Sight and Sound: the March 2026 issue

“Since its release last September, the film has been a Molotov cocktail thrown into the contemporary cultural debate, when the stakes for the American project have rarely seemed higher. Reviews by right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro have condemned it as dangerous leftist propaganda. On the other side have come arguments that it plays to the right’s concocted fear of a coordinated antifa network working to bring down the America they imagine. Anderson himself has sidestepped such debates, refusing to be drawn either way, and insisting instead that the film is less about the immediate moment than it is about a more ongoing tension in American life – a recurring “disease”, as he puts it – and that, in any case, most audiences have responded to it as the barrelling action thriller it undoubtedly is.”

— James Bell on One Battle After Another, in our cover interview

Landing at a moment of profound political shock and turmoil, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth feature, the darkly comical action thriller One Battle After Another, has captured the zeitgeist like few f ilms do. In this rare and wide-ranging interview, the writer-director discusses the film’s inspirations, innovations and topicality, his loyalty to celluloid and the formative influence of Steven Spielberg on his career. Words by James Bell. Portrait by Pal Hansen. 

Emerging as a child star at the turn of the century, Kristen Stewart has accumulated a body of work that straddles Twilight fame and arthouse distinction. Now a writer-director with The Chronology of Water, she explains how she connected with Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of childhood trauma and its liberating female expression. By Mary Harrod.

Kristen Stewart details some of her formative cinematic influences.

Harking back to the 1970s dog days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sometimes grizzly, always gripping satirical period thriller The Secret Agent mixes cinematic modes to potent effect. He talks about putting on screen the sprawling complexities and brutalities of his nation’s history. By Isabel Stevens.

A sublime, pounding cinematic foray with a father and son joining five ravers on a quest through Morocco’s primal desert scapes, Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt is a film of rolling awe and several shocks. The Galician filmmaker discusses his intuitive, sensorial filmmaking, the give and take of the desert, Death and other inspirations and the transcendent qualities of celluloid. By Guy Lodge. 

After co-writing The Brutalist with Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold is back in the director’s chair with The Testament of Ann Lee, a musical biopic starring Amanda Seyfried as the Mancunian prophet of Shakerism in America. She talks about emancipatory equality, feminist celibacy and artisanal filmmaking. By David Thompson. 

Built around a frenetic performance by Timothée Chalamet as a prodigious New York table-tennis scrabbler, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme has been raising critical plaudits along with audiences’ pulses. The director talks about dreams, drive and delusions – and how to choreograph a rally. By Thomas Flew. 

In the barbed comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein’s first feature in 17 years, Rose Byrne plays a mother on the edge, juggling a sick child, a collapsing home and a mounting sense of isolation. Bronstein talks about channelling her own experiences – and testing where audiences will follow. By Katie McCabe. 

The Hungarian director, who has died aged 70, was a pioneer of slow cinema whose uncompromising vision reshaped the possibilities of filmic time and space, most famously in his seven-hour magnum opus Sátántangó. Here, three of his collaborators – Fred Kelemen, Tilda Swinton and Guy Maddin – pay tribute.

New films by Miryam Charles, Charlie Polinger, Boots Riley and Alice Birch. By Hope Rangaswami. 

The director mixes personal and political in his impressive Lagos set debut My Father’s Shadow. By Hope Rangaswami. 

Four decades after it started as Gay’s Own Pictures with a nine film presentation at the National Film Theatre, BFI Flare has become the UK’s largest and longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival. Here are ten lesser-known films that trace its journey. By Alex Davidson. 

As a 40th birthday treat, we dust off some of the most brilliant Flare posters in the BFI Archive. By Hope Rangaswami. 

There are many ways for a film version of Wuthering Heights to be authentic – or inauthentic. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

Josh Safdie and Philip Roth share a quality – a supreme love of tastelessness. By Nicole Flattery. 

The Lowdown fights back against Taylor Sheridan’s land grab of Indigenous American themes. By Andrew Male.

And the winner is… viral showmanship, metatheatre and the never-ending pursuit of authenticity. By Mike Williams. 

Though Ritwik Ghatak’s importance as a filmmaker is widely recognised, his work is largely invisible outside India – and in the case of this thrilling tragedy of love, caste and modernity, that’s baffling. By Tom Charity. 

Our annual poll of the year’s best video essays, as nominated by 72 critics and practitioners, this year threw up 255 examples, all listed online. Here we spotlight eight of the best – and weigh up how the practice is evolving across different realms of production and reception. By Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková, Occitane Lacurie and Kevin B. Lee. 

Marking ten years since the death of Andrzej Wajda, a BFI retrospective celebrates the towering Polish director whose films bore witness to his country’s experience of war and tyranny. In this late interview he reflected on historical filmmaking, evading censorship and the lessons of American cinema. By Michael Brooke and Kamila Kuc. 

Our critics review: The Sound of Falling, The Testament of Ann Lee, The Secret Agent, The President’s Cake, The Chronology of Water, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, We Were the Scenery, Marty Supreme, A Private Life, Looney Tunes: The Day the Earth Blew Up, Scarlet, The Shepherd and the Bear, Sirāt, Hamlet, Ménus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Wasteman, 100 Nights of Hero, Little Amélie, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, All that’s Left of You, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. 

Our critics review: Cinema Expanded: The Films of Frederick Wiseman, Splendid Outing, Apache, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Yi Yi, Carlton Browne of the F.O., Une femme douce, I Know Where I’m Going!, Full Moon High. 

Our critics review: The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, The Man Who Gave Me a Biscuit, David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema.