'One
of the great British horror films, Death Line is a classic example of
what Hellraiser director Clive Barker calls 'embracing the monstrous'.
The film's basic premise is a gruesome one: following a cave-in during
the construction of an underground tunnel in 1892, successive
generations of plague-ridden cannibals have survived and developed their
own subterranean culture. Forced out of hiding by the death of his
wife, the sole surviving cannibal begins abducting passengers from
Russell Square tube station. The disgust provoked by the corpse-filled
underground world inhabited by the cannibal is offset by the tenderness
with which he treats his dying wife, and by the unutterable sadness of
his lonely plight. The film's great achievement is in eliciting sympathy
for a creature whose residual capacity for human feeling amid such
terrible degradation is ultimately more moving than horrifying.' Nigel Floyd
Here is the celebrated long take from this genuine British horror classic.
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
Chicago Reader review: 'Jean Vigo's only full-length feature (1934), one of the supreme
masterpieces of French cinema, was edited and then brutally reedited
while Vigo was dying, so a “definitive” restoration is impossible. (The
reassembled version released in France in 1990 is almost certainly the
best and most complete we'll ever be able to see—it's wondrous to
behold.) The simple love-story plot involves the marriage of a
provincial woman (Dita Parlo) to the skipper of a barge (Jean Daste),
and the only other characters of consequence are the barge's skeletal
crew (Michel Simon and Louis Lefebvre) and a peddler (Gilles Margaritis)
who flirts with the wife at a cabaret and describes the wonders of
Paris to her. The sensuality of the characters and the settings,
indelibly caught in Boris Kaufman's glistening cinematography, are only
part of the film's remarkable poetry, the conviction of which goes
beyond such categories as realism or surrealism, just as the powerful
sexuality in the film ultimately transcends such categories as
heterosexuality, homosexuality, and even bisexuality. Shot by shot and
moment by moment, the film is so fully alive to the world's
possibilities that magic and reality seem to function as opposite sides
of the same coin, with neither fully adequate to Vigo's vision. The
characters are at once extremely simple and extremely complex (richest
of all is Simon's Pere Jules, as beautiful a piece of character acting
as one can find anywhere), and while the continuity is choppy in spots—a
factor skillfully cloaked by Maurice Jaubert's superb score—the film's
aliveness and potency are so constant that this hardly seems to
matter. A major inspiration to subsequent generations of filmmakers,
yet no one has ever succeeded in matching it.' Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Time travel has many enticing possibilities, but one of the most
enjoyable would be to travel back to 1982 and tell John Carpenter that
his new movie would someday score sixth place in a list of the 100 best
horror movies – even beating his own iconic ‘Halloween’. Like many
future horror classics, ‘The Thing’ was hated on first release,
dismissed as an ‘Alien’ clone more interested in pushing the boundaries
of SFX than in character or tension. It was a disastrous flop, and
threatened Carpenter’s once unassailable reputation as the king of the
new horror. It’s hard to imagine now: with the benefit of hindsight
(and, more importantly, repeat viewings), ‘The Thing’ has emerged as one
of our most potent modern terrors, combining the icy-cold chill of
suspicion and uncertainty with those magnificently imaginative, pre-CG
effects blowouts. Tom Huddleston
This is part of the Onwards & Outwards season, a nationwide programme of screenings, talks, and events, which aims to
establish a dialogue around the conditions of production that women face
when attempting to use the moving image as a means of expression.
Here is the ICA introduction to today's special screening: Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's experimental investigation of deeply
personal psychology, combined with their self-sufficient production
ethics, would serve as inspiration for Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar.
Using repetitive structures and iconic imagery, they construct a
hallucinatory narrative that delves into the intimate subjectivity of
its characters. Meshes Of The Afternoon was one of the key films which influenced Lynne Ramsay to study filmmaking rather than still photography.
Continuing her distinctive, and personal approach to filmmaking, Ramsay followed her debut feature Ratcatcher with
an adaptation based of the novel Morvern Callar written by Alan
Warner. The story follows a young woman in Scotland, played by Samantha
Morton, who wakes on Christmas morning to find her boyfriend has
committed suicide. Discovering his bank card and the text of his first
novel, she decides to take his money and publish the novel under her
name.
"I was interested in [Morvern Callar] because it isn't a
very straight narrative, it is original in terms of character, it's
original in terms of plot in some ways as well. That's a major risk
because the reason conventional narratives are liked is because they
work, and they've always worked. People like to be led like that. But
that doesn't mean that there isn't another way of doing it. I enjoy
experimenting and taking risks with the form." Lynne Ramsay, Vertigo
Chicago Reader review of Morvern Callar: Morvern Callar (cult fave Samantha Morton) is an inarticulate grocery
store clerk in a Scottish hamlet—dead-end girl in a dead-end job in a
dead-end town. She seems frozen, unable to act, but when she does it's
sudden and startling. An unexpected influx of cash sends her and her
best friend, Lanna, who's noisier but equally feckless, on an aimless
Spanish beach trip full of joyless sex, drug taking, and drunken Brits.
It's not what Morvern wants—not that she knows what she wants—and when
the accidental tourist becomes an accidental celebrity, things get even
more disturbing. Fans of director Lynne Ramsay's first movie, the bleak Ratcatcher, won't be surprised that this little existential exercise makes The Stranger look like a funwagon Meredith Brody
This is part of the Scalarama film season. You can find all the details for the September screenings if you click on the link here. Here is the Whitechapel Gallery introduction to today's event:
A rare 16mm screening of Alan Clarke’s remarkable 1974 BBC Play for
Today, one of the masterworks of British television drama. The screening
will be introduced by its writer, David Rudkin, who will also be in conversation. The afternoon is opened with live music by multi-instrumentalist Bird Radio. The event also marks the launch of The Edge Is Where the Centre Is, a major new book exploring the making of the film, edited by Sukhdev Sandhu and published in association with Seen Studio.
Time Out review of Penda's Fen (the magazine voted the film at No76 in their top 100 British films list here): This remarkable feature length television film – commissioned for the
legendary 1970s ‘Play for Today’ single drama series – is often
described as a step ‘off piste’ for its director Alan Clarke. That’s a
misleading reading, however. The work’s qualities of resistance,
questioning and personal and public transformation are entirely in
keeping with the normally urban-centric filmmaker’s milieu. But the real
credit lies with its writer David Rudkin. An astonishing playwright
with a visionary reach and a genuine sense of ‘deep England’ and its
radical potential, Rudkin here crafts a multi-layered reading of
contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and
metaphysical fault lines. Fusing Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’ with a
heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief
systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and
prescient – ecological awareness, ‘Penda’s Fen’ is a unique and
important statement, rumoured soon – finally – to be available on DVD Gareth Evans
This film screens as part of a 1970s New Hollywood season at Close-Up. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: A virtuoso performance by Al Pacino and some expert location work by
Sidney Lumet add up to a tour de force genre piece (1973) that
transcends the supercop conventions to create a moving, engrossing
portrait of Frank Serpico—a literate, sensitive, honest cop who tried to
come to terms with society and the policeman's place in it, and was
crucified by a police department too corrupt to want any part of the
real world. Don Druker
This film is part of a double-bill with the movie Backstreet Boys at Regent Street. You can find all the details here. Chicago Reader review: A singular vocalist but a protean songwriter, Scott Walker became a teen
idol in the 60s with the Walker Brothers, embarked on an ambitious
series of solo albums, and then dropped out of sight in the 70s,
emerging every few years with a record more radical and off-putting than
the last. For this engrossing 2008 documentary, Walker invited director
Stephen Kijak into the studio to interview him and watch him record The Drift,
and the brooding mystery man turns out to be a surprisingly open,
clearheaded fellow who simply wants to be left alone to pursue his own
ideas. Kijak also interviews some of Walker's famous fans - David
Bowie, Sting, Lulu, Johnny Marr, Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Ute
Lemper - and some of their most revealing comments come as they
simply react to Walker's tunes playing in the background. The movie is
hardly immune to Walker's mystique - it begins by likening him to
Orpheus - but Kijak, like his subject, is admirably focused on the
music. JR Jones
The third, and arguably the best, of Michelangelo Antonioni's 'trilogy' about troubled relationships in an alienating world, is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details of the screenings, which start on August 28th, here. Chicago Reader review: The conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni's loose trilogy (preceded by L'Avventura and La Notte),
this 1961 film is conceivably the best in Antonioni's career, but
significantly it has the least consequential plot. A sometime translator
(Monica Vitti) recovering from an unhappy love affair briefly links up
with a stockbroker (Alain Delon) in Rome, though the stunning final
montage sequence—perhaps the most powerful thing Antonioni has ever
done—does without these characters entirely. Alternately an essay and a
prose poem about the contemporary world in which the "love story"
figures as one of many motifs, this is remarkable both for its
visual/atmospheric richness and its polyphonic and polyrhythmic mise en
scene (Antonioni's handling of crowds at the Roman stock exchange is
never less than amazing). Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
Here is the BFI Southbank introduction to tonight's special screening, part of the BFI Screen Epiphanies series: We welcome writer, director and producer Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher,
Drive, Only God Forgives) to discuss how this film inspired him with
film critic Alan Jones. This controversial 1970s docudrama explored the
evils of slavery with graphic re-enactments of true events before the
American Civil War. The director will also discuss his new book, The Act of Seeing, with co-author Jones at 6.15pm tonight in NFT1. Full details here.
New York Times review: Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E. Prosperi, best-known for the groundbreaking shockumentary Mondo Cane, directed this bizarre and shocking look at slavery in America. Set in the deep South prior to the Civil War, Zio Tom finds Jacopetti and Prosperi
travelling back in time aboard a helicopter to investigate the nuts and
bolts of slavery as it happened in the United States prior to
abolition. Along the way, the filmmakers go aboard a slave ship as
frightened Africans are brought to America under inhuman conditions;
they witness the dangerous and degrading process by which slaves were
made ready for market; and they visit a "breeding farm" for slaves after
laws prohibit the importation of slaves from abroad. Also included is a
sermon from a preacher who argues for the moral and spiritual necessity
of slavery (while another man speaks out against it strictly on grounds
of economics and practicality); the contrasting thoughts of men and
women on the matter of miscegenation; and an interview with an educated
slave who feels his circumstances are better for him than conventional
employment. Also shown is the brutal torture and punishment of slaves
for any number of real or imagined grievances. Re-creating both the
opulence and the ugliness of the Old South on a grand scale, Zio Tom
concludes with present-day African-Americans reading {-The Confession
of Nat Turner} and contemplating violent overthrow of the
white-dominated culture. Understandably controversial, Zio Tom received a very brief theatrical release in the United States under the title Farewell Uncle Tom,
where it received an X rating despite being trimmed by
approximately 20 minutes from its original Italian running time. Mark Deming
This film, part of the Orson Welles season at the BFI, is also screened on Saturday 29th August. You can find all the details here. Chicago Reader review: The last completed essay film of Orson Welles, and the last of his
features to be released during his lifetime, this wonderfully
candid, rarely screened account of the making of his first wholly
independent feature offers a perfect introduction to that movie and to
Welles's "second" manner of moviemaking, which became necessary once he
parted company with the studios and mainstream media. Significantly, the
only section of the original Othello we see and hear in its original
form is part of the opening sequence; everything else--usually shown
silently with Welles's narration--is an intricate reediting of the
original material. Whether he's addressing us beside his moviola,
delivering new versions of Shakespearean speeches, chatting with his old
Irish friends and collaborators Micheal MacLiammoir (his Iago) and
Hilton Edwards, or speaking to college students, Welles is at his
spellbinding best. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is part of the Hackney Picturehouse Vintage Sundays season. Full details here.
Time Out review: Made with all the awareness of hindsight, Shampoo offers a sharp sexual satire and a mature statement on both America and Hollywood in 1968, The Graduate
as it should have been, perhaps. Everyone is shown to act out of the
same fatal expediency, as the country elects Nixon for President while
Beatty's chic Hollywood hairdresser tries to sort out an increasingly
dishevelled sex life, a campaign against the Establishment via its wives
and mistresses that's subversive only by default. Ostensibly a farce
about fucking for fun and its repercussions, but the laughs are tempered
by bleakness and the film ends up saddened by its characters'
waywardness.
Chris Peachment Here (and above) is the trailer.
Prince Charles Cinema introduction: We adore Wes Anderson and considering how frequently our screenings of
his unique films sell out, you adore him as much as we do! So let"s all
have an all-night marathon dedicated to his wonderful vision as we have
EVERY one of his feature films (plus one short) in our most epic Wes
Anderson marathon to date!
What's your favourite Wes Anderson film? Mine's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Here's the Chicago Reader review: If Wes Anderson's Rushmore recalls J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and his The Royal Tenenbaums offers a touch of Franny and Zooey, this 2004 feature by Anderson feature suffers from the mannerist self-consciousness of Seymour: An Introduction.
Each successive movie seems further removed from real human behavior,
though the attitudes here—mainly invested in Bill Murray as the title
character, an over-the-hill filmmaker-oceanographer—seem as authentic as
ever, and the fantasy trimmings are noticeably more lavish, drawing on
the resources of Italy's Cinecitta studio and recalling Fellini in their
cartoon colors. The secondary eccentrics—Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe,
Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Gambon, Bud
Cort—resourcefully juggle about two character traits apiece, and the
climactic rescue sequence is characteristically underplayed. Noah
Baumbach collaborated on the arch script, whose bittersweet weirdness
leaves a residue even as the narrative disintegrates. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This classic American movie is screening as part of the Summer Love Weekend at the British Museum organised by the BFI, ahead of their season later this year. Here are the details.
Chicago Reader review: Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as an aw-shucks madman killer and his
fudge-brained girlfriend. Loosely based on the Starkweather-Fugate
horror show of the late 50s, writer-director Terrence Malick's 1973
first feature is a film so rich in ideas it hardly knows where to turn.
Transcendent themes of love and death are fused with a pop-culture
sensibility and played out against a midwestern background, which is
breathtaking both in its sweep and in its banality. Days of Heaven put Malick's intuitions into cogent form, but this is where his art begins. With Warren Oates and Alan Vint.
Dave Kehr
This special screening is part of the London on Film season and includes a Q&A with stars Martin and Gary Kemp, director Peter Medak and scriptwriter Philip Ridley. Full details here.
Here is the Prince Charles introduction to this special screning: Premiered at the Watershed in Bristol for the
BFI"s Sci-Fi season in 2014, FILM4 FrightFest is delighted to bring DJ
Cheeba to London for the first time with his re-scored version of the
infamous Ed Wood classic PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.
Using records,
laptops, DJ mixers, midi controllers, iPad based synths and drum
machines, a voice changing megaphone and an ultra rare QFO turntable, DJ
Cheeba adds a more dark and terrifying atmospheric edge to this classic
film. Tickets are £12.50 and are available here now.
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
Crispin Glover is back for his famous Big Slide Show plus a screening of the second part of the "It" trilogy, titled'It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine!'This comes highly recommended by colleagues at the Guardian and all those who went the last time the actor was in town and, having looked at some of Glover's work on YouTube, I am certain it will be like nothing else on offer in London tonight and as such well worth investigating. Apparently, Glover has said he has previously stayed until 4am to finish off his Q&A's!Hereis Guardian film editor Catherine Shoard's interview with the actor/director.
Checkthisout, the trailer for tonight's movie. Andthis. Or eventhis.
The ICA introduction to tonight's show:
Crispin Glover will perform Crispin Hellion Glover's Big Slide Show part 2, a
one hour dramatic narration of eight different profusely
illustrated books. The images from the books are projected behind Mr.
Glover during his performance.
There will then be a screening of It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.
This film goes into uncharted cinematic territory with screenwriter
Steven C. Stewart starring in this semi-autobiographical, psycho-sexual
tale about a man with severe cerebral palsy and a fetish for girls with
long hair.
Part horror film, part exploitation picture and part documentary of a
man who cannot express his sexuality in the way he desires, this
fantastical and often humorous tale is told completely from Stewart’s
actual point of view – that of someone who has lived for years watching
people do things he will never be able to do. Here, Stewart’s character
is something of a ladykiller, seducing a troubled, recently divorced
mother, her teenage daughter and any number of other women he encounters
along the way.
There will be a Q&A with Crispin Glover following the screening.
Here is the Picturehouse Central introduction to this special screening: Join us for a Guardian Live screening of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, introduced by Observer film critic, Mark Kermode.
For 40 years Jaws has been terrifying cinemagoers
out of the water. Based on a pulp bestseller by Peter Benchley, it is a
story about an unlikely trio of men - an Ahab-like seadog (Robert
Shaw), a hippy marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a cop (Roy
Scheider) - tracking down a killer shark terrorising a sleepy beach
town. Long takes and John Williams's menacing orchestral score ratchet
up the tension, but it is more than a masterfully constructed thriller.
Critics have read it as a reaction to the Watergate scandal, an analysis
of masculinity in crisis, and as an update of Melville's Moby-Dick. It
also laid the template for the modern summer blockbuster.
Mark will introduce this special anniversary screening of the
film, exploring its production, its legacy, and the elements that make
it a modern masterpiece. Just remember: it's not about the shark.
Running time: 2 hrs & 45 mins, no interval. Time Out review: 'Is
there such a thing as a perfect film? One that knows what it wants to
achieve and does it, flawlessly, artfully and intelligently? If so, then
‘Jaws’ is as good a candidate as any. Thirty-seven years on (and
reissued in a new HD print), this tale of an island community terrorised
by a killer shark still feels timeless and terrifying. The
characterisation is precise and acutely observed (it’s one of the great
guys-on-a-mission flicks), the dialogue is witty and wise, and the plot
fits together like a finely crafted watch. The performances – not just
leads, but the kids, townsfolk and the grief-stricken mother too – are
impeccable. Best of all is Steven Spielberg’s
direction: the camera moves like a predatory animal, gliding eerily
across the surface of the vast Atlantic, creating sequences of almost
unbearable suspense (never mind that the scariest scene was shot in a
swimming pool). It’s no wonder a generation of holidaymakers still
thinks twice before stepping into the water.' Tom Huddleston
Here is the ICA introduction for this special screening:
Despite positive reviews and film festival success, Signe Baumane’s 2014
feature is not set for theatrical release. Her energetic taboo-busting
candour and a style of animation that captures the shape-shifting whimsy
of the imaginary world deserve to meet and engage a wider audience.
We will be screening Rocks in my Pockets, preceded by three shorts from Baumane's 2008 web series, The Teat Beat of Sex.
The series is an non-squeamish look at how sex works from a female
perspective. Each 'explicitly educational' episode clocks in at under
two minutes and provides graphic insights into one of a range of
coming-of-age issues.
This screens in the BFI's Cult strand and is also showing on Thursday 20th August. Details here.
Time Out review: An intriguing premise: what if a certain species of LSD, a decade later,
should begin to have an unexpected effect on its users' chromosomes?
All over an American city, isolated individuals inexplicably slaughter
their loved ones before going on the rampage. The film has a phenomenal
opening, and makes the most of its plot possibilities, but the police's
continual arrival at the scene of murder just in time to implicate the
investigative hero will put a strain on any audience's credulity.
Exploitation of a superior kind, nonetheless. David Pirie
Chicago Reader review: By far the most underrated of Sam Peckinpah's films, this grim 1974 tale
about a minor-league piano player in Mexico (Warren Oates) who
sacrifices his love (Isela Vega) when he goes after a fortune as a
bounty hunter is certainly one of the director's most personal and
obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano
in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its
rather ghoulish lyricism. (Critic Tom Milne has suggestively compared
the labyrinthine plot to that of a gothic novel.) Oates has perhaps
never been better, and a strong secondary cast—Vega, Gig Young, Robert
Webber, Kris Kristofferson, Donnie Fritts, and Emilio Fernandez—is
equally effective in etching Peckinpah's dark night of the soul. Jonathan Rosenbaum
