Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 23: Fri Jan 23

Night Nurse (Wellman, 1931): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

Cinema Museum introduction:
Women and Cocaine Presents is a film night presented by curator Caroline Cassin at The Cinema Museum to celebrate the fierce and liberated women of Pre code cinema. From the period of 1930 to 1934, before the introduction of censorship, women were depicted in roles with a frankness and sex-positivity that remains rare even today. Each month we celebrate a different woman from that era. This month it's Barbara Stanwyck who, in one of her defining early roles, plays Lora Hart, an idealistic nurse who takes a job caring for two wealthy little kids kept in a state of mysterious ill health. As Lora works the night shift, she uncovers a sinister plot involving their menacing chauffeur, Nick (played by Clark Gable sans moustache).

Chicago Reader review:
A William Wellman curiosity done for Warners in 1931, this gritty thriller, a favorite of film critic Manny Farber, is of principal interest today for its juicy early performances by Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Clark Gable. Hard as nails, with lots of spunk.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 22: Thu Jan 22

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Climber, 1976): Nickel Cinema, 6pm

This film was one of the original banned 'video nasties' in the UK in the 1980s.

Nickel Cinema introduction:
A troubled woman named Molly works nights as a waitress at a seaside bar while caring for her young nephews by day. Haunted by memories of childhood abuse at the hands of her sea‑captain father, she becomes increasingly tormented by nightmares and fantasies. As her grip on reality slips, she begins seducing men and enacting a brutal, vengeful murder spree. Bleak and disturbing, The Witch Who Came from the Sea is more psychological horror than supernatural — a grim portrait of trauma, repression, and rage that turns intimacy into terror and the ocean’s memory into a twisted obsession.

Starburst Magazine review:
If you ever find yourself arguing that the idiots behind the ‘video nasties’ list didn’t have a clue what they were doing, The Witch Who Came from the Sea should be your Exhibit A. This film doesn’t deserve its schlocky reputation and it certainly has nothing to do with the evocative but incredibly misleading poster that probably put it on the list in the first place – there are no witches here, and certainly no warrior women brandishing decapitated heads. Instead, The Witch Who Came from the Sea is an intriguing and occasionally moving study of an abused young woman spiralling into insanity. True, it has the low-budget look of most ’70s exploitation movies, but Perkins’ extraordinarily nuanced performance, the psychologically incisive screenplay by her soon-to-be-ex-husband Robert Thom (Death Race 2000) and the classy cinematography by DOP Dean Cundey, who would later lens John Carpenter’s Halloween, The Fog and The Thing, elevates this controversial little psycho-shocker into the echelons of art. This isn’t some grubby video nasty designed to shock and titillate, this is a chillingly effective character study that occupies the shadowy middle-ground somewhere between Polanski’s Repulsion and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave.

Here (and above) is the opening scene.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 21: Wed Jan 21

The American Friend (Wenders, 1977): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This film also screens on Tuesday February 17th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
This gripping 1977 American thriller from Wim Wenders turns back on itself with deadly European irony. Dennis Hopper is an international art smuggler, Bruno Ganz is a Hamburg craftsman. Together they commit a murder and briefly become friends. The film has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 20: Tue Jan 20

Love Hotel (Somai, 1985): Nickel Cinema, 8.15pm

Dazed introduction to  Shinji Somai:'When it comes to filmmaking auteurs, Somai, a previously forgotten master of 1980s Japanese cinema, is not a name that has always been afforded much attention in Western criticism. But off the back of passionate new appraisals by contemporary filmmakers, a first US-based retrospective of his films in New York in 2023, and a string of UK home media releases in 2024, the director is now rightly getting his dues overseas – some two decades after his death from lung cancer at the age of just 53.' The Nickel Cinema are showing one of his lesser known films here.

Nickel Cinema introduction:
In a single night inside a Tokyo love hotel, two damaged lives intersect under the pressure of desperation, fantasy, and self-erasure. A failed businessman planning his own death hires a call girl, only for their transaction to unravel into something unstable and emotionally raw. Love Hotel operates within the framework of pink cinema, yet consistently resists its expectations, redirecting erotic spectacle toward exhaustion, confession, and psychological exposure. Sex here is not titillation but a temporary suspension of consequence—a space where shame can be voiced without permanence. Shinji Sōmai’s long takes and restless camera movement trap the characters in real time, refusing narrative shortcuts or moral framing. The hotel room becomes a liminal zone between performance and collapse, where power shifts moment to moment and intimacy feels both compulsory and unreachable. Stripped of glamour and redemption, Love Hotel presents desire as a survival mechanism already failing, and connection as something briefly possible only when nothing else remains intact.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 19: Mon Jan 19

Bend of the River (Mann, 1952): Regent Street Cinema, 1pm

Time Out review:
Anthony Mann's finest Western casts James Stewart as a wagon train leader, guiding a group of settlers through Indian country to the Oregon Territory. Stewart is a man haunted by a secret, his violent past as a Missouri border raider - a past which catches up with him when another former raider (Arthur Kennedy) joins the wagon train. The two men are paralleled throughout, Kennedy representing the old violence which may yet erupt in the reformed Stewart, and the whole film is concerned with the testing of Stewart's capacity for change. Continually provoked by his spiky relationship with Kennedy, Stewart is a man who must clarify and reaffirm his new relationship with a peaceful society. Lighthearted comedy, majestic scenery, and superbly handled action are fused into a unifying moral vision which, though it deals with abstractions, always expresses itself through visible actions and tangible symbols.
Nigel Floyd

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 18: Sun Jan 18

Eureka (Aoyama, 2000): ICA Cinema, 2.15pm

This screening of Eureka will be introduced by Vietnamese film critic Phuong Le.

Time Out review:
A bus is hijacked; only the driver (Koji Yakusho, from The Eel and Shall We Dance?) and two school-age passengers survive the bloodbath. Two years later, the driver returns from his mysterious wanderings, finds life with his family awkward, and moves in with the brother and sister, by now utterly speechless and living alone (at least until their student cousin also comes to stay). Meanwhile, a number of local women are murdered. The slightly bogus serial killer subplot notwithstanding, Shinji Aoyama's lengthy, but never over-long study of psychological trauma and regeneration is beautifully shot (in monochrome 'Scope), acted, and directed; at least until the last two shots, an elegant understatement holds sway, even allowing for wry, gentle humour to be slowly but surely introduced into the otherwise serious proceedings. Like his superb lead actor, Aoyama achieves a lot with a little, proving that one needn't shout to be heard. Ozu, one feels, would have approved.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 17: Sat Jan 17

In the Mood for Love (Kar-wai, 2000): Prince Charles Cinema, 3pm

This is a 35mm presentation with other screenings throughout January and February. Full details here. Exactly one year on from selecting this film when the Prince Charles Cinema started its regular run of screenings of this film it's remarkable to discover that it is now entering its 104th consecutive week at the movie house, a run that, within a year or so may well break the British record for the longest continuous theatrical engagement of a single film. The longest continuous theatrical run ever recorded in the UK belongs to softcore porn film Come Play With Me, which screened at the Moulin Cinema on Great Windmill Street for 201 weeks between 1977 and 1981, a record listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. "What began as a revival has quietly become one of the most extraordinary long-term relationships between a cinema, a film, and its audience. Still playing, still selling, still stopping people in their tracks, often from our stunning original-release 35mm print," stated the Prince Charles Cinema team in a recent press release.

Chicago Reader review:
A brooding chamber piece (2000) about a love affair that never quite happens. Director Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s most romantic filmmaker, is known for his excesses, and in that sense the film’s spareness represents a bold departure. Claustrophobically set in adjacent flats in 1962 Hong Kong, where two young couples find themselves sharing space with other people, it focuses on a newspaper editor and a secretary at an export firm (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the sexiest duo in Hong Kong cinema) who discover that their respective spouses are having an affair on the road. Wong, who improvises his films with the actors, endlessly repeats his musical motifs and variations on a handful of images, rituals, and short scenes (rainstorms, cab rides, stairways, tender and tentative hand gestures), while dressing Cheung in some of the most confining (though lovely) dresses imaginable, whose mandarin collars suggest neck braces.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.