The Best Films to Watch at BFI London FIim Festival 2024

A world-first screening of Steve McQueen’s Blitz and UK premieres for Queer, Hard Truths and Anora are among the picks at this year’s fest

Blitz

This year’s festival scored a major coup with the world premiere of Blitz, Steve McQueen’s return to feature-fiction filmmaking after a six-year absence. From the trailer, it looks like his most commercial project yet, starring Saoirse Ronan as a young mum searching for her nine-year-old boy (Elliott Heffernan) after he goes missing during the Nazi bombing campaign of London. Harris Dickinson, Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham co-star, alongside surprising turns from musicians Paul Weller and Benjamin Clementine.

The Room Next Door

He may not be the fiery provocateur of old, but Pedro Almodóvar continues to maintain a healthy relationship with his muse well into his 70s, a fact that was recognised with his Golden Lion win at Venice for The Room Next Door, his debut English-language feature. Screening at LFF as a UK premiere, it’s an unusually restrained end-of-life drama from the Spanish master, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as old friends who rekindle their friendship in the most unexpected of circumstances.

Read our review of the film here.

Hard Truths

Mike Leigh’s first contemporary-set film in a decade was passed up for inclusion at Cannes and Venice before finally making its bow in Toronto this month, where it won the Salford maestro some of his best reviews in years. Reuniting Leigh with his Oscar-nominated muse from Secrets & Lies (1997), the film stars the great Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy, an embittered London matriarch whose brittle rage is a terror to all who know her, and promises a “tough but compassionate study of family life”.

Queer

Desire “radiates off the screen” in this sweat-soaked retelling of William S Burroughs’ novel of the same name, starring a dishevelled Daniel Craig as a lonely expat living in Mexico City who becomes infatuated with a discharged serviceman. What follows is a drug-fuelled study in unslakable thirst that ranks as director Luca Guadagnino’s most surreal excursion to date.

Read our review of the film here. 

Anora

Anora has the feel of an opus for Sean Baker, whose portraits of precarious living in modern America (Tangerine, The Florida Project) are pretty much without rival at this point. A Palme D’Or winner at Cannes, it’s an almost Safdie Bros-esque romp starring Mikey Madison as Annie/Anora, a Brooklyn sex worker whisked up in a dubious romance with the hard-partying son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn). Pretty Woman, it ain’t – but you’ll laugh much harder than expected at this freewheeling caper with a conscience.

Bird

Andrea Arnold returns to the working-class Kent of her youth in this unexpected new drama, a social-realist flight of fancy with a magical twist. Nykiya Adams stars as Bailey, a nature-loving tween bounced between her drug-addict mum and layabout dad (Barry Keoghan), whose latest wheeze involves a “drug toad” in a plastic bag he hopes will make him his fortune. One day she meets a stranger, Bird (Franz Rogowski), who is looking for his childhood home in the neighbourhood – but all is not as it seems with this curious loner, prone to perching on the rooves of the local high-rise blocks.

Pepe

Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s surprise hit from Berlin is a ghost story narrated by a hippo descended from Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s fabled private zoo. Even after the absurdity of that premise has sunk in, the Dominican director’s film is reportedly a wild clash of tones and ideas, extracting from one animal’s sad story a surreal meditation on themes of nature, language and cultural exile.

Dahomey

Another director of cultural ghost stories, Atlantics’ Mati Diop, scooped the top prize at Berlin for her docufiction feature Dahomey, about the return of colonial plunder to Benin from Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly. Bringing poetry to a highly charged political issue, Diop’s film mixes cultural debate with stories about the artefacts’ origins and a dreamlike score from Dean Blunt and Beninese musician Wally Badarou.

All We Imagine As Light

Payal Kapadia’s second feature was the best-reviewed film to come out of Cannes this year, a tale of three Indian nurses’ flight from Mumbai praised for the “exquisite poetry” of its filmmaking. Kapadia is a dissenting figure who led student protests in India against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s attempts to shackle the creative industries; her film is freighted with political baggage despite its pervading sense of quiet.

A Real Pain

Jesse Eisenberg’s self-penned two-hander with Kieran Culkin was a big hit at Sundance, an odd-couple comedy buoyed by career-high performances from its leads. Directed by Eisenberg in his second outing on the other side of the camera, the story concerns two American cousins’ trip through Poland in honour of their late grandma, a Holocaust survivor. With a brilliant turn from Culkin, in particular, serving up a soulful comic riff on the douchey persona he perfected in Succession, it’s a heartfelt family drama that benefits from a beautifully turned script.

The BFI London Film Festival runs from 9-20 October.