March - SHOPLIFTERS - Connaught Cinema, Tuesday 5th 

March's film from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda
SHOPLIFTERS(2018). 

Film: 8.15pm

Tickets: free to members / £7.50 for adults £6.50 for seniors and students

Connaught Cinema on Tuesday 5th March

WFC are extremely pleased to be screening this gem of a film. Winner of the 2018’s Palme d’Or at Cannes and nominated in 2019 for an Oscar and BAFTA in the Best Foreign Language Film categories, Shoplifters is the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s at his most delicate and devastating best. 

Described as ‘Dickens for a modern age’ Shoplifters tells the tale of a family living at the edges of destitution and having to operate and survive on the margins of Japanese society. Centring on a three generational family, living in a rundown part of Tokyo rarely seen on the screen, this ragtag bunch get by with marginal jobs, claiming pensions of dead partners and supplementing their meagre wages by shoplifting. One night while returning from a shoplifting session, father and son encounter a small girl on her own, and they decide to take her home to become part of their family. However this act will come at a devastating price.

Kore-eda has long been preoccupied with the various forces that do — or do not — hold a family together. Like the best of the director’s work (Still Walking, I Wish, Like Father Like Son) Shoplifters is all about the subtle complexities, strengths and frailties of the family unit, but here he is taking it one step further by questioning the very notion of what constitutes a family and the parameters of the term. Filled with subtle nuanced details, moments, looks and smiles, Leigh Singer writing for the BFI astutely notes that Kore-eda’s ‘films are intimate domestic dramas, languid in pace and muted in overt sentiment, but rich in quotidian detail and imbued with unexpectedly deep emotional resonance. They are mellow drama, not melodrama…’. 

Kore-eda has the ability to quietly and discreetly breaks one’s heart without ever seeming to yank on heartstrings, which makes Shoplifters all the more haunting and affecting. It’s a film that asks its audience to reflect on where they belong, and on what belongs to them. Prepare to have your heart stolen and broken. We at WFC just cannot recommend this little beauty highly enough.

Don't miss the screening. Watch the trailer

'Shoplifters lucidly vivisects the loneliness of not belonging to anyone, and the messiness of sticking together. “Shoplifters” is a masterpiece.' David Ehrlich Indiewire

‘Shoplifters is a complex, subtle, mysterious film that builds to the most extraordinary surprise ending, a twist-reveal worthy of psychological suspense noir…. A rich, satisfying and deeply intelligent film.’ Peter Bradshaw The Guardian

The film is free to Worthing Film Club members (£30 a year - email Caroline at worthingfilmclub@gmail.com to join) or £5 for a ticket, cash on the door.  For more details on membership, see here

Wednesday, 23 January 2019

February - CLIMAX - St. Paul's, Tuesday 12th

February's film from Argentinian/ French director Gaspar Noe is
CLIMAX (2018). 

Doors open: 7.30pm

Film: 8pm

Tickets: free to members / £5 for everyone else.

Back at St. Paul's on Tuesday 12th February

Ever the provocateur, Gaspar Noé maker of 2002's visceral shocker ‘Irrevérsible’  returns with the exhilarating and hallucinatory Climax.

Amazingly shot in just 15 days it tells the story of a young French dance troupe, on the cusp of an American tour, partying after rehearsal only to discover the sangria is spiked with LSD. Ripping up the filmic rules books and playing by his own rules as ever Noé has produced a film that is 'visually extraordinary, structurally and formally audacious.' Peter Bradshaw 

He cranks up the decibels of a pounding dance soundtrack, along with his trade mark nausea-inducing camera work, to produce a work of sensual overload that will have your head melting and your heart pounding. He takes us from the heaven of the initial breathtaking dance sequence into a not so slow descent into hell, albeit a  startlingly beautiful hell. Playing with the conventional narratives, he begins with the end credits and a seemingly sweet opening sequence of the dancers talking to camera about why they love to dance. But look closer and next to the tv in which the dancers are talking are a pile of videos, the titles of which signal the influences and forces that are about to be unleashed.

Noé's interest in the primal forces that "LSD or mainly alcohol can bring you back to a more reptilian way of thinking, you are not human anymore. It is all about survival, about reproducing species, about sex and domination. The moment we start losing control of the logical brain we go to a psychotic way of thinking." are laid bare in the most exhilarating and heart stopping fashion. Climax certainly is one of a kind.

Don't miss it! Watch the trailer

'Part musical, part political treatise, and with more than a wink to Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, Noé is at his most decadent and devilish.' Joseph Walsh Time Out

'Noé is giving us a cinema of sensual outrageousness and excess that makes other films look middleaged and tame.' Peter Bradshaw The Guardian

The film is free to Worthing Film Club members (£30 a year - email Caroline at worthingfilmclub@gmail.com to join) or £5 for a ticket, cash on the door.  For more details on membership, see here

January - BAD TIMING - St. Paul's, Tuesday 22th

    

January - BAD TIMING - St. Paul's, Tuesday 22th

‼️‼️ IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT ‼️‼️ Due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts, our screening of BAD TIMING will now be on the 22ND JANUARY. 

Screening is still being held at St. Paul's and doors will open at 7.30 for an 8pm start. 

As always, screening is free to members and £5 for non-members. We apologise for any inconvenience but still hope to see lots of you there on the 22nd nonetheless!

January's film from the late great British director Nicolas Roeg is

BAD TIMING (1980). 

Doors open: 7.30pm

Film: 8pm

Tickets: free to members / £5 for everyone else.

New venue at St. Paul's Tuesday 15th January

With a sly nod to Vertigo Roeg’s Bad Timing is one of his most complex, elusive and dark movies. In typical Roeg fashion he builds a thousand piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a passionate affair gone wrong between two Americans - Alex and Milena - in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine enquiry on memory, love and guilt as the free spirited Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst lover (Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller investigations of the detective assigned to her case - Keitel in visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor.  

Fate is at the heart of all the director’s films. And none more so than with Bad Timing. There is a claustrophobic sense of inevitability to Alex and Milena’s relationship. On meeting him for the first time at a party, she even says: ‘If we’re going to meet, it might as well be now.’ The characters are on an unstoppable course, swerving towards emotional oblivion. The sensation is like a looped dream. The viewer can’t help but want to reorganise the edited scraps in a desperate bid to change the unavoidable outcome in some way.

  

Once described by Mark Cousins as a ‘Douglas Sirk melodrama attacked by Edward Scissorhands’, it goes someway in describing the lacerating and intriguing journey the film takes us on. Branded "a sick film made by sick people for sick people" by its own distributor, the Rank Organisation, the film polarised critics and was given an X Rating in the USA. It was effectively shelved for 25 years before it was released on DVD in 2005. But perhaps it was simply ahead of its time, or maybe the film itself suffered from bad timing.

Multi layered, compelling and provocative Bad Timing is a fitting tribute for its former cinematographer (Far From the Madding Crowd, Fahrenheit 451) turned one of cinema’s most visionary, bold and innovative auteurs. We at WFC highly recommend it!

Nicolas Roeg 1928 - 2018

Don't miss it. Watch the trailer

Watch Mark Cousins introduce the film for Moviedrome

The film is free to Worthing Film Club members (£30 a year - email Caroline at worthingfilmclub@gmail.com to join) or £4 for a ticket, cash on the door.  For more details on membership, see here.

Post Xmas Party Thanks

Worthing Film Club would just like to say a massive thank you to all our members who braved the cold, damp, dark, December night to attend our annual xmas party. Despite some technical issues we trust you had a good time. We hope you enjoyed not only the very delicious pizzas - very kindly supplied by the excellent Pizzaface Worthing - but also watching the veritable smorgasbord of short films picked by the committee members. Here are the six shorts that we screened, in the order we showed them:

The Astronomer’s Dream by Georges Méliès
La Jetée by Chris Marker
Fucking Bunnies by Teemu Niukkanen
Small Deaths by Lynne Ramsay
The Alphabet by David Lynch
World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts by Don Hertzfeldt

 





Looking forward to seeing you all on Monday the 14th of January for our tribute to Nicolas Roeg. We’re screening BAD TIMING at Cellar Arts Club.

Thanks again, and wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, where we hope you will be joining us on many new Film Adventures in 2019!

Cheers
WFC x

DECEMBER - CHRISTMAS PARTY!!!! - Coast Cafe, Monday 3rd

December's Worthing Film Club will be its annual Christmas party hosted at Coast.

Doors open: 7.30pm 

Members only AND members can bring will one guest only for £2.00!!! 

Not a member yet? No problem, you can join on the night and delight in WFC's exclusive seasonal celebrations!!! Remember this will be the last chance to buy membership for the humble sum of £25. 

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Worthing Film Club would like to invite its members to the annual Christmas Party.  
There will be the usual selection of short films in-between the mingling and merriment. All films have been hand selected by the Committee Members so there should be some lovely unseen surprises in there to delight everybody. 


A night of film, fun, food, drink and excellent company in great surroundings at Coast. Hopefully you will be able to join us for the xmas film festivities.

On offer will be food and nibbles and some free drinks, as well as a well stocked bar at Coast.

Hope to see you there!

Please note that from January 2019 Film club prices will be increasing from £25 to £30 per annum. If you wish to join please email Caroline at worthingfilmclub@gmail.com. For more details on membership, see here.

Stuck on present ideas for Christmas and want something different and interesting? Why not give someone the fabulous gift of a Worthing Film Club membership! At a bargain rate of £25 until December 31st, members can enjoy 12 screenings a year (at a variety of venues, including the Connaught Cinema for select films), free use of our extensive DVD library and an exclusive invite to our annual Xmas party. More information on the membership can be found on our website below. 

Contact worthingfilmclub@gmail.com to order a membership and we can post it out to you- cheques payable to Worthing Film Club. Or why not pick one up at this year's Member's Christmas Party on Monday 3rd December?!

Worthing Film Club wishes to thank all their members for their continued support of the club and alternative cinema. Wishing you all a very Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year. 

Here's to many more adventures in cinema in 2019!

November - I AM NOT A WITCH - Coast Cafe, Monday 12th

November's film from Welsh-born/Zambian director Rungano Nyoni is
I AM NOT A WITCH (2017). 

Doors open: 7.30pm

Film: 8pm

Tickets: free to members / £4 for everyone else.

Back at Coast on Monday 12th November

A bewilderingly funny tragi-comic tale that veers into magical surrealism. 8-year-old Shula (played by newcomer, Margaret Mulubwa) is accused of witchcraft; faced with the options of accepting her supernatural branding and living life as a sorceress, or being transformed into a goat, Shula ends up at the local “witch camp”.

Winner of the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer this film draws on the director's mixed heritage and boldly scrunitises the modern-day persecution of Zambian and Ghanian witches with dark cruel humour and raw emotion.

With stunning cinematography under the masterful hand of DOP David Gallego (Embrace of the Serpent) the film weaves its brutal and beautiful magic whilst we see our protagonist face trial for crimes of black magic, with her fate in the hands of others. 

Nyoni delivers a taut storyline whilst skilfully balancing moments of surrealist humour, of fleeting happiness and abject fear. Nyoni does an excellent job of keeping an absurd tone while losing none of the gravity of the situation. A gripping tale which we cant recommend highly enough. 

Don't miss it! Watch the trailer.

+Margaret Mulubwa is a mesmerising presence+ Mark Kermode

+a blend of sorrow, anger and humour, marking debuting writer-director Nyoni as an exciting new talent. + Rotten Tomatoes

The film is free to Worthing Film Club members (£25 a year - email Caroline at worthingfilmclub@gmail.com to join) or £4 for a ticket, cash on the door.  For more details on membership, see here.



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October - The Rider (2017) - Connaught Studio - Monday 1st October

Our next screening is the Cannes award winning THE RIDER (2017), a contemporary western that offers a rare female perspective on masculinity in crisis. 

 

The film is screening at 8.15pm on Monday the 1st of October at Connaught Studio Cinema. 

From director Chloé Zhao this acclaimed drama won the top prize at the Directors Fortnight at Cannes 2017. We follow a young rodeo cowboy who is coming to terms with life after a near-fatal accident. The film's star is real-life cowboy Brady Jandreau, from South Dakota (where the film is set), who blurs the line between fiction and documentary with his honest raw lead performance.  

 

The film was nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards, and has been declared one for the years best by critics stateside. Expect a nuanced take on the American heartlands and stunning cinematography from DoP Joshua James Richards, who also shot last years stunning GODS OWN COUNTRY, which makes the South Dakota landscape a character in itself.

The use of non profession actors adds to the films realism. Brady Jandreau plays Brady, Lilly Jandreau plays his sister Lilly, and so on. Almost all the cast seem to be playing variations of themselves, and use their own names. This cast bring their own experiences to the film, and it's all tied together by a script from director Zhao. It’s a prime example of a modern western from an exciting new talent, we can’t wait! 

"Impressive, stylish bronco rider drama bucks the trend” - **** The Guardian 

"Chloe Zhao’s hushed neo western offers a feminist perspective on a man in crisis.” - Little White Lies 

“A very nuanced portrait of the hopelessness and lack of opportunity abounding in America’s hinterlands.” - Sight and Sound 

The film is free to Worthing Film Club members (£25 a year - email Caroline at worthingfilmclub@gmail.com to join) or £7 for a ticket, which are available from Connaught now (https://worthingtheatres.co.uk/show/the-rider-15tbc/). For more details on membership, see here.

See the Trailer here