Sight and Sound: the October 2025 issue

“When I was a young actor, I just wanted to play American and play English and not be restricted by my extraction or by my nationality. Whereas as I get older, I really want to tell our stories more and more. That’s just, I think, to do with age. But I also do think there is something in the air culturally, with film and with music. There seems to be a real energy around it. Not just flag waving, it’s trying to investigate our history and our place in the world. I think it’s all very healthy.”

— Cillian Murphy speaking to Katie McCabe in the new issue of Sight and Sound.

You can tell when somebody really knows Cillian Murphy when they start casually referring to him as ‘Cill’. That’s how it is for director Tim Mielants, and the author Max Porter, who first met the actor when he starred in the demanding stage adaptation of his 2015 novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. During lockdown, they created the short film All of This Unreal Time (2021). Eager to work together again, Porter turned to Shy, his propulsive novella told from the perspective of a troubled teen as he absconds from his ‘last chance’ school. He turned the book on its head – switching its central focus to create a film script about the school’s caring but strung-out headmaster. When I sit down with Murphy to talk about the film, Steve, the word that comes up again and again is ‘collaboration’. Almost every time he begins a sentence with ‘I’, he corrects himself to ‘we…’ It’s a personal role for the actor, who was raised by two teachers, and he knows exactly how to communicate the nerve-jangling toll the job exacts on the body and mind. By Katie McCabe.

After a brutal experience on Dune in 1984, which he felt had been butchered by the studio, David Lynch vowed to maintain tighter control of his future projects. Here his business partners, from producers Mary Sweeney and Sabrina Sutherland to his former agent Tony Krantz, explain how he clawed back his artistic freedom through discipline, frugality and canny delegation. By Phil Hoad.

The wild, hypnotic brilliance of the German actor’s performances are beyond doubt, but how do we square that knowledge with the fact that he was also a vile, egomaniacal bully and almost certainly a sexual abuser? Should we cancel him altogether – or study him, and try to learn? By Benjamin Myers.

In recent years a number of faith-based film companies in the US have helped to upend box-office expectations for Christian-themed films, with smash hits including the thriller Sound of Freedom and animation The King of Kings. Here two major producers for the Christian market discuss the big business of Jesus on screen. By Ralph Jones.

Over the last decade, in films as wildly different as The King’s Man and Triangle of Sadness, Harris Dickinson has established himself as an actor of charisma and intelligence – qualities that are also richly in evidence in his first feature as writer and director, Urchin, a morally serious film about homelessness that’s infused with a love of cinema. By Arjun Sajip.

Although cinema wasn’t part of the cultural landscape of her youth, the Argentinian director developed a fascination with filmmaking when her father bought a video camera in her teens. As her documentary Landmarks screens in Venice, she describes how film first offered her a springboard to go out and explore the world. By Lou Thomas.

The 69th edition promises, as always, exciting filmmaking from new voices and established auteurs – including the UK premiere of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Cannes hit The Secret Agent. By Isabel Stevens.

New films from Joseph Archer, Annie Baker, Jonah Hill, and Lee Chang-Dong. By Hope Rangaswami.

Terry Gilliam: ‘Someone give me the money’. By Lou Thomas.

Graphic guerrillas. By Sean Rogers.

The fable of a child’s world and a meet-cute between a model and an undertaker grace the Swiss festival. By Nick James.

Ari Aster’s Eddington, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s conspiracist sheriff and Pedro Pascal’s tech-friendly centrist lock horns in an election, lays bare the deep divisions in the American psyche. The director discusses the project’s origins and why he feels we’re living on the cusp of something new, alarming and deeply strange. By Thomas Flew.

A poster for the rerelease of Dogtooth joins a tradition of limb-led artworks, but makes a familiar motif feel fresh. By Hope Rangaswami. 

The long, the short and the tall: how to master the art of the on-stage film introduction. By Pamela Hutchinson.

Friendship and Toxic explore the remorseless pressures on friendship in a world wearied by stress and hard work. By Nicole Flattery.

The seemingly unstoppable rise of YouTube leaves UK broadcasters on the ropes. By Andrew Male.

No novel is unfilmable. All it takes is a bit of imagination. By Mike Williams.

Acclaimed internationally when it was made, and still beloved in Lebanon, this haunting story of the end of a love affair in the war-torn, wounded city has never found the audience in the West that it deserves. By Joseph Fahim.

In July, at Somerset House in London, a work by the Nigerian British filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr exploring the rituals of Black British life became the basis of an unforgettable multimedia event. By Kevin Le Gendre.

The sequel to the hit game Death Stranding explores life, death and human connection through a story set in a gorgeously realised universe infested by invisible monsters and… film directors? By Thomas Flew.

With Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another set to arrive in UK cinemas, we revisit an interview he gave to Sight and Sound at the time of the UK release of his breakthrough film Boogie Nights, in which he laid bare his feelings about porn in the 1970s and 80s – its erotic shortcomings, its dark comedy and its overwhelming sadness. Sight and Sound, January 1998, by Gavin Smith.

Our critics review: Deaf, Mother Vera, Paul & Paulette Take A Bath, Ebony & Ivory, The Glassworker, From Ground Zero: Stories From Gaza, Big Boys, The Ceremony, Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk, Happyend, Ellis Park, Brides, Islands, Young Mothers, Ghost Trail, The Golden Spurtle, The Courageous, Highest 2 Lowest, Afternoons of Solitude, The Outrage, Runaway Train, Last Man Standing, Vice is Broke.

Our critics review: Two Films by Edward Yang, Trouble Every Day, Not Guilty, The Lost One, Girl with Hyachinths, Essential Polish Animation, Bhaji on the Beach, The Shootist, Szindbád, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Though and Through, Orlando.

Our critics review: Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, Hanyŏ (The Housemaid), Circle of Lions: Nicholas Ray, Gloria Grahame and Me, A Love Story.