Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 321: Thu Nov 19

Chess Of The Wind (Aslani, 1976): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm

This presentation is part of the 'Lost, Banned, Reclaimed' season at ICA Cinema (details here).

ICA introduction: Screened publicly only once on its original release, at the 1976 Tehran International Film Festival, Chess of the Wind is one of the most distinctive films of Iran's pre-revolutionary New Wave. After the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979, the film was banned, and its original negative was presumed lost. Only degraded VHS copies survived. Lost for nearly four decades until its improbable rediscovery in a Tehran antique shop in 2014, Aslani's masterwork has since been restored, regaining its place as an achievement of Iranian cinema.  Set inside an ornate, candlelit mansion, the film follows Aghdas, a wheelchair-using heiress who becomes vulnerable to her late mother's husband, a corrupt stepfather determined to seize her inheritance, while his two greedy nephews circle her wealth. Her only ally is her maidservant, with whom she develops a complicated alliance. Drawing on classical Persian art, gothic horror and European modernism, Aslani creates a claustrophobic, still-life atmosphere of avarice and isolation. The film’s eerie, atonal score was composed by Sheyda Gharachedaghi, one of the most prolific female film composers of the 1960s and 1970s, blending Persian instrumentation with her Viennese conservatoire training. This screening will be introduced by Ali Lalfam, the season curator, followed by a short post-screening Q&A with Iranian filmmaker and actor Ali Mosaffa. 

Chess Of The Wind review: 
A rich matriarch has died and the battle lines of inheritance are drawn between her disabled daughter and second husband (rumoured to dabble in witchcraft). As the paranoid, hothouse atmosphere builds – and the murky basement with its jars of acid is revealed – murder seems inevitable. Aslani’s chilling, decadent family thriller is told with unsettling control and restraint. The beautifully composed interiors inspired by classic Persian miniatures become the home to horror in a world where disembodied hands express as much as faces. Sabotaged, suppressed and banned, with its negatives lost for decades, Chess of the Wind almost disappeared from the face of world cinema. With this new restoration, our perception of Iranian film will never be the same again. 
Robin Baker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 320: Wed Nov 18

Losing Ground (Collins, 1982): Barbican Cinema, 6.30pm

Barbican introduction: A masterpiece from the late Kathleen Collins, this film is a beautifully crafted drams, focusing on the tension between university lecturer Sara Rogers and her artist husband played by Bill Gunn. A rare example of an Black independent film depicting the ennui of a Black middle class, focusing on a community of professional well-educated artists, this is a rare object, made all the more rare by the premature passing of both Collins and Gunn, two artists, whose short career’s were important examples of refusing to be subsumed by the limitations provided by the film industry at the tie and would be integral in developing networks and avenues for independent Black creative spaces. The film was restored in 2022, premiering in October, having received a preservation grant from the Film Foundation and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation which enabled the creation of a new digital master from the original 16mm film elements, a new 35mm film negative, and a restored 35mm optical soundtrack, which we will be showing for our screening. The screening will be introduced by Dr Terri Francis.

New Yorker review:
It’s great news that one of the first American features directed by a black woman, “Losing Ground,” Kathleen Collins’s 1982 film, which wasn’t released until 2015, is about to come out on DVD and Blu-ray, thanks to Milestone Films. Though it’s good to see this film on the big screen, it’s most important simply to see it and see it again, freeze-frame on its deeply textured images and rewatch its sharply constructed scenes, flip through it rapidly for the pleasures of memory and watch it backward to see how it hangs together. I think it’s the movie that I’ve watched most often in the past year-plus, in the time since its rediscovery at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in February, 2015, and it continues to yield mysteries along with revelations. Rewatching it again this week, I was struck by a quality that had eluded me earlier: anger, an emotion that’s potentially destructive to express but self-destructive to repress. The film’s protagonist, Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), is a professor of philosophy (she teaches, as Collins did, at City College of New York), whose research involves the quest for ecstatic experience outside the realm of religion. Her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), is an older artist finally enjoying the first flush of success and looking to advance his work by spending a summer upstate spent sketching landscapes and people. To join him there, Sara would have to put her own research on the back burner, and Victor doesn’t hesitate to urge her to do so. The title of the film suggests the conflicts at its core—the paradox faced by many individual black women despite general progress regarding opportunities for women and African-Americans—and the action of the film, as I discuss in this clip, suggests some of the reasons why. Reason itself is among them—the effort to advance constructively while gripped by the irrational force of tradition, of unexpressed assumptions and unexamined mythologies, repressed desires and frustrated aspirations, undiscussed history and unacknowledged grief. The movie’s subject is the notion of liberation, one that’s as much aesthetic, philosophical, and emotional as it is practical and political. It’s one of the great tragedies of the modern cinema that Collins didn’t make any subsequent movies in which to pursue her powerful art and her powerful ideas—or that this very movie wasn’t seen widely in its time, and thus didn’t inspire (as it doubtless would have) a wide range of other filmmakers to pursue those ideas, to seek their own cinematic liberation.
Richard Brody

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 319: Tue Nov 17

The Making of a Prostitute (Imamura, 1973): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This 16mm presentation is part of the Shōhei Imamura season at the ICA. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Kikuyo Zendo, the subject of Shohei Imamura’s funny, shocking, and seemingly effortless 1975 documentary, was one of thousands of impoverished Japanese women forced into prostitution and shuttled across southeast Asia in the early 20th century. The director clearly regards her story as a vehicle for numerous perennial themes: the resilience of women, sex as a function of capitalism, and the radical idea that the oppressed economic underclass are the most reliable commentators on Japanese history. Sort of a nonfiction follow-up to Imamura’s narrative films The Insect Woman (1963) and Intentions of Murder (1964), this also looks forward to his 1987 period piece Zegen in its cynical portrait of Japanese imperialism, and Imamura’s warm onscreen rapport with Zendo (whom he dotes on as if she were his own mother) anticipates the humanism of his late masterpieces The Eel (1997) and Dr. Akagi (1998).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 318: Mon Nov 16

Tokyo Drifter (Suzuki, 1966): Nickel Cinema, 6.30pm

Time Out review:
Deliriously playful yakuza pic, in which Seijun Suzuki lets logic hang. Basically just another tale of gang warfare, it's kitted out with plot ellipses, bizarre sets and colour effects, inappropriate songs, absurd irrelevancies (nice hair-drier gags!), action scenes that verge on the abstract, and some visual jokes tottering precariously between slapstick and surrealism. Somehow, it still just about works as a thriller, with (very, very faint) echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and Sergio Leone. Inspired lunacy.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 317: Sun Nov 15

Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Hernandez, 2009): ICA Cinema, 2pm

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.

Reverse Shot review:
Raging Sun, Raging Sky is split into three distinct verses, consisting of a prologue and two separate epic visual love songs, the first contemporary the second mythic and ancient, featuring the same principal characters, but for the first time in color. All stanzas are largely dialogue-free, with images moving in musical ebbs and flows—it’s unlikely that anyone has made or ever will again make a men’s room seduction scene as lengthy and sinuous and erotic as the one that opens the film’s second act. After a brief shot of a projectionist, firmly situating us both in a movie dream world and literally in a movie theater frequented by horny young gay men, Hernández orchestrates an intense roundelay of flirtations, intercourse, masturbation, and voyeurism between multiple mute characters, from urinal to stall and back again—graceful camera dexterity transforms this potentially putrid lavatory space into an erotic labyrinth and unites these hungry young men in a luscious continuum of desire. The cruising continues in the shadowy entrance to the theater itself, an overhead chiaroscuro of Kieri avoiding Tari’s attempted seduction on the steps—as stunningly patterned with light as anything from early Sternberg. The lingering air of sensuality in this film, as in Broken Sky, is so strong that it’s almost as though all the characters have ESP—that they can sense each other’s presence, their skin and bodies, yes, but also their melancholy and loneliness, their intense passions. Hernández here almost seems to view this young community of gay men (more than twenty years his junior) as spiritually connected. In their isolation one could read a rather old-fashioned take on the homosexual doomed to loneliness, but there is no discernible sociopolitical angle to his point of view—this is the stuff of classic romantic legend, of poetry, of lovesickness and pursuit. When Hernández shows us an overhead shot of man in bed curled up, the sheet creases fanning out around his body like rays of light, it’s not a visual aside, it’s an entire stanza from the love song itself. Yet Hernández is seeking something more sensuous; these men are not shirking their skins but inhabiting them even more fully, and their desire is depicted as a primal, ancient force, one that, in this case, even has power to affect the present. Indeed, the richness of Hernández’s filmmaking isn’t quite comparable to that of any other of the formalist darlings of the contemporary art-house scene, from Tsai Ming-liang to Lisandro Alonso or even to Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues, who may also trade in vivid homoeroticism but whose approach is less extravagant and more given to tragic grotesquerie. The romanticism and desperation in Hernández’s films are an aesthetic unto themselves—Mexican cinema has somehow given birth to the bastard child of Cocteau and Ophuls. Now the world needs to take notice.
Michael Koresky

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 316: Sat Nov 14

Troy (Petersen, 2004): Prince Charles Cinema, 11.45am

This is a 35mm screening.

Chicago Reader review:
I can’t vouch for its fidelity to Homer, but this version of the Iliad, scripted by David Benioff (25th Hour) and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, is clearly more than a prequel to O Brother, Where Art Thou? It has plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O’Toole (as King Priam), a deeper sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic (even if Pitt’s character has some of the beefcake accoutrements of Leonardo DiCaprio’s in Titanic). Far from lost among the zillions of extras are Eric Bana (Hector), Brian Cox (Agamemnon), Diane Kruger (Helen), Orlando Bloom (Paris), Sean Bean (Odysseus), Rose Byrne, and Julie Christie.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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.