Cinema Year Zero

An essay by Adam Murray, from our coverage of Cinema Rediscovered 2026.

An essay by Daisy Steinhardt on Looking for Mr. Goodbar, from our coverage of Cinema Rediscovered 2026. CW: This piece discusses Looking for Mr. Goodbar in its entirety, and includes major plot points. It contains graphic descriptions of physical and sexual violence.

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.