Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 269: Sun Sep 27

A Summer's Tale (Rohmer, 1996): ICA Cinema, 7.30pm

A Tale of Summer is the third instalment of Éric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons series and, according to the filmmaker himself, the most autobiographical of his work. Mary Stephen, who will be in a in-person Q&A after this 35mm screening, not only collaborated with Rohmer on the film as an editor, but also worked with him on the music under the pseudonym ‘Sébastien Erms’, creating the melodious sea shanty the protagonist wrote in the film. This is part of a collaboration between Hong Kong Film Festival UK and the ICA.

Time Out review:
From the verbose intellectuals in his 1969 classic My Night at Maud’s to the loquacious lovers of 2007’s erotic The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, director Eric Rohmer has always loved talk. Yet in this sublime 1996 love story, nearly ten minutes elapse before a line of dialogue is spoken—a tension-generating exception to the norm. During that time we observe introverted young adult Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) as he wanders the streets of a seaside resort town, eating at restaurants, noodling on his guitar and generally avoiding eye contact. In short order, he’s approached by waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet, a Rohmer veteran), who gets the full story: Gaspard is two weeks away from starting a new job and is spending his downtime waiting for flaky sorta-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin) to arrive. Will she? Won’t she? Rohmer has a genius for taking a seemingly mundane situation and slowly tightening the screws. Margot has a rapport with Gaspard, though she denies any attraction—until maybe she doesn’t. Then there’s local girl Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon), who becomes smitten with the young man, but senses that his mind is elsewhere and continually challenges him about it. And, of course, the emotionally volatile girlfriend does show up—to Gaspard’s initial delight and eventual dismay. Conversation is a way for the characters to continually put off that crucial moment when a decision must be made. A long, enthralling interlude during which Solene and Gaspard hem and haw, evading any intimate expression (the scene’s punch line is killer) is the film in miniature. Think of it as a thriller by Hitchcock—a Rohmer favorite—only with words, not knives, that cut straight to the heart.
Keith Uhlich

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 268: Sat Sep 26

Story of Women (Chabrol, 1988): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 5.50pm

This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film on October 1st is detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
A bit mislabeled–the French title is Une affaire de femmes, which translates better as “Women’s Business”–Claude Chabrol’s accomplished and generally uncharacteristic period film (set in World War II occupied France), loosely adapted from a nonfiction book by lawyer Francis Szpiner, gives a plausible and wholly unsentimental account of a housewife and mother (Isabelle Huppert at her finest) who becomes an abortionist and winds up being sent to the guillotine for it. Married to a wounded French soldier (Francois Cluzet) who is initially off in a POW camp, she doesn’t want to sleep with him after his return, and soon becomes the family breadwinner–a tough little cookie who’s also helping other women out. Chabrol’s mise en scene and his handling of the period and performances are masterful (1988).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 267: Fri Sep 25

Audition (Miike, 1999): Rio Cinema, 8.30pm

This 35mm screening is part of the cinema's Rio Forever strand and will be introduced by filmmaker and Hackney resident Asif Kapadia.

Time Out review:
Seven years after losing his wife to cancer, video producer Aoyama (Ryo Another Lonely Hitman Ishibashi) finds the new bride of his dreams at a casting call for a non-existent movie. Asami (Shiina) is modest, polite, sexy, a trained dancer - and, apparently, available. As Aoyama nervously begins dating her, the film slips into nightmare. Is his paranoia and guilt causing him to imagine the worst, or is Asami really a woman physically and mentally damaged by men since her childhood and out for revenge? Creatively reworked from a script by the son of director Shohei Imamura, this was a breakthrough film for Miike: his first to win festival prizes and overseas sales. It takes sex war tensions to an hallucinatory extreme and has a Grand Guignol climax that leaves many males crawling to the exits.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 266: Thu Sep 24

The Cry of the Owl (Chabrol, 1987): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.55pm

This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film on September 28th is detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
Adapting the Patricia Highsmith thriller of the same title while transferring the action from an American small town to Vichy, Claude Chabrol returns to the manner—if not quite the distinction—of his late 60s work (e.g., La femme infidele, Le boucher). The plot concerns a solitary figure (Christophe Malavoy) fleeing a vengeful wife (Virginie Thevenet). He spies on a young woman (Mathilda May) from afar until she discovers and is drawn to him, which destroys her own relationship with her fiance (Jacques Penot). Things get much more complicated after that; Jean-Pierre Kalfon (L’amour fou) plays the police detective who eventually steps in. For viewers who enjoy the grim moral ironies of Highsmith, this can be highly recommended; those like myself who find her work gratuitously unpleasant won’t see any reason here to revise their opinion.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 265: Wed Sep 23

Les Biches (Chabrol, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.40pm

This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film on September 6th and 27th and October 5th are detailed here.

Time Out review:
The film with which Chabrol returned to 'serious' film-making after his series of delightful thriller/espionage spoofs, this was also the film in which he began transferring his allegiance from baroque Hitchcockery to the bleak geometry of Lang. A calm, exquisite study, set in an autumnal Riviera, of the permutational affairs of one man and two women which lead to obsession, madness and despair. Each sequence is like a question-mark adding new doubts and hypotheses to the circular (as opposed to triangular) relationship as a rich lady of lesbian leanings (Audran) picks up an impoverished girl (Sassard), and whisks her off to her St Tropez villa. There, much to the distress of her benefactress, the girl embarks on an affair with a handsome young architect (Trintignant), only to find in her turn that architect and lesbian lady are in the throes of a mutual passion. Impeccably performed, often bizarrely funny, the film winds, with brilliant clarity, through a maze of shadowy emotions to a splendidly Grand-Guignolesque ending.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the opening of the film. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 264: Tue Sep 22

The Wrong Box (Forbes, 1966): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

This 16mm screening, introduced by Nanette Newman, one of its stars and the wife of the late Bryan Forbes, is part of the Projecting the Archive: Bryan Forbes at 100 season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

BFI introduction:
A catalogue of mishaps and bizarre coincidences foils the attempts of two bumbling brothers to secure a fortune from their elderly uncle. This surreal comedy won a BAFTA for Julie Harris’ exquisite period costumes, and is brimming with famous faces, including cameos by Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers. The print being screened is Peter Sellers’ own personal 16mm copy.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 263: Mon Sep 21

On the Silver Globe (Żuławski, 1988): Garden Cinema, 2.30pm

The film will feature a video introduction by writer Adam Żuławski.

Andrzej Żuławski’s sprawling lunar futurist epic, a dark and delirious allegory on civilisation and original sin is a haven of futurist worldbuilding, hemmed in by Magdalena Tesławska’s ornate, baroque costume design. Famous for its long, troubled and repeatedly thwarted production, On the Silver Globe was finally immortalised in its incomplete state in 1988, with supplemented scenes of contemporary Poland that further a jarring juxtaposition to the story’s otherworldly alien landscapes. 

Film Comment review extract (full analysis here):
Even with this extra self-reflexive layer, it’s hard to make claims for On the Silver Globe as a great film or even, by conventional criteria, a good one. It’s excessive in so many ways—so grandiose, so hysterical, so utterly earnest. Yet it’s a film you should see, on the big screen if possible, because it’s such a spectacular anomaly—because its sheer will to strangeness is so furiously unrestrained. In its poetic and philosophical aspirations, in its outrageous maximalism, in its utter disregard for the normal prerogatives of pleasing an audience, this is the sort of film that by rights should not even exist. On the Silver Globe is not just a film maudit, but a genuine example of that small but exalted category of films you might call “Impossible Cinema,” in which I’d include other massive visionary projects either completed or aborted: Andrei Rublev; the landscape epics of Miklos Jancsó; Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune, as well as his earlier completed films; Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (similar to Silver Globe in its mix of primitivism and futurism); and the supposedly forthcoming Dau, a long-gestating Russian epic of already-legendary don’t-hold-your-breath status.
Jonathan Romney 

Here (and above) is the trailer.