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).
Chicago Reader review: One of the loveliest of Nick Ray’s movies: this 1952 feature begins as a
harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism
reminiscent of Frank Borzage. Robert Ryan is the unstable hero, a
thuggish cop sent upstate in search of a murderer; he ends up falling in
love with the killer’s blind sister (Ida Lupino, who took over some of
the direction when Ray fell ill). Ray excels both in the portrayal of
the corrupt urban environment, a swirl of noirish shadows and violent
movements, and in his exalted vision of the snow-covered countryside,
filmed as a blindingly white, painfully silent field for moral
regeneration. With Ward Bond and an excellent score by Bernard Herrmann. Dave Kehr
This is a 35mm screening and is part of the Rio Forever season. More details here. Director and Rio Patron
Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona, 2073) will introduce the
film, discussing its importance to him both as a director and film
lover. Here is an excellent article by John Patterson in the Guardian on the movie.
Time Out review:
It’s
worrying that 1974’s ‘The Godfather Part II’ is now best known for
being the film-lover’s kneejerk answer to the question ‘which sequel is
superior to the original’? It’s a pointless discussion, because both
films are damn close to perfect: two opposing but complementary sides of
the same coin. If ‘The Godfather’ was a knife in the dark, its sequel
is the long, slow death rattle; if the first film lusted after its
bloodthirsty antiheroes, the second drowns itself in guilt and
recrimination. Two stories run in parallel in ‘Part II’. In the first, a
young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) rises to power in New York,
fuelled by vengeance and brute, old-world morality. In the second, set
50 years later, his son Michael (Al Pacino) struggles to reconcile his
father’s ideals with an uncertain world, and finds himself beset on all
sides by treachery and greed. This is quite simply one of the saddest
movies ever made, a tale of loss, grief and absolute loneliness, an
unflinching stare into the darkest moral abyss. Tom Huddleston Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm screening is on sale at £1 for Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: Jerry Schatzberg might be a very urban cowboy (Panic in Needle Park, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Sweet Revenge,
etc), but there's no evidence here of slick, Altman-style condescension
to country 'n' western culture. Instead there's an unforced equation of
the upfront emotional currency of C&W lyrics with a simple
triangular plotline pared down from Intermezzo (singer Willie Nelson and
wife Dyan Cannon almost come apart over the lure of the road and one more
infidelity). Nothing new under the sun - but the easy-going fringe
benefits are well worth the ticket: Nelson's a natural, and the duets
with Cannon are pure gold. Paul Taylor
