Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 71: Thu Mar 13

There's Always Tomorrow (Sirk, 1956): Barbican Cinema, 6.20pm 

This is a 35mm screening that will also be accompanied by a ScreenTalk with Elena Gorfinkel, John David Rhodes and Joanna Hogg.

From the Barbican introduction: Screened on 35mm, this film’s richly detailed mise-en-scène gains new resonance through the lens of The Prop by Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes. As Gorfinkel and Rhodes suggest, Sirk’s films elevate everyday objects—lamps, teacups, and furniture—to silent witnesses of emotional turmoil, amplifying the tension between characters and their environments. The domestic items in There’s Always Tomorrow become more than mere set dressing; it serves as a narrative agent, embodying the constraints of suburban life and the unspoken desires simmering beneath its surface.

Chicago Reader review:
Douglas Sirk is best known for his highly stylized Technicolor melodramas, but he also did superlative work in restrained black and white. There's Always Tomorrow is a virtuoso study in tones, ranging from the blinding sunlight of a desert resort to the expressionist shadows of the suburban home where Fred MacMurray lives in unhappy union with Joan Bennett. Barbara Stanwyck is the old flame who turns up by accident, rekindling for MacMurray the dangerous illusion that happiness is still possible.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 70: Wed Mar 12

Cry of the City (Siodmak, 1948): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This is a Kennington Noir evening with the film presented from a 16mm print.

BFI introduction:
An electrifying variation on the theme of a hoodlum (Conte) and a cop (Mature) who knew one another as kids, it opens with the former seriously wounded in hospital but determined to escape the police watching over him; he needs to clear the name of his fiancée, who’s suspected of a jewel robbery. While Conte, all insolent, menacing charm, is especially magnificent, and Mature invests the detective’s pursuit with unsettling hints of obsession, the movie fields a glorious gallery of shady figures, from a lawyer oozing corruption to a memorably sadistic masseuse. The steely realism is enhanced by flourishes of noir stylisation. A classic awaiting rediscovery.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 69: Tue Mar 11

Dog Lady (Citerella/Llinas, 2015): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task. The group borrowed their name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the same title, and find inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16. This is their latest offering.

MOMA review:
An indelible and quietly haunting study of a nameless woman (memorably played by co-director Verónica Llinás) living with a loyal pack of stray dogs in silent, self-imposed exile in the Pampas, on the edge of Buenos Aires. Almost dialogue-free, the film follows this hermit across four seasons as she patches up her makeshift shack in the woods, communes with nature, and forages for (and sometimes steals) food, making only the briefest of forays into the city and only fleetingly engaging with other people. She’s a distant cousin of Agnès Varda’s protagonist in Vagabond, perhaps, and is just as enigmatic. Dog Lady is filmed with an attentive and sympathetic eye, yet it is careful never to “explain” its subject—but be sure to stay to the very end of the film’s extended final long shot.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 68: Mon Mar 10

D'Est (Akerman, 1993): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The digital restoration also screens on February 20th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Chantal Akerman’s haunting 1993 masterpiece documents without commentary or dialogue her several-months-long trip from east Germany to Moscow—a tough and formally rigorous inventory of what the former Soviet bloc looks and feels like today. Akerman’s penchant for finding Edward Hopper wherever she goes has never been more obvious; this travelogue seemingly offers vistas any alert tourist could find yet delivers a series of images and sounds that are impossible to shake later: the countless tracking shots, the sense of people forever waiting, the rare plaint of an offscreen violin over an otherwise densely ambient sound track, static glimpses of roadside sites and domestic interiors, the periphery of an outdoor rock concert, a heavy Moscow snowfall, a crowded terminal where weary people and baggage are huddled together like so many dropped handkerchiefs. The only other film I know that imparts such a vivid sense of being somewhere is the Egyptian section of Straub-Huillet’s Too Early, Too Late. Everyone goes to movies in search of events, but the extraordinary events in Akerman’s sorrowful, intractable film are the shots themselves—the everyday recorded by a powerful artist with an acute eye and ear.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 67: Sun Mar 9

La Captive (Akerman, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The digital restoration also screens on February 24th and March 17th. Full details here.

Time Out review: Chantal Akerman returns to top form with this strange but compelling version of Proust's La Prisonnière. Set in (just about) modern-day Paris, it charts the effects of the festering jealousy felt by wealthy young Simon towards his seemingly innocent and defenceless lover Ariane, whom he keeps cooped up in their apartment lest her occasional forays outside for singing lessons tempt her into (improbable) sexual escapades with her girlfriends. Pared in the Bressonian manner, but inflected with an almost operatic intensity, the film transcends/eschews naturalism to create an almost timeless parable about the deadeningly obsessive/possessive perversities of many male-female relationships. The use of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead is particularly effective. Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 66: Sat Mar 8

I'm All Right Jack (Boulting, 1959): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This film is part of the 'Celebrating Peter. Sellers' season at the Cinema Museum and will be followed by a Q&A discussion with leading film and media experts Dr. Graham McCann, Robert Ross and David Stubbs.

Time Out review:
The best of the Boulting Brothers' warm, vulgar, affectionate satires. The travails of silly-ass hero Ian Carmichael are only mildly amusing, but the film blazes into life with the arrival of Peter Sellers' Stalinist Don Quixote, tilting with alarming predictability at the windmills constructed by his class enemies. The Red Robbos of this world may be an unfairly easy target, but Sellers' caricature is affectionate, not malicious. Accusations of union-bashing are misplaced. The workers may all be dumb clods who sleep with their vests on, but there's a grudging appreciation of their truculent cynicism, and Richard Attenborough's horrid little entrepreneur discovers that in making them the dupes of his capitalist crookery he brings about his own downfall.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 65: Fri Mar 7

Blood and Black Lace (Bava, 1964): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

Film Frenzy review:
After making a name for himself with a pair of exquisite horror flicks, 1960s gothic-infused gem Black Sunday and 1963’s trippy anthology opus Black Sabbath, Italian filmmaker Mario Bava went off and pretty much invented a new film genre all by himself. Generally considered the second produced giallo but the first in terms of importance and influence — the previous year had seen Bava release The Girl Who Knew Too Much, but that one is often overlooked or dismissed — Blood and Black Lace features many of the components that would largely come to define the genre: laser-like focus on the various murders; a camera that’s constantly on the prowl; dazzling use of light and color; and the employment of an American actor in a central role. Centering on a fashion house steeped in corruption and crime, this opens as one of its models is brutally murdered, a slaying that leads the local police to interrogate the owner (Eva Bartok), the manager (Cameron Mitchell), the other models, and various men involved with the couture culture. As is often the case with giallo entries, story is secondary to style, and that’s particularly true here. But what Blood and Black Lace lacks in narrative, it makes up for it on a visual level, and while there would be better giallo films arriving in later years, the postmark on this one makes it essential viewing.
Matt Brunson

Here (and above) is the trailer.