Sight and Sound: the October 2026 issue

“With a giant, gushing geyser of blood, American director Jane Schoenbrun announces a playful new direction. In a glistening wide shot early in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the villain of their multilayered slasher film enters the frame to gouge one of his victims with a spear, unleashing a crimson fountain the size of a modest apartment block. “It was something of a loosening of my belt,” Schoenbrun says of the scene, “committing to excess instead of restraint.”

— Katie McCabe introducing her cover interview and feature with Jane Schoenbrun on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

From the internet-coded worlds of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow to the sex and blood of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun has emerged as one of American cinema’s most distinctive voices. The director talks genre, desire and the strange territory where reality can be remade. By Katie McCabe. 

The director talks us through their career, from a short created with school-broadcast found footage and collaborative work to their breakthrough features We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. 

Denmark’s genre- and boundary-pushing Nicolas Winding Refn has returned to feature filmmaking with Her Private Hell, a misty mystery fable made under the sign of one of his heroes, giallo maestro Dario Argento. When the two recently met in Rome, the conversation amounted to an inventory of the human corpus and its filmic uses. Introduction and annotations by John Bleasdale. 

From his breakthrough screenplay for Training Day to recent fruitful collaborations with Jason Statham, David Ayer has scaled the heights of white-knuckle action filmmaking. Taking his Brad Pitt-starring Alaskan survivalist thriller Heart of the Beast as a case study, he shares his lessons from 25 years of forging thrills. By Philip Concannon. 

From a creative awakening in the movie palaces of his childhood Mumbai to watching Satyajit Ray at work, screenwriting Midnight’s Children and playing a clutch of cameos, the writer’s life has intersected with cinema in myriad ways. As his near-death memoir Knife comes to the screen, he shares his encounters and inspirations. Interview and introduction by Nick James. 

Sarah Maldoror, now celebrated with a season at BFI Southbank, has long stood as an exemplar of politically radical filmmaking. But her films are also intimate works of joy, celebration and beauty. By Rachel Pronger.

Eighteen years after his acclaimed debut Ballast, US writer-director Lance Hammer is back with the London-set Queen at Sea, a searching drama about dementia, love and safeguarding. He discusses its moral dilemmas and working a cast including Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall and Juliette Binoche. By Jonathan Romney. 

BFI festivals director Kristy Matheson teases the festival’s 70th edition lineup, whose hottest ticket may just be Ken Russell’s The Devils, a restored director’s cut of the infamous, crucifix-clutching masterwork. By Isabel Stevens. 

In a BFI London Film Festival programme crammed full of the best of new cinema from across the world, many films – some by established auteurs, others by exciting new voices – risk being overlooked. Here, we select eight titles you may not get a chance to see anywhere else.

The American director talks through key influences on I Want Your Sex, from the leading ladies of screwball comedies to the visual pleasures of Wong Kar Wai. By Blake Simons.

New films by Luna Carmoon, Bong Joon Ho, Pablo Larraín, Brady Corbet and Sarah Polley. By Hope Rangaswami.

Director Georgia Oakley follows up Blue Jean with an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, jumping from the 1980s to Austen’s 18th-century-set drama of romance and manners. By Hope Rangaswami.

One of the most important visual documents of American life in the 1980s, Paris Is Burning, which has been restored for a Blu-ray release, gave a voice to the leading lights of NYC’s queer ballroom culture. By Alex Davidson. 

Ghana’s inventive and unconventional film posters bring subtext to the surface. By Hope Rangaswami.

Samantha Morton’s astonishing Circe elevates The Odyssey, like many single-scene triumphs. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

Fame-sick Lena Dunham might appreciate Career Girls’ expression of the latent bonds of friendship. By Nicole Flattery.

Furious holds no hope of ending cyclical patriarchal abuse, but it can say where the bodies are buried. By Andrew Male.

Alex Gibney’s doc shows us the real, human Salman Rushdie. Now, how about filming his books? By Mike Williams. 

A scandal in its day, this hidden-camera documentary about a sex worker in Rome, made for Italian state television by a feminist collective, was banned before broadcast and seemingly vanished forever – but maybe not. By Erika Balsom. 

Two unmade Alex Cox screenplays plunge into the dark heart of American power and corruption. Together, they illuminate the uncompromising politics that made Cox such a troublesome fit for Hollywood. By Will Sloan. 

Twenty-four years after 24 Hour Party People reprised – and enshrined – the story of Factory Records and 80s Manchester, Michael Winterbottom’s film is re-releasing in UK cinemas. Here, we revisit Ryan Gilbey’s appraisal of its use of irony and irreverence to subvert the deferential tendencies of more conventional biopics. 

Our critics review: Bad Apples, Knife, Leviticus, The End of Oak Street, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, Better Go Mad in the Wild, Nervous Energy, The Weight, Songs of Forgotten Trees, Tony, Kikuyu Land, Extra Geography, Coyote vs. Acme, Her Private Hell, Babystar, Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii: Junior Ghosts – Premorphic Drift; A Fragmentary Passage, Ancestral Visions of the Future, Barrio Triste, Queen at Sea, Pulp, Blue Film. 

Our critics review: Histoire(s) du cinéma and Other Works, Scars of the Sun / Blow the Night, Ten Women in Black, Two Boxes: Televised Terror in Franco’s Spain, Jiří Trnka: Puppet Master, Dead Man’s Shoes, Billy Liar. 

Our critics review: Élisabeth, The Edges of Cinema: essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture