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Apr 11, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick James |Jessica Kiang |Josephine Botting |Mar Diestro-Dópido
Kapadia’s heartbreaking documentary about Amy Winehouse presents a complex picture of someone who is both more canny and more intimidated than we could ever have imagined. From our July 2015 issue. 12 April 2024By Nick JamesThe scene is some ordinary flat-pack London lounge at the turn of this century. A petite but gawky teenaged girl with flappy fingers – all fidgety overspill – is eyeballing the lens of a videocam; there’s insistence and pleading in those eyes.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang |Josephine Botting |Mar Diestro-Dópido |Bruno Savill De Jong
Looking back at American cinema’s banner year, fifty years later10 April 2024By Jessica KiangIn April 1974 when Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation opened and Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul shuffled on to US screens wearing his perpetual plastic raincoat and his perpetual peevish frown, there had not yet been much evidence that this would be a particularly unusual year. Notable things happened – in February, Bruce Balick and Robert L.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Josephine Botting |Mar Diestro-Dópido |Bruno Savill De Jong |Isabel Stevens
A woman desperately pursues a frenzied, dishevelled man along the banks of the Thames at Hammersmith. To shake her off, he pushes her roughly to the ground in front of a dilapidated riverside pub. The film is London-set noir Night and the City (1950) and burned-out spiv Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is running headlong to his death, while long-suffering girlfriend Mary Bristol, played by Gene Tierney, tries to hold him back. It was 1949, and Tierney’s career had flourished over the decade.
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Sep 28, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Concannon |Pamela Hutchinson |Mar Diestro-Dópido
Craig Gillespie’s uninspired account of the 2021 GameStop phenomenon, in which the company’s artificially inflated share price caused major problems for hedge funds, is fatally lacking in insight and imagination. 28 September 2023By Philip ConcannonIn Wall Street parlance, ‘dumb money’ is a catch-all term for individual and amateur traders, whose investments pale in comparison to the billions managed by hedge funds and capital investment groups.
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Sep 28, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Concannon |Pamela Hutchinson |Mar Diestro-Dópido |Caitlin Quinlan
Tony Leung and Aaron Kwok star as crooked cops in Philip Yung’s entertaining, decades-spanning true-crime story where fascinating incidents in Hong Kong’s history are skimmed over too quickly. 28 September 2023By Philip ConcannonNews, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. Where the Wind Blows has not had a straightforward path to the big screen.
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Sep 28, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Pamela Hutchinson |Mar Diestro-Dópido |Caitlin Quinlan |Lou Thomas
A landlord of a failing pub in County Durham befriends a Syrian refugee and attempts to quell tensions between their two communities in this sobering film that may well be Loach’s last. 28 September 2023By Pamela HutchinsonNews, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. Ken Loach, veteran of a formidable six-decade career in British film and television, has stated that The Old Oak may well be his last film.
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Sep 25, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Mar Diestro-Dópido |Elisabet Cabeza |Lou Thomas |Michael Brooke
Cowboy lovers reunite after 25 years in Almodóvar’s gloriously sumptuous queer ode to spaghetti westerns. 25 September 2023By Mar Diestro-DópidoNews, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. More than five decades ago, Almodóvar debuted with his short Dos putas, o historia de amor que termina en boda (1974) (Two Prostitutes, Or A Love Story that Ends up in Marriage).
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Sep 22, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Sara Merican |Mar Diestro-Dópido |Caitlin Quinlan |Lou Thomas
News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. Reviewed from the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Concrete Utopia feels like a blockbuster-level thought experiment about social organisation in an apocalypse: provocative, full of moral quandaries and at times conceptual to a fault. South Korea’s entry for the Academy Awards opens with an earthquake decimating almost all of Seoul and leaving a wake of rubble and dust.
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May 26, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Leigh Singer |Mar Diestro-Dópido |John Bleasdale |Jason Anderson
The Spanish auteur’s first feature in 30 years deals with the disappearance of a fictional actor who vanished during a film shoot, exploring themes of loss, grief and the exquisite power of cinema. 26 May 2023By Leigh Singer Reviewed from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Few filmmakers have such a hold on cineastes with such a slim body of work (three features, including one documentary, and a handful of acclaimed shorts) as Spain’s Víctor Erice.
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Feb 17, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Mar Diestro-Dópido
Very few filmmakers can have claimed Luis Buñuel as their mentor and friend. The Spanish surrealist even famously remarked that he wished he’d made Elisa, My Life (1977), one of Carlos Saura’s defining reflections on past and present, fiction and reality, remembering and forgetting.
