Chicago Reader review: Producer-writer-director Ken Russell updates the last novel of Dracula‘s Bram Stoker (known as The Garden of Evil
in the U.S.), about the discovery of a somewhat vampiristic ancient
anti-Christian cult built around a giant white worm in rural England.
For once, Russell’s over-the-top conceits are anchored in a fairly
humdrum horror story and allowed to flourish mainly at privileged
moments of hallucinatory delirium; the rest of the time the storytelling
is serviceable if occasionally lumpy. But the mad campy moments—which
chiefly involve snake woman Amanda Donohoe slinking around in various
stages of undress or in dominatrix outfits—are worth waiting for. With
Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, Peter Capaldi, Sammi Davis, Stratford
Johns, and a great many B-film accessories, including snakes, worms,
dildos, caves, dungeons, and tatty special effects (1988). Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Vincent Gallo's
directorial debut is one of a kind, an eccentric, provocative comedy
which laces a poignant love story with both a sombre, washed-out
naturalism and surreal musical vignettes. Throwing out the standard
repetitions of shot/reverse shot, Gallo brings an individual film
grammar to the screen, a beguiling mix of formal tropes and
apparently impetuous conceits. If not autobiographical, then at least
deeply personal, the film follows one Billy Brown (Gallo) out of
prison and back to his hometown, Buffalo, NY. There he kidnaps a
girl, Layla (Christine Ricci) a busty, blonde in two-inch skirt and
dazzling fairy tale slippers, and entreats her to play his loving
wife for his parents' benefit. The homecoming goes a long way to
explain Billy's aggressive insecurity: his indifferent mom (Anjelica
Huston) is a rabid football obsessive, while his dad (Ben Gazzara) is
taciturn and hostile, though taken with Layla. The cruel caricature
of this sourly funny episode is tempered by Layla's sweetness.
Billy's turmoil is redeemed in her simplicity. You may scoff at such
blatant male wish-fulfilment, but when Billy finally opens himself to
the threat of intimacy, it's a heart-rending moment. A brave, honest,
stimulating film, this reaches parts other movies don't even know
exist. Tom Charity
This is part of a great Eric Rohmer season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Eric Rohmer’s least typical and least popular film also happens to be
his best: a wonderful version of Chretien de Troyes’ 12th-century epic
poem, set to music, about the adventures of an innocent knight.
Deliberately artificial in style and setting—the perspectives are as
flat as in medieval tapestries, the colors bright and vivid, the musical
deliveries strange and often comic—the film is as faithful to its
source as it can be, given the limited material available about the
period. Rohmer’s fidelity to the text compels him to include narrative
descriptions as well as dialogue in the sung passages. Absolutely
unique—a must for medievalists, as well as filmgoers looking for
something different. This film also features the acting debut of the
late and very talented Pascal Ogier. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Sophisticated British comedy starring matinee idol Ivor Novello as a railway Romeo with an introduction to the film by Michael Williams, author of Ivor Novello: Screen Idol. This is a 35mm presentation from the BFI National Archive,
BFI introduction: Train attendant Gaston has a girl in every city and juggles them with
farcical results. Ivor Novello effortlessly made the transition from
silent to sound stardom and this romantic comedy demonstrates how
perfectly he suited the genre. Litvak directs with a light touch and
more than a nod to the tradition of European filmmaking that provided
his training. The Continental feel is cemented by the cinematography of
Günther Krampf and Alfred Junge’s art direction, including a replica of a
luxurious train on the set at Shepherd’s Bush. It’s a film so lavish,
even the jewelry gets a credit.
Garden Cinema introduction to new 'London Reviewed' season in association with the London Review of Books: LRB Screen returns
to the Garden Cinema with a new series exploring visions of London
created by non-British filmmakers: films in which the city is a key
player, rather than a backdrop; in which its buildings, streets, parks
and rivers cast a distinctive shadow over the drama; in which a fresh
encounter makes the city unfamiliar and mysterious again. London Reviewed begins in perhaps the only way it could, with Blow-Up,
Antonioni’s classic countercultural take on (mis)perception and
(un)reality in the swinging 1960s. Adapted by the great Marxist
playwright Edward Bond from a short story by the cult Argentinian writer
Julio Cortázar, the film follows a fashion photographer (Hemmings,
channelling David Bailey) who thinks he might have unintentionally
photographed a murder. Moving from the heart of the zeitgeist to a South
London park that proves pivotal, its richness in social, cultural and
architectural detail makes it one of the defining works of the decade. Introducing
the film, and discussing it afterwards with regular host Gareth Evans,
will be Miles Aldridge, the acclaimed fashion photographer and artist.
Born two years before the film’s release, Aldridge grew up in the heart
of the cultural scene it portrays and has since created his own highly
distinctive photographic signature.
Chicago Reader review: Michelangelo Antonioni’s sexy art-house hit of 1966, which played a
substantial role in putting swinging London on the map, follows a day
in the life of a young fashion photographer (David Hemmings) who
discovers, after blowing up his photos of a couple glimpsed in a
park, that he may have inadvertently uncovered a murder. Part erotic
thriller (with significant glamorous roles played by Vanessa
Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Verushka, and Jane Birkin), part exotic
travelogue (featuring a Yardbirds concert, antiwar demonstrations,
street mimes, one exuberant orgy, and a certain amount of pot), this
is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and
pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than
worrying) that you’re likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions
— which become prevalent only at the very end — and go with the
60s flow, just as the original audiences did. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is a 16mm presentation in the Celluloid on Sunday strand at the ICA.
Time Out review: 'There are many ways to tell a story, realism is just the most dull.' That, at any rate, is the ethos of the writers of The Love Judge,
a TV show set in a California divorce court. Here circus lesbians vie
with schizophrenic opera divas and stripper nuns for truth, justice and
alimony. The writers' lot seems mundane in comparison, though these
maladjusted under-achievers are a colourful group: Mark (Chester) is
still grieving for his lover who died a year ago of AIDS, but he's in
with a chance for a production job and is besotted with Bill (Arquette).
Jeremy (Wilborn) says Bill's a lost cause, and Leslie (Douglas) agrees
with him; she prefers Ben, the photocopy repairman. Meanwhile, the boss,
Jo (Beat), is incensed to find her new sofa despoiled with sperm stains
every morning. While Glatzer's debut boasts a good number of campy,
enjoyable scenes (notably 'extracts' from The Love Judgefeaturing the likes of Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) and a stand-out performance from Jackie Beat,
it's a surprisingly well structured, carefully nuanced affair (taking
place over a working week, and, except in the extracts, never leaving
the office). A genuinely moving comedy. Tom Charity
This great, late Fritz Lang film is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA Cinema. You can find the details here.
"What, then, is this film really? Fable,
parable, equation, blueprint? None of these things, but simply the
description of an experiment." – Jacques Rivette
The subject of one of Rivette's most famous and decidedly inscrutable essays for Cahiers du cinéma, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is at its heart, as Rivette elucidates, a treatise on the very concepts of innocence and guilt.
Chicago Reader review: Fritz Lang’s last American film, shot in a stripped-down, almost
anonymous style that seems to befit its bitterness and disillusion.
Reporter Dana Andrews has himself framed for the murder of a stripper in
order to expose the incompetence of the police and the fallacy of
capital punishment. But after he’s sentenced, the evidence that will
clear him is lost when his editor is killed in an accident. Once he’s
raised the standard social issues, Lang destroys them all with a
shatteringly nihilistic conclusion. Joan Fontaine is the Lang heroine to
end (literally) all Lang heroines, at least in Hollywood. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Although Andrei Tarkovsky regarded this 1972 SF spectacle in 'Scope as
the weakest of his films, it holds up remarkably well as a soulful
Soviet “response” to 2001: A Space Odyssey, concentrating on the
limits of man's imagination in relation to memory and conscience. Sent
to a remote space station poised over the mysterious planet Solaris in
order to investigate the puzzling data sent back by an earlier mission, a
psychologist (Donatas Banionis) discovers that the planet materializes
human forms based on the troubled memories of the space
explorers—including the psychologist's own wife (Natalya Bondarchuk),
who'd killed herself many years before but is repeatedly resurrected
before his eyes. More an exploration of inner than of outer space,
Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's
boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances
by all the principals. In Russian with subtitles. 165 min.
Jonathan Rosenabum
This 35mm presentation also screens on June 5th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Peter Greenaway’s programmatic and schematic 1989 dark comedy about
conspicuous consumption isn’t very funny, although it offers a nearly
unbroken string of obnoxious verbal abuse—misogynist, racist,
scatological—from a crook (Michael Gambon) who runs an expensive gourmet
restaurant. Similarly, it isn’t very erotic, although it features a
great deal of nudity, and there’s also fair amount of unpleasant (if
otherwise affectless) violence. The film is mainly set in the canyonlike
rooms of the restaurant—immaculately lit and shot by master French
cinematographer Sacha Vierny in ‘Scope, with elaborate color coding,
extended tracking shots, and a striking neoclassic score by Michael
Nyman. Greenaway has suggested that this is supposed to be an attack on
Thatcher England, but while his film certainly has the nastiness of
satire, it doesn’t have much political focus; petty malice rather than
anger is the main bill of fare, with deep-dish notations about food and
sex thrown in for spice. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is part of a great Eric Rohmer season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Eric Rohmer’s detailed, infinitely subtle 1976 retelling of a Heinrich
von Kleist story about an Italian aristocrat who discovers,
unaccountably, that she’s pregnant. Rohmer deals with grand
passions—love and hate, dignity and humility, forgiveness and
contrition—but in an understated way that makes the emotion seem that
much more true. The film’s slow, stately pace and the quiet way in which
it makes its points give it the aura of a neoclassical dream, a fading
vision of the virtue of gentility. With Edith Clever and Bruno Ganz. Dave Kehr
Introduced by Jon Jost, filmmaker, cinematographer and friend of Robina Rose
Demonstrating the influence of Meshes of
the Afternoon and Jeanne Dielman, and starring punk icon Jordan, the
moody, atmospheric Nightshift (1981) by Robina Rose is newly restored from
original camera elements, and looks beautiful.
BFI introduction: Legendary punk stayover The Portobello Hotel provides the location for
Robina Rose’s stunning, psycho-dramatic long-night-of-the-soul. The
thankless, dreamlike monotony and stillness of nocturnal reception work
shifts and mutates with the eruptive arrival of eccentric guests from
London’s counterculture, including Heathcote Williams and Anne
Rees-Mogg. The Penguin Café Orchestra’s Simon Jeffes soundtracks the
uncanny temporal fluctuations and strange events. Tonight’s screening is
dedicated to the memory of Robina Rose, who died in January.
Chicago Reader review: Two college students from New York (Ralph Macchio and Mitchell
Whitfield) are wrongly accused of killing a clerk in a convenience store
in Wahzoo City, Alabama, and one’s Brooklyn cousin–a rookie lawyer (Joe
Pesci)–arrives with his fiancee (Marisa Tomei) to defend them in what
proves to be his first court case. While it’s easy to imagine an
infinite number of bad courtroom comedies based on this scenario, this
movie turns out to be wonderful–broad and low character comedy that’s
solidly imagined and beautifully played. Far from having a bone to pick
with either side of the cultural collision, writer-producer Dale Launer
(Ruthless People) and director Jonathan Lynn (Nuns on the Run), both
surpassing their earlier accomplishments, are clearly equal-opportunity
caricaturists, with affection for both the southern and northern
factions in the movie. The cast (which also includes a very wry Fred
Gwynne and Austin Pendleton in a cameo role) is uniformly good, but
Tomei is especially worth noting as the lawyer’s smart and feisty
girlfriend; her performance triumphs over an improbable number of
costume changes. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Rio introduction to a special screening: Revisiting a landmark 1987 Rio event with a screening and discussion
that not only pays tribute to the visionary work of David Lynch, but
also celebrates the enduring importance of protest, dialogue, and
critical engagement. The death of David
Lynch offers us the special opportunity to revisit a landmark
screening of BLUE VELVET, held at the cinema on Thursday 25 July
1987. Promoted by the controversy over the film, it was followed by a
discussion with renowned film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey,
whose influential essay “Netherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus
and Blue Velvet” explored how the film uncovered deeper
psychological forces in society. The event was chaired by Mandy
Merck, then editor of leading film journal, Screen. By then, BLUE
VELVET had already stirred significant concern because of its graphic
depictions of violence and sexuality. What made the Rio’s screening
particularly unique was the response from some of its own staff, who
not only objected to the film on personal grounds but took the
unusual step of protesting outside the cinema. They handed out
leaflets to attendees, arguing that the film’s portrayal of women
violated the Rio’s anti-sexist commitments. This upcoming screening is a re-staging of that memorable event and
will reflect on how debates around this now cult classic have evolved
over the past four decades. We are delighted that both Laura Mulvey
and Mandy Merck, who has been researching the events at the Rio
alongside feminist debates of the 1980s, will return for a
post-screening discussion, hosted by Rio regular Helen de Witt, who
was present at the original 1987 event.
Chicago Reader review: It's
personal all right, also solipsistic, intransigent, and occasionally
ridiculous. David Lynch's 1986 fever-dream fantasy, of a young college
student (Kyle MacLachlan) returned to his small-town roots and all
manner of strangeness, is replete with sexual fear and loathing,
parodistic inversions (of Capra, Lubitsch), and cannibalistic recyclings
from Lynch's own Eraserhead and Dune.
The bizarrely evolving story—MacLachlan becomes involved with two
women, one light and innocent (Laura Dern, vaguely lost), the other dark
and sadomasochistic (Isabella Rossellini), as well as with a murderous
psychopath (a brilliantly demented Dennis Hopper)—seems more obsessive
than expressive at times, and the commingling of sex, violence, and
death treads obliquely on familiar Ken Russell territory: it's Crimes of Passion with
the polarities reversed. Still, the film casts its spell in countless
odd ways, in the archetype-leaning imagery, eccentric tableau styling,
and moth-in-candle-flame attraction to the subconscious twilight. Pat Graham
This classic supernatural chiller has an atmosphere and feeling of dread and evil that is hard to shake. Guy Lodge sums that up well for his feature on the film for the Guardian here. The film also screens at BFI Southbank on May 21st with an introduction by writer, lecturer and producer Mo Moshaty.
Time Out review: Often overwrought in its performances, this adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House
- a group of people gather in a large old house to determine whether or
not a poltergeist is the source of rumours that it is haunted - still
manages to produce its fair share of frissons. What makes the film so
effective is not so much the slightly sinister characterisation of the
generally neurotic group, but the fact that Robert Wise makes the house itself
the central character, a beautifully designed and highly atmospheric
entity which, despite the often annoyingly angled camerawork, becomes
genuinely frightening. At its best, the film is a pleasing reminder that
Wise served his apprenticeship under Val Lewton at RKO. Geoff Andrew
Chicago Reader: It was a dark and stormy night . . . There’s obviously no cure for Ken Russell (Crimes of Passion, Lisztomania),
the Bulwer-Lytton of our cinematic subconscious, but this travestying
of history and literary imagination seems even more overwrought than
usual, a free-form, psychodramatic yowl in the direction of Nightmare
Abbey. It’s an evening with Lord Byron and the Shelleys that Russell
serves up, mad Fuselian geniuses after his own demented design (and if
not, well, literary history be damned), and the seeds of the
Frankenstein myth and modernist self-consciousness are laid on a long
night of excremental (as in sacramental) excess and hysterical acting
out. The thematic intermixing of sexuality and death, of imaginative
rebirth and visceral disgust, is characteristic of Russell, as is the
cartoonishly heavy hand with which he trowels it all on: he’s as subtle
as a supermarket tabloid, and just as obsessed with literal,
concretizing images of perversity. Still, it’s fascinating to watch this
frenetic concoction unwind (an Altered States before the fact, hallucinogenically revised), though I’d probably stop short of calling it a pleasure. Pat Graham
This screening is part of the Black Debutantes: A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Shot on the cheap in Evanston and Chicago, this 1999 drama by Zeinabu
Irene Davis manages to surmount its budget limitations through the
beauty and symmetry of its narrative. In the early 20th century a deaf
black woman (Michelle A. Banks) struggles to overcome the three strikes
against her, even as she falls for a hearing but illiterate stockyard
worker (John Earl Jelks); interspersed with this tale, and starring the
same actors, is a modern story about another deaf black woman and her
hearing boyfriend. Davis shoots in black-and-white, using archival
photos to establish the turn-of-the-century setting, but they’re so
evocatively deployed that you might forget they’re a money-saving
device. The storytelling is pointedly visual, modeled after the silent
cinema, and the resulting purity of emotion elevates even the modern-day
love story. JR Jones
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
This
rarely screened George Cukor 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.
Tonight’s film (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.
Chicago Reader review: Feelings of great depth and poignancy surface unpredictably in this film
by George Cukor, though they have little to do with the ostensible
subject: the director seems to be responding to the material in private,
wholly personal ways completely divorced from the concerns of his
collaborators. The screenplay, an old rewrite of Old Acquaintance by Gerald Ayers (Foxes),
is one of the worst Cukor has had to work with in his long career,
redolent of strained staircase wit and false sophistication. The lead
performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college
friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor
audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in
evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark
asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.
Dave Kehr
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
This late John Huston 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.
Everyone
will be doing Huston's film a favour if they try hard not to compare it
with the now classic Malcolm Lowry novel. In fact it captures the
doomed spirit of the original, while - rightly - in no way apeing its
dense, poetic style. Huston opts for straightforward narrative, telling
the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic English ex-diplomat who
embraces his own destruction in Mexico shortly before the outbreak of
World War II. As the limp-wristed observers of this manic process,
Anthony Andrews and Jacqueline Bisset are at best merely decorative, at worst an
embarrassment, and the film's success rests largely on an (often
literally) staggering performance from Albert Finney as the dipso diplo.
Slurring sentences, sweating like a pig, wobbling on his pins, he
conveys a character who is still, somehow, holding on to his sense of
love and dignity. Not for the purists, maybe, but the last half-hour, as
Firmin plunges ever deeper into his self-created hell, leaves one
shell-shocked. Richard Rayner
This
great, late Billy Wilder 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.
Chicago Reader review: This 1972 release is the most underrated of all Billy Wilder comedies
and arguably the one that comes closest to the sweet mastery and lilting
grace of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch. Jack Lemmon arrives at a small
resort in Italy to claim the body of his late father, who’s perished in a
car accident; there he meets Juliet Mills, whose mother has died in the
same accident and, as it turns out, had been having an affair with the
father. The development of Mills and Lemmon’s own romance over various
bureaucratic complications is gradual and leisurely paced; at 144
minutes, this is an experience to roll around on your tongue. Wilder and
I.A.L. Diamond adapted a relatively obscure play by Samuel A. Taylor,
and the lovely music is by Carlo Rustichelli; with Clive Revill and
Edward Andrews. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This
rarely screened George Cukor 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.
Tonight’s film (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.
Chicago Reader review: Feelings of great depth and poignancy surface unpredictably in this film
by George Cukor, though they have little to do with the ostensible
subject: the director seems to be responding to the material in private,
wholly personal ways completely divorced from the concerns of his
collaborators. The screenplay, an old rewrite of Old Acquaintance by Gerald Ayers (Foxes),
is one of the worst Cukor has had to work with in his long career,
redolent of strained staircase wit and false sophistication. The lead
performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college
friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor
audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in
evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark
asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.
Dave Kehr
