Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Knives Out franchise with Daniel Craig as the eccentric Southern detective Benoit Blanc put some fizz into the London film festival a couple of years ago when the second film in the series was included. Now the threequel is the festival’s opening gala: Josh O’Connor is the principled young priest who finds himself in the frame when his fierce clerical superior is whacked – and Benoit has to find out the truth.
The Secret Agent
One of the best films of the year – perhaps the best. Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho sets his expansive, freewheeling dramedy-thriller during the 1970s Brazilian dictatorship and Wagner Moura plays a dissident scientist on the run from government forces who want to dispose of him. With its visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue and languorous mystery it feels like Elmore Leonard mixed with Antonioni’s The Passenger.
The Ice Tower
An eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this fairytale of deathwish yearning and erotic submission from Lucile Hadžihalilović, whose partner Gaspar Noé has a cameo as a seedy movie director. A teen runaway in 60s France with an obsession with Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen breaks into a movie studio where this story is actually being filmed starring a magnificently chilly Marion Cotillard: it’s a dreamy and narcotic melodrama.
Father Mother Sister Brother
Jarmusch won the Venice Golden Lion with this diverting and beguiling anthology movie, whose cast includes Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore, Cate Blanchett and Tom Waits. It’s a triptych of family scenes: separate scenarios with mischievous, mysterious moments in which they appear to cosmically resonate with each other.
Bugonia
Prolific Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos is back with another macabre, startling and amusing film featuring his superstar muse Emma Stone. It’s a bizarre black comedy about online conspiracy delusion whose final, sensational montage of images sent Venice audiences reeling out of the auditorium. Stone plays an icy corporate CEO who is kidnapped by crazed eco-activist Jesse Plemons who is convinced she is an evil space alien.
Dreams
Mexican auteur Michel Franco can be relied to deliver the shock factor, and so it proves again with this hypnotically disturbing, chilling satire-nightmare of erotic obsession among the liberal superrich in the US. Jessica Chastain plays a wealthy, entitled heiress (like one of the Roy family in TV’s Succession) who conceives an erotic obsession with one of the ballet stars in the dance school her family bankrolls.
Hamnet
A creative take on the private life of William Shakespeare needs audacity — and director Chloé Zhao has boldly taken on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about young William, his wife Anne Hathaway and the imagined heartbreak caused by the death of his young son Hamnet, that name so close to that of his great tragic hero. Paul Mescal is Shakespeare and as the grieving Anne, Jessie Buckley is already being spoken of as a best actress contender at the Academy Awards.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
This docufictional movie had tearful audiences on their feet at Venice: Tunisian film-maker Kaouther Ben Hania recounts the true story of the five-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was stranded in her uncle’s car during a 2024 assault by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, and desperately stayed on the phone for hours to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, begging for help before she was killed, with many others. Ben Hania uses the real audio recording of the girl’s voice and has actors playing the agonised staff on the other end of the line.
Die My Love
Big performances, big emotions and big scenes in this movie from Lynne Ramsay, who brings the gothic realist steam heat to this study of a lonely, passionate woman played by Jennifer Lawrence – a performance which brings back memories of Gena Rowlands’ work for Cassavetes. Lawrence’s character has postpartum depression, left alone in the house all day with the baby, supposedly writing a novel, while her husband (Robert Pattinson) absents himself.
The Mastermind
Here’s an art heist movie with a downbeat vibe: Kelly Reichardt gives us a non-hero who is anything but a mastermind here, wonderfully played by Josh O’Connor. He’s the art school dropout in the 1960s who conceives a bizarre get-rich-quick scheme: using his wealthy parents’ money, he pays a couple of tough guys and a getaway driver to help him steal paintings from a local gallery.
H Is for Hawk
Claire Foy stars in this adaptation of the classic of nature-writing and memoir. She is Helen who suffers a near breakdown when her father dies and to process her grief and loss, trains a fierce goshawk named Mabel, which is as unsentimental a beast as could possibly be imagined – much prized for hunting. It’s a film perhaps to set alongside Kes?
It Was Just an Accident
Iranian director and democracy campaigner Jafar Panahi continues to work, continues to be harassed by the authorities, and won the Cannes Palme d’Or this year with this satirical suspenser about state violence and revenge. A man suffers an accident at night when his car hits a dog and the careworn mechanic helping out realises with a chill that he knows this man – and he must now exact revenge on him.
