This year’s BFI London Film Festival will showcase hundreds of the movies that everyone will be talking about in the coming months, with performances from the likes of Andrew Scott, Scarlett Johansson, Pedro Pascal, Cynthia Erivo, Penélope Cruz and Julianne Moore taking centre stage, alongside new works by filmmakers including Danny Boyle, Martin McDonagh and – with what is believed to be his final movie – the legendary Mike Leigh. Taking place between 7 and 18 October, the festival will launch with a gala presentation of Elsinore, a buzzy new British drama about the last days of Chariots of Fire star Ian Charleson as he prepares to play Hamlet on stage while dying from Aids. Andrew Scott portrays Charleson, while Olivia Colman plays his doctor.
Other major films at LFF this year include Danny Boyle’s Ink, starring Jack O’Connell and Guy Pearce and all about the meteoric rise of Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper and his early domination of Fleet Street. Jesse Eisenberg follows up his Oscar-winning A Real Pain with The Debut, about an unassuming housewife (Julianne Moore) who joins a local theatre production, and Cynthia Erivo headlines the film adaptation of Suzie Miller’s blockbuster play Prima Facie, which previously won Jodie Comer a Tony and a Laurence Olivier award. McDonagh’s new comedy Wild Horse Nine, his follow-up to The Banshees of Inisherin, will screen, alongside the Pedro Pascal starrer Behemoth! and the Cannes smash Club Kid starring Jordan Firstman.
Alex Gibney’s eagerly anticipated Elon Musk documentary Musk and Ava DuVernay’s 14th, her follow-up to her Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary 13th, will also screen, as well as the Scarlett Johansson/Adam Driver drama Paper Tiger, from director James Gray. Artificial, the controversial Luca Guadagnino film starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – which was dropped by its backers at Amazon after production was completed – is also at LFF, alongside Tender Loving Care, which its 83-year-old maker Mike Leigh has said will likely be his final movie. Penélope Cruz also stars in two buzzy new films, the Spanish queer epic La Bola Negra, and Florian Zeller’s timely psychological thriller Bunker, about an architect building a bunker for a billionaire.
In the latter, Cruz stars alongside her real-life husband Javier Bardem. There will additionally be screen talks with a number of stars, including Erivo, Wild Horse Nine’s John Malkovich, British actor Naomi Ackie (who stars in the comedy thriller I Love Boosters at the festival), and filmmaker Sofia Coppola, who is the subject of a documentary by her late mother Eleanor, comprised of footage from the making of her initially lambasted but ultimately beloved 2006 film Marie Antoinette. Speaking to the Press Association, Kristy Matheson, artistic director of BFI festivals, said: “There’s always such a diversity of genres and subjects that people are dealing with, but this year there’s a lot of films that are looking at labour, that are looking at work and how we work and the equity around how we work.
There’s also a lot of films about care and not just caring for each other, but systems of care and how we best relate to each other.” New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
She added: “There’s a number of works that are looking at this idea of radical tenderness in different ways, so that’s been really interesting. So I think that people are definitely mining history at the moment.” In total, 251 titles from 88 nations will be shown, with 14 of those productions screening across 10 cinemas nationwide, including Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, Chapter in Cardiff, Glasgow Film Theatre, Home in Manchester, MAC in Birmingham, Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast, Showroom Cinema in Sheffield, Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, Watershed in Bristol and Filmhouse in Edinburgh. The BFI London Film Festival takes place between 7 and 18 October, with tickets on sale from 17 September.
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