BFI Film Festival Best Films To See
Next month London will be the centre stage for the BFI festival, showcasing the coming year’s most talked-about narrative films, documentaries and more. We’ve chosen what we think is a strong selection of potential hits, that are likely to pick up statues this awards season. Jim Jarmusch is back with new film Paterson, as is Tom Ford with his follow up to A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals. And there’s even one quirky BBC comedy/drama film Spaceship, which we think has cult potential. Tickets are already on sale but for those who can’t make it, here are our selected trailers. BFI runs from the 5th of October until the 15th.
Moonlight – Dir. Barry Jenkins
This critically acclaimed drama details the life and times of a black man coming out in a hostile part of Miami. Shown in three stages – as a young child, a teenager, and an adult – Moonlight is romantic, thoughtful, and genuine. Watch out for Janelle Monáe’s silver screen acting debut.
A touching drama set in the North Shore telling the tale of Lee Chandler and the unwelcomed sudden burden of becoming his nephew’s legal guardian after his brother dies. Lee returns back home to Massachusetts where he has more than just his brother’s teenage son to deal with.
Adapted from stage to screen by Dolan, this French film is about a dying writer who travels to visit his family back home after a twelve-year hiatus to tell them that he is terminally ill. It’s a tense, atmospheric get together that won the Grand Prix award at Cannes Film Festival.
Already being heralded as Jarmusch’s greatest film to date, Paterson is about a bus driver in New Jersey. As well as being a bus driver, the titular character is also a poet, and his wife is desperate for him to make copies of his romantic verse. All is ritual and peace until something horrible gets thrown into the mix.
Lauded German filmmaker Werner Herzog is back with another dumbfounding documentary – this time looking into the past, present, and future of the internet and its evolving technology. He interviews the biggest names in the industry to get a grasp on what is going on in this existentially confusing, technological revolution.
A psychedelic BBC drama about a teenage cyberpunk who feigns her own alien abduction seven years after the mysterious death of her mother. In the wake of her disappearance, her father is forced down the unicorn infested, black rabbit hole to go and find his daughter.
Based on the short story Story of Your Life, this is science fiction at its best – combining unobtainable extraterrestrial antics with applicable global politics. Amy Adams is a linguist called to action to communicate with strange spacecrafts that have appeared all over the world. She has to find answers before mankind collapses in on itself.
Nocturnal Animals – Dir. Tom Ford
Fashion designer Tom Ford reveals his second film, this time based on the 1993 novel Tony and Susan. This is a compelling psychological thriller about an art-gallery owner who is tormented by her ex-husband after he sends her a violent romp of a novel that he wrote, which she is convinced is a symbolic threat to her wellbeing and life.
