Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 15: Sun Jan 15

She Dies Tomorrow (Siemetz, 2020): ICA Cinema, 4.30pm

This screening will feature an introduction from writer and critic Lillian Crawford and is part of the Beyond Interpretation season curated by Chris Cassingham in partnership with the National Film and Television School and the ICA. Full details here.

Observer review:
Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) is convinced that she will die tomorrow. Gripped by this morbid knowledge she floats around her sparsely decorated Los Angeles home in a dreamlike stupor, drinking white wine, stroking the walls and browsing ceramic urns on the internet. She plays Mozart’s Requiem on repeat. Her scientist friend Jane (Jane Adams) attempts to reassure her but Amy’s paranoia is catching and it’s not long before Jane too is certain of her own impending death. Jane’s pyjama-clad attendance at a house party has a knock-on effect, propelling each guest to make his or her final arrangements. Hallucinatory neon reds, blues, greens and purples wash over terrified faces. This is an audacious cinematic rendering of anxiety as contagion from US writer-director Amy Seimetz. Alternately hilarious and spine-tingling, it recalls David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in its serious, penetrating sense of doom.
Simran Hans

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 14: Sat Jan 14

Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

This David Lynch classic is also being screened at Close-Up Cinema on January 7th. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review: 
It's personal all right, also solipsistic, intransigent, and occasionally ridiculous. David Lynch's 1986 fever-dream fantasy, of a young college student (Kyle MacLachlan) returned to his small-town roots and all manner of strangeness, is replete with sexual fear and loathing, parodistic inversions (of Capra, Lubitsch), and cannibalistic recyclings from Lynch's own Eraserhead and Dune. The bizarrely evolving story—MacLachlan becomes involved with two women, one light and innocent (Laura Dern, vaguely lost), the other dark and sadomasochistic (Isabella Rossellini), as well as with a murderous psychopath (a brilliantly demented Dennis Hopper)—seems more obsessive than expressive at times, and the commingling of sex, violence, and death treads obliquely on familiar Ken Russell territory: it's Crimes of Passion with the polarities reversed. Still, the film casts its spell in countless odd ways, in the archetype-leaning imagery, eccentric tableau styling, and moth-in-candle-flame attraction to the subconscious twilight.
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 13: Fri Jan 13

The Idiot (Kurosawa, 1951): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 7.45pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 21st, is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
Kurosawa's adaptation from his favourite novelist Dostoevsky has an undeserved reputation as a failure. True, it has a plot which is at first extremely difficult to follow if you don't know the novel, but its literal faithfulness (transferred from St Petersburg to modern Hokkaido) hardly deserves rebuke. The acting has an eerie, trance-like quality; and the perpetually snowbound sets and locations, warmed by scarcely adequate fires and bulky clothing, together with a continually turbulent music soundtrack, make up the perfect expressionist metaphor for the emotional lives of Dostoievsky's characters. Tom Milne has noted similarities to Dreyer's Gertrud; like that film, it repays the initial effort required to get into it.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 12: Thu Jan 12

A Matter of Life and Death (Powell/Pressburger, 1946): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This 16mm presentation by the Cine-Real team is also screening on January 8th. Full details can be found via this link.

Chicago Reader review:
This enduring 1946 Technicolor fantasy by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger began as a propaganda piece meant to cement wobbly British-American postwar relations, and some of that theme survives, notably in the climactic trial scene set in heaven. But the rest is given over to a delirious romanticism, tinged with morbidity, mysticism, and humor. David Niven is the British fighter pilot who misses his appointment with death, falling in love with a Wac (Kim Hunter) on his borrowed time. Powell had more and bigger ideas than any other postwar British director: his use of color and bold graphic images is startling and exhilarating, as is his willingness to explore the subsidiary themes of Pressburger’s screenplay, never sacrificing creative excitement to linear plot. And yet, for all its abstraction, the film remains emotionally specific and affecting.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 11: Wed Jan 11

And God Created Woman (Vadim, 1956): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on January 8th, is part of the Jean-Louis Trintignant season at Cine Lumiere. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The eternal feminine, circa 1957, in the person of an amoral young woman (Brigitte Bardot) who plows her way through a succession of men—innocent Jean-Louis Trintignant, wealthy Curt Jurgens, misogynist Christian Marquand. The first feature of director Roger Vadim, this was an inspiring example to the young French critics who would soon emerge as the New Wave; produced cheaply and independently, it pointed to a way around the closed-off system of production that was then the French cinema. Today it has turned largely to camp, though Bardot remains a startlingly frank erotic presence.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 10: Tue Jan 10

Scandal (Kurosawa, 1950): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 5.45pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 24th, is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details here.

BFI review:
The first of two films Kurosawa made for the Shochiku studio (alongside the Dostoevsky adaptation The Idiot in 1951), this punchy social drama takes a righteous swipe at the gutter press, as Toshiro Mifune’s up-and-coming painter is snapped by the paparazzi while sitting on a hotel balcony with a famous singer (played by Yoshiko Yamaguchi), the photo inspiring a fabricated story in a popular gossip magazine. Needless to say, the outraged artist refuses to take things lying down and vows to take the magazine’s editor to court. A lesser-known work from the master, Scandal is nonetheless worth checking out not only as an example of Kurosawa’s technical virtuosity and strong compositional approach, but for its critique of some of the less palatable aspects of westernisation.
Jasper Sharp

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 9: Mon Jan 9

Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul, 2004): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This film, which is also being screened on January 7th, is part of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll season. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The third work and second narrative feature of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours), the prodigiously gifted Thai filmmaker who studied painting and filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute—a spellbinding, beautiful, enigmatic film with a mysterious, allusive two-part structure. The first section tracks the hesitant, playful relationship between a shy provincial ice cream truck driver (Sakda Kaewbuadee) and a dashing soldier (Banlop Lomnoi); the astonishing second section is set deep in the Thai jungle and includes an abstract, wordless pursuit of a ghost tiger. The two parts are linked by lyrical compositions and an almost painful sense of longing and regret. Viewers open to a new way of imagining film are sure to be enthralled by this singular young voice.
Patrick McGavin

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 8: Sun Jan 8

The Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1997): ICA Cinema, 6.15pm

This is the latest in the ICA's Celluoid on Sunday 35mm screenings.

Time Out review:
About the experiences of a Beijing family - seen largely through the eyes of its youngest member, Tietou - between 1953 and 1967, Tian's epic domestic drama is a direct, honest account of how Mao's policies affected the lives of ordinary people. While the steadily darkening tale makes for a film at least partly about death and absence, it focuses not on those who are exiled or die, but on those left behind. Tian's method is understatement, with the result that the trials faced by Shujuan (Lu Liping), her brothers and sister, her three husbands and her son Tietou become all the more plausible and affecting. There's an immense amount of telling detail, and Tian manages to express both sympathy and righteous anger without once resorting to bombast or sentimentality. A masterly blend of the personal and the political.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 7: Sat Jan 7

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977):
Islington Screen on Green, 10.30pm

Those wonderful programmers at Everyman Screen on the Green are putting on a 35mm Steven Spielberg season (full details here) with the arrival of The Fabelmans due later in January. This film is also being screened on January 11th. 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

Here (and above) is the original trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 6: Fri Jan 6

Symptoms (Larraz, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This film, also being screened on January 15th, was chosen by director Mark Jenkin as part of his 'The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men' season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Made by a Spanish director working for an English company, with Angela Pleasence running mad in an old dark house and giving murderous vent to her sexist grievances, this is the finest British horror movie from a foreigner since Polanski’s Repulsion. The comparison is inevitable, because thematically the films have a good deal in common, charting the gradual mental dissolution of their spectral heroines. Symptoms imitates, but also improves on its original in a multiplicity of ways. The muted love affair between Pleasence and Lorna Heilbron is etched with enormous suggestiveness, and Larraz’s eye for visual detail is mesmerising.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 5: Thu Jan 5

 The Leopard (Visconti 1963): BFI Southbank, NFR3, 6.40pm

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 4: Wed Jan 4

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975):
BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.30pm 

Rare chance to see the film voted No 1 in the recent Sight and Sound Greatest films of All-Time poll. The movie is also being screened on January 28th. Details here. Jeanne Dielman was chosen by director Mark Jenkin as part of his 'The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men' season. Full details here.

Jenkin stated: "It took a reference to Jeanne Dielman in an Enys Men review to make me consider the impact of this film upon my own work. The confrontational camera, the sparse dialogue, the performances devoid of grand gesture or faux emotion are all there, but the gradual subversion of a strict routine is the obvious starting point when it comes to its influence."

Chicago Reader review:
Chantal Akerman’s greatest film—made in 1975 and running 198 minutes—is one of those lucid puzzlers that may drive you up the wall but will keep you thinking for days or weeks. Delphine Seyrig, in one of her greatest performances, plays Jeanne Dielman, a Belgian woman obsessed with performing daily rounds of housework and other routines (including occasional prostitution) in the flat she occupies with her teenage son. The film follows three days in Dielman’s regulated life, and Akerman’s intense concentration on her daily activities—monumentalized by Babette Mangolte’s superb cinematography and mainly frontal camera setups—eventually sensitizes us to the small ways in which her system is breaking down. By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt over, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 3: Tue Jan 3

One Wonderful Sunday (Kurosawa, 1947): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 15th, is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details here.

BFI introduction:
If this story of one young penniless couple spending a day together initially bears some resemblance to the work of the Italian Neorealists, as it develops there are echoes of Frank Capra – a director beloved by Kurosawa – with Isao Numasaki and Chieko Nakakita channelling James Stewart and Jean Arthur. The film’s climax is bold, breaking the fourth wall and employing Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony to heighten the film’s emotional heft.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 2: Mon Jan 2

No Regrets for Our Youth (Kurosawa, 1946): BFI Southhbank, NFT1, 12.45pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 10th, is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details here.

BFI introduction to 10 essential Kurosawa films:
Inspired by several real-life incidents, No Regrets for Our Youth is an intelligent and balanced drama about wavering ideologies and personal allegiances set between 1933-46, the years of imperial Japan’s increasing militarisation through to its wartime defeat. Yukie is the privileged daughter of a Kyoto University law professor who is controversially removed from his post for his leftist beliefs. The film portrays her relationships over the years with 2 of his former students, both rival for her affections, and her love affair and ensuing marriage to one of them, who is arrested for his anti-government activities and subsequently disappears from public view. Kurosawa’s oeuvre is not particularly regarded for its focus on sympathetic female characters, but the central turn by Setsuko Hara (better known for her work with Yasujiro Ozu) in his fifth feature (and first of the postwar period) showcases another side to the director, and also counts as his most overtly political work.
Jasper Sharp

Here (and above) is a video of extracts from the film.

Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 1: Sun Jan 1

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (Kurosawa, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 4.20pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 11th, is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Akira Kurosawa’s slimmest feature, running only an hour, is also one of the best of his early period. Made in 1945 but not released until 1953, it’s about a celebrated Japanese general fleeing another general who happens to be his brother. Based on Kanjincho, a Kabuki drama that’s said to be as well-known in the East as Robin Hood is in the West, this film is pitched as a parody of Kabuki, meant to undermine the feudal values of the original.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 362: Sat Dec 31

When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

An appropriate annual New Year's Eve screening of this re-released crowd-pleaser, the Prince Charles Cinema trumping the other venues showing the movie by screening on 35mm.

Time Out review:
Too often dismissed as the bland, cutesy, cakey-bakey face of the modern romcom, the late Nora Ephron was an unacknowledged genius when it came to screenplay construction – and ‘When Harry Met Sally’ remains her finest work. This is a film where everything works: Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s just-this-side-of-smug central couple, the gorgeous photography of New York through the changing seasons, even Harry Connick Jr’s jazz-lite soundtrack. And it’s all rooted in that flawless script. The story is simple: Crystal and Ryan meet after college, and loathe one another on sight. As the years pass the random meetings pile up, and dislike turns to reluctant friendship. But, as the film insistently, infamously asks, can men and women ever really be just friends? It’s not just that Ephron poses these kinds of obvious-but-important questions. It’s that she does so while circumventing romantic clichés left and right, creating unforgettably loveable characters and throwing in some of the most fluid, insightful and witty set-piece conversations ever written (the diner orgasm is the most famous, but it’s the tip of a very large iceberg). ‘Perfect’ is a big word to use about any film, but in this case no other will do.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 361: Fri Dec 30

Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994): Prince Charles Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
'A sprawling, discursive fresco: three stories bookended by a prologue and epilogue. In the first story, a mobster (John Travolta) is charged with looking after the irresponsible wife (Uma Thurman) of his vengeful boss. In the second, a washed-up boxer (Willis) tries to trick the Mob by failing to throw a fight. And in the third, two hitmen (Travolta and Jackson) carry out a job, only to call on the services of a 'cleaner' (Harvey Keitel) when it gets messier than planned. It's the way Tarantino embellishes and, finally, interlinks these old chestnuts that makes the film alternately exhilarating and frustrating. There's plenty of sharp, sassy, profane dialogue, and there are plenty of acute, funny references to pop culture, though the talk sometimes delays the action, and the references sometimes seem self-consciously arch. And there are, too, the sudden lurches between humour and violence - shocking, but without moral depth. What writer/director Tarantino lacks, as yet, is the maturity to invest his work with anything that  might provoke a heartfelt emotional response to his characters. Very entertaining, none the less.' 
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 360: Thu Dec 29

Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.20pm

This film, also being screened on December 19th, is part of the In Dreams are Monsters season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Part three of George Romero's “Living Dead” cycle (1985) takes an unexpected turn away from satire and spectacle and into an intimate, discursive tone. The action is largely confined to a huge cavern (shades of Edgar G. Ulmer) where a team of scientists is investigating what makes the zombies tick. But months underground have eaten away at them and their military aides: the chief scientist has embarked on a series of increasingly grotesque and pointless experiments on his zombie specimens, and the chain of military command has passed to a brutal psychopath. As always in Romero's films, the minority characters—a woman, a black, an alcoholic intellectual—provide the only positive contrast to the American nightmare of power lust and compulsive consumption, yet this time the focus is less political than philosophical. Beginning from a position of absolute misanthropy, Romero asks what it means to be human, and the answers are funny, horrifying, and ultimately hopeful.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 359: Wed Dec 28

Cape Fear (Thompson, 1962): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

This film also screens at the Prince Charles Cinema on December 27th. Details here.

Time Out review:
An irredeemable criminal exacts his revenge on the family of a lawyer who put him away. This supremely nasty thriller - originally severely cut by the British censor - boasts great credentials: a source in John D MacDonald's novel The Executioners, Robert Mitchum as the sadistic villain (a bare-chested variant on his Night of the Hunter role), Gregory Peck as the epitome of threatened righteousness, seedy locations in the Southern bayous, and whooping music by Bernard Herrmann. If director J Lee Thompson isn't quite skilful enough to give the film its final touch of class (many of the shocks are just too planned), the relentlessness of the story and Mitchum's tangibly sordid presence guarantee the viewer's quivering attention.
David Thompson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 358: Tue Dec 27

Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962): Prince Charles Cinema, 3pm

This 35mm presentation also screens on December 26th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
That eternal theme of melodrama—the love too fine to last—given intelligent and sensitive treatment by Francois Truffaut. Oskar Werner and Henri Serre are the two friends of the title, who, when World War I breaks out, must fight on different sides; Jeanne Moreau, in a performance that combines the intensely physical and the fleetingly enigmatic, is Catherine, the woman who loves them both. With this 1961 film Truffaut comes closest to the spirit and sublimity of his mentor, Jean Renoir, and the result is a masterpiece of the New Wave.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 357: Mon Dec 26

How The West Was Won (Hathaway/Marshall/Ford, 1962):
Prince Charles Cinema, 8.05pm

This epic film (£1 for Prince Charles members) is also screened on December 28th. Details here. This movie has sequences filmed by three directors but it's the section helmed by John Ford that demands to be seen at this very rare screening.

New York Times review:
It is John Ford who rises to the challenge most poetically, chiefly by ignoring it. “The Civil War” is an exquisite miniature (unfortunately padded out by some battle sequences lifted from “Raintree County,” an earlier MGM Civil War film) that consists of only three scenes: a mother (Ms. Baker) sends a son (Peppard) off to war; the son has a horrible experience as night falls on the battlefield of Shiloh; the son returns and finds that his mother has died. The structure has a musical alternation: day, night, day; exterior, interior, exterior; stillness, movement, stillness. In the first and last scenes the famous Fordian horizon line extends the entire length of the extra-wide Cinerama frame. In the aftermath of the battle the horizon line disappears in darkened studio sets. The sense of the sequence is profoundly antiwar — Generals Sherman and Grant, played by John Wayne and Henry Morgan, briefly appear as a couple of disheveled, self-pitying drunks — and it gradually becomes apparent that the elderly Ford is revisiting one of his early important works, the 1928 drama “Four Sons.”

The expressionistic middle sequence, with its studio-built swamp, refers to F. W. Murnau, whose “Sunrise” was one of the great influences on the young Ford, while the open-air sequences that bracket it, with their unmoving camera, long-shot compositions and rootedness in the rural landscape, recall the work of the American pioneer D. W. Griffith. When, in the final panel of Ford’s triptych, a gust of wind tousles Peppard’s hair in the foreground and then continues across to the forest in the middle distance and on to the stand of trees in the most distant background, it seems like a true miracle of the movies: a breath of life, moving over the face of the earth. No less formidable a filmmaker than Jean-Marie Straub has called “The Civil War” John Ford’s masterpiece.
Dave Kehr (you can find the full review via the link here)

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 356: Sun Dec 25

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

The repertory cinemas are closed today but you can catch my twitter recommendations for great movies on the television over the holiday period via my twitter handle @tpaleyfilm and the hashtag #bestxmasholidayfilmonTVtoday.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 355: Sat Dec 24

It's A Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.30pm & 5.45pm

Christmas Eve and It’s A Wonderful Life at the Prince Charles is always one of the best screenings of the year. Don’t worry if you can’t get along on December 24th their are plenty of other screenings of this bona fide great film (regardless of Christmas or not). You can find the full details here (and they are all being screened from 35mm).

Chicago Reader review: 
The film Frank Capra was born to make. This 1946 release marked his return to features after four years of turning out propaganda films for the government, and Capra poured his heart and soul into it. James Stewart stars as a small-town nobody, on the brink of suicide, who believes his life is worthless. Guardian angel Henry Travers shows him how wrong he is by letting Stewart see what would have happened had he never been born. Wonderfully drawn and acted by a superb cast (Donna Reed, Beulah Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Lionel Barrymore, Gloria Grahame) and told with a sense of image and metaphor (the use of water is especially elegant) that appears in no other Capra film. The epiphany of movie sentiment and a transcendent experience.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 354: Fri Dec 23

The Queen of Spades (Dickinson, 1949): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.30pm

This overlooked British classic is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Time Out review: Pushkin’s marvellously histrionic tale of cupidity and terrible vengeance gets a suitably wild-eyed treatment in Thorold Dickinson’s 1949 film. In Tsarist Russia, Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) watches enviously as aristocratic officers lose more at the card table than he can expect to see in a lifetime. He hears of an old countess (the wonderful Edith Evans) who knows the secret of winning at cards, and determines to use her pretty ward to force her to reveal it. The upshot is a tense, increasingly scary battle between good and evil that – despite Walbrook’s Austrian accent and everyone else’s cut-glass RP – displays excesses which feel authentically Russian enough to have made Eisenstein proud. Nina Caplan 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 353: Thu Dec 22

Wild At Heart (Lynch, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.35pm

This film is part of the David Lynch Over The Rainbow season at BFI Southbank and also screens on December 7th and 30th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
As petty criminal Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and his lover Lula (Laura Dern) go on the run through a murderous Deep South, fleeing but meeting sleazy oddballs hired by Lula's mom (Diane Ladd) to end their relationship, Lynch evokes a surreal, sinister world a mite too reminiscent of his earlier work: bloody murder, violent sexual passion, kooky kitsch, freaky characters immersed in private fantasies, digressive metaphors, symbols and cultish references, and bizarre humour to lighten the nightmare. This déjà vu weakens the film; sometimes the weirdness seems so forced that Lynch appears merely to be giving fans what they expect. But it's churlish to focus on flaws when so much is exhilaratingly unsettling. Even more than a virtuoso shoot-out, two scenes - Stanton tortured by a gang of grotesques, a truly nasty car crash - exemplify Lynch's ability to disturb through carefully contrived atmosphere; while the performances lend a consistency of tone lacking in the narrative (but ever-present in Fred Elmes' fine camerawork). The film, finally, is funny, scary and brilliantly cinematic.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 352: Wed Dec 21

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Black, 2005): Everyman Screen on the Green Cinema, 10.30am

This 35mm presentation (also being screened on December 17th) is part of the 35mm Noughties season at the Screen on the Green. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Last Action Hero) makes his directing debut with this cheerful mess of a pulp-fiction parody, pumped full of laughs by Michelle Monaghan, Val Kilmer, and Robert Downey Jr. An east-coast thief (Downey) is improbably lured out west for a screen test and schooled for his role by a gay private eye (Kilmer); after the crook encounters an old childhood friend (Monaghan), the three are drawn into a convoluted web of intrigue. Downey’s character provides voice-over narration, a task he mocks along with the story’s other pulp conventions; when the structure is this rickety, crashing through the fourth wall isn’t a bad idea.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 351: Tue Dec 20

To Live and Die in L.A. (Friedkin, 1985): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

A 35mm presentation also screening on December 16th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
'A B-movie script about a U.S. Treasury agent (William L. Petersen) who will stop at nothing to nail a diabolical counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe), treated in a kinky, weirdly aestheticized manner by William Friedkin; it's like an episode of Miami Vice directed by Helmut Newton. Friedkin seems to take the screenplay only as an excuse to display a range of postmodernist colors and lighting effects (beautifully captured by cinematographer Robby Muller), never really connecting with the characters or the situations. But at the same time, he's clearly magnetized by the story's sexual subtext (the battle between the two men becomes some strange, violent ritual of seduction and possession), and the general affectlessness of the proceedings is punctuated by rhapsodic images of male power and destructiveness. Friedkin isn't nearly in enough control of his material for the film to qualify as an artwork, yet it's one of his few films with a real emotional current.'
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 350: Mon Dec 19

Nightwatching (Greenaway, 2007): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6pm

This 35mm presentation, which is also at NFT3 on December 3rd, is part of the Peter Greenaway season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Peter Greenaway returns to the premise of The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)–an artist destroyed by his aristocratic clientele–with this 2007 drama about the creation of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1642, when Rembrandt (Martin Freeman of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) is at the height of his fame and fortune. His wife Saskia (Eva Birthistle) advises him to undertake a commission for a monumental portrait of a local militia representing the wealthiest families in Holland, but Rembrandt, suspecting that two militiamen colluded to murder another, fills the canvas with clues to their guilt and motives. Trained as a painter, Greenaway has often relied on such painterly devices as chiaroscuro, symbolism, and tableaux vivants, and this dense, highly theatrical feature is a lesson in visual literacy as well as a challenging whodunit. With Toby Jones and Jodhi May.
Andrea Gronvall

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 349: Sun Dec 18

Black Sunday (Bava, 1960): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.30pm

This film is part of the In Dreams are Monsters season (and also being screened on December 9th) at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
A classic horror film (from a story by Gogol) involving Barbara Steele as a resurrected witch who was burned to death in a small medieval town and seeks revenge on her persecutors. The exquisitely realised expressionist images of cruelty and sexual suggestion shocked audiences in the early '60s, and occasioned a long-standing ban by the British censor.
David Pirie

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 348: Sat Dec 17

The Uninvited (Allen, 1944): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 2.30pm

This film is part of the In Dreams are Monsters season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

In the post-Rebecca cinematic landscape, Lewis Allen’s homoerotic, fabulously eerie ghost story emerged from the glut of imitators as one of the enduring classics of the genre ...

Time Out review:
Set in a distinctly Hollywoodian but nevertheless persuasive Cornwall, this is an impressive supernatural thriller, not unlike Rebecca in its use of an eerily atmospheric house and a sense of morbid brooding about the troubled past. Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey are the siblings who buy the old house, only to find it haunted and exerting a sinister influence over the previous owner's granddaughter (Russell). Lewis Allen's direction tightens the screws of tension to genuinely frightening effect, aided by an intense performance from Gail Russell as the girl who believes herself haunted by the malevolent ghost of her mother, and by beautiful camerawork in the noir style from Charles Lang. The real strength of the film, though, is its atypical stance part way between psychology and the supernatural, achieving a disturbingly serious effect.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.