London Film Festival 2025 - from paranoia in Brazil and Iran, to light relief in New York and Tuscany

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL From paranoia in Brazil and Iran, to light relief in New York and Tuscany 

'Jay Kelly' disappoints, 'It Was Just an Accident' doesn't

Film festivals are a bran tub: what you find in them may be unexpected, and not always in a good way. Here are six I pulled out in my first week (minus one of my favourites, The Mastermind, which I will review when it goes on general release next week).

Jay Kelly 

theartsdesk Q&A: musician Warren Ellis recalls how jungle horror and healing broke him open

The Bad Seed explains the cost of home truths while making documentary Ellis Park

Warren Ellis is Nick Cave’s wild-maned Bad Seeds right-hand man and The Dirty Three’s frenzied violinist. Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects meanwhile exist on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly.

Ellis is the contrastingly loving renegade subject of Kurzel’s debut documentary Ellis Park, an escapee from suburban Ballarat who here journeys further out to the titular Sumatran wildlife sanctuary he helps fund, where he plays to animals like a shaman Dolittle in jungle mist.

Blu-ray: The Graduate

★★★ BLU-RAY: THE GRADUATE Post #MeToo, can Mike Nichols' second feature still lay claim to Classic Film status?

Post #MeToo, can Mike Nichols' second feature still lay claim to Classic Film status?

Can a film’s classic status expire, or be rescinded? If it can, I’d say The Graduate is a potential candidate.

Oslo Stories Trilogy: Sex review - sexual identity slips, hurts and heals

★★★★ OSLO STORIES TRILOGY: SEX Sexual identity slips, hurts and heals

A quietly visionary series concludes with two chimney sweeps' awkward sexual liberation

Two chimney sweeps sit by a window. The boss (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream meeting with David Bowie, who disconcertingly looks at him like he’s a woman. Funny thing, his friend (Jar Gunnar Røise) replies. Yesterday, a male client asked him to have sex, and he did. It felt good. He hasn’t told anyone else, apart from his wife.

Oslo Stories Trilogy: Love review - freed love

★★★★ OSLO STORIES TRILOGY: LOVE A heady ode to urban connection

Gay cruising offers straight female lessons in a heady ode to urban connection

Love was the Norwegian climax of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy, the most lovestruck vision of his city and boldest prophesy of how to live there, beyond borders and bonds of sexual identity and shame. Released here between Dreams’ meta-memories of swooning first love and Sex’s look at desire undefined by gender, it also settles in Oslo’s heart.

Weapons review - suffer the children

★★★★ WEAPONS 'Barbarian' follow-up hiply riffs on ancient fears

'Barbarian' follow-up hiply riffs on ancient fears

Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint through night streets, arms flung back like fighter jets, before vanishing utterly.

Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams review - love lessons

★★★ OSLO STORIES TRILOGY: DREAMS First love's bliss begins a utopian city symphony

First love's bliss begins a utopian city symphony

Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.

28 Years Later review - an unsentimental, undead education

★★★★ 28 DAYS LATER An unsentimental, undead education

Allegorical mayhem in an eerily familiar zombie Britain

The 23 years since 28 Days Later and especially those since Danny Boyle’s soulful encapsulation of Britain’s best spirit at the 2012 Olympics have offered rich material for a franchise about deserted cities, rampaging viruses, hard quarantines and an insular, afraid country hacked adrift from Europe.