20 great films playing at BFI London Film Festival 2024

1. Anora

Anora plays like a dizzy homage to, and then a breakneck evisceration of, the whole Pretty Woman fantasy machine.”Jessica Kiang

2. The Room Next Door

If Pedro Almodóvar was apprehensive about directing his first English-language feature, one would not guess from the story he has chosen to tell.”Nicolas Rapold

3. All We Imagine as Light

With exquisite delicacy, Kapadia has crafted a portrait of Mumbai and its citizens that is by turns precise and impressionistic.”Arjun Sajip

4. Familiar Touch 

The human mind, in all its frailness and glory, is the real protagonist in Familiar Touch.”Ela Bittencourt

5. The Seed of a Sacred Fig

Sacred Fig proceeds to bust out of the confines of domestic drama… with eye-opening developments that express the paranoia engendered by the patriarchal regime and its corrosive effects.”Nicolas Rapold

6. Bird

Andrea Arnold grapples with the very real dilemma of how to keep one’s senses, and spirit, alive, against uncertainty and pain. ”Ela Bittencourt

7. Dahomey

In this bewitching work of speculative documentary, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop takes on a hot topic of the culture wars – the decolonisation of European museums – and weaves from it a beguiling meditation on identity, ancestry and the weight of history.”Rachel Pronger

8. Pepe

A hippo muses on its history and its relation to language and the race of the Two-Legged, with which it has become inextricably involved. Speaking from an afterlife, having been shot dead in Colombia, the creature is descended from the hippos transported across the Atlantic for the private zoo of drug baron Pablo Escobar.”Jonathan Romney

9. Pavements 

As a band, Pavement seems to invite an alternative approach to the usual potted-history-with-testimonials rock doc, and Alex Ross Perry has fully taken up the challenge.”Nicolas Rapold

10. The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire’s fragmented structure reflects the ultimate unknowability of the director’s subject, but also the racist and patriarchal structures which restrict the dissemination of work by Black women artists.”Rachel Pronger

11. Grand Tour

Combining the wistful retrospection of Tabu (2012) with the experimental freedom of Our Beloved Month of August (2008) and The Tsugua Diaries (2021), Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour is another seductive ode to cinema by this most cinephilic of filmmakers.”Giovanni Marchini Camia

12. September Says

Adapted from Daisy Johnson’s 2020 novel Sisters, a modern gothic story in the Shirley Jackson mould, September Says brings the lyrical incantations of the writing to life with two skilfully choreographed physical performances from its leads. ”Katie McCabe

13. Look into My Eyes

The genius of Lana Wilson’s portrait of New York City psychics is that she doesn’t ask us to believe, but to feel.”Nicolas Rapold

14. Happyend

Like most future-shock satires, Happyend isn’t so much a cautionary tale as a state of the union; Neo Sora’s vision of a quasi-militarised educational-industrial complex prods his country’s encroaching social conservatism while also highlighting more universal adolescent anxieties.”Adam Nayman

15. Conclave

Conclave is an engrossing ecclesiastical hoot which elegantly compresses a prestige-miniseries’ worth of meaty intrigue and lively incident into two brisk hours.”Neil Young

16. Architecton

Victor Kossakovsky’s latest elemental documentary doubles as a study in the impermanence of civilisation and often as a mesmeric example of pure cinema.”Nicolas Rapold

17. Universal Language

The film follows in the surrealist tradition of Matthew Rankin’s gonzo debut The Twentieth Century (2019). Gentler parodies animate Universal Language, in which absurdism guides us toward a better way of life.”Saffron Maeve

18. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

In February 1961, the jazz singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach gatecrashed the UN Security Council to protest against the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first post-independence prime minister. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État takes this collision of politics and jazz, Cold War and colonialism, and lays out with cool precision the different strands of its backstory.”Sam Davies

19. April

It comes in with the breath and never comes out, the dread that lives in your chest from the first, uncanny scene of Déa Kulumbegashvili’s severe and brilliant April, incredibly only her second film after her debut masterpiece Beginning (2020). ”Jessica Kiang

20. Eight Postcards from Utopia 

Eight Postcards from Utopia, an experiment in sardonic screen archaeology, uses a montage of TV commercials from post-Revolutionary Romania to tell the story of the country’s last three-and-a-half decades. The phrase “found-footage movie” suggests horror, but the only ghoul prowling this labyrinth of the hard-sell is capitalism.”Pamela Hutchinson