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.