BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Girl Cut in Two

Claude Chabrol on ‘The Girl Cut in Two’ ‘A chaste film about perversion’ is Claude Chabrol’s description of his slyly amusing melodrama The Girl Cut in Two. His 56th feature tells the story of Gab...

October 3, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

The Bridesmaid

Claude Chabrol on ‘The Bridesmaid’ Your thrillers are always totally distinctive. How do you explain that? Generally, in thrillers, it’s the plot that keeps things moving. In my films, that’s not...

October 3, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

Pretty in Pink

Producer and writer John Hughes’ bittersweet tale, with a soundtrack that includes tracks by The Psychedelic Furs, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, INXS, Suzanne Vega and Orchestral Manoeuvres i...

October 2, 2026 | A Road Less Travelled
Harry Dean Stanton

La Cérémonie

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In recent years, Claude Chabrol’s films with the actress Isabelle Huppert have epitomised the best and worst of his work. Une affair...

October 1, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

King Rat

+ intro by Sarah Standing, Bryan Forbes’ daughter Bryan Forbes on ‘King Rat’ For an English director to make a film in Hollywood is a little like playing a Cup Final on an away ground. But everyon...

September 29, 2026 | Projecting the Archive
Bryan Forbes at 100

Shame

Steve McQueen on ‘Shame’ Where do you think the tipping point is between someone who is merely sexually promiscuous and somebody who is sexually addicted? When I first heard about the idea of sex...

September 24, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Paris Is Burning

Nearly 40 years after the release of Paris Is Burning (1990), Jennie Livingston’s beloved documentary exploring the LGBTQ+ underworld of New York’s ball culture, its reputation is stronger than eve...

September 23, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Queen at Sea

It’s not a theme to make audiences comfortable – nor filmmakers, nor actors. It takes seriousness, and nerves of steel, to attempt substantial dramas about old age and infirmity, especially about d...

September 21, 2026 | Seniors

Violette Nozière

‘I fell in love with Violette Nozière’ by Claude Chabrol One night in 1933, a girl of 18 began a long odyssey through the Bois de Vincennes in a bus. This was Violette Nozière. Until this night she...

September 20, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

Eden

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Mia Hansen-Løve’s elegiac descriptions of the ephemeral, will-o’-the-wisp experience of girlhood have earned her comparisons with So...

September 18, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Repo Man

Hugely divergent in tone, yet both made by exiled Europeans with an outsider’s perspective on their American location and featuring Robby Müller’s elegant cinematography, Repo Man and Paris, Texas ...

September 12, 2026 | A Road Less Travelled
Harry Dean Stanton

Lucky

John Carroll Lynch on ‘Lucky’ and Harry Dean Stanton Lucky is dominated by Harry Dean Stanton. Did you want him to play the lead from the start or did you consider any other actors? This material...

September 11, 2026 | A Road Less Travelled
Harry Dean Stanton

Wedding in Blood

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. If Chabrol is to be believed, Les Noces rouges is the last film of his Balzacian comédie humaine of French society in the middle twe...

September 10, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

Cruising

As a serial killer hunts down gay men in New York’s leather scene, Al Pacino’s naïve cop is sent undercover into an alien world of hyper-sexual debauchery. As he immerses himself in the anonymity o...

September 9, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Le Boucher

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Around the midpoint of Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher a schoolteacher, Mlle Hélène (Stéphane Audran), is conducting a party of her pupi...

September 9, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

Juste avant la nuit

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The bourgeoisie survives on guilty secrets and its own discreet charm; the masochist craves public humiliation as the ultimate affir...

September 8, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

Barcelona

+ intro by Ruby McGuigan, BFI Programme Development Manager Whit Stillman on ‘Barcelona’ Barcelona had its inception in 1983 – in Madrid. I was there playing the part of the obnoxious American dir...

September 7, 2026 | Seniors

The Missouri Breaks

Described by Philip French as ‘a rich, allusive movie, witty, tinged with tragedy, and beautifully lit in the style of paintings by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell,’ Arthur Penn’s story of c...

September 6, 2026 | A Road Less Travelled
Harry Dean Stanton

Les Biches

Even a film-crazy computer, fed with appropriate details of all 14 Chabrol features (and three sketches), from Le Beau Serge to La Route de Corinth, could hardly have come up with a more quintessen...

September 6, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

The Beast Must Die

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Que la bête meure may be Chabrol’s Iliad. It is, at least according to the description of that work given by the film’s protagonist ...

September 5, 2026 | Claude Chabrol
Elements of Crime

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