November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 7
Ù Film season: Discover tough female kung-fu
legends in HOME Manchester’s ‘The Original
Ass Kickers: Hong Kong Cinema’s Female
Action Heroes from Shaw Brothers and Beyond’
(20 October – 18 November). Watch 19-year-
old Cheng Pei-Pei furiously dispatch a room
of leering men in Come Drink with Me (1966)
and Kara Hui dishing out blows in My Young
Auntie (1981). Hui, who rose out of poverty to
star in more than 51 action films, once broke
her leg on set: “They drained the blood from
my bruise and then I went straight back to the
studio to film,” she recalled. “When we finished,
that’s when I went back to the hospital.”
Ù Director retrospective: Coinciding with Black
History Month, the Barbican, London, and HOME
Manchester host a close-up on Euzhan Palcy – the
first black woman to direct a Hollywood studio
film with A Dry White Season (1989). Don’t miss
her 1983 debut Sugar Cane Alley, a bittersweet
coming-of-age tale filmed in her homeland of
Martinique. The season runs to 26 October.
Ù Festival: A vital showcase for contemporary
African cinema, the Africa in Motion Film
Festival takes over cinemas in Glasgow and
Edinburgh (25 October – 3 November).
Ù Exhibition: The Cinémathèque française
in Paris explores the fascination filmmakers
have with all things fanged. ‘Vampires, from
Dracula to Buffy’ (9 October – 19 January) sets
the undead as imagined in film posters and
designs alongside those in art and literature.
Ù Halloween highlight: FilmFear (29 October –
6 November) descends on HOME Manchester
for six nights of sneak previews, classic chillers
and family-friendly frighteners. The scares
start with one of the most anticipated genre-
flicks of the festival circuit: Robert Eggers’s
hallucinatory period sea yarn The Lighthouse,
featuring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe
as lighthousekeepers spiralling into madness.
Ù Book: Shawn Levy’s The Castle on Sunset
digs up the dirt on Chateau Marmont, the
Hollywood hotel that for more than 90 years
has been a home from home for stars, often
behaving badly – like Jean Harlow, who took
lovers there while on her third honeymoon.
Ù Streaming: The film El Camino picks up where
Breaking Bad ended, with Walter White’s sidekick
Jesse (Aaron Paul) on the run (Netflix, from 11
October). Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen
tells the fascinating, staggering story of how a
poor Maori mother of five battled racism and
sexism to enjoy a 25-year career as a director in
New Zealand (Netflix, out now). One of the best
- and most beautiful – films about filmmaking,
Pere Portabella’s Vampir Cuadecuc (1970) will be on
BFI Player from 28 October. And MUBI has a new
rediscovery strand – in the spotlight this month,
recently restored, is Hector Babenco’s visceral
portrait of Brazil’s delinquent youth Pixote (1980).
Ù Podcast: Tune in for horror recommendations
aplenty as S&S contributors Kim
Newman, Virginie Sélavy and Anton Bitel
dissect August’s Frightfest for the S&S
pod (on iTunes and SoundCloud).
all-African-American cast, including Lena Horne
and Louis Armstrong. Meanwhile, Show Boat
(1936), West Side Story (1961) and Cabaret (1972)
all confront racism. In the 60s, second-wave
feminism strutted into studio musicals: “Don’t
rain on my parade,” sang – or is it ordered? –
Barbra Streisand’s dynamo heroine in Funny Girl
(1968), determined to have a stage career despite
not being considered conventionally beautiful.
Of course, the season is also a reminder that to
fully appreciate the magic of a musical, you must
see it on a big screen, with a big audience. As Judy
Garland (a star brilliantly portrayed by Renée
Zellweger in the new film Judy – see page 9) once
sang, “Forget your troubles, come on get happy!”
‘BFI Musicals! The Greatest Show on Screen’
runs from 14 October to 31 January at venues
across the UK
ON OUR RADAR
The poster for Vincente Minnelli’s classic 1943 African-American musical
Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968)
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