Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 79: Fri Mar 21

Remembrance (Gregg, 1982): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

Cinema Museum introduction:
A rare opportunity to see this re-discovered British film from 1982 on the big screen, which was Gary Oldman’s first film, and also starred Tim Spall and John Altman. Remembrance was released in 1982. It won the Grand Prize at the Taormina Film Festival and was screened in the first month of Channel 4’s existence. A group of young Royal Navy sailors spend their last night ashore before leaving on a six-month tour of duty. Set around the pubs and clubs of the notorious Union Street in Plymouth, the film cuts between interweaving stories of several characters: some are happy to go, others sad to be parting from families friends and lovers. And for one, there is a score to settle. Central among these stories is a mystery: who is the young man who we meet at the start of the film, so drunk, so adrift – and at risk? Remembrance was the third in the sequence of six films made between 1978 and 1988 by director Colin Gregg and screenwriter Hugh Stoddart, and perhaps it was the speed with which they were being funded to make films at the time that might explain why Remembrance was allowed to disappear. The Falklands War, happening between the shoot and the film’s release, rightly attracted huge attention and may have pushed aside a fictional film set in peacetime.It was shot entirely on location in Plymouth, much of it at night, using Super-16mm stock. It has now been meticulously restored by the British Film Institute and re-issued in their Flipside series. The event will feature a Q&A with screenwriter Hugh Stoddart.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 78: Thu Mar 20

Strella (Koutras, 2009): Garden Cinema, 6.30pm

This presentation is part of the Contemporary Greek Cinema: Beyond the Weird Wave season at the Garden Cinema. The film is also screened on March 2nd.

Garden Cinema introduction:
The screening on Sunday 2 March will be followed by an in-person Q&A with director Panos Koutras. It will be introduced by Prof. Dimitris Papanikolaou, Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Cultural Studies and Fellow of St. Cross College, University of Oxford.

 

Yiorgos is released from prison after 14 years of incarceration for a murder he committed in his small Greek village. He spends his first night out in a cheap downtown hotel in Athens. There he meets Strella, a young transsexual prostitute. They spend the night together and soon they fall in love. But the past is catching up with Yiorgos. With Strella on his side he will have to find a new way out. An extraordinary and spellbinding relationship, a post-modern Greek tragedy in the glowing nights of Athens.

"I think that Strella is perhaps the most important cultural contribution in recent years to thinking about oedipalization within queer kinship, as well as about contemporary challenges to understandings of sexuality and kinship, all through a meditation on very contemporary modes of living and loving that nevertheless draw on ancient norms." - Judith Butler, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (with A. Athanasiou, 2013).

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 77: Wed Mar 19

The Music Lovers (Russell, 1970): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.05pm

This 35mm screening is part of a mini Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
This Ken Russell fantasia—musical biography as wet dream—hangs together more successfully than his other similar efforts, thanks largely to a powerhouse performance by Glenda Jackson, one actress who can hold her own against Russell's excess. Richard Chamberlain stars as a befuddled, banal-minded Tchaikovsky, who imagines the cannon fire of the 1812 Overture aimed at the heads of his enemies.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 76: Tue Mar 18

The Searchers (Ford, 1956): Prince Charles Ciunema, 8.45pm

This presentation is on 70mm and has three other screenings in March. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
We may still be waiting for the Great American Novel, but John Ford gave us the Great American Film in 1956. The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford. Through the central image of the frontier, the meeting point of wilderness and civilization, Ford explores the divisions of our national character, with its search for order and its need for violence, its spirit of community and its quest for independence.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 75: Mon Mar 17

Mahjong (Yang, 1996): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.30pm

This film is part of the Edward Yang season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Edward Yang’s angriest film (1996) follows various gangsters, hustlers, jet-setters, and western expatriates in contemporary Taipei, focusing in particular on the disappearance of a tycoon who owes $100 million to the local mob and his grown son, who wants to find him. A high-energy mosaic about the way we live, especially during economic boom conditions, with as much emphasis on sexual behavior as on business tensions, this builds to a climax of shocking violence before resolving itself into a poignant love story; the emotional and generic gear changes are part of what’s so exciting and reckless about it. In some ways it’s a loose remake of Yang’s previous feature, A Confucian Confusion, but it succeeds even more in capturing the tenor of our times.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) are extracts from the film.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 74: Sun Mar 16

Bread, Love and Dreams (Comencini, 1953): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 1.45pm

This film is part of the 'Cinema Made in Italy' season. Full details here.

Made in Italy introduction:
Our archive screening celebrates one of Luigi Comencini’s greatest early films. A wonderful, classic comedy, it details the improbable flirtations of a police chief (an irrepressible Vittorio De Sica) with a midwife and a wayward young woman in a small country village. The film also features a standout performance by Gina Lollobrigida.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 73: Sat Mar 15

 Cure (Kurosawa, 1997): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This film also screens on April 14th and is part of a mini retrospective of Kiyoshi Kurosawa films. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been at work for nearly two decades, sometimes making straight-to-video features but more recently receiving some belated international recognition. The engrossing Cure (1997) stars Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance?, The Eel) as a troubled detective exploring a series of murders committed through hypnotic suggestion (as in The Manchurian Candidate), and while its creepy mystery plot is easy enough to follow even when it turns metaphysical, it’s unsatisfying as a story precisely because it aspires to create a mounting sense of dread by enlarging questions rather than answering them. Like other recent thrillers by this director, it’s fairly grisly, though Kurosawa’s frequent long shots impart a cool, detached tone to the cruelty and violence. Stylistically it’s the most inventive Japanese feature I’ve seen in some time, much more unpredictable than Takeshi Kitano’s recent yakuza exercises.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) ios the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 72: Fri Mar 14

From the Other Side (Akerman, 2002): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The digital screening is also being shown on March 5th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
What gives Chantal Akerman’s video documentary about illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. so much bite as well as poignancy is her personal investment in the material. It’s felt in her haunted and highly evocative lingering over landscapes (an Akerman specialty), as well as in her subtitled interviews with Mexicans in Spanish and a few Americans in English. These are capped by her own highly moving monologue in French. A major work that creeps up on you gradually.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 64: Thu Mar 6

Suntan (Papadimitropoulos, 2016): Garden Cinema, 3.30pm

This film, which also screens on March 23rd with a Q&A, is part of the Contemporary Greek Cinema: Beyond the Weird Wave season at the Garden Cinema.

Guardian review:
Argyris Papadimitropoulos is a Greek film-maker whose work I didn’t know before seeing this unbearably sad story of sexual obsession. His style stands a little outside the black-comic absurdism of contemporaries such as Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, but he deserves to be as well known as them. Suntan is tremendously acted, fiercely and instantly absorbing, a tragicomic tale of male midlife breakdown, featuring someone who could possibly be described as an EasyJet Gustav von Aschenbach. Makis Papadimitriou (who was in Tsangari’s film Chevalier) is excellent as Kostis, a plump, bald, middle-aged doctor who, after an unspecified history of personal disappointment, takes up a job as local practitioner on a Greek island whose economy depends on the summer months, when it becomes party central for beautiful twentysomethings. Poor, lonely Kostis one day has to attend to Anna (Elli Tringou), a gorgeous young woman who has fallen off her quad bike. She playfully takes a shine to Kostis and, with the heedless caprice and cruelty of youth, invites him to hang out on the beach with her and her friends after his daily clinic. Inevitably, Kostis embarrasses himself by falling deeply in love with her. Humiliation and worse is in store. It is superbly directed and shot with great scenes: quietly devastating when Kostis is happily dancing at a club until his poor face is creased with sadness when he realises that Anna and the gang have gone. And Kostis licking sand out of Anna’s eyeball is an extraordinary moment. Trevor Howard never thought to try that with Celia Johnson.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 63: Wed Mar 5

The Boy Friend (Russell, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This film is part of the Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Sandy Wilson’s nostalgic pastiche of 20s musicals is predictably decorated by wizard of excess Ken Russell with the slightly soured whipped cream of hommages to Hollywood musicals and memories of his own days as a chorus boy. The seediness and squalor of backstage life aptly deflate the onstage illusion, though blond and beautiful premier danseur Christopher Gable is effortlessly elegant as the young lead, and Twiggy brings a naive, crumpled charm to the part of the girl who goes out a youngster and—naturally—comes back a star. With Max Adrian and the incomparable Vladek Sheybal as De Thrill, the Hollywood producer in the audience, whose fantasies are in tune with Russell’s own.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 62: Tue Mar 4

Sunday Bloody Sunday (Schlesinger, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.40pm

This is a Funeral Parade Queer Film Society screening. There are others here

Empire Magazine review:
Easily John Schlesinger’s most personal film, this is a poignant study of the twin perils of being British and lonely. Doctor Peter Finch and unemployment advisor Glenda Jackson are so afraid of facing life alone that they agree to share with caring but self-serving sculptor Murray Head. Neither is that comfortable with the arrangement, but the anticipation of stolen trysts dulls the pain of the interminable absences. But this is not just about urbane socio-emotional compromise. Schlesinger explores the impact on the middle-class of 1960s attitudes to sex and class, while also taking swipes at the vulgarity of American culture. He also elicits performances of great sensitivity from the Oscar-nominated Jackson and Finch, who keep their passions buried beneath a hair-shirt of civility.
David Parkinson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 61: Mon Mar 3

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 7.10pm

This 35mm presetnation is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.

BFI introduction:
Returning to the big screen to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Peter Weir’s adaption of Joan Lindsay’s novel has lost none of its mystique or mesmerising power. On Valentine’s Day 1900, students from Appleyard College, a girls’ private school in Victoria, Australia, embark on a field trip to an unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock. Despite rules against it, several of the girls wander off. It’s not until the end of the day that the group realise that some of their party have mysteriously disappeared. Weir’s wonderfully enigmatic film, with its ethereal cinematography, is possessed of a ghostly, foreboding atmosphere. A significant influence on the work of Sofia Coppola, Picnic at Hanging Rock has become a landmark for its dreamlike exploration of the intensely romantic, yet profoundly unsettling, experience of girlhood and burgeoning sexuality.
Kimberley Sheehan, Lead Programmer

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 60: Sun Mar 2

North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959): Prince Charles Cinema, 12 noon

This is a 70mm presentation and there are a number of other screenings from February 17th. You can find the details via the link here.

Chicago Reader review:
Cary Grant, a martini-sodden advertising director, awakes from a middle-class daydream into an underworld nightmare when he's mistaken for a secret agent (1959). A great film, and certainly one of the most entertaining movies ever made, directed by Alfred Hitchcock at his peak. With Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Leo G. Carroll.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 59: Sat Mar 1

Ae Fond Kiss (Loach, 2004): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 5.50pm

Chicago Reader review:
A second-generation Pakistani (Atta Yaqub) in working-class Glasgow falls for a white woman (Eva Birthistle) who teaches music at his sister’s Catholic school, and the two young lovers find themselves isolated as both his family and her employers condemn the relationship. This Romeo and Juliet story (2004) plays out in fairly predictable fashion, but the great social realist director Ken Loach (Land and Freedom) puts it across with an uncharacteristic focus on the lovers’ sexual delight. Birthistle delivers a passionate performance as the young teacher, who finds that her parish priest and her boyfriend’s Muslim father share the same ugly paternalism. The screenplay is by Loach’s frequent collaborator Paul Laverty (Sweet Sixteen, Bread and Roses).
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 58: Fri Feb 28

The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Rossellini, 1966): Cine Lumeiere, 2pm

This film is on at Cine Lumiere from February 23rd to February 28th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
One of Roberto Rossellini’s supreme masterpieces, and perhaps the greatest of the TV films that mark his last period. Made in 1966, the film chronicles the gradual steps taken in the Sun King’s seizure of power over 21 years; the treatment is contemplative, wise, and quietly humorous, and Rossellini’s innovative trick shots to integrate the real decor of Versailles are deftly executed. The color photography is superb.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

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

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 57: Thu Feb 27

Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This 16mm presentation by those great people at Cine-Real film club is also being screened on Wednesday February 19th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
When Fritz Lang filmed it in 1938 (as You Only Live Once), the story had a metaphysical thrust. When Nicholas Ray filmed it in 1948 (They Live by Night), it was romantic and doom laden. But by the time Arthur Penn got to it in 1967, it was pure myth, the distillation of dozens of drive-in movies about rebellious kids and their defeat at the hands of the establishment. It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films (the tone wobbles between hick satire and noble social portraiture, and the issue of violence is displayed more than it's examined), but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 56: Wed Feb 26

Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980): Garden Cinema, 3.30pm

 
This film - part of the Visions in Ruins: British Cinema 1970 - 1980 season at Garden Cinema - is also screened on February 20th will be introduced on that night by novelist and publisher Nicholas Royle, and will be followed by a post-film discussion in the cinema bar.

As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or, possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly distributed at the time.

It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting; masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat. The ending stayed with me for quite some time. Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.

Time Out review:
One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing, less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters.
Don Macpherson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 55: Tue Feb 25

Je Tu il Elle (Akerman, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The digital restoration also screens on February 15th and 21st. Full details here. Tonight’s screening will include an extended intro by Melanie Iredale, Director of Reclaim The Frame.

Chicago Reader review of Je Tu il Elle:
Chantal Akerman directed and plays the lead in this early (1974) black-and-white feature that charts three successive stages of its heroine's love life. In the first part she lives like a hermit, eating only sugar, compulsively rearranging the furniture in her one-room flat, and apparently writing and rewriting a love letter; in part two she hitches a ride with a truck driver and eventually gives him a hand job; in part three she arrives at the home of her female lover, and they proceed to make frantic love. This is every bit as obsessive and as eerie as Akerman's later Jeanne Dielman and Toute une nuit, though not as striking on a visual level; as in all her best work, however, the minimalist structure is both potent and haunting.
Jonathan Rosenbaum 

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 54: Mon Feb 24

Chess Of The Wind (Aslani, 1976): Barbican Cinema, 6.10pm

This film is part of the Masterpieces of the excellent Iranian New Wave season at the Barbican. You can find full details here.

Released and shown only twice in 1976, this Iranian gothic thriller was banned by the Iranian theologians in power from 1979 and thought lost forever - until that is, the mid 2010s, when the director’s children found a copy in a charity shop. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris) in collaboration with Mohammad Reza Aslani and Gita Aslani Shahrestani. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Film Forum introduction:
In an ornate, candlelit mansion in 1920s Tehran, the heirs to a family fortune vie for control of their matriarch’s estate — erupting in a ferocious final act. Screened publicly just once before it was banned, then lost for decades. “The opulent, claustrophobic interiors are reminiscent of Persian miniatures… The influence of European cinematic masters like Pasolini, Visconti and Bresson is also apparent. The sound design also stands out: wolves howl and dogs bay as they circle the house, ratcheting up the sense of menace; crows caw, jangling the nerves; heavy breathing makes the characters’ isolation in this haunted house increasingly oppressive. The soundtrack — an early work by trailblazing female composer Sheyda Gharachedaghi — takes inspiration from traditional Iranian music, and sounds like demented jazz.” – The Guardian.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 53: Sun Feb 23

Latino (Wexler, 1985): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This is a 35mm screening in the Celluloid on Sunday strand at the ICA Cinema.

Time Out review:
After the impressive but inevitably compromised Under Fire, it's good to see a movie that deals with conflict in Central America with a real sense of commitment. Haskell Wexler's brazenly partisan film may lack the artistic sophistication of its mainstream counterparts, but it gains in power by focusing not on the familiar 'neutral' journalist/photographer figure, but on an invading American soldier, a Green Beret lieutenant (Robert Beltran) drafted to Honduras to train a platoon of 'Contras' for secret raids on Nicaragua. There he becomes embroiled not only in the infliction of death, torture and US propaganda upon the Sandinistas, but in the contradictions of his position. First, he's a Latin American himself; second, he falls for a woman working in Honduras who hails from the village that is his prime target. Wexler's methods involve passion rather than 'balance': black-and-white moralising may occasionally be the result, but there's no denying the emotional punch dealt by the assured combination of taut narrative and intelligently researched context.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 52: Sat Feb 22

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Lynch, 1992): Rio Cinema, 8.30pm

This night dedicated to the late director also includes mystery shorts plus coffee, doughnuts and cherry pie as well as a David Lynch raffle.

Time Out review:
It begins with an axe crashing into a TV set: sparks fly, a scream is heard, and the symbolism is brutally obvious - forget everything you thought you knew about the quirky, wacky, cosy world of ‘Twin Peaks', cos Daddy's home and he's pissed off. Like many of the show's hardcore fans, David Lynch was disillusioned with what ‘Twin Peaks' had become: from a groundbreaking, excoriating peek into America's small-town underbelly to a cute parade of oddball soap-operatics in under two years. The big screen version gave him licence to bring it all back to basics, and he grabbed it with both hands: even in Lynch-land, with all its ear-severing, head-exploding, exploitation and rough sex, there's nothing so dark and demented as ‘Fire Walk With Me', the simplest, strangest, saddest and arguably greatest of all his films. The critics sneered, the fans balked and the public stayed away in droves. It's their loss: this was a beautiful new kind of madness, terrifying, exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.