BFI Player’s September 2025 line-up

Thirty-two films in 30 days. A hectic month with multiple connections. A theme of incarceration, be it legal or not, links the Brazilian hit I’m Still Here and Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners with the classic Midnight Express or the home invasion nightmare of Funny Games. 

That’s one of ten titles from Michael Haneke arriving in September, a major retrospective of an inventive, divisive career. It’s a minor leap from that to a trio of homegrown ‘video nasties’ — G.B.H., Xtro and Exposé — which sparked moral panic. 

Those seeking uplift should head for Holy Cow, the tale of a French teenager who finds redemption by making Comté. Blessed are the cheesemakers. 

I’m Still Here
2024/Brazil
SUBSCRIPTION EXCLUSIVE
Walter Salles’ Oscar-winning drama about living under an oppressive regime is a humanistic ode to resilience.

Prisoners
2013/United States
In Denis Villeneuve’s thriller – starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman — a father takes the law into his own hands after his daughter’s abduction

In the Cut
2003/United Kingdom
Jane Campion’s feminist erotic thriller starring Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo adds a frisson of dangerous sex to a murder investigation.

Enter the Void
2010/France
Gaspar Noé’s psychedelic, unflinching journey through life and death, a defining work of New French Extremity set it neon-soaked Tokyo.

Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea
1977/Czechoslovakia
A deliciously demented Czech time-travel romp that’s both hilariously silly and impressively ingenious.

Interrogation
1982/Poland
Acclaimed drama about state torture and internment, banned for many years in its native Poland and reflecting the Stalinist terror of the early 1950s.

Slade in Flame
1975/United Kingdom
This incendiary Glam-rock cult classic is described by critic Mark Kermode as ‘the Citizen Kane of British pop movies’.

Central Station
1988/Brazil
I’m Still Here director Walter Salles’ touching BAFTA winner about a retired teacher and young boy who become unlikely travel companions across Brazil

Benny’s Video
1992/Austria
Michael Haneke’s drama explores a teenager’s obsession with screen violence, and his inability to distinguish between reality and fiction.

Funny Games
1997/Austria
Haneke’s most controversial film is a terrifying home invasion thriller.

Code Unknown
2000/France
Haneke’s brilliant multi-strand narrative delivers a chillingly prescient treatise on migration and racism, starring Juliette Binoche.

The Piano Teacher
2001/Austria
Isabelle Huppert’s turn as a woman disturbed yet consumed by her own desires has lost none of its gut-punching torment, in Haneke’s unsettling drama.

The White Ribbon
2009/Germany
Michael Haneke’s Cannes prize-winner, set in a pre-WW1 German village, explores the oppressively strict social conditions that gave rise to Nazism

Amour 
2012/France
Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winner, about an octogenarian couple trying to cope when a stroke leaves the wife partly paralysed and speechless.

Time of the Wolf
2003/France
Isabelle Huppert drives Michael Haneke’s unsettling, post-apocalyptic vision of societal collapse.

Hidden
2004/France
Haneke’s Cannes award-winning masterpiece is both an enthralling thriller and a piercing analysis of colonial guilt.

Happy End
2017/France
Isabelle Huppert and Toby Jones are among the cast in Haneke’s impressive satire about a well-to-do and French family oblivious to the migrant crisis.

Holy Cow
SUBSCRIPTION EXCLUSIVE
2024/France

In the heart of the French Alps, a wayward teen finds his purpose in cheese – and discovers that maturity isn’t just for Comté.

Human Traffic
1999/United Kingdom
A 1990s club-culture cult classic about five Cardiff friends planning a night out to remember. The weekend has landed!

Nightcrawler
2014/United States
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a crime journalist scouring the streets of after-dark LA in a stylish thriller that examines the morals of mass media.

G.B.H.
1983/United Kingdom
A bouncer is enlisted to fight off a mob boss, in this barmy, shot-on-video cult actioner from famed Mancunian hardman Cliff Twemlow.

Xtro
1983/United Kingdom
A man who was abducted by aliens returns to his family years later with a sinister purpose, in this outrageously bizarre British horror.

Exposé 
1976/United Kingdom
A novelist’s rural retreat descends into an orgy of violent mayhem, in one of the most notorious shockers in British cinema.

Dying
2024/Germany
SUBSCRIPTION EXCLUSIVE
Tragedy draws a successful German orchestra conductor back to his complicated family in a three-hour saga that finds hope in the darkest of places.

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin
1971/Italy
A woman accused of murder begins to lose grip on reality, in this psychedelic, Swinging London thriller from cult director Lucio Fulci (The Beyond).

Midnight Express
1978/United States
Alan Parker’s brutal, riveting and controversial true-life account of an American student’s incarceration in a Turkish jail continues to be debated.

Sex and Fury
1973/Japan
This wildly violent ‘70s Japanese sexploitation film about a gambler hunting her father’s killers was a key influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill series.

9 Songs
2005/United Kingdom
After meeting at a gig, a London couple’s relationship unfolds in Michael Winterbottom’s intimate and controversial portrait of sex and live music.

The Motorcycle Diaries
2004/United Kingdom
Gael García Bernal excels as a young Che Guevara biking across South America in Walter Salles’ adaptation of the Cuban revolutionary’s journals.

The Sheltering Sky
1990/United Kingdom
Bernardo Bertolucci’s stunning and sensual adaptation of Paul Bowles’ heartbreaking classic novel, starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger.

Blood Relatives
1977/Canada
Donald Sutherland stars as a Montreal detective investigating a grisly familial murder in Claude Chabrol’s twisty police procedural.

The Kingdom
2024/France
SUBSCRIPTION EXCLUSIVE
A teenager is taken to a Corsican villa where her fugitive mob boss father is hiding, before an assassination attempt forces them to go on the run.