From Priscilla to Poor Things, what’s coming to Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in December 2023
Sponsored feature | Our film critic, Mark Walsh, lets us know what’s coming to Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.
Priscilla
Last year, Baz Lurhmann gave us Elvis the legend, with Austin Butler as the hip-swivelling rock’n’roll legend. Now, working from her 1985 memoir Elvis And Me, Sophia Coppola offers the perspective of Elvis’s wife , with Priscilla Presley also receiving an executive producer credit.
Cailee Spaeny portrays Priscilla from her first meeting at 14 with a singer 10 years her senior, through their courtship, tempestuous relationship and eventual separation, while Jacob Elordi offers a more humanised portrayal of The King than last year’s blockbuster.
Spaeny won best actress at the Venice Film Festival and Elordi, also recently seen in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, has also won plaudits for his portrayal of Presley as he navigates a career taking in military service and a comeback special.
Coppola says she saw similarities with the subject of one of her earlier biopics, Marie Antoinette, Priscilla being forced to navigate a journey into womanhood in a world of celebrity and intense scrutiny. Coppola takes the focus away from Elvis’ music and focuses on the relationship, examining the flush of first love, the lure of celebrity and the tribulations of being with the world’s most famous man.
Priscilla opens on Friday, December 29, and is screening on 35mm from Friday, January 5.
The Holdovers (preview)
A few years ago, a kind and wonderful newspaper called the Cambridge Independent published my top 30 Christmas films. It’s a list that I hope is not fixed and that each year, a new entry might arrive to warm our hearts at the festive season.
Alexander Payne reteams with Paul Giamatti for a seasonal tale that would be a genuine contender not just for the top 30, but the top 10, and it’s being released in... January.
All the more reason to make time on Boxing Day for the perfectly timed preview, which Payne has shot and styled to appear as if it was contemporary to its 1970 setting. Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a curmudgeonly professor at a New England boarding school charged with chaperoning the boarding students unable to return home for the holidays. When most of his charges get the chance to escape to a skiing trip, only Angus (Dominic Sessa), whose mother is on honeymoon, and school cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), still grieving the loss of her son in Vietnam.
Watching the threesome, each emotionally cocooned in their own way, emerge and flourish in each other’s company is an absolute delight and Payne and Giamatti’s reteaming, their first since Sideways nearly 20 years ago, is set to become a seasonal classic for the ages. Catch it while the decorations are still up if you can.
The Holdovers Kia Preview is on Tuesday, December 26, and bundle tickets come with free popcorn and a drink.
Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos’s films are anything but conventional, exploring the darker recesses of the human psyche in often bleakly comic ways.
Having announced himself in 2009 with native language drama Dogtooth, he’s since gone on to surprise and confound audiences with The Lobster, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer and The Favourite.
Having won Olivia Colman an Oscar for the latter, he’s now putting Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo into the awards conversation with his latest, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray.
While all of Lanthimos’ pitch-black sensibilities remain intact, this Frankenstein-esque tale represents a significant departure in a variety of ways: while his films are always high concept, this tale of a woman (Stone) revived unusually by unorthodox scientist (Willem Dafoe) veers into steampunk sci-fi and is visually expansive in a way the Greek director hasn’t yet demonstrated. It also has, in Ruffalo’s lothario Duncan Wedderburn, a performance of impeccable comic timing that takes elements of The Favourite and pushes them further into sideways glances and arched eyebrows. Stone is also a delight, relishing her role as the unrestrained woman with the mind of a child, on a journey of self-discovery that drags in everyone in her path. From a director who’s been a favourite of mine for over a decade, this might just be his best yet.
Poor Things has a Kia Preview on Sunday, December 31 and opens on Friday, January 12.
Blue Monday: Eyes Wide Shut
Stanley Kubrick’s final film – he screened it for the studio less than a week before his death – might have shocked some audiences on its release, causing walkouts from audiences unprepared for Hollywood couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s embracing of Kubrick’s vision, but Eyes Wide Shut remains as compelling now as any of the other Kubrick masterpieces from the American director’s four-decade career.
An adaptation of Arthur Schnitzer’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, it casts Cruise as Bill, a doctor, and Kidman as his wife Alice who had contemplated having an affair. Bill hears from an old classmate about a mysterious masked orgy only to find himself quickly in over his head. The shoot marked the apex of the director’s notorious perfectionist streak, filming continuously for over a year, but Kubrick’s final addition to his legacy is as thematically rich as ever, tackling masculinity and the patriarchal nature of society, class, relationships and psychology, and the Picturehouse’s late night strand offers the chance to reassess the film which closed the career of one of cinema’s greatest directors.
Eyes Wide Shut is screening on Monday, December 18.
Lord of the Rings Extended Marathon
Can you believe it’s 20 years this year since the release of the final part of Peter Jackson’s defining adaptation of J R R Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy?
Whether you know them intimately or just want to revisit Middle Earth to be reminded of its greatness, if you have the staying power of Sam and Frodo then you can catch the longer versions of the hobbit-themed adventures over the course of a single day. Arrive at the cinema for 11am and settle in for a 12-hour feast (with a couple of comfort breaks) that includes two and a half hours more footage than the original trilogy, expanding on everything from the battle scenes to the character development. Fly, you fools! Fly to the Picturehouse!
The Lord of the Rings Extended Marathon is on Saturday, December 16.
