Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

Last Night in Soho

This preview will feature a pre-recorded intro from director Edgar Wright and Q&A with Paul Machliss, Marcus Rowland, Odile Dicks-Mireaux and Steven Price. Louis CK once pointed out in a routi...

October 21, 2021 | PREVIEWS

Illustrious Corpses

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. During his peak years Francesco Rosi was one of Europe’s premier explorers of criminal-political rot and social anxiety. This key fi...

October 21, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Peasant life in rural Lombardy in 1898. The eternal struggle of living and surviving from day to day, from season to season. Spiritual, infuriating, tender, moving and profound. The ultimate locati...

October 20, 2021 | MIKE LEIGH’S CHOICES

Tongues Untied

+ intro by programmer Rico Johnson-Sinclair What does it take to claim your rightful Black identity, as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community? Poignant yet playful, and affirming in the most importan...

October 20, 2021 | BFI FLARE

Nuts in May

Though far lighter than many other works for film and television by Mike Leigh, his 1976 episode for BBC’s Play for Today strand, Nuts in May, surprisingly asks more pertinent and still relevant qu...

October 20, 2021 | MIKE LEIGH

The Long Goodbye

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Leigh Brackett was one of the few women to publish science fiction in the pulp magazine era, albeit under a gender-neutral byline. ...

October 20, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

I Am Cuba

Mikhail Kalatozov’s epic about the Cuban Revolution is breathtaking both for its scope and the audacity of its cinematic experiments, including the legendary floating tracking shot at the cigar fac...

October 20, 2021 | MIKE LEIGH’S CHOICES

Un flic

+ pre-recorded introduction by film critic Christina Newland Un flic opens with a quote from François-Eugène Vidocq (1775-1857), an escaped convict who became Chief of Police and published his mem...

October 20, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

An Actor's Revenge

Kon Ichikawa is often seen as a key modernist figure, bridging the gap from the classical golden age of the 1950s to the more formally experimental 60s. Alongside literary adaptations (notably 1955...

October 20, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Yojimbo

Kurosawa on ‘Yojimbo’ For a long time I had wanted to make a really interesting film – and it finally turned into this picture. The story is so ideally interesting that it’s surprising no one else...

October 19, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Throne of Blood

In 1955, the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa and his colleagues began work on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, transposing from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan the tale of a ...

October 19, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Peeping Tom

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Never has Eastmancolor felt so woozily, vividly hypnotic than in Michael Powell’s controversial shocker. It’s as easy to be seduced ...

October 19, 2021 | EDGAR WRIGHT’S LONDON AFTER DARK

Kiss Me Deadly

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The dead of night. A distressed woman, out of breath, running along a desert road. The broken lines in the middle of the asphalt fl...

October 19, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Jules et Jim

A contemporary review Jules et Jim is very much a conscious attempt on Truffaut’s part to make a synthesis of his first two films: to combine the ‘big’ subject with obvious human significance of L...

October 19, 2021 | MIKE LEIGH’S CHOICES

Heat

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. After a journey into the 18th-century wilderness for The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann returns to the urban terrain of his tele...

October 19, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Early Spring

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. After the domestic critical and box office success of Tokyo Story in late 1953, Ozu found himself taking an uncharacteristic break ...

October 19, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Dutchman

This screening will be introduced by curator and writer Karen Alexander, who’ll be joined by academic Dr Clive Nwonka for a post-screening discussion chaired by Voice4Change Director Kunle Olulode....

October 19, 2021 | PROJECTING THE ARCHIVE

Denis Villeneuve in Conversation

As Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve welcomes audiences to his version of the planet Arrakis – the setting for his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune (previously adapted for the screen...

October 19, 2021 | IN PERSON & PREVIEWS

Tokyo Story

Ozu described Tokyo Story as his ‘most melodramatic’ movie, an observation taken by most western commentators, dazzled by the director’s minimalist style and resolutely quotidian material, as ironi...

October 18, 2021 | JAPAN 2021
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Passport to Shame

One of those rare B-movies that manages to live up to or even exceed the lurid promise of its title and poster. It finds an (American) London cabbie on a dangerous mission to rescue an innocent Fre...

October 18, 2021 | EDGAR WRIGHT’S LONDON AFTER DARK

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