Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

It Happened One Night

A runaway socialite clashes with a blunt, down-on-his luck reporter when they are required to pose as a married couple. Colbert and Gable ooze star power as they bicker and flirt their way through ...

June 2, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Badlands

There have always been movies where the sign ‘badlands’ was a significant warning – Badlands of Dakota (1941), Badlands of Montana (1957) and just plain Bad Lands (1939). These are minor films, one...

June 1, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Wages of Fear

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. Clouzot’s masterly account of a quartet of desperate and/or greedy misfit expatriates agreeing to transport two truckloads of nitro...

June 1, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The General

‘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,’ Buster Keaton is quoted as saying. Trains had often been used for gag...

June 1, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Cléo from 5 to 7
(Cléo de 5 à 7)

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. When was this immaculate feature film, Agnès Varda’s essay on time and space, love and death, ever not on our minds? Arriving with ...

June 1, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Apocalypse Now
Final Cut

In the year of its 40th anniversary, Francis Ford Coppola’s acid-drenched odyssey to the dark heart of the Vietnam war is returning to the big screen, in what has been billed Apocalypse Now: Final ...

June 1, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Lindsay Anderson
Experimenta Mixtape
Curated by Stephen Sutcliffe

Long fascinated with Anderson’s place in British film and television, and praised for his film about Anderson’s relationship with Richard Harris, artist and filmmaker Stephen Sutcliffe is brilliant...

May 30, 2024 | O DREAMLAND!
LINDSAY ANDERSON’S DARK BRITISH CINEMA

La terra trema

With La terra trema, Visconti developed the neorealist approach to a dramatic subject in its most extreme form: the players, the lines they speak, the places they live in, the whole social backgrou...

May 26, 2024 | CHASING THE REAL
ITALIAN NEOREALISM

In Collaboration
Anderson and Others

‘The Pleasure Garden’: contemporary reviews This light extravaganza by the Californian poet James Broughton, whose 16mm films (Mothers’ Day, Loony Tom, etc.) have been seen over here, was financed ...

May 26, 2024 | O DREAMLAND!
LINDSAY ANDERSON’S DARK BRITISH CINEMA

There's Still Tomorrow

It is more than a little ironic that it took a highly commercial feminist film to outdo Barbie. Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow was the No. 1 attraction in Italian cinemas last year, gros...

May 24, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Never Apologize
A Personal Visit with
Lindsay Anderson

No actor was more associated with Anderson than Malcolm McDowell, the ‘Mick Travis’ of the director’s great trilogy, and friend through thick and thin. In this filmed one-man stage performance, fir...

May 24, 2024 | O DREAMLAND!
LINDSAY ANDERSON’S DARK BRITISH CINEMA

La chimera

At one point in Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera, Josh O’Connor’s brooding English grave-robber grips a makeshift divining rod with both hands and slowly, reverently, walks through the local Tuscan wo...

May 24, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Stand Up! Stand Up!

Momma Don’t Allow In March 1954, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson submitted a proposal to the BFI Experimental Film Fund for a short documentary. At the time, Reisz was working for the BFI as progra...

May 23, 2024 | O DREAMLAND!
LINDSAY ANDERSON’S DARK BRITISH CINEMA

Lindsay Anderson vs
the Short Films Industry

+ intro by Patrick Russell, Senior Curator of Non-fiction, BFI National Archive Anderson spent some time toiling in Britain’s sponsored shorts industry. This screening explores the intriguing rela...

May 23, 2024 | O DREAMLAND!
LINDSAY ANDERSON’S DARK BRITISH CINEMA

The Magic Flute

Originally produced for television, Ingmar Bergman’s rendering of Mozart’s beloved opera is a cinematic spectacle. The film blurs the boundaries of theatre, between audience and stage, as Tamino ...

May 20, 2024 | RELAXED SCREENING

Chi-Raq

In more than three decades as a filmmaker, Spike Lee has tackled topics as far-ranging as college fraternities, jazz music, the Son of Sam murder spree and influential Black nationalist Malcolm X, ...

May 20, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Billy Connolly - Big Banana Feet

Murray Grigor on ‘Big Banana Feet’ Billy Connolly was already the talk of the town in the late 60s with his wry, outrageous re-enactments of the Crucifixion, complete with such heresies as Christ b...

May 20, 2024 | EVENTS

The Vagabond Queen

+ intro by BFI curator Bryony Dixon Before we had the universes of Star Wars, DC, Marvel etc, there was the fantasy land of Ruritania, a make-believe central-European kingdom in which princesses w...

May 19, 2024 | SILENT CINEMA

Germany Year Zero

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. ‘The city was deserted, the grey of the sky seemed to run in the streets and, from the height of a man, you could look out over all...

May 19, 2024 | CHASING THE REAL
ITALIAN NEOREALISM

Bicycle Thieves

A contemporary review Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, like Rossellini’s Paisà, came to London with a fabulous reputation to live up to, and, in a way, to live down. To Paisà, a film made in a s...

May 19, 2024 | CHASING THE REAL
ITALIAN NEOREALISM

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