Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 105: Wed Apr 15

Pacific Heights (Schlesinger, 1990): Nickel Cinema, 6pm

This film is creening as part of 'The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100' season. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) is not the ideal tenant: he trifles with razor blades, cultivates cockroaches, and doesn't pay the rent. It's a sign of the times when the landlord gets all our sympathy, but that's the general idea. Live-in lovers Drake and Patty (Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) buy a sprawling Victorian house in San Francisco. To pay for renovations, they rent out apartments to a quiet Japanese couple and to the psychopathic Hayes, who proceeds to strip the fittings and terrorise everyone in the house. But the law is firmly on his side. Schlesinger stages the action with smooth assurance, gradually building tension until Hayes goes completely round the bend. The problem lies in Daniel Pyne's script: the relationship between Drake and Patty is half-realised, while Hayes' motivations remain strangely muddled. That said, Keaton is chillingly convincing.
Collette Maude

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 104: Tue Apr 14

Witness (Weir, 1985): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This film, which also screens on March 31st, April 5th and April 22nd, is part of the Peter Weir season at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here. Tonight's screening is introduced by season curator Elena Lazic.

Time Out review:
Peter Weir's first film set in America explores a theme familiar from his earlier work: the discovery of an all but forgotten culture in modern society: in this case the Amish, a puritanical sect whose life in Pennsylvania has remained unchanged since the 18th century. Threat explodes into this community when an Amish boy witnesses a murder; cop Harrison Ford investigates the case and, finding his own life endangered, is forced to hot-foot it back to the Amish ranch with the bad guys in pursuit. The film also allows Ford to fall in love with the boy's mother (Kelly McGillis), and comments on the distance between the messy world Ford leaves behind and the cloistered one in which he takes refuge. Powerful, assured, full of beautiful imagery and thankfully devoid of easy moralising, it also offers a performance of surprising skill and sensitivity from Ford.
Richard Rayner

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 103: Mon Apr 13

Normal Love (Smith, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This is a 16mm presentation screening as part of the Trash season at BFI Southbank. The screening of Normal Love on Wednesday 1 April will be introduced by Professor Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London.

Chicago Reader review: Though Jack Smith never quite completed Normal Love (1963), what he left behind maintains a consistent level of intensity, its weirdly costumed characters cavorting before the camera in role-playing more twisted than the word “drag” could ever convey. Mostly filmed the year Smith?s orgy-comedy Flaming Creatures became a famous obscenity case, Normal Love is a kind of lyrical sequel, replacing the earlier film’s bleached-out black and white with lush color (faded somewhat in this restoration) and its urban claustrophobia with rural locales outside New York City. Over the years Smith showed Normal Love in various versions; the present film was assembled using notes from actual screenings and records he’s known to have played with it. His cast of “creatures,” including Mario Montez and Tiny Tim, perform in a series of disjointed sequences that oscillate between trancelike impersonation and utterly reflexive self-parody: a mermaid in a tub, for example, is larger than life yet totally ridiculous, her tail phonier than the worst B-movie costume. Smith’s gender-fuck visions, more radical than mainstream concepts of drag, conflate dress-up with striptease, ludicrous acting with a sure belief that one can become one’s costume. His visual style is a dense and demented re-creation of von Sternberg, the smallest fashion accessory a radiant surface as camera and character—and character and costume—move in a coordinated ballet at once graceful and spastic. Fred Camper

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 102: Sun Apr 12

The Hurricane (Jewison, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 5.50pm

This 35mm presentation, which also screens on April 24th, is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1967, boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) spent years asserting his innocence, growing increasingly hopeless until he was befriended by an American teenager living in Canada (Vicellous Reon Shannon). In this deeply moving biopic, some of the characters who rally to Carter’s defense seem like saints, and some who oppose him seem like demons. Yet the narrative–a complex structure of flashbacks and shifts in perspective that’s part inspirational story, part courtroom drama, part character study, part expose–never makes it seem that history is being oversimplified.
Lisa Alspector

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 101: Sat Apr 11

Body and Soul (Rossen, 1947): BFI Souhbank, NFT1, 12.10pm

This 35mm presentation, which also screens on March 30th, is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
With its mean streets and gritty performances, its ringside corruption and low-life integrity, Body and Soul looks like a formula '40s boxing movie: the story of a (Jewish) East Side kid who makes good in the ring, forsakes his love for a nightclub floozie, and comes up against the Mob and his own conscience when he has to take a dive. But the single word which dominates the script is 'money', and it soon emerges that this is a socialist morality on Capital and the Little Man - not surprising, given the collaboration of Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky (script) and John Garfield, all of whom tangled with the HUAC anti-Communist hearings (Polonsky was blacklisted as a result). A curious mixture: European intelligence in an American frame, social criticism disguised as noir anxiety (the whole film is cast as one long pre-fight flashback). But Garfield's bullish performance saves the movie from its stagy moments and episodic script.
Chris Auty

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 100: Fri Apr 10

The Perfect Storm (Petersen, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.25pm

This 35mm screening is part of director Mark Jenkin's 'Cinema and Sound' season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Wolfgang Petersen's movie of Sebastian Junger's bestseller chronicles the last voyage of the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachussetts, lost at sea in October 1991. In his foreword, Junger admits any attempt to recreate the crew's experience can only be a matter of conjecture: 'I toyed with the idea of fictionalising, but that risked diminishing the value of whatever facts I was able to determine.' No such scruples for the movie-makers, of course, but given that they're making it up, there's no excuse for lines as corny as 'I wanna catch some fish - it's what I do!' It doesn't much matter though. This is one of those films where actions speak louder than words. Regular guy George Clooney may be too intuitively smarmy to play your straight-ahead skipper, but the authentically grizzled beard helps, and Petersen loads the boat with plausible working-man types. And this is what's striking about the movie. It's the first blockbuster in recent memory to hold faith with everyday heroes just doing their jobs. More impressive still, their heroism is a kind of unconscious blunder, a macho bluff compelled by hard economic choices. The special effects are staggering and the last hour builds from sinking dread to exhilarating defiance and, finally, remorseful exhaustion.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 99: Thu Apr 9

Trash (Morrissey, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This is a 35mm screening. The film is screening as part of the Trash season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
A companion piece to Flesh, with Joe Dallesandro as a down-and-out junkie living on New York's Lower East Side whose heroin addiction has rendered him impotent; just as Joe's desirable virility formed the (nominal) subject of Flesh, so his undesirable impotence is at the centre of Trash. The surprise value of Paul Morrissey's films (the 'liberating nudity', the frankness about sexuality, the playful reversals of sex-roles) camouflaged a number of crucial failings. Flesh and Trash are both eulogies to Dallesandro's body, but are also both moralistic to the point of being puritan about sex in general, and the female sex in particular.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is an extract.