Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

Criminal Lovers

The films of the New French Extremity and the accompanying focus on Gaspar Noé examine an important, controversial and highly violent cinema movement. They are not suitable for all. The film you a...

The Tale of The Princess Kaguya

The plan was to release The Tale of The Princess Kaguya in Japan on the same day as The Wind Rises, 25 years after the double-bill of Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies and Hayao Miyazaki’s My ...

Mike Hodges
in Conversation

With a career that spans film and TV – including highlights such as Get Carter, Flash Gordon, Croupier, Tempo and World in Action – Mike Hodges is an auteur filmmaker who has proved himself adept a...

Black Rainbow

‘Black Rainbow is a crossroads of many different ideas,’ says writer/director Mike Hodges. ‘I’m concerned about what we’re doing to our planet and I’m interested in the revival of numerous kinds of...

Akira

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Akira is very probably the first animated feature with a genuinely novelistic density of incident and character. Its narrative speed...

The Terminal Man

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A contemporary review In 1969 the first hapless chimpanzee was directly linked by radio to a computer which took over the functionin...

Sunrise
A Song of Two Humans

When F.W. Murnau left Germany for America in 1926, did cinema foresee what was coming? Did it sense that change was around the corner – that now was the time to fill up on fantasy, delirium and spe...

Princess Mononoke

What’s It About After being cursed by a demon, young warrior Ashitaka begins a journey to search for a cure and meets a princess named San. He soon finds himself in the middle of an ongoing war bet...

Perfect Blue

Satoshi Kon’s feature debut plunges us into Japan’s late 1990s pop idol scene, and surfaces with a fractured tale of psychological and physical brutality. Mima is 21 when she decides to leave CHAM!...

The Ordeal

The films of the New French Extremity and the accompanying focus on Gaspar Noé examine an important, controversial and highly violent cinema movement. They are not suitable for all. The film you a...

Man Bites Dog

The films of the New French Extremity and the accompanying focus on Gaspar Noé examine an important, controversial and highly violent cinema movement. They are not suitable for all. The film you a...

Your Name

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Makoto Shinkai’s dreamily emotional anime romance, the highest grossing film of 2016 in Japan at ¥15bn and counting, has unsurprisin...

I Stand Alone

The films of the New French Extremity and the accompanying focus on Gaspar Noé examine an important, controversial and highly violent cinema movement. They are not suitable for all. The film you a...

The Girl Who Leapt through Time

Every sci-fi fan knows that time-travel is never easy. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, compared history to badly plastered wallpaper; push one bubble down and anot...

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway’s story of a doomed love affair between an American ambulance driver and a nurse is turned into a full-blown tearjerker by Frank Borzage. With luminous close-ups of Gary Cooper and...

Baise-moi

The films of the New French Extremity and the accompanying focus on Gaspar Noé examine an important, controversial and highly violent cinema movement. They are not suitable for all. The film you a...

We're All Going to the World's Fair

Director’s Statement When I was 13 years old, I would stay up late writing scary stories about serial killers and vampires on an online horror message board. I was a morbid, creative kid still dec...

BUG 62

Now, where were we? Ah yes. A mere two years and three months after the last time we did this, BUG is back at BFI Southbank with a brand new show of outstanding creativity from the world of music v...

The Funhouse

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. If you want to understand Tobe Hooper’s relationship to and impact on the horror genre, you could do worse than watching one of his ...

Illuminating the Wilderness

+ discussion with artists and makers from Project Art Works Illuminating the Wilderness offers a window onto the experiences of a group of neurodiverse artists, filmmakers, families and carers ...