Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

Haunted Generations - The Lingering Legacy of the Public Information Film

Introduced by author and Fortean Times columnist Bob Fischer Lingering eerily in the imagination of those who grew-up haunted by the warnings of danger and death, public information films occupy a...

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

+ Q&A with directors Peter Baynton and Charlie Mackesy, and producer Cara Speller When Charlie Mackesy published his book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse in October 2019, he started a...

Bones and All

‘Whatever you and I got, it’s got to be fed,’ Lee (Timothée Chalamet) tells his lover Maren (Taylor Russell) in Luca Guadagnino’s deliciously dark cannibal road movie, something of a return to the ...

The Uninvited

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The Uninvited was, famously, Hollywood’s first authentic ghost story. It’s a slick, romantic, sometimes even campy potboiler that, i...

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...

Kwaidan

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. From Masaki Kobayashi, best known for his socially conscious dramas (Black River, 1957; The Human Condition, 1959-61) and intense sa...

The Fly (Relaxed Screening)

+ intro and discussion. David Cronenberg’s heart-breaking horror about a man who realises ‘the insect is awake’ is a dark dissection of scientific optimism and the limits of the human body. Seth...

Good Manners

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Directors Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra on ‘Good Manners’ With Good Manners you take your cinematographic approach to a new level in...

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

About 20 minutes into Alexandre Koberidze’s enchanting, meandering and unclassifiable second feature, a caption appears on screen, imploring the audience to close our eyes at the sound of a signal ...

She Said

+ Q&A with screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz Two-time Academy Award® nominee Carey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman, An Education) and Emmy nominee Zoe Kazan (The Plot Against America, The Big Si...

Under the Shadow

There’s nothing new about a ghost story in which a lone mother must protect her child or children from supernatural forces, but there is something new about its context in this film. Under the Shad...

Big Monster Energy

Where do we draw the line between the terrifying and the titillating? Scary films aren’t supposed to be sexy, and yet, there is a very thin line between the titillating and the terrifying. Romantic...

The Pillow Book

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The Pillow Book, it is clear, gathers up the two concerns that have driven so many of Peter Greenaway’s films: the question of sex a...

Aftersun

At their budget coastal resort in Turkey in the late 1990s, Calum, 30, and Sophie, 11, are mistaken for brother and sister. It’s to do with his youthful looks, sure, but also the easy-going, conspi...

Def by Temptation

A contemporary review The blossoming new black cinema is gradually reclaiming the generic territory seeded by the 70s wave of Blaxploitation pictures. While New Jack City redrafted the parameters o...

Luca Guadagnino in Conversation

The deeply humanistic films of Luca Guadagnino, films that seem able to seize the most visceral, indescribable feelings out from the air, have traversed many subjects, though he is perhaps most bel...

Bones and All

‘Whatever you and I got, it’s got to be fed,’ Lee (Timothée Chalamet) tells his lover Maren (Taylor Russell) in Luca Guadagnino’s deliciously dark cannibal road movie, something of a return to the ...

Play for Today - Licking Hitler

+ panel and Q&A with writer David Hare and actor Bill Paterson Almost incredibly, David Hare made the visually highly sophisticated Licking Hitler ‘without having ever looked down a camera unt...

Darkest Hour

Though Gary Oldman has long been commended for his elastic range as an actor, few could have foreseen that the man who once played Sex Pistol Sid Vicious would give one of the screen’s most persuas...

No Bears

For the last decade, Jafar Panahi has made a series of boldly inventive statements defying the Iranian government’s ban on his being an active filmmaker. As he faces six years imprisonment, his lat...