BFI London Film Festival 2026 preview
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The 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival kicks off on Wednesday 7 October with another captivating programme of over 250 features, shorts, series and immersive works from around the world. The Opening and Closing Night Galas each shine fascinating light on the world of theatre. Simon Stone’s lovingly crafted Elsinore stars Andrew Scott as acclaimed stage and screen actor Ian Charleson, as he delivers an astounding final performance as Hamlet at the National Theatre. Director Richard Eyre brought Charleson on board the production despite the actor’s grave battle with AIDS, and his arduous five-week run is captured with intense vitality by Scott. The stellar cast also includes Olivia Colman, Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Juliet Stevenson, Adeel Akhtar and Peter Mullan.
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Writer-Director Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut is a raucously funny depiction of community theatre, in which unassuming housewife Mona (Julianne Moore) is forced out of her shell when she is unexpectedly cast by bombastic director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) in the lead role in an ill-starred new musical.
Literary adaptations to look out for include Taika Waititi’s gleeful interpretation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, with Jenny Ortega playing an enthusiastic artificial friend desperate to find a loving home. Klara’s wide-eyed wonder and wired-in loyalty are put to the test when she joins the household of sick girl Josie (Mia Tharia) and her overbearing mum Chrissie (Amy Adams).
Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter is adapted from a story by Colm Tóibín in his 2006 collection Mothers and Sons, with events transposed from the Spanish Pyrenees in the 1930s to the mountains of Colorado at the time of the Korean War. The snowbound landscape is the backdrop to a delicate study of grief, fragility, resilience and desire as Fred Hechinger’s Mike returns to the family homestead, only for his damaged mother Louise (Catríona Balfe) to go missing.
The ever versatile Olivia Colman exercises her comic chops in Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s Wicker, a raunchy offbeat comedy adapted from the Ursula Wills story ‘The Wicker Husband’. When Colman’s Fisherwoman orders the local weaver to craft her a companion (Alexander Skarsgård), his presence wreaks jealousy and havoc in their isolated village. Elizabeth Debicki and Peter Dinklage lead the supporting cast.
Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s The Idiot(s), based on the novel The Gambler Wife by Andrew D. Kaufman, stars Aimee Lou Wood and Johnny Flynn as Anna and Fydor Dostoyevsky, at a time when a determined Anna is striving to steer Fyodor away from a crippling gambling and booze habit and recover his creativity. A witty and acerbic takedown of notions of single-minded male genius.
Rachel Rose’s The Last Day and Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in contrasting ways.”
Few film festivals would be complete without a new Virginia Woolf adaptation, and Rachel Rose’s The Last Day and Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa each riff on Mrs Dalloway in contrasting ways. Rose delivers a mood piece in the present-day New York suburbs, with Alicia Vikander and Victoria Pedretti as two struggling women trying to navigate ubiquitous and intrusive Fourth of July celebrations; while the Esiris transfer Clarissa (Sophie Okonedo)’s garden party to today’s Lagos, to deliver a rich study of class and gender in Nigerian society.
Daniel Oriahi’s boisterous adaptation of Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives offers another slice of contemporary Nigeria, in which a polygamous wealthy patriarch (Odunlade Adekola) is dismayed to discover that his fourth and favoured wife, young graduate Bolanle (Omowunmi Dada) appears to be infertile. The three elder wives view the newcomer with suspicion, and a lightly comical melodrama unfolds in which they conspire to undermine her standing within the household.
Keiran Goddard’s novel I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is brought to the screen by director Clio Barnard and writer Enda Walsh. Anthony Boyle, Lola Petticrew, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo and Daryl McCormack play old school friends from Birmingham now in their thirties who find their lifelong bonds tested as they face fractured relationships, disillusionment and long-buried secrets. A piercing portrait of broken Britain set to the pulsing beat of club music.
Writer-director Benjamín Naishtat adapts Hernan Ronsino’s suspenseful whodunit Glaxo, which sees the lives of four young men in a derelict town in Argentina’s pampa disrupted when a retired police officer (Marcelo Subiotto) and his seductive young wife (Lali Espósito) move into the neighbourhood. A lush score by Shigeru Umebayashi sets the mood for a tightly-coiled noir.
Mariano Llinás’ Life of Jorge Luis Borges is an epic three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary contemplation of the life and works of the great man that is every bit as wily and playful as a Borges story collection. Drawing on archival materials and literary experts, and exploring the a sprawl of streets and buildings where Borges once lived, visited, or may have been inspired by, it raises as many questions as it delivers answers about this singular writer.
With Fatherland, Paweł Pawlikowski explores the fragmented soul of post-war Germany as Nobel laureate author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) is accompanied by his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) – an accomplished actress, writer and rally driver – on a literary road trip across the divided country. When family tragedy strikes, it becomes clear that the spiritual healing Mann deems essential for the nation will also be needed to repair their own relationship.
Based on the classic 2000 AD comic series created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons, Duncan Jones’ Rogue Trooper is the story of genetic infantryman ‘19’ (Aneurin Barnard), the sole survivor of an invasion force, on a mission to track down the traitor who sold him and his comrades out. Accompanied by three killed-in-action squad mates whose personalities have been stored in his gun, helmet and backpack (voiced by Jack Lowden, Daryl McCormack and Reece Shearsmith), he stalks the poisoned, war-torn landscape of Nu-Earth driven by an embittered sense of revenge and justice.
A notable transfer from stage to screen is Susanna White’s adaptation of Suzie Miller’s globally acclaimed Prima Facie, starring Cynthia Erivo as an ambitious barrister who specialises in defending men accused of sexual assault. When she herself becomes a victim of a rape, she is forced to confront the legal system she once trusted. The elemental power embodied by Jodie Comer in the one-woman play was rooted in her reflective and fiery monologue as she replays past events, but for the film Miller pads out the story for a wider cast, which early reviews suggest diminishes the impact.
In Sean Mathias’ Frank and Percy, screenwriter Martin Sherman similarly extends Ben Wetherill’s theatrical two-hander about the unexpected blossoming of late-life love. Roger Allam and Ian McKellen reprise their stage roles as the titular pair, supported by a broad ensemble cast including such luminaries as Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Derek Jacobi and Siân Phillips.
Adapted by James Graham from his hit play, Danny Boyle directs Ink starring Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch and Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb. The burgeoning media baron and his pugnacious editor, driven by perceived Establishment slights, use the 1969 acquisition of The Sun to relaunch the ailing, left-leaning broadsheet as an unapologetically populist and sensational tabloid. A gleeful dissection of press ethics and ruthless ambition takes a sinister turn when the wife of a senior executive is kidnapped, and the paper tracks the story to its grisly outcome.
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About the festival
With its central base at BFI Southbank and gala presentations at the Royal Festival Hall, screenings and events also run in cinemas and venues across central London plus partner cinemas in Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield.
The programme runs from Wednesday 7 to Sunday 18 October 2026.
Tickets from £10/£6 under 25s are on general sale and selling fast. Check the LFF homepage after 10am each day during the festival to see new ticket releases and standby queues.
More info and book tickets
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Mark Reynolds and Farhana Gani are founding editors of Bookanista.
@wearebookanista.bsky.social
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