La Bola Negra wins Toronto film festival people’s choice award
The queer period drama wins Oscar-predicting award, being named the most popular audience film at the festival
Iranian actor Laleh Marzban faces severe threats after Venice film festival speech
Marzban, who won a best actress award for her portrayal of a woman held hostage by her father in Falling House, has received condemnations from authorities after dedicating her prize to ‘the women of Iran’
Woman Unknown wins Venice film festival as NAZA takes special jury prize
May el-Toukhy becomes eighth female director to take Golden Lion as Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love and Guardian-produced exposé of Israel’s Gaza killings also awarded
The best films of 2026 so far
Jessie Buckley is dug up to marry Christian Bale, while Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel are the double act of the year in Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy. Here’s our round up of movie magic from the last six months in the UK, in order of release
The Beloved review – Javier Bardem turns in a career-scariest performance
Cannes film festival: This tremendously alarming drama from Rodrigo Sorogoyen is a meditation on male auteurs entirely without sentimentality
Nathalie Baye, prolific star of French and Hollywood cinema, dies aged 77
Baye went from working with the great French auteurs in the 1970s and 80s, including Truffaut and Godard, to high profile roles in Catch Me if You Can and Downton Abbey: A New Era
‘It’s the year of gay Brazilian cruising!’ The makers of Night Stage on public sex and their ‘deranged erotic thriller’
Writer-directors Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher talk about the ‘assimilation myth’, why Wim Wenders is wrong and how they’re developing queer western and horror movies
Why The Secret Agent should win the best picture Oscar
Kicking off this year’s series in which our writers advocate for one Academy Award nominee, our chief critic on why the Brazilian drama-thriller is the most audacious and fully realised film in the race
‘A love letter to all the good men I know’: Shahrbanoo Sadat on making Afghanistan’s first romcom
Opening the Berlin film festival, No Good Men blends romance and rebellion, capturing love, humour and female agency in Kabul on the eve of the Taliban’s return
Silence and Cry review – deeply strange 1960s erotic ballet meditating on Hungary’s history and politics
Director Miklós Jancsó creates a bizarre psychodrama set after the fall of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet republic, encompassing postwar trauma and erotic overtones
Brigitte Bardot, French screen legend, dies aged 91
Emmanuel Macron leads tributes to actor who became an international sex symbol and later embraced animal rights and far-right politics
It’s turkey time! The 12 worst films of 2025
This year has brought us some great movies – and also at least a dozen dire one-star disasters. Here are the Guardian’s critics on the pick of the year’s cinematic calamities
And the 2025 Braddies go to … Peter Bradshaw’s film picks of the year
Now the Guardian’s Top 50 countdowns, as voted for by the whole film team, have announced their No 1s, here are our chief critic’s personal choices – in no particular order
Palestine 36 director Annemarie Jacir: ‘We don’t want a state, we just want to live’
Fresh from a 20-minute ovation at Toronto, the film-maker’s historical drama reveals how Britain’s 1936 crackdown created the blueprint for the ongoing genocide in Gaza
Pépé le Moko review – mysterious and passionately despairing French noir with a luminous Jean Gabin
Powerful French film that inspired Casablanca stars Gabin as a holed-up gangster in Algiers lured to his doom by infatuation