Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 272: Sat Sep 30

Misery (Reiner, 1990): David Lean Cinema, 2pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
The gore is toned down and the psychology played up in this darkly humorous adaptation of Stephen King's novel. Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a successful author of romantic fiction, but public demand for his heroine Misery Chastain has stifled his creativity; so after killing her off in a forthcoming final adventure, he writes a long-neglected personal novel. When a blizzard sends his car off the road on the drive home from his mountain retreat, his life is saved by nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who soon has the invalid tucked up in her home. It's a bonus that as his number one fan she's extremely attentive; and a definite minus that she's a psychopath who's looking forward to his next 'Misery' novel. William Goldman's intelligent script operates both as psycho-thriller and as sly comment on the sort of attitude towards celebrity which can enshrine and - in this case, literally - imprison the object of devotion. The casting is inspired: Caan oozes frustration at his physical disability, while Bates brings authority and an eerie naturalness to her demented character, her homespun expressions ('oogie', 'dirty birdy') providing a bizarre counterpoint to her increasingly cruel actions. Rob Reiner captures just the right level of physical tension, but for the most part wisely emphasises the mental duels. Terrific.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 271: Fri Sep 29

Mona Lisa (Jordan, 1986): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This 35mm presentation (also screening on September 24th) is part of the is part of the excellent 'Acting Hard' season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
A film tailor-made for Bob Hoskins, the appealing British actor who suggests an unlikely cross of James Cagney and Ed Asner. He's an ex-con who gets a job as chauffeur and protector to an elegant black call girl (Cathy Tyson); he's awed by her beauty and poise, and when she asks him to find an old girlfriend from her streetwalking days, he charges into London's sexual underworld like a knight on a quest. Director Neil Jordan (Danny Boy, The Company of Wolves) does a good job of re-creating the dark romanticism of American film noir, and if the project does feel a little like a hand-me-down, it is graced by Jordan's fine, contemporary feel for bright, artificial colors and creatively mangled space. Hoskins delivers a classic star turn, capitalizing on his instant likability to draw us into a characterization of unexpected depth and dignity, and Michael Caine makes the most of a brief appearance as a satanic crime lord. With Robbie Coltrane and Clarke Peters.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 270: Thu Sep 28

My Beautiful Launderette (Frears, 1985): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This film (also screening on September 20th) is part of the is part of the excellent 'Acting Hard' season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
Directed for television by Stephen Frears (The Hit) from a scenario by playwright Hanif Kureishi, this is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn’t limited to social realism—it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance (1986). Omar, a Pakistani student, charms his wealthy uncle into letting him take over one of his less successful enterprises—a crud-caked launderette in a questionable South London neighborhood. He solicits the help of Johnny, an old school buddy grown into a surly street tough, and as their plans for the business take shape they fall in love. Frears doesn’t treat the gay relationship as anything remarkable—which makes the film itself remarkable—but simply as a surge of encouraging human feeling against a background of economic devastation and racial divisiveness.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 269: Wed Sep 27

Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990): Everyman Screen on the Green, 10am

This 35mm presentation is part of the Martin Scorsese season at Everyman Screen on the Green cinema and can also be seen on September 23rd. Details here.

Observer review:
The gangster movie began in the silent era with DW Griffith’s primitive The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), but it was the talkies and their vibrant soundtracks of chattering machine guns, screeching tyres, hardboiled dialogue and thudding fists on yielding flesh that ushered in the first great cycle of gangster flicks. The enforcement of the Hays Office Production Code in 1934 tamed this first wave, but the gradual relaxation of censorship in the 1960s led to a grand revival of the genre focusing on the celebration of crime waves in the past (Bonnie and Clyde) and the criminal underworld of the present (The Godfather). From the beginning of his film career, Martin Scorsese has been at home with crime both period and contemporary, starting with Boxcar Bertha (1972), a true story of outlaws in the depression, and Mean Streets (1973), which drew on his personal knowledge of Italian-Americans embarking on a life of crime in New York’s Little Italy. I predicted in my 1990 review that GoodFellas “will take its place among the great gangster pictures”, a judgment confirmed by a special two-disc Blu-ray version published to mark its 25th anniversary. Neither glamorising nor moralising, the film is closely based on Nicholas Pileggi’s chilling biography of career criminal Henry Hill (a compelling performance by Ray Liotta). In 1980, to save his neck, Hill gave evidence that convicted several dozen mafiosi and then went into hiding under the federal witness protection programme. A peculiarly brutal pre-credit sequence of a 1970 underworld murder strips the euphemistic shroud off the phrase “taken for a ride”. It’s followed by Hill’s unrepentant declaration: “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.” The picture observes his progress over some 25 years in a New York mafia family that has taken him under its wing, and twice he goes to jail without betraying his lethal comrades Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, but finally, after getting involved with drugs and sniffing too much of his own merchandise, he cracks. The film is accompanied by a series of excellent documentaries in which his collaborators explain how Scorsese made crucial decisions about freeze-frames, long takes, voiceovers, the evocative use of popular music and so on to create the film’s elaborate texture. GoodFellas is a great auteur’s masterpiece.
Philip French

Here (and above) is the 2017 BFI trailer for the film.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 268: Tue Sep 26

The Mosquito Coast (Weir, 1986): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.05pm

This 35mm presentation is also screened on October 11th. Tonight's screening feratures an introduction by Elena Lazic of Animus Magazine.

Time Out review:
Given that Paul Theroux's harrowing tale of jungle craziness is one of the least filmable properties of recent years, Peter Weir's river journey to the heart of darkness works considerably better than one might imagine. Meticulously translated from the book, Mosquito Coast charts the mental decline and fall of idealistic inventor Allie Fox, who drags wife and family to the jungles of Central America in a doomed effort to bring ice to the natives. Although it's too long, with Weir attempting to negotiate too many psychological bends in Paul Theroux's River of No Return, the director still manages to conjure out of the breathtaking landscape a genuine whiff of mental and physical hell, and in so doing draws from Harrison Ford a tour de force performance as mad Allie. Indeed, this is Ford's movie: Helen Mirren's flower-child-gone-to-seed wife and son Charlie (River Phoenix), the heart and voice of the novel, are mere jungle shadows in comparison. Wherein lies the film's major flaw; for try as he might, after a lifetime playing the ultimate hero, Ford finally fails to convince as the ultimate villain, particularly when he's back battling natives à la Indiana Jones. A brave and serious piece of film-making, nevertheless.
Don Atyeo

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 267: Mon Sep 25

The Third Generation (Fassbinder, 1979): Barbican Cinema, 7pm

This promises to be a fascinating evening as Barbican Cinema, in partnership with Fitzcarraldo Editions, to coincide with the release of Ian Penman's latest book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, are screening Rainer Werner Fassbinder's chaotic interrogation of terrorism, capitalist greed, and human desires in post-war Germany. Penman, writer and music journalist (The Guardian, Sight & Sound) will join Gareth Evans, writer, producer and curator, for a Q&A after the film.

Time Out review:
Just what we always wanted: the every-day angsts of a terrorist cell as Life with the Lyons. Fassbinder's basic proposition is simple: the West German state is already so repressive that it might well have invented its terrorists as scapegoats for its own growing totalitarianism. Hence this 'comedy in six acts, just like the fairy stories we tell our children, to make their short lives more bearable'. It's a return to the grotesquely overplayed melodrama of Satan's Brew, acted by the entire RWF stock company, plus Bulle Ogier and Eddie Constantine, with a gaggle of haute couture 'subversives' going through the film noir motions of paranoia and anti-capitalist rhetoric. And it's formulated as an affront to all conceivable audiences: if the concept doesn't make you ill, then the interpolations of lavatory graffiti and the constant barrage of background noise from TV and radio will certainly give you headaches. Essential viewing.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 266: Sun Sep 24

Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 3.50pm

If there is one film I am looking forward to seeing this month more than any other this is it. Part of the excellent Ozu season at BFI Southbank, this Leo McCarey-directed 1937 melodrama is apparently a Hollywood one-off and not to be missed.  Make Way For Tomorrow concerns the travails of an elderly couple whose five children won’t take them in when they hit hard times during America’s depression.

Orson Welles said the film “would make a stone cry” and the influential critic Robin Wood, who wrote so movingly of the movie in his book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, put in his all-time top ten.

This screening is introduced by Ozu season curator Ian Haydn Smith.

Chicago Reader review:
With the possible exception of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, this 1937 drama by Leo McCarey is the greatest movie ever made about the plight of the elderly. (It flopped at the box office, but when McCarey accepted an Oscar for The Awful Truth, released the same year, he rightly pointed out that he was getting it for the wrong picture.) Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play a devoted old couple who find they can’t stay together because of financial difficulties; their interactions with their grown children are only part of what makes this movie so subtle and well observed. Adapted by Vina Delmar from Josephine Lawrence’s novel Years Are So Long, it’s a profoundly moving love story and a devastating portrait of how society works, and you’re likely to be deeply marked by it. Hollywood movies don’t get much better than this.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 265: Sat Sep 23

Sexy Beast (Glazer, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This 35mm presentation (also screening on October 2nd) is part of the is part of the 'Acting Hard' season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
From the off it's clear at once that Jonathan Glazer will be a ballsy, switched-on film-maker: Winstone's belly burns in the Spanish sun, an ice-cold flannel slyly folded over his privates - and then an a boulder bumps down the hill and bounces over the oblivious ex-villain's head to splashland in the swimming pool. The verve isn't so surprising, but Glazer goes on to prove that he's got much more than flash in his arsenal. A macabre comedy played out in deadly earnest, this has dramatic heft and tension. Kingsley's bald and beady-eyed Don Logan is so tightly wrapped in his neuroses, he's an alien in any social context, a monster in a man's skin. Easy to believe Winstone's scared to death of this maggot. The first two thirds of this superbly acted film is dynamite, even as nothing happens, really. Gal (Winstone) and wife Deedee (Redman) play reluctant hosts to Don, who's intent on bringing Gal back to London for a big score. Gal refuses. Don insists. The tension racks up until something has to give, but you'll be hard pressed to guess how and where the break will come.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 264: Fri Sep 22

The Year of Living Dangerously (Weir, 1982): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.15pm

This 35mm presentation is also screened on September 13th with an introduction by Elena Lazic of Animus Magazine.

Time Out review:
Bedeviled by much-publicised script wrangles (between Weir and source novelist Christopher Koch) and production difficulties (death threats to the crew on location in the Philippines), this bears too many signs of compromise betokening an at least partly US financed project. Mel Gibson is adequate as the Aussie news journalist on assignment in the turbulent Indonesia of late 1965, teamed up romantically with the assistant to the British military attaché (Sigourny Weaver), and professionally with a dwarf Chinese-Australian camera-man (actress Linda Hunt, extraordinary as the movie's Tolstoy-quoting social conscience). Weir's steamy atmospherics often have the camera standing in for the unwelcome, uncomprehending Westerner in South East Asia to impressive effect; but the delineation of the political forces at work in the last days of Sukarno's regime is often less than clear. The result is a curiously languid affair, rather than the breathless Costa-Gavras-style thriller which was the least one might have expected from this kind of material.
Rod McShane

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 263: Thu Sep 21

Anguish (Luna, 1987): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.20pm

 
This is a 35m presentation from those new kids on the block, Movies Are Dead.

Time Out review:
A strikingly original, intricately constructed, and extremely gruesome horror film about a mother-fixated opthalmologist's assistant with an unhealthy interest in eyeballs. 'Soon' says his diminutive mother (Zelda Rubenstein), 'all the eyes in the city will be ours' - and she means it. Using creepily effective ultra close-ups and a clever Chinese box structure, Bigas Luna introduces another level of voyeuristic disturbance by allowing the events in this film-within-the-film to spill out into the auditorium (it's a case of who's watching who when?), where a teenage girl in the audience is becoming increasingly disturbed by the twitchy antics of a popcorn-eating man. The execution doesn't always match the boldness of the conception, but this post-modern shocker intelligently exploits the notion that horror is in the eye of the beholder.
Nigel Floyd

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 262: Wed Sep 20

Look Back in Anger (Richardson, 1959): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This 16mm screening is presented by the ever-popular Cine-Real duo.

Chicago Reader review:
Tony Richardson directed this competent 1959 adaptation of John Osborne's archetypal (and, alas, archetypally misogynist) Angry Young Man play. Richard Burton (a bit too old for his role) is the antiestablishment Jimmy Porter, Mary Ure is his dumped-on wife, and Claire Bloom is her best friend (and his lover). Probably still watchable today, if only for the brittle dialogue and kitchen-sink realism, but undoubtedly dated as well. Nigel Kneale wrote the script; with Edith Evans and Donald Pleasence
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 261: Tue Sep 19

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (Dante, 2003): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

Wow! An ultra-rare screening (and in 35mm) of this Joe Dante romp is a thrill.

Chicago Reader review:
Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck costar with Brendan Fraser (playing the hapless son of superspy Timothy Dalton) and Jenna Elfman (playing a Warners executive who fires Daffy) in this spirited, quintessential, and often hilarious Saturday matinee romp by Joe Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers). The movie scavenges from Who Framed Roger Rabbit for its mix of animated and live-action characters and from the Austin Powers movies for its espionage spoof and over-the-top villain (Steve Martin), but actually it’s more indebted to 50s and early-60s pop cinema: Frank Tashlin’s Son of Paleface, Hope and Crosby’s Road to Bali, and assorted cartoon, horror, and SF touchstones of the period (everything from This Island Earth to Psycho), referenced both in Larry Doyle’s script and in peripheral visual details. I had a ball.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 260: Mon Sep 18

Radio On (Petit, 1979): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.30pm

This rare 35mm presentation is also being screened on September 7th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A British film about alienation, asphalt, and narrative disconnections, coproduced by Wim Wenders's German company. Director Christopher Petit, a former film critic, slips into Wenders's style—the cool, austere black-and-white images, the blank underplaying—as if he were taking it for a test drive: he wants to see what it can do, what its strengths are and where its weaknesses lie. Seizing on an archetypal Wenders situation—a car trip that becomes a metaphor for an emotional pilgrimage—Petit inspects and abstracts Wenders's ideas. The film is dull and distant, though not objectionably so—it seems to be the effect Petit has in mind. The relationships between his isolated, distracted characters are reproduced in the movie's low-key appeal to its audience. With David Beames and Lisa Kreuzer (1979).
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 259: Sun Sep 17

Tokyo Chorus (Ozu, 1931): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 4pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on September 2nd, is part of the Yasujirō Ozu season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
One of the cinema’s supreme humanists and ironists, Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu started his lengthy filmmaking career in 1927. After a remarkably prolific jack-of-all-trades apprenticeship, he eased into directing a series of silent shomin-geki–dramas of humor and pathos in lower-middle-class life–a specialty of his studio and a popular genre in depression-devastated Japan. With each film in the series–from Days of Youth (1929) to What Did the Lady Forget? (1937)–Ozu experimented with narrative, camera angles, and editing; along the way he recruited a core of creative personnel who became frequent collaborators. Twelve of those silent features, some of which were recently discovered in studio and museum archives, form a touring retrospective (now at Facets) that sheds light on Ozu’s formative years (his best period, according to critics like Noel Burch). The 1931 Tokyo Chorus is considered pivotal in the evolution of his aesthetics. Its bare-bones plot–concocted by Ozu’s longtime partner Kogo Noda–concerns the bittersweet tribulations of a young white-collar family coping with unemployment. Ostensibly a comedy, the film hinges on a succession of gags interspersed with moments of disillusionment and thwarted expectations. Its theme of parent-child conflict, the institutional settings of office and school, the low-angle frontal shots, and the cutaways to enigmatic still lifes mark Tokyo Chorus as a blueprint for the masterpieces to come.
Ted Shen

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 258: Sat Sep 16

Casino (Scorsese, 1995): Screen on the Green, 10pm

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

This great film screens as part of the Martin Scorsese season at Everyman Screen on the Green cinema and can also be seen on September 20th. 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) are the opening titles. 

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 257: Fri Sep 15

The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (Ozu, 1952): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm

This 4K presentation, part of the Yasujirō Ozu season at BFI Southbank, is also being screened on September 30th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The dissolution of a Japanese marriage: the wife complains of her husband’s dull provincialism, the husband chafes under his wife’s Western pretensions. Yasujiro Ozu’s delicate melodramas (this one dates from his finest period, 1952) avoid any sense of cliche in their restrained, sometimes painfully subtle study of family relationships. Ozu is the master of a difficult and austere style, in which the lack of camera movement sometimes speaks more than the elaborate techniques of his contemporaries.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 256: Thu Sep 14

Early Spring (Ozu, 1956): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.10pm

This 4K presentation, part of the Yasujirō Ozu season at BFI Southbank, is also being screened on October 1st. Details here.

Time Out review:
A typically low-key domestic drama in Ozu's mournful, defeatist vein: it deals with the break-up between an office-worker and his wife when the husband embarks on a tentative affair, and surrounds both partners with extensive webs of friends, relatives, acquaintances and colleagues. It's shot and edited in Ozu's characteristic 'minimalist' style, with hardly any camera movement, a carefully circumscribed syntax, and an editing method that's as unconventional by Japanese standards as it is remote from the Western norm. Ozu's pessimism is deeply reactionary, and the idiosyncrasy of his methods is more interesting for its exoticism than anything else; but anyone who finds the socio-psychological problems of post-war Japan engaging will find the movie both fascinating and rather moving, simply as evidence.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 255: Wed Sep 13

Sweet Sixteen (Loach, 2002): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6pm

This is part of the 'Acting Hard' season at BFI Southbank, which explores representations of working-class masculinity in British cinema from the Thatcher era to the present day. This is a 35mm screening and the film is also being shown on September 25th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Ken Loach’s 2002 feature about a poor 15-year-old boy living in a seaside town in western Scotland is a real heartbreaker; like The Bicycle Thief and Rebel Without a Cause, it confronts the tragedy of someone trying to be a good person who finds that the world he inhabits won’t allow it. Liam (played by teenage soccer pro Martin Compston) has a mother in prison; his sister loves him but can’t understand why he gets into so many fights, just as his mother?s lover can’t understand why he refuses to slip drugs to his mother. Paul Laverty’s script, which won the best screenplay prize at Cannes, never sentimentalizes Liam, yet it fully draws us into his world. I’m not prone to like socially deterministic films of this kind, yet Loach is so masterful at squeezing nuance and truth out of the form that I was completely won over.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 254: Tue Sep 12

Dead Man's Shoes (Meadows, 2005): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

This is part of the 'Acting Hard' season at BFI Southbank, which explores representations of working-class masculinity in British cinema from the Thatcher era to the present day.

Time Out review:
With his autistic brother at his shoulder, accompanied by the wistful strum of Smog’s ‘Vessel in Vain’ and cine-cam childhood memories, Paddy Considine’s grizzly wayfarer wends his way down fields and country lanes in the preamble to Meadows’ latest rummage through English small-time masculine values; the pastoral tranquility barely ruffled by the steady purpose of his stride. It’s a nonchalant image that only retrospectively conjures the ghosts of Harry Dean Stanton emerging from the desert in ‘Paris, Texas’, Clint riding into town in ‘High Plains Drifter’, or even the homecomings of Hamlet or Richard Lionheart… Something is rotten in a Midlands village, though from initial appearances it runs no deeper than the petty drug-dealing, porn and Pot Noodles that characterise the lives of local goons Herbie, Soz, Tuff and Sonny. Considine busts their chops, steals their stash and daubs taunts on their walls before they have time to figure out who he could be; even when they do, they don’t realise quite how scared they should be. A gritted antithesis to ‘Once Upon a Time in the Midlands’, Meadows’ and co-writer Considine’s stripped-down revenge drama similarly transposes western archetypes to the modest back-cloth of their local manor, but to much more serious intent: male fecklessness is viewed through a far darker lens, and redemption is in short supply. It’s a fascinating project, in terms of both its technique and ambition, and gloriously watchable: working with a young cinematographer (Danny Cohen) and a triumvirate of editors, Meadows has raised his visual craft to the level of his dexterity with actors, while Considine is as striking as lightning.
Nick Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 253: Mon Sep 11

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Ozu, 1941): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This 35mm prersetnation, part of the Yasujirō Ozu season at BFI Southbank, is also being screened on September 30th. Details here.

BFI introduction:
The Toda family gathers for its authoritarian patriarch’s birthday. When he dies shortly after, the father’s profligate spending is revealed and leaves the family no choice but to sell the home that they all once lived in. The mother and youngest daughter are forced to rely on the kindness of close relatives, who barely conceal their disdain at having to show charity towards them. Made soon after his return from the front in China, Ozu’s biggest hit to date prefigures some aspects of Tokyo Story. Bourgeois selfishness is criticised while a new generation shows the ‘correct’ way forward.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 252: Sun Sep 10

The Crowd (Vidor, 1928): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 3.30pm

This 35mm presentation includes an introduction by Bryony Dixon, BFI National Archive Curator.

Chicago Reader review:
King Vidor’s 1928 classic, with James Murray as the “average man” picked out of the crowd by Vidor’s gliding camera. In his autobiography, Vidor claims he sold the project to Irving Thalberg as a sequel to his hit war film, The Big Parade: “Life is like a battle, isn’t it?” Accordingly, the misfortunes that befall Murray are hardly average, but the melodramatic elements are integral to Vidor’s vision of individual struggle. The camera style owes something to Murnau, but the sense of space—the vast environments that define and attack his protagonists—is Vidor’s own.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 251: Sat Sep 9

A Story of Floating Weeds (Ozu, 1934): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 11.50am

This 35mm presentation, also screening on September 23rd, is part of the Yasujirō Ozu season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
One of the last of Yasujiro Ozu’s silent films, which he remade toward the end of his career, this 1934 feature has a fairly standard soap-opera plot—the lead actor in an impoverished acting troupe returns to a remote mountain village to meet his illegitimate son for the first time—but, needless to say, the Japanese master works wonders with it. Like other Ozu films of the period, this has a great deal of camera movement; stylistic purification would later lead him to eliminate such expressive devices.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is a link to an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 250: Fri Sep 8

Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

This was to have been shown at the Film on Film festival in June but there were issues with the print.

Time Out review of Mildred Pierce (screening from an original 1945 nitrate release print):
James Cain's novel of the treacherous life in Southern California that sets house-wife-turned waitress-turned-successful restauranteur (Joan Crawford) against her own daughter (Ann Blyth) in competition for the love of playboy Zachary Scott, is brought fastidiously and bleakly to life by Michael Curtiz' direction, Ernest Haller's camerawork, and Anton Grot's magnificent sets. Told in flashback from the moment of Scott's murder, the film is a chilling demonstration of the fact that, in a patriarchal society, when a woman steps outside the home the end result may be disastrous.
Phil Hardy

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 249: Thu Sep 7

I Confess (Hitchcock, 1953): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This is a 35mm screening in association with Alfred Hitchcock and I Confess 70 Years On – An International Symposium.

Chicago Reader review:
Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest serious critics, the Catholic-minded Cahiers group, revered this 1953 film above all his 50s work; today it’s very seldom revived. Montgomery Clift plays a stone-faced priest (Hitchcock’s only direction to him seems to have been “don’t twitch”) who hears a confession of murder and assumes the killer’s guilt. The movie is more interesting than achieved: it’s the most forthright statement of the transference theme in Hitchcock’s work, but it’s also the least nuanced. Still, there are shots of extraordinary beauty, emerging from the grayish Quebec background like flashes into color.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 248: Wed Sep 6

The Name of the Rose (Annaud, 1986): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This is a 35mm presentation from Lost Reels.

Time Out review:
As intelligent a reductio of Umberto Eco's sly farrago of whodunnit and medieval metaphysics as one could have wished for. Just who is killing the monks of an isolated monastery in a variety of vile ways, and why? William of Baskerville is the Franciscan Holmes called upon to point the finger: a complex man, at once the great detective delighted with his own powers of deduction, and a man both defeated by the brutality of his age and enthralled by its mysteries (and it's to Sean Connery's credit that he portrays as much and more). In addition, the film simply looks good, really succeeds in communicating the sense and spirit of a time when the world was quite literally read like a book, with impressively claustrophobic sets, particularly the Escher-like labyrinth of a library with its momentous secret. The monks themselves are marvellous, a gallery of grotesques straight out of Brueghel, and if the film has faults, they are quibbles: the murder mystery is solved too soon, and rather too much plot is crammed into the available space.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 247: Tue Sep 5

The Lost Sorrows of Jean Eustache (Diaz, 1997): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.15pm

This documentary is an intimate look at Jean Eustache through his films and collaborators, followed by a discussion about the remarkable director.

Chicago Reader review:
Eustache, who made his mark on French cinema with The Mother and the Whore (1973) and committed suicide eight years later, is said to have revealed more of himself on-screen than in real life. As a consequence, this 52-minute documentary by Angel Diaz takes a mosaic approach, combining clips from Eustache’s work, voice-over excerpts from his writings, and recollections from noted collaborators (Jean-Pierre Leaud, Francois Lebrun, Jean-Michel Barjol). Some of Eustache’s statements are surprising (the great renegade once said he wanted to return to the 19th-century origins of the cinema), but he remains a mysterious figure; whatever his sorrows were, they seem to have been lost for good.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is a trailer for a Jean Eustache retrospective.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 246: Mon Sep 4

Sorry We Missed You (Loach, 2019): Genesis Cinema, 6.30pm

This screening includes a Q&A with director Ken Loach.

Chicago Reader review:
An urgent and heart-rending drama, Ken Loach’s 2019 film follows Ricky (Kris Hitchen), a stoic delivery driver and Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), a home care nurse. Together, they struggle to make ends meet while trying to hold their family together, caring for their sensitive young daughter Liza (Katie Proctor) and rebellious, but ultimately goodhearted, son Seb (Rhys Stone). Unflinchingly frank, this British-French-Belgian film can feel stifling at times because of the many injustices Ricky and his family face. Still, Loach manages to deftly render a tender and complex portrait of the modern working-class family, dealing honestly with the cruelties of the gig economy while still managing to find moments of warmth and laughter in the family’s love for each other.
Nina Li Coomes

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 245: Sun Sep 3

A Summer at Grandpa's (Hou, 1984): ICA Cinema, 5.30pm

This is a 35mm screening, part of the Celluloid on Sunday strand at the ICA.

Time Out review:
Young Tung-Tung and his little sister spend the vacation with their grandparents while mother lies sick in hospital. It's an eventful stay, but Hou Hsiao-hsien never opts for melodrama, and at first his quietly amused observation of events seems to border on the inconsequential. Not so, however. What makes the film so affecting is its unflinching honesty. As boy and girl take time off from playing games to become barely comprehending witnesses to the adult world, the film examines, with precision and wit, both the innocence and the unthinking cruelty of childhood. But life among the grown-ups is no better, and the children are confronted with violence, crime, sexual passion, and the presence of death. It's a clear-eyed movie, never sentimental, always intelligent and revealing.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 244: Sat Sep 2

Scum (Clarke, 1979): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 7.50pm

This is part of the 'Acting Hard' season at BFI Southbank, which explores representations of working-class masculinity in British cinema from the Thatcher era to the present day. This is a 35mm screening and the film is also being shown on September 8th. Details here.

Time Out review:
Roy Minton's teleplay about Borstal life and its vicious circle of violence, remade as a movie after being banned by the BBC: a toughened docudrama (schools of BBC/old Warners/Corman) that carries the same force as the improvised weapons Ray Winstone uses to bludgeon his way through the Borstal power structure. A far-from-blunt instrument itself (and containing some necessary leavening humour), this is potentially knife-edge film-making: will audiences buy the reformist liberalism and stomach the violence, or in fact buy the violence and racism and miss the message? The careful calculations show, but you're still likely to leave at the end feeling righteously angry.
Paul Taylor

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 243: Fri Sep 1

Hospitalité (Fukada, 2010): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

To celebrate the release of Love Life and further exploring the domestic space in Japanese life that lies at the heart of the BFI Southbank's Yasujirō Ozu season, the cinema looks back on three key titles so far in Kōji Fukada’s career. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A shy, middle-aged printer (Kenji Yamauchi), living in a Tokyo duplex with his grown daughter and second wife, takes in an eccentric slacker (Kanji Furutachi) as an employee and lodger, only to find the stranger inserting himself into every aspect of his life. This charming comedy begins as a very Japanese joke about limited privacy but deepens into something more ambiguous. The stranger’s motives are never made clear until the end; his behavior is irritating and occasionally malicious, yet he also wants to bring the printer out of his shell. Director Koji Fukada’s deadpan visual style recalls that of Aki Kaurismaki (Le Havre), but his direction of actors is far less mannered. He and his two leads are veterans of Tokyo’s long-running Seinendan Theater Company, and the players temper the cartoonish writing with intimate, naturalistic performances.
Ben Sachs

Here (and above) is the trailer.