Scottish Film Events: January 2026

You'll find lots of great new films covered in this month's issue, but one title we couldn’t wrench from its distributor ahead of print was Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater's loving tribute to Jean-Luc Godard and his game-changing Breathless. Never fear, though: Glasgow Film Theatre and Filmhouse will be giving Linklater’s film the fanfare it deserves with two unmissable retrospectives. As part of its ongoing CineMasters series, GFT has a season of Jean-Luc Godard films across January and February. Eight screen in total, from that incredible debut, Breathless (screening in 4K), to his swansong, The Image Book, via masterworks like Une Femme est Une Femme, Le Mepris and Bande a Part. Full details at glasgowfilm.org

Filmhouse takes a different tack. Its season is dedicated to the many directors associated – both directly and tangentially – with the French New Wave. So think Claude Chabrol (Le Boucher), Jacques Rivette (Paris Nous Appartient) and Agnès Varda (Cléo from 5 to 7) as well as crucial influences like Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur), Roberto Rossellini (Journey to Italy) and Robert Bresson (Pickpocket). Full details at filmhouse.org.uk

Breathless. Image courtesy of GFT.

The first film festival of 2026 is Goethe Institute’s Fokus: Films from Germany. Rather than give a snapshot of contemporary German cinema, this tenth edition of the festival digs into Goethe’s archives with the programme Women: Words and Worlds. “I wanted to cover a century of German cinema, to revisit different moments in German history and women's changing roles and experiences,” says the curator. The festival kicks off with Ula Stöckl's The Cat Has Nine Lives (GFT, 21 Jan; also 4 Feb, DCA), and other highlights include G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (GFT, 29 Jan), Angela Schanelec’s The Dreamed Path (Institut français d’Ecosse, 3 Feb) and Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman (GFT, 5 Feb). Full details at goethe.de

Ben Wheatley remains one of the UK’s most surprising filmmakers. In the January mag, the Kill List and Sightseers director tells us how he went from making a big-budget studio picture (Meg 2: The Trench) to a wildly inventive micro-budget sci-fi (BULK). You can watch and discover more about the latter this month as Wheatley takes BULK on a Q&A tour across the country with three stops in Scotland. On 18 January, he’s at both Filmhouse and GFT, and the following day he’s at DCA.

DV8 Film Club is a new indie film night in Glasgow with an intriguing MO: it’ll be celebrating films shot on the miniDV format that was popular with indie filmmakers in the late 90s and early 00s. Richard Linklater is clearly in the water, because DV8 Film Club's inaugural screening is TAPE, Linklater’s 2001 drama in which three high-school pals (Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman) hash out painful memories in a Michigan motel room. It's an underrated and gripping film that unfolds in real time; this rare screening shouldn't be missed (The Old Hairdressers, 31 Jan).