This week No.6 goes all-modern, with three current releases, albeit each of a very different hue. Your newsletter author may have to confine his drooling over the classics to the ‘coming soon’ paragraph at the end (but rest assured, it is a cracker), but these are three high-quality releases. We’re extremely pleased to have worked with the University of Portsmouth and Palestine Solidarity Campaign to bring The Teacher to our screen (don't forget our UNESCO-backed showing of Io Capitano on 28th November – head to our recent blog post for more details). Allow us also to big up the understated Cillian Murphy drama Small Things Like These and the excitement of the latest Almodovar (in English, no less) The Room Next Door. As new movies go, in the age of the multiplex, this is a trio of real gems.
Here is this week’s timetable. Bar opens at 6pm for the 7pm screenings.
The Teacher
Thursday 21st November at 7pm
The Teacher is a British-Palestinian co-production, written and directed by Farah Nabulsi, who won both the Oscar and BAFTA for her short film The Present, a charming personal tale set in the occupied West Bank. Continuing the approach of inter-weaving the personal and political (a la Bicycle Thieves), and of winning awards, The Teacher is the story of a Palestinian school teacher caught between his commitment to political resistance and his role as a father figure to one of his students. This engaging film is brought to you by the University of Portsmouth in collaboration with the local branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and is, in the Director’s words, "a story about a marginalised and underrepresented people."
Please Note: The film is in English and Arabic with subtitles.
Small Things Like These
Friday 22nd November at 7pm
Following the triumph of his portrayal as Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy returns to the big screen in Small Things Like These, a historical drama directed by Tim Mielants and adapted from the Claire Keegan novel. Set in a small Irish town and told mainly in flashbacks, Bill Furlong (Murphy) discovers sinister goings-on at a local convent, where young girls are being kept prisoner and forced to work in drudgery. Based on the notorious ‘Magdalene Laundries’, an asylum where so-called ‘fallen women’ were confined, the film has 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Telegraph notes that it is, "shouldered with hypnotic grace by a special Cillian Murphy", while Emily Watson’s duplicitous Mother Superior won her a Best Supporting Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival.
The Room Next Door
Saturday 23rd November at 7pm
As Pedro Almodovar’s latest film, we should be calling this La Habitacion de al Lado, but it’s also the great auteur’s English language debut, so instead it’s The Room Next Door. Starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as Almodovarian women, with customarily sterling support from John Turturro, the film retains a Spanish tinge via its supporting cast. Plot wise the film is right in the Director’s ballpark - two women meet after years and find their lives have taken very different paths, while the film’s title refers to a special request Swinton’s character makes of Moore. Peter Bradshaw notes in the Guardian that the American setting makes explicit Almodovar’s debt to Hitchcock in mixing humour and impending death, but also calls the film "extravagant and engrossing".
Up Next Week:
Small Things Like These (matinee), Io Capitano, Cult Classic: Point Break, Blitz
Coming Soon:
Cult cinema doesn’t come much more cult than the narrow field of surfing movies – Endless Summer, Crystal Voyager, Big Wednesday – but Hollywood caught the wave perfectly in 1991 when it integrated surfing into a compelling crime thriller to produce Point Break (not to be confused with the equally brilliant Point Blank). What makes the film so memorable, and such a firm cult favourite, is the face-off between two actors at the top of their game – Patrick Swayze as would-be mystical hang-tenner Bodhisattva (not his real name, we’re sure) and Keanu Reeves as the undercover FBI agent with the equally unlikely name of Johnny Utah. Is it an eclectic concoction of disparate metaphysical elements or a homo-erotic fashion shoot featuring two of Hollywood’s hunkiest? Decide for yourselves when we show Point Break on Friday 29th November.
