Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 180: Mon Jun 29

The Prestige (Nolan, 1996): Everyman Screen on the Green, 7.30pm

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

Time Out review: With ‘Following’, ‘Memento’, ‘Insomnia’ and the uncommonly smart blockbuster ‘Batman Begins’, Christopher Nolan has established himself as a filmmaker fascinated by the fluid, tricksy contingencies of memory, identity, narrative and time: the way we depend on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and the little slips and dodges, ignorant or willed, that allow us to keep those stories straight – at least for a while. Selfhood emerges from these films as a rickety trick, an illusion dependent on misdirection and oversight. Apt, then, that the director’s latest is a story about magicians. Nolan’s first period picture, ‘The Prestige’ shares the fractured chronology common to his earlier work. Based in turn-of-the-last-century London, the plot centres on two ambitious young illusionists: flashy, easygoing Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman, abetted, as in ‘Batman Begins’, by Michael Caine) and the more original but less extrovert Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). Fellow apprentices turned bitter rivals after a grisly onstage accident, their escalating feud is a game of cat and mouse played out in a hall of mirrors, set in cramped prison cells and Colorado expanses as well as theatres, as they compete to deliver the most spectacular version of a teleportation trick that calls for something like real magic. Jackman and Bale make impressive tango partners, neither wholly sympathetic nor villainous, each drawing out the synergy between his character’s personality and his onstage style. It’s a handsome film, too, beautifully photographed by Wally Pfister in a chocolate-and-cinnamon sepia palette flashed with electric blue. Ben Walters

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 179: Sun Jun 28

My Left Foot (Sheridan, 1989): Phoenix Cinema, 2pm

The film will be followed by a Q&A with director Jim Sheridan.

Chicago Reader review:
The remarkable Daniel Day-Lewis plays the remarkable Christy Brown, an Irishman born with a severe case of cerebral palsy who eventually taught himself to paint and write with his left foot, in a film adapted by director Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton from Brown’s autobiography. Far from milking this subject for conventional sentimentality, the filmmakers use it as the basis for an engaging and idiosyncratic character study. Lewis’s performance is necessarily a bit showy–one has to strain at times to understand all his dialogue because of the character’s contorted features–but he puts on a terrific drunk scene, and for all his character’s travails, the film as a whole winds up as surprisingly upbeat. With Brenda Fricker (also very fine) as Brown’s mother, Alison Whelan, Kirsten Sheridan, Declan Croghan, Fiona Shaw, and Cyril Cusack.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 178: Sat Jun 27

Nightcleaners (Karlin/Kelly/Scott, 1975): Barbican Cinema, 4.30pm

Barbican Cinema introduction:
In London, in the early seventies, a group of women had begun to leaflet cleaners who worked at night to encourage them to form a union. This labour organisation became the central action of the documentary. Completed in 1975, Nightcleaners is the combined work of Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan, together known as the Berwick Street Film Collective. The film quickly became known for its innovative structure. Through its approach to revealing otherwise hidden truths, it successfully challenges conventional documentary storytelling. More than any other film produced during this period, it stands out as a work that, to this day, continues to inspire a new generation of filmmakers to question longstanding practices in political filmmaking. 

Time Out review:
This documentary started out as a conventional agit-prop project in support of the 1972 campaign to unionise women nightcleaners in London. In the three years that it took to complete, it turned into something very much more complex and challenging: a film that places the nightcleaners' campaign within a series of broader political discussions formulated as an 'open text' which asks as many questions about its own status as a film as it does about the socio-political issues that are its subject. No engaged person should overlook its challenge.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 177: Fri Jun 26

A Taste of Flesh (Wishman, 1967): Barbican Cinema, 6.30pm

This screening, which is part of the Queer 60s season at the Barbican Cinema, will be followed by a discussion about Wishman and her legacy with Jaye Hudson and Selina Robertson, chaired by season curator Alex Davidson.

Barbican Cinema introduction:
Doris Wishman was truly a one-of-a-kind. She was a rare female director working in the exploitation subgenre, although there are few proto-feminist messages to be found in her films. She put a lesbian character centre in A Taste of Flesh (1967), a sensational thriller made on the cheap and shot entirely in one apartment, featuring three women who are held captive by two male crooks planning an assassination on a visiting foreign president. The results have to be seen to be believed. One of the women is a predatory lesbian, who, despite the problematic nature of her character, is underestimated by the two men who threaten her. There is a jaw-dropping queer daydream sequence that is worth the ticket price alone. While it is first and foremost a sleazy exploitation thriller, this is one of Wishman’s most fascinating films.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 176: Thu Jun 25

Kill List (Wheatley, 2011): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.30pm

Presented at the Prince Charles Cinema on 35mm with a special 15th Anniversary Post-Film Q&A with Director Ben Wheatley, as part of BLEAK WEEK 2026. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Much of ‘Kill List’ will be familiar to anyone who caught ‘Down Terrace’ during its brief run last year: the semi-improvised dialogue and naturalistic performances, the close, documentary-style photography and the deep-seated sense of suburban moral decay. But it’s altogether more confident: where the earlier film leavened the darker moments with slapstick and satire, ‘Kill List’ is an unrelentingly grim ride into the bleakest imaginable terrain, its only humour black beyond belief. There will be some who find the resulting series of increasingly brutal and dreamlike events hard to process, and a number of plot points remain unexplained even as the credits roll. But allow the film to take hold and its power is inescapable: the effect is like placing your head in a vice and waiting as it inexorably closes. It’s hard to remember a British movie as nerve-shreddingly effective since ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ in 2004. Like that film, ‘Kill List’ may not make the impact it deserves upon initial release. But this is a grower, a film which lingers long in the memory: look for it on ‘Best of British’ lists for a long time to come.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 175: Wed Jun 24

The Crazies (Romero, 1973): Nickel Cinema, 8.45pm

Time Out review:
Night of the Living Dead suggested that George A Romero was an unusual if none too clearly defined talent; two non-horror movies later, The Crazies proved it. The main plot premise echoes The Andromeda Strain: an accident with a virus creates a terrifying civil emergency, and incidentally reveals that the US government is working towards germ warfare. Romero, however, is more interested in effect than cause. First, he brilliantly updates the riddle Don Siegel posed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: how can one tell who is infected and who isn't? The virus drives its victims mad before killing them, but what is the line between 'normal' hysteria and actual insanity? Second, and equally brilliantly, he demonstrates the difficulty in imposing martial law on a community of gun-owners, thereby creating a highly feasible vision of social collapse. Good dialogue and performances, too.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 174: Tue Jun 23

Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This is an Animus magazine presentation of a 35mm screening. There will be an introduction by legendary producer Jeremy Thomas (schedule permitting). 

As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or, possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly distributed at the time.

It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting; masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat. The ending stayed with me for quite some time. Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.

Time Out review:
One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing, less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters.
Don Macpherson

Here (and above) is the trailer.