Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

She Said

Two-time Academy Award® nominee Carey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman, An Education) and Emmy nominee Zoe Kazan (The Plot Against America, The Big Sick) star as New York Times reporters Megan Twohe...

Scrooged

Bill Murray’s Frank Cross is a modern-day Scrooge. An unpleasant TV executive, he pushes his team to the limit when he plans a live production of A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve, expecting them ...

Scrooge

Although there will always be dispute over which is Alastair Sim’s finest screen performance, there’s little doubt as to which is the best known. His 1951 characterisation of Charles Dickens’ notor...

Häxan

Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan is sort of a documentary, and it’s the ‘sort of’ that makes it unlike any other film. The Swedish silent melds historical fact and folk superstition to explore ideas ab...

Carol

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Adapted from a Patricia Highsmith novel, Haynes’ typically elegant yet acerbic movie charts the intense (yet hesitant and furtive) r...

Triangle of Sadness

Ruben Östlund on ‘Triangle of Sadness’ Let’s start with the title: what does ‘triangle of sadness’ refer to? It’s a term used in the beauty industry. A friend sat next to a plastic surgeon at a p...

Tangerine

On Christmas Eve, a couple of transgender sex workers meet-up at a donut shop in Hollywood. From there, the evening pans out, encompassing discovered infidelity, police interference, an impressive ...

One Cut of the Dead

It’s impossible to discuss Shin’ichirô Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead in any meaningful way without giving away vital plot twists and this review is no different. If you haven’t seen it yet, stop here ...

Experimenta Mixtape
Secret Santa Edition

W: Hi everybody, we hope you enjoyed the Experimenta Mixtape Secret Santa edition. Kristina and I have put together a whole load of different material which of course you’ve just seen. So today you...

Decision to Leave

Decision to Leave begins with the detective Hae-joon investigating the death of a man who fell from a mountaintop. When he meets the deceased man’s wife Seo-rae, he starts to suspect her at the sam...

Dead of Night

+ intro Horror films or stories of the supernatural were little attempted in British cinema prior to the days of Hammer in the 1950s. There are the exceptions of course, such as The Ghoul (1933) a...

The Banshees of Inisherin

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of Inishmore… In titling his gritty, west coast Irish dramas, Martin McDonagh certainly has a type. All three aforementioned pl...

Ghosts Christmas Special

We are pleased to welcome the following guests for a Q&A following tonight’s screening: Lolly Adefope, Mathew Baynton, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard, Charlotte Ritchie, Kiel...

The Babadook

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Post-millennial horror has proven to be particularly accommodating to women directors, from the Soska Sisters, Jen and Sylvia (Dead ...

Twelve Monkeys

Dangling in mid-air, the bald man works diligently, sifting through clues to a monumental puzzle, piece by piece. Across one wall of a forbidding 21st century archive he has pasted the headlines of...

Arrebato

A key movie from the movida madrileña, the explosion of countercultural creativity that erupted in Spain in the years following the death of Franco, Iván Zulueta’s second film is a radical, unpredi...

This Man Is Mine

+ intro by film historian Carole Sharp This Man Is Mine is based on the hit stage play A Soldier for Christmas which opened in the West End from 3 February 1944 and ran for most of the year. It wa...

Every Day Except Christmas

+ intro by Patrick Russell, Senior Curator, BFI National Archive A new wave of documentary art and an affectionate appreciation of the hard-working. Tonight we explore Lindsay Anderson’s landmark ...

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Relaxed Screening)

+ intro and discussion. Michael Caine plays Ebenezer Scrooge in this Christmas comedy favourite that appeals across the generations. The exuberant Muppets take on Dickens’ characters, offering th...

Goltzius and the Pelican Company

+ extended intro by Peter Greenaway (Saturday 10 December screening only) Peter Greenaway, one of the most inventive, ambitious and controversial filmmakers of our time, returns to the cinematic a...