Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 25: Sun Jan 25

The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941): Castle Cinema, 2pm

This film is part of the monthly16mm Cine-Real events at the Castle Cinema.

Chicago Reader review:
The key film in the Bogart myth (1941). I don't want to knock it, but what John Huston does with Bogart's personality and the hard-boiled genre in general has always struck me as pale compared to the Howard Hawks films that followed (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep). The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 24: Sat Jan 24

Prime Cut (Ritchie, 1972): Nickel Cinema, 6.15pm

Time Out review:
Michael Ritchie's inexplicably underrated second feature is a superb amalgam of pulp gangster thriller and fairytale, in which white knight/Chicago syndicate enforcer (Lee Marvin) visits recalcitrant black knight/Kansas boss (Gene Hackman), rescuing damsel in distress (Sissy Spacek, making her debut) while there. Underneath a surface that constantly juxtaposes opposites, Prime Cut concerns a curious, fundamental naiveté underlying America's corruption: that allows Hackman to give the country the dope and flesh it wants; that permits Marvin to attempt to live out his Beauty and the Beast romance; that implies, in the fairground shootout, an America totally oblivious to what is going on in front of its eyes. In his round-trip of bars, hotels, flophouses, ranches, cities and countryside, Ritchie demonstrates a truly fine handling of locations, best realised in two classic Hitchcock-like chases, through the fairground, and across a cornfield pursued by a combine harvester.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.