Living (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
It proves a bold but inspired gambit to remake Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru in mid-century City of London tailoring. Bill Nighy is cast in the Takashi Shimura role of the salaryman who gets a fatal diagnosis and begins to wonder what his lifetime of dedication to his office job has really been for. The well-crafted script by Kazuo Ishiguro finds a snug fit for Ikiru’s buttoned-up world in the trappings of 1950s London – a pre-swinging climate of deference and constraint. Not unlike the Kurosawa film, director Oliver Hermanus isn’t shy of holding down the sustain pedal as the story builds to its emotional playground ending.
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Now quarter of a century old, Kasi Lemmons’ ravishing southern gothic drama continues its ascent to canonical status with this new Blu-ray from Criterion. Samuel L. Jackson plays the philandering patriarch of a well-respected family whose dark secrets are about to emerge during a hot summer in 1960s Louisiana. Making her debut as director, Lemmons serves up a heady concoction of buried trauma and mysticism, as the Batiste clan faces up to a turbulent reckoning. Pioneering African-American actor Diahann Carroll makes a vivid impression as a fortune teller and voodoo priestess.
Nil by Mouth (1997)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide and online on BFI Player
Also celebrating its 25th birthday is this directorial debut from Gary Oldman – now remastered by the BFI and still the actor’s only feature behind the camera. Steeped in autobiography, it’s one of British cinema’s great one-offs: a scalding social-realist drama woven from life and Oldman’s own memories of growing up in a working-class family in south London. In the livewire naturalism of its scenes of patriarch Ray Winstone out on the town with his mates and its later unflinching depictions of domestic abuse and drug addiction, Nil by Mouth has a kind of bulldog, John Cassavetes energy. Even at its most harrowing, it never loses sight of its sense of humanity.
Time to Love (1965)
Where’s it on? Mubi
Mubi’s first venture into the world of restoration has turned up a stunner. Time to Love is a spellbinding romantic fable from Turkish director Metin Erksan, whose 1963 film Dry Summer saw similar attention from Scorsese’s World Film Foundation a while back. The setting is a villa on the rainy Princes’ Islands near Istanbul, where a painter and decorator falls head over heels for a framed photograph of a beautiful woman. When the lady in question turns up and falls for him, however, he tells her it’s only her image he’s in love with. Erksan’s exquisite film is pitched halfway between the Greek myth of Pygmalion and the figures-in-a-landscape 1960s arthouse cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais.
Private Property (1960)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday, 12.20am
Private Property is a gnarly, sleazy home-invasion drama – an off-Hollywood product made outside the studio system by director Leslie Stevens, creator of TV’s The Outer Limits. Warren Oates and Corey Allen play two layabouts who spot a passing blonde while menacing a California gas station and follow her back to her home, moving into a deserted house next door in order to spy on her. Stevens’ film was condemned for its low morals upon release and sank without a trace for several decades before re-emerging to acclaim from critics who’d since developed a taste for B-movie efficiency and crackerjack visual invention.
