Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 31: Fri Jan 31

Plan 75 (Hayakawa, 2022): Birkbeck Cinema, 6pm

Birkbeck Cinema introduction:
The coincidence of the UK crisis in public funding with the Assisted Dying Bill prompts this screening of Plan 75. Produced by the famed melodrama auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda and directed by a woman, Chie Hayakawa, Plan 75 is set in a very contemporary Japan, beset by an aging population with minimal state support. (Real-life Japan has some of the rich world’s highest rates of senior poverty, particularly among single women.) The consequence is a new state venture, in which all citizens of 75 and over are offered financially-incentivized euthanasia. The film will be introduced by Birkbeck Honorary Research Fellow Mandy Merck, and you are invited to discuss it afterwards with her and Birkbeck Professor Emerita Lynne Segal, author of Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Aging.

Guardian review:
This strange, melancholy film from Japan effectively makes the (unfashionable) case against euthanasia: that old people won’t want to be a bother or appear selfish and so will feel pressured into accepting state medicide. We see older characters retired from jobs which they really need, people without access to welfare and housing, old people who are desperately lonely and who even crave the Plan 75 helpline as someone to talk to. But the movie creates dissident moments: a young employee of Plan 75 realises that one applicant is his elderly uncle, while a Plan 75 call centre operative meets an old lady in person and takes her for an evening’s bowling, and realises that her colleagues are being trained in steering callers away from the last-minute change of heart which is the customer’s theoretical right. This is a poignant and weird film.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 30: Thu Jan 30

Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a 16mm screening from the wonderful Cine-Real team.

Chicago Reader review:
Completing a loose trilogy that began with Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, Zhang Yimou’s grim 1991 adaptation of a novel by Su Tong once again stars Gong Li as a young woman who marries a much older man, and once again tells a story that explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and indirectly contemporary China. This time, however, the style is quite different (despite another key use of the color red) and the vision is much bleaker. The heroine, a less sympathetic figure than her predecessors, is a university student in the 1920s who becomes the fourth and youngest wife of a powerful man in northern China after her stepmother can no longer afford to pay for her education. She quickly becomes involved in the various intrigues and rivalries between wives that rule her husband’s world and family tradition: each wife has her own house and courtyard within the palace, and whoever the husband chooses to sleep with on a given night receives a foot massage, several lighted red lanterns, and the right to select the menu for the following day. The film confines us throughout to this claustrophobic universe of boxes within boxes, where wives and female servants devote their lives to scheming against one another; the action is filmed mainly in frontal long shots. Zhang confirms his mastery and artistry here in many ways, some relatively new (such as his striking sound track), though the cold, remote, and stifling world he presents here doesn’t offer much emotional release.
Joanthan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 29: Wed Jan 29

Inspector Lavardin (Chabrol, 1986): Cine Lumiere, 3.45pm

This film, also screening on January 26th and 28th, is part of the Claude Chabrol season at Cine Lumiere. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
In Claude Chabrol’s 1986 French detective film, the title character travels to a village to investigate the murder of a local luminary, only to discover that the man’s widow is his former lover. The characters are interesting enough, pursuing self-centered activities that, typically for Chabrol, seem parodies of bourgeois behavior (the widow’s brother spends his time making painted sculptures of eyeballs). There are also some wonderfully characteristic images—the widow first appears behind glass, her face rendered at once more vivid and more distant, and an overhead shot of the murder scene lays out the geography while distancing us from the characters.
Fred Camper

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 28: Tue Jan 28

The Annihilation of Fish (Burnett, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm

BFI introduction:
In this tender and bittersweet comedy of outsiders, a former housewife and a Jamaican widower, the latter freshly released from a mental institution, strike up an irresistible romance. Directed by one of America’s most revered independent filmmakers, this delicate tale approaches aging, mental illness and race in a poignant and honest way. Unreleased for decades, this 4K restoration finally does justice to the film and the late, great James Earl Jones’ performance.

Here (and above) is an introduction to the film.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 27: Mon Jan 27

Murder by Contract (Lerner, 1958): Regent Street Cinema, 1pm

Chicago Reader review:
This rarely screened 1958 gem about the mind of a contract killer is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite thrillers, and it’s easy to see why. The film follows an existential hipster (Vince Edwards) who coolly regards his work as a business until he gets thrown by a big-time assignment to rub out a woman about to testify in court. Neither the screenwriter (Ben Simcoe) nor the director (Irving Lerner) ever made it big, but here they achieved something nearly perfect–with a memorable guitar score, a witty feeling for character, dialogue, and narrative ellipsis, and a lean, purposeful style. Lucien Ballard did the black-and-white cinematography.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 26: Sun Jan 26

In The White City (Tanner, 1983): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.35pm

This is a 4K restoration screening and part of the Alfonso Cuáron on Alain Tanner season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A sailor (Bruno Ganz) abandons his job as a hand on an automated oil tanker to spend a few days exploring the city of Lisbon. Suddenly liberated from purpose, responsibility, and structured time, he finds that the world looks different to him, and slowly he loses himself in its newly opened fissures. What gives this 1983 film its authenticity and powerful moodiness is perhaps the fact that the director, Alain Tanner, has followed the course of his own protagonist, cutting himself off from a planned scenario and allowing the shape of the city to dictate the incidents of his drama. Temperamentally it's like no other Tanner film (at times, it suggests the work of Wim Wenders), but it has all his rigor and visual acuteness. With Teresa Madruga (of Manuel de Oliveira's Francisca).
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 25: Sat Jan 25

White Nights (Visconti, 1957):  BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12pm

This 4K premiere, also screening on January 7th, is part of the Luchino Visconti season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Long dismissed as a footnote to Luchino Visconti’s career, this 1957 film, from the Dostoyevsky story, now seems to be a crucial turning point, the link between Visconti’s early neorealist manner and the obsessive stylization of his late films. Shot on forthrightly false sets entirely within a studio, the film brings a lonely stranger (Marcello Mastroianni, in one of his first important parts) together with a surrealistically detached woman (Maria Schell) for a brief, enigmatic affair. Robert Bresson treated the same material in his Four Nights of a Dreamer; curiously, it became one of Bresson’s most socially oriented films, while this is one of Visconti’s least.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.