BFI London Film Festival 2017 – all our coverage

30 recommendations at the BFI London Film Festival 2017

Our critics’ top tips to the best of this year’s world cinema showcase, from the big-ticket galas (including our own special presentation) to the rarer choices with no UK distribution plans in place.
Friday 15 September 2017

Come out to play: nine of the best Cult titles at the BFI London Film Festival 2017

Are you sitting uncomfortably? From medieval witches to prison fights, Hitchcock’s gruesome visions to a UFO death cult, the transgressive, marginal and sometimes deeply odd films in this year’s Cult programme are full of surprises, writes Anton Bitel.
Tuesday 3 October 2017

Can the crime film change its ways? The sway of the 1970s at the 2017 LFF

As the BFI begins a major season of thrillers, Christina Newland looks at the crime titles unveiled in the 2017 London Film Festival and wonders, given how many harked back to the 70s, how the genre can still ring the changes?
Friday 27 October 2017

10 Treasures from the Archive at the 2017 London Film Festival – as we first reviewed them

From Lucía to The L-Shaped Room, Scarface to Suspiria and Saturday Night Fever, the 2017 LFF is reviving a host of classics – but which did we originally consider clumsy, vulgar or a “long slog” and which did we hail as a masterpiece?
Friday 6 October 2017

Breaking time’s arrow: Lucrecia Martel and Zama at the 2017 LFF

The Argentinian filmmaker brought her colonial-era costume fever dream to the London Film Festival, and in a following screen talk explained her invitation to the audience to submerge themselves in its voluminous conception of time, reports Erika Balsom.
Friday 20 October 2017

Guillermo del Toro: “The Shape of Water is my first movie that is hungry for life”

While charming the crowd at the LFF, the cult Mexican director discussed his brilliant new film, how Pedro Almodóvar gave him “a second chance at life” and his own tangle with the Weinsteins, reports Mar Diestro-Dópido.
Thursday 26 October 2017

Listen to the actress: Annette Bening, directly

Against the backdrop of breaking Harvey Weinstein disclosures, the star of The Grifters and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool held forth on stage at the London Film Festival – bringing home how rare it is for women in the industry to be truly heard, writes Thirza Wakefield.
Friday 24 November 2017

The serial killer variations: David Fincher on Mindhunter at the 2017 LFF

The Seven and Zodiac director took to the stage at the BFI London Film Festival to discuss his latest riff on the serial-killer genre, working with actors and his changing attitude to the thematics of his films. By Kelli Weston.
Friday 27 October 2017

Lucrecia Martel on location with Zama: “All that heroic past and brave macho stuff makes me ill”

On the set of the Argentinian director’s long-awaited new film Zama, Diego Lerer spoke to her about the radical language of the film’s source novel and how to shoot a period film on a modest budget.
Thursday 27 July 2017

Faith and creation: Anoushka Shankar on her score for Shiraz

The composer and sitarist tells Simon Broughton about the challenges and discoveries of writing her first film soundtrack – for the rare Indian silent film Shiraz: A Romance of India.
Friday 6 October 2017

Austin Lynch and Matthew Booth on Gray House: a film to live in

Poised between documentary and fiction, Gray House evokes the residential space of prisoners and oil-rig workers with oblique imagery and Alvin Lucier’s architectural score. The filmmakers explain the ideas behind their project to Sophie Brown.
Tuesday 10 October 2017

Chamber trouble: Tom Benn on scripting his first short, Real Gods Require Blood

Manchester-born and -blooded crime writer Tom Benn tells Michael Pattison about the cinema that influenced his screenplay for a kitchen-sink horror set during the satanic abuse panic of the early 1990s, which premieres at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
Friday 19 May 2017

Radu Jude interview: “Scarred Hearts is like a jazz piece”

The director’s new and stylistically distinctive film uses a sanatorium setting to interrogate Romania’s Golden Age. He talks to Jonathan Romney about fragmenting narratives and exposing antisemitism.
Saturday 15 July 2017

Battle of the Sexes review: Emma Stone and Steve Carell are a crowd-pleasing match

Billie Jean King’s showdown stunt fixture against retired men’s champion Bobby Riggs is played for more than just laughs in this smart, feminist comedy, writes Tom Charity.
Tuesday 12 September 2017

The Florida Project review: a happy film about an ugly world

Sean Baker’s energetic, candy-coloured followup to Tangerine traces a fiery six-year-old girl’s progress through the rundown motels housing poor families in the shadow of Disney World, writes Isabel Stevens.
Wednesday 24 May 2017

Foxtrot review: a savage satire of Israeli military grief and grind

Following his Venice Golden Lion winner Lebanon, Samuel Maoz extends his range with this Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize winner, playing off home-front traumas with the absurdism and rage of life on the Israeli frontline, writes Paul O’Callaghan.
Monday 11 September 2017

Happy End review: Michael Haneke hosts a family blowout

Corrupted by privilege, technology, teen anomie and other engines of psychosis, a fissile upper middle class family brings out the dark wit in the Austrian master, says Jessica Kiang.
Monday 22 May 2017

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) review: bittersweet and brutal stories of family life

Noah Baumbach’s latest is a thematic, mature sequel to his breakthrough The Squid and the Whale, with Dustin Hoffman at the head of a dysfunctional brood of New York intellectuals, writes Michael Leader.
Thursday 25 May 2017

Mudbound review: days of hell in 1940s Mississippi

Dee Rees’s devastating adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s WWII-era saga of neighbouring black and white cotton-farming families finds humanity up to its neck in hardships both natural and self-inflicted, says Sophie Brown.
Thursday 26 January 2017

The Party review: Sally Potter’s fast and furious farce

The versatile writer-director’s latest is a dark satire exposing the foibles of the British middle classes, and political systems, with barbed dialogue and delicious irony, writes Geoff Andrew.
Tuesday 14 February 2017

Redoubtable review: irreverent riff on Godard in ’68

Michel Hazanavicius’s nouvelle vague romcom re-enacts the affair between an angst-ridden Jean-Luc Godard and ingenue actress Anne Wiazemsky. It’s far from respectful, but few cinephiles will be able to resist its knowing humour, writes Jonathan Romney.
Friday 26 May 2017

The Shape of Water review: Guillermo del Toro’s magical anti-fascist fairytale

Guillermo del Toro conjures a cinematic extravaganza teeming with high notes, from Sally Hawkins’ mute, dreamy musical-loving cleaner to the B-movie creature from the deep she sides with against the worst of 1960s US military-industrial iniquity, writes Nick James.
Saturday 2 September 2017

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri first look: Frances McDormand grieves a small-town shitstorm

Martin McDonagh’s latest laconic, multilayered wrong-footer pits McDormand’s storming mourner against two local cops, Woody Harrelson’s omnipotently beloved sheriff and Sam Rockwell’s richly monstrous officer in waiting, writes Nick James.
Friday 8 September 2017

Wonderstruck review: Todd Haynes’s split-era kids’ yarn provides sumptuous but saccharine cinephilia

Haynes’s adaptation of Brian Selznick’s twin-track children’s detective adventure revels in the eloquence of silent cinema and gorgeous evocations of vintage New York, but falls dramatically flat, writes Sophie Monks Kaufman.
Friday 19 May 2017

You Were Never Really Here review: Joaquin Phoenix storms Lynne Ramsay’s kidnap thriller

A bulked-up Phoenix carries the weight of the world into nightmarish terrain in Ramsay’s hardboiled, sharp-edged, audacious adaptation of Jonathan Ames’s novel, says Jonathan Romney.
Saturday 27 May 2017

Angels Wear White review: sexism in a small town

Vivian Qu’s savage portrait of institutional corruption and misogyny in a Chinese seaside resort demands to be seen, writes Michael Leader.
Wednesday 27 September 2017

EX LIBRIS – the New York Public Library review: Fred Wiseman’s ode to patience and fortitude

The director’s latest magisterial study of a public institution is a tribute to the power of education and the importance of community, characteristically ambitious yet surprisingly brisk, writes Neil Young.
Thursday 7 September 2017

Faces Places review: Agnès Varda and JR big up the country byways

Serendipities fly as cinema’s greatest gleaner goes rambling in the cine-van of magnum muralist JR, and pits her memories against her thirst for new faces, writes Isabel Stevens.
Saturday 20 May 2017

Jeune Femme review: furious moments in an unruly life

Laetitia Dosch plays an impulsive, newly single young woman adrift in Paris in this enjoyably chaotic, picaresque character study, the feature debut by Léonor Serraille, writes Sophie Monks Kaufman.
Thursday 25 May 2017

Lean on Pete review: Andrew Haigh’s low-key road movie hits hard

A shy teenager crosses America with his horse in this bracing, well-crafted coming-of-age fable that sees the 45 Years director tackle a broader canvas, writes Paul O’Callaghan.
Tuesday 5 September 2017

Loveless review: Andrey Zvyagintsev finds resonances in a Russian family falling apart

The Russian director’s fifth feature is an enigmatic, and very rewarding, film about a missing child, a dissolving marriage and a country in crisis. At its best, it’s cinematic poetry, writes Geoff Andrew.
Saturday 20 May 2017

120 Beats per Minute (BPM) review: queer lives honoured

Robin Campillo’s drama gives life, joy and distinction to the struggles of France’s Act Up AIDS activists of the early 1990s, says Caspar Salmon.
Saturday 27 May 2017

Ana, mon amour review: scenes from an agonised relationship

This time-shifting dissection of a romantic coupling beset by a mental disorder, from the director of the Golden Bear-winning Child’s Pose, echoes Ingmar Bergman’s probing psychological studies, says Geoff Andrew.
Monday 20 February 2017

Brawl in Cell Block 99 review: Vince Vaughn’s headbanger in the clanger

S. Craig Zahler follows Bone Tomahawk with a slice of prison guignol as Vince Vaughn, Don Johnson and Udo Kier paint the jailhouse black and blue, writes Neil Young.
Tuesday 12 September 2017

Let the Sunshine In review: Juliette Binoche rings love’s changes

In Claire Denis’s low-key rondo, archetypal romantic situations elicit subtle yet surprising transformations in the character of Binoche’s newly divorced painter as she returns to the romantic fray, writes Nick James.
Saturday 20 May 2017

Custody review: a scintillating separation drama

This scintillating separation drama deservedly won first-time feature director Xavier Legrand the Venice Film Festival’s Best Director award, writes Paul O’Callaghan.
Saturday 16 September 2017

El mar la mar review: a shape-shifting portrait of the US desert border, cloaked in dread

J.P. Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta’s unsettling portrait of the American southwest and people caught in purgatory is one of the strongest films yet from Harvard’s celebrated Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, says Jordan Cronk.
Tuesday 14 February 2017

Good Time review: Robert Pattinson careens the Safdies’ mean streets

Pattinson’s lone sibling desperado rampages nocturnal New York in Benny and Josh Safdie’s streetish 70s-throwback bungled heist thriller, writes Michael Leader.
Saturday 27 May 2017

Tonsler Park: Kevin Jerome Everson captures democracy in close-up

This 16mm black-and-white documentary was filmed at Charlottesville polling stations the day that Donald Trump was elected, a riveting study of a world about to be shattered, writes Helen de Witt.
Wednesday 27 September 2017

24 Frames review: Abbas Kiarostami’s living, parting miniatures

Mementos of the late master’s increasingly minimalist poetics, these short experiments in animating photographs and a painting teem with life’s magic and mysteries, says Geoff Andrew.
Wednesday 24 May 2017

Untitled review: Michael Glawogger’s posthumous cine-soul odyssey

The late Austrian documentarist may have prematurely come to rest in 2014, but his spirit and drive live on in this deliberately themeless compendium of his roving observations of human labour and culture across more than a dozen countries, says Jordan Cronk.
Friday 17 February 2017

Western review: once upon a time in modern-day eastern Europe

Valeska Grisebach’s stunning existential study of masculinity tips its hat to classic genre cinema even as it casts an extraordinary troupe of non-professional actors as its grizzled migrant construction workers in a foreign land, writes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Friday 19 May 2017