Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Where’s it on? Selected cinemas
In the same week that Jennifer Lopez leads a troupe of scamming strippers in the much buzzed about Hustlers, two of cinema’s veteran street hustlers – Jon Voight’s male prostitute Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman’s ailing conman Rizzo – return to cinemas for a 50th anniversary reissue of Midnight Cowboy. John Schlesinger’s film was one of those landmark late-1960s films that found a liberalising Hollywood embracing properly adult themes, and Midnight Cowboy has some kinship with Velvet Underground records of the same time in its immersion in a seamy nocturnal underside of New York life. Its grit and X certificate proved no barrier to mainstream success, with the Hollywood establishment crowning it best picture and Schlesinger best director at the 1970 Oscars. Seen today, it looks like a model for the likes of My Own Private Idaho (1991) and the Safdie brothers’ Heaven Knows What (2014).
The Red House (1947)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday 6am
– “There’s something out in those woods. Something tells me we won’t find out what it is until I find the red house.”
– “What are we going to do with it when we find it?”
– “Bust it open, I guess, and let some light in. Maybe it’ll shake the creeps out of a lot of things.”
This dialogue may sound like it’s from a lost episode of Twin Peaks, but it’s actually from this tremulously dreamlike Hollywood drama from 1947, which Talking Pictures TV is giving a crack-of-dawn slot this Sunday. By the late 40s, all types of latent strangeness were seeping into Hollywood film from the American subconscious, and The Red House is a kind of looking-glass fairytale with unspoken-of horror at its heart. Delmer Daves’ film begins as apple-pie-innocent high-school kid Nath takes work at the farm of classmate Meg’s adoptive father (played by Edward G. Robinson), the latter warning him not to return home via the woods, where a red cabin holds dangerous secrets. Like Lynchian innocents drawn towards darkness, however, Nath and Meg can’t contain their intrigue…
High Life (2018)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray/DVD/BFI Player
With James Gray’s Ad Astra due in cinemas next week, the year’s other great slab of auteur sci-fi touches down on DVD and streaming channels. Anyone who saw Claire Denis’ entrée into the world of horror with the one-of-a-kind vampire film Trouble Every Day (2002) might have expected her first science fiction to be off-the-chart special, and so it turned out to be. Robert Pattinson and his baby are the sole survivors on a deep-space mission to harvest energy from black holes, with fragmentary flashbacks also introducing Juliette Binoche’s ‘shaman of sperm’, a shadowy doctor engaged in experimenting on the semen of the ship’s crew of convicts. As that might suggest, this is a space travel movie with an unusual fascination with the human body, in all its messy unknowability.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday 13.30
BBC2 have you covered for perfect Sunday afternoon viewing this week – they’re giving a welcome airing to the middle part of John Ford’s great cavalry trilogy: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. After the monochrome of Fort Apache (1948), this second dip into the world of frontier life for military men in the American west pops with resplendent Technicolor cinematography, which won Winston Koch a deserved Oscar and brings a vivid, Frederic Remington-inspired grandeur to Ford’s characteristic Monument Valley locations. John Wayne plays the cavalry captain nearing retirement who’s given one last mission: to contain a breakout from a Cheyenne reservation following the defeat of General Custer.
La flor (2018)
Where’s it on? Selected cinemas
Of all this week’s new releases, the most daunting is surely the new film from Argentinian director Mariano Llinás. Ten years in the making, La flor runs a staggering 807 minutes – or more than 13 hours – incorporating six separate episodes (connected by linking sequences with the director) and featuring the same four recurring actresses playing various parts. Llinás’s comparatively brief four-hour 2008 film Extraordinary Stories is one of the most beguilingly inventive films of that decade, and La flor doubles – or rather quadruples – down on that movie’s infectious play with narrative and storytelling for its own sake. Episodes take on the style of Hollywood B-movies, musicals or the lyrical pastoralism of Jean Renoir’s daytripping classic Partie de campagne (1936) as Llinas serves up perhaps the ultimate cinephile binge-watch.
