The Choral (2025)
★★★☆☆
The story of a wartime community told through the local choral group as they battle to recruit for an upcoming performance in Nicholas Hytner’s historical comedy-drama The Choral, by Alan Bennett.
festivals
Bugonia (2025)
★★★★☆
A factory worker and his cousin abduct a female CEO believing her to be an alien in Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal comedy-drama remake Bugonia
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: it opens out in your mind, like the ripples of a pebble in still water, into the state of broken Britain, loneliness and the fragile desire for human connection (like a dragonfly, as per the opening quote by James Thurber).
Odyssey (2025)
★★☆☆☆
The confusingly titled Odyssey is a violent thriller set in a gentrifying Britain, directed by Gerard Johnson.
BFI LFF 2025: Blue Moon (2025)
★★★𗰶☆
After the opening of Oklahoma! renowned lyricist Lorenz Hart has to deal with the success of his former partner Richard Rodgers and his own insecurities in Richard Linklater’s period drama Blue Moon.
BFI LFF 2025: Winners
BFi LFF 2025: The Choral (2025)
★★★☆☆
The story of a wartime community told through the local choral group as they battle to recruit for an upcoming performance in Nicholas Hytner’s historical comedy-drama The Choral, by Alan Bennett.
BFI LFF 2025: Bugonia (2025)
★★★★☆
A factory worker and his cousin abduct a female CEO believing her to be an alien in Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal comedy-drama remake Bugonia.
BFI LFF 2025: Hamnet (2025)
★★★★☆
The story of the marriage between Agnes and William Shakespeare and how unthinkable tragedy helped the playwright create Hamlet is told in Chloe Zhao’s emotional adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet.
BFI LFF 2025: 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.
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.
BFI LFF 2025: The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
★★☆☆☆
Amanda Seyfried portrays the founder of the Shaker movement in director Mona Fastvold’s historical drama The Testament of Ann Lee, co-written by Brady Corbet.
Suleymane’s Story (2024) (L’Histoire de Suleymane)
★★★★☆
Souleymane’s Story, directed by Boris Lojkine, is a searingly realistic two days in the life of one of the invisible asylum seekers – a bicycle courier in Paris.
Urchin (2025)
★★★★☆
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