-
3 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Sam Wigley |Alex Ramon |Michael Brooke
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwideMisericordia is the eccentric new comic murder drama from Alain Guiraudie, the French director best known for his humid 2013 cruising-ground thriller Stranger by the Lake. Like most of his films, it’s set in France’s rural south, where Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to his hometown to attend the funeral of the baker, a former boss.
-
4 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Alex Ramon |Sam Wigley |Michael Brooke |Carmen Gray
Between the Sex Pistols’ first live performance and Margaret Thatcher making history by defeating Edward Heath in the Conservative leadership contest to become the first female leader of a major UK political party, 1975 offered some clear indications of the contending cultural forces shaping British life.
-
1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Sam Wigley |Michael Brooke |Carmen Gray
Netflix’s harrowing incel drama, a tale of animals in a post-apocalyptic world, and a double dose of Kurosawa. What are you watching this weekend? 21 March 2025Where’s it on? NetflixGenerating huge buzz since it landed on Netflix last week, Adolescence is the harrowing new four-part drama co-created by Jack Thorne (This Is England) and actor Stephen Graham. Each episode offers a different angle on a horrific case in which a 13-year-old boy stands accused of murdering a female classmate.
-
1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Michael Brooke |Carmen Gray |Sam Wigley |Barry Levitt
The first-ever UK release of Peter Solan’s The Barnabáš Kos Case (1964), which has just been issued on Blu-ray, throws a spotlight on a still neglected but unimpeachably vital part of what is correctly called the Czechoslovak New Wave but too often casually abbreviated to ‘Czech New Wave’.
-
1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Sam Wigley |Michael Brooke |Adam Nayman |Jacob Heayes
Jacques Rivette’s 1971 film Out 1 (co-directed by Suzanne Schiffman) has played the longest of long games. It’s not only that it lasts 13 hours – always the first thing anybody mentions about it – or that, by comparison with his prolific nouvelle vague contemporaries, Rivette took a long time to get to this fourth feature (Godard and Chabrol had each signed more than 20 by 1971).
-
1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Michael Brooke |Adam Nayman |Jacob Heayes |Chloe Walker
Although Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925 to 2000) made 14 features, you’d never know it from what made it into British commercial distribution – just three theatrically (How to Be Loved, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Doll), and two subsequently on video (Saragossa, The Hourglass Sanatorium). Until the recent release of an expensive Blu-ray box set, distribution was similarly patchy in his native Poland, with only the French making comprehensive efforts at keeping the Has flame burning after his death.
-
Dec 6, 2024 | 
surfertoday.com | Michael Brooke
Detective Sarah Router stood at the city limits, staring at the peculiar sight before her.
Two identical cities, separated by a mere river, yet they couldn't be more different.
On the east bank lay Ridehaven, a thriving community with active teens skating down tree-lined streets and well-used skate parks.
Its school counselors reported remarkable improvements in student mental health, and local skateboard shops buzzed with energy.
-
Dec 4, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Duncan Wheeler |George Bass |Nick James |Michael Brooke
In the 2002 tragicomic faux western 800 Bullets, Basque filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia homes in on the life and fragmented family of an ageing stuntman in Almería who ekes out a living by recreating scenes from the mythical western films in which he once participated.
-
Dec 2, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Michael Brooke |Guy Maddin |Sam Wigley |Craig Mann
When Guy Maddin premiered his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), it seemed so impossibly weird and stylistically and thematically recondite that it might well have remained a one-off. Surely this couldn’t be the springboard for not just an entire career but an impressively prolific one, and in a very similar vein?
-
Sep 3, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Lillian Crawford |Michael Brooke |Sam Wigley |to Irma Vep
“All art is one, man, one,” Michael Powell wrote, defining his concept of the ‘composed’ film. It was an idea borne of Wagner’s application of the aesthetic idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’, translated by Brecht into ‘epic theatre’ and Powell into cinema: that is, the fusion of multiple art forms into a single whole. For example, music and image brought together as opera or ballet, and then heightened in cinema through editing and camerawork.
