Movies of the month

Movies of the month

For details and showtimes, see the websites above.   12 YEARS A SLAVE February 27–March 10   BAFTA award winner for Best Film and Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Steve McQueen’s third movie maintains the tradition of excellence established by the director with Hunger and Shame. This

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Wed 26 Feb 2014 11:00 PM

For details and showtimes, see the websites above.

 

12 YEARS A SLAVE

February 27–March 10

 

BAFTA award winner for Best Film and Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Steve McQueen’s third movie maintains the tradition of excellence established by the director with Hunger and Shame. This is the true story of Solomon Northrup, once a freeman, abducted off the streets of Washington in 1841 and sold into brutal servitude on a Louisiana plantation. A gruelling epic of endurance and fortitude in the face of seemingly insurmountable oppression, the images remain long in the mind. Critical opinion is almost unanimously favourable: ‘A document that is raw, eloquent, horrifying and essential’ (Time). ‘Stark, visceral and unrelenting, 12 Years a Slave is not just a great film but a necessary one’ (Guardian). But the sour note sounded by the Slant reviewer, ‘Steve McQueen’s film practically treats Solomon Northrup as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own education’, has some validity.

 

ODEON Cinema

piazza Strozzi 2, tel. 055/295051

www.odeonfirenze.com

 

LA GRANDE BELLEZZA

March 5, 10–13

 

(in Italian with English subtitles)

 

Paolo Sorrentino’s great international success: Oscar Winner for Best Foreign Film. Amidst the glories and follies of ancient and modern Rome, disenchanted writer Jep observes the vacuousness and decadence of the debauched demimonde. A scathing attack on contemporary Italian culture and an exposure of the numbness and torpidity that age-old political and religious institutions have inculcated in the Italian mind through media manipulation, its referencing particularly of Fellini (La dolce vita, 1960 and Otto e mezzo, 1963) as both homage and parody is its main but by no means its only smartly executed conceit. Everything you wanted to know about post-Berlusconi Italy but were afraid to ask. ‘Splashes of overstatement aside, the ambition intoxicates’ (Total Film). ‘Paolo Sorrentino’s film is really just a huge turn-on that has the bad manners to go sour, succumbing to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur’ (Slant). ‘A shimmering coup de cinema to make your heart burst, your mind swim and your soul roar’ (Telegraph).

 

ODEON Cinema

piazza Strozzi 2, tel. 055/295051055/295051

www.odeonfirenze.com

 

HER

March 14–20

 

Oscar Winner for Best Original Screenplay. A comment on our continuing love affair with technology. Theodore Twombly, heartbroken after the end of a long relationship, makes his living writing letters for other people. He becomes intrigued by and gradually falls in love with ‘Samantha,’ a new, advanced operating system. Set in a very near future with an original and rather enigmatic costume design, Spike Jonze’s important movie steers clear of the almost inevitable crassness of its premise and masterfully tunes into the zeitgeist with telling results. ‘Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, Her is the right film at the right time’ (New Yorker). ‘It is a love story. Also a profoundly metaphysical meditation on what it means to be human. Also one of the more touchingly relevant movies to the ways we actually live and may soon live. Oh, and the year’s best film, or at least the one that may stick with you until its storyline comes true’ (Boston Globe).

 

ODEON Cinema

piazza Strozzi 2, tel. 055/295051055/295051

www.odeonfirenze.com

 

The British Institute 

IL GATTOPARDO 

March 5, 8pm

 

‘If we want things to stay as they are, things have to change.’  Visconti’s grand and eloquent, wistful and resolute epic sweep across the personal and political transformations hoped for and accomplished by the Risorgimento focuses on the Prince of Salina, observer and participant in the crumbling world of the Sicilian aristocracy. Burt Lancaster is magisterial in a pitch-perfect performance, with equally matched support from Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon. With impeccable visuals and a rigorously accurate recreation to the finest detail of the splendour and wealth that was about to disappear, Visconti’s nostalgia for the lost age is never quite overcome by his zeal for social reform. The final extended ball scene is one of cinema’s greatest treasures.

 

BRITISH INSTITUTE of Florence

Lungarno Guicciardini 9

tel. 055/26778270055/26778270

www.britishinstitute.it

 

 

LA CADUTA DEGLI DEI (GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG)(THE DAMNED)

(in Italian with English subtitles)

March 19, 8 p.m.

 

Visconti’s sinister, provocative, titillating, and violent story of the downfall of a rich German industrialist family, sucked into Nazi excesses, scandalised audiences in the late sixties and early seventies with its combination of mainstream, “respectable” actors like Dirk Bogarde and Ingrid Thulin, engaged in graphic (for the time) depictions of decadent sex and violence, transvestitism and incest. Disturbing, edgy and compelling, its recreation of events surrounding The Night of the Long Knives (personally witnessed by Visconti in 1933) and the grotesque intimacies of the Von Essenbecks will leave an indelible impression. “A magnificent failure, an example of a great director working at the peak of his ability and somehow creating almost nothing at all” (Roger Ebert). “A spectacle of such greedy passion, such uncompromising sensation, and such obscene shock that it makes you realize how small and safe and ordinary most movies are” (New York Times).

BRITISH INSTITUTE of Florence

Lungarno Guicciardini 9

tel. 055/26778270055/26778270

www.britishinstitute.it

 

 

DEATH IN VENICE

March 26, 8pm

 

Thomas Mann’s novella is adapted by Visconti in his customary lavish way, but with perhaps an uncharacteristic misstep in turning Mann’s dying intellectual von Aschenbach into a version of Gustav Mahler. The fin-de-siecle ambience of plague-infested Venice is the backdrop to von Aschenbach’s impossible and ultimately morbid love for abstract beauty as personified by the rather too knowing and seductive object of desire, the ravishing boy Tadzio. Dirk Bogarde was made for this role. The music of Mahler, notably the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony famously underlines the aching melancholy of unrequited love. ‘Some of the “flashback” scenes debating art and life sound a little shrill, and the extraordinary addiction Visconti had to the slow zooms which attend almost every shot look eccentric, though they are of their time. This is exalted film-making’ (Guardian).

 

BRITISH INSTITUTE of Florence

Lungarno Guicciardini 9

tel. 055/26778270055/26778270

www.britishinstitute.it

 

 

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