BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Near Dark

In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City singled out independent horror film Near Dark, made by up-and-coming director Kathryn Bigelow, for special attention. Recognising the film’...

February 3, 2026 | Close to the Edge
The Films of Kathryn Bigelow

The Loveless

A graduate in fine art and film studies, Kathryn Bigelow wrote and directed her stylised, colour-saturated first feature with Monty Montgomery. The Loveless was both the last of the juvenile delinq...

February 1, 2026 | Close to the Edge
The Films of Kathryn Bigelow

A Generation

When the 28-year-old Andrzej Wajda made A Generation, his debut feature, he was clearly in thrall to the Italian non-realists. He eschewed the contrivance of studio filmmaking, preferring to work o...

February 1, 2026 | Andrzej Wajda
Portraits of History and Humanity

Nouvelle Vague

A precedent has been broken. The omens for a movie about the making of À bout de souffle (1960) were not favourable: comparable projects like Hitchcock (2012) and Mank (2020), about the makings of ...

January 28, 2026 | Seniors Paid Matinee

National Gallery

Frederick Wiseman on ‘National Gallery’ Why did you settle on the National Gallery as the subject for this film? The first reason is that it’s one of the great museums of the world. Second is tha...

January 25, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

David Lynch - The Art Life

Famously tight-lipped when it comes to discussing his work, offering little more than peculiar observations – ‘Keep your eye on the donut’ – David Lynch’s disarming ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ person...

January 14, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Twin Peaks
Fire Walk with Me

Given that Twin Peaks, the television series, represents a bizarre fusion of the values of prime-time soap-mystery with the sado-delirium of David Lynch’s evolving vision, it is at once surprising ...

January 13, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Twin Peaks – original US pilot episode

+ intro by Lisa Kerrigan, Senior Curator of Television, BFI National Archive A contemporary review There’s been a rush to proclaim the apocalypse in everything that has been written so far about T...

January 12, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Ex Libris - The New York Public Library

‘Libraries are not about books,’ explains architect Francine Houben, ‘libraries are about people.’ Frederick Wiseman could hardly have written a more perfect summation of his invigorating new film,...

January 11, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

Out 1

Jacques Rivette’s 12-hour-plus Out 1 languished for years as one of European cinema’s great unseen films, although it has gradually emerged into the daylight over the past decade or so. Out 1 is pe...

January 10, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

La Danse - Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris

Performance has been a concern of legendary documentarist Frederick Wiseman ever since his 1967 debut Titicut Follies, titled after the revue put on by prisoners and guards at the mental asylum exp...

January 10, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

Moon

The screening on Wednesday 21 January will be introduced by Melanie Bell, Feminist Film Historian and Principal Investigator for the Film Costumes in Action project SPOILER WARNING The following n...

January 9, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

INLAND EMPIRE

Whether or not such a thing as ‘pure cinema’ exists is an argument that will never cease – can movies attain essential ‘movieness’ by way of pure visual effect, associative or imagistic, without de...

January 8, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Les Cousins

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The story told in Chabrol’s Les Cousins, his second film, is wonderfully simple, or, if you prefer, simply beautiful. It begins like...

January 8, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Mulholland Dr.

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For all its mood shifts from black wit to sheer terror (Peter Deming’s camerawork creeps around corners and into darkened rooms to d...

January 7, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

The Elephant Man

David Lynch on ‘The Elephant Man’ Can you talk a little about how The Elephant Man arose? Because that must be one of the most inspired pieces, I think, of creative casting of a director to a proj...

January 6, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Slacker

Richard Linklater on breaking through and ‘Slacker’ In your early learning about cinema, was your focus on watching films or amassing technical expertise? All of the above. I just read a Godard q...

January 5, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Paris nous appartient

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The innocuous title of Paris nous appartient suggests we are in for a New Wave fourteenth of July. In fact it uncovers a secret cham...

January 4, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Lost Highway

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The legend of Luis Buñuel’s collaboration with Salvador Dalí is that if either included an image or incident open to rational explan...

January 4, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Gate of Hell

A leading entry in the vanguard of Japanese cinema at the time of its belated discovery in the west in the early 1950s, Gate of Hell was the first Japanese film to nab the top prize at Cannes and t...

January 4, 2026 | Big Screen Classics