BFI Southbank Programme Notes

A Serious Man

In 25 years of filmmaking, Joel and Ethan Coen have established themselves as a major international voice, a postmodern sensibility overcome with cosmic jokiness. If No Country for Old Men, in all ...

January 15, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Woyzeck

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Consistent in nothing if not his eccentricity, Werner Herzog has only in his two most recent features (his eighth and ninth) bothere...

January 13, 2024 | JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN
THE FILMS OF WERNER HERZOG

The Thing

When John Carpenter’s The Thing was unleashed into cinemas in 1982, it received an almost unanimous critical drubbing on both sides of the Atlantic. Critic after critic griped about weak characteri...

January 13, 2024 | SCALA
SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL CINEMA

Song of the Sea

If you set out to assess the global state of play for feature animation, you might come up with three creative hot spots. The US west coast, home to the likes of Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks, is an...

January 13, 2024 | CARTOON SALOON AT 25

Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a film about women’s lib that owes as much to Erica Jong as it does to received wisdom from the male establishment. It exists in a curious margin of late-1970s American c...

January 13, 2024 | SCALA
SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL CINEMA

Scala!!!

+ intro by co-director Ali Catterall Fasten your seatbelts for the return of the homegrown hit of this year’s LFF, featuring John Waters along with John Akomfrah, Adam Buxton, Caroline Catz, Mat...

January 12, 2024 | RELAXED SCREENING

The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady bestows on the world one of the greatest heroines in fiction. As read by Campion’s film, Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman) is a gauche and difficult young American on the brink o...

January 12, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Pee-wee's Big Adventure

The screening on Friday 12 January will be introduced by Ben Roberts, BFI CEO Pee-wee Herman, the on-screen persona of comedian Paul Reubens, is perhaps the most consistently developed comic crea...

January 12, 2024 | SCALA
SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL CINEMA

Nosferatu the Vampyre

A contemporary review Given the current fashion for remakes, together with the bubbling revival of German film production, it’s to be expected that the Caligari era, stretching gloriously from Rye’...

January 12, 2024 | JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN
THE FILMS OF WERNER HERZOG

Grizzly Man

Timothy Treadwell is an unusual protagonist for a Herzog film: he has a high, squeaky voice, a mildly effeminate manner and a stridently sentimental impulse towards animals. This seems unlikely in ...

January 12, 2024 | JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN
THE FILMS OF WERNER HERZOG

Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom

Pasolini’s hopes, energies and talent were focused on resistance to the sameness of culture, to the homogenising, consumerist demands of capital, its creation of (false) desires and the politico-so...

January 9, 2024 | SCALA
SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL CINEMA

8½

Taking its title from the number of films Fellini had completed up to this point, 8½ features filmmaker Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) being besieged by sycophants and collaborators as he struggles t...

January 9, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Sunset Blvd.

Gloria Swanson on ‘Sunset Blvd.’ When we started Sunset Blvd. we had only 26 pages of script. [Screenwriter Charles] Brackett and Wilder were determined I should do it. I didn’t want to. Because in...

January 8, 2024 | SENIORS

Stroszek

Herzog’s second film with lead actor Bruno S. (following The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) was written specifically as a vehicle for the unusual performer’s rough-edged naivety. Having reneged on a prom...

January 8, 2024 | JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN
THE FILMS OF WERNER HERZOG

California Split

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In the remarkable unbroken panning shot at the beginning of Thieves like Us – with the convicts glimpsed at the start of its parabol...

January 8, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Oh, Mr Porter!

This British comedy was a vehicle for the talents of Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt, who had first performed together in Windbag The Sailor (1936) in which Hay played an inept sea capt...

January 7, 2024 | MEMBER PICKS

Fitzcarraldo

We seem to have been here before. The very name Fitzcarraldo, corrupted from Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald because the Peruvian Indians had difficulty with the pronunciation, might have been invented ex...

January 7, 2024 | JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN
THE FILMS OF WERNER HERZOG

Thundercrack!

A great many Londoners of a certain age remember Curt McDowell’s notorious art/trash/porn crossover with genuine fondness. Made in 1975, it became a monthly staple at the legendary Scala Cinema in ...

January 6, 2024 | SCALA
SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL CINEMA

Sunrise
A Song of Two Humans

When F.W. Murnau left Germany for America in 1926, did cinema foresee what was coming? Did it sense that change was around the corner – that now was the time to fill up on fantasy, delirium and spe...

January 6, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Secret of Kells

Housed in the Library at Trinity College Dublin since 1661, the ninth-century manuscript the Book of Kells, in which monks intricately illustrated the four Gospels, is held to be one of Ireland’s g...

January 6, 2024 | CARTOON SALOON AT 25