This 16mm presentation in the Never on Sunday season at Close-Up Cinema is introduced by strand curator Ehsan Khoshbakht
Close-Up Cinema introduction: Hester (Vivien Leigh), a middle-aged woman's suicide attempt at the
beginning of the story sparks off two flashbacks, one from the point of
view of the upper-class husband she has abandoned and the other from the
view of the younger, capricious ex-RAF pilot for whom she has left her
husband. Back to the present, the film revolves around her desperate
attempt to win back her lover, only to realise she is yearning for
something she can’t have. Adapted from a play of the same name by
Terence Rattigan who also wrote the script under director Anatole
Litvak’s supervision, Litvak conveys a stifling world of failed dreams
(a doctor who has turned bookie, a jobless and meddlesome actress) with
an emotional impact somehow stronger than Terence Davies’s 2011 version.
Litvak shows unconstrained impulses without making them look pathetic.
There's no malice of intent in the way characters hurt each other, but
things always fall in the wrong places. When hope wanes, the dust of
memories obscures it beyond recognition. There’s a profound sadness to
the sense of love ebbing away, scene after scene. Ehsan Khoshbakht
BFI introduction: Set on a secluded island, Boom introduced a new, minimal ‘music box’
sound that composer John Barry frequently used in the years immediately before his
move to the US. The powerhouse combination of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at their
most florid propels Joseph Losey’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Wonderfully camp, it bombed in
1968. But time has been kind to it. And Noël Coward has a star turn as
Bill Ridgeway, ‘the witch of Capri’. Indeed. dubbed ‘The Angel of Death’, Burton’s wandering-poet-cum-gigolo washes
up on the isolated Sardinian isle of Taylor’s ailing widow, in this
visually stunning, alcohol-drenched adaptation. Compellingly miscast, the pair face off in the sort of
unhinged register best relished with an enthusiastic audience. Devoted
fans include John Waters, who opined, ‘If you don’t like this film, I
hate you’.
This film, being shown from 35mm and 70mm, is on an extended run at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader review: On a visual level, Interstellar is an exceptionally well-crafted
Hollywood entertainment. Director Christopher Nolan, art director Dean
Wolcott, and their effects artists render the imaginary settings in
stunning detail. The film is rife with brilliant imagery: a horizon of
frozen clouds, an ocean wave as tall as a skyscraper, the flashing
interior of a wormhole through which the principal characters fly their
spacecraft. The most striking thing about these images is that we’re
rarely encouraged to ooh and aah over them; unlike most ambitious space
operas since 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), Interstellar
inspires not wonder but a cool contemplation. Nolan and his brother
Jonathan, who cowrote the script, advance a hard-science perspective,
incorporating such concepts as the theory of relativity and placing
dramatic emphasis on research and problem solving. Ben Sachs
This film screens at JW3 Cinema from December 21st to 25th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Billy
Wilder's searing, funny, morbid look at the real tinsel beneath the
phony tinsel (1950). Aging silent-movie vamp Gloria Swanson takes up
with William Holden, a two-bit screenwriter on the make, and virtually
holds him captive in her Hollywood gothic mansion. Erich von Stroheim,
once her director, now her butler, is the other figure in this
menage-a-weird. A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder's better
efforts. Dan Druker
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.
Guardian review (full five-star write-up here): Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are renowned for small-screen comic
masterpieces such as Porridge and The Likely Lads, but in 1971 they
scripted the deadly serious and horribly gripping London crime picture
Villain,. It’s an extremely lairy and tasty piece of work in which Richard Burton gave one of his best, most lip-smackingly gruesome performances: this film’s easily as good as the far better known Get Carter with Michael Caine, released that same year. Peter Bradshaw
Time Out review: A companion piece to the William Dieterle/David O. Selznick Love Letters, also
starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten; but where the earlier film remained rooted in
superior romantic hokum, this one takes wing into genuine romantic
fantasy through its tale of a love that transcends space and time as
Cotten's struggling artist meets, falls in love with, and is inspired by
a strangely ethereal girl (Jones) whom he eventually realises is the
spirit of a woman long dead. Direction and performances are superb
throughout, but the real star is Joseph August's camera, which conjures
pure magic out of the couple's tender odyssey, from the gravely
quizzical charm of their first encounter in snowy Central Park (when she
is still a little girl, strangely dressed in clothes of bygone days)
through to the awesome storm at sea that supernaturally heralds their
final parting. Buñuel saw it and of course approved: 'It opened up a big
window for me'. Tom Milne
This 35mm screening of this superb Billy Wilder film is part of the 'David Lynch Stole Christmas' season at Curzon cinemas. Full details here.
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’.
BFI introduction: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s children inspired his acceptance of the role of
Special Ops’ Major Smith in this gripping comic-book caper. There is,
though, a brutality to Burton and Clint Eastwood’s action-hero antics as they
attempt to rescue, via jaw-dropping Austrian alpine stunts, an American
General held prisoner in a mountainous Nazi fortress. Eastwood was
reportedly happy to do the machine-gunning, wisely leaving the talking
to Burton.
Chicago Reader review: Everybody seems to hate this movie, and not without good reason. But
John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s shocker is a much
more interesting film than the original, and Boorman deserves credit for
trying out some new ideas, even if most of them backfire. Visually,
it’s fascinating—sort of a blend of Minnellian baroque and Buñuelian
absurdity—but the dialogue is childish, the story is incomprehensible,
and the metaphysics are ridiculous. Still, an audacious failure is
preferable to a chickenhearted success. More than worth a look, if only
out of curiosity. Dave Kehr
This screening, one of the final ones before Curzon Mayfair closes, is part of the 'David Lynch Stole Christmas' season at Curzon cinemas. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: If what you know about this exuberant, self-regarding movie comes from
its countless inferior imitations (from Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland
and The Pickle to Allen’s Stardust Memories to Fosse’s All That Jazz),
you owe it to yourself to see Federico Fellini’s exhilarating,
stocktaking original... It’s Fellini’s last black-and-white picture, and
conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he’s ever made —
certainly more fun than anything he’s made since. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film, a masterpiece by any standards, is also screening at BFI Southbank in the Melodrama season, on December 6th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A baroque masterpiece by Max Ophuls, his last film (1955) and his only
work in color and wide-screen. The producers were expecting a routine
melodrama with Martine Carol (a bland French star of the period); when
they saw what Ophuls had made—with its exquisite stylization, elaborate
flashbacks, and infinite subtlety—they cut it to ribbons. The film was
restored in the 60s and impressed some critics, including Andrew Sarris,
as "the greatest film ever made," and certainly this story of a
courtesan's life is among the most emotionally plangent, visually
ravishing works the cinema has to offer. With Peter Ustinov, Anton
Walbrook, Ivan Desny, and Oskar Werner. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: It is a costly affair. The American Dream is a
pact with the devil, and, of course, opportunity comes at a price. Time
and time again, sprawling American epics from The Godfather (1972) to There Will Be Blood (2007) have nailed in the same sinister motifs, so The Brutalist isn’t
necessarily digging up earth-shattering revelations. That said,
director Brady Corbet probes the foundation of the dream, particularly
how this idea is concretized in postwar America. And what’s truly
shocking about The Brutalist is not that it teaches us
something new, but that it presents an America we recognize—hollowed out
yet standing on the same eroded foundations. Its three-and-a-half-hour runtime is dedicated to an atmospheric
exploration of American life—family, legacy, success, you name it—rather
than anything concise. It does, however, set the tone immediately,
commencing with a disorienting, upside-down shot of Lady Liberty as
Adrien Brody’s László Tóth arrives in the United States from the ruins
of WWII. A Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor, Tóth arrives destitute.
He is only welcomed by his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola)—who had
Americanized not just his name but his business and his principles.
Given a second chance, Tóth is helped by Attila to secure a job
redesigning the library of Harrison Van Buren, a wealthy plutocrat
played with a nefarious edge by Guy Pearce. Van Buren is initially furious at the two men hired by his foolish
son, Harry (Joe Alwyn). However, after researching Tóth’s esteemed
European background, he has a change of heart. Van Buren proposes Tóth’s
deal with the devil: Tóth will design a monumental community center
featuring a church, library, gymnasium, and auditorium atop a hill in
Pennsylvania. This colossus costs Tóth everything as he battles for his art form
against every odd: a volatile capitalist, drug addiction, and the uphill
revival of his legacy. Like any quintessential American epic, the
relentless pursuit comes at a steep cost to family, unraveling as his
wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and orphaned niece, Zsófia (Raffey
Cassidy), finally set foot in America. The Brutalist is Corbet’s colossus: it’s a massive American
epic that damns the ground we stand on. Corbet achieves this without
leaning too heavily on his predecessors, instead forging a myth from the
bedrock of this country’s brutal psyche. Maxwell Raab
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 cinema, is also being shown on December 21st 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
This screening is part of the Travelling Shots season at Cine Lumiere and is shown again at the cinema on December 17th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Jean Renoir’s 1945 examination of dirt farmers in the American south is
probably his finest Hollywood film, which is to say a masterpiece. There
isn’t much of a story, but the film has a sense of people and place
that gives it a tremendous weight and authenticity. The visuals seem
sunbaked, blistering. Dave Kehr
Unavailable in any format in the UK Lost Reels are bringing this critically praised movie back to cinema audiences followed by an online
Q&A with writer/director Keith Gordon.
Time Out review: As the end of World War II approaches, a group of American soldiers
settle in a deserted house on the Franco-German border in order to
report on enemy movements. But their foe remains elusive, and after
making contact with these young, nervous men, the Germans prove
strangely unwilling to attack. Less war movie than psychological
thriller, writer/director Gordon's absorbing, stylised adaptation of
William Wharton's novel explores issues of faith and morality. The
performances are uniformly excellent as the film moves inexorably
towards bloody confrontation and spiritual reckoning. Collette Maude
BFI introduction: Gothic mansions, high octane murder, sexual intrigue and sibling envy
form a tumultuous whirlwind in Gavaldón’s breakout hit, a flamboyant
pre-cursor to the 1963 Bette Davis vehicle Dead Ringer. Assuming two
roles as the evil twin and her also-evil counterpart, The incandescent
Dolores Del Río brings both glamour and downtrodden resentment to the
story of a desperate manicurist who abandons her own life to assume that
of her sister.
Time Out review: This peculiar, funny addition to the already out-there cannibal
sub-genre is your basic black-comedy horror Western with metaphorical
overtones. Call it Dances with Werewolves. The year is 1847.
Fresh from the Mexican American war, Capt John Boyd (Guy Pearce) is
transferred to a remote, sparsely populated army fort in the high
Nevadas. Hot on his heels comes the stricken figure of a Scot, Colqhoun
(Robert Carlyle), with a cannibal tale to chill even the bravest of them.
Colqhoun escaped, hoping to save the last of the women, so Boyd and
Colonel Hart (JeffreyJones) lead a rescue party with Colqhoun as guide. What
they encounter is more terrifying than they ever imagined. Antonia Bird (Priest)
was the third director on what was evidently a troubled shoot, and it's
not a neat and tidy piece of work. But whoever wanted a neat, tidy
comic horror Western? Carlyle acts his socks off, Pearce endures against
terrible odds, and the action is confidently handled. As bizarre as its
Michael Nyman-Damon Albarn bluegrass score, this is a gourmet dish for midnight movie ghouls. Tom Charity
Time Out review: Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte) has a point to prove. Divorced with an eight-year-old daughter who wants as little to do with him as possible, he's the town cop, but generally considered either an irrelevance or an embarrassment. His drinking is getting worse and he's itching to square things with the old man, a bitter, abusive bully (James Coburn). Instead, he latches on to a fatal hunting incident to see if he can't sniff out a murderer. Like The Sweet Hereafter, also based on a Russell Banks novel and also shot by cameraman Paul Sarossy under a cold blanket of snow, Affliction puzzles over an accidental death, seeks to apportion blame, forlornly, only to skid off-track into unrelated sins of the fathers. Nolte is tremendous: poignantly floundering in his attempts to connect with his daughter and frequently flushed with anger, he's painfully aware that he's gotten a raw deal from life, while staying blind to the consolations offered by waitress Sissy Spacek. Coburn, meanwhile, snarls savagely and chews up the scenery like a shark; no subtlety here, you can taste the violence in his blood. The heaviness is a little stifling, but not inappropriate - Paul Schrader's American tragedy has a dull finality that is determinedly depressing. Tom Charity
This 35mm screening will be introduced by Sheldon Hall, Emeritus Fellow, Sheffield Hallam University.
Time Out preview: A splendidly overripe swashbuckler, with Tyrone Power as an adventurer who lends a sword to his old comrade Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar) when he is appointed governor of Jamaica, seconding his bid to rid the Caribbean of buccaneers, in the process wooing and winning O'Hara's feisty damsel in distress, daughter of the former governor (George Zucco). Sanders is the villain of the piece, one Captain Leech, an unreformed pirate with a brazen red hairpiece and the beard to go with it. Excitingly staged, boldly photographed in Technicolor, and boasting a flamboyant cast, this is a classic of its type. Tom Charity
Barbican introduction: Stripped of conventional narrative details, Joseph Losey's Figures in a Landscape has no backstory, no clear motivation, and no explanation for who’s chasing the convicts. The film plunges the viewer into a world defined by ambiguity and tension, creating a persistent atmosphere of dread and paranoia that transforms the cat-and-mouse pursuit into a haunting meditation on surveillance, power, and the fragile nature of human freedom under invisible control. Selected by North American artist Lucy Raven to accompany her exhibition Rounds, Losey’s portrayal of vast, impersonal landscapes, seen through the unblinking eye of the helicopter, offers a stark counterpoint to Raven’s own explorations of land, space, and the material scars left by extractive industry.
Screening on 35mm at Picturehouse Central, Quentin Tarantino’s revenge spectacular returns to the big screen as its auteur intended: with both chapters brought together as one film, alongside a never-before-seen animated sequence. Prepare for Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. The film also screens at Picturehouse Central on December 5th, 6th and 14th. Details here.
If “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” isn’t the greatest movie ever made, it’s certainly the most movie ever made, an exhilarating blend of Western, martial arts epic, and revenge thriller that’s also far more than the genre pastiche that description implies. While Tarantino riffs on and alludes to dozens — maybe hundreds — of movies ranging from the obvious Asian action and B-Western influences to totems of the New Hollywood like “The Last Picture Show” and Walter Hill’s “The Driver,” he’s not engaging in mere homage or imitation. He comes at the conventions and the archetypes from the inside out, investing characters and situations we’ve seen before (and plenty that we haven’t) with a critical eye and emotional depth that allows him to improve on virtually every film he’s referencing.
This screening is followed by Kevin Brownlow's 1975 feature Winstanley at 8.30pm. Followed by a live conversation between Brownlow and Stanley Schtinter.
Chicago Reader review: This speculative 1965 drama by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo
exemplifies English independent filmmaking at its most resourceful and
intransigent. Paralleling Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle,
which imagined what North America might have become had Hitler won, the
film portrays what England might have been like in 1944 had it been
invaded and occupied by Germany four years earlier. Fanatically
dedicated to period detail and refusing to fall back on stock footage,
Brownlow started the film in 1956, at age 18, some time before enlisting
military scholar Mollo as a full collaborator and a full decade before
the film was finally released. Their decision to use real English
fascists and proto-Nazis to express the views of their 1944 counterparts
on Jews and euthanasia led to the film’s most interesting sequence
being suppressed in the 60s, and it took Brownlow over 30 years to
regain the rights to the film so he could restore it. As narrative it
can be dry and unemphatic (most of the actors are nonprofessionals), but
as speculation it’s highly convincing and endlessly fascinating. The
beautiful black-and-white cinematography is by Peter Suschitzky, who
went on to work for John Boorman, Ken Russell, George Lucas, Tim Burton,
and David Cronenberg. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Barbican Cinema introduction: Lucy Raven introduces a double bill of films that
create a dialogue across decades – between materials and meaning,
monumental structures and the people who build them. In China Town (2009), Raven follows the
journey of copper from an open-pit mine in Nevada to China’s Three
Gorges Dam, revealing how landscapes are transformed, exploited,
repurposed and abandoned as global industries shift. Screened after is Opération Béton
(1955), an early industrial film by a young Jean-Luc Godard. While
working on the Grande Dixence dam, Godard documented its construction
and layered the footage with his own voiceover, offering a wry, personal
take on the labour behind the concrete. Here (and above) is an extract.
This is part of the Luc Moullet season at ICA and this screening will be followed by an online Q&A with Moullet, hosted by Sam Warren Miell, editor of Narrow Margin.
Full programme: Barres, (1983), 15 mins; Essai d’ouverture, (1988), 14 mins; Les Sièges de l’Alcazar, (1989), 54 mins.
ICA introduction: The 1980s saw Luc Moullet further his experiments with short subjects. Barres (1983) and Essai d’ouverture (1988),
two of Moullet’s most beloved shorts, are both structured around
increasingly absurd variations on a single scenario. The former is an
exhaustive account of “the sole sport of Parisians”: evading the
barriers on the Paris Métro. The latter, inspired by Moullet’s own
dyspraxia, depicts the filmmaker on a lifelong journey to open stiff
Coca-Cola bottletops.
In the featurette Les Sièges de l’Alcazar(1989), Moullet returns
to the passionate cinephilia of 1950s Paris. Guy (Olivier Maltinti), a
critic for Cahiers du cinéma, is covering a retrospective of the obscure
Italian filmmaker Vittorio Cottafavi at the run-down Alcazar cinema. As
he dutifully returns each day, he begins to suspect that Jeanne
(Jacqueline Moreau), a critic from the rival magazine Positif, is
following him. Alcazar is a loving send-up of the culture from which
Moullet emerged, and one of the finest films ever made about going to
the movies.
Cinema Museum introduction: An epitome of late 70s/80s domestic filmmaking, McVicar features
a popular musician/actor as a real-life British criminal in a film that
combines crime, prison drama, action, social realism and music. When
seen today it’s a curious hybrid and a work of two halves. The first
concerns McVicar’s incarceration, planning and escape from Durham
prison; the second his re-entry to life on the outside with his former
girlfriend and son and his eventual return to crime. The prison scenes
are effective with strong supporting performances from Adam Faith and
Steven Berkoff; on the outside, there are great cameos from Ian Hendry,
Georgina Hale and Billy Murray. Produced by The Who Films, Daltrey was a
driving force behind the project and contributes a strong lead
performance together with several music tracks which comprised a solo
album for him. Based on McVicar by Himself (by John McVicar)
it’s consistently involving, and director Tom Clegg helms the film with a
calm economy and competence. It’s a fascinating object of its time and a
quintessential wrap-up to our season of films celebrating this
distinctive British sub-genre.
Out of circulation for decades and celebrating its 45th anniversary this year, Lost Reels is excited to screen McVicar from a vintage 16mm print courtesy of The Cinema Museum.
This screening, part of the Melodrama season at BFI Southbank, will be introduced by Ellen E Jones, film and TV journalist and author of Screen Deep: How film and TV can solve racism and save the world.
Chicago Reader review: The first version (1934) of Fannie Hurst’s elaborate soap opera about a
working girl who promotes her maid’s pancake recipe into a fast-food
empire, and the trials and tribulations of the maid’s daughter, who
tries to pass for white. Douglas Sirk’s famous 1959 remake was pure
metaphysics; this version emphasizes the social content, particularly in
its Depression-era attention to class nuances. Director John Stahl was a
notable visual stylist (although this film contains few of his
characteristic flourishes) and was possessed of the prime asset of the
melodramatist, the ability to take his material seriously and make it
play. It seems racist now, of course, but it was earnest in its time. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation also screens on November 19th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: 'Japanese New Wave director Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 allegory on the
meaning of freedom and the discovery of identity. An office worker (Eiji
Okada) on an entomological holiday spends the night with a widow (Kyoko
Kishida), whose shack at the bottom of a sand pit becomes his prison.
Gradually he learns to love her and to help her in her endless task of
shoveling sand, which the local villagers use to protect themselves from
the elements. A bizarre film, distinguished not so much by Kobo Abe's
rather obvious screenplay as by Teshigahara's arresting visual style of
extreme depth of focus, immaculate detail, and graceful eroticism.' Dan Druker
Phoenix Cinema introduction to a special screening: This screening of Shadowlands,
directed by the legendary Richard Attenborough, will be followed by an exclusive
Q&A with his son, Michael Attenborough CBE, D.Litt. Michael will
share personal insights into his father’s creative process and
behind-the-scenes stories from Richard’s remarkable filmmaking career. Michael
Attenborough has been a distinguished theatre director for over 50
years. His career began as Associate Director at the Mercury Theatre
Colchester, followed by roles at the Leeds Playhouse and London’s Young
Vic Theatre. He went on to become Artistic Director of the Palace
Theatre Watford, and later the Hampstead Theatre — renowned for its
dedication to new writing. Michael then served 12 years as Principal
Associate Director and Executive Producer at the Royal Shakespeare
Company, where he remains an Honorary Associate Artist, before spending
11 years as Artistic Director of the acclaimed and award-winning Almeida
Theatre in London. His extensive freelance work includes acclaimed
productions for the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Tricycle, the
Globe and Chichester Festival Theatre, as well as international work in
Dublin, Edmonton, Toronto, Brisbane, Washington, and twice on Broadway. This
promises to be a fascinating afternoon celebrating both film and
theatre, offering a rare glimpse into the life and legacy of one of
Britain’s most celebrated filmmakers.
Chicago Reader review: Richard Attenborough has never been a very interesting director, but
working here with a fairly foolproof package—two terrific actors
(Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger) and an adaptation by author William
Nicholson of his highly successful BBC telefilm and stage play—he does a
respectable job (1993). Based on the real-life friendship and marriage
of New York City writer Joy Gresham (Winger) and Oxford writer and
professor C.S. Lewis (Hopkins), this is an understated love story shot
in ‘Scope by Roger Pratt that makes the most of its lead players and
lush English countryside, including the Oxford campus. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: Alexandre Bisson’s 1908 play, with its tragic anti-heroine and tale of
moral decline, has been revived and transformed across the decades.
Holly is a working-class girl who marries into wealth, only to find her
new surroundings isolated and suffocating. Her relationship with a local
hedonist prompts a downward spiral, with Holly quickly ejected by those
who never truly accepted her. For Lana Turner, it is the role she was
born to play. As the bored housewife-turned-fugitive who loses
everything, including her beloved son, she brings a fragility and
tenacity that elevates the emotional avalanche of this Technicolor
tragedy. Even Sirk must have been envious.
This screening is part of the Theo Angelopoulos season at the ICA. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Winner of the 1998 Palme d’Or at Cannes, this rambling but beautiful
feature by Theo Angelopoulos may seem like an anthology of 60s and 70s
European art cinema: family nostalgia from Bergman and seaside frolics
from Fellini; long, mesmerizing choreographed takes and camera movements
from Jancso and Tarkovsky; haunting expressionist moods and visions
from Antonioni. Yet it’s so stirring and flavorsome–far richer
emotionally and poetically than Woody Allen’s derivations–that I was
moved and captivated throughout its 132 minutes. Bruno Ganz is
commanding as a Greek writer who’s recently learned that he’s terminally
ill; the part was conceived for the late Marcello Mastroianni, yet Ganz
seems perfect for it (though he’s dubbed by a Greek actor, as
Mastroianni undoubtedly would have been). Brooding over the loss of his
seaside retreat and family home in Thessaloniki, the hero meets an
eight-year-old illegal alien from Albania (Achilleas Skevis) and spends
the day crisscrossing the past and visiting his familiar haunts,
sometimes in the flesh and sometimes in his imagination, and
Angelopoulos is masterful in orchestrating these lyrical and complex
encounters. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: This early sound film by Alfred Hitchcock (1930) finds him already
experimenting with interior monologues and distorted sound effects. The
story, of a stage actor (Herbert Marshall) who’s determined to prove a
young girl innocent of murder, is one of the first, tentative statements
of Hitchcock’s theme of obsessional love. Hitchcock was still marking
out his territory at this point, and the film is heavy and vague around
the edges. But it remains a crucial insight into the development of one
of the cinema’s greatest artists, and so, essential viewing. Dave Kehr
This is definitely one of the repertory film scene highlights of the year.
ICA Cinema introduction: This screening puts into practice a radical Godardian proposition: the screening of his Made in USA (1966) and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1966) as a single work, with their reels and narratives intertwined. Godard’s cinema was steeped in literature from the outset. One of his favourite modern authors was William Faulkner, whose work is a recurrent touchstone in his critical writings and films. He referenced Faulkner’s The Wild Palms prominently in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) and toyed in the 1960s with the idea of adapting it. He also nursed the dream of making a musical in the United States with Anna Karina, Gene Kelly and Faulkner himself, but the project foundered following the latter’s death in 1962. The Wild Palms famously comprises two distinct alternating narrative strands – a tragic love story (‘The Wild Palms’), and the tale of an unnamed convict (‘Old Man’) – that illuminate one another through counterpoint throughout. The novel had a significant impact on French cinema following its publication in France in 1952, Agnès Varda borrowing its experimental structure for her pioneering first feature, La Pointe Courte (1955). In 1967, having set aside the idea of adapting The Wild Palms, Godard proposed instead projecting his two very different most recent features, which he had shot back-to-back for separate producers, as an integrated work. As Richard Roud reported, what Godard wanted was to have them shown together, ‘first a reel of Made in USA, then a reel of Two or Three Things I Know About Her, then a reel of Made in USA, etc., just as Faulkner mixed two stories in The Wild Palms. That would be his adaptation of the novel.’ This principle of weaving together and alternating between large self-contained blocks deeply influenced Godard’s practice in this period, notably in his emblematically titled One Plus One (1968) and unfinished projects such as Cub(us)a and One American Movie. It also fed into his experimentation with the juxtaposition of film reels in his film history lectures in Montreal in 1978 and Rotterdam in 1980–81. This special screening, which inaugurates a programme of films devoted to Godard’s unmade and abandoned projects, is the first time that his proposed ‘adaptation’ of The Wild Palms has been enacted rather than simply imagined. This screening will be introduced by Michael Witt.
A hypnotic, bittersweet ode to boyhood, cinemagoing, postwar working-class family life, Catholicism and glacial erosion,The Long Day Closesfollows
Bud, a lonely young boy growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s. Told as a
trance of memories and moments, the film’s particular brand of sadness,
beauty, breathtaking rhythm and atmospheric cinematography is
emblematic of why writer-director Terence Davies is one of the great
artists of contemporary British cinema.
Chicago Reader review: The
1992 conclusion of Terence Davies's second autobiographical trilogy may
not achieve the sublime heights of parts one and two (which comprised
1988'sDistant Voices, Still Lives), but it's still a
powerful film, possibly even a great one—the sort of work that can
renew one's faith in movies. Part three chronicles his life in
working-class Liverpool between the ages of 7 and 11, a period he
compresses into the years 1955 and 1956, but Davies focuses less on plot
or memory as they're usually understood than on the memory of emotions
and subjective consciousness. Music, lighting, elaborate camera
movements, and the sound tracks of other films are among the tools he
uses in relation to the basic settings of home, street, school, church,
pub, and movie theater. Davies emphasizes the continuities and
discontinuities between these places and the emotions they evoke,
creating a consistent sense of religious illumination and
transfiguration. What he does with the strains of "Tammy" in one
climactic sequence and with the drift of moving clouds in another are
alone worth the price of admission. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of the Theo Angelopoulos season at the ICA. Details here.
Time Out preview: When film-maker A... (Harvey Keitel) returns, after 35 years in the US, to his
hometown in Greece for a retrospective of his work, he takes the
opportunity to pursue an obsession: to track down the missing three
reels of the first film footage ever shot (by the Manakia brothers) in
the Balkans. His odyssey, from Ptolemais through Albania, Macedonia,
Bulgaria and Romania, to Belgrade and Sarajevo, allows for a meditation
on changing borders, national identity, and the relationship of film to
historical and political reality. Angelopoulos' stately epic is hugely
ambitious, and despite some art movie clichés - A's encounters with
various women, each played by the same actress - and some clumsiness in
the English dialogue, by and large it succeeds. Constructed from long
elegant takes, and moving fluidly between naturalism and tableaux-like
theatricality, it's a mesmerising work of arresting beauty and
impressive emotional power. Geoff Andrew
This film is part of the Made in Prague festival. Details here.
Blueprint review: When the director Juraj Herz gave us the soot-tinged, black and white bite of The Cremator
audiences would likely have been surprised to hear he’d wanted to shoot
the film in colour. He’d imagined a world rendered all the more drab
and grey by picking out a few highlight colours – notably blood red.
Cinematographer, Stanislav Milota felt it wouldn’t work and they stuck
with black and white. Oil Lamps vindicates Herz’s earlier idea. The film is the story of Štěpa Kiliánová (Iva Janžurová), an
independent and admirably fierce young woman trapped both by the slow
birth of the twentieth century and the parochial town in which she
lives. She wants love and marriage but nobody finds her remotely
suitable for either. For all the gaudy frills of decadence she surrounds
herself with – she’s never happier than when carousing at the theatre –
her world is misery and fin de siècle rot. Knowing that she’s on a path
to regret, she pins her hopes on marriage to her cousin, ex-soldier,
Pavel Malina (Petr Čepek). She’s won over as he teaches her to shoot,
lured by the violence and illusion of dignity a soldier’s uniform can
possess… as long as it stays on the peg. Malina’s brother and father are all for the idea, Kiliánová’s dowry
will save their beleaguered farm. Kiliánová’s father, meanwhile would
“rather stuff every penny into a dead dog’s arse.” Soon she will hoist
her bridal veil, offering her lips to a man who cannot bring himself to
kiss them. A wedding party will elongate the night like a wake, loaded
down with mournful songs, shadows and the threat of worse to come. Every frame of Herz’s film is interlaced with soil and shit and
regret. A tragedy, draped in funereal blacks, inevitable, painful and
beautiful. It’s as lavish as a worm-food apple, as rich and opulent as a body dragged from the canal. Guy Adams
Presented in collaboration with Cici Peng and Sine Screen, this screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with the Japanese experimental director Kaori Oda. Details of the first full retrospective of her films at the ICA can be found here.
Screen Slate review: In the span of three features, Kaori Oda has established herself as
one of the foremost practitioners of the kind of immersive documentary
filmmaking pioneered, at least in part, by the Sensory Ethnography Lab,
with films like Sweetgrass and Leviathan. Oda’s Cenote
(2019) returns to an experimental mode, albeit with significantly
more formal variations. The documentary plunges into the deep, intricate
Mexican sinkholes that give it its name; cenotes were water sources for
the Mayans and were believed to act as conduits between the world and
the afterlife. Today, they still exert a pull on the tropical jungle
communities, especially physically. Because the pits possess strong,
unexpected currents, many people have fallen in and drowned,
accidentally or intentionally. Oda’s ultimate achievement is to situate
them in a real, tangible place, in a conception of culture that still
manages to accurately reflect the unique blend of happenstance,
tradition, and myth that form human experience. A uniformly, often
eerily beautiful film, Cenote understands that the meaning and
effect of a place is often immeasurably influenced by the point of view:
a camera and light pointed there, a story told there. Ryan Swen
New Yorker review: Kinuyo Tanaka was at the forefront of Japanese cinema, deep into an acting career that started with silent films, when she became a director, creating masterworks that would take their place alongside those she appeared in. The 1955 drama Forever a Woman is one of the great movies about a writer. (It’s based on “The Eternal Breasts,” a biography of the real-life poet Fumiko Nakajo.) It stars Yumeji Tsukioka as Fumiko, an unhappily married mother of two young children in Sapporo, who writes poetry in her spare time. After her divorce, Fumiko becomes prolific, locally recognized, and then nationally admired—but her success coincides with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Tanaka films Fumiko’s mastectomy and its physical and emotional consequences with a sensitive yet jolting intimacy. The poet’s creative drive is inseparable from her pain, and her brazen romanticism in the face of death is expressed in moments of overwhelming candor and exquisite restraint alike. Tanaka’s direction is logical, tender, and heartbreaking, conveying worlds of passion in the averted gazes of hopeless love. Richard Brody
