A Useful Ghost at Top Kino
- The file
- The practical details Claire checked before this went into the index.
- When
- 4 July 2026 – 13 July 2026
- Where
- Top Kino, Rahlgasse 1, 1060 Wien
- Price
- check website
A Thai man's wife dies of air pollution. Her soul takes up residence in his vacuum cleaner. It's the premise of Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's debut feature, which screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2025 — and it's not quirky. The film uses its absurdist conceit to explore grief, class, environmental destruction, and the way capitalism turns even love into a transaction. Boonbunchachoke comes from theatre and short film; this is his first feature and it reads like the work of someone who knows exactly what he's doing. The Thai-Singapore-French-German co-production is exactly the kind of film that wouldn't make it to most Vienna cinemas. Top Kino is one of the few places in the city with the programming instinct to show it. Screening in OmdU.
More in On Screen
ROSE at Top Kino
- When
- 4 July 2026 – 20 July 2026
- Where
- 6th · Mariahilf
Sandra Hüller won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the 2026 Berlinale for her role as Rose, a woman born in 18th-century Austria who disguises herself as a man to escape the constraints of her sex. She builds a small empire, eventually marries a woman who may have secrets of her own. Markus Schleinzer's third feature — shot in elegant black and white and based on a real historical case — sits in a lineage of films about women who lived as men out of necessity. But Schleinzer, who made his name with the deeply unsettling Michael (2011), brings a formal precision and emotional restraint that makes this feel genuinely different. He's Austrian, trained as a casting director, and his films consistently find the extraordinary in the historically overlooked. Screening in OmeU (original with German subtitles) at Top Kino, Rahlgasse 1, the 6th. July 4–20.
Read the note →Virginia Woolf's Night & Day at Filmhaus Spittelberg
- When
- 14 July 2026 – 22 July 2026
- Where
- 6th · Mariahilf
Iranian-born British director Tina Gharavi adapts Virginia Woolf's most accessible novel into a sharp, funny, and quietly radical period film set in 1910 London. Haley Bennett plays Katharine Hilbery, granddaughter of a celebrated poet, who secretly studies mathematics and astronomy in a world that expects her to marry well — until she meets a firebrand suffragette (Lily Allen) who upends everything. Gharavi, who grew up in Iran before building her career in the UK and US, brings an outsider's eye to the English class system and Woolf's feminist subtext, turning what could have been a costume drama into something genuinely alive. The Guardian called it “a film of extraordinary quality — beautifully crafted and shot, suffused with a yearning romanticism.” Running across both Filmhaus Spittelberg and Filmcasino through late July, this is the rare literary adaptation that earns its source material.
Read the note →Stop Making Sense at Filmcasino
- When
- 22 July 2026
- Where
- 5th · Margareten
Jonathan Demme's 1984 concert film of the Talking Heads screens at the Filmcasino on July 22. It's the 4K restoration that's been touring cinemas globally since 2023 — one of the most visceral experiences available on a big screen. The film was shot over three nights at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, with David Byrne building the stage piece by piece from a single spotlight and a boombox to a full band and a choir. The big suit. The running in place. The pure kinetic joy of a band at the absolute peak of its powers. The Filmcasino's retro interior — 50s/60s design frozen in time — is the right room for this. One night only, July 22.
Read the note →