This 35mm presentation is also being screened on July 15th and September 12th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Sergio
Leone's comic, cynical, inexplicably moving epic spaghetti western
(1966), in which all human motivation has been reduced to greed—it's
just a matter of degree between the Good (Clint Eastwood), the Bad (Lee
Van Cleef), and the Ugly (Eli Wallach). Leone's famous close-ups—the
"two beeg eyes"—are matched by his masterfully composed long shots,
which keep his crafty protagonists in the subversive foreground of a
massively absurd American Civil War. Though ordained from the beginning,
the three-way showdown that climaxes the film is tense and thoroughly
astonishing. Dave Kehr Here(and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Sam Peckinpah's notorious western depicted an outlaw gang, made obsolete
by encroaching civilization, in its last burst of violent, ambiguous
glory. By 1969, when the film was made, the western was experiencing its
last burst as well, and in retrospect Peckinpah's film seems a eulogy
for the genre (there is even a dispassionate audience—Robert Ryan's
watchful Pinkerton man—built into the film). The on-screen carnage
established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that
followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling. With
William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates, Ben
Johnson, Strother Martin, and Albert Dekker; scripted by Walon Green and
Peckinpah from a story by Green and Roy N. Sickner, and photographed by
Lucien Ballard. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Cult British filmmaker Peter Watkins made the 1971 pseudo-documentary
‘Punishment Park’ as a reaction to the ‘revolutionary’ events in the
United States in the late ’60s, in particular the wave of
anti-Vietnam-fuelled activism, as well as protests against the
suppression of the Black Panther movement and the shooting by the
National Guard of students at Kent State University. Intended as an
analysis and illustration of (US) state terrorism, the film imagines a
futuristic correction facility out in the Mojave desert, where ‘security
risks’ are gathered and sentenced by an unconstitutional court to
potentially fatal punishments involving forced treks, without water,
through the desert. Seen today, the film can be viewed in a number of
ways. Firstly, it’s a prime example of Watkins’ innovative, radical
approach to filmmaking. His use of fictional scenarios to examine actual
political events and practices – here the reactionary tendencies of
the Nixon era – has a hyper-Swiftian effect, whereby artistic
exaggeration highlights the real to an intense degree. Likewise, his
considered use of non-professionals as actors – real National Guardsmen,
draft protesters and black activists – intensifies the emotional
atmosphere, the sense of immediacy and the processes of audience
identification. Interestingly, the improvised outpourings – ‘the US is
as psychotic as it is powerful!’ screams one defandant – now seem very
much like historical documents themselves. Finally, and more
problematically, there’s the question of whether Watkins’ film succeeds
as pure, tensely-structured, drama – will the two groups of dissidents
survive? Will they tear themselves apart in trying to do so? Personally,
I think not. But this is fascinating, gut-wrenching and
thought-provoking filmmaking all the same. Wally Hammond
A very rare screening for this wonderful independent movie that was Steve Buscemi's directorial debut. The film is also being shown on August 27th.
Time Out review: Tommy Basilio (Steve Buscemi), a no-hoper living in suburban Long Island, is
not exactly happy. He's been sacked for 'borrowing' money from the
garage owned by his buddy Rob (Anthony LaPaglia), with whom Tommy's girl Theresa
(Elizabeth Bracco) has now taken up. His family tend to regard him as a black
sheep, while Jerry (Daniel Baldwin), Theresa's volatile brother-in-law, is
anxious about Tommy hanging around his teenage daughter Debbie
(Chloe Sevigny). Small wonder Tommy takes to getting legless with troubled
family man Mike (Boone), trying to pick up anyone in a skirt, and
generally making a nuisance of himself in the unprepossessing Trees
Lounge bar. Buscemi's semi- autobiographical first feature as
writer/director is a beautifully low-key, disarmingly perceptive
blue-collar character-study, reminiscent of vintage Cassavetes in its
sociological and emotional authenticity. If nothing here is quite as
risky or inspirational as the late indie king's nerviest masterpieces,
there's still much to savour: a cherishably naturalistic, extremely
witty script packed with tasty trivialities and non sequiturs; top-notch
performances from a superb cast; a smattering of subtle sight-gags; and
sufficient drama to ensure that the overall understatement never
outstays its welcome. Crucially, despite the loose narrative structure
and amiable air of inconsequentiality, it's all held together, and lent
poignancy, by Buscemi's Tommy: irresponsible, selfish even, but endowed
with enough scrawny charm to allow us to care about his need, and
capacity, for some kind of redemption. Geoff Andrew
Time Out review: Coolly received by comparison with the more immediately accessible James
Bond films which were then at the height of their popularity, Modesty Blaise
is, like Rolls-Royces, built to last. Modelled on the cartoon strip, it
plays the game up to the hilt with its op-art sets, its extravagant
conceits, its outlandish violence, and its arch-fiend Gabriel (Bogarde
having a ball in silvery wig and sinister glasses) daintily dreaming up
ever more monstrous fancies. But under the non-stop stream of jokes lies
a bitter edge of malice, directed not only against the genre itself but
against a society which trusts its politicians and its generals. Tom Milne
Chicago Reader review: The 1924 film in which F.W. Murnau freed his camera from its stationary
tripod and took it on a flight of imagination and expression that
changed the way movies were made. Cameras had tracked and panned before,
but never to such a deliberate and spectacular degree. Emil Jannings is
the hotel doorman whose life is ruined when he is shunted to
semiretirement as a lavatory attendant and his beautiful uniform is
taken away from him. The film was a great international success and
secured a Hollywood contract for its German director—although a
president of Universal, according to legend, complained that the story
made no sense because everyone knew that washroom attendants made more
money than doormen. Dave Kehr
Curzon Mayfair introduction: Tom Courtenay joins us at Curzon Mayfair after the 3pm screening on Saturday 1 August of Billy Liar to talk about this, his breakthrough role and working with director John Schlesinger.Here are details of the Schlesinger season at Curzon Cinema.
Time Out review: Released in the wake of the early social realist films of Karel Reisz
and Tony Richardson, Schlesinger’s physical world is the same – northern
and working-class – but his approach to social commentary and
storytelling, as adapted from Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s
book and play, is more playful and less concerned with realism than
films like ‘Taste of Honey’ and ‘Saturday Night, Sunday Morning’.
Schlesinger’s Billy (Tom Courtenay)
is a confused young man with too much imagination for considering
kitchen sinks: nominally he’s an undertaker’s clerk, but his real job is
to carve a parallel, fantasy world for himself, whether leading men to
war in a state called Ambrosia or forging himself a career in showbiz.
Billy’s endless lies feel less like deceptions and more like an
expression of the conflicts within a young man who’s uneasy in a
fast-changing world. Funny and unexpectedly poignant.
Dave Calhoun
ICA introduction: A special screening of Looking for Mr. Goodbar with France-Lise McGurn, presented by MARFA journal. Set in the sexual frontiers of 1970s New York, Looking for Mr Goodbar
features the late Diane Keaton as a well-ordered teacher by day and a
restless thrillseeker by night, who looks for excitement through
tempestuous hook-ups at singles bars to enrich her ordinary life and
meets a brash Richard Gere along the way.
The latest edition of MARFA pays a visit to artist France-Lise McGurn’s
East London studio, featuring McGurn's collection of novelty furniture,
magazine clippings, and large canvases propped up by tins of paint – one
titled Looking for Mr. Goodbar. This event will continue with drinks at the ICA Bar.
MARFA is as much a biannual magazine as it is an intimate take on
the current state of culture. The publication pairs together
contemporary art, fashion, and whatever else takes their fancy into an
eccentric visual and editorial experience. Spanning across twenty-five
issues and many books over more than ten years, all is elevated but
unexpected. Nothing is as it should be. MARFA collaborates with the VIPs
of the creative world and partners pop with niche, old with new, the
cerebral with the relaxed - all to create their inimitable aesthetic.
Peter Bradshaw wrote about the film in an article he wrote for the Guardian to coincide with the release of Gaspar Noe's film Love. Here is an extract: Diane Keaton plays a teacher: here, specifically a teacher of
hearing-impaired children, a touch that accentuates her utterly
respectable, in fact, laudable life. She gets involved in casual sex
with men she meets in seedy bars. It ends in shocking violence. It is as
if female sexuality is always a natural fit for the erotic thriller or
crime thriller genre, and undoubtedly, Goodbar pathologises female
sexuality to some extent, indicating that for a woman to have an
interest in recreational sex is symptomatic of damage, and essentially
tragic in origin and destiny. The film has been occasionally reviled and dismissed, but is arguably
ripe for rediscovery as a confrontational exploitation classic from the
Martin Scorsese/Paul Schrader 70s. It is not available on DVD.
Garden Cinema introduction: This
edition of Composing Cinema celebrates the experimental musician and
three-time Oscar nominated composer Richard Rodney Bennett's score for
Joseph Losey's unique (and rarely screened) Figures in a Landscape. The screening will be introduced by regular host, the Oscar nominated composer Gary Yershon.
Joseph
Losey returned to his roots in genre filmmaking in this minimalist
reinvention of the paranoid political thriller so popular in the 1970s.
Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell are two anonymous fugitives, just
escaped from an unknown prison in an unnamed country and relentlessly
pursued by a malevolent police helicopter. Despite their sympathy, the
local population can do little to help the men and by the end it becomes
clear that the two protagonists are playing out another of Losey's
rituals of power and role-playing, albeit on a more ambitious scale than
usual. Losey reportedly despised the gratuitous violence of the source
material and enlisted Shaw's skill as a writer to craft a screenplay
that would be a tough critique of militaristic violence. The result
remains an intelligent and suspenseful film that powerfully uses the
scenario of the chase as an existential metaphor.
This film, which also screens on July 20th, is part of the 'Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films' season. Full details here.
BFI Southbank introduction: Her long-term relationship crumbling, a Finnish art student takes a train beyond the Arctic Circle to the north coast of Russia. She’s forced to share an austere compartment with a boorish young miner (Yura Borisov, as brilliant here as he was in Anora) who delights in making her feel uncomfortable. But as the landscape outside grows bleaker, these two lost souls begin tentatively to share empathy and friendship. Sublime and heart-warming, Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix winner has the gentle profundity of Chekhov’s best stories.
Time Out review: Sixteen-year-old Lilya (Oskana Akinshina) is cruelly abandoned by her mother to
post-Soviet welfare and an aunt who only wants to steal the little she
has. From here, things go downhill. The aunt turfs her out of their
flat. Her only true friend is Volodya (Artyom Bogucharskij), a suicidal
13-year-old suffering at the fists of his father. Her only asset is her
looks. It's taken for granted she will cash in sooner or later. Then she
meets Andrei, who holds out the promise of a better world, and provides
her with what we know all along will be a one-way ticket to hell on
earth. Writer/director Moodysson's third film is grim and gruelling, a
'feelbad' entertainment signalled by scalding blasts of cacophonous
Rammstein at ear-splitting volume. A flashback structure imbues the
manifold injustices which befall Lilya with a harrowing inevitability.
The film's soul is revealed in the friendship between Lilya and Volodya,
their solace in sorrows shared, her innate kindness and generosity, his
reciprocal fidelity and affection. Moodysson retains his knack for
getting vivid, natural, immensely sympathetic performances out of
children. Their humanity invests the movie with heartbreaking power. Tom Charity
This 35mm screening is part of Curzon's John Schlesinger season. Details here.
BFI introduction to LFF screening in 2015: 1967 saw Julie Christie and Terence Stamp immortalised by The Kinks in
‘Waterloo Sunset’ and cast as lovers in Thomas Hardy’s epic love story.
Headstrong and independent, farmer Bathsheba Everdene is among the most
modern of 19th-century heroines and Christie’s performance beautifully
underlines her as a woman at odds with the conventions of the time. The
film contains a number of stand-out set-pieces, such as Stamp’s
seductive, almost Freudian display of swordsmanship. But what resonates
so deeply is the way in which Schlesinger and cinematographer Nicolas
Roeg frame the passions and tragedy at the film’s heart with the
patterns of rural life and the harsh, sodden beauty of the Dorset
landscape. Almost 50 years on, this restoration reveals the film as an
immersive piece of cinema with Hardy’s cruel ironies and bleak lyricism
fully intact. Robin Baker
John Patterson wrote an excellent article in the Guardian on this re-release. You can read the full article here. This is an extract:
Schlesinger’s Hardy was derided back then for its casting of Julie
Christie and Terence Stamp, mere months after they’d been name-checked
in the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, and who then seemed more Swinging London
than Wailing Wessex. Time and distance have eradicated that feeling,
however, and I delighted in the credits as they unfolded: not just Terry
and Julie, but Peter Finch and eternal peasant-pagan Alan Bates, all
perfectly cast; Stamp in particular, as the vile Sergeant Troy, whose
name should really be “destroy”.But behind the camera too, there is joy to be had. Frederic Raphael’s
screenplay, tied to Hardy as it must be, keeps the screenwriter’s more
irritating locutions and “sparkling dialogue” tendencies in check, and
serves Hardy admirably in terms of scale and pacing, while making hay of
double entendres such as Troy’s leering “I’ll unfasten you in no time”.
But perhaps the heart of the movie is the relationship between
production designer Richard Macdonald – the man responsible for Joseph
Losey’s eye-popping “mise-insane” films during the 60s – and
cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, at the height of what I think of as his
Red Period as a cameraman. Best of all is to see a large-scale British
period movie in which millions and millions of MGM’s dollars are clearly
and effectively visible on the screen.
This film is presented by 'Some Kind of Kick', who present 'celluloid rock ‘n’ roll trash on a Saturday night.' Here is their full programme at the Cinema Museum.
Time Out review: Sir Henry's disgusting ancestral home has spawned an industry: a Radio 4
sketch, Peel-show episodes, Bonzo track, complete album, stage
readings. His motto is 'Omnes Blotto'; his home is Knebworth outside, and a dusty heap of rotten food, excrement, and empty bottles within. Vivian Stanshall
has pieced together a shambolic poem, stuffed with extraordinary
one-liners, with the sad, manic skeleton necessary to all great comedy; a
satire tempered with nostalgia. Fixing this down visually is ultimately
as self-defeating as filming a Goon Show: Steve Roberts has opted for a grainy monochrome, and has fortunately resisted the temptation to 'explain'. With the surprising exception of Denise Coffey, the actors quite correctly play the farrago dead straight: Trevor Howard,
in particular, relishes the role of Sir Henry as if shooting for an
Oscar. Too many favourite album lines are missing to prevent a little
disappointment, and the edifice gets close to collapse on occasions, but
this is one film it would have been impossible to get irrefutably
'right'. John Collis
Chicago Reader review: A British film about alienation, asphalt, and narrative disconnections,
coproduced by Wim Wenders's German company. Director Christopher Petit, a
former film critic, slips into Wenders's style—the cool, austere
black-and-white images, the blank underplaying—as if he were taking it
for a test drive: he wants to see what it can do, what its strengths are
and where its weaknesses lie. Seizing on an archetypal Wenders
situation—a car trip that becomes a metaphor for an emotional
pilgrimage—Petit inspects and abstracts Wenders's ideas. The film is
dull and distant, though not objectionably so—it seems to be the effect
Petit has in mind. The relationships between his isolated, distracted
characters are reproduced in the movie's low-key appeal to its audience.
With David Beames and Lisa Kreuzer (1979). Dave Kehr
Cinema Museum introduction: July
2026 marks eighty years since the formation of Martin and Lewis, and
seventy years since their break up, exactly a decade later. It’s
difficult to overstate their success in this period; at the height of
their fame in the early fifties, the pair were a showbiz phenomenon
who incited levels of hysteria reserved in popular memory for fans of
Elvis or The Beatles. The Martin and Lewis empire spread everywhere:
from the nightclub scene where they originated into television,
radio, comics and, of course, Hollywood. The
Caddy remains
one of the better works for understanding their volatile, magnetic
chemistry. It was their ninth of sixteen films together, one of three
Martin and Lewis films released in 1953 alone. The film was a massive
commercial success and became the fourteenth highest grossing film of
the year. But it also marked the beginning of the end for the pair,
as Lewis grew increasingly egotistical and controlling and,
emboldened by the commercial success of That’s
Amore,
Martin became convinced of his ability to go it alone. By the summer
of 1954, whispers of a rapidly fracturing partnership, even a feud,
began to spread through Hollywood like wildfire. Martin and Lewis
went on to release seven more films after The
Caddy,
and in the three years after its release, they remained a mainstay of
popular television and film until their acrimonious split in 1956,
after which both went on to enjoy successful solo careers. The film
will be preceded by an introduction reflecting on the shared career
and legacy of Martin and Lewis.
This film was famously buried by Fox studios and there was just one late
press screening in Britain.
I wrote about the tortured pre-release history here.
But Kenneth
Lonergan's follow up to the excellent You Can Count On Me gained a
second life thanks to critics enthused by one of the best American film
in recent years championing this superb movie.
Here the film screens in the full extended version.
This is Peter Bradshaw's review from the Guardian to the time of release: Since 2000, when he made his mark with a tremendous debut, You Can Count
on Me, Kenneth Lonergan has been absent from the radar as a
director. The reason turns out to have been years of acrimonious studio
argument over the length of his followup project, a post-9/11 New York
drama in a world of trauma, rage, blame, overtalking and interrupting.
Originally conceived as a three-hour movie, it has been allowed into
cinemas in a two-and-a-half hour cut. Perhaps Lonergan is content with this and perhaps not, but
the resulting movie is stunning: provocative and brilliant, a sprawling
neurotic nightmare of urban catastrophe, with something of John
Cassavetes and Tom Wolfe, and rocket-fuelled by a superbly thin-skinned
performance by Anna Paquin. Its sheer energy and dramatic vehemence,
alongside that raw lead performance, puts it way ahead of more
tastefully formed dramas.Paquin plays Lisa, the daughter
of divorced parents: a mouthy, smart-but-not-that-smart teen at private
school, sexy but emotionally naive, self-absorbed and scarily
hyper-articulate in the language of entitlement and grievance. She may
have inherited drama-queen tendencies from her mother Joan (J
Smith-Cameron), a Broadway stage star, with whom she lives in New York.
One day, after an encounter of pouting defiance with her exasperated
mathematics teacher (Matt Damon), Lisa takes it into her head to buy a
cowboy hat. She sees a bus driver wearing one she likes: he is played by
Mark Ruffalo.
With a teenager's heedless disregard for the consequences, she
flirtatiously runs alongside his bus, waving wildly, asking where he got
it. He smiles back at her, taking his eyes off the road – with terrible
results.Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at
having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup,
and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a
whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. But is that emotion
guilt or righteousness? Or a sociopathic convulsion, a need to create a
huge redemptive drama with herself at the centre, to lash out against
her mother and the entire adult world; or to enact vengeance against a
man who, without trying, has placed her in a position of weakness – at
the very point at which she considers she should be attaining her adult,
queen-bee status? Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly
unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically
compelling to watch.
Chicago Reader review: In 1969 Ken Loach took time out from an acclaimed television career to
direct this quietly powerful narrative feature, a classic of British
social realism. Based on a novel by Barry Hines but shot like a
documentary, with a hardscrabble industrial setting and a cast that
blends professionals and amateurs, the film tracks an introverted
Yorkshire lad (David Bradley) who's abandoned by his father and bullied
by his coal-miner brother (Freddie Fletcher). A failure in the classroom
and on the soccer pitch alike, the boy finds his wings when he adopts
and trains a fledgling kestrel. Working in the style of cinema verite,
cinematographer Chris Menges captures the petty tyrannies of the
provincial working class and the inchoate joys of a youngster stumbling
toward the greater world. Andrea Gronvall
This is the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of one of John Ford's early magnificent westerns. The screening features an introduction by Bryony Dixon, Rosie Taylor and Makeda Doyal and a live accompaniment by Ashley Valentine.
Chicago Reader review: The film that introduced Yasujiro Ozu, one of Japan's
greatest filmmakers, to American audiences (1953). The camera remains
stationary throughout this delicate study of conflicting generations in a
modern Japanese family, save for one heartbreaking moment when Ozu
tracks around a corner to discover the grandparents, alone and
forgotten. A masterpiece, minimalist cinema at its finest and most
complex. Dave Kehr
This film is part of the Category H’s late night Rio Forever season.
Category H introduction: Where strange inhabitants commit unspeakable deeds or where past
inhabitants can’t quite seem to put their bad habits to rest, even
from beyond the grave. Blood (1973), directed by cult filmmaker
Andy Milligan, is a sprawling tale of multiple monsters who move into
a new home in order to conduct scientific experiments. Led by one Dr
Orlofski and his beautiful sunlight hating wife Regina, the monsters
attempt to find ways to make their strange family work in a hostile
new town. Blood plays as a strange melodrama featuring constant
injections, arguments and the odd carnivorous plant, creating an
entertaining completely one of a kind film. Screening at the Rio for
the first time X years, leave any ideas of typical plot development
at the door and prepare to be injected with Milligan’s infectious
cinematic world. After a short break, we will return to the
cinema for Bones (2001). Bones is a truly original 00s horror film
that was sorely overlooked upon release, and which we cannot wait to
bring to the Rio Cinema for the first time. Starring Snoop Dogg and
featuring Pam Grier, Bones is a ghost story tinged with giallo.
Twenty years after his unlawful death, former man of the people Jimmy
Bones’s ghost remains haunting his now run down neighborhood. After
a group of teenagers acquire his old house and plan to turn it into a
nightclub, they accidentally summon his vengeful spirit who is
looking to take revenge on those who have ruined his beloved former
home. Featuring incredible practical effects and excellent
performances, Bones is a film ripe for reappraisal.
Prince Charles Cinema introduction: Four
teenage friends from Hell's Kitchen end up being sent to reform
school after almost killing a man. There they are brutalized by the
guards. John (Ron Eldard) and Tommy (Billy Crudup) grow up to be hit
men who recognize their abuser years later and kill him. Their trial
is prosecuted by another member of their gang, who is now the
assistant DA.
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: It’s been a summer of great expectations. First there was ‘The
Avengers’, which ticked all the right geeky boxes and made a truckload
of dosh. Then ‘Prometheus’, which disappointed most but still managed to
ring a few tills. Now here comes the biggie. Can Christopher Nolan see
out his Bat trilogy in style? Can he make that so-far-elusive five-star
superhero movie, the one which gets the blend between action, emotion,
plot and character just right? Can he at least live up to the eyepopping
standard he set with 2008’s ‘The Dark Knight’? The answers are yes, no, and mostly. As its running time suggests,
‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is a sprawling, epic feast of a movie, stuffed
to the gills with side characters, subplots and diversions. So if the
balance skews in favour of grandstanding action rather than emotional
resonance, of statuesque icons rather than real people, we can let it
slide. There’s nothing here to match the intensity of Heath Ledger’s
Joker, and the movie feels weaker for it. But that was a one-off, and
the show must go on. We’re reintroduced to Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (Christian Bale), living as a recluse, holed up in the east wing of Wayne Manor while Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) presides over a relatively crime-free Gotham City. But when marauding, mask-wearing psycho Bane (Tom Hardy) muscles in with the intention of kickstarting a popular revolution, Bruce must don the cape and cowl once again. This is just the central thread in an increasingly tangled story: there’s also Anne Hathaway as a slinky, burgling Catwoman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
as a square-jawed beat cop and lots of confusing financial shenanigans
with the shareholders of Wayne Enterprises. As in the previous films,
Nolan and his co-writer, his brother Jonathan, draw on real-world issues
to spice up the fantasy, and with dubious results: with its rampaging
Occupy Gotham anarchists, philanthropic billionaires and decent cops who
ignore due process, this is so staunchly right-wing it’ll thrill all
those Fox News anchors outraged by ‘The Muppets’. But when the Bat flies, such considerations go out the window.
Sublimating CGI in favour of real crowd scenes and massive cityscapes,
Nolan creates a grand, dirty, engrossing world, and his action sequences
just hum. The way the various strands tie up is a mite predictable, but
it’s satisfying nonetheless. And as our heroes swoop off into the
sunset, we realise we’ve been witness to something truly impressive: a
seven-year cinematic adventure which combined the epic and the personal
in dizzying, inventive, sometimes perplexing, often enthralling, always
imaginative ways. Tom Huddleston
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: Funny things, dreams. Fascinating for the dreamer, but as dull
as a late morning in Slough for anybody else, unless, of course, your
guide is Freud. Or, as it turns out, Christopher Nolan, the 39-year-old
British director of ‘Memento’ and ‘The Dark Knight’, whose solution to
the boredom of other people’s dreams is to collide their woozy,
ever-changing, upside-down and roundabout nature with the thrust of a
fast-paced, men-on-a-mission movie and a startling visual language that
mirrors their strangeness. Better still, the dreams preferred by Nolan
include images of Paris folding in on itself and a trackless train
thundering through a city. The limited, sleepworld excitements of
retaking your A levels ad infinitum or forever missing a flight at the
airport don’t figure here. Nolan throws a perfect
storm of stunts, effects, locations and actors at one big idea: that
it’s possible to pilfer ideas from dreams by a process called
‘extraction’, which involves hooking yourself up to a drip, falling
asleep and entering the world of the subconscious. The holy grail of
this process is to reverse it, which is ‘inception’, the planting of a
new idea in another’s mind. That’s the trick that experts Dom (Leonardo
DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), aided by new recruits
Ariadne (Ellen Page) and Eames (Tom Hardy), try to pull off while
hopping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa. They’re working for Saito (Ken
Watanabe) in pursuit of business magnate Robert (Cillian Murphy), and
their motives vary, from financial to intellectual. But DiCaprio has
another driver: the memory of his wife Mal (Marion Cottilard) is
haunting him and it’s going to take a lot of psychological
spring-cleaning for him to reconnect with that lost world. All
hail Nolan for mastering a higher class of mass entertainment. Like all
good science fiction, ‘Inception’ demands we pay serious attention to
pure fantasy on the back of strong ideas and exquisite craft – but it
also combines fantasy with real observations about our sleeping lives.
Like a dream, Nolan’s film fades swiftly in the light – but while it
lasts, it feels like there’s nothing more important to decipher. Dave Calhoun
This is part of the '£1 for Members' season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Samuel Fuller’s wild, wonderful, semicoherent black-and-white ‘Scope
western (1957) was shot in ten days, and in some ways looks it. But it’s
also the feature that fully announces his talent as an avant-garde
filmmaker, even in this unlikeliest of genres. Barbara Stanwyck stars as
the “woman with a whip,” the land baroness of Tombstone Territory.
She’s assisted by the 40 dudes of the title, and Barry Sullivan is the
marshal who turns up to challenge her. There’s a hilarious romantic
subplot involving a female gunsmith (whose sexual initiation is handled
through an iris and dissolve that Godard incorporated into Breathless),
an endless crane-and-track shot through a western town that defies
belief, a lot of delirious violence, perverse sexuality, imaginative
visual energy, and several startling plot twists. If you’ve ever
wondered why Godard and other French New Wave directors deify Fuller,
this movie explains it all. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review:For all his versatility as a writer-director, I was surprised to learn
that Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies) had made a film about the genesis
of Gilbert and Sullivan's mid-1880s comic opera The Mikado. Yet this
160-minute "backstage musical" is about something he knows
intimately--the complex of personal, organizational, artistic, and
cultural factors that go into putting on a show. Leigh begins with
leisurely character sketches of composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan
Corduner) and librettist William Gilbert (Jim Broadbent), two very
different men whose collaboration appears to be at an end. Only after
Gilbert's wife (Lesley Manville) drags him to a Japanese exhibition in
London does The Mikado (and this movie) begin to take shape, and after
that the film keeps getting better and better. The actors and actresses
in the stage production, including Leigh regular Timothy Spall, all sing
in their own voices, and Leigh's flair for comedy and sense of social
interaction shine as he shows all the ingredients in The Mikado
beginning to mesh. Thoroughly researched and unobtrusively upholstered,
this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a
string of delights. With Ron Cook, Wendy Nottingham, Eleanor David,
Kevin McKidd, Shirley Henderson, Dorothy Atkinson, and many Leigh
standbys, including Alison Steadman and Katrin Cartlidge.
This film is part of the 'Not By Lynch' series at the Cinema Museum. Full details here.
Not By Lynch: The Lynchian Before and After David Lynch – is
a nine-film programme paying tribute to the late David Lynch by
exploring films that share aspects of his distinctive style and
sensibility. Like any great artist, Lynch not only imprinted his unique
vision on the world but also examined it with a discerning eye. The
collision between that subjective vision and the objective reality gave
rise to what we now call the ‘Lynchian’: a perspective in which everyday
reality is a thin veil over a dream-state that feels closer to the
truth. While this vision finds its most intense and sustained expression in
Lynch’s own films, the Lynchian both predates Lynch and will survive
him, so long as the world that inspired it endures. Beginning 16 January
2026 – one year after Lynch’s death – the programme unfolds across nine
decades of his lifetime (1940s–2020s), pairing precursors and
descendants that echo the moods, methods, and mysteries we call
Lynchian. Each screening will be preceded by an introduction and accompanied by an original commissioned essay, produced by Cinema Year Zero. The season is curated by Arta Barzanji.
Chicago Reader review: I’ve seen Michael Snow’s sprightly experimental feature from Canada,
which showed at a couple of weekend matinees at Facets early last
October, three times in various theaters and many times on video, and
I’ve found it virtually inexhaustible–each viewing has felt like a
brand-new encounter rather than the replay of a golden oldie. Not all of
my colleagues who’ve seen this magnum opus would agree that it’s the
crowning achievement of North America’s greatest living experimental
filmmaker and conceptual artist, but I’m far from alone in my estimation
of this masterpiece. It’s a kind of playful and comic encyclopedia of all the things
digital video can do to stretch, compress, combine, and otherwise
distort human bodies, compiled with neither malice nor anxiety. It
unravels mainly in two contrasting spaces. One is a circular work space
spotted with people at computers and backed by picture windows
overlooking skyscrapers, which the camera glides past in perpetual
motion. The other, viewed from a fixed vantage point, is a windowless
boxlike chamber resembling both a living room and a bomb shelter, where
kitschy objects and members of a nuclear family clustered around a TV
set appear, disappear, explode, reappear, and get scrambled in various
combinations. Snow’s first digital video was in gestation for many years while he
waited for the necessary technology to develop, and since he started out
as an animator (he concludes *Corpus Callosum with his very first piece
of animation), he knows that this kind of patience can sometimes pay
off in unexpected ways. I’ve argued elsewhere that the long-range
working methods of animators may allow them, quite apart from their
conscious intentions, to bear witness to their time in certain respects
more profoundly than live-action filmmakers, who work within much
shorter time frames. Furthermore, the endless possibilities of digital
video, which allow conceptual artists to achieve precisely what they
think, are a boon to someone as focused as Snow, though they’ve
handicapped many less imaginative and original filmmakers by making
their work too easy. The film’s title refers to the tissue that passes messages between the
brain’s two hemispheres. The asterisk, as Snow has noted, means what an
asterisk generally means–a sign pointing toward an extension of the
material. Its addition clearly baffled some; when I reviewed the film
for Film Comment the asterisk got shaved off as if it were a wart, and
the error wasn’t deemed important enough to warrant correcting. Yet the
asterisk points to what I value most about the film, which goes beyond
the kind of formalism usually associated with Snow to meditate on the
ways human bodies have occupied interior spaces over the past half
century. On this very broad canvas, rhymes of shape, costume, decor,
movement, and viewing itself (with functional work-space computers
supplanting kitschy living-space TVs) are combined with contrasting
ideas about how space is represented and negotiated. All of which yields
a kaleidoscopic vaudeville that recapitulates and updates most of the
concerns of Snow’s earlier work–including camera movement, working and
living space, philosophical journeys, and mathematical paradoxes such as
the Moebius strip–while teasing out some of their social implications. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This restored Sri Lankan classic is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.
BFI introduction: Sumitra Peries’ groundbreaking Sri Lankan film offers a tender and
transporting journey through young dreams and first loves. Kusum, a poor
but studious village girl who cleans the house of a wealthy family,
sparks a connection with Nimal, the family’s prized son. Soma, Kusum’s
younger sister, pursues beauty pageants and dreams of acting, believing
it’s her best chance of a better life. What unfolds is a lyrical and
poignant coming of age story, brimming with yearning and feminine
sensibility. Sumitra Peries, known as ‘the poetess of Sri Lankan
cinema’, became the country’s first female director with this
astonishing debut. She draws out natural, affecting performances from
her cast, particularly Vasanthi Chathurani, who was still at school when
she played Kusum – the role that launched a long screen career. The
Girls was crowned the Outstanding Film of the Year at the 1978 London
Film Festival. Beautifully restored in digital 4K, it feels just as
fresh, illuminating and moving today. Kimberley Sheehan
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
