Category H Goth Summer: Carrie X Aliens
Now Playing
Come and celebrate World Goth Day, 22nd May, with the launch of Category H’s Goth Summer season, and our late night Goth Space Prom screening of CARRIE X ALIENS. Goth Summer AKA Goth Films Or Films Of Interest To Goths, is a film season based on a print-out we discovered in the depths of the Rio Archive. Written by a Rio cinema worker in the early 1990s, this is a list of 56 films they considere...
Hackney History Fest: Save our Heritage + Hands Off
Showing from Sat 24 May
Hackney History Festival presents SAVE OUR HERITAGE and HANDS OFF Followed by a Q & A with Winstan Whitter director of SAVE OUR HERITAGE and HANDS OFF and Bill Parry-Davies solicitor activist with a bias against social and environmental injustice. SAVE OUR HERITAGE: In anticipation of London’s Olympic bid, a new tube line for Hackney and urban regeneration efforts were planned. The site of the ol...
Hackney History Festival: How To Get On With Everybody + Q&A
Showing from Sun 25 May
Hackney History Festival presents a new documentary followed by a Q&A with with directors Winstan Whitter, Elin Moe and the star of the film Rabbi Herschel Gluck. How To Get On with Everybody is an intimate portrait of the unique life of Herschel Gluck, a Rabbi from the Haredi Jewish community in north London. Herschel has dedicated himself to dissolving barriers and building friendships in unl...
Little White Lies presents The Phoenician Scheme
Showing from Wed 28 May
Little White Lies and the Rio present a special screening of Wes Anderson's THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME, the film currently on the cover of LWLies issue 108. The film will be introduced by LWLies editor David Jenkins, and copies of the magazine will be available at the cinema. Visionary filmmaker Wes Anderson continues his gloriously subversive path of cinematic mainstream destruction with a poignant t...
Emo Video Jukebox
Showing from Fri 30 May
After gestating for the better part of the eighties and nineties, emo broke through to the MTV mainstream in the early aughts, suckering in the angsty young hearts and existential woes of a million kohl-eyed teens. Don your skinniest skinnies and come revel in the millenniums last true youth subculture with DJ sets in the Ludski and a selection of music videos in Screen 2.
Dream Emulator: Fast Forward: Dark Souls Trilogy Speedruns
Showing from Fri 30 May
Dream Emulator presents Fast Forward: Dark Souls Trilogy Speedruns Get in we’re linking the first flame in under 10 minutes. In the world of Dark Souls, the age of fire is coming to an end, an undead curse is spreading, darkness looms, demons run rampant, and even the gods themselves have either fled or turned insane under the influence of this crumbling world and its convoluted relationship to t...
Fashion in Film: Grounded: Animated Shorts
Showing from Sat 31 May
Fashion in Film Festival 2025 presents GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature, a major UK-wide season exploring the relationship between fashion and nature through the lens of cinema in an era marked by escalating ecological crises Spanning the late 19th century to present day, GROUNDED examines fashion’s role as simultaneously a barrier and a connecting tissue between humans and the nat...
Doctor Who: The 2025 Finale
Showing from Sat 31 May
ADVANCE BOOKING NOW OPEN Celebrate the epic two-part end of season finale of DOCTOR WHO 2025 and experience time and space on the big screen with Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, Varada Sethu as Belinda Chandra, and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. The screening starts at 18:00 with Wish World , followed by The Reality War . Belinda Chandra has been kidnapped by robots, faced a terrifying god and a...
Fashion in Film Festival: Grounded: Donkey Skin (Peau d’Âne) + Intro
Showing from Sun 1 Jun
Fashion in Film Festival 2025 presents GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature, a major UK-wide season exploring the relationship between fashion and nature through the lens of cinema in an era marked by escalating ecological crises. Spanning the late 19th century to present day, GROUNDED examines fashion’s role as simultaneously a barrier and a connecting tissue between humans and the natur...
Unycorn + Q&A
Showing from Sat 7 Jun
43AD Films presents the premiere screening of UNYCORN, the latest film by Conrad Armstrong in collaboration with legendary New York club performance artist Rose Wood. Through their collusion Armstrong and Wood form a search party to explore the mythical hunting ground of Manhattan. Documenting the rich tapestry that threads along Broadway; from the indigenous forest of Inwood to the relics of the...
Rio Staff Selects: Agnes Varda's Vagabond + Intro
Showing from Sun 8 Jun
To celebrate its 40th anniversary and the work of its director, a special screening of Agnes Varda’s VAGABOND (Sans Toit Ni Loi) with an introduction by the Rio’s own Bells Kennedy-Compston, film programmer and producer. With an unforgettable performance from Sandrine Bonnaire, VAGABOND premiered at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival and won Varda the Golden Lion. In the dead of win...
Love & Rage: Munroe Bergdorf
Showing from Tue 10 Jun
Please note that tickets for this screening are available only from the Cinematik website. An intimate portrait of trans trailblazer Munroe Bergdorf as she navigates identity, race, activism, and hope. Weaving past and present, Olivia Cappuccini’s LOVE & RAGE: MUNROE BERGDORF explores both the journey of the model, trans activist, and author and the balance between personal needs and public ...
NEVER WATCHING MOVIES & Pink Palace present STUD LIFE + DIRECTOR Q&A
Showing from Fri 13 Jun
Following the screening of STUD LIFE award-winning British filmmaker Campbell X joins us for a live Q&A. Set in mid 2000s London, Stud life explores the city’s queer community centring on black queer perspectives and explorations of love, relationships, sexuality and gender. Lesbian JJ works as a wedding photographer with Seb her (male) gay best friend. After JJ falls in love with gorgeous div...
S/HE IS STILL HER/E - THE OFFICIAL GENESIS P-ORRIDGE DOC + Q&A
Showing from Fri 13 Jun
Genesis P-Orridge lived their art to the extreme. A pioneering musician, avant-garde artist, spiritual explorer and gender revolutionary, Genesis has been featured in films and videos, but never the full story… never this intimate... until now. In this authorised but raw and personal documentary, award-winning director David Charles Rodrigues documents the final year of P-Orridge’s existence as t...
Autumn + Filmmakers Q&A
Showing from Tue 17 Jun
This special preview of London Film School graduate Antonio Sequeira’s heartwarming, intimate and award-winning debut feature is followed by a live-on-stage Q&A with the director and the cinematographer Anastasiia Vorotniuk. In a small Portuguese town, a family is turned upside down when the eldest son leaves to study in London. As Winter turns into Spring and Summer becomes Autumn, a daughter ...
Windrush Caribbean Festival: Burning An Illusion + Q&A
Showing from Sat 21 Jun
This programme will feature a post-screening discussion, hosted by Paulette Harris-German and featuring s pecial guest Cassie McFarlane, star of Burning an illusion, Co-Directors of M.A E. Yvonne Jeffrey and April John-Lewis, and Directors from the Warner Bros Black Britain Unspoken scheme. 6th Windrush Caribbean Film Festival 2025 (WCFF), in partnership with www.alt-africa.com , and with support ...
Windrush Day: Fearless + Filmmakers Q&A
Showing from Sun 22 Jun
In celebration of Windrush Day, FEARLESS is a heartwarming and revealing documentary that features six women aged between 78 and 90 who as young people left everything behind to start new lives far from home. All were part of the generation of people from British colonies invited to help rebuild the mother country after WWII. They came and thrived despite the tumultuous times and often hostile rec...
Green Film Festival: The Here Now Project
Showing from Tue 24 Jun
2021 was the year climate change came home. From the streets of Brooklyn to the forests of Siberia, a relentless barrage of fires, floods, and storms made devastatingly clear that the extreme weather climate scientists had been predicting for half a century had arrived. In a production of unprecedented scope, Emmy-winning filmmakers Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs chronicle that pivotal year through th...
All Out of Bubblegum Film Club: The Matrix
Showing from Wed 25 Jun
The All Out of Bubblegum Film Club presents THE MATRIX, the legendary 1999 sci-fi classic which still has the power to blow your mind. Neo, a computer programmer and hacker, has always questioned the reality of the world around him. His suspicions are confirmed when Morpheus, a rebel leader, contacts him and provides the answer to the question he seeks - what is The Matrix? For fans of popcorn a...
Green Film Festival: Once Upon a Time in a Forest
Showing from Wed 25 Jun
Young people seamlessly weave into the fabric of nature, swim in crystalline lakes and revel in the calm presence of the ancient trees. But this idyllic harmony is imperilled as the forest faces man-made extinction. Driven by her love for the forest, 22-year-old Ida becomes the leader of the new Forest Movement, coming face to face with industry giants and confronting generational bias. Unfolding ...
Green Film Festival: As the Tide Comes In
Showing from Thu 26 Jun
The 27 residents of the tiny island of Mandø are used to severe weather and flooding, but climate change is making things worse and serious catastrophe looms. Yet the island's last farmer, Gregers, whose family has lived there for eight generations, hasn’t given up. He refuses to build a life elsewhere and hopes to find a wife to manage the farm with him. Accompanied by masterfully crafted shots o...
Space to Breathe + Filmmakers Q&A
Showing from Sun 29 Jun
Following the UK Premiere at the Sheffield Documentary Festival, an exclusive opportunity to see an outstanding short film and meet its director Juicebox Burton and co-producer Jordan Flaherty. SPACE TO BREATHE is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, framed with a future where there are no prisons or police. The year is 2070 and Sojourner is a young genderqueer filmmaker who sets...
Underscore Cinema 2025: A Working-Class Film Festival
Showing from Sat 13 Sep
Underscore Cinema returns for its second edition — a bold and proudly grassroots short film festival that champions working-class filmmakers across the UK. Presented by Underscore Studios and supported by the BFI. This a one-day event is a celebration of radical, heartfelt, and boundary-pushing cinema from working-class voices, featuring a Panel discussion with the creators themselves. Underscor...
Classic Matinee: To Wong Foo, Thanks...
Showing from Mon 16 Jun
This June, join us for 1985's TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING! JULIE NEWMAR, a vibrant and heartfelt road-trip comedy that celebrates friendship, self-expression, and the power of kindness. Starring Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo as three fabulous drag queens on an unforgettable journey across small-town America, this cult classic is bursting with charm, humour, and iconic p...
Classic Matinee: Rye Lane
Showing from Mon 14 Jul
This July, fall in love with 2023's RYE LANE, a fresh and vibrant romantic comedy that captures the energy and charm of South London. Following two strangers, both reeling from bad breakups, as they embark on a spontaneous day of adventure, this film is bursting with humour, heart, and dazzling visuals. A modern love story with a sharp, playful edge, RYE LANE is a joyous celebration of connection...
Nothing Scheduled
The Phoenician Scheme
Showing from Fri 23 May
ADVANCE BOOKING NOW OPEN Visionary filmmaker Wes Anderson continues his gloriously subversive path of cinematic mainstream destruction with a poignant tale of love and regret, espionage and intrigue, and the power of second chances. Zsa-zsa Korda, one of the richest men in Europe has survived six plane crashes and fathered nine sons and one daughter – a nun- whom he appoints as the sole heir to ...
PINK PALACE: THE BACKSTREET + Q&A
Showing from Sat 31 May
Pink Palace presents a newly made documentary about the legendary East London Leather Club The Backstreet, we are also delighted to welcome the film makers and special guests for this screening, and the basement bar will be suitable decorated! Sweat, moans, the haze of smoke and the rugged smell of leather. This is The Backstreet – London's secret haven for leathermen. After 37 years in existenc...
PINK PALACE: 54 (DIRECTORS CUT)
Showing from Thu 5 Jun
Pink Palace presents the Directors Cut of 54, a film that was butchered by the studios after test audiences ran screaming from all the homo content, Miramax ordered 45 gay/bi minutes cut and 25 minutes of new hetero footage be added, the film flopped. In 2015 director Mark Christopher reassembled the cut footage and delivered this darker, queer centric look at the lives of the staff who worked at...
PINK PALACE: HAIL THE NEW PURITAN
Showing from Thu 12 Jun
Pink Palace presents an incredible work from 1986 filmed locally at the Chisenhale Dance Space in Victoria Park and on location in and around Hackney Wick by avant garde film maker Charles Atlas. Throughout his career, Atlas has collaborated with key figures from a range of disciplines, expanding the relationships between dance, music, theatre, video, fashion, and television. Atlas’s experimenta...
A Minecraft Movie
Showing from Sat 24 May
Welcome to the world of Minecraft, where creativity doesn’t just help you craft, it’s essential for survival! Four misfits—Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, Henry, Natalie and Dawn—find themselves struggling with ordinary problems when they are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld: a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To get back home, they’ll...
The Wedding Banquet
NOW SHOWING
More than just a remake of the 1993 hit movie , THE WEDDING BANQUET is a joyfully loving and fresh reimagining of a classic comedy of errors about a family navigating cultural identity, queerness, and family expectations as they live, love, fight and make up again. Frustrated with his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris and running out of time, Min makes a proposal: a green-card marriage with the...
Motel Destino
NOW SHOWING
MOTEL DESTINO delivers heat, desire and danger as it fuses crime thriller and unbridled eroticism in a gloriously debauched piece of neon-noir set on the sun-drenched coast of Northern Brazil. Welcome to the neon-hued Motel Destino, a roadside sex hotel run by hot-headed Elias and his restless younger wife Dayana. The arrival of 21-year-old Heraldo, on the run after a botched robbery, disrupts th...
The Surfer
NOW SHOWING
It’s full throttle Cage Rage as Nicolas Cage is pushed into hallucinatory madness in Irish director Lorcan Finnegan’s deliriously sweaty psycho-thriller played out on Australia’s sun-drenched beaches. A man returns to the idyllic beach of his childhood to surf with his son but his paradise is now the territory of surfing gang the Bay Boys and their policy is “locals only.” But this washed-up wand...
The Phoenician Scheme
Showing from Fri 23 May
ADVANCE BOOKING NOW OPEN Visionary filmmaker Wes Anderson continues his gloriously subversive path of cinematic mainstream destruction with a poignant tale of love and regret, espionage and intrigue, and the power of second chances. Zsa-zsa Korda, one of the richest men in Europe has survived six plane crashes and fathered nine sons and one daughter – a nun- whom he appoints as the sole heir to ...
Sinners
NOW SHOWING
Vampire thriller meets serious intent in Ryan Coogler’s weighty and soulful SINNERS featuring Michael B. Jordan in a dual role. “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.” Mississippi 1932. Trying to leave their troubled lives behind gangster twin brothers Smoke and Stack return home after a stint in Chicago working with Al Capone, with plans to open a juke joint – dri...
Darling
Showing from Fri 30 May
Celebrating the 60th anniversary of one of the coolest and most defining films of the 1960s, DARLING, a tale of the desperate, and at times tragic, pursuit of fame that is as relevant in today’s image conscious society as it was back then. Now lavishly restored in 4K, John Schlesinger’s classic set amid London’s fashion scene features dazzling performances from Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and ...
