Letterboxd — Your life in film

Over four decades, BFI Flare has been a vital platform for LGBTQIA+ stories on screen and a cherished community space. From its beginnings in 1986 to its global standing today, the Festival has championed bold filmmaking, nurtured new voices and created moments of connection, celebration and resistance.

A beginner’s path through the career of Peter Weir, from his beginnings in the Australian New Wave to making some of the most vivid and transporting Hollywood films of the 1980s and 90s.

Discover the best new queer cinema from around the world at BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival 18-29 March at BFI Southbank.

The master of modern murder mysteries, Rian Johnson, visited BFI Southbank to talk about his creative process as director and writer, and how he’s reinventing the genre. This event was part of the 2025 BFI London Film Festival, where Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery was the Opening Night Gala.

In 2025, cinema was no bystander. Immigrant detention centres. Protests, with protesters getting arrested. Authoritarian governments rooting out rebellious figures. Culture wars and conspiracy theories. The backdrops to many of the best films, as chosen by our critics in the list below, could have been plucked out of the news cycle. Somehow, even though these films went into production long before, many caught a reflection of the year’s horrors.

Jacob Elordi joined us at the 69th BFI London Film Festival for the gala screening of Frankenstein, where he spoke to us about Guillermo del Toro, The Creature and 10 hours in the make-up chair.

Jennifer Lawrence joined us at the 69th BFI London Film Festival for a gala screening of Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love.

Thirty-eight films arrive in October, with an impressive range of themes. We celebrate Black History Month with some pioneering titles, and revisit two very different British contributors to cinema: Terence Davies and Laura Mulvey. We pay tribute to melodrama, and have some stunning exclusives, including Sister Midnight, Late Shift and Islands.

We're committed to nurturing filmmakers and creative risk-takers, developing the UK’s world-class workforce, inspiring children and young people, and connecting audiences to a more diverse screen culture. 

We're thrilled to have added 4 titles to the LFF 2025 programme: the UK premieres of Paolo Sorrentino’s La grazia, Claire Denis’ The Fence and Gastón Solnicki’s The Souffleur, as well as the world premiere of Samuel Abrahams’ Lady!

Big things have small beginnings.

The year's BFI London Film Festival Closing Night Gala will the UK premiere of Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero.

This year’s BFI London Film Festival Cunard Gala will be the UK premiere of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on Friday 10 October. Written by Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, the comedy-drama features an ensemble cast including George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Riley Keough.

With the looseness of a summer shirt, our monthly slate connects to a theme of summer getaway. We have an excellent homegrown debut of Last Swim, and Aussie comedy Audrey, a woman who knows the sun revolves around her. Things darken in the Turkish heat with Vampyros Lesbos and lighten again with the idlers of Steve Buscemi’s debut behind the camera, Trees Lounge. 

Introverted 16-year-old Lucia (Jara Sofija Ostan) joins her Catholic school's all-girls choir, where she befriends Ana-Maria (Mina Švajger), a popular and flirty third-year student. But when the choir travels to a countryside convent for a weekend of intensive rehearsals, Lucia’s interest in a dark-eyed restoration worker tests her friendship with Ana-Maria and the other girls. As she navigates unfamiliar surroundings and her budding sexuality, Lucia begins to question her beliefs and values, disrupting the harmony within the choir.

Directed by Jan-Ole Gerster (Lara, A Coffee in Berlin), the tense thriller Islands stars Sam Riley (BAFTA-nominated for Control, Firebrand) as a tennis coach working at a hotel resort who becomes entangled with an enigmatic couple played by Stacy Martin (The Brutalist, Nymphomaniac) and Jack Farthing (Spencer, The Lost Daughter).

Plunge into July’s BFI Player line-up, which once again gathers the greatest in world cinema, white-hot and riveting.

Two years on from its premiere at Cannes, arthouse auteur and multihyphenate Takeshi Kitano’s latest feature, Kubi, still awaits a UK release, but in April it made its debut on these shores as the opening night film of Queer East Festival. It was a bold programming move from an ever-expanding festival, because Kubi is a provocative and slippery film that evades easy categorisation. Long in development, it explores the overthrowing of daimyō Nobunaga Oda in 1582, and the political and personal machinations that led…

How do you plan a retrospective around a filmmaker with a limited body of work? This question lies at the heart of Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden, a new season screening at BFI Southbank this June. Many fans of feminist and US independent cinema will have heard of Wanda, a low budget 1970 US indie road movie, and the sole directorial feature of actor turned filmmaker Barbara Loden. A loose, semi-improvised story of an aimless divorcee who drifts into the orbit of an unstable…

This June, it’s time for the big beasts, led by an elephant you’ll never forget, with some of the best new releases to celebrate Pride Month and unmissable world cinema – all coming to BFI Player.

The film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 25 years ago, on 20 May 2000, was not the one that Wong Kar Wai had envisaged when he set out on the project sometime around 1997. Far from it. In the Mood for Love emerged from a succession of rapidly evolving projects. One was called Summer in Beijing – it was a comedy. And there was a triptych movie about food. Wong particularly wanted to make a segment about the 1960s Hong…

Winner of the BFI London Film Festival’s Audience Award, Four Mothers is Irish director Darren Thornton’s long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed ex-con drama A Date for Mad Mary (2016). Co-written with brother Colin Thornton, it’s a loose adaptation of Mid-August Lunch (2008), Gianni Di Gregorio’s comedy about a man living with his mother in a small apartment, only to get saddled with three additional old women – all of them strangers – during an Italian holiday.