This weekend The Ritzy Brixton pays tribute to the recently deceased Phillip Seymour Hoffman with a special screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), one of his best and most memorable performances.
In celebration of one of Europe’s most original and fearless directors and in anticipation of her latest controversial film Bastards, The Claire Denis Retrospective consists of two of her most well renowned films. Based on Billy Budd by Herman Melville Beau Travail (1999) sees a new young recruit in the Foreign Legion disrupting a delicate balance of power for one his fellow officers. And Vedredi Soir (2003) is a provocative and intimate reflection on a woman’s one night stand with a mysterious stranger.
Out of the Furnace stars Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Forest Whitaker, Zoe Saldana, and Sam Shepard in a gritty, violent tale of bare knuckle fighting, corruption, and revenge from the director of Crazy Heart (2009). And on the other end of the spectrum, using a barrage of varying filmic styles, An Over Simplification of Her Beauty is an experimental, kaleidoscopic journey into the imagination of a young artist who decides to make a film for the girl who stood him up on a date.
The Dallas Buyers Club has Mathew McConaughey as a party hard rodeo cowboy whose carefree life is shattered when he contracts the HIV virus. Given thirty days to live, his search for viable treatment only brings him up against government bureaucracy and red tape, forcing him to take things into his own hands. The word is it’s a career best from McConaughey who seems to be successfully reinventing his career.
The Lego Movie certainly looks like a big bucket of plastic fun. After case of mistaken identity, average Lego figure Emmett recruited by a band of fighting crusaders out to destroy the evil Lord Business who plans on gluing their world together and destroying Legoland. If that doesn’t sound appealing there’s always The Armstrong Lie, an in depth look at the fall from grace of Lance Armstrong, the seven time Tour de France champion who admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs.
If you haven’t seen The Wolf of Wall Street yet then it’s an absolute must. Martin Scorsese is back on form with a scathing, visceral and unrelenting social satire that has a fantastic streak of dark humour. Although some critics have claimed that it irresponsibly glamorises convicted Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort, I see it as an absurdist impression of the infantile, self-serving and debauched lunatics that have a grip on our economy. Basically The Wolf of Wall Street does for the economic crisis what Dr Strangelove (1964) did for the cold war.
Inside Llewyn Davis is also worth checking out. Although it isn’t as otherworldly and surreal as the Coen’s early nineties Barton Fink, it does share a similar preoccupation with random oddball characters, off beat humour and artistic failure. And much like Barton Fink it also reflects the often-unseen melancholic monotony that haunts most creative endeavours. It’s also very funny and a perfect antidote to the sentimental and anodyne mainstream musical biopics that always seem to follow the same format. Just don’t expect an easily digestible Hollywood resolve. So if you’re looking to escape train strikes and bad weather I couldn’t suggest a better place than The Ritzy Brixton.
