BFI Southbank Programme Notes

La Maison des bois

As a filmmaker, Maurice Pialat was a late bloomer. From the mid-50s to the mid-60s, when he was in his thirties, he shot several shorts and, before that, had attempted to realise his artistic ambi...

August 15, 2026 | Re-releases

Child's Play

Chucky is a sweet-looking ‘Good Guy’ doll which becomes hideously evil when its body is inhabited by the soul of a killer. Like many other movie stars, Chucky’s off-screen persona is totally unlik...

August 15, 2026 | No Strings Attached
Puppets on Film

The Oberwald Mystery

Monica Vitti on ‘The Oberwald Mystery’ Naturally, this further professional encounter with Antonioni was not by chance… Of course not. Michelangelo and I had been talking for years about the poss...

August 14, 2026 | Monica Vitti
Creative Force

À nos amours

Unhappiness, to coin a maxim, often derives from nothing more than the fact that we do not possess precisely the kind of happiness we might wish. As with most of Maurice Pialat’s protagonists, Suza...

August 14, 2026 | Three Films by Maurice Pialat

Culloden

Watkins’ strikingly original reconstruction of the 1746 Battle of Culloden strips away any sense of noble pageantry to confront the brutality inflicted on Highland soldiers and civilians by the Bri...

August 9, 2026 | System Critical
The Radical Films of Peter Watkins

Privilege

In 1966, following the collapse of a film which I hoped to develop with Albert Finney’s production company, on the 1916 Easter uprising in Dublin, I was approached by John Heyman, a British artists...

August 8, 2026 | System Critical
The Radical Films of Peter Watkins

La notte

A disaffected novelist and his wife drift through Milan for a day and night in Antonioni’s sublimely chilly masterpiece. Vitti plays a key foil to Mastroianni and Moreau’s characters, as a rich you...

August 8, 2026 | Monica Vitti
Creative Force

The Sacrifice

He was a giant for work, and a highly disciplined man who hated disorder and would only come to the set after much preparation. Quite often I found it strenuous to keep up with his pace – which is ...

August 7, 2026 | Re-releases

To Catch a Thief

Hitchcock on ‘To Catch a Thief’ Straightening out the zigzag course conversations are apt to take, especially when prompted by questions, I find that in the main my talk with Alfred Hitchcock after...

August 6, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Hôtel du Nord

The film of Hôtel du Nord was inspired by a book written in 1928 by Eugene Dabit, a gifted young writer who died in 1936 in tragic and mysterious circumstances. Dabit’s L’Hôtel du Nord is a collect...

August 4, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

The Double Life of Véronique

With its obsessive brooding on objects – their unearthly light, their depths of emotive resonance, their portentous presence – it would be fair to say that The Double Life of Véronique is concerned...

August 4, 2026 | No Strings Attached
Puppets on Film

Red Desert

Against the backdrop of a bleak industrial landscape, a traumatised woman embarks on an affair. Antonioni’s first colour film critiques industrialisation and reflects on fragmented human connection...

August 2, 2026 | Monica Vitti
Creative Force

Somewhere

Sofia Coppola on ‘Somewhere’ Somewhere is your most pared-down, restrained film yet: the camera’s often held at a distance and there’s not much dialogue. How did you arrive at that approach? Afte...

August 1, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Clever Girls

In 1950s Rome, three girls use all their wiles to trick their reluctant boyfriends into marriage. This early and little-seen Vitti film showcases a battle of the sexes in which only one side will t...

August 1, 2026 | Monica Vitti
Creative Force

Hamlet

Riz Ahmed and Aneil Karia on ‘Hamlet’ What drew you to tell this story, and why Hamlet now? RA: When I first connected with the material, I was in a really raw place as a teenager, going through ...

July 25, 2026 | Film Wallahs

Nostalgia

How could I have imagined as I was making Nostalgia that the stifling sense of longing that fills the screen space of that film was to become my lot for the rest of my life; that from now until the...

July 24, 2026 | Re-releases

Tickets

Three Palme d’Or winners share the directing credit, but I’ve yet to find anyone who has seen this film. (Aside from the stranger in the Japanese restaurant who alerted me to its existence – my tha...

July 23, 2026 | Station to Station
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films

Radio On

In an interview accompanying the DVD release of Radio On, director/writer Chris Petit uses the word ‘autistic’ on three separate occasions to describe the mood he was aiming for. Embarking on his d...

July 23, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Kings of the Road

A three-hour study of two men who are on the road, servicing the projectors in failing movie theatres, Kings of the Road is full of film references and the situation of a Hawksian bond tested again...

July 19, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Bhaji on the Beach

About a third of the way through Bhaji on the Beach, one of the film’s most dayglo characters, the Bombay-based, Chanel-clad Rekha, clambers down from the coach, totters around the corner on her pi...

July 15, 2026 | Big Screen Classics