Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 7: Wed Jan 7

The Best Year of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Chicago Reader review:
This 1946 domestic epic about three World War II veterans returning to civilian life, 172 minutes long and winner of nine Oscars, isn’t considered hip nowadays. Its director, William Wyler, and literary source, MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Glory for Me (adapted here by Robert Sherwood), are far from fashionable, and the real veteran in the cast, Harold Russell, who lost his hands in the war, has occasioned outraged reflections from critic Robert Warshow about challenged masculinity and even sick jokes from humorist Terry Southern. But I’d call this the best American movie about returning soldiers I’ve ever seen—the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever did. The rest of the cast—including Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Fredric March, Cathy O’Donnell, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael, and Ray Collins—is strong too.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 6: Tue Jan 6

Moss Rose (Ratoff, 1947): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

A 35mm screening in the 'Projecting the Archive' strand at BFI Southbank introduced by Josephine Botting, BFI Curator.

BFI introduction:
We mark the centenary of Peggy Cummins with a film from her Hollywood period – one of three collaborations with director Ratoff. Marjorie Bowen’s 1934 source novel was itself based on an unsolved Victorian murder and this adaptation features Cummins as a Cockney chorus girl who blackmails a rich gentleman she suspects of being the killer. Despite the excellent cast and crack screenwriting team, the film didn’t enhance Cummins’ stateside career. Nevertheless, it remains an entertaining mystery thriller set against the backdrop of foggy Victorian London, Hollywood-style.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 5: Mon Jan 5

Slacker (Linklater, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm

This 35mm presentation (introduced by season programme assistant Sean Atkinson), also screened on January 29th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here. 

Chicago Reader review:
Richard Linklater's delightfully different and immensely enjoyable second feature (1991) takes us on a 24-hour tour of the flaky dropout culture of Austin, Texas; it doesn't have a continuous plot, but it's brimming with weird characters and wonderful talk (which often seems improvised, though it's all scripted by Linklater, apparently with the input of some of the participants, as in his later Waking Life). The structure of dovetailing dialogues calls to mind an extremely laid-back variation of The Phantom of Liberty or Playtime. “Every thought you have fractions off and becomes its own reality,” remarks Linklater himself to a poker-faced cabdriver in the first (and in some ways funniest) scene, and the remainder of the movie amply illustrates this notion with its diverse paranoid conspiracy and assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists, college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and layabouts (around 90 in all). Even if the movie goes nowhere in terms of narrative and winds up with a somewhat arch conclusion, the highly evocative scenes give an often hilarious sense of the surviving dregs of 60s culture and a superbly realized sense of a specific community.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 4: Sun Jan 4

Paris Belongs to Us (Rivette, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 16th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

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

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 3: Sat Jan 3

The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.20pm

This is a 35mm screening.

Time Out film review:
Martin Scorsese's magnificent film, taken from Edith Wharton's novel, is set in 1870s New York and centres on lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose plans to wed the impeccably connected Mary Welland (Wynona Rider) are upset by his love for her unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). The performances are excellent, while the director employs all the tools of his trade to bring his characters and situations vividly to life; from the start, it's clear from the speedy cutting and sumptuous mise-en-scène that Scorsese and his team are intent on drawing us into the heart of Archer's perceptions and the world around him (this is, most certainly, an expressionist film). Decor reflects and oppresses characters; posture, gesture and glance (like the witty, ironic narration) convey not only individual psychology but the ideals of an entire, etiquette-obsessed elite. Everything here serves to express an erotic fervour, imprisoned by unbending social rituals designed to preserve the status quo in favour of a self-appointed aristocracy. Scorsese's most poignantly moving film.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 2: Fri Jan 2

Midnight Run (Brest, 1988): Prince Charles Cinema, 11,45am

This is a 35mm screening.

Time Out review:
That old formula, handcuffed captor and captive who become buddies on the run, gets an injection of new life from the playing of the cast. Bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) captures bail-jumping accountant Jon Mardukas (Charles Grodin) in New York, but his problems really start when he tries to deliver him to the bail bondsman in LA. Mardukas, learning that his employer was a Mafia mobster, stole millions which he distributed among the poor, and Walsh has to run the gauntlet of the FBI, the Mob and a rival bounty hunter (Ashton), besides putting up with his captive's concern about smoking and morality. Both actors get off on each other, improvising routines and inhabiting the standard Odd Couple teaming so interestingly that at times the film touches a profundity. Here and there, director Brest succumbs to the car chase, but overall the movie is way above average for the genre.
Brian Case

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 1: Thu Jan 1

Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.15pm

This is a 35mm presentation also screening on December 9th, plus January 31st and February 14th. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
Half the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still amounts to some hill of beans.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.