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2 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Pamela Hutchinson |Philip Strick |Brogan Morris
Roman Polanski’s ‘Apartment Trilogy’ includes some of the most unnerving urban portraits ever put on film. With the occult conspiracy of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and the bizarre delusions of The Tenant (1976), these films look at the modern city as a realm of intensely paranoid horror and psychological torment. Rosemary’s Baby takes place in New York and The Tenant is set in Paris, but the trilogy begins with 1965’s Repulsion, where the city in question is London.
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2 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Pamela Hutchinson |Philip Strick |Brogan Morris
Roman Polanski’s ‘Apartment Trilogy’ includes some of the most unnerving urban portraits ever put on film. With the occult conspiracy of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and the bizarre delusions of The Tenant (1976), these films look at the modern city as a realm of intensely paranoid horror and psychological torment. Rosemary’s Baby takes place in New York and The Tenant is set in Paris, but the trilogy begins with 1965’s Repulsion, where the city in question is London.
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3 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Strick |Brogan Morris |Joseph Fahim |Ros Cranston
Before it became a decades-spanning franchise, Philip Strick visited the set of Star Wars and spoke with the crew, including George Lucas. From our Summer 1976 issue. 5 June 2025The BFI Film on Film festival, which runs from 12 to 15 June at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX, will open with a screening of Star Wars (1977) from an original unfaded dye transfer IB Technicolor British release print.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David Parkinson |Craig Mann |Philip Strick |Juana Albina
Spoiler warning: This article gives away elements of the plotAndrea Arnold’s latest film is steered by a sense of wonder you don’t find in your typical family drama. The story of a young girl on the brink of coming of age navigating a hostile family life in north Kent, Bird is anything but one-dimensional. Throughout her career, Arnold has often been pigeonholed as a social realist. Although her skills as a director shine in social realism, reducing her to that label oversimplifies her talents.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David Parkinson |Craig Mann |Philip Strick |Lisa Kerrigan
Louis Feuillade is not an easy sell. A Catholic monarchist with a military background, he had championed bullfighting as a journalist before becoming a screenwriter at Gaumont. Here, he quickly rose to succeed Alice Guy-Blaché as artistic director in 1907 and transformed the company’s fortunes with a string of hit crime serials. Unpersuaded by the merits of stylistic experimentation, Feuillade was convinced that cinematic truth was best conveyed by melodrama.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Craig Mann |Philip Strick |Lisa Kerrigan |Lara Callaghan
It’s fair to say that the mainstream action film as it is typically thought of today – the kind of narratives in which musclebound action heroes single-handedly take on entire armies of bad guys – was forged during a particularly conservative period in American history. Following Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, the nation lurched to the right politically, socially, culturally and economically.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick Bradshaw |Kate Stables |Roger Luckhurst |Philip Strick
It’s a tale as old as the hills, the kind that international law says should have long been buried in them: ordinary people menaced on their land by raiding parties, invaders and occupiers waving weapons and new rules or expulsion orders.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Roger Luckhurst |Kate Stables |Philip Strick |Tony Rayns
The Pittsburgh Cycle of ten plays set in ten decades, by the African American playwright August Wilson (1945-2005), is a towering artistic record of the Black experience across the 20th century. In 2015 Denzel Washington announced that he would direct a film adaptation of Fences (1985), and co-produce films of the other nine. Fences came out in 2016, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (staged in 1984) in 2020.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kate Stables |Philip Strick |Tony Rayns |Guy Lodge
We’re going on a bear hunt. After two fine London-based Paddington films, this sweet but increasingly generic furry franchise has taken the predictable lure of an exotic location, and since we can’t go around it, we have to go through it. Paddington, now proud possessor of a blue British passport (his Chaplinesque photo-booth chaos the film’s only memorable slapstick) has been summoned to Peru with the Browns to comfort his Aunt Lucy in the Home for Aged Bears.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Strick |Juana Albina |David Parkinson |Craig Mann
Before the world knew what had hit it, our reporter Philip Strick visited the set of Ridley Scott’s answer to Star Wars, to discuss terror, smoke and the Alien Problem. From our Winter 1978/79 issue. 8 November 2024In the hottest days of last summer, they had constructed a labyrinth at Shepperton Studios, and deep inside it was Ridley Scott, compact, redbearded, in an Enigma jacket and an accent lightly recalling Tyne & Wear.
