored Edward Norton encountering a nihilistic doppelganger (Brad Pitt) who teaches him that getting your brains bashed out is fun. Though you're barely allowed to disagree with him, your jaw is supposed to drop with admiring disbelief at the provocation, and the overall impression of complexity might easily be mistaken for the genuine article. In other words, this is American self-absorption at its finest.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 215: Fri Aug 4

Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1984): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

Time Out review:
Any film which features a dead, bald and very hungry punk lurching towards the camera screaming 'More Brains!' gets my vote. Directed by Dan O'Bannon courtesy of George Romero, this is an energetic cross-referencing of genre: not just a horror movie, but a comic apocalyptic zombie horror movie. O'Bannon has his cake, eats it, and then throws it up in the face of the audience. Warehousemen unwittingly release a zombie interred by the CIA (of course) along with a nifty gas which ensures that local graveyards are bursting at the seams with brain-peckish corpses. Most of the film froths and bubbles merrily: there is a deeply artistic sequence where a punkette dances naked on a tombstone before being transformed into a zombie, and another moving bit where para-meds get their heads munched.
Richard Rayner

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 214: Thu Aug 3

Hot Fuzz (Wright, 2007): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This 35mm presentation, which is also being screened on August 11th, is part of the Edgar Wright season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.

Chicago reader review:
After scoring with the horror spoof Shaun of the Dead, British comedy writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg take on American cop thrillers, and as in their earlier movie the good humor bubbles up from a deep reservoir of affection for Hollywood schlock. Pegg, who played the underachieving Shaun of the earlier movie, plays it ramrod straight this time as an overachieving London patrolman assigned to a sleepy country village. Roly-poly Nick Frost also returns, as Pegg’s partner, an incompetent bobby with a head full of melodrama derived from blockbusters like Point Break and Bad Boys II. The transplanted action cliches mix easily with the eccentric English characters, and as a director Wright is adept at framing and cutting for excitement as well as laughs.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 213: Wed Aug 2

Sawdust and Tinsel (Bergman, 1953): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

This film, part of the Big Screen Classics strand, will be introduced by the BFI's programmer-at-large Geoff Andrew. There is another screening of the movie on August 22nd. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A major early feature by Ingmar Bergman, also known as The Naked Night (though the Swedish title apparently means "The Clown's Night"). This 1953 film is perhaps the most German expressionist of Bergman's 50s works, as redolent of sexual cruelty and angst as Variety and The Blue Angel, but no less impressive for all that. The aging owner of a small traveling circus who left his wife for a young performer in his troupe tries to regain his lost family. Visually splendid, but you may find the masochistic plot pretty unpleasant.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 212: Tue Aug 1

Buchanan Rides Alone (Boetticher, 1958): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.05pm

This film, part of the Ranown Series: Westerns of Budd Boetticher season at the Prince Charles, also screens on August 24th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
In some respects this is my favorite of Budd Boetticher’s Randolph Scott westerns (1958, 78 min.), though it’s usually considered a minor work next to Ride Lonesome and The Tall T. After becoming innocently involved in a revenge killing in a small border town, Scott is robbed of his money and ordered away at gunpoint; he decides to go back for his money without really understanding all the local intrigues. Boetticher’s acerbic humor, always his strong point, is given more edge than usual here through an intricate Charles Lang script.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 211: Mon Jul 31

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This 4K presentation, also screening on September 3rd, is part of the Peter Weir season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here. Tonight’s film is presented by London online publication Animus Magazine.

There is a subset of films which are arguably pure dream from beginning to end, that take place entirely within the dream world. Picnic at Hanging Rock is one brilliant example. This unsettling period film about the disappearance of a party of schoolgirls announces it is based on a real story. But in its most memorable moments its realism is corroded by a dense, dream-like atmosphere that sends us back to the Edgar Allan Poe line recited earlier: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

Here (and above) is the trailer.