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Jul 29, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Maha Albadrawi |Neil Young |Kristina Tarasova |Stephen Morgan
Sixty years old this year, Richard Lester’s musical comedy – in which The Beatles good-naturedly weather the storm of their early fame – helped establish the idea of a pop star persona. Through the Fab Four to Take That, One Direction and Taylor Swift, the lines between public and private, star and fan, reality and fantasy have been blurry ever since. 29 July 2024About halfway through A Hard Day’s Night (1964), George Harrison gets lost in a TV studio.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Neil Young |Kristina Tarasova |Stephen Morgan |Anne Billson
¡Que viva Kafka! On 3 June 2024, the 100th anniversary of his death, the Prague literary giant featured in one biopic playing in European cinemas – Judith Kaufmann and Georg Maas’ romantically oriented The Glory of Life. Meanwhile, cameras were rolling on another, Agnieszka Holland’s “kaleidoscopic mosaic” Franz, at Barrandov Studios on the outskirts of the city where he was born in 1883.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kristina Tarasova |Stephen Morgan |Anne Billson |Michael Brooke
The European leg of the streaming giant's biannual gathering took place in Rotterdam this year. Showcasing events by popular streamers like CDawgVA and Sweet_Anita, it captured and reflected the lives of Twitch’s 30 million users and highlighted the importance of archiving a ballooning sector of our screen culture. 23 July 2024“You’re making the Truman Show.
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Jul 22, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Stephen Morgan |David Thompson |Jez Stewart |Leigh Singer
The recent success of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and TV’s Reservation Dogs (2021 to 2023) has highlighted a growing appetite for Indigenous screen stories. But where Scorsese’s film confronted the brutality of white supremacy, it also struggled to shift its gaze away from settler perspectives. Likewise, while Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s TV series offers a refreshing comic take on ‘Rez’ life, it is still firmly rooted in the harsh realities of the contemporary First Nations experience.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
magdalene.co | Stephen Morgan
In former British colonies like Australia, cinema has historically played an important cultural role in legitimising the presence of settlers. And from its relatively modest beginnings in the late 1970s to today’s billboard-hogging blockbuster franchise, the Mad Max series occupies a lofty place in the pantheon of this kind of cinema. The latest film in the franchise, Furiosa, is the first to shift focus entirely away from the eponymous Max Rockatansky.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Dan Callahan |Ben Walters |Stephen Morgan
One of the defining British queer films of the 1990s, Beautiful Thing follows the coming-of-age story of two working-class young men realising that they are gay. Jamie (Glen Berry) is bullied at school for his increasingly obvious sexuality, while Ste (Scott Neal) is very much in denial about his growing feelings for his schoolmate.
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Mar 14, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Dan Callahan |Ben Walters |Stephen Morgan |Adam Scovell
Laura is more talked about than seen in the first quarter of the 1944 film that bears her name. She has supposedly been murdered, blown away by a shotgun at close range – the kind of blast that destroys a beautiful face beyond all recognition. Mainly, Laura exists as a painting in her apartment that hovers over the detective investigating her murder, a close-lipped type who soon develops a kind of obsession with the dead girl. But then she reappears… and who is she, exactly?
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Mar 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Ben Walters |Stephen Morgan |Adam Scovell |Paolo Taviani
The 38th edition of the London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival will platform inspiring and thoughtful stories of trans lives, including Elliot Page’s subtle family drama Close to You
and Levan Akin’s Istanbul-set Crossing. 12 March 2024By Ben WaltersAt this year’s BFI Flare, two special presentation screenings will explore aspects of the often complex dynamics between trans people and their families of origin. It’s a timely subject.
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Stephen Morgan |Adam Scovell |Paolo Taviani |Kelechi Anucha
Writing in the Guardian about Warwick Thornton’s 2009 debut feature, expatriate Australian pot-stirrer Germaine Greer suggested: “Some people say they don’t get Warwick Thornton’s film, Samson & Delilah. And some people who say they do get it, don’t.” Although criticised at the time, Greer did identify a significant undercurrent that would carry through all of Thornton’s subsequent work, which manages a consistent balance of the universal and the culturally specific.
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Jan 4, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Ian Christie |Neil Young |Kristina Tarasova |Stephen Morgan
Cinema has few martyrs today – perhaps fortunately. Although there are Chinese and Iranian film-makers who may be silenced by their overbearing governments, most censorship is no more than economic. But in the Russian Soviet era, filmmaking could be a life-threatening occupation, and no one exemplified this better than Sergei Parajanov, whose imprisonment and persecution attracted worldwide concern throughout the 1970s and early 80s.
