Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 224: Fri Aug 16

3 Women (Altman, 1977): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

This film is showing in tribute to the late Shelley Duvall and is also screened at Close-Up Cinema on August 31st. Full details here.

Time Out review:
One of Robert Altman's most enigmatic and personal films, this study of three women who exchange personalities (based on a dream of Altman's) combines comedy, suspense, social comment, and Bergmanesque reverie to weird but often wonderful effect. What really holds the film together is Shelley Duvall's breathtaking performance as the vacuous, gossipy therapist who becomes mentor to the naïve Spacek after the latter moves in as her flatmate. The third woman is a mute painter (Janice Rule), fashioning her fears and fantasies into mythic murals of male aggression and female victimisation. Although any feminist content is undercut by the advent of insanity halfway through, and the plot construction is not entirely cohesive, the film succeeds through its perky, acute portrait of ordinary people living stunted lives against a backdrop of consumer-orientated glamour fuelled by films and advertising. Often very funny, always stylish, it's a fascinating film for all its faults.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 223: Thu Aug 15

Dracula (Browning, 1931): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

The screenings of this film (also being shown on August 3rd) will feature a performance of the Philip Glass score for the movie by the Kronos Quartet.

BFI introduction (to this film which is part of the Philip Glass season at BFI Southbank):
The vampire Count Dracula relocates from Transylvania to England, hoping to nourish himself on the blood of unsuspecting victims. Bela Lugosi’s seminal performance as Count Dracula was an early – but not the first – entry in Universal Studio’s remarkably successful monster series of the 1930s. Glass’s score, performed by long-term collaborators the Kronos Quartet, tweaks out the tale’s emotional undercurrents, its romance and elements of the sublime, while never resorting to the trappings of a conventional horror score.

Time Out review:
Not by any means the masterpiece of fond memory or reputation, although the first twenty minutes are astonishingly fluid and brilliantly shot by Karl Freund, despite the intrusive painted backdrops. Innumerable imaginative touches here: the sinister emphasis of Lugosi's first words ('I...am...Dracula') and the sonorous poetry of his invocation to the children of the night; the moment when Dracula leads the way up his castle stairway behind a vast cobweb through which Renfield has to struggle as he follows; the vampire women, driven off by Dracula, reluctantly backing away from the camera while it continues hungrily tracking in to Renfield's fallen body. Thereafter the pace falters, and with the London scenes growing in verbosity and staginess, the hammy limitations of Bela Lugosi's performance are cruelly exposed. But the brilliant moments continue (Renfield's frenzy in his cell, for instance), and Freund's camerawork rarely falters.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 222: Wed Aug 14

Destroy All Monsters (Honda, 1968): Barbican Cinema, 6.30pm

This film is part of the Japanese monsters season at the Barbican. Full details here.

Time Out review:
A romping Japanese monster rally, the 20th production in this vein from Toho studios, who have energetically devastated Japan on film virtually every year since 1954. Their output is graphic and witty, with a weird gladiatorial style which has emerged under the guidance of Honda since his first Godzilla. In some ways these features are more like sporting events than fantasies, with a radio commentary ('It's Godzilla leading the attack') as the monsters of this world rally to protect it from extraterrestrial invasion.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 221: Tue Aug 13

The Children's Hour (Wyler, 1961): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

Funeral Parade Queer Film Society introduction:
Longtime friends Martha and Karen are teachers at a boarding school for young girls. When a rebellious student is punished, she accuses Karen and Martha of being in a romantic relationship with one another, scandalising the local community. This seminal film is a landmark for queer representation in mainstream cinema, with a pair of moving and tender performances from Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine at its centre.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 220: Mon Aug 12

Mystery Train (Jarmusch, 1989): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film, part of the Jim Jarmusch season, also screens on August 28th. Details here.

Time Out review:
A trilogy of off-beat, Beat-besotted tales, shot in gorgeous colour, set in and around a seedy Memphis hotel. On one level it's about passers-through: a Japanese teenage couple on a pilgrimage to Presley's grave and Sun studios; an Italian taking her husband's coffin back to Rome, forced to share a room with a garrulous American fleeing her boyfriend; and an English 'Elvis', out of work, luck in love and his head as he cruises round town with a black friend, a brother-in-law, and a gun. But on a deeper level, the film is about storytelling, about how we make connections between people, places, objects and time to create meaning, and how, when these connections shift, meaning changes. Only halfway through do we begin to grasp how the stories and characters relate to each other. Happily, Jim Jarmusch's formal inventiveness is framed by a rare flair for zany entertainment: Kudoh and Nagase make 'Far From Yokohama' delightfully funny; Braschi brings the right wide-eyed wonder to 'A Ghost'; and Joe Strummer proffers real legless menace in 'Lost in Space', which at least explains the cause and effect of a mysterious gun shot heard in the first two episodes. Best of all are Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee as argumentative hotel receptionists hooked on Tom Waits' late night radio show. They, and Jarmusch's remarkably civilised direction, hold the whole shaggy dog affair together, turning it into one of the best films of the year.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 219: Sun Aug 11

Fellini’s Casanova (Fellini, 1976): Close-Up Cinema, 5pm

This film, part of the Donald Sutherland tribute season at Close-Up Cinema, also screens on August 3rd. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
What the world wanted from Fellini's epic account of the famous 18th-century lover (Donald Sutherland) was hardly the dark, disturbingly jaundiced, alienated view of eroticism offered here (1976). But as one of the late flowerings of the director's claustrophobic studio style at its most deliberately artificial, this is a memorable work, helped along by Nino Rota's music and Danilo Donati's Oscar-winning costumes.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

‘Sutherland's performance is the most astonishing piece of screen acting since Brando's in Last Tango in Paris’ Time Out

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 218: Sat Aug 10

The Old Dark House (Whale, 1932): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 4pm

This film, part of the Big Screen Classics strand, is also being shown on 5th, 10th, 25th and 29th August. Details here.

Time Out review:
Alongside The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale's greatest film, a masterly mixture of macabre humour and effectively gripping suspense. A very simple story - a group of travellers stranded by a storm take shelter in the sinister, unwelcoming Femm household, a gloomy mansion peopled by maniacs and murderers - allows Whale to concentrate on quirky characters (Charles Laughton's brash, boorish Yorkshire mill-owner, blessed with a near-incomprehensible accent, is particularly delightful) and thick Gothic atmosphere to stunning effect. But what is perhaps most remarkable is the way Whale manages to parody the conventions of the dark house horror genre as he creates them, in which respect the film remains entirely modern. (Form JB Priestley's novel Benighted.)
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.