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 As a result he spends much of the film depressed and withdrawn, resisting the inevitable climactic moment of catharsis.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/