Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 240: Sat Aug 30

Eureka (Roeg, 1983): Garden Cinema, 8.15pm

I saw this film on release, with director Nicolas Roeg in attendance. In the Q&A after the movie was screened, the director shocked the audience by telling them they were some of the very few who would see Eureka. Roeg said he couldn't elaborate on that for legal reasons but suffice to say the film received very limited distribution. This is a rare chance (I did once got to show this at the Prince Charles Cinema with producer Jeremy Thomas introducing) to see one of Roeg's finest works (voted in his top ten films of all-time by Mark Cousins).

Time Out review:
The usual nervy Nicolas Roeg cross-cutting has almost vanished in favour of a cleaner but just as distanced narrative, in two plain parts: a prospector (Gene Hackman) in Canada in the '20s finally strikes it lucky, engulfed in a river of gold; and then the rest of his life, immured in his house ('Eureka') in the Bahamas and wondering what on earth there is left. While the weight of Roeg's success is usually stylistic, this is more of a harkback to the cosmic scale of The Man Who Fell to Earth, with enormous themes streaming through a strange tale. Alongside the bass-line of a man who 'once had it all, and now just owns everything', there are games of knowledge and power (voodoo, cabbalahs, magick), a devouring relationship with his daughter (Theresa Russell), and a nebulous running battle with business competitors who want their own share of the planet. The man who raped the earth and lost his demon is finally the victim of 'business interests' in the same way that Mick Jagger was in Performance. It's a great, Kane-like notion - the price we pay for gaining what we want - and overflowing with awkward ideas and strange emotion. 
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 239: Fri Aug 29

Moonfleet (Lang, 1955): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This double-bill (with Night and Fog) is part of the Serge Daney season at the ICA. Details here.

ICA introduction:
Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet and Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog are two films that influenced Serge Daney’s understanding of cinema and the world early on, shaping the moral and aesthetic poles of his cinematic universe. Their influence would be felt throughout his career as a critic.

Chicago Reader review:
Fritz Lang’s only film in CinemaScope (1955, 89 min.) is one of his most neglected features, at least in this country. (In France there’s a deluxe edition on DVD made especially for high school students.) A kind of 18th-century fairy tale about an orphan in Dorset (Jon Whiteley) who’s adopted, after a fashion, by a smuggler (Stewart Granger), this classy MGM production was adapted from a novel by J. Meade Faulkner by Margaret Fitts and Jan Lustig, and its dreamlike sense of wonder is equaled only in Lang’s German pictures. John Houseman produced, and Miklos Rozsa wrote the stirring score; the fine secondary cast includes George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, and Viveca Lindfors.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 238: Thu Aug 28

Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972): Prince Charles Cinema, 8pm

This 35mm presentation is also screened at the Prince Charles Cinema on September 5th.

Chicago Reader review:
Although Andrei Tarkovsky regarded this 1972 SF spectacle in 'Scope as the weakest of his films, it holds up remarkably well as a soulful Soviet “response” to 2001: A Space Odyssey, concentrating on the limits of man's imagination in relation to memory and conscience. Sent to a remote space station poised over the mysterious planet Solaris in order to investigate the puzzling data sent back by an earlier mission, a psychologist (Donatas Banionis) discovers that the planet materializes human forms based on the troubled memories of the space explorers—including the psychologist's own wife (Natalya Bondarchuk), who'd killed herself many years before but is repeatedly resurrected before his eyes. More an exploration of inner than of outer space, Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals. In Russian with subtitles. 165 min.
Jonathan Rosenabum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 237: Wed Aug 27

Baby Blood (Robak, 1990): Nickel Cinema, 7pm

A cruel circus owner beats and abuses his pregnant wife. One day the circus receives a leopard newly captured in Africa, but the animal soon dies. However, an evil creature that was inside the leopard bursts out of the animal’s body, burrows into the wife’s body and takes over her fetus. It soon starts demanding blood, and the woman goes searching for victims for her new “baby.

Screen Slate review (full text here via this link):
Revisiting a film like Alain Robak’s Baby Blood (1990) is a strange experience in this current moment when its specifically splattery strain of body horror, once largely relegated to nth-generation bootleg tapes of movies like Guinea Pig 5: Mermaid in a Manhole (1988) and the pages of Gorezone magazine, has fully ascended to the mainstream with a film like The Substance (2024). In a way, it makes sense. With horror movies suddenly needing to “Mean Something” or “Explore Trauma” in increasingly boneheaded ways so that traditionally lowbrow genre fare is more palatable to discerning highbrow audiences and, more importantly, awards voters, the horrors of having a body (and there are many) easily lend themselves to a wide range of allegories, from transness to AIDS to the myriad pressures that society places on women. From Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to It’s Alive (1974) and Alien (1979)—and all of their respective rip-offs, spin-offs, sequels, and prequels—fears surrounding pregnancy have been especially (I’m sorry) fertile ground for body horror over the years, but few are as visceral—or twistedly empowering—as Baby Blood.
Elizabeth Purchell

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 236: Tue Aug 26

Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948): Nickel Cinema, 6pm & 8.30pm

This is a 16mm screening.

Chicago Reader review:
Abraham Polonsky's superior 1949 melodrama about the numbers racket. A poetic, terse, beautifully exact, and highly personal re-creation of the American underworld, with an unpunctuated Joycean screenplay by Polonsky that is perhaps unique in the American cinema. This is film noir at its best. Beautifully acted by John Garfield, Thomas Gomez, and Beatrice Pearson.
Don Druker

Here (and above) you can see Mark Cousins introducing the film on the TV programme Moviedrome.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 235: Mon Aug 25

Only Two Can Play (Gilliat, 1962): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3pm

This world premiere 4K restoration is part of the Peter Sellers season at BFI Southbank. The film also screens on August 15th. Details here.

Time Out review:
Peter Sellers is at his most controlled in this biting, rather sad farce, adapted from the Kingsley Amis novel That Uncertain Feeling. He's embarrassingly good as an anxiously lecherous Welsh librarian, married with kids, living in a gloomy apartment with peeling wallpaper and the plumbing up the spout. Enter Mai Zetterling, the delicious, bored wife of a local dignitary... It's well-observed, dry, and just a tad smutty.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 234: Sun Aug 24

The Return of the Pink Panther (Edwards, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2.50pm

This classic comedy film (screened on 35mm) is part of the Peter Sellers season at BFI Southbank. The film also screens on August 27th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A triumphant 1974 return of Peter Sellers as the exquisitely inept Inspector Clouseau. The razor-sharp direction is by Blake Edwards, whose instinct for the amusing aspects of life’s gruesome interludes makes this innocent looking comedy-mystery a study of survival-with-style in the face of almost certain disaster. 
Dan Druker 

Here (and above) is the trailer.