Film4 TV Guide: Listings, Schedule & What’s On Film4 Tonight

Published: 21 September 2026

Film4 is the UK’s free-to-air film channel, on Freeview 14. It dropped its subscription fee on 23 July 2006 and has run on advertising ever since. Tonight, Tuesday 22 September 2026, it’s three films rather than the usual single premiere: the apocalypse comedy Save Yourselves! (2020) at 7:10pm, Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings (2023) at 9pm, and the New Zealand horror-comedy Housebound (2014) closing the night from 11:05pm.

Film4 Schedule: Tuesday 22 September 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Film4 schedule for Tuesday 22 September 2026, on Freeview 14.

Overnight

Morning

Afternoon

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Film4 today

Overnight, the drama Songs My Brothers Taught Me opens the day at 1:50am, then a long teleshopping block holds the channel from 3:40am right through to 11am.

The Viking adventure The Long Ships (1964), with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier chasing a legendary golden bell, opens the daytime film schedule. Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) follows at 1:35pm, then a short Theory of Everything interview special airs just before 4pm, ahead of the wartime drama For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, which carries the afternoon through to early evening.

Film4 tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the Film4 primetime line-up for tonight, Tuesday 22 September 2026.

Save Yourselves! — Film4, 7:10pm

A Brooklyn couple heads upstate for a screen-free weekend to reconnect, only to come back to find an alien invasion has started without them. Sunita Mani and John Reynolds carry the joke well past a single premise, and it’s a rare Film4 primetime film not aiming for prestige.

No Hard Feelings — Film4, 9pm

Jennifer Lawrence’s 2023 comedy, in which a cash-strapped woman is hired by anxious parents to take their sheltered son on some dates before he leaves for college. Broader than it needed to be in places, but Lawrence’s willingness to go all in on the physical comedy is most of what makes it work.

Housebound — Film4, 11:05pm

A New Zealand horror-comedy from 2014: a young offender sentenced to house arrest with her mother starts to suspect the place is haunted. Morgana O’Reilly leads a cast that plays it straighter than the premise suggests, and it’s held up well since its 2014 festival debut.

What kind of films are on Film4?

Hollywood and recent theatrical releases

A good chunk of the schedule is mainstream Hollywood: films that played UK multiplexes and reached television a couple of years later. The bigger, more recent titles go in the 9pm and 6.30pm slots, where the audience is widest.

British cinema and Film4 Productions

Film4 Productions, the channel’s film-funding arm, has backed British cinema since 1982, originally trading as Channel Four Films. Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting, This Is England, 12 Years a Slave, Poor Things. Four decades of co-productions, and the reason the channel gets more benefit of the doubt than its commercial rivals.

World cinema, independent and cult film

Film4 shows more subtitled film than any other British free-to-air channel, mostly after 11pm, alongside cult American independents and things that never got a proper UK release. That late shift is the best thing about it.

Film4 is the least repetitive channel on Freeview by a wide margin. When we logged 48 days of schedules across all 32 main channels, only 36.3 per cent of Film4’s slots were a title it had already shown, against 87.9 per cent across Freeview as a whole — the difference being that films are scheduled once or twice rather than stripped across the week. The full comparison is in our study of repeats on UK television.

How to watch Film4

Channel numbers

Where to find Film4 on the main UK platforms:

Film4 is free on all of the above, with no subscription required. Virgin Media and Freesat numbers can vary by box and region, so check your on-screen guide if these don’t match.

Streaming online

Film4 streams live and free at channel4.com/now/f4 and via the Channel 4 app on smart TVs, iOS, Android, and Amazon Fire TV. You’ll need a free Channel 4 account, which takes a couple of minutes to set up. Films that have aired often turn up on demand in the Film4 collection afterwards, but licensing means plenty of them never do, and the ones that make it don’t stay long.

Film4 +1 and catching a film you missed

Film4 +1 runs the same schedule an hour behind, on Freeview 47 and Sky 314. Sit down at 10:15pm with the 9pm premiere already 75 minutes gone and +1 lets you start it near the beginning instead of writing the evening off.

If you miss a film outright and it never appears on demand, wait. Film4 reruns titles fairly regularly, usually in themed seasons or when a director or actor is back in the news, so searching a week or two ahead in your on-screen guide often turns one up.

Frequently asked questions

What’s on Film4 tonight?

Three films run back to back tonight: the apocalypse comedy Save Yourselves! (2020) opens at 7:10pm, Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings (2023) follows at 9pm, and the New Zealand horror-comedy Housebound (2014) closes out the night from 11:05pm. Full times for the rest of the day, including The Long Ships at 11am and the run of afternoon classics, are in the schedule table above.

What time do films start on Film4?

Typically around 11am, 2pm, 4pm, 6.30pm, 9pm, and 11pm to midnight. Running lengths shift the exact times day to day, so your on-screen guide has the most accurate information.

Is Film4 free to watch?

Yes, and it has been since it left subscription in July 2006. Expect ad breaks during films, but no fee on any platform.

Can I watch Film4 online for free?

Yes, live at channel4.com or through the Channel 4 app, with a free account.

Verdict

I rate Film4, with reservations. The 9pm slot and the run after 11pm are what keep me coming back: recent releases, the odd Productions title, and foreign-language cinema you’d rarely stumble across on any other free channel. Daytime is mostly the same forty-odd Hollywood titles on rotation, and the ad breaks mid-film wear thin some nights.

Tonight is a genuine triple bill rather than one headline premiere. Save Yourselves! at 7:10pm is the lightest of the three, a comedy that gets more mileage out of its screens-versus-aliens premise than the trailer suggests. No Hard Feelings at 9pm is broader still, but Jennifer Lawrence commits to the physical comedy in a way that papers over the thinner stretches of the script. Housebound closing out from 11:05pm is the pick of the night for anyone still up: a haunted-house comedy from New Zealand that plays its scares straighter than its jokes, and neither suffers for it. Daytime is a proper classic-film day: a 1964 adventure romp in The Long Ships, Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt from 1943, and the Hemingway adaptation For Whom the Bell Tolls taking the mid-afternoon.

Watch

Related: What’s On TV Tonight | BBC One TV Guide | Freeview Channel Guide | What Films Are on Tonight