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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick James |Nicolas Rapold |Jessica Kiang |Sam Wigley
A swimmer floats on her back off Copacabana Beach as a helicopter flies above. She is Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), whose five children are playing beach volleyball while a stray dog keeps interfering. The family’s blissful life of affection and closeness is signalled by the children’s adoption of the dog, agreed to by their easy-going, burly engineer father Rubens (Selton Mello), the figure on whom, at first, the film centres.
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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.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Strick |Guy Lodge |Jessica Kiang |Nick James
“One gasps one's way through Point Break, partly in admiration, partly in shock, often because time to breathe appears limited,” wrote our critic upon the initial release of Kathryn Bigelow’s adrenaline-fuelled game of cat-and-mouse.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Guy Lodge |Jessica Kiang |Nick James |Nick Bradshaw
Back in the mid-Nineties, when Hollywood’s John Grisham adaptation mill was ravenously working through elder-statesman filmmakers like Coppola, Altman, Pollack and Pakula, the newly Oscar-crowned Clint Eastwood looked a good candidate for one. Instead, he saddled himself to a far zanier legal drama, the queer Southern Gothic curate’s egg Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1998), an ill-suited experiment that swiftly sank from memory.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick James Festivals |Nick James |Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang
High in the Italian Alps in 1944, village life subsists in precarious isolation from the war but follows the grooves of ingrained tradition. The family of grey-haired school teacher Cesare Graziadei (Tommaso Ragno) runs to nine children with a 10th on the way, despite each new addition threatening their ability to feed themselves and further educate their children.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick Bradshaw |Nick James |Sophia Satchell-Baeza |Kelli Weston
Milisuthando Bongela was born and remembers a happy childhood in a Transkei, the first of white-run South Africa’s Black-assigned ‘homelands’ that was never recognised by most of the world. After apartheid and Transkei’s dissolution, she was one of the first Black children integrated into a mixed school in East London, South Africa, where she learned her inferiority in white eyes against the backdrop of Nelson Mandela’s grandfatherly coaxing of the would-be ‘rainbow nation’.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Cici Peng |Jessica Kiang |Nick James |Cici PengFestivals
Reviewed from the 2024 New York Film Festival When was the last time you looked up at the sky in search of stars? This is the question docu-fiction film Little, Big, and Far asks – not as a clichéd romantic ideal, but as an interrogative, political examination. Its protagonist, a 70-year-old Austrian astronomer named Karl, tells us: “People don’t care about the stars because they don’t see them.” Jem Cohen’s films are always concerned with ‘ways of seeing’.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Nick James |Chris Shields
“I have lost my faith,” says actor Tom (Adrian Pasdar), highlighting the line in the script (provisionally titled The Georgetown Project) that he holds in his hands. He walks through – indeed does a walkthrough of – a house that is also visibly a giant set on a soundstage. Reaching the upper floor’s bedroom, he shouts “I cast thee out, Molech!” and, looking at the script, summarises: “Then she barfs, she screams, and I die.” Moments later, under apparent supernatural assault, Tom does in fact die.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Jessica Kiang |Nick James |Nick Bradshaw
“I have lost my faith,” says actor Tom (Adrian Pasdar), highlighting the line in the script (provisionally titled The Georgetown Project) that he holds in his hands. He walks through – indeed does a walkthrough of – a house that is also visibly a giant set on a soundstage. Reaching the upper floor’s bedroom, he shouts “I cast thee out, Molech!” and, looking at the script, summarises: “Then she barfs, she screams, and I die.” Moments later, under apparent supernatural assault, Tom does in fact die.
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Jun 18, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick James |Chris Shields |Simran Hans
Inside Out (2015), Pixar’s best film of the last 15 years, built its story around a model of the human psyche that was both lucid and playful, centering on the interactions between five personified emotions – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – who direct the moods of its preteen protagonist Riley. The elegance of its premise was capped by the simplicity of its ending, in which Joy and Sadness learn to collaborate in shaping the girl’s inner life.
