This 35mm presentation is part of the 'Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films' season. Full details here. The screening of Rome Express on Tuesday 21 July will include an introduction with writer Jonathan Coe, hosted by writer and season curator Kazuo Ishiguro.
BFI introduction: German star Conrad Veidt and ace Austrian cameraman Günther Krampf bring
a near-expressionist Weimar sensibility to this riveting British
thriller, set aboard a train filled with enjoyably stiff-upper-lipped
stereotypes. Deplorably neglected today, this deserves to be remembered
both as a classic and as a strangely serendipitous blending of two
normally opposed cinematic styles.
Barbican
Cinema introduction:
Charismatic gay club performer Jason
Holliday talks about his life to camera in Shirley
Clarke’s documentary, described by Ingmar Bergman as 'the
most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.' Edited down from a
12-hour shoot, Portrait of Jason comprises an interview with
Black, gay nightclub performer Jason Holliday, talking directly to
camera about his fabulous life, with occasional off-screen
interjections and provocations by director Shirley Clarke and her
partner, Carl Lee. A gifted raconteur, Jason’s
tales of strife throughout his messy career – all laced with wit
and expert comic timing – make for a constantly entertaining
dialogue. The film remains controversial for the techniques used by
Clarke and Lee in interviewing Holliday. By the end, a very drunk
Holliday becomes increasingly distressed by the questioning of Clarke
and especially Lee, who berate him for his performative style and
accuse him of lying. Portrait of Jason remains a
powerful, provocative and challenging work.
New Yorker review: A raw-edged sketch of furiously extended takes… A masterwork of
grand-scale intimacy. The extraordinary protagonist, alone onscreen for
an hour and a half, seems to give birth to his new identity in real
time. Meanwhile, he presents an agonizing time capsule of an age of
ambient racism, homophobic persecution, and moralistic hypocrisy. Jason Holliday’s stories of arrests and enforced psychiatric sessions, and of
the racist arrogance of white employers (for whom he worked as a
domestic), are adorned with as much self-deprecating, life-loving
laughter as his tales of sexual adventures and samples of his night-club
act (featuring impressions of Mae West and Katharine Hepburn, among
others). In his lifelong pursuit of pleasure, Holliday (who died in
1998) paid an outsized price in pain. But he was outspokenly wise to the
transaction—and he knew that this very performance, with its risky
self-exposure, involved both. Richard Brody
This 35mm screening is part of the Nolan in 35mm season at the Screen on the Green from June 20th to July 15th. Full details here.
Time Out review:With ‘Following’, ‘Memento’, ‘Insomnia’ and the uncommonly smart blockbuster ‘Batman Begins’, Christopher Nolan has established himself as a filmmaker fascinated by the fluid, tricksy contingencies of memory, identity, narrative and time: the way we depend on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and the little slips and dodges, ignorant or willed, that allow us to keep those stories straight – at least for a while. Selfhood emerges from these films as a rickety trick, an illusion dependent on misdirection and oversight. Apt, then, that the director’s latest is a story about magicians. Nolan’s first period picture, ‘The Prestige’ shares the fractured chronology common to his earlier work. Based in turn-of-the-last-century London, the plot centres on two ambitious young illusionists: flashy, easygoing Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman, abetted, as in ‘Batman Begins’, by Michael Caine) and the more original but less extrovert Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). Fellow apprentices turned bitter rivals after a grisly onstage accident, their escalating feud is a game of cat and mouse played out in a hall of mirrors, set in cramped prison cells and Colorado expanses as well as theatres, as they compete to deliver the most spectacular version of a teleportation trick that calls for something like real magic. Jackman and Bale make impressive tango partners, neither wholly sympathetic nor villainous, each drawing out the synergy between his character’s personality and his onstage style. It’s a handsome film, too, beautifully photographed by Wally Pfister in a chocolate-and-cinnamon sepia palette flashed with electric blue.Ben Walters
The film will be followed by a Q&A with director Jim Sheridan.
Chicago Reader review: The remarkable Daniel Day-Lewis plays the remarkable Christy Brown, an
Irishman born with a severe case of cerebral palsy who eventually taught
himself to paint and write with his left foot, in a film adapted by
director Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton from Brown’s autobiography.
Far from milking this subject for conventional sentimentality, the
filmmakers use it as the basis for an engaging and idiosyncratic
character study. Lewis’s performance is necessarily a bit showy–one has
to strain at times to understand all his dialogue because of the
character’s contorted features–but he puts on a terrific drunk scene,
and for all his character’s travails, the film as a whole winds up as
surprisingly upbeat. With Brenda Fricker (also very fine) as Brown’s
mother, Alison Whelan, Kirsten Sheridan, Declan Croghan, Fiona Shaw, and
Cyril Cusack. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Barbican Cinema introduction: In London, in the early seventies, a group of women had begun to leaflet cleaners who worked at night to encourage them to form a union. This labour organisation became the central action of the documentary. Completed in 1975,Nightcleanersis the combined work ofMarc Karlin,Mary Kelly,James ScottandHumphry Trevelyan, together known as theBerwick Street Film Collective. The film quickly became known for its innovative structure. Through its approach to revealing otherwise hidden truths, it successfully challenges conventional documentary storytelling. More than any other film produced during this period, it stands out as a work that, to this day, continues to inspire a new generation of filmmakers to question longstanding practices in political filmmaking.
Time Out review: This documentary started out as a conventional agit-prop project in
support of the 1972 campaign to unionise women nightcleaners in London.
In the three years that it took to complete, it turned into something
very much more complex and challenging: a film that places the
nightcleaners' campaign within a series of broader political discussions
formulated as an 'open text' which asks as many questions about its own
status as a film as it does about the socio-political issues that are
its subject. No engaged person should overlook its challenge. Tony Rayns
This screening, which is part of the Queer 60s season at the Barbican Cinema, will be followed by a discussion about Wishman and her legacy with Jaye Hudson and Selina Robertson, chaired by season curator Alex Davidson.
Barbican Cinema introduction: Doris Wishman was truly a one-of-a-kind. She
was a rare female director working in the exploitation subgenre,
although there are few proto-feminist messages to be found in her films.
She put a lesbian character centre in A Taste of Flesh (1967),
a sensational thriller made on the cheap and shot entirely in one
apartment, featuring three women who are held captive by two male crooks
planning an assassination on a visiting foreign president. The
results have to be seen to be believed. One of the women is a predatory
lesbian, who, despite the problematic nature of her character, is
underestimated by the two men who threaten her. There is a jaw-dropping
queer daydream sequence that is worth the ticket price alone. While it
is first and foremost a sleazy exploitation thriller, this is one of
Wishman’s most fascinating films.
Presented at the Prince Charles Cinema on 35mm with a special 15th Anniversary Post-Film Q&A with
Director Ben Wheatley, as part of BLEAK WEEK 2026. Full details here.
Time Out review: Much of ‘Kill List’ will be familiar to
anyone who caught ‘Down Terrace’ during its brief run last year: the
semi-improvised dialogue and naturalistic performances, the close,
documentary-style photography and the deep-seated sense of suburban
moral decay. But it’s altogether more confident: where the earlier
film leavened the darker moments with slapstick and satire, ‘Kill
List’ is an unrelentingly grim ride into the bleakest imaginable
terrain, its only humour black beyond belief.There will be some who find the resulting series of increasingly brutal
and dreamlike events hard to process, and a number of plot points
remain unexplained even as the credits roll. But allow the film to take
hold and its power is inescapable: the effect is like placing your
head in a vice and waiting as it inexorably closes. It’s hard to remember a British movie as nerve-shreddingly effective
since ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ in 2004. Like that film, ‘Kill List’ may not
make the impact it deserves upon initial release. But this is a grower,
a film which lingers long in the memory: look for it on ‘Best of
British’ lists for a long time to come. Tom Huddleston
