Rashomon (1950)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank
Coming 41st in the recent Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll, Akira Kurosawa’s conflicting-truths drama Rashomon still holds a towering place in the minds of international film fans more than 70 years after it caused an earthquake at the Venice Film Festival. The film uses an innovative four-story structure to try to get at the facts of an assault and murder in the woods outside the Rashomon gate in medieval Kyoto. A bandit, a wife, a samurai and a woodcutter take their turns to relay their version of events, and perhaps some of the film’s replayability comes from our own difficulty in remembering what happens in each varying account.
Till (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Mamie Till was the mother who became an activist after the racist murder of her 14-year-old son Emmett in 1950s Mississippi. In this clear-eyed, wrenchingly powerful dramatisation, she’s played with righteous anger and steely presence by The Harder They Fall’s Danielle Deadwyler. With Barbara Broccoli and Whoopi Goldberg on board as producers, the new film from Chinonye Chukwu – the Nigerian-American director behind 2019’s Clemency – has the contours of a prestige biopic. But with Deadwyler controlling its gravitational centre, Till becomes a wounding, rousing and valuable work of historical portraiture.
Married to the Mob (1988)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Michelle Pfeiffer plays the glamorous mafia wife who gets romantically entangled with Matthew Modine’s FBI agent in Jonathan Demme’s screwball gangster film. Following on the heels of Something Wild (1986), it’s one of Demme’s cycle of irresistibly off-kilter 1980s genre movies: full of primary-coloured fun and borne along on a New Wave soundtrack (including New Order, Debbie Harry, The Feelies and Brian Eno). This packed Blu-ray by the US label Fun City Editions is being brought out on these shores by the newly formed boutique label Radiance Films, who’ve also released their inaugural discs this week: neglected Palme d’Or winner The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) and yakuza drama Big Time Gambling Boss (1968).
Manhunter (1986)
Where’s it on? BBC2, Friday, 11:05pm
Right after Married to the Mob, Jonathan Demme would tame his more idiosyncratic instincts for Thomas Harris adaptation The Silence of the Lambs (1991). In doing so, he was creating a kind of de facto sequel to Michael Mann’s 1986 version of Harris’s novel Red Dragon, which caused fewer ripples in the culture than Demme’s Oscar winner but nonetheless gave a big break to Brian Cox in the Hannibal Lecter role (here spelled Lecktor). Through TV’s Miami Vice, Mann was already established as the 1980s poet of neon and nightfall, and there’s a gripping mastery to his handling of Manhunter’s cat-and-mouse dynamics as FBI agent Will Graham (William Petersen) seeks Lecktor’s help in his pursuit of a new killer.
My Twentieth Century (1989)
Where’s it on? Klassiki
Highlighted as pick of the week on Klassiki, the streaming platform dedicated to cinema from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, this incredible black-and-white fantasy comes from Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi. Set at the end of the 1890s, when electricity was transforming life on Earth, it follows two sisters who are separated as children but whose lives are destined to intersect again on the Orient Express as the year is about to tick over into the new century. One is now a glamorous conwoman, the other a bomb-wielding revolutionary. Full of archaic formal tricks harking back to the early years of cinema, Enyedi’s film is a cosmic origin story for the modern era.
