Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 112: Wed Apr 23

Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.20pm

Here's one of the great films of recent times and an opportunity to see Stanley Kubrick's much-underrated final movie in an original 35mm print. The movie is also screened on May 10th.

If you're interested in reading more about this film I can recommend two BFI publications - Michel Chion's Modern Classics monograph on Eyes Wide Shut and the chapter on the film in James Naremore's book titled On Kubrick. And also Robert P Kolker and Nathan Abrams' illuminating 2019 book Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film.

Chicago Reader review:
Initial viewings of Stanley Kubrick's movies can be deceptive because his films all tend to be emotionally convoluted in some way; one has to follow them as if through a maze. A character that Kubrick might seem to treat cruelly the first time around (e.g., Elisha Cook Jr.'s fall guy in The Killing) can appear the object of tender compassion on a subsequent viewing. The director's desire to avoid sentimentality at all costs doesn't preclude feeling, as some critics have claimed, but it does create ambiguity and a distanced relationship to the central characters. Kubrick's final feature very skillfully portrays the dark side of desire in a successful marriage; since the 60s he'd been thinking about filming Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant novella "Traumnovelle," and working with Frederic Raphael, he's adapted it faithfully--at least if one allows for all the differences between Viennese Jews in the 20s and New York WASPs in the 90s. Schnitzler's tale, about a young doctor contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies, has a somewhat Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy (hence Kubrick's title), and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this delicate territory. Yet the story has been altered to make the successful doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite and his wife (powerfully played by Nicole Kidman) a little feistier; Kubrick's also added a Zeus-like tycoon (played to perfection by Sydney Pollack) who pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in fact only summarizes the various mysteries, his cynicism and chilly access to power revealing that Kubrick is more of a moralist than Schnitzler. To accept the premises and experiences of this movie, you have to be open to an expressionist version of New York with scant relation to the 90s (apart from cellular phones and AIDS) and a complex reading of a marriage that assumes the relations between men and women haven't essentially changed in the past 70-odd years. This is a remarkably gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over time.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 111: Tue Apr 22

Katzelmacher (Fassbinder, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.45pm

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

Time Out review: Fear and loathing in the mean streets of suburban Munich, where all behaviour obeys the basest and most basic of drives, and fleeting allegiances form and re-form in almost mathematically abstract permutations until disrupted by the advent of an immigrant Greek worker (played by Fassbinder himself; the title is a Bavarian slang term for a gastarbeiter, implying tomcatting sexual proclivities) who becomes the target for xenophobic violence. Fassbinder's sub-Godardian gangster film début, Love is Colder than Death, was dismissed as derivative and dilettanté-ish; this second feature, based on his own anti-teater play, won immediate acclaim. It still seems remarkable, mainly for Fassbinder's distinctive, highly stylised dialogue and minimalist mise-en-scène that transfigures a cinema of poverty into bleakly triumphant rites of despair. Sheila Johnston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 110: Mon Apr 21

Under the Volcano (Huston, 1984): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.35pm

This late John Huston film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

This 35mm presentation is also screened on April 29th. Full details of the season can be found here.

Time Out review:

Everyone will be doing Huston's film a favour if they try hard not to compare it with the now classic Malcolm Lowry novel. In fact it captures the doomed spirit of the original, while - rightly - in no way apeing its dense, poetic style. Huston opts for straightforward narrative, telling the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic English ex-diplomat who embraces his own destruction in Mexico shortly before the outbreak of World War II. As the limp-wristed observers of this manic process, Anthony Andrews and Jacqueline Bisset are at best merely decorative, at worst an embarrassment, and the film's success rests largely on an (often literally) staggering performance from Albert Finney as the dipso diplo. Slurring sentences, sweating like a pig, wobbling on his pins, he conveys a character who is still, somehow, holding on to his sense of love and dignity. Not for the purists, maybe, but the last half-hour, as Firmin plunges ever deeper into his self-created hell, leaves one shell-shocked.
Richard Rayner

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 109: Sun Apr 20

Avanti! (Wilder, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 2.40pm

This great, late Billy Wilder film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

The 35mm presentation also screens on April 23rd. Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
This 1972 release is the most underrated of all Billy Wilder comedies and arguably the one that comes closest to the sweet mastery and lilting grace of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch. Jack Lemmon arrives at a small resort in Italy to claim the body of his late father, who’s perished in a car accident; there he meets Juliet Mills, whose mother has died in the same accident and, as it turns out, had been having an affair with the father. The development of Mills and Lemmon’s own romance over various bureaucratic complications is gradual and leisurely paced; at 144 minutes, this is an experience to roll around on your tongue. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond adapted a relatively obscure play by Samuel A. Taylor, and the lovely music is by Carlo Rustichelli; with Clive Revill and Edward Andrews.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 108: Sat Apr 19

Rich and Famous (Cukor, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 5.45pm

This rarely screened George Cukor film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Tonight’s film (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.

Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Feelings of great depth and poignancy surface unpredictably in this film by George Cukor, though they have little to do with the ostensible subject: the director seems to be responding to the material in private, wholly personal ways completely divorced from the concerns of his collaborators. The screenplay, an old rewrite of Old Acquaintance by Gerald Ayers (Foxes), is one of the worst Cukor has had to work with in his long career, redolent of strained staircase wit and false sophistication. The lead performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 107: Fri Apr 18

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Minnelli, 1962): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2pm

This rarely screened Vincente Minnelli film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Tonight’s film (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.

Full details of the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Considering how stupid the whole idea was—to remake a Rudolph Valentino silent with Glenn Ford—this 1962 feature picture is surprisingly passable, particularly when you turn off the sound track and concentrate on the sumptuous visuals provided by Vincente Minnelli. It’s no classic, but there’s more integrity here than anyone would have a right to expect. With Ingrid Thulin, Charles Boyer, Lee J. Cobb, and the two horsemen of 40s melodrama, Paul Henreid and Paul Lukas.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 106: Thu Apr 17

Such Good Friends (Preminger, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.45pm

This rarely screened Otto Preminger film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.

Tonight’s film will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.

Full details of the season can be found here.

New Yorker review: One of the more effervescent—yet nonetheless scathing—films in a season on ‘The New York Woman’, “Such Good Friends”, from 1971, by the triumvirate of the novelist Lois Gould, the screenwriter Elaine May, and the director Otto Preminger, presents a sheltered young stay-at-home Park Avenue mother (Dyan Cannon), who learns that her husband (Laurence Luckinbill), a prominent art director and author, has been unfaithful. The ironic action, blending flashbacks and fantasies, dispels her comforting illusions on the path to self-reliance. Richard Brody

Here (and above) is the trailer.