BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Serpico

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For decades, American cinema sought a populist genre to replace the western as a form in which good and evil could be embodied in wh...

August 18, 2023 | RE-RELEASE

Red River

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. Hawks’ first western remains one of his greatest, its story of an epic cattle drive that established the Chisholm Trail serving as ...

August 17, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

My Brother the Devil

Sally El Hosaini on ‘My Brother the Devil’ Occasionally festival juries get it right. The award for Best British Newcomer at [the 2011] BFI London Film Festival went to writer-director Sally El Hos...

August 16, 2023 | BE GAY DO CRIME
A SEASON OF QUEER CRIME FILMS

Beau travail

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The first time I watched Beau travail, on DVD, in my childhood bedroom, in the spring of 2014, I didn’t know how it would end. My fa...

August 15, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Mildred Pierce

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. ‘She was thirty-seven years old, fat, and getting a little shapeless. She had lost everything she had worked for, over long and wear...

August 13, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Lion King

The adventure-filled journey of Simba, a heroic young lion struggling to find his place in nature’s ‘circle of life’ and follow in the regal paw prints of his father, the great King Mufasa, forms t...

August 13, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Bambi

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. By 1942, Disney was at war. On the day of Pearl Harbor, the studio’s sound stage had been commandeered by the US army for vehicle an...

August 13, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Soul

What is it that makes you… YOU? Pixar Animation Studios’ Soul introduces Joe Gardner (voice of Jamie Foxx) – a middle-school band teacher who has a passion for jazz. ‘Joe wants more than anything t...

August 12, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Love Is the Devil

When Love Is the Devil was released in 1998, it was John Maybury’s first incursion into the mainstream after a long career stretching back to his teens when he worked on Derek Jarman’s celebrated f...

August 12, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Variety

A contemporary review Variety is likely to arouse a fair deal of interest on the basis of Kathy Acker’s script credit. And there are certainly elements in the film which relate to the writer and he...

August 11, 2023 | RE-RELEASES

L'immensità

Penélope Cruz is unmistakably the selling point of Emanuele Crialese’s L’immensità. It’s her face with those trademark lashes in close-up on the Italian poster – but then, the Spanish star has long...

August 11, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

Brief Encounter

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Brief Encounter has always been regarded as a quintessentially British film, typical of British cinema and of Britishness itself. Th...

August 10, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Up

Pete Docter, director of Pixar’s new hit Up, describes his creative process in watery terms: ‘It’s as though we’re in a pool splashing around, looking for things. It’s being in it, just feeling – a...

August 9, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Pinocchio

Disney’s Pinocchio is the first cartoon feature to allegorise animation’s miracle, the creation of life. By Pinocchio’s release in 1940, cinema audiences had seen many fantastic births, but usually...

August 9, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Housekeeping

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A contemporary review One of the most attractive features of Bill Forsyth’s work is his refusal, at the risk of having his films dis...

August 8, 2023 | MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

Charulata

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. Two hands, a man’s and a woman’s, reach tentatively out to each other. But just before they meet, the frame freezes. Reconciliation...

August 8, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

By Hook or by Crook

By Hook or by Crook is a buddy film that chronicles three weeks in the life of a handsome, gender-bending, small-town butch with a nagging messiah-complex. Emotionally defeated since the death of h...

August 8, 2023 | BE GAY DO CRIME
A SEASON OF QUEER CRIME FILMS

In the Mood for Love

The signs were already there that Wong Kar Wai’s woozy, hungry, love story was likely to earn a significant promotion in this year’s poll. Ten years ago, it stood out as the best-performing film of...

August 7, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Heat and Dust

+ intro and Q&A with Adrian Garvey, Film Historian SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Speaking of a shrine once sacred to Muslims, a character in Heat and Dust wr...

August 7, 2023 | SENIORS

Zootropolis

In its 92-year history, Walt Disney Animation Studios has created a long and storied legacy of talking-animal films – from Mickey Mouse’s debut short Steamboat Willie to Bambi, Dumbo, The Jungle Bo...

August 6, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY