22.10.2026

Seven you need to watch

Over 200 feature films and shorts were showcased over October 7-18 at the 70th annual London Film Festival. As with every year, there were some duds, a few shocks, but many treats. Jim Moody picks his particular highlights

Danny Boyle (director) Ink UK 2026, release January 8 2027

The fact that the failed labour movement newspaper, The Daily Herald, was transformed into the similarly dull broadsheet, The Sun, produced hardly a blip on most people’s radar in 1964. But when in 1969 Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) wanted the printing presses of his newly acquired Sunday broadsheet, News of the World, to be used every day of the week, he looked around for a daily paper to print on them. The Daily Mirror stable’s second-rate The Sun fitted the bill, so Murdoch bought it to became the Mirror’s main competitor. While the ‘hands’ operating the News of the World/Sun press stayed, restaffing the Sun editorial side often meant going below par.

However, with talented editor Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), an ex-Mirror sub-editor, The Sun grabbed an audience with its increasingly crass, lurid approach. It is just the job for women’s page writer Jules Davies (Claire Foy), whose role blends several female contemporaries. As Murdoch says, “It’s a business”, and as such must make a profit - the bigger the better. Ink depicts the changes as shocking to the existing British national newspaper scene - then still centred on London’s Fleet Street.

The film ends with Lamb being replaced by a more reactionary editor to better fit Murdoch’s subsequent move to Docklands and the de-unionisation of production (printworkers had struck against particularly reactionary editions) and editorial staff.

Never mentioned explicitly is that the mass media acts in the interests of the capitalist state, even when not a ‘pillar of respectability’. After all, to bourgeois minds ‘public opinion’ means the mass media. So it was that, peering from behind the normal cloud of obfuscation, The Sun felt able to headline its front page in 1992 “It’s The Sun wot won it”, following the Tory election victory.

Asmahan Bkerat (director) Concrete land Jordan, Palestine 2026, released

Afro-Palestinian Bedouins were kicked out of their homeland during the war which founded the state of Israel. The Najars are one such family, living down on their uppers near Amman in Jordan. Elder Abu-Awad Najar is one of the last: he still herds sheep on squatted agricultural land with no security. But his son, Awad, drives a cement truck for the very construction companies that are creeping toward them, building luxury villas. Awad’s bright 10-year-old daughter, Eman, is bullied at school as a Bedouin: even though the bourgeois society in the form of the city offers education, it requires cultural erasure.

Suddenly, a government eviction notice arrives, demanding the family cleans up its animal yard or be removed within five days. Thus, the Najar family again faces eviction and displacement. Selling their animals destroys Abu-Awad’s very self - it literally kills him. A racist neighbour, possibly in the pay of developers, slashes their canvas dwelling. With a newborn in the family and perceiving threats to their lives, the remainder of the Najars, unable to resist, have to leave. With Eman’s education sacrificed, she now faces an uncertain future. They disappear into a concrete landscape.

The film won the Grierson Award in Documentary Competition at the 2026 London Film Festival.

Ashley Walters (director) Animol UK 2025, release October 30

Fifteen-year-old Troy (Tut Nyuot) and Krystiyan (Vlad Baliuk) enter a young offenders’ institution on the same day on remand; Dion (Sekou Diaby) demands Troy anally smuggle a phone, but later he loses it to his threatening cellmate, Mason (Ryan Dean). Later, Troy attacks Mason in defence of Krystiyan. Dion gets Troy to pick up contraband dropped by drone; Krystiyan helps Troy and their relationship deepens. Mason films them kissing to blackmail Troy; Mason stabs Krystiyan, but not mortally, when he tries to grab the offending mobile. Troy gets homophobic abuse, but, soon after DNA evidence rules out Troy as guilty of the crime of which he was accused, he is released.

What this excellently directed and acted film exposes are key parts of the foul prison system of the UK state. Ashley Walters was himself an inmate of a youth prison, which clearly raises the credibility and impact of the film. Their inescapable duty of care means prison authorities must safeguard the wellbeing of every single inmate, protecting them 100% from harm from any quarter; failure should mean disciplinary action and the release of the prisoners affected.

At a lower level - that mobile phones should be prohibited and indeed that anything a prisoner does legally outside is hedged around or prohibited in a prison - all this is a basic denial of human rights. Some youth prisons, like the one portrayed, refuse to allow remand prisoners to wear their own clothes. Over 80 years ago, the chief prison administrator of the UK made clear that prisoners were sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment. While we still have prisons, which is moot, pressure for prisoners’ rights on a par with those outside prison must to be fought for by all who consider themselves democratic, let alone socialist.

Alex Huston Fischer, Eleanor Wilson (directors) Wicker USA 2026, release October 30

Imagining a pre-bowdlerised Brothers Grimm story might nowadays produce something like Wicker. Here you have it: magical wickerwork from the local basket weaver (a compellingly thoughtful Peter Dinklage) in an isolated medieval village. There is bawdiness of a 21st century kind too, but with an apparently near-horizontal social ladder - no doubt supposed to keep modern mass audiences good-natured. Here everyone speaks slightly different versions of modern English.

Be that as it may, class appears subsumed into simple individual distaste: when the local, aptly named Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman, excelling) sells her daily catch around the village, she is despised for her smell, infused from her work. But the Fisherwoman’s unlikely outsider status changes when a bride’s mini-basket (standing in for the modern cliché bouquet) lands at her feet, and she is next in line to be married.

Soon after, Fisherwoman pays the basket weaver to make her a wickerwork fiancé - he promises delivery in a month. Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård, creaking majestically) duly marries Fisherwoman: his usefulness and pure devotion to his wife undermines the chauvinist approach of village husbands. Simplistically, this so romantic expression of married life unsettles villagers, especially husbands, and all is in disorder. Village grand dame, the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki, Diana in The Crown) is so put out, she drips lies into receptive ears that Wicker Husband is unfaithful, causing catastrophe. Not a hallmark romance, thankfully, but the bittersweet charm of modern whimsy … with notes of unauthenticity.

(The film is adapted by the directors from the short story The Wicker husband by Ursula Wills-Jones).

Biljana Tutorov, Petar Glomazić (directors) To hold a mountain Serbia, France, Montenegro, Slovenia 2026, release November 27

This documentary opens in the summer pastures of the Sinjajevina plateau in Montenegro, one of Europe’s last great pastoral highlands. And it is where we join families - Gara and her sister’s 13-year-old daughter, Nada, in particular - in a glimpse of what it is like to live and work there. Sheep, cows, cats, dogs, horses - all part of this hard, contradictorily idyllic life. But all is not good in Eden, near the mountain they all call Mother: the Montenegrin army wants to use the area for NATO military exercises. A reconnaissance helicopter periodically disturbs the quiet, so locals make sure that they are constantly present to thwart the military. Gara even challenges army representatives on television.

There are suggestions that local customs tend toward ‘mother right’ in the Engels/Morgan sense. Interwoven is the fact that Nada’s father murdered her mother. So Nada’s adolescent awakening and the armed forces’ potential violence on the land reopen questions from her past and for her future; and an expectation that she can help break the cycle of harm. In the end, the army backs down, following a countrywide campaign of opposition, particularly by the people of the mountains.

Florian Zeller (writer/director) Bunker UK 2026, release February 19 2027

Famed, prizewinning architect Miguel Moreno (Javier Bardem) lives in a swish London pad (production designer Alain Bainée constructed the house in toto on a Madrid soundstage). Miguel can now choose whatever work project he likes. Although his wife, Sofia (Penélope Cruz), has her own career in book publishing, she cannot progress in her London job. She is shackled in luxury to her husband’s career (even if not to him).

Miguel ponders his future; then a tech billionaire (Paul Dano) approaches him (after Miguel signs a non-disclosure agreement), offering a golden handshake for designing a 30-person luxury bunker in Hawaii. (This relates to real-life news about Mark Zuckerberg building just such a bunker in Hawaii.) Sofia challenges him about being unjustly jealous, then her cri de coeur calls him out on his work choices: he could be building hospitals, schools and other socially useful things. Fractious relations develop. Meanwhile, Miguel fumes over another problem: next-door neighbour Toby (Stephen Graham) has bashed a hole in their garden wall for a window, driving Miguel frantic. Toby is in an otherwise lightless garage without a house attached.

But, when gun-toting burglars arrive and menace Miguel’s family, it is Toby who notices and intervenes - at the cost of getting shot, though not mortally. Miguel at last gains insight, in part from recalling a stark video message that “No one will remember you within 50 years of your death”.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen (director) The Beloved, Spain, France 2026, release March 5 2027

Director Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem) meets his daughter estranged for 13 years, Emilia Vera (Victoria Luengo), who is now an actor, and wants her in his next film. But all does not bode well. He offers her the female lead, but without “favouritism”, he assures her: he will be as hard on her as he is to anybody else in the production. And that is not an idle boast, since his machismo proves a heavy burden to all around him, daughter included. The director is not beloved, hubris not serving him well.

Self-destructing on set, Esteban reduces Emilia to tears, perhaps as a proxy for other actors and crew (or maybe out of guilt for abandoning her). Everyone is appalled, despite knowing his reputation. This has been a massive misstep too far, resulting in the director of photography leading her team off set forthwith. Others leave too, leaving a much-reduced production team. Most of the actors stay, including Emilia, gritting their teeth, but Esteban’s redemption seems remote. Some individuals just should not be allowed power over others: a microcosm of capitalist relations.

This is the end to any hopes of father/daughter reconciliation after all these absent years. Esteban is without shame, deluding himself to the end that Emilia or anyone else remaining do not see him in the worst possible light. What was that about work/life balance?