Sight & Sound

Starring Theo James and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, David Mackenzie’s deftly edited crime caper sees a group of men attempt to rob a bank while the military and police are busy defusing a bomb. 30 March 2026 Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Major Will Tranter in Fuze (2025) An unexploded World War II-era bomb is unearthed early on in the twisty, propulsive Fuze; what gradually becomes apparent is that the men in its radius possess the same hair-trigger volatility.

Sight and Sound, May 2026 “The first thing we see is a jellyfish, pulsing in the oily grey shallows of a Cornish harbour. Rust eats at the metal of the moorings, oxidising the paintwork into blooms that resemble fungi and moss. Blades of new grass sway against the backdrop of a boat that hasn’t seen the sea in a lifetime. The static images themselves seem to tremble. Time erodes. Nature reclaims.

Gianfranco Rosi’s film might have been called Below the Crowds, since it so often concerns what it calls the ‘disembowelling’ of Naples, the tunnelling by thieves into buried archaeological sites to steal Roman and Etruscan treasures.

The run-up to the outbreak of World War II saw the curious phenomenon of people fleeing Stalin’s Soviet Union for refuge in Nazi Germany, their reasoning being that Hitler wasn’t anywhere near as bad. Bizarre as this notion may seem in hindsight, statistical evidence at the time backed them, as Stalin’s Great Terror had unleashed what were then unprecedented horrors.

Between October 1940 and August 1941 George Orwell wrote twenty-six film review columns – which were omitted from the four volumes of his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters – for Time and Tide. This politically independent weekly magazine was edited by the lively Lady Rhondda, the plump and curly-haired daughter of a Welsh coal magnate. Most of the films Orwell reviewed were undistinguished escapist entertainment, which he mostly disapproved of and disliked.

A few dangerous moments aside, The Immortal Manleans so heavily into the World War I PTSD that afflicted Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) during six riveting seasons of Peaky Blinders (2013-2022) that its first half is dominated by ponderous melancholy. But once our Brummie folk-hero-gangster overcomes his reluctance to return to the fray – and his criminal past – in Small Heath, we’re back in furious and familiar territory.

Here at last is the cinematic equivalent of Eimear McBride’s eviscerating 2013 novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing: Sound of Falling is a furious, fragmented piece of filmmaking in which the violence wrought on the female body explodes formal convention, leaving us scrambling to make sense out of its scattered pieces.

Mascha Schilinski’s haunting second feature Sound of Falling, awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes, has seen the Berlin director hailed as an exciting new voice in German cinema. Co-written with Louise Peter and shot by cinematographer Fabian Gamper with images that seem to recall the dead and manufacture illusions for the living, the drama flows back and forth through four generations living in a farmstead in the Altmark region, from just before World War I up to recent times.

Blondeness is a force to be reckoned with, for better or worse; in this study of Britain’s fascination with hair colour between the 1940s-1960s, Nead explores the political complexities of blonde British icons. 26 February 2026 Yield to the Night (1955) Anyone reading the rush of articles which greeted the death of Brigitte Bardot at the end of last year will be in no doubt of the unique position blondeness holds in our culture.

Shahrbanoo Sadat’s confidently-made film about the relationship between two journalists in Afghanistan underlines the difficulty of having a mutually respectful romance while a volatile political crisis rages in the background. 27 February 2026 Anwar Hashimi as Qodrat and Shahrbanoo Sadat as NaruCourtesy of Berlin International Film Festival Shahrbanoo Sadat’s No Good Men, the opening film of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, was a powerful signal from the festival.