Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

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

Blow Out

Introduction by Ben Roberts, BFI CEO (Monday 17 May screening only). SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film's ending A great 1970s movie that came out too late to be included in t...

May 17, 2021 | DREAM PALACE - THE FILMS THAT CINEMAS WERE BUILT FOR

Ammonite

Francis Lee’s follow-up to his first film, God’s Own Country (2017), is a story similarly entrenched in the wild beauty and weather-beaten roughness of British landscape, where the interpersonal ha...

May 17, 2021 | NEW RELEASES AND RE-RELEASES

Sound of Metal

The elevator pitch of Darius Marder’s debut film has the ring of a joke set-up: did you hear about the metal drummer who went deaf? It doesn’t help that the target of the joke is the butt of so man...

May 17, 2021 | NEW RELEASES AND RE-RELEASES