Time Out review: Barbara Stanwyck in one of her most famous roles, as an invalid who overhears a
telephone conversation between conspiring murderers, and slowly realises
that she is their intended victim. Based on Lucille Fletcher's
celebrated 22-minute radio play, the film is none the less well
sustained. Anatole Litvak's camera paces the confines of Stanwyck's lacy bedroom
like an accused man in his cell; and although she is for the most part
restricted to acting from the head up, Stanwyck's metamorphosis from
indolence to hysteria is brilliantly executed. Tom Charity
This film, screening in tribute to the late, great Anouk Aimée, is also being screened on July 14th and 19th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Jacques
Demy's only - and underrated - American film may lack the fairytale
charm of his finest French work, but the bitter-sweet delicacy of tone
and acute feeling for place are at once familiar. Anouk Aimée's Lola,
abandoned by her lover Michel, has now turned up in LA where, older and
sadder, she works in a seedy photographer's shop, and brings brief
respite to a disenchanted young drifter (Gary Lockwood) with whom she
has a one night stand. Unlike Antonioni withZabriskie Point,
Demy never even tries to deal with the malaise afflicting American
youth in the '60s, but gives us yet another (relatively plotless) tale
of transient happiness and love lost. It's also one of the great movies
about LA, shown for once as a ramshackle, rootless sprawl, where
movement on the freeways (accompanied by the sounds of West Coast band
Spirit) is seemingly endless. Geoff Andrew Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 masterpiece opens with the messy separation of a
middle-class couple (Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani), then goes on to
imagine various catastrophic breakdowns—of interpersonal relationships,
social order, and ultimately narrative logic itself. The film can be
hilarious one moment and terrifying the next, and Zulawski's roving
camera only heightens the sense of unpredictability. Few movies convey
so viscerally what it's like to go mad: when this takes an unexpected
turn into supernatural horror, the development feels inevitable, as
though the characters had been bracing themselves for it all along.
Adjani won the best actress prize at Cannes for her dual performance (as
an unfaithful wife and her angelic doppelganger), but the whole cast is
astonishing, exorcising painful feelings with an intensity that rivals
that of the filmmaking. Performed in English and shot in Berlin by an
international crew, this also conveys a sense of displacement that's
always been crucial to Zulawski's work. Ben Sachs
This film in the season of French Sundaes at the Cinema Museum is a 35mm presentation.
Cinema Museum introduction: A brilliant dark comedy to conclude our French Sundaes season. Great
performances and a sparkling script gives you an insight into paid
assassins you would never expect.
“Anchoring the film is another of (Jean) Rochefort’s superb
portrayals of the haut bourgeois whose very inscrutability and
repression engender sympathy and amusement in equal portion. As his
dignity is eroded in a knockabout farce around the streets of Paris, his
emotions begin to unbutton” (Time Out).
Each film is accompanied by an introductory illustrated talk by Jon Davies, Tutor in French Cinema at Morley College. Here (and above) is the trailer.
ICA introduction: Filmmaker, Julian Cole first met Gilbert & George when he modelled
for them in 1986. His intimate and moving portrait filmed over 18 years,
reveals for the first time the individuals behind the living
sculptures. The film traces their lives from humble beginnings to the
world’s artistic stage where they have performed their enigmatic and
controversial double act for four decades.Followed by an in-person conversation with Gilbert & George and filmmaker Julian Cole, hosted by Gregor Muir.
This film is part of the Pan-African film season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
BFI introduction: Shot amid the turmoil of revolution, this impressive debut takes place
in the suburbs of Cairo and traces one day in the life of a daughter as
she and her mother struggle to look after her father, who is housebound
following a stroke. Echoing the work of Chantal Akerman, Lofty’s film is
noted for its disorientating use of space and time to convey the
solitude and claustrophobia of life.
Time Out review: Originally aired on British TV during the mid ‘80s, Mick Jackson’s
docudrama is a sobering, scary and highly realistic hypothetical account
of what might happen following a breakdown of society perpetrated, in
this instance, by a nuclear strike on Sheffield. The sense of impending
doom is palpable as the city’s citizens watch TV news reports about the
collapse in relations between Russia and the West. Panic buying becomes
looting as humanity begins to adopt a dog-eat-dog mentality. Then the
obliteration begins – and it’s pretty ghastly. Small wonder Threads
is in our 'Best Horror Films' list; while not strictly part of the horror genre, it
provokes a raft of similar emotions – only here you’re aware that this
can really happen. Powerful, thought-provoking stuff.
This Francis Ford Coppola classic is on an extended run at BFI Southbank (details here). Tonight;s screening features a Q&A with the movie'sfilm editor and sound designer Walter Murch.
Chicago Reader review: Gene Hackman excels in Francis Ford Coppola's tasteful, incisive 1974
study of the awakening of conscience in an “electronic surveillance
technician.” Coppola manages to turn an expert thriller into a portrayal
of the conflict between ritual and responsibility without ever letting
the levels of tension subside or the complicated plot get muddled. Fine
support from Allen Garfield as an alternately amiable and desperately
envious colleague, plus a superb soundtrack (vital to the action) by
Walter Murch—all this and a fine, melancholy piano score by David Shire. Don Druker
This rarely screened film is being presented from a new 4K restoration for the first time in the UK, via Animus Magazine.
Chicago Reader review: Director Mike Nichols tries for a European visual patina (the
cinematographer is Giuseppe Rotunno, Fellini’s man) but the structure is
pure American short-hit—the style of the blackout sketch and comic
book. Jack Nicholson, here in the first flush of his stardom, plays the
shallow stud hero in an impenetrable combination of masochism and
snottiness, though Art Garfunkel and Ann-Margret are quietly charming in
support (or should I say relief). The picture has its moments of
chilling insight, though essentially it is one more quaint early-70s
stab at an American art cinema that never materialized. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Steppenwolf ensemble member Tracy Letts adapted his play into this
fearsome horror movie, directed with single-minded claustrophobia by
William Friedkin (The Exorcist). Michael Shannon, reprising his
role from the original 1996 production, is all crawling skin as a man
convinced that unknown government powers have infested him with aphids;
Ashley Judd is persuasively unstrung as the woman who buys into his
delusions to escape her own problems. Friedkin embraces the story’s
staginess and sense of implosion as the pair retreat into paranoid
madness, a journey that includes several electrifying scares and
ultimately plays out in blue light against tinfoil-covered walls. The
shocker ending has a rather rhetorical quality, but you have to admire
Letts for obeying his own sick logic. J R Jones
Chicago Reader review: John
Cassavetes's 1974 masterpiece, and one of the best films of its decade.
Cassavetes stretches the limits of his narrative—it's the story of a
married couple, with the wife hedging into madness—to the point where it
obliterates the narrator: it's one of those extremely rare movies that
seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama
are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film.
The lurching, probing camera finds the same fascination in moments of
high drama and utter triviality alike—and all of those moments are
suspended painfully, endlessly. Still, Cassavetes makes the viewer's
frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an
emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen. With Gena Rowlands
and Peter Falk. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: A scarifyingly grim and grimy account of an alcoholic writer's lost
weekend, stolen from time intended to be spent on taking a cure and
gradually turning into a descent into hell. What makes the film so
gripping is the brilliance with which Wilder uses John F Seitz's
camerawork to range from an unvarnished portrait of New York brutally
stripped of all glamour (Ray Milland's frantic trudge along Third Avenue on
Yom Kippur in search of an open pawnshop is a neo-realist morceau d'anthologie)
to an almost Wellesian evocation of the alcoholic's inner world (not
merely the justly famous DTs hallucination of a mouse attacked by bats,
but the systematic use of images dominated by huge foreground objects).
Characteristically dispassionate in his observation, Wilder elicits
sympathy for his hero only by stressing the cruelly unthinking
indifference to his sickness: the male nurse in the alcoholic ward
gleefully chanting, 'Good morning, Mary Sunshine!', or the pianist in
the bar leading onlookers in a derisive chant of 'somebody stole my
purse' (to the tune of 'Somebody Stole My Gal') after he is
humiliatingly caught trying to acquire some money. A pity that the
production code demanded a glibly unconvincing ending in which love
finds a way. Tom Milne
This is a 35mm screening with piano accompaniment.
Birkbeck Institute introduction: A mourning lover reawakens after 200 years to search for his beloved.
Filmed in Berlin and on location in Venice, this romantic time-travel
fantasy has an exotic atmosphere rare in the British silent era, thanks
to the group of bohemian artists and skilled technicians Brunel
assembled for his debut feature, with cameraman Henry Harris fresh from
working on Abel Gance's J'accuse. It helped launch the screen career of
Ivor Novello, although by a cruel irony Brunel was denied the
opportunity to direct Novello's biggest hit, The Rat. A rare chance to
see this on 35mm with live accompaniment by Costas Fotopoulos.
This film is part of the Restored strand at BFI Southbank.
Time Out review: Impressive
allegory of war – notably in how it affects communities of the elderly,
infirm, children and women left bereft by the absence of their menfolk,
either through battle, exile or death – set in an undefined region of
the Caucasus, but making clear references to the genocidal Armenian
experience. Lena (the expressive Anna Kapaleva) journeys by train to her
mountain village, in the aftermath of an unspecified war hinted at by
government radio broadcasts, to encourage her grandparents’ departure
but finds herself stranded. Beautifully shot in muted colour tones
(replete with some extraordinary mordant, misty time-lapse shots of the
helicopter-gun-ship strewn landscape), this atemporal requiem,
assuredly directed by Mariya Saakyan, is played out with a Kusturica-style
heightened naturalism, stripped bare of his carnival-esque levity, and
deepened by affecting poetic musings on familial and cultural loss. Wally Hammond
This is a 16mm screening and part of The Nickel's season of road movies at the cinema.
Chicago Reader review: An
audacious, skillful film noir (1978) by Walter Hill, so highly stylized
that it's guaranteed to alienate 90 percent of its audience. There's no
realism, no psychology, and very little plot in Hill's story of a
deadly game between a professional getaway driver (Ryan O'Neal) and a
detective obsessed with catching him (Bruce Dern). There is, however, a
great deal of technically sophisticated and very imaginative filmmaking.
The cross-references here are Howard Hawks, Robert Bresson, and
Jean-Pierre Melville: a strange, heady, and quite effective range of
influences. With Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley, and Matt Clark. Dave Kehr
There is another screening of this film on July 18th and is part of the Yorgos Lanthimos season at the Prince Charleds Cinema. Full details here.
Time Out review: In a gymnasium, a handful of odd people calling themselves ‘Alps’ hangs
out, connected by a fixation with the mundane details of the lives of
people at death’s door – including a promising teenage tennis player in
intensive care. Weird hobby? Exploitative enterprise? Search for
identity? Greek filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos might be best suited to a
form that doesn’t really exist: the cinematic novella. Both 2009’s
‘Dogtooth’, about a perversely insulated nuclear family, and this
follow-up have much to recommend them. They cultivate queasy suspense
from banalities and unfurl with a dry-as-dust deadpan absurdism that
covers a multitude of sins. They have a powerful feeling for the ways in
which social and linguistic structures underwrite arbitrary but binding
– even reassuring – power games. And they have a juggling,
discombobulating way with intimate deceptions, sudden violence and
nuggets of Hollywood fandom. Ben Walters
This
film takes me back to an era before video, DVD and social media when
print and word-of-mouth were the main forms of communication where a
film was concerned. Lynch's debut was a must-see back in the late 1970s
and it was fitting that the movie had its premiere at a midnight
screening at the Cinema Village in New York as the midnight-movie circuit was responsible for popularising this indefinable work.Eraserhead is
a seminal work in the history of independent film and is as much a
must-see now for anyone interested in what film can achieve.
Chicago Reader review: David
Lynch describes his first feature (1977) as “a dream of dark and
troubling things,” and that's about as close as anyone could get to the
essence of this obdurate blend of nightmare imagery, Grand Guignol, and
camp humor. Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat,
but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond
anything else on the midnight-show circuit. With Jack Nance and
Charlotte Stewart.' Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: A masterpiece, this fifth feature by
Terrence Malick manages to reconcile the emotional force of his 70s
classics, Badlands and Days of Heaven, with the epic naturalism of his
more recent comeback films, The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World
(2005). Brad Pitt gives an impressively sober, tight-lipped performance
as the rigid 1950s patriarch of a little family in Waco, Texas, a
decent but angry man whose strict treatment of his three young sons is
countered by the love and Christian grace of his ethereal wife (Jessica
Chastain). Interspersed with this humble family conflict are scenes of
the world's creation that Malick concocted with the legendary special
effects artist Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey). These audacious
sequences can't help but evoke the metaphysical questing of 2001, and
in fact The Tree of Life often feels like a religious response to
Stanley Kubrick's cold, cerebral view of our place in the universe. Not
to be missed. JR Jones
This film is also screened on June 22nd at Close-Up Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: On the surface, despite the presence of a different fictional source (a
story by Adelaida Garcia Morales) and scriptwriter (Jose Luis Lopez
Linares), Victor Erice's second feature seems to bring back some of the
haunting obsessions of his first, the wonderful Spirit of the Beehive
(1973): the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the magical spell
exerted by movies over childhood, and a little girl's preoccupation with
her father and the past. But as English critic Tim Pulleine has
observed, a reference to Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt in El sur (South,
1983) points to an elaborate system of doubling and duplication that
underlies the film's structure as a whole, operating on the level of
shots and sequences as well as themes (north and south, father and
daughter, real and imaginary). Although this subtle spellbinder ends
somewhat abruptly, reportedly because the film's budget ran out, it
seems to form a nearly perfect whole as it is: a brooding tale about an
intense father-daughter relationship and the unknowable past, mysterious
and resonant, with the poetic ambience of a story by Faulkner. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film is part of the Nicolas Cage season at the Prince Charles. Full details here.
Time Out review: Brian De Palma's coldly executed techno-thriller opens with a signature
sequence: a continuous Steadicam shot starts outside an Atlantic City
sports arena, then snakes its way along corridors, up stairs and down an
escalator, to reveal the packed crowd awaiting the start of a
heavyweight boxing match. We're following flamboyant Rick Santoro
(Nicolas Cage), a corrupt cop who revels in the fact that he sees every angle.
Inside, his old pal, Navy commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), is keeping an
eye on Secretary of Defence Kirkland, who has a ringside seat courtesy
of arena owner and munitions tycoon Gilbert Powell (John Heard). Minutes
later, the odds-on favourite hits the canvas, a shot rings out, and
Kirkland is fatally wounded. Santoro immediately seals the crowd inside
the arena and, using TV and surveillance camera playback, scans the
screens for clues as to the killer's identity. As Santoro interviews key
witnesses, the film turns into Rashomon with action replays, as
we see flashbacks from multiple points of view. The film echoes the
technical wizardry and complex plotting of De Palma's best film, Blow Out.
Edgy suspense and powerful kinetic energy are generated by the
intriguing revelations and razor-sharp editing, while the truth behind
its convoluted conspiracy has a surprisingly serious political and
emotional undertow. Nigel Floyd
ICA introduction: This event will celebrate the semicentennial of Shūji Terayama’s film Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Den-en ni shisu,
1974). Pastoral is a playfully painful, shrewdly surreal investigation
into the mutability of memory & identity. At the foot of Mt. Fear,
in a fever dream idyll of the countryside, a boy longs to escape a
present that never was. Shūji Terayama (1935-1983) is considered an icon of the post-war
avant-garde movement in Japan. Before establishing himself as a
filmmaker and the leader of angura theatre troupe Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama
broke into public consciousness as a poet. Pastoral shares its title and key themes with Terayama’s final tanka collection, Den-en ni shisu (1965). Rather than an ‘adaptation’, the film is an experiment in melding poetry with film to create a new way of expression. A screening of the film will be preceded by a polyphonic recital of
Terayama’s poetry, co-directed by Kaisa Saarinen and Alan Fielden &
in collaboration with performance artist Noe Iwai. The dialogue of
poetry and cinema in Pastoral will be expanded into a trilogue of forms through this hybrid performance.
This presentation is also screened on June 10th. Details here.
Time Out review: Jim Jarmusch's 16mm feature debut, made not long after the
writer/director graduated from film school, is an oblique study of a
young man (Chris Parker) adrift on the streets of New York. As he roams, he
has chance encounters with a car thief, a saxophone player and a
grizzled war veteran, among others. Learning their stories, he begins to
seem more and more isolated. Even his relationship with his girlfriend
(Leila Gastil) is coming under strain. Perhaps the film doesn't have quite the
charm of its successor, Stranger Than Paradise, but Jarmusch's freewheeling episodic approach to storytelling is already evident. Geoffrey Macnab
