Both Edward Berger and Brady Corbet’s dramas take four awards while Demi Moore denied comeback prize as competition heats up for next month’s Oscars
• Live blog: Baftas 2025: the red carpet, the ceremony, the winners – live!
• Full list of winners
• Baftas 2025 red carpet: sequins, satin and a ski mask – in pictures

Conclave, Edward Berger’s Vatican-set thriller starring Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal overseeing the election of a new pope, went into this year’s Bafta ceremony with a dozen nominations – the most of any contender. It ended up with four awards: for best picture, outstanding British film, adapted screenplay and editing.

Accepting the second of those, Berger – who swept the board at the awards two years ago with his remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, which won seven prizes – said: “We live in a time of a crisis of democracy. Institutions used to bringing us together are used to pull us apart. Sometimes it’s hard to keep the faith, and that’s why we make movies.”

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Finborough theatre, London
A symbolic, stripped-down staging fails to plumb the chilling emotional depths of this story about a Jewish man trying to flee Germany in the 1930s

A wealthy Jewish businessman takes a series of Kafkaesque journeys on the German train system soon after Kristallnacht, driven from his home and in flight for his life. Otto Silbermann never makes it out of the country but – maddeningly – loops round and round, stuck in the trap of rising Nazi terror and afraid of every passenger he meets. He carries a suitcase of money, the last vestige of power he has in a homeland that has turned against Jews.

The Passenger is based on Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel, which was written at blazing speed when Boschwitz, himself a German Jew, was just 23. His manuscript was discovered decades after his death in 1942, at the age of 27.

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From balaclavas to open-necked shirts and floor-length frocks, here’s what caught the eye at the awards ceremony this year

• Baftas 2025: the red carpet, the ceremony, the winners – live!

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Cotillard plays a movie actor starring in a production of The Snow Queen in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s unwholesome story of yearning

An eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this film; it is a fairytale of death-wish yearning and erotic submission. It wittily fuses the real and the fictional into a trance-state – and that’s the state that I’ve sometimes found a little static in previous films by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, but not here. Dreamily strange it might be (and in fact, on the face of it, entirely preposterous) this movie had me gripped with its two outstanding lead performances – from Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini – and a clamorous musical score.

Cotillard plays a diva-ish movie actress called Cristina, who is the lead in a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen being filmed on a soundstage which is in a remote and snowy spot in late 60s France; she is gorgeously costumed in a sparkling white form-fitting gown and crown, a look she carries off with great unsmiling hauteur. Pacini plays Jeanne, a teenage girl in a foster home nearby, stricken with memories of the death of her mother, whose bead necklace she keeps. In her loneliness and grief, Jeanne has projected her feelings into an obsession with the story of the Snow Queen, an obsession further displaced at another remove into idolising the teen girls who ice-skate at the local rink. One day she runs away, stealing the ID of an older girl called Bianca and breaks into the film studio to sleep overnight; she somehow gets a job as an extra, astonished to realise what story is being filmed, and it is here that her gamine prettiness and air of demurely sensitive adoration for the queen catches Cristina’s eye.

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Readers respond to Adrian Chiles’s experience of the institution’s treasures

I would guess that Adrian Chiles is no fan of The Great Pottery Throw Down, currently on Channel 4 ( At 57, I went to the British Museum for the first time – and it left me rather cold, 12 February ). Not only is he missing out on a lovely creative piece of television, but he is failing to recognise that pots, jugs, vessels, dishes and containers of all shapes and sizes have played a vital part in the development of civilisation over the ages.

Pots for carrying, storing and dispensing water, wine, oil, foodstuff and human waste are important historical markers of human ingenuity and skill that we should not dismiss. While the use of terracotta, ceramics, bone china etc for functional items in our lives has been usurped by plastic and metal, the artistic merits of pots and their intricate illustrations is something to be celebrated. Maybe Mr Chiles needs to sign up for a pottery class.
Jan Ross
Silverton, Devon

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Thatcher nostalgia | US hypocrisy | Valentine’s Day | Inside Reform | School reports

Among the justified furore around America’s new position in the world , one part at least triggers a bit of nostalgia ( JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February ). JD Vance’s description of the “threat from within” brings back memories of Margaret Thatcher’s designation of those who disagreed with her as “the enemy within”. I still have a badge with that somewhere. Maybe it’s time I dusted it off.
Steve Townsley
Cowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan

• As JD Vance lectures European leaders about freedom of speech, Louisiana is banning health officials from promoting vaccinations and libraries across the US are having to purge their shelves of any books that make mention of subjects that Republicans dislike. No hypocrisy there, then?
Tony Green
Ipswich, Suffolk

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Software engineer and developer Nadia Odunayo created the social media readers’ platform StoryGraph and its popularity has rocketed

Nadia Odunayo never planned to take on the mighty global juggernaut that is Amazon, but for many book ­lovers, she has become the hero they didn’t know they needed.

For 18 years, bibliophiles have been able to catalogue their ­reading, leave reviews and star ratings, and get recommendations for their next read on Goodreads, which was set up by two Stanford University alumni from California.

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In a nuanced stand-alone sequel, the Irish novelist revisits the lovers from her second book – and finds two lives even more complicated, messy and human than before

In literary terms, Britain was a duller place 15 years ago: Booker judges looked for novels that “ zip along ”, editors were saying no to Deborah Levy and the publisher Jacques Testard couldn’t get a job. There was nothing for it but DIY: new houses, like Testard’s Fitzcarraldo Editions, and new prizes for new authors shut out by the risk-averse mentality that prevailed after the 2008 recession. Leading the way was Liverpool-born, Ireland-raised writer Eimear McBride , whose 2013 debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing , a looping soliloquy published by Norwich startup Galley Beggar Press, won the inaugural Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction as well as the Women’s prize (then known as the Baileys), traditionally a more commercial award, in a sign that the thirst for novelty perhaps wasn’t so niche after all.

McBride’s new novel, The City Changes Its Face , is a stand-alone sequel to her second book, 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians , which was told by teenage drama student Eily, who comes to London from Ireland in the mid-90s and falls for Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, with an estranged daughter Eily’s age, living overseas after her mother couldn’t hack Stephen sleeping around – a snag for Eily, too.

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Latest film in the series starring Renée Zellweger has posted record-breaking figures on its home turf

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy has exceeded expectations at the UK box office, becoming the best-performing romcom in the UK on opening weekend ever.

The fourth instalment in the adventures of Helen Fielding’s bumbling diarist made $14.9m (£11.8m) over its four-day opening weekend, beating all three previous instalments, the second of which, Edge of Reason, was the previous record-holder with $8.1m.

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