BFI Southbank Programme Notes

A Man Escaped

The subject is simple. It comes from an escape story by a member of the French secret service called André Devigny. In 1943 he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo at Lyons. He made an atte...

January 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Touki Bouki

John Akomfrah on ‘Touki Bouki’ Until I saw Touki Bouki, I hadn’t understood an African Cinema to be political by its very nature, being born out of the process of cultural and post-colonial renewal...

January 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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The Stone Tape

This selection is all about Nigel Kneale’s script, which gave birth to the endlessly intriguing stone tape theory, along with the unmistakable work of Desmond Briscoe and the BBC Radiophonic Worksh...

January 2, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Seven Samurai

When Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai premiered in Japan on 26 April 1954, it was the most expensive domestic production ever, costing 125 million Yen (approximately $350,000), almost five times the ...

January 2, 2023 | KUROSAWA

The Red Shoes

5 things to know about ‘The Red Shoes’ 1 It’s a spectacular rejection of realism The Red Shoes, which premiered on 6 September 1948, followed a tremendous run of films by Michael Powell and Emeric ...

January 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Once upon a Time in the West

It may not be the definitive western, but it might just be the most western: part parody, part eulogy, part apotheosis, Once upon a Time in the West is every narrative and formal cliché, every gran...

January 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Get Out

Thrilling and thought provoking, Get Out takes the concept of meeting-the-parents to horrifying new heights. Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris becomes increasingly aware that the overly accommodating behaviou...

January 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Walkabout

When it comes to Nic Roeg’s influence upon my own work, there are probably more obvious choices: the red coat of Don’t Look Now, the fractured identities of Performance, the time slip of The Man Wh...

January 1, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Sunset Blvd.

Gloria Swanson on ‘Sunset Blvd.’ When we started Sunset Blvd. we had only 26 pages of script. [Screenwriter Charles] Brackett and Wilder were determined I should do it. I didn’t want to. Because in...

January 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Metropolis

Urban Modernity, Berlin’s ‘Golden 20s’, the Cinematic City: no film evokes these clichés of the past century more vividly than Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s flawed masterpiece from 1926-7. Feeding on it...

January 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail

Kurosawa’s final film of the war years (in fact Japan surrendered while it was still being made) is the shortest of all his features. They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail (1945), running just under an...

January 1, 2023 | KUROSAWA

The Leopard

Against a 19th-century backdrop of radical Italian Nationalism, Visconti’s masterful epic recreates a tumultuous period when the aristocracy lost its grip and the middle classes rose up to form a u...

January 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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The General

‘The moment you give me a locomotive and things like that to play with, as a rule I find some way of getting laughs out of it,’ Buster Keaton is quoted as saying. Trains had often been used for gag...

January 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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L'avventura

When Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura arrived in 1960 – amidst a tumultuous reception in Cannes that saw some disturbed audience members wanting to throw something at the screen – cinema was al...

January 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Corsage

In Corsage, a dry, wry, winking quasibiopic of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the anachronisms arrive slowly, subtly and then, quite recklessly, all at once. Does that swimming pool the empress ...

December 27, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

The Queen of Spades

Described by Martin Scorsese as ‘A uniquely haunting film’ and once thought lost forever, The Queen of Spades is the perfect horror tale for a winter’s day. It’s 1806 and in St Petersburg, Captain ...

December 23, 2022 | RE-RELEASES

A Dark Song

Sophia is grief-stricken and overwhelmed with sadness since the untimely death of her son. In a desperate attempt to achieve some form of closure, she reaches out to Solomon, an occultist with expe...

December 23, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Ginger Snaps

Try to imagine what Buffy the Vampire Slayer would look like if it had been written by Angela Carter and you might get close to the heady cocktail of high-school pubescence and feminist folklore th...

December 21, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Society

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Out of the morassic age of huge teen mullets, John Hughes high-school psychodramas and squishily analogue genre FX came this unnervi...

December 20, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Gremlins

Joe Dante on ‘Gremlins’ I never happened to believe that Gremlins was a movie that scared children. That was a thing that came up when the movie was released, and there were articles in the paper....

December 20, 2022 | CHRISTMAS FILMS