Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 315: Fri Nov 13

Drive (Winding Refn, 2011): Hackney Picturehouse, 6.45pm

This is part of the excellent Mubi Weekend Festival at Hackney Picturehouse. Full details here.

Time Out review:
The truly great ‘LA noir’ movies – ‘Point Blank’, ‘The Driver’, ‘Straight Time’, ‘To Live and Die in LA’, ‘Heat’ – share common characteristics beyond the basic clichés of the crime genre. These are movies informed by the city in which they were made, a city constructed of gleaming surfaces – six-lane highways, vast industrial wastelands and endless suburban sprawl – and a place where crime is grubby and small-time, carried out by empty, hopeless loners in hock to dapper despots with unpredictable personalities. It’s in this world that we find the near-silent hero of ‘Drive’, Nicolas Winding Refn’s self-consciously slick, synth-scored throwback. Ryan Gosling plays the unnamed Driver, a mechanic and occasional getaway guy whose life is overturned when he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan), a struggling mum with a husband in the joint. As all the above implies, this is a film built on familiarity, in terms of narrative and style: neon lights flash, rubber tyres screech, Gosling broods, Mulligan swoons and a trio of wisecracking, overdressed character actors – Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman and Bryan Cranston – provide both levity and dramatic weight. But ‘Drive’ never drags: this is an entirely welcome riff on old material, a pulse-pounding, electronically enhanced cover version of a beloved standard. Sure, it’s shallow, but it’s also slickly compelling, beautifully crafted and so damn shiny.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 314: Thu Nov 12

Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Mikesch/Treut, 1985): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm

This film is part of the Collective Visions of Pleasure season at the ICA Cinema and this screening will be introduced by the season curator Nico Hughes.

ICA introduction:
Wanda, a dominatrix and businesswoman, presides over a gallery in Hamburg’s seedy port district. She stages sadomasochistic rituals as elaborate spectacles for her eager audiences. As Wanda’s many lovers become entangled in her meticulous web, the shifting dynamics between pleasure and pain, performance and reality, love and obsession, salaciously intertwine. Inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Treut and Mikesch queer the conventions of the S&M classic, placing a woman’s bisexual desire at the centre of its narrative. Pairing the glamorous and commanding presence of Mechthild Großmann with an achingly submissive Udo Kier, Mikesch’s cinematography oozes with New German Cinema cool. Banned for 18 years by the German Federal Board of Censorship, the exquisitely controlled staging and charged psychosexual tension have since established the film as a seminal work of queer cinema.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 313: Wed Nov 11

Another Woman (Allen, 1988): Nickel Cinema, 6.30pm & 8.40pm

This is a 16mm presentation.

Time Out review:
A reflective drama about a college professor in her fifties. On sabbatical to write a book on German philosophy, Marion (Gena Rowlands) rents an apartment for the necessary solitude. There she starts overhearing sessions in the psychologist's office next door, in particular the disclosures of Hope (Mia Farrow), who has cause to question her marriage, the meaning of life and death, etc. Marion gets to thinking, and is appalled to realise that so many assumptions about her own life and marriage are largely unfounded: in her desire for a controlled existence, she has evaded the emotional truth about relationships with her best friend (Sandy Dennis), brother (Harris Yulin) and husband (Ian Holm). The film shows a refinement and development of recurrent Allen themes, particularly in the characterisation of what is arguably his most complex female character to date. But in choosing a stylised approach, Allen too often obscures points in overstatement and intellectual posturing. Where the film gains considerable momentum and richness is in the marvellous performances: Rowlands' perfectly pitched approach to a demanding role is particularly stunning.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 312: Tue Nov 10

52 Pick-Up (Frankenheimer, 1986): Nickel Cinema, 6.30 & 9.15pm

This is a 16mm presentation. 

Time Out review:
This is the one Elmore Leonard fans were waiting for, the one that lost least on the swings and roundabouts of translation to the screen. It has, damagingly, exchanged the precise economic placing of Detroit for impersonal LA, fiddled a bit with the plot, but courageously sticks by the unheroic tone of the book. Married Harry's passing fling with a young 'model' places him in the hands of a trio of extortionists. They show him the evidence on video, and when he refuses to pay up, execute his mistress with his gun, and play him the subsequent snuff movie. Harry's survival depends upon his ability to play the unstable trio off against each other. Excellent performances. Best of all is the casting of Clarence Williams III as Bobby Shy - as shamblingly conspicuous as the brother from another planet, golliwog hair and a too-tight raincoat that clings like a hobo's fart, this is a guy who wants a good leaving alone.
Brian Case

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 311: Mon Nov 9

Crimes of Passion (Russell, 1984): Nickel Cinema, 6.20pm

This is a 16mm screening. 

Time Out review:
First and foremost, an extremely uninhibited satire on American sexual dreams and nightmares. Kathleen Turner, a career woman who doubles by night as the ultra-hooker China Blue, acts out every male fantasy in the book until she picks up a cop, sees him turn into a piece of meat beneath her, and gets carried away with her stiletto heels and his nightstick. She meets her Baudelairean match in Anthony Perkins, a deranged fundamentalist consumed by lust and slowly mustering the energy to act out his own dark fantasies. In between, the film lays into an 'average' suburban couple, living a sexual fantasy of their own - of marital fulfilment. It relies on sheer pace and stylistic bravura, and talks dirty more wittily than anything since Bogart and Bacall. There are lapses, but this is in the main a comedy so black that it recaptures some of the cinema's long-lost power to shock.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 310: Sun Nov 8

Profound Desires of the Gods (Imamura, 1968): ICA Cinema, 2pm

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

ICA Cinema introduction:
Set on the fictional island of Kurage which, as an islander sings throughout the film, is said to have been forged by discarded objects thrown by incestuous brother and sister gods, Imamura’s final fiction film for almost a decade builds upon many of the obsessions that characterised his work throughout the 60s, namely the clash between the primitive and the civilized. At the heart of the film sits both the Futori family, outcast from the rest of the islands inhabitants due a variety of indiscretions, ranging from incest to infidelity, improper fishing practices to mental instability, and Kariya, a Tokyo engineer sent to the island to oversee the opening of a Sugar manufacturing facility. From its lush tropical forests to its shining turquoise seas, all captured in mesmerising technicolor, Kurage appears to be an island paradise. However under its paradisiacal surface Kariya quickly discovers that the island is not only teeming with the animals and insects Imamura regularly trains his camera upon - but also with deep rooted superstitions, privation, and duplicities. Despite his attempts to complete his work, Kariya finds himself engulfed by the primal urges of the Futori family, and as the months pass under the beating sun, he slowly finds himself drawn into their way of life. Profound Desires of the Gods expands the obsessions that had animated the first decade of Imamura’s work to his largest canvas yet and in the island of Kurage (Okinawa in reality) he finds the means to examine the entire strata of a society from its messy familial dramas to its political machinations. However, the film is by no means an exercise in intellectual study, whilst Imamura’s famous anthropological outlook is ever-present, its blood, flesh, and feeling that sits at its heart. A history of Japan made myth, Imamura traces the evolution of a nation from the agrarian to the industrial, the primitive to the modern, but all the while taking great pains to remind us that no matter how things change our foundations are as desirous and ritualistic as ever.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 309: Sat Nov 7

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (Greaves, 1968): Barbican Cinema, 2.30pm

Barbican Cinema introduction: This acclaimed experimental film follows William Greaves directing a screen test of a couple arguing in Central Park; questioning both the authenticity of what we see, and the act of filmmaking. Fascinated by sociology and philosophy, Greaves created the hyper-meta Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One to explore human behaviour through the lens of social roles and pressures. More of a psychological experiment than drama or doc, Greaves uses the pretence of making a film, to examine the dynamics of a crew. Playing out like a documentary about a documentary about making a film; all these ideas come together to reflect 1960s US counterculture, and playfully subvert audience expectations at every turn, set to In A Silent Way by Miles Davis. As we celebrate the centenary of both Davis and Greaves, the film brings together the musical language of the legendary musician with the complex rhythms and shifting perspectives of Greaves’ masterpiece.

Here (and above) is the trailer.