This is a 35mm screening which is also being shown at the Prince Charles Cinema on April 29th and June 18th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: The ultimate family film. Francis Ford Coppola gives full
due to the themes of clannish insularity that made Mario Puzo's novel a
best seller, though his heart seems to be with Al Pacino's lonely,
willful isolation. This 1972 feature is sharp, entertaining, and
convincing—discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that
Coppola hasn't achieved since. With Marlon Brando, James Caan, Robert
Duvall, Sterling Hayden, and Diane Keaton. Dave Kehr
Here (and above) are some excerpts from the opening scenes.
This film (being shown on May 16th, 29th and 30th) is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here. Time Out review: Glauber Rocha's
first major film introduced most of the methods, themes and even
characters that were developed five years later in his Antonio das
Mortes. Set in the drought-plagued Brazilian Sertao in 1940, it explores
the climate of superstition, physical and spiritual terrorism and fear
that gripped the country: the central characters, Manuel and Rosa, move
credulously from allegiance to allegiance until they finally learn that
the land belongs not to god or the devil, but to the people themselves.
The film's success here doubtless reflects the 'exoticism' of its style,
somewhere between folk ballad and contemporary myth, since the
references to Brazilian history and culture are pervasive and fairly
opaque to the uninitiated. But Rocha's project is fundamentally
political, and completely unambiguous: he faces up to the contradictions
of his country in an effort to understand, to crush mystiques, and to
improve. Tony Rayns
The screening of We Are Also Brothers on Friday 1 May will be introduced by Dr Felipe Botelho Correa, King’s College London. This is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here.
BFI introduction: Two Black brothers opt for very different career paths in Rio. One
pursues education and respectability, while the other is drawn into
petty crime. Burle blends melodrama with social critique and uses his
characters’ stories as a platform to confront Brazil’s myth of racial
harmony.
Chicago Reader review: Despite its self-deprecating camp and convoluted plot, there is an
appealing honesty to Bruce LaBruce’s Super 8 1/2. The director plays
Bruce, an over-the-hill porn star trying to restart his flagging career,
in part by acting in a documentary about him by an up-and-coming
lesbian filmmaker. We see footage from his porno loops and scenes from
the film in progress and hear comments on Bruce’s own “unfinished” epic,
“Super 8 1/2.” The title’s two obvious references are to Fellini’s
famous film about his problems making a film and to the low-budget
medium of Super-8. But a third meaning is supplied by a woman who
suggests that it’s Bruce’s own overoptimistic view of his own endowment.
In the explicit sex scenes, LaBruce moves beyond narcissism to its
opposite. As one “critic” suggests in a pretentious voice-over analysis
of one of the porn films, Bruce’s performances acknowledge the camera,
and his self-consciousness suggests a kind of emptiness that works
against any sex appeal he might have. The way the film constantly turns
back on itself, with its films-within-films and comments on them, leaves
the viewer without any firm ground, suggesting the void behind
self-absorption. Bruce’s agonized cries, heard after the final credits,
perhaps acknowledge the terror of that void. Fred Camper
This screening is part of Violet Hour’s City of Angels
season, where we peel back the silver screen and gaze into the sordid
underworld of Los Angeles. A city of duality, this season is an ode to
the ultimate American nightmare masquerading as a dream. Violet Hour showcases the dark,
transgressive and enigmatic side of the screen. Exploring the darker
aspects of life through cinema, they screen and discuss works that "unsettle, undo us and challenge our perceptions."
Chicago Reader review: It pains me to say it, but I think Brian De Palma has
gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of this thriller represents
the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he has ever
done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it
follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De
Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences. Craig Wasson is an
unemployed actor who is invited to house-sit a Hollywood Hills mansion;
he becomes voyeuristically involved with his beautiful neighbor across
the way, and witnesses her murder. Those who have seen Vertigo
will have solved the mystery within the first 15 minutes, but De Palma's
use of frame lines and focal lengths to define Wasson's point of view
is so adept that the suspense takes hold anyway. De Palma's borrowings
from Hitchcock can no longer be characterized as hommages or even
as outright thievery; his concentration on Hitchcockian motifs is so
complete and so fetishized that it now seems purely a matter of
repetition compulsion. But Body Double is the first De Palma film
to make me think that all of his practice is leading at least to the
beginnings of perfection. Dave Kehr
This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season.
Time Out review: Depending on how you look at it, Mike Figgis' fascinating film is the story of an alcoholic movie producer on the verge of a nervous breakdown; or it's about a two-timing lesbian starlet who gets her first big break; or it's a critical day in the life of a fledgling film production company; or it's a portrait of spurned wives, lovers and actresses on the LA scene. Four movies in one,Timecodesplits the screen on a horizontal and a vertical axis to showcase simultaneously four unbroken shots, each 93 minutes long. The initial dizzying sensory overload doesn't last. An ingenious sound mix and the familiar faces of Stellan Skarsgård, Selma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Julian Sands, Holly Hunter and Saffron Burrows invite you to conspire order from the chaos. Characters from the top left screen bump into their neighbours from bottom right, while at two o'clock they're bitching about those assholes screwing them at eight. Like a riff on Robert Altman'sShort CutsandThe Player, it adds up to a properly jaundiced satire of Hollywood on the rocks. The movie is a stunt, a conceptual in-joke; or it's a portent of cinema to come; or it's a brilliant but hollow technical exercise; or it's a dynamic if erratic ensemble improv. Make of it what you will, it's certainly something to see. Tom Charity
Time Out review: Neither straight remake nor looser homage to Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle;
better by far to just enjoy it on its own terms when it turns out at
least three parts better than anyone predicted. Richard Gere is the rockabilly
punk living permanently on the edge, on the run from a cop-killing, and
certain of at least two things: how to steal cars and his obsession with
his girl. Together they conduct a fugitive romance across LA, a common
enough idea from Hollywood (Gun Crazy is a motif) but one which is
burning with a rarely seen passion. The breathless shooting style
lingers forever on Gere's pumping, preening narcissism, which leaves you
in no doubt that the true romance is not between boy and girl, but
between Gere and camera. The film's other star is LA, which is filmed as
a series of dazzling pop art backdrops - cultural vacancy and hedonism,
yoked together by violence: a city for the '80s. A wanton, playful
film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy. Chris Peachment
