Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 210: Fri Jul 29

Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 7.45pm

This Stanley Kubrick masterpiece is on an extended run at BFI Southbank.  

Geoff Andrew (BFI programmer-at-large) introduction:
With its meticulous historical accuracy and its astonishing visual beauty, Kubrick’s most underrated work is also probably his greatest. Deriving its story and characters (but not its tonal delicacy) from Thackeray’s comic novel about an 18th-century rake, the film deploys a stately pace to chart the rise and fall of Redmond Barry (O’Neal) as he flees Ireland, travels Europe and eventually seduces his way into the English aristocracy. Expertly combining caricature with actorly restraint while creating immaculate painterly tableaux with natural light or candles, Kubrick creates a world that feels ineffably strange yet utterly real. As he quietly castigates not the conniving protagonist but the hypocritical, complacent society he determines to join, the mood steadily shifts from irony to melancholy and, finally, tragedy.

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 2016 - Day 209: Thu Jul 28

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Gessner, 1976):
Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This 35mm screening curated by Josh Saco at Cigarette Burns is part of the 'Check The Gate' season at the Prince Charles, dedicated to presenting films on film that will run at the cinema from 9th July to August 20th.

Prince Charles Cinema introduction:
Quiet, withdrawn 13-year-old Rynn Jacobs (Jodie Foster) lives peacefully in her home in a New England beach town. Whenever the prying landlady (Alexis Smith) inquires after Rynn's father, she politely claims that he's in the city on business. But when the landlady's creepy and increasingly persistent son, Frank (Martin Sheen), won't leave Rynn alone, she teams up with kindly neighbor boy Mario (Scott Jacoby) to maintain the dark family secret that she's been keeping to herself. 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 208: Wed Jul 27

Scream (Craven, 1996): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This 35mm screening is part of the 'Check The Gate' season at the Prince Charles, dedicated to presenting films on film that will run at the cinema from 9th July to August 20th.

Time Out review:
'Wes Craven draws on a shared pop cultural heritage in horror flicks to fashion this bloody brand of post-modern comedy. 'So you like scary movies? Name the killer in Friday the 13th?' demands the anonymous caller of Drew Barrymore's lone teen in the prologue. 'Hang up again and I'll gut you like a fish!' The killer describes his apparently irrational vendetta against the high school population of Woodsboro as a game, and in this he's surely speaking for screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Craven, who kill off the clichés and all the wrong characters with panache. At times, it's too clever, but it's sure scary, with the jokes notching up the general level of hysteria. As a bonus, Craven throws in half a dozen of Hollywood's brightest hopefuls: Neve Campbell in the central role of the teenager haunted by the murder of her mother; David Arquette as a naive local deputy; Courtney Cox as a TV star; Rose McGowan as the doomed best friend; and Skeet Ulrich as the evocatively named Billy Loomis. Intelligence, wit and sophistication - at last, a horror movie to shout about!'
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 207: Tue Jul 26

My Beautiful Launderette (Frears, 1985): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This 35mm screening is part of the 'Check The Gate' season at the Prince Charles, dedicated to presenting films on film that will run at the cinema from 9th July to August 20th. The film will be introduced by the Unicorn Nights film club.

Chicago Reader review:
Directed for television by Stephen Frears (The Hit) from a scenario by playwright Hanif Kureishi, this is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism—it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance (1986). Omar, a Pakistani student, charms his wealthy uncle into letting him take over one of his less successful enterprises—a crud-caked launderette in a questionable South London neighborhood. He solicits the help of Johnny, an old school buddy grown into a surly street tough, and as their plans for the business take shape they fall in love. Frears doesn't treat the gay relationship as anything remarkable—which makes the film itself remarkable—but simply as a surge of encouraging human feeling against a background of economic devastation and racial divisiveness. With Daniel Day-Lewis, Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Gordon Warnecke, and Shirley Anne Field.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the Unicorn Nights trailer for the evening's entertainment.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 206: Mon Jul 25

Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.40pm

This screening is part of a season of director Kelly Reichardt films at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Kelly Reichardt's masterful low-budget drama tells a story a child could understand even as it indicts, with stinging anger, the economic cruelty of George Bush's America. Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) is impressively restrained as Wendy, a young homeless woman who's living in her car with her beloved mutt, Lucy. After the car breaks down in an Oregon hick town, she makes the mistake of tying Lucy up outside a grocery store before going in to shoplift, and when she gets busted and taken to the local police station, the dog disappears. Reichardt (Old Joy) and co-writer Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after hearing conservative commentators bash the poor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and their movie is a stark reminder of how easily someone like Wendy can fall through our frayed safety net. The climax is a heartbreaker, and in its haunting finale the movie recalls no less than Mervyn LeRoy's Depression-era classic I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 205: Sun Jul 24

Innocent Moves (Zaillian, 1993): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.10pm

This 35mm screening is part of the 'Check The Gate' season at the Prince Charles, dedicated to presenting films on film that will run at the cinema from 9th July to August 20th. The film will be introduced by Daily Telegraph film critic Tim Robey.

Chicago Reader review:
One of the craftiest and most satisfying pieces about gender politics to come along in ages (1993)—all the more crafty because audiences are encouraged to see it simply as a movie about a seven-year-old chess genius, based on Fred Waitzkin's nonfiction book about his son Josh. Very well played (with Max Pomeranc especially good as Josh), shot (by Conrad Hall), and written and directed (by Steven Zaillian, who also scripted Schindler's List), it gradually evolves into a kind of parable about how a gifted kid learns to choose his role models and choose what he needs from them. The part played by gender in all this is both subtle and complex, relating not only to chess strategy (e.g., when to bring your queen out) and the personality of Bobby Fischer, but also to the varying attitudes toward competition taken by his parents (Joe Mantegna and Joan Allen) and two teachers (Laurence Fishburne and Ben Kingsley). It makes for a good old-fashioned inspirational story, absorbing and pointed.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 204: Sat Jul 23

Heaven's Gate (Cimino, 1980): Prince Charles Cinema, 11.30am

This 35mm screening is part of the 'Check The Gate' season at the Prince Charles, dedicated to presenting films on film that will run at the cinema from 9th July to August 20th.

"It seems to me, in its original version, among the supreme achievements of the Hollywood cinema."
Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan

Time Out review:
For all the abuse heaped on it, this is - in its complete version, at least - a majestic and lovingly detailed Western which simultaneously celebrates and undermines the myth of the American frontier. The keynote is touched in the wonderfully choreographed opening evocation of a Harvard graduation in 1870: answering the Dean's ritual address urging graduates to spread culture through contact with the uncultivated, the class valedictorian (John Hurt) mockingly replies that they see no need for change in a world 'on the whole well arranged'.

Twenty years later, as Hurt and fellow-graduate Kris Kristofferson become involved in the Johnson County Wars, their troubled consciences suggest that some change in the 'arrangements' might well have been in order. Watching uneasily as the rich cattle barons legally exterminate the poor immigrant farmers who have taken to illegal rustling to feed their starving families, they can only attempt to enforce the law that has become a mockery (Kristofferson) or lapse into soothing alcoholism (Hurt).

Moral compromise on a national scale is in question here, a theme subtly echoed by the strange romantic triangle that lies at the heart of the film: a three-way struggle between the man who has everything (Kristofferson), the man who has nothing (Christopher Walken), and the girl (Isabelle Huppert) who would settle for either provided no fraudulent compromise is asked of her. The ending, strange and dreamlike, blandly turns a blind eye to shut out the atrocities and casuistries we have witnessed, and on which the American dream was founded; not much wonder the American press went on a mass witch-hunt against the film's un-American activities.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.