The 68th edition of the BFI London Film Festival, which runs from 9 to 20 October, brings together the best in new cinema, alongside a programme of archive treasures and Expanded titles. This year's edition offers over 160 features, 60 shorts and a handful of upcoming serial drama episodes. There's also 14 Expanded projects, a series of Screen Talks with some of the most vital voices in cinema and a wide-ranging LFF for Free programme. Here’s an overview of the many highlights the Festival has to offer, from the biggest hitters to some low-key gems.
With Steve McQueen’s Blitz and the Pharrell Lego documentary Piece by Piece bookending this 12-day celebration of the moving image, Festival Director Kristy Matheson makes clear just how wide she and her team of programmers have cast their net across the many thousands of new films, shorts and other visual projects produced this year. A brief look at the Gala and Special Presentations highlights the richly eclectic selection.
Blitz (2024)
The American Express Gala gives us Elton John: Never Too Late, which doubles up as a record of the singer-songwriter’s final tour and a journey through his fabulous career. Tickets will be snapped up in the hope that the film’s subject may be in attendance. From Cannes there is Sean Baker’s dazzling, Cinderella-esque Palme d’Or winner Anora, the contentious Donald Trump drama The Apprentice, Andrea Arnold’s superb Bird, Jacques Audiard’s riveting twist on the crime drama with Emilia Pérez and Indian director Payal Kapadia’s involving All We Imagine As Light.
The Room Next Door (2024)
Films coming to the LFF directly from the Venice Film Festival include Maria, Pablo Larraín’s portrait of the legendary opera singer Maria Callas, with this year’s first surefire Oscar contender, Angelina Jolie, in the titular role. Another mooted Oscar favourite is Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language drama The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. Swinton in particular is winning some of the most favourable notices in an already impressively lauded career, as a dying journalist who rekindles her years-old friendship with Moore’s novelist. Almodóvar, alongside Todd Haynes, is contemporary cinema’s master of the melodrama and his 23rd feature already looks set to be one of the year’s standout films.
British cinematic stalwart Mike Leigh returns with Hard Times, which reunites him with his Secrets & Lies (1996) star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, in an uncompromising portrait of family life. In Conclave, Ralph Fiennes is a Vatican cardinal charged with overseeing the process that will decide on a new pontiff, only to realise that devious games are in play. All Quiet on the Western Front’s director Edward Berger directs this adaptation of Robert Harris’ hit novel with some nerve, channeling the spirit of the great 1970s conspiracy thrillers, like Francesco Rosi’s Italian classic Illustrious Corpses (1976), shooting in an understated classical style that adds further depth to the intrigue.
Secrets & Lies (1996)
The British drama Joy, directed by Ben Taylor and written by Jack Thorne, recounts the groundbreaking work of nurse and embryologist Jean Purdy, scientist Robert Edwards and surgeon Patrick Steptoe (played by Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton and Bill Nighy) in the development of IVF treatment. At a time when this process has once again become politicised, this is an essential account of the work of these individuals, often against the rancour of political and moral campaigners, to bring happiness to women unable to conceive. Thorne is a supremely gifted and compassionate writer, who invests the film with the emotion of his own personal experience of being the father of children conceived by IVF.
Eight years ago, Denzel Washington directed and starred in an adaptation of the great American playwright August Wilson’s landmark work Fences (2016). This year’s festival sees Denzel’s son, John David Washington, star opposite Samuel L Jackson in an adaptation of Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winner The Piano Lesson. It’s directed by another of Washington’s sons, Malcolm, who remains faithful to the play’s origins while pushing the staging into more cinematic territory. Another essential voice in Black American letters, Colson Whitehead, sees his novel Nickel Boys (his second Pulitzer Prize-winning work after the coruscating The Underground Railroad) brought to the screen by RaMell Ross. The director’s previous work was his astonishing portrait of small-town American life, Hale County This Morning, This Evening. He employs the same mosaic-like approach here, eschewing much of Whitehead’s undeniably rich dialogue in favour of a visual language that is both richly atmospheric and bracingly bold.
Nickel Boys (2024)
The Mayor of London’s Gala is John Crowley’s guaranteed crowd-pleaser We Live In Time, starring the charismatic pairing of Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. Written by Nick Payne, author of the award-winning play Constellations, this is an intimate and affecting chronicle of a relationship over time, charting the vicissitudes of everyday life on a modern couple who want everything from life but don’t always find life so generous. A very different relationship lies at the heart of the Special Presentation A Real Pain. Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg stars in his film as a man who decides to attend his Jewish grandmother’s wake in Poland with his cousin. When you know that said cousin is played by Kieran Culkin, you have some idea of the chaos that ensues. Eisenberg has quietly become one of American cinema’s most witty comic talents – both in front of and behind the camera – while Culkin goes from strength to strength. There are moments in A Real Pain when even Succession’s Roman Roy might have reservations about the antics at play. The result is whip-smart, canny and very, very funny.
A Real Pain (2024)
The Gala and Special Screenings section also sees the return of the great Brazilian director Walter Salles (I’m Still Here); Call Me by Your Name and Challengers director Luca Guadagnino takes on William Burroughs with Queer, which stars Daniel Craig; outspoken Iranian director critiques his country with the riveting The Seed of the Sacred Fig; Attenburg director Athina Rachel Tsangari returns with a stunning adaptation of Jim Crace’s Harvest; and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich immediately joins the ranks of the finest recent directors to emerge on the global cinematic stage with her intoxicating meta-drama The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, which aims to assert the Martinique writer as a major voice in Afro-Caribbean letters.
The remainder of the festival, as with previous years, is divided into competitions and strands. Among the Official Competition, standout titles include The Extraordinary Miss Flower, by the directing team behind the Nick Cave doc 20,000 Days on Earth, which finds a family uncovering the secrets of their mother’s life after she died. In Bring Them Down, writer-director Christopher Andrews creates a charged atmosphere between Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan’s warring Irish family members, raising questions about the legacy of long-forgotten rivalries. Adam Elliot (Mary and Max) creates another stop-motion classic with his sublime Memoir of a Snail, while Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio paints a fascinating portrait of life in a rural mountain region of Italy towards the end of World War II.
Memoir of a Snail (2024)
Curzon, in its capacity as a distributor, will once again be a strong presence at the festival. Showing in the Journey strand, Amrou Al-Kadhi’s Layla explores the limitations of love and attraction. Palestinian-British drag performer Layla has started seeing Max, who’s more than a little conservative by comparison. The magnetism between the two is evident, but can a relationship between two very different people work. With stellar performances by the leads, this is a timely and perceptive portrait of love amid the throng of a bustling and ever-changing city. Julie Keeps Quiet, which shows as part of the Debate strand, is the assured debut of co-writer and director Leonardo Van Dijl. It unfolds in a prestigious tennis academy where a lead coach has been suspended following the suicide of a student. As allegations of abuse circulate, one student stands out for their silence on the issue, attracting concern and curiosity in equal measure. There have been a number of films dealing with this theme in recent years and it is to Van Dijl’s credit that his film is both sensitive and original in its approach. Curzon also have Flow screening in the Journey strand. A seafaring adventure unlike any other, Gints Zilbalodis’ exciting film is presented, entirely dialogue free, from the perspective of a group of animals that bandy together in order to survive a natural disaster. It's a visually confident drama from the filmmaker behind Away (2019).
Away (2019)
Other standout feature titles in the strand sections include Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’ rapturous monochrome delight Grand Tour, Shiori Itō’s powerful documentary Black Box Diaries, Maria Bakalova (who is also superb as Ivana Trump in The Apprentice) shining in Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov’s Triumph, wildly entertaining Romanian director Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s Eight Postcards From Utopia, The Quay Brothers’ otherworldly Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Victor Kossakovsky’s monumental architectural documentary Architecton, Noémie Merlant’s grossly entertaining The Balconettes, Nicholas Cage breaking the waves and a few heads in Lorcan Finnegan’s tense Australian drama The Surfer and Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, a compassionate portrait from the makers of McQueen.
Finally, if you want to find out more about what goes into the making of some of the films in this year’s festival, beyond the post-screening Q&As there are an impressive line-up of special events and screen talks, featuring Zoe Saldaña, Steve McQueen, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, Alfonso Cuarón, Lupita Nyong’o, Daniel Kaluuya, Andrea Arnold, Sam Mendes, Mike Leigh, Sean Baker and Denis Villeneuve.
From the archives, there’s a beautifully restored version of the 1978 animated classic Watership Down. Yasuzô Masumura’s Manji (1964) looks and feels startlingly fresh. The Hollywood classic The Talk of the Town (1942), starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman, is all sass and quotable one-liners. Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (1977) carries on from LFF 2020’s screening of Chess of the Wind in unearthing classic films from Iran.
Expanded once again unfolds across London, pushing at the remit of what the moving image can achieve. Alongside a new base at Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf, there are also projects at BFI Southbank and Outernet, at the junction of Charing Cross Road, Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street.
The expansive LFF for Free programme will be made available alongside the LFF launch. It’s increased in size this year and a particular focus will be on writing about cinema, with talks and discussions featuring authors and critics.
EXPLORE THE 2024 BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL PROGRAMME
