The Stranger (2025) (L’Étranger)
★★★★☆
The Stranger by François Ozon is an atmospheric adaptation of Camus’ classic.
Broken English (2025)
★★★★☆
Marianne Faithfull is a much-misunderstood icon. Broken English, this documentary to set the record straight, made near the end of her life by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, also features myriad stars of music and film.
SIRAT (2025)
★★★★☆
Sirat by Oliver Laxe is a desert survival story — and one of the year’s most gripping films
BAFTA 2026 winners
★★★★☆
BAFTA 2026 winners
The President’s Cake (2025) (Mamlaket al-qasab)
★★★★☆
Despite her attempts to avoid it, a nine-year-old rural schoolgirl in Iraq wins the dubious prize of being the one chosen in her class to make a birthday cake to celebrate the dictator’s birthday in The President’s Cake, directed by Hasan Hadi.
Nouvelle Vague (2025)
★★★★☆
Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) and Citizen Kane are generally accepted to be the most influential films ever made: Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles, their directors. Breathless was on television recently: it is now part of film history.
H is for Hawk (2025)
★★★☆☆
Claire Foy plays an academic devastated by bereavement who finds solace in a connection with a goshawk in Philippa Lowthorpe’s true-story drama H is for Hawk.
Golden Globes 2026
★★★★☆
The Golden Globes awards are on 11 January 2026. WINNERS, Nominations, predictions and snu.bs
it was just an accident (2025) (Yek tasadef sadeh)
★★★★☆
It Was Just An Accident directed by Jafar Panahi is a moral examination of what happens when former political prisoners think they have seen a former torturer.
Pillion (2025)
★★★★☆
Pillion is a sensational feature debut by Harry Lighton with graphic images of sub-dom gay sex.
Dragonfly (2025)
★★★★☆
Dragonfly is a small film. Small in the sense it’s obviously low budget (location) and a two-hander. But it’s so well written (by director Paul Andrew Williams) and exquisitely acted that it seems bigger.
Odyssey (2025)
★★☆☆☆
The confusingly titled Odyssey is a violent thriller set in a gentrifying Britain, directed by Gerard Johnson.
BFI LFF 2025: Winners
BFI LFF 2025: Sound of Falling (2025): (In die Sonne schauen)
★★★★☆
Mascha Schilinsky’s superb Sound of Falling is an immersive, fractured reflection on childhood, telling the story of four young girls from different eras.