Previews

Mulholland Drive, USA 2001

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Showing Sunday 7th May 3:10pm

1

Rita: “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.”
Some of the many reasons for you to see Mulholland Drive (or to see it again!) –
  • Chosen by “Les Cahiers du Cinéma” as the best picture of the decade (2010)
  • Coco’s (Ann Miller) story about the kangaroo
  • Adam Kesher’s  (Justin Theroux) demonstration of how to smash a limousine with a golf club
  • Lorraine and the pool cleaner getting their comeuppance
  • Joe the hitman looking for a black address book
  • Betty’s audition
  • the tenderness of the relationship between naive and optimistic Betty (Naomi Watts) and the beautiful and confused Rita (Laura Elena Harring)
  • Rebekah Del Rio singing “Llorando”
  • the Mulholland Drive dinner party
  • and of course to explore the surreal logic behind clues ranging from a pillow, name badges, the blue box, and red lampshades, to a cowboy hat and the piano-shaped ashtray.
Director, David Lynch, described the film as “A love story in the city of dreams”.
All in all, Mulholland Drive is a great feast for the imagination, and one which will stay with you.
Blue-haired lady: “Silencio … “

Bill Walton

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, USA 1975

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Bank Holiday Monday 1st May 2:20pm

Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) : “The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine.”

McMurphy (Jack Nicholson): “In one week, I can put a bug so far up her ass, she don’t know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch”.

The setting: a real Oregon psychiatric hospital in the 70’s (cast includes hospital patients). The film centres on the power play between polar opposites, Randle McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. This is arguably Jack Nicholson’s finest acting performance. Louise Fletcher’s performance is spot on too. Rebel versus the system. Who comes out on top? There’s a question for you …

The film is based on Ken Kesey’s excellent book of the same name. It was published at a time when Erving Goffman’s ‘Asylums’ and R D Laing’s ‘Self and Others’ were questioning the very concept of mental illness and how it is treated. Director Milos Forman and a superb supporting cast get us thinking about institutionalisation and routine, coercion and manipulation, rebellion and empowerment. It’s still extremely funny, sad, and thought-provoking 40 years on.

A great film. Make sure that you see it on the big screen!

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew east
One flew west
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

Bill Walton

Neruda, Chile, France, Argentina, Spain, USA 2016

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Daily from Friday April 14th until Thursday April 20th

[but only in late evening performances]

The film is set in 1948 as the famous Chilean poet and Communist Party Member [Partido Comunista de Chile] Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) goes into hiding and exile when the Party is outlawed. The subject is immediately interesting and the film’s director, Pablo Larrain, has already achieved an enviable reputation for his earlier films.

His last film, Jackie (2016) was both highly praised and relatively  successful. The earlier Tony Manero (2008) and then The Club (2015) were stylish exercises that used noir techniques to offer stories that commented obliquely on Chile’s fractured past. Both the latter films enjoyed the talented cinematography of Sergio Armstrong. He is back on Neruda and the film also offers the acting skills of Gael Garcia Bernal.

My reservations are that I am not certain that Larrain will deal effectively with the politics of the work of the great revolutionary poet. Tony Manero and The Club were effective partly because they used less obviously political stories as metaphors. In Jackie, dealing directly with the Kennedy legend, its myths were uncritically revisited. And Larrain’s other film, No (2012) dealing with the 1988 Referendum on the Junta in Chile, presented a one-sided view of the organised working class in that country, effectively ignoring the Socialist Party of Chile [Partido Socialista de Chile].

It will be interesting to compare the portrait of the great poet with that in Michael Radford’s Il Postino: The Postman (1994 with Pilippe Noiret). Even if the film fails to do justice to Neruda’s politics it is most likely to be an absorbing and well produced film.

Certain Women, USA 2015

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April 8th and 9th only.

This film was screened at the 2016 Leeds International Film Festival but inextricably it was not in the top twenty ‘picks’. It is a very fine film from the talented and stimulating filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. This is a portmanteau film with three stories, all centred on female characters and set in Montana. Laura Dern plays Laura a lawyer: Michelle Williams plays Gina, a business woman, mother and wife building her new house; Kristen Stewart plays ‘Beth’ teaching an evening class on the law. All three actors provide fine performances and the final story also offers stand out performance by Lily Gladstone as Jamie, a worker on a horse ranch.

Reichardt’s films frequently fit into contemporary treatments of the western; such as Brokeback Mountain (2005), though that is a rather different film. She also has a fine feeling for landscapes, assisted her by her regular cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt. Reichardt herself edited the film.

The director also has ‘simpatico’ for our canine friends: witness the fine Wendy and Lucy (2008). In this film Laura is accompanied by a faithful canine retainer and Jamie patrols the ranch in the company of  madcap sheep dog.

These are all reasons to make sure you see the film, or see it again. Note, it is only on Saturday and Sunday as the Leeds Young Film Festival kicks off on Monday. Meanwhile, if like me you are a fan of Kristen Stewart, then she also appears in Personal Shopper (2016) at the cinema: and that film is preceded by high praise from critics. It was directed by Olivier Assayas who also wrote and directed the excellent Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) in which Stewart worked with Juliette Binoche to fine effect.

Free Fire

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Showing multiple times daily until Thursday 6th April

The main feature this week is Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, “a mad contraption, bristling with bravado and black, sardonic wit” according to Robbie Collins in The Telegraph.  The director and local actor, Sam Riley, brought the film to a sold out screening at the Picture House last month as part of a national tour.

Here are some Tweets from that night:

The Salesman / Forushande Iran, France, 2016.

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Daily from Friday March 24th until Thursday March 30th

Salesman

This film won the Best Foreign Language title at the Academy Awards. It also gained attention when the director boycotted the ceremony in opposition to new and discriminatory immigration controls by the USA. It is rather pleasing that most notable bane of the USA has recently won two Academy Awards; this title and A Separation / Jodaeiye Nader az Simin in 2012. That title was also written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. This film repeats some of the tropes of the earlier title though the central theme is rather different.

Both films rely on the importance of place for the characters, especially the apartments that provide their home. But this new film has an added dimension: a play within a play, ‘Death of a Salesman’. There are definite parallels between the apartment of the lead characters and the theatrical setting. However, I thought the relationships were closer to Tennessee Williams than to Arthur Miller.

The are fine performances as the central couple by Taraneh Alidoosti as Rana Etesami  and Shahab Hosseini  as Emad Etesami.  They were also a couple in Farhadi’s earlier About Elly / Darbareye Elly (2009) and if you saw that film the relationship then it offers a faint but interesting prequel to that in this film.

This is a fascinating and absorbing study. And the production is very well done. However, I found it was less compelling than the two earlier films made in Iran, [Farhadi has also worked on a French film The Past / Le passé, 2013). And I felt it was not quite as telling in its portrayal of contemporary Iran.

It is still worth seeing, especially as this has not been so far [with a few exceptions] a great year for new releases. Note regarding the UK trailer; it includes more plot than is necessary; and the cutting does not represent the film effectively, this has a rather different tempo,

Prevenge

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Showing Friday 6:20pm and  Saturday 8:45pm

Last month Alice Lowe brought her debut film as a director to Leeds…

The Valentine’s Night screening and Q&A sold out…

and everybody had a great time…

If you missed the film it’s showing again this weekend (Fri 6:20pm & Sat 8:45pm) and as Bill posted on our Facebook page earlier this week, it’s one worth catching:

Did you enjoy American Psycho (2000)?

If so, imagine Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) replaced by Ruth (Alice Lowe). Next, imagine that Patrick Bateman is 8 months pregnant (as Alice Lowe was when she starred in Prevenge) and has moved from Wall Street to South Wales.

And then further imagine that, instead of his murderous impulses being driven by materialism and envy, Patrick Bateman is carrying out his homicidal rampage guided by  his unborn child.

Prevenge is an exuberant, funny and original low-budget film, written and directed by Alice Lowe. There is some great camerawork and a strong supporting cast. And, arguably, its underlying morality is superior to that of American Psycho!

Manchester by the Sea USA 2016

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manchester-by-the-sea1Saturday March 4th and Monday March 6th

It is good to have another opportunity to see this film, the best new release so far of 2017. That said, the first two months of the year have been fairly undistinguished: a number of good films but a lack of masterworks [Moonlight (2016) will hopefully remedy this]. This film garnered Lead Actor and Original Screenplay Awards at the recent Academy. I do still worry that a mislaid envelope may turn up and scupper either of these.

Casey Affleck as Lee Chandler is superb and fulfils the promise displayed in his earlier films. The supporting cast are uniformly excellent. I was especially struck by Michelle Williams as Randi Chandler. She has a brief but powerful scene with Casey.

The film also fulfils the promise shown by writer and director Kenneth Lonergan in his previous films. He heads a fine production team and I was particularly struck by the cinematography by  Jody Lee Lipes, with some  beautifully executed exteriors on the North Eastern Atlantic coastline. And the  Film Editing by Jennifer Lame  is very fine, handling a complex set of flashbacks that fill out the story and the drama. Note, the actual town is ‘Manchester-by-the Sea’: odd that the title is different in all release versions as it suggests something else.

This is a film that deals with memories and loss that colour and inhibit the present. The powerful drama delves into these and the accompanying relationships with care and compassion. It is a long film, 137 minutes, but the characters and settings render that timescale completely absorbing.

Fences, USA 2016

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Daily, Saturday February 18th through till Thursday February 23rd.

fences-2016-david-gropman-design

The two leading players in this film, Denzel Washington and Viola Davies, have both been nominated for Academy Awards. Viola Davis has already won a Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actress. This, like the Academy Award, nomination, should really be for Best Actress as whilst her screen time is less than Washington her character and performance are equally essential to the film.

This is an actor’s films with both Washington and Davis reprising roles that they played on Broadway in 2010: Troy and Rose Maxton. And another player in this production Stephen McKinley Henderson as Jim Bono is part of a fine supporting cast.

The film is adapted from a play originally written in 1983 by August Wilson. He died in 2005 but had already written a screenplay on which this film is based. Wilson, whose early experiences of US racism informed his work, wrote a cycle of seven plays about Afro-American life and experiences. He insisted that this play, if adapted for cinema, should be directed by an African-American, and Washington both stars and directs.

The play fits into what is almost a genre of African-American life on film, harking back to A Raisin in the Sun (USA 1961), another play adapted first for television then cinema. In fact this film displays its theatrical origins both in structure and settings. It also has lengthy dialogue scenes but the delivery by the fine cast make these compelling and convincing.

The film is set in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and moves onto the early 1960s. These times are an important backdrop to what is essentially a family drama. And the title, as Rose explains to Troy in one powerful scene, is itself a metaphor for the emotions and contradictions dramatised in this absorbing film.

T2 Trainspotting, UK 2017

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Daily from Friday February 10th until Thursday February 16th

t2-trainspotting

This is a sequel twenty years on from the popular and well received original.  I suspect that the pleasures of watching the film will depend on how much you liked the 1996 title: this is clearly an exercise in retro-pleasure, even nostalgia. The original cast are all there; Ewan McGregor as Renton; Robert Carlyle as Begbie; Ewan Bremner as Spud; John Lee Miller as Simon. Kelly MacDonald also returns as Diane, but only in a brief walk-on part. She does tell Renton that the new romantic/sexual character Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) is ‘too young for you’.

The film also returns with familiar settings and tropes from the original: including toilets and the great Scottish outdoors. The new film also has the same certification as the earlier title, 18. However, from memory, I would say that this has slightly less violence and drug-taking and a little more sex.

The film uses extracts from the 1996 film, more frequently than I thought was justified or necessary. But it also shows the characters’ lives before the plot of 1996 and we get to see on-screen the meaning of the title of both films. At the same time it brings the story up-to-date in terms of changed mores and social settings. Thus we have Veronika who is from Bulgaria. And the ending of the film moves on from  that of 1990s Edinburgh.

The production values, including the cinematography and editing are very well done. However the film is circulating in  a 2K DCP which I think does less justice to the visual than the 35mm of the original. But probably as Renton proposes, ‘choose  Trainspotting 2′.