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
