Sight and Sound: the November 2025 issue

On the cover: Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro on reanimating Frankenstein.

Inside the issue: A journey to the Zanzibar International Film Festival in the Black Film Bulletin, an interview with The Mastermind director Kelly Reichardt, Rebecca Miller on her five-part portrait of director Martin Scorsese, and Guillermo del Toro talks about the gothic, generational pain, and what comes next.

“This is a movie I’ve been pursuing for decades. I was pursuing it actually before I had a camera, as a kid – as soon as I learned what directing was.”

-  Guillermo del Toro in the new issue of Sight and Sound.

Guillermo del Toro’s lavish version of Frankenstein is the culmination of a lifelong obsession and, the director says, the end of a phase in his artistic career. He talks about the gothic, generational pain, war and technology, the let-down that comes after a great creative effort – and what comes next. By Jonathan Romney.

Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind offers a fresh spin on the crime caper movie in a tale of a deadbeat thief planning a snatch and-grab raid on an art gallery in 1970. The director explains why this is ‘more of a coming-undone film than a heist film’ and how her impulse to question genre norms helps her uncover new ways of thinking. By Beatrice Loayza.

Rebecca Miller’s riveting five-part portrait of Martin Scorsese examines his life and films through interviews with the director and the people who have known him, exploring the mean streets of New York that made him and the religious connection that drives his work. She explains the thrill of ‘trying to ride his intelligence like a bucking bronco’. Introduction and interview by Philip Horne.

Andy Mundy-Castle’s documentary Shoot the People focuses on Oscar-nominated British Nigerian photographer, filmmaker and activist Misan Harriman, who was the first Black man to shoot a cover of British Vogue, examining how protest and organised movements can lead to social change. The pair talk to Afua Hirsch about the meaning of life and film, the state of the industry and their shared Nigerian roots. Interviewed by Afua Hirsch.

Few recent Hollywood films have tackled the subject of climate change head-on, but Paul Greengrass has placed the issue right at the heart of The Lost Bus, a blistering true-life tale of a school bus full of children trapped by raging fires in California. By Isabel Stevens.

What’s on at this year’s BFI London Film Festival. By the Sight and Sound team.

New films by Gints Zilbalodis, Josephine Decker, Lulu Wang and Tomás Pichardo Espaillat. By Michael Leader and Hope Rangaswami.

Derek Cianfrance is best known for emotionally challenging films like Blue Valentine, but his latest film has a lighter touch: Roofman is based on the real-life story of a serial robber who after raiding multiple branches of McDonald’s hid from police for six months inside a toy shop. By Hope Rangaswami.

VistaVision, the 1950s ancestor of Imax, is making a belated comeback – with Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another the first film projected in the widescreen format in the UK since the days of Powell and Pressburger. Take that, CinemaScope! By Philip Concannon.

Ancient dreads return to life in Graham Humphreys’ gorgeously retro hand-drawn horror artwork. By Liz Tray.

Let’s celebrate the fact that cinema attendance is up and young people are still embracing the cinema. By Pamela Hutchinson.

The Play for Today revival on Channel 5 rekindles memories of the revelatory brilliance of the original series. By Andrew Male.

The hollowness and class anxieties at the heart of Celine Song’s Materialists echo Edith Wharton. By Nicole Flattery.

Frankenstein’s monster is a stitched-together canvas on to which filmmakers, and viewers, can project their fears and fascinations. By Mike Williams.

We are all in the gutter, and while some of us may be looking at the stars, others actually find the gutter more satisfying and interesting. The gleeful provocations of the post-punk New York auteur Nick Zedd hint at what John Waters might have been like stripped of any instinct to ingrat ate himself with an audience. By Will Sloan.

Louise Weard’s beguiling, lovable lo-fi epic, which currently runs to more than nine hours, offers a dazzling mix of queer soap opera and genre-hopping odyssey to explore themes of identity and self-discovery. By Rachel Pronger.

Cinelogue, a non-profit streaming site, is quietly rewriting the rules of digital exhibition. By Hope Rangaswami.

With a major retrospective of the work of Terence Davies set to screen in London, we revisit the numerous interviews he gave to Sight and Sound over the years, to hear his memories of falling in love with the cinema in the 1950s, the acting styles he liked and loathed and his dread of sex scenes. In a short introduction from 1994 Jennifer Howarth, the producer of Distant Voices, Still Lives, recalls meeting the director at film school.

Our critics review: Bugonia, The Mastermind, Hedda, Frankenstein, Steve, One Battle After Another, The Smashing Machine, A House of Dynamite, How to Shoot a Ghost, Urchin, Tape, Souleymane’s Story, Plainclothes, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Kontinental ‘25, Good Boy, Honey Don’t!, A Want in Her, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, After the Hunt, The Long Walk, Caught Stealing.

Our critics review: Michael Haneke: A Curzon Collection, Who Wants to Kill Jessie?, The Graduate, and The Pusher Trilogy.

Our critics review: Darkness Visible: The Cinema of Jonathan Glazer, Mark Kermode’s Surround Sound: The Stories of Movie Music, and Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde — Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop.