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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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Nov 5, 2024 | 
msn.com | Jez Stewart
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Jez Stewart
For more than 40 years Emma Calder forged a distinctive career as an independent animator and producer, working in short film, music video and children’s television. Madame Potatoe, her 1983 graduation project from the Royal College of Art, was an installation featuring a potato-print animated film, a cookbook, T-shirts and a lifesize motorised sculpture of the character eating crisps and watching itself on TV.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Blake Simons |Leigh Singer |Josephine Botting |Jez Stewart
Amazon Prime’s new crime series Like a Dragon: Yakuza is a live-action adaptation of Sega’s cult video game franchise, which itself took some moves from the yakuza movies of Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike and more. 1 November 2024A man in a grey suit stands beneath the glowing red archway of a bustling street lined with stores, clubs, places to be. The man is stoic yakuza-of-the-people Kiryu Kazuma and the street is red light district Kamurochō, modelled on real-life Kabukichō, Tokyo.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Stuart Isaac Burnside |David Thompson |Jez Stewart |Leigh Singer
P.T. – 10 years of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro's horror micro-masterpieceA collaboration between two masters in their respective fields, P.T. paired the indelible creepiness of Guillermo del Toro’s darkest imaginings with the atmospheric wizardry of video game legend Hideo Kojima. Bold, brief and terrifying, P.T. elevated the indie horror genre and left a lasting mark on game design. 12 August 2024P.T. (2014)Kojima Productions
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Aug 2, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jez Stewart |Leigh Singer |Maha Albadrawi |Neil Young
Britain’s rich history of stop motion filmmaking stretches back to the earliest years of cinema. There is no clear origin point, but between roughly 1906 and 1908 a range of enterprising pioneers around the world began to adapt the internal workings of movie cameras to capture frames individually rather than in rapid-fire sequence.
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Jul 22, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Stephen Morgan |David Thompson |Jez Stewart |Leigh Singer
The recent success of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and TV’s Reservation Dogs (2021 to 2023) has highlighted a growing appetite for Indigenous screen stories. But where Scorsese’s film confronted the brutality of white supremacy, it also struggled to shift its gaze away from settler perspectives. Likewise, while Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s TV series offers a refreshing comic take on ‘Rez’ life, it is still firmly rooted in the harsh realities of the contemporary First Nations experience.
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Jun 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jonathan Romney |Jez Stewart |Adam Scovell |Kim Newman
One of the most celebrated and poignant scenes in Mad Men comes in the final episode of season one: meeting a delegation from Eastman Kodak, ad executive Don Draper pitches his proposed campaign for the company’s new slide projector. Don tells the Kodak people how a veteran copywriter once explained to him the concept of nostalgia: “It’s delicate, but potent… In Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound’.
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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.
