James R | On 05, Jun 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 Bad Timing. Nicolas Roeg’s complex erotic thriller, starring Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel, “still seems as raw and shocking today as it did 36 years ago”, says Kermode, who places it within the context of the director’s controversial and challenging career that has always pushed boundaries.

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

Silence

Sound can be a powerful tool in cinema – and, as Berberian Sound Studio demonstrated, can also make for a fascinating subject. Pat Collins’ 2011 film, as its title suggests, has acoustics on the brain: it follows a sound recordist around Ireland, as he searches for a space untouched by artificial, man-made sound.

Ikiru

BFI Player+’s collection of Kurosawa continues to grow with this story of a bureaucrat diagnosed with cancer. Takashi Shimura plays the bureaucrat, while the film’s message is summed up by its title: “To Live”.

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.

Opening Night

BFI Player+ adds an ideal film for fans of Black Swan this week in the form of 1977’s Opening Night. John Cassavetes’ film about an actress rehearsing for a play about a woman unable to admit that she’s ageing. The film was nominated for two Golden Globes.

The Immortal One

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s feature debut follows a French professor who meets a beautiful woman while on holiday in Istanbul. The result is what the BFI labels as a “daring examination of fantasy and memory”.

Eden and After

BFI Player+ continues a mini-season of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work with another sensual fantasy about a group of students who take a strange drug and end up in a strange sadomasochistic realm.

Distant Voices Still Lives

Terence Davies’ 1988 debut goes back to his working-class autobiographical roots by chronicling a family’s life in Liverpool in the 1940s.

 

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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