Cinema Museum introduction: Women
and Cocaine Presents is a film night presented by curator Caroline
Cassin at The Cinema Museum to celebrate the fierce and liberated
women of Pre code cinema. From the period of 1930 to 1934, before the
introduction of censorship, women were depicted in roles with a
frankness and sex-positivity that remains rare even today. Each month
we celebrate a different woman from that era. This month it's Barbara Stanwyck who, in
one of her defining early roles, plays Lora Hart, an idealistic nurse who takes a job caring for two
wealthy little kids kept in a state of mysterious ill health. As Lora
works the night shift, she uncovers a sinister plot involving their
menacing chauffeur, Nick (played by Clark Gable sans moustache).
Chicago Reader review: A William Wellman curiosity done for Warners in 1931, this gritty thriller, a favorite of film critic Manny Farber, is of principal interest today for its juicy early performances by Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Clark Gable. Hard as nails, with lots of spunk. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film was one of the original banned 'video nasties' in the UK in the 1980s.
Nickel Cinema introduction: A
troubled woman named Molly works nights as a waitress at a seaside
bar while caring for her young nephews by day. Haunted by memories of
childhood abuse at the hands of her sea‑captain father, she
becomes increasingly tormented by nightmares and fantasies. As her
grip on reality slips, she begins seducing men and enacting a brutal,
vengeful murder spree. Bleak and disturbing, The Witch Who Came from
the Sea is more psychological horror than supernatural — a grim
portrait of trauma, repression, and rage that turns intimacy into
terror and the ocean’s memory into a twisted obsession.
Starburst Magazine review: If you ever find yourself arguing that the idiots behind the ‘video nasties’ list didn’t have a clue what they were doing,The Witch Who Came from the Seashould be your Exhibit A. This film doesn’t deserve its schlocky reputation and it certainly has nothing to do with the evocative but incredibly misleading poster that probably put it on the list in the first place – there are no witches here, and certainly no warrior women brandishing decapitated heads. Instead,The Witch Who Came from the Seais an intriguing and occasionally moving study of an abused young woman spiralling into insanity. True, it has the low-budget look of most ’70s exploitation movies, but Perkins’ extraordinarily nuanced performance, the psychologically incisive screenplay by her soon-to-be-ex-husband Robert Thom (Death Race 2000) and the classy cinematography by DOP Dean Cundey, who would later lens John Carpenter’sHalloween,The FogandThe Thing, elevates this controversial little psycho-shocker into the echelons of art. This isn’t some grubby video nasty designed to shock and titillate, this is a chillingly effective character study that occupies the shadowy middle-ground somewhere between Polanski’sRepulsionand Meir Zarchi’sI Spit on Your Grave.
This film also screens on Tuesday February 17th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: This
gripping 1977 American thriller from Wim Wenders turns back on itself
with deadly European irony. Dennis Hopper is an international art
smuggler, Bruno Ganz is a Hamburg craftsman. Together they commit a
murder and briefly become friends. The film has a fine grasp of tenuous
emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe.
Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life
on the edge; this is one of his edgiest. Dave Kehr
Dazed introduction to Shinji Somai:'When
it comes to filmmaking auteurs, Somai, a previously forgotten master of 1980s Japanese cinema, is not a name that has
always been afforded much attention in Western criticism. But off the
back of passionate new appraisals by contemporary filmmakers, a
first
US-based retrospective of his films in
New York in 2023, and a string of UK home media releasesin
2024, the director is now rightly getting his dues overseas
– some two decades after his death from lung cancer at the age of
just 53.' The Nickel Cinema are showing one of his lesser known films here.
Nickel Cinema introduction: In a single
night inside a Tokyo love hotel, two damaged lives intersect under
the pressure of desperation, fantasy, and self-erasure. A failed
businessman planning his own death hires a call girl, only for their
transaction to unravel into something unstable and emotionally raw.
Love Hotel operates within the framework of pink cinema, yet
consistently resists its expectations, redirecting erotic spectacle
toward exhaustion, confession, and psychological exposure. Sex here
is not titillation but a temporary suspension of consequence—a
space where shame can be voiced without permanence. Shinji Sōmai’s long
takes and restless camera movement trap the characters in real time,
refusing narrative shortcuts or moral framing. The hotel room becomes
a liminal zone between performance and collapse, where power shifts
moment to moment and intimacy feels both compulsory and unreachable.
Stripped of glamour and redemption, Love Hotel presents desire as a
survival mechanism already failing, and connection as something
briefly possible only when nothing else remains intact.
Time Out review: Anthony Mann's finest Western casts James Stewart as a wagon train leader, guiding a
group of settlers through Indian country to the Oregon Territory.
Stewart is a man haunted by a secret, his violent past as a Missouri
border raider - a past which catches up with him when another former
raider (Arthur Kennedy) joins the wagon train. The two men are paralleled
throughout, Kennedy representing the old violence which may yet erupt in
the reformed Stewart, and the whole film is concerned with the testing
of Stewart's capacity for change. Continually provoked by his spiky
relationship with Kennedy, Stewart is a man who must clarify and
reaffirm his new relationship with a peaceful society. Lighthearted
comedy, majestic scenery, and superbly handled action are fused into a
unifying moral vision which, though it deals with abstractions, always
expresses itself through visible actions and tangible symbols. Nigel Floyd
This screening of Eureka will be introduced by Vietnamese film critic Phuong Le.
Time Out review: A bus is hijacked; only the driver (Koji Yakusho, from The Eel and Shall We Dance?)
and two school-age passengers survive the bloodbath. Two years later,
the driver returns from his mysterious wanderings, finds life with his
family awkward, and moves in with the brother and sister, by now utterly
speechless and living alone (at least until their student cousin also
comes to stay). Meanwhile, a number of local women are murdered. The
slightly bogus serial killer subplot notwithstanding, Shinji Aoyama's lengthy,
but never over-long study of psychological trauma and regeneration is
beautifully shot (in monochrome 'Scope), acted, and directed; at least
until the last two shots, an elegant understatement holds sway, even
allowing for wry, gentle humour to be slowly but surely introduced into
the otherwise serious proceedings. Like his superb lead actor, Aoyama
achieves a lot with a little, proving that one needn't shout to be
heard. Ozu, one feels, would have approved. Geoff Andrew
This is a 35mm presentation with other screenings throughout January and February. Full details here. Exactly one year on from selecting this film when the Prince Charles Cinema started its regular run of screenings of this film it's remarkable to discover that it is now entering its104th consecutive weekat the movie house, a run that, within a year or so may well break the British record for the longest continuous theatrical engagement of a single film. The longest continuous theatrical run ever recordedinthe UK belongs to softcore porn film Come Play With Me, which screened at the Moulin Cinema on Great Windmill Street for 201 weeks between 1977 and 1981, a record listedintheGuinness Book of World Records."What began as a revival has quietly become one of the most extraordinary long-term relationships between a cinema, a film, and its audience. Still playing, still selling, still stopping peopleintheir tracks, often from our stunning original-release35mm print," stated the Prince Charles Cinema team in a recent press release.
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
This presentation comes with an accompanying essay and introduction by curator, Arta Barzanji, and is part of the 'Not Lynch' season from Cinema Year Zero at the Cinema Museum. You can find details of the near year-long season here.
Time Out review: An example of Hollywood's mooncalf affair with Freud during the '40s,
ending in an absurd instant cure for psychopathy. But the premise is
fascinating, and fraught with Gothic overtones as Joan Bennett's heroine
('This is not the time to think of danger', she murmurs at the outset,
shaking off premonition, 'this is my wedding day') gradually realises
that, married to an architect (Michael Redgrave) who literally and obsessively
'collects' rooms in which murders have occurred, she must uncover the
secret of the one room always kept locked. Fritz Lang himself didn't think
much of the film, but nevertheless set it under his usual sign of
destiny ('This is not the time to think of danger...') and invested it
with roots in older myths of the magic power of love. His direction is
masterly, imposing meanings and tensions through images that are spare,
resonant and astonishingly beautiful. A remarkable film.
Tom Milne
This film, introduced by Ben Tyrer, Lecturer in Film Theory, Middlesex University London, is part of the David Lynch season at BFI Southbank. Details here. The movie also screens on 4th and 29th January - all the details here.
Film Society of Lincoln Centre review: Most of David Lynch’s later films straddle (at least) two realities, and their most ominous moments arise from a dawning awareness that one world is about to cede to another. In Lost Highway, we are introduced to brooding jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) while he lives in a simmering state of jealousy with his listless and possibly unfaithful wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). About one hour in, a rupture fundamentally alters the narrative logic of the film and the world itself becomes a nightmare embodiment of a consciousness out of control. Lost Highway marked a return from the wilderness for Lynch and the arrival of his more radical expressionism – alternating omnipresent darkness with overexposed whiteouts, dead air with the belligerent soundtrack assault of metal-industrial bands, and the tactile sensations that everything is happening with the infinite delusions of schizophrenic thought.
Time Out review: Oppression, guilt, blackmail and murder in turn-of-the-century London's quiet Laburnum Terrace - the plot specifics of The Suspect inevitably evoke Alfred Hitchcock's world, even if the studio choice of noirspecialist Robert Siodmak as director suggests a more darkly labyrinthine
atmosphere. As it turns out, the generic common denominator of
psychological suspense proves stronger than the auteurist imprint, and
if any individual has a right to 'sign' the film, it is Charles Laughton in one
of his most engaged and engaging roles, as a sympathetic wife-killer and
victim of blackmail, whose fatal flaw is eventually revealed to be his
sense of simple decency. Between the characters of Laughton, his
shrewish wife (Rosalind Ivan), innocent femme fatale (Ella Raines), a
suspicious detective (Stanley C Ridges), and a wife-beating good-for-nothing
neighbour (Henry Daniell), are etched some intricate moral shadings; and some
teasing reflections on manipulation emerge from within the narrative,
echoing the virtuoso audience manipulation. Paul Taylor
Here (and above) is a trailer for a Robert Siodmak season at New York's Lincoln Centre.
This is a 'The Machine That Kills Bad People' screening.
Programme Barbara Rubin, Christmas on Earth (1963), double 16mm projection, 29 min. Jackie Raynal, Deux fois (1968), DCP, 66 min.
ICA introduction: A double bill of films that double. Barbara Rubin’s underground classic Christmas on Earth (1963) possesses a spirit of riotous, orgiastic anarchism. Made when Rubin was still a teenager and inspired by Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,
this sexually explicit work sought to challenge the social mores of its
time – an attitude captured in its working title, “Cocks and Cunts.” Christmas on Earth is a double 16mm projection that incorporates live performative
elements, such as the use of coloured gels and a radio soundtrack, to
create a singular and spectacular cinematic experience. Deux fois (1968) is the directorial debut of Jackie Raynal, a figure renowned not
only as a filmmaker, but equally for her work as Éric Rohmer’s editor
and as a programmer at New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema. Made under the
umbrella of the Zanzibar Group, with the patronage of Sylvina
Boissonnas, Deux fois deconstructs cinematic conventions through a
series of discrete episodes. In the words of Noël Burch, the film is
"an intentionally elementary meditation on certain primary functions of
film, that could be said to be at the roots of film editing as such –
expectations, exploring the picture, perceptual memory, relationships
between on-screen and off-screen space – all explored in a series of
free-standing sequence shots of perfect simplicity."
Time Out review: Dismissed by Robin Wood in his monograph on Hawks as 'tired' but championed by the French, Man's Favorite Sport? is in many ways the quintessential Hollywood auteur movie. Seen in isolation from the rest of Hawks' work, it seems to be merely an out-of-time slapstick comedy. Seen in context, it effortlessly demonstrates the auteur's ability to stamp his artistic identity on anything - in this case, the travails of an armchair expert (Rock Hudson) forced to enter a fishing contest and confronted with a typically Hawksian superior woman (Paula Prentiss). A marvellous film.
This screening will be introduced by Michael Witt and is part of the Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned season at the ICA (details here). This presentation is a double bill devoted to Godard’s extensive engagement with theatre
in the 1960s: Jacques Rivette’s The
Nun(1966),
which evolved out of a stage production funded by Godard, and La
Chinoise(1967),
which was the culmination of his exploration of theatrical forms in
this decade.
Chicago Reader review of The Nun: Jacques Rivette’s controversial though chaste second feature (1966),
originally banned for a year both in France and for export, was trimmed
and slightly reedited by its U.S. distributor (years later it was
restored to its original form and 140-minute running time). As a direct
and indirect commentary on institutional repression and the depravity
that arises from compulsory religious training, it’s a feminist movie
with particular relevance for our era. Adapted from Denis Diderot’s
famous 18th-century novel about Suzanne Simonin (the remarkable Anna
Karina)—an illegitimate teenager forced to enter a convent by her
family—this is the most accessible by far of all of Rivette’s features.
It has a straightforward narrative that mainly concentrates on Suzanne’s
experiences at two convents—one severe and punitive, the other
“progressive” and more worldly (though no less stifling for Suzanne when
she finds herself pursued by the lesbian mother superior)—before she
escapes to encounter a different kind of oppression in the world
outside. Far from a nonbeliever, Suzanne is a devout character without a
religious calling, and the film as a whole is a complex celebration of
her continuous drive toward freedom. Rivette’s highly original and
formal “cellular” construction uses a striking contemporary score (by
Jean-Claude Eloy) and selective sound effects (by Michel Fano) to
balance the feeling of confinement with a nearly constant sense of the
world outside; the intense mise en scene and use of camera movements
often recall Carl Dreyer (though Rivette’s conscious model was Kenji
Mizoguchi); and the metallic colors and resourceful use of settings
conspire to create a world that’s both material and abstract. A great
film that remains one of the cornerstones of the French New Wave. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review of La Chinoise: One of Jean-Luc Godard’s most underrated and misunderstood films, this
1967 feature isn’t so much an embrace of France’s Maoist youth movement
as a multifaceted interrogation of it—far more nuanced and lively than
the theoretical agitprop Godard would make with others after the May
1968 uprisings. Though it explores the dogmatism and violence of a
Maoist cell in Paris, Godard is equally preocccupied by such things as
French rock, the color red, the history of cinema, the “revisionism” of
the French Communist Party, and the rebels’ youthful romantic longings.
The spirited cast–including Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and
Juliet Berto–make all this touching as well as troubling. The movie
helped inspire student revolt at Columbia University soon afterward, but
that’s a tribute to its style and energy, not its political
intelligence. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: A thwarted caper film in the vein of Melville’s Bob le flambeur and Kubrick’s The Killing,
Henri Verneuil’s 1963 feature stars Jean Gabin, the avatar of
world-weary criminality, in one of his finest roles. Fresh out of
prison, he enlists a former cell mate (Alain Delon) in a daring plan to
rob a casino on the Riviera. Though the film was an international hit,
Verneuil’s conventional narrative style attracted the scorn of the
French New Wave. Forty years later it stands as a well-crafted noir with
a long, tautly executed heist and a protracted denouement that’s even
more engrossing. Joshua Katzman
Chicago Reader review: If this 1984 film really cost $60 million, producer Dino De Laurentiis
must be the greatest patron of avant-garde cinema since the Vicomte de
Noailles financed Buñuel's L'Age d'Or. Director David Lynch
thoroughly (and perhaps inadvertently) subverts the adolescent inanities
of Frank Herbert's plot by letting the narrative strangle itself in
unnecessary complications, leaving the field clear to imagery as
disturbing as anything in Eraserhead. The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't
rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The
real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum;
its passage through the shopping malls of America was a
once-in-a-lifetime anomaly. Kyle MacLachlan is the pallid hero who
becomes a messiah to an oppressed desert tribe. Dave Kehr
This is a 35mm presentation, also screening on December 26th at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Observer review: The gangster movie began in the silent era with DW Griffith’s primitiveThe Musketeers of Pig Alley(1912), but it was the talkies and their vibrant soundtracks of chattering machine guns, screeching tyres, hardboiled dialogue and thudding fists on yielding flesh that ushered in the first great cycle of gangster flicks. The enforcement of the Hays Office Production Code in 1934 tamed this first wave, but the gradual relaxation of censorship in the 1960s led to a grand revival of the genre focusing on the celebration of crime waves in the past (Bonnie and Clyde) and the criminal underworld of the present (The Godfather). From the beginning of his film career, Martin Scorsese has been at home with crime both period and contemporary, starting with Boxcar Bertha(1972), a true story of outlaws in the depression, andMean Streets (1973), which drew on his personal knowledge of Italian-Americans embarking on a life of crime in New York’s Little Italy. I predicted in my 1990 review that GoodFellas“will take its place among the great gangster pictures”, a judgment confirmed by a special two-disc Blu-ray version published to mark its 25th anniversary. Neither glamorising nor moralising, the film is closely based on Nicholas Pileggi’s chilling biography of career criminal Henry Hill (a compelling performance by Ray Liotta). In 1980, to save his neck, Hill gave evidence that convicted several dozen mafiosi and then went into hiding under the federal witness protection programme. A peculiarly brutal pre-credit sequence of a 1970 underworld murder strips the euphemistic shroud off the phrase “taken for a ride”. It’s followed by Hill’s unrepentant declaration: “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.” The picture observes his progress over some 25 years in a New York mafia family that has taken him under its wing, and twice he goes to jail without betraying his lethal comrades Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, but finally, after getting involved with drugs and sniffing too much of his own merchandise, he cracks. The film is accompanied by a series of excellent documentaries in which his collaborators explain how Scorsese made crucial decisions about freeze-frames, long takes, voiceovers, the evocative use of popular music and so on to create the film’s elaborate texture.GoodFellas is a great auteur’s masterpiece. Philip French
Times review:“Is it safe? Is it safe?” The centrepiece torture scene, in which Laurence Olivier’s Nazi dentist Dr Szell drills the truth out of Dustin Hoffman’s innocent patsy, is iconic. Hoffman’s expression of dawning dread as the dental instruments are revealed matches that of the audience. Yet everything else here — the gritty supporting players (Roy Scheider, William Devane), the conspiracy theories and the Central Park finale — marks the pinnacle of 1970s paranoia thrillers, as Hoffman’s Jewish graduate student is sucked into a shadowy world of postwar spooks and power politics by his CIA agent brother (Scheider). Olivier, who was having cancer treatment during filming and taking painkillers to get through it, was nominated for an Oscar.Kevin Maher
Chicago Reader review: This 1946 domestic epic about three World War II veterans returning to
civilian life, 172 minutes long and winner of nine Oscars, isn’t
considered hip nowadays. Its director, William Wyler, and literary
source, MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Glory for Me (adapted here by
Robert Sherwood), are far from fashionable, and the real veteran in the
cast, Harold Russell, who lost his hands in the war, has occasioned
outraged reflections from critic Robert Warshow about challenged
masculinity and even sick jokes from humorist Terry Southern. But I’d
call this the best American movie about returning soldiers I’ve ever
seen—the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its
times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg
Toland’s deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever
did. The rest of the cast—including Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa
Wright, Fredric March, Cathy O’Donnell, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael,
and Ray Collins—is strong too. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of the Funeral Parade strand at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find all the details here.
Welcome
to the reason this blog exists. In December 2010 I watched this film, a
movie I went to see when restored and re-released in cinemas in 1983,
on television. I thought afterwards how much I would love to see this
movie on the big screen again and that prompted an idea to write a daily
blog picking a film to see in London. The purpose of starting the blog
was to highlight to film lovers the best movies on the capital's
repertory cinema circuit.
What
writing the blog has also done is reinvigorate my moviegoing. The act
of putting this small contribution to the London film scene together has
resulted in encouraging me to go and see more movies. I hope the blog
has had that impact on others too. This brilliant restoration of one of
the greatest Hollywood films of all time comes highly recommended. Many
believe Judy Garland gave her greatest performance in this film and one
critic has called Mason's the best supporting performance by a male
actor in modern Hollywood. Try and get to see A Star is Born where it
should be seen - in a cinema.
Chicago
Reader review: Even
in this incomplete restoration George Cukor's 1954 musical remake of
the 1937 Hollywood drama is devastating. Judy Garland plays a young
singer discovered by aging, alcoholic star Norman Maine (James
Mason), who helps her to fame as "Vicki Lester" even as his
career slips. Garland gives a deeply affecting performance--halting,
volatile, unsure of herself early on and unsure of Norman later--and
her musical numbers are superb. Yet the film's core is its
two-character scenes, in which small shifts in posture subtly
articulate the drama's essence. Cukor gives his preoccupation with
self-image a surprisingly anti-Hollywood spin: despite the many
industry-oriented group scenes, the characters seem fully authentic
only when they're alone with each other. The scenes of Lester acting
seem tainted with artifice, and her a cappella performance of her
current hit for Norman on their wedding night further separates the
public from the private. Later, reenacting the production number shot
that day, she uses a food cart for a dolly and a chair for a harp;
Cukor's initial long take heightens the intimacy between her and
Norman, just as the household props implicitly critique studio
artificiality. All that matters, Cukor implies, is what people can
try to become for each other. The film was badly mangled when Warner
Brothers cut a half hour shortly after its release; this 1983
35-millimeter restoration replaces some footage, offering stills when
only the sound track could be found. Fortunately these slide shows
are confined to early scenes, giving some sense of what was
lost. Fred
Camper
No 2: Moss Rose (Ratoff, 1947): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pmA 35mm screening in the 'Projecting the Archive' strand at BFI Southbank introduced by Josephine Botting, BFI Curator.
BFI introduction: We mark the centenary of Peggy Cummins with a film from her Hollywood
period – one of three collaborations with director Ratoff. Marjorie
Bowen’s 1934 source novel was itself based on an unsolved Victorian
murder and this adaptation features Cummins as a Cockney chorus girl who
blackmails a rich gentleman she suspects of being the killer. Despite
the excellent cast and crack screenwriting team, the film didn’t enhance
Cummins’ stateside career. Nevertheless, it remains an entertaining
mystery thriller set against the backdrop of foggy Victorian London,
Hollywood-style.
This 35mm presentation (introduced by season programme assistant Sean Atkinson), also screened on January 29th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Richard
Linklater's delightfully different and immensely enjoyable second
feature (1991) takes us on a 24-hour tour of the flaky dropout culture
of Austin, Texas; it doesn't have a continuous plot, but it's brimming
with weird characters and wonderful talk (which often seems improvised,
though it's all scripted by Linklater, apparently with the input of some
of the participants, as in his later Waking Life). The structure of dovetailing dialogues calls to mind an extremely laid-back variation of The Phantom of Liberty or Playtime.
“Every thought you have fractions off and becomes its own reality,”
remarks Linklater himself to a poker-faced cabdriver in the first (and
in some ways funniest) scene, and the remainder of the movie amply
illustrates this notion with its diverse paranoid conspiracy and
assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists,
college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and
layabouts (around 90 in all). Even if the movie goes nowhere in terms of
narrative and winds up with a somewhat arch conclusion, the highly
evocative scenes give an often hilarious sense of the surviving dregs of
60s culture and a superbly realized sense of a specific community. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 16th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the
French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s troubled and troubling 1960 account
of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and
philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of
world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters—a
student, an expatriate American, members of a low-budget theater company
rehearsing Pericles—as the student tries to recover a tape of
guitar music by a deceased Spanish emigre who may have committed
suicide. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu;
Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room
flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film’s
title (which is countered by the opening epigraph from Charles Peguy:
“Paris belongs to no one”). Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out film review: Martin Scorsese's magnificent film, taken from Edith Wharton's novel, is set in
1870s New York and centres on lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose
plans to wed the impeccably connected Mary Welland (Wynona Rider) are upset by
his love for her unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer).
The performances are excellent, while the director employs all the
tools of his trade to bring his characters and situations vividly to
life; from the start, it's clear from the speedy cutting and sumptuous
mise-en-scène that Scorsese and his team are intent on drawing us into
the heart of Archer's perceptions and the world around him (this is,
most certainly, an expressionist film). Decor reflects and oppresses
characters; posture, gesture and glance (like the witty, ironic
narration) convey not only individual psychology but the ideals of an
entire, etiquette-obsessed elite. Everything here serves to express an
erotic fervour, imprisoned by unbending social rituals designed to
preserve the status quo in favour of a self-appointed aristocracy.
Scorsese's most poignantly moving film. Geoff Andrew
Time Out review: That old formula, handcuffed captor and captive who become buddies on
the run, gets an injection of new life from the playing of the cast.
Bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) captures bail-jumping accountant Jon
Mardukas (Charles Grodin) in New York, but his problems really start when he
tries to deliver him to the bail bondsman in LA. Mardukas, learning that
his employer was a Mafia mobster, stole millions which he distributed
among the poor, and Walsh has to run the gauntlet of the FBI, the Mob
and a rival bounty hunter (Ashton), besides putting up with his
captive's concern about smoking and morality. Both actors get off on
each other, improvising routines and inhabiting the standard Odd Couple
teaming so interestingly that at times the film touches a profundity.
Here and there, director Brest succumbs to the car chase, but overall
the movie is way above average for the genre. Brian Case Here (and above) is the trailer.
This is a 35mm presentation also screening on December 9th, plus January 31st and February 14th. You can find all the 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.
An
appropriate annual New Year's Eve screening of this re-released
crowd-pleaser, the Prince Charles Cinema showing the movie on 35mm. The film is also being shown on
February 14th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Too
often dismissed as the bland, cutesy, cakey-bakey face of the modern
romcom, the late Nora Ephron was an unacknowledged genius when it came
to screenplay construction – and ‘When Harry Met Sally’ remains her
finest work. This is a film where everything works: Billy Crystal and
Meg Ryan’s just-this-side-of-smug central couple, the gorgeous
photography of New York through the changing seasons, even Harry Connick
Jr’s jazz-lite soundtrack. And it’s all rooted in that flawless script.
The story is simple: Crystal and Ryan meet after college, and loathe
one another on sight. As the years pass the random meetings pile up, and
dislike turns to reluctant friendship. But, as the film insistently,
infamously asks, can men and women ever really be just friends? It’s not
just that Ephron poses these kinds of obvious-but-important questions.
It’s that she does so while circumventing romantic clichés left and
right, creating unforgettably loveable characters and throwing in some
of the most fluid, insightful and witty set-piece conversations ever
written (the diner orgasm is the most famous, but it’s the tip of a very
large iceberg). ‘Perfect’ is a big word to use about any film, but in
this case no other will do. Tom Huddleston
Chicago Reader review: Released in 1975, near the end of Arthur Penn's most productive period (which began in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde),
this haunting psychological thriller ambitiously sets out to unpack
post-Watergate burnout in American life. Gene Hackman plays an LA
detective tracking a runaway teenager (Melanie Griffith in her screen
debut) to the Florida Keys while evading various problems of his own
involving his father and his wife. The labyrinthine mystery plot and
pessimistic mood suggest Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, and like
them screenwriter Alan Sharp has more than conventional mystery
mechanics on his mind. One of Penn's best features; his direction of
actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout. With Jennifer Warren,
Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars and James Woods. Jonathan Rosenabum
This is a 35mm presentation also screening on January 7th, 16th and 30th. Details here.
Time Out review: Paul Thomas Anderson's
meandering multi-story megasoap with a message is over-ambitious,
self-conscious, self-indulgent, self-important and clumsy into the
bargain. But it's also one of the most enthralling and exhilarating
American movies in ages. Much in the style of Nashville and Short Cuts
(though lacking Altman's light touch), this intimate epic charts the
various fortunes, over a day or so, of various individuals living in the
San Fernando Valley - including the dying Earl (Jason Robards), his
young wife Linda (Julianne Moore), and his nurse Phil (Philip Seymour
Hoffman); Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise), prophet of machismo; and numerous
people associated, past or present, with a TV quiz show - whose paths
cross by design, destiny, chance or coincidence. Insofar as the film is
about 'story', little happens save that Anderson initially conceals
information, and then slowly scatters snippets so that we can piece the
jigsaw together. For all the humour, it's a dark portrait of loss,
lovelessness and fear of failure in contemporary America, and not a film
that trades in understatement. As the lost souls make their way towards
- what? - redemption? - a deus ex machina plot development occurs, as
contrived, ludicrous, bold and grandly imaginative as any Biblical flood
or plague. Geoff Andrew
