Sight and Sound: the Summer 2026 issue

In a world of ever-accelerating, ever more frantic change, when artificial intelligence is becoming more and more an accepted element in filmmaking, what can science fiction offer that reality doesn’t already give us? Going by the films our writers have suggested, unbounded imagination and an extraordinary capacity for turning complex ideas into astonishing visual images. Over the next 56 pages, Michael Atkinson presents an all-seeing overview of science fiction cinema in the 21st century, while critics and sci-fi novelists select a film from each year since the millennium that has expanded the genre and stretched our minds. Plus, the state of AI in filmmaking – is the hype for real? And a chance to pit your sci-fi knowledge against Kim Newman’s alternative 21st-century timeline quiz: can you name the crystal gazing films that prophesied each year from 2001 to 2050?

As imagined futures crash into reality with increasing frequency, can science-fiction cinema teach us anything, or at least help us to orient ourselves among the chaos? Michael Atkinson steps out of his module to survey the landscape of the 21st century. 

At the dawn of the social media age, in his final film, the late anime director Kon Satoshi let it all hang out, orchestrating a surrealist carnival of networked dreams that spill into and subsume reality as tech is hacked and ids run amok. It makes for a dazzlingly prophetic vision of our psychic transformation, says Michael Leader. 

Entwining eerie surrealism with candid scenes of Scarlett Johansson picking up Scotsmen, Jonathan Glazer’s film examined human physicality through an alien gaze, wrote Jonathan Romney in our April 2014 issue. 

In recent work, the filmmaker Marc Isaacs has pushed at the boundary between documentary and fiction. His new film wonders what happens to that boundary when AI can manufacture people. Dominic Lees spoke to him. 

It’s not been easy to keep up with the rapid development of artificial intelligence in the last five years, from useful plot device on screen to powerful tool behind the camera. Dominic Lees picks seven areas where AI is proving particularly fruitful – or controversial. 

Hollywood glitz was notably absent at this year’s festival, where the most revolutionary work screened was made 55 years ago and set in the 17th century. But there was still plenty of quiet iconoclasm and fine filmmaking to celebrate. By Isabel Stevens PLUS Cannes talking points, including critics’ reviews and discoveries, interviews with Sandra Hüller, Bruce Dern and Mark Cousins’s Cannes diary.  

Named ‘outstanding film of the year’ at the 1978 London Film Festival, The Girls (Gehenu Lamai) was the debut feature of the late Sumitra Peries, whose ten films would earn her the epithet the ‘poetess of Sri Lankan cinema’. As a restoration of this heartrending story of a schoolgirl’s fate returns to UK cinemas, we print the full version of Mark Cousins’ interview with Peries for his 2018 documentary Women Make Film. Introduction by Uditha Devapriya. Interview by Mark Cousins. 

Time and Water, Sara Dosa’s follow-up to the volcano story Fire of Love, is an ode to Iceland’s melting glaciers through the eyes of the writer Andri Snær Magnason. The director talks about treasure-hunting in the archives and turning climate fear to love. By Nick Bradshaw. 

The director of family favourites like The Incredibles and Ratatouille returns this autumn with an adult animation, Ray Gunn, inspired by 1940s private detective thrillers but set in a futuristic landscape. By Isabel Stevens. 

Based on the director’s childhood, Ish examines two boys and their racialised experiences in the UK. By Leigh Singer. 

The director talks about his black comedy Rosebush Pruning’s top inspirations. By Hope Rangaswami. 

With his hand-painted designs, Tony Stella brought traditional poster design into the present. By Hope Rangaswami.

Effervescent escapism or spiky social critique? Screwball comedy was both – and still can be. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

London Falling dives into moral ruins even greyer than in Sexy Beast’s day. By Nicole Flattery. 

Another Liverpool crime drama? The Cage shares its characters’ sense of oppression. By Andrew Male. 

As the future became the present, science fiction shifted its gaze from the stars to the self. By Mike Williams. 

Víctor Erice’s painstaking documentary portrait of an artist’s attempt to capture in paint a tree in his garden is a film of enormous beauty, as well as a profound meditation on representation. Why is it almost impossible to see? By Geoff Andrew. 

Sixty years ago, our writer David Robinson ventured to MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, where Stanley Kubrick, having satirised nuclear Armageddon in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, was boldly – if enigmatically – shooting for the stars with the “science prediction” epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. From Sight and Sound, Spring 1966. BY David Robinson. 

Our critics review: Blue Heron, Rosebush Pruning, Backrooms, Time and Water, Cactus Pears, There Will Come Soft Rains, The Invite, Köln 75, My Father’s Island, The Last Viking, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, Familiar Touch, Effi o Blaenau, Nino, Ish, Shoot the People, Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, The Last one for the Road, Dry Leaf, I am Frankelda, Synthetic Sincerity. 

Our critics review: Gilda, Crucible of Horror, Jeanne la Pucelle, Leaving Las Vegas, Invaders from Mars, Cécile Is Dead, Hammer Volume Seven: Ships & Giggles, The Cars That Ate Paris, Insomnia, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Transcending Dimensions, Rockers, Five Easy Pieces. 

Our critics review: Jane Fonda: There’s a Great Deal to Say, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies.