The blockbuster run of the epic `The Odyssey’ continues at the Phoenix Cinema Friday, at 1.15, Saturday and Sunday at 7pm.
While it is hard to imagine a film in which all four of the cast are annoying, `The Invite’ (today and Monday at 4.30, Tuesday 2pm) is seen as perfectly cast.
Joe, is miserable, petulant and antagonistic, a man who has zoned out of his job, his relationship and everything. His buttoned-up wife Angela, is desperate and flailing. They bicker; at worst they’re at each other’s throats, the endlessly petty grievances amounting to depressing discord.
Then there are their guests, loose and liberated. Edward Norton brilliantly smug as the seemingly enlightened Hawk, and a peroxided Penélope Cruz, gloriously unfiltered and incredibly European as Pína.
What can go wrong?
Lovers of vintage crime drama will be captured by `The French Connection’ (Friday 7pm, Saturday 4.30pm). An edge-of-the-seat thriller.
No sooner has Hugh Jackman entertained us by reading a book to his sheep, than he pops up as Robin Hood. This is, however, no jolly romp for Robin, Friar Tuck and the Band of Merry Men versus the Sheriff of Nottingham Forest.
In “The Death of Robin Hood” (Sunday 2pm, Sunday and next Friday, 4.30pm), Robin is grappling with his past after a life of crime and murder. Now he is gravely injured after a battle he thought would be his last. Thankfully, a mysterious woman offers him a chance of salvation.
Francis Ford Coppola’s eerie 1974 classic, `The Conversation’ (Monday 4.30) captures Watergate-era paranoia and disillusion. As the Catholic eavesdropper, Caul, Gene Hackman, at the nadir of his despair, ends up smashing a figure of the Blessed Virgin in his apartment because he suspects it contains a listening device.
In his glasses and moustache, drab suit, white shirt and tie with clear plastic Macintosh worn indoors, Cal is unforgettable. A classic and poignant “American everyman” comparable to Ernest Borgnine “Marty” from 1955 or Paul Walter Hauser in Clint Eastwood’s “Richard Jewell” from 2019.
Some critics even believe he probably inspired the East German Stasi agent in Florian von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film `The Lives of Other’, listening in on lives happier and more fulfilling than his.
The global phenomenon, `The Odyssey’, screens at 7pm over the next three days.
`Spirited Away’( (Sunday, 11am), is a 2001 Japanese animated fantasy film. Can one imagine one’s parents being turned into pigs? It was the highest-grossing Japanese film for 19 years.
Next Thursday sees the arrival of the groundbreaking `Serpico’ (4.30). Fresh from `The Godfather’, Al Pacino is superb as the New York cop fighting corruption.
Corruption at a greater, government-shaking levels seen in `All the President’s Men’ (7pm). At this distance Nixon and his attempt to bug the Democratic Party HQ seems childlike when compared with today’s White House antics, to use a mild term.
We have seen in our time the desperate scramble for ratings by commercial TV (and radio). In `Network’ (Friday, 2pm) Peter Finch is messianic with his paranoid rants :”I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” A damming portrayal of those who churn out TV stuff and those who devour it.
We learn a lot about what Vladimir Putin has got up to in `The Wizard of the Kremlin’ (7pm). Based on a hit satirical novel about a Putin spin doctor the action takes us through the 1990s decline of ailing president Boris Yeltsin and the promotion of secret police chief Putin as prime minister by entrenched oligarchic interests who assume he will be their puppet. Through the eyes of the strangely cynical media-manipulator hero, we see Putin’s presidential election triumph in 2000, his neo-Stalinist ruthlessness in ignoring public opinion, the Chechen wars, the annexation of Crimea, the development of internet black ops and bot farms, and his growing hatred of Ukraine.
Bookings and information at Phoenix Cinema.
This article was submitted by the Daylesford Cinema Society.
