Instead of coming in from the Cold War, British agent Alec Leamas chooses to face another mission. Screening in conjunction with our ‘John le Carré on Screen’ Talk and complementing the Chichester Festival Theatre production.

At the height of the Cold War, British spy Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is nearly ready to retire, but first he has to take on one last dangerous assignment. Going deep undercover, he poses as a drunken, disgraced former MI5 agent in East Germany in order to gain information about colleagues who have been captured. When he himself is thrown in jail and interrogated, Leamas finds himself caught in a sinister labyrinth of plots and counter-plots unlike anything in his long career. This is the definitive anti-Bond spy movie and the best big-screen adaptation of John le Carré.

UK 1965 Martin Ritt 112m

Filmed in West Sussex, this local film focuses on an old man who works all alone to maintain his ancestral farmland, as his children prove to be at once both remote and controlling.

David (Rory Kinnear) and Laura (Emily Beecham) are in their early forties and tearaway underachievers who grew up on a still-lucrative family farm run by their father (Roger Marten). With David’s alcohol and drug addictions plaguing the majority of his adult life and Laura working on farms in sunnier climes like California and Spain, their eyes are drawn homeward as their father enjoys his final years of work, as they each proffer their case to inherit the land. This feature debut shows impressive audio-driven film storytelling, reaching something unique in its tale of an intransigent English farmer. The unique way this story is told is nothing less than inspired – we only ever see one of the characters, the farmer, although we never see him speak. Instead, the camera follows him as he goes about his business on the farm. We do however hear a series of answering machine messages from the children, because their father tends to have his phone turned off when he’s out in the fields. Filmed close to Pulborough, West Sussex.

UK 2023 Nicholas Parish 93m

Night Courier

In the heart of Riyadh, where desperation and opportunity collide, this is the gripping tale of a mentally fragile man racing against time to save his ailing father.

‘Mandoob’ is a darkly comedic, gripping tale about the lives of Saudi Arabia’s gig workers, who toil in the shadows to make the fantastical lives of elites possible. Fahad’s (Mohammed Aldokhei) aspiring entrepreneur sister Sarah (Hajar Alshammari) and their ailing father Nasser (Mohammed Alttowayan) know that Fahad means well and genuinely wants what’s best for the family. But he is a restless call centre worker whose habitual lateness and apathy regarding irrational customers gets him fired. He becomes a delivery driver for an Uber-like service known as Mandoob (which loosely translates to “courier” in Arabic). This powerful and surprising film cleverly shows the realities of how hard it is to thrive as a gig worker in a system that’s designed to keep them nameless, faceless, perpetually busy and underpaid.

Saudi Arabia 2023 Ali Kalthami 110m

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo

This new adaptation of the famous novel by Alexandre Dumas was the summer box office smash in France.

Set against the tumultuous post-Napoleonic era, the story follows Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney), who is wrongly imprisoned and then escapes, crafting intricate revenge schemes against those who wronged him. This is a stunning and emotionally gratifying adventure film, built on rock-solid source material of course – with its timeless revenge theme still entertaining modern-day viewers. Compared to earlier adaptations, this latest version is briskly paced and rousingly acted by an all-around stellar ensemble. Everything about this robust and very enjoyable retelling of the classic is epic in scale: from the lavish sets and the orchestral score to the bold performances and the running time. We will include a short intermission.

France 2024 Alexandre de La Patellière & Matthieu Delaporte 178m