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Jul 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David Wilson |Anton Bitel |Sophia Satchell Baeza |Kim Newman
The Conversation begins, as did The Godfather, with a general viewpoint which gradually closes into a particular focus: a zoom which starts high above a crowded square and ends on the figure of a man eavesdropping on a couple walking round the square. From this very first shot the perspective of Coppola’s film is fixed almost entirely on this one figure, an intensely private man who lives by invading other people’s privacy.
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Jul 4, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Sophia Satchell Baeza |Kim Newman
The third chapter in Ti West’s X trilogy bleeds the franchise dry with a cynical giallo-esque 1980s-styled thriller starring Mia Goth as a porn actor trying to get her break in horror movies. 4 July 2024The only film genre simultaneously more morally censured – and more popular – than horror is porn. That censor-baiting sweet spot where sex and violence intersect has already been explored by Ti West’s 1970s-set X and its Great War prequel Pearl (both 2022).
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Jan 18, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kate Stables |Leila Latif |Kambole Campbell |Sophia Satchell Baeza
Get in, loser, we’re going to another fun, pink-hued, faintly-feminist feature. The much-memed millennial high-school comedy Mean Girls (2004) has been rebooted as part of Hollywood’s strange circular economy, which sends hit films to Broadway and beyond, then funnels them back onscreen, Hairspray style.
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Jan 18, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Leila Latif |Kambole Campbell |Sophia Satchell Baeza |Jason Anderson
There are plenty of reasons to hesitate before bringing a child into this world: financial, interpersonal, practical, ethical. But for millennia, even ‘end-of-days’ threats haven’t stopped many longed-for babies being born. People celebrated new life while accepting the likelihood of nuclear annihilation, and now, we coo at the tiny feet of newborns while simultaneously worrying about the climate crisis.
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Jan 11, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kambole Campbell |Kate Stables |Leila Latif |Sophia Satchell Baeza
You could throw a dart at a map of London, and near its landing find an example of the city’s erosion of social housing that’s not too far flung from the premise of The Kitchen.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Tom Milne |Kambole Campbell |Sophia Satchell Baeza |Jason Anderson
In an original Monthly Film Bulletin review of Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, critic Tom Milne argued that its protagonist has much to teach us about ‘the freakish systems on which civilisation is founded’.
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Nov 28, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Concannon |Kambole Campbell |Sophia Satchell Baeza |Jason Anderson
With a simple love story about two Finns navigating an increasingly impersonal and industrial age, Aki Kaurismäki has made his Modern Times. 28 November 2023By Philip ConcannonComing six years after Aki Kaurismäki announced his retirement from filmmaking, Fallen Leaves feels like a return to very familiar territory.
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Nov 2, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Stephanie Bunbury |Arjun Sajip |Rebecca Harrison |Sophia Satchell Baeza
Jessie Buckley plays Anna, a new trainer at the Love Institute, where couples are tested to find out whether they are really in love, in Christos Nikou’s satisfyingly strange romcom. 2 November 2023By Stephanie BunburyNews, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. Can we call it a romcom? Given that Christos Nikou’s new film is entirely about what it means to fall in love, it must be a sort of romance.
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Oct 24, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Rebecca Harrison |Sophia Satchell Baeza |Anne Billson |Catherine Wheatley
News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. As Get Out proved with such haunting precision back in 2017, cinematic horror tropes can offer an effective means of unearthing the disturbing quotidian realities of oppression. But, also starting life in 2017 – as a short story in The New Yorker – Cat Person unfortunately proves that generic conventions can undermine attempts to tell stories about power and identity, too.
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Oct 24, 2023 | 
bfi.org.uk | Sophia Satchell Baeza |Rebecca Harrison |Anne Billson |Catherine Wheatley
Though the central apian metaphor might be a little overdone, this study of an eight-year-old Basque child who begins to question their gender identity is distinguished by its warm naturalism and excellent performances. News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. The image of the beehive must be one of the hardest-working metaphors in Spanish culture.
