From There to Eternity
Digitally re-mastered retro classics have earned a big-screen reprise.
Days of Heaven
Fri | 4 Nov | 10.50 | Screen 4 | Book Tickets
Sun | 6 Nov | 14.35 | Screen 1 | Book Tickets
Dir. Terence Malick | USA 1978 | 15 | 95min
Considered one of the most beautifully photographed films of all time, and Terence Malick’s finest, winning him the best director award at Cannes in 1979, Days of Heaven has been digitally remastered in a fresh print to be appreciated by – and to inspire – a whole new generation. In 1916, after trouble at work, Bill (Richard Gere) leaves Chicago for Texas, together with girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and his sister Linda (Linda Manz). Passing as siblings in order to find work, the lovers keep up the pretence when it becomes clear the shy farmer they work for (Sam Shepard) – rumoured to be dying, with no one to inherit his fortune – has fallen for Abby.
Famously encouraging cinematographers Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler to shoot during the crepuscular 'magic hour,’ Malick created a rapturous, visually sublime meditation on American history and myth that is at once lyrical, epic and resonant in its tantalising echoes of the Bible. The pervasive sense of profoundly beguiling mystery is further enhanced by Ennio Morricone's magnificent score and Linda's inarticulate yet strangely expressive, even wise narration. A masterpiece.
“Terrence Malick’s portrait of a fleeting utopia in the lie between four souls working the pre-WWI Texan wheat fields distils a poetic vision of paradise lost.” – Tom Milne, writing in the May 1979 Monthly Film Bulletin
“[The] new print does justice to Néstor Almendros’s magnificent cinematography drawing on the paintings of Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper and (in one scene of a religious ceremony in wheat fields) Jean-François Millet.” – Philip French, The Observer
Heavenly Creatures
Fri | 4 Nov | 10.35 | Screen 3 | Book Tickets
Sun | 6 Nov | 21.10 | Screen 2 | Book Tickets
Dir. Peter Jackson | New Zealand 1994 | 18 | 99min
Based on the true story of New Zealand’s notorious Parker-Hulme murder case, Heavenly Creatures is the feature that put Peter Jackson on the international film circuit and rocketed Kate Winslet to fame. A stirring drama that offers up the unexpected, the story surrounds Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Winslet), outcasts who became best friends, whose bizarre fantasy life becomes more intense as their bond becomes increasingly more obsessive. When Pauline’s mother tries to intervene and split the girls apart, they bring about a terrible revenge, resulting in what is to this day still a celebrated and controversial case.
Winslet and Lynskey, both in their debut film roles, create two sympathetic and yet uncomfortably bizarre characters in riveting portrayals. Jackson’s direction offers up an ethereal fantasy world into which the two girls escape – a vision of special effects created by Weta that were groundbreaking at the time and later developed further to magnificent effect in the multi-award-winning Lord of the Rings productions.
“Energetic camerawork, eye-popping colour and quicksilver editing are complemented by the hyper-charged performances of a youthful Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey . . . Jackson shows brilliantly how they created their own self-enclosed fantasy world .” – Sight & Sound
“What a joy to watch again Peter Jackson’s masterly, formally daring, and superbly acted drama Heavenly Creatures . . .” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“Heavenly Creatures is enchantingly funny, horrifically frightening and quite, quite brilliant. It is a work of art, and quite literally unforgettable. And if it doesn’t make you yearn for the glorious unwholesomeness and hysteria that is so essential to any obsessive friendship, in all its brutal, beautiful flamboyance, you really might just as well be dead.” – Julie Burchill, Sunday Times, 12 February 1995
