Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 255: Sun Sep 13

Lost Reels All Day Film Event: Women on the Edge, Cinema Museum, 12.30pm-10.30pm
12:30pm: Butterfly Kiss (1995) dir. Michael Winterbottom + Q&A with producer Julie Baines

A one-of-a-kind serial killer lesbian love story set in the anonymous motorways and service stations cafés of Northern England. A heady cocktail of road movie, psychodrama, black comedy, and religious allegory as we follow unpredictable schizophrenic Eunice (Amanda Plummer) wandering through petrol stations in search of a mysterious woman named Judith. Miriam (Saskia Reeves), her hard of hearing and hopelessly in love companion, joins her on the road, becoming her lover, caretaker, and murderous assistant. Compared to Thelma and Louise and Natural Born Killers, Michael Winterbottom’s debut feature is a dreamlike, downbeat British film – a jarringly uncomfortable ride through a British landscape rarely travelled.

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2.50pm: Safe (1995) 35mm dir. Todd Haynes

A Todd Haynes masterpiece about middle-class suburban housewife Carol (Julianne Moore), who contracts a mystery illness and gradually descends into sickness and possibly madness. Described by Haynes as a “horror movie of the soul,” Carol’s unexciting passionless existence is disrupted when she becomes increasingly afflicted by the sounds, odours, and chemical substances of her contemporary Los Angeles life. Haynes tracks her degeneration in calmly distanced, perfectly composed scenes, recalling the work of Stanley Kubrick. In Safe, everything is open to interpretation. The ambiguous nature of Carol’s affliction and lack of concrete solutions slowly increase our uncertainty and horror.

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6pm: Girlfight (2000) 35mm dir. Karyn Kusama + online Q&A with Karyn Kusama

Karyn Kusama’s debut feature follows a rebellious Latina teenager (a star-making turn for Michelle Rodriguez) who channels her aggression into boxing. It successfully combines urban social drama, romance, coming-of-age, and sports action to create a rewarding, uplifting, and emotionally satisfying whole. Inner-city locations and boxing sequences are shot with gritty authenticity, based on Kusama’s own experiences. The performances are first rate, particularly Rodriguez (who at times resembles a young Brando) and Jaime Tirelli as her trainer and surrogate father, Hector.
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8.30pm: Kissed (1996) 35mm dir. Lynne Stopkewich + Guest Introduction

A hauntingly beautiful and breathlessly romantic film about necrophilia is a tricky proposition, but that’s exactly what writer-director Lynne Stopkewich delivers. The film concerns a young woman, Sandra (Molly Parker) who is fascinated by death. As a child she dances around the bodies of dead animals and as an adult studies biology, taking a job at a funeral home to be near the recently deceased. She studies embalming, eventually consummating her forbidden passion. Sharing her secret with Matt (Peter Outerbridge), they embark on a doomed romance. Kissed is filled with jaw-dropping surprises among them a squirm-inducing embalming session with her creepy mortician boss.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 254: Sat Sep 12

Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006): Olympic Studios, Barnes, SW3, 12midday-11.20pm

A one-off even this one for the James Bond fan.

Event introduction:
Following the recent celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of GoldenEye, and as Casino Royale celebrates its landmark 20th anniversary, there has never been a more fitting moment to celebrate the extraordinary filmmaker responsible for introducing not one, but two James Bonds to the world.

007GB – The British James Bond Fan Club is absolutely delighted to welcome in person at OPERATION: ROYALE, acclaimed director Martin Campbell as the 2026 recipient of a Bond & Beyond Lifetime Achievement Award, recognising his outstanding contribution not only to the James Bond franchise, but to cinema as a whole.

• Exclusive access to “In Conversation with Martin Campbell” and audience Q&A
• Presentation of a Bond & Beyond Lifetime Achievement Award
• Martin Campbell introducing a special 20th anniversary screening of Casino Royale
• Screening of Casino Royale in Olympic Studios’ luxurious screening room
• Complimentary popcorn and bottled water provided at each seat
• Exclusive Champagne & Canapé reception following the screening (included in ticket price)
• Guest stars in attendance
• Opportunity to meet fellow James Bond enthusiasts from across the UK and beyond
• Limited professional red carpet photo and autograph opportunities available as paid add-ons
• Associated fundraising activities in support of UNICEF

Indicative timeline:

• 12:00pm – Guest arrival & registration opens
• 12:30pm – Guests begin taking their seats
• 1:00pm – Martin Campbell: In Conversation
• 2:00pm – Bond & Beyond Lifetime Achievement Award presentation
• 2:30pm – Casino Royale 20th Anniversary Screening, introduced by Martin Campbell
• 5:00pm – Champagne & Canapés Reception (included in ticket price) 
• 5:15pm – Pre-booked Red Carpet Photo Opportunities
• 6:30pm – Autograph Signing Session
• 8:00pm – Charity Raffle & Auction in support of UNICEF
• 9:00pm – Social Bonding continues & opportunity to mingle with Martin Campbell, special guests and fellow Bond enthusiasts
• 11:30pm – Event Close

Time Out review:
Bond: ‘A vodka martini, please.’ Casino barman: ‘Shaken or stirred?’ Bond: ‘Do I look like I give a damn?’ It’s a sharp and knowing line – probably penned by Paul Haggis, the talented, final scriptwriter of this highly enjoyable ‘back-to-basics re-boot’ of the 007 franchise – that not only simultaneously acknowledges and confounds audience expectations, but also neatly confirms that Daniel Craig’s intriguing and charismatic tyro agent is cut from quite different cloth to his Savile Row-tailored predecessors. Ian Fleming’s titular 1953 Cold-War source novel presented a proto-Bond; and it’s interesting how much licence Martin Campbell’s confidently directed action thriller takes with it. Gone is the RN commander; as the jagged, handheld, monochrome opening sequence of Craig drowning his first ‘kill’ in a blood-strewn public toilet shows, this Bond’s a tough, no-nonsense, Mondeo-driving product of the ‘who dares wins’ SAS school rather than the snobby naval wardroom, and he has some of the social contempt as well as the pumping thighs, bulging pecs and inflated ego to prove it. Cobra-baiting in Madagascar, car-chases in Nassau, Montenegro, Miami – there’s enough globe-trotting to please the purists. But, notwithstanding the fine CGI/special effects, best used in the climactic set-piece involving a disintegating Venetian palazzo, Campbell has cut down the gadgets and gizmos (not to mention ‘Q’) to inject some needed ‘realismo’ back into the action sequences, steering a neat line between romance and thrills. Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd – a government accountant assigned to keep an eye on the millions Bond stakes in the crucial poker game with Mads Mikkelsen’s pleasingly sadistic terrorist-banker, Le Chiffre – proves a sexy sparring equal to the increasingly smitten and vulnerable Bond, having been donated an audacious amount of screen time. The politics are coy, David Arnold’s score is maybe underwhelming and Phil Meheux’s cinematography merely efficient, but otherwise ‘Casino Royale’ kicks new life (literally as well as metaphorically) into the ageing hero.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 253: Fri Sep 11

La Femme infidèle (Chabrol, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT2 2.30pm & 8.30pm; NFT1 6.10pm

 This digital restoration is the centrepiece of the Claude Chabrol season Other screenings of the film, which is on an extended run during the season, are detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
Claude Chabrol’s richly ironic 1969 melodrama, in which it is shown that nothing revitalizes a dried-up marriage quite like murder. Not the least of the ironies is that the point is made sincerely and responsibly: when the film’s smug, tubby hero kills his wife’s lover, he genuinely becomes a richer, worthier individual. The observation of bourgeois life (as practiced in France, where it was perfected) is so sharp and funny that the film often feels like satire, yet its fundamental seriousness emerges in a magnificent last act, and an unforgettable last shot.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 252: Thu Sep 10

Ten Days' Wonder (Chabrol, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This is part of the Claude Chabrol season and features an introduction by season curator Catherine Wheatley. Another screenings of the film (on September 19th) during the season is detailed here.

Time Out review:
Here Claude Chabrol inaugurates a new genre, the theological thriller. Charles (Anthony Perkins at his most charismatically unstable) wakes from a dream of Creation to find himself with blood on his hands. He turns for help to his erstwhile professor of philosophy (Michel Piccoli), and persuades him back to the Van Horn country estate to use his 'Logic of Science' in sorting out the family mess. The estate is a 1925 dream engineered by Charles' adoptive father Theo Van Horn (Orson Welles), who is worshipped by his child-bride (Marlene Jobert), and sculpted as Jupiter by the awed Charles. Chabrol's movies, echoing Fritz Lang's, have long been edging towards a confrontation with the theme of Fate. This is it. Theo Van Horn chooses to play God, creating his own world, dictating the behaviour of those he places in it, taking care to add flaws to his creation to keep it breathing. But God hasn't reckoned with his own capacity for imperfection, for such shining qualities as jealousy, hatred, revenge; so he comes to his own grief, faced with the lonely fact that his creation is a nine-day wonder... Chabrol's movies grow less and less like anyone else's; this is one worth seeing again and again.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 251: Wed Sep 9

Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This is part of the Claude Chabrol season and features an introduction by season curator Catherine Wheatley. Other screenings of the film (September 21st and 25th and October 4th and 6th) during the season are detailed here.

Time Out review:
Classically simple but relentlessly probing thriller, set in a French village shadowed by the presence of a compulsive killer. Some lovely Hitchcockian games, like the strange ketchup that drips onto a picnic hamburger from a clifftop where the latest victim has been claimed. But also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the 'exchange of guilt' as Stephane Audran's starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact, for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of society's dead and maimed. With this film Claude Chabrol came full circle back to his first, echoing not only the minutely detailed provincial landscape of Le Beau Serge but its theme of redemption. The impasse here, a strangely moving tragedy, is that there is no way for the terrified teacher, bred to civilised restraints, to understand that her primeval butcher may have been reclaimed by his love for her.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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.