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Jan 15, 2025 | 
mdpi.com | Mengyuan Wang |Richard Murphy |Ian Christie
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Jan 29, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Caroline Cassin |Pasquale Iannone |Brogan Morris |Ian Christie
Dorothy Arzner occupies a unique space in film history. Working her way up the ranks from screenwriter to editor, she eventually became – for a time – the only female director working within the Hollywood studio system. Her films offered audiences new approaches to storytelling. Her protagonists were snappy and headstrong, subverting traditional gender roles on a mission to determine their own identity.
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Jan 22, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Pasquale Iannone |Brogan Morris |Ian Christie |Leigh Singer
As youngsters, brothers Paolo (b. 1931) and Vittorio Taviani (1929 to 2018) – like so many aspiring filmmakers of their generation, both in Italy and abroad – were struck by the raw, unadorned neorealist cinema of Roberto Rossellini, director of films such as Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948).
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Jan 9, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Brogan Morris |Ian Christie |Leigh Singer |Rebecca Vick
“If you asked me specifically, ‘When you did 12 Angry Men, were you interested in the justice system?’ Absolutely not. I was interested in doing my first movie.” So says Sidney Lumet in the 2015 documentary By Sidney Lumet, though he is, surely, exaggerating. Over a 50-year filmmaking career, Lumet, with workmanlike regularity, turned his hand to a great number and variety of projects, but he returned most often to the subject of law and order.
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Jan 4, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Ian Christie |Neil Young |Kristina Tarasova |Stephen Morgan
Cinema has few martyrs today – perhaps fortunately. Although there are Chinese and Iranian film-makers who may be silenced by their overbearing governments, most censorship is no more than economic. But in the Russian Soviet era, filmmaking could be a life-threatening occupation, and no one exemplified this better than Sergei Parajanov, whose imprisonment and persecution attracted worldwide concern throughout the 1970s and early 80s.
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Nov 16, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Horne |Ian Christie |Rachel Pronger |Michael Brooke
News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. When I interviewed Martin Scorsese for the October issue of Sight and Sound about Killers of the Flower Moon, I took the opportunity to ask for his thoughts on Powell and Pressburger. He’s one of their most impassioned advocates, combining scholarly knowledge and a career-long creative engagement with their oeuvre both together and individually.
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Nov 8, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Mandeep Kaur-Lakhan |Kenneth Tynan |Ian Christie |Clive Nwonka
In the 75th year of the National Health Service, BFI assistant curator Mandeep Kaur-Lakhan looks at how shows from General Hospital to Casualty have helped to take the pulse of the nation. While the first NHS hospital was opened by Aneurin Bevan in Greater Manchester in 1948, it wasn’t until 1957 that audiences were first admitted on to the fictional wards of the hospital soap.
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Nov 6, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Ian Christie |Becca Voelcker |Mandeep Kaur-Lakhan |Kenneth Tynan
Was it the scandal of Peeping Tom’s critical reception that put an end to Michael Powell’s career as a major filmmaker? Judging by how often this is repeated, it’s widely believed as a convenient explanation for why one of Britain’s great filmmakers produced so little of substance after 1960, while his near contemporary, and former editor, David Lean was reaching the climax of his career.
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Oct 6, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Brogan Morris |Ian Christie |Leigh Singer
The phrase ‘instant cult’, like ‘instant classic’, involves a paradox, even an oxymoron. For if a film is to acquire cult status, it requires time and a special, typically repeat audience that keeps returning ritualistically to its place of worship. This is what makes terming a strand of new films ‘Cult’ such a brazen provocation.
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Sep 9, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Thomas Flew |Brogan Morris |Ian Christie |Leigh Singer
Poor Things is the most visually extravagant film Lanthimos has made so far, and creating the baroque world in which it takes place was a huge technical and imaginative challenge. 9 September 2023By Thomas FlewNews, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. Visiting the set of Poor Things in Hungary was a whirlwind journey from London to Lisbon to Paris, travelling in style by steamboat: a dizzying one-day itinerary.
