BFI London Film Festival 2019 – all our coverage

Co-ordinating intimacy: making sex scenes safe

At the 2019 BFI London Film Festival, two film directors and two intimacy coordinators shared notes on what they’ve learned filming up close and comfortably for actors and crew. Rebecca Harrison took notes.
Monday 14 October 2019

7 excursions from reality in the 2019 London Film Festival Cult strand

From Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg as petri-dish suburban parents to Nicolas Cage in the latest mindbender from Richard Stanley, these seven films will reprogramme your view of the world, says Anton Bitel.
Thursday 10 October 2019

A thoroughly modern Betty: rediscovering Betty Balfour’s Love, Life and Laughter

The mesmerising allure of Betty Balfour in Love, Life and Laughter, lost for almost a century, can now be enjoyed in a sparkling restoration, says Bryony Dixon.
Tuesday 1 October 2019

Five treasures from the archive at the 2019 London Film Festival – as we first reviewed them

From a whimsical French fantasy to an Italian political satire, a Fellini-inspired musical and two cult horror classics, the archive strand at this year’s LFF looks like a crowd-pleaser. But have our critics always been so keen?
Tuesday 1 October 2019

Introducing the 2019 BFI London Film Festival: the top titles to see

Isabel Stevens talks to LFF director Tricia Tuttle about the festival’s premieres of some of the most exciting new films around – including new titles by directors from Céline Sciamma to Martin Scorsese – as well as surprises from debut filmmakers and some forgotten gems from the archives.
Thursday 12 September 2019

The Cave review: a painterly portrait of Ghouta’s last, unwavering doctor

Feras Fayyad’s follow-up to Last Men in Aleppo is a experiential documentary of a Syrian hospital-cum-refuge manager and the layers of pressure she shoulders, from bombs to misogyny, writes Ela Bittencourt.
Wednesday 25 September 2019

First Love first look: Miike Takashi pits yakuza against triads in a gonzo frenzy

Cartoonish ultraviolence and even cartoons break out in the Japanese director’s 103rd movie, a blood-soaked tale of a madcap scheme gone dangerously awry, writes Michael Leader.
Thursday 23 May 2019

Greed review: Coogan and Winterbottom take idle aim at the grim rich

The veteran actor-director duo target Philip Green and the preening kleptocrat class with this satire of gilded follies, but they’re hitting a broad mark with a blunt stick, says Tom Charity.
Thursday 10 October 2019

Hope Gap review: Annette Bening puts some puff into a little English separation story

Bening makes a brilliantly bitter new divorcée opposite a button-up Bill Nighy in screenwriter-turned-director William Nicholson’s crisp but all too modest drama of a couple parting ways, says Tom Charity.
Friday 4 October 2019

The Irishman review: De Niro and Scorsese say goodbye to the goodfellas

A digitally de-aged Robert De Niro leads Martin Scorsese’s epic portrait of the man who may have shot Jimmy Hoffa, writes Graham Fuller.
Wednesday 2 October 2019

Jojo Rabbit review: Taika Waititi laughs in the face of fascism

In this bravely brazen ‘anti-hate satire’ a Führer with halitosis and a misguidedly fervent member of the Hitler Youth provide an outlet to poke fun at prejudice and cherish innocence, writes Ella Kemp.
Tuesday 10 September 2019

Knives Out first look: Daniel Craig and Rian Johnson give Agatha Christie a fond tweak

Not so much a whodunnit as a whollbethefallguy, Rian Johnson’s modern remix of the classic country-house detective mystery is a hoot, not least when Daniel Craig’s flamboyant detective is on screen, says Wendy Ide.
Thursday 19 September 2019

The Lighthouse first look: Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson raise their own tempest at sea

Robert Eggers follows his New England ghost story The Witch with a superbly sulphurous maritime two-hander that channels the word and spirit of Herman Melville, says Jonathan Romney.
Sunday 19 May 2019

Le Mans ’66 (Ford v Ferrari) review: a makeshift motor-men drama that comes alive behind the wheel

James Mangold’s racetrack buddy movie casts Christian Bale and Matt Damon as a Ford motor-race team driver and designer – but the real romance is inside the metal, writes Beatrice Loayza.
Wednesday 18 September 2019

Marriage Story review: Noah Baumbach’s divorce tale has the rueful ring of truth

Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver play divorcing spouses struggling to take care of their son in Noah Baumbach’s reflective and occasionally devastating drama, writes Christina Newland.
Sunday 1 September 2019

Rocks review: Sarah Gavron follows a London girl growing up fast and letting go slowly

In Sarah Gavron’s sweet but gritty new film, Bukky Bakray’s teenager is burdened with adult responsibilities when her mother leaves the family home, writes Ela Bittencourt.
Wednesday 18 September 2019

Honey Boy first look: Shia LaBeouf unearths his own childhood trauma

This fictionalised memoir, directed by Alma Har’el from a moving screenplay by LaBeouf, features an outstanding performance by child actor Noah Jupe as the young Shia, tormented by his bitter alcoholic father, played by LaBeouf himself, writes Simran Hans.
Tuesday 29 January 2019

La Llorona review: the ghosts of Guatemala’s disappeared come calling

A new Mayan maid in the household of a genocidal Guatemalan general heralds the return of the repressed in Jayro Bustamante’s powerful postcolonial supernatural fable, writes Andrew Simpson.
Thursday 10 October 2019

Moffie review: fear and desire on the front lines of Apartheid-era South Africa

Oliver Hermanus’s feverish portrait of a gay South African army trainee on the wrong side of his country’s wars of repression is an unsettling portrait of the psyche of a nation, writes Jamie Dunn.
Monday 9 September 2019

Monos first look: a surrealist trip into the jungle

A squad of teenage soldiers and their panic-stricken hostage go on an eerie and absurd journey in this tense thriller directed by Alejandro Landres, writes Jordan Hoffman.
Tuesday 29 January 2019

The Perfect Candidate review: a political fable fuelled by optimism

Haifaa Al-Mansour’s winning story of a small-town doctor who finds herself standing for election relishes progressiveness and pizzazz in contemporary Saudi Arabia, writes John Bleasdale.
Sunday 1 September 2019

Atlantics first look: Mati Diop’s paranormal take on the migration crisis

The Senegalese filmmaker’s feature debut blends the supernatural into an uneven but tenderly ethereal tale of injustice, exodus and abandonment in a dystopian modern-day Dakar, writes Beth Webb.
Friday 17 May 2019

Instinct review: a woman’s dark fantasy of male validation

A study of a prison psychologist’s dangerous crush on a sexually violent patient, Halina Reijn’s accomplished and hypnotic film goes to some secret, lonely places, says Elena Lazic.
Wednesday 16 October 2019

And Then We Danced first look: Georgian dance drills and furtive feelings

Levan Akin’s sensuous drama conjures the glint of gay desire amidst the lithe but forbidding orthodoxies of a Georgian dance ensemble, says Ella Kemp.
Sunday 19 May 2019

Maternal review: motherly care in sisterly solidarity

Maura Delpero’s portrait of young women who find a haven to raise their families in a religious community is disarmingly funny and moving, writes Katherine McLaughlin.
Thursday 15 August 2019

“May God burn their livers”: nonfiction Furies in Shooting the Mafia, The Disappearance of My Mother and Honeyland

Feminine anger surges through some of 2019’s best documentary subjects, from one filmmaker’s firebrand mother to a pioneering news photographer and a duo scraping a living in rural Macedonia, writes Sophie Brown.
Monday 16 September 2019

By the Grace of God first look: François Ozon delineates a triptych of church trauma cases

François Ozon tamps down his natural filmmaking flair to tell the urgent, ripped-from-the-headlines story of Lyon’s Catholic Church abuse scandal, writes Jamie Dunn.
Saturday 16 February 2019

A Hidden Life first look: Terrence Malick floats over the storm clouds of war

Terrence Malick reprises his worst tics – and adds some new ones – with this trite rehearsal of the life and death of World War II Austrian anti-fascist objector Franz Jägerstätter, finds Nick James.
Sunday 19 May 2019

Just Mercy first look: Michael B Jordan leads a legal rescue drama on the front lines of death row

Jordan brings his ever-ready charisma to bear as American activist lawyer Bryan Stevenson, inspiring a comparably strong turn from Jamie Foxx as a framed murder convict in Destin Daniel Creton’s impassioned, upstanding adaptation of Stevenson’s memoir, finds Kambole Campbell.
Wednesday 25 September 2019

Mr. Jones first look: Agnieszka Holland reprises the exposé of Stalin’s Ukrainian genocide

Agnieszka Holland’s period biopic honours Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’s muck-raking reporting on the 1930s Holodomor genocide-famine in unsurprising but deft ways, says Nick James.
Monday 11 February 2019

Seberg review: a breathless biopic of a star with a complex life

Kristen Stewart shines as Jean Seberg in this glamorised retelling of her short life, in particular her intrusive surveillance by the US government, writes Nick James.
Sunday 1 September 2019

Waiting for the Barbarians review: a vital portrait of an empire in decline

Morality, and society itself, crumbles in Ciro Guerra’s English-language debut, a stunningly shot, allegorical film featuring a powerful lead performance by Mark Rylance, writes John Bleasdale.
Friday 6 September 2019

Workforce review: a stark parable of building injustice

Tyrants can be toppled but tyranny is a more obdurate proposition in David Zonana’s beady drama of a construction worker occupying the luxury villa he has built, writes Naomi Obeng.
Monday 28 October 2019

Days of the Bagnold Summer review: can two awkward loners make a family?

A single mum and her moody, heavy-metal-obsessed teenager negotiate their strained relationship in Simon Bird’s poignant coming-of-age movie.
Wednesday 21 August 2019

The Unknown Saint first look: a lean, timeless desert caper

Alaa Eddine Aljem’s deadpan debut plants an empty shrine over loot buried in the sands of southern Morocco, and watches a community of sun-beaten oddballs pay reverence, finds John Bleasdale.
Sunday 19 May 2019

Beanpole first look: life, and beauty, persist after the siege of Leningrad

Kantemir Balagov’s extraordinary second film depicts the febrile friendship of two nursing women in a WWII Soviet hospice with impressive rigour and poetry, writes Caspar Salmon.
Tuesday 21 May 2019

Family Romance, LLC review: Werner Herzog explores a deeply personal Japanese service

In Japan, the rent-a-family business offers everything from a cure for loneliness to a coverup for a secret shame. Herzog meets the man who replaces absent or disappointing relatives in this sensitive new drama, writes Katherine McLaughlin.
Wednesday 29 May 2019

Fire Will Come first look: Oliver Laxe charts a path to paradise that ends in hell

Laxe paints an immersive portrait of the Galician countryside, in which the mystery and beauty of the landscape dwarfs the inner turmoil of those who occupy it, writes James Lattimer.
Wednesday 29 May 2019

Ghost Town Anthology review: Denis Côté explores a community haunted by grief

The Québécois filmmaker’s unsettling look at a small-town tragedy resists the temptation to become a horror movie, but instead offers a thought-provoking study of how we cope when our loved ones are taken away, writes Geoff Andrew.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

I Lost My Body review: the touching tale of a manus on a mission

O body, where art thou? A French animation about a dismembered hand won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes. Imagine if The Thing from The Addams Family had its own action franchise, says Isabel Stevens.
Thursday 23 May 2019

Little Joe first look: a heady lab-of-horrors mystery

Emily Beecham bio-engineers happy flowers that set her world askew in Jessica Hausner’s richly enigmatic fantasia, says Geoff Andrew.
Saturday 18 May 2019

The Painted Bird review: Václav Marhoul makes exquisite torture of an abject war story

Horrifically violent but beautifully composed, Václav Marhoul’s third feature is an unforgettable experience that boldly confronts the very worst horrors of war, writes David Opie.
Monday 9 September 2019

Vitalina Varela review: Pedro Costa serenades his haunted heroine

In his seventh feature, the Portuguese master and his community of Lisbon castaways continue their otherworldly incantations of lives lost and sundered, writes Christopher Small.
Thursday 15 August 2019

Zombi Child first look: a post-colonial boarding-school voodoo horror

Bertrand Bonello shuffles privilege and oppression in this brooding high-concept horror experiment that shadows the study of a Haitian teenager at an elite modern-day Parisian girls’ school with a zombie wandering his 1960s homeland, writes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Sunday 26 May 2019

Piranhas first look: tracing the rise of a Napolitan criminal whippersnapper

Another gripping Saviano adaptation, from the Gomorrah writer’s latest book, Claudio Giovannesi’s film is an authentic account of Naples’ Littler Caesars, writes Geoff Andrew.
Saturday 16 February 2019

The Traitor first look: Marco Bellocchio’s murky tale of a mafia informant

This true story of Italian gangster Tommaso Buscetta, and how he broke the code of silence, is both too generically familiar and too complex, especially for non-Italian audiences, writes John Bleasdale.
Thursday 30 May 2019

The Whistlers review: Corneliu Porumboiu’s Canary Islands crime caper sings flat

Absconding from his melancholic-minimalist comfort zone, the Romanian talent surfaces in La Gomera with his fallen Police, Adjective anti-hero for a series of somersaulting film noir variations that leave character and narrative engagement in the dust, says Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Sunday 26 May 2019

Workforce review: a stark parable of building injustice

Tyrants can be toppled but tyranny is a more obdurate proposition in David Zonana’s beady drama of a construction worker occupying the luxury villa he has built, writes Naomi Obeng.
Monday 28 October 2019

Deerskin first look: Jean Dujardin seeks one jacket to rule them all

Quentin Dupieux pulls off an unlikely but deftly oddball comedy about a man over the edge, and determined to document it, says Caspar Salmon.
Friday 17 May 2019

Synchronic review: Anthony Mackie trips lightly through the Benson-Moorhead time fantastic

Time travel is the hardest drug for buddy medics Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan in this high-concept if under-polished pop mystery from indie sci-fi darlings Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, writes Beatrice Loayza.
Wednesday 18 September 2019

37 Seconds first look: debut filmmaker Hikari looks at desire and discrimination with compassion

A young woman with cerebral palsy defies expectations by writing adult comics in this open-minded, sympathetic and occasionally outlandish debut film by Hikari, writes Kambole Campbell.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

The Cordillera of Dreams first look: a portrait of Chile carved in rock

In this poetic documentary, filmmaker Patricio Guzmán mediates on the past and future of his home country via the mountains that close it off from the rest of the world, writes Jonathan Romney.
Wednesday 22 May 2019

The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmao first look: the odyssey of a fractured family from Brazil

Karim Aïnouz makes a triumphant return to feature films with this transcendent ‘tropical melodrama’ about the enduring bond between two not-so distant sisters, writes Geoff Andrew.
Saturday 25 May 2019

Öndög first look: a winding portrait of a tough dame on the Mongolian plain

Out on the Mongolian steppe, Wang Quan’an fashions a shaggy-camel story that dispenses with its police-procudural clothing to probe the heart of a gnarly herdswoman, writes Andrew Gutman.
Monday 11 February 2019

The Orphanage first look: Quodrat comes of age in late Soviet-era Afghanistan

The Soviet occupation collapses and the Mujahideen arise as teenage Quodrat and his fellow street kids flourish in a state-run orphanage in the second part of Shahrbanoo Sadat’s planned five-part history of her country, writes John Bleasdale.
Saturday 25 May 2019

Rialto review: Peter Mackie Burns finds a haven for two unlikely lovers

A Dublin docker’s midlife crisis drives him into the arms of a desperate teenage hustler in Peter Mackie Burns’ low-key drama about masculinity in crisis, writes Jamie Dunn.
Wednesday 4 September 2019