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.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 99: Mon Apr 8

The Ballad of Narayama (Imamura, 1983): Garden Cinema, 3pm

This film, part of the Japanese Golden Age season at the Garden Cinema, is also screening on March 28th and 30th. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
'This harsh and beautiful 1983 film by Shohei Imamura (Pigs and Battleships) marks a turning point in his career, away from the violence and confrontationalism of his earlier films and toward an almost Ozu-like acceptance of human fate. The story is set in an impoverished mountain village, where the law of survival requires that every citizen over 70 be put to death to make room for new mouths at the table. Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto in a sublime performance) is approaching the limit but doesn't want to die until she finds a new wife for her widowed son Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata). Imamura's rough sexual humor is still in evidence, but now it has taken on a dark tone: to make love is to flirt with death. The snow that falls in the final scene is a blanket of oblivion, a complex image that offers hope through loss. In Japanese with subtitles.'
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 98: Sun Apr 7

The Good, the Bad & The Ugly (Leone, 1966): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.30pm

This 35mm presentation is also being screened on April 29th. Full details here.

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

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 97: Sat Apr 6

Exotica (Egoyan, 1994): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

Lost Reels introduction: Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Exotica was Atom Egoyan’s international and commercial breakthrough; with his latest film, Seven Veils due for release this year, its a perfect opportunity to see this signature work from one of cinema’s most acclaimed and distinctive auteurs. Lost Reels is proud to present this seminal film from an original 35mm release print, followed by a online Q&A with writer/director Atom Egoyan, hosted by critic Jonathan Romney, author of Atom Egoyan (BFI World Directors Series).

Chicago Reader review:
This may be the best of writer-director Atom Egoyan’s slick, Canadian carriage-trade productions (the other two are Speaking Parts and The Adjuster), though it’s also a regression, both formally and thematically, compared to his previous film, Calendar. The central location–a triumph of lush, imaginative set design–is a sort of strip club where young female dancers sit at male customers’ tables and verbally cater to their psychic needs; at the center of this faux-tropical establishment is an odd little house where the club’s pregnant owner hangs out with the jaundiced announcer (Egoyan regulars Arsinee Khanjian and Elias Koteas), voyeuristically overseeing the voyeuristic clientele. The main customer is still mourning the death of his young daughter, and other significant characters include a dancer who sits at his table, a baby-sitter, and an eccentric smuggler whose path briefly crosses that of the bereaved father. As a narrative this is something of a tease, building toward a denouement straight out of Freud; its structure both benefits and suffers from Egoyan’s customary splintered focus and repetition compulsion, and there’s an unmistakable sadness in its pornographic luster. But as mise en scene it’s rich and accomplished–for better and for worse, a place to get lost in.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 96: Fri Apr 5

The Last of the Mohicans (Mann, 1992): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank and is also being screened on 21st April. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Set in the mountainous frontier wilderness of the colony of New York in 1757, this charts the role played by Hawkeye (Daniel Day Lewis) in the complex war waged between the English and the French and their respective allies among both settlers and Indians. Adopted as a child by the Mohican Chingachgook (Russell Means) after his white settler parents were killed, Hawkeye belongs to neither one culture nor the other. Similarly, he is both warrior and peacemaker; and it is this dichotomy which simultaneously alienates him from the English military and wins him the love of the colonel's daughter (Madeleine Stowe). While few would deny the impressive spectacle Mann provides in some truly magnificent battle scenes, criticisms have been levelled at the way the film changes from a historically accurate account of the war into a full-blown love story. Indeed, it is best seen as an epic romantic adventure of a sort seldom executed with much intelligence these days. As such, Mann's characteristic mix of rousing, profoundly physical action, lyrical interludes, and strikingly stylish imagery, serves to create superior mainstream entertainment.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 95: Thu Apr 4

Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.45pm

This is a 35mm presentation and also screens on May 7th. Details here.

"This now-classic road movie turned the B-movie youthquake into an international art cinema. Easy Rider tells the story of Captain America and Billy the Kid as they go looking for America and, as Columbia’s original poster put it, “can’t find it anywhere.” From its legendary compilation score to its echt-60’s lens flares and culminating LSD trip, Easy Rider feels disconcertingly familiar, a model of what Tom Frank calls “the conquest of cool.” As they motor along to their inevitably tragic end, our heroes do drugs, have their rights violated, meet some interestingly allegorical groups of folks, and find themselves enframed by László Kovács’s gorgeous cinematography."
Harvard Film Archive

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 94: Wed Apr 3

The Getaway (Peckinpah, 1972): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This great heist movie is part of a Nickel Cinema season of road films and screens from 16mm.

Time Out review:
An evident precursor to The Driver (Walter Hill scripted both, this one from Jim Thompson's novel). The major strength of The Getaway rests solidly on Steve McQueen's central role, a cold tense core of pragmatic violence. Hounded by furies (two mobs, police, a hostile landscape), he responds with a lethal control, blasting his way through shootouts that teeter on madness to the loot, the girl, and Sam Peckinpah's mythic land of Mexico. Survival, purification, and the attainment of grace are achieved only by an extreme commitment to the Peckinpah existential ideal of action - a man is what he does. Peckinpah's own control of the escalating frenzy is masterly; this is one of his coldest films, but a great thriller.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 93: Tue Apr 2

Robocop (Verehoven, 1987): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
Android policeman roots out criminals in futuristic Detroit at the behest of greedy corporate controllers. Gentrification, criminality, what's the difference? Not much, according to Paul Verhoeven's creepily stylish SF thriller (1987, 103 min.), though Verhoeven, a Dutch director (The Fourth Man) with a taste for subterranean kinks and slick continental veneer, is careful not to let his satirical assaults intrude on the more numbingly physical kind. Still, there's a brooding, agonized quality to the violence that almost seems subversive, as if Verhoeven were both appalled and fascinated by his complicity in the toxic action rot (the entropic mise-en-scene is more than a designer's coup: Verhoeven can't get out of the sludge, so he cynically slides right in). As the human cop turned android, Peter Weller hardly registers behind his fiberglass visor, though Verhoeven, usually a master at suggesting the sleazily psychological through the physical, might have made something more of his eerie Aryan blandness
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 92: Mon Apr 1

The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1940): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.10pm

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

Chicago Reader review:
John Ford’s Oscar-winning 1940 vision of the ant line of Okies marching across the Depression desert to California was based on John Steinbeck’s best seller, and it remains, for better or worse, Ford’s best-known and most “respectable” film. Ford’s admirers have rightly tended to play this down in favor of his later and more personal westerns, but there’s much to admire here in Gregg Toland’s sun-beaten photography and Henry Fonda’s meticulous performance as Steinbeck’s dashboard saint, Tom Joad.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 91: Sun Mar 31

Brick and Mirror (Golestan, 1964): ICA Cinema, 5.30pm

This screening is presented by Cinema Tehran. Ebrahim Golestan's seminal films, which were virtually unseen, are pristinely and painstakingly restored by Cineteca di Bologna with supervision by the director.

Chicago Reader review:
A high point of Iran’s first new wave, this 1965 masterpiece by Ebrahim Golestan takes its title from the classical Persian poet Sa’adi, who wrote, “What the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.” The philosophical implications of this are fully apparent in Golestan’s tale of a young man who finds a baby girl in his cab and spends a night with his girlfriend debating what to do with the infant. Though this black-and-white ‘Scope film superficially resembles Italian neorealism, especially in its indelible look at Tehran street life and nightlife in the 60s, its spirit is a mix of Dostoyevsky and expressionism: minor characters periodically step forward to deliver anguished soliloquies, contributing to an overall lament both physical and metaphysical.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 90: Sat Mar 30

It's Winter (Pitts, 2006): ICA Cinema, 5.45pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Rafi Pitts and preceded by a screening of Mahyar Mandegar's short film White Winged Horse. This film is presented by Cinema Tehran.

Time Out review:
Kicking off with memorably beautiful music and images, this third fiction feature from Rafi Pitts – a London-educated Iranian whose previous film was a documentary on Abel Ferrara – is a stylish, confident fable that at first comes across a little like a reworking of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. After a man recently made jobless takes a train to seek work abroad, his attractive young wife (Mitra Hadjar), daughter and mother are left to fend for themselves in their small home on the edge of town. Months pass with no news of the husband; understandably, doubts arise as to whether he’s even still alive, and life gets harder. Meanwhile, a handsome but feckless mechanic (Ali Nicksolat) who’s new to town notices the woman now rumoured to be a widow, and starts hanging around in the hope of catching her attention. The crucial difference here from the James M Cain story is that Pitts never plays this situation for suspense, other than how the heroine will respond to her suitor’s advances. Still, the film is as specifically aligned to its setting as Cain’s novel was to southern California, and it reflects on how poverty, unemployment and the need to seek work elsewhere affect Iranian families. That, however, makes it all sound too analytically political, for it’s a determinedly lyrical meditation on how economic factors and loneliness may influence both social and sexual relationships. Happily, sturdy performances all round ensure the film feels real rather than merely ‘poetic’, and even though it doesn’t pack a particularly strong punch in emotional terms, it’s an impressively intelligent piece of work, and well worth catching.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 89: Fri Mar 29

Cinema Paradiso (Tomatore, 1988): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.15pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review (from 2013):
Prepare to feel old: Giuseppe Tornatore’s wistful, honey-glazed ode to nascent cinephile pleasures, already something of a nostalgia piece when it first hit our screens in 1989, is 25 years old. Now, to prepare to feel young again: returning to cinemas in spiffily remastered form ahead of a new Blu-ray release, the film retains its wide-eyed charm, pitched halfway between unrestrained romanticism and unknowing kitsch. It’s never exactly been fashionable to like ‘Cinema Paradiso’, and time won’t have done much to soften the sneers of dissenters. But the advantage of brazen sentimentality is that it gives the film very little to lose. Sure enough, this viewer’s tear ducts started prickling as early as the first scene, when renowned Italian auteur Salvatore (Jacques Perrin) learns that a certain Alfredo has died, and we mistily flash back to his post-WWII childhood in Sicily. Of course, Alfredo (the wonderful Philippe Noiret) is the village cinema projectionist. Six-year-old Salvatore (button-cute Salvatore Cascio) is the movie-mad poppet he takes under his wing. Mischief and melodrama ensue, but it’s the film’s ‘you can’t go home again’ message that now hits hardest amid the sweetness.
Guy Lodge

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 88: Thu Mar 28

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm

This is a Cine Real screening. 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 March 24th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Though open to criticism for its obsession with the brutality of modern life, this 1948 film by Vittorio De Sica is undeniably the most important neorealist film after Rossellini's Open City. As a man searches for the stolen bicycle that means the difference between work and unemployment, De Sica explores the terrible dehumanization of postwar life—and finds that loneliness is its unifying theme.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 87: Wed Mar 27

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007):
Prince Charles Cinema, 2.15pm

This modern classic will be screened from a 35mm print.

Time Out review:
Where does criminality end and celebrity begin is the question posed by Australian director Andrew Dominik whose stunning second film – after 2000’s excellent (and not entirely dissimilar) ‘Chopper’ – sets the Western genre barn ablaze to deliver a gripping, Gothic tête à tête between two of American history’s most morally perplexing folk heroes. Kicking off with an expertly choreographed train robbery which acts as both a narrative nub and tonal barometer for the director’s bucolic, mournful mise en scene and script, the film then ruefully traces the interlocking paths of Jesse James and his young admirer Robert Ford. Early word suggested that Casey Affleck’s Ford was the man to keep an eye on come awards season, but this is unquestionably Pitt’s film, his James insouciantly radiating a piercing, unreadable intensity redolent of Joe Pesci’s work with Scorsese, a truly enigmatic presence constantly obscured behind warped glass, thick smoke, or even his own visibly battered visage. Though, in the end, the film’s main intention is to have you query every element of its mischievous title (and you probably will), it’s a journey of immense emotional foreboding and, flabby coda aside, a red-raw classic. 
David Jenkins

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 86: Tue Mar 26

Le Bonheur (Varda, 1965): Lexi Cinema, 6.30pm

Chicago Reader review:
A beautiful and disturbing 1965 feature by Agnes Varda about family happiness, full of lingering and creepy ambiguities. A happily married carpenter (Jean-Claude Drouot) with a beautiful wife (Claire Drouot) and two small children (Sandrine and Oliver Drouot) falls in love with a beautiful postal clerk (Marie-France Boyer), who becomes his mistress. After the wife dies for mysterious reasons (whether by accident or suicide isn't clear), his idyllic family life continues with the postal clerk. Provocative and lovely to look at, this is one of Varda's best and most interesting features (along with Cleo From 5 to 7 and Vagabond).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 85: Mon Mar 25

The Call of Cthulhu (Leman, 2005): Garden Cinema, 8pm

Garden Cinema introduction: The screening will be introduced by author and academic Roger Luckhurst. This award-winning film was shot to look like a 1920s era film. Long presumed to be 'unfilmable', the HP Lovecraft Historical Society went to great lengths to be as true to the source material as possible. Film fanatic HP Lovecraft might even have watched this himself.

Call of Cthulhu is a fun, spooky romp following Francis Thurston's investigation into his deceased uncle's discovery of a mysterious cult, deep in the swamplands of Louisiana, the closer he gets to the call of Cthulhu, the more his sanity starts to fade...

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, who are presenting this film, has been running since 2013, with branches in LA, NYC, Online and HQ'd in London's Horse Hospital. They present a series of academic lectures to the public, aimed to broaden their understanding of this complicated and nuanced genre, covering film, literature, music, and video games.

 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

 

 

 

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 84: Sun Mar 24

Klute (Pakula, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This 35mm presentation (also being screened on April 10th) is part of the Alan Pakula Paranoia Trilogy at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.

Chicago Reader:
As close to a classic as anything New Hollywood produced, Alan Pakula's 1971 film tells of a small-town detective who comes to New York in search of a friend's killer. The trail leads to a tough-minded hooker who can't understand the cop's determination. Donald Sutherland works small and subtly, balancing Jane Fonda's flashy virtuoso technique. 
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 83: Sat Mar 23

L'Amour fou (Rivette, 1969): ICA Cinema, 1pm

A classic of the French New Wave and one of Rivette’s most radical works, L’amour fou was unavailable for years, with the original elements tragically burned in a fire. Now meticulously restored, the ICA, in partnership with Radiance Films, is presents the UK Premiere of this new restoration ahead of Radiance Films Blu-Ray release in April.

Chicago Reader review:
Rightly described by Dave Kehr as Jacques Rivette’s “breakthrough film, the first of his features to employ extreme length (252 minutes), a high degree of improvisation, and a formal contrast between film and theater,” this rarely screened 1968 masterpiece is one of the great French films of its era. It centers on rehearsals for a production of Racine’s Andromaque and the doomed yet passionate relationship between the director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his actress wife (Bulle Ogier, in her finest performance), who leaves the production at the start of the film and then festers in paranoid isolation. The rehearsals, filmed by Rivette (in 35-millimeter) and TV documentarist Andre S. Labarthe (in 16), are real, and the relationship between Kalfon and Ogier is fictional, but this only begins to describe the powerful interfacing of life and art that takes place over the film’s hypnotic, epic unfolding; watching this is a life experience as much as a film experience.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.