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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Concannon |David Parkinson |Josephine Botting |George Bass
What I love about watching Jaws now is that for all the technology that exists, which didn’t exist 50 years ago, there’s nothing new that’s been invented that makes moving that pneumatic shark on a sled any easier. It’s still as hard today as it was then. It’s all ‘in camera’, and to this day nobody has been able to really duplicate what was accomplished, even in the sequels.
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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | David Parkinson |Josephine Botting |George Bass |Pamela Hutchinson
It takes chops to steal a film from Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. But Derren Nesbitt – who turns 90 on 19 June – did exactly that in Brian G. Hutton’s film of Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare (1968). And he was only on screen for a fraction of the epic’s 155-minute running time. He had played Germans before, in The Blue Max (1965) and The Naked Runner (1967).
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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Josephine Botting Rarities |Josephine Botting |George Bass |Pamela Hutchinson
In September 1962, the Sunday Express reported on the presence of a fading Hollywood star in London. “Once he could not have stepped into a London street without being mobbed,” the article said. “Now at 8.30 on a busy morning in Oxford Street, no one pays the slightest attention to him. Who is he, this man with a beard who goes unnoticed in the crowd? He was once the greatest screen tough guy of them all.” The former ‘tough guy’ was Edward G.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Stuart Isaac Burnside |Anton Bitel |José Arroyo |Jose arroyo |Josephine Botting
How do you begin to discuss a video game as seminal as Pac-Man on its 45th anniversary? Pac-Man is a rare gaming beast that has managed to transcend its trappings to become something of a cultural shorthand for the medium of video games as a whole. Titles are rarely as impactful as Namco’s 1980 masterpiece, and the little circular hero shows no signs of retiring any time soon.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |José Arroyo |Jose arroyo |Josephine Botting |Carmen Gray
“Eeurgh, that was horrible!” says a schoolgirl during a class on cinematic presentations of World War II, complaining about Come and See (1985), Elem Klimov’s notoriously confronting story of Belarusian Holocaust. “Well maybe it was horrible,” responds her teacher Stuart Reeves (Stuart Laing), “but war is horrible.” This exchange, coming near the beginning of Thomas Clay’s debut feature The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), also neatly reflects the film’s initial reception.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Stephen Dalton |Josephine Botting |Katie Granger |Henry Barnes
A gritty rags-to-riches rock musical with a strikingly sour aftertaste, Slade in Flame was a surprisingly bleak cinematic star vehicle for West Midlands glam-pop crowd-pleasers Slade. The film was a box office flop in 1975, but some critics praised its depth and sophistication. Over the last two decades, director Richard Loncraine’s debut feature has earned a growing cult reputation as an unsung classic, a potent blend of tender lyricism and bruising cynicism.
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Mar 19, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kevin Harley |Emily Maskell |Josephine Botting
Throughout his career, Toronto-born film composer Howard Shore has combined mainstream reach with the modernist rigour and range of his influences. Educated at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, his inspirations have included Toru Takemitsu, Ornette Coleman, Nino Rota and John Cage. From 1969 to 1972 he played in jazz-fusion band Lighthouse, before flexing his repertory instincts as music director for Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1980.
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Feb 17, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Brogan Morris |Geoff Andrew |Josephine Botting
Explosions, lens flares and VFX galore... On his 60th birthday, explore Michael Bay's action-packed filmography to venture into an identifiable stylistic Bayhem. 17 February 2025To many critics and cinema connoisseurs in the 1990s through to the 2010s, no director represented all that was crass and ugly about Hollywood more than Michael Bay.
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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 7, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Jan Asante |Alex Ramon |Josephine Botting
Richard Linklater’s ‘Before trilogy’ is concerned with walking and talking. Following many years in the lives of Parisian Céline (Julie Delpy) and American Jesse (Ethan Hawke), the three films show the ups and downs of a relationship as well as how such relationships interact with the exploration of places on foot.
