This is also screened at Close-Up Cinema on May 31st. Details here.
BFI introduction: Whilst renovating his dilapidated home, Aston (Robert Shaw) invites an irritable and devious vagrant (Donald Pleasance) to stay. But, when his ill-tempered brother Mick (Alan Bates) returns, an ominous yet darkly comic power struggle between the trio commences. A play that changed the face of modern theatre and made Harold Pinter's name, The Caretaker remains one of Pinter’s most famous works. Featuring original production cast members Pleasance and Bates and sensitively directed by Clive Donner and shot by Nicolas Roeg, this study of shared illusion, tragic dispossession and the fraternal bond of unspoken love, combines mesmerising performances and the magic of Pinter's dialogue into a spellbinding film.
This film is introduced by the ‘Pink Floyd on Film’ series curator Sophia Satchell-Baeza.
Chicago Reader review: 'Though Michelangelo Antonioni's only American film was very poorly received when it was released in 1969, time has been much kinder to it than to, say, La Notte, which was made a decade earlier. Antonioni's nonrealistic approach to American counterculture myths and his loose and slow approach to narrative may still put some people off—along with the uneven dialogue (credited to Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe, and the director)—but his beautiful handling of 'Scope compositions and moods has many lingering aftereffects, and the grand and beautiful apocalyptic finale is downright spectacular. With Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, and Rod Taylor.' Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is part of the Rio Forever season at the cinema and is a 35mm screening.
Chicago Reader review: The Wachowskis, who scripted Assassins, wrote and directed this
adroit and sexy 1996 crime thriller about the hot romance between a
gangster’s moll (Jennifer Tilly) and the ex-con who’s her neighbor (Gina
Gershon). Eventually they concoct an elaborate scam to rip off the
gangster (Joe Pantoliano)—a money launderer for the mob who temporarily
has a couple million dollars. (The laundering here involves literally
washing blood off bills.) This gets very suspenseful (as well as fairly
gruesome) in spots, and if it never adds up to anything profound, it’s
still a welcome change to have a lesbian couple as the chief
identification figures. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: Ozualdo
Candeias was a truck driver who loved movies and decided to make his
own. He did so in a very idiosyncratic style that didn’t care to conform
to anyone’s idea of cinema. His first feature, The Margin, often
suggests a São Paulo rereading of Mario Peixoto’s great avant-garde
classic Limite (1931). It’s a sort of love story set among a group of
desperate and abandoned characters. The
movie takes place around the banks of the Tietê river, which stands as a
promise and a limit for everyone’s lives. While Peixoto was in dialogue
with the European modern art he knew well, Candeias draws heavily from
the poverty around him. The movie has barely any dialogue, and the
filmmaker finds a lot of beauty in the middle of the harshness. Brazil’s
underdevelopment would remain Candeias’s great source of inspiration,
and from The Margin onwards, no other filmmaker did more to give
it representation.
Time Out review: There’s a superb and important early
scene in Ang Lee’s absorbing spy
romance, set on a stylised (studio-shot) Hong Kong tram in 1939, as a
young troupe of Chinese actors board, flushed with the rousing success
of that night’s patriotic play. (The Japanese have already occupied
their homeland, British-run Hong Kong is soon to fall.) The exhilarated
lead character Wong Chia Chi (a remarkable, film-dominating debut
performance by newcomer Wei Tang) thrusts her head out the window to
taste the rain, as if to make physical and personal the night’s small
triumph. You see in that moment how the innocent young actress may be
persuaded, in patriotic duty, to adopt an alias, spy on and seduce, in
order to kill Tony Leung’s collaborationist chief of police. You
could call Lee’s Chinese-language version of Eileen Chang’s novella a
revisionist wartime thriller. Its sub-Brechtian moments are muted, but
it is more than happy to pay self-conscious attention to the period
setting, design and clothes to highlight, in echo of David Hare’s
‘Plenty’, the seductive role of dress as disguise and mask. Like Hare
(with his OAS volunteer, Kate Nelligan), Lee is interested in applying
an emotional and psychological realism to his heroine’s incredible
bravery. It seems, in wartime, some are able to assume grave
responsibilties, but – as Lee’s film quietly and provocatively suggests –
the actions of those that do make mockery of conventional, sex-based,
notions of what constitutes courage, honour, love or even patriotism
itself. In this sense, the real battlefield, the genuine theatre of
truth, in ‘Lust, Caution’ is the bed – the sex – in the arranged flat
three years later in Shanghai, something of a last tango wherein Leung’s
previously almost obsequiously mannered ‘traitor’ shows his true
colours, and Miss Wong, under her alias Mrs Mak, is transformed by the
ever-present knowledge that discovery is death. It’s not a companionable
film – Lee’s directorial discipline, objectivity and lack of
expressionist touch in the use of either Rodrigo Prieto’s camerawork or
Alexandre Desplat’s score can push the viewer close to outsider-dom or
voyeurism – but its dark romanticism lingers in the mind. Wally Hammond
The 'Reece Shearsmith presents' choices at BFI Southbank have been excellent and this is no exception. The actor will introduce the film.
Chicago Reader review: Roger Donaldson’s film of the classic tale of discipline and revolt in
the British navy (1984) is far better than its predecessors, despite the
dim wattage of Anthony Hopkins (as Captain Bligh) and Mel Gibson (as
Mister Christian). Robert Bolt’s screenplay was originally prepared for
David Lean, and it contains a lot of Bolt-ish/Lean-ish disquisition on
the question of civilization versus savagery. But Donaldson brings it
alive by applying the agonizing rhythm of tension and release,
suppression and explosion, that governed his superb New Zealand film Smash Palace.
Hardly another filmmaker in the 80s could leap from smooth classicism
to dynamic modernism with such agility and expressiveness. The appalling
electronic score, by Chariots of Fire‘s Vangelis, is the film’s only grating flaw. Dave Kehr
This is a £1 for members screening at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: America's homeboy comedy of the year is about basketball only in the sense that writer-director Ron Shelton'sBull Durhamwas
about baseball. It's a truly terrific piece of entertainment propelled
by the magic and dynamism of its stars. Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes)
meets Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) on a public court where the game is
played as a mix of macho combat, stand-up comedy and con-artistry. The
jokes and banter are wonderful. But this is also a most unlikely buddy
movie, where the black/white pair team up as hustlers floating around
the rougher areas of Los Angeles, turn on each other, and finally bury
the hatchet to get Billy out of hock to some surprisingly obliging
hoods. Sadly, in doing so, the duo alienate Billy's long-suffering
Hispanic girlfriend (Rosie Perez), who dreams of the straight life and
spends her time memorising trivia in hopes of a TV game show break.
Snipes and Harrelson bounce off the screen like Michael Jordan, while
Shelton and cinematographerRussell Boydperfectly capture the agile thrills of the game itself. A double-whammy slam-dunker of a movie. Steve Grant
