Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 328: Thu Nov 26

The Trip (Corman, 1967): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.40pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Roger Corman season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
An earlier Corman picture, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, had uncannily predicted the rise and fall of a Timothy Leary-type hero, whose desire to see beyond human limits was punished by humiliation as a sideshow freak and by self-inflicted blindness. The Trip, a definitive commercial for acid scripted by Jack Nicholson, is in contrast boundlessly optimistic. Its advertising director hero, Fonda, takes a trip with no retribution at all: no death, no disillusionment, but much bikinied girls on sea shores, swirling psychedelia, and mumbling of 'Wow!' by the obligatory Dennis Hopper in the land of a thousand visual clichés. Despite the hedonistic panache, its lack of a comeuppance means it now lacks credence (as it once lacked a censor's certificate). Rich pickings for the pathologist of '60s life-styles, but it took Coppola to work out that the best movies were about bad trips, not good ones.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 327: Wed Nov 25

Fighting Elegy (Suzuki, 1966): Japan House, 6pm

This film is part of the season, ‘The maverick visionary: the cinematic world of Suzuki Seijun’ at Japan House and also screens on November 22.

Film Comment review: One of Suzuki’s most overlooked titles is the 1966 black-and-white, satirical antiwar film Fighting Elegy. Phalluses and crucifixes rule the imagination of Kiroku, a hyperactive student whose military training is continually interrupted by the sexual fantasies he has about the Catholic daughter of the family he’s staying with. While the country ramps up for war with China, militarism and adolescent sexuality are conflated by Suzuki and screenwriter Kaneto Shindo until the only way to practice abstinence is through violence, both personal and political. It’s one of Suzuki’s best films, and deserves a place among the finest works of cinema satire, alongside the best of Yasuzo Masumura, Robert Altman, or Billy Wilder. Marc Walkow

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 326: Tue Nov 24

Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (Kawashima, 1957): ICA Cinema, 8.30pm

This film is part of the Shōhei Imamura season at the ICA. Full details here.

ICA introduction: 
The ensemble comedy masterpiece directed by Imamura’s mentor Yūzō Kawashima, co-written with Imamura and Keichi Tanaka, takes place mostly within a high-class brothel in the Shinegawa district right before the end of the Shogunate. A critique of the Meiji Restoration period, the film exposes the encroachment of Westernisation in Japan, against rapidly dissipating ideas of honour and tradition, as sacred promises are ruptured, and deception offers the only turns to fortune. Imamura wrote about the making of the film: “When, during the writing of the screenplay, I asked him what the film was really about, Kawashima answered: ‘About the positive flight,’ but I didn't have the faintest idea what he meant by this. In any case, this film is essential for an understanding of Kawashima.” Although much has been written about Imamura’s working relationship with Ozu, experts including Audie Bock, Max Tessler and James Quandt have emphasised that Yūzō Kawashima’s off-beat, individualistic comedies have had a huge influence on Imamura’s style.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 325: Mon Nov 23

Les Diaboliques (Clouzot, 1955): Nickel Cinema, 8.55pm

 This is a 16mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
The notoriously ruthless 1955 thriller by France's most neurotic director, Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear). Clouzot cast his own wife, Vera, as an invalid who plots the murder of her husband, assisted by his mistress (Simone Signoret). Set in the rotting confines of a private school for boys, the film is cruel, sour, and—unfortunately—very effective.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 324: Sun Nov 22

The Raven (Corman, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Roger Corman season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
The humour of Richard Matheson's well-calculated send-up of Poe's gruesome The Black Cat – as the middle story in Roger Corman 's Tales of Terror – went down so well that Matheson here used Poe's poem The Raven as the basis for a full-length parody. With Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre superbly funny as rival magicians - and Jack Nicholson turning up to give the most atrocious performance of his career as the juvenile lead - The Raven is one of the few fantasy comedies that hangs together as happily as a fairytale, and it climaxes with a suitably splendid duel of marvels between Karloff and Price.
David Pirie

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 323: Sat Nov 21

The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Hou, 1985): Garden Cinema, 2pm

This is part of the Made in Taiwan season at the Garden Cinema. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A reflective autobiographical film (1985) about filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien’s youth in the late 40s and early 50s. Largely filmed in the same places in Taiwan where the events originally happened, this unhurried family chronicle carries an emotional force and a historical significance that may not be immediately apparent. Working in long takes and wide-screen, deep focus compositions that frame the characters from a discreet distance, Hou allows the locations to seep into our own memories and experience, so that, as in Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Tian’s The Blue Kite, we come to know them almost as intimately as touchstones in our own lives. Yet paradoxically, the unseen Chinese mainland carries as much weight in the film as the landscape of Taiwan: Hou’s Christian family left in 1948, and the revolution that followed made it impossible for them to return. Subtly interweaving everyday details with processes and understandings that evolve over years, the film conveys a density of familial detail that we usually encounter only in certain novels, and a sense of the tragic within hailing distance of Ozu. This was the first film by Hou I ever saw, and it provides an excellent introduction to his work as a whole
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 322: Fri Nov 20

Blue Note (Żuławski, 1991): Cine Lumiere, 8pm

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with Sophie Marceau, moderated by Daniel Bird (Curator and scholar of Eastern European cinema).

Cine Lumiere introduction: As she does every summer, George Sand spends a day in 1846 at her Nohant estate, a place steeped in childhood memories and filled with her close circle of writers and artists. Among them are her rebellious daughter Solange, whom she resents and urges to marry Fernand, a local country squire; Frédéric Chopin, her lover of eight years; Pauline Viardot, who performs his music; and painter Eugène Delacroix, who has a studio on the estate. Having dismissed the servants for the day, the household is busy in the kitchen preparing to welcome new guests... Recently restored to its original splendour, La Note bleue is one of four films Sophie Marceau made with Andrzej Żuławski over fifteen years. Their collaboration also produced L’Amour braque (1985), Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989) and La Fidélité (2000). 

Here (and above) is the trailer.