Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 99: Mon Apr 8

The Ballad of Narayama (Imamura, 1983): Garden Cinema, 3pm


This film, part of the Japanese Golden Age season at the Garden Cinema, is also screening on March 28th and 30th. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
'This harsh and beautiful 1983 film by Shohei Imamura (Pigs and Battleships) marks a turning point in his career, away from the violence and confrontationalism of his earlier films and toward an almost Ozu-like acceptance of human fate. The story is set in an impoverished mountain village, where the law of survival requires that every citizen over 70 be put to death to make room for new mouths at the table. Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto in a sublime performance) is approaching the limit but doesn't want to die until she finds a new wife for her widowed son Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata). Imamura's rough sexual humor is still in evidence, but now it has taken on a dark tone: to make love is to flirt with death. The snow that falls in the final scene is a blanket of oblivion, a complex image that offers hope through loss. In Japanese with subtitles.'
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 98: Sun Apr 7

The Good, the Bad & The Ugly (Leone, 1966): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.30pm


This 35mm presentation is also being screened on April 29th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Sergio Leone's comic, cynical, inexplicably moving epic spaghetti western (1966), in which all human motivation has been reduced to greed—it's just a matter of degree between the Good (Clint Eastwood), the Bad (Lee Van Cleef), and the Ugly (Eli Wallach). Leone's famous close-ups—the "two beeg eyes"—are matched by his masterfully composed long shots, which keep his crafty protagonists in the subversive foreground of a massively absurd American Civil War. Though ordained from the beginning, the three-way showdown that climaxes the film is tense and thoroughly astonishing.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 97: Sat Apr 6

Exotica (Egoyan, 1994): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm


Lost Reels introduction: Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Exotica was Atom Egoyan’s international and commercial breakthrough; with his latest film, Seven Veils due for release this year, its a perfect opportunity to see this signature work from one of cinema’s most acclaimed and distinctive auteurs. Lost Reels is proud to present this seminal film from an original 35mm release print, followed by a online Q&A with writer/director Atom Egoyan, hosted by critic Jonathan Romney, author of Atom Egoyan (BFI World Directors Series).

Chicago Reader review:
This may be the best of writer-director Atom Egoyan’s slick, Canadian carriage-trade productions (the other two are Speaking Parts and The Adjuster), though it’s also a regression, both formally and thematically, compared to his previous film, Calendar. The central location–a triumph of lush, imaginative set design–is a sort of strip club where young female dancers sit at male customers’ tables and verbally cater to their psychic needs; at the center of this faux-tropical establishment is an odd little house where the club’s pregnant owner hangs out with the jaundiced announcer (Egoyan regulars Arsinee Khanjian and Elias Koteas), voyeuristically overseeing the voyeuristic clientele. The main customer is still mourning the death of his young daughter, and other significant characters include a dancer who sits at his table, a baby-sitter, and an eccentric smuggler whose path briefly crosses that of the bereaved father. As a narrative this is something of a tease, building toward a denouement straight out of Freud; its structure both benefits and suffers from Egoyan’s customary splintered focus and repetition compulsion, and there’s an unmistakable sadness in its pornographic luster. But as mise en scene it’s rich and accomplished–for better and for worse, a place to get lost in.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 96: Fri Apr 5

The Last of the Mohicans (Mann, 1992): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank and is also being screened on 21st April. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Set in the mountainous frontier wilderness of the colony of New York in 1757, this charts the role played by Hawkeye (Daniel Day Lewis) in the complex war waged between the English and the French and their respective allies among both settlers and Indians. Adopted as a child by the Mohican Chingachgook (Russell Means) after his white settler parents were killed, Hawkeye belongs to neither one culture nor the other. Similarly, he is both warrior and peacemaker; and it is this dichotomy which simultaneously alienates him from the English military and wins him the love of the colonel's daughter (Madeleine Stowe). While few would deny the impressive spectacle Mann provides in some truly magnificent battle scenes, criticisms have been levelled at the way the film changes from a historically accurate account of the war into a full-blown love story. Indeed, it is best seen as an epic romantic adventure of a sort seldom executed with much intelligence these days. As such, Mann's characteristic mix of rousing, profoundly physical action, lyrical interludes, and strikingly stylish imagery, serves to create superior mainstream entertainment.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 95: Thu Apr 4

Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.45pm


This is a 35mm presentation and also screens on May 7th. Details here.

"This now-classic road movie turned the B-movie youthquake into an international art cinema. Easy Rider tells the story of Captain America and Billy the Kid as they go looking for America and, as Columbia’s original poster put it, “can’t find it anywhere.” From its legendary compilation score to its echt-60’s lens flares and culminating LSD trip, Easy Rider feels disconcertingly familiar, a model of what Tom Frank calls “the conquest of cool.” As they motor along to their inevitably tragic end, our heroes do drugs, have their rights violated, meet some interestingly allegorical groups of folks, and find themselves enframed by László Kovács’s gorgeous cinematography."
Harvard Film Archive

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 94: Wed Apr 3

The Getaway (Peckinpah, 1972): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This great heist movie is part of a Nickel Cinema season of road films and screens from 16mm.

Time Out review:
An evident precursor to The Driver (Walter Hill scripted both, this one from Jim Thompson's novel). The major strength of The Getaway rests solidly on Steve McQueen's central role, a cold tense core of pragmatic violence. Hounded by furies (two mobs, police, a hostile landscape), he responds with a lethal control, blasting his way through shootouts that teeter on madness to the loot, the girl, and Sam Peckinpah's mythic land of Mexico. Survival, purification, and the attainment of grace are achieved only by an extreme commitment to the Peckinpah existential ideal of action - a man is what he does. Peckinpah's own control of the escalating frenzy is masterly; this is one of his coldest films, but a great thriller.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 93: Tue Apr 2

Robocop (Verehoven, 1987): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.30pm


This is a 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
Android policeman roots out criminals in futuristic Detroit at the behest of greedy corporate controllers. Gentrification, criminality, what's the difference? Not much, according to Paul Verhoeven's creepily stylish SF thriller (1987, 103 min.), though Verhoeven, a Dutch director (The Fourth Man) with a taste for subterranean kinks and slick continental veneer, is careful not to let his satirical assaults intrude on the more numbingly physical kind. Still, there's a brooding, agonized quality to the violence that almost seems subversive, as if Verhoeven were both appalled and fascinated by his complicity in the toxic action rot (the entropic mise-en-scene is more than a designer's coup: Verhoeven can't get out of the sludge, so he cynically slides right in). As the human cop turned android, Peter Weller hardly registers behind his fiberglass visor, though Verhoeven, usually a master at suggesting the sleazily psychological through the physical, might have made something more of his eerie Aryan blandness
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.