James R | On 24, Sep 2016

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 Anthony Asquith’s Underground.

Underground tells the story of the lives and loves of four young working people in 1920s London. Parallels with life in the metropolis today are poignant, as we see the locations of the Underground, the pubs and shops in which the drama unfolds.

Kermode highlights the director’s assured filmmaking style, which contains the occasional impressive flourish. The film is released on BFI Player+ with a new score by Neil Brand.

What else is available to stream? Every week, we bring you a round-up of the latest titles on BFI Player+:

Woman of the Dunes

An entomologist gets trapped in an old woman’s desert shack in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film, which sees the two become increasingly psychologically and erotically entangled.

Anger Me

Elio Gelmini’s documentary is a portrait of Kenneth Anger, avant-garde filmmaker and author of the Hollywood Babylon books.

Children

Terence Davies begins his Liverpool Trilogy with this 45-minute short, which he wrote at drama school. The film introduces Robert Tucker as a withdrawn boy, bullied at school, terrorised by a violent dad and raised under the umbrella of a stretch Catholic upbringing.

Rose Red

Simon Pummell’s sci-fi short from 1994 is a thriller that follows the theft of an experimental drug that suppresses the immune system – only to reveal a cast of virtual reality addiction.

Yojimbo

Kurosawa’s superb classic about a drifting samurai who plays two gangs against each other is famous for being remade as A Fistful of Dollars, but is well worth watching in its own right.

The Living Dead Girl

The BFI’s Jean Rollin collection expands once more with this 1983 horror about a dead girl who comes back to live after toxic waste spills on her grave.

 

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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