Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 139: Sun May 19

No1: Someone to Love (Jaglom, 1987): ICA Cinema, 6.15pm

This 35mm screening os part of the ICA's Celluloid on Sunday strand.

Chicago Reader review:
Another of Henry Jaglom’s let-it-all-hang-out gabfests, this one set in a beautiful, about-to-be-destroyed Los Angeles theater, where Jaglom invites his friends on Valentine’s Day. It certainly has its moments—most of them provided by Orson Welles (in one of his last extended film performances), his vivacious long-time companion Oja Kodar, and the venerable Sally Kellerman—but most of this largely improvised movie, as critic Elliott Stein has pointed out, is pretty much the equivalent of the Donahue show, with all the strengths and limitations that this implies, and Jaglom’s own earnest inquiries about what makes so many people lonely can get a bit cloying after a while. However, Welles, as the equivalent of a talk-show guest, is very much in his prime, and his ruminations about feminism, loneliness, drama, and related subjects certainly give the proceedings an edge and a direction that most of the remainder of this floundering movie sadly lacks. Among the other participants in this encounter session are Jaglom’s brother Michael Emil, Andrea Marcovicci, Ronee Blakley, and Monte Hellman.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

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No 2: Barbarella (Vadim, 1968): Cinema Museum, 2pm

 
This is a 35mm screening. There will be an introductory illustrated talk by Jon Davies, tutor in French Cinema at Morley College.

Time Out review:
Director Roger Vadim kicks off his adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest's 'adult' comic strip by stripping Jane Fonda starkers. From there on it's typically vacuous titillation as Barbarella takes off for the mysterious planet Sorgo in 40,000 AD, there to survive attack by perambulating dolls with vampire fangs, receive her sexual initiation from a hairy primitive, fall in love with a blind angel, be whisked off to an alarming Lesbian encounter with the tyrannical Black Queen, etc. But Terry Southern's dialogue occasionally sparkles, and the imaginative designs, as shot by Claude Renoir, look really splendid.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 138: Sat May 18

Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation at the Prince Charles Cinema.

Chicago Reader review: 
'What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were? The first time I saw Kane I discovered the existence of the director; the next dozen or so times taught me what he did—with lights and camera angles, cutting and composition, texture and rhythm. Kane (1941) is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take Ambersons, Falstaff, or Touch of Evil), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking about Welles—or for that matter about movies in general.'   
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 137: Fri May 17

Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 2.40pm/6.15pm/8.40pm

This film, presented in a 4K restoration, is on an extended run at BFI Southbank, and is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.

I haven't seen this since my post-graduate days at Derby Lonsdale College in the mid-1980s but found it a real eye-opener at the time and wouldn't disagree with this ecstatic review in Chicago Reader. Director Roberto Rossellini was a pioneer and this film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, brought the attention of the world to the development of the hugely influential neorealism era in Italian cinema.

Chicago Reader review:
Roberto Rossellini's 1946 story of a group of workers and a priest in 1943-'44 Rome, declared an “open city” by the Nazis, was begun only two months after the liberation. Its realistic treatment of everyday Italian life heralded the postwar renaissance of the Italian cinema and the development of neorealism; the film astonished audiences around the world and remains a masterpiece. With Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi, and Maria Michi.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 136: Thu May 16

The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of classic film.

Time Out review:
Bernardo Bertolucci’s beautiful, idea-laden and thrilling film noir, released in post-événements 1970, opens with a Paris hotel sign flashing on a man with a fedora, a gun and a naked woman. But Bertolucci’s late-’30s-set adaptation of Albert Moravia’s novel examining Italy’s fascist past was no exercise in black-and-white nostalgia. The noir elements – the complex flash-back structure and the out-of-kilter ‘Third Man’-syle camera angles framing its anti-hero, volunteer assassin Jean-Louis Trintignant – are a mere frame, pencil drawings on which cinematographer Vittorio Storaro paints his Freudian washes of blue and red.  Even at the time of the ‘The Conformist’, with its poison-penned quotations of Godard, Bertolucci was already showing himself the greatest pleasure seeker of the ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’ agit-prop school. Trintignant’s classically-educated Marcello Clerici – he quotes Emperor Hadrian and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave – is the epitome of the repressed bourgeois, so ashamed of his ‘mad’ father and opium-addicted mother to be delighted, in shades of Sartre’s Daniel, to be married to a ‘mediocre’ wife ‘full of paltry ideas’ and prepared to commit murder to follow the flow of fascist political fashion. Until that is, he claps eyes on the beautiful, decadent wife (Dominique Sanda) of his old tutor and present target, Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). It’s a dazzling film, dated only in its sense of passionate intellectual engagement, which seductively balances its seditious syllabus of politics, philosophy and sex with a serio-comic tone, exemplified by Gastone Moschin’s near pantomimic Blackshirt and Georges Delerue’s delightful score.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 136: Wed May 15

This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This is a 35mm screening (also being shown on May 1st and from digital on May 23rd) and is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
Lindsay Anderson's debut film (1963) is probably the best crafted of the British "kitchen sink" movies and features a memorable if somewhat theatrical performance by Richard Harris as a rugby star who can't handle success.
Dave Kehr

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 135: Tue May 14

Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This film is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand at the Prince Charles Cinema and will feature an introduction from Sarah Cleary.

Chicago Reader review:
Nicholas Ray's great sur-western (1954), in which, as Francois Truffaut put it, the cowboys circle and die like ballerinas. For all its violence, this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film, Ray's gentlest statement of his outsider theme. Joan Crawford, with a mature, reflective quality she never recaptured, is the owner of a small-town saloon; Sterling Hayden is the enigmatic gunfighter who comes to her aid when the townspeople turn on her. Filmed in the short-lived (but well-preserved) Trucolor process, its hues are pastel and boldly deployed, and the use of space is equally daring and expressive. With Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis, as well as Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Royal Dano, Ward Bond, and Ben Cooper.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 134: Mon May 13

Girlfriends (Weill, 1978): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the female filmmakers strand at the Prince Charles Cinema and is £1 for members.

New Yorker review:
One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely, that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing, the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor, the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind, achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her. Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical, dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women, when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded, perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in the same way.
Richard Brody

Here is Brody's video discussion of the film.