Introduction

Welcome to Issue 116 of the eclectic and serious discussion of cinema! As usual, our inaugural gesture of the new year is the World Poll – Senses’ annual attempt to measure the pulse of global film culture by asking you, our readers, contributors, and co-conspirators, to send in lists of 2025’s cinematic highlights. This year, 142 of you did so, and we thank each and every one.

The issue is rich in other aspects as well. “There are soccer fields everywhere for those with eyes to see them,” writes Dylan Adamson in his exquisite dissection of Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf – a 2025 standout that features prominently across our World Poll. Captured with an old Sony Ericsson phone from AD 2008, the film’s blurry, pixellated images do not just make for a strident clash with our current hyper-definition media regime, but suggest a new relationship between viewers and the screen. Paul D. Peters, in turn, uses Revenge of the Sith’s 20th anniversary to reflect on how US citizens turned to politicians against their best interest; he does so through the looking glass of Anakin Skywalker’s transformation into Darth Vader. On the occasion of another anniversary, Alisa Zhulina appraises Adrian Lyne’s 9 ½ Weeks (released 40 years ago) as a conflicted treatise on the intermingling of economics, subject formation, and erotic desire. Bleart Thaçi surveys every R. W. Fassbinder work that employs Leonard Cohen’s music, an affectual collaboration between two creators who most likely never met. Carolina Bracco reconsiders Palestine, Another Vietnam from a feminist perspective, noting that whilst it is a fundamentally critical example of solidarity cinema, it maintains “limits, omissions and unresolved tensions”, in this case eliding the representation of women as complex political subjects. Terence W. Yang analyses Argentine filmmaker and key El Pampero Cine player Mariano Llinás and his evolving cinematic approach, providing useful context for the second part of Hamed Sarrafi’s interview with Llinás, also published in this issue.

Our Interviews section is customarily diverse, but this issue includes three interviews by Cristóbal Escobar with key participants of the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (FIDOCS), which took place in November 2025. Including Argentine experimental filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland, French film critic and programmer Antoine Thirion, and Taiwanese queer filmmaker Su Hui-Yu, all are fascinating subjects in their own right. Thirion’s practice is redefining film criticism; Rinland’s cinema “reanimates the materiality of the earth”; and Su Hui-Yu’s camera “documents bodies that resurrect forbidden desires and ideological ghosts.” Two long-form interviews also appear in this issue, both intimate and authentic exchanges between filmmaker and critic: Susana Bessa’s interview with Catalan Jaume Claret Muxart and Hamed Sarrafi’s aforementioned conversation with Llinás. Regular Gary Kramer interviews Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti about his latest film, Happy Holidays, in which Copti discusses his vision, methodology, and views on politics and life in the Middle East. Nothing short of gripping. Finally, Jaimey Fisher interviews cinema legend Michael Douglas on producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025.

A new festival season is upon us, but before we turn our eyes to Rotterdam and Berlin, a few more dispatches from 2025. Last fall, Kim Munro travelled to Japan to attend the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival, a horizontal, largely non-hierarchical event designed to make documentary “a citizen’s pursuit,” while Virat Nehru reported from the Kolkata International Film Festival, an edition enriched by a stellar retrospective of Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema. Kohei Usuda’s TIFF report offers an illuminating account of the festival’s evolution into a gargantuan “festival of festivals”; unsurprisingly, some of the most singular offerings of its 50th iteration were once again found in that treasure trove of a sidebar known as Wavelengths. Longtime Senses contributor Maria Giovanna Vagenas covered the 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival and its Atlas workshops; Joshua Bogatin, in turn, was entranced by several road trip movies he caught at Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival. Elsewhere in Europe, Nasheed Qamar Faruqi wrote about the “disorientated cocktail of denialism and thought paralysis” that was the 2025 London Film Festival; finally, Savina Petkova reflects on the films and guests that made the 63rd Viennale, to borrow from Jean Epstein (the subject of an extraordinary retrospective held in partnership with the Austrian Film Museum), “a place of great wonders.”

The Great Director highlighted in this issue is British gothic horror pioneer Terence Fisher, whose films, in Steve Johnson’s astute assessment, are “easily the most libidinal of their era, with a sensuality and drive few could imitate.” Margaret Lindsay, meanwhile, enters the ranks of our Great Actors. Explicated by Andy Hageman as a “somewhat-public queer woman in Hollywood during decades when this was all but unimaginable,” Lindsay remains an understudied shadow figure whose appearances in 1930s to ‘70s Hollywood nevertheless stood at the vanguard of female representation.

This issue closes with four book reviews covering a very wide set of topics: Amber Patrice Sweat took on the difficult job of assessing Laura U. Marks’ most recent theoretical feat, The Fold, and succeeded; Arindam Sen went through William Raban’s Nautical Twilight, in which the filmmaker examines his own praxis, mostly in technical terms; B. Geetha studied Maggie Hennefeld’s Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema; and Efrén Cuevas analysed Kim Nelson’s Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film.

Wherever these articles take you next, we wish you and yours a cinematic and fulfilling 2026.