This film is part of a Pier Paolo Pasolini season. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 film of ten tales from the Boccaccio classic represents the first part of his celebrated “trilogy of life,” which also includes the less enjoyableThe Canterbury Talesand the more enjoyable (though equally questionable)Arabian Nights. Working with an Italian classic, he seems less inclined to transform his material, though what emerges is entertaining, if only in a mild way—rather likePlayboy‘s “Ribald Tales.” Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film is showing as part of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder season at Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: This
1975 melodrama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of his better
middle-period films. A fairgrounds worker (Fassbinder) who wins a small
fortune in a state lottery is exploited and eventually destroyed by his
effete bourgeois lover (Karlheinz Boehm) and the lover's stuck-up
friends. Very sharp about class and milieu, the film is limited only by
Fassbinder's characteristic enjoyment of the hero-victim's pain. At one
point the camera is even stationed on a floor a moment before the
hapless hero slips and falls, in sadistic anticipation of his mishap. As
with much of Fassbinder's work, his cruelty complicates rather than
negates his mordant, on-target social analysis. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 4K presentation is part of the Satyajit Ray season at BFI Southbank (details here).
BFI review: Ray had been
planning to make a film about the Bengal famine of 1943 to 1944 for some
years when he finally returned to the village landscapes he’d left
behind with Three Daughters. A man-made catastrophe exacerbated by war
and natural disasters, the famine decimated rural agriculture, leading
to the death of some five million people. Adapted by Ray from the
contemporaneous novel by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee, Distant Thunder
examines the causes of the cataclysm. Shooting in vibrant colour, Ray
fielded accusations that he’d glamourised or aestheticised the famine,
and while it’s true that cinematographer Soumendu Roy captures the
lushness of the natural world in vibrant detail, its disharmony with man
speaks to the film’s bitter critical ironies. Although
Distant Thunder took the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival,
otherwise it seems Ray couldn’t win. Local critics found it
insufficiently anguished, while western writers saw only unsubtle
melodrama. It’s a powerful examination of human failure, but charges of
universality do Ray – and his subject – a disservice. “From the first
moment of any Ray film,” read The Times review, “the spectator forgets
the racial and cultural difference of the characters and sees only human
beings.” As biographer Andrew Robinson has noted, however, that’s a
misleading charge, however well-intentioned, for such an explicit – and
specific – examination of caste tensions. Matthew Thrift
This 35mm presentation is part of the Satyajit Ray season at BFI Southbank (details here).
BFI introduction: Adapting Munshi Premchand’s story, Ray once again focuses on two
individuals trapped in the vortex of history. Ruling Nawab Wajed Ali
Shah, a poet and lover of arts, is ordered to step down by Lord Outram.
As that feud plays out on a national stage, two friends play chess,
oblivious to the changes taking place around them. Betrayal, on a
personal and wider political scale, lies at the heart of this visually
dazzling, richly rewarding drama.
This great post-modern horror movie is part of the '90s Films on 35mm' programme at the Everyman Islington Screen on the Green. This also screens on August Details here.
Time Out review: 'Wes Cravendraws
on a shared pop cultural heritage in horror flicks to fashion this
bloody brand of post-modern comedy. 'So you like scary movies? Name the
killer in Friday the 13th?' demands the anonymous caller of Drew
Barrymore's lone teen in the prologue. 'Hang up again and I'll gut you
like a fish!' The killer describes his apparently irrational vendetta
against the high school population of Woodsboro as a game, and in this
he's surely speaking for screenwriterKevin Williamsonand
director Craven, who kill off the clichés and all the wrong characters
with panache. At times, it's too clever, but it's sure scary, with the
jokes notching up the general level of hysteria. As a bonus, Craven
throws in half a dozen of Hollywood's brightest hopefuls: Neve Campbell
in the central role of the teenager haunted by the murder of her mother;
David Arquette as a naive local deputy; Courtney Cox as a TV star; Rose
McGowan as the doomed best friend; and Skeet Ulrich as the evocatively
named Billy Loomis. Intelligence, wit and sophistication - at last, a
horror movie to shout about!' Tom Charity
This film is being shown as part of the Big Screen Classics strand (details here) at BFI Southbank. Time Out review: You was my brudda. You shoulda looked out for me a little bit… I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum…’ When the washed-up Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) quotes ‘On The Waterfront’ to himself, it tells us as much about his self-pity as the actual parallels with Brando’s Terry Malloy. Not just a contender but a champ, La Motta’s fall stemmed not from outside pressures but inner weaknesses, stunningly realised in De Niro’s colossal performance; both he and Scorsese have arguably never been better. Following from 1941 to 1964 the explosively jealous and narcissistic middle-weight, his brother-manager Joey – Joe Pesci, great in his breakthrough role, first of the badabing pairings with De Niro that would define his career – and Jake’s tenderised wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), ‘Raging Bull’ is a masterclass in pain inflicted on oneself and one’s loved ones, as well as one’s opponents. The use of pop and opera and the black-and-white photography (by Michael Chapman) are exemplary, the actual boxing a compulsive dance of death. Ben Walters
Chicago Reader review: For many years this 1937 tale of brotherhood and escape, set in a World
War I German prison camp, was considered Jean Renoir's official
masterpiece. It's an excellent film, with Renoir's usual looping line
and deft shifts of tone, though today the balance of critical opinion
has shifted in favor of the greater darkness and filigree of The Rules of the Game.
Francois Truffaut described it as"the least eccentric of all of
Renoir's French movies," and for that reason it has long been the most
popular. But to imagine this same material in the hands of any of the
cinema's more naive, more didactic humanists—a Capra or a Stevens,
say—is to appreciate the measure of Renoir's genius and honesty. Dave Kehr
