Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 122: Sat May 3

Joan The Maid: The Battles (Rivette, 1994): ICA Cinema, 4pm

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

Roger Ebert website review:
Jacques Rivette’s 1994, two-part film on Joan of Arc is absolutely one of the director’s masterpieces. Why? Firstly, at least as far as its immediate accessibility is concerned, it contains one of the great performances by Sandrine Bonnaire as the French warrior-saint. This film exists in an entirely different context than Robert Bresson’s “The Trial of Joan of Arc,” which made a cinema icon out of Florence Delay. In the Bresson picture Joan is circumscribed as falsely accused, tormented. Rivette’s film puts Joan in a variety of situations. She’s a pious teenage girl, she’s a determined persuader/politician, she’s an inspired leader whose mere presence compels men who mocked her before meeting her to immediately acknowledge her saintliness. Bonnaire inhabits all of these modes with breathtaking immediacy. Rivette was a critic before he was a filmmaker, and others have observed that this film shows its consciousness of prior major films about Joan — by Dreyer, by Preminger, by Bresson — by minimizing repetition of the events depicted in those. The two parts “The Battles” and “The Prisons” concentrate not only on events not treated by other films, but on the spaces between the most famous events of Joan’s life. Rivette applies a cinematic style that’s both impassioned and elegantly simple and rational to Joan’s inner and outer life, using long takes and brilliantly considered camera movements throughout. While my experience of the truncated version was still a profound one, finally seeing the uncut version made me a little angry. In the shortened version, some of the excisions were, if not excusable, at least coherent. Lifting one entire abortive attempted journey to find the Dauphin makes some sense. Cutting off Joan’s dictation of her famous Holy Week letter to the King of England, on the other hand, now seems inexcusable. The director’s cut also features a device entirely removed from the prior version. Here, supporting characters directly address the camera to fill gaps in the narrative of explain their relationship to Joan and their motivations for helping her. This takes the film out of the realm of the pure period piece, to be sure.  Yet Rivette’s execution of this device is so credible that the effect is less postmodern than it is magical realist — you will believe there were film cameras in the fifteenth century.
Glen Kenny

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 121: Fri May 2

Heat (Mann, 1995): Prince Charles Cinema, 12pm 

This is a 35mm presentation. Also screening on other dates this year - details here.

Time Out review:
Investigating a bold armed robbery which has left three security guards dead, LA cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), whose devotion to work is threatening his third marriage, follows a trail that leads him to suspect a gang of thieves headed by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). Trouble is, McCauley's cunning is at least equal to Hanna's, and that makes him a hard man to nail. Still, unknown to Hanna, McCauley's gang have their own troubles: one of their number is a volatile psychopath, while the businessman whose bonds they've stolen is not above some rough stuff himself. Such a synopsis barely scratches the surface of Mann's masterly crime epic. Painstakingly detailed, with enough characters, subplots and telling nuances to fill out half a dozen conventional thrillers, this is simply the best American crime movie - and indeed, one of the finest movies, period - in over a decade. The action scenes are better than anything produced by John Woo or Quentin Tarantino; the characterisation has a depth most American film-makers only dream of; the use of location, decor and music is inspired; Dante Spinotti's camerawork is superb; and the large, imaginatively chosen cast gives terrific support to the two leads, both back on glorious form.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 120: Thu May 1

Slade in Flame (Loncraine, 1975):  BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

The re-release of the rock showbiz drama will finally mean this terrific movie will get the attention it richly deserves. There are a number of screenings at BFI for this movie in May while this special event includes Noddy Holder, director Richard Loncraine and actor Tom Conti on stage for a Q&A.

BFI introduction:
Gritty rather than glam, this incendiary, cult rock-biz classic sizzles its way back to the big screen for its 50th anniversary. Confounding and delighting audiences in equal measure at the height of Slade’s Top Ten pop majesty, Slade in Flame remains a singular rags-to-riches music film. Charting the rise of fictional rock group Flame, with Slade themselves playing the band, it offered a witty, sublimely cynical and warts-and-all inside-view of the music industry circa 1970. And it features a soundtrack stuffed with high-octane Slade boot-stompers. Labelled ‘the Citizen Kane of British pop movies’ by Mark Kermode, it features pitch-perfect performances by Slade, alongside an outstanding early role for Conti, brilliant as an icy businessman hell-bent on making them stars. Newly remastered by the BFI from original film materials, Slade in Flame returns in a blaze of glory.
Vic Pratt

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 119: Wed Apr 30

Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.30pm

This screening is part of a Reiner Werner Fassbinder season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1971 film about a movie crew trapped in a Spanish seaside hotel, waiting first for the star (Eddie Constantine) to arrive and then for the director (Lou Castel) to find his inspiration. This edgy, violent, impacted movie was based on incidents that occurred during the shooting of Fassbinder’s Whity, and survivors claim that it more or less accurately records the paranoia and desperate needfulness that reigned on Fassbinder’s sets. It was also the last film of his ragged avant-gardist period; with the subsequent Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, he moved into an emulation of a Hollywood director’s distance and control. With Hanna Schygulla, Ulli Lommel, and Magdalena Montezuma.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 118: Tue Apr 29

Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970): Cine Lumiere, 6.15pm

This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at Cine Lumiere and also screens on April 26th followed by a discussion with Prof. Antoine de Baecque (author of the biography Chabrol, Stock, 2021)

Time Out review:
Classically simple but relentlessly probing thriller, set in a French village shadowed by the presence of a compulsive killer. Some lovely Hitchcockian games, like the strange ketchup that drips onto a picnic hamburger from a clifftop where the latest victim has been claimed. But also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the 'exchange of guilt' as Audran's starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact, for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of society's dead and maimed. With this film Claude Chabrol came full circle back to his first, echoing not only the minutely detailed provincial landscape of Le Beau Serge but its theme of redemption. The impasse here, a strangely moving tragedy, is that there is no way for the terrified teacher, bred to civilised restraints, to understand that her primeval butcher may have been reclaimed by his love for her.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 117: Mon Apr 28

Movie Movie (Donen, 1978): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.50pm

This late Stanley Donen 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 20th. Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
A parody of Old Hollywood conventions that is, for once, clever, insightful, and genuinely funny—thanks, no doubt, to the intelligence and stylistic know-how brought to bear by Stanley Donen, who was there (Singin’ in the Rain). It’s a double feature—a fight picture and a backstage musical—with actors, lines, plot twists, sets, and shots repeated in both films. The screenplay relies too heavily on facile non sequiturs, but Donen has the shape down pat: squared off, symmetrical, and wholly self-contained.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 116: Sun Apr 27

La Belle Noiseuse (Rivette, 1991): ICA Cinema, 2pm

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

Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since the 70s is one of the most penetrating examinations of the process of art making on film. It concerns the highly charged work of a figurative painter (Michel Piccoli, giving the performance of his career) with his beautiful and mainly nude model (Manon of the Spring’s Emmanuelle Beart), but also the complex input and pressures of the painter’s wife and former model (Jane Birkin), the model’s boyfriend (David Bursztein), and an art dealer who used to be involved with the painter’s wife (Gilles Arbona). The complex forces that produce art are the film’s obsessive focus, and rarely has Rivette’s use of duration to look at process been as spellbinding as it is here. The film runs for four hours, but the overall effect is mesmerizing and perpetually mysterious (as Rivette always is at his best), and not a moment is wasted. Rivette’s superb sense of rhythm and mise en scene never falters, and the plot has plenty of twists. Freely adapted from Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette, with exquisite cinematography by William Lubtchansky, beautiful location work in the south of France (mainly a 19th-century chateau), and drawings and paintings executed by Bernard Dufour. The title, incidentally, translates roughly as “the beautiful nutty woman” and is also the title of the masterpiece the painter, emerging from ten years of retirement, is bent on finishing. Winner of the grand prize at the 1991 Cannes film festival.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 115: Sat Apr 26

La Femme Infidele (Chabrol, 1969): Cine Lumiere, 3.45pm

This film, part of the Claude Chabrol season at Cine Lumiere, will be followed by a discussion with Prof. Antoine de Baecque (author of the biography Chabrol, Stock, 2021)

Chicago Reader review:

Claude Chabrol’s richly ironic 1969 melodrama, in which it is shown that nothing revitalizes a dried-up marriage quite like murder. Not the least of the ironies is that the point is made sincerely and responsibly: when the film’s smug, tubby hero kills his wife’s lover, he genuinely becomes a richer, worthier individual. The observation of bourgeois life (as practiced in France, where it was perfected) is so sharp and funny that the film often feels like satire, yet its fundamental seriousness emerges in a magnificent last act, and an unforgettable last shot.

Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 114: Fri Apr 25

Altered States (Russell, 1980): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.05pm

This film is part of the Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles Cinema and is also screened on May 28th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
This Ken Russell film (1980) is just as much a camp joke as Lisztomania or Mahler, but this time nobody’s laughing, perhaps because Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay provided the first recognizably realistic context for Russell’s obsessions since Women in Love. Chayefsky, who had his name removed from the credits, may have thought it was about the agony and ecstasy of scientific investigation, but in Russell’s hands it becomes another nutball Neoplatonic allegory, riddled with Catholic epiphanies. There isn’t a lucid moment in it (and much of the dialogue is rendered unintelligible by Russell’s subversive direction), but it has dash, style, and good looks, as well as the funniest curtain line since Some Like It Hot.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 113: Thu Apr 24

Turang (Siagain, 1960): Barbican Cinema, 6.30pm

Barbican introduction (screening as part of the Cinema Restored series):
Directed by Bachtiar Siagian, this neorealist gem captures the turbulence and resilience of a community caught in the fight for independence. The story follows Rusli, a wounded freedom fighter who finds sanctuary in a remote, Dutch-occupied village. As he heals under the care of Tipi and her father, the village chief, bonds of loyalty, love, and courage emerge amidst the unrest. A powerful reflection on solidarity and survival, Turang offers a rare cinematic insight into the spirit of a nation striving for liberation. Don't miss this beautifully restored classic, a vital part of Indonesia's film heritage.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 112: Wed Apr 23

Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.20pm

Here's one of the great films of recent times and an opportunity to see Stanley Kubrick's much-underrated final movie in an original 35mm print. The movie is also screened on May 10th.

If you're interested in reading more about this film I can recommend two BFI publications - Michel Chion's Modern Classics monograph on Eyes Wide Shut and the chapter on the film in James Naremore's book titled On Kubrick. And also Robert P Kolker and Nathan Abrams' illuminating 2019 book Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film.

Chicago Reader review:
Initial viewings of Stanley Kubrick's movies can be deceptive because his films all tend to be emotionally convoluted in some way; one has to follow them as if through a maze. A character that Kubrick might seem to treat cruelly the first time around (e.g., Elisha Cook Jr.'s fall guy in The Killing) can appear the object of tender compassion on a subsequent viewing. The director's desire to avoid sentimentality at all costs doesn't preclude feeling, as some critics have claimed, but it does create ambiguity and a distanced relationship to the central characters. Kubrick's final feature very skillfully portrays the dark side of desire in a successful marriage; since the 60s he'd been thinking about filming Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant novella "Traumnovelle," and working with Frederic Raphael, he's adapted it faithfully--at least if one allows for all the differences between Viennese Jews in the 20s and New York WASPs in the 90s. Schnitzler's tale, about a young doctor contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies, has a somewhat Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy (hence Kubrick's title), and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this delicate territory. Yet the story has been altered to make the successful doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite and his wife (powerfully played by Nicole Kidman) a little feistier; Kubrick's also added a Zeus-like tycoon (played to perfection by Sydney Pollack) who pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in fact only summarizes the various mysteries, his cynicism and chilly access to power revealing that Kubrick is more of a moralist than Schnitzler. To accept the premises and experiences of this movie, you have to be open to an expressionist version of New York with scant relation to the 90s (apart from cellular phones and AIDS) and a complex reading of a marriage that assumes the relations between men and women haven't essentially changed in the past 70-odd years. This is a remarkably gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over time.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 111: Tue Apr 22

Katzelmacher (Fassbinder, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.45pm

This screening is part of a Reiner Werner Fassbinder season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Time Out review: Fear and loathing in the mean streets of suburban Munich, where all behaviour obeys the basest and most basic of drives, and fleeting allegiances form and re-form in almost mathematically abstract permutations until disrupted by the advent of an immigrant Greek worker (played by Fassbinder himself; the title is a Bavarian slang term for a gastarbeiter, implying tomcatting sexual proclivities) who becomes the target for xenophobic violence. Fassbinder's sub-Godardian gangster film début, Love is Colder than Death, was dismissed as derivative and dilettanté-ish; this second feature, based on his own anti-teater play, won immediate acclaim. It still seems remarkable, mainly for Fassbinder's distinctive, highly stylised dialogue and minimalist mise-en-scène that transfigures a cinema of poverty into bleakly triumphant rites of despair. Sheila Johnston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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

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.

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.