Series: BFI Film Classics

On arrival in Stepford, Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) starts to notice something strange about the town’s women. They all seem perfectly poised, flawlessly beautiful and obsessed with housework—a parody of femininity. As Joanna attempts to settle in, she befriends the only other person in town who seems to be like her, Bobby Markowe (Paula Prentiss), and together they start to...

It is becoming clearer and clearer that Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis, is one of the masterpieces of 1990s Hollywood cinema. One of the first films to use a science-fiction premise as the basis for romantic comedy, it tells the story of a splenetic TV weatherman, Phil Connors (Bill Murray at his disreputable best), who finds himself repeating...

Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7), Agnes Varda's classic 1962 work, depicts, in near real-time, 90 minutes in the life of Cléo, a young woman in Paris awaiting the results of medical tests that she fears will confirm a fatal condition. The film, whose visual beauty matches its evocation of early-Fifth Republic Paris, was a major...

Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan's most successful film, and one of the top-grossing 'foreign language' films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax...

Sam Rohdie's insightful and compelling analysis of Luchino Visconti's 1960 epic of modern urban life reveals the film as one of the greatest masterpieces of Italian cinema. Rocco tells the story of a family of peasants uprooted from their village in southern Italy and forced to battle for existence in the industrial metropolis of Milan. Though fascinated by the social...

In Seven Samurai (1954) a whole society is on the verge of irrevocable change. Akira Kurosawa’s celebrated film, regarded by many to be the major achievement of Japanese cinema, is an epic that evokes the cultural upheaval brought on by the collapse of Japanese militarism in the 16th century, but at the same time also echoes the sweeping cultural changes...

A new kind of film emerged from Hollywood in the early 1940s, thrillers that derived their plots from the hard-boiled school of crime fiction but with a style all their own. Appearing in 1944, Double Indemnity was a key film in the definition of the genre that came to be known as film noir. Its script creates two unforgettable criminal...

M by Fritz Lang (1931) is an undisputed classic of world cinema. Lang considered it his most lasting work. Peter Lorre's extraordinary performance as the childlike misfit Hans Beckert was one of the most striking of film debuts, and it made him an international star. Lang's vision of a city gripped with fear, haunted by surveillance and total mobilisation, is...

A Taste of Honey (1961) is a landmark in British cinema history. In this book, Melanie Williams explores the many extraordinary ways in which it was trailblazing. It is the only film of the British New Wave canon to have been written by a woman — Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own groundbreaking stage play. At the behest of director Tony...