Time Out review: Interested only in Ludwig of Bavaria as a neurotic individual, Luchino Visconti
centres everything on the king's fears, sublimations and fantasies. He
therefore produces a loving, uncritical portrait of a mad homosexual
recluse, whose passions are opera, fairy-tale castles, and exquisite
young men. Nothing is more sumptuous than Helmut Berger's performance in
the lead, the brooding mad scenes, the deliberately contrived
hysterical outbursts, and it takes only a flicker of scepticism to find
the whole charade risible. But suspension of disbelief has its own
rewards: Visconti's connoisseurship of historical detail and manners is
as acute as ever, and his commitment to his subject is total. The film
was originally released in cut versions ranging between 186 and 137
minutes; this uncut one, obviously more coherent, simply doubles the
interest/boredom rate. Tony Rayns
Chicago Reader review: James M. Cain's pulp classic (1944), as adapted by Raymond Chandler and
directed by Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck is perfectly cast as a Los
Angeles dragon lady burdened with too much time, too much money, and a
dull husband. Fred MacMurray (less effectively) is the fly-by-night
insurance salesman who hopes to relieve her of all three. Wilder trades
Cain's sun-rot imagery for conventional film noir stylings, but the
atmosphere of sexual entrapment survives. Dave Kehr
This screening, which will be introduced by the film’s scriptwriter, Cécile Maistre-Chabrol is part of the Claude Chabrol season at the Cine Lumiere. The movie also screens on January 28th. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: ‘French society may be drifting towards Puritanism or decadence,’ says
deciduous, sixtysomething, Goncourt-winning author Charles Saint-Denis
(a marvellously offhand François Berléand) in a mock-channel TV
interview in this nonchalantly acidic, upper-class-baiting delight by
approaching-nonagenarian director Claude Chabrol. Charles is clearly a
fully paid-up member of the decadent party: holed up in splendid
isolation in his modernist manse in the Lyon countryside, the old
married roué, gourmand, aphorist and erotomane is dubbed affectionately
‘the Marquis de Sade’ by his well-preserved publisher Capucine (Mathilda
May). He’s moved to join the despised Parisian ‘media circus’ having smelled fresh blood in Ludivine Sagnier’s
honest-hearted, less socially favoured weather girl, who he subjects to
a series of ‘free-love’ humiliations and abasements in his upmarket
brothel. Meanwhile, the unfortunate woman is assailed, in the equally
threatening second half of a destructive pincer-movement, by the manic
attentions of idle, arrogant, unstable, fatherless – and puritan –
millionaire Paul (Benoít Magimel) intent on marriage and possession. An
immaculate script, written with his long-term collaborator Cécile
Maistre, reinvents the celebrated 1906 White murder case as a barbed
anti-French-establishment anti-fairy tale (Sagnier’s weather girl is
named Deneige – ‘snow’). Beautifully lit and crisply shot by Eduardo
Serra, and directed with a confidence and seeming ease that stems from
(and quotes) some 60 years of post-New Wave cinematic mastery, Chabrol’s
latest comedy of manners is a minor stylistic and tonal triumph. Eschewing
explicit moral condemnation in favour of a scabrous Buñuelian cool,
humanised by a marvellously affecting central performance by Sagnier,
and surrounded intriguingly by satellite performances which play riskily
and amusingly with the edges of self-parody, this is one of Chabrol’s
most elegant, acerbic and heartfelt entertainments in years. Wally Hammond
Time Out review: Soviet Belorussia, near the Polish border, 1943. Florya, a young partisan, left behind as his unit moves to prepare for a renewed German advance, returns to his village to find only a mass of bodies, including those of his family, and later witnesses the entire population of a near-by town being machine-gunned and burnt to death. This epic, allegorical and traumatising enactment of the hellish experience of war (especially its effect upon a generation of the Soviet people) is rendered by Elem Klimov - albeit unintentionally - as a disorienting and undifferentiated amalgam of almost lyrical poeticism and expressionist nightmare. Wally Hammond
This is a 35mm presentation with other screenings throughout December and January . Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: A brooding chamber piece (2000) about a love affair that never quite
happens. Director Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s most romantic filmmaker, is
known for his excesses, and in that sense the film’s spareness
represents a bold departure. Claustrophobically set in adjacent flats in
1962 Hong Kong, where two young couples find themselves sharing space
with other people, it focuses on a newspaper editor and a secretary at
an export firm (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the sexiest duo in Hong
Kong cinema) who discover that their respective spouses are having an
affair on the road. Wong, who improvises his films with the actors,
endlessly repeats his musical motifs and variations on a handful of
images, rituals, and short scenes (rainstorms, cab rides, stairways,
tender and tentative hand gestures), while dressing Cheung in some of
the most confining (though lovely) dresses imaginable, whose mandarin
collars suggest neck braces. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: A fitfully engaging oddity, adapted by Ronald Blythe from his own study
of everyday life, past and present, in a Suffolk farming village. The
use of non-professional actors is for the most part effective in a
sub-Loachian kind of way, but the intercutting between the largely
prosaic lives of Akenfield's contemporary inhabitants, and the harsher
but seemingly more lyrical existence of their Edwardian forebears, makes
for some fairly simplistic contrasts. That said, Ivan Strasberg's lush,
soft-focus landscape photography - especially when accompanied by the
lilting pastoral strains of Tippett's 'Fantasia Concertante on a Theme
of Corelli' - imbues the past with a not unappealing romantic aura. Geoff Andrew
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 Billy 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
The Machine that Kills Bad People film club presents a double bill that puts
catharsis, protest, and personal transformation at the heart of grief.
In the shortMitchell's Death (1977) performance artist Linda Mary Montano
works through the accidental passing of her ex-husband and close friend
Mitchell Payne. Framed in close-up, with her face pierced by acupuncture
needles, Montano narrates her experience, from when she hears of his
death to when she visits the morgue to see his body. Her monotone voice
recalls Buddhist chanting, creating a trance-like incantation. In The Cannibals (1970), Liliana Cavani offers a countercultural
retelling of Antigone in fascist state, set to an Ennio Morricone
soundtrack and starring Bond girl Britt Ekland and 1960s’ icon Pierre
Clémenti. Made four years before the succès de scandale of The Night Porter
(1974), The Cannibals uses spectacular imagery to tell the story of two
young people who refuse to submit to the government's brutality and
insist on burying the murdered rebels, whose bodies have been left lying
in the street. The film was made near the beginning of the violent
turmoil of Italy’s Years of Lead, leading Cavani to later call it a
“tragic prophecy.” With a specially commissioned essay by CAConrad.
Time Out review: Made directly after Galileo, whose strengths director Liliana Cavani enlarges and
develops, this also postulates a primacy of human and emotional response
over the nihilism of The Night Porter (made four years later). In this modern day reworking of Antigone,
Cavani's striking visual sense illuminates her subject sufficiently to
overcome doubts about some of the '60s conceits. Where she manages to
evoke her Fascist state as exceptionally normal, the film works
exceptionally well. Verna Glaesner
Chicago Reader review: One of the great transgressive moments in 50s Hollywood was Bill Haley’s
“Rock Around the Clock” playing over the opening credits of this
black-and-white melodrama (1955, 101 min.) about unruly boys in a slum
high school. This was released a year before the movie Rock Around the Clock,
and the fact that the earlier film was an MGM release only added to the
punch. A crew-cut Glenn Ford, the squarest of teachers, tries to tame
Vic Morrow and Paul Mazursky, among other hoods, and win over Sidney
Poitier (in one of his best early roles). As Dave Kehr suggested in his
original Reader capsule, the kids are better actors than the
adults (who also include Anne Francis, Louis Calhern, and Richard
Kiley). Writer-director Richard Brooks had a flair for sensationalism,
and his adaptation of Evan Hunter’s novel is loads of fun as a
consequence, but don’t expect much analysis or insight. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is part of the ICA's 'Celluloid Sunday' strand and screens from 35mm.
Time Out review: Bad things start happening to Moon, a kid from a housing estate, when he comes into possession of two bloodstained letters left behind by a schoolgirl suicide: his mother walks out, he starts having pesky wet dreams, his mentally handicapped best friend gets into trouble - and he falls for a girl who turns out to be seriously ill. The irresistibly namedFruit Chan, a long-serving assistant director in the film industry, got this indie feature made on a wing and a prayer: various industry figures (notablyAndy Lau) helped out, hardly anyone got paid and the non-pro cast was recruited on the street. Much of it is fresh, truthfully observed and touching in its honesty, but the climactic escalation into triad melodrama and the several false endings suggest that old industry habits die hard. Nonetheless, a striking achievement. Tony Rayns
This is a Lost Reels 16mm double-bill. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review of Extreme Prejudice: Walter Hill (48 HRS.) returns to familiar action turf (and almost to top
form after bottoming out with Brewster’s Millions and Crossroads) with
this story of an old-fashioned Texas lawman (Nick Nolte) who clashes
with a special forces unit assigned to eliminate a Mexican drug dealer
(Powers Boothe). Hill intends a familiar values-in-conflict story line
(flattering, as usual, to tradition at the expense of unscrupulous
modernity), but the real line of tension is the relation between Nolte
and Boothe, once close friends, now sexual and moral rivals. Boothe
comes on as pure 40s archetype, a brooding John Ford apparition in white
suit and Stetson (the moral/visual paradox is obvious but mythically
effective); he’s an odd, commanding figure, and Nolte, shrinking into
his ranger outfit (huh?), really can’t compete. Still, the character
interactions are strong, especially for this depleted genre, and Hill’s
tight, efficient styling recovers a lot of lost formal ground: his
framing and crosscutting are as sharp as ever, and the bloodbath finale
is, improbably, a model of intelligent restraint, the classicist’s
answer to Peckinpah baroque. With Michael Ironside. Maria Conchita
Alonso, and Rip Torn in a scene-stealing cracker-barrel turn. Pat Graham
Here (and above) is the trailer for Extreme Prejudice.
A
bona fide masterpiece which grows in stature with the passing years and
now in a remastered form which simply adds to the beauty of a
magisterial work of cinema. Here is critic Dave Kehr on the film's history, it was butchered on release and only seen in a truncated form for many years, and here is
Martin Scorsese talking about his involvement in the restoration. The
Leopard is one of the American director's favourite films as evidenced
in this list. This screening, part of the Luchino Visconti season at BFI Southbank, will be introduced by Adrian Wootton, Chief Executive, Film London and British Film Commission. There are other presentations of the film on January 4th and 26th. Chicago Reader review: Cut,
dubbed, and printed in an inferior color process, the U.S. release of
Luchino Visconti's epic didn't leave much of an impression in 1963; 20
years later, a restoration of the much longer Italian version revealed
this as not only Visconti's greatest film but a work that transcends its
creator, achieving a sensitivity and intelligence without parallel in
his other films. Burt Lancaster initiated his formidable mature period
as the aging aristocrat Don Fabrizio, who works to find a place for
himself and his family values in the new Italy being organized in the
1860s. The film's superb first two hours, which weave social and
historical themes into rich personal drama, turn out to be only a
prelude to the magnificent final hour—an extended ballroom sequence that
leaves history behind to become one of the most moving meditations on
individual mortality in the history of the cinema. Dave Kehr Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm presentation screens again on February 25th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: The end of the world, starring Ralph Meeker (at his sleaziest) as Mickey
Spillane’s Mike Hammer (at his most neolithic). Robert Aldrich’s 1955
film is in some ways the apotheosis of film noir—it’s certainly one of
the most extreme examples of the genre, brimming with barely suppressed
hysteria and set in a world totally without moral order. Even the
credits run upside down. This independently produced low-budget film was
a shining example for the New Wave directors—Truffaut, Godard, et
al—who found it proof positive that commercial films could accommodate
the quirkiest and most personal of visions. Dave Kehr
This is a 'Projecting the Archive' 35mm screening which will include an introduction by Josephine Botting, BFI Curator.
BFI introdcution: Back on civvy street, a pair of demobbed soldiers decide on a career in the police force. But the austerity of post-war Britain makes it hard to resist the illicit ‘perks’ of the job and when one falls for a scheming nightclub singer, he’s drawn deeper into criminality. Christine Norden, in her film debut, is perfectly cast as the temptress and this screening celebrates the centenary of her birth on 28 December 1924. Though her film career was brief, she had an electric screen presence and could have been a leading British femme fatale if her potential had been realised.
This 35mm presentation is part of the Luchino Visconti season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Aptly titled—a lush, melodramatic portrait of seduction and betrayal,
decadence and deceit in the midst of Italy's resistance to Austrian
occupation in the mid-19th century, revealing Luchino Visconti at his
most baroque and the Italian cinema at its most spectacular (1954). A
fine tragic performance by Alida Valli and surprisingly good work by
Farley Granger (imported for American box-office appeal) help overcome
some of the obvious narrative gaps created by the Italian censors.
Visconti's sinuous Marxism here begins to creep to the fore. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Luchino Visconti’s epic melodrama of social migration and
moral decay was first released in 1960, when it was met with great
scandal (a prosecutor threatened to charge the director with
“disseminating an obscene object”) and even greater success. Today,
distanced from ridiculous controversy and dislocated from the provincial
politics that drive its story, this immaculately restored classic of
post-WWII Italian cinema often feels like a new experience altogether. Set in the early ’60s, when Italy’s moneyed Northern
classes were regularly exploiting the people of the South for cheap
labor, Visconti’s shaggy tale begins with the hardscrabble Parondi
family moving from rural Lucania up to industrial Milan, where recently
widowed Rosaria (Katina Paxinou) and her four sons hope to find a better
life. “My family arrived like an earthquake,” sighs Vincenzo, the
eldest son who’s already in Milan, to his fiancée (a young Claudia
Cardinale) after his mother and siblings crash their engagement party
and interrupt the first strains of the flowing Nino Rota score that
would earn the composer a gig on The Godfather. From there, Visconti paves the way for rollicking family sagas like 2003’s The Best of Youth,
unspooling his tale across three brisk hours and five overlapping
chapters, one for each of the Parondi boys. Over time, idealistic Rocco
(Delon, magnetic even when dubbed by an actor who pronounces his
character’s name as though it were spelled with eight rs),
closeted older brother Simone (Salvatori) and local prostitute Nadia
(Girardot, sensational) emerge as the true focal points. Stubbornly attached to the clannish virtues of his
father’s generation, Rocco can’t help but forgive Simone even his most
violent transgressions—including Nadia’s brutal semipublic rape—as his
moral absolutism rots into something perverse as he tries to hold the
family together. Watching the film so far removed from the time of its
making underlines the tragedy of Rocco’s anachronistic nature and
compensates for the increasing clumsiness of Visconti’s more topical
subplots. “The world’s a one-way street,” Girardot’s character blithely
declares, but Rocco still can’t see that he’s speeding toward a dead
end. David Ehrlich
BFI introdcution: Poitier’s first collaboration with director Stanley Kramer is an
action-packed thriller that transformed the actor into the first bona
fide Black movie star. He plays Noah Cullen, an escaped convict in the
Deep South who is handcuffed to Tony Curtis’ embittered racist. To stay
alive and out of reach of the authorities, they forge an embittered
friendship. As a man seething with rage from a life of indignity,
Poitier is superb. It earned him a landmark first Oscar nomination for
Best Actor.
This Lost Reels presentation is from an original 35mm print, and will be followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Whit Stillman.
Time Out review: Manhattan, the early '80s. Recent graduates from an upper crust college,
Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) - flatmates and friends of a
sort - pass their days working as trainee publishing editors, and most
of their nights discussing social niceties at a fashionable disco where
assistant manager Des (Eigeman) courts the boss's disfavour by admitting
the wrong kind of clientele. The girls hang out at the disco with a
preppy bunch of Harvard admen and lawyers; rumour, rivalry and
falling-out is rife and relationships are frequently at risk. The third
comedy of manners in Whit Stillman's loose trilogy about the 'doomed
bourgeois in love' again highlights the writer/director's expertise with
naturalistically articulate dialogue whose idioms, ironies and
absurdities provide vivid insights into the delusions, desires and often
ludicrous tribal rituals of the young, privileged and, mostly, pretty
ineffectual. Like Metropolitan and Barcelona, it's a
brittle, sporadically brilliant film, very funny but rooted in social,
political, historical and emotional realities. Beckinsale, especially,
is a revelation, making Charlotte smug, spiteful, sexy and, underneath,
rather sad, all with a spot-on accent. Geoff Andrew Here (and above) is the trailer.
Time Out review: Luchino Vsconti's second feature (five years after Ossessione
in 1942) was an improvised drama produced by the Communist Party,
filmed with and among Sicilian fishermen in the village of Aci-Trezza.
An overwhelmingly stark chronicle of a family which strives but fails to
break out of the poverty trap - they try to cut out the middlemen by
embarking in what one might call 'free enterprise', with disastrous
results - La Terra Trema‚ stands as a masterpiece of neo-realism,
a social conscience cinema of proletarian ways and means. Yet, despite
this, it's no less 'operatic' than the director's later decadent
melodramas: it surges with great tides of emotion. The film is
distinguished by its vivid camerawork, at once poetic and 'documentary'.
(Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, it may be noted, served as
assistant directors.) Visconti only finished the film by selling some of
his mother's jewellery and an apartment in Rome. Yet, true to his
breeding, he brought home one of the boys from the film and installed
him as his butler. Tom Charity
Vulture review: The Way We Wereis
told in a series of flashbacks and montages, primed for maximum
nostalgia and some truly gorgeous period costuming. The entire film is
Hollywood confection from start to finish, opening with the lush,
familiar croon of Barbara Streisand’s famous titular song, allowing
Robert Redford to wear his navy whites for so long that he begins to
look as though he’s emerged from a perfume ad. There are some scenes cut
from the conclusion that make the timeline a little confusing, butThe Way We Weredoes
not endure because of its plot. It endures because of a fearsome,
desirous performance from Streisand, and Redford’s cold beauty, and all
the ways that it captures a one-sided desire many of us have felt. Christina Newland
This 35mm screening is part of the Big Screen Classics strand (the 'Singers on Screen' season) at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Time Out review: Touted as a ground-breaking addition to the crime-on-the-streets genre,
Mario Van Peebles' thriller is far more modest: a high-tech update on that old
warhorse, a mobster's rise and fall. Ruthless Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) lords
it over a New York neighbourhood with an empire built on crack and
violence. It's only when two disenchanted streetwise officers come
together - African-American Scott Appleton (Ice T) and Nick Peretti
(Judd Nelson) - that his domain is effectively threatened. The movie pays lip
service to social analysis while delighting in the paraphernalia of
violence. As such, it's a superior example of what used to be called
blaxploitation, with Van Peebles piling on corruption and carnage for
all he's worth. Geoff Andrew
Chicago Reader review: Perhaps the most unjustly neglected of Luchino Visconti’s early films is
this hilarious 1951 comedy, tailored to the talents of Anna Magnani,
about a working-class woman who is determined to get her plain
seven-year-old daughter into movies. A wonderful send-up of the Italian
film industry and the illusions that it fosters, delineated in near-epic
proportions with style and brio. With Walter Chiari and Alessandro
Blasetti. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: A
masterpiece of the German silent cinema and easily the most effective
version ofDracula on record. F.W. Murnau's 1922 film follows the Bram
Stoker novel fairly closely, although he neglected to purchase the
screen rights—hence, the title change. But the key elements are all
Murnau's own: the eerie intrusions of expressionist style on natural
settings, the strong sexual subtext, and the daring use of fast-motion
and negative photography. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: This eloquent social comedy has a self-pitying professor hunting out the
mutt who's been disturbing his sleep. He locks the creature in a closet
in the basement of his apartment block and later stumbles across a
janitor with a taste for dog soup (dog lovers might want to give this
one a miss). The trouble is, he realises he put away the wrong hound.
Ironies multiply. His pregnant wife drives him crazy. He throws the
right dog from the roof of the building. His main rival for a top job is
beheaded in a drunken subway accident. His wife buys a poodle. And so
on. Beautifully directed, unsentimental and darkly funny. Tom Charity
This 35mm presentation, part of the Golden Age of Korean Film season, also scrrens on Decembner 20th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Ennui and overexposure in the sexual arena are key stimuli for the
libertines in Choderlos de Laclos’ ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’, and after
‘Dangerous Liaisons’, ‘Valmont’, ‘Cruel Intentions’ and more, any
filmmaker attempting another adaptation runs the risk of incurring
similar sensations in the audience. This Korean remake re-spins the
story in the late-nineteenth century twilight of the country’s Chosun
dynasty, and arranges the tale’s erotic strife as a contest not only
between the precepts of official high-Confucian morality and its
trustees’ decadence, but also between that local-grown hypocrisy and the
threat of religious puritanism imported from abroad. Thus Laclos’
chaste Madame de Tourvel becomes the persecuted Catholic Lady Chong
(Jeon Do-Yeon), and her would-be corruptor Cho-Won (Korean TV star Bae
Yong-Jun, genially rakish) must feign theological dissidence as well as
personal virtue to conquer her. Not that the film pushes such
points. A prologue alerts us not to take it as historical gospel: ‘The
men and women who appear here are lecherous and immoral beyond belief,’
it promises. ‘One is led to doubt whether they indeed existed.’ In the
event, it’s a shame that the film takes itself increasingly seriously as
it proceeds. Rarely outright salacious, it unfolds its intrigue with a
certain dramatic equanimity and visual period splendour – it’s richly
shot by Kim Byeong-Il, Park Chan-Wook’s cinematographer on ‘Sympathy for
Mr Vengeance’. But that much good work done, the film runs out of
ideas, and the endgame plays out as doggedly prosaic. It’s hard not to
pine for the nudie-painting, virgin-breaking Cho-Won in the full flower
of his pre-comeuppance mischief. Nicholas Barber
This film also screens on January 7th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: This David Cronenberg masterpiece (1991) breaks every rule in adapting a
literary classic—maybe “On Naked Lunch” would be a more accurate
title—but justifies every transgression with its artistry and audacity.
Adapted not only from William S. Burroughs’s free-form novel but also
from several other Burroughs works, this film pares away all the social
satire and everything that might qualify as celebration of gay sex,
yielding a complex and highly subjective portrait of Burroughs himself
(expertly played by Peter Weller) as a tortured sensibility in flight
from his own femininity, proceeding zombielike through an echo chamber
of projections (insects, drugs, typewriters) and repudiations. According
to the densely compacted metaphors that compose this dreamlike movie,
writing equals drugs equals sex, and the pseudonymous William Lee, as
politically incorrect as Burroughs himself, repeatedly disavows his
involvement in all three Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: The prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been at work for
nearly two decades, sometimes making straight-to-video features but more
recently receiving some belated international recognition. The
engrossing Cure (1997) stars Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance?, The Eel) as a troubled detective exploring a series of murders committed through hypnotic suggestion (as in The Manchurian Candidate),
and while its creepy mystery plot is easy enough to follow even when it
turns metaphysical, it’s unsatisfying as a story precisely because it
aspires to create a mounting sense of dread by enlarging questions
rather than answering them. Like other recent thrillers by this
director, it’s fairly grisly, though Kurosawa’s frequent long shots
impart a cool, detached tone to the cruelty and violence. Stylistically
it’s the most inventive Japanese feature I’ve seen in some time, much
more unpredictable than Takeshi Kitano’s recent yakuza exercises. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This great modern Christmas film is part of the Christmas season at the Prince Charles Cinema and is also being screened on December 5th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Loneliness, Vietnam-era alienation and a sourpuss Paul Giamatti
aren’t, on paper, the things of which cockle-warming yuletide classics
are typically made – any more than teams of hi-tech thieves sticking up
Japanese corporations. But like Die Hard,
Alexander Payne’s wintry story of human connection is an unexpected
Christmas gem. It even plays a tiny bit like a 1970-set version of ‘A
Christmas Carol’, with Giamatti’s cranky ancient history teacher
learning uncomfortable truths about himself in a redemption arc that
gives the film a genuine glow. Payne’s old Sideways star
is, as ever, a curmudgeonly delight as Paul Hunham, a universally
unpopular member of the teaching staff at New England’s Barton Academy.
In fact, his outsider status at the prep school is such that he’s given
up trying to charm his students or colleagues, instead embracing his own
pain-in-the-arse misanthropy, self-parody (he’s always ready with an
Aeneas reference) and self-limiting horizons. ‘You can’t even dream a
whole dream, can you?’ chides a colleague. So when someone is needed to babysit a handful of ‘holdovers’ over
the holidays, pupils whose parents have more or less abandoned them
during Christmas, it’s Paul who is stuck with the job. Spending the festive period
with the gawky, sharp-tongued and inwardly raging Tully (Dominic
Sessa), a young man abandoned by his mum and grieving his dad,
immediately feels like hell for all concerned. What follows is a coming-of-age story for Tully and Paul, and a
reminder that the sure-to-be-awards-bound Giamatti deserves to be top
of the bill far more often, instead of being lumbered with supporting
roles in so-so blockbusters like Jungle Cruise and San Andreas. Few other actors could inhabit this rumpled, embittered man and make you root for him so wholeheartedly. The Holdovers is a triumphant comeback story for Alexander Payne, too. The director bounces back from 2017’s misfiring Downsizing
to find his tone – a rare kind of jaded hopefulness – with all his old
assurance. He adds another string to his bow here in spotting the
talented Sessa. The newcomer is Giamatti’s equal in a volatile
odd-couple dynamic that ebbs and flows before the pair finally begin to
understand each other. Props, too, to Da'Vine Joy Randolph (Only Murders in the Building),
who hits all the film’s major keys as the school’s bubbly but blunt
cook, and some of the most touching minor ones, too. The death of her
son in Vietnam haunts The Holdovers as
much as that of Tully’s dad. All three characters are nursing broken
hearts but their path to solidarity is never straightforward or
predictable. David Hemingson’s screenplay makes every moment of
reluctant connection feel earned. And I loved that The Holdovers isn’t
just set in the 1970s; it feels like it was made then too. From the
desaturated cinematography, captured with vintage lenses, to the
lived-in production design, you could be watching a Hal Ashby movie (the
film’s trailer even has an old-school voiceover). It’s a bittersweet
callback to a golden age when there were a whole lot more movies like
this one. Phil De Semlyen
The
repertory cinemas are closed today but you can catch my recommendations for great movies on television over the holiday
period via my 'X' handle @tpaleyfilm or on Bluesky @tpaleyfilm.bsky.social with the hashtag #bestxmasholidayfilmonTVtoday.
Christmas Eve and It’s A Wonderful Life on 35mm at the Prince Charles is always
one of the best screenings of the year. Don’t worry if you can’t get along on December 24th their are
plenty of other screenings of this bona fide great film (regardless of
Christmas or not). You can find the full details here (of screenings from 35mm and digital).
Chicago Reader review: The
film Frank Capra was born to make. This 1946 release marked his return
to features after four years of turning out propaganda films for the
government, and Capra poured his heart and soul into it. James Stewart
stars as a small-town nobody, on the brink of suicide, who believes his
life is worthless. Guardian angel Henry Travers shows him how wrong he
is by letting Stewart see what would have happened had he never been
born. Wonderfully drawn and acted by a superb cast (Donna Reed, Beulah
Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Lionel Barrymore, Gloria Grahame) and told with a
sense of image and metaphor (the use of water is especially elegant)
that appears in no other Capra film. The epiphany of movie sentiment and
a transcendent experience. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: When Park Ki-Hyung declined to make a sequel to his surprise hit Whispering Corridors,
producer Oh had the smart idea of offering the challenge to two recent
graduates from the Korean Film Academy who had already collaborated on
the excellent shorts Seventeen and Pale Blue Dot. They
came up with a very different take on a haunting in a high school for
girls: a convoluted tale of teenage lesbian feelings, telepathy, sexual
rivalry, spirit possession and unwanted pregnancy. Intricately
structured and made with great technical brio, the film falters in its
final reel in which the entire school is terrorised by the spirit of a
wronged girl driven to suicide. But when it forgets about grandstanding
and concentrates on the intimate feelings of its protagonists, it's
quite something. Tony Rayns
