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BFICinema10 great South Korean films of the 2020s With this year’s London Korean Film Festival under way, and Lee Chang-dong’s acclaimed drama Possible Love landing on Netflix, we cast a net over a wide selection of some of the best recent films…

BFICinemaGodzilla Minus Zero: a thrilling mega-monster romp Yamazaki Takashi’s smart sequel leans hard into family melodrama and post-war politics, while leaving plenty of room for a carnage-laden kaiju spectacle.

BFICinemaMajor new David Cronenberg season announced at BFI David Cronenberg: Mind, Body, Reality takes place from 1 January to 16 March at BFI Southbank, with selected films at BFI IMAX and on BFI Player.

BFICinemaInside the Archive #78: Getting to grips with copyright In this bonus edition of the blog, revisit the BFI Copyright Conference and learn more about how copyright impacts how we work with screen heritage collections.

BFICinemaAt Night: an oneiric after-hours journey through Paris from artist Beatrice Gibson The British artist’s first feature takes inspiration from the works of Kathy Acker and poet Alice Notley for a night of chance encounters.

BFICinema“An alien vision of an alien world”: Rocky reviewed in 1977 As both the 4K restoration of Rocky (1976) and the new biopic I Play Rocky hit cinemas, we return to our original review of the picture that made Sylvester Stallone a star.

BFICinema70th BFI London Film Festival announces LFF Audience Award winners This year, festival audiences in London reached their highest ever level, with thousands more attending screenings UK-wide.

BFICinemaNominations announced for the British Independent Film Awards 2026 BFI backed films pick up 39 nominations including eight for Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning and seven for Ashley Walters’ Animol.

BFICinemaAshley Walters on his prison-drama directorial debut Animol: “I wanted it to look like how it really is” As Animol, his first feature as director, reaches audiences, Ashley Walters talks to us about bringing authenticity to prison drama, nurturing young talent and broadening the stories told about Black…

BFICinemaImran Perretta on community, collaboration and composing Ish: highlights from a BFI Film Academy masterclass Imran Perretta, cinematographer Jermaine Canute Edwards and location manager Aly Ripo joined a BFI Film Academy masterclass to discuss the making of Ish, from its roots in Perretta’s own teenage…

BFICinema10 great witch films From silent-era demons to modern folk-horror nightmares, witches have haunted cinema for well over a century.

BFICinemaCannes winner Everytime coming to UK and Irish cinemas on 26 February Sandra Wollner’s third feature, the enigmatic Un Certain Regard prize-winner will open in UK and Irish cinemas through BFI Distribution.

BFICinemaKiss kiss bang bang: Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet For the 30th anniversary of Baz Luhrmann’s visceral epic Romeo + Juliet, we republish José Arroyo’s essay on how the film turned Shakespeare into cinema. From our March 1997 issue.

BFICinemaThe world moves on: Billy Wilder’s cinema of ageing and obsolescence From overlooked office workers to fading movie stars, ageing in Billy Wilder’s films is about more than growing old.

BFICinemaWildwood: Laika’s ambitious fantasy shows off its spellbinding stop motion craft Laika animation studio’s film about a teen on an epic quest to save her baby brother is filled with astounding detail, but the magic lies in the craftsmanship rather than the story.

BFICinemaBFI Player’s November 2026 line-up Settle into November with a feast of cinema, from the splendour of silent classics to bold new voices and rare discoveries.

BFICinemaScotland’s rival to The Jazz Singer: the story behind a groundbreaking British sound film One hundred years after its Edinburgh cinema release, we tell the story behind Till the Bells Ring, a Scottish talking picture that included synchronised dialogue a full year before Hollywood’s own…

BFICinemaSight and Sound: the December 2026 issue On the cover: Godzilla, from Gojira to Minus Zero: an interview with director Yamazaki Takashi, plus a look at the monster’s 70 years in film Inside: as the fifth anniversary of the Black Film…

BFICinema10 great East African films As this year’s Film Africa opens with Cannes prizewinner Ben’Imana, we explore 10 films that reveal the richness, diversity and transnational currents of East African cinema, challenging perceptions…

BFICinemaWhalefall: Austin Abrams gives it his all in a passable film about a man swallowed by a whale Brian Duffield’s CGI-filled blockbuster production has moments spectral of sci-fi beauty behind the blubber, but can’t quite capture the evocative prose of Daniel Krauss’s source novel.

BFICinemaNightborn: Finnish myths are lost in the thicket of this gory post-partum horror Director Hanna Bergholm’s monstrous exploration of new parenthood ends up feeling overstuffed writes George Townsend, one of the critics on this year’s LFF Critics Mentorship Programme.

BFICinemaPortrait of a lady: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette With The Making of Marie Antoinette arriving in cinemas this week, we revisit Pam Cook’s analysis of Sofia Coppola’s irreverent teen queen biopic. From our November 2006 issue.

BFICinema“It was a way of understanding my own generation”: Manuela Martelli on her snowbound Chilean drama The Meltdown The award-winning director of 1976 talks to us about her second feature, a wintry coming-of-age drama set during Chile’s uneasy transition to democracy.

BFICinemaInside the Archive #77: Preserving Frankenstein, a new-look study store and a trip to Colorado via London This month, learn more about how we're preserving Guillermo del Toro’s latest creation, how funding is helping us transform vital archive facilities and a recent Colorado collaboration with actress…

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About

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo