Cinema Year Zero

Ben Flanagan braves Ken Russell's Uri Geller biopic to find just how bad things can get for a great filmmaker.

Shelby Cooke worships at the Altar of Marilyn Monroe and the Church of the Pinball Wizard

Caught the personal documentary fever but don’t know where to go next? Luckily for you, Cinema Year Zero has assembled a list of ten further films from throughout the short but vibrant history of the genre.

Blaise Radley on Therese Henningsen's film. Driven by a recurring urge to encounter strangers with her camera, the filmmaker begins to film her solitary Greek Cypriot neighbour Pete in the tower block in North London where they both live. 

Kirsty Asher looks at Chloe Abrahams' cinematic love letter spanning time and generations, which probes at raw questions her mother and grandmother have long brushed aside, untangling painful knots in her family’s unspoken past.

Tom de Lancy Green on Shared Resources, which depicts Jordan Lord’s family after their father was fired from his job as a debt collector and their parents declared bankruptcy, largely due to the filmmaker’s student debt.

Ben Flanagan on Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, The first feature-length film by Julian Castronovo. It follows a young filmmaker named Julian Castronovo who discovers a trail of clues related to the disappearance of a skilled art forger known as Fawn Ma.

Arta Barzanji on Azza El-Hassan's documentary about the films in the PLO Media Unit. These were supposed to show a self-determined image of Palestinian reality – and they went missing during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. In a road movie from Palestine to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, director El-Hassan follows the contradicting and confusing clues as to the whereabouts of the lost archive.

Emily Jisoo Bowles discusses Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Audrey project, an ongoing series of films made in collaboration with actor Deragh Campbell. Together, Bohdanowicz and Campbell have created the character of Audrey as an amalgamation of themselves, exploring different facets of Bohdanowicz’s personal life and research through her conduit persona.

Four programmers on their online video that showcases the stories Britain tells about itself through the internet. From vlogs to memes to uncategorisable curiosities, these videos might not have initially been intended as ‘cinema’, but what is cinema if not images and narratives that are so iconic that they stick in our heads?

Orla Smith speaks with Joe Bini about his attempt to cross the experience of reading a book with the experience of watching a film.

Kimia Ipakchi on the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend 2025 programme

Orla Smith finds kinship between Ken Russell and the films of Caveh Zahedi.On 23rd July, join us at The Cinema Museum for a rare screening of Crimes of Passion on 16mm, where print copies of the issue will be exclusively available. Tickets are now on sale via our website.

Carmen Paddock on the composer as superhero – and supervillain. On 23rd July, join us at The Cinema Museum for a rare screening of Crimes of Passion on 16mm, where print copies of the issue will be exclusively available. Tickets are now on sale via our website.

Cinema Year Zero is excited to announce Volume 20: Ken Russell’s History of the World, a 7-essay retrospective of the untamable British director.On 23rd July, join us at The Cinema Museum for a rare screening of Crimes of Passion on 16mm, where print copies of the issue will be exclusively available. Tickets are now on sale here.The event is presented in collaboration with film club and contributor Siren Screen, who have chosen a feature and short film both exploring the Madonna-Whore myth and the surreal world of bedroom fantasies.But first, please enjoy the issue intro, penned by Cinema Year Zero Associate Editor, Kirsty Asher.

Christmas, again.

Earlier this autumn, long before the pitch call for this Christmas edition of CYZ landed in my inbox, while absentmindedly scrolling through TikTok I came across a video by user @livgrace_x with the caption “If you live in liverpool.. wait for the end …”.

Woke Hallmark Movies DESTROYING Christmas

Kelsey Grammer has stolen valour.

In 2004, a movie was released about the joyous reclamation of youthful romance through time travel, and the rejection of hard-bitten corporate life in favour of downhome suburban bliss.

It’s a cold winter’s night in the UK, and the dazzling floodlights of AFC Newbourne’s home ground are visible for miles in every direction across the London skyline, each dappled beam only matched in reach by the echoing caterwauls of the staunchly loyal blues fans.

Something unspoken lies underneath the whole of cinephilia. Well, not exactly unspoken.

I grew up in a pulseless nothing-ville outside a certain Canadian metropolis.

For the estimable cineastes confused by last year’s dispatch, may I state for the record: I love the Locarno Film Festival.

Swashbuckling action, scoundrelly antics, and even tattered iconography are all mere ornaments of what the act of piracy actually entails.

If you access Brown Sugar Too Bitter For Me (2013) via Guyanese director Mahadeo Shivraj’s official YouTube account, the first image that appears is a message in white on a black background: “Piracy is not a victimless crime”.

The camera trembles ever so slightly, the unseen cameraperson weary of its illicit recording.

2012’s Trouble With The Curve opens on a then-83 year-old Clint Eastwood in dialogue with his penis, attempting to coax pee out by berating it with gruff, raspy words.

Detective John Anderton spends his days in the future, solving murders that haven’t happened yet.

During each presentation at the fourth and latest edition of New York’s Prismatic Ground film festival,  which focuses on experimental and documentary cinema, the founder and organiser, Inney Prakash, made it a point to note that the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli, British, and American governments was ongoing.

Think of Arnold van Gennep.

“I shot the movie in 1993,” rasps the unseen director George Sluizer with a Herzog-like Germanic twang, his haggard voice emanating from the screen as it zooms slowly in on a still photograph: Sluizer’s arm is linked casually, almost absent-mindedly, with that of his star River Phoenix, who looks off into the distance (it is unclear whether he knows the camera is there). They are shooting Dark Blood (2012), a morose neo-Western whose production would be forever halted by Phoenix’s sudden and tragic overdose outside a nightclub in West Hollywood.

The film was dead: to begin with.

The method of cinema invokes the ghost of reality rather than reanimating it, the technology itself the vessel through which the ghost is projected to the seeing eye.

Digby Houghton reckons with the varying fortunes of the Australian film industry, where, for a time in the ‘70s, titillation was successful in getting arses in local cinema seats.

Ellisha Izumi finds the body and mind separated in the works of Scarlett Johansson, parallelling similar tensions between her MCU-superstar status and her personal sense of self.

Kirsty Asher pays tribute to the inimitable vaginal illusionist Sticky Vicky, using Bigas Luna’s Iberian passion trilogy to examine the interplay of food and the erotic in the post-Francoist era. 

Ben Flanagan attempts to make sense of a world mobilised by reaction for reaction’s sake, armed with the Kuleshov effect and Elizabeth Taylor’s curious performance in Identikit.

Joseph Owen recounts his experiences at a Five Flavours Film Festival in Warsaw, in which a new city provides room for thought about how man-made infrastructures impinge on the individual.

“If you can’t bear pain, you don’t live up to your reputation.”

Dan Wilkinson takes affront at the new mode of prudishness ushered in by the internet age, presenting the unfiltered sexuality of experimental films Pickelporno and Sweet Love Remembered as possible antidotes.

The uneasy status of Film Criticism is readily discussed.

Blaise Radley profiles pop-culture’s greatest representation of the film critic: Jay Sherman, the animated hack and one-time Simpsons guest star.

Joseph Owen returns to the Locarno Film Festival, where he casts a sideways the economics of the professional film critic between bottles of Swiss red.

Fedor Tot delves into the world of the film festival critics workshop, asking if its purpose serves less to help individual participants than to uphold institutional compliance.

Orla Smith explores her personal history with the film catalog-turned-social media app Letterboxd as a way of marking changing taste and sharpening perspective.

Natasha Fedorson takes Roland Barthes ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’ as a conduit for her own ruminations on the spaces where we can engage with the medium.

Esmé Holden gives a close reading of the ultimate critic-turned-filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard’s key 1966 film Made in U.S.A.

Kirsty Asher finds Youtube a safe haven for a specific kind of film criticism: analysis of costume design as a key element of the cinematic image.

Wilde Davis pushes against print criticism as an avenue for transgressive film analysis, and instead finds solace in the cinematic reflections of queer artists.