Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 132: Tue May 12

Tender Mercies (Beresford, 1983): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This is a 35mm screening.

Time Out review:
Alongside works by Terrence Malick, John Cassavetes and John Huston, this breathtaking 1983 melodrama is one of the wellsprings of US indie cinema. Writer Horton Foote – most famous for scripting ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ – and his star Robert Duvall shopped the screenplay to every major American director, but ended up having to settle for Aussie Bruce Beresford making his first Hollywood film. It’s a bizarre trio – the respected playwright, the not-quite-bankable star, the Ocker sex-comedy veteran – especially when one considers that the film they came up with – all downhome reverence, stifled emotion and expressive minimalism – stands completely alone in each man’s CV (at least until Duvall co-starred in virtual remake ‘Crazy Heart’). Duvall plays Mac Sledge – greatest character name ever? – the strung-out former country star who washes up in a remote Texas town and shacks up with the local widow. Redemption stories are ten to the dozen in Hollywood, but this one feels heartbreakingly genuine – Duvall was never better, and that’s saying something. The look of the film is entrancing, from a series of disconcertingly flat rural landscapes to the gorgeous photography of human faces – head on, eyes wide, nothing hidden. It’s a film of quiet, relentless power which demands – and rewards – a level of belief, even faith in its characters which few other films even dare to suggest. For all its simplicity, this is bold, heartfelt filmmaking. A masterpiece.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 131: Mon May 11

Songwriter (Rudolph, 1984): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This film is only £1 for Prince Charles Cinema members.

Time Out review:
Unexpectedly, at three days' notice, Alan Rudolph was asked by producer Sydney Pollack to take the helm on this carefree comedy set in the world of Country & Western music. The result was Rudolph's fastest paced and most uninhibited film to date: a quirky, rambling tale of two star performers on the road. Incorporating songs specially written by Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, the film indulges their male-bonding, hard-drinking, womanising life style, as well as giving Lesley Ann Warren her own shot at performing (not bad). A likeable shaggy dog of a movie, assuming the music's to your taste.
David Thomson

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 130: Sun May 10

Altar (Gomes, 2003): ICA Cinema, 6pm

For more than two decades, Rita Azevedo Gomes (b. 1952) has quietly forged and reshaped an unmistakable cinema, rooted in literature, theatre, music and art history, and unfolding with a rare attentiveness to language, performance, and the spaces that open between them, and moving always with deliberate strangeness and clarity. This screening is part of the ICA season devoted to the filmmaker. You can find the full details here.

ICA introduction to tonight's screening:
Widowed actor René lives in purposeful isolation, drifting between phone conversations and memories that refuse to settle, as fragments of a distant past resurface. The screening will be preceded by an introduction from Benjamin Crais, a scholar, critic, and film programmer. He is on the editorial board of the film magazine Narrow Margin, a quarterly magazine of film criticism.

Critic Adrian Martin has written about Gomes' cinema (full article via this link) and here is an extract from his writing about her on the film screening this evening:
Altar (2003) is Rita Azevedo Gomes' most radical and inventive exploration of this layered approach. At its core stands the small, physical gesture of a woman, Madeleine (Patrícia Saramago), a gesture that obsesses a widower playwright (René Gouzene) living on an island. The entire film is constructed as a slow-paced unfolding of the events and implications surrounding this single gesture. The oral retelling of memories, filled with rich literary description, is both accompanied and counterpointed by a careful soundtrack mixing natural sounds, various musical pieces, and passages of poetry by E.E. Cummings and Sophia de Mello (read by the director herself). The image-track mixes domestic scenes where the protagonist tells the story to a young visitor, with a selection of details from paintings. Altar is a stunningly beautiful piece, very much in line with an idea that Oliveira and Bénard da Costa discuss in The Fifteenth Stone: that the power of an image comes not from what it shows but what it signifies, a meaning which is not strictly visible, and can be found only by going right “inside” the work. Altar also plays with two tropes beloved of Azevedo Gomes: the paradoxical parallelisms between sensory or aesthetic experiences (“images so silent that, when seeing them, it seems like I’ve closed my eyes”, as one of de Mello’s poems says); and the intermingling of spatio-temporal dimensions. These tropes were already evident in Azevedo Gomes’ stunning debut, The Sound of the Trembling Earth (1990), where Alberto (José Mário Branco) quotes Leonardo da Vinci’s famous saying: “Painting is mute poetry and poetry is blind painting”. A powerful device in this film is the hallucinatory collapse of movements occurring simultaneously in different directions – a little like the famous “zolly” shots (zooming in and tracking out) made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 129: Sat May 9

On Dangerous Ground (Ray, 1951): ICA Cinema, 2pm

This film, one of Nicholas Ray's very finest, is being shown as part of the Nothing But Life: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes season at the ICA Cinema. 

Chicago Reader review:
One of the loveliest of Nick Ray’s movies: this 1952 feature begins as a harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism reminiscent of Frank Borzage. Robert Ryan is the unstable hero, a thuggish cop sent upstate in search of a murderer; he ends up falling in love with the killer’s blind sister (Ida Lupino, who took over some of the direction when Ray fell ill). Ray excels both in the portrayal of the corrupt urban environment, a swirl of noirish shadows and violent movements, and in his exalted vision of the snow-covered countryside, filmed as a blindingly white, painfully silent field for moral regeneration. With Ward Bond and an excellent score by Bernard Herrmann.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 128: Fri May 8

The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 1974): Rio Cinema, 7pm

This is a 35mm screening and is part of the Rio Forever season. More details here.

Director and Rio Patron Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona, 2073) will introduce the film, discussing its importance to him both as a director and film lover.

Here is an excellent article by John Patterson in the Guardian on the movie.

Time Out review:

It’s worrying that 1974’s ‘The Godfather Part II’ is now best known for being the film-lover’s kneejerk answer to the question ‘which sequel is superior to the original’? It’s a pointless discussion, because both films are damn close to perfect: two opposing but complementary sides of the same coin. If ‘The Godfather’ was a knife in the dark, its sequel is the long, slow death rattle; if the first film lusted after its bloodthirsty antiheroes, the second drowns itself in guilt and recrimination. Two stories run in parallel in ‘Part II’. In the first, a young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) rises to power in New York, fuelled by vengeance and brute, old-world morality. In the second, set 50 years later, his son Michael (Al Pacino) struggles to reconcile his father’s ideals with an uncertain world, and finds himself beset on all sides by treachery and greed. This is quite simply one of the saddest movies ever made, a tale of loss, grief and absolute loneliness, an unflinching stare into the darkest moral abyss.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 127: Thu May 7

Honeysuckle Rose (Schatzberg, 1980): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.20pm

This 35mm screening is on sale at £1 for Prince Charles Cinema.

Time Out review:
Jerry Schatzberg might be a very urban cowboy (Panic in Needle Park, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Sweet Revenge, etc), but there's no evidence here of slick, Altman-style condescension to country 'n' western culture. Instead there's an unforced equation of the upfront emotional currency of C&W lyrics with a simple triangular plotline pared down from Intermezzo (singer Willie Nelson and wife Dyan Cannon almost come apart over the lure of the road and one more infidelity). Nothing new under the sun - but the easy-going fringe benefits are well worth the ticket: Nelson's a natural, and the duets with Cannon are pure gold.
Paul Taylor

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 126: Wed May 6

Private Worlds (La Cava, 1935): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This 16mm screening is introduced by Gregory La Cava researcher Annabel Jessica Goldsmith.

Chicago Reader review:
With this 1935 film, Gregory La Cava turned his talent for ensemble improvisation (My Man Godfrey, Stage Door) to melodrama rather than comedy, and the result is a tearjerker of unusual sobriety and heft. The setting is a mental hospital, where the new director (Charles Boyer) is resented by the staff for his scientific detachment, while doctor Claudette Colbert tries to extricate herself from an overly warm working relationship with a married colleague (Joel McCrea). While the drama seeks to define precise emotional distances, La Cava’s camera adheres to his actors with a respectful mobility that still seems strikingly modern.
Dave Kehr

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 125: Tue May 5

Seconds (Frankenheimer, 1966): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

This is a Funeral Parade screening. Full details of the strand can be found here.

Time Out review:
Hemmed in by an arid marriage, paunchy middle-aged banker John Randolph grasps another chance at life when a secret organisation transforms him into hunky Rock Hudson and gives him a new start as an artist in Californian beach-front bohemia. Freedom, however, turns out to be a rather daunting prospect, and the struggle to fill the blank canvas comes to typify Hudson's unease with his new existence. Saul Bass' unsettling title sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score. After that, the film's uptight view of the hang-loose West Coast feels like a slightly forced argument, until Frankenheimer regroups and the jaws of the narrative shut tight on one of the most chilling endings in all American cinema. Little wonder it flopped at the time, only to be cherished by a later generation, notably film-makers Siegel and McGehee who drew extensively on its themes and visuals in their debut Suture. (This downbeat sci-fi thriller completed Frankenheimer's loose 'paranoid' trilogy - earlier instalments being The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May).
Trever Johnston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 124: Mon May 4

The Fallen Idol (Reed, 1948): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 3.20pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on May 11th, is part of the British Postwar Cinema (1945-1960) season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
"I hate you," goes the most explosive line in Carol Reed's marvelously plotted murder mystery, all the more powerful for being spoken by an adorable eight-year-old in short pants. We've already seen curious Phillipe (Henrey) romping around the airy chambers of France's ambassadorial mansion in London (his dad's the often-absent diplomat) and bonding with his pet garden snake, MacGregor. Phillipe's true hero, and the idol of the title, is affectionate butler Baines (Richardson), whose stern head-maid wife nonetheless has it in for the boy to an almost pathological degree. So empathic is the movie toward its young dreamer that when complications arise, you wince on his behalf. Baines has a secret lover, Julie (Morgan), whom he meets for a chaste rendezvous in a pub; after Phillipe surprises them, Baines introduces the youngster to his "niece" and to the concept of private confidences—many of which are to follow, this being a thriller. Reed, of course, is better known for his next movie, The Third Man, also penned by novelist Graham Greene. But The Fallen Idol is arguably the superior film; both deal with the seasoning of naive innocents, but unlike Joseph Cotten's charmingly soused pulp novelist, young Phillipe actually deserves his time in happyland, making his awakening a true stab to the heart. And Reed's signature noirish side streets work even better as the scary vistas of a boy outdoors long after bedtime.
Joshua Rothkopf

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 123: Sun May 3

The Godfather (Coppola, 1972): Prince Charles Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a 35mm screening which is also being shown at the Prince Charles Cinema on April 29th and June 18th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The ultimate family film. Francis Ford Coppola gives full due to the themes of clannish insularity that made Mario Puzo's novel a best seller, though his heart seems to be with Al Pacino's lonely, willful isolation. This 1972 feature is sharp, entertaining, and convincing—discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that Coppola hasn't achieved since. With Marlon Brando, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden, and Diane Keaton.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) are some excerpts from the opening scenes.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 122: Sat May 2

Black God, White Devil (Rocha, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm

This film (being shown on May 16th, 29th and 30th) is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here.

Time Out review:
Glauber Rocha's first major film introduced most of the methods, themes and even characters that were developed five years later in his Antonio das Mortes. Set in the drought-plagued Brazilian Sertao in 1940, it explores the climate of superstition, physical and spiritual terrorism and fear that gripped the country: the central characters, Manuel and Rosa, move credulously from allegiance to allegiance until they finally learn that the land belongs not to god or the devil, but to the people themselves. The film's success here doubtless reflects the 'exoticism' of its style, somewhere between folk ballad and contemporary myth, since the references to Brazilian history and culture are pervasive and fairly opaque to the uninitiated. But Rocha's project is fundamentally political, and completely unambiguous: he faces up to the contradictions of his country in an effort to understand, to crush mystiques, and to improve.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 121: Fri May 1

We Are Brothers (Burle, 1949): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 3.20pm

The screening of We Are Also Brothers on Friday 1 May will be introduced by Dr Felipe Botelho Correa, King’s College London. This is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here. 

BFI introduction:
Two Black brothers opt for very different career paths in Rio. One pursues education and respectability, while the other is drawn into petty crime. Burle blends melodrama with social critique and uses his characters’ stories as a platform to confront Brazil’s myth of racial harmony. 

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 120: Thu Apr 30

Super 8½ (La Bruce, 1994): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.05pm

This is part of the Trash season at BFI Southbank and also screens on April 18th. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Despite its self-deprecating camp and convoluted plot, there is an appealing honesty to Bruce LaBruce’s Super 8 1/2. The director plays Bruce, an over-the-hill porn star trying to restart his flagging career, in part by acting in a documentary about him by an up-and-coming lesbian filmmaker. We see footage from his porno loops and scenes from the film in progress and hear comments on Bruce’s own “unfinished” epic, “Super 8 1/2.” The title’s two obvious references are to Fellini’s famous film about his problems making a film and to the low-budget medium of Super-8. But a third meaning is supplied by a woman who suggests that it’s Bruce’s own overoptimistic view of his own endowment. In the explicit sex scenes, LaBruce moves beyond narcissism to its opposite. As one “critic” suggests in a pretentious voice-over analysis of one of the porn films, Bruce’s performances acknowledge the camera, and his self-consciousness suggests a kind of emptiness that works against any sex appeal he might have. The way the film constantly turns back on itself, with its films-within-films and comments on them, leaves the viewer without any firm ground, suggesting the void behind self-absorption. Bruce’s agonized cries, heard after the final credits, perhaps acknowledge the terror of that void.
Fred Camper

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 119: Wed Apr 29

Body Double (De Palma, 1984): Castle Cinema, 9pm

This screening is part of Violet Hour’s City of Angels season, where we peel back the silver screen and gaze into the sordid underworld of Los Angeles. A city of duality, this season is an ode to the ultimate American nightmare masquerading as a dream. Violet Hour showcases the dark, transgressive and enigmatic side of the screen. Exploring the darker aspects of life through cinema, they screen and discuss works that "unsettle, undo us and challenge our perceptions."

If you want to read more about this movie there's Susan Dworkin's Double De Palma, an on-the-set account of the making of the film, plus a very thoughtful chapter in Misogyny in the Movies: the De Palma Question by Kenneth Mackinnon. Manuela Lazic has also written about the movie in a recent blog piece for The Film Stage. 

Chicago Reader review:
It pains me to say it, but I think Brian De Palma has gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of this thriller represents the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he has ever done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences. Craig Wasson is an unemployed actor who is invited to house-sit a Hollywood Hills mansion; he becomes voyeuristically involved with his beautiful neighbor across the way, and witnesses her murder. Those who have seen Vertigo will have solved the mystery within the first 15 minutes, but De Palma's use of frame lines and focal lengths to define Wasson's point of view is so adept that the suspense takes hold anyway. De Palma's borrowings from Hitchcock can no longer be characterized as hommages or even as outright thievery; his concentration on Hitchcockian motifs is so complete and so fetishized that it now seems purely a matter of repetition compulsion. But Body Double is the first De Palma film to make me think that all of his practice is leading at least to the beginnings of perfection.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 118: Tue Apr 28

Timecode (Figgis, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm

This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season. 

Time Out review:
Depending on how you look at it, Mike Figgis' fascinating film is the story of an alcoholic movie producer on the verge of a nervous breakdown; or it's about a two-timing lesbian starlet who gets her first big break; or it's a critical day in the life of a fledgling film production company; or it's a portrait of spurned wives, lovers and actresses on the LA scene. Four movies in one, Timecode splits the screen on a horizontal and a vertical axis to showcase simultaneously four unbroken shots, each 93 minutes long. The initial dizzying sensory overload doesn't last. An ingenious sound mix and the familiar faces of Stellan Skarsgård, Selma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Julian Sands, Holly Hunter and Saffron Burrows invite you to conspire order from the chaos. Characters from the top left screen bump into their neighbours from bottom right, while at two o'clock they're bitching about those assholes screwing them at eight. Like a riff on Robert Altman's Short Cuts and The Player, it adds up to a properly jaundiced satire of Hollywood on the rocks. The movie is a stunt, a conceptual in-joke; or it's a portent of cinema to come; or it's a brilliant but hollow technical exercise; or it's a dynamic if erratic ensemble improv. Make of it what you will, it's certainly something to see.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 117: Mon Apr 27

Breathless (McBride, 1983): Nickel Cinema, 8.45pm

Time Out review:
Neither straight remake nor looser homage to Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle; better by far to just enjoy it on its own terms when it turns out at least three parts better than anyone predicted. Richard Gere is the rockabilly punk living permanently on the edge, on the run from a cop-killing, and certain of at least two things: how to steal cars and his obsession with his girl. Together they conduct a fugitive romance across LA, a common enough idea from Hollywood (Gun Crazy is a motif) but one which is burning with a rarely seen passion. The breathless shooting style lingers forever on Gere's pumping, preening narcissism, which leaves you in no doubt that the true romance is not between boy and girl, but between Gere and camera. The film's other star is LA, which is filmed as a series of dazzling pop art backdrops - cultural vacancy and hedonism, yoked together by violence: a city for the '80s. A wanton, playful film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 116: Sun Apr 26

Bait (Jenkin, 2019): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12pm

This is a 35mm presentation, part of Mark Jenkin's Cornish Trilogy which is being screened at BFI Southbank. The film screening will be preceded by an intro by writer-director Mark Jenkin, and actors Edward Rowe and Mary Woodvine.

Time Out review:
It may look like it was made on a shoestring 50 years ago, but this abrasive seaside parable is a quietly thrilling piece of filmmaking. Using old 16mm cameras, scratchy black-and-white stock and a handful of coastal locations, Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin has conjured up something truly arresting: a debut film rooted in local traditions, with a dark humour and an atmosphere that’s as brooding as its Atlantic backdrop. Filmed mostly in unblinking close-ups, its central character is scowling Cornish fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe). He’s a fundamentally good-hearted man who nurses a bundle of unexpressed grudges over the flood of new money into his fishing village. His equally gruff brother (Giles King) uses their dad’s old trawler to take tourists on pleasure cruises, while the family’s quayside home has been sold to the kind of well-heeled urbanites Martin so resents. To add insult to injury, they’ve installed a porthole. ‘Bait’ is a story of gentrification and class friction that builds and builds, searching for the release that inevitably comes. But it has deeper currents too, as Jenkin explores the day-to-day slog of maintaining a generations-old way of life – you’ll learn a lot about lobster potting – and the near-spiritual pain of being prised, like a barnacle off a rock, from your place in life by forces beyond your control. He’s abetted in that by a wonderfully human performance from Rowe, all bruised pride and righteous fury. It’s clear where Jenkin’s sympathies lie, and one or two of the middle-class characters tiptoe towards caricature, but ‘Bait’ never feels polemical or didactic: it’s more of a quiet lament than a shaking fist. It feels almost like a modern-day sea shanty. Let its hypnotic rhythms wash over you.
Phil de Semleyen

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 115: Sat Apr 25

Manhattan Murder Mystery (Allen, 1993): David Lean Cinema, 2pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
Like the Bob Hope movies which it alludes to, Manhattan Murder Mystery is as light and brazenly generic as Woody Allen's early work. As a result, it is both unusually insubstantial, and, at least in the second half, extremely funny. Hope-like in his panicky cowardice, Larry worries not only about the feelings of his wife Carol (Diane Keaton, refreshing) for his old friend Ted (Alan Alda), but about her determination to investigate the death of a neighbour. At first, Larry thinks Carol is fantasising, but then he starts to witness strange events. Cue to a fast, ramshackle, thrill comedy as entertaining as it is removed from the realities of contemporary New York. A movie inspired by movie escapism. Minor, but surprisingly, almost defiantly upbeat.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 114: Fri Apr 24

Orlando (Potter, 1992): Rio Cinema, 6.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation. There will be a Q&A with writer, director and Rio Cinema patron Sally Potter herself, to be hosted by curator and author of many books including The Cinema of Sally Potter, So Mayer.

Time Out review:
Virginia Woolf's 1928 modernist novel, but the joy is that the film comes over simply: a beautiful historical pageant of 400 years of English history, full of visual and aural pleasures, sly jokes, thought-provoking insights, emotional truths - and romance. It begins at the opulent court of Virgin Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp), where the male immortal Orlando receives favour and an estate; and thence follows his quest for love in 50-year jumps through the Civil War, the early colonial period, the effete literary salons of 1750 (by which time Orlando is a woman), the Victorian era of property, and finally a 20th century postscript added by Sallly Potter. The fine, stylised performances from an idiosyncratic international cast are admirably headed by Swinton's magnificent Orlando, who acts as the film's complicitous eyes and ears; and there's little to fault in Alexei Rodionov's cinematography, which renders the scenes with rare sensitivity. It's a critical work - in the sense that it comments wryly on such things as representations of English history, sexuality/androgyny and class - but made in the spirit of a love poem to both Woolf and the England that made us.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 113: Thu Apr 23

Lianna (Sayles, 1983): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.15pm

This is a 35mm screening from Lost Reels. The presentation will include an online Q&A discussion with filmmaking legend John Sayles and his producer and partner Maggie Renzi.

Time Out review:
John Sayles is spokesman for his generation, the babies of the post-war boom who made love and fought their wars within themselves. Their growing pains came late: Lianna (Linda Griffiths) is thirty, married and the mother of two, when she falls in love with Ruth (Jane Hallaren), her night-school teacher. Sayles sympathetically maps the hurricane-like effects of this on Lianna's life - thrown out by her philandering husband, cold-shouldered by her straight friends, stormy scenes with her lover - his sparkling dialogue illuminating every aspect of Lianna's sexuality with a zeal that is almost proselytising. The love scenes are infused with a tender erotic glow that deepens the shadows around the titillation of Personal Best, and the comedy in Lianna's post-coital glee as she cruises other women and announces herself as gay to people in launderettes is irresistible. A gem, rough-hewn by Sayles and polished to perfection in peerless performances.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 112: Wed Apr 22

Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season and here is the directo's introduction to the movie:
'When it comes to the creative use of sound, I could have picked any Nicholas Roeg movie as a key influence. Bad Timing is the film that most clearly, simply and effectively illustrates the potential of sound to confound the expectations of the viewer, and to open up the creative potential of the form in the starkest way.'

As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or, possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly distributed at the time.

It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting; masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat. The ending stayed with me for quite some time. Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.

Time Out review:
One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing, less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters.
Don Macpherson

Here (and above) is the trailer.