BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Last Picture Show

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Released in 1971 amidst the dope-fuelled rush of the New Hollywood, Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature The Last Picture Show was in ...

May 21, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

David Byrne's
American Utopia

Introduced by Tricia Tuttle, BFI Festivals Director (Friday 21 May only). David Byrne on ‘American Utopia’ Thirty-six years after Talking Heads and director Jonathan Demme changed the idea of wha...

May 21, 2021 | DREAM PALACE - THE FILMS THAT CINEMAS WERE BUILT FOR

County Lines

May 21, 2021 | NEW RELEASES

Car Wash

Introduced by director Gurinder Chadha (Friday 21 May screening only). ‘Car Wash’: a contemporary review At a time when many of the old-style forms of community-minded entertainment have virtuall...

May 21, 2021 | DREAM PALACE - THE FILMS THAT CINEMAS WERE BUILT FOR

California Split

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In the remarkable unbroken panning shot at the beginning of Thieves like Us – with the convicts glimpsed at the start of its parabo...

May 21, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

Footloose

With a pre-recorded introduction by director Francis Lee. Kevin Bacon plays Ren MacCormack, a city teen who relocates from Chicago to the Midwest sticks, where he finds that rock music and dancing...

May 20, 2021 | DREAM PALACE - THE FILMS THAT CINEMAS WERE BUILT FOR

L'eclisse

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. I was 15 when I first saw Antonioni’s L’eclisse. It was screened for only one afternoon at the Tooting Classic. I skipped school ga...

May 20, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

Introduced by Justin Johnson, BFI Lead Programmer (Thursday 20 May only). Eating is a constant theme in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. More oddly, as Donald Spoto observed in his biography, lavato...

May 20, 2021 | DREAM PALACE - THE FILMS THAT CINEMAS WERE BUILT FOR

Booksmart

‘It’s hilarious and just wonderful! It’s such a great film in terms of representation, and not clichéd at all’. Emilie Cunning, BFI Member In a long line of teen comedies mostly set over the cours...

May 20, 2021 | MEMBER PICKS

Siren of the Tropics

Siren of the Tropics may feature one of America’s greatest stars, but it’s a film that could never have been made in America at the time, or for decades later. In the silent era, Anna May Wong set ...

May 19, 2021 | HER VOICE - BLACK WOMEN FROM THE SPOTLIGHT TO THE SCREEN

The Shout

With a pre-recorded introduction by director Mark Jenkin. Jeremy Thomas on ‘The Shout’ I came back to England via a short stay in America, and a friend called Michael Austin, who has since writte...

May 19, 2021 | DREAM PALACE - THE FILMS THAT CINEMAS WERE BUILT FOR

Citizen Kane

Andrew Sarris on the 50th anniversary of the opening of ‘Citizen Kane’ Citizen Kane erupted on to the screen, at least as a long-lived figure of speech, on 1 May 1941 at New York’s Palace Theater....

May 19, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Whitney 'Can I Be Me'

Nick Broomfield made his name in the 1990s with a series of exposés in which he thrust his trademark oversized boom microphone into the lives of people who would rather not talk to him. This featur...

May 18, 2021 | HER VOICE - BLACK WOMEN FROM THE SPOTLIGHT TO THE SCREEN

A Wedding

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. All the ingredients needed for a traditional family wedding are present and correct in Robert Altman’s audacious social satire: cla...

May 18, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

Touch of Evil

The last great Film Noir and the final film Orson Welles would direct in Hollywood, Touch of Evil is a sweat-drenched saga of corruption and intrigue on the US/Mexico border. Beginning with one of...

May 18, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Tango Lesson

The director and star of The Tango Lesson, Sally Potter, has described her film as one which ‘exists, perilously, on the knife edge between reality and fiction’. Potter’s previous feature Orlando (...

May 18, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The General

Introduced by Stuart Brown, BFI Head of Programme and Acquisitions. ‘The moment you give me a locomotive and things like that to play with, as a rule I find some way of getting laughs out of it,’ ...

May 18, 2021 | DREAM PALACE THE FILMS THAT CINEMAS WERE BUILT FOR

Amazing Grace

The first recorded evidence of Aretha Franklin’s glorious voice was captured in 1956, when she performed a string of gospel numbers in her Baptist minister father’s Detroit church. She was just 14,...

May 17, 2021 | HER VOICE - BLACK WOMEN FROM THE SPOTLIGHT TO THE SCREEN

Nomadland

Nomadland stars Frances McDormand as a van-dwelling modern migrant worker travelling across the American West. A lyrical, anti-materialist neo-western with docudrama elements, it punctuates its mel...

May 17, 2021 | NEW RELEASES AND RE-RELEASES

MAS*H

Perhaps it’s all the fault of the U.S. Army and Air Force, who banned M*A*S*H from their service theatres because it ‘reflected unfavourably on the military,’ that critical discussion of Robert Alt...

May 17, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER