TEST Programme Notes TEST

BFI Southbank

Pulp Fiction (30th Anniversary)

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. It looks like a tribute to Quentin Tarantino’s fast rise to fame that he has managed to draw quite such a varied crowd of names for ...

August 23, 2024 | RE-RELEASES

Kneecap

Deftly fusing the sublime with the ridiculous, this ketamine-fuelled adrenaline ride through the back streets of Belfast sees the most unlikely of figureheads propelled to the front of a movement t...

August 23, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Forbidden

+ intro by film critic Phuong Le Producer/director George King is a figure who has been unjustly neglected by British cinema historians. Often described as ‘King of the Quota Quickies’, he is gene...

August 22, 2024 | PROJECTING THE ARCHIVE

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!

+ Q&A with director Peter Lord ‘I loved pirate stories when I was a boy – particularly Treasure Island,’ says two-time Academy Award nominee Peter Lord, a co-founder of Aardman and the directo...

August 21, 2024 | IN PERSON & PREVIEWS

Koyaanisqatsi

A timely alert to how life on Earth is changing, Godfrey Reggio’s film was produced on a surprisingly small budget over many years, only to become an instant cult success. Philip Glass’s gorgeous...

August 19, 2024 | RELAXED SCREENING

The Fog of War
Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Morris’s Oscar-winning portrait of Robert S. McNamara, the former US Defence Secretary, who offers his thoughts on modern warfare, is both compelling and provocative. The director made great use of...

August 19, 2024 | SHIFTING LAYERS
THE FILM SCORES OF PHILIP GLASS

The Man from London

The extinction of the aesthetically and intellectually rigorous European art film has been predicted for so long (in the early 1980s, a Sight and Sound columnist called for the creation of a Societ...

August 18, 2024 | WILL HEAVEN FALL UPON US
A BÉLA TARR RETROSPECTIVE

Sátántangó

Béla Tarr is not a man for small talk. When our Zoom call connects, I begin by thanking him for his time and telling him I was pleased to have this opportunity – to which he replies that I shouldn’...

August 17, 2024 | WILL HEAVEN FALL UPON US
A BÉLA TARR RETROSPECTIVE

Lone Star

When an old skeleton with a sheriff’s badge is unearthed in a Texas border town, Sheriff Sam Deeds must investigate what could have happened to his predecessor. Examining racial violence, local leg...

August 16, 2024 | RE-RELEASES

The Philip Glass Effect

Join our special guests Richard Guérin from Philip Glass’s publishing company and record label, and author and journalist Eddi Fiegel for a richly illustrated discussion about the composer’s distin...

August 14, 2024 | SHIFTING LAYERS
THE FILM SCORES OF PHILIP GLASS

Henry Selick in Conversation

At the California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s, Henry Selick was one of the few students who attended both the Disney-centric character animation course and the one for experimental animation...

August 12, 2024 | IN PERSON & PREVIEWS

Coraline 15th Anniversary Screening (3D)

+ Q&A with director Henry Selick and actor Teri Hatcher The story of Coraline Jones and her adventure in the Other World is one that has crossed many avenues of storytelling – father to daught...

August 11, 2024 | IN PERSON & PREVIEWS

Sky Peals

Moin Hussain’s highly anticipated feature debut blends realist drama with a playful suggestion of otherworldly science-fiction. Adam works nightshifts at a motorway service station and lives a life...

August 9, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Ran

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. Akira Kurosawa often liked to draw on western literature for his material – Dostoevsky for The Idiot (1951), Gorky for The Lower De...

August 9, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Truman SHow

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Truman Burbank lives an unassuming small-town life, unaware that every movement in his life is anything but ordinary. His wife, his ...

August 8, 2024 | SHIFTING LAYERS
THE FILM SCORES OF PHILIP GLASS

Naqoyqatsi

The final part of Reggio and Glass’s visually rich symphonic trilogy concludes with a title that translates from the Hopi language as ‘life as war’. It depicts an interconnected world where nature ...

August 8, 2024 | SHIFTING LAYERS
THE FILM SCORES OF PHILIP GLASS

Isle of Dogs

Many auteur directors create films that seem to exist in pocket universes as self-contained, circumscribed and minutely thought-through as the virtual-reality environment of a computer game or the ...

August 7, 2024 | STOP MOTION
CELEBRATING HANDMADE ANIMATION
ON THE BIG SCREEN

Time of the Heathen

An erratic wanderer crosses paths with a young Black boy while walking through rural America. What begins as an American neorealist film soon evolves into a psychedelic Western, exploring the impac...

August 6, 2024 | RESTORED

ParaNorman

When a small town comes under siege by zombies, who can it call? ‘Norman!’ From Focus Features and LAIKA, the companies behind the Academy Award-nominated animated feature Coraline, comes the come...

August 5, 2024 | STOP MOTION
CELEBRATING HANDMADE ANIMATION
ON THE BIG SCREEN

The Old Dark House

‘We’ve lost our way, we’re somewhere in the Welsh mountains, it’s half past nine and I’m very sorry.’ The three characters we encounter at the beginning of James Whale’s 1932 film The Old Dark Hou...

August 5, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

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