This film, also screening on June 21st, is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Time Out review: Frank Perry and his scriptwriter-wife Eleanor have consistently made
provocative, offbeat films about mental and spiritual reawakening (until
the disastrous Mommie Dearest, that is). Some of them, like the allegorical The Swimmer,
have been intriguing catastrophes; this is one of the more successful.
Bored New York housewife Snodgress tires of smug, over-ambitious husband
Benjamin and his persistent nagging, and decides to gamble on an affair
with narcissistic writer Langella, only to find that relationship
equally dissatisfying. Often very funny in its acerbic swipes at
American success-orientated society (as revealed at a camp art preview
and an unsuccessful party), imaginatively scripted and acted (Richard Benjamin
is superbly repellent), it's an entertaining satire that disappoints
only in the stereotypically limited choices it offers to the woman. Geoff Andrew
Garden Cinema introduction: Alfredo
Gasper, a dissatisfied Buenos Aires newspaperman (Carlos Cores),
partners with Paar Liudas, a clever Hungarian refugee (Vassili
Lambrinos) who needs money to bring his family to Argentina. Together
they create a bogus correspondence school, exploiting the hopes of
would-be journalists. As their scheme succeeds beyond their wildest
dreams, a mystery woman from Liudas’ past sparks Gasper’s suspicion: his
charming colleague may be playing him for a sucker. Soon Gasper finds
himself plotting the perfect crime - but fate has many twists in store. This
adaptation of journalist Adolfo Jasca’s award-winning novel was
acclaimed upon its release, earning top prizes in 1957 from the
Argentine Film Critics Association for Best Picture, with Fernando Ayala
named Best Director. American Cinematographer magazine listed Los tallos amargos #49 on its roster of the 100 Best Photographed Films of All-Time.
This film is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. This very rare screening will feature an introduction by season curator Elena Gorfinkel.
BFI introduction: Made on the rocky Moab set of the Terence Stamp western Blue, Fade In
concerns a budding and unlikely city-country romance between a film
editor (Loden’s first leading role) and a Utah rancher. After editorial
meddling by Paramount, this film became the first pseudonymous ‘Alan
Smithee’ vehicle, shelved until a TV debut in 1973. Due to its unusual
production history, this is a rare opportunity to see this film on the
big screen.
Time Out review: Francis Ford Coppola's fourth feature, a fascinating early road movie made entirely
on location with a minimal crew and a constantly evolving script. Never
very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably because it
suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has far greater depth
and complexity to its curious admixture of feminist tract and pure
thriller. Shirley Knight is outstanding (in a superb cast) as the pregnant woman
who runs away in quest of the identity she feels she has lost as a Long
Island housewife, and finds herself increasingly tangled in the snares
of responsibility through her encounters with a football player left
mindless by an accident (James Caan) and a darkly amorous traffic cop
(Robert Duvall). Symbolism rumbles beneath the characterisations (Caan as the
baby she is running from and with, Duvall as the sexuality and
domination she is trying to deny) but it is never facile; and the
rhythms of the road movie (leading through wonderfully bizarre locations
to a resonantly melodramatic finale) confirm that Coppola's prime
talent lies in choreographing movement. Tom Milne
Garden Cinema introduction: A
treasure of Mexico’s cinematic golden age, this deliriously plotted
blend of gritty crime film, heart-tugging maternal melodrama, and mambo
musical is a dazzling showcase for iconic star Ninón Sevilla. She brings
fierce charisma and fiery strength to her role as a rumbera - a
female nightclub dancer - who gives up everything to raise an abandoned
boy, whom she must protect from his ruthless gangster father. Directed
at a dizzying pace by filmmaking titan Emilio Fernández, and shot in
stylish chiaroscuro by renowned cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa amid
smoky dance halls and atmospherically seedy underworld haunts, Victims of Sin is
a ferociously entertaining female-powered noir pulsing with the
intoxicating rhythms of some of Latin America’s most legendary musical
stars.
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 35mm presentation (also screening on June 8th) is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
BFI introduction: A tale of unfulfilled teenage desire set in Kansas circa 1928, Elia
Kazan’s hothouse parable (with an Academy Award winning screenplay by
playwright William Inge) examines the toll of Puritanical social
propriety and sexual repression on high-school sweethearts: Bud Stamper,
the child of oil wealth (Beatty’s Hollywood debut) and the fragile
Deanie. Loden’s tempestuous role as Bud’s wild flapper sister Ginny
provides a prominent foil for the film’s critique of judgmental
small-town mores.
Adrian Martin introduction: From the first notes of David Amram’s intense score and the
opening image of Bud (first-timer Warren Beatty) and Deanie (Natalie Wood)
kissing in a car by a raging waterfall, Splendor in the Grass sums up
the appeal of Hollywood melodrama at its finest: the passions repressed by
society (the setting is Kansas 1928) find a displaced expression in every
explosive burst of colour, sound and gesture. Repression is everywhere in this movie, a force that twists people
in monstrous, dysfunctional directions. Men are obliged to be successful and
macho while women must choose between virginity and whorishness – as is the
case for Bud’s unconventional flapper sister, indelibly incarnated by Barbara
Loden. Director Elia Kazan, like Arthur Penn, worked at the intersection
of studio-nurtured classical narrative and the innovative, dynamic forms
introduced by Method acting and the French New Wave. Here, collaborating with
the dramatist William Inge, he achieved a sublime synthesis of both approaches. The film offers a lucid, concentrated analysis of the social
contradictions determined by class, wealth, industry, technology, moral values
and gender roles within the family unit. At the same time, it is a film in
which the characters register as authentic individuals, acting and reacting in
a register that is far from the
Hollywood
cliché. Full review here.
This is part of the Reiner Werner Fassbinder season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Time Out review: One of Fassbinder's excellent melodramas. The director himself plays a
working-class man who wins a small fortune on the lottery and is
destroyed by men who befriend him on Munich's gay community. It's his
usual vision of exploitation and complicity hidden under the deceiving
mantle of love, but Fassbinder's precision, assured sense of milieu, and
cool but human compassion for his characters, make it a work of
brilliant intelligence. And the director himself is superb as the
none-too-intelligent hero. Geoff Andrew
I wrote about this extraordinary movie for the Guardian here when it was screened at the London Film Festival in 2011. This 35mm screening is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's presentation will include an extended introduction to the season by Elena Gorfinkel.
Time Out review: A remarkable one-off from Elia Kazan's wife. Shot in 16mm and blown up
to 35, it's a subtly picaresque movie about the wanderings of a
semi-destitute American woman. Directing herself, Barbara Loden manages to make the character at once completely convincing in her
soggy and directionless amorality, yet gradually sympathetic and even
heroic. After a desultory involvement with a bank robber, to whom she
becomes attached despite his unpredictable temper, Wanda botches
everything - having agreed to drive a getaway car for him - by getting
lost in a traffic jam; and our last glimpse of her is back on the road,
being picked up in a bar. The film is all the more impressive for its
refusal to get embroiled in half-baked political attitudinising; it's
good enough to make one regret that the director/star produced nothing
else before her untimely death from cancer. David Pirie
Chicago Reader review: The Tennessee branch of the Mississippi, that is, where TVA agent
Montgomery Clift is faced with the job of evicting a matriarch (Jo Van
Fleet) from her family island in order to complete a dam project. This
1960 drama is probably Elia Kazan’s finest and deepest film, a
meditation on how the past both inhibits and enriches the present. Lee
Remick costars as Van Fleet’s widowed daughter, giving one of the most
affecting performances of her underrated career. The tone shifts from
hysteria to reverie in the blinking of an eye, but Kazan handles it all
with a sure touch. Scripted by Paul Osborn, and adapted in part from
books by Borden Deal and William Bradford Huie. Dave Kehr
This screening is part of the 2025 Fashion in Film festival. Full details here.
Time Out review: Even on paper this couldn't have seemed such a terrific idea, and Demy's
attempt to fuse Cocteau with Disney via one of Perrault's less
endearing conceits (a gold-shitting donkey) contrives to be both garish
and coyly tasteful. Catherine Deneuve sings four Michel Legrand
ballads whose resemblance to each other is matched by their resemblance
to the composer's earlier work, while a soppy Jacques Perrin emerges as more
Prince Charles than Prince Charming. To its credit are Delphine Seyrig as a chic, malicious Fairy Godmother, and Marais as the genuinely Cocteau-esque King. Geoff Andrew
This 35mm screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
ICA introduction: General Montriveau, having returned from the Napoleonic Wars in despair,
quickly becomes enamored with Duchess Langeais. Across a series of
nocturnal visitations, the Duchess mercilessly toys with her
hot-tempered suitor, as the machinations of a shadowy conspiracy unfold
in the background. An incisive exploration of the social mores of courtship and the
maddening nature of desire, Jacques Rivette's adaptation of Honore de
Balzac's novella La Duchesse de Langeais is a biting chamber drama of selfish passions and competing agendas.
Chicago Reader review: Over the course of his long career, Jacques Rivette has mainly worked in
three modesviewing the present historically, period drama, and fantasy;
only in Celine and Julie Go Boating has he combined all three. His
other greatest works, L’Amour Fou and both versions of Out 1, are in the
first mode, even though they work with historical referencesRacine’s
Andromache and Balzac’s History of the Thirteen. Conversely, his period
films tend to avoid contemporary references. So his period adaptation of
the second of the three novellas in History of the Thirteen is a far
cry from Out 1 in terms of both method and substance; the only common
point is the focus on actors and mise en scene. The flirtation between a
married aristocrat (Jeanne Balibar) and a general (Guillaume Depardieu)
in Restoration Paris, inspired by a recent romantic frustration of
Balzac’s, is masterfully charted and adeptly played, but also rather
minimalist. It’s charged with nuance yet ultimately an exercise in
compressed literary adaptation. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI Screenonline review: IfJohn Osbornewas the original 'Angry Young Man' of British theatre in the 1950s, thenJoe Ortonwas probably the 'Naughty Young Man' of the 1960s.Entertaining Mr Sloanewas his first play, beginning as an experimental production at the Arts Theatre Club, London, in 1964, when Sloane was played byDudley SuttonandPeter Vaughantook the role of Ed. It won critical praise and theLondon Evening Standardaward for best play by a new dramatist, transferred to the West End for a long and successful run, and reached New York the following year. Audiences were shocked - and amused - by the prim dialogue contrasted with violent and outrageous action. This was something new, a style all ofOrton's own. The play is a black comedy and a parody of family life, dripping with sexual innuendo. It was produced for British television in 1968 (ITV, tx. 15/7/1968), and the film version appeared nearly two years later.Clive Exton's screenplay made some changes. The little suburban house becomes a mini-Gothic edifice complete with garden and conservatory. Almost blind in the play, the Dadda is the only character to 'see' through Sloane, but in the film he is equipped with a series of spy-holes throughout the house, through which he can watch every stage of Sloane's progress through his family. Ed's car is seen to be a bright pink Cadillac, which speaks volumes about the character. Douglas Hickoxhad toiled for nearly twenty years as an assistant director, and director of commercials and short documentaries, before landing this, his first important feature film. His opening sequence fully realises the spirit of the play in filmic terms, when the camera pans from a funeral to show the grotesque Kath eating an ice lolly in close-up, and then reveals Sloane sunbathing on an adjacent tombstone, while a heavenly choir sings on the soundtrack. Throughout the film, the outrageous situations are juxtaposed with the gothic windows and stained glass of the house.The Servant(Joseph Losey, 1963) also explored the theme of psychological and territorial ascendancy, but Sloane meets his match in Ed and Kath. Janet Moat
This 35mm screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
ICA introduction:
A solitary clockmaker finds
his nefarious attempts at blackmail sidetracked by the appearance of a
mysterious woman who bears a striking resemblance to a former lover.
Returning to a project he was forced to abandon more than thirty years
prior due to ill health, Jacques Rivette crafts an erotic, haunting and
formally audacious exploration of love and time, starring Emmanuelle
Béart and Jerzy Radziwilowicz.
This film is part of the Eric Rohmer season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A perfect film. Eric Rohmer
began his series titled "Comedies and Proverbs" with this
1981 tale of romantic entanglements, disappointments, and ever fresh
possibilities, all set in a verdant Paris. Shot in 16-millimeter, the
film has a simple, open visual style, yet its construction is
extremely complex and pointed, as Rohmer abandons the first-person
perspective of the "Six Moral Tales" in favor of an
elegant, intertwining pattern of shifting points of view. The title
character never appears but instead precipitates a chain of events
that pull a young postal worker (Philippe Marlaud), his older
girlfriend (Marie Riviere), and a teenage gamine (Anne-Laure Meury)
together and apart. Charming, languorous, piercing,
discreet—quintessential Rohmer, and more. Dave Kehr
BFI Southbank introduction: Mai Zetterling’s borstal drama pulls no punches in its portrayal of a group
of troubled young women who laugh, fight and fall in love within prison
walls. The claustrophobia is tangible while the raw female energy erupts
as constant noise, violence and frenetic dancing. Zetterling’s
meticulous work with the cast really shows in the performances, making
for a powerfully affecting film.
Time Out review: An early encounter between Kurosawa and two of his favourite actors,
Mifune and Shimura, both playing detectives in Japan's uneasy postwar
period under US imperialism. When Mifune's pistol is stolen, he is
overwhelmed by a feeling of dishonour rather than failure, and sets out
on a descent into the lower depths of Tokyo's underworld, which
gradually reveals Dostoievskian parallels between himself and his
quarry. A sweltering summer is at its height, and Kurosawa's strenuous
location shooting transforms the city into a sensuous collage of
fluttering fans and delicate, sweating limbs. A fine blend of US
thriller material with Japanese conventions, it's a small classic. Chris Peachment
This 4K screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
Time Out review: Jacques Rivette revisits familiar ground with this leisurely tale of romantic
intrigue and possibly dark deeds among members of a theatrical troupe
and their various acquaintances, but while it certainly lacks the edge
of Paris Nous Appartient, it nevertheless exerts immense charm.
Jeanne Balibar is the Parisian diva returning after three years in Italy in a
production of Pirandello's Come tu mi vuoi; Sergio Castellitto is her
lover, leading man and manager, jealous that she's in touch with her
(now married) ex, seeking out an apocryphal play by Goldoni, and drawn
to the daughter of a woman who may have the text. As ever, it's about
different kinds and levels of performance and falsehood, and shifts from
'realist' elements to something more fancifully theatrical (a
delightful duel - by drinking). Funny, sentimental but ironic, and
wondrously assured. Geoff Andrew
This screening is part of the 2025 Fashion in Film festival. Full details here.
Fashion in film festival introduction: This rarely screened film is a lush existentialist portrayal of personhood and contemplation of beauty as raw material. Written by and starringVeruschka von Lehndorff– the fashion model cum performance artist incarnate – and directed by the photographerFranco Rubartelli, this rarely screened film is a lush portrayal of personhood and contemplation of beauty as raw material. The screen is enveloped by the glittering miasma that is typical of the early 1970s. The model is a woman with a tortured soul. In the snowy landscape dreaming of sun and dust she is told: 'you’ll be like a tree taken away from the forest, your roots will be crying.' From its opening sequence we immediately see her iconography rooted into the earth as she appears camouflaged as a boulder in a pile of rocks. Between philosophical musings and panoramas of rural Italy, we watch her paint her face like a flower in a rainbow of hues and see her cavorting on a tree dappled in cheetah spots. Throughout her extensive career,Veruschka’s image has been so iconic that she has always seemed to want to escape it. Her most celebrated images present her veiled in body paint, artful makeup and drag. Most were made in collaboration withRubartelliwho often captured her as a lynx or exotic cat leaning into her enduring animalistic magnificence. Speaking about a picture they had made together in the 1970sDiana Vreelandsaid: 'A world without leopards, well, who would want to live in it?'
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
This screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
ICA introduction: Exalted
by many among the Nouvelle Vague, in particular Rivette, Japanese
filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi's final film, completed just months before
his death, interweaves portraits of five women working in
“Dreamland,” a brothel in Tokyo’s notorious and then historic
Yoshiwara red-light district. Jacques Rivette characterised
Mizoguchi's art as one of modulation, writing in reference to his use
of the camera. that it was "placed always at the exact point so
that the slightest shift inflects all the lines of space, and upturns
the secret face of the world and of its gods."
Time Out review: Kenji Mizoguchi's final film is a grim but profoundly moving study of a group
of prostitutes in Tokyo's red light district. While they go about their
daily business, there are constant references to the anti-prostitution
legislation which Parliament is debating. As is made clear, merely
passing a law won't save the women. For whatever reasons they became
prostitutes (money-related in every case), they can never escape the
judgment passed on them by the repressive, patriarchal society which
shunned them in the first place. The settings are a far removed from the
medieval landscapes of Ugetsu or The Life of Oharu, but Mizoguchi's focus on the plight of his women characters is as intent and heart-rending as ever. Geoffrey MacNab
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
