Capital Celluloid: January 2020

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 37: Thu Feb 6

Gerry (Van Sant, 2002): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation, also being shown on February 22nd, is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Guardian review (full version here):
If you can imagine Dude, Where's My Car? rewritten by Samuel Beckett, you have some idea of what this intriguing, ferociously austere, but subtly and unlocatably humorous picture feels like. It was evidently a labour of love for director Gus Van Sant and his two principals, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, and made before his latest film, Elephant - the powerful Columbine nightmare which this year deservedly carried off the Golden Palm at Cannes. Gerry is actually a riveting companion-piece to Elephant, and together they make up a remarkable career triumph for Van Sant after the soupy drama Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, his woeful flirtations with the commercial mainstream. It is not precisely a return to Van Sant's widely publicised indie roots, but actually a vivid progression, a bold excursion into a European cinematic sensibility, which Van Sant cooks up with some Americana of his own devising.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 36: Wed Feb 5

La Strada (Fellini, 1954): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

Time Out review:
For all its sentimentality, this overshadows virtually everything Federico Fellini has made since La Dolce Vita. As ever for il maestro, life is both cyclic odyssey and circus, a teeming, tragicomic arena of pain, cruelty and solitude. Giulietta Masina plays Gelsomina, a naïve waif whose simpleton innocence provides a direct line to life's eternal mysteries; when she is sold into virtual slavery to play clown to itinerant strongman Zampano (Anthony Quinn), the boorish brute simply exploits his new assistant's desire for affection at every opportunity. It's basically a road movie: she vainly tries to escape, they join a circus, and her friendship with the tightrope-walking Fool (Richard Basehart) brings its own problems. Despite the pessimism of much of the story, memorably embodied in the grey, desolate towns the pair visit, Fellini has already moved far from his roots in neo-realism; symbols, metaphors, and larger-than-life performances hold sway, and moments of bizarre if inconsequential charm abound.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 35: Tue Feb 4

Joan of Arc of Mongolia (Ottinger, 1989): Cine Lumiere, 6.15pm

In Delphine Seyrig’s last film, set on the Trans-Siberian railway, seven Western women are kidnapped by a mysterious Mongolian princess and her companions and are forced to join their caravan on a journey through inner Mongolia into the unknown.

New York Times review (full version here):

There’s an element of reserve in Ulrike Ottinger’s approach to the characters; she’s a respectful outsider, and her observations are impressionistic, not intimate. She films, along with the styles and manners of Mongolian society, the strong but imprecise influence that exposure to Mongolian culture has upon the Western women forced to observe it and participate in it. Her approach to their experiences is similarly fragmentary—full in its approach to detail but dramatically gappy and fitful. Ottinger’s art is more deeply stylistic and intellectual than it is dramatic. The dramatic organization of a movie is essentially mathematical; the stylistic tone is essentially poetic. The difference is that the former can be learned or imposed, whereas the inventions of style are personal, spontaneous, inimitable, and unteachable. Form can be mastered; style is what one either has or doesn’t. Style is a crucial part of personality, of personhood, of character—but “Johanna d’Arc” suggests that, like personal identity itself, it doesn’t emerge in isolation but is informed by culture, beliefs, heritage, landscape, a grand social realm that each person involuntarily represents and transforms. Ottinger seeks, through style, the deep background from which it arises, and finds a superb, simple cinematic correlate for that idea. For all its outwardly probing observation and decorative delights, the movie concludes with an abstract touch that’s as breathtaking as any of its sights and sounds.

Richard Brody

Here (and above) is a flavour of the film.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 34: Mon Feb 3

The African Queen (Huston, 1951): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.35pm

This screening will be introduced by the film’s script supervisor, Angela Allen. The movie will also be shown, in the Big Screen Classics strand, on February 10th, 14th, 24th and 29th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
John Huston's odyssey theme reprised as comedy (1951), as Humphrey Bogart cavorts like a monkey and Katharine Hepburn exploits a latent strain of Eleanor Roosevelt. It's 1915, and Hepburn gradually persuades drunken captain Bogart to attack the German navy with his broken-down tub. The direction is often questionable, but the screenplay (by James Agee, John Collier, Huston, and Peter Viertel from C.S. Forester's novel) is a model of tight construction. With Robert Morley and Theodore Bikel.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 33: Sun Feb 2

A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.35pm

This 35mm presentation is part of a John Cassavetes season at the Prince Charles Cinema, with some of his greatest films being shown and all from prints. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
John Cassavetes's 1974 masterpiece, and one of the best films of its decade. Cassavetes stretches the limits of his narrative—it's the story of a married couple, with the wife hedging into madness—to the point where it obliterates the narrator: it's one of those extremely rare movies that seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film. The lurching, probing camera finds the same fascination in moments of high drama and utter triviality alike—and all of those moments are suspended painfully, endlessly. Still, Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen. With Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 32: Sat Feb 1

Crimes at the Dark House (Slaughter, 1940) & The Face at the Window (Slaughter, 1939):
Cinema Museum, 2.30pm

Jasper Sharp presents a 35mm double-bill of Tod Slaughter’s Crimes at the Dark House (1940) and The Face at the Window (1939). Hemlock Books will be in attendance selling the brand new Tod Slaughter biography, with authors in attendance to sign copies.

14.00 Doors open
14.30 Introduction by Jasper Sharp
14.45 Screening of Crimes at the Dark House (1940)
16.00 Introduction by Kip Xool
16.15 Screening of The Face at the Window (1939)

Here (and above) is an extract from Crimes at the Dark House.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 31: Fri Jan 31

Leto (Serebrennikov, 2018): Cine Lumiere, 7.30pm

Amid the hyper-controlled cultural world of pre-Perestroika Leningrad, a rock scene is burgeoning. Their leader is the charismatic Mike (Roma Zver), who works in a factory by day and transcribes Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and David Bowie lyrics by night. Enter Viktor Tsoy (Teo Yoo), an aspiring musician who quickly charms the gang – and Mike’s girlfriend Natasha (Irina Starshenbaum). Amongst the rockers inspired by Western music playing in Communist Party-licensed clubs and semi-sedated audiences whose applause is policed, Tsoy’s raw talent is a breath of fresh air and hints at the possibility of – and need for – change. Though Serebrennikov remains under house arrest on as-yet-unfounded embezzlement charges, Summer is a timely mood piece that dares to ask how artists can survive in a repressive regime.

Anna Bogutskaya

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 30: Thu Jan 30

Day for Night (Truffaut, 1973): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.50pm

This 35mm presentation, which is also screening on January 24th and 26th, is part of the Big Screen Classics strand. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:

If we’re to learn anything from François Truffaut’s delicately cynical, New Hollywood-style satire from 1973 on the joys and pains of movie making, it’s that we must view directors as social and professional chameleons. They must tap in to the emotions of their cast and exploit real suffering for the good of their camera. They must stand their ground with money men, sometimes employing visual trickery and snap decisions to preserve their integrity. Most of all, they must suppress the cosmic fury that comes when a leading lady arrives on set drunk or a trained kitten refuses to hit a mark. It’s a hilarious and informative movie, and in the pantheon of films about filmmaking, it strikes a neat balance between the operatic neuroses of ‘8 1/2’ and the warm, pastel-hued nostalgia of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. Also of interest – and a devious nod back to his ’60s heyday – is the manner in which Truffaut captures these behind-the-scenes shenanigans, employing gliding crane shots and flashes of abrupt editing to make us fully aware of the majestically artificial way the world is depicted by filmmakers. Truffaut stars as indefatigable director Ferrand, shooting a fusty melodrama called ‘Meet Pamela’ and wearing the same sports jacket, shirt and tie combo as he would in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. He delivers the same coolly detached performance too, though it works a lot better in this context. The fact that his childish lead (Jean-Pierre Léaud, of course) is too often in a strop to concentrate on the part, or that his star (Jacqueline Bisset) is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown are accepted as part and parcel of the business. But as Ferrand makes sure he’s seen in possession of a stack of serious film tomes and has nightmares about being trapped outside a cinema showing ‘Citizen Kane’, the point is that even if the end result is a piece of trash, a director always strives to be an artist.
David Jenkins

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 29: Wed Jan 29

Girlfriends (Weill, 1978): ICA Cinema, 6.45pm

The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task. The group borrowed their name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the same title, and find inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16. The Machine That Kills Bad People is held bi-monthly in the ICA Cinema and is programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz and Ben Rivers. This is tonight’s choice.

New York Times review:
One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely, that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing, the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor, the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind, achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her. Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical, dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women, when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded, perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in the same way.
Richard Brody

Here is Brody's video discussion of the film.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 28: Tue Jan 28

No Man of Her Own (Ruggles, 1932): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.20pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Carole Lombard season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Clark Gable and Carole Lombard make a dazzling on-screen couple in this 1932 Paramount comedy, their only movie together. Gable, a big-city cardsharp, eludes a police detective by hopping a train to the sticks, where he meets straight arrow Lombard in a library; the two decide to get married based on a coin toss, and soon she begins to find out about his other life. The dialogue slackens after the first half hour, but the stars have some fine comic moments together, and the intimate precode encounters are pretty sexy. Wesley Ruggles directed; with Dorothy Mackaill and Grant Mitchell.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 27: Mon Jan 27

The Asphalt Jungle (Huston, 1950): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

Chicago Reader review:
John Huston's bleak, semidocumentary account of a jewel heist and its moral consequences. One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution. But Huston's interest remains with his characters, who dissolve as tragically as the prospectors of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the adventurers of The Man Who Would Be King. The film has been remade at least three times, as The Badlanders, Cairo, and Cool Breeze.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 26: Sun Jan 26

Fellini’s Casanova (Fellini, 1976): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 4.45pm

This Federico Fellini classic is part of the season devoted to the Italian director. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
What the world wanted from Fellini's epic account of the famous 18th-century lover (Donald Sutherland) was hardly the dark, disturbingly jaundiced, alienated view of eroticism offered here (1976). But as one of the late flowerings of the director's claustrophobic studio style at its most deliberately artificial, this is a memorable work, helped along by Nino Rota's music and Danilo Donati's Oscar-winning costumes.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

‘Sutherland's performance is the most astonishing piece of screen acting since Brando's in Last Tango in Paris’ Time Out

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 25: Sat Jan 25

Fellini Satyricon (Fellini, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 5.45pm

This Federico Fellini classic, also being shown on January 19th with an introduction by season programmer Pasquale Iannone, is part of the season devoted to the Italian director. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Sprawling and conspicuously undisciplined, this is less an adaptation of Petronius than a free-form fantasia on his themes. Fellini's characteristic delirium is in fact anchored in a precise, psychological schema: under the matrix of bisexuality, he explores the complexes of castration, impotence, paranoia and libidinal release. And he pays homage to Pasolini's ethnographic readings of myths. It's among his most considerable achievements.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 24: Fri Jan 24

Nights of Cabiria (Fellini, 1957): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

This Federico Fellini classic, also being shown on January 27th, is part of the season devoted to the Italian director. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Federico Fellini's restored 1957 masterpiece, starring his wife, Giulietta Masina. Though the additional scene—an incident involving a man who distributes food and clothing to the homeless—may have little consequence in terms of the overall plot, it changes one's thematic and spiritual sense of the whole film. The story basically consists of five lengthy episodes in the life and career of a prostitute who repeatedly becomes disillusioned but keeps finding the resources to believe in romantic love just the same. Masina's exaggerated grimaces and clownlike features, which hark back to the tradition of silent comics, are undoubtedly mannerist, but part of Fellini's mastery is to make them necessary correlatives to his own vision of innocence. Too melodramatic and fanciful in turn to qualify as “neorealism” in the usual sense, despite the gritty Roman street slang contributed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, this gains immeasurably, like many other Fellini films, from Nino Rota's wistful music.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 23: Thu Jan 23

The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This film, part of the monthly 16mm Cine-Real events at the Castle Cinema, will also be screened on January 26th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The key film in the Bogart myth (1941). I don't want to knock it, but what John Huston does with Bogart's personality and the hard-boiled genre in general has always struck me as pale compared to the Howard Hawks films that followed (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep). The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 22: Wed Jan 22

Mother (Bong Joon-ho, 2017): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

The Prince Charles Cinema is trying to bring as many of Bong Joon-ho's titles to their screen as possible to coincide with the release of Parasite; there are continual rights issues with SNOWPIERCER, and MEMORIES OF MURDER has recently become unabailable, but they are working on getting both. Here is their current season, aside from this 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
With The Host, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho unpacked the cultural and geopolitical baggage of the atomic monster movie; this follow-up (2009) takes on the fractured Freudianism of Hitchcock's Psycho. Kim Hye-ja, known in South Korea for her maternal roles, plays the mother of a mentally and sexually retarded man who's fallen in with a local troublemaker; in one early scene the boy insists to his pal that he's not a virgin, that he and his mother sleep together, though it's not entirely clear whether he should be believed or even knows what he's saying. When a local schoolgirl is murdered, all evidence points to the son, but the mother declares him innocent and stops at nothing to exonerate him. Bong's opening and climactic scenes, in which the old woman bops around to a dance tune amid a vast field of yellow grass, are typical of the movie's cockeyed poetry.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 21: Tue Jan 21

Karine (Manaryan, 1969): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 20: Mon Jan 20

To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, 1942): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on January 14th, of the Ernst Lubitsch classic is part of the Carole Lombard season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Ernst Lubitsch directed this 1942 film from his own story about a troupe of Polish actors stranded in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw of World War II. It could be his finest achievement, and it's certainly one of the most profound, emotionally complex comedies ever made, covering a range of tones from satire to slapstick to shocking black humor. The issues, as the title suggests, are deeply serious, but it's part of the film's strategy—and the strategy it endorses for its characters—never to openly acknowledge them. Jack Benny, as the leader of the troupe, displays an acting talent never again demanded of him; Carole Lombard, in her last film, is kittenish, slinky, and witty as his unfaithful wife. With Robert Stack and Sig Ruman.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 19: Sun Jan 19

Faces (Cassavetes, 1968): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This 35mm presentation is part of a John Cassavetes season at the Prince Charles Cinema, with some of his greatest films being shown and all from prints. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
John Cassavetes's galvanic 1968 drama about one long night in the lives of an estranged well-to-do married couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin) and their temporary lovers (Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel) was the first of his independent features to become a hit, and it's not hard to see why. It remains one of the only American films to take the middle class seriously, depicting the compulsive, embarrassed laughter of people facing their own sexual longing and some of the emotional devastation brought about by the so-called sexual revolution. (Interestingly, Cassavetes set out to make a trenchant critique of the middle class, but his characteristic empathy for all of his characters makes this a far cry from simple satire.) Shot in 16-millimeter black and white with a good many close-ups, this often takes an unsparing yet compassionate "documentary" look at emotions most movies prefer to gloss over or cover up. Adroitly written and directed, and superbly acted—the leads and Val Avery are all uncommonly good (and the astonishing Lynn Carlin was a nonprofessional discovered by Cassavetes, working at the time as Robert Altman's secretary)—this is one of the most powerful and influential American films of the 60s.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 18: Sat Jan 18

Freaks (Browning, 1932): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6pm

This 35mm presentation, which also screens on January 16th and 21st, is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning. Browning flirts with compassion for the sad, deformed creatures of his sideshow—most played by genuine freaks from the Ringling Brothers circus—but ultimately finds horror and revulsion as the outsiders take their climactic revenge. A happy ending, shot by Browning but deleted when the film was rereleased, resurfaced after many years: it shows the midget couple reunited under the condescending gaze of the “normal” friends, firmly reestablishing the complacent sense of “separateness” the body of the film has worked so hard to undermine. With Leila Hyams, Wallace Ford, and Harry and Daisy Earles.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 17: Fri Jan 17

La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960): BFI Southbank, Studio, 7.50pm

This Federico Fellini classic, on an extended run at BFI Southbank, is part of the season devoted to the Italian director. Full details here.

Guardian review:

For a dizzying moment in the disorientated postwar era, cinema and Federico Fellini put Rome at the centre of the world; now his early masterpiece from 1960, La Dolce Vita, is rereleased as part of a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. It’s a film with Fellini’s genius for revealing dreamlike and surreal images everywhere, especially that extraordinary image of Christ being helicoptered over the city, apparently on its way to be delivered to the pope. The movie finds Rome in a hysterical, excitable but also somehow desperate mood – the mood of “Il Boom”, that economic and cultural revival in which Italy was euphorically eager to forget the catastrophe of fascism and defeat, and to start all over again, in a headlong rush of modernity and excitement: movies, music, fashion and style. It is as if Rome’s new contemporary sexiness and hedonism has revived the spirit of pre-Christian Rome and pagan ritual. But this coexists with a secret melancholy, a spiritual bust to go with the boom: ennui and fear.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 16: Thu Jan 16

Twentieth Century (Hawks, 1934): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This presentation, also being screened on January 29th, of the Howard Hawks classic is part of the Carole Lombard season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
To register a minority opinion, I find this knockdown screwball farce (1934), directed by Howard Hawks four years before Bringing Up Baby, six years before His Girl Friday, and fifteen before I Was a Male War Bride, a great deal funnier than all three. It costars John Barrymore and Carole Lombard at their hyperbolic best as egomaniacal theatrical monsters, a director and a star in a series of duels. The story comes from a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur that lampoons theatrical excess as much as The Front Page lampoons journalistic excess—a subject that Hawks can view with greater familiarity. The show here belongs almost entirely to the fast-talking stars, mainly having it out on the cross-country train of the title, and the movie is a veritable concerto for their remarkable talents, put across by Hawks with maximal energy and voltage.
Jonathan Rosenabum

Here (and above) Peter Bogdanovich recommends the film.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 15: Wed Jan 15

To Sleep with Anger (Burnett, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This 35mm presentation will be introduced by programmer David Somerset. There is another screening of this beguiling and mysterious film on January 10th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
It seems scandalous that Charles Burnett, the most gifted black American director offering purely realistic depictions of black urban life, was able to make this 1990 feature only because Danny Glover agreed to play a leading role. Harry Mention (Glover), an old friend from the rural south, arrives on the doorstep of a Los Angeles family, wreaking subtle and not-so-subtle havoc on their lives. The family is headed by a retired farmer (Paul Butler) and his midwife spouse (Mary Alice), whose two married sons (Carl Lumbly and Richard Brooks) are in constant conflict. Burnett's acute and sensitive direction is free of hackneyed movie conventions; even something as simple as a hello is said differently from the way you've heard it in any other movie. All of Burnett's features have the density of novels, rich with characters and their interplay, and this one is no exception.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 14: Tue Jan 14

Carnival Night (Ryazanov, 1956): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

This Kino Klassika screening is part of Melodia!, a thrilling season of classic and contemporary musicals from Russia and the Caucasus. Melodia! celebrates the diversity and complexity of the genre across Soviet, Russian and Caucasian cultures. You can find the full details here.

Guardian review:
In 1956, the Soviet Union having passed from Stalinist terror to Khrushchevian
unease, the state cinema industry produced one of the most commercially successful films in its history: a musical comedy called Carnival Night, the debut feature from Eldar Ryazanov, previously a documentary-maker. It is as light and nimble as a racehorse jockey – a little miracle of innocence, gaiety, mischief and fun, proof that Soviet cinema could do musicals to be compared to Hollywood’s MGM greats, in spirit, if not exactly in budget. Ryazanov went on to be renowned for slyly satirising the grisliness of apparatchiks and officials, and Carnival Night is surely an influence on Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 13: Mon Jan 13

Fast and Loose (Newmeyer, 1930): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 9pm

This 35mm presentation, a very rare screening of this Pre-Code film, is part of the Carole Lombard season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

BFI introduction:
A rich man’s son falls for a good-natured chorus girl (Carole Lombard), and his rebellious daughter (MIriam Hopkins) falls in love with a mechanic. While Twentieth Century and It Happened One Night are often considered the first screwball comedies, Lombard considered this earlier Preston Sturges-penned film a pioneer of the genre.
Miriam Bale

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 12: Sun Jan 12

I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 5pm

This film (part of the Federico Fellini season at the BFI Southbank) is also being screened on January 4th, 7th, 19th and 21st. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Well worth seeing, this early Fellini (1953) follows the fortunes of five rootless, middle-class young men in a small town on the Adriatic, and forms a fascinating companion piece to his Amarcord. Though it's still realist in approach, its aura of bitter nostalgia places it squarely among Fellini's most personal and atmospheric works.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 11: Sat Jan 11

Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.45pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the 1950s Hitchcock season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Alfred Hitchcock's famous 1951 thriller, centered on a classic Catholic theme—that there is no difference between thinking a sin and committing it. When Guy (Farley Granger) daydreams the murder of his wife, black, neurotic Bruno (Robert Walker) materializes as if in answer to his prayers: Bruno will kill Guy's wife if Guy, in turn, will kill Bruno's father. Some critics (famously Robin Wood) have claimed that the film cops out by relieving Guy of his end of the deal, but something else is going on here, particularly when Bruno's father—elevated, unseen, all-powerful—is clearly more than a father. Perhaps Strangers on a Train still hasn't yielded all its secrets. With Ruth Roman and Leo G. Carroll; a disgruntled Raymond Chandler worked on the screenplay.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 10: Fri Jan 10

Nothing Sacred (Wellman, 1937): BFI Southbank, 6pm

This 35mm presentation (which also screens on January 5th) is part of the Carole Lombard season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The definitive Ben Hecht screenplay—about a cynical New York reporter (Fredric March) who turns the case of a small-town girl (Carole Lombard) dying of radiation poisoning into the sob story of the century. Unfortunately, she turns out to be in perfect health. Would that fthe direction were just as definitive; it's the work, alas, of William Wellman, whose grating, rough-edged style gives the comedy a brutal tone. In anomalous Technicolor
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 9: Thu Jan 9

Stolen Kisses (Truffaut, 1968): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

This 35mm screening (also being shown on January 5th) is part of the Delphine Seyrig season at Cine Lumiere. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The third instalment (1968) of Francois Truffaut's autobiographical Antoine Doinel cycle, with the hero of The 400 Blows on the brink of adulthood, hard at work in a series of absurd jobs, desperate to fit into middle-class society, and hopelessly in love (with Claude Jade). One of Truffaut's best, lyrical and resonant in a way the later films in the cycle would not be.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2020 – Day 8: Wed Jan 8

Ratcatcher (Ramsay, 1999): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Lynne Ramsay season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Social and magical realism make cozy bedfellows in this 1999 drama set during a garbage strike in 70s Glasgow, as writer-director Lynne Ramsay elegantly reduces two generations to products of their environment. Twelve-year-old James (William Eadie) weathers his father's neglect and dreams of a better life, hoping the housing authority will assign his family a new home, and his sometimes passive-aggressive, sometimes boldly compassionate behavior isn't predictable, even if its implications are. In daring dark compositions, James, a 14-year-old girl he befriends, and a gang of boys she has sex with are treated with the same enlightened moral neutrality, but shots like a close-up of James's father drooling in a drunken slumber betray the usual patronizing sympathy.
Lisa Alspector

Here (and above) is the trailer.