Long Take: October 2025
The London Film Festival and other screenings
The Comedy screens at The Nickel on the 9th, introduced over video by director Rick Alverson.
The London Film Festival opens on the 8th, strictly speaking with Enzo, Laurent Cantet’s final film, screening at the Curzon Soho at 6pm, but more officially with the Opening Night Gala of Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Like much of the festival, both are sold out — unless you fancy stumping up £1,000 for the fundraising ticket for Benoit Blanc’s latest adventure.
Highlights below are mostly comprised of events outside the LFF — the festival is big and coveted enough to skim over. In the spirit of boosting independent and repertory cinema, the Experimenta strand is always worth checking out, and makes up most of the screenings from the festival drawn attention to below. The festival’s free programme of talks and workshops is also worth highlighting. Archives of a Present Future, a discussion led by global majority LGBTQIA+ artists on the power of archives; Gaming and Cinema: Storytelling in the Multiverse, a dive into the increasing imbrication between video game and film aesthetics; and Voices From the Frontline of Regeneration, an illustrated panel on London’s regeneration and its “often overlooked impact on Black, Brown and migrant communities,” all look worthwhile for the festivalgoer looking to take the road less travelled.
There’ll be further nods in the next couple of editions of Deep Focus if anything crops up, but otherwise, you all know what you’re doing. I’ll see you in the return queues.
Screens that aren’t occupied by LFF are mostly avoiding anything too ambitious over the middle of the month at least, though there is a greater-than-normal wealth of treasures to be found, reflected in the bumper list of Highlights below. To name a few: the London Georgian Film Festival rolls on until the 6th. The ICA’s A Moving Image of Eternity: The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos opens on the 23rd. At Close-Up, there are three iterations of The Liberated Film Club. And the BFI, drunk on all that Ridley Scott and Rian Johnson money, has a flood of seasons for the bagmen at the far end of the month: Terence Davies, Frederick Wiseman, and a deep season of Melodrama including works by Borzage, Sirk and Fassbinder; Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film arrives in November, marking the 50th anniversary of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
Highlights
The Barbican’s All Kaiju Attack: Earth SOS! season continues with Son of Godzilla, introduced by Toshiko Kurata on the 25th
— On the 2nd, opening the London Georgian Film Festival, Institut Français have a screening of Kote Mikaberidze’s My Grandmother, introduced by actor and writer Lasha Bakradze and accompanied on the piano by John Sweeney. Querelle closes the Rio’s Sailors Are Gay! Season. Queer Shorts from Ukraine: What Will You Do When the War Continues? completes the Barbican’s Visions of Ukraine strand.
— On the 3rd, marking the publication of her new selected stories, Close-Up hosts Lynne Tillman for a screening of Committed, her 1984 film, followed by a Q&A moderated by Gareth Evans. The Rio’s Category H presents a late night screening of Michael Crichton’s Westworld, accompanied by a mystery episode of television. The Apple, Menahem Golan’s dystopian sci-fi rock musical, is at The Nickel, introduced by programmer Ally Russell-Shields.
— On the 5th, French Sundaes screens Trois Hommes et un Couffin on 35mm at The Cinema Museum. “A transcendent reimagining of the Oedipus myth,” Music closes the ICA’s Being in Time: The Cinema of Angela Shanelec season. The London Georgian Film Festival presents Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause, an early sound melodrama about a fading burlesque star.
— On the 6th, The Garden Cinema welcomes Peter Kennard and Gareth Evans for a Q&A following a screening of Punishment Park director Peter Watkins’ The War Game. Murnau’s Nosferatu is downstairs at The Prince Charles Cinema, accompanied live by violist Hugo Max. Lizzy Borden’s Born in Flames screens at Coldharbour Blue, raising funds for Lambeth Mutual Aid.
— On the 7th the ICA screens Mulholland Drive followed by a conversation between writers Philippa Snow and Emily LaBarge on the ways in which Lynch has informed their work. Santa Sangre, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal horror following a young man torn between madness, memory and the ghost of his mother, is at The Nickel. Stephen Fears’ My Beautiful Laundrette is at The Cinema Museum on 16mm, introduced by Dave Hill and urbanist Denean Rowe.
— On the 8th, The Most Terrible Time in My Life, Kaizō Hayashi stylish neo-noir is at The Nickel, introduced by critic James Balmont, followed by Stairway to the Distant Past. The London Film Festival begins — The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the same Box), the elliptical winner of Berlinale’s Perspectives competition is at the ICA.
— On the 9th The Nickel hosts a Rick Alverson double-bill made up of the bleak, confrontational study of the Brooklyn hipster, The Comedy, and Neil Hamburger vehicle, Entertainment. Alverson introduces both over video. Poor Cow is at The Garden Cinema as part of Ken Loach: A Retrospective.
—On the 10th, Close-Up’s The Liberated Film Club returns with experimental nonfiction filmmaker Courtney Stephens behind its mystery selections.
— On the 12th, the Safdie-cameo-featuring millennial mumblecore time capsule Yeast screens at The Castle Cinema, featuring a video introduction by lead Greta Gerwig and a live Q&A with director Mary Bronstein. Mortu Nega, Flora Gomes’ 1988 epic of Guinea-Bissau’s struggle for independence is at the London Film Festival in NFT1, newly restored by The Film Foundation.
— On the 18th, there’s another The Liberated Film Club at Close-Up, helmed this time by Earwig and The Ice Tower director Lucile Hadžihalilović. The London Film Festival hosts a new restoration of Sumirtra Peries’ The Girls (1978) in NFT1. The ICA has a run of screenings from LFF’s Experimenta strand — Transformers: The Premake filmmaker Kevin B. Lee’s Afterlives is preceded by Cadences of Refusal, a programme of shorts counter to traditional non-fiction cinema.
— On the 20th Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven, a romantic silent melodrama following a Parisian sewer worker and a mistreated young woman whose love endures through poverty and the upheaval of World War I, opens the BFI’s Too Much: Melodrama on Film season in NFT1; Sara Gómez’s portrait of love, race, gender, and class in post-revolutionary Havana, One Way or Another is in NFT3. Trans Video Buffet returns for a sixth iteration at North Greenwich’s Queercircle Gallery.
— On the 21st Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies opens with The Terence Davies Trilogy — Children; Madonna and Child, his NFTS graduation film; and Death and Transfiguration — introduced by season curator Ben Roberts. Shrime Time: A Night of Bizarro Underseen Anime returns to The Nickel, a programme offering work from the “outermost edges of Japan’s visual imagination”.
— On the 22nd the latest iteration of the Barbican’s Animation at War presents Heroic Times, screening from a new restoration by the National Film Institute of Hungary. Continuing the BFI’s Melodrama season, Camila, introduced by Cinema Mentiré, screens in NFT1. Women in Flux opens at the Prince Charles Cinema with 3 Women, Altman’s classic dreamlike psychological drama about the shifting identities and relationships of three women in a California desert town.
— On the 23rd, the ICA’s A Moving Image of Eternity: The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos opens with Reconstruction, a “haunting tragedy” drawing from Aeschylus and film noir to essay Greek urbanisation. Across town at the Rio, Category H presents Short Sharp Shocks, an “eye-opening assemblage of unusual, exceptional, exciting, horrific, eerie and eccentric short subjects”. At the BFI Too Much: Melodrama on Film rolls on with John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven, introduced by Aga Baranowska in NFT1.
— On the 25th, the Barbican’s All Kaiju Attack: Earth SOS! season continues with Son of Godzilla, introduced by Toshiko Kurata. The BFI’s Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies has The Neon Bible, a lyrical coming-of-age drama adapted from John Kennedy Toole’s novel, on 35mm in NFT3.
— On the 29th, the BFI’s Cinema Expanded, The Films of Frederick Wiseman opens with his debut Titicut Follies, a harrowing portrait of Massachusetts’ Bridgewater State Hospital shot in his inimitable, comprehensive style, and introduced by season curator Sandra Hebron; Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance is in NFT2. After a sell-out opening screening of its title feature, the Tetsuo and Beyond season continues with Julia Docornau’s Titane at the Prince Charles.
— On the 30th Both Sides Now returns for its 10th edition, hosted in the Barbican’s Cinema 2, offering a curated showcase of experimental film and video exploring identity, heritage, and speculative futures from UK and Hong Kong artists that “captures the diversity and complexity of our times”.
— On the 31st, The Nightingale’s Prayer screens in NFT1 as part of Too Much: Melodrama on Film, introduced by Imane Lamine, curator and founder of Fhamtini FIlm Festival; while those of a spooky persuasion can catch Carol Kane against type in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer on 35mm in NFT1. A hat-trick of The Liberated Film Club comes to a close with Weathergirl, the programming duo of Brontë Dow and Freya Field-Donovan, in the driver’s seat for this iteration.
White Cube
Stan Douglas’ Birth of a Nation and The Enemy of All Mankind runs throughout October at Victoria Miro.
— From the start of the month through to November the 1st, Victoria Miro presents Stan Douglas’ sixth solo exhibition, Birth of a Nation and The Enemy of All Mankind, featuring the UK premiere of his multi-channel video installation Birth of a Nation and new photographs from The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly, works that explore race, class, and gender through historic narratives and media.
— continuing: through to November the 2nd, LUX Waterlow Park hosts Niki Kohandel: ‘(I am are writing)’, a show that explores language, memory, and belonging through the imagined journeys of a poet, a painter, and an owl.
— continuing: Goldsmiths CCA presents Life Before Automation, Lawrence Lek’s latest exhibition, featuring video work that positions viewers in parallel futures where present-day anxieties about technological progress have become everyday, reframing Chinese industrialisation through AI, with machinic protagonists including a satellite aspiring to be an artist and an AI ghostwriter.
Forum
Remembering Terences Davies, a commemoration and celebration of the life and works of the House of Mirth director takes place on the 28th at the BFI.
— A capstone to the BFI’s excellent Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention season, on the 2nd NFT2 hosts Professor Yiman Wang for ‘A Yellow Spot on the Silver Screen’ — Anna May Wong’s Performative Pleasure, a lecture on the star’s trailblazing four-decade career.
— On the 9th, as part of the exhibition Life Before Automation, Goldsmith’s CCA hosts Nøtel and other fictions: Steve Goodman (Kode9) in conversation with Lawrence Lek, a discussion on the pair’s collaborative audio-visual projects since 2014, including Black Cloud, AIDOL, Astro-Darien, and Lek’s upcoming film Death Drive.
— On the 18th, as part of the London Film Festival, the BFI hosts On our Own Terms, a free panel featuring Akinola Davies Jr., Imran Perretta and Jennifer Lauren Martin, who will discuss their working methods, and the ways in which they “navigate questions of socially engaged and globally resonant cinema” in a time of rapid change within and beyond the industry.
— On the 28th, the BFI’s Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies hosts Mark Kermode and guests including close collaborators for Remembering Terences Davies, a celebration and commemeration of the filmmaker’s life and work. The talk will also feature a screening of Home! Home!, a short film centered around poems written by Davies, along with extracts from his novel Hallelujah Now!
Until next time