It's taken us a while to get our grubby mitts on this bizarre and nightmarish masterpiece from the king of cinematic surrealism Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain). Now we are incredibly excited to announce that SANTA SANGRE will be shown on the big screen in glorious 4K restoration by Severin Films!
Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy with relative ease to create a narrative that feels like a creepy, horrific fever dream, SANTA SANGRE is an insane but beautiful piece of cinematic majesty.
The film follows Fénix (played by the late Axel Jodorowsky) as he escapes a sanitarium he is held in...through flashbacks the viewer then learns of his traumatic past living with his family of circus performers. To say much more would take away from the magic and tragedy of what unfolds on screen.
Jodorowosky masterfully weaves his unmistakable magic to draw you into this mysterious world all the while touching on many themes such as identity, trauma and religious horror. Breathtaking and bizarre in equal measure - make sure you catch this surreal spectacle for its northern UK 4K premiere!
You can't say we don't treat you! See the iconic Space Jam for just £1 to celebrate the 30th anniversary! Swackhammer, an evil alien theme park owner, needs a new attraction at Moron Mountain. When his gang, the Nerdlucks, heads to Earth to kidnap Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes, Bugs challenges them to a basketball game to determine their fate. The aliens agree, but they steal the powers of NBA ...
Part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour: a Watershed project in association with Wiper & True and collaboration with principal sponsors Park Circus and StudioCanal. With support from BFI Audience Projects Fund awarding National Lottery funding. The films in this season, far from the liberal consensus often associated with Hollywood of the period, are darkly difficult in terms of subject matter and pr...
BUTTON MASHER RETURNS TO MANCHESTER Lower the lights, and turn every night into Halloween with MONSTERS CRASH THE PAJAMA PARTY. After months away, crawling the internet for more weird and wonderful cinema gimmicks, the wild cats at Button Masher have stumbled across the often overlooked gem MONSTERS CRASH THE PAJAMA PARTY, a staple of the now defunct touring spook show circuit. A group of teena...
UrbanArtistry Presents... Basquiat (Black + White Version)
Sat 19 Sep
Basquiat (Black + White Version) + Short Film [ CADAQUÉS ] by SHEONE - 2026 Midnight projections in the home town of Dali 6mins No painter electrified the 1980s art scene like Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New York street kid whose visionary blending of expressionism, pop art, and the radical new aesthetics of hip-hop and graffiti propelled him to international fame before a tragic early demise. Juli...
Part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour: a Watershed project in association with Wiper & True and collaboration with principal sponsors Park Circus and StudioCanal. With support from BFI Audience Projects Fund awarding National Lottery funding. The films in this season, far from the liberal consensus often associated with Hollywood of the period, are darkly difficult in terms of subject matter and pr...
From the dazzling imagination that brought you It Follows comes a feverish neo-noir starring Andrew Garfield! An epic, code-cracking, acid-spiked amateur sleuth story that tips its hat to Hitchcock, Lynch, Carpenter, and everything in between. Directed by David Robert Mitchell, this film is a mesmerizing blend of noir, mystery, and dark comedy that invites you into a labyrinthine journey through ...
Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet + Q&A
Thu 24 Sep
'Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet' is coming to Cultplex in Manchester on September 24th! The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend's (CNFW) one-night-only touring programme of digital delights on the big screen showcases the stories Britain tells about itself through the internet. Touring Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, and Lewes, this programme of vlogs, memes, and...
Counterfilms is proud to present Jean Luc Godard’s atmospheric sci fi-noir masterpiece, Alphaville. A film which created and broke genres and showcased his inventiveness, flamboyance and is at the same time poetic and in some strange way, a romance. Set in a dystopian AI governed future, it takes the conventions of macho thriller and spy films and subverts them to create humour and suspense, whil...
FFS Screening! Friday 5pm for £5! Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Claude Barras’s My Life as a Courgette tears up the rulebook for children’s cinema. Adapted from Gilles Paris’ book by Céline Sciamma ( Girlhood, Tomboy ), this melancholy yet witty claymation traces the effects of childhood tragedy. Nine-year-old Icare, known to his friends as ‘Courgette’, finds himself...
Redline is a turbo-charged, hand-drawn adrenaline rush from anime powerhouse Madhouse—ten years in the making and an all-gas-no-brakes spectacle that pushes 2D animation to its physical and artistic limits. Every frame pulses with raw energy, packed with high-speed collisions, mutant mayhem, and the wildest character designs this side of the galaxy. The story follows reckless racer JP as he enter...
Animation Weekender: Wallace and Gromit Shorts Collection
Sat 26 Sep
We couldn't host an animation weekender without all four cracking half-hour specials featuring Aardman's Oscar-Winning duo - the charming and eccentric inventor Wallace and his faithful, four-legged friend Gromit- on the big screen! Join Cultplex for a crackin' day out to celebrate Aardman Animations 50th anniversary! A GRAND DAY OUT On a quest for his favourite snack, Wallace takes Gromit on an ...
Animated plastic toys like Cowboy, Indian and Horse have problems, too! Cowboy and Indian’s plan to surprise Horse with a homemade birthday gift backfires when they destroy his house instead. Surreal adventures take over as the trio travel to the centre of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe where pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures live. Each sp...
Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer adapts Lewis Carroll's classic, combining a live-action Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) with creepy stop motion animated characters. While around forty film versions exist, as well as numerous TV adaptations, the version that Czech stop motion master Jan Švankmajer fashioned in 1988 stands alone in its dark and original take on Carroll’s light-hearted tale. In Alice, Ko...
Obscure Film Presesnts: Dance Along Stop Making Sense
Sat 26 Sep
If you're not too Byrne'd out from discovering who is the sky, come and join us on the dancefloor! A24’s 4K rerelease of Stop Making Sense showcases a crisp restoration of the iconic Talking Heads concert film, directed by Jonathan Demme. FAIRFIELD SOCIAL CLUB provides the dancefloor. Get dressed up so nice as you’re encouraged to get on the floor and make flippy floppy to all of Talking Heads’ a...
It’s “Bambi meets Apocalypse Now” in this provocative and strangely beautiful horror comedy from acclaimed filmmaker and illustrator Alberto Vázquez (Birdboy: The Forgotten Children). For ages, teddy bears have been locked in an ancestral war against their sworn enemy, the unicorns, with the promise that victory will complete the prophecy and usher in a new era. Aggressive, confident teddy bear B...
Animation Weekender: The Adventures of Prince Achmed
Sun 27 Sep
Three years in the making, and worth every moment, Lotte Reiniger’s beautiful 1926 silhouette animation, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, brings to life magical tales from the Arabian Nights. The earliest surviving animated feature film – preserved in the BFI National Archive – it has been hailed as one of the world’s most innovative and influential animations and celebrates it's 100th Anniversary...
When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters - an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire - to rescue him, in this beloved 2003 animation from director Sylvain Chomet. Adopted by his grandmother, Madame Souza, Champion is a lonely little boy. Noticing that the lad is never happier than on a bi...
Ralph Bakshi encountered Tolkien’s writing early in his career, and had made several attempts to produce THE LORD OF THE RINGS as an animated film before being given funding by producer Saul Zaentz and distributor United Artists. The film is notable for its extensive use of rotoscoping, a technique in which scenes are first shot in live-action, then traced onto animation cels. It uses a hybrid ...
It's taken us a while to get our grubby mitts on this bizarre and nightmarish masterpiece from the king of cinematic surrealism Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain). Now we are incredibly excited to announce that SANTA SANGRE will be shown on the big screen in glorious 4K restoration by Severin Films ! Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy with relative ease to create a narr...
Screening as part of STAB! It's time once again to celebrate a dead guy rising from the grave! Our annual screening of everyone's favourite seventies Lancashire/ Cumbrian based zombie movie with the incredible 1974 Euro-horror cult classic The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (also known under the titles Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Don't Open the Window, and Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dea...
You can't say we don't treat you! See the iconic Space Jam for just £1 to celebrate the 30th anniversary! Swackhammer, an evil alien theme park owner, needs a new attraction at Moron Mountain. When his gang, the Nerdlucks, heads to Earth to kidnap Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes, Bugs challenges them to a basketball game to determine their fate. The aliens agree, but they steal the powers of NBA ...
Part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour: a Watershed project in association with Wiper & True and collaboration with principal sponsors Park Circus and StudioCanal. With support from BFI Audience Projects Fund awarding National Lottery funding. The films in this season, far from the liberal consensus often associated with Hollywood of the period, are darkly difficult in terms of subject matter and pr...
BUTTON MASHER RETURNS TO MANCHESTER Lower the lights, and turn every night into Halloween with MONSTERS CRASH THE PAJAMA PARTY. After months away, crawling the internet for more weird and wonderful cinema gimmicks, the wild cats at Button Masher have stumbled across the often overlooked gem MONSTERS CRASH THE PAJAMA PARTY, a staple of the now defunct touring spook show circuit. A group of teena...
UrbanArtistry Presents... Basquiat (Black + White Version)
Sat 19 Sep
Basquiat (Black + White Version) + Short Film [ CADAQUÉS ] by SHEONE - 2026 Midnight projections in the home town of Dali 6mins No painter electrified the 1980s art scene like Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New York street kid whose visionary blending of expressionism, pop art, and the radical new aesthetics of hip-hop and graffiti propelled him to international fame before a tragic early demise. Juli...
Part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour: a Watershed project in association with Wiper & True and collaboration with principal sponsors Park Circus and StudioCanal. With support from BFI Audience Projects Fund awarding National Lottery funding. The films in this season, far from the liberal consensus often associated with Hollywood of the period, are darkly difficult in terms of subject matter and pr...
From the dazzling imagination that brought you It Follows comes a feverish neo-noir starring Andrew Garfield! An epic, code-cracking, acid-spiked amateur sleuth story that tips its hat to Hitchcock, Lynch, Carpenter, and everything in between. Directed by David Robert Mitchell, this film is a mesmerizing blend of noir, mystery, and dark comedy that invites you into a labyrinthine journey through ...
Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet + Q&A
Thu 24 Sep
'Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet' is coming to Cultplex in Manchester on September 24th! The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend's (CNFW) one-night-only touring programme of digital delights on the big screen showcases the stories Britain tells about itself through the internet. Touring Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, and Lewes, this programme of vlogs, memes, and...
Counterfilms is proud to present Jean Luc Godard’s atmospheric sci fi-noir masterpiece, Alphaville. A film which created and broke genres and showcased his inventiveness, flamboyance and is at the same time poetic and in some strange way, a romance. Set in a dystopian AI governed future, it takes the conventions of macho thriller and spy films and subverts them to create humour and suspense, whil...
FFS Screening! Friday 5pm for £5! Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Claude Barras’s My Life as a Courgette tears up the rulebook for children’s cinema. Adapted from Gilles Paris’ book by Céline Sciamma ( Girlhood, Tomboy ), this melancholy yet witty claymation traces the effects of childhood tragedy. Nine-year-old Icare, known to his friends as ‘Courgette’, finds himself...
Redline is a turbo-charged, hand-drawn adrenaline rush from anime powerhouse Madhouse—ten years in the making and an all-gas-no-brakes spectacle that pushes 2D animation to its physical and artistic limits. Every frame pulses with raw energy, packed with high-speed collisions, mutant mayhem, and the wildest character designs this side of the galaxy. The story follows reckless racer JP as he enter...
Animation Weekender: Wallace and Gromit Shorts Collection
Sat 26 Sep
We couldn't host an animation weekender without all four cracking half-hour specials featuring Aardman's Oscar-Winning duo - the charming and eccentric inventor Wallace and his faithful, four-legged friend Gromit- on the big screen! Join Cultplex for a crackin' day out to celebrate Aardman Animations 50th anniversary! A GRAND DAY OUT On a quest for his favourite snack, Wallace takes Gromit on an ...
Animated plastic toys like Cowboy, Indian and Horse have problems, too! Cowboy and Indian’s plan to surprise Horse with a homemade birthday gift backfires when they destroy his house instead. Surreal adventures take over as the trio travel to the centre of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe where pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures live. Each sp...
Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer adapts Lewis Carroll's classic, combining a live-action Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) with creepy stop motion animated characters. While around forty film versions exist, as well as numerous TV adaptations, the version that Czech stop motion master Jan Švankmajer fashioned in 1988 stands alone in its dark and original take on Carroll’s light-hearted tale. In Alice, Ko...
Obscure Film Presesnts: Dance Along Stop Making Sense
Sat 26 Sep
If you're not too Byrne'd out from discovering who is the sky, come and join us on the dancefloor! A24’s 4K rerelease of Stop Making Sense showcases a crisp restoration of the iconic Talking Heads concert film, directed by Jonathan Demme. FAIRFIELD SOCIAL CLUB provides the dancefloor. Get dressed up so nice as you’re encouraged to get on the floor and make flippy floppy to all of Talking Heads’ a...
It’s “Bambi meets Apocalypse Now” in this provocative and strangely beautiful horror comedy from acclaimed filmmaker and illustrator Alberto Vázquez (Birdboy: The Forgotten Children). For ages, teddy bears have been locked in an ancestral war against their sworn enemy, the unicorns, with the promise that victory will complete the prophecy and usher in a new era. Aggressive, confident teddy bear B...
Animation Weekender: The Adventures of Prince Achmed
Sun 27 Sep
Three years in the making, and worth every moment, Lotte Reiniger’s beautiful 1926 silhouette animation, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, brings to life magical tales from the Arabian Nights. The earliest surviving animated feature film – preserved in the BFI National Archive – it has been hailed as one of the world’s most innovative and influential animations and celebrates it's 100th Anniversary...
When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters - an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire - to rescue him, in this beloved 2003 animation from director Sylvain Chomet. Adopted by his grandmother, Madame Souza, Champion is a lonely little boy. Noticing that the lad is never happier than on a bi...
Ralph Bakshi encountered Tolkien’s writing early in his career, and had made several attempts to produce THE LORD OF THE RINGS as an animated film before being given funding by producer Saul Zaentz and distributor United Artists. The film is notable for its extensive use of rotoscoping, a technique in which scenes are first shot in live-action, then traced onto animation cels. It uses a hybrid ...
It's taken us a while to get our grubby mitts on this bizarre and nightmarish masterpiece from the king of cinematic surrealism Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain). Now we are incredibly excited to announce that SANTA SANGRE will be shown on the big screen in glorious 4K restoration by Severin Films ! Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy with relative ease to create a narr...
Screening as part of STAB! It's time once again to celebrate a dead guy rising from the grave! Our annual screening of everyone's favourite seventies Lancashire/ Cumbrian based zombie movie with the incredible 1974 Euro-horror cult classic The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (also known under the titles Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Don't Open the Window, and Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dea...
