BFI
Tom Birchenough
The Storyville documentary strand must rank as one of the special glories of British television. As its opening titles unfold in different languages, we can only celebrate programmes that still give time to international stories, told in their own time, and allowing an eclectic, sometimes oblique view on their subjects. Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, a film by George Carey (pictured below), serves as a rallying cry to endorse exactly that.The “Mr Jones” of the title was a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, whose career in the 1930s and before took him to both Hitlerite Germany and Soviet Russia, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Bruce Lacey has had this unbelievable career,” says the Turner prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller. “His is an alternative version of British art history - people didn't seem to know that Bruce has intersected with British history. I felt he deserves to be looked at again." Deller has put his energies into a documentary, exhibition and film season, all celebrating this influential, but largely unsung and unique British artist.In the new documentary The Bruce Lacey Experience, Lacey himself says, “I’m a satirist or, to put it a crude way, a piss-taker. If I see something, I like to take the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Thirty years ago the British were coming. So cried Colin Welland rallyingly from the stage of the Academy Awards, having just accepted an Oscar for best screenplay. And now Chariots of Fire is coming again, twice. An energetic stage reincarnation has sprinted round the block at Hampstead Theatre and now jogs along to the Gielgud, where it will continue to leave barely a dry eye in the house. And then there is the film itself, out shortly for another turn on the red carpet in this Olympic season.Hugh Hudson (b 1936), debut director of the film, wizened producer of the play, has another Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Five and a half hours of documentaries about beer and pubs. The temptation is to stock up on pork scratchings and consume the whole lot in one session, but this wonderful, handsomely-restored two-disc set is best savoured in several sittings. There’s a paradox in the fact that thousands of pubs have closed in recent years but the rate of alcohol-related illness has soared. We’re now getting more smashed than ever, but we buy our booze from Tesco and drink ourselves senseless at home.Roll Out the Barrel will make all but the hardest-hearted drinker shed a tear for what’s been lost, namely the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
BOAC, BEA, and Britannia: the recent past is so near and yet so far. All have now disappeared from the national consciousness but, in these two DVDs, the flagship planes of the British Overseas Airways Corporation and British European Airways appear – in improbable colourways – bookending royal tours in stirring shots by British Pathé News or British Movietone as commissioned by the Central Office of Information, to be shown mostly abroad.So, too, the royal yacht sailing serenely into ports world wide, a safe haven and elegant entertainment venue for heads of state. The COI Collection Volume Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The bad taste left by The Black Panther lingers like a mouthful of cinders long after it’s been expelled from the DVD player. This latest entry in the BFI's Flipside series of rescued British film obscurities is the shocking adaptation of the story of British murderer and psychopath Donald Neilson, dubbed The Black Panther by the Seventies’ press. The film arrived in cinemas in 1978 within months of Neilson's conviction and was swiftly banned by local authorities concerned it was a gratuitous cash-in.It opens with Neilson preparing for crime. Ex-army, with a head full of the sound of marching Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the golden age of the movies that was 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful must have seemed quite a radical attack on the industry. A gorgeous opening sequence suggests that we are to be treated to an unadulterated love letter to the pictures: the camera moves in on a director perched on a huge boom (pictured below) as he swoops down on an intimate scene featuring a prone young actress in a lowcut gown. Then comes a phone call which, when he hears the name, the director refuses to take. The caller, we learn, is Tinseltown’s hottest hotshot producer, now fallen on lean times. A director needs a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Launched to the press today with an hour-long presentation and Hitchcockian lunch, the British Film Institute proudly unveiled a fittingly hefty programme of screenings, events, exhibitions and publications celebrating the work of Alfred Hitchcock - inarguably Britain’s most iconic and influential film director. Hailing from London’s East End, Hitchcock worked in the British film industry for two decades before signing a deal with David O. Selznick and decamping to Hollywood, where he continued to go from strength to strength with films such as Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo.The BFI’s Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A couple of years ago a retrospective season for the BFI sought to reflect the filmmaking renaissance across South America that started at the end of the 1990s, and simply hasn’t stopped. Freed from the shackles of dictatorship and economic hardship, a young generation of directors were producing some of the best films in the world. It was never going to be easy to choose just 20 to reflect that, but our task as curators would have been a lot easier if one country, Argentina, wasn’t producing quite so many wonderful films.The Argentine Film Festival, at London’s Ritzy this weekend, is a first Read more ...
ronald.bergan
For most film buffs, the name of director Vincente Minnelli immediately recalls the quintessence of the MGM musical of the 1940s and 1950s - a world of fantasy, brilliant colours, stylish décor and costumes in which Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance and sing. The name also evokes steamy dramas and civilised comedies such as Some Came Running and Father of the Bride. As the BFI launches a major season of his films this week, however, it's worth pondering whether there is more to his oeuvre than meets the eye. Could Minnelli make claim to being an auteur? Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional. These towering talents, it could be said, give the impression that opportunities for women behind the camera are at a high, rather than being persistently paltry. And so it’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The film is a series of very curious, strange and macabre unbelievable incidents,” said director Ken Russell of The Devils in 1971. "The point of the film really is the sinner who becomes a saint." The tribulations surrounding its release, still fresh in Russell's mind, could easily have been described as curious and strange too. The long-overdue arrival on DVD of his career landmark is important. The Devils is one of the most astonishing and powerful British films. Following Russell's death last year, its release now also serves as a posthumous tribute to the great auteur.Russell was Read more ...