BFI Southbank

BUG 37: The Evolution Of Music Video

Throw Of A Dice + Discussion

The King of Marvin Gardens

In 1972, two years after their generation-defining study of masculinity ‘Five Easy Pieces’, director Bob Rafelson and star Jack Nicholson reteamed for this thematically similar but artistically inferior follow-up. We’re in Atlantic City, where mob fi...

Manderlay

Von Trier is back to the vaguely anti-American concerns and stark sub-Brechtian style of ‘Dogville’, with considerably diminished returns. Grace and her gangster father (Howard and Dafoe, replacing – none too successfully – Kidman and Caan) arrive at...

The Sky Is Yours (Le Ciel Est A Vous)

Journey to Italy

Stuck in a dying marriage, far from home – journey to misery is more like it. In this 1954 film, American couple Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are visiting the Naples area to sell a late relative’s property and they come to feel lost in this rugg...

Side Effects

The latest film – maybe the last; more on that later – from Steven Soderbergh is a slippery one. It’s a pacy, sleight-of-hand thriller that satisfies as unabashed, borderline schlocky genre fun. It’s also full of sly digs at consumerism and the love...

Song for Marion

A marvellously insightful portrait of male emotional reticence lurks within an otherwise doggedly conventional feelgood drama in this change of pace for writer-director Paul Andrew Williams (‘London to Brighton’, ‘Cherry Tree Lane’). He puts two cash...

The Spirit of '45

Ken Loach rarely makes documentaries, and when he does, they’re usually about an urgent topical issue, such as the 1980s miners’ strike (‘Which Side Are You On?’) or the 1990s Liverpool dockers’ strike (‘The Flickering Flame’). On the surface, ‘The S...

Dogville

Ambitious, intriguing but fatally self-important account of how an archetypal small town in the Rockies, proud of its ethics, turns against a woman (Kidman) apparently on the run from a gangster, notwithstanding the efforts of a free thinking liberal...

Rome Open City

Bicycle Thieves

All you ‘Concerned of Actons’ can put down those Biros and half-cocked sawn-offs right now: yes, two stars for one of the Greatest Films of All Time may seem a little derisive, but what a time to reissue this bleak and emotionally manipulative (sorry...

Heavenly Creatures

Based on a real-life murder case that scandalised New Zealand in the '50s, Peter Jackson's movie marks a welcome change from the splatter of Bad Taste and Braindead. Rather than focus on the final act of violence, the film explores the overheated enc...

The Five Obstructions

In 1967, Jørgen Leth made The Perfect Human, a short anthropological comedy about a man in a room, which became a favourite of the young Lars von Trier. Years later, the latter came to Leth with an offer he couldn't refuse: he would produce five rema...

The Boss Of It All

Tired of all of his employees' niggles and gripes, company director Ravn invents a fictitious CEO called Svend, who works out of America and is only contactable via email. The ruse works a treat until Ravn puts the company up for sale and potential b...

Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro)

Silk Stockings

Antichrist

Click here to read our interview with director Lars Von TrierI’ve seen Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’ twice now and experienced such wildly different reactions to it each time that you might want to consider this review as written in sand, not stone....

A Prairie Home Companion

Like its predecessor, the virtually plot-free, therefore less audience-friendly ‘The Company’, this finds the late, great Robert Altman making the creation of a modest but marvellously subtle gem look near-effortless, such was his distinctive genius...

Breaking The Waves

A young woman's life changes dramatically when her oil-rigger husband is injured in an industrial accident.

Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle)

Corey is released from prison after a long stretch and his thoughts immediately turn to the robbery of a swanky jewellery store in Place Vendome. By chance, he crosses paths with Vogel, a convict who escaped from police custody by leaping from a movi...

Melancholia

This is a lethargic, pretty and empty study in ways of living and dying from Lars von Trier. The Dane borrows some of the trappings of the sci-fi genre – in the same way he set the Dogme rules for ‘The Idiots’ or adopted a Brechtian austerity for ‘Do...

The Limey

Funny, touching, and as effortlessly assured, in its own relatively low budget way, as Out of Sight, this consistently imaginative, comic crime movie milks the fish-out-of-water theme for all it is worth, and then some. Stamp is superb as the ageing...

Epidemic