Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 137: Fri May 17

Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 2.40pm/6.15pm/8.40pm

This film, presented in a 4K restoration, is on an extended run at BFI Southbank, and is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.

I haven't seen this since my post-graduate days at Derby Lonsdale College in the mid-1980s but found it a real eye-opener at the time and wouldn't disagree with this ecstatic review in Chicago Reader. Director Roberto Rossellini was a pioneer and this film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, brought the attention of the world to the development of the hugely influential neorealism era in Italian cinema.

Chicago Reader review:
Roberto Rossellini's 1946 story of a group of workers and a priest in 1943-'44 Rome, declared an “open city” by the Nazis, was begun only two months after the liberation. Its realistic treatment of everyday Italian life heralded the postwar renaissance of the Italian cinema and the development of neorealism; the film astonished audiences around the world and remains a masterpiece. With Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi, and Maria Michi.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 136: Thu May 16

Chinatown (Polanski, 1974): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of classic film. The film is also being shown on May 19th. Details here.

Time Out review:
The hard-boiled private eye coolly strolls a few steps ahead of the audience. The slapstick detective gets everything wrong and then pratfalls first over the finish line anyway. Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is neither - instead he's a hard-boiled private eye who gets everything wrong. Jake snaps tabloid-ready photos of an adulterous love nest that's no such thing. He spies a distressed young woman through a window and mistakes her for a hostage. He finds bifocals in a pond and calls them Exhibit A of marital murder, only the glasses don't belong to the victim and the wife hasn't killed anyone. Yet when he confronts ostensible black widow Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) with the spectacular evidence, the cigarette between his teeth lends his voice an authoritative Bogie hiss. Throughout, Gittes sexes up mediocre snooping with blithe arrogance and sarcastic machismo. It's the actor's default mode, sure, but in 1974 it hadn't yet calcified into Schtickolson, and in 1974 a director (Roman Polanski), a screenwriter (Robert Towne) and a producer (Robert Evans) could decide to beat a genre senseless and dump it in the wilds of Greek tragedy. 'You see, Mr Gits,' depravity incarnate Noah Cross (John Huston) famously explains, 'most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.' As is Chinatown. The last gunshot here is the sound of the gate slamming on the Paramount lot of Evans' halcyon reign, and as the camera rears back to catch Jake's expression, the dolly lists and shivers - an almost imperceptible sob of grief and recognition, but not a tear is shed.
Jessica Winter

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 136: Wed May 15

This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This is a 35mm screening (also being shown on May 1st and from digital on May 23rd) and is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
Lindsay Anderson's debut film (1963) is probably the best crafted of the British "kitchen sink" movies and features a memorable if somewhat theatrical performance by Richard Harris as a rugby star who can't handle success.
Dave Kehr

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 135: Tue May 14

Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This film is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand at the Prince Charles Cinema and will feature an introduction from Sarah Cleary.

Chicago Reader review:
Nicholas Ray's great sur-western (1954), in which, as Francois Truffaut put it, the cowboys circle and die like ballerinas. For all its violence, this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film, Ray's gentlest statement of his outsider theme. Joan Crawford, with a mature, reflective quality she never recaptured, is the owner of a small-town saloon; Sterling Hayden is the enigmatic gunfighter who comes to her aid when the townspeople turn on her. Filmed in the short-lived (but well-preserved) Trucolor process, its hues are pastel and boldly deployed, and the use of space is equally daring and expressive. With Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis, as well as Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Royal Dano, Ward Bond, and Ben Cooper.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 134: Mon May 13

Girlfriends (Weill, 1978): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the female filmmakers strand at the Prince Charles Cinema and is £1 for members.

New Yorker review:
One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely, that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing, the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor, the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind, achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her. Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical, dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women, when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded, perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in the same way.
Richard Brody

Here is Brody's video discussion of the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 133: Sun May 12

 Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942): Prince Charles Cinema, 12pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Classic Film Season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Time Out review:
Half the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still amounts to some hill of beans.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 132: Sat May 11

Cinema is Evil – Kenneth Anger night: BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This evening (in the Experimenta strand at BFI Southbank) is a collection of films celebrating underground filmmaker and Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger titled 'Cinema Is Evil: Welcome to the World of Legendary, Queer Occult Filmmaker Kenneth Anger'.

BFI introduction:
Kenneth Anger was a pioneering, agitational, visionary voice in independent, underground film, whose stunningly shot, magick-inspired movies disrupted experimental film and influenced the darker elements of counterculture and punk. A year to the day since Anger’s death, we pay homage to this cinematic magus and his contention that, ‘the day cinema was invented was a dark day for mankind’. Programme includes early cinema title When the Devil Drives (1907), Arena special Hollywood Babylon (1991), about Anger’s infamous book, and his psychodramas Fireworks (1947) and Rabbit’s Moon (1972).

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 131: Fri May 10

His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This classic Howard Hawks movie, which also screens on May 19th and 23rd, is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Most of what Robert Altman has done with overlapping dialogue was done first by Howard Hawks in this 1940 comedy, without the benefit of Dolby stereo. (The film, in fact, often circulates in extremely poor public-domain prints that smother the glories of Hawks's sound track.) It isn't a matter of speed but of placement—the dialogue almost seems to have levels in space. Hawks's great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways. Cary Grant's performance is truly virtuoso—stunning technique applied to the most challenging material. With Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy, a genius in his way too.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 130: Thu May 9

In Celebration (Anderson, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.25pm

This film, which also screens on May 22nd, is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.

BFI introduction:
Lindsay Anderson’s capacity for drawing out extraordinary performances hits full flight in this tight, tense domestic drama starring Brian Cox, James Bolam and Alan Bates. The powerhouse trio play three successful brothers returning home to celebrate their working-class parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. As the actors hit their stride, it’s not long before old secrets, suppressed bitterness and quiet sadness resurface.

Here (and above) is Alan Bates talking about the making of the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 129: Wed May 8

Sudden Fury (Damude, 1975): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

Cinema Museum introduction:
The Nickel Cinema continues its season of offbeat road film with the lean, mean and rarely seen Canuxploitation thriller Sudden Fury (1975). Psychosis and matricide on the Ontario backwoods! This forgotten grindhouse gem triumphs over its low budget with a tight script and a memorably deranged performance by regional actor Dominic Hogan, building to a breathless crescendo of an ending. You wont see this on Disney Plus!

Here (and above) is the trailer for this road movie season.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 128: Tue May 7

Bonjour Tristesse (Preminger, 1958): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

This film also screens on May 5th and 9th. Full details here. I wrote a feature about the film and its star, Jean Seberg, for the Guardian when the movie was screened at the London Film Festival in 2012.

Chicago Reader review:
Jean-Luc Godard conceived Jean Seberg's character in Breathless as an extension of her role in this 1958 Otto Preminger film: the restless teenage daughter of a bored, decaying playboy (David Niven), she tries to undermine what might be her father's last chance for happiness, a romance with an Englishwoman (Deborah Kerr). Arguably, this is Preminger's masterpiece: working with a soapy script by Arthur Laurents (by way of Francoise Sagan's novel), Preminger turns the melodrama into a meditation on motives and their ultimate unknowability. Long takes and balanced 'Scope compositions are used to bind the characters together; Preminger uses the wide screen not to expand the spectacle, but to narrow and intensify the drama. With Mylene Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, and Juliette Greco; photographed in Technicolor (apart from a black-and-white prologue and epilogue), mainly on the Riviera, by Georges Perinal.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 127: Mon May 6

Paisan (Rossellini, 1946): BFI Soutbank, Studio, 3.20pm

This film, part of the Italian Neorealism season at BFI Southbank, also screens on May 10th, 19th, 20th and 29th. You can find the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Roberto Rossellini’s six-part film about the liberation of Italy was released in 1946; it confirmed the neorealist style of his Open City, released a year earlier, but also extended that style into melodrama, where many critics did not want to follow. The episodes all seem to have an anecdotal triteness—black soldier befriends orphan boy, prostitute finds redemption, etc—but each acquires a wholly unexpected naturalness and depth of feeling from Rossellini’s refusal to hype the anecdotes with conventional dramatic rhetoric. The concluding episodes—a final skirmish between Germans and partisans in the Po valley—is one of Rossellini’s most sublime accomplishments, a largely wordless sequence that uses shifting focal lengths, drifting camera movements, and natural sounds to create a suspense of almost unbearable intensity and immediacy.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is Martin Scorsese's introduction to the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 126: Sun May 5

Tattoo (Brooks, 1981) + The Skin I Live In (Almodovar, 2011): Cinema Museum, 6pm

Cinema Museum introduction:
Lost Reels continues its series of provocative celluloid double bills with two of the most terrifying, horror-infused love stories ever made. Love stories and horror are synonymous with the movies, and Lost Reels’ provocative new double bill presents two of the most unusual – and terrifying – films of passion in cinematic history. First is the virtually forgotten and completely out of circulation, Tattoo (1981) starring Bruce Dern and Maud Adams. Described by Variety as, “your standard boy-meets-girl, boy-kidnaps-girl, boy-tattoos-girl-against-her-will love story” the film caused controversy when first released, gained an ‘X’ certificate in the UK, and is a genuinely bizarre, outrageous cult curio. Second is The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) (2011), Pedro Almodóvar’s brilliantly subversive foray into provocation and horror starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, and Jan Cornet. Unique within Almodóvar’s filmography, it’s a film first-time audiences should know as little about as possible while at the same time being prepared for one of the most perverse and unsettling experiences a trip to the cinema can provide.

Here (and above) is the trailer for Tattoo.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 125: Sat May 4

Ossessione (Visconti, 1943): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.15pm

This film, part of the Italian Neorealism season at BFI Southbank, also screens on May 12th. You can find the details here.

Time Out review:
Luchino Visconti's stunning feature debut transposes The Postman Always Rings Twice to the endless, empty lowlands of the Po Delta. There, an itinerant labourer (Massimo Girotti) stumbles into a tatty roadside trattoria and an emotional quagmire. Seduced by Calamai, he disposes of her fat, doltish husband (Juan de Landa), and the familiar Cain litany - lust, greed, murder, recrimination - begins. Ossessione is often described as the harbinger of neo-realism, but the pictorial beauty (and astute use of music, often ironically) are pure Visconti, while the bleak view of sexual passion poaches on authentic noir territory, steeped, as co-scriptwriter Giuseppe De Santis put it, 'in the air of death and sperm'.
Sheila Johnston

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 124: Fri May 3

She's All That (Iscove, 1999): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.30pm

Chicago Reader review:
High school BMOC Freddie Prinze Jr. is challenged by a mean-spirited buddy to upgrade the social standing of an unpopular girl by courting her, and the question of whether Prinze is supposed to be likable hangs in the air as this romantic comedy stumbles along. As an undiscovered beauty who frequents open-stage night at the local performance-art club, her rack hidden under paint-spattered overalls, her chiseled face obscured by glasses, Rachael Leigh Cook is charming and sincere, and ultimately so is Prinze, whose character’s realization that he’s not as shallow as he’d thought is convincing. Their charisma and the movie’s enthusiastically inconsistent tone make this makeover vehicle watchable; it’s often impossible to distinguish what’s meant to be cartoonish from what’s meant to be dramatic, but the confusion seems appropriately adolescent.
Lisa Alspector

Here (and above) is ther trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 123: Thu May 2

Dr Strangelove (Kubrick, 1963): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Stanley Kubrick season at the Prince Charles Cinema and is also being screened on April 13th. Details here.

Time Out review:
'Perhaps Stanley Kubrick's most perfectly realised film, simply because his cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is wedded with comedy, in this case Terry Southern's sparkling script in which the world comes to an end thanks to a mad US general's paranoia about women and commies. Peter Sellers' three roles are something of an indulgent showcase, though as the tight-lipped RAF officer and the US president he gives excellent performances. Better, however, are Scott as the gung-ho military man frustrated by political soft-pedalling, and - especially - Sterling Hayden as the beleaguered lunatic who presses the button. Kubrick wanted to have the antics end up with a custard-pie finale, but thank heavens he didn't; the result is scary, hilarious, and nightmarishly beautiful, far more effective in its portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy anti-nuke documentaries.'
Geoff Andrew

Watch this trailer. Now try and tell me you don't want to see this film again.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 122: Wed May 1

Leaving Las Vegas (Figgis, 1995): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.05pm

This film is part of the Nicolas Cage season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Time Out review:
Alcoholic scriptwriter Ben (Nicolas Cage) is blowing his options. Our first glimpse sees his beyond-niceties collaring of an agent friend in a smart restaurant to demand drink money, a symptomatic preamble to what's staring him in the face: a 'sadly, we have to let you go' dismissal from his studio job. Figgis sets the crap game running here: the pay-off finances a one-way ticket to oblivion or, to give hell its name, Las Vegas, city of permanent after-hours. Cash the cheque, burn the past, take the freeway - we're in the booze movie, that most fascinatingly flawed form of the modern urban tragedy. This modestly budget masterpiece pools the Vegas streets with reflected neon and watches Ben drown. Shue is good as the young hooker he falls for, but Cage is extraordinary, producing an Oscar-winning performance of edgy, utterly convincing suicidal auto-destruct. In fact, Figgis makes of him something of an existential saint, a man for whom terminal self-knowledge leads to a kind of grace. If the film lacks the depth and structural sophistication of, say, The Lost Weekend (it was shot fast, with Declan Quinn's saturated Super-16 photography blown up, which may explain its kinetic buzz), it certainly has the courage of its convictions.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 121: Tue Apr 30

Leila and the Wolves (Srour, 1984): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This is the closing night film in the Open City Documentary Festival of 2024. Details here.

ICA introduction:
It took Heiny Srour six years to make Leila and the Wolves, a film that reveals a hidden past of women’s struggle in Palestine and Lebanon in an attempt to rewrite the history of the region from a feminist point of view. As John Akomfrah has written, Leila and the Wolves “weaves a rich tableau of history, folklore, myth and archival material.” The film is structured in a series of sketches, each of which features the same actors. The female protagonist (Nabila Zeitoni) is a modern Lebanese woman living in London, where she is staging a photography exhibition in which women are the unsung heroines and martyrs of political conflict. She time travels through the 1900s to the 1980s, wandering through real and imaginary landscapes of Lebanon and Palestine. In an interview from 2020, the filmmaker says: “Nowadays, Leila and the Wolves is travelling the world again, more relevant than ever; my unconscious and the collective unconscious of the women of the Middle East spoke together throughout the extreme conditions of making this film.”

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its release, we are honoured to close the 2024 edition of Open City Documentary Festival with a new digital restoration of Leila and the Wolves, co-presented with Cinenova. Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. Leila and the Wolves was originally distributed in the UK by Cinema of Women, one of Cinenova’s predecessor organisations.  

With an introduction by Nadia Yahlom (Sarha Collective)

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 120: Mon Apr 29

Where the Sidewalk Ends (Preminger, 1950): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This film is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank and also screens on April 27th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
A weatherbeaten Dana Andrews gives one of his finest performances as Detective Mark Dixon, a belligerent cop whose father was a crook and whose roughhouse tactics appal his bosses. He's a good man at heart, but the fates are against him and his behaviour becomes closer and closer to that of the father he abhorred. Mobster Merrill is always on hand to taunt him about his background. His plight becomes yet more desperate when he accidentally kills a murder suspect and then falls in love with the widow (Gene Tierney). Otto Preminger's superior noir boasts hardboiled and sardonic dialogue, courtesy of Ben Hecht, but also a surprising strain of pathos as Dixon fights against his own nature. Brutal, fatalistic, but desperate for redemption, he's just the kind of cop James Ellroy would write about so well a generation later.
Geoffrey Macnab

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 119: Sun Apr 28

Nowhere (Araki, 1997): Barbican Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the Chronic Youth Film Festival at the Barbican.

Chicago Reader review:
Try to imagine a Russ Meyer porn movie about LA teenagers crossed with an early scatological John Waters opus and punctuated with outtakes from Natural Born Killers; you’ll have a rough idea what Gregg Araki is up to in this hyper, scattershot movie, whose own publicity compares it to a Beverly Hills 90210 episode on acid. Even if the compulsively kaleidoscopic visual style (ten times too many close-ups for my taste) and scuzzy dialogue are such that only one moment out of seven makes much of an impression, there’s still plenty to be amused or nauseated by: phrases like “Whatev” (a reductio ad absurdum of west-coast verbal sloth), “Dogs eating people is cool,” and “You smell like a wet dog”; a face getting beaten to a pulp by an unopened can of tomato soup (making one wonder if Campbell’s paid for the product placement); blood-spattered walls color coordinated with a tacky floral bedspread; flashes of kinky straight sex and tender homoeroticism; periodic appearances by the Creature From the Black Lagoon; and so on—adding up to loads of flash and minimal substance. The cast includes James Duval, Rachel True, Christina Applegate, Debi Mazar, and Chiara Mastroianni, and there are loads of guest appearances.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 118: Sat Apr 27

Kes (Loach, 1969): Cinema Museum, 3pm

Cinema Museum introduction to this special day:
Misty Moon presents a rare chance to see Ken Loach’s seminal classic film Kes (1969) and meet Billy Casper himself. Based on the book A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines and set in South Yorkshire, Kes was originally released in 1969 and tells the tale of young Billy Casper and his beloved kestrel. With memorable performances from David Bradley, Colin Welland and Brian Glover, it is often cited as one of the greatest British films ever made. The film will be shown in its entirety from an original 35mm release print, followed by a Q&A with its leading man, David Bradley. There will also be an opportunity to meet David after the show and to purchase autographs.
Doors open at 14.00, for a 15.00 start. Q&A starts at 17.30.

Chicago Reader review:
In 1969 Ken Loach took time out from an acclaimed television career to direct this quietly powerful narrative feature, a classic of British social realism. Based on a novel by Barry Hines but shot like a documentary, with a hardscrabble industrial setting and a cast that blends professionals and amateurs, the film tracks an introverted Yorkshire lad (David Bradley) who's abandoned by his father and bullied by his coal-miner brother (Freddie Fletcher). A failure in the classroom and on the soccer pitch alike, the boy finds his wings when he adopts and trains a fledgling kestrel. Working in the style of cinema verite, cinematographer Chris Menges captures the petty tyrannies of the provincial working class and the inchoate joys of a youngster stumbling toward the greater world.
Andrea Gronvall

For a change (from the footy) here's the pub scene.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 117: Fri Apr 26

The Ghost and Mrs Muir (Mankiewicz, 1947): BFI Southbank, Studio, 12.20pm*

*There is another screening of this film on April 23rd at 6.10pm in NFT2. Details here. This movie is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
Apprentice work, comparatively speaking, not scripted by Joseph L Mankiewicz himself (although he contributed), but still astonishingly characteristic in its airy philosophical speculations about the imagination and its role as a refuge when the salty ghost of a sea captain (Harrison) befriends a beautiful widow (Gene Tierney) and intervenes to save her from the cad she is thinking of marrying. Leaning too heavily towards light comedy, Mankiewicz doesn't get the balance quite right, so that the tale of a romance tenuously bridging two worlds isn't quite as moving as it should be when reality ultimately reasserts its claims. A hugely charming film, nevertheless, beautifully shot (by Charles Lang), superbly acted, and with a haunting score by Bernard Herrmann.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 116: Thu Apr 25

The Crazy Family (Ishii, 1984): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

The Nickel presents the 40th Anniversary restoration of Sogo Ishii’s (Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001), Crazy Thunder Road (1980)) cult classic, with introduction by film critic James Balmont.

Chicago Reader review:
An ideally symmetrical Japanese family–dad, mom, junior, and sis–moves into a new suburban home, where rising middle-class expectations (and gramps barging in for an open-ended stay) cause everything to deconstruct explosively. Sogo Ishii’s lunatic black comedy seems less concerned with actual family dynamics than with turning its sitcom household into an open arena of competing pop-culture images and energies. Ishii has a keen eye for cultural detritus–the samurai films and superhero cartoon shows and pornographic comic strips that have bored their way into modern Japanese consciousness (in much the same manner as crazy dad’s termites)–and his film at times displays the antinarrative logic of a TV wrestling marathon: it redundantly accumulates rather than develops, with outrage piling upon outrage in baroque profusion (kitchenware samurai mom faces off against Tojo warrior gramps while martial nymphet sis plots against spacehead junior, etc). There’s a Woman of the Dunes metaphor lurking about (dad digs a hole in the kitchen floor and everybody falls in, but the house is already an entropic pit) and plenty cartoon silliness to push the sitcom strategies over the subversive edge. Not, shall we say, the shapeliest of films, but one that packs a raw, energetic punch.
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 115: Wed Apr 24

Leon Morin, Priest (Melville, 1961): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
Aiming successfully for a wider audience in 1961, the neglected French independent Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai) adapted Beatrix Beck's autobiographical novel, set in a French village during World War II, about a young woman falling in love with a handsome, radical young priest who's fully aware of his power over her. For the starring roles Melville, godfather of the New Wave, ironically selected two talented actors catapulted to fame by that movement—Emmanuele Riva (Hiroshima, Mon Amour) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless). The poetic results are literary and personal; the heroine's offscreen narration suggests the pre-Bressonian form of Melville's first feature, Le Silence de la Mer, and sudden subjective shots convey the woman's physical proximity to the priest as she undergoes an ambiguous religious conversion. Not an unqualified success, the film remains strong for its performances, its inventive editing and framing, and its evocative rendering of the French occupation. The eclectic and resourceful nonjazz score is by jazz pianist Martial Solal.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 114: Tue Apr 23

Chess Of The Wind (Aslani, 1976): Genesis Cinema, 9pm

 
Released and shown only twice in 1976, this Iranian gothic thriller was banned by the Iranian theologians in power from 1979 and thought lost forever - until that is, the mid 2010s, when the director’s children found a copy in a charity shop. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris) in collaboration with Mohammad Reza Aslani and Gita Aslani Shahrestani. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Film Forum introduction:
In an ornate, candlelit mansion in 1920s Tehran, the heirs to a family fortune vie for control of their matriarch’s estate — erupting in a ferocious final act. Screened publicly just once before it was banned, then lost for decades. “The opulent, claustrophobic interiors are reminiscent of Persian miniatures… The influence of European cinematic masters like Pasolini, Visconti and Bresson is also apparent. The sound design also stands out: wolves howl and dogs bay as they circle the house, ratcheting up the sense of menace; crows caw, jangling the nerves; heavy breathing makes the characters’ isolation in this haunted house increasingly oppressive. The soundtrack — an early work by trailblazing female composer Sheyda Gharachedaghi — takes inspiration from traditional Iranian music, and sounds like demented jazz.” – The Guardian.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 113: Mon Apr 22

The Magician (Bergman, 1958): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.45pm

This rarely seen Ingmar Bergman film is being screened from 35mm and is also being shown  at the Prince Charles Cinema on April 10th and May 8th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Widely underrated, probably because of its strong comic elements and a tour-de-force scene derived from horror movie conventions, Ingmar Bergman's chilling exploration of charlatanism is in fact one of his most genuinely enjoyable films. Max Von Sydow is the 19th century magician/mesmerist Volger, on the run with his troupe from debts and charges of blasphemy, whose diabolical talents are put to the test by the cynical rationalist Dr Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand); their clash results in humiliation, doubt, and death. Much of the film is devoted to wittily ironic sideswipes at bourgeois hypocrisy; more forceful, however, is the way Bergman transforms Volger's ultimately futile act of revenge into a sequence of nightmarish suspense.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 112: Sun Apr 21

Whirlpool (Preminger, 1950): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This film is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank and also screens on April 21st. Full details here.

Time Out review:
The same themes and the same cool style as in Laura and Angel Face are at work in this portrait of the wealthy and sophisticated cracking apart at the seams, under pressure from psychological hang-ups, repressed passion, and innocent gullibility. When rich kleptomaniac Gene Tierney turns for help not to her psychoanalyst husband (Richard Conte) but to a hard-hearted hypnotherapist (Jose Ferrer), she finds herself bereft of memory and implicated in a murder. Preminger translates the rather daft story (scripted by a pseudonymous Ben Hecht, loosely adapting Guy Endore's novel Methinks the Lady) into a typically unhysterical and lucid examination of people under stress: as the crime is investigated, currents of distrust, fear, and falsehood disturb the smooth waters of an apparently happy marriage. Content to observe rather than moralise, he creates a world of sympathetically flawed characters, the magnificent exception being the swindling quack, a manipulating charmer whose underplaying by Ferrer suggests credible evil. With its noir themes played out in cold, bright interiors, it's a fine example of the way Preminger, on occasion, managed to deflect routine melodrama into something more personal and profound.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 111: Sat Apr 20

Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This film is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank and also screens on April 11th and 28th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The American family melodrama at its most neurotic. Rich girl Gene Tierney decides that the only way she can corner the affections of her husband (Cornel Wilde) is to eliminate his beloved younger brother, so she drowns the boy in a lake on a beautiful Technicolor day. John Stahl’s 1945 film is so lurid that it seems to exist on another plane of reality: it may be absurd, and even risible, but its single-minded concentration has its own kind of fascination and power. The great cinematographer Leon Shamroy shot it, and the artificial brightness of the 40s color adds yet another level of abstraction—the actors seem enameled against the backgrounds.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 110: Fri Apr 19

The Razor's Edge (Goulding, 1946): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.45pm

This film (screening from a 4K restoration) is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
The 1946 original, with Tyrone Power as the proto-hippie who resigns his North Shore upbringing in favor of wandering Europe and India in search of eternal wisdom; once he’s attained it, he goes back to his upper-class friends and straightens out their hopelessly muddled lives. Somerset Maugham’s novel is basically a revenge fantasy for intellectuals, with a heavy streak of misogyny focused on the figure of the hero’s grasping, jealous, and eventually murderous fiancee, elements that come through just as unpleasantly here as in Bill Murray’s 1984 remake. But director Edmund Goulding is able to check the more embarrassing excesses of the material, turning philosophical hokum into acceptable melodrama. Still, it’s Gene Tierney’s incarnation of the spurned fiancee that brings the picture to life; her transformation from wounded innocent to cold-blooded harpy is subtle, terrifying, and weirdly erotic.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 109: Thu Apr 18

Blow Out (De Palma, 1981): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Full review here:
Blow Out is among Brian De Palma's very best films. It entertains a close relation with a very strong (and better respected) American film of the '70s, Francis Coppola's The Conversation (1974). Both these films are about the art and the act of sound recording; both are about the uncovering of conspiracies. Through The Conversation, De Palma reaches back to Michelangelo Antonioni's famous (and somewhat overrated) Blow Up (1966), where it was still photography that inadvertently uncovered a mystery. All three films trace a sad arc of failure: the conspirators rise up and crush the would-be everyday investigators, with their cameras and sound recording machines. All are about the treachery of appearances, and the ease with which technological evidence can be tampered with (photos can be falsified, audiotapes can be erased), something which usually happens mysteriously, off-screen, in the dead of night. Finally, all three films, from the '60s to the '80s mark a certain kind of moral, or rather amoral mood. Their heroes, whether played by David Hemmings (Blow Up), Gene Hackman (The Conversation) or John Travolta (Blow Out), tend to have pretty soft, flabby, moral senses to begin with – they're cool, indifferent, cruising, sometimes repressing very effectively some past crisis or trauma. And although fate spurs all three into some daring action, they eventually take the blows of the world as some kind of sad, tragic or just matter-of-fact confirmation that no ordinary person can effect or change anything in this dirty world – so you may as well sink back into sloth, and keep drifting off to the big sleep.
Adrian Martin

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 108: Wed Apr 17

The Quince Tree Sun (Erice, 1992): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.25pm

This film, part of the Victor Erice season at BFI Southbank, is also being screened on March 28th. Full details can be found here.

Time Out review:
A truly magnificent film from the maker of Spirit of the Beehive and The South, which effortlessly transcends the term 'documentary'. Basically, it follows Madrileño painter Antonio López as he meticulously and slowly labours over a painting of a quince tree in his garden. That the task takes him months is of interest in itself, but where the film scores is in its fleshing out of its subject through conversation with friends, wife, admirers, and builders at work on his house, a strategy that simultaneously contextualises López and puts his bizarre, even limited conception of artistic endeavour into perspective. Don't worry about a lengthy, fairly banal dialogue about half-an-hour into the film; the rest is visually extraordinary, funny, touching, and quite unlike anything else.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is an excerpt.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 107: Tue Apr 16

The First Gentleman (Cavalcanti, 1948): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This is a 35mm presentation and will feature a introduction by Josephine Botting, the BFI's National Archive Curator.

BFI introduction:
The behaviour of the British royals is a hot topic, and this historical drama depicts one of the House of Windsor’s most controversial forebears. Cecil Parker, best known as a character actor, was given the leading role he was born to play: the bloated, dissolute Prince Regent. He revels in the pomposity and lecherousness of the decadent ‘Prinny’, who attempts to marry off his daughter Charlotte. Her tragically brief but happy marriage to the handsome Belgian Prince Leopold is superbly portrayed through the sensitive performances of Hopkins and Aumont. Beautifully photographed against a lavish regency canvas, the fabulous costumes by top Gainsborough designer Elizabeth Haffenden are the icing on the cake.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 106: Mon Apr 15

Dragonwyck (Mankiewicz, 1946): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This film (screening from a 4K restoration) is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank and also screens on April 18th and March 30th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Joseph L. Mankiewicz's directing debut is a far cry from the acerbically scripted satires - A Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve - for which he is best known; indeed, though it inhabits basically the same Gothic territory as his later The Ghost and Mrs Muir, it lacks that film's charm, easy wit and ambivalent psychological insights. Still, it's an efficient enough drama in the tradition of Rebecca, with innocent young Gene Tierney leaving her rural home to stay with wealthy and sophisticated cousin Vincent Price. Needless to say, she marries him only to discover that he's a cruel, brooding tyrant who maltreats his workers and has a sinister skeleton in his closet. Few surprises, but the performances are vivid and the recreation of the 1840s setting is subtly plausible.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 105: Sun Apr 14

The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This 35mm presentation (also showing on 30th April) is part of the Pakula Paranoia Trilogy. You can find the full details here.

Time out review:
A thriller about a journalist, alerted to the mysterious deaths of witnesses to the assassination of a presidential candidate, who embarks on an investigation that reveals a nebulous conspiracy of gigantic and all-embracing scope. It sounds familiar, and refers to or overlaps a good handful of similar films, but is most relevantly tied to Klute. Where Klute was an exploration of claustrophobic anxiety, The Parallax View is inexorably agoraphobic. Its visual organisation is stunning as the journalist (Beatty) is drawn into an increasingly nightmarish world characterised by impenetrably opaque structures, a screen whited out from time to time, or meshed over with visually deceptive patterns. It is some indication of the area the film explores that in place of the self-revealing session with the analyst in Klute, The Parallax View presents us with the more insecurity-inducing questionnaire used by the mysterious Parallax Corporation for personality-testing prospective employees. Excellent performances; fascinating film.
Verina Glaessner

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 104: Sat Apr 13

Laura (Preminger, 1944): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.30pm

This genunine Hollywood classic screens as part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank and is alose being shown on March 28th and April 14th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Otto Preminger's directorial debut (1944), not counting the five previous B films he refused to acknowledge and an earlier feature made in Austria. It reveals a coldly objective temperament and a masterful narrative sense, which combine to turn this standard 40s melodrama into something as haunting as its famous theme. Less a crime film than a study in levels of obsession, Laura is one of those classic works that leave their subject matter behind and live on the strength of their seductive style. With Dana Andrews as the detective, Gene Tierney as the lady in the portrait, and Clifton Webb as the epicene litterateur.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 103: Fri Apr 12

Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 9pm

This film, also screening on April 6th,  is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank and features an introduction by Arike Oke, Executive Director of Knowledge, Learning & Collections at BFI and musical accompaniment from Neil Brand.

Chicago Reader review:
'A masterpiece of the German silent cinema and easily the most effective version ofDracula on record. F.W. Murnau's 1922 film follows the Bram Stoker novel fairly closely, although he neglected to purchase the screen rights—hence, the title change. But the key elements are all Murnau's own: the eerie intrusions of expressionist style on natural settings, the strong sexual subtext, and the daring use of fast-motion and negative photography.'
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 102: Thu Apr 11

Women in Love (Russell, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.20pm

This film also screens on April 20th and 26th and is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. Full details here. 

BFI introduction:
Two couples (Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates and Jennie Linden) find themselves trapped between the pressure to follow convention and the urge to explore a Bohemian lifestyle. The lush English landscape offers a verdant backdrop as the protagonists engage with nature in a direct and sensuous way, each searching for love but unsure what it means. Cinematographer Billy Williams’ gorgeous imagery and dramatic lighting, and Shirley Russell’s vibrant period costumes make Women in Love a visual delight throughout. This newly remastered digital version restores the film’s colour and texture to its full glory.
Josephine Botting

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 101: Wed Apr 10

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins excel in Rouben Mamoulian’s superb adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, now beautifully restored in 2K and part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. Programmer-at-large Geoff Andrew will introduce the film.

Chicago Reader review:
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this 1932 screen adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be much better known. Fredric March won a well-deserved Oscar for his performance as the lead, and Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart play the two women who match the opposite sides of the hero’s nature. The transformations of Jekyll are a notable achievement for March and Mamoulian alike, and the disturbing undercurrents of the story are given their full due (as they weren’t in the much inferior 1941 Victor Fleming version with Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana Turner). Mamoulian was at his peak in the early 30s, as this film shows.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 100: Tue Apr 9

Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm

This screening is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand (you can find full details here) and will be introduced by Sarah Cleary.

Time Out review:
Like Nagisa Oshima's contemporary Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, this still extraordinary film was a response to the 1968 student riots. But Toshio Matsumoto goes further than Oshima - into Shinjuku 2-chome, Tokyo's gay ghetto, to enact a queer revamp of the Oedipus myth. Popular young trannie Eddie (Peter, later the Fool in Ran) throws himself into affairs with a black GI and a Japanese hippie to drown out his memories of killing his mother when he caught her inflagrante with a stranger. Then he shacks up with Gonda, manager of the gay bar Genet, only to find out that the man is his long-lost father. Matsumoto splinters the story's time-frame, splashes captions across the frame and cuts in bits of ciné vérité and interviews with the cast - making it one of the most formally advanced films of the psychedelic decade.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.