Twelve films at LFF 2026. Six days in October
Booking for a festival is quite a different thing from booking a cinema ticket. You are choosing partly blind, partly on trust, and partly on a hunch about which of these will still matter during awards season. So some of what follows has been reviewed to death since May already. Some of it has almost nothing written about it in English at all. Both kinds are on the list for different reasons, and I’ve said which is which.
Here’s the slate.
Monday 12
Ink,
Boyle at full tilt still shoots like he’s angry about something. That’s the only reason this is on the list. A Murdoch-shaped media mogul, Guy Pearce in the lead, 92% out of Venice and a lot of people saying best in years. That kind of consensus usually makes me suspicious. Going anyway.
Tuesday 13
Rose,
Sandra Hüller as a Thirty Years’ War soldier surviving disguised as a man, shot in hard black and white by Markus Schleinzer. Berlin raved. An 87 Metascore, and a lot of serious people reaching for the phrase career-best about an actor who has already been extraordinary more than once. So that’s the draw for me. Not the war. The face.
Ana, en passant,
Brazilian mixed-technique animation, a young Black French-Brazilian woman working through her grandmother’s death. It premiered at Annecy, Miyu picked it up, and as far as I can find nobody has written a proper English review of it yet. Which is exactly the gap I’m looking for.
Wednesday 14
Behemoth!,
Tony Gilroy. Pedro Pascal, Olivia Wilde, Will Arnett. And no formal reviews at all, anywhere. Test screenings have apparently gone very well and there’s already Oscar chatter attached to Pascal, so by the time most coverage lands it’ll just be repeating a position someone else set weeks ago. I’d rather walk in cold and find out for myself.
Wicker,
Olivia Colman orders herself a wicker husband. She gets Alexander Skarsgård. Sundance adored it, and getting THR, Variety, Screen and IndieWire to all agree that a comedy is actually funny seems much rarer than it sounds.
Thursday 15
Fruit Gathering,
Aung Phyoe’s feature debut. Two women working a factory floor in Yangon, and a friendship that turns into something else. It took the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary, which is the top prize, and it’s the first Myanmar film ever selected in competition there. The jury called it “a lush and meditative portrait of work and friendship” that becomes “a harrowing drama of obsession and queer desire.”
A Grand Prix winner with almost nothing written about it in English. That’s one of the most interesting positions on this whole list.
La Bola Negra,
Los Javis, Best Director at Cannes. Ambitious, rapturously staged, every prestige adjective already spent on it. It’ll be written about by people with a decade of authority on me, so I’m not going to pretend I’ll add anything. This one is just for love.
Friday 16
Elsinore,
Andrew Scott as a dying actor determined to perform Hamlet one last time, directed by Simon Stone. Opening gala, raves out of Telluride, and awards weather buzz already forming around this one. The premise is almost too neat. Whether it earns that is the whole question.
Amazomania,
Nathan Grossman, who made I Am Greta, starts out with an adventure story about contact with an Amazon tribe and then deliberately turns the camera round onto who actually owns that story. CPH:DOX praised it for refusing easy answers. Documentary has always been in the remit here, and this is why.
Saturday 17
Ray Gunn,
Brad Bird’s sci-fi noir detective animation, roughly thirty years in the making, with Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits on voices. No reviews exist anywhere, because nobody outside that room has seen it. And it lands on Netflix on 18 December.
This is the most valuable ticket I hold. It’s the one thing on this list I wouldn’t give up for anything.
Fjord,
Cristian Mungiu’s latest, and this year’s Palme d’Or. A foreign-language Palme winner gets a UK release you measure in screens rather than weeks, so the festival is genuinely the best chance most people will get to see it big.
Club Kid,
Jordan Firstman’s Cannes surprise. Audiences apparently went in expecting a joke and came out moved, and then the distributors started bidding. I want to know which half of that is true.
So that’s the twelve. Four of them have effectively no English coverage at all, which is where I’ll be fastest. Three are already reviewed everywhere, so if I write about those it’ll be about the room, the Q&A and the audience, not a straight read nobody needs.
Reviews go up same day or next morning where I can manage it. A festival review published a fortnight later is just a review.
The lights go down on the 12th. See you on the other side of it.
11
LFF 2026: the films nobody is talking about
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