Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 82: Mon Mar 24

 Nightfall (Tourneur, 1956): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

This film, by the great Jacques Tourneur, is prresented from a 35mm print.

Chicago Reader review:
This 1956 masterpiece by Jacques Tourneur, best known for the stylish horror films Cat People and Curse of the Demon, begins as Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) meets Marie Gardiner (Anne Bancroft), who’s soon helping him evade the private investigator and two thugs chasing him. His explanation of why he can’t go to the police marks him as the typical film noir outsider. The story unfolds gradually, as Vanning’s flight is intercut with the investigator’s pursuit and with a series of flashbacks that reveal how he became wanted for murder; the intercutting develops each story in a parallel space or time, movingly articulating the theme of a character trapped by his history. Tourneur links scenes by cutting between footsteps or looks at a clock in different locales, and his images have a smooth, almost liquid quality. He eschews the high-contrast lighting of most noirs in favor of a moody, brooding poeticism in which shadows come because it’s nightfall. His delicate lyricism, which takes the natural world as the norm, is linked to the observational skills Vanning has developed–“I know where every shadow falls,” he says–but it also contrasts with the plot’s paranoia as the shadow world of noir meets the streets of LA or the Wyoming wilderness.
Fred Camper

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 81: Sun Mar 23

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974): ICA Cinema, 2pm

A personal favourite. This is a long movie and I took a hip flask in when I went to see this on a date at Notting Hill's Electric Cinema back in the day. That worked wonderfully as this is a meandering film, probably best seen under some sort of influence.

This 35mm presentation is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Rivette’s comic feminist extravaganza is as scary and unsettling in its narrative high jinks as it is exhilarating in its uninhibited slapstick (1974). Its slow, sensual beginning stages a meeting between a librarian (Dominique Labourier) and a nightclub magician (Juliet Berto). Eventually, a plot within a plot magically takes shape—a somewhat sexist Victorian melodrama with Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder (the film’s producer), and a little girl—as each character, on successive days, visits an old dark house and the same events take place. The elaborate Hitchcockian doublings are so beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and power. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue with Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its euphoric effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons, musicals, thrillers, and serials).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 80: Sat Mar 22

Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959): Barbican Cinema, 3.20pm 

Barbican introduction:
This screening of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) is presented in response to Noah Davis’s Barbican exhibition 'Imitation of Wealth', creating a dialogue between film and art about themes of identity, aspiration, and representation. Sirk’s lush melodrama examines the intersecting lives of two women—one black and one white—and their daughters, navigating the complexities of race, class, and familial sacrifice. The film’s exploration of constructed identities and societal expectations resonates with Davis’s work, which reimagines illusions of prosperity and cultural symbolism as layered narratives about value and visibility. This screening invites audiences to consider how both Davis and Sirk use their respective mediums to critique systems of representation and question the ways we assign meaning to art, labour, and life. (The other film screenings as part of the season can be found here).

Chicago Reader review:
Douglas Sirk's 1959 film was the biggest grosser in Universal's history until the release of Airport, yet it's also one of the most intellectually demanding films ever made in Hollywood. The secret of Sirk's double appeal is a broadly melodramatic plotline, played with perfect conviction yet constantly criticized and challenged by the film's mise-en-scene, which adds levels of irony and analysis through a purely visual inflection. Lana Turner stars as a young widow and mother who will do anything to realize her dreams of Broadway stardom; her story is intertwined with that of Susan Kohner, the light-skinned daughter of Turner's black maid, who is tempted to pass for white. By emphasizing brilliant surfaces, bold colors, and the spatial complexities of 50s moderne architecture, Sirk creates a world of illusion, entrapment, and emotional desperation. With John Gavin, Sandra Dee, Dan O'Herlihy, Robert Alda, and Juanita Moore.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.