BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The eruption of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire at 30th place, the highest new entry in the poll, mirrors the meteoric ri...

March 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
30

Persona

In many ways Bergman’s most avant-garde and radical film, Persona is ostensibly about a great stage actor (Ullmann) who has mysteriously withdrawn into silence and travels to a remote island to rec...

March 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
18=

Do the Right Thing

During the hottest day of the year, Mookie (Lee) travels around his predominantly black Brooklyn neighbourhood making deliveries for the local pizzeria run by Italian American Sal (Aiello). As the ...

March 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
24=

Close

Lukas Dhont on ‘Close’ Following the glowing reception of your debut film Girl , first in Cannes in May 2018 and then globally, when did you get a chance to start thinking about making your next o...

March 3, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

Busting the Bias
Opening Night

An illustrated talk + ECLECTIC: Shorts Programme, an evening celebrating Disability visibility and filmmaking. Andrew Miller MBE and current chair of the BFI’s Disability Screen Advisory Group wil...

March 3, 2023 | BUSTING THE BIAS

The War of the Roses

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. US cinema had quite a run of prestigious, serious-minded relationship crisis movies in the 1970s and 80s (Kramer vs. Kramer, Shoot ...

March 2, 2023 | MEMBER PICKS

Taxi Driver

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Perhaps the place to begin is with John Hinckley III, the man who, in 1981, tried to kill President Ronald Reagan so that, as the de...

March 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
29

Au hasard Balthazar

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Robert Bresson drafted the rules of a new cinema and realised them in Au hasard Balthazar, his masterpiece. This seemingly aloof, co...

March 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
25=

Jeanne Dielman
23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Such a sudden shake-up at the top of Sight and Sound ’s ten-yearly poll! Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 108...

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

Haunted Engines - UNICA and Other Films from Computer Generated Worlds

+ Q&A with Blaise Kirschner UNICA is the new, eagerly anticipated film by Blaise Kirschner, a personally absorbing exploration of post-apocalyptic game worlds that merges current forms of digi...

March 1, 2023 | EXPERIMENTA

Daisies + Meshes in the Afternoon

Daisies An early short film by Vera Chytilová bears the title A Bagful of Fleas (1962), an evocative image that neatly describes the intended effect of much of the work of Czech cinema’s arch-provo...

March 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
28 AND 16

Throne of Blood
(Relaxed Screening)

+ intro and discussion The ruins of the former Spiders Web Castle emerge from the mist for the second relaxed screening in our Kurosawa season. But why exactly has the castle met such a fate and...

February 27, 2023 | RELAXED SCREENING

Creature

The latest production choreographed by Akram Khan with the English National Ballet, Creature, has taken several years to arrive on stage. When it looked like the show might never come to life, dire...

February 24, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

Broker

Hirokazu Koreeda’s Cannes-winning feature, his first to be shot in Korea, focuses on the semi-illicit world of adoption markets. So-young leaves her recently born child at a church where Dong-soo w...

February 24, 2023 | NEW RELEASE

Shadow

Director’s Statement Shadow uses a combination of dramatic and documentary-style elements to tell the story of a group of activists who hold a public meeting only to discover their own prejudices a...

February 22, 2023 | YOU BEAUTIES - NEW AUSTRALIAN CINEMA

The Apartment

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond’s sharp, cynical script concerns an insurance clerk (Jack Lemmon) who, bent on promotion, lends his ap...

February 22, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
54=

A.K.

Notoriously media-shy, Kurosawa gave Marker permission to film the making of Ran. As his earlier Sans Soleil highlighted, the acclaimed French filmmaker was intrigued by Japanese culture and behavi...

February 22, 2023 | KUROSAWA

The Strays

+ Q&A with writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White and actors Ashley Madekwe, Bukky Bakray, Jorden Myrie, Maria Almeida and Samuel Small SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of ...

February 20, 2023 | PREVIEW

Madadayo

Just as the camera had panned down in the opening moments of Sanshiro Sugata [Akira Kurosawa’s first film], so it pans back up at the conclusion of Madadayo as a small boy raises his head to a swir...

February 20, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Yojimbo

Introduced by Asif Kapadia, season co-curator (Thursday 23 February only) Kurosawa on ‘Yojimbo’ For a long time I had wanted to make a really interesting film – and it finally turned into this pic...

February 18, 2023 | KUROSAWA