Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 52: Sat Feb 21

Deep Red (Argento, 1975): Barbican Cinema, 7.30pm

Coinciding with Deep Red’s 40th anniversary Goblin will be playing their original score live to a screening of the film at the Barbican.

Here is the Barbican introduction:
Along with Suspiria, Profondo Rosso is perhaps Argento’s most celebrated film and a total classic of the giallo horror subgenre in its own right. Its score is synth-heavy characterised by a chilling central theme.

Having been dissatisfied with the original soundtrack, Argento called local band Cherry Five in at short notice. They renamed themselves Goblin, and, legend has it, wrote the new soundtrack in one night. Originally inspired by bands like King Crimson and prog-era Genesis, Goblin’s unique sound is instantly recognisable and has earned them a cult status all of their own.

Time Out review:
Dario Argento's Deep Red is arguably the crowning achievement of the Giallo movement, a folm of breathless intensity, knowing strangeness and still unsettling brutality which also manages to be a sly, subversive and hugely enjoyable satirical attack on Italy's Catholic obsession with gender roles and sexual norms.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 51: Fri Feb 20

Borderline (Macpherson, 1930): Tate Modern, 6.30pm

This is screening as part of 'The Black Subject: Ancient and Modern' season at the Tate. You can find all the details here.

Here is the Tate's introduction to this groundbreaking film:
Borderline (1930) is a silent film with an explicit theme of racial prejudice and an implicit homoerotic subtext. Directed by Kenneth Macpherson, editor of the influential intellectual film journal Close Up (1927–33) it is highly influenced by the psychological realism of GW Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein’s montage.  Borderline tells the story of a tense, inter-racial love triangle and its deadly consequences. Macpherson embellishes this story by portraying the extreme psychological states of the characters. The result is a unique and complex matrix of racial and sexual tension moving between the boundaries of black and white, male and female and the conscious and the unconscious. This version of the film includes a score by jazz musician Courtney Pine. 

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Prof. Laura Marcus (Oxford University) and writer and critic Prof. Sukhdev Sandhu (NYU), chaired by Tate curator Sonya Dyer. 

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 50: Thu Feb 19

The Apartment (Wilder, 1960): Ritzy Cinema, 6pm

Ritzy Cinema introduction to tonight's special Guardian Film event:

Join the Guardian Film team as they discuss the nominations, give their verdicts and make their predictions ahead of this year’s Oscars ceremony. The panel will introduce a special screening of this surprisingly dark comedy with a heart of gold, and discuss what makes it one of the best Oscar winners of all time.

Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel lead the pack for this year’s Academy Awards, scoring nine nominations apiece. But who will be the winners and losers on 22 February? Will Michael Keaton, nominated for the first time this year, take the Best Actor gong, or will it go to British actors Benedict Cumberbatch or Eddie Redmayne? Can Linklater’s Boyhood take the top prize? Why wasn’t Inherent Vice nominated, and what happened to The Lego Movie? And most importantly of all, who will make this year’s Oscars selfie? Join the debate with Peter Bradshaw, Catherine Shoard, Henry Barnes and Andrew Pulver.

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

Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 49: Wed Feb 18

It Follows (Mitchell, 2014): BFI Southbank, 8.45pm

This screening, a special preview of the much-heralded new horror film, will feature a Q&A with the director David Mitchell and actress Maika Monroe. Full details here.

BFI review (for London Film Festival):
Horror cinema has a long history of chastening the sexually active teenager, with the old sex equals death adage firmly established in the pantheons of genre cliché. Taking the skewed morals of the slasher heyday and subverting them into an entirely fresh and stimulating meditation on sexual paranoia, David Robert Mitchell’s remarkable shocker has the power to provoke and terrify in equal measures. For 19-year-old Jay, an exploratory sexual encounter subsequently turns into a living nightmare when she begins to experience strange visions and the unfathomable sense that she is being followed. Terrified and helpless, Jay must find a way to pass on the curse that has seemingly befallen her. The suburban milieu evokes John Carpenter’s iconic Halloween, and the cyclical persistence of the horror undeniably recalls Hideo Nakata’s Ring, yet It Follows remains a defiantly original piece of work, impeccably realised and with enough subtext to keep your mind buzzing for days.
Michael Blyth

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 48: Tue Feb 17

Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This is screening as part of the cinema's Classic Films season. Full details here.

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.  Here is the famous Yardbirds scene.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 47: Mon Feb 16

Fish Tank (Arnold, 2009): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This excellent British film is part of the While We Sweat Water and Blood season at the Prince Charles of films directed by women. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
British filmmaker Andrea Arnold made her feature debut with Red Road (2006), an eerie, low-budget suspense story about a woman stalking, seducing, and finally exacting her revenge against the man who ruined her life. This excellent follow-up, set against a similar landscape of shabby council estates, unfolds as a conventional coming-of-age story, yet Arnold hasn't altered her persuasively jaundiced view of men, who seem as pitifully helpless against their horndog urges as the women foolish enough to care for them. The heroine (Katie Jarvis) is a moody, restless 15-year-old without much in the way of role models: her father is long gone and her mother (Kierston Wareing) is a clueless party girl. The only person who seems to understand the angry teen is mom's new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender of Hunger), though their friendship oscillates between intimate and vaguely creepy. 123 min.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 46: Sun Feb 15

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Hunt, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

The Prince Charles Cinema continues its full 007 Retrospective showing every James Bond movie over the coming months. You can see all the details of the screenings here.

The press reviews of the films don't capture the excitement of this retrospective for Bond fans and I am recommending the Blogalongabond series by Neil Alcock (aka @theincrediblesuit on Twitter). Here is his take on On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Here (and above) is the trailer.