This is part of the '£1 for Members' season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Samuel Fuller’s wild, wonderful, semicoherent black-and-white ‘Scope
western (1957) was shot in ten days, and in some ways looks it. But it’s
also the feature that fully announces his talent as an avant-garde
filmmaker, even in this unlikeliest of genres. Barbara Stanwyck stars as
the “woman with a whip,” the land baroness of Tombstone Territory.
She’s assisted by the 40 dudes of the title, and Barry Sullivan is the
marshal who turns up to challenge her. There’s a hilarious romantic
subplot involving a female gunsmith (whose sexual initiation is handled
through an iris and dissolve that Godard incorporated into Breathless),
an endless crane-and-track shot through a western town that defies
belief, a lot of delirious violence, perverse sexuality, imaginative
visual energy, and several startling plot twists. If you’ve ever
wondered why Godard and other French New Wave directors deify Fuller,
this movie explains it all. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review:For all his versatility as a writer-director, I was surprised to learn
that Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies) had made a film about the genesis
of Gilbert and Sullivan's mid-1880s comic opera The Mikado. Yet this
160-minute "backstage musical" is about something he knows
intimately--the complex of personal, organizational, artistic, and
cultural factors that go into putting on a show. Leigh begins with
leisurely character sketches of composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan
Corduner) and librettist William Gilbert (Jim Broadbent), two very
different men whose collaboration appears to be at an end. Only after
Gilbert's wife (Lesley Manville) drags him to a Japanese exhibition in
London does The Mikado (and this movie) begin to take shape, and after
that the film keeps getting better and better. The actors and actresses
in the stage production, including Leigh regular Timothy Spall, all sing
in their own voices, and Leigh's flair for comedy and sense of social
interaction shine as he shows all the ingredients in The Mikado
beginning to mesh. Thoroughly researched and unobtrusively upholstered,
this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a
string of delights. With Ron Cook, Wendy Nottingham, Eleanor David,
Kevin McKidd, Shirley Henderson, Dorothy Atkinson, and many Leigh
standbys, including Alison Steadman and Katrin Cartlidge.
This film is part of the 'Not By Lynch' series at the Cinema Museum. Full details here.
Not By Lynch: The Lynchian Before and After David Lynch – is
a nine-film programme paying tribute to the late David Lynch by
exploring films that share aspects of his distinctive style and
sensibility. Like any great artist, Lynch not only imprinted his unique
vision on the world but also examined it with a discerning eye. The
collision between that subjective vision and the objective reality gave
rise to what we now call the ‘Lynchian’: a perspective in which everyday
reality is a thin veil over a dream-state that feels closer to the
truth. While this vision finds its most intense and sustained expression in
Lynch’s own films, the Lynchian both predates Lynch and will survive
him, so long as the world that inspired it endures. Beginning 16 January
2026 – one year after Lynch’s death – the programme unfolds across nine
decades of his lifetime (1940s–2020s), pairing precursors and
descendants that echo the moods, methods, and mysteries we call
Lynchian. Each screening will be preceded by an introduction and accompanied by an original commissioned essay, produced by Cinema Year Zero. The season is curated by Arta Barzanji.
Chicago Reader review: I’ve seen Michael Snow’s sprightly experimental feature from Canada,
which showed at a couple of weekend matinees at Facets early last
October, three times in various theaters and many times on video, and
I’ve found it virtually inexhaustible–each viewing has felt like a
brand-new encounter rather than the replay of a golden oldie. Not all of
my colleagues who’ve seen this magnum opus would agree that it’s the
crowning achievement of North America’s greatest living experimental
filmmaker and conceptual artist, but I’m far from alone in my estimation
of this masterpiece. It’s a kind of playful and comic encyclopedia of all the things
digital video can do to stretch, compress, combine, and otherwise
distort human bodies, compiled with neither malice nor anxiety. It
unravels mainly in two contrasting spaces. One is a circular work space
spotted with people at computers and backed by picture windows
overlooking skyscrapers, which the camera glides past in perpetual
motion. The other, viewed from a fixed vantage point, is a windowless
boxlike chamber resembling both a living room and a bomb shelter, where
kitschy objects and members of a nuclear family clustered around a TV
set appear, disappear, explode, reappear, and get scrambled in various
combinations. Snow’s first digital video was in gestation for many years while he
waited for the necessary technology to develop, and since he started out
as an animator (he concludes *Corpus Callosum with his very first piece
of animation), he knows that this kind of patience can sometimes pay
off in unexpected ways. I’ve argued elsewhere that the long-range
working methods of animators may allow them, quite apart from their
conscious intentions, to bear witness to their time in certain respects
more profoundly than live-action filmmakers, who work within much
shorter time frames. Furthermore, the endless possibilities of digital
video, which allow conceptual artists to achieve precisely what they
think, are a boon to someone as focused as Snow, though they’ve
handicapped many less imaginative and original filmmakers by making
their work too easy. The film’s title refers to the tissue that passes messages between the
brain’s two hemispheres. The asterisk, as Snow has noted, means what an
asterisk generally means–a sign pointing toward an extension of the
material. Its addition clearly baffled some; when I reviewed the film
for Film Comment the asterisk got shaved off as if it were a wart, and
the error wasn’t deemed important enough to warrant correcting. Yet the
asterisk points to what I value most about the film, which goes beyond
the kind of formalism usually associated with Snow to meditate on the
ways human bodies have occupied interior spaces over the past half
century. On this very broad canvas, rhymes of shape, costume, decor,
movement, and viewing itself (with functional work-space computers
supplanting kitschy living-space TVs) are combined with contrasting
ideas about how space is represented and negotiated. All of which yields
a kaleidoscopic vaudeville that recapitulates and updates most of the
concerns of Snow’s earlier work–including camera movement, working and
living space, philosophical journeys, and mathematical paradoxes such as
the Moebius strip–while teasing out some of their social implications. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This restored Sri Lankan classic is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.
BFI introduction: Sumitra Peries’ groundbreaking Sri Lankan film offers a tender and
transporting journey through young dreams and first loves. Kusum, a poor
but studious village girl who cleans the house of a wealthy family,
sparks a connection with Nimal, the family’s prized son. Soma, Kusum’s
younger sister, pursues beauty pageants and dreams of acting, believing
it’s her best chance of a better life. What unfolds is a lyrical and
poignant coming of age story, brimming with yearning and feminine
sensibility. Sumitra Peries, known as ‘the poetess of Sri Lankan
cinema’, became the country’s first female director with this
astonishing debut. She draws out natural, affecting performances from
her cast, particularly Vasanthi Chathurani, who was still at school when
she played Kusum – the role that launched a long screen career. The
Girls was crowned the Outstanding Film of the Year at the 1978 London
Film Festival. Beautifully restored in digital 4K, it feels just as
fresh, illuminating and moving today. Kimberley Sheehan
Chicago Reader review: A major landmark in American independent cinema, this unlikely
commercial hit remains one of the best films of the 1980s, noted for its
intense personal vision anchored by some remarkably easygoing humor and
John Lurie’s great performance. Jarmusch’s casual approach to narrative
remains one of his strongest virtues as a filmmaker. Stranger Than Paradise‘s
leisurely pace and apparently lack of action open up the film’s
hyperrealistic environment, giving the film an immersive experience akin
to getting lost in a great book. Drew Hunt
This is the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of this Iranian classic and includes an introduction by film curator Ehsan Khoshbakht.
BFI introduction: A boy who lost everything during the Iran-Iraq war flees his war-torn
village in southern Iran by hiding in the back of a truck. He reaches a
verdant farmland in the north and, despite struggling to be accepted for
his darker skin and unintelligible dialect, he attempts to find a
family and a new home. A quietly poignant story of displacement and
unspoken wounds, this is one of the finest examples of Beyzaie’s
mythical realism.
This is a Funeral Parade Presents presentation. Here's the full season of their screenings.
Venerable and adored film critic Roger Ebert crossed the line to become
scriptwriter in this collaboration with 1970s skin-flixster Russ Meyer.
An enduring camp cult classic, it follows three pneumatic wannabees who
come to Hollywood to make it big but find only sex, drugs and sleaze.
Sophisticate Ebert brings a touch of sly wit and class to this most
unlikely of projects.
From Kate Arthur, on BuzzFeed:
“…But always enhancing Ebert’s place as a seminal figure in movie
criticism was his hilarious contribution to movies themselves: the 1970
release Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He cowrote it with
shlocktarian Russ Meyer, and it’s just an unparalleled spectacle of
amazingness. On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, Ebert wrote about
the experience in Film Comment: “We wrote the screenplay in six weeks flat, laughing maniacally from time to time, and then the movie was made.”
“The plot doesn’t make any sense, but if you want to try, Wikipedia has a good summary. And Louis Peitzman has written the “19 Reasons “Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls” Is The Greatest Cult Film Of All Time.” As Louis points out, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
gave us many gifts, but my favorite (and I’m sure I’m not alone) was
the Z-Man character, who Ebert said was based on Phil Spector (“but
neither Meyer nor I had ever met Spector,” he wrote).”
Two thumbs up, Roger!
Time Out review: 'With his first movie for a major studio,
Meyer simply did what he'd been doing for years, only bigger and
better. That's to say, he turned the homely story of an all-girl rock
band's rise to fame under their transsexual manager into a delirious
comedy melodrama, soused in self- parody but spiked with dope, sex and
thrills.' Tony Rayns
