The Nickel | Independent Cinema in Clerkenwell, London

The Nickel is an adult-oriented space. The films, preshow materials and space itself may contain violent, sexual and potentially offensive imagery unsuitable for under-18s or those of a sensitive disposition.

Please note we are unable to offer refunds or exchanges on tickets. No late admissions from 10 minutes after showtime.

TIMES SQUARE

(1980, USA, Allan Moyle)

Two teenagers escape a psychiatric hospital and turn the streets of New York into their stage. As the Sleez Sisters, Pamela and Nicky invent a noisy new identity that parents, police and respectable society cannot comfortably contain.

Trini Alvarado and Robin Johnson give Allan Moyle’s cult film its bruised, rebellious heart. A tremendous punk and new-wave soundtrack propels a vision of friendship as self-invention, against a Midtown that has since disappeared. Ragged, romantic and fiercely attached to its outsiders, TIMES SQUARE is a love song to girls making themselves heard.

STAY

(2026, Ireland, Tracey Moberly)

STAY tells the story of an artist (The Artist) sentenced to do time in The Curfew Tower, with only a handheld puppet of Elvis (Puppet Elvis) as company. While doing time, The Artist is expected to write the second-best song he has ever written. And this song is for the Ghost of Elvis and is to be performed at The 25 Comeback Special. In reality The Artist is just trying to escape the gathering storm clouds of his inevitable midlife crisis. That, and the reality of being a bad father. The only dialogue in the film is an internal one between The Artist and Puppet Elvis.

STAY is probably the bleakest film you could ever watch. It contains no sex or violence, no kissing or killing, not even any fucking or fighting, or any of those other things some might want to vicariously experience via the medium of film. STAY is a film without HOPE.

The screening at The Nickel is to be the only screening in UK in 2026. Tracey Moberly, Tony Wright & Puppet Elvis will be there for a post screening interrogation. The former Bill Drummond will be there to chair the interrogation. He will also be there to stamp people’s wrists as they enter the building.

WARNING: It is expected that everyone attending this screening will bring their own handheld puppet to watch the film with them – No Puppet, No Entry. Also... Puppet Elvis will be the judge of the post Interrogation Puppet Contest.

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS

(1970, Czechoslovakia, Jaromil Jireš)

A pair of enchanted earrings offers Valerie protection as her village fills with vampires, corrupt holy men and relatives who will not stay in the same shape. Growing up here means discovering that familiar faces can become the strangest masks.

Jaromil Jireš makes a fairy tale from the collision of innocence, fear and awakening. Jan Curík’s luminous images and Luboš Fišer’s haunting score give the Czech New Wave fantasy the vividness of a half-remembered dream. Beautiful and deeply uncanny, it draws folk horror out of sunlight as readily as shadow.

Presented by Softcore Cinema Club.

MYSTERY DOJO: SURPRISE KUNG FU MATINEES

Enter the 36 Chambers of Grindhouse Cinema, with these Sunday mystery martial-arts matinees that harken back to the glory days of 42nd Street.

Expect deep-cut chopsocky plucked from the 70s and 80s screening on both digital and VHS - with bone-crushing bashers from the genre that mixed Chinese folklore and fantasy, spaghetti westerns, melodrama, Japanese samurai films and American genre cinema into an electrifying combo that inspired both the future of action films - and hip hop.

These Kung Fu flicks became an international sensation in the 1970s, particularly at the Grindhouse cinemas that proliferated in impoverished inner-cities. Here were movies in which working-class heroes stood up to oppression, speaking loud and clear to the marginalised underclasses around the world.

Bring the ruckus!

DONT LOOK BACK + BOB DYLAN CONCERT FOOTAGE

(1967, United States, D. A. Pennebaker)

Dylan on stage is only half the story. In hotel rooms, backstage corridors and combative interviews during his 1965 British tour, he is inventing—and resisting—the public figure everyone wants him to become.

D. A. Pennebaker’s camera catches the wit, the cruelty, the boredom and the sudden electricity without a narrator telling us what to think. From the cue cards of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to performances alive with concentration, this landmark music documentary puts you in the room at the moment a musician becomes an enigma.

Presented with a programme of Bob Dylan concert footage.

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID + BOB DYLAN CONCERT FOOTAGE

(1973, United States, Sam Peckinpah)

Pat Garrett takes a badge and a job: kill the friend who represents the life he has left behind. Billy the Kid keeps moving, even as the West is being bought, fenced and brought to heel around him.

James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson give Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac western its weathered soul. Bob Dylan drifts through as Alias and supplies songs that seem to mourn the landscape itself. Less a chase than a long farewell, this is a film about friendship becoming history—and the terrible price of choosing the winning side.

Presented with a programme of Bob Dylan concert footage.

TOKYO DRIFTER

(1966, Japan, Seijun Suzuki)

Tetsu wants to leave the yakuza behind. Loyalty keeps dragging him back. Sent away from Tokyo, he becomes a wandering target in a gangster story that seems to shed another piece of realism with every mile.

Seijun Suzuki turns a studio assignment into pure pop-art invention: snowbound pursuits, neon nightclubs, startling colour and a final space almost abstract enough to swallow the actors. Tetsuya Watari’s cool presence and recurring theme song hold the delirium together. A crime film that dances away from the rules while still carrying a gun.

SEX AND FURY

(1973, Japan, Norifumi Suzuki)

Ocho Inoshika has the men who killed her father in her sights. A pickpocket, gambler and swordswoman moving through Meiji-era Tokyo, she finds her revenge tangled with yakuza interests, corrupt politicians and a British spy.

Reiko Ike commands Norifumi Suzuki’s pinky-violence landmark with an extraordinary combination of stillness and explosive force. Christina Lindberg adds another volatile presence to its political intrigue and pop-art spectacle. Snow, tattoos, blades and delirious colour turn a revenge story into a film whose visual audacity refuses to stay within any single genre.

LA PRISONNIÉRE

(1968, France, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

A gallery owner’s private photographs draw a young woman into a world where looking is never innocent. Fascination becomes an experiment in control, and the distance between observer and captive grows dangerously small.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s final film trades the monochrome menace of DIABOLIQUE for optical art, saturated colour and fractured reflections. The images are seductive precisely because they are traps. A feverish study of voyeurism and obsession from a master of suspense discovering new ways to make the act of seeing feel unstable.

THE TELEPHONE BOOK

(1971, USA, Nelson Lyon)

Alice receives an obscene phone call so extraordinary that she falls in love with the caller. Finding him means crossing a New York populated by voyeurs, fantasists and people with rather specialised ideas about communication.

Nelson Lyon’s lost countercultural comedy makes sexploitation collide with pop art, media satire and underground filmmaking. Stark monochrome photography and a restless parade of eccentrics turn the romantic quest into something wonderfully unstable. Dirty jokes become questions about loneliness and images, with the city itself answering back in the wrong voice.

WANDA

(1970, United States, Barbara Loden)

Wanda gives up custody of her children and drifts through Pennsylvania’s coal country with no plan that will survive the day. A petty criminal offers her a place beside him, but belonging comes with another set of orders.

Barbara Loden wrote, directed and stars in this extraordinary independent film, finding immense emotional force in pauses, uncertain gestures and shabby rooms. The camera grants attention to a woman other stories would hurry past. Unsentimental and profoundly humane, WANDA asks what freedom can mean when almost every available choice belongs to somebody else.

FREEWAY: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY

(1999, USA, Matthew Bright)

White Girl and Cyclona break out of detention and head for Mexico, trusting a promise of sanctuary that sounds suspiciously like another trap. Their trail of bad decisions turns into a filthy, violent rewrite of HANSEL AND GRETEL.

Natasha Lyonne and María Celedonio make an explosive double act in Matthew Bright’s grotesque fugitive fairy tale, with Vincent Gallo waiting at the far end of the road. Beneath its gleefully offensive surfaces is a world that keeps turning vulnerable people into predators. An abrasive midnight movie with a very crooked grin.

THE HAUNTED MOUSTACHE + Q&A

(2025, United Kingdom, Stewart Armstrong)

After inheriting a century-old moustache from an eccentric great-aunt, David Bramwell follows the trail of its former owner through séances, spiritualist churches, Brighton basement clubs and an increasingly strange occult odyssey.

Blending filmed monologue, memoir and psychedelic folklore, this funny and affecting modern fireside tale won a Special Mention Audience Award at CINECITY 2025. The screening is followed by an on-stage Q&A.

EROTIC WITCHCRAFT

(1972, France, Bepi Fontana, Mario Mercier)

Raised by a magician, a young man inherits a duty stranger than any ordinary family legacy: guarding La Goulve, the Daughter of the Golem. When occult power meets his desires, the boundary between the everyday and the supernatural begins to give way.

Mario Mercier and Bepi Fontana’s elusive French fantasy is a discovery from the wilder edges of seventies occult cinema. Sorcery, desire and the Golem legend make an unusual combination, promising a detour from familiar vampire and witchcraft stories into a much less mapped corner of the fantastic.

SISTERS

(1972, USA, Brian DePalma)

A reporter sees a murder through a window. By the time the police arrive, the evidence has vanished. Her investigation leads towards a model, a possessive ex-husband and a medical history nobody wants brought into the light.

Brian De Palma turns the pleasures of watching into a nasty liability. Split screens, fractured viewpoints and Bernard Herrmann’s agitated score make certainty increasingly impossible, while Margot Kidder gives the mystery its unnerving human face. A wickedly inventive early De Palma thriller, with Hitchcockian machinery leading somewhere much stranger.

MYSTERY MOVIE

Take a seat without knowing what is coming. Our mystery screenings explore the bold, disreputable and gloriously unclassifiable world of psychotronic cinema: discoveries that make you wonder how they were made, who they were made for, and why nobody showed you sooner.

The title stays secret until showtime. Curiosity is essential; good taste is negotiable.

Strictly for adult audiences. Films may contain offensive and upsetting content. Do not attend if you are of a sensitive disposition.

DEADBEAT AT DAWN

(1988, USA, Jim Van Bebber)

Goose wants out of gang life. The street has other plans. When his attempt to leave ends in devastating violence, he is pulled back into a world where loyalty is temporary and revenge is the only reliable currency.

Jim Van Bebber writes, directs and hurls himself into this handmade Dayton action nightmare. Rooftops, graveyards and derelict buildings become an arena for bone-rattling stunts and feral physical commitment. Shot with the resourcefulness of punk cinema and the ambition of a martial-arts epic, it feels dangerous in ways polished action rarely does.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE

(1974, USA, Joseph Sargent)

Four armed men take a New York subway carriage and demand a ransom. Transit lieutenant Garber has an hour, a radio and a city bureaucracy that is almost as difficult to negotiate with as the hijackers.

Walter Matthau’s magnificent weary wit faces Robert Shaw’s icy precision in Joseph Sargent’s impeccably paced thriller. David Shire’s muscular score and the city’s abrasive humour keep the tension moving above and below ground. A hostage film in which procedure, personality and one very clever escape plan are equally lethal.

MORGIANA

(1972, Czechoslovakia, Juraj Herz)

Two sisters inherit a fortune. One inherits a murderous jealousy. A slow poison and an increasingly unreliable conscience turn their ornate household into a trap from which even the family cat seems unable to look away.

Iva Janžurová plays both women in Juraj Herz’s intoxicating Gothic fairy tale. Distorting lenses, lavish costumes and colour that seems to seep into the characters’ minds make beauty itself feel dangerous. A poisoned jewel of Czech cinema, where sibling rivalry becomes a hallucination and every sumptuous room conceals another reason to be afraid.

DILDO HEAVEN

(2002, United States, Doris Wishman)

Three roommates are tired of disappointing men and dead-end routines. Their pursuit of pleasure becomes a cheerfully unruly chain of fantasies, misunderstandings and encounters, all filtered through Doris Wishman’s gloriously peculiar comic imagination.

A late-career return from one of American exploitation cinema’s great independents, DILDO HEAVEN makes eccentric framing, mismatched voices and homemade ingenuity part of its language. Nothing moves quite as expected. Beneath the disreputable title is the unmistakable rhythm of an artist who spent a career finding her own way around the rules.

FINAL FLESH

(2009, USA, Ike Sanders)

A family awaits the end of the world. Four fetish-video companies are separately commissioned to film parts of the same absurd script. They must follow the words; almost everything else is up to them.

The resulting collision is unlike anything a conventional production could plan: mismatched rooms, matter-of-fact performances and apocalyptic non sequiturs delivered with total commitment. Written by Vernon Chatman, FINAL FLESH turns commissioned fantasy into a bizarre experiment in authorship. A Dada family sitcom transmitted from a civilisation that has received all the wrong instructions.

THE HEROIC TRIO

(1993, Hong Kong, Johnnie To)

Babies are vanishing into an underground empire. A masked vigilante, a mercenary and an invisible assassin are drawn into the same fight—and towards the histories that connect them. The city’s future depends on an alliance none of them planned.

Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung make an unbeatable triangle in Johnnie To’s exhilarating genre collision. Ching Siu-tung’s action sends bodies and blades flying through a world of Gothic monsters, superhero masks and motorcycle stunts. Hong Kong cinema’s imagination running gloriously beyond the speed limit.

INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION

(1970, Italy, Elio Petri)

A police chief murders his mistress and leaves evidence pointing directly at himself. He is testing a theory: that an institution built to enforce the law will refuse to recognise the guilt of the man who embodies it.

Gian Maria Volonté is magnificent—swaggering, childish, terrifying—in Elio Petri’s acid political satire. Ennio Morricone’s sly, lurching score helps make authority look both ridiculous and deadly. A murder investigation turned inside out, where the suspense lies in how far power can go before anyone dares to name what is in front of them.

COP (VHS)

(1988, USA, James B. Harris)

Lloyd Hopkins sees connections nobody else can see. The trouble is that the LAPD detective also sees rules as somebody else’s problem. Hunting a killer, he pushes his methods, marriage and already threadbare ethics towards breaking point.

James Woods brings terrifying conviction to James B. Harris’s stripped-down adaptation of James Ellroy’s BLOOD ON THE MOON. The case matters, but so does the unsettling pleasure Hopkins takes in being right. A cold, abrasive Los Angeles thriller in which detective brilliance and institutional brutality become dangerously difficult to separate.

Presented on VHS.

ERASERHEAD (ON 16MM)

(1977, USA, David Lynch)

Henry Spencer has a room, a girlfriend and a newborn baby. None of them offers much comfort. Outside, machinery groans; inside, the infant cries and a woman in the radiator promises that everything will be fine.

David Lynch’s handmade first feature turns the terrors of parenthood, sex and responsibility into an entirely private industrial universe. Stark monochrome images and Alan Splet’s enveloping sound make the nightmare physical. Horrifying, oddly tender and very funny in places you may not expect, ERASERHEAD remains an experience that resists explanation and rewards surrender.

Introduced by Dominic Hicks and presented on 16mm with a reel intermission and programme notes.

DIABOLIQUE (16MM)

(1955, France, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

A cruel headmaster has made enemies of both his wife and his mistress. Together they devise the perfect murder. Then the body disappears—and the most frightening question becomes whether their victim is really dead.

Henri-Georges Clouzot turns damp corridors, a neglected swimming pool and two extraordinary performances into an almost unbearable machine of suspicion. Simone Signoret’s steel meets Véra Clouzot’s mounting terror in a thriller that understands how guilt makes every ordinary sound threatening. Go in knowing as little as possible; leave the secrets in the cinema.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

(1974, United States, Mexico, Sam Peckinpah)

A bounty, a dead man and one last chance to get out. Warren Oates’s down-at-heel piano player Bennie takes to the Mexican roads with his lover Elita, chasing a payday that becomes a filthy, heartbreaking personal crusade.

Sam Peckinpah strips the adventure film of glamour and finds something rawer: bruised tenderness, bitter comedy and a man arguing with a severed head. Oates is magnificent, his battered face carrying every bad bargain. Sun-blasted, disreputable and stubbornly alive, this is Peckinpah at his most defiantly personal.

Runtime: 112 mins

Certificate: 18

Tuesday 24/11

Bar 6:00pm

Film 6:30pm

Digital

Book here

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

(1964, France, West Germany, Jacques Demy)

They are young, in love and certain they will wait for each other. Then Guy is sent to Algeria, Geneviève discovers she is pregnant, and the future begins asking questions their romance cannot answer.

Every line is sung, every colour seems to carry a feeling, and Michel Legrand’s music makes ordinary heartbreak soar. Jacques Demy and Catherine Deneuve create a world of ravishing surfaces without protecting their characters from money, time or compromise. A musical of overwhelming beauty whose greatest surprise is how clear-eyed it is about love.

WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGGOO?

(1966, France, William Klein)

A television crew wants to discover the real Polly Maggoo. The fashion industry wants an image. Admirers want a fantasy. Somewhere inside the competing demands is a young American model who keeps slipping out of the frame.

Photographer William Klein turns his insider’s eye on the absurd theatre of fashion and celebrity. Metallic couture, mock-documentary interviews and surreal interruptions make a wickedly funny pop-art assault on the business of manufacturing personalities. A sixties satire whose question has only become more pointed: who gets to decide what an image means?

OVER THE EDGE

(1979, United States, Jonathan Kaplan)

New Granada has houses, roads and a bright suburban future. It has almost nothing for its teenagers. Boredom becomes solidarity, solidarity becomes defiance, and the adults discover that treating young people as a problem can make their fears come true.

Jonathan Kaplan’s cult youth film catches adolescence with unusual sympathy and bite. A young Matt Dillon, a remarkable rock soundtrack and the unruly energy of its cast make rebellion feel exhilarating before the consequences land. A suburban pressure cooker that refuses to dismiss the kids as either innocents or delinquents.

SMOOTH TALK

(1985, USA, Joyce Chopra)

For Connie, summer means music, shopping trips and practising the person she wants to become. Then an older stranger pulls up outside her house while she is alone, and ordinary flirtation begins turning into something she cannot easily name—or escape.

Laura Dern and Treat Williams are extraordinary in Joyce Chopra’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates. Sunlit teenage restlessness gives way to a confrontation whose menace grows almost imperceptibly. The film understands the thrill of being seen and the terror of being claimed, making its shift from coming-of-age drama to psychological nightmare devastating.

THE HEARTBREAK KID

(1972, USA, Elaine May)

Lenny is three days into his honeymoon when he spots the woman he thinks he should have married. The bride is upstairs with sunburn. He is downstairs selling himself a completely different future.

Elaine May makes romantic self-delusion almost unbearably funny. Charles Grodin turns every conversation into a sales pitch, while Jeannie Berlin gives the discarded Lila a presence the film refuses to let him wish away. A romantic comedy with surgical instincts, exposing the monstrous entitlement hidden inside one ordinary man’s idea of the perfect match.

NAKED LUNCH

(1991, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, David Cronenberg)

The bug powder is addictive. The typewriter is alive. And Bill Lee’s latest assignment may be coming from an insect intelligence service. Fleeing into the Interzone, he tries to write a report from a reality that will not stay still.

David Cronenberg fuses William S. Burroughs’s fiction and biography into a wonderfully deadpan nightmare of addiction and authorship. Peter Weller plays the impossible with perfect weary conviction, while grotesque organic machines make language horribly physical. A literary adaptation that succeeds by becoming its own mutant creature.

MYSTERY MOVIE

DIVA

(1981, France, Jean-Jacques Beineix)

A postman secretly records the opera singer who refuses to be recorded. Another cassette contains evidence that powerful people would kill to suppress. When the two worlds collide, Paris becomes a maze of hired killers, impossible escapes and sudden romance.

Jean-Jacques Beineix makes every surface sing: blue light, wet streets, lofts and métro tunnels turn a thriller into an art-pop daydream. Opera and street culture, immaculate design and scruffy obsession exist in the same enchanted city. A defining burst of cinéma du look, made for anyone who has ever loved an image—or a voice—too much.

SCREAMPLAY + DIRECTOR/STAR RUFUS BUTLER SEDER Q&A

(1984, USA, Rufus Butler Seder)

Aspiring screenwriter Edgar Allan arrives in Hollywood and lands a janitor’s job in a fleabag apartment building. His neighbours become characters in his script. Then the murders he writes start happening for real.

Rufus Butler Seder turns a tiny budget into an entire expressionist world: painted sets, silent-cinema tricks and stark monochrome give this Hollywood nightmare a handmade magic. Underground legend George Kuchar is unforgettable as the landlord. A funny, macabre love letter to movie obsession, where the dream factory looks like something assembled in a very gifted man’s bedroom.

Director and star Rufus Butler Seder joins us for a Q&A.

Runtime: 91 mins

Certificate: 18

Saturday 28/11

Bar 5:30pm

Film 6pm

Digital

Book here