Best film screenings in the North (29 Jul-5 Aug)
The best film events happening in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds this week, including the likes of Solaris and The Second Mother at FACT, and Round Midnight at HOME.
‘Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier)
The great Bertrand Tavernier, perhaps France’s finest post-Nouvelle Vague director, and certainly one of its most underrated, delivers a beautifully offbeat love letter to jazz with ‘Round Midnight. We follow a chirpy French jazz nut (François Cluzet) who ends up taking his hero, a sublime but self-destructive sax man (Dexter Gordon), under his wing and into his home after one drinking binge too many. The film reeks of smoke-filled joints and authentic jazz sounds. Look out for a Martin Scorsese cameo along with a slew of jazz greats like Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and Wayne Shorter.
Sat 30 Jul, HOME, Manchester, 6pm
The Second Mother (Anna Muylaert)
This brilliant comedy of manners from Brazil centered on Val, a live-in maid who's become an integral part of an upper-crust São Paulo household. Her identity as the family's “second mother” is threatened, however, when her own daughter, Jessica, comes to stay for a few days, disrupting the unspoken but very distinct servant-master dynamic at play within the house. Jessica’s over-familiarity with her mother’s employers soon turn this repressed, claustrophobic household into a powderkeg.
Part of Brazilica 2016. brazilicafestival.co.uk
Tue 2 Aug, FACT, Liverpool, 7.30pm
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)
A space movie unlike any other, Tarkovsky works his usual transcendental magic on the genre with this story of an astronaut who discovers that the planet he’s studying from a remote space station has the power to turn his memories of his dead wife into real life manifestations. A dreamlike interrogation of faith and memory, this is one of the all-time great science fiction films, but also one of cinema's most moving odes to the power of love.
Tue 2 Aug, FACT, Liverpool, 6pm
Body (Malgorzata Szumowska)
There are shades of Krzysztof Kieślowski – albeit with more laughs – in this quirky drama with supernatural overtones. Set in a rain-drenched Warsaw, director Malgorzata Szumowska’s 2015 film follows a new age therapist, a bitter police chief and the latter’s anorexic daughter (who’s also the former’s patient) and weaves several intriguing plots combining elements of murder mystery, ghost story and deadpan black comedy. Body picked up the Silver Bear award at Berlin Film Festival last year but is yet to have a full UK release, so snap up this opportunity to see it on the big screen, which comes courtesy of Small Cinema’s 58% initiative.
Sun 31 Jul, Liverpool Small Cinema, 6pm
Cry of the Owl (Claude Chabrol)
Claude Chabrol and Patricia Highsmith are a match made in heaven, and this 1987 adaptation of Highsmith’s novel is as elegant and chilling as you’d expect from the Nouvelle Vague’s master of thrillers. Slow and deliberately paced, Chabrol blends notes of film noir with the tones of his own 60s studies in dread (The Butcher, The Unfaithful Wife) to create one of the finest non-Ripley Highsmith adaptations.