Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 145: Mon May 25

Time Without Pity (Losey, 1957): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 12.30pm

This 35mm presentation (also being screened on May 30th) is part of the excellent British Post-War Cinema season at BFI. Details here.

Time Out review: An adaptation of Emlyn Williams' potboiling play Someone Waiting, about a young man wrongly convicted of murder (Alec McCowen), and the last-minute hunt for the real killer by his dipsomaniac father (Michael Redgrave). This was the first time Losey had filmed under his own name since the trauma of the blacklist, and it shows in the overstatement: the persistent play with clocks, for instance, indicating not just that Redgrave is racing against a 24-hour deadline to uncover the truth, but that his alcoholism was a way of making time stand still by shutting out his responsibilities (to his son, to society). By shifting the emphasis from thriller to anti-capital punishment pleading, Losey also strains the structure almost to breaking point. An undeniably powerful film, all the same, superbly shot by Freddie Francis and conceived with a raw-edged brilliance, right from the brutal opening murder, that accommodates even the symbolism of a Goya bull, with the real killer (Leo McKern) finally cornered. Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 144: Sun May 24

The Caretaker (Donner, 1963): Close-Up Centre, 4.30pm

This is also screened at Close-Up Cinema on May 31st. Details here.

BFI introduction: Whilst renovating his dilapidated home, Aston (Robert Shaw) invites an irritable and devious vagrant (Donald Pleasance) to stay. But, when his ill-tempered brother Mick (Alan Bates) returns, an ominous yet darkly comic power struggle between the trio commences. A play that changed the face of modern theatre and made Harold Pinter's name, The Caretaker remains one of Pinter’s most famous works. Featuring original production cast members Pleasance and Bates and sensitively directed by Clive Donner and shot by Nicolas Roeg, this study of shared illusion, tragic dispossession and the fraternal bond of unspoken love, combines mesmerising performances and the magic of Pinter's dialogue into a spellbinding film.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 143: Sat May 23

Zabriskie Point (Antonioni, 1970): Regent Street Cinema, 7.30pm

This film is introduced by the ‘Pink Floyd on Film’ series curator Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

Chicago Reader review: 
'Though Michelangelo Antonioni's only American film was very poorly received when it was released in 1969, time has been much kinder to it than to, say, La Notte, which was made a decade earlier. Antonioni's nonrealistic approach to American counterculture myths and his loose and slow approach to narrative may still put some people off—along with the uneven dialogue (credited to Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe, and the director)—but his beautiful handling of 'Scope compositions and moods has many lingering aftereffects, and the grand and beautiful apocalyptic finale is downright spectacular. With Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, and Rod Taylor.'
Jonathan Rosenbaum 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 142: Fri May 22

Bound (The Wachowskis, 1996): Rio Cinema, 8.45pm

This is part of the Rio Forever season at the cinema and is a 35mm screening.

Chicago Reader review:
The Wachowskis, who scripted Assassins, wrote and directed this adroit and sexy 1996 crime thriller about the hot romance between a gangster’s moll (Jennifer Tilly) and the ex-con who’s her neighbor (Gina Gershon). Eventually they concoct an elaborate scam to rip off the gangster (Joe Pantoliano)—a money launderer for the mob who temporarily has a couple million dollars. (The laundering here involves literally washing blood off bills.) This gets very suspenseful (as well as fairly gruesome) in spots, and if it never adds up to anything profound, it’s still a welcome change to have a lesbian couple as the chief identification figures.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 141: Thu May 21

The Margin (Candieas, 1967): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.15pm 

This film, which also screens on May 8th, is part of the Brazil on Film season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
Ozualdo Candeias was a truck driver who loved movies and decided to make his own. He did so in a very idiosyncratic style that didn’t care to conform to anyone’s idea of cinema. His first feature, The Margin, often suggests a São Paulo rereading of Mario Peixoto’s great avant-garde classic Limite (1931). It’s a sort of love story set among a group of desperate and abandoned characters. The movie takes place around the banks of the Tietê river, which stands as a promise and a limit for everyone’s lives. While Peixoto was in dialogue with the European modern art he knew well, Candeias draws heavily from the poverty around him. The movie has barely any dialogue, and the filmmaker finds a lot of beauty in the middle of the harshness. Brazil’s underdevelopment would remain Candeias’s great source of inspiration, and from The Margin onwards, no other filmmaker did more to give it representation.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 140: Wed May 20

Lust, Caution (Lee, 2007): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.30pm

Time Out review:
There’s a superb and important early scene in Ang Lee’s absorbing spy romance, set on a stylised (studio-shot) Hong Kong tram in 1939, as a young troupe of Chinese actors board, flushed with the rousing success of that night’s patriotic play. (The Japanese have already occupied their homeland, British-run Hong Kong is soon to fall.) The exhilarated lead character Wong Chia Chi (a remarkable, film-dominating debut performance by newcomer Wei Tang) thrusts her head out the window to taste the rain, as if to make physical and personal the night’s small triumph. You see in that moment how the innocent young actress may be persuaded, in patriotic duty, to adopt an alias, spy on and seduce, in order to kill Tony Leung’s collaborationist chief of police. You could call Lee’s Chinese-language version of Eileen Chang’s novella a revisionist wartime thriller. Its sub-Brechtian moments are muted, but it is more than happy to pay self-conscious attention to the period setting, design and clothes to highlight, in echo of David Hare’s ‘Plenty’, the seductive role of dress as disguise and mask. Like Hare (with his OAS volunteer, Kate Nelligan), Lee is interested in applying an emotional and psychological realism to his heroine’s incredible bravery. It seems, in wartime, some are able to assume grave responsibilties, but – as Lee’s film quietly and provocatively suggests – the actions of those that do make mockery of conventional, sex-based, notions of what constitutes courage, honour, love or even patriotism itself. In this sense, the real battlefield, the genuine theatre of truth, in ‘Lust, Caution’ is the bed – the sex – in the arranged flat three years later in Shanghai, something of a last tango wherein Leung’s previously almost obsequiously mannered ‘traitor’ shows his true colours, and Miss Wong, under her alias Mrs Mak, is transformed by the ever-present knowledge that discovery is death. It’s not a companionable film – Lee’s directorial discipline, objectivity and lack of expressionist touch in the use of either Rodrigo Prieto’s camerawork or Alexandre Desplat’s score can push the viewer close to outsider-dom or voyeurism – but its dark romanticism lingers in the mind.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 139: Tue May 19

The Bounty (Donladson, 1984): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

The 'Reece Shearsmith presents' choices at BFI Southbank have been excellent and this is no exception. The actor will introduce the film.

Chicago Reader review:
Roger Donaldson’s film of the classic tale of discipline and revolt in the British navy (1984) is far better than its predecessors, despite the dim wattage of Anthony Hopkins (as Captain Bligh) and Mel Gibson (as Mister Christian). Robert Bolt’s screenplay was originally prepared for David Lean, and it contains a lot of Bolt-ish/Lean-ish disquisition on the question of civilization versus savagery. But Donaldson brings it alive by applying the agonizing rhythm of tension and release, suppression and explosion, that governed his superb New Zealand film Smash Palace. Hardly another filmmaker in the 80s could leap from smooth classicism to dynamic modernism with such agility and expressiveness. The appalling electronic score, by Chariots of Fire‘s Vangelis, is the film’s only grating flaw.
Dave Kehr 

Here (and above) is the trailer.