Barbican Cinema intrduction: These two 35mm 'race films' from the late 1940s
feature all-Black casts, and a young William Greaves as he was
establishing his career on screen and Broadway. Screened
in segregated cinemas for Black audiences from 1915–1950s, ‘race films’
provided opportunities for more authentic representations of Black life
and a wider range of roles for Black performers in 1900s America.Miracle in Harlem blends
music, romance, and comedy; telling a story of a shipowner who is
tricked by a corrupt real estate mogul. Greaves plays the romantic lead,
straight-laced Bert, who must fend for his fiancée as they are swept up
in a murder. The film stars legendary vaudevillian star Stepin Fetchit. In Souls of Sin,
Greaves showcases his singing as guitar-playing blues musician Isaiah
'Alabama' Lee, one of three young men seeking fame and success in
Harlem.
Introduction to a special evening of two screenings of Ben Wheatley's debut film: 'This is a F&TT&N 5 Launch screening! We celebrate the launch of Ben
Wheatley's latest fanzine - film & television Thoughts & notes 5
- the Low Budget issue: with a special screening and Q&A with Ben
of his debut feature DOWN TERRACE - made for less than £10K in 2009
Ben's latest fanzine unpacks some of the thoughts, processes and
mistakes in making the film. It also features an interview with
Charlotte Regan about making her debut feature Scrapper. Every ticket to
this event comes with a copy of the fanzine. Be the first to get one -
only at the Nickel.'
Time Out review: The British gangster movie has taken a self-inflicted beating of late,
but it’s not out for the count. Staying well clear of the usual parade
of putdowns and punch-ups, ‘Down Terrace’ takes an unexpected approach
to the genre, fusing the wry realism of Ken Loach with the blackly comic
bloodlust of Ken Russell to produce perhaps the best homegrown movie of
the year so far. The action is confined almost exclusively to
one claustrophobic suburban house, where shiftless, insular dope dealers
Karl (co-writer Robin Hill) and his petulant, paranoid dad, Bill (a
stunning first-time performance from Hill’s father, Robert), are facing
trouble with the law and a snitch in their midst. Everyone is in the
frame: brooding matriarch Maggie (Julia Deakin), chubby, avuncular neighbour Garvey (Tony Way) and sadistic Irish thug Pringle (Michael Smiley) are all called upon to explain their actions, leading to rows, recriminations and, inevitably, bloodshed. Lots of it. What director Ben Wheatley
and his writing partner, Hill – veterans of TV comedy shows like ‘Time
Trumpet’ – manage to achieve in ‘Down Terrace’ is a mounting, sickening
sense of a world in freefall, where morality has been compromised to the
point of meaninglessness and where distrust leads to murder, even
within the family unit. And while this does result in a few berserk plot
diversions, particularly in the final act, Wheatley and Hill establish
such an oppressive mood and construct their characters so meticulously
that even in its most extreme moments, the film remains engrossing, not
to mention consistently funny and even, at times, rather sweet. Tom Huddleston
Chicago Reader review: A businessman with a hangdog face (Alain Delon) drinks too much beer on a
train. “What will happen to him?” he asks aloud, then answers:
“Absolutely nothing.” An affectless woman (Nathalie Baye) appears and
tells him, “The story begins on a train.” A sexual encounter between
them leaves him smitten. Begging her to use him “as a minor character,”
he follows her home to the suburbs and installs himself in her easy
chair to wallow in his infatuation and drink more beer, sometimes
joining her friends and bathrobe-clad neighbors in parading from house
to house. Bertrand Blier begins this enchanting 1984 burlesque of
bourgeois marital manners in the self-reflexive spirit of Alain
Robbe-Grillet, morphs it into a droll Bunuelian farce, then ends it on a
surprisingly sentimental note. With Genevieve Fontanel. Bill Stamets
This 35mm presentation also screens on October 29th and 30th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: No one denies it: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is
still the gold standard for Dracula onscreen. This 1922 silent German
expressionist film—an unauthorized riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula—harnessed
the macabre tale of desire and despair from the 1897 novel. By turning
Count Dracula into the grotesque Count Orlok and moving the story to a
German town, Murnau created something entirely its own. Despite lawsuits
and near extinction, Nosferatu survived—and its shadow still looms over every vampire film made since. An adaptation was previously undertaken by Werner Herzog (1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre) and with The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022) under his belt, director Robert Eggers daringly follows in these footsteps. Eggers’s Nosferatu is
predictably stylized—a cryptic horror that gradually leverages its
score and pallid lighting to cultivate a grand, disquieting epic. It
does so with Ellen (the Mina Murray character from Stoker’s novel,
played by Lily-Rose Depp) in the foreground. “Come to me,” Ellen calls out in a
sleepwalking state. Her call is answered by a brutish voice, and in a
second, a communion between the melancholic girl and a demon takes place
in the outside garden. This nightmare haunts Ellen to the present—1838
in the fictional German port town of Wisborg. There, she’s comforted by
her new husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a too-sincere property
man. This comfort is cut short. Hutter’s boss, a
certain suspicious Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), sends him to the
Carpathian Mountains to help secure a property for Count Orlok in
Wisborg. Bill Skarsgård’s rendition of the vampire is unlike any
predecessor: he’s a brute with a bushy mustache who looms just out of
focus for most of the film. A rising king of horror, Skarsgård makes
sure to put his stamp on this legacy. The narrative unfolds with all the classic Dracula checkpoints—a feverish account from Hutter to the vampire’s trip on the Demeter. It’s interspersed with tributes to the yearning vampire in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1992) and the fear of the plague featured in the original silent film.
It’s fair to say Eggers is juggling a lot, and it’s these influences
that pull the film apart at times; it often clumsily balances the
absurdity and horror of its predecessors. Yet, it’s the actors who pull together Nosferatu.
Thanks to a career-making performance by Depp, Ellen is at the heart of
this forlorn nightmare—it’s a performance that pulls its audience
deeply into this sinister love affair. Maxwell Rabb
This 35mm screening is part of the National Film & Television School student-curated film seasons making their way across London cinemas in the next few months. Details here.
Time Out review: Described by director Karyn Kusama (‘Girlfight’) as ‘a tribute to the
fierce power of oestrogen’, this coming-of-age horror comedy typecasts
beautiful ‘Transformers’ star Megan Fox as Jennifer, a high school alpha
female in the ‘Heathers’ or ‘Mean Girls’ mould. However, by going
against the grain of the ’80s horror movies to which it pays
affectionate homage – ‘Carrie’, ‘Fright Night’, slasher movies in
general – the script by ‘Juno’ writer Diablo Cody explores the toxic
friendship between Jennifer and her nerdy, speccy bosom buddy, Needy
(Amanda Seyfried). ‘Sandbox love never dies,’ so they are best friends
forever. But when Jennifer’s encounter with a diabolical indie band ends
with her being sacrificed and transformed into a literally maneating
demon, Needy must see through her one-sided girl-crush in order to end
Jennifer’s bloody reign of terror. A welcome antidote to the
sexless romanticism of ‘Twilight’, Kusama and Cody’s female-driven
horror comedy explores the premise that ‘hell is a teenage girl’. When
the far from virginal Jennifer transforms, she simply becomes herself,
but more so: her sexual power is magnified, she glows with health after
feeding, and her cruel selfishness goes into overdrive. But not even
Needy’s sensitive boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) will believe that
Jennifer’s body is now the embodiment of evil. There are
weaknesses: Kusama’s set-piece scare scenes aren’t always frightening,
Cody’s trademark teen slang is occasionally more forced than arch, and
the mysterious psychic connection between Jennifer and Needy is never
explained. But by tapping in to the same vein of ‘hormonal horror’ as
the excellent ‘Ginger Snaps’, this offers a witty, subversive look at
the darker side of teen friendship. Nigel Floyd
This is a 16mm presentation from the great Cine-Real team and is also screened on October 25th. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: Nearly 60 years on, Ealing's compendium of
spooky tales remains scary as hell. The best of the five stories,
which we see enacted as they're related in turn by guests at a country
house, are Alberto Cavalcanti's 'The Ventriloquist's Dummy', with Michael Redgrave
possessed by his deceptively lifeless little partner, and Hamer's 'The
Haunted Mirror', with the splendid Googie Withers a reluctant participant as
history repeats itself; least frightening, but amusing, are Basil Radford and
Naunton Wayne as typically obsessive sporting coves in Crichton's 'Golfing
Story'. Best of all, however, is the overall narrative arc, with the
framing story finally taking a headlong rush into a nightmarish realm
almost surreal in its weird clarity and familiarity. Geoff Andrew
This 35mm screening is part of the National Film and Television Schoolstudent-curated film seasons making their way to cinemas across London over the few months. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A yakuza chief who’s turned up in LA helps his brother form an alliance
between Japanese and black gangsters, which rivals the city’s Italian
Mafia only until the new syndicate clashes with the old. The chief,
played by writer-director-editor Takeshi Kitano (aka Beat Takeshi),
exhales self-parody and cool in the same breath. Though he bonds with
local Omar Epps in the buddy configuration typical of action comedy,
Kitano’s handling of this convention—and of extreme violence—is unique.
The buddies are characterized by deceptively simple twists on
acknowledged stereotypes, and their intimacy evolves gradually through
an accumulation of small gestures. A wizard at manipulating time, Kitano
introduces staccato elements that interrupt the meditative pace even as
they help set it. And he uses this paradoxically peaceful tension to
inspire in us a kind of spiritual response to the violence—a sensation
that’s utterly different from the visceral reaction we have to most
actioners, which we only hope is catharsis. Pat Graham
