Here's a full review of this extraordinary movie by Time Out's Tom Huddleston in his Classic Film Club series on the magazine's website. I think this is only the second ever screening in London for this remarkable film.
Chicago Reader review: Trent Harris shot the first section of this video in 1979, but the trilogy wasn't completed until 2000. A TV cameraman, Harris traveled to Beaver, Utah, to tape a local talent show in which a young drag performer appeared as “Olivia Newton-Dawn”; the audience is minuscule, and after his preshow makeover at a mortuary the singer looks more like an old man than a woman. Parts two and three are fictional remakes of the documentary, the first shot in 1981 with a lively and unknown Sean Penn as the singer, the second in 1985 and featuring Crispin Glover, whose manic energy and shifts of tone are especially effective. The remakes allow Harris to comment on aspects of the original sequence, emphasizing the small-town homophobia that a drag performer might encounter and suggesting that the TV crew wants to exploit him for laughs. The ensuing questions of truth versus fiction and copy versus original take on a special poignancy when applied to drag.Fred Camper
This film, introduced by Hope Rangaswami, is part of the 'Strange Encounters' season at Close-Up Cinema. Full details here.
Time Out review: The last week before the 21st century: a mysterious epidemic has
resulted in mass evacuation from Taipei, with only a few residents
refusing to leave their homes, two of whom - a man and the woman who
lives in the flat below - become involved in a mysterious, unspoken
relationship when the latter's ceiling collapses, due to the non-stop
rain, and they suddenly become aware of one another. The premise is
weird enough, but interrupting the metaphorical story with delightfully
amateurish song and dance sequences (by way of homage to '50s star Grace
Chang, though they also reflect on the woman's fantasies) takes it
still further into uncharted territory. Somehow, it all comes off: the
characters are depicted with insight and wit, the mood is kept
controlled, and the ending is genuinely moving. Idiosyncratic, of
course, but immensely impressive. Geoff Andrew
Chicago Reader review: Frank Borzage won an Academy Award for his direction of this 1927
romance, and it remains the best known of his silent films. Janet Gaynor
(who also won an Oscar) is a Parisian waif taken in by free spirit
Charles Farrell; their love deepens as the clouds of World War I gather
and Farrell is drafted and sent to the front. With its theme of
sheltering love and its justly celebrated ending (perhaps the most
serious assault on realism in the American cinema), the film is
quintessential Borzage, though it seems rather simple in comparison to
the masterworks that came later (including the semisequel Street Angel). Dave Kehr
This film is a ‘Machine That Kills Bad People’ Film Club presentation.
ICA introduction to tonight’s screening:
Two films about stripping and striptease. Focusing on dancers from a Mumbai cabaret, this early documentary feature from Mira Nair attends to the tensions between the women’s daytime existence and their nighttime activities. India Cabaret is, in Nair's words, “about the unshakeable inviolability of double standards, of patriarchal values, of the strong conditioning of women never to question or challenge." A portrait of stripper Ellion Ness in shimmering black and white, Gunvor Nelson’s short Take Off takes off in several senses of the word. After removing her clothes, Nelson’s protagonist undoes her body parts as well before the film ends on an intergalactic note. Nelson’s camera encircles Ness with irony, humour and razor sharp critique.
Programme
India Cabaret, dir. Mira Nair, India 1985, 60 min.
Take Off, dir. Gunvor Nelson, USA 1972, 10 min.
This screening is accompanied by a newly commissioned essay by Devika Girish.
Time Out review: Written by none other than the great Sam Fuller, this superior blend of
love-on-the-run thriller and social comment, filtered through film noir, follows the fraught, doomed relationship between a parole officer and
the female ex-con with whom he falls in love. The depiction of the ways
in which society refuses to forgive criminals for their past
misdemeanours is none too sophisticated, but Fuller's punchy,
tabloid-like script, Douglas Sirk's stylishly economical direction, and the
unsentimental characterisations lend it power. A pity about the
contrived ending, imposed on Sirk by Columbia, but the film still looked good enough for Richard Hamilton to base a series of paintings on its shots of Patricia Knight.
The screening will be introduced by Prof. Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech (University of Silesia, Poland, President of the Joseph Conrad Society, Poland, and author of Adaptations of J. Conrad’s Life and Works in Contemporary Culture, 2022)
This is part of the Joseph Conrad and Cinema season. Details here.
Time Out review: 'Returning to feature filmmaking after a lengthy sojourn as a video artist, Belgium’s Chantal Akerman delivers a work as substantive, challenging and unique as her brilliant Proust adaptation from 2000, ‘The Captive’. Billed as a ‘liberal’ take on Joseph Conrad’s little-known first novel, this languid essay in despair sees Stanislas Merhar playing the stuttering, frenzied but ultimately tragic and possibly deranged figure of Almayer, a European ex-pat in Cambodia who idly tends to his failing trading post while ensuring his daughter, Nina (born to a local mother), is instilled with the same enlightened European values as himself. Scenes usually run in single, medium close-up takes (all immaculately framed and executed) and the elliptical narrative can usually be navigated by gauging the griminess of the cast. Tough as the film may be, it still speaks volumes about colonial exploitation and catastrophic clashes of culture, gender and age. The (eight-minute) climactic shot is also sensational.' David Jenkins
This film, also being shown on November 1st, is part of the Melodrama season at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.
Time Out review: The '70s, North-West Scotland: despite opposition from the Calvinist community in which she lives, Bess (Watson) is sufficiently sure God looks kindly on her love for oil-rig worker Jan (Skarsgård) that she marries him. When he returns to the rig, however, she can barely tolerate his absence, and prays for his return - which he does, paralysed and perhaps brain-damaged by an accident. Distraught that his wife's brief sexual bliss is over, Jan suggests she take lovers and describe her liaisons afterwards, so they might still enjoy sex by proxy. Bess consents reluctantly - until, that is, she comes to believe that the sacrifices she's making will restore Jan's health, or at least save his life. Meanwhile, the villagers ostracise her as a whore. This epic melodrama about love, faith, suffering and redemption is emotionally overwhelming. Its raw power is assured not only by the forthright performances and the increasingly cruel, violent events of the last hour, but by Robby Müller's edgily realist 'Scope camerawork. It's a rapt movie, and so wrapped up in its own harrowing dynamics that it finally, perhaps, goes too far in subjecting its selfless heroine to pain and indignity; is this sympathy or sadism? That said, it's a remarkable achievement for all concerned, with Katrin Cartlidge, as Bess's widowed sister-in-law, sharing the acting laurels with the radiant Emily Watson, and writer/director Lars von Trier building the emotional and dramatic intensity with consummate skill. Geoff Andrew
This is part of the Terence Davies season at the cinema. Full details here.
The three films that make up the triogy, Children
(1976), Madonna And Child (1980) and Death And Transfiguration (1983)
are a fictional account of Davies’s life follows his alter ego from
birth to death and examine the clash between his strict Catholic
upbringing and his masochistic sexual fantasies. A remarkable
achievement by one of Britain's greatest directors and a
landmark film in post-War British cinema. Highly recommended. Tony Paley
Time Out review: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film opens with a mime performance of Kleist's play
about the Queen of the Amazons, and then proceeds through a suite of
four further sequences designed to tease out some of the main
implications in this opening 'statement'. Feminist issues loom large,
not surprisingly, but the film embraces many other things, from Kleist's
bizarre personal history to the way an actor feels in assuming a role.
It's constructed as an exploration of relationships, real or potential,
rather than as an argument or a single line of thought: it's interested
in the link that may exist between a Greek vase-painting of a warrior
woman and the Suffragettes, or, more formally, between a specific sound
and a specific image. As such, it's a kind of scrapbook with a polemic
kick. And it's also something of a milestone in dragging the moribund
British cinema into an era long inhabited by Godard and Straub. Tony Rayns
Play Misty for Me is part of Women in Flux,
presented in association with the National Film and Television School’s
Film Studies, Programming and curation MA.This is a 35mm screening.
Chicago Reader review: Clint Eastwood wisely chose a strong, simple thriller for his first film
as a director (1971), and the project is remarkable in its
self-effacing dedication to getting the craft right—to laying out the
story, building the rhythm, putting the camera in the right place, and
establishing small characters with a degree of conviction. Eastwood
himself stars as a small-town disc jockey terrorized by a pathological
fan (Jessica Walter, in a performance so creepy and sexually aggressive
that she hardly worked again for years). Eastwood’s directorial mentor,
Don Siegel, has a bit part. Dave Kehr
New Yorker review: In his exquisite and anguished adaptation, from 2000, of Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” Terence Davies brings to life the book’s daring societal X-rays—the
revelations of codes and norms, unspoken rules and silent judgments,
that govern the glittering whirl of fin-de-siècle New York high society,
especially those that limit women’s independence. Gillian Anderson
stars as Lily Bart, the orphaned heiress to a vanished fortune, who
depends entirely on an elderly aunt’s charity. The alluringly
free-spirited Lily’s only hope to maintain her lavish life style is to
marry into money, but the man she loves (Eric Stoltz), a lawyer, hasn’t
got much, and she spurns rich men she doesn’t love. Pursuing her desires
with an ingenuous sincerity, she risks exposing the falsehoods of other
women, who eject her from their social ranks, sending her into free
fall without a financial safety net. The tragic contradictions of Lily’s
brilliant character—her refined aestheticism, lacerating wit, and
heedless passion—are matched by Davies’s rapturous yet rueful display of
the era’s sumptuous fashions and furnishings, which quietly shudder
with the crushing power of the unwritten laws that sustain them. Richard Brody
This is a 35mm screening (also showing on November 1st) and is part of the excellent ‘Joseph Conrad and Cinema’ season at Cine Lumiere. You can find the full details here.
This film was one of my five picks for the Guardian of underrated Alfred Hitchcock films. You can read my thoughts on the quintet of movies via the web here and this is what I had to say about Sabotage:
'Darker in tone and more harrowing than its reputation allows, Sabotage is arguably the most underrated of Hitchcock's still undervalued British period. A loose adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel The Secret Agent about a shadowy network of anarchists, the film deserves to be remembered for much more than Hitchcock famously regretting his decision to let the bomb go off at the end of one of the director's most celebrated and manipulative suspense sequences. The movie's central couple run a cinema, which Hitchcock uses to masterful effect in an intriguing and rich sequence contrasting Walt Disney on the screen with the heartbreak of the wife following the tragedy at the centre of the narrative. The scene involving the "murder" (or is it "willed suicide"?) of her husband foreshadows the most brutal and shocking killing in Hitchcock's canon 30 years later, that of the East German agent Gromek in Torn Curtain (1966).'
Here (and above) is the famous bus bomb scene (Spoiler warning).
This film is part of the ‘Strange Encounters’ season at Close-Up Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: French director Claire Denis (Beau Travail) has a robust curiosity about interactions between strangers. The primary focus of this feature is a one-night stand involving a woman (Valerie Lemercier) and a man (Vincent Lindon) brought together haphazardly by a huge and menacing traffic jam caused by a Parisian transit strike. But its numerous ancillary characters are so closely observed that even those without speaking parts register as people, in a manner that blurs the line between strangeness and intimacy. The effect bears fruit when the lovers, flushed and happy after sex in a cheap hotel, go out to dinner and observe a loud fight between another couple in the otherwise deserted restaurant. When Lindon excuses himself to use the restroom, Lemercier pictures him taking the other woman over the sink—a chilling illustration of the transience of their own connection. The film could have ended there: we learn little more about the protagonists in its remaining reel, and it ends with a shrug.JR Jones
Garden Cinema introduction: Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of MURDER. For Halloween 2025, Zodiac Film Club have been workin’ 9 to 5 to bring you Office Killer (1997), the criminally underwatched sole feature by Cindy Sherman. Overlooked copy editor Dorine never quite fits in with her yuppie co-workers. But when she’s downsized from office drudge to home-worker, she finds an unexpected new way to stay connected with her colleagues. Beware what happens when grammatical sticklers get to write their own endings! Expect a schlocky script (co-written with Todd Haynes), slick visuals, and a stacked line-up: our strange queen Carol Kane, supported by Molly Ringwald, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Michael Imperioli. Our Halloween cup overfloweth with 90s candy.
Join us in the bar from 8pm for drinks, office-inspired costume judging, and further Zodiac Halloween highjinx.
Garden Cinema introduction: Released in 1982, Der Fan stands as one of the most unsettling works of the German New Wave. The film follows Simone, a disaffected teenager whose obsession with a pop idol named R transcends adoration and descends into pure horror. This film is far more than just a provocation; Schmidt crafts a chilling portrait of alienation, youth culture, and the consuming power of celebrity worship and parasocial relationships. Anchored by Désirée Nosbusch’s remarkable performance and propelled by a cold, minimalist synth score from cult German new wave band, Rheingold, Der Fan is both hypnotic and horrifying, capturing the sterile surfaces and hidden violence of West German society at the dawn of the 1980s. At once art-house meditation and exploitation shocker, it remains one of the most unforgettable and uncompromising horror films of its time.
This 16mm screening is presented by the great Cine-Real team.
Time Out review: A baby cries, granddaddy is crucified, cannibals with CB radios stalk a land where even the hills have eyes. Somewhere in the desert a clean WASP family of six are stranded; there are murmurs of atomic tests, and at the local gas station, an old man talks of a monster mutant son he abandoned in the wilds. To little avail: the Carters are besieged in their trailer and the nightmare begins. The baby is kidnapped (for supper), half the family die. From there, it's a question of the 'civilised' family acquiring the same cunning as their cannibal counterparts in a fight to the death. Parallel families, Lassie-style pet dogs who turn hunter-killers, savage Nature: exploitation themes are used to maximum effect, and despite occasional errors (the cannibal girl who protects the 'human' baby), the sense of pace never errs. A heady mix of ironic allegory and seat-edge tension. Chris Auty
This is a 16mm presentation from Lost Reels. Full details here.
Time Out review: Medak's biopic skirts Sweeney-style fair-cop-guv clichés for bolder terrain, in which the macabre beginnings of the identical angels - all chirpy cockney, poor-but-spotless nostalgia - are placed as much within womb, hearth and home as in the streets, clubs and fairground booths through which Ron and Reg came to criminal prominence between Elvis and early Beatles. If Philip Ridley's script charts most of the signposts - school, army, protection, murder - it seems keen to establish the female connection, be it through Reggie's tormented, finally destroyed wife (Hardie, magnificent), or the endless, loyal patience of the kray brood, presided over by mother (Whitelaw) and consumptive but awesome Aunt Rose (Fleetwood). Most surprising is the impressive showing of Gary and Martin Kemp (of Spandau Ballet) as the twins, despite fears that the 'youth cult' dimension might be too strong a factor in the concept; most riveting, a series of cameos including Bell (ultra-seedy as victim Jack McVitie), Berkoff (OTT as victim George Cornell), Jimmy Jewel as the tall-tale-telling grandad every young thug should have. Little about the Krays' position as social climbing roughnecks, and not in the Badlands league, but a lot better than one dared hope. Steve Grant
A lesser-known Ken Loach work perhaps but a very underrated movie which is
typical of the director in that it is both funny and tragic in equal
amounts. The story of a group of men on a London building site, this has
the mark of authenticity that comes from being written by an
ex-labourer.
Rarely screened and well worth checking out if you are a fan of Loach's
work. Starring Robert Carlyle and Ricky Tomlinson (with a superb joke
concerning a Turkish bazaar). This is part of the Loach retrospective at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Ken Loach, perhaps the last unreconstructed English realist (Kes, Land and Freedom),
takes a funky, intermittently comic, and generally uncompromisingly
grim look at a group of men on a London building crew, placing
particular emphasis on a young man from Glasgow and his affair with an
aspiring singer (1991). Using actors experienced in construction, Loach
shot on an actual building site complete with rats. Written by the late
Bill Jesse, a former laborer himself, this film has a gritty
authenticity about English working-class life that makes even Mike Leigh
seem like a bit of an artificer. With Robert Carlyle and Emer McCourt.
Recommended. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Douglas
Sirk directed a number of films which say an awful lot about '50s
America. A European who saw Americans more clearly than most, he found,
in the 'women's weepies' producers often gave him, a freedom to examine
contemporary middle class values. This one (from a novel by Lloyd C
Douglas) has a preposterous plot: playboy Hudson takes up medicine again
after being indirectly responsible for the death of a philanthropic
doctor and directly responsible for his widow's blindness. Assuming the
dead man's role, Rock Hudson starts practising the same kind of
secretive Christianity, but has to resort to an alias to win the widow
herself. Sirk turns all this into an extraordinary film about vision:
sight, destiny, blindness (literal and figurative), colour and light;
the convoluted, rather absurd actions (a magnificent repression?)
tellingly counterpointed by the clean compositions and the straight
lines and space of modern architecture. Sirk's films are something else:
can Fassbinder even hold a candle to them? Chris Peachment
This film is part of the Theo Angelopoulos season at the ICA Cinema. Details here.
Time Out review: Made, incredibly, under the noses of the military police during the
Colonels' regime, Angelopoulos' film examines, with a passionate
radicalism, the labyrinth of Greek politics around that country's
agonising civil war. This is done through the eyes of a troupe of
actors, whose pastoral folk drama Golfo the Shepherdess is
continually interrupted as they become unwitting spectators of the
political events that ultimately polarise them. This slow, complex,
four-hour film will obviously provide problems for people raised on
machine-gun cutting techniques. Editing is very restrained, and some
takes last up to five minutes, but the stately pace of the film soon
becomes compulsive; and the shabby provincial Greece of rusting railway
tracks and flaking facades which the slow camera examines is visually
beguiling. The closing passage, when one of the actors is buried after
being executed, and his colleagues spontaneously raise their hands above
their heads to applaud not a performance but a life, is an incredibly
moving moment. Don Macpherson
This film is part of the Theo Angelopoulos season at the ICA Cinema. Details here.
ICA introduction:
Theo Angelopoulos' second feature, and the first part of his trilogy of history, Days of '36 leans further into the procedural tendencies of his debut as he crafts a densely layered investigation into the machinations of political corruption. From dusty courtyards draped in Mediterranean sun to the dim smoky corridors and offices of a prison, Angelopoulos's tale of a political assassination and ensuing governmental crisis is a profoundly tactile study of Greek history shortly before the dictatorship of General Metaxas.
Chicago Reader review: One of Luis Bunuel's more perverse low-budget Mexican features (1952), also known in this country as This Strange Passion. Arturo de Cordova plays a wealthy Catholic whose insane jealousy toward his wife (Delia Garces) first becomes apparent on their honeymoon. In some ways it's a parody of machismo, full of anticlerical thrusts, but like many other Bunuel features of this period, the irreverence—consisting in part of such ghoulish, Sade-inspired notions as the hero wanting to sew up his wife's vagina—tends to be almost parenthetical rather than the main focus. Bunuel remained true to his surrealist origins throughout his Mexican period, but the full command of his earliest and latest films, as well as such intermediate masterpieces as Los olvidados and The Exterminating Angel, resulted in stronger fare than this. Still, the hero's wonderful crooked walk in the final shot seems the perfect emblem of Bunuel's own sly subversion in adverse circumstances. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film is part of the Terence Davies season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: It’s hard to say what Terence Davies’s powerful 1988 masterpiece is about—growing up in a working-class family in Liverpool in the 40s and 50s—without making it sound familiar and lugubrious. In fact, this beautiful memoir, conceivably one of the greatest of all English films, is so startling and original that we may not have the vocabulary to do it justice. Organized achronologically, so that events are perceived more in terms of emotional continuity than of narrative progression, the film concentrates on family events like weddings and funerals and on songs sung at parties and the local pub. Davies’s childhood, which was lorded over by a brutal and tyrannical father, was not an easy one, yet the delight shown and conveyed by the well-known songs makes the film cathartic and hopeful as well as sorrowful and tragic. (There are some wonderful laughs as well.) Much of the film emphasizes the bonds between the women in the family and their female friends, though there’s nothing doctrinal or polemical about its vision, and the purity and intensity of its emotional thrust are such that all the characters are treated with passion and understanding. The sense of the periods depicted—ranging from the blitz to a mid-50s screening of Love Is a Many Splendored Thing at the Futurist Cinema—is both precise and luminous. Jonathan Rosenbaum
The master director used 3-D in typically innovative fashion and the
screening of this film in that format has created quite a stir when
shown in New York in recent years. I wrote about the background to this
version of the film here
in a Guardian article while the celebrated film academic David Bordwell
has written extensively on the 3-D aspects of Dial M For Murder on his
blog here.
Chicago Reader review: 'Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 adaptation of Frederick Knott's dinner-theater
warhorse about a fading tennis champion (Ray Milland) who arranges the
murder of his wife (Grace Kelly). The film is confined almost entirely
to a cramped apartment set—a constricted space that takes on a highly
expressive quality in the picture's original 3-D version. The screenplay tends to constrain rather than liberate
Hitchcock's thematic thrust, but there is much of technical value in his
geometric survey of the scene and the elaborate strategies employed to
transfer audience sympathy among the four main characters.' Dave Kehr
There are some 3-D clips (above) and on YouTube here.
A deliriously romantic reworking of The Taming of the Shrew,
set during the Juarez Revolution. When general Armendáriz seizes the
town of Cholula, he immediately falls for the beautiful but volatile
Félix, daughter of a wealthy landowner; unsympathetic to the
revolutionary cause, she treats his attempts at courtship with fiery
contempt. Acted and directed with wit, verve and passion, the film
also benefits from Gabriel Figueroa's stunning b/w photography; see
it, too, for the overwhelmingly lovely scene when Armendáriz finally
begins to win over the stubborn Félix with a heart-rending serenade.Geoff Andrew
This is one of my favourite ever films which grows in my estimation with every viewing. As Dave Kehr says in his Chicago Reader review see this at the cinema or not at all!
Here is a superb Tate Modern introduction from 2013:Tarnished Angels, based on William Faulkner’s Pylon,
is a Depression-era story set during the New Orleans Mardi Gras of the
1930s. Rock Hudson plays a reporter fascinated by the marginal lives of a
fairground pilot and his wife, played by Robert Stack and Dorothy
Malone. Shot in lush, sweeping black-and-white CinemaScope, the camera
follows with fluid sweeps and pans the tragic plight of these passionate
lost souls caught in a downward spiral of obsession jealousy,
self-destruction and defeat. In 1975 Warren Sonbert described Sirk’s
cinema as follows:
The fetid taste of intrinsic imperfection, of behavioural mistakes
endlessly repeated from generation to generation, find expression in the
staggeringly demonic visual motifs recurring throughout Sirk’s films of
the merry-go-round, the amusement park ride, the circular treadmill,
the vehicle that really goes nowhere, insulated hopeless activity, the
Western frame of mind, people struggling to get outside cages of their
own building yet encased by their own unique palpable qualities.
Sonbert was known not only for his films and opera reviews but he was
also a noted film critic. His writings about feature films are amongst
his more extraordinarily profound and insightful creations. In them, he
expressed admiration for a pantheon of American directors working within
the studio system, including Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, and
notably Douglas Sirk who appears in Sonbert’s film Noblesse Oblige
(1981). He deeply admired Sirk’s ability to expose the ‘hollow cupidity
and superficiality of middle class ideals’ and to accentuate the forces
of destruction rent upon the nuclear family structure of the 1950s.
Chicago Reader review of The Tarnished Angels: Douglas Sirk took a vacation from Ross Hunter and Technicolor for this
1958 production, though he retained Rock Hudson, who turns in an
astonishingly good performance as a journalist fascinated by the sordid
lives of a trio of professional stunt fliers (Robert Stack, Dorothy
Malone, and Jack Carson). Based on a minor novel by William Faulkner (Pylon),
the film betters the book in every way, from the quality of
characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery. Made
in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film doesn't survive on TV;
it should be seen in a theater or not at all. Dave Kehr
