BFI Southbank Programme Notes

El sur

It is virtually impossible to write about El sur, the second feature in Spanish director Víctor Erice’s highly acclaimed if small body of work – The Spirit of the Beehive was made ten years earlier...

March 26, 2024 | OF TIME AND LIGHT
THE FILMS OF VÍCTOR ERICE

More Than a Dream
Gene Tierney

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot of a couple of films in Gene Tierney’s season. Join season programmer Aga Baranowska and special guests for a richly illustrated conv...

March 26, 2024 | OUT OF THE SHADOWS
THE FILMS OF GENE TIERNEY

The Gospel According to Matthew

Although Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to Matthew (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo) is habitually praised as a key work both of the director’s oeuvre and of world cinema as a whole, sma...

March 26, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Spirit of the Beehive

Erice’s remarkable first feature concerns a family living in a remote Castilian village shortly after the end of the Civil War, and centres on eight-year-old Ana, confused about the relationship of...

March 25, 2024 | OF TIME AND LIGHT
THE FILMS OF VÍCTOR ERICE

Robot Dreams

Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams is an outlier. An adaptation of American illustrator Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel about a dog who builds himself a robot friend, the film is released in cinemas in Ma...

March 25, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Monster

An incident of classroom misconduct – and its ramifications, both domestic and institutional – plays out from three different vantage points in Monster. ‘Perspectives’ wouldn’t quite be the right t...

March 25, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Poor Things

When a young woman in Victorian England dies, little does she know how much life lies in store for her. Re-animated by her de facto guardian, the scientist Dr Godwin Baxter, Bella Baxter’s mind bec...

March 12, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

La La Land

La La Land, the new film by Damien Chazelle, is a cinematic ghost. This apparition is a movie musical, and it is set in Hollywood, the town that used to make this kind of film all the time, once up...

March 9, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Rainbow - A Private Affair

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani on ‘Rainbow: A Private Affair’ Have you had plans for a long time to adapt Beppe Fenoglio’s novel? We still find it hard to believe it ourselves, but it really happened...

March 8, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Radu Jude’s delightfully digressive dark satire about the ills of modern life is one of the most remarkable movies of the last year. It follows Angela, an insanely overworked assistant working for ...

March 8, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

The Blue Description Project

In 1993, Derek Jarman released Blue, an epoch-defining account of AIDS, illness, and the experience of disability in a culture of repressive heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despit...

March 8, 2024 | EXPERIMENTA

The Killers

Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner star in Robert Siodmak’s gritty and muscular film noir. Told entirely in flashback, a life insurance investigator pieces together the tragic story of ‘the Swede’ (Bur...

March 5, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

A Sign Is a Fine Investment

+ intro by director Judith Williamson and Steve Foxon, Curator of Non-Fiction, BFI National Archive From the 1890s until the 1930s, early advertising frequently used images of industrial work to ...

March 4, 2024 | ART IN THE MAKING

Origin

Following the screening, there will be a discussion in the Blue Room hosted by actor, director, presenter, Burt Caesar, who will be joined by author and publisher Michelle Asantewa, and Nicole-Rach...

March 4, 2024 | PREVIEW

High & Low
John Galliano

Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald (Marley, Whitney) turns his camera towards the life and career of the gifted fashion designer and head of Dior, who caused outrage following a drunken, anti-S...

March 4, 2024 | PREVIEW

The Meadow

In a large room in an 18th century villa cluttered with coloured pictures and posters, and patchwork and papier-mâché puppets, a waif-like, girlish figure is conducting a lesson on film animation w...

March 3, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS

In the Cut

In one of In the Cut’s early scenes, English professor Frannie is teaching her students about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. They look bored, apathetic. One complains that all that happens in ...

March 3, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Walkabout

Nic Roeg’s masterpiece details the growing bond between an indigenous Australian boy, on a ritual separation from his tribe, and two white children lost in the outback. Beautifully shot, it inspire...

March 2, 2024 | JOHN BARRY
SOUNDTRACKING BOND AND BEYOND

Special People

+ Q&A with director Justin Edgar and actors Dominic Coleman & David Proud Enlisted to teach a class of wheelchair-users about filmmaking, neurotic Jasper gets a little more than he barga...

March 2, 2024 | RELAXED SCREENING
BUSTING THE BIAS

The Night of the Shooting Stars

La notte di San Lorenzo, like the Taviani brothers’ previous films, belongs to a cinema of rhetoric. The overall structure is loose, defined in broad strokes that can be grasped immediately and the...

March 2, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS