Sight and Sound: the May 2025 issue

“At the time, [In the Mood for Love] was one of the most difficult productions I’d ever done. But now, when I think back, what I remember are the small moments. Time has a way of softening the edges of memory. Perhaps [it endures] because the film isn’t really about 1960s Hong Kong, but about something more fundamental – how we connect with each other, how we navigate desire and restraint, how we construct narratives to make sense of our lives. These are questions that don’t date, that every generation has to answer for itself.”

— Wong Kar Wai, speaking in the new issue of Sight and Sound

Is Wong Kar Wai’s 1960s-set story of unfulfilled love in a crowded Hong Kong apartment block the most swooningly gorgeous, chastely erotic film in cinema history? A quarter of a century after its release, Jessica Kiang assesses its legacy, arguing that as well as the film’s renowned beauty and its central romance, it offers a profound understanding of the role of time and memory in life.

Since its Cannes premiere in 2000, Wong Kar Wai’s film has only gained in stature. In the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll it was the highest-placed film of this millennium, at No. 5. But its beginnings were very uncertain, and right up to that first public screening, cast and crew had little idea of what the finished film would be like. Here, Wong, Maggie Cheung, William Chang, Christopher Doyle, Umebayashi Shigeru and Tony Rayns offer an oral history of the making of a masterwork.

Although they couldn’t be further apart in terms of subject, budget and style, Laura Carreira’s spellbinding feature debut On Falling, about a woman who takes a job in a warehouse run by an online shopping giant, and Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 share an implicit concern for the precarity of modern working conditions and the loneliness of modern life. By Hannah McGill.

A new series of Karina Longworth’s long-running podcast You Must Remember This explores the late work of 14 directors who made their names during Hollywood’s studio era. The film historian talks to Pamela Hutchinson about her intentions for the podcast and the accompanying season in London that aims to reassess a selection of underrated masterworks.

From The French Connection to The Royal Tenenbaums, Hackman – who has died at 95 – redefined the idea of a leading man in his own image, bringing wit, humanity and deceptive expressiveness to five decades of memorable roles. By Adam Nayman.

As Caught by the Tides, the director’s haunting portrait of a doomed love affair in modern China, screens in London, Jia reminisces about the illegal video screenings of Asian films that occupied his adolescence, his love for Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin and how he became transfixed by the penetrating power of documentaries. Interview by Nick Bradshaw.

With restored and newly discovered footage of a landmark concert, plus home movies and phone calls, One to One: John & Yoko offers a fascinating and revealing picture of the couple’s post-Beatles life in Manhattan. By Jonathan Romney.

New films by Christopher Nolan, Werner Herzog, Bong Joon Ho and Raine Allen-Miller. By Thomas Flew.

The Japanese director’s Cloud, in which a young man taking all he can get from his online business finds himself in real danger from the customers he’s ripping off, shows society reaching a tipping point with the internet’s influence, as the forces of capitalism create a shaky balance between good and evil. By Adam Nayman.

Showing African cinema for local audiences has long been the mission of Ouagadougou’s biennial festival. This year highlighted complexities around who owns and restores films and questioned where film archives belong. By Abiba Coulibaly.

The surrealist posters for Wojciech Jerzy Has’s films are looking right at you. By Michael Brooke.

In choosing not to make its Hollywood execs the villains, The Studio flies in the face of tradition. By Pamela Hutchinson.

From the work of Tony Tulathimutte to a proposed American Psycho remake, angry men are all the rage. By Nicole Flattery.

It’s not the end of the world for an otherwise enjoyable series, but Paradise fumbles its finale. By Andrew Male.

Adolescence has been praised for bringing the ‘manosphere’ into our living rooms. But could it have done more? By Mike Williams.

As wriggling and unpredictable as the creature it’s named for, Imamura Shōhei’s Palme d’Or winner turns an old story – the one about the ex-con whose past won’t let go – into something new and delightful. Now, finally, it has been given the home cinema release it deserves. By Michael Brooke.

In other hands, this story of a quasi-incestuous romance by mail between a lonely middle-aged woman and her wheelchair-bound brother could have been tacky. But Moshé Mizrahi, one of cinema’s great humanists, created a film of complexity and enormous tenderness. By Kat Ellinger.

Stanley Schtinter’s playful shot-for-shot remake of a 1999 Portuguese art film based on the tale of Snow White offers an acerbic satirical commentary on everything from auteurism to Disney films to the idea of cinema as a marketplace for commodities. By Arjun Sajip.

Alexander Horwath’s fascinating documentary explores the connections and frictions that exist between the history of the US and the trajectory of an actor who is emblematic of the moral goodness of the everyman. By Erika Balsom.

At the height of the Actors Studio’s influence in cinema through Method acting, the British director of Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey, Tony Richardson, reflected on its benefits and shortcomings, especially in the work of James Dean and Marlon Brando. By Tony Richardson.

The denouement of Michael Mann’s powerful tale of a whistleblower and a crusading journalist facing the might of the tobacco industry harks back to the pessimism and scepticism of the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s. By Matthew Taylor.

Our critics reviews: April, Caught by the Tides, One to One: John & Yoko, Blue Road: the Edna O’Brien Story, The Surfer, The Uninvited, Two to One, The Return, Motel Destino, Cloud, Grand Tour, Holy Cow, Parthenope, Opus, Seeking Mavis Beacon, The Extraordinary, Restless, Black Bag, Warfare, Riefenstahl.

Our critics reviews: Chantal Akerman Volume 1: 1967-1978; Yojimbo/Sanjuro; Ugetsu; Je t’aime, Je t’aime; Doctor Vampire; Peter Ibbetson; Basquiat; Performance; Harriet Craig; Drugstore Cowboy.