Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 7: Wed Jan 7

The Best Year of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
This 1946 domestic epic about three World War II veterans returning to civilian life, 172 minutes long and winner of nine Oscars, isn’t considered hip nowadays. Its director, William Wyler, and literary source, MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Glory for Me (adapted here by Robert Sherwood), are far from fashionable, and the real veteran in the cast, Harold Russell, who lost his hands in the war, has occasioned outraged reflections from critic Robert Warshow about challenged masculinity and even sick jokes from humorist Terry Southern. But I’d call this the best American movie about returning soldiers I’ve ever seen—the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever did. The rest of the cast—including Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Fredric March, Cathy O’Donnell, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael, and Ray Collins—is strong too.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 6: Tue Jan 6

Moss Rose (Ratoff, 1947): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

A 35mm screening in the 'Projecting the Archive' strand at BFI Southbank introduced by Josephine Botting, BFI Curator.

BFI introduction:
We mark the centenary of Peggy Cummins with a film from her Hollywood period – one of three collaborations with director Ratoff. Marjorie Bowen’s 1934 source novel was itself based on an unsolved Victorian murder and this adaptation features Cummins as a Cockney chorus girl who blackmails a rich gentleman she suspects of being the killer. Despite the excellent cast and crack screenwriting team, the film didn’t enhance Cummins’ stateside career. Nevertheless, it remains an entertaining mystery thriller set against the backdrop of foggy Victorian London, Hollywood-style.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 5: Mon Jan 5

Slacker (Linklater, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm

This 35mm presentation (introduced by season programme assistant Sean Atkinson), also screened on January 29th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here. 

Chicago Reader review:
Richard Linklater's delightfully different and immensely enjoyable second feature (1991) takes us on a 24-hour tour of the flaky dropout culture of Austin, Texas; it doesn't have a continuous plot, but it's brimming with weird characters and wonderful talk (which often seems improvised, though it's all scripted by Linklater, apparently with the input of some of the participants, as in his later Waking Life). The structure of dovetailing dialogues calls to mind an extremely laid-back variation of The Phantom of Liberty or Playtime. “Every thought you have fractions off and becomes its own reality,” remarks Linklater himself to a poker-faced cabdriver in the first (and in some ways funniest) scene, and the remainder of the movie amply illustrates this notion with its diverse paranoid conspiracy and assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists, college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and layabouts (around 90 in all). Even if the movie goes nowhere in terms of narrative and winds up with a somewhat arch conclusion, the highly evocative scenes give an often hilarious sense of the surviving dregs of 60s culture and a superbly realized sense of a specific community.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 4: Sun Jan 4

Paris Belongs to Us (Rivette, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 16th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s troubled and troubling 1960 account of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters—a student, an expatriate American, members of a low-budget theater company rehearsing Pericles—as the student tries to recover a tape of guitar music by a deceased Spanish emigre who may have committed suicide. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu; Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film’s title (which is countered by the opening epigraph from Charles Peguy: “Paris belongs to no one”).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 3: Sat Jan 3

The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.20pm

This is a 35mm screening.

Time Out film review:
Martin Scorsese's magnificent film, taken from Edith Wharton's novel, is set in 1870s New York and centres on lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose plans to wed the impeccably connected Mary Welland (Wynona Rider) are upset by his love for her unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). The performances are excellent, while the director employs all the tools of his trade to bring his characters and situations vividly to life; from the start, it's clear from the speedy cutting and sumptuous mise-en-scène that Scorsese and his team are intent on drawing us into the heart of Archer's perceptions and the world around him (this is, most certainly, an expressionist film). Decor reflects and oppresses characters; posture, gesture and glance (like the witty, ironic narration) convey not only individual psychology but the ideals of an entire, etiquette-obsessed elite. Everything here serves to express an erotic fervour, imprisoned by unbending social rituals designed to preserve the status quo in favour of a self-appointed aristocracy. Scorsese's most poignantly moving film.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 2: Fri Jan 2

Midnight Run (Brest, 1988): Prince Charles Cinema, 11,45am

This is a 35mm screening.

Time Out review:
That old formula, handcuffed captor and captive who become buddies on the run, gets an injection of new life from the playing of the cast. Bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) captures bail-jumping accountant Jon Mardukas (Charles Grodin) in New York, but his problems really start when he tries to deliver him to the bail bondsman in LA. Mardukas, learning that his employer was a Mafia mobster, stole millions which he distributed among the poor, and Walsh has to run the gauntlet of the FBI, the Mob and a rival bounty hunter (Ashton), besides putting up with his captive's concern about smoking and morality. Both actors get off on each other, improvising routines and inhabiting the standard Odd Couple teaming so interestingly that at times the film touches a profundity. Here and there, director Brest succumbs to the car chase, but overall the movie is way above average for the genre.
Brian Case

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 1: Thu Jan 1

Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.15pm

This is a 35mm presentation also screening on December 9th, plus January 31st and February 14th. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
Half the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still amounts to some hill of beans.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 363: Wed Dec 31

When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989): Prince Charles Cinema, 1.30pm & 7pm

An appropriate annual New Year's Eve screening of this re-released crowd-pleaser, the Prince Charles Cinema showing the movie on 35mm. The film is also being shown on February 14th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Too often dismissed as the bland, cutesy, cakey-bakey face of the modern romcom, the late Nora Ephron was an unacknowledged genius when it came to screenplay construction – and ‘When Harry Met Sally’ remains her finest work. This is a film where everything works: Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s just-this-side-of-smug central couple, the gorgeous photography of New York through the changing seasons, even Harry Connick Jr’s jazz-lite soundtrack. And it’s all rooted in that flawless script. The story is simple: Crystal and Ryan meet after college, and loathe one another on sight. As the years pass the random meetings pile up, and dislike turns to reluctant friendship. But, as the film insistently, infamously asks, can men and women ever really be just friends? It’s not just that Ephron poses these kinds of obvious-but-important questions. It’s that she does so while circumventing romantic clichés left and right, creating unforgettably loveable characters and throwing in some of the most fluid, insightful and witty set-piece conversations ever written (the diner orgasm is the most famous, but it’s the tip of a very large iceberg). ‘Perfect’ is a big word to use about any film, but in this case no other will do.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 362: Tue Dec 30

Night Moves (Penn, 1975): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
Released in 1975, near the end of Arthur Penn's most productive period (which began in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde), this haunting psychological thriller ambitiously sets out to unpack post-Watergate burnout in American life. Gene Hackman plays an LA detective tracking a runaway teenager (Melanie Griffith in her screen debut) to the Florida Keys while evading various problems of his own involving his father and his wife. The labyrinthine mystery plot and pessimistic mood suggest Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, and like them screenwriter Alan Sharp has more than conventional mystery mechanics on his mind. One of Penn's best features; his direction of actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout. With Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars and James Woods.
Jonathan Rosenabum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 361: Mon Dec 29

Magnolia (Anderson, 1999): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.55pm

This is a 35mm presentation also screening on January 7th, 16th and 30th. Details here.

Time Out review:
Paul Thomas Anderson's meandering multi-story megasoap with a message is over-ambitious, self-conscious, self-indulgent, self-important and clumsy into the bargain. But it's also one of the most enthralling and exhilarating American movies in ages. Much in the style of Nashville and Short Cuts (though lacking Altman's light touch), this intimate epic charts the various fortunes, over a day or so, of various individuals living in the San Fernando Valley - including the dying Earl (Jason Robards), his young wife Linda (Julianne Moore), and his nurse Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman); Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise), prophet of machismo; and numerous people associated, past or present, with a TV quiz show - whose paths cross by design, destiny, chance or coincidence. Insofar as the film is about 'story', little happens save that Anderson initially conceals information, and then slowly scatters snippets so that we can piece the jigsaw together. For all the humour, it's a dark portrait of loss, lovelessness and fear of failure in contemporary America, and not a film that trades in understatement. As the lost souls make their way towards - what? - redemption? - a deus ex machina plot development occurs, as contrived, ludicrous, bold and grandly imaginative as any Biblical flood or plague.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 360: Sun Dec 28

The Deep Blue Sea (Litvak, 1955): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm

This 16mm presentation in the Never on Sunday season at Close-Up Cinema is introduced by strand curator Ehsan Khoshbakht

Close-Up Cinema introduction:
Hester (Vivien Leigh), a middle-aged woman's suicide attempt at the beginning of the story sparks off two flashbacks, one from the point of view of the upper-class husband she has abandoned and the other from the view of the younger, capricious ex-RAF pilot for whom she has left her husband. Back to the present, the film revolves around her desperate attempt to win back her lover, only to realise she is yearning for something she can’t have. Adapted from a play of the same name by Terence Rattigan who also wrote the script under director Anatole Litvak’s supervision, Litvak conveys a stifling world of failed dreams (a doctor who has turned bookie, a jobless and meddlesome actress) with an emotional impact somehow stronger than Terence Davies’s 2011 version. Litvak shows unconstrained impulses without making them look pathetic. There's no malice of intent in the way characters hurt each other, but things always fall in the wrong places. When hope wanes, the dust of memories obscures it beyond recognition. There’s a profound sadness to the sense of love ebbing away, scene after scene.
Ehsan Khoshbakht

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 359: Sat Dec 27

Boom! (Losey, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 2.15pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on December 8th, is part of the Richard Burton season at BFI Southbank. Details here. 

BFI introduction:
Set on a secluded island, Boom introduced a new, minimal ‘music box’ sound that composer John Barry frequently used in the years immediately before his move to the US. The powerhouse combination of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at their most florid propels Joseph Losey’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Wonderfully camp, it bombed in 1968. But time has been kind to it. And Noël Coward has a star turn as Bill Ridgeway, ‘the witch of Capri’. Indeed. dubbed ‘The Angel of Death’, Burton’s wandering-poet-cum-gigolo washes up on the isolated Sardinian isle of Taylor’s ailing widow, in this visually stunning, alcohol-drenched adaptation. Compellingly miscast, the pair face off in the sort of unhinged register best relished with an enthusiastic audience. Devoted fans include John Waters, who opined, ‘If you don’t like this film, I hate you’.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 358: Fri Dec 26

Interstellar (Nolan, 2014): Prince Charles Cinema, 2pm

This film, being shown from 35mm and 70mm, is on an extended run at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
On a visual level, Interstellar is an exceptionally well-crafted Hollywood entertainment. Director Christopher Nolan, art director Dean Wolcott, and their effects artists render the imaginary settings in stunning detail. The film is rife with brilliant imagery: a horizon of frozen clouds, an ocean wave as tall as a skyscraper, the flashing interior of a wormhole through which the principal characters fly their spacecraft. The most striking thing about these images is that we’re rarely encouraged to ooh and aah over them; unlike most ambitious space operas since 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), Interstellar inspires not wonder but a cool contemplation. Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who cowrote the script, advance a hard-science perspective, incorporating such concepts as the theory of relativity and placing dramatic emphasis on research and problem solving.
Ben Sachs

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 357: Thu Dec 25

Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950): JW3 Cinema, 341-351 Finchley Rd, NW3 12.30pm

This film screens at JW3 Cinema from December 21st to 25th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Billy Wilder's searing, funny, morbid look at the real tinsel beneath the phony tinsel (1950). Aging silent-movie vamp Gloria Swanson takes up with William Holden, a two-bit screenwriter on the make, and virtually holds him captive in her Hollywood gothic mansion. Erich von Stroheim, once her director, now her butler, is the other figure in this menage-a-weird. A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder's better efforts.
Dan Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 356: Wed Dec 24

It's A Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946): Everyman Screen on the Green, 7pm

The 35mm presentation, part of the Christmas season at the Screen on the Green, is also being shown on December 7th, 13th and 21st and you can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review: 
The film Frank Capra was born to make. This 1946 release marked his return to features after four years of turning out propaganda films for the government, and Capra poured his heart and soul into it. James Stewart stars as a small-town nobody, on the brink of suicide, who believes his life is worthless. Guardian angel Henry Travers shows him how wrong he is by letting Stewart see what would have happened had he never been born. Wonderfully drawn and acted by a superb cast (Donna Reed, Beulah Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Lionel Barrymore, Gloria Grahame) and told with a sense of image and metaphor (the use of water is especially elegant) that appears in no other Capra film. The epiphany of movie sentiment and a transcendent experience.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 355: Tue Dec 23

Villain (Tuchner, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on December 28th, is part of the Richard Burton season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Guardian review (full five-star write-up here):
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are renowned for small-screen comic masterpieces such as Porridge and The Likely Lads, but in 1971 they scripted the deadly serious and horribly gripping London crime picture Villain,. It’s an extremely lairy and tasty piece of work in which Richard Burton gave one of his best, most lip-smackingly gruesome performances: this film’s easily as good as the far better known Get Carter with Michael Caine, released that same year.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 354: Mon Dec 22

Portrait of Jennie (Dieterle, 1948): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

This 35mm screening, part of the Melodrama season at BFI Southbank, is also screened at the cinema on December 27th. Details here.

Time Out review:
A companion piece to the William Dieterle/David O. Selznick Love Letters, also starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten; but where the earlier film remained rooted in superior romantic hokum, this one takes wing into genuine romantic fantasy through its tale of a love that transcends space and time as Cotten's struggling artist meets, falls in love with, and is inspired by a strangely ethereal girl (Jones) whom he eventually realises is the spirit of a woman long dead. Direction and performances are superb throughout, but the real star is Joseph August's camera, which conjures pure magic out of the couple's tender odyssey, from the gravely quizzical charm of their first encounter in snowy Central Park (when she is still a little girl, strangely dressed in clothes of bygone days) through to the awesome storm at sea that supernaturally heralds their final parting. Buñuel saw it and of course approved: 'It opened up a big window for me'.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 353: Sun Dec 21

The Apartment (Wilder, 1960): Curzon Soho, 2pm

This 35mm screening of this superb Billy Wilder film is part of the 'David Lynch Stole Christmas' season at Curzon cinemas. Full details here. 

Time Out review:
Re-teaming actor Jack Lemmon, scriptwriter Iz Diamond and director Billy Wilder a year after ‘Some Like It Hot’, this multi-Oscar winning comedy is sharper in tone, tracing the compromises of a New York insurance drone who pimps out his brownstone apartment for his married bosses’ illicit affairs. The quintessential New York movie – with exquisite design by Alexandre Trauner and shimmering black-and-white photography – it presented something of a breakthrough in its portrayal of the war of the sexes, with a sour and cynical view of the self-deception, loneliness and cruelty involved in ‘romantic’ liaisons. Directed by Wilder with attention to detail and emotional reticence that belie its inherent darkness and melodramatic core, it’s lifted considerably by the performances: the psychosomatic ticks and tropes of nebbish Lemmon balanced by the pathos of Shirley MacLaine’s put-upon ‘lift girl’.

Wally Hammond

 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 352: Sat Dec 20

Where Eagles Dare (Hutton, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 5.20pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on December 28th, is part of the Richard Burton season at BFI Southbank. Details here. 

BFI introduction: 
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s children inspired his acceptance of the role of Special Ops’ Major Smith in this gripping comic-book caper. There is, though, a brutality to Burton and Clint Eastwood’s action-hero antics as they attempt to rescue, via jaw-dropping Austrian alpine stunts, an American General held prisoner in a mountainous Nazi fortress. Eastwood was reportedly happy to do the machine-gunning, wisely leaving the talking to Burton.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 351: Fri Dec 19

Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on December 28th, is part of the Richard Burton season at BFI Southbank. Details here. 

Chicago Reader review:
Everybody seems to hate this movie, and not without good reason. But John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s shocker is a much more interesting film than the original, and Boorman deserves credit for trying out some new ideas, even if most of them backfire. Visually, it’s fascinating—sort of a blend of Minnellian baroque and Buñuelian absurdity—but the dialogue is childish, the story is incomprehensible, and the metaphysics are ridiculous. Still, an audacious failure is preferable to a chickenhearted success. More than worth a look, if only out of curiosity.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 350: Thu Dec 18

 8½ (Fellini, 1963): Curzon Mayfair, 7.40pm

This screening, one of the final ones before Curzon Mayfair closes, is part of the 'David Lynch Stole Christmas' season at Curzon cinemas. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
If what you know about this exuberant, self-regarding movie comes from its countless inferior imitations (from Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland and The Pickle to Allen’s Stardust Memories to Fosse’s All That Jazz), you owe it to yourself to see Federico Fellini’s exhilarating, stocktaking original... It’s Fellini’s last black-and-white picture, and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he’s ever made — certainly more fun than anything he’s made since.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the BFI trailer.