BFI London Film Festival 2016 reviews and recommendations

Recommendations and roundups

News and interviews

Reviews

  • Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith review – nature up close and sticky

    Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith review – nature up close and sticky

    A new cut-up of pioneering movie naturalist F. Percy Smith’s Secrets of Nature series, directed by the Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples and scored by the band, is a richly steamy experience, says Pamela Hutchinson.
    Tuesday 18 October 2016

  • A United Kingdom – first look

    A United Kingdom – first look

    Simran Hans on Amma Asante’s retelling of the post-war, inter-continental love story between Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, a refresh of the woman’s picture that again confronts skeletons of Britain’s colonial past.
    Monday 12 September 2016

  • Free Fire – first look

    Free Fire – first look

    Simran Hans on Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise counterpoint, a late 70s, warehouse-confined Boston-Irish crime caper steeped in blood and banter.
    Sunday 11 September 2016

  • Nocturnal Animals review: Tom Ford gets his junk on

    Nocturnal Animals review: Tom Ford gets his junk on

    The fashion designer’s follow-up to A Single Man, in which Amy Adams’ gallerist projects herself into her ex-husband’s latest potboiler, conjures a very good sense of reading a not very good book, says Simran Hans.
    Monday 26 September 2016

  • The Handmaiden – first look

    The Handmaiden – first look

    The latest from South Korea’s sensual stylist Park Chan-Wook is an overworked but stirring period fetish romp, says Catherine Bray.
    Sunday 15 May 2016

  • Toni Erdmann – first look

    Toni Erdmann – first look

    German talent Maren Ade’s highly anticipated third film is a semi-comic portrait of grownup father-daughter awkwardness that also takes a chisel to the corporate bubble-world – and is likely to be one of the very best at this year’s Cannes, says Jonathan Romney.
    Sunday 15 May 2016

  • La La Land – first-look review

    La La Land – first-look review

    Once more with zing: Chazelle, Hurwitz, Gosling and Stone bring the musical back to Hollywood, says Tom Charity.
    Thursday 15 September 2016

  • Paterson – first look

    Paterson – first look

    Jim Jarmusch’s latest steers poems of place and people through Adam Driver’s city bus driver. Nick James hops on board.
    Wednesday 18 May 2016

  • American Honey – first look

    American Honey – first look

    Andrea Arnold hits the road with Shia LaBeouf, the scintillating discovery Sasha Lane and a slice of subcultural Americana, writes Alissa Simon.
    Monday 16 May 2016

  • Elle – first look

    Elle – first look

    A typically inimitable Isabelle Huppert takes no prisoners in Paul Verhoeven’s typically black-comic provocation, a rape-reaction art melodrama that’s his first film in ten years, writes Geoff Andrew.
    Sunday 22 May 2016

  • Moonlight first-look review: masculinity, differently

    Moonlight first-look review: masculinity, differently

    Barry Jenkins’ deft, affecting drama shades three steps of growth and connection in a quiet Miami boy’s journey to manhood, says Simran Hans.
    Tuesday 13 September 2016

  • Neruda – first look

    Neruda – first look

    The latest from Chile’s beady-eyed Pablo Larraín is a ludic thriller about exiled poet and enemy of the junta Pablo Neruda that plays cat and mouse games with fact and fiction, says Wendy Ide.
    Sunday 15 May 2016

  • A Quiet Passion – first look

    A Quiet Passion – first look

    This poised and painterly rendition of the poet Emily Dickinson in youth and later age finds Terence Davies back on masterly form, says Geoff Andrew.
    Monday 15 February 2016

  • Divines review: an exuberant young female buddy thriller

    Divines review: an exuberant young female buddy thriller

    This go-its-own-way banlieu barnstormer from the self-taught Houda Benyamina was officially the best debut feature at Cannes 2016, says Isabel Stevens.
    Sunday 22 May 2016

  • My Life as a Courgette – first look

    My Life as a Courgette – first look

    A big film in a small package: Claude Barras’s children’s animation, written by Girlhood’s Céline Sciamma, broaches downbeat themes with charm, heart and smarts, says Wendy Ide.
    Friday 20 May 2016

  • Raw – first look

    Raw – first look

    Chloe Roddick hails a fresh feminine (and sororal) horror from French first feature director Julia Ducournau, set in the blank spaces of a veterinary college.
    Saturday 21 May 2016

  • David Lynch: The Art Life – first look

    David Lynch: The Art Life – first look

    Art is where Lynch’s heart is in this open-handed portrait of the filmmaker in his element, says Nick James.
    Wednesday 7 September 2016

  • The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography review – Errol Morris’s homage to Polaroids

    The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography review – Errol Morris’s homage to Polaroids

    Ben Nicholson on Errol Morris’s genial inquiry into photographic memory by way of a tribute to a photographer and friend.
    Friday 23 September 2016

  • Aquarius – first-look review

    Aquarius – first-look review

    Neighbouring Sounds’ Kleber Mendonça Filho switches from Recife’s gated highrises to its smalltime beachfront with this eloquent saga of Sonia Braga’s proudly autonomous, economically besieged widower, writes Jordan Cronk.
    Friday 20 May 2016

  • Hermia & Helena review: Matías Piñeiro’s midsummer Manhattan dream

    Hermia & Helena review: Matías Piñeiro’s midsummer Manhattan dream

    Tom Charity on Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro’s first English-language film, a New York transposition of his Rohmeresque riffs on Shakespeare’s romcoms.
    Friday 23 September 2016

  • Hissein Habré, a Chadian Tragedy – first look

    Hissein Habré, a Chadian Tragedy – first look

    Chadian director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun was one of many exiles from the country’s brutal 1980s dictatorship. Now he honours the regime’s victims and documents a quarter-century campaign for justice, writes Geoff Andrew.
    Friday 20 May 2016

  • Graduation – first look

    Graduation – first look

    Nick James on a winning web of everyday Romanian secrets and compromises from the Palme d’Or-winning director of Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.
    Friday 20 May 2016

  • Kate Plays Christine – first look

    Kate Plays Christine – first look

    Nonfiction-cinema champion Robert Greene peels the documentary onion in this redolent portrait of a portrait of Christine Chubbuck and her 1974 television suicide, says Jordan Cronk.
    Friday 11 March 2016

  • Sieranevada – first look

    Sieranevada – first look

    Cristi Puiu hones the art of Romanian realism with a deadpan family-wake drama that’s his most approachable film since The Death of Mr Lazarescu.
    Thursday 12 May 2016

  • The Unknown Girl – first look

    The Unknown Girl – first look

    Adèle Haenel keeps it simple and open as a medic turned gumshoe in the Dardenne brothers’ latest investigation of social ties and moral binds, says Jonathan Romney.
    Wednesday 18 May 2016

  • Prevenge review: Alice Lowe’s broody slasher satire

    Prevenge review: Alice Lowe’s broody slasher satire

    Look who’s stalking: director-star Alice Lowe lets it all hang out as a psycho mum-to-be in this wicked send-up of pregnancy mores, says Michael Leader.
    Friday 23 September 2016

  • The Death of Louis XIV – first look

    The Death of Louis XIV – first look

    Six decades after The 400 Blows, Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the dying Sun King in a stately, majestic study of flesh and emblems from Albert Serra – surely the most beautiful film at Cannes 2016.
    Sunday 22 May 2016

  • Personal Shopper – first look

    Personal Shopper – first look

    A medium-cool Kristen Stewart shops and drops in with the dead in Olivier Assayas’s modern mystical Paris, says Nick James.
    Wednesday 18 May 2016

  • Staying Vertical – first look

    Staying Vertical – first look

    Stranger by the Lake writer-director Alain Guiraudie returns to the pansexual playground of his early features with a shape-shifting fantasia of young parenthood and emotional paralysis, writes Jordan Cronk.
    Sunday 15 May 2016

  • The Red Turtle – first look

    The Red Turtle – first look

    Studio Ghibli’s first international coproduction is a ravishing castaway fable by animator Michael Dudok de Wit that combines beauty, mystery, drama and heartbreak – with not a word spoken, says Isabel Stevens.
    Friday 20 May 2016

  • Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey – first look

    Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey – first look

    Drifting clouds: Terrence Malick at his most vaporous considers creation in this proto-National Geographic documentary. Nick James reviews.
    Friday 9 September 2016

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