White Riot (2019)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
The punk era has been endlessly picked over for its music, its attitude and its fashions, but the politics that moment was steeped in are often airbrushed out of the picture. Rubika Shah’s new film White Riot is a welcome corrective to the kind of punk nostalgia documentary so often seen on TV. Taking its name from The Clash’s debut single, it charts the formation of Rock Against Racism, a vital London-based protest movement that emerged to counter the rise of anti-immigration hostility, the National Front and the racist narratives of MP Enoch Powell. Infamously, Powell counted rock legend Eric Clapton among his vocal supporters, and so RAR’s mission was to fight the other corner, staging a series of epochal punk and reggae gigs in which music was celebrated as a force that – in founder Red Saunders’ words – “breaks down people’s fear of one another”. Shah never hammers home the parallels with our own time, but they won’t be lost on many. Her film is getting a 24-hour preview this Saturday on BFI Player as part of S.O.U.L. Fest.
Downhill Racer (1969)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 10pm
Michael Ritchie was fairly big news during the New Hollywood years, but he’s become a neglected figure – light years behind fellow travellers like Scorsese, Spielberg or even Robert Altman in fame terms. Like Altman, Ritchie came up through TV, and he brought a crisply contemporary, photojournalistic style to his debut cinematic feature, which skirts close to docudrama as it follows the championship-hopping pursuits of an ambitious American skier. Rising star Robert Redford, who’d just hit the big time with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), plays the Olympic hopeful, while Gene Hackman is his coach, although the star of the show is arguably British cinematographer Brian Probyn. Ritchie had headhunted Probyn after seeing his work on Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), and his hire brings a live-broadcast immediacy to the electrifying downhill sequences shot in various locations across the Alps and the Rockies.
Get Out (2017)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
This week’s brace of fan-favourite reissues looking to welcome audiences back into cinemas includes that 1980s childhood cornerstone The Karate Kid and, more up to date, Jordan Peele’s sensational 2017 directorial debut, Get Out. A terrifically clever and entertaining spin on the type of plot favoured by novelist Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives) in which a seemingly benign domestic setting harbours a sinister, even evil secret, Get Out already looks era-defining for the way it uses genre to tackle themes of both racism and patronising liberal attitudes to race. Brit Daniel Kaluuya plays the photographer who travels to upstate New York to meet the family of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams), becoming an increasingly uncomfortable guest amid unsettling comments and odd behaviour, especially from the family’s black servants. Three years on, Peele’s balance of humour, horror, politics and narrative surprises hasn’t faded a jot.
Sansho Dayu (1954)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
The latest bucketful of titles to be added to the Japan collection on BFI Player is an auteur-driven pick’n’mix. There are two more from Takeshi Kitano, A Scene at the Sea (1991) and Getting Any? (1994); one more from Seijun Suzuki, Zigeunerweisen (1980); and the collection’s first offering from one of Japanese cinema’s grand masters, Kenji Mizoguchi. Sansho Dayu is one of the landmark titles from that early 1950s flurry when the west fell hard for Japanese cinema via premieres at festivals like Venice and Cannes. Like many of those films, it’s a medieval tale, in this case following the woebegotten fortunes of a mother and her two children who become fatefully separated en route to joining the exiled father, a provincial governor. One of Mizoguchi’s masterpieces, it’s a film that’s Shakespearian in its combination of epic sweep and acutely emotional tragedy. Via his characteristically lengthy travelling shots, we’re given both distance and bruising intimacy as witnesses of the family’s plight.
The Man Who Laughs (1928)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
The joker in this week’s pack is this silent Hollywood melodrama about a clown whose rictus grin was carved into his face in childhood by the men who killed his father. That ghoulish premise is derived from Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel L’Homme qui rit, with the action set in 17th-century England. Although a Universal production, and one that fed into that studio’s subsequent cycle of gothic horror movies, The Man Who Laughs has the fable-like contours of that decade’s German Expressionist classics, with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari star Conrad Veidt giving an affectingly tortured performance as the sad-sack clown and émigré director Paul Leni – late of Waxworks (1925) and early haunted-house picture The Cat and the Canary (1927) – bringing the shadows. Leni’s film is most famous these days for having inspired the appearance of DC Comics’ most famous supervillain, so this new restored Blu-ray edition is perfect timing for any Joker (2019) fans looking to trace the grinning one’s actual origin story.