10 Must-Sees at This Year’s London Film Festival

New films from Paul Thomas Anderson and Luca Guadagnino will screen at next month’s event, which also boasts a stunning restoration of Ken Russell’s sacrilegious shocker The Devils

Each autumn, as the nights grow dark and crisp, cinephiles descend upon the BFI London Film Festival. It is, arguably, the most perfectly timed film festival, with events kicking off as we finally bid farewell to the summer heat and everyone dusts off their Letterboxd account. LFF is the time for London moviegoers (and those willing to travel) to play catch-up and see what all the fuss is about; to finally check out the recent Palme d’Or winner and the hyped TIFF darling. 

This year’s edition of BFI London Film Festival offers some big-ticket features like Paul Thomas Anderson’s concert film Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall, the Coppola family documentary Making Marie Antoinette, Mike Leigh’s final film Tender Loving Care and, of course, the much-anticipated restoration of Ken Russell’s The Devils. Here, we compile a list of essential picks for your diary.

A Long Winter

After the bleak, London-set ghost story of All of Us Strangers, director Andrew Haigh heads west to the snowy plains of Colorado with A Long Winter. Adapted from Colm Tóibín’s short story, it stars Fred Hechinger, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Catríona Balfe as a family imploding over a father and son’s conflicting approaches to manhood. Haigh is an excellent filmmaker with a brilliant, eclectic filmography, so A Long Winter is a must-see at LFF this year. 

All of a Sudden

The arrival of a new Ryusuke Hamaguchi film is always cause for celebration and his latest, All of a Sudden, is no exception. It’s the Japanese auteur’s French-language debut and stars Virginie Efira as a nursing home director who pushes an unusual approach to humane care, forming a bond with a terminally ill dramaturge (Tao Okamoto) in the process. It sounds like classic Hamaguchi: sharp, strange and beautifully pitched. 

Artificial

A biopic of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Italian maestro Luca Guadagnino’s latest provocation made international news when its original distributor Amazon MGM Studios dropped it, allegedly due to the film’s negative portrayal of Altman. This kind of controversy is brilliant PR, of course, making Artificial an uber-hot ticket at this year’s festival as a late addition to the lineup.

Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall

If it wasn’t evident enough that Cameron Winter is a star on a stratospheric rise, then getting Paul Thomas Anderson to direct his first concert film confirms it. Amidst the awards campaign for One Battle After Another late last year, Anderson found time to capture Winter’s Carnegie Hall gig, shooting it on 35mm with the help of Benny Safdie. It’s a dreamy, once-in-a-lifetime collaboration and pure catnip for cinephiles.

Club Kid

After defying all expectations with his raucous and self-critical performance in Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun, Jordan Firstman has stepped behind the camera and delivered his debut feature, Club Kid. It’s thrilling how quickly Firstman has jumped from social media provocateur to bona fide Cannes-approved filmmaker. By all accounts, Club Kid, a Big Daddy-style story about a queer club promoter who discovers he has a son, is a phenomenal calling card. 

The Devils

It speaks volumes to the current state of cinemagoing that one of the year’s biggest releases is the 4K restoration of Ken Russell’s The Devils. This oft-censored tale of the sexual hysteria induced by an especially sexy priest (Oliver Reed) is one of the finest films Russell ever made; it’s no surprise that people have been queuing around the block to see it in New York and Toronto. Thankfully, LFF offers British audiences the chance to see this masterwork by a homegrown legend. 

La Bola Negra

Few films enter awards season with as much tailwind as La Bola Negra, which made a mighty impression at Cannes this year and scooped up best director. A handsomely mounted epic that traces the lineage of gay life from the 1930s all the way to 2017, it hails from Spanish directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo. With a stamp of approval from producer Pedro Almodóvar and memorable cameos by Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close, La Bola Negra is absolutely one to watch out for. 

Making Marie Antoinette

During the production of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the director’s mother, Eleanor, filmed more than 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage. The pair got together during the pandemic to condense the footage into a documentary but before they completed their work, Eleanor passed away in 2024. Sofia Coppola finished the film which she now brings to LFF as Making Marie Antoinette, a lovely tribute to her mother and to the misunderstood classic that put her on the map.

Minotaur

Having landed the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, and with five-star reviews across the board, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur leads the field of international features. Set against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, it works as both a searing rebuke to Putin-era Russia and a portrait of a marriage in crisis. Most intriguingly, Minotaur adapts Claude Chabrol’s erotic thriller La Femme Infidèle (currently enjoying a 4K theatrical rerelease that’s well worth checking out) and provides a gripping critique of corruption in all its forms. 

Tender Loving Care

After 55 wonderful years producing some of the greatest films Britain has ever seen, the incredible Mike Leigh is walking away from filmmaking. It’s a genuine tragedy that Tender Loving Care is set to be Leigh’s final film, having announced his retirement due to ill health. The least any of us can do to honour Leigh’s legendary service to British cinema is to show up for Tender Loving Care, a typically understated story about a social worker (Widow’s Bay star Kate O’Flynn), when it has its British premiere next month. 

BFI London Film Festival runs 7–18 October.