What’s on at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in May 2023: Beau is Afraid, Mulholland Drive and more
Sponsored feature | Our film critic, Mark Walsh, looks at what is coming up at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.
Beau is Afraid
Modern horror, particularly that which has crossed over into the mainstream, has been in excellent shape, with new names including Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers establishing themselves as masters of the genre in just a few films.
Arguably, Ari Aster did that with just his debut film, the incredibly unsettling Hereditary, before following it up with the Scandinavian folk horror Midsommar. He’s changing tack slightly with his third feature, which while drawing inspiration from the horror genre is more a blackly comic drama than his previous efforts.
After showcasing the talents of Toni Collette and Florence Pugh in those first two films, this time Joaquim Phoenix is centre stage. Aster gives us a week in the life of Beau Wassermann, a sad sack loner heavily dependent on his therapist for help in dealing with an upcoming visit to the home of his mother (Patti LuPone). Sounds simple enough, but this is Beau’s world we’re inhabiting, a dystopian city that seems to reflect his own psyche, and that he’s attempting to escape as much as his own psyche.
Along the journey he encounters an overbearing family including Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan who take him in after running him over, and a wandering theatre company whose works glimpse into Beau’s alternate possibilities. Aster weaves in everything from a crime thriller to a throwback monster movie, there’s animation, flashbacks, surrealism and a nightmarish lack of reality at every turn. Rather than resting on his impressive laurels, Aster is expanding his vision, as long as you’re not afraid to dive into it headfirst.
Beau is afraid opens on Friday, May 19
Sight and Sound Top 10 - Mulholland Drive
How long does it take for a film to become a classic? The decennial Sight And Sound magazine poll of critics has always been weighted heavily towards films from the first few decades of cinema history, those that broke the mould and pushed the boundaries of possibility on the silver screen.
In last year’s most recent vote, only two films from this century made the top 10, and the more recent of the two is certainly a mould breaker, even if – or maybe because – it wasn’t originally intended to be a film at all.
David Lynch had made appointment television with his surreal murder mystery Twin Peaks, and executives keen for more commissioned a TV pilot. When that didn’t get picked up, Lynch took the original script and footage, abandoned the planned character arcs and wrote an ending. What resulted has been eagerly pored over by audiences and critics alike for 20 years, with the director typically coy about what any of it actually means.
It’s a meditation on Hollywood and the nature of fame that cemented Naomi Watts’ place as a Hollywood star herself. Who knows what would have resulted if it had fulfilled its original plan, but the hybrid nature of the film only feeds into its surrealism, mystery and flecks of horror, and it remains one of many David Lynch masterpieces. Its return to the Picturehouse is a chance to embark on your own search for meaning once more.
Mulholland Drive is showing on Saturday, May 27.
Blue Monday - Bound
Cinema can evoke so many emotions, not just from what’s on screen but from the company you keep with your fellow audience members, and the time and place you enter into a filmmaker’s world too. There’s something almost provocative about any late-night film watching, venturing into the cinema at the end of the day before venturing out into the early hours of the morning, having gorged on a movie indulgence fit only for the more adventurous.
You may have forgotten that the Wachowskis’ first adventure into directing wasn’t with the era-defining cyber thriller The Matrix. Their earlier work is a lesbian neo-noir thriller starring Jennifer Tilly as Violet, stuck in a controlling relationship with a mafioso (Joe Pantoliano), who seduces her apartment building’s handywoman (Gina Gershon) before they come up with a scheme to get their hands on $2million of the Mafia’s money to make a new life for themselves.
While the film’s sex scenes caused trouble with the US censors originally, they are just the decoration on a sumptuous cake that’s a fine entry into the modern noir canon with fantastic performances from its leads.
Bound is screening on Monday, May 15 at 11pm.
Wes Anderson double bills
One of the most distinctive visual stylists currently working in cinema, Wes Anderson’s imprint as an auteur is so strong that it works equally well in animation and live action.
His perpendicular direction, finely honed scene composition and enormous casts portraying fractured families are always a huge treat, and to prepare audiences for the arrival of this summer’s latest opus, Asteroid City, there’s a season of double bills representing the finest stop motion and fully human features that Anderson has produced.
The first is on Sunday, May 14 and pairs the director’s debut with a later work where his style was more fully developed.
The common thread there is Owen Wilson, who co-wrote and starred in Bottle Rocket alongside his brother Luke as they made their acting debuts, and then returned in The Darjeeling Limited with Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman as brothers on a spiritual journey on a luxury Indian train. On Sunday, May 21, animation takes centre stage, with the Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr Fox (George Clooney plays the titular fox) and the original story Isle Of Dogs, whose title Anderson claims was inspired by its UK counterpart!
The third pairing is on June 4, with Rushmore and its British soundtrack proving the perfect counterpoint to the final stories told by the American foreign bureau of The French Dispatch. The following Sunday sees Ralph Fiennes taking charge of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Bill Murray as the oceanographer with a grudge in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Finally, on June 18 two of my personal favourites – if such a thing is possible among such consistent high quality – with the supremely dysfunctional family story of The Royal Tenenbaums and young lovers on the run in Moonrise Kingdom.
