BFI Southbank Programme Notes

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

Jules et Jim

In 1912, Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre) and the Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) become firm friends, happily sharing their enjoyment of Paris, art, literature and women, even when their adoration of the...

March 2, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Good Morning Babylon

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In contrast to that movie radicalism which springs from some marriage of Marx and Hollywood, the Tavianis belong to a solid, mature,...

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

Going to Mars - The Nikki Giovanni Project

+ Q&A with Chanje Kunda, Bianca Wilson and host Chardine Taylor-Stone This life-affirming, award-winning documentary follows legendary poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, aged 80, as she looks b...

March 2, 2024 | AFRICAN ODYSSEYS

Doctor Who
The Celestial Toymaker

The making of ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ Brian Hayles would write many Doctor Who stories and is best remembered for creating the Martian Ice Warriors and the planet and civilisation of Peladon. But ...

March 2, 2024 | Preview

The Subversives

This early drama interweaves the stories of four men with complex personal lives (one of whom is a film director) and political affiliations, linked by their presence at a – real-life – public figu...

March 1, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS