Time Out review: A film noir from the Ealing funny man? But Alexander Mackendrick's
involvement with cosy British humour was always less innocent than it
looked: remember the anti-social wit of The Man in the White Suit, or
the cruel cynicism of The Ladykillers? Sweet Smell of Success
was the director's American debut, a rat trap of a film in which a
vicious NY gossip hustler (Tony Curtis) grovels for his 'Mr Big' (Burt Lancaster),
a monster newspaper columnist who is incestuously obsessed with
destroying his kid sister's romance... and a figure as evil and
memorable as Orson Welles in The Third Man or Robert Mitchum in The Night of
the Hunter. The dark streets gleam with the sweat of fear; Elmer
Bernstein's limpid jazz score (courtesy of Chico Hamilton) whispers
corruption in the Big City. The screen was rarely so dark or cruel.
Chris Auty
This is part of the 'Censored to Restored' season at BFI Southbank. The screening on July 7th will include an introduction.
Museum of Modern Art introduction: Banned in France for three decades, Paul Carpita’s 1955 feature Rendez-vous of the Docks
emerges both as a vital document of postwar French social consciousness
and a precious record of working-class life in midcentury Marseille.
Self-described as “a schoolteacher who knew how to use a camera,”
Carpita brought both artistic ambition and documentary rigor to this
politically charged narrative, in which a young couple searches for a
home against the background of Marseille’s dock workers’ strikes of the
early 1950s. The film captures a critical moment when workers,
discovering they were loading munitions by day while secretly unloading
soldiers’ coffins by night, went on strike in protest of France’s
Indochina War.
This 16mm screening is part of the ICA's Celluloid on Sunday festival. Details here.
Time Out review: Mark Rappaport's remarkable documentary works through Seberg's life, from her
Midwest school days, through her much-publicised debut in Preminger's Saint Joan and her success in A Bout de Souffle,
to her nightmarish marriage to Romain Gary, her involvement with the
Black Panthers, and her eventual suicide in 1979. But it also uses the
actress's experiences as a starting point for the exploration of an
array of subjects. Hurt's Seberg is impressive as she reminisces
straight to camera from beyond the grave, but what makes the film so
extraordinary is the way Rappaport weaves illuminating connections
between the threads of his densely informative thesis. This is
intertextuality at its most accessible, provocative and surprising: a
scene in Saint Joan, for example, leads to observations on Jane Fonda that take in Klute,
Vadim, Vietnam, Josh Logan, workout tapes, Ted Turner, Lev Kuleshov and
the opportunities afforded ageing actresses - even as Fonda is rhymed
with Falconetti, Vanessa Redgrave and Seberg herself. Entertaining,
moving, intellectually sharp and imaginatively brilliant. Geoff Andrew
Sight & Sound review: This is the
first feature in Africa to be directed by a woman. Set in 1961, at the
start of the Angolan War of Independence, and shot in Congo, the film
tracks the resistance efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation
of Angola (MPLA), a militant group whose
leader Mário Pinto de Andrade was also Maldoror’s husband. In part, it’s
about the arrest and brutal torture of a tractor driver, Domingos
Xavier, who lives in a working-class district of the capital city Luanda
and harbours seditious beliefs such as, “There are no whites, no
mulattos, no blacks. There’s only the poor and the rich.” She
gives equal importance to his wife Maria who, carrying along her infant
child, sets out to find him, going from one prison to another,
confronting indifference, lechery, dead ends. In her suffering, she
becomes a kind of Mother Angola. Her doggedness and her heartache are
portrayed with wounding acuity and illuminate Maldoror’s much-quoted
belief that “African women must be everywhere. They must be in the
images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every
stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about
their problems.” Yet
Maria’s plight is not solely African or colonial; a dogged seeker of
justice, she resembles the desperate women in Zhao Liang’s documentary
Petition (2009). For the director, she evokes “the alone-ness of a woman
and the time it takes to trudge… It could be any woman, in any country,
who takes off to find her husband.” Sukhdev Sandhu
This 16mm presentation by those great people at Cine-Real film club is
also being screened on Sunday July 20th. Full details here.
Time Out review: One of Bergman's warmest, and therefore finest films, this concerns an
elderly academic - grouchy, introverted, dried up emotionally - who
makes a journey to collect a university award, and en route
relives his past by means of dreams, imagination, and encounters with
others. It's an occasionally over-symbolic work (most notably in the
opening nightmare sequence), but it's filled with richly observed
characters and a real feeling for the joys of nature and youth. And
Sjöström - himself a celebrated director, best known for his silent work
(which included the Hollywood masterpiece The Wind) - gives an
astonishingly moving performance as the aged professor. As Bergman
himself wrote of his performance in the closing moments: 'His face shone
with secretive light, as if reflected from another reality...It was
like a miracle'. Geoff Andrew
This extraordinary film is part of the Barbican Cinema's Queer 70s season. Details here.
Time Out review: Not exactly typical of the British independent cinema, this not only
tackles an avowedly 'difficult' subject (the relationship between sex
and power, and the destructive force of unrequited passion), but does so
within two equally 'difficult' frameworks: that of exclusively male
sexuality, and that of the Catholic legend of the martyred saint, set
nearly 1,700 years ago. Writer/director Derek Jarman sees Sebastian as a
common Roman soldier, exiled to the back of beyond with a small platoon
of bored colleagues, who gets selfishly absorbed in his own mysticism
and then picked on by his emotionally crippled captain. It's filmed
naturalistically, to the extent that the dialogue is in barracks-room
Latin, and carries an extraordinary charge of conviction in the staging
and acting; it falters only in the slightly awkward elements of parody
and pastiche. One of a kind, it's compulsively interesting on many
levels.
Tony Rayns
Screen Slate review: Anthony
Franciosa plays Peter Neal, an American mystery writer who
travels to Rome in promotion of his latest novel, but must confront the
influence his lurid fiction has when a black-gloved murderer begins
mutilating people. Genre film actor John Saxon (Enter the Dragon, Black
Christmas) and frequent Dario Argento collaborator (and former spouse)
Daria Nicolodi (Deep Red, Phenomena, Opera)
also star as Neal's agent and assistant who become embroiled in the
investigation — Nicolodi in particular gives an impressive performance
(with an even more impressive scream) that elevates an admittedly thin
role. Tenebrae is often regarded as a giallo comeback for the
filmmaker, a return to the subgenre he helped define, following his
foray into supernatural horror with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980).
However, it is also a self-reflexive examination of his own career, and
the accusations of misogyny often directed at him. Argento was never
one to conceal his more perverse preoccupations; if there is an
opportunity to capture the strangling of a beautiful woman on screen, he
will not only take it but provide the grip of his own hand in front of
the camera. At the same time, the technical focus in Tenebrae —
from rather majestic (and now infamous) crane shots to the general
construction of the plot itself (essentially a way to move from one
intricate and gorgeous murder set-piece to another) feels like an
acknowledgment of responsibility: like pulling back the curtain on the
machinations in place that not only punish women, but turn such
punishment into spectacle. Tenebrae is essential Argento: perhaps the
auteur's clearest
articulation of his own psychological and stylistic obsessions, but
with a more critical eye. We long to see men who dehumanize and kill
women eventually fall on the sword themselves. In Argento's world those
glimmers of hope are there if you look: the impalement will just most
likely involve a stiletto. Stephanie Monahan
Time Out review: With their hangdog mugs now nestled
against the bosom of mainstream
Hollywood, indie-crossover darlings the Coen brothers have concocted
another of their Hawkesian screwball quickies in which an ensemble of
beautiful A-listers merrily play the fool. Already a hit in the US,
‘Burn After Reading’ is a snappy, confident, lightly satirical and
stridently mischievous entertainment that arrives on the back of their
sand-blasted lament for times past, ‘No Country for Old Men’. But
while the tenor may have changed, the madcap template is very much in
place. The rub: a disc containing the memoirs of recently dismissed,
mid-level CIA operative Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich at his
high-falutin, foul-mouthed best) floats into the hands of two gormless
gym employees-turned-recreational grifters, plastic surgery-obsessed
singleton Linda (Frances McDormand) and soft liberal airhead Chad (Brad
Pitt,
right). After an inevitably calamitous attempt at bribery (‘We’ve got
your secret shit!’), the pair find themselves cack-handedly doorstepping
the Russian embassy in search of a swifter pay-off. Fold into that a
parallel story where George Clooney’s rubber-faced philanderer, Harry,
tries to juggle semi-serious flings with Linda and Osbourne’s
flamed-haired ex, Katie (Tilda Swinton).
Considering
the Coens’ past form with intricately plotted farces (‘Raising
Arizona’, ‘Fargo’, ‘The Big Lebowski’), this does feel effortless to the
point that you might imagine they could have scribbled it on the back
of a napkin between breakfast and brunch. Yet, beneath its deadpan
façade, nimble direction and robust photography (care of Emmanuel
Lubezki) lies a cheerily nihilistic (misanthropic even?) work which
paints its characters as preening, self-obsessed, idiot savants who wear
stupid clothes, habitually lie, misuse the internet for dating and
wouldn’t know a conscience from a Coke bottle. Even at their lowest ebb
(2004’s ‘The Ladykillers’) the brothers’ palpable affection for old
movies injected some humanity into the overly sardonic proceedings; but
here, even the movies are bad, as seen in their snarkily anodyne
film-within-a-film, ‘Coming Up Daisy’. The audience are, in the
end, placed in the boots of JK Simmons’s flummoxed CIA chief who, having
been nervously informed of the preceding antics, finds it tough to
fathom how these people could have been so damn stupid. It’s possibly
the Coens’ least romantic film, which makes the cynical tone a tough
pill to swallow, but chances are that you’ll be too busy hooting and
chuckling idiotically to notice. David Jenkins
This screening is part of the Restored strand at BFI Southbank.
Chicago Reader review: Recruited as MGM’s production chief in 1948, Dore Schary tried to inject
the sluggish fantasy factory with a dose of social realism, and one of
the first products was this taut sun-washed noir (1949) directed by Fred
Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here to Eternity). Robert Ryan is an
avenging angel in raincoat and fedora, limping inexorably toward
respected California businessman Van Heflin to punish him for his
treachery in a German prison camp during the war. Aiding the
guilt-ridden traitor are the late Janet Leigh as his flinty wife and
Mary Astor as a jaded hooker, both excellent. The studio’s polished
production works against the moral rot at the heart of the story, but a
strong script by Robert L. Richards (Winchester ’73) cuts deep into the
tortured ethics of the two former POWs. J R Jones
Chicago Reader review: Peter Falk as the manager of two female wrestlers, winningly played by
Vicki Frederick and Laurene Landon. The subject seems perfect for
director Robert Aldrich, with its themes of feminine violence (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) and existential conflict (Emperor of the North),
yet his treatment isn’t particularly personal in this 1981 project,
which turned out to be his last film. It succeeds, however, as
adequately engrossing entertainment, and it has a surprisingly pleasant,
high-minded spirit: Aldrich refuses to treat the women as freaks, but
grants them the same opportunities for self-definition through physical
struggle as his male heroes. With superbly sharp, dark cinematography by
Joseph Biroc. Dave Kehr
Time Out review:Filmed
on location in the countryside of Norfolk and Suffolk on a modest
budget, this portrait of backwoods violence - set in 1645, it deals with
the infamous witchhunter Matthew Hopkins, and the barbarities he
practised during the turmoils of the Civil War - remains one of the most
personal and mature statements in the history of British cinema. In the
hands of the late Michael Reeves (this
was his last film, made at the age of 23), a fairly ordinary but
interestingly researched novel by Ronald Bassett, with a lot of phony
Freudian motivation, is transformed into a highly ornate, evocative, and
poetic study of violence, where the political disorganisation and
confusion of the war is mirrored by the chaos and superstition in men's
minds. The performances are generally excellent, and no film before or
since has used the British countryside in quite the same way. David Pirie Here (and above) is the trailer.
You can read critic Robin Wood's famous 1970 Movie article on director Michael Reeves here.
Code Unknown is
one of the richest achievements of modern European art cinema. Director
Michael Haneke places his typically forensic gaze on modern western
society and finds it wanting but the way he does so is cinematically
innovative. Implicating the audience and challenging the expectations of
the viewer is the aim here and the director succeeds, leaving mysteries
which will have filmgoers arguing long after they have left the cinema. Chicago Reader review: 'Aptly
subtitled “Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys,” the best feature to
date by Austrian director Michael Haneke (2000, 117 min.) is a
procession of long virtuoso takes that typically begin and end in the
middle of actions or sentences, constituting not only an interactive
jigsaw puzzle but a thrilling narrative experiment. The second episode
is a nine-minute street scene involving an altercation between an
actress (Juliette Binoche), her boyfriend's younger brother, an African
music teacher who works with deaf-mute students, and a woman beggar from
Romania; the other episodes effect a kind of narrative dispersal of
these characters and some of their relatives across time and space. I
couldn't always get what was happening, but I was never bored, and the
questions raised reflect the mysteries of everyday life. The title
refers to the pass codes used to enter houses in Paris—a metaphor for
codes that might crack certain global and ethical issues.' Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: This
exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a swell
script by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry and my favorite Warren Oates
performance, looks even better now than it did in 1971, although it was
pretty interesting back then as well. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are
the drivers of a supercharged '55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a
new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the
cars they drive); they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the
east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically
distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird).
(GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new
passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer's novelNog.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract—it's unsettling but also beautiful. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: I wrongly assumed that this venerated 1969 film, a founding gesture of
the Iranian new wave, would be humanist and sentimental. In fact,
Dariush Mehrjui’s second feature, written with the late playwright
Gholam-Hossein Saedi and shot in stark black and white, is a cruel
allegory whose meanings are far from obvious. The owner (Ezzatolah
Entezami) of the only cow in a village that’s terrified of potential
invaders goes mad and comes to believe he’s a cow after the animal dies
for unexplained reasons during his brief absence from home. Ultimately
this is a film more about community and scapegoating than about aberrant
individuality—full of dark implications, powerfully acted, and graced
by a striking modernist score. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time out review: 'What would Jesus say?' demands the tapestry mounted over the shabby
rooming house bed which, as Jack Carter (Michael Caine) surmises upon his return
home from London, has 'seen some action in its time'. The question goes
unanswered. Christ has forsaken the grimy muteness of Newcastle, 1971,
just as surely as he was airlifted out of Rome in La Dolce Vita a
decade earlier - and though they share initials, Carter certainly won't
be filling his shoes. A dapper, domineering angel of vengeance, he
stands a head above his fellow hoods, but not apart from them. This is
movie modernism British-style. The occasional stylistic flourishes
suggest the imported influence of the New Wave, the brief bursts of sex,
violence and soundtrack funk offer a trendsetting '70s take on the
gangster movie. But its prime virtue now, in 2004, looks like its
depiction of a nation slowly made to face its own moral and physical
dilapidation, hope and glory gone way down and out. Like the train
journey opening the film, Mike Hodges' debut offers a tunnel vision of
this landscape. He shoots it cold, sparse and ambivalent, the terse,
gnomic plotting and dialogue doubtless contributing to the allure of
what might otherwise be a relatively plain genre movie. Refusing ever to
dwell, it cuts sharp rather than deep, but sharp enough.
Chicago Reader review: Though I liked his criticism for Cahiers du Cinema in the 60s, on the
basis of five of his early films I haven’t been a big fan of Andre
Techine. But this wonderful and masterful feature (1994), his 12th,
suggests that maybe he’d just been tooling up. It’s one of the best
movies from an excellent French television series of fiction features on
teenagers of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, and it’s the first to be
released in the U.S. If Techine’s French Provincial (1974) evoked in
some ways the Bertolucci of The Conformist, this account of kids living
in southwest France in 1962, toward the end of the Algerian war, has
some of the feeling, lyricism, and sweetness of Bertolucci’s Before the
Revolution–though it’s clearly the work of someone much older and wiser.
The main characters, all completing their baccalaureate exam at a
boarding school, include a boy struggling with his homosexual desire for
a close friend, an older student who’s a right-wing opponent of
Algerian nationalism, and a communist girl, the daughter of one of the
teachers, who befriends the homosexual and falls for the older student
in spite of their violent political differences. One remembers these
characters and others as vividly as old friends, and Techine’s handling
of pastoral settings is as exquisite as his feeling for period. Winner
of Cesar awards (the French equivalent of Oscars) for best picture,
director, screenplay, and “new female discovery” (Elodie Bouchez). With
Frederic Gorny, Gael Morel, Stephane Rideau, and Michele Moretti (who’s
best known for her work with Jacques Rivette). Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: Like Alex Cox’s previous films (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy),
this delirious 1987 fantasy about William Walker, the American who
ruled Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857, is all over the place and excessive,
but as a radical statement about the U.S.’s involvement in that country
it packs a very welcome wallop. The witty screenplay is by novelist Rudy
Wurlitzer (Nog, Slow Fade), whose previous screenwriting forays included Two-Lane Blacktop and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; Ed Harris plays the crazed Walker, Marlee Matlin (Children of a Lesser God)
is his deaf-mute fiancee, and Peter Boyle is Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Deliberate and surreal anachronisms plant the action in a historical
version of the present, and David Bridges’s cinematography, combined
with a liberal use of slow motion, creates a lyrical depiction of
carnage and devastation. Significantly, most of the film was shot in
Nicaragua, with the cooperation and advice (but without the veto power)
of the Sandinista government, and Edward R. Pressman—whose previous
credits include Badlands and True Stories—was executive
producer. One can certainly quarrel with some aspects of the film’s
treatment of history, but with political cowardice in commercial
filmmaking so prevalent, one can only admire this movie’s gusto in
calling a spade a spade, and the exhilaration of its anger and wit. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: All those sacrifices to the
cinema gods must have worked, because after a yearlong worldwide search,
the final cut of ‘The Wicker Man’ has been found. The thrill of seeing
the 1973 cult classic on the big screen is reason enough to drop
everything and go – but doubly so with this longer version, which deeply
enhances the film’s eerie pagan weirdness. That creepiness is what made distributors delete some of the film’s
most evocative scenes: a sermon at the start, the ‘Gently Johnny’ song
segment with snail-on-snail action and more of Christopher Lee’s
splendid Lord Summerisle. The print quality is variable and much of the ‘new’ material has
appeared on DVDs previously. Whole websites have been dedicated to
spotting the differences, so fans will keep debating about which version
is ‘definitive’. What an incredible treat, though, to see it all in one
place, in the cinema, as director Robin Hardy intended. ‘The Wicker
Man’, as a British classic, has it all: ‘Carry On’-style gags, a
haunting folk soundtrack, spectacular Scottish landscapes, Edward
Woodward’s stiff-upper-lip sense of duty, a critique of organised
religion and that still-harrowing ending. Kathryn Bromwich
Chicago Reader review: The latest by Europe’s philosopher of violence, Michael Haneke, whose Benny’s Video
(1992) was a mixed blessing at best. If you’re the sort of person who
complains about violence in movies, don’t even think about seeing this;
otherwise you might be intrigued by this alternately cool and horrifying
meditation on pain and human nastiness in which a middle-class Austrian
family on holiday is set upon by two sadists who apparently have
nothing better to do than torture them. Haneke has put a cerebral spin
on the whole business, issuing a manifesto to the press at Cannes, where
the film was in competition. His purpose, he says, is to show violence
as something visceral and revolting as a counter to the cartoon carnage
of a Schwarzenegger film. Near the end of Funny Games Haneke
begins playing with the audience as Brecht might, foregrounding its role
in the whole voyeuristic process. A brilliant yet chilling theoretical
study. Peter Brunette
This screening is part of the Censored to Restored season (details here) at BFI and will be preceded by an extended season intro by season curator Giulia Saccogna.
This silent film classic will have a live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.
BFI introduction: An incompetent employee is fired and searches desperately for a
‘grandmother’ – an influential benefactor – to help him get his job
back. While his wife is busy in a frenzy of bourgeois living, the man’s
quest reveals a Kafkaesque state corporation run by lazy bureaucrats.
This anarchic political satire from Georgia is a dizzyingly entertaining
feature debut, displaying a virtuoso use of experimental techniques.
For almost five decades it was banned domestically for its attack on
corruption and scathing critique of bureaucracy.
Here (and above) is a short montaage from the film.
This 35mm presentation also screens on July 11th at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A 1955 feature by Akira Kurosawa and one of his most underrated,
starring Toshiro Mifune as an aging patriarch who, frightened by the
prospect of a nuclear war, decides to sell his family business and move
to a farm in Brazil. Along with Kurosawa’s sublime Rhapsody in August,
which also deals with the atomic bomb, this was probably the most
poorly received work of his entire career, but I persist in finding it
among the most memorable: eerie, troubling, and haunting. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This excellent melodrama was one of my five picks for the Guardian of underrated
Alfred Hitchcock
films when the BFI did a complete retrospective devoted to the director. not to be missed this summer. You can read my thoughts on the
quintet of movies via the web here and this is what I had to say about The Paradine Case: Hitchcock's rough-cut of The Paradine Case, with which producer David Selznick tinkered
extensively in post-production, was lost in a flood in the 1980s.
That's a shame as its restoration would surely have revived interest in a
film now almost wholly neglected but which has at its core themes the
director was to return to with such devastating effect in Vertigo. In no
other Hitchcock film, bar that 1958 masterpiece, is the central male
character so undermined as he is here, with Gregory Peck as a barrister
who ends up destroying the object of his obsession, the woman he is
supposed to be defending on a charge of murder. Peck's wife's plea to
him to win the case, despite her knowledge of his love for her rival,
and her protestation that "if she dies you are lost to me forever"
undercuts the notional happy ending here in a film darkened even more by
Charles Laughton's scene-stealing role as the grotesque judge, Lord
Horfield.
Slant review: It's easy for a cinephile or film critic to recognize the accomplished
audacity of, say, the shower scene from Psycho. But The Paradine Case
revels in the quiet brilliance that defines Hitchcock's cinema: its
geometrically fluid rendering of power. The film's first act might've
been regarded as exposition by a conventional director and tossed off in
a series of over-the-shoulder shots that would live or die by the
actors' performances. For Hitchcock, such scenes are at the core of his
very subject, as The Paradine Case is a study of neurosis, in which a
murder trial comes to stand as a pretense for influential men and women
to argue their statuses vis-à-vis each other. Hitchcock utilizes faces
as pivot points throughout The Paradine Case, most famously when a
witness's entrance into a courtroom is staged entirely from behind a
close-up of Paradine's head. This witness will prove to have a great
deal of meaning to Paradine, which is clouded in a fog of class, sexual
instinct, and romantic longing. The film is concerned with how class
dwarfs our sexuality, conditioning men to resent an inability to procure
women to whom they feel their station entitles them. This stifled
hunger runs throughout Hitchcock's filmography as his master theme: In
his comedies and light thrillers, sex and its corresponding acceptance
are freely experienced by goodlooking and charismatic people; in his
existential thrillers, these are forbidden fruits to the emasculated
male protagonists. In The Paradine Case, men and women talk almost
entirely of sex via legal euphemisms-conversations which Hitchcock
frames in tableaux that evoke the ebb and flow of one-upmanship,
dramatizing a series of checks and checkmates as women grapple for the
agency that men cruelly deny them. Chuck Bowen (full review here).
Inaugurating a cycle of cinema politico in Italy, Petri's
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
is a dark and satirical political thriller set during a time of
internal political disturbance, where a psychopathic Roman police
inspector (Gian Maria Volonté) cracks down with relish on the political
dissidents of the day. After slashing the throat of his masochistic
mistress (Florinda
Bolkan), the inspector is perversely put in charge of the investigation.
With sadistic pleasure, he plants clues that implicate himself and then
craftily diffuses them, ostensibly to prove his invincibility. As
director Petri's split-second edits rocket back and forth between
flashback and detection, this film is a biting critique of Italian
police methods and authoritarian repression, a psychological study of a
budding crypto-fascist and a probing who-dunnit. The iciest of film
noirs, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion won the Academy Award
for Best Foreign Language Film of 1970.
Chicago Reader review: One of the most jarringly original independent films of the
1990s, Nina Menkes’ lost underground classic reemerges in a gorgeous new
restoration. In a neon-soaked dream vision of Las Vegas, a disaffected
blackjack dealer (played by the director’s sister Tinka Menkes) drifts through
a series of encounters alternately mundane, surreal, and menacing, while death
and violence hover ever-present in the margins. Awash in lush, hallucinatory
images, Queen of Diamonds is a haunting study of female alienation
that “may become for America in the 90s what Jeanne Dielman was for
Europe in the 70s—a cult classic using a rigorous visual composition to
penetrate the innermost recesses of the soul” Berenice Reynaud
Here is a Cigarette Burns film club introduction to a previous screening of the film in 2012: Eurocrime.An
over-the-top, short-lived, Italian action filled, crime thriller
genre, and still one of the few undiscovered genres ...until
recently. When the fantastic documentary EUROCRIME screened at this
year's Frightfest, it sent film geeks scurrying off to hunt down
these still quite obscure films, hungry for more. Few have been
transferred to a digital format, leaving many only available on VHS,
so the hunt is on.A
great introduction to the genre is MILANO CALIBRO 9, fist fights, car
chases, double-crossing
and dripping with 70s slickness, this Fernando DiLeo-directed
masterpiece follows recently released con, Ugo (Gastone Moschin), as
he tries to escape his previous life, all the elements from his past
conspire against him, convinced that he still has the missing
$300,000. Caught between the police, his old crime bosses, his
psychotic ex-mate, the brutal Rocco (Mario Adorf), and his love for
his girlfriend, played by the stunning Barbara Bouchet, there doesn't
appear to be much hope for Ugo... This
is truly a fantastic film.
This 35mm presentation is part of the Michael Haneke season at the Genesis Cinema (details in the full What’s On guide here). Virtually all the films are being shown from prints.
Chicago Reader review: People seem divided by the second film (1992) in Michael Haneke’s deadpan, low-key Austrian trilogy (after The Seventh Continent, before 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), about affectless contemporary violence. Some consider it an essential document of our time, while others (myself included) regard it as a letdown after its predecessor—overly familiar in its themes, though still somewhat potent in its depiction of an alienated 14-year-old boy from a well-to-do family who’s preoccupied with video technology and winds up commiting a monstrous act. In some ways, the portrait of his parents is even more chilling. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is a 16mm presentation with live score by Fiscal Harm.
Chicago Reader review: Before Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, before John Wayne and John
Ford, Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning forged an ongoing
collaboration–nine films from 1920 to ’29–whose macabre stories and
carny/underworld settings mocked the bright lights of the Jazz Age.
Their most delirious project was The Unknown (1927), a perverse
melodrama about an armless circus performer (Chaney) and a beautiful
bareback rider (18-year-old Joan Crawford) with a phobia of men’s hands.
With its undercurrents of frigidity and castration anxiety, the story
was excellent material for Browning, and the film races along with the
awful momentum of a bad dream. Don Druker
Chicago Reader review: Eric
Rohmer's shift from a subjective to an objective viewpoint for his
“Comedies and Proverbs” series brought with it a gradual
darkening of tone: his characters no longer live in a world colored
by their personal attitudes and expectations, but are trapped in a
universe that blankly refuses to take their desires into
account. Full Moon in Paris(1984), the fourth in
the series, is bleaker than any of its predecessors: the heroine
(Pascale Ogier) lives with a lover in the suburbs of Paris, but takes
a small apartment in town as a way of asserting her freedom. But no
one is truly free in the network of relationships Rohmer sketches
around her, and by asserting her independence she upsets the delicate
equilibrium that has provided her with a measure of happiness. With
Fabrice Luchine (Rohmer's Perceval), Tcheky Karyo, and Christian
Vadim. Dave Kehr
This film also screens on June 5th at the prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader
review: Orson
Welles's 1966 version of the Falstaff story, assembled from
Shakespearean bits and pieces, is the one Welles film that deserves
to be called lovely; there is also a rising tide of opinion that
proclaims it his masterpiece. Restrained and even serene (down to its
memorably muddy battle scene), it shows Welles working largely
without his technical flourishes—and for those who have never seen
beyond his surface flash, it is ample proof of how sensitive and
subtle an artist he was. With Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Margaret
Rutherford, and Jeanne Moreau. Dave
Kehr
This 35mm presentation, which is also screening on June 28th, is part of the Wanda and Beyond season (full details here) at BFI Southbank.
Chicago Reader review: John
Cassavetes's 1974 masterpiece, and one of the best films of its decade.
Cassavetes stretches the limits of his narrative—it's the story of a
married couple, with the wife hedging into madness—to the point where it
obliterates the narrator: it's one of those extremely rare movies that
seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama
are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film.
The lurching, probing camera finds the same fascination in moments of
high drama and utter triviality alike—and all of those moments are
suspended painfully, endlessly. Still, Cassavetes makes the viewer's
frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an
emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen. With Gena Rowlands
and Peter Falk. Dave Kehr
