BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Ali

Chicago 1964. Soul singer Sam Cooke is belting out an ecstatic medley of his most popular songs to an excited crowd in a nightclub; outside, the young boxer then known as Cassius Clay is doing road...

April 6, 2026 | The Cinematic Life of Boxing

The Year of Living Dangerously

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Peter Weir has always been a filmmaker in the grand manner. In retrospect, this was clear as early as The Cars That Ate Paris, where...

April 4, 2026 | Finding Your Way
The Films of Peter Weir

When We Were Kings

Leon Gast’s 23-year odyssey in bringing When We Were Kings to the screen, and his fortuitous teaming with David Sonenberg, is a story with as many surprise turns as the events the movie documented....

April 4, 2026 | The Cinematic Life of Boxing

The Boxer

The screening on Tuesday 14 April will include a Q&A with boxer Barry McGuigan Whether they are stories of ferociously driven fighters who lose all sense of moral perspective in their drive t...

April 4, 2026 | The Cinematic Life of Boxing

The Truman Show

Film critics and preview audiences occasionally experience something extraordinary: they get to see a ﬁlm absolutely cold, before it is written about, discussed, excerpted and trailered into ubiqui...

April 3, 2026 | Finding Your Way
The Films of Peter Weir

Hold Me While I’m Naked, George Kuchar!

The incredible George Kuchar mixed with the cream of the American avant-garde while taking his inspiration from melodramas and B-movies. His camp, cheap films create feelings of joy, inclusivity, a...

April 3, 2026 | Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen

TwentyFourSeven

There is an extraordinary moment half way through Shane Meadows’ TwentyFourSeven. Darcy (Bob Hoskins), the thickset trainer at the boxing club, dresses up in a smart suit and takes his elderly aunt...

April 2, 2026 | The Cinematic Life of Boxing

Sins of the Fleshapoids

One million years into the future, human-looking androids known as Fleshapoids break into revolt when their masters become too lazy to service their needs and desires. A whole other universe is unc...

April 2, 2026 | Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen

Blood Feast

Violence, mayhem and murder most foul are the meat and gravy of American cinema, but if one man can be said to have added the ketchup it was Chicago-based filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis, originat...

April 2, 2026 | Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen

The Last Wave

Peter Weir on ‘The Last Wave’ David Gulpilil, the young aboriginal star, is familiar to American audiences as the star of Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout . How did you come to use him? It’s very difficu...

April 1, 2026 | Finding Your Way
The Films of Peter Weir

The Garden

This film was such an inspiration to me when I first saw it. It has a lot to do with what was coming out of the speakers. So much of it is shot silently on Super 8, so the sound had to be created f...

April 1, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Witness

When you get down to it, all Peter Weir’s films have been horror movies in disguise. Like the Harkers (Jonathan and Mina), Weir’s heroes have been simultaneously mesmerised and repelled by their va...

March 31, 2026 | Finding Your Way
The Films of Peter Weir

Multiple Maniacs

It’s no accident that Multiple Maniacs opens with a carnival barker. Transgressive spectacle is the name of the game in John Waters’s first feature-length talkie – though it’s curious to note, almo...

March 31, 2026 | Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen

Amélie

The French icon of 2001 is a small, slim young woman with bobbed hair and girlish clothes. Her name is Amélie Poulain. Played by the delightful Audrey Tautou, she is the heroine of France’s latest ...

March 31, 2026 | 25th Anniversary

Trash

At first sight Trash is unmistakably a very good film; re-seen, it has sections at least when it looks like a great film. What it takes on along the way is subtlety and density; far from being impr...

March 30, 2026 | Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen

Punishment Park

It took me a long time to realise quite how experimental the sound design on this film really is. Like all of Peter Watkins’ work, the sonic landscape is doing so much of the heavy lifting in creat...

March 30, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

The Cars That Ate Paris

Contemporary reviews Paris, Australia, that is: a small collection of shabby houses with a ministering church and hospital, somewhere amongst the scrubwood and winding roads of the outback. Once it...

March 30, 2026 | Finding Your Way
The Films of Peter Weir

Body and Soul

That Body and Soul is a seminal film is indisputable. The trouble with it as a seminal film is that it has disappeared into its accrued significance (its germinology?), a film of more context than ...

March 30, 2026 | The Cinematic Life of Boxing

Lawrence of Arabia

On Monday 10 December 1962, at the Odeon Leicester Square, filmgoers first watched Colonel T.E. Lawrence blow out a half-spent match and instantly transform the screen into a blazing red Arabian da...

March 14, 2026 | BFI Member Poll

Multicultural TV in Europe

+ intro by writer and researcher Momtaza Mehri Early explorations of multicultural TV looked at Europe, through the lens of interconnected forms of global oppression. Over time, focus on the lived...

March 13, 2026 | Constructed, Told, Spoken
A Counter-History of Britain on TV

TEST Programme Notes TEST

Ali