This 35mm presentation is part of the 'Projecting the Archive' strand at BFI Southbank and will feature an extended introduction by curator Ehsan Khoshbakht.
BFI introduction: When a theatre is bombed in wartime London, a famous actor loses his
memory and assumes the personality of the character he’s been playing on
stage: The Brighton Strangler. British expat stars John Loder and June
Duprez bring authenticity to their roles – much needed to counterbalance
the Hollywood depiction of Britain’s south coast. Director Max Nosseck
was a colourful character, best-known for making low-budget crime dramas
across different countries, of which this is a deliciously melodramatic
example. Taking place over the theatre’s Christmas closure, this RKO
B-movie makes a perfect alternative seasonal offering.
Time Out review: The town mouse and his country cousin. Or, the story of two students,
one who was very, very good, and one who was very, very bad; but the bad
one passed his exams, got the girl (when he wanted her), and survived
to live profitably ever after. A fine, richly detailed tableau of
student life in Paris, and Chabrol's first statement (in his second
film) of his sardonic view of life as a matter of the survival of the
fittest. The centrepiece, as so often in the early days of the nouvelle vague,
is an orgiastic party climaxed, as the guest sleeps it off next
morning, by a sublimely cruel and characteristic 'joke' by the bad
cousin (Jean-Claude Brialy) when he performs an eerie Wagnerian charade with
candelabra and Gestapo cap to wake a Jewish student into nightmare. Tom Milne
BFI introduction: Six-year-old Ok-hee lives with her widowed mother and stern
grandmother-in-law in a rural village. When the kindly Mr. Han arrives
to stay as a boarder, Ok-hee watches with curiosity and delight as
feelings develop between her mother and the father figure she always
longed for. Shin Sang-ok and his actor wife Choi Eun-hee were two key
figures in the Golden Age. Mother and a Guest is considered among their
finest achievements.
This Christmas movie horror classic is on across Picturehouse cinemas in London tonight and also Saturday 14th and Monday 16th. Full details here.
Popcorn Horror website review: What’s
so terrifying about Black Christmas is its own history. If you’re a
film buff you’re probably aware of this film’s existence: “that
Christmas themed horror”/”the first slasher”. It's this status as one of
the earliest slashers that sets up a false sense of security. Unlike the
standard template however, the antagonist is not a lumbering threat.
The fact he stays hidden in the shadows of the house means his
omnipresence (an idiom Black Christmas does conform to) is
verisimilitudinous without resorting to fantastical devices. Something
is a little unsettling about Black Christmas. It’s a little too
confined, the players somewhat more trapped, the playing field is that
bit smaller. There’s the traditional set-up but then, early on are the
phone-calls. Not calls that Scream hoped to parody; Scream would be
lucky if it could capture something as revolting as these. The calls in
the movie are genuinely some of the most horrifying, deranged audio ever
committed to film. It’s something that will stand out and stay with
you. This helps build the palpable tension and star Olivia Hussey is a
grand scream queen. But
the best thing about Black Christmas? The plot goes in a direction that
will leave you thinking for days , if not weeks. Yes, there are huge
leaps in logic (why do the girls stay in the sorority house after
several murders? Why do the police not have someone next to the phone
24/7?) It doesn’t matter, this remains utterly original and raw. Thanks
to the performances and brutality of the story, this continues to be a
terrifying movie to all but the most cynical; and frankly if this
picture doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s on too tight. RJ Bayley
This film is screening as part of the 'Film Wallahs' strand at BFI Southbank showcasing new South Asian and world cinema. Full details here.
BFI introduction: In this adaptation of AJ Cronin’s The Citadel, we follow a young,
idealistic doctor as he moves to a small village with intentions of
making a difference. But life soon finds him compromising his values.
When a tragedy befalls him and his new bride, the bitterness in the
doctor exacerbates his pursuit of wealth and power. But it comes at a
price. We are delighted to welcome Vijay Anand’s son to introduce the
restored version of this riveting classic.
Chicago Reader review: There
are no Art Deco nightclubs, shimmering silk gowns, or slamming bedroom
doors to be seen, but this 1940 film is one of Ernst Lubitsch's finest
and most enduring works, a romantic comedy of dazzling range that takes
place almost entirely within the four walls of a leather-goods store in
prewar Budapest. James Stewart is the earnest, slightly awkward young
manager; Margaret Sullavan is the new sales clerk who gets on his
nerves—and neither realizes that they are partners in a passionate
romance being carried out through the mails. Interwoven with subplots
centered on the other members of the shop's little family, the romance
proceeds through Lubitsch's brilliant deployment of point of view,
allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual
character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and
suspense. With Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut, Sara Haden, and Felix
Bressart. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Sparky indie feature in four chapters, two previously shown as shorts in
their own right. The chapters are deliberately varied in style
(ciné-vérité, horror-noir, etc), but linked into a loose
narrative. Seok-Hwan (Ryoo himself) provokes a pool hall fight between
rival student gangs in which one guy dies. Seven years later he's become
a cop and his kid brother is drifting into crime. Meanwhile the
accidental murderer Sung-Bin (Park) is released from jail and
universally ostracised. Haunted by the ghost of the boy he killed, he
becomes a crimelord's enforcer and eventually revenges himself on
Seok-Hwan by putting his brother in danger. By the end everyone is dead,
dying or merely irredeemable. Basically an excuse for Ryoo and friends
to show off their stunt action skills, it says all the obvious things
about macho values and delinquency, but comes up fresh and watchable
thanks to its play with form. A version trimmed by 3 to 4 minutes was a
surprise hit in Korea. Tony Rayns
This film is part of the Golden Age of Korean Films season and also screens on December 14th. Full details here. Tonight's screening will be introduced by Professor Jinhee Choi, King’s College London.
BFI introduction: A murdered daughter-in-law returns as a vengeful spirit. While the film
adheres to the classic Korean horror tropes, it also absorbs influences
from Hollywood and Japanese horror. Lee Yong-min’s distinctive style
deftly captures the tension between Western modernity and pre-modern
Korean traditions, coexisting and interacting in the shifting space of a
rapidly changing society.
The film, part of the Celluloid Sunday strand at the cinema, is presented on a 35mm print from the ICA Archives.
ICA introdcution: The sophomore feature by Chen Kaife (King of Children, Farewell My Concubine, Killing Me Softly),
regarded as one of China’s most important directors and a leading
filmmaker of the Fifth Generation of Chinese cinema, follows a group of
military cadets on a grueling training programme to prepare for a parade
celebrating the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People's
Republic. Criticized both by the anti-military youth, in which
they saw the glorification of the martial spirit, and by the Chinese
authorities, which banned it after completion, the film was presented at
the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 1988 from a heavily
cut and censored version, and remains rarely seen on the big screen to
this day.
BFI introduction: When newlywed Hae-soon loses her fisherman husband to the sea, she joins
the company of villagers left widowed by the forces of nature. But when
she becomes the target of an aggressive courtship, Hae-soon is forced
to leave her home. Adapted from the novel by Oh Yeong-su, Kim Soo-yong’s
drama deftly captures the rhythms of rural life, the communal bond
between women and human resilience in the face of an unforgiving natural
world. Here (and above) is the trailer.
Time Out review: No pigs or wells in sight in Hong Sang-soo's justly acclaimed first feature,
which looks at the lives of five very recognisable urban types as if all
of them were witnesses at the scene of some freak accident. These men
and women make mistakes and suffer frustrations in the ways we all do: a
failed novelist blames everyone but himself for his inability to keep a
relationship going; a woman dreams of divorcing her husband and pins
her hopes on a lover who has already moved on; a generally faithful
husband impulsively rents a hooker while on a business trip and catches
an STD. Part of the pleasure here comes from the skill with which Hong
interweaves these seemingly unconnected lives; the rest comes from the
excellence of the images, sounds and performances and from Hong's warm
but unsentimental engagement with his characters. Tony Rayns
Chicago Tribune review: Given a
free hand to create the sequel to Batman, director Tim Burton has
come up with a far more personal film than his 1989 original. There
are flashes of commercially oriented action and humor, but the overall
feeling is one of a languid depression sprung straight from the heart of
its author. In fact, ''Batman Returns'' is so personal that it owes much more to ''Edward
Scissorhands,'' Burton`s 1990 Christmas fantasy about a lonely young
man with knifeblades for fingers, than it does to the comic book hero
created by Bob Kane. Not
only is the theme identical-that of the misunderstood man-boy, whose
knowledge of the dark side of life has made him unlovable, he fears, to
other human beings-but so are the tattered leather costumes, the
exaggerated, expressionistic set design, the swelling, highly emotional
score by Danny Elfman, and many of the more self-pitying lines of
dialogue. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Re-teaming actorJack Lemmon, scriptwriter Iz Diamond and directorBilly Wildera
year after ‘Some Like It Hot’, this multi-Oscar winning comedy is
sharper in tone, tracing the compromises of a New York insurance drone
who pimps out his brownstone apartment for his married bosses’ illicit
affairs. The quintessential New York movie – with exquisite design byAlexandre Traunerand
shimmering black-and-white photography – it presented something of a
breakthrough in its portrayal of the war of the sexes, with a sour and
cynical view of the self-deception, loneliness and cruelty involved in
‘romantic’ liaisons. Directed by Wilder with attention to detail and
emotional reticence that belie its inherent darkness and melodramatic
core, it’s lifted considerably by the performances: the psychosomatic
ticks and tropes of nebbish Lemmon balanced by the pathos of Shirley MacLaine’s put-upon ‘lift girl’.
Here's
one of the great films set during Christmas, and an opportunity to see
Stanley Kubrick's much-underrated final movie in an original 35mm print. The film, part of the Christmas season at the Prince Charles, is also being shown on December 6th, 13th and 18th and you can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader review: Initial
viewings of Stanley Kubrick's movies can be deceptive because his films
all tend to be emotionally convoluted in some way; one has to follow
them as if through a maze. A character that Kubrick might seem to treat
cruelly the first time around (e.g., Elisha Cook Jr.'s fall guy in The
Killing) can appear the object of tender compassion on a subsequent
viewing. The director's desire to avoid sentimentality at all costs
doesn't preclude feeling, as some critics have claimed, but it does
create ambiguity and a distanced relationship to the central characters.
Kubrick's final feature very skillfully portrays the dark side of
desire in a successful marriage; since the 60s he'd been thinking about
filming Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant novella "Traumnovelle," and
working with Frederic Raphael, he's adapted it faithfully--at least if
one allows for all the differences between Viennese Jews in the 20s and
New York WASPs in the 90s. Schnitzler's tale, about a young doctor
contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering
that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies, has a somewhat
Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy (hence
Kubrick's title), and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this
delicate territory. Yet the story has been altered to make the
successful doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite and his wife
(powerfully played by Nicole Kidman) a little feistier; Kubrick's also
added a Zeus-like tycoon (played to perfection by Sydney Pollack) who
pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in fact only
summarizes the various mysteries, his cynicism and chilly access to
power revealing that Kubrick is more of a moralist than Schnitzler. To
accept the premises and experiences of this movie, you have to be open
to an expressionist version of New York with scant relation to the 90s
(apart from cellular phones and AIDS) and a complex reading of a
marriage that assumes the relations between men and women haven't
essentially changed in the past 70-odd years. This is a remarkably
gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like
Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over
time. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Muriel Spark's wonderful slip-sliding novella is narrowed down and heightened in Jay Presson Allen's
adaptation for Fox of her own stage play (drawn from Spark's book),
which omits much sense of the wider, crueller world of the '30s outside
the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, where Miss Brodie
imparts her own rarefied, romantic view of life to her chosen 'set'.
Nevertheless, Maggie Smith is handed a part in the eccentric, trite,
purposeful and finally pathetic Jean Brodie which allows her to play to
all her considerable strengths. Her performance is ably counterpointed
by Stephens as the knowing, married art teacher Teddy Lloyd (to whose
bed she attempts to send one of her girls, in her own place), and Celia Johnson as the pursed headmistress determined to sack her. Good support, too, from the girls, notably Jane Carr, as Mary McGregor, the new girl who dies on her way to fight against Miss Brodie's hero Franco, and Pamela Franklin, as Sandy, who finally puts paid to her teacher by denouncing her fascism. Jonathan Pym
This is a 35mm presentation. (The perfect way to start the festive season?) Chicago Reader review: Pier
Paolo Pasolini's last feature (1975) is a shockingly literal and
historically questionable transposition of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom to
the last days of Italian fascism. Most of the film consists of long
shots of torture, though some viewers have been more upset by the
bibliography that appears in the credits. Roland Barthes noted that in
spite of all its objectionable elements (he pointed out that any film
that renders Sade real and fascism unreal is doubly wrong), this film
should be defended because it "refuses to allow us to redeem ourselves."
It's certainly the film in which Pasolini's protest against the modern
world finds its most extreme and anguished expression. Very hard to
take, but in its own way an essential work. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
Close-Up Cinema introduction: To summarise the plot of Om Dar Badar is to attempt
articulating the truly incomprehensible. Steering clear of the modernist
collisions of meaning and desire, Kamal Swaroop spins an 'ism' denying
prism of absurdly fragmented surrealisms, positing Indian society as
intrinsically postmodernist, regardless of prevailing religious
conservatisms and contradictory philosophical musings, or rather,
because of it. On the face of it, the film is a portrait of life in
Ajmer, Rajasthan, telling us the story of a boy named Om during his
carefree adolescence, gifted with the skill of holding his breath for a
long time. His father, Babuji, a government servant, leaves his
government job to dedicate his life to astrology. His sister, with a
sense of independence and agency, dates a spineless good for nothing. He
studies science, but grows increasingly fascinated with magic and
religion, visiting a fantasy city and taking a home close to a frog
pond. Avowedly non-committal to any theme or plot, the film whimsically
satirises the interspersing of Western concepts with Hindu religion,
blending the sacred with the profane, the carnal with the divine, and
antiquity with modernity. In doing so, it mocks the sacred pursuits of
meaning and desire, weaving together an idiosyncratic pastiche of
consciously contradictory nonsense. The kind of nonsense that happily
subverts all cinematic expectations into a satirical anti-cinema of
scientific and religious aphorisms, pseudo moralistic science fiction,
pop mythologies and ingenuously purposeless musical numbers.
Screen Slate review: Considered an idiosyncratic anomaly during its festival run in 1988 and
an established masterpiece of Indian parallel cinema when it finally
released commercially in India in 2014, Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar
is no longer a secret. Swaroop acknowledges the inspiration of foreign artists such as Godard,
Warhol, Buñuel, and Man Ray, along with his “teachers,” the giants of
India’s Parallel cinema movement Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani. The
results are a radical combination of surrealist montage and formalist
camerawork and editing – like the montage of Jagdish being caught with
the lock of hair that turns the movie into not only an experimentation
of form but of concept. His screenwriter Kuku’s approach is also
singular, littering his dialogue with non-sequiturs and jocular
double-entendres that jump between Hindi and English – a favorite of
mine is the repeated phrase “frog keychain,” which when said in Hindi
can be understood also as frog ki chaeen, meaning “the frog’s love.” Peerless in its vision and esoteric in its details, Om Dar-B-Dar is a movie that can hold true to the moniker of being “unlike anything you’ve ever seen."
Time Out review: One of Nagisha Oshima's most teasing and provocative collages, inspired by the
student riots of '68 and contemporary 'youth culture' generally. The
main thread running through it is the relationship between a passive and
vaguely effeminate young man and an aggressive and vaguely masculine
young woman. They meet when he steals books and she poses as a shop
assistant who catches him in the act; they spend the rest of the movie
trying to reach satisfactory orgasms with each other. Their route takes
them through a dizzying mixture of fact and fiction, from an encounter
with a real-life sexologist to involvement in a 'fringe' performance of a
neo-primitive kabuki show. The logical connections are there, but
they're deliberately submerged in a welter of contrasting moods, styles
and lines of thought. Tony Rayns
Close-Up Cinema introduction: At once the portrait of a landmark and a poem of liminality, Mekong Hotel
is, eponymously, set in a hotel overlooking the Mekong river. The river
lies on the border of Thailand and Laos, once flooded with civil war
refugees, now submerged in talks about floods in faraway Bangkok. In
bedrooms and terraces, the actors play out scenes from a script about
reincarnated lovers and folk spirits, reflecting on their worlds both as
characters and performers. The film blends fact and fiction, spirits
and humans, a flesh-eating ghost mother and her daughter, young lovers
and the river, gently weaving together waves of demolition, politics,
and a floating desire of the future. Using characters constantly
transitioning between the real and unreal, Apichatpong contemplatively
embraces the liminal, and reconstructs the dreams and darkest desires of
a civilisation and its future.
BFI introduction: Based on Lee Beo-seon’s short novel of the same name, Yu Hyun-mok’s film
follows a displaced North Korean family, settled in a Seoul slum, who
are struggling to survive in a world devoid of morality and meaning.
Influenced by both Italian neo-realism and German Expressionism, and
capturing the spirit of the era and the tragedy of the divided nation,
Aimless Bullet holds a similar iconic status in Korean cinema to Citizen
Kane in Hollywood.
This haunting Claude Chabrol picture screens in the Claude Chabrol season at the Cine Lumiere. The film also screens on November 24th and December 13th. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Arguably the best as well as the most disturbing movie
Claude Chabrol has made to date, this unjustly neglected 1960 feature,
his fourth, focuses on the everyday lives and ultimate fates of four
young women (Bernadette Lafont, Stephane Audran, Clotilde Joano, and
Lucile Saint-Simon) working at an appliance store in Paris and longing
for better things. Ruthlessly unsentimental yet powerfully
compassionate, it shows Chabrol at his most formally inventive, and it
exerted a pronounced influence on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz two decades later. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: A middle-class office worker takes a trip back to his rural hometown, where memories of his troubled past and an intimate encounter with a local schoolteacher stir up complex feelings. Kim Soo-yong’s magnum opus, Mist employs atmospheric cinematography to create a melancholy mood, while the natural chemistry between Shin Seong-il and Yoon Jeong-hee, who is best known internationally for her work in Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, heightens the drama’s emotional heft.
This film is part of the Al Pacino season at the Garden Cinema, and is also screening on Tuesday December 3rd. Full details here.
Time Out review: There's an obvious point of comparison here with imperial Rome's taste for recreational carnage and brutality, which is why Stone includes a lengthy clip from Ben-Hur in this gargantuan, gung-ho American footballfest. Also included: colour filters and transitions, split-screens, freeze frames, pictures-in-pictures, assorted film and video stocks, helicopter shots, cornball weather imagery, histrionic sound effects, HipHop, heavy metal, drugs, sex, gyrating cheerleaders, colliding jocks, onfield set-pieces, off field set-tos, an encyclopaedic deployment of genre stereotypes, and stars stars stars. You may, of course, take this as a recommendation. Supercilious Europeans who insist that Americans possess no sense of irony have spent too much time in the company of Oliver Stone films. Agreed, the director has other qualities: few film-makers could hope to martial this much information into two and a half hours (fewer would try), and his flair for representational overload in itself must make Stone one of the outstanding chroniclers of American cultural decadence. Whether simply parroting the world around him makes the resulting work any good, or enjoyable, is another matter. This one's a meathead burlesque.Nicholas Barber
BFI introduction: A border incident leaves North and South Korean soldiers wounded or
dead, prompting an investigation by a neutral officer. Based on Park
Sang-yeon’s novel DMZ and masterfully directed by Park Chan-wook, the
film alternates between light, airy flashbacks and heavy, claustrophobic
investigation scenes. Song Kang-ho and Lee Byung-hun are superb and the
film is now ranked as an essential entry in New Korean Cinema. Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Geena Davis and her director-husband, Renny Harlin, crawled out from under the rubble of Cutthroat Island,
which at the time was reported to be the costliest flop in Hollywood
history, to make an even nastier action thriller, about a housewife with
amnesia who discovers she’s actually a trained government assassin (and
apparently takes her orders directly from La femme Nikita). Frankly, if I had to see either Harlin-Davis movie again, I’d opt for the klutzy unpleasantness of Cutthroat Island
over the efficient if equally stupid unpleasantness of this 1996
release, with its protracted torture sequences and its overall
celebration of pain and injury (“You’re gonna die screaming, and I’m
gonna watch”). Still, if you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Geena
Davis say “Suck my dick,” New Line probably deserves your money. Jonathan Rosenbaum
