With fears our winter travel will need a, let’s say, reconsideration, the Criterion Channel’s monthly programming could hardly come at a better moment. High on list of highlights is Louis Feuillade’s delightful Les Vampires, which I suggest soundtracking to Coil, instrumental Nine Inch Nails, and Jóhann Jóhannson’s Mandy score. Notable too is a Sundance ’92 retrospective running the gamut from Paul Schrader to Derek Jarman to Jean-Pierre Gorin, and I’m especially excited for their look at one of America’s greatest actors, Sterling Hayden.
Special notice to Criterion editions of The Killing, The Last Days of Disco, All About Eve, and The Asphalt Jungle, and programming of Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load, among the better debuts in recent years.
See the full list of January titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.
-Ship: A Visual Poem, Terrance Day, 2020
5 Fingers, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1952
After Migration: Calabria,...
Special notice to Criterion editions of The Killing, The Last Days of Disco, All About Eve, and The Asphalt Jungle, and programming of Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load, among the better debuts in recent years.
See the full list of January titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.
-Ship: A Visual Poem, Terrance Day, 2020
5 Fingers, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1952
After Migration: Calabria,...
- 12/20/2021
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
Though New York moviegoing is (sort of) getting back to normal, we’ve only now filled one of the biggest spots: Metrograph have announced a return of their theater and commissary on October 1, while Metrograph At Home programming will continue through their site and Metrograph TV app.
The lineup, currently handled by new programmer-at-large Nellie Killian, doesn’t seem to have missed a step: there’s the cool factor of Żuławski’s Possession restored in 4K, the auteurist cred of a four-film Eastwood series, new releases like Bulletproof and Labyrinth of Cinema, the high art of an Amos Vogel tribute—precisely what we’ve missed for, God help us, 18 months.
Health and safety guidelines can be found here, and a highlight of October programming below.
Opens October 1
Possession (1981)
New 4K Restoration of Andrzej Żuławski’s Hallucinatory Masterpiece
Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of...
The lineup, currently handled by new programmer-at-large Nellie Killian, doesn’t seem to have missed a step: there’s the cool factor of Żuławski’s Possession restored in 4K, the auteurist cred of a four-film Eastwood series, new releases like Bulletproof and Labyrinth of Cinema, the high art of an Amos Vogel tribute—precisely what we’ve missed for, God help us, 18 months.
Health and safety guidelines can be found here, and a highlight of October programming below.
Opens October 1
Possession (1981)
New 4K Restoration of Andrzej Żuławski’s Hallucinatory Masterpiece
Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of...
- 9/9/2021
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy, starring Ray Gange with The Clash is a 59th New York Film Festival Revival highlight Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Film at Lincoln Center has announced the Revivals of the 59th New York Film Festival will include highlights Michael Powell’s Bluebeard’s Castle; Ed Lachman’s Songs For Drella; Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher; Christopher Petit’s Radio On; Sedat Pakay’s James Baldwin: From Another Place; Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala; Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street; Márta Mészáros’ Adoption, and Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy.
59th New York Film Festival Revivals
The other films in the program are John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13; Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga; Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song; Christine Choy’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?; Nina Menkes’ The Bloody Child; Govindan Aravindan’s Kummatty; Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up, and...
Film at Lincoln Center has announced the Revivals of the 59th New York Film Festival will include highlights Michael Powell’s Bluebeard’s Castle; Ed Lachman’s Songs For Drella; Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher; Christopher Petit’s Radio On; Sedat Pakay’s James Baldwin: From Another Place; Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala; Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street; Márta Mészáros’ Adoption, and Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy.
59th New York Film Festival Revivals
The other films in the program are John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13; Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga; Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song; Christine Choy’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?; Nina Menkes’ The Bloody Child; Govindan Aravindan’s Kummatty; Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up, and...
- 8/18/2021
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Andrew Kötting’s dream-documentary traces a ritual journey in which a mysterious object is returned to a Scottish island
That unique artist, director and psycho-geographic savant Andrew Kötting sculpts another strange film-shamanic happening – intriguing, sometimes baffling, a bit preposterous, but pregnant with ideas. Tonally, his work is complex; humour is a part of it, and the film can’t really function without humour on the audience’s part, but it also requires a setting aside of mockery and irony, demanding instead to be accepted as a kind of higher playfulness, an inspired and transcendental jeu d’ésprit. In his 2012 film Swandown, Kötting included among his cast of characters a cameo from the comedian Stewart Lee, who was permitted to take the mickey a bit. But I sense that this isn’t a response that the film-maker wants to encourage.
Like much of his previous work, this is a dream-documentary road movie,...
That unique artist, director and psycho-geographic savant Andrew Kötting sculpts another strange film-shamanic happening – intriguing, sometimes baffling, a bit preposterous, but pregnant with ideas. Tonally, his work is complex; humour is a part of it, and the film can’t really function without humour on the audience’s part, but it also requires a setting aside of mockery and irony, demanding instead to be accepted as a kind of higher playfulness, an inspired and transcendental jeu d’ésprit. In his 2012 film Swandown, Kötting included among his cast of characters a cameo from the comedian Stewart Lee, who was permitted to take the mickey a bit. But I sense that this isn’t a response that the film-maker wants to encourage.
Like much of his previous work, this is a dream-documentary road movie,...
- 4/1/2020
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Museum of the Moving Image
A particularly outstanding weekend for “See It Big! Action” includes Die Hard on Friday, Big Trouble in Little China and Face/Off on Saturday, and Police Story this Sunday.
A series showcasing Diana Ross runs this weekend.
A spotlight on Mexico’s queer scene is underway.
Metrograph
A Jim Jarmusch series continues.
Museum of the Moving Image
A particularly outstanding weekend for “See It Big! Action” includes Die Hard on Friday, Big Trouble in Little China and Face/Off on Saturday, and Police Story this Sunday.
A series showcasing Diana Ross runs this weekend.
A spotlight on Mexico’s queer scene is underway.
Metrograph
A Jim Jarmusch series continues.
- 6/14/2019
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Neneh Cherry stars as a grieving academic who wanders Stockholm in a pensive mood
Stockholm, My Love is an intriguing and palate-cleansing work, ruminative and cerebral, with a literary feel, like an elegant European novella in translation. There are some tremendous reportage images created by both Mark Cousins and Christopher Doyle as cinematographers, showing the city’s clear, open, mostly unpopulated spaces. In the city-symphony tradition, it has something of Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital or Cousins’ own previous work, I Am Belfast. This is vernacular cinema, in its way, straightforwardly taking the camera for a walk.
Stockholm, My Love stars singer Neneh Cherry, presented in downbeat, daylit and unglamorised closeup, and the whole film could be seen as a reverse engineered video for her title song, which comes in at the very end. She plays an academic who had come to Stockholm to give a lecture on the city’s architecture,...
Stockholm, My Love is an intriguing and palate-cleansing work, ruminative and cerebral, with a literary feel, like an elegant European novella in translation. There are some tremendous reportage images created by both Mark Cousins and Christopher Doyle as cinematographers, showing the city’s clear, open, mostly unpopulated spaces. In the city-symphony tradition, it has something of Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital or Cousins’ own previous work, I Am Belfast. This is vernacular cinema, in its way, straightforwardly taking the camera for a walk.
Stockholm, My Love stars singer Neneh Cherry, presented in downbeat, daylit and unglamorised closeup, and the whole film could be seen as a reverse engineered video for her title song, which comes in at the very end. She plays an academic who had come to Stockholm to give a lecture on the city’s architecture,...
- 6/16/2017
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.
- 10/11/2016
- MUBI
As a young film-maker, Chris Petit sought inspiration in a divided city – where composers were Stasi agents and a night out clubbing could end in a nuclear flash
It is 1984 and I’m being driven around East Berlin in a Jaguar XJ6, the only one in town. We are making Chinese Boxes, a cheap thriller with an incomprehensible plot about teenage drug deaths, Berlin gangsters and Us intelligence. The film’s budget is about three quid and, to save money, it is being scored in East Berlin, hence the driver of the white Jag, who is its composer – and, we learn later, a Stasi informer. But it seems anyone who is anyone is. We drink red wine from Bulgaria and talk about the unthinkable, reunification, known then as the German spring.
In those days, I was living in West Berlin which, by contrast, was less a city than an advertisement...
It is 1984 and I’m being driven around East Berlin in a Jaguar XJ6, the only one in town. We are making Chinese Boxes, a cheap thriller with an incomprehensible plot about teenage drug deaths, Berlin gangsters and Us intelligence. The film’s budget is about three quid and, to save money, it is being scored in East Berlin, hence the driver of the white Jag, who is its composer – and, we learn later, a Stasi informer. But it seems anyone who is anyone is. We drink red wine from Bulgaria and talk about the unthinkable, reunification, known then as the German spring.
In those days, I was living in West Berlin which, by contrast, was less a city than an advertisement...
- 7/12/2016
- by Chris Petit
- The Guardian - Film News
Post-Nearly Press has released two book-length interviews with Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. Also in today's roundup of news and views: A review of and two excerpts from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasmagorical memoir, Where the Bird Sings Best; the Quietus on Wojciech Has's The Saragossa Manuscript; an oral history of Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan at 30; Paul Thomas Anderson's conversation with Jonathan Demme; more interviews with feminist filmmaker Vivienne Dick, Wim Wenders, Errol Morris, Noah Baumbach and David Zellner; the New York Times on cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 3/29/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
Post-Nearly Press has released two book-length interviews with Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. Also in today's roundup of news and views: A review of and two excerpts from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasmagorical memoir, Where the Bird Sings Best; the Quietus on Wojciech Has's The Saragossa Manuscript; an oral history of Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan at 30; Paul Thomas Anderson's conversation with Jonathan Demme; more interviews with feminist filmmaker Vivienne Dick, Wim Wenders, Errol Morris, Noah Baumbach and David Zellner; the New York Times on cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 3/29/2015
- Keyframe
Unusually for a teen horror, Unfriended delivers decent old-fashioned chills. Dare you peek between your fingers at… the haunted Skype chat?
Are we living in an interesting era for horror movies, or is there currently just a glut of them? It Follows was playing in the same multiplex as Unfriended, which itself was preceded by trailers for The Gallows, Insidious 3, The Visit and the Poltergeist remake, one or other of which was advertised as being “from the producers of The Purge and The Grudge”. My optimistic half (okay, third) warms to the thought of teens nationwide leaping screaming into the laps of their zit-stippled dates all summer long; my pessimistic half just keeps thinking about that glut.
Unfriended comes on like the last gasp of the found-footage boomlet of the last few years, as the genre finally exhausts itself just in time for the 20th-anniversary re-release of The Blair Witch Project,...
Are we living in an interesting era for horror movies, or is there currently just a glut of them? It Follows was playing in the same multiplex as Unfriended, which itself was preceded by trailers for The Gallows, Insidious 3, The Visit and the Poltergeist remake, one or other of which was advertised as being “from the producers of The Purge and The Grudge”. My optimistic half (okay, third) warms to the thought of teens nationwide leaping screaming into the laps of their zit-stippled dates all summer long; my pessimistic half just keeps thinking about that glut.
Unfriended comes on like the last gasp of the found-footage boomlet of the last few years, as the genre finally exhausts itself just in time for the 20th-anniversary re-release of The Blair Witch Project,...
- 1/12/2015
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
Via The Criterion Collection, "Mad World Locations, Then and Now". Serge Daney in English has published a three-part series entitled The "Berri affair", "...which Serge Daney described as one of the 'two moments in my life where I was ashamed to belong to something idiotic' Future posts will attempt to describe what happens in 1991 (a year or so before Daney's death)." Part: 1 | 2 | 3. Also, check out the blog's summary of Daney translations from 2013.
Above: the trailer for Aïda Ruilova's Head and Hands: My Black Angel, a documentary that captures a conversation between writer Alissa Bennett and Abel Ferrara. For The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes on Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip:
"The movie is another installment in a decadelong run of independent films with career-centric stories. It’s a tradition that goes back more than half a century, which arises from the practical difficulties built into the process of making films.
Above: the trailer for Aïda Ruilova's Head and Hands: My Black Angel, a documentary that captures a conversation between writer Alissa Bennett and Abel Ferrara. For The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes on Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip:
"The movie is another installment in a decadelong run of independent films with career-centric stories. It’s a tradition that goes back more than half a century, which arises from the practical difficulties built into the process of making films.
- 1/29/2014
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
The writer and king of London psychogeography is curating a season of 70 classic and unusual films throughout his 70th birthday year, presented in cinemas and quirky venues across the capital. Here he explains the project's genesis
Approaching a birthday I had no particular desire to record or commemorate, I was seduced by an enticing offer: the opportunity to nominate 70 films, one for each year survived. The man floating this folly across the table of the Little Georgia restaurant on Hackney's Goldsmith's Row was Paul Smith, underground impresario and secret magus of King Mob, Blast First, Disobey, and other shortlived but potent cultural manifestations. We had some previous, through a series of spoken-word CDs involving Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, the Black Panthers, Stewart Home. The CDs existed and I had copies to prove it, but they never really made the transit from warehouse to retail counter. I had performed, under Paul's promotion,...
Approaching a birthday I had no particular desire to record or commemorate, I was seduced by an enticing offer: the opportunity to nominate 70 films, one for each year survived. The man floating this folly across the table of the Little Georgia restaurant on Hackney's Goldsmith's Row was Paul Smith, underground impresario and secret magus of King Mob, Blast First, Disobey, and other shortlived but potent cultural manifestations. We had some previous, through a series of spoken-word CDs involving Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, the Black Panthers, Stewart Home. The CDs existed and I had copies to prove it, but they never really made the transit from warehouse to retail counter. I had performed, under Paul's promotion,...
- 7/16/2013
- by Iain Sinclair
- The Guardian - Film News
Moving Stories | 70 x 70: The Sorcerers + Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore & Chris Petit | Ray Harryhausen | London Indian Film Festival
Moving Stories, Bradford
Should you let the kids slob out with a movie or make them do something vaguely constructive during the summer holiday? This new, free exhibition lets you have it both ways. Using original sketches, models, and even full-scale sets, it shows how children's books are translated to the screen – which means you can see Roald Dahl's illustrated notebook for Fantastic Mr Fox alongside Wes Anderson's models from his movie, for example. There are also activity workshops, and some of the titles are playing in the cinema, too.
National Media Museum, Sat to 6 Oct
70 x 70: The Sorcerers + Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore & Chris Petit, London
Often labelled a "psychogeographer", Iain Sinclair has become chief custodian of a certain esoteric but indispensable strain of English identity, via his writings,...
Moving Stories, Bradford
Should you let the kids slob out with a movie or make them do something vaguely constructive during the summer holiday? This new, free exhibition lets you have it both ways. Using original sketches, models, and even full-scale sets, it shows how children's books are translated to the screen – which means you can see Roald Dahl's illustrated notebook for Fantastic Mr Fox alongside Wes Anderson's models from his movie, for example. There are also activity workshops, and some of the titles are playing in the cinema, too.
National Media Museum, Sat to 6 Oct
70 x 70: The Sorcerers + Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore & Chris Petit, London
Often labelled a "psychogeographer", Iain Sinclair has become chief custodian of a certain esoteric but indispensable strain of English identity, via his writings,...
- 7/13/2013
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
The final offering in our season of British cult classics are two films that take us far into the dark heart of England
The fourth and last of our British cult classics double bills offers two very different, virtually unclassifiable films: Patrick Keiller's London, from 1993, and Christopher Petit's Radio On, released in 1979. Keiller's film, a melancholy homage to the UK capital, resembles a string of animated still photographs, while Petit's is a gloomy, mannered black-and-white road movie that, as its director suggests, is something of a journey into the past as well as across England. Despite their surface dissimilarities, the two films share a dynamic intelligence towards the environment and landscape that surrounds them; both are cinematic pilgrimages through England.
London is perhaps the slightly better known: written and filmed by Keiller, who rather obviously spent considerable amounts of time traipsing around the city with a locked-off camera...
The fourth and last of our British cult classics double bills offers two very different, virtually unclassifiable films: Patrick Keiller's London, from 1993, and Christopher Petit's Radio On, released in 1979. Keiller's film, a melancholy homage to the UK capital, resembles a string of animated still photographs, while Petit's is a gloomy, mannered black-and-white road movie that, as its director suggests, is something of a journey into the past as well as across England. Despite their surface dissimilarities, the two films share a dynamic intelligence towards the environment and landscape that surrounds them; both are cinematic pilgrimages through England.
London is perhaps the slightly better known: written and filmed by Keiller, who rather obviously spent considerable amounts of time traipsing around the city with a locked-off camera...
- 11/30/2012
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Controversial film is banned by the Pakistan military government
There's nothing quite like being on the jury at the Taormina Film Festival where, on the final night in the vast and ancient amphitheatre overlooked by permanently steaming Mount Etna, the prizes are dispensed in front of 30 000 excited Sicilians as prelude to the Italian Oscar awards.
That meant 18 million television viewers watching as well, with each juror introduced either to cheers or catcalls (cheers for me, since Italy after all beat England and they could afford to be generous).
This year, though, there were better moments for Britain than just that since the festival's Special Jury Prize for the most striking and original first feature went to Chris Petit's Radio On and John Schlesinger won a Donatello award for his general work as director.
Petit's film, on the eve of its release in Italy, is the first British Film Institute...
There's nothing quite like being on the jury at the Taormina Film Festival where, on the final night in the vast and ancient amphitheatre overlooked by permanently steaming Mount Etna, the prizes are dispensed in front of 30 000 excited Sicilians as prelude to the Italian Oscar awards.
That meant 18 million television viewers watching as well, with each juror introduced either to cheers or catcalls (cheers for me, since Italy after all beat England and they could afford to be generous).
This year, though, there were better moments for Britain than just that since the festival's Special Jury Prize for the most striking and original first feature went to Chris Petit's Radio On and John Schlesinger won a Donatello award for his general work as director.
Petit's film, on the eve of its release in Italy, is the first British Film Institute...
- 8/2/2012
- by Derek Malcolm
- The Guardian - Film News
Cocking a snook at the Olympic torch procession two men have plotted their own epic journey – along the waterways from Hastings to east London in a giant fibreglass swan
'Ahoy there!" shouts film-maker Andrew Kötting to a dredging vessel on the Lee Navigation canal, just outside London's Olympic Park. The man on the boat gives us a grudging wave. Kötting explains that the same man wouldn't let him pass any further up the canal yesterday. Nor would the Gurkhas who guard the Olympic site.
This could have something to do with our mode of transport. I am sitting beside Kötting in a two-person fibreglass pedalo in the shape of a giant swan. Or it could have something to do with my co-pilot: Kötting is wearing mirrored shades and a shabby, dark blue suit on top of a cardigan embroidered with swans. He hasn't washed the suit for the past month,...
'Ahoy there!" shouts film-maker Andrew Kötting to a dredging vessel on the Lee Navigation canal, just outside London's Olympic Park. The man on the boat gives us a grudging wave. Kötting explains that the same man wouldn't let him pass any further up the canal yesterday. Nor would the Gurkhas who guard the Olympic site.
This could have something to do with our mode of transport. I am sitting beside Kötting in a two-person fibreglass pedalo in the shape of a giant swan. Or it could have something to do with my co-pilot: Kötting is wearing mirrored shades and a shabby, dark blue suit on top of a cardigan embroidered with swans. He hasn't washed the suit for the past month,...
- 7/20/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Acre After Acre, Mile After Mile, London
If you've had the feeling in recent years that British cinema has become a story of steadily eroding national identity, then here's where you need to be looking. The season's subtitle – Tradition, Memory & Journey In British Folk Cinema – tells you what you need to know: that there's a solid, albeit underfunded, core of film-makers still out there looking for the soul of Britain, and many of them crop up here. Like Chris Petit, who this Thursday accompanies his seminal late-70s road trip Radio On. Or Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair, who'll be previewing their pedalo-powered journey to the Olympics later. Or, fresh to their ranks, Ben Rivers, here with his Scottish wilderness film Two Years At Sea. Look out too for more commercial fare such as The Long Good Friday and The Elephant Man.
Sugar House Studios, E15, Thu to 28 Jun
Jean Gabin,...
If you've had the feeling in recent years that British cinema has become a story of steadily eroding national identity, then here's where you need to be looking. The season's subtitle – Tradition, Memory & Journey In British Folk Cinema – tells you what you need to know: that there's a solid, albeit underfunded, core of film-makers still out there looking for the soul of Britain, and many of them crop up here. Like Chris Petit, who this Thursday accompanies his seminal late-70s road trip Radio On. Or Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair, who'll be previewing their pedalo-powered journey to the Olympics later. Or, fresh to their ranks, Ben Rivers, here with his Scottish wilderness film Two Years At Sea. Look out too for more commercial fare such as The Long Good Friday and The Elephant Man.
Sugar House Studios, E15, Thu to 28 Jun
Jean Gabin,...
- 5/4/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
The 49th New York Film Festival has announced their Masterworks and Special Anniversary screenings that will show between the festival’s seventeen days, September 30th – October 16th. The Masterworks program and the festival’s additional programming will provide audiences with exciting opportunities to explore new film-making styles and storytelling events. To learn more about the Masterworks and Anniversary films, please check out below for full synopsis and details.
Masterworks And Special Anniversary Screenings
Masterworks: The Gold Rush
Chaplin’s personal favorite among his own films, The Gold Rush (1925), is a beautifully constructed comic fable of fate and perseverance, set in the icy wastes of the Alaskan gold fields. Re-released by Chaplin in 1942 in a recut version missing some scenes, and with added narration and musical score, The Gold Rush will be presented in a new restoration of the original, silent 1925 version. In this frequently terrifying and always unpredictable universe of...
Masterworks And Special Anniversary Screenings
Masterworks: The Gold Rush
Chaplin’s personal favorite among his own films, The Gold Rush (1925), is a beautifully constructed comic fable of fate and perseverance, set in the icy wastes of the Alaskan gold fields. Re-released by Chaplin in 1942 in a recut version missing some scenes, and with added narration and musical score, The Gold Rush will be presented in a new restoration of the original, silent 1925 version. In this frequently terrifying and always unpredictable universe of...
- 8/28/2011
- by Christopher Clemente
- SoundOnSight
Statue of the late star posing over a drafty subway vent causes outrage in Chicago
The big story
It's the big Marilyn. And the big fuss a 26ft-statue of the Hollywood icon has caused in Chicago, where a monolithic Monroe - stuck with her skirt blown up in the famous pose from The Seven Year Itch - towers over the city's Pioneer Court, allowing leerers and jeerers alike to cop a giant's eyeful.
Labelled Forever Marilyn by 80-year-old New Jersey sculptor Steward Johnson, the statue has been described as "sexist" and "creepy" by critics, among them film writer Richard Roeper: "Men (and women) licking Marilyn's leg, gawking up her skirt, pointing at her giant panties as they leer and laugh," huffed the Chicago Sun-Times columnist, which sorta cooled the ankles of those who had been merrily papping the blonde bombshell's giant errrrr ... smalls.
Still, you suspect this Marilyn would...
The big story
It's the big Marilyn. And the big fuss a 26ft-statue of the Hollywood icon has caused in Chicago, where a monolithic Monroe - stuck with her skirt blown up in the famous pose from The Seven Year Itch - towers over the city's Pioneer Court, allowing leerers and jeerers alike to cop a giant's eyeful.
Labelled Forever Marilyn by 80-year-old New Jersey sculptor Steward Johnson, the statue has been described as "sexist" and "creepy" by critics, among them film writer Richard Roeper: "Men (and women) licking Marilyn's leg, gawking up her skirt, pointing at her giant panties as they leer and laugh," huffed the Chicago Sun-Times columnist, which sorta cooled the ankles of those who had been merrily papping the blonde bombshell's giant errrrr ... smalls.
Still, you suspect this Marilyn would...
- 7/21/2011
- by Henry Barnes
- The Guardian - Film News
Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit's film installation, Flying Down to Rio, takes the viewer on a journey via a wall-to-wall simulated drive
An installation taking up four walls and 16 frames, simulating a car driving north from Dalston Junction, with cameras mounted left, right, fore and aft, Flying Down to Rio itself marks the convergence of two paths, reuniting Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. Petit's fascination with the view from the dashboard dates back to the 1970s. "Music and speed, combined with the ratio of the windscreen, made for an experience that was often more cinematic than the films I had to review for Time Out," he has said; and his debut film Radio On (1979) contained a cherished driving sequence shot on the Westway, in tribute to Jg Ballard's Crash and Concrete Island, and soundtracked by David Bowie.
Over the decades, through London Orbital (2002), also made with Sinclair, and Content (2009), the windscreen shots have proliferated,...
An installation taking up four walls and 16 frames, simulating a car driving north from Dalston Junction, with cameras mounted left, right, fore and aft, Flying Down to Rio itself marks the convergence of two paths, reuniting Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. Petit's fascination with the view from the dashboard dates back to the 1970s. "Music and speed, combined with the ratio of the windscreen, made for an experience that was often more cinematic than the films I had to review for Time Out," he has said; and his debut film Radio On (1979) contained a cherished driving sequence shot on the Westway, in tribute to Jg Ballard's Crash and Concrete Island, and soundtracked by David Bowie.
Over the decades, through London Orbital (2002), also made with Sinclair, and Content (2009), the windscreen shots have proliferated,...
- 7/20/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
The veteran German film writer and producer died earlier this week aged 61. We look back over his career in clips
The sudden death of Bernd Eichinger has left German cinema reeling, as arguably its most powerful and influential figure is no longer around. Eichinger started writing and directing in the early 70s New German Cinema ferment, but really made his mark as a producer – his first serious credit was on the 1975 movie The Wrong Movement, directed by Ngc wunderkind Wim Wenders. The Wrong Movement is one of those odd Wim Wenders road movies featuring Rüdiger Vogler, made in between Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road, that were so bafflingly influential at the time. (Try watching Chris Petit's Radio On, you'll see what I mean.)
But Eichinger's production career didn't take proper wing until the New German Cinema wave was all but over. In 1978 he bought an established distribution company,...
The sudden death of Bernd Eichinger has left German cinema reeling, as arguably its most powerful and influential figure is no longer around. Eichinger started writing and directing in the early 70s New German Cinema ferment, but really made his mark as a producer – his first serious credit was on the 1975 movie The Wrong Movement, directed by Ngc wunderkind Wim Wenders. The Wrong Movement is one of those odd Wim Wenders road movies featuring Rüdiger Vogler, made in between Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road, that were so bafflingly influential at the time. (Try watching Chris Petit's Radio On, you'll see what I mean.)
But Eichinger's production career didn't take proper wing until the New German Cinema wave was all but over. In 1978 he bought an established distribution company,...
- 1/28/2011
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
<p><img align="middle" src="http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/donpayasos/Kobayashi/vlcsnap-825451.png" alt="l" width="500" /></p> <p>In the dying years of the last century, Patrick Keiller was Britain's leading cinematic psychogeographer, mapping the unconscious impulses of the English cityscape in two remarkable feature films, <i>London</i> (1994) and <i>Robinson in Space</i> (1997). Both films were supported by the British Film Institute, before it stopped supporting the production of actual films. As state support for the arts dwindled in Britain, becoming more and more driven by the desire to pursue commercial success at the expense of artistic creativity (as if the two should always be considered polar opposites), Keiller seemed to fall silent, like that other great BFI beneficiary, Terence Davies.</p> <p>But now, rather astonishingly, he's back! <i>Robinson in Ruins</i> (2010) will continue the peregrinations of the fictitious lecturer and flaneur, although with the passing of Sir Paul Scofield, the film's narrator has undergone a change of identity and will now be embodied, or rather disembodied, by Vanessa Redgrave.</p> <p>Such a...
- 12/2/2010
- MUBI
Brian Dillon hails the return of Patrick Keiller's Robinson in a film about the conundrum of the countryside
The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller's new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller's enigmatic oeuvre: "When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt." Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller's feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director's own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films' narrators' vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but...
The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller's new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller's enigmatic oeuvre: "When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt." Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller's feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director's own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films' narrators' vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but...
- 11/20/2010
- by Brian Dillon
- The Guardian - Film News
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Berwick-upon-Tweed
England's northernmost town exploits its tourist-friendly heritage for this imaginative festival, with a trail of film-based artworks commissioned for local landmarks as well as regular cinema screenings. The theme is Stagings, which means all manner of film-related art based around ideas of performance. So you'll find dance in the 14th-century Coxon's Tower and animation in the town hall prison cells, while film artist Guy Sherwin presents his ingenious projected pieces in the Holy Trinity Church. The screenings are also performance-themed, ranging from The Keystone Cut Ups, a live event colliding music, silent comedy and early avant garde cinema, to Malaysian drama Karaoke (you can guess what it's about), a Finnish rugby mockumentary and the Marx brothers' A Night At The Opera.
Various venues, Wed to 19 Sep, berwickfilm-artsfest.com
The Scoop Film Season, London
The holidays are over, the kids are back to school...
England's northernmost town exploits its tourist-friendly heritage for this imaginative festival, with a trail of film-based artworks commissioned for local landmarks as well as regular cinema screenings. The theme is Stagings, which means all manner of film-related art based around ideas of performance. So you'll find dance in the 14th-century Coxon's Tower and animation in the town hall prison cells, while film artist Guy Sherwin presents his ingenious projected pieces in the Holy Trinity Church. The screenings are also performance-themed, ranging from The Keystone Cut Ups, a live event colliding music, silent comedy and early avant garde cinema, to Malaysian drama Karaoke (you can guess what it's about), a Finnish rugby mockumentary and the Marx brothers' A Night At The Opera.
Various venues, Wed to 19 Sep, berwickfilm-artsfest.com
The Scoop Film Season, London
The holidays are over, the kids are back to school...
- 9/10/2010
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Alfred Hitchcock meets himself in this disturbing fantasy
No better way to mark the 50th anniversary of Psycho (the rerelease is reviewed on page 8) than with this bizarre and distinctly inspired mash-up by writer Tom McCarthy and film-maker Johan Grimonprez. Their ever so slightly mad cine-essay, based on a Borgès short story, and perhaps influenced by British film-maker Chris Petit, is a delirious bad trip, imagining that Alfred Hitchcock, working on the set of The Birds in 1962, is visited by his own double: the near-dead Hitchcock from 1980, who enigmatically hints at how cold war history may or may not turn out. (The older Hitchcock double is of course only slightly better informed on this subject than the younger.)
Grimonprez and McCarthy achieve their fiction with a drawling Hitchcockian voiceover narration with staged fragments on video, an interview with a professional Hitchcock lookalike, along with clips of Hitchcock movies, a swirling...
No better way to mark the 50th anniversary of Psycho (the rerelease is reviewed on page 8) than with this bizarre and distinctly inspired mash-up by writer Tom McCarthy and film-maker Johan Grimonprez. Their ever so slightly mad cine-essay, based on a Borgès short story, and perhaps influenced by British film-maker Chris Petit, is a delirious bad trip, imagining that Alfred Hitchcock, working on the set of The Birds in 1962, is visited by his own double: the near-dead Hitchcock from 1980, who enigmatically hints at how cold war history may or may not turn out. (The older Hitchcock double is of course only slightly better informed on this subject than the younger.)
Grimonprez and McCarthy achieve their fiction with a drawling Hitchcockian voiceover narration with staged fragments on video, an interview with a professional Hitchcock lookalike, along with clips of Hitchcock movies, a swirling...
- 4/1/2010
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Four and a half years of watching films several times a week ... I can hardly believe in that life of the distant thirties now, a way of life which I adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun. More than four hundred films ... all those Empires and Odeons of a luxury and a bizarre taste which we shall never see again. How, I find myself wondering, could I possibly have written all these reviews?
—Graham Greene, preface to The Pleasure Dome, 1972
April, some say, is the cruelest month. But February is definitely the shortest. Apart from leap years, it consists of twenty-eight little days arranged in four neat weeks of seven, boasting a pleasing symmetry which those vulgar and bloated 31-day months can't dream of matching. A symmetry that's pleasing to anal-retentive sorts such as myself, the kind of critic who keeps a careful list of all the films that he or she—and,...
—Graham Greene, preface to The Pleasure Dome, 1972
April, some say, is the cruelest month. But February is definitely the shortest. Apart from leap years, it consists of twenty-eight little days arranged in four neat weeks of seven, boasting a pleasing symmetry which those vulgar and bloated 31-day months can't dream of matching. A symmetry that's pleasing to anal-retentive sorts such as myself, the kind of critic who keeps a careful list of all the films that he or she—and,...
- 3/8/2010
- MUBI
Four and a half years of watching films several times a week ... I can hardly believe in that life of the distant thirties now, a way of life which I adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun. More than four hundred films ... all those Empires and Odeons of a luxury and a bizarre taste which we shall never see again. How, I find myself wondering, could I possibly have written all these reviews?
—Graham Greene, preface to The Pleasure Dome, 1972
April, some say, is the cruelest month. But February is definitely the shortest. Apart from leap years, it consists of twenty-eight little days arranged in four neat weeks of seven, boasting a pleasing symmetry which those vulgar and bloated 31-day months can't dream of matching. A symmetry that's pleasing to anal-retentive sorts such as myself, the kind of critic who keeps a careful list of all the films that he or she—and,...
—Graham Greene, preface to The Pleasure Dome, 1972
April, some say, is the cruelest month. But February is definitely the shortest. Apart from leap years, it consists of twenty-eight little days arranged in four neat weeks of seven, boasting a pleasing symmetry which those vulgar and bloated 31-day months can't dream of matching. A symmetry that's pleasing to anal-retentive sorts such as myself, the kind of critic who keeps a careful list of all the films that he or she—and,...
- 3/8/2010
- MUBI
Chris Petit on an exploration of Warren Beatty's reputation
Warren Beatty famously never made up his mind, but his indecision was the source of his power. By revealing so little of his hand, it fell to others to interpret his wishes and act on them. Peter Biskind shows by default how life in Hollywood operates like a Renaissance principality, and the key to understanding it is not Sun Tzu, whom movie agents are fond of quoting, but Machiavelli's The Prince.
This latest biography is predictable in its treatment of Beatty, being neither authorised nor unauthorised and written in the hope of acquiring its subject's blessing. In a typical move, the star has issued a statement dumping on the book. For his part, Biskind demonstrates all the standard phases of dealing with Beatty – infatuation, adulation and manipulation leading to resentment as it dawns that the confidences on offer are as...
Warren Beatty famously never made up his mind, but his indecision was the source of his power. By revealing so little of his hand, it fell to others to interpret his wishes and act on them. Peter Biskind shows by default how life in Hollywood operates like a Renaissance principality, and the key to understanding it is not Sun Tzu, whom movie agents are fond of quoting, but Machiavelli's The Prince.
This latest biography is predictable in its treatment of Beatty, being neither authorised nor unauthorised and written in the hope of acquiring its subject's blessing. In a typical move, the star has issued a statement dumping on the book. For his part, Biskind demonstrates all the standard phases of dealing with Beatty – infatuation, adulation and manipulation leading to resentment as it dawns that the confidences on offer are as...
- 1/23/2010
- by Chris Petit
- The Guardian - Film News
Sam Riley and Samantha Morton in Control
Photo: The Weinstein Co. I finally watched Anton Corbijn's Control last night based on the life of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis and on top of being a good film, it is a beautiful film to look at, but one I am sure most general audience members wouldn't even give a chance. Why? It's in black-and-white, but there's a slight twist to this story and it's the only reason I bring it up. Control was actually shot in color and then converted to black-and-white in post. In the special features on the DVD Corbijn explains he originally considered shooting the film on black-and-white film stock, but he said the tests "were so grainy, which was one thing, but the grain also moved around and it became just another element you had to look at and I didn't want that in the film.
Photo: The Weinstein Co. I finally watched Anton Corbijn's Control last night based on the life of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis and on top of being a good film, it is a beautiful film to look at, but one I am sure most general audience members wouldn't even give a chance. Why? It's in black-and-white, but there's a slight twist to this story and it's the only reason I bring it up. Control was actually shot in color and then converted to black-and-white in post. In the special features on the DVD Corbijn explains he originally considered shooting the film on black-and-white film stock, but he said the tests "were so grainy, which was one thing, but the grain also moved around and it became just another element you had to look at and I didn't want that in the film.
- 6/6/2009
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
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