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May 17, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Sam Wigley |David Parkinson |Georgina Guthrie
Twisting tales of growing pains, an urgent Italian classic and a cinematic page-turner. What are you watching this weekend? Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI SouthbankChildhood is messy, intense and unhygienic in Luna Carmoon’s striking directorial debut. Sometime in the 1970s, young Maria is being brought up by her loving but troubled mother (a wild-eyed performance from Hayley Squires), who has an obsessive compulsion for hoarding.
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May 16, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David Parkinson |Sam Wigley |Georgina Guthrie
A century ago, French artists and filmmakers showed the way towards a dreamlike, confrontational, nonsensical cinema, from The Seashell and the Clergyman to Un chien andalou. Chance was vital to both Dada and surrealism, and it was something of a happy accident that each movement’s flirtation with film happened in France in the 1920s. Paris had long been the world’s artistic capital, but ‘les années folles’ witnessed a cross-pollination across the artforms and a greater willingness to experiment.
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May 10, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Sam Wigley |Georgina Guthrie |Catherine Wheatley
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwideJosh O’Connor trades the tennis garms of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers for a grubby, Englishman-abroad white suit in this latest film from another Italian auteur: Happy as Lazzarro director Alice Rohrwacher. O’Connor plays a British archaeologist living in 1980s Tuscany who gets into the sub-rosa business of tomb-raiding for priceless Etruscan artefacts on behalf of an international smuggling network.
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May 9, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Georgina Guthrie |Matthew Thrift |David Parkinson |Sam Wigley
Screenwriter Colin Welland’s rallying cry “The British are coming!” on the night Chariots of Fire (1981) won a best picture Oscar was short lived. A perfect storm of bad luck and bad economics meant that for the UK’s film industry, things went – to use the enduring British expression – ‘tits up’. In 1980, only 31 British films were made – half that from the year before. This dropped to 24 in 1982.
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Apr 25, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Gayle Sequeira |Sam Wigley |Vic Pratt |Georgina Guthrie
What could go wrong? Ahead of the release of the new Ryan Gosling action comedy The Fall Guy, we look at movies that put stunt people centre stage – from Drive to Once upon a Time in Hollywood. 25 April 2024By Gayle SequeiraThe fact that few films have stunt performers as their protagonists might seem an unfair lot for cinema’s unsung heroes – those men and women who put their bodies on the line but whose faces are never seen.
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Sam Wigley |Vic Pratt |Georgina Guthrie
All You Need Is Death (2023)Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwideVIDEOIan Lynch of the Mercury Prize-nominated dark Irish folk band Lankum provides an appropriately ominous score to this inspired – if uninspiredly titled – horror film from director Paul Duane. It centres on two Alan Lomax-style ethnomusicologists who travel Ireland recording folk songs. One day, they hear tell of a woman who has had a song handed down to her through the generations over 1,000 years, but which has never been recorded.
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Vic Pratt |Georgina Guthrie |Sam Wigley
Do you remember the Children’s Film Foundation? It was one of the most fantastic British filmmaking initiatives of the 20th century, crafting hundreds of hours of high-quality, eclectic entertainment for the young – fabulous films shown at the cinema in the old days before TikTok. It began in the post-war period, decades before the internet was a gleam in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee – back when even television was a novelty.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Georgina Guthrie |Sam Wigley
If there’s one scene to help non-Catholics understand Catholic cinema, it’s Harvey Keitel’s titular Bad Lieutenant (1992) arguing with a colleague in a carpark after a coke binge. “The church is a racket.” “So what? Are you a Catholic?” “I’m a Catholic”, he says, staring the guy down. Unlike other denominations, where membership is built on personal decision and active participation, being Catholic isn’t necessarily spiritual, nor something you choose.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Sam Wigley |Georgina Guthrie
Alex Garland imagines a second American civil war, while a sweeping epic of the industrial revolution turns up for streaming. 12 April 2024By Sam WigleyWhere’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI IMAXCalifornia and Texas have entered into an (unlikely) alliance as the ‘Western Forces’ bent on bringing down a dictatorial US president (Nick Offerman) in this uncomfortably real-feeling near-future war movie from writer-director Alex Garland.
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Apr 11, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Georgina Guthrie |Sam Wigley |Matthew Thrift
With its potential for meta jokes and irony, the film-within-a-film concept (a kind of mise-en-abyme, as it’s known in academic circles) feels like a modern invention. In reality, the technique of placing an image within itself stretches back to medieval times, predating its notable appearance in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which famously features a play-within-a-play.
