BFI introduction: Based on Lee Beo-seon’s short novel of the same name, Yu Hyun-mok’s film
follows a displaced North Korean family, settled in a Seoul slum, who
are struggling to survive in a world devoid of morality and meaning.
Influenced by both Italian neo-realism and German Expressionism, and
capturing the spirit of the era and the tragedy of the divided nation,
Aimless Bullet holds a similar iconic status in Korean cinema to Citizen
Kane in Hollywood.
This haunting Claude Chabrol picture screens in the Claude Chabrol season at the Cine Lumiere. The film also screens on November 24th and December 13th. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Arguably the best as well as the most disturbing movie
Claude Chabrol has made to date, this unjustly neglected 1960 feature,
his fourth, focuses on the everyday lives and ultimate fates of four
young women (Bernadette Lafont, Stephane Audran, Clotilde Joano, and
Lucile Saint-Simon) working at an appliance store in Paris and longing
for better things. Ruthlessly unsentimental yet powerfully
compassionate, it shows Chabrol at his most formally inventive, and it
exerted a pronounced influence on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz two decades later. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: A middle-class office worker takes a trip back to his rural hometown, where memories of his troubled past and an intimate encounter with a local schoolteacher stir up complex feelings. Kim Soo-yong’s magnum opus, Mist employs atmospheric cinematography to create a melancholy mood, while the natural chemistry between Shin Seong-il and Yoon Jeong-hee, who is best known internationally for her work in Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, heightens the drama’s emotional heft.
This film is part of the Al Pacino season at the Garden Cinema, and is also screening on Tuesday December 3rd. Full details here.
Time Out review: There's an obvious point of comparison here with imperial Rome's taste for recreational carnage and brutality, which is why Stone includes a lengthy clip from Ben-Hur in this gargantuan, gung-ho American footballfest. Also included: colour filters and transitions, split-screens, freeze frames, pictures-in-pictures, assorted film and video stocks, helicopter shots, cornball weather imagery, histrionic sound effects, HipHop, heavy metal, drugs, sex, gyrating cheerleaders, colliding jocks, onfield set-pieces, off field set-tos, an encyclopaedic deployment of genre stereotypes, and stars stars stars. You may, of course, take this as a recommendation. Supercilious Europeans who insist that Americans possess no sense of irony have spent too much time in the company of Oliver Stone films. Agreed, the director has other qualities: few film-makers could hope to martial this much information into two and a half hours (fewer would try), and his flair for representational overload in itself must make Stone one of the outstanding chroniclers of American cultural decadence. Whether simply parroting the world around him makes the resulting work any good, or enjoyable, is another matter. This one's a meathead burlesque.Nicholas Barber
BFI introduction: A border incident leaves North and South Korean soldiers wounded or
dead, prompting an investigation by a neutral officer. Based on Park
Sang-yeon’s novel DMZ and masterfully directed by Park Chan-wook, the
film alternates between light, airy flashbacks and heavy, claustrophobic
investigation scenes. Song Kang-ho and Lee Byung-hun are superb and the
film is now ranked as an essential entry in New Korean Cinema. Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Geena Davis and her director-husband, Renny Harlin, crawled out from under the rubble of Cutthroat Island,
which at the time was reported to be the costliest flop in Hollywood
history, to make an even nastier action thriller, about a housewife with
amnesia who discovers she’s actually a trained government assassin (and
apparently takes her orders directly from La femme Nikita). Frankly, if I had to see either Harlin-Davis movie again, I’d opt for the klutzy unpleasantness of Cutthroat Island
over the efficient if equally stupid unpleasantness of this 1996
release, with its protracted torture sequences and its overall
celebration of pain and injury (“You’re gonna die screaming, and I’m
gonna watch”). Still, if you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Geena
Davis say “Suck my dick,” New Line probably deserves your money. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI Southbank introduction: The London Action Festival team bring their roadshow ‘World’s
Greatest Screening’ series to BFI Southbank with this special event
celebrating George Miller’s acclaimed action masterpiece, Mad Max 2: The
Road Warrior. Among other surprises, the extra components to the evening will
include an exclusive on-screen contribution by George Miller himself; a
look at how the 1982 classic was a game-changer for the vibrant
franchise; an in-person interview with Iain Smith OBE, BAFTA-winning
Producer of Mad Max: Fury Road, where he’ll look at what it takes to
produce for George Miller and talk about his involvement in bringing the
franchise back; and a live performance of the “Mad Max Medley” by The
McBain Quartet led by Patrick Savage.
Chicago Reader review: George Miller’s 1981 sequel to his 1980 sleeper, Mad Max. Set in a
postapocalyptic Australia, where nomadic tribes battle each other for
precious gasoline, it’s a highly stylized, roaringly dynamic action film
that shuns plot and characterization in favor of a crazy iconographical
melange—it’s like the work of a western punk trucker de Sade. The style
is more spectacular and comic-bookish than that of the original, which
isn’t all to the good: without the crude but functional motivations of
the first film, the violence here comes to seem somewhat arbitrary and
distasteful. But for pure rhythm and visual panache, Miller has few real
competitors; the climactic chase, with its deft variation of tempo and
point of view, is a minor masterpiece. Dave Kehr
