LFF 2026: At Night (Beatrice Gibson, 2026)

The late American poet Alice Notley's work feels like a continuous act of defiance against the limits poetry tries to place on itself.  Across decades, she carved out a voice that was at once intimate and insurgent, folding grief, feminism, myth, and everyday survival into sprawling, incantatory lines that refused neat containment.  Her poems often read like conversations overheard from another dimension—raw, restless, and fiercely protective of the inner lives women are told to quiet.  Notley's commitment to pushing past convention made her a lodestar for poets who see the page not as a boundary but as a site of ongoing rebellion, where language can be remade in the image of a life lived uncompromisingly.

Notley's work—particularly her epic poem The Descent of Alette—underpins Beatrice Gibson's feature debut At Night, which was presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart in 2024 and screens at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday and Tuesday.  Gibson established herself as a filmmaker through several experimental shorts, including IFFR Tiger Award winner The Tiger's Mind, and it's mildly surprising to find that, for all its experimental form, At Night has been placed in the LFF's Dare strand.  That said, the film is a more accessible work than what is typically found in the festival's ever-fascinating Experimenta section.

True to its title, At Night is a nocturnal odyssey through a Paris in which the bulk of its residents appear to have turned in for the evening.  It's a wonderfully atmospheric backdrop against which a number of women voice their hopes and fears.  One such woman, filmmaker B—deftly played by Gibson herself—is visiting Paris to scout for locations for an upcoming project.  While in the French capital, B attempts to contact her old friend Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), who once worked for B as a childminder; Didi lives in Belleville—where B is looking at potential locations—but appears to have been ghosting B for quite some time.

Gibson's film, which is wonderfully photographed (in 16mm) by Mare's Nest director Ben Rivers, opens up to include the stories of other women, such as Sophie Robinson's poet, who, in one of At Night's most striking scenes, recites one of her works to a roomful of people.  It is safe to assume that Robinson—like Gibson and the other women featured in this slippery film—is playing a once-removed version of herself.  The poetry of Notley, who died during production, is heard via a voiceover she recorded especially for this project after she became too ill to fulfil her planned onscreen role.  As such, Notley is a ghostly, ethereal presence, one who always seems to hover around the edges of this beguilingly original piece of autofiction.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

LFF 2026: Ken Russell's The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971)

Ken Russell's French-set film The Devils is back on the big screen as part of this year's BFI London Film Festival, where it plays on Friday and Monday ahead of a wider global release that commences in the US.  It is difficult to overstate the importance of this hell-freezes-over moment: not only are Warner Bros.—the studio that for so long seemed intent on burying the film—behind this re-release, but The Devils has been restored in 4K and cut to Russell's specific instructions (he worked with the film's original editor, Michael Bradsell, to reinstate long-lost scenes that had fallen foul of censorship).  Fifty-five years on from its initial run and 15 years after its director's death, the result is the definitive version of a work that—even in its previously truncated forms—stands as the blazing apex of Russell's career.

Russell's 1971 shocker, set in 17th-century Loudun, centres on Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), a rakish and arrogant secular priest who finds himself in deep trouble when Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), the abbess of the local Ursuline convent, accuses him of sorcery.  These baseless claims prove most convenient for several influential individuals who are scheming to remove Grandier from his dual posts; the priest is also Loudun's acting governor, and has so far thwarted Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue), who wishes to destroy the city's walls on the rationale that such fortifications provide a bedrock for further Protestant uprisings.  Grandier is therefore a political heretic who is tried as a religious one, with the Catholic church he's served for so long gleefully facilitating his terrible, fiery end.

While basking in the magnificence of Ken Russell's The Devils—note the possessive title credit, which serves to differentiate this edit from the cut versions—it is easy to forget that, from the 1980s on, Russell had fallen out of fashion, and those championing his work were few and far between (it didn't help that The Devils, the main exhibit for those coming to Russell's defence, was a tricky title to track down).  But less than six months after Russell's death, the BFI, having somehow secured the rights from Warner Bros., released The Devils as a double-disc DVD that led to renewed interest in both the film and its maker.  While this edition was the UK theatrical version, the missing scenes had been broadcast in a 2002 documentary, resulting in several fan edits that aimed to reproduce Russell's original vision.

Yet back in 2004, Russell and Bradsell had pieced together their own reconstruction of the film, and this served as the basis for this new restoration, which was completed using the original camera negative.  There's something bittersweet about the whole venture: while Russell lived to recreate his greatly preferred cut of the film—a situation that was obviously unthinkable prior to the recovery of the excised footage—he died with the assumption that it would never be given a fittingly wide release.  In my book on the film, my adamantine stance was that The Devils works perfectly well without the restored scenes—a heresy seemingly greater than anything that transpired in Loudun—and, up until now, it has had no other choice. If this is your first time with this unique, shattering film, prepare to be blown away.

  

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

White Guilt (Marcus Flemmings, 2025)

Marcus Flemmings’ latest feature White Guilt was one of a number of horror films that screened at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, an edition in which the genre offerings were particularly strong; other selections in the same strand included hyper-stylised giallo Saturnalia, body horror Thinestra, and Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation Snatchers.  Over the course of the past nine years, prolific Londoner Flemmings has directed four other features—Reach!, Blonde. Purple, Palindrome and Six Rounds—and has also written and produced Before Nikkah, a film directed by White Guilt's cinematographer Haider Zafar.

White Guilt sees a group of white, wealthy (and presumably quite bored) millennials board a bus to an ex-plantation; each has paid a not inconsiderable sum to experience an inversion of the scenario that once played out on this property.  Thus, these white people act as slaves, while several black masters mete out harsh treatment to their charges.  The lines appear to be clearly drawn, until one of the last members to join the programme, the mixed-race Sally (Temica Thompson), threatens to derail the dynamic; it's quite obvious from the masters' faces that this is the first time that someone of this ethnicity has signed up for the event.

How the masters respond to this conundrum is quite predictable, as they double down on punishing Sally, a process which culminates in a startlingly brutal scene that proves that this whole setup is far removed from the realm of cosplay.  Rattled, the members of the group realise they've underestimated the severity of this immersive experience, and one of the cohort, David (Theo Watt), is on the brink of using a gun he smuggled in; David plans on defending Ellie (Freya Crompton), who, despite having been threatened with sexual violence, wants no such protection from this would-be white knight (pun intended).

It transpires that David is descended from the onetime owners of the plantation, but this only partly explains his presence in the group, as there's an even more personal reason for his being there.  This UK production—which, it should be said, features the occasional wobbly accent—sees the south of England stand in for the southern US, to good effect, and there's a universality to the tricky question it poses: how, exactly, should we deal with racial guilt?  The coruscating White Guilt may not offer a solution, but it makes it clear that the answer does not lie in enrolling in a circus like this, which degrades everyone involved.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance