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.

WILD HORSE NINE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 4

WILD HORSE NINE is exactly what I expected and wanted from a Martin McDonagh film: a brutally darkly funny script; career-best multifaceted performances; beautiful landscape cinematography; an acute sense of moral and political corruption; but a deep and moving emotional core centred on male friendship.  

Those friends are Chris and Lee - two CIA assassins in Chile ahead of the 1973 coup that replaced the democratically-elected Marxist President Allende with the fascist General Pinochet. Chris is old and sick and indiscreet but as played by John Malkovich reveals layers of conscience and melancholy and genuine good. Lee is a series of mostly reaction shots, with Sam Rockwell both open-mouthed aghast at Chris’ inappropriate behaviour but also caring and loving. 

The bulk of the action takes place amidst the “Big Heads” on Easter Island as the friends enjoy a last hurrah, befriending a couple of idealistic young feminists on the way. Of the two, Mariana di Girolamo Arteaga as Monica really holds her own in the more demanding role. The action occasionally cuts to Lee’s wife Marge (Parker Posey) or to their boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) - both superb. To say more would be to reveal a pleasingly twisty plot full of surprises. 

There’s much to be said in praise of Carter Burwell’s beautiful score and incredibly well-chosen needle drops; of Ben Davis’ stunning cinematography; and of Mikkel E. G. Nielsen’s precise and subtle editing that makes so much of the humour and suspense land. But really this, as all of his films, is a Martin McDonagh joint. And he is at his most supremely McDonagh-y here. You will laugh consistently but more importantly you will neither forget these men nor their friendship.

WILD HORSE NINE and has a running time of 1hr 58m and is rated R. It played Venice, Telluride and Toronto 2026. It will be released in the USA and UK on November 6th.

MUSK** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 3

Alex Gibney’s four-hour Elon Musk doc is - as one would expect from an Academy Award-winning documentarian - a handsomely produced and well-constructed survey of the tech giant and political menace. 

The problem is that the only people likely to want to see a doc like this are people like me - people who are already hyper-aware of all of the dangers that Musk poses - the kind of people who read long-form exposes in The Atlantic and The New Yorker and who listen to podcasts by Kara Swisher - the kind of people who already suspect Musk is a misogynistic racist psychopath but want to know the truth behind his drug use and the extent of his paternity. 

And for these people there’s literally not one new revelation in this entire documentary. We don’t actually get to the bottom of his drug use. We don’t actually find out how many kids Musk has. We don’t know what he meant when he said he knew the election result hours before anyone else with a high degree of confidence. Because while Alex Gibney has brilliantly marshalled all the “known knowns” and put them in one handy place, he hasn’t actually contributed any new knows. 

So we are left in the uncomfortable position that the people who probably need to be brought up to speed on this topic are going to be put off by the film’s running time. And those that will be drawn to it, and are willing to commit the time, will be disappointed.

MUSK has a running time of 3 hrs 52 mins. It played Venice and Toronto and opens in the USA on October 16th.

THE BELOVED***** aka EL SER QUERIDO - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 2

THE BELOVED is an absolutely majestic character drama that focusses on a brutal father-daughter relationship. Script, performances, cinematography, editing, sound, cinema-history meta-text - I wouldn't change a single-frame of this masterpiece.  It's like the already brilliant SENTIMENTAL VALUE's more accomplished, more searing, more brutal big brother.

Javier Bardem gives a complex performance as a celebrated film director called Esteban, who has recovered from his wild and reckless youth and seeks to reconnect with his estranged adult daughter Emilia.  In a brutal central scene the audience is taken from farcical laughter to one of the most painful, sadistic, nasty scenes of attempted control and psychological brutalisation I have seen in quite some time.  Esteban is a man who thinks he has reckoned with his past, but has not. He may be sober, but he is still the guy whose behaviour can hurt and damage.  The only difference is that now he is faced with women - whether his daughter or his cinematographer - who won't put up with his bullshit.

As good as Bardem is, this film is the vehicle for Victoria Luengo as Emilia. The part was written for her, and she occupies nearly every frame of this film with a powerful and desperately moving performance as Esteban's long-abandoned child.  They dance a dance of seeing but not seeing - of trying to connect and rebuffing that connection.  You sense that Emilia, closely observed by Esteban whether in real life or through his camera lens, wants to REALLY be seen by him.  But he spends most of the film just creating his own narrative, and directing his own back story, and refusing to centre her pain.  It's a remarkable double act and one gets the feeling that this is one of those performances - like Vicky Krieps in THE PHANTOM THREAD or Sandra Hueller in TONI ERDMANN - that makes an international star out of a European, hitherto domestically known, talent. 

So kudos to writer-director Rodrigo Sorogoyen and longtime writing partner Isabel Pena for creating such a brave and complex script and to Sorogoyen for setting them within some of the most intentional and clever cinematography I have seen in a while.  There are so many nods to Hitchcock, Bergman and Almodovar and a feeling of complete mastery of the form. 

THE BELOVED has a running time of 2hr 15 mins. It played Cannes and Toronto.

ELSINORE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Opening Night Gala

I had expected ELSINORE to contain a great performance from Andrew Scott. I had NOT expected it to be part of a great film. Maybe that’s just years of underwhelming London Film Festival opening night films. They tend to be British, “heritage”, earnest and po-faced. And the plot summary - CHARIOTS OF FIRE actor Ian Charleson achieves his dream of playing Hamlet at the National Theatre despite dying of AIDS - suggested that this film might also fall into mawkish mediocrity. 

But ELSINORE is just a superb film! Brilliantly, darkly funny from start to finish. Scabrously British in its biting wit and affectionate use of mockery. And yet also genuinely affecting while never being emotionally manipulative. Screenwriter Stephen Beresford (PRIDE) knows just how to show us courage and joy and love and grief without ever bowing to trite clichés. And my goodness does he have a cast to deliver that range of emotions. Andrew Scott - who has himself delivered a widely acclaimed Hamlet on the London stage - gives the performance of his life as Charleson and one that is rightly being spoken of as an Oscar-contender. He is ably supported by a large cast. The standouts for me are Peter Mullen as Charleson’s father and Monica Dolan as the hilarious stage door manager at the National. And my goodness how delightful to see Juliet Stevenson on our screens again. 

But this isn’t simply a movie that works as a talky script to showcase performances. For a movie basically set in a flat, an NHS clinic and the National Theatre, director Simon Stone really gives us a visually arresting film. He shoots the National to make it a kind of self-contained protective city or community within itself. I really felt I had a sense of its internal layout and architecture - as if I had been taken into the Company. Further, cinematographer Mike Eley shoots many of the major emotional beats with almost claustrophobic close-ups that give us the full power of Scott’s performance.  

Most of all this is a film that while - yes - about death and the cruelty of a generation of young men taken from us - is also about a life lived with purpose and even joy - and the community who rallied round and made that happen. It’s a film about found family and actual family - the power of art - and human decency. And yet - to its great credit - it is never pompous. What a beautiful delicate balance to have achieved. 

ELSINORE has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2026 and will be released in the USA on November 20th.