BFI London Film Festival 2025: For this latest edition of the London Film Festival, I decided to take a different approach. I’m covering the films I saw sequentially, one by one, so you can experience them just as I did – in the heat of the moment and in an intense flurry of screenings.
I must also give credit to my film aficionado friends – Hamed, Mehrva, Nassreen, Anna and Romy – with whom I shared recommendations, and from whom I received several tip-offs. They never fail to enrich my experience and contribute to the breadth and depth of my movie-going each year.
SOUND OF FALLING (above)
Who could have predicted that we would start the festival with one of its finest, and most beautiful films? There’s normally quite a bit of flotsam and jetsam in the previews building up to the main event, but not this year. Mascha Schilinski’s sophomore feature is a jaw-dropping journey through four young German women’s lives across the 20th Century, in a sole location, a rural farmhouse. Co-written with Louise Peter, it is the definition of unflinching in its subject matter. Shot with lots of POV, it’s also painterly in its muted palette and evocation of each period. Dipping in and out of each character’s story, you are transported around each decade slowly and deliberately, yet with little opportunity to process or even draw breath. We glimpse scenes unfolding through doorways and windows, piecing together their stories across the two-and-a-half-hour film. You feel the women’s isolation – surrounded by heavy shoes and crockery and endless servings of soup – and always repressed, beaten down and abused by the toxic masculinity defining each time and its menfolk. The stricken faces and realisations of each woman hit home, and death is pervasive throughout, as imagery and atmosphere swirl around. Within each story, all told from a female perspective, are satisfying echoes and patterns, and there’s a sensory warmth underpinning Schilinski’s narrative, despite the isolation and cruelty at its heart. Already looking forward to her next feature.
ENZO
The final film of the late Laurent Cantet was bound to be emotional, and this coming-of-age, workplace drama is set against the masculine backdrop of a building site, with class and cultural differences also simmering around the edges. Directed by one of Cantet’s co-writers, Robin Campillo, it introduces us to young apprentice Enzo (Eloy Pohu), a good-looking college dropout who doesn’t fit in with the other labourers. For Enzo is an artist from a well-off family and wants his own life to go in a different direction. But as he increasingly gravitates towards handsome Ukrainian builder Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), Enzo’s rising passion – his first love – grips him and drives a wedge between their friendship. It’s realistic and romantic, yet dark thoughts gather, even as the characters are surrounded by bright blue skies and blissful surroundings just outside Marseille. If you enjoy the plot and its complicated people, then the non-committal, open ending suggests there could even be room for a follow-up…
PROMISED SKY
This Tunisian film from Erige Sehiri is framed much like a documentary; starting with a small child quickly adopted after the small boat she’s been in has sunk. At the heart of the movie is a trio of Ivorian women, mismatched yet reliant on each other in a strange land, with a fervently religious community around them and the child. The evangelical church is led by another indomitable woman, a pastor fighting against all odds, but with her faith carrying her through, as random arrests take people off the street, and a sense of panic ramps up. With themes of migration, trafficking, anti-immigrant feelings and a longing to return ‘home’ this feels very timely.
MY FATHER’S SHADOW
Starring the remarkable Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, of Slow Horses TV fame, and most recently on stage in Rhinoceros at the Almeida, this 1993-set Nigerian movie is a family reunion of sorts. Dìrísù plays the absentee father, Folarin, forced to look after his two young boys, and take them on a journey to Lagos. As they learn more about him across one day, with Folarin’s old friends talking about football and politics with the same passion, the trio also encounter unrest and anger exploding into violence around them. Impressionistic and realistic in equal measure, this debut film from Akinola Davies Jr, co-written with his brother, Wale is promising indeed.
ROMERIA
From Spanish director Carla Simon, who gave us the exquisite Summer 1993 and then Alcarràs, comes another powerful look at memory, this time set in the coastal city of Vigo in Galicia. It links two decades – specifically the mid-1980s and 2004 – but how can the characters address their past, when the family is in denial and refuses to reveal the truth? Marina (Llúcia Garcia making her debut) is looking for her biological parents, and is being told very different stories of her late mother’s life and death. There’s even a tinge of the Schrödinger for her, as she wonders what her life might have been like if she’d been raised by her affluent father’s family rather than given up. Suddenly surrounded by lots of cousins and facing a wall of secrets and half-truths, it doesn’t get any easier for Marina when she starts to discover her parents’ hedonistic and destructive trail amidst the devastation of AIDS in the 1980s.
SIRÂT (above)
At times more reminiscent of Mad Max, notably in apocalyptic backdrops and palette, Oliver Laxe’s Cannes Jury Prizewinning movie boasts action that sprawls across a desert. It starts at a music festival and moves, with a caravan of hippy vagabonds, into more dangerous territory. The mystery that draws us into the story, foregrounds a father searching for his lost daughter, accompanied by his son. When armed forces come to shut down the rave, the duo fall in with the free dancing ravers, follow their vehicles, and become part of this family instead. The tension ramps up with mini-rebellions in the ranks, attritional events scything them down, and I have to admit I watched much of the last part through my fingers. Obviously a parable of our broken, misdirected times, frankly nihilistic, but with a banging soundtrack, you can see why it went down so well in Cannes.
DJ AHMET
Another winner, this time of the Sundance Audience Award, this Turkish feature from Georgi M. Unkovski is piled high with charms in the face of adversity. Farmer’s son Ahmet is smart, but his widowed father takes him out of school to help with their sheep, and with his mute little brother – all of whom are bereft. Known as the village’s problem solver, Ahmet is meandering along in this frustrating new existence until – BANG – he spots a beautiful young woman and is love struck among the livestock. You sense that the men value their sheep more than their womenfolk, who are generally suppressed and kept at home. Tiny shafts of light in the village women’s existence include playing football in the fields – where, of course, music-loving Ahmet sets up a sound system using the family’s tractor and trailer. And the object of his affections is equally keen on Ahmet, rather than the older man whom she is meant to be married off to. Resistance to the film and Ahmet’s charm is useless.
LIFE AFTER
This Sundance prizewinning documentary addresses maybe the hottest topic in healthcare, ethics and politics right now, the debate around assisted dying. We get to grips with the situation now by counterintuitively looking back at the 1983 case of Elizabeth Bouvia, when this bedridden young woman sought the right to die. There was a mystery around what happened to her after, and we know that her body was “like a battlefield”, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, yet mentally sharp enough to decide she wanted out. Crucially the film’s author, Reid Davenport, is a disabled director who identifies with Bouvia, yet his approach is always measured. A very necessary watch.
A PRIVATE LIFE (VIE PRIVÉE)
We don’t normally associate Jodie Foster with comedy, but she plunges headlong into this French language comic-thriller with obvious relish. Foster is an experienced therapist and the always-excellent Daniel Auteuil plays her estranged, but still devoted, husband. Then there is Virginie Efira as a key patient, Paula, married to Mathieu Amaric, while this stacked cast also sees a host of other great French actors drift in and out of the plot. And this plot is absolutely stuffed with McGuffins. When Paula passes away, the finger of blame points at Foster, and mysteries swirl around and threaten to sink a shrink who clearly prefers to be in control. Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, who has clearly been studying the TV series Only Murders in the Building, there is a similar darkly comic vibe here, despite or maybe because of the action. Frankly amateur sleuthing by Foster and Auteuil and betrayals of patient confidentiality laced with guilt make this more of an homage to harder, often brutal, French thrillers, but the humour carries it through into another genre of what is verging on cosy crime.
LEFT-HANDED GIRL
This lovely debut from Shih-Ching Tsou, was co-written by Sean Baker, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it focuses on another dysfunctional family that somehow just about functions. A struggling mum and her two daughters have gone back home to Taipei – the older teen daughter mucking in grudgingly, and her five-year-old sister unwittingly becoming one of the criminal community, shoplifting while blaming her ‘devil’s left hand’. Just as with Baker’s Florida Project, they have coaxed another fabulous performance from a young girl, and there’s also much trademark Baker POV filming. The family are soaked in loneliness and alcohol, yet they manage to swim just when they look like sinking, and the film is a mini marvel.
TWINLESS
Sometimes (well, usually) it’s best to go into a film screening with an open mind. Twinless won a couple of Sundance awards for its director-screenwriter-leading-man James Sweeney, but I avoided any other info. Which was the best way to see what seems to be a broad, almost slapstick comedy and ends up a meditation on different ways of coping with grief. Alongside co-stars Dylan O’Brien and Aisling Franciosi, Sweeney plunges us into a runaway plot about two men who have lost their respective twins, with wisecrack after wisecrack masking the unhappiness and neediness lurking beneath. Roman (O’Brien) is pretty dim and needs a buddy to hang out and even shop with, and Dennis (Sweeney) is the witty gay friend willing to step in. Their lives become intertwined while the black comedy flips and reveals its major plot twist early on. But will Dennis’ big secret ever be revealed?
THE SECRET AGENT (above)
This cracking political thriller should win every single award it’s up for. And it might even do that, such is the word-of-mouth that’s greeted director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s gripping story of Brazil in 1977. Repression is rampant, and you are welcomed into this world and the movie like its hero, Marcelo (Wagner Moura), when he pulls up at a gas station in the middle of nowhere to be greeted by a dead body left lying on the ground a few feet away. Marcelo is fleeing towards Recife, right then in the midst of carnival, on the edge of joy and danger. Phones are tapped, random killings pile up, cops are implicated, there’s a prevailing stench of death along with corruption, no-one is safe, everyone seems complicit, and it’s hard to know who to trust. But maybe not so hard to work out why this tale of foul play starting at the top is going down so well in the States…
THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER
Two things can be true at the same time. This is a remarkable directorial debut from Kirsten Stewart, who draws a career-best performance from Imogen Poots. Yet I never want to see it again. For over two hours this is brutality and misogyny to the max, suggested with sound, stones and blood, although the everyday abuse is sometimes explicitly and horrifically shown. What it lacks is the subtlety of something like Sound of Falling, even though both films are tackling the same subject. Based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoirs and co-starring Thora Birch, Tom Sturridge, and Jim Belushi, this is not an easy watch. In fact, during my screening, dozens walked out, all men. The title comes from the idea of water cleansing, and from Lidia’s prowess as a competitive swimmer – her abuse started by her father (Belushi) when he’s coaching her. Lidia enters unwittingly into a lifetime spiral of addiction and trauma, and her ordeal also begins to feel like yours as a viewer. Every frame is beautifully shot, despite the subject matter, and my only comment would be that as decades go by, Poots as Lidia never ages. But maybe this is a deliberate choice to emphasise her eternal and unchanging suffering, with just a thin sliver of hope…
THE THING WITH FEATHERS
Full disclosure means I must admit to previously seeing the live, theatrical adaptation of Max Porter’s remarkable book Grief is the Thing with Feathers, starring Cillian Murphy, and it left an indelible impression. So Dylan Southern’s film version of the same work could have felt like a bit of a let-down. Benedict Cumberbatch certainly brings a lot of Cumberbatch to the party as the widower, but this somehow only makes his grief for his recently-deceased wife even more poignant. He can’t deal with his two young sons (Richard and Henry Boxall, both excellent), sees his wife everywhere, and declares: “I don’t want her turned into a series of anecdotes.” There’s also the creeping presence of a ‘crow man’ who invades every spare space of his life, and is voiced in threatening fashion by David Thewlis, who is definitely channelling his inner Ian McKellen. Pitched somewhere between Ted Hughes’ and Porter’s own visceral, energetic language, this crow is a violent presence, a home invader, who accuses Cumberbatch of being “such a cliché, the dead wife trope”. For those who like to spot an authorial presence, look out for Max Porter in a brief cameo as a bookshop customer.
LURKER
With a similar vibe and obsession to Twinless, plus a great soundtrack, this is about a nerdy fan, Matty (Théodore Pellerin), and the pop singer he worships, Oliver (Archie Madekwe). Using a mixture of social media and sleuthing, Matty tracks down Oliver in LA, and cunningly ingratiates himself into his posse. He even starts to do all their chores and makes himself indispensable. But who is using who? Some scenes are also reminiscent of All About Eve and even Single White Female, with the plot including extortion, backstabbing a friend, and a power struggle revolving around some compromising footage. A promising debut from Alex Russell.
TRAIN DREAMS (above)
Mainstream, yet almost poetic, this Clint Bentley film fleshes out the original novella by Denis Johnson and then some. Indeed, it’s almost Forrest Gump or Zelig-like in showing a very personal view of a century, which is somehow universal. Robert (Joel Edgerton) has a harsh life as an itinerant lumberjack who witnesses recurring casualties and fatalities, which both haunt and people his existence. And among the umpteen characters who interact with him, is the brilliant William H Macy. Gruff and alone, Robert’s story is softened when he meets and falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones) and they build their own idyllic home. No spoilers on what happens next, but you will be moved. Grief is tackled headlong, desperately and blindly, echoing with The Thing With Feathers and Twinless. In many ways, Robert is the archetypal, mythic American – the way America sees itself perhaps – so it’s perhaps ironic that the two main characters are played by an Aussie (Edgerton) and a Brit (Jones).
MAGELLAN (MAGALHAES)
I had great expectations for this Lav Diaz film, which runs to nearly three hours, and contains much on 16th Century colonialism and politics, squeezed into a deliberately square frame. We see the star Gael Garcia Bernal as explorer Magellan, invading the lands of indigenous people. Their fightback includes invoking their gods, but they don’t stand a chance against massacres, disease and greed – indeed, Magellan is rebuked with the accusation that they are “all guided by greed.” However, the slow speed and stylistic choices made by Diaz could surely mean that this ambitious movie project will be as cursed as the ship full of dead and dying on which the explorers voyage.
UNTAMABLE
Who doesn’t love a flawed detective? Short and bittersweet, Thomas Ngijol’s Cameroon-set thriller is based on an original 1999 documentary, A Crime in Abidjan, and here Ngijol casts himself as the central character, Commissioner Billong, investigating a fellow policeman’s murder. It’s seen as an unsolvable crime and is not made any easier by his frantic home life – with kids out of control – and his shambolic police force, constantly gossiping and drinking. No-one wants to talk, and casual police violence is employed to get confessions from criminals with nicknames like Putin and Vin Diesel. The currency of corruption echoes that in a different continent and different decade in Secret Agent, this time mired in Kafkaesque bureaucracy and incompetence, but it all rings true.
A PALE VIEW OF HILLS (above)
Set in two places and periods – in the aftermath of the Nagasaki bomb in 1952, and decades later in buttoned-down 1982 England – this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel feels incredibly timely in our unsettled, fractured present. Directed by Kei Ishikawa, draped in mystery, with beautiful costume and set design, you’re right there, trying to work out what’s at the heart of the twin stories. In the later period, the mother still has the traumatic memories of Nagasaki, and her journalist daughter wants to mine these from her, framing the earlier story. We flash back to see women under their husbands’ thumbs, teetering on the brink of liberation, and all the while dark secrets lurk beneath calm exteriors. The struggle between past and present and accepting the truth of what’s happened (no spoilers) ripples around the characters and this quietly powerful film lingers long after the credits.
SHE’S THE HE
In Siobhan McCarthy’s smart movie, two school chums play with their gender identities, and decide to pretend to be trans with the frankly dodgy intention of getting into the women’s locker room. Handbrake turn comes in this increasingly sweet comedy when one of them discovers they really are trans. Cartoonish in parts, the duo egg each other on, and the gags come thick and fast, until the gender-swap farce sobers up and gets genuinely emotional. Also notable for its mainly trans and non-binary cast.
THE ICE TOWER
This dark, snowy fairytale is all about storytelling, with echoes of Black Swan, and starring Marion Cotillard. Jeanne is an orphan, a loner, with no-one to turn to, who wanders onto a film set. Cotillard is the Snow Queen, and Jeanne a kind of Red Riding Hood (sans hood) in the fantasy. Director Lucile Hadžihalilović makes us question what is a dream, what is reality? It’s all a bit Hitchcocky, especially reminiscent of The Birds, but sadly not quite the sum of its parts.
BAD APPLES
Hands down my favourite comedy of the entire festival, this starts in pesky-schoolkids-in-Grange-Hill territory, before hurtling into darkly comic absurdity. The jewel in this movie’s crown is Saoirse Ronan, with razor sharp comic timing, playing it straight throughout and gaining even more laughs in doing so. She is a primary school teacher stressed out and reaching the end of her tether, who finds her only relaxation in playing a tractor-ploughing video game. One especially difficult pupil, Danny, is the bane of her daily existence, the bad apple. So what would happen if he was removed – by fair means or foul – from the classroom? Director Jonatan Etzler juggles intertwined plots of pushy parents, affairs, Ofsted inspections, and a cidermaking empire, with Ronan impossibly straddling all of them, and clearly having fun in this part. Shout-out too to the two key child actors, Eddie Waller as Danny and Nia Brown as teacher’s pet Pauline, whose adoration of Ronan turns into something more Lurker-like. A must-see.
FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER
Three entirely separate, short stories directed by the inimitable Jim Jarmusch at first seem unrelated – despite the film’s title. But on closer examination there are rhymes, echoes, verbatim repetitions and even colours that link all three, each story stuffed with A list stars. The first one shows an ageing Tom Waits visited by his estranged, grown-up kids (Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik), who pity his small, messy existence in a swampy, sprawling bit of America, but the moment they drive off, his parallel and entirely glamorous life is revealed. Next, best-selling romantic novelist Charlotte Rampling welcomes her own estranged daughters, loud Vicky Krieps and timid Cate Blanchett, to afternoon tea in her Dublin home, with stiff conversation and manners to the fore. And in Paris Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat are freshly bereaved, now orphaned twins going through their dead parents’ belongings – and their own memories – in their old apartment. All three parts are imbued with muted nostalgia, and this feels like another Jarmusch that will benefit from a second viewing.
BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER (above)
Colin Farrell excels in this strange voyage into the gaudy, Vegas-like depths of Macau, directed by Edward Berger (Conclave). His life as reckless gambling addict, “Lord Doyle” – constantly running out of casino credit and chasing the next hit – threatens to turn legit. But he just can’t quit, even when love, dodgy health and danger look like halting his runaway route to self-destruction. Superficially a thriller, this is even more of a ghost story, based on Lawrence Osborne’s original novel. Surrounded by a great colour palette, it’s no surprise that Tilda Swinton strides into the action as an investigator, with Farrell backed into a corner, with piles of money, food and booze – and misery.
MIROIRS NO.3
German director Christian Petzold continues to make gripping, character-filled dramas placing outwardly ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, here confronting grief and trauma. The action crashes in from the first frames, when a fatal auto accident leaves a bewildered young woman, Laura (Paula Beer), stranded. She is taken in by an older, local woman, Betty (Barbara Auer), who quickly and generously adopts her as her own, gives her clothing and makes her part of her life. There are mysteries around both women, and Petzold makes sure we are never ahead of them in discovering what’s afoot. Betty’s husband and son are puzzled by what’s happening, and they all seem to be skirting around a huge elephant in the room… Question is: once the revelation lands, will they also crash, or can they reinvent themselves? Reminiscent of Mia Love-Hansen’s work, which is a big compliment in my eyes.
THE LOVE THAT REMAINS
Almost like an Icelandic Saga, this is minimalist Nordic filmmaking that embraces everyday mundanity. The central subject matter is divorce and it could easily have been a bleak portrait of a marriage breakdown. But director-screenwriter Hlynur Pálmason keeps it upbeat with the ubiquity of art as a balm, a refuge and an outlet throughout. Everyone tries to stay civil, including the kids, and the playful creativity and warmth of the family buoys them up, as they take trips to forage for mushrooms and berries, while local, large scale fishing continues, with the sea always very present.
RESURRECTION
Lots to admire in Bi Gan’s latest, from visual devices like witty, silent movie-style title cards to the almost iconic, fascinating framing of female characters. The main drawback amidst all the visual wit and cinematic devices is that the film lacks heart and narrative arc. Is the main character Frankenstein (in female form) and have we as viewers created a monster? Are we witnessing a history of 20th Century cinema, including referencing the likes of Orson Welles’ film noir masterpiece, The Lady from Shanghai? Are we witnessing film as the ultimate resurrection of memory (as its title suggests)? The overwhelming majority of the audience didn’t make it through my screening to find out.
BUGONIA (above)
You never know what you’re going to get when director Yorgos Lanthimos and his muse, Emma Stone, team up. This is their fourth picture together and is based on a Korean cult classic, Save the Green Planet. It’s set up as an anti-capitalist picture, in which two hopeless hippies, Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis making his professional debut) kidnap ‘corporate visionary’, aka horrible boss Stone, while wearing Jennifer Aniston masks. They see her as an alien, and her quick-talking, attempted rapport with them fails to dampen their environmental fervour. As with most Lanthimos films, there’s much brutality and almost comic violence, yet on another level you could also see the movie as an anti-science parable of the myth of creation and faith. Stone – like Saoirse Ronan in Bad Apples – clearly relishes the chance to use her comic chops by playing it straight. And yes, no spoilers, but there is a massive twist.
JAY KELLY
This is a Noah Baumbach fable about fame and false idols in which George Clooney is basically George Clooney, even though his character is called Jay Kelly. With a fantastic supporting cast including Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Riley Keough, who all know something about fame themselves, we feel his entourage is tightly wrapped around Clooney’s every move, every sip of water, every vanity project and product placement. Sandler is the manager who has given his own life to the star, always at his beck and call, and both are remiss as fathers. Stacey Keach plays Clooney’s own dad, larger than life and having a ball while stealing every scene. In one of the best sequences, character actors – mainly Brits – play strangers on a train journey Clooney makes from Paris to Italy, on his way to a special cinematic tribute to himself. But as he sees his own movie history up on the big screen, can he face his own past?
SEEDS
Black and white and starkly filmed, Brittany Shyne’s portrait of the plight of black farmers in the American South does not shy away from their truth. Each of them talks directly to camera, while trying to keep afloat farming corn and pecan, cattle and watermelon. One farm has been in the family since 1883, and they are all philosophical about the future of farming, with eyesight and trucks failing, they are also sick and tired of being sick. Marching on the government might not bring change, but it’s the only hope they have – apart from the next generation, the children and grandchildren who seem close to their roots. You can see why this won the Sundance documentary Grand Jury Prize.
LOVE ME TENDER
Based on a novel, this film’s director Anna Cazenave Cambet picked exactly the right main actor in Vicky Krieps to navigate the narrative. There is a central question at its heart about motherhood and the shunning of those who don’t fall into line in their prescribed roles. Krieps wants freedom more than 24/7 maternal ties, and to explore her sexuality, while endlessly swimming in the local pool to relax. She does not, however, want to relinquish all access to her son, Paul, and much of the action and her angst revolves around the tug-of-war between her and her estranged husband over their child. In between she has flings, writes, goes clubbing, but always pines for Paul, within a spiral of paperwork, despair and hope. And Krieps just about pulls off the impossible in making her character sympathetic even as she pushes back against cultural norms.
HAMNET (above)
Maybe the most haunting and perfect film of the festival is also based on one of my favourite novels, by Maggie O’Farrell, who is also director Chloe Zhao’s co-screenwriter here. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal are superbly cast as Mr and Mrs William Shakespeare, from their courtship and marriage through joy and sadness. The film opens with Jessie Buckley as Agnes, curled into a comma, a slash of red, in the green forest. Agnes comes from a world of herbs and spells, Will from a world of logic and rationality. Yet, despite their differences and the disapproval of their families (Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn are both wonderful), they are a happy match, until his writing success pulls him away from the Midlands to that there London, the plague hits, and their family fortunes change. Running to two hours it left me in floods of tears, especially during the very last scene. This cathartic sequence was shot at the Globe and features Noah Jupe as ‘Hamlet’ – following on from his little brother Jacobi Jupe’s moving portrayal of Shakespeare’s son, ‘Hamnet’ in preceding scenes. Everyone processes grief in a different way, and it might just be that this is the film’s greatest gift, enabling buttoned-up, hidden grieving to pour out from audiences, just as it does for Agnes.
AFTER THE HUNT
Much like David Mamet’s pre-MeToo play Oleanna, this Luca Guadagnino movie is set in an academic circle, peopled by friends, professors and students. Perched at the top is Professor Julia Roberts, who hosts these complacent soirées, along with her loyal but cynical husband Michael Stuhlbarg. As their performative dance of academic back and forth unspools, lubricated by alcohol, we can see who are the acolytes, the enablers and nemeses. They include academic frenemies like the untouchable, flirty Andrew Garfield and outspoken students like Ayo Edebiri (Bottoms), but once the discordant music starts, and an accusation is made, the thriller element clicks into gear and the staid campus drama is set alight. Meanwhile Roberts is managing vast amounts of pain and losing control – and there’s a philosophical dilemma at the heart of both her and the Hitchcocky film itself. Who to believe? Where is the evidence? As an audience, we pick up all the jigsaw pieces in the plot, including something lurking in Roberts’ past, and put them together. Sharply written too, by Nora Garrett.
HEDDA
As a huge Ibsen fan, I’m always partial to a new twist on one of his best plays, Hedda Gabler, and I definitely saw this in the Orange Tree’s stage adaptation, by Tanika Gupta, just before Nia DaCosta’s movie version. Onstage it made so much sense to make Hedda’s secret about race and passing as white in a very conservative film industry. On screen, DaCosta made the choice that Hedda (Tessa Thompson, all angles and cynicism) had a gay lover in the past – Eileen, played by the imperious Nina Hoss – and is therefore intensely jealous of her new love, Mrs Ellison (Imogen Poots). And this is not the only love triangle; there are many in the hedonistic, high society hostess’s house. Worryingly, there are also loaded guns around the sprawling mansion. Power, sex, money and love crowd in, and although this is not as dramatically coherent as the stage version, Thompson is as outstanding as ever.
KONTINENTAL ’25
Romanian director Radu Jude is always interesting as he prods away at materialism and capitalism – and this time he shot his entire feature on his iPhone in just 10 days. A lone bloke forages for fungi, begs for money or work, wanders past a plastic dinosaur theme park and returns ‘home’ to find an eviction squad and bailiff demand he leaves, so that luxury apartments can be built. Dehumanising homelessness, rising nationalism, and unrest between Hungary and Romania are spreading, and Jude picks away at the edges, but with no clear answer.
& SONS (above)
If you want more Noah Jupe, having seen him steal the final scene in Hamnet, then you’re in luck. Bonus is the entire cast is British acting royalty. Bill Nighy is a washed-up, fed-up writer with two estranged sons, Johnny Flynn and George MacKay, not to mention ex-wife Imelda Staunton, and the curious, much-younger son, Jupe, who is due back at boarding school. It’s almost too simplistic or Succession-like to compare Nighy’s character with King Lear, all hubris and unlikeable small-mindedness. But this is surely what director Pablo Trapero and his co-screenwriter Sarah Polley intend, as they adapt David Gilbert’s novel. Their plot muddles along, propelled by some great acting, until it hits a major twist that delivers the mother of all revelations. What is intended to bring the dysfunctional family back together does exactly the opposite. And Noah Jupe is a bona fide rising star.
THE WORLD OF LOVE
The usual hormones are flying around in a Korean high school, when student Jooin suddenly jokes that she has been sexually assaulted. But has she? Director Yoon Ga-eun gives us a measured drama that one minute shows girls doing taekwondo, and the next shows visiting a car wash repeatedly to expunge the past. In the courtroom scenes the victims are cross-examined, painting the abused as the abuser, the perpetrator. Bold subject matter.
HAMLET (above)
Check out the cast – Riz Ahmed is Hamlet, Morfydd Clark Ophelia, Art Malik Claudius, Timothy Spall Polonius, and Joe Alwyn Laertes – in this gritty, London-based version of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. Director Aneil Karia and screenwriter Michael Lesslie manage to make this work at the start of the drama, revolving around a traditional Indian wedding, with much conspicuous wealth and power on show. It sadly falls apart when the dialogue goes ‘off-script’ and the action veers into London’s underworld, tent city and seedy underbelly, though Ahmed remains suitably unhinged, intense and on edge throughout as the famous Dane/Londoner.
DREAMS
Any new movie from Mexican director Michel Franco brings an expectation of boundary-pushing, often transgressive themes. New Order (2021) looked at class – or wealth – warfare, and Memory (2023) covered care, addiction and abuse. Crucially, he’s brought on board Jessica Chastain from the latter, to star as a philanthropist who falls hard and fast for gifted ballet dancer, Fernando (Isaac Hernandez) who she is trying to bring across the border from Mexico to San Francisco. She has poise and status, he has fled illegally. The overlap between ambition, desire, philanthropy and steamy lust makes every decision a compromise, especially when Fernando is deported. But as the power balance shifts we see their characters and real motives stripped bare. Apart from the handbrake sudden ending, this is satisfying as both a study of a migrant’s journey and a glossy thriller.
COVER-UP
Already a fan of documentary director Laura Poitras, and keen follower of her subject, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, this was frankly unmissable. Co-directed with Mark Obenhaus, this two-hour film was a long time coming, with Poitras originally approaching Hersh two decades earlier. And it was worth the wait, embracing everything from self-censorship by the US press “there’s a history of America that’s so hard to write” to the cover-ups he’s explored, including the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He puts his curiosity down to joining the Book of the Month Club as a kid, with these works teaching him how to think. His career has put him in harm’s way, and in the crosshairs of powerful people, as he’s covered everything from the CIA, Chile and Pinochet to Watergate and Gulf & Western. Not to mention the Kennedys themselves. Sadly, his conclusion after decades of investigations and numerous stories is not optimistic, as he concludes that “we have a culture of enormous violence.” Essential viewing.
ANEMONE
Do sparks fly when arthouse royalty meets TV royalty – when reclusive, semi-retired Southern thespian meets gritty Northern actor? There’s only one way to find out. By watching the punchy Anemone, directed by star Daniel Day-Lewis’ son, Ronan, and co-starring Sheffield steel, Sean Bean, with Samantha Morton on top enigmatic form as a lost love. Dan plays a hermit, Ray, huddled away in a remote Hansel and Gretel style hut in the forest, whose silence is broken when his brother, Jem (Bean) turns up unannounced and unwanted. Their pasts are inextricably intertwined from their time serving in Northern Ireland, which has also left a huge mark on both, and the plot gradually hints at added trauma from their violent father, and childhood abuse. Cleverly co-written by Dan and Ronan, there’s a subtlety as we uncover their pasts while they reminisce. Let’s hope this family endeavour means Daniel Day-Lewis’ retirement is over.
BLUE MOON
They are a golden pair, director Richard Linklater and his long-time muse Ethan Hawke. And in this single-location biopic of Lorenz Hart – set over one evening in the famous Broadway bar, Sardi’s – we are onlookers witnessing one man’s career (Hawke as Hart) on the slide, soaked in alcohol and show tunes. Meanwhile, his previous theatrical partner Richard Rodgers (a deliciously sharp Andrew Scott), rises alongside his new chosen replacement, Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) as their new musical, Oklahoma opens to huge acclaim. The opening night party spills down into the bar, while Hart drowns in bitterness and regret, dismissing the new musical as “fraudulent on every possible level”. The clever device to get the true feelings and words to spill out of Hart is having a friendly bartender, played as confessor by the magnificent Bobby Cannavale. So we get the firsthand emotions of Hart as tortured artist, the failed affairs, the love, lust and creativity – and meanwhile we see EB White talking of his little mouse called Stuart and a very young ‘Stevie’ Sondheim also hanging out in Sardi’s. Nostalgic, yes, but by no means rose-tinted.
SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE (above)
Daddy issues dominate much of this drama that documents Bruce Springsteen’s years of depression, when there was a real darkness on the edge of his life and creativity. Jeremy Allen White plays the Boss in facsimile style, getting his singing and movement chops just right. Stephen Graham is the inspired casting as his alcoholic father, and Jeremy Strong is Jon Landau, who guided much of Springsteen’s career. Flashbacks from his childhood and youth are peppered throughout, memories of growing up in 1950s Freehold, New Jersey, of trying to pull his dad out of various bars, of fighting, shouting parents, simmering violence, jams at the Stone Pony, and the need for escape. We are right there for his lightbulb moment, when he sees Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Terence Malick’s masterpiece, Badlands. And he grabs their story with both hands. As a Springsteen fan, I admit to getting goosebumps every time the opening chords of any classic song came to the fore. This is balanced by seeing his internalised trauma, still suppressed.
NO OTHER CHOICE
I am a sucker for Korean films in general, and Park Chan-wook’s in particular, but this is a bit of a departure for him. It does, however, have his pitch-black humour at its heart. For this is a workplace drama, or at least an ex-workplace drama, in Falling Down style, with an employee, Man-su, at its heart who has been let go and won’t take it lying down. Played by Lee Byung-hun of Squid Games fame, Man-su begins a labyrinthine plot to take down everyone who stands in his way, from his enemies and ex-co-workers to the bosses. It veers into comic-tragedy territory, but is always buoyed up by a pinch of humour. Anyone in his way gets bumped off, and much physical comedy ensues. No ending spoilers, but as this is basically a commentary on the stripping down and dehumanisation of the modern workforce, the outcome does feel grimly, darkly inevitable. I saw it with a packed, euphoric audience who loved it and laughed all the way through.
DIE MY LOVE
Co-written with playwrights Alice Birch and Enda Walsh, this is Lynne Ramsay in her fully American phase. Though the starry names above the title are Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence, they are outshone throughout by the older actors, Nick Nolte and particularly Sissy Spacek, who feel altogether more credible. The story centres around Lawrence’s post-partum depression and the couple’s inability to cope with or without each other. At times they are feral (we get a montage sequence to show how crazy in love they are) and Pattinson’s folks (Nolte and Spacek) are necessary helpers as Lawrence fades fast with her depression and the grinding mundanity of motherhood propelling her downward. “Everybody gets a bit loopy in the first year,” are Spacek’s comforting words to her daughter-in-law, as a sense of dread and madness swirl around the younger woman. High drama indeed, and much like his character, it feels like Pattinson isn’t quite up to the task he’s facing.
CHRISTY (above)
Talking of Robert Pattinson, he was the inadvertently comical dauphin in David Michôd’s previous movie, The King. With Christy, the biopic of female boxing legend Christy Martin, Michôd has taken another actor who has become as divisive as the character she plays, Sydney Sweeney. Main difference is that Sweeney drives this biopic forward effortlessly, transforming her looks, physique and gait for the role. Co-written with his wife, Mirrah Foulkes, Michôd’s Christy is that rare thing, a film about a woman who is good at her job, and even rarer, a film about a successful sportswoman. What gives it grit is that Martin goes through huge setbacks, including spousal abuse on her journey to self-discovery, even more than sporting success. Casual misogyny is rife, as is homophobia, yet the closeted, put-upon Christy also agrees to be dressed from head to toe in pink for her bouts, and falls for the seductive promise that she’ll be “the greatest female fighter in the world”. Promoter Don King makes her a pay-per-view smash hit and dubs her ‘The Coal Miner’s Daughter” as she whirls and punches her way to the top. But she remains a paradox, on the one hand declaring: “I don’t see myself as a champion for women’s sport” while also saying: “I’m the best thing that’s happened to women’s boxing.” Perhaps the more pertinent quote is when she says late in her career, “I have no idea who I actually am.” This feels like a film that will improve with age, once the (understandable) bile against Sweeney and her views has died down.
THE HISTORY OF SOUND
Best known for Moffie, South African director Oliver Hermanus may have surpassed even that with his American story of lust, love and longing by casting two of our best young actors, Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal as his twin protagonists, David and Lionel. As the title might suggest, this is about the power of sound, focusing on two men who travel North America collecting and recording local folk music on wax cylinders, in the style of Alan Lomax (and our own Cecil Sharp, of course). They are kindred spirits, entwined by their passion for music, with folk songs underscoring the plot. As they trek across the land, they fall for each other almost imperceptibly, then all at once. As this is all happening in 1917, you know the beat of war is on the edge of their lives, and inevitably the draft comes. I won’t give too much away, but Hermanus and his writer Ben Shattuck give an extra dimension to the story by having Chris Cooper as the older Lionel, many years later.
PILLION
Hard to believe this is director Harry Lighton’s debut, especially as he’s brought together such a strong cast, and has a terrific co-writer in Adam Mars-Jones. When the film opens, we are situated very much in the heart of suburbia, with a barbershop quartet performing in the local pub, with young Colin (Harry Melling) surrounded by friends and his adoring mum and dad (Douglas Hodge and Lesley Sharp). When a group of bikers come in, loud and leather-clad, it disrupts the gentle harmony and soon disrupts everything about naïve Colin’s existence. He’s drawn to their edgy, exciting glamour, and most particularly Ray (an impossibly handsome Alexander Skarsgård). Rapidly Colin falls under Ray’s spell, and becomes his slave, not just sexually, but domestically too. As Colin observes, Ray “says I have an aptitude for devotion.” The open-air group sex scenes with the bikers are not for the easily shocked, but otherwise this is a very sweet portrait of a young man longing for love and gradually able to stand up for himself and not be entirely submissive.
LA GRAZIA
Toni Servillo has been director Paolo Sorrentino’s leading man, and perhaps muse, for many years. And you could argue that they do their best work together, including Il Divo, The Great Beauty, and the excellent Consequences of Love. This latest movie once again pulls no punches as it delves into one of the duo’s favourite themes, politics. Servillo plays the Italian president, twisted with grief for his late wife, Aurora, and battered by knowledge of her infidelity, coping by listening to hip-hop, and continuing to smoke despite having only one lung left. Meanwhile, he must make big decisions on legalising euthanasia, as well as pardoning a couple of ‘murderers’. Deliberating over the euthanasia bill, he says: “If I don’t I’m a torturer, if I do I’m a murderer.” The only person keeping him on track is his loyal daughter. This is stronger on character than plot, but if you like your satire on the nose, delivered with wit and a sharp tongue, this will be right up your street.
100 NIGHTS OF HERO
There are shades of The Handmaid’s Tale in this fairy story, though maybe its main fault is having such a light-as-a-feather tone, that the patriarchal grip on the characters feels less threatening. Maybe this comes from its source being a graphic novel, and the jaunty, comic approach director Julia Jackman employs frequently pulls you away from what could be much heavier drama. The cast is a mix of the brilliant, notably Emma Corrin, to the okay, such as Nicholas Galitzine, and even the untested, like Charli XCX. Like many fairy tales, there is a challenge to be overcome, and the plot meanders around an escape route out of the main character’s (Maika Monroe’s suitably-named Cherry’s) looming fate. There is much charm in the story telling, but it’s not quite the barnstorming closing movie the festival perhaps wanted.