This 35mm screening is part of the Kubrick on Film season - full details here.
Time Out review: The scariest moments inThe Shiningare
so iconic, they’ve become in-jokes: Jack Nicholson leering
psychotically from posters on the walls of student bedrooms everywhere:
‘Here’s Johnny!’. Even so, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of execution
and claustrophobia still retains the power to frighten audiences out of
their wits. Nicholson is Jack Torrance, a writer working as a caretaker
at the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains over winter.
Stephen King, on whose novel the film was based, was famously
unimpressed. The problem, he said, was that ghost-sceptic Kubrick was ‘a
man who thinks too much and feels too little’. He resented Kubrick for
stripping out the supernatural elements of his story. Torrance is not
tortured by ghosts but by inadequacy and alcoholism. And for many, it’s as a study of insanity and failure that makesThe Shiningso chilling. Cath Clarke
This 35mm presentation is part of the French Extremity season at BFI Southbank. The full film schedule can be found via this link
BFI introduction: After a car accident, a Parisian marketeer (de Van) becomes obsessed with self-harm; the dissociation of her character with herself manifesting as an inability to feel pain or pleasure. Marina de Van – who writes, directs and stars in the film – digs into the grossness of the body in excruciating close-ups, crafting a melancholic body-horror.
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on May 14th, is part of the Nicolas Cage on 35mm season at the Screen on the Green. Details here. Time Out review: Pay attention, none of this makes much sense. Five years after the murder of his son, FBI agent Sean Archer (Travolta) finally has the drop on terrorist Castor Troy (Cage) - but with Castor comatose and a bomb ticking somewhere in LA, Archer's persuaded to undergo facial surgery, swapping Castor's features for his own. In this way, Archer-as-Troy (Cage) hopes to trick the location out of Castor's brother Pollux (Nivola). Unfortunately, Castor wakes up, and makes off with Archer's face, killing everyone who's in on the secret, and moving into his enemy's office. Woo's poetic-kinetic style has evolved, if not to the point of abstraction, then to delirium: he makes a virtue of incredulity. With two of Hollywood's most flamboyant actors playing each other, the movie becomes a kind of popHeat, an elaborate self-parody and quasi-serious examination of the art of film acting. Yet there's an authentic subversive frisson as Travolta (as-Troy-as-Archer) sizes up his rebellious teenage daughter, puts the sizzle back into a stale marriage, and generally carries on with the air of a sociopath getting the most out of life. 'Are we having any fun yet?' he demands. Twice over. Tom Charity
This 35mm presentation is part of the Daniel Day-Lewis at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Guardian review: Few collaborations are so distinctive that the names of those involved come to denote a genre, rather than just a credit. A Room With a View, the first of directorJames Ivoryand producer Ismail Merchant's EM Forster adaptations, was shot before the term Merchant-Ivory had become an insult; watch it today and you'll blush to have ever smirked at the cliche. This is incredibly fresh and arresting film-making: moving and amusing, swooningly romantic and socially ferocious – nothing less than a full-frontal (in every way) assault on your soul. Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) is on a Baedeker-led tour of Florence with punctilious cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith) when she encounters, at their pensione, free-thinking Mr Emerson (Denholm Elliott) and his dreamy son, George (Julian Sands). Through a series of bloody physical confrontations and, worse yet, sticky etiquette breaches, Lucy's desire for emotional freedom starts to bubble, coming to the boil when George kisses her in a cornfield. But Charlotte witnessed the snog, so Lucy is whisked back to Surrey, where she gets engaged to the horribly priggish Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis), to the polite distaste of her family, and the Rev Beebe (Simon Callow, uncharacteristically subtle). Then the Emersons reappear … What might have been starched and talky in other hands comes out of the wash alive with spring and spirit. The botched embrace between Lucy and Cecil, and the heartbreaking moment when he, after being rejected, puts his boots back on, are once seen, never forgotten. Smith's Charlotte – so funny as a curmudgeonly drag ("The ground will do for me," she says, as cushions are assigned on a picnic, "I haven't had rheumatism for years. And if I do feel a twinge, I shall stand up") – is just tragic alone, as Lucy might well have been, had her story not had such a happy ending. The final scene, a ravishing in a room, with a view, as the bells of Florence chime out, would leave only a stone unmoved. Catherine Shoard
Time Out review: A thoughtful and unusually pessimistic sci-fi pic based on Michael Crichton's novel about a psychotic (George Segal) who has a tiny computer planted in his brain to control his violent impulses. Unfortunately, the plan backfires: Segal enjoys the sensation of being calmed down so much that he goes on a murder spree in order to enjoy further mental restraint. Opening with a brilliant sequence in which Segal is reborn on the operating table, and building towards a finale in which the scientists realise that they can do nothing to control this hi-tech monster of their own making, the film's bleak futuristic vision also benefits greatly from some extraordinary sets, and from writer/producer/director Mike Hodges' confident direction. Nigel Floyd
This 35mm presentation is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Akira
Kurosawa's 1960 presagement of the Lockheed scandal, with Toshiro
Mifune fighting corporate corruption, is a well-done thriller with
Kurosawa's usual social overtones. His use of the wide screen here
seems, unaccountably, much more accomplished than in the later Dersu Uzala. Dave Kehr Here (and above) is the trailer
CAPITAL CELLULOID takes over the Album Club session at the Spiritland bar in Kings Cross this week. Each night from 6pm on Tuesday to Saturday we’ll be spinning a soundtrack LP at the famous music venue, and tonight’s is the superb selection found to accompany Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Do come along to say hello (here are the details of how to get there) and enjoy the vibe at one of the best venues in town.
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on May 4th (details here), is part of the French Extremity season at BFI Southbank. The full film schedule can be found via this link
CAPITAL CELLULOID takes over the Album Club session at the Spiritland bar in Kings Cross this week. Each night from 6pm on Tuesday to Saturday we’ll be spinning a soundtrack LP at the famous music venue, and tonight’s choice takes us back to the disco era and a film set in the lounge bars of the late 1970s, Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977). Do come along to say hello (here are the details of how to get there) and enjoy the vibe at one of the best venues in town.
CAPITAL CELLULOID takes over the Album Club session at the Spiritland bar in Kings Cross this week. Each night from 6pm on Tuesday to Saturday we’ll be spinning a soundtrack LP at the famous music venue, and tonight’s is a rarely heard Bob Dylan album, his country/folk influenced compositions for the Sam Peckinpah movie Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Do come along to say hello (here are the details of how to get there) and enjoy the vibe at one of the best venues in town.
This 35mm screening is part of a Seasscapes: Our Oceand on Screen season at Cine Lumiere. You can read all the details of the season here.
Cine Lumiere introduction: With the background of the Aegean Sea, Ilya (Melina Mercouri), a self-employed, free-spirited prostitute who lives in the port of Piraeus in Greece, meets Homer (Jules Dassin), an American tourist and classical scholar who is enamored of all things Greek. Homer feels Ilya’s lifestyle typifies the degradation of Greek classical culture, and attempts to steer her onto the path of morality, while, at the same time, Ilya attempts to loosen Homer up, notably on Sunday, when they all go ‘to the seashore!’
CAPITAL CELLULOID takes over the Album Club session at the Spiritland bar in Kings Cross this week. Each night from 6pm on Tuesday to Saturday we’ll be spinning a soundtrack LP at the famous music venue, and tonight’s is from a movie set in London, with Herbie Hancock’s widely praised set of jazz numbers for Michelangelo Antonioni’s archetypal swinging Sixties classic, Blowup (1967). Do come along to say hello (here are the details of how to get there) and enjoy the vibe at one of the best venues in town.
Times review: “The day started quietly enough. Then I got out of bed. That was my first mistake.” And so beginsPulp, an underrated comedic masterpiece from Mike Hodges (who later directedFlash GordonandCroupier) that features one of the greatest voiceovers in film history. It helps, of course, that Michael Caine is delivering the words with his least cockney caramel burr. He plays Mickey King, a writer of trashy novels who is seconded to Malta to ghostwrite the biography of a legendary Hollywood egomaniac (Mickey Rooney). Naturally, murder intervenes, and King must ultimately become the detective hero of his own fictions. Which he does, but always, thankfully, with that deliciously wry commentary. (“I wondered who he was, the poor dead bastard,” hesighs at a murder scene.) Worth rediscovering.Kevin Maher
CAPITAL CELLULOID takes over the Album Club session at the Spiritland bar in Kings Cross this week. Each night from 6pm on Tuesday to Saturday we’ll be spinning a soundtrack LP at the famous music venue, starting with Roy Budd’s hugely influential jazz score for Get Carter (the film gets a re-release at BFI Southbank at the end of this month). Do come along to say hello (here are the details of how to get there) and enjoy the vibe at one of the best venues in town.
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on May 2nd (details here), is part of the French Extremity season at BFI Southbank. The full film schedule can be found via this link.
Time Out review: Mostly,
Ben (Benoit Poelvoorde) is an ordinary sort of guy. One passion,
however, is unusual: he regularly commits murder, not exactly at random,
but certainly without malice or provocation. So intriguing is Ben's
deadly charm that a film crew decide to make a documentary about him;
and come to like him so much that they start facilitating, then
collaborating in, his crimes. This spoof fly-on-the-wall documentary is
funny, scary, provocative, and profoundly disturbing. While the body
count is sky high and the violence explicit, it's neither a thriller
nor, finally, a psychological study. Rather, it's a witty,
uncompromising acknowledgment of both film-makers' and audiences' often
unhealthy fascination with the spectacle of violence. Even as you admire
its bravura, intelligence and seeming authenticity, such is its rigour
that you are also forced to question just why you are watching it.
Purely on a gut level, it may offend; but as an exploration of
voyeurism, it's one of the most resonant, caustic contributions to the
cinema of violence sincePeeping Tom. Geoff Andrew
This 35mm presentation is part of the Barbara Streisand season. Full details here.
Vulture review: The Way We Wereis told in a series of flashbacks and montages, primed for maximum nostalgia and some truly gorgeous period costuming. The entire film is Hollywood confection from start to finish, opening with the lush, familiar croon of Barbara Streisand’s famous titular song, allowing Robert Redford to wear his navy whites for so long that he begins to look as though he’s emerged from a perfume ad. There are some scenes cut from the conclusion that make the timeline a little confusing, butThe Way We Weredoes not endure because of its plot. It endures because of a fearsome, desirous performance from Streisand, and Redford’s cold beauty, and all the ways that it captures a one-sided desire many of us have felt. Christina Newland
Time Out review: Investigating a bold armed robbery which has left three security guards
dead, LA cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), whose devotion to work is
threatening his third marriage, follows a trail that leads him to
suspect a gang of thieves headed by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). Trouble is,
McCauley's cunning is at least equal to Hanna's, and that makes him a
hard man to nail. Still, unknown to Hanna, McCauley's gang have their
own troubles: one of their number is a volatile psychopath, while the
businessman whose bonds they've stolen is not above some rough stuff
himself. Such a synopsis barely scratches the surface of Mann's masterly
crime epic. Painstakingly detailed, with enough characters, subplots
and telling nuances to fill out half a dozen conventional thrillers,
this is simply the best American crime movie - and indeed, one of the
finest movies, period - in over a decade. The action scenes are better
than anything produced by John Woo or Quentin Tarantino; the
characterisation has a depth most American film-makers only dream of;
the use of location, decor and music is inspired; Dante Spinotti's
camerawork is superb; and the large, imaginatively chosen cast gives
terrific support to the two leads, both back on glorious form. Geoff Andrew
Chicago Reader review: The
unpredictable and provocative Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul
(Tropical Malady) offers a mysterious and beautiful experimental feature
(2006) based on memories of his parents, who were both doctors. It's
divided into two parts, both set in the present, with many rhyme effects
between them. The first, set in and around a rural clinic, centers on
his mother; the second, set in the vicinity of a Bangkok hospital,
focuses on his father, though it's a kind of quizzical remake of the
first and both characters appear in each section. There's nothing here
that resembles narrative urgency, but this is a quiet masterpiece,
delicate and full of wonder. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This 35mm presentation is part of the 'Genesis Cinema Turns 23' season. Full details here.
Time Out review: From the off it's clear at once that Jonathan Glazer will be a ballsy, switched-on film-maker: Winstone's belly burns in the Spanish sun, an ice-cold flannel slyly folded over his privates - and then an a boulder bumps down the hill and bounces over the oblivious ex-villain's head to splashland in the swimming pool. The verve isn't so surprising, but Glazer goes on to prove that he's got much more than flash in his arsenal. A macabre comedy played out in deadly earnest, this has dramatic heft and tension. Kingsley's bald and beady-eyed Don Logan is so tightly wrapped in his neuroses, he's an alien in any social context, a monster in a man's skin. Easy to believe Winstone's scared to death of this maggot. The first two thirds of this superbly acted film is dynamite, even as nothing happens, really. Gal (Winstone) and wife Deedee (Redman) play reluctant hosts to Don, who's intent on bringing Gal back to London for a big score. Gal refuses. Don insists. The tension racks up until something has to give, but you'll be hard pressed to guess how and where the break will come. Tom Charity
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on May 28th (details here), is part of the French Extremity season at BFI Southbank. The full film schedule can be found via this link.
Chicago Reader review: I haven't read Herman Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities,
but it's reportedly director Leos Carax's favorite novel. What there is
of a plot to this 1999 modern-dress adaptation, which Carax wrote with
Lauren Sedofsky and Jean-Pol Fargeau, concerns a wealthy author
(Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) living in Normandy in
semi-incestuous contentment with his mother (Catherine Deneuve). Upon
encountering a soulful eastern European war refugee (Katerina Golubeva)
who claims to be his half sister, he runs out on his wealthy fiancee
(Delphine Chuillot) and retreats to a funky part of Paris to write
another novel. There's clearly some sort of self-portraiture going on
here. A 19th-century romantic inhabiting a universe as mythological as
Jean Cocteau's, Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood, The Lovers on the Bridge)
has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing
rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him.
He's as self-indulgent as they come, and we'd all be much the poorer if
he weren't. Characteristic of his private sense of poetics is this
film's dedication, near the end of the closing credits, "to my three
sisters"—it appears on-screen for less than a second. Pola, incidentally, is the acronym of the French title of Melville's novel; X alludes to the fact that Carax used the tenth draft of the script. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Four friends just out of high school join the military: Denise Richards
wants to pilot enormous spaceships, Casper Van Dien wants to be near
her, Dina Meyer wants to be near him, and Neil Patrick Harris wants to
pit his brain power against that of giant enemy insects—if they have
brains. The plot of this 1997 feature may sound like silly, conventional
science fiction and soap opera romance, but director Paul Verhoeven
blends the conflicting elements of intentional camp and perverse
sincerity into a single tone—and he doesn't resort to simple irony.
Instead he revels in the contradictions and defies us to see fascist
ideology in a story that allows us to identify with warmongering
characters. Lisa Alspector
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on May 24th (details here), is part of the French Extremity season at BFI Southbank. The full film schedule can be found via this link. Tonight's screening wilkl be introduced by writer Sophie Monks Kuafman.
This 35mm presentation is part of the 'Genesis Cinema Turns 23' season. Full details here.
Time Out review: At times a little too hyperkinetic and punchy for its own good, this account of the spread of drug-fuelled crime into Rio'sfavelasfrom the '60s to the '80s is nevertheless an impressive affair. Centred on a kid keen to keep his nose clean and become a photographer, despite the live-fast-die-young tendencies of those around him, the film blends superb location photography, a pacy but nicely elastic editing style, an ingenious, imaginative approach to narrative, and expertly choreographed action to document the way petty crime and petty rivalries spiral out of control to plunge the neighborhood into murderous gang wars. And the performances, many from non-pros, are terrific. Geoff Andrew
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on May 20th (details here), is part of the French Extremity season at BFI Southbank. The full film schedule can be found via this link.
Introducing the screening will beDJ Spoonyand special guests are spinning classic reggae, while after the film a panel withBrinsley Forde, Trevor Liard,Brian Bovell,Dennis BovellandBeverley Michaels.
Time Out review: Although Babylon shows what it's like to be young, black and
working class in Britain, the final product turns dramatised documentary
into a breathless helter-skelter. Rather than force the social and
political issues, Rosso lets them emerge and gather momentum through the
everyday experience of his central character Blue (sensitively played
by Brinsley Forde). A series of increasingly provocative incidents finally
polarise Blue and lead to uncompromising confrontation. Although the
script runs out of steam by the end, the sharp use of location, the
meticulous detailing of black culture, the uniformly excellent
performances and stimulating soundtrack command attention.
Ian Birch
This 35mm presentation also screens on May 4th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Gene Hackman excels in Francis Ford Coppola's tasteful, incisive 1974
study of the awakening of conscience in an “electronic surveillance
technician.” Coppola manages to turn an expert thriller into a portrayal
of the conflict between ritual and responsibility without ever letting
the levels of tension subside or the complicated plot get muddled. Fine
support from Allen Garfield as an alternately amiable and desperately
envious colleague, plus a superb soundtrack (vital to the action) by
Walter Murch—all this and a fine, melancholy piano score by David Shire. Don Druker
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. For Your Eyes Only also screens on Saturday April 23rd. All the information is here.
Chicago Reader review: Most of the action sequences in this 1981 Bond film have been recycled from earlier entries, but if the producers haven’t come up with anything startlingly new, they have managed to freshen the tone enough to give the old standards a different cast. Roger Moore has crumpled his comic-strip good looks into something approaching world-weariness, and the newfound maturity in his expression is reflected in director John Glen’s style, which goes for the measured and elegant over the flashy and excessive. The Bond girl here, Carole Bouquet, was picked up from Luis Buñuel’sThat Obscure Object of Desire, and her frozen good looks are slightly too sinister for the conventional glamour part she’s been given. With Topol, Julian Glover, and Lynn-Holly Johnson. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is part of the Barbara Streisand season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find all the details of the strand here.
Time Out review: William Wyler's only musical,Funny Girlis the fictionalised biography of Fanny Brice (Barbara Streisand), the ugly duckling who became a glamorous Ziegfeld star and achieved fame as a comic, so puncturing the mythic public eroticism of theZiegfeld Follies. The film's central irony is not the usual one of public success at the expense of private pain, but the complex one of success at the expense of personal knowledge. Streisand never looks into the mirrors that Wyler surrounds her with. Well worth watching, even if most later Streisand movies aren't.
Chicago Reader review: One sequel that surpasses the original. Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott’s 1979Alienin favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus (1986). Sigourney Weaver, the sole survivor of the first encounter, returns to the scene as an adviser to a military mission sent to exterminate the alien scourge. The first half of the film is virtually actionless, as Cameron audaciously draws out our anticipation by alluding to past horrors and building the threat of even more extreme developments; the second half is nonstop, driving action, constructed in a maniacal cliff-hanger style in which each apparently hopeless situation feeds immediately into something even wilder. At 137 minutes the film is a bit long, and Cameron does overplay his hand here and there, pushing things just a shade further than he should to maintain audience credibility. But unlike the original, the action is used to develop character, and the central image—the alien spores as a monstrous parody of human birth—finds an effective resonance in the plotline. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Treated as a debacle upon release, partially as payback for producer-star Warren Beatty’s high-handed treatment of the press, this Elaine May comedy was the most underappreciated commercial movie of 1987. It isn’t quite as good as May’s previous features, but it’s still a very funny work by one of this country’s greatest comic talents. Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, both cast against type, play inept songwriters who score a club date in North Africa and accidentally get caught up in various international intrigues. Misleadingly pegged as an imitationRoad to Morocco, the film is better read as a light comic variation on May’s masterpieceMikey and Nickyas well as a prescient send-up of blundering American idiocy in the Middle East. Among the highlights: Charles Grodin’s impersonation of a CIA operative, a blind camel, Isabelle Adjani, Jack Weston, Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography, and a delightful series of deliberately awful songs, most of them by Paul Williams. Jonathan Rosenbaum
