Sight & Sound

Film of the week: The Girl with All the Gifts

Meet the new breed: Sennia Nanua excels as a human/zombie hybrid with a destiny in Colm McCarthy’s gorily potent post-apocalyptic horror, says Nikki Baughan.

Reviews and recommendations

Into the Inferno review: Werner Herzog communes with volcanoes

Ben Nicholson on Werner Herzog and Cambridge professor Clive Oppenheimer’s wispy but winningly insouciant geological jaunt around the earth’s fiery maws.

Reviews and recommendations

Michael O’Pray obituary: Film and Video Umbrella founder who helped artists’ film flourish

David Curtis on the professor, writer and curator who championed experimental filmmakers from Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol to Derek Jarman, Bill Viola, Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay.

Obituaries

Encounters 2016 preview: Mutant strains lurk just beneath the skin

If you look to short films for a fresher way of seeing, these seven highlights of Bristol’s Encounters festival should sluice your eyes, reckons Tim Hayes.

Festivals

Arab cinema after the Arab Spring

The region’s revolutions may have largely curdled, but its filmmakers persist in opening up, programmer Rasha Salti tells Ben Nicholson.

Festivals

The myth of authenticity and the limits of access: Under the Sun, Cameraperson and the Kiarostami-esque sublime

Two of this year’s most original movies emphasise the made, mediated nature of nonfiction cinema – and thereby lead us to deeper truths, argues Robert Greene.

Unfiction

Film of the week: Hell or High Water

Hard times make hard desperados in David Mackenzie’s sage, post-recessionary Texan crime thriller, says Trevor Johnson.

Reviews and recommendations

We have never been Star Trek

Gerry Canavan slingshots around a lifetime of allegiance to the Star Trek Ideal – and the series’ very fallible reality.

Features

Where no fan had gone before: 50 years of Trekkies

You want audience engagement? As Star Trek turns 50, Kevin Lyons looks back at the ‘mother fandom’.

Features

Film of the week: Things to Come

Back in the soup: Isabelle Huppert explores the nitty-gritty of unexpected, unnerving post-marital freedom in Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicate and disarming character portrait, writes Kate Stables.

Reviews and recommendations

Portrait(s) of the exiled artist: the how and why of Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch

The filmmaker’s friend and scholar Joseph Gomez divulges the background to the making of Watkins’ masterpiece – a film “about Munch and about Peter Watkins and, ultimately, about all of us.”

Unfiction

Podcast: FrightFest 2016 critics’ roundtable post-mortem

Sixtysomething movies later, Anton Bitel, Kim Newman and Virginie Selavy emerge to dissect the best and worst, darkest and weirdest of this year’s horror scene.

Festivals

L’avventura giapponese: Antonioni in Japan

Celluloid Liberation Front on a rare chance to see il maestro’s early 1980s Japanese Betacam tapes.

Bytes

Film of the week: Julieta

Pedro Almodóvar spins a triptych of Alice Munro short stories into a sombre, supremely expressive reflection on love, tragedy and transformation, says Jonathan Romney.

Reviews and recommendations

Hip-hop, don’t stop: inside The Get Down

A new generation bigs up the first days of hip-hop in Baz Luhrmann and co.’s Bronx musical. Ashley Clark visits the cast and crew on set.

TV

“Viewer, I killed them”

Quentin Tarantino’s wilfully unsatisfying endings ask us to confront our baser film-watching urges, says Brad Stevens.

Bradlands

The great levelling: ‘expanded cinema’ and the humbling of the movies

In the post-film projection world, mutated versions of movies demand a new language, argues Nick Pinkerton.

Features

Video: Haunted memories – the cinema of Víctor Erice

Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López explore the joy and regret of nostalgia with one of the cinema’s great, spare poets of sense-memory.

Video

Video: Kirk Douglas – Hollywood champ

Ninety-nine not out: we celebrate the dimpled one with a tribute reel of his greatest scenes.

Video

Video: A speck in the cosmos – the inner frontiers of Raoul Walsh’s Pursued

Often described as the first psychoanalytic western, Raoul Walsh’s 1947 Pursued plays out the traumas of Robert Mitchum’s homecoming Civil War vet as an existential maelstrom of violence, isolation and psychopathy. In this video essay Tag Gallagher offers a psychological reading of one of Hollywood’s weirdest westerns.

Video

Video essay: What is neorealism?

kogonada pits the director of The Bicycle Thieves against the producer of Gone with the Wind on the same movie material.

Video