Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 136: Thu May 16

Chinatown (Polanski, 1974): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of classic film. The film is also being shown on May 19th. Details here.

Time Out review:
The hard-boiled private eye coolly strolls a few steps ahead of the audience. The slapstick detective gets everything wrong and then pratfalls first over the finish line anyway. Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is neither - instead he's a hard-boiled private eye who gets everything wrong. Jake snaps tabloid-ready photos of an adulterous love nest that's no such thing. He spies a distressed young woman through a window and mistakes her for a hostage. He finds bifocals in a pond and calls them Exhibit A of marital murder, only the glasses don't belong to the victim and the wife hasn't killed anyone. Yet when he confronts ostensible black widow Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) with the spectacular evidence, the cigarette between his teeth lends his voice an authoritative Bogie hiss. Throughout, Gittes sexes up mediocre snooping with blithe arrogance and sarcastic machismo. It's the actor's default mode, sure, but in 1974 it hadn't yet calcified into Schtickolson, and in 1974 a director (Roman Polanski), a screenwriter (Robert Towne) and a producer (Robert Evans) could decide to beat a genre senseless and dump it in the wilds of Greek tragedy. 'You see, Mr Gits,' depravity incarnate Noah Cross (John Huston) famously explains, 'most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.' As is Chinatown. The last gunshot here is the sound of the gate slamming on the Paramount lot of Evans' halcyon reign, and as the camera rears back to catch Jake's expression, the dolly lists and shivers - an almost imperceptible sob of grief and recognition, but not a tear is shed.
Jessica Winter

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 136: Wed May 15

This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This is a 35mm screening (also being shown on May 1st and from digital on May 23rd) and is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
Lindsay Anderson's debut film (1963) is probably the best crafted of the British "kitchen sink" movies and features a memorable if somewhat theatrical performance by Richard Harris as a rugby star who can't handle success.
Dave Kehr

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 135: Tue May 14

Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This film is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand at the Prince Charles Cinema and will feature an introduction from Sarah Cleary.

Chicago Reader review:
Nicholas Ray's great sur-western (1954), in which, as Francois Truffaut put it, the cowboys circle and die like ballerinas. For all its violence, this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film, Ray's gentlest statement of his outsider theme. Joan Crawford, with a mature, reflective quality she never recaptured, is the owner of a small-town saloon; Sterling Hayden is the enigmatic gunfighter who comes to her aid when the townspeople turn on her. Filmed in the short-lived (but well-preserved) Trucolor process, its hues are pastel and boldly deployed, and the use of space is equally daring and expressive. With Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis, as well as Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Royal Dano, Ward Bond, and Ben Cooper.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 134: Mon May 13

Girlfriends (Weill, 1978): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the female filmmakers strand at the Prince Charles Cinema and is £1 for members.

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 is Brody's video discussion of the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 133: Sun May 12

 Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942): Prince Charles Cinema, 12pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Classic Film Season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Time Out review:
Half the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still amounts to some hill of beans.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 132: Sat May 11

Cinema is Evil – Kenneth Anger night: BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This evening (in the Experimenta strand at BFI Southbank) is a collection of films celebrating underground filmmaker and Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger titled 'Cinema Is Evil: Welcome to the World of Legendary, Queer Occult Filmmaker Kenneth Anger'.

BFI introduction:
Kenneth Anger was a pioneering, agitational, visionary voice in independent, underground film, whose stunningly shot, magick-inspired movies disrupted experimental film and influenced the darker elements of counterculture and punk. A year to the day since Anger’s death, we pay homage to this cinematic magus and his contention that, ‘the day cinema was invented was a dark day for mankind’. Programme includes early cinema title When the Devil Drives (1907), Arena special Hollywood Babylon (1991), about Anger’s infamous book, and his psychodramas Fireworks (1947) and Rabbit’s Moon (1972).

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 131: Fri May 10

His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This classic Howard Hawks movie, which also screens on May 19th and 23rd, is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Most of what Robert Altman has done with overlapping dialogue was done first by Howard Hawks in this 1940 comedy, without the benefit of Dolby stereo. (The film, in fact, often circulates in extremely poor public-domain prints that smother the glories of Hawks's sound track.) It isn't a matter of speed but of placement—the dialogue almost seems to have levels in space. Hawks's great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways. Cary Grant's performance is truly virtuoso—stunning technique applied to the most challenging material. With Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy, a genius in his way too.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.