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Director: Janus Metz Pedersen.
Starring: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny. Sweden 2017. 108 mins. English and Swedish with English subtitles.
Björn Borg (Gudnason) has the tennis world at his feet. Ranked number one and playing at the top of his game, the calm, ascetic Swede is on the verge of a record-breaking fifth consecutive Wimbledon Championship. Only one man stands in his way – John McEnroe (LaBeouf), a young American firebrand with a swagger brazen enough to unsettle even Borg’s icy composure. As the final approaches, both men delve into their formative memories to find the strength and answers they’ll need to triumph on the hallowed turf of SW19. As much a character study as a sports movie, Borg Vs. McEnroe reveals the personalities and inner demons that would shape one of the sporting world’s most riveting dramas – the thrilling high point of a compelling rivalry.
Director: Matthew Vaughn.
Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Julianne Moore. UK/USA 2017. 141 mins.
Three years ago Kingsman: Secret Service, a spy action-comedy about ‘Kingsman’, an independent, international intelligence agency was a smash hit, raking in over $414 million at the global box office. In this sequel, again written/directed by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class), special agent ‘Eggsy’ (Egerton), the council estate kid, chosen as a recruit for this mysterious organisation, is reunited with his pin-striped mentor (Firth) and they head over the Pond to meet their opposite numbers at ‘Statesman’. A spangly cast includes Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Mark Strong, Jeff Bridges and Elton John while Oscar-winner Julianne Moore gets to flex her baddie muscles as Poppy, a notorious criminal mastermind, whose personal bodyguard is the inimitable Vinnie Jones. Once again the agents’ wits and nerve are tested to the limit in this cheeky, ever-so-British, pastiche-Bond caper.
Director: Darren Aronofsky.
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer. USA 2017. 121 mins.
Revisiting the psycho-chiller genre he mined so vividly in his 1998 feature debut Pi and 2010’s Oscar-winning Black Swan, writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s latest, exceedingly dark drama catapults Jennifer Lawrence into wildly different territory to her Hunger Games, X-Men and David Russell-directed roles (Joy, American Hustle). Lawrence plays one half of an apparently happy young couple – Javier Bardem being the slightly sinister other – whose tranquil existence is disrupted in terrifying fashion by some unexpected visitors (a spookily passive-aggressive Ed Harris and, continuing her impressive return to big screen stardom, Michelle Pfeiffer). Unlocking dark secrets is Aronofsky’s speciality, and with regular cinematographer Matthew Libatique and Hunger Games’ brilliant production designer Philip Messina on board, Mother! delivers plenty more of the same.
Director: Stephen Frears.
Starring: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard. UK/USA 2017. 112 mins.
The year is 1887, and the British Empire is celebrating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. A young Indian clerk, Abdul Karim (Fazal), travels to England to present the monarch with a ceremonial coin. “Whatever you do, you must not look at Her Majesty,” he is told. But he does. And he smiles. And so begins one of the unlikeliest friendships in history. As the Queen (Dench) questions the constrictions of her long-held position, she forms a strong bond with her newest servant. Their devoted alliance provokes outrage and conspiracy within the Royal Household, but it also rejuvenates the cosseted ruler, who begins to see a changing world through new eyes. A lavish, heartfelt period drama with wit and charm, Victoria And Abdul allows us to peek beyond the portraits and imagine the hardships – and joys – of being the figurehead of the last true empire.
Director: Andrés Muschietti.
Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard. USA 2017. 135 mins.
Afraid of clowns? You might want to skip this one. All is not well in the town of Derry. Children are vanishing. A trail of cast-off toys snakes through the sewers. Something lurks in the labyrinth below. It preys on the phobias of its victims. It changes shape to become what they fear. It masquerades as a clown to ensnare young children, dangling balloons to lure them to its lair. Seven young misfits unite to confront it, but this evil bozo is the one hunting them. It’s an ancient, monstrous, bloodthirsty demon – and it’s all their worst nightmares and terrors at once. Having scared readers witless for over three decades, Stephen King’s classic horror novel finally gets the big-screen treatment, and it’s all set to make cinema audiences leap out of their skin.
Director: Taylor Sheridan.
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Jon Bernthal. UK/Canada/USA 2017. 107 mins.
Best known for his screenplays for heart-thumping thriller Sicario and gritty neo-western Hell Or High Water, Taylor Sheridan steps behind the camera for Wind River – an intelligent crime drama set on the rugged, snow-covered plains of Wyoming. After wildlife officer Cory Lambert (Renner, The Hurt Locker) discovers a body while tracking mountain lions in the Wind River Indian Reservation, the FBI sends in rookie agent Jane Banner (Olsen) to lead the investigation. Unprepared for the unforgiving, inhospitable terrain, she employs the reluctant Lambert as a tracker, and the two venture into a world ravaged by the elements to hunt a very different kind of predator. Wind River is a stark look at life on the edge of an imposing wilderness, where the rule of law is eclipsed by the laws of nature.
Director: Francis Lee.
Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart. UK 2017. 105 mins.
Johnny Saxby (O’Connor) works long hours on his family’s remote farm in the north of England. He numbs the daily frustration of his lonely existence with nightly binge drinking at the local pub and casual sex. But when a handsome Romanian migrant worker (Secareanu) arrives to take up temporary work on the family farm, Johnny suddenly finds himself dealing with emotions he has never felt before. As they begin working closely together during lambing season, an intense relationship forms – one that could change Johnny’s life forever. Captivating and broodingly beautiful, God’s Own Country is the award-winning debut feature from writer-director Francis Lee. Set in the heart of rural Yorkshire, this is a bracingly openhearted romantic story marked by stunning lead performances.
Dreamers, Lovers, Legends: The true story of the Argentine dancers who made the tango famous.
Written and directed by Germán Kral (The Last Applause, Música Cubana) and executive produced by Wim Wenders (Pina, Buena Vista Social Club), OUR LAST TANGO tells the life and love story of Argentina's most celebrated tango dancers Maria Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes. They met as teenagers and danced together for nearly fifty years, becoming international stars and making the Argentine tango famous around the world before a painful separation tore them apart.
In German Kral´s film the virtuosos reunite to open up about their journey, recreating incredible tango-choreographies with the help of a group of young dancers from Buenos Aires including acclaimed dancer Pablo Verón (The Tango Lesson).
15.10Ad Free: No advertisements will play ahead of this screening. You are recommended to arrive promptly.
Picturehouse Docs: Bringing you the best in new and topical documentaries covering issues around the world.
Director: Carol Salter. Featuring: Ying Ling. UK 2017. 72 mins.
Seventeen-year-old Ying Ling is away from home for the first time and training to become a mortician at one of China’s largest funeral homes. Despite her fear of ghosts and dead bodies, she learns the spa rituals; cleaning and massaging the corpses while the grieving families look on.
Ying Ling finds solace from her new job through her playful banter with another young mortician. Together, they spend their time off talking about their hopes, fears and plans for the future. As one of many rural-to-urban teenagers working to support her family, Ying Ling must immerse herself unusual and grinding world of China’s industrialisation of mortality.
Almost Heaven is a rites of passage that is both humorous and tender that also confronts a subject we tend to avoid.
17.20Ad Free: No advertisements will play ahead of this screening. You are recommended to arrive promptly.
Picturehouse Docs: Bringing you the best in new and topical documentaries covering issues around the world.
Director: James Mangold.
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen. USA 2017. 137 mins.
In 2029, mutants have been all but wiped out. The world-weary Logan has gone into hiding. But when a young girl with similar powers to his own appears, with a sinister organisation not far behind, he reluctantly agrees to take her to a refuge near the Canadian border. It’s a long road to safety, but one that brings deliverance for both of them.
Not since The Dark Knight has a superhero film subverted the genre code as powerfully as Logan. Director James Mangold shuns the capes and CGI for something altogether more human: a gritty, neo-Western road movie that slowly sinks its claws into the heartstrings and doesn’t let go.
In the new black-and-white cut, Logan’s noir and Western qualities shine. The monochrome visuals are fitting for a film with such a strong nostalgic undertow, and that’s why Logan Noir is a perfect companion piece to the colour release that won over audiences earlier this year.
Director: Janus Metz Pedersen.
Starring: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny. Sweden 2017. 108 mins. English and Swedish with English subtitles.
Björn Borg (Gudnason) has the tennis world at his feet. Ranked number one and playing at the top of his game, the calm, ascetic Swede is on the verge of a record-breaking fifth consecutive Wimbledon Championship. Only one man stands in his way – John McEnroe (LaBeouf), a young American firebrand with a swagger brazen enough to unsettle even Borg’s icy composure. As the final approaches, both men delve into their formative memories to find the strength and answers they’ll need to triumph on the hallowed turf of SW19. As much a character study as a sports movie, Borg Vs. McEnroe reveals the personalities and inner demons that would shape one of the sporting world’s most riveting dramas – the thrilling high point of a compelling rivalry.
Director: Matthew Vaughn.
Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Julianne Moore. UK/USA 2017. 141 mins.
Three years ago Kingsman: Secret Service, a spy action-comedy about ‘Kingsman’, an independent, international intelligence agency was a smash hit, raking in over $414 million at the global box office. In this sequel, again written/directed by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class), special agent ‘Eggsy’ (Egerton), the council estate kid, chosen as a recruit for this mysterious organisation, is reunited with his pin-striped mentor (Firth) and they head over the Pond to meet their opposite numbers at ‘Statesman’. A spangly cast includes Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Mark Strong, Jeff Bridges and Elton John while Oscar-winner Julianne Moore gets to flex her baddie muscles as Poppy, a notorious criminal mastermind, whose personal bodyguard is the inimitable Vinnie Jones. Once again the agents’ wits and nerve are tested to the limit in this cheeky, ever-so-British, pastiche-Bond caper.
Director: Darren Aronofsky.
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer. USA 2017. 121 mins.
Revisiting the psycho-chiller genre he mined so vividly in his 1998 feature debut Pi and 2010’s Oscar-winning Black Swan, writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s latest, exceedingly dark drama catapults Jennifer Lawrence into wildly different territory to her Hunger Games, X-Men and David Russell-directed roles (Joy, American Hustle). Lawrence plays one half of an apparently happy young couple – Javier Bardem being the slightly sinister other – whose tranquil existence is disrupted in terrifying fashion by some unexpected visitors (a spookily passive-aggressive Ed Harris and, continuing her impressive return to big screen stardom, Michelle Pfeiffer). Unlocking dark secrets is Aronofsky’s speciality, and with regular cinematographer Matthew Libatique and Hunger Games’ brilliant production designer Philip Messina on board, Mother! delivers plenty more of the same.
Director: Stephen Frears.
Starring: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard. UK/USA 2017. 112 mins.
The year is 1887, and the British Empire is celebrating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. A young Indian clerk, Abdul Karim (Fazal), travels to England to present the monarch with a ceremonial coin. “Whatever you do, you must not look at Her Majesty,” he is told. But he does. And he smiles. And so begins one of the unlikeliest friendships in history. As the Queen (Dench) questions the constrictions of her long-held position, she forms a strong bond with her newest servant. Their devoted alliance provokes outrage and conspiracy within the Royal Household, but it also rejuvenates the cosseted ruler, who begins to see a changing world through new eyes. A lavish, heartfelt period drama with wit and charm, Victoria And Abdul allows us to peek beyond the portraits and imagine the hardships – and joys – of being the figurehead of the last true empire.
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director David Shulman and Mark Kermode.
During his short life, Jean-Michel Basquiat took the 1980s art world by storm. The work of this former downtown New York graffiti artist is now considered alongside stars of twentieth-century painting such as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol.
This BBC feature-length documentary includes exclusive interviews with Basquiat’s sisters – Lisane and Jeanine Basquiat – who have never before talked about their brother and his art for a TV documentary. Other contributors include major art dealers, such as Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, and Mary Boone, who exhibited Basquiat as his reputation rocketed to art world fame.
With striking candour, Basquiat's most intimate friends, lovers and fellow artists tell of a handsome and charismatic personality. The beating heart of this documentary is his work, and the ways in which it embodied and reflected breakthroughs in music, poetry, and modern art.
Basquiat: Rage To Riches (1x90) was commissioned by the BBC. It is executive produced by Janet Lee and the producer/director is David Shulman for BBC Studios.
Director: Andrés Muschietti.
Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard. USA 2017. 135 mins.
Afraid of clowns? You might want to skip this one. All is not well in the town of Derry. Children are vanishing. A trail of cast-off toys snakes through the sewers. Something lurks in the labyrinth below. It preys on the phobias of its victims. It changes shape to become what they fear. It masquerades as a clown to ensnare young children, dangling balloons to lure them to its lair. Seven young misfits unite to confront it, but this evil bozo is the one hunting them. It’s an ancient, monstrous, bloodthirsty demon – and it’s all their worst nightmares and terrors at once. Having scared readers witless for over three decades, Stephen King’s classic horror novel finally gets the big-screen treatment, and it’s all set to make cinema audiences leap out of their skin.
Director: Taylor Sheridan.
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Jon Bernthal. UK/Canada/USA 2017. 107 mins.
Best known for his screenplays for heart-thumping thriller Sicario and gritty neo-western Hell Or High Water, Taylor Sheridan steps behind the camera for Wind River – an intelligent crime drama set on the rugged, snow-covered plains of Wyoming. After wildlife officer Cory Lambert (Renner, The Hurt Locker) discovers a body while tracking mountain lions in the Wind River Indian Reservation, the FBI sends in rookie agent Jane Banner (Olsen) to lead the investigation. Unprepared for the unforgiving, inhospitable terrain, she employs the reluctant Lambert as a tracker, and the two venture into a world ravaged by the elements to hunt a very different kind of predator. Wind River is a stark look at life on the edge of an imposing wilderness, where the rule of law is eclipsed by the laws of nature.
Director: Francis Lee.
Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart. UK 2017. 105 mins.
Johnny Saxby (O’Connor) works long hours on his family’s remote farm in the north of England. He numbs the daily frustration of his lonely existence with nightly binge drinking at the local pub and casual sex. But when a handsome Romanian migrant worker (Secareanu) arrives to take up temporary work on the family farm, Johnny suddenly finds himself dealing with emotions he has never felt before. As they begin working closely together during lambing season, an intense relationship forms – one that could change Johnny’s life forever. Captivating and broodingly beautiful, God’s Own Country is the award-winning debut feature from writer-director Francis Lee. Set in the heart of rural Yorkshire, this is a bracingly openhearted romantic story marked by stunning lead performances.
Dreamers, Lovers, Legends: The true story of the Argentine dancers who made the tango famous.
Written and directed by Germán Kral (The Last Applause, Música Cubana) and executive produced by Wim Wenders (Pina, Buena Vista Social Club), OUR LAST TANGO tells the life and love story of Argentina's most celebrated tango dancers Maria Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes. They met as teenagers and danced together for nearly fifty years, becoming international stars and making the Argentine tango famous around the world before a painful separation tore them apart.
In German Kral´s film the virtuosos reunite to open up about their journey, recreating incredible tango-choreographies with the help of a group of young dancers from Buenos Aires including acclaimed dancer Pablo Verón (The Tango Lesson).
15.00Ad Free: No advertisements will play ahead of this screening. You are recommended to arrive promptly.
Picturehouse Docs: Bringing you the best in new and topical documentaries covering issues around the world.
Select:
21.00Ad Free: No advertisements will play ahead of this screening. You are recommended to arrive promptly.
Picturehouse Docs: Bringing you the best in new and topical documentaries covering issues around the world.
Director: Carol Salter. Featuring: Ying Ling. UK 2017. 72 mins.
Seventeen-year-old Ying Ling is away from home for the first time and training to become a mortician at one of China’s largest funeral homes. Despite her fear of ghosts and dead bodies, she learns the spa rituals; cleaning and massaging the corpses while the grieving families look on.
Ying Ling finds solace from her new job through her playful banter with another young mortician. Together, they spend their time off talking about their hopes, fears and plans for the future. As one of many rural-to-urban teenagers working to support her family, Ying Ling must immerse herself unusual and grinding world of China’s industrialisation of mortality.
Almost Heaven is a rites of passage that is both humorous and tender that also confronts a subject we tend to avoid.
17.10Ad Free: No advertisements will play ahead of this screening. You are recommended to arrive promptly.
Picturehouse Docs: Bringing you the best in new and topical documentaries covering issues around the world.
Step is the real-life story of a girls’ high-school step team set against the backdrop of social unrest in the troubled city of Baltimore. These young women learn to laugh, love and thrive – on and off the stage – even when the world seems to work against them. Empowered by their teachers, teammates, counsellors, coaches and families, they chase their ultimate dreams – to win a step championship and to be accepted into college. This all-female school is reshaping the futures of its students’ lives: they’ve made it their goal to have every senior student graduate from college, many of whom will be the first in their family to do so. Deeply insightful and emotionally inspiring, Step embodies the true meaning of sisterhood through a story of courageous young women worth cheering for.
The Discover Tuesdays screening on Sept 26 will screen accompanied by a Random Acts short.
Sapeur Showdown
Two rival sapeur factions favour fashion over violence in this vibrant dance short.
19.00Discover Tuesdays: Discover stunning cinema. Whether it's a cult classic, an art-house gem or a riveting documentary, there will always be a chance to see something different and brilliant in our weekly slot.
Picturehouse Docs: Bringing you the best in new and topical documentaries covering issues around the world.
Director: Janus Metz Pedersen.
Starring: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny. Sweden 2017. 108 mins. English and Swedish with English subtitles.
Björn Borg (Gudnason) has the tennis world at his feet. Ranked number one and playing at the top of his game, the calm, ascetic Swede is on the verge of a record-breaking fifth consecutive Wimbledon Championship. Only one man stands in his way – John McEnroe (LaBeouf), a young American firebrand with a swagger brazen enough to unsettle even Borg’s icy composure. As the final approaches, both men delve into their formative memories to find the strength and answers they’ll need to triumph on the hallowed turf of SW19. As much a character study as a sports movie, Borg Vs. McEnroe reveals the personalities and inner demons that would shape one of the sporting world’s most riveting dramas – the thrilling high point of a compelling rivalry.
Director: Matthew Vaughn.
Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Julianne Moore. UK/USA 2017. 141 mins.
Three years ago Kingsman: Secret Service, a spy action-comedy about ‘Kingsman’, an independent, international intelligence agency was a smash hit, raking in over $414 million at the global box office. In this sequel, again written/directed by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class), special agent ‘Eggsy’ (Egerton), the council estate kid, chosen as a recruit for this mysterious organisation, is reunited with his pin-striped mentor (Firth) and they head over the Pond to meet their opposite numbers at ‘Statesman’. A spangly cast includes Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Mark Strong, Jeff Bridges and Elton John while Oscar-winner Julianne Moore gets to flex her baddie muscles as Poppy, a notorious criminal mastermind, whose personal bodyguard is the inimitable Vinnie Jones. Once again the agents’ wits and nerve are tested to the limit in this cheeky, ever-so-British, pastiche-Bond caper.
Jean (Jean Gabin) is an army deserter who arrives in Le Havre, France, planning to leave the country on one of the many ships anchored there. He gets distracted in the foggy port city, however, when he falls in love with the lovely Nelly (Michèle Morgan). Jean faces some sinister competition, as Nelly is caught between the influence of her overbearing godfather (Michel Simon) and a petty gangster (Pierre Brasseur). Jean wants to skip town with Nelly, but tempers are escalating quickly.
Director: Darren Aronofsky.
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer. USA 2017. 121 mins.
Revisiting the psycho-chiller genre he mined so vividly in his 1998 feature debut Pi and 2010’s Oscar-winning Black Swan, writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s latest, exceedingly dark drama catapults Jennifer Lawrence into wildly different territory to her Hunger Games, X-Men and David Russell-directed roles (Joy, American Hustle). Lawrence plays one half of an apparently happy young couple – Javier Bardem being the slightly sinister other – whose tranquil existence is disrupted in terrifying fashion by some unexpected visitors (a spookily passive-aggressive Ed Harris and, continuing her impressive return to big screen stardom, Michelle Pfeiffer). Unlocking dark secrets is Aronofsky’s speciality, and with regular cinematographer Matthew Libatique and Hunger Games’ brilliant production designer Philip Messina on board, Mother! delivers plenty more of the same.
Director: Stephen Frears.
Starring: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard. UK/USA 2017. 112 mins.
The year is 1887, and the British Empire is celebrating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. A young Indian clerk, Abdul Karim (Fazal), travels to England to present the monarch with a ceremonial coin. “Whatever you do, you must not look at Her Majesty,” he is told. But he does. And he smiles. And so begins one of the unlikeliest friendships in history. As the Queen (Dench) questions the constrictions of her long-held position, she forms a strong bond with her newest servant. Their devoted alliance provokes outrage and conspiracy within the Royal Household, but it also rejuvenates the cosseted ruler, who begins to see a changing world through new eyes. A lavish, heartfelt period drama with wit and charm, Victoria And Abdul allows us to peek beyond the portraits and imagine the hardships – and joys – of being the figurehead of the last true empire.
Director: Andrés Muschietti.
Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard. USA 2017. 135 mins.
Afraid of clowns? You might want to skip this one. All is not well in the town of Derry. Children are vanishing. A trail of cast-off toys snakes through the sewers. Something lurks in the labyrinth below. It preys on the phobias of its victims. It changes shape to become what they fear. It masquerades as a clown to ensnare young children, dangling balloons to lure them to its lair. Seven young misfits unite to confront it, but this evil bozo is the one hunting them. It’s an ancient, monstrous, bloodthirsty demon – and it’s all their worst nightmares and terrors at once. Having scared readers witless for over three decades, Stephen King’s classic horror novel finally gets the big-screen treatment, and it’s all set to make cinema audiences leap out of their skin.
Director: Taylor Sheridan.
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Jon Bernthal. UK/Canada/USA 2017. 107 mins.
Best known for his screenplays for heart-thumping thriller Sicario and gritty neo-western Hell Or High Water, Taylor Sheridan steps behind the camera for Wind River – an intelligent crime drama set on the rugged, snow-covered plains of Wyoming. After wildlife officer Cory Lambert (Renner, The Hurt Locker) discovers a body while tracking mountain lions in the Wind River Indian Reservation, the FBI sends in rookie agent Jane Banner (Olsen) to lead the investigation. Unprepared for the unforgiving, inhospitable terrain, she employs the reluctant Lambert as a tracker, and the two venture into a world ravaged by the elements to hunt a very different kind of predator. Wind River is a stark look at life on the edge of an imposing wilderness, where the rule of law is eclipsed by the laws of nature.
Director: Francis Lee.
Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart. UK 2017. 105 mins.
Johnny Saxby (O’Connor) works long hours on his family’s remote farm in the north of England. He numbs the daily frustration of his lonely existence with nightly binge drinking at the local pub and casual sex. But when a handsome Romanian migrant worker (Secareanu) arrives to take up temporary work on the family farm, Johnny suddenly finds himself dealing with emotions he has never felt before. As they begin working closely together during lambing season, an intense relationship forms – one that could change Johnny’s life forever. Captivating and broodingly beautiful, God’s Own Country is the award-winning debut feature from writer-director Francis Lee. Set in the heart of rural Yorkshire, this is a bracingly openhearted romantic story marked by stunning lead performances.
Dreamers, Lovers, Legends: The true story of the Argentine dancers who made the tango famous.
Written and directed by Germán Kral (The Last Applause, Música Cubana) and executive produced by Wim Wenders (Pina, Buena Vista Social Club), OUR LAST TANGO tells the life and love story of Argentina's most celebrated tango dancers Maria Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes. They met as teenagers and danced together for nearly fifty years, becoming international stars and making the Argentine tango famous around the world before a painful separation tore them apart.
In German Kral´s film the virtuosos reunite to open up about their journey, recreating incredible tango-choreographies with the help of a group of young dancers from Buenos Aires including acclaimed dancer Pablo Verón (The Tango Lesson).
Director: Carol Salter. Featuring: Ying Ling. UK 2017. 72 mins.
Seventeen-year-old Ying Ling is away from home for the first time and training to become a mortician at one of China’s largest funeral homes. Despite her fear of ghosts and dead bodies, she learns the spa rituals; cleaning and massaging the corpses while the grieving families look on.
Ying Ling finds solace from her new job through her playful banter with another young mortician. Together, they spend their time off talking about their hopes, fears and plans for the future. As one of many rural-to-urban teenagers working to support her family, Ying Ling must immerse herself unusual and grinding world of China’s industrialisation of mortality.
Almost Heaven is a rites of passage that is both humorous and tender that also confronts a subject we tend to avoid.
Director: Mel Brooks. Starring: Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Kenneth Mars, Gene Wilder. 1974. USA.
Mel Brooks' monstrously crazy tribute to Mary Shelley's classic pokes hilarious fun at just about every Frankenstein movie ever made. Summoned by a will to his late grandfather's castle in Transylvania, young Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) soon discovers the scientist's step-by-step manual explaining how to bring a corpse to life. Assisted by the hunchback Igor (Marty Feldman) and the curvaceous Ings (Teri Garr), he creates a monster (Peter Boyle) who only wants to be loved..
The End of The End chronicles the final tour from the band who forged the sound of metal - Black Sabbath. After nearly 50 years together, the Birmingham band took to the stage for the last time in their home city, bringing down the curtain on their final tour ever. They performed generation-spanning songs that have defined a genre in front of a sold-out arena and, in exclusive new interviews, the band themselves tell it how they lived it. After half a century, this is your chance to hear the final word from the greatest metal band of all time.
Director: Janus Metz Pedersen.
Starring: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny. Sweden 2017. 108 mins. English and Swedish with English subtitles.
Björn Borg (Gudnason) has the tennis world at his feet. Ranked number one and playing at the top of his game, the calm, ascetic Swede is on the verge of a record-breaking fifth consecutive Wimbledon Championship. Only one man stands in his way – John McEnroe (LaBeouf), a young American firebrand with a swagger brazen enough to unsettle even Borg’s icy composure. As the final approaches, both men delve into their formative memories to find the strength and answers they’ll need to triumph on the hallowed turf of SW19. As much a character study as a sports movie, Borg Vs. McEnroe reveals the personalities and inner demons that would shape one of the sporting world’s most riveting dramas – the thrilling high point of a compelling rivalry.
13.45Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Select:
16.10Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Director: Matthew Vaughn.
Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Julianne Moore. UK/USA 2017. 141 mins.
Three years ago Kingsman: Secret Service, a spy action-comedy about ‘Kingsman’, an independent, international intelligence agency was a smash hit, raking in over $414 million at the global box office. In this sequel, again written/directed by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class), special agent ‘Eggsy’ (Egerton), the council estate kid, chosen as a recruit for this mysterious organisation, is reunited with his pin-striped mentor (Firth) and they head over the Pond to meet their opposite numbers at ‘Statesman’. A spangly cast includes Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Mark Strong, Jeff Bridges and Elton John while Oscar-winner Julianne Moore gets to flex her baddie muscles as Poppy, a notorious criminal mastermind, whose personal bodyguard is the inimitable Vinnie Jones. Once again the agents’ wits and nerve are tested to the limit in this cheeky, ever-so-British, pastiche-Bond caper.
12.45Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Select:
15.40Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Director: Darren Aronofsky.
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer. USA 2017. 121 mins.
Revisiting the psycho-chiller genre he mined so vividly in his 1998 feature debut Pi and 2010’s Oscar-winning Black Swan, writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s latest, exceedingly dark drama catapults Jennifer Lawrence into wildly different territory to her Hunger Games, X-Men and David Russell-directed roles (Joy, American Hustle). Lawrence plays one half of an apparently happy young couple – Javier Bardem being the slightly sinister other – whose tranquil existence is disrupted in terrifying fashion by some unexpected visitors (a spookily passive-aggressive Ed Harris and, continuing her impressive return to big screen stardom, Michelle Pfeiffer). Unlocking dark secrets is Aronofsky’s speciality, and with regular cinematographer Matthew Libatique and Hunger Games’ brilliant production designer Philip Messina on board, Mother! delivers plenty more of the same.
16.20Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Director: Stephen Frears.
Starring: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard. UK/USA 2017. 112 mins.
The year is 1887, and the British Empire is celebrating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. A young Indian clerk, Abdul Karim (Fazal), travels to England to present the monarch with a ceremonial coin. “Whatever you do, you must not look at Her Majesty,” he is told. But he does. And he smiles. And so begins one of the unlikeliest friendships in history. As the Queen (Dench) questions the constrictions of her long-held position, she forms a strong bond with her newest servant. Their devoted alliance provokes outrage and conspiracy within the Royal Household, but it also rejuvenates the cosseted ruler, who begins to see a changing world through new eyes. A lavish, heartfelt period drama with wit and charm, Victoria And Abdul allows us to peek beyond the portraits and imagine the hardships – and joys – of being the figurehead of the last true empire.
13.40Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
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16.10Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Director: Andrés Muschietti.
Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard. USA 2017. 135 mins.
Afraid of clowns? You might want to skip this one. All is not well in the town of Derry. Children are vanishing. A trail of cast-off toys snakes through the sewers. Something lurks in the labyrinth below. It preys on the phobias of its victims. It changes shape to become what they fear. It masquerades as a clown to ensnare young children, dangling balloons to lure them to its lair. Seven young misfits unite to confront it, but this evil bozo is the one hunting them. It’s an ancient, monstrous, bloodthirsty demon – and it’s all their worst nightmares and terrors at once. Having scared readers witless for over three decades, Stephen King’s classic horror novel finally gets the big-screen treatment, and it’s all set to make cinema audiences leap out of their skin.
13.00Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
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15.50Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Director: Taylor Sheridan.
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Jon Bernthal. UK/Canada/USA 2017. 107 mins.
Best known for his screenplays for heart-thumping thriller Sicario and gritty neo-western Hell Or High Water, Taylor Sheridan steps behind the camera for Wind River – an intelligent crime drama set on the rugged, snow-covered plains of Wyoming. After wildlife officer Cory Lambert (Renner, The Hurt Locker) discovers a body while tracking mountain lions in the Wind River Indian Reservation, the FBI sends in rookie agent Jane Banner (Olsen) to lead the investigation. Unprepared for the unforgiving, inhospitable terrain, she employs the reluctant Lambert as a tracker, and the two venture into a world ravaged by the elements to hunt a very different kind of predator. Wind River is a stark look at life on the edge of an imposing wilderness, where the rule of law is eclipsed by the laws of nature.
14.00Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Director: Francis Lee.
Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart. UK 2017. 105 mins.
Johnny Saxby (O’Connor) works long hours on his family’s remote farm in the north of England. He numbs the daily frustration of his lonely existence with nightly binge drinking at the local pub and casual sex. But when a handsome Romanian migrant worker (Secareanu) arrives to take up temporary work on the family farm, Johnny suddenly finds himself dealing with emotions he has never felt before. As they begin working closely together during lambing season, an intense relationship forms – one that could change Johnny’s life forever. Captivating and broodingly beautiful, God’s Own Country is the award-winning debut feature from writer-director Francis Lee. Set in the heart of rural Yorkshire, this is a bracingly openhearted romantic story marked by stunning lead performances.
16.00Silver Screen: Aged over 60? Join the Silver Screen Club for discounted tickets and a free tea or coffee at these shows. Usual ticket prices apply to non-Members.
Dreamers, Lovers, Legends: The true story of the Argentine dancers who made the tango famous.
Written and directed by Germán Kral (The Last Applause, Música Cubana) and executive produced by Wim Wenders (Pina, Buena Vista Social Club), OUR LAST TANGO tells the life and love story of Argentina's most celebrated tango dancers Maria Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes. They met as teenagers and danced together for nearly fifty years, becoming international stars and making the Argentine tango famous around the world before a painful separation tore them apart.
In German Kral´s film the virtuosos reunite to open up about their journey, recreating incredible tango-choreographies with the help of a group of young dancers from Buenos Aires including acclaimed dancer Pablo Verón (The Tango Lesson).
Director: Carol Salter. Featuring: Ying Ling. UK 2017. 72 mins.
Seventeen-year-old Ying Ling is away from home for the first time and training to become a mortician at one of China’s largest funeral homes. Despite her fear of ghosts and dead bodies, she learns the spa rituals; cleaning and massaging the corpses while the grieving families look on.
Ying Ling finds solace from her new job through her playful banter with another young mortician. Together, they spend their time off talking about their hopes, fears and plans for the future. As one of many rural-to-urban teenagers working to support her family, Ying Ling must immerse herself unusual and grinding world of China’s industrialisation of mortality.
Almost Heaven is a rites of passage that is both humorous and tender that also confronts a subject we tend to avoid.
In Ridley Scott’s brooding, doom-laden thriller set in a spectacularly imagined future Los Angeles, a hired killer named Deckard (Ford) tracks down a group of renegade androids who have escaped from slavery on a colonised planet. Loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s paranoid masterpiece Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and undoubtedly one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time, BLADE RUNNER was famously butchered in previous studio versions, including a so-called director’s cut that was nothing of the sort.
This ‘final cut’ is the only version over which Scott had full artistic control, and with its intense atmosphere, breath-taking visuals and lavishly eerie soundtrack by Vangelis, it’s an unforgettable big-screen experience.
Director: Slavko Martinov. New Zealand 2017. 88mins.
Join members of the 148-year-old Christchurch Poultry, Bantam and Pigeon Club in this documentary about the lead up to the 2015 New Zealand National Poultry Show. Fierce rivalries, infighting, irregular judging and temperamental birds abound as enthusiastic breeders compete in their quest for the top prize, united only in their passion for chickens. A hilarious, unique and heart-warming slice of Kiwiana which is sure to delight and surprise audiences of all ages.
Director: Slavko Martinov. New Zealand 2017. 88mins.
Join members of the 148-year-old Christchurch Poultry, Bantam and Pigeon Club in this documentary about the lead up to the 2015 New Zealand National Poultry Show. Fierce rivalries, infighting, irregular judging and temperamental birds abound as enthusiastic breeders compete in their quest for the top prize, united only in their passion for chickens. A hilarious, unique and heart-warming slice of Kiwiana which is sure to delight and surprise audiences of all ages.
When five very different high-school students are forced to spend a Saturday together in detention, they find themselves interacting with and understanding each other for the first time.
A jock (Emilio Estevez), a criminal (Judd Nelson), a princess (Molly Ringwald), a basket case (Ally Sheedy) and a brain (Anthony Michael Hall) talk about everything, from parental tensions to sex to peer pressure and hurtful stereotypes, while serving time.
Ultimately, the five find that they may have more in common than they ever imagined and learn more about themselves as well as each other. The only question is, will they still speak to each other when they return to classes?
Director and writer John Hughes, along with the stellar cast, makes this a memorable, moving film filled with believable dialogue, intelligent humour, and a generous dose of high jinks. A true teen classic with timeless appeal.
13.00We ♥ John Hughes: Brain, athlete, basket case, princess or criminal - revisit your misspent youth in 2017 with our We ♥ John Hughes season
Vintage Sundays: Classic films back on the big screen where they belong.
When Rodolfo, a penniless poet, meets Mimì, a seamstress, they fall instantly in love. But their happiness is threatened when Rodolfo learns that Mimì is gravely ill.
Acclaimed director Richard Jones (Boris Godunov, Il trittico) directs a new production of Puccini’s 'La bohème'. Irresistible in its witty, passionate blend of comedy and tragedy, the opera focusses on the lives of a groupof young artists as they eke out an existence on the bohemian fringes of Paris, the capital of the 19th century. Jones brings his characteristically acute insight to this much-loved classic, visualized in Stewart Laing’s spectacular, stylized 1850s setting.
Puccini’s romantic depiction of bohemian Paris, with memorable music and a love story drawn from everyday life, has captivated audiences around the world, making La bohème one of the best-loved of all operas. It was first performed in Covent Garden in 1897 and has had more than five hundred performances there since.
Director: David Bruckner.
Starring: Rafe Spall, Robert James-Collier, Arsher Ali . UK 2017. 94 mins.
After the violent death of one of their group, four old college friends decide to take a hiking trip deep in the Swedish wilderness in order to bond and reminisce about old times. However, the inexperienced hikers soon find themselves hopelessly lost in the dense woods and, as night closes in and tempers start to fray they take shelter in an abandoned shack. But they are not alone. Someone, or something, malevolent is watching them, intent on making them face their deepest fears and ensuring they never leave.
Director: Denus Villeneuve.
Starring: Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto. USA 2017. 164 mins.
One of the decade’s most anticipated films, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s seminal 1982 neo-noir, Blade Runner, is finally upon us. Scott himself returns as producer, freeing up the director’s chair for the supremely talented Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Sicario), while Harrison Ford reprises his role as Rick Deckard. In 2049, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Gosling), uncovers a terrible secret that could throw what’s left of an already broken society into terminal chaos. His discovery leads him on a quest to find former replicant hunter Deckard, who has been missing for 30 years. In true Blade Runner style, K wants to ask him some questions – the answers to which may have a lot to do with a chilling creator of ‘disposable workforces’, Niander Wallace (Leto).
Academy Award® nominee Benedict Cumberbatch (BBC’s Sherlock, The Imitation Game) takes on the title role of Shakespeare’s great tragedy.
Now seen by over 750,000 people worldwide, the original 2015 NT Live broadcast returns to cinemas.
As a country arms itself for war, a family tears itself apart. Forced to avenge his father’s death but paralysed by the task ahead, Hamlet rages against the impossibility of his predicament, threatening both his sanity and the security of the state. Directed by Lyndsey Turner (Posh, Chimerica) and produced by Sonia Friedman Productions.
Director: Wim Wenders. Starring: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Peter Falk. West Germany 1987. 128 mins. B & W/Colour. Subtitles.
Wenders marked his return to Germany with this romantic, melancholy but affirmative fable that celebrates the complex mythical associations of Berlin. With Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander as angels hovering in the streets of the city, bearing mute but privileged witness to the joys and tribulations of their mortal flock. And while Ganz elects to give up his immortality and experience human love, Peter Falk arrives to make a film about the Nazi era on locations that still bear the scars of wartime destruction.
19.30Ad and Trailer Free: No advertisements or trailers will play ahead of this screening. You are recommended to arrive promptly.
Bruno Ganz Retrospective.
+ Q&A with Bruno Ganz: Following the screening, we are delighted to welcome Bruno Ganz for a Q&A hosted by Gareth Evans.
A full-throttle war play that revels in the sweat of the battlefield, Coriolanus transports us back to the emergence of the republic of Rome.
Caius Martius Coriolanus is a fearless soldier but a reluctant leader. His ambitious mother attempts to carve him a path to political power, but he struggles to change his nature and do what is required to achieve greatness. In this new city state struggling to find its feet, where the gap between rich and poor is widening every day, Coriolanus must decide who he really is and where his allegiances lie.
Rome Season Director, Angus Jackson, completes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s collection of Shakespeare’s Roman plays with a visceral production which sees Sope Dirisu (One Night in Miami, Donmar Warehouse, 2016) take on the title role.
All Neal Page (Steve Martin) wanted was to spend Thanksgiving with his family. What he got was three torturous days on the road with just a blabbermouth shower-curtain-ring salesman (John Candy) for company.
13.00We ♥ John Hughes: Brain, athlete, basket case, princess or criminal - revisit your misspent youth in 2017 with our We ♥ John Hughes season
Vintage Sundays: Classic films back on the big screen where they belong.
Director: Wim Wenders.
Starring: Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz. West Germany/France 1977. 126 mins. German with English subtitles.
Contains moderate violence.
Superb adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, with Hopper as her amiably cynical hero, asked to find a non-professional for a killing or two, and - in echo of Strangers on a Train - drawing an innocent family man (Ganz) into the game by persuading him that the blood disease he is suffering from is not merely incurable but terminal. Good Highsmith, it's even better Wenders, with Ripley, an American expatriate in Germany, first seen keeping a rendezvous with a dead man, then confiding his disorientation to a tape recorder ('There is nothing to fear but fear itself... I know less and less about who I am or who anybody else is'). Ripley, in other words, becomes the quintessential Wenders hero, the loner travelling through alien lands in quest of himself, of friendship, of some meaning to life. Emerging enviously from his solitude to wonder at the radiating warmth of Ganz' family circle, he is irresistibly attracted; but he is also condemned by his own self-disgust to approach only someone on whom he can already smell the scent of death, and by destroying whom he can complete his drive to self-destruction.
Following its world premiere in 1927, half an hour was cut from Fritz Lang's masterpiece and lost to the world.
Eighty years later a spectacular discovery was made when the footage was found in a small, dusty museum in Buenos Aires.
The film was then painstakingly reconstructed and digitally restored with a new recording of the original score. At last audiences could see the iconic futuristic fairy tale as Lang had envisioned it. Simply magnificent.
Director: Armando Iannucci. Starring: Steve Buscemi, Andrea Riseborough, Jeffrey Tambor. UK, 2017. 104 mins
The internal political landscape of 1950’s Soviet Russia takes on darkly comic form in a new film by Emmy award-winning and Oscar-nominated writer/director Armando Iannucci. In the days following Stalin’s collapse, his core team of ministers tussle for control; some want positive change in the Soviet Union, others have more sinister motives. Their one common trait? They’re all just desperately trying to remain alive. A film that combines comedy, drama, pathos and political manoeuvring, The Death of Stalin is a Quad and Main Journey production, directed by Armando Iannucci, and produced by Yann Zenou, Kevin Loader, Nicolas Duval Assakovsky, and Laurent Zeitoun. The script is written by Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin, with additional material by Peter Fellows.
In 1923 during the Japanese occupation, Koreans who live in Tokyo are severely exploited by Japanese. After the Great Kanto Earthquake strikes Japanese island, People falls into chaos. To calm down people‟s anxiety, Japanese Cabinet decides to arrest Korean men randomly. Among innocent Korean men, the officer Mizno arrests a young man named PARK Yeol as an example. However PARK rather draws the whole Cabinet into confusion by telling his extreme scheme he had planned with Japanese Anarchist Fumiko; “Kill the Crown Prince of Japan.”
A national intelligence agent, a detective, and a North Korean officer all collide in their attempts to capture a North Korean defector, the son of a key political figure who turns out to be a prime suspect in a serial murder case. Directed by screenwriter of I Saw The Devil, Park Hoon-jung.
In the near future, parallel universes have been proven to exist. Xia Tian and her team have been working for years on a technology that would allow travel through the spacetime continuum. Up until now, their experiments have never involved living tissue and the technology’s capacity has remained limited to 110 minutes. But when her kid is abducted by terrorists, Xia Tian must act as quickly as possible and test her prototype on herself… Produced by Jackie Chan.
Directed by actor turned director, Derek Tsang, Soulmate portrays the decades-spanning friendship between Qiyue and Ansen, two disparate women who both struggle to find positions for their real selves within the modern world.
A weird and wild tale in which three intergalactic travellers from the distant future are whisked back to the court of the ancient Egyptian queen by time machine to intervene in an alien plan to destroy mankind by altering the course of human history.
19.003D.
Ad Free: No advertisements will play ahead of this screening. You are recommended to arrive promptly.
LEAFF: London East Asia Film Festival 2017
Director: Stanley Kubrick.
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood. USA/UK 1968. 150 mins.
Heralded in 1968 as the most striking sci-fi film ever, Stanley Kubrick’s epic meditation on human evolution shines brilliantly 46 years later in a new BFI restoration.
The film opens with the discovery of a mysterious monolith by prehistoric, ape-like hominids. The narrative then jumps to the 21st century, when a scientist (William Sylvester) landing on the moon discovers an identical obelisk. Eighteen months later, a pair of astronauts (Dullea and Lockwood) journey to Jupiter in search of the monoliths with the aid of their omnipresent speaking computer, known as HAL 9000 (eerily voiced by Douglas Rain). The mission is fraught with tension and murderous intent as HAL begins to endanger the astronauts’ lives.
Often regarded as a metaphor and moral allegory, Kubrick’s film is a visual tour de force with a stunning soundtrack.
15.0070mm: Playing from a 70mm print
Culture Shock: Dedicated to bringing you the best in cult and genre films.
Keepin' It Reel: Culture Shocks monthly programming strand screening cult classic films on old-school 35mm or 70mm.
Andie (Ringwald) is one of the not-so-popular girls in high school, with her weird punk makeup and clothes. She usually hangs out with her geek friends Iona and Duckie, but with the prom coming up, she has to choose between them and the popular set when she falls for new rich guy Blane. Will she sell out or will she stay true to her wrong-side-of-the-tracks roots?
This seminal '80s brat-pack movie transcends the teen-flick genre with a set of spot-on performances, great '80s pop and a heart-rending finale at the prom.
13.00We ♥ John Hughes: Brain, athlete, basket case, princess or criminal - revisit your misspent youth in 2017 with our We ♥ John Hughes season
Vintage Sundays: Classic films back on the big screen where they belong.
At a garden party on a sunny afternoon, Alice is surprised to see her parents’ friend Lewis Carroll transform into a white rabbit. When she follows him down a rabbit hole events become curiouser and curiouser… As Alice journeys through Wonderland, she encounters countless strange creatures. She’s swept off her feet by the charming Knave of Hearts, who’s on the run for stealing the tarts. Confusion piles upon confusion. Then Alice wakes with a start. Was it all a daydream?
Christopher Wheeldon’s 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland' burst onto the stage in 2011 in an explosion of colour, stage magic and inventive, sophisticated choreography. Joby Talbot’s score combines contemporary soundworlds with sweeping melodies that gesture to ballet scores of the 19th century. Bob Crowley’s wildly imaginative, eye-popping designs draw on everything from puppetry to projections to make Wonderland wonderfully real.
Alice encounters a cast of extraordinary and instantly recognizable characters, from the highly strung Queen of Hearts – who performs a hilarious send-up of The Sleeping Beauty's famous Rose Adage – to a playing-card corps de ballet, a sinuous caterpillar and a tap-dancing Mad Hatter. But the ballet does not avoid the darker undercurrents of Lewis Carroll’s story: a nightmarish kitchen, an eerily disembodied Cheshire Cat and the unhinged tea party are all here in vivid detail. The delicious result shows The Royal Ballet at its best, bringing together world-class dance with enchanting family entertainment.
Rob Reiner's classic 1987 fairytale with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humour, THE PRINCESS BRIDE remains as fresh and as entertaining today as when it was first released.
Director: Alain Tanner. Starring: Bruno Ganz, Teresa Madruga, Julia Vonderlinn. Germany 1983. 108 mins. German, English, Portuguese & French with English Subtitles.
Ganz, that great loner of modernist cinema, here plays a Swiss seaman who jumps ship in Lisbon, gets involved with a barmaid, and sends reels of home movies back to his wife. Adrift in the exotic White City, he is robbed and then stabbed, loses the barmaid after a passionate fling, and finally hitting rock bottom he raises the fare home. The home movies, accompanied by Jean-Luc Barbier's beautiful, hard-edged jazz score, terrifyingly reflect the disintegration of a man in flight from himself. But this is no idling tract on alienation, more an intrigue built around silences, blankness, deceptions of space and time. A teasingly simple film that compels and stimulates. TIME OUT
Preceded by short film Nice Time, also by director Alain Tanner
Director: Stanley Kubrick.
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood. USA/UK 1968. 150 mins.
Heralded in 1968 as the most striking sci-fi film ever, Stanley Kubrick’s epic meditation on human evolution shines brilliantly 46 years later in a new BFI restoration.
The film opens with the discovery of a mysterious monolith by prehistoric, ape-like hominids. The narrative then jumps to the 21st century, when a scientist (William Sylvester) landing on the moon discovers an identical obelisk. Eighteen months later, a pair of astronauts (Dullea and Lockwood) journey to Jupiter in search of the monoliths with the aid of their omnipresent speaking computer, known as HAL 9000 (eerily voiced by Douglas Rain). The mission is fraught with tension and murderous intent as HAL begins to endanger the astronauts’ lives.
Often regarded as a metaphor and moral allegory, Kubrick’s film is a visual tour de force with a stunning soundtrack.
19.0070mm: Playing from a 70mm print
Culture Shock: Dedicated to bringing you the best in cult and genre films.
Keepin' It Reel: Culture Shocks monthly programming strand screening cult classic films on old-school 35mm or 70mm.
Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami - Live with Friends promises to be thrilling and enlightening evening with the inimitable icon, as she discusses her life and work with some of her closest collaborators from the worlds of music, fashion, art and film. The discussion follows an exclusive preview of Sophie Fiennes’ highly anticipated new film Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami.
Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami takes the viewer on an intimate and electrifying journey that moves between four cinematic layers – performance, family, artist and gypsy – to explore the fascinating world of a pop-culture phenomenon. Here we see the daughter, mother, sister and grandmother behind the mask, and she takes to the stage for a specially commissioned performance that showcases legendary hits like Pull Up To The Bumper and Slave To The Rhythm. Larger than life, bordering on cartoon, wild, scary and androgynous – Grace Jones plays all these parts.
Filled with sparkling, Tarantino-esque dialogue, this grim animated noir from China begins when a young construction worker steals a case filled with cash and finds himself pursued by a rogues’ gallery of punk rockers, crazed inventors, and a hammer-wielding hit man.
We are delighted to welcome Cinematographer Kim Hyungkoo for a Q&A following this screening.
The Day After
Director: Hong Sangsoo
Writer: Hong Sangsoo
Producer: Hong Sangsoo
Cast: Kwon Haehyo, Kim Minhee, Kim Saebyuk
Production Company: Jeonwonsa Film
International Sales: Finecut
Drama / 2017 / 92 min / Cert. 18 / DCP / B&W
The unhappily-married Bongwan (Kwon Haehyo) runs a small publishing house and has been having an affair with a young female employee. His wife finds out about it on the very day that heÕs hiring the new employee Areum (Kim Minhee). In this shimmering, monochrome movie a weak, middle-aged man comes up against a strong-willed and determinedly positive young woman who simply wonÕt let herself be bruised by the encounter.
We are delighted to welcome director Kang Yun-Sung for a Q&A following this screening.
Crime City
Director: Kang Yun-sung
Writer: Kang Yun-sung
Producer: Kim Hong-baek, Billy Acumen
Cast: Don Lee, Yoon Kye-sang, Cho Cha-yun
Production Company: Hong Film, BA Entertainment
International Sales: M-Line Distribution
Action / 2017 / 121 min / Cert. 18 / DCP / Colour
Based on the 2004 Chinese-Korean gangster mop-up operation in Seouls Garibong neighbourhood, during which 32 gang members were arrested, Kang Yun-sungs work of fiction sees Don Lee using his fists like he did in the gargantuan box office hit Train to Busan. This time, the star is not up against zombies but ruthless Chinese-Korean gangsters, when new thug on the block Jang Chen and his two sadistic sidekicks try to seize control of the local area. A hard-boiled cop Ma Suk-do is determined, together with his team, to bring peace to the area, which means hunting down Jang and his gang. Full of humour, this crime action-thriller is certainly violent but it never takes itself too seriously.
We are delighted to welcome director Chung Yoon-chul for a Q&A following this screening.
Warriors of the Dawn
Director: Chung Yoon-chul
Writer: Shin Doyeong
Producer: Won Dong-yeon, Kim Ho-sung
Cast: Lee Jung-jae, Yeo Jin-gu, Kim Mu-yeol
Production Company: Realies Pictures, 20th Century Fox International Productions
International Sales: M-Line Distribution
Drama, Historical / 2017 / 130 min / Cert. 15 / DCP / Colour
The Warriors of the Dawn are a band of mercenaries who assist the young Prince Gwanghae (Yeo Jin-gu), forced to defend the Joseon Kingdom against Japanese invaders during the Imjin War in 1592. An uneasy relationship between the gruff mercenary leader (Lee Jung-jae) builds into one of mutual respect as they fight side by side on the battlefield. The film is the latest Korean production by 20th Century Fox International Productions, who were also responsible for last years hit The Wailing.
Following the screening we'll be joined by director Sophie Fiennes for a Q&A.
Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami takes the viewer on an intimate and electrifying journey that moves between four cinematic layers – performance, family, artist and gypsy – to explore the fascinating world of a pop-culture phenomenon. Here we see the daughter, mother, sister and grandmother behind the mask, and she takes to the stage for a specially commissioned performance that showcases legendary hits like Pull Up To The Bumper and Slave To The Rhythm. Larger than life, bordering on cartoon, wild, scary and androgynous – Grace Jones plays all these parts.
Come, Together
Director: Shin Dong-il
Writer: Han Ji-su, Shin Dong-il
Producer: Shin Dong-il
Cast: Im Hyeong-gook, Lee Hee-eun, Chae Bin
Production Company: Biashin Pictures
International Sales: Finestory
Drama / 2017 / 113 min / Cert. 15 / DCP / Color
Koreas highly competitive nature goes under the microscope in Shin Dong-ils heated new drama about a harried family of three. Following 18 years of loyalty, the patriarch of the family is suddenly fired from his desk job, while his credit card saleswoman wife winds up in hot water when she cuts corners to entice customers. Both parents are desperate for their daughter to get into Korea University, but when she ends up on the waiting list, pressure mounts as the deadline looms. Continuing his exploration of characters struggling to toe the line of Korean society, Shin crafts another tense microcosm of modern Seoul.
We are delighted to welcome Korean cinema expert Tony Rayns to introduce this screening.
Merry Christmas Mr. Mo
Director: Lim Dae-hyung
Writer: Lim Dae-hyung
Producer: Park Du-hui
Cast: Gi Ju-bong, Oh Jung-hwan, Go Won-hee
Production Company: Film Run
International Sales: Indiestory
Drama / 2016 / 101 min / Cert. 12A / DCP / B&W
Lim Dae-hyungs tragi-comic debut feature stars veteran character actor Gi Ju-bong as a taciturn, lonely widower with a secret or two. Mo Geum-sans provincial life seems orderly and governed by routine: undemanding days in his small barber-shop, daily visits to the local swimming pool for his fitness, a drink and a snack on the way home and nights spent wrestling with a pillow thats too lumpy. But Mr Mo is semi-estranged from his son, a student in Seoul, and only bad news from a doctor makes him want to reconnect. Lim tells Mr Mos story across five chapters, using images which seem classically restrained but at the same time startlingly precise.
We are delighted to welcome Korean Cinema expert Tony Rayns to introduce this screening.
A Confession Expecting a Rejection
Director: Park Jeong-hoon
Writer: Park Jeong-hoon
Producer: Park Jeong-hoon
Cast: Kim Dong-won, Kim Hyun-jin, Kim Pan-kyum
Rights Holder: Park Jeong-hoon
Drama / 2017 / 112 min / Cert. 15 / DCP / Colour
Park Jeong-hoons second feature (after 2012s "December") presents itself as one single, uninterrupted take. The camera is set up in a small, plain studio. Young men and women enter, sit, respond to off-screen questions from the crew, and leave. Or rather, thats whats supposed to happen. But it turns out that one female subject has a prior, broken relationship with a member of the crew which brings submerged tensions to the surface.
New World
Director: Park Hoon-jung
Writer: Park Hoon-jung
Producer: Kim Woo-taek
Cast: Lee Jung-jae, Choi Min-sik, Hwang Jung-min
Production Company: Sanai Pictures
International Sales: Contents Panda
UK Distributor: Eureka Entertainment
Crime, Drama / 2013 / 134 min / Cert. 18 / DCP / Color
The second directorial feature from Park Hoon-jung, the screenwriter behind The Unjust and I Saw the Devil. A noirish gangster epic in which undercover cops and corrupt policemen plot from the shadows to gain control of Koreas biggest crime syndicate, Goldmoon, when its CEO is killed in a suspicious car accident. With a succession crisis mounting, police chief Kang (Choi Min-sik) launches Operation New World in which he hopes to manoeuvre his long-term undercover agent, Lee Ja-sung (Lee Jung-jae), into the top spot by taking out the two main factions led by flashy gangster Jung Chang (Hwang Jun-min) and the unscrupulous Lee Joong-gu (Park Sung-woong).
Can’t get a date? Make one! Rejected by their peers and desperate to be liked, two misfit teens design their ideal woman on a computer – and then accidentally bring her to life.
13.00We ♥ John Hughes: Brain, athlete, basket case, princess or criminal - revisit your misspent youth in 2017 with our We ♥ John Hughes season
Vintage Sundays: Classic films back on the big screen where they belong.
My Turn
Director: Kim Na-kyung
Writer: Kim Na-kyung
Producer: Lee Seung-hyun, Kwon Soon-sang
Cast: Joo Ga-young, Kim Hannah, Jeong Hee-jeong
Rights Holder: Kim Na-kyung
Drama / 2017 / 15 min / Cert. 12A / DCP / Colour
The films SIWFF Audience Award rewarded its smart dramatic approach to hot topics in Korean media: the pregnancy order system used in some female-dominated workplaces, and abortion access. When Hyun-jung gets pregnant out of turn, there are rows with her boss, her pregnant colleague, and the nurse who is next on the roster.
Mild Fever
Director: Park Sun-joo
Writer: Park Sun-joo
Producer: Ahn Do-young
Cast: Jeon Seok-ho, Han Woo-yeon
International Sales: Central Park Films
Fiction, Drama / 2017 / 36 min / Cert. 12A / DCP / Colour
Winner of the Asian Short Film and Video Competition Grand Prize at SIWFF. Eun-ju, a writer with a young child, finds her confidence, independence and loving relationship with her husband and mother overshadowed by the return of a violent incident from her past. Beautifully performed, the film offers an everyday grace set against a cleverly maintained tone of unease, as Eun-ju and her family respond unpredictably to the shattering news.
Night Working
Director: Kim Jungeun
Writer: Kim Jungeun
Producer: Lee Hoyeon
Cast: Sreng Vuchny, Kim Yae-eun, Gil Haeyeon
Rights Holder: Kim Jungeun
Drama / 2017 / 28 min / Cert. 12A / DCP / Colour
A dreamy study of Lyn, a young Cambodian worker in Korea and her friendship with Yeonhee, her co-worker at a small factory as they navigate their boss insidious harassment and face Yeonhees decision to move to Australia. Framed by Lyns letters to her mother, the film offers an intimate depiction of female-female relationships and of immigrant and working-class Korea.
Director: Werner Herzog. Starring: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz. West Germany/France 1979. 107 mins. German with English subtitles.
Jonathan Harker (Ganz) leaves his young wife Lucy (Adjani) at home in Wismar and travels to Transylvania to meet the mysterious Count Dracula (Kinski), who is buying a house in Wismar opposite his own. After a terrifying ordeal in Dracula’s castle, Jonathan returns home a broken man, leaving Lucy to contend with their death-dealing new neighbour in the only way she can. In many ways a remake of F. W. Murnau’s horror masterpiece, Herzog’s film nonetheless owes more to the tradition of German Romanticism than to Murnau’s Expressionism, with long, lush sequences in the Carpathian Mountains, darkly luminous images of the Count, and ghastly scenes of the plague-stricken town. Kinski gives an exquisite performance as the weary Count; his languid glide through the darkness underscores this beautiful film’s sinister, dreamlike atmosphere.
Contains moderate horror and gore.
Leaving the world of J-pop behind her, Mima Kirigoe begins life as an actress on a crime drama show called Double Blind. When offered a lead role in the show as a rape victim, Mima accepts in spite of her manager’s reservations. However, the backlash from fans over her career change and a strange website called ‘Mima's Room’, written by a fake Mima, begin to worry her. When a stalker appears and people involved in Double Blind begin turning up dead, with all the evidence pointing to her, Mima is thrown into a state of confusion, madness and paranoia.
We are delighted to welcome director Kim Il-rhan for a Q&A following this screening.
Two Doors
Director: Kim Il-rhan, Hong Ji-you
Producer: PINKS
Cast: Kwon Yeongguk, Kim Hyeongtae, Ryoo Juhyeong
Production Company: Pinks
International Sales: Cinema DAL
Documentary / 2012 / 101 min / Cert. 15 / DCP / Colour
Following the Yongsan Tragedy, when a sit-in rally in central Seoul against forced eviction resulted in the deaths of five protesters and one police officer, three people involved in the demonstration were arrested and deemed responsible for the lives lost. This documentary is an investigation into what took place and questions the actions of the police who took part in the suppression of the demonstration, as well as the role of the government. The high public visibility of the incident made hours of CCTV footage and recordings from both the press and onlookers being available to the filmmakers.
We are delighted to welcome the directors of this film for a Q&A after the screening.
The Remnants
Director: Kim Il-rhan, Lee Hyuk-sang
Producer: Kim Il-rhan, Lee Hyuk-sang
Cast: Kim Ju-hwan, Kim Chang-su, Lee Chung-yeon
Production Company: Pinks
International Sales: Cinema DAL
Documentary / 2016 / 116 min / Cert. 15 / DCP / Colour
A follow-up to "Two Doors", which investigated the events that took place in Yongsan, amassing documents to question the use of force against the people involved in the occupation of a watchtower, as a protest against the redevelopment of a local neighborhood in central Seoul. "The Remnants" turns to the personal stories of five people involved in the demonstrations, who were accused of legal violations. Where the first film seeks to provide material evidence against the use of violence by state police, "The Remnants" focuses instead on the personal accounts of what happened.
Starring: Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz, Cherry Jones, Emily Mortimer, Cillian Murphy, Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall. UK 2017. 71 mins.
Janet (Scott Thomas) has just been appointed to a key ministerial position in the shadow cabinet – the crowning achievement of her political career. She and her husband Bill (Spall) plan to celebrate this with a few close friends. As the guests arrive at their home in London, the party takes an unexpected turn when Bill suddenly makes some explosive revelations that take everyone present by surprise. What follows is a hilarious comedy of tragic proportions in which love, friendships and political convictions are soon called into question. From acclaimed British filmmaker Sally Potter, The Party is a smart, fast-paced film full of razor-sharp one-liners that perfectly suits these turbulent times.
Director: John Hughes
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Mia Sara, Alan Ruck USA 1986 103 mins
Ferris is a boy who gets anything he wants, screws over anyone who gets in his way, and gets patted on the back for doing so. Gathering his best friend (Ruck) and his best girlfriend (Sara), he skips school for a day out in Chicago.
13.00We ♥ John Hughes: Brain, athlete, basket case, princess or criminal - revisit your misspent youth in 2017 with our We ♥ John Hughes season
Vintage Sundays: Classic films back on the big screen where they belong.
Director: Theo Angelopoulos. Starring: Bruno Ganz, Isabelle Renauld, Achileas Skevis. 1999. 137 mins. Greek, English, Italian with English subtitles
A dying author (Ganz) prepares to leave his beloved family home by the sea, and settle things with his daughter; his feelings of despair are interrupted, complicated and finally, to some extent, banished by memories of happier times with his wife (Renauld) and by an encounter with a young Albanian orphan. Angelopoulos' film, a deserving winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes '98, is a characteristically elegant, eloquent and idiosyncratic meditation on the relationships between personal and political histories, and between life and art. More intimate than, say, The Travelling Players or Ulysses' Gaze, the film nevertheless reaches out, as its long, fluid takes escort us through space and time, to universal themes and broader topicalities, effortlessly fending off charges of hermetic aestheticism.
A team of special force ops, led by a tough but fair soldier, Major "Dutch" Schaefer, are ordered in to assist CIA man, George Dillon, on a rescue mission for potential survivors of a Helicopter downed over remote South American jungle. Not long after they land, Dutch and his team discover that they have been sent in under false pretenses. This deception turns out to be the least of their worries though, when they find themselves being methodically hunted by something not of this world.
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel. Starring: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara. Germany 2004. 155 mins. German with English subtitles.
Nominated as Best Foreign language film, Downfall faced huge controversy as well as acclaim in its native Germany. Adolf Hitler’s final stenographer, Traudl Junge, tells of the Nazi dictator's final days in a Berlin bunker as his world slowly crumbles around him. His advisers Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels are wrought with conflict as Hitler clearly begins to lose his grip on reality. At the centre of the film is the towering performance of Bruno Ganz (Wings Of Desire), who not only bears an eerily uncanny likeness to Hitler, but manages to both absorb and emanate the seething mass of contradiction that this most destructive of historical figures must have been.
Stephen Sondheim’s legendary musical is staged for the first time at the National Theatre and broadcast live to cinemas. New York, 1971. There’s a party on the stage of the Weismann Theatre. Tomorrow the iconic building will be demolished. Thirty years after their final performance, the Follies girls gather to have a few drinks, sing a few songs and lie about themselves. Tracie Bennett, Janie Dee and Imelda Staunton play the magnificent Follies in this dazzling new production. Featuring a cast of 37 and an orchestra of 21, it’s directed by Dominic Cooke (The Comedy of Errors). Winner of Academy, Tony, Grammy and Olivier awards, Sondheim’s previous work includes A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George.
Picturehouse Central is delighted to host screenings in this year's Russian Film Week.
Arrhythmia
Director: Boris Khlebnikov
Screenplay: Natalya Meshchaninova, Boris Khlebnikov
Producers: Ruben Dishdishyan, Sergey Selyanov,Natalya Drozd
Cast: Aleksandr Yatsenko, Irina Gorbacheva, Anna Kotova, Nikolay Shrayber
Oleg is a young gifted paramedic. His wife Katya works at the hospital emergency department. She loves Oleg, but is fed up with him caring more about patients than her; she wants a divorce. Oleg's new boss, a cold-hearted manager, got new strict rules to implement. Oleg couldn't care less - he's got lives to save. Caught between emergency calls, alcohol-fueled off-shifts, trouble at work and search for a meaning in life, Oleg and Katya have to find the binding force that keeps them together.
We are delighted to host screenings for this year's Russian Film Week at Picturehouse Central
Blockbuster
Year: 2017
Country: Russia
Director: Roman Volobuev
Screenplay:Roman Volobuev
Producers: Murad Osmann, Ilya Stewart
Cast: Svetlana Ustinova, Anna Chipovskaya, Evgeniy Tsyganov, Mikhail Efremov, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Alexandr Ilin
A wannabe model from a small Russian town robs a local bank to fund her modeling career and takes hostage an accidental witness of the crime, Lisa, who herself has recently experienced a mental breakdown and ran away from her daily life.
Stephen Sondheim’s legendary musical is staged for the first time at the National Theatre and broadcast live to cinemas. New York, 1971. There’s a party on the stage of the Weismann Theatre. Tomorrow the iconic building will be demolished. Thirty years after their final performance, the Follies girls gather to have a few drinks, sing a few songs and lie about themselves. Tracie Bennett, Janie Dee and Imelda Staunton play the magnificent Follies in this dazzling new production. Featuring a cast of 37 and an orchestra of 21, it’s directed by Dominic Cooke (The Comedy of Errors). Winner of Academy, Tony, Grammy and Olivier awards, Sondheim’s previous work includes A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George.
The young Clara creeps downstairs on Christmas Eve to play with her favourite present – a Nutcracker doll. But the mysterious magician Drosselmeyer is waiting to sweep her off on a magical adventure. After defeating the Mouse King, the Nutcracker and Clara travel through the Land of Snow to the Kingdom of Sweets, where the Sugar Plum Fairy treats them to a wonderful display of dances. Back home, Clara thinks she must have been dreaming – but doesn’t she recognize Drosselmeyer’s nephew?
Peter Wright’s nigh-on definitive production for The Royal Ballet ranks as one of the most enduring and enchanting versions of 'The Nutcracker'. With its festive period setting, dancing snowflakes and enchanting stage magic, Lev Ivanov’s 1892 ballet has become the perfect Christmas entertainment, with Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous, sugar-spun music the most recognizable of all ballet scores.
Loosely based on the story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the ballet opens with a lively Christmas party, its Victorian setting captured in opulent detail by Julia Trevelyan Oman’s designs. Wright’s choreography ingeniously incorporates surviving fragments of the ballet’s original material, including the sublime pas de deux for the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Prince. But in emphasizing the relationship between Clara and the Nutcracker Prince, the production also gains a touching subtext of first love.
Rory Kinnear (The Threepenny Opera, Penny Dreadful, Othello) is Marx and Oliver Chris (Twelfth Night, Green Wing) is Engels, in this new comedy written by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman. Broadcast live from The Bridge Theatre, London, the production is directed by Nicholas Hytner and reunites the creative team behind Broadway and West End hit comedy One Man, Two Guvnors.
1850, and Europe’s most feared terrorist is hiding in Dean Street, Soho. Broke, restless and horny, the thirty-two-year-old revolutionary is a frothing combination of intellectual brilliance, invective, satiric wit, and child-like emotional illiteracy. Creditors, spies, rival revolutionary factions and prospective seducers of his beautiful wife all circle like vultures. His writing blocked, his marriage dying, his friend Engels in despair at his wasted genius, his only hope is a job on the railway. But there’s still no one in the capital who can show you a better night on the piss than Karl Heinrich Marx.
The corruption of innocence is at the heart of Verdi’s potent tragedy in David McVicar’s production for The Royal Opera. Rigoletto, court jester to the libertine Duke of Mantua, is cursed by the father of one of the Duke’s victims for his irreverent laughter. When the Duke seduces Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda, it seems the curse is taking effect…
David McVicar’s production highlights the cruelty at the heart of the court of Mantua. Richly dressed courtiers engage in orgies and revelries to Verdi’s heady, spirited dances. The opera’s many musical highlights include the ebullient ‘La donna è mobile’, in which the Duke boasts of his disregard for women; Gilda’s exquisite, plangent duets with Rigoletto and the Duke; and the gorgeous Act III quartet that beautifully weaves the voices together as the story quickens to its shattering conclusion.
Giuseppe Verdi wrote in 1855 that Rigoletto was his ‘best opera’. He had had to overcome state censorship to stage it – the censors objected to its depiction of an immoral ruler – but he was vindicated by the premiere’s huge success in 1851. Rigoletto was performed 250 times in the next 10 years and has remained one of the most popular of all operas.
'Tosca' is one of the great evenings of opera, and from its strident opening chords conjures up a world of political instability and menace.
Jonathan Kent’s production for The Royal Opera captures the dangerous political turbulence of Rome in 1800. The Chief of Police, Scarpia – one of the most malevolent villains in opera – ruthlessly pursues and tortures enemies of the state. His dark, demonic music contrasts with the expansive melodies of the idealistic lovers, Tosca and Cavaradossi, who express their passion in sublime arias, including ‘Vissi d’arte’ and ‘E lucevan le stelle’. Giacomo Puccini’s dramatic work was a hit with audiences on its 1900 premiere and it remains one of the most performed of all operas – with its gripping plot and glorious music, it’s easy to see why.
A candle-lit church, Scarpia’s gloomy study with its hidden torture chamber and the false optimism of a Roman dawn: this handsome production throws into relief the ruthlessly taut drama, as the tension is wound up towards a fateful conclusion. Puccini’s meticulously researched score is infused with the same authentic detail, from distant cannon fire during the Act I Te Deum to tolling church bells and the sounds of a firing squad.
'I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too.'
Twelfth Night is a tale of unrequited love – hilarious and heartbreaking. Two twins are separated in a shipwreck, and forced to fend for themselves in a strange land. The first twin, Viola, falls in love with Orsino, who dotes on OIivia, who falls for Viola but is idolised by Malvolio. Enter Sebastian, who is the spitting image of his twin sister...
Christopher Luscombe, Director of the ‘glorious’ (Daily Telegraph) Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing (2014 and 2016), returns to the Royal Shakespeare Company to tackle Shakespeare’s greatest comedy, a brilliantly bittersweet account of "the whirligig of time".
Tennessee Williams’ twentieth century masterpiece Cat on a Hot Tin Roof played a strictly limited season in London’s West End in 2017. Following his smash hit production of A Streetcar Named Desire, Benedict Andrews’ ‘thrilling revival’ (New York Times) starred Sienna Miller alongside, Jack O’Connell and Colm Meaney.
On a steamy night in Mississippi, a Southern family gather at their cotton plantation to celebrate Big Daddy’s birthday. The scorching heat is almost as oppressive as the lies they tell. Brick and Maggie dance round the secrets and sexual tensions that threaten to destroy their marriage. With the future of the family at stake, which version of the truth is real – and which will win out?
Captured live on stage, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof will screen in cinemas around the world from 22 February 2018.
Christopher Wheeldon, Artistic Associate of The Royal Ballet, created his adaptation of Shakespeare’s late great romance 'The Winter’s Tale' for The Royal Ballet in 2014. Building on the success of 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland', T'he Winter’s Tale' received ecstatic praise at its premiere, acclaimed by critics and audiences alike for its intelligent, distinctive and emotionally powerful story, told through exquisite dance. It is now widely judged to be a modern ballet classic.
The story follows the destruction of a marriage through consuming jealousy, the abandonment of a child and a seemingly hopeless love. Yet, through remorse and regret – and after a seemingly miraculous return to life – the ending is one of forgiveness and reconciliation. With powerful designs by Bob Crowley and atmospheric music by Joby Talbot, The Winter’s Tale is a masterful modern narrative ballet.
'Carmen' is the best-known work by French composer Georges Bizet, and one of the most famous operas in the entire art form – numbers such as the Habanera and the Toreador Song have permeated the popular consciousness as little else has. The opera’s heady combination of passion, sensuality and violence initially proved too much for the stage, and it was a critical failure on its 1875 premiere. Bizet died shortly after, and never learned of the spectacular success his Carmen would achieve: the opera has been performed more than five hundred times at Covent Garden alone.
This ever-popular opera is given a fresh point of view in Barrie Kosky’s highly physical production, originally created for Frankfurt Opera. The Australian director is one of the world’s most sought-after opera directors, whose Royal Opera debut with Shostakovich’s The Nose in 2016 was greeted with delight. For Carmen he has devised a far-from-traditional version, incorporating music written by Bizet for the score but not usually heard, and giving a new voice to the opera’s endlessly fascinating central character.
Leonard Bernstein was one of the first classical composers in America to achieve both popular and critical acclaim. He was eclectic in his sources – drawing on jazz and modernism, the traditions of Jewish music and the Broadway musical – and many of Bernstein’s scores are remarkably well suited to dance. He was particularly associated with Jerome Robbins, their credits together including Fancy Free and West Side Story. To celebrate the centenary year of the composer’s birth, The Royal Ballet has united all three of its associate choreographers to celebrate the dynamic range and danceability of Bernstein’s music.
The programme includes two world premieres by Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor and Artistic Associate Christopher Wheeldon, marking each artist’s first foray into Bernstein. At the heart of the programme is the first revival of Artist in Residence Liam Scarlett’s The Age of Anxiety, created in 2014 to Bernstein’s soul-searching Second Symphony. Both symphony and ballet are inspired by W.H. Auden’s masterful modernist poem, itself written in response to the atmosphere of disillusionment and uncertainty that followed the end of World War II.
Ben Whishaw (The Danish Girl, Skyfall, Hamlet) and Michelle Fairley (Fortitude, Game of Thrones) play Brutus and Cassius, David Calder (The Lost City of Z, The Hatton Garden Job) plays Caesar and David Morrissey (The Missing, Hangmen, The Walking Dead) is Mark Antony. Broadcast live from The Bridge Theatre, London.
Caesar returns in triumph to Rome and the people pour out of their homes to celebrate. Alarmed by the autocrat’s popularity, the educated élite conspire to bring him down. After his assassination, civil war erupts on the streets of the capital.
Nicholas Hytner’s production will thrust the audience into the street party that greets Caesar’s return, the congress that witnesses his murder, the rally that assembles for his funeral and the chaos that explodes in its wake.
Verdi’s life-long love affair with Shakespeare’s works began with Macbeth, a play he considered to be ‘one of the greatest creations of man’. With his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi set out to create ‘something out of the ordinary’. Their success is borne out in every bar of a score that sees Verdi at his most theatrical: it bristles with demonic energy.
The warrior Macbeth fights on the side of the King of Scotland – but when a coven of witches prophesy that he shall become king himself, a ruthless ambition drives Macbeth and his wife to horrific acts.Murder makes Macbeth king, and intrigue and butchery are the hallmarks of his brief, doomed reign. The witches make another prediction, which also comes true: Macbeth and his lady lose their lives, and justice is restored.
Phyllida Lloyd’s 2002 production for The Royal Opera is richly hued, shot through with black, red and gold. The witches – imagined by designer Anthony Ward as strange, scarlet-turbaned creatures – are ever-present agents of fate. Lloyd depicts the Macbeths’ childlessness as the dark sadness lurking behind their terrible deeds. The Royal Opera’s production uses Verdi’s 1865 Paris revision of the opera, which includes Lady Macbeth’s riveting aria ‘La luce langue’.
Manon’s brother Lescaut is offering her to the highest bidder when she meets Des Grieux and falls in love. They elope to Paris, but when Monsieur G.M. offers Manon a life of luxury as his mistress she can’t resist. With the Lescauts’ encouragement Des Grieux cheats at cards in an attempt to win Monsieur G.M.’s fortune. They are caught. Manon is arrested as a prostitute and deported to New Orleans, followed by Des Grieux. On the run, Manon dies from exhaustion.
Kenneth MacMillan’s source for Manon was the 18th-century French novel already adapted for opera by Massenet and Puccini. The premiere was given on 7 March 1974, with the lead roles danced by Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell. The ballet quickly became a staple of The Royal Ballet’s repertory, and a touchstone of adult, dramatic dance.
MacMillan found new sympathy with the capricious Manon and her struggle to escape poverty. Designs by his regular collaborator Nicholas Georgiadis reflect this, depicting a world of lavish splendour polluted by miserable destitution. MacMillan’s spectacular ensemble scenes for the whole Company create vivid, complex portraits of the distinct societies of Paris and New Orleans. But it is Manon and Des Grieux’s impassioned pas de deux – recalling the intensity of MacMillan’s earlier Romeo and Juliet – that drive this tragic story, and make Manon one of MacMillan’s most powerful dramas.
'Swan Lake' has had a special role in the repertory of The Royal Ballet since 1934. This Season The Royal Ballet creates a new production with additional choreography by Artist in Residence Liam Scarlett. While remaining faithful to the Petipa-Ivanov text, Scarlett will bring fresh eyes to the staging of this classic ballet, in collaboration with his long-term designer John Macfarlane.
Prince Siegfried chances upon a fl ock of swans while out hunting. When one of the swans turns into a beautiful woman, Odette, he is enraptured. But she is under a spell that holds her captive, allowing her to regain her human form only at night.
'Swan Lake' was Tchaikovsky’s first ballet score. Given its status today as arguably the best loved and most admired of all classical ballets, it is perhaps surprising that at its premiere in 1877 Swan Lake was poorly received. It is thanks to the 1895 production by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov that Swan Lake has become part of not only ballet consciousness but also wider popular culture. That success is secured not only by the sublime, symphonic sweep of Tchaikovsky’s score, but also by the striking choreographic contrasts between Petipa’s royal palace scenes and the lyric lakeside scenes created by Ivanov.
