On Wednesday, Drunken Angel, Akira Kurosawa’s portrait of two broken men amidst the rubble of postwar Japan, his first collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, screens at the Prince Charles Cinema on 35mm for season Gangsters Have Feelings Too.
Monday, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella’s sun-drenched thriller of identity theft, queerness and class, is at The Garden Cinema, opening season Stolen Identities. Hackney Wick’s Eastway Baths hosts Recurring Gestures, a silent programme boasting Combat de Boxe, The Telltale Heart, and Dulac’s Thèmes et variations, accompanied by a live improvised score. Strawberry and Chocolate, the only Cuban film ever nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, screens at the Barbican for Contemporary 75, introduced by curator Alex Davidson. Jarman’s Edward II plays at Reference Point bookshop, followed by a talk by costume designer Sandy Powell. The Cinema Museum presents Dragging into the Future, Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Festival’s shorts programme tracing drag’s history from London’s Drag King scene through to Canadian collective The Darlings. The Rio has Ganja and Hess introduced by Criterion’s Ashley Clark live from New York and filmmaker Dionne Edwards in the room.
Tuesday, Franco Piavoli’s The Blue Planet, a hypnotic, three-years-in-the-making symphony tracing the seasons and human evolution itself praised by Andrei Tarkovsky, continues Beyond Human Time at Close-Up. Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room screens on 35mm at BFI Southbank, introduced by author Cathi Unsworth. Fringe! brings New Queer Worlds to Genesis, four speculative shorts moving through Afrofuturism, fairytale and the supernatural to imagine queer and trans life beyond the present. Funeral Parade presents Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In at PCC. Sands Films Cinema Club hosts Chaplin’s Limelight, his bittersweet swan song to America, pairing him onscreen with Buster Keaton.
Wednesday, Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel, his first collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, following an alcoholic doctor and a tubercular yakuza, is at The Prince Charles Cinema opening season Gangsters Have Feelings Too. Fresh from Locarno, Kukla’s Fantasy screens at the Barbican for their returning Kino Bloc strand. Brando, Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton star in The Missouri Breaks, Arthur Penn’s eccentric 1976 Western at BFI Southbank. At the Rio, the safe word is “spoilers” — with Little White Lies presenting Celluloid Surprise #2, a mystery screening of a much loved cult classic on 35mm. Down in the basement of Dalston Superstore TRANSMISSIONS film club pairs Bug with Cronenberg short The Nest.
Thursday, Dream Emulator presents Beneath the Blistered Moon, a Lovecraftian combination rave and shorts programme of machinima, animation and digital-culture cosmic horror at the Rio. Anthony Asquith’s Underground, a 1928 silent set on London’s tube platforms and streets, screens with a live piano score from John Sweeney at Good Shepherd Studios. Bergman’s Wild Strawberries plays at The Castle on 16mm for Cine Real x Contemporary 75 collab. Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso is at The Cinema Museum for season Italy Through Its Cinema. Frowzy Films, a new strand celebrating microbudget genre cinema, opens with Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Friday, Closely Observed Trains, Jiří Menzel’s Oscar-winning tale of a bumbling apprentice’s sexual awakening at a sleepy railway depot in occupied Czechoslovakia is at The Garden Cinema. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, following a wide-eyed student through 1990s Paris’s golden-age electronic club scene across years and heartbreaks, is at BFI Southbank. Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Festival continues with Intimate Meetings, a shorts programme of chance encounters, fleeting hookups and missed connections at Genesis Cinema.
Saturday, Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga plays at BFI Southbank. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is at Close-Up. Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s documentary on the chaos behind Fitzcarraldo, screens at The Garden Cinema. Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? plays at The Nickel. Fringe! fest presents Video Home Self, a shorts programme using home-video aesthetics and archival media to explore memory, family and selfhood, at the Museum of the Home.
Sunday, Fringe! x TGirlsonFilm presents Eva Man, a newly restored Eurospy softcore trans-exploitation romp, starring Eva Robin’s and Ajita Wilson at Genesis Cinema. Cine-Real presents The Big Sleep on 16mm at The Castle Cinema. Play Misty for Me is at The Nickel. Flaming Creatures, Jack Smith’s classic of queer underground cinema screens at The Cinema Museum, another projection from 16mm.
Until next time