Philip French

Apr 30, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Stuart Isaac Burnside |Chloe Walker |Pasquale Iannone |Philip French

Lost in the Wasteland? Getting your Pip-Boy’s muddled with your Ghouls? Here's an explainer of the world of Fallout, the post-apocalyptic TV sensation, spun off from Bethesda Game Studios’ video games. 30 April 2024By Stuart BurnsideThe Last of Us, Twisted Metal, and now Fallout – live action adaptations of post-apocalyptic video games are a hot commodity on streaming services. Fallout, the most recent, is based on Bethesda’s long-running role playing video game series of the same name.

Apr 30, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Chloe Walker |Pasquale Iannone |Philip French |Michael Balcon

This article gives away plot details of Rome, Open CityItalian neorealism was meant to be a genre populated by non-professional actors, but Anna Magnani was the exception that proved the rule. Despite her stardom, her bawdy ebullience, earthy intensity and resolute lack of glamour made her the perfect emblem for a cinematic movement centred around ordinary Italians dealing with the tough realities of life in the shadow of the Second World War.

Apr 25, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Pasquale Iannone |Stuart Isaac Burnside |Chloe Walker |Philip French

One glance at the bookshelf of volumes dedicated to Italian neorealism might lead us to assume that there is very little left to say about what Martin Scorsese has called “the most precious moment in film history”.

Aug 28, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | David Thompson |Carmen Gray |Philip French |Soham Gadre

In an unsurpassed era of cinematic scandals – think of The Devils (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1971) or La Grande Bouffe (1973) – the controversy provoked by Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore at the 1973 Cannes Festival might seem surprising. A self-styled ‘intimate epic’ shot in unadorned black and white, lasting over three and a half hours and set solely in dowdy Parisian apartments and cafés, the film portrayed a love triangle whose participants spend most of their time… talking.

Aug 21, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | Carmen Gray |Philip French |Soham Gadre |Jamie Dunn

Combining the inscrutability of arthouse with genre’s rushed pulse, German director Christian Petzold’s cinema plays out on borders, alert to the contested, slippery nature of time, place and identity. A leading figure of the so-called Berlin School, emerging in the 1990s with Angela Schanelec and Thomas Arslan, he makes intentionally modern films, yet ones full of ghosts. For nowhere does a nation feel more haunted by its past than Germany.