Alas, the best time of year in London is about to begin and no, I don’t mean Negroni Week. It’s BFI London Film Festival week (7 to 18th October 2026), which means I can finally spend hours sitting in the dark without remorse.

Every year, the BFI brings together some of the best of the festival circuit, fresh from Cannes, Venice and Toronto: films we’ll spend the next few months talking about, arguing over and, inevitably, watching compete for Oscars, BAFTAs and assorted golden statuettes.

The LFF 2026 programme includes 251 films, shorts, series and immersive works from 88 countries, overwhelming to say the least. The fight for tickets is ruthless. So, after spending an unreasonable amount of time going through it, I’ve compiled the films I believe should not be missed at the BFI London Film Festival 2026.

Why the 70th London Film Festival matters

Its 70th anniversary gives the occasion an added significance. That anniversary arrives as cinema finds itself at something of an inflection point. AI has radically altered the way images can be created and forced the industry to confront what authorship might mean in the years ahead. Against that backdrop, sitting in a cinema and watching films made by artists takes on a certain importance.

Kristy Matheson, Artistic Director of BFI Festivals, has compared this moment to the period in which the festival was born, when Britain, and society more broadly, was undergoing rapid social change. It is, as she puts it, a moment to “turn to artists to synthesise our times.”

Opening night gala: Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott

The LFF begins and ends with a rather wonderful nod to theatre, starting strong with Simon Stone’s Elsinore for the opening night gala. Fresh from TIFF and arriving in London for its European premiere, the film sees Andrew Scott take on the story of Ian Charleson, whose celebrated performance as Hamlet at the National Theatre came while he was gravely ill with AIDS.

Stone feels unusually well placed to take this on. Three years ago, he directed Phaedra at the National Theatre, and now finds himself at the same institution on screen, turning his attention to one of its actors. The fascination, for me, lies in seeing how a director whose work is so intensely theatrical translates that language back to cinema.

©️ The Debut (2026). Courtesy of A24.

Closing night gala: Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut

The festival closes with Jesse Eisenberg’s third directorial effort, The Debut, closing on the 18th October. At the same time that The Social Network sequel arrives in cinemas without him, as Eisenberg chose not to play Mark Zuckerberg, he returns to LFF behind the camera for the second time.

And rather wonderfully, with a film about community theatre.

Jesse Eisenberg’s wry and painfully observant sense of humour. Julianne Moore. Community theatre. What else might one need?

If you haven’t seen his 2024 A Real Pain, which also premiered at LFF, watch it before The Debut. Eisenberg has a rare ability to be funny without being cruel and compassionate without becoming mawkish. It makes him one of the filmmakers whose evolution behind the camera I find most compelling.

Prima Facie: Cynthia Erivo takes on Jodie Comer’s role

Another important theatrical nod is undoubtedly Prima Facie. Perhaps it is simply because the National Theatre sits next door to the Royal Festival Hall, but the stage seems to be following us around the programme. What I want to see is how Cynthia Erivo approaches a role that became so closely associated with Jodie Comer after her extraordinary NT run. Taking on Tessa after Comer is no small task; the inevitable comparison is precisely what makes Erivo’s interpretation so interesting.

Ink: Danny Boyle’s Murdoch film is the Mayor of London’s Gala

One of the most anticipated Gala is Danny Boyle’s Ink, adapted from James Graham’s play. Going back to 1969, it tackles the scandalous early days of Rupert Murdoch’s reign over the British press, as he acquires The Sun and hires Larry Lamb to turn the struggling newspaper around. There are few subjects more deliciously British than Fleet Street, tabloids, power and Murdoch, and Boyle seems particularly well suited to the chaos of it all.

Jack O’Connell. Guy Pearce. Claire Foy. The Mayor of London’s Gala. Some serious Fleet Street drama at the Royal Festival Hall. I’m sold.

Artificial: Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman film with Andrew Garfield

Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, the OpenAI film. The Sam Altman origin story, with Andrew Garfield as Altman and Anora darling Yura Borisov alongside him, promises to be provocative, morally ambiguous and entertaining, which is exactly where Guadagnino tends to excel. He rarely seems interested in making the same film twice, which makes his take on the mythology surrounding OpenAI and its CEO all the more enticing.

©️ 2026 Blue Morning Pictures Mod Producciones Pathé Films

Bunker: Florian Zeller directs Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem

Silicon Valley is nearly as well represented at the 70th LFF as the theatre. After The Father and The Son, Florian Zeller returns to the festival with another safe domestic structure turning psychologically unsafe: Bunker. One of cinema’s great real-life couples, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, play a married couple whose relationship begins to unravel after the architect husband accepts a morally dubious commission to build a luxury bunker for a tech billionaire. An actual bunker being built just as the safety of a marriage begins to collapse feels almost too perfect for Zeller.

Cannes favourites at LFF 2026: Pawlikowski and Zvyagintsev

The programme is hardly short of auteurs, but the two I cannot wait to see are also two enduring Cannes favourites: Paweł Pawlikowski with Fatherland and Andrey Zvyagintsev with Minotaur.

©️ Agata GRZYBOWSKA

Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski

In full honesty, a new Pawlikowski film would have made this list regardless of what it was about. I consider Cold War one of the most beautiful films ever made, and luckily for us, Łukasz Żal is once again in charge of cinematography. He is the Thelma to Pawlikowski’s Louise, and together they are responsible for some of the most aesthetically pleasing heartbreak ever put on screen.

Fatherland follows a father and daughter through post-war Germany. Memory, exile, Europe, complicated families and beautiful people being haunted by history. We are firmly onPawlikowski’s home territory.

©️ DR.

Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev

Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, meanwhile, brings Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife to contemporary Russia. If Pawlikowski is brilliant at contemplating the ghosts of post-war Europe, Zvyagintsev prefers to take modern-day Russia apart with a scalpel. From Leviathan to Loveless, marriages, families and private moral failures become something much larger: portraits of the political and social structures surrounding them. After almost a decade without a feature film, the question that fascinates me is what contemporary Russia looks like through Zvyagintsev’s prism now.

Your London Film Festival 2026 prescription

Seventy years on from the first London Film Festival in 1957, the ritual remains pleasingly analogue: a ticket, a dark room and two or so hours surrendered to somebody else’s imagined world. Consider the above my prescription. Choose wisely and I’ll see you in the dark at BFI Soutbank.