BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Mirror

Olivier Assayas on ‘Mirror’ What interests me in cinema is not cinema in itself, but what cinema, as an exploratory tool, catches in its nets. So for me Mirror is not a film, it is something that ...

February 13, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Throne of Blood

In 1955, the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa and his colleagues began work on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, transposing from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan the tale of a ...

February 12, 2023 | KUROSAWA

The Third Man

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. It is hard now to credit that there was a time when Carol Reed was seriously touted as the world’s greatest living director. Still, ...

February 12, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Some Like It Hot

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. ‘Sensationally funny, one of the best scripts ever, Marilyn Monroe at the peak of her incandescence, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon bey...

February 12, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Killer of Sheep

It’s hard to believe there was a time when Killer of Sheep wasn’t widely recognised as a canonical work. The operative word however, is ‘widely’: it got great reviews from its premiere in 1978. So ...

February 12, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Red Beard

+ intro by Ian Haydn Smith, season co-curator (Saturday 11 February only) Kurosawa’s last black and white film was his final collaboration with Mifune. It might not be one of their best-known work...

February 11, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Iron Giant

What’s it about? Hogarth Hughes is an intelligent nine-year-old who befriends a 50-foot alien robot, which recently landed in the United States and is being hunted by government agents who believ...

February 11, 2023 | BFI FAMILIES

Free Renty
Lanier v. Harvard

In celebration of Black History Month USA, this compelling documentary tells the story of Tamara Lanier, an African American woman determined to force Harvard University to cede possession of dague...

February 11, 2023 | AFRICAN ODYSSEYS

Bicycle Thieves

A contemporary review Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, like Rossellini’s Paisa, came to London with a fabulous reputation to live up to, and, in a way, to live down. To Paisa, a film made in a s...

February 11, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Barry Lyndon

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. One of the mysteries of Stanley Kubrick’s career is why he seized upon William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon for...

February 11, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Ordet

The Danish playwright and Lutheran country priest, Kaj Munk (1898–1944), whose play Ordet (1932) is the basis of Dreyer’s astonishing 1955 film, once declared that the aim and object of all true ar...

February 10, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Blue Jean

For many in the UK, the story of Section 28 and its eventual repeal is a triumphant memory of unity and activism. Resistance to the Conservative government’s attempt to prohibit the ‘promotion’ of ...

February 10, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

The 400 Blows

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. One of the greatest films about childhood, Truffaut’s partly autobiographical first feature is also profoundly moving. Forever in tr...

February 10, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Wanda

Isabelle Huppert on ‘Wanda’ I first saw Barbara Loden’s film many years ago, though it was long after its original release; despite support from Marguerite Duras, it had become more or less invisib...

February 9, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Fear Eats the Soul

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s other recent imitations of life, Fear Eats the Soul achieves a remarkable balance between stylisatio...

February 9, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Edward Hopper

+ intro by Steven Foxon, Curator BFI National Archive, producer Patsy Nightingale and director of photography Patrick Duval A contemporary review ‘Where to start?’ muses the narrator-director at t...

February 9, 2023 | ART IN THE MAKING

Shadow (Relaxed Screening)

Introduced by Clare Baines (Disability Equality Lead, BFI) and Matthew Hellett, Lead Programmer, Oska Bright Film Festival. Challenging expectations is at the heart of Shadow. A group of activis...

February 8, 2023 | RELAXED SCREENING

The Piano

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For a while I could not think, let alone write, about The Piano without shaking. Precipitating a flood of feelings, The Piano demand...

February 8, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Joyland

+ Q&A with director Saim Sadiq In inner city Lahore, Haider, a quiet and seemingly happy house husband is pressured by his fiercely patriarchal father into finding work. He takes a job in an e...

February 8, 2023 | PREVIEWS

Dreams

A portmanteau work comprising eight tales inspired by recurring dreams the director had, Kurosawa’s penultimate film – the first solely written by him since 1945’s The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s ...

February 8, 2023 | KUROSAWA