Following this special screening wmany of the film’s
cast will be present for an in-person discussion including Lee Ingleby, Bryan Dick,
Alex Palmer, Robert Pugh, Jack Randall, Max Benitz, Edward Woodall and
William Mannering.
Time Out review: 'Off tacks and main sheet!' commands
Russell Crowe's pony-tailed,
gimlet-eyed Royal Navy captain, 'Lucky' Jack Aubrey, in Peter Weir's
rousing
1805 adventure, adapted from two of Patrick O'Brian's much-admired
seafaring novels. Aubrey's three-masted frigate HMS Surprise,
cruising the coast of Brazil on the lookout for Napoleon's allies, comes
under splintering fire from the fleeter French privateer Acheron
and lifts off in the fog. The sailing master (Robert Pugh) counsels
caution,
but the standfast Aubrey, who fought with Nelson on the Nile, will have
his man, whatever the odds, come hell or high water. Thanks in no small
measure to Perfect Storm designer William Sandell, this handsomely
mounted actioner exudes the authentic tang of salt, sweat and gunpowder.
Cameraman Russell Boyd gives painterly expression to the ship's 'little
world' and, as in Gallipoli,
Weir shows his adroitness at action and the psychology of men at war,
helped by a string of sterling performances, notably Bettany's
Darwin-esque doctor (Aubrey's friend, cello partner and obverse) and
young Pirkis as a heroic aristocratic midshipman. Nice too to hear
English accents in a major US production, especially Crowe's clipped
tones, and a well used classically oriented score stripped of bombast.
If there's a problem, it's the insistence on the warrior/man-of-science
dichotomy, which has the film meander off on a naturalist jaunt through
the Galapagos to tension-slackening effect. But in the main, a fine
old-fashioned Boy's Own yarn. Wally Hammond
Time Out review: It's difficult to know why Robert Mitchum, slouching through a few scenes in
the ill-fitting disguise of an ageing, bearded academic with little
girls on his mind, should have accepted this part. Elizabeth Taylor, however, is
very fine as a tacky madonna: a devout prostitute who's offered a
respite from the streets when a regressive child-woman called Cenci
(Mia Farrow in long wig and Pollyanna tights) adopts her as substitute
mother and moves her into a mansion of art-déco splendour. No wonder
then that Taylor/Laura should fervently pray 'Oh Lord, let no one snatch
me from this heaven'; and as the strange 'secret ceremonies' begin, her
treatment of Cenci displays the same mix of greed and generosity.
Losey's mannered direction, somehow entirely appropriate, makes for a
memorable film. Jane Clarke
Time Out review: The first British Hell's Angels pic, and just about the blackest comedy to come out of this country in years. It features a bike gang called The Living Dead, whose leader (Nicky Henson) discovers the art of becoming just that. So he kills himself and is buried along with his bike, until he guns the engine and shoots back up through the turf; two victims later, he drives to a pub and calls his mother (Beryl Reid), a devil worshipper ensconced in her stately old dark house with George Sanders as her sinisterly imperturbable butler, to say he's back. This level of absurdity could be feeble, but director Don Sharp knows how to shoot it straight, without any directorial elbows-in-the-ribs. Consequently, much of the humour really works, even though the gang as individuals are strictly plastic. David Pirie
This screening will be introduced by freelance writer and programmer Savina Petkova. It will feature English subtitles.
Synopsis:
Papatakis’s debut unfolds in a country home where two domestic servants are cruelly exploited by the family they work for. When their abusive employers push them too far, it provokes a shocking and escallating rebellion. This allegorical portrait of the Algerian resistance was inspired by the real-life story of the Papin sisters, two maids who brutally murdered their employers in 1930s France - also the basis for Jean Genet’s influential 1947 play The Maids and Claude Chabrol’s 1995 psychological thriller La Cérémonie.
Curator’s note:
Boycotted by the selection committee of the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, Les Abysses was publicly defended by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Breton, and Jean Genet. The case of the two sisters has long been cited in French left-wing intellectual circles as a perfect example of working-class struggle. In Papatakis' view, the sisters' violence stemmed directly from their living conditions - the humiliations they endured and the exploitation they suffered at the hands of their employers.
The film exemplifies Papatakis' hyper-stylized, expressionistic approach, escalating the domestic conflict into paroxysmic class warfare. Like ancient Greek tragedies where masked actors embodied archetypes rather than nuanced psychological portraits, the performances are deliberately exaggerated - raw and symbolic rather than naturalistic.
Here (and above) is an interview with the director at the Cannes film festival in 1963
This film is creening as part of 'The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100' season. You can find all the details here.
Time Out review: Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) is not the ideal tenant: he trifles with
razor blades, cultivates cockroaches, and doesn't pay the rent. It's a
sign of the times when the landlord gets all our sympathy, but that's
the general idea. Live-in lovers Drake and Patty (Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith)
buy a sprawling Victorian house in San Francisco. To pay for
renovations, they rent out apartments to a quiet Japanese couple and to
the psychopathic Hayes, who proceeds to strip the fittings and terrorise
everyone in the house. But the law is firmly on his side. Schlesinger
stages the action with smooth assurance, gradually building tension
until Hayes goes completely round the bend. The problem lies in Daniel Pyne's
script: the relationship between Drake and Patty is half-realised,
while Hayes' motivations remain strangely muddled. That said, Keaton is
chillingly convincing. Collette Maude
Time Out review: Peter Weir's first film set in America explores a theme familiar from his
earlier work: the discovery of an all but forgotten culture in modern
society: in this case the Amish, a puritanical sect whose life in
Pennsylvania has remained unchanged since the 18th century. Threat
explodes into this community when an Amish boy witnesses a murder; cop
Harrison Ford investigates the case and, finding his own life endangered, is
forced to hot-foot it back to the Amish ranch with the bad guys in
pursuit. The film also allows Ford to fall in love with the boy's mother
(Kelly McGillis), and comments on the distance between the messy world Ford
leaves behind and the cloistered one in which he takes refuge. Powerful,
assured, full of beautiful imagery and thankfully devoid of easy
moralising, it also offers a performance of surprising skill and
sensitivity from Ford. Richard Rayner
Chicago Reader review:Though Jack Smith never quite completed Normal Love (1963), what he left behind maintains a consistent level of intensity, its weirdly costumed characters cavorting before the camera in role-playing more twisted than the word “drag” could ever convey. Mostly filmed the year Smith?s orgy-comedy Flaming Creatures became a famous obscenity case, Normal Love is a kind of lyrical sequel, replacing the earlier film’s bleached-out black and white with lush color (faded somewhat in this restoration) and its urban claustrophobia with rural locales outside New York City. Over the years Smith showed Normal Love in various versions; the present film was assembled using notes from actual screenings and records he’s known to have played with it. His cast of “creatures,” including Mario Montez and Tiny Tim, perform in a series of disjointed sequences that oscillate between trancelike impersonation and utterly reflexive self-parody: a mermaid in a tub, for example, is larger than life yet totally ridiculous, her tail phonier than the worst B-movie costume. Smith’s gender-fuck visions, more radical than mainstream concepts of drag, conflate dress-up with striptease, ludicrous acting with a sure belief that one can become one’s costume. His visual style is a dense and demented re-creation of von Sternberg, the smallest fashion accessory a radiant surface as camera and character—and character and costume—move in a coordinated ballet at once graceful and spastic.Fred Camper
This 35mm presentation, which also screens on April 24th, is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader review: Convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1967, boxer
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) spent years asserting his
innocence, growing increasingly hopeless until he was befriended by an
American teenager living in Canada (Vicellous Reon Shannon). In this
deeply moving biopic, some of the characters who rally to Carter’s
defense seem like saints, and some who oppose him seem like demons. Yet
the narrative–a complex structure of flashbacks and shifts in
perspective that’s part inspirational story, part courtroom drama, part
character study, part expose–never makes it seem that history is being
oversimplified. Lisa Alspector
This 35mm presentation, which also screens on March 30th, is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.
Time Out review: With its mean streets and gritty performances, its ringside corruption and low-life integrity, Body and Soul
looks like a formula '40s boxing movie: the story of a (Jewish) East
Side kid who makes good in the ring, forsakes his love for a nightclub
floozie, and comes up against the Mob and his own conscience when he has
to take a dive. But the single word which dominates the script is
'money', and it soon emerges that this is a socialist morality on
Capital and the Little Man - not surprising, given the collaboration of
Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky (script) and John Garfield, all of whom tangled with the
HUAC anti-Communist hearings (Polonsky was blacklisted as a result). A
curious mixture: European intelligence in an American frame, social
criticism disguised as noir anxiety (the whole film is cast as one long
pre-fight flashback). But Garfield's bullish performance saves the movie
from its stagy moments and episodic script. Chris Auty
This 35mm screening is part of director Mark Jenkin's 'Cinema and Sound' season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Time Out review: Wolfgang Petersen's movie of Sebastian Junger's bestseller chronicles the last voyage of the Andrea Gail,
a swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachussetts, lost at sea in
October 1991. In his foreword, Junger admits any attempt to recreate the
crew's experience can only be a matter of conjecture: 'I toyed with the
idea of fictionalising, but that risked diminishing the value of
whatever facts I was able to determine.' No such scruples for the
movie-makers, of course, but given that they're making it up, there's no
excuse for lines as corny as 'I wanna catch some fish - it's what I
do!' It doesn't much matter though. This is one of those films where
actions speak louder than words. Regular guy George Clooney may be too
intuitively smarmy to play your straight-ahead skipper, but the
authentically grizzled beard helps, and Petersen loads the boat with
plausible working-man types. And this is what's striking about the
movie. It's the first blockbuster in recent memory to hold faith with
everyday heroes just doing their jobs. More impressive still, their
heroism is a kind of unconscious blunder, a macho bluff compelled by
hard economic choices. The special effects are staggering and the last
hour builds from sinking dread to exhilarating defiance and, finally,
remorseful exhaustion. Tom Charity
Time Out review: A companion piece to Flesh, with Joe Dallesandro as a down-and-out
junkie living on New York's Lower East Side whose heroin addiction has
rendered him impotent; just as Joe's desirable virility formed the
(nominal) subject of Flesh, so his undesirable impotence is at the centre of Trash.
The surprise value of Paul Morrissey's films (the 'liberating nudity', the
frankness about sexuality, the playful reversals of sex-roles)
camouflaged a number of crucial failings. Flesh and Trash
are both eulogies to Dallesandro's body, but are also both moralistic
to the point of being puritan about sex in general, and the female sex
in particular. Tony Rayns
This is a Funeral Parade screening. Here are the details of the screenings in the regular season at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: In Theorem, Pasolini achieved his most
perfect fusion of Marxism and religion with a film that is both
political allegory and mystical fable. Terence Stamp
plays the mysterious Christ or Devil figure who stays briefly with a
wealthy Italian family, seducing them one by one. He then goes as
quickly as he had come, leaving their whole life-pattern in ruins. What
would be pretentious and strained in the hands of most directors, with
Pasolini takes on an intense air of magical revelation. In fact, the
superficially improbable plot retains all the logic and certainty of a
detective story. With bizarre appropriateness, it was one of the last
films made by Stamp before he virtually disappeared from the
international film scene for some years. David Pirie
Peter
Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in
Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried
his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to
appear on the programme.It wasan invitation that sadly was never extended to himandI thought of that tale when I wasactuallyasked to contributeto the most famousof all moviepolls, run by Sight & Sound magazine. All those years of trawling the previous decades choiceswith rapt fascination, readingthe articles on the canonand the time keeping thatrunning list of my ten all-time favourites that wereinevitablemixed up withthegreatest in my headwas not wasted. Now,though,I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Othersweredoing the same,prompting responses varying widely from“it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”.
The
more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just
that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted
people to seebut had not been consideredin the previous voting,and modestlyhoping fora re-evalutionof the choices.I made two rules.All ofthe films in my list(reproduced below) would deserve to bepart oftheSight&SoundGreatest poll conversation andallthe choiceswould not havereceived a single vote in the 2012 poll.
Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases thereareverygoodreasonssome ofthese
films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from
view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in
the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The
heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared afterbombing at the box officeand thesubsequentdissolving of the director’sproduction company,deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishesin limbo, only seen at major retrospectives.The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are bothoncelost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery.White Dog,after a desultory release overshadowed bymisguidedaccusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years.Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, wasshownin 2013from(fortuitously I later discovered)16mm in an ICA gallery and feltthrillinglyauthentic,thesoundof thewhirring projectorand the artist’s singular framingcombining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:
Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)
Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)
Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
Six from the list have been shown in a London cinema since the poll appeared and now we have a rare screening of the brilliant director Sam Fuller's late masterpiece at the Nickel Cinema.
Chicago Reader review: Samuel
Fuller's 1982 masterpiece about American racism—his last work shot in
this country—focuses on the efforts of a black animal trainer (Paul
Winfield) to deprogram a dog that has been trained to attack blacks.
Very loosely adapted by Fuller and Curtis Hanson from a memoir by Romain
Gary, and set in southern California on the fringes of the film
industry, this heartbreakingly pessimistic yet tender story largely
concentrates on tragic human fallibility from the vantage point of an
animal; in this respect it's like Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar,
and Fuller's brilliantly eclectic direction gives it a nearly comparable
intensity. Through a series of grotesque misunderstandings, this
unambiguously antiracist movie was yanked from U.S. distribution partly
because of charges of racism made by individuals and organizations who
had never seen it. But it's one of the key American films of the 80s.
With Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, and, in cameo roles,
Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, Christa Lang, and Fuller himself. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening includes an extended intro by BFI National Archive preservation and curatorial staff, and writer Ken Hollings. The film is screening as part of the Trash season at BFI Southbank and is also being shown on April 21st. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Bela Lugosi died during the making of this low-budget
science fiction programmer, but that didn't faze director Edward Wood:
the Lugosi footage, which consists of the actor skulking around a
suburban garage, is replayed over and over, to highly surreal effect.
Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I
Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange
and appealing in its undisguised incompetence. J. Hoberman of the
Village Voice
has made a case for Wood as an unconscious avant-gardist; there's no
denying that his blunders are unusually creative and oddly expressive. Dave Kehr
