BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Counsellor

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. As Chekhov famously remarked, ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired...

October 1, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

The Last Duel

A concern for truth lies at the heart of Sir Ridley Scott’s new epic film The Last Duel and it follows a thin red line connecting all his period films from The Duellists (1977) to Robin Hood (2010)...

September 29, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Missing Believed Wiped
Associated-Rediffusion Special

Studio 5 The opening of Associated-Rediffusion’s Studio 5 was a BIG deal. So big that the opening itself was televised and we were given a guided tour of the studio and a look at the rehearsals for...

September 27, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Ready Steady Go!

In the early 1960s, as pop music became the vanguard of a newly developing and revolutionary artistic and cultural movement, television producers began to tackle the task of inventing a format to c...

September 26, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

The Ice Storm

With its spare, circular story line, the ability to crystallise so much of what it is about in its visuals, and an exceptional cast delivering the most precise of spoken lines, The Ice Storm is cin...

September 26, 2025 | Re-releases

Captive Cinema

+ intro by Lisa Kerrigan, Senior Curator of Television Shaking up the world of TV documentary, the features department of Associated-Rediffusion was the subject of the first TV season at the Natio...

September 23, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Drama 3 - The Classics at Associated-Rediffusion

As an original ITV company, in the early years Associated-Rediffusion mined the classical theatre canon for many of its TV dramas. It has left us a fascinating historical legacy, acclaimed 1960s ac...

September 20, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Matchstick Men

‘People are fascinated with con men like they’re fascinated with mobsters – at least the fictional kind,’ says novelist Eric Garcia, whose manuscript for Matchstick Men was being considered for the...

September 16, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

The Lost World of Children’s Programming

+ intro by Elinor Groom, Curator of Television This programme includes Television for Children, a featurette made exclusively for the NFT, which follows a version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice down the...

September 16, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Gladiator

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The Encyclopaedia Britannica imperiously dismisses the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius as ‘an historically overrated figur...

September 13, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Alien

In 1977, a heavily revised script optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox entitled Alien went through the hands of several Hollywood directors. Peter Yates passed on it. Robert Aldrich passed on it. The ...

September 13, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Black Rain

After discovering the Black Rain screenplay by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, Michael Douglas brought the project to producers Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, who had worked with him on the h...

September 12, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Bad Education

Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, discover love, cinema and fear in a religious school at the start of the 60s. Father Manolo, the school principal and their literature teacher, is witness to and ...

September 12, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Thelma & Louise

In the summer of 1991, Thelma & Louise was a much talked-about movie, sparking a broad public debate about women, men, guns and the fate of women who break the law. A generation later, we could...

September 10, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Someone to Watch Over Me

Director Ridley Scott established himself as a filmmaker with an extraordinary eye for beauty in his first film The Duellists. With each subsequent film he has enhanced his reputation as one of the...

September 9, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Leslie Harris’ ultra-low-budget Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., a cautionary comedy about teenage pregnancy, opened in the US in Fe...

September 9, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Good Morning, Boys!

Good Morning, Boys! was the first comedy Will Hay made with director Marcel Varnel and what was later to become his stock company of technicians and writers: Guest, Edgar, Crabtree, Vetchinsky and ...

September 6, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Blade Runner - The Final Cut

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Philip K. Dick died three months before the US release of Blade Runner, the film based on his 1968 science-fiction novel Do Androids...

September 6, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

American Gangster

The legend of heroin smuggler/family man/death dealer/civic leader Frank Lucas was first chronicled in a New York Magazine article by journalist Mark Jacobson. In 2000, executive producer Nicholas ...