This 35mm presentation is part of the BFI musicals season (details here). The screening on a 35mm Technicolor dye transfer print from the BFI National Archive.
BFI introduction: This backstage musical puts emphasis on the numbers rather than narrative logic, but it’s packed with extraordinary delights. Enjoy Lena Horne’s sensational renditions of ‘Somebody Loves Me’ and ‘Brazilian Boogie’, as well as pianist Hazel Scott’s dazzling performance. The contortionist number featuring the Ross Sisters will leave you slack-jawed and breathless. And, oh, the Technicolor! Robin Baker Here (and above) is an extract.
The Prince Charles Cinema are having £1 members’ screenings on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. You can find all the films, including this one, on offer here. Chicago Reader review: Danny Boyle's second feature (1996), a lot more stylish and entertaining than Shallow Grave. Far from nihilistic, though certainly calculated to butt up against various puritanical norms, this feel-good jaunt about young Scottish heroin addicts and their degradation and betrayals of one another draws a lot of its energy from Richard Lester movies of the 60s and 70s and from A Clockwork Orange (the novel as well as the movie). Adapted by John Hodge from Irvine Welsh's popular pidgin-English novel (which had already been successfully adapted for the stage) and partially redubbed for American ears, it floats by almost as episodically as 94 minutes of MTV. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
The repertory cinemas are closed today but you can catch my twitter recommendations for great movies on the television over the holiday period via my twitter handle @tpaleyfilm and the hashtag #bestxmasholidayfilmonTVtoday.
Christmas Eve and It’s A Wonderful Life at the Prince Charles is always one of the best screenings of the year. The 6pm showing is already sold out — but don’t worry if you can’t get along on December 24th their are plenty of other screenings of this bona fide great film (regardless of Christmas or not). You can find the full details here (and most are from 35mm).
Chicago Reader review: The film Frank Capra was born to make. This 1946 release marked his return to features after four years of turning out propaganda films for the government, and Capra poured his heart and soul into it. James Stewart stars as a small-town nobody, on the brink of suicide, who believes his life is worthless. Guardian angel Henry Travers shows him how wrong he is by letting Stewart see what would have happened had he never been born. Wonderfully drawn and acted by a superb cast (Donna Reed, Beulah Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Lionel Barrymore, Gloria Grahame) and told with a sense of image and metaphor (the use of water is especially elegant) that appears in no other Capra film. The epiphany of movie sentiment and a transcendent experience. Dave Kehr
The screening of the new 4K release of this modern Christmas classic at BFI Southbank is on an extended run. You can find the full details here. Chicago Reader review: E.T. with the lid off (1984). At the center of this horror comedy is a tidy family parable of the kind so dear to the heart of producer Steven Spielberg: the cute little whatzits who turn into marauding monsters when they pass through puberty (here gooily envisioned as “the larval stage”) are clearly metaphors for children, and the teenager (Zach Galligan) whose lapse of responsibility unleashes the onslaught is a stand-in for the immature parents of the 80s (Poltergeist). But Spielberg's finger wagging is overwhelmed by Joe Dante's roaring, undisciplined direction, which (sometimes through sheer sloppiness) pushes the imagery to unforeseen, untidy, and ultimately disturbing extremes. Dante is perhaps the first filmmaker since Frank Tashlin to base his style on the formal free-for-all of animated cartoons; he is also utterly heartless. With Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, and more movie-buff in-jokes than Carter has pills. Dave Kehr
This movie, the best film version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, also screens at BFI Southbank on December 20th and 21st - full details here. Tom Charity's review below is an honest and excellent one but I defy you not to be moved by Sim's central performance and it is this Ghost of Christmas Future that has haunted me since I saw this film as a ten-year-old.
Time Out review: Surprisingly, there isn't a film version of the Dickens novella which merits the imprimatur 'classic'. The Muppets had a good stab at it, and Bill Murray was well cast in the otherwise scattershot Scrooged. On the plus side, this version is cast like an engraved illustration: Miles Thesiger, Mervyn Johns, Michael Hordern, Kathleen Harrison, Ernest Malleson, Hermione Baddeley and, above all, the splendidly aloof Alastair Sim, who feasts on Dickens' best lines ('I expect you want the whole day off tomorrow?'), greets each new ghost with a weary shiver, and handles his giddy rebirth with aplomb. A jobbing director who knew how to point a camera, Brian Hurst never betrayed much facility for cutting or movement. He stages the action competently, but the transitions between scenes are so choppy you wonder where the ads are. Add to this a prosaic adaptation by Noel Langley which gets bogged down in the backstory (the relatively dull visitation from the ghost of Christmas Past which explains how nice Ebenezer - a bashful George Cole - fell from the path of righteousness), some rather depressed-looking spirits, and the cringeworthy sentimentality of the Tiny Tim scenes, and you have what Scrooge himself might call 'Ho-hum-bug'. Tom Charity
This 35mm screening (also being presented on December 18th) is part of the Maurice Pialat season. Full details here. Chicago Reader review: Maurice Pialat's last feature (1995) was cowritten by him and his wife, Sylvie Danton, and features a performance by their four-year-old son, Antoine; starring Gerard Depardieu again, it's a brutal self-portrait of a troubled and violent man. Jonathan Rosenbaum
