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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 7, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Tony Rayns |Philip Strick |Guy Lodge |Tony Rayns Festivals
Yeo Siew Hua asks intelligent questions about the effect of surveillance on the psyche in a brilliantly-cast mystery about a child’s disappearance. 5 November 2024It’s not possible to discuss Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes without revealing at least some of its secrets.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip Strick |Tony Rayns |Guy Lodge
Piece by Piece is the product – and ‘product’ is the right word – of a collaboration between a creator of slick, likeable music, a director of slick, likeable documentaries, and a slick, likeable toy brand. Pharrell has always had a remarkable knack for putting novel twists on forms by marrying elements in quirky, intuitive ways. This feature is the result of the application of his genius to film.
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Jun 14, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Davidson |Stephen Puddicombe |Tony Rayns |Katherine McLaughlin
From the moment Takashi Miike’s Audition premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in late 1999, it caused shockwaves in the horror genre. Europeans got their first look at it at Rotterdam in 2000, and mass walkouts were reported. Even quarter of a century on it’s lost none of its capacity to unsettle. It’s the definition of a ‘discomfort movie’ – a film whose squirm-inducing provocations linger long after the movie ends.
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Apr 22, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Alex Barrett |Carrie Rickey |Henry Miller |Tony Rayns
Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini caused scandal in both his life and work; his filmmaking was unorthodox and experimental; his interests adventurous and multifaceted. ‘Il miracolo’, from his two-story anthology film L’amore (1948), was denounced as blasphemous and banned in the US before the ban was overturned by the US Supreme Court. His high-profile extra-marital affairs with Swedish mega-star Ingrid Bergman and Indian screenwriter Sonali DasGupta triggered international outrage.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Henry Miller |Tony Rayns |Andrew Male |George Bass
From gothic elements to surreal satire and unexplained weirdness, the films of Lindsay Anderson were never only about getting “ordinary life” on screen. 17 April 2024By Henry K Miller“Print the legend.” The meaning of this famous line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), uttered by a newspaper editor, is that some untruths are necessary. Lindsay Anderson, a critic before he became the director of films including This Sporting Life (1963) and If….
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Apr 16, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Tony Rayns |Andrew Male |George Bass |Nick James
The young man who calls himself Utamaro (after the painter) is on the street, phoning the girlfriend he’s been living with, when he’s dumped. His reactions are nihilistic, macho and misogynistic. Moments later, across the street, he literally bumps into a young woman in a hurry, clutching a Doors LP, who says she’s being harassed by a pervert. Utamaro deliberately trips up the man pursuing her and is promptly arrested for abetting a shoplifter.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jonathan Romney |Adam Scovell |Tony Rayns |Ken Hollings
The director’s connection of The Zone of Interest to the war in Gaza has aroused controversy in Hollywood and beyond, and sparked debate around the right of Jews, in Israel and outside, to criticise that nation. 27 March 2024By Jonathan RomneyWhen it premiered in Cannes last May, it might have been possible to read Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest as straightforwardly a film about the Holocaust and the mindset of its perpetrators.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Geoff Andrew |Adam Scovell |Tony Rayns |Ken Hollings
Many of those filmgoers familiar with the work of the Spanish-Basque filmmaker Víctor Erice consider him one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers. To many others, however, his name means nothing whatsoever. The problem is one of visibility – in terms both of the man himself, who is unusually reclusive for an acclaimed filmmaker, and of his output.
