Film Reviews & Previews
The debut film by “one of the forgotten heroes of British cinema” (Matthew Sweet, BBC Radio 4), Barney Platts-Mills’ Bronco Bullfrog is “remarkable” (Mollie Panter-Downes, The New Yorker), a “breathtaking time capsule” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian), and a “revelation” (Kieron Corless, Sight & Sound).
Seventeen-year-old Del, with no money and nowhere to go, breaks into train cars with his cool, fresh-out-of-borstal (reform school) pal Bronco Bullfrog. But one day he meets the lovely Irene, and despite an earful from his dad (and her mum), the two young lovers run away together… but to where?
Shot in London’s East End in 1969, cast with Doc Marten-wearing “suedehead” locals, and set to a dynamic soundtrack by early ’70s art rock band Audience, Bronco Bullfrog has been compared to the work of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, but with a punk rock spirit. After a minuscule American release following its Edinburgh and Cannes premieres, this “lost gem” (Dave Calhoun, Time Out) returns over 50 years later as a cult landmark of two teens in love, in black and white and cockney—with subtitles.
Sadly, filmmaker Barney Platts-Mills passed away last year so is not here to be part of the re-release of his film. In his stead, Oscar-winning director James Scott will participate in a Q&A after 7:30 PM screening of Bronco at the Laemmle Glendale on Friday, April 29.
From Sasha Frere-Jones recent piece in the Observer:
“The British 1970 film Bronco Bullfrog…is about kids in the streets, full stop. Del (Del Walker) starts up a romance with Irene (Anne Gooding) and bounces around with his friend Joe, aka Bronco Bullfrog (Sam Shepherd), running from cops and parents through Stratford, East London. A year before starring in this neo-realist dream, Walker was talking to director Barney Platts-Mills while they made a short documentary of Walker and his friends doing improvisatory theater with director Joan Littlewood.
“‘Is this better than hanging about in the streets? Is that all you do?’ Platts-Mills asks him.
“‘It’s all I’ve ever done,’ Walker says. “Streets—Stratford, Plaistow, Green Gate, East Ham, Leyton, Sleaford. Everywhere. Get a bit sick of it.’
“That film is called Everybody’s An Actor, Shakespeare Said, but that statement is the plot of Bronco Bullfrog, almost in total. Now rereleased by Gabriele Caroti and Seventy-Seven, a “boutique movie and music label focusing on vintage, underseen, and underappreciated work,” Bronco Bullfrog is a funnel right back into 1969 East London, a bright black-and-white look at several working class kids with no future and all the time in the world. Before Quadrophenia, before the Jam, before the Sex Pistols, there was this.
“‘We both loved the Italian neo-realists, Barney and me,’ cinematographer Adam Barker-Mill told me. ‘Joan and the boys had something.’ In the late ‘60s, Littlewood had been working in a theater in East London, putting on shows with local teens. The gang of boys hanging about in front of the theater was slowing things down, so she put them to work.”
Read the rest of Frere-Jones’ piece here.
The fall of 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of Fiddler on the Roof, the film Pauline Kael called “the most powerful movie musical ever made.” Narrated by Jeff Goldblum, Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen captures the humor and drama of director Norman Jewison’s quest to recreate the lost world of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia and re-envision the beloved stage hit as a wide-screen epic. We have an advance screening of Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen May 5 at the Royal followed by week-long engagements at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center beginning May 6.
For a taste of the film, here’s a clip in which composer John Williams and Jewison discuss enlisting the brilliant violinist Isaac Stern to provide the title character’s music.
We are planning a series of Q&As at the Royal: Thursday, May 5th – evening show for LAJFF – Q&A with Daniel Raim (director), moderated by Hilary Helstein (LAJFF); Fri. May 6 – 7:30pm – Q&A with Daniel Raim (director), Sasha Berman (producer), and Michael Sragow (co-writer, co-producer); Sat. May 7th – 7:30pm – Moderated by film critic Kenneth Turan, Q&A with Daniel Raim (director), Sasha Berman (producer), and Michael Sragow (co-writer, co-producer); Wed. May 11 at 7:30pm – Q&A with Michael Sragow (co-writer, co-producer).
Finally, here’s an excerpt from a rave review Raquel Stecher recently posted on her site Out of the Past:
“Director Daniel Raim continues his quest to champion the art of filmmaking with his latest documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen (2022). Narrated by Jeff Goldblum, this documentary takes a deep dive into the making of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), director Norman Jewison’s personal and professional journey and all of the key players who came to together to make one of the greatest musical films of all time.
“Fiddler on the Roof was the brainchild of composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and writer Joseph Stein. The inspiration came from a selection of short stories by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem called Teyve and his Daughters as well as artist Marc Chagall’s 1912 painting The Fiddler. The play opened on Broadway in 1964 and there was some concern that the story would only appeal to a small Jewish audience. However, Fiddler’s tale of a Jewish dairy farmer who attempts to marry off his five daughters in pre-revolutionary Russia, is a story of family, tradition and the inevitability of change. This gave the story a universal appeal and along with the excellent story and top-notch musical numbers, Fiddler was an international success. And naturally it was destined to become a film.
“Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen explores the history behind the Broadway show, how Norman Jewison came to be involved, the casting, musical direction, art direction, location scouting, choreography, cinematography and many other elements that came to make the film as well as Fiddler‘s legacy. There is so much here to take in but it never feels overwhelming.
“The documentary includes interviews with director Norman Jewison, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, musical director John Williams, actresses Rosalind Harris (Tzeitel), Michele Marsh (Hodel) and Neva Small (Chava) and film critic Kenneth Turan. There are also archival interviews of Jewison back in 2000 as well as actor Topol and art director Robert F. Boyle. The interviews add so much to this documentary. There is nothing quite like firsthand accounts of an important moment in film history. And much like Daniel Raim’s other documentaries, there are illustrations from artist Patrick Mate as well as plenty of archival footage and behind-the-scenes photographs. The documentary is also is chock full of interesting facts even beyond just the making of Fiddler on the Roof. Watching it felt like I was getting two documentaries for the price of one: the making of a film and the biography of its director.”
Read the rest of Ms. Stecher’s review here.
We love a movie set on a train and are excited to open an excellent new addition to the genre, the acclaimed new Finnish movie COMPARTMENT NO. 6. (We may be hosting the filmmaker for a Q&A; check our website for news.) The film follows a young woman who escapes an enigmatic love affair in Moscow by boarding a train to the Arctic port of Murmansk. Forced to share the long ride and a tiny sleeping car with a larger than life Russian miner, the unexpected encounter leads the occupants of compartment no. 6 to face major truths about human connection. In addition to the Royal engagement starting Wednesday, January 26, we’ll expand the film to Encino and Pasadena on February 4. The Academy has short-listed the film for its Best International Feature Oscar and prompted some glowing reviews:
“An engrossingly offbeat rail movie…the two leads…walk us through the human condition with the nuances of a big Russian novel.” ~ Deborah Young, The Film Verdict
“It makes for a take on the love story as fresh, resonant and honest… as you’ll find in a contemporary film.” ~ Robert Abele, L.A. Times
“As bleak as the settings may be, it has a delicious black comic streak and shares the buzz of personal re-awakening without ever feeling obvious or cheap. It turns out to be a beacon of warmth amid a frozen wasteland.” ~ Dave Calhoun, TimeOut
“COMPARTMENT NO. 6 evokes a powerful nostalgia for a type of loneliness we don’t really have any more, and for the type of love that was its cure.” ~ Jessica Kiang, Variety
“Seida Haarla gives a winning, intelligent performance as a naturally very clever person made to feel small and helpless in a strange land. But Yuriy Borisov pops from the first moments you see him.” ~ Mark Asch, Little White Lies
Director/co-screenwriter Juho Kuosmanen penned the following about his film:
“COMPARTMENT NO. 6 is an Arctic road movie, perhaps it could be seen as a clumsy attempt to find harmony and peace of mind in a world of chaos and anxiety. The core of the story lies in the notion of acceptance. It’s a hard duty to accept that you are part of this chaotic world, and that you exist as you do. Our hero, Finnish student Laura, takes a long train ride to visit some ancient petroglyphs. She quotes a man she met: “To know yourself, you need to know your past.” She would like to be an archaeologist who gets fulfilment out of these kind of things, petroglyphs and such. But is she really that person? Or is this just a stolen dream from a person she would like to be?
“On the train she meets Ljoha, an annoying Russian miner who follows her like a shadow. She wanted to know her past, and Ljoha is the embodiment of it. It’s unpleasant and banal, but it is what it is.
“Road movies are often about freedom. In a car you can go where you want, every crossroad is a possibility. But I tend to think that freedom isn’t an endless number of options but rather, the ability to accept your limitations. A train ride is more like destiny. You can’t decide where to go, you just have to take what it gives you.”
“All film lovers were saddened by the passing of director Peter Bogdanovich last week, but I may have felt it a bit more keenly. Peter joined us for an Anniversary Classics screening of The Last Picture Show in December of 2016 at the Fine Arts Theatre, and he shared incisive memories about the making of the movie and about many of his other encounters with Hollywood legends over the decades. We were all impressed with how well his film held up after 45 years. As many people commented, it didn’t seem dated at all. The evocation of a dying Texas town in the early 1950s remained incisive and poignant.
“That was not my first encounter with Bogdanovich. I first met him when I was a graduate student at UCLA film school in the late 1960s and he taught a class on Howard Hawks, one of his friends and idols. I remember we got into a bit of an argument when I suggested that Hawks’ To Have and Have Not was not quite as original as he claimed but might have owed something to Casablanca, which came out a couple of years earlier and was directed by non-auteur Michael Curtiz. Anyway, Peter cheerfully dismissed my criticisms. Around the same time, I saw his first film, Targets, which impressed me greatly. Its portrayal of a mass shooter was way ahead of its time, and this story was welded skillfully to an inside-Hollywood tale starring the legendary Boris Karloff in one of his last screen performances. After that came The Last Picture Show and two other huge hits, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. We are hoping to pay tribute to Peter with a 50th Anniversary screening of Doc this year.
“Not all of his later movies were as successful, but he continued working productively, and he also scored successes as an actor and as a film historian. His books of interviews with directors and actors were enormously valuable to all film students and film lovers.
“In the 50 years between that UCLA class and the screening of The Last Picture Show, I encountered Peter on several occasions, and he was always warm and engaging. When I was writing a story about Cher in the 1990s, he shared some incisive memories of directing her in Mask, even though he spoke quite candidly about the tensions between them. Although he was a lover of old Hollywood, he saw the blemishes as well as the triumphs; he was a most clear-eyed observer. Hollywood did not always treat him any better than it treated some of his idols, like his good friend Orson Welles, but he survived to tell the tales, and he never surrendered to bitterness. I feel fortunate to have known him and to have shared a stage with him at that memorable anniversary screening five years ago.”
~ Stephen Farber was president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association from 2012-2016. He is currently a critic for The Hollywood Reporter, a curator of Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics series and co-author of Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies.
Updated: The 12/29 Q&A with JOCKEY star Clifton Collins Jr. and Laemmle Theatres president Greg Laemmle has been cancelled.
The highlight of the poignant new drama Jockey is the performance by Clifton Collins Jr., the prolific character actor here in the title role as an aging jockey training for a final championship. At Sundance earlier this year he earned the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for acting. We open the film Wednesday at the Royal, January 21 at the Playhouse and Town Center, and February 4 at the Claremont, Glendale, Newhall and NoHo.
“An evocative study of American life on the fringes that unfolds alongside the grand mysticism of stallions. Clifton Collins Jr. delivers a haunting, profoundly poignant performance.” ~ Tomris Laffly, Harper’s Bazaar
“Bentley’s intimate character study shows a man coming to terms with his vulnerability, resting on a career-best performance from Clifton Collins Jr, who navigates the role of athlete and father with subtle but striking conviction.” ~ Emily Maskell, Little White Lies
“Jockey is a modest, intimate film, to be sure, but an impressively assured one. It finds a lovely, low-key groove early on and maintains it, and draws performances from its key players that are terrific and true.” Todd McCarthy, Deadline Hollywood Daily
“You’ve certainly seen [Collins Jr.] before, but never quite like this.” ~ Carlos Aguilar, TheWrap
“Somewhere between swagger and selflessness, win and lose, Jockey takes the home stretch.” ~ Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter
Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, co-directors of the double Sundance-winning film WRITING WITH FIRE, will participate in a Q&A at the Royal following the 7:20 PM screening on Thursday, December 2. Film critic Kenneth Turan will moderate.
THE FIRST WAVE director Matt Heineman will participate in Q&As at the Monica Film Center after the 7:30 PM screening on Saturday, November 20 and after the 4:40 screening on Sunday, November 21. Joining him will be Covid survivor Ahmed Ellis and his wife Alexis, Dr. Nathalie Dougė, and physical therapist Karl Arabian.
