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Each week, we round up the most exciting film events happening in London over the coming week, from pop-ups and one-offs to regular film clubs, outdoor screenings and festivals. Here’s this week’s top five…
1. Rio Centenary Double Bill
The Rio Cinema is 100 years young. First opened as the Kingsland Empire in 1915, the cinema once contained a tearoom, a parapet, a proscenium arch and a massive painted frieze overlooking the screen. Nowadays it’s a bit more modest, but the Rio is still one of our favourite London cinemas, with an old-school feel that comes from being inside such a beautiful, classic building. To celebrate their birthday they’re playing two silent films from 1915 that might have screened at the cinema when it first opened a century ago: gangster flick ‘Regeneration’, which has been described as the spiritual godfather to Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’, and Cecil B DeMille’s tale of eroticism and betrayal, ‘The Cheat’.
Rio, 107 Kingsland High St, E8 2PB. Sun Nov 15, 1.45pm. £11, £9 concs.
2. Deptford Film Club Dive-In Movies: ‘Splash’
We’ve had rooftop cinema, hot-tub cinema and edge-of-a-lido cinema, now here’s swimming-pool cinema. Watching a film while entirely immersed in water would appear to present certain challenges: like keeping afloat (though there will be lilos available for those weaklings who need them) and getting horribly wrinkly. Still, it’s a really fun setting for a very sweet film: the beauty of mermaid romance ‘Splash’ is that the love is purely innocent, and beautifully acted by Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah.
Wavelengths Leisure Pool, Giffin St, SE8 4RJ. Sat Nov 14, 7pm. £15.
3. Luis Bunuel season: 'El'
Over the next couple of weeks, the ICA will be screening most of surrealist master Luis Buñuel’s remarkable, head-spinning body of big-screen work. Here, Little White Lies editor and ex-Time Out man David Jenkins will introduce one of the director’s lesser known works, about a fanatically jealous husband who tries to murder his wife. Buñuel examines the character dispassionately, as a victim of himself and of the society that formed him; his story is neither a tragedy nor a comedy, but a necessary working out of certain moral and psychological tensions that are intrinsic in his class.
ICA, Nash House, The Mall, SW1Y 5AH. Sun Nov 15, 4.15pm. £11, £7 concs.
4. FREE ‘How I Live Now’ + Kevin Macdonald Q&A
‘Last King of Scotland’ director Kevin Macdonald introduces his startling, powerful teen movie, one of the most underrated British films of recent years. Saoirse Ronan plays pain-in-ass Daisy: with her poker-straight bleached hair, angry black eyeliner and huffy snarl, she’s perfect as this prickly, vulnerable 16-year-old, dumped in the English countryside for the summer to live with her boho British cousins as Word War III breaks out.
Highgate Library and Civic Centre, Croftdown Road, NW5 1HB. Tue Nov 10, 7.30pm.
5. FREE Science Fiction Theatre: ‘Dark City’
At midnight the city stops. Citizens black out, while all around them The Strangers modify the urban environment, transforming streets and buildings, the fabric of people's lives. When the clock starts again, collective amnesia shrouds the general unease. John Murdoch wakes up to face a murder rap he knows makes no sense. Tipped off by the mysterious Dr Schreber, he sets about unearthing his apparently metaphysical pursuers. This screening of Alex Proyas’s gleaming paranoid thriller will be followed by a talk on modern urban spaces.
The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Road, E8 3AS. Mon Nov 26, 7.30pm.
For the full list, go to Time Out’s film events page.