TEST Programme Notes TEST

BFI Southbank

Gladiator

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The Encyclopaedia Britannica imperiously dismisses the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius as ‘an historically overrated figur...

Alien

In 1977, a heavily revised script optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox entitled Alien went through the hands of several Hollywood directors. Peter Yates passed on it. Robert Aldrich passed on it. The ...

Black Rain

After discovering the Black Rain screenplay by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, Michael Douglas brought the project to producers Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, who had worked with him on the h...

Bad Education

Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, discover love, cinema and fear in a religious school at the start of the 60s. Father Manolo, the school principal and their literature teacher, is witness to and ...

Someone to Watch Over Me

Director Ridley Scott established himself as a filmmaker with an extraordinary eye for beauty in his first film The Duellists. With each subsequent film he has enhanced his reputation as one of the...

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Leslie Harris’ ultra-low-budget Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., a cautionary comedy about teenage pregnancy, opened in the US in Fe...

Good Morning, Boys!

Good Morning, Boys! was the first comedy Will Hay made with director Marcel Varnel and what was later to become his stock company of technicians and writers: Guest, Edgar, Crabtree, Vetchinsky and ...

American Gangster

The legend of heroin smuggler/family man/death dealer/civic leader Frank Lucas was first chronicled in a New York Magazine article by journalist Mark Jacobson. In 2000, executive producer Nicholas ...

A Good Year

Peter Mayle is a native Brit who abandoned a successful advertising career and reinvented himself as a best-selling author and novelist. He has been writing about the good life in the South of Fran...

Être et avoir

Nicolas Philibert on ‘Être et avoir’ In Spring 2000, I began thinking about a project about rural life, and I began my research by having meetings with farmers on the edge of bankruptcy… But, in t...

Electra Glide in Blue

‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult ...

White of the Eye

‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult ...

Central Station

In 1991 the renowned director Hector Babenco declared that ‘Brazilian cinema is dead’. Argentine-born, but a naturalised Brazilian citizen, Babenco was lamenting a calamitous turn of events for his...

A New Leaf

+ intro by Aga Baranowska, BFI Contextual Events Programmer Elaine May is nobody’s idea of obscure. This birdlike woman began pecking away at American mores in the 1950s as part of a hip, witty do...

Mishima - A Life in Four Chapters

‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult ...

The Wrong Arm of the Law

The set-up for The Wrong Arm of the Law is a familiar one, with comic thieves conflicting with an equally comic police force. Nevertheless, this is a genuinely imaginative film, upholding a brisk c...

Performance

‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult ...

Diva

‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult ...

Carnival of Souls

‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult ...

The American Friend

Faithful to the spirit if not the letter of Highsmith for most of its way, The American Friend suddenly ditches the novel and gallops cavalierly through a hundred-odd pages (more than a third of th...