The screening will be followed by a Q&A with League of Gentleman actor Steve Pemberton.
Chicago Reader review: A British black comedy/horror film (1973) about a demented
Shakespearean actor (Vincent Price) having his revenge in the most
macabre ways on eight critics: Ian Hendry, Robert Morley, Robert Coote,
Harry Andrews, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, and Coral
Browne. Gory, imaginative, wildly melodramatic—good fun. With Diana Rigg
as Price's helpful daughter. Dan Druker
Here (and above) are the gorgeous opening credits.
Rio Cinema introduction: The second screening of Category H horror film club’s Rio Forever/Rio Never Ever season is Ladies Night, a double bill of THE STEPFORD WIVES X TEETH. Dedicated to women in horror taking charge of the narrative and fighting back against the corrupt men who surround them, we present two controversial feminist horror films. Join us this 15th May, 23:30, for a night of misandry to remember and a Ladies Night like no other.Kicking off the evening is the rarely screened THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975). Inspiration to Jordan Peele, THE STEPFORD WIVES is a searing satire of the American aspirational middle class. After being persuaded to move to a suburban town by her husband, Joanna begins to notice that there is something uncanny about the other women of Stepford. They don’t talk about anything other than their households, their facial expressions are moulded in a sinister smile, there’s just something not right about them. Aided by her one ally, fellow Stepford wife outcast Bobbie, she attempts to get to the bottom of the conspiracy at the heart of the suburbs and falls into a labyrinth of power she might never be able to escape from.Afterwards, settle in for the 00s sleepover classic, a film whispered about in school corridors as the “one where she’s got teeth in her vagina”, the infamous TEETH (2007). President of her school's abstinence club, Dawn’s world is turned upside down when the proud virgin discovers her body can bite! She harnesses her newfound jaws in a refreshing horror comedy in which women bite back, literally. Category H is excited to give TEETH the big screen treatment it deserves, showing this modern classic at the Rio Cinema for the first time.
This is a 'Members Picks' screening (at just £8 for BFI patrons).
Time Out review: In the future, geneticists will design test-tube babies to be
disease-free. Physical perfection will become the norm, and those flawed
specimens born the old-fashioned way will form the new underclass - the
'in-valids'. Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), an in-valid with a heart defect,
is only taken seriously in the powerful Gattaca space programme when he
assumes the identity of Jerome (Jude Law), a 'valid' who supplies blood,
tissue and urine samples in return for shelter (he himself having been
crippled in a car accident). The subterfuge is successful - until a
murder draws unwelcome scrutiny from the authorities. Self-consciously
at a remove from the trashy B-movie sensibilities which have dominated
science-fantasy movies in recent times, this harks back to the
vacuum-packed, classically alienated dystopia of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. Chilly, elegant, and a little bloodless. Tom Charity
At the Prince Charles Cinema there is a requests board and I have been requesting this movie (which I haven’t seen on the big screen since it was shown at Manchester Cornerhouse in the late 1980s) regularly for many months. Don’t miss the chance to see a great early example of Brian De Palma’s work and luxuriate in Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score.
Chicago Reader review: One of Brian De Palma’s better thrillers (1976)—perhaps because its true auteur is neither De Palma nor screenwriter Paul Schrader but composer Bernard Herrmann, who contributed one of his last scores to the film. It was Herrmann who insisted on cutting the third act of Schrader’s already excessive script (a rather tortured hommage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo), about a businessman (Cliff Robertson) who feels responsible for the death of his wife (Genevieve Bujold) in a kidnapping plot, and who meets and marries her double 15 years later. There’s nothing in the aesthetic and neo-Freudian delirium within hailing distance of Vertigo, and the plot’s often more complicated than complex, but Herrmann’s overpowering score and De Palma’s endlessly circling camera movements do manage to cast a spell.Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Alongside works by Terrence Malick, John Cassavetes and John Huston,
this breathtaking 1983 melodrama is one of the wellsprings of US indie
cinema. Writer Horton Foote – most famous for scripting ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
– and his star Robert Duvall shopped the screenplay to every major
American director, but ended up having to settle for Aussie Bruce
Beresford making his first Hollywood film. It’s a bizarre trio – the respected playwright, the
not-quite-bankable star, the Ocker sex-comedy veteran – especially when
one considers that the film they came up with – all downhome reverence,
stifled emotion and expressive minimalism – stands completely alone in
each man’s CV (at least until Duvall co-starred in virtual remake ‘Crazy Heart’). Duvall plays Mac Sledge – greatest character name ever? – the
strung-out former country star who washes up in a remote Texas town and
shacks up with the local widow. Redemption stories are ten to the dozen
in Hollywood, but this one feels heartbreakingly genuine – Duvall was
never better, and that’s saying something. The look of the film is entrancing, from a series of disconcertingly
flat rural landscapes to the gorgeous photography of human faces – head
on, eyes wide, nothing hidden. It’s a film of quiet, relentless power
which demands – and rewards – a level of belief, even faith in its
characters which few other films even dare to suggest. For all its
simplicity, this is bold, heartfelt filmmaking. A masterpiece. Tom Huddleston
This film is only £1 for Prince Charles Cinema members.
Time Out review: Unexpectedly, at three days' notice, Alan Rudolph was asked by producer Sydney Pollack
to take the helm on this carefree comedy set in the world of Country
& Western music. The result was Rudolph's fastest paced and most
uninhibited film to date: a quirky, rambling tale of two star performers
on the road. Incorporating songs specially written by Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, the film indulges their male-bonding, hard-drinking,
womanising life style, as well as giving Lesley Ann Warren her own shot at performing (not bad). A likeable shaggy dog of a movie, assuming the music's to your taste. David Thomson
For more than two decades, Rita Azevedo Gomes (b. 1952) has quietly
forged and reshaped an unmistakable cinema, rooted in literature,
theatre, music and art history, and unfolding with a rare attentiveness
to language, performance, and the spaces that open between them, and
moving always with deliberate strangeness and clarity. This screening is part of the ICA season devoted to the filmmaker. You can find the full details here.
ICA introduction to tonight's screening: Widowed actor René lives in purposeful isolation, drifting
between phone conversations and memories that refuse to settle, as
fragments of a distant past resurface. The screening will be preceded by an introduction from Benjamin Crais, a scholar, critic, and film programmer. He is on the editorial board of the film magazine Narrow Margin, a quarterly magazine of film criticism.
Critic Adrian Martin has written about Gomes' cinema (full article via this link) and here is an extract from his writing about her on the film screening this evening: Altar (2003) is Rita Azevedo Gomes' most radical and inventive exploration
of this layered approach. At its core stands the small, physical gesture of a
woman, Madeleine (Patrícia Saramago), a gesture that obsesses a widower
playwright (René Gouzene) living on an island. The entire film is constructed
as a slow-paced unfolding of the events and implications surrounding this single
gesture. The oral retelling of memories, filled with rich literary description,
is both accompanied and counterpointed by a careful soundtrack mixing natural sounds,
various musical pieces, and passages of poetry by E.E. Cummings and Sophia de
Mello (read by the director herself). The image-track mixes domestic scenes
where the protagonist tells the story to a young visitor, with a selection of
details from paintings. Altar is a stunningly beautiful piece, very much in line
with an idea that Oliveira and Bénard da Costa discuss in The Fifteenth Stone: that the power of an image comes not from what
it shows but what it signifies, a meaning which is not strictly visible, and
can be found only by going right “inside” the work.Altar also plays with two tropes beloved of Azevedo Gomes:
the paradoxical parallelisms between sensory or aesthetic experiences (“images
so silent that, when seeing them, it seems like I’ve closed my eyes”, as one of
de Mello’s poems says); and the intermingling of spatio-temporal dimensions.
These tropes were already evident in Azevedo Gomes’ stunning debut, The Sound of the Trembling Earth (1990),
where Alberto (José Mário Branco) quotes Leonardo da Vinci’s famous saying:
“Painting is mute poetry and poetry is blind painting”. A powerful device in
this film is the hallucinatory collapse of movements occurring simultaneously in
different directions – a little like the famous “zolly” shots (zooming in and
tracking out) made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
