Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 214: Mon Aug 4

All I Desire (Sirk, 1953): Regent Street Cinema, 1pm

This screening will also feature a live organ.

Time Out review:
There are things wrong with All I Desire, but Douglas Sirk isn't responsible for them. It didn't need the forced 'happy ending' for a start, and it should clearly have been made in colour. But Hollywood producers were even more stupid in 1953 than they are now, and directors didn't often get their way. Sirk was less compromised than most, because his strategy was a kind of 'hidden' subversion of genres like musicals and weepies: appearing to deliver the producer's goods, and simultaneously undercutting them. Here, the excellent Barbara Stanwyck plays an actress who hasn't made the grade, returning to the small-town family she walked out on after a scandalous affair with a local stud. She moves from one 'imitation of life' to another: from life-on-the-run in showbiz to life-under-wraps in Hicksville, Wisconsin. Sirk's delineation of the manners and 'morality' of bourgeois middle America is devastating; and the precision with which he dissects the repressions, jealousies and joys that permeate a family has never been rivalled.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 213: Sun Aug 3

Mommie Dearest (Perry, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.20pm

This film, also being screened on August 14th, is part of the great BFI Moviedrome: Bringing the Cult TV Series to the Big Screen season.

Chicago Reader review:
No one would mistake this stiff, shoddy 1981 biopic of Joan Crawford for a “good” movie, but in terms of issues—movies, melodramas, mothers and daughters—it’s rich, stimulating thought in spite of itself. Frank Perry was a poor choice to direct (Robert Aldrich and Paul Morrissey would have been more appropriate), yet his gross inadequacies somehow help the film—the bad laughs he gets push it into black comedy, which is what the audience wants. The dominant tone is that of a horror movie as it might have been produced by soap opera king Ross Hunter in the 50s: lots of elegant clothes and settings, weirdly linked to a shock rhythm of tension and release. It’s a movie dream turned into a movie nightmare, a wonderful idea the film doesn’t know it has.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 212: Sat Aug 2

The Gold of Naples (De Sica, 1954): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2.50pm

This 4K screening (also being shown on August 14th) is part of the Sophia Loren season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Film Forum review:
L’oro di Napoli (1954, Vittorio De Sica) Six stories set in De Sica’s father's hometown: street performer Totò (The Passionate Thief) lays flowers on the capo’s wife’s grave, then returns home to his own wife and three boys — and il guappo who’s taken over his household for the past ten years; when voluptuous 20-year-old pizza purveyor Sophia Loren loses the emerald ring given to her by her nervously tubby husband — in the dough? — they comb the quartiere for the day’s customers, including suicidal Paolo Stoppa, in hysterical mourning for his just-deceased wife; Teresa De Vita carries off the “Funeralino” of her small child along the Bay of Naples; tightly-reined-in compulsive gambler Count De Sica (an out-of-control gambler in private life) finds a formidable opponent in his doorman’s shrewd but bored 7-year-old son; working girl Silvana Mangano finds, out of nowhere, her dreams coming true: marriage with a handsome, prosperous middle class man — or is something else coming true?; a local wisdom dispenser, legendary Neapolitan playwright and actor Eduardo De Filippo (see Marriage Italian Style and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), advises on such things as the get-off-easy way to razor-slash a cheek and the proper delivery of a full-blooded, communal pernacchio to a despised duke. The granddaddy and gold standard of European omnibus films, adapted from stories by Giuseppe Marotta (and scripted with Marotta by De Sica and longtime collaborator Cesare Zavattini), runs the gamut from pure farce to outright tragedy, with Loren’s gyrating walk in the rain her star-making moment.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 211: Fri Aug 1

Two Women (De Sica, 1960): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.40pm

This 4K screening (also being shown on August 13th) includes an introduction by season curator Adrian Wootton. It is part of the Sophia Loren season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Director Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) hits his stride in this powerful 1961 story of a mother (Sophia Loren) and her daughter who meet with tragedy and violence in the waning days of World War II. Loren won a deserved Oscar for her performance as the life force encased in a magnificent body.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 210: Thu Jul 31

Hidden (Haneke, 2005): Genesis Cinema, 6.15pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Michael Haneke season at the Genesis.

Chicago Reader review:
This brilliant if unpleasant puzzle without a solution, about surveillance and various kinds of denial, finds writer-director Michael Haneke near the top of his game, though it's not a game everyone will want to play (2005). The brittle host of a TV book-chat show (Daniel Auteuil) and his unhappy wife (Juliette Binoche) start getting strange videos that track their comings and goings outside their Paris home. Once the husband traces the videos to an Algerian he abused when both were kids, things get only more tense, troubled, and unresolved. Haneke is so punitive toward the couple and his audience that I periodically rebelled against—or went into denial about—the director's rage, and I guess that's part of the plan.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 209: Wed Jul 30

Hardcore (Schrader, 1979): Nickel Cinema, 6.45pm

New Yorker review:
Paul Schrader’s second feature, “Hardcore,” from 1979, is his version of John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Both movies are dramas of an isolated, stoic, rigidly principled man who takes it upon himself to rescue a young female family member from a way of life—captivity, or something like it—that he deems unfit for her. But Ford’s film, from 1956, is a Western, a philosophical drama set just after the Civil War, in a place and a time far removed from the director’s birth in Maine, in 1894, whereas Schrader’s is contemporary—set in his home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan (where he was born in 1946), and in the religious community of rigorous Calvinists in which he was raised. Built on the very bedrock of Schrader’s being, “Hardcore” is one of the key works of his career, a cinematic declaration of identity and principle that echoes throughout his body of work.
Richard Brody

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 208: Tue Jul 29

Terminal Island (Rothman, 1973): Barbican Cinema, 6.10pm

This film is part of the Stephanie Rothman season at the Barbican. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A lurid exploitation subject turned into a crafty feminist allegory (1973) by Stephanie Rothman. The setting is a tiny island where the state of California has decided to send all prisoners convicted of first-degree murder to fend for themselves; the more brutal elements quickly erect a fascist dictatorship, while the women they’ve enslaved plot an escape to join the utopian rebels hiding in the hills. It’s difficult now to believe there was a time when such progressive politics could be expressed in a drive-in movie, but yes, Virginia, there was an early 70s. With Phyllis Elizabeth Davis, Don Marshall, Barbara Leigh, Sean Kenney, and (way down in the cast) the future stars of TV’s neocon series Magnum P.I.—Tom Selleck and Roger Mosley.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.