Sight and Sound: the June 2026 issue

“I always liked Marilyn, my favourite of her films being How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), one of the best ‘three girls on the make’ movies. In some ways this is also the quintessential Monroe vehicle. She brings her superb timing and line delivery to the role of a beauty in search of a rich man. She has the smallest of the three main parts (the other two being Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall), but she’s the most memorable. Most important of all, Marilyn’s Pola is a little naive, but she’s not dumb. What may seem like Pola’s brain fog is caused by her being “blind as a bat”, and too insecure to wear glasses. Even as a kid, I knew that getting a huge laugh on a single syllable – “Oh” – when Pola is told she’s reading a book upside down was the mark of a true gift. Later on, I realised that after Marilyn Monroe, as after her idol Jean Harlow, no one ever played a blonde in a comedy – dumb or otherwise – in quite the same way again.”

— Farran Smith Nehme on Marilyn Monroe, in our cover feature

During her lifetime, Marilyn Monroe was condescended to by critics, directors and other actors, who too often confused her with the dumb blondes she was asked to play. One hundred years after her birth it’s time to put aside the distractions of her beauty and the tragic aspects of her life and consider the knockout moments in her films that illuminate what she really was – a hard-working, gifted and hugely original actress. By Farran Smith Nehme. 

The Mexican director receives a BFI Fellowship this month for his prolific body of work straddling fantasy and gothic horror, as well as his unstoppable endeavours to support the wider film culture. Here he retraces the roots of his cinephilia, extolling little men, ecstatic monsters and his holy trinity of Hitchcock, Buñuel and Fellini. Interview and introduction by Mar Diestro-Dópido. 

As the international success of Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent brings Brazilian cinema into the spotlight, we look back at the outpouring of thrillingly imaginative and original films that the military dictatorship of April 1964 to March 1985 perversely inspired. By Filipe Furtado. 

Two drum-and-bass artists, NC-17 and High Contrast, have a surprising side gig: using a homemade scanner to preserve theatrical film prints, leaving texture and blemishes intact. Their endeavour speaks to the pleasures and limits of analogue, and suggests that DJs and archivists have more in common than you think. By Hope Rangaswami. 

Celebrating the fifth anniversary of the BFB’s return to print, we showcase a Paris conversation between June Givanni and director Euzhan Palcy, explore the power of Black resistance through humour in film, and catch up with Akinola Davies Jr fresh from his Bafta win. 

For her Pan-African cinema archive project ‘Excavating Legacies’, June Givanni sat down in Paris with Martinican director Euzhan Palcy for a conversation spanning tensions between awards recognition and access to funding, Palcy’s unrealised films and the geographies and figures that have defined both women’s itinerant careers. Abiba Coulibaly introduces their discussion. 

Examining a centuries-old tradition of Black resistance humour etched within the fraught social fabric of American culture, Artel Great appraises the cinematic power of Black comedy, parody and satire as signifiers of complex truths. 

Fresh on the heels of his Bafta win for Outstanding Debut by a British writer-director, filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr speaks to ‘Beyond Nollywood’ curator Nadia Denton about the zeitgeist, creating his own mythologies, and what comes next. 

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

With his intense and gory horror Obsession, the story of a young man’s life in ruins when he gets everything he wishes for, Curry Barker is the latest emerging filmmaker to make the jump from YouTube shorts to big-screen features. By Philip Concannon. 

The director’s psychodrama Mother Mary, in which Anne Hathaway faces off against Michaela Coel, mines ghost stories and his Catholic upbringing, and takes its cue from modern pop icons. By Katie McCabe. 

New films by Radu Jude, Justine Triet, Alex garland and Bertrand Bonello. By Hope Rangaswami. 

Celluloid serves as a striking and evocative visual theme in the marketing of metafictional films. By Tom Saer. 

Kind Hearts and Coronets is the cutthroat forebear of a yet more cynical satire of today’s corporate order. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

Cutbacks are spurring the resurgence of some BBC archive treasures – but locking away others. By Andrew Male. 

The best films about romantic relationships reflect all our muddled feelings back at us. By Nicole Flattery. 

Viva 1926! The year that gave us television, documentary, animation, sound… and Marilyn Monroe. By Mike Williams. 

Isaki Lacuesta’s bewitching film is a fiction that verges on documentary, in which nonprofessional actors – a Roma boy on the edge of manhood, a Japanese woman who longs to be a flamenco singer – play versions of themselves. By Mary Harrod

Adapted from the sleeper-hit video game The Exit 8, a walking simulator in which a Tokyo commuter roams the glitchy labyrinth of a blank subway station, Kawamura Genki’s Exit 8 shuffles in the footsteps of a long line of fugue-state modernists, from Antonioni, Kubrick and Marker to Van Sant and Bi Gan. By Adam Nayman. 

As a rare, complete retrospective of the films of Ritwik Ghatak, one of India’s most radical and fervent filmmakers, comes to BFI Southbank half a century after his early death, we revisit the late Derek Malcolm’s appraisal of Ghatak’s embattled career across eight vital and challenging films. 

Our critics review: The Christophers, Orphan, Hen, Eagles of the Republic, Lesbian Space Princess, The Balloonists, Hokum, Madfabulous, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Endless Cookie, The Drama, Enzo, Tuner, Moss & Freud, Erupcja, Queer as Punk, Normal, Obsession, The Girl who Cried Pearls, Mother Mary, Power Ballad. 

Our critics review: Time to Play: Films by Jacques Rozier, Matador, Romancing in Thin Air, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, Underworld Chronicles: Three Yakuza Fables by Takashi Miike, Trouble in Paradise, The Big City, Highway to Hell, Bulk, All my Sons. 

Our critics review: No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene, Ken Jacobs: I walked into my shortcomings.