Sight and Sound: the December 2026 issue

“What are we to make of our friend Godzilla, who has been kicking around our cities for more than 70 years? Ever constant and ever protean, he’s thrived as a brand and a franchise and a cultural imaginary, serving as the good guy, bad guy, victim, perpetrator and bystander – see some of those the-gang’s-all-here free-for-alls that Toho produced in the late 1960s with titles like Destroy All Monsters. On top of all that, he has been a pioneer in opening up the global market for the monster movie while, in interpretive terms, serving as a metaphor for all we hold dear and our capacity for mayhem, as well as, perhaps, a figure for one of our first inklings that we might have a reckoning in store from the natural world we are abusing. Along the way, Godzilla has transitioned from being brought to life by special effects that even ten-year-olds had to consider indulgently to being conjured up by the kind of state-of-the-art VFX that can still flatten our ability to resist and increase our capacity for wonder, even at this late date.”

— Jim Shepard on Godzilla, in our cover feature

Over seven decades, Godzilla has inspired both terror and affection, evolving from over seven decades, Godzilla has inspired both terror and affection, evolving from metaphor for atomic destruction into an unlikely hero and beloved global icon. As cinema’s most famous monster returns in Godzilla Minus Zero, how did a giant radioactive ocean- dwelling dinosaur come to mean so much to so many people? By Jim Shepard. 

After fulfilling a childhood dream with the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, Yamazaki Takashi gets bigger and bloodier with the sequel Godzilla Minus Zero. He talks to Steven Sloss about his long road to the franchise, Japan’s wartime scars and why he sees Godzilla not as a monster to be destroyed but an angry god to be appeased. 

Oscar-winning VFX artist Nojima Tatsuji tells Steven Sloss about turning abstract ideas into spectacular images and building on the franchise’s tradition of practical effects. 

After 39 feature-film rampages, Toho’s titanic dinosaur may have reached pensionable age, but his powers show no sign of decline. We put Kim Newman on the monster’s tail to score every bout. 

In Primetime, Robert Pattinson plays the paedophile-trapping US TV presenter Chris Hansen as a compulsive masked crusader. Director Lance Oppenheim talks to Thomas Flew about spinning fever dreams from real life. 

The films of the Korean director Lee Chang-dong are delicate in their attention to the tiniest aspects of ordinary people’s lives and imaginations, sweeping in their picture of the rifts of class and income that divide the contemporary world. With his latest, Possible Love, arriving in cinemas and on Netflix, he talks to Isabel Stevens. 

An audacious gay melodrama unfolding across three periods of Spanish history, La bola negra draws on an unfinished Lorca play to explore forbidden desire and multigenerational trauma. Its directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, aka Los Javis, discuss poetry, passion and the complicated freedoms of modern Spain. By MariaDelgado.

For Quentin Tarantino, one of the joys of youth was his ardour for the films of Brian De Palma – but there was one film, the bare-budget experimental thriller Murder à la Mod, that always played hard to see. Watching it now, the director hails a flawed but key work in De Palma’s career and the New York New Wave – and revisits the fires of his own fandom. 

Closing out the fifth anniversary of the BFB’s return to print, we discuss ancestral magic with the director and stars of Children of Blood and Bone and expanding the Black canon with Ashley Clark – and reflect on the cultural changes we’ve seen since the bulletin began. 

Tomi Adeyemi’s young-adult bestseller Children of Blood and Bone confronts racism and persecution through dazzling fantasy inflected with West African culture and mythology – and has now been adapted as a star-studded blockbuster by Gina Prince-Bythewood. She and actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lashana Lynch talk to Eloïse King about collaboration, representation, youth and magic. 

In his latest book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, film programmer and Criterion Collection curatorial director Ashley Clark makes his case for an expansion of the diasporic Black film canon beyond American hegemony. BFB editor Jan Asante sat down with Clark to connect the dots. 

To wrap up five years since the Black Film Bulletin returned to print, Nadia Awad takes stock of its significance, from its formulation of the hopes and struggles of early 1990s Black filmmaking to its window on the strides made by Black film culture today. 

The parodic documentarian Philomena Cunk, played to poker-faced perfection by Diane Morgan, turns her attention to film history with creator Charlie Brooker’s help – both talk to Arjun Sajip about the upcoming BBC series. 

New films by Catarina Vasconcelos, Olivier Assayas, Colm Bairéad, Sharon Maguire and Julia Ducournau. By Hope Rangaswami.

The CODA director’s third film Being Heumann details a critical moment in disability rights history. By Charlie Little. 

Imamura Shōhei’s formidable female characters have inspired striking, colourful portraits. By Hope Rangaswami.

Irma Vep lit up my path into silent film history, and showed how the past endlessly opens up the new. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

After Rod Serling’s fights on the frontier of The Twilight Zone, his next series followed a weary western path. By Andrew Male.

Die My Love vents the same abandoned female fury and frustration as Elena Ferrante’s best novel. By Nicole Flattery.

If You Can See Everything teaches you one thing, it’s not to trust anyone – even yourself. By Mike Williams. 

Sydney Pollack’s bleak 1969 drama, set during a dance marathon in early 1930s California, is a grimly satirical take on the crazed competitiveness and chronic exhaustion inseparable from the American dream. It feels very far from being a period piece. By Arjun Sajip. 

Mexican miniaturist Nicolás Pereda’s latest chamber drama, Everything Else Is Noise, pokes fun at art-world insularity through the unravelling of an aurally challenged interview in a classical musician’s apartment. The director discusses the comedy of creative travails. By Adam Nayman. 

Already on a roll after her Oscar-winning short film Wasp, Andrea Arnold launched her feature filmmaking career 20 years ago with Red Road, a striking sexual revenge drama set on a former Glasgow tower-block estate, with Kate Dickie’s CCTV camera operator as its inscrutable protagonist. 

Our critics review: Magellan, Primetime, Godzilla Minus Zero, La bola negra, Onwards and Sideways, The Social Reckoning, Being Heumann, Filipiñana, Minotaur, Shot Reverse Shot, Making Marie Antoinette, Josephine, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Heysel 85, American Doctor, A Talent for Murder, Wild Horse Nine, Fjord, Digger, NAZA, I Play Rocky. 

Our critics rewview: Treasures from the Golestan Film Studio, Days and Nights in the Forest, Daniel Farson’s Guide to Britain: Vol.2, I Even Met Happy Gypsies, Friday the 13th, Hard Eight, The Desperate Hours, Pressure, Flic Story, The Screaming Skull. 

Our critics review: Frank Capra: A Life, The Steps