Scottish Film Events: November 2025

Autumn’s film festival season keeps on serving. Coming up in November, we’ve got Scotland Loves Anime (until 16 Nov) and French Film Festival UK (6 Nov-14 Dec) – find highlights from both elsewhere on the website. The Dundee leg of Take One Action comes to DCA (7-9 Nov), while the Taiwan Film Festival brings a programme titled ‘Encounter Taiwan and the World’ to GFT (7-13 Nov). Edinburgh Short Film Festival offers a selection of short films at Filmhouse (7-16 Nov). Inverness Film Festival (6-13 Nov) has another great lineup at Eden Court, including Palme d’Or-winner It Was Just an Accident and a retrospective dedicated to documentary don Frederick Wiseman. And not to be confused with Glasgow Film Festival, the International Film Festival Glasgow (12-16 Nov) rocks up at Grosvenor Picture Theatre with a lively selection of films that includes the likes of Joachim Trier’s festival hit Sentimental Value.

Among film fans, November is Noirvember. If you partake in this annual celebration, get yourself to Filmhouse, where themed noir double-bills screen every Sunday throughout the month, from French crime noir (The Hole & Rififi, 9 Nov) to corrupt journalist noir (Ace in the Hole & The Sweet Smell of Success, 23 Nov). Filmhouse also pay tribute to French provocateur Julia Ducournau: as well as screening her latest release, Alpha (21-27 Nov), the cinema’s bringing back her two previous features, Raw (22 & 25 Nov) and Titane (23 & 27 Nov).

I’m sure you’re all itching to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another again, and you’ve the perfect excuse to do so with a 70mm print of the film doing the rounds in Scotland this month. Filmhouse screens it 14 to 20 November, while GFT screens it 28 to 30 November. Both cinemas have crackerjack technical teams, so we know it's gonna look *chef’s kiss*. It's a long film, so we recommend watching it with a few small beers.

The programming at weekly film club Leith Kino continues to be immaculate. A double bill screening 16 November at Leith Depot looks particularly special: they're showing the brand new Rocky Horror Picture Show doc Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror alongside the criminally underseen Shock Treatment, a sort-of sequel to Rocky Horror from 1981.

One of the best books on cinema this year has been Ryan Gilbey’s It Used to Be Witches, which evocatively mixes a deeply researched history of queer cinema with memoir. Gilbey will be in Glasgow for a Q&A and signing at GFT as part of Aye Write on 9 November, and will be presenting one of the great queer films: Teorema, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 allegorical masterwork in which Terence Stamp plays a mysterious man who’s so hot that he sends an entire bourgeois family into a sexual frenzy.

BFI’s Too Much Melodrama season expands to Filmhouse, DCA and continues at GFT. A highlight at the latter will be a screening of All About Eve on 8 November, followed by a panel discussion digging into the queer legacy of Hollywood melodramas. On the panel: film historian Pamela Hutchinson, Invisible Women’s Lauren Clarke, and The Skinny’s Jamie Dunn (that’s me!). If that wasn’t a selfplug too far, I’ll also be providing intros to two other screenings at GFT this month: the underrated Burn After Reading on 17 November, as part of Coen Brothers of the Month, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lasserating melodrama The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant on 30 November, screening as part of Queer Cinema Sundays.