Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 313: Sat Nov 9

A Flower in Hell (Shin Sang-ok, 1958): Rio Cinema, 3.30pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the 2019 Korean Film Festival. You can find full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
What's reportedly the first on-screen kiss in Korean cinema appears in this potent and grim 1958 melodrama by Shin Sang-ok, set in Seoul after the Korean war. A country rube turns up looking for his older brother, who by now has entered a life of crime, stealing from U.S. army warehouses and pimping for a prostitute (Choi Eun-hee—described as the Korean Mary Pickford and therefore shockingly cast against type) who services American soldiers. Frank about other forms of corruption, such as bribery of the police, this sordid tale is limited only by its simplistic characters. (The prostitute is a standard-issue femme fatale, seducing the innocent brother and snitching on her lover.) It culminates in an impressively staged action sequence involving a train heist, followed by a showdown in a muddy wasteland that reflects the probable influence of The Wages of Fear. 
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 312: Fri Nov 8

A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009): Picturehouse Central, 6.30pm

This Little White Lies magazine screening will be presented by Adam Nayman, author of ‘The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together’, who will be in conversation after the film with writer and critic Manuela Lazic.

Chicago Reader review:
After the unbridled misanthropy of Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen return to the more affectionate tone of their most endearing films (Fargo, The Big Lebowski). Noted stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg stars as a put-upon physics professor at a small Minnesota college; his wife wants to leave him, his dysfunctional brother won't move out of their house, and his upcoming tenure vote is complicated by a cash bribe from a pushy South Korean student. The Summer of Love is just beginning, and the movie's funniest motif is its intermingling of Judaic teaching and the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow LP. Like the Coens' protagonist in The Man Who Wasn't There, Stuhlbarg is driven to an existential crisis, but in contrast to the earlier movie, with its tired noir moves, this 2009 feature is earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 311: Thu Nov 7

Journey To Italy (Rossellini, 1954): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This Roberto Rossellini masterpiece is screening as part of the ‘Big Screen Classics’ strand at BFI Southbank and is also being shown on November 26th and 29th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
'Roberto Rossellini's finest fiction film and unmistakably one of the great achievements of the art. Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders play a long-married British couple grown restless and uncommunicative. On a trip to Italy to dispose of a piece of property, they find their boredom thrown into relief by the Mediterranean landscape—its vitality (Naples) and its desolation (Pompeii). But suddenly, in one of the moments that only Rossellini can film, something lights inside them, and their love is renewed as a bond of the spirit. A crucial work, truthful and mysterious.'
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 310: Wed Nov 6

The Disorderly Orderly (Tashlin, 1964): Regent Street Cinema, 12pm & 3.30pm

This Frank Tashlin comedy will be presented from a 35mm print.

Chicago Reader review:
This 1964 Jerry Lewis vehicle is the sixth and last directed by his gifted mentor, Frank Tashlin, though it resembles Lewis's own directorial efforts in its focus on pain (it's set almost exclusively in a hospital) and its trading of satire for surreal fantasy, improbably infused with brassy showbiz gusto (Sammy Davis Jr. sings the title tune). There's also a Lewis-like emphasis on bizarre sound gags and abrasive villains (Everett Sloane as a Scrooge type) that contrasts with Tashlin's cartoonish imagery and relative tolerance for fools and assholes. But Lewis's infantile mannerisms are overtaken by the director, who treats the hero as a grown-up struggling with “neurotic identification empathy,” and the movie's finale, with its cascading shopping carts, could only have come from Tashlin. 
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 309: Tue Nov 5

V for Vendetta (McTegiue, 2006): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This 35mm presentation (part of the 5th November special with Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General) is the annual Capital Celluloid choice for November 5th.

Chicago Reader review:
A popcorn movie that preaches mass rebellion against the government—what's not to like? After milking The Matrix for two superfluous sequels, writer-producers Andy and Larry Wachowski adapt a 1989 graphic novel by David Lloyd and Alan Moore; set in a futuristic Great Britain, the movie follows a masked figure (Hugo Weaving) as he carries out a series of assassinations and tries to unite the cowed populace against a totalitarian national-security state. The swashbuckling first hour is superior to the second, which bursts at the seams with backstory, but a rousing climax makes this the most potent piece of agitpop in years.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 308: Mon Nov 4

Gold Diggers of 1933 (LeRoy, 1933): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation of this classic is part of the BFI musicals season (details here). The movie will also be shown on November 1st and 9th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The great Depression musical, produced by Warner Brothers as a follow-up to Forty-Second Street. If Forty-Second Street was an agreeable sketch, this one is the Sistine Chapel, an insanely overproduced extravaganza that gave Busby Berkeley his first chance to really cut loose. A zillion chorus girls playing electric violins decorate "The Shadow Waltz"; "Pettin' in the Park" is an unbridled voyeuristic fantasy that rivals Michael Powell's Peeping Tom in perversity. Ginger Rogers sings "We're in the Money" in pig latin, and—to give the enterprise a noble touch—the plight of the unemployed veteran is explored in "Remember the Forgotten Man." With Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Warren William, Aline MacMahon, Sterling Holloway, Guy Kibbee, and Ned Sparks; Mervyn LeRoy directed the dialogue passages.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 307: Sun Nov 3

Pillar of Mist (Park Chul-soo, 1987): Rio Cinema, 3.30pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the 2019 Korean Film Festival. You can find full details here.

Korean Film Festival introduction:

Through this mundane-sounding, anti-melodramatic tale, Park Chul-soo constructs an image of a whole generation of young, middle-class Korean women who, by the decade of the 1980s, were facing challenges unknown to most of their mothers: how to succeed in higher education, enter the world of work and at the same time maintain roles as wife and mother. Choi Myung-kil gives an understated performance as a young woman who will finally make the most difficult decision of her life.

Here (and above) is an extract.