BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Mulholland Dr.

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For all its mood shifts from black wit to sheer terror (Peter Deming’s camerawork creeps around corners and into darkened rooms to d...

January 7, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

The Elephant Man

David Lynch on ‘The Elephant Man’ Can you talk a little about how The Elephant Man arose? Because that must be one of the most inspired pieces, I think, of creative casting of a director to a proj...

January 6, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Slacker

Richard Linklater on breaking through and ‘Slacker’ In your early learning about cinema, was your focus on watching films or amassing technical expertise? All of the above. I just read a Godard q...

January 5, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Paris nous appartient

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The innocuous title of Paris nous appartient suggests we are in for a New Wave fourteenth of July. In fact it uncovers a secret cham...

January 4, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Lost Highway

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The legend of Luis Buñuel’s collaboration with Salvador Dalí is that if either included an image or incident open to rational explan...

January 4, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Gate of Hell

A leading entry in the vanguard of Japanese cinema at the time of its belated discovery in the west in the early 1950s, Gate of Hell was the first Japanese film to nab the top prize at Cannes and t...

January 4, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Blue Velvet

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A contemporary review In terms of David Lynch’s work, Blue Velvet marks a huge leap forward, almost magically establishing him as th...

January 2, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The screening on Wednesday 28 January will be introduced by Dr Alice Sage, Research Fellow on the Film Costumes in Action project ‘Impeccable Exactitude’ – The costumes of The Grand Budapest Hotel...

January 1, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

The 400 Blows

Linklater on Truffaut I don’t know if Godard means the most to me. I think it’s Truffaut and Rohmer – long term, it’s probably Truffaut. I like Chabrol’s early films, but he became more of a genre ...

January 1, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Eraserhead

In his first film, Eraserhead, David Lynch created a world from which everything has been stripped away except for the anxiety at its heart. Henry Spencer tramps numbly across a ruined industrial l...

January 1, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Villain

Meet Vic Dakin, your everyday London businessman and murderous, sadistic gang leader: the sort of diamond geezer who would shake your hand prior to nailing your head to a passing milk float. Vic lo...

December 23, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

Exorcist II - The Heretic

Boorman’s follow-up to the Friedkin-Blatty hit was plagued by production problems and savaged by critics, but it has more going for it than its reputation suggests. Not least of which is Burton’s c...

December 19, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

True Lies

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Watching James Cameron’s films, I sometimes experience what I imagine the Lumières’ original audiences must have felt: a mixture of ...

December 17, 2025 | James Cameron

Nineteen Eighty-four

Burton was not first choice for the role of inscrutable Inner Party official O’Brien in Radford’s as-yet-unmatched adaptation of the totemic dystopian novel. Yet his casting opposite Hurt’s Winston...

December 15, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

Silent Sherlock - Three Classic Cases

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series, which was so popular it ran for 45 episodes, was sanctioned by Arthur Conan Doyle, who thoroughly approved of Eille Norwood as Holmes. This programme featu...

December 14, 2025 | Silent Cinema

The Cloud-Capped Star

The Cloud-Capped Star iconically represents the angst of the Partition and affective impacts of the resultant refugee crisis on women. In this film, Ritwik Ghatak politicised melodrama to embody th...

December 14, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Silences of the Palace

In its new year issue Time magazine listed the ten best movies of 1994. Predictably, Pulp Fiction was at number one. Less predictably, eight of the other nine were made outside the United States, t...

December 13, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Four Nights of a Dreamer

Robert Bresson on ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’ You first turned to Dostoevsky for A Gentle Creature and returned to him for White Nights , which you called Four Nights of a Dreamer . Why? It was pa...

December 13, 2025 | UK Premiere of 4K Restoration

Boom!

The screening on Monday 8 December will be introduced by Charlotte Frances Burton, Richard Burton’s granddaughter Dubbed ‘The Angel of Death’, Burton’s wandering-poet-cum-gigolo washes up on the i...

December 8, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

The Terminator

Four decades ago, a filmmaker with one previous director credit to his name changed the face of science-fiction movies forever. James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) effortlessly blended the slashe...

December 7, 2025 | James Cameron