One last time: welcome back to Cinema Year Zero at Cinema Rediscovered Festival 2026.

On this holy day, Blaise Radley delivers a sermon on Whistle Down the Wind, which screens on 35mm today at 10.30.

Blaise Radley is a writer based in Brixton, and the features editor at Cinema Year Zero.

Our thanks to the Cinema Rediscovered and Watershed team for inviting this partnership. Cinema Year Zero team members Kirsty Asher and Ben Flanagan are both alumni of Tara Judah’s film criticism workshop at the festival. Much of this publication’s approach to slow criticism is downstream from those experiences, so it has been a privilege to return to Bristol and make this contribution to the festival.

Next, we will be at The Castle Cinema in Hackney on 8th August to launch our new issue TOTALLY SPIES. Tickets are available now.

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Whistle Down the Wind: Suffer the Little Children

Barely ten minutes pass in the pastoral British coming-of-age classic Whistle Down the Wind (1961) before the three child protagonists find themselves forced into a lie. Adapted from Mary Hayley Bell’s 1958 novel of the same name and set on a struggling smallholding in post-war Lancashire, the film opens with much put upon farm hand Eddie (Norman Bird) attempting to drown a bag of kittens, having been ordered to by the children’s father, the gruff local farmer (Bernard Lee). The children’s motivation in lying is, therefore, altruistic: having saved the kittens they must bluff their way past their father to the safety of the barn. Yet for all their seeming wiles, it’s not long before they themselves are hoodwinked by a complete stranger—and suspected murderer.

This tension is at the heart of Whistle Down the Wind: that children are simultaneously capable of scheming and acts of feckless rebellion, but still vulnerable to adult influence. In the case of Kathy (Hayley Mills), Nan (Diane Holgate), and Charles (Alan Barnes), the moment that triggers their delusion could be the set up for a dad joke. Upon discovering a man, Blakey (Alan Bates), sleeping in their barn (how very Bethlehem) and asking his name, they take his exclamation of “Jesus Christ!” a little too literally, believing him to be the son of God. The various religious zealots in town, from the punctilious Salvation Army soldiers to the hopelessly oblivious Sunday school teacher, really only have themselves to blame.

It’s this Protestant fervour in the Lancashire air that leads to the children being so easily led astray. To the children—and particularly the younger siblings Nan and Charles—Jesus is already a source of superstition, liable to appear at any moment to help with minor problems or correct bad behaviour. Before their fateful encounter with Blakey, Charles talks to a woman from the “Sally Army” who assures him that “He’ll take care of it”—“He” being Jesus and “it” being the repeated attempts to drown the kittens. Moments later, having smuggled the kittens home, Kathy scoffs at the idea that God would intervene and rather cruelly tells Charles that Jesus is dead, attempting to assert her older, more rational view of the world. Her siblings look at her wide-eyed, retorting ominously, “You just wait till Jesus comes and gets you.” A flash of fear crosses Kathy’s face. Batten down the hatches: He is imminent.

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Admittedly Blakey doesn’t look much like Jesus. He’s rough and grizzled, wearing an unkempt suit with no tie and a heavy five o’clock shadow across his face. “Jesus wore a long dress,” observes Charles, taking his turn to be sceptical. “Well, that was in them days,” replies Kathy, yesterday’s doubts quelled by Blakey’s sudden appearance. This, if we follow the line of reasoning, is a modern Jesus for a modern age, one who eats table scraps and smokes ciggies. Perhaps that sense of ownership over a Jesus for their generation, alongside the fear and reverence borne of their muddled Christian upbringing, is why they elect to not tell any adults about their holy visitation. If they did, they’d have quickly discovered he was a wanted fugitive on the run—a local scandal the town’s parents misguidedly hide from their kids, speaking only vaguely about stranger danger. White lies a-plenty.

Whatever questions and concerns the children do have around their new messiah are repeatedly bungled by a clergy that is either poorly discerning or actively disinterested. Their Sunday school teacher (Diane Clare) doesn’t question the sudden uptick in questions about what might happen if the second coming occurred now, like right now, or about how one should act when faced with Him. Instead her ignorance only leads to further dramatic irony: “Of course, Jesus has never really left us, has He?” she says, blissfully ignorant in her non-answers. The Vicar, for his part, barely even acknowledges the questions Kathy has about Jesus’ intervention in the world, too focused on petty earthly concerns, like the guttering on the church being nicked, or other minor acts of vandalism.

With traditional religious figures proving ineffective, the Bostock children instead go straight to the source, bringing a posse of local school kids to Blakey for an impromptu sermon—but not before they’ve paid their respects more formally, handing him gifts as if he were still sleeping in a manger. One child passes him a local paper with a charm bracelet concealed inside, another brings him “your book” (the Bible, to you and me), and Kathy, now the most dutiful and thoughtful of the disciples, brings him food to sate his hunger and restore his spirit. That many of these children aren’t actors but rather locals from the surrounding Lancashire villages adds a certain wide-eyed awe.

If the Jesus of the children’s Sunday studies is too stuffy, too serious, too concerned with guttering, Blakey more readily meets the children at their level, however selfishly motivated his actions may be. His congregation gathered, Blakey hesitates briefly, unsure on what spiritual leadership to provide or whether he should even continue his ruse—his lie is, after all, both the most necessary and the most damaging. He leafs through the Bible (it’s unclear whether it sits in his hand awkwardly due to a lack of familiarity or lapsed belief), before putting it to one side and picking up a newspaper, reading the day’s news as if it were scripture. For their part, the children don’t care—it’s less about the substance than the act of communing. Daily news, daily prayers.

Their faith only comes undone when Blakey lets the kitten entrusted to him by Charles die. So earth-shattering is this thoughtlessness that after discovering it Charles tosses the lifeless kitten to the ground, an act both violent beyond his years and indicative of the fragility of childish compassion. In Charles’s eyes, Jesus was explicitly sent here to protect the kittens. To see that Jesus has seemingly ignored his kitten’s suffering breaks Charles’s belief: The problem of evil is something for philosophy text books, not the lives of cats. “It’s dead. He let it die. He let it die. He let it die.” A rather haunting refrain.

Judas may have ultimately betrayed Jesus due to avarice, but he also didn’t believe that Jesus was anything more than a teacher, and certainly not the living embodiment of God. It’s fitting, then, that Charles is the one to betray Blakey—albeit due to a moment of unchecked frustration rather than thirty silver pieces. Cross-cutting between Blakey skulking around the barn and Charles’s birthday party, the children all wearing tall paper hats and eyeballing huge slices of cake, Nan takes an extra portion and slips up, saying in a sing-song tone “One for me and one for Jesus.” Charles retorts, “It isn’t Jesus. It’s just a fella,” and just like that, the gig is up.

In a film of mostly quaint images, the ones that stick out are those that lean most heavily on religious iconography. One of the film’s last shots is of Blakey being frisked by the police, his arms outstretched so that this silhouette resembles that of the crucifixion. But what is his sacrifice in service of? His final communion with Kathy, taken like confessional through a crack in the barn wall, hinges on an admission of her belief that finally breaks through Blakey’s willingness to profit from her childish naivety. And so, as the police hold their perimeter and hundreds of children descend upon the barn, Blakey sheds a tear and gives himself up. His penance can’t undo the lies, but it does set the children free, enabling them to hold those two contradictory impulses in tension with each other; to remain open to belief while learning to distrust false prophets and adult lies. Isn’t that what growing up is all about?

This article is part of Cinema Rediscovered’s Other Ways of Seeing, a development opportunity supported by BFI awarding funds from National Lottery.

Welcome back to Cinema Year Zero at Cinema Rediscovered 2026.

Josie and the Pussycats screens today at 14.00. To celebrate, we present a new essay on the film by Kirsty Asher.

Kirsty Asher is a writer and folklore researcher based in South London. She is Associate Editor of Cinema Year Zero and also writes a folklore blog A Place With Such A Name.

Today at 15.30, we are hosting a Critics Salon, featuring readings from the commissioned essayists along with conversation about our critical practices.

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Josie and the Pussycats - Artistic Integrity in the Era of AI Slop

The song of the summer for 2026, according to multiple news outlets and its own internet virality, is Puerto Rico Song. It doesn’t even have an official name. It is credited as being made “by” TikTok user @saxboybilly18 (real name William Stiteler), but Stiteler only wrote the lyrics. The rest of the song—its catchy pentatonic scale, its I-IV-V-VI chord progression and distinctly cosy ‘80s synths—was formulated entirely using generative AI. Now, Stiteler is being approached by the Puerto Rico tourism board about possible promotion collaborations.

The world may not be ready for how AI is already coagulating within the arts, or in what form it will continue to do so. But twenty-five years ago, a devious computer was already turning American teens into super-consumers with subliminal messaging hidden within bubblegum pop-punk in the underappreciated Josie and the Pussycats (2001). While the Puerto Rico Song doesn’t inspire sinister undertones (it mostly blandly lists sightseeing spots), its grip on internet virality and its heralding a new era of popular music is relevant to the film’s conceit—manufactured art warps artistic integrity.

Josie and the Pussycats, an adaptation of the Archie comics and animated TV series, playfully poked at commercialised music with its visual assault of brand signifiers and its melodramatic characterisation of fan culture. It experienced a disjointed reception upon first release from critics who misread the heavily featured branded merchandise, such as Sean P. Means who quipped “I’ve seen NBA games where the advertising was more discreet.” Gradually, retrospective thinkpieces about Josie and the Pussycats being “ahead of its time” are starting to trickle in, in a wider trend of vindication for a generation of women taught to dismiss their adolescent pop-culture treasures as without cultural merit. This speaks to how contemporary popular opinion is shaped by highly selective factors such as cultural perceptions of sexuality, gender, or socioeconomic situations. The reappraisal of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) in a post-financial crisis context, framing Anne Hathaway’s Andy as an ingrate and her boyfriend as the “real villain”, is an example of how cultural priorities shift. What once we scorned, or lionised, can easily be reevaluated with maturity, and with a generational shift in sociopolitical ideals.

The oversaturation of brands in Josie and the Pussycats’ production design was always intentionally crass (and importantly was also not compensated as product placement), but in the early twenty-first century critics saw another tired reminder of a globalised world where mainstream media had become a corporate cavalcade. Still, it speaks to a particularly humourless film critic who couldn’t bear a twitch of the mouth at the kitsch campness of Target bullseye bed pillows and a shower unit featuring tiles and frosted door patterns of the Golden Arches—especially when the intention is a maximalist satire of commercialisation. Indeed, it’s the film’s well-placed paw on the pulse of corporate manufacturing in the creative industries which contributes to its lasting legacy.

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This film was not the first piece of popular media in 2001 to take a dig at institutional or corporate subliminal messaging in pop music. The Simpsons (1989–) episode New Kids on the Blecch, which aired in February that year, gave us the classic “Yvan Eht Nioj” (or ‘Join the Navy’ to the uninitiated) in which Bart and the boys quickly rise to stardom in a manufactured boy band whose purpose is to recruit cannon fodder. Similarly, Josie (Rachel Leigh Cook), Melody (Tara Reid), and Valerie (Rosario Dawson) are plucked from obscurity by MegaRecords to replace recently (and mysteriously) deceased boyband DuJour, and their songs that previously only entertained bowling alley patrons suddenly top the charts. They marvel at their overnight success but do little to question it, instead enjoying a distinctly early ‘00s makeover montage. Little do they know that MegaRecords’ CEO Rachel (Parker Posey) is using a machine called the Megasound 8000 to generate subliminal messages that will keep America’s teens locked into intense hyperconsumerism. Sound familiar? To cap it off, Posey’s character is very much a proto-Musk, pulling the strings behind a deeply unhappy persona whose biggest downfall is a desperation to be cool.

Manufactured musical groups have their origins in dire infamy, as original prefab band The Monkees were unmasked Scooby-style in their attempt to rival The Beatles, a group which had come together in more organic terms. Nevertheless, the concept became more normalised, to the extent that individuals from The X Factor (2004 - 2018) sausage factory still maintain cultural relevance today in their solo work, thanks to the popularity of bands such as Little Mix and One Direction (even if X Factor has now lost its cultural staying power). One could argue that their success was driven by the teams behind these acts whose expertise could perfectly craft a string of hits. But in the age of generative AI, that knowledge is increasingly being left up to the algorithm. Now, the worry is not whether film, music, art, or comedy is replete with adverse subliminal messaging, but whether it was even made by a human at all. The idea of worrying over a manufactured musical group who don’t write their own lyrics pales in comparison.

What a film like Josie and the Pussycats couldn’t predict was what kind of corporations would take a stranglehold over mainstream media, while others fell by the wayside. The companies behind generative AI secure their stranglehold with a phantom grip—they don’t need to slap branding everywhere, so long as their LLMs are being normalised on a widespread scale. And the ‘Puerto Rico Song’ is simply the beginning of a new phase of media consumption, in which the word “manufactured” obfuscates the presumption of human participation beyond a few prompts and clicks.

Even before AI, issues such as the increased ubiquity of CGI and negligible scene lighting have had certain audiences romanticising even the most mid mid-budgets of the 1990s and 2000s. The same could be taken further in terms of gen-AI and Josie and the Pussycats’ pop-punk soundtrack. Sure, it’s slightly corny pop-punk, but several relatively famous humans, including Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger and Counting Crow’s Adam Duritz, worked hard to make that cheesy soundtrack, and the record went Gold for it. Human mediocrity becomes powerful by virtue of being human, not the sputterings of machine learning. Played with adept focus by Reid, the dumb-blonde persona of Melody Valentine is far more endearing than a machine that is presumed to be smart.

It has reached a point where cinema is beginning to tentatively confront generative AI in its storytelling approaches, especially in this year’s releases. In the mainstream, The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) hired artist Alexis Franklin to painstakingly craft an AI slop meme of Miranda Priestly, with human-made art becoming resistance in and of itself. In the outer perimeters, Radu Jude’s Dracula (2026) turned AI art on itself in suitably ridiculous fashion. Generated images of a prompt for the sex scenes from Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) engorge and undulate into rubbery caricatures, monstrous in their constant metamorphosis as the machine hallucinates. I see a direct correlation between the sets festooned with corporate branding in Josie and Jude’s AI humiliation ritual in Dracula—both actively harness the meta-satirical to emphasise their cultural critiques. While Jude lampoons from the fringes, a highly mainstream, family-friendly romp like Josie and the Pussycats took a big leap, and is only now on the verge of delayed appreciation.

Josie and the Pussycats failed hard at the box office, and didn’t charm the critics. But in light of its ahead-of-its-time messaging on the perils of manufactured art, it achieves a charming gutsiness. The integrity at the heart of the story, however simplified for a pre-teen target audience, provides a template for how mainstream art can tackle encroaching threats. Where once it was corporate branding, now gen-AI deserves a glitterpunk send-up. Who will take up the cat-ear mantle?

This article is part of Cinema Rediscovered’s Other Ways of Seeing, a development opportunity supported by BFI awarding funds from National Lottery.

Welcome back to our coverage of Cinema Rediscovered Festival 2026.

Today we present an essay by Daisy Steinhardt on Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which screens on 35mm today at 16.30.

Daisy Steinhardt is a film and media researcher and writer. She is interested in reactionary media, internet politics, and films that make her feel stuff.

Following today’s 11.10 screening of Les Sièges de l’Alcazar, we will chair a casual post-screening discussion of cinephilia at Watershed café/bar.

Tomorrow (Saturday 25th) at 15.30, we are hosting a Critics Salon, featuring readings from the commissioned essayists along with conversation about our critical practices.

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“I Never Understood What Terrible Thing I Did To Make God So Angry:” Sex and Violence in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1976)

CW: This piece discusses Looking for Mr. Goodbar in its entirety, and includes major plot points. It contains graphic descriptions of physical and sexual violence.

The 1970s San Francisco in Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1976) embodies tensions between the burgeoning bodily autonomy movement, and the insidious sleaze and violence of the hetero-patriarchal world. As a television broadcasts, it’s gearing up to be the “decade of the dames.” Schoolteacher Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) lives in a nuclear family unit with her mother (Priscilla Pointer) and overbearing Catholic father (Richard Kiley), her older sister Katherine (Tuesday Weld) sometimes dropping in with stories of boyfriends and abortions. The film follows a year in Theresa’s life as she makes forays into the world of hook ups and cocaine and 70s funk, picking up and putting down a string of men along the way. The film, directed by Hollywood steady-hand Richard Brooks, is based on Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel of the same name, itself inspired by the 1973 murder of schoolteacher Roseann Quinn. It was relatively difficult to access before 2024 due to soundtrack licensing issues, and is still rarely screened in the UK.

The first man Theresa has sex with is her college professor, Martin Engle (Alan Feinstein). He is older and married; a safe fantasy. What begins as a daydream solidifies into reality as soon as class is over, as he tells her that sex between teacher and student is improper…immoral…illegal…and unbelievably tempting, slowly unzipping her dress. The scene contains the haptic eroticism of forbidden love, with close up shots of Theresa’s face and his hands on her skin. It finishes as quickly as it started. He doesn’t love her, doesn’t want to hurt his wife, doesn’t want to talk to women after he’s fucked them. The subtle subjugation of the mistress bleeds into Theresa’s waking dreams; she imagines Martin hitting her with his car, running through the hospital to find her and proclaiming his undying love. Accepting defeat, she goes home to her father.

Having graduated from college and wanting to escape from her father’s domineering presence, Theresa moves into an apartment in Katherine’s building. Her paternal relationship does somewhat contextualise her attitude towards and expectations of men. But to fall into psychoanalysing Theresa (as Roger Ebert did in a contemporary review) misses the bigger picture that harm within the nuclear family exists as a small-scale articulation of systemic patriarchal violence. This is demonstrated excruciatingly through the slow revelation that Theresa’s misdiagnosis of polio (in place of the congenital scoliosis she inherited from her father) was only acknowledged after it was too late, leaving young Theresa physically immobilised in a full-body cast for a year after surgery.

Theresa begins teaching deaf children and frequenting singles bars, becoming entangled with a man from each world. She meets welfare caseworker James (William Atherton) at the home of one of her pupils. He’s steady, reliable, a good Catholic. Theresa’s family approve. James slowly encroaches on her life. He shows up at her school while she is working; when she rushes to the hospital upon hearing that her father is dying, James is already there.

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As her father pulls through, Theresa becomes increasingly unwell. She’s taking more drugs and struggling to look after herself; cockroaches fester in the weeks of unwashed dishes piled in the sink. James’s nice guy veneer starts to crack; he tells her about being twelve years old and witnessing his father violently and sexually assaulting his mother. Theresa holds his face in her hands. They start to have sex for the first time, Theresa barely visible in the frame under his writhing torso. She laughs out loud at the condom he pulls out, in retaliation he tells her that he had made the story about his parents up, laughing in her face as he gets up to leave. As the door shuts behind him, the film cuts to a charcoal drawing on Theresa’s wall of a woman screaming.

James seems worlds away from Tony (Richard Gere), whose eye Theresa catches in a singles bar. Tony is vain and vulgar and a liar, displaying nauseating acts of hypermasculinity at any opportunity. Their sex is darkly lit and unremarkable: enjoyable, but devoid of eroticism. Tony stops halfway through and starts doing press ups. He pretends to threaten her with a knife that turns out to be a glowstick, delighting in her fear, which gradually dulls into disillusionment. The next time he comes round he breaks into her house, takes cocaine with her and force feeds her a Quaalude.

Theresa picks up a succession of old and sleazy men for a quick fuck. One complains that her breasts are too small, another steals her money. A third has his trousers down and his wallet out when Tony angrily bursts into the apartment. He chases the man out of the house, shouting homophobic abuse at him. Theresa slaps him; Tony punches her in the mouth; the woman on the wall screams. Katherine runs downstairs and throws him out. “He was only trying to hurt his mother, we’re all cunts” Theresa cries, holding an ice lolly on her bleeding face. Katherine finds a damp cloth, and cockroaches spill out, scuttling over Theresa’s body.

Theresa’s fantasies become more violent. She imagines that Tony has summoned the violent arm of the patriarchal state and she is arrested in a drug raid, her sultry mugshot taking up most of a double page tabloid spread, headlined “Teacher leads double life - saviour by day, sexist by night.” The paper frames the surrounding stories as insignificant: to the left in small print “Virus that may cause cancer in humans isolated,” to the right “Oil Giant admits new illegal gifts.” Her distorted fantasy of getting caught exists in the same media-sphere as the film’s diegetic world; the prurience of the misogynistic tabloid press both glorifies and vilifies the sexual exploits of a woman in charge of protecting children. Theresa’s fear of a salacious media culture resonates today as an early iteration of the countless ‘disgraced teacher has a secret OnlyFans’ headlines that litter tabloid media.

James visits the apartment at Christmas. He’s angry that Theresa is rejecting his gestures of affection, and breaks an erotic wall hanging that she inherited from Katherine. Theresa goes home and her father throws books down the stairs at her. On New Year’s Eve, Tony appears at her door with a single red rose and pretends to ejaculate through the flimsily chained door. Theresa won’t let him in, and picks up her phone, asking the operator for the police. He screams “you are dead” at her before slamming the door and walking off. It’s the last we see of him. She resolves to pack it all in; after the new year she will stop the sex and the drugs.

So when, at a New Year’s party, Theresa picks up a repressed gay man who has just been homophobically attacked, and he rapes and murders her, and she screams for her sister, and takes her last breath while the blue light from the projector flickers out, we as an audience are denied the affective catharsis of her survival into the new year, or the vindication of having correctly identified the bad apple had Tony killed her. Contemporary critics suggested the film punishes her, but in portraying the totality of patriarchal subjugation, femicide is shown to be one ugly endpoint of violent heteromasculine ideals. Theresa tries her best to live a life that she has chosen, but one woman cannot always escape the evil that men do.

This article is part of Cinema Rediscovered’s Other Ways of Seeing, a development opportunity supported by BFI awarding funds from National Lottery.

Welcome back to our coverage of Cinema Rediscovered Festival 2026.

Today, we’re happy to present an essay by Adam Murray on My Brother’s Wedding, which screens today at 11.10, and tomorrow at 19.20.

Adam Murray is a Film programmer and Bristol Black Horror Club founder. His interests explore Blackness, Mixed-Race identity, Horror and Hip Hop on screen.

Check back every day this week for a new essay. And if you’re at the festival, you can join us at a couple of free events:

Friday 24th July: we chair Les Sièges de l’Alcazar post-screening discussion of the film’s depiction of the pratfalls of cinephilia at Watershed café/bar.

Saturday 25th July at 15.30, we are hosting a Critics Salon at Pervasive Media Studio, featuring readings and with conversation about our critical practices.

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Thoughts on Charles Burnett and My Brother’s Wedding

My Brother’s Wedding (1983) raw, honest and at times laugh out loud funny, is a sobering time capsule of early 1980s African American working class life. Contemplative and dreamlike pacing enables the audience to critically unpack what’s unfolding on the screen. It’s a portent of the upheaval and turmoil of the 1990s in Los Angeles’ South Central and Watts neighborhoods: a litmus test for audiences, and a turning point in Charles Burnett’s career.

The story follows Pierce (Everett Silas) a single, young, working class Black man who helps out at his parents dry cleaners, caught in an existential bind between his upwardly mobile older brothers imminent wedding into a middle class family and his allegiance to his best friend Soldier (Ronald Bell) who is soon to be released from prison. At times intentionally ambiguous and observational the film painstakingly depicts daily life from moments of tenderness to harsh brutality, maintaining the same tone of mundanity regardless. Whether it’s play-fighting between Pierce and his father (Denis Kemper) in the dry cleaners, or a breathtaking reunion sequence showing Soldier in his mother’s (Sally Easter) embrace and the hesitant gaze between father (Hobert Durham Jr.) and son, the audience are held in a tense moment of time standing still wondering how his father will react to his sons return from prison.

These seemingly impartial juxtapositions illuminate the systemic quandaries at the heart of young Black working class masculinity. After running the streets all day including an absurdist altercation with a misfired gun and ensuing inconsequential chase, never clearly resolved, Soldier asks Pierce where the rest of their friends are to be met with the solemn revelation from Pierce that they are the only ones left. However detached Burnett might be from prescribing value judgements on his protagonists there is also an authenticity, a grounded understanding and love for the characters and their onscreen daily challenges. This moral distance yet intimate closeness of the portraiture of these characters’ lives as they unfold imbues the film with real poetic power. It is a film that isn’t limited to tragedy. Rich with empathy and glimpses of tenderness and joy, it wrestles with identity, class and the question of ‘becoming’ humanizing Black life/lives onscreen.

Why then, has such a striking work of American cinema been so difficult to see before now? During the editing process the producers, against Burnett’s wishes, submitted an unfinished version to New York Film Festival to meet the deadline. Janet Maslin of The New York Times was scathing in her review of Burnett’s technique as ‘stiff and rudimentary’. The impact on the film and Burnett’s career was devastating. Distributors were turned off by the cold reception. The film was not only shelved, Burnett was not allowed to complete it. It would be eight years before Burnett would revive his career with the success of his black comic masterpiece To Sleep With Anger (1990). My Brother’s Wedding sat on the shelf in obscurity for three decades until Milestone Films purchased the rights allowing a Pacific Film Archive restoration of the print and supporting Burnett to complete a ‘directors cut’ in 2007 to critical acclaim.

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Cinema Rediscovered 2024 attendees may recall the UK premiere of The Annihilation of Fish (Burnett, USA, 1999). That film received a similar fate: receiving a negative review at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, which led to the distributor cancelling its release. Milestone’s meticulous work on the 4K restoration of My Brother’s Wedding is finally righting some wrongs in relation to the film’s reception and legacy. Audiences new to Burnett’s body of work, or who saw a previous iteration, can now experience the film as the director intended.

Filmmakers like Burnett demonstrate to Black people that there are narratives for them free from the restrictions of Hollywood’s preferences for storytelling — how the wider Black diaspora sees itself and not how Hollywood represents it — in front of and behind the camera. As Milestone Films owner and Black Film Archive curator Maya Cade asserts, “If they are a public figure, they are a Black public figure. The idea of who they are in the public imagination is tiny. So what I often do is show people that there is a world for them.” This is the essence of Burnett’s film; a snapshot of Black lives in Black community as they unfold in front of us, liberating possibilities. Similarly, Cade’s archivist project curates new opportunities for Black audiences to re-appraise the works of Black film and Black filmmakers.

Cade draws attention to how the Black director has been failed by the film industry in the USA and beyond. The capitalist commodification of Black artistry and talent as labour has led to Black filmmakers experiencing their lives and careers shaped by a particular “lack of care”. This goes to the heart of Burnett’s experience of the industry. Cade’s activism mitigates the rules of White supremacist commodification, facilitating care and consideration in curation through her role as an archivist while building a platform for income generation and financial stability as distributor.

In My Brother’s Wedding, Burnett achieves a compelling presentation of community replete with dynamic nuances typically denied Black lives, historically and systemically, by the Hollywood studio system. “Whether they made a film in the 1990s or the 1970s, their film never got out into the world. I want to show them that there is a world ready for them.” A world beyond Black communities, a world in which the reproduction of stereotyping is interrogated by all, and especially by those who need most to engage with this deconstruction.

My Brother’s Wedding was conceived in community and frames the struggle that is Burnett’s lived experience as an African American filmmaker, in turn mapping out on shared diasporic Black experience. If Burnett’s films had remained cruelly buried then we would not be here in community and generating a hopeful viewing and dialogue of the film. African storytelling is an oral tradition, an oratorical act; Bob Marley makes a record in Jamaica, but through the diasporic eco-system, the diasporic web, the record, music and message migrate and embed within and across many cultures. Burnett’s protagonist Pierce, a reluctant Griot, delivers oratorical observations that replicate within diasporic communities over time, highlighting differences as well as similarities. Through his oratorical observations of the world around him we are able to experience the turbulence of 1980s Los Angeles and reflect on the similarities and differences of diasporic life and conditions for our own lives and communities today.

We live in a time of ever-encroaching erasure of cultural artifacts and spaces; swathes of the Internet being redacted and firewalled, a reliance on very limited and impermanent streaming catalogues and subscription services, and the creeping all-encompassing anti-art dominance of AI. Restoration, curation, film festivals and repertory cinema sustain a wonderful dynamic of shared community and rediscovery. Partnerships like the one between Milestone, Maya Cade and Festivals like Cinema Rediscovered are ways of keeping film history alive, an act of resistance. Celebrating Burnett’s journey and struggle with this 4K restoration of My Brother’s Wedding is the unique and powerful opportunity we are taking together at this year’s 10^th Anniversary of Cinema Rediscovered.

This article is part of Cinema Rediscovered’s Other Ways of Seeing, a development opportunity supported by BFI awarding funds from National Lottery.

Welcome, friends, to Cinema Year Zero at Cinema Rediscovered 2026. For the festival’s tenth edition, the fine people at Watershed have commissioned our writing on a number of choice films from the festival.

Our coverage begins with an essay by Ben Flanagan on Danger: Diabolik, which opens the festival tonight at 20.30.

Ben Flanagan is a writer based in South London. He is the Managing Editor of Cinema Year Zero.

Check back every day this week for a new essay. And if you’re at the festival, you can join us at a couple of free events:

Friday 24th July: we chair Les Sièges de l’Alcazar post-screening discussion of the film’s depiction of the pratfalls of cinephilia at Watershed café/bar

Saturday 25th July at 15.30, we are hosting a Critics Salon at Pervasive Media Studio, featuring readings and with conversation about our critical practices.

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Danger: Diabolik - Don’t play the hero

A cavalcade of motorbikes cruise towards a bank. Through the revving of engines you can hear the sounds of industry, individualism, the hope of an Italy which looks at fascism in the rear-view. But within plumes of coloured smoke, there he is: the master thief Diabolik (John Phillip Law) who emerges in close-up, and in a flash the loot is gone, along with those illusions.

Who else but Mario Bava could open Danger: Diabolik (1968) so locating the viewer in a richly designed, tactile world, and then letting them sit, with languid blobs of colour occasionally punctuated by graceful camera moves? Having shown a mastery of horror aesthetics in the likes of Black Sabbath (1963), Bava’s budget was pushed to the limit here by producer Dino De Laurentiis—picking up the project which had been abandoned by British director Seth Holt. Shot concurrently with Barbarella (1968), sharing sets and cast members, just as mid-century Italy wrangled its tarnished past with its groovy present, so too are both authority and villainy reevaluated in Danger: Diabolik, where simple romance is navigated through a constant sequence of action set pieces.

The Diabolik comic book which Danger: Diabolik is based on is itself a reinterpolation of French Detective Fiction character Fantômas, which enjoyed its own successful 1960s film trilogy. In what became known as fumetti neri (black comics), other comics including Kriminal and Satanik would riff on the character. Given their salacious lashings of sex and violence, abounding moral panic led to some publishers being put on trial in the mid-1960s. So by the time of Danger: Diabolik, the genre had been somewhat defanged. As such, Danger: Diabolik brims with visual double entendre. This might recall the Bond-crazed, Euro Spy Film cycle, but be warned: there are no heroes within, just a beguiling supervillain.

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As is made clear after the initial bank job, Diabolik is no Robin Hood; he’d rather use those piles of cash as bedding on which to make love to Eva Kant (Giallo legend Marisa Mell), than hand any of it out to the poor. The film constantly ironises sexual politics. At the time when Bond was at his most bum-smackingly revolting, Diabolik’s relationship with co-conspirator Eva is surprisingly tender. Connery would never have broken into a castle to steal Moneypenny some jewels. But Diabolik is ready to risk it all for Eva’s approval.

Bava has a curious place in film history. So venerated and influential in genre circles: Blood and Black Lace (1964) setting the template for Giallo, Black Sunday (1960) throwing the gauntlet for Gothic horror. Yet auteurist critics lambast his seemingly absent personal point of view. His films are beautiful sundaes, empty calories. The film critic Serge Daney criticised Bava’s “desire for authenticity at all costs, efforts to make us forget the artifice of the endeavour. Tiny details succeed, but cannot make up for a non-existent whole.” This emptiness gets at something deeper. His films are rooted in ‘camp’ B-movie aesthetics, but there is a psychic alienation and paranoia that pulls us into modernity. I believe time has been kind to Bava, that these tiny details are the very stuff that makes Cinema so compelling: they are a portal to an alternate history of the world.

Consider the sequence of images that introduces Eva, sensually moving the pair together, with a revolving background that brings us into their opulent lair for the first time. It is vast and geometric, like a space from Lang’s silent epics. The constant twang of Ennio Morricone’s sui generis soundtrack, which combines the typical operatic wailing of ‘Ecstacy of Gold’ with jazz noodling and surf guitars, echoes around polygonous production design—memorably, in cinema’s second most famous shower, which cheekily covers Eva and Diabolik’s nether regions. Law’s Diabolik is a flat presence, necessarily Yankee in his smug upending of European hierarchy. He is mere set dressing, which Bava points out with regularity. For a jewel heist (it’s Eva’s birthday after all), Diabolik doesn’t just don a balaclava: the mask goes up his nostrils and around his lips to perfectly illustrate a second, blank face.

Bava chops up the elements of his images, from cast to set dressing, into harmonious quadrangular compositions, recreating the effect of reading a comic book without lapsing into literalism (as the groovy 1966 Batman had). A zoom out from Eva’s eyes reveal them to be framed in a rear view mirror, and through the windshield: a gothic castle. Other superimpositions of faces onto day for night photography look surreal and uncanny, adding to the film’s zeitgeisty pop art fascination. This visual affect becomes a part of the plot too, such as when Diabolik and Eva escape a police tail using a complex web of decoys and mirrors to throw them off the scent.

Don’t sympathise with the cops too much. Their only purpose is to harsh our mellow: nimbly illustrated in a discotheque where some frivolous smoking of the devil’s lettuce is interrupted by a police raid. That scene has inspired queer readings of the film: How suggestive are the joints that men pass from mouth to mouth? The film’s thrum of bisexuality goes further, with Terry-Thomas treading the line: is he playing gay, or just posh? As the increasingly authoritarian Minister of the Interior, Terry-Thomas’s one-of-a-kind stiff upper lip creates an abject psychedelia.

For Inspector Zinko, the Wile E. Coyote to Diabolik’s Roadrunner, there could be no better choice than Michel Piccoli. That talismanic character actor brought a vulnerability to the stock authority figure role across French cinema. He gives up the moral grandstanding almost immediately here, by going into business with wretched mafioso Valmont (Adolfo Celi, fresh from the shark tank in Thunderball (1965) as Emilio Largo), neatly depicting corrupt law enforcement‘s relationship to organised crime in mid-century Italy.

Even the nameless country in which the film is set is a mish-mash of European signifiers. Many of Bava’s films are bound to a few locations—he is the master of the haunted house after all. But Danger: Diabolik is a broad epic, which sweeps across locations in a web of national landscapes. From the dockyard opening, to the gothic castle, to motorways, and eventually to the sea depths. Between Piccoli, Celi, and Terry-Thomas, we have France, Italy, and England representing different poles of interest in this case. Diabolik, thus, is the flash American, who swoops the Austrian Eva. These rampant individualists charge across an ever-evolving game board, only stopping when the film seems to run out of steam. What irony after Valmont brandishes a gun with a wicked glint, Zinko yells “Don’t play the hero!” As though anyone was under such illusions.

Danger: Diabolik is a sheer procession of excessively stylised images. It matches the chaos of Dino De Laurentiis’ production style, setting a precedent for the formal qualities which are shared by comic books and the cinema. Bava’s film lingers through pop culture: The Beastie Boys ‘Body Movin’ video (1998) freely riffs on the film, while a new, “slopified” Italian reboot trilogy (2021-2023) sees Diabolik facing off with Ginko through hours of digital sheen. It’s a curious fact that this film was chosen for the final episode of the sardonic roast-a-movie series Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1999). Its chintzy, joyously silly tone shouldn’t be mistaken as a failing. It speaks well to contemporary cinephile culture that this film is now taken seriously enough to open a film festival. Less Rediscovered than reclaimed. But watch out for your jewels when the lights go down, because Diabolik gets everywhere.

This article is part of Cinema Rediscovered’s Other Ways of Seeing, a development opportunity supported by BFI awarding funds from National Lottery.

This past weekend, Cinema Year Zero provided programme notes for a double bill screening of two cowboy vs vampire films. Presented at The Cinema Museum by programmers Kit Ramsay and Jack Higgins, Wanted: Undead or Alive paired Billy the Kid Vs Dracula (1966) with Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1986), the latter playing on a pristine 35mm print.

Below, it’s Blaise on Baize: Blaise Radley tackles Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire. We published Ben Flanagan on Billy the Kid Vs Dracula here.

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Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985, Alan Clarke)

Britain might not be able to lay claim to many aesthetic sensibilities, but camp is certainly one of them (not to be confused with its boisterous US equivalent, schlock). You can find it in Ealing Studios, Hammer Horror, and Doctor Who serials; in the Carry On films and Rocky Horror (1975). Yet, in recent years it’s been pushed to the cultural peripheries, limited to drag shows, local pantomime, and, occasionally, Inside No. 9 (2014-2024). Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a modern British auteur, except perhaps Peter Strickland, risking their reputation on a style so out of fashion—let alone on something as offbeat and tasteless as Alan Clarke’s wonderful snooker vampire rock opera, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985).

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This past weekend, Cinema Year Zero provided programme notes for a double bill screening of two cowboy vs vampire films. Presented at The Cinema Museum by programmers Kit Ramsay and Jack Higgins, Wanted: Undead or Alive paired Billy the Kid Vs Dracula (1966) with Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1986), the latter playing on a pristine 35mm print.

Below, you can read Ben Flanagan’s piece on Billy the Kid Vs Dracula. Check out Blaise Radley on Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire here.

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Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966, William Beaudine)

It takes patience to love the films of William Beaudine. Posthumously nicknamed ‘one-shot’ for his apocryphal tendency not to retake, he worked across genres, from beginnings in socially-alert silents through to the comic and criminal demands of poverty row. He handled large, unruly ensembles, composed of faces you just don’t see on screen anymore—and maybe never should have. His hastily-produced films often ran no longer than 75 minutes, captured in long, static shots, and without emphasis on such aesthetic gluttony as blocking or camera placement. Scenes drag for as long as they can, to hit the requisite length and get everyone paid. This economical production line would make Roger Corman look like a decadent emperor. By the time of his death in 1970, he amassed an estimated 200 features, painting a filmmaking persona which has drifted into myth. How apt for a filmmaker who toyed with the imagery of cultural folklore. Just take his final film, Billy the Kid vs Dracula, which has become perhaps the most representative of this unique figure in the American Cinema.

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Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘26, our monthly review supplement. This month we travelled to Delillo’s end of history, uncovered a pop conspiracy, took a victory lap for one of America’s greatest institutions, and confronted Hollywood’s latest horror craze.

Don’t forget to subscribe to receive this and more film writing direct to your inbox.

Join us on 4th July for Wanted: Undead or Alive at The Cinema Museum. We have supplied a pair of duelling programme notes for a double bill presentation of Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966) and Billy the Kid and The Green Baize Vampire (1986) to celebrate the latter’s 40th anniversary in a rare 35mm special screening.

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Mare’s Nest (Ben Rivers, 2025, UK)

Set in an out-of-time-and-space dystopia, teenage Moon (Moon Guo Barker) crashes her car on a countryside road and starts her odyssey to revisit human history. Described by its director, Ben Rivers, as a ‘road movie on foot’, Mare’s Nest takes the audience to deep caves, distant shores, dense woods and remote shacks. During her journey, Moon wanders through ruins of ex-military bunkers, encountering remnants of the gone world. She visits a scholar and a translator, talks about time and language with them—which bores her—and meets a community of children living an isolated yet utopic life.

Partly based on Don DeLillo’s play The Word for Snow (2014), Rivers’ latest film suggests how our perception tends to rationalise everything around us—the eternal yearning to tame nature. Whereas the heroine in the film is on her quest to perceive nature as it is: an expanse that neither history nor language succeeds in wholly describing. What is important to Moon and might be good for us to look for too, is to try to give room for a sense of being beyond the conventions of our age: a quiet rebellion.

Typical of Rivers’ cinema, Mare’s Nest is ornamented with tender shots of nature, both in a warmly tinted colour palette and in a deep, grainy, and intimate black-and-white. With minimal dialogue, the film lets you immerse yourself in the vast landscapes it’s shot in. This film is a reading of the past in fragments. It might feel disorientating at first, but I invite you to follow Moon’s perspective when watching these segments: life exists somewhere between boredom and excitement. Mare’s Nest also has one of the best endings I’ve seen lately, where Moon looks into the camera with a bright smile that seems to tell us, ‘That’s all, folks!’ Farzad Azimbeik

Power Ballad (John Carney, 2026, Ireland/USA)

My English teacher was a bitter man. Mr Writtle claimed that he had written the then-hit single ‘Mercy’ by Welsh pop singer Duffy. They were from the same small town. He told us, often, that he had played bass in a pub band, and that their original version of the song had been a barnstormer. It even had the same hook. He once warned against urinating on electric fences, and was suing Walkers because he had found toenails at the bottom of a packet of Cheese & Onion.

In fact, ‘Mercy’ has often been accused of ripping off Aretha Franklin and Ben E. King. There is no shortage of backstories to hit singles where inspiration begets sampling begets plagiarism. John Carney’s Power Ballad moves through this phenomenon the same way he moves through the film’s corny pop songs, hitting each mark, almost entirely predictable, and yet emotionally satisfying. The audience shares washed up rocker Paul Rudd’s frustrations when the music industry closes ranks to exclude his claim to a song he played for superstar Danny Wilson (a Jonas brother-like played by Nick Jonas) at a jam session, which said purity ring wearing superstar takes to fuel his own comeback single. He might be a thief, but Jonas is constantly manipulated and stage managed by label execs who doubtless have orders coming down from on high.

It recalls conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Michael Jackson, who had owned The Beatles’ catalogue. They might get into this in Michael 2, when, it’s been promised, “his story continues.” The darker side of the biz is gestured to in Power Ballad, when Jonas beckons a pair of young models up to his jacuzzi at an afterparty. In 2020, Duffy herself was the victim of a kidnapping and human trafficking ordeal, which is due to be detailed in a Disney+ documentary. As much syrupy fun as it’s possible to have with Power Ballad, there’s a tension between the sweetness of Carney’s large, well characterised ensemble, and the powers behind each locked door they find. It reveals the same truths about the entertainment industry that Mr Writtle tried to warn us about. Ben Flanagan

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Jackass: Best and Last (Jeff Tremaine, 2026, USA)

I went into Jackass: Best and Last under a misapprehension. Where I thought both adjectives were referring to the fifth (!) entry as a whole, they are, in fact, divisible. This is half the “best” and half the “last”, an equation that never really works either as a triumphant victory lap or as a more introspective swan song.

Far be it from me to take a Jackass film in bad faith by attempting to find some deeper thematic resonance. But there was at least a guiding spirit before! The first, second, and third entries strived to go bigger, better… 3D-er. Then Forever, a surprisingly warm passing of the torch from the old heads to the next gen, brought it all home. As for Best and Last, bar two moments that bookend the film of Knoxville tearing up, this is really no different from a TV reunion special. The aborted first attempt at the bull stunt in Forever is hard to watch because of what’s come before—we know Knoxville won’t be satisfied until he gets it right, and we know his body can’t handle “perfection” anymore. In Best and Last, we just watch him get a brain haemorrhage again and move on to the next skit.

Which, okay, who cares? Seeing Knoxville laugh at Bam getting absolutely clattered by a giant hand was electric then, and it’s electric now. But barring a credits montage that actually finds visual synergies between the ball-smacking, poop-spraying chaos of the past 26 years, this is never more than a jumble of the “best” and “last”. It’s hard not to see the clip-show format as a missed opportunity to play with the passage of time more directly—whether it was getting new cast members to remix old routines, or even just spending more time shooting the shit behind the scenes. Really, it’s only the unseen material that provides a hook, including a cut sketch with Bam from Forever—but how any of the cast feels about Bam still not being there is left a mystery. Let’s watch Poo Cocktail Supreme again instead. Blaise Radley

Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026, USA)

Summer 2026 may be looked back on as a monumental shift in theatrical release cinema. After years of films being shunted to online-only release and theatres hinging on blockbusters for their livelihood, turns out if you put the highly original work of an Internet filmmaker in cinemas, the younger audiences will come in their droves. Backrooms, distributed by A24 and directed by Kane Parsons, is testament to how trusting a creator’s throughline vision, even a greenhorn, can bring something as esoteric as online liminality to cinematic life.

Yung Parsons fleshes out his online series into the story of Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a vaguely pathetic man who runs a failing furniture shop. Desperate to kickstart his business—a suitably 1990s pirate-themed TV spot aside—he finds renewed curiosity and purpose in a dimension beyond the basement wall. Parsons transplants what worked best in his Rolling Giant film in the The Oldest View series (2023-2024), creating a homunculus which struggles to fit within the frame, a genuine horror in its clumsiness. The film undoubtedly works best during its handheld found footage moments, when the crackled Blender visuals Parsons favours in his web series charge the unnerving expanse of the Backrooms.

Parsons’ web series deals with the pitfalls of human curiosity. With the addition of a wounded protagonist in Clark, who splits his time between the store, bitter nights drinking alone and resentful sessions with his therapist, (Renate Reinsve) the film proves to be a fascinating portrayal of Main Character Syndrome. Pixellated people filled with nutritious furniture stuffing and the aforementioned homunculus serve to necrotise Clark’s ego, revealing the Backrooms’ awful capacity. What’s more, the numerous esoteric easter eggs induce their own curiosity in the audience, who will no doubt keep coming back for more if the film becomes anthologised. Something’s been unlocked in the Backrooms. Kirsty Asher

Today, Cinema Year Zero presents a new essay by Ellisha Izumi, reflecting on the unique position of participating as both programmer and audience member at Double Wonderful’s 24 HOUR CINEMA experiment.

Ellisha is a freelance film historian based in London (she/they).

Join us on 4th July for Wanted: Undead or Alive at The Cinema Museum. We have supplied a pair of duelling programme notes for a double bill presentation of Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966) and Billy the Kid and The Green Baize Vampire (1986) to celebrate the latter’s 40th anniversary in a rare 35mm special screening.

24 Hour Nostalgia

From 12 noon Friday 10^th April to 12 noon Saturday 11th, curator-provocateurs Double Wonderful hosted a 24 hour, non-stop film screening. Like a screening of Bela Tarr’s 7.5 hour Satantango or a Scala overnight movie marathon, this was endurance cinema. But with no advertised programme, no start times and no billed collaborators there was an added twist: ‘embrace the unknown’.

My role shifted throughout the event. I co-curated and introduced one of the films, I worked shifts on the door checking tickets (while stealing glances at the screen behind me) and stayed on as an audience member. Despite my involvement behind the scenes, the rest of the programme was kept a mystery to me.

When I walked in and started watching, I had missed the start and I didn’t know if what was on screen would be on for another 2 minutes or 2 hours. Waiting to the end of the film to find out what it was felt familiar. As a viewer surrendering control and practising patience I was reminded of watching TV as a child, with no access to a remote or TV guide. I fondly recalled the curios I would find as they unfolded in front of me, in contrast to the highly individual experience and control when streaming or channel surfing today. At 24 Hour Cinema if I missed something I couldn’t rewind, press the info button or try the +1 channel. Going along for the ride and accepting the unknowability changed my relationship to what I was watching, forcing me to reflect on my spectatorship.

When each new film started the sense of the unknown persisted and a process of constant evaluation was initiated. While I could identify the features I tried to absorb all the context clues from the international shorts to deduce where they were from and how they were made. When each short film finished I scanned the credits intently, trying to commit the names of characters and directors to memory, so I could find them later and log them accurately on letterboxd (a thought process which forced me to contemplate the insufferable performativity of my own cinephilia).

After a couple of hours, I took a toilet break as my film and spoken intro was coming up in 30 minutes. When I returned, the film before mine had already started, so I was constantly reassessing what I was watching: was it a documentary or fiction? How did they gain access to film in so many television news studios? Did this have a big budget or was this incredible escalating story of a Russian rapper called Husky actually real? Post-screening research tells me the truth of Lucifer (2019) lies somewhere in-between: it was a mockumentary. As I marinated in the mode of watching the unknown, I suddenly felt the intro I was about to give felt redundant, even antithetical to the spirit of the event.

The film I co-curated was 20^th Century Nostalgia (1997) a feature film directed and co-written by Masato Hara and a lesser known example of denpa – a genre of Japanese cinema and anime responding to y2k modernity in the city and online. The film follows a teenage girl called Anzu, who had spent the summer filming life in Tokyo with the charming oddball Toru. When Toru abruptly leaves, Anzu tries to edit their combined footage into a film. In my intro I picked out themes that I hoped would prime the audience to enjoy the film: the highs and lows of the creative process, how the different filmmaking styles of the characters reflects their perspectives: where Anzu was an optimist Toru was frequently pessimistic about Tokyo, the placed he dubbed “the artificial forest” creating artistic montages from the blinding lights of “a city that cannot sleep”. As I watched the other films over the course of the evening and the following morning, I was surprised and exhilarated to see the themes of 20^th Century Nostalgia echoed and refracted through the others. Connections born from chaos and my contextual intro just added to the variety of presentation.

With each new film, there was a sense of being over-stimulated and vastly inspired. From Canadian vampires, to adverts helmed by Harmony Korine and Tony Scott, shorts from local filmmakers to features such as Hi, Mom! Brian de Palma’s 1970 black comedy starring a young Robert de Niro. Like many others in the films and in the audience de Niro’s character is an aspiring filmmaker, and as we watch him peer through a consumer camera set up in front of his window to capture his unaware neighbours, the audience watches the watcher, the apparatus of the camera is made visible and confronted with their own role as a viewer amongst viewers, a community of voyeurs, and the themes of surveillance and spectatorship are repeated across the night. As unexpected links were made, neural pathways forged from across the globe, across time, in different languages, different genres and different aesthetics.

Another running theme was the perseverance of filmmaking: from Anzu’s efforts to edit coherence out of Toru’s footage, to Sion Sono’s BAD FILM shot with handheld cameras in 1995 and finally edited and released in 2012. This theme was highlighted by the section ‘London Lonely’ a trio of penetrating documentary shorts including Lift (2001) by Marc Isaac, who seemingly spent hours, days and weeks standing in the lift of a tower block, filming and interviewing residents he got to know over time, producing something permanent from a transient space. Boris Gerrets’ People I could have been and maybe am (2010) was shot entirely on a mobile phone Armed with the mission to break through urban anonymity, Gerrets finds his documentary subjects by chance encounter, and over the course of the film becomes intimately entwined with their affairs and addictions at great emotional cost. Bringing things to the modern day and in parallel to the 24 hour endurance of Double Wonderful’s screening was the recent release, 6 TILL 6, in which the filmmakers gave themselves one rule, keep the camera running from 6am Saturday to 6am Sunday as they explored gentrification and interviewed subjects in East London.

The experience was like a concentrated-film-festival: condensed and more potent, a whiskey with no mixer. There was a constant negotiation between the desire to watch as much as possible, versus physical comfort and bodily needs, toilet breaks, snacks, coffee, tinnies, cigarettes, a conversation with a familiar face, or taking a walk to stretch your stiffening limbs. You had to make the experience your own. I attended the screening from 3pm-11pm and opted to go home at night, before returning at 9:45am for the final stretch.

Waking up after a short sleep at home and forcing myself through the motions of my morning routine was not easy, but to make up for my failure as a night owl I would return in the morning. I had committed to a final shift on the door and glad that I had. Like the filmmakers of 6 TILL 6 my experience with 24 Hour Cinema gave me London at a cross-section, as I passed run clubs and families starting their day out and returned to 24 Hour Cinema I saw the overnighters head home, binning their empty cans and searching for transport. I thought of Bar Italia by Pulp, about the 24 hour bar which saw party goers and office workers cross paths for a coffee at dawn, the two tribes casting judgement on the others’ opposing lifestyle, but there is no judgement at 24 Hour Cinema., just mutual understanding of an unusual endeavour and commitment.

As I returned to the screening I felt deeply comforted that art and unique programming was still going, was still there even when I wasn’t.

Today, Cinema Year Zero is excited to announce that we are partnering with Cinema Rediscovered Festival 2026.

The festival, which takes place in Bristol from Wednesday 22nd to Sunday 26th July, focuses on reviving restored and forgotten films from the history of cinema. It is Britain’s leading hub for repertory cinema, with the industry-focused Reframing Film Sessions always impacting the following year of exhibition.

But the festival has endured over the last decade through its dedicated audience focus. This year, strands include Comics Come Alive, Rogue Hollywood, Restored and Rediscovered, 50 Years of Aardman at Cinema Rediscovered, Reframing Film, and Vive Le Cinema!

For our part, Cinema Year Zero will publish an essay for each day of the festival on a film in the programme. These will be available online here, and in print at Watershed.

Following Les Sièges de l’Alcazar screening on Friday 24th July, we will be hosting an informal discussion of the film’s depiction of the pratfalls of cinephilia at Watershed café/bar https://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/14062/les-siges-de-lalcazar

We will also host a Critics Salon, featuring readings from the commissioned essayists along with conversation about our critical practices. Free to attend, with more details to follow.

Cinema Rediscovered’s Festival Producer Madeleine Probst had this to say: “We’re delighted to partner up with independent publication Cinema Year Zero on this 10th anniversary edition to platform new writing by film critics and create a space at the festival for peer sharing work. It’s especially fitting as members of the editorial team Ben Flanagan and Kirsty Asher were participants in Tara Judah’s Film Critics workshop during early editions of the festival. We share a passion for cinema, for developing film criticism and are both committed to creating paid opportunities for writers where possible.”

Below, we have picked 10 highlights from the festival. But there’s so much more. You can find the full programme and tickets here: https://www.watershed.co.uk/cinema-rediscovered-2026

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10 to see at Cinema Rediscovered 2026

Danger: Diabolik (Mario Bava, 1968, Italy)

Produced during the peak of Bondmania, Danger: Diabolik reenvisions Britain’s most recognisable export as an Italian master thief, cladding him in a black skin-tight suit and amplifying his sexual lasciviousness (if you can imagine such a thing) into something more… well, dangerous. There’s a strange sensuous quality to Diabolik (John Phillip Law), unsettlingly lithe in his acts of violence as well as his love-making, that makes him a slippery prospect as a main character. No-one can even seem to agree how to pronounce his name in his own film. Enter at your own peril. Blaise Radley

(El Chacal de Nahueltoro) Jackal of Nahueltoro (Miguel Littin, 1969, Chile)

This fiery fable, based on a murder case which shook 1960s Chile, is probably the South American nation’s most famous film. Director Miguel Littin, who was later exiled during the Pinochet regime, proceeds through the case with a documentarian’s eye, questioning the value of atonement and sympathy in a bureaucratic state. Lyrical voice over applies questions and answers from media interviews with the killer (Nelson Villagra) to brutal scenes. Limber handheld camerawork, and fragmentary edits that evoke the era’s modernist masterpieces, lift the dramatic landscapes to an even higher plain. Newly digitised in 4k by Cineteca Nacional de Chile. Ben Flanagan

Trees Lounge (Steve Buscemi, 1996, USA)

The flowering of the American independent film movement in the late 1980s and 1990s led to plenty of sub-Tarantino slop, but it also allowed for Trees Lounge, a languid, semi-autobiographical slice-of-life shaggy dog story that deliberately never quite goes anywhere. The film’s director and star Steve Buscemi commits to depicting the boredom and repetition of functioning alcoholism, but not as a grim miserabilist; drawn from his own experiences, he understood how tedium can animate and slowly infect the barfly’s life until there’s nothing left but an empty glass. It’s coloured with sharply observed humour and a top-tier cast: Buscemi’s stop-start directorial career never eclipsed his acting work, but his debut is an undersung pleasure. Fedor Tot

50 Years of Aardman at Cinema Rediscovered

Radioactive dust falls from green skies; malicious, black-tied men make totalitarian speeches about arms trade and profit; a sparse soundtrack of howls, groans, burps, gulps and rumbles: here in Aardman’s 1986 short Babylon we find the origins of the beloved, Bristol-based animation studio’s beloved fuzzy contemporary style. Celebrating Aardman’s 50th birthday, Cinema Rediscovered presents a trio of events with co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton: shorts programme Sweet Disaster (including the sinister Babylon described above), a deep dive into the playful world of Morph (one of the studio’s first characters), and documentary Peter Gabriel: Sledgehammer Revealed explores Aardman’s innovative stop-motion work for Gabriel’s 1986 music video. Anna Devereux

The Movie Orgy (Joe Dante, 1968, USA)

Joe Dante is known for his affectionate satire of mid-century Americana in Gremlins (1984), Matinee (1993), and Small Soldiers (1998), something you can trace back to his days as Head of his student Film Programme. The Movie Orgy began as an experimental screening, with several vintage film reels set up on different projectors—when one got boring he would switch to the next, and splice in cartoons and adverts. With the projectionist as auteur, responding to audience reactions, each subsequent showing saw the project evolve further and faster ending up with the film in its current form at over 2000 cuts and a treasure trove of clips juxtaposed together in this hilarious pop-culture mélange. Ellisha Izumi

Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, 1970, Italy, France)

Le Boucher begins with a regimented village-wide operation putting together a wedding, shot in the same reticulated way one would draw a multiplication table. It climaxes with a haunting set of close-ups, humid with desperation. In between, Claude Chabrol sticks the viewer like Blu-Tack to the Les Eyzies township without a whiff of touristic glazing; sketches Hitchcockian flashpoints on a subtler scale than the master; gives a classic middle-class wedding meet-cute a blooming maturity amongst the southwestern woodlands; and heaves a funeral at his audience like a ship coming into port, complete with an open grave surging towards the camera in a beautiful wide-angle composition. Tom De Lancy Green

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003, Taiwan)

In a Taiwanese movie theatre soon to be closed forever, a smattering of clientele gather to haunt it one last time. Bored tourists and cruisers, disinterested theatre staff, and two aging actors reminiscing on their former glory all constitute the theatre’s final audience. Screening as part of Cinema Rediscovered’s Vive le Cinema! in celebration of the festival’s 10th edition, Tsai Ming-Liang’s slow cinema classic Goodbye, Dragon Inn fills its long, ponderous takes with quiet contemplation about death and cinema. Finality and continuity find a coexistence in this gloriously serene, morbidly funny swansong of the cinemagoing experience. Kirsty Asher

Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976, USA)

Elaine May decided to out-Cassavetes Cassavetes with Mikey and Nicky, and presumably rubbed it further in his face by casting John Cassavetes himself in it. The result is a truly ugly nighttime odyssey, which starts out poorly for Cassavetes’ Nicky and only gets worse from there, the arrival of old pal Mikey (Peter Falk) nothing like the balm of friendship it’s supposed to be. The film has a brilliantly raggedy quality: it seems somehow entirely improvised at times, the grungy, scruffy atmosphere looking as if it’s just walked in on its protagonist’s self-destruction. Yet given that May is a famously perfectionist director, we can only assume that this off-the-cuff spirit is the work of meticulous preparation. Fedor Tot

Chronically Online: Archiving and Activating Online Moving Image for Audiences

In 2024, the BFI National Archive embarked on ‘Our Screen Heritage’, an accelerated acquisition programme to preserve hundreds of online moving image works. They have partnered with The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend (CNFW) on ‘Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet’, to engage audiences with this material. Join CNFW for a screening of early internet video and a discussion about what it means to preserve online moving image and to screen it in cinemas. They’ll be joined by Will Swinburne, Curator at the BFI National Archive, and special guest Paul Weedon (the viral video star who once said “I can’t believe you’ve done this”). Orla Smith

Nostalgia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983, Russia/Italy)

“I am fed up of all your beauties.” Having just concluded my own mini-trip to Italy, I understand the overwhelming strain of another fresco. I had never heard the phrase trompe-l’œil spoken aloud until a month ago. In what amounted to a few days, I heeded its call like a death knell. I saw many churches and palazzos, an infinity of columns, altars, and doorknockers. I, too, longed for home. Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia paints the drama I’ve described in a more profound light, its protagonist Andrei a sorrowful Muscovite who can’t abide a lick of della Francesca’s plaster-work. This is a gorgeous film whose mysteries are wrapped in emotional candour. Steaming baths, a freak babydoll, the red-head’s coquettishness: all gasp-inducing. Technical gimmicks abound, trimmed to a fine point: revelatory tracking shots, insidious zooms and breathy pulls, outrageous tableaux. Tarkovsky’s visual tropes remain steadfast. A perforated farmhouse, water gushing through the cracks. Monochrome evocations of time past, held together in time present. Almost my experience, then. Instead, the film amplifies an additional world beyond mortal sense, and by the end, two solid tears rolled down either cheek. If only I shared the hubris of Eugenia, Andrei’s thwarted tour guide: “Not only am I a good translator, I improve on the original.” Joseph Owen

This article is part of Cinema Rediscovered’s Other Ways of Seeing, a development opportunity supported by BFI awarding funds from National Lottery.

NOT BY LYNCH continues this Friday, June 12th at The Cinema Museum with Tobe Hooper’s Spontaneous Combustion (1990)

Below, Sam Warren Miell finds a dance of influence between the parallel careers of Hooper and Lynch. Sam is on the editorial board of the magazine Narrow Margin.

Tickets are available here, and come with a print booklet which includes the essay.

Two in the shadows

In the summer of 1973, aged thirty, Tobe Hooper shot The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In the spring of 1976, also aged thirty, David Lynch finished Eraserhead (1977), which he had begun shooting around four years earlier. The influence of these two quintessential midnight movies is by now so deeply ingrained that it would be near impossible to map, forming part of the bedrock of whole continents of cinema. Lynch died a filmmaker of enormous renown, a cult hero who was also a Palme d’Or winner, his work the subject of countless academic works and two Simpsons references. Hooper’s obituaries, meanwhile, relay the narrative of a wunderkind whose promise dissipated somewhere along the way; his ‘later work for the cinema and television was said to lack the impact of his early films’, the BBC drily reported.

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Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘26, our monthly review supplement. This month we took in a surplus of folk cinema, a pean to a lost Hong Kong, Soderbergh’s latest forgery, and Desplechin at his most conceited.

Don’t forget to subscribe to receive this and more film writing direct to your inbox.

NOT BY LYNCH continues on Friday, 12th June at The Cinema Museum with Spontaneous Combustion (1990). Tickets are available now.

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Offbeat Folk Film Festival - Welcome to the UK (UK, 2025-2026)

Starting four years ago with slap-up screenings of niche BFI Archive films that explored British working class and folk culture, Offbeat Folk Film Club has now branched into an film festival which has recently completed its second edition. One screening, Welcome to the UK, feels particularly pertinent to Offbeat’s goal as a programming collective, and to the wider musings of the current folk ‘revival’: to explore the notion of a national British identity in a time of fraught political upheaval.

Music for Prawn (McD, 2026) follows a mute papier-mache headed individual named Prawn around the Medieval Music in the Dales festival. There he is taught how rural bagpipes are created from the body of a goat, is serenaded by countertenor David Yardley, and educated on contemporary medieval dressmaking. It’s a fun jaunt, although perhaps a bit too irony-pilled in its execution. W: A Return to Oz (Howard-Baker, 2025) adeptly fuses archive of defunct Plymouth rave project The Warehouse with his own footage of its present abandoned state to track the glum decline of British rave culture since the 1990s.

Merrie England (Robinson, 2026) examines the uncertain and often misunderstood origins of English folk custom in response to the nationalism of Raise the Flags. While engaging, it is mostly highlighting paths already well-trod in this national conversation. Music For Waltzers (Carson, 2025) may well be the stand-out of the programme. A childhood passion for the Waltzer fairground ride and its musical accompaniments of jungle, gabber and dubstep leads Carson to uncover a previously unsung world of British carnival culture, replete with DJs and hardy ride workers, and even a Waltzer worshipper. Must be seen to be believed! While You Wait (Stockman, 2025) captured the audience’s hearts at the programme’s close - a delightful short about a Sussex hospital radio station, one of the longest running in the country, and boasting potentially the country’s oldest radio DJ on its roster. Within the programme’s context it presents volunteer-run radio as a vernacular tradition, a fascinating concept that echoes in the festival’s burgeoning wave of filmmakers interested in capturing contemporary folk practice and vernacular tradition in the UK. Long may it continue! Kirsty Asher

Ciao UFO (Patrick Leung, Hong Kong, 2019)

Despite what its title may suggest, Ciao UFO is not a sci-fi film, but a tender, highly local portrayal of Hong Kong’s collective memories from the 1980s to the early 2000s. It follows the lives of four childhood friends who witness what they believe to be an extraterrestrial event, and gradually drift apart as they enter adulthood. Struggling in their late 20s, they have to revisit their past in order to solve their current life challenges.

In the original Chinese title Zoi-gin UFO, the Cantonese phrase Zhoi-gin, like “Ciao”, carries the double meaning of ‘goodbye’ and ‘see you again’. The UFO thus symbolises a farewell to, and a revisiting of, something that has been lost and is still longed for, including Hong Kong’s past.

Accordingly, the film vividly captures Hong Kong society during major events including the stock market crash and the city’s return to China. The protagonists’ lives form a microcosm of Hong Kong society, where individuals are told to pursue stability and financial success, while feeling lost in, and pressured by, the city’s rapid changes.

However, the link between the characters’ prospects and Hong Kong’s changing climes is held back by its weak storytelling. The UFO bonds the friends and recalls their brave, innocent younger selves, serving as a potent link between the loss of childhood purity and the city’s changes. Yet, such depth is limited by overly explicit dialogue about courage and imagination, and the cliché plot of grown-ups disheartened by their current lives looking to rediscover their “true” selves.

Despite its success in Hong Kong, whether Ciao UFO will resonate with international audiences is more uncertain. Culturally-specific references in the soundtrack’s lyrics and the characters’ favourite TV shows are not translated or explained, preventing some from sharing the sense of nostalgia that provides much of the emotional weight of the film. Its wistful depiction of Hong Kong remains a poignant reflection on a city struggling to reconcile its past with an uncertain future. Angel Sun

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The Christophers (Steven Soderbergh, USA/UK, 2026)

The Christophers is a fidgety film, ratty like a moth-eaten scarf, and a marble run of inconsequentialisms. Tension is cranked down rather than up in this misshapen two-hander about a notorious bad boy artist (Ian McKellen) and the forger (Michaela Coel) sent to finish a series of romantic portraits for his grubbing children to sell on when the old man kicks it. McKellen looks as though he might melt, yet grips his silences with the pregnant threat of vindictive bitchiness. Coel is diligent, but terse and sharp. She makes just as much art out of a serrated cheekbone as any painting she produces in the film, and her spoken g’s and k’s punctuate the musty air within the unkempt, gloomy bombsite of the former’s Bloomsbury townhouse like hailstones on corrugated iron.

Steven Soderbergh assists the leads in reviving the two-shot, long forgotten in the wake of the streaming service’s ultra-legible chain-link editing. The camera’s movements stay contracted and tense in London’s post-Millennium exteriors, but once inside the older house, Soderbergh, operating his own camera, floats aquatically as he did for last year’s Presence, drifting up staircases and around corners. He is known post-retirement for being weaselly and spry like Coel’s forger, taking people’s money and running with it, but it’s obvious Soderbergh most sympathises here with McKellen. Like the camera, the thespian is allowed to dodder, half beginning sentences with a charming elderly stutter.

According to McKellen, rehearsal time was minimal: too much polish would spoil the effect. The film is tiny by design, sighing and sauntering, only coming alive in more recognisably ‘Bergh-ian fashion when Soderbergh reminds the audience of his youthful punchiness with an image he loves returning to: stolen goods in the back of a van. Even so, for a quasi-heist film, Soderbergh pulls back at each new revelation, like air out of a balloon. Strangely, it’s the oldest person in the room, McKellen, that keeps the maverick director’s energy up. Tom de Lancy Green

Two Pianos (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2025)

Arnaud Desplechin’s films have a novelistic nature. Desplechin himself categorises his work as the product of an ‘unaccomplished writer’, of which his latest addition, Two Pianos, is no different. Following pianist Mathias’ (François Civil) return to Lyon from Japan, lured by mentor Elena (Charlotte Rampling), he encounters a child in the park who bears a striking resemblance to himself - who, it is revealed, is the son of his former flame Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). What follows is a carefully scripted melodrama depicting unrequited passion and quiet anguish.

Despite DOP Paul Guilhaume’s intimate handheld camera, Desplechin approaches the melodramatic torment of the characters with an emotional restraint. The characters are entrapped in a cycle of internal pain that bears itself in the film’s most striking images - an elevator door closing on Mathias’ collapsed body, a child fallen on the floor of a playground, a young widow telling a risqué story at a funeral. When Claude’s husband Pierre (Jeremy Lewin) suddenly dies, we are only shown the paramedic’s attempts at resuscitation of his dead body. In this film, lifeless bodies proliferate, like marionettes with their strings undone.

By rendering the action off-screen, Desplechin circumscribes any emotional interiority for the characters to an unreachable arena that the audience is not granted access to. Novelistic detail conspires to keep the inner emotions of the characters unspoken and unexplained whilst refusing to delve beyond the surface. All we are left with is the after-image of an unlocatable interiority that we can never grasp.

By stripping the film of any discernment - for the audience and director alike - we are left in the lurch, spinning endlessly in the rumination of events. In clothing the characters in a veil of indecipherability, Desplechin fails to depict the human interior inside the lifeless shroud. Bethan Ingman

Today, Cinema Year Zero presents a new essay by Oliver Hunt, whose discovery of an obscure 1990s karaoke video leads to a deep dive on the aesthetic pleasures and inherent contradictions of the genre.

Oliver is a programmer and video artist.

On the 12th June, NOT BY LYNCH returns to The Cinema Museum with Spontaneous Combustion (1990). Tickets are available now.

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John Lennon is dead. His ashes are scattered by long term creative, romantic and sexual partner Yoko Ono in Central Park. Then in 1999, across an entirely different hemisphere, a cameraman aims his lens at a bikini-clad woman who finds herself in a precarious circumstance as a tribal sacrifice unfolds. Tied up, her body will be ritually committed to the Gods. An indeterminable time later, a drunken salaryman sings ‘Let It Be’ in a dulcet tone, contemplating his rebellious youthful aspirations in a karaoke booth off a side alley in Shinjuku. Despite these seemingly opaque moments appearing disconnected, via the lens of karaoke videos still quietly circulating through digital archives, such threads begin to cohere.

Karaoke videos occupy an oddly overlooked corner of video culture. They are, in essence, conceptual grunt work, often found flickering behind the lyrics in the low glow of karaoke booths worldwide. Designed for half glances and minimal engagement, they resemble the faintly Dadaist animations found in bowling alleys. The precedent had been set decades earlier through Max Fleischer’s “bouncing ball” sing-a-long animations of the 1920s, though by the 1980s karaoke companies in Japan had begun folding low-budget video imagery into the format. Throughout the 1990s, karaoke videos circulated primarily via LaserDisc before disappearing into the obscurity of car boot sales and, eventually, online archives.

Karaoke videos are typically delivered in two flavours. The first derives from cheaply purchased stock footage of American skylines or first-person travelogues somehow pressed into service beneath Anglo-Western songs and ultimately mismatched over Morrissey’s warbles. The second, more common for Japanese city pop catalogues, resembles a shoestring rendition of familiar music video grammar: a heartbroken woman clutching candles beneath the moonlight, a youthful Casanova kicking stones down a lonely road, et cetera. Instantly recognisable forms of melodrama. Perhaps lorem ipsum is the key to it all. A placeholder, yes, but also a curious aesthetic proposition. Something recognisable yet unknowable, suggestive of meaning without ever quite delivering it. To the uninitiated, it carries the vague promise of coherence and for the initiated, it is gloriously nonsensical. A plastic surface stretched taut over a void.

The lo-fi karaoke montages of those looping, faintly baffling visuals paired with a hit pop song remain a curiosity in its own right. The imagery (by necessity) must never be too stimulating. Anything genuinely arresting might throw off the aspiring chanteur mid-verse. A visual language of broad genre cues, just enough to establish a vibe for those lingering in the booth but not currently clutching the microphone. Visuals one could distract a child with, perhaps, without much discernment. So what would happen when that fragile contract breaks down? When genre signifiers fall away, and the screen behind the lyrics begins to serve up imagery that is not merely bland, but actively bewildering? Who, one wonders, is responsible for producing such artefacts, and who is diligently archiving them on the Internet Archive for posterity?

In this epoch of relentless video consumption, let’s consider one anomaly that has skirted beneath the radar. Unearthed from the afterglow of the internet’s hum, the karaoke mixtape Everlasting Oldies 1 (2000) now survives online as both an artefact and apparition. Internet Archive user tnsrchv described it lovingly as “a childhood memory”.

DVD Track Listing Contents

01. Morning Has Broken

02. Top of the World

03. Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

04. The End of the World

05. How Can I Tell Her

06. Rose Rose I Love You

07. Yesterday

08. Sealed with a Kiss

09. Let It Be

10. Your Cheating Heart

11. Help Me Make It through the Night

12. We May Never Love Like This Again

13. Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree

14. Sad Movies

Taken on its own terms, the track listing reads rather like a volume of poetry pulled straight from the psyche of whimpering adolescence. All the more striking, then, that Cat Stevens’ ‘Morning Has Broken’ is entrusted with opening proceedings, only for matters to wind down with Sue Thompson’s ‘Sad Movies’. These song titles feel oddly of a piece, yet to Western audiences born after the arrival of an internet connection, they have largely faded from cultural memory. In Japan, meanwhile, karaoke has quietly preserved once popular music within the contemporary cultural mindset.

If one were to watch (as I have) the whole collection in one long viewing, it wasn’t until ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ began that I perked up with curiosity. Doe-eyed models clad in Union Jack attire pose before vaguely defined “safari protection” figures, rifles in hand, eyes darting uneasily towards the camera. We are presented with a kind of collective daydream, colonial tableaux by way of bargain-bin surrealism. At one point, a small blond haired boy playfully wrestles with a child in traditional tribal dress, the sort of imagery that now instinctively prompts a collective grimace. Bare-chested women look on as Taiwanese models (identified a little later on when draped in their national flag) recline in the brush, posing with children as though assembled for some improbable fashion ethnography. Throughout it all, the karaoke lyrics continue their indifferent forward march. They do not pause for discomfort or rumination. You must keep singing.

Night falls. A fire crackles. Poses are struck. Men with automatic weapons hover just within frame. Whether these men function as protectors or merely as an unstable nod to the perennial idea that guns are “cool” remains open to interpretation. By the time ‘The End of the World’ arrives, a sort of egalitarianism takes hold. The rifles are passed to the models themselves, who handle them with a studied indifference, brushing hair from their eyes as though mildly inconvenienced by the apocalypse. The camera, with quiet insistence, pans down to their pristine white Adidas trainers meeting the dust.

What becomes immediately apparent is that we have departed the safe harbour of reasonable taste and decorum, and drifted instead into the cultural black hole that coalesced at the tail end of the 20th century and dawn of the new. It was a rather unhinged moment in new media. The era in which fringe visual media escaped containment and seeped into the mainstream. Audiences, newly hungry for forms of bodily spectacle that television had previously sanitised, found themselves awash in strange digital subcultures where the likes of Bumfights Vol. 1: A Cause for Concern (2002) circulated with alarming ease via file-sharing forums. The sort of material that took up permanent, rent free residence in the collective psyche of a generation. Taste, in such an environment, became not so much refined as wilfully gauche. For those coming of age in the digital gutter, the future wasn’t bright, it was (quite simply) deranged. Seen through this lens, Everlasting Oldies 1’s colonial safari fantasia feels less like an accident than an inevitable byproduct of its era.

The absurdity finally draws to a close with the comforts of a modern television studio, delivering something resembling a satisfying third act resolution. Two pasty blond hosts sit opposite one of the surviving models in an oddly confrontational yet surreal double act interview, whilst Sue Thompson’s dulcet refrain supplies the emotional scaffolding as she sings “Sad movies always make me cry.” As we dutifully echo the lyrics on screen, the interview dissolves into a montage of the model triumphantly posing with a python. The symbolism is hardly subtle, yet she appears entirely in command. Her fear mastered, a narrative reclaimed. A survivor of this ordeal. “And when he kissed her lips I almost died”.

Interpretive imagery, of course, is almost entirely counterproductive for karaoke. The same could be said for obscure meme montages and bowling alley animations whose very lack of intention makes them oddly fertile ground for postmodern critique. Their absence of artistry, or auteurship, if one is feeling generous, might instead be attributed to a kind of naïve practicality, bordering on the childlike.

Everlasting Oldies 1 emerges, then, as both relic and mirror. A peculiar artefact reflecting globalisation, colonial hangovers, commerce, beauty, and an undercurrent of quiet fatuity. To watch it from beginning to end and impose a narrative is less an act of criticism than one of stylistic endurance. One imagines the members of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle having an absolute field day with material of this sort. We can only imagine what unsettling portraits of 20th Century hang-overs might emerge in Everlasting Oldies 2, 3, or 4. Such artefacts feel strangely primed for reinterpretation in an age oversaturated with images and noise. Sometimes the wisest course is not to look beyond the lyrics, but merely to sing the song you’re given.

NOT BY LYNCH continues tomorrow, May 8th at The Cinema Museum with Jack Sholder’s The Hidden (1987).

Below, experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator Mahda Purmehdi introduces the film’s uncanny use of Lynch muse Kyle MacLachlan.

Tickets are available here, and come with a print booklet which includes the essay.

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The Owls Are Not What They Seem: A Cinema of Echoes, a House of Mirrors

1982: the cinema screen lights up the white snow in Antarctica where a sled dog runs away from bullets fired by a helicopter in pursuit. The dog is taken in by the people working in a research station. It starts to shapeshift, taking over the American bodies one by one. In the same year, a woman adopts a White Shepherd dog after it defends her from an attacker. It is revealed shortly after that the dog is trained to kill black people. Five years later, in Los Angeles, Lieutenant Masterson’s dog, hosting an alien, attacks Masterson. The alien switches its host and becomes the LAPD Lieutenant. Three dogs across three films. White Dog (Samuel Fuller) is not science-fiction and its eponymous dog is not host to an alien entity as in The Thing (John Carpenter) or The Hidden (Jack Sholder). It is, however, just like the owls in Twin Peaks (1990-1991): not what it seems.

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Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘26, our monthly review supplement. This month we encountered an indie horror of online anxiety, a blockbuster plagued by AI-accusations, and a romanian arthouse film that rubs our faces in the whole thing.

Don’t forget to subscribe to receive this and more film writing direct to your inbox.

NOT BY LYNCH continues on Friday, 8th May at The Cinema Museum with The Hidden (1987). Tickets are available now.

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Worm (Ned Caderni, UK, 2026)

British debut director Ned Caderni’s Worm burrows into a simple metaphor for grief. In it, a couple’s holiday to a remote Welsh village becomes increasingly hostile. After a year together, their sexual alienation is manifesting through bizarre outbursts. And then Bella (Freddie Acaster) begins to receive emails from her dead ex, attached with CCTV videos and pictures of her movements. She should have deleted the caché. It’s a rather loose metaphor, one which permits Caderni room to play in his hauntological milieu.

Accordingly, Worm is sparse in approach, making the most of its meagre production. Lingering shots of the house, of the sea, of endless roads, are framed with a sickening clarity. DOP Edward Glynne Jones constantly emphasises friction between the digitised aesthetic and the natural beauty of the landscape. His black and white photography creates an icy distance between the characters, as though they are already living beyond the pale. The digital flatness encourages an aesthetic minimalism which extends to the story’s languid pace. It’s best when scenes play out in single long takes that allow time to pass through and the performances to develop to excruciating ends.

These discordant performances raise the tension. Acaster’s naturalist sorrow bristles against the jokey, irreverent chatter of Joshua Dowden as her boyfriend. Their anti-chemistry flitters from Alf Garnett to Penda’s Fen (1974), while Paris Raine’s Herrmanniac score hints at a violence buried beneath their relationship. Caderni travels from one uncomfortable encounter to the next, rarely giving his characters the opportunity for emotional breathing room even as the coastal wind rattles around this holiday home.

With shades of Kurosawa (the good one), Bergman, and Franz & Fiala’s overlooked The Lodge (2019), this self-distributed, truly independent film attempts to engage directly with audiences via a roadshow distribution. Rather than sink in a maelstrom of weekly new releases, Worm could become a perpetual attraction, an alternative pathway for contemporary British film exhibition that suits this cadaverous journey to the underworld. Ben Flanagan

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The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, USA, 2026)

In our current era of AI-overload it’s tempting to label anything remotely shit as ‘slop’. But this would do a disservice to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. And all the other non-ai generated terrible films that came before it; at least they bear the mark of human hands. While accusations of AI generation and laziness abound, coming from both serious film critics and serious losers, this sequel to 2023’s global, billion-dollar blockbuster hit is really just another movie in a historic chain of ca$hing in. A safe bet.

Perhaps it’s this safety that made the viewing experience–alongside my 10-year old daughter, who lauded the glut of in-universe references–into such a delight. The film lacks the incessant ‘look now’ action that seems to fill almost every second of many new big-budget family films, which, even when done well (see Spiderverse, Puss in Boots: Last Wish et al.) can often be exhausting. Instead the Mario Galaxy movie opts to capture as much of the Marioverse as it can, feeling at times a little like, well, a video game. Whether that’s rainbow coloured night skies or mushroom filled vistas, the scope is reminiscent of the immersion felt in open world games like Skyrim or Red Dead Redemption. There’s even a handful of 8-bit throwbacks for good measure. Add in a bountiful Bowser (Jack Black) backstory that provides the bulk of the film’s laughs, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a good-looking, breezy 90-minuter. What’s everyone’s problem? Jeremy Arblaster

Dracula (Radu Jude, Romania, 2025)

It’s hard to stay mad at Radu Jude. A three-hour ode to Romania’s most famous geo-cultural signifier threatens one’s will to live, punctuated as it is by narrative oubliettes of deteriorating AI and asides from its national literature and folk tales.One aside is even outlined as being fifty minutes long by our fictionalised director (Adonis Tanța), as if to coax us over the finish line. And yet, Jude’s roguish charm as a storyteller persists. The film opens with AI grotesqueries, prompts of Dracula with various generated voices repeating “Dracula can suck my dick”. Soon enough these are explained by the director, sitting with his new American-Japanese AI model Dr. AI JUDEX 0.0: the mise en abyme that will ensue is his attempt to create a sure-fire hit Dracula film solely using AI.

Interspersed is this director’s own gaudy Dracula tourist sex show, which also includes a chase through Transylvanian streets where Dracula (Gabriel Spahiu) and his sexy accomplice Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia) keep baying tourists satiated. With this story, and the navel-gazing conversations that take place within it, there is something more muted in Jude’s outlook. Behind his usual brisk humour, slapstick, and unbridled body humour, there is a mournful pessimism about humanity’s capacity for exploitation and violence which perforates the silliness.

The AI slop is unconscionable, but really this is the most suitable environment for it. The director’s prompt to recreate Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) but, to paraphrase, ‘actually sexy and not boring’ releases increasingly contorted horror-porno images that sends up genAI’s ugly inadequacies. It’s wholly anti-aesthetic, and Jude’s willing victims may end up begging for a swift end, our very own cinematic Impaler. Like the bouffon clown, Jude is laughing at us as much as he wants to make us laugh. Kirsty Asher

Today, Cinema Year Zero presents a new essay by Nikolai Phoya on This is England, situating Shane Meadows’ film between its social realist aesthetic and the historical context of white nationalism. Happy St. George’s.

Nikolai is a writer based in Greater Manchester, with essays and short stories on affinities.world and the T A P E Collective.

On the 8th May, NOT BY LYNCH returns to The Cinema Museum with The Hidden (1987). Tickets are available now.

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“What has happened before will happen again,” King Solomon tells his student.

“It’s like looking in the mirror,” Combo (Stephen Graham) tells Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), “twenty years ago, when I was fucking twelve.” In the tight space of the car they share, the camera barely fits the former’s wry face, where, etched in ink and bridging his brow, his warrior saint’s cross bobs in and out of view. This Is England (2006) was pulled heavily from Shane Meadows’ own childhood, where Combo’s white-nationalist vision of the future as a hallowed past is ultimately rejected by Shaun, the writer-director’s self-insert. Yet twenty years after the film’s premiere, Combo’s reflection has never been clearer.

After losing his father to the ten-week Falklands War, Shaun finds himself bullied, angry and listless in a Midlands town that was being stripped of its industry by a burgeoning neoliberal government. By setting this film in 1983, Meadows takes a snapshot of Britain’s political and cinematic landscape. Two television films released that same year—Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain and Mike Leigh’s Meantime—outlined, in differing ways, how easily that anger and listlessness metastasise into fascist ideology. From Leigh, Meadows borrows his ‘deviser’-director methodology, spending weeks of pre-production in actor-collaboration sessions, improvising and growing the characters and story from scratch. The developed chemistry among the actors leads to the first third of the film’s cosy, wholesome camaraderie as the skinhead gang takes Shaun in to help him cope.

But Combo’s fated arrival from prison reintroduces British New Wave’s ‘angry young men’ trope to a twenty-first century audience. Tony Richardson’s Look Back In Anger (1959, from John Osborne’s play) being the blueprint, the protagonist Jimmy (Richard Burton), despite his petulance and foibles, possesses enough virtue to defend his British Indian friend from the bigotry of their Midlands town. Believing a police officer to be responsible for revoking Kapoor’s licence, Jimmy discovers it was his own fellow marketplace vendors who are to blame. “You don’t want him here,” they profess at the pub. “You’ve seen his prices, son. We’ve got to eat.” This terror of the colonised was in opposition to Jimmy’s values, which the following generation of filmmakers found, however radical, insufficient. By the time we reach Meadows, Britain’s former colonies, without the supposedly guiding, Christian light of the empire, assume the form of a westward, Islamic dragon, “raping and pillaging,” according to the likes of Combo, the helpless damsel this country has become. Who else but Saint George and his “proud fucking warriors” could save her?

Clarke’s direction of David Leland’s script for Made In Britain warps Osborne and Richardson’s righteous indignation into something altogether repugnant. This angry young man has no backstory, no excuses. Clarke and Leland’s construction is barely a character, barely a man. Tim Roth initially plays Trevor as though his neo-Nazism is just another facet of youthful acting-out, of his need to be heard, which is a trait Western media commonly frames as a valid excuse for causing pain; a rite of passage white adolescents embark upon on their way to total liberal self-actualisation. The fact Trevor’s partner-in-crime is Errol (Terry Richards), his Black roommate at the assessment centre, almost further supports this idea he does not truly believe these things. That maybe Trevor can redeem himself. But near the story’s midpoint, in response to the superintendent’s bleak estimation of his past and future, Trevor lashes out for ten unbroken minutes of ranting: he explains, with Crusader logic, how sending the Pakistanis “back” would be a kindness rather than a cruelty, lest they all get a brick through their window, “and piss, and shit, and petrol,” because they “don’t even speak fucking English”; and when talking about Black people, he claims, “You lock up anything that frightens you … I hate you for putting me in here. Blacks in here are thick as shit with no brains—you know it. Admit it. I had to sit in school and watch these wankers add up on their fingers. I was held back. All the white kids were held back.” Blackness is, to him, Heidegger’s abyss: the groundless foundation of Being upon which the Western imagination flounders. The terror of becoming The Nothing, becoming The Death, that Blackness represents, powers his anger. The terror of the supposed Islamist horde from the eastern horizon powers his anger. Trevor’s final acts of freedom are bricking the window of the same Pakistani family who got him sent to the assessment centre in the first place, and getting Errol arrested for the van they stole together. There is no redemption for him. No hope.

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Leigh’s process loses the didacticism of the British New Wave that Clarke had tapped into. In place of anger, the centripetal force around which his characters’ psyches orbit becomes shame. Besides the occasional anti-Thatcher graffiti, the characters of Meantime are too disenfranchised to assemble why they feel this loss of dignity. All they can do is steal it from others they deem lower. When the Black patron (Herbert Norville) in the pub takes up the offer of a pint, Mark (Phil Daniels), almost like a tic, blurts, “Piss off, you Black bastard. Nah, I’m only joking,” before buying him his lager. When Coxy (Gary Oldman) and Colin (Tim Roth) share an elevator with another Black man, Coxy, in the punning style of the film’s dialogue, says, “I’m all-white, you all-white?” and attempts another racist joke before being intimidated out of finishing it. These interactions are not the film’s focus, because the film, like the characters within it, has no focus, only the desperate fumble in that groundless dark for some foothold that can never be found.

Meadows borrows Leigh’s methods for character construction, and from Clarke, he maps the differing relationships his skinheads have between the West Indians and the South Asians. It is the brown boys in jacketed thobes who they siege, whose ball they plunder; the P-word with which they graffiti the underpass and Mr. Sandhu’s shop. Yet it is from Black people the gang derives their skinhead culture, a degree of appropriation that only happens when the originators are seen as nothing, as already socially dead. “How does metaphysics transform Nothing into Something so that it can dominate this Nothing?” Calvin Warren asks in Ontological Terror (2018). “Through Blackness—it gives a form for the formless, but a form that perplexes and threatens … Blackness is invented to absorb the terror of this Nothing, of the interruption of time and space, within modernity.” The skanking chords of Toots & the Maytals are the foundation of This Is England’s soundtrack, following the skinheads’ surreal shift from their Jamaican British roots to Neo-Nazism; from the gang’s cosy camaraderie in the film’s first third to the caustic resentments in its remaining runtime. As the gang unwinds with some weed in the film’s climax, Milky, the gang’s lone Black member, confronts Combo over this subculture’s burgeoning contradiction. Combo explains, honeyed and high, how the uncles who introduced Milky to the ska, the rocksteady, the fashion, are the same who introduced Combo himself. But as the conversation lingers on those uncles, on Milky’s loving family, the Nothingness that floundered Trevor, that flounders Western imagination, begins floundering Combo; hardens his gaze. All he can do at that point is beat Milky half to death. This Black man’s ability to give and receive love interrupts and disturbs Combo’s understanding of himself and the world. It is equal parts anger and terror.

It is this same dangerous concoction Nadine El-Nany observes in her book (B)ordering Britain (2020). She illustrates how migrants were constructed by the 2016 Leave campaign as “unjustly enriched and undeserving of access to territory and resources,” when the irony is, like everything else on this island, their venerated defender against the hordes is himself an import. Born in Turkey, buried in Palestine, Saint George still finds the pointed steel of his lance fed by Rupert Lowe’s lust for “widespread stop-and-searches”; by the Grenfell Tower disaster Simon Dudley laments has “stopped housebuilding of any tall buildings” because, ultimately, “everyone dies in the end.” The poplar wood of the Crusader Saint’s shield is reinforced by Reform UK’s policy to “withdraw from every treaty that prevents a full lockdown of the nation’s borders”; by the multi-partisan desire to “stop the boats.” The Labour government that ended fourteen years of Conservative rule has since increased the difficulty of English-language citizenship tests, decreased the jobs eligible for skilled worker visas, nearly halved the standard length of graduate visas, while doubling the qualifying period for permanent residence. At the National Front meeting Combo takes the gang to, we hear the spokesperson explain: “We’re not racists, we’re realists … People who work hard, pay their way—it don’t matter their ethnic background—I welcome with open arms. People who think we owe them a living, these are the people that need to go back.” His words hit like an ocean wave at the abyss within his audience, amplifying in its depths all their anger and terror, which have been given, for the first time, a direction toward a shore: “Send them back,” they crash and foam, “send them back.”

The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes attributed to King Solomon teaches the student to wrangle life’s meaninglessness, and the listlessness and anger it inspires, under the feared, coveted banner of God. Combo two-thousand years later, in the squalor of his gang’s squatted flat, points to the ground, to his heart, to his head, professing, “this is England, and this is England, and this is England.” The room is all slumped shoulders and curious eyes, any seeding dissent salted in his fervour. “And for what?” he then asks them. “What now?”

NOT BY LYNCH continues tomorrow, Wednesday 22nd April at The Cinema Museum with Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).

Below, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo situates the film within the classical literary tradition which Rivette and his cast and crew deviously rip up. Maria is the founder and editor of Hellebore magazine. She’s written about film and myth for Severin, Radiance Films and Indicator.

Tickets are available here, and come with a print booklet which includes the essay.

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The Triumph of Whimsy

On the 4^th of July 1862, Lewis Carroll first told the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on a boat trip that departed from near the aptly named Folly Bridge in Oxford. Over a century later, the heroines of Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) embark on a journey that culminates with another boat trip. Their journey started with another nod to Alice, with magic-seeking Julie (Dominique Labourier) following Céline (Juliette Berto), who embodies the chaotic energy of the white rabbit, down the rabbit hole of the streets of Montmartre, the Bohemian heart of Paris. Thus unravels one of the most interesting female friendships seen on screen, amusingly recognisable yet imbued with something ineffable and almost mystical. As they explore an unsolved mystery from the past, both women become ultimately interchangeable, mirror images of each other.

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Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘26, our monthly review supplement. This month we caught up with PS2 surrealism, a striking Ishiguro adaptation, Glenn riffing on Ealing, and a document of vital community activism.

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NOT BY LYNCH continues on Wednesday, 22nd April at The Cinema Museum with Celine & Julie Go Boating (1974). Tickets are available now.

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Return to Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, France / USA, 2026)

Cinematic Impressionism has been difficult to pinpoint. Considered more of an impulse than a method; a way of doing and experiencing guided by affection and spirituality instead of prowess and rationale. From Gance to Dulac, each filmmaker understood this differently, with their own unique way of manipulating the film image as an open inquiry towards transcendental truth.

The Francophone impressionists posited that aspiring for this meant revolting against the narrative paradigms of commercial filmmaking, embracing the erratic swings of symbolism and the exalted subjectivity of poetry. Their existence within the auteurist framework is in that sense a point of contention, precisely due to their unfathomable qualities, spectres of a bygone era of esoteric image-making. Christophe Gans’ Return to Silent Hill presents a counterpoint, a sort of aesthetic séance that looks to connect the oneiric logic of the 1920s to the jagged digital pixels of the Sony PlayStation 2 era.

The clunky videogame dialogue and top-down camerawork are indeed first experienced as a jarring affront to cinematic conventions, but as the film’s Gothic atmosphere becomes more and more pervasive, Gans double downs on the uncanniness as an expressive form to fully inhabit a sort of liminal space between mediums. After all, he’s working with one of the most revered source materials in the history of videogames, one of the pioneering exhibits of the “videogames as an artform” banner: Masashi Tsuboyama’s Silent Hill 2 (2001).

Just by itself, merely attempting to touch such a cultural touchstone will inevitably draw vitriol from purists, which isn’t helped by the fact that Gans goes even further: not trying to retell Silent Hill 2, but embody it. Like the impressionists before him, he molds cinematic power towards capturing the essence of subjects, and then being consumed by them. The film’s visual grammar intertwines kitsch digital textures and grotesque practical imagery, artificial camerawork and abrasive, Nu-metal editing choices as an open inquiry into protagonist James’ tortured psyche as he looks for lost lover Mary and confronts the myriad of manifestations of his dark past.

More than a narrative, Return to Silent Hill is an overflowing nightmare. Hallways change as soon as they are crossed, walls are in constant collapse and from their hubris rise harrowing constructs of projected guilt and rotten flesh. It’s disorientating while doomladen. Oppressive while mournful. Always elusive. Only an unrestrained maximalist like Gans could come up with a thing such as January-release photogénie. Alonso Aguilar

A Pale View of Hills (Kei Ishikawa, Japan / UK, 2025)

Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills is largely faithful to its source, Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel of the same name, except for one key difference - the perspective from which we are told the story. By framing through the daughter’s interrogation, rather than the mother’s recollection, the film diverts away from the novel towards a plot that seeks to uncover the secret of the past. Letters, postcards, and photographs are closely examined as evidence of the mystery tucked away in Etsuko’s past. Much is dedicated to Niki’s search: her investigation of the house, her confrontations with her mother, her desire to write about Nagasaki. But this feels ceaseless when the film is devoted to telling us secrets without us even beginning to ask.

Everything is spelled out - we know exactly what happened to Keiko, Etsuko’s older daughter, because Niki tells us: ‘she’d hung herself, all alone up there’. We know that it happened in her room. We know that Etsuko shies away from discussing it. The mother slaps the daughter for saying that she is ashamed. Violence intrudes like the flashes of light protruding from the estate agent’s camera in Keiko’s room - sudden, sharp, and all on the surface.

Ishiguro’s writing is at its best when it exposes and restrains, in equal measure, the violence of his characters. Ishikawa’s direction, instead, transforms restraint into pure, showy action. By ending with a montage that makes Etsuko’s secrets exceedingly clear, Ishikawa takes away our readerly delight in uncertainty, thereby removing any dread that could have been left to linger. Bethan Ingman

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How to Make a Killing (John Patton Ford, USA, 2026)

The arc of Glenn Powell’s stardom is long but it bends towards justice. A year ago, he was the anointed one, a Cruise mentee whose not-so-ironic chad energy had him earmarked for A-list phenom. But a sequence of disappointments, including an unloved Running Man remake and a Hawk Tuah-cameoing Eastbound & Down rip-off have damaged the Texan. Take his latest, How to Make a Killing: is Becket Redfellow an incel? Sociopath? Socialist? We cannot know because Powell doesn’t either.

Per Wikipedia, it’s “loosely inspired” by Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, though to my eye How to Make a Killing is a fairly straightforward remake. In lieu of Alec Guinness’ elite Klumping (the practice of playing multiple family members in a single film), Patton Ford casts a range of character actors, including Bill Camp as a finance mogul, and Ed Harris as a sinister patriarch. The doofus amateur photographer Henry is updated to become a downtown New York hipster (Zach Woods).

It’s a parting shot in the Eat The Rich cycle of social satires for the ‘gestures at everything’ crowd in Hollywood, which broadly started with the success of Parasite. This one doesn’t have much to say on what the interplay of wealth and class in America does to a person, relying on a series of affectations associated with supposed good filmmaking. Patton Ford rattles through scenes as a sequence of depersonalised zooms early PTA’s Magnolia; frantic scenes in grotty locations like a prison, or New Jersey, recall the Safdie-verse; a mansion’s closed gate is answered with a threatening typewritten letter à la Eyes Wide Shut. The simple symbolic elegance of Kind Hearts & Coronets’ hunting/beartrap denouement is injected with some green de-ageing substance, so it becomes a cat-and-mouse rifle chase through a billionaire’s mansion.

One can’t help but feel sorry for Powell. It seems the harder he tries to relate to mankind, the more bland his performances become. I wonder, is this sympathy the marker of some star quality, after all? Ben Flanagan

Everybody to Kenmure Street (Felipe Bustos Sierra, UK, 2026)

The documentaries of Chilean-Belgian, Glasgow-based director Felipe Bustos Sierra bring hope to his leftist-liberal British audience. His first feature, Nae Pasaran (2018), about the Glaswegian unionised factory workers who stalled production of fighter jets being sent to support Pinochet’s fascist dictatorship, used its interview subjects to hone in on the nitty-gritty of what leftist politics means, and what they can achieve, which perhaps also narrowed its audience. It follows a certain logic that his second feature-length doc should expand on these Scottish social and political connections, to highlight a more recent example of the collective action and solidarity needed for a successful political movement: the 2021 protest against the attempted Home Office deportation of two Sikh Indian men in Glasgow’s Pollokshields neighbourhood, in his latest film, Everybody to Kenmure Street.

Bustos Sierra plays to his strengths by engaging the ordinary people who participated in the protest as the majority of his interview subjects, some who were there from the very beginning as neighbours on the street. Where this isn’t possible for sake of anonymity, well-respected British thesps recreate their parts verbatim in solo reenactment scenes. One particular British A-lister, in a gender-swapped role, reenacts the person who, incredibly, managed to slide under the Home Office van in the early stages of the deportation, wrap their arms around the axel and remain there for the endurance of the protest, preventing the men from being deported. Archive is cheekily employed, with footage of a comrade rolling a water bottle under the van, and a mystery hand reaching out from under the bumper to snag it. By adhering to a straightforward chronology of events, Bustos Sierra brings to life what those who followed the protest in real time on social media could only glean in part, and in doing so heightens the stakes.

Despite its stirring content, there are puzzling gaps in Bustos Sierra’s process. The only interviewee to receive a name card is the firebrand lawyer Aamer Anwar who is parachuted in to save the day. This leaves the film at times absent of some very necessary context, like formally identifying in archive the legendary Glaswegian trade unionist Jimmy Reid, whose still-living daughter lives on Kenmure Street and witnessed the entire proceedings. The persistent attention paid to the Home Office and Priti Patel’s refusal to acknowledge the burgeoning situation, having caused the chaos in the first place, hints at an argument for Scottish Independence that is never fully explored.

As heartening as the story of this left-wing cause may be, one can’t help but note the concerning acceleration of far-right mobilisation in the streets that has occurred in the five years since. Everybody to Kenmure Street leaves the open question: would the results play out with such success today? Kirsty Asher

NOT BY LYNCH continues tomorrow, Friday 20 March at The Cinema Museum with Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962).

Below, film critic and folklorist Kirsty Asher introduces the film as a liminal terrain. Alongside her role as Associate Editor of Cinema Year Zero, Kirsty runs the Substack A Place With Such A Name.

Tickets are available here, and come with a print booklet which includes the essay.

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Death’s Waiting Room

“I hope she does leave.”

“I hope she can.”

Carnival of Souls, Herk Harvey’s only feature film, was relatively overlooked by critics and audiences upon release in 1962. With only around $30,000 to spare for his neo-noir fantasia, most of the location filming in Salt Lake City was done either at night in empty buildings or guerrilla-style with bribed locals playing brief parts.

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The first draft of this essay by Tom de Lancy Green was submitted to Cinema Year Zero’s editors on February 12th. Frederick Wiseman turned it into an obituary four days later.

A BFI-led retrospective across Britain is still disproportionate and meagre in comparison to the place Wiseman had in Western film culture (Tom’s dispatches from the first two months of the season can be found here and here). The name Wiseman was always on the lips of those in the constellation of this publication, a load-bearer for an art form that increasingly felt years behind him. His work is out there for those of us who look, but now some of its possibilities have been foreclosed, which is perhaps the thing he fought against most in his art. At all moments, the world can be re-shaped, potentialities await actualisation, the social sphere’s death has been exaggerated.

One can resist the urge to lionise, and it certainly wouldn’t be in Wiseman’s interrogative nature to do so, but sometimes the heart must win out: 96 years of age was simply too young to have lost him.

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Frederick Wiseman’s works belong to that strange cultural decline from the late 1960s through Reagan and Clinton. As the capitalist machine realised it would not be able to satisfy its polity with reality, postmodernism slowly took over, reducing things, people, and ideas to iconography and fantasy. President Clinton himself said: ‘It depends on what your definition of “is” is.’ Existence became contingent, co-opted, re-moulded, unstable. By now, candidness is never value-neutral, and images are never unloaded or unsmeared with idealist dust and grime. Fighting this tide, Wiseman is perhaps D. A. Pennebaker’s only true disciple, an American lapsed radical with a cool, hip punchiness undergirding an agitated fly-on-wall scanning.

Radicals, however, have a tendency to calcify as scepticism sets in. In this regard, Wiseman is a peculiar case study. The tone of his films from anywhere south of 1980 sits opaquely between jaded rebellion and a more studied, fraught contemplation. Wiseman’s involvement in the 60s moment of high-modernism naturally leads one to look for a treatise on something as lofty as The American Nation. It’s rare for any one artist to even attempt this, but when they do, it inevitably leads them to the melting pot gateway of Staten Island (James Gray’s The Immigrant [2013]), the flatlands of the White Sands Proving Ground at the site of the Trinity Test (David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return [2017]), the racism of the American South (Toni Morrison’s Beloved [1987]), or even a consciously freewheeling sprawl across the country’s culture (Thomas Pynchon’s works, Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ [1965]).

Wiseman surely belongs to the latter category. A single film mightn’t be enough to do this alone, although Belfast, Maine (1999) comes close. But Wiseman’s maturation brought with it a curiosity that pokes around the fluffy skirting boards and rusted plumbing of God’s United States, a termitic burrowing that marks genuine growth from those iconoclastic days in Pennebaker’s long shadow.

His later works are more reminiscent of poetry than essays, though none are without their discursive qualities. It’s one of the cinema’s finer pleasures to sit in Wiseman’s meeting rooms as discourse unfurls, be it on the obligations of public institutions to accommodate commercial interests (National Gallery, 2014), the capacity for sympathy in Flaubert’s novels (1990’s Aspen), or fathers searching for answers to the questions of post-carceral reintegration (Public Housing from 1997, which we discussed in previous dispatches).

One thing Wiseman was not credited for enough: drawing back the veil on menial jobs, processual labour, working with one’s hands. And these forms of work are always extensions of a broader idea: those hands might belong to framing craftspeople in the National Gallery, but they are not neutral aestheticians. Everyone is doing their part in the maintenance (!) of a certain kind of superstructure. Why do paintings need frames? Maybe for the same reason that, in the very next sequence in National Gallery, an exhibition needs a lavish opening night with media attention. This is The Way Things Are Done.

Althusser tells us: it’s the ideology, stupid. Always immanent to organisations, any idiot can say that they are operating within the contradictions of society. But, surprise: the contradictions of society are also operating within you! One would be silly to pretend otherwise. Maybe this is why so many of Wiseman’s films come across so caustically. He happens upon a great many people—bureaucrats, mainly—who tell on themselves so easily. Recall Mark Twain’s apocryphal dictum: ‘If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it’—and if openly revealing oneself to be a morally disinterested footsoldier of the superstructure had any real consequences, I doubt Wiseman would have much to do with any of this.

Aspen is all about the superstructure. Wiseman here skirts the twin problems of metonymic symbolism and detached, hyper-observant ‘realism’ with a hilarious overview of a Colorado mountain town fueled by the concurrent economies of bourgeois lifestyle tourism, mining, and the church.

Like scaffolds in the film’s architecture, the church appears in four variations. Gregorian chants open the film—patience is already set in, and Wiseman watches intently, monastically. A men’s discussion group asks what marriage means in the eyes of the Lord; a seminar later on asks the same about living in the then-current economy. Finally, at the film’s end, the leap has been made from Protestant asceticism to Evangelist proselytising. American capital’s white, snowy vapours have infused Aspen’s wood-panelled nervous system. This orange on white—the Donny T special—recurs frequently. A cabal of tanned investors gather in one of the town’s snowy lodges, pulling the shades and running a gamut of plastic surgery phenotypes that flatten racial differences—noses, eyelids, cheekbones—into a Caucasian nightmare of loveliness.

At least they’re semi-open about it. At the opening of a local artist’s gallery exhibition, the artist’s underhanded philosophy is to paint ‘what she sees’, a loaded phrase as ever. Once again: the superstructure is within you. Her paintings are flattened, photo-realist depictions of phone booths, pantries, and more four-walled boxes. Wiseman takes the American bourgeoisie as a frequent subject—they have more than enough rope to hang themselves with, after all. But it’s ironic that he so often happens upon images so delicate and fleetingly special whilst spending so much time with this loutish, repugnant class: these paintings, and the taste they represent, are terrible.

Postmodernism in Aspen lurks around the corner like the bum behind Winkie’s in Mulholland Dr. (2001). Fredric Jameson wrote in Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that commodity and aesthetic production had effectively merged in that dreaded, Fukuyamist breakdown of history’s grand arc. Well, in Aspen’s funniest sequence, set in a cavernous house on the mountainside, an art lesson is delivered by the owner of a wall-size print of Warhol’s Mao (1972-73). The Chairman is mounted to get a full view out the double-storey windows towards the town, whilst the monied class inside the citadel get a crash course in perspective. West and East collapse at the ice caps, the frontier—the End of History is upon us!