BFI
Veronica Lee
We are in the far north of somewhere, where it's freezing and rains for most of the year. As if the weather isn’t bad enough, the sturdy Viking community of the island of Berk have a pest problem - not mice or foxes, but feral dragons who, with their huge talons and fiery breath, steal their sheep and set fire to their houses as they attack on a regular basis. The opening scenes of How to Train Your Dragon, presented by DreamWorks Animation SKG (Shrek, Madagascar) in 3D, which portrays such an attack, are certainly vivid.The story by Will Davies, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (Lilo & Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Soviet-era film director Sergei Paradjanov is a figure whose complicated biography has often overshadowed his innovative and distinctive cinematic style. The first full UK retrospective of his work at the British Film Institute on London's South Bank, marking the 20th anniversary of the director’s death, gives a chance to reassess the paradoxes of his heritage, and delight in a character whose rebellious passion for life and for artistic beauty brought him through some of the worst trials that the Soviet system could impose on an artist. Meanwhile, an exhibition of photographs by his long- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The huge upsurge in interest in the Austrian author Stefan Zweig continues at the BFI Southbank when Letter from an Unknown Woman is revived next week. Shot by Max Ophüls in 1948, it beautifully captures the spirit of Zweig’s post-Hapsburg, pre-Freudian Vienna, where bourgeois lives are fired by romantic ardour and obsessive longing.The novella on which it is based first appeared in 1922 and is published in this country in Selected Stories. It stars Louis Jourdan as a feckless concert pianist who, as he is about to leave Vienna to avoid a duel, hears from a woman (Joan Fontaine) who professes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nostalgists often hark back to a “golden age” of TV drama, referring to the likes of ITV’s Brideshead Revisited, or the BBC’s I Claudius or The Forsyte Saga. This week on the South Bank, the BFI launches a season which examines a lost age of a different kind, that of the radical TV dramatists who scorched across British screens from the mid-Sixties, through the Seventies and the Margaret Thatcher era, and finally into the ambiguous world of New Labour. The two-part season, United Kingdom!, stretches across November and December, and en route will take in such abrasive televisual benchmarks as Read more ...