Capital Celluloid: March 2025

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 110: Mon Apr 21

Under the Volcano (Huston, 1984): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.35pm

This late John Huston film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

This 35mm presentation is also screened on April 29th. Full details of the season can be found here.

Time Out review:

Everyone will be doing Huston's film a favour if they try hard not to compare it with the now classic Malcolm Lowry novel. In fact it captures the doomed spirit of the original, while - rightly - in no way apeing its dense, poetic style. Huston opts for straightforward narrative, telling the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic English ex-diplomat who embraces his own destruction in Mexico shortly before the outbreak of World War II. As the limp-wristed observers of this manic process, Anthony Andrews and Jacqueline Bisset are at best merely decorative, at worst an embarrassment, and the film's success rests largely on an (often literally) staggering performance from Albert Finney as the dipso diplo. Slurring sentences, sweating like a pig, wobbling on his pins, he conveys a character who is still, somehow, holding on to his sense of love and dignity. Not for the purists, maybe, but the last half-hour, as Firmin plunges ever deeper into his self-created hell, leaves one shell-shocked.
Richard Rayner

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 109: Sun Apr 20

Avanti! (Wilder, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 2.40pm

This great, late Billy Wilder film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

The 35mm presentation also screens on April 23rd. Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
This 1972 release is the most underrated of all Billy Wilder comedies and arguably the one that comes closest to the sweet mastery and lilting grace of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch. Jack Lemmon arrives at a small resort in Italy to claim the body of his late father, who’s perished in a car accident; there he meets Juliet Mills, whose mother has died in the same accident and, as it turns out, had been having an affair with the father. The development of Mills and Lemmon’s own romance over various bureaucratic complications is gradual and leisurely paced; at 144 minutes, this is an experience to roll around on your tongue. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond adapted a relatively obscure play by Samuel A. Taylor, and the lovely music is by Carlo Rustichelli; with Clive Revill and Edward Andrews.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 108: Sat Apr 19

Rich and Famous (Cukor, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 5.45pm

This rarely screened George Cukor film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Tonight’s film (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.

Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Feelings of great depth and poignancy surface unpredictably in this film by George Cukor, though they have little to do with the ostensible subject: the director seems to be responding to the material in private, wholly personal ways completely divorced from the concerns of his collaborators. The screenplay, an old rewrite of Old Acquaintance by Gerald Ayers (Foxes), is one of the worst Cukor has had to work with in his long career, redolent of strained staircase wit and false sophistication. The lead performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 107: Fri Apr 18

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Minnelli, 1962): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2pm

This rarely screened Vincente Minnelli film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Tonight’s film (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.

Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Considering how stupid the whole idea was—to remake a Rudolph Valentino silent with Glenn Ford—this 1962 feature picture is surprisingly passable, particularly when you turn off the sound track and concentrate on the sumptuous visuals provided by Vincente Minnelli. It’s no classic, but there’s more integrity here than anyone would have a right to expect. With Ingrid Thulin, Charles Boyer, Lee J. Cobb, and the two horsemen of 40s melodrama, Paul Henreid and Paul Lukas.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 106: Thu Apr 17

Such Good Friends (Preminger, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.45pm

This rarely screened Otto Preminger film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Tonight’s film will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.

Full details of the season can be found here.

New Yorker review: One of the more effervescent—yet nonetheless scathing—films in a season on ‘The New York Woman’, “Such Good Friends”, from 1971, by the triumvirate of the novelist Lois Gould, the screenwriter Elaine May, and the director Otto Preminger, presents a sheltered young stay-at-home Park Avenue mother (Dyan Cannon), who learns that her husband (Laurence Luckinbill), a prominent art director and author, has been unfaithful. The ironic action, blending flashbacks and fantasies, dispels her comforting illusions on the path to self-reliance. Richard Brody

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 105: Wed Apr 16

Frenzy (Hitchcock, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.35pm

This great, late Alfred Hitchcock film, introduced by season curator Karina Longworth, is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Tonight’s film will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.

Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review: This turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film (1972), though there’s no sign of the serenity and settledness that generally mark the end of a career. Frenzy, instead, continues to question and probe, and there is a streak of sheer anger in it that seems shockingly alive. The plotting combines two of Hitchcock’s favorite themes: the poisoned couple (Marnie, The Man Who Knew Too Much) and the lone man on the run (North by Northwest, Saboteur); its subjects are misogyny and domestic madness. Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 104: Tue Apr 15

The Wife's Confession (Masumura, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

The BFI mark Yasuzô Masumura’s centenary year with a UK premiere 4K restoration screening of his celebrated drama about a wife accused of her husband’s murder.

BFI introduction:
Shot in exquisite black and white CinemaScope, this poignant courtroom drama, with noir elements, tells of a young widow on trial following a mountaineering accident involving her husband. With its flashback structure, the film is also an existential melodrama that raises ethical issues. Influenced by Antonioni and Visconti, Masumura subverts the rules and presents a complex portrait of a woman who is governed by destructive desire, while also trying to break free from submission.

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 103: Mon Apr 14

Red Line 7000 (Hawks, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

“The most underestimated film of the sixties” Robin Wood

This video presentation, introduced by season curator Karina Longworth, is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Red Line 7000 is also screened on April 26th.

Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
One of Howard Hawks’s last films (1965), this study of perverse and insane ambition on the stock car racing circuit did not do well with the critics of the time, although it has since become something of a cause celebre. The racing footage, strangely, is flat and dull—so bad that some writers claim Hawks didn’t direct it. But the dialogue scenes have a primitive emotional force and directness, in spite of (or perhaps, because of) the young, untried cast, which includes James Caan. Depending on your point of view, you’ll find it either beautifully pure or sadly unshaded. A puzzlement, but intriguing.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the opening.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 102: Sun Apr 13

Hurlevent (Rivette, 1985): ICA Cinema, 5.15pm

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

Slant website review:
Ostensibly an adaptation of the oft-filmed Wuthering Heights, Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent (or Howling Wind, per the translation) feels more like a schematic indication of Emily Brontë’s famed novel, though that should not be taken as a criticism. This is one of Rivette’s most stripped down works; emotion is secondary to the film’s tight and taut surface (updated to the Cévennes countryside circa the 1930s) where passions flare imperceptibly and a romantic tragedy is performed as if preordained, though this is more than just Céline and Julie Go Boating’s haunted house melodrama played straight. Rivette’s characters are often held captive by the stage (whether real or imagined), so when Catherine (Fabienne Babe) and her farmhand lover Roch (Lucas Belvaux) run through the fields adjacent to an imposing stone homestead (one of the film’s two primary settings), there is a profound sense of meta liberation, of escape beyond the boundaries of narrative (the wind-strewn leaves of grass, counterpointed by the incantatory vocalizations of the Bulgarian choir Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, might very well be located in the empty margins of the Book of Life). Certain of Rivette’s weaker films assume a window-dressed Christian pose (anxiety of influence, I think, from Hitchcock and Rossellini, among others), but here the spiritual inquiry is entirely genuine. The three dream sequences that near-invisibly signal Hurlevent’s beginning, middle, and end are as much a holy trinity as they are a thematic backbone; the characters wake from these becalmed and psychologically penetrating visions into a nightmarish reality of Escher-like doorways and windows that lead them over a prolonged and circuitous path to destruction. Rivette never concretely illustrates the divide between mind and matter (the blink-of-an-eye passage of three years feels particularly apocalyptic in this context) and that allows him to have it both ways when, in Hurlevent’s finale, the spirit world quite literally breaches the real world, an action that manages to have repercussions at once miraculous, damning, and devastating.
Keith Uhlich

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 101: Sat Apr 12

Angel Face (Preminger, 1953): ICA Cinema, 4.30pm

This screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
This intense Freudian melodrama by Otto Preminger (1953) is one of the forgotten masterworks of film noir. Jean Simmons, beautifully blank, plays the ultimate femme fatale, a rich girl who seduces her beefcake chauffeur (Robert Mitchum) when daddy (Herbert Marshall) resists her advances. The film is a disturbingly cool, rational investigation of the terrors of sexuality, much as Preminger’s later masterpiece Bunny Lake Is Missing is a detached appraisal of childhood horrors. The sets, characters, and actions are extremely stylized, yet Preminger’s moving camera gives them a frightening unity and fluidity, tracing a straight, clean line to a cliff top for one of the most audacious endings in film history.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 100: Fri Apr 11

The Boys from Fengkuei (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1983): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.45pm

This film, which also screens on April 5th and 30th, is part of the Taiwan New Cinema season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's presentation is introduced by director Chen Kun-hou.

Time Out review:
Hou Hsiao-hsien's first indie production was also a creative breakthrough, the film in which he turned away from commercial formulas and began experimenting with long takes, wide-angle shots and melodrama-free plotlines. Three young men from Fengkuei, a backwater village in the Penghu Islands, decamp to Kaohsiung, Taiwan's southern port, for what they think will be a life of laddish fun; like Fellini's Vitelloni, they are pushed towards maturity by encounters with crime, death, work and women. Hou soon went far beyond these rather obvious social and psychological observations, but the film retains a real freshness and charm; it launched several acting careers. The classical music track doesn't work in this context, but it's a small improvement on the Taiwanese version (three minutes longer, thanks to a now-cut theme song), which had a dreadul pop soundtrack.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 99: Thu Apr 10

Southern Comfort (Hill, 1981): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This 4K restoration screening is a Lost Reels presentation and the first time the film will have been seen in the UK for decades.

Time Out review:
Transposing The Warriors from Brooklyn to the bayous of Louisiana, this reactivates the old genre of the platoon movie, echoes to the distant trumpets of Vietnam, unconcernedly risks pigeonholing as Deliverance II, and generally sets up more reverberations from its pared-down premise than do any number of scattershot epics. Nine part-time National Guardsmen embark on weekend training manoeuvres in the southern swamplands, expecting only a long, wet walk towards a whorehouse - until the gunplay abruptly stops being kids' stuff, and eight virgin soldiers suddenly face long odds on survival, lost and leaderless in a guerrilla war of attrition against the native Cajuns. Walter Hill's characters exercise their own deadly group dynamics in the firing line, while Ry Cooder's score, an eerily-shot alien landscape, and a lifestyle familiar mainly from Les Blank documentaries point up the internal cultural divide. Straight-line conflicts, low-light visuals: the film's basics, its strengths, and its critical Achilles' heel are all those of the classic American male action movie.
Paul Taylor

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 98: Wed Apr 9

Cheyenne Autumn (Ford, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.10pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on April 19th, is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Full details of the season can be found here.

Time Out review:
Making amends for his less than sensitive treatment of the Indians in his earlier movies, John Ford came up with a sprawling epic illustrating the callous disregard with which the US government treated the Cheyenne in the 1880s, uprooting them from the Yellowstone and resettling them in distant Oklahoma without proper provisions for survival. Over-long, often clichéd and uneven (there are comic interludes complete with cameo performances), but still imbued with moments of true poetry, thanks largely to William Clothier's magnificent Panavision landscapes.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 97: Tue Apr 8

The Terrorizers (Wang, 1986): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.50pm

This digital restoration, also being screened on April 19th, 25th and 28th, is part of the Taiwan New Cinema season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Edward Yang’s evocative and deliberately ambiguous third feature (1986) pivots on a chance encounter between a rebellious Eurasian girl and a novelist and housewife who decides to leave her husband, a lab technician. As Taiwanese film critic Edmund Wong has noted, the film offers “a refreshing look at Yang’s theme of urban melancholy and self-discovery”—a preoccupation running through Yang’s early work that often evokes some of Antonioni’s poetry, atmosphere, and feeling for modernity. Well worth checking out.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 96: Mon Apr 7

One Room Tenants (Has, 1960): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm

This film, part of the Wojciech Has season at BFI Southbank, also screens on April 18th. You can find all the details here.

BFI introduction:
At the turn of the 1930s, a group of students and self-styled artist-intellectuals all share a single room – the only place they can afford – in a Warsaw tenement house. They grapple with the challenges of living in Polish society while still retaining a truly independent spirit, expressed most frequently through – often bitterly funny – sarcastic takes on events and incidents happening around them.

Here (and above) is the opening.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 95: Sun Apr 6

Time of the Heathen (Kass, 1961): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm

Welcome to the latest Capital Celluloid film screening, another important landmark in the history of the blog at which I hope to see as many of you as possible. We are returning to Close-Up Cinema in Shoreditch again after the presentations of selections from my Sight and Sound 2022 poll top ten list. My recommendation is to read as little as possible (even the review below) before experiencing this recent 1961 rediscovery. This was one of the revelations at the Bologna Cinema Ritrovarto festival in 2023 and has had only two screenings in London since. Don't miss the chance to see what I've seen best described as "a nightmarish, hyper-edited, avant-garde freak-out of a film as atomic angst and racial woes wend their way toward Shakespearean tragedy".

Il Cinema Ritrovarto 2023 introduction:
A protégé of Clifford Odets in the 1940s, Peter Kass was mostly known for his work as a world-famous theater actor, director and acting coach for the likes of Olympia Dukakis, Faye Dunaway, Val Kilmer, and Maureen Stapleton. Except for a very limited release in the UK and on European television at the time (and a screening of a rare 35mm print more recently at the Finnish Film Archive), Kass’s sole feature release Time of the Heathen has been mostly overlooked and forgotten in the past several decades. Kass collaborated with celebrated artist and avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller on Heathen, and thanks to the programming efforts by the Lightbox Film Center at University of the Arts (Philadelphia) around a 2019 Emshwiller retrospective, the original Heathen pre-print elements were discovered at the BFI.
Todd Wiener

Screen Slate review:
During its first hour, Time of the Heathen (1961) breezily earns the familiar admiration extended to serious-minded low-budget features, an affection which prizes resourcefulness and chutzpah over the qualities usually deployed to evaluate a film such as impressive craftsmanship or satisfying narrative mechanics. Director and co-writer Peter Kass milks his depopulated upstate locations for every bit of photographic intrigue they possess and coaxes a tiny cast to go big enough to fill the empty spaces usually occupied by extras and sets. In its final stretch, however, the film explodes into a harrowing acid bummer of American foreign policy atrocities. What’s more, Heathen’s final act of grim proto-psychedelia somehow dovetails perfectly with the bone-simple, though righteous-for-1961, morality tale Kass had been building for the bulk of the film. The final moments retroactively imbue everything that preceded them with a heavier apocalyptic aura that keeps the film lodged in the psyche like a splinter. Shortly after World War II, a “tall stranger, ugly as sin” named Gaunt (John Heffernan) shuffles around the countryside with only a bible for comfort. When he’s framed for the rape and murder of a Black maid, he flees the scene with her mute son in tow. As the pair are hunted through the forest by the law, Gaunt and the unnamed boy share a doomed isolation. The film begins with a title card that reads, “The story of this film takes place in a period four years after the BOMB fell on Hiroshima.” This instant context, plus ominous shots of jets flying overhead, enshroud the bubbling brooks and handsome foliage in unseen clouds of radioactivity. Gaunt’s fragile grip on existence frays until he’s beset by an excruciating phantasmagoria of city maps, fire, bomb bay doors opening, children laughing, and scorched corpses. The sequence is a brief, but nearly comprehensive reckoning with nuclear ethics, which are ultimately pretty simple as long as you’re not Christopher Nolan or a History Channel buff. The film’s co-editor, Ed Emshwiller, is also credited with “cinematography and art work.” That presumably means he’s responsible for this sequence, which recalls Vertigo’s nightmares and forecasts 2001’s Stargate. Emshwiller had been illustrating pulp science fiction for a decade prior to Heathen’s miniscule release in 1962, and would make his own debut as an experimental filmmaker that same year with Thanatopsis. That short, the beginning of a brilliant second career that would last into the late 1980s, features a soundtrack of industrial noise and heartbeats overtop a dancer twitching in an irradiated blur, none of which would be out of place in the montage of world-historic immiseration he contributed to Heathen.
Patrick Dahl

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 94: Sat Apr 5

The Indian Tomb (Lang, 1959): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Full details of the season can be found here.

Fritz Lang follows up The Tiger of Eschnapur (screening on the 1st and 12th) with this story of the Indian prince who is determined to possess a beautiful dancer – dead or alive. In part two of Lang’s Indian epic, Paget’s dancer and Hubschmid’s architect go on the run from Reyer’s prince, who is determined to possess the beautiful Seetha at any cost. With his last big-budget movie, Lang goes for broke with decadent production design.

Chicago Reader review:
Fritz Lang’s penultimate work (1959)—a two-part adventure saga set and partly shot in India—marked a return, in more ways than one, to his masterpieces of the silent era. On a literal level, the project is a remake of another diptych from 1921 that Lang developed with his former wife, Thea von Harbou (who also wrote the novel on which the films are based); but more importantly, it’s driven by powerful, architectural mise en scene reminiscent of that of Metropolis and Spies. The films take place in the fictional Indian kingdom of Eschnapur and center on a German architect (Paul Haubschmid) who’s been hired by the Maharajah (Walther Reyer) to construct schools and hospitals. The architect falls in love with the Maharajah’s betrothed (Debra Paget), a naive but passionate temple dancer, and their affair so enrages the prince that he turns from benevolent to wrathful almost instantly. (His transformation occurs near the end of The Tiger of Eschnapur, setting the stage for his brutal revenge in The Indian Tomb.) As all this is going on, the ruler’s brother plots to usurp the throne, and there are provocative conversations about the will of the gods that reflect Lang’s career-long obsession with forces beyond human control. This is a work of Orientalism that borders on camp—all the principal Indian characters are played by Western actors, and the depiction of India plays up the country’s exoticness—but as film historian Tom Gunning has noted, it’s an Orientalist vision as personal and visually inventive as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, which was made only a few years later. Lang’s handling of color, blocking, and suspense is masterful throughout; if you’re at all interested in this major film artist, you can’t miss this.
Ben Sachs

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 93: Fri Apr 4

Farewells (Has, 1958): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This film, part of the Wojciech Has season at BFI Southbank, also screens on April 18th tomorrow. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Wojciech Has’s 1958 Polish film was apparently conceived as a mixture of comedy and melodrama, but its deliberate imagery, ponderous pace, and fatalistic tone give it an air of hopeless melancholy. A rebellious young student, sick of his studies and his family, flees to the country with a taxi dancer; the year is 1939, and not long after his father intervenes Poland is invaded. When the student meets the girl a few years later under the German occupation, their circumstances have changed greatly. From the beginning Has suggests that his characters are ruled more by social forces than by their own wills: often they surrender the foreground and move into the background, taking their place in the larger scheme as the narrative descends into despair.
Fred Camper

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 91: Thu Apr 3

The Keep (Mann, 1983): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

Those of you who weren't with us at the 35mm Cigarette Burns screening in 2016 can catch up as this bona fide cult movie makes its way back to the Prince Charles Cinema, this time in a 4K restoration. The film also screens on April. 23rd. Details here.

Prince Charles Cinema introduction:
The Keep contains all of Mann’s signature visual style, with its moody lighting, dreamlike cinematography, and an eerie, hypnotic electronic score by Tangerine Dream. However, the film was plagued by production issues, including extensive studio interference, drastic cuts to its runtime, and lost footage. Add in that two weeks into post-production, visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers died, causing massive amounts of problems because no one knew how he planned to finish the visual effects scenes in the movie. All this lead to a final version that feels disjointed and incomplete. The original cut was reportedly over three hours long, but Paramount forced Mann to trim it down to just under 100 minutes, resulting in a film with significant narrative gaps and abrupt character developments. Despite its troubled history and lukewarm reception upon release, The Keep has developed a cult following over the years. Fans appreciate its unique atmosphere, ambitious blend of horror and fantasy, and its haunting, dreamlike aesthetic. After years of seeming unlikely, the film has finally been restored. This is lovely news for us here at the Prince Charles Cinema, where the film has been largely absent from our screens lately, as the 35mm print has sound issues.

Chicago Reader review:
This supernatural thriller has the look of a doomed project—one of those movies, like Lucky Lady or Catch-22, where something went irretrievably, inexplicably wrong, but the results had to be released anyway. At least that’s a more charitable assumption than blaming it all on the writer-director, Michael Mann (Thief), whose work as displayed here wouldn’t cut the mustard on a Saturday morning kids’ show. The film—about a squad of Nazi soldiers who accidentally unleash a diabolical force in a remote Romanian village—is almost absurdly uncentered in terms of plot, structure, and character; none of it makes dramatic—or even temporal—sense. There is some nice art direction—particularly on the title structure, a kind of Dracula’s castle by Frank Lloyd Wright—but it only serves to shelter an utterly forlorn cast; Scott Glenn, Jurgen Prochnow, Robert Prosky, Ian McKellen.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trrailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 90: Wed Apr 2

A Hole in the Head (Capra, 1959): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

BFI introduction:
Returning to feature filmmaking after an exile making educational documentaries, Capra directed this CinemaScope vehicle. Sinatra plays a broke Miami motel owner whose rich brother offers a financial lifeline – if he gives up his preteen son and marries a melancholy widow. The movie is cynical, but theme song ‘High Hopes’, appropriated by the JFK campaign, became the soundtrack of Camelot-era optimism.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 90: Tue Apr 1

The Tiger of Eschnapur (Lang, 1959): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.45pm

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 89: Mon Mar 31

The Clock (Minnelli, 1945): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This film is on offer at £1 for Prince Charles Cinema members.

Chicago Reader review:
Vincente Minnelli's first non-musical (1945) is a charming and stylish if somewhat sentimental love story about a soldier (Robert Walker) on a two-day leave in New York who meets and marries an office worker (Judy Garland). Filmed on a studio soundstage with enough expertise to make it seem like a location shoot, the film is appealing largely for its performances and the innocence it projects. (Similar qualities can be found, at a half-century remove, in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise.) In addition to Walker and Garland, Keenan Wynn and Moyna Macgill are well used.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 88: Sun Mar 30

Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983): ICA Cinema, 7pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Celluloid on Sunday strand at the ICA Cinema.

Chicago Reader review:

This 1983 shocker by David Cronenberg comes about as close to abandoning a narrative format as a commercial film possibly can: James Woods plays the programmer of a sleazy Toronto cable channel who stumbles across a mysterious pirate emission—a porno show called “Videodrome” that features hideous S and M fantasies performed with appalling realism. Knowing a ratings winner when he sees one, Woods sets out to find the producer and quickly becomes involved with a kinky talk-show hostess (Deborah Harry), expanding rubber TV sets, a bizarre religious cult, and—almost incidentally—a plot to take over the world. Never coherent and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to place obsessive personal images before a popular audience—a kind of Kenneth Anger version of Star Wars.

Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 87: Sat Mar 29

The Master (Anderson, 2012): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.45pm

This 35mm presentation of The Master is repeated a number of times in March and April. Here are the full details via this link.

The Master was the best film of 2012 and if you read one lengthy article on this movie make it J Hoberman's in the Guardian which you can find here.

Chicago Reader review:
A self-destructive loner (Joaquin Phoenix), discharged from the navy after serving in the Pacific in World War II, flounders back in the States before coming under the wing of a charismatic religious leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) transparently based on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. This challenging, psychologically fraught drama is Paul Thomas Anderson's first feature since the commanding There Will Be Blood (2007), and like that movie it chronicles a contest of wills between an older man and a younger one, as the troubled, sexually obsessed, and often violent young disciple tries to fit in with the flock that's already gathered around the master. This time, however, the clashing social forces aren't religion and capitalism but, in keeping with the era, community and personal freedom—including the freedom to fail miserably at life. The stellar cast includes Amy Adams, Laura Dern, and Jesse Plemons.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 86: Fri Mar 28

Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

This film, which also screens on March 22nd, is part of the David Lynch season at Close-Up Cinema that runs throughout March. Full details here.

Film Society of Lincoln Centre review:
Most of David Lynch’s later films straddle (at least) two realities, and their most ominous moments arise from a dawning awareness that one world is about to cede to another. In Lost Highway, we are introduced to brooding jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) while he lives in a simmering state of jealousy with his listless and possibly unfaithful wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). About one hour in, a rupture fundamentally alters the narrative logic of the film and the world itself becomes a nightmare embodiment of a consciousness out of control. Lost Highway marked a return from the wilderness for Lynch and the arrival of his more radical expressionism – alternating omnipresent darkness with overexposed whiteouts, dead air with the belligerent soundtrack assault of metal-industrial bands, and the tactile sensations that everything is happening with the infinite delusions of schizophrenic thought.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 85: Thu Mar 27

In A Lonely Place (Ray, 1950): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.45pm

In a Lonely Place is one of the best films about life in Hollywood and one of Nicholas Ray's finest movies. Highly recommended. This 35mm screening is part of a film noir season at the Prince Charles Cinema (you can find all the details here).

"I lived a few weeks while you loved me . . ."

Chicago Reader review:
'With his weary romanticism, Humphrey Bogart was made for Nicholas Ray, and together they produced two taut thrillers (the other was Knock on Any Door). In this one (1950, 94 min.), Bogart is an artistically depleted Hollywood screenwriter whose charm is inextricable from his deep emotional distress. He falls for a golden girl across the way, Gloria Grahame, who in turn helps him face a murder charge. Grahame and Ray were married, but they separated during the shooting, and the screen breakup of the Bogart-Grahame romance consciously incorporates elements of Ray's personality (he even used the site of his first Hollywood apartment as Bogart's home in the film). The film's subject is the attractiveness of instability, and Ray's self-examination is both narcissistic and sharply critical, in fascinating combination. It's a breathtaking work, and a key citation in the case for confession as suitable material for art'
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 84: Wed Mar 26

The Conversation (Coppola, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 12pm

This is a 35mm presentation and is also screened on April 12th. Details here.

Time Out review:
Francis Ford Coppola’s sparse, prescient thriller is inner, rather than outer-directed film about the threat of electronic surveillance, conceived well before the Watergate affair broke. Acknowledged as the king of the buggers, Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry Caul is an intensely private man. Living alone in a scrupulously anonymous flat, paying functional visits to a mistress who plays no other part in his life, he is himself a machine; and the point Coppola makes is that this very private man only acquires something to be private about through the exercise of his skill as a voyeur. Projecting his own lonely isolation on to a conversation he painstakingly pieces together (mesmerising stuff as he obsessively plays the tapes over and over, adjusting sound levels until words begin to emerge from the crowd noises), he begins to imagine a story of terror and impending tragedy, and feels impelled to try to circumvent it. In a splendidly Hitchcockian denouement, a tragedy duly takes place, but not the one he foresaw; and he is left shattered not only by the realisation that his soul has been exposed, but by the conviction that someone must have planted a bug on him which he simply cannot find. A bleak and devastatingly brilliant film.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 83: Tue Mar 25

Bay of Angels (Demy, 1963): Garden Cinema, 6pm

Peter Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to appear on the programme. It was an invitation that sadly was never extended to him and I thought of that tale when I was actually asked to contribute to the most famous of all movie polls, run by Sight & Sound magazine, the latest of which was in 2022. All those years of trawling the previous decades choices with rapt fascination, reading the articles on the canon and the time keeping that running list of my ten all-time favourites that were inevitable mixed up with the greatest in my head was not wasted. Now, though, I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Others were doing the same, prompting responses varying widely from “it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”.

The more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted people to see but had not been considered in the previous voting, and modestly hoping for a re-evalution of the choices. I made two rules. All of the films in my list (reproduced below) would deserve to be part of the Sight & Sound Greatest poll conversation and all the choices would not have received a single vote in the previous 2012 poll.

Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases there are very good reasons some of these films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared after bombing at the box office and the subsequent dissolving of the director’s production company, deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishes in limbo, only seen at major retrospectives. The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are both once lost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery. White Dog, after a desultory release overshadowed by misguided accusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years. Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, was shown in 2013 from (fortuitously I later discovered) 16mm in an ICA gallery and felt thrillingly authentic, the sound of the whirring projector and the artist’s singular framing combining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:

Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)

Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)

The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)

La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)

Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)

Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)

Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)

White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)

Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)

Four from the list have been shown in a London cinema since the poll appeared and now the Jacques Demy film gets two screenings at the Garden Cinema. Bay of Angels, which also screens on March 11th, is part of the Demy season there. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
Jacques Demy's second feature has a ravishing Jeanne Moreau, ash-blonde for the occasion and dressed all in white, as a compulsive gambler who doesn't care what happens to her so long as she has a chip to start her on the roulette tables. Ostensibly the subject is gambling, but the real theme is seduction - with Moreau casting a spell on Claude Mann that turns him every which way - and this is above all a visually seductive film. Shot mainly inside the casinos and on the sunstruck promenades of Nice and Monte Carlo, it is conceived as a dazzling symphony in black and white. Moreau's performance is magnificent, but it's really Jean Rabier's camera which turns the whole film into an expression of sheer joy - not only in life and love, but things. Iron bedsteads make arabesques against white walls; a little jeweller's shop becomes a paradise of strange ornamental clocks; a series of angled mirrors echo the heroine as she runs down a corridor into her lover's arms; roulette wheels spin to a triumphant musical accompaniment; and over it all hangs an aura of brilliant sunshine.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) are the evocative opening credits.