BFI Southbank Programme Notes

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...

November 24, 2022 | PREVIEW

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...

November 23, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

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...

November 22, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

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...

November 18, 2022 | FRAMES OF MIND
THE FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY

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...

November 18, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

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...

November 16, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

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...

November 14, 2022 | IN PERSON & PREVIEWS

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 ...

November 14, 2022 | PREVIEW

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...

November 12, 2022 | BFI’S 100 BBC TV GAMECHANGERS

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...

November 12, 2022 | GARY OLDMAN

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...

November 11, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Life Moves Pretty Fast – The John Hughes Mixtapes Launch
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Please note, the discussion will take place before the screening. The panel will feature music supervisor (for John Hughes) Tarquin Gotch; journalist and 80s film enthusiast Hadley Freeman; musicia...

November 11, 2022 | IN PERSON & PREVIEWS

The Greenaway Alphabet

Anyone looking for a way into the works of Peter Greenaway would do well to begin with The Greenaway Alphabet. His films are visually appealing but can challenge the unsuspecting viewer not prepare...

November 11, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

The Entity

Horror icon Barbara Hershey stars in this underseen and affecting film about a single mother repeatedly attacked by an unseen force. She is beaten, sexually assaulted and hounded by this spectral c...

November 11, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

The Draughtsman's Contract

Peter Greenaway on ‘The Draughtsman’s Contract’ The Draughtsman’s Contract. A film that is 40 years old. Made in 1982 about events in 1694. Elaborate, stylised, enjoyable, spiteful and mysterious,...

November 11, 2022 | RE-RELEASES

Ganja & Hess

Marlene Clark and Duane Jones star as the eponymous lovers of Bill Gunn’s iconic vampire romance, one of the defining classics of the genre. After his erratic assistant stabs him with an ancient da...

November 7, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

The Unreliable Narrator
Adventures in Storytelling,
Documentary and Misinformation

Veracity and doubt play off each other to uncanny, witty ends in imaginative films by Greenaway, John Smith, Patrick Keiller, Steven Ball and Philip Sanderson. The voice illuminates and obscures in...

November 6, 2022 | FRAMES OF MIND
THE FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY

Black Panther

Black Panther, from director Ryan Coogler and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole, begins with a history lesson. A colourful animated sequence unravels the origins of the fictional African nation of Wa...

November 6, 2022 | CLOSE-UP - RYAN COOGLER

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

With a remarkable cast (Benedict Cumberbatch, Kathy Burke, Tom Hardy and Stephen Graham are in there too), this adaptation of John Le Carré’s Cold War espionage mystery is inevitably classy and (gi...

November 5, 2022 | GARY OLDMAN

Peter Greenaway
Pioneer of Cinema

Few directors have been as committed to articulating film as a medium distinct from other forms of drama and storytelling as Peter Greenaway. Working as filmmaker and visual artist, Greenaway has e...

November 5, 2022 | FRAMES OF MIND
THE FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY