Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 89: Mon Mar 30

Mulholland Dr (Lynch, 2001): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.30pm

Mulholland Drive is the cinematic re-release of the decade so far. There was a terrific piece on the movie written to coincide with the re-release you can find here by Robert Bright in The Quietus. This presentation (also screening till May) is on 35mm.

"Like Billy Wilder’s film named after another iconic Hollywood street, Mulholland Drive tells a sordid tale of the industry of illusion and its boulevards of broken dreams – but for David Lynch, these dreams fold into dreams within dreams within dreams. Originally intended as a pilot for a television series, Lynch’s möbius riddle was rejected by TV executives. In restructuring it for the silver screen, Lynch crafted one of his finest masterworks. When the perky, wholesome Betty Elms lands in Hollywood for what could be her big break, she meets “Rita,” an ostensible femme fatale who is rendered identity-less because of amnesia from a car accident. Lynch’s (and Hollywood’s) dazzling dream factory sets to work with mysterious objects, startling visions, amusing detours and revelatory alterations in acting styles and character identities. The noir cracks open and gives way to a multi-toned, terrifyingly beautiful hallucination that is as much a complex reflection on Hollywood as it is an endlessly transforming psychological puzzle. Cinematic archetypes – including all versions of the female presented or rejected by Hollywood – double, reflect and regenerate into uncanny metaphors in Lynch’s subconscious minefield where the fluid layers of identity, nostalgia, desire, deception and projection could be in the minds of the characters, the audience, or a complete fabrication by dark, unknown forces behind the scenes … or well beyond."
Harvard Film Archive

Here (and above) is the trailer for the re-release.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 88: Sun Mar 29

sex, lies and videotape (Soderbergh, 1989): ICA Cinema, 8.15pm

This screening is showing from a 35mm print.

ICA introduction: A Palme d’Or winner and indie classic, sex, lies, and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) examines intimacy, deception and performance within contemporary relationships. The film centres on confession and voyeurism, revealing how desire is mediated through speech, surveillance and withholding. Reworking the logic of the ‘bed trick’ for a modern context, sex, lies, and videotape replaces physical disguise with emotional concealment. Characters seek intimacy through misdirection and revelation, turning acts of confession into forms of erotic performance. In doing so, the film unsettles distinctions between truth and fabrication, consent and manipulation, exposing desire as something staged, deferred and negotiated.

This screening forms part of a wider film programme exploring the 'bed trick' – one of the oldest narrative devices in myth, literature and cinema – in which characters go to bed with one person and wake up with another. Across three films and a book launch, the programme examines how cinema uses disguise, secrecy and revelation to probe desire, fantasy and the entanglement of sex and lies.

Time Out review:
Ann (Andie MacDowell) is not happy: her husband John (Peter Gallagher) is a lawyer who, unbeknownst to her, is having an affair with her virtually estranged sister (San Giacomo). The deception only comes to light with the arrival of John's old friend Graham (James Spader), a shy, impotent eccentric who gets his kicks from watching interviews he has taped with women about their sexual experiences... Steven Soderbergh's first feature is impressively mature, less concerned with actions per se than with the gulf between deed and motivation, between what we feel and what we say we feel. Despite the title, there is almost no explicit nudity or sexual activity; by avoiding sensationalism, Soderbergh leaves himself free to focus unblinkingly on moral and psychological complexities. No character is entirely without dishonesty or hang-ups; all initially shrink from taking full responsibility for their actions. The actors are superb; working from Soderbergh's funny, perceptive, immaculately wrought dialogue, they ensure that the film stimulates both intellectually and emotionally.
Geoff Andrew 

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 87: Sat Mar 28

Lenny (Fosse, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 3pm

This is a 35mm presentation and part of Bob Fosse day at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find full details here.

Prince Charles Cinema introduction:
Controversial comedian Lenny Bruce (Dustin Hoffman) begins his career telling bad jokes to bored audiences in the 1950s, but can't repress his desire to unleash edgier material. When he does, he begins a one-man campaign to break down social hypocrisy, and his groundbreaking stage act propels him to cult-hero status. When authorities ban Lenny's act for obscenity, he begins a downward spiral of drugs, sex and debt, aided by his bombshell wife, a stripper named Honey (Valerie Perrine).

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 86: Fri Mar 27

The Liberated Film Club: Sophie Sleigh-Johnson: Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

The Liberated Film Club is running twice monthly from July 2025 to July 2026. No film titles are announced in advance of the screenings but we feel sure writer Sophie Sleigh-Johnson's choice will not disappoint. For more information on the year-long season click here 

Close-Up Cinema introduction:
Welcoming Sophie Sleigh-Johnson. Sleigh-Johnson’s book Code: Damp - An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms (2024, Repeater Books) brings 1970s comic actor Leonard Rossiter into communion with the Hierophantic mystical tradition, extruded through the spagyric material and metaphor of damp. Here, the magnetic field of the television image bids occult artefact and memory to coagulate one to another. “I didn't get where I am today without recognising ‘promising inroads’ when I see them,” she says, pace C.J. Her ongoing work is distributed across spoken word, sonic environments, printmaking, props, and local newspapers, and is written in periodicals including Darkside magazine, Faunus: The Journal of Arthur Machen Society, and The London Drinker. Recent projects include her curation of a special 'Code: Damp' Experimenta Mixtape series at the BFI. She lives in Southend-on-Sea.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 85: Thu Mar 26

Yanks (Schlesinger, 1979): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This rare screening of Yanks – presented from a 35mm print held in the Cinema Museum’s own collections – takes place as part of The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100, a UK-wide celebration of one of Britain’s greatest directors in his centenary year and feels This rare screening of Yanks – presented from a 35mm print held in the Cinema Museum’s own collections – takes place as part of The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100, a UK-wide celebration of one of Britain’s greatest directors in his centenary year. There will be a special introduction by Yanks aficionado Carole Sharp.

Cinema Museum introduction:
During the Second World War, over a million American soldiers were stationed in cities and towns the length and breadth of Britain.  At the end of the war, some 70,000 ‘GI brides’ would return to America with them. Director John Schlesinger tells how the lives of three women (Vanessa Redgrave, Lisa Eichhorn, Wendy Morgan) were indelibly changed by three such ‘Yanks’ (Richard Gere, William Devane, Chick Vennera) who were all, as the saying went, ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Colin Welland’s story, set in a typical Lancashire town in the years between Pearl Harbour and D-Day, draws on a range of the real-life Anglo-American romances that were all too familiar during the war, yet have rarely been depicted in films before or since. A powerful ensemble drama, it features outstanding performances from, amongst many others, Rachel Roberts in a deservedly BAFTA-winning role.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 84: Wed Mar 25

M Butterfly (Cronenberg, 1993): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm

This screening is showing from a 35mm print.

ICA introduction:
A provocative, lesser-known gem in David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, M. Butterfly entwines love with deception, espionage and fantasy. Based on a real-life affair in 1960s China, the film unfolds as a haunting variation on the 'bed trick': a story of mistaken identity and self-delusion, where desire is sustained through illusion and cultural fantasy. As a lover’s identity is gradually unmasked, the film exposes the fragile boundaries between intimacy, performance and belief, and the limits of what can truly be known about another person.

This screening forms part of a wider film programme exploring the 'bed trick' – one of the oldest narrative devices in myth, literature and cinema – in which characters go to bed with one person and wake up with another. Across three films and a book launch, the programme examines how cinema uses disguise, secrecy and revelation to probe desire, fantasy and the entanglement of sex and lies.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 83: Tue Mar 24

The Last Supper (Alea, 1976): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This film is part of a Cuban cinema season at the ICA. Full details here. 

ICA introduction: This powerful drama brings a pious sugar plantation owner, in 1790s Cuba, attempting to head off an uprising, to share his table at Easter with 12 enslaved men. A radical and often surreal parable showing slavery as an economic system and championing Black resistance. “A masterpiece from the first image to the last”. The film was inspired by a real story. The impressive dinner sequence is the structural core of the film: almost an hour, which feels experimental and chaotic. “Let me see if I understand, when overseer beats me, I should be happy?” says one man at the table to the plantation owner. It is an extraordinary meditation on speech and power, slavery and freedom, submission and rebellion, ideology and oppression, ritual and ethics. 2026 marks its 50th anniversary. The screening will be introduced by a Cuban film specialist.

Time Out review:
A brilliant Godardian parable, reflecting the contemporary Cuban situation through a tale of a slave revolt on a sugar plantation in late 18th century Havana (historically, the moment when the old slave-based industry was under pressure from the new mechanised European techniques of sugar refining, and when the heady scent of freedom was sniffed in the air). The action takes place over the days of Easter, culminating when a rich, fanatically religious landowner reconstructs the Last Supper with twelve slaves. But when the slaves' response theatens his economic interests, the pious Christian suppresses the uprising. This complex indictment of religious hypocrisy and cultural colonisation reflects the same subtlety as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's earlier Memories of Underdevelopment.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 82: Mon Mar 23

A Very Private Affair (Malle, 1962): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

This screening will be preceded by a talk by Professor Ginette Vincendeau (King’s College), author of Brigitte Bardot (BFI, 2019) and of the forthcoming BFI Classic on Godard’s Le Mépris, who will reflect on the controversial legacy of the iconoclastic star in the era of  ‘cancel culture’. The film is also being shown on March 29th. Details here. Here's all the information on the Bardot season at the cinema.

Cine Lumiere introduction:
A dazzling poem of sumptuous, shimmering images, A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) was long considered one of the most beautiful colour films ever made, with its unique impressionist texture and luminosity together with its astonishing camera movements. Louis Malle did not want to make a documentary about Brigitte Bardot, but a film. He said, “Explaining the Bardot myth… is the business of sociologists, not storytellers”. In the film, Jill, a young woman from Geneva, arrives in Paris and quickly becomes a dancer, actress, and sex symbol. She is adored but also hounded day and night by photographers and fans. She has no privacy… A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) was invisible for almost thirty years and restored in 2023.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 81: Sun Mar 22

Lucia (Solas, 1968): ICA Cinema, 2pm

This film is part of a min-season of Cuban cinema at the ICA. Details here. 

New York Times review:
An openly tendentious tour de force considered by many as Cuban cinema’s peak accomplishment, Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968) is a landmark film. Solás, who died 10 years ago, was in his mid-20s when he made Cuba’s most elaborate and expensive movie yet — and perhaps ever. A 2-hour-40-minute black-and-white pageant, Lucía dramatizes the situation of three oppressed women, all named Lucía, at cusp moments of Cuban history — the 1890s war of independence, the early 1930s uprising against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and the post-revolutionary ’60s. Each story has its own style, and each Lucía represents a different social class. The Lucía of 1895 (played by the stage diva Raquel Revuelta) is a woman from an aristocratic Havana family who, losing her youth, embarks on a passionate affair with a handsome Spaniard. A story of love and betrayal is set against the war between the Spanish and the Cuban guerrillas known as mambises, many former slaves; the sequence is reminiscent of but even wilder in its orchestrated tumult than Luchino Visconti’s operatic costume dramas. Like the lovers in Visconti’s Senso, the protagonist cannot will herself outside of history. The second Lucía (Eslinda Nuñez, who played the object of the antihero’s fantasies in “Memories of Underdevelopment”) is the daughter of a bourgeois family. Unlike the first Lucía, she tries to engage rather than escape, giving herself to an idealistic young opponent of the Machado regime. Although not without violence, this section is tender and even dreamy — episodes of street fighting punctuate a “new wave” love story. Hauntingly beautiful, Ms. Nuñez could double for Delphine Seyrig in “Last Year at Marienbad.” But despite her character’s political commitment, she is marginalized as a woman even as her intellectual lover is betrayed. The 1930s revolution is incomplete. The third Lucía is the Castro equivalent of a Soviet positive heroine — not unlike Adela Legrá, the captivating untrained actress who plays her. An illiterate peasant, this Lucía leaves a female work brigade for love of a self-regarding, insanely proprietary truck driver. Having traded labor for servitude, she must learn to assert herself against the traditional macho husband who tells her, “I am the Revolution.” Reminiscent of the Italian film farces of the ’60s, the episode employs a rollicking version of the ballad “Guantanamera” to comment on their conjugal struggle and end the movie on a note of triumphant ambiguity.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 80: Sat Mar 21

House for Swap (Tabio, 1983): Garden Cinema, 4.20pm

This film is part of the Cuban film season at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with special guests from Cuba, distinguished cinema actors Mirtha Ibarra and Eslinda Núñez.

Garden Cinema introduction:
This film heralded a new genre of sociocritical comedy in Cuba and was the debut feature of director Juan Carlos Tabio. It is full of Cubanisms – popular everyday problems, language and attitudes of that era and a range of characters from an idealist architect to an opportunistic bureaucrat. Gloria wants her adult daughter to find a husband, who she considers a “good match”, and engineers a chain of house swaps to move to a “better neighbourhood” to make things go her way - but her daughter has different ideas and to love who she wants. It examines the desire to get ahead in a society that says everyone is equal but also celebrates the resourcefulness with which people solve their own problems.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 79: Fri Mar 20

The Killer (Woo, 1989): Nickel Cinema, 6pm

Time Out review:
The most dementedly elegiac thriller you've ever seen, distilling a lifetime's enthusiasm for American and French film noir, with little Chinese about it apart from the soundtrack and the looks of the three beautiful leads. It started out as a homage to Martin Scorsese and Jean-Pierre Melville, but the limitless arsenal of guns and rocket-launchers appears somehow to have got in the way. Exquisitely-tailored contract killer Jeff (Chow Yun-Fat, Hong Kong's finest actor) accidentally damages the sight of nightclub singer Jennie while blasting a dozen gangsters to kingdom come. He befriends the near-blind girl, and decides to take One Last Job to finance the cornea graft she needs. Meanwhile he is stalked by a misfit cop (Danny Lee), who eventually falls in love with him and winds up fighting alongside him. There are half-a-dozen mega-massacres along the way, plus extraordinary spasms of sentimentality, romance and soul searching. The tone is hysterical from start to finish, but John Woo's lush visual stylings and taste for baroque detail give the whole thing an improbably serene air of abstraction.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 78: Thu Mar 19

Taking Off (Forman, 1971): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

Time Out review:
A delightfully touching comedy, Milos Forman's first in America and far better than his later One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Ragtime, this deals with the attempts of a middle-aged, middle class American couple to trace and lure back their runaway daughter. Scenes of their search are intercut with sequences at a musical audition for disillusioned youth, and Forman's wry but sympathetic humour derives largely from the incongruities he observes in both situations: deserted parents, concerned and conservative, getting stoned in an effort to understand why kids smoke dope; a rosy, virginal young girl singing a quiet folk song in praise of fucking. Never taking sides, but allowing both factions engaged in the generation gap war plenty of space and generosity, its gentle wit has aged far more gracefully than the hectoring sermons of most youth movies churned out in the late '60s and early '70s.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 77: Wed Mar 18

Up to a Certain Point (Alea, 1983): Garden Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the Cuban film season at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A short feature (1984) by Cuba’s Tomas Gutierrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment). It seems to have been part of an official government assault on the problem of “machismo” in Cuban society, though Alea is able to lighten the schematism inherent in propaganda films with a fairly open shooting style and attractive performances. Assigned to do a documentary on women working in jobs traditionally held by men, a famous Cuban writer finds himself falling in love with his principal subject, a feisty female dockhand, but is ultimately unable to accept her independence.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 76: Tue Mar 17

Innocence (Hadzihalilovic, 2004): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This is a 'Machine That Kills Bad People'* screening

ICA introduction:

Leslie Thornton, Peggy and Fred in Hell (The Prologue), 1984, 21 min.
Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Innocence, 2004, 122 min.
 
Leslie Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell maps a surreal, apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this semiotic wilderness, the protagonists Peggy and Fred have been, in Thornton words, "raised by television," their experience shaped by a palimpsest of science and science-fiction, new technologies and obsolete ones, half-remembered movies and the leavings of history. 
 
In a different kind of hell, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s debut feature Innocence unfolds in a girls' boarding school, ostensibly at the start of the twentieth century. Based on a 1903 novella by Frank Wedekind, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, Innocence begins with the arrival of the youngest girl – in a wooden coffin. Investigating the socially-conditioned origins of female sexual knowledge, Hadzihalilovic uses dreamlike images to explore the metamorphosis from girl to woman.

This screening is accompanied by a commissioned essay by Chris McCormack. 

Time Out review:
Is this a horror movie or a grim fairy tale? Dedicated to her colleague, confrontationalist director Gaspar Noé, and sourced from a work by dark expressionist Frank Wedekind, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s stunning debut describes the purgatorial existence of schoolgirls in a sequestered rural college. In their crisp white gym shifts andpigtail ribbons colour-coded by age, these prepubescent model pupils are self-policing, save for a lone crippled mistress and a ballet teacher and the hovering threat of their ‘graduation’ ceremony in the mysterious house through the dark wood from whence none ever return. Meticulously shot by Benoît Debie with the chromatic richness of the pre-Raphaelite painters  – you can almost smell the moss and decay – and miraculously acted by its predominately young cast, Hadzihalilovic’s film may make for a finally problematic feminist fable, but its unique vision conjures memories of the terrible beauty of Franju’s surreal work and Laughton’s supreme symbolist invocation of childhood, ‘The Night of the Hunter’. 
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

*The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task. The group borrowed their name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the same title, and find inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16.

The Machine That Kills Bad People is held bi-monthly in the ICA Cinema and is programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Ben Rivers.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 75: Mon Mar 16

Wałęsa: Man of Hope (Wajda, 2013): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This film, part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank, is also screened on March 1st. Details can be found here.

Guardian review:
At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda has directed a movie with terrific gusto and a first-rate lead performance from Robert Więckiewicz. It’s a full-tilt biopic tribute to the trade-union leader Lech Wałęsa, founder of the Solidarity movement: bullish, cantankerous, with an exasperating charm and the gift of the gab. Wałęsa’s defiance of Poland’s Soviet masters removed the very first brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałęsa was the one subversive trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. Wałęsa: Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), respectively about a Stakhanovite bricklayer and his son in Poland; it discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow suggests, in retrospect, that the heroic “Man” of those first two films really was Wałęsa all along. The almost Napoleonic career of Wałęsa looked at the time like a kind of miracle; Wajda sets out to examine how that miracle came about. Wałęsa starts as a shipyard electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska), and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdańsk shipyard riot of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda suggests that Wałęsa’s luxuriant moustache made him famous and recognisable: the anti-Stalin in the cause of freedom. His activism moreover coincided with the sensational arrival of the charismatic new Polish Pope John Paul II; the Catholic Wałęsa was a key political beneficiary. It’s an invigorating and very enjoyable film from a director who shows no sign of slowing down.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 74: Sun Mar 15

Man of Iron (Wajda, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

This film, part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank, is also screened on February 22nd and March 1st. Details here.

Time Out review:
Andrzej Wajda's remarkable sequel to Man of Marble welds newsreel footage of the Solidarity strike to fiction in a strong investigative drama. A disillusioned, vodka-sodden radio producer is bundled off to Gdansk in a black limousine. His mission: to smear one of the main activists - who also happens to be the son of the hapless 'Marble' worker-hero. But, tempered by bitter experience of the failed reforms of '68 and '70, these new men of iron are more durable than their fathers, not as easily smashed. Media cynicism, censorship and corruption are again dominant themes, this time anchored through the TV coverage of the strike, though the conclusion hints with guarded optimism at a possible rapprochement between workers and intelligentsia. An urgent, nervy narrative conveys all the exhilaration and bewilderment of finding oneself on the very crestline of crucial historical change; and for the viewer, all the retrospective melancholy of knowing that euphoria shattered by subsequent events.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 73: Sat Mar 14

Planet of the Apes (Schaffner, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm

This film is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Time Out review:
Four sequels and a TV series bred contempt, but this first visit to Pierre Boulle's planet, bringing a welcome touch of wit to his rather humourlessly topsy-turvy theory of evolution, remains a minor sci-fi classic. The settings (courtesy of the National Parks of Utah and Arizona) are wonderfully outlandish, and Franklin Schaffner makes superb use of them as a long shot chillingly establishes the isolation of the crashed astronauts, as exploration brings alarming intimations of life (pelts staked out on the skyline like crucified scarecrows), and as discovery of a tribe of frightened humans is followed by an eruption of jackbooted apes on horseback. The enigma of the planet's history, juggled through Charlton Heston's humiliating experience of being studied as an interesting laboratory specimen by his ape captors, right down to his final startling rediscovery of civilisation, is quite beautifully sustained.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 72: Fri Mar 13

Ma Vida Loca (Anders, 1993): ICA Cinema, 6.15pm

ICA introduction: Mi Vida Loca a.k.a. My Crazy Life, centres on a group of young Latina women who navigate friendship, rivalry, and responsibility amidst the street gangs of Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Shot in the real streets, porches, and apartments of Echo Park the film paints a picture of a close-knit community with its own conflicts, rules, and pressures. After the success of Gas Food Lodging writer/director Allison Anders delivered a new take on the female-led romance/drama by embracing the story of young Chicanas in an urban setting as colourful and vibrant as the songs on the film’s soundtrack. Organised into three connected chapters and using a mix of professional and non-professional actors, Anders unflinching eye and commitment to reality led Hal Hinson of The Washington Post to praise the “extraordinary powers of observation…each segment is richly detailed and vivid…the stuff of life.” Out of circulation in the UK for decades, Lost Reels presents an extremely rare 35mm screening of this unique drama by special arrangement with HBO and it will be followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Allison Anders.

Chicago Reader review: A funky independent feature by Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging), set in the Los Angeles barrios and concentrating on the friendships between working-class women there. The stylistic boldness may get a little top-heavy in spots, but in general this is funny, insightful, and imaginatively told. The cinematographer, interestingly, is Rodrigo Garcia, son of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 71: Thu Mar 12

Gas Food Lodging (Anders, 1992): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

ICA introduction: One of the quintessential American indies of the nineties, writer/director Allison Anders elicits detailed performances from an engaging cast and astutely observes the quiet challenges of small-town life. Beautifully written, directed and photographed, the film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1992. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, “subtly etched characters, effortlessly fine performances, and a moving story that is not easily forgotten.” Tonight’s screening from Lost Reels is a rare 35mm presentation of this evocative, lyrical film followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Allison Anders.

Time Out review: Nora (Adams) waits tables and scrapes by, single-handedly raising two teenage daughters in a clapped-out trailer. Romance seems as scarce as rain in her New Mexico backwater: Nora and elder daughter Trudi (Skye) know what it means to be left high and dry, and even young Shade (Balk) suffers rejection at the hands of dreamy Darius (Leitch). But hopes of love die hard, and there's escapism to be found at the local Spanish fleapit. Shade decides to go father-hunting, but an attempt at match-making and the hunt for her long-absent dad (Brolin) yield decidedly mixed results. Far from gloomy fare, this debut from an American independent offers humour, wry observation and sympathetic characterisation. Without patronising her characters, writer-director Anders captures the frustrations of both generations, and the concluding optimistic note isn't forced. Delightfully oddball and strangely sane.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 70: Wed Mar 11

The Promised Land (Wajda, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.45pm

This screening features a Q&A with actor Daniel Olbrychski. The film, part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank, is also being shown on February 22nd.

Guardian review (in full here):
Andrzej Wajda’s queasily compelling film from 1975, adapted by him from a novel by Wladysław Reymont, is an expressionist comic opera of toxic capitalism and bad faith, carried out by jittery entrepreneurs whose skills include insider trading, worker-exploitation and burning down failing businesses for the insurance. It is set in late 19th-century Łódź, a supposed promised land of free enterprise, whose night skies are shown by Wajda as more or less permanently red with factories set ablaze.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 69: Tue Mar 10

Young Soul Rebels (Julien, 1991): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

This is a 35mm screening . It is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand (you can find full details here) and will be introduced by Sarah Cleary.

The year is 1977, the Queen's Silver Jubilee is fast approaching, and DJs Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay) are bringing the sounds of soul, disco, and funk to London’s airwaves with Soul Patrol, the pirate radio station they operate from an East End garage. After the death of their friend, who is killed during a night-time cruise in the park, the pair find themselves implicated in the murder when Chris comes into possession of a cassette tape which contains a recording of the killer’s voice. Meanwhile, Caz is falling head over heels for punk rocker Billibud (Jason Durr), even as omnipresent homophobia and racial tensions threatThe year is 1977, the Queen's Silver Jubilee is fast approaching, and DJs Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay) are bringing the sounds of soul, disco, and funk to London’s airwaves with Soul Patrol, the pirate radio station they operate from an East End garage. After the death of their friend, who is killed during a night-time cruise in the park, the pair find themselves implicated in the murder when Chris comes into possession of a cassette tape which contains a recording of the killer’s voice. Meanwhile, Caz is falling head over heels for punk rocker Billibud (Jason Durr), even as omnipresent homophobia and racial tensions threaten to pull the young lovers apart. A unique blend of thriller, social realism, and the ‘hangout movie’, Young Soul Rebels is vibrant celebration of music and youth culture, as well as a vital comment on the UK’s deep-seated divisions.en to pull the young lovers apart. A unique blend of thriller, social realism, and the ‘hangout movie’, Young Soul Rebels is vibrant celebration of music and youth culture, as well as a vital comment on the UK’s deep-seated divisions.

Here (and above) is the trailer.
 

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 68: Mon Mar 9

The Conductor (Wajda, 1980): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and features an introduction by film critic and scholar Michał Oleszczyk.

Time Out review: Culture shocks: Andrzej Wajda's credit appears over New York; John Gielgud's lips move and a disembodied Pole speaks his lines. Such incongruities are never quite integrated within this parable about a prodigal elder's attempted return to the fold. Gielgud is the eponymous international maestro whose encounter with a young violinist stirs memories of a provincial Polish debut - and an old debt - prompting him to celebrate his jubilee with his long-abandoned ain folk. His reception incorporates simmering jealousies and personality clashes (and Wajda's sly digs at the star system of socialist culture), but the film only really lives in fits and starts. Paul Taylor

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 67: Sun Mar 8

One P.M. (Pennebaker, 1971): ICA Cinema, 2pm

This screening is part of the Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned season at the ICA Cinema (full details here) and will be introduced by the season curator 

Time Out review: In 1968, Godard began work on a film in America (One AM or One American Movie) dealing with aspects of resistance and revolution. Dissatisfied with what he had shot, he abandoned the project. Pennebaker here assembles the Godard footage, together with his own coverage of Godard at work (One PM standing for either One Parallel Movie or One Pennebaker Movie). Although it may be dubious to show stuff that Godard had rejected, the film does manage to convey how he got his results. You can draw your own conclusions about his approach and why he abandoned the film.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 66: Sat Mar 7

Les Flocons d'or/Goldflocken (Schroeter, 1976): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This screening is part of the season at the ICA Cinema devoted to Werner Schroeter. You can finds all the details here.

ICA introduction:
Using the modest sum in prize money that Willow Springs had garnered, Schroeter began work on what would be one of his most uncompromising films to date and an unofficial final part to a trilogy of films alongside Willow Springs and The Death of Maria Malibran. With international co-production extending his cast of regular collaborators like Ingrid Caven and Magdalena Montezuma to include arthouse stalwarts like Bulle Ogier and Udo Kier, the film encompasses four parts weaving together high and low culture in a richly textured tapestry of underground filmmaking. The screening is preceded by an introduction from Anneke Kampman.

Venice film festival review:
A multilingual film, the summary of Schroeter’s early films: four episodes about great feelings and emotions, about the search for luck, about destiny and mortality, taking place in Cuba, France and Bavaria. Beautiful dreamlike variations on classic genres, from kitschy Mexican melodrama to poetic realism of French art films to Bavarian Heimatfilm in dialect. As Schroeter said: “It starts with an introduction conceived like a romantic poem about the general theme of the film: Death”. Les Flocons d’or was Schroeter’s last “super underground film” for which he could combine a unique international cast. Andréa Ferréol gambols erotically with three dogs and recites Poe’s The Raven; Magdalena Montezuma incarnates an angel of death; Bulle Ogier personifies “The Murderous Soul”; and Udo Kier carries a flower into the forest, like Schroeter’s hero Novalis, before repeatedly bashing his head into a rock. 

Here (and above) is an excerpt.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 65: Fri Mar 6

The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2008): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.20pm

This is a 35mm presentation which also screens on February 21st. The film is part of the Kathryn Bigelow season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.  

Chicago Reader review:
Kathryn Bigelow’s heart-stopping Iraq war drama (2009) follows a U.S. army bomb squad around Baghdad as it defuses IEDs, a job that places the men in potentially deadly situations a dozen times a day. After the squad’s explosives expert is killed in action, he’s replaced by a shameless cowboy (Jeremy Renner) whose needless risk-taking infuriates his two partners (Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty). He’s a true warrior, but Bigelow defines that in terms of addiction; as one of the other soldiers points out, he doesn’t mind endangering them to get his daily “adrenaline fix.” The war has already produced some excellent fiction films (The Lucky Ones, In the Valley of Elah), but this is the first to dispense with the controversy surrounding the invasion and focus on the timeless subject of men in combat. It’s the best war movie since Full Metal Jacket.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 64: Thu Mar 5

Katyn (Wajda, 2007): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and also screens on March 10th (with an introduction by journalist Carmen Gray). You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Andrzej Wajda has spent much of his long career dramatizing major events in Polish history, and this poignant feature depicts the circumstances surrounding the Soviet Union’s massacre of thousands of Polish officers in the spring of 1940. The film opens with a striking scene that underlines the plight of Wajda’s people in World War II: as hundreds of Poles cross a bridge to flee invading German troops, others run toward them to escape the advancing Russian army. The rest of this feature follows a handful of families over five years as they suffer through the Nazi occupation and the Soviet occupation that succeeded it.
Joshua Katzman

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 63: Wed Mar 4

Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This film is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. This screening will be introduced by writer and editor Laura Staab and the film is also being shown on March 8th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Kelly Reichardt's masterful low-budget drama tells a story a child could understand even as it indicts, with stinging anger, the economic cruelty of George Bush's America. Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) is impressively restrained as Wendy, a young homeless woman who's living in her car with her beloved mutt, Lucy. After the car breaks down in an Oregon hick town, she makes the mistake of tying Lucy up outside a grocery store before going in to shoplift, and when she gets busted and taken to the local police station, the dog disappears. Reichardt (Old Joy) and co-writer Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after hearing conservative commentators bash the poor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and their movie is a stark reminder of how easily someone like Wendy can fall through our frayed safety net. The climax is a heartbreaker, and in its haunting finale the movie recalls no less than Mervyn LeRoy's Depression-era classic I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 62: Tue Mar 3

The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.45pm

Time Out review:
Victor Erice's remarkable one-off (he has made only one film since, the generally less well regarded El Sur) sees rural Spain soon after Franco's victory as a wasteland of inactivity, thrown into relief by the doomed industriousness of bees in their hives. The single, fragile spark of 'liberation' exists in the mind of little Ana, who dreams of meeting the gentle monster from James Whale's Frankenstein, and befriends a fugitive soldier just before he is caught and shot. A haunting mood-piece that dispenses with plot and works its spells through intricate patterns of sound and image.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 61: Mon Mar 2

The Loveless (Bigelow/Montgomery, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

This presentation, also screening on February 20th, is part of the Kathryn Bigelow season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.  

Time Out review:
'Man, I was what you call ragged... I knew I was gonna hell in a breadbasket' intones the hero in the great opening moments of The Loveless, and as he zips up and bikes out, it's clear that this is one of the most original American independents in years: a bike movie which celebrates the '50s through '80s eyes. Where earlier bike films like The Wild One were forced to concentrate on plot, The Loveless deliberately slips its story into the background in order to linger over all the latent erotic material of the period that other films could only hint at in their posters. Zips and sunglasses and leather form the basis of a cool and stylish dream of sexual self-destruction, matched by a Robert Gordon score which exaggerates the sexual aspects of '50s music. At times the perversely slow beat of each scene can irritate, but that's a reasonable price for the film's super-saturated atmosphere.
David Thompson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 60: Sun Mar 1

The Death of Maria Malibran (Schroeter, 1972): ICA Cinema, 4pm

This is a 35mm screening and part of the season at the ICA Cinema devoted to Werner Schroete. You can finds all the details here.

Rowe Reviews review:
An experimental art film that is sure to only appeal to the more adventurous viewer who is a fan of opaque and mysterious works of art, Werner Schroeter’s Death of Maria Malibran provides little conclusions through its running time but never-the-less it's a harrowing portrait that challenges the fundamental ideals of what cinema can be.  The film is a fever dream of emotion and subtle energy, being dreamlike as it uses a vibrant orchestral score and operatic performance art to deliver an expressionistic art piece that confounds as much as it intrigues.  The film is simply stunning, with cinematography, art direction, and lighting which combine to create an intoxicating experience that feels very much like an operatic stage play while still giving off an almost supernatural vibe of mystery and intrigue.  The film starts off full of Romanticism but as it progresses it becomes clear The Death of Maria Malibran is one of ironic romanticism and subversive style, routinely having sound and image intentionally out of sync which creates a playful perversion, something that becomes darker and darker as the film progresses, dehumanizing these romanticized, picturesque woman of bourgeois society.  While trying to easily define Schroeter's film in any easily discernible way feels like a fools errand, The Death of Maria Maliban is a film which uses opera as a device to expose the ugliness and cruelty that exists in bourgeouis society, one that is driven by status and the collective ideals.   Characters routinely speak in a way that makes little sense and many of the characters become  undifferentiable as the film progresses, as if to suggest that language itself has little meaning, as one's actions are the deriving force of morality and personal characters.  Schroeter routinely injects the film with upbeat, vapid pop-style songs throughout, another bizarre but expressionistic decision which speaks to the vapid nature of society.  While many of these observations could be completely off-base, The Death of Maria Maliban as a whole feels like an indictment on the selfish, abusive constructs which society as a whole can create, one which routinely tears down the individual for the sake of the collective.  Conformity and lack of individuality feel like a major aspect of this film, with the bourgeois characters essentially attempting to destroy the young Maria Maliban for having a different perspective than their overall ideals.  Featuring so much to think about, consider, and attempt to deconstruct, Werner Schroeter's The Death of Maria Maliban is a film you experience more than attempt to define, being an expressionistic fever dream that is not quite like anything I've ever seen.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 59: Sat Feb 28

Blonde Death (Baker, 1984): Nickel Cinema, 6pm

This cult movie will be shown via VHS. 

Nickel Cinema introduction:
Shot on consumer-grade video and circulating for decades as a near-mythic underground tape, Blonde Death follows the runaway odyssey of Tammy, a teenage misfit fleeing an abusive home with two queer outsiders who christen themselves her new family. Their improvised road trip blends impulsive romance, petty crime, and manic self-invention, gradually collapsing into violence as the trio drifts further from stability. The film’s messy exuberance is threaded with a growing sense of doom, capturing the volatility of youth pushed to the margins. A seminal artifact of queer DIY cinema, Blonde Death fuses melodrama, punk energy, and camp excess with unexpectedly sharp social commentary. Director James Robert Baker — better known for his incendiary fiction — uses the limitations of shot-on-video production to amplify the film’s immediacy and emotional rawness. The result is a rare, transgressive work whose jagged form reflects the precarity, rebellion, and desperation of its characters, standing at the intersection of outsider art and queer counterculture.

Screen Slate review:
If an angry gay anarchist reimagined Badlands for the 80s, what might we expect of its impressionable yet fiercely loyal protagonist? Would her family move to Orange County to start a Christian ministry? Could her relationship with her bad-to-the-bone boytoy be complicated by the release of his prison bunkmate? Might the musical refrain of Carl Orff's "Gassenhauer" be replaced by The Angry Samoans' "My Old Man's a Fatso"? And what if the whole thing was shot on video for $2,000? These questions are answered in Blonde Death (1984), which deserves a place alongside Bill Gunn's Personal Problems as a recently revived shot-on-video feature worthy of serious consideration within the cinematic canon. Its director, James Robert Baker – credited here as "James Dillinger" – is best known for his transgressive gay fiction like Boy Wonder (1985) and Tim and Pete (1993), the latter about rekindled former lovers on a death trip to assassinate the American New Right. Around the time of Blonde Death's production, Baker was an award-winning yet unproduced UCLA screenwriting grad, and this, his only feature, was realized under the auspices of Hollywood-based media arts center and video gallery EZTV. The result is a tightly structured, character-driven satire buoyed by pitch-perfect casting of unknown actors, including Sara Lee Wade as Tammy "the teenage timebomb," who narrates in an earnest voiceover with a singsong southern drawl. Tammy's parents espouse strict Christian values, but her potentially closeted father has a spanking fetish, and her stepmother, we learn, is scheming to murder him with poison Tang to inherit money to open a new church with her lover. When both are out of town, Tammy is aggressively courted by a one-eyed lesbian, but she instead falls into the thralls of a hunky home invader, with whom she plots to rob Disneyland to start a new life. (The eventual heist is shot guerrilla style within the Magic Kingdom.) But their plans receive a mixed blessing with the arrival of Tammy's new squeeze's prison lover, who is embraced as a third partner—but may be a homicidal maniac. Blonde Death is rich with cultural clutter: doomsday churches, singing televangelists, pill-popping, Mickey Mouse, and knotty sexual confusion. But Baker is uniquely talented at tying satire back to his characters, weaving a consistently engaging tapestry of transgressive societal commentary. And alongside the affinities with John Waters's oeuvre, Mudhoney, and Baby Doll, Blonde Death feels equally of a piece with the Abject Art of fellow Angelenos Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, or Bruce & Norman Yonemoto's videographic deconstructions of Hollywood mythmaking and melodrama. The result resists easy placement within the continuum of independent 80s cinema or video art; and while it seems like a tragic and unfair twist of fate that Baker's feature filmmaking career never took flight, such an outsider position seems to befit this perverse, uncompromising, and deeply felt work.
Jon Dieringer

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 58: Fri Feb 27

Angel Heart (Parker, 1987): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

Chicago Reader review:
Mickey Rourke as a private investigator hired by a mysterious client (Robert De Niro) to track down a missing person. Deliberate mystification in all this, with imponderable flashbacks and assorted voodoo distractions, though director Alan Parker (Midnight Express) drops so many ironic cues along the way that when the surprise ending finally comes, it isn’t. Parker directs everything for maximum visual impact but can’t manage to tie the scenes together: there’s no pacing, no development, only alternating passages of disaffected ramble and hysterical rant. The semiautistic styling may be congenial to his perennial themes (of personal entrapment and the self under siege), but for all the supernatural bloodletting and explosions of technique, the film remains distant and closed (1987).
Pat Graham 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 57: Thu Feb 26

The Secrets of the Jinn Valley Treasure (Gholestan, 1974): Barbican Cinema, 8.30pm

Barbican introduction to this film in Iranian Masterpieces season:
The final cinematic work of director Ebrahim Golestan, this political satire places the ills of a society under a comic magnifying glass. A Monty Python–esque allegory about the corrosive impact of oil exports on Iranian life, following a villager who discovers a hidden fortune, becomes rich overnight, and swiftly transforms into a tyrant. The film’s troubled history began even before its release. Golestan felt compelled to conceal the story during production, aware of how his intentions may be skewed. When it finally reached cinemas, the film was banned after 2 weeks. The questions remained – were they misinterpretations, or simply interpretations? Featuring several major stars of the era, including comedian Parviz Sayyad and Mary Apick. Golestan re-edited the film but the director’s version was never publicly screened… until now. This screening marks the world premiere of the brand-new restoration of the film’s director’s cut. 

Chicago Reader review:
Having moved to London in 1967, the distinguished Iranian writer, translator, producer, and director Ebrahim Golestan returned to his homeland to make this unpleasant allegorical comedy (1972), his second and final feature to date. A bitter satire about the shah’s corrupt regime, it centers on a poor peasant who plunges into a hidden cave, discovers a cache of valuable antiques, and becomes a grotesque nouveau riche tyrant. Golestan tackled a related theme in his exquisite 1965 short The Iranian Crown Jewels (see listing for “Documentaries by Ebrahim Golestan”), which was commissioned and then banned by the shah’s cultural ministry, but that film attacked the very elitism that subsumes this one.
Jonathan Rosenbaum