West End smash and Tokyo Story among highlights at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse
Sponsored | Mark Walsh, our film critic, looks forward to what’s coming up at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse
Screen Arts: A Little Life
The latest West End smash comes to the cinema screen courtesy of the Screen Arts strand.
Filmed earlier this year at London’s Savoy Theatre after enjoying a successful first run at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Ivo Van Hove (A View From The Bridge) co-adapts and directs this version of Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel. Tickets for the theatre run were hard to come by, so thankfully this cinematic screening opens up the chance for new audiences to see the play.
It stars former Grantchester leading man James Norton as Jude, a lawyer with a mysterious past. He’s one of four college friends from New York City: the others, artist JB (Omari Douglas), architect Malcolm (Zach Wyatt) and actor Willem (Luke Thompson) who are collectively attempting to deal with the stresses and strains of life in the Big Apple.
As success, wealth, addiction and pride place a huge tension on the group, it’s Jude who keeps them together. But the secrets of Jude’s past come to light, the tensions within the group increase as they attempt to help the lawyer process the childhood traumas he’s attempted to suppress.
A Little Life is showing on Thursday, September 28 and Sunday, October 1.
Sight and Sound Top 10: Tokyo Story
The monthly screening series counting down the choices of critics as the best films of all time reaches number four, and the highest ranked Asian film on the chart.
It’s another of those films which didn’t make much of an impact internationally on its original release, being described by some distributors as “too Japanese”. What may have once been perceived as a fault has surely played a part in how it has now become so beloved by both critics and audiences.
A retired couple, Shūkichi (Chishū Ryū) and Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama), living in western Japan with their daughter, and travel to Tokyo to see more of the family. But the children don’t really have time for their parents, and after the trip turns into a disaster, the parents return home.
After experiencing dizziness during their trip, Tomi falls ill and dies during their return trip, requiring the family to come together again under very different circumstances.
Loosely inspired by Leo McCarey’s 1937 film Make Way for Tomorrow, director and co-writer Yasujirō Ozu adapts the story to their Japanese setting. Ozu’s deliberate, unfussy directing style uses predominantly static camera work shot from low angles, as if the viewer is seated (in the traditional Japanese style), watching the story unfold.
Key events (such as the train journey to Tokyo and Tomi’s initial illness) occur offscreen, allowing Ozu to focus on the human drama at the story’s core. Showing a Japan in transition after the Second World War, its examination of family and humanity is lyrical and complex; don’t miss the chance to allow it to absorb you in the cinema.
Tokyo Story is showing on Sunday, September 24.
The Old Oak
Ken Loach is one of the finest social commentators and critics in the history of British cinema.
From his early career classics such as Kes to his two wins for Best British Independent Film at the BIFAs (My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen), followed by his two Palme d’Or wins at Cannes (The Wind That Shakes The Barley and I, Daniel Blake), he’s been a forceful voice in the cinema landscape of this country for nearly six decades. Aged 87, his passion for filmmaking remains undimmed and his latest – and possibly last - slice of life is set in the last remaining pub in a village in north-east England.
Loach has reunited with regular screenwriter Paul Laverty to examine the effect of the immigrant crisis on both those who’ve been displaced and those struggling to come to terms with unfamiliar faces in their communities.
Dave Turner is TJ, the Old Oak’s landlord with depression, a divorce and an alienated son. He attempts to mediate tensions when a coachload of Syrian refugees arrive in the community. The locals resent the intrusion into their lives and the charity shown to the migrants when they are struggling to make ends meet.
TJ refuses to allow his back room to be used as a meeting place for the residents to stir up conflict, but then risks inflaming the situation by forming a friendship with Yara (Ebla Mari), a woman attempting to make a new life for herself, her brother and elderly mother.
TJ sees similarity in their situations and histories and attempts to find common ground and a way forward in their mutually difficult lives.
The Old Oak opens on Friday, September 29.
Strange Way of Life
I have regular discussions with friends and as a film critic about the length of films, with the standard for summer blockbusters now seeming to have crept to between two and a half and three hours.
Pedro Almodóvar brings his second English language film to the big screen, and this one clocks in at a compact and bijou thirty-one minutes.
Why then, should you part with hard-earned cash for seeing something of this length in the cinema? Firstly, it features two of the finest actors working today, Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. It’s also that most cinematic of genres, the Western, with Pascal as Silva, returning to an American border town after twenty-five years and reuniting with Jake (Hawke), who’s now the town’s sheriff. While Hawke is pleased to see his old friend, it seems that Silva may have an ulterior motive for returning to town after a quarter of a century.
Secondly, it’s an Almodóvar film and while a Western with LGBT themes might conjure images of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, this is a very different beast.
It’s co-produced by fashion house Saint Laurent, and thanks to this and the efforts of director of photography José Luis Alcaine, it has strong visual appeal as well as a tender soul. And if that still doesn’t tempt you, the film is followed by a recorded chat about its production.
Strange Way Of Life is showing with a recorded Q&A on Monday, September 25.
