BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Pawnbroker

Although it rarely features in top 100 lists, Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964) played a significant role in shaping 1960s American cinema. Yet, it was almost never made and sat in a vault for m...

May 6, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

A Few Good Men

In Rob Reiner’s riveting courtroom drama, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee’s moral compass is put to the test when a murder with hints of institutional wrongdoing takes place inside the famed Guantanamo Ba...

May 5, 2025 | Tom Cruise

Top Gun - Maverick

There’s a line in Top Gun: Maverick that sums up its production maybe more than any other. Appropriately, it’s said in a scene between two of its returning heroes: Tom Cruise’s title character, Mav...

May 3, 2025 | Tom Cruise

The Romantic Age

As a precocious French pupil who seduces the new male teacher at a prim girls’ school, Zetterling steals the film. French-English director Edmond Gréville pushes at the moral limits of what was per...

May 3, 2025 | Passion and All That Goes with It
The Films of Mai Zetterling

Losing Ground

Among the first of a small number of Black women to explore narrative filmmaking in the 1970s and 80s – no small feat in what was then, as now, a predominantly white male arena – Kathleen Collins ...

May 3, 2025 | Black Debutantes
A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors

Pariah

Dee Rees on ‘Pariah’ The film started out as a student short in 2007. Did you always envision being able to turn the short into a feature film? The crazy thing is, I envisioned it as a feature to...

May 1, 2025 | Black Debutantes
A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors

Under the Tower Trilogy by William Raban

+ William Raban in conversation Foreword to William Raban’s Nautical Twilight. Fifty Years an Artist Filmmaker. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). By William Fowler. (Extract) Beware: once you open it a...

April 24, 2025 | Experimenta

Avanti!

Jack Lemmon plays a Nixonian corporate stiff who travels to an Italian island to retrieve the body of his recently deceased father, only to fall for the daughter of the woman his dad was having an ...

April 20, 2025 | You Must Remember This Presents...
“The Old Man Is Still Alive”

The Hourglass Sanatorium

The Hourglass Sanatorium began life as Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (the film’s Polish title), a 1937 novella by the writer and painter Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) that is so elusive and elliptical that i...

April 17, 2025 | The Long Strange Trips of Wojciech Jerzy Has

The Only Game in Town

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Perhaps because of its Las Vegas locale, George Stevens’s The Only Game in Town improves as the stakes in its story are raised. Base...

April 15, 2025 | You Must Remember This Presents...
“The Old Man Is Still Alive”

The Liberation of L.B. Jones

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The title of William Wyler’s final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, is as ironic as that of his most famous work, The Best Years ...

April 15, 2025 | You Must Remember This Presents...
“The Old Man Is Still Alive”

A Time to Live and a Time to Die

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A Summer at Grandpa’s, which Hou Hsiao-Hsien made in 1984, is his sunniest picture, a nostalgic recollection of a childhood that was...

April 14, 2025 | Myriad Voices
Reframing Taiwan New Cinema

Red Line 7000

I was trying to do something, I tried an experiment. I had three good stories about the race track – I used to race, I know it pretty well – but none of them would make a picture, so I thought mayb...

April 14, 2025 | You Must Remember This Presents...
“The Old Man Is Still Alive”

Okja

Bong Joon Ho on ‘Okja’ It was quite strange: three different ideas came together seamlessly. Some 16 or 17 years ago, when I’d finished my first feature, I had the idea for a story about a little ...

April 12, 2025 | Bong Joon Ho
Power and Paradox

Goodbye to the Past

Although Wojciech Has had already featured strong female characters in his films, (notably Maria Wachowiak’s Lidka in 1958’s Farewells), his fourth feature Goodbye to the Past – also known as Parti...

April 11, 2025 | The Long Strange Trips of Wojciech Jerzy Has

Mother

Bong Joon Ho on ‘Mother’ What was it about mothers and the maternal instinct that you wanted to explore in this film? I always try to look for another side to that which we always praise or worsh...

April 9, 2025 | Bong Joon Ho
Power and Paradox

The Merry Monarch

+ intro by Josephine Botting, BFI Curator SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Contemporary reviews Emil Jannings as a jovial royal buffoon in a fantasy-extravaganza. ...

April 9, 2025 | Projecting the Archive

Cheyenne Autumn

The Iron Horse to Cheyenne Autumn… what a career it is! John Ford’s world is a reincarnation of the pioneer spirit recollected and diffused by time and memory: the coming of the railroads, the insu...

April 9, 2025 | You Must Remember This Presents...
“The Old Man Is Still Alive”

One Room Tenants

While The Noose (1957) was set in the then present and Farewells (1958) in 1939 and 1944, Wojciech Has’s third feature One Room Tenants (also known as Roomers and Roommates) goes back further, to t...

April 7, 2025 | The Long Strange Trips of Wojciech Jerzy Has

The Host

The Host provides a perfect introduction to several of the key facets of Bong Joon Ho’s filmmaking that wind their way through his entire oeuvre and make the films feel distinctly his. First is his...

April 5, 2025 | Bong Joon Ho
Power and Paradox