This screening is part of the Mai Zetterling season at BFI Southbank and also screens on May 21st. Details here. There is an introduction tonight by Professor Louis Lemkow, Mai Zetterling’s son.
BFI introduction: Jan returns with his fiancée to his childhood home – a sprawling estate
stuffed with antiques – where he relives his memories of his beautiful,
decadent and mercurial mother, and finds himself forced to confront his
unresolved Oedipal longings. Night Games was controversial upon its
release, with some outraged by scenes of incest, masturbation and a
birth at a debauched party. John Waters named it his favourite film.
This 35mm screening is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand (you can find full details here) and will be introduced by Sarah Cleary.
Chicago Reader: Dated and bowdlerized but nonetheless sincere, Vincente Minnelli’s 1956
‘Scope version of a Robert Anderson play—adapted by the author, with
Hays Office censorship—is about a persecuted, effeminate schoolboy taken
under the wing of an older woman, with John Kerr and Deborah Kerr (no
relation) re-creating their stage roles. The result may be less
memorable or celebrated than Minnelli’s other ‘Scope melodramas (The Cobweb, Home From the Hill, Some Came Running), but it’s still probably better than most contemporary movies. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: When Joachim Newman receives a call to come to the aid of his estranged
father, he finds himself caught up in a tangled web of intrigue. As a
devious widow, Mai Zetterling has some terrific scenes with her partner in
crime, played by Peter Cushing, but Baker steals the show as the
angst-ridden son.
Chicago Reader review: When it opened, this 1988 Oscar winner sounded like a worst-case
scenario for the most lachrymose movie of the year: Tom Cruise attends
the funeral of his long-estranged father and discovers that the entire
estate has been left to an older brother (Dustin Hoffman) whose
existence he’s never known about—an autistic, institutionalized idiot
savant with a photographic memory for numbers. He abducts his brother in
an attempt to claim half of the inheritance, but in the course of a
cross-country journey gradually learns to care for his sibling.
Fortunately, the script by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow isn’t half bad,
and both Barry Levinson’s direction and the performances are agreeably
restrained. Valeria Golino is appealing as Cruise’s girlfriend; Hoffman
makes his character pretty believable without milking the part for
pathos and tears, and it’s nice to see Cruise working for a change in a
context that isn’t determined by hard sell and hype. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
Roger Ebert website review: Jacques Rivette’s 1994, two-part film on Joan of Arc is absolutely one of the director’s masterpieces. Why? Firstly, at least as far as its immediate accessibility is concerned, it contains one of the great performances by Sandrine Bonnaire as the French warrior-saint. This film exists in an entirely different context than Robert Bresson’s
“The Trial of Joan of Arc,” which made a cinema icon out of Florence
Delay. In the Bresson picture Joan is circumscribed as falsely accused,
tormented. Rivette’s film puts Joan in a variety of situations. She’s a
pious teenage girl, she’s a determined persuader/politician, she’s an
inspired leader whose mere presence compels men who mocked her before
meeting her to immediately acknowledge her saintliness. Bonnaire
inhabits all of these modes with breathtaking immediacy. Rivette was a critic before he was a
filmmaker, and others have observed that this film shows its
consciousness of prior major films about Joan — by Dreyer, by Preminger,
by Bresson — by minimizing repetition of the events depicted in those.
The two parts “The Battles” and “The Prisons” concentrate not only on
events not treated by other films, but on the spaces between the most
famous events of Joan’s life. Rivette applies a cinematic style that’s
both impassioned and elegantly simple and rational to Joan’s inner and
outer life, using long takes and brilliantly considered camera movements
throughout. While my experience of the truncated version
was still a profound one, finally seeing the uncut version made me a
little angry. In the shortened version, some of the excisions were, if
not excusable, at least coherent. Lifting one entire abortive attempted
journey to find the Dauphin makes some sense. Cutting off Joan’s
dictation of her famous Holy Week letter to the King of England, on the
other hand, now seems inexcusable. The director’s cut also features a device entirely removed from the
prior version. Here, supporting characters directly address the camera
to fill gaps in the narrative of explain their relationship to Joan and
their motivations for helping her. This takes the film out of the realm
of the pure period piece, to be sure. Yet Rivette’s execution of this device is so credible that the effect is less postmodern than it is magical realist — you will believe there were film cameras in the fifteenth century. Glen Kenny
This is a 35mm presentation. Also screening on other dates this year - details here.
Time Out review: Investigating a bold armed robbery which has left three security guards
dead, LA cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), whose devotion to work is
threatening his third marriage, follows a trail that leads him to
suspect a gang of thieves headed by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). Trouble is,
McCauley's cunning is at least equal to Hanna's, and that makes him a
hard man to nail. Still, unknown to Hanna, McCauley's gang have their
own troubles: one of their number is a volatile psychopath, while the
businessman whose bonds they've stolen is not above some rough stuff
himself. Such a synopsis barely scratches the surface of Mann's masterly
crime epic. Painstakingly detailed, with enough characters, subplots
and telling nuances to fill out half a dozen conventional thrillers,
this is simply the best American crime movie - and indeed, one of the
finest movies, period - in over a decade. The action scenes are better
than anything produced by John Woo or Quentin Tarantino; the
characterisation has a depth most American film-makers only dream of;
the use of location, decor and music is inspired; Dante Spinotti's
camerawork is superb; and the large, imaginatively chosen cast gives
terrific support to the two leads, both back on glorious form. Geoff Andrew
The re-release of the rock showbiz drama will finally mean this terrific movie will get the attention it richly deserves. There are a number of screenings at BFI for this movie in May while this special event includes Noddy Holder, director Richard Loncraine and actor Tom Conti on stage for a Q&A.
BFI introduction: Gritty rather than glam, this incendiary, cult rock-biz classic sizzles
its way back to the big screen for its 50th anniversary. Confounding and
delighting audiences in equal measure at the height of Slade’s Top Ten
pop majesty, Slade in Flame remains a singular rags-to-riches music
film. Charting the rise of fictional rock group Flame, with Slade
themselves playing the band, it offered a witty, sublimely cynical and
warts-and-all inside-view of the music industry circa 1970. And it
features a soundtrack stuffed with high-octane Slade boot-stompers.
Labelled ‘the Citizen Kane of British pop movies’ by Mark Kermode, it
features pitch-perfect performances by Slade, alongside an outstanding
early role for Conti, brilliant as an icy businessman hell-bent on
making them stars. Newly remastered by the BFI from original film
materials, Slade in Flame returns in a blaze of glory. Vic Pratt
Chicago Reader review: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1971 film about a movie crew trapped in a Spanish seaside hotel, waiting first for the star (Eddie Constantine) to arrive and then for the director (Lou Castel) to find his inspiration. This edgy, violent, impacted movie was based on incidents that occurred during the shooting of Fassbinder’s Whity, and survivors claim that it more or less accurately records the paranoia and desperate needfulness that reigned on Fassbinder’s sets.It was also the last film of his ragged avant-gardist period; with the subsequent Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, he moved into an emulation of a Hollywood director’s distance and control. With Hanna Schygulla, Ulli Lommel, and Magdalena Montezuma. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Classically simple but relentlessly probing thriller, set in a French
village shadowed by the presence of a compulsive killer. Some lovely
Hitchcockian games, like the strange ketchup that drips onto a picnic
hamburger from a clifftop where the latest victim has been claimed. But
also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the 'exchange of
guilt' as Audran's starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly
drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact,
for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the
schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of
society's dead and maimed. With this film Claude Chabrol came full circle back
to his first, echoing not only the minutely detailed provincial
landscape of Le Beau Serge but its theme of redemption. The
impasse here, a strangely moving tragedy, is that there is no way for
the terrified teacher, bred to civilised restraints, to understand that
her primeval butcher may have been reclaimed by his love for her. Tom Milne
This late Stanley Donen film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man
is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of
Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course
in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new
season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The
men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady,
Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to
engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards
race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences
who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a
world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some
railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s
phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo;
others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a
transformed society.
This 35mm presentation is also screened on April 20th. Full details of the season can be found here. Chicago Reader review: A parody of Old Hollywood conventions that is, for once, clever,
insightful, and genuinely funny—thanks, no doubt, to the intelligence
and stylistic know-how brought to bear by Stanley Donen, who was there (Singin’ in the Rain).
It’s a double feature—a fight picture and a backstage musical—with
actors, lines, plot twists, sets, and shots repeated in both films. The
screenplay relies too heavily on facile non sequiturs, but Donen has the
shape down pat: squared off, symmetrical, and wholly self-contained. Dave Kehr
This screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since the 70s is one of the most
penetrating examinations of the process of art making on film. It
concerns the highly charged work of a figurative painter (Michel
Piccoli, giving the performance of his career) with his beautiful and
mainly nude model (Manon of the Spring’s Emmanuelle Beart), but also the
complex input and pressures of the painter’s wife and former model
(Jane Birkin), the model’s boyfriend (David Bursztein), and an art
dealer who used to be involved with the painter’s wife (Gilles Arbona).
The complex forces that produce art are the film’s obsessive focus, and
rarely has Rivette’s use of duration to look at process been as
spellbinding as it is here. The film runs for four hours, but the
overall effect is mesmerizing and perpetually mysterious (as Rivette
always is at his best), and not a moment is wasted. Rivette’s superb
sense of rhythm and mise en scene never falters, and the plot has plenty
of twists. Freely adapted from Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece
by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette, with exquisite
cinematography by William Lubtchansky, beautiful location work in the
south of France (mainly a 19th-century chateau), and drawings and
paintings executed by Bernard Dufour. The title, incidentally,
translates roughly as “the beautiful nutty woman” and is also the title
of the masterpiece the painter, emerging from ten years of retirement,
is bent on finishing. Winner of the grand prize at the 1991 Cannes film
festival. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Claude Chabrol’s richly ironic 1969 melodrama, in which it is shown that nothing revitalizes a dried-up marriage quite like murder. Not the least of the ironies is that the point is made sincerely and responsibly: when the film’s smug, tubby hero kills his wife’s lover, he genuinely becomes a richer, worthier individual. The observation of bourgeois life (as practiced in France, where it was perfected) is so sharp and funny that the film often feels like satire, yet its fundamental seriousness emerges in a magnificent last act, and an unforgettable last shot.
This film is part of the Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles Cinema and is also screened on May 28th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: This Ken Russell film (1980) is just as much a camp joke as Lisztomania or Mahler,
but this time nobody’s laughing, perhaps because Paddy Chayefsky’s
screenplay provided the first recognizably realistic context for
Russell’s obsessions since Women in Love. Chayefsky, who had his
name removed from the credits, may have thought it was about the agony
and ecstasy of scientific investigation, but in Russell’s hands it
becomes another nutball Neoplatonic allegory, riddled with Catholic
epiphanies. There isn’t a lucid moment in it (and much of the dialogue
is rendered unintelligible by Russell’s subversive direction), but it
has dash, style, and good looks, as well as the funniest curtain line
since Some Like It Hot. Dave Kehr
Barbican introduction (screening as part of the Cinema Restored series): Directed by Bachtiar Siagian, this
neorealist gem captures the turbulence and resilience of a community
caught in the fight for independence. The story follows Rusli, a wounded
freedom fighter who finds sanctuary in a remote, Dutch-occupied
village. As he heals under the care of Tipi and her father, the village
chief, bonds of loyalty, love, and courage emerge amidst the unrest. A powerful reflection on solidarity and survival, Turang offers
a rare cinematic insight into the spirit of a nation striving for
liberation. Don't miss this beautifully restored classic, a vital part
of Indonesia's film heritage.
Here's
one of the great films of recent times and an opportunity to see
Stanley Kubrick's much-underrated final movie in an original 35mm print. The movie is also screened on May 10th.
Chicago Reader review: Initial
viewings of Stanley Kubrick's movies can be deceptive because his films
all tend to be emotionally convoluted in some way; one has to follow
them as if through a maze. A character that Kubrick might seem to treat
cruelly the first time around (e.g., Elisha Cook Jr.'s fall guy in The
Killing) can appear the object of tender compassion on a subsequent
viewing. The director's desire to avoid sentimentality at all costs
doesn't preclude feeling, as some critics have claimed, but it does
create ambiguity and a distanced relationship to the central characters.
Kubrick's final feature very skillfully portrays the dark side of
desire in a successful marriage; since the 60s he'd been thinking about
filming Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant novella "Traumnovelle," and
working with Frederic Raphael, he's adapted it faithfully--at least if
one allows for all the differences between Viennese Jews in the 20s and
New York WASPs in the 90s. Schnitzler's tale, about a young doctor
contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering
that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies, has a somewhat
Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy (hence
Kubrick's title), and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this
delicate territory. Yet the story has been altered to make the
successful doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite and his wife
(powerfully played by Nicole Kidman) a little feistier; Kubrick's also
added a Zeus-like tycoon (played to perfection by Sydney Pollack) who
pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in fact only
summarizes the various mysteries, his cynicism and chilly access to
power revealing that Kubrick is more of a moralist than Schnitzler. To
accept the premises and experiences of this movie, you have to be open
to an expressionist version of New York with scant relation to the 90s
(apart from cellular phones and AIDS) and a complex reading of a
marriage that assumes the relations between men and women haven't
essentially changed in the past 70-odd years. This is a remarkably
gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like
Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over
time. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of a Reiner Werner Fassbinder season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: Fear and loathing in the mean streets of suburban Munich, where all
behaviour obeys the basest and most basic of drives, and fleeting
allegiances form and re-form in almost mathematically abstract
permutations until disrupted by the advent of an immigrant Greek
worker (played by Fassbinder himself; the title is a Bavarian slang
term for a gastarbeiter, implying tomcatting sexual proclivities) who
becomes the target for xenophobic violence. Fassbinder's
sub-Godardian gangster film début, Love is Colder than Death,
was dismissed as derivative and dilettanté-ish; this second feature,
based on his own anti-teaterplay, won immediate acclaim. It
still seems remarkable, mainly for Fassbinder's distinctive, highly
stylised dialogue and minimalist mise-en-scène that
transfigures a cinema of poverty into bleakly triumphant rites of
despair.Sheila Johnston