Sight and Sound: the June 2025 issue

“It took just a pink shirt, white socks and a slide. Into the public consciousness glided Tom Cruise, his bare left leg snapping taut in the beat before the intro to Bob Seger’s ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’ kicked in again in Risky Business (1983). He’s never left it. Over 40 years and 40 films after this nifty move into an empty frame and his raucous dance, lip-syncing into a candlestick, at 62 he’s still the world’s pre-eminent – and, some would argue, in our fragmented entertainment age the last – movie star.”

— Isabel Stevens introducing her cover feature, a world exclusive interview with Tom Cruise as he prepares to receive a BFI Fellowship. 

More than just one of the world’s most bankable stars, Tom Cruise is an impresario and a powerful advocate for the big-screen theatrical experience. As he prepares to receive a BFI Fellowship, he talks about his lifelong devotion to cinema and his unforgettable work with Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson. Words by Isabel Stevens. 

The Phoenician Scheme, the tale of a shady businessman in the 1950s, hurtling around Europe and the Middle East to raise funds for a new enterprise and fending off assassination threats from rivals as he does so, returns Wes Anderson to the straightforward pleasures of the caper movie. He talks about writing the film for its star, Benicio del Toro, his fascination with charismatic, powerful men, and the influence of Luis Buñuel’s late movies. By Arjun Sajip. 

Wes Anderson on the films, books and music that helped to inspire the characters and the elegant mid-century world of The Phoenician Scheme. By Arjun Sajip. 

Mai Zetterling is best known for her remarkable early acting career and for directing a trio of brilliant, controversial Swedish films in the 1960s, but any attempt to reduce her long, fascinating career to a few standout moments risks flattening a complex, contradictory artist. By Rachel Pronger. 

Lesser-known gems from Zetterling’s filmography. By Rachel Pronger. 

The Film Society, a monthly miscellany staged at West End venues in London between 1925 and 1939, played a critical role in helping to define film as the seventh art. Here are seven ways it did so, from introducing films from around the world to Britain to its influence as a seedbed for artists’ films. By Henry K. Miller. 

In this edition of Black Film Bulletin, we explore the African American western with director Mario Van Peebles, Black Britishness with Lanre Bakare, and the pioneering work of a foundational figure in African cinema, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, with Tambay Obenson. 

A recent BFI season ‘Black Rodeo’ paid homage to the counterculture phenomenon of the African American ‘western’ and its bold repudiation of mainstream Hollywood tropes. At the European premiere of Outlaw Posse, his latest auteur take on the genre, actor-director Mario Van Peebles sat down with Mia Mask, the season’s curator and professor of film at Vassar College, New York, to discuss his work in the genre. 

Excavating hidden histories of British Blackness, Lanre Bakare’s book We Were There casts an expansive and overdue spotlight on Black life in the UK and its depictions in screen cultures outside the confines of London. 

Before African cinema had institutions, support systems or even meaningful access to production tools, the Beninese Senegalese filmmaker and historian Paulin Soumanou Vieyra was laying its foundations. In celebration of the centenary of his birth, Akoroko founder Tambay Obenson retraces the triumphs of an unsung visionary.

A quick glimpse at essential events, festivals, screen and literature releases across the diaspora. 

The second edition of the BFI’s Film on Film Festival will take place at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX in June, and includes a rare showing of an original print of Star Wars, among other treasures. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

New films by Geoff Barrow, David Fincher, Goran Stolevski and Yuasa Masaaki. By Thomas Flew. 

The German filmmaker’s documentary, Riefenstahl, tries to unravel the truth about the pioneering Nazi propagandist. By Thomas Flew.   

With a plentiful offering of films from Ukraine, the Copenhagen festival stood up for truth and connection. By Nick Bradshaw.

With The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola captured the era-defining brilliance of Nancy Jo Sales’s source article. By Nicole Flattery. 

From The Shocking Miss Pilgrim to Seeking Mavis Beacon, films about women’s empowerment often revert to type. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

The latest season of Black Mirror is steeped in nostalgia, using the future as a springboard into the past. By Andrew Male. 

Ironic laughter is poisoning our cinemas. But what is the antidote? By Mike Williams. 

If a better-known director had made this chilly, ambiguous Canadian thriller, set against a background of rocketing property prices and growing household debt, perhaps it would have been recognised as a masterpiece in the mould of Michael Haneke or Edward Yang. As things turned out, it was David Christensen’s first and last feature, and it has vanished from sight. By Adam Nayman. 

While the restitution of colonial artefacts has been the subject of much recent media attention, film repatriation is less commonly discussed – but Western archives are inextricably tied to the film histories of countries as diverse as Malaysia and Trinidad and Tobago, and have faced calls to hand back some of their colonial collections. By Xavier Alexandre Pillai. 

In the 1960s Tokyo became the world’s largest city – as well as one of its most prosperous. But beneath the economic good times Japan’s youth were agitating for change – and with them a new generation of filmmakers broke away from the studio system to produce exciting, socially challenging work. This feature, originally published in 2001, looks back on a tumultuous era when Ōshima Nagisa, Yoshida Yoshishige and Shinoda Masahiro – who died in March – got their first breaks. By Donald Richie. 

Our critics review: When the Light Breaks, E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea, The Ballad of Wallis Island, Tornado, It’s Not Me, Mongrel, The Ugly Stepsisiter, The Marching Band, The Woman in the Yard, Magic Farm, Bad for a Moment, The Penguin Lessons, The Wedding Banquet, Good One, Bogancloch, Birdeater, Fréwaka, A New Kind of Wilderness, Sinners, Lollipop, The Salt Path. 

Our critics review: Oil Lamps, Prince of Broadway, Little Man, What Now?, Mabuse Lives!, Booger, Behold a Pale Horse, A Woman of Paris, Brother, Eclipse, River of Grass.

Our critics review: It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema; When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki); In the Scene: Steve McQueen.