sun 15/06/2025

BFI

Great White Silence with James Cracknell, Discovery

For a while in the 1990s, the NASDAQ of polar exploration knocked Scott off his plinth and installed Shackleton as Britain’s favourite Antarctic hero. To a modern sensibility, survival seemed a more laudable pursuit than sacrifice. Better a live...

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A Day in the Life: Four Portraits of Post-War Britain

An English teacher in a brand-new Hertfordshire secondary school is about to lose his rag. “You said ‘relaxed, like,’” he storms at a boy. “Why like? Like what? Why do you use that expression? What does it mean?” This is 1962. It’s a scene from Our...

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From the Ballets Russes, BFI

Where Busby Berkeley learned everything he knew

This is the second part of a series that has passed a little too quietly for comfort. The V&A’s grand Diaghilev show has received all the noise in the press – “fabulous”, “sumptuous”, “exotic” – in fact, all the words that were used at the time...

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František Vláčil Season at the BFI

Of all the schools of film which were allowed to sprout behind the Iron Curtain, it was in Czechslovakia which contrived to export its work most successfully to the West.Poland had Andrzej Wajda. Hungary had István Szabó. But Czech cinema seemed to...

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Separado!/ Gruff Rhys, BFI Southbank

Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psych-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and...

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Triomf

White trash fear and social intolerance in mid-1990s South Africa

"Change" has been the watchword of the past few months, the standard flown hopefully aloft by every political party. A week spent anxiously waiting for a political conclusion, worrying about its impact, and heatedly debating its validity has made...

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How to Train Your Dragon

How to Train Your Dragon: our hero Hiccup flies on the back of his friend, Toothless

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...

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Sergei Paradjanov: Retrospective for a Visionary

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...

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Zweig classic back on screen

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-...

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United Kingdom! Radical TV Drama, BFI Southbank

Tim Roth as Trevor the skinhead, in David Leland's Made in Britain

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...

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