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).
BFI LFF 2025: Winners
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: 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.
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)
★★★★☆
In
Busan Film Festival 2025: 17-26 September: Awards
★★★★☆
Busan Film Festival 2025 Awards
The Librarians (2025)
★★★★☆
Oscar-nominated The Librarians, directed by Kim A Snyder and executive produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, is a documentary about the unlikely defenders of intellectual freedom in schools in Trump’s changing USA.
San Sebastián Film Festival: 19-27 September 2025: Awards
★★★★☆
San Sebastián 2025
Solo (2023)
★★★★☆
The rush of a new love turns sour for young drag queen Simon, whilst also dealing with the return of his absent mother, in writer-director Sophie Dupuis’s excellent drama Solo.
From Ground Zero (2024)
★★★★☆
From Ground Zero, compiled by Rashid Masharawi and executive produced by Michael Moore, is a poignant compilation of short films showing everyday life in a destroyed Gaza.
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.