Chicago Reader review: The notoriously ruthless 1955 thriller by France's most neurotic director, Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear).
Clouzot cast his own wife, Vera, as an invalid who plots the murder of
her husband, assisted by his mistress (Simone Signoret). Set in the
rotting confines of a private school for boys, the film is cruel, sour,
and—unfortunately—very effective. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is part of the Roger Corman season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: The humour of Richard Matheson's well-calculated send-up of Poe's gruesome The Black Cat – as the middle story in Roger Corman 's Tales of Terror – went down so well that Matheson here used Poe's poem The Raven as the basis for a full-length parody. With Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre superbly funny as rival magicians - and Jack Nicholson turning up to give the most atrocious performance of his career as the juvenile lead - The Raven
is one of the few fantasy comedies that hangs together as happily as a
fairytale, and it climaxes with a suitably splendid duel of marvels
between Karloff and Price. David Pirie
This is part of the Made in Taiwan season at the Garden Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A reflective autobiographical film (1985) about filmmaker Hou
Hsiao-hsien’s youth in the late 40s and early 50s. Largely filmed in the
same places in Taiwan where the events originally happened, this
unhurried family chronicle carries an emotional force and a historical
significance that may not be immediately apparent. Working in long takes
and wide-screen, deep focus compositions that frame the characters from
a discreet distance, Hou allows the locations to seep into our own
memories and experience, so that, as in Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs
and Tian’s The Blue Kite, we come to know them almost as intimately as
touchstones in our own lives. Yet paradoxically, the unseen Chinese
mainland carries as much weight in the film as the landscape of Taiwan:
Hou’s Christian family left in 1948, and the revolution that followed
made it impossible for them to return. Subtly interweaving everyday
details with processes and understandings that evolve over years, the
film conveys a density of familial detail that we usually encounter only
in certain novels, and a sense of the tragic within hailing distance of
Ozu. This was the first film by Hou I ever saw, and it provides an
excellent introduction to his work as a whole Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with
Sophie Marceau, moderated by Daniel Bird (Curator and scholar of Eastern
European cinema).
Cine Lumiere introduction: As she does every summer, George Sand spends a day in 1846 at her
Nohant estate, a place steeped in childhood memories and filled with her
close circle of writers and artists. Among them are her rebellious
daughter Solange, whom she resents and urges to marry Fernand, a local
country squire; Frédéric Chopin, her lover of eight years; Pauline
Viardot, who performs his music; and painter Eugène Delacroix, who has a
studio on the estate. Having dismissed the servants for the day, the
household is busy in the kitchen preparing to welcome new guests... Recently restored to its original splendour, La Note bleue is one of four films Sophie Marceau made with Andrzej Żuławski over fifteen years. Their collaboration also produced L’Amour braque (1985), Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989) and La Fidélité (2000).
This presentation is part of the 'Lost, Banned, Reclaimed' season at ICA Cinema (details here).
ICA introduction: Screened publicly only once on its original release, at the 1976
Tehran International Film Festival, Chess of the Wind is one
of the most distinctive films of Iran's pre-revolutionary New Wave.
After the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979, the film was
banned, and its original negative was presumed lost. Only degraded
VHS copies survived. Lost for nearly four decades until its
improbable rediscovery in a Tehran antique shop in 2014, Aslani's
masterwork has since been restored, regaining its place as an
achievement of Iranian cinema. Set inside an ornate,
candlelit mansion, the film follows Aghdas, a wheelchair-using
heiress who becomes vulnerable to her late mother's husband, a
corrupt stepfather determined to seize her inheritance, while his two
greedy nephews circle her wealth. Her only ally is her maidservant,
with whom she develops a complicated alliance. Drawing on classical
Persian art, gothic horror and European modernism, Aslani creates a
claustrophobic, still-life atmosphere of avarice and isolation. The
film’s eerie, atonal score was composed by Sheyda Gharachedaghi,
one of the most prolific female film composers of the 1960s and
1970s, blending Persian instrumentation with her Viennese
conservatoire training. This screening will be introduced
by Ali Lalfam, the season curator, followed by a short post-screening
Q&A with Iranian filmmaker and actor Ali Mosaffa.
Chess Of The Wind review: A
rich matriarch has died and the battle lines of inheritance are drawn
between her disabled daughter and second husband (rumoured to dabble in
witchcraft). As the paranoid, hothouse atmosphere builds – and the murky
basement with its jars of acid is revealed – murder seems inevitable.
Aslani’s chilling, decadent family thriller is told with unsettling
control and restraint. The beautifully composed interiors inspired by
classic Persian miniatures become the home to horror in a world where
disembodied hands express as much as faces. Sabotaged, suppressed and
banned, with its negatives lost for decades, Chess of the Wind almost
disappeared from the face of world cinema. With this new restoration,
our perception of Iranian film will never be the same again. Robin Baker
Barbican introduction: A masterpiece from the late Kathleen Collins, this film is a beautifully crafted drams, focusing on the tension between university lecturer Sara Rogers and her artist husband played by Bill Gunn. A rare example of an Black independent film depicting the ennui of a Black middle class, focusing on a community of professional well-educated artists, this is a rare object, made all the more rare by the premature passing of both Collins and Gunn, two artists, whose short career’s were important examples of refusing to be subsumed by the limitations provided by the film industry at the tie and would be integral in developing networks and avenues for independent Black creative spaces. The film was restored in 2022, premiering in October, having received a preservation grant from the Film Foundation and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation which enabled the creation of a new digital master from the original 16mm film elements, a new 35mm film negative, and a restored 35mm optical soundtrack, which we will be showing for our screening. The screening will be introduced by Dr Terri Francis.
New Yorker review: It’s
great news that one of the first American features directed by a black
woman, “Losing Ground,” Kathleen Collins’s 1982 film, which wasn’t
released until 2015, is about to come out on DVD and Blu-ray,
thanks to Milestone Films. Though it’s good to see this film on the big
screen, it’s most important simply to see it and see it again,
freeze-frame on its deeply textured images and rewatch its sharply
constructed scenes, flip through it rapidly for the pleasures of memory
and watch it backward to see how it hangs together. I think it’s the
movie that I’ve watched most often in the past year-plus, in the time
since its rediscovery at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in February,
2015, and it continues to yield mysteries along with revelations.
Rewatching it again this week, I was struck by a quality that had eluded
me earlier: anger, an emotion that’s potentially destructive to express
but self-destructive to repress. The
film’s protagonist, Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), is a professor of
philosophy (she teaches, as Collins did, at City College of New York),
whose research involves the quest for ecstatic experience outside the
realm of religion. Her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), is an older artist
finally enjoying the first flush of success and looking to advance his
work by spending a summer upstate spent sketching landscapes and people.
To join him there, Sara would have to put her own research on the back
burner, and Victor doesn’t hesitate to urge her to do so. The title of
the film suggests the conflicts at its core—the paradox faced by many
individual black women despite general progress regarding opportunities
for women and African-Americans—and the action of the film, as I discuss
in this clip, suggests some of the reasons why. Reason
itself is among them—the effort to advance constructively while gripped
by the irrational force of tradition, of unexpressed assumptions and
unexamined mythologies, repressed desires and frustrated aspirations,
undiscussed history and unacknowledged grief. The movie’s subject is the
notion of liberation, one that’s as much aesthetic, philosophical, and
emotional as it is practical and political. It’s one of the great
tragedies of the modern cinema that Collins didn’t make any subsequent
movies in which to pursue her powerful art and her powerful ideas—or
that this very movie wasn’t seen widely in its time, and thus didn’t
inspire (as it doubtless would have) a wide range of other filmmakers to
pursue those ideas, to seek their own cinematic liberation. Richard Brody
This 16mm presentation is part of the Shōhei Imamura season at the ICA. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Kikuyo Zendo, the subject of Shohei Imamura’s funny, shocking, and
seemingly effortless 1975 documentary, was one of thousands of
impoverished Japanese women forced into prostitution and shuttled across
southeast Asia in the early 20th century. The director clearly regards
her story as a vehicle for numerous perennial themes: the resilience of
women, sex as a function of capitalism, and the radical idea that the
oppressed economic underclass are the most reliable commentators on
Japanese history. Sort of a nonfiction follow-up to Imamura’s narrative
films The Insect Woman (1963) and Intentions of Murder (1964), this also looks forward to his 1987 period piece Zegen
in its cynical portrait of Japanese imperialism, and Imamura’s warm
onscreen rapport with Zendo (whom he dotes on as if she were his own
mother) anticipates the humanism of his late masterpieces The Eel (1997) and Dr. Akagi (1998). Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Deliriously playful yakuza pic, in which Seijun Suzuki lets logic hang.
Basically just another tale of gang warfare, it's kitted out with plot
ellipses, bizarre sets and colour effects, inappropriate songs, absurd
irrelevancies (nice hair-drier gags!), action scenes that verge on the
abstract, and some visual jokes tottering precariously between slapstick
and surrealism. Somehow, it still just about works as a thriller, with
(very, very faint) echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and Sergio Leone. Inspired lunacy. Geoff Andrew
Reverse Shot review: Raging Sun, Raging Sky is split into three distinct verses,
consisting of a prologue and two separate epic visual love songs, the
first contemporary the second mythic and ancient, featuring the same
principal characters, but for the first time in color. All stanzas are
largely dialogue-free, with images moving in musical ebbs and flows—it’s
unlikely that anyone has made or ever will again make a men’s room
seduction scene as lengthy and sinuous and erotic as the one that opens
the film’s second act. After a brief shot of a projectionist, firmly
situating us both in a movie dream world and literally in a movie
theater frequented by horny young gay men, Hernández orchestrates an
intense roundelay of flirtations, intercourse, masturbation, and
voyeurism between multiple mute characters, from urinal to stall and
back again—graceful camera dexterity transforms this potentially putrid
lavatory space into an erotic labyrinth and unites these hungry young
men in a luscious continuum of desire. The cruising continues in the
shadowy entrance to the theater itself, an overhead chiaroscuro of Kieri
avoiding Tari’s attempted seduction on the steps—as stunningly
patterned with light as anything from early Sternberg. The lingering air of sensuality in this film, as in Broken Sky,
is so strong that it’s almost as though all the characters have
ESP—that they can sense each other’s presence, their skin and bodies,
yes, but also their melancholy and loneliness, their intense passions.
Hernández here almost seems to view this young community of gay men
(more than twenty years his junior) as spiritually connected. In their
isolation one could read a rather old-fashioned take on the homosexual
doomed to loneliness, but there is no discernible sociopolitical angle
to his point of view—this is the stuff of classic romantic legend, of
poetry, of lovesickness and pursuit. When Hernández shows us an overhead
shot of man in bed curled up, the sheet creases fanning out around his
body like rays of light, it’s not a visual aside, it’s an entire stanza
from the love song itself. Yet Hernández is seeking something more sensuous; these men are not
shirking their skins but inhabiting them even more fully, and their
desire is depicted as a primal, ancient force, one that, in this case,
even has power to affect the present. Indeed, the richness of
Hernández’s filmmaking isn’t quite comparable to that of any other of
the formalist darlings of the contemporary art-house scene, from Tsai
Ming-liang to Lisandro Alonso or even to Portuguese director João Pedro
Rodrigues, who may also trade in vivid homoeroticism but whose approach
is less extravagant and more given to tragic grotesquerie. The
romanticism and desperation in Hernández’s films are an aesthetic unto
themselves—Mexican cinema has somehow given birth to the bastard child
of Cocteau and Ophuls. Now the world needs to take notice. Michael Koresky
Chicago Reader review: I can’t vouch for its fidelity to Homer, but this version of the Iliad,
scripted by David Benioff (25th Hour) and directed by Wolfgang Petersen,
is clearly more than a prequel to O Brother, Where Art Thou? It has
plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to
Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O’Toole (as King Priam), a deeper
sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic
(even if Pitt’s character has some of the beefcake accoutrements of
Leonardo DiCaprio’s in Titanic). Far from lost among the zillions of
extras are Eric Bana (Hector), Brian Cox (Agamemnon), Diane Kruger
(Helen), Orlando Bloom (Paris), Sean Bean (Odysseus), Rose Byrne, and
Julie Christie. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is part of the excellent Mubi Weekend Festival at Hackney Picturehouse. Full details here.
Time Out review: The
truly great ‘LA noir’ movies – ‘Point Blank’, ‘The Driver’, ‘Straight
Time’, ‘To Live and Die in LA’, ‘Heat’ – share common characteristics
beyond the basic clichés of the crime genre. These are movies informed
by the city in which they were made, a city constructed of gleaming
surfaces – six-lane highways, vast industrial wastelands and endless
suburban sprawl – and a place where crime is grubby and small-time,
carried out by empty, hopeless loners in hock to dapper despots with
unpredictable personalities. It’s in this world that we find the
near-silent hero of ‘Drive’,Nicolas Winding Refn’s self-consciously slick, synth-scored throwback.Ryan Goslingplays the unnamed Driver, a mechanic and occasional getaway guy whose life is overturned when he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan),
a struggling mum with a husband in the joint. As all the above implies,
this is a film built on familiarity, in terms of narrative and style:
neon lights flash, rubber tyres screech, Gosling broods, Mulligan swoons
and a trio of wisecracking, overdressed character actors –Albert Brooks,Ron Perlmanand
Bryan Cranston – provide both levity and dramatic weight. But ‘Drive’
never drags: this is an entirely welcome riff on old material, a
pulse-pounding, electronically enhanced cover version of a beloved
standard. Sure, it’s shallow, but it’s also slickly compelling,
beautifully crafted and so damn shiny. Tom Huddleston
ICA introduction: Wanda, a dominatrix and businesswoman, presides over a gallery in Hamburg’s seedy port district. She stages sadomasochistic rituals as elaborate spectacles for her eager audiences. As Wanda’s many lovers become entangled in her meticulous web, the shifting dynamics between pleasure and pain, performance and reality, love and obsession, salaciously intertwine. Inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Treut and Mikesch queer the conventions of the S&M classic, placing a woman’s bisexual desire at the centre of its narrative. Pairing the glamorous and commanding presence of Mechthild Großmann with an achingly submissive Udo Kier, Mikesch’s cinematography oozes with New German Cinema cool. Banned for 18 years by the German Federal Board of Censorship, the exquisitely controlled staging and charged psychosexual tension have since established the film as a seminal work of queer cinema.
Time Out review: A reflective drama about a college professor in her fifties. On sabbatical to write a book on German philosophy, Marion (Gena Rowlands) rents an apartment for the necessary solitude. There she starts overhearing sessions in the psychologist's office next door, in particular the disclosures of Hope (Mia Farrow), who has cause to question her marriage, the meaning of life and death, etc. Marion gets to thinking, and is appalled to realise that so many assumptions about her own life and marriage are largely unfounded: in her desire for a controlled existence, she has evaded the emotional truth about relationships with her best friend (Sandy Dennis), brother (Harris Yulin) and husband (Ian Holm). The film shows a refinement and development of recurrent Allen themes, particularly in the characterisation of what is arguably his most complex female character to date. But in choosing a stylised approach, Allen too often obscures points in overstatement and intellectual posturing. Where the film gains considerable momentum and richness is in the marvellous performances: Rowlands' perfectly pitched approach to a demanding role is particularly stunning.
Time Out review: This is the one Elmore Leonard fans were waiting for, the one that lost
least on the swings and roundabouts of translation to the screen. It
has, damagingly, exchanged the precise economic placing of Detroit for
impersonal LA, fiddled a bit with the plot, but courageously sticks by
the unheroic tone of the book. Married Harry's passing fling with a
young 'model' places him in the hands of a trio of extortionists. They
show him the evidence on video, and when he refuses to pay up, execute
his mistress with his gun, and play him the subsequent snuff movie.
Harry's survival depends upon his ability to play the unstable trio off
against each other. Excellent performances. Best of all is the casting
of Clarence Williams III as Bobby Shy - as shamblingly conspicuous as the brother
from another planet, golliwog hair and a too-tight raincoat that clings
like a hobo's fart, this is a guy who wants a good leaving alone.
Brian Case
Time Out review: First and foremost, an extremely uninhibited satire on American sexual
dreams and nightmares. Kathleen Turner, a career woman who doubles by night as
the ultra-hooker China Blue, acts out every male fantasy in the book
until she picks up a cop, sees him turn into a piece of meat beneath
her, and gets carried away with her stiletto heels and his nightstick.
She meets her Baudelairean match in Anthony Perkins, a deranged fundamentalist
consumed by lust and slowly mustering the energy to act out his own dark
fantasies. In between, the film lays into an 'average' suburban couple,
living a sexual fantasy of their own - of marital fulfilment. It relies
on sheer pace and stylistic bravura, and talks dirty more wittily than
anything since Bogart and Bacall. There are lapses, but this is in the
main a comedy so black that it recaptures some of the cinema's long-lost
power to shock. Tony Rayns
This is part of the Shōhei Imamura season at the ICA. Full details here.
ICA Cinema introduction: Set on the fictional island of Kurage which, as an islander sings
throughout the film, is said to have been forged by discarded objects
thrown by incestuous brother and sister gods, Imamura’s final fiction
film for almost a decade builds upon many of the obsessions that
characterised his work throughout the 60s, namely the clash between the
primitive and the civilized.
At the heart of the film sits both the Futori family, outcast from the
rest of the islands inhabitants due a variety of indiscretions, ranging
from incest to infidelity, improper fishing practices to mental
instability, and Kariya, a Tokyo engineer sent to the island to oversee
the opening of a Sugar manufacturing facility.
From its lush tropical forests to its shining turquoise seas, all
captured in mesmerising technicolor, Kurage appears to be an island
paradise. However under its paradisiacal surface Kariya quickly
discovers that the island is not only teeming with the animals and
insects Imamura regularly trains his camera upon - but also with deep
rooted superstitions, privation, and duplicities. Despite his attempts
to complete his work, Kariya finds himself engulfed by the primal urges
of the Futori family, and as the months pass under the beating sun, he
slowly finds himself drawn into their way of life. Profound Desires of the Gods expands the obsessions that had
animated the first decade of Imamura’s work to his largest canvas yet
and in the island of Kurage (Okinawa in reality) he finds the means to
examine the entire strata of a society from its messy familial dramas to
its political machinations. However, the film is by no means an
exercise in intellectual study, whilst Imamura’s famous anthropological
outlook is ever-present, its blood, flesh, and feeling that sits at its
heart. A history of Japan made myth, Imamura traces the evolution of a
nation from the agrarian to the industrial, the primitive to the modern,
but all the while taking great pains to remind us that no matter how
things change our foundations are as desirous and ritualistic as ever.
Barbican Cinema introduction: This acclaimed experimental film follows William Greaves directing a screen test of a couple arguing in Central Park; questioning both the authenticity of what we see, and the act of filmmaking.Fascinated by sociology and philosophy,Greavescreated the hyper-metaSymbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take Oneto explore human behaviour through the lens of social roles and pressures. More of a psychological experiment than drama or doc, Greaves uses the pretence of making a film, to examine the dynamics of a crew. Playing out like a documentary about a documentary about making a film; all these ideas come together to reflect 1960s US counterculture, and playfully subvert audience expectations at every turn, set toIn A Silent WaybyMiles Davis. As we celebrate the centenary of both Davis and Greaves, the film brings together the musical language of the legendary musician with the complex rhythms and shifting perspectives of Greaves’ masterpiece.
Prince Charles Cinema introduction: It’s something we’ve been trying to make happen for years: Robert Altman's 1993 sprawling masterpieceSHORTCUTSis finally coming to the Prince Charles Cinema from an original 35mm print for three shows in November. Anytime you can experience Altman on the big screen is a great thing, but this one is particularly special! Adapted from nine short stories by renowned writer Raymond Carver,SHORTCUTSfollows 22 Los Angeles residents whose lives intersect over the course of a few days as they all struggle to find solace and meaning in life alongside heavy boozing, infidelity, tragedy and clowns. The extraordinary ensemble cast includes Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Lemmon, Lily Tomlin, Andie MacDowell, Tom Waits, Fred Willard, Frances McDormand, Lili Taylor, Chris Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh—all giving fearless performances in what is one of Altman’s most compassionate creations. Riding a high off a career resurgence in the early 1990s followingThe Player,Altman’s film was an ambitious feat, featuring a very large cast and intertwining stories similar to his films from the 1970s. While it wasn’t a hit at the box office, the industry and critics alike loved the film, with it picking up the Golden Lion at Venice, an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, and landing on many best films of 1993 lists. The film, along with countless other works by Robert Altman, would also play a part in influencing a young Paul Thomas Anderson. You can see elements of the film in many of PTA’s works, most notably inBoogie Nightsand his own Los Angeles-set sprawling epic,Magnolia. Altman developed a distinctive storytelling style that captured the intricacies of relationships and the contradictions of American life, an approach Anderson has carried forward since his death in 2006.
Time Out review: From the exhilarating opening, you know Altman's epic 'adaptation' of
eight stories and a poem by Raymond Carver is going to be special. Like Nashville,
it's a tragicomic kaleidoscope of numerous barely interlinked stories
(plus a similarly portentous ending). Here, the focus is on couples
whose relationships are, at one point or another, subjected to small,
seismic shudders of doubt, disappointment or, in a few cases, disaster. A
surgeon suspects his wife's fidelity; a pool-cleaner worries over his
partner's phone-sex job; a waitress is racked by guilt after running
down a child; a baker makes sinister phone calls to the injured boy's
parents; the discovery of a corpse threatens a fishing-trip...and a
marriage. The marvellous performances bear witness to Altman's
iconoclastic good sense, with Lili Tomlin, Tom Waits, Matthew Modine, Tim Robbins, Andi MacDowell
and the rest lending the film's mostly white, middle-class milieu an
authenticity seldom found in American cinema. But the real star is
Altman, whose fluid, clean camera style, free-and-easy editing, and
effortless organisation of a complex narrative are quite simply the mark
of a master. Geoff Andrew
This screening is part of the 'Collective Visions of Pleasure' season at the ICA Cinema. The short season brings together four transgressive works from Japan,
USA, Germany and Mexico to consider how group desire can become a
political, world-making force, is curated by Nico Hughes and presented in association with the National Film and Television School.
MUBI review: Using video
footage shot in 2004, Leilah Weinraub’s seductively illicit and frequently
joyous film lets us voyeuristically enter an underground black lesbian
strip club in the Mid-City neighborhood of Los Angeles and revel in the
frenzied atmosphere of exuberant nudity, physical prowess, and, above
all, black queer desire. Hassled occasionally by the L.A.P.D., who we
see often shut the club down for solicitation—which seems unlikely but
is neither confirmed nor defined by the film—the status of the club and
its dancers is shown to be always in danger of being illegal through the
sheer and wonderful audacity of running such a club, as one eager
attendee remarks, “in the hood.”Why this film was made now and
not around the time Weintraub shot it is not clear, nor, exactly, is its
story, which seems in-part a vivid snapshot of Weintraub’s archive of
footage while working at the club, and a slimmer effort at telling the
evolution and sudden shutdown of the Shakedown by catching up with some
of the dancers, the club’s founder, and a pioneering dancer and
organizer a decade later (though still not in the present). All this
material provides for tantalizing glimpses into the culture (including a
fabulous montage of cheap but wondrous promotional art for numerous
strip parties), the pressures, and reflections of participating in such a
radical enterprise. But the core of the film is its original footage,
which has the lustrously fogged texture of early 2000s consumer digital
photography, and which feels like a combination (at least for this
straight white male) of barely authorized voyeurism and an enthralled
and participatory queer gaze at the extraordinary bodies and efforts of
dancers like Egypt and the show's star, Jazmine. Their work at the club
seems to exist in a unique place between labor and pleasure, as the
tremendous erotic-gymnastic efforts required to dance are readily seen,
while in interviews they speak often of acting out and evolving their
public roles, as well as the passion of their fans.Shakedown’s
impeccable packaging, with stylish credits delineating club and dancer
encounters in chapter titles and a richly narcotic soundtrack by Tom
DeWitt (former drummer of tribal-psych band Gang Gang Dance) is a
reminder that Weintraub is now known for running the hip haute
streetwear brand Hood by Air. This slick wrapping combines with the
strange sense of time evoked in the picture, with its 2004 club footage
and 2014 interviews, to hit a tone of nostalgia for something seemingly
so close yet so far away, perhaps a kind of utopic space for performance
and desire. Suffice to say, this is not your average documentary. We
should be happy indeed for such a welcome revelation of a vivacious
sexualized and racialized side of work and play that is too often, even
now, relegated to a social underground. Daniel Kasman
Castle Cineme introduction: Join The Swinging Christies, aka "Christie Time" - Dr Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown - for a special screening of this psychedelic, cult Agatha Christie classic. Ticket includes a 20-minute long live episode discussion after the film all about Endless Night!
When ambitious, salt-of-the-earth Mike (Hywel Bennett) meets refined heiress Ellie (Hayley Mills), sparks fly. They set about creating their dream marital home - but before long they discover it's cursed... Based on the fan-favourite Agatha Christie novel Endless Night (1968).
Mark is Associate Professor of Screen Histories at Solent University, and an Agatha Christie historian and speaker. His books include Agatha Christie's Marple: Expert on Wickedness, Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, and Agatha Christie on Screen. Gray is a lifelong Christie fan, podcaster, speaker and writer. He has been published by Puffin Audio and his plays have been read at the Southwark Playhouse, the Old Red Lion and The Place Bedford. Together as "Christie Time", their podcasts are The Swinging Christies and Westmapod. Their first book together, The Swinging Christies: How Agatha Christie Conquered the 1960s will be published by HarperCollins in 2027
Barbican Cinema intrduction: These two 35mm 'race films' from the late 1940s
feature all-Black casts, and a young William Greaves as he was
establishing his career on screen and Broadway. Screened
in segregated cinemas for Black audiences from 1915–1950s, ‘race films’
provided opportunities for more authentic representations of Black life
and a wider range of roles for Black performers in 1900s America.Miracle in Harlem blends
music, romance, and comedy; telling a story of a shipowner who is
tricked by a corrupt real estate mogul. Greaves plays the romantic lead,
straight-laced Bert, who must fend for his fiancée as they are swept up
in a murder. The film stars legendary vaudevillian star Stepin Fetchit. In Souls of Sin,
Greaves showcases his singing as guitar-playing blues musician Isaiah
'Alabama' Lee, one of three young men seeking fame and success in
Harlem.
Introduction to a special evening of two screenings of Ben Wheatley's debut film: 'This is a F&TT&N 5 Launch screening! We celebrate the launch of Ben
Wheatley's latest fanzine - film & television Thoughts & notes 5
- the Low Budget issue: with a special screening and Q&A with Ben
of his debut feature DOWN TERRACE - made for less than £10K in 2009
Ben's latest fanzine unpacks some of the thoughts, processes and
mistakes in making the film. It also features an interview with
Charlotte Regan about making her debut feature Scrapper. Every ticket to
this event comes with a copy of the fanzine. Be the first to get one -
only at the Nickel.'
Time Out review: The British gangster movie has taken a self-inflicted beating of late,
but it’s not out for the count. Staying well clear of the usual parade
of putdowns and punch-ups, ‘Down Terrace’ takes an unexpected approach
to the genre, fusing the wry realism of Ken Loach with the blackly comic
bloodlust of Ken Russell to produce perhaps the best homegrown movie of
the year so far. The action is confined almost exclusively to
one claustrophobic suburban house, where shiftless, insular dope dealers
Karl (co-writer Robin Hill) and his petulant, paranoid dad, Bill (a
stunning first-time performance from Hill’s father, Robert), are facing
trouble with the law and a snitch in their midst. Everyone is in the
frame: brooding matriarch Maggie (Julia Deakin), chubby, avuncular neighbour Garvey (Tony Way) and sadistic Irish thug Pringle (Michael Smiley) are all called upon to explain their actions, leading to rows, recriminations and, inevitably, bloodshed. Lots of it. What director Ben Wheatley
and his writing partner, Hill – veterans of TV comedy shows like ‘Time
Trumpet’ – manage to achieve in ‘Down Terrace’ is a mounting, sickening
sense of a world in freefall, where morality has been compromised to the
point of meaninglessness and where distrust leads to murder, even
within the family unit. And while this does result in a few berserk plot
diversions, particularly in the final act, Wheatley and Hill establish
such an oppressive mood and construct their characters so meticulously
that even in its most extreme moments, the film remains engrossing, not
to mention consistently funny and even, at times, rather sweet. Tom Huddleston
Chicago Reader review: A businessman with a hangdog face (Alain Delon) drinks too much beer on a
train. “What will happen to him?” he asks aloud, then answers:
“Absolutely nothing.” An affectless woman (Nathalie Baye) appears and
tells him, “The story begins on a train.” A sexual encounter between
them leaves him smitten. Begging her to use him “as a minor character,”
he follows her home to the suburbs and installs himself in her easy
chair to wallow in his infatuation and drink more beer, sometimes
joining her friends and bathrobe-clad neighbors in parading from house
to house. Bertrand Blier begins this enchanting 1984 burlesque of
bourgeois marital manners in the self-reflexive spirit of Alain
Robbe-Grillet, morphs it into a droll Bunuelian farce, then ends it on a
surprisingly sentimental note. With Genevieve Fontanel. Bill Stamets
This 35mm presentation also screens on October 29th and 30th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: No one denies it: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is
still the gold standard for Dracula onscreen. This 1922 silent German
expressionist film—an unauthorized riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula—harnessed
the macabre tale of desire and despair from the 1897 novel. By turning
Count Dracula into the grotesque Count Orlok and moving the story to a
German town, Murnau created something entirely its own. Despite lawsuits
and near extinction, Nosferatu survived—and its shadow still looms over every vampire film made since. An adaptation was previously undertaken by Werner Herzog (1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre) and with The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022) under his belt, director Robert Eggers daringly follows in these footsteps. Eggers’s Nosferatu is
predictably stylized—a cryptic horror that gradually leverages its
score and pallid lighting to cultivate a grand, disquieting epic. It
does so with Ellen (the Mina Murray character from Stoker’s novel,
played by Lily-Rose Depp) in the foreground. “Come to me,” Ellen calls out in a
sleepwalking state. Her call is answered by a brutish voice, and in a
second, a communion between the melancholic girl and a demon takes place
in the outside garden. This nightmare haunts Ellen to the present—1838
in the fictional German port town of Wisborg. There, she’s comforted by
her new husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a too-sincere property
man. This comfort is cut short. Hutter’s boss, a
certain suspicious Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), sends him to the
Carpathian Mountains to help secure a property for Count Orlok in
Wisborg. Bill Skarsgård’s rendition of the vampire is unlike any
predecessor: he’s a brute with a bushy mustache who looms just out of
focus for most of the film. A rising king of horror, Skarsgård makes
sure to put his stamp on this legacy. The narrative unfolds with all the classic Dracula checkpoints—a feverish account from Hutter to the vampire’s trip on the Demeter. It’s interspersed with tributes to the yearning vampire in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1992) and the fear of the plague featured in the original silent film.
It’s fair to say Eggers is juggling a lot, and it’s these influences
that pull the film apart at times; it often clumsily balances the
absurdity and horror of its predecessors. Yet, it’s the actors who pull together Nosferatu.
Thanks to a career-making performance by Depp, Ellen is at the heart of
this forlorn nightmare—it’s a performance that pulls its audience
deeply into this sinister love affair. Maxwell Rabb
This 35mm screening is part of the National Film & Television School student-curated film seasons making their way across London cinemas in the next few months. Details here.
Time Out review: Described by director Karyn Kusama (‘Girlfight’) as ‘a tribute to the
fierce power of oestrogen’, this coming-of-age horror comedy typecasts
beautiful ‘Transformers’ star Megan Fox as Jennifer, a high school alpha
female in the ‘Heathers’ or ‘Mean Girls’ mould. However, by going
against the grain of the ’80s horror movies to which it pays
affectionate homage – ‘Carrie’, ‘Fright Night’, slasher movies in
general – the script by ‘Juno’ writer Diablo Cody explores the toxic
friendship between Jennifer and her nerdy, speccy bosom buddy, Needy
(Amanda Seyfried). ‘Sandbox love never dies,’ so they are best friends
forever. But when Jennifer’s encounter with a diabolical indie band ends
with her being sacrificed and transformed into a literally maneating
demon, Needy must see through her one-sided girl-crush in order to end
Jennifer’s bloody reign of terror. A welcome antidote to the
sexless romanticism of ‘Twilight’, Kusama and Cody’s female-driven
horror comedy explores the premise that ‘hell is a teenage girl’. When
the far from virginal Jennifer transforms, she simply becomes herself,
but more so: her sexual power is magnified, she glows with health after
feeding, and her cruel selfishness goes into overdrive. But not even
Needy’s sensitive boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) will believe that
Jennifer’s body is now the embodiment of evil. There are
weaknesses: Kusama’s set-piece scare scenes aren’t always frightening,
Cody’s trademark teen slang is occasionally more forced than arch, and
the mysterious psychic connection between Jennifer and Needy is never
explained. But by tapping in to the same vein of ‘hormonal horror’ as
the excellent ‘Ginger Snaps’, this offers a witty, subversive look at
the darker side of teen friendship. Nigel Floyd
This is a 16mm presentation from the great Cine-Real team and is also screened on October 25th. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: Nearly 60 years on, Ealing's compendium of
spooky tales remains scary as hell. The best of the five stories,
which we see enacted as they're related in turn by guests at a country
house, are Alberto Cavalcanti's 'The Ventriloquist's Dummy', with Michael Redgrave
possessed by his deceptively lifeless little partner, and Hamer's 'The
Haunted Mirror', with the splendid Googie Withers a reluctant participant as
history repeats itself; least frightening, but amusing, are Basil Radford and
Naunton Wayne as typically obsessive sporting coves in Crichton's 'Golfing
Story'. Best of all, however, is the overall narrative arc, with the
framing story finally taking a headlong rush into a nightmarish realm
almost surreal in its weird clarity and familiarity. Geoff Andrew
This 35mm screening is part of the National Film and Television Schoolstudent-curated film seasons making their way to cinemas across London over the few months. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A yakuza chief who’s turned up in LA helps his brother form an alliance
between Japanese and black gangsters, which rivals the city’s Italian
Mafia only until the new syndicate clashes with the old. The chief,
played by writer-director-editor Takeshi Kitano (aka Beat Takeshi),
exhales self-parody and cool in the same breath. Though he bonds with
local Omar Epps in the buddy configuration typical of action comedy,
Kitano’s handling of this convention—and of extreme violence—is unique.
The buddies are characterized by deceptively simple twists on
acknowledged stereotypes, and their intimacy evolves gradually through
an accumulation of small gestures. A wizard at manipulating time, Kitano
introduces staccato elements that interrupt the meditative pace even as
they help set it. And he uses this paradoxically peaceful tension to
inspire in us a kind of spiritual response to the violence—a sensation
that’s utterly different from the visceral reaction we have to most
actioners, which we only hope is catharsis. Pat Graham
This 35mm presentation (also screened on November 23rd) is part of the Roger Corman season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Scientist Ray Milland discovers a potion that gives him X-ray vision,
and after becoming a freak he ends his days as a sideshow attraction
promoted by Don Rickles, who gives a fine low performance. This queasy
1963 SF parable was directed—quickly and cheaply—by Roger Corman for
American-International, drawing some of its strength from its tawdry
drive-in overtones. Milland grows through his debasement, and the
production offers plenty of it. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: A large portion of this highly original 2006 feature from Mali by Abderrahmane Sissako (Life on Earth, Waiting for Happiness)
consists of a hearing devoted to the operations of the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund in Africa, with judge, black and white
lawyers, and witnesses all played by nonactors who’ve written their own
speeches, many of them angry. All this is set outdoors, in a backyard in
a poor section of Bamako, the capital of Mali, and the remainder of the
film is devoted to glimpses of everyday African life taking place
around this event. Sissako scrupulously avoids making any facile
connections between his two blocks of material, and his cast, even when
silent, are always eloquent. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Marvellous performance from Barbara Stanwyck, all snap, crackle and pop as the
brassy nightclub entertainer Sugarpuss O'Shea who seeks refuge with
seven crusty old professors (plus Gary Cooper) to escape unwelcome attentions
from a gangster, and whose vocabulary (not to mention charms) excite
delighted wonderment in the professors since they have just reached
'Slang' in the encyclopaedia they are compiling. Rather surprisingly,
Hawks slightly muffs the sequence in which the gangster and his aides
get their comeuppance; otherwise his handling of the sparkling
Brackett-Wilder script and its subversions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is pure joy. Tom Milne
Rejoice! Screenings from prints are back at Everyman Screen where Michael Mann returns from September 25th to October 24th in a season dedicated to five unforgettable works from one of modern cinema's most influential filmmakers. This 35mm screening (also being shown on October 23rd and 25th) is part of a programme that included Collateral, Last of the Mohicans and Thief. Full details here.
Time Out review: Investigating a bold armed robbery which has left three security guards
dead, LA cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), whose devotion to work is
threatening his third marriage, follows a trail that leads him to
suspect a gang of thieves headed by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). Trouble is,
McCauley's cunning is at least equal to Hanna's, and that makes him a
hard man to nail. Still, unknown to Hanna, McCauley's gang have their
own troubles: one of their number is a volatile psychopath, while the
businessman whose bonds they've stolen is not above some rough stuff
himself. Such a synopsis barely scratches the surface of Mann's masterly
crime epic. Painstakingly detailed, with enough characters, subplots
and telling nuances to fill out half a dozen conventional thrillers,
this is simply the best American crime movie - and indeed, one of the
finest movies, period - in over a decade. The action scenes are better
than anything produced by John Woo or Quentin Tarantino; the
characterisation has a depth most American film-makers only dream of;
the use of location, decor and music is inspired; Dante Spinotti's
camerawork is superb; and the large, imaginatively chosen cast gives
terrific support to the two leads, both back on glorious form. Geoff Andrew
This is a 35mm restoration print of Ken Russell's cult movie and is being screened for a week ending its run on October 29th. You can find the full details here. The new director's cut was a great success at the London Film Festival and these 35mm presentations seem sure to prove very popular.
Time Out review: There's plenty here that's still incredibly shocking. The
scenes of plague are truly vile, as are the climatic torture scenes. But
what horrifies most is Ken Russell's nihilistic view of the world in
general, and humanity in particular: almost without exception, we are
shown to be vain, lustful, perverse, self-serving, murderous,
disease-ridden, exploitative, decadent, deluded creatures unworthy or
incapable of salvation. Approach with extreme caution. Tom Huddleston
This is the opening night of the Shōhei Imamura season at the ICA. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Shohei Imamura’s first feature (1958), shot in black-and-white ‘Scope,
deals with a form of working-class Kabuki that attracted him as a
college student, but its story about an itinerant troupe performing a
striptease version of the form near Osaka isn’t very inspired.
Nevertheless, Imamura characteristically finds some vitality in
vulgarity—though his more prosaic working title, “Tent Theatre,” was
rejected by the production company. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film will be followed by a group discussion in the bar area with Nick Walker of the Cult Classic Collective.
Chicago Reader review: The treacherous-mate theme that has been a staple of “women's pictures” since Gaslight
gets its ultimate, most agonizing development in this 1968 story about a
young woman (Mia Farrow) who discovers her husband has sold her body
for use by a witches' coven. The horror is more clinical than
supernatural, as Polanski transforms Ira Levin's story into a metaphor
for the loss of identity induced by pregnancy. A very sophisticated,
very effective piece of work spun from primal images, with an excellent
cast that includes John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Ralph
Bellamy, Maurice Evans, Patsy Kelly, and Elisha Cook Jr. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Detective Vince Edwards hunts Los Angeles for dynamiter Chuck Connors (a
nicely quirky characterisation), who is writing to the papers to
explain that his bombs are punishments meted out to society. The victims
include a high school, a hospital, a Women's Lib group...and aid comes
from the unlikely quarter of a pathetic rapist (Brand, another fine
performance). Shoddily assembled, but brightly conceived and very well
acted, it has a genuine 'B' movie vitality. (From a story by Marc Behm).
Time Out review: A mini-masterpiece, this is a cross between a ‘Grand Hotel’ for the
1980s and film noir: a crumbling Paris hotel houses four groups of
people whose paths occasionally cross. One is the group around detective
Terzieff, still trying to solve a murder of years ago; another is the
entourage of boxer Tiger Jones, in training with his manager (Johnny
Hallyday); another is a couple on the verge of breaking up; and the last
is the Mafia. Much of it, especially Léaud (Terzieff’s nephew-aide) and
Cuny as a Godfather who judges men by their toilet habits, is riotously
funny. Built on the charisma of its stars and on memories of the great
thrillers of the ’40s, tenuously held together by Jean-Luc Godard’s romantic
pessimism, curiosity and sense of humour, it’s co-dedicated, sensibly,
to Clint Eastwood. Tony Rayns
Time Out review: RogerCorman's first gangster movie is one of the most ambitious and rewarding of his '50s quickies: not because it transcends any of its inherent limitations, but rather because it indulges them recklessly. Apparently modelling itself on Siegel's Baby Face Nelson, it sees Kelly (Charles Bronson) as a child-like thug with a pathological fear of death, helplessly dominated by his moll Flo (Susan Cabot, Corman's favourite femme fatale until Barbara Steele came along). The post-Freudian motifs aren't imposed on the dime-novel material; they grow with a hysteria all of their own from the sleazy settings and one-note performances. The movie reveals Corman as a director entirely in touch with his audience, and Floyd Crosby as one of the most prodigiously resourceful cameramen in Hollywood history. Tony Rayns
