BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Great Expectations

Great Expectations was the first of David Lean’s two adaptations of Dickens classics (Oliver Twist followed in 1948). Lean realised the cinematic potential of the novel more skilfully than his pred...

April 17, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Michael Palin in Nigeria

+ Q&A with Michael Palin, chaired by Ronke Phillips-Pakenham. Michael Palin in Nigeria is a new three-part 1,300-mile journey series with broadcaster and writer Michael Palin, as he visits thi...

April 15, 2024 | TV PREVIEW

The Sweet East

In a 1985 article for the New York Times, the American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson comments on a perceived lack of ‘political seriousness’ in the work of many American artists, a failu...

April 12, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Ratcatcher

Set in and around a Glasgow tenement block during a dustmen’s strike in the mid-’70s, Ramsay’s marvellous first feature centres on a 12-year-old (Eadie) who, haunted by a secret, retreats into a pr...

April 12, 2024 | RE-RELEASES

Close Your Eyes

Víctor Erice’s first feature in three decades is a characteristically ambitious, richly satisfying meditation on memory, identity, family, friendship… and cinema. Twenty years after an actor’s myst...

April 12, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

The Last of the Mohicans

Michael Mann on ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ Do you see Hawkeye in the same terms as the protagonists of your earlier films, Thief or Manhunter , as someone who, due to his special abilities, is coe...

April 5, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Pather Panchali

Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Ray’s film is one of the most extraordinary feature debuts ever made. It follows the everyday lives of an imp...

April 2, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Wonka

What’s it about? Young Willy Wonka arrives in Europe full of drive and ambition. Despite his having an incredible product, the rival chocolatiers and an unscrupulous laundry owner take advantage of...

March 31, 2024 | FAMILIES

Passport to Pimlico

By general consent the best of writer T.E.B. Clarke’s six Ealing comedies, Passport to Pimlico arguably best exemplifies studio head Michael Balcon’s description of Ealing’s post-war films as ‘our ...

March 30, 2024 | MEMBER PICKS

Silver Haze

‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,’ runs the quote – usually misattributed to Plato – that pops up in email signatures, motivational posters and countless memes. It’s a sent...

March 29, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

After Hours

It’s hard to believe now, but Martin Scorsese was once on the outs in Hollywood. Today, his passion projects command blockbuster budgets; 40 years ago, however, The King of Comedy (1982) had just b...

March 29, 2024 | RE-RELEASES

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The most ready defence of director Albert Lewin is that he was ahead of his time. In the 50s and 60s, the question of what he had to do with cinema or cinema to do with him created a sense of inass...

March 28, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Peasants

From the creators of Loving Vincent, adapted from the Polish Nobel-Prize winning novel of the same name by Wladyslaw Reymont. The Peasants tells the story of Jagna, a young woman determined to forg...

March 28, 2024 | KINOTEKA CLOSING NIGHT GALA

Nosferatu

The question of how Nosferatu came to be made is still something of a mystery. Virtually the only film produced by Prana-Film – a financial sinking ship whose owners were subsequently taken to cour...

March 27, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Art of Seeing
The Lifelong Passion of Víctor Erice

Good evening, and thank you for coming along to this talk on the films of Víctor Erice; I hope you find it enjoyable and illuminating. It should last around 90 minutes; around half of that will be ...

March 27, 2024 | OF TIME AND LIGHT
THE FILMS OF VÍCTOR ERICE

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