To Be Number One

May 27, 2025 — Suffused with slapstick humor and slightly surreal wit, Richard Lester’s beloved take on a frequently adapted adventure epic embodies a style of extravagant filmmaking that didn’t survive long past the 1970s.

Sep 18, 2024 — We’re reading or anticipating new books from Pedro Almodóvar, Al Pacino, Werner Herzog, and Cher.

Sep 16, 2024 — Ready or not, the win for Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation kicks off this year’s awards season.

Oct 26, 2023 — Ever since he began working with the Miami-based film festival and collective Third Horizon in 2016, Jonathan Ali has been finding ways of celebrating Caribbean cinema and how it captures the irreducible complexity of the region and its diaspora. He...

Nov 16, 2022 — After glimpsing his great-great-grandfather on-screen, a writer searches for the history of a landmark silent film.

Oct 18, 2022 — Drawing from Latin American folklore, Jayro Bustamente conjures an intimate, supernatural tale that engages with Guatemala’s history of violence.

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...

Jan 28, 2021 — Deep Dives Domestic work offers both an agonizing ennui and the satisfaction of a necessary task being completed. In the 1981 documentary Clotheslines, filmmaker Roberta Cantow mines these two moods, as well as the subtler emotions that fill the distance...

Jun 15, 2020 — The hugely popular and prolific Italian actor Alberto Sordi relished playing rogues, characters riddled with foibles and weaknesses. In an interview with Positif’s Jean A. Gili in 1999, he revealed that his aim was to depict in a comic register...

May 15, 2020 — Directors, actors, and critics look back on their most memorable moments in movie theaters, and the BFI spotlights the best of Japanese cinema.