London
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.
Mother Vera (2024)
★★★☆☆
Mother Vera is an award-winning documentary by Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson that enthrallingly reveals the life of a nun in Belarusia both pre- and post-convent.
BFI LFF 2025: Line-up
★★★★☆
BFI LFF 2025 line-up
Four Mothers (2024)
★★★☆☆
Loosely based on the gentle, charming Italian 2008 film Mid-August Lunch, a national holiday when cities are deserted, Four Mothers, directed by Darren Thornton, opens out into a broader Irish take on getting old and being gay.
Sebastian (2024)
★★★★☆
A young writer dives into the world of sex work for content for his debut novel: soon the lines between research and reality become blurred in writer-director Mikko Mäkelä’s Sebastian.
Misericordia (2024) (Miséricorde)
★★★☆☆
Misericordia by Alain Guiraudie is an entertaining and disturbing mixture of sex and death.
The Stimming Pool (2024)
★★★☆☆
April is Autism Acceptance Month and Peckhamplex has a special screening of The Stimming Pool, made by The Neurocultures Collective.
On Falling (2024)
★★★★☆
On Falling, a first feature directed by Laura Carreira, is a worthy addition to the Ken Loach trilogy on Sixteen Films: the lives of people struggling on low-wage or zero-hours contracts.