Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

Nil by Mouth

An uncompromisingly frank portrait of a particular sector of working-class family life in south-east London (where Gary Oldman grew up), Nil by Mouth is a powerful, astute, authentically foul-mouth...

Gary Oldman in Conversation

Since making his film debut in the early 1980s, Gary Oldman has established himself as one of the most successful movie stars of the modern era. Renowned for the range, power and subtlety of his pe...

Peter Greenaway
Frames of Mind Season Introduction

Join us for a panel discussion exploring our Peter Greenaway season and his career as director, film philosopher and visual artist. Chaired by season programmer Justin Johnson, this season introduc...

Bram Stoker's Dracula

+ intro by award-winning writer and broadcaster Christopher Frayling, in celebration of his upcoming book Vampire Cinema (Wednesday 19 October only) Coppola’s version of Stoker’s novel – determine...

The Belly of an Architect

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A contemporary review Experienced viewers of Peter Greenaway’s films, even if they are relatively familiar with architectural histor...

A Zed & Two Noughts

Twin zoologists, grieving the death of their wives in a collision involving a car and a swan, gradually form a bond with the woman who was driving the vehicle that caused their spouses’ demise. The...

The Others

Who’d have thought that things could still go bump in the night and render 21st-century sophisticates witless with terror? Who’d have believed that the uncanny in its most moth-eaten Miss Havisham ...

My Winnipeg

UK distribution for the films of the avant-garde Canadian director Guy Maddin has been erratic, with only The Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), Dracula Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) and The ...

Meantime

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In Leigh’s TV film about an East End family faced with unemployment and recession in Thatcher’s Britain, Oldman plays Coxy, volatile...

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...

The Passion of Remembrance

Almost 40 years after it was first made, the Sankofa collective’s The Passion of Remembrance remains salient. The film is a grand tapestry filled with allusions to the intersectional concerns, moti...

No Time to Die

Where once the James Bond films played as separate adventures, linked by characters both malevolent and benign, EON Productions wanted the Daniel Craig series to unfold as a unified whole. Quantum ...

Madly, Deeply
A celebration of Alan Rickman

Alan Rickman was an exceptional performer and human being, much loved by his fellow actors and the general public. This event celebrates and remembers his life and work, and launches the publicatio...

The Living Daylights

The first Bond film to star Timothy Dalton, The Living Daylights is a familiar mixture of popular elements from the series, given a certain political relevance through allusions to glasnost and the...

Flux Gourmet

No short synopsis to a Peter Strickland film can comprehensively illustrate how bonkers his films are, and Flux Gourmet is possibly his wildest yet. His fifth feature takes place at an art institut...

Who Needs Channel 4?
with Channel 4 Chief Content Officer Ian Katz

Special guests include: BAFTA-winner Nida Manzoor (We Are Lady Parts), TV presenter Yinka Bokinni (Unapologetic, How to Hire a Hit Man), comedian Rosie Jones (Trip Hazard), and satirist Munya Chawa...

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

+ panel and Q&A with creators Becky Sloan, Joseph Pelling and Baker Terry, executive producer James Stevenson Bretton, producers Hugo Donkin and Charlie Perkins (Channel 4 Head of Comedy). Wha...

Bent

+ Q&A with director Sean Mathias, writer Martin Sherman and actor Ian McKellen Contains strong violence and upsetting scenes. One night in 1930s Berlin, a promiscuous gay man Max (Clive Owen)...

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Lillian Crawford, film and culture writer and a regular host of Autism Through Cinema podcast will host this relaxed screening and the discussion that follows. The everyday world of shop worker ...

Last Year in Marienbad

‘I am now quite prepared to claim that Marienbad is the greatest film ever made, and to pity those who cannot see it.’ So wrote Jacques Brunius in Sight & Sound in 1962, regarding ‘the film I h...