Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 51: Tue Feb 20

Big Trouble in Little China (Carpenter, 1986): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.30pm

Time Out review:
'Ready, Jack?' asks Kurt Russell's Chinese buddy before another fraught round of mayhem beneath the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown. 'I was born ready', comes back the growled response; and it is this level of conscious self-mockery which saves the John Wayne posturing and genre high kicks from being just another climber on the Raiders of the Lost Ark band wagon. Russell is the T-shirted bozo trucker, who only has to fire his gun into the ceiling for the plaster to fall on his head. Down the mean catacombs and underground streams of Chinatown he goes, in search of something or other and encountering every Chinese cliché known to man: devil women, 900-year-old sages, water tortures, black magic monsters. The icing on all this cake is a load of kung-fuey, which in spite of three nifty warlords who come equipped with their own static electricity and interesting hats, isn't really up to the mark established in the meanest of Hong Kong martial arts movies. Carpenter has always been a skilful genre mechanic, breathing life into old forms; if he stubs his toes up against the bamboo curtain this time, there is still more enjoyable sly humour than in most slug-fests.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 50: Mon Feb 19

Caravaggio (Jarman, 1986): Rio Cinema, 6.30pm

Through the Looking Glasses Presents: Derek Jarman's Caravaggio followed by an in person Q&A with the actor Garry Cooper and soundtrack composer Simon Fisher Turner.

Time Out review:
As Caravaggio (excellently played by Terry) lies dying at Porto Ercole in 1610, his mind drifts back over a short life of extraordinary passion: his relationship with his model, Ranuccio Thomasoni, who posed perhaps as the muscular assassin in so many 'martyrdom' pictures, and the other apex in the triangle, Lena, who is Ranuccio's mistress and Caravaggio's model for the Magdalene and the dead Virgin. Jarman proposes a murderous intensity as the mainspring for both Caravaggio's love life and for his furious painting, and it certainly carries great weight of conviction. For all the melodrama of the story, however, he has elected a style of grave serenity, composed of looks and glances, long silences in shaded rooms, sudden eruptions of blood. It all works miraculously well, even the conscious use of anachronisms and the street sounds of contemporary Italy.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 49: Sun Feb 18

The Room (Wiseau, 2003): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.15pm, 3pm & 5.45pm

Move aside The Sound of Music and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Room is the modern-day Plan 9 From Outer Space and a movie so awful it now has a cult following, a following so large that the Prince Charles has nine screenings planned over the weekend - and most of them are sold out. If you want some background to the film it's all here in a fine piece which appeared in the Telegraph in 2009. If you want a flavour of the movie here is an extract.

The Prince Charles have regular screenings of The Room but the cause of all the excitement this time is that the director, Tommy Wiseau, is in town and will be delivering live intro and be around for a Q&A after every screening. You can get all the details here via the cinema website.

Chicago Reader review:
'Written, produced, and directed by Tommy Wiseau, this inept 2003 melodrama has become a Rocky Horror-style cult favorite in Los Angeles and other cities. Wiseau stars as an eerily placid and good-natured banker whose live-in girlfriend is secretly getting it on with his best friend, though the filmmaker often strikes out in different directions, only to bump into the wall and come back. As someone who's watched more bad movies than you can imagine, I'm mostly immune to the so-bad-it's-good aesthetic, though I can see how, viewed in a theater at midnight after a few drinks, this might conjure up its own hilariously demented reality. Poignantly, Wiseau has now positioned the movie as a "black comedy."
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 48: Sat Feb 17

Working Girls (Arzner, 1931): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.50pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on February 10th, is part of the Dorothey Arzner season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Senses of Cinema review extract:
Dorothy Arzner’s Working Girls is an astonishingly fresh Pre-Code film made by a very smart lesbian feminist director. Given the circumstances, it is surprising that the film was ever made; even so, Paramount gave the film a rather limited national release. It is a miracle that the film even survives. This makes any public screening of Working Girls all the more important. Arzner was way ahead of her time. Let’s hope she finally finds her winking, knowing audience.
Gwendolin Audrey Foster

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 47: Fri Feb 16

Victor/Victoria (Edwards, 1982): Garden Cinema, 8.30pm

Chicago Reader review of Victor/Victoria (1982):
Blake Edwards's 1982 sex comedy has the most beautiful range of tones of any American film of its period: it is a work of dry wit, high slapstick, black despair, romantic warmth, and penetrating intelligence. A tale of transvestism in the Paris of the 1930s is used as a study of socially fixed identities turned gloriously fluid, which Edwards sees as the only way of surviving in a churning, chaotic world. It is a direct thematic and stylistic sequel to 10, with the shallow, telescoped images of the earlier film giving way to deep-focus compositions and a corresponding shift in interest from beautiful surfaces to soulful interiors. Very personal and very entertaining, with Julie Andrews, James Garner, and a brilliant Robert Preston.
Dave Kehr

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 46: Thu Feb 15

Petulia (Lester, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation, part of the John Barry season at BFI Southbank, also screens on February 3rd. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
One of the finest films of and about the 60s, Richard Lester's romantic comedy tells the story of the relationship between a recently divorced surgeon (George C. Scott) and an unhappily married San Francisco socialite (Julie Christie) and takes deft, unexpected turns into the tragic and terrifying. Lester's volatile, quick-cut style finds its most expressive application in his description of a world fatally fragmented into rich and poor, past and present, compassion and indifference. Scott has never been more powerful or so subtle: his weary but still hopeful physician is a Shakespearean figure, cloaked in a majestic sadness. But the film belongs to Christie, who earns the Oscar she won for Darling with a plangent portrayal of a woman struggling to transcend her own shallowness. With Richard Chamberlain, Shirley Knight, Arthur Hill, and Joseph Cotten; the excellent screenplay is the work of Lawrence Marcus, and Nicolas Roeg did the cinematography (1968). 105 min.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 45: Wed Feb 14

One from the Heart: Reprise (Coppola, 1982): Prince Charles Cinema, 1pm

This unfairly maligned movie is back in a great 4K restoration and in a modified version via its director Francis Ford Coppola. The film also screens on February 16th and 27th. Full details here. Here's New Yorker critic Richard Brody's take.

Time Out review:
Apparently Francis Ford Coppola got his inspiration while wandering the back streets of Tokyo with a copy of Goethe's Elective Affinities, pondering the Kabuki and his alimony payments. He saw a sequence of brilliant tableaux: a hoary yarn about love lost and refound, spun with high-tech artifice and elaborate theories about colour. Fortunately the movie outgrew its origins with barely a stretch mark in sight, to become a likeable, idiosyncratic musical, its few remaining pretensions (dud symbolism just when you most expect it) so bare-faced they're almost winning. The human element keeps the film modest. Coppola shows an affection for the commonplaceness of his new romantic couple (Frederick Forrest and Terri Garr) surprising after his previous ones from the heart of darkness: they smooch, quarrel, cheat on each other (respectively with Natassja Kinski and Raul Julia), and live to smooch again over a long Fourth of July weekend in a Las Vegas confected entirely in the sets and mixing-boards of Zoetrope studios. The result, crafted with the help of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, looks terrific: walls dissolve, scenes play in wry tandem, and the dance routines move nimbly into neon-tinged fantasies. At times the project seems in danger of being scuppered by its own lavishness; the saving grace is a light heart.

Here (and above) is the trailer.