Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 335: Mon Dec 5

The Bishop’s Wife (Koster, 1947): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2.30pm

This film also screens on December 19th and 21st. Details here.

Time Out review:
Samuel Goldwyn-produced whimsy, cashing in on the success of '40s angelic fantasies such as Here Comes Mr Jordanand It's a Wonderful Life. Angel Grant responds to a bishop's plea for help after his devotion to his plans for a new cathedral has alienated him from family and parishioners. Cary's charm works as successfully upon audiences as it does upon the film's characters, and his relaxed wit plus Loretta Young's delicate loveliness makes for a frothily touching comedy.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 334: Sun Dec 4

Erotikon (Machatý, 1920): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 3pm

This is the Made in Prague Festival Closing Gala and features an introduction by Michal Bregant and live musical accompaniment from Stephen Horne.

BFI introduction:
Before his infamous erotic film Ecstasy, Gustav Machatý directed this exploration of the moral consequences of a night of passion between a Prague playboy and a stationmaster’s daughter. The masterly direction and camerawork transform a simple story into a work of compelling power, full of symbolism. It set a benchmark in the portrayal of female sexuality, as personified by the exquisite Ita Rina.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 333: Sat Dec 3

Daughters of Darkness (Kumel, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm

This film (also being screened on December 13th) is part of the In Dreams are Monsters season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Harry Kumel's stylish Belgian vampire film with a cult reputation (1971) is worth seeing for several reasons, not least of which is Delphine Seyrig's elegant lead performance as a lesbian vampire who operates a luxury hotel. The baroque mise en scene is also loads of fun; with Daniele Ouimet and Andrea Rau.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 332: Fri Dec 2

Fanny and Alexander (Bergman, 1982): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 1.50pm & NFT2, 5.15pm

This film is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Ingmar Bergman's 1982 feature, condensed from a much longer TV series, is less an autumnal summation of his career than an investigation of its earliest beginnings: through the figure of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), Bergman traces the storytelling urge, developing from dreams and fairy tales into theater and (implicitly) movies. The film doesn't so much surmount Bergman's usual shortcomings—the crude contrasts, heavy symbolism, and preachy philosophizing—as find an effective context for them. Tied to a child's mind, the oversimplifications become the stuff of myth and legend. As in The Night of the Hunter, a realistic psychological drama is allowed to expand into fantasy; the result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 331: Thu Dec 1

Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999): Prince Charles Cinema, 12 noon

Here's one of the great films set during Christmas, and an opportunity to see Stanley Kubrick's much-underrated final movie in an original 35mm print. The film, part of the Christmas season at the cinema, is also being shown on December 5th and 18th and you can find all the details here.

If you're interested in reading more about this film I can recommend two BFI publications - Michel Chion's Modern Classics monograph on Eyes Wide Shut and the chapter on the film in James Naremore's book titled On Kubrick. And also Robert P Kolker and Nathan Abrams' illuminating 2019 book Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film.

Chicago Reader review:
Initial viewings of Stanley Kubrick's movies can be deceptive because his films all tend to be emotionally convoluted in some way; one has to follow them as if through a maze. A character that Kubrick might seem to treat cruelly the first time around (e.g., Elisha Cook Jr.'s fall guy in The Killing) can appear the object of tender compassion on a subsequent viewing. The director's desire to avoid sentimentality at all costs doesn't preclude feeling, as some critics have claimed, but it does create ambiguity and a distanced relationship to the central characters. Kubrick's final feature very skillfully portrays the dark side of desire in a successful marriage; since the 60s he'd been thinking about filming Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant novella "Traumnovelle," and working with Frederic Raphael, he's adapted it faithfully--at least if one allows for all the differences between Viennese Jews in the 20s and New York WASPs in the 90s. Schnitzler's tale, about a young doctor contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies, has a somewhat Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy (hence Kubrick's title), and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this delicate territory. Yet the story has been altered to make the successful doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite and his wife (powerfully played by Nicole Kidman) a little feistier; Kubrick's also added a Zeus-like tycoon (played to perfection by Sydney Pollack) who pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in fact only summarizes the various mysteries, his cynicism and chilly access to power revealing that Kubrick is more of a moralist than Schnitzler. To accept the premises and experiences of this movie, you have to be open to an expressionist version of New York with scant relation to the 90s (apart from cellular phones and AIDS) and a complex reading of a marriage that assumes the relations between men and women haven't essentially changed in the past 70-odd years. This is a remarkably gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over time.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 330: Wed Nov 30

8½ Women (Greenaway, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.35pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Peter Greenaway season at BFI Southbank and also screens on November 30th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Writer-director Peter Greenaway never uses narrative lightly, but in this reflexive fiction, set mainly in a Kyoto pachinko parlor and on a Geneva estate, references to the act of filmmaking exhaust their impact pretty quickly. A woman dies, and her son and husband respond by embarking on a sexual odyssey that at first seems as thought provoking as it is iconoclastic. The nearly continuous discussion between father and son is punctuated by largely elided sex acts and set in varied locations whose establishing shots have superimposed texts representing the pages of a screenplay from which the scenes might have been drawn. Greenaway wants viewers to rethink the purpose of cinema, and his points are radical and clear. When the son decides he wants to make a film, the father wonders why, explaining that most people make films about the things they haven’t got, such as sex and happiness. To really expose an embarrassing truth about cinema—that it’s fantasy for the filmmaker as well as the audience—could revolutionize it. Maybe eventually someone will.
Lisa Alspector

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 329: Tue Nov 29

Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950): Garden Cinema, 3.30pm

This film also screens at the Garden Cinema on November 21st and December 14th and 19th. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
'Billy Wilder's searing, funny, morbid look at the real tinsel beneath the phony tinsel (1950). Aging silent-movie vamp Gloria Swanson takes up with William Holden, a two-bit screenwriter on the make, and virtually holds him captive in her Hollywood gothic mansion. Erich von Stroheim, once her director, now her butler, is the other figure in this menage-a-weird. A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder's better efforts.'
Dan Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.