There was certain inevitability that Sydney Tafler would be found playing the title role in Wide Boy (d. Ken Hughes, 1952). In British films of the late 1940s, 50s and 60s, Tafler was most likely to ...

Two British officers in North Africa are assigned to escort an ambulance to Alexandria. En route, they pick up a South African officer, who proves invaluable on their perilous journey through enemy ...

Probably best remembered as a leading exponent of Expressionist acting in The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari (Germany, 1919), or as the villainous Major Strasser in Casablanca (US, 1942), Conrad Veidt was one ...

A decade of radical change - not least for British cinema ...

The 1960s witnessed a number of events that helped change the face of the industrialised world. These included deepening East/West tensions, an explosion in international travel, the growth of ...

A young boy dreams that his snowman comes to life.

The heroic bas-relief and the stirring score behind the opening titles leave us in no doubt that this is a film about heroism, a propagandist documentary using real firemen that doesn't pull its ...

Better than any other genre, social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and shaping our ideas of what British ...

In 1935, the notion that film should be considered an art form, something to be preserved in the same way books and paintings are, was still quite revolutionary. The BFI National Archive was one of ...

Intended for broadcast in 1965, writer / director Peter Watkins' nuclear war drama was withheld by the BBC - possibly as a result of political pressure - and remained unshown for nearly twenty years, ...

In the year 2005, Mitchell and Kenyon, a late Victorian and Edwardian film company, went from being a footnote in the received film history of cinema scholars to becoming a virtual household name. The ...

As an actor, John Hurt is drawn to misfit roles, outsiders and mavericks, victims and - occasionally - oppressors, sometimes pathetic (the Elephant Man), sometimes defiant (Emperor Caligula, or the ...