Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 350: Tue Dec 24

It's A Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.30pm

Christmas Eve and It’s A Wonderful Life on 35mm 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 (of screenings from 35mm and digital).

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 2024 — Day 349: Mon Dec 23

Memento Mori (Kim Tae-yong/Min Kyu-dong, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm

This 4K presentation is part of the Golden Age of Korean Films season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
When Park Ki-Hyung declined to make a sequel to his surprise hit Whispering Corridors, producer Oh had the smart idea of offering the challenge to two recent graduates from the Korean Film Academy who had already collaborated on the excellent shorts Seventeen and Pale Blue Dot. They came up with a very different take on a haunting in a high school for girls: a convoluted tale of teenage lesbian feelings, telepathy, sexual rivalry, spirit possession and unwanted pregnancy. Intricately structured and made with great technical brio, the film falters in its final reel in which the entire school is terrorised by the spirit of a wronged girl driven to suicide. But when it forgets about grandstanding and concentrates on the intimate feelings of its protagonists, it's quite something.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.