Introduction the editors July 2026 Editorial Welcome, dear Readers, to the 118th edition of the Internet’s most eclectic and serious discussion of cinema! As ever, we open the Issue with a slate of original, timely, and impressively researched Features...
Crimes Against Reality: Speculation and the New Red Order Max Bowens & Candice Strongwater July 2026 Feature Articles This article has been peer reviewed. It was the winter of 1637 and tulipmania was in full swing. In Holland, the price of tulips – an exotic new ex...
Consent Puzzles in the Oslo Stories Trilogy by Dag Johan Haugerud Colette de Castro July 2026 Feature Articles In France, Dreams, Sex and Love came out over three weeks in the summer of 2025. I was like a restless teenager in my discovery of these intricate, su...
The Eternal Return: The Battle of Algiers at 60 Salvador Carrasco July 2026 Feature Articles The opening title card of La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) announces that this is “the first great Algerian film...
Beyond Revolution as Romance: On the Enduring Relevance of Humberto Solás’ Lucía Pritish Das July 2026 Feature Articles The 2020s have seen a renaissance of radical politics from its neoliberal slumber. In a survey by the right-wing Cato Institute, 62% of American adult...
Bee and Bresson: Pickpocket and its Painting Leonard Schwartz July 2026 Feature Articles Susan Bee’s painting “Pickpocket” (2013), like many of her paintings – there are five in the “Pickpocket” series alone – is based on a film still. In ...
An Interview with Giulio Bertelli Gary M. Kramer July 2026 Interviews Giulio Bertelli’s remarkable feature debut, Agon, depicts three women competing in a fictional Olympics at Ludoj in 2024. But this is not an inspirati...
Mahboobeh Kalaee: Creation as Antidote to Destruction during American and Israeli airstrikes Amanda Barbour July 2026 Interviews On what should have been an inconspicuous and inconsequential morning in Tehran, Mahboobeh Kalaee boarded a flight bound for Vienna on February 28, 20...
Time and Tide: In Conversation with Director Vee Shi and Cinematographer-Producer Nicholson Ren Tùng Bạch Đăng July 2026 Interviews Filial piety is a key moral virtue in China. This Confucian doctrine urges children to show respect to parents, obey their wishes, and care for them i...
Lee Anne Schmitt: An Anthropology of Americanism Arindam Sen July 2026 Interviews In the last 20 years, across four feature-length and a handful of short films, US filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt has presented a critical portrait of Amer...
“What is a complete image of oil?”: An Interview with Sanaz Sohrabi Botagoz Koilybayeva July 2026 Interviews “What does it mean if I blow up this tiny image and make it three metres long?” says Iranian filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi, when talking about the politics ...
Interview with Pierre le Gall Gary M. Kramer July 2026 Interviews Pierre le Gall makes an auspicious directorial debut with Flesh and Fuel, the winner of this year’s Queer Palm Revelation prize at Cannes. A character...
An Interview with Christian Petzold Daniel Theophanous July 2026 Interviews For a film named after a solo piano suite, Miroirs No.3 is surprisingly silent. The rare moments of music and sound in Christian Petzold's latest film...
Reimagining History from Within: An Interview with Wael Shawky Hamed Sarrafi & Ehsan Zivaralam July 2026 Interviews Several months ago, as Israel and the United States launched military strikes against Iran, I found myself searching for a way to escape the relentles...
Ferrara, Abel Florian Zappe July 2026 Great Directors b. 19 July 1951, New York City, United States “I do think that filmmaking is sacred.“ – Abel Ferrara Discussions of Abel Ferrara – who celebrate...
Khavn Patrick F. Campos July 2026 Great Directors b. 23 December 1973, Quezon City, Philippines This Is Not an Essay about Khavn I. In the summer of 2008, at the artist-run Mag:net Café in Quezon C...
Yuasa, Masaaki Nicholas Buccheri July 2026 Great Directors b. 16 March 1965, Fukuoka, Japan Yuasa Masaaki came onto the scene as an anime director with the film Mind Game (2004). This most experimental of nar...
Korean Cinephilia and Its Possible Futures: The 27th Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond July 2026 Festival Reports Korean film festivals, like the industry itself, have wrestled with an existential crisis since the COVID pandemic, with declining audiences and many ...
What is the honour of cinema? – The 79th Cannes Film Festival Daichi Ogi July 2026 Festival Reports "even scratched to death a simple rectangle of thirty-five millimeters saves the honor of all of the real. " – J.-L. Godard, Histoire(s) du cin...
Coming of age does not happen overnight: IndieLisboa turns 23 Susana Bessa July 2026 Festival Reports First feral, then domestic, at last foreign. – Raquel Nobre Guerra Growing up happens over time and never stops. At least, that’s what most of u...
The hottest ticket in town: the 40th Il Cinema Ritrovato Stefan Solomon July 2026 Festival Reports Festivals, like films, begin life before they officially open. For Il Cinema Ritrovato, the trickle of information about the programme becomes somethi...
Shanghai IFF 2026: Things that Change, Things that Don’t Maja Korbecka July 2026 Festival Reports Shanghai is a city where time seems to run faster. New metro stations are built within just two or three months, and urban redevelopment has completel...
Feeling the Screen Story’s Pulse: Karen Peralman’s Cutting Rhythms: Creative Film Editing Mark Seton July 2026 Book Reviews This third edition by Dr Karen Pearlman, entitled Cutting Rhythms: Creative Film Editing, marks an important revaluing of intuition as an overarching ...
The Material Ghosts of Bombay Horror Ragib Rahman July 2026 Book Reviews Kartik Nair’s Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror begins with a beautiful mistake. In the Ramsay Brothers’ Bandh Darwaza (Shyam Ram...
Cinephilia Reconsidered: Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s East Asian Auteurism, Cinephilia and the Media Platform Era Jiahan Olivia Lin July 2026 Book Reviews Emerging Chinese art cinema director Bi Gan’s latest work, Kuang ye shi dai (Resurrection, 2025), reads like a final letter to cinema. Throughout the ...
Filmmaking at the end of the world: The Quiet Earth Gregory Bennett August 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Is there a more convincing definition of Aotearoa New Zealand cinema than Geoff Murphy’s three-film directorial run of Goodbye Pork Pie (1981), Utu (1...
Porno, Disco, and Summer of Sam: Spike Lee on Sexuality Desirae Embree July 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film At the time of its release Summer of Sam (1999) was seen as a notable departure for Spike Lee, whose body of work up to that point had been predominat...
4 Little Girls Darragh O’Donoghue July 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film The most memorable moment in Spike Lee’s documentary 4 Little Girls (1997) occurs nearly halfway through, as two veterans remember participating in th...
A Pedagogy of Resistance: From Double Consciousness to the Unified Self in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X Sandra E. Lim July 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film The first few minutes of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) are easy to miss. The Warner Brothers logo appears against a cotton-ball cerulean sky. A voiceov...
25th Hour Michael Green July 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Wake the fuck up. It’s over after tonight.” This line is uttered by Frank (Barry Pepper) to his buddy Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Spike Lee’...
School Daze-d and Confused Sebastian Carrasco July 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film What would you have done in moments of great fracture and systemic injustice? We tend to think of ourselves as moral beings, always standing firm and ...
About Endlessness Martyn Bamber June 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film 1. Anecdotes The other day, I don’t know if it was in Stockholm or London. Pouring rain. I saw a little girl, about seven years old, holding an umbre...
In the Afterglow: Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence Adrian Danks June 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Roy Andersson’s En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, 2014) is the final part of his “...
You, The Living Jamie Jungyoon Tak June 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film ‘Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave licks your escaping foot.’ – Johann Wolfgang von...
Nine Commercials by Roy Andersson Iris Chen June 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film The characters in a Roy Andersson advertisement wear whiteface: a memento mori. It’s one of the reasons why one watches these otherwise ordinary scene...
Summer Pleasure: Swedish Naturalist Painting in A Swedish Love Story Eli Vannata June 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film En Kärlekshistoria (A Swedish Love Story, Roy Andersson, 1970) is a unique film in a body of work known for its idiosyncrasy. Watching Roy Andersson’s...
Human Poems: Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor Cerise Howard June 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1970, a Swedish filmmaker in his mid-twenties became an instant critical darling with his debut feature: a lyrical, Czechoslovak New Wave-inflected...
Life Without Principle: “I Understand Completely” Sankeerthna Vedamtam May 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film It is both grimly amusing and frankly unsurprising that the entire global economic system again seems on the verge of collapse, à la 2008’s global fin...
Running on Karma Faith Everard May 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film All the world will be your enemy, Prince With a Thousand Enemies – Watership Down Though Dai zek lo (Running on Karma, Johnnie To, 2003) follows B...
Knives Out: Johnnie To’s Election Kevin Bui May 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film “If I betray the trust of my sworn brothers, then I shall be killed by ten thousand knives.” – The 36 Oaths of the Triad Initiation Ceremony Acc...
Away From Her Grace Boschetti May 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Although she was only in her 20s, Sarah Polley was already a veteran actress when she set out to direct her first feature film. For this intended debu...
Through the Looking Glass: The Gold Diggers Isabella Gullifer-Laurie May 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Sally Potter characterised her first feature, The Gold Diggers (1983), as “a musical describing a female quest.” A labyrinthine, post-punk exploration...
The Go-Between Gabrielle O'Brien May 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Based upon L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971) is an elegant film in its pristine formal composition and beguiling Edwardia...
