The Prince Charles Cinema continues its
full 007 Retrospective showing every James Bond movie over the coming
months. You can see all the details of the screenings here.
Chicago Reader review: For my money, still the best Bond, with a screwball plotline that keeps
the locales changing and the surprises coming—even when reason dictates
that the picture should be over. Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw make a
creepy pair, and Daniela Bianchi embodies the essence of centerfold sex,
circa 1964. Dave Kehr
This famous silent film screens as part of the London Short Film Festival and full details of all the screenings can be found here. Tonight's ticket includes free entry to the 'Salt, Sweat, Sugar' night on the Hackney Attic dancefloor till 1am.
This is part of a Filmphonics season at Hackney Picturehouse, a series of live score screenings at Hackney Attic that bridge the
gap between sound and moving image, curating diverse nights that include
silent films brought to life by live scores, special screenings of
films about music, experimental collaborations and edgy live
performances.
Chicago Reader review: A silent curiosity made in Denmark in 1922, with an episodic, rhetorical
structure that would have appealed to Jean-Luc Godard. Director
Benjamin Christensen apparently intended his film as a serious study of
witchcraft (which he diagnoses, in an early pop-Freud conclusion, as
female hysteria), but what he really has is a pretense for sadistic
pornography. The film has acquired impact with age: instead of seeming
quaint, the nude scenes and scatological references now have a crumbly,
sinister quality—they seem the survivals of ancient, unhealthy
imaginations. Dave Kehr
This film, part of the Eric Rohmer season, also screen son 15 January. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Eric Rohmer's droll and delicate comedy of language
(1969), about a devout Catholic (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who delivers an
all-night monologue on the philosophy of Pascal to escape being seduced
by the lovely atheist Maud (Francoise Fabian). Number three in Rohmer's
series of “Six Moral Tales,” it is probably the most pure: the plotline
transpires entirely in the central character's mind and is never
explicitly acknowledged by Rohmer's direction, which concentrates
instead on the elaborate gambits of a style of speech meant to do
anything but communicate. Dave Kehr
In
his stellar 22 year career, Elvis Presley was regarded as the most
popular singer the world had ever seen, but 37 years after his death, it
is easy to forget the importance of his many movies on his incredible
career. As Elvis stopped touring between 1958 and 1970, his films
were the only way for his immense worldwide fan base to see and hear
their hero in action. Although they were subject to much critical
mauling, his films were incredibly popular and included the very songs
that went on to become classics of his repertoire.
Illustrated
with clips from the King’s best flicks, Adrian Wootton, will recount the
history of Elvis’s extensive career on the silver screen from 1956 to
1973. Chicago Reader review: Vulgar, spirited, and neglected director George Sidney (Bye Bye Birdie, The Eddy Duchin Story, Kiss Me Kate)
meets his match with this 1964 Elvis Presley vehicle: Presley,
Ann-Margret, and Las Vegas itself are all ready-made for his talents,
which mainly have to do with verve and trashy kicks. Unfortunately not
as many sparks fly as one might hope. Still there's Presley as a race
car driver who doubles as a singing waiter, and, as critic Tom Milne
describes it, “Ann-Margret revs her chassis at him.” There's also
William Demarest and, among the songs, "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film is part of the Eric Rohmer season at BFI Southbank and also screens on 10 January. Full details here. Chicago Reader review: The fourth episode of Eric Rohmer's “Six Moral Tales” series (actually
the third in order of shooting, and the first of feature length).
Haydee, the “collector” of the title, is a young woman who hoards sexual
experiences, though she refuses to sleep with either of the two stuffy
males with whom she shares a villa. Rohmer's impossibly light, graceful
way of posing profound moral questions hasn't yet wholly coalesced,
though this 1966 film does have his soft, slow rhythm. With Patrick
Bauchau and Daniel Pommerulle. Dave Kehr
One of the best releases of 2014 is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.
BFI introduction: A huge audience-pleaser at festivals around the world, Manakamana is a
gentle pleasure, with humorous moments and serious themes. The
documentary was filmed entirely in a cable car transporting visitors and
locals to an ancient Nepalese mountaintop shrine. In journeys of 10
minutes – the length of a single reel of 16mm film – we witness 11
unedited encounters, from a trio of gossiping old ladies in traditional
costume to a group of teen rockers.
Little White Lies review: It may sound trite to say so, but the film is about nothing and it's
about everything. It allows you to see as much or as little as you want.
Maybe some will see it as a quaint people-watching comedy which
explores facial expressions, age, beauty and stillness? Others might see
it as a being more of a cinematic work, posing questions about the
relationship between subject and camera, the relationship between
subject and director, and even whether this is a film in which the
industry term “director” is even valid? You could even ingest it as a
purely ambient work, and in the spirit of the passengers themselves,
take the practical option of using the time to allow life to gloss past
your eyes and meditate on other Earthly matters. Maybe even consider
what other Earthly matters are going through the heads of the people on
screen?
Perhaps this is a pessimistic view of things, but Manakamana feels most
enriching as a work about life and death. The people who sit in these
cars are whisked across what looks to be highly treacherous (albeit
breathtaking) terrain without the merest consideration for potential
mortality. Stunning beauty and fiery death buffet against one another as
we humans casually slip between the tiny slither of space that parts
them. Manakamana itself is a temple which sits at the top of this line,
and so the metaphor feels extended to one of life, death and
transcendence. David Jenkins
This film is part of the Passport to Cinema season at BFI Southbank and also screens on 3 January. Tonight's presentation is introduced by Richard Combs. Full details here.
This movie is a bona fide masterpiece which grows in stature with the passing years and seen in a remastered print on the best sccreen in London simply adds to the beauty of a magisterial work of cinema.
Hereis critic Dave Kehr on the film's history, it was butchered on release and only seen in a truncated form for many years, andhereis Martin Scorsese talking about his involvement in the restoration. The Leopard is one of the American director's favourite films as evidenced inthis list.
Chicago Reader review: 'Cut, dubbed, and printed in an inferior color process, the U.S. release of Luchino Visconti's epic didn't leave much of an impression in 1963; 20 years later, a restoration of the much longer Italian version revealed this as not only Visconti's greatest film but a work that transcends its creator, achieving a sensitivity and intelligence without parallel in his other films. Burt Lancaster initiated his formidable mature period as the aging aristocrat Don Fabrizio, who works to find a place for himself and his family values in the new Italy being organized in the 1860s. The film's superb first two hours, which weave social and historical themes into rich personal drama, turn out to be only a prelude to the magnificent final hour—an extended ballroom sequence that leaves history behind to become one of the most moving meditations on individual mortality in the history of the cinema. With Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale. In Italian with subtitles.' Dave Kehr Here (and above) is the BFI trailer.
Starting tonight the Prince Charles Cinema are running a full 007 Retrospective showing every James Bond movie over the coming months. You can see all the details of the screenings here.
The press reviews of the films don't capture the excitement of this retrospective for Bond fans and I am recommending the Blogalongabond series by Neil Alcock (aka @theincrediblesuit on Twitter). Here is his take on the first movie in the Bond franchise. Time Out review: The first Bond film, made comparatively cheaply but effectively
establishing a formula for the series - basically a high-tech gloss
repackaging of the old serials - and setting up a box-office bonanza
with its gleeful blend of sex, violence and wit. As memorable as
anything in the series (the arteries hadn't hardened yet) are modest
highlights like Bond's encounter with a tarantula, Honeychile's first
appearance as a nymph from the sea, the perils of Dr No's assault course
of pain.
Here is Bond's first introduction to the film-going public.
This film, part of the Maggie Smith season at the BFI Southbank, also screens on 9 January. Full details here. BFI Southbank preview: Alan Bennett’s brilliant Yorkshire comedy deals with a civic ‘do’ to
celebrate the Queen’s wedding in 1947, and the habits of an incontinent
pig smuggled away for the banquet. Michael Palin’s chiropodist uncovers a
conspiracy while Maggie Smith, the Lady Macbeth of Ilkley, aspires to her
rightful milieu: ‘Put me in a long dress and surround me with
sophisticated people, and I’d bloom.’
[the pig has been abducted]... Grand Hotel Manager:
'I can put my hands on two turkeys in Bradford.' Frank Lockwood the Solicitor:
'Two? TWO? We've got a hundred and fifty people coming! And Jesus isn't one of them!'
The Green Ray, the centrepiece of the BFI Southbank Eric Rohmer season, starts an extended run today and runs till 18 January. You can find all the details here. Chicago Reader review: Eric Rohmer's fifth installment in his "Comedies and
Proverbs" cycle is as conversationally obsessed as ever (which is quite
all right with me), though as always in Rohmer's ironic universe, talk
is less the moral equivalent of action than the rationalizing substitute
for it. A jilted secretary pining away the summer in Paris decides to
take a vacation on her own; unfortunately, the more she travels the
lonelier she becomes as her rationalizing search for the ideal food, the
ideal romance, the ideal traveling companion drives her more and more
toward narcissistic nullity. I suspect Rohmer sees in his heroine an
ironic reflection of his own aesthetic temper—the lighter and airier she
gets, the more she threatens to evanesce completely—and at times this
1986 film comes perilously close to duplicating the girl's predicament.
Fortunately, there's more to Rohmer's subtle strategy than idle
distillations, and the marvelous epiphany at the end provides whatever
justification is needed for the precarious formal balancing: it's a
moment of emotional complexity and revelation based, appropriately
enough, on a trivial optical illusion. With Marie Riviere, Lisa Heredia,
Eric Hamm, and an appealingly contentious Beatrice Romand. Pat Graham
This film, also being shown on 6 January, screens as part of the Eric Rohmer season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
BFI Southbank preview: Rohmer’s earliest extant feature still feels remarkably raw and modern
as he blends fiction with documentary footage of Paris in summer,
through which his feckless hero treks in search of money to survive on
after taking a legacy for granted. A caustic cautionary tale, laced with
dark ironies, sharp insights and appearances by Resnais, Melville and
(most memorably) Godard.
Time Out review: 1977: cynical womaniser Harry (Crystal) and clean-living would-be journo
Sally (Ryan) are thrown together on an 18-hour trip to New York. They
don't exactly hit it off, but ten years later, having suffered the
traumas of break-up and divorce, they meet again and find they can offer
mutual support. Will their friendship move from platonic to romantic?
It seems likely, but there's a problem: Harry is reluctant to commit
himself, while Sally won't countenance one-night stands. Reiner's Woody
Allen-ish comedy is, for all its up-front discussion of matters sexual,
disarmingly old-fashioned. A mite too pat, it never really probes or
challenges Harry and Sally's attitiudes; but Nora Ephron's
extended, slightly sentimental, and none-too-original meeting cute
scenario includes enough funny one-liners to hold the attention of all
but the most jaded viewer. As ever, Reiner clearly likes his characters,
and elicits sturdy performances from a proficient cast (Kirby and
Fisher are especially fine as friends and confidants to the pair). Geoff Andrew
Time Out review: In Reiner's superior slice of teen nostalgia, Dreyfuss is the now
middle-aged writer, looking back at the dear dead days beyond recall
when he and a group of young friends ventured into the local woods where
they believed a corpse was buried. Based on an (apparently)
semi-autobiographical story by Stephen King, the film covers similar
territory to countless other rites-of-passage dramas. The Ben E King
theme song and all the imagery of tousled adolescents preening
themselves like miniature James Deans rekindle memories of old jeans
commercials, but the film is so well-observed and so energetically acted
by its young cast that mawkishness is kept at bay. Geoffrey Macnab
This is part of the Prince Charles Cinema's 'While We Sweat Water and
Blood' season devoted to films by female directors. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
The grisly murders in this modest proposal (2000), set in 80s Manhattan,
are inspired by envy and ennui, and their perpetrator is a suavely
pathetic solipsist and independently wealthy executive (Christian Bale).
The slick satire cleverly equates materialism, narcissism, misogyny,
and classism with homicide, but you may laugh so loud at the protagonist
that you won't be able to hear yourself laughing with him. Guinevere
Turner and director Mary Harron adapted Bret Easton Ellis's novel; with
Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny, Samantha Mathis, Reese Witherspoon, and
Jared Leto. Lisa Alspector
Here's a chance to see one of the movies destined to be one of the big films of 2015.
Chicago Reader review: A washed-up Hollywood star (Michael Keaton), famous for
playing a winged superhero in a multimillion-dollar action franchise,
tries to stage a comeback as a serious actor on Broadway, writing,
directing, and starring in a stage adaptation of Raymond Carver's story
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Given Keaton's
identification with the title character in Batman (1989), his
role here might seem like the ultimate stunt casting. Yet before playing
the Caped Crusader, he'd already distinguished himself in both comedy (Beetlejuice) and drama (Clean and Sober),
and he more than holds his own in a cast that includes Edward Norton,
Naomi Watts, Emma Stone, Andrea Riseborough, and Zach Galifianakis.
Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of such ethereal dramas as Babel and 21 Grams,
counterbalances the wicked backstage comedy with surreal flights of
fancy, pondering the gulf between dubious celebrity and artistic
immortality.
JR Jones
Time Out review: Like Bob Rafelson, a director similarly
obsessed with the trials and tribulations of the children of the rich,
Ashby forever treads the thin line between whimsy and absurdity and
'tough' sentimentality and black comedy. Harold and Maude is the
story of a rich teenager (Cort) obsessed with death - his favourite
pastime is trying out different mock suicides - who is finally liberated
by his (intimate) friendship with Ruth Gordon,
an 80-year-old funeral freak. It is most successful when it keeps to
the tone of an insane fairystory set up at the beginning of the movie. Phil Hardy
The Everyman Screen on the Green have restarted their midnight movie season. Full details here.
Time Out review: Director Roger Vadim kicks off his adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest's 'adult' comic
strip by stripping Jane Fonda starkers. From there on it's typically vacuous
titillation as Barbarella takes off for the mysterious planet Sorgo in
40,000 AD, there to survive attack by perambulating dolls with vampire
fangs, receive her sexual initiation from a hairy primitive, fall in
love with a blind angel, be whisked off to an alarming Lesbian encounter
with the tyrannical Black Queen, etc. But Terry Southern's dialogue
occasionally sparkles, and the imaginative designs, as shot by Claude
Renoir, look really splendid. Tom Milne
This greatest of all Christmas films is on an extended run at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: 'The film Frank Capra was born to make. This 1946 release marked his
return to features after four years of turning out propaganda films for
the government, and Capra poured his heart and soul into it. James
Stewart stars as a small-town nobody, on the brink of suicide, who
believes his life is worthless. Guardian angel Henry Travers shows him
how wrong he is by letting Stewart see what would have happened had he
never been born. Wonderfully drawn and acted by a superb cast (Donna
Reed, Beulah Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Lionel Barrymore, Gloria Grahame)
and told with a sense of image and metaphor (the use of water is
especially elegant) that appears in no other Capra film. The epiphany of
movie sentiment and a transcendent experience.' Dave Kehr
Cinemas are closed today but you can catch my twitter
recommendations for great movies on the television over the holiday
period via my twitter handle @tpaleyfilm #bestxmasholidayfilmonTVtoday
The best film of the year? Under The Skin, on a short run at the ICA, was my pick. Full details of the ICA screenings, which start on December 21, can be found here.
Time Out review: ET landed in the cosy American suburbs and wanted to go home. Now
Scarlett Johansson – or something that looks like her – lands in modern
Glasgow and thinks about sticking around in Jonathan Glazer’s creepy,
mysterious and bold ‘Under the Skin’. One can only guess that the
weather is beyond dire on her side of the galaxy. The film is an
adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel and the first in nearly a decade
from the director of ‘Sexy Beast’ and ‘Birth’. It’s an intoxicating
marvel, strange and sublime: it combines sci-fi ideas, gloriously
unusual special effects and a sharp atmosphere of horror with the
everyday mundanity of a woman driving about rainy Scotland in a battered
transit van. Dave Calhoun Here (and above) is the trailer.
Time Out review: 'Comedy legend Bob Newhart
immediately raises a smile as the elderly elf framing the story of
Santa's biggest little helper. Buddy (Will Ferrell) is different because he's
a human, brought back to the North Pole as a baby when he strayed into
the old boy's sack during the Christmas run. He's been raised in the
traditional elfin ways of industrious good humour, but now it's time for
him to venture to distant New York and discover his real father is a
grumpy publisher (James Caan), who naturally thinks his 'son' is a dangerous
loony. Must be the tights and the pointy hat. What follows is a fairly
predictable 'fish out of water' romp with seasonal bells on.
Nevertheless, Favreau delivers the cornball sentiments with an adept
balance of irony and sincerity, sprinkling felicities in the margins -
cult crooner Leon Redbone voicing a stop-motion snowman, indie fave Zooey Deschanel
as the department store helper giving Ferrell understandable tingles,
and a particularly successful running gag enshrining the significance of
etch-a-sketch in elf culture. Some humour might sail over the heads of
the very young, but there's a higher chuckle rate for the grown-ups than
much dread 'family' fare.' Trevor Johnston
