Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 172: Sun Jun 21

Interstellar (Nolan, 2014): Everyman Screen on the Green, 2pm

This 35mm screening ias part of the Nolan in 35mm season at the Screen on the Green from June 20th to July 15th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
On a visual level, Interstellar is an exceptionally well-crafted Hollywood entertainment. Director Christopher Nolan, art director Dean Wolcott, and their effects artists render the imaginary settings in stunning detail. The film is rife with brilliant imagery: a horizon of frozen clouds, an ocean wave as tall as a skyscraper, the flashing interior of a wormhole through which the principal characters fly their spacecraft. The most striking thing about these images is that we’re rarely encouraged to ooh and aah over them; unlike most ambitious space operas since 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), Interstellar inspires not wonder but a cool contemplation. Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who cowrote the script, advance a hard-science perspective, incorporating such concepts as the theory of relativity and placing dramatic emphasis on research and problem solving.
Ben Sachs

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 171: Sat Jun 20

Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer, 1949): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 5.20pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Push Play (Skateboarding) season at BFI Southbank and will feature a Q&A with artist, skateboarder and model Blondey McCoy.

Chicago Reader review:
Robert Hamer’s 1949 film is often cited as the definitive black, eccentric British comedy, yet it’s several cuts better than practically anything else in the genre. Dennis Price, as a poor, distant relative of the rich D’Ascoynes, must murder eight members of the family (all played by Alec Guinness) to obtain the title and fortune he believes are his right. Hamer’s direction is bracingly cool and clipped, yet he’s able to draw something from his performers (Price has never been deeper, Guinness never more proficient, and Joan Greenwood never more softly, purringly cruel) that transcends the facile comedy of murder; there’s lyricism, passion, and protest in it too. With Valerie Hobson and Arthur Lowe.
Dave Kehr 

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 170: Fri Jun 19

La Cabina (Mercero, 1972) + El Televisor (Serrador, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This double-bill is part of the Bleak Week season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here. 

Prince Charles Cinema introduction: Spain in the early 1970s was a country in transition, with increasing economic prosperity and the expectations of a growing middle class put in direct conflict with the dying dictatorship regime of Franco, where state surveillance, media censorship and social control was still the norm. Inspired by mystery-horror anthology series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, this unique period in history is depicted with terrifying clarity and dark humour in these two infamous television films: La cabina and El televisor. In Antonio Mercero’s La cabina, a group of officials install a telephone box outside a block of flats. After a man enters to make a phone call, he finds himself unable to leave, attracting the attention of fascinated locals as he grows increasingly desperate to escape. A sensation upon release and a cultural touchstone in Spain to this day, La cabina also developed a huge cult following in the UK after regular screenings on late-night TV.  In El televisor, a man living a dreary suburban life has a simple dream: to possess his own television. When he finally gets his wish, the dream soon becomes a dangerous, all-consuming obsession. Originally a special episode of the hugely popular series Tales to Keep You Awake, written and directed by Narcisco Ibanez Serrandor (Who Can Kill A Child), El televisor’s escalating dread and shocking conclusion still retains its power to shock over 50 years later. Released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK by Transmission on 22nd July, this double bill will be released into UK cinemas on June 19th to coincide with Bleak Week, and will receive its premiere screening at the Prince Charles Cinema with an intro from Reece Shearsmith (Inside No 9, The League of Gentlemen). 

Here (and above) is the trailer for La Cabina.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 169: Thu Jun 18

Il Mare (Griffi, 1962): Barbican Cinema, 6.20pm

This 35mm screening is part of the 'Queer 60s' season at the Barbican. Details here. Tonight's presentation will by Lillian Crawford. The screening on Sunday 28th June will be introduced by the season's curator Alex Davidson.

There is a longer article on the film on the Senses of Cinema website here.

Barbican Cinema introduction: An actor (Umberto Orsini) recovering from a break-up and a 19-year-old man (Dino Mele) with an unspoken trauma connect in off-season Capri, where the restaurants close early in the evening, the rain is a frequent visitor and the streets are practically deserted. Homoerotic fireworks explode – but the arrival of a woman (Françoise Prévost) on the island threatens to change everything. Griffi’s camera is in love with the beautiful Mele, who gives a great performance depicting the wild, untamed passion of youth. Il Mare received little attention upon its release, but its reception has grown over the decades, with director Derek Jarman even declaring it his favourite film.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 168: Wed Jun 17

The Boy and the Wind (Christensen, 1967): Barbican Cinema, 6.20pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Queer 60s season at the Barbican. Details here.

Barbican Cinema introduction: 
A boy disappears in a rural Brazilian community and all fingers point to a stranger in town in Carlos Hugo Christensen’s extraordinary magical realist drama. To the horror of the locals of a small rural Brazilian community, handsome engineer Jose (Ênio Gonçalves), an accused child murderer, is back in town and on trial following the disappearance of teenager Zeca (Luiz Fernando Ianelli). As homophobic lies and accusations fly, we gradually learn more about the man and the boy, and the latter’s extraordinary connection to the strong winds that blow through the town. A plot synopsis of The Boy and the Wind cannot do justice to what follows, with incredible set pieces and an appropriately dramatic conclusion. The film remains an outstanding, magical realist depiction of queerness that still fascinates today.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 167: Tue Jun 16

Girlfriends (Weill, 1978): Rio Cinema, 6.30pm

Rio Cinema introduction: To celebrate RIO FOREVER, Rio Film Feminists returns to 1979/80 to shine a light on the Rio’s first feminist film season, organised in association with Hackney and Islington Socialist Feminist Group, Hackney Black Women’s Group and Women in Entertainment. We have picked to re-screen American writer/director Claudia Weill’s landmark feminist indie Girlfriends (1978), which was presented in a late-night double-bill with Rapunzel: Let Down Your Hair (1978) by The London Women’s Film Group. 

New Yorker review:
One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely, that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing, the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor, the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind, achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her. Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical, dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women, when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded, perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in the same way.
Richard Brody

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 166: Mon Jun 15

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Hamburger, 2006): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This film, part of the Brazilian film season at BFI Southbank, is also screened on June 1st. You can find all the details here.

BFI introduction:
Left with relatives while his parents ‘disappear’ during the dictatorship, a football-obsessed boy finds community in a São Paulo neighbourhood. Cao Hamburger filters political trauma through childhood perception, blending humour and melancholy. It’s a tender coming-of-age story shaped by absence, memory and solidarity, with the 1970 World Cup as a national soundtrack.

Here (and above) is the trailer.