Ten films to see at Edinburgh Film Festival 2026

One of the chief criticisms levelled at Edinburgh International Film Festival for at least a decade before its financial collapse in 2022 was that its identity had become a bit confused. Was its focus innovative arthouse cinema or was the aim to get celebrities on red carpets and bums on seats? Was it for the industry or the public? Was it ‘the Sundance of the North’ or ‘an orphanage for film festival titles looking for a home’?

Following its return with a new team headed by director Paul Ridd, the festival's intentions seem clearer. While it's now a more modest affair in terms of size, with around 40 feature films screening over seven days, it has the ambitious aim to be a festival of discovery. Among the programme you’ll still find well-known directors, like Nicolas Winding Refn (Her Private Hell), Gregg Araki (I Want Your Sex), Daniel Goldhaber (Faces of Death), Paul Wright (Mission) and Hirokazu Koreeda (Sheep in the Box), but for the most part audiences are diving into the unknown. Over half the programme is made up of world premieres, most of them from emerging filmmakers, which means adventurous audiences have the thrill of the brand new to look forward to.

As ever with EIFF, my advice is to dive in to whatever titles catch your eye, but to get you started, here are ten films I recommend from across the programme, taking in world premieres, festival hits and the odd retrospective title. If you opt for EIFF's new Choose Cinema pass, you could watch all of them for £80, which isn't too shabby. 

Goodbye Cruel World

This debut feature from Félix de Givry, who was the lead of Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, might sound like a downer, given that it begins with a bullied teen’s botched attempt to take his own life, but from this bleak premise de Givry spins something magical and life-affirming. Young Anatomy of a Fall star Milo Machado-Graner is deeply compelling as the film’s despondent 14-year-old protagonist who discovers a reason to live when all his friends and loved ones presume he’s dead, while Tara-Jay Bangalter’s evocative 16mm cinematography and a mellifluous narration by an unnamed older woman (Françoise Lebrun) give the film an otherworldly, fairytale vibe. 17, 18 & 19 Aug

Queen at Sea

Lance Hammer’s bruising drama sets up a delicate moral question: can someone with advanced dementia consent to a sexual relationship with their long-term romantic partner? Hammer then proceeds to examine this quandary from every thorny angle. Juliette Binoche plays Amanda, a woman who’s deeply concerned for her elderly mother; Anna Calder-Marshall plays Amanda's mother, Leslie, who has Alzheimer's; and Tom Courtenay plays Amanda's frail father-in-law, Martin, who's barely coping as his wife slips further away from him. All three are terrific, as is Florence Hunt as Amanda’s teen daughter, Sara, and a subplot following her flirtations with a school friend provides a bittersweet parallel with the elderly couple whose love story is nearing an inevitable end. 15, 16 & 17 Aug

Extra Geography

Molly Manners’ quirky bildungsroman reportedly shares some DNA with 2019's Booksmart, although the humour here is more of the deadpan British variety and the setting is an all-girl boarding school. Like Olivia Wilde’s American indie, though, Extra Geography centres on two high-achieving best friends who make a pact to put the same effort into their love life as they do their schoolwork. The one issue is that they set their sights on the same target of lust: their geography teacher, Miss Delavigne. 15, 16 & 17 Aug

Snapshot

The found-footage horror subgenre has been flogged to oblivion, but Joseph Archer seems to have found an interesting new angle with his debut feature, Snapshot. He asks the question: 'What if some documentary footage shot on a pinhole camera during the Victorian era was uncovered that contained spooky new revelations pertaining to a spree of murders in Whitechapel that were attributed to Jack the Ripper?' Shot entirely in a 1:1 circle aspect ratio, this looks like one of the most formally interesting films competing for EIFF’s Sean Connery Prize. If Archer pulls off that imaginative conceit, Snapshot could be terrific. 15, 16, 17 & 18 Aug

Empty Heaven

One of the most pleasing aspects of this new incarnation of EIFF has been their championing of Abdolreza Kahani, the veteran Iranian filmmaker who's switched in recent years to making self-produced work shot on his iPhone. A film of his competed in each of the first two editions of the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, with last year’s Mortician winning the award and the £50,000 prize fund. Kahani is back again this year, playing out of competition with a new film presumably made with that cash. This one follows an Iranian dissident living in Canada who gets embroiled with local gangsters. 15 & 16 Aug

Bad Day at the Office

John Hannah will be a busy boy on EIFF’s opening night. Not only is he wonderfully sinister as a sea-dwelling finman in the festival's opening gala title – Louis Paxton’s absurdist comedy The Incomer – he’s also the lead in Chee Keong Chung’s Bad Day at the Office, the flick kicking off Midnight Madness. EIFF call this an “anarchic, ultra-violent and relentless cinematic rollercoaster”, which might be code for shaky-cam nastiness, but I’m certainly intrigued to see this sexagenarian Scot who’s much-loved for his gentle screen presence in films like Four Weddings and a Funeral embracing his action side. 13 & 14 Aug, plus a 4DX screening on 19 Aug

The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight

Giving Birth to a Butterfly, the 2023 debut from Theodore Schaefer, never made it to UK cinemas but the critics who saw it seem to agree this New York filmmaker’s dreamlike blending of American nostalgia with deadpan humour and a sinister atmosphere called to mind the work of David Lynch. That’s got us hyped for this follow-up, The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight, which follows three seemingly disconnected stories taking place in New York, which EIFF says “plays like free jazz”. As John Thomson's Louis Balfour would say... Nice! 14 & 15 Aug

Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon, the Turner prize-winner responsible for works like 24 Hour Psycho and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, is one of the most fascinating characters from the world of visual art, so this portrait exploring his creative process looks essential. As you might expect, digging beneath the Glaswegian’s wildman public persona is no easy feat, but word is that director Finlay Pretsell’s intense and exhausting shoot following Gordon at work in his Berlin studio chips away enough bravado to discover the real person underneath. 14 & 15 Aug

Sexy Beast

Jonathan Glazer’s debut feature Sexy Beast looks even better now than it did 25 years ago on its release. The premise is cliched (a retired safe-cracker is pulled back into the underworld for ‘one last job’), but the execution is startlingly fresh. The flinty script from David Scinto and Louis Mellis is pure cockney gangster poetry; Glazer’s casually surreal visuals are a world away from the wave of British gangster films released near the turn of the millennium; and Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley are simply electrifying as the duelling gangsters whose war of words feels even more violent than their sparring fists. 17 Aug

The Rock

It seems that one guarantee from EIFF's current incarnation is a Sean Connery picture, and that’s no bad thing given the depth and breadth of the legendary Scottish actor’s filmography. After burning through his six James Bond films with last year’s Sacred Bond retrospective, this year EIFF is screening what is essentially those films' high-octane successor: Michael Bay’s daft thriller The Rock. Connery gets all the best lines playing a grizzled British spy who once broke out of Alcatraz and is tasked with helping Nicolas Cage’s chemical weapons specialist break back in when Ed Harris’s madman general steals some lethal VX gas and takes a bunch of people hostage on Alcatraz Island. 18 Aug

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The 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival takes place 13-19 Aug at venues across Edinburgh
edfilmfest.org