Sight and Sound: the April 2026 issue

“Every year, usually beginning sometime in September and extending through the holiday deluge, there emerge a series of screen performances so showy and impressive, so conspicuous in their conjoined displays of craft and ambition, that there is nothing to be done with them but to bestow nominations and prizes.”

— Adam Nayman introduces our cover feature, the art of acting 

As the awards season reaches its climax, we look deeper at the how and the why of acting excellence, as well as the who. Below, Adam Nayman weighs last year’s most astonishing screen turns. Over the next pages, actors from Isabelle Huppert and Wagner Moura to Sopé Dìsírù and Jennifer Lawrence nominate the performances they treasure, while Jodie Foster, Ethan Hawke, Daniel Day-Lewis and the legendary Kim Novak tell us about their craft. 

On a wave of acclaim for her performance as Shakespeare’s wife Agnes in Hamnet, Buckley spoke to Mark Kermode on stage at BFI Southbank about her first encounters with stagecraft and cameras, finding her way into her characters and the magic of live communion. 

Half a century after her breakout aged 12 in Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster stands as an icon of on-screen intelligence and force of will. She tells Catherine Wheatley about learning from Robert De Niro, the precision of her method and testing herself anew in the French romantic thriller A Private Life.

Speaking on stage at BFI Southbank with Mark Kermode during last year’s London Film Festival, the screen legend recounted his immersive method schooling, and his links to Chekhov, Alec Guinness and Sean Bean. 

The actress immortalised as the twinned faces of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo spent little more than a decade in Hollywood before she quit the fame game. Now the subject of the documentary Kim Novak’s Vertigo, she tells Hannah McGill about her career encounters, her fight for self expression and how she found her creativity.

An actor since his teenage years, Ethan Hawke’s career has straddled Hollywood roles from Dead Poets Society to Gattaca and Training Day and a rich partnership with Richard Linklater. Now nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the latter’s Blue Moon, he talks about the movies that have inspired him – and trying to pass the baton. Interview and introduction by Samuel Wigley. 

The successes of German-Turkish drama Yellow Letters and British film Queen at Sea should have been the Berlinale’s focus, but yet another year of political fallout overshadowed the occasion. By Thomas Flew. 

New films by Liam Saint-Pierre, Lisandro Alonso, Annika Berg, Isabella Eklöf, Mike Leigh and Tomas Alfredson. By Hope Rangaswami.

VFX producer James Alexander and designer Michael Ralla explain how they put together the scenery, music and precise double performance from Michael B. Jordan in Ryan Coogler’s blues-and-blood picture Sinners. By Nick Hasted.

The Icelandic director discusses casting his homeland and his own children in the family drama The Love That Remains. By Jonathan Romney. 

Tom Charity remembers Robert Duvall, 5 January 1931 – 15 February 2026. 

The vibrancy of James Bidgood’s tale of a gay hustler is matched by the shocking pinks of its posters. By Emma Michaelsen Aasland.

The latest Game of Thrones and Marvel spin-offs bring those overbearing sagas down to earth. By Andrew Male. 

AI wants to be the film restorer’s friend. It’s hard to credit. By Pamela Hutchinson

Play hard? Saipan’s Roy Keane wrestles with the limits of the sporting drive. By Nicole Flattery. 

When pop stars venture into movies, are they acting, or just being? By Mike Williams. 

It’s an interesting coincidence that Jacques Scandelari’s West Side story, about a bear on the loose among the sweaty, filthy nightspots inhabited by New York’s gay subcultures in the 1970s, shares a soundtrack with Donald Trump’s rallies. But that’s all it is, right? By Peter Strickland. 

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s second feature Collective Monologue films the inmates of zoos and animal sanctuaries in Argentina with an imaginative eye open to many meanings. She talks about care, confinement and her spirit of unfettered inquiry. By Erika Balsom. 

With his National Gallery commission Dance of the sun on the water, Ming Wong revisits the iconography of Saint Sebastian across Western art history – finding particular kinship with Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane. By Sophia Satchell-Baeza. 

Thirty years ago Maggie Cheung, a Hong Kong action heroine turned Wong Kar Wai muse, starred as herself playing a silent-film icon in the bold French experiment Irma Vep. She and her directors Wong, Stanley Kwan and Olivier Assayas talked about her screen power and her acting from the heart. By Bérénice Reynaud.

Our critics review: Resurrection, Broken English, La Grazia, The Love That Remains, Splitsville, Orwell: 2+2=5, Pompei: Below the Clouds, DJ Ahmet, Collective Monologue, Everybody to Kenmure Street, How to Make a Killing, The Good Boy, Flint, A Pale View of Hills, The Moment, The Tasters, D Is for Distance, Arco, Two Prosecutors, Dead Man’s Wire and “Wuthering Heights”. 

Our critics review: Columbia Noir #7: Made in Britain, Libido, American Yakuza, Excalibur, Birth, Save the Green Planet!, The Japanese Godfather Trilogy, The Straight Story, Iphigenia and Strongroom. 

Our critics review: Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, The Last Kings of Hollywood, Hannibal Lecter: A Life.