Film Group screenings
Dir: Werner Herzog: West Germany 1972 (93 mins) (Member’s Request) From its opening shots of an ant-like column of Spanish conquistadors and their enslaved indigenous porters scrambling perilously down through the clouds on a sheer pass in the Andes, it’s immediately clear that Werner Herzog’s account of the quest for El Dorado will be […]
Dir: Roman Polanski: USA 2002 (149 mins) Evoking his own childhood experiences in the Krakow ghetto, Roman Polanski laid some personal ghosts to rest with this poignant Holocaust drama based on the memoirs of the Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. Events are seen through the eyes of Szpilman who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto as deportations to […]
Dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer: Denmark 1955 (126 mins) For many this adaptation of Kaj Munk’s play about tensions within a Jutland farming family is the very greatest of all Dreyer’s masterpieces as suspenseful as it is emotionally devastating. Dreyer’s penultimate film is at once a wise, even witty exploration of pride, prejudice and pretensions to […]
Dir: Billy Wilder: USA 1991 (122 mins) (Member’s Request) Still one of Wilder’s funniest satires. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play jazz musicians on the run after witnessing the St Valentine’s Day massacre, masquerading in drag as members of an all-girl band (with resulting gender confusions involving Marilyn Monroe) to escape the clutches of Chicago […]
Set in a lovingly evoked Budapest in the run-up to Christmas, Lubitsch’s deliciously delicate comedy focuses on the various obstacles blocking the path of potential lovers, played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullaven, fellow workers in a gossip-ridden emporium who are unaware they’re in fact courting one another by mail in an anonymous correspondence. Lubitsch’s […]
Babette’s Feast is an Oscar-winning tale of everyday passion, magic and miracles in which a chef (the late Stéphane Audran) prepares an extravagant banquet for her employers. This marvellous film is based on the story of the same name by Isak Dinesan (Karen Blixen), and was the first Danish film of a Blixen story, and […]
This Moroccan Arabic-language drama film directed by Maryam Touzani depicts a woman (Mina) and her closeted gay husband (Halim) who run a caftan store in the medina of Salé, Morocco, and hire a talented young man as an apprentice. Slowly Mina realises how much her husband is moved by his presence. The Blue Caftan is […]