Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 111: Tue Apr 21

TwentyFourSeven (Meadows, 1997): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

This screening will feature a Q&A with director Shane Meadows (work permitting). It is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
Those who have seen Shane Meadows' camcorder gem Smalltime will already know the young writer/director is one of Britain's most promising talents. This, his first full length feature, lives up to expectations splendidly. Though it's never quite as funny as the earlier movie, and the bigger (£1.5m) budget has resulted in more conventional characterisation and plotting, the extra polish comes with no significant drop in energy, flair or invention. Darcy (Bob Hoskins) decides to inject a sense of community and purpose into the disaffected youth of a Nottingham suburb by reopening a club. While determination and a canny ability to win over most people he meets results in camaraderie and a modicum of sporting success, resentment, cynicism and even violence are so deeply ingrained in certain locals that the club is never entirely without enemies. What lifts the film beyond the constraints of this potentially corny story is Meadows' engagingly blend of authentic naturalism, robust rapscallion humour, jaunty editing and off-the-cuff lyricism.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 110: Mon Apr 20

The Razor's Edge (Saab, 1985): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

A unique example of activist experimental cinema on the survival of people during a time of occupation, thanks to the power of art, this film is preceded by a pre-recorded intro by Mathilde Rouxel, co-founder of the Association Jocelyne Saab.

New York Film Festival review:
“I’ve invented places, as if by making a work of fiction about them, I could preserve them,” the Lebanese war correspondent–turned–filmmaker Jocelyne Saab said of her interest in fiction. Her 1985 drama The Razor’s Edge takes place during the Lebanese Civil War and centers on the bond formed between Karim (Jacques Weber), a fortysomething painter, and Samar (Hala Bassam), a teenager who grew up during the war (Juliet Berto has a small but striking role as Karim’s friend). Underneath the character-driven narrative is another story, that of a place. Saab started her career as a journalist working for French television and her reporter’s eye deftly captures the destruction of war-torn Beirut and the disparate but vibrant people wandering through its rubble and ruins. Screenwriter Gérard Brach (The Tenant, Identification of a Woman) worked on the final version of the script, and the result, juxtaposing the creation of art with violence, is an arresting meditation on humanity’s struggle in the face of unthinkable horror.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 109: Sun Apr 19

Master and Commander (Weir, 2003): BFI IMAX, 11am

Following this special screening wmany of the film’s cast will be present for an in-person discussion including Lee Ingleby, Bryan Dick, Alex Palmer, Robert Pugh, Jack Randall, Max Benitz, Edward Woodall and William Mannering.

Time Out review:
'Off tacks and main sheet!' commands Russell Crowe's pony-tailed, gimlet-eyed Royal Navy captain, 'Lucky' Jack Aubrey, in Peter Weir's rousing 1805 adventure, adapted from two of Patrick O'Brian's much-admired seafaring novels. Aubrey's three-masted frigate HMS Surprise, cruising the coast of Brazil on the lookout for Napoleon's allies, comes under splintering fire from the fleeter French privateer Acheron and lifts off in the fog. The sailing master (Robert Pugh) counsels caution, but the standfast Aubrey, who fought with Nelson on the Nile, will have his man, whatever the odds, come hell or high water. Thanks in no small measure to Perfect Storm designer William Sandell, this handsomely mounted actioner exudes the authentic tang of salt, sweat and gunpowder. Cameraman Russell Boyd gives painterly expression to the ship's 'little world' and, as in Gallipoli, Weir shows his adroitness at action and the psychology of men at war, helped by a string of sterling performances, notably Bettany's Darwin-esque doctor (Aubrey's friend, cello partner and obverse) and young Pirkis as a heroic aristocratic midshipman. Nice too to hear English accents in a major US production, especially Crowe's clipped tones, and a well used classically oriented score stripped of bombast. If there's a problem, it's the insistence on the warrior/man-of-science dichotomy, which has the film meander off on a naturalist jaunt through the Galapagos to tension-slackening effect. But in the main, a fine old-fashioned Boy's Own yarn.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 108: Sat Apr 18

Secret Ceremony (Losey, 1968): Nickel Cinema, 3.45pm

Time Out review:
It's difficult to know why Robert Mitchum, slouching through a few scenes in the ill-fitting disguise of an ageing, bearded academic with little girls on his mind, should have accepted this part. Elizabeth  Taylor, however, is very fine as a tacky madonna: a devout prostitute who's offered a respite from the streets when a regressive child-woman called Cenci (Mia Farrow in long wig and Pollyanna tights) adopts her as substitute mother and moves her into a mansion of art-déco splendour. No wonder then that Taylor/Laura should fervently pray 'Oh Lord, let no one snatch me from this heaven'; and as the strange 'secret ceremonies' begin, her treatment of Cenci displays the same mix of greed and generosity. Losey's mannered direction, somehow entirely appropriate, makes for a memorable film.
Jane Clarke

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 107: Fri Apr 17

Psychomania (Sharp, 1973): Nickel Cinema, 3.30pm

Time Out review: The first British Hell's Angels pic, and just about the blackest comedy to come out of this country in years. It features a bike gang called The Living Dead, whose leader (Nicky Henson) discovers the art of becoming just that. So he kills himself and is buried along with his bike, until he guns the engine and shoots back up through the turf; two victims later, he drives to a pub and calls his mother (Beryl Reid), a devil worshipper ensconced in her stately old dark house with George Sanders as her sinisterly imperturbable butler, to say he's back. This level of absurdity could be feeble, but director Don Sharp knows how to shoot it straight, without any directorial elbows-in-the-ribs. Consequently, much of the humour really works, even though the gang as individuals are strictly plastic. David Pirie

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 106: Thu Apr 16

Les Abysses (Papatakis, 1963): Garden Cinema, 8.15pm

This screening will be introduced by freelance writer and programmer Savina Petkova. It will feature English subtitles. 

Synopsis:

Papatakis’s debut unfolds in a country home where two domestic servants are cruelly exploited by the family they work for. When their abusive employers push them too far, it provokes a shocking and escallating rebellion. This allegorical portrait of the Algerian resistance was inspired by the real-life story of the Papin sisters, two maids who brutally murdered their employers in 1930s France - also the basis for Jean Genet’s influential 1947 play The Maids and Claude Chabrol’s 1995 psychological thriller La Cérémonie.

Curator’s note:

Boycotted by the selection committee of the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, Les Abysses was publicly defended by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Breton, and Jean Genet. The case of the two sisters has long been cited in French left-wing intellectual circles as a perfect example of working-class struggle. In Papatakis' view, the sisters' violence stemmed directly from their living conditions - the humiliations they endured and the exploitation they suffered at the hands of their employers.

The film exemplifies Papatakis' hyper-stylized, expressionistic approach, escalating the domestic conflict into paroxysmic class warfare. Like ancient Greek tragedies where masked actors embodied archetypes rather than nuanced psychological portraits, the performances are deliberately exaggerated - raw and symbolic rather than naturalistic.

Here (and above) is an interview with the director at the Cannes film festival in 1963

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 105: Wed Apr 15

Pacific Heights (Schlesinger, 1990): Nickel Cinema, 6pm

This film is creening as part of 'The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100' season. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) is not the ideal tenant: he trifles with razor blades, cultivates cockroaches, and doesn't pay the rent. It's a sign of the times when the landlord gets all our sympathy, but that's the general idea. Live-in lovers Drake and Patty (Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) buy a sprawling Victorian house in San Francisco. To pay for renovations, they rent out apartments to a quiet Japanese couple and to the psychopathic Hayes, who proceeds to strip the fittings and terrorise everyone in the house. But the law is firmly on his side. Schlesinger stages the action with smooth assurance, gradually building tension until Hayes goes completely round the bend. The problem lies in Daniel Pyne's script: the relationship between Drake and Patty is half-realised, while Hayes' motivations remain strangely muddled. That said, Keaton is chillingly convincing.
Collette Maude

Here (and above) is the trailer.