Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 161: Wed Jun 11

Diary of a Mad Housewife (Perry, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.15pm

This film, also screening on June 21st, is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Frank Perry and his scriptwriter-wife Eleanor have consistently made provocative, offbeat films about mental and spiritual reawakening (until the disastrous Mommie Dearest, that is). Some of them, like the allegorical The Swimmer, have been intriguing catastrophes; this is one of the more successful. Bored New York housewife Snodgress tires of smug, over-ambitious husband Benjamin and his persistent nagging, and decides to gamble on an affair with narcissistic writer Langella, only to find that relationship equally dissatisfying. Often very funny in its acerbic swipes at American success-orientated society (as revealed at a camp art preview and an unsuccessful party), imaginatively scripted and acted (Richard Benjamin is superbly repellent), it's an entertaining satire that disappoints only in the stereotypically limited choices it offers to the woman.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 160: Tue Jun 10

The Bitter Stems (Ayala, 1956): Garden Cinema, 6.20pm

This film, part of the Noir International season at the Garden Cinema, also screens on May 31st and June 4th. You can find the full deails here.

Garden Cinema introduction:
Alfredo Gasper, a dissatisfied Buenos Aires newspaperman (Carlos Cores), partners with Paar Liudas, a clever Hungarian refugee (Vassili Lambrinos) who needs money to bring his family to Argentina. Together they create a bogus correspondence school, exploiting the hopes of would-be journalists. As their scheme succeeds beyond their wildest dreams, a mystery woman from Liudas’ past sparks Gasper’s suspicion: his charming colleague may be playing him for a sucker. Soon Gasper finds himself plotting the perfect crime - but fate has many twists in store. This adaptation of journalist Adolfo Jasca’s award-winning novel was acclaimed upon its release, earning top prizes in 1957 from the Argentine Film Critics Association for Best Picture, with Fernando Ayala named Best Director. American Cinematographer magazine listed Los tallos amargos #49 on its roster of the 100 Best Photographed Films of All-Time.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 159: Mon Jun 9

Fade In (Taylor, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.15pm

This film is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. This very rare screening will feature an introduction by season curator Elena Gorfinkel.

BFI introduction:
Made on the rocky Moab set of the Terence Stamp western Blue, Fade In concerns a budding and unlikely city-country romance between a film editor (Loden’s first leading role) and a Utah rancher. After editorial meddling by Paramount, this film became the first pseudonymous ‘Alan Smithee’ vehicle, shelved until a TV debut in 1973. Due to its unusual production history, this is a rare opportunity to see this film on the big screen.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 158: Sun Jun 8

The Rain People (Coppola, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This film, which also screens on June 17th and 24th, is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Francis Ford Coppola's fourth feature, a fascinating early road movie made entirely on location with a minimal crew and a constantly evolving script. Never very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably because it suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has far greater depth and complexity to its curious admixture of feminist tract and pure thriller. Shirley Knight is outstanding (in a superb cast) as the pregnant woman who runs away in quest of the identity she feels she has lost as a Long Island housewife, and finds herself increasingly tangled in the snares of responsibility through her encounters with a football player left mindless by an accident (James Caan) and a darkly amorous traffic cop (Robert Duvall). Symbolism rumbles beneath the characterisations (Caan as the baby she is running from and with, Duvall as the sexuality and domination she is trying to deny) but it is never facile; and the rhythms of the road movie (leading through wonderfully bizarre locations to a resonantly melodramatic finale) confirm that Coppola's prime talent lies in choreographing movement.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 157: Sat Jun 7

Victims of Sin (Fernandez/Sevilla, 1951): Garden Cinema, 3pm

This film, part of the Noir International season, also screens on June 17th and 23rd.

Garden Cinema introduction:
A treasure of Mexico’s cinematic golden age, this deliriously plotted blend of gritty crime film, heart-tugging maternal melodrama, and mambo musical is a dazzling showcase for iconic star Ninón Sevilla. She brings fierce charisma and fiery strength to her role as a rumbera - a female nightclub dancer - who gives up everything to raise an abandoned boy, whom she must protect from his ruthless gangster father. Directed at a dizzying pace by filmmaking titan Emilio Fernández, and shot in stylish chiaroscuro by renowned cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa amid smoky dance halls and atmospherically seedy underworld haunts, Victims of Sin is a ferociously entertaining female-powered noir pulsing with the intoxicating rhythms of some of Latin America’s most legendary musical stars.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 156: Fri Jun 6

Buffalo '66 (Gallo, 1998):  Prince Charles Cinema, 3.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
Vincent Gallo's directorial debut is one of a kind, an eccentric, provocative comedy which laces a poignant love story with both a sombre, washed-out naturalism and surreal musical vignettes. Throwing out the standard repetitions of shot/reverse shot, Gallo brings an individual film grammar to the screen, a beguiling mix of formal tropes and apparently impetuous conceits. If not autobiographical, then at least deeply personal, the film follows one Billy Brown (Gallo) out of prison and back to his hometown, Buffalo, NY. There he kidnaps a girl, Layla (Christine Ricci) a busty, blonde in two-inch skirt and dazzling fairy tale slippers, and entreats her to play his loving wife for his parents' benefit. The homecoming goes a long way to explain Billy's aggressive insecurity: his indifferent mom (Anjelica Huston) is a rabid football obsessive, while his dad (Ben Gazzara) is taciturn and hostile, though taken with Layla. The cruel caricature of this sourly funny episode is tempered by Layla's sweetness. Billy's turmoil is redeemed in her simplicity. You may scoff at such blatant male wish-fulfilment, but when Billy finally opens himself to the threat of intimacy, it's a heart-rending moment. A brave, honest, stimulating film, this reaches parts other movies don't even know exist.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 155: Thu Jun 5

Splendor in the Grass (Kazan, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This 35mm presentation (also screening on June 8th) is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
A tale of unfulfilled teenage desire set in Kansas circa 1928, Elia Kazan’s hothouse parable (with an Academy Award winning screenplay by playwright William Inge) examines the toll of Puritanical social propriety and sexual repression on high-school sweethearts: Bud Stamper, the child of oil wealth (Beatty’s Hollywood debut) and the fragile Deanie. Loden’s tempestuous role as Bud’s wild flapper sister Ginny provides a prominent foil for the film’s critique of judgmental small-town mores.

Adrian Martin introduction:
From the first notes of David Amram’s intense score and the opening image of Bud (first-timer Warren Beatty) and Deanie (Natalie Wood) kissing in a car by a raging waterfall, Splendor in the Grass sums up the appeal of Hollywood melodrama at its finest: the passions repressed by society (the setting is Kansas 1928) find a displaced expression in every explosive burst of colour, sound and gesture. Repression is everywhere in this movie, a force that twists people in monstrous, dysfunctional directions. Men are obliged to be successful and macho while women must choose between virginity and whorishness – as is the case for Bud’s unconventional flapper sister, indelibly incarnated by Barbara Loden. Director Elia Kazan, like Arthur Penn, worked at the intersection of studio-nurtured classical narrative and the innovative, dynamic forms introduced by Method acting and the French New Wave. Here, collaborating with the dramatist William Inge, he achieved a sublime synthesis of both approaches. The film offers a lucid, concentrated analysis of the social contradictions determined by class, wealth, industry, technology, moral values and gender roles within the family unit. At the same time, it is a film in which the characters register as authentic individuals, acting and reacting in a register that is far from the Hollywood cliché.
Full review here.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 154: Wed Jun 4

Fox and His Friends (Fassbinder, 1975): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.15pm

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

Time Out review:
One of Fassbinder's excellent melodramas. The director himself plays a working-class man who wins a small fortune on the lottery and is destroyed by men who befriend him on Munich's gay community. It's his usual vision of exploitation and complicity hidden under the deceiving mantle of love, but Fassbinder's precision, assured sense of milieu, and cool but human compassion for his characters, make it a work of brilliant intelligence. And the director himself is superb as the none-too-intelligent hero.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 153: Tue Jun 3

Wanda (Loden, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

I wrote about this extraordinary movie for the Guardian here when it was screened at the London Film Festival in 2011. This 35mm screening is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's presentation will include an extended introduction to the season by Elena Gorfinkel.

Time Out review:
A remarkable one-off from Elia Kazan's wife. Shot in 16mm and blown up to 35, it's a subtly picaresque movie about the wanderings of a semi-destitute American woman. Directing herself, Barbara Loden manages to make the character at once completely convincing in her soggy and directionless amorality, yet gradually sympathetic and even heroic. After a desultory involvement with a bank robber, to whom she becomes attached despite his unpredictable temper, Wanda botches everything - having agreed to drive a getaway car for him - by getting lost in a traffic jam; and our last glimpse of her is back on the road, being picked up in a bar. The film is all the more impressive for its refusal to get embroiled in half-baked political attitudinising; it's good enough to make one regret that the director/star produced nothing else before her untimely death from cancer.
David Pirie

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 152: Mon Jun 2

Wild River (Kazan, 1960): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.15pm

This film, which also screens on June 7th and 26th, is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The Tennessee branch of the Mississippi, that is, where TVA agent Montgomery Clift is faced with the job of evicting a matriarch (Jo Van Fleet) from her family island in order to complete a dam project. This 1960 drama is probably Elia Kazan’s finest and deepest film, a meditation on how the past both inhibits and enriches the present. Lee Remick costars as Van Fleet’s widowed daughter, giving one of the most affecting performances of her underrated career. The tone shifts from hysteria to reverie in the blinking of an eye, but Kazan handles it all with a sure touch. Scripted by Paul Osborn, and adapted in part from books by Borden Deal and William Bradford Huie.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 151: Sun Jun 1

Donkey Skin (Demy, 1970): Rio Cinema, 3pm

This screening is part of the 2025 Fashion in Film festival. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Even on paper this couldn't have seemed such a terrific idea, and Demy's attempt to fuse Cocteau with Disney via one of Perrault's less endearing conceits (a gold-shitting donkey) contrives to be both garish and coyly tasteful. Catherine Deneuve sings four Michel Legrand ballads whose resemblance to each other is matched by their resemblance to the composer's earlier work, while a soppy Jacques Perrin emerges as more Prince Charles than Prince Charming. To its credit are Delphine Seyrig as a chic, malicious Fairy Godmother, and Marais as the genuinely Cocteau-esque King.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 150: Sat May 31

Ne touches pas la hache (Rivette, 2007): ICA Cinema, 4pm

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

ICA introduction: General Montriveau, having returned from the Napoleonic Wars in despair, quickly becomes enamored with Duchess Langeais. Across a series of nocturnal visitations, the Duchess mercilessly toys with her hot-tempered suitor, as the machinations of a shadowy conspiracy unfold in the background. An incisive exploration of the social mores of courtship and the maddening nature of desire, Jacques Rivette's adaptation of Honore de Balzac's novella La Duchesse de Langeais is a biting chamber drama of selfish passions and competing agendas. 

Chicago Reader review:
Over the course of his long career, Jacques Rivette has mainly worked in three modesviewing the present historically, period drama, and fantasy; only in Celine and Julie Go Boating has he combined all three. His other greatest works, L’Amour Fou and both versions of Out 1, are in the first mode, even though they work with historical referencesRacine’s Andromache and Balzac’s History of the Thirteen. Conversely, his period films tend to avoid contemporary references. So his period adaptation of the second of the three novellas in History of the Thirteen is a far cry from Out 1 in terms of both method and substance; the only common point is the focus on actors and mise en scene. The flirtation between a married aristocrat (Jeanne Balibar) and a general (Guillaume Depardieu) in Restoration Paris, inspired by a recent romantic frustration of Balzac’s, is masterfully charted and adeptly played, but also rather minimalist. It’s charged with nuance yet ultimately an exercise in compressed literary adaptation.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 149: Fri May 30

Entertaining Mr Sloane (Hickox, 1970): Garden Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of a mini-season, a collaboration between the Austrian Cultural Forum London and The Garden Cinema, on the cameraman Wolfgang Suschitzky.

BFI Screenonline review:
If John Osborne was the original 'Angry Young Man' of British theatre in the 1950s, then Joe Orton was probably the 'Naughty Young Man' of the 1960s. Entertaining Mr Sloane was his first play, beginning as an experimental production at the Arts Theatre Club, London, in 1964, when Sloane was played by Dudley Sutton and Peter Vaughan took the role of Ed. It won critical praise and the London Evening Standard award for best play by a new dramatist, transferred to the West End for a long and successful run, and reached New York the following year. Audiences were shocked - and amused - by the prim dialogue contrasted with violent and outrageous action. This was something new, a style all of Orton's own. The play is a black comedy and a parody of family life, dripping with sexual innuendo. It was produced for British television in 1968 (ITV, tx. 15/7/1968), and the film version appeared nearly two years later. Clive Exton's screenplay made some changes. The little suburban house becomes a mini-Gothic edifice complete with garden and conservatory. Almost blind in the play, the Dadda is the only character to 'see' through Sloane, but in the film he is equipped with a series of spy-holes throughout the house, through which he can watch every stage of Sloane's progress through his family. Ed's car is seen to be a bright pink Cadillac, which speaks volumes about the character. Douglas Hickox had toiled for nearly twenty years as an assistant director, and director of commercials and short documentaries, before landing this, his first important feature film. His opening sequence fully realises the spirit of the play in filmic terms, when the camera pans from a funeral to show the grotesque Kath eating an ice lolly in close-up, and then reveals Sloane sunbathing on an adjacent tombstone, while a heavenly choir sings on the soundtrack. Throughout the film, the outrageous situations are juxtaposed with the gothic windows and stained glass of the house.The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963) also explored the theme of psychological and territorial ascendancy, but Sloane meets his match in Ed and Kath.
Janet Moat

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 148: Thu May 29

The Story of Marie and Julien (Rivette, 2003): ICA Cinema, 8pm

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

ICA introduction:
A solitary clockmaker finds his nefarious attempts at blackmail sidetracked by the appearance of a mysterious woman who bears a striking resemblance to a former lover. Returning to a project he was forced to abandon more than thirty years prior due to ill health, Jacques Rivette crafts an erotic, haunting and formally audacious exploration of love and time, starring Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwilowicz.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 147: Wed May 28

The Aviator's Wife (Rohmer, 1981): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.20pm

This film is part of the Eric Rohmer season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A perfect film. Eric Rohmer began his series titled "Comedies and Proverbs" with this 1981 tale of romantic entanglements, disappointments, and ever fresh possibilities, all set in a verdant Paris. Shot in 16-millimeter, the film has a simple, open visual style, yet its construction is extremely complex and pointed, as Rohmer abandons the first-person perspective of the "Six Moral Tales" in favor of an elegant, intertwining pattern of shifting points of view. The title character never appears but instead precipitates a chain of events that pull a young postal worker (Philippe Marlaud), his older girlfriend (Marie Riviere), and a teenage gamine (Anne-Laure Meury) together and apart. Charming, languorous, piercing, discreet—quintessential Rohmer, and more.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 146: Tue May 27

Scrubbers (Zetterling, 1982): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

Tonight's screening includes an introduction by producer Don Boyd, The film, part of the Mai Zetterling season at BFI Southbank, is also being shown on May 24th. Details here.

BFI Southbank introduction:
Mai Zetterling’s borstal drama pulls no punches in its portrayal of a group of troubled young women who laugh, fight and fall in love within prison walls. The claustrophobia is tangible while the raw female energy erupts as constant noise, violence and frenetic dancing. Zetterling’s meticulous work with the cast really shows in the performances, making for a powerfully affecting film.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 145: Mon May 26

Stray Dog (Kurosawa, 1949): Garden Cinema, 5.45pm

This film also screens at the Garden Cinema on June 5th and 20th and is part of the excellent Noir International season. You can find full details here.

Time Out review:
An early encounter between Kurosawa and two of his favourite actors, Mifune and Shimura, both playing detectives in Japan's uneasy postwar period under US imperialism. When Mifune's pistol is stolen, he is overwhelmed by a feeling of dishonour rather than failure, and sets out on a descent into the lower depths of Tokyo's underworld, which gradually reveals Dostoievskian parallels between himself and his quarry. A sweltering summer is at its height, and Kurosawa's strenuous location shooting transforms the city into a sensuous collage of fluttering fans and delicate, sweating limbs. A fine blend of US thriller material with Japanese conventions, it's a small classic.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 144: Sun May 25

Va Savoir (Rivette, 2001): ICA Cinema, 3.30pm

This 4K screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Jacques Rivette revisits familiar ground with this leisurely tale of romantic intrigue and possibly dark deeds among members of a theatrical troupe and their various acquaintances, but while it certainly lacks the edge of Paris Nous Appartient, it nevertheless exerts immense charm. Jeanne Balibar is the Parisian diva returning after three years in Italy in a production of Pirandello's Come tu mi vuoi; Sergio Castellitto is her lover, leading man and manager, jealous that she's in touch with her (now married) ex, seeking out an apocryphal play by Goldoni, and drawn to the daughter of a woman who may have the text. As ever, it's about different kinds and levels of performance and falsehood, and shifts from 'realist' elements to something more fancifully theatrical (a delightful duel - by drinking). Funny, sentimental but ironic, and wondrously assured.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 143: Sat May 24

Veruschka - Poetry of a Woman (Rubartelli, 1971): Horse Hospital, 7pm

This screening is part of the 2025 Fashion in Film festival. Full details here.

Fashion in film festival introduction:
This rarely screened film is a lush existentialist portrayal of personhood and contemplation of beauty as raw material. Written by and starring 
Veruschka von Lehndorff – the fashion model cum performance artist incarnate – and directed by the photographer Franco Rubartelli, this rarely screened film is a lush portrayal of personhood and contemplation of beauty as raw material. The screen is enveloped by the glittering miasma that is typical of the early 1970s. The model is a woman with a tortured soul. In the snowy landscape dreaming of sun and dust she is told: 'you’ll be like a tree taken away from the forest, your roots will be crying.' From its opening sequence we immediately see her iconography rooted into the earth as she appears camouflaged as a boulder in a pile of rocks. Between philosophical musings and panoramas of rural Italy, we watch her paint her face like a flower in a rainbow of hues and see her cavorting on a tree dappled in cheetah spots. Throughout her extensive career, Veruschka’s image has been so iconic that she has always seemed to want to escape it. Her most celebrated images present her veiled in body paint, artful makeup and drag. Most were made in collaboration with Rubartelli who often captured her as a lynx or exotic cat leaning into her enduring animalistic magnificence. Speaking about a picture they had made together in the 1970s Diana Vreeland said: 'A world without leopards, well, who would want to live in it?'

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 142: Fri May 23

The Lair of the White Worm (Russell, 1988): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This is part of the Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles and also screens 11th June.

Chicago Reader review:
Producer-writer-director Ken Russell updates the last novel of Dracula‘s Bram Stoker (known as The Garden of Evil in the U.S.), about the discovery of a somewhat vampiristic ancient anti-Christian cult built around a giant white worm in rural England. For once, Russell’s over-the-top conceits are anchored in a fairly humdrum horror story and allowed to flourish mainly at privileged moments of hallucinatory delirium; the rest of the time the storytelling is serviceable if occasionally lumpy. But the mad campy moments—which chiefly involve snake woman Amanda Donohoe slinking around in various stages of undress or in dominatrix outfits—are worth waiting for. With Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, Peter Capaldi, Sammi Davis, Stratford Johns, and a great many B-film accessories, including snakes, worms, dildos, caves, dungeons, and tatty special effects (1988).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 141: Thu May 22

Street of Shame (Mizoguchi, 1956): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

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

ICA introduction:
Exalted by many among the Nouvelle Vague, in particular Rivette, Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi's final film, completed just months before his death, interweaves portraits of five women working in “Dreamland,” a brothel in Tokyo’s notorious and then historic Yoshiwara red-light district. Jacques Rivette characterised Mizoguchi's art as one of modulation, writing in reference to his use of the camera. that it was "placed always at the exact point so that the slightest shift inflects all the lines of space, and upturns the secret face of the world and of its gods."

Time Out review:
Kenji Mizoguchi's final film is a grim but profoundly moving study of a group of prostitutes in Tokyo's red light district. While they go about their daily business, there are constant references to the anti-prostitution legislation which Parliament is debating. As is made clear, merely passing a law won't save the women. For whatever reasons they became prostitutes (money-related in every case), they can never escape the judgment passed on them by the repressive, patriarchal society which shunned them in the first place. The settings are a far removed from the medieval landscapes of Ugetsu or The Life of Oharu, but Mizoguchi's focus on the plight of his women characters is as intent and heart-rending as ever.
Geoffrey MacNab

Here (and above) is an extract.

 

******************************************************************

THE SCREENING BELOW IS NOW ONLY TAKING PLACE ON JUNE 6th

Buffalo '66 (Gallo, 1998): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This 35mm presentation also screens at the Prince Charles Cinema on June 6th.

Time Out review:
Vincent Gallo's directorial debut is one of a kind, an eccentric, provocative comedy which laces a poignant love story with both a sombre, washed-out naturalism and surreal musical vignettes. Throwing out the standard repetitions of shot/reverse shot, Gallo brings an individual film grammar to the screen, a beguiling mix of formal tropes and apparently impetuous conceits. If not autobiographical, then at least deeply personal, the film follows one Billy Brown (Gallo) out of prison and back to his hometown, Buffalo, NY. There he kidnaps a girl, Layla (Christine Ricci) a busty, blonde in two-inch skirt and dazzling fairy tale slippers, and entreats her to play his loving wife for his parents' benefit. The homecoming goes a long way to explain Billy's aggressive insecurity: his indifferent mom (Anjelica Huston) is a rabid football obsessive, while his dad (Ben Gazzara) is taciturn and hostile, though taken with Layla. The cruel caricature of this sourly funny episode is tempered by Layla's sweetness. Billy's turmoil is redeemed in her simplicity. You may scoff at such blatant male wish-fulfilment, but when Billy finally opens himself to the threat of intimacy, it's a heart-rending moment. A brave, honest, stimulating film, this reaches parts other movies don't even know exist.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 140: Wed May 21

Perceval le Gallois (Rohmer, 1978): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.45pm

This is part of a great Eric Rohmer season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Eric Rohmer’s least typical and least popular film also happens to be his best: a wonderful version of Chretien de Troyes’ 12th-century epic poem, set to music, about the adventures of an innocent knight. Deliberately artificial in style and setting—the perspectives are as flat as in medieval tapestries, the colors bright and vivid, the musical deliveries strange and often comic—the film is as faithful to its source as it can be, given the limited material available about the period. Rohmer’s fidelity to the text compels him to include narrative descriptions as well as dialogue in the sung passages. Absolutely unique—a must for medievalists, as well as filmgoers looking for something different. This film also features the acting debut of the late and very talented Pascal Ogier.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 139: Tue May 20

Sleeping Car (Litvak, 1933): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

Sophisticated British comedy starring matinee idol Ivor Novello as a railway Romeo with an introduction to the film by Michael Williams, author of Ivor Novello: Screen Idol. This is a 35mm presentation from the BFI National Archive,

BFI introduction:
Train attendant Gaston has a girl in every city and juggles them with farcical results. Ivor Novello effortlessly made the transition from silent to sound stardom and this romantic comedy demonstrates how perfectly he suited the genre. Litvak directs with a light touch and more than a nod to the tradition of European filmmaking that provided his training. The Continental feel is cemented by the cinematography of Günther Krampf and Alfred Junge’s art direction, including a replica of a luxurious train on the set at Shepherd’s Bush. It’s a film so lavish, even the jewelry gets a credit.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 138: Mon May 19

Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966): Garden Cinema, 7.45pm

Garden Cinema introduction to new 'London Reviewed' season in association with the London Review of Books:
LRB Screen returns to the Garden Cinema with a new series exploring visions of London created by non-British filmmakers: films in which the city is a key player, rather than a backdrop; in which its buildings, streets, parks and rivers cast a distinctive shadow over the drama; in which a fresh encounter makes the city unfamiliar and mysterious again. London Reviewed begins in perhaps the only way it could, with Blow-Up, Antonioni’s classic countercultural take on (mis)perception and (un)reality in the swinging 1960s. Adapted by the great Marxist playwright Edward Bond from a short story by the cult Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, the film follows a fashion photographer (Hemmings, channelling David Bailey) who thinks he might have unintentionally photographed a murder. Moving from the heart of the zeitgeist to a South London park that proves pivotal, its richness in social, cultural and architectural detail makes it one of the defining works of the decade. Introducing the film, and discussing it afterwards with regular host Gareth Evans, will be Miles Aldridge, the acclaimed fashion photographer and artist. Born two years before the film’s release, Aldridge grew up in the heart of the cultural scene it portrays and has since created his own highly distinctive photographic signature.

Chicago Reader review:
Michelangelo Antonioni’s sexy art-house hit of 1966, which played a substantial role in putting swinging London on the map, follows a day in the life of a young fashion photographer (David Hemmings) who discovers, after blowing up his photos of a couple glimpsed in a park, that he may have inadvertently uncovered a murder. Part erotic thriller (with significant glamorous roles played by Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Verushka, and Jane Birkin), part exotic travelogue (featuring a Yardbirds concert, antiwar demonstrations, street mimes, one exuberant orgy, and a certain amount of pot), this is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than worrying) that you’re likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions — which become prevalent only at the very end — and go with the 60s flow, just as the original audiences did.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 137: Sun May 18

Grief (Glatzer, 1993): ICA Cinema, 2pm

This is a 16mm presentation in the Celluloid on Sunday strand at the ICA.

Time Out review:
'There are many ways to tell a story, realism is just the most dull.' That, at any rate, is the ethos of the writers of The Love Judge, a TV show set in a California divorce court. Here circus lesbians vie with schizophrenic opera divas and stripper nuns for truth, justice and alimony. The writers' lot seems mundane in comparison, though these maladjusted under-achievers are a colourful group: Mark (Chester) is still grieving for his lover who died a year ago of AIDS, but he's in with a chance for a production job and is besotted with Bill (Arquette). Jeremy (Wilborn) says Bill's a lost cause, and Leslie (Douglas) agrees with him; she prefers Ben, the photocopy repairman. Meanwhile, the boss, Jo (Beat), is incensed to find her new sofa despoiled with sperm stains every morning. While Glatzer's debut boasts a good number of campy, enjoyable scenes (notably 'extracts' from The Love Judge featuring the likes of Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) and a stand-out performance from Jackie Beat, it's a surprisingly well structured, carefully nuanced affair (taking place over a working week, and, except in the extracts, never leaving the office). A genuinely moving comedy.
Tom Charity

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 136: Sat May 17

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Lang, 1956): ICA Cinema, 4pm

This great, late Fritz Lang film is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA Cinema. You can find the details here.
 
"What, then, is this film really? Fable, parable, equation, blueprint? None of these things, but simply the description of an experiment." – Jacques Rivette

The subject of one of Rivette's most famous and decidedly inscrutable essays for Cahiers du cinéma, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is at its heart, as Rivette elucidates, a treatise on the very concepts of innocence and guilt.

Chicago Reader review:
Fritz Lang’s last American film, shot in a stripped-down, almost anonymous style that seems to befit its bitterness and disillusion. Reporter Dana Andrews has himself framed for the murder of a stripper in order to expose the incompetence of the police and the fallacy of capital punishment. But after he’s sentenced, the evidence that will clear him is lost when his editor is killed in an accident. Once he’s raised the standard social issues, Lang destroys them all with a shatteringly nihilistic conclusion. Joan Fontaine is the Lang heroine to end (literally) all Lang heroines, at least in Hollywood.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 135: Fri May 16

Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972): Prince Charles Cinema, 12pm

This 35mm presentation is also screened at the Prince Charles Cinema on June 7th.

Chicago Reader review:
Although Andrei Tarkovsky regarded this 1972 SF spectacle in 'Scope as the weakest of his films, it holds up remarkably well as a soulful Soviet “response” to 2001: A Space Odyssey, concentrating on the limits of man's imagination in relation to memory and conscience. Sent to a remote space station poised over the mysterious planet Solaris in order to investigate the puzzling data sent back by an earlier mission, a psychologist (Donatas Banionis) discovers that the planet materializes human forms based on the troubled memories of the space explorers—including the psychologist's own wife (Natalya Bondarchuk), who'd killed herself many years before but is repeatedly resurrected before his eyes. More an exploration of inner than of outer space, Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals. In Russian with subtitles. 165 min.

Jonathan Rosenabum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 134: Thu May 15

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Greenaway, 1989): Prince Charles, 1pm

This 35mm presentation also screens on June 5th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Peter Greenaway’s programmatic and schematic 1989 dark comedy about conspicuous consumption isn’t very funny, although it offers a nearly unbroken string of obnoxious verbal abuse—misogynist, racist, scatological—from a crook (Michael Gambon) who runs an expensive gourmet restaurant. Similarly, it isn’t very erotic, although it features a great deal of nudity, and there’s also fair amount of unpleasant (if otherwise affectless) violence. The film is mainly set in the canyonlike rooms of the restaurant—immaculately lit and shot by master French cinematographer Sacha Vierny in ‘Scope, with elaborate color coding, extended tracking shots, and a striking neoclassic score by Michael Nyman. Greenaway has suggested that this is supposed to be an attack on Thatcher England, but while his film certainly has the nastiness of satire, it doesn’t have much political focus; petty malice rather than anger is the main bill of fare, with deep-dish notations about food and sex thrown in for spice.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 133: Wed May 14

The Marquise of O (Rohmer, 1976): Prince Charles Cinema, 1.15pm

This is part of a great Eric Rohmer season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Eric Rohmer’s detailed, infinitely subtle 1976 retelling of a Heinrich von Kleist story about an Italian aristocrat who discovers, unaccountably, that she’s pregnant. Rohmer deals with grand passions—love and hate, dignity and humility, forgiveness and contrition—but in an understated way that makes the emotion seem that much more true. The film’s slow, stately pace and the quiet way in which it makes its points give it the aura of a neoclassical dream, a fading vision of the virtue of gentility. With Edith Clever and Bruno Ganz.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 132: Tue May 13

Nightshift (Rose, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

Introduced by Jon Jost, filmmaker, cinematographer and friend of Robina Rose

Demonstrating the influence of Meshes of the Afternoon and Jeanne Dielman, and starring punk icon Jordan, the moody, atmospheric Nightshift (1981) by Robina Rose is newly restored from original camera elements, and looks beautiful.

BFI introduction:
Legendary punk stayover The Portobello Hotel provides the location for Robina Rose’s stunning, psycho-dramatic long-night-of-the-soul. The thankless, dreamlike monotony and stillness of nocturnal reception work shifts and mutates with the eruptive arrival of eccentric guests from London’s counterculture, including Heathcote Williams and Anne Rees-Mogg. The Penguin Café Orchestra’s Simon Jeffes soundtracks the uncanny temporal fluctuations and strange events. Tonight’s screening is dedicated to the memory of Robina Rose, who died in January.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 131: Mon May 12

My Cousin Vinny (Lynn, 1992): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.15pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
Two college students from New York (Ralph Macchio and Mitchell Whitfield) are wrongly accused of killing a clerk in a convenience store in Wahzoo City, Alabama, and one’s Brooklyn cousin–a rookie lawyer (Joe Pesci)–arrives with his fiancee (Marisa Tomei) to defend them in what proves to be his first court case. While it’s easy to imagine an infinite number of bad courtroom comedies based on this scenario, this movie turns out to be wonderful–broad and low character comedy that’s solidly imagined and beautifully played. Far from having a bone to pick with either side of the cultural collision, writer-producer Dale Launer (Ruthless People) and director Jonathan Lynn (Nuns on the Run), both surpassing their earlier accomplishments, are clearly equal-opportunity caricaturists, with affection for both the southern and northern factions in the movie. The cast (which also includes a very wry Fred Gwynne and Austin Pendleton in a cameo role) is uniformly good, but Tomei is especially worth noting as the lawyer’s smart and feisty girlfriend; her performance triumphs over an improbable number of costume changes.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 130: Sun May 11

Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986): Rio Cinema, 2.30pm


Rio introduction to a special screening:
Revisiting a landmark 1987 Rio event with a screening and discussion that not only pays tribute to the visionary work of David Lynch, but also celebrates the enduring importance of protest, dialogue, and critical engagement. The death of David Lynch offers us the special opportunity to revisit a landmark screening of BLUE VELVET, held at the cinema on Thursday 25 July 1987. Promoted by the controversy over the film, it was followed by a discussion with renowned film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey, whose influential essay “Netherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus and Blue Velvet” explored how the film uncovered deeper psychological forces in society. The event was chaired by Mandy Merck, then editor of leading film journal, Screen. By then, BLUE VELVET had already stirred significant concern because of its graphic depictions of violence and sexuality. What made the Rio’s screening particularly unique was the response from some of its own staff, who not only objected to the film on personal grounds but took the unusual step of protesting outside the cinema. They handed out leaflets to attendees, arguing that the film’s portrayal of women violated the Rio’s anti-sexist commitments. This upcoming screening is a re-staging of that memorable event and will reflect on how debates around this now cult classic have evolved over the past four decades. We are delighted that both Laura Mulvey and Mandy Merck, who has been researching the events at the Rio alongside feminist debates of the 1980s, will return for a post-screening discussion, hosted by Rio regular Helen de Witt, who was present at the original 1987 event.

Chicago Reader review: 
It's personal all right, also solipsistic, intransigent, and occasionally ridiculous. David Lynch's 1986 fever-dream fantasy, of a young college student (Kyle MacLachlan) returned to his small-town roots and all manner of strangeness, is replete with sexual fear and loathing, parodistic inversions (of Capra, Lubitsch), and cannibalistic recyclings from Lynch's own Eraserhead and Dune. The bizarrely evolving story—MacLachlan becomes involved with two women, one light and innocent (Laura Dern, vaguely lost), the other dark and sadomasochistic (Isabella Rossellini), as well as with a murderous psychopath (a brilliantly demented Dennis Hopper)—seems more obsessive than expressive at times, and the commingling of sex, violence, and death treads obliquely on familiar Ken Russell territory: it's Crimes of Passion with the polarities reversed. Still, the film casts its spell in countless odd ways, in the archetype-leaning imagery, eccentric tableau styling, and moth-in-candle-flame attraction to the subconscious twilight.
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 129: Sat May 10

The Haunting (Wise, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This classic supernatural chiller has an atmosphere and feeling of dread and evil that is hard to shake. Guy Lodge sums that up well for his feature on the film for the Guardian here. The film also screens at BFI Southbank on May 21st with an introduction by writer, lecturer and producer Mo Moshaty.

Time Out review:
Often overwrought in its performances, this adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House - a group of people gather in a large old house to determine whether or not a poltergeist is the source of rumours that it is haunted - still manages to produce its fair share of frissons. What makes the film so effective is not so much the slightly sinister characterisation of the generally neurotic group, but the fact that Robert Wise makes the house itself the central character, a beautifully designed and highly atmospheric entity which, despite the often annoyingly angled camerawork, becomes genuinely frightening. At its best, the film is a pleasing reminder that Wise served his apprenticeship under Val Lewton at RKO.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 128: Fri May 9

Gothic (Russell, 1986): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.40pm


This film is part of the Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles Cinema.

Chicago Reader:
It was a dark and stormy night . . . There’s obviously no cure for Ken Russell (Crimes of Passion, Lisztomania), the Bulwer-Lytton of our cinematic subconscious, but this travestying of history and literary imagination seems even more overwrought than usual, a free-form, psychodramatic yowl in the direction of Nightmare Abbey. It’s an evening with Lord Byron and the Shelleys that Russell serves up, mad Fuselian geniuses after his own demented design (and if not, well, literary history be damned), and the seeds of the Frankenstein myth and modernist self-consciousness are laid on a long night of excremental (as in sacramental) excess and hysterical acting out. The thematic intermixing of sexuality and death, of imaginative rebirth and visceral disgust, is characteristic of Russell, as is the cartoonishly heavy hand with which he trowels it all on: he’s as subtle as a supermarket tabloid, and just as obsessed with literal, concretizing images of perversity. Still, it’s fascinating to watch this frenetic concoction unwind (an Altered States before the fact, hallucinogenically revised), though I’d probably stop short of calling it a pleasure.
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 127: Thu May 8

Compensation (Davis, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.55pm

This screening is part of the Black Debutantes: A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Shot on the cheap in Evanston and Chicago, this 1999 drama by Zeinabu Irene Davis manages to surmount its budget limitations through the beauty and symmetry of its narrative. In the early 20th century a deaf black woman (Michelle A. Banks) struggles to overcome the three strikes against her, even as she falls for a hearing but illiterate stockyard worker (John Earl Jelks); interspersed with this tale, and starring the same actors, is a modern story about another deaf black woman and her hearing boyfriend. Davis shoots in black-and-white, using archival photos to establish the turn-of-the-century setting, but they’re so evocatively deployed that you might forget they’re a money-saving device. The storytelling is pointedly visual, modeled after the silent cinema, and the resulting purity of emotion elevates even the modern-day love story.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 126: Wed May 7

Night Games (Zetterling, 1966): BFI Southbank, BFT2, 8.45pm


This screening is part of the Mai Zetterling season at BFI Southbank and also screens on May 21st. Details here. There is an introduction tonight by Professor Louis Lemkow, Mai Zetterling’s son.

BFI introduction:
Jan returns with his fiancée to his childhood home – a sprawling estate stuffed with antiques – where he relives his memories of his beautiful, decadent and mercurial mother, and finds himself forced to confront his unresolved Oedipal longings. Night Games was controversial upon its release, with some outraged by scenes of incest, masturbation and a birth at a debauched party. John Waters named it his favourite film.

Here (and above) is the trailer

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 125: Tue May 6

Tea and Sympathy (Minnelli, 1956): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm


This 35mm screening is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand (you can find full details here) and will be introduced by Sarah Cleary.

Chicago Reader:
Dated and bowdlerized but nonetheless sincere, Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 ‘Scope version of a Robert Anderson play—adapted by the author, with Hays Office censorship—is about a persecuted, effeminate schoolboy taken under the wing of an older woman, with John Kerr and Deborah Kerr (no relation) re-creating their stage roles. The result may be less memorable or celebrated than Minnelli’s other ‘Scope melodramas (The Cobweb, Home From the Hill, Some Came Running), but it’s still probably better than most contemporary movies.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 124: Mon May 5

The Man Who Finally Died (Lawrence, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Mai Zetterling season at BFI Southbank and also screens on May 17th. Details here.

BFI introduction:
When Joachim Newman receives a call to come to the aid of his estranged father, he finds himself caught up in a tangled web of intrigue. As a devious widow, Mai Zetterling has some terrific scenes with her partner in crime, played by Peter Cushing, but Baker steals the show as the angst-ridden son.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 123: Sun May 4

Rain Man (Levinson, 1988): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

This film, part of the Tom Cruise season at BFI Southbank, also screens on May 17th. Tonight's presentation will be introduced by Clare Baines, BFI Inclusion Partner.

Chicago Reader review:
When it opened, this 1988 Oscar winner sounded like a worst-case scenario for the most lachrymose movie of the year: Tom Cruise attends the funeral of his long-estranged father and discovers that the entire estate has been left to an older brother (Dustin Hoffman) whose existence he’s never known about—an autistic, institutionalized idiot savant with a photographic memory for numbers. He abducts his brother in an attempt to claim half of the inheritance, but in the course of a cross-country journey gradually learns to care for his sibling. Fortunately, the script by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow isn’t half bad, and both Barry Levinson’s direction and the performances are agreeably restrained. Valeria Golino is appealing as Cruise’s girlfriend; Hoffman makes his character pretty believable without milking the part for pathos and tears, and it’s nice to see Cruise working for a change in a context that isn’t determined by hard sell and hype.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.