Sight and Sound: the Summer 2025 issue

In this special issue, we celebrate an annus mirabilis in cinema, combing our archive for contextualising features and interviews which appear here alongside fresh new appraisals. Enjoy your trip back in time.

Jaws and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The length of their titles – one an evocative flash of teeth, the other a woman’s name and address in full – tells a story in itself. Between those two films, both released in 1975, all the rest of cinema sits, a spectrum between aggression and exhilaration on the one hand, duration and repetition on the other. One reinvented Hollywood in its image, spawning five decades of summer blockbusters; the other, a challenge to preconceived notions of the ‘cinematic’, is now crowned Greatest Film of All Time by Sight and Sound’s poll. These two titles alone would make 1975 worthy of the title this issue bestows on it, ‘The year that changed cinema forever’ – add classics by Andrei Tarkovsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ousmane Sembène, Marguerite Duras, Stanley Kubrick and Agnès Varda, among others, and the reasons seem overwhelming.

The Italian costume designer recalls her work with Stanley Kubrick on his adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s picaresque novel about the roving adventures of an 18th-century Irish soldier-gambler-conman-fortune seeker.

Stuck at home with a two-year-old, her career in the doldrums, Agnès Varda decided to make a virtue of necessity and film what was going on just outside her front door, on the rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. By Carrie Rickey.

Starring in Sidney Lumet’s tragicomedy about a failed heist, Al Pacino picked up his third Best Actor Oscar nomination in a row, playing Sonny Wortzik, who has turned to bank robbery to fund the surgery his trans lover needs. David Thomson considers the great actor’s career, and what it has to tell us about modern masculinity.

Set in the gilded world of the French embassy in Calcutta in the 1930s, as leprosy stalks the city beyond, Marguerite Duras’s enigmatic film explores boredom, alienation and colonial guilt in a tale of the doomed life of a failed concert pianist married to the French ambassador. On the occasion of the film’s release in the UK, Sight and Sound spoke to the director to try to understand the film’s ghostly magic.

Steven Spielberg’s spellbinding box-office monster transformed the way we think about cinema, both as a business and an artform. Jessica Kiang explores an ageless masterpiece that has lost none of its nerve-shredding ability to tap into humanity’s most primal fears. 

A flop isn’t always a bad thing for a filmmaker. Ousmane Sembène’s uproarious comedy uses an attack of impotence as a stick to beat Africa’s self-serving new postcolonial elites, and what it lacks in subtlety, it makes up in recognisability and righteousness. By Guy Lodge.

Against a backdrop of threats on tariffs from Donald Trump, Cannes showed cinema to be in rude health, and the biggest story of the festival was positive: the return of one of the most admired living filmmakers, Jafar Panahi. By Isabel Stevens PLUS Cannes talking points, including critics’ reviews, an interview with Joachim Trier, new kids on the block and the unavoidable issue of Gaza.

Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s return to feature filmmaking after a decade working in television, sees the Greek director tackling an ‘unadaptable’ novel about a community violently upended by the enclosure of its land. She talks to Kieron Corless about the fable-like nature of the material, the ‘transcendental’ experience of the shoot and why she didn’t want to make a period film.

No filmmaker has been as preoccupied as David Cronenberg by flesh and the many ways it can be transformed. In his latest film, the 82-year-old looks at the last transformation flesh undergoes, through the story of a tech entrepreneur who invents a system for observing the dead in their coffins. Here, he talks about death, film and conspiracy in the digital age.

As Jurassic World Rebirth arrives in UK cinemas, we revisit Peter Wollen’s illuminating 1993 article, in which he asks what the 1925 monster movie The Lost World, the 19th-century dinosaur cult and Hitchcock’s The Birds share with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. 

Music editors Lori Eschler and Dean Hurley, who worked with David Lynch on different seasons of Twin Peaks, recall the pleasures of collaborating with the great director: his infectious sense of wonder, his bold sonic tricks and his delight in experimentation. By Sam Davies. 

Rachel Pronger visits the set of Clio Barnard’s new film, I see Buildings Fall like Lightning. 

New films by Jane Schoenbrun, Andrucha Waddington, Timo Tjahjanto, Damien Chazelle and Adam Pearson to play Joseph Merrick in a new adaptation of The Elephant Man. By Hope Rangaswami. 

With a Dorothy Dandridge season opening at BFI Southbank, her biographer talks about her career. By Miriam Bale.

To celebrate the 90th anniversary of the BFI’s National Film Library, now called the National Archive, we explore the first decade of the library’s existence and the impact that World War II had on its work. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

Charlie Chaplin’s comic takedown of the Nazis in The Great Dictator stands as a monument to optimism. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

The satire in The Studio and Perfection lacks the killer instincts of past masters like The Player. By Nicole Flattery. 

The warmth, generosity and welcome refusal to judge in Dying for Sex is a revelation for American TV. By Andrew Male. 

It’s a shit business? Slade in Flame exposes the very non-glam side of the music industry. By Mike Williams. 

The drama of exile from Nazi Germany is embedded, often invisibly, in cinema’s global history. It is made visible in a monumental German TV series, now 50 years old, and in the strange experimental work of one of the exiled. By Ehsan Khoshbakht. 

At the 15th edition of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, movie magic is conjured through site-specific installations, multimedia works and an invigorating programme of shorts. The result is a communitarian gathering that captures the best of what festivals can offer. By Sophia Satchell-Baeza. 

Reviews of: The Phoenician Scheme, The Shrouds, Ballerina, From Hilde with Love, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Dying, Zero, The Encampments, Red Path, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, The Other Way Around, Harvest, The Secret Garden, Final Destination: Bloodlines, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Hot Milk, Hallow Road, Sudan, Remember Us, Autumn, Echo Valley, The Prosecutor. 

Reviews of: Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA, Slade in Flame, The Railroad Man, The Magnificent Chang Cheh: The Magnificent Trio and Magnificent Wanderers, Dangerous to know, A Samurai in Time, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ishanou, Tokyo Pop, Themroc. 

Four recent translations of writings by Chris Marker offer further insight into the filmmaker as a critic, historian, sociologist and poet-reporter, writes Chris Darke.

Reviews of: Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, The Director, Wanda.