5 things to watch this weekend – 5 to 7 July
Twenty-six people play Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Gene Hackman wades into conspiracy, and black magic brings terror to British suburbia. What are you watching this weekend?
Orlando, My Political Biography (2023)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando has already inspired a suitably vaulting, adventurous 1992 film version by Sally Potter, with Tilda Swinton switching genders through centuries of British history. But her text has now inspired an invigorating, exquisitely filmed and extraordinarily supple reimagining by the Spanish writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, who casts (and documents the casting of) 26 trans and non-binary people in the role of Orlando as a means of interrogating Woolf’s novel through the prism of real 21st-century lives and transgender identities. Provocative and often devastatingly personal, Preciado’s essay film is neither drama nor completely documentary but is shot through with the beauty of an invigorating thinker finding bespoke cinematic forms.
The Conversation (1974)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank
Not content with delivering that quickfire duo of mafia masterpieces The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), Francis Ford Coppola filled the time in between by making one of America’s great paranoid thrillers. The Conversation stars Gene Hackman as the surveillance expert who believes he’s stumbled on evidence of murder and possible conspiracy after bugging a conversation between a young couple. A set text for getting to grips with how the anxieties of the Watergate era manifest in cinema, Coppola’s neo-noir is doggedly downbeat but transfixing viewing, putting us claustrophobically inside the headspace of Hackman’s Harry Caul as he obsessively runs and reruns the same recording to get at its inscrutable mystery.
Floating Clouds (1955)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Shockingly the first film by Japanese master Mikio Naruse to make it to Blu-ray in the UK, Floating Clouds is his customarily delicate 1955 drama about the renewal of an affair between a young secretary and a forestry engineer who can’t leave his ailing wife. Floating Clouds traces their complicated relationship through the turning of many calendar pages, and as ever in Naruse’s work you barely notice the emotional undercurrent building to a level where the dam won’t take anymore. Not for nothing did Akira Kurosawa compare Naruse’s films to a river with a quiet surface concealing raging turmoil underneath. Playing the young woman is Hideko Takamine, whose elegant resilience is tested to heartbreak point in so many of the director’s best films.
Night of the Eagle (1962)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Less well known than the similarly titled Night of the Demon (1957), this properly unsettling drama from 1962 deserves an adjacent place in the annals of witchy British cinema. Branded with the startling release title Burn, Witch, Burn! over in the US, it stars Peter Wyngarde (in his pre-Jason King days) as a rationalist college professor specialising in belief and superstition who discovers that his own wife, Tansy (Janet Blair), is practising obeah, a voodoo-like spiritualism that she encountered in the West Indies. Although Wyngarde’s skeptic orders her to destroy all the magic aids she’s hidden around the house to help further his career, things inevitably spiral out of the couple’s control. Director Sidney Hayers steadily summons an atmosphere of creeping dread that’s all the more effective for being situated in a recognisably ordinary English suburbia.
The Party’s Over (1965)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 02:10
A flashback to the beatnik, jazz-filled London of the early 1960s, The Party’s Over was filmed in 1963 but then held up by the censors for a scene involving suggested necrophilia. It was finally released in the April of 1965, just a year before Time magazine would declare London as a ‘swinging city’, by which time God only knows what audiences made of this determinedly nihilistic, black-and-white story of an American heiress getting toxically involved with a group of hedonistic Chelsea hipsters headed up by Oliver Reed. ‘The party’s over’ was a strange message for a moment when an almighty party seemed about to begin. John Barry wrote the music, and Guy Hamilton directed, immediately before their collaboration on the third Bond film, Goldfinger (1964).