BFI Southbank Programme Notes

A Way of Life

Growing up in South London in the 1980s writer and first-time director Amma Asante recalls ‘the part of London I lived in seems so diverse now. It wasn’t then. We were one of two Black families liv...

May 16, 2025 | Black Debutantes
A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors

Nightshift

+ intro by Jon Jost, filmmaker, cinematographer and friend of Robina Rose Legendary punk stayover The Portobello Hotel provides the location for Robina Rose’s stunning, psycho-dramatic long-night...

May 13, 2025 | Restored

Drylongso

Cauleen Smith on ‘Drylongso’ In your Amos Vogel lecture at the 2022 New York Film Festival, you discussed his idea of cinema as both a medium of subversion and one of wonder and magic. Considering...

May 11, 2025 | Black Debutantes
A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors

Jerry Maguire

Jerry Maguire, a slick, high-flying sports agent working for a giant company has doubts about the ethics of his industry. When he proposes there is a better, kinder way for taking care of clients h...

May 10, 2025 | Tom Cruise

The Haunting

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Filmmaker Brian Yuzna on ‘The Haunting’ The cinema of fear is my special interest. Since my first flickering nightmares, I have been...

May 10, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Jack Reacher

Jack Reacher is based on One Shot, the ninth in the series of Lee Child’s novels, so why begin in the middle, as it were? Producer Don Granger says, ‘One Shot is perhaps the most cinematic of all t...

May 9, 2025 | Tom Cruise

Collateral

Silver-haired Vincent hops on a random taxi with a suitcase and a mission. In the driver’s seat is a man with big dreams (Jamie Foxx), none of which involve a hitman in the back of his car. Alas, d...

May 9, 2025 | Tom Cruise

Compensation

Zeinabu irene Davis on ‘Compensation’ The inspiration to make Compensation grew out of a journal entry. I frequently work with non-actors and, in order to keep cast members engaged and in character...

May 8, 2025 | Black Debutantes
A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors

The War Game

+ In Conversation with Professor Louis Lemkow, Mai Zetterling’s son In a stark apartment building, two children playfully fight over a gun. As the tussle escalates from play to something more seri...

May 6, 2025 | Passion and All That Goes with It
The Films of Mai Zetterling

The Pawnbroker

Although it rarely features in top 100 lists, Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964) played a significant role in shaping 1960s American cinema. Yet, it was almost never made and sat in a vault for m...

May 6, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

A Few Good Men

In Rob Reiner’s riveting courtroom drama, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee’s moral compass is put to the test when a murder with hints of institutional wrongdoing takes place inside the famed Guantanamo Ba...

May 5, 2025 | Tom Cruise

Top Gun - Maverick

There’s a line in Top Gun: Maverick that sums up its production maybe more than any other. Appropriately, it’s said in a scene between two of its returning heroes: Tom Cruise’s title character, Mav...

May 3, 2025 | Tom Cruise

The Romantic Age

As a precocious French pupil who seduces the new male teacher at a prim girls’ school, Zetterling steals the film. French-English director Edmond Gréville pushes at the moral limits of what was per...

May 3, 2025 | Passion and All That Goes with It
The Films of Mai Zetterling

Losing Ground

Among the first of a small number of Black women to explore narrative filmmaking in the 1970s and 80s – no small feat in what was then, as now, a predominantly white male arena – Kathleen Collins ...

May 3, 2025 | Black Debutantes
A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors

Pariah

Dee Rees on ‘Pariah’ The film started out as a student short in 2007. Did you always envision being able to turn the short into a feature film? The crazy thing is, I envisioned it as a feature to...

May 1, 2025 | Black Debutantes
A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors

Under the Tower Trilogy by William Raban

+ William Raban in conversation Foreword to William Raban’s Nautical Twilight. Fifty Years an Artist Filmmaker. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). By William Fowler. (Extract) Beware: once you open it a...

April 24, 2025 | Experimenta

Avanti!

Jack Lemmon plays a Nixonian corporate stiff who travels to an Italian island to retrieve the body of his recently deceased father, only to fall for the daughter of the woman his dad was having an ...

April 20, 2025 | You Must Remember This Presents...
“The Old Man Is Still Alive”

The Hourglass Sanatorium

The Hourglass Sanatorium began life as Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (the film’s Polish title), a 1937 novella by the writer and painter Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) that is so elusive and elliptical that i...

April 17, 2025 | The Long Strange Trips of Wojciech Jerzy Has

The Only Game in Town

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Perhaps because of its Las Vegas locale, George Stevens’s The Only Game in Town improves as the stakes in its story are raised. Base...

April 15, 2025 | You Must Remember This Presents...
“The Old Man Is Still Alive”

The Liberation of L.B. Jones

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The title of William Wyler’s final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, is as ironic as that of his most famous work, The Best Years ...