Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

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