Northwest Film Event Highlights – April 2013

Just a bit late for Easter, Manchester's Cornerhouse offers up The Gospel According to St. Matthew (7 & 10 Apr), the finest cinematic rendering of that ill-fated conjurer Jesus, a magician so talented he makes Dynamo look like Tommy Cooper. This is the surprisingly reverential retelling of the life of the New Testament’s golden boy by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the bad boy of Italian cinema. The story goes that Pasolini, a Marxist atheist, was inspired to make a film about JC while holed up in an Assisi hotel with only the Good Book for company. Keep that in mind the next time you check into a Travelodge.

For the gorehounds who make the pilgrimage each year, horror festival Grimm Up North is no less of a religious experience. April has three Grimm Up North nights to keep you sated till the full fest in October: a pair of David Cronenberg body-horrors (Scanners & The Brood, 4 Apr, Stockport Plaza); a twisted family double feature on 17 Apr – one’s an oldie (gross-out class satire Society) and one’s a newie (Resurrection); and on 24 Apr at The Dancehouse, Manchester, you can see a preview of Shadow People and much anticipated horror anthology The ABCs of Death.

Pedro Almodóvar follows 2011’s nerve-shredding thriller The Skin I Live In with something altogether frothier: a workplace comedy about an ebullient cabin crew who put the cock in cockpit. It’s called I’m So Excited!, and that’s exactly what the Spanish director’s fans should be as this looks like a delightful throwback to his raunchy comedies of the 80s. It opens nationwide on 3 May but make your way to FACT, in Liverpool, on 23 Apr to see a sneak preview and a Q&A with Almodóvar via satellite.

Two fine music docs screen on 12 Apr at 2022NQ, in Manchester. LCD Soundsystem call it a day in Shut Up and Play the Hits, a concert movie of the band’s farewell gig, and Iceland: Beyond Sigur Rós showcases the eclectic and less celebrated music emerging from the home of the omnipresent band of the title.

While not quite as trendy as the Northern Quarter, a tiny cinema in Moston has been up to something equally as radical. A Small Cinema started life as pop-up events but since last year it's had a permanent space in a renovated miners’ washhouse in Moston Community Arts and Music Centre. On 20 Apr it has a screening of a documentary following a local acting group from first rehearsal to the first night performance of their self-penned play inspired by The Condition of the Working Class, Friedrich Engels’ landmark study of Victorian England. [Jamie Dunn]