Chicago Reader review: A major landmark in American independent cinema, this unlikely
commercial hit remains one of the best films of the 1980s, noted for its
intense personal vision anchored by some remarkably easygoing humor and
John Lurie’s great performance. Jarmusch’s casual approach to narrative
remains one of his strongest virtues as a filmmaker. Stranger Than Paradise‘s
leisurely pace and apparently lack of action open up the film’s
hyperrealistic environment, giving the film an immersive experience akin
to getting lost in a great book. Drew Hunt
This is the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of this Iranian classic and includes an introduction by film curator Ehsan Khoshbakht.
BFI introduction: A boy who lost everything during the Iran-Iraq war flees his war-torn
village in southern Iran by hiding in the back of a truck. He reaches a
verdant farmland in the north and, despite struggling to be accepted for
his darker skin and unintelligible dialect, he attempts to find a
family and a new home. A quietly poignant story of displacement and
unspoken wounds, this is one of the finest examples of Beyzaie’s
mythical realism.
This is a Funeral Parade Presents presentation. Here's the full season of their screenings.
Venerable and adored film critic Roger Ebert crossed the line to become
scriptwriter in this collaboration with 1970s skin-flixster Russ Meyer.
An enduring camp cult classic, it follows three pneumatic wannabees who
come to Hollywood to make it big but find only sex, drugs and sleaze.
Sophisticate Ebert brings a touch of sly wit and class to this most
unlikely of projects.
From Kate Arthur, on BuzzFeed:
“…But always enhancing Ebert’s place as a seminal figure in movie
criticism was his hilarious contribution to movies themselves: the 1970
release Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He cowrote it with
shlocktarian Russ Meyer, and it’s just an unparalleled spectacle of
amazingness. On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, Ebert wrote about
the experience in Film Comment: “We wrote the screenplay in six weeks flat, laughing maniacally from time to time, and then the movie was made.”
“The plot doesn’t make any sense, but if you want to try, Wikipedia has a good summary. And Louis Peitzman has written the “19 Reasons “Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls” Is The Greatest Cult Film Of All Time.” As Louis points out, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
gave us many gifts, but my favorite (and I’m sure I’m not alone) was
the Z-Man character, who Ebert said was based on Phil Spector (“but
neither Meyer nor I had ever met Spector,” he wrote).”
Two thumbs up, Roger!
Time Out review: 'With his first movie for a major studio,
Meyer simply did what he'd been doing for years, only bigger and
better. That's to say, he turned the homely story of an all-girl rock
band's rise to fame under their transsexual manager into a delirious
comedy melodrama, soused in self- parody but spiked with dope, sex and
thrills.' Tony Rayns
Chicago Reader review: Perhaps the most delightful of Yasujiro Ozu’s late comedies (1959), this very loose remake of his earlier I Was Born, But . . . (1932) pivots around the rebellion of two brothers whose father refuses to buy a TV set. The layered compositions of the suburban topography are extraordinary, as are the intricate interweavings of the various characters and miniplots. The title is Japanese for “good morning,” and the film’s profound and gentle depiction of social exchanges extends to the farting games of schoolboys. The color photography is vibrant and exquisite. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: A love triangle set in a scruffy seaport town, with Barbara Stanwyck,
Paul Douglas, and Robert Ryan. The script, adapted from a Clifford Odets
play, seems to have roused the realist in director Fritz Lang: the
backwater atmosphere is as authentic as it is oppressive. The naturalism
of this 1952 film, one of Lang’s most underrated, makes an interesting
contrast with the wild exaggerations of his Rancho Notorious, made the same year; for the buffs, there’s also an early starlet appearance by Marilyn Monroe. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Unusually seedy and small-scale for a Fox picture of 1952, this
black-and-white thriller is set over one evening exclusively inside a
middle-class urban hotel and the adjoining bar. The bar’s singer (Anne
Bancroft in her screen debut) breaks up with her sour pilot boyfriend
(Richard Widmark), a hotel guest. He responds by flirting with a woman
(Marilyn Monroe) in another room who’s babysitting a little girl (Donna
Corcoran), but the babysitter turns out to be psychotic and potentially
dangerous. Daniel Taradash’s script is contrived in spots, and the main
virtue of Roy Ward Baker’s direction is its low-key plainness, yet
Monroe—appearing here just before she became typecast as a gold-plated
sex object—is frighteningly real as the confused babysitter, and the
deglamorized setting is no less persuasive. With Jim Backus as the
girl’s father and Elisha Cook Jr. as Monroe’s uncle, the hotel elevator
operator. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: Peggy and her overprotective mother Mae work as chorus girls in a
burlesque troupe. When the star of their show quits, Mae hatches a plan
for Peggy to take the top spot. In her first major screen role, Monroe
elevates a low-budget, uneven b-movie musical. It’s fascinating to see
the then 22-year-old performing with her natural voice and building the
foundations of her future star persona. It showcases both her gift for
comedy and her musicality, culminating in the catchy, if somewhat
questionable, sugar-baby anthem Every Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy.
This film, also screening on July 11th and 16th, will be introduced by writer and season curator Kazuo Ishiguro and is part of the 'Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films' season. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: More
action oriented than the other Dietrich-Sternberg films, this 1932
production is nevertheless one of the most elegantly styled. The
setting, a broken-down train commandeered by revolutionaries on its way
to Shanghai, becomes a maze of soft shadows and shifting textures,
through which the characters wander in a philosophical quest for
something—anything—solid. The screenplay, by Jules Furthman and an
uncredited Howard Hawks, has a quality of wisecracking wit unusual in
Sternberg's films: when someone asks Dietrich why she's going to
Shanghai, she retorts, "To buy a new hat." Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is part of the 'Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films' season. Full details here. The screening of Rome Express on Tuesday 21 July will include an introduction with writer Jonathan Coe, hosted by writer and season curator Kazuo Ishiguro.
BFI introduction: German star Conrad Veidt and ace Austrian cameraman Günther Krampf bring
a near-expressionist Weimar sensibility to this riveting British
thriller, set aboard a train filled with enjoyably stiff-upper-lipped
stereotypes. Deplorably neglected today, this deserves to be remembered
both as a classic and as a strangely serendipitous blending of two
normally opposed cinematic styles.
Barbican
Cinema introduction:
Charismatic gay club performer Jason
Holliday talks about his life to camera in Shirley
Clarke’s documentary, described by Ingmar Bergman as 'the
most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.' Edited down from a
12-hour shoot, Portrait of Jason comprises an interview with
Black, gay nightclub performer Jason Holliday, talking directly to
camera about his fabulous life, with occasional off-screen
interjections and provocations by director Shirley Clarke and her
partner, Carl Lee. A gifted raconteur, Jason’s
tales of strife throughout his messy career – all laced with wit
and expert comic timing – make for a constantly entertaining
dialogue. The film remains controversial for the techniques used by
Clarke and Lee in interviewing Holliday. By the end, a very drunk
Holliday becomes increasingly distressed by the questioning of Clarke
and especially Lee, who berate him for his performative style and
accuse him of lying. Portrait of Jason remains a
powerful, provocative and challenging work.
New Yorker review: A raw-edged sketch of furiously extended takes… A masterwork of
grand-scale intimacy. The extraordinary protagonist, alone onscreen for
an hour and a half, seems to give birth to his new identity in real
time. Meanwhile, he presents an agonizing time capsule of an age of
ambient racism, homophobic persecution, and moralistic hypocrisy. Jason Holliday’s stories of arrests and enforced psychiatric sessions, and of
the racist arrogance of white employers (for whom he worked as a
domestic), are adorned with as much self-deprecating, life-loving
laughter as his tales of sexual adventures and samples of his night-club
act (featuring impressions of Mae West and Katharine Hepburn, among
others). In his lifelong pursuit of pleasure, Holliday (who died in
1998) paid an outsized price in pain. But he was outspokenly wise to the
transaction—and he knew that this very performance, with its risky
self-exposure, involved both. Richard Brody
This 35mm screening is part of the Nolan in 35mm season at the Screen on the Green from June 20th to July 15th. Full details here.
Time Out review:With ‘Following’, ‘Memento’, ‘Insomnia’ and the uncommonly smart blockbuster ‘Batman Begins’, Christopher Nolan has established himself as a filmmaker fascinated by the fluid, tricksy contingencies of memory, identity, narrative and time: the way we depend on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and the little slips and dodges, ignorant or willed, that allow us to keep those stories straight – at least for a while. Selfhood emerges from these films as a rickety trick, an illusion dependent on misdirection and oversight. Apt, then, that the director’s latest is a story about magicians. Nolan’s first period picture, ‘The Prestige’ shares the fractured chronology common to his earlier work. Based in turn-of-the-last-century London, the plot centres on two ambitious young illusionists: flashy, easygoing Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman, abetted, as in ‘Batman Begins’, by Michael Caine) and the more original but less extrovert Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). Fellow apprentices turned bitter rivals after a grisly onstage accident, their escalating feud is a game of cat and mouse played out in a hall of mirrors, set in cramped prison cells and Colorado expanses as well as theatres, as they compete to deliver the most spectacular version of a teleportation trick that calls for something like real magic. Jackman and Bale make impressive tango partners, neither wholly sympathetic nor villainous, each drawing out the synergy between his character’s personality and his onstage style. It’s a handsome film, too, beautifully photographed by Wally Pfister in a chocolate-and-cinnamon sepia palette flashed with electric blue.Ben Walters
The film will be followed by a Q&A with director Jim Sheridan.
Chicago Reader review: The remarkable Daniel Day-Lewis plays the remarkable Christy Brown, an
Irishman born with a severe case of cerebral palsy who eventually taught
himself to paint and write with his left foot, in a film adapted by
director Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton from Brown’s autobiography.
Far from milking this subject for conventional sentimentality, the
filmmakers use it as the basis for an engaging and idiosyncratic
character study. Lewis’s performance is necessarily a bit showy–one has
to strain at times to understand all his dialogue because of the
character’s contorted features–but he puts on a terrific drunk scene,
and for all his character’s travails, the film as a whole winds up as
surprisingly upbeat. With Brenda Fricker (also very fine) as Brown’s
mother, Alison Whelan, Kirsten Sheridan, Declan Croghan, Fiona Shaw, and
Cyril Cusack. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Barbican Cinema introduction: In London, in the early seventies, a group of women had begun to leaflet cleaners who worked at night to encourage them to form a union. This labour organisation became the central action of the documentary. Completed in 1975,Nightcleanersis the combined work ofMarc Karlin,Mary Kelly,James ScottandHumphry Trevelyan, together known as theBerwick Street Film Collective. The film quickly became known for its innovative structure. Through its approach to revealing otherwise hidden truths, it successfully challenges conventional documentary storytelling. More than any other film produced during this period, it stands out as a work that, to this day, continues to inspire a new generation of filmmakers to question longstanding practices in political filmmaking.
Time Out review: This documentary started out as a conventional agit-prop project in
support of the 1972 campaign to unionise women nightcleaners in London.
In the three years that it took to complete, it turned into something
very much more complex and challenging: a film that places the
nightcleaners' campaign within a series of broader political discussions
formulated as an 'open text' which asks as many questions about its own
status as a film as it does about the socio-political issues that are
its subject. No engaged person should overlook its challenge. Tony Rayns
This screening, which is part of the Queer 60s season at the Barbican Cinema, will be followed by a discussion about Wishman and her legacy with Jaye Hudson and Selina Robertson, chaired by season curator Alex Davidson.
Barbican Cinema introduction: Doris Wishman was truly a one-of-a-kind. She
was a rare female director working in the exploitation subgenre,
although there are few proto-feminist messages to be found in her films.
She put a lesbian character centre in A Taste of Flesh (1967),
a sensational thriller made on the cheap and shot entirely in one
apartment, featuring three women who are held captive by two male crooks
planning an assassination on a visiting foreign president. The
results have to be seen to be believed. One of the women is a predatory
lesbian, who, despite the problematic nature of her character, is
underestimated by the two men who threaten her. There is a jaw-dropping
queer daydream sequence that is worth the ticket price alone. While it
is first and foremost a sleazy exploitation thriller, this is one of
Wishman’s most fascinating films.
Presented at the Prince Charles Cinema on 35mm with a special 15th Anniversary Post-Film Q&A with
Director Ben Wheatley, as part of BLEAK WEEK 2026. Full details here.
Time Out review: Much of ‘Kill List’ will be familiar to
anyone who caught ‘Down Terrace’ during its brief run last year: the
semi-improvised dialogue and naturalistic performances, the close,
documentary-style photography and the deep-seated sense of suburban
moral decay. But it’s altogether more confident: where the earlier
film leavened the darker moments with slapstick and satire, ‘Kill
List’ is an unrelentingly grim ride into the bleakest imaginable
terrain, its only humour black beyond belief.There will be some who find the resulting series of increasingly brutal
and dreamlike events hard to process, and a number of plot points
remain unexplained even as the credits roll. But allow the film to take
hold and its power is inescapable: the effect is like placing your
head in a vice and waiting as it inexorably closes. It’s hard to remember a British movie as nerve-shreddingly effective
since ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ in 2004. Like that film, ‘Kill List’ may not
make the impact it deserves upon initial release. But this is a grower,
a film which lingers long in the memory: look for it on ‘Best of
British’ lists for a long time to come. Tom Huddleston
Time Out review: Night of the Living Dead suggested that George A Romero was an unusual if none too clearly defined talent; two non-horror movies later, The Craziesproved it. The main plot premise echoes The Andromeda Strain:
an accident with a virus creates a terrifying civil emergency, and
incidentally reveals that the US government is working towards germ
warfare. Romero, however, is more interested in effect than cause.
First, he brilliantly updates the riddle Don Siegel posed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers:
how can one tell who is infected and who isn't? The virus drives its
victims mad before killing them, but what is the line between 'normal'
hysteria and actual insanity? Second, and equally brilliantly, he
demonstrates the difficulty in imposing martial law on a community of
gun-owners, thereby creating a highly feasible vision of social
collapse. Good dialogue and performances, too. Tony Rayns
This is an Animus magazine presentation of a 35mm screening. There will be an introduction by legendary producer Jeremy Thomas (schedule permitting).
As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or,
possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly
distributed at the time.
It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the
studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a
disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting;
masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated
with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat.
The ending stayed with me for quite some time.Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.
Time Out review: One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece
jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between
two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the
girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine
enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst
lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller
investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in
visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now
sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a
case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing,
less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at
one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters. Don Macpherson
Chicago Reader review: Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum search for her missing husband in this
excellent 1954 western by Otto Preminger, one of the first films to
discover the potential of CinemaScope and a fine example of Preminger's
rational approach to the mysteries of personal morality. Dave Kehr
This 35mm screening ias part of the Nolan in 35mm season at the Screen on the Green from June 20th to July 15th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: On a visual level, Interstellar is an exceptionally well-crafted
Hollywood entertainment. Director Christopher Nolan, art director Dean
Wolcott, and their effects artists render the imaginary settings in
stunning detail. The film is rife with brilliant imagery: a horizon of
frozen clouds, an ocean wave as tall as a skyscraper, the flashing
interior of a wormhole through which the principal characters fly their
spacecraft. The most striking thing about these images is that we’re
rarely encouraged to ooh and aah over them; unlike most ambitious space
operas since 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), Interstellar
inspires not wonder but a cool contemplation. Nolan and his brother
Jonathan, who cowrote the script, advance a hard-science perspective,
incorporating such concepts as the theory of relativity and placing
dramatic emphasis on research and problem solving. Ben Sachs
This 35mm screening is part of the Push Play (Skateboarding) season at BFI Southbank and will feature a Q&A with artist, skateboarder and model Blondey McCoy.
Chicago Reader review: Robert Hamer’s 1949 film is often cited as the definitive black,
eccentric British comedy, yet it’s several cuts better than practically
anything else in the genre. Dennis Price, as a poor, distant relative of
the rich D’Ascoynes, must murder eight members of the family (all
played by Alec Guinness) to obtain the title and fortune he believes are
his right. Hamer’s direction is bracingly cool and clipped, yet he’s
able to draw something from his performers (Price has never been deeper,
Guinness never more proficient, and Joan Greenwood never more softly,
purringly cruel) that transcends the facile comedy of murder; there’s
lyricism, passion, and protest in it too. With Valerie Hobson and Arthur
Lowe. Dave Kehr
This double-bill is part of the Bleak Week season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Prince Charles Cinema introduction: Spain in the early 1970s was a country in transition, with increasing
economic prosperity and the expectations of a growing middle class
put in direct conflict with the dying dictatorship regime of Franco,
where state surveillance, media censorship and social control was
still the norm. Inspired by mystery-horror anthology series such as
Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, this unique period
in history is depicted with terrifying clarity and dark humour in
these two infamous television films: La cabina and El televisor. In
Antonio Mercero’s La cabina, a group of officials install a
telephone box outside a block of flats. After a man enters to make a
phone call, he finds himself unable to leave, attracting the
attention of fascinated locals as he grows increasingly desperate to
escape. A sensation upon release and a cultural touchstone in Spain
to this day, La cabina also developed a huge cult following in the UK
after regular screenings on late-night TV.
In El
televisor, a man living a dreary suburban life has a simple dream: to
possess his own television. When he finally gets his wish, the dream
soon becomes a dangerous, all-consuming obsession. Originally a
special episode of the hugely popular series Tales to Keep You Awake,
written and directed by Narcisco Ibanez Serrandor (Who Can Kill A
Child), El televisor’s escalating dread and shocking conclusion
still retains its power to shock over 50 years later. Released on
Blu-ray for the first time in the UK by Transmission on 22nd July,
this double bill will be released into UK cinemas on June 19th to
coincide with Bleak Week, and will receive its premiere screening at
the Prince Charles Cinema with an intro from Reece Shearsmith (Inside
No 9, The League of Gentlemen).
This 35mm screening is part of the 'Queer 60s' season at the Barbican. Details here. Tonight's presentation will by Lillian Crawford. The screening on Sunday 28th June will be introduced by the season's curator Alex Davidson.
There is a longer article on the film on the Senses of Cinema website here.
This 35mm screening is part of the Queer 60s season at the Barbican. Details here.
Barbican Cinema introduction: A
boy disappears in a rural Brazilian community and all fingers point
to a stranger in town in Carlos Hugo Christensen’s extraordinary
magical realist drama. To the horror of the locals of a small rural
Brazilian community, handsome engineer Jose (Ênio
Gonçalves), an accused child
murderer, is back in town and on trial following the disappearance of
teenager Zeca (Luiz Fernando
Ianelli). As homophobic lies and
accusations fly, we gradually learn more about the man and the boy,
and the latter’s extraordinary connection to the strong winds that
blow through the town. A plot synopsis of The
Boy and the Wind cannot do justice to
what follows, with incredible set pieces and an appropriately
dramatic conclusion. The film remains an outstanding, magical realist
depiction of queerness that still fascinates today.
Rio Cinema introduction: To celebrate RIO FOREVER, Rio Film Feminists returns to 1979/80 to
shine a light on the Rio’s first feminist film season, organised in
association with Hackney and Islington Socialist Feminist Group,
Hackney Black Women’s Group and Women in Entertainment. We have
picked to re-screen American writer/director Claudia Weill’s
landmark feminist indie Girlfriends (1978), which was presented in a
late-night double-bill with Rapunzel: Let Down Your Hair (1978) by
The London Women’s Film Group.
New Yorker review: One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely,
that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing,
the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor,
the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the
humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the
young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an
audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to
short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind,
achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her.
Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical,
dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible
spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women,
when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more
openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New
York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open
hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional
activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded,
perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its
intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and
a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that
Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in
the same way. Richard Brody
BFI introduction: Left with relatives while his parents ‘disappear’ during the
dictatorship, a football-obsessed boy finds community in a São Paulo
neighbourhood. Cao Hamburger filters political trauma through childhood
perception, blending humour and melancholy. It’s a tender coming-of-age
story shaped by absence, memory and solidarity, with the 1970 World Cup
as a national soundtrack.
This is a 35mm screening and part of the Flemish Film Classics strand. Details here.
Time Out review: Coming hot on the heels of Rosetta, another Belgian film which
takes a long hard look at the woes of a working class teenage girl.
Rosie (Aranka Coppens) also lives alone with her mum - or her 'sister', as
Irene (Sara de Roo) prefers to pretend in front of her boyfriends. At 13,
Rosie is a loner with a taste for the steamier sort of romantic fiction,
making her easy prey for a handsome delinquent like Jimi (Joost Wijnant),
who rocks her world with his petty thieving and joyriding. Out of a
warped and wounded kindness, Rosie picks up a crying baby and carries it
off, playing happy families with Jimi at the oil works in the old part
of town. Call me 'Mummy', she instructs the poor infant, louder and
louder. You want to give her a good shake, and then you want to hug her.
Somewhere in translation, Patrice Toye's movie has lost its original
subtitle, 'The Devil in My Head,' which gave a hint that this is not
just social realism, but something closer in spirit to the tortured
psychodramas of pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me; The Grifters).
Toye seems unsure just how much of a melodrama he wants to make - an
alert viewer will tease out the twists well before the end - but the
discrepancy between the flat, mundane treatment and the heightened
American narrative hovering in the background works quite effectively.
Pain in this film is too all-encompassing to be expressed in short,
sharp shocks; instead Rosie endures a dulled, mute suffering. If Ken
Loach had made Badlands it might have looked something like this: depressing, claustrophobic, not romantic, but innocent. Tom Charity
This screening will be introduces by Ketty RodrÃguez, Founder & Artistic Director of the London Latino Film Festival.
Time Out review: This arresting early work by one of Cuba's foremost film-makers is a
black comedy about institutionalised bureaucracy at its most pedantic.
After a model factory worker is killed in an accident at work, he's
buried with his union card as a mark of eternal solidarity; trouble is,
when his wife applies for a pension, she's told she must present the
card before she can get any money - and there's a law forbidding
exhumation within the first two years of burial. It's a surprising piece
to have been made in the Cuba of the mid-'60s, but the laughs come as
much from a Buñuelian sense of absurdity as they do from any outright
criticism of Castro's regime. Trevor Johnston
Try
not to miss this ultra-rare screening of a key early Brian De Palma
film which the late, great critic Robin Wood described as “one of the
key American films of the 1970s”.
After ten years and a number of ambitious works (commercially successful and critically controversial) such as Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, Sisters arguably remains Brian De Palma's most completely satisfying film. Like Dressed to Kill, it is an elaborate variation on Psycho; unlike
it, its attachment to the feminine viewpoint is much less compromised.
Like all De Palma's films, it invites a psychoanalytic reading (‘the
wound' as symbolic castration). Few Hollywood films (and perhaps no
other horror film) have explored so rigorously the oppression of women
under patriarchy and its appalling consequences for both sexes. Robin Wood
Chicago Reader review: After a hiatus of nearly a decade, the brilliant Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman)
returns with an entrancing 17th-century period drama. The title
character, a magistrate in rural Argentina, longs to return to his
native Spain so he can be reunited with his wife and children; waiting
on his deliverance, he idles away his time with native women and petty
political squabbles until he’s sent into the jungle on a suicide mission
to capture a violent bandit. As always with Martel, the story is opaque
but the atmosphere is rich and immersive, with meticulously designed
frames that balance one’s attention between the principal characters and
marginalized individuals (in this case women, slaves, and Native
Americans). The soundtrack is also characteristically vibrant, as Martel
conjures up a vivid world beyond the frame. Ben Sachs
BFI introduction: A migrant family and their dog cross the drought-stricken arid Sertão
region in a desperate bid to survive. Pereira dos Santos adapts
Graciliano Ramos’ acclaimed 1938 novel, one of Brazil’s key literary
works, employing stark landscapes and non-professional performances to
stunning effect. It is regarded as a foundational Cinema Novo work – a
devastating yet deeply humane portrait of poverty, endurance and
cyclical displacement.
This 35mm screening is part of the 'Projecting the Archive' strand at BFI Southbank. There will be an introduction by Jason Morell, actor and son of Joan Greenwood.
BFI introduction: When a young dancer has her career cut short by illness, she marries an
eminent sculptor whose cruelty drives her into the arms of another man.
This early role for Joan Greenwood sees her perfectly cast as the
fragile ballerina trapped in an abusive relationship. Sewell’s
atmospheric evocation of the fin de siècle decadence of bohemian Paris
is enhanced by the camerawork of silent horror veteran Günther Krampf.
Based on a French play, which the director adapted four times across his
career, this macabre tale exploring jealousy and spiritualism serves up
a shocking final twist.
Chicago Reader review: Howard Hawks's grand, brassy 1953 musical about two girls from Little
Rock—Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell—gone gold digging in Paris. The
male sex is represented by a bespectacled nerd (Tommy Noonan), a dirty
old man (Charles Coburn), and a 12-year-old voyeur (the unforgettable
George "Foghorn" Winslow), all of whom deserve what they get. The
opening shot—Russell and Monroe in sequins standing against a screaming
red drape—is enough to knock you out of your seat, and the audacity
barely lets up from there, as Russell romances the entire U.S. Olympic
team to the tune of "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" and Hawks keeps
topping perversity with perversity. A landmark encounter in the battle
of the sexes. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: The mood of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 masterpiece is evoked by the English
translation most often given to its title, “Tales of the Pale and
Silvery Moon After the Rain.” Based on two 16th-century ghost stories,
the film is less a study of the supernatural than a sublime embodiment
of Mizoguchi’s eternal theme, the generosity of women and the
selfishness of men. Densely plotted but as emotionally subtle as its
name, Ugetsu is one of the great experiences of cinema. Dave Kehr
This film, which also screens on June 1st and 26th, is in the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: George Roy Hill’s 1969 film moves with steady, stupid grace from oozy
sentimentality to nihilistic violence; you have to admire the craft and
assurance of the thing even as its artificiality hits you in the face.
Paul Newman and Robert Redford are the romantic couple of the title;
Katharine Ross is the interloper. With Strother Martin, Jeff Corey,
Cloris Leachman, and Henry Jones. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction for UK premiere of digital restoration: When a US plane is shot down in occupied France, its pilot finds
shelter in a convent. He encounters a young novice who agrees to help
him escape the country, to save him and his secret cache of documents
from the Nazis. The night casts a veil of intimacy over the couple, who
develop a bond beyond physical love. Full of suspense and
expressionistic chiaroscuro, this transcendental drama remains striking
for its mix of thrill, torment and wonder. Restored in 4K by Universal Pictures and The Film Foundation at
NBCUniversal StudioPost laboratory, from the original 35mm negative
nitrate, a 35mm composite fine grain and the 35mm optical sound track
negative nitrate. Special thanks to Martin Scorsese and Steven
Spielberg.
Time Out review: Frank Borzage's admirers - and who'll not claim at least associate membership
of that circle? - will find this movie to be in a familiar case. The
writing suggests melodrama at its most mechanical and life cheapening,
yet the director infuses individual scenes with such warmth and
spontaneity as to ensure that the affections are celebrated even as
they're being betrayed. This time the love affair is explicitly
non-sexual, since the plot is to do with shot down flyer Ray Milland and
virginal nun Britton pretending to be husband and wife while on the run
in occupied France - a situation requiring fancy footwork from all
concerned to keep the censors at bay. It's salutary to watch the usually
tight-lipped Milland transformed into a model Borzage hero,
enthusiastic and brimming with tenderness.
The
Prince Charles are showing this classic movie from 70mm in a season
that continues throughout May and the beginning of June. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: David
Lean's 1962 spectacle about T.E. Lawrence's military career between
1916 and '18, written by Robert Bolt and produced by Sam Spiegel,
remains one of the most intelligent, handsome, and influential of all
war epics. Combining the scenic splendor of De Mille with virtues of the
English theater, Lean endeared himself to English professors and action
buffs alike. The film won seven Oscars, including best picture and
direction, yet the ideological crassness of De Mille and most war movies
isn't so much transcended as given a high gloss: the film's subject is
basically the White Man's Burden—despite ironic notations—with Alec
Guinness, Anthony Quinn, and Omar Sharif called upon to represent the
Arab soul, and Jose Ferrer embodying the savage Turks. The all-male cast
helps make this one of the most homoerotic of all screen epics, though
the characters' sexual experiences are at best only hinted at. Jonathan Rosenabum
'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, MarÃa 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
