Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 356: Tue Dec 22

The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, 1940): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.30pm

This film is part of the BFI Love: Fools for Love strand. You can find the full details of the season here. This movie also screens on December 28th and 30th. It will be screened on 35mm.

Chicago Reader review:
There are no art deco nightclubs, shimmering silk gowns, or slamming bedroom doors to be seen, but this 1940 film is one of Ernst Lubitsch's finest and most enduring works, a romantic comedy of dazzling range that takes place almost entirely within the four walls of a leather-goods store in prewar Budapest. James Stewart is the earnest, slightly awkward young manager; Margaret Sullavan is the new sales clerk who gets on his nerves—and neither realizes that they are partners in a passionate romance being carried out through the mails. Interwoven with subplots centered on the other members of the shop's little family, the romance proceeds through Lubitsch's brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense. With Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut, Sara Haden, and Felix Bressart.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 355: Mon Dec 21

Scrooge (Hurst, 1951): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.55pm

This movie, the best film version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, also screens at the Prince Charles Cinema on December 23rd and is also on an extended run at the BFI Southbank from December 18th to 30th. 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

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 354: Sun Dec 20

Limelight (Chaplin, 1952): Regent Street Cinema, 2pm

This film, in my personal top ten favourites of all-time, is part of a Chaplin Sundays season at the Regent Street Cinema. You can find all the details of the season here.

Chicago Reader review:
Charles Chaplin's 1952 film is overlong, visually flat, episodically constructed, and a masterpiece—it isn't “cinema” on any terms but Chaplin's own, but those are high terms indeed. An autobiographical fantasy, it tells of an aging vaudeville clown, Calvero, and his friendship with a young ballerina (Claire Bloom). Buster Keaton appears as an old crony, in a lovely hommage, and there are many antique music-hall numbers interspersed among the personal meditations on life, death, and the transcendence of art. The final shot is among the most eloquent and moving images I know, a picture of the soul in flight.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 353: Sat Dec 19

Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975): ICA Cinema, 3pm

Richard Ayoade, Jan Harlan and Maria Pramaggiore are at the ICA Cinema for a panel discussion after the screening, presented by The Badlands Collective.

Here is the Badlands Collective introduction to today's special screening:
Winner of four Oscars for 1975, including Best Cinematography, Stanley Kubrick’s painterly, darkly comic masterpiece is celebrated in this rare screening from a 35mm archive print.

Based on William Thackeray’s novel about the rise and fall of an 18th Century Irish rogue (Ryan O’Neal), Barry Lyndon features breathtaking, technically revolutionary candlelit visuals that recall the paintings of Hogarth and Gainsborough, vividly realising an epic world of beauty, deceit and poetic justice. This event is presented by the curation group The Badlands Collective, and we also welcome Kubrick collaborator Jan Harlan, cinema scholar Maria Pramaggiore and filmmaker Richard Ayoade for a discussion after the film.

Chicago Reader review:
All of Stanley Kubrick's features look better now than when they were first released, but Barry Lyndon, which fared poorly at the box office in 1975, remains his most underrated. It may also be his greatest. This personal, idiosyncratic, melancholy, and long (three hours) adaptation of the Thackeray novel is exquisitely shot in natural light (or, in night scenes, candlelight) by John Alcott, with frequent use of slow backward zooms that distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative about an 18th-century Irish upstart (Ryan O'Neal). Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A Space Odyssey. With Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, and Leonard Rossiter; narrated by Michael Hordern.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 352: Fri Dec 18

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

This film screens in the BFI Love: The Power of Love season strand. You can find the full details of the season here and you can find the details for this film's screening on this date and on December 22nd here.

Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Demy's 1964 "film opera," with music by Michel Legrand, has a reputation for sappiness it doesn't deserve. The chief feature of Demy's direction is his deft avoidance of the pat, the obvious, and the sentimental, which is no mean feat when you're dealing with material as self-consciously simple as this. Catherine Deneuve loses her fiance to the draft; he's wounded and doesn't write, so she reluctantly marries someone else.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 351: Thu Dec 17

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Lucas, 2015): Science Museum, 1.10pm

The Science Museum in London is the only venue you can see the new Star Wars film in the IMAX 70mm format. Here is their introduction to the screenings which run from December 17th to 31st.

The Science Museum’s IMAX Theatre is the only venue in Europe screening this blockbuster film in the IMAX 15/70mm format. Sequences expand vertically to give viewers a truly immersive experience, filling the entire screen and displaying 40% more of the image than can be seen in standard cinemas. We recommend booking early as demand is expected to be high.

You can find all the details of times, screenings and bookings here.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 350: Wed Dec 16

Red Beard (Kurosawa, 1965): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm

This 35mm screening is part of Close-Up Cinema's Akira Kurosawa season. You can find full details here. The film is also being shown on 29th December.

Chicago Reader review:
Akira Kurosawa's 1965 film stars Yuzo Kayama as an impetuous young doctor coming into conflict with his aging superior in an impoverished clinic in early 19th-century Japan. As the older doctor, Toshiro Mifune is superb; and though the film has been criticized for its excessive sentimentality by some, it's a masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism. A mature work that merits the term most apply to it: Dostoyevskian.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is an extract.