BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Captive Cinema

+ intro by Lisa Kerrigan, Senior Curator of Television Shaking up the world of TV documentary, the features department of Associated-Rediffusion was the subject of the first TV season at the Natio...

September 23, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Drama 3 - The Classics at Associated-Rediffusion

As an original ITV company, in the early years Associated-Rediffusion mined the classical theatre canon for many of its TV dramas. It has left us a fascinating historical legacy, acclaimed 1960s ac...

September 20, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Matchstick Men

‘People are fascinated with con men like they’re fascinated with mobsters – at least the fictional kind,’ says novelist Eric Garcia, whose manuscript for Matchstick Men was being considered for the...

September 16, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

The Lost World of Children’s Programming

+ intro by Elinor Groom, Curator of Television This programme includes Television for Children, a featurette made exclusively for the NFT, which follows a version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice down the...

September 16, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Gladiator

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The Encyclopaedia Britannica imperiously dismisses the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius as ‘an historically overrated figur...

September 13, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Alien

In 1977, a heavily revised script optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox entitled Alien went through the hands of several Hollywood directors. Peter Yates passed on it. Robert Aldrich passed on it. The ...

September 13, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Black Rain

After discovering the Black Rain screenplay by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, Michael Douglas brought the project to producers Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, who had worked with him on the h...

September 12, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Bad Education

Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, discover love, cinema and fear in a religious school at the start of the 60s. Father Manolo, the school principal and their literature teacher, is witness to and ...

September 12, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Thelma & Louise

In the summer of 1991, Thelma & Louise was a much talked-about movie, sparking a broad public debate about women, men, guns and the fate of women who break the law. A generation later, we could...

September 10, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Someone to Watch Over Me

Director Ridley Scott established himself as a filmmaker with an extraordinary eye for beauty in his first film The Duellists. With each subsequent film he has enhanced his reputation as one of the...

September 9, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Leslie Harris’ ultra-low-budget Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., a cautionary comedy about teenage pregnancy, opened in the US in Fe...

September 9, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Good Morning, Boys!

Good Morning, Boys! was the first comedy Will Hay made with director Marcel Varnel and what was later to become his stock company of technicians and writers: Guest, Edgar, Crabtree, Vetchinsky and ...

September 6, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Blade Runner - The Final Cut

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Philip K. Dick died three months before the US release of Blade Runner, the film based on his 1968 science-fiction novel Do Androids...

September 6, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

American Gangster

The legend of heroin smuggler/family man/death dealer/civic leader Frank Lucas was first chronicled in a New York Magazine article by journalist Mark Jacobson. In 2000, executive producer Nicholas ...

September 6, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

A Good Year

Peter Mayle is a native Brit who abandoned a successful advertising career and reinvented himself as a best-selling author and novelist. He has been writing about the good life in the South of Fran...

September 5, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Battleship Potemkin

Marking the film’s 100th anniversary, Eisenstein’s legendary drama of rebellion and revolution returns to the big screen with a celebrated score from the Pet Shop Boys. During the Russian Revolutio...

September 5, 2025 | Re-releases

Être et avoir

Nicolas Philibert on ‘Être et avoir’ In Spring 2000, I began thinking about a project about rural life, and I began my research by having meetings with farmers on the edge of bankruptcy… But, in t...

September 1, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Electra Glide in Blue

‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult ...

August 21, 2025 | Moviedrome
Bringing the Cult TV Series to the Big Screen

White of the Eye