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Nov 14, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Guy Lodge |Kambole Campbell |Kate Stables |Roger Luckhurst
For a sequel so long in the works and so highly anticipated, there’s something surprisingly utilitarian about its title: Gladiator II, minus any prestigious-sounding subtitles, as if merely churned out onto a rather slow-moving factory conveyor belt. Ridley Scott continues to favour an unusual combination of colossal scale and minimal fuss.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kambole Campbell |Kate Stables |Roger Luckhurst |Kambole Campbell Festivals
An 11-year-old girl embarks on an emotional journey with an immortal ghost cat in Yamashita Nobuhiro and Kuno Yoko’s frenetic, style-switching animation. 12 November 2024Reviewed from the 2024 Tokyo International Film FestivalIt feels easy and perhaps reductive to draw a line between the countryside fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki and Ghost Cat Anzu.
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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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Oct 26, 2024 | 
ft.com | Roger Luckhurst
It’s a balmy Saturday afternoon in a meeting room above a pub, a stone’s throw from the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Samuel Thomas Davies |Kate Stables |Roger Luckhurst |Nick Bradshaw
In February 1961, the jazz singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach gatecrashed the UN Security Council to protest against the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first post-independence prime minister. In a decade of seismic protest, it’s an incident that might seem a fleeting early tremor.
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Paul Duane |Roger Luckhurst |Adam Scovell |Lou Thomas
The Outcasts, which tells the story of a ‘mad’ young woman in pre-famine Ireland who meets a feared shaman and has her powerful true nature revealed to her, is the great lost classic of Irish cinema. Combining gritty realism in its depiction of rural Irish poverty, sexual frankness and mythic grandeur, it had a tremendously powerful effect on Irish cinephiles of a certain age, myself included, but has been impossible to see in any decent form in the four decades since its release.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Pamela Hutchinson |Roger Luckhurst |Tom Charity
The prolific Korean auteur’s minimalist story centred around four untrained actors working on a skit may lack the visual inventiveness of his last two features, but the real beauty is in the performances. 19 August 2024Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film FestivalEven when working at his recent rate of two features per year, Hong Sangsoo still manages to surprise.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Chris Neilan |Roger Luckhurst |Tom Charity |Pamela Hutchinson
“It’s everyone’s responsibility, because we are all linked to this story.” Saint Helena, an isolated island a thousand miles from the coast of west Africa, a British colony since 1659 and Napoleon’s place of death, was for centuries accessible only by ship.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Pamela Hutchinson |Roger Luckhurst |Tom Charity
Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film FestivalAndy Warhol’s debut film Sleep (1963) captured his lover John Giorno slumbering for more than five hours. Now from Radu Jude comes Sleep #2, which is considerably shorter, but culled from a year’s worth of webcam footage of Warhol’s grave – here the subject also sleeps, according to a more finite, poetical definition. It’s a desktop film, as the digital artefacting and wandering watermark attest, but also an observational piece.
