David Farnor | On 11, Mar 2017

Heard of BFI Player? Well, there’s also BFI Player+, a subscription service that offers an all-you-can-eat selection of hand-picked classics.

Every Friday, Mark Kermode highlights one of the collection’s titles with a video introduction. This week, it’s Amores Perros. Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga’s thriller, which sees three characters connected in Mexico City by one fateful car crash, is brutal, powerful, visceral filmmaking.

What else is new? Here are the latest titles on BFI Player+ this week:

Godzilla (1954)

Go back 70 years to Ishiro Honda’s original Gojira flick and the monster wasn’t just a monster. He was a walking nightmare – with feet the size of a truck. Flattening buildings less than a decade after the atomic bomb did the same, he was a radioactive reminder of the trauma and destruction. The result is an exciting blockbuster, an alarming pacifist warning and a jaw-dropping piece of catharsis.

Before Stonewall

DIrector Greta Schiller captures the testimonies of those who dared to challenge the world and help create the modern gay community, before the riots took place at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969. Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Barbara Gittings, Harry Hay and Ann Bannon join the group of interviewes.

Peeping Tom

Michael Powell’s dark, disturbing, once controversial tale of a shy camera technician who films women as he kills them is now regarded as a classic

Duffer

This study of obsession focuses on a teenage boy torn between the charms of a fleshly female prostitute and the sadism of an older man.

We Were Here

The first documentary to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in 1980s San Francisco.

Face

Antonia Bird’s stylish and political crime thriller from 1997 stars Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone as members of a gang of thieves that falls apart when a heist goes wrong.

Aguirre: The Wrath of God

Werner Herzog’s 1972 masterpiece stars the inimitable Klaus Kinski as a power-crazed explorer in 16th century South America, who leads a band of conquistadors through the Amazon in search of El Dorado. The result is a mesmerising descent into existential darkness. Once you’ve watched it, you won’t forget it.

 

A BFI Player+ subscription costs £4.99 a month with a 30-day free trial. For more information, visit http://player.bfi.org.uk.
 

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