I PLAY ROCKY***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 Surprise Film

Sly Stallone's ROCKY is hands down one of the best films of all time. It's a boxing movie, yes, but it's also an underdog story, about a poor kid who speaks funny and just wants a chance to compete, and won't give up, even when he's getting pummelled.  It's a story about working class people with grit. And finding love, even when you don't look conventionally pretty or have nice clothes. It's a story about community, and learning to believe in yourself, and sometimes saying sorry to the people who are trying to help you.  Man, I love that film. It's also a film with an iconic score, not least its fanfare, with several iconic training montages.  It's a film that gave us the first landmark use of the steady-cam. And it's a film that showed us contemporary Philly in all its grit and glory.  It's also a film that scored a LOT of Oscar nominations, not least the double-crown of a Best Acting and Best Screenplay nod for its creator, Sly Stallone. This was the first time someone had achieved that double-nom since Orson Welles for CITIZEN KANE. 

So, if you haven't already gathered, I am the PERFECT audience for this new "making of" film, directed by Peter Farrelly (GREEN BOOK) and based on a screenplay by Peter Gamble. It stars Anthony Ippolito as Stallone in what is sure to be a star-making part.  We follow a young Stallone struggle to get taken seriously as an actor, his passion. So much so that his girlfriend, later wife, tells him to write a leading role so that they have to cast him in it.  And it turns out, he really can write! He has a voice! So much so that two famous Hollywood producers tell him to give up on the acting and just focus on the lucrative work of selling screenplays. So much so that Tracy Letts' studio boss is willing to pay Stallone so much money for the script he can buy a house if he will only let them cast someone else.  But no, Stallone insists, "I play Rocky."  

The resulting film is unabashedly feel-good. I bounced out of the cinema singing the Rocky fanfare and buzzing.  Ippolito is a knock-out (pun intended) but the supporting performances, particularly from P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell as the producers, are stunning.  I loved all the cinephile in-jokes, not least Tracy Letts' studio boss being paranoid about Paramount, at a time when we are all suspicious of David Ellison.  And I loved all the debate about what kind of film Rocky is.  

But as we left the screening I turned to my 23-year old cousin who had never actually seen ROCKY and asked him if he was still able to enjoy the film.  The answer was a resounding yes! He loved every minute and spent his long late-night train home watching the original. So, success, all round!

I PLAY ROCKY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 128 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2026. It goes on release in the USA on November 13th and in the UK on November 20th.

MINOTAUR**** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 10

Andrey Zvyagintsev (LEVIATHAN) returns to our screens with another profound and scabrous of the holistic corruption of Russia under Vladimir Putin. Every level of life, from federal to local government, corporate, personal has been twisted and tainted until nothing remains but hollow, performative, nihilism. God is dead, what Putin wants is permitted. 

As the film opens, Russia has just invaded Ukraine and working age men are fleeing the country.  Dmitriy Mazurov plays Gleb, a wealthy and successful businessman in an anonymous Russian town.  The local Mayor asks him to name the workers he is willing to send to fight in Ukraine. Is Gleb a good guy or not? He won't send his men (good?) so randomly employs a bunch of other men so he can send them off instead (bad?).  Meanwhile, Gleb suspects that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair.  She can barely look at him let alone touch him. 

The first hour of the film is achingly slow, deliberately slow, and I didn't forgive the film for that, even when I realised that it was laying the foundations for an explosion of action and a second two-thirds that would try and work through the consequences of that act. It plays like a personal morality tale and a mirror to the wider corruption in Russian society. The final scene, that sees a resolution and accommodation of sorts, is chilling.  It speaks to complicity and enablement and acceptance. 

Overall, this is a handsomely made and beautifully acted film. I know why the first hour needed to be slow, but I still didn't like it. Other than that, this is essential viewing.

MINOTAUR has a running time of 2hrs 15m and is rated 15. It played Cannes, Toronto and Telluride. It goes on release in the USA on November 20th and in the UK on November 27th.

KLARA AND THE SUN**** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 10

I have read so many negative reviews of KLARA AND THE SUN and I just want to say that those reviewers are all heartless bastards!  Maybe they were all expecting a hard-boiled sci-fi film about some kind of BLADERUNNER style dystopian future that asks profound questions about the nature of consciousness and whether androids can be human too.  But neither Kazuo Ishiguro's stunning novel, nor Taika Waititi's adaptation are about that. They are both beautiful and deeply moving fables about grief and the lengths parents will go to to "never let me go".  And in doing so, both works of art ask us profound questions about selfishness, and the limit between humanity and inhumanity.  In other words, when and how do good people do bad things for seemingly good reasons.

Looked at through this lens, it becomes clear that KLARA AND THE SUN is neither about Jenna Ortega's AI-driven robot companion Klara, nor is it about the chronically ill human, Josie (Dahvi Waller), that she has been bought to accompany.  In fact, this is a movie about Josie's mother Chrissy (Amy Adams).  When we meet Chrissy, she is portrayed as a deeply controlling, vaguely sinister, working, single-mother. But as the movie unfolds we realise that Chrissy is already grieving the death of Josie's younger sister, and is now clinging on to Josie with all her emotional strength, no matter the cost. Meanwhile Josie is both struggling with grief and going through a kind of teenage rebellion. And all the time, we have Klara as a naïve observer, struggling to do good and to make everyone happy, even when they have competing claims.

I loved all three performances and really believed in the emotional stakes.  I didn't love all of Waititi's directorial choices though. I might have cooled down some of the more fairy-tale, grotesque costuming and production design - especially in the mean kids' party scene - because I feel it takes away from the profound emotional core of the story. And I think we lose something by not seeing what happened to Josie's father and the people who choose to live outside of the system that Chrissy is eager to compete in. That said, this is still a satisfying and moving film to watch and well worth your time.

KLARA AND THE SUN is rated 12A and has a running time of 1hr 56m. It will be released in the UK and USA on October 23rd.

FJORD***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 11

FJORD is a stunning piece of provocative film-making from Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu. It makes for uncomfortable viewing because it forces us to confront our own prejudices and to educate ourselves about our own countries. 

The action begins in a remote Norwegian town where a new family is welcomed warmly with woollen mittens and apple cakes. The father is Romanian, the mother is Norwegian, they have five kids including a nursing infant, and they are evangelical Christians.  Their differing religious and cultural norms soon bring them up against the profoundly progressive liberal norms of the town.  

The teachers call in social services because the daughter has some bruising.  Is it from wrestling, or tumbling down the stairs in a fight with her brother? No matter, because pretty soon the father and mother are being accused of child abuse because the father admits to scolding his children with light slaps across the bottom and on their hands. (Something that would be legal in the U.K..) He admits to not realising that this is illegal and frowned upon in Norway.  He says he is sorry - he just wants his kids back.  We see the civil court case play out, and his case is taken up by Christian right social media.

So many questions arise from this.  Why did the lovely progressive liberal teachers not bother investigating the fact that the headmaster's daughter Noora is slitting her wrists but jump into action when the immigrant girl has bruising?  Are they angry at the potential child abuse OR because the daughter Elia has the temerity to say that she doesn't agree that kids can be gay.  How far does the state have the right to intervene in how parents parent their children?  When is a light slap physical abuse? Where is the line?  How far is progressive liberal Norway really welcoming of immigrants? Or do they just want people to conform? Does freedom of religion really exist if you have to conform to views on LGBTQ?

I love that this film creates so much discussion and also that the director allows us to answer those questions for ourselves. It's a film that poses a problem of co-living and integration and allows us to try to answer it.  But Mungiu does put his hands on the scale in interesting and subtle ways.  The Norwegians subtly mispronouncing Elia's name.  The police case that is conducted in questionable ways.  The prosecuting lawyer resorting to Romanian idiom to make his case.  And going the other way, the fact that in the final very moving scene it becomes clear that Noora is gay.  

Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve are very strong in the lead roles of the two religious parents.  The cast in general is strong, and the cinematography stunning.  We get so many still frames and long scenes that when we get deliberate visual action it's all the more powerful. An avalanche comes down the mountain toward the small town.  And so over Europe more broadly.

FJORD has a running time of 2hrs 26m and is rated 15. It won the Palme D'Or at Cannes and also played Telluride and Toronto. It is on release in the USA and will be released in the UK on November 13th.

YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 11

YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER is an absolutely fantastic film. It's hilarious, the action choreography is thrilling, it's genuinely moving, and it takes us into a world and a community few of us will know.  Writer-director Bassam Tariq (MOGUL MOWGLI) is really doing something as unique and authentic and purposeful as when Tarantino first came to our screens. 

The film is set in contemporary Houston, where community comes from religious groups.  Mahershala Ali plays a hitman called Latif, whose beloved wife has just died leaving him with three kids to take care of.  The fact that he got the call about his wife amidst murder clean-up AND the fact that his infant needs breast-milk become the twin MacGuffins that propel the action of the film. 

First off, because his boss Mike needed to clean-up the murder, Latif now owes him, and Mike wants him to pay that debt by assassinating an evangelical Christian cult-leader called Pastor Hwan (John Cho) that's going for Mike's nephew Hatty.  Second, Latif needs to find a nursing mother that can provide his hungry infant Zizi with food.  

All of which speaks to a gonzo cast of characters and a richness of world-building that echoes early Tarantino and comes complete with some rather sweet Mormons and a vibrant mosque community.  

What I love about this film is that it shows how the younger generations intermix and riff on each other's cultural language and tropes. It also dares to speak openly and honestly about faith, loss of faith, and balancing the desire to be pious with the desire to have a boyfriend or the need to provide for your kids. 

It was amazing to me how in one moment we would be laughing at Hatty's mogul stylings and then listening to him opine about his faith in moving terms. Or how we could see Latif's elder daughter Fatiha have to contend with being a mother stand-in and try to be pious, but then also be a normal teenage girl with a crush on Elder Wade.

I also loved how despite it's hilarious dialogue and exaggerated settings and crazy fight-scenes this was a movie that kept me guessing and laid some profundity on me in its final moments.  John Cho plays Pastor Hwan for laughs, as he should, but his character speaks to the profound issue of the rise of Christian nationalism.  And Latif is on a long journey of realising that while he can never replace the children's mother, he can be the best father he can.

So kudos to all involved. This is some of Ali's best stunt and acting work in a storied career. I would argue that it's a career best performance from John Cho.  But it's Adia as Fatiha who is the heart and soul of the film and most clearly shows how Tariq's script allows its characters a fully realised spectrum of emotions and responses.

YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER is rated R and has a running time of 1hr 51m. It played Toronto and was released in the USA last month. It will be released in the UK on November 20th.

CLUB KID*** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 11

CLUB KID is the debut feature from writer-director-actor Jordan Firstman (I Love LA).  A gay club promoter, drug-dealer, addict the inevitable move-cliche "heart of gold" discovers he has a ten-year old kid and has to take over parenting when the kid's mum dies.  I really wanted to love this film. It has an authenticity rooted in the contemporary queer clubbing scene and Firstman writes and performs superb comedy.  Everyone is adorable.  But that's the problem.  Everyone is too adorable, the spikiness and darkness is tamped down, and the plot is as predictable and tropey as any of those films from GREEN CARD to KRAMER VS KRAMER.

First off, the dad, Peter, seems to be able to magically give up drugs despite having been a seriously heavy user for over a decade and still hanging out with users. We see one relapse. But no therapy, no NA, no AA, and he's just fine. We don't even really see withdrawal.  Then there's the kid, Arlo, who seems remarkably kind, sweet, open and undamaged despite the fact he grew up with a violent and abusive father, a drug-addict mother, and is still grieving. We don't see any of that in how he interacts with all the new people he meets or being around drug use.  Then there's the fact that Peter starts dating Arlo's psychiatrist (Diego Calva). We see enough of the psychiatrist to think he takes his job seriously and would not breach this boundary.

So this is a really funny, really heart-warming film that's beautifully shot and acted, but that is fatally flawed.  I just didn't believe any of it.  And it just felt super-cliched and sanitised and obvious in ways that I found problematic.

CLUB KID is rated R and has a running time of 2hrs 2m. It played Cannes, Telluride and Toronto. It opens in the USA on November 6th.

THE DEBUT** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Closing Night Gala

Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg (A REAL PAIN) returns to our screens with a mis-cast and beyond obvious musical comedy.  Julianne Moore stars as a bored housewife who, quelle surprise, finds community and self-confidence through her local theatre troupe.  So, so, so trite.  Her road to self-knowledge comes via Paul Giamatti's theatre director. In a tour-de-force scene, worth the price of admission alone, he forces her to really channel her character of the building janitor to the point that she turns from shy mouse into shouting desperate working-class woman.  The audience I watched this with burst into spontaneous applause. 

Unfortunately, that's the high point of the film. Thereafter, Eisenberg takes the character into increasingly laughable and absurdist territory, as she moves into a dodgy room-for-the-night roach motel as she completely inhabits her role.  We end up with a fright-wig and crazy make-up.  Not that an absurdist comedy couldn't have worked. But I don't think Julianne Moore is the woman for that role. Just imagine Lisa Kudrow in the part and weep for what could have been.  Overall, I am just surprised that after the layered, complicated depth of A REAL PAIN, this is where Eisenberg would choose to go next. It just feels so... slight.  

THE DEBUT is rated R and has a running time of 1hr 45m. It played Telluride and Toronto 2026. It opens in the USA on December 11th 2026 and in the UK on January 15th 2027.

ROSE**** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 9

Writer-director Markus Schleinzer’s ROSE is a beautifully-made historical drama that speaks to the contemporary debate around trans rights. It stars the ever-brilliant Sandra Hueller in the title role, playing a woman who has adopted the guise of a man in 17th century Germany. She does so not because she wants to be a man, but because wearing trousers gives her freedom. 

As the film opens, the soldier returns home from the brutal Thirty Years’ War to claim his inheritance - a small, broken-down rural farm. He turns it around and takes a wife Suzanna (Caro Braun), adding to his landholdings and his respectability. About halfway through, they come to an understanding. Both can achieve freedom and respectability from their arrangement. But the villagers cannot abide such deception and subversion. 

Schleinzer shoots the film in black and white and it is well done. I also loved the score and costuming. Caro Braun holds her own against Hueller in arguably the more demanding role. The film concludes exactly as one might expect and fear but the final moments made me gasp. I did chuckle at the idea that Rose had even been lying about her religion though. 

Overall it’s a beautiful film but very on the nose in its politics and predictable in its outcomes. It is elevated by Hueller but still feels rather slight.

ROSE has a running time of 1hr 34m. Sandra Hueller won the acting award at Berlin.  It goes on release in the USA on December 11th 

A LONG WINTER***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 9

Writer-director Andrew Haigh returns to the London Film Festival with another beautifully-made, deeply-felt film about grief, gay longing and addiction. This iteration, A LONG WINTER, is based on a novella written by Colm Toibin and set set in 1930s Spain. Haigh transposes it to 1950s rural Colorado. The film centres on a family of four. As it opens, the younger brother (Heartstoppers’ Kit Connor) is leaving for the Korean War just as his elder brother Mike (Fred Hechinger - GLADIATOR II) has returned home. Mike may be elder but he seems feckless and naive, shocked at his mother’s depression and alcoholism, and seemingly the last to know in the village. Indeed, once she walks out into the winter, it’s Mike who refuses to give up hope of finding her. He may be joined in his mountain walks by his Uncle Jack (Martin Freeman) but Jack at least knows it’s a forlorn mission. Meanwhile, father and son take in a drifter called Jimmy (Reservation Dogs’ D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) to fill the practical housekeeping role left by the mother. 

That I found the so-called protagonist Mike to be profoundly irritating did not harm my enjoyment of the film, because as much as it is marketed as Mike’s coming-of-age story it’s really about the parents. And here, The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Outlander’s Caitriona Balfe are outstanding and heartbreaking in beautifully-written many-layered roles. She plays the mother as a frustrated restless soul trapped in a rural home so far from the glamour and modernity of the magazines and music that she loves. He plays a father just trying his best - maybe harsh, maybe bigoted as many people of that time, but trying to keep the woman he loves safe and the sons he loves from knowing the full extent of their difficulties. 

The resulting film is a patient and heartbreaking exploration of grief and sorrow and frustration shot beautifully by cinematographer Andre Turpin. It’s a showcase for Moss-Bachrach who truly steals the film.

A LONG WINTER has a running time of 1hr 57m. It played Telluride and Toronto. It will be released in the UK and USA on January 17th 2027.

FATHERLAND***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 8

Writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Palme D’or winning FATHERLAND is a masterpiece.  It says more in 75 minutes about love, morality and humanity than most films say in two hours, and many directors say in an entire career.  

Pawlikowski re-imagines Nobel-prize winning author Thomas Mann's post-war return to Germany with his wife as a trip with his daughter Erika instead.  He had fled to the USA in 1933 to avoid Nazi prosecution and this is his first trip back to his Heimat or homeland.  Journalists, politicians, and ordinary Germans all want to know if his loyalty is to the capitalist USA or to Communist Russia, as this division is now being played out in the emerging zones of West and East Germany. And is he an American or Germany now?  Where is home versus homeland.

The political story is told through the lens of music, just as Pawlikowski did in COLD WAR.  Erika is horrified at the free-spirited joyous dancing to a jazz band in Frankfurt, by people who years earlier would have been happily enabling the Nazi regime.  Various choirs are brought out to regale the famous Thomas Mann - and perhaps win him to their cause - whether children singing of a new socialist future in Weimar or soldiers singing Russian folk songs. It is significant that the only spontaneous moment of music is the final one - when the Manns come across the church where Bach was capellmeister and hear an organist play.  This is the sincere and true moment of emotional catharsis.

That catharsis is prompted by the apparent suicide of Klaus Mann. We see him in the prologue in Cannes with his lover, on the phone to Erika, complaining of his persecution under the Nazis and his existential crisis now that all must be forgotten and a new Germany forged.  He argues for artists to refuse to play the game, and to commit suicide. When he reels off the list of those who have already done so, it is chilling.  His ghost haunts the balance of the film.

But his father Thomas is with Goethe. He argues not for an "inner emigration" or a nihilistic suicide but for life and love and the complexity of humanity, and for society not to be hidebound by ideology but to embrace that complexity.  Even when he's verbally slapping down the Wagner grandkids, he does so with a twinkle in his eye. As played by German legend Hans Zischler, he is vital. 

His daughter Erika, as played by Sandra Hueller, the finest actress of her generation, is brave, pragmatic but deeply felt.  The portrait of intimacy between father and daughter, and daughter and brother, is heartfelt and beautiful. But also lightly done and never manipulative. 

The final scene of intimate grief and soul-enriching music me cry. The whole film is a tour-de-force of post-war cinematic language as well as how music both enriches and is exploited. It is a film that tells us everything about what it means to be part of society and to preserve one's humanity and embrace art, while never shying away from the difficulties of doing so. Poor Klaus could not. 

FATHERLAND is rated 12A and has a running time of 1hr 22m. Pawel Pawlikowski won Best Director at Cannes. It goes on release in the UK and USA on October 23rd.

POSSIBLE LOVE** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 8

Lee Chang-Dong’s POSSIBLE LOVE is a superb 1hr 45m social drama entrapped in a ponderous, obvious, yawn-inducing 2hr 40m running time. Which is a real shame because the lead performances are all superb. The plot, such as it is, sees a working-class couple toyed with by a rich couple. The husband was laid off from his factory after a strike was violently disbanded by the police, resulting in physical and mental trauma that he’s self-medicating with alcohol. As a result he spends much of the film depressed and withdrawn, resisting the inevitable climactic moment of catharsis. By contrast the wife revels in the attention of her newfound “sister” … until she doesn’t. 

As for the rich couple they are full of carefree unselfconscious condescension and display zero emotional range or growth. The wife is making a documentary about the value of labour and alights upon our working-class couple. She’s charming and manipulative and gets her footage at all costs - much like Chris Hansen and his production team in PRIMETIME.  Meanwhile, her husband is a super-rich nepo baby whose side hustle is corporate finance. This film is so on the nose that you can figure out exactly where his story is going to end up well before the ending. At least the husband recognises that his wife is exploiting the poor couple by befriending them. But he doesn’t have enough self-awareness that in whistling for his childhood playmate he is equally exploitative. 

It’s all well enough filmed and handsomely acted but it’s also very predictable and obvious. We get it. Everybody is a voyeur. The super-rich are selfish tits. Next?

POSSIBLE LOVE is rated 18 and has a running time of 2hrs 44m. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice.  It goes on release in the UK and USA on October 23rd.

INK** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 6

I went into INK thinking it was going to be another movie about an evil corrupting billionaire, putting money ahead of ethics, in the manner of THE SOCIAL RECKONING, ARTIFICIAL, MUSK and BUNKER. But in this film, media mogul Rupert Murdoch is the one being corrupted!  Instead, it's his newly appointed editor of British tabloid The Sun, Larry Lamb, that's doing the corrupting. Not just of Rupert Murdoch but the entire British public.

As the film opens, Murdoch (Guy Pearce) and Lamb (Jack O'Connell) are meeting in Rules restaurant in Covent Garden.  Rupert is pissed off that he's not taken seriously by the British media establishment on account of being an Australian.  So he's bought a left-leaning broadsheet called The Sun, and is trying to hire Lamb to run it.  Lamb is likewise an outsider: a Northern journalist working on the then best-selling tabloid, The Mirror, but blocked from getting the top job by a long-serving editor. Murdoch wants Lamb to overtake The Mirror.  His sole innovation is to turn it into a tabloid and to give Lamb the funding to assemble a team of "undesirables".  Lamb's innovation is to ask what the British people actually care about and to write about that, no matter how trashy or beyond the pale.

And of course the plan works. Sleaze sells. Lamb is delighted.  Murdoch is more squeamish and prudish.  But you can't deny the sales figures.  Even when a senior exec's wife is kidnapped, and Lamb splashes it all over the front page, Murdoch does not restrain him, let alone sack him. Money talks. 

There's a lot to like about this film, and most of it centres of the twin lead performances from Pearce and O'Connell. I also think it will help a younger generation to understand how we ended up with the tabloid media culture of the 80s and 90s and by extension the scurrilous online TMZ culture we now live with. To that extent, this movie would pair well with PRIMETIME.

But what I didn't like was the fundamental framing, by screenwriter James Graham, based on his own stage-play.  I get that Murdoch wasn't always the man he became, but I think it's weird to frame the entire film as the corruption of Murdoch.  And it's even weirder not to do so showing the influence that his then wife and his mother had on him.  Once his mum died, the gloves really came off. I also feel that Graham failed to turn his play into a screenplay. There's way too much portentous monologuing, especially from Claire Foy's female journo who seems to act as the voice of conscience in the film.

I also pretty much hated Danny Boyle's direction. I get that he's trying to stop it feeling staid and stagey but having weird camera angles is a cheap trick and doesn't substitute for actual cinematic style. I also think it is deeply hypocritical to make a whole film about the morally corrupt media and then to infringe IP and use AI to exploit the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It cheapens the film, and it makes Danny Boyle look like a screaming hypocrite. He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself. 

INK is rated R and has a running time of 1hr 56m. It played Venice, Telluride and Toronto. It opens in the USA on December 11th and in the UK on January 8th 2027.

MISTY GREEN*** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 6

Writer-director-stand-up-comedian Chris Rock has created a frustrating film that showcases a great actor in Slow Horses' Rosalind Eleazer in the eponymous lead role.  

To start with the positive, Chris is willing to go there. He is willing to talk about the reality of Hollywood for women of a certain age and ambiguous racial heritage. He shows just how excruciating and demoralising the casting process can be, and how even highly talented and formerly successful stars like Misty Green can find themselves struggling financially and forced to yacht.  Let's just say that as an avid reader of DeuxMoi and Enty, I *never* thought I would see actors being paid by rich men for their services would be shown on the big screen. And yet that's the framing dilemma for Misty.  She has a week to leave the apartment she's been crashing in and no money. She gets a shot at landing a big part. But she is constrained by her own self-destructive behaviour, and her obligations toward her bipolar brother (Daniel Kaluuya). Meanwhile her "friend" Zach (Adam Driver) offers her the chance to earn 300k for one night with a Sheikh. And her best friend Naomi (Anna Kendrick) shows the other option: marry for financial security.

The complication of the script is that it's not just that Misty is in a sexist, racist environment that is designed to undercut her. She also has a fierce temper and is taking a lot of drugs and seems to bite every hand that tries to feed her.  And while this creates a really complex character and allows Rosalind Eleazer to give a fantastic, and award-worthy, performance, one does wonder whether the script verges on the misogynistic. Another major negative is that Rock just cannot get out of his way. He plays a director called Jordan who has a long history with Misty.  But Jordan isn't a character as much as a vehicle for Rock to do stand-up skits.  They're funny, but they definitely pulled me out of the film. I also feel that Rock's script doesn't know how to balance humour and gravity more broadly.  There's a key third act plot point that involves a long-running gag with a plastic spider.  That was a jump the shark moment for me.

MISTY GREEN is rated 15 and has a running time of 1hr 43m. It played Toronto and was released last week in the USA. 

PAPER TIGER***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 5

Writer-director James Gray’s PAPER TIGER is a handsomely-made, well-considered and strangely old-fashioned character drama set in early 80s New York. TOP GUN: MAVERICK’s Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson star as husband and wife Irwin and Hester, raising two teenage boys in a family home in Queens. They both work and are doing well enough but are acutely aware that they’re about to have to pay college tuition. 

At the start of the film, Irwin’s charismatic larger-than-life brother Gary (Adam Driver) arrives armed with a van of Peter Luger steaks and wearing a flashy suit and watch. He’s clearly done well with his security business since leaving the police, but he envies Irwin’s loving home life. His big idea is that they should go into business together advising the new Russian migrants taking over the docks on environmental matters. Of course, the new Russians turn out to be incredibly dangerous and Irwin’s family is at risk. But this raises the question of who really is family. Should Irwin care about Gary as much as he cares about Hester and the kids? And what will Hester do knowing her kids are at risk? 

What I love about this film is how I never really knew which way Gary would go right up until the final scene. I believed in the family dynamics completely. And all three leads give characteristically strong, layered performances. The film works as a play about institutionalised corruption and what happens to the small guy caught in its vice. It’s never obvious and always allows its plot moves to feel organic.  

But what elevates PAPER TIGER beyond another worthy drama is the visual and audio style of James Gray. Every scene, every frame, every audio cue is intentional and considered. It’s carefully constructed and you feel the emotional and psychological insight and weight that comes with that. The result is a grown-up film for grown-ups. One that rewards patient and careful viewing. 

PAPER TIGER is rated R and has a running time of 1hr 55m. It opens in the UK on November 13th.

BUNKER*** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 6

Writer-director Florian Zeller’s BUNKER is a handsomely-made, beautifully-cast, social drama fatally undone by an obvious and ham-fisted script. Zeller’s social observations are so obvious and banal and told in a style that is so on the nose as to be patronising. Real-life husband and wife Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz play husband and wife Miguel and Sophia. They live in London and are the embodiment of complacent success - stunning house, beautiful kids, fashionable friends. But all is not well under the surface. Sophia resents the fact that while Miguel’s career as an architect has thrived in London, hers as an editor has been constrained. 

The action begins when their poor neighbour Tony (Adolescence’s Stephen Graham) punches a hole through the dividing wall between his garage and their garden. He wants to put in a window so that he can make the space liveable but in doing so violates their privacy. Miguel threatens legal action and of course Tony cannot afford to go to court. All of this is embedded in a wider discussion of security alarms. Miguel wants to protect his property and that may or may not include his wife. 

The acquisitive possessiveness of the striving couple is thrown into relief by a new commission. A tech billionaire wants Miguel to build him a bunker in Hawaii. Sophia hates the idea but as the commission’s fees go up and up Miguel is clearly tempted. Cue a zoom meeting between Miguel and the billionaire. He’s played by Paul Dano in a chilling cameo, all the more chilling because Dano has such a babyish face and underplays the role. When asked by Miguel why he would want to build a bunker he’s genuinely flummoxed why anyone who had the means would not. And when he drops a line about maintaining the chain of command in a situation where money had lost all value you could hear the audience audibly gasp. It says a lot that in a couple of weeks where we’ve seen films skewering Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman that it was Zeller who managed to say something that finally shocked an audience already predisposed to thinking that all billionaire techbros are evil. 

So this ends up being a three-star film. You know from the opening scene that you’re gonna get a slow build over 90 minutes to a big blow-out argument between the couple and some kind of violent confrontation with the neighbour. And you can definitely guess the composition of the final shot. But the Paul Dano scene and the production design make the film worth watching nonetheless.

BUNKER has a running time of 2hrs 6m. It played Venice and Toronto 2026.

ARTIFICIAL***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 5

ARTIFICIAL is basically THE SOCIAL NETWORK but for OpenAI: it's the origin story of the company that launched ChatGPT and so literally changed the world.  What it is NOT is the story of Sam Altman. Because whatever Mark Zuckerberg's infinite failings, he at least wrote the code for Facebook. By contrats, Sam Altman is just an emotionally manipulative liar who excels at sales.  The real story of OpenAI, as penned by screenwriter Simon Rich (INSIDE OUT), is the story of Ilya Sutskever (ANORA's Yura Borisov).  

Ilya is the super smart mathmo who teams up with Nobel Prize-winning academic Geoff Hinton and basically invents AI, sells the idea to Google, only to part ways with Geoff and join OpenAI when Geoff keeps preaching patience. Of course Ilya thinks Sam Altman is his friend and believes in their mission of creating an open AI away from the control of any single corporation, only to have Sam sell that dream from under him for Microsoft's cash and compute. So Ilya famously pushes Sam off the board only to have Microsoft's CEO and half the OpenAI employees go against him and reinstall their messiah. 

ARTIFICIAL worked for me as a film because it’s really about Ilya with Sam Altman as a side character.  The actor playing Ilya is so good and his character arc is so compelling that I was captivated for the two hour plus running time. As for Andrew Garfield he just reprises his role as Jonathan Larsen in TICK, TICK...BOOM! but with the camp turned up to a thousand and some weird de-ageing shit going on that makes him look like Spock I think he mistook weird physical ticks for an actual performance. And he probably needs to stop playing gay characters like some kind of SNL skit camp kabuki that’s borderline homophobic. It's a totally weird choice but something that's not surprising given director Luca Guadagnino's fondness for excess.  If Yura Borisov is in a serious biopic, Garfield is in COYOTE VS ACME. And Ike Barinholtz's portrayal of Elon Musk is straight out of SNL.  It's just a super-weird choice.

By contrast, I really loved Simon Rich's screenplay. He tells a complicated story well and keeps a lot of the intricacies of the boardroom drama. I think he gets Altman's basic psychopathy right, but this goes against the broad performance from Garfield. Garfield got a lot of laughs from the Festival audience, but if Sam Altman were so laughable in real life, he wouldn't have been able to manipulate so may people.  I also really loved Damon Albarn’s score.

ARTIFICIAL is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 2hrs 20m. It will be released in the USA on December 25th and in the UK on January 22nd 2027/

PRIMETIME***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 5

Lance Oppenheim’s PRIMETIME is a lurid fever dream set in the early days of the internet and the dawn of reality TV. Ajon Singh’s slippery and skewering screenplay takes us inside the dark ambition of real-life TV presenter Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and his fictionalised show producer Andie (Merritt Wever). Their hit TV show consisted of entrapping predators on camera and as the film opens they have just been given a coveted primetime slot going up against Damon Lindelof’s Lost. Suddenly Hansen has a shot at the prestige and acclaim that he craves but only if he can keep the gotcha moments coming. And if this means emotionally endangering the “teen”-looking actors he uses as bait or entrapping the predators in cahoots with law enforcement, so be it. 

All of this foreshadows the clickbait social media rage-bait algorithms that no longer just rule our TVs but also rule our politics. The very concept of “primetime” now seems quaint and anachronistic: an entire nation sitting down together to watch linear network TV. But the concept of intrusive, privacy-busting, legally-ambiguous bread and circuses is sadly all-encompassing now. The enshittification started with Chris Hansen and went via Mark Burnett and Andy Cohen to Donald Trump. 

PRIMETIME feels like a horror movie of our worst nightmares projected back in time to their origin point. The visual style, audio design and soundtrack all contribute to a feeling of nausea and corruption. And it’s anchored in co-lead performances of incredible power from Pattinson and Wever. But special mention has to go to SUPERMAN’s Skyler Gisondo as Decoy Dan - the vulnerable young actor sucked into Hansen’s world in desperation for his SAG card. I can see why this film has been hyped. It is so well considered in front of and behind the lens. I wouldn’t change a frame. And my goodness Robert Pattinson may well be the best cineaste of us all. His ability to ferret out interesting new directors and scripts is unparalleled. 

PRIMETIME is rated R and has a running time of 1hr 50m.  It played Venice and opened in the USA last month. It opens in the UK on October 30th.

WILDWOOD*** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 5

If your dad is a billionaire willing to fund your media dreams you can turn Dark Spidey like David Ellison or use the Force for good like Travis Knight. There’s something to be said for being so insulated from commercial pressure that you can create ludicrously expensive, visually ravishing, stop-motion films that are too long and violent for kids but charm adults. His latest project, WILDWOOD, is a mash-up of elements from LABYRINTH, STAR WARS and LOTR, with a script by ParaNorman writer Chris Butler, based on the book by Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy. A teenage girl called Pru goes into a magical forest to rescue her baby brother, assisted by a nerdy gamer boy called Curtis (Jacob Tremblay). She encounters a world of magical animals, forest outlaws and Yoda-ish hippies. Together they must defeat the evil Dowager Governor (Carey Mulligan) who is so grief-stricken that she wants to use black magic to resurrect her son. 

I loved everything about the film that was to do with its look and feel. The animation is wonderful and kinetic, the soundtrack is propulsive and beautiful, and the imagination behind the worlds it creates is awe-inspiring. An early scene of the siblings cycling through Portland, Oregon is just beyond charming and the visualisation of their parents is simply adorable. It all felt organic and tactile and beautifully, lovingly hand-made. 

What I didn’t like was the script. Two hours twenty is just too long for a kids film, and as I was taken on my third, fourth and fifth chase scene even I started to tire. This film is also way way too scary for your typical kid and I am utterly surprised it’s been given a 12 rating. More than that I didn’t like that we only found out the backstory and plot motivation 45 mins in. In LABYRINTH and other great kids’ adventures you know the stakes immediately. 

It’s a measure of how far out of the movie I was that by the time we got to the big climactic battle scene I was like a) no way evil queen is losing if she has the high ground and guns b) why is her bombardment in the midst of battle when it kills her own troops rather than before the battle. So yeah. Not an immersive compelling story.

WILDWOOD is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 2hrs 13m. 

THE LIBERATION**** aka HARMONIA - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 4

In the early 80s director Guy Nattiv’s real-life grandmother Rita abandoned her family and joined a cult led by a charismatic woman. In this fictional version of that tale, Rita is a mother of two teenage girls, a wife to a loving husband of 21 years, and a long-time bank manager. She’s smart and capable but is deeply emotional vulnerable, troubled by memories of the mother and three sisters that she lost in the Holocaust. The cult leader sees both this and Rita’s healthy savings account and lures her to a rural compound. It is to this compound that her two daughters follow her to try to bring her home. 

The resulting film is a rightly painful and sometimes horrifying watch anchored by a searing performance from The Gilded Age’s Carrie Coon. We get a full range of emotions from her - joy, panic, depression, concern, love - sometimes all at the same time. It’s the kind of performance that should garner awards although I am not sure if this is the kind of environment in which a film from an Israeli director is going to get a fair shake. The Last of Us’ Bella Ramsay is also incredibly strong as Rita’s sceptical daughter. By contrast, I was never entirely convinced by Downton Abbey’s Lily James as the cult-leader Ricky and couldn’t help wondering what the originally cast Vicky Krieps might have made of the role.

THE LIBERATION has a running time of 2hrs 4 mins.  It played Telluride and Toronto 2026 and will be released in the US on January 8th. 

MAKING MARIE ANTOINETTE*** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 4

This is the twentieth anniversary of the release of Sofia Coppola’s desperately beautiful and radical retelling of the story of MARIE-ANTOINETTE. We have already been gifted with a lavish and delightful book of on-set stills photos from Andrew Durham. And now we have an equally delightful documentary made by Sofia’s mother - herself the acclaimed film-maker - Eleanor Coppola. 

Of course, this is not going to be anything like HEART OF DARKNESS, Eleanor’s iconic on-set doc of her husband’s film APOCALYPSE NOW. Because as tiring and awesome as filming at Versailles was, MARIE-ANTOINETTE was not the drug-induced folie de grandeur that APOCALYPSE NOW was. No. This film comes in on time and on budget and while Sofia clearly has a firm vision of what she wants to achieve - occasionally in opposition to her DP Lance Accord - her manner is quieter, and more delicate. 

As Eleanor comments, in journals read by the actress Diane Lane, Sofia is herself a young woman thrust into a high-pressure situation with all of the eyes upon her. No wonder she and her young lead actor Kristen Dunst can both relate. It’s almost shocking how young both of them look and how slight - Sofia particularly - swallowed up in the lavish set and amidst the huge crew. With Eleanor filming between takes there’s no downtime. Kristen is polite but often looks exhausted. Meanwhile Jason Schwartzman plays up to the gallery and Asia Argento reads everybody’s fortune. 

The real revelations are not so much about the making of MARIE-ANTOINETTE but about Eleanor. She passed away a couple of years ago and her children finished her film. What I found most touching was hearing and seeing Eleanor’s evident pride and delight in being part of her daughter’s world. But also - and perhaps more importantly - in seeing the evident love snd trust between her children, as Roman arrives to direct the second unit. I also found it bracingly honest but rather melancholy to hear Eleanor compare her own struggle to balance being a young mother with her artistic ambitions. She comments wistfully that the next generation of artists, including her daughter and Kristen, are more boldly following their dreams. It made me wonder how much has really changed. Sofia was one of the few successful female directors twenty years ago and remains so today.

MAKING MARIE ANTOINETTE has a running time of 1hr 26m.  It played New York and Telluride and will be released on Mubi on November 6th.