After our fantastic festival , we return to 'business as usual' with Under the Shadow... or is it usual? As Rotten Tomatoes says, it "deftly blends seemingly disparate genres to deliver an effective chiller with timely themes and thought-provoking social subtext". What we are offering you is, then, a believable horror movie!
Set in Tehran, we follow Shideh as she deals with the problems of bringing up her child alone in the Iran-Iraq war, facing bombs, hunger and thirst plus male and religious intolerance. Under these pressures, is she imagining the noises in the night and the misplaced articles...or has something sinister arrived in her apartment block..? So, do expect some classic horror tricks, but well wrapped up in a story of our time - "The jump scares are solid, and earned. The suspense is genuine. And Under the Shadow never loses sight of the basic human reality of mother and child, trapped at home, encircled by a variety of evils, both real and imagined" – Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice.
So, when did you last watch a horror movie? Come along and enjoy yourself!
The weather may suggest otherwise but we're now on our summer break. Of course there will still be plenty of great films to see at the Alhambra and the film club will be back in September. Hopefully you'll consider joining, we haven't confirmed the prices yet but this year it was only £7 and saves you £1 for every film you see, including the festival.
Talking of the festival, the good news for us all was that Ian Payne took over the job of running it from Ann Martin after her 10 fantastic years as Director. We should thank both Ann for her amazing work AND Ian for be willing to take over - Thanks both! We do now need a new Club Secretary though. This is not too heavy a task, so I hope you will think about volunteering.
Don't forget we're on Twitter as @keswickfilm and will continue to tweet details of things coming up at the Alhambra throughout the year.
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."
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".
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.
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."
And so we come to weekend of the 17th Keswick Film Festival at last! This year we have 29 films – with themes from Jazz, Documentaries, Memory and Best of Fests. Nearly all of the films get the new F-Rated marking too with female directors, writers and/or significant female roles – how good that this has started in Ann Martin’s last year as Festival Director.
I am sure each of us would pick out different highlights from the films (take a look at the brochure here for full details) but three novel features are the launch of a book about the history of the Alhambra Cinema by our own Ian Payne, a talk from special effects guru Simon Hughes and some animation workshops from Sheryl Jenkins at Rheged.
For those who have been before, you will know we pride ourselves on being the 'friendly festival' – you won’t get lost in dozens of venues around a big city and you will always find someone willing to stop and help you or just to talk about how great that last film was! Keswick is still recovering from the recent flood (though our venues weren't hit, fortunately), so why not come along and show your support while you enjoy yourself?!
With the festival coming up this weekend, what better way to get in the mood than watching a classic at the Alhambra? And when the classic is the great Brief Encounter, it is a treat indeed. David Lean directed "One of cinema's classic love stories" (Kate Muir, Times) in 1945 and it still recognized as one of the best British films ever made.
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard play the two innocents from loveless marriages who meet by accident in a station cafe and find themselves falling gradually in love; but what future can there be?
Sunset Song this weekend brings us some great acting from Agyness Deyn and Peter Mullan, some beautiful photography and a classic story (from the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon), all brought together by the director, Terence Davies – who will be here in person to answer your questions.
Davies made his name with Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), going on to make 8 films so far. In Sunset Song he follows the life of Chris Guthrie, brought up by a very strict patriarch (Peter Mullan) on a Scottish farm, through her love for Ewan into the First World War. We'll leave any more introductions to Terence Davies himself, but, to quote Mark Kermode in the Observer "Davies's long-delayed passion project finally reaches our screens. It has been worth the wait" - don't miss your chance to see both the film and the director himself!
My Skinny Sister this Sunday comes from Sweden and follows the relationship between a 12 year old girl, just coming into her teens, and her older sister who is becoming famous as a figure skater. Suffering from prepubescent worries, Stella idolises her sister, only gradually realising that Katja is herself suffering from eating disorders. The film shows the relationship from Stella's viewpoint, allowing director Sanna Lenken to "Draw on personal experience of anorexia, (and) examine the conflicting web of intimacy and alienation that entraps both sisters and moves with humour and compassion toward resolutions born of honesty, insight and affection" – Mark Kermode, Observer.
This is also the first film we have shown since we 'affiliated' to a campaign to get more females into film; it wins the new F-Rated mark on all 3 grounds here; female director and writer and 'significant' female roles. There are very few film produced that hit any of these qualifications! (Note: next week's Sunset Song gets the F-Rating as well)
We are into Oscar nominated territory for Tangerines on Sunday, and visiting a country we rarely go to: Estonia. In a world full of conflicts and wars, it is surely timely for us to look at Ivo's attempts to rescue his tangerine crop whilst patching up two wounded soldiers from different sides of the Georgia/Abkhazia war and trying to stop them fighting each other, all at the same time. As Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, thinks the result is "a tremendous, old-fashioned anti-war film, by turns touching, moving and suspenseful... It is tremendous storytelling: engaging, intelligent, and with some lovely touches", we should be in for a great film too.
This Sunday we turn to the naturalistic, British drama scene with Hector, after the heavy Hard To Be A God and the laughter of A Night at the Opera last week. The great Peter Mullan is cast perfectly as Hector, a long-term itinerant who is happy with his lot wandering from town to town on the roads of Britain. As Mark Kermode says in the Observer "the spirit of Ken Loach hangs over this surprisingly warm and rewardingly aware tale of homelessness at Christmas".
Jake Gavin concentrates on showing Hector's life is normal, if only to him, and that he is a real person not the invisible beggar we so easily ignore. As he wanders between service stations waiting for lifts, we begin to understand what brought him on to the roads in the first place.
The classics proved popular last season so we are going to carry on. The theme this season is 'as chosen by members': all three were requested by you!
We kick off with this Marx Brothers classic from 1935. With all their usual mixture of anarchy and slick timing, this time they are organising the New York Opera as they try to get two friends hired at the expense of real talent.
Our film on Sunday, Hard to be a God – at 4.30pm, almost defies description. You can tell how difficult it is when the reviewers clutch at comparators to try and give a flavour of what you are going to see. Breughel, Bosch, Kafka and Monty Python and the Holy Grail all featured, although the latter comparison had nothing to do with humour.
All agreed that this is a true cinematic experience – a world perpetually locked in the Middle Ages: "a world beset with tyranny and factional wars between groups called 'Blacks' and 'Greys'. In the midst of this, what looks like an imperious baronial chieftain called Don Rumata, played by Leonid Yarmolnik, walks with relative impunity: this sovereignty is based on his claim to be descended from a god." – Peter Bradshaw
Roger Ebert seems to agree:
"not only an unforgettable individual masterpiece but probably one of the capital-G Great Films. You’ll need a strong stomach and another kind of endurance to sit through it, as it’s nearly three hours long and is more than a little oblique in its approach to narrative ...... but once it is over you know you’ve really had an experience. An experience very different from watching an average or even a very good conventional film."
Our film this week is Marshland, a Spanish film set in "the fabled wetlands region of Andalusia, home to a series of barren, yet forbiddingly beautiful landscapes quite unlike any other" (Herald Sun).
The story unfolds in 1980 as the country still faces the consequences of change after the death of Franco a few years earlier and the restoration of democracy. We follow two, newly-partnered plainclothes cops as they investigate the disappearance of two teenage sisters.
Australia's Herald Sun ranked the film as one of the best films of 2015, commenting upon the partnership between the two cops as ‘utterly mesmerising’ and the cinematography as ‘sublime’.
If the Aussies aren't your preferred arbiter of a good movie, then how about this from Empire?
"A gripping police procedural thriller from writer-director Alberto RodrÃguez with understated character (and political) depth as Spain’s fascist past looms over all the characters. RodrÃguez punctuates the film with stunning overhead landscape shots, delivers a burst of action in a nighttime car chase on marsh causeways and pays off with haunting ambiguity."
We finished our Autumn season yesterday with the blockbuster Sicario . Like the rest of the season, it too was blighted by the bad weather but 85 brave souls made it to the Alhambra to watch it. The feelings were mixed, but mainly favourable scoring 74%.
So we now take our Christmas Break until 10th January, when we are back with a French comedy drama La Famille Belier . Members will get their Spring brochures in the post soon and anyone else can pick up the new brochure at the Alhambra or TIC. It is also available to download and you can view the full programme or watch the following selection of trailers for more...
