Finding Emily

Finding Emily is a Working Title production in the company's most recognisable register — the British romantic comedy — but handed to a director and writer with no interest in nostalgia. Alicia MacDonald, who came up through short films and television, directs from a script by Rachel Hirons, with Focus Features and Parkville Pictures co-producing. It opened in UK cinemas in May 2026 and reached the United States that August, distributed by Universal.

The premise turns on a single mistake: a musician is given the wrong phone number by the woman he meets at a student union bar, and recruits a psychology student to help him find her, unaware that she is treating the search as thesis material. Angourie Rice and Spike Fearn play the pair, with Minnie Driver and Cora Kirk in support. Rachel Clark shoots it in warm, unfussy campus light, and Morgan Kibby — once of M83, later a composer for television — provides the score.

Reviews were unusually strong for the genre: a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating across thirty reviews, with critics praising the rapport between the two leads and the film's willingness to satirise modern courtship without sneering at the people caught up in it. Metacritic recorded 71 from six critics. Audiences have been warmer still — a Letterboxd average of 3.8 from more than sixty thousand ratings, the kind of word-of-mouth figure Working Title's earlier hits earned on release, and a sign the studio's house style still has life in it.