BFI Southbank Programme Notes

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

Runaway Train

Two convicts break out of a hellish prison to find themselves trapped on a speeding train they can’t control. Is this Jon Voight’s finest moment? (He and Roberts both received Oscar nominations.) O...

July 11, 2026 | Station to Station
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films

The Girls

One of the defining auteurs of Sri Lankan cinema, Sumitra Peries was also one of the few international figures from the island nation. Her films capture, in all their nuances and complexities, the ...

July 10, 2026 | Re-releases

Stranger than Paradise

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Jim Jarmusch is remarkable for having achieved both critical and a degree of commercial success with work that in many respects bear...

July 9, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Bashu, the Little Stranger

+ intro by film curator Ehsan Khoshbakht Jafar Panahi: Maestro Bahram Beyzaie is not only a filmmaker in the Iranian tradition. He is a writer, a scholar, and an artist who has made an unrivalled...

July 8, 2026 | UK Premiere of 4K Restoration

Planes, Trains & Automobiles

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Promoted as teen-movie guru John Hughes’ first adult comedy, no doubt on the strength of a number of profanity-laden sequences, Plan...

July 6, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

The Lady Vanishes

On a train crossing Europe on the brink of the Second World War, Iris takes tea with the friendly English governess she met in her compartment. Minutes later, the governess has vanished and none of...

July 5, 2026 | Station to Station
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films

The Killer

A contemporary review As an abstract of themes, images and motifs from classic American and French film noir, John Woo’s film makes Walter Hill’s The Driver look like Ken Loach. Woo began directing...

July 4, 2026 | Bullets and Brotherhood
The Films of John Woo

A Better Tomorrow

Every origin story has a prequel. It was Rick Baker, editor of martial arts magazine Eastern Heroes, who in the late ’80s identified the emergent genre he called ‘Heroic Bloodshed’. This was a grou...

July 3, 2026 | Bullets and Brotherhood
The Films of John Woo

Rome Express

German star Conrad Veidt and ace Austrian cameraman Günther Krampf bring a near-expressionist Weimar sensibility to this riveting British thriller, set aboard a train filled with enjoyably stiff-up...

July 1, 2026 | Station to Station
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films

Candy Mountain

Beginning in New York City before meandering to Canada, Candy Mountain follows a musician (Kevin J. O’Connor) whose ambition leads him to feign an association with the J.D. Salinger of guitar-makin...

July 1, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Blue Heron

In one of her early short films, Grandma’s House (2018), Sophy Romvari documented her late grandmother’s flat in Budapest. Each shot showed a different room, all of them eerily quiet, in grainy dig...

July 1, 2026 | Seniors

Iracema - Uma Transa Amazônica

A young Indigenous woman travels a newly opened highway with a truck driver, witnessing exploitation along the route. Blending documentary and fiction, the film exposes the human cost of Amazonian ...

June 20, 2026 | Brazil on Film

Wadjda

‘My name is Haifaa al Mansour and I’m working on a script about a young Saudi girl.’ So began the 2007 email plea Saudi director al Mansour sent to as many Western film companies she could find onl...

June 17, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

The Second Mother

The tensions in the life of the enterprising and affectionate housekeeper-cum-nanny protagonist of Anna Muylaert’s accomplished The Second Mother are identified from the very opening of the film. S...

June 16, 2026 | Brazil on Film