APRIL 2025

6 EDITORIAL Think everything’s terrible? Don’t worry: it could be worse!

I S S U E

I S

T H

I N

9 OPENING SCENES

· Opener: AI’s present and future

· Festival: BFI Flare

· Editors’ Choice

· In Production:

Gabe Klinger’s Isabel and more · In Conversation:

Sandhya Suri on Santosh · Under the Influence:

Robert Eggers on Nosferatu · Mean Sheets: a Soviet-era Polish poster for Return of the Jedi

18 LETTERS

20 TALKIES

· The Long Take: Pamela

Hutchinson could do with more of Dogme 95’s scathing energy · Flick Lit: Nicole Flattery finds liberation in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s passionate essays on Douglas Sirk · TV Eye: Andrew Male thinks

Channel 4 drama Brian and Maggie has let Thatcher off lightly

98 ENDINGS

· The wrenching loss of leaving home is depicted in the final scenes of Akenfield, Peter Hall’s elegiac portrait of rural life in 20th-century Suffolk

90 VIT TORIO DE SICA

A 1950 interview with the director

F R O M T H E

A R C H I

V E

96 THIS MONTH IN… 1950

On the Town on the cover and a Rossellini profile

REVIEWS

60 | FILMS

· Misericordia

· The End

· The People’s Joker

· The Monkey

· When Autumn Falls

· Day of the Fight

· Mr. Burton

· War Paint: Women at War

· The Stimming Pool

· La Cocina

· September Says

· Sister Midnight

· Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other · Short Film: Linda and Irina

· Twiggy

· Four Mothers

· Flow

· Sebastian

· Santosh

· Brief History of a Family

· Mickey 17

78 | DVD & BLU-RAY

· Sirk in Germany: 1934-1935

· Godzilla vs. Biollante

· Bumpkin Soup

· Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling

· Golem

· Rediscovery: Night Moves

· Lost and Found: Woman in a Hat

· Two films by Patrick Tam: Nomad and My Heart Is That Eternal Rose · Cronos

· A Touch of Love

· The Lives of a Bengal Lancer

· What Happened Was…

86 | WIDER SCREEN

· The novelist Esther Kinsky’s memoir about rebuilding a derelict Hungarian cinema; and Jacques Rivette plays the long game at the ICA in London

88 | BOOKS

· Brad Stevens on Jonathan

Rosenbaum’s lifetime of criticism; Neil Sinyard on an investigation of De Palma’s Vietnam movie Casualties of War; and Hannah McGill on the power of props

CONTRIBUTORS

MARTIN SCORSESE

is an American filmmaker whose works include Taxi Driver, GoodFellas and Killers of the Flower Moon. He has founded three nonprofit organisations for the preservation of film: The Film Foundation, the World Cinema Foundation and the African Film Heritage Project.

PAMELA HUTCHINSON

is a freelance critic, curator and film historian. She is the author of BFI Film Classics on The Red Shoes and Pandora’s Box. Her curation projects include seasons on Marlene Dietrich and Asta Nielsen for BFI Southbank.

TONY RAYNS

is a London-based critic who has written for Sight and Sound (and the MFB before it) for 50-odd years. His books include the recent Just Like Starting Over: A Personal View of the Reinvention of Korean Cinema and the forthcoming second edition of the BFI Classic In the Mood for Love.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Dominic Lees, Leigh Singer, Adam Scovell, Rachel Pronger, Ryan Gilbey, Kim Newman, Sophie Monks Kaufman, Maria Delgado, Arjun Sajip, Ben Walters, Alex Ramon, Laura Staab, Matthew Taylor, Guy Lodge and more