BFI Southbank Programme Notes

La dolce vita

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In an age when few arthouse films cause riots or give rise to parliamentary debates, it’s difficult to envisage the sheer seismic fo...

February 4, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
60=

Battleship Potemkin

Every phenomenon has a chance, superficial manifestation. And underlying it is a profound feeling that reason has dictated it. So it was too with the film Battleship Potemkin. A grand epic, ‘1905’,...

February 4, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
54=

Sanshiro Sugata

+ intro by Ian Haydn Smith, season co-curator (Friday 3 February only) Kurosawa’s accomplished debut is inspired by the life of 19th-century judo pioneer, Saigo Shiro. The wilful Sanshiro travels ...

February 3, 2023 | KUROSAWA

So-Called Australia - Blak Art on Film + TERROR NULLIUS

Canvassing memory, inheritance and invasion, this programme of shorts is a melodic tribute to Indigenous strength and the poetic subversion of colonial amnesia. The artists address issues of state-...

February 3, 2023 | YOU BEAUTIES - NEW AUSTRALIAN CINEMA

Blade Runner - The Final Cut

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Philip K. Dick died three months before the US release of Blade Runner, the film based on his 1968 science-fiction novel Do Androids...

February 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
54=

Sunshine

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. It’s 2057. The sun is dying and the Earth is in a precipitous state, with all life threatened as the planet turns into a frozen wast...

February 2, 2023 | MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

The Silent Duel

An idealistic young doctor is unwittingly infected with a patient’s syphilitic blood. Although determined to continue his vocation, his medical condition has a profound effect on his relationship w...

February 2, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Moonlight

You stand, wrapped in that strange communal spell during the thunderous ovation, as the memory of cinema floods back. Not the explosive, momentarily gratifying, empty-bellied franchise juggernaut t...

February 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
60=

M

Some years ago – we’re talking about the mid-80s to the mid-90s – serial killer movies were, for want of a better phrase, all the rage. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), Manhunter (1986), ...

February 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
36=

Drunken Angel

Kurosawa on ‘Drunken Angel’ In this picture I finally discovered myself. It was my picture: I was doing it and no one else. Part of this was thanks to Mifune. Shimura played the doctor beautifully,...

February 2, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Stray Dog

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In Stray Dog a young police detective, Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), has his gun stolen by a pickpocket. Humiliated by the loss and tak...

February 1, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Sans soleil

‘By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Ile de France?’ This is surely not the most pertinent question in Chris Marker’s monumental Sans soleil – a time-and-space-hopping travelogue th...

February 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
59

Le Mépris

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. ‘Death,’ says Fritz Lang in Le Mépris, ‘is not a conclusion.’ Not, at least, in the way it was for Michel Poiccard or Nana, for Ulys...

February 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
54=

Enys Men

A cross between folk horror and nature documentary, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men is as idiosyncratic as his acclaimed first feature, Bait. Told through poetic visuals, it is similarly shot on grainy 16mm...

February 1, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

Daughters of the Dust

The ascension of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust to recognition as one of the greatest films of all time hardly comes as a surprise to Black women moviegoers, who championed the film from its ea...

February 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
60=

Breathless

‘We barged into cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis the Fifteenth.’ (Jean-Luc Godard) Godard’s first feature is as fresh as ever after [in 1988] nearly thirty years. If Truffaut’s deb...

February 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
38=

The Hidden Fortress (Relaxed Screening)

+ intro and discussion. See the film that George Lucas drew inspiration from for the original trilogy in the Star Wars saga, in the first of two relaxed screenings in our Kurosawa season. At a t...

January 30, 2023 | RELAXED SCREENING

Berberian Sound Studio

The screening on Sunday 29 January will be introduced by Mark Jenkin and Peter Strickland. This is a great example of an untrustworthy film – a feeling that you’re in unsafe hands and not everyth...

January 29, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Requiem for a Village

It may be nearly half a century old, but this melancholic portrait of loss seems more relevant than ever. I was intrigued by this film when I heard about the dead rising from their graves sequence,...

January 27, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Sanjuro

Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro ends with what must surely be the briefest, and most breathtaking, duel in all cinema. Two samurai swordsmen face up to each other, motionless, gazing into each other’s eye...

January 26, 2023 | KUROSAWA