Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 250: Tue Sep 8

The English Patient (Minghella, 1996): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

Marking the reopening of the refurbished Ciné Lumière under the auspices of its figurehead, Kristin Scott Thomas, and the 30th anniversary of the release of The English Patient, the screening on 8 Sept at 18.30 will be preceded by an extended introduction by lead actors Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes.

Time Out review:
Tuscany, as the Allies pursue the Germans north at the end of WWII: traumatised by loss and carnage, Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) decides to stay behind in an abandoned, bombed monastery and care for her dying patient (Ralph Fiennes). He seems to recall little of his life, but when Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a vengeful, morphine-addicted thief, turns up and quizzes him over past dark secrets, and as Hana reads from his beloved Herodotos, memories return of the pre-war years when, as an archaeologist/cartographer in the Sahara, he had a passionate affair with Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas), wife of a British colleague. Though Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel simplifies, jettisons and changes certain elements of the original story, it remains a rich, complex, entrancing piece of work. Part poignant romance, part suspenseful adventure, part enigmatic mystery, it's essentially a study in different responses to love and war, honour and betrayal, nationality and identity, falsehood and forgiveness, which sounds subtle echoes as the narrative flashes to and fro between two main time frames. Needless to say, the performances are flawless; more surprising is the fluency, poetry and scale of Minghella's direction (John Seale's sensuous desert photography is superb), equally eloquent whether depicting boudoir intimacies, bomb-disposal skills, drunken dementia or a deadly sandstorm.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 249: Mon Sep 7

Wise Blood (Huston, 1979): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.55pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on September 19th, is part of the Harry Dean Stanton season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

 
Chicago Reader review:
Along with The Man Who Would Be King and The Dead, this is arguably John Huston's best literary adaptation, and conceivably his very best film—a very close rendering of Flannery O'Connor's remarkable first novel about a crazed southern cracker (a perfectly cast Brad Dourif) who sets out to preach a “church without Christ,” and winds up suffering a true Christian martyrdom in spite of himself. The period, local ambience, and O'Connor's deadly gallows humor are all perfectly caught, and apart from the subtle if highly pertinent fact that this is an unbeliever's version of a believer's novel, it's about as faithful a version of O'Connor's grotesque world as one could ever hope to get on film, hilarious and frightening in equal measure. O'Connor conceived her novel as a parody of existentialism, and Huston's own links with existentialism—as the director of the first U.S. stage production of No Exit, as well as Sartre's Freud script—make him an able interpreter. With Harry Dean Stanton, Amy Wright, Daniel Shor, Ned Beatty, and Huston himself as the hero's fire-and-brimstone grandfather. The producer is Michael Fitzgerald, whose family's friendship with O'Connor guaranteed the fidelity and seriousness of the undertaking.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 248: Sun Sep 6

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on September 29th, is part of the Sarah Maldoror season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Chris Marker’s 1982 masterpiece is one of the key nonfiction films of our time—a personal philosophical essay that concentrates mainly on contemporary Tokyo but also includes footage shot in Iceland, Guinea-Bissau, and San Francisco (where the filmmaker tracks down all the locations from Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Difficult to describe and almost impossible to summarize, this poetic journal of a major French filmmaker radiates in all directions, exploring and reflecting upon many decades of experience. While Marker’s brilliance as a thinker and filmmaker has largely (and unfairly) been eclipsed by Godard’s, there is conceivably no film in the entire Godard canon that has as much to say about the state of the world, and the wit and beauty of Marker’s highly original form of discourse leave a profound aftertaste. A film about subjectivity, death, photography, social custom, and consciousness itself, Sans Soleil registers like a poem one might find in a time capsule.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 247: Sat Sep 5

The Dresser (Yates, 1983): David Lean Cinema, 2pm

This screening is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
An accomplished film of Ronald Harwood's theatrical two-hander, animated by two gigantic performances. Albert Finney, grossly Shakespearean as Sir, the imperious, declamatory actor-manager with a Moses-like command of his company and inanimate objects ('St-o-o-p th-a-a-a-t tr-ai-ai-n!' he bawls, bringing British Rail to its knees), is fully matched by Tom Courtenay's pantomime poof Norman, Sir's devoted dresser: mincing, nagging, but the only one able to reach to the furthest depths of Sir's hair-tearing madness and coax him into the costumes and roles that have by wicked irony destroyed him. Especially pleasing, then, that in the final act it is the quiet craft of an actress - Eileen Atkins as the long-suffering, love-lorn stage manageress - that rises above constrictions of plot and thankless part to upstage them.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 246: Fri Sep 4

Whistle Down the Wind (Forbes, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

This 35mm screening in the 'Projecting the Archive' strand features a Q&A with actors Hayley Mills, Diane Poole and Alan Barnes.

BFI introduction: When a stranger appears in their barn, three siblings care for him in the belief that he’s Jesus returned to Earth. Forbes shot his directorial debut on location in rural Lancashire with a cast of local children, who give performances of astonishing wit and candour. A film about childhood that avoids sentimentality, it has enchanted audiences across the generations.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 245: Thu Sep 3

Bleak Moments (Leigh, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm
 

'I've tried to vary my films considerably, but I would have to admit that Bleak Moments remains, in some ways, the mother of all Mike Leigh films. And I'm very proud of it.'
Mike Leigh

The film screened by Contemporary 75, a London festival screening films that inspired generations of British audiences and filmmakers, will be followed by a Q&A with director Mike Leigh.

Chicago Reader review:
Mike Leigh's auspicious first feature focuses on the painful gaps in communication between a lonely accountant's clerk (Anne Raitt) and an uptight schoolteacher she halfheartedly tries to seduce. Kitchen-sink realism with a vengeance, punctuated by painful and awkward silences, this was made before Leigh formed a fully coherent social and political view of his material, but his feeling for the characters never falters. One can find a glancing relationship with John Cassavetes's first feature, Shadows, but the style and milieu is English to the core. This might seem overlong, and the drabness and emotional constipation may drive you slightly batty, but the film leaves a powerful aftertaste.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 244: Wed Sep 2

Sambizanga (Maldoror, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This film, which also screens on September 19th, is part of the Sarah Maldoror season at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.

Sight & Sound review:
This is the first feature in Africa to be directed by a woman. Set in 1961, at the start of the Angolan War of Independence, and shot in Congo, the film tracks the resistance efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a militant group whose leader Mário Pinto de Andrade was also Maldoror’s husband. In part, it’s about the arrest and brutal torture of a tractor driver, Domingos Xavier, who lives in a working-class district of the capital city Luanda and harbours seditious beliefs such as, “There are no whites, no mulattos, no blacks. There’s only the poor and the rich.” She gives equal importance to his wife Maria who, carrying along her infant child, sets out to find him, going from one prison to another, confronting indifference, lechery, dead ends. In her suffering, she becomes a kind of Mother Angola. Her doggedness and her heartache are portrayed with wounding acuity and illuminate Maldoror’s much-quoted belief that “African women must be everywhere. They must be in the images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about their problems.” Yet Maria’s plight is not solely African or colonial; a dogged seeker of justice, she resembles the desperate women in Zhao Liang’s documentary Petition (2009). For the director, she evokes “the alone-ness of a woman and the time it takes to trudge… It could be any woman, in any country, who takes off to find her husband.”
Sukhdev Sandhu

Here (and above) is the trailer.