BFI
Creature review - Asif Kapadia shines light on a dark dance pieceFriday, 24 February 2023
Filmed ballets involve a different way of watching: you may know a piece well, but you aren’t used to staring into its lead dancers’ eyes as they perform their roles. Not all dancers give good close-up, either. But a new film by the Oscar-winning... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Ingmar Bergman Vol 4Tuesday, 21 February 2023
Another box-set from the BFI full of Bergman treasures, from core catalogue classics such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to less well-known films such as After the... Read more... |
Enys Men review - mystifying Seventies Cornish folk horrorThursday, 12 January 2023
Unlike the black and white Bait, Mark Jenkin’s highly acclaimed previous film, Enys Men (stone island in Cornish) is full of colour. Strange, saturated colour that doesn’t look quite real: a deep blue sea, a bright red raincoat, yellow gorse against... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Nil by MouthTuesday, 03 January 2023
Greg Urbanski, Gary Oldman’s long-term producing partner, tells us on the commentary track that no film company wanted to touch the script of Nil by Mouth. Oldman was riding high as an actor in 1996, renowned for his shape-shifting... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Ghost Stories for Christmas, Volume 1Sunday, 25 December 2022
The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series first consisted of eight short films broadcast between 1971 and 1978, five of which were adaptations of short stories by MR James.Shot on 16mm film instead of videotape, most were directed by documentary... Read more... |
Aftersun review - the last good timeFriday, 18 November 2022
The New York-based Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells's feature debut Aftersun is a sublime example of how an opaque style can be wedded to an ambiguous storytelling technique without cost to psychological truth. Though the movie is... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Ballad of Tam-LinFriday, 28 October 2022
The British folk horror wave of the late Sixties and early Seventies wasn’t impervious to American influence. Though Roddy McDowall (1928-98), the director of The Ballad of Tam-Lin (1970), was born in Herne Hill, he was as Hollywood-steeped as its... Read more... |
London Film Festival 2022 - the winners and the losersFriday, 21 October 2022
The London Film Festival ended with the announcement of assorted prizes, all well-deserved. My colleague Demetrios Matheou has already written here about the Chilean political thriller, 1976, which won Best First Feature, and we’ll be writing... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Ingmar Bergman Vol 3Tuesday, 18 October 2022
The release of each box-set in the BFI’s Blu-ray four-volume collection of Ingmar Bergman films is a delight. Volume 3 provides some of the Swedish master’s essential works.Most of them are as dark as they come. The Scandi Noir that has... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Kuhle WampeTuesday, 20 September 2022
Kuhle Wampe is a fascinating curio, a blend of documentary, social realist drama and political debate which so bothered the German authorities upon its release in 1932 that they promptly banned it. The censorship board’s justification condemned the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Get CarterTuesday, 26 July 2022
Director Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) has been praised as the best British gangster film. I would go even further, and put it up against the best gangster films of all time, on the same level as Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Melville’s Le... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Soft SkinSunday, 19 June 2022
The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules et Jim (1962) established François Truffaut as an outstanding and original director. His next film, The Soft Skin (La peau douce) from 1964, was not in the same league.Although it displays many of his story-telling... Read more... |
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