Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 201: Mon Jul 21

Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 1957): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 9pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the great Moviedrome: Bringing the Cult TV Series to the Big Screen season. The other screening of the film on July 6th will be introduced by filmmaker and Moviedrome presenter Alex Cox.

Time Out review:
A film noir from the Ealing funny man? But Alexander Mackendrick's involvement with cosy British humour was always less innocent than it looked: remember the anti-social wit of The Man in the White Suit, or the cruel cynicism of The Ladykillers? Sweet Smell of Success was the director's American debut, a rat trap of a film in which a vicious NY gossip hustler (Tony Curtis) grovels for his 'Mr Big' (Burt Lancaster), a monster newspaper columnist who is incestuously obsessed with destroying his kid sister's romance... and a figure as evil and memorable as Orson Welles in The Third Man or Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. The dark streets gleam with the sweat of fear; Elmer Bernstein's limpid jazz score (courtesy of Chico Hamilton) whispers corruption in the Big City. The screen was rarely so dark or cruel.
Chris Auty

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 200: Sun Jul 20

Rendez-vous of the Docks (Carpita, 1955): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.45pm

This is part of the 'Censored to Restored' season at BFI Southbank.
The screening on July 7th will include an introduction.

Museum of Modern Art introduction:
Banned in France for three decades, Paul Carpita’s 1955 feature Rendez-vous of the Docks emerges both as a vital document of postwar French social consciousness and a precious record of working-class life in midcentury Marseille. Self-described as “a schoolteacher who knew how to use a camera,” Carpita brought both artistic ambition and documentary rigor to this politically charged narrative, in which a young couple searches for a home against the background of Marseille’s dock workers’ strikes of the early 1950s. The film captures a critical moment when workers, discovering they were loading munitions by day while secretly unloading soldiers’ coffins by night, went on strike in protest of France’s Indochina War.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 199: Sat Jul 19

From the Journals of Jean Seberg (Rappaport, 1995): ICA Cinema, 12.10pm

This 16mm screening is part of the ICA's Celluloid on Sunday festival. Details here.

Time Out review:
Mark Rappaport's remarkable documentary works through Seberg's life, from her Midwest school days, through her much-publicised debut in Preminger's Saint Joan and her success in A Bout de Souffle, to her nightmarish marriage to Romain Gary, her involvement with the Black Panthers, and her eventual suicide in 1979. But it also uses the actress's experiences as a starting point for the exploration of an array of subjects. Hurt's Seberg is impressive as she reminisces straight to camera from beyond the grave, but what makes the film so extraordinary is the way Rappaport weaves illuminating connections between the threads of his densely informative thesis. This is intertextuality at its most accessible, provocative and surprising: a scene in Saint Joan, for example, leads to observations on Jane Fonda that take in Klute, Vadim, Vietnam, Josh Logan, workout tapes, Ted Turner, Lev Kuleshov and the opportunities afforded ageing actresses - even as Fonda is rhymed with Falconetti, Vanessa Redgrave and Seberg herself. Entertaining, moving, intellectually sharp and imaginatively brilliant.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 198: Fri Jul 18

Sambizanga (Maldoror, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This is part of the Censored to Restored season at BFI and also screens on July 30th.

Sight & Sound review:
This is the first feature in Africa to be directed by a woman. Set in 1961, at the start of the Angolan War of Independence, and shot in Congo, the film tracks the resistance efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a militant group whose leader Mário Pinto de Andrade was also Maldoror’s husband. In part, it’s about the arrest and brutal torture of a tractor driver, Domingos Xavier, who lives in a working-class district of the capital city Luanda and harbours seditious beliefs such as, “There are no whites, no mulattos, no blacks. There’s only the poor and the rich.” She gives equal importance to his wife Maria who, carrying along her infant child, sets out to find him, going from one prison to another, confronting indifference, lechery, dead ends. In her suffering, she becomes a kind of Mother Angola. Her doggedness and her heartache are portrayed with wounding acuity and illuminate Maldoror’s much-quoted belief that “African women must be everywhere. They must be in the images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about their problems.” Yet Maria’s plight is not solely African or colonial; a dogged seeker of justice, she resembles the desperate women in Zhao Liang’s documentary Petition (2009). For the director, she evokes “the alone-ness of a woman and the time it takes to trudge… It could be any woman, in any country, who takes off to find her husband.”
Sukhdev Sandhu

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 197: Thu Jul 17

Wild Strawberries (Begman, 1957): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm 

This 16mm presentation by those great people at Cine-Real film club is also being screened on Sunday July 20th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
One of Bergman's warmest, and therefore finest films, this concerns an elderly academic - grouchy, introverted, dried up emotionally - who makes a journey to collect a university award, and en route relives his past by means of dreams, imagination, and encounters with others. It's an occasionally over-symbolic work (most notably in the opening nightmare sequence), but it's filled with richly observed characters and a real feeling for the joys of nature and youth. And Sjöström - himself a celebrated director, best known for his silent work (which included the Hollywood masterpiece The Wind) - gives an astonishingly moving performance as the aged professor. As Bergman himself wrote of his performance in the closing moments: 'His face shone with secretive light, as if reflected from another reality...It was like a miracle'. 
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 196: Wed Jul 16

Sebastiane (Jarman, 1976): Barbican Cinema, 6.20pm

This extraordinary film is part of the Barbican Cinema's Queer 70s season. Details here.

Time Out review:
Not exactly typical of the British independent cinema, this not only tackles an avowedly 'difficult' subject (the relationship between sex and power, and the destructive force of unrequited passion), but does so within two equally 'difficult' frameworks: that of exclusively male sexuality, and that of the Catholic legend of the martyred saint, set nearly 1,700 years ago. Writer/director Derek Jarman sees Sebastian as a common Roman soldier, exiled to the back of beyond with a small platoon of bored colleagues, who gets selfishly absorbed in his own mysticism and then picked on by his emotionally crippled captain. It's filmed naturalistically, to the extent that the dialogue is in barracks-room Latin, and carries an extraordinary charge of conviction in the staging and acting; it falters only in the slightly awkward elements of parody and pastiche. One of a kind, it's compulsively interesting on many levels.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 195: Tue Jul 15

Tenebrae (Argento, 1982): Nickel Cinema, 8.30pm

Screen Slate review:
Anthony Franciosa plays Peter Neal, an American mystery writer who travels to Rome in promotion of his latest novel, but must confront the influence his lurid fiction has when a black-gloved murderer begins mutilating people. Genre film actor John Saxon (Enter the Dragon, Black Christmas) and frequent Dario Argento collaborator (and former spouse) Daria Nicolodi (Deep Red, Phenomena, Opera) also star as Neal's agent and assistant who become embroiled in the investigation — Nicolodi in particular gives an impressive performance (with an even more impressive scream) that elevates an admittedly thin role. Tenebrae is often regarded as a giallo comeback for the filmmaker, a return to the subgenre he helped define, following his foray into supernatural horror with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). However, it is also a self-reflexive examination of his own career, and the accusations of misogyny often directed at him. Argento was never one to conceal his more perverse preoccupations; if there is an opportunity to capture the strangling of a beautiful woman on screen, he will not only take it but provide the grip of his own hand in front of the camera. At the same time, the technical focus in Tenebrae — from rather majestic (and now infamous) crane shots to the general construction of the plot itself (essentially a way to move from one intricate and gorgeous murder set-piece to another) feels like an acknowledgment of responsibility: like pulling back the curtain on the machinations in place that not only punish women, but turn such punishment into spectacle. Tenebrae is essential Argento: perhaps the auteur's clearest articulation of his own psychological and stylistic obsessions, but with a more critical eye. We long to see men who dehumanize and kill women eventually fall on the sword themselves. In Argento's world those glimmers of hope are there if you look: the impalement will just most likely involve a stiletto.
Stephanie Monahan

Here (and above) is the trailer.