This screening is part of the Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned season at the ICA Cinema (full details here) and will be introduced by the season curator
Time Out review: In 1968, Godard began work on a film in America (One AM or One American Movie) dealing with aspects of resistance and revolution. Dissatisfied with what he had shot, he abandoned the project. Pennebaker here assembles the Godard footage, together with his own coverage of Godard at work (One PM standing for either One Parallel Movie or One Pennebaker Movie). Although it may be dubious to show stuff that Godard had rejected, the film does manage to convey how he got his results. You can draw your own conclusions about his approach and why he abandoned the film.
This screening is part of the season at the ICA Cinema devoted to Werner Schroeter. You can finds all the details here.
ICA introduction: Using the modest sum in prize money that Willow Springs had
garnered, Schroeter began work on what would be one of his most
uncompromising films to date and an unofficial final part to a trilogy
of films alongside Willow Springs and The Death of Maria Malibran. With
international co-production extending his cast of regular collaborators
like Ingrid Caven and Magdalena Montezuma to include arthouse stalwarts
like Bulle Ogier and Udo Kier, the film encompasses four parts weaving
together high and low culture in a richly textured tapestry of
underground filmmaking. The screening is preceded by an introduction from Anneke Kampman.
Venice film festival review: A multilingual film, the summary of Schroeter’s early films: four
episodes about great feelings and emotions, about the search for luck,
about destiny and mortality, taking place in Cuba, France and Bavaria.
Beautiful dreamlike variations on classic genres, from kitschy Mexican
melodrama to poetic realism of French art films to Bavarian Heimatfilm
in dialect. As Schroeter said: “It starts with an introduction conceived
like a romantic poem about the general theme of the film: Death”. Les Flocons d’or was
Schroeter’s last “super underground film” for which he could combine a
unique international cast. Andréa Ferréol gambols erotically with
three dogs and recites Poe’s The Raven; Magdalena Montezuma incarnates
an angel of death; Bulle Ogier personifies “The Murderous Soul”; and Udo
Kier carries a flower into the forest, like Schroeter’s hero Novalis,
before repeatedly bashing his head into a rock.
Chicago Reader review: Kathryn
Bigelow’s heart-stopping Iraq war drama (2009) follows a U.S. army bomb
squad around Baghdad as it defuses IEDs, a job that places the men in
potentially deadly situations a dozen times a day. After the squad’s
explosives expert is killed in action, he’s replaced by a shameless
cowboy (Jeremy Renner) whose needless risk-taking infuriates his two
partners (Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty). He’s a true warrior, but
Bigelow defines that in terms of addiction; as one of the other soldiers
points out, he doesn’t mind endangering them to get his daily
“adrenaline fix.” The war has already produced some excellent fiction
films (The Lucky Ones,In the Valley of Elah),
but this is the first to dispense with the controversy surrounding the
invasion and focus on the timeless subject of men in combat. It’s the
best war movie sinceFull Metal Jacket. JR Jones
This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and also screens on March 10th (with an introduction by journalist Carmen Gray). You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Andrzej Wajda has spent much of his long career dramatizing major events
in Polish history, and this poignant feature depicts the circumstances
surrounding the Soviet Union’s massacre of thousands of Polish officers
in the spring of 1940. The film opens with a striking scene that
underlines the plight of Wajda’s people in World War II: as hundreds of
Poles cross a bridge to flee invading German troops, others run toward
them to escape the advancing Russian army. The rest of this feature
follows a handful of families over five years as they suffer through the
Nazi occupation and the Soviet occupation that succeeded it. Joshua Katzman
This film is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. This screening will be introducedby writer and editor Laura Staab and the film is also being shown on March 8th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Kelly Reichardt's masterful low-budget drama tells a story a child could
understand even as it indicts, with stinging anger, the economic
cruelty of George Bush's America. Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain)
is impressively restrained as Wendy, a young homeless woman who's
living in her car with her beloved mutt, Lucy. After the car breaks down
in an Oregon hick town, she makes the mistake of tying Lucy up outside a
grocery store before going in to shoplift, and when she gets busted and
taken to the local police station, the dog disappears. Reichardt (Old Joy)
and co-writer Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after hearing
conservative commentators bash the poor in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina, and their movie is a stark reminder of how easily someone like
Wendy can fall through our frayed safety net. The climax is a
heartbreaker, and in its haunting finale the movie recalls no less than
Mervyn LeRoy's Depression-era classic I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. JR Jones
Time Out review: Victor Erice's remarkable one-off (he has made only one film since, the generally less well regarded El Sur)
sees rural Spain soon after Franco's victory as a wasteland of
inactivity, thrown into relief by the doomed industriousness of bees in
their hives. The single, fragile spark of 'liberation' exists in the
mind of little Ana, who dreams of meeting the gentle monster from James
Whale's Frankenstein, and befriends a fugitive soldier just
before he is caught and shot. A haunting mood-piece that dispenses with
plot and works its spells through intricate patterns of sound and image. Tony Rayns
Time Out review: 'Man, I was what you call ragged... I knew
I was gonna hell in a breadbasket' intones the hero in the great
opening moments of The Loveless,
and as he zips up and bikes out, it's clear that this is one of the
most original American independents in years: a bike movie which
celebrates the '50s through '80s eyes. Where earlier bike films like The
Wild Onewere forced to concentrate on plot, The Loveless deliberately
slips its story into the background in order to linger over all the
latent erotic material of the period that other films could only hint at
in their posters. Zips and sunglasses and leather form the basis of a
cool and stylish dream of sexual self-destruction, matched by a Robert Gordon
score which exaggerates the sexual aspects of '50s music. At times the
perversely slow beat of each scene can irritate, but that's a reasonable
price for the film's super-saturated atmosphere. David Thompson
This is a 35mm screening and part of the season at the ICA Cinema devoted to Werner Schroete. You can finds all the details here.
Rowe Reviews review: An experimental art film that is sure to only appeal to the more
adventurous viewer who is a fan of opaque and mysterious works of art,
Werner Schroeter’s Death of Maria Malibran provides little conclusions
through its running time but never-the-less it's a harrowing portrait
that challenges the fundamental ideals of what cinema can be. The film
is a fever dream of emotion and subtle energy, being dreamlike as it
uses a vibrant orchestral score and operatic performance art to deliver
an expressionistic art piece that confounds as much as it intrigues. The film is simply stunning, with cinematography, art direction, and
lighting which combine to create an intoxicating experience that feels
very much like an operatic stage play while still giving off an almost
supernatural vibe of mystery and intrigue. The film starts off full of
Romanticism but as it progresses it becomes clear The Death of Maria
Malibran is one of ironic romanticism and subversive style, routinely
having sound and image intentionally out of sync which creates a playful
perversion, something that becomes darker and darker as the film
progresses, dehumanizing these romanticized, picturesque woman of
bourgeois society. While trying to easily define Schroeter's film in
any easily discernible way feels like a fools errand, The Death of Maria
Maliban is a film which uses opera as a device to expose the ugliness
and cruelty that exists in bourgeouis society, one that is driven by
status and the collective ideals. Characters routinely speak in a way
that makes little sense and many of the characters become
undifferentiable as the film progresses, as if to suggest that language
itself has little meaning, as one's actions are the deriving force of
morality and personal characters. Schroeter routinely injects the film
with upbeat, vapid pop-style songs throughout, another bizarre but
expressionistic decision which speaks to the vapid nature of society.
While many of these observations could be completely off-base, The
Death of Maria Maliban as a whole feels like an indictment on the
selfish, abusive constructs which society as a whole can create, one
which routinely tears down the individual for the sake of the
collective. Conformity and lack of individuality feel like a major
aspect of this film, with the bourgeois characters essentially
attempting to destroy the young Maria Maliban for having a different
perspective than their overall ideals. Featuring so much to think
about, consider, and attempt to deconstruct, Werner Schroeter's The
Death of Maria Maliban is a film you experience more than attempt to
define, being an expressionistic fever dream that is not quite like
anything I've ever seen.
Nickel Cinema introduction: Shot on consumer-grade video and circulating for decades as a
near-mythic underground tape, Blonde Death follows the runaway odyssey
of Tammy, a teenage misfit fleeing an abusive home with two queer
outsiders who christen themselves her new family. Their improvised road
trip blends impulsive romance, petty crime, and manic self-invention,
gradually collapsing into violence as the trio drifts further from
stability. The film’s messy exuberance is threaded with a growing sense
of doom, capturing the volatility of youth pushed to the margins. A
seminal artifact of queer DIY cinema, Blonde Death fuses melodrama,
punk energy, and camp excess with unexpectedly sharp social commentary.
Director James Robert Baker — better known for his incendiary fiction —
uses the limitations of shot-on-video production to amplify the film’s
immediacy and emotional rawness. The result is a rare, transgressive
work whose jagged form reflects the precarity, rebellion, and
desperation of its characters, standing at the intersection of outsider
art and queer counterculture.
Screen Slate review: If
an angry gay anarchist reimagined Badlands for
the 80s, what might we expect of its impressionable yet fiercely
loyal protagonist? Would her family move to Orange County to start a
Christian ministry? Could her relationship with her bad-to-the-bone
boytoy be complicated by the release of his prison bunkmate? Might
the musical refrain of Carl Orff's "Gassenhauer" be
replaced by The Angry Samoans' "My Old Man's a Fatso"? And
what if the whole thing was shot on video for $2,000? These questions
are answered in Blonde
Death (1984),
which deserves a place alongside Bill Gunn's Personal
Problems as
a recently revived shot-on-video feature worthy of serious
consideration within the cinematic canon. Its director, James Robert
Baker – credited here as "James Dillinger" – is best
known for his transgressive gay fiction like Boy
Wonder (1985)
and Tim
and Pete (1993),
the latter about rekindled former lovers on a death trip to
assassinate the American New Right. Around the time of Blonde
Death's
production, Baker was an award-winning yet unproduced UCLA
screenwriting grad, and this, his only feature, was realized under
the auspices of Hollywood-based media arts center and video gallery
EZTV. The result is a tightly structured, character-driven satire
buoyed by pitch-perfect casting of unknown actors, including Sara Lee
Wade as Tammy "the teenage timebomb," who narrates in an
earnest voiceover with a singsong southern drawl. Tammy's parents
espouse strict Christian values, but her potentially closeted father
has a spanking fetish, and her stepmother, we learn, is scheming to
murder him with poison Tang to inherit money to open a new church
with her lover. When both are out of town, Tammy is aggressively
courted by a one-eyed lesbian, but she instead falls into the thralls
of a hunky home invader, with whom she plots to rob Disneyland to
start a new life. (The eventual heist is shot guerrilla style within
the Magic Kingdom.) But their plans receive a mixed blessing with the
arrival of Tammy's new squeeze's prison lover, who is embraced as a
third partner—but may be a homicidal maniac. Blonde
Death is
rich with cultural clutter: doomsday churches, singing
televangelists, pill-popping, Mickey Mouse, and knotty sexual
confusion. But Baker is uniquely talented at tying satire back to his
characters, weaving a consistently engaging tapestry of transgressive
societal commentary. And alongside the affinities with John Waters's
oeuvre, Mudhoney,
and Baby
Doll, Blonde
Death feels
equally of a piece with the Abject Art of fellow Angelenos Paul
McCarthy and Mike Kelley, or Bruce & Norman Yonemoto's
videographic deconstructions of Hollywood mythmaking and melodrama.
The result resists easy placement within the continuum of independent
80s cinema or video art; and while it seems like a tragic and unfair
twist of fate that Baker's feature filmmaking career never took
flight, such an outsider position seems to befit this perverse,
uncompromising, and deeply felt work. Jon Dieringer
Chicago Reader review: Mickey Rourke as a private investigator hired by a mysterious client
(Robert De Niro) to track down a missing person. Deliberate
mystification in all this, with imponderable flashbacks and assorted
voodoo distractions, though director Alan Parker (Midnight Express)
drops so many ironic cues along the way that when the surprise ending
finally comes, it isn’t. Parker directs everything for maximum visual
impact but can’t manage to tie the scenes together: there’s no pacing,
no development, only alternating passages of disaffected ramble and
hysterical rant. The semiautistic styling may be congenial to his
perennial themes (of personal entrapment and the self under siege), but
for all the supernatural bloodletting and explosions of technique, the
film remains distant and closed (1987). Pat Graham
Barbican introduction to this film in Iranian Masterpieces season: The final cinematic work of director Ebrahim
Golestan, this political satire places the ills of a society under a
comic magnifying glass. A Monty Python–esque allegory about the corrosive impact of oil exports on Iranian life, following a villager who discovers a hidden fortune, becomes rich overnight, and swiftly transforms into a tyrant.The film’s troubled history began even before its release. Golestan
felt compelled to conceal the story during production, aware of how his
intentions may be skewed. When it finally reached cinemas, the film was
banned after 2 weeks. The questions remained – were they
misinterpretations, or simply interpretations? Featuring several major stars of the era, including comedian Parviz Sayyad and Mary Apick.
Golestan re-edited the film but the director’s version was never
publicly screened… until now. This screening marks the world premiere of
the brand-new restoration of the film’s director’s cut.
Chicago Reader review: Having moved to London in 1967, the distinguished Iranian writer,
translator, producer, and director Ebrahim Golestan returned to his
homeland to make this unpleasant allegorical comedy (1972), his second
and final feature to date. A bitter satire about the shah’s corrupt
regime, it centers on a poor peasant who plunges into a hidden cave,
discovers a cache of valuable antiques, and becomes a grotesque nouveau
riche tyrant. Golestan tackled a related theme in his exquisite 1965
short The Iranian Crown Jewels (see listing for “Documentaries by
Ebrahim Golestan”), which was commissioned and then banned by the
shah’s cultural ministry, but that film attacked the very elitism that
subsumes this one. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: This first feature follows Mike (Favreau) as he gets back into the
dating game after the abrupt and unwelcome termination of a six-year
relationship. An out-of-work New York actor looking for a break in LA,
he's dragged out of his mope by pals Rob (Livingston), Charles (Desert),
Sue (Van Horn) and, especially, the irrepressible Trent (Vaughn), who
insists they chase down some honeys in Vegas. Wiser, and poorer, they
return to trawl the Angelino hotspots. Love it and loathe it, this film
wants it both ways. We're supposed to be appalled at the callous
chauvinism of the predatory male, but also to get off on his jive, sharp
suits and cool car. We do, too. It's a bit smug, a bit smarmy, but you
should still see this movie, and here are ten reasons why: (i) Vince Vaughn - a louche, lanky ego salesman, he's the definitive '90s lounge lizard. (ii) Jon Favreau
- a subtler actor than Vaughn, he spends the entire picture sulking,
and still has you pulling for him. Plus, he wrote the script, and (iii)
this is the most quotable movie since Clueless. (iv) It boasts
the best answerphone gag in the history of the movies. Bar none. (v-x)
Ninety minutes spent learning how not to pick up girls. This is what the
movies were made for, isn't it? Tom Charity
This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and also screens on February 15th. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: One
of the first works of the Polish New Wave, Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film is
a compelling piece, although it's been somewhat overrated by critics
who considered its story of a resistance fighter's ideological struggle
as a cagey bit of anti-Soviet propaganda, and hence automatically
admirable. Following the art cinema technique of the time, Wajda tends
toward harsh and overstated imagery, but he achieves a fascinating
psychological rapport with his lead actor, Zbigniew Cybulski—who was
known as Poland's James Dean. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: On her first day of active duty, rookie NY cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis)
surprises a supermarket robber and blows him away. Suspended for
shooting an unarmed suspect (his gun has mysteriously disappeared),
Megan is later seducedby charming commodities-broker Eugene Hunt
(Ron Silver). Then dead bodies start turning up all over town, killed with
bullets fired from her gun and etched with her name. Detective Nick Mann
(Clancy Brown) takes Megan under his wing, but even when Hunt virtually
confesses to the crimes, the disturbing cat-and-mouse games have just
begun. Curtis gives her most complex performance to date as the reckless
Megan, whose obsessive behaviour and over-reactions have more to do
with turning the tables on violent men than balancing the scales of
justice. Short on plausibility but preserving the psycho-sexual
ambiguities throughout, Kathryn Bigelow's seductively stylish, wildy fetishistic
thriller is proof that a woman can enter a traditionally male world
and, like Megan, beat men at their own game. Nigel Floyd
This film, part of the 'World of Black Film Weekend' at BFI Southbank, is introduced by Ashley Clark. The writer, broadcaster, and film programmer presents an
eclectic selection of films featured in his new book The World of Black
Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films (Laurence
King). He will also be in attendance to sign copies of his
book.
BFI introduction:On paper, Mauritanian director Med Hondo’s film seems difficult to
believe: a single-set song-and-dance voyage through four centuries of
colonialism, enslavement, liberation struggles and modern immigration –
in just 110 minutes. On screen, it’s astonishing to behold the
successful realisation of such an ambitious project. One of the greatest
movies ever made, Hondo’s thrillingly passionate cri de coeur remains a
troubling, resonant work.
Chicago Reader review: One of the most neglected and underrated Hollywood films of its era,
Richard Fleischer's blistering 1975 melodrama about a slave-breeding
plantation in the Deep South, set in the 1840s, was widely ridiculed as
camp in this country when it came out. But apart from this film and
Charles Burnett's recent Nightjohn, it's doubtful whether many
more insightful and penetrating movies about American slavery exist.
Scripted by Norman Wexler from a sensationalist novel by Kyle Onstott;
with James Mason, Susan George, Perry King, Richard Ward, Brenda Sykes,
and Ken Norton.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is the UK premiere of the extended cut of this film which then gets a number of screening at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.
The Times review: Wong Kar-wei’s The Grandmaster is one of the more exquisite martial arts movies around, as the Hong Kong auteur behind the lyrical In the Mood for Love takes
on the legend of Ip Man, the 1930s wing chun master, played by Tony
Leung. China’s history unrolls in the background as Ip Man’s fortunes
fail in the Second World War. Perhaps the most beautiful — and violent —
scene in the film is a long, balletic, multistorey fight between Ip Man
and the female mistress of the craft Gong Er (the elegant Zhang Ziyi),
filled with the ache of impossible attraction. French
cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd provides a deliciously noir take on
many scenes, particularly the opening moments where Ip Man, in a trilby,
takes on a town full of assassins in
black, gloopy rain. Kate Muir
This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and also screens on February 6th. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: Here they are again, our old friends illusion and reality, battling it out to unsettling effect in a film with more layers than an onion and umpteen references to Wajda's own career. A film director called Andrzej tries to continue shooting after his lead (clearly modelled on Zbigniew Cybulski, the actor who became the personification of postwar Polish cinema through his work with Wajda, and who had recently died in tragic circumstances) has disappeared. The result is stylistically and emotionally overwrought, but Wajda's technical assurance helps enormously in maintaining tension. Geoff Brown
This film is part of 'Movies on Movies' day at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: Shrewd Hollywood exec Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is already paranoid that a
rival may join the studio; but what of the anonymous postcards he's
getting from a scriptwriter whose pitch he hasn't followed up? Rattled
by the death threats, he decides (wrongly) that the likely sender is
David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio). But when Kahane is found dead after a meeting
with Mill and it becomes known that Mill is dating the writer's
ungrieving lover (Greta Scacchi), his troubles multiply... Robert Altman turns Michael Tolkin's
thriller into the most honest, hilarious Hollywood satire ever, even
persuading some 60 celebs to play themselves. Besides the superb
performances, photography, music and seamless blend of comedy and
tension, what's finally so special about the film is its form. Altman
refines his open, 'democratic' style of the '70s, to show an untidy
world from numerous shifting perspectives, yet the film is far from
chaotic. With its many movie references and film-within-a-film
structure, it's forever owning up to the fact that it's only a movie.
Only? Were more films as complex and revealing about people, society and
the way we watch and think about films, today's Hollywood product would
be far more interesting than it is. Geoff Andrew
Time Out review: Rough Treatment takes up where Man of Marbleleft off,
with its exploration of the contemporary (1978) political situation in
Poland and its pursuit of the relationship between the individual and
society. The film follows the downfall of an urbane and well-known
political correspondent (a phenomenal performance from Zbigniew Zapasiewicz), who
steps out of line during a TV interview and simultaneously discovers
that his wife is leaving him. The cold, grey society of which he's part
is discovered in the grim attitudes of those around him; at the same
time his own faults and inadequacies build with every scene. Working in
the wake of the censorship problems which beset Man of Marble, Andrzej Wajda had this to say on its release: 'I worked on this film in a blind
rage...it has no flourishes. Its impact was to come solely from a
logically constructed chain of events'. The end isn't entirely
satisfactory, but that doesn't matter - the rest is fascinating, and
he's already made his point.
This superbly acted, heartbreaking movie is showing from a 35mm print.
Chicago Reader review: Michelle
Williams and Ryan Gosling tear up the screen as mismatched lovers,
shown in alternating sequences as a giddy young couple forging a
much-compromised emotional bond on their earliest dates and then years
later as bitterly divided spouses with a young daughter. They're just
getting by on his wages as a boozy house painter and hers as a nurse,
and his close, intuitive relationship with the little girl seems to be
the only glue holding it all together. In a desperate move, husband and
wife retreat for a romantic evening alone in a crummy hotel with theme
rooms; theirs is the "future room," a garish space-age pad, and—wouldn’t
you know it?—the future arrives. The performances are so gripping that
the movie works despite its diagrammatic structure, which focuses on
ironic rhymes between past and present and omits the entirety of the
couple’s marriage. JR Jones Here (and above) is the trailer.
One of Quentin Tarantino's favourite Spaghetti Westerns, and an influence on Django Unchained, I've seen this and it packs quite a punch.
Nickel Cinema introduction: After a gang of marauders massacres his tribe and desecrates their land, a lone warrior named Navajo Joe (Burt Reynolds) vows to track down the perpetrators across a frontier defined by greed, violence, and shifting alliances. Hired by a corrupt town to combat the very outlaws responsible for his people’s destruction, Joe becomes both a weapon and a reminder of the hypocrisies embedded in the settler economy. As the conflict intensifies, the film charts a path of brutal reprisals and uneasy transactions, where every act of resistance is shadowed by exploitation. Positioned within the mid-1960s explosion of Italian westerns, Navajo Joe blends Corbucci’s flair for stark landscapes and ruthless pacing with a pointed critique of frontier mythmaking. Ennio Morricone’s insistent score underscores the film’s tension between Indigenous identity and genre convention, resulting in a western that is both operatically stylised and structurally confrontational — a story where revenge intersects with the broader violence of colonial expansion.
This screening is part of the Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave season at the Barbican curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht. You can find full details here.
Barbican introduction: A seamless fusion of myth, symbolism, folklore and classical Persian literature, Bahram Beyzaie’s drama unfolds like a feminist re-telling of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epics. Tara, a strong-willed widow, encounters an ancient warrior spirit in the forest near her village. The ghostly figure pursues her relentlessly, trying to steal a sword she inherited from her father. Finding himself in love in love with Tara, the warrior becomes barred from returning to the realm of the dead. The film’s completion coincided with the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent Islamist takeover, leading to its indefinite suppression. It was not its political allegory that troubled the authorities, so much as its vision of a woman both desired and in control of her fate — an image intolerable to the fanatics. The film is the first of Beyzaie’s works to be fully centred on a woman: a figure of almost ethereal presence, portrayed with unforgettable poise portrayed bySusan Taslimi.
The screening for this film on Saturday 31 January will be introduced by Tom Cunliffe
(UCL), and will be followed by a post film discussion group in the
Atrium Bar. The movie is part of the 1980s: The Lost Decade of Japanese Cinema season at the Garden Cinema.
Time Out review: On the surface, Gakuryu Ishii's 'crazy family' is as normal as you or me:
husband, wife and two pretty, healthy teenage kids, living in the
suburban house of their dreams. But Ishii rips aside this bourgeois
façade to show the horror festering beneath. Dad's mind is a seething
can of paranoid worms, convinced that his 'love' is the only cure for
the 'sickness' he detects in the others, and well before the end he's
trying to trick them into a painless group suicide with a stout dose of
insecticide in the coffee. The problems come to a head when his senile
father (disgusting as only the elderly know how to be) visits and
outstays his welcome, forcing Dad to take a chainsaw to the living-room
floor with the perfectly reasonable intention of digging a
cellar-cum-fallout shelter to accommodate the old misery. But that's
when he strikes the nest of white ants... Seeing Ishii's film is a bit
like rediscovering the thrill of your first encounter with Monty Python
all those years ago: black humour at its most vicious (ie. funniest),
paced like a commuter express and spiked with a dash of science fiction
to keep even the most micro-chipped viewer unsure where he, she or it is
going. Tony Rayns
Chicago Reader review: Like most people with a cat phobia, Val Lewton, the legendary producer
of RKO’s horror cycle, was fascinated by them. His first film (1942),
eerily directed by Jacques Tourneur, is dedicated to his fetish. Based
on a wholly fabricated Serbian legend about medieval devil worship, Cat People
describes the effects of this legend on the mind of a New York fashion
designer (Simone Simon) who believes herself descended from a race of
predatory cat women. More a film about unreasoning fear than the
supernatural, this work demonstrates what a filmmaker can accomplish
when he substitutes taste and intelligence for special effects. Don Druker
This is a Jellied Reels presentation. Details of their other screenings can be found here.
Chicago Reader review: Arguably Stanley Donen’s masterpiece, and undoubtedly one of the most stylistically influential films of the 60s, Two for the Road
(1967) follows a couple (Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney) through four
successive trips through the south of France, telling the story of the
dissolution of their marriage by cutting from one time level to another.
The literate script is by Frederic Raphael, and Eleanor Bron
contributes a hilarious cameo as the ultimate University of Chicago
graduate. Dave Kehr
This is a 35mm screening in the 'Projecting the Archive' series at BFI Southbank.
BFI introduction: One of the most accomplished British films of the 1930s, this fantasy melodrama boasts a wonderful ensemble cast headed by one of the industry’s finest imports: Conrad Veidt. Set in that most evocative, claustrophobic locale, the English boarding house, Jerome K. Jerome’s play brings together characters from different classes to play out its drama of sexual and class politics, reflecting on relationships and generational shift. The script was co-written by Alma Reville (Alfred Hitchcock’s wife and early collaborator), whose sensitive depiction of female characters is one of the film’s greatest assets, particularly Rène Ray as the put-upon maid and Beatrix Lehmann as a bitter spinster.
The latest season of theLondon Review of Book’s long-running film series continues its exploration of visions of London created by non-British filmmakers throughout 2026. First up for the new year is the golden-age British film noirNight and the City. It was Jules Dassin’s last film before he was blacklisted by Hollywood. He declared that he had not read the novel by the now-cult writer, Gerald Kersh, on which it was based. It follows the attempts of a small-time American con artist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark on definitive, anti-heroic form) to establish himself shattered post-war London’s wrestling rackets. With a production history as vivid as its tangled plot, Night and the City was widely misunderstood upon release, but is now regarded as a classic of the genre: ‘A work of emotional power and existential drama that stands as a paradigm of noir pathos and despair,’ according to the film scholar Andrew Dickos.
IntroducingNight and the City, and discussing it afterwards with regular host Gareth Evans, will be the novelist, occasionalLRBcontributor and screenwriter Ronan Bennett (Top Boy,Public Enemies,The Day of the Jackal).
Time Out review: Bizarre film noir
with Richard Widmark as a small time nightclub tout trying to hustle his way
into the wrestling rackets, but finding himself the object of a
murderous manhunt when his cons catch up with him. Set in a London
through which Widmark spends much of his time dodging in dark alleyways,
it attempts to present the city in neo-expressionist terms as a
grotesque, terrifyingly anonymous trap. Fascinating, even though the
stylised characterisations (like Francis L Sullivan's obesely outsized nightclub king) remain theoretically interesting
rather than convincing. Inclined to go over the top, it all too clearly
contains the seeds of Jules Dassin's later - and disastrous - pretensions. Tom Milne
This monumental historical epic set in the 13th century, four-years-in-the-making yet slipped into semi-obscurity, was recently restored in 4K and is finally available in all its grandiosity on the IMAX screen and part of the Restored strand.
Chicago Reader review: Shot in 1990, as Kazakhstan was asserting its independence, this brutal
historical epic by Ardak Amirkulov charts political intrigue among the
Kipchaks, a confederation of tribes on the steppes of central Asia,
before they were overrun by Genghis Khan. At 165 minutes this is a
pretty long haul, and the shifting alliances mapped out in the dark and
claustrophobic first part can be difficult to follow; the payoff comes
in the second part, which opens out into dramatic locations and bloody
battle as the Mongols lay siege to Otrar. The film’s respectful
treatment of Islam was welcomed in Kazakhstan as a celebration of
national identity, though Amirkulov’s attitude may be more ambivalent:
as Genghis Khan prepares to execute the governor of Otrar, he points out
two holy men whose marginal religious differences have allowed him to
divide and conquer. J R Jones
BFI Southbank introduction: This epic tale of the Napoleonic wars and Poles’ participation in
them provides Wajda with an opportunity to consider thorny questions
around heroism and patriotism. A young nobleman partakes in the
conflict, fighting for Poland’s freedom while searching for his own
self. Wajda worked with a higher budget and on a much larger scale to
create this visually dazzling CinemaScope drama, which examines
nationhood and national identity.
Chicago Reader review: By far the most underrated of Sam Peckinpah's films, this grim 1974 tale
about a minor-league piano player in Mexico (Warren Oates) who
sacrifices his love (Isela Vega) when he goes after a fortune as a
bounty hunter is certainly one of the director's most personal and
obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano
in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its
rather ghoulish lyricism. (Critic Tom Milne has suggestively compared
the labyrinthine plot to that of a gothic novel.) Oates has perhaps
never been better, and a strong secondary cast—Vega, Gig Young, Robert
Webber, Kris Kristofferson, Donnie Fritts, and Emilio Fernandez—is
equally effective in etching Peckinpah's dark night of the soul. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: A 22-year-old Jerzy Skolimowski coscripted this minor
Andrzej Wajda feature (1960), a modish comedy about a hip young doctor
who moonlights as a jazz drummer. The film serves as a fascinating
document of Polish youth culture during the least repressive years of
the communist era, as well as a rough draft for the freewheeling
comedies Skolimowski would soon direct himself (Walkover, Identification Marks: None).
Wajda, for all his talent, has never had much flair for comedy, and
this feels weirdly studied for a movie about youthful exuberance. But
there are passages of genuine spontaneity, especially in an extended
confrontation between the hero and a young woman he's trying to bed; it
recalls the famous bedroom showdown in Godard's Breathless, released earlier that same year. Ben Sachs
Here (and above) is a montage of scenes from the film.
This screening is part of the Big Screen Classics strand.
Chicago Reader review: Charles Crichton, the veteran British director who made his biggest mark with The Lavender Hill Mob
in 1950, teams up with actor, writer, and executive producer John
Cleese in another madcap caper comedy (1988) that’s every bit as funny
as its predecessor. Like many of the best English comedies, much of the
humor here is based on character, good-natured high spirits, and fairly
uninhibited vulgarity (a speech impediment and dead dogs supply the
basis for some of the gags). The superlative cast includes Americans
Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis (at her sexiest), as well as Michael
Palin and Cleese; Crichton keeps the laughs coming with infectious
energy. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening will be introduced by actor Reece Shearsmith.
Chicago Reader review: Everyone involved seems somewhat confused over what a sequel to
Hitchcock’s masterpiece could possibly be; if ever a film definitively
ended, it was Psycho. Director Richard Franklin (Road Games) and writer Tom Holland (Class of ’84)
find a tentative solution in taking Hitchcock’s psychiatric metaphors
literally: for much of its length, the film is a surprisingly serious
plea for the rights of the mentally ill and the legitimacy of the
insanity defense. When the need to make a commercial shocker finally
asserts itself, the film shifts gears with unseemly, damaging haste.
Though far from a worthy successor to the original (but why make
impossible demands?) the film clearly could have been much worse;
there’s even some inadvertent artistic interest in the Proustian
conjunction of the original actors (Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles), who
have aged, and the meticulously re-created sets, which have not. Dave Kehr
New Statesman film critic, Ryan Gilbey, has written a BFI Modern Classics monograph on Groundhog Day which I can highly recommend. Here is an extract from a feature he wrote for the Observer on the film: '[Groundhog Day] has emerged as one of the most influential films in modern cinema -
and not only on other movies. Tony Blair did not refer to Jurassic
Park in his sombre speech about the Northern Ireland peace process.
Dispatches during the search for weapons of mass distraction made no
mention of Mrs Doubtfire . And the Archbishop of Canterbury neglected
to name-check Indecent Proposal when delivering the 2002 Richard
Dimbleby Lecture. But Groundhog Day was invoked on each of these
occasions. The title has become a way of encapsulating those
feelings of futility, repetition and boredom that are a routine part of
our lives. When Groundhog Day is referred to, it is not the 2 February
celebration that comes to mind, but the story of a cynical TV
weatherman, Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, who pitches up in
Punxsutawney to cover the festivities. Next morning, he wakes to
discover it's not the next morning at all: he is trapped in Groundhog
Day. No matter what crimes he commits or how definitively he annihilates
himself, he will be returned to his dismal bed-and-breakfast each
morning at 5.59am . . .'
Here (and above) all the Ned Ryerson scenes, here are all the Ned Ryerson scenes, here are all the Ned Ryerson scenes, here are all the Ned Ryerson scenes ...
This film is part of the Claudia Cardinale season at Cine Lumiere. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: The past weighs heavily on the present in this 1965 family saga by
Luchino Visconti, though for much of the running time that weight is
more felt than understood. Young Sandra (Claudia Cardinale) returns to
her hometown in Northern Italy to dedicate a monument to her father, a
Jewish scholar killed in the Holocaust. Her husband is uncomfortable
with the aristocratic clan, but only near the end does Sandra’s real
antagonist emerge: her stepfather, who may have betrayed the father to
the Nazis and who now insinuates that Sandra and her raffish brother
have a dark secret of their own. Cardinale has been criticized for her
performance, which seems too emotive given the hard surfaces presented
by the other players, but Visconti, shooting in black and white with
cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi, subordinates all the actors to the
ornate interiors of the family’s decaying mansion; as in The Leopard (1963), one senses not just the glory but the burden of wealth. JR Jones
This is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Time Out review: The town mouse and his country cousin. Or, the story of two students,
one who was very, very good, and one who was very, very bad; but the bad
one passed his exams, got the girl (when he wanted her), and survived
to live profitably ever after. A fine, richly detailed tableau of
student life in Paris, and Chabrol's first statement (in his second
film) of his sardonic view of life as a matter of the survival of the
fittest. The centrepiece, as so often in the early days of the nouvelle vague,
is an orgiastic party climaxed, as the guest sleeps it off next
morning, by a sublimely cruel and characteristic 'joke' by the bad
cousin (Jean-Claude Brialy) when he performs an eerie Wagnerian charade with
candelabra and Gestapo cap to wake a Jewish student into nightmare. Tom Milne
This 35mm screening will be introdcued by James Bell, Senior Curator, BFI National Archive. The film is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.
BFI Southbank preview: Taut as a drum, Vernon Sewell’s suspense thriller is an outstanding
example of the lean British ‘B’ film. A carefully-planned bank heist
goes awry when the robbers are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of
two nattering cleaners. The gang lock the manager and his secretary in
the airtight vault and make off with the cash, but soon realise that the
pair will suffocate and they will face a murder rap if they can’t free
them. With only 12 hours’ worth of air in the vault, the clock is
ticking. Gripping to the end, the film is a real rediscovery. James Bell
