The 68th BFI London Film Festival arrived this October with an unmistakable urgency. As the global film industry attempts to find its footing amid shifting distribution models, technological upheaval, and rapidly evolving audience habits, the 2024 programme offered a resolute, unflinching defence of cinema’s vitality. Across the capital—from the brutalist concrete halls of the Southbank Centre to Leicester Square’s ornate, cavernous viewing palaces—LFF 2024 unveiled a staggering array of independent breakthroughs, high-wire auteur experiments, and heavyweight awards contenders.
This year’s Film selection was defined by its stylistic daring and emotional rigour. Directors like Andrea Arnold and Mike Leigh returned to their social realist roots with devastating precision, investigating the margins of British society with unyielding empathy. Meanwhile, international cinema brought lyrical, dreamlike visions and formal radicalism to the forefront. These are not merely movies designed to passively entertain for a few hours; they are meticulously crafted works of art engineered to challenge our preconceptions, test the limits of our empathy, and interrogate the turbulent times we live in.
After days immersed in the dark of the cinema, engaging with a schedule that spanned continents and genres, distinct thematic currents emerged. Filmmakers are wrestling with historical legacy, the feral realities of domesticity, and the fraught nature of identity in an increasingly fragmented world. Here are the 12 brilliant, essential films that defined the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
1. Blitz (Steve McQueen)
Serving as the festival’s prestigious opening film, Steve McQueen’s Blitz offered a bruising, unsentimental vision of World War II London. Starring Saoirse Ronan as Rita, a desperate mother relentlessly searching for her displaced son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), during the terrifying German bombing campaign, the film boldly eschews the familiar, comforting tropes of wartime stoicism. Instead, McQueen delivers something far more visceral and unsettling.
McQueen, who previously won the Camera d'Or for Hunger and Best Picture for 12 Years a Slave, reconstructs the Blitz not as a unifying national myth wrapped in "Keep Calm and Carry On" nostalgia, but as a terrifying ordeal sharply marked by class division and racial tension. Critics praised its profound emotional resonance, and while some reviewers found the episodic narrative structure demanding, the film's ambition is undeniable. It stands as a monumental work of historical reclamation, cementing McQueen’s status as one of Britain’s most essential, truth-seeking contemporary filmmakers.
2. Bird (Andrea Arnold)
Andrea Arnold’s return to the festival circuit was met with universal acclaim, establishing Bird as an immediate must-see of the autumn season. Set in the marginalized, forgotten fringes of Kent, the drama follows a young, fiercely independent girl named Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and her volatile, chaotic father, played with a dangerous, live-wire energy by Barry Keoghan.
Arnold’s mastery of British social realism is well-documented, but Bird introduces an unexpected, almost magical-realist dimension to her gritty, kinetic, handheld aesthetic. The director’s intensely empathetic gaze captures the fraught dynamics of a fractured, struggling family with a naturalism that is deeply moving. Critics celebrated the film for its raw cinematic power, repeatedly highlighting Arnold's unparalleled ability to excavate poetry from the bleakest of socioeconomic circumstances.
3. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
Arriving in London on a massive wave of international acclaim following its historic Grand Prix win at the Cannes Film Festival, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light is a luminous, quietly overwhelming triumph. Kapadia, making her narrative feature debut after a background in documentary, crafts a delicate, dreamlike exploration of female friendship set against the sprawling, impersonal, and overwhelming backdrop of Mumbai.
The film follows two nurses who embark on a transformative journey to a coastal town, allowing Kapadia to interrogate the quiet, often invisible lives of working-class women in modern India. The cinematography is profoundly lyrical and observant, rendering the monsoon-soaked streets and crowded trains with a melancholic, tactile beauty. Widely considered one of the defining cinematic achievements of the entire year, it is a flawless masterclass in subtlety and emotional intelligence.
4. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
Perhaps the most fiercely debated and wildly ambitious film of the festival, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is a genre-bending, audacious experiment that gleefully defies easy categorization. A Spanish-language musical crime thriller about a fearsome Mexican cartel boss who undergoes gender affirmation surgery in order to leave a life of violence and embrace her true self, the film swings wildly between high camp, brutal violence, and poignant soap-opera melodrama.
Featuring commanding, physically demanding performances from Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón, the picture is a bold testament to Audiard’s fearless direction. While some festival reviewers felt the eclectic musical numbers and heavy political messaging resulted in a "mixed bag," its sheer formal audacity and willingness to risk spectacular failure make it a vital, unforgettable cinematic experience that demands to be seen on the largest screen possible.
5. Queer (Luca Guadagnino)
Luca Guadagnino continues his prolific, stylistically restless streak with Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ famously unfilmable semi-autobiographical novella. Starring Daniel Craig in a brave, career-redefining performance as Lee, an American expat drifting through 1940s Mexico City on a hazy tide of cheap tequila and heroin, the film is an intoxicating, suffocating descent into desire and obsession.
Guadagnino leans heavily into the surreal, employing experimental visual flourishes and distinct cinematic textures to capture the hallucinatory nature of Burroughs’ disjointed prose. It is a deeply intimate, deliberately opaque work that fiercely challenges the audience, willingly trading traditional narrative momentum for an oppressive, sweaty atmosphere of longing and existential dread.
6. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
Reuniting with his Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths marks a triumphant, harrowing return to contemporary domestic drama for the veteran British auteur. Jean-Baptiste delivers a staggering, uncompromising performance as Pansy, a woman whose profound inner torment and hypochondria manifest as relentless, combative hostility towards absolutely everyone in her orbit.
Leigh’s script is remarkably sharp, deploying a biting, uncomfortable wit that frequently and suddenly gives way to devastating emotional truths. The film offers a compassionate, albeit notoriously difficult, examination of familial duty, mental illness, and the suffocating weight of long-unresolved trauma. It is a stark reminder of Leigh’s enduring relevance and his peerless, intensive collaborative skill with actors.
7. We Live in Time (John Crowley)
In a festival heavy with challenging, avant-garde cinema and formal experimentation, John Crowley’s We Live in Time provided a necessary dose of emotionally direct, intelligently crafted romantic drama. Spanning a tumultuous decade, the narrative traces the relationship between Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), meticulously charting the ecstatic highs and devastating lows of a life built together.
Pugh and Garfield share a crackling, authentic, and lived-in chemistry that elevates the material far beyond conventional, saccharine tearjerker territory. Crowley, best known for Brooklyn, navigates the film's complex non-linear structure with grace, ensuring that the emotional beats land with a resonant, cumulative power rather than feeling manipulative. It is a heartfelt, deeply satisfying reminder of the enduring appeal of the adult-oriented cinematic romance.
8. The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar)
Pedro Almodóvar’s first-ever full-length English-language feature, The Room Next Door, adapts Sigrid Nunez’s celebrated novel What Are You Going Through with the legendary Spanish director’s signature visual elegance and thematic warmth. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore star as estranged, intellectual friends who reconnect when one of them is diagnosed with terminal cancer and makes a profound request for company during her final days.
Rather than succumbing to maudlin sentimentality, Almodóvar crafts a restrained, deeply civilized, and remarkably eloquent chamber piece. The vibrant production design and meticulous, primary-colour palettes—longtime hallmarks of the director's distinctive style—provide a rich, life-affirming contrast to the stark, inescapable reality of human mortality. It is a mature, surprisingly serene meditation on life, death, and the sustaining power of female companionship.
9. Conclave (Edward Berger)
Following the massive, Oscar-winning success of All Quiet on the Western Front, director Edward Berger pivots away from the battlefield and into the secretive, labyrinthine halls of the Vatican with Conclave. Adapted from Robert Harris’s bestselling thriller, the film meticulously follows the tense, highly political, and secretive process of electing a new Pope following the sudden death of the pontiff.
Anchored by a formidable ensemble cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow, the picture is an absolute masterclass in sustained, simmering tension. Berger directs with a cold, precise, and gripping elegance, framing the whispers and machinations of the cardinals as a high-stakes, gripping political thriller. It is a smart, enormously entertaining piece of prestige filmmaking that executes its premise flawlessly.
10. Nightbitch (Marielle Heller)
Marielle Heller, known for The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, brings Rachel Yoder’s fiercely original, bizarre novel to the screen with Nightbitch. The film stars Amy Adams as an exhausted, creatively stifled stay-at-home mother who, pushed to the brink of sanity by isolation and domestic drudgery, begins to legitimately believe she is transforming into a dog.
The wildly unconventional premise serves as a potent, literalised metaphor for the feral, isolating realities of modern motherhood. While some festival critics suggested the cinematic adaptation slightly smoothed over the sharp, unhinged bite of its literary source material, Adams’ thoroughly committed, vanity-free performance anchors the picture. It is a peculiar, darkly comic, and deeply strange exploration of feminine rage and domestic dissatisfaction that lingers long after the credits roll.
11. Maria (Pablo Larraín)
Pablo Larraín concludes his unofficial trilogy of iconic, intensely isolated women (following Natalie Portman in Jackie and Kristen Stewart in Spencer) with Maria, a stylistically bold, elegiac portrait of opera legend Maria Callas during her final, reclusive days in 1970s Paris. Angelina Jolie delivers a fiercely theatrical, haughty performance, perfectly capturing the legendary diva’s brittle grandeur and fading power.
The film operates continuously on a register of opulent melancholy, employing hallucinatory interview sequences (featuring Kodi Smit-McPhee) to effectively map Callas’s deteriorating psyche and shifting relationship with her own myth. As Callas herself notes in the film, "My life is opera – and opera is unreasonable." Larraín wholeheartedly embraces this unreasonableness, delivering a polarizing, highly ambitious film that wrestles with the crushing, isolating weight of artistic legacy.
12. Anora (Sean Baker)
If one film truly encapsulated the electric, unpredictable, and triumphant energy of the 2024 festival, it was Sean Baker’s Palme d'Or-winning Anora. A chaotic, raunchy, and deeply empathetic "Cinderella story gone wrong," the film stars a sensational Mikey Madison as a Brooklyn sex worker who impulsively marries the reckless son of a Russian oligarch, sparking a desperate retrieval mission by his family's goons.
Baker, long a dedicated champion of marginalized narratives and sex workers, brilliantly balances manic, screwball comedy with devastating, grounded emotional gut punches. The film's seamless transition from a glitzy, high-energy party atmosphere into a bleak, tense, and sobering third act is masterfully handled. Critics at the festival heralded it as a towering achievement, noting Baker's unparalleled ability to write combative, authentically messy dialogue. Standing as one of the Top 10 Anticipated Film Premieres of the autumn season, Anora more than delivered on its massive promise, concluding the festival on an unforgettable, breathless high note.
As the curtains close on the 68th edition, the London Film Festival continues to forcefully prove that cinema, in all its fractured, glorious, and varied forms, remains an indispensable tool for understanding the complexities of the human condition.