The Prince Charles Cinema

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ShowingWednesday 22nd January
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The Substance
2024 141mins USA (18) Horror

5 BAFTA Award Nominations – Best Director, Best Screenplay (Original), Best Make Up & Hair, Best Sound, Best Leading Actress

A fading celebrity decides to use a black market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.

Paprika
2006 90mins Japan (15) Adventure / Drama

When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patients' dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist, Paprika, can stop it.

American Psycho
2000 101mins USA, Canada (18) Horror

A wealthy New York investment banking executive hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he escalates deeper into his illogical, gratuitous fantasies.

The Big Heat
89mins USA (15) Film Noir

A police officer seems to have committed suicide, but Detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) thinks there's more to the story. After talking to the man's mob-connected mistress, Bannion discovers far-reaching corruption that leads all the way from the police station to kingpin Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby). But when the policeman's lover is killed, it becomes clear that crossing Lagana is a dangerous thing to do. Soon Bannion finds himself marked for death and his family in mortal danger.

The Thing
1982 108mins USA (18) Sci-Fi / Horror

In remote Antarctica, a group of American research scientists are disturbed at their base camp by a helicopter shooting at a sled dog. When they take in the dog, it brutally attacks both human beings and canines in the camp and they discover that the beast can assume the shape of its victims. A resourceful helicopter pilot (Kurt Russell) and the camp doctor (Richard Dysart) lead the camp crew in a desperate, gory battle against the vicious creature before it picks them all off, one by one.

13 Assassins
2009 125mins Japan (15) Action / Thriller

Bad boy of Japanese cinema Takashi Miike delivers a jaw-dropping spectacle with this celebrated and gleefully visceral samurai epic.

In Shogun-era Japan, the powerful and sadistic Lord Naritsugu threatens to shatter the country’s fragile peace and plunge it once more into war. Determined to stop him at all costs, an elite group of renegade samurai plot his downfall. Absurdly outnumbered, the baker’s dozen of fearless warriors must face Naritsugu’s lethal army in a monumental and bloodily violent showdown.

Miike doesn’t shy away from the cruelty of Lord Naritsugu in the film’s opening scenes. But that only places us firmly on the side of the renegade heroes, whose ruthlessness is justified in the face of such sadism. Lengthily detailing their meticulous planning as they construct a trap for an entire army with meagre means, our patience is paid off through the film’s hour-long final act – one of the finest battle sequences in contemporary cinema. Imagine Akira Kurosawa on acid and you’re getting close to the extraordinary intensity of Miike’s 77th – or thereabouts – movie.

The Hateful Eight
2015 168mins USA (18) Western

While racing toward the town of Red Rock in post-Civil War Wyoming, bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his fugitive prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) encounter another bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) and a man who claims to be a sheriff. Hoping to find shelter from a blizzard, the group travels to a stagecoach stopover located on a mountain pass. Greeted there by four strangers, the eight travelers soon learn that they may not make it to their destination after all.

Days Of Being Wild
1990 95mins Hong Kong (12) Romance/Drama

Yuddy, a Hong Kong playboy known for breaking girls' hearts, tries to find solace and the truth after discovering the woman who raised him isn't his mother.

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