Our critic’s guide to Cambridge Film Festival 2025
Our film critic, Mark Walsh, offers his guide to the 2025 Cambridge Film Festival.
As seasonal and satisfying as the crunch of fresh autumn leaves underfoot, the Cambridge Film Festival is returning once again. Now in its 44th edition, the festival - supported again by the Cambridge Independent - is returning to Cambridge Arts Picturehouse for 11 days (23 October-2 November) of the best in new, world, family, and short cinema, and so much more. There’s so much going on that trying to find a way in can be a little intimidating, but don’t be scared, the festival is a place for casual film lovers and cinephiles alike, and there’s a cinematic banquet of treats in store this year.
Here are a few of my personal highlights.
For timings, and to book, visit https://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/.
Opening and closing films
The latest partnership between Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone is opening the festival in style this year. Having worked together on films including The Favourite and Poor Things (for which Stone picked up her second Oscar and BAFTA), Stone gives her most physically demanding performance in Bugonia – including shaving her head - as a healthcare CEO abducted by two men who believe her to be an alien. It’s as strong, darkly hilarious, and occasionally shocking as we’ve come to expect from the Greek director, supplemented by another attention-grabbing performance from Stone with able support from Jesse Plemons.
Closing the festival is Rental Family, the latest chapter of Brendan Fraser’s career renaissance. Hikari’s film is a life-affirming joy that made me both sad cry and happy cry, possibly because I wanted Brendan Fraser and his bemused puppy dog expression to come and adopt me.
He’s a failing actor who is offered work by a rental family agency: when Japan’s more repressed society is unable to deal with their personal issues, they hire an actor to play the parts of missing family members. Initially becoming the “sad American” at a bizarre funeral, he soon becomes a confidante, a father and a friend. It’s a perspective on honesty and human bonds with Fraser as its brilliant heart and soul.
Gala screenings
Each night of the festival between those two, there’s a high-profile film showing each evening well before its wider release, a chance to experience the best in cinema as we approach the annual awards season. Sure to be a strong contender is The Voice Of Hind Rajab, the story of a Red Crescent call centre in Gaza and their attempts to rescue a six-year-old girl caught in the crossfire of the conflict. It features real audio from the real-life incident featured, and Kaouther Ben Hania’s film packs a devastating gut punch. It’s executive producers include Brad Pitt, Joaquim Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón and Jonathan Glazer, but it’s the images on screen that will live with you long after the credits roll.
If you’re looking for something lighter, then Bradley Cooper has just what you’re after with his latest directorial effort. Will Arnett plays a man channelling the pain of his separation from wife Laura Dern into an unlikely hobby of stand-up comedy. Is This Thing On is set in New York but is actually loosely inspired by British comedian and actor John Bishop, who found his route into comedy in a similar manner. Arnett’s comic gifts are perfectly suited to a man awkwardly taking his first steps onto the unforgiving stage of comedy night clubs, and Cooper finds humanity and hilarity in equal measure.
One actress best known for her comedic roles but finding new dramatic depths to explore is Rose Byrne, who explores the loneliness and escalating frustration of being a carer and a mother while barely keeping her own life together in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Mary Bronstein’s feature directing debut ranges from blackly comic to surreal and deeply felt, often to great effect in the same scene, and Byrne’s career-best work is supported by an eclectic cast including Conan O’Brien and Christian Slater. It’s a frank, sympathetic and surprising portrayal of a woman desperately seeking help or relief from life’s increasing challenges.
And a new award is being created this year in memory of Isabelle McNeill, the festival’s former chair who died from cancer in February. It’ll be awarded to a special achievement by a female filmmaker each year, in recognition of the festival’s efforts to give balance to women directors under her stewardship. The Ice Tower is a deserving first recipient, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s dark fantasy starring Oscar winner Marion Cotillard as an actress in a Hans Christian Anderson adaptation who takes a teenage orphan under her wing on set. The Bosnian director casts a dreamlike spell over her two leads, with Cotillard by turns ethereal and mesmeric.
Other gala screenings include Titane and Raw director Julia Ducournau exploring the spread of a mysterious virus in Alpha, a two-hander based on a 1970s interview starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in Peter Hujar’s Day, Richard Linklater examining the beginning of the French New Wave in Nouvelle Vague, Jodie Foster’s life being turned upside down by the death of a patient in A Private Life, and Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor hunting for songs in The History Of Sound.
Other festival strands
There’s a great deal more to explore in the festival’s other strands as well. The return of Catalan film makers including Carla Simón and Mar Coll with their new films, and fresh young talent including Charlie Shackleton and Oliver Laxe, feature in a packed International Festival section.
Simón’s Romeria is her follow up to Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs and follows a young woman (Liúcia Garcia) seeking the truth about her father and intertwines her life with that of her parents. Laxe’s Sirāt will represent Spain at next year’s Academy Awards, where a man searches for his daughter in the world of Moroccan desert raves. Coll’s Salve Maria explores the experience of being a new mother, and Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project is an experimental documentary of the true crime film that he didn’t manage to make, blending parody with critical commentary on the true crime genre.
Environment and Community sees films from the USA to Kazakhstan examine various aspects of our changing world in an era of climate change, while Belongings looks at home and family and includes Rupert Everett and Tamsin Greig in Niall Johnson’s Legend Has It. Otherwise spans human existence, from black women battling breast cancer in Shades Of Survival to a British Christmas BDSM rom-com starring Harry Melling, Alexander Skarsgård and Lesley Sharp in Pillion, a film that won Best Screenplay in this year’s Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. And the festival wouldn’t be complete without some classics, and the BFI-curated season Private Lives, Public Fates includes Douglas Sirk’s 1955 gem All That Heaven Allows, as well as films from Tunisia, Japan and Mexico.
Festival events
There are events throughout the festival that offer additional experiences alongside the usual diet of films. That other film critic called Mark (Kermode, you know, the famous one) is joined by radio producer Jenny Nelson in an event called Surround Sound, inspired by their book of the same name. There’s also the annual Industry Day as the festival looks to support new talent and filmmakers with guests from across the industry.
If you’ve never been to the Surprise Film, then you’re missing out. The joys of sitting down to a film with no idea what it is until the credits roll are a unique pleasure, and the festival’s previous surprises have included last year’s Small Things Like These, as well as Up, Looper, Roma, and Sunshine On Leith: you really do never know what you’re going to get!
You might also be surprised to know that there are a selection of films shot locally in Cambridge Connections: Measures For A Funeral travels to Cambridge and Meldreth, while Lost For Words was filmed in Ely. Finally, if you’ve accrued a wealth of film knowledge over the festival, why not test it out at the Film Quiz hosted by the Youth Lab?
Short Fusion / Family Film Festival
Finally, your annual reminder that the festival offers other ways to consume as much cinema as possible, with the short film programmes each offering a selection of shorter, but no less impactful, films from new talent exploring the full possibilities of the big screen. Each of the programmes offers between four and six films, each coming in at between one and two hours, and for the indecisive among us (and I hold my hand up for that one), an ideal way to explore a large variety of the programme in a short space of time.
The festival also coincides with half term, and the return of the Family Film Festival includes free screenings to keep the kids entertained during the school break. What better way to develop their cinema addiction at a suitably early age? The line-up includes Whale Rider, The Parent Trap, The Princess And The Frog, Inside Out 2 and The Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as new film Grow. Anna And The Apocalypse director John McPhail’s story of an annual pumpkin-growing contest that has a cast including Nick Frost and Jane Horrocks.