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Jan 16, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Josephine Botting |Jez Stewart |Michael Gray |Alex Barrett
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Anna Neagle was one of Britain’s most popular film stars. The peak of her fame came after World War II thanks to her pairing with Michael Wilding in a string of post-war musicals directed by her husband Herbert Wilcox, bringing her a huge and devoted audience. An all-round entertainer, she exuded a wholesome girl-next-door persona, although she and Wilcox were romantically involved long before he divorced his first wife.
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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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Sep 2, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Alex Barrett |Dylan Cave |Adam Scovell |Philip Kemp
Despite being the most prolific director at England’s beloved Ealing Studios, Basil Dearden is largely absent from history books – that is, when he’s not being damned with faint praise or outright savaged. Take this, for example, from David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: “[Dearden’s] proficiency was at the expense of inventiveness or artistic personality… His films are decent, empty, and plodding.” Ouch.
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Aug 7, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Richard Pickard |Lou Thomas |Alex Barrett |Richard Pickard Lists
For a generation of cinemagoers, the films of Tim Burton were a beginner’s guide to the notion of an auteur and a catalyst for lifelong film fandom. There is arguably no other body of work more effective in speaking to a style and a sense of the person sat in the director’s chair, with Burton’s ability to blend the gloomy and frightful with the whimsical, capturing imaginations for almost 40 years.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Geoff Andrew |Alex Davidson |Alex Barrett |Lou Thomas
As widely noted at the time, it was no great surprise when Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep won this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or. After all, since first appearing in the main Competition with Distant (Uzak, 2002), which carried off both the Grand Prix and the Best Actor prizes, he’d won most of the festival’s major awards.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Alex Davidson |Carmen Gray |Alex Barrett |Lou Thomas
Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin discusses his sensitive trans drama Crossing, which presents a transformative journey though Istanbul’s LGBTQ+ underground. 23 July 2024In Levan Akin’s powerful follow-up to And Then We Danced (2019), taciturn, middle-aged Georgian woman Lia (Mzia Arabuli) meets a disaffected teen, Achi (Lucas Kankava) as she tries to track down her niece, a trans woman named Tekla.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Alex Barrett |Lou Thomas |Georgia Korossi
Béla Tarr is not a man for small talk. When our Zoom call connects, I begin by thanking him for his time and telling him I was pleased to have this opportunity – to which he replies that I shouldn’t be too polite, but simply tell him what I want. The smile on his face betrays a cheerful mood, even as his words suggest we get straight down to business. So we do. The occasion of our conversation is the 30th anniversary of his magnum opus Sátántangó (1994).
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May 20, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Martyn Conterio |Adam Scovell |Ela Bittencourt |Alex Barrett
George Miller takes his time with projects. He’s directed only 12 theatrically released films in 45 years. At a glance, also, the work can look distinctly divided: dominated by an influential franchise (the Mad Max series), the remainder might seem less important. The Mad Max films – of which Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the fifth and latest – have earned him a place in the pantheon of modern greats; a maestro of metal-on-metal carnage and a consummate craftsman of spectacle.
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May 17, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Ela Bittencourt |Alex Barrett |Stephen Dalton
Sending Charles Dance on an exploration of London’s secret streets, Stephen Poliakoff’s directorial debut puts our writer in mind of the psychogeography movement and the urban conspiracy films of Jacques Rivette. 17 May 2024By Adam ScovellStephen Poliakoff’s directorial debut Hidden City (1987) explores London with an unusual level of psychogeographic curiosity.
