Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 119: Wed Apr 29

Body Double (De Palma, 1984): Castle Cinema, 9pm

This screening is part of Violet Hour’s City of Angels season, where we peel back the silver screen and gaze into the sordid underworld of Los Angeles. A city of duality, this season is an ode to the ultimate American nightmare masquerading as a dream. Violet Hour showcases the dark, transgressive and enigmatic side of the screen. Exploring the darker aspects of life through cinema, they screen and discuss works that "unsettle, undo us and challenge our perceptions."

If you want to read more about this movie there's Susan Dworkin's Double De Palma, an on-the-set account of the making of the film, plus a very thoughtful chapter in Misogyny in the Movies: the De Palma Question by Kenneth Mackinnon. Manuela Lazic has also written about the movie in a recent blog piece for The Film Stage. 

Chicago Reader review:
It pains me to say it, but I think Brian De Palma has gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of this thriller represents the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he has ever done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences. Craig Wasson is an unemployed actor who is invited to house-sit a Hollywood Hills mansion; he becomes voyeuristically involved with his beautiful neighbor across the way, and witnesses her murder. Those who have seen Vertigo will have solved the mystery within the first 15 minutes, but De Palma's use of frame lines and focal lengths to define Wasson's point of view is so adept that the suspense takes hold anyway. De Palma's borrowings from Hitchcock can no longer be characterized as hommages or even as outright thievery; his concentration on Hitchcockian motifs is so complete and so fetishized that it now seems purely a matter of repetition compulsion. But Body Double is the first De Palma film to make me think that all of his practice is leading at least to the beginnings of perfection.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 118: Tue Apr 28

Timecode (Figgis, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm

This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season. 

Time Out review:
Depending on how you look at it, Mike Figgis' fascinating film is the story of an alcoholic movie producer on the verge of a nervous breakdown; or it's about a two-timing lesbian starlet who gets her first big break; or it's a critical day in the life of a fledgling film production company; or it's a portrait of spurned wives, lovers and actresses on the LA scene. Four movies in one, Timecode splits the screen on a horizontal and a vertical axis to showcase simultaneously four unbroken shots, each 93 minutes long. The initial dizzying sensory overload doesn't last. An ingenious sound mix and the familiar faces of Stellan Skarsgård, Selma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Julian Sands, Holly Hunter and Saffron Burrows invite you to conspire order from the chaos. Characters from the top left screen bump into their neighbours from bottom right, while at two o'clock they're bitching about those assholes screwing them at eight. Like a riff on Robert Altman's Short Cuts and The Player, it adds up to a properly jaundiced satire of Hollywood on the rocks. The movie is a stunt, a conceptual in-joke; or it's a portent of cinema to come; or it's a brilliant but hollow technical exercise; or it's a dynamic if erratic ensemble improv. Make of it what you will, it's certainly something to see.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 117: Mon Apr 27

Breathless (McBride, 1983): Nickel Cinema, 8.45pm

Time Out review:
Neither straight remake nor looser homage to Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle; better by far to just enjoy it on its own terms when it turns out at least three parts better than anyone predicted. Richard Gere is the rockabilly punk living permanently on the edge, on the run from a cop-killing, and certain of at least two things: how to steal cars and his obsession with his girl. Together they conduct a fugitive romance across LA, a common enough idea from Hollywood (Gun Crazy is a motif) but one which is burning with a rarely seen passion. The breathless shooting style lingers forever on Gere's pumping, preening narcissism, which leaves you in no doubt that the true romance is not between boy and girl, but between Gere and camera. The film's other star is LA, which is filmed as a series of dazzling pop art backdrops - cultural vacancy and hedonism, yoked together by violence: a city for the '80s. A wanton, playful film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 116: Sun Apr 26

Bait (Jenkin, 2019): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12pm

This is a 35mm presentation, part of Mark Jenkin's Cornish Trilogy which is being screened at BFI Southbank. The film screening will be preceded by an intro by writer-director Mark Jenkin, and actors Edward Rowe and Mary Woodvine.

Time Out review:
It may look like it was made on a shoestring 50 years ago, but this abrasive seaside parable is a quietly thrilling piece of filmmaking. Using old 16mm cameras, scratchy black-and-white stock and a handful of coastal locations, Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin has conjured up something truly arresting: a debut film rooted in local traditions, with a dark humour and an atmosphere that’s as brooding as its Atlantic backdrop. Filmed mostly in unblinking close-ups, its central character is scowling Cornish fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe). He’s a fundamentally good-hearted man who nurses a bundle of unexpressed grudges over the flood of new money into his fishing village. His equally gruff brother (Giles King) uses their dad’s old trawler to take tourists on pleasure cruises, while the family’s quayside home has been sold to the kind of well-heeled urbanites Martin so resents. To add insult to injury, they’ve installed a porthole. ‘Bait’ is a story of gentrification and class friction that builds and builds, searching for the release that inevitably comes. But it has deeper currents too, as Jenkin explores the day-to-day slog of maintaining a generations-old way of life – you’ll learn a lot about lobster potting – and the near-spiritual pain of being prised, like a barnacle off a rock, from your place in life by forces beyond your control. He’s abetted in that by a wonderfully human performance from Rowe, all bruised pride and righteous fury. It’s clear where Jenkin’s sympathies lie, and one or two of the middle-class characters tiptoe towards caricature, but ‘Bait’ never feels polemical or didactic: it’s more of a quiet lament than a shaking fist. It feels almost like a modern-day sea shanty. Let its hypnotic rhythms wash over you.
Phil de Semleyen

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 115: Sat Apr 25

Manhattan Murder Mystery (Allen, 1993): David Lean Cinema, 2pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
Like the Bob Hope movies which it alludes to, Manhattan Murder Mystery is as light and brazenly generic as Woody Allen's early work. As a result, it is both unusually insubstantial, and, at least in the second half, extremely funny. Hope-like in his panicky cowardice, Larry worries not only about the feelings of his wife Carol (Diane Keaton, refreshing) for his old friend Ted (Alan Alda), but about her determination to investigate the death of a neighbour. At first, Larry thinks Carol is fantasising, but then he starts to witness strange events. Cue to a fast, ramshackle, thrill comedy as entertaining as it is removed from the realities of contemporary New York. A movie inspired by movie escapism. Minor, but surprisingly, almost defiantly upbeat.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 114: Fri Apr 24

Orlando (Potter, 1992): Rio Cinema, 6.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation. There will be a Q&A with writer, director and Rio Cinema patron Sally Potter herself, to be hosted by curator and author of many books including The Cinema of Sally Potter, So Mayer.

Time Out review:
Virginia Woolf's 1928 modernist novel, but the joy is that the film comes over simply: a beautiful historical pageant of 400 years of English history, full of visual and aural pleasures, sly jokes, thought-provoking insights, emotional truths - and romance. It begins at the opulent court of Virgin Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp), where the male immortal Orlando receives favour and an estate; and thence follows his quest for love in 50-year jumps through the Civil War, the early colonial period, the effete literary salons of 1750 (by which time Orlando is a woman), the Victorian era of property, and finally a 20th century postscript added by Sallly Potter. The fine, stylised performances from an idiosyncratic international cast are admirably headed by Swinton's magnificent Orlando, who acts as the film's complicitous eyes and ears; and there's little to fault in Alexei Rodionov's cinematography, which renders the scenes with rare sensitivity. It's a critical work - in the sense that it comments wryly on such things as representations of English history, sexuality/androgyny and class - but made in the spirit of a love poem to both Woolf and the England that made us.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 113: Thu Apr 23

Lianna (Sayles, 1983): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.15pm

This is a 35mm screening from Lost Reels. The presentation will include an online Q&A discussion with filmmaking legend John Sayles and his producer and partner Maggie Renzi.

Time Out review:
John Sayles is spokesman for his generation, the babies of the post-war boom who made love and fought their wars within themselves. Their growing pains came late: Lianna (Linda Griffiths) is thirty, married and the mother of two, when she falls in love with Ruth (Jane Hallaren), her night-school teacher. Sayles sympathetically maps the hurricane-like effects of this on Lianna's life - thrown out by her philandering husband, cold-shouldered by her straight friends, stormy scenes with her lover - his sparkling dialogue illuminating every aspect of Lianna's sexuality with a zeal that is almost proselytising. The love scenes are infused with a tender erotic glow that deepens the shadows around the titillation of Personal Best, and the comedy in Lianna's post-coital glee as she cruises other women and announces herself as gay to people in launderettes is irresistible. A gem, rough-hewn by Sayles and polished to perfection in peerless performances.

Here (and above) is the trailer.