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.