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Feb 10, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Chloe Walker |Ryan Swen
Director Wim Wenders often made films about journeying. Famed for his distinctly more pessimistic, European take on the American road movie form, Wenders regularly looked at journeys heading nowhere in films such as Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). In the 1980s, Wenders’ cinema went decidedly more fantastical, notably his beautiful 1987 angel drama Wings of Desire. The journey here isn’t simply across autobahns and cities but to realms beyond the Earth.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Chloe Walker |Adam Scovell |Ryan Swen |Jasper Sharp
John Grisham had two careers before becoming one of the best-selling novelists in American history – first as a trial lawyer, and then as a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives. His intimate knowledge of the law and of the South helped power his remarkable writing career, which began in 1989 with A Time to Kill. There have been nearly 50 bestsellers since then, between them shifting over 300 million copies.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jez Stewart |Alex Barrett |Adam Scovell |Jan Asante
The evening of 13 January 1955 was bitterly cold with blustery snow. It was a hardy crowd that gathered at the Ritz cinema in London for the first UK showing of Animal Farm, a feature-length animated adaptation of George Orwell’s novella. The book was first published a decade previously, a political ‘fairy story’ of animals taking over a farm from its cruel human owner, only to succumb to worse treatment under the tyranny of rule by pigs.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Alex Barrett |Adam Scovell |Jan Asante |Alex Ramon
In the years since his death in 1968, an aura of austere Christianity has surrounded the reputation of the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, and his late masterpiece Ordet is central to this mystique. Premiered 70 years ago in January 1955, the film focuses on the rivalry between two Christian factions – the lively followers of Grundtvig (or “Glad Christians”, as Dreyer called them) and those of the dour Inner Mission (“the sour-faced ones”).
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Jan Asante |Alex Ramon |Josephine Botting
Richard Linklater’s ‘Before trilogy’ is concerned with walking and talking. Following many years in the lives of Parisian Céline (Julie Delpy) and American Jesse (Ethan Hawke), the three films show the ups and downs of a relationship as well as how such relationships interact with the exploration of places on foot.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Craig Mann |Adam Scovell |Lisa Kerrigan |Kevin Lyons
On 15 April 2022, former heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast on which it is not uncommon for guests to indulge in wild conspiracy theories. In keeping with the show’s reputation, Tyson shared an earnest belief that someone, somewhere has hunted a human being for sport – and, specifically, that a cabal of powerful elites regularly kidnap the vulnerable, traffic them to isolated locales and prey on them like animals.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Lisa Kerrigan |Kevin Lyons |Jacob Heayes
Part of a golden age of (often landscape-infused) adventure tales published for younger readers, Richard Adams’ 1972 novel Watership Down defined many a 1970s childhood in Britain. But Martin Rosen’s subsequent film adaptation of it in 1978 arguably terrified the same generation as much as it thrilled it, with a notoriously dark, occasionally violent, saga realised through innovative animation.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jacob Heayes |Adam Scovell |Lisa Kerrigan |Kevin Lyons
“Rise and shine, Mr Freeman.” Half-Life 2 players are first greeted not with a tutorial nor text, but with a command and a piercing gaze. As far as overtures go, the opening minute of Valve’s legendary game more closely evokes the uncanny horror of Bergman’s Persona (1966) than the pleasantries of Super Mario Bros. Opening with such a suffocating close-up doubles as a declaration of intent on developer Valve’s part: you are not a spectator of this world but a participant.
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Oct 31, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Tim Lucas |Adam Scovell |George Bass
Just because people don’t like it and they have no use for it doesn’t mean it’s garbage!”Holly Woodlawn in Paul Morrissey’s Trash (1970)What is ‘trash cinema’? Ask a dozen people and you’ll get a dozen answers, but here’s my take on the subject. To be truly worthy of the adjective, trash movies should live up (or rather, down) to their adjective by embodying the very refuse of mainstream cinema.
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Oct 31, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |George Bass |Brogan Morris
Take a Halloween trip inside Dario Argento’s shop and museum: a treasure trove of esoteric books, comics, horror memorabilia and creepy recreations of film sets. 31 October 2024In 1989, Italian horror maestro Dario Argento founded his own horror memorabilia shop and museum, Profondo Rosso. Named after his brilliant 1975 film starring David Hemmings, the shop is an unusual cross between a Forbidden Planet emporium, a battered copy of the Fortean Times and a gloriously lurid giallo film.
