HITS OUTNUMBER HOPS : LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

FESTIVAL : Hits Outnumber Misses at London Film Festival. This year showed a large number of filmmakers turning inwards and pointed to films to look out for in 2026.

It was a classic year at this year's BFI London Film Festival, which took place early in October. If there was any observable shift, it was the number of filmmakers who turned to smaller-scale dramas of human connection, with action, fantasy and, to some degree, politics less prominent than usual.

Even the big releases seemed to turn inwards. The opening night gala marked a break with precedent by not showcasing a major British release. 

Instead, there was a screening of WAKE UP DEAD MAN : A Knives Out Mystery, the third in Benoit Blanc comedy detective series, hailed as a return to form after rather grandiose GLASS ONION.

The film's really excelled at this year's festival succeeded in taking apparently small subjects and revealing the depths within.

BLUE MOON is set in the theatre bar on the opening night of OKLAHOMA!, the first collaboration between legendary partnership Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Rodgers' previous writing partner, Lorenz Hart, sits there drowning his sorrows, regaling fellow bar patrons with tales of showbiz glamour and trying to hold on to his fading hopes.

Directed by Richard Linklater, it's a tour-de-force by Ethan Hawke as Hart, by turn amused, melancholy and sardonic in his take on the power of entertainment to brighten and conceal the disappointments of life.

Chloe Zhao's HAMNET adapts Maggie O’Farrell's novel about the son who died prior to Shakespeare writing HAMLET.

It is a two-hander between Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes, as they become estranged by personal tragedy and Shakespeare's pursuit of the London stage.

In an astonishing closing sequence, Agnes travels to London to see the play her husband abandoned her for, its poetic questioning of the meaning of a life lived under the shadow of grief transcending the division between author and stage, imitation and life.

The World Students Society thanks Louis Bayman, an Associate Professor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Southampton, in the UK.