'This is the LAST screening from the people behind THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE!* After eight
years, the series is coming to a close with the launch of a book
containing all the essays specially commissioned for each screening. As
always, two towering films. But at this final event, the film club will
reveal the secret rule that has governed their programming all along.'
*(The Machine That Kills Bad People is held bi-monthly in the ICA Cinema
and is programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, María Palacios Cruz,
and Ben Rivers.)
Time Out review: Flora Tristan was a 19th century utopian socialist feminist, notorious
in her day, now largely forgotten. A young historian (Rebecca Pauly) leaves
husband and child to seek traces of Tristan in contemporary Lyons.
Disillusioned with the records-and-monuments methods of historians, she
roams the streets recording sounds Tristan may have heard. A film about
the impossibility of knowing the past; the camera looks and looks but
only yields implacably closed images. Sound's the thing, and in the
final, long-held shot of the woman ecstatically playing her violin, the
film's complex and compelling themes come together. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: As
close to a classic as anything New Hollywood produced, Alan Pakula's
1971 film tells of a small-town detective who comes to New York in
search of a friend's killer. The trail leads to a tough-minded hooker
who can't understand the cop's determination. Donald Sutherland works
small and subtly, balancing Jane Fonda's flashy virtuoso technique. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Bobby is a struggling black actor. The few roles offered by white movie
writers and producers reek of artifice: punks, pimps, sassy soul
brothers and Eddie Murphy clones. What's a man to do? Townsend's satire
may be gentle, but more often than not it's spot on. As Bobby (Townsend)
escapes the sad reality of racial stereotyping through daydreams that
expose the absurdity of whites telling blacks how to be Black, we're
treated to visions of a Black Acting School (learn how to play a
yodelling butler Stepin Fetchit-style), a truly noir TV-noir (Sam Ace in Death of a Breakdancer),
and best of all, a Bros' version of a Bazza Norman-type movie round-up.
Despite the film's conspicuously minuscule budget and shaky narrative
structure, it is funny. If you value enthusiasm and imagination more
than glossy sophistication, you'll laugh. Geoff Andrew
Robert Altman made a number of groundbreaking films in the 1970s (MASH,
The Long Goodbye, Nashville and McCabe and Mrs Miller). This one has
slipped through the net but is no less innovative and is a must-see for
anyone interested in the director's work.
Elliott Gould (slumbering through the decade in his inimitable style)
and George Segal are excellent in the lead roles. It's funny and
poignant and undoubtedly the best film I've seen on the subject of
gambling as the pair take the well-worn road from casino to racetrack to
card hall, ending up in Reno.
Chicago Reader review: Robert Altman's masterful 1974 study of the psychology of the
compulsive gambler. Elliott Gould, loose, jocular, and playful, and
George Segal, neurotic, driven, and desperate, are really two halves of
the same personality as they move from bet to bet, game to game, until
they arrive for the big showdown in Reno. As in all Altman films,
winning is losing; and the more Altman reveals, in his oblique,
seemingly casual yet brilliantly controlled way, the more we realize
that to love characters the way Altman loves his, you have to see them
turned completely inside out. Don Druker
This is part of the excellent Rio Forever season at the Rio Cinema.
Time Out review: Thirty-year-old New Yorker Desiree Akhavan writes, directs and stars in
this indie feature. She plays Shirin, an Iranian-American hipster trying
to recover from a break-up with her girlfriend. There are shades of
‘Girls’ here (Akhavan and Lena Dunham are buddies in real life, and the
rising star appears in the new season). But ‘Appropriate Behaviour’
isn’t all knowing LOLs; there’s a satisfying depth and heart here that’s
more in line with ‘Annie Hall’. In flashbacks we watch Shirin’s
relationship with her ex sputter into life and run a wobbly course to
its ignominious end (‘You’re ruining my birthday! You’re ruining my
twenties!’). Shirin’s awkwardness may be fashionable, but it’s not
affected – she’s genuinely scared to confess her bisexuality to her
conservative Iranian parents, and doesn’t remotely fit in at her family
circle’s Persian parties, any more than she suits the supposedly
confidence-boosting bustier she’s coaxed into wearing at a fancy
lingerie store. For all the brazen charms of this warm and funny
debut, though, its quieter moments signal a profundity that’s really
worth getting excited about. Sophie Harris
This is part of the Jewish Culture Month season at Curzon cinemas. Details here.
Time Out review: Josh and Benny Safdie, the indie filmmaking brothers whose New York
City movies shudder with attitude, tell fast and grubby stories that
harken back to the 1970s, when Sidney Lumet ruled sets. Their vigor is
an instant rush: why creep a camera down a hallway when you can fling it
behind equally unhinged characters? In ‘Heaven Knows What’, the Safdies turned uptown heroin junkies into wild, unkempt angels. Then, in ‘Good
Time’, they gave Robert Pattinson all the confusion he could handle as a
Pacino-like Queens hustler out of his depth. There’s no nostalgia to
these films, no cuteness, only the mania of urban survival, improvised
on the fly with a side of trash talk. ‘Uncut Gems’, the Safdies’ electrifying and abrasive latest
drama, flirts with becoming a headache. (For some, it will feel like
more than flirting.) But the film gets closer than the brothers ever
have to developing a genuine affection for their various schemers, and
that makes all the difference. Tenaciously, it follows a week in the
2012 life of a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants Diamond District dealer,
Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler, channeling his obnoxiousness into something
magically right, even moving). You may be overwhelmed by the Safdies’s
spiky sound design – filled with yelling, sports betting, the jewelry
shop’s constantly buzzing security door and an overcaffeinated,
Tangerine Dream–like synth score – but Howard thrives in this chaos.
It’s his normal. Beyond his bling salesmanship, Howard dreams of a big score, which
arrives by messenger from Ethiopia: a gleaming chunk of opal-encrusted
rock which he hopes to auction off for a fortune. (It’s ‘real old-school
Middle-earth shit’, he tells the hypnotized NBA star Kevin Garnett,
playing himself with self-deprecating charm.) The various whereabouts of
this stone will become a plot spine for ‘Uncut Gems’, but
that’s just an excuse to ping-pong Howard between a kaleidoscopic
cross-section of sharply etched neurotics: pawnshop kibitzers, menacing
debt collectors (led by a spookily intense Eric Bogosian), a
semi-estranged wife (Idina Menzel, seeping fury from every pore) and a
brassy mistress, also his shop’s counter clerk, who may be falling in
love with him (Julia Fox, making a stellar debut). Gamblers at heart, the Safdies have a palpable love of gamesmanship,
of arguments pushed to the brink, verbal beatdowns and courtside
chatter. (Gifted cinematographer Darius Khondji, a master of
reflections, gives ‘Uncut Gems’a sheen that
visually counterbalances.) Something else is going on here, too: a
lovably pronounced American Jewishness in terms of tone and touchstones,
from Billy Joel’s showbizzy ‘The Stranger’, heard during a car ride
back to Long Island, to a family’s Passover seder rife with marital
tensions and kids running around searching for theafikomen.
This was the environment in which the Safdies grew up; their film isn’t
merely an outstanding portrait of a charming fate-tempter who goes a
bit too far, but a kind of autobiography (as was their 2009
breakthrough, ‘Daddy Longlegs’). It’s made with so much
love, care and enthusiasm – plus no small amount of risk – you thrill to
think that they’re just getting started. Joshua Rothkopf
This 35mm screening, introduced by Professor Melanie Williams, is part of the excellent British Post-War Cinema season at BFI. Details here. The film is also being shown on May 14th.
BFI introduction: This neorealist-influenced story of three women, who are released from
jail and into the cold indifference of London, is vividly captured by
Geoffrey Unsworth’s stunning cinematography. This film alone attests to
Lee’s underrated place in cinema, showcasing his sensitive, occasionally
sensual approach, continental flair and remarkably assured pacing.
This is the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of the film.
BFI introduction: The corpses of the opponents of a tyrannical regime fill the streets
of Milan – left unburied by the repressive state as a warning to the
population. Amid indifference, a modern-day Antigone finds help from an
enigmatic stranger to bury her brother. Filmed in the revolutionary
climate of post-’68 Milan by a filmmaker who made a profound mark on the
history of cinema, this tale of resistance against totalitarianism
revisits Greek dramatist Sophocles, resulting in a chillingly relevant
and provocative work.
Time Out review: Made directly after Galileo, whose strengths director Liliana Cavani enlarges and
develops, this also postulates a primacy of human and emotional response
over the nihilism of The Night Porter (made four years later). In this modern day reworking of Antigone,
Cavani's striking visual sense illuminates her subject sufficiently to
overcome doubts about some of the '60s conceits. Where she manages to
evoke her Fascist state as exceptionally normal, the film works
exceptionally well. Verna Glaesner
Time Out review: An adaptation of Emlyn Williams' potboiling play Someone Waiting, about a young man wrongly convicted of murder (Alec McCowen), and the last-minute hunt for the real killer by his dipsomaniac father (Michael Redgrave). This was the first time Losey had filmed under his own name since the trauma of the blacklist, and it shows in the overstatement: the persistent play with clocks, for instance, indicating not just that Redgrave is racing against a 24-hour deadline to uncover the truth, but that his alcoholism was a way of making time stand still by shutting out his responsibilities (to his son, to society). By shifting the emphasis from thriller to anti-capital punishment pleading, Losey also strains the structure almost to breaking point. An undeniably powerful film, all the same, superbly shot by Freddie Francis and conceived with a raw-edged brilliance, right from the brutal opening murder, that accommodates even the symbolism of a Goya bull, with the real killer (Leo McKern) finally cornered. Tom Milne
This is also screened at Close-Up Cinema on May 31st. Details here.
BFI introduction: Whilst renovating his dilapidated home, Aston (Robert Shaw) invites an irritable and devious vagrant (Donald Pleasance) to stay. But, when his ill-tempered brother Mick (Alan Bates) returns, an ominous yet darkly comic power struggle between the trio commences. A play that changed the face of modern theatre and made Harold Pinter's name, The Caretaker remains one of Pinter’s most famous works. Featuring original production cast members Pleasance and Bates and sensitively directed by Clive Donner and shot by Nicolas Roeg, this study of shared illusion, tragic dispossession and the fraternal bond of unspoken love, combines mesmerising performances and the magic of Pinter's dialogue into a spellbinding film.
This film is introduced by the ‘Pink Floyd on Film’ series curator Sophia Satchell-Baeza.
Chicago Reader review: 'Though Michelangelo Antonioni's only American film was very poorly received when it was released in 1969, time has been much kinder to it than to, say, La Notte, which was made a decade earlier. Antonioni's nonrealistic approach to American counterculture myths and his loose and slow approach to narrative may still put some people off—along with the uneven dialogue (credited to Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe, and the director)—but his beautiful handling of 'Scope compositions and moods has many lingering aftereffects, and the grand and beautiful apocalyptic finale is downright spectacular. With Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, and Rod Taylor.' Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is part of the Rio Forever season at the cinema and is a 35mm screening.
Chicago Reader review: The Wachowskis, who scripted Assassins, wrote and directed this
adroit and sexy 1996 crime thriller about the hot romance between a
gangster’s moll (Jennifer Tilly) and the ex-con who’s her neighbor (Gina
Gershon). Eventually they concoct an elaborate scam to rip off the
gangster (Joe Pantoliano)—a money launderer for the mob who temporarily
has a couple million dollars. (The laundering here involves literally
washing blood off bills.) This gets very suspenseful (as well as fairly
gruesome) in spots, and if it never adds up to anything profound, it’s
still a welcome change to have a lesbian couple as the chief
identification figures. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: Ozualdo
Candeias was a truck driver who loved movies and decided to make his
own. He did so in a very idiosyncratic style that didn’t care to conform
to anyone’s idea of cinema. His first feature, The Margin, often
suggests a São Paulo rereading of Mario Peixoto’s great avant-garde
classic Limite (1931). It’s a sort of love story set among a group of
desperate and abandoned characters. The
movie takes place around the banks of the Tietê river, which stands as a
promise and a limit for everyone’s lives. While Peixoto was in dialogue
with the European modern art he knew well, Candeias draws heavily from
the poverty around him. The movie has barely any dialogue, and the
filmmaker finds a lot of beauty in the middle of the harshness. Brazil’s
underdevelopment would remain Candeias’s great source of inspiration,
and from The Margin onwards, no other filmmaker did more to give
it representation.
Time Out review: There’s a superb and important early
scene in Ang Lee’s absorbing spy
romance, set on a stylised (studio-shot) Hong Kong tram in 1939, as a
young troupe of Chinese actors board, flushed with the rousing success
of that night’s patriotic play. (The Japanese have already occupied
their homeland, British-run Hong Kong is soon to fall.) The exhilarated
lead character Wong Chia Chi (a remarkable, film-dominating debut
performance by newcomer Wei Tang) thrusts her head out the window to
taste the rain, as if to make physical and personal the night’s small
triumph. You see in that moment how the innocent young actress may be
persuaded, in patriotic duty, to adopt an alias, spy on and seduce, in
order to kill Tony Leung’s collaborationist chief of police. You
could call Lee’s Chinese-language version of Eileen Chang’s novella a
revisionist wartime thriller. Its sub-Brechtian moments are muted, but
it is more than happy to pay self-conscious attention to the period
setting, design and clothes to highlight, in echo of David Hare’s
‘Plenty’, the seductive role of dress as disguise and mask. Like Hare
(with his OAS volunteer, Kate Nelligan), Lee is interested in applying
an emotional and psychological realism to his heroine’s incredible
bravery. It seems, in wartime, some are able to assume grave
responsibilties, but – as Lee’s film quietly and provocatively suggests –
the actions of those that do make mockery of conventional, sex-based,
notions of what constitutes courage, honour, love or even patriotism
itself. In this sense, the real battlefield, the genuine theatre of
truth, in ‘Lust, Caution’ is the bed – the sex – in the arranged flat
three years later in Shanghai, something of a last tango wherein Leung’s
previously almost obsequiously mannered ‘traitor’ shows his true
colours, and Miss Wong, under her alias Mrs Mak, is transformed by the
ever-present knowledge that discovery is death. It’s not a companionable
film – Lee’s directorial discipline, objectivity and lack of
expressionist touch in the use of either Rodrigo Prieto’s camerawork or
Alexandre Desplat’s score can push the viewer close to outsider-dom or
voyeurism – but its dark romanticism lingers in the mind. Wally Hammond
The 'Reece Shearsmith presents' choices at BFI Southbank have been excellent and this is no exception. The actor will introduce the film.
Chicago Reader review: Roger Donaldson’s film of the classic tale of discipline and revolt in
the British navy (1984) is far better than its predecessors, despite the
dim wattage of Anthony Hopkins (as Captain Bligh) and Mel Gibson (as
Mister Christian). Robert Bolt’s screenplay was originally prepared for
David Lean, and it contains a lot of Bolt-ish/Lean-ish disquisition on
the question of civilization versus savagery. But Donaldson brings it
alive by applying the agonizing rhythm of tension and release,
suppression and explosion, that governed his superb New Zealand film Smash Palace.
Hardly another filmmaker in the 80s could leap from smooth classicism
to dynamic modernism with such agility and expressiveness. The appalling
electronic score, by Chariots of Fire‘s Vangelis, is the film’s only grating flaw. Dave Kehr
This is a £1 for members screening at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: America's homeboy comedy of the year is about basketball only in the sense that writer-director Ron Shelton'sBull Durhamwas
about baseball. It's a truly terrific piece of entertainment propelled
by the magic and dynamism of its stars. Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes)
meets Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) on a public court where the game is
played as a mix of macho combat, stand-up comedy and con-artistry. The
jokes and banter are wonderful. But this is also a most unlikely buddy
movie, where the black/white pair team up as hustlers floating around
the rougher areas of Los Angeles, turn on each other, and finally bury
the hatchet to get Billy out of hock to some surprisingly obliging
hoods. Sadly, in doing so, the duo alienate Billy's long-suffering
Hispanic girlfriend (Rosie Perez), who dreams of the straight life and
spends her time memorising trivia in hopes of a TV game show break.
Snipes and Harrelson bounce off the screen like Michael Jordan, while
Shelton and cinematographerRussell Boydperfectly capture the agile thrills of the game itself. A double-whammy slam-dunker of a movie. Steve Grant
BFI introduction: This first-class thriller follows a salesman, brilliantly played by
Todd, whose quest to recover his stolen car leads him into the hands of a
brutal London gang, led by a cast-against-type Sellers. Guillermin’s
brassy precision, revealing his fascination with characters driven by
obsession and psychopathy, is heightened by John Barry’s score and Ralph
Sheldon’s fast, riotous editing.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with League of Gentleman actor Steve Pemberton.
Chicago Reader review: A British black comedy/horror film (1973) about a demented
Shakespearean actor (Vincent Price) having his revenge in the most
macabre ways on eight critics: Ian Hendry, Robert Morley, Robert Coote,
Harry Andrews, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, and Coral
Browne. Gory, imaginative, wildly melodramatic—good fun. With Diana Rigg
as Price's helpful daughter. Dan Druker
Here (and above) are the gorgeous opening credits.
Rio Cinema introduction: The second screening of Category H horror film club’s Rio Forever/Rio Never Ever season is Ladies Night, a double bill of THE STEPFORD WIVES X TEETH. Dedicated to women in horror taking charge of the narrative and fighting back against the corrupt men who surround them, we present two controversial feminist horror films. Join us this 15th May, 23:30, for a night of misandry to remember and a Ladies Night like no other.Kicking off the evening is the rarely screened THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975). Inspiration to Jordan Peele, THE STEPFORD WIVES is a searing satire of the American aspirational middle class. After being persuaded to move to a suburban town by her husband, Joanna begins to notice that there is something uncanny about the other women of Stepford. They don’t talk about anything other than their households, their facial expressions are moulded in a sinister smile, there’s just something not right about them. Aided by her one ally, fellow Stepford wife outcast Bobbie, she attempts to get to the bottom of the conspiracy at the heart of the suburbs and falls into a labyrinth of power she might never be able to escape from.Afterwards, settle in for the 00s sleepover classic, a film whispered about in school corridors as the “one where she’s got teeth in her vagina”, the infamous TEETH (2007). President of her school's abstinence club, Dawn’s world is turned upside down when the proud virgin discovers her body can bite! She harnesses her newfound jaws in a refreshing horror comedy in which women bite back, literally. Category H is excited to give TEETH the big screen treatment it deserves, showing this modern classic at the Rio Cinema for the first time.
This is a 'Members Picks' screening (at just £8 for BFI patrons).
Time Out review: In the future, geneticists will design test-tube babies to be
disease-free. Physical perfection will become the norm, and those flawed
specimens born the old-fashioned way will form the new underclass - the
'in-valids'. Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), an in-valid with a heart defect,
is only taken seriously in the powerful Gattaca space programme when he
assumes the identity of Jerome (Jude Law), a 'valid' who supplies blood,
tissue and urine samples in return for shelter (he himself having been
crippled in a car accident). The subterfuge is successful - until a
murder draws unwelcome scrutiny from the authorities. Self-consciously
at a remove from the trashy B-movie sensibilities which have dominated
science-fantasy movies in recent times, this harks back to the
vacuum-packed, classically alienated dystopia of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. Chilly, elegant, and a little bloodless. Tom Charity
At the Prince Charles Cinema there is a requests board and I have been requesting this movie (which I haven’t seen on the big screen since it was shown at Manchester Cornerhouse in the late 1980s) regularly for many months. Don’t miss the chance to see a great early example of Brian De Palma’s work and luxuriate in Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score.
Chicago Reader review: One of Brian De Palma’s better thrillers (1976)—perhaps because its true auteur is neither De Palma nor screenwriter Paul Schrader but composer Bernard Herrmann, who contributed one of his last scores to the film. It was Herrmann who insisted on cutting the third act of Schrader’s already excessive script (a rather tortured hommage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo), about a businessman (Cliff Robertson) who feels responsible for the death of his wife (Genevieve Bujold) in a kidnapping plot, and who meets and marries her double 15 years later. There’s nothing in the aesthetic and neo-Freudian delirium within hailing distance of Vertigo, and the plot’s often more complicated than complex, but Herrmann’s overpowering score and De Palma’s endlessly circling camera movements do manage to cast a spell.Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Alongside works by Terrence Malick, John Cassavetes and John Huston,
this breathtaking 1983 melodrama is one of the wellsprings of US indie
cinema. Writer Horton Foote – most famous for scripting ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
– and his star Robert Duvall shopped the screenplay to every major
American director, but ended up having to settle for Aussie Bruce
Beresford making his first Hollywood film. It’s a bizarre trio – the respected playwright, the
not-quite-bankable star, the Ocker sex-comedy veteran – especially when
one considers that the film they came up with – all downhome reverence,
stifled emotion and expressive minimalism – stands completely alone in
each man’s CV (at least until Duvall co-starred in virtual remake ‘Crazy Heart’). Duvall plays Mac Sledge – greatest character name ever? – the
strung-out former country star who washes up in a remote Texas town and
shacks up with the local widow. Redemption stories are ten to the dozen
in Hollywood, but this one feels heartbreakingly genuine – Duvall was
never better, and that’s saying something. The look of the film is entrancing, from a series of disconcertingly
flat rural landscapes to the gorgeous photography of human faces – head
on, eyes wide, nothing hidden. It’s a film of quiet, relentless power
which demands – and rewards – a level of belief, even faith in its
characters which few other films even dare to suggest. For all its
simplicity, this is bold, heartfelt filmmaking. A masterpiece. Tom Huddleston
This film is only £1 for Prince Charles Cinema members.
Time Out review: Unexpectedly, at three days' notice, Alan Rudolph was asked by producer Sydney Pollack
to take the helm on this carefree comedy set in the world of Country
& Western music. The result was Rudolph's fastest paced and most
uninhibited film to date: a quirky, rambling tale of two star performers
on the road. Incorporating songs specially written by Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, the film indulges their male-bonding, hard-drinking,
womanising life style, as well as giving Lesley Ann Warren her own shot at performing (not bad). A likeable shaggy dog of a movie, assuming the music's to your taste. David Thomson
For more than two decades, Rita Azevedo Gomes (b. 1952) has quietly
forged and reshaped an unmistakable cinema, rooted in literature,
theatre, music and art history, and unfolding with a rare attentiveness
to language, performance, and the spaces that open between them, and
moving always with deliberate strangeness and clarity. This screening is part of the ICA season devoted to the filmmaker. You can find the full details here.
ICA introduction to tonight's screening: Widowed actor René lives in purposeful isolation, drifting
between phone conversations and memories that refuse to settle, as
fragments of a distant past resurface. The screening will be preceded by an introduction from Benjamin Crais, a scholar, critic, and film programmer. He is on the editorial board of the film magazine Narrow Margin, a quarterly magazine of film criticism.
Critic Adrian Martin has written about Gomes' cinema (full article via this link) and here is an extract from his writing about her on the film screening this evening: Altar (2003) is Rita Azevedo Gomes' most radical and inventive exploration
of this layered approach. At its core stands the small, physical gesture of a
woman, Madeleine (Patrícia Saramago), a gesture that obsesses a widower
playwright (René Gouzene) living on an island. The entire film is constructed
as a slow-paced unfolding of the events and implications surrounding this single
gesture. The oral retelling of memories, filled with rich literary description,
is both accompanied and counterpointed by a careful soundtrack mixing natural sounds,
various musical pieces, and passages of poetry by E.E. Cummings and Sophia de
Mello (read by the director herself). The image-track mixes domestic scenes
where the protagonist tells the story to a young visitor, with a selection of
details from paintings. Altar is a stunningly beautiful piece, very much in line
with an idea that Oliveira and Bénard da Costa discuss in The Fifteenth Stone: that the power of an image comes not from what
it shows but what it signifies, a meaning which is not strictly visible, and
can be found only by going right “inside” the work.Altar also plays with two tropes beloved of Azevedo Gomes:
the paradoxical parallelisms between sensory or aesthetic experiences (“images
so silent that, when seeing them, it seems like I’ve closed my eyes”, as one of
de Mello’s poems says); and the intermingling of spatio-temporal dimensions.
These tropes were already evident in Azevedo Gomes’ stunning debut, The Sound of the Trembling Earth (1990),
where Alberto (José Mário Branco) quotes Leonardo da Vinci’s famous saying:
“Painting is mute poetry and poetry is blind painting”. A powerful device in
this film is the hallucinatory collapse of movements occurring simultaneously in
different directions – a little like the famous “zolly” shots (zooming in and
tracking out) made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
Chicago Reader review: One of the loveliest of Nick Ray’s movies: this 1952 feature begins as a
harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism
reminiscent of Frank Borzage. Robert Ryan is the unstable hero, a
thuggish cop sent upstate in search of a murderer; he ends up falling in
love with the killer’s blind sister (Ida Lupino, who took over some of
the direction when Ray fell ill). Ray excels both in the portrayal of
the corrupt urban environment, a swirl of noirish shadows and violent
movements, and in his exalted vision of the snow-covered countryside,
filmed as a blindingly white, painfully silent field for moral
regeneration. With Ward Bond and an excellent score by Bernard Herrmann. Dave Kehr
This is a 35mm screening and is part of the Rio Forever season. More details here. Director and Rio Patron
Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona, 2073) will introduce the
film, discussing its importance to him both as a director and film
lover. Here is an excellent article by John Patterson in the Guardian on the movie.
Time Out review:
It’s
worrying that 1974’s ‘The Godfather Part II’ is now best known for
being the film-lover’s kneejerk answer to the question ‘which sequel is
superior to the original’? It’s a pointless discussion, because both
films are damn close to perfect: two opposing but complementary sides of
the same coin. If ‘The Godfather’ was a knife in the dark, its sequel
is the long, slow death rattle; if the first film lusted after its
bloodthirsty antiheroes, the second drowns itself in guilt and
recrimination. Two stories run in parallel in ‘Part II’. In the first, a
young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) rises to power in New York,
fuelled by vengeance and brute, old-world morality. In the second, set
50 years later, his son Michael (Al Pacino) struggles to reconcile his
father’s ideals with an uncertain world, and finds himself beset on all
sides by treachery and greed. This is quite simply one of the saddest
movies ever made, a tale of loss, grief and absolute loneliness, an
unflinching stare into the darkest moral abyss. Tom Huddleston Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm screening is on sale at £1 for Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: Jerry Schatzberg might be a very urban cowboy (Panic in Needle Park, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Sweet Revenge,
etc), but there's no evidence here of slick, Altman-style condescension
to country 'n' western culture. Instead there's an unforced equation of
the upfront emotional currency of C&W lyrics with a simple
triangular plotline pared down from Intermezzo (singer Willie Nelson and
wife Dyan Cannon almost come apart over the lure of the road and one more
infidelity). Nothing new under the sun - but the easy-going fringe
benefits are well worth the ticket: Nelson's a natural, and the duets
with Cannon are pure gold. Paul Taylor
This 16mm screening is introduced by Gregory La Cava researcher Annabel Jessica Goldsmith.
Chicago Reader review: With this 1935 film, Gregory La Cava turned his talent for ensemble improvisation (My Man Godfrey,Stage Door) to melodrama rather than comedy, and the result is a tearjerker of unusual sobriety and heft. The setting is a mental hospital, where the new director (Charles Boyer) is resented by the staff for his scientific detachment, while doctor Claudette Colbert tries to extricate herself from an overly warm working relationship with a married colleague (Joel McCrea). While the drama seeks to define precise emotional distances, La Cava’s camera adheres to his actors with a respectful mobility that still seems strikingly modern. Dave Kehr
This is a Funeral Parade screening. Full details of the strand can be found here.
Time Out review: Hemmed in by an arid marriage, paunchy
middle-aged banker John Randolph
grasps another chance at life when a secret organisation transforms him
into hunky Rock Hudson and gives him a new start as an artist in
Californian
beach-front bohemia. Freedom, however, turns out to be a rather daunting
prospect, and the struggle to fill the blank canvas comes to typify
Hudson's unease with his new existence. Saul Bass' unsettling title
sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something
bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting
camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score.
After that, the film's uptight view of the hang-loose West Coast feels
like a slightly forced argument, until Frankenheimer regroups and the
jaws of the narrative shut tight on one of the most chilling endings in
all American cinema. Little wonder it flopped at the time, only to be
cherished by a later generation, notably film-makers Siegel and McGehee
who drew extensively on its themes and visuals in their debut Suture.
(This downbeat sci-fi thriller completed Frankenheimer's loose
'paranoid' trilogy - earlier instalments being The Manchurian Candidate
and Seven Days in May). Trever Johnston
This 35mm presentation, also screening on May 11th, is part of the British Postwar Cinema (1945-1960) season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Time Out review: "I hate you," goes the most explosive line in Carol Reed's
marvelously plotted murder mystery, all the more powerful for being
spoken by an adorable eight-year-old in short pants. We've already seen
curious Phillipe (Henrey) romping around the airy chambers of France's
ambassadorial mansion in London (his dad's the often-absent diplomat)
and bonding with his pet garden snake, MacGregor. Phillipe's true hero,
and the idol of the title, is affectionate butler Baines (Richardson),
whose stern head-maid wife nonetheless has it in for the boy to an
almost pathological degree. So empathic is the movie toward its young dreamer that when
complications arise, you wince on his behalf. Baines has a secret lover,
Julie (Morgan), whom he meets for a chaste rendezvous in a pub; after
Phillipe surprises them, Baines introduces the youngster to his "niece"
and to the concept of private confidences—many of which are to follow,
this being a thriller. Reed, of course, is better known for his next movie, The Third Man, also penned by novelist Graham Greene. But The Fallen Idol is
arguably the superior film; both deal with the seasoning of naive
innocents, but unlike Joseph Cotten's charmingly soused pulp novelist,
young Phillipe actually deserves his time in happyland, making his
awakening a true stab to the heart. And Reed's signature noirish side
streets work even better as the scary vistas of a boy outdoors long
after bedtime. Joshua Rothkopf
This is a 35mm screening which is also being shown at the Prince Charles Cinema on April 29th and June 18th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: The ultimate family film. Francis Ford Coppola gives full
due to the themes of clannish insularity that made Mario Puzo's novel a
best seller, though his heart seems to be with Al Pacino's lonely,
willful isolation. This 1972 feature is sharp, entertaining, and
convincing—discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that
Coppola hasn't achieved since. With Marlon Brando, James Caan, Robert
Duvall, Sterling Hayden, and Diane Keaton. Dave Kehr
Here (and above) are some excerpts from the opening scenes.
This film (being shown on May 16th, 29th and 30th) is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here. Time Out review: Glauber Rocha's
first major film introduced most of the methods, themes and even
characters that were developed five years later in his Antonio das
Mortes. Set in the drought-plagued Brazilian Sertao in 1940, it explores
the climate of superstition, physical and spiritual terrorism and fear
that gripped the country: the central characters, Manuel and Rosa, move
credulously from allegiance to allegiance until they finally learn that
the land belongs not to god or the devil, but to the people themselves.
The film's success here doubtless reflects the 'exoticism' of its style,
somewhere between folk ballad and contemporary myth, since the
references to Brazilian history and culture are pervasive and fairly
opaque to the uninitiated. But Rocha's project is fundamentally
political, and completely unambiguous: he faces up to the contradictions
of his country in an effort to understand, to crush mystiques, and to
improve. Tony Rayns
The screening of We Are Also Brothers on Friday 1 May will be introduced by Dr Felipe Botelho Correa, King’s College London. This is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here.
BFI introduction: Two Black brothers opt for very different career paths in Rio. One
pursues education and respectability, while the other is drawn into
petty crime. Burle blends melodrama with social critique and uses his
characters’ stories as a platform to confront Brazil’s myth of racial
harmony.
Chicago Reader review: Despite its self-deprecating camp and convoluted plot, there is an
appealing honesty to Bruce LaBruce’s Super 8 1/2. The director plays
Bruce, an over-the-hill porn star trying to restart his flagging career,
in part by acting in a documentary about him by an up-and-coming
lesbian filmmaker. We see footage from his porno loops and scenes from
the film in progress and hear comments on Bruce’s own “unfinished” epic,
“Super 8 1/2.” The title’s two obvious references are to Fellini’s
famous film about his problems making a film and to the low-budget
medium of Super-8. But a third meaning is supplied by a woman who
suggests that it’s Bruce’s own overoptimistic view of his own endowment.
In the explicit sex scenes, LaBruce moves beyond narcissism to its
opposite. As one “critic” suggests in a pretentious voice-over analysis
of one of the porn films, Bruce’s performances acknowledge the camera,
and his self-consciousness suggests a kind of emptiness that works
against any sex appeal he might have. The way the film constantly turns
back on itself, with its films-within-films and comments on them, leaves
the viewer without any firm ground, suggesting the void behind
self-absorption. Bruce’s agonized cries, heard after the final credits,
perhaps acknowledge the terror of that void. Fred Camper
This screening is part of Violet Hour’s City of Angels
season, where we peel back the silver screen and gaze into the sordid
underworld of Los Angeles. A city of duality, this season is an ode to
the ultimate American nightmare masquerading as a dream. Violet Hour showcases the dark,
transgressive and enigmatic side of the screen. Exploring the darker
aspects of life through cinema, they screen and discuss works that "unsettle, undo us and challenge our perceptions."
Chicago Reader review: It pains me to say it, but I think Brian De Palma has
gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of this thriller represents
the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he has ever
done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it
follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De
Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences. Craig Wasson is an
unemployed actor who is invited to house-sit a Hollywood Hills mansion;
he becomes voyeuristically involved with his beautiful neighbor across
the way, and witnesses her murder. Those who have seen Vertigo
will have solved the mystery within the first 15 minutes, but De Palma's
use of frame lines and focal lengths to define Wasson's point of view
is so adept that the suspense takes hold anyway. De Palma's borrowings
from Hitchcock can no longer be characterized as hommages or even
as outright thievery; his concentration on Hitchcockian motifs is so
complete and so fetishized that it now seems purely a matter of
repetition compulsion. But Body Double is the first De Palma film
to make me think that all of his practice is leading at least to the
beginnings of perfection. Dave Kehr
This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season.
Time Out review: Depending on how you look at it, Mike Figgis' fascinating film is the story of an alcoholic movie producer on the verge of a nervous breakdown; or it's about a two-timing lesbian starlet who gets her first big break; or it's a critical day in the life of a fledgling film production company; or it's a portrait of spurned wives, lovers and actresses on the LA scene. Four movies in one,Timecodesplits the screen on a horizontal and a vertical axis to showcase simultaneously four unbroken shots, each 93 minutes long. The initial dizzying sensory overload doesn't last. An ingenious sound mix and the familiar faces of Stellan Skarsgård, Selma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Julian Sands, Holly Hunter and Saffron Burrows invite you to conspire order from the chaos. Characters from the top left screen bump into their neighbours from bottom right, while at two o'clock they're bitching about those assholes screwing them at eight. Like a riff on Robert Altman'sShort CutsandThe Player, it adds up to a properly jaundiced satire of Hollywood on the rocks. The movie is a stunt, a conceptual in-joke; or it's a portent of cinema to come; or it's a brilliant but hollow technical exercise; or it's a dynamic if erratic ensemble improv. Make of it what you will, it's certainly something to see. Tom Charity
Time Out review: Neither straight remake nor looser homage to Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle;
better by far to just enjoy it on its own terms when it turns out at
least three parts better than anyone predicted. Richard Gere is the rockabilly
punk living permanently on the edge, on the run from a cop-killing, and
certain of at least two things: how to steal cars and his obsession with
his girl. Together they conduct a fugitive romance across LA, a common
enough idea from Hollywood (Gun Crazy is a motif) but one which is
burning with a rarely seen passion. The breathless shooting style
lingers forever on Gere's pumping, preening narcissism, which leaves you
in no doubt that the true romance is not between boy and girl, but
between Gere and camera. The film's other star is LA, which is filmed as
a series of dazzling pop art backdrops - cultural vacancy and hedonism,
yoked together by violence: a city for the '80s. A wanton, playful
film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy. Chris Peachment
This is a 35mm presentation, part of Mark Jenkin's Cornish Trilogy which is being screened at BFI Southbank. The film screening will be preceded by an intro by writer-director Mark Jenkin, and actors Edward Rowe and Mary Woodvine.
Time Out review: It
may look like it was made on a shoestring 50 years ago, but this
abrasive seaside parable is a quietly thrilling piece of filmmaking.
Using old 16mm cameras, scratchy black-and-white stock and a handful of
coastal locations, Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin has conjured up
something truly arresting: a debut film rooted in local traditions, with
a dark humour and an atmosphere that’s as brooding as its Atlantic
backdrop. Filmed mostly in unblinking close-ups, its central character is
scowling Cornish fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe). He’s a fundamentally
good-hearted man who nurses a bundle of unexpressed grudges over the
flood of new money into his fishing village. His equally gruff brother
(Giles King) uses their dad’s old trawler to take tourists on pleasure
cruises, while the family’s quayside home has been sold to the kind of
well-heeled urbanites Martin so resents. To add insult to injury,
they’ve installed a porthole. ‘Bait’ is a story of gentrification and class friction that builds
and builds, searching for the release that inevitably comes. But it has
deeper currents too, as Jenkin explores the day-to-day slog of
maintaining a generations-old way of life – you’ll learn a lot about
lobster potting – and the near-spiritual pain of being prised, like a
barnacle off a rock, from your place in life by forces beyond your
control. He’s abetted in that by a wonderfully human performance from
Rowe, all bruised pride and righteous fury. It’s clear where Jenkin’s sympathies lie, and one or two of the
middle-class characters tiptoe towards caricature, but ‘Bait’ never
feels polemical or didactic: it’s more of a quiet lament than a shaking
fist. It feels almost like a modern-day sea shanty. Let its hypnotic
rhythms wash over you. Phil de Semleyen
