Revolutionary cinema comes to UCLA, plus the best movies to see this week
Los Angeles Times | Mark Olsen | November 21, 2025
Nathan Gelgud featured in the LA Times!
"Launching tonight, the UCLA Film and Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater will present a series titled “Reel Politik: Seizing the Means of Projection with Nathan Gelgud” that will include a number of films that grapple with notions of revolutionary rhetoric and action. Movie fans will recognize Gelgud’s drawings from the series of tote bags, T-shirts and other merchandise he has done for venues and organizations in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. He’s seemingly become the official cartoonist (and satirist) of cinema culture.
His new book, “Reel Politik,” expands on a series of comics that he began on Instagram. It’s the story of a group of small-town movie theater employees who form a revolutionary cadre. (They hijack the Criterion Closet van.) Movie lovers will likely recognize themselves in the characters’ small-stakes bickering over such topics as assigned seating and film formats.
On the phone this week from his home in South Pasadena, Gelgud, 47, explained how he became a cinema-centric cartoonist.
“I’ve been a cartoonist for a long time and a few years ago I just kind of decided that I should really be doing comics about movies, just because that’s the thing that I know about and that I love the most,” he says, “and that my comics would probably get, if not better, they would at least have more of me in them. I would just find a voice, a more effective way of making comics and speaking to readers if they were just always about movies.”
The UCLA series, extending five nights between Friday and Dec. 20, includes movies that don’t screen that often, so all of these events are worth checking out. Things kick off with Jean-Luc Godard’s brilliant and funny 1967 provocation “La Chinoise,” about a group of students who refashion themselves as revolutionaries, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky. Gelgud will be there for a book signing and Q&A and will also appear at other evenings when possible.
Other films in the series include Peter Watkins’ 1971 dystopian “Punishment Park,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 terrorist drama “The Third Generation,” Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 “Putney Swope,” the anarchic 1935 Marx Brothers comedy “A Night at the Opera” and Brian De Palma’s “Hi, Mom!,” starring a young Robert De Niro."
His new book, “Reel Politik,” expands on a series of comics that he began on Instagram. It’s the story of a group of small-town movie theater employees who form a revolutionary cadre. (They hijack the Criterion Closet van.) Movie lovers will likely recognize themselves in the characters’ small-stakes bickering over such topics as assigned seating and film formats.
On the phone this week from his home in South Pasadena, Gelgud, 47, explained how he became a cinema-centric cartoonist.
“I’ve been a cartoonist for a long time and a few years ago I just kind of decided that I should really be doing comics about movies, just because that’s the thing that I know about and that I love the most,” he says, “and that my comics would probably get, if not better, they would at least have more of me in them. I would just find a voice, a more effective way of making comics and speaking to readers if they were just always about movies.”
The UCLA series, extending five nights between Friday and Dec. 20, includes movies that don’t screen that often, so all of these events are worth checking out. Things kick off with Jean-Luc Godard’s brilliant and funny 1967 provocation “La Chinoise,” about a group of students who refashion themselves as revolutionaries, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky. Gelgud will be there for a book signing and Q&A and will also appear at other evenings when possible.
Other films in the series include Peter Watkins’ 1971 dystopian “Punishment Park,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 terrorist drama “The Third Generation,” Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 “Putney Swope,” the anarchic 1935 Marx Brothers comedy “A Night at the Opera” and Brian De Palma’s “Hi, Mom!,” starring a young Robert De Niro."