Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 217: Wed Aug 5

Punishment Park (Watkins, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.50pm

This film, which also screens on August 14th, is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Time Out review:
Cult British filmmaker Peter Watkins made the 1971 pseudo-documentary ‘Punishment Park’ as a reaction to the ‘revolutionary’ events in the United States in the late ’60s, in particular the wave of anti-Vietnam-fuelled activism, as well as protests against the suppression of the Black Panther movement and the shooting by the National Guard of students at Kent State University. Intended as an analysis and illustration of (US) state terrorism, the film imagines a futuristic correction facility out in the Mojave desert, where ‘security risks’ are gathered and sentenced by an unconstitutional court to potentially fatal punishments involving forced treks, without water, through the desert. Seen today, the film can be viewed in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s a prime example of Watkins’ innovative, radical approach to filmmaking. His use of fictional scenarios to examine actual political events and practices – here the reactionary tendencies of the Nixon era – has a hyper-Swiftian effect, whereby artistic exaggeration highlights the real to an intense degree. Likewise, his considered use of non-professionals as actors – real National Guardsmen, draft protesters and black activists – intensifies the emotional atmosphere, the sense of immediacy and the processes of audience identification. Interestingly, the improvised outpourings – ‘the US is as psychotic as it is powerful!’ screams one defandant – now seem very much like historical documents themselves. Finally, and more problematically, there’s the question of whether Watkins’ film succeeds as pure, tensely-structured, drama – will the two groups of dissidents survive? Will they tear themselves apart in trying to do so? Personally, I think not. But this is fascinating, gut-wrenching and thought-provoking filmmaking all the same.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 216: Tue Aug 4

Trees Lounge (Buscemi, 1996): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

A very rare screening for this wonderful independent movie that was Steve Buscemi's directorial debut. The film is also being shown on August 27th.

Time Out review:
Tommy Basilio (Steve Buscemi), a no-hoper living in suburban Long Island, is not exactly happy. He's been sacked for 'borrowing' money from the garage owned by his buddy Rob (Anthony LaPaglia), with whom Tommy's girl Theresa (Elizabeth Bracco) has now taken up. His family tend to regard him as a black sheep, while Jerry (Daniel Baldwin), Theresa's volatile brother-in-law, is anxious about Tommy hanging around his teenage daughter Debbie (Chloe Sevigny). Small wonder Tommy takes to getting legless with troubled family man Mike (Boone), trying to pick up anyone in a skirt, and generally making a nuisance of himself in the unprepossessing Trees Lounge bar. Buscemi's semi- autobiographical first feature as writer/director is a beautifully low-key, disarmingly perceptive blue-collar character-study, reminiscent of vintage Cassavetes in its sociological and emotional authenticity. If nothing here is quite as risky or inspirational as the late indie king's nerviest masterpieces, there's still much to savour: a cherishably naturalistic, extremely witty script packed with tasty trivialities and non sequiturs; top-notch performances from a superb cast; a smattering of subtle sight-gags; and sufficient drama to ensure that the overall understatement never outstays its welcome. Crucially, despite the loose narrative structure and amiable air of inconsequentiality, it's all held together, and lent poignancy, by Buscemi's Tommy: irresponsible, selfish even, but endowed with enough scrawny charm to allow us to care about his need, and capacity, for some kind of redemption.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 215: Mon Aug 3

Modesty Blaise (Losey, 1966): BFI Southbank, 6pm

This is a 35mm screening (also on at BFI Southbank on Saturday August 22nd) and part of the Monica Vitti season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
Coolly received by comparison with the more immediately accessible James Bond films which were then at the height of their popularity, Modesty Blaise is, like Rolls-Royces, built to last. Modelled on the cartoon strip, it plays the game up to the hilt with its op-art sets, its extravagant conceits, its outlandish violence, and its arch-fiend Gabriel (Bogarde having a ball in silvery wig and sinister glasses) daintily dreaming up ever more monstrous fancies. But under the non-stop stream of jokes lies a bitter edge of malice, directed not only against the genre itself but against a society which trusts its politicians and its generals.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 214: Sun Aug 2

The Last Laugh (Murnau, 1924): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.10pm

This silent film will feature a live piano accompaniment. The screening of The Last Laugh on Monday 10 August will be introduced by programmer Margaret Deriaz.

Chicago Reader review:
The 1924 film in which F.W. Murnau freed his camera from its stationary tripod and took it on a flight of imagination and expression that changed the way movies were made. Cameras had tracked and panned before, but never to such a deliberate and spectacular degree. Emil Jannings is the hotel doorman whose life is ruined when he is shunted to semiretirement as a lavatory attendant and his beautiful uniform is taken away from him. The film was a great international success and secured a Hollywood contract for its German director—although a president of Universal, according to legend, complained that the story made no sense because everyone knew that washroom attendants made more money than doormen.
Dave Kehr 

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 213: Sat Aug 1

Billy Liar (Schlesinger, 1963): Curzon Mayfair, 3pm

Curzon Mayfair introduction: Tom Courtenay joins us at Curzon Mayfair after the 3pm screening on Saturday 1 August of Billy Liar to talk about this, his breakthrough role and working with director John Schlesinger. Here are details of the Schlesinger season at Curzon Cinema.

Time Out review:
Released in the wake of the early social realist films of Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, Schlesinger’s physical world is the same – northern and working-class – but his approach to social commentary and storytelling, as adapted from Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s book and play, is more playful and less concerned with realism than films like ‘Taste of Honey’ and ‘Saturday Night, Sunday Morning’. Schlesinger’s Billy (Tom Courtenay) is a confused young man with too much imagination for considering kitchen sinks: nominally he’s an undertaker’s clerk, but his real job is to carve a parallel, fantasy world for himself, whether leading men to war in a state called Ambrosia or forging himself a career in showbiz. Billy’s endless lies feel less like deceptions and more like an expression of the conflicts within a young man who’s uneasy in a fast-changing world. Funny and unexpectedly poignant.
Dave Calhoun

Here's my favourite scene (and above). Courtenay rehearses his resignation ahead of the arrival of employer Emmanuel Shadrack (Leonard Rossiter).

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 212: Fri Jul 31

Looking for Mr Goodbar (Brooks, 1977): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

ICA introduction: A special screening of Looking for Mr. Goodbar with France-Lise McGurn, presented by MARFA journal. Set in the sexual frontiers of 1970s New York, Looking for Mr Goodbar features the late Diane Keaton as a well-ordered teacher by day and a restless thrillseeker by night, who looks for excitement through tempestuous hook-ups at singles bars to enrich her ordinary life and meets a brash Richard Gere along the way. The latest edition of MARFA pays a visit to artist France-Lise McGurn’s East London studio, featuring McGurn's collection of novelty furniture, magazine clippings, and large canvases propped up by tins of paint – one titled Looking for Mr. Goodbar. This event will continue with drinks at the ICA Bar. 

MARFA is as much a biannual magazine as it is an intimate take on the current state of culture. The publication pairs together contemporary art, fashion, and whatever else takes their fancy into an eccentric visual and editorial experience. Spanning across twenty-five issues and many books over more than ten years, all is elevated but unexpected. Nothing is as it should be. MARFA collaborates with the VIPs of the creative world and partners pop with niche, old with new, the cerebral with the relaxed - all to create their inimitable aesthetic. 

Peter Bradshaw wrote about the film in an article he wrote for the Guardian to coincide with the release of Gaspar Noe's film Love. Here is an extract:
Diane Keaton plays a teacher: here, specifically a teacher of hearing-impaired children, a touch that accentuates her utterly respectable, in fact, laudable life. She gets involved in casual sex with men she meets in seedy bars. It ends in shocking violence. It is as if female sexuality is always a natural fit for the erotic thriller or crime thriller genre, and undoubtedly, Goodbar pathologises female sexuality to some extent, indicating that for a woman to have an interest in recreational sex is symptomatic of damage, and essentially tragic in origin and destiny. The film has been occasionally reviled and dismissed, but is arguably ripe for rediscovery as a confrontational exploitation classic from the Martin Scorsese/Paul Schrader 70s. It is not available on DVD. 

Here (and above) are the opening credits.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 211: Thu Jul 30

Figures in a Landscape (Losey, 1970): Garden Cinema, 7.45pm

Garden Cinema introduction:
This edition of Composing Cinema celebrates the experimental musician and three-time Oscar nominated composer Richard Rodney Bennett's score for Joseph Losey's unique (and rarely screened) Figures in a Landscape. The screening will be introduced by regular host, the Oscar nominated composer Gary Yershon.

Joseph Losey returned to his roots in genre filmmaking in this minimalist reinvention of the paranoid political thriller so popular in the 1970s. Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell are two anonymous fugitives, just escaped from an unknown prison in an unnamed country and relentlessly pursued by a malevolent police helicopter. Despite their sympathy, the local population can do little to help the men and by the end it becomes clear that the two protagonists are playing out another of Losey's rituals of power and role-playing, albeit on a more ambitious scale than usual. Losey reportedly despised the gratuitous violence of the source material and enlisted Shaw's skill as a writer to craft a screenplay that would be a tough critique of militaristic violence. The result remains an intelligent and suspenseful film that powerfully uses the scenario of the chase as an existential metaphor.

Here (and above) is the trailer.