This 35mm presentation of The Master is repeated a number of times in March and April. Here are the full details via this link.
The Master was the best film of 2012 and if you read one lengthy article
on this movie make it J Hoberman's in the Guardian which you can find here.
Chicago Reader review: A self-destructive loner (Joaquin Phoenix), discharged from the navy
after serving in the Pacific in World War II, flounders back in the
States before coming under the wing of a charismatic religious leader
(Philip Seymour Hoffman) transparently based on L. Ron Hubbard, the
founder of Scientology. This challenging, psychologically fraught drama
is Paul Thomas Anderson's first feature since the commanding There Will Be Blood
(2007), and like that movie it chronicles a contest of wills between an
older man and a younger one, as the troubled, sexually obsessed, and
often violent young disciple tries to fit in with the flock that's
already gathered around the master. This time, however, the clashing
social forces aren't religion and capitalism but, in keeping with the
era, community and personal freedom—including the freedom to fail
miserably at life. The stellar cast includes Amy Adams, Laura Dern, and
Jesse Plemons. JR Jones
This film, which also screens on March 22nd, is part of the David Lynch season at Close-Up Cinema that runs throughout March. Full 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.
In
a Lonely Place is one of the best films about life in Hollywood and one
of Nicholas Ray's finest movies. Highly recommended. This 35mm screening is
part of a film noir season at the Prince Charles Cinema (you can find all the details here).
"I lived a few weeks while you loved me . . ."
Chicago Reader review: 'With
his weary romanticism, Humphrey Bogart was made for Nicholas Ray, and
together they produced two taut thrillers (the other wasKnock
on Any Door). In this one (1950, 94 min.), Bogart is an artistically
depleted Hollywood screenwriter whose charm is inextricable from his
deep emotional distress. He falls for a golden girl across the way,
Gloria Grahame, who in turn helps him face a murder charge. Grahame and
Ray were married, but they separated during the shooting, and the screen
breakup of the Bogart-Grahame romance consciously incorporates elements
of Ray's personality (he even used the site of his first Hollywood
apartment as Bogart's home in the film). The film's subject is the
attractiveness of instability, and Ray's self-examination is both
narcissistic and sharply critical, in fascinating combination. It's a
breathtaking work, and a key citation in the case for confession as
suitable material for art' Dave Kehr
This is a 35mm presentation and is also screened on April 12th. Details here.
Time Out review: Francis Ford Coppola’s sparse, prescient thriller is inner,
rather than outer-directed film about the threat of electronic
surveillance, conceived well before the Watergate affair broke. Acknowledged
as the king of the buggers, Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry
Caul is an intensely private man. Living alone in a scrupulously
anonymous flat, paying functional visits to a mistress who plays no
other part in his life, he is himself a machine; and the point Coppola
makes is that this very private man only acquires something to be
private about through the exercise of his skill as a voyeur. Projecting
his own lonely isolation on to a conversation he painstakingly pieces
together (mesmerising stuff as he obsessively plays the tapes over and
over, adjusting sound levels until words begin to emerge from the crowd
noises), he begins to imagine a story of terror and impending tragedy,
and feels impelled to try to circumvent it. In a splendidly Hitchcockian
denouement, a tragedy duly takes place, but not the one he foresaw; and
he is left shattered not only by the realisation that his soul has been
exposed, but by the conviction that someone must have planted a bug on
him which he simply cannot find. A bleak and devastatingly brilliant film. Tom Milne
Peter
Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in
Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried
his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to
appear on the programme.It wasan invitation that sadly was never extended to himandI thought of that tale when I wasactuallyasked to contributeto the most famousof all moviepolls, run by Sight & Sound magazine, the latest of which was in 2022. All those years of trawling the previous decades choiceswith rapt fascination, readingthe articles on the canonand the time keeping thatrunning list of my ten all-time favourites that wereinevitablemixed up withthegreatest in my headwas not wasted. Now,though,I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Othersweredoing the same,prompting responses varying widely from“it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”.
The
more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just
that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted
people to seebut had not been consideredin the previous voting,and modestlyhoping fora re-evalutionof the choices.I made two rules.All ofthe films in my list(reproduced below) would deserve to bepart oftheSight&SoundGreatest poll conversation andallthe choiceswould not havereceived a single vote in the previous 2012 poll.
Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases thereareverygoodreasonssome ofthese
films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from
view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in
the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The
heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared afterbombing at the box officeand thesubsequentdissolving of the director’sproduction company,deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishesin limbo, only seen at major retrospectives.The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are bothoncelost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery.White Dog,after a desultory release overshadowed bymisguidedaccusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years.Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, wasshownin 2013from(fortuitously I later discovered)16mm in an ICA gallery and feltthrillinglyauthentic,thesoundof thewhirring projectorand the artist’s singular framingcombining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:
Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)
Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)
Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
Four from the list have been shown in a London cinema since the poll appeared and now the Jacques Demy film gets two screenings at the Garden Cinema. Bay of Angels, which also screens on March 11th, is part of the Demy season there. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: Jacques Demy's second feature has a ravishing Jeanne Moreau, ash-blonde for the
occasion and dressed all in white, as a compulsive gambler who doesn't
care what happens to her so long as she has a chip to start her on the
roulette tables. Ostensibly the subject is gambling, but the real theme
is seduction - with Moreau casting a spell on Claude Mann that turns him every
which way - and this is above all a visually seductive film. Shot mainly
inside the casinos and on the sunstruck promenades of Nice and Monte
Carlo, it is conceived as a dazzling symphony in black and white.
Moreau's performance is magnificent, but it's really Jean Rabier's
camera which turns the whole film into an expression of sheer joy - not
only in life and love, but things. Iron bedsteads make arabesques
against white walls; a little jeweller's shop becomes a paradise of
strange ornamental clocks; a series of angled mirrors echo the heroine
as she runs down a corridor into her lover's arms; roulette wheels spin
to a triumphant musical accompaniment; and over it all hangs an aura of
brilliant sunshine. Tom Milne
Here (and above) are the evocative opening credits.
This film, by the great Jacques Tourneur, is prresented from a 35mm print.
Chicago Reader review: This 1956 masterpiece by Jacques Tourneur, best known for the stylish horror films Cat People and Curse of the Demon, begins as Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) meets Marie Gardiner (Anne Bancroft), who’s soon helping him evade the private investigator and two thugs chasing him. His explanation of why he can’t go to the police marks him as the typical film noir outsider. The story unfolds gradually, as Vanning’s flight is intercut with the investigator’s pursuit and with a series of flashbacks that reveal how he became wanted for murder; the intercutting develops each story in a parallel space or time, movingly articulating the theme of a character trapped by his history. Tourneur links scenes by cutting between footsteps or looks at a clock in different locales, and his images have a smooth, almost liquid quality. He eschews the high-contrast lighting of most noirs in favor of a moody, brooding poeticism in which shadows come because it’s nightfall. His delicate lyricism, which takes the natural world as the norm, is linked to the observational skills Vanning has developed–“I know where every shadow falls,” he says–but it also contrasts with the plot’s paranoia as the shadow world of noir meets the streets of LA or the Wyoming wilderness. Fred Camper
A
personal favourite. This is a long movie and I took a hip flask in when
I went to see this on a date at Notting Hill's Electric Cinema back in
the day. That worked wonderfully as this is a meandering film, probably
best seen under some sort of influence.
This 35mm presentation is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Jacques Rivette’s comic feminist extravaganza is as scary and unsettling
in its narrative high jinks as it is exhilarating in its uninhibited
slapstick (1974). Its slow, sensual beginning stages a meeting between a
librarian (Dominique Labourier) and a nightclub magician (Juliet
Berto). Eventually, a plot within a plot magically takes shape—a
somewhat sexist Victorian melodrama with Bulle Ogier, Marie-France
Pisier, Barbet Schroeder (the film’s producer), and a little girl—as
each character, on successive days, visits an old dark house and the
same events take place. The elaborate Hitchcockian doublings are so
beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and
power. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue with Eduardo
de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its euphoric
effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons,
musicals, thrillers, and serials). Jonathan Rosenbaum
Barbican introduction: This screening of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) is presented in response to Noah Davis’s Barbican exhibition 'Imitation of Wealth', creating a dialogue between film and art about themes of identity, aspiration, and representation. Sirk’s
lush melodrama examines the intersecting lives of two women—one black
and one white—and their daughters, navigating the complexities of race,
class, and familial sacrifice. The film’s exploration of constructed
identities and societal expectations resonates with Davis’s work, which
reimagines illusions of prosperity and cultural symbolism as layered
narratives about value and visibility. This screening invites
audiences to consider how both Davis and Sirk use their respective
mediums to critique systems of representation and question the ways we
assign meaning to art, labour, and life. (The other film screenings as part of the season can be found here).
Chicago Reader review: Douglas Sirk's 1959 film was the biggest grosser in Universal's history until the release of Airport,
yet it's also one of the most intellectually demanding films ever made
in Hollywood. The secret of Sirk's double appeal is a broadly
melodramatic plotline, played with perfect conviction yet constantly
criticized and challenged by the film's mise-en-scene, which adds levels
of irony and analysis through a purely visual inflection. Lana Turner
stars as a young widow and mother who will do anything to realize her
dreams of Broadway stardom; her story is intertwined with that of Susan
Kohner, the light-skinned daughter of Turner's black maid, who is
tempted to pass for white. By emphasizing brilliant surfaces, bold
colors, and the spatial complexities of 50s moderne architecture, Sirk
creates a world of illusion, entrapment, and emotional desperation. With
John Gavin, Sandra Dee, Dan O'Herlihy, Robert Alda, and Juanita Moore. Dave Kehr Here (and above) is the trailer.