Features and reviews
Discover the latest from the BFI, the UK’s lead organisation for film, television and the moving image.
How a pioneering cinema season tackled disability, 40 years ago
“If our title offends your sensibilities, then you need this season.” So began the programme notes for the BFI’s groundbreaking 1981 season Carry On Cripple, which aimed to show “the extent to which the cinema propagates harmful stereotypes” about disability.
By Henry K Miller
In the beginning: cinema’s murky origin story
By Peter Domankiewicz
The Watermelon Woman at 25: the Black lesbian classic that wears its brilliance lightly
By Chrystel Oloukoi
“Bogarde is exactly ripe for this role”: on the set of Visconti’s Death in Venice
By Margaret Hinxman
What to watch at the Glasgow Film Festival 2021
By Josh Slater-Williams
Wong Kar Wai’s needle-drops: a journey through his melancholic soundscapes
By Kambole Campbell
Kawase Naomi: looking from the outside in
By Jasper Sharp
“I am NOT going to write my memoirs!”: Gloria Swanson talks pictures
By Rui Nogueira
Power to the people: Shaka King on Judas and the Black Messiah
By Nicholas Russell
What to watch at the BFI Future Film Festival 2021 – the programmers’ picks
By Aleks Dimitrijevic, Chris Childs and others
Beyond the tombstone: how British TV responded to the AIDS crisis
By Simon McCallum
Tokyo rising: how Japan’s new wave rose – and broke
By Donald Richie
Rotterdam round-up: the best of the 2021 IFFR
By Kambole Campbell
Marlene Dietrich in the 1940s: The changing face of transgressive Hollywood
By Tamsin Cleary
Where to stream the best Chinese-language films
By John Berra
Funeral in Berlin: Marlene Dietrich and Germany
By Gertrud Koch
Where to begin with Mia Hansen-Løve
By David Morrison
In the mood for loneliness and longing: How Wong Kar Wai depicts emotion
By Ann Lee
Eight new visions of Japan on screen in 2021
By Jasper Sharp
Wolves, lambs – and Clarice Starling: the rise of the serial killer in 1990s cinema
By Amy Taubin
Where to stream the best Scottish films
By Josh Slater-Williams
How to dramatise a plague: a brief history of Aids on screen
By Simon McCallum