Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 230: Fri Aug 23

Baxter, Vera Baxter (Duras, 1977): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm

This film is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here) and is also being screened on August 10th.

ICA introduction:
This portrait of Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay) – an affectless bourgeois woman, and (as an ever-surprising Durassian voiceover tells us) witch – unfolds in an isolated modernist villa, bordering a forest. Her situation is revealed through the visits of two women, a former mistress of her husband (Noëlle Châtelet), and an unnamed woman (Delphine Seyrig), who coaxes her out of her silence. Through these conversations, staged theatrically in different rooms of the unadorned house, the source of Vera Baxter’s despondency gradually emerges. Her indifferent husband has sold her to other men for a million francs – the price required to cover the rental of the villa – turning her, reluctantly, into an adulteress (and a sex worker). Baxter, Vera Baxter was written against the backdrop of the Women’s Movement, with which Duras had a fluctuating and sometimes ambivalent relationship, and is arguably the film that deals most explicitly with feminist lines of questioning.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 229: Thu Aug 22

Jagged Edge (Marquand, 1985): 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.

Time Out review:
This shows that a contemporary whodunit can still rivet sophisticated modern audiences without retreating into horror or camp. Richard Marquand and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas achieve this coup by ringing brilliant changes on ancient material: Glenn Close plays a woman defence lawyer who becomes involved with client Jeff Bridges, fighting to prove he's innocent of murdering his wife. The trial scenes are scripted and played with electrifying skill, as every turn and twist is amplified through Close's emotions. But it is much more than a courtroom picture. These days it is almost unheard of for a movie to keep you guessing until the last frame, but this one does, partly because Marquand plays it so beautifully straight.
David Pirie

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 229: Wed Aug 21

Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1962): Curzon Soho, 6pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Curzon 90 season. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:

Agnes Varda's 1961 New Wave feature—recounting two hours in the life of a French pop singer (Corinne Marchand) while she waits to learn from her doctor whether she's terminally ill—is arguably her best work, rivaled only by herVagabond (1985) and The Gleaners and I (2000). Beautifully shot and realized, this film offers an irreplaceable time capsule of Paris, and fans of Michel Legrand won't want to miss the extended sequence in which he visits the heroine and rehearses with her. The film's approximations of real time are exactly that—the total running time is 90 minutes—but innovative and thrilling nonetheless. Underrated when it came out and unjustly neglected since, it's not only the major French New Wave film made by a woman, but a key work of that exciting period—moving, lyrical, and mysterious.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 228: Tue Aug 20

The Last Detail (Ashby, 1973): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.25pm

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

Chicago Reader review:
Two career sailors escort a backward young colleague to naval prison to serve an eight-year stretch for petty thievery. Along the way, the two initiate the youngster into the rites of manhood (getting drunk, getting laid, and pushing back when pushed), then have to stifle the boy's newfound sense of freedom to protect their careers. A tough-talking, sparely directed effort (1973) by Hal Ashby, with an immaculate performance by Jack Nicholson as the arrogant and salty (but feeling) sailor who tries to stay in charge of the odyssey, and almost doesn't.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 227: Mon Aug 19

The Cable Guy (Stiller, 1996): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

This "comedy" is part of the £1 for Prince Charles members season but there’s something more than comedy going on here. Something much darker ... highly recommended.

Time Out review:
A twisted and often nasty black comedy. When naive suburbanite Matthew Broderick asks Jim Carrey's over-eager Cable Guy to give him a few extra channels for free, he has no idea he's inviting the wired-up plugster into his life. Newly separated from his girlfriend, Broderick is sucked into his socially inept pal's deranged fantasy world, the result of a lonely boyhood spent watching TV. Carrey's whirlwind comic energy is too spontaneous and elusive to be contained by Lou Holtz Jr's initially unsettling script. Also, Ben Stiller's erratic direction fails to establish a consistent tone, so that obvious, crowd pleasing set-pieces alternate with creepy, disturbing weirdness. Compare, for instance, Carrey's typically berserk karaoke rendition of Jefferson Airplane's 'Somebody to Love?' with the nightmarish sequence in a kitschy Arthurian theme restaurant, where he and Broderick quaff ale and gnaw chicken before fighting, virtually to the death, with swords, axes, maces and jousting lances. Nevertheless, because it dares to expose the dark side of Carrey's persona, and to take chances at this pivotal stage in his meteoric career, Stiller's film ranks as an honourable failure.
Nigel Floyd

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 226: Sun Aug 18

Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944): Castle Cinema, 2pm

Double Indemnity is also screened on August 15th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
James M. Cain's pulp classic (1944), as adapted by Raymond Chandler and directed by Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck is perfectly cast as a Los Angeles dragon lady burdened with too much time, too much money, and a dull husband. Fred MacMurray (less effectively) is the fly-by-night insurance salesman who hopes to relieve her of all three. Wilder trades Cain's sun-rot imagery for conventional film noir stylings, but the atmosphere of sexual entrapment survives.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 225: Sat Aug 17

Le Naivre Night (Duras, 1979): ICA Cinema, 5pm

This film is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here) and is also being screened on August 30th.

ICA introduction:
In another of Duras's experiments with wresting sound from image, the through-line of Le Navire Night is a story of love and desire sustained and nourished through sound waves. The film’s voice-over tells the story of a woman, terminally ill with leukemia, living in isolation at her wealthy father's villa, and a man working night shifts at a telephone company. They have never met in person. For a period, they connected over unused phone lines: remnants of the German occupation of Paris. Now they have lost contact altogether. This story is illustrated by pans and travelling shots of an empty Paris – its touristscapes and an overgrown cemetery – and three actors (Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier, Mathieu Carrière) as they prepare to shoot a film (this film?).

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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

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.