Sight and Sound's annual round-up of the best films, as voted for by over 100 contributors, is as eclectic and unpredictable as it has ever been – reflecting a year of remarkable cinematic achievements, from arthouse blockbusters to small-scale heartbreakers. Read more

See notes for where films are ranked simultaneously.

1. All We Imagine as Light

   What could the cinema do for us, in a year as violent and divided as 2024? It’s a lot to ask of art to save the planet, but it can at least, we hope, inform and educate, broadening our collective horizons – a salve in an age of misinformation, culture wars and starkly polarised political debates. The international diversity of this year’s winners and their subject matter, chosen by a global pool of critics, gives a heartening sense of broadened horizons. Cinema has always been the fastest way to travel.

   Our worthy winner is a film about love, but one that takes a clear stance against Islamophobia and other religious, caste and class prejudices that constrict real people’s lives. For its maker, love can be “both a form of resistance against society, but also [a step] towards having choice for women”. Such a feminist message sits comfortably at the top of this year’s poll. There are more female than male directors in the top ten, a feat that has only happened once before, in the pandemic year of 2020, when there were seven women listed – this year finds six.

   — Pamela Hutchinson

2. Anora
3. La Chimera
4. Dahomey
5. Hard Truths
6. Caught by the Tides
7. Love Lies Bleeding

   Joint 7th

8. The Substance

   Joint 7th

9. No Other Land
10. Nickel Boys

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Want more? Check out bfi.org.uk

Think something is missing? Comment below!

• The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
• The 47 Ronin
• 48 Hrs.
• The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter
• The Adventures of Robin Hood
• Akira
• Aliens
• Antonio das Mortes
• The Assassin
• Assault on Precinct 13

...plus 213 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

We are proud to support bold and original storytellers, awarding National Lottery funding to champion powerful debuts as well as established filmmakers. This breath-taking list of UK films, shows the range of stories National Lottery funding has financed over the last 30 years.

• On Falling
• Santosh
• Sister Midnight
• Bird
• Grand Theft Hamlet
• Doppelgängers³
• Timestalker
• Edge of Summer
• Sebastian
• Layla

...plus 282 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The story of action cinema – year by year, blow by blow.

List curated by Henry Barnes, Anton Bitel, Kambole Campbell, Elena Lazic, David Morrison, Hayley Scanlon, Gayle Sequeira, Timon Singh, Lou Thomas, Matthew Thrift, Chloe Walker and Sam Wigley.

Read more.

• The Thief of Bagdad
• Battleship Potemkin
• The General
• The Kid Brother
• Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery
• The Flying Scotsman
• The Dawn Patrol
• The Public Enemy
• The Most Dangerous Game
• King Kong

...plus 91 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The BFI London Film Festival Surprise Film is always one of the hottest tickets of the year! Kicking off in 1985 with A Chorus Line, we've screened everything from future classics to Oscar winners and featured introductions from some of the biggest directors and stars. In 1996, we even had two surprise films!

Unless otherwise stated in the notes, the film date corresponds with the year the film screened at LFF.

• Saturday Night
• Ferrari
• The Menu
• C'mon C'mon
• Uncut Gems
• Green Book
• Lady Bird
• Sully
• Anomalisa
• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Want more?

Check out the following articles or Barry Keith Grant's BFI Screen Guides, 100 American Horror Films.
A great horror film from every year, from 1922 to now
10 great vampire films

• Longlegs
• The Substance
• I Saw the TV Glow
• When Evil Lurks
• Where the Devil Roams
• Abruptio
• Talk to Me
• Barbarian
• Skinamarink
• Nope

...plus 268 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

First launched in 2009, the BFI London Film Festival Official Competition showcases inspiring, inventive and distinctive international filmmaking.

• Memoir of a Snail
• Evil Does Not Exist
• Corsage
• Hit the Road
• Another Round
• Monos
• Joy
• Loveless
• Certain Women
• Chevalier

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Catch past festival winners at the BFI London Film Festival 2024. Taking place 9-20 Oct 2024 in London and across the UK.

Select List View to see the awards each film has won.

• All We Imagine as Light

  Cannes Film Festival 2024 (winner, Grand Prix)

• Anora

  Cannes Film Festival 2024 (winner, Palme d’Or)

• April

  Venice Film Festival 2024 (winner, Special Jury Prize)

• Bionico's Bachata

  SXSW 2024 (winner, Audience Award)

• Bird

  Cannes Film Festival 2024 (winner, Prix de la Citoyenneté)

• Chain Reactions

  Venice Film Festival 2024 (winner, Venice Classics Award for Best Documentary on Cinema)

• Dahomey

  Berlinale 2024 (winner, Golden Bear)

• Dragfox

  Yugo BAFTA Student Awards 2024 (winner, Jury Prize)

• Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

  Cannes Film Festival 2024 (winner, L'Oeil d'Or)

• Familiar Touch

  Venice Film Festival 2024 (winner, Luigi De Laurentiis for Debut Film and Orizzonti Best Director)

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

See future Oscar nominees on the big screen this October at the BFI London Film Festival. Taking place 9-20 Oct 2024 in London and across the UK.

Select List View to see the submitting countries for each film.

• Dahomey

  Senegal

• Emilia Pérez

  France

• Flow

  Latvia

• Grand Tour

  Portugal

• I’m Still Here

  Brazil

• Julie Keeps Quiet

  Belgium

• Santosh

  UK

• The Seed of the Sacred Fig

  Germany

• Shambhala

  Nepal

• Sujo

  Mexico

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

What are your favourite films about the Black British experience?

• Jemima + Johnny
• Pressure
• Black Joy
• Babylon
• Burning an Illusion
• Playing Away
• Young Soul Rebels
• Babymother
• Bullet Boy
• The Stuart Hall Project

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Everyone is invited!

Discover the world's best new films, series and immersive storytelling in London and around the UK 9-20 Oct.

Explore the line-up bfi.org.uk/lff

Creating your own LFF list or logging films watched during the Festival? Tag lff to share with us!

• Blitz
• Piece By Piece
• Elton John: Never Too Late
• Anora
• The Apprentice
• Bird
• Conclave
• Emilia Pérez
• Hard Truths
• Joy

...plus 208 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The films and television that shaped many facets of Starve Acre, Daniel Kokotajlo’s adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s acclaimed novel.

"This mix of cinema and television all have the uncanny ability to haunt and unsettle me. And yet they also bring a wry smile to my face. Each one is enshrouded by a distinct atmosphere, and lures you in with its charm while warning you of its danger. It’s the duality found in dark fantasy and folk horror that fascinates me — a time or place that beckons you to immerse yourself in its beauty, even as you sense its sinister agenda. It’s an incredible mood – a devilish place you can’t help but want to enter; folk horror is the hang-out horror movie. All of these films craft worlds of wild landscapes, ancient folklore and the fantastical, drawing you in with their hypnotic rhythm, only to gently sink their fangs into you… And when they do, you’re sort of okay with it, because you’re finally at one with your true nature."

Daniel Kokotajlo, filmmaker and season curator

Roots, Rituals and Phantasmagoria screens at BFI Southbank in September 2024. Starve Acre arrives in UK and Ireland cinemas on 6 Sep.

• Starve Acre
• Dead of Night
• Whistle and I'll Come to You
• Robin Redbreast
• A Warning to the Curious
• Don't Look Now
• Murrain
• Beasts: Baby
• Children of the Stones
• Eraserhead

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From restored film classics to new releases, we've released the following films in the UK and Ireland since 2018. How many have you seen?

In cinemas
Sky Peals
Starve Acre

Coming soon
All We Imagine As Light

• Starve Acre
• Sky Peals
• Ama Gloria
• Silver Haze
• Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet
• Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande
• The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
• Scala!!!
• Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer
• The Eternal Daughter

...plus 65 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Stop-motion animations, both short and feature length, that we wouldn't recommend watching with the children! Most titles have been given a BBFC rating of 12A or higher, or contain adult themes.

Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen continues until early Oct 2024 at BFI Southbank. Explore the programme!

• King Kong
• Dimensions of Dialogue
• Street of Crocodiles
• The Pied Piper
• Clothes
• Next
• Achilles
• Little Otik
• Peter & the Wolf
• Yours Truly

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

If it's weird, and forgotten, then it's Flipside.

BFI Flipside is dedicated to rediscovering the margins of British and Irish film, reclaiming a space for forgotten movies and filmmakers who would otherwise be in danger of disappearing from our screens forever. It is a home for cinematic oddities, offering everything from exploitation documentaries to B-movies, countercultural curios and obscure classics.

This list features all the titles that have been released on DVD or Blu-ray. Some titles have since been deactivated. Shop our Blu-ray collection.

• The Bed Sitting Room
• London in the Raw
• Primitive London
• Herostratus
• All the Right Noises
• Man of Violence
• Privilege
• That Kind of Girl
• Permissive
• The Pleasure Girls

...plus 38 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In the past, the BFI London Film Festival has not had a consistent policy on identifying a ‘closing night gala’ and programmers were often at great pains not to focus on one film above the rest of the programme. In some cases films are identified as the 'closing night film' but may have simply been last film in the festival screened at 11.15pm. Since the 1986 festival there has been clearly defined opening and closing film.

How many have you seen?

• Daisies

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1967

• if....

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1968

• Boy

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1969 (1/2)

• Sweet Hunters

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1969 (1/2)

• Quiet Days in Clichy

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1970

• Trafic

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1971

• Ludwig – Requiem for a Virgin King

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1973

• The Fierce One

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1974

• The Middleman

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1975

• The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

  BFI London Film Festival Closing Night film 1976

...plus 50 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Revenge, money, power and love. What else would you add?

Explore more at bfi.org.uk

• Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
• Sherlock Jr.
• Piccadilly
• Dragnet Girl
• The Maltese Falcon
• Murder, My Sweet
• The Postman Always Rings Twice
• It Always Rains on Sunday
• Obsession
• The Asphalt Jungle

...plus 57 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films mentioned by Martin Scorsese during his 90 minute interview with fellow filmmaker Edgar Wright.

The Screen Talk is available to watch on YouTube.

• Accattone
• The Bad and the Beautiful
• Before the Revolution
• The Big Heat
• Bomba, the Jungle Boy
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Faces
• The FBI Story
• Fists in the Pocket
• The Heiress

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Travel back through the years with our list of the opening night films of the BFI London Film Festival!

During its 66 years, LFF has not had a consistent policy on identifying an ‘opening night gala’ and programmers were often at great pains not to focus on one film above the rest of the programme. In some cases films are identified as ‘opening night’ but in subsequent years the film listed may just be the first film in the programme. From the 1986 festival onwards there is a clearly defined opening and closing film.

Check our lists for every closing night film and every surprise film!

• Throne of Blood
• H-8...
• A Midsummer's Night Dream
• The Love Game
• Lola
• The Elusive Corporal
• Funny Side of Life
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
• Loves of a Blonde
• The Shameless Old Lady

...plus 61 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From terrifying tales of vengeful female ghosts to haunting explorations of economic inequality, colonialism, xenophobia, geopolitics and gender dynamics, South Korean horror films have carved out a distinct niche in the global genre landscape.

Read more

• The Housemaid
• A Bloodthirsty Killer
• Suddenly in the Dark
• Whispering Corridors
• Phone
• A Tale of Two Sisters
• Into the Mirror
• Acacia
• R-Point
• The Red Shoes

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Most people are familiar with the ‘comfort movie’; the feel-good, film equivalent of comfort food. Viewing that is pleasurable, familiar or undemanding. Films that offer us precious escapism or a soothing balm from our own realities. But what about the films that make us feel bad?

Discomfort Movies, curated by Kim Sheehan, takes place at BFI Southbank from 1-31 July 2024.

What are your Discomfort Movies?

1-15 - Discomfort Movies programme
16-54 - Staff picks
55-150 - Your picks

1. Eraserhead
2. The Lost Weekend
3. They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
4. A Woman Under the Influence
5. Possession
6. Threads
7. Funny Games
8. Audition
9. Requiem for a Dream
10. Bug

...plus 140 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From our vantage point in 2024, we sit one quarter of the way through the 21st century. To acknowledge this milestone, Sight and Sound have enlisted the help of 25 critics, asking each to nominate a film that is significant within our cinematic era – the kind of film that could be put into a time capsule for the cinephiles of the 22nd century and beyond to marvel at, a movie that is both representative of and a high watermark of the years 2000 to 2024.

From the Sight and Sound Summer 2024 issue

• The Gleaners and I
• A.I. Artificial Intelligence
• Divine Intervention
• Oldboy
• Anatomy of Hell
• A History of Violence
• Inland Empire
• Unrelated
• La Rabbia di Pasolini
• Everyone Else

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Undead princesses, murderous mermaids and scarecrow-based folk horror. We place new supernatural drama A House in Jerusalem within the rich tapestry of horror and fantasy films from the Arab world. Read more

• A Thousand and One Nights
• Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
• Arouss el Nil
• The Lady of the Black Moons
• Ballad of Tara
• Tall Shadows of the Wind
• Fangs
• Pegasus
• Kindil
• Dachra

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Life after the end of the world doesn’t look pretty in these post-apocalypse films!

What else would you add?

• Things to Come
• La Jetée
• The War Game
• Planet of the Apes
• The Omega Man
• A Boy and His Dog
• Dawn of the Dead
• Stalker
• The Last Battle
• Threads

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Here are the pioneers, the iconoclasts, the brave - from landmark LGBTQIA+ portraits to the next generation of queer classics. Start streaming today on BFI Player.

• 20,000 Species of Bees
• Blue Jean
• Lonesome
• In from the Side
• Girl Picture
• Loving Highsmith
• Firebird
• Colors of Tobi
• Sweetheart
• The Man with the Answers

...plus 51 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

One of the most significant post-war developments in cinema, Italian neorealism rejected traditional cinematic canons.

Neorealism came to exist out of a moral necessity, following the urgency, as Cesare Zavattini, one of the movement’s architects, put it, to ‘find the hidden drama in everyday life’. When the subject of art becomes ordinary life, reality becomes spectacle.

This decisive decade is ripe for rediscovery; it’s been 80 years since Rossellini started work on Rome, Open City and 70 years since the ‘official’ end of the movement, yet it remains relevant to our current times in its ability to teach us the importance of freedom and to reinforce our capacity for compassion. - Giulia Saccogna, season curator

Chasing the Real: Italian Neorealism plays May-June 2024 at BFI Southbank.

The first three films on this list are considered as ‘proto-neo­realist’, with traces still remaining of the sentimentality that marked films of the fascist era, alongside the first manifestations of a new kind of cinema.

• Four Steps in the Clouds
• Ossessione
• The Children Are Watching Us
• Rome, Open City
• Shoeshine
• Paisan
• The Bandit
• Tragic Hunt
• Germany, Year Zero
• La Terra Trema

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From Oscar-winning British classics to Hollywood musicals and Westerns, from Soviet epics to Bollywood thrillers, Shakespeare has inspired an almost infinite variety of films. Directors as diverse as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann and Julie Taymor have transferred Shakespeare's plays from stage to screen with unforgettable results.

Explore the full selection in Daniel Rosenthal's 100 Shakespeare films.

• The Tempest
• The Life and Death of King Richard III
• Hamlet
• Othello
• Once Upon a Time
• The Jew of Mestri
• The Taming of the Shrew
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Romeo and Juliet
• As You Like It

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Meta is murder: Tie yourself in knots with these movies about fictional movies. Read more.

• The Cameraman
• Sullivan's Travels
• Singin' in the Rain
• Cléo from 5 to 7
• 8½
• Contempt
• Day for Night
• The State of Things
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• The Player

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

'Different rules apply when it gets this late, you know what I mean? It’s like, after hours.'

Stay up late watching these gems, all set over the course of one night. Read more.

• That Night's Wife
• Rope
• People in the Summer Night
• The Set-Up
• All Night Long
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Night of the Living Dead
• American Graffiti
• Assault on Precinct 13
• Mikey and Nicky

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From H.G. Wells to Philip K. Dick, the titans of sci-fi literature have been keeping filmmakers busy for decades.

• Metropolis
• Frankenstein
• The Invisible Man
• Things to Come
• The Thing from Another World
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Forbidden Planet
• The Time Machine
• Planet of the Apes
• 2001: A Space Odyssey

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Read more on bfi.org.uk

• Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
• Blood Quantum
• Broken Arrow
• Cheyenne Autumn
• Geronimo: An American Legend
• Killers of the Flower Moon
• Powwow Highway
• Prey
• Slash/Back
• Smoke Signals

All the films mentioned in the documentary Scala!!! Or, the incredibly strange rise and fall of the world’s wildest cinema and how it influenced a mixed-up generation of weirdos and misfits.

Available to watch now on BFI Player.

• Aguirre, the Wrath of God
• Alice
• Antonia and Jane
• Apocalypse Now
• Attack of the 50 Foot Woman
• Bad Taste
• Barbarella
• The Beast
• Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
• Blade Runner

...plus 114 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival showcases the best new queer cinema from around the globe.

The 38th edition of BFI Flare took place 13-24 March 2024 at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player. Explore the full line-up of features, shorts and events today!

• Layla

  2024 BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival Opening Night Gala

• Lady Like

  2024 BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival Closing Night Gala

• Close to You

  2024 BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival Special Presentation

• Crossing

  2024 BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival Special Presentation

• Aligned
• Incomplete
• Chasing Chasing Amy
• Isla's Way
• Lesvia
• Old Lesbians

...plus 89 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Few countries can rival the UK when it comes to making great and diverse queer films. This may come as a surprise from a country where male homosexuality was illegal until as recently as 1967, and where gay marriage continues to ruffle feathers. Yet despite their often taboo nature, films with queer characters have been around since the silent era.

• All of Us Strangers
• Femme
• Blue Jean
• In from the Side
• Benediction
• Rebel Dykes
• Sweetheart
• Ammonite
• The Favourite
• Tucked

  Watch on BFI Player

...plus 41 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The UK’s largest festival for young, emerging filmmakers, the BFI Future Film Festival 2024 returns 15-18 February.

This year’s festival will take place at BFI Southbank, online and in venues around the UK. Explore the full programme.

• 36,000 Words For Love
• All Up There
• And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil
• Anna McGee’s Wild Ride
• Appetite
• Are You Okay?
• Away from the Fields
• Bird Drone
• Blood from a Stone
• Cariad Brawdol

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

As more and more films are turned into stage shows, these stage versions are being turned back into movies. With Mean Girls and The Color Purple coming up, we chart a growing trend. Each musical in this list is preceded by the original film.

By Richard Pickard

• The Trapp Family
• The Sound of Music
• Nights of Cabiria
• Sweet Charity
• Smiles of a Summer Night
• A Little Night Music
• The Little Shop of Horrors
• Little Shop of Horrors
• The Producers
• The Producers

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Dark, twisted or just plain maverick, these are some of the 1980s’ most deliciously offbeat movies.

• Inferno
• Saturn 3
• Bad Timing
• City of the Living Dead
• The Night of the Hunted
• The Elephant Man
• Scanners
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne
• Burning an Illusion
• Fitzcarraldo

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From recent hits to cult classics, these are BFI Player subscribers' most watched films of 2023.

• Scrapper
• I Am Weekender
• Pretty Red Dress
• Name Me Lawand
• Love Life
• Blue Jean
• Godard Cinema
• LOLA
• The Beasts
• Chile '76

...plus 50 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Before Michael Mann’s Ferrari speeds into cinemas, we test drive some of its fiercest competitors in the car-racing movie stakes. Read more

• Kid Auto Races at Venice
• Speedway
• The Crowd Roars
• Speed
• Genevieve
• The Racers
• Red Line 7000
• Winning
• Le Mans
• Two-Lane Blacktop

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Sight and Sound's annual round-up of the best films, as voted for by over 100 contributors, is as eclectic and unpredictable as it has ever been – reflecting a year of remarkable cinematic achievements, from arthouse blockbusters to small-scale heartbreakers. Read more

See notes for where films are ranked simultaneously.

• Killers of the Flower Moon
• The Zone of Interest
• Past Lives
• Poor Things
• Barbie

  Joint 5th

• Oppenheimer

  Joint 5th

• Passages
• Anatomy of a Fall
• Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
• May December

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Drop your suggestions in the comments below!

• 2046
• 3 Godfathers
• 8 Women
• An Affair to Remember
• The Apartment
• Bad Santa
• Birdsong
• The Bishop's Wife
• Black Christmas
• Blast of Silence

...plus 94 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Tired of your usual Christmas viewing? Check out these festive films available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, BFI Player and elsewhere this December! Updated for 2023

• The Mistletoe Bough
• The Little Match Girl
• Santa's Workshop
• My Favorite Wife
• Meet John Doe
• The Curse of the Cat People
• Dead of Night
• A Guest Is Coming
• The Bishop's Wife
• Holiday Affair

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From The Shining to The Lobster, hotels on film are the perfect settings for crime, sex, farce, horror and all kinds of subterfuge. As The Eternal Daughter checks in to cinemas, we celebrate some of the most memorable! Read more

• Brief Encounter
• Key Largo
• Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
• Ashes and Diamonds
• Last Year at Marienbad
• The Silence
• The Graduate
• Death in Venice
• Daughters of Darkness
• What's Up, Doc?

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

BFI Facilities Coordinator Rhys White has kicked off spooky season with a list of his favourite British horror films!

How many have you seen? What else would you add?

• The Innocents
• Witchfinder General
• The Blood on Satan's Claw
• The Devils
• The Wicker Man
• The Appointment
• Born of Fire
• Hellraiser
• 28 Days Later
• Shaun of the Dead

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Everyone is invited to the 67th BFI London Film Festival!

Discover the best new films, series and immersive storytelling from around the world in cinemas across the UK 4-15 Oct. Tickets from £10. Explore the line-up bfi.org.uk/lff

Creating your own LFF list or logging films watched during the Festival? Tag lff to share with us!

• Saltburn
• The Kitchen
• One Life
• The Book of Clarence
• The Holdovers
• Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
• The Killer
• Killers of the Flower Moon
• Maestro
• The End We Start From

...plus 192 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Published in 2019, Barry Keith Grant's 100 Science Fiction Films is a comprehensive guide to sci-fi films, analysing and contextualising the most important examples of the genre.

See the biggest sci-fi classics from a century of cinema on the UK’s largest screen this Autumn.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• Aelita: Queen of Mars
• Alien
• Alphaville
• Altered States
• Avatar
• Back to the Future
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
• Blade Runner

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Celebrate 100 years of Disney at BFI Southbank this August.

• Treasure Island
• The Living Desert
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• Old Yeller
• Swiss Family Robinson
• The Absent-Minded Professor
• The Parent Trap
• Mary Poppins
• That Darn Cat!
• Blackbeard's Ghost

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Curated by programmer Grace Barber-Plentie, this list of provocative and playful films explores the relationship between queerness and crime.

Be Gay, Do Crime – a phrase that can seem intimidating to the uninitiated. While commonly known as an anarchist slogan to be shouted at protests or graffitied on buildings, these four words have in recent years become associated with the works of cult directors such as John Waters and Gregg Araki, who posit crime and anarchy as a form of resistance for queer characters. Rather than condoning crime, this season seeks to explore it.

Now playing at BFI Southbank.

• Dog Day Afternoon
• On Guard
• Bound
• My Brother the Devil
• The Devil Queen
• By Hook or by Crook
• Madame Satã
• The Bloodettes
• Fresh Kill
• Chocolate Babies

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

By any measure, Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most influential of all filmmakers, but where did he get his own inspiration from? Read more

• The Avenging Conscience
• Forbidden Fruit
• Lyman H. Howe's Famous Ride on a Runaway Train
• Destiny
• The Last Laugh
• Un Chien Andalou
• Bicycle Thieves
• Diabolique
• Peeping Tom
• Blow-Up

We've woven together a list of films inspired by the launch of Threads 🧶 What films would you add?

1. Mädchen in Uniform
2. Little Women
3. Paris Frills
4. Cinderella
5. Sleeping Beauty
6. West Side Story
7. The Sound of Music
8. Fiddler on the Roof
9. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
10. Carrie

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Everyone is invited to discover the world's best new films, series and immersive storytelling at the 68th BFI London Film Festival 9-20 October in London and around the UK.

Discover the line-up at bfi.org.uk/lff and starting building your watchlist!

Tickets from £10 on sale 17 September - BFI Members book early.

BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival is thrilled to announce a Screen Talk with the award-winning actor, writer, director, and producer Elliot Page, alongside a Special Presentation feature of Close to You, written and directed by BAFTA-winning Dominic Savage and starring, produced and co-written by Page.

BFI Flare will welcome Page onstage at BFI Southbank, on 15 March, to talk about his remarkable career and latest film Close to You, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Close to You receives its European premiere at BFI Flare as a Special Presentation feature on Thursday 14 March with Elliot Page, Hillary Baack and Dominic Savage in attendance.

Based on a story by Dominic Savage and Elliot Page, Close to You sees simmering apprehensions surround a family get-together, as Elliot Page’s Sam returns home for the first time since transitioning, in this highly collaborative feature. Sam moved to Toronto from his small town on Lake Ontario, Canada and finally decides to return home to visit his family for his dad’s birthday as the grown-up children are gathered back into the fold. On his journey, Sam has a chance encounter with a close friend from high school, Katherine (Hillary Baack) with whom he had lost touch, a moment that sparks old feelings. It is on this trip home where Sam can finally confront long-buried feelings, a first love that was never properly resolved, his relationship with his family, and a newfound love and confidence in himself.

Many in the LBGTQIA+ community will be familiar with the particular sense of dread that can come with such emotionally charged occasions. Although warmly welcomed, misgendering and misunderstandings are only a breath away. Close to You is an intensely naturalistic drama that’s become the hallmark of director Dominic Savage’s previous work Love + Hate and The Escape and most recently in the double BAFTA winning I Am Ruth starring Kate Winslet.

Close to You was produced by Krishnendu Majumdar and Richard Yee of Me + You Productions, along with Daniel Bekerman and Chris Yurkovich of Good Question Media in Canada. Savage and Page also produced after developing, conceiving and co-authoring the story together. Kindred Spirit co-financed the film, with Anita Gou and Sam Intili exec producing alongside Rolling Dice’s Nia Vazirani. Pageboy Productions’ Matt Jordan Smith, Andrew Frank and Francine Maisler also executive produced.

Elliot Page made his screen debut in Pit Pony (1997), followed by his feature debut in Marion Bridge (2002). But it was his standout performance in the provocative chamber thriller Hard Candy (2005), playing a teen who entraps a suspected sexual predator, that he scored his first international breakthrough. Page’s standout central performance in Juno (2007) was not only regarded as one of the best of the year, it saw him receive an Independent Spirit and Genie Award, and nominations for BAFTA, Oscar, Golden Globe and People’s Choice Awards. 

Further success came in Drew Barrymore’s roller derby comedy Whip It (2009) and as an aspiring dream architect in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). Subsequent appearances include Freeheld (2015) Tallulah (2016), and My Days of Mercy (2017). He hosted the documentary series Gaycation (2016 to 2017), earning two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Since 2019, Page has starred as a series regular in the globally successful Netflix series The Umbrella Academy, which is gearing up to launch its fourth and final season.  

Page directed the documentary There’s Something in the Water (2019), and with his production company Pageboy Productions, he develops and produces entertaining, original, and socially responsible stories.  

A New York Times and Sunday Times instant bestseller, Page’s memoir, Pageboy was published to international acclaim in 2023.

BFI Flare Festivals Event Manager, Darren Jones said: “We’re honoured to have Elliot Page join us this year at BFI Flare for this special Screen Talk and to present the European premiere of Close to You. It is exciting for us to introduce Flare audiences to this incredible film and welcome one of the most dynamic performers in contemporary cinema to BFI Flare to discuss his career and the creative process behind Close to You.”
Elliot Page said: “I am thrilled that UK audiences will be introduced to Close to You at BFI Flare. The experience of collaborating with Dominic, Hillary, and the whole team was magical, and I am honored to be a part of this film.”

Dominic Savage, Close to You director said: “I’m so excited that Close to You is having its European premiere at BFI Flare. It has been a real privilege to create this unique film about love, identity and family with Elliot Page and the incredible cast of actors. I’m looking forward to UK audiences feeling and appreciating the important themes and emotions that the film expresses.”

The full programme line up for BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival will be revealed on Tuesday 13 February at 11am. 

Part of the enduring majesty of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's cinema comes from their ability to undercut the prim and proper sensibility of war-time filmmaking with moments that are deeply strange, sometimes even disturbing.

In this video essay director Will Webb highlights scenes from Powell + Pressburger films - including The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I'm Going! and Black Narcissus - that tilt us off-balance, shaking what we thought we knew about the world's that one of cinema's greatest filmmaking partnerships created.

This video essay is part of an ongoing season celebrating Powell + Pressburger's work, Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger.

Writer-directors Alfonso Cuarón (Roma, Children of Men, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void, Love, Irreversible) talk about Cuarón's 3D sci-fi masterpiece, Gravity, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.

Writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years, Lean on Pete) attends the red carpet for his new film, All Of Us Strangers, a Headline Gala at the BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express.

All of Us Strangers stars Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal and is a superb and unsettling adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s book, Strangers.

How do you follow a kick-ass revisionist Western? By offering up a blistering take on the Gospels, of course! Director Jeymes Samuel brings his follow-up to The Harder They Fall to the BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express.

Unlike some members of the Jerusalem community in AD33, Clarence is not the most spiritual of citizens. Seemingly unmoved by Jesus Christ’s message of peace and brotherly love, Clarence sees a perfect window of opportunity to take advantage of a nascent celebrity culture. But at what cost to his eternal soul?

Following his kinetic, hugely enjoyable all-Black frontier action drama The Harder They Fall, Jeymes Samuel returns with the most original take on the story of Christ since Monty Python’s Life of Brian. And playing Clarence, LaKeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Judas and the Black Messiah, Sorry to Bother You) delivers a star performance cementing his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most compelling performers.

A work of huge ambition and style, The Book of Clarence wins hands down as the most punk, political, and hugely fun film you’ll see this year.

Writer-director Molly Manning Walker and actors Mia McKenna-Bruce, Shaun Thomas, Lara Peake and Samuel Bottomley talk about their startlingly frank film, about a wild teen holiday gone awry, which tackles thorny issues of coercion and consent head on.

The legendary director behind classics such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and The Wolf of Wall Street talks to fellow filmmaker Edgar Wright about his career.

It is impossible to talk about cinema over the last 50 years without mentioning Martin Scorsese. The world of film preservation is no less indebted to him, for his championing the medium’s rich and storied past.

As he unveils his latest opus, the epic historical drama Killers of the Flower Moon, the director explores a body of work that is as daring as it is beautiful, and ground-breaking as it is thrilling. From Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence and The Irishman, Martin Scorsese has investigated masculinity, honour, the tenets of faith and the forces that shape the world around us. He has done so with a virtuosity that is rarely short of breathtaking.

Three hot tickets from the Nordic selection at this year’s festival, including a reunion for Lukas Moodysson’s classic commune tale Together and a scorching Mediterranean noir.

By Sarah Lutton

Together 99 (Tillsammans 99)

What’s it about?

It’s 1999. Göran and Klasse – the two remaining, rather lonely, members of the once vibrant Swedish commune ‘Together’ – decide to host a reunion with their former collective friends. Needless to say, some 24 years down the line since the commune’s inception, time, money, success, mental health – you name it – have taken their toll on their ideals.

Who made it?

This is writer/director Lukas Moodysson’s eighth feature film. Moodysson’s first feature Fucking Åmal (aka Show Me Love) was an immediate indie hit in 1998, beloved by youth and adult audiences alike. Moodysson is one of Sweden’s most important and influential directors – his films have been recognised and celebrated internationally. His last major opus was the magnificent 12-part series Gösta (LFF 2019), and Together 99 is his first feature film since the riotous We Are the Best! in 2013.

What’s special about it?

One of the most enduring and moving features of Moodysson’s work is the love and empathy he exhibits in his quirky (and often flawed) characters. There’s a gorgeous sense of tenderness and hope in Together 99, and although many of the characters can be inconsistent, and even infuriating, Moodysson’s sensitive script and gentle humour ensure we get why they are how they are. 

The cast is overflowing with quirky charm, with notable turns from Clara Christiansson Drake (who was so marvellous as Saga in Gösta) bringing a grounding spirit and fresh modern edge to the ‘Together’ world, and David Dencik as the sweetest interloper you could ever hope to stumble into your world. This film is a sequel to Moodysson’s much-loved 1975-set Together (Tillsammans; LFF 2000) and there is much joy to be had in revisiting familiar faces and joining in the feelgood sadness that things can never be the same as they were. And, for those not yet familiar with that earlier film, there’s the huge delight of discovery of this warm-hearted, yet eyes-wide-open world.

See this if you like…

The Big Chill (1983), Together (2000), The Commune (2016)

Paradise Is Burning (Paradiset Brinner)

What’s it about?

Three sisters – Laura (16), Mira (12) and Steffi (7) – live ‘home alone’ in a small apartment on the poor side of town. The sisters haven’t seen their mother in months and have to rely on ever-more elaborate (and always fun) shoplifting scams to feed and clothe themselves. Life is actually pretty sweet – they spend their time hanging out with their friends and breaking into houses in the posh district to access their pools. But when Laura takes a call from social services demanding a meeting with their mother suddenly their ‘idyll’ of freedom is under threat.

Who made it?

This is Swedish director/co-writer Mika Gustafson’s first dramatic feature. She previously directed the award-winning documentary biopic Silvana about the uncompromising Swedish female rapper Silvana Imam. Gustafson co-wrote Paradise Burning with actor/writer Alexander Öhrstrand, who also has a small role in the film. Gustafson always knew she wanted to use non-professional actors in the main roles – she found Dilvin Asaad who plays Mira in a school, and spotted Safira Mossberg (Steffi) in a subway. It was Öhrstrand who found their lead Bianca Delbravo (Laura), when he heard her yelling into a mobile phone. The film is produced by Nima Yousefi, one Sweden’s most exciting producers, whose credits also include Clara Sola (LFF 2021).

What’s special about it?

Paradise Is Burning is a fresh and lovely celebration of sisterhood and female friendship. Gustafson captures beautiful, fleeting moments in the sisters’ lives with great clarity and lightness. Each of the sisters is on a cusp: Laura longs for romance or at least some kind of intimate connection; Mira is becoming a woman and is getting fed up with being bossed by Laura; Steffi’s no longer a baby and wants to hang out with her own friends. Music also plays an important part in the sisters’ lives: there’s dancing and some seriously competitive karaoke.

See this if you like…

Fucking Åmal (1998), American Honey (2016), Maya Nilo (Laura) (2022)

Shame on Dry Land (Syndabocken)

What’s it about?

This cunning, twisty thriller sees exiled conman Dimman arrive in Malta seeking forgiveness from his soon-to-be-married, ex-partner-in-crime Frederik. But there’s not much chance for absolution in the unflinching glare of the island’s scorching sun…

Who made it?

Shame on Dry Land is writer/director (and sometime actor) Axel Petersén’s fourth feature. His previous feature The Real Estate, which he wrote and co-directed with fellow Swede Måns Månsson premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018.

What’s special about it?

Petersén calls the film “a redemption drama stuck inside a Mediterranean noir” – there’s a real low-key, gumshoe feel to it, including a downbeat low-fi jazz score, which fits the mood of the film perfectly. Most scenarios are dedramatised, but punctuated to great effect with a few shocks. And, although it is a ‘thriller’, much of the film’s strength lies in what is held back. That said, watch out for a truly chilling crooner version of Cher’s ‘Do You Believe in Life After Love?’.

See this if you like…

Chinatown (1974), Blow Out (1981), Blue Ruin (2013)

The 67th BFI London Film Festival takes place 4-15 Oct. Tickets on sale now! bfi.org.uk/lff

Explore films for the young and young at heart at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival (4-15 October).

Deep Sea (3D)

Underneath the ocean lies a magical world, in a film of unrivalled beauty that combines the latest 3D animation with traditional Chinese ink-brush painting styles.

The Sacred Cave
La Grotte Sacree

This wonderful animated tale features a quest for an antidote to cure a king, but its success depends on overcoming magical obstacles.

Animated Shorts For Younger Audiences

This wonderful animated tale features a quest for an antidote to cure a king, but its success depends on overcoming magical obstacles.

Before Warp Films there was Warp Records, a Sheffield-born music label that made an immediate impact on British culture with their experimental electronic music. The name Warp was synonymous with low budgets, working quickly and spontaneously, and a fierce commitment to talented and innovative artists. Founding partners Rob Mitchell (who sadly died in 2001) and Steve Beckett, enlisting the help of producer Mark Herbert, founded Warp Films with the same pioneering principles.

Since then, Warp has played an essential part in energising and invigorating the resurgence of an increasingly vibrant and successful British cinema. With their films, like their music, they have brought what once was considered underground into the mainstream.

Warp Films quickly expanded in 2006 and set up Warp X, a sister company dedicated to digital, low-budget filmmaking driven by creativity and independence, established with the backing of a consortium of industry bodies. Employing Robin Gutch to produce six low-budget films in three years, Warp X redefined the industry rulebook for the way in which such productions could be approached in the UK.

Written to honour of Warp Films' 10th anniversary in 2013, here are some highlights from its first decade.

Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)

After winning a BAFTA for his debut short My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117, directed by Chris Morris and starring Paddy Considine, producer Mark Herbert – working out of his garden shed – encouraged Considine and director Shane Meadows to develop a feature film. The result was Dead Man’s Shoes, a brutal and unnerving fable that transposes the revenge sagas of westerns like Bad Day at Black Rock (1954), Hang ’em High (1968) and High Plains Drifter (1972) to the pastoral outskirts of the East Midlands.

Considine, who co-wrote the script, plays ex-squaddie Richard, returning to his hometown to punish a local gang for abusing and humiliating his younger brother, Anthony (Toby Kebbell). As they move through the village, Richard hunts down each member individually, while a series of flashback in grainy sepia reveals what happened to Anthony some years before.

Made on a shoestring budget, Meadows combines superbly gripping genre moviemaking with the social realist aesthetics of Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Alan Clarke. The commercial and critical success of Dead Man’s Shoes was crucial in allowing Warp to develop their next project, This Is England (2006).

This Is England (2006)

Much like the England that we saw in Alan Clarke’s pugilistic social realist drama Made in Britain (1983), Meadows’s and Warp’s next collaboration centres around a pack of skinheads in 1980s England. Set in the Nottinghamshire boondocks – where Meadows grew up – in his seventh film, and Warp’s second, both were demonstrating an attachment to the locality of small-town, working-class life.

This Is England begins on the last day of school, as 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), teased by bullies about his father’s death in the Falklands, discovers a sense of belonging that is missing at home by joining a skinhead gang. However, when National Front hard-case Combo (Stephen Graham) emerges from jail, the group become about more than dungarees, Ben Sherman shirts and Doc Martins.

The eventual and inevitable outbreaks of violence are earth-shattering. Unlike Dead Man’s Shoes, the violence has no direct or reasonable explanation beyond how youth had become susceptible to the extremist right in the years of Thatcher. The powerfully ambiguous final image, which captures Shaun on a beach, expressionlessly looking into the camera – an homage to the indelible freeze-frame that ends Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) – emphasises the haunted disenchantment of the era.

Although this is a violent film, and these are violent people, there are touching and occasionally funny moments, especially between Shaun and his girlfriend, Smell (Rosamund Hanson). Meadows remembers being young, and the humour and innocence of growing up, and calls upon it to power This Is England’s emotional impact. Such was the homegrown success of this new, invigorated brand of social realism, it spawned This Is England ’86 and ’88 (2010 and 2011 respectively), two three-hour TV series, also directed by Meadows and produced by Warp.

Four Lions (2010)

Chris Morris has gained a reputation as one of the most uncompromising satirists working in the British entertainment industry, and with Four Lions, he took on a typically controversial subject: a group of self-styled mujahideen bombers, hilariously plotting martyrdom from their terrace houses in Doncaster.

Teaming up with Peep Show scribes Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, Morris’s first feature film has little to do with ideology and everything to do with comedy. As he did in his satirical news programmes The Day Today and Brass Eye, Morris uses biting satire to expose the stupidity and petty disdain for authority endemic in terrorism.

While other production companies might have distanced themselves from the incendiary wit of Morris, Warp showed faith in his Dad’s Army vision of terrorism. They were rewarded with commercial and critical success, while Morris won the 2011 BAFTA award for outstanding debut film.

Submarine (2010)

Submarine, another directorial debut, this time from Chris Morris’s The IT Crowd co-star, Richard Ayoade, again shows Warp’s dedication to fostering new filmmaking talent. Based on the 2008 novel by Joe Dunthorne, this rudely updated Catcher in the Rye relocated to Swansea, is about fantastical, solipsistic 15-year-old schoolboy Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), whose chief concerns are trying to lose his virginity to his brusque girlfriend (Yasmin Paige) and keeping his parents from splitting up.

Ayoade absorbs the style of the French New Wave, Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry with distinctive visuals and deadpan humour, displaying the same maturity and confidence of his influences. Referencing Les Quatre Cents Coups explicitly, like This Is England, it captures the delicate moments of adolescence when idealism and truth collide. Stories of youth have played an important role in Warp’s own coming-of-age tale, and represent their commitment to independence, risk-taking and cultivating their own voice.

Tyrannosaur (2011)

A startlingly assured and emotionally devastating first feature film, written and directed by Dead Man’s Shoes star Paddy Considine – who, with appearances in Submarine and Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee (2009), is one of the stalwarts of Warp Films – Tyrannosaur revisits the interlocking themes of flawed friendship and male rage from Shane Meadows’ films.

As in Dog Altogether, Considine’s 2007 award-winning short, Peter Mullan plays lonely, rage-filled widower Joseph, who seeks refuge from his inner pain in a charity thrift store managed by committed Christian Hannah (Olivia Colman). Drawn together in a symbiosis of misery, they develop a mutually damaged relationship that offers the possibility of far-off redemption.

The first film on this list from Warp’s sister company Warp X, Tyrannosaur is an impassioned and unrelentingly bleak examination of abuse and rage – without the conciliatory poetic dimension Meadows, Lynne Ramsay or Andrea Arnold might offer – but is too viscerally affecting to subscribe to any obscure concept of British miserabilism.

Kill List (2011)

After his feature debut, Down Terrace (2009), Ben Wheatley was predictably compared to Mike Leigh for his uncannily precise suburban observations. His second film, Kill List, features the same semi-improvised dialogue, naturalistic performances and documentary style photography, but is more reminiscent of The Wicker Man (1973) or The Blair Witch Project (1999).

Eight months after a disastrous – and unexplained – job in Kiev left him physically and mentally scarred, ex-soldier turned contract killer Jay (Neil Maskell) is pressured by his former partner, Gal (Michael Smiley), into taking a new assignment. What starts as a harrowing portrait of male inner torture and domestic distress turns into an occult, ultra-violent nightmare, and one of the most genuinely disturbing British thrillers in years.
Wheatley is not content to wallow in cheap shock tactics. Instead, his film pulverises the senses with a haunting score and claustrophobic visuals that exceed the capacity of most big-budget productions.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

Totally original and all but unclassifiable, Berberian Sound Studio is a metafictional and metaphysical horror based almost entirely within a 1970s Italian sound studio. Toby Jones plays mousey sound engineer Gilderoy, who has taken a job away from home in Dorking to post-synch an unidentified giallo film.

Although director Peter Strickland riffs on the lurid, semi-erotic fantasies of Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, this is more of a persuasive study of breakdown – personal, professional and technological – from someone who is privy to the artifice and manipulation of horror movies yet incapable to resist their affective power: an intriguing metaphor for the filmmaker/viewer relationship.

Set almost entirely within the secretive indoor space of the sound studio – which draws comparison to Mark Lewis’s deathly screening room in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) – it’s more interior than most of Warp’s output, but creates the familiar feelings of claustrophobia and alienation that are present in the small towns of nearly all of Warp’s productions.

Like Warp Films itself, Berberian Sound Studio wants to recalibrate how we think about the movies, and create a world rich with the suggestive possibilities of the medium, taking inspiration from cinema history, exploring new ideas and altering the landscape of fiction.

By Chris Fennell

'Hey, what’s going on?'

'Nothing.'

'Not much?'

'Nothing at all.'

When Dazed and Confused opened in theatres 30 years ago, it arrived in the wake of a teen movie golden era defined by the likes of The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

But this John Hughes model, of upper-middle-class teens trying out rebellion and reinvention in a poppy, PG-13 suburbia, was the antithesis of what writer-director Richard Linklater had envisioned when he began developing his own high school film in the late 1980s.

Linklater didn’t want to see another teen drama where 'the girl gets pregnant and there’s a car crash and somebody dies', so he decided to make one about the largely uneventful small-town youth he remembered instead.

It wouldn’t deliver the instant sugar high that the popular high school movies of the previous decade had.

Following various intersecting groups of Austin teens on the last day and night of school for the students of Lee High, in May of ‘76, Dazed and Confused is never about anything more dramatic than its characters trying to organise a start-of-summer rager after the last one got busted.

Welcomed at first by polite reviews and half-empty theatres, a quarter-century on Linklater’s anti-drama is considered a landmark high school film.

Quentin Tarantino has dubbed it the ultimate ‘hangout movie’: a film you’ll return to ad infinitum because the experience is akin to catching up with old friends.

Dazed’s young boomers aren’t high school movie types. They can’t simply be reduced to 'a beauty, a jock, a rebel': nominal protagonist Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd (Jason London) is as at home with the jocks as he is with the burnouts.

So authentic are Linklater’s high schoolers that, even if you had caught Dazed back when then-fresh-faced cast members including Ben Affleck, Parker Posey and Matthew McConaughey were strangers to the audience, they still would have felt familiar.

It’s down to the anthropological script written by Linklater, ever the curious humanist, and his ensemble of hungry future stars. Cast chemistry was proof-tested on and off set, reshaping the film as it shot.

While Shawn Andrews and Milla Jovovich’s roles were reduced after Linklater saw they weren’t ‘gelling’ with the other actors, McConaughey’s natural bonhomie expanded his initial cameo as predatory space-age philosopher Wooderson into a fully-fledged supporting role.

In jettisoning the ‘pregnancies and car crashes’, Linklater gave his actors room to breathe as regular kids in regular situations. It’s in the ordinary, and not in the heightened drama that movies typically locate characters in, that Dazed and Confused finds its real people.
The film’s kinda-sequel, the less specific and more idealised college comedy Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), is almost the rose-tinted, everything-happens-in-one-weekend account of young adult life that Linklater wanted to avoid with Dazed.

Made 28 years and 18 films into Linklater’s filmmaking career, Everybody Wants Some!!, raucously entertaining though it is, comes precariously close to being middle-aged nostalgia for a never-been age. Dazed and Confused in contrast was made when Linklater was just 32, young enough for high school to be fresh in the memory and for his latest film to recall what being a teen was really like.

In Dazed and Confused, high schoolers are hyper, horny and perpetually anxious about a fast-approaching future.

Sometimes, they’re impossibly cool, strolling through pool halls in slo-mo as Bob Dylan blares on the soundtrack. More often, they’re a little lame (some of the mid-70s music tastes, clothes and attitudes are observed by Linklater with eyebrow firmly arched).
Mostly, though, they’re just bored. Two of Linklater’s touchstones on Dazed were the sobering American teen flicks Over the Edge (1979) and River’s Edge (1986). This being a Richard Linklater joint, Dazed is naturally a warmer film: with its reliably good-natured characters and marijuana-cured dialogue, it might actually be his most entertaining.
What Linklater took from those considerably more downbeat high school movies was the characters’ sense of longing, of waiting for something to happen.

Dazed and Confused’s high schoolers have fun, holding impromptu drag-races in their prized muscle cars and ‘welcoming’ freshmen in bizarre hazing rituals, but for the most part they drink, smoke and shoot the breeze in the anticipation of fun.

It takes skill for a filmmaker to make a deliberately constructed film feel this easy-going, especially when they’re making the leap from a $23,000 indie to a $6.9m studio movie. (Dazed and Confused’s opening and closing track, Aerosmith’s ‘Sweet Emotion’, alone cost four times the budget of Slacker, Linklater’s previous film.)

Even rarer is the ability to make a film so free of conflict and obvious drama compelling.
That Linklater ignores the Hitchcock maxim to keep the dull bits in is what sets Dazed and Confused apart from other high school movies. It’s also what makes the film feel so genuine.

In recalling the tedium of teenage as well as the glorious, sporadic highs, Linklater’s is an anti-high school movie that ironically gets about as close to a real high school experience as a film can.

By Brogan Morris

Across the past 15 years, Koji Fukada has steadily become one of the most celebrated independent filmmakers working in Japan. Many of his films are characterised by a family unit’s illusion of stability being completely overturned by one major event, which he has explored through very different tonal registers: his second feature, Hospitalité (2010), is largely played for laughs, while Harmonium (2016), perhaps his most internationally renowned film, takes a haunting detour into thriller territory.

Fukada’s latest feature as writer-director, Love Life, operates somewhere between the two extremes of those earlier films. While the plot-instigating tragedy is truly horrific, its melodrama narrative unfolds at a gentle pace, with plenty of moments of tension-breaking levity.

Directly inspired by ‘Love Life’, a song by singer and composer Akiko Yano, the film follows Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and her husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama), who live with her young son, Keita (Tetta Shimada). When an accident occurs at a birthday party, the superficially peaceful existence the couple had built comes to an abrupt end, something only exacerbated by the reemergence of Taeko’s Korean ex-partner and Keita’s father, Park (Atom Sunada).

Deaf and now homeless, Park, who had suddenly disappeared many years ago, becomes the focus of Taeko’s attention and emotional attachment, instead of the man she has since married.

Read the full interview on bfi.org.uk

Everyone is invited to the 67th BFI London Film Festival, taking place 4-15 October in cinemas around the UK and on BFI Player!

Discover the line-up and get your tickets from 12 September (BFI Members book early).

The 67th BFI London Film Festival (4 to 15 October) in partnership with American Express is delighted to announce that the world premiere of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget has been added to this year’s programme. From the multi-Academy and BAFTA award-winning Aardman (Creature Comforts, Wallace & Gromit, and Shaun the Sheep), and Academy Award and BAFTA-nominated director Sam Fell (ParaNorman and Flushed Away, respectively), the film is the eagerly anticipated sequel to the beloved and highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time, Chicken Run.

Starring Thandiwe Newton (Ginger), Zachary Levi (Rocky), Bella Ramsey (Molly), Imelda Staunton (Bunty), Lynn Ferguson (Mac), David Bradley (Fowler), Jane Horrocks (Babs), Romesh Ranganathan (Nick), Daniel Mays (Fetcher), Josie Sedgwick-Davies (Frizzle) and Nick Mohammed (Dr Fry), Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget will receive its world premiere on Saturday 14 October at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall; the gala screening is supported by the Mayor of London and Film London. There will also be simultaneous preview screenings of the film taking place at multiple cinemas across the UK. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget debuts globally on Netflix on 15 December 2023.

Having pulled off a death-defying escape from Tweedy’s farm, Ginger has finally found her dream – a peaceful island sanctuary for the whole flock, far from the dangers of the human world. When she and Rocky hatch a little girl called Molly, Ginger’s happy ending seems complete. But back on the mainland the whole of chicken-kind faces a new and terrible threat. For Ginger and her team, even if it means putting their own hard-won freedom at risk – this time, they’re breaking in!

Sam Fell, the director of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, said: 'What an honour to world premiere our film on home turf at the London Film Festival this year. Dawn of the Nugget showcases the amazing talent and ingenuity of the crew at Aardman backed by the enduring passion of the team at Netflix. We’ve poured everything we’ve got into making this a treat for both die-hard fans and the new generation of families discovering Chicken Run for the first time.'

Kristy Matheson, BFI London Film Festival director, said: 'We are so excited to be sharing the magic and artistry of the Aardman studio and their favourite feathered friends with audiences this October with a film that’s brimming with fun and has such enormous heart.'

Justine Simons OBE, Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, said: I am delighted that Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget will receive its world premiere at the gala screening at this year’s BFI London Film Festival. This highly anticipated sequel to the hugely successful Chicken Run features an all-star cast and shows off Aardman’s award-winning creativity in a family film that is packed with fun and laughter. London’s annual film festival shows why our capital is a global hub for film and television, and, after a hugely successful summer for our big screens, I’m determined to continue doing all I can to support the growth of the industry as we build a better London for everyone.'

The 67th BFI London Film Festival (4 to 15 October) in partnership with American Express is thrilled to announce that this year’s closing night gala, supported by BMW, will be Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya’s The Kitchen starring Kane Robinson, Jedaiah Bannerman, Hope Ikpoku Jr, Teija Kabs, Demmy Ladipo, Cristale and BackRoad Gee.

Exploring themes of community, inequality, family, resilience, defiance and care in a dystopian London, The Kitchen is directed by British filmmakers Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, the latter of whom also screenwrites with Joe Murtagh. The film will receive its world premiere on Sunday 15 October at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, ahead of its release into UK cinemas and subsequent launch on Netflix. The Kitchen was made in association with Film4 who also supported the film’s development and is produced by DMC Film and 59% Productions.

In a dystopian London, the gap between rich and poor has been stretched to its limits. All forms of social housing have been eradicated and only The Kitchen remains. A community that refuses to move out of the place they call home. This is where we meet a solitary Izi (Kane Robinson), living here by necessity and desperately trying to find a way out, and a 12-year-old Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), who has lost his mother and is searching for a family. We follow our unlikely pair as they struggle to forge a relationship in a system that is stacked against them.

Tavares and Kaluuya, said: “We both grew up in London, and The Kitchen is a love letter to our city, so it’s a true honour to premiere it here, in our hometown, on the closing night of BFI’s London Film Festival. Starting a decade ago as a workshop in a local barbershop, the film’s journey from script to screen has been a continued collaboration between us, and the community of cast and crew that came to make up our ‘Kitchen’, including our two amazing leads Kane Robinson and Jedaiah Bannerman whose performances anchor the heart of our story. Together we have aimed to make something fresh, thoughtful and cinematic – an allegory and homage to the residents of ‘The Kitchen’ in every city in the world.”

Kristy Matheson, BFI London Film Festival director, said: “Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya have made a film that totally explodes our expectations of contemporary UK cinema. The Kitchen offers such scope for audiences – the essential social politics and high-octane energy gel perfectly to create an electrifying big screen experience. We could not be more excited to close the festival with this inventive film set in a near future London that showcases this incredibly talented team who call this city home.”

Read more

After 30 years, we’re welcoming audiences back to Jurassic Park. Just imagine, the size of those dinosaurs on the UK’s largest screen!

In Steven Spielberg’s dino classic paleontologists Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) are among a select group chosen to tour an island theme park populated by dinosaurs created from prehistoric DNA. While the park’s mastermind, billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), assures everyone that the facility is safe, they find out otherwise when various ferocious predators break free and go on the hunt.

Celebrate this milestone anniversary with us and relive this larger-than-life thrill ride and its Academy-Award® winning visual effects in spectacular 4K for the first time ever on the big screen. Booking now at BFI IMAX

‘I tried to represent the collapse of the Japanese family system through showing children growing up.’

 
This year marks the 120th anniversary of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu’s birth. It’s also 70 years since the release of his masterpiece Tokyo Story and 60 years since his death. He has been feted by critics around the world, influenced filmmakers, interpreted in myriad ways by academics and beloved by audiences.

Although his early work spanned a variety of genres, including student comedies and crime thrillers, this season focuses on the theme that dominated his finest films: family life. From his early silents and sound films, through to his limited output during the Second World War and his acclaimed late period, beginning with 1949’s Late Spring, Ozu perfected a style that stripped away unnecessary plot mechanics and camera movement. In doing so, he produced a cinema whose surface simplicity belies character studies of depth, warmth and, on occasion, humour.

Showing at BFI Southbank in September 2023 and UK-wide on BFI Player.

From the Cannes award-winning director of Harmonium and Goodbye Summer comes a beguiling, beautifully paced portrait of a family navigating the aftermath of a tragedy.

Inspired by Japanese singer and musician Akiko Yano's song Love Life, Kôji Fukada’s Love Life tells the story of Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and her husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama) who are living a peaceful existence with her young son Keita (Tetta Shimada), when a tragic accident brings the boy’s long-lost father, Park (Atom Sunada), back into Taeko’s life.

Arrives in UK and Ireland cinemas from 15 Sep 2023.

A hundred years after the invention of 16mm, we dig into the history and technology of a film format that transformed the way moving images were made and distributed.

What is 16mm?

1923 was the year the bitter, brutal Irish civil war ended. That same year, Pancho Villa was assassinated, Calvin Coolidge entered the White House following his predecessor’s sudden death, and a bedridden Lenin stepped back from heading the Soviet state. It was in 1923 that the future George VI married the future Queen Mother, and it was 1923 that saw Wembley Stadium first opened to the public to host that year’s FA Cup. But it was also that year, attracting less loud attention, that a significant media technology event occurred. An event that would prove at least as consequential for the world as these headline-grabbing occasions. It was in 1923 that Eastman Kodak launched 16mm film upon an unsuspecting world. 

16mm film would go on to have a profound effect on the screen, and on society. In deep ways, it both predicted and influenced the moving image as we all experience it today in virtually every part of our lives. 

16mm is what we call a film ‘gauge’. Other gauges include 35mm, 70mm and 8mm. As the name suggests, it is a type of analogue film, 16mm in width, containing sequential still images that appear to move when projected.

By 1923, despite early experiments with wider formats, 35mm had long been the near-universal spec for professional film production. If we think of 16mm, then, as a new piece of software, what’s culturally significant about its smaller size is what it meant for the hardware that runs it. 16mm cameras and projectors were, compared to 35mm, smaller, more flexible, more mobile – and like the film stock itself, they were cheaper both to buy and to operate. Those factors allowed both the cameras (and therefore filmmaking) and the projectors (and therefore film distribution and access) to penetrate more deeply into the world than ever before. Among other things, this was a profoundly democratisting development. 

Indeed, Kodak initially had the home market in mind and it was because of 16mm that amateur filmmaking took off worldwide, a significant thing in itself. But it became the medium of choice for far more fields than just home movie-making – it became essential to such diverse screen practices as experimental artist filmmaking, ethnographic filmmaking, medical and scientific films shot in the lab, guerrilla activist filmmaking shot in the streets. This is to name just a few examples, and many of these things were virtually impossible to do, at scale, without 16mm. 

The gauge also came to be crucial to many areas of mainstream production, especially on TV. Britain plays a key role here because the BBC worked closely with Kodak to help perfect the technology for widespread use by broadcasters across the globe. In the UK alone, thousands upon thousands of hours of footage, in many genres and ranging from prestige series – Brideshead Revisited (1981) and David Attenborough’s first big natural history series Life on Earth (1979) are two high-profile examples – to all the exterior scenes in humble sitcoms, were shot on 16mm through the postwar decades. It remained the default choice for much outdoors shooting until the 1990s.

16mm was particularly crucial for non-fiction genres. The ease with which 16mm cameras could go on location, could be held by hand, could move around uninterrupted, and could, equally crucially, come easily to record sound and picture together, enabled entire documentary movements – such as cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema – but also countless numbers of everyday documentaries. The observational (or ‘fly-on-the-wall’) documentary so familiar to us is now almost always born-digital, but it was unimaginable before 16mm imagined it and actualised it.

For similar reasons, 16mm revolutionised news-gathering and current affairs reportage. To give an example of just one major post-war event, the Vietnam war saw many 16mm camera operators on the ground: their extensive coverage not only documented the conflict but also influenced the public impression and therefore the course of that war, by bringing it into the world’s living rooms. Such scale, benefiting from such a sense of immediacy, would have been impossible without 16mm technology.

But if there’s a strong case for 16mm as a production format having changed our relationship with the world we live in, that’s only half the argument for its importance. The other half is about 16mm as a distribution format: not what the camera could do, but what the projector could, often when teamed up with a portable screen.

Suddenly, film was no longer confined to cinemas or other dedicated screening venues. That didn’t just change where, when and how film was seen but also what films were made and for what purposes. From the 1930s, especially, a world of media possibilities opened up as it became understood that film could now be shown in classrooms, to teach their viewers; in political rallies, to persuade or inspire them; in work canteens or boardrooms to train them; in film societies hiring classics from libraries of world cinema; in village halls, clubs, churches, union meetings, charity fundraisers, trade fairs, art exhibitions. Thousands of films were made for screening in such venues, entire film industry sectors were devoted to making them and distributing them. 

The 1947 film embedded below, an explanation of the workings of the government’s Central Film Library, which distributed 16mm prints (of films usually made on 35mm) across the UK is a great gateway to that universe. On the one hand, it’s a civil service primer on everything you ever wanted to know about 16mm film libraries but were afraid to ask; on the other it’s a moving glimpse of a pre-television civic world of which film, thanks to 16mm distribution, was very much a part.

Find out more about how we project and protect 16mm film.

Introducing our new BFI Flare programmer, her taste in films and what she hopes to bring to the festival.

When did you first become aware of BFI Flare?

I studied at the University of Warwick in the academic year 2021 to 2022, and one of the modules I did during my master’s programme was film cultures. I learned all about the distribution circuit, which included the BFI. At the time, I was also designing a module on queer African cinema, and one of the films I wanted to watch was Dakan (1997), but I couldn’t find it anywhere online. Months later, my lecturer informed me the film was showing at Flare, and this was the first time I attended the festival. It was also my first time seeing a queer African film on the big screen.

What is it that makes BFI Flare special for you?

Having only been aware of the festival for a year, both in front of the screen as an audience member and behind the scenes as a programmer, it’s apparent to me that Flare takes inclusivity seriously. The festival strives to include everyone of every nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, which is what makes it such a comfortable space for me to exist in.

Why were you keen to be part of the programme team?

When I saw the ad online to join the team, I almost didn’t apply – I barely had any experience in festival programming. However, the opportunity to surround myself with queer cinema and work on a team of queer people was too good to pass up. Luckily, the team gave me a chance and took me on as an assistant programmer. The growth and experience have been immeasurable.

Have you previously been involved in any other film festivals? Or had other experiences of programming films?

I have never been involved in a professional film festival, except in a volunteering capacity. However, I did get the opportunity to curate my own film festival through a university assignment. My project was a virtual queer African festival, and its focus was accessibility; I know what it’s like not to be able to legally watch queer films in your country, so I designed a festival that would bypass this – partly inspired by Flare and the British Council’s #FiveFilmsForFreedom initiative.

What do you bring to the programming mix?

My goal has been to put more queer Africans on screen and highlight asexual cinema as well. I am glad to say that we have representation of both this year. I was also really interested in the stories of queer elders, which are rare in my own community, and I’ve been able to explore and share this through a shorts programme I curated that highlights elderly LGBTQIA+ people around the world.

What are some of your favourite queer films, and who are your favourite queer filmmakers working today and why?

I don’t think I have discovered all my favourite queer films yet (some of them are in the 2023 Flare programme). So, I’ll just go for queer firsts. Tangerine (2015) – the first film I saw that featured Black trans women; Watermelon Woman (1996) – the first film I saw that was written and directed by a Black lesbian; But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) – my first queer teen romcom; and Rafiki (2018) – my first gay Kenyan film.

One of my favourite queer filmmakers and all-round creatives is Jim Chuchu. I deeply resonated with his feature film Stories of Our Lives (2014) – an anthology of short stories that captures the lives of various queer Kenyans. He continues to explore sexuality in his works and boldly exhibits it in African spaces, despite the danger.

What would you like to see more of in queer cinema?

I may sound like a broken record saying this, but Africans. I just want to see queer Africans in all our courage – and joy. There are many who’d prefer that queer Africans remain hidden. I’d also love to see more asexual and aromantic people on screen. Basically, I’d like to see even more diverse representation.

Wema Mumma is from Nairobi, Kenya. She has just started her journey in the world of filmmaking. She also works as a writer and event manager. She hopes to create more inclusivity through her work in the creative industries.

BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival runs 15 to 26 March 2023.