Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 304: Mon Nov 2

Down Terrace (Wheatley, 2009): Nickel Cinema, 6pm & 8.45pm

Introduction to a special evening of two screenings of Ben Wheatley's debut film:
'This is a F&TT&N 5 Launch screening! We celebrate the launch of Ben Wheatley's latest fanzine - film & television Thoughts & notes 5 - the Low Budget issue: with a special screening and Q&A with Ben of his debut feature DOWN TERRACE - made for less than £10K in 2009 Ben's latest fanzine unpacks some of the thoughts, processes and mistakes in making the film. It also features an interview with Charlotte Regan about making her debut feature Scrapper. Every ticket to this event comes with a copy of the fanzine. Be the first to get one - only at the Nickel.'

Time Out review:
The British gangster movie has taken a self-inflicted beating of late, but it’s not out for the count. Staying well clear of the usual parade of putdowns and punch-ups, ‘Down Terrace’ takes an unexpected approach to the genre, fusing the wry realism of Ken Loach with the blackly comic bloodlust of Ken Russell to produce perhaps the best homegrown movie of the year so far. The action is confined almost exclusively to one claustrophobic suburban house, where shiftless, insular dope dealers Karl (co-writer Robin Hill) and his petulant, paranoid dad, Bill (a stunning first-time performance from Hill’s father, Robert), are facing trouble with the law and a snitch in their midst. Everyone is in the frame: brooding matriarch Maggie (Julia Deakin), chubby, avuncular neighbour Garvey (Tony Way) and sadistic Irish thug Pringle (Michael Smiley) are all called upon to explain their actions, leading to rows, recriminations and, inevitably, bloodshed. Lots of it. What director Ben Wheatley and his writing partner, Hill – veterans of TV comedy shows like ‘Time Trumpet’ – manage to achieve in ‘Down Terrace’ is a mounting, sickening sense of a world in freefall, where morality has been compromised to the point of meaninglessness and where distrust leads to murder, even within the family unit. And while this does result in a few berserk plot diversions, particularly in the final act, Wheatley and Hill establish such an oppressive mood and construct their characters so meticulously that even in its most extreme moments, the film remains engrossing, not to mention consistently funny and even, at times, rather sweet.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 303: Sun Nov 1

Our Story (Blier, 1984): Cine Lumiere, 2pm

This 35mm presentation is also screened on November 11th and is part of the Nathalie Baye season at Cine Lumiere. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A businessman with a hangdog face (Alain Delon) drinks too much beer on a train. “What will happen to him?” he asks aloud, then answers: “Absolutely nothing.” An affectless woman (Nathalie Baye) appears and tells him, “The story begins on a train.” A sexual encounter between them leaves him smitten. Begging her to use him “as a minor character,” he follows her home to the suburbs and installs himself in her easy chair to wallow in his infatuation and drink more beer, sometimes joining her friends and bathrobe-clad neighbors in parading from house to house. Bertrand Blier begins this enchanting 1984 burlesque of bourgeois marital manners in the self-reflexive spirit of Alain Robbe-Grillet, morphs it into a droll Bunuelian farce, then ends it on a surprisingly sentimental note. With Genevieve Fontanel.
Bill Stamets

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 302: Sat Oct 31

Nosferatu (Eggers, 2024): Everyman Screen on the Green, 4.45pm

This 35mm presentation also screens on October 29th and 30th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
No one denies it: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is still the gold standard for Dracula onscreen. This 1922 silent German expressionist film—an unauthorized riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula—harnessed the macabre tale of desire and despair from the 1897 novel. By turning Count Dracula into the grotesque Count Orlok and moving the story to a German town, Murnau created something entirely its own. Despite lawsuits and near extinction, Nosferatu survived—and its shadow still looms over every vampire film made since. An adaptation was previously undertaken by Werner Herzog (1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre) and with The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022) under his belt, director Robert Eggers daringly follows in these footsteps. Eggers’s Nosferatu is predictably stylized—a cryptic horror that gradually leverages its score and pallid lighting to cultivate a grand, disquieting epic. It does so with Ellen (the Mina Murray character from Stoker’s novel, played by Lily-Rose Depp) in the foreground. “Come to me,” Ellen calls out in a sleepwalking state. Her call is answered by a brutish voice, and in a second, a communion between the melancholic girl and a demon takes place in the outside garden. This nightmare haunts Ellen to the present—1838 in the fictional German port town of Wisborg. There, she’s comforted by her new husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a too-sincere property man. This comfort is cut short. Hutter’s boss, a certain suspicious Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), sends him to the Carpathian Mountains to help secure a property for Count Orlok in Wisborg. Bill Skarsgård’s rendition of the vampire is unlike any predecessor: he’s a brute with a bushy mustache who looms just out of focus for most of the film. A rising king of horror, Skarsgård makes sure to put his stamp on this legacy. The narrative unfolds with all the classic Dracula checkpoints—a feverish account from Hutter to the vampire’s trip on the Demeter. It’s interspersed with tributes to the yearning vampire in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and the fear of the plague featured in the original silent film. It’s fair to say Eggers is juggling a lot, and it’s these influences that pull the film apart at times; it often clumsily balances the absurdity and horror of its predecessors. Yet, it’s the actors who pull together Nosferatu. Thanks to a career-making performance by Depp, Ellen is at the heart of this forlorn nightmare—it’s a performance that pulls its audience deeply into this sinister love affair.
Maxwell Rabb

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 301: Fri Oct 30

Jennifer’s Body (Kusama, 2009): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This 35mm screening is part of the National Film & Television School student-curated film seasons making their way across London cinemas in the next few months. Details here.

Time Out review:
Described by director Karyn Kusama (‘Girlfight’) as ‘a tribute to the fierce power of oestrogen’, this coming-of-age horror comedy typecasts beautiful ‘Transformers’ star Megan Fox as Jennifer, a high school alpha female in the ‘Heathers’ or ‘Mean Girls’ mould. However, by going against the grain of the ’80s horror movies to which it pays affectionate homage – ‘Carrie’, ‘Fright Night’, slasher movies in general – the script by ‘Juno’ writer Diablo Cody explores the toxic friendship between Jennifer and her nerdy, speccy bosom buddy, Needy (Amanda Seyfried). ‘Sandbox love never dies,’ so they are best friends forever. But when Jennifer’s encounter with a diabolical indie band ends with her being sacrificed and transformed into a literally maneating demon, Needy must see through her one-sided girl-crush in order to end Jennifer’s bloody reign of terror. A welcome antidote to the sexless romanticism of ‘Twilight’, Kusama and Cody’s female-driven horror comedy explores the premise that ‘hell is a teenage girl’. When the far from virginal Jennifer transforms, she simply becomes herself, but more so: her sexual power is magnified, she glows with health after feeding, and her cruel selfishness goes into overdrive. But not even Needy’s sensitive boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) will believe that Jennifer’s body is now the embodiment of evil. There are weaknesses: Kusama’s set-piece scare scenes aren’t always frightening, Cody’s trademark teen slang is occasionally more forced than arch, and the mysterious psychic connection between Jennifer and Needy is never explained. But by tapping in to the same vein of ‘hormonal horror’ as the excellent ‘Ginger Snaps’, this offers a witty, subversive look at the darker side of teen friendship.
Nigel Floyd

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 300: Thu Oct 29

Dead of Night (Cavalcanti/Hamer/Dearden/Crichton, 1945): Castle Cinema, 6.45pm

This is a 16mm presentation from the great Cine-Real team and is also screened on October 25th. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
Nearly 60 years on, Ealing's compendium of spooky tales remains scary as hell. The best of the five stories, which we see enacted as they're related in turn by guests at a country house, are Alberto Cavalcanti's 'The Ventriloquist's Dummy', with Michael Redgrave possessed by his deceptively lifeless little partner, and Hamer's 'The Haunted Mirror', with the splendid Googie Withers a reluctant participant as history repeats itself; least frightening, but amusing, are Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as typically obsessive sporting coves in Crichton's 'Golfing Story'. Best of all, however, is the overall narrative arc, with the framing story finally taking a headlong rush into a nightmarish realm almost surreal in its weird clarity and familiarity.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 299: Wed Oct 28

Brother (Kitano, 2000): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

This 35mm screening is part of the National Film and Television School student-curated film seasons making their way to cinemas across London over the few months. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A yakuza chief who’s turned up in LA helps his brother form an alliance between Japanese and black gangsters, which rivals the city’s Italian Mafia only until the new syndicate clashes with the old. The chief, played by writer-director-editor Takeshi Kitano (aka Beat Takeshi), exhales self-parody and cool in the same breath. Though he bonds with local Omar Epps in the buddy configuration typical of action comedy, Kitano’s handling of this convention—and of extreme violence—is unique. The buddies are characterized by deceptively simple twists on acknowledged stereotypes, and their intimacy evolves gradually through an accumulation of small gestures. A wizard at manipulating time, Kitano introduces staccato elements that interrupt the meditative pace even as they help set it. And he uses this paradoxically peaceful tension to inspire in us a kind of spiritual response to the violence—a sensation that’s utterly different from the visceral reaction we have to most actioners, which we only hope is catharsis.
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 298: Tue Oct 27

X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (Corman, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.30pm

This 35mm presentation (also screened on November 23rd) is part of the Roger Corman season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Scientist Ray Milland discovers a potion that gives him X-ray vision, and after becoming a freak he ends his days as a sideshow attraction promoted by Don Rickles, who gives a fine low performance. This queasy 1963 SF parable was directed—quickly and cheaply—by Roger Corman for American-International, drawing some of its strength from its tawdry drive-in overtones. Milland grows through his debasement, and the production offers plenty of it.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.