DEoL @ London Film Festival 2026 #7 - Pakeezah (India 1972: Dir Kamal Amrohi)

I was originally pointed to the existence of Pakeezah by my wife; it's one of her treasured films, not least because it was her own now late mother's favourite and she has precious memories of both of them enjoying it together. 

My own exposure to 'Bollywood' cinema (and I don't really like that term) was, until Amrohi's movie, pretty slight. I'd caught the odd late night feature on Channel 4 back in the day, finding them energetic but slightly impenetrable, so when we first saw this film together, at a BFI screening several years ago, I was impressed but still a little cool; always an uncomfortable position when your significant other values something so much.

Flash forward a few years and the BFI's choice to show a restored Pakeezah on their IMAX screen for the last day of the 2026 LFF was an opportunity not to be missed, particularly as the film was introduced by the director's son and sister, respectively Tajdar and Rukhsaar Amrohi.

There are many great pieces of writing on the gestation and lengthy development of Pakeezah, covering the fractured relationship between the allegedly controlling Amrohi and his troubled wife Meena Kumari, the star of the film, who would die shortly after its release at the age of 39; I'll let you read those rather than reproduce that history here.

As you would expect from a 153 minute film, Pakeezah's story has many complexities. Split into two parts, the first concerns a famous courtesan, Nargis (Kumari) who dreams of marrying Shahbuddin (Ashok Kumar) but is prevented from doing this by his father, Hakim Saab (D. K. Sapru). Rejected, she flees to a nearby cemetery, giving birth to a daughter before dying, but not before she writes Shahbuddin a letter asking him to come for his child. Nargis' sister Nawabjaan (Veena) discovers Nargis's body and brings the baby home with her.

17 years later the daughter, named Sahibjaan (also Kumari) is also a courtesan at Nawabjaan's brothel. Shahbuddin comes into possession of the letter and tracks down his now-adult daughter, claiming her for his own, but she's stolen away. While travelling by train, a young man enters Sahibjaan's compartment and sees her sleeping. Struck by her beauty, he leaves her a note. After arriving at her destination, Sahibjaan wakes up and finds the note. She reads it and falls in love with the note's author. Meanwhile a wealthy patron, Nawab (Kamal Kapoor) steals Sahibjaan away on his boat, but it's attacked by elephants; shipwrecked, she's taken to the tent of forest ranger Salim (Raaj Kumar) who works out that she was the woman he met on the train.

Sahibjaan feigns amnesia to avoid telling him of her profession, and although she's taken back to the brothel again she escapes and is nearly run over by a train; luckily Salim is on hand to rescue her, where the pair plan to elope; he renames her 'Pakeezah'; the pure one. But, scared of declaring her profession, once again she returns to the brothel; Salim decides to marry someone else but asks Sahibjaan to dance at his wedding. . During the recital, Nawabjaan recognises Shahbuddin, Salim's paternal uncle, and calls him to witness the irony of the situation: his own daughter dancing and entertaining his family. Shahbuddin's father tries to shoot Nawabjaan to silence her but instead kills Shahbuddin who was trying to protect her. With his dying breath, Shahbuddin asks Salim to marry Sahibjaan. Salim's wedding palanquin defies convention and arrives at Sahibjaan's brothel, fulfilling Shahbuddin's dying wish.

Because of the absence of original elements, Pakeezah's restoration is far from perfect, but the combination of the rich Eastmancolor - particularly in the exterior scenes of the second half of the film - coloured by legendary matte artist Ivor (Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes) Beddoes (credited as Ivory Bedos), and the overall hazy look is extraordinary. Veteran 'Bollywood' cinematographer Josef Wirsching manages immense sweeping vistas of the sumptuous countryside and extraordinary crane shots as the camera explores the complicated brothel sets, a fabulous setting for the songs and dances that bring the film to life. As my wife noted within the libretto Sahibjaan is a quiet character without agency; when she sings and dances her character is brought to life and she becomes an elemental force. It's an extraordinary performance, bitter sweet that it was to be Kumari's last. The length of the shoot - possibly as much as fifteen years - tells on the actress's face and need for body double, but there's no denying the power and pain of her performance.

DEoL @ London Film Festival 2026 #6 - Rogue Trooper (UK 2026: Dir Duncan Jones)

After Jones's dreadful Warcraft back in 2016, the prospect of more animation from the director filled me with dread. Rogue Trooper, based on a strip from the '2000 AD' comic, was a labour of love for Jones, and it shows. This is a 'Mocap' feature (you know, Avatar, that kind of thing) with a stellar UK cast providing the voices (and the sources of the faces). At the screening I attended, the majority of the audience were thirty something blokes clearly at ease with the gaming culture look of the movie (although I heard one guy on the way out saying that he felt sick throughout...and I know what he means).

Anyway, what's it all about? Well as far as I can ascertain - and there's a lot of content -  it's set on a wartorn and environmentally poisoned version of earth, the location for a long term battle between the 'Norts' and the 'Southers' (the latter's rousing battle song plays over the opening and closing credits). 

19, a 'genetic infantryman' (Aneurin Barnard) is one of a squad of adapted soldiers developed by the 'Southers', with personalities that can be removed and placed in new bodies on death; the ultimate killing machines (although the fact that the reanimated 'souls' of the GIs (geddit?) sometimes end up in guns or backpacks provides a lot of the movie's often spot on humour).

A betrayal within the ranks decimates 19's regiment, and it's up to him to infiltrate the enemy and discover the mole. This pretty simple setup is occluded with a barrage of characters, situations and noise that will have anyone unfamiliar with this kind of thing (non gamers who don't sit very close to their TVs then) exhausted.

But gradually the mo-cap mist clears and this viewer really started to enjoy themselves. The cast is stuffed with UK comedy regulars; Diane Morgan is a stiff backed colonel, Matt Berry 'plays' one half of a dodgy sales team, looking to sell 19 off, and Hayley Atwell makes a mid movie appearance as a tough vigilante named Venus Bluegenes. This is bold stuff from Jones, a director not afraid to take risks, and I really hope it does well at the box office when released.

Rogue Trooper is also a proudly British production (although with come Canadian money) from its comic book origins to the fact that it was made in a video game studio in Oxfordshire. It's bold, brash, frequently looks amazing, but viewer it takes some getting used to (or maybe that's just me being an old git). Oddly I'm desperate to see it again. 

DEoL @ London Film Festival 2026 #5 - Rebellion (UK 2026: Dir Ken Fero, Tariq Mehmood)

Fero and Mehmood's third documentary, following 2020's Ultraviolence and the following year's Injustice, concentrates on a 1981 story that has, unjustly, largely faded from memory.

The 'Bradford 12', as they came to be known, were a group of British-Asian men who were arrested, imprisoned and tried as 'terrorists' for creating and storing Molotov cocktails intended, as prosecutors alleged, to attack both the local community and the police.

Rebellion frames the arrests and trial within the depressingly familiar story of poor working class families, high unemployment and Government rhetoric on immigrants 'swamping' the country, as well as the rise of the National Front, police brutality (and unlawful killings) and, in 1981, a wave of riots which brought all these things to a head. The national anti 'black' mood is also illustrated by the case of Anwar Ditta, a British-born woman of South Asian heritage whose high-profile fight to be reunited with her three children became a landmark case, where a six year battle with the Home Office finally overturned their intransigent position.

In Bradford, where racist incidents were commonplace, based on information supplied to the Indian community (by the police) about potential skinhead gang attacks, a group of men decided to defend themselves by fashioning makeshift 'molotov cocktails'. The threatened attacks didn't happen, but police raids on several houses led to the discovery of the unused 'bombs' and the arrest of twelve men.

The documentary follows the arrest, committal to prison, and trial of the 'Bradford 12' through interviews and clips from a reconstruction of the court proceedings. In that the whole point of the film hinges on their mistakenly being classified as 'terrorists' for the purposes of conviction, comments from real terrorists like Leila Khaled seem more than a little out of place.

The unanimous acquittal of the 12 was important not only for their personal freedoms but because, in concluding that the men were justified in defending themselves largely because of information received from the police - who lied about the threat levels - it also confirmed that the police were not policing 'without fear or favour'.

Fero and Mehmood's documentary is by its very existence polemical in nature and therefore leaves many questions unanswered. One thing it doesn't state, but is implicit in its message, is that none of the threats faced by those communities 45 years ago have gone away; in fact the hostility they feared has, in a post Brexit world, been mainstreamed. The extensive list of support groups in the end credits suggest that these threats are larger and more insidious than ever. 

DEoL @ London Film Festival 2026 #4 - The Blood Countess (Austria/Luxembourg/Germany 2026: Dir Ulrike Ottinger)

At some point there will be a definitive onscreen biography of Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Ecsed; 16th Century Hungarian noblewoman, aristocrat and, more infamously, bather in the blood of virgins. God knows there have been a few attempts, from 1971's twin offerings Countess Dracula from Hammer films and Daughters of Darkness by Harry Kümel, and more recently, Bathory: Countess of Blood from 2008, with Anna Friel in the title role.

Anyway Ulrike Ottinger's most recent film is definitely not it; to be blunt, it's difficult to know what this is. Set in a weird fusion of 19th Century and contemporary Vienna, Isabelle Huppert is the Blutgräfin (Blood Countess) Erzsébet Báthory, in town for a kind of family reunion. Aided by her vampire maidservant Hermine (Birgit Minichmayr sporting a Weimar bob), stopping off for an enroute snack courtesy of a young girl's neck, she begins the process of meeting up with her relatives.

Principal among these is nephew Rudi (Thomas Schubert), a strikingly dressed (and among a cast that are all colourfully dressed, that's quite something) vegetarian whose aversion to the red stuff is being worked on with his attendant therapist Theobald (Lars Eidinger). 

Following the gathering of the clans are two would be vampire hunters, who have clearly strayed in from the set of Roman Polanski's 1967 horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers (clearly an inspiration for this film); Theobastus Bombastus (André Jung) and Nepomuk Afterbite (Marco Lorenzini). While Erzsébet's trail of bloodlust continues, she's also on the search for a book which contains the details of her family's ancestry, keen to stop the records from being destroyed.

Much of the film is devoted to this search, with a distinctly make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach. Clearly eighty-something Ottinger, who is a painter as well as a filmmaker, was much more interested in giving her audience a baroque romp than in following a coherent narrative. After a while the viewer has two options; walk or surrender to the gentle insanity on display.

For the benefit of the rest of this review, reader I stayed and got to witness: lavish ballroom sequences; a feast comprising a centre piece of a body reconstituted from various entrails; magnificent Viennese libraries; a row of gentlemen, seated, shaved and throats slit (mostly offscreen) as one of the banquet courses; a CGI bat with the sensibility of Lassie; oh and Conchita Wurst.

Yes that Conchita Wurst, Austrian Eurovision winner and drag queen who gets to belt out their hit 2014 hit 'Rise Like a Phoenix' probably for no other reason that they happened to be available. Unfortunately this rendition becomes the film's highlight; in its near two hour running time it's the closest The Blood Countess comes to being, if you'll pardon the phrase, full blooded.

I fully accept that The Blood Countess looks amazing with a rousing Strauss-esque score, but its flat pacing and air of self congratulation make it a chore to sit through. I also get that it's a thinly disguised satire of the Austro-Hungarian power dynasties; but it still has to be watchable. The only saving grace, apart from the production design and costumes by Jorge Jara Guarda (and oh if they could be in a better film), is Huppert as Báthory. From the opening scene, where, dressed in trademark vermillion, she steps off a crimson barge floating in an underground canal, straight into the camera like the Bond villainess we'll never see, to the climax on board the giant Wiener Riesenrad ferris wheel, the radiant actor lights up the screen every time she's on. Sadly it's just not enough.

DEoL @ London Film Festival 2026 #3 - Ink (UK/France/USA 2026: Dir Danny Boyle)

It's 1969 and entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch, following his acquisition of the News of the World, has just bought the struggling broadsheet The Sun from the Mirror Group, a paper with a very limited circulation. People think him bonkers, but he has an idea; to relaunch the paper to an audience who fall between other newspapers - and this is at a time when daily papers are bought by a significant percentage of the UK - and provide something that the working person would want to buy regularly. He also wants 'the establishment' to see him as a major player, something he has, to date, been unable to achieve.

To make this happen, Murdoch makes an offer that can't be refused to Larry Lamb, a brash northerner who at the time was editing The Manchester Daily Mail. Lamb accepts, packs up his family and moves down south, pitching to a number of fellow writers and sub editors to join him.

This is the jumping off point for Danny Boyle's latest movie, which charts The Sun's meteoric rise in popularity under Lamb's control, choosing a populist approach to content and daring to take the paper to places that other titles avoided.

A ferocious Jack O'Connell plays Lamb to Guy Pearce's Murdoch, and much of the film is devoted to the shifting relationship of the pair, with the editor giving the people what they want, no matter how salacious, and the owner tolerating, but never embracing his protege's approach.

Adapted by James Graham from his own 2017 stage play of the same name, Ink's cast of characters mixes the fictitious with the real; chief among these is the excellent Claire Foy as Jules Davies, a plain speaking amalgamation of several strong women who worked on the paper at this time, advancing the female angle of the daily while competing with the hard talking, tough speaking male staff.

Boyle's movie, while remaining faithful to the play, nevertheless manages to open out the action into the printing presses and rainy streets of London; the film begins and ends in elite hangout Rules, the oldest restaurant in London, bookended with two scenes that take place just over ten years apart. The expense account living enjoyed by the pair, and indeed the staff of The Sun, locks the journalists and executives in a golden handshake in which they must tolerate, if not like, the increased excesses of the newspaper; a real work hard, play hard environment. 

It also covers the most horrendous (real life) incident in Lamb's tenure: the mistaken identity kidnap (and eventual murder) of Muriel McKay (Lucy Russell), wife of Murdoch executive Alick McKay (Jonathan Hyde). The kidnappers, who wanted to extort a ransom, thought they'd taken Murdoch's wife, and the paper unwisely decided to publicise the incident as it played out. McKay's end (her body was never found) demonstrates the line between responsibility and exploitation, one which sadly didn't hurt The Sun's circulation.

The film closes with the decision which changes The Sun's fortunes forever (and outlasts Lamb and his successor Kelvin Mackenzie, shown waiting in the wings); to feature 20-year-old Stephanie Rahn as its first 'Page 3' girl. Boyle pivots off this scene to a filmed montage which suggests that the paper presaged the slide into populism, embracing pugilist politicians, Facebook, Farage, Musk and Trump. It's a lofty claim and one I didn't totally buy into; indeed I question whether the film would have existed at all if it weren't for the inspiration of the stage play.

Ink is well acted, with the stylish flourishes (and anachronistic soundtrack) which are pure Danny Boyle. See it for O'Connell's taught, driven Lamb and its recreation of a lost time, even though ultimately the film might not equal the sum of its admittedly involving parts.

DEoL @ London Film Festival 2026 #2 - Nightborn (Finland/UK/Lithuania/France/USA 2026: Dir Hanna Bergholm)

Bergholm's second feature, after 2022's Hatching, may be unusual territory for some LFF audience members, but seems remarkably familiar to anyone with more than a basic knowledge of the folk horror genre. 

Seida Haarla and Rupert Grint are Saga and Jon, who have moved back to Saga's home country of Finland to start a family, with plans for three kids; specifically they've moved into her grandmother's run down house, its generous land filled with broken down vehicles and machinery. She's given up work for five years to make their child rearing plans happen; he's negotiating a new career in a foreign country.

Saga has grown up 'in nature' (to use an annoying phrase) whereas Jon has been uprooted from the UK and seems a lot more down to earth. They wander in their new country environment, full of fairy tale trees that look like people, and make love outside; a blunt cut confirms that seed has been sown with a close up of their new baby being born, blood covering an attentive Jon.

The birth is not without problems, leaving Saga bruised and bloody, and their little offspring is unusually hairy. "This is where it all begins," says Jon when the family return home, and he's not wrong; the baby, whom they're going to christen Christian (after Jon's father), aggressively latches during breastfeeding, cries all the time, and wears down the parents. So far, so newborn; add in Saga's brusque mum who criticises her daughter's tendency to romanticise life ("You look tired," she says to Saga in possibly the least welcome observation ever) and her sister Taru (Pamela Tola) whose pretty daughter and well scrubbed image contrasts with Saga's post birth knackerdness, and you have a recipe for an extremely stressful household.

But things get worse; the baby, now named Kuura in a surprise announcement by Saga at a family do, seems incredibly sensitive to sunlight, burning on exposure, and prefers darkness. More baffling, he seems to have a physical aversion to cold iron. Much of Bergholm's film is concerned with the rift between the parents, Jon's distant, patronising manner contrasting with Saga's desperate attempts to mother her child in a normal way and, when realising Kuura's more basic instincts, abandoning all traditional childrearing techniques in favour of pacifying her newborn.

Nightborn is ultimately unsuccessful because its equating of the stresses of new parenthood with the mysteries of the forest is too clunky; performances, particularly the supporting cast, verge on the parodic, and the balance of horror and domestic drama is uneasy. As a mother on the brink, almost from the first frame, Haarla is convincing and sometimes deeply affecting, but Grint's Jon doesn't have the heft to match it. Too often Bergholm's film pivots around too thin a premise, making the drama repetitious and, considering the fantastic elements, often rather hollow. Disappointing.

DEoL @ London Film Festival 2026 #1 - Musk (USA 2026: Dir Alex Gibney)

A near four hour long documentary on the planet's richest manchild sounds like quite the undertaking, but in Alex Gibney's deft hands we're served up a film that is by turns fascinating, sometimes darkly funny, but ultimately devastating.

Split into two parts with, mercifully, a small intermission, the first two hours (!) details Elon Musk's rise to riches via Zip 2, a sort of map based local directory which he developed with his brother Kimbal and sold for a huge profit in the late 90s. Shock numbers one and two - there will be others - are a) his ability to make large fortunes remarkably easy and b) footage of him at this point being follicularly challenged, something quietly rectified as the years advance (along with other tweakments).

The rot sets in with the Tesla project. A laudable ambition, to create a battery driven car, becomes strained when Musk pushes for the development of Autopilot, the driverless vehicle, and proceeds to convince the buying public of the project's safety; in real life this is very much not the truth. Gibney produces witness testimony - and, shockingly, real crash footage - showing the human cost of Autopilot gone wrong in numerous accidents hushed up by out of court settlements, and manipulated demonstrations which cover up the technology's shortcomings. Musk also covers his brutal buyout - and internal massacre  - at Twitter, using management 'techniques' that he'd later deploy within the US Government.

We hear a little about Musk's upbringing and his horrendous bullying father Errol but, because Elon wasn't prepared to talk to Gibney, these recollections are delivered via existing statements from family and, in the documentary's much needed human element, interviews with former wives, most notably his first, Justine Wilson. Through her we learn of the man's ambition to be the world's most prolific baby father, the public manipulation of the heartbreak of their first child dying as a baby (he maintained online that the child died in his arms when in reality it was Justine doing the holding) and later his disowning - personally and financially - of his trans daughter Vivian, claiming that his 'son' was "dead - killed by the woke mind virus". Gibney's way around the non participation of the subject is to use an AI version of the man, articulating sentences attributed to him over the years; it's a bit of a clunky device, but turning Musk into a chisel jawed avatar is exactly the version of the guy that he himself would probably deploy.

Where ambition morphs into folly is evidenced through his SpaceX project into 'Occupy Mars' (wherein Musk is aiming for an established city on the planet by 2050); experts are on hand to dismiss the practicality of this by describing the extent of Mars's hostile environment, but of course it doesn't stop the US President sliding the project onto his own agenda, as shown in Part 2 of the documentary.

And let's get to Part 2, which slowly pulls the Quixotic mask off Musk to reveal the dark heart of, as he's described when he joins Trump on the 2024 Campaign trail, 'the greatest capitalist in modern day America'. Gibney shows how the hyper-enthusiastic Musk - which some have attributed to the guy's excessive drug use - and his likely deployment of the controversial 'Starlink' satellite comms system to aid pro Trump messaging in the days leading up to the President's second term in office - inveigled his way into Trump's perverted Camelot. His appointment as head of the Department of Government Efficiency shows the DOGE project for what it was; a cynical dismantling of those central departments who were starting to bring an investigative case against Musk for his previous transgressions. 

Footage of Musk, hoisting his son X on his shoulders (the child the subject of a fierce custody battle with the musician Grimes) while he and Trump seemingly make it up as they go along in the Oval Office, his spat with the President and reconciliation, make up some of the most chilling aspects of the documentary. "He is a nuke" is how ex partner Ashley St Clair, a former MAGA cheerleader who is also in a custody battle with the man, describes Musk, and an interview at the close of the documentary, in which a tongue tied Musk is unable to articulate precisely what his motivations are, either suggests someone who has lost sight of his ambitions, or someone in full possession of them but who chooses, once again, not to publicly play his hand.

Musk profiles a man completely without self awareness, whose treatment of employees, wives and Government high ups is disdainful and whose world view is that of a child with his finger uncomfortably near the button. He offers no solutions beyond progress for its own sake, no humanity (he scarcely considers himself as human), is totally unaccountable and considers those who would challenge him as '"stupid" or "douchebags". See this documentary now, and tell me afterwards if you don't agree that we're totally fucked, and we brought it on ourselves.