David Bowie cemented his unearthly persona in Nicolas Roeg’s startling cult film; playing an alien stranded on Earth while on a mission to find water for his own world, he initiates a plan to amass a fortune to help save his home planet.
Innovative and influential, and originally envisaged as children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set was a madcap early-evening comedy sketch show that quickly acquired a cult following with Swinging Sixties adults, who rushed home from work to see it. Written by and starring Michael Palin, Terry Jone...
The tube will never look the same again. Franka Potente plays the young Londoner who falls asleep on the way home, waking up trapped in a deserted London Underground. As she tries to make her way to the surface she discovers she’s sharing her subterranean sojourn with a terrifying, malign presence.
Lively period drama set in 17th century London, based on the play by Jeffrey Hatcher and directed by Richard Eyre. Billy Crudup stars as Ned Kynaston, the brightest star in Restoration theatre. Since women are forbidden to appear on stage, the beautiful, brazen Ned is able to shine in all the gre...
This lively Free Cinema short captures a night out at the Wood Green Jazz Club, where teenagers jive to trad jazz. Funded by the BFI Experimental Film Fund, it was filmed over the course of nine Saturdays by Karel Reisz, then programmer of the National Film Theatre, and a young BBC television dir...
English tourist John Trant (Mark Gatiss) visits an East European cathedral in search of an obscure religious painting. There he encounters enigmatic guides, who lead him deep into the strange church, where horror awaits... With the unnerving black humour you'd expect from League of Gentlemen pedi...
An early classic of Black British cinema about the intriguing social dynamics that arise as a ten shilling note is passed around the black community. A student borrows ten bob from a white man and then in turn lends it to a natty musician. Later, when the student meets an upstanding member of the...
Masie Blue is an enigmatic Black Widow figure under investigation by detective Margrave for her involvement in the suicides of successful white men. Through the blurred lines of perception and reality, the myth of the black feminine mystique is explored under the guise of a murder mystery. Writte...
Italian director Lorenza Mazzetti borrowed techniques from the neorealist school to conjure this striking study of East End life, one of the original Free Cinema shorts. Following the ambling existence of two deaf-mute dock workers, Mazzetti crafts a poetic depiction of post-war London populated ...
Karel Reisz’s honest and sympathetic depiction of South London teens aimed to challenge the media perception of ‘Teddy Boys’, and would be one of the last films to appear under the Free Cinema banner. One of the key elements of the Free Cinema films was the sympathetic representation of working-c...
Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt's famous film, produced at the GPO film unit, is an enduring example of British self-mythology and rousing evidence of the artistic potential of supposed propaganda. A hymn to our capital city's resilience during the Blitz, structured as a day-in-the-life of stiff...
Humphrey Jennings epitomises the artist-filmmaker and this poetic evocation of ordinary people enjoying well-earned time away from the mill, mine, or foundry is a forerunner to Jennings' later wartime greats such as Listen to Britain. Joyous shots of people either pigeon fancying, ballroom danci...
Documentary, public information film, morale booster; propaganda film. All descriptions that apply to Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's extraordinary war-time film. Using his customary combination of poetry and propaganda, Jennings constructs a collage of the various people and classes ...
The villagers of Cwmgiedd, southwest Wales, are the stars of Humphrey Jennings' unforgettably inventive drama-doc. At Lidice, Czechoslovakia, a mining community's entire male population was executed by the Nazis in 1942. Jennings (often said to be Britain's greatest documentary filmmaker) ingenio...
The Great White Silence is one of the jewels in the crown of the BFI National Archive fully justifying this stunning tinted and toned restoration with new score by electronic musician Simon Fisher Turner. The official film record of the British Expedition of 1910-13 led by Scott was reworked by p...
A soldier, out on reconnaissance in the American Civil War, finds himself trapped - buried alive and alone under the rubble of a fallen wall - deep in enemy territory. Unable to move, he is overcome by a mad terror as he hallucinates and awaits his almost certain death. This potent short, based o...
Innovative and influential, and originally envisaged as children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set was a madcap early-evening comedy sketch show that quickly acquired a cult following with Swinging Sixties adults, who rushed home from work to see it. Written by and starring Michael Palin, Terry Jone...
Before Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Goodies there was At Last the 1948 Show, the ground-breaking comedy sketch series starring John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Marty Feldman, and Aimi MacDonald. Highlights of this package include brilliant a solo turn from Brooke-Taylor as ...
Knowing it is every prisoner's duty to escape, Allied prisoners hatch an ingenious plan to do just that. Inspired by Greek mythology, the soldiers use their wooden vaulting horse to cover an escape tunnel that hopes to make its way under the camp's wire fence. Inspired by one of the most famous e...
With a star-studded cast, The Magic Box follows the marvellous and magical life of William Friese-Greene (Robert Donat) as he works tirelessly to develop ever more innovative technological gadgets for capturing the moving image. This engaging biopic celebrates the medium of cinema joyously, looki...
Carol Reed, fresh off the success of Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949), directs this crime thriller with James Mason and Claire Bloom in the lead roles. In post-war Berlin, Ivo Kern (Mason) is a man with a criminal past who participates in the accidental kidnapping of British citizen Su...
The friendship of a young white boy and a black girl reaches out across the generations in this uplifting mid-60s short, directed by South African-born actor and anti-Apartheid activist Lionel Ngakane. Against a background media narrative suggesting ever-worsening racial tensions, Jemima + Johnny...
This ghoulish short has a truly gripping premise. Distracted by her boyfriend while driving on a quiet country lane, a young woman regains consciousness in their wrecked car to find herself hand in hand with her lover. But his lifeless hand, frozen by rigor mortis refuses to let go. John Hardwick...
