Tuesday 23 July @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm
Based on the case that helped end the death penalty in Britain, Richard Attenbrough is chilling as serial killer John Christie.
John Hurt and Judy Geeson play his unfortunate neighbours at the notorious Notting Hill address.
Related Links
Why did we pick it?
Following In A Lonely Place, another film about a less than desirable neighbour.
Tuesday 9 July @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm
“Ray wrings plenty of sweat from the Hitchcockian premise, and Bogart outdoes himself as a man mid-breakdown.” - Empire
A potentially violent screenwriter is a murder suspect until his lovely neighbor clears him. But she begins to have doubts...
Related Links
Tuesday 25 June @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm
"Stands up extraordinarily well: mostly because of two outstanding central performances, Gary Oldman as the talented, blase Orton, and Alfred Molina as his thwarted, Hancock-esque murderer Kenneth Halliwell." Andrew Pulver, Guardian
The story of the spectacular life and violent death of British playwright Joe Orton at the hands of his jealous lover, Kenneth Halliwell. Staring Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett.
Watch trailer >>
Related Links
Do too many authors spoil the book? - Guardian blog post by Wayne inspired by Orton and Halliwell
A Genius Like Us - watch great BBC Arena doc on Joe Orton in full on YouTube
Why Did We Pick It?
Following Heavenly Creatures another fact-based drama in which an overly-intense relationships has fatal consequences.
Tuesday 11 June 8pm @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm
"Taut, clever, and fronted with two excellent performances, this is a clever choice for Jackson's first step into mainstream filmmaking." - Empire
Tuesday 28 May @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm
“A classic Minnelli musical, Brigadoon is an explicit statement about (and partial criticism of) the notion that an artist only lives through his art, preferring its reality to the world's.” -Time Out
While on a hunting trip in Scotland, two Americans (Gene Kelly & Van Johnson) become lost in the woodland and stumble across Brigadoon: a miraculous village that rises out of the mists every hundred years for just a single day.
Watch the trailer >>
Tuesday 14 May @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm
“Demonstrates Forsyth's uncanny ability for making an audience sense that something magical is going on, even if that something isn't easily explained”. - Janet Maslin, New York Times
An American oil tycoon (Burt Lancaster) decides to buy up a Scottish beach in order to build a refinery - to a decidedly mixed response from the inhabitants.
In addition to Lanacster you'll also spot many familar faces in the cast including Peter Capaldi, Fulton Mackay, John Gordon Sinclair, Jenny Seagrove and Denis Lawson.
Filmed in a variety of beautiful Scottish locations and featuring a memorable score by Mark Knopfler, Local Hero is an utterly charming, and surprising, fish-out-of-water story.
Watch the trailer >>
Tuesday 23 April @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm
“Though its plot contains much that's new, The Long Good Friday is a swift, sharp-edged gangster story in a classic mold.” - New York Times
London gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) refuses to let anything as inconvenient as seeing his organisation decimated by a series of brutal murders interfere with his dreams of making a big time deal with American Mafia. Helen Mirren also stars as a distinctly British femme fatale.
Watch the trailer >>
Related Link
Tuesday 30 April @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm*
* Rescheduled from 23 April.
"A movie that combines lurid melodrama with vast improbabilities, sexy soap opera with heartfelt romance, and cheerful satire with heedless raunch." - Roger Ebert
An additional screening in tribute to Spanish director Bigas Luna who died on on 6 April.
Class, sex, and food are the obsessions of this comedy drama that not only inspired the name of the tapas restaurant on Parkway in Camden Town, it also brought Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem to international audiences for the first time.
In a small town in Spain's arid Monegros region, young underwear factory executive Jose Luis (Jordi Molla) falls in love with the beautiful Silvia (Penelope Cruz), a worker on the shop floor.
When Silvia becomes pregnant, Jose Luis wants to marry her, but his mother Conchita (Stefania Sandrelli), the factory owner, is appalled by the thought of her son marrying a working-class girl, especially one who is the daughter of a prostitute, Carmen (Anna Galiena).
So Conchita hatches a scheme to woo Silvia away from her son by hiring handsome model Raul (Javier Bardem) to seduce the girl. A ham factory employee with aspirations to become a bullfighter, Raul's charms work their magic on both Silvia and Conchita, much to the dismay of Jose Luis, who seeks comfort in the arms of his sometime lover, Carmen.
Related Links
Tuesday 2 April @ The Lord Palmerston 8pm
"A miraculously literate script whose every line deservedly became a quotable classic and the film boasts a once-in-a-lifetime combination of perfect performances from Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant". - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
As a tribute to Richard Griffiths, who sadly died on Friday 29 March, we are showing the great British comedy in which he so memorably starred.
Watch the trailer >>
Tuesday 16 April, 8pm @ The Lord Palmerston*
*postponed from 2 April due to Richard Griffiths tribute screening of Withnail & I.
“You can see the joy with which these actors get their teeth into these great lines, after living through movies in which flat dialogue serves only to advance the story.” - Roger Ebert
David Mamet’s most quotable play about the travails of a group of Chicago real-estate salesman who start to feel the pressure when the bosses send in a manager who threatens all but the top two with the sack.
An all-star cast includes an Oscar-nominated Al Pacino, as well as Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce.
Watch the trailer >>
Related Links
Why Glengarry Glen Ross' Alec Baldwin scene is so unusual - AV Club article
Tuesday 19 March 8pm at The Star, 47 Chester Road, N19 5DF
“Not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary.” - Vincent Canby, New York Times
Alfred Hitchcock’s first colour film was adapted from Patrick Hamilton's play Rope's End by no less than Hume Cronyn.
Their heads filled with Nietzschean philosophy by their kindly professor James Stewart, two young men strangle their "inferior" classmate just for the thrill of it. The pair hide the body in their apartment, and invite his friends and family to a dinner party as a means to challenge the "perfection" of their crime.
Rope is one of Hitchcock's most experimental movies. Aside from the establishing shot the film takes place in a single room. Each shot runs up to 10 minutes in length and are edited to give the impression that the film was actually filmed in a single take.
Watch the trailer >>
Related Links
Hitchcock's Rope: A Stunt Behold - Vincent Canby's 1984 review from the New York Times
Why Did We Pick It?
Michel in Pickpocket justifies his crimes by defining himself as one of Friedrich Nietzsche's “supermen”. In Rope Jimmy Stewart's Professor Cadell inspires his muderous students with Nietzschean philosophy.
Tuesday 5 March 8pm at The Star, 47 Chester Road, N19 5DF
“Ultimately inexplicable, this concentrated, elliptical, economical movie is an experience that never loses its strangeness.” - J Hoberman, Village Voice
Robert Bresson’s incomparable tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsion grows, however, so too does his fear that his luck is about to run out. Tautly choreographed and crafted in Bresson’s inimitable style, Pickpocket reveals a master director at the height of his powers.
Watch the trailer >>
Why Did We Pick It?
Martin LaSalle, who plays Michel in Pickpocket, was a non-professional actor. As was Bruno S in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.
Tuesday 19 February 8pm
“A lyrical film about the least lyrical of men”. - Roger Ebert
The Bavarian director Werner Herzog is one of the greats. He made his first feature in 1968 and is still making brilliant films today.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was released in 1974 and is Herzog’s third feature film after the brilliantly titled Even Dwarfs Started Small and Aguirre: Wrath of God (which lost out to Sweet Smell of Success in our vote of films about men with ‘psychotic egos’).
There are lots of incredible things about this film but the most remarkable is its lead actor Bruno S who plays Kaspar Hauser. Bruno never knew his father, his mother was prostitute and at the age of three he was sent to an institution for children with learning difficulties. After that, with almost no education, he spent the next 23 years in various institutions and prisons.
Herzog discovered Bruno after seeing him in a documentary about his life. At the time he was street musician and forklift truck driver.
He says, “Bruno was so unbelievably good on screen. He has such depth and power, and he moves me so deeply like no other actor in the world.”
If you’re taken by Bruno in this film then you really must watch Stroszek, his second collaboration with Herzog.
If there are any Krautrock fans in the audience Florian Fricke who was in the band Popul Vuh, played with Tangerine Dream plays a pianist in the film.
In The AV Club’s Werner Herzog primer they list The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser under ‘Advanced Studies’ and I think it probably is the most challenging film we’ve shown so far.
The film is based on a true story. In 1828 a young man suddenly appeared in Nuremberg in barely able to speak or walk and claiming to have spent his entire life held captive in a dungeon.
So what’s the film actually about? This is what Herzog says about The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser in Paul Cronin’s book Herzog on Herzog.
“What really interested me was the story of someone who had not been influenced or contaminated in any way by society and outside forces, someone with no notion of anything whatsoever...Kaspar was, in the most purest sense, a being without culture, language and civilisation, an almost primeval human being.
As such he suffered greatly from his contact with people and society. Not an idiot, rather a saint like Joan of Arc, something that I feel really comes in Bruno’s performance. So for me the story of this boy is really almost a science fiction tale that takes in the age-old idea of aliens who arrive on our planet... They have no human and social conditioning whatsoever and walk around confused and amazed.
The real question is perhaps anthropological: what happens to a man who has crashed on to our planet with no education and no culture? What does he feel? What does he see? What must a tree or a horse look to such an arrival? And how will he be treated?”
You'll have to watch the film to find out.
Watch the trailer >>
Why Did We Pick It?
As in Zelig another film in which the cenrtral character is considered a freak by society.
Related Links
Your Next Five Werner Herzog Films - Nigel's picks of what to watch after Kaspar Hauser
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser on IMDb
Werner Herzog | AV Club Primer - excellent intro to the great man's work
Valentine's Day Special - Thursday 14 February 9pm
"A ravishing, romantic lark brimming over with style, intelligence and flashing wit". - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
A Valentine's Day Special at The Lord Palmerston - a delicious meal followed by a classic romantic movie. Contact the pub to book a table for dinner or just along to watch the film at 9pm.
Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning? It's the classic set-up to the most enduring romantic comedy of the last 30 years.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal play the two college friends whose story is told via a series of chance encounters in New York City over a dozen or so years.
Nora Ephron, who died last year, wrote the cracking script and the film not only features the greatest ever scene set in a diner but also terrific supporting parts for Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby.
Watch thne trailer >>
Related Links
Five things When Harry Met Sally says about relationships - BBC News Online article
Tuesday 5 February 8pm
“A masterpiece: a brilliant, even passionate historical pastiche, a superbly pregnant meditation on American society and individuality, and an eerie fantasy that will live in your dreams.” - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
One of Woody’s early, funny films is a fake documentary about the life of human chameleon Leonard Zelig, a man who becomes a celebrity in the 1920s due to his ability to look and act like whoever is around him. These memorably include James Cagney, Woodrow Wilson and Adolf Hitler.
Watch the trailer >>
Why Did We Pick It?
Following Tootsie an even more remarkable transformation
Related Links
Zelig (Guardian) - Peter Bradshaw's five-star review
Tuesday 22 January 8pm
“The tone is quick-witted and appealing, with some of the smartest dialogue this side of Billy Wilder...” - Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Watch the trailer >>
Related Links
Tootsie - Mixed Messages - 1983 article critcsiing the film's "implicit sexism and the mixed 'feminist' message"
Dialogue on Film - Dustin Hoffman - 1983 interview in which Hoffman talks at length about Tootsie
Why Did We Pick It?
Another film about fame and the small screen following on from The King of Comedy.
Tuesday 8 January 2013 8pm
"Sometimes manic to the edge of lunacy and, along the way, terrifying." - Vincent Canby, New York Times
A Scorsese/De Niro partnership that presents a character that, in many respects, is as frightening as Travis Bickle. Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) is a wannabe stand-up comic who resorts to stalking his idol, talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), in effort to make the big-time. The dark satire was Scorsese's third box office flop in a row and he still seldom talks about it despite its renewed status as a cult classic.
Watch the trailer >>
Watch Mark Kermode explain why he loves the film >>
Tuesday 27 November 8pm
"All the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage". - Variety (1971)
The most surprising screen couple in Hollywood history? Bud Cort is a death-obsessed teenager whose life and world-view are forever changed when he meets a lively septuagenarian (Ruth Gordon).
Harold and Maude is dark comedy like no other and despite the poor reviews and zero box office success it's now rightly regarded as a classic.
Watch the trailer >>
Why Did We Pick It?
Following Midnight Cowboy's on-screen odd couple, the oddest of all time?
Tuesday 6 November 8pm
“This is a nearly flawless little film, a cheerful nightmare that knows just where it wants to go and uses precisely calibrated comic effects to get there.” – Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
In the AV Club’s recent list of the best films of the 90s Election came in at 28 and in 2010 the Guardian placed it at number 14 in its list of the 25 best comedies of all time.
Reese Witherspoon is terrific as the go-getting Tracy Flick who’ll stop at nothing to get elected as High School president. Matthew Broderick is equally brilliant as the teacher who has other plans.
Election was released while Bill Clinton was still in the White House but it’s not hard to imagine Tracy Flick getting a job with George W Bush. In fact, this is probably not too far removed a vision from what Sarah Palin was like in High School.
Election is Alexander Payne’s second feature, following the seldom-seen Citizen Ruth. He went to greater acclaim as the director About Schmidt, Sideways and the Oscar-winning The Descendants.
Watch the trailer >>
Nigel’s walking tours
Wayne’s lives in literature
Wayne’s book dedications Wayne’s greetings cards
