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What's on at Greenwich Picturehouse - Vintage Sundays
Inspired by the serialised matinee action films Steven Spielberg loved as a child, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK became one of the defining action/adventure films of its day and remains a hugely enjoyable movie experience.
Harrison Ford, fresh from his propulsion to super-stardom through the STAR WARS series, embodied the reluctant yet capable adventurer Indiana Jones, a serious and scholarly archaeology professor who is hired by the US government to track down the Ark of the Covenant ahead of their Nazi rivals.
The action set-pieces, tongue-in-cheek humour, impressive production values and a sheer love of cinema make RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK an irresistibly enjoyable big-screen treat.
Paul thomas Anderson reunites with several of his Boogie Nights stars in this ensemble drama comprised of six interwoven stories dealing with parents, children, love and lonliness. An epic mosaic of several interrelated characters in search of happiness, forgiveness, and meaning in the San Fernando Valley.
Insurance man Walter Neff schemes the perfect murder with the beautiful wife of one of his clients: kill her husband and make off with the insurance money. But Walter's colleague - a shrewd insurance investigator - has a feeling that not all is as it seems with the widow's claim. A classic Film Noir thriller and a template for the genre.
Dixon Steele, a moody, volatile Hollywood screenwriter who's had his heyday, is accused of murdering a coat check girl from a showbiz restaurant. Laurel, an actress who lives in Dixon's apartment complex, provides an alibi for her neighbour when questioned by the police, and the pair start a relationship. But the chief of police is unconvinced of Dixon’s innocence and, after learning of his violent past, Laurel begins to question if she is putting herself in danger by staying with him.
Top-notch film noir, adapted from Hemingway's short story of robbery and betrayal. Two hit men walk into a diner asking for a man called "the Swede" (Burt Lancaster). When the killers find the Swede, he's expecting them and doesn't put up a fight. Since the Swede had a life insurance policy, an investigator (Edmond O'Brien), on a hunch, decides to look into the murder. As the Swede's past is laid bare, it comes to light that he was in love with a beautiful woman (Ava Gardner) who may have lured him into pulling off a bank robbery overseen by another man (Albert Dekker).
Beginning with perhaps the most celebrated tracking shot in history, Orson Welles’s bravura film noir is a shadowy tale of murder, malevolence and police corruption.
When a car bomb explodes on the US-Mexican border, Mike Vargas (Heston), a Mexican official investigating drug trafficking, is drawn into the case. Vargas is convinced that American cop Hank Quinlan (Welles) is planting evidence to incriminate the prime suspect, and he becomes obsessed with exposing Quinlan as a rotten apple. Quinlan then seeks revenge by conspiring with gangsters, who terrorise Vargas’s wife Susan (Leigh).
Welles gives a stunning performance as a man increasingly depleted of humanity, and his deliriously daring thriller with a dark emotional core is one of the greatest of its genre.
Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, an aging silent film queen, and William Holden as the struggling writer who is held in thrall by her madness, created two of the screen's most memorable characters in Sunset Boulevard.
Winner of three Academy Awards., director Billy Wilder's orchestration of the bizarre tale is a true cinematic classic. From the unforgettable opening sequence through the inevitable unfolding of tragic destiny, the film is the definitive statement on the dark and desperate side of Hollywood. Erich von Stroheim as Desmond's discoverer, ex-husband and butler, and Nancy Olson as the bright spot in unrelenting ominousness, are equally celebrated for their masterful performances.
On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone's hate and bigotry smolders and builds until it explodes into violence.
Robert Mulligan's classic adaptation of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the racially charged atmosphere of Macon County, Alabama in the 1930s, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a poignant coming-of-age story. It is told from the perspective of a young girl nicknamed Scout (Mary Badham) whose widowed father Atticus Finch (Peck), an attorney, decides to defend a black man (Brock Peters) charged with raping a white woman. But the bigoted townspeople would rather lynch the accused than try him, and they make life hellish for the lawyer, his daughter and his son Jem. While their father is in the throes of the trial, his bright, inquisitive children learn a hard and unforgettable lesson in justice, morality and prejudice, part of which requires overcoming their unfounded fear of their mysterious neighbour Boo Radley (a very young Robert Duvall).
A slow-burning masterwork of the early 1990s, this third feature by Charles Burnett is a singular piece of American mythmaking. In a towering performance, Danny Glover plays the enigmatic southern drifter Harry, a devilish charmer who turns up out of the blue on the South Central Los Angeles doorstep of his old friends. In short order, Harry’s presence seems to cast a chaotic spell on what appeared to be a peaceful household, exposing smoldering tensions between parents and children, tradition and change, virtue and temptation. Interweaving evocative strains of gospel and blues with rich, poetic-realist images, To Sleep with Anger is a sublimely stirring film from an autonomous artistic sensibility, a portrait of family resilience steeped in the traditions of African American mysticism and folklore.
Miyazaki’s superbly animated tale is considered to be one of the best-loved family films of all time. The story follows Satsuki (Hidaka) and Mei (Sakamoto), two young girls who find their new home is by a mystical forest inhabited by a menagerie of fantastical creatures called Totoros. They befriend O-Totoro, the biggest and eldest of them, and king of the forest. While the girls' mother lies sick in hospital, O-Totoro takes them on a magical adventure and helps them to understand the realities of life. Containing a powerful ecological theme, this is a lovingly crafted work of depth, import and beauty.
A fantasy adventure film unlike any other, Spirited Away tells the story of Chihiro, a capricious 10-year-old girl who believes the entire world should submit to her every whim. While en route to a new home, Chihiro and her parents stumble upon a mysterious tunnel, which leads them to a ghostly town. There, Chihiro’s parents greedily devour the buffet in an abandoned restaurant and unceremoniously turn into pigs as she looks on. They have unwittingly strayed into the Land of the Spirits, a world inhabited by ancient gods and magical beings, who holiday at a giant bath house run by the demonic sorceress, Yubaba. Chihiro finds an ally in the enigmatic Haku, who explains that in order to survive this strange and perilous world, Chihiro must make herself useful by working hard at the bath house. Chihiro renounces her laziness, her reason, her memories, even her name… This visionary work from legendary animator Miyazaki is a surreal fable and an enchanting fairytale.
Miyazaki’s eagerly awaited follow-up to SPIRITED AWAY is a freestyle adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel and a delight for all fans of the Japanese animators, Studio Ghibli. Cursed by the Witch of the Waste to take on the form of a 90-year-old woman, but unable to explain her predicament, Sophie soldiers on undeterred. She finds a job as a cleaner in a clanking walking castle with huge chicken legs, smokestacks and wings. Within, dandified wizard, Howl, his assistant and a talking fire-sprite use their sorcery as a military weapon, outwitting warmongering factions and battling inner demons. As if conceived by Hieronymous Bosch himself, the intricate castle design is the centrepiece of an enchanting animation that is brimming with imaginative treats from start to finish.
When Prince Ashitaka slays a raging boar god, he is wounded and becomes infected with the sickness that had sent the beast berserk, a malady stemming from humankind’s disharmony with nature. Set at the time of Japan’s transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era, Princess Mononoke is a morally complex tale that blends a fantasy quest with social comment for our times.
