Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 203: Wed Jul 24

Hardcore (Schrader, 1979): Picturehouse Central, 6.30pm

This film is being screened across Picturehouse cinemas in London. Details here.

New Yorker review:
Paul Schrader’s second feature, “Hardcore,” from 1979, is his version of John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Both movies are dramas of an isolated, stoic, rigidly principled man who takes it upon himself to rescue a young female family member from a way of life—captivity, or something like it—that he deems unfit for her. But Ford’s film, from 1956, is a Western, a philosophical drama set just after the Civil War, in a place and a time far removed from the director’s birth in Maine, in 1894, whereas Schrader’s is contemporary—set in his home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan (where he was born in 1946), and in the religious community of rigorous Calvinists in which he was raised. Built on the very bedrock of Schrader’s being, “Hardcore” is one of the key works of his career, a cinematic declaration of identity and principle that echoes throughout his body of work.
Richard Brody

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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