The Terminator, Jackie Chan, The Wild Bunch and more great film events happening this week
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…
Time Out presents: ‘The Terminator’
Throughout August, we at Time Out are hosting a series of classic science fiction screenings at Battersea Power Station to celebrate the launch of our definitive 100 Best Sci-Fi Movies list. Later in the month you can catch ‘Robocop’, ‘Attack the Block’ and ‘Children of Men’ (which actually features a cameo from the power station itself), but tonight it’s the turn of the No 9 film on our list, James Cameron’s career-making time travel actioner ‘The Terminator’. The story is blissfully pulpy: a killer robot in synthetic skin is sent back from a ruined Earth to murder the mother of the future saviour of humanity. Battersea Power Station, SW8 4NN.7pm, Tue Aug 5. £15.
There Will Be Blood + live score
Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood joins the London Contemporary Orchestra to perform his remarkable score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s majestic film about the founding of America. We begin down a hole. It’s 1898 in the California desert and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a lithe, daddy-long-legs of a man, a lone-gun silver prospector whose tools, as he scratches around in the dark, are a pickaxe, a rope, some dynamite and sheer will. The beginning of the film feels like the beginning of the world, stressed by the primal buzz of Greenwood’s wonderful score. The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Rd, NW1 8EH.8pm, Wed Aug 6 – Thu Aug 7.
Chinese Zodiac + Jackie Chan Q&A
He turned 60 this year and has appeared in over 100 movies, but Jackie Chan is still one of the world’s most popular action stars. Now he’s coming to London to introduce his new movie ‘Chinese Zodiac’, an old-school action-adventure which Chan wrote, directed, and of course stars in. It’s the tale of a treasure hunter tasked with finding six bronze statues shaped to represent the signs of the Chinese zodiac, who finds himself on the run from mysterious forces. But of course the real appeal of this screening is seeing a true cinema legend in the flesh.Prince Charles Cinema, 7 Leicester Place, WC2H 7BP.7pm, Mon Aug 11. £13.50, £11 concs.
Science Fiction Theatre: ‘Fahrenheit 451’
This underrated film missed out on our recent 100 Best Sci-Fi Movies poll by a whisker,perhaps because it’s less science fiction than a tale of ‘once upon a time’. Where Ray Bradbury’s novel posited a strange, terrifyingly mechanised society which has banned books in the interests of material well-being, director Francois Truffaut presents a cosy world not so very different from our own, with television a universal father-figure pouring out reassuring messages, and the only element of menace a fire-engine tearing down the road. Dalston CLR James Library, Dalston Lane, E8 3BQ. 6.45pm, Thu Aug 7. FREE.
The Wild Bunch
From the opening sequence, in which a circle of laughing children poke at a scorpion writhing in a sea of ants, Sam Peckinpah completely rewrites Western mythology by looking from the point of view of the marginalised outlaws rather than the law-abiding settlers. Though he spares us none of the callousness and brutality of William Holden and his gang, Peckinpah nevertheless presents their macho code of loyalty as a positive value in a world increasingly dominated by corrupt railroad magnates and their mercenary killers. In purely cinematic terms, the film is a savagely beautiful spectacle. BFI Southbank, Belvedere Rd, SE1 8XT. 5.50pm, Mon Aug 11. £8.15-£11.50.
Find more fantastic film events in the capital this week here.