The Regulars Review: A Day at the Prince Charles

Set at the Prince Charles Cinema and featuring its staff, The Regulars is a very enjoyable workplace comedy drama that is a perfect tribute to the iconic cinema.

An online petition to save it has racked up more than 150,000 signatures, whilst Christopher Nolan, Paul Mescal and others have lent their support. This genuine love for the Prince Charles, one of the few independent cinemas left in an increasingly gentrified city, is undoubtedly clear.  

That can also be seen in the new film The Regulars, from writer-director-star Fil Freitas, a film school graduate turned usher turned manager at the Prince Charles. He takes that background into his first feature, which is set across one day (March 7, 2019, to be precise) and features the cinema heavily.

The film follows a normal day at the Prince Charles and the people who work there, particularly Fil (Freitas). His day starts with him being late for work, then being trapped in his flat because of an oven outside his front door. Once Fil arrives, he has to navigate a double shift full of dead rats, annoying customers and The Sound of Music sing-a-longs. Luckily, he isn’t alone. His girlfriend Dusty (Dusty Keeney) has a shift later and is waiting for news about a promotion. Also present are front-of-house staff Flavio (Sergio Barba) and Caroline (Lisa Marie Flowers), projectionist Dan (Kevin Johnson) and new employee Sophie (Bronte Appleby). They are all led by manager Sam (Ricardo Freitras), who himself has a boss in the more serious and professional Becca (Lauren Shotton).

That is the simple premise of a workplace comedy drama based on the real-life experiences and stories from Prince Charles workers, with some of the main characters and patrons played by staff (“it’s not a documentary but it’s close enough,” Freitas says about the film on its website). All that provides an excellent sense of realism, which is one of The Regulars’ greatest strengths. That realism is demonstrated from the start, as the staff prepare to open up for the day. They top up the popcorn and test out the soda machines. Flavio and Caroline butt heads over who gets to watch the first movie of the day.

Then there is the monotonous waiting for customers, followed by interactions that turn out to be equally tedious. Fil and the other staff show contempt for the customers that is sometimes justified, as they can alternate between being indecisive and belligerent. Watching these scenes might make you agree with the film’s tagline that ‘the customer is always wrong.’ The lived-in feeling is emphasised by DP Ben Rolph (who’s also a film critic), who makes good use of tight corridors and rooms to capture the cramped milieu effortlessly. There is even a homage to the Goodfellas Copacabana one-shot as the camera winds down the stairs and through the crowd arriving for The Sound of Music.

The obvious influence here is Kevin Smith’s Clerks, and there are many similarities between it and The Regulars. Both are microbudget, black and white indie films (Freitas partly funded his through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo). Both are shot in the places where the filmmaker worked for that extra realism. And crucially, both have a snarkiness and sardonicism that were present throughout Gen X cinema. In Freitas’ great script, those traits are found in deadpan deliveries, entertainingly snappy back-and-forths between the staff and postmodern rants on room-temperature water and Kylo Ren.

Yet they are also found in the staff. Disenchanted on the surface, Freitas reveals a bunch of creative dreams deferred, artists stuck in what could be considered a dead-end job to make ends meet. It can be seen in the ‘Local Artist Fund’ jip tar at the bar or in Flavio, who is struggling with money and rent (“ironically, it’s so hard to live in London out of a London Living Wage.”) Or in Fils, who is visited by a film school classmate who has directed his first feature. As Sam notes, “this place is a waiting room of ambition.”

The Regulars is a little slow and awkward in places, but it ends up being a very enjoyable and humorous film. Anyone who has worked in a cinema (or in hospitality) will see themselves in this group and their struggles. And anyone who has been to the Prince Charles Cinema will recognise that Freitas’ film is a perfect tribute to its setting. As it takes us into the bowels of this building, into the breakrooms and the screens where many cinephiles have frequented, you get a sense of how much this cinema means to Freitas.

The other main reference point here is Empire Records, another Gen X movie about characters hanging out at a workplace over one day. It is also a film about an independent cultural establishment under threat from big money. The ‘under threat’ part doesn’t factor into The Regulars, but it looms over the whole thing, adding an urgency to something that was years in the making (Freitas had the idea in 2019 and began shooting three years later). Hopefully, this great film doesn’t soon become a nostalgic look at a magical place we once had.

The Regulars was screened at the Sheffield Film Festival on August 7, 2025 and will be released in U.K. cinemas on August 22, 2025.