Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 143: Thu May 23

Point Blank (Boorman, 1967): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of classic film.

Chicago Reader review:
John Boorman's modernist, noirish thriller (1967) is still his best and funniest effort (despite the well-phrased demurrals of filmmaker Thom Andersen regarding its cavalier treatment of Los Angeles). Lee Marvin, betrayed by his wife and best friend, finds revenge when he emerges from prison. He recovers stolen money and fights his way to the top of a multiconglomerate—only to find absurdity and chaos. Boorman's treatment of cold violence and colder technology has lots of irony and visual flash—the way objects are often substituted for people is especially brilliant, while the influence of pop art makes for some lively 'Scope compositions—and the Resnais-like experiments with time and editing are still fresh and inventive. The accompanying cast (and iconography) includes Angie Dickinson, John Vernon, and Carroll O'Connor; an appropriate alternate title might be "Tarzan Versus IBM," a working title Jean-Luc Godard had for his Alphaville.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 142: Wed May 22

35 Shots of Rum (Denis, 2008): Barbican Centre, 6.15pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the 'The Devil Finds Work' season based on the critic James Baldwin's work with the same title. You can find the details here.

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

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 141: Tue May 21

if.... (Anderson, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Lindsay Anderson season (full details here) at BFI Southbank. Information about other screenings of if.... on May6th, 24th and 28th throughout the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Lindsay Anderson indulges his taste for social allegory with a tale of a repressive boys’ school rocked by student revolutionaries who listen to African music. Though clearly about Mother England and her colonies, the film found its popular success, in that distant summer of 1969, in being taken quite literally. Anderson deserves credit for sniffing out the cryptofascist side of the student movement, and his presentation of oppression—sexual and social—is very forceful. Yet the film finally succumbs to its own abstraction with an ending that satisfies neither symbolism nor wish fulfillment.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 140: Mon May 20

The Scarlet Empress (Von Sternberg, 1934): Regent Street Cinema, 1pm

Chicago Reader review:
Josef von Sternberg's 1934 film turns the legend of Catherine the Great into a study of sexuality sadistically repressed and reborn as politics, thus anticipating Bernardo Bertolucci by three decades. Marlene Dietrich's transformation from spoiled princess to castrating matriarch is played for both terror and sympathy, surface coolness and buried passion, with weird injections of black humor from Sam Jaffe's degenerate grand duke. Sternberg's mise-en-scene is, for once, oppressively materialistic, emphasizing closeness, heaviness, temperature, and smell.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 139: Sun May 19

No1: Someone to Love (Jaglom, 1987): ICA Cinema, 6.15pm

This 35mm screening os part of the ICA's Celluloid on Sunday strand.

Chicago Reader review:
Another of Henry Jaglom’s let-it-all-hang-out gabfests, this one set in a beautiful, about-to-be-destroyed Los Angeles theater, where Jaglom invites his friends on Valentine’s Day. It certainly has its moments—most of them provided by Orson Welles (in one of his last extended film performances), his vivacious long-time companion Oja Kodar, and the venerable Sally Kellerman—but most of this largely improvised movie, as critic Elliott Stein has pointed out, is pretty much the equivalent of the Donahue show, with all the strengths and limitations that this implies, and Jaglom’s own earnest inquiries about what makes so many people lonely can get a bit cloying after a while. However, Welles, as the equivalent of a talk-show guest, is very much in his prime, and his ruminations about feminism, loneliness, drama, and related subjects certainly give the proceedings an edge and a direction that most of the remainder of this floundering movie sadly lacks. Among the other participants in this encounter session are Jaglom’s brother Michael Emil, Andrea Marcovicci, Ronee Blakley, and Monte Hellman.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

****************

No 2: Barbarella (Vadim, 1968): Cinema Museum, 2pm

 
This is a 35mm screening. There will be an introductory illustrated talk by Jon Davies, tutor in French Cinema at Morley College.

Time Out review:
Director Roger Vadim kicks off his adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest's 'adult' comic strip by stripping Jane Fonda starkers. From there on it's typically vacuous titillation as Barbarella takes off for the mysterious planet Sorgo in 40,000 AD, there to survive attack by perambulating dolls with vampire fangs, receive her sexual initiation from a hairy primitive, fall in love with a blind angel, be whisked off to an alarming Lesbian encounter with the tyrannical Black Queen, etc. But Terry Southern's dialogue occasionally sparkles, and the imaginative designs, as shot by Claude Renoir, look really splendid.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 138: Sat May 18

Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation at the Prince Charles Cinema.

Chicago Reader review: 
'What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were? The first time I saw Kane I discovered the existence of the director; the next dozen or so times taught me what he did—with lights and camera angles, cutting and composition, texture and rhythm. Kane (1941) is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take Ambersons, Falstaff, or Touch of Evil), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking about Welles—or for that matter about movies in general.'   
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 137: Fri May 17

Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 2.40pm/6.15pm/8.40pm

This film, presented in a 4K restoration, is on an extended run at BFI Southbank, and is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.

I haven't seen this since my post-graduate days at Derby Lonsdale College in the mid-1980s but found it a real eye-opener at the time and wouldn't disagree with this ecstatic review in Chicago Reader. Director Roberto Rossellini was a pioneer and this film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, brought the attention of the world to the development of the hugely influential neorealism era in Italian cinema.

Chicago Reader review:
Roberto Rossellini's 1946 story of a group of workers and a priest in 1943-'44 Rome, declared an “open city” by the Nazis, was begun only two months after the liberation. Its realistic treatment of everyday Italian life heralded the postwar renaissance of the Italian cinema and the development of neorealism; the film astonished audiences around the world and remains a masterpiece. With Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi, and Maria Michi.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 136: Thu May 16

The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of classic film.

Time Out review:
Bernardo Bertolucci’s beautiful, idea-laden and thrilling film noir, released in post-événements 1970, opens with a Paris hotel sign flashing on a man with a fedora, a gun and a naked woman. But Bertolucci’s late-’30s-set adaptation of Albert Moravia’s novel examining Italy’s fascist past was no exercise in black-and-white nostalgia. The noir elements – the complex flash-back structure and the out-of-kilter ‘Third Man’-syle camera angles framing its anti-hero, volunteer assassin Jean-Louis Trintignant – are a mere frame, pencil drawings on which cinematographer Vittorio Storaro paints his Freudian washes of blue and red.  Even at the time of the ‘The Conformist’, with its poison-penned quotations of Godard, Bertolucci was already showing himself the greatest pleasure seeker of the ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’ agit-prop school. Trintignant’s classically-educated Marcello Clerici – he quotes Emperor Hadrian and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave – is the epitome of the repressed bourgeois, so ashamed of his ‘mad’ father and opium-addicted mother to be delighted, in shades of Sartre’s Daniel, to be married to a ‘mediocre’ wife ‘full of paltry ideas’ and prepared to commit murder to follow the flow of fascist political fashion. Until that is, he claps eyes on the beautiful, decadent wife (Dominique Sanda) of his old tutor and present target, Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). It’s a dazzling film, dated only in its sense of passionate intellectual engagement, which seductively balances its seditious syllabus of politics, philosophy and sex with a serio-comic tone, exemplified by Gastone Moschin’s near pantomimic Blackshirt and Georges Delerue’s delightful score.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 136: Wed May 15

This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This is a 35mm screening (also being shown on May 1st and from digital on May 23rd) and is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
Lindsay Anderson's debut film (1963) is probably the best crafted of the British "kitchen sink" movies and features a memorable if somewhat theatrical performance by Richard Harris as a rugby star who can't handle success.
Dave Kehr

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 135: Tue May 14

Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This film is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand at the Prince Charles Cinema and will feature an introduction from Sarah Cleary.

Chicago Reader review:
Nicholas Ray's great sur-western (1954), in which, as Francois Truffaut put it, the cowboys circle and die like ballerinas. For all its violence, this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film, Ray's gentlest statement of his outsider theme. Joan Crawford, with a mature, reflective quality she never recaptured, is the owner of a small-town saloon; Sterling Hayden is the enigmatic gunfighter who comes to her aid when the townspeople turn on her. Filmed in the short-lived (but well-preserved) Trucolor process, its hues are pastel and boldly deployed, and the use of space is equally daring and expressive. With Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis, as well as Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Royal Dano, Ward Bond, and Ben Cooper.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 134: Mon May 13

Girlfriends (Weill, 1978): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the female filmmakers strand at the Prince Charles Cinema and is £1 for members.

New Yorker review:
One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely, that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing, the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor, the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind, achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her. Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical, dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women, when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded, perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in the same way.
Richard Brody

Here is Brody's video discussion of the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 133: Sun May 12

 Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942): Prince Charles Cinema, 12pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Classic Film Season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Time Out review:
Half the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still amounts to some hill of beans.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 132: Sat May 11

Cinema is Evil – Kenneth Anger night: BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This evening (in the Experimenta strand at BFI Southbank) is a collection of films celebrating underground filmmaker and Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger titled 'Cinema Is Evil: Welcome to the World of Legendary, Queer Occult Filmmaker Kenneth Anger'.

BFI introduction:
Kenneth Anger was a pioneering, agitational, visionary voice in independent, underground film, whose stunningly shot, magick-inspired movies disrupted experimental film and influenced the darker elements of counterculture and punk. A year to the day since Anger’s death, we pay homage to this cinematic magus and his contention that, ‘the day cinema was invented was a dark day for mankind’. Programme includes early cinema title When the Devil Drives (1907), Arena special Hollywood Babylon (1991), about Anger’s infamous book, and his psychodramas Fireworks (1947) and Rabbit’s Moon (1972).

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 131: Fri May 10

His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This classic Howard Hawks movie, which also screens on May 19th and 23rd, is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Most of what Robert Altman has done with overlapping dialogue was done first by Howard Hawks in this 1940 comedy, without the benefit of Dolby stereo. (The film, in fact, often circulates in extremely poor public-domain prints that smother the glories of Hawks's sound track.) It isn't a matter of speed but of placement—the dialogue almost seems to have levels in space. Hawks's great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways. Cary Grant's performance is truly virtuoso—stunning technique applied to the most challenging material. With Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy, a genius in his way too.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 130: Thu May 9

In Celebration (Anderson, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.25pm

This film, which also screens on May 22nd, is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.

BFI introduction:
Lindsay Anderson’s capacity for drawing out extraordinary performances hits full flight in this tight, tense domestic drama starring Brian Cox, James Bolam and Alan Bates. The powerhouse trio play three successful brothers returning home to celebrate their working-class parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. As the actors hit their stride, it’s not long before old secrets, suppressed bitterness and quiet sadness resurface.

Here (and above) is Alan Bates talking about the making of the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 129: Wed May 8

Sudden Fury (Damude, 1975): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

Cinema Museum introduction:
The Nickel Cinema continues its season of offbeat road film with the lean, mean and rarely seen Canuxploitation thriller Sudden Fury (1975). Psychosis and matricide on the Ontario backwoods! This forgotten grindhouse gem triumphs over its low budget with a tight script and a memorably deranged performance by regional actor Dominic Hogan, building to a breathless crescendo of an ending. You wont see this on Disney Plus!

Here (and above) is the trailer for this road movie season.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 128: Tue May 7

Bonjour Tristesse (Preminger, 1958): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

This film also screens on May 5th and 9th. Full details here. I wrote a feature about the film and its star, Jean Seberg, for the Guardian when the movie was screened at the London Film Festival in 2012.

Chicago Reader review:
Jean-Luc Godard conceived Jean Seberg's character in Breathless as an extension of her role in this 1958 Otto Preminger film: the restless teenage daughter of a bored, decaying playboy (David Niven), she tries to undermine what might be her father's last chance for happiness, a romance with an Englishwoman (Deborah Kerr). Arguably, this is Preminger's masterpiece: working with a soapy script by Arthur Laurents (by way of Francoise Sagan's novel), Preminger turns the melodrama into a meditation on motives and their ultimate unknowability. Long takes and balanced 'Scope compositions are used to bind the characters together; Preminger uses the wide screen not to expand the spectacle, but to narrow and intensify the drama. With Mylene Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, and Juliette Greco; photographed in Technicolor (apart from a black-and-white prologue and epilogue), mainly on the Riviera, by Georges Perinal.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 127: Mon May 6

Paisan (Rossellini, 1946): BFI Soutbank, Studio, 3.20pm

This film, part of the Italian Neorealism season at BFI Southbank, also screens on May 10th, 19th, 20th and 29th. You can find the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Roberto Rossellini’s six-part film about the liberation of Italy was released in 1946; it confirmed the neorealist style of his Open City, released a year earlier, but also extended that style into melodrama, where many critics did not want to follow. The episodes all seem to have an anecdotal triteness—black soldier befriends orphan boy, prostitute finds redemption, etc—but each acquires a wholly unexpected naturalness and depth of feeling from Rossellini’s refusal to hype the anecdotes with conventional dramatic rhetoric. The concluding episodes—a final skirmish between Germans and partisans in the Po valley—is one of Rossellini’s most sublime accomplishments, a largely wordless sequence that uses shifting focal lengths, drifting camera movements, and natural sounds to create a suspense of almost unbearable intensity and immediacy.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is Martin Scorsese's introduction to the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 126: Sun May 5

Tattoo (Brooks, 1981) + The Skin I Live In (Almodovar, 2011): Cinema Museum, 6pm

Cinema Museum introduction:
Lost Reels continues its series of provocative celluloid double bills with two of the most terrifying, horror-infused love stories ever made. Love stories and horror are synonymous with the movies, and Lost Reels’ provocative new double bill presents two of the most unusual – and terrifying – films of passion in cinematic history. First is the virtually forgotten and completely out of circulation, Tattoo (1981) starring Bruce Dern and Maud Adams. Described by Variety as, “your standard boy-meets-girl, boy-kidnaps-girl, boy-tattoos-girl-against-her-will love story” the film caused controversy when first released, gained an ‘X’ certificate in the UK, and is a genuinely bizarre, outrageous cult curio. Second is The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) (2011), Pedro Almodóvar’s brilliantly subversive foray into provocation and horror starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, and Jan Cornet. Unique within Almodóvar’s filmography, it’s a film first-time audiences should know as little about as possible while at the same time being prepared for one of the most perverse and unsettling experiences a trip to the cinema can provide.

Here (and above) is the trailer for Tattoo.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 125: Sat May 4

Ossessione (Visconti, 1943): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.15pm

This film, part of the Italian Neorealism season at BFI Southbank, also screens on May 12th. You can find the details here.

Time Out review:
Luchino Visconti's stunning feature debut transposes The Postman Always Rings Twice to the endless, empty lowlands of the Po Delta. There, an itinerant labourer (Massimo Girotti) stumbles into a tatty roadside trattoria and an emotional quagmire. Seduced by Calamai, he disposes of her fat, doltish husband (Juan de Landa), and the familiar Cain litany - lust, greed, murder, recrimination - begins. Ossessione is often described as the harbinger of neo-realism, but the pictorial beauty (and astute use of music, often ironically) are pure Visconti, while the bleak view of sexual passion poaches on authentic noir territory, steeped, as co-scriptwriter Giuseppe De Santis put it, 'in the air of death and sperm'.
Sheila Johnston

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 124: Fri May 3

She's All That (Iscove, 1999): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.30pm

Chicago Reader review:
High school BMOC Freddie Prinze Jr. is challenged by a mean-spirited buddy to upgrade the social standing of an unpopular girl by courting her, and the question of whether Prinze is supposed to be likable hangs in the air as this romantic comedy stumbles along. As an undiscovered beauty who frequents open-stage night at the local performance-art club, her rack hidden under paint-spattered overalls, her chiseled face obscured by glasses, Rachael Leigh Cook is charming and sincere, and ultimately so is Prinze, whose character’s realization that he’s not as shallow as he’d thought is convincing. Their charisma and the movie’s enthusiastically inconsistent tone make this makeover vehicle watchable; it’s often impossible to distinguish what’s meant to be cartoonish from what’s meant to be dramatic, but the confusion seems appropriately adolescent.
Lisa Alspector

Here (and above) is ther trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 123: Thu May 2

Dr Strangelove (Kubrick, 1963): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Stanley Kubrick season at the Prince Charles Cinema and is also being screened on April 13th. Details here.

Time Out review:
'Perhaps Stanley Kubrick's most perfectly realised film, simply because his cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is wedded with comedy, in this case Terry Southern's sparkling script in which the world comes to an end thanks to a mad US general's paranoia about women and commies. Peter Sellers' three roles are something of an indulgent showcase, though as the tight-lipped RAF officer and the US president he gives excellent performances. Better, however, are Scott as the gung-ho military man frustrated by political soft-pedalling, and - especially - Sterling Hayden as the beleaguered lunatic who presses the button. Kubrick wanted to have the antics end up with a custard-pie finale, but thank heavens he didn't; the result is scary, hilarious, and nightmarishly beautiful, far more effective in its portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy anti-nuke documentaries.'
Geoff Andrew

Watch this trailer. Now try and tell me you don't want to see this film again.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 122: Wed May 1

Leaving Las Vegas (Figgis, 1995): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.05pm

This film is part of the Nicolas Cage season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Time Out review:
Alcoholic scriptwriter Ben (Nicolas Cage) is blowing his options. Our first glimpse sees his beyond-niceties collaring of an agent friend in a smart restaurant to demand drink money, a symptomatic preamble to what's staring him in the face: a 'sadly, we have to let you go' dismissal from his studio job. Figgis sets the crap game running here: the pay-off finances a one-way ticket to oblivion or, to give hell its name, Las Vegas, city of permanent after-hours. Cash the cheque, burn the past, take the freeway - we're in the booze movie, that most fascinatingly flawed form of the modern urban tragedy. This modestly budget masterpiece pools the Vegas streets with reflected neon and watches Ben drown. Shue is good as the young hooker he falls for, but Cage is extraordinary, producing an Oscar-winning performance of edgy, utterly convincing suicidal auto-destruct. In fact, Figgis makes of him something of an existential saint, a man for whom terminal self-knowledge leads to a kind of grace. If the film lacks the depth and structural sophistication of, say, The Lost Weekend (it was shot fast, with Declan Quinn's saturated Super-16 photography blown up, which may explain its kinetic buzz), it certainly has the courage of its convictions.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 121: Tue Apr 30

Leila and the Wolves (Srour, 1984): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This is the closing night film in the Open City Documentary Festival of 2024. Details here.

ICA introduction:
It took Heiny Srour six years to make Leila and the Wolves, a film that reveals a hidden past of women’s struggle in Palestine and Lebanon in an attempt to rewrite the history of the region from a feminist point of view. As John Akomfrah has written, Leila and the Wolves “weaves a rich tableau of history, folklore, myth and archival material.” The film is structured in a series of sketches, each of which features the same actors. The female protagonist (Nabila Zeitoni) is a modern Lebanese woman living in London, where she is staging a photography exhibition in which women are the unsung heroines and martyrs of political conflict. She time travels through the 1900s to the 1980s, wandering through real and imaginary landscapes of Lebanon and Palestine. In an interview from 2020, the filmmaker says: “Nowadays, Leila and the Wolves is travelling the world again, more relevant than ever; my unconscious and the collective unconscious of the women of the Middle East spoke together throughout the extreme conditions of making this film.”

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its release, we are honoured to close the 2024 edition of Open City Documentary Festival with a new digital restoration of Leila and the Wolves, co-presented with Cinenova. Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. Leila and the Wolves was originally distributed in the UK by Cinema of Women, one of Cinenova’s predecessor organisations.  

With an introduction by Nadia Yahlom (Sarha Collective)

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 120: Mon Apr 29

Where the Sidewalk Ends (Preminger, 1950): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This film is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank and also screens on April 27th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
A weatherbeaten Dana Andrews gives one of his finest performances as Detective Mark Dixon, a belligerent cop whose father was a crook and whose roughhouse tactics appal his bosses. He's a good man at heart, but the fates are against him and his behaviour becomes closer and closer to that of the father he abhorred. Mobster Merrill is always on hand to taunt him about his background. His plight becomes yet more desperate when he accidentally kills a murder suspect and then falls in love with the widow (Gene Tierney). Otto Preminger's superior noir boasts hardboiled and sardonic dialogue, courtesy of Ben Hecht, but also a surprising strain of pathos as Dixon fights against his own nature. Brutal, fatalistic, but desperate for redemption, he's just the kind of cop James Ellroy would write about so well a generation later.
Geoffrey Macnab

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 119: Sun Apr 28

Nowhere (Araki, 1997): Barbican Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the Chronic Youth Film Festival at the Barbican.

Chicago Reader review:
Try to imagine a Russ Meyer porn movie about LA teenagers crossed with an early scatological John Waters opus and punctuated with outtakes from Natural Born Killers; you’ll have a rough idea what Gregg Araki is up to in this hyper, scattershot movie, whose own publicity compares it to a Beverly Hills 90210 episode on acid. Even if the compulsively kaleidoscopic visual style (ten times too many close-ups for my taste) and scuzzy dialogue are such that only one moment out of seven makes much of an impression, there’s still plenty to be amused or nauseated by: phrases like “Whatev” (a reductio ad absurdum of west-coast verbal sloth), “Dogs eating people is cool,” and “You smell like a wet dog”; a face getting beaten to a pulp by an unopened can of tomato soup (making one wonder if Campbell’s paid for the product placement); blood-spattered walls color coordinated with a tacky floral bedspread; flashes of kinky straight sex and tender homoeroticism; periodic appearances by the Creature From the Black Lagoon; and so on—adding up to loads of flash and minimal substance. The cast includes James Duval, Rachel True, Christina Applegate, Debi Mazar, and Chiara Mastroianni, and there are loads of guest appearances.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 118: Sat Apr 27

Kes (Loach, 1969): Cinema Museum, 3pm

Cinema Museum introduction to this special day:
Misty Moon presents a rare chance to see Ken Loach’s seminal classic film Kes (1969) and meet Billy Casper himself. Based on the book A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines and set in South Yorkshire, Kes was originally released in 1969 and tells the tale of young Billy Casper and his beloved kestrel. With memorable performances from David Bradley, Colin Welland and Brian Glover, it is often cited as one of the greatest British films ever made. The film will be shown in its entirety from an original 35mm release print, followed by a Q&A with its leading man, David Bradley. There will also be an opportunity to meet David after the show and to purchase autographs.
Doors open at 14.00, for a 15.00 start. Q&A starts at 17.30.

Chicago Reader review:
In 1969 Ken Loach took time out from an acclaimed television career to direct this quietly powerful narrative feature, a classic of British social realism. Based on a novel by Barry Hines but shot like a documentary, with a hardscrabble industrial setting and a cast that blends professionals and amateurs, the film tracks an introverted Yorkshire lad (David Bradley) who's abandoned by his father and bullied by his coal-miner brother (Freddie Fletcher). A failure in the classroom and on the soccer pitch alike, the boy finds his wings when he adopts and trains a fledgling kestrel. Working in the style of cinema verite, cinematographer Chris Menges captures the petty tyrannies of the provincial working class and the inchoate joys of a youngster stumbling toward the greater world.
Andrea Gronvall

For a change (from the footy) here's the pub scene.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 117: Fri Apr 26

The Ghost and Mrs Muir (Mankiewicz, 1947): BFI Southbank, Studio, 12.20pm*

*There is another screening of this film on April 23rd at 6.10pm in NFT2. Details here. This movie is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
Apprentice work, comparatively speaking, not scripted by Joseph L Mankiewicz himself (although he contributed), but still astonishingly characteristic in its airy philosophical speculations about the imagination and its role as a refuge when the salty ghost of a sea captain (Harrison) befriends a beautiful widow (Gene Tierney) and intervenes to save her from the cad she is thinking of marrying. Leaning too heavily towards light comedy, Mankiewicz doesn't get the balance quite right, so that the tale of a romance tenuously bridging two worlds isn't quite as moving as it should be when reality ultimately reasserts its claims. A hugely charming film, nevertheless, beautifully shot (by Charles Lang), superbly acted, and with a haunting score by Bernard Herrmann.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 116: Thu Apr 25

The Crazy Family (Ishii, 1984): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

The Nickel presents the 40th Anniversary restoration of Sogo Ishii’s (Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001), Crazy Thunder Road (1980)) cult classic, with introduction by film critic James Balmont.

Chicago Reader review:
An ideally symmetrical Japanese family–dad, mom, junior, and sis–moves into a new suburban home, where rising middle-class expectations (and gramps barging in for an open-ended stay) cause everything to deconstruct explosively. Sogo Ishii’s lunatic black comedy seems less concerned with actual family dynamics than with turning its sitcom household into an open arena of competing pop-culture images and energies. Ishii has a keen eye for cultural detritus–the samurai films and superhero cartoon shows and pornographic comic strips that have bored their way into modern Japanese consciousness (in much the same manner as crazy dad’s termites)–and his film at times displays the antinarrative logic of a TV wrestling marathon: it redundantly accumulates rather than develops, with outrage piling upon outrage in baroque profusion (kitchenware samurai mom faces off against Tojo warrior gramps while martial nymphet sis plots against spacehead junior, etc). There’s a Woman of the Dunes metaphor lurking about (dad digs a hole in the kitchen floor and everybody falls in, but the house is already an entropic pit) and plenty cartoon silliness to push the sitcom strategies over the subversive edge. Not, shall we say, the shapeliest of films, but one that packs a raw, energetic punch.
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 115: Wed Apr 24

Leon Morin, Priest (Melville, 1961): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
Aiming successfully for a wider audience in 1961, the neglected French independent Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai) adapted Beatrix Beck's autobiographical novel, set in a French village during World War II, about a young woman falling in love with a handsome, radical young priest who's fully aware of his power over her. For the starring roles Melville, godfather of the New Wave, ironically selected two talented actors catapulted to fame by that movement—Emmanuele Riva (Hiroshima, Mon Amour) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless). The poetic results are literary and personal; the heroine's offscreen narration suggests the pre-Bressonian form of Melville's first feature, Le Silence de la Mer, and sudden subjective shots convey the woman's physical proximity to the priest as she undergoes an ambiguous religious conversion. Not an unqualified success, the film remains strong for its performances, its inventive editing and framing, and its evocative rendering of the French occupation. The eclectic and resourceful nonjazz score is by jazz pianist Martial Solal.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 114: Tue Apr 23

Chess Of The Wind (Aslani, 1976): Genesis Cinema, 9pm

 
Released and shown only twice in 1976, this Iranian gothic thriller was banned by the Iranian theologians in power from 1979 and thought lost forever - until that is, the mid 2010s, when the director’s children found a copy in a charity shop. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris) in collaboration with Mohammad Reza Aslani and Gita Aslani Shahrestani. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Film Forum introduction:
In an ornate, candlelit mansion in 1920s Tehran, the heirs to a family fortune vie for control of their matriarch’s estate — erupting in a ferocious final act. Screened publicly just once before it was banned, then lost for decades. “The opulent, claustrophobic interiors are reminiscent of Persian miniatures… The influence of European cinematic masters like Pasolini, Visconti and Bresson is also apparent. The sound design also stands out: wolves howl and dogs bay as they circle the house, ratcheting up the sense of menace; crows caw, jangling the nerves; heavy breathing makes the characters’ isolation in this haunted house increasingly oppressive. The soundtrack — an early work by trailblazing female composer Sheyda Gharachedaghi — takes inspiration from traditional Iranian music, and sounds like demented jazz.” – The Guardian.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 113: Mon Apr 22

The Magician (Bergman, 1958): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.45pm

This rarely seen Ingmar Bergman film is being screened from 35mm and is also being shown  at the Prince Charles Cinema on April 10th and May 8th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Widely underrated, probably because of its strong comic elements and a tour-de-force scene derived from horror movie conventions, Ingmar Bergman's chilling exploration of charlatanism is in fact one of his most genuinely enjoyable films. Max Von Sydow is the 19th century magician/mesmerist Volger, on the run with his troupe from debts and charges of blasphemy, whose diabolical talents are put to the test by the cynical rationalist Dr Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand); their clash results in humiliation, doubt, and death. Much of the film is devoted to wittily ironic sideswipes at bourgeois hypocrisy; more forceful, however, is the way Bergman transforms Volger's ultimately futile act of revenge into a sequence of nightmarish suspense.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.