This Little White Lies magazine screening will be presented by Adam Nayman, author of ‘The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together’, who will be in conversation after the film with writer and critic Manuela Lazic. Chicago Reader review: After the unbridled misanthropy of Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen return to the more affectionate tone of their most endearing films (Fargo, The Big Lebowski). Noted stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg stars as a put-upon physics professor at a small Minnesota college; his wife wants to leave him, his dysfunctional brother won't move out of their house, and his upcoming tenure vote is complicated by a cash bribe from a pushy South Korean student. The Summer of Love is just beginning, and the movie's funniest motif is its intermingling of Judaic teaching and the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow LP. Like the Coens' protagonist in The Man Who Wasn't There, Stuhlbarg is driven to an existential crisis, but in contrast to the earlier movie, with its tired noir moves, this 2009 feature is earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived. JR Jones
This Roberto Rossellini masterpiece is screening as part of the ‘Big Screen Classics’ strand at BFI Southbank and is also being shown on November 26th and 29th. Details here. 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
This Frank Tashlin comedy will be presented from a 35mm print.
Chicago Reader review: This 1964 Jerry Lewis vehicle is the sixth and last directed by his gifted mentor, Frank Tashlin, though it resembles Lewis's own directorial efforts in its focus on pain (it's set almost exclusively in a hospital) and its trading of satire for surreal fantasy, improbably infused with brassy showbiz gusto (Sammy Davis Jr. sings the title tune). There's also a Lewis-like emphasis on bizarre sound gags and abrasive villains (Everett Sloane as a Scrooge type) that contrasts with Tashlin's cartoonish imagery and relative tolerance for fools and assholes. But Lewis's infantile mannerisms are overtaken by the director, who treats the hero as a grown-up struggling with “neurotic identification empathy,” and the movie's finale, with its cascading shopping carts, could only have come from Tashlin. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: A popcorn movie that preaches mass rebellion against the government—what's not to like? After milking The Matrix for two superfluous sequels, writer-producers Andy and Larry Wachowski adapt a 1989 graphic novel by David Lloyd and Alan Moore; set in a futuristic Great Britain, the movie follows a masked figure (Hugo Weaving) as he carries out a series of assassinations and tries to unite the cowed populace against a totalitarian national-security state. The swashbuckling first hour is superior to the second, which bursts at the seams with backstory, but a rousing climax makes this the most potent piece of agitpop in years. JR Jones
This 35mm presentation of this classic is part of the BFI musicals season (details here). The movie will also be shown on November 1st and 9th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: The great Depression musical, produced by Warner Brothers as a follow-up to Forty-Second Street. If Forty-Second Street was an agreeable sketch, this one is the Sistine Chapel, an insanely overproduced extravaganza that gave Busby Berkeley his first chance to really cut loose. A zillion chorus girls playing electric violins decorate "The Shadow Waltz"; "Pettin' in the Park" is an unbridled voyeuristic fantasy that rivals Michael Powell's Peeping Tom in perversity. Ginger Rogers sings "We're in the Money" in pig latin, and—to give the enterprise a noble touch—the plight of the unemployed veteran is explored in "Remember the Forgotten Man." With Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Warren William, Aline MacMahon, Sterling Holloway, Guy Kibbee, and Ned Sparks; Mervyn LeRoy directed the dialogue passages. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is part of the 2019 Korean Film Festival. You can find full details here. Korean Film Festival introduction:
Through this mundane-sounding, anti-melodramatic tale, Park Chul-soo constructs an image of a whole generation of young, middle-class Korean women who, by the decade of the 1980s, were facing challenges unknown to most of their mothers: how to succeed in higher education, enter the world of work and at the same time maintain roles as wife and mother. Choi Myung-kil gives an understated performance as a young woman who will finally make the most difficult decision of her life.
This film is part of the 2019 Korean Film Festival. You can find full details here.
Far East Film introduction (full review here): Heo-wook and Ji-youn are a young couple, desperately poor, who can only meet on Sundays. Without any money to go into a cafe, they wander the windswept streets and parks of Seoul. Their present circumstances are bleak, and their relationship seems strained. But they face a crisis: Ji-youn is pregnant. Unable to support a child, and with little hope for the future, she tells Heo-wook that she wants an abortion. Forgotten in storage for 37 years after censors refused to allow its release, A Day Off is now recognized as one of the modernist masterpieces of 1960s Korean cinema. Clearly influenced by European auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais, Lee Man-hee’s spare, lyrical images express all the desperation and pessimism that the characters themselves struggle to put into words. It is a work that combines bold aesthetic experimentation with an unflinchingly critical depiction of life for the young and poor in 1960s South Korea. Darcy Paquet Here (and above) is the Korean Film Festival trailer.
This 35mm presentation is the opening film in this year’s Korean Film Festival. This screening will be followed by a conversation between director Kim Soo-yong and Sandra Hebron, a film programmer, the Head of Screen Arts at the National Film and Television School and former artistic director of the London Film Festival. Korean Film Festival introduction: Based on the 1953 novel by Oh Young-soo, The Seashore Village was one of the earliest successful munye (literary adaptation) films, a genre which would come to define much of South Korean cinema during the 1960s. Kim Soo-yong directed an astonishing 109 films between 1958 and his retirement in 1999, and during his most active period in the 1960s, regularly made several films a year. His 34th feature, The Seashore Village, was a collaboration with Ho Hyun-chan - producer of the legendary, now lost Late Autumn (1966) with Lee Man-hee - and honours the power of female compassion to overcome tragic circumstances. Through dazzling long shots, Kim Soo-yong brings the sublime landscape to life. The power of the sea and the mountains frames the story, set in a Korean fishing village, with human life and tragedy playing out as part of the wider narrative of the natural world. Women here are fierce, and yet care for and support each other. Their bond made more resolute through their shared sufferings, we witness an intense yet playful intimacy emerging between them.
The Cine-Real film club (which specialises in 16mm screenings) have come up with an ideal Halloween entertainment, a double-bill of Friday the 13th and The Exorcist (the latter also being shown on Sunday November 3rd). You can find all the details here. Chicago Reader review: 'Doubtless this tale of spirit possession in Georgetown packs a punch, but so does wood alcohol,” wroteReader critic Don Druker in an earlier review of this. I wouldn't be quite so dismissive: as a key visual source for Mel Gibson's depiction of evil inThe Passion of the Christ, as well as an early indication of how seriously pulp can be taken when religious faith is involved, this 1973 horror thriller is highly instructive as well as unnerving. William Friedkin, directing William Peter Blatty's adaptation of his own novel, aims for the jugular, privileging sensation over sense and such showbiz standbys as vomit and obscenity over plodding exposition.' Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This modern classic, one of the best films of this century, is part of the Ink On Screen programme at Regent Street Cinema. The other movie being shown under the Ink On Screen banner is Don't Look Now, showing on October 28th. You can find the full details of that screening here.
Regent Street Cinema introduction: INK ON SCREEN launches the Mayfair and St James festival
with a double bill of films curated by remarkable British actor, Tobias Menzies
(soon to star as Prince Phillip in The
Crown, and star of Casino
Royale, Outlander, Game of Thrones and others). Spotlighting
the indelible link between cinema and the written word Tobias has chosen two of
his favourite films, Jonathan Glazer’s haunting Under the Skin, starring Scarlett
Johansson, and chilling 70’s classic Don’t
Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland helmed by
famed director Nicholas Roeg. Both books are based on novels and explore the
indelible link between cinema and the written word, Under the Skin being penned by
Michael Faber (The Crimson Petal and the
White) and Don’t Look
Now an adaptation from Daphne Du Maurier. With introductory
speeches and Q&As with key creative contributors to both films, this is an
opportunity to delve into the world of word and moving image, and enjoy the
fiercely personal film choices of one of our most talented and versatile
actors.
Chicago Reader review: This arty sci-fi thriller, adapted from a 2000 novel by Michael Faber, raises far more questions than it answers, yet that enigmatic quality is central to its appeal. Like Birth (2004)—the previous feature of director Jonathan Glazer, with Nicole Kidman as a woman convinced that her dead lover has been reincarnated as a preteen boy—Under the Skin hints at several different readings without confirming any of them. That makes for an occasionally frustrating viewing experience, yet it also ensures that the film stays with you. If the gradual critical reevaluation of Birth is any indication, this new release may look better the longer we stew over it. Jonathan Glazer reportedly spent ten years developing Under the Skin, and some aspects of it are so immaculately realized that they seem eerily inevitable. The audio design immerses the listener, its layered soundscapes suggesting how overwhelmed the alien might feel on earth. Glazer disorients the viewer through his use of the Steadicam, exploiting its uncannily smooth movement to suggest, as Stanley Kubrick did in The Shining, the perspective of a superhuman voyeur. The most impressive effects come during the seduction sequences, as Glazer creates the blank, ever-shifting environment of a nightmare. And just as Kubrick did from 2001: A Space Odyssey onward, Glazer offsets the immaculacy of the effects with moments of spontaneity. The scenes of Johansson picking up strange men, for instance, were all unstaged; Glazer instructed the actress to offer rides to random men and shot these encounters with a hidden camera. Remarkably, these scenes fit right in with the rest of the movie—amid the meticulous filmmaking, the banal conversations seem uncanny too. Like its protagonist, Under the Skin effectively draws us in while managing to stay beyond our grasp. Ben Sachs
Chicago Reader review: Few directors used the jump cut to more potent effect than Maurice Pialat; his films hurtle from one volatile scene to the next, skipping over anything that might suggest emotional stability in the characters' lives. This 1972 drama—his second theatrical release and an unlikely commercial success in France—depicts the on-again-off-again relationship between a brutish aspiring filmmaker (Jean Yanne) and his younger mistress (Marlene Jobert), with many of the details drawn from Pialat's own life. The film is infuriating by design, focusing almost exclusively on the couple's arguments and reconciliations, yet it never feels predictable, thanks to the acute characterization and intimate, seemingly spontaneous performances. Though often painful to watch, this is an edifying portrait of codependence mistaken for love. Ben Sachs
This film is showing as part of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder season at Close-Up Cinema. You can find the full details here. Chicago Reader review: My favorite Fassbinder feature (released in 1973 but not shown in the U.S. for years because of problems involving the rights to the Cornell Woolrich source novel) is a horrific black comedy—a devastating view of bourgeois marriage rendered in a delirious baroque style. Vacationing in Rome, a virgin librarian in her 30s (Margit Carstensen) meets a macho architect (Peeping Tom's Karlheinz Böhm) and winds up marrying him. It's a match made in heaven between a masochist and a sadist, with the husband's contempt and absurdly escalating demands received by the fragile heroine as her proper due. Suspenseful and scary, excruciating and indigestible, this is provocation with genuine bite—though the manner often suggests a parody of a 50s Douglas Sirk melodrama. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is an extract.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Distant’ is being shown in a season curated by Octavian Dancila as part of the Programming and Curation MA at the National Film and Television School, ‘Together Alone’ is a season of four absorbing, thought-provoking films exploring solitude from different, and often surprising perspectives. There is a double bill each afternoon together with introductions, a panel discussion and a live spoken word performance by British/Ghanaian poet Miss Yankey. Discover more at the website here.
This double bill today at the Rio Cinema also includes ‘A Coffee In Berlin (Gerster, 2013). Full details can be found here.
Chicago Reader review:
Clouds of May, the second feature of Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, struck some viewers as belonging to the school of Kiarostami, a mistake they wouldn't make with his masterful third feature. An industrial photographer in Istanbul (Muzaffer Ozdemir) who hasn't recovered from his busted marriage finds himself the reluctant host of a country cousin (Mehmet Emin Toprak) looking for work. Ceylan uses this slim premise to build a psychologically nuanced relationship between the men, as an uncomfortable domestic arrangement leads to irrational spats. The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn't always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other. The nonprofessional leads won top honors at Cannes; shortly afterward Toprak died in an auto accident.
This film is showing as part of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder season at Close-Up Cinema. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: This 1975 melodrama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of his better middle-period films. A fairgrounds worker (Fassbinder) who wins a small fortune in a state lottery is exploited and eventually destroyed by his effete bourgeois lover (Karlheinz Boehm) and the lover's stuck-up friends. Very sharp about class and milieu, the film is limited only by Fassbinder's characteristic enjoyment of the hero-victim's pain. At one point the camera is even stationed on a floor a moment before the hapless hero slips and falls, in sadistic anticipation of his mishap. As with much of Fassbinder's work, his cruelty complicates rather than negates his mordant, on-target social analysis. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm presentation, which is also being shown at the Cinema Museum on October 28th (details here), is part of the ‘Nightlife: Ourselves; Our Spaces on Film’ season at the Barbican Cinema. Full details here. Time Out review: Vicky (Shu Qi) came to Taipei as a teenager and lurched into an affair with the ultra-possessive Hao-Hao (Tuan Chun-hao), who lived for DJ-ing but thought it would be uncool to play records for a living. She decided she'd leave him when her savings ran out but in the meantime gravitated into the orbit (not the bed) of small-time gangster Jack (JacKao), who treated her like a best friend. But when she finally moved into Jack's place, he had a sudden money crisis and disappeared somewhere in Japan. This differs from Hou's earlier accounts of women around male riff-raff (Daughter of the Nile, the present-day parts of Good Men, Good Women) in two striking ways. First, it looks back at the present from a point ten years in the future, rendering it strange and distant. Second, Vicky is seen not as a marginalised onlooker but as a young woman coming into bloom, learning by experience how to build her own identity. The film is a virtual portrait of Shu Qi, in much the way that Godard once made films as pretexts for capturing the moods of Anna Karina. Extremely beautiful, as hypnotic as its trance-techno soundtrack, and (like Flowers of Shanghai) very, very druggy. Tony Rayns
Chicago Reader review: “A film Hollywood dared not to do” is how writer-director Leslie Harris described her lively 1992 movie—a brave independent quickie with only a 17-day shooting schedule, about an ambitious and angry black teenage girl (Ariyan Johnson) living in one of the Brooklyn projects who goes into denial (with catastrophic results) when her boyfriend (Kevin Thigpen) gets her pregnant. What's both refreshing and off-putting is that Harris's sense of urgency isn't accompanied by any clear or consistent analysis; her heroine's denial eventually overwhelms the movie. Yet Harris's refusal to treat her heroine strictly as role model or bad example makes her portrait a lot livelier and less predictable—as well as more confusing—than the standard genre exercises most reviewers seem to prefer. What's exciting about this movie is a lot of loose details: frank girl talk about AIDS and birth control, glancing observations about welfare lines and the advantages of a boy with a car over one with subway tokens. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This presentation is part of Ben Driscoll's Live Cultures programme, for the Film Studies, Programming and Curation MA at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). Close-Up Cinema introduction: Early 20th century La Réunion: five delinquent boys commit a ghastly crime at school. Their punishment? A mysterious disciplinary on a cruel captain’s ship. Yet when the boys arrive on the shores of a gorgeous paradise island, they succumb to the earthly delights of its unusually sexy, luxurious and sticky vegetation, leading to a metamorphosis that is less body horror more body ecstasy. Director Bertrand Mandico is recognised for his camp, artificial and film-literate style in his short films, but The Wild Boys (his first feature length) is a next step: as abundant with ideas and images as the islands’ plants. Conjuring The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ idea of the vegetal invading the human body and mind, The Wild Boys shows how one can literally outgrow toxic masculinity with the help of some ecosexuality. Ben Driscoll Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Few recent films have left me feeling more conflicted than Valeska Grisebach's second feature (2006), which is sensitive, moving, accomplished in its extraordinary direction of nonprofessional actors but also a little bogus. A gentle, happily married metalworker in a tiny village goes away for a weekend to train as a volunteer fireman and has a drunken fling with a waitress, which leads to tragic consequences. The most telling points in this story register in the faces rather than the dialogue, but it's conceived like a folk ballad and feels self-conscious in some of its plot developments and in its neo-Brechtian finale. Jonthan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is an extract.
Chicago Reader review: A volatile realist who's often been compared to John Cassavetes, Maurice Pialat started out as a painter and a documentary filmmaker, though in contrast to most realist works (as well as most paintings) his movies are too intimate to date very much. He was 43 when he made his first feature, Naked Childhood (1968), a nonjudgmental and unsentimental look at a troubled, abandoned ten-year-old boy who's shuttled between foster parents. (Francois Truffaut served as coproducer, though Pialat was a sworn enemy of the New Wave.) Jonathan Rosenbaum
Harvard Film Archive review: In sharp contrast to the lush, exquisitely composed Chocolat, Denis' second film uses its rough edge handheld camera to explore the claustrophobic and fraught world of two black immigrant friends raising fighting cocks in a gritty Parisian suburb. A precursor to Beau Travail's study of uneasy male camaraderie No Fear, No Die carefully observes the subtly shifting dynamic between the two men – wonderfully played by Denis’ favorite actors, Alex Descas and Isaach de Bankolé – and the rituals and cruelties that define their world.
