Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 221: Sun Aug 9

Culloden (Watkins, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12.40pm

This film, which also screens on August 12th, is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Peter Watkins' films are compulsively interesting almost in spite of themselves. His oeuvre may be characterised as a progression from polemical hysteria towards formal paranoia, yet it is impossible to deny his films their emotive, affective power, derived from an innovatory manipulation of technique. Culloden (made for TV) exhibits Watkins' virtues and vices in about equal proportions, but takes on a critical centrality as an initiator of the 'drama-doc' strain of British TV. These quasi-newsreels of the past and future, feeding off the documentary tradition to bolster the 'realism' of their speculative fictions, and usurping the medium's primary resources for capturing 'actuality' to present reconstructions, effectively efface their artifice by playing on the 'integrity' of certain strategies of representation. Yet Watkins must still here rely on an omniscient/propagandist commentary to convey the contextual discourses around his 'horror movies': a problem superseded in his later, similar, but increasingly worrying work.
Paul Taylor

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 220: Sat Aug 8

Death by Hanging (Oshima, 1968): ICA Cinema, 4pm

This film, which is also screened on August 5th, is part of the Nagisa Oshima season at the ICA Cinema. You can find the full details here. 

Chicago Reader review:
One of Nagisa Oshima’s very best, this Japanese feature from 1968 is concerned with the death penalty and the public’s understanding of a rape and murder committed by a Korean youth. The inventive staging is not merely dazzling but purposeful: a group of Japanese officials discovers, through a fantasy conceit, that the Korean prisoner refuses to die because the issues of his crime and his punishments aren’t understood, and the film works through a series of imaginative reconstructions of the events leading up to the rape and murder. (The issue of Japanese persecution of Koreans is also pertinent to the proceedings.) The results are Brechtian in the best sense: entertaining, instructive, gripping, mind-boggling, often humorous, and very much alive.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 219: Fri Aug 7

The Good, the Bad & The Ugly (Leone, 1966): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.10pm

This 35mm presentation is also being screened on July 15th and September 12th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Sergio Leone's comic, cynical, inexplicably moving epic spaghetti western (1966), in which all human motivation has been reduced to greed—it's just a matter of degree between the Good (Clint Eastwood), the Bad (Lee Van Cleef), and the Ugly (Eli Wallach). Leone's famous close-ups—the "two beeg eyes"—are matched by his masterfully composed long shots, which keep his crafty protagonists in the subversive foreground of a massively absurd American Civil War. Though ordained from the beginning, the three-way showdown that climaxes the film is tense and thoroughly astonishing.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 218: Thu Aug 6

The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This film is also screened on August 24th when it will shown from a 35mm print.

Chicago Reader review:
Sam Peckinpah's notorious western depicted an outlaw gang, made obsolete by encroaching civilization, in its last burst of violent, ambiguous glory. By 1969, when the film was made, the western was experiencing its last burst as well, and in retrospect Peckinpah's film seems a eulogy for the genre (there is even a dispassionate audience—Robert Ryan's watchful Pinkerton man—built into the film). The on-screen carnage established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling. With William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Strother Martin, and Albert Dekker; scripted by Walon Green and Peckinpah from a story by Green and Roy N. Sickner, and photographed by Lucien Ballard. 
Dave Kehr 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 217: Wed Aug 5

Punishment Park (Watkins, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.50pm

This film, which also screens on August 14th, is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Time Out review:
Cult British filmmaker Peter Watkins made the 1971 pseudo-documentary ‘Punishment Park’ as a reaction to the ‘revolutionary’ events in the United States in the late ’60s, in particular the wave of anti-Vietnam-fuelled activism, as well as protests against the suppression of the Black Panther movement and the shooting by the National Guard of students at Kent State University. Intended as an analysis and illustration of (US) state terrorism, the film imagines a futuristic correction facility out in the Mojave desert, where ‘security risks’ are gathered and sentenced by an unconstitutional court to potentially fatal punishments involving forced treks, without water, through the desert. Seen today, the film can be viewed in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s a prime example of Watkins’ innovative, radical approach to filmmaking. His use of fictional scenarios to examine actual political events and practices – here the reactionary tendencies of the Nixon era – has a hyper-Swiftian effect, whereby artistic exaggeration highlights the real to an intense degree. Likewise, his considered use of non-professionals as actors – real National Guardsmen, draft protesters and black activists – intensifies the emotional atmosphere, the sense of immediacy and the processes of audience identification. Interestingly, the improvised outpourings – ‘the US is as psychotic as it is powerful!’ screams one defandant – now seem very much like historical documents themselves. Finally, and more problematically, there’s the question of whether Watkins’ film succeeds as pure, tensely-structured, drama – will the two groups of dissidents survive? Will they tear themselves apart in trying to do so? Personally, I think not. But this is fascinating, gut-wrenching and thought-provoking filmmaking all the same.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 216: Tue Aug 4

Trees Lounge (Buscemi, 1996): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

A very rare screening for this wonderful independent movie that was Steve Buscemi's directorial debut. The film is also being shown on August 27th.

Time Out review:
Tommy Basilio (Steve Buscemi), a no-hoper living in suburban Long Island, is not exactly happy. He's been sacked for 'borrowing' money from the garage owned by his buddy Rob (Anthony LaPaglia), with whom Tommy's girl Theresa (Elizabeth Bracco) has now taken up. His family tend to regard him as a black sheep, while Jerry (Daniel Baldwin), Theresa's volatile brother-in-law, is anxious about Tommy hanging around his teenage daughter Debbie (Chloe Sevigny). Small wonder Tommy takes to getting legless with troubled family man Mike (Boone), trying to pick up anyone in a skirt, and generally making a nuisance of himself in the unprepossessing Trees Lounge bar. Buscemi's semi- autobiographical first feature as writer/director is a beautifully low-key, disarmingly perceptive blue-collar character-study, reminiscent of vintage Cassavetes in its sociological and emotional authenticity. If nothing here is quite as risky or inspirational as the late indie king's nerviest masterpieces, there's still much to savour: a cherishably naturalistic, extremely witty script packed with tasty trivialities and non sequiturs; top-notch performances from a superb cast; a smattering of subtle sight-gags; and sufficient drama to ensure that the overall understatement never outstays its welcome. Crucially, despite the loose narrative structure and amiable air of inconsequentiality, it's all held together, and lent poignancy, by Buscemi's Tommy: irresponsible, selfish even, but endowed with enough scrawny charm to allow us to care about his need, and capacity, for some kind of redemption.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 215: Mon Aug 3

Modesty Blaise (Losey, 1966): BFI Southbank, 6pm

This is a 35mm screening (also on at BFI Southbank on Saturday August 22nd) and part of the Monica Vitti season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
Coolly received by comparison with the more immediately accessible James Bond films which were then at the height of their popularity, Modesty Blaise is, like Rolls-Royces, built to last. Modelled on the cartoon strip, it plays the game up to the hilt with its op-art sets, its extravagant conceits, its outlandish violence, and its arch-fiend Gabriel (Bogarde having a ball in silvery wig and sinister glasses) daintily dreaming up ever more monstrous fancies. But under the non-stop stream of jokes lies a bitter edge of malice, directed not only against the genre itself but against a society which trusts its politicians and its generals.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.