BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Laura Mulvey in Conversation

A towering presence in debates surrounding independent cinema, gender and psychoanalysis in film, classical Hollywood, writing and filmmaking, the author of the seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and ...

November 4, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Sunset Song

Terence Davies on ‘Sunset Song’ Sunset Song, Davies’s adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Scottish novel, is partly a paean to a landscape and the changing seasons within it, and Davies a...

November 2, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Farewell My Concubine

+ introduction by Carol-Mei Barker, BFI Programme Lead for Schools and Specialist in Chinese Cinema Covering much the same historical period as The Last Emperor, and with much the same Steadicam s...

November 2, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Far from Heaven

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Todd Haynes has managed, surprisingly successfully, to build different levels of audience access into Far from Heaven, almost like t...

November 2, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

High School

The screening on Thursday 13 November will include a discussion about Frederick Wiseman’s aesthetics and approach with filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman and curator Matthew Barrington Although some ...

November 1, 2025 | Frederick Wiseman

The Deep Blue Sea

In his centenary year, dramatist Terence Rattigan, long considered the outmoded epitome of bourgeois English theatre, has again become fashionable, with a spate of West End revivals. His new modish...

November 1, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Breaking the Waves

Lars von Trier on ‘Breaking the Waves’ Breaking the Waves has taken five years and four million pounds to realise. Where did the original idea for the film come from? I prefer to work with unassa...

November 1, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Titicut Follies

How does Titicut Follies stand up today? Its effect is still devastating. Were the film a muck-raking exposé, it might now seem merely a dated document. But Wiseman is beyond self-righteous anger o...

October 29, 2025 | Frederick Wiseman

Spring in a Small Town

Fei Mu is considered part of the Second Generation of Chinese filmmakers, memorably captured in Centre Stage (aka Ruan Lingyu, 1991), Stanley Kwan’s biopic of actress Ruan Lingyu. The Second Genera...

October 29, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Passion of Remembrance + Step Forward Youth

Almost 40 years after it was first made, the Sankofa collective’s The Passion of Remembrance remains salient. The film is a grand tapestry filled with allusions to the intersectional concerns, moti...

October 29, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Remembering Terence Davies

We are pleased to announce Mark Kermode will be joined by actors Debi Jones and Ann Mitchell, cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, producers Sol Papadopoulos, Roy Boulter and Sean O’Connor, writer ...

October 28, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

The Long Day Closes

The screening on Wednesday 19 November will be introduced by season curator Ben Roberts ‘This is the last of the autobiographical films I shall do; perhaps I’ve changed. When I was that young, tho...

October 28, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Of Time and the City

There is something mysterious about Terence Davies’ Liverpool from the outset: at the heart of this meditation on the city lies a tension, between urban change as a process that is brutal and unrem...

October 26, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

The Neon Bible

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A contemporary review No director – probably not even Quentin Tarantino – is more thoroughly saturated in popular culture than Teren...

October 25, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Johnny Guitar

It starts like any other western, with a lone man riding along a rocky trail. Before the scene can settle into a familiar rhythm, explosions blast through the mountains and workmen swarm around the...

October 25, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The House of Mirth

Terence Davies on ‘The House of Mirth’ How did the idea for The House of Mirth originate? I first read the novel about 15 years ago. And then about five years ago I went to Channel 4 – David Auki...

October 24, 2025 | Re-releases

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Terence Davies makes films in instalments. The 100-minute Trilogy – Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration – which was begun in 1976 took eight years to complete. It won the 1984 BF...

October 23, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Crooklyn

In an article for Sight and Sound, cultural theorist bell hooks famously referred to Crooklyn as a failure of ‘counter-hegemonic representation’. Originally pitched to mainstream audiences as a fam...

October 22, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Camila

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. A contemporary review Camila gains much of its power from the circumstances of its production. Its story of a tragic love affair be...

October 22, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Terence Davies Trilogy

The screening on Tuesday 21 October will be introduced by season curator Ben Roberts In 1977, as new students at the National Film School, the first thing we had to do was watch one another’s fil...

October 21, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies