Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 228: Mon Aug 18

Heller in Pink Tights (Cukor, 1960): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

This 35mm presentation (also screening on August 5th) is part of the Sophia Loren season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's screening is introduced by season curator Adrian Wootton.

Time Out review:
George Cukor's one stab at the Western genre was a typically personal response to the conventions, playing much of the adventure for comedy, and centering the plot around a touring theatrical troupe. As in so many of his films, the relationship between life and theatre is explored as the company, performing to ramshackle communities in an untamed frontier, act out heroic tales of love, passion and honourable death, surrounded by an altogether less romantic reality in which people struggle simply to survive. As in A Star Is Born and Les Girls, George Hoyningen-Huene's colour designs are magnificent, and under the expert eye of Cukor, even Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn give superb performances.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 227: Sun Aug 17

Ran (Kurosawa, 1985): Genesis Cinema, 2.30pm

This presentation is part of an excellent Classics on 35mm season at the Genesis. 

Chicago Reader review:
Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film is slightly marred by some too obvious straining toward masterpiece status, yet it’s a stunning achievement in epic cinema. Working on a large scale seems to bring out the best in Kurosawa’s essentially formal talents; Kagemusha seems only a rough draft for the effects he achieves here through a massive deployment of movement and color. Both landscape and weather seem to bend to his will as he constructs an imaginary 16th-century Japan out of various locations throughout the islands, which seems to re-form itself to reflect the characters’ surging passions as the violent tale progresses. It’s loosely adapted from King Lear: an aging warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai, in a performance that approaches a Kabuki stylization) decides to step down as the head of his clan, which unleashes a power struggle among his three sons. As in Kagemusha, Kurosawa envisions the only alternative to rigid oppression as apocalyptic chaos, yet the bleak proposal is put with infinitely more immediacy and personal involvement.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 226: Sat Aug 16

The Voyage (De Sica, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This creening (also being shown on August 26th) is part of the Sophia Loren season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
Set just prior to the First World War, Adriana is a sick widow in a rich Sicilian family who reaches for her last chance at happiness with her brother-in-law Cesare. Director De Sica’s final collaboration with Loren is a handsome, heartbreaking romantic saga and also a fitting coda to their storied cinematic partnership.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 225: Fri Aug 15

Dangerous Game (Ferrara, 1993): Nickel Cinema, 6.30 & 9pm

Chicago Reader reviews: A gut-wrenching movie, and probably the director’s most personal. It’s a corrosive ode to the filmmaking process that manages to find beauty and wonder in some truly ugly scenarios. The film’s movie-within-a-movie conceit offers jarring lapses into documentary style and video formatting, informing the volatile atmosphere created by Ferrara’s stand-in Harvey Keitel, perhaps the director’s most important onscreen collaborator. As the critic Camille Nevers wrote, this is “the film in which [Ferrara] is ultimately not just foreman as well as architect but also active spectator and implicit and central actor.” Drew Hunt

Concept movies are rarely as galvanizing as this deliberately disorienting 1993 movie-within-a-movie. Some scenes seem improvised or even documentary, some are impossible to relegate to a single level of fictional reality. Yet there’s a clear story line in which Harvey Keitel plays movie director Eddie Israel and Madonna plays Sarah Jennings, a celebrity recommended for a lead role in his latest production by her on- and offscreen allure, star status in another medium, and capital. Much of the movie Israel’s making (and Dangerous Game) exposes Madonna/Jennings to emotional and physical intrusions that are engineered by Keitel/Israel, though ultimately director Abel Ferrara calls the shots. This grueling, multifaceted drama about (and by) a filmmaker whose MO includes severely testing the sanity and loyalty of his actors complicates the significance of the casting of Madonna–who also produced–even if you believe a woman’s complicity in her own exploitation is a feminist gesture. Lisa Alspector

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 224: Thu Aug 14

The Working Girls (Rothman, 1974): Barbican Cinema, 6.15pm

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

Barbican Cinema introduction:
Stephanie Rothman’s filmmaking career in Hollywood was bookended by two brilliant films about gender, labour, sex, money and class. The first, was her breakout film The Student Nurses, yet it is her last film, The Working Girls that captures Rothman’s heart and politics.  Three young single women in Los Angeles look for their place in the world. Each character reflects the challenges and misogyny Rothman faced as a female filmmaker in 1970s Hollywood. Although set during a chronic recession, seen today, the film oozes a distinctly dreamy Californian carefreeness and lightness, punctuated throughout with Rothman’s razor-sharp humour. A socially and politically trenchant film, full of melancholia, regret and hope. Rothman’s final film leaves us imagining what could have been had she continued her film career. 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 223: Wed Aug 13

The Naked Truth (Zampi, 1957): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This very rarely seen comedy film is part of the Peter Sellers season at BFI Southbank and was the actor's first lead role in which he played numerous parts, as he was to in other much more famous films). This is a 35mm presentation which also screens on August 3rd. Details here.

Time Out review:
Simply spiffing comedy about scandal-mongering, with smarmy Dennis Price playing a gutter press baron who plans to blackmail a number of public figures or smear them across page one unless they hand over their House of Lords luncheon vouchers. Much miffed, Terry-Thomas contacts other victims - Peggy Mount's romantic novelist, Peter Sellers' TV celeb - and lays plans to undo the beastly rotter. A period piece, maybe, but much funnier and arguably more authentic than Scandal.
Adrian Turner

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 222: Tue Aug 12

The Velvet Vampire (Rothman, 1971): Barbican Cinema, 6.30pm

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

Chicago Reader review:
Given the genre (horror) and the budget (extremely low), it may seem perverse to say that Stephanie Rothman’s 1971 film is among the best women’s films ever made, but so it is—a highly intelligent, deftly poetic reimagining of the vampire myth, with the theme of fatal sexuality transferred to a female character. The vampire is neither an aggressor nor a seductress, but an abstract figure of polymorphous sensuality: her “victims” choose her, and they range from a would-be rapist to a liberated (and wittily parodied) southern California couple.
Dave Kehr 

Here (and above) is the trailer.