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
This 35mm presentation is part of the 'Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films' season. Full details here. The screening of Rome Express on Tuesday 21 July will include an introduction with writer Jonathan Coe, hosted by writer and season curator Kazuo Ishiguro.
BFI introduction: German star Conrad Veidt and ace Austrian cameraman Günther Krampf bring
a near-expressionist Weimar sensibility to this riveting British
thriller, set aboard a train filled with enjoyably stiff-upper-lipped
stereotypes. Deplorably neglected today, this deserves to be remembered
both as a classic and as a strangely serendipitous blending of two
normally opposed cinematic styles.
Barbican
Cinema introduction:
Charismatic gay club performer Jason
Holliday talks about his life to camera in Shirley
Clarke’s documentary, described by Ingmar Bergman as 'the
most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.' Edited down from a
12-hour shoot, Portrait of Jason comprises an interview with
Black, gay nightclub performer Jason Holliday, talking directly to
camera about his fabulous life, with occasional off-screen
interjections and provocations by director Shirley Clarke and her
partner, Carl Lee. A gifted raconteur, Jason’s
tales of strife throughout his messy career – all laced with wit
and expert comic timing – make for a constantly entertaining
dialogue. The film remains controversial for the techniques used by
Clarke and Lee in interviewing Holliday. By the end, a very drunk
Holliday becomes increasingly distressed by the questioning of Clarke
and especially Lee, who berate him for his performative style and
accuse him of lying. Portrait of Jason remains a
powerful, provocative and challenging work.
New Yorker review: A raw-edged sketch of furiously extended takes… A masterwork of
grand-scale intimacy. The extraordinary protagonist, alone onscreen for
an hour and a half, seems to give birth to his new identity in real
time. Meanwhile, he presents an agonizing time capsule of an age of
ambient racism, homophobic persecution, and moralistic hypocrisy. Jason Holliday’s stories of arrests and enforced psychiatric sessions, and of
the racist arrogance of white employers (for whom he worked as a
domestic), are adorned with as much self-deprecating, life-loving
laughter as his tales of sexual adventures and samples of his night-club
act (featuring impressions of Mae West and Katharine Hepburn, among
others). In his lifelong pursuit of pleasure, Holliday (who died in
1998) paid an outsized price in pain. But he was outspokenly wise to the
transaction—and he knew that this very performance, with its risky
self-exposure, involved both. Richard Brody
This 35mm screening is part of the Nolan in 35mm season at the Screen on the Green from June 20th to July 15th. Full details here.
Time Out review:With ‘Following’, ‘Memento’, ‘Insomnia’ and the uncommonly smart blockbuster ‘Batman Begins’, Christopher Nolan has established himself as a filmmaker fascinated by the fluid, tricksy contingencies of memory, identity, narrative and time: the way we depend on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and the little slips and dodges, ignorant or willed, that allow us to keep those stories straight – at least for a while. Selfhood emerges from these films as a rickety trick, an illusion dependent on misdirection and oversight. Apt, then, that the director’s latest is a story about magicians. Nolan’s first period picture, ‘The Prestige’ shares the fractured chronology common to his earlier work. Based in turn-of-the-last-century London, the plot centres on two ambitious young illusionists: flashy, easygoing Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman, abetted, as in ‘Batman Begins’, by Michael Caine) and the more original but less extrovert Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). Fellow apprentices turned bitter rivals after a grisly onstage accident, their escalating feud is a game of cat and mouse played out in a hall of mirrors, set in cramped prison cells and Colorado expanses as well as theatres, as they compete to deliver the most spectacular version of a teleportation trick that calls for something like real magic. Jackman and Bale make impressive tango partners, neither wholly sympathetic nor villainous, each drawing out the synergy between his character’s personality and his onstage style. It’s a handsome film, too, beautifully photographed by Wally Pfister in a chocolate-and-cinnamon sepia palette flashed with electric blue.Ben Walters
The film will be followed by a Q&A with director Jim Sheridan.
Chicago Reader review: The remarkable Daniel Day-Lewis plays the remarkable Christy Brown, an
Irishman born with a severe case of cerebral palsy who eventually taught
himself to paint and write with his left foot, in a film adapted by
director Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton from Brown’s autobiography.
Far from milking this subject for conventional sentimentality, the
filmmakers use it as the basis for an engaging and idiosyncratic
character study. Lewis’s performance is necessarily a bit showy–one has
to strain at times to understand all his dialogue because of the
character’s contorted features–but he puts on a terrific drunk scene,
and for all his character’s travails, the film as a whole winds up as
surprisingly upbeat. With Brenda Fricker (also very fine) as Brown’s
mother, Alison Whelan, Kirsten Sheridan, Declan Croghan, Fiona Shaw, and
Cyril Cusack. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Barbican Cinema introduction: In London, in the early seventies, a group of women had begun to leaflet cleaners who worked at night to encourage them to form a union. This labour organisation became the central action of the documentary. Completed in 1975,Nightcleanersis the combined work ofMarc Karlin,Mary Kelly,James ScottandHumphry Trevelyan, together known as theBerwick Street Film Collective. The film quickly became known for its innovative structure. Through its approach to revealing otherwise hidden truths, it successfully challenges conventional documentary storytelling. More than any other film produced during this period, it stands out as a work that, to this day, continues to inspire a new generation of filmmakers to question longstanding practices in political filmmaking.
Time Out review: This documentary started out as a conventional agit-prop project in
support of the 1972 campaign to unionise women nightcleaners in London.
In the three years that it took to complete, it turned into something
very much more complex and challenging: a film that places the
nightcleaners' campaign within a series of broader political discussions
formulated as an 'open text' which asks as many questions about its own
status as a film as it does about the socio-political issues that are
its subject. No engaged person should overlook its challenge. Tony Rayns
This screening, which is part of the Queer 60s season at the Barbican Cinema, will be followed by a discussion about Wishman and her legacy with Jaye Hudson and Selina Robertson, chaired by season curator Alex Davidson.
Barbican Cinema introduction: Doris Wishman was truly a one-of-a-kind. She
was a rare female director working in the exploitation subgenre,
although there are few proto-feminist messages to be found in her films.
She put a lesbian character centre in A Taste of Flesh (1967),
a sensational thriller made on the cheap and shot entirely in one
apartment, featuring three women who are held captive by two male crooks
planning an assassination on a visiting foreign president. The
results have to be seen to be believed. One of the women is a predatory
lesbian, who, despite the problematic nature of her character, is
underestimated by the two men who threaten her. There is a jaw-dropping
queer daydream sequence that is worth the ticket price alone. While it
is first and foremost a sleazy exploitation thriller, this is one of
Wishman’s most fascinating films.
Presented at the Prince Charles Cinema on 35mm with a special 15th Anniversary Post-Film Q&A with
Director Ben Wheatley, as part of BLEAK WEEK 2026. Full details here.
Time Out review: Much of ‘Kill List’ will be familiar to
anyone who caught ‘Down Terrace’ during its brief run last year: the
semi-improvised dialogue and naturalistic performances, the close,
documentary-style photography and the deep-seated sense of suburban
moral decay. But it’s altogether more confident: where the earlier
film leavened the darker moments with slapstick and satire, ‘Kill
List’ is an unrelentingly grim ride into the bleakest imaginable
terrain, its only humour black beyond belief.There will be some who find the resulting series of increasingly brutal
and dreamlike events hard to process, and a number of plot points
remain unexplained even as the credits roll. But allow the film to take
hold and its power is inescapable: the effect is like placing your
head in a vice and waiting as it inexorably closes. It’s hard to remember a British movie as nerve-shreddingly effective
since ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ in 2004. Like that film, ‘Kill List’ may not
make the impact it deserves upon initial release. But this is a grower,
a film which lingers long in the memory: look for it on ‘Best of
British’ lists for a long time to come. Tom Huddleston
Time Out review: Night of the Living Dead suggested that George A Romero was an unusual if none too clearly defined talent; two non-horror movies later, The Craziesproved it. The main plot premise echoes The Andromeda Strain:
an accident with a virus creates a terrifying civil emergency, and
incidentally reveals that the US government is working towards germ
warfare. Romero, however, is more interested in effect than cause.
First, he brilliantly updates the riddle Don Siegel posed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers:
how can one tell who is infected and who isn't? The virus drives its
victims mad before killing them, but what is the line between 'normal'
hysteria and actual insanity? Second, and equally brilliantly, he
demonstrates the difficulty in imposing martial law on a community of
gun-owners, thereby creating a highly feasible vision of social
collapse. Good dialogue and performances, too. Tony Rayns
This is an Animus magazine presentation of a 35mm screening. There will be an introduction by legendary producer Jeremy Thomas (schedule permitting).
As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or,
possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly
distributed at the time.
It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the
studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a
disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting;
masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated
with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat.
The ending stayed with me for quite some time.Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.
Time Out review: One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece
jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between
two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the
girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine
enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst
lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller
investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in
visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now
sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a
case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing,
less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at
one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters. Don Macpherson
Chicago Reader review: Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum search for her missing husband in this
excellent 1954 western by Otto Preminger, one of the first films to
discover the potential of CinemaScope and a fine example of Preminger's
rational approach to the mysteries of personal morality. Dave Kehr
