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Dec 2, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Michael Brooke |Guy Maddin |Sam Wigley |Craig Mann
When Guy Maddin premiered his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), it seemed so impossibly weird and stylistically and thematically recondite that it might well have remained a one-off. Surely this couldn’t be the springboard for not just an entire career but an impressively prolific one, and in a very similar vein?
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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 15, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Stuart Isaac Burnside |Juana Albina |David Parkinson |Craig Mann
In a 2020 interview with BAFTA following his receipt of the BAFTA Fellowship, celebrated game director Hideo Kojima reflected on the influence of the Rambo series on the Japanese games industry of the late 80s. “At the time, my company’s instruction was to, ‘Make a war game like that popular arcade game Rambo!’ But I was against that”, he reflected.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David Parkinson |Craig Mann |Philip Strick |Juana Albina
Spoiler warning: This article gives away elements of the plotAndrea Arnold’s latest film is steered by a sense of wonder you don’t find in your typical family drama. The story of a young girl on the brink of coming of age navigating a hostile family life in north Kent, Bird is anything but one-dimensional. Throughout her career, Arnold has often been pigeonholed as a social realist. Although her skills as a director shine in social realism, reducing her to that label oversimplifies her talents.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David Parkinson |Craig Mann |Philip Strick |Lisa Kerrigan
Louis Feuillade is not an easy sell. A Catholic monarchist with a military background, he had championed bullfighting as a journalist before becoming a screenwriter at Gaumont. Here, he quickly rose to succeed Alice Guy-Blaché as artistic director in 1907 and transformed the company’s fortunes with a string of hit crime serials. Unpersuaded by the merits of stylistic experimentation, Feuillade was convinced that cinematic truth was best conveyed by melodrama.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Craig Mann |Philip Strick |Lisa Kerrigan |Lara Callaghan
It’s fair to say that the mainstream action film as it is typically thought of today – the kind of narratives in which musclebound action heroes single-handedly take on entire armies of bad guys – was forged during a particularly conservative period in American history. Following Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, the nation lurched to the right politically, socially, culturally and economically.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Strick |Juana Albina |David Parkinson |Craig Mann
Before the world knew what had hit it, our reporter Philip Strick visited the set of Ridley Scott’s answer to Star Wars, to discuss terror, smoke and the Alien Problem. From our Winter 1978/79 issue. 8 November 2024In the hottest days of last summer, they had constructed a labyrinth at Shepperton Studios, and deep inside it was Ridley Scott, compact, redbearded, in an Enigma jacket and an accent lightly recalling Tyne & Wear.
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Jun 11, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jez Stewart |Adam Scovell |Kim Newman |Craig Mann
With Annecy International Animation Festival in full swing, and with just under a month before the deadline for applications to the BFI National Lottery Short Form Animation Fund, animation curator Jez Stewart looks back on some of the fund’s successes to date. 11 June 2024By Jez StewartBack in the 1990s, British animation was on a roll.
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Jun 10, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Kim Newman |Craig Mann
Ealing comedies often posses a dark streak. Though synonymous with a particularly English brand of warm, cosy humour, in fact several of them indulge in the blackest comedy. This is never more apparent than in Robert Hamer’s murderous classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, which first premiered 75 years ago on 13 June 1949.
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Jun 6, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kim Newman |Craig Mann |Adam Scovell |Soham Gadre
Writing in June 1999, Kim Newman saw The Matrix as a new, extravagant kind of 'virtual reality' cinema, more kung-fu than Cronenberg. “What’s the matter with you guys,” asked a straight bystander of an acid-hazed Peter Fonda in Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967), “isn’t the real world good enough for you?” Posed in a film today, that question would still be rhetorical, but the many layers of irony would be more onion-like still.
