Chicago Reader review: Vincente Minnelli created one of his masterpieces with this loosely plotted but tightly structured 1944 story of a middle-class family waiting through spring, summer, and fall for the opening of the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904. One of the first films to integrate musical numbers into the plot, it explores, without condescension or simplemindedness, the feelings that drive the family members apart and then bring them back together again. And there's the sublime Minnellian spectacle of Judy Garland singing "The Trolley Song," "The Boy Next Door," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." A great film. Dave Kehr
Soul Jazz Records are presenting the classic reggae movie Rockers in this rare one-off screening at Regent Street Cinema. The film will be introduced by Stuart Baker (head of Soul Jazz Records) and also followed by a free pre-xmas reggae and funk DJ-set from Soul Jazz Records Soundsystem DJs in the bar.
Time Out review: A Trenchtown variant on Robin Hood, with dreadlocked drummer Horsemouth (Leroy Wallace) up against the local minor-league mafia. An excellent soundtrack (Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Bunny Wailer, etc), and an endearingly witty script which digresses through explanations of the Rasta faith and countless idiosyncratic solidarity rituals, make for a delightful piece of whimsy. Complete with subtitles transliterating the Rasta patois. Frances Lass
Time Out review: Set in the world of CIA power games and scientific hardware, but dominated by an intriguing Borges-like riddle: why should a mystery thriller that didn't sell be translated into obscure languages? And why should the American Literary Historical Society in New York be massacred while one of their readers (Robert Redford) is out getting lunch? With the telephone his only method of contact with Olympian and untrustworthy superiors, Redford becomes lost, unpredictable, even sentimental. He holes up in Faye Dunaway's apartment and starts making mistakes. Thanks to an intelligent script, partly byLorenzo Semple Jr(Pretty Poison, The Parallax View), the action rarely falters, and at its best the film offers an intriguing slice of neo-Hitchcock. A certain gloss irritates, but enough scenes compensate for the chic portrayal of the Redford/ Dunaway relationship: Redford's sudden intrusion into civilisation when he visits a dead man's apartment, and finds the wife preparing her husband's dinner; the postman whose pen won't work; Redford in the strange, darkened house of his quarry, taking the initiative by blaring soul music from the hi-fi. Chris Peachment
This is part of a Michael Haneke season (all 35mm screenings) at Curzon Soho. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: This brilliant if unpleasant puzzle without a solution, about surveillance and various kinds of denial, finds writer-director Michael Haneke near the top of his game, though it's not a game everyone will want to play (2005). The brittle host of a TV book-chat show (Daniel Auteuil) and his unhappy wife (Juliette Binoche) start getting strange videos that track their comings and goings outside their Paris home. Once the husband traces the videos to an Algerian he abused when both were kids, things get only more tense, troubled, and unresolved. Haneke is so punitive toward the couple and his audience that I periodically rebelled against—or went into denial about—the director's rage, and I guess that's part of the plan. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of the 'Time, Memory Dream' season at the Bartbican. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: It's almost impossible to define this 1943 masterpiece by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It was ostensibly based on a cartoon series that satirized the British military class, yet its attitude toward the main character is one of affection, respect, and sometimes awe; it was intended as a propaganda film, yet Churchill wanted to suppress it; it has the romantic sweep of a grand love story, yet none of the romantic relationships it presents is truly fulfilled, and the film's most lasting bond is one between the British colonel (Roger Livesey) and his Prussian counterpart (Anton Walbrook). Pressburger's screenplay covers 40 years in the colonel's life through a series of brilliantly constructed flashbacks, compressions, and ellipses; Powell's camera renders the winding plot through boldly deployed Technicolor hues and camera movements of exquisite design and expressivity. It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain. With Deborah Kerr, Roland Culver, and James McKechnie. Dave Kehr
This is part of the Latin America Monthly strand, curated by ICA Cinema and Maria Delgado, director of research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.
Here is the ICA introduction: Axel is a ten year-old who lives with his mother Margarita, and his three twenty-something sisters in a flat in Montserrat, a once-aristocratic Buenos Aires neighborhood now fallen into decadence. Margarita requests to be locked up in her bedroom as part of a homemade treatment which remains partially unexplained. Axel and his sisters play the part of jailers of their own mother in this odd self-preservation agreement - this will be the arrangement between them until Margarita attempts to break it. Axel will then have to decide which of the contradictory orders given by his mother to follow.
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Vladimir Durán
This screening is part of the 'Time, Memory Dream' season at the Bartbican. Full details here.
Barbican Cinema introduction: There is a subset of films which are arguably pure dream from beginning to end, that take place entirely within the dream world.Picnic at Hanging Rockis one brilliant example. This unsettling period film about the disappearance of a party of schoolgirls announces it is based on a real story. But in its most memorable moments its realism is corroded by a dense, dream-like atmosphere that sends us back to theEdgar Allan Poeline recited earlier: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
Chicago Reader review: Alfred Hitchcock's masterful 1938 spy thriller, with Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave searching for kidnapped agent Dame May Whitty aboard a trans-European express train, pursued all the while by sinister Nazi agents. This is vintage Hitchcock, with the pacing and superb editing that marked not only his 30s style but eventually every film that had any aspirations whatever to achieving suspense and rhythm. Don Druker
This video presentation, which is also being screened on December 17th (details here), is part of the 'Can You Trust Them' season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Time Out review: A disturbingly powerful version of Heinrich Böll's novel about the irresponsibility of the gutter press and their ability to destroy lives. Angela Winkler is excellent as the shy, apolitical young woman who sleeps with a man she meets at a party, unaware that he's a terrorist; next morning, after he's gone, armed police burst in, arrest her, and the nightmare begins. A smear campaign is started against her character, her privacy is repeatedly violated, and the links between single-minded, right-wing police and news-hungry press are made clear. It's a frightening account of how external, arbitrary forces can ruin lives, which simultaneously portrays the heroine as a courageous, dignified upholder of her freedom. Sometimes surreal, always intelligent and menacing, it's far superior to Victor Schlöndorff's later The Tin Drum. Geoff Andrew
This 35mm presentation is the latest Badlands Collective screening.
Chicago Redaer review: Kenneth Branagh (Henry V) directs and plays two roles in a show-offy American thriller scripted by Scott Frank that is loads of fun even if it's ultimately strangled by its excesses. A Los Angeles private eye (Branagh) sets out to learn the identity of a beautiful amnesiac (Emma Thompson) who suffers from nightmares; he's aided by an antique dealer (Derek Jacobi) with a flair for hypnosis. With his help the woman produces tales set in LA in the 40s about a European composer and his wife (Branagh and Thompson again), shot in black and white. As the twists come thick and fast and the plot gets progressively more and more baroque, Branagh shows himself to be at least as intelligent as Brian De Palma in delivering over-the-top stylistic filigree and every bit as willing to take his own two-dimensional postmodernism too seriously; with Andy Garcia, Hanna Schygulla, and an enjoyable turn by an uncredited Robin Williams (1991). Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm screening is part of a superb "Light Show' season devoted to
screening from prints over at the weekend of December 8th to 10th at the
ICA. More details here.
Chicago Reader review: 'Orson Welles's underrated 1973 essay film—made from discarded
documentary footage by Francois Reichenbach and new material from
Welles—forms a kind of dialectic with Welles's never-completed It's All True.
The main subjects are art forger Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Howard
Hughes, Pablo Picasso, Welles himself, and the practice and meaning of
deception. Despite some speculation that this film was Welles's indirect
reply to Pauline Kael's bogus contention that he didn't write a word of
Citizen Kane, his sly commentary—seconded by some of the
trickiest editing anywhere—implies that authorship is a pretty dubious
notion anyway, a function of the even more dubious art market and its
team of “experts.” Alternately superficial and profound, the film also
enlists the services of Oja Kodar, Welles's principal collaborator after
the late 60s, as actor, erotic spectacle, and cowriter, and briefer
appearances by many other Welles cohorts. Michel Legrand supplies the
wonderful score.' Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here is the most impressive part of the film, Welles' paean to Chartres Cathedral. Here are Welles's words:'Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man
perhaps in the whole western world and it’s without a signature:
Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All
that’s left most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor,
forked, radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep
telling us, is a universe, which is disposable. You know it might be
just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest,
this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation,
which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark
where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us, to accomplish.
Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a
few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in
war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and
the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life. We’re going to
die. “Be of good heart,” cry the dead artists out of the living past.
Our songs will all be silenced – but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a
man’s name doesn’t matter all that much. (Church bells peal…)'
This 35mm screening is part of a superb "Light Show' season devoted to screening from prints over at the weekend of December 8th to 10th at the ICA. More details here.
Chicago Reader review: My favorite movie, this 1967 French comedy by
actor-director Jacques Tati has the most intricately designed mise en
scene in all of cinema. The restored 65-millimeter version, with
four-track DTS sound, expands the possibilities of becoming lost in
Tati's vast frames and creatively finding one's way again. His
studio-constructed vision of Paris begins in daytime with nightmarishly
regimented straight lines and right angles and proceeds to night with
accidental yet celebratory curves of people instinctively coming
together. It peaks in an extraordinary sequence, set in a gradually
disintegrating restaurant, that comprises almost half the film: once
various musicians start to perform, the viewer's gaze inevitably follows
the customers in a kind of improvised dance, collecting and juxtaposing
simultaneous comic events and details. In this landscape everyone is a
tourist, but Tati suggests that once we can find one another, we all
belong. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This 35mm screening is part of the 'Christmas at the PCC season'. Full details here.
Time Out review:
'Re-teaming actor Jack Lemmon, scriptwriter Iz Diamond and director Billy Wilder a
year after ‘Some Like It Hot’, this multi-Oscar winning comedy is
sharper in tone, tracing the compromises of a New York insurance drone
who pimps out his brownstone apartment for his married bosses’ illicit
affairs. The quintessential New York movie – with exquisite design by Alexandre Trauner and
shimmering black-and-white photography – it presented something of a
breakthrough in its portrayal of the war of the sexes, with a sour and
cynical view of the self-deception, loneliness and cruelty involved in
‘romantic’ liaisons. Directed
by Wilder with attention to detail and emotional reticence that belie
its inherent darkness and melodramatic core, it’s lifted considerably by
the performances: the psychosomatic ticks and tropes of nebbish Lemmon
balanced by the pathos of Shirley MacLaine’s put-upon ‘lift girl’.'
Cinema Museum introduction: The film Pavement Butterfly (1929), is a German English co-production directed by Richard Eichberg in Germany, and stars Anna May Wong. Tonight's presentation will be screened using a 35mm BFI print, and will be accompanied by guest pianist Stephen Horne. In this, her second silent film with Eichberg, Wong plays Princess Butterfly, an exotic Parisian fan dancer whose “death leap through a circle of naked swords” act goes tragically wrong. Blamed for the impalement of a fellow performer, she runs away and takes shelter with a handsome but starving painter who she brings luck.
Nicholas Ray’s beguiling blend of murder mystery and unusually adult love story is one of the finest American movies of the early 50s. The lonely place is Hollywood: scriptwriter Dix (Bogart) is prime suspect in the murder of a young woman, until neighbour Laurel (Grahame) provides him with a false alibi. But as the pair embark on a romance, his volatile temper – exacerbated equally by the studio and the cops – makes her wonder whether he might have been guilty... Brilliantly adapted from Dorothy B Hughes’ novel, Ray’s tough but tender film is spot-on in its insightful characterisation of Tinseltown and of the troubled lovers. Marvellously cast, Bogart and Grahame bring an aching poignancy to their painful predicament. Geoff Andrew, BFI Programmer-at-large
Time Out review: The place is Hollywood, lonely for scriptwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart),
who is suspected of murdering a young woman, until girl-next-door Laurel
Gray (Gloria Grahame) supplies him with a false alibi. But is he the killer?
Under pressure of police interrogation, their tentative relationship
threatens to crack - and Dix's sudden, violent temper becomes
increasingly evident. Nicholas Ray's classic thriller remains as fresh and
resonant as the day it was released. Nothing is as it seems: the noir
atmosphere of deathly paranoia frames one of the screen's most adult
and touching love affairs; Bogart's tough-guy insolence is probed to
expose a vulnerable, almost psychotic insecurity; while Grahame abandons
femme fatale conventions to reveal a character of enormous, subtle
complexity. As ever, Ray composes with symbolic precision, confounds
audience expectations, and deploys the heightened lyricism of melodrama
to produce an achingly poetic meditation on pain, distrust and loss of
faith, not to mention an admirably unglamorous portrait of Tinseltown.
Never were despair and solitude so romantically alluring. Geoff Andrew
This 35mm presentation is part of the Prince Charles' Christm as season. Full details here. Chicago Reader review: There are no art deco nightclubs, shimmering silk gowns, or slamming bedroom doors to be seen, but this 1940 film is one of Ernst Lubitsch's finest and most enduring works, a romantic comedy of dazzling range that takes place almost entirely within the four walls of a leather-goods store in prewar Budapest. James Stewart is the earnest, slightly awkward young manager; Margaret Sullavan is the new sales clerk who gets on his nerves—and neither realizes that they are partners in a passionate romance being carried out through the mails. Interwoven with subplots centered on the other members of the shop's little family, the romance proceeds through Lubitsch's brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense. With Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut, Sara Haden, and Felix Bressart. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: The end of the world, starring Ralph Meeker (at his sleaziest)
as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (at his most neolithic).
Robert Aldrich's 1955 film is in some ways the apotheosis of film
noir—it's certainly one of the most extreme examples of the genre,
brimming with barely suppressed hysteria and set in a world totally
without moral order. Even the credits run upside down. This
independently produced low-budget film was a shining example for the New
Wave directors—Truffaut, Godard, et al—who found it proof positive
that commercial films could accommodate the quirkiest and most personal
of visions. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Initial viewings of Stanley Kubrick's movies can be deceptive
because his films all tend to be emotionally convoluted in some way; one
has to follow them as if through a maze. A character that Kubrick might
seem to treat cruelly the first time around (e.g., Elisha Cook Jr.'s
fall guy in The Killing) can appear the object of tender compassion on a
subsequent viewing. The director's desire to avoid sentimentality at
all costs doesn't preclude feeling, as some critics have claimed, but it
does create ambiguity and a distanced relationship to the central
characters. Kubrick's final feature very skillfully portrays the dark
side of desire in a successful marriage; since the 60s he'd been
thinking about filming Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant novella
"Traumnovelle," and working with Frederic Raphael, he's adapted it
faithfully--at least if one allows for all the differences between
Viennese Jews in the 20s and New York WASPs in the 90s. Schnitzler's
tale, about a young doctor contemplating various forms of adultery and
debauchery after discovering that his wife has entertained comparable
fantasies, has a somewhat Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream
and waking fantasy (hence Kubrick's title), and all the actors do a fine
job of traversing this delicate territory. Yet the story has been
altered to make the successful doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite
and his wife (powerfully played by Nicole Kidman) a little feistier;
Kubrick's also added a Zeus-like tycoon (played to perfection by Sydney
Pollack) who pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in
fact only summarizes the various mysteries, his cynicism and chilly
access to power revealing that Kubrick is more of a moralist than
Schnitzler. To accept the premises and experiences of this movie, you
have to be open to an expressionist version of New York with scant
relation to the 90s (apart from cellular phones and AIDS) and a complex
reading of a marriage that assumes the relations between men and women
haven't essentially changed in the past 70-odd years. This is a
remarkably gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling
that, like Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and
intensity over time. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This modern classic will be screened from a 35mm print.
Time Out review: Where does criminality end and celebrity begin is the question posed by Australian director Andrew Dominik
whose stunning second film – after 2000’s excellent (and not entirely
dissimilar) ‘Chopper’ – sets the Western genre barn ablaze to deliver a
gripping, Gothic tête à tête between two of American history’s most
morally perplexing folk heroes. Kicking off with an expertly
choreographed train robbery which acts as both a narrative nub and tonal
barometer for the director’s bucolic, mournful mise en scene and
script, the film then ruefully traces the interlocking paths of Jesse
James and his young admirer Robert Ford. Early word suggested that Casey Affleck’s
Ford was the man to keep an eye on come awards season, but this is
unquestionably Pitt’s film, his James insouciantly radiating a piercing,
unreadable intensity redolent of Joe Pesci’s work with Scorsese, a
truly enigmatic presence constantly obscured behind warped glass, thick
smoke, or even his own visibly battered visage. Though, in the end, the
film’s main intention is to have you query every element of its
mischievous title (and you probably will), it’s a journey of immense
emotional foreboding and, flabby coda aside, a red-raw classic. David Jenkins
