Youth - Sunday 27th March 5pm

The Keswick Film Club season concludes with Paolo Sorrentino's first (or possibly second) film in English, Youth.

Starring Michael Caine  (Ballinger) and Harvey Keitel (Boyle) as a composer and film director respectively, both men ponder a last hurrah as they reach the end of their careers.The reviewer from Seven Days loved it - — "How the hell did Paolo Sorrentino's latest not dominate awards season?  Spotlight and The Big Short are timely films. Youth is timeless.

The Italian writer-director's is easily on a par with his 2013 masterpiece The Great Beauty. That picture earned the Foreign Language Film Oscar, so it's particularly baffling that this sumptuous follow-up was overlooked and underestimated."

Uncut was also impressed both with the acting and the sumptuous cinematography -  "Beneath its luxurious surface, bubble themes of regret. The tone is wistful, as Ballinger and Boyle consider lost loves, lost time and encroaching old age. Boyle is working on a script – his “moral testament” – while Ballinger reflects on his wife’s sad decline into Altzheimer's. “Being young makes everything close," he says. "Being old makes everything far away."

"Caine is terrific – inscrutable and distant, but evidently there are depths behind his oversized horn-rimmed glasses. The sense of dry, wintry pathos is superb. It’s great to see him doing such good work, and you wish he'd do more of it. A late arriving cameo from Jane Fonda, as a fading Hollywood star, suddenly breaks the mood of languid introspection, but is in keeping with Sorrentino’s penchant for grotesque characters – and is, critically, very funny."

Some Like It Hot - Tuesday 22nd March 5pm

For our last classic this season, we go back to comedy with Billy Wilder's gender-buster Some Like It Hot. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are on the run from the mob disguised as women - Josephine and Daphne. They board a train as part of an all-women band, whose singer and ukulele player (naturally) is Marilyn Monroe. The inevitable love triangle is further complicated by yet more disguises, and a real millionaire who decides to chat up Daphne…

Voted by the American Film Institute in 2000 as the best comedy film ever, this has to be a film to watch over and over. As Roger Ebert said "Wilder's 1959 comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft".

Rams - Sunday 20th March 5pm

The Theatre By the Lake has obviously noticed that we are showing Rams this weekend as they start their showing of The Shepherd’s Life at the same time! Rams comes from Iceland and follows in the same hoof marks as Of Horses and Men we had in 2014. This time we meet two farming brothers, Kiddi and Gummi, who keep sheep on adjacent farms, but haven't spoken for 40 years...until now, when circumstances bring about a reconciliation (of sorts).

The film won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes and gets 97% from the Rotten Tomatoes critics. Expect some more wry Icelandic humour mixed with lots of country drama in... "A lovely film that will stay with you" – Linda Barnard, Toronto Star. "The movie is about collision: between stubborn farmers and the government veterinary board, between ancient ways and modern times, between two old, hardheaded brothers" – Ty Burr, Boston Globe.

The Crow's Egg - Sunday 13th March 5pm

After Court at the Festival we return to India, this time in the slums of Chennai, for The Crow's Egg.

Hollywood Reporter said: "In a shantytown wedged between the highway and the river, a pair of mischievous young brothers are known only by their strange nicknames: Big Crow's Egg and Little Crow's Egg, refer to their pastime of eating actual crows' eggs straight from the nest. With their father in jail and their mother holding down the fort, the boys are pretty much left to their own devices, trying to make a few Rupees salvaging coal from the nearby train tracks while otherwise imagining a better life for themselves – the kind they see on TV or through the fence of a rich kid's backyard.

But their lives suddenly do look better when mobsters sell the brothers' local playground to shady real estate developers, who open up a brand new franchise for a chain known as 'Pizza Spot'. Hoping to save up enough cash to sample their very first pie, the two Eggs engage in various shenanigans about town, including one where they offer their services to neighbouring men who are way too drunk to find their way home."

"The film itself is charged with feel-good moments, some of which are artificially maintained through slow-motion effects and nonstop music, others that are earned through a handful of clever screenwriting twists, not to mention endearing turns from the two lead cuties -  there's a dark honesty to what's being depicted that recalls Italian social comedies of the 1940's and 50's, making for a pizza that's tastier than it seems, and ultimately bittersweet."