Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 158: Sun Jun 8

The Rain People (Coppola, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This film, which also screens on June 17th and 24th, is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Francis Ford Coppola's fourth feature, a fascinating early road movie made entirely on location with a minimal crew and a constantly evolving script. Never very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably because it suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has far greater depth and complexity to its curious admixture of feminist tract and pure thriller. Shirley Knight is outstanding (in a superb cast) as the pregnant woman who runs away in quest of the identity she feels she has lost as a Long Island housewife, and finds herself increasingly tangled in the snares of responsibility through her encounters with a football player left mindless by an accident (James Caan) and a darkly amorous traffic cop (Robert Duvall). Symbolism rumbles beneath the characterisations (Caan as the baby she is running from and with, Duvall as the sexuality and domination she is trying to deny) but it is never facile; and the rhythms of the road movie (leading through wonderfully bizarre locations to a resonantly melodramatic finale) confirm that Coppola's prime talent lies in choreographing movement.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 157: Sat Jun 7

Victims of Sin (Fernandez/Sevilla, 1951): Garden Cinema, 3pm

This film, part of the Noir International season, also screens on June 17th and 23rd.

Garden Cinema introduction:
A treasure of Mexico’s cinematic golden age, this deliriously plotted blend of gritty crime film, heart-tugging maternal melodrama, and mambo musical is a dazzling showcase for iconic star Ninón Sevilla. She brings fierce charisma and fiery strength to her role as a rumbera - a female nightclub dancer - who gives up everything to raise an abandoned boy, whom she must protect from his ruthless gangster father. Directed at a dizzying pace by filmmaking titan Emilio Fernández, and shot in stylish chiaroscuro by renowned cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa amid smoky dance halls and atmospherically seedy underworld haunts, Victims of Sin is a ferociously entertaining female-powered noir pulsing with the intoxicating rhythms of some of Latin America’s most legendary musical stars.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 156: Fri Jun 6

Buffalo '66 (Gallo, 1998):  Prince Charles Cinema, 3.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
Vincent Gallo's directorial debut is one of a kind, an eccentric, provocative comedy which laces a poignant love story with both a sombre, washed-out naturalism and surreal musical vignettes. Throwing out the standard repetitions of shot/reverse shot, Gallo brings an individual film grammar to the screen, a beguiling mix of formal tropes and apparently impetuous conceits. If not autobiographical, then at least deeply personal, the film follows one Billy Brown (Gallo) out of prison and back to his hometown, Buffalo, NY. There he kidnaps a girl, Layla (Christine Ricci) a busty, blonde in two-inch skirt and dazzling fairy tale slippers, and entreats her to play his loving wife for his parents' benefit. The homecoming goes a long way to explain Billy's aggressive insecurity: his indifferent mom (Anjelica Huston) is a rabid football obsessive, while his dad (Ben Gazzara) is taciturn and hostile, though taken with Layla. The cruel caricature of this sourly funny episode is tempered by Layla's sweetness. Billy's turmoil is redeemed in her simplicity. You may scoff at such blatant male wish-fulfilment, but when Billy finally opens himself to the threat of intimacy, it's a heart-rending moment. A brave, honest, stimulating film, this reaches parts other movies don't even know exist.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 155: Thu Jun 5

Splendor in the Grass (Kazan, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This 35mm presentation (also screening on June 8th) is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
A tale of unfulfilled teenage desire set in Kansas circa 1928, Elia Kazan’s hothouse parable (with an Academy Award winning screenplay by playwright William Inge) examines the toll of Puritanical social propriety and sexual repression on high-school sweethearts: Bud Stamper, the child of oil wealth (Beatty’s Hollywood debut) and the fragile Deanie. Loden’s tempestuous role as Bud’s wild flapper sister Ginny provides a prominent foil for the film’s critique of judgmental small-town mores.

Adrian Martin introduction:
From the first notes of David Amram’s intense score and the opening image of Bud (first-timer Warren Beatty) and Deanie (Natalie Wood) kissing in a car by a raging waterfall, Splendor in the Grass sums up the appeal of Hollywood melodrama at its finest: the passions repressed by society (the setting is Kansas 1928) find a displaced expression in every explosive burst of colour, sound and gesture. Repression is everywhere in this movie, a force that twists people in monstrous, dysfunctional directions. Men are obliged to be successful and macho while women must choose between virginity and whorishness – as is the case for Bud’s unconventional flapper sister, indelibly incarnated by Barbara Loden. Director Elia Kazan, like Arthur Penn, worked at the intersection of studio-nurtured classical narrative and the innovative, dynamic forms introduced by Method acting and the French New Wave. Here, collaborating with the dramatist William Inge, he achieved a sublime synthesis of both approaches. The film offers a lucid, concentrated analysis of the social contradictions determined by class, wealth, industry, technology, moral values and gender roles within the family unit. At the same time, it is a film in which the characters register as authentic individuals, acting and reacting in a register that is far from the Hollywood cliché.
Full review here.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 154: Wed Jun 4

Fox and His Friends (Fassbinder, 1975): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.15pm

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

Time Out review:
One of Fassbinder's excellent melodramas. The director himself plays a working-class man who wins a small fortune on the lottery and is destroyed by men who befriend him on Munich's gay community. It's his usual vision of exploitation and complicity hidden under the deceiving mantle of love, but Fassbinder's precision, assured sense of milieu, and cool but human compassion for his characters, make it a work of brilliant intelligence. And the director himself is superb as the none-too-intelligent hero.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 153: Tue Jun 3

Wanda (Loden, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

I wrote about this extraordinary movie for the Guardian here when it was screened at the London Film Festival in 2011. This 35mm screening is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's presentation will include an extended introduction to the season by Elena Gorfinkel.

Time Out review:
A remarkable one-off from Elia Kazan's wife. Shot in 16mm and blown up to 35, it's a subtly picaresque movie about the wanderings of a semi-destitute American woman. Directing herself, Barbara Loden manages to make the character at once completely convincing in her soggy and directionless amorality, yet gradually sympathetic and even heroic. After a desultory involvement with a bank robber, to whom she becomes attached despite his unpredictable temper, Wanda botches everything - having agreed to drive a getaway car for him - by getting lost in a traffic jam; and our last glimpse of her is back on the road, being picked up in a bar. The film is all the more impressive for its refusal to get embroiled in half-baked political attitudinising; it's good enough to make one regret that the director/star produced nothing else before her untimely death from cancer.
David Pirie

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 152: Mon Jun 2

Wild River (Kazan, 1960): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.15pm

This film, which also screens on June 7th and 26th, is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The Tennessee branch of the Mississippi, that is, where TVA agent Montgomery Clift is faced with the job of evicting a matriarch (Jo Van Fleet) from her family island in order to complete a dam project. This 1960 drama is probably Elia Kazan’s finest and deepest film, a meditation on how the past both inhibits and enriches the present. Lee Remick costars as Van Fleet’s widowed daughter, giving one of the most affecting performances of her underrated career. The tone shifts from hysteria to reverie in the blinking of an eye, but Kazan handles it all with a sure touch. Scripted by Paul Osborn, and adapted in part from books by Borden Deal and William Bradford Huie.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.