CINÉ-REAL is a non-for-profit film club with the aim of bringing together film makers, actors, writers, directors, producers, photographers, cinephiles etc, to enjoy classic films as film and share their passion for filmmaking.. The films shown are all 16mm prints.
Chicago Reader review: For many years this 1937 tale of brotherhood and escape, set in a World
War I German prison camp, was considered Jean Renoir's official
masterpiece. It's an excellent film, with Renoir's usual looping line
and deft shifts of tone, though today the balance of critical opinion
has shifted in favor of the greater darkness and filigree of The Rules of the Game.
Francois Truffaut described it as"the least eccentric of all of
Renoir's French movies," and for that reason it has long been the most
popular. But to imagine this same material in the hands of any of the
cinema's more naive, more didactic humanists—a Capra or a Stevens,
say—is to appreciate the measure of Renoir's genius and honesty. Dave Kehr
Here is the Horse Hospital introduction: Hallucinatory satanists infest swinging London in this hard-to-find
psychedelic Giallo from one of its boldest proponents, Sergio Martino
(The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, Torso, Your Vice is a Locked Room and
Only I have the Key). All the necessary ingredients are here, including
giallo queen Edwige Fenech as the troubled victim of a psychopathic
stalker, exotic West London locations and a psyched-out sitar heavy
theme from Bruno Nicolai.
Here is the BFI introduction: Director Gracie Otto pays a vibrant tribute to a fascinating entertainer – possibly the
most famous person you’ve never heard of! Notorious London theatre and
film impresario Michael White produced over 300 shows and movies over
the last 50 years, including risqué productions of Oh! Calcutta!, The
Rocky Horror Show and Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. This intimate
documentary introduces us to this playboy, gambler, bon vivant and
friend of the rich and famous via interviews with Naomi Watts, Kate
Moss, John Waters, Barry Humphries and more.
Time Out review: A film made with vaseline and railway tracks, which takes some adjusting
to; but you soon forget to read the subtitles, because you can
understand all you need without them. It's based on the book Le Grand Meaulnes
by Alain-Fournier, and explores a strange adolescence in provincial
France at the end of the last century. In the film, Roger Corman meets
Proust, Elvira Madigan rides again, and Renoir takes acid. John Collis
Here is the Scalarama introduction: Kinetta. A Greek defunct resort town, inhabited during the off-season by
migrant workers. Lanthimos studies the cryptic activities of an
inscrutable trio (a policeman, a photographer, and a hotel maid) who
barely speak and who pass the time by staging reenactments of murders.
The policeman with a passion for automobiles, tape recorders and Russian
women, investigates a series of recent murders in the area. He enlists
the help of a photo-store clerk, a loner who is a part-time
videographer, and a young hotel maid, who will be performing the role of
the female victims. This oddball trio engages in a succession of murder
re-enactments, directed by the cop with exhaustive attention to detail
but questionable scientific purpose… We know nothing more of these
people. Not even their names. They will disappear in the first flood of
summer vacationers…
Victoria & Albert Museum introduction: Watch A.I. Artificial Intelligence
and
hear Professor Mark Bishop, a world authority on computer intelligence,
introduce the dazzling sci-fi created by Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. Tracing its genesis in Kubrick's 2001: A Space
Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Professor Bishop discusses the movie's
robot child with current developments in A.I. technology and philosophy.
This event is part of the London Design Festival at the V&A 2014
Chicago Reader review:
A collaboration between the living Steven Spielberg and
the late Stanley Kubrick seems appropriate to a project that reflects
profoundly on the differences between life and nonlife. Kubrick started
this picture and came up with the idea that Spielberg should direct it,
and after inheriting a 90-page treatment Kubrick had prepared with Ian
Watson and 600 drawings he'd done with Chris Baker, Spielberg finished
it in so much his own manner that it may be his most personal film, as
well as his most thoughtful. It might make you cry; it's just as likely
to give you the creeps—which is as it should be. This is a movie people
will be arguing about for many years to come. Jonathan Rosenabum Here (and above) is the trailer.
Time out review: Four sequels and a TV series bred contempt, but this first visit to
Pierre Boulle's planet, bringing a welcome touch of wit to his rather
humourlessly topsy-turvy theory of evolution, remains a minor sci-fi
classic. The settings (courtesy of the National Parks of Utah and
Arizona) are wonderfully outlandish, and Schaffner makes superb use of
them as a long shot chillingly establishes the isolation of the crashed
astronauts, as exploration brings alarming intimations of life (pelts
staked out on the skyline like crucified scarecrows), and as discovery
of a tribe of frightened humans is followed by an eruption of jackbooted
apes on horseback. The enigma of the planet's history, juggled through
Heston's humiliating experience of being studied as an interesting
laboratory specimen by his ape captors, right down to his final
startling rediscovery of civilisation, is quite beautifully sustained. Tom Milne
Time Out review: The opening shot shows a helicopter lifting a statue of Christ into the
skies and out of Rome. God departs and paves the way for Fellini's
extraordinarily prophetic vision of a generation's spiritual and moral
decay. The depravity is gauged against the exploits of Marcello
(Mastroianni), a playboy hack who seeks out sensationalist stories by
bedding socialites and going to parties. Marcello is both repelled by
and drawn to the lifestyles he records: he becomes besotted with a
fleshy, dimwit starlet (Ekberg), he joins in the media hysteria
surrounding a child's alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary, yet he longs
for the bohemian life of his intellectual friend Steiner (Cuny). There
are perhaps a couple of party scenes too many, and the peripheral
characters can be unconvincing, but the stylish cinematography and
Fellini's bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting. Elaine Patterson Here is an excerpt.
Chicago Reader review: Bela Lugosi died during the making of this low-budget
science fiction programmer, but that didn't faze director Edward Wood:
the Lugosi footage, which consists of the actor skulking around a
suburban garage, is replayed over and over, to highly surreal effect.
Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange and appealing in its undisguised incompetence. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice
has made a case for Wood as an unconscious avant-gardist; there's no
denying that his blunders are unusually creative and oddly expressive. Dave Kehr
One of the highlights of the year, a very rare screening from Little White Lies magazine (with an introduction by critic Matt Thrift) of Brian De Palma's underrated mid-1980s
Hitchcockian thriller. Highly recommended.
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
Chicago Reader review: Peter Lorre stars in Fritz Lang's sympathetic and terrifying story of a
child murderer, filmed in Germany in 1931. The underworld joins forces
with the police in tracking down Lorre's plump, helpless maniac because
his atrocities have interrupted the course of crime-as-usual. The moral
issues are complex and deftly handled: Lorre is at once entirely
innocent and absolutely evil. Lang's detached, modified expressionist
style gives the action a plastic beauty: the geometry of the images is
reflected in the geometry of the plot, as every piece of film clicks
together on its way to the inevitable climax. Two lines meet, and Lorre
is at the center. Dave Kehr
Cine Lumiere introduction: The creaking wheels of the phantom carriage ridden by Death himself
– and driven by the hapless man who dies at the stroke of midnight on
New Year’s eve – provide the sinister backdrop for this rare French
fantasy film. Pierre Fresnay is remarkable as hard-drinking tough guy,
David, whose buddy Georges haunts his nights as the ghostly carriage
driver. A woman from the Salvation Army will try to save David from the
fate of his friend.
Scalarama preview: Inspired by American serial killer Edward Gein, Nekromantik tells the
story of necrophilic couple: Betty and Rob. He works for a street
cleaning company specializing in body disposals of all kinds. With
Betty, he not only shares the apartment, but also a sexual preference
for the dead. What excitement, when Rob brings home a corpse. But when
he is fired from his job, Betty leaves him, taking the dead lover with
her. Buttgereit’s debut feature was made as a protest against rigid new
censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s. While it was
banned in some countries, it achieved cult status in others, and
established Buttgereit as master of German splatter and horror.
John Huston is much better known for The Dead, African Queen and The
Maltese Falcon but Fat City is surely, along with Wise Blood (1979), his finest work. Don't miss the
chance to see a rare screening of this wonderful slice of Hollywood
melancholia in which Stacy Keach gives the performance of a lifetime as a
struggling boxer giving it one last try and Jeff Bridges shines as a
naive up-and-coming fighter. Watch out in particular for the final scene
of this movie and an audacious, haunting shot a minute from the end.
Time Out review:
'Marvellous, grimly downbeat study of desperate lives and the escape routes people construct for themselves, stunningly shot by Conrad Hall.
The setting is Stockton, California, a dreary wasteland of smoky bars
and sunbleached streets where the lives of two boxers briefly meet, one
on the way up, one on the way down. Neither, you sense instantly, for
all their talk of past successes and future glories, will ever know any
other world than the back-street gymnasiums and cheap boxing-rings
where battered trainers and managers exchange confidences about their
ailments, disappointments and dreams, and where in a sad and sobering
climax two sick men beat each other half to death for a few dollars and a
pint of glory. Huston directs with the same puritanical rigour he
brought to Wise Blood. Beautifully summed up by Paul Taylor as a
"masterpiece of skid row poetry".' Tom Milne
This screening is part of a short season at the ICA dedicated to the brilliant Italian director Elio Petri. Full details here.
Here is the ICA introduction: Petri’s erotic, intellectual horror film, winner of a Special Jury
Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1969, offers a harrowing, hallucinatory account of an
artist’s descent into madness. Franco Nero stars as a successful abstract painter who heads out for a
peaceful rural idyll with his mistress-turned-manager (Vanessa
Redgrave) only to become unhinged by his growing obsession with the
ghost of a murdered woman (Gabriella Grimaldi) that haunts their holiday
villa. The film’s striking canvases are by the American artist Jim Dine
and the original score is from maestro Ennio Morricone.
The Q&A after the screening will feature Pasquale Iannone.
Pasquale Iannone is a film academic and critic based
in Edinburgh. He is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound as well
as various BBC Radio programmes. His film curation work includes seasons
at BFI Southbank, Glasgow Film Theatre and Edinburgh’s Filmhouse.
Here is the ICA introduction:
A hypnotic, bittersweet ode to boyhood, cinemagoing, postwar working-class family life, Catholicism and glacial erosion, The Long Day Closes
follows Bud, a lonely young boy growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s.
Told as a trance of memories and moments, the film’s particular brand of
sadness, beauty, breathtaking rhythm and atmospheric cinematography is
emblematic of why writer-director Terence Davies is one of the great
artists of contemporary British cinema.
The movie will be shown from a 35mm print and the screening will
feature an introduction and complimentary programme booklet from
repertory cinema curators The Badlands Collective.
Chicago Reader review: The 1992 conclusion of Terence Davies's second autobiographical trilogy
may not achieve the sublime heights of parts one and two (which
comprised 1988's Distant Voices, Still Lives), but it's still a
powerful film, possibly even a great one—the sort of work that can renew
one's faith in movies. Part three chronicles his life in working-class
Liverpool between the ages of 7 and 11, a period he compresses into the
years 1955 and 1956, but Davies focuses less on plot or memory as
they're usually understood than on the memory of emotions and subjective
consciousness. Music, lighting, elaborate camera movements, and the
sound tracks of other films are among the tools he uses in relation to
the basic settings of home, street, school, church, pub, and movie
theater. Davies emphasizes the continuities and discontinuities between
these places and the emotions they evoke, creating a consistent sense of
religious illumination and transfiguration. What he does with the
strains of "Tammy" in one climactic sequence and with the drift of
moving clouds in another are alone worth the price of admission. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here is that sequence Rosenbaum discusses in the conclusion of his short review.
This screening is part of a short season at the ICA dedicated to the brilliant Italian director Elio Petri. Full details here.
Here is the ICA introduction:
Petri's first adaptation of a work by Leonardo Sciascia follows the
unauthorised investigation of timid left-wing university professor
Laurana (Gian Maria Volonté) who refuses to discount a double murder in
his Sicilian hometown as an old-fashioned honour killing. On the trail
of the real murderer in what soon appears to be a politically-motivated
crime, Laurana must navigate a maze-like conspiracy which appears to
implicate most of the town's dignitaries. Complicating matters, he also
falls in love with one of the murdered men's wives.
This claustrophobic thriller is a study of the interaction between
organised crime and power in which the Mafia (never explicitly
mentioned) is analysed as a social phenomenon deeply and irrevocably
ingrained into society.
The Q&A after the screening will feature Alan O'Leary and Nico Marzano. Dr Alan O'Leary is Senior Lecturer in Italian Cinema
and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He recently partook in
a series of overseas fellowships as part of the World Universities
Network. Nico Marzano is Film & Cinema Manager at the ICA.
This is screening as part of the Passport to Cinema season at BFI and was my personal 2005 London Film Festival highlight. Chicago Reader review: The three episodes of Hou Hsiao-hsien's exquisite 2005 feature, his best
in many years, are set achronologically in Taiwan, in 1966, 1911, and
2005; each is about 40 minutes long and stars Chang Chen and Shu Qi. The
structure may make the film sound like Hou's greatest hits, echoing not
only his trilogy about Taiwan in the 20th century (City of Sadness, The
Puppet Master, and Good Men, Good Women) but the nostalgia about
adolescence in A Time to Live and a Time to Die, the ritzy period
bordello in Flowers of Shanghai, and the contemporary club scene in
Millennium Mambo (which also starred Shu). But it's the intricate formal
and thematic relation of the three parts that defines the film's beauty
and makes it such a passionate meditation on youth, love, and freedom
in relation to history. The ironic Chinese title translates as "The Best
of Times." Jonathan Rosenabum
Chicago Reader review of Alphaville: The unadorned streets of Paris become Alpha 60, Capital of Pain, in
Jean-Luc Godard's smoky, acrid 1965 science fiction film. It's the most
political of Godard's films before his complete radicalization, and
probably his most anguished. The terrain crossed by special agent Lemmy
Caution (B movie star Eddie Constantine) is relentlessly sterile and
oppressive, a wilderness of glass-box architecture and endless white
corridors. The view of technology as inherently evil is too facile for
Godard's fine, paradoxical mind, and the film as a whole is light on
insight. But it remains an outstanding example of the filmmaker's power
to transform an environment through the selection of detail: everything
in it is familiar, but nothing is recognizable. With Anna Karina and
Akim Tamiroff. Dave Kehr
Here is academic Colin MacCabe's introduction to Alphaville. *************** Chicago Reader review of Pierrot Le Fou: "I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple," Jean-Luc
Godard said of this brilliant, all-over-the-place adventure and
meditation about two lovers on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna
Karina). Made in 1965, the film, with its ravishing colors and beautiful
'Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard, still looks as iconoclastic and
fresh as it did when it belatedly opened in the U.S. Godard's
misogynistic view of women as the ultimate betrayers is integral to the
romanticism in much of his 60s work—and perhaps never more so than
here—but Karina's charisma makes this pretty easy to ignore most of the
time. The movie's frequent shifts in style, emotion, and narrative are
both challenging and intoxicating: American director Samuel Fuller turns
up at a party scene to offer his definition of cinema, Karina performs
two memorable songs in musical-comedy fashion, Belmondo's character
quotes copiously from his reading, and a fair number of red and blue
cars are stolen and destroyed. Jonathan Rosenbaum
When Pierrot Le Fou, which will surely come to be seen as one of Jean-Luc
Godard's finest, was re-released in 1989 after many years out of
circulation, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum had this to say in an article in
Chicago Reader : "Looking at Pierrot Le Fou again almost a quarter of a
century after it was made, 20 years after its initial U.S. release,
is a bit like visiting another planet; it’s an explosion of color,
sound, music, passion, violence, and wit that illustrates what used to
be regarded as cinema."
It's impossible for me to give a swift synopsis for Pierrot Le Fou in which
Jean Paul Belmondo, ostensibly escaping stifling domesticity, and Anna
Karina, fleeing a group of gangsters, depart Paris for the south of
France suffice to say that it is brimming with ideas and scenes of
extraordinary complexity. My abiding memories of seeing this the first
time was of the vitality and colour - I was reminded when viewing it
again last year that this was also a caustic commentary by the director
on his relationship with Karina. Still, a huge treat and a film you
will not forget in a hurry.
If I had to pick one excerpt it would be
this one
in which fellow director Sam Fuller is asked what is the meaning of
cinema: "Film is like a battleground", recounts the American filmmaker.
"Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion."
Here is the ICA introduction:
This legendary film, running at 7 hours 12 minutes, deals with the
collapse of a collectivised Soviet-era farm in rural Hungary. There is
the scent of money in the air, and, in chaotic and changeable times, a
yearning for meaning and salvation. At such times it is inevitable that
prophets and Messiahs will be longed and waited for. The question is
whether they will be false prophets, or mere charlatans. In the chilly,
bleak rotten world of Sátántangó, who will follow who, and why, are left wonderfully uncertain. These are ordinary human concerns, but it is the vastness of the
landscape, the featureless plains and endless horizons, and a
terrifying, unremitting wind from nowhere, and a rain that falls without
end, that threatens to wash away all human hope. Signature long takes,
often as long as the 10 minutes that a roll of film allows, combined
with astonishing camera choreography offers a sublime cinema experience. To commit to Sátántangó is to commit to the unforgettable and life-changing: these are the outer limits of cinema. The screening is on 35mm.
Chicago Reader review: How can I do justice to this grungy seven-hour black
comedy (1994), in many ways my favorite film of the 90s? Adapted by
Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr and Laszlo Krasznahorkai from the latter's
1985 novel, this is a diabolical piece of sarcasm about the dreams,
machinations, and betrayals of a failed farm collective, set during a
few rainy fall days (two of them rendered more than once from the
perspectives of different characters). The form of the novel was
inspired by the steps of the tango—six forward, six backward—an idea
reflected by the film's overlapping time structure, 12 sections, and
remarkable choreographed long takes and camera movements. The subject of
this brilliantly constructed narrative is nothing less than the world
today, and its 431-minute running time is necessary not because Tarr has
so much to say, but because he wants to say it right. In Hungarian with
subtitles. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of a short season at the ICA dedicated to the brilliant Italian director Elio Petri. Full details here.
Here is the ICA introduction:
Inaugurating a cycle of cinema politico in Italy, Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
is a dark and satirical political thriller set during a time of
internal political disturbance, where a psychopathic Roman police
inspector (Gian Maria Volonté) cracks down with relish on the political
dissidents of the day. After slashing the throat of his masochistic mistress (Florinda
Bolkan), the inspector is perversely put in charge of the investigation.
With sadistic pleasure, he plants clues that implicate himself and then
craftily diffuses them, ostensibly to prove his invincibility. As
director Petri's split-second edits rocket back and forth between
flashback and detection, this film is a biting critique of Italian
police methods and authoritarian repression, a psychological study of a
budding crypto-fascist and a probing who-dunnit. The iciest of film noirs, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1970.
The panel discussion afterwards will include: Pasquale Iannone, a film academic and critic based
in Edinburgh. He is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound as well
as various BBC Radio programmes. His film curation work includes seasons
at BFI Southbank, Glasgow Film Theatre and Edinburgh’s Filmhouse. Michael Brooke, a regular contributor to Sight & Sound who also produced the Arrow Academy editions of Elio Petri’s L’Assassino and Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano.
Chicago Reader review: There's a world of difference between the natural, “found” surrealism of
Louis Feuillade's lighthearted French serial (1914) and the darker,
studied surrealism and campy piety of this 1964 remake by Georges
Franju. Yet in Franju's hands the material has its own magic (and
deadpan humor), which makes this one of the better features of his
middle period. Judex (Channing Pollack) is a cloaked hero who abducts a
villainous banker to prevent the evil Diana (Francine Bergé in black
tights) from stealing a fortune from the banker's virtuous daughter.
Some of what Franju finds here is worthy of Cocteau, and as he
discovered when he attempted another pastiche of Feuillade's work in
color, black and white is essential to the poetic ambience. With Jacques
Jouanneau and Sylva Koscina. In French with subtitles. Jonathan Rosenabum
Here is the Prince Charles Cinema introduction: Psychotronic and Cigarette Burns Cinema team up
to present a series of ultra-rare UK cinema screenings of the notorious
video nasty The Last House on the Left. When two innocent girls head to the big city for their
first rock gig, little do they expect their simple diversion to score a
bit of weed would go so disastrously wrong for all involved.
Released in 1972, Wes Craven"s rough-edged directorial debut The Last House on the Left remains as controversial now, as it did then.
Suffering for decades under an outright UK ban, before finally seeing an
official home video release in the mid-noughties and a few, very limited
theatrical screenings in the UK, we are pleased to bring this
groundbreaking and nerve shattering nasty to UK screens on 35mm for its
largest and longest theatrical run ever.
Wes Craven closes the door on the hippie 60s and kicks down a new
path to the post Vietnam era of harsh brutality, in a movie you won"t
soon forget, but don"t worry, it"s only a movie...
Psychotronic Cinema is a monthly cult film event which has been
dedicated to bringing the world"s greatest, rarest and flat out weirdest
cult movies to Scottish cinema screens for over a decade. While down
south, Cigarette Burns flies the battered and bloodied flag of
celluloid, screening 35mm and 16mm genre magic wherever there"s a
projector.
Roger Ebert review: Last House on the Left is a tough, bitter little sleeper of a movie
that's about four times as good as you'd expect. There is a moment of
such sheer and unexpected terror that it beats anything in the
heart-in-the-mouth line since Alan Arkin jumped out of the darkness at Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark. I don't want to give the impression, however, that this is simply a good
horror movie. It's horrifying, all right, but in ways that have nothing
to do with the supernatural. It's the story of two suburban girls who
go into the city for a rock concert, are kidnapped by a gang of sadistic
escaped convicts and their sluttish girlfriend, and are raped and
murdered. Then, in a coincidence even the killers find extreme, the gang
ends up spending the night at the home of one of the girls' parents.
Wes Craven's direction never lets us out from under almost unbearable
dramatic tension. The
acting is unmannered and natural, I guess. There's no posturing. There's
a good ear for dialogue and nuance. And there is evil in this movie.
Not bloody escapism, or a thrill a minute, but a fully developed sense
of the vicious natures of the killers. There is no glory in this
violence. And Craven has written in a young member of the gang (again
borrowed on Bergman's story) who sees the horror as fully as the victims
do. This movie covers the same philosophical territory as Sam
Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs"
(1971), and is more hard-nosed about it: Sure, a man's home is his
castle, but who wants to be left with nothing but a castle and a
lifetime memory of horror?
Chicago Reader review: My favorite Czech film, and surely one of the most exhilarating
stylistic and psychedelic eruptions of the 60s, this madcap and
aggressive feminist farce by Vera Chytilova explodes in any number of
directions. Two uninhibited young women named Marie engage in escapades
that add up to less a plot than to a string of outrageous set pieces,
including several antiphallic gags and a free-for-all with fancy food
(rivaling Laurel and Hardy) that got Chytilova in lots of trouble with
the authorities; disturbing yet liberating, it shows what this talented
director can do with freedom. A major influence on Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating,
this 1966 feature is chock-full of female giggling, which might be
interpreted in context as the laughter of Medusa: subversive, bracing,
energizing, and rather challenging to most male spectators. In Czech
with subtitles. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here is the True Images, Tall Stories introduction to the evening:Narimane Mari's Bloody Beans (2013), is a strange fable
from Algeria based on an episode from its war of independence. Sick of
only ever getting beans, a group of children on the
beach decide to kidnap a soldier and demand something better to eat...
Sunsoaked, surreal and with a great electro soundtrack by Zombie Zombie,
this film almost defies description and we are grateful to Narimane for
kindly allowing us to show it for free.
This screening is from the Nomad Cinema. Here is their introduction:
The original Casino Royale (1967) may have been a spoof comedy, but this 2006 take on Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel is a very dark affair. Daniel Craig stars in his first role as 007
in what the producers were hoping would be a successful reboot of the
Bond franchise - and they certainly succeeded. Set at the beginning of
Bond’s career as a secret agent, we see a less experienced and far more
vulnerable man, as he typically falls in love with a treasury employee
[the exquisite Eva Green] assigned to help him bankrupt a terrorist in a high-stakes game of poker.
No need to gamble on us though: go all in and grab yourself
a ticket to see this contemporary classic in the extraordinary,
atmospheric setting of the Hippodrome Casino in London’s West End. Go on, take our advice...
Tickets include one Super Odd Chip, courtesy of The Hippodrome Casino.
Please note: This screening is partly seated at tables in cabaret style
[first come, first seated] with waiter service throughout the film.
*************
Chicago Reader review: Clive Owen seemed like the natural choice, but in casting Daniel Craig
as the new James Bond, franchise owners Barbara Broccoli and Michael G.
Wilson opted for someone who looked cold enough to kill a man with his
bare hands. That he does, in a brutal black-and-white opening sequence,
and for the rest of the movie Craig's wardrobe seems to alternate
between crisp evening clothes and other people's blood. The script
updates Ian Fleming's first Bond novel to a post-9/11 world and scales
back the silliness that always seems to creep into the series; director
Martin Campbell (The Mask of Zorro) contributes some superior
action set pieces but keeps the camp and gadgetry to a minimum. With Eva
Green, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, and liver-lipped
Mads Mikkelsen as the villain, an international terrorism financier who
weeps drops of blood. JR Jones
This film was famously buried by Fox studios and there was just one late
press screening in Britain.
I wrote about the tortured pre-release history here. But Kenneth
Lonergan's follow up to the excellent You Can Count On Me gained a second life thanks to critics enthused by one of the best American film in recent years championing this superb movie.
Here the film screens in the Teenage Kicks season and can also be seen on 31 August. Details here.
This is Peter Bradshaw's review from the Guardian to the time of release: Since 2000, when he made his mark with a tremendous debut, You Can Count
on Me, Kenneth Lonergan has been absent from the radar as a
director. The reason turns out to have been years of acrimonious studio
argument over the length of his followup project, a post-9/11 New York
drama in a world of trauma, rage, blame, overtalking and interrupting.
Originally conceived as a three-hour movie, it has been allowed into
cinemas in a two-and-a-half hour cut.
Perhaps Lonergan is content with this and perhaps not, but
the resulting movie is stunning: provocative and brilliant, a sprawling
neurotic nightmare of urban catastrophe, with something of John
Cassavetes and Tom Wolfe, and rocket-fuelled by a superbly thin-skinned
performance by Anna Paquin. Its sheer energy and dramatic vehemence,
alongside that raw lead performance, puts it way ahead of more
tastefully formed dramas.
Paquin plays Lisa, the daughter
of divorced parents: a mouthy, smart-but-not-that-smart teen at private
school, sexy but emotionally naive, self-absorbed and scarily
hyper-articulate in the language of entitlement and grievance. She may
have inherited drama-queen tendencies from her mother Joan (J
Smith-Cameron), a Broadway stage star, with whom she lives in New York.
One day, after an encounter of pouting defiance with her exasperated
mathematics teacher (Matt Damon), Lisa takes it into her head to buy a
cowboy hat. She sees a bus driver wearing one she likes: he is played by
Mark Ruffalo.
With a teenager's heedless disregard for the consequences, she
flirtatiously runs alongside his bus, waving wildly, asking where he got
it. He smiles back at her, taking his eyes off the road – with terrible
results.
Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at
having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup,
and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a
whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. But is that emotion
guilt or righteousness? Or a sociopathic convulsion, a need to create a
huge redemptive drama with herself at the centre, to lash out against
her mother and the entire adult world; or to enact vengeance against a
man who, without trying, has placed her in a position of weakness – at
the very point at which she considers she should be attaining her adult,
queen-bee status? Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly
unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically
compelling to watch.
The Sci-Fi season at the BFI begins this weekenmd with three outdoor screenings, of which this is the second one.
Time Out review: 'Nicholas
Roeg's hugely ambitious and imaginative film transforms a
straightforward science fiction story (novel, Walter Tevis) into a rich
kaleidoscope of contemporary America. Newton (David Bowie), an alien
whose understanding of the world comes from monitoring TV stations,
arrives on earth, builds the largest corporate empire in the States to
further his mission, but becomes increasingly frustrated by human
emotions. What follows is as much a love story as sci-fi: like other
films of Roeg's, this explores private and public behaviour.
Newton/Bowie becomes involved in an almost pulp-like romance with Candy Clark,
played out to the hits of middle America, that culminates with his
'fall' from innocence. Roeg, often using a dazzling technical skill,
jettisons narrative in favour of thematic juxtapositions, working best
when exploring the clichés of social and cultural ritual. Less
successful is the 'explicit' sex Roeg now seems obliged to offer; but
visually a treat throughout.' Chris Peachment
The Sci-Fi season at the BFI starts with this outdoor screening.
BFI introduction: A Fleet Street journalist (Edward Judd) investigates the world’s
increasingly ferocious weather conditions, and discovers that the Earth
has been knocked off its axis by extensive nuclear testing. Is the Earth
doomed? With strong performances (Leo McKern is a stand-out), a vivid
depiction of the world of newspaper journalism, and extensive location
shooting on the streets of London, Val Guest delivers one of the best
British sci-fi films.
This film is on an extended run at the BFI. Full details here.
Chicago Reader: Also known as The Lonely Wife, this relatively early (1965) film by Satyajit Ray (The World of Apu),
based on a Tagore novel of Victorian India, may be the first of his
features in which he really discovers mise-en-scene, and it's an
exhilarating encounter. It's typically rich in the nuances of grief and
in extraordinarily allusive dialogue, though not very much happens in
terms of plot (a sensitive woman is neglected by her newspaper-publisher
husband and drawn to his younger cousin). But at every moment, the
gorgeous cinematography and expressive camera movements and dissolves
have plenty of stories of their own to tell. You shouldn't miss this. In
Bengali with subtitles. Dave Kehr
One of my most anticipated films of 2014 gets a special preview ahead of release later this week.
Chicago Reader review: In the acclaimed Wendy and Lucy (2008), writer-director Kelly
Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond submerged their anger over
America’s fraying social safety net in a simple story of a homeless
young woman and her dog; this excellent drama is more explicit
politically but marries the rhetoric to a slow-burning suspense story
that won't let go. Three scruffy young eco-terrorists (Jesse Eisenberg,
Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard) plot to blow up a dam in Oregon with a
boatful of explosives, but in the finest noir tradition, something goes
terribly wrong and they break ranks. Eisenberg, an actor prone to
strutting and preening, gives his most restrained and effective
performance in years, and Fanning is perfectly believable as an
east-coast rich girl who bankrolls the operation but can't live with the
consequences. As in Wendy and Lucy, the natural and social
environs are impeccably authentic, in this case conveying the bohemian
radicalism of the Portland area that nurtures the trio's dangerous
scheme. JR Jones
This film is part of the Passport to Cinema season at BFI Southbank and is introduced by Richard Combs. There is another screening on August 29th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Olivier Assayas wrote and directed this dark, brittle French comedy
(1996) about a film company remaking Louis Feuillade's silent 1916
serial Les Vampires. This unexpected masterpiece was assembled so
quickly that it has an improvisational feel and a surrealist capacity
to access its own unconscious—traits it shares with Feuillade's work. A
once prestigious French director of the 60s (Jean-Pierre Léaud) casts
Maggie Cheung (playing herself) as villainess Irma Vep (an anagram for vampire),
and his sexual infatuation with her is matched by that of the costume
designer who escorts her around Paris (Jacques Rivette regular Nathalie
Richard). The feverish pace of the shooting seems to unleash bad vibes
as well as desire, and Assayas follows the delirium as if he were at the
center of a hurricane. What emerges is a memorable look at contemporary
life in general and international low-budget filmmaking in particular.
In English and subtitled French. Jonathan Rosenabum
This screening takes place on the fourth night of Fright Fest 2014, the
UK's premiere international fantasy and horror film festival. You can
find the details of the festival here. I am indebted to horror film expert Nigel Floyd for his suggestions and selections.
Fright Fest introduction:The first ever horror film produced in Venezuela to reach an
international audience, director Alejandro Hidalgo's heady mix of THE
OTHERS, H.P. Lovecraft and old school Mario Bava was a big box-office
hit in its home country. Thirty years after being put in prison for
murdering her family, Dulce (Ruddy Rodriguez, a former Miss Venezuela)
returns to the old dark house to try and understand the mysteries and
tragedies that have tormented her life, This sci-fi tinged chiller has
solid direction, convincing performances, wonderful cinematography and a
unique South American style.
This screening takes place on the third night of Fright Fest 2014, the
UK's premiere international fantasy and horror film festival. You can
find the details of the festival here. I am indebted to horror film expert Nigel Floyd for his suggestions and selections.
Here is the Fright Fest introduction:Repulsion meets 'The Gruffalo' in writer/director Jennifer Kent's
Sundance acclaimed debut feature as the unresolved traumas of a
conflicted mother and disturbed son manifest as a malevolent entity
threatening to consume them both. Amelia (Essie Davis) and her son, Sam
(Daniel Henshall), have had a raw deal in life. Her husband Oskar died
six years prior while driving her to the hospital pregnant with Sam, and
his birthday is a particularly painful reminder. But now things worsen
dramatically. Samuel's been having nightmares, and when a mysterious
pop-up children's book appears on his shelf titled 'Mister Babadook', he
is finally able to put a name to the terror.
This screening takes place on the second night of Fright Fest 2014, the
UK's premiere international fantasy and horror film festival. You can
find the details of the festival here. I am indebted to horror film expert Nigel Floyd for his suggestions and selections.
Fright Fest introduction: Like THE LOVED ONES? Then this one’s for you. Gore, guffaws and a scary whole
lot more lie in wait for permanently pissed-off Kylie Bucknell, forced
to return to the family house when the court places her on home
detention. Her punishment for a botched ATM raid is made all the more
intolerable by the fact she has to live with her over-bearing
motor-mouth mother Miriam who's convinced the house is haunted. But
after dismissing Miriam's superstitions, rebellious Kylie too starts
hearing unsettling whispers in the dark, creaking floorboards and
strange bumps in the night. Has she inherited her mother’s overactive
imagination or is there indeed evil afoot between the windows and doors?
Find out in this TALES OF THE CRYPT-style Kiwi comedy chiller sporting a
great sense of local humour, pitch-perfect cast chemistry, a fiercely
fun tone, a very creepy atmosphere and a good deal of splatter mayhem.
