All you need is love

Dive into a summer of love with our specially curated programme

At Regent Street Cinema, we often talk about how much we love cinema. We love film as a medium, we love the whole cinema experience… and, of course, we love our cinema, with its incredibly comfy seats, stunning Art Deco décor, and state-of-the-art audio-visual setup. What’s not to love?

When we looked at our programme of films for this month, we realised everything really is about love. Turns out it’s quite a versatile kind of emotion! Here are just some of the kinds of love you can experience on our big screen over the next couple of weeks:

The love of music

Questlove’s Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is a true labour of love: the documentary is assembled from some forty-odd hours of footage shot back in 1969 at the Harlem Cultural Festival, which had been left languishing in an archive ever since.

The film showcases some of the most powerful moments in remastered performances from some of the greatest Black artists of all time (Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight & The Pips… too many to list here!). Those performances, combined with new interviews with some of the artists involved, as well as current artists who were inspired by them, make this real heart-expanding stuff.

If your music taste is a little more alternative, we’ve also got an encore screening of Darius Marder’s award-winning heartbreaker Sound Of Metal, in which Riz Ahmed plays a heavy metal drummer facing the prospect of losing his hearing, plus a bonus screening of Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers, a documentary about your favourite band’s favourite band… and, just maybe, they’ll become your new favourites, too.

The love of the open road

In Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winning Nomadland, Frances McDormand plays a woman who takes to a new life on the road after losing her job. The story is pragmatically framed – it’s not easy to make a living out there – but also a hopeful one.

Zhao cast real-life nomads and let them fit themselves organically into her film, which gives it a real ring of authenticity, and their hard-won zeal for their lifestyle and their community shines through. It’s beautifully shot, too, full of gorgeous landscape and breath-taking wide-open skies. If you haven’t had a chance to see this one on a big screen yet, we’d really encourage you to!

Love of family

As part of our Awards Season Tuesdays strand, we’re bringing back Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture winner Parasite. It’s not a film that requires much introduction – you’ll have heard everyone raving about it for at least a year! – but if you don’t know much about it, we wouldn’t want to spoil it.

Suffice it to say it’s about a family facing some pretty serious hardships, who find incredibly creative ways to work through it all together. A bitingly satirical crime caper that demands to be seen.

And, of course, romantic love

There’s nothing quite like a big sweeping romance on the silver screen, and The Last Letter From Your Lover is guaranteed to tug on your heartstrings. With dual timelines – a star-crossed affair unfolding on the French Riviera in the 1960s, plus a cosier one in present-day London – Augustine Frizzell’s adaptation of the Jojo Moyes novel of the same title is a full-on swoon-fest.

Maybe we’re overly sentimental. But come and watch a film with us, and we promise you’ll feel the love, too.