This 35mm screening is part of the 'Focusing on Women's Contribution to Film' season at the Prince Charles. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: This impressive 1999 debut feature by Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar) extends the visual acuity and emotional power of her astonishing shorts Small Deaths and Gasman.
Seeking refuge from a stultifying home life, a 12-year-old boy (William
Eadie) searches for adventure at a nearby canal, where he befriends a
vulnerable, sexually exploited 14-year-old (Leanne Mullen). Their
relationship is understated yet emotionally truthful, exploring their
alternating fear and exhilaration. Sometimes Ramsay relies too heavily
on metaphor (the mounting garbage that surrounds their economically
ravaged community) to balance out her work, and the children's bleak
home lives are too recognizable from the work of Alan Clarke and Mike
Leigh. But the film becomes almost abstractly beautiful in its final
half hour; with its fluent images and sensitivity to mood, it signaled
the start of a promising career. Patrick Z. McGavin
To launch the new digital restoration of Ken Loach's Poor Cow, the Barbican Cinema present this special screening with star Terence Stamp and the author of the book on which it was based, Nell Dunn, for a ScreenTalk after the film.
BFI Screenonline analysis: Poor Cow was Ken Loach's first feature film, and was based on the novel by Nell Dunn, who also wrote Loach's earlier Wednesday Play, Up The Junction (BBC, tx.3/11/1965). Throughout his career, Loach has been a collaborative filmmaker, often working with the same team. Carol White, Poor Cow's star, was already well-known as a result of her starring roles in Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home (BBC, tx. 16/11/1966). Uncharacteristically, Loach - who has generally preferred lesser-known actors - also used other 'names', notably Terence Stamp, in Poor Cow.
White plays the appropriately named Joy,
free-spirited, resilient and flirtatious, despite being caught in a web
of circumstances largely outside her control, relating to her gender and
class. Loach shows characteristic sympathy for the characters and their situation. The opening song, written for the film and sung by Donovan, urges the audience "Be not too hard, for life is short, and nothing is given to man".
Loach has acknowledged the influence of Italian neo-realist film-making, of which probably the best-known example is Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette,
Italy, d. Vittorio de Sica, 1948): "Those classic post-war Italian
films just seem to have an immense respect for people. They give people
space and they're concerned with their concerns." This could be a
motto for Loach's own film-making, with his
compassionate observation of the ways in which ordinary people deal with
difficult social circumstances. Poor Cow shares this socio-political concern with the effects of poverty and poor housing on the lives of its characters.
As with Loach's earlier work, the
stylistic techniques are inventive. The use of Joy as a narrator on the
soundtrack reflects the first-person narration of the original novel.
The film also makes occasional use of intertitles, more
commonly associated with silent films. This risks distancing the viewer
from their involvement in the story, but is effective in adding an
ironic note, exemplified by "The world was our oyster... And we chose
Ruislip".
The continuity of the story is sometimes broken: Loach uses montage
techniques, juxtaposing observational shots of characters not connected
with the main story, for example in the pub where Joy works. As is
common in Loach's work, the film is at the
same time the story of an individual and a demonstration of the way
everyone is connected with the wider community.
Here is the Barbican introduction: Philippe Leroy stars as Dr Sayer, a rich philanthropist who has a dark secret to hide in Piero Schivazappa’s pop art thriller. When Maria (Dagmar Lassander),
a journalist, drops by Sayer's mansion to pick up some documents, she
soon finds herself victim to his unpleasant and degrading games. But the
tables are turned as Maria subverts the doctor's game and becomes the
manipulator.
We're delighted to have Virginie Sélavy, editor of Electric Sheep Magazine, introduce this screening.
Here is the Barbican introduction: Would genetically modified people be Frankenstein monsters? With
advances in medical technology, it has already become possible to make
in vitro interventions on human embryos - prompting the thought that
human beings could be engineered genetically. Many are afraid of this
possibility: why? What are the possibilities, the potentials, the risks?
Will future humanity be a genetically engineered one? Philosopher AC Grayling explores James Whale’s iconic horror Frankenstein.
Time Out review: A stark, solid, impressively stylish film, overshadowed (a little
unfairly) by the later explosion of Whale's wit in the delirious Bride of Frankenstein.
Karloff gives one of the great performances of all time as the monster
whose mutation from candour to chill savagery is mirrored only through
his limpid eyes. The film's great imaginative coup is to show the
monster 'growing up' in all too human terms. First he is the innocent
baby, reaching up to grasp the sunlight that filters through the
skylight. Then the joyous child, playing at throwing flowers into the
lake with a little girl whom he delightedly imagines to be another
flower. And finally, as he finds himself progressively misjudged by the
society that created him, the savage killer as whom he has been
typecast. The film is unique in Whale's work in that the horror is
played absolutely straight, and it has a weird fairytale beauty not
matched until Cocteau made La Belle et la Bête. Tom Milne Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: 'Roberto Rossellini's finest fiction film and
unmistakably one of the great achievements of the art. Ingrid Bergman
and George Sanders play a long-married British couple grown restless and
uncommunicative. On a trip to Italy to dispose of a piece of property,
they find their boredom thrown into relief by the Mediterranean
landscape—its vitality (Naples) and its desolation (Pompeii). But
suddenly, in one of the moments that only Rossellini can film, something
lights inside them, and their love is renewed as a bond of the spirit. A
crucial work, truthful and mysterious.' Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Andrei Tarkovsky's first major film (1966, though banned and unseen
until 1971), cowritten by Andrei Konchalovsky, about a 15th-century icon
painter. This medieval epic announced the birth of a major talent; it
also stuns with the sort of unexpected poetic explosions we've come to
expect from Tarkovsky: an early flying episode suggesting Gogol, a
stirring climax in color. Not to be missed. Jonathan Rosenbaum
I wrote about this extraordinary movie for the Guardian here when it was screened at the London Film Festival two years ago. This rare screening will be introduced by Isabelle Huppert.
New Yorker review: The actress Barbara Loden’s only film as a director, from 1970, is a harrowing, epiphanic masterwork. She also stars as the title character, Wanda Goronski, a pallid wraith in an anthracite landscape. Reduced to apathy by the drudgery and banality of a mining town, she flees her husband and young children and rides off with a buttoned-down, steely-eyed drifter (Michael Higgins). Unbeknownst to her, he is a robber on the run as well as a fussy, domineering brute who improves her manners and her wardrobe even while launching her on a criminal path. Though suspicious from the start, Wanda is ready for anything that makes her feel alive—and the movie matches her in audacity and sensibility. Loden’s indelible depiction of Wanda’s degradation, resistance, and resignation blends intense psychological realism with a spontaneous, quasi-musical mastery of form. Her rough-grained images, with their attention to place, light, and detail, have an intimate, sculptural texture; they seem to bring matter to life and to glow with the characters’ inner radiance. Richard Brody
Time Out review: Iris (Morton) has always been jealous of sister Rose (Rushbrook), but
when their mother (Tushingham) dies, she's thrown into numb, furious
confusion. Rejecting her old life (Rose and boyfriend Gary), Iris turns
instead to the discomfort of strangers. At first glance, writer/director
Adler's film seems extremely thin. Morton has charisma in spades and
wears oddball clothes well. Such blasted poise proves irresistible to
Adler, whose frenetic camera feasts on Morton as if she were a piece of
meat. We never believe Iris is part of a community; she's more a
wandering Lolita, slumming it among ignorant, treacherous low life. And
though the sexual commentary is clearly intended to be cold, it's also
tiresome. Are the sex scenes exploitative? Who can say. In the last
third, however, Adler's strategy becomes clear: she's been playing a
waiting game. Rose acquires an integrity that goes beyond mere
respectable virtue, and when Iris's grief thaws, her helpless,
animal-like pain is overwhelming. More surprisingly, our sense of the
will-o'-the-wisp mother gathers force, the 'story' of her complex
mothering told through the daughters' pinches, pokes and eventual tender
fumblings towards each other. In its own twisty way, then, the film
avoids both sentimentality and art-school cool, and with the help of
superlative performances from Morton and Rushbrook, digs deep into the
psyche. Charlotte O'Sullivan
This 35mm screening is part of the Wim Wenders Selectrospective at the Prince Charles Cinema, You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader: The first masterpiece of the New German Cinema. Wim Wenders's
existentialized road movie (1975) follows two drifters—an itinerant
movie-projector repairman and a child psychologist who has followed his
patients by dropping out—in a three-hour ramble through a deflated
Germany, touching on their private pasts and their hopes for the future.
It's full of references to Hawks, Ford, and Lang, and one scene has
been lovingly lifted in its entirety from Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men. As the hommages
indicate, one of the subjects is the death of cinema, but this isn't an
insider's movie. Wenders examines a played-out culture looking for one
last move. An engrossing, enveloping film, made with great craft and
photographed in highly textured black-and-white by Robby Müller. Dave Kehr
Variety review: A piano teacher goes on a second honeymoon of sorts with her missing husband when he returns as a ghost in “Journey to the Shore,” Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s return to human drama in the vein of “Tokyo Sonata,” albeit
with a spiritual dimension. Traversing East Japan from small towns to
remote hamlets, the film’s winding, episodic form ultimately conveys an obvious message, but the way in which its motley characters
work through feelings of loss, regret and acceptance have a hushed,
timorous sentiment that’s uniquely Japanese. Fans of Kurosawa’s earlier
psycho-thrillers may desire more eeriness and visual panache, but those
who’ve accepted the helmer’s conscious change of tune and pace should be
gently touched. Guy Lodge
Little White Lies review: It’s been referred to as a ‘B-side’ to The Tree Of Life’s operatic
prime cut, but that description infers that To The Wonder is some kind
of funky doodle not deemed good enough as a standalone work. No, these
two films operate better as a monumental double A-side, both evolved out
of the same miasmic primordial yolk and constructed with an insouciant
rigour that’s bound to leave the righteous slack-jawed in awe.
While Tree Of Life presented Earth as a place of rhapsodic
enchantment, To The Wonder gives us a modern-day world on the cusp of
devastation. Taking place among the prefab tract houses of a dusty
Oklahoman berg where every hour is magic hour, To The Wonder is less
interested in the consolations of spirituality and the dynamics of love
than it is the emotional barricades that prevent us from living a life
of sublime indifference.
Ben Affleck essays Neil, a commitment-shy environmental health officer
whose internal anxieties prevent him from truly accepting childlike
Russian-French nymphet Marina (Olga Kurylenko) into his cold heart. A
patina of dread and disquietude – both spoken and concealed – encases
the action. Characters grapple with metaphysical conundrums and
paradoxical homilies to come to terms with the preciousness of
existence. They even begin to realise that the universal constant of
romantic relationships may just be losing its place at the top of the
chain of human responsibility.
With this more insidiously dour and subtly opaque affair, Malick
again acts as head curator of a luxuriant flick-book of divine images,
all of which have been immaculately beat-matched via the breathtaking,
elliptical editing. His partner in cinematographic crime, Emmanuel
‘Chivo’ Lubezki, locates tumbling cosmic depths in the most mundane of
moments: a meadow of ambling bison mutates into a vision of chaos and
claustrophobia; the shifting sands near Mont Saint-Michel; a night-time
visit to a washing-machine outlet becomes a trial of enforced
domesticity; Marina euphorically flits, jerks and prances, her façade of
innocence a physical manifestation of the idea that Neil is unable to
get close to her, to consume her.
Weaving in tandem to this is the story of a priest (Javier Bardem)
who’s straying from the flock. He surveys the lives of impoverished
locals just as Neil finds toxic chemicals leaking from local industrial
plants. To The Wonder ponders how different life might be if we could
comprehend the awesomeness of a world we take for granted. We might
wrestle with our own doubts about this film, but how fitting is that for
a film about doubt?
Its utter earnestness leaves it wide open to criticism, but to bemoan
the superficial quality of the performances, the script or the story
would be to miss the point of the film entirely. Malick doesn’t make
films anymore. He builds cathedrals. David Jenkins
This rarely seen film is part of the 'Grin, Guffaw and Giggle' season at the Prince Charles. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: One of the stranger chapters in Jerry Lewis's continuing
psycho-biography, the most direct and intimidating confrontation between
his perpetual preadolescent character and the wide world of sex. Jerry
bungles into a plot line that might have been lifted from an ancient
stag movie: he's the handyman at a women's boardinghouse. But Jerry
resists the fleshy temptations of the opposite sex with all the blind
determination of a six-year-old. An interesting, if not screamingly
funny, film (1961), enlivened by some of Lewis's most audacious camera
work and a spectacular three-story cutaway set that impressed Godard so
much he borrowed it for Tout va Bien. Dave Kehr
This remarkable and rarely seen film screens at the Regent Street Cinema in 35mm.
Time Out review: Lord knows what they're putting in the water in Austria these days, but
it ain't happy pills! Like Michael Haneke's Code Unknown, Seidl's first
fiction film cuts back and forth between half-a-dozen characters who may
occasionally cross paths. There's the mental girl who hitches rides
from the supermarket and proceeds to provoke and insult her benefactors;
the security advisor plying for trade; the sexist asshole insanely
jealous of his girl; the divorcee still living with her alienated
husband. Seidl has a couple of controversial documentaries to his name
(Werner Herzog is a big fan) and he apparently used an improvisational
method here, although it's framed with careful ironic poise. Seidl
himself is a lot like the crazy hitcher: pushing and humiliating his
characters and his audience alike. There are a couple of extremely
explicit orgy scenes, one featuring the Austrian National Anthem.
They're probably meant as shock therapy. Tom Charity
ICA Cinema introduction:
The ICA in association with MUBI and LSFF present a screening of
Austrian analogue filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky’s work, featuring the UK
premiere of The Exquisite Corpus (2015).
Having premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year and after travelling through New York, Toronto or Melbourne, The Exquisite Corpus
is a found footage work using various erotic films and advertising
rushes. It plays on the “cadavre exquis” technique used by the
Surrealists, drawing disparate body parts and constellating magical
creatures. Myriad fragments are melted into a single sensuous, humorous,
gruesome, and ecstatic dream.
The screening is followed by a Q&A with Peter Tscherkassky and director Peter Strickland.
Full programme: L´Arrivee, 1998, 35mm, black & white, no sound, 2 min 09 sec Outer Space, 1999, 35mm, black & white, sound, 9 min 58 sec Dream Work, 2001, 35mm, black & white, sound, 11 min Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, 2005, 35mm, black & white, no sound, 17 min The Exquisite Corpus, 2015, 35mm, black & white, no sound, 19 min
Reverse Shot review: Peter Tscherkassky’s The Exquisite Corpus, a 20-minute sensory
spectacle was a true anomaly at Cannes, a blatantly experimental work
whose aesthetic and thematic pleasures are inextricably linked to its
author’s analog approach and sense of formal foreplay. Constructed from
strips of vintage erotica and associated paraphernalia, the film centers
its threadbare narrative around a literal nightmare of sexual
indulgence. In the initial footage a nudist couple stumbles upon a naked
and unconscious woman on the beach. Proceeding from this setup (which
seems to nod to the aesthetics of silent cinema) is an eruption of
heavily manipulated images, presumably memories or death-rattle
hallucinations from the mind of the unresponsive girl, which
Tscherkassky edits into a cascade of overlapping limbs and disassociated
debaucheries. Superimpositions stack one atop the other, creating a
kind of carnal conniption where divergent figures and detached
narratives collapse into single frames that flicker and fragment in a
display of accumulating sensation. I was reminded of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures on more than one occasion, and at its hallucinatory best, The Exquisite Corpus approaches a similar plane of enraptured physicality.
Jordan Cronk
This film is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank and this 35mm screening is introduced by Helen de Witt, BFI head of cinemas.
Chicago Reader review: Nagisa Oshima's depiction of the obsessive lovemaking between a
prostitute and the husband of a brothel keeper, which leads ultimately
to the death of the man (with his own consent), is one of the most
powerful erotic films ever made, but it certainly isn't for every taste.
Based on a true story that originally made headlines in Japan in the
30s, which turned the woman into a tragic public heroine, the film
concentrates on the sex so exclusively that a rare period shot—the man
observing a troop of soldiers marching past—registers like a brief
awakening from a long dream. This 1976 feature is unusually
straightforward for Oshima, and those who are put off are likely to be
disturbed more by the content than by the style. But the film is
unforgettable for its ritualistic (if fatalistic) fascination with sex
as a total commitment. With Tatsuya Fuji and Eiko Matsuda as the couple,
and Aio Nakajima as the brothel keeper. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This
was one of my five picks for the Guardian of underrated Alfred Hitchcock films
not to be missed during the BFI Southbank retrospective of 2012. You can read my thoughts on the quintet
of movies via the web here and this is what I had to say about Sabotage:
'Darker
in tone and more harrowing than its reputation allows, Sabotage is
arguably the most underrated of Hitchcock's still undervalued British
period. A loose adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel The Secret Agentabout a shadowy network of anarchists, the film deserves to be remembered for much more than Hitchcock famously regretting his decision to let the bomb go off at the end of one of the director's most celebrated and manipulative suspense sequences. The
movie's central couple run a cinema, which Hitchcock uses to masterful
effect in an intriguing and rich sequence contrasting Walt Disney on the
screen with the heartbreak of the wife following the tragedy at the
centre of the narrative. The scene involving the "murder" (or is it
"willed suicide"?) of her husband foreshadows the most brutal and
shocking killing in Hitchcock's canon 30 years later, that of the East
German agent Gromek in Torn Curtain (1966).'
Here is the famous bus bomb scene (Warning: spoiler)
Time Out review: School's breaking up for the summer
of '76. The seniors debate party politics while next term's freshmen run
the gauntlet of brutal initiation rites, barely comforted by the
knowledge that they'll wield the stick one day. No one's looking much
farther ahead than that. This has a free-wheeling, 'day-in-the-life-of'
structure which allows writer/director Linklater, in his second feature,
to eavesdrop on an ensemble cast without much in the way of dramatic
contrivance. There's a quirky counter-cultural intelligence at work:
sympathy for those on the sidelines, and a deadpan pop irony which
places this among the hippest teenage movies. While the camera flits
between some two dozen youngsters (played by uniformly excellent
unknowns), Linklater allows himself to develop a handful of stories.
Seriously funny, and shorn of any hint of nostalgia or wish-fulfilment,
this is pretty much where it's at. Tom Charity
Time Out review: Investigating a bold armed robbery which has left three security guards
dead, LA cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), whose devotion to work is
threatening his third marriage, follows a trail that leads him to
suspect a gang of thieves headed by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). Trouble is,
McCauley's cunning is at least equal to Hanna's, and that makes him a
hard man to nail. Still, unknown to Hanna, McCauley's gang have their
own troubles: one of their number is a volatile psychopath, while the
businessman whose bonds they've stolen is not above some rough stuff
himself. Such a synopsis barely scratches the surface of Mann's masterly
crime epic. Painstakingly detailed, with enough characters, subplots
and telling nuances to fill out half a dozen conventional thrillers,
this is simply the best American crime movie - and indeed, one of the
finest movies, period - in over a decade. The action scenes are better
than anything produced by John Woo or Quentin Tarantino; the
characterisation has a depth most American film-makers only dream of;
the use of location, decor and music is inspired; Dante Spinotti's
camerawork is superb; and the large, imaginatively chosen cast gives
terrific support to the two leads, both back on glorious form. Geoff Andrew
This is part of the She’s So Giallo (Women of 1970s Italian Thrillers) season at the Barbican curated by Josh Saco, aka Cigarette Burns Cinema. You can find all the details here. Cigarette Burns introduction: Lost for nearly 30 years and regarded as Dario Argento’s masterpiece, Michael Brandon and Mimsy Farmer star in this rarely seen cult horror. Roberto
(Brandon), a drummer in a rock band, finds himself embroiled in a
nightmare when he is framed for killing a mysterious man who has been
stalking him. But Roberto’s troubles get worse when he’s blackmailed by
an unknown killer who is knocking off his friends, one by one. Turning
to his wife, Nina (Farmer), Roberto struggles to identify who he can
really trust. Featuring a playful score by Ennio Morricone’s and innovative cinematography from Franco Di Giacomo, this suspense-filled drama has rightly cemented itself as one of Argento's greatest giallo features.
The Prince Charles' latest 70mm presentation is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, on an extended run from June 4th to 20th. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review of Vertigo: 'One of the landmarks—not merely of the movies, but of 20th-century
art. Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film extends the theme of Rear Window—the
relationship of creator and creation—into the realm of love and
sexuality, focusing on an isolated, inspired romantic (James Stewart)
who pursues the spirit of a woman (the powerfully carnal Kim Novak). The
film's dynamics of chase, capture, and escape parallel the artist's
struggle with his work; the enraptured gaze of the Stewart character
before the phantom he has created parallels the spectator's position in
front of the movie screen. The famous motif of the fall is presented in
horizontal rather than vertical space, so that it becomes not a satanic
fall from grace, but a modernist fall into the image, into the artwork—a
total absorption of the creator by his creation, which in the end is
shown as synonymous with death. But a thematic analysis can only scratch
the surface of this extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps
the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema.' Dave Kehr
Variety review: Chad Hartigan’s “This
Is Martin Bonner” (2013) established him as a subtle, original
filmmaking voice attuned to stories of uprooting and dislocation, and he
wrings a more accessible and no less specific variation on the same
theme with “Morris From America,”
a warm and winsome portrait of an African-American teenager adjusting
uneasily to his new life in Heidelberg, Germany. Set to the pulsing
hip-hop music that fuels Morris’ dreams and offers him refuge in a place
that can seem friendly and threatening by turns, this coming-of-age
dramedy explores how the challenges of being young, black and
misunderstood can be compounded in a foreign environment, but goes about
it in a grounded, character-driven way that never smacks of
manipulation or special pleading. Justin Chang
Time Out review: Who would make an entire movie about man's best friend? Not
misanthropic writer-director Todd Solondz, it turns out. Boasting a
canine cast of exquisitely neurotic Dachshunds—all bearing the same
pinched demeanor as Jane Adams in Happiness (1998)—Wiener-Dog
follows the trajectory of one dog traipsing into a series of domestic
traps only Solondz could devise. As a warning to animal lovers, the
title character sometimes has more in common with a tube of meat meant
to be gnashed by life's vicissitudes. But en route to the harshest, most
unremittingly bleak film of his career, Solondz unleashes some of his
sharpest commentary on human mortality and regret.
Ironically scored to lullabies and Debussy's "Clair de lune," Wiener-Dog
is subdivided into four short segments (split by a jokey animated
intermission). The bookends have the toughest stuff: A delicate
nine-year-old thrills to his new pet, but must learn about spaying from
his uptight yogacized mother (a fearless Julie Delpy), using racist
language that wins the award for worst parenting ever. Later on, the
extraordinary Ellen Burstyn, hidden behind shades and a frown,
carelessly strokes her companion animal (dubbed Cancer) until she's
unexpectedly visited by a group of sweet-voiced redheaded angels who
taunt her with the kinder life she could have led. It's the scariest
scene of Solondz's work to date: the essence of his worldview distilled
into one nightmarish moment of supernatural comeuppance. Why are we watching this? It's a question that comes up often with this indie stalwart, and Wiener-Dog, as polished as it is (these vignettes are lensed by Carol's
Edward Lachman), won't convince doubters. But there's a deeper value
here, teased out in themes that few filmmakers apart from Sweden's
savage Roy Andersson would dare: the ephemerality of existence, the need
to emotionally invest in these fragile four-legged totems. Ultimately, Wiener-Dog
is about art itself.
Danny DeVito plays a passé screenwriter and
film-school teacher who sees his legacy becoming a joke among glib
students, while elsewhere, a contemporary artist (furious at comparisons
to Damien Hirst) turns flesh and blood into animatronic puppets. The
final canvas is the pavement itself—you know it's coming but brace
yourself. Joshua Rothkopf
This is being shown at Picturehouse Central's Sundance Film Festival in London season. It is being screened in the 'Road to Stardom' strand, a programme dedicated to showcasing notable films
discovered by the Sundance Film Festival that feature stars and
filmmakers who have since achieved global recognition.
Chicago Reader review: Writer-director Debra Granik made her feature debut with Down to the Bone
(2004), a stark working-class drama with Vera Farmiga giving a breakout
performance as a coke-addicted young mother. Farmiga has since moved on
to more upscale projects, but with this second feature Granik steps
even farther down the economic ladder, to the piss-poor Ozarks. A
17-year-old girl (Jennifer Lawrence) struggles to care for her mentally
incapacitated mama and two younger siblings. The situation grows even
more bleak after her daddy, busted for cooking crystal meth, signs their
home over to a bail bondsman and then disappears; she needs to find him
before the family is evicted, but the murderous meth dealers he
supplied want him to stay lost. The social detail of a 21st-century
mountain community is completely persuasive, heightening the drama
immeasurably; the movie wouldn't be half as suspenseful if Granik hadn't
sealed us into this little envelope of wilderness and poverty. JR Jones
This film screens (35mm) in the Cult strand and can also be seen on June 5th. Details here.
Time Out review: This faithful, scary and visually imaginative adaptation of Clive
Barker's story 'The Forbidden' casts Virginia Madsen as a Chicago doctoral
student researching an urban myth about a hook-handed killer called
Candyman. A series of murders in the city's run-down projects are linked
with stories about a figure who appears when you say his name five
times in front of a mirror. But are the frightened residents and
elaborate graffiti proof that Candyman exists, or simply evidence of
their wish to believe in the bogeyman? Following up on Paperhouse,
Bernard Rose stages the suspense and horror with skill and panache, making this
one of the best sustained horror movies for some years. Nigel Floyd
This film is on an extended run at BFI Southbank from a new 35mm print. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: For better or worse, one of Steven Spielberg's best films (1977), and
perhaps still the best expression of his benign, dreamy-eyed vision.
Humanity's first contact with alien beings proves to be a cause for
celebration and a form of showbiz razzle-dazzle that resembles a slowly
descending chandelier in a movie palace. The events leading up to this
epiphany are a mainly well-orchestrated buildup through which several
diverse individuals—Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Melinda
Dillon—are drawn to the site where this spectacle takes place. Very
close in overall spirit and nostalgic winsomeness to the fiction of Ray
Bradbury, with beautiful cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond that
deservedly won an Oscar. This is dopey Hollywood mysticism all right,
but thanks to considerable craft and showmanship, it packs an undeniable
punch. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: An incredibly overwrought Freudian Western, with Henry Fonda as the
notorious
killer hired by the cowardly citizens of Warlock to defend them from a
vicious gang. Fonda brings with him his lifelong partner (and possible
lover), the blond, neurotic, club-footed Anthony Quinn. After a few
rousing shoot-outs, one of the opposition (Richard Widmark) joins them,
and he is appointed sheriff. Enter Dorothy Malone,
whose fiancé has been murdered by Quinn, and she falls in love with
Widmark, whom she hopes will avenge her. It all ends with a Viking-style
funeral, and with Fonda starting to think beyond his guns. Edward
Dmytryk
(after the blacklist days, at least) was usually one of Hollywood's
dullest directors, but not here. The movie is overlong yet dynamic,
juxtaposing moments of repose, when the script shuffles relationships
like a stacked deck, and bursts of action which have something of the
operatic stylisation of Sergio Leone. Adrian Turner
This 35mm screening is part of the Wim Wenders Selectrospective at the Prince Charles Cinema, You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Wim Wenders's roughly styled but sensitive 1974 film about fading
cultural identities. Long-faced Rüdiger Vogler, a Wenders favorite, is a
German photojournalist in search of the Real America. While in New
York, he reluctantly accepts responsibility for Alice, a nine-year-old
German girl abandoned by her mother. Together they return to Europe in
search of the girl's grandmother, remembered, dimly, as living in a
small village. Which one, they don't know. Without a place to stop, the
characters continue to move—restlessly, desperately, the end point
always out of sight. Dave Kehr
This is part of the Isabelle Huppert retrospective at Cine Lumiere. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Though based on a short story by Joseph Conrad, Patrice Chereau's Gabrielle
brings to mind the plays of Strindberg and Albee. Chereau was a man of
the theater before becoming a film director, and this highly stylized
portrait of a loveless marriage at the beginning of the 20th century
merges a claustrophobic theatricality with dazzlingly cinematic
wide-screen compositions (the sumptuous cinematography is by Eric
Gautier). The narrative is propelled by the decision of Gabrielle
(Isabelle Huppert in a superb performance) to return to her befuddled
husband, Jean (Pascal Greggory), after a passionate dalliance with
another man. By the time she declares that she's repelled by the very
idea of her husband's sperm inside her, their bourgeois household has
become a minefield. Richard M. Porton
This is part of the 'Ride Lonesome: Psychological Western' season at BFI Southbank. There is another chance to catch this 35mm screening of Sam Fuller's debut film on Sunday 29th May. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Samuel Fuller's directing debut (1949) is one of the most impressive on
record, passionate and intense. Its protagonist is Robert Ford, the
"dirty little coward / who shot Mr. Howard" in the back. Filmed almost
entirely in close-up—the style that Jean-Luc Godard would later call
"cine-fist"—this is agonizing, claustrophobic, and brilliant.
Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Arguably Andre de Toth's greatest film, this 1959 western combines a
hostage situation with a bleak, snowbound terrain to produce a gripping
vision of hopeless entrapment. Robert Ryan stars as a rancher who's
about to start a gunfight over land when a motley gang of outlaws led by
Burl Ives ride in and take over the town. Because it's at the end of
the trail, the outlaws become "prisoners of a white silence," in de
Toth's words: isolated, surrounded by snow, they're about to run wild
with the townswomen when Ryan leads them on a false escape route through
the mountains. Their final ride is one of the most despairing visions
in all cinema: the turning course followed by the men seems to twist
back on itself, and the stark black-and-white background of rock and
snow forms a closed, lifeless world excluding all human warmth. Fred Camper
Director Whit Stillman will be at the BFI for a Q&A after his much-praised new film. Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny are paired up by Stillman once
more (The Last Days of Disco) in this adaptation of Jane Austen’s
novella Lady Susan. Taking up residence with her in-law’s following an
intrigue, Lady Susan is delightful, irresistible and entirely without
need of scruples as she sets about making a match for her daughter
Frederica – never forgetting about her own requirements, of course.
This film is part of the Michael Mann season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: 'Michael Mann hits top form with this splendidly stylish and oppressive thriller adapted from Thomas Harris' Red Dragon.
The plot is complex and ingenious: FBI forensics expert Will Graham
(William Peterson), blessed (and tormented) by an ability to fathom the workings
of the criminal mind through psychic empathy, is brought back from
voluntary retirement to track down a serial killer, the 'Tooth Fairy'.
Focused on the anxiety and confusion of the hunter rather than his
psychotic prey, the film functions both as a disturbing examination of
voyeurism, and as an often almost unbearably grim suspenser. Mann
creates a terrifying menacing atmosphere without resorting to graphic
depiction of the seriously nasty killings: music, designer-expressionist
'Scope photography, and an imaginative use of locations, combine with
shots of the aftermath of the massacres to evoke a world nightmarishly
perceived by Graham's haunted sensibility. The performances, too, are
superior, most memorably Cox's intellectually brilliant and malevolent
asylum inmate. One of the most impressive American thrillers of the late
'80s.' Geoff Andrew
The Guardian's John Patterson hailed tonight's film the best of the first decade of the millennium – and by some way. This is his article in full and here is an extract:
'It may seem like an exaggeration, but with The New World cinema has
reached its culmination, its apotheosis. It is both ancient and modern,
cinema at its purest and most organic, its simplest and most refined,
made with much the same tools as were available in the infancy of the
form a century ago to the Lumières, to Griffith and Murnau. Barring a
few adjustments for modernity – colour, sound, developments in editing, a
hyper-cine-literate audience – it could conceivably have been made 80
years ago (like Murnau and Flaherty's Tabu). This is why, I believe,
when all the middlebrow Oscar-dross of our time has eroded away to its
constituent molecules of celluloid, The New World will stand tall,
isolated and magnificent, like Kubrick's black monolith.'
This screening is part of the Classic Film season at the Prince Charles. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Reporter Clark Gable chases spoiled heiress Claudette Colbert across
most of the eastern seaboard, pausing long enough between wisecracks to
set the definitive tone of 30s screwball comedy. Even though Frank
Capra's 1934 film won all five of the top Oscars, it's still pretty
good. This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a
minimum of populist posturing. Dave Kehr
Don't miss the chance to see this movie screened from a 35mm print.
Chicago Reader review: A masterpiece, one of Michelangelo Antonioni's finest works (1975).
Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider star as a journalist who trades one
identity for another and the woman who becomes his accomplice (and
ultimately the moral center of his adopted world). Less a thriller
(though the mood of mystery is pervasive) than a meditation on the
problems of knowledge, action for its own sake, and the relationship of
the artist to the work he brings into being. Next to this film, Blowup
seems a facile, though necessary, preliminary. By all means go. Don Druker
The Bard’s penchant for cruelty is gleefully exploited in this
devilishly macabre black comedy of terrors. Vincent Price is Edward
Lionheart, a vengeful actor seeking bloody payback on the critics who so
callously denied him the recognition he felt he deserved. Featuring a
slew of inventive death scenes inspired by Shakespeare plays, this campy
slice of Grand Guignol was a personal favourite of Price himself.
InClose Up,Peter Gidal’s political, ultra-leftist practice is augmented by the disembodied voices of two Nicaraguan revolutionaries heard of the soundtrack. These voices punctuate a film whose representation of a room, an inhabited space, is one in which the viewer must consciously search for recognition, for meaning-making. The image-content is muted and abstract, but fascinating, with moments of (no-doubt) inadvertent beauty.
"Close Upis crystal hard, intransigent, and filmin extremis. In short, one of the best 'political' films made in this country." –Michael O’Pray
This film is part of the Isabelle Huppert season at Cine Lumiere. Full details here.
Time Out review: When Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) takes on Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) as housekeeper, her
family's impressed by Sophie's aura of quiet responsibility, even though
they're not convinced she knows how to serve dinner correctly. Snobbish
but liberal, they nevertheless treat her generously. Only when she
starts to consort with postmistress Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a gossip whom
husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) suspects of opening the family mail, do they
find real cause for complaint. But by then the women have a secret bond
which excludes them from the safe cosseted world of Sophie's employers.
Claude Chabrol's adaptation of Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone
benefits from the director's immaculate sense of social and
psychological detail. The film's strong points are not mystery, suspense
or even surprise, but Chabrol's flair for characterisation, careful
pacing and solid evocation of bourgeois complacency and anti-bourgeois
hatred creates a palpable sense of unease that fully justifies the
shockingly violent finale. Ledoyen, the daughter of the household, is a
discovery; Bisset returns to form; and Huppert, unusually vivacious, is
terrific. Geoff Andrew
Chicago Reader review of The Tall T: One of the best of the Randolph Scott-Budd Boetticher B westerns (1957),
in which the action is almost entirely psychological (Scott tries to
pry Maureen O'Sullivan away from the outlaws—Richard Boone, Henry Silva,
Skip Homeier—who are holding her for ransom) and the landscape is
deftly stylized into dark interiors (caves, a fateful well) that
punctuate the wide-open spaces. Boone makes one of the most memorable of
Boetticher's witty, intelligent villains; no other western director so
seductively gave evil its due. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review of Ride Lonesome: Budd Boetticher stretched the format of his Randolph Scott westerns into
CinemaScope with this 1959 entry in the cycle, and in some respects the
narrative seems drawn out as well: there is hardly any pretense of
action or suspense as the characters move, almost aimlessly, through an
open landscape, testing each other's strengths and weaknesses through
conversations that become psychological chess games. Scott, as usual, is
looking for the man who murdered his wife; his companions are two
wisecracking outlaws (James Coburn and Pernell Roberts) and a woman
whose husband has been killed by Indians (Karen Steele). Dave Kehr
Subsequent to the initial posting for today's pick this message was sent out by the Prince Charles Cinema: Next Wednesday 18th May's screening of THE PASSION OF ANNA has been cancelled. The print has been taken out of service by the distributor. The Passion of Anna (Bergman, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm
This (35mm) screening is part of a short Ingmar Bergman season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Ingmar Bergman's 1970 film about the impossibility of purity and
consistency in a world where to live is to contradict yourself. The
passion of the title is not sexual, but the ability to live with the
contradictions of life and to bear them without resignation. A
tentative, plotless film that pulses with the rhythms of life rather
than the rhythms of drama.
Don Druker
This (35mm) screening is part of the Terrence Malick season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.
The Thin Red Line confused Jonathan Romney so much when he was the
Guardian's chief film critic that he said he wasn't sure whether it was
worth one star or five so he put a row of question marks at the top of
his review which you can read in full here.
Here is the Chicago Reader review: There's less sense of period here and more feeling for terrain than
in any other World War II movie that comes to mind. Terrence Malick's
strongest suits in his two previous features, Badlands (1973) and Days
of Heaven (1978)—a painterly sense of composition and a bold and
original use of offscreen narration—are enhanced here, first by a
successful wedding of ecology and narrative (which never quite happened
in Days of Heaven) and second by the notion of a collective hero, which
permits the internal monologues of many characters in turn. I haven't
read the James Jones novel this is based on, which some feel is his
best, but Malick clearly is distancing the material philosophically and
poetically, muting the drama periodically and turning it into reverie.
This may have its occasional dull stretches, but in contrast to Saving
Private Ryan it's the work of a grown-up with something to say about the
meaning and consequences of war. The fine cast includes Sean Penn,
Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson,
Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and, in tiny parts, John
Travolta and George Clooney. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Duck Soup is the greatest of the Marx Brothers' movies - and is being screened in the Clasic Film season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review of Duck Soup: The Marx Brothers' best movie (1933) and, not coincidentally, the one
with the strongest director—Leo McCarey, who had the flexibility to give
the boys their head and the discipline to make some formal sense of it.
Groucho is Rufus T. Firefly, brought in by Margaret Dumont to restore
order to the crumbling country of Freedonia; his competition consists of
two bumbling spies, Chico and Harpo, sent in by the failed
Shakespearean actor (Louis Calhern) who runs the country next door. The
antiwar satire is dark, trenchant, and typical of Paramount's liberal
orientation at the time. Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the famous lemonade vendor scene.
Juliet Stevenson will be on stage for a Q&A following the screening of this British classic, starring the late Alan Rickman.
Chicago Reader review: An English feature written and directed by playwright Anthony Minghella,
about a young woman (Juliet Stevenson) stricken by the death of her
cellist lover (Alan Rickman) who appears to be revisited by his ghost,
this comes across as an English realist variation on the sort of
quasi-supernatural stories that producer Val Lewton specialized in
during the 40s: that is, the supernatural elements are used to enhance
the realistic psychology rather than the other way around. If the
relatively prosaic Minghella, making his movie debut, lacks the
suggestive poetic sensibility of Lewton, he does a fine job in capturing
the contemporary everyday textures of London life, and coaxes a strong
performance out of Stevenson, a longtime collaborator. Full of richly
realized secondary characters and witty oddball details (e.g., the home
video tastes of her late lover's ghostly male companions), this is a
beguiling film in more ways than one. Jonathan Rosenbaum
