Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 278: Tue Oct 6

The Girl Cut in Two (Chabrol, 2007): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6pm

This screening, which will be introduced by the director's daughter and the film’s scriptwriter, Cécile Maistre-Chabrol is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. There is another screening on October 3rd (details here).

Time Out review:
‘French society may be drifting towards Puritanism or decadence,’ says deciduous, sixtysomething, Goncourt-winning author Charles Saint-Denis (a marvellously offhand François Berléand) in a mock-channel TV interview in this nonchalantly acidic, upper-class-baiting delight by approaching-nonagenarian director Claude Chabrol. Charles is clearly a fully paid-up member of the decadent party: holed up in splendid isolation in his modernist manse in the Lyon countryside, the old married roué, gourmand, aphorist and erotomane is dubbed affectionately ‘the Marquis de Sade’ by his well-preserved publisher Capucine (Mathilda May). He’s moved to join the despised Parisian ‘media circus’ having smelled fresh blood in Ludivine Sagnier’s honest-hearted, less socially favoured weather girl, who he subjects to a series of ‘free-love’ humiliations and abasements in his upmarket brothel. Meanwhile, the unfortunate woman is assailed, in the equally threatening second half of a destructive pincer-movement, by the manic attentions of idle, arrogant, unstable, fatherless – and puritan – millionaire Paul (Benoít Magimel) intent on marriage and possession. An immaculate script, written with his long-term collaborator Cécile Maistre, reinvents the celebrated 1906 White murder case as a barbed anti-French-establishment anti-fairy tale (Sagnier’s weather girl is named Deneige – ‘snow’). Beautifully lit and crisply shot by Eduardo Serra, and directed with a confidence and seeming ease that stems from (and quotes) some 60 years of post-New Wave cinematic mastery, Chabrol’s latest comedy of manners is a minor stylistic and tonal triumph. Eschewing explicit moral condemnation in favour of a scabrous Buñuelian cool, humanised by a marvellously affecting central performance by Sagnier, and surrounded intriguingly by satellite performances which play riskily and amusingly with the edges of self-parody, this is one of Chabrol’s most elegant, acerbic and heartfelt entertainments in years.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 277: Mon Oct 5

Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.15pm

This screening is the theatrical English premiere of the new 4K Restoration, courtesy of Arrow Video.

Chicago Reader review:
Ted Kotcheff (First Blood, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) directed this forgotten Australian masterpiece (1971) about an arrogant Sydney schoolteacher (Garry Bond) who's slowly driven mad after a prolonged stay in the Yabba, a desolate mining town in the middle of the Australian outback. After gambling away every dollar he has, Bond succumbs to the aggressive hospitality of the locals, and they condition him to their brutish lifestyle, which seems to consist mostly of constant drinking, random fistfights, anarchic destruction of other people's property, and kangaroo hunting. A Conradian parable of a man succumbing to the wild, the film is remarkable for its raw, pointed depiction of human behavior. Push a man too far, Kotcheff suggests, and you'll find the beast concealed behind the mask of propriety.
Drew Hunt

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 276: Sun Oct 4

No 1: Blanche (Borowczyk, 1971): ICA Cinema, 4pm

The screening will be introduced by Daniel Bird, Co-founder of Friends of Walerian Borowczyk, a non-profit association based in Paris that manages the rights to the painter, sculptor and filmmaker. He will discuss Borowczyk’s association with Contemporary Films, and will be joined by Kathleen Wallfisch, Music Supervisor for film and TV, to talk about the music of the film and how it is arranged and presented on screen. This is part of the Contemporary Films season across London. Details here.

Time Out review:
In this remarkable film, Walerian Borowczyk, through his commitment to ambiguity (notably in his framing, which forever denies the foreground/background opposition) and his belief in almost entomological observation, transforms his 13th century characters - a foolish old Baron, an overproud King, a lecherous page and a stupidly handsome lover, all of whom are in love with and/or lust after the simple Blanche, the Baron's young wife - into tragic figures caught up in a dance of death over which they have no control. In exactly the same way, the castle and its decor, photographed by Borowczyk as though it were living and its inhabitants were mere dolls for the most part, is seen as the backdrop to a happy fairytale, and at the same time as the root of all evil, as rooms and bizarre machines are opened and set in motion.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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No 2: The Colour of Lies (Chabrol, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.10pm

This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screening of the film on September 26th is detailed here.

BFI Southbank introduction:
When a young girl is found murdered in a small Breton coastal town, suspicion falls on a local painter – a man of volatile temperament and uncertain alibi – as the community begins to turn on itself. Fans of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt will recognise much here. However, Chabrol is less interested in identifying the killer than in capturing the poisonous social atmosphere that the crime unleashes: the rumour, the prejudice and the quiet savagery of village life.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 275: Sat Oct 3

The Bridesmaid (Chabrol, 2004): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.10pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film, introduced by season curator Catherine Wheatley, is on October 5th. Details here.

BFI Southbank introduction:
A shy, somewhat passive young man falls into an all-consuming affair with a woman he meets at his sister’s wedding. Unfortunately, she’s a compulsive fantasist who will shortly ask him to prove his love in the most extreme ways. A Ruth Rendell adaptation, this is a heady tale of amour fatale, carried along by the charismatic performances of Magimel and Smet.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 274: Fri Oct 2

The Last Days of Disco (Stillman, 1998): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation also screens on September 25th at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Time Out review:
Manhattan, the early '80s. Recent graduates from an upper crust college, Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) - flatmates and friends of a sort - pass their days working as trainee publishing editors, and most of their nights discussing social niceties at a fashionable disco where assistant manager Des (Eigeman) courts the boss's disfavour by admitting the wrong kind of clientele. The girls hang out at the disco with a preppy bunch of Harvard admen and lawyers; rumour, rivalry and falling-out is rife and relationships are frequently at risk. The third comedy of manners in Whit Stillman's loose trilogy about the 'doomed bourgeois in love' again highlights the writer/director's expertise with naturalistically articulate dialogue whose idioms, ironies and absurdities provide vivid insights into the delusions, desires and often ludicrous tribal rituals of the young, privileged and, mostly, pretty ineffectual. Like Metropolitan and Barcelona, it's a brittle, sporadically brilliant film, very funny but rooted in social, political, historical and emotional realities. Beckinsale, especially, is a revelation, making Charlotte smug, spiteful, sexy and, underneath, rather sad, all with a spot-on accent.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 273: Thu Oct 1

La Ceremonie (Chabrol, 1995): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

This film, featuring an extended intro on queer Chabrol by academic Kit Francis Bradbury Rance, is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screening of the film on October 6th is detailed here.

Time Out review:
When Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) takes on Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) as housekeeper, her family's impressed by Sophie's aura of quiet responsibility, even though they're not convinced she knows how to serve dinner correctly. Snobbish but liberal, they nevertheless treat her generously. Only when she starts to consort with postmistress Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a gossip whom husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) suspects of opening the family mail, do they find real cause for complaint. But by then the women have a secret bond which excludes them from the safe cosseted world of Sophie's employers. Claude Chabrol's adaptation of Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone benefits from the director's immaculate sense of social and psychological detail. The film's strong points are not mystery, suspense or even surprise, but Chabrol's flair for characterisation, careful pacing and solid evocation of bourgeois complacency and anti-bourgeois hatred creates a palpable sense of unease that fully justifies the shockingly violent finale. Ledoyen, the daughter of the household, is a discovery; Bisset returns to form; and Huppert, unusually vivacious, is terrific.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 272: Wed Sep 30

Beautiful Thing (MacDonald, 1996): Genesis Cinema, 6.15pm

This 35mm screening will feature a Q&A with director Hettie Macdonald, moderated by Reclaiam The Frame's Melanie Iredale.

Time Out film:
A real winner this, from producer Tony Garnett and Channel 4: an 'urban fairytale' set in darkest Thamesmead, South London. Jamie (Berry) is in love with next-door neighbour Ste (Neal), but he's terrified his mum will find out, and Ste has plenty of troubles of his own. It may sound like a feelgood movie, but throw in the timeless tunes of Mama Cass, a funny romantic screenplay by Jonathan Harvey (skillfully adapting his own play), and a formidable performance from Linda Henry as Jamie's independent-minded mother, and you have the likeliest gay crossover hit since My Beautiful Laundrette.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 271: Tue Sep 29

King Rat (Forbes, 1965): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This 35mm presentation, introduced by Sarah Standing, Bryan Forbes’ daughter, is part of the Projecting the Archive: Bryan Forbes at 100 season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

BFI Southbank introduction:
The infamous Changi prison was recreated in California for this study of the human spirit in the face of cruelty and deprivation. In his adaptation of James Clavell’s sprawling novel, Forbes focuses on the psychological toll on the men, and how military rank matters little when survival is all. The ensemble cast brilliantly conveys the bonds and rifts that form between the prisoners.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 270: Mon Sep 28

Only God Forgives (Winding Refn, 2013): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.50pm

This film is one of the most remarkable of director Nicolas Winding Refn's. Most critics were dismissive on release but the review below by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw is a very good summing up of the movie's qualities. It is a one-off and, as Bradshaw argues, "deserves to be seen".

Guardian review (full version here):
Like a thwacked piñata, critical opinion for something provocative at a film festival can swing off in any direction. But it was, for me, surprising to find that one of the very best movies at Cannes this year had such a shrill and hostile reception. Nicolas Winding Refn's brilliant, macabre and ultraviolent anti-revenge movie Only God Forgives – his most interesting work since the Pusher trilogy in the Mads Mikkelsen era – was deafeningly denounced at its first screening. Some booed from their seats, cupping their hands around their mouths so that the sound carried that vital few yards further. Then came the nervy, brushfire social-media consensus – a new feature of criticism at festivals – as insecure pundits checked their Twitter feeds and committed themselves to derision, evidently taking Refn's supposed failure to be the "story", and in any case believing that something has to be seen to take a pasting if the praise-economy is not to go bankrupt. And all the while, middleweight products and franchise mediocrities are cordially waved through. I can only say that Refn's movie is entirely gripping, put together with lethal, formal brilliance, with bizarre setpieces of sentimentality and nauseous black comedy. It has its own miasma of anxiety and evil, taking place in a universe of fear, a place of deep-sea unreality in which you need to breathe through special gills – and through which the action swims at about 90% of normal speed through to its chilling conclusion. It is a kind of hallucinated tragi-exploitation shocker, an enriched uranium cake of pulp with a neon sheen.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 269: Sun Sep 27

A Summer's Tale (Rohmer, 1996): ICA Cinema, 7.30pm

A Tale of Summer is the third instalment of Éric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons series and, according to the filmmaker himself, the most autobiographical of his work. Mary Stephen, who will be in a in-person Q&A after this 35mm screening, not only collaborated with Rohmer on the film as an editor, but also worked with him on the music under the pseudonym ‘Sébastien Erms’, creating the melodious sea shanty the protagonist wrote in the film. This is part of a collaboration between Hong Kong Film Festival UK and the ICA.

Time Out review:
From the verbose intellectuals in his 1969 classic My Night at Maud’s to the loquacious lovers of 2007’s erotic The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, director Eric Rohmer has always loved talk. Yet in this sublime 1996 love story, nearly ten minutes elapse before a line of dialogue is spoken—a tension-generating exception to the norm. During that time we observe introverted young adult Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) as he wanders the streets of a seaside resort town, eating at restaurants, noodling on his guitar and generally avoiding eye contact. In short order, he’s approached by waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet, a Rohmer veteran), who gets the full story: Gaspard is two weeks away from starting a new job and is spending his downtime waiting for flaky sorta-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin) to arrive. Will she? Won’t she? Rohmer has a genius for taking a seemingly mundane situation and slowly tightening the screws. Margot has a rapport with Gaspard, though she denies any attraction—until maybe she doesn’t. Then there’s local girl Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon), who becomes smitten with the young man, but senses that his mind is elsewhere and continually challenges him about it. And, of course, the emotionally volatile girlfriend does show up—to Gaspard’s initial delight and eventual dismay. Conversation is a way for the characters to continually put off that crucial moment when a decision must be made. A long, enthralling interlude during which Solene and Gaspard hem and haw, evading any intimate expression (the scene’s punch line is killer) is the film in miniature. Think of it as a thriller by Hitchcock—a Rohmer favorite—only with words, not knives, that cut straight to the heart.
Keith Uhlich

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 268: Sat Sep 26

Story of Women (Chabrol, 1988): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 5.50pm

This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film on October 1st is detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
A bit mislabeled–the French title is Une affaire de femmes, which translates better as “Women’s Business”–Claude Chabrol’s accomplished and generally uncharacteristic period film (set in World War II occupied France), loosely adapted from a nonfiction book by lawyer Francis Szpiner, gives a plausible and wholly unsentimental account of a housewife and mother (Isabelle Huppert at her finest) who becomes an abortionist and winds up being sent to the guillotine for it. Married to a wounded French soldier (Francois Cluzet) who is initially off in a POW camp, she doesn’t want to sleep with him after his return, and soon becomes the family breadwinner–a tough little cookie who’s also helping other women out. Chabrol’s mise en scene and his handling of the period and performances are masterful (1988).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 267: Fri Sep 25

Audition (Miike, 1999): Rio Cinema, 8.30pm

This 35mm screening is part of the cinema's Rio Forever strand and will be introduced by filmmaker and Hackney resident Asif Kapadia.

Time Out review:
Seven years after losing his wife to cancer, video producer Aoyama (Ryo Another Lonely Hitman Ishibashi) finds the new bride of his dreams at a casting call for a non-existent movie. Asami (Shiina) is modest, polite, sexy, a trained dancer - and, apparently, available. As Aoyama nervously begins dating her, the film slips into nightmare. Is his paranoia and guilt causing him to imagine the worst, or is Asami really a woman physically and mentally damaged by men since her childhood and out for revenge? Creatively reworked from a script by the son of director Shohei Imamura, this was a breakthrough film for Miike: his first to win festival prizes and overseas sales. It takes sex war tensions to an hallucinatory extreme and has a Grand Guignol climax that leaves many males crawling to the exits.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 266: Thu Sep 24

The Cry of the Owl (Chabrol, 1987): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.55pm

This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film on September 28th is detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
Adapting the Patricia Highsmith thriller of the same title while transferring the action from an American small town to Vichy, Claude Chabrol returns to the manner—if not quite the distinction—of his late 60s work (e.g., La femme infidele, Le boucher). The plot concerns a solitary figure (Christophe Malavoy) fleeing a vengeful wife (Virginie Thevenet). He spies on a young woman (Mathilda May) from afar until she discovers and is drawn to him, which destroys her own relationship with her fiance (Jacques Penot). Things get much more complicated after that; Jean-Pierre Kalfon (L’amour fou) plays the police detective who eventually steps in. For viewers who enjoy the grim moral ironies of Highsmith, this can be highly recommended; those like myself who find her work gratuitously unpleasant won’t see any reason here to revise their opinion.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 265: Wed Sep 23

Les Biches (Chabrol, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.40pm

This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film on September 6th and 27th and October 5th are detailed here.

Time Out review:
The film with which Chabrol returned to 'serious' film-making after his series of delightful thriller/espionage spoofs, this was also the film in which he began transferring his allegiance from baroque Hitchcockery to the bleak geometry of Lang. A calm, exquisite study, set in an autumnal Riviera, of the permutational affairs of one man and two women which lead to obsession, madness and despair. Each sequence is like a question-mark adding new doubts and hypotheses to the circular (as opposed to triangular) relationship as a rich lady of lesbian leanings (Audran) picks up an impoverished girl (Sassard), and whisks her off to her St Tropez villa. There, much to the distress of her benefactress, the girl embarks on an affair with a handsome young architect (Trintignant), only to find in her turn that architect and lesbian lady are in the throes of a mutual passion. Impeccably performed, often bizarrely funny, the film winds, with brilliant clarity, through a maze of shadowy emotions to a splendidly Grand-Guignolesque ending.
Tom Milne

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

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 264: Tue Sep 22

The Wrong Box (Forbes, 1966): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

This 16mm screening, introduced by Nanette Newman, one of its stars and the wife of the late Bryan Forbes, is part of the Projecting the Archive: Bryan Forbes at 100 season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.

BFI introduction:
A catalogue of mishaps and bizarre coincidences foils the attempts of two bumbling brothers to secure a fortune from their elderly uncle. This surreal comedy won a BAFTA for Julie Harris’ exquisite period costumes, and is brimming with famous faces, including cameos by Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers. The print being screened is Peter Sellers’ own personal 16mm copy.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 263: Mon Sep 21

On the Silver Globe (Żuławski, 1988): Garden Cinema, 2.30pm

The film will feature a video introduction by writer Adam Żuławski.

Andrzej Żuławski’s sprawling lunar futurist epic, a dark and delirious allegory on civilisation and original sin is a haven of futurist worldbuilding, hemmed in by Magdalena Tesławska’s ornate, baroque costume design. Famous for its long, troubled and repeatedly thwarted production, On the Silver Globe was finally immortalised in its incomplete state in 1988, with supplemented scenes of contemporary Poland that further a jarring juxtaposition to the story’s otherworldly alien landscapes. 

Film Comment review extract (full analysis here):
Even with this extra self-reflexive layer, it’s hard to make claims for On the Silver Globe as a great film or even, by conventional criteria, a good one. It’s excessive in so many ways—so grandiose, so hysterical, so utterly earnest. Yet it’s a film you should see, on the big screen if possible, because it’s such a spectacular anomaly—because its sheer will to strangeness is so furiously unrestrained. In its poetic and philosophical aspirations, in its outrageous maximalism, in its utter disregard for the normal prerogatives of pleasing an audience, this is the sort of film that by rights should not even exist. On the Silver Globe is not just a film maudit, but a genuine example of that small but exalted category of films you might call “Impossible Cinema,” in which I’d include other massive visionary projects either completed or aborted: Andrei Rublev; the landscape epics of Miklos Jancsó; Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune, as well as his earlier completed films; Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (similar to Silver Globe in its mix of primitivism and futurism); and the supposedly forthcoming Dau, a long-gestating Russian epic of already-legendary don’t-hold-your-breath status.
Jonathan Romney 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 262: Sun Sep 20

Queen Kelly (Von Stroheim, 1929): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2.30pm

This special screening will be introduced by film critic and historian Pamela Hutchinson who will be signing copies of her book The Curse of Queen Kelly in the BFI Southbank Foyer following the film. There will be a live piano accompaniment by Neil Brand. The long-awaited restoration and reconstruction of the surviving nitrate reels of Queen Kelly, based on Von Stroheim’s original scripts, with added stills and titles, was undertaken by longtime friends of the BFI, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller of Milestone Films.

Chicago Reader review:
Erich von Stroheim’s 1928 film was the last that he would be allowed to sign, yet it, too, survives only in a fragmentary version. The story of a convent girl who is romanced by a prince but ends up as the mistress of an African bordello, it was intended to run for five hours, but producer Joseph P. Kennedy (who financed the film as a showcase for his close friend Gloria Swanson) turned off the money at the midway point, and the film was released in a truncated 70-minute version. (Two reels of the African footage, shot but never incorporated into the original prints, were discovered some years ago and spliced into the present 101-minute version.) Though it’s far from coherent, Queen Kelly is one of Stroheim’s most provocative works, not just in terms of its extravagant subject matter but in the aesthetic shift it suggests between the fierce realism of Stroheim’s earlier work and a distant, abstract perspective that points to the cinema of Josef von Sternberg.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 261: Sat Sep 19

Web of Passion (Chabrol, 1959): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 2.50pm

This is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film on September 5th is detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
Claude Chabrol’s first color feature (1959) adapts a Stanley Ellin thriller in which a bourgeois family’s oedipal conflicts lead to murder. The beautiful color cinematography of Aix-en-Provence is by Henri Decae, and the film is plotted with a mise en scene that suggests Alfred Hitchcock. The lively if uneven cast includes Jean-Paul Belmondo, the creepy Andre Jocelyn, Madeleine Robinson, Bernadette Lafont, and nouvelle vague axiom Laszlo Szabo. It’s not a total success, but it was one of the first pictures to translate the French New Wave’s genre interests into mainstream terms, and it’s full of sexy and irreverent details.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 260: Fri Sep 18

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Scorsese, 1974): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

This film, presented in a new 4K restoration, also screens on September 9th, 19th and 26th. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
Although the ending is a bit of a cop out from a feminist point of view, Martin Scorsese's warm and witty blending of the road movie with the conventions of the women's weepie is a delight. Ellen Burstyn is excellent as the eponymous heroine who, following the death of a husband she barely loved, sets off for the Monterey of her childhood with hopes of reviving her abandoned singing career. Her encounters, and those of her precociously witty 12-year old son, are observed with great generosity and a raw realism, while Scorsese typically makes wonderful use of music to underline character and situation. Bitter-sweet and very charming.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 259: Thu Sep 17

The Beast Must Die (Chabrol, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank with the film being introduced by critic Geoff Andrew. Other screenings of the film (September 5th and October 4th) during the season are detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
Claude Chabrol’s 1969 adaptation of Nicholas Blake’s thriller The Beast Must Die. Michel Duchaussoy and Jean Yanne star in a tale of a father obsessed with discovering and murdering the hit-and-run killer of his son. One of Chabrol’s most affecting, and chilling, studies of middle-class guilt and the parameters of retribution. Not to be missed.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 258: Wed Sep 16

The Missouri Breaks (Penn, 1976): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.30pm

This 35mm screening of a superb and rarely seen western is part of the Harry Dean Stanton season and is also being shown on September 6th (details here).

Time Out review:
A wonderfully quirky Western, brilliantly scripted by Thomas McGuane, which strips all the cute whimsy away from the Butch Cassidy theme (outlaws on the run from a relentless lawman), replacing it with a kind of pixillated terror. Playing the 'regulator' as a camp Buffalo Bill with an Irish accent, Marlon Brando makes his entrance playing peekaboo from behind his horse, and at one point even stalks his prey in a dress and poke bonnet. But he is also a legalised killer, expert with a rifle but preferring (as the flail of God) to use a harpoon shaped like a crucifix. And as his gloating sadism shades into hints of bizarre perversion when he dedicates a love song and a kiss to his horse, the tone gradually darkens to a kind of horror. It's one of the few truly major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 257: Tue Sep 15

Wedding in Blood (Chabrol, 1973): BFI Southbank, NFT1 9pm

This is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. Other screenings of the film (September 10th and 29th) during the season are detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
Yet another facet of Claude Chabrol’s view of the bourgeois life as a facade behind which lurk extravagant, destructive, and often totally ridiculous passions (1974). Like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, Chabrol loves to work variations on the disintegration of an ordered world; but unlike Hitchcock, who keeps his order and his chaos neatly separated, Chabrol concentrates more on character, so that when the bottom drops out, it does so precisely and inevitably. Stephane Audran and Michel Piccoli star as adulterous lovers who never manage to realize that there’s an easier way out of their predicament than murder. A smashing work from a master craftsman.
Dan Druker

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 256: Mon Sep 14

Ganja and Hess (Gunn, 1973): Rio Cinema, 6.30pm

Described by Spike Lee as "one of the most underappreciated filmmakers of his time", African-American playwright turned actor-writer-director Bill Gunn’s radical 1973 vampire movie Ganja & Hess returns as part of the Rio Forever celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the cinema in its current form.

Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at Criterion and the author of The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, will be online from New York and will be discussing Gunn’s masterpiece with local filmmaker Dionne Edwards, who will host the screening in person.

Time Out review:
Bill Gunn's film maudit was the most ambitious 'black movie' of its day and a milestone for indie film-making in the US. Opening captions explain that academic Dr Hess Green (Duane Jones, Night of the Living Dead) has been invulnerable and addicted to blood since being stabbed (in a parody of Catholic dogma) with a dagger from 'the ancient Black civilisation of Myrthia'. Affluent and (thanks to discreet raids on a local blood-bank) comfortable, he avoids murdering for sustenance until stuck with a new assistant (Gunn), who turns out to be a suicidal alcoholic. Deliberately fragmented and punctuated with disquieting cutaways to art works, the film charts his growing sense that he is afflicted with a curse, across his marriage to his assistant's widow Ganja (Marlene Clark) and his provision of a stud-victim to feed her 'hunger'. Theological musings jostle with sexual-visceral imagery in a mix which is still very potent.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 255: Sun Sep 13

Lost Reels All Day Film Event: Women on the Edge, Cinema Museum, 12.30pm-10.30pm
12:30pm: Butterfly Kiss (1995) dir. Michael Winterbottom + Q&A with producer Julie Baines

A one-of-a-kind serial killer lesbian love story set in the anonymous motorways and service stations cafés of Northern England. A heady cocktail of road movie, psychodrama, black comedy, and religious allegory as we follow unpredictable schizophrenic Eunice (Amanda Plummer) wandering through petrol stations in search of a mysterious woman named Judith. Miriam (Saskia Reeves), her hard of hearing and hopelessly in love companion, joins her on the road, becoming her lover, caretaker, and murderous assistant. Compared to Thelma and Louise and Natural Born Killers, Michael Winterbottom’s debut feature is a dreamlike, downbeat British film – a jarringly uncomfortable ride through a British landscape rarely travelled.

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2.50pm: Safe (1995) 35mm dir. Todd Haynes

A Todd Haynes masterpiece about middle-class suburban housewife Carol (Julianne Moore), who contracts a mystery illness and gradually descends into sickness and possibly madness. Described by Haynes as a “horror movie of the soul,” Carol’s unexciting passionless existence is disrupted when she becomes increasingly afflicted by the sounds, odours, and chemical substances of her contemporary Los Angeles life. Haynes tracks her degeneration in calmly distanced, perfectly composed scenes, recalling the work of Stanley Kubrick. In Safe, everything is open to interpretation. The ambiguous nature of Carol’s affliction and lack of concrete solutions slowly increase our uncertainty and horror.

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6pm: Girlfight (2000) 35mm dir. Karyn Kusama + online Q&A with Karyn Kusama

Karyn Kusama’s debut feature follows a rebellious Latina teenager (a star-making turn for Michelle Rodriguez) who channels her aggression into boxing. It successfully combines urban social drama, romance, coming-of-age, and sports action to create a rewarding, uplifting, and emotionally satisfying whole. Inner-city locations and boxing sequences are shot with gritty authenticity, based on Kusama’s own experiences. The performances are first rate, particularly Rodriguez (who at times resembles a young Brando) and Jaime Tirelli as her trainer and surrogate father, Hector.
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8.30pm: Kissed (1996) 35mm dir. Lynne Stopkewich + Guest Introduction

A hauntingly beautiful and breathlessly romantic film about necrophilia is a tricky proposition, but that’s exactly what writer-director Lynne Stopkewich delivers. The film concerns a young woman, Sandra (Molly Parker) who is fascinated by death. As a child she dances around the bodies of dead animals and as an adult studies biology, taking a job at a funeral home to be near the recently deceased. She studies embalming, eventually consummating her forbidden passion. Sharing her secret with Matt (Peter Outerbridge), they embark on a doomed romance. Kissed is filled with jaw-dropping surprises among them a squirm-inducing embalming session with her creepy mortician boss.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 254: Sat Sep 12

Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006): Olympic Studios, Barnes, SW3, 12midday-11.20pm

A one-off event this one even for the most committed James Bond fan.

Event introduction:
Following the recent celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of GoldenEye, and as Casino Royale celebrates its landmark 20th anniversary, there has never been a more fitting moment to celebrate the extraordinary filmmaker responsible for introducing not one, but two James Bonds to the world.

007GB – The British James Bond Fan Club is absolutely delighted to welcome in person at OPERATION: ROYALE, acclaimed director Martin Campbell as the 2026 recipient of a Bond & Beyond Lifetime Achievement Award, recognising his outstanding contribution not only to the James Bond franchise, but to cinema as a whole.

• Exclusive access to “In Conversation with Martin Campbell” and audience Q&A
• Presentation of a Bond & Beyond Lifetime Achievement Award
• Martin Campbell introducing a special 20th anniversary screening of Casino Royale
• Screening of Casino Royale in Olympic Studios’ luxurious screening room
• Complimentary popcorn and bottled water provided at each seat
• Exclusive Champagne & Canapé reception following the screening (included in ticket price)
• Guest stars in attendance
• Opportunity to meet fellow James Bond enthusiasts from across the UK and beyond
• Limited professional red carpet photo and autograph opportunities available as paid add-ons
• Associated fundraising activities in support of UNICEF

Indicative timeline:

• 12:00pm – Guest arrival & registration opens
• 12:30pm – Guests begin taking their seats
• 1:00pm – Martin Campbell: In Conversation
• 2:00pm – Bond & Beyond Lifetime Achievement Award presentation
• 2:30pm – Casino Royale 20th Anniversary Screening, introduced by Martin Campbell
• 5:00pm – Champagne & Canapés Reception (included in ticket price) 
• 5:15pm – Pre-booked Red Carpet Photo Opportunities
• 6:30pm – Autograph Signing Session
• 8:00pm – Charity Raffle & Auction in support of UNICEF
• 9:00pm – Social Bonding continues & opportunity to mingle with Martin Campbell, special guests and fellow Bond enthusiasts
• 11:30pm – Event Close

Time Out review:
Bond: ‘A vodka martini, please.’ Casino barman: ‘Shaken or stirred?’ Bond: ‘Do I look like I give a damn?’ It’s a sharp and knowing line – probably penned by Paul Haggis, the talented, final scriptwriter of this highly enjoyable ‘back-to-basics re-boot’ of the 007 franchise – that not only simultaneously acknowledges and confounds audience expectations, but also neatly confirms that Daniel Craig’s intriguing and charismatic tyro agent is cut from quite different cloth to his Savile Row-tailored predecessors. Ian Fleming’s titular 1953 Cold-War source novel presented a proto-Bond; and it’s interesting how much licence Martin Campbell’s confidently directed action thriller takes with it. Gone is the RN commander; as the jagged, handheld, monochrome opening sequence of Craig drowning his first ‘kill’ in a blood-strewn public toilet shows, this Bond’s a tough, no-nonsense, Mondeo-driving product of the ‘who dares wins’ SAS school rather than the snobby naval wardroom, and he has some of the social contempt as well as the pumping thighs, bulging pecs and inflated ego to prove it. Cobra-baiting in Madagascar, car-chases in Nassau, Montenegro, Miami – there’s enough globe-trotting to please the purists. But, notwithstanding the fine CGI/special effects, best used in the climactic set-piece involving a disintegating Venetian palazzo, Campbell has cut down the gadgets and gizmos (not to mention ‘Q’) to inject some needed ‘realismo’ back into the action sequences, steering a neat line between romance and thrills. Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd – a government accountant assigned to keep an eye on the millions Bond stakes in the crucial poker game with Mads Mikkelsen’s pleasingly sadistic terrorist-banker, Le Chiffre – proves a sexy sparring equal to the increasingly smitten and vulnerable Bond, having been donated an audacious amount of screen time. The politics are coy, David Arnold’s score is maybe underwhelming and Phil Meheux’s cinematography merely efficient, but otherwise ‘Casino Royale’ kicks new life (literally as well as metaphorically) into the ageing hero.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 253: Fri Sep 11

La Femme infidèle (Chabrol, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT2 2.30pm & 8.30pm; NFT1 6.10pm

 This digital restoration is the centrepiece of the Claude Chabrol season Other screenings of the film, which is on an extended run during the season, are detailed here.

Chicago Reader review:
Claude Chabrol’s richly ironic 1969 melodrama, in which it is shown that nothing revitalizes a dried-up marriage quite like murder. Not the least of the ironies is that the point is made sincerely and responsibly: when the film’s smug, tubby hero kills his wife’s lover, he genuinely becomes a richer, worthier individual. The observation of bourgeois life (as practiced in France, where it was perfected) is so sharp and funny that the film often feels like satire, yet its fundamental seriousness emerges in a magnificent last act, and an unforgettable last shot.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 252: Thu Sep 10

Ten Days' Wonder (Chabrol, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This is part of the Claude Chabrol season and features an introduction by season curator Catherine Wheatley. Another screenings of the film (on September 19th) during the season is detailed here.

Time Out review:
Here Claude Chabrol inaugurates a new genre, the theological thriller. Charles (Anthony Perkins at his most charismatically unstable) wakes from a dream of Creation to find himself with blood on his hands. He turns for help to his erstwhile professor of philosophy (Michel Piccoli), and persuades him back to the Van Horn country estate to use his 'Logic of Science' in sorting out the family mess. The estate is a 1925 dream engineered by Charles' adoptive father Theo Van Horn (Orson Welles), who is worshipped by his child-bride (Marlene Jobert), and sculpted as Jupiter by the awed Charles. Chabrol's movies, echoing Fritz Lang's, have long been edging towards a confrontation with the theme of Fate. This is it. Theo Van Horn chooses to play God, creating his own world, dictating the behaviour of those he places in it, taking care to add flaws to his creation to keep it breathing. But God hasn't reckoned with his own capacity for imperfection, for such shining qualities as jealousy, hatred, revenge; so he comes to his own grief, faced with the lonely fact that his creation is a nine-day wonder... Chabrol's movies grow less and less like anyone else's; this is one worth seeing again and again.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 251: Wed Sep 9

Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This is part of the Claude Chabrol season and features an introduction by season curator Catherine Wheatley. Other screenings of the film (September 21st and 25th and October 4th and 6th) during the season are detailed here.

Time Out review:
Classically simple but relentlessly probing thriller, set in a French village shadowed by the presence of a compulsive killer. Some lovely Hitchcockian games, like the strange ketchup that drips onto a picnic hamburger from a clifftop where the latest victim has been claimed. But also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the 'exchange of guilt' as Stephane Audran's starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact, for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of society's dead and maimed. With this film Claude Chabrol came full circle back to his first, echoing not only the minutely detailed provincial landscape of Le Beau Serge but its theme of redemption. The impasse here, a strangely moving tragedy, is that there is no way for the terrified teacher, bred to civilised restraints, to understand that her primeval butcher may have been reclaimed by his love for her.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 250: Tue Sep 8

The English Patient (Minghella, 1996): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

Marking the reopening of the refurbished Ciné Lumière under the auspices of its figurehead, Kristin Scott Thomas, and the 30th anniversary of the release of The English Patient, the screening on 8 Sept at 18.30 will be preceded by an extended introduction by lead actors Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes.

Time Out review:
Tuscany, as the Allies pursue the Germans north at the end of WWII: traumatised by loss and carnage, Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) decides to stay behind in an abandoned, bombed monastery and care for her dying patient (Ralph Fiennes). He seems to recall little of his life, but when Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a vengeful, morphine-addicted thief, turns up and quizzes him over past dark secrets, and as Hana reads from his beloved Herodotos, memories return of the pre-war years when, as an archaeologist/cartographer in the Sahara, he had a passionate affair with Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas), wife of a British colleague. Though Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel simplifies, jettisons and changes certain elements of the original story, it remains a rich, complex, entrancing piece of work. Part poignant romance, part suspenseful adventure, part enigmatic mystery, it's essentially a study in different responses to love and war, honour and betrayal, nationality and identity, falsehood and forgiveness, which sounds subtle echoes as the narrative flashes to and fro between two main time frames. Needless to say, the performances are flawless; more surprising is the fluency, poetry and scale of Minghella's direction (John Seale's sensuous desert photography is superb), equally eloquent whether depicting boudoir intimacies, bomb-disposal skills, drunken dementia or a deadly sandstorm.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 249: Mon Sep 7

Wise Blood (Huston, 1979): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.55pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on September 19th, is part of the Harry Dean Stanton season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

 
Chicago Reader review:
Along with The Man Who Would Be King and The Dead, this is arguably John Huston's best literary adaptation, and conceivably his very best film—a very close rendering of Flannery O'Connor's remarkable first novel about a crazed southern cracker (a perfectly cast Brad Dourif) who sets out to preach a “church without Christ,” and winds up suffering a true Christian martyrdom in spite of himself. The period, local ambience, and O'Connor's deadly gallows humor are all perfectly caught, and apart from the subtle if highly pertinent fact that this is an unbeliever's version of a believer's novel, it's about as faithful a version of O'Connor's grotesque world as one could ever hope to get on film, hilarious and frightening in equal measure. O'Connor conceived her novel as a parody of existentialism, and Huston's own links with existentialism—as the director of the first U.S. stage production of No Exit, as well as Sartre's Freud script—make him an able interpreter. With Harry Dean Stanton, Amy Wright, Daniel Shor, Ned Beatty, and Huston himself as the hero's fire-and-brimstone grandfather. The producer is Michael Fitzgerald, whose family's friendship with O'Connor guaranteed the fidelity and seriousness of the undertaking.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 248: Sun Sep 6

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on September 29th, is part of the Sarah Maldoror season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Chris Marker’s 1982 masterpiece is one of the key nonfiction films of our time—a personal philosophical essay that concentrates mainly on contemporary Tokyo but also includes footage shot in Iceland, Guinea-Bissau, and San Francisco (where the filmmaker tracks down all the locations from Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Difficult to describe and almost impossible to summarize, this poetic journal of a major French filmmaker radiates in all directions, exploring and reflecting upon many decades of experience. While Marker’s brilliance as a thinker and filmmaker has largely (and unfairly) been eclipsed by Godard’s, there is conceivably no film in the entire Godard canon that has as much to say about the state of the world, and the wit and beauty of Marker’s highly original form of discourse leave a profound aftertaste. A film about subjectivity, death, photography, social custom, and consciousness itself, Sans Soleil registers like a poem one might find in a time capsule.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 247: Sat Sep 5

The Dresser (Yates, 1983): David Lean Cinema, 2pm

This screening is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
An accomplished film of Ronald Harwood's theatrical two-hander, animated by two gigantic performances. Albert Finney, grossly Shakespearean as Sir, the imperious, declamatory actor-manager with a Moses-like command of his company and inanimate objects ('St-o-o-p th-a-a-a-t tr-ai-ai-n!' he bawls, bringing British Rail to its knees), is fully matched by Tom Courtenay's pantomime poof Norman, Sir's devoted dresser: mincing, nagging, but the only one able to reach to the furthest depths of Sir's hair-tearing madness and coax him into the costumes and roles that have by wicked irony destroyed him. Especially pleasing, then, that in the final act it is the quiet craft of an actress - Eileen Atkins as the long-suffering, love-lorn stage manageress - that rises above constrictions of plot and thankless part to upstage them.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 246: Fri Sep 4

Whistle Down the Wind (Forbes, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

This 35mm screening in the 'Projecting the Archive' strand features a Q&A with actors Hayley Mills, Diane Poole and Alan Barnes.

BFI introduction: When a stranger appears in their barn, three siblings care for him in the belief that he’s Jesus returned to Earth. Forbes shot his directorial debut on location in rural Lancashire with a cast of local children, who give performances of astonishing wit and candour. A film about childhood that avoids sentimentality, it has enchanted audiences across the generations.

Here (and above) is the trailer.