This week’s new releases on BFI Player+ (20th May 2017)
David Farnor | On 20, May 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 The Hunt, the provocative drama for which Mads Mikkelsen won the Best Actor award at Cannes 2012. He plays a nursery teacher in a tiny village whose life is shattered when the daughter of a friend says something innocent that gets hideously misconstrued. It’s devastatingly brilliant, and brilliantly devastating. Read our full review
What else is new? Here are the latest titles on BFI Player+ this week:
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
One of Powell & Pressburger’s many masterpieces, their 1943 classic profiles General Candy, a veteran officer now out-of-touch with the war, whose career is unearthed through a series of flashbacks, including his relationships with three different women (Deborah Kerr).
The Hidden Fortress
Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling mix of fairy story and samurai movie – a story of rival clans, hidden gold and a princess in distress – was famously a key inspiration for George Lucas’ Star Wars.
Helen
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s film is an unusual piece, following the transformation of a teenager, who agrees to play her friend in a crime reconstruction of her mysterious disappearance – and begins to appreciate just how different their upbringings have been.
Sleep Furiously
Gideon Koppel’s 2008 documentary depicts a small farming community in mid-Wales, from sheep to mobile libraries.
This Filthy Earth
Andrew Kotting directs this 2001 drama – inspired by the novels La Terre and Pig Earth – about two sisters, whose lives collide with two men – a villager greedy for their land and a kind stranger offering a chance of escape from their rural community.
Odd Man Out
A gunman, badly wounded during a robbery, attempts to escape from the authorities in Belfast, in Carol Reed’s moody Belfast set-thriller with James Mason.
24 City
Jia Zhangke mixes reminiscence and performance in his cool, measured, moving look at the changing fortunes of a Chinese factory-turned-shopping mall
A BFI Player+ subscription costs £4.99 a month with a 30-day free trial. For more information, visit http://player.bfi.org.uk.