Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Peasant life in rural Lombardy in 1898. The eternal struggle of living and surviving from day to day, from season to season. Spiritual, infuriating, tender, moving and profound. The ultimate locati...

October 20, 2021 | MIKE LEIGH’S CHOICES

Yojimbo

Kurosawa on ‘Yojimbo’ For a long time I had wanted to make a really interesting film – and it finally turned into this picture. The story is so ideally interesting that it’s surprising no one else...

October 19, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Throne of Blood

In 1955, the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa and his colleagues began work on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, transposing from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan the tale of a ...

October 19, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Peeping Tom

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Never has Eastmancolor felt so woozily, vividly hypnotic than in Michael Powell’s controversial shocker. It’s as easy to be seduced ...

October 19, 2021 | EDGAR WRIGHT’S LONDON AFTER DARK

Kiss Me Deadly

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The dead of night. A distressed woman, out of breath, running along a desert road. The broken lines in the middle of the asphalt fl...

October 19, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Jules et Jim

A contemporary review Jules et Jim is very much a conscious attempt on Truffaut’s part to make a synthesis of his first two films: to combine the ‘big’ subject with obvious human significance of L...

October 19, 2021 | MIKE LEIGH’S CHOICES

Heat

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. After a journey into the 18th-century wilderness for The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann returns to the urban terrain of his tele...

October 19, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Early Spring

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. After the domestic critical and box office success of Tokyo Story in late 1953, Ozu found himself taking an uncharacteristic break ...

October 19, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Dutchman

This screening will be introduced by curator and writer Karen Alexander, who’ll be joined by academic Dr Clive Nwonka for a post-screening discussion chaired by Voice4Change Director Kunle Olulode....

October 19, 2021 | PROJECTING THE ARCHIVE

Denis Villeneuve in Conversation

As Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve welcomes audiences to his version of the planet Arrakis – the setting for his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune (previously adapted for the screen...

October 19, 2021 | IN PERSON & PREVIEWS

Tokyo Story

Ozu described Tokyo Story as his ‘most melodramatic’ movie, an observation taken by most western commentators, dazzled by the director’s minimalist style and resolutely quotidian material, as ironi...

October 18, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Passport to Shame

One of those rare B-movies that manages to live up to or even exceed the lurid promise of its title and poster. It finds an (American) London cabbie on a dangerous mission to rescue an innocent Fre...

October 18, 2021 | EDGAR WRIGHT’S LONDON AFTER DARK

The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice

Well into the master’s post-war golden age, this often overlooked shoshimin-eiga (contemporary domestic drama) explores once again the generational divide Ozu was so interested in. A typically prec...

October 18, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Chinatown

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Roman Polanski on ‘Chinatown’ Despite the fact that you began filmmaking at the time of the Nouvelle Vague, you always seemed to ha...

October 18, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Bleak Moments

There is nothing quite like English suburbia, and a solid tradition of literary commentators, from Arnold Bennett to William Cooper, has ventured down the tree-lined avenues to unmask the mysteries...

October 18, 2021 | MIKE LEIGH

All My Friends Hate Me

+ intro and Q&A with Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton Just because you’re paranoid, Joseph Heller noted, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. This is birthday boy Pete’s own Catch-22: invited by his...

October 18, 2021 | PREVIEWS

Dune

+ pre-recorded Q&A with Denis Villeneuve Set thousands of years in the future, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a young man propelled by fate into an intergalactic power struggle. The so...

October 5, 2021 | PREVIEWS

Rocks

+ Q&A with director Sarah Gavron ‘Real queens fix each other’s crowns’ reads a sticker tacked to 16-year-old Shola’s bedroom wall. Shola (Bukky Bakray), better known as Rocks, might be the bes...

October 2, 2021 | NFTS AT 50

Of Time and the City

+ Q&A with Terence Davies There is something mysterious about Terence Davies’ Liverpool from the outset: at the heart of this meditation on the city lies a tension, between urban change as a p...

October 2, 2021 | NFTS AT 50

Surge

+ Q&A with director Aneil Karia Most people have thought about jumping the barriers at a train station, but the decision to act is what makes all the difference. Aneil Karia’s debut feature Su...

September 28, 2021 | NFTS AT 50

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