Introduction the editors January 2026 Editorial 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 a...
Part 1 the editors January 2026 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 1: Antti Alanen Hussain Al-Dubaisi Francisco Algarín Navarro Algitya Geoff Andrew Martyn Bamber Jennifer Lynde Barker Kyle Barrett Arta Barzanji Nathaniel BellSean Bell Jonathan Bento...
Part 2 the editors January 2026 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 2: Raphaël Bassan Ivana Brehas Jutta Brendemuhl Samantha Broadhead Duncan Caillard Thomas Caldwell María Elena de las Carreras Michael J. Casey Damien CassarKevin Cassidy Guilherme Cav...
Part 3 the editors January 2026 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 3: Nicholas de Villiers Connor Denney Emanuele Di Nicola Sérgio Dias Branco Matthew Dillon Wheeler Winston Dixon José D’LauraDana Duma Cristóbal Escobar Adalberto Fonkén Simon Foster ...
Part 4 the editors January 2026 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 4: Sean Gilman Antony I. Ginnane Leonardo Goi Leo Goldsmith Andrew Goode Jared Gores Mary Graham Michael Granados Francesco GriecoAndy Hazel Michael Heath William Heidbreder Maggie H...
Part 5 the editors January 2026 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 5: Christoph Huber Darren Hughes Darik Janik Ioannis Kanonakis Daniel Kasman Christopher Kearney Simon Killen Rainer Knepperges Bogna Konior Gary M. Kramer Peter KrauszEugenia Lai Ma...
Part 6 the editors January 2026 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 6: Duncan McLean Jason Mehlhorn Adrian D. Mendizabal Hind Mezaina Stefano Miraglia Jessica Moraza Marcel Müller Abel Muñoz-Hénonin Peter Nagels James NaremoreLuc Neacy Virat Nehru Bo...
Part 7 the editors January 2026 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 7: Warut Pornchaiprasartkul Ayush Pramanik Milan Pribisic Daniel Ribas Peter H. Rist Stuart Romeo-Richards Eduardo A. Russo Christopher Sanda Jack Sargeant Maria San FilippoAngus Saund...
Part 8 the editors January 2026 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 8: Tyson Stewart Iván Suárez Tyler Thier Josh Timmermann Donato Totaro Mustafa Uzuner Diana Vagas Eli VannataNoel Vera Peter Verstraten Nicholas Vroman David Walsh James Waters Nadi...
White Backlash Politics and the Reframing of Narrative Logic: Reconsidering Revenge of the Sith on Its 20th Anniversary Paul D. Peters January 2026 Feature Articles Upon its release, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005) stood out among audiences who were most accustomed to strict cause...
Bird on the Wire: Leonard Cohen’s Music in Fassbinder’s Cinema Bleart Thaçi January 2026 Feature Articles Few collaborations in cinema feel as oddly inevitable as the one that emerged (without ever being formal) between Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Leonard...
A Place and an Absence: Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf Dylan Adamson January 2026 Feature Articles The final eight minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1961) present a horrifying vision: the film’s world bereft of its characters. When Pier...
Filming Internationalism: Palestine, Another Vietnam and the Transnational Imaginaries of Third World Cinema Carolina Bracco January 2026 Feature Articles Introduction Palestinian cinema began to take shape as a national project in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in close connection with broader movemen...
9 ½ Weeks Turns 40 Alisa Zhulina January 2026 Feature Articles When the Hot Priest (Andrew Scott) whispered “kneel” through the lattice of a confession booth in Fleabag (Harry Bradbeer, 2016-2019), audiences lost ...
Glory to Small Forms: The Recent Work of Mariano Llinás Terence W. Yang January 2026 Feature Articles To accompany this essay, read Hamed Sarrafi’s ‘Part 2’ interview with Mariano Llinás published in this issue. The difficulty of writing about Mari...
An Interview with Scandar Copti Gary M. Kramer January 2026 Interviews Happy Holidays (2024) is Palestinian Scandar Copti’s first solo feature as writer/director, following his Oscar-nominated Ajami (2009), cowritten and ...
Cinema Takes Place in the Imagination: A Day with Antoine Thirion Cristóbal Escobar January 2026 Interviews During his visit to the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (FIDOCS) 2025, film critic and programmer Antoine Thirion offered a masterc...
The Expression of the Hands: In Conversation with Jessica Sarah Rinland Cristóbal Escobar January 2026 Interviews For over a decade, the films of Argentine experimental filmmaker, Jessica Sarah Rinland, have unfolded as spaces of discovery where touch performs a k...
“I love how a river has the power to resurface different stories”: An interview with Jaume Claret Muxart Susana Bessa January 2026 Interviews The river as a mode of expression and perception has long been a source of inspiration for many filmmakers. From Jean Renoir to Ritwik Ghatak, Christi...
“It is a paradox: repression produces excess”: Su Hui-Yu on Re-shooting History Cristóbal Escobar January 2026 Interviews There are audiovisual artists for whom cinema is a medium of historical reanimation. In the works of Taiwanese filmmaker and artist Su Hui-Yu, the cam...
Michael Douglas on Cuckoo’s Nest at 50: The Actor-Producer on moving on from Hal Ashby, Getting Jack Nicholson his first Oscar, and Telling his Father Kirk he wouldn’t be playing McMurphy Jaimey Fisher January 2026 Interviews Michael Douglas is well known as an era-defining actor of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a resumé of, among others, Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyn...
We Just Wanted the Dog to Bark: Interview with Mariano Llinás (Part 2) Hamed Sarrafi January 2026 Interviews For an in-depth analysis of Mariano Llinás’ evolving cinematic approach, read Terence W. Yang’s critical essay, also published in this issue. As a...
Fisher, Terence Steve Johnson January 2026 Great Directors b. 23 February 1904, London d. 18 June 1980, London There are filmmakers who channel their views and experiences into a body of work that remains ...
Lindsay, Margaret Andy Hageman January 2026 Great Actors Margaret Lindsay: A Recovered Treasure Behind the Scenes I was inspired to write this article on Margaret Lindsay while researching to develop a sin...
Yamagata: A film festival for these times Kim Munro January 2026 Festival Reports In the final moments of the closing party of the 2025 Yamagata International Documentary Festival (YIDFF), two city mascots dance around the hotel ban...
Viennale 2025: A place of pasts and presents Savina Petkova January 2026 Festival Reports When Jean Epstein wrote about “approaching the promised land, a place of great wonders,” in the early 1920s, he was referring to a metaphorical topos,...
The Capital of Cinephilia: The Toronto International Film Festival at 50 Kohei Usuda January 2026 Festival Reports “The biggest movie-going town…” If you were lucky enough to have been a Torontonian about a quarter of a century ago, back in the early 2000s, during...
The 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival and its Atlas Workshops: A Global Event Shaping the Future of MENA Cinema Maria Giovanna Vagenas January 2026 Festival Reports Arriving in Marrakech at the end of November to attend the Marrakech International Film Festival means being embraced at once by a warm, golden light ...
Fractured Communities and Festering Wounds at the 31st Kolkata International Film Festival Virat Nehru January 2026 Festival Reports The 31st Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) screened over 200 films from 39 countries across 21 venues. With 2025 marking the birth centenary ...
How Wonderful It Is That There are Roads: The 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival Joshua Bogatin January 2026 Festival Reports In the opening of his book series Poetics of Cinema, Chilean avant-garde filmmaker Raul Ruiz ponders what it would mean to create a cinema free of the...
London Film Festival 2025 Report Nasheed Qamar Faruqi January 2026 Festival Reports A fish rots from the head. No surprise, then, given the lack of integrity shown by a series of UK governments, that the 2025 London Film Festival shou...
We, Cosmos: Laura U. Marks’s Text as Soul Assemblage Amber Patrice Sweat January 2026 Book Reviews In The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro writes that: here is no structuring lack, no primordial division, but a continuity between the physiological a...
To show, rather than tell: William Raban’s Nautical Twilight Arindam Sen January 2026 Book Reviews In 1974, critic Lawrence Alloway wrote in an essay that “Artists’ writings serve as self-characterization by providing an index of specific traits and...
Unruly Pleasures of Scholarship: On Maggie Hennefeld’s Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema B. Geetha January 2026 Book Reviews Ladies can laugh at the pleasures of the world, but not too much. It might kill them. In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (2024), t...
Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film by Kim Nelson Efrén Cuevas January 2026 Book Reviews The latest book by Canadian scholar Kim Nelson, Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film, proposes a novel and systematic approach ...
Magnificent Obsession Martyn Bamber December 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Alfred Hitchcock, when discussing a key plot point of The Lady Vanishes (1939) with François Truffaut, mentions “the plausibles”, a reference to those...
Leave Her to Heaven Dana Polan December 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Martin Scorsese: And then eventually Leave Her to Heaven, in color. . . The use of the blues and the reds. Richard Schickel: Oh, that film seems to m...
Back Street Jonathan Mackris December 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Three factors stand in the way of any appreciation of John M. Stahl. First, there is the fact that so many of his films are relatively unavailable. A ...
Imitation of Life Amelia Leonard December 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Adapted from Fannie Hurst’s 1933 bestseller, Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl, 1934) arose from a cultural moment in which women’s stories were at onc...
Personal and Poetic: Australian Women’s Animation after 1990 Ruth Richards November 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film “I love to look at the few small treasures the sea discards…” – Small Treasures (Sarah Watt, 1995) “Animation offers real potential for exploring w...
Breaking Ground: Five Animations from the 1980s Ruth Richards November 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film I see the image of an image imposed upon my view. – Pleasure Domes (Maggie Fooke, 1987) A man holds a little theatre in the palm of his hand. A woman...
Protected: The Truth About Palm Island Adrian Danks November 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film One of the great deficiencies of Australian cinema during the “revival” are films made by Aboriginal filmmakers or from a First Nations perspective. M...
“I Don’t Serve Scabs”: Sunday Too Far Away Stephen Gaunson November 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Depending on whose narrative is believed, Gil Brealey, producer and director/chairman of the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC), either saved or...
Homosexuality: A Film For Discussion Barbara Creed November 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Homosexuality: A Film For Discussion (1975) was born of the early heady days of Gay Liberation several years after its first historic meeting in 1971 ...
Exits Faith Everard November 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film “A conservative government survives essentially by dampening expectations and subduing hopes. Conservatism is basically pessimistic, reformism is basi...
Pure Shit Angelo Koulouris November 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film A woman tightens a belt around her arm as a makeshift tourniquet, restricting blood flow and allowing her to inject a hypodermic needle into her vein,...
