BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Red Shoes in the Spotlight

Join us to dive deeper into the breathtaking world of Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor masterpiece. Pamela Hutchinson, author of the recently published BFI Film Classics book on The Red Shoes, ...

December 8, 2023 | CINEMA UNBOUND
THE CREATIVE WORLDS OF POWELL + PRESSBURGER

Meet Me in St. Louis

The closer you look at most famous Hollywood productions, the harder it is to see how they turned out all right – let alone to believe that anyone was in charge. Just as on any set the crew trusts ...

December 8, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Earth Mama

‘I don’t need a gold star to tell me I’m a good mom!’ Gia (Tia Nomore) snaps at her case worker, showing her frustration as she struggles to meet the seemingly impossible court-mandated conditions ...

December 8, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

Peeping Tom

Thelma Schoonmaker on ‘Peeping Tom’ What’s so powerful is that you care about this man who was a murderer – so beautifully portrayed by Carl Boehm – but who has been created by his father to be a m...

December 7, 2023 | CINEMA UNBOUND
THE CREATIVE WORLDS OF POWELL + PRESSBURGER

Boyz N the Hood

‘One out of every twenty-one Black American males will be murdered in their lifetime. Most will die at the hands of another Black male.’ These two stark statements trigger John Singleton’s 1991 fe...

December 7, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

White Material

Claire Denis’ films aspire to a crystalline purity. Even when packed with the stuff of social and political unrest – war, murder, racial tension, unemployment, refugees, families in crisis – they g...

December 6, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Truelove

+ Q&A with cast Lindsay Duncan, Clarke Peters, Sue Johnston, writer Iain Weatherby, co-creator Charlie Covell and director Chloë Wicks. Chaired by Miranda Sawyer. Truelove is a unique spin o...

December 6, 2023 | TV PREVIEW

The Phantom Light

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Michael Powell bid for box-office success with this tale of a gang of ship-wreckers who spread the legend of a ‘phantom lighthouse’ ...

December 6, 2023 | CINEMA UNBOUND
THE CREATIVE WORLDS OF POWELL + PRESSBURGER

Strange Days

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Kathryn Bigelow shoots in light. Cinema’s outlaw, she disrupts assumptions about where a film can go, taking genres and ripping them...

December 5, 2023 | WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

Five Easy Pieces

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Three years after Jean-Luc Godard’s weekending couple Corinne and Roland became caught up in the interminable traffic jam that block...

December 5, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The End of the River

+ intro by film scholar Dr Kulraj Phullar ‘Who is guilty, the twig or the current?’ asks a courtroom lawyer, making a plea for clemency for a native Brazilian (played by Indian star Sabu) who fate ...

December 5, 2023 | CINEMA UNBOUND
THE CREATIVE WORLDS OF POWELL + PRESSBURGER

Scrooge

One of the best-known adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Christmas classic, Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 film stars Alastair Sim as the notorious curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge, visited by the ghosts of Ch...

December 3, 2023 | CHRISTMAS FILMS

The Love Test +
Something Always Happens

Male chauvinist pigs meet 1930s girl power in Powell’s superior quota-quickie, in which chemists seeking a formula for fireproofing celluloid take exception to colleague Mary’s upcoming promotion –...

December 3, 2023 | CINEMA UNBOUND
THE CREATIVE WORLDS OF POWELL + PRESSBURGER

After Life

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. One of the visual motifs which runs through After Life turns out in retrospect to be a kind of running gag. Limbo staff-members pass...

December 3, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Passenger

The screening on Saturday 2 December will include a pre-recorded introduction by Jason Wood, BFI Executive Director of Public Programmes & Audiences SPOILER WARNING The following notes give aw...

December 2, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Odds against Tomorrow

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Harry Belafonte shines as a mercurial gambler uncertain of bourgeois respectability, indebted to loan-sharks, who threaten his job a...

December 2, 2023 | HARRY BELAFONTE
MOVIES RACE DEFIANCE

Lazybones +
Her Last Affaire

The lazybones of Powell’s amiable comedy is idle, penniless aristocrat Sir ‘Reggie’ Ford, who is shaken into a more productive existence when a criminal plot forces him to prove his worth to his Am...

December 2, 2023 | CINEMA UNBOUND
THE CREATIVE WORLDS OF POWELL + PRESSBURGER

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg enjoys a legendary place as an all-but-unique curiosity in French cinema – the film for which the epithet ‘bittersweet’ was invented, less a musical (though French examp...

December 1, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Queendom

No one quite uses the term ‘degenerate art’ in Queendom, but the sentiment is nigh. Russia, it seems, is not a country big enough to hold both a chest-baring Kremlin folk saviour, who bombs his nei...

December 1, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

Fallen Leaves

Coming six years after Aki Kaurismäki announced his retirement from filmmaking, Fallen Leaves feels like a return to very familiar territory. The director’s last two features were unusually explici...