Promising Young Woman (2020) – on demand – Oscar winner
★★★★☆
Promising Young Woman stars Carey Mulligan in a witty, much-talked-about and multi-award-nominated writer/director debut by actor Emerald Fennell.
2020
Undine (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
Undine by Christian Petzold is a strange, otherworldly, watery romance with unsettling depths.
BFI Flare: Jump, Darling (2020) – on demand
★★★☆☆
Following a break-up, a struggling drag queen visits his ailing grandmother in the country and finds himself staying as the pair support each other in various ways in writer/director Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling.
Ammonite (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
Francis Lee’s second feature after his stunning, award-winning debut God’s Own Country is another queer love story, this time between two women in 1840s Lyme Regis, starring Kate Winslet and Saorse Ronan.
BFI Flare: Cowboys (2020) – on demand on Curzon Home Cinema on 7 May
★★★☆☆
In writer/director Anna Kerrigan’s Cowboys a father and his transgender son journey through the Montana mountain ranges escaping the boy’s mother, who is unable to accept his gender dysphoria.
BFI Flare: Sublet (2020) – on demand
★★★☆☆
In Eytan Fox’s Sublet a middle-aged American travel writer visiting Tel Aviv forms an unexpected connection with his young Israeli landlord and in the process learns new things about himself.
BFI Flare: My First Summer (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
In My First Summer by Katie Found, in rural Australia a sheltered teenage girl suffers a devastating loss but is unexpectedly brought to life by a sudden special connection with a fellow teen.
Notturno (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
Filmed over three years in war zones in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon, Notturno (Nocturne) by Gianfranco Rosi is a documentary oddity.
BFI LFF 2020: Mogul Mowgli (2020)
★★★★☆
Mogul Mowgli is a passionate, sincere, deeply felt snapshot of conflicting identity in contemporary Britain, starring Riz Ahmed, a strikingly compelling actor, directed by Bassam Tariq.
African Apocalypse (2020)
★★★★☆
The BFI London Film Festival 2020 premiered African Apocalypse, a brilliant new documentary by British-Nigerian poet and activist Femi Nylander that uncovers a hidden part Africa’s colonial history.
BFI LFF 2020: Ammonite (2020)
★★★★☆
Francis Lee’s second feature after his stunning, award-winning debut with God’s Own Country is another queer love story, this time between two women in 1840s Lyme Regis, starring Kate Winslet and Saorse Ronan.
Rebecca (2020)
★★★☆☆
Ben Wheatley’s lavish take on Rebecca, though truer to Daphne du Maurier’s novel, can’t help but be overshadowed by the iconic Hitchcock version.
BFI LFF 2020: One Night in Miami (2020)
★★★★☆
One Night in Miami, directed by Regina King, is a fictionalised account of an extraordinary meeting that really took place in 1964 between black icons the-then Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke.
Body of Water (2020)
★★★☆☆
Lucy Brydon’s powerful drama Body of Water is unusual in showing anorexia affecting an adult, rather than the teenage girls we usually associate with the eating disorder.