As we say au revoir to Cannes and Ciao to Venice, it’s London’s turn to host the world’s biggest film stars at the 69th BFI London Film Festival, and you’re all invited.

Bugonia

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons & Aidan Delbis

 

Oscar-winning director Yorgos Lanthimos returns with another surreal collision of human instinct and absurdity, harnessing the offbeat magnetism of his frequent collaborator Emma Stone. In Bugonia, she stars as a corporate titan who two conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) are convinced is actually an alien. Expect biting dark humour, existential dread and an unsettling reflection of our fractured times.

Die My Love

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson & LaKeith Stanfield

 

Lynne Ramsay adapts Ariana Harwicz’s feverish novel and delivers a blistering portrait of motherhood and mental collapse. Jennifer Lawrence burns on screen with raw ferocity, matched by Robert Pattinson and LaKeith Stanfield as they’re drawn into her shifting reality. It’s a film of raw edges: desire, rage, tenderness; always threatening to tip into chaos.

After The Hunt

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri & Andrew Garfield

 

A highlight of this year’s London Film Festival, Luca Guadagnino sets the stage in academia, where Julia Roberts’ professor faces the fallout of a scandal that entwines her student and trusted colleague. Meteorically rising star Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield orbit her in this taut drama about loyalty, truth, and the blurred lines between personal and professional survival.

Hamnet

Director: Chloé Zhao

Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal & Emily Watson

 

Chloé Zhao transforms Maggie O’Farrell’s beloved novel into a luminous, elegiac vision of grief, love, and legacy. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal play parents gutted by the death of their son, a loss that reverberates through art and memory. Inspired by Shakespeare’s own child-loss influencing his magnum opus Hamlet, it’s a luminous, intimate story about how absence shapes what endures.

Blue Moon

Director: Richard Linklater

Starring: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale & Andrew Scott

 

Richard Linklater reunites with his Before trilogy star Ethan Hawke as he plays Lorenz Hart, a genius songwriter confronting irrelevance while the world celebrates his former partner’s success. A wry, soulful look at middle age, artistic ambition, and regret, Margaret Qualley and Andrew Scott electrify the ensemble in a story that lingers as both a bittersweet chamber piece and a meditation on legacy.

The Death of Bunny Munro

Director: Isabella Eklöf

Starring: Matt Smith, Rafael Mathé & Sarah Greene

 

Rising director Isabella Eklöf brings musician Nick Cave’s darkly comic novel to screen with Matt Smith as a salesman spiralling through grief and self-destruction. Brutal, bleakly funny and disturbingly tender, it’s a portrait of masculinity at its most unhinged.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Director: Scott Cooper

Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong & Stephen Graham

 

Capturing Bruce Springsteen at his most vulnerable, Jeremy Allen White channels the Boss wrestling with fame, fear, and the stripped-back creation of Nebraska. A portrait of art, obsession, and American myth, the film captures the cost of honesty in art, powered by grit and soul.

The Mastermind

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim & Hope Davis

 

Kelly Reichardt crafts a quietly radical drama about ambition and compromise, starring Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim in performances layered with aching subtlety. Transforming the heist film into a study of quiet desperation as a carpenter dreams of stealing big. What unfolds is less about thrills than the weight of failure and the lives left behind.

Hedda

Director: Nia DaCosta

Starring: Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss & Imogen Poots

 

For her feature directorial debut, Nia DaCosta reimagines Ibsen’s heroine for now: Tessa Thompson burns as Hedda, a woman suffocating within privilege and yearning for escape. Stark, stylish, and unflinching, it’s a modern gothic about the hunger for freedom and the violence of repression.

Rose of Nevada

Director: Mark Jenkin

Starring: George MacKay & Callum Turner

 

Mark Jenkin turns his singular, handmade cinematic style toward the American West. Starring next-generation actors George MacKay and Callum Turner, the pair are caught in a hallucinatory tale of brotherhood and survival, it’s a haunting vision carved in dust and silence.

Get your tickets to BFI’s London Film Festival here now, starting from £10 (£6 for 16-25s).