The Gothique Film Society concludes its 55th season at the Cinema Museum with this movie and the 1971 Italian horror film Lady Frankenstein.
Time Out review:A genuine sequel to Tod Browning's Dracula (based on Bram Stoker's story Dracula's Guest), Universal's low-budget shocker finds Van Helsing placed under arrest for the murder of the Count, only for a mysterious woman (Gloria Holden) to turn up and take away Dracula's body for ritual consignment to a funeral pyre. Though she has inherited the vampic urge from her father, this princess of darkness desperately seeks release from her condition through an understanding psychologist (Otto Kruger). Apart from its haunting, low-key mood, the film is also notable for its subtle suggestion (hardly expected from a former director of B Westerns) of the lesbian nature of the female vampire.David Thompson
This presentation is part of a David Robert Mitchell season. Full details here.
Time Out review: The fog is thick in ’Under the Silver Lake’ – not the funk of pot smoke (though there is some of that) nor of bad weather. Rather, it’s the profound confusion located somewhere behind Andrew Garfield’s brow: His unkempt character, Sam, prowls the streets like a Scooby-less Shaggy in search of answers to a riddle he only half comprehends. Hypnotic, spiraling and deliriously high on its own supply of amateur-sleuth movie references, writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s deeply personal follow-up to his relentless meta-horror film ‘It Follows’ vaults him into ‘Big Lebowski’ territory, by way of several Lynchian side streets. It’s the kind of raggedy-ass thriller that only gets made when a young filmmaker, emboldened by success, moves past virtues of concision, hoping to summon the full, meandering spell of a paranoid dream. Don’t hold it against him. (Extended review here)Joshua Rothkopf
This film is part of the ‘Other Modernisms’ season at the Barbican. Full details here.
New Yorker review: The distinction between political and aesthetic audacity is obliterated in the Indian director Mrinal Sen’s 1971 drama Interview. It’s a Kolkata-based variation on “Bicycle
Thieves,” about a young man named Ranju (Ranjit Mallick), who, for a job
interview with a British firm, has only a few hours to get hold of a
Western-style suit. During a scene in which Ranju is travelling by
streetcar, the movie shows Mallick being recognized by a
fellow-passenger, and Sen has the actor address the camera and explain
how he came to be cast in the film (the director also depicts himself at
work, camera in hand). This breaking of the fourth wall is part of
Sen’s personal truth-in-media campaign: Ranju’s frantic dashes through
the city are filled with the print ads, billboards, store displays, and
movie posters that he sees, which Sen presents as a crucial form of
political mind control and a prime target of any future revolution. Richard Brody
Chicago Reader review: The mood of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 masterpiece is evoked by the English translation most often given to its title, “Tales of the Pale and Silvery Moon After the Rain.” Based on two 16th-century ghost stories, the film is less a study of the supernatural than a sublime embodiment of Mizoguchi’s eternal theme, the generosity of women and the selfishness of men. Densely plotted but as emotionally subtle as its name,Ugetsuis one of the great experiences of cinema. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is part of the female coming-of-age films season (details here) and also screens on 11th March (details here).
Chicago Reader review: An alluring Australian teenager (Abbie Cornish) stumbles into a kiss with her mother’s boyfriend, and after mom catches them red-handed the impulsive girl finds herself out on the street, where her only asset is a sexuality she doesn’t quite understand. Arriving in a mountain town, she’s not averse to trading her body for a place to sleep, but her bad choices come back to haunt her when she begins to connect emotionally with the townspeople, especially the bottled-up hunk (Sam Worthington) who catches her eye. This beautifully understated feature (2004) revolves around sex, but it’s neither erotic nor puritanical; its young characters are governed by their urges, but the experience itself seems as neutral and mysterious as sleep. Cate Shortland directed. J R Jones
Sapphic Cinema and Lesflicks have joined forces to start a new monthly film night dedicated to celebrating the best of Lesbian Cinema. This 1999 film is the first.
Chicago Reader review: A torturous, dangerous romance between a Berlin housewife and a Jewish lesbian living underground in 1943 is the subject of this piece of art-house erotica disguised as melodrama disguised as history (1998). Rona Munro and director Max Färberböck wrote the screenplay, which was based on Erica Fischer’s book, which was based on letters exchanged by two real women and on interviews with one of them, Lilly Wust. Lisa Alspector
This 35mm screening is part of a 70s season screening from prints. The Godfather also screens on March 16th at 10.30am. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: The ultimate family film. Francis Ford Coppola gives full due to the themes of clannish insularity that made Mario Puzo's novel a best seller, though his heart seems to be with Al Pacino's lonely, willful isolation. This 1972 feature is sharp, entertaining, and convincing—discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that Coppola hasn't achieved since. Dave Kehr
Guardian review: Stanley Kubrick greeted the 1970s with this massive howl of rage: a boiling, combative screed as different as humanly possible from 2001’s paean to cosmic harmony which preceded it. Kubrick is taking aim at the powers-that-be, unable to effectively contain the problems in their midst, alternating between quasi-fascist social control and absurdly indulgent liberalism. Like Full Metal Jacket, this film’s first half is where the real goodies are: if truth be told, the fireworks tail off towards the back end as Alex successively re-encounters his victims. But what fireworks they are. Andrew Pulver Here (and above) is the new BFI trailer.
This 35mm screening is part of the James Bond season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can see all the details of the screenings here. Casino Royale is also being screened on March 10th. Full details here.
Radio Times review:It is perhaps wise not to think of this unwieldy spy caper as a James Bond movie at all. Though nominally based on Ian Fleming's first 007 novel (originally dramatised in a 1954 TV show starring Barry Nelson and remade in 2006 with Daniel Craig), it is in actual fact an Austin Powers-type spoof, in which David Niven's retired Bond recruits assorted 007 agents (among them Ursula Andress and Peter Sellers) to avenge the death of "M" (John Huston). A surfeit of screenwriters (eight, including Billy Wilder) and directors (five, including Huston) lends the whole a chaotic, disjointed air, but there is much fun to be had along the way. In the all-star cast, Orson Welles plays villain Le Chiffre and Woody Allen appears as James's neurotic nephew, Jimmy.Andrew Collins
70mm screenings of The Master are on an extended run at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A self-destructive loner (Joaquin Phoenix), discharged from the navy after serving in the Pacific in World War II, flounders back in the States before coming under the wing of a charismatic religious leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) transparently based on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. This challenging, psychologically fraught drama is Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature since the commanding There Will Be Blood (2007), and like that movie it chronicles a contest of wills between an older man and a younger one, as the troubled, sexually obsessed, and often violent young disciple tries to fit in with the flock that’s already gathered around the master. This time, however, the clashing social forces aren’t religion and capitalism but, in keeping with the era, community and personal freedom—including the freedom to fail miserably at life. The stellar cast includes Amy Adams, Laura Dern, and Jesse Plemons. JR Jones
Chicago Reader review: A tense, sensitive, and rigorous film by Jean-Luc Godard, based on Alberto Moravia's novel A Ghost at Noon. Michel Piccoli stars as a French screenwriter unable to counter the contempt that his wife (Brigitte Bardot) builds for him as he humbles himself before a producer (Jack Palance) and a legendary director (Fritz Lang). Made in 'Scope and color at the behest of producer Joseph Levine, who expected a big commercial success, this 1963 feature begins as an unlikely project for Godard but develops (some would say degenerates) into one of his most archly stylized films. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: For all the abuse heaped on it, this is - in its complete version, at least - a majestic and lovingly detailed Western which simultaneously celebrates and undermines the myth of the American frontier. The keynote is touched in the wonderfully choreographed opening evocation of a Harvard graduation in 1870: answering the Dean's ritual address urging graduates to spread culture through contact with the uncultivated, the class valedictorian (John Hurt) mockingly replies that they see no need for change in a world 'on the whole well arranged'.
Twenty years later, as Hurt and fellow-graduate Kris Kristofferson become involved in the Johnson County Wars, their troubled consciences suggest that some change in the 'arrangements' might well have been in order. Watching uneasily as the rich cattle barons legally exterminate the poor immigrant farmers who have taken to illegal rustling to feed their starving families, they can only attempt to enforce the law that has become a mockery (Kristofferson) or lapse into soothing alcoholism (Hurt).
Moral compromise on a national scale is in question here, a theme subtly echoed by the strange romantic triangle that lies at the heart of the film: a three-way struggle between the man who has everything (Kristofferson), the man who has nothing (Christopher Walken), and the girl (Isabelle Huppert) who would settle for either provided no fraudulent compromise is asked of her. The ending, strange and dreamlike, blandly turns a blind eye to shut out the atrocities and casuistries we have witnessed, and on which the American dream was founded; not much wonder the American press went on a mass witch-hunt against the film's un-American activities. Tom Milne Here (and above) is the trailer.
This film is part of the ‘Other Modernisms’ season at the Barbican. Full details here.
The falling birth rate and high infant mortality are noted with concern by the inhabitants of a remote Andean village. As rumour swirl, corrupt local police open fire on some local men. Ignacio, the sole survivor, is taken by his wife to La Paz for hospital care. There, his brother desperately tries to scrape together the cash for a blood transfusion, a quest that leads him to some shocking discoveries. Blood of the Condor was made in Quechua, and with the participation of (and starring) people from the village where it was shot. Its baseline realism is overlaid with an intricate narrative structure that makes extensive use of flashbacks, a technique borrowed from European art cinema.
This film is part of the ‘Other Modernisms’ season at the Barbican. Full details here.
A young teacher is sent to a school in the impoverished south-end of Tehran where he falls in love with his student's elder sister, and directs all his energy into helping the students put on a stage show. Moving, witty and brilliantly directed in a dazzling and unusual combination of neorealism and political symbolism.In the late 1960s, Iranian audiences and filmmakers were hungry for an alternative to Hollywood imports and Iran’s own home-grown commercial genre cinema. With its contemporary, true-to-life subject, working-class protagonists, veiled social critique, and combined native and Western expressive styles, Downpour is typical of the new counter-cinema that emerged.
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 groundbreaking Soviet film, screened from a 35mm print, is part of the 'Other Modernism, Other Futures' season (details here).
Variety review:One
of the highlights of the Locarno Soviet retrospective, Marlen
Khutsiev’s “July Rain” has lost none of its radical modernity.
Often described as the Soviet version of an Antonioni film, pic
follows 28-year-old Lena (Evgeniya Uralova, who bears a vague
resemblance to Monica Vitti) through a kind of existential crisis, as
she realizes her relationship with perfect boyfriend Volodya
(Aleksandr Belyavsky) is empty and their friends are superficial
fools. The film captures a moment in time when Soviet life was
radically changing, when the joyful camaraderie was turning into
modern solitude and emptiness. The images, lensed by German Lavrov in
striking B&W, often contrast with the soundtrack, as in the long
opening dolly through the streets of Moscow to the accompaniment of
radio music.
Made
shortly before the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, it is in many
ways a prophetic work forecasting the end of the dream of
collectivism. This is in notable contrast to Khutsiev’s previous
film, “I Am Twenty,” which propounded socialism with a human
face. “Twenty”
was violently attacked by Khrushchev, but won a prize at Venice in a
cut version. “July Rain” was also invited to Venice, but the
authorities refused to send it. It received a very limited release. Deborah Young
This film is part of the Scorsese season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.
Guardian review: Silence is a movie of great fervour that resolves itself into a single thought: if a believer is forced to recant, yet maintains a hidden impregnable core of secret faith, a hidden finger-cross, is that a defeat or not? God sees all, of course, including the way a public disavowal of faith has dissuaded hundreds or thousands from believing. Is the public theatre of faith more important than a secret bargain with a silent creator? It is a question kept on a knife-edge. Martin Scorsese’s powerful, emotional film takes its audience on a demanding journey with a great sadness at its end. Peter Bradshaw
This 35mm screening is part of the Asta Nielsen season. Full details here.
BFI introduction: This dark thriller begins with a deceptive romantic breeziness, as Nielsen plays a journalist in love. However, this determined, principled woman will stop at nothing to support her friend’s life-saving medical research, which leads her inexorably towards a terrible act of violence. Soon, we sense the shadow of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) in Nielsen’s character – but played in her own, specifically modern way.
Chicago Reader review: A middle-aged man who’s contemplating suicide drives around the hilly, dusty outskirts of Tehran trying to find someone who will bury him if he succeeds and retrieve him if he fails. This minimalist yet powerful and life-enhancing 1997 feature by Abbas Kiarostami (Where Is the Friend’s House?,Life and Nothing More,Through the Olive Trees) never explains why the man wants to end his life, yet every moment in his daylong odyssey carries a great deal of poignancy and philosophical weight. Kiarostami, one of the great filmmakers of our time, is a master at filming landscapes and constructing parablelike narratives whose missing pieces solicit the viewer’s active imagination.Taste of Cherryactually says a great deal about what it was like to be alive in the 1990s, and despite its somber theme, this masterpiece has a startling epilogue that radiates with wonder and euphoria. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This Francois Truffaut film ispart of the director's seasonis also being screened on Ferbruary 5th and 12th at BFI Southbank (full details here).
Time Out review: Based on an American novel (Charles Williams'The Long Saturday Night, but set in small-town South of France, the plot introduces Jean-Louis Trintignant as the owner of an estate agency and Fanny Ardant as his long-suffering secretary. Trintignant is first implicated in one murder. Then his wife is killed. While he is on the run, it falls to Ardant to solve the crimes, with the neat role reversal allowing Truffaut both to cover familiar genre ground in unfamiliar manner, and to reflect on the fragility of the male ego. Thoughtfully composed, elegantly performed, and shot atmospherically in black-and-white, it could so easily have become a brittle exercise in form. But the sentimentality is constantly undercut, and almost every scene is infused with deft, sometimes dark humour, even as the corpses pile high on the sidewalks of those not particularly mean French streets.
The Prince Charles Cinema continues its
full 007 Retrospective showing every James Bond movie over the coming
months. You can see all the details of the screenings here. Yu Only Live Twice is also being screened on March 3rd and June 12th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Agent 007 travels to Japan, where he fakes his own death, gets married (?!), and thwarts a plan by cat-loving SPECTRE mastermind Blofeld (Pleasence) to use hijacked US and Soviet space capsules to blackmail the world super-powers.Roald Dahl's implausible script is padded out with the usual exotic locations, stunts, and trickery. Sean Connery left the series after this one, but was lured back forDiamonds Are Foreverfour years later. Nigel Floyd
This screening is part of the Wong Kar-wai season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You casn find thew full details here.
Time Out review: Wong Kar-Wai’s long-awaited, sumptuous follow-up to ‘In the Mood for Love’ makes for a rapturous cinematic experience. It’s not just the stunning production design (William Chang), exquisite camerawork (Chris Doyle,Lai Yiu Fai,Kwan Pun Leung) and superbly used music (various artists and composers, includingShigeru Umebayashi), which together give the film the febrile intensity of a nineteenth-century opera (Bellini features on the track). It’s also the subtlety and complexity that distinguish Wong’s charting of the emotional odyssey undergone by Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung) as he goes through a series of relationships with different but likewise lovely women: a prostitute (Ziyi Zhang), a gambler (Gong Li), a cabaret singer (Carina Lau), and his landlord’s daughter (Faye Wong).
With such beauties surrounding him, you’d expect Chow to be happy, but the film mainly takes place in the mid-’60s, the years immediately following his heart-breaking encounter with a married woman (Maggie Cheung in ‘In the Mood for Love’). It’s a relationship that still shades and shapes his reactions to every woman he meets, and it therefore also influences the allegorical sci-fi novel he’s writing, set in the year 2046 (after the number on a hotel-room door) but inspired by his own memories and desires… Wong intercuts scenes from this book with Chow’s various affairs and non-affairs, allowing Wong to build layer upon bittersweet layer of meaning in a work as cerebrally rewarding as it is sensually seductive. It may help if you grasp the many allusions to Wong’s earlier films (including, notably, ‘Days of Being Wild’), but it’s far from necessary. This, after all, is undeniably real cinema. Geoff Andrew
This film is part of a Stehen Dwoskin season at BFI. Full details here.
BFI introduction: Dwoskin began as an underground filmmaker, and ended his career as one. Distantly inspired by Beauty and the Beast, The Sun and the Moon features Dwoskin as the Beast, all but confined to his bed and hooked up to a breathing machine, opposite performance artist and stunt performer Helga Wretman, and dancer Beatrice ‘Trixie’ Cordua (Dwoskin’s muse of many years). The high point of Dwoskin’s late period, the film was described by scholar Raymond Bellour as an ‘absolute masterpiece’.
This 35mm prersentation s aprt of the Paul Schrader season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Paul Schrader did very well his first time out as a director with this downbeat tale (1978) of workday oppression starring Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto, and Harvey Keitel. The union squeezes from one side, the bosses from another, and three autoworkers are caught in the contradictions of capitalism. Schrader’s cold, deliberate camera style plays a subtle counterpoint to the story of breakdown and despair. An intelligent, controlled, and well-observed film, with excellent performances by Kotto and Pryor. Dave Kehr
This film is part of the 'Homeland: Films by Australian First Nations directors' season at the Barbican Cinema. You can find the full details here.
Barbican introduction: The Southern Cross constellation is one of the most familiar symbols in Australia, which has been claimed and appropriated by many groups, including racist nationalists, since colonisation. For Indigenous Australian people, it is a symbol with profound resonance. In this scorching essay film,Warwick Thornton(Samson and Delilah,Sweet Country) explores the cultural roots of the constellation and its position in Australian culture. The film, edited from over 70 hours of footage, is infused with a punk spirit. Thornton is certainly unafraid of provocation – a couple of years before the film he stated that ‘the Southern Cross was becoming the new swastika’. Told through his often bawdy style, this is a passionate and fearless film that, in the words of the director, asks ‘who we are and where we are going’.
This 35mm presentation is part of the Penny Marshall season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: 'It's no fun being in your early teens,
especially if you're none too tall. So thinks Josh Baskin, having been
denied a ride on a fairyground superloop. But neither is being a kid in a
grown-up body so hot, as Josh discovers after a carnival
wishing-machine grants the change overnight. What do you do when Mom
doesn't recognise you, and thinks you're your own abductor? How do you
get a job when you can't drive and have no social security number? And
when you do find work with a toy-design company, how do you cope with
board meetings, office rivalries, and swish staff parties? Penny Marshall's
movie may be a mite predictable, but it's genuinely funny, thanks partly
to Tom Hanks' engagingly gauche and gangly performance as the overgrown
Josh, and partly to a script that steers admirably clear of gross
innuendo. Much of the humour derives from Josh's inability to comprehend
adult life; much of its charm from the way his forthright innocence
steadily revitalises those around him. Admittedly, this latter theme
makes for an ending oozing with saccharine sentiment; but until then
Marshall, Hanks, and his co-stars seldom put a foot wrong.' Geoff Andrew
This film is also screened at Close-Up Cinema on February 13th (details here).
Observer review: Cornish film-maker Mark Jenkin’s breakthrough feature is a thrillingly adventurous labour of love – a richly textured, rough-hewn gem in which form and content are perfectly combined. A refreshingly authentic tale of tensions between locals and tourists in a once-thriving fishing village, it’s an evocative portrait of familiar culture clashes in an area where traditional trades and lifestyles are under threat. Shot with clockwork cameras on grainy 16mm stock, which Jenkin hand-processed in his studio in Newlyn,Baitis both an impassioned paean to Cornwall’s proud past, and a bracingly tragicomic portrait of its troubled present and possible future. It’s a genuine modern masterpiece, which establishes Jenkin as one of the most arresting and intriguing British film-makers of his generation. Mark Kermode
The Prince Charles Cinema continues its
full 007 Retrospective showing every James Bond movie over the coming
months. You can see all the details of the screenings here. Thunderball is also being screened on February 24th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Following up Goldfinger was no picnic, but Sean Connery’s
fourth outing demonstrated the series’ durability, cementing a brash
formula that yielded huge box office (it’s still the highest-grossing
Bond, when adjusted for inflation). Return to it now, and the effort is
painfully obvious: Yes, we love spooky underwater sequences involving
the conveyance of stolen A-bombs, but must there be endless minutes of
them? Regardless, there's some essential stuff here: the electric chair
that incinerates an underperforming villain at a meeting, the swimming
pool with sharks, the widescreen luxury. Joshua Rothkopf
