Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

Amorosa

For her final feature, Zetterling returned to Agnes von Krusenstjerna – this time telling the novelist’s life story rather than adapting her work. The film begins as a fever dream, with von Krusens...

War of the Worlds

Dock worker and divorced dad Ray has custody of his children for the weekend when a tumultuous thunderstorm brings with it more than inclement weather. In Cruise’s second collaboration with Spielbe...

Test Pattern

Director’s notes Test Pattern complicates the easier narratives of sexual assault. #metoo, Times Up, and modern feminism have caused a world-shaking shift in power, empowering individual victims o...

Sleeping Car

+ intro by Michael Williams, author of Ivor Novello: Screen Idol Train attendant Gaston has a girl in every city and juggles them with farcical results. Ivor Novello effortlessly made the transiti...

100 Years of Film as Art - Celebrating the Centenary of The Film Society

+ intro by BFI National Archive curator Bryony Dixon It’s 100 years since a group of London cinephiles founded The Film Society. From its first screenings in October of that year, the society was ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...