BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Rye Lane

+ Q&A with director Raine Allen-Miller and actor Vivian Oparah Rye Lane is a modern-day romantic comedy based in South London about two young people falling in love while finding themselves i...

March 13, 2023 | PREVIEW

The Godfather

If you want a film that exemplifies and honours the impossible, arbitrary and contradictory history and nature of moviemaking, look no further. Hollywood movies are an artform and a mass entertainm...

March 10, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Close-up

From the mid-1990s until his death in 2016, Abbas Kiarostami was widely regarded as one of the most original, innovative and important filmmakers around, an audacious, idiosyncratic artist with a p...

March 10, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Winners

+ Q&A with director Hassan Nazer and producer Nadira Murray Director’s Statement Winners is a story of a nine-year-old boy’s passion for cinema and the reawakening of an old actor’s love for t...

March 9, 2023 | PREVIEW

Bruce Lacey, The Alberts and more

Introduced by William Fowler, BFI Archive Curator It’s easy, when thinking about Bruce Lacey’s life, art and films, to draw attention to his collaborators and famous friends, as if he were a Zelig...

March 9, 2023 | IVOR CUTLER AND THE ECCENTRIC MISCELLANY

The Teckman Mystery + The Stranger Left No Card

Wendy Toye originally trained as a ballet dancer before turning to acting and then directing, both on the stage and screen. She inspired a generation of female filmmakers to pursue a career in a ma...

March 8, 2023 | SENIORS
CELEBRATING INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

WOW Festival presents
Prima Facie

This screening is made possible with the kind support of Empire Street Productions and National Theatre Live. A donation from each ticket sold will go to support The WOW Foundation’s work. The WOW...

March 8, 2023 | PREVIEWS AND EVENTS

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...

March 8, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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The Night of the Hunter

In my film-watching experience, The Night of the Hunter is the closest a director has come to capturing the hypnotic, compelling potency of the kind of nightmares we have when we are children. Init...

March 7, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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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...

March 7, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Vertigo

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Though admiring Vertigo’s pictorial splendour, I found Kim Novak gauche, the plot baloney and the whole enterprise lacking the maste...

March 6, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Late Spring

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. A widowed professor lives harmoniously with his grown-up daughter until a meddling aunt intervenes and suggests that it is time for...

March 6, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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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...

March 6, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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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...

March 5, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Shoah

Shoah – the title is the Hebrew word for ‘Annihilation’ – took ten years to complete. It runs in two parts for some nine and a half hours. Its subject is the minutiae of the Holocaust, what occurre...

March 5, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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The Passion of Joan of Arc

The Passion of Joan of Arc is an extraordinary achievement. Based on the original 1431 transcript of the trial of the teenager, Dreyer’s sparse style, filmed with little emphasis on plot or setting...

March 5, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Nothing About Us
Without Us

A disabled-led discourse on accessible advancements within the film industry. ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’ will be a celebration of the BFI’s Disability Screen Advisory Group’s first cohort of le...

March 5, 2023 | BUSTING THE BIAS

I Didn't See You There

+ pre-recorded Q&A A ground-breaking documentary shot entirely from filmmaker Reid Davenport’s physical perspective, both from his wheelchair and his two feet. Reid Davenport’s documentary ex...

March 5, 2023 | BUSTING THE BIAS

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Inspired by Andreas Malm’s book, director Daniel Goldhaber (Cam) spins a tense thriller that is part heist movie wrapped up in an exploration of the current climate crisis that the world is facing....

March 5, 2023 | GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL PREVIEW

Cléo from 5 to 7

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Sixty years after it was first released, Cléo from 5 to 7 has finally leapt into the top 20: a slow pace for a film so light on its ...

March 5, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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