Chicago Reader review: The film that introduced Yasujiro Ozu, one of Japan's
greatest filmmakers, to American audiences (1953). The camera remains
stationary throughout this delicate study of conflicting generations in a
modern Japanese family, save for one heartbreaking moment when Ozu
tracks around a corner to discover the grandparents, alone and
forgotten. A masterpiece, minimalist cinema at its finest and most
complex. Dave Kehr
This film is part of the Category H’s late night Rio Forever season.
Category H introduction: Where strange inhabitants commit unspeakable deeds or where past
inhabitants can’t quite seem to put their bad habits to rest, even
from beyond the grave. Blood (1973), directed by cult filmmaker
Andy Milligan, is a sprawling tale of multiple monsters who move into
a new home in order to conduct scientific experiments. Led by one Dr
Orlofski and his beautiful sunlight hating wife Regina, the monsters
attempt to find ways to make their strange family work in a hostile
new town. Blood plays as a strange melodrama featuring constant
injections, arguments and the odd carnivorous plant, creating an
entertaining completely one of a kind film. Screening at the Rio for
the first time X years, leave any ideas of typical plot development
at the door and prepare to be injected with Milligan’s infectious
cinematic world. After a short break, we will return to the
cinema for Bones (2001). Bones is a truly original 00s horror film
that was sorely overlooked upon release, and which we cannot wait to
bring to the Rio Cinema for the first time. Starring Snoop Dogg and
featuring Pam Grier, Bones is a ghost story tinged with giallo.
Twenty years after his unlawful death, former man of the people Jimmy
Bones’s ghost remains haunting his now run down neighborhood. After
a group of teenagers acquire his old house and plan to turn it into a
nightclub, they accidentally summon his vengeful spirit who is
looking to take revenge on those who have ruined his beloved former
home. Featuring incredible practical effects and excellent
performances, Bones is a film ripe for reappraisal.
Prince Charles Cinema introduction: Four
teenage friends from Hell's Kitchen end up being sent to reform
school after almost killing a man. There they are brutalized by the
guards. John (Ron Eldard) and Tommy (Billy Crudup) grow up to be hit
men who recognize their abuser years later and kill him. Their trial
is prosecuted by another member of their gang, who is now the
assistant DA.
This 35mm screening is part of the Nolan in 35mm season at the Screen on the Green from June 20th to July 15th. Full details here.
Time Out review: It’s been a summer of great expectations. First there was ‘The
Avengers’, which ticked all the right geeky boxes and made a truckload
of dosh. Then ‘Prometheus’, which disappointed most but still managed to
ring a few tills. Now here comes the biggie. Can Christopher Nolan see
out his Bat trilogy in style? Can he make that so-far-elusive five-star
superhero movie, the one which gets the blend between action, emotion,
plot and character just right? Can he at least live up to the eyepopping
standard he set with 2008’s ‘The Dark Knight’? The answers are yes, no, and mostly. As its running time suggests,
‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is a sprawling, epic feast of a movie, stuffed
to the gills with side characters, subplots and diversions. So if the
balance skews in favour of grandstanding action rather than emotional
resonance, of statuesque icons rather than real people, we can let it
slide. There’s nothing here to match the intensity of Heath Ledger’s
Joker, and the movie feels weaker for it. But that was a one-off, and
the show must go on. We’re reintroduced to Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (Christian Bale), living as a recluse, holed up in the east wing of Wayne Manor while Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) presides over a relatively crime-free Gotham City. But when marauding, mask-wearing psycho Bane (Tom Hardy) muscles in with the intention of kickstarting a popular revolution, Bruce must don the cape and cowl once again. This is just the central thread in an increasingly tangled story: there’s also Anne Hathaway as a slinky, burgling Catwoman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
as a square-jawed beat cop and lots of confusing financial shenanigans
with the shareholders of Wayne Enterprises. As in the previous films,
Nolan and his co-writer, his brother Jonathan, draw on real-world issues
to spice up the fantasy, and with dubious results: with its rampaging
Occupy Gotham anarchists, philanthropic billionaires and decent cops who
ignore due process, this is so staunchly right-wing it’ll thrill all
those Fox News anchors outraged by ‘The Muppets’. But when the Bat flies, such considerations go out the window.
Sublimating CGI in favour of real crowd scenes and massive cityscapes,
Nolan creates a grand, dirty, engrossing world, and his action sequences
just hum. The way the various strands tie up is a mite predictable, but
it’s satisfying nonetheless. And as our heroes swoop off into the
sunset, we realise we’ve been witness to something truly impressive: a
seven-year cinematic adventure which combined the epic and the personal
in dizzying, inventive, sometimes perplexing, often enthralling, always
imaginative ways. Tom Huddleston
This 35mm screening is part of the Nolan in 35mm season at the Screen on the Green from June 20th to July 15th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Funny things, dreams. Fascinating for the dreamer, but as dull
as a late morning in Slough for anybody else, unless, of course, your
guide is Freud. Or, as it turns out, Christopher Nolan, the 39-year-old
British director of ‘Memento’ and ‘The Dark Knight’, whose solution to
the boredom of other people’s dreams is to collide their woozy,
ever-changing, upside-down and roundabout nature with the thrust of a
fast-paced, men-on-a-mission movie and a startling visual language that
mirrors their strangeness. Better still, the dreams preferred by Nolan
include images of Paris folding in on itself and a trackless train
thundering through a city. The limited, sleepworld excitements of
retaking your A levels ad infinitum or forever missing a flight at the
airport don’t figure here. Nolan throws a perfect
storm of stunts, effects, locations and actors at one big idea: that
it’s possible to pilfer ideas from dreams by a process called
‘extraction’, which involves hooking yourself up to a drip, falling
asleep and entering the world of the subconscious. The holy grail of
this process is to reverse it, which is ‘inception’, the planting of a
new idea in another’s mind. That’s the trick that experts Dom (Leonardo
DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), aided by new recruits
Ariadne (Ellen Page) and Eames (Tom Hardy), try to pull off while
hopping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa. They’re working for Saito (Ken
Watanabe) in pursuit of business magnate Robert (Cillian Murphy), and
their motives vary, from financial to intellectual. But DiCaprio has
another driver: the memory of his wife Mal (Marion Cottilard) is
haunting him and it’s going to take a lot of psychological
spring-cleaning for him to reconnect with that lost world. All
hail Nolan for mastering a higher class of mass entertainment. Like all
good science fiction, ‘Inception’ demands we pay serious attention to
pure fantasy on the back of strong ideas and exquisite craft – but it
also combines fantasy with real observations about our sleeping lives.
Like a dream, Nolan’s film fades swiftly in the light – but while it
lasts, it feels like there’s nothing more important to decipher. Dave Calhoun
This is part of the '£1 for Members' season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Samuel Fuller’s wild, wonderful, semicoherent black-and-white ‘Scope
western (1957) was shot in ten days, and in some ways looks it. But it’s
also the feature that fully announces his talent as an avant-garde
filmmaker, even in this unlikeliest of genres. Barbara Stanwyck stars as
the “woman with a whip,” the land baroness of Tombstone Territory.
She’s assisted by the 40 dudes of the title, and Barry Sullivan is the
marshal who turns up to challenge her. There’s a hilarious romantic
subplot involving a female gunsmith (whose sexual initiation is handled
through an iris and dissolve that Godard incorporated into Breathless),
an endless crane-and-track shot through a western town that defies
belief, a lot of delirious violence, perverse sexuality, imaginative
visual energy, and several startling plot twists. If you’ve ever
wondered why Godard and other French New Wave directors deify Fuller,
this movie explains it all. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review:For all his versatility as a writer-director, I was surprised to learn
that Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies) had made a film about the genesis
of Gilbert and Sullivan's mid-1880s comic opera The Mikado. Yet this
160-minute "backstage musical" is about something he knows
intimately--the complex of personal, organizational, artistic, and
cultural factors that go into putting on a show. Leigh begins with
leisurely character sketches of composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan
Corduner) and librettist William Gilbert (Jim Broadbent), two very
different men whose collaboration appears to be at an end. Only after
Gilbert's wife (Lesley Manville) drags him to a Japanese exhibition in
London does The Mikado (and this movie) begin to take shape, and after
that the film keeps getting better and better. The actors and actresses
in the stage production, including Leigh regular Timothy Spall, all sing
in their own voices, and Leigh's flair for comedy and sense of social
interaction shine as he shows all the ingredients in The Mikado
beginning to mesh. Thoroughly researched and unobtrusively upholstered,
this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a
string of delights. With Ron Cook, Wendy Nottingham, Eleanor David,
Kevin McKidd, Shirley Henderson, Dorothy Atkinson, and many Leigh
standbys, including Alison Steadman and Katrin Cartlidge.
