Best Film Screenings in the North (21-28 Oct)
The best film events happening in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds this week, including HOME's preview of Prevenge and the latest No Gloss Festival
Frankenstein
Not the first film version of Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus tale, but still the best. Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster, with his square head and neck bolts, makes the creature iconic, while James Whale's atmospheric direction and fairy tale rhythms makes this a study of alienation that’s both terrifying and moving.
Suspiria
This blast of hallucinatory terror follows a young American ballerina who finds her new dance academy in Germany to be a less than hospitable place. Something is clearly rotten within its baroque, blood red corridors and mirrored dance studios. Director Dario Argento takes his visual style to new heights, with story and character replaced by eye-searing colours and ear-splitting sounds (the latter courtesy of krautrock noise-makers Goblin).
27 Oct, Texture, Manchester, 7.30pm
No Gloss Film Festival
Leeds short film festival championing “underground cinema, do-it-yourself, unconventional filmmaking and independent films by local and international filmmakers.” For programme details, head to noglossfilmfestival.co.uk
22-23 Oct, Canal Mills, Leeds, various times
Prevenge (Alice Lowe Q&A) + FilmFear
For her debut film, Alice Lowe provides a blackly funny addition to the demonic pregnancy sub-genre with the deliciously-titled Prevenge, which is being presented as part of HOME and Film4’s Film Fear season by kickass feminist horror programmers The Final Girls. Lowe's twisted comic horror follows a pregnant mother who goes on a killing spree at the behest of her unborn demon seed. Lowe will be at HOME to present the film and give a Q&A after the screening. Read our preview to the FilmFear season.
27 Oct, HOME, Manchester, 6.10pm
The Wind that Shakes the Barley
Ken Loach won his second Palme d’Or award for his powerful new film I, Daniel Blake. You’ve a chance to check out the first film he won the same award for: 2006’s Wind that Shakes the Barley, which tells of the birth of the Irish Republican Army in the early 1920s through the eyes of brothers who develop two different political ideologies as they wage guerrilla war against the British.
23 Oct, Hyde Park Picturehouse, 3pm
Stormy Weather
Screening as part of the UK-wide Black Star season, this trailblazing Hollywood musical from 1943 features a predominantly black cast, who include Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Ada Brown, Lena Horne and, most notably, self-taught entertainers the fabulous Nicholas Brothers.
23 Oct, HOME, Manchester, 1pm / 23 Oct, FACT, Liverpool, 6pm