Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 224: Fri Aug 16

3 Women (Altman, 1977): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

This film is showing in tribute to the late Shelley Duvall and is also screened at Close-Up Cinema on August 31st. Full details here.

Time Out review:
One of Robert Altman's most enigmatic and personal films, this study of three women who exchange personalities (based on a dream of Altman's) combines comedy, suspense, social comment, and Bergmanesque reverie to weird but often wonderful effect. What really holds the film together is Shelley Duvall's breathtaking performance as the vacuous, gossipy therapist who becomes mentor to the naïve Spacek after the latter moves in as her flatmate. The third woman is a mute painter (Janice Rule), fashioning her fears and fantasies into mythic murals of male aggression and female victimisation. Although any feminist content is undercut by the advent of insanity halfway through, and the plot construction is not entirely cohesive, the film succeeds through its perky, acute portrait of ordinary people living stunted lives against a backdrop of consumer-orientated glamour fuelled by films and advertising. Often very funny, always stylish, it's a fascinating film for all its faults.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 223: Thu Aug 15

Dracula (Browning, 1931): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

The screenings of this film (also being shown on August 3rd) will feature a performance of the Philip Glass score for the movie by the Kronos Quartet.

BFI introduction (to this film which is part of the Philip Glass season at BFI Southbank):
The vampire Count Dracula relocates from Transylvania to England, hoping to nourish himself on the blood of unsuspecting victims. Bela Lugosi’s seminal performance as Count Dracula was an early – but not the first – entry in Universal Studio’s remarkably successful monster series of the 1930s. Glass’s score, performed by long-term collaborators the Kronos Quartet, tweaks out the tale’s emotional undercurrents, its romance and elements of the sublime, while never resorting to the trappings of a conventional horror score.

Time Out review:
Not by any means the masterpiece of fond memory or reputation, although the first twenty minutes are astonishingly fluid and brilliantly shot by Karl Freund, despite the intrusive painted backdrops. Innumerable imaginative touches here: the sinister emphasis of Lugosi's first words ('I...am...Dracula') and the sonorous poetry of his invocation to the children of the night; the moment when Dracula leads the way up his castle stairway behind a vast cobweb through which Renfield has to struggle as he follows; the vampire women, driven off by Dracula, reluctantly backing away from the camera while it continues hungrily tracking in to Renfield's fallen body. Thereafter the pace falters, and with the London scenes growing in verbosity and staginess, the hammy limitations of Bela Lugosi's performance are cruelly exposed. But the brilliant moments continue (Renfield's frenzy in his cell, for instance), and Freund's camerawork rarely falters.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 222: Wed Aug 14

Destroy All Monsters (Honda, 1968): Barbican Cinema, 6.30pm

This film is part of the Japanese monsters season at the Barbican. Full details here.

Time Out review:
A romping Japanese monster rally, the 20th production in this vein from Toho studios, who have energetically devastated Japan on film virtually every year since 1954. Their output is graphic and witty, with a weird gladiatorial style which has emerged under the guidance of Honda since his first Godzilla. In some ways these features are more like sporting events than fantasies, with a radio commentary ('It's Godzilla leading the attack') as the monsters of this world rally to protect it from extraterrestrial invasion.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 221: Tue Aug 13

The Children's Hour (Wyler, 1961): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

Funeral Parade Queer Film Society introduction:
Longtime friends Martha and Karen are teachers at a boarding school for young girls. When a rebellious student is punished, she accuses Karen and Martha of being in a romantic relationship with one another, scandalising the local community. This seminal film is a landmark for queer representation in mainstream cinema, with a pair of moving and tender performances from Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine at its centre.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 220: Mon Aug 12

Mystery Train (Jarmusch, 1989): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film, part of the Jim Jarmusch season, also screens on August 28th. Details here.

Time Out review:
A trilogy of off-beat, Beat-besotted tales, shot in gorgeous colour, set in and around a seedy Memphis hotel. On one level it's about passers-through: a Japanese teenage couple on a pilgrimage to Presley's grave and Sun studios; an Italian taking her husband's coffin back to Rome, forced to share a room with a garrulous American fleeing her boyfriend; and an English 'Elvis', out of work, luck in love and his head as he cruises round town with a black friend, a brother-in-law, and a gun. But on a deeper level, the film is about storytelling, about how we make connections between people, places, objects and time to create meaning, and how, when these connections shift, meaning changes. Only halfway through do we begin to grasp how the stories and characters relate to each other. Happily, Jim Jarmusch's formal inventiveness is framed by a rare flair for zany entertainment: Kudoh and Nagase make 'Far From Yokohama' delightfully funny; Braschi brings the right wide-eyed wonder to 'A Ghost'; and Joe Strummer proffers real legless menace in 'Lost in Space', which at least explains the cause and effect of a mysterious gun shot heard in the first two episodes. Best of all are Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee as argumentative hotel receptionists hooked on Tom Waits' late night radio show. They, and Jarmusch's remarkably civilised direction, hold the whole shaggy dog affair together, turning it into one of the best films of the year.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 219: Sun Aug 11

Fellini’s Casanova (Fellini, 1976): Close-Up Cinema, 5pm

This film, part of the Donald Sutherland tribute season at Close-Up Cinema, also screens on August 3rd. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
What the world wanted from Fellini's epic account of the famous 18th-century lover (Donald Sutherland) was hardly the dark, disturbingly jaundiced, alienated view of eroticism offered here (1976). But as one of the late flowerings of the director's claustrophobic studio style at its most deliberately artificial, this is a memorable work, helped along by Nino Rota's music and Danilo Donati's Oscar-winning costumes.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

‘Sutherland's performance is the most astonishing piece of screen acting since Brando's in Last Tango in Paris’ Time Out

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 218: Sat Aug 10

The Old Dark House (Whale, 1932): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 4pm

This film, part of the Big Screen Classics strand, is also being shown on 5th, 10th, 25th and 29th August. Details here.

Time Out review:
Alongside The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale's greatest film, a masterly mixture of macabre humour and effectively gripping suspense. A very simple story - a group of travellers stranded by a storm take shelter in the sinister, unwelcoming Femm household, a gloomy mansion peopled by maniacs and murderers - allows Whale to concentrate on quirky characters (Charles Laughton's brash, boorish Yorkshire mill-owner, blessed with a near-incomprehensible accent, is particularly delightful) and thick Gothic atmosphere to stunning effect. But what is perhaps most remarkable is the way Whale manages to parody the conventions of the dark house horror genre as he creates them, in which respect the film remains entirely modern. (Form JB Priestley's novel Benighted.)
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 217: Fri Aug 9

Caligula - The Ultimate Cut (Brass, 2023): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.15pm

This film also screens on August 11th, 14th and 15th. Details here.

Prince Charles Cinema introduction:
CALIGULA: THE ULTIMATE CUT stars Malcolm McDowell (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), Academy-Award Winners Helen Mirren (THE QUEEN) and Sir John Gielgud (ARTHUR), Peter O'Toole (LAWRENCE OFARABIA), Teresa Ann Savoy. The original writer was Gore Vidal and the original director, Tinto Brass, but both removed their names when their vision was severely compromised. The original film was produced by Bob Guccione and Franco Rossellini. With sumptuous set designs by two-time Oscar winner Danilo Donati. Shadowed by the murder of his entire family, the young, wary Caligula (Malcolm McDowell) eliminateshis devious adoptive grandfather (Peter O'Toole) and seizes control of the declining Roman Empire, descending into a spiral of depravity, destruction, and madness. A treatise on the corrupting influence ofpower, this extensive reconstruction reveals the complete performances of McDowell and Helen Mirren,as the promiscuous 'Caesonia', from an unprecedented amount of never-before-seen footage. Mirren’s role is greatly expanded from less than 20 minutes to almost an hour onscreen. McDowell and Mirren display a natural chemistry in this their third teaming, having appeared together in the previously acclaimed productions of O LUCKY MAN!, directed by Lindsay Anderson, and Harold Pinter's THE COLLECTION, directed by Michael Apted, also starring Alan Bates and Laurence Olivier.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 216: Thu Aug 8

Dawson City: Frozen Time (Morrison, 2017): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

Chicago Reader review:
Bill Morrison, whose extraordinary documentary Decasia (2002) turned decomposing film stock into the stuff of avante-garde reverie, returns with another staggering journey into the past. In 1978 a construction crew in Dawson City, Yukon, uncovered hundreds of reels of silent film that were used as landfill after a local theater switched over to talkies in the 1930s. Drawing on these materials as well as archival photos and other movie clips, Morrison reconstructs the history of the frontier town from its gold-rush heyday to the present, even as he connects it to the emergence of the American cinema. The movie honors the silent-film aesthetic with a majestic score and the narration in onscreen titles, though composer Alex Somers cuts loose with a little electronic noise whenever Morrison presents one of his abstract studies in peeling emulsion. Included is rare footage of the Chicago “Black Sox” playing the infamous 1919 World Series.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 215: Wed Aug 7

The Reckoning (Gold, 1970): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

The Nickel film club introduction:
As part of its season of road movies, The Nickel presents the rarely seen British thriller The Reckoning (1970) on a glorious IB Tech 16mm print. Two years before Get Carter, The Reckoning sees a successful London-based businessman (Nicol Williamson) hit the north to his hometown of Liverpool in order to exact revenge on some teddy boys who assaulted his father. If American road movies are about the infinite expanse of the great frontier, The Reckoning depicts its antithesis – a starkly divided island where you can’t drive a day before you start coming back to yourself.

Here (and above) is The Nickel's Road Movies season trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 215: Tue Aug 6

Time of the Heathen (Kass, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6,10pm

This remarkable film has its 4K restoration UK premiere (+ one more screening on August 12th)

BFI introduction:
An erratic wanderer crosses paths with a young Black boy while walking through rural America. What begins as an American neorealist film soon evolves into a psychedelic Western, exploring the impact of war, racism and trauma, which is perfectly distilled in the film’s hallucinatory climactic sequence. Set four years after the bombing of Hiroshima, this gripping cinematic debut by Peter Kass – his only feature film – was overlooked and forgotten for decades, but is now gloriously restored.

There are excellent fuller reviews here by J Hoberman and here via Screen Slate.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 214: Mon Aug 5

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.15pm

A personal favourite. This is a long movie and I took a hip flask in when I went to see this on a date at Notting Hill's Electric Cinema back in the day. That worked wonderfully as this is a meandering film, probably best seen under some sort of influence. The film also screens on July 28th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Rivette's 193-minute comic feminist extravaganza is as scary and unsettling in its narrative high jinks as it is exhilarating in its uninhibited slapstick (1974). Its slow, sensual beginning stages a meeting between a librarian (Dominique Labourier) and a nightclub magician (Juliet Berto). Eventually, a plot within a plot magically takes shape—a somewhat sexist Victorian melodrama with Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder (the film's producer), and a little girl—as each character, on successive days, visits an old dark house and the same events take place. The elaborate Hitchcockian doublings are so beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and power. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue with Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its euphoric effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons, musicals, thrillers, and serials).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is BFI review of the film

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 213: Sun Aug 4

Alma's Rainbow (Chenzira, 1994):  BFI Southbank, NFT3, 4pm

This film is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.

BFI Southbank introduction:
This lively, humorous and charming coming-of-age story is an unsung gem of American independent cinema of the 1990s. Teenager Rainbow, who lives with her strict mother Alma, navigates her way into adulthood as a young African-American woman in 1990s Brooklyn. Both their worlds are turned upside-down when Alma’s glamorous and outgoing sister Ruby, who has been absent for a decade, visits from Paris. She becomes an inspiring figure for Rainbow, but her presence brings back painful memories for Alma. In creating a multi-layered story about troubled family relations, Ayoka Chenzira vividly explores the complexities of Black womanhood, and presents a tender portrait of mother-daughter relationship. Warmly shot by Ronald K. Gray, who worked on Kathleen Collins’ essential 1982 drama Losing Ground, Alma’s Rainbow is this summer’s top rediscovery title.
Aga Baranowska, Events Programmer

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 212: Sat Aug 3

India Song (Duras, 1975): ICA Cinema, 4pm

This film is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here) and is also being screened on August 14th.

Chicago Reader review:
There's so little to the subjects in Marguerite Duras' films—here it's that old favorite, doomed love among the rotting aristocracy—that it's easy to think of her as the most perverse of minimalists. But Duras' thin dramas are perceived through layers upon layers of style—she's the Busby Berkeley of structuralism. In this 1974 film, she uses constantly shifting tenses, rigorous patterns of camera movement (and stillness), acting boiled down to broad isolated gestures, nonsynchronous dialogue (often between characters who don't appear in the visuals), and a dozen other radical devices. The result is a film that is extremely boring in rather fascinating ways, well worth seeing for those with a tolerance for stasis and a taste for French abstraction.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 211: Fri Aug 2

The Outsider (Tarr, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This film also screens on August 23rd and is part of the Bela Tarr season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr’s second feature (1981), 146 minutes long, is a portrait of a restless young male nurse and factory worker (Andras Szabo) who plays the violin and seems unhappy with both the woman who bore him a child and the woman he subsequently marries. The key filmmaking influence here is John Cassavetes, and much of the film is shot in close-ups, making for a stark oppressiveness.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 210: Thu Aug 1

Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929): 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.

Chicago Reader review:
Dziga Vertov's 1929 Russian film amounts to a catalog of all the tricks the movies can perform. As a newsreel cameraman travels through a city (actually an amalgam of Moscow and Odessa), Vertov transforms the images captured by his camera through a kaleidoscope of slow motion, superimposition, animation, and wild montage effects. Vertov's motives were impeccably Marxist-Leninist—he wanted to expose the materialism behind an illusionist medium—but his film set off a storm of debate among his colleagues, who accused him of the bourgeois crime of “impressionism.” The film's real influence did not emerge for another 40 years, when it was taken up by American structuralist filmmakers on one side of the Atlantic and by French neoleftists on the other. The film remains a fascinating souvenir, though its flourishes are now fairly familiar.
Dave Kehr
 
Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 209: Wed Jul 31

American Gigolo (Schrader, 1980): Picturehouse Central, 8.15pm

Chicago Reader review:
Paul Schrader makes a habit of struggling with the most recondite of theological themes in the most lurid of commercial contexts. The subject of this 1980 prostitution saga is grace, and it's certainly amazing. Richard Gere, as the top hired stud of Beverly Hills, achieves salvation through the right balance of innocence and victimization—though ultimately it's the unselfish and unmotivated love of a good woman (Lauren Hutton) that clinches his election. And you thought it was about sex? Most critics have cited Robert Bresson's Pickpocket as Schrader's inspiration (as it was for Taxi Driver), but the Gere character's oblivious journey toward sainthood reminded me mainly of Bresson's put-upon mule in Au hasard Balthazar. The drawback here is an alienating, overelaborate visual style that forestalls any involvement with the characters.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 208: Tue Jul 30

Poitin (Quinn, 1978): Kiln Theatre, 8pm

Kiln Theatre introduction:
We will be joined by filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle and actor and Irish-language tutor Pádraig Ó Loingsigh of The Irish Cultural Centre Hammersmith to place Poitín in context.

A very rare chance to see the first feature film produced in the Irish language, Poitín tells the story of moonshiner Michil (Cyril Cusack), who lives the quiet life with his daughter tending to his stills on his remote farm in Connemara. He relies on two ne’er-do-wells to get the black market drams to the people, but following a brush with the law, they plan to double-cross him. But Michil has more than a few dark tricks up his sleeve. More than just a pioneering film, Poitín is also a masterclass in building atmosphere, with an authentic, unsettling sense of place. Full of characterful faces and great performances from non-actors, sitting alongside Irish acting royalty like Cyril Cusack (Odd Man Out) and Donal McCann (The Dead), Poitín deserves a place alongside folk horror classics, while also showing a memorable vision of rural Ireland miles away from Emerald Isle clichés.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 207: Mon Jul 29

The Landlord (Ashby, 1970): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the Hal Ashby season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Time Out review:
Hal Ashby’s 1969 debut clearly sprang from the mind behind ‘Harold and Maude’. It’s the tale of a bourgeois brat (Beau Bridges) from an old-money family who buys a tenement block in a black neighbourhood intending to create the perfect bachelor pad, but ends up falling for the residents instead. Loose, funky and rough around the edges in that trademark late ’60s screw-sense-let’s-try-it fashion, ‘The Landlord’ succeeds thanks to terrific performances, political nous, flawless photography from Gordon Willis, a handful of sublimely witty moments and an overall sense of rebellious fun.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 207: Sun Jul 28

La Voleuse (Chapot, 1966): ICA Cinema, 4pm

This film is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here).

ICA introduction: Werner (Michel Piccoli) and Julia (Romy Schneider), are a middle-class French-speaking couple who live in Berlin. Unable to conceive, Julia confesses to her husband that she gave up a child to a working class Polish couple when she was a teenager. Having articulated this for the first time, the child, now six years old, becomes an obsession, and she begins to stalk him. For a film scripted by Marguerite Duras, La Voleuse is fairly conventional, but its subject resonates with many themes and motifs that she revisited throughout her literary and cinematic work: the abandoned child; belated, compulsive grief; class divisions…

"Jean Chapot offered me the role of Julia. As soon as I read the synopsis, my mind was made up: it was a dream role, offering the possibility of expressing the full range of feelings experienced by a young woman, from grief to exacerbated passion to resignation. I would be able to be sweet and tender, but also to scream and rage like someone possessed.” (Romy Schneider)

This screening will be the UK premiere of the 4K restoration.

Here (and above) are the opening credits.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 206: Sat Jul 27

Brian De Palma Mystery Marathon: Prince Charles Cinema, 11.15pm

Prince Charles Cinema introduction:
In 2024 our Mystery Movie Nights will come with a theme, and this one is... BRIAN DE PALMA!One of the most influential and acclaimed directors of the 21st century, join us for a night of De Palma films back to back! No clues, no hints, no refunds.

There are few better cinematic pleasures for a dedicated cinephile than sitting in a darkened theatre to watch a Brian De Palma film (and here is Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López's MUBI audiovisual essay and text on the great filmmaker. This promises to be a hugely enjoyable evening for fans of the director. I presume there will be a few crowd pleasers this evening but this would be my wish-list, based on the fact that it's been years since these had a UK screening, if at all:

Hi, Mom! (1970)
Sisters (1972)
Obsession (1976)
Dressed to Kill (1980)
Raising Cain (1992)
Femme Fatale (2002)

Here (and above) is Mark Cousins' 'Scene by Scene' programme with De Palma.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 205: Fri Jul 26

The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang, 1992): Garden Cinema, 6pm

This Garden Cinema presentation will be introduced by Chris Berry of King's College London and is part of a rare selection of masterpieces from Fifth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s early career, many of which have long been unavailable to screen in Europe. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Zhang and his constant muse Gong Li reinvent themselves (and Chinese social-realist cinema in the process) with this docu-drama about a peasant woman's dogged fight for what she thinks is justice. Qiu Ju is furious when the chief of her village refuses to apologise for kicking her husband in the balls during a fight, and takes the matter to court to demand compensation; the film charts her stubborn climb up the legal hierarchy. The plot seems expressly designed to placate the bureaucrats who banned Zhang's two previous films in China, but the quasi-documentary approach (involving scores of non-professional actors, hidden cameras and radio mikes) is brilliantly finessed.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 204: Thu Jul 25

Nathalie Granger (Duras, 1972): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm

This film is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here) and will also screen on August 9th. The evening will start  with a new restoration of François Barat’s Gaumont-Palace, screening for the first time in the UK.

Chicago Reader review:
A neglected early feature by Marguerite Duras (1972), produced by Luc Moullet, full of poker-faced, absurdist humor and deceptive sound cues. Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bose sit around in a country house doing very little apart from listening to radio reports about two teenage killers in the neighborhood. Occasionally they’re joined by their two little girls (one of them named Nathalie Granger); more often we’re reminded of them by the offscreen sound of their piano lessons. On two occasions, a very young Gerard Depardieu turns up, trying to sell a washing machine and getting more than he bargains for. It’s hard to describe this beautiful miniature, but somehow it reduces the whole modern world to audiovisual shorthand; Duras’ verbal and visual terseness has seldom been put to better use.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 203: Wed Jul 24

Hardcore (Schrader, 1979): Picturehouse Central, 6.30pm

This film is being screened across Picturehouse cinemas in London. Details here.

New Yorker review:
Paul Schrader’s second feature, “Hardcore,” from 1979, is his version of John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Both movies are dramas of an isolated, stoic, rigidly principled man who takes it upon himself to rescue a young female family member from a way of life—captivity, or something like it—that he deems unfit for her. But Ford’s film, from 1956, is a Western, a philosophical drama set just after the Civil War, in a place and a time far removed from the director’s birth in Maine, in 1894, whereas Schrader’s is contemporary—set in his home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan (where he was born in 1946), and in the religious community of rigorous Calvinists in which he was raised. Built on the very bedrock of Schrader’s being, “Hardcore” is one of the key works of his career, a cinematic declaration of identity and principle that echoes throughout his body of work.
Richard Brody

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 202: Tue Jul 23

Down By Law (Jarmusch, 1986): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film, which also screens on August 8th, is part of the Jim Jarmusch season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Reissued in a new digital print, Jim Jarmusch’s deliciously deadpan third feature (first released in 1986) looks more than ever like a milestone in American independent cinema. Though not bound to the intellectual angst of Cassavetes, the anti-authoritarian anger of ‘Easy Rider’ or the aloofness of European art cinema (yet clearly influenced by all three), Jarmusch proved DIY film could be heartfelt, charming, wise and silly all at the same time. On a sweaty night in New Orleans, three mismatched oddballs – DJ Zack (Tom Waits), hipster pimp Jack (John Lurie) and stray Italian tourist Roberto (Roberto Benigni) – are banged up for a variety of perceived misdemeanours. Trapped together in a tiny cell, the men must learn to deal with each other’s shortcomings. The claustrophobic setting and semi-improvised tone might suggest something closer to sitcom than cinema (had Jarmusch seen ‘Porridge’?), but Robby Müller’s stately monochrome photography single-handedly lifts it into the realm of Proper Art. It’s a sad and beautiful world indeed.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 201: Mon Jul 22

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Pollack, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.35pm

This film is part of the Discomfort Movies season and is also screening on July 9th.

Chicago Reader review:
The hopelessness of human life as represented by a marathon dance contest in the darkest 30s. The material is simple and irresistible, and Sydney Pollack stages it well (though without transcending the essential superficiality of his talent). Jane Fonda offers the first signs that she inherited something more than her father’s jawline, and Gig Young is reborn as a character actor. With Susannah York, Michael Sarrazin, Red Buttons, Bonnie Bedelia, and Bruce Dern.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 200: Sun Jul 21

The Long Absence (Colpi, 1961): ICA Cinema, 2.30pm

This is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Directed by Henri Colpi—editor of Alain Resnais’ first two features, Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad—and coscripted by Marguerite Duras, this melancholy tone poem focuses on a woman who runs a workers’ cafe in a dingy Paris suburb and an amnesiac derelict she comes to believe is her long-lost husband, who apparently was deported to Germany during the war and may have died there. Decidedly pre-New Wave in its conventional narrative style, though attractively filmed in black-and-white ‘Scope, this picture, which won the grand prize at Cannes in 1961, is interesting today mainly as a haunting period piece.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 199: Sat Jul 20

Secretary (Shainberg, 2002): The Ritzy, Brixton, 8.15pm

The Lost Reels team is proud to present a rare screening of this funny, sexy, romantic, one-of-a-kind comedy/drama from a beautiful 35mm print.

Chicago Reader review:
This wicked little black comedy (2002), adapted from a short story by Mary Gaitskill, chronicles the perverse attraction between a young typist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her uptight boss (James Spader), a sadomasochistic tango that strikes unexpected chords in each character. The young woman is a self-mutilator, and when the attorney spanks her for a minor mistake, she knows she’s found the right job. The film’s romantic conceit turns on the decidedly un-PC notion of female submissiveness, but director Steven Shainberg (Hit Me) twists the story into a sly and stylized study of two lonely souls who come to realize they’re made for each other. Spader is both haughty and tender as the sadistic control freak, and Gyllenhaal is even better as the love-starved kitten, crawling around on all fours and meowing for more. Angelo Badalamenti wrote the creepy score; with Lesley Ann Warren as the typist’s overly solicitous mother and Stephen McHattie as her self-loathing father.
Ted Shen

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 198: Fri Jul 19

Destroy, She Said (Duras, 1969): ICA Cinema, 6.45pm

This film, part of the Marguerite Duras season at the ICA, is also being screened on August 6th. Full details here.

ICA introduction:
Marguerite Duras’s debut as a solo director – based on her 1969 novel of the same name – is a film about love and destruction. Shot in gloomy black and white, which serves to enhance the film’s underlying but palpable violence, Destroy, She Said captures a series of encounters between a couple and another man and woman at a secluded hotel in rural France, where they seem to be the only people present. Elisabeth, recuperating after a miscarriage, catches the eye of Professor Max Thor. Meanwhile, Max’s young wife, Alissa, is drawn to an enigmatic German Jew, Stein, who sleeps in the hotel grounds and furtively observes her and Max each night. Amid wanderings and conversations in the forest adjoining the hotel, characters gaze at each other in different configurations and with ambiguous intent. Suddenly, Elisabeth’s husband arrives to take her home, and another angle is revealed.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 197: Thu Jul 18

La Musica (Duras, 1967): ICA Cinema, 6.45pm

This is the opening night of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA. Full details here.

ICA introduction:
In 1966, Marguerite Duras – already established as a prolific writer, but looking for an escape from the world of publishing – made her debut as a filmmaker with La Musica, based on a short play she had written a year earlier. Co-directed with Paul Seban – with whom she had made television – La Musica is a psychological three-hander that delicately dissects love after separation. The paths of two women and a man cross in a provincial town in the North of France. A young American woman (Julie Dassin, who, for Duras, possessed “a kind of wildness combined with a certain purity”) accosts the man (Robert Hossein) in a café. She is ostensibly on holiday, though the true reasons behind her stay are less clear. They spend the afternoon together. He is there to formalise his divorce from a woman (the ever-marvellous Delphine Seyrig), in the town in which they had once lived. In an empty hotel, the couple has a final conversation: with corridors, rooms and lobbies providing containers for their reminiscences, confessions, and renewed feelings. With exquisite staging and camerawork by Sacha Vierny, who had worked on Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, this screening of La Musica is a New Wave-adjacent primer to Duras’s filmic universe.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 196: Wed Jul 17

Sorry, Wrong Number (Litvak, 1946): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

Time Out review:
Barbara Stanwyck in one of her most famous roles, as an invalid who overhears a telephone conversation between conspiring murderers, and slowly realises that she is their intended victim. Based on Lucille Fletcher's celebrated 22-minute radio play, the film is none the less well sustained. Anatole Litvak's camera paces the confines of Stanwyck's lacy bedroom like an accused man in his cell; and although she is for the most part restricted to acting from the head up, Stanwyck's metamorphosis from indolence to hysteria is brilliantly executed.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 195: Tue Jul 16

Model Shop (Demy, 1969): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

This film, screening in tribute to the late, great Anouk Aimée, is also being screened on July 14th and 19th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Jacques Demy's only - and underrated - American film may lack the fairytale charm of his finest French work, but the bitter-sweet delicacy of tone and acute feeling for place are at once familiar. Anouk Aimée's Lola, abandoned by her lover Michel, has now turned up in LA where, older and sadder, she works in a seedy photographer's shop, and brings brief respite to a disenchanted young drifter (Gary Lockwood) with whom she has a one night stand. Unlike Antonioni with Zabriskie Point, Demy never even tries to deal with the malaise afflicting American youth in the '60s, but gives us yet another (relatively plotless) tale of transient happiness and love lost. It's also one of the great movies about LA, shown for once as a ramshackle, rootless sprawl, where movement on the freeways (accompanied by the sounds of West Coast band Spirit) is seemingly endless.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 194: Mon Jul 15

Possession (Zulawski, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This film is screening as part of the Discomfort Movies season.

Chicago Reader review:
Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 masterpiece opens with the messy separation of a middle-class couple (Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani), then goes on to imagine various catastrophic breakdowns—of interpersonal relationships, social order, and ultimately narrative logic itself. The film can be hilarious one moment and terrifying the next, and Zulawski's roving camera only heightens the sense of unpredictability. Few movies convey so viscerally what it's like to go mad: when this takes an unexpected turn into supernatural horror, the development feels inevitable, as though the characters had been bracing themselves for it all along. Adjani won the best actress prize at Cannes for her dual performance (as an unfaithful wife and her angelic doppelganger), but the whole cast is astonishing, exorcising painful feelings with an intensity that rivals that of the filmmaking. Performed in English and shot in Berlin by an international crew, this also conveys a sense of displacement that's always been crucial to Zulawski's work.
Ben Sachs

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 193: Sun Jul 14

Wild Target (Salvadori, 1993): Cinema Museum, 2pm

This film in the season of French Sundaes at the Cinema Museum is a 35mm presentation.

Cinema Museum introduction:
A brilliant dark comedy to conclude our French Sundaes season. Great performances and a sparkling script gives you an insight into paid assassins you would never expect.

“Anchoring the film is another of (Jean) Rochefort’s superb portrayals of the haut bourgeois whose very inscrutability and repression engender sympathy and amusement in equal portion. As his dignity is eroded in a knockabout farce around the streets of Paris, his emotions begin to unbutton” (Time Out).

Each film is accompanied by an introductory illustrated talk by Jon Davies, Tutor in French Cinema at Morley College.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 192: Sat Jul 13

With Gilbert & George (Cole, 2008): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

ICA introduction:
Filmmaker, Julian Cole first met Gilbert & George when he modelled for them in 1986. His intimate and moving portrait filmed over 18 years, reveals for the first time the individuals behind the living sculptures. The film traces their lives from humble beginnings to the world’s artistic stage where they have performed their enigmatic and controversial double act for four decades. Followed by an in-person conversation with Gilbert & George and filmmaker Julian Cole, hosted by Gregor Muir.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 191: Fri Jul 12

Coming Forth by Day (Lofty, 2012): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

This film is part of the Pan-African film season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
Shot amid the turmoil of revolution, this impressive debut takes place in the suburbs of Cairo and traces one day in the life of a daughter as she and her mother struggle to look after her father, who is housebound following a stroke. Echoing the work of Chantal Akerman, Lofty’s film is noted for its disorientating use of space and time to convey the solitude and claustrophobia of life.

Here (and above) is an introduction to the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 190: Thu Jul 11

Threads (Jackson, 1984): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm

This film is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 21st.

Time Out review:
Originally aired on British TV during the mid ‘80s, Mick Jackson’s docudrama is a sobering, scary and highly realistic hypothetical account of what might happen following a breakdown of society perpetrated, in this instance, by a nuclear strike on Sheffield. The sense of impending doom is palpable as the city’s citizens watch TV news reports about the collapse in relations between Russia and the West. Panic buying becomes looting as humanity begins to adopt a dog-eat-dog mentality. Then the obliteration begins – and it’s pretty ghastly. Small wonder Threads is in our 'Best Horror Films' list; while not strictly part of the horror genre, it provokes a raft of similar emotions – only here you’re aware that this can really happen. Powerful, thought-provoking stuff.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 189: Wed Jul 10

The Conversation (Coppola, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This Francis Ford Coppola classic is on an extended run at BFI Southbank (details here). Tonight;s screening features a Q&A with the movie's film editor and sound designer Walter Murch.

Chicago Reader review: 
Gene Hackman excels in Francis Ford Coppola's tasteful, incisive 1974 study of the awakening of conscience in an “electronic surveillance technician.” Coppola manages to turn an expert thriller into a portrayal of the conflict between ritual and responsibility without ever letting the levels of tension subside or the complicated plot get muddled. Fine support from Allen Garfield as an alternately amiable and desperately envious colleague, plus a superb soundtrack (vital to the action) by Walter Murch—all this and a fine, melancholy piano score by David Shire. 
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 188: Tue Jul 9

Carnal Knowledge (Nichols, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This rarely screened film is being presented from a new 4K restoration for the first time in the UK, via Animus Magazine.

Chicago Reader review:
Director Mike Nichols tries for a European visual patina (the cinematographer is Giuseppe Rotunno, Fellini’s man) but the structure is pure American short-hit—the style of the blackout sketch and comic book. Jack Nicholson, here in the first flush of his stardom, plays the shallow stud hero in an impenetrable combination of masochism and snottiness, though Art Garfunkel and Ann-Margret are quietly charming in support (or should I say relief). The picture has its moments of chilling insight, though essentially it is one more quaint early-70s stab at an American art cinema that never materialized.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 187: Mon Jul 8

Bug (Friedkin, 2006): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm

This film is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 25th.

Chicago Reader review:
Steppenwolf ensemble member Tracy Letts adapted his play into this fearsome horror movie, directed with single-minded claustrophobia by William Friedkin (The Exorcist). Michael Shannon, reprising his role from the original 1996 production, is all crawling skin as a man convinced that unknown government powers have infested him with aphids; Ashley Judd is persuasively unstrung as the woman who buys into his delusions to escape her own problems. Friedkin embraces the story’s staginess and sense of implosion as the pair retreat into paranoid madness, a journey that includes several electrifying scares and ultimately plays out in blue light against tinfoil-covered walls. The shocker ending has a rather rhetorical quality, but you have to admire Letts for obeying his own sick logic.
J R Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 186: Sun Jul 7

A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 7.30pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 28th.

Chicago Reader review:
John Cassavetes's 1974 masterpiece, and one of the best films of its decade. Cassavetes stretches the limits of his narrative—it's the story of a married couple, with the wife hedging into madness—to the point where it obliterates the narrator: it's one of those extremely rare movies that seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film. The lurching, probing camera finds the same fascination in moments of high drama and utter triviality alike—and all of those moments are suspended painfully, endlessly. Still, Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen. With Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 185: Sat Jul 6

The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.50pm

This film is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 21st and 29th.

Time Out review:
A scarifyingly grim and grimy account of an alcoholic writer's lost weekend, stolen from time intended to be spent on taking a cure and gradually turning into a descent into hell. What makes the film so gripping is the brilliance with which Wilder uses John F Seitz's camerawork to range from an unvarnished portrait of New York brutally stripped of all glamour (Ray Milland's frantic trudge along Third Avenue on Yom Kippur in search of an open pawnshop is a neo-realist morceau d'anthologie) to an almost Wellesian evocation of the alcoholic's inner world (not merely the justly famous DTs hallucination of a mouse attacked by bats, but the systematic use of images dominated by huge foreground objects). Characteristically dispassionate in his observation, Wilder elicits sympathy for his hero only by stressing the cruelly unthinking indifference to his sickness: the male nurse in the alcoholic ward gleefully chanting, 'Good morning, Mary Sunshine!', or the pianist in the bar leading onlookers in a derisive chant of 'somebody stole my purse' (to the tune of 'Somebody Stole My Gal') after he is humiliatingly caught trying to acquire some money. A pity that the production code demanded a glibly unconvincing ending in which love finds a way.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 184: Fri Jul 5

The Man Without Desire (Brunel, 1923): Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image, 6.30pm

This is a 35mm screening with piano accompaniment.

Birkbeck Institute introduction:
A mourning lover reawakens after 200 years to search for his beloved. Filmed in Berlin and on location in Venice, this romantic time-travel fantasy has an exotic atmosphere rare in the British silent era, thanks to the group of bohemian artists and skilled technicians Brunel assembled for his debut feature, with cameraman Henry Harris fresh from working on Abel Gance's J'accuse. It helped launch the screen career of Ivor Novello, although by a cruel irony Brunel was denied the opportunity to direct Novello's biggest hit, The Rat. A rare chance to see this on 35mm with live accompaniment by Costas Fotopoulos.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 183: Thu Jul 4

The Lighthouse (Saakyan, 2006): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This film is part of the Restored strand at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
Impressive allegory of war – notably in how it affects communities of the elderly, infirm, children and women left bereft by the absence of their menfolk, either through battle, exile or death – set in an undefined region of the Caucasus, but making clear references to the genocidal Armenian experience. Lena (the expressive Anna Kapaleva) journeys by train to her  mountain village, in the aftermath of an unspecified war hinted at by government radio broadcasts, to encourage her grandparents’ departure but finds herself stranded. Beautifully shot in muted colour tones (replete with some extraordinary mordant, misty time-lapse shots of  the helicopter-gun-ship strewn landscape), this atemporal requiem, assuredly directed by Mariya Saakyan,  is played out with a Kusturica-style heightened naturalism, stripped bare of his carnival-esque levity, and deepened by affecting poetic musings on familial and cultural loss. 
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.