BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Villain

Meet Vic Dakin, your everyday London businessman and murderous, sadistic gang leader: the sort of diamond geezer who would shake your hand prior to nailing your head to a passing milk float. Vic lo...

December 23, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

Exorcist II - The Heretic

Boorman’s follow-up to the Friedkin-Blatty hit was plagued by production problems and savaged by critics, but it has more going for it than its reputation suggests. Not least of which is Burton’s c...

December 19, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

True Lies

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Watching James Cameron’s films, I sometimes experience what I imagine the Lumières’ original audiences must have felt: a mixture of ...

December 17, 2025 | James Cameron

Nineteen Eighty-four

Burton was not first choice for the role of inscrutable Inner Party official O’Brien in Radford’s as-yet-unmatched adaptation of the totemic dystopian novel. Yet his casting opposite Hurt’s Winston...

December 15, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

Silent Sherlock - Three Classic Cases

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series, which was so popular it ran for 45 episodes, was sanctioned by Arthur Conan Doyle, who thoroughly approved of Eille Norwood as Holmes. This programme featu...

December 14, 2025 | Silent Cinema

The Cloud-Capped Star

The Cloud-Capped Star iconically represents the angst of the Partition and affective impacts of the resultant refugee crisis on women. In this film, Ritwik Ghatak politicised melodrama to embody th...

December 14, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Silences of the Palace

In its new year issue Time magazine listed the ten best movies of 1994. Predictably, Pulp Fiction was at number one. Less predictably, eight of the other nine were made outside the United States, t...

December 13, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Four Nights of a Dreamer

Robert Bresson on ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’ You first turned to Dostoevsky for A Gentle Creature and returned to him for White Nights , which you called Four Nights of a Dreamer . Why? It was pa...

December 13, 2025 | UK Premiere of 4K Restoration

The Terminator

Four decades ago, a filmmaker with one previous director credit to his name changed the face of science-fiction movies forever. James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) effortlessly blended the slashe...

December 7, 2025 | James Cameron

Look Back in Anger

A contemporary review Is Richard Burton too old for Jimmy? At the time I found his performance in Look Back in Anger so compelling that I did not question his physical suitability. And there is no ...

December 6, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

At Berkeley

‘Faculty meetings, generally speaking, are just awful. I’ve spent half my life in the United States government in meetings, and the other half in faculty meetings. And I can tell you, faculty meeti...

December 6, 2025 | Frederick Wiseman

Evolution

Lucile Hadzihalilovic on ‘Evolution’ Were you always going to set the film in and out of, or beside, the sea? No. It seems strange but in the beginning it was only the hospital – a hospital in a ...

December 4, 2025 | Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Tea and Sympathy

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away plot details for Tea and Sympathy and Home from the Hill (1960). Filmmakers David Siegel and Scott McGehee on ‘Tea and Sympathy’ Neither of us believe...

December 3, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Pillion

+ intro by Diana Cipriano, BFI Flare Programmer The coupling up of a six-foot-four Swedish sex god with Harry Potter bully boy Dudley Dursley may sound like a lurid work of fan fiction but that is...

December 3, 2025 | Seniors Paid Matinee

Innocence

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For her debut feature Lucile Hadzihalilovic has produced a film of distinctive aesthetic quality and mystery. Innocence charts a yea...

December 3, 2025 | Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Beyond Camp - The Queer Life and Afterlife of the Hollywood Melodrama

Old Hollywood ‘women’s pictures’ have been a part of queer culture for decades, with stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford still reigning as gay icons. Fassbinder, Almodóvar and Haynes have all ...

December 3, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Antonio das Mortes

Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes is surely one of the most astonishing films to come out of Brazil in the 1960s. A well-deserved Palme d’Or winner at Cannes in 1969, it starred Maurício do Valle ...

November 29, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Disgraced Monuments + 23rd August 2008

+ discussion with directors Laura Mulvey, Mark Lewis and Faysal Abdullah Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ essay film Statues Also Die (1953) infamously opens with the pronouncement: ‘When people di...

November 27, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Mephisto

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. It is helpful to know the historical background of Mephisto, and then perhaps as helpful to forget it. Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto a...

November 26, 2025 | Restored

Le Vent d’est

The cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal it, because the truth is not out there in the real world, waiting to be photographed. What the cinema can do is produce meanings, and meanings can only b...

November 24, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

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