Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 207: Sun Jul 26

Far From the Madding Crowd (Schlesinger, 1967): Curzon Soho, 2pm

This 35mm screening is part of Curzon's John Schlesinger season. Details here.

BFI introduction to LFF screening in 2015:
1967 saw Julie Christie and Terence Stamp immortalised by The Kinks in ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and cast as lovers in Thomas Hardy’s epic love story. Headstrong and independent, farmer Bathsheba Everdene is among the most modern of 19th-century heroines and Christie’s performance beautifully underlines her as a woman at odds with the conventions of the time. The film contains a number of stand-out set-pieces, such as Stamp’s seductive, almost Freudian display of swordsmanship. But what resonates so deeply is the way in which Schlesinger and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg frame the passions and tragedy at the film’s heart with the patterns of rural life and the harsh, sodden beauty of the Dorset landscape. Almost 50 years on, this restoration reveals the film as an immersive piece of cinema with Hardy’s cruel ironies and bleak lyricism fully intact.
Robin Baker

John Patterson wrote an excellent article in the Guardian on this re-release. You can read the full article here. This is an extract:

Schlesinger’s Hardy was derided back then for its casting of Julie Christie and Terence Stamp, mere months after they’d been name-checked in the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, and who then seemed more Swinging London than Wailing Wessex. Time and distance have eradicated that feeling, however, and I delighted in the credits as they unfolded: not just Terry and Julie, but Peter Finch and eternal peasant-pagan Alan Bates, all perfectly cast; Stamp in particular, as the vile Sergeant Troy, whose name should really be “destroy”. But behind the camera too, there is joy to be had. Frederic Raphael’s screenplay, tied to Hardy as it must be, keeps the screenwriter’s more irritating locutions and “sparkling dialogue” tendencies in check, and serves Hardy admirably in terms of scale and pacing, while making hay of double entendres such as Troy’s leering “I’ll unfasten you in no time”. But perhaps the heart of the movie is the relationship between production designer Richard Macdonald – the man responsible for Joseph Losey’s eye-popping “mise-insane” films during the 60s – and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, at the height of what I think of as his Red Period as a cameraman. Best of all is to see a large-scale British period movie in which millions and millions of MGM’s dollars are clearly and effectively visible on the screen.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 206: Sat Jul 25

Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (Roberts, 1980): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This film is presented by 'Some Kind of Kick', who present 'celluloid rock ‘n’ roll trash on a Saturday night.' Here is their full programme at the Cinema Museum.

Time Out review:
Sir Henry's disgusting ancestral home has spawned an industry: a Radio 4 sketch, Peel-show episodes, Bonzo track, complete album, stage readings. His motto is 'Omnes Blotto'; his home is Knebworth outside, and a dusty heap of rotten food, excrement, and empty bottles within. Vivian Stanshall has pieced together a shambolic poem, stuffed with extraordinary one-liners, with the sad, manic skeleton necessary to all great comedy; a satire tempered with nostalgia. Fixing this down visually is ultimately as self-defeating as filming a Goon Show: Steve Roberts has opted for a grainy monochrome, and has fortunately resisted the temptation to 'explain'. With the surprising exception of Denise Coffey, the actors quite correctly play the farrago dead straight: Trevor Howard, in particular, relishes the role of Sir Henry as if shooting for an Oscar. Too many favourite album lines are missing to prevent a little disappointment, and the edifice gets close to collapse on occasions, but this is one film it would have been impossible to get irrefutably 'right'.
John Collis

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 205: Fri Jul 24

Midnight (Liesen, 1939): Garden Cinema, 6pm

This is part of the Garden Cinema's Screwball Comedy season. Full details here.

Time Out review:
An enchanting comedy which starts with Claudette Colbert, as an American chorine on the make, stranded in Paris in a gold lamé evening gown (what else?). She is befriended on the one hand by a poor taxi-driver who is really a Russian count (Don Ameche), and on the other by a wealthy socialite (John Barrymore) who 'introduces' her to society so that she can oblige by luring a gigolo away from his wife. Uncanny coincidental parallels with La Règle du Jeu abound, and although the film echoes Renoir's bark more than his bite, it has a superbly malicious script by Brackett and Wilder, gorgeous sets and camerawork, and a matchless cast. All in all, probably Mitchell Leisen's best film.
Tom Milne

Here and above is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 204: Thu Jul 23

Radio On (Petit, 1979): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This is a rare 35mm presentation. The screening of Radio On on Wednesday 29 July will include a pre-recorded intro by director Chris Petit.

Chicago Reader review:
A British film about alienation, asphalt, and narrative disconnections, coproduced by Wim Wenders's German company. Director Christopher Petit, a former film critic, slips into Wenders's style—the cool, austere black-and-white images, the blank underplaying—as if he were taking it for a test drive: he wants to see what it can do, what its strengths are and where its weaknesses lie. Seizing on an archetypal Wenders situation—a car trip that becomes a metaphor for an emotional pilgrimage—Petit inspects and abstracts Wenders's ideas. The film is dull and distant, though not objectionably so—it seems to be the effect Petit has in mind. The relationships between his isolated, distracted characters are reproduced in the movie's low-key appeal to its audience. With David Beames and Lisa Kreuzer (1979).
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 203: Wed Jul 22

The Caddy (Taurog, 1953): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

Cinema Museum introduction:
July 2026 marks eighty years since the formation of Martin and Lewis, and seventy years since their break up, exactly a decade later. It’s difficult to overstate their success in this period; at the height of their fame in the early fifties, the pair were a showbiz phenomenon who incited levels of hysteria reserved in popular memory for fans of Elvis or The Beatles. The Martin and Lewis empire spread everywhere: from the nightclub scene where they originated into television, radio, comics and, of course, Hollywood. The Caddy remains one of the better works for understanding their volatile, magnetic chemistry. It was their ninth of sixteen films together, one of three Martin and Lewis films released in 1953 alone. The film was a massive commercial success and became the fourteenth highest grossing film of the year. But it also marked the beginning of the end for the pair, as Lewis grew increasingly egotistical and controlling and, emboldened by the commercial success of That’s Amore, Martin became convinced of his ability to go it alone. By the summer of 1954, whispers of a rapidly fracturing partnership, even a feud, began to spread through Hollywood like wildfire. Martin and Lewis went on to release seven more films after The Caddy, and in the three years after its release, they remained a mainstay of popular television and film until their acrimonious split in 1956, after which both went on to enjoy successful solo careers. The film will be preceded by an introduction reflecting on the shared career and legacy of Martin and Lewis.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 202: Tue Jul 21

Margaret (Lonergan, 2011): Prince Charles Cinema, 7.50pm

This film was famously buried by Fox studios and there was just one late press screening in Britain. I wrote about the tortured pre-release history here. But Kenneth Lonergan's follow up to the excellent You Can Count On Me gained a second life thanks to critics enthused by one of the best American film in recent years championing this superb movie.

Here the film screens in the full extended version.

This is Peter Bradshaw's review from the Guardian to the time of release:
Since 2000, when he made his mark with a tremendous debut, You Can Count on Me, Kenneth Lonergan has been absent from the radar as a director. The reason turns out to have been years of acrimonious studio argument over the length of his followup project, a post-9/11 New York drama in a world of trauma, rage, blame, overtalking and interrupting. Originally conceived as a three-hour movie, it has been allowed into cinemas in a two-and-a-half hour cut. Perhaps Lonergan is content with this and perhaps not, but the resulting movie is stunning: provocative and brilliant, a sprawling neurotic nightmare of urban catastrophe, with something of John Cassavetes and Tom Wolfe, and rocket-fuelled by a superbly thin-skinned performance by Anna Paquin. Its sheer energy and dramatic vehemence, alongside that raw lead performance, puts it way ahead of more tastefully formed dramas. Paquin plays Lisa, the daughter of divorced parents: a mouthy, smart-but-not-that-smart teen at private school, sexy but emotionally naive, self-absorbed and scarily hyper-articulate in the language of entitlement and grievance. She may have inherited drama-queen tendencies from her mother Joan (J Smith-Cameron), a Broadway stage star, with whom she lives in New York. One day, after an encounter of pouting defiance with her exasperated mathematics teacher (Matt Damon), Lisa takes it into her head to buy a cowboy hat. She sees a bus driver wearing one she likes: he is played by Mark Ruffalo. With a teenager's heedless disregard for the consequences, she flirtatiously runs alongside his bus, waving wildly, asking where he got it. He smiles back at her, taking his eyes off the road – with terrible results. Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup, and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. But is that emotion guilt or righteousness? Or a sociopathic convulsion, a need to create a huge redemptive drama with herself at the centre, to lash out against her mother and the entire adult world; or to enact vengeance against a man who, without trying, has placed her in a position of weakness – at the very point at which she considers she should be attaining her adult, queen-bee status? Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically compelling to watch.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 201: Mon Jul 20

Kes (Loach, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.15pm

This is a 35mm screening.

Chicago Reader review:
In 1969 Ken Loach took time out from an acclaimed television career to direct this quietly powerful narrative feature, a classic of British social realism. Based on a novel by Barry Hines but shot like a documentary, with a hardscrabble industrial setting and a cast that blends professionals and amateurs, the film tracks an introverted Yorkshire lad (David Bradley) who's abandoned by his father and bullied by his coal-miner brother (Freddie Fletcher). A failure in the classroom and on the soccer pitch alike, the boy finds his wings when he adopts and trains a fledgling kestrel. Working in the style of cinema verite, cinematographer Chris Menges captures the petty tyrannies of the provincial working class and the inchoate joys of a youngster stumbling toward the greater world.
Andrea Gronvall

For a change (from the footy) here's the pub scene.