Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 66: Sat Mar 8

I'm All Right Jack (Boulting, 1959): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm


This film is part of the 'Celebrating Peter. Sellers' season at the Cinema Museum and will be followed by a Q&A discussion with leading film and media experts Dr. Graham McCann, Robert Ross and David Stubbs.

Time Out review:
The best of the Boulting Brothers' warm, vulgar, affectionate satires. The travails of silly-ass hero Ian Carmichael are only mildly amusing, but the film blazes into life with the arrival of Peter Sellers' Stalinist Don Quixote, tilting with alarming predictability at the windmills constructed by his class enemies. The Red Robbos of this world may be an unfairly easy target, but Sellers' caricature is affectionate, not malicious. Accusations of union-bashing are misplaced. The workers may all be dumb clods who sleep with their vests on, but there's a grudging appreciation of their truculent cynicism, and Richard Attenborough's horrid little entrepreneur discovers that in making them the dupes of his capitalist crookery he brings about his own downfall.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 65: Fri Mar 7

Blood and Black Lace (Bava, 1964): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm


Film Frenzy review:
After making a name for himself with a pair of exquisite horror flicks, 1960s gothic-infused gem Black Sunday and 1963’s trippy anthology opus Black Sabbath, Italian filmmaker Mario Bava went off and pretty much invented a new film genre all by himself. Generally considered the second produced giallo but the first in terms of importance and influence — the previous year had seen Bava release The Girl Who Knew Too Much, but that one is often overlooked or dismissed — Blood and Black Lace features many of the components that would largely come to define the genre: laser-like focus on the various murders; a camera that’s constantly on the prowl; dazzling use of light and color; and the employment of an American actor in a central role. Centering on a fashion house steeped in corruption and crime, this opens as one of its models is brutally murdered, a slaying that leads the local police to interrogate the owner (Eva Bartok), the manager (Cameron Mitchell), the other models, and various men involved with the couture culture. As is often the case with giallo entries, story is secondary to style, and that’s particularly true here. But what Blood and Black Lace lacks in narrative, it makes up for it on a visual level, and while there would be better giallo films arriving in later years, the postmark on this one makes it essential viewing.
Matt Brunson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 64: Thu Mar 6

Suntan (Papadimitropoulos, 2016): Garden Cinema, 3.30pm


This film, which also screens on March 23rd with a Q&A, is part of the Contemporary Greek Cinema: Beyond the Weird Wave season at the Garden Cinema.

Guardian review:
Argyris Papadimitropoulos is a Greek film-maker whose work I didn’t know before seeing this unbearably sad story of sexual obsession. His style stands a little outside the black-comic absurdism of contemporaries such as Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, but he deserves to be as well known as them.
Suntan is tremendously acted, fiercely and instantly absorbing, a tragicomic tale of male midlife breakdown, featuring someone who could possibly be described as an EasyJet Gustav von Aschenbach. Makis Papadimitriou (who was in Tsangari’s film Chevalier) is excellent as Kostis, a plump, bald, middle-aged doctor who, after an unspecified history of personal disappointment, takes up a job as local practitioner on a Greek island whose economy depends on the summer months, when it becomes party central for beautiful twentysomethings. Poor, lonely Kostis one day has to attend to Anna (Elli Tringou), a gorgeous young woman who has fallen off her quad bike. She playfully takes a shine to Kostis and, with the heedless caprice and cruelty of youth, invites him to hang out on the beach with her and her friends after his daily clinic. Inevitably, Kostis embarrasses himself by falling deeply in love with her. Humiliation and worse is in store. It is superbly directed and shot with great scenes: quietly devastating when Kostis is happily dancing at a club until his poor face is creased with sadness when he realises that Anna and the gang have gone. And Kostis licking sand out of Anna’s eyeball is an extraordinary moment. Trevor Howard never thought to try that with Celia Johnson.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 63: Wed Mar 5

The Boy Friend (Russell, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm


This film is part of the Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Sandy Wilson’s nostalgic pastiche of 20s musicals is predictably decorated by wizard of excess Ken Russell with the slightly soured whipped cream of hommages to Hollywood musicals and memories of his own days as a chorus boy. The seediness and squalor of backstage life aptly deflate the onstage illusion, though blond and beautiful premier danseur Christopher Gable is effortlessly elegant as the young lead, and Twiggy brings a naive, crumpled charm to the part of the girl who goes out a youngster and—naturally—comes back a star. With Max Adrian and the incomparable Vladek Sheybal as De Thrill, the Hollywood producer in the audience, whose fantasies are in tune with Russell’s own.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 62: Tue Mar 4

Sunday Bloody Sunday (Schlesinger, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.40pm


This is a Funeral Parade Queer Film Society screening. There are others here

Empire Magazine review:
Easily John Schlesinger’s most personal film, this is a poignant study of the twin perils of being British and lonely. Doctor Peter Finch and unemployment advisor Glenda Jackson are so afraid of facing life alone that they agree to share with caring but self-serving sculptor Murray Head. Neither is that comfortable with the arrangement, but the anticipation of stolen trysts dulls the pain of the interminable absences. But this is not just about urbane socio-emotional compromise. Schlesinger explores the impact on the middle-class of 1960s attitudes to sex and class, while also taking swipes at the vulgarity of American culture. He also elicits performances of great sensitivity from the Oscar-nominated Jackson and Finch, who keep their passions buried beneath a hair-shirt of civility.
David Parkinson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 61: Mon Mar 3

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 7.10pm

This 35mm presetnation is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.

BFI introduction:
Returning to the big screen to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Peter Weir’s adaption of Joan Lindsay’s novel has lost none of its mystique or mesmerising power. On Valentine’s Day 1900, students from Appleyard College, a girls’ private school in Victoria, Australia, embark on a field trip to an unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock. Despite rules against it, several of the girls wander off. It’s not until the end of the day that the group realise that some of their party have mysteriously disappeared. Weir’s wonderfully enigmatic film, with its ethereal cinematography, is possessed of a ghostly, foreboding atmosphere. A significant influence on the work of Sofia Coppola, Picnic at Hanging Rock has become a landmark for its dreamlike exploration of the intensely romantic, yet profoundly unsettling, experience of girlhood and burgeoning sexuality.
Kimberley Sheehan, Lead Programmer

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 60: Sun Mar 2

North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959): BFI Southbank, 12 noon

This is a 70mm presentation and there are a number of other screenings from February 17th. You can find the details via the link here.

Chicago Reader review:
Cary Grant, a martini-sodden advertising director, awakes from a middle-class daydream into an underworld nightmare when he's mistaken for a secret agent (1959). A great film, and certainly one of the most entertaining movies ever made, directed by Alfred Hitchcock at his peak. With Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Leo G. Carroll.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 59: Sat Mar 1

Ae Fond Kiss (Loach, 2004): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 5.50pm


Chicago Reader review:
A second-generation Pakistani (Atta Yaqub) in working-class Glasgow falls for a white woman (Eva Birthistle) who teaches music at his sister’s Catholic school, and the two young lovers find themselves isolated as both his family and her employers condemn the relationship. This Romeo and Juliet story (2004) plays out in fairly predictable fashion, but the great social realist director Ken Loach (Land and Freedom) puts it across with an uncharacteristic focus on the lovers’ sexual delight. Birthistle delivers a passionate performance as the young teacher, who finds that her parish priest and her boyfriend’s Muslim father share the same ugly paternalism. The screenplay is by Loach’s frequent collaborator Paul Laverty (Sweet Sixteen, Bread and Roses).
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 58: Fri Feb 28

The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Rossellini, 1966): Cine Lumeiere, 2pm


This film is on at Cine Lumiere from February 23rd to February 28th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
One of Roberto Rossellini’s supreme masterpieces, and perhaps the greatest of the TV films that mark his last period. Made in 1966, the film chronicles the gradual steps taken in the Sun King’s seizure of power over 21 years; the treatment is contemplative, wise, and quietly humorous, and Rossellini’s innovative trick shots to integrate the real decor of Versailles are deftly executed. The color photography is superb.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

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

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 57: Thu Feb 27

Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm


This 16mm presentation by those great people at Cine-Real film club is also being screened on Wednesday February 19th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
When Fritz Lang filmed it in 1938 (as You Only Live Once), the story had a metaphysical thrust. When Nicholas Ray filmed it in 1948 (They Live by Night), it was romantic and doom laden. But by the time Arthur Penn got to it in 1967, it was pure myth, the distillation of dozens of drive-in movies about rebellious kids and their defeat at the hands of the establishment. It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films (the tone wobbles between hick satire and noble social portraiture, and the issue of violence is displayed more than it's examined), but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 56: Wed Feb 26

Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980): Garden Cinema, 3.30pm

 
This film - part of the Visions in Ruins: British Cinema 1970 - 1980 season at Garden Cinema - is also screened on February 20th will be introduced on that night by novelist and publisher Nicholas Royle, and will be followed by a post-film discussion in the cinema bar.

As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or, possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly distributed at the time.

It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting; masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat. The ending stayed with me for quite some time. Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.

Time Out review:
One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing, less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters.
Don Macpherson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 55: Tue Feb 25

Je Tu il Elle (Akerman, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The digital restoration also screens on February 15th and 21st. Full details here. Tonight’s screening will include an extended intro by Melanie Iredale, Director of Reclaim The Frame.

Chicago Reader review of Je Tu il Elle:
Chantal Akerman directed and plays the lead in this early (1974) black-and-white feature that charts three successive stages of its heroine's love life. In the first part she lives like a hermit, eating only sugar, compulsively rearranging the furniture in her one-room flat, and apparently writing and rewriting a love letter; in part two she hitches a ride with a truck driver and eventually gives him a hand job; in part three she arrives at the home of her female lover, and they proceed to make frantic love. This is every bit as obsessive and as eerie as Akerman's later Jeanne Dielman and Toute une nuit, though not as striking on a visual level; as in all her best work, however, the minimalist structure is both potent and haunting.
Jonathan Rosenbaum 

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 54: Mon Feb 24

Chess Of The Wind (Aslani, 1976): Barbican Cinema, 6.10pm


This film is part of the Masterpieces of the excellent Iranian New Wave season at the Barbican. You can find full details here.

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

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

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 53: Sun Feb 23

Latino (Wexler, 1985): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm


This is a 35mm screening in the Celluloid on Sunday strand at the ICA Cinema.

Time Out review:
After the impressive but inevitably compromised Under Fire, it's good to see a movie that deals with conflict in Central America with a real sense of commitment. Haskell Wexler's brazenly partisan film may lack the artistic sophistication of its mainstream counterparts, but it gains in power by focusing not on the familiar 'neutral' journalist/photographer figure, but on an invading American soldier, a Green Beret lieutenant (Robert Beltran) drafted to Honduras to train a platoon of 'Contras' for secret raids on Nicaragua. There he becomes embroiled not only in the infliction of death, torture and US propaganda upon the Sandinistas, but in the contradictions of his position. First, he's a Latin American himself; second, he falls for a woman working in Honduras who hails from the village that is his prime target. Wexler's methods involve passion rather than 'balance': black-and-white moralising may occasionally be the result, but there's no denying the emotional punch dealt by the assured combination of taut narrative and intelligently researched context.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 52: Sat Feb 22

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Lynch, 1992): Rio Cinema, 8.30pm


This night dedicated to the late director also includes mystery shorts plus coffee, doughnuts and cherry pie as well as a David Lynch raffle.

Time Out review:
It begins with an axe crashing into a TV set: sparks fly, a scream is heard, and the symbolism is brutally obvious - forget everything you thought you knew about the quirky, wacky, cosy world of ‘Twin Peaks', cos Daddy's home and he's pissed off. Like many of the show's hardcore fans, David Lynch was disillusioned with what ‘Twin Peaks' had become: from a groundbreaking, excoriating peek into America's small-town underbelly to a cute parade of oddball soap-operatics in under two years. The big screen version gave him licence to bring it all back to basics, and he grabbed it with both hands: even in Lynch-land, with all its ear-severing, head-exploding, exploitation and rough sex, there's nothing so dark and demented as ‘Fire Walk With Me', the simplest, strangest, saddest and arguably greatest of all his films. The critics sneered, the fans balked and the public stayed away in droves. It's their loss: this was a beautiful new kind of madness, terrifying, exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 51: Fri Feb 21

Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Akerman, 1978): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The 4K restoration also screens on March February 7th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The succes de scandale of Jeanne Dielman brought Chantal Akerman the opportunity to make a film for the French major Gaumont; the result was this moody, terse, haunting feature about a woman filmmaker (Aurore Clement) on a promotional tour of Europe. In each city she takes the chance to look up relatives, friends, and ex-lovers, but none of the meetings is wholly satisfying; some block to communication always remains. Akerman’s use of long takes and open spaces delineates the gulf that separates her characters from their environment and from each other. While the atmosphere of anomie may be familiar from countless European art films, it is Akerman’s intense emotionality, held desperately in check by her precise camera style, that makes this effort something special.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the opening to the film.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 50: Thu Feb 20

Paris Belongs to Us (Rivette, 1961): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This 35mm presentation is the opening night of the Jacques Rivette season at ICA Cinema. Full details of the programme devoted to the director can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s troubled and troubling 1960 account of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters—a student, an expatriate American, members of a low-budget theater company rehearsing Pericles—as the student tries to recover a tape of guitar music by a deceased Spanish emigre who may have committed suicide. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu; Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film’s title (which is countered by the opening epigraph from Charles Peguy: “Paris belongs to no one”).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 49: Wed Feb 19

Women in Love (Russell, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm


This 35mm screening is part of a mini Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Ken Russell first claimed attention with this 1970 adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novel. In retrospect, it seems surprisingly sane and classy for him, though his themes of excess and abandon bubble beneath the surface. Though the plotting is largely shucked in favor of image and atmosphere, it remains Russell’s best-told film apart from Savage Messiah. The delirious romanticism is not nullified, in Russell’s usual way, by a sour awareness of its absurdity, which may account for the film’s persistent popularity.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 48: Tue Feb 18

Tomorrow We Move (Akerman, 2004): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The 4K restoration is also screening on March 12th. Full details here.

Review:
Tomorrow We Move (2004) is Chantal Akerman’s most underrated film. There is frequently an element of self-portraiture in Akerman’s work, but probably never so frankly as in Tomorrow We Move. Sylvie Testud plays Charlotte, a writer finding it difficult to crank out her commissioned, erotic prose. Chain-smoking, clumsy, eternally scatty and distracted, Charlotte is a human sponge: whatever she sees and (especially) hears goes straight into whatever she’s typing. Those around her burst into laughter at one glimpse of her “comic” attempts at describing sex. “Comic?”, she keeps asking herself at unexpected intervals. Comedy, sensuality, hard work, mess, cooking, chaos, and above all the constant presence of music: everything flows, buzzes and intersects in this portrait of everyday life. It’s a film that the philosopher Spinoza could have dreamed up, because everything here is a matter of swiftly fluctuating moods, sensations, inputs that instantly alter people and the way they see and experience their surroundings. Akerman – much to the chagrin of her co-writer, Eric de Kuyper – insisted on incorporating even those familial memories of the Holocaust that haunt much of her Å“uvre, deepening the prevailing “lightness” and airiness of the piece. Akerman had, indeed, a lot to “get out of her system”! The English title gives the film a pun it lacks in the original French, but fully deserves. “We move”: the reference is to moving house, relocating oneself; Akerman had already used it once before in the 40 minute monologue-piece, Le Déménagement (Moving In, 1992), which (recalling Michael Snow’s Wavelength [1967]) slowly creeps into an extreme close-up of Sami Frey amidst the unpacked boxes of his life. But there is another type of movement that is incessant here: the physical movement of walking, rushing, gesturing, dancing. Like in a musical, everyone is inevitably enchanted (even when they wish not to be), everybody sways to the rhythm – but the relations between music, dance and action remain loose, mutually autonomous.
Adrian Martin

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 47: Mon Feb 17

Personal Best (Towne, 1982): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm


This is a 35mm presentation from the excellent Lost Reels, an organisation dedicated to showing lost, unavailable and out-of-circulation films.

Lost Reels introduction:
This rarely screened coming-of-age drama follows the tempestuous relationship between Mariel Hemingway’s college hurdler Chris and Patrice Donnelly’s Olympian pentathlete Tory, as they first become lovers and then competitors during the 1980 US Olympic trials. This tender, poetic film explores the dynamics of sporting alliances, the rigours of training, sexual fluidity, and what it means to compete. A clear influence on last year’s Challengers.

Chicago Reader review:
Robert Towne, the acclaimed screenwriter of Shampoo and Chinatown, turned to directing with this 1982 drama (from his own script) about the love affair between two female athletes (Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly). Though the gay theme is given much greater erotic force than in Arthur Hiller’s movie of the same year, Making Love, it is also used as a metaphor for what Towne sees as the innate narcissism of the athlete, the love of one’s own body as reflected in another. The characters have a fullness and vitality rare in American films of that period. With Scott Glenn as a flinty coach, making the most of a part that is an actor’s dream.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 46: Sun Feb 16

Yi Yi (Yang, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 3.15pm


This film, part of the Edward Yang season at BFI Southbank, also screens on March 2nd and March 5th (with introdusciton by season programmer Hyun Jin Cho).

Chicago Reader review:
Edward Yang's most accessible movie is also his best since A Brighter Summer Day, displaying a comparable mastery that won him the prize for best direction in Cannes. In keeping with the musical connotation of the English title, the thematic counterpoint between generations is as adroit as the focus on a single generation was in his earlier masterpiece. Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral in the same contemporary Taipei family, the film takes almost three hours to unfold, and not a moment seems gratuitous or squandered. Working again with nonprofessional actors, Yang coaxes a standpout lead performance from Wu Nienjen (a major screenwriter and director in his own right) as a middle-aged partner in a failing computer company who has a secret Tokyo rendez-vous with a former girlfriend he jilted 30 years ago, now living in Chicago, while trying to team up professionally with a Japanese games designer. (The chats between the latter two are all in English, and Yang's own background in American computers serves him well.) Other major characters include the hero's spiritually traumatized wife, her comatose mother, his pregnant sister and her debt-ridden husband, his teenage daughter, and his eight-year-old son. The latter—a comic and unsentimental marvel named Yang-Yang—may come closest to serving as Yang's own mouthpiece; the kid becomes obsessed with photographing what people can't see, such as the backs of their own heads, which comprises for him the half of reality that's missed. Yang, one comes to feel, misses nothing, thanks to the interweave of shifting viewpoints and poignant emotional refrains. Cutting between the absent-mindedness of three family members in the opening sequence and orchestrating comparable thematic rhymes later, he makes his family one of the richest in modern movies—with the deepest impacts made by the oldest and youngest members, like the top and bottom notes in a musical scale.
Jonathan Rosenbaum


Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 45: Sat Feb 15

Night and Day (Akerman, 1991): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.30pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The screening on Friday 7 March will be introduced by Laura Carreira, director of On Falling.

Chicago Reader review:
One of the constants of Chantal Akerman’s remarkable work is a powerful if “heavy” painterly style that practically precludes narrative flow even when she’s telling stories. Even at her best, as in Jeanne Dielman and The Man With a Suitcase, the only kind of character development she seems able to articulate with conviction is a gradual descent into madness. But the relatively unneurotic Night and Day (1991) strikes me as her most successful work in years. Julie (Guilaine Londez), the heroine, makes love to Jack (Thomas Langmann) in their small flat by day and wanders through Paris at night while he drives a cab—until she meets Joseph (Francois Negret) and guiltlessly launches a secret nighttime affair with him. Akerman brings a lyricism to the material that makes it “sing” like a musical. Whether the camera is gracefully traversing Jack and Julie’s flat or slowly retreating from Julie and Joseph across bustling traffic while he recounts the things he loves about Paris, Akerman seems to have discovered both a musical rhythm for her mise en scene and a deftness in integrating her score that eluded her in her literal musical Window Shopping. This movie isn’t for everyone—no Akerman feature is—but if you care about her work you shouldn’t miss it.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 44: Fri Feb 14

My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.35pm

This is a 35mm screening. 

Chicago Reader review:
Gus Van Sant's 1990 feature, his best prior to Elephant, is a simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating road movie about two male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in the Pacific Northwest. Phoenix, a narcoleptic from a broken home, is essentially looking for a family, while Reeves, whose father is mayor of Portland, is mainly fleeing his. The style is so eclectic that it may take some getting used to, but Van Sant, working from his own story for the first time, brings such lyrical focus to his characters and his poetry that almost everything works. Even the parts that show some strain—like the film's extended hommageto Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight—are exciting for their sheer audacity. Phoenix was never better, and Reeves does his best with a part that's largely Shakespeare's Hal as filtered through Welles.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 43: Thu Feb 13

Take A Hard Ride (Dawson, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm


This film is part of the African American Western season and also screens on February 8th. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
A rather crude attempt to expand the Italian Western, cashing in on the blaxploitation and kung-fu markets. Two black dudes (Jim Brown, Fred Williamson), in uneasy alliance and carrying a heap of money, pick up a couple of waifs and strays, including a kung-fu fighting Indian, while a vast army of bounty hunters headed by Lee Van Cleef chase after the loot. All an excuse for some undemanding thrills, listlessly put together. The film only rouses itself to kill people off: they don't just die, they fall from heights, slam into railings, and throw themselves into puddles just in front of the camera. Ironic that it's only in their dying seconds that most of the cast come alive.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 42: Wed Feb 12

Laura (Preminger, 1944): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm


This is a 16mm presentation from Kennington Noir.

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 2025 — Day 41: Tue Feb 11

Almayer's Folly (Akerman, 2011): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
'Returning to feature filmmaking after a lengthy sojourn as a video artist, Belgium’s Chantal Akerman delivers a work as substantive, challenging and unique as her brilliant Proust adaptation from 2000, ‘The Captive’. Billed as a ‘liberal’ take on Joseph Conrad’s little-known first novel, this languid essay in despair sees Stanislas Merhar playing the stuttering, frenzied but ultimately tragic and possibly deranged figure of Almayer, a European ex-pat in Cambodia who idly tends to his failing trading post while ensuring his daughter, Nina (born to a local mother), is instilled with the same enlightened European values as himself. Scenes usually run in single, medium close-up takes (all immaculately framed and executed) and the elliptical narrative can usually be navigated by gauging the griminess of the cast. Tough as the film may be, it still speaks volumes about colonial exploitation and catastrophic clashes of culture, gender and age. The (eight-minute) climactic shot is also sensational.'
David Jenkins

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 40: Mon Feb 10

 Posse (Van Peebles, 1993): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation (which will feature an introduction by Mario Van Peebles) is part of the African American Western season and also screens on February 25th. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Not to be confused with the better-than-average western directed by Kirk Douglas in 1975, this 1993 movie about blacks in the west directed by and starring Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City) breaks with standard genre myth to come closer to historical truth. Pretty good in terms of action and character, but since historical verisimilitude is at issue I certainly could have done without the blatantly anachronistic music (I seriously doubt that chanteuses resorted to flatted fifths in turn-of-the-century saloons). The plot follows the exploits of veterans of the Spanish-American War (including Van Peebles, Charles Lane, Tone Loc, Tiny Lister Jr., and Big Daddy Kane), all but one of them (Stephen Baldwin) black, who have banded together to form a posse. As in New Jack City, Van Peebles displays a distinctive visual style of tilted angles and frequent camera movement, and the script by Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane also keeps things moving, but perhaps the best sequence of all is the opening one, which features the great Woody Strode.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 39: Sun Feb 9

Eraserhead (Lynch, 1976): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm


THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT BUT THERE IS A REPEAT 16mm SCREENING on Saturday February 15th. Details here.

This film, being shown on 16mm by Nickel Cinema after David Lynch's recent death, takes me back to an era before video, DVD and social media when print and word-of-mouth were the main forms of communication where a film was concerned. Lynch's debut was a must-see back in the late 1970s and it was fitting that the movie had its premiere at a midnight screening at the 
Cinema Village in New York as the midnight-movie circuit was responsible for popularising this indefinable work.
Eraserhead is a seminal work in the history of independent film and is as much a must-see now for anyone interested in what film can achieve.

Chicago Reader review:
David Lynch describes his first feature (1977) as “a dream of dark and troubling things,” and that's about as close as anyone could get to the essence of this obdurate blend of nightmare imagery, Grand Guignol, and camp humor. Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit. With Jack Nance and Charlotte Stewart.'
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the original trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 38: Sat Feb 8

Toute Une Nuit (Akerman, 1982): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI and will also be shown on February 19th. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
Chantal Akerman, the mistress of minimalism, has made her own midsummer night's sex comedy, with a superabundance of stories and a cast of (almost) thousands. The film shows an endless series of brief encounters that take place in Brussels in the course of one delirious, torrid June night, with the twist that each relationship is condensed into a single moment of high melodrama - the coup de foudre, the climax of passion, the end of an affair - with the spectator left to fill in the fictional spaces between scenes. Each couple compulsively plays through the same gestures, each mating rite is a variation on the same theme: repetitions which Akerman uses both as a rich source of comedy and as a device to show erotic desire as a pattern of codes and conventions. Marrying the pleasure of narrative to the purism of the avant-garde, this is her most accessible film to date.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 37: Fri Feb 7

Duel at Diablo (Nelson, 1966): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the African American Western season and also screens on February 1st. You can find the full details here.

BFI introduction:
Set in 1880, this adaptation of Marvin Albert’s best-selling 1957 novel Apache Rising arrived at a moment when the Western genre was undergoing significant revision. The film employs the Anglo-Native American conflict as a metaphor for Black-white relations in contemporary US society. In his first Western, Sidney Poitier delivers a commanding performance alongside James Garner, fresh from the hit TV series Maverick. Together, they confront prejudice on the frontier, in a groundbreaking precursor to the interracial buddy films that became a hallmark of US cinema.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 36: Thu Feb 6

Skin Game (Bogart, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the African American Western season and also screens on March 2nd. You can find the full details here.

BFI introduction:
In the pre-Civil War West, Gossett and Garner’s buddies and professional conmen Jason O’Rourke and Quincy Drew beat racist slave owners at their own game. Traveling through small towns, they swindle auction buyers out of their ill-gotten gains and abscond with their money. But what will these gamblers do when their luck runs out? Paul Bogart and Gordon Douglas’ comedy balances action and quick-fire dialogue, and features its two stars at their very best.

Here (and above) is thew trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 36: Wed Feb 5

The Learning Tree (Parks, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This groundbreaking film is part of the African American Western season and also screens on February 21st. Details here.

BFI introduction:

Renowned photographer Gordon Parks wrote, directed, produced and scored this adaptation of his 1963 novel. A deeply personal and semi-autobiographical drama, it follows Newt Winger, a Black teenager navigating adolescence and manhood in 1920s Cherokee Flats, Kansas. This poignant coming-of-age story vividly captures the challenges of racial injustice, community and self-discovery during a turbulent era. Among the first films to be inducted into the American National Film Registry in 1989, it remains a touchstone of American cinema.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 35: Tue Feb 4

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Fassbinder, 1972): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.15pm

This is a Funeral Parade Queer Film Society screening. There are others here.

Chicago Reader review:
A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film (1972). The action is confined to a single set—the apartment of fashion designer Margit Carstensen, decorated with desiccated mannequins and a mammoth painting of fleshy, galloping nudes—where the three characters (one is a mute) scheme, complain, and attempt to seduce. With Irm Hermann and Hanna Schygulla.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 34: Mon Feb 3

Golden Eighties (Akerman, 1986): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.35pm

This screening, part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI, will feature an introduction by cellist and composer Sonia Wieder-Atherton. The film is also being shown on February 13th and 28th.

Chicago Reader review:
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman) made this independent work from a work-in-progress known as The Eighties (the English title of the finished film is Window Shopping). Forty minutes of videotaped auditions and rehearsals for Akerman's shopping center musical are followed by three production numbers—in radiant 35-millimeter—from the film. The subject is first and foremost Akerman's love of actors and the filmmaking process, and second the process itself—the intermediary steps between conception and perfection, from physical materials to cinematic illusions. If you don't know Akerman's work, this is an excellent place to start: it's a very funny, very idiosyncratic piece from one of the most sympathetic of modernist filmmakers.

Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the opening to the film.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 33: Sun Feb 2

La Region Centrale (Snow, 1971): ICA Cinema, 12.15pm

This 16mm presentation is part of a two days of screenings at ICA Cinema devoted to a titan of experimental cinema, Michael Snow (1929-2023), who produced a body of work that established entirely new ways of seeing.

Chicago Reader review:
Michael Snow’s 1971 film La region centrale is surely one of the most unusual in the history of the medium. For three hours we see a single northern Quebec landscape from a single position, with no signs of human presence save a rare glimpse of the camera shadow. The camera is mounted on a complex custom-designed machine that takes it through a series of increasingly elaborate, carefully choreographed movements, many of which combine several different kinds of rotation. The sound track consists entirely of a series of beeps that come from the tape used to control the machine. Clearly, this is not a film for everyone, but what emerges for the patient viewer is a sense that this rocky, mostly treeless landscape possesses a vast, timeless, almost visionary continuity that ultimately transcends the human-designed camera movements. I have hiked similar Canadian terrain and can testify that this land has a feeling of being very old, as if barely evolved through the aeons, a sense well captured by Snow’s film. Few works of art have so eloquently articulated the difference between the world we were given and the consciousness we have evolved.
Fred Camper

Here
(and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 32: Sat Feb 1

Wavelength (Snow, 1967): ICA Cinema, 4pm

This film (showing along with 'So This Is' (1982), is part of a two days of screenings at ICA Cinema devoted to a titan of experimental cinema, Michael Snow (1929-2023), who produced a body of work that established entirely new ways of seeing.


ICA introduction:
A painter, sculptor, photographer and musician as well as a filmmaker, Snow used techniques from across the disciplines to challenge conventional cinematic notions of perception and representation. As part of the structural film movement in which form was prioritised over content, he saw framing, sound and duration as tools for reinventing the language of the medium, saying that “to shape time seems to me to be the quintessence of cinema”.

 Objecting to commercial cinema’s explicit attempts to prompt emotional responses, Snow didn’t try to predict the effect his work would have on audiences. Instead he stressed the bodily effect of viewership, emphasising that his films, while carefully structured, were “real experiences”. Noting that his 1971 work La Région Centrale had caused some viewers to faint, he said “I must be doing something right”. His work's ability to prompt both instinctive and analytical reactions has helped it endure across the decades. With thanks to Dream of Light, a London-based film project that champions experimental and underseen cinema.

Chicago Reader review:
Michael Snow’s notorious experimental classic (1967), consisting of a single, extended zoom (if anything moving at such a snaillike pace can properly be called a zoom) from one side of a loft space to the other. The aesthetic unfolding is engaging, also quite demanding, though I’m not convinced that letting your technical apparatus make the major decisions of your art is such a good formal idea. If nothing else, the film provides an inadvertent comment on the old classroom riddle of whether it’s possible to have a one-word poem; no, the classical answer goes, because it wouldn’t rhyme . . . and I’m not so sure that’s as stupid as it sounds.
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.


Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 31: Fri Jan 31

Plan 75 (Hayakawa, 2022): Birkbeck Cinema, 6pm

Birkbeck Cinema introduction:
The coincidence of the UK crisis in public funding with the Assisted Dying Bill prompts this screening of Plan 75. Produced by the famed melodrama auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda and directed by a woman, Chie Hayakawa, Plan 75 is set in a very contemporary Japan, beset by an aging population with minimal state support. (Real-life Japan has some of the rich world’s highest rates of senior poverty, particularly among single women.) The consequence is a new state venture, in which all citizens of 75 and over are offered financially-incentivized euthanasia. The film will be introduced by Birkbeck Honorary Research Fellow Mandy Merck, and you are invited to discuss it afterwards with her and Birkbeck Professor Emerita Lynne Segal, author of Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Aging.

Guardian review:
This strange, melancholy film from 
Japan effectively makes the (unfashionable) case against euthanasia: that old people won’t want to be a bother or appear selfish and so will feel pressured into accepting state medicide. We see older characters retired from jobs which they really need, people without access to welfare and housing, old people who are desperately lonely and who even crave the Plan 75 helpline as someone to talk to. But the movie creates dissident moments: a young employee of Plan 75 realises that one applicant is his elderly uncle, while a Plan 75 call centre operative meets an old lady in person and takes her for an evening’s bowling, and realises that her colleagues are being trained in steering callers away from the last-minute change of heart which is the customer’s theoretical right. This is a poignant and weird film.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 30: Thu Jan 30

Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm


This is a 16mm screening from the wonderful Cine-Real team.

Chicago Reader review:
Completing a loose trilogy that began with Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, Zhang Yimou’s grim 1991 adaptation of a novel by Su Tong once again stars Gong Li as a young woman who marries a much older man, and once again tells a story that explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and indirectly contemporary China. This time, however, the style is quite different (despite another key use of the color red) and the vision is much bleaker. The heroine, a less sympathetic figure than her predecessors, is a university student in the 1920s who becomes the fourth and youngest wife of a powerful man in northern China after her stepmother can no longer afford to pay for her education. She quickly becomes involved in the various intrigues and rivalries between wives that rule her husband’s world and family tradition: each wife has her own house and courtyard within the palace, and whoever the husband chooses to sleep with on a given night receives a foot massage, several lighted red lanterns, and the right to select the menu for the following day. The film confines us throughout to this claustrophobic universe of boxes within boxes, where wives and female servants devote their lives to scheming against one another; the action is filmed mainly in frontal long shots. Zhang confirms his mastery and artistry here in many ways, some relatively new (such as his striking sound track), though the cold, remote, and stifling world he presents here doesn’t offer much emotional release.
Joanthan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 29: Wed Jan 29

Inspector Lavardin (Chabrol, 1986): Cine Lumiere, 3.45pm

This film, also screening on January 26th and 28th, is part of the Claude Chabrol season at Cine Lumiere. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
In Claude Chabrol’s 1986 French detective film, the title character travels to a village to investigate the murder of a local luminary, only to discover that the man’s widow is his former lover. The characters are interesting enough, pursuing self-centered activities that, typically for Chabrol, seem parodies of bourgeois behavior (the widow’s brother spends his time making painted sculptures of eyeballs). There are also some wonderfully characteristic images—the widow first appears behind glass, her face rendered at once more vivid and more distant, and an overhead shot of the murder scene lays out the geography while distancing us from the characters.
Fred Camper

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 28: Tue Jan 28

The Annihilation of Fish (Burnett, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm

BFI introduction:
In this tender and bittersweet comedy of outsiders, a former housewife and a Jamaican widower, the latter freshly released from a mental institution, strike up an irresistible romance. Directed by one of America’s most revered independent filmmakers, this delicate tale approaches aging, mental illness and race in a poignant and honest way. Unreleased for decades, this 4K restoration finally does justice to the film and the late, great James Earl Jones’ performance.

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

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 27: Mon Jan 27

Murder by Contract (Lerner, 1958): Regent Street Cinema, 1pm

Chicago Reader review:
This rarely screened 1958 gem about the mind of a contract killer is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite thrillers, and it’s easy to see why. The film follows an existential hipster (Vince Edwards) who coolly regards his work as a business until he gets thrown by a big-time assignment to rub out a woman about to testify in court. Neither the screenwriter (Ben Simcoe) nor the director (Irving Lerner) ever made it big, but here they achieved something nearly perfect–with a memorable guitar score, a witty feeling for character, dialogue, and narrative ellipsis, and a lean, purposeful style. Lucien Ballard did the black-and-white cinematography.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.