Cinema Year Zero

Today, Cinema Year Zero presents a new essay by programmer and video artist Oliver Hunt, whose discovery of an obscure 1990s karaoke video leads to a deep dive on the aesthetic pleasures and inherent contradictions of the genre. Read the full piece over at cinemayearzero[dot]com, or via the link in bio. #karaoke #essay #newpost😍 #1990s #cinema

NOT BY LYNCH continues on Friday 8 May at @the_cinema_museum . The next screening in the season is Jack Sholder’s The Hidden (1987) — a propulsive sci-fi thriller that mutates the body-swap premise into something darker, stranger, and more unsettling. The screening will be accompanied by a printed booklet, including a commissioned programme essay by @mahda.purmehdi , available exclusively on the night. Curated by @hairyabao In collaboration with @cinemayearzero Graphic design by @jj_designed About THE HIDDEN What begins as a familiar crime narrative — a series of unexplained killings, a lone FBI agent pursuing an elusive suspect — quickly mutates into something stranger. The perpetrator is not one person, but a presence that moves from body to body, leaving behind a trail of excess, violence, and desire. Starring a pre-Twin Peaks Kyle MacLachlan, The Hidden feels like an early echo of Lynch’s universe: hidden entities, divided selves, and identities that seem less fixed than inhabited. Beneath its genre pleasures, the film imagines America as a house of mirrors, where violence passes from one body to another and reality slips quietly out of alignment. 🎟 Friday 8 May, 7.30 pm 📍 The Cinema Museum, London 🔗 cinemamuseum[dot]org[dot]uk

NOT BY LYNCH continues on Wednesday 22 April at @the_cinema_museum . The next screening in the season is Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) — a playful, labyrinthine tale of friendship, performance, and storytelling that unfolds somewhere between dream, game, and spell. The screening will be accompanied by a small printed booklet, including a newly commissioned programme note by critic Maria J. Pérez Cuervo (@mjpcuervo ), founder and editor of Hellebore (@helleborezine ). Introduction by season curator Arta Barzanji. Curated by @hairyabao Presented in collaboration with @cinemayearzero Graphic design by @jj_designed About CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating begins as a whimsical story of two women — librarian Julie and magician Céline — who embark on a game of swapped identities, improvised performances, and shared invention. Following one another through the streets of Paris, they discover a mysterious house where a gothic melodrama repeats endlessly. By consuming enchanted sweets, they are able to enter the story, watch it unfold, and gradually take control — becoming both spectators and participants in a narrative that refuses to stay fixed. Like Mulholland Drive, Rivette’s film imagines stories as spaces that can be entered, replayed, and rewritten, where identities shift like masks and reality becomes porous. Lighter in tone but no less radical, Céline and Julie Go Boating transforms narrative into a site of play, doubling, and collective creation. 🎟 Wednesday 22 April, 6.30 pm 📍 The Cinema Museum, London 🔗 Link: cinemamuseum[dot]UK[dot]org

NOT BY LYNCH continues on Friday 20 March at @the_cinema_museum . The third screening in the season is Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) — a haunting, low-budget cult classic that drifts between psychological horror, dream logic, and ghost story. The screening will be introduced by writer and folklorist Kirsty Asher (@kush__tea ), Associate Editor of Cinema Year Zero. Curated by @hairyabao Presented in collaboration with @cinemayearzero Graphic design by @jj_designed About CARNIVAL OF SOULS Made for around $30,000 and largely filmed at night in empty locations around Salt Lake City, Herk Harvey’s only feature follows Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), the lone survivor of a mysterious car crash who begins to feel increasingly detached from the world around her. After taking a job as a church organist in a new town, Mary finds herself drawn again and again to an abandoned pavilion standing far out in the Great Salt Lake. What unfolds is a strange journey through empty streets, silent interiors, and haunted spaces where the boundary between the living and the dead begins to blur. Long before the word Lynchian existed, Carnival of Souls seemed to anticipate it — with its eerie liminal spaces, its drifting sense of time, and the unsettling feeling that ordinary reality is quietly slipping out of place. Watching it today, one has the uncanny sensation that something from the future is already present: figures and moods that would later haunt the cinema of David Lynch. 🎟 Friday 20 March, 7.30 pm 📍 The Cinema Museum, London 🔗 Link: cinemamuseum[dot]org[dot]uk

Following the sad news of Frederick Wiseman's passing, Tom de Lancy Green (@nosniktamot ) completes his trilogy of dispatches from the BFI's career retrospective. This longer piece situates Wiseman's mastery of film form within the historical and political milieu in which he worked. "The name Wiseman was always on the lips of those in the constellation of this publication, a load-bearer for an art form that increasingly felt years behind him." Read it now at cinemayearzero[dot]com or via the link in bio. #FrederickWiseman #Essay #Documentary #Film #Cinema

This week, we published a lively and discursive two part essay from critic Anand Sudha (@philosolver ) on forms of auteurist criticism via Alexander Horwath’s 2024 essay film Henry Fonda for President, which streamed last week on @lecinemaclub . You can read it now at cinemayearzero[dot]com or via the link in bio. #HenryFonda #Auteur #Essay #Film #Cinema

NOT BY LYNCH continues on Saturday 7 February at @the_cinema_museum . The second screening in the season is Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) — a ferocious, end-of-the-line noir that turns pulp detective fiction into something radioactive and uncanny. The screening will be accompanied by a small printed booklet, including a newly commissioned programme note by writer Alison Rumfitt (@alison.zone ), author of Tell Me I’m Worthless and Brainwyrms, available exclusively on the night. Curated by @hairyabao Presented in collaboration with @cinemayearzero . Graphic design by @jj_designed About KISS ME DEADLY A loose adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novel, Kiss Me Deadly strips noir back to its bare elements — a man, a mystery, a series of violent encounters — only to push them toward something stranger and more apocalyptic. Aldrich’s film feels less like a whodunit than a descent: plot gives way to obsession, atmosphere thickens, and the world itself seems to vibrate with dread. Long recognised as a key precursor to New Hollywood, the French New Wave, and filmmakers from Godard to Lynch, Kiss Me Deadly is haunted by the sense that something unspeakable lies just out of view — contained, hidden, but ready to burn through everything. A perfect early expression of the Lynchian, before it was ever named. 🎟 Saturday 7 February, 7.30 pm 📍 The Cinema Museum, London 🔗 Link: cinemamuseum.org.uk

NOT BY LYNCH opens next Friday, Jan 16 at @the_cinema_museum . The first screening in the season is Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1947), introduced by programme curator Arta Barzanji (@hairyabao ) The screening will be accompanied by a small printed booklet, including a new essay on the film by critic Alonso Aguilar (@registrosradio ) and the season introduction. Presented in collaboration with @cinemayearzero . Graphic design by @jj_designed . About SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR: Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door takes the Bluebeard legend and turns it into a brooding psychological noir. Joan Bennett plays Celia, a wealthy young woman who impulsively marries an enigmatic architect and moves into his secluded country house. There she discovers a series of carefully preserved rooms, each recreating a famous historical murder. One door remains locked – a forbidden space that seems to hold the key to her husband’s disturbed inner life. Lang’s film is saturated with dreamlike touches: drifting voiceover, expressionistic shadows, sudden flashbacks and a haunted, fairy-tale atmosphere. It feels like a blueprint for the Lynchian home, where respectable surfaces conceal obsessive fantasies and violence. Celia’s journey through corridors and locked doors anticipates the women of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, drawn toward truths that may destroy them. As an opening to Not By Lynch, Secret Beyond the Door reveals how the seeds of the Lynchian were already planted in Hollywood’s golden age.

Cinema Year Zero polled 50 contributors, colleagues, and personal heroes on their favourite films of the year. You can find the top ten, along with the complete individual ballots and discoveries lists, at cinemayearzero[dot]com, or via the link in our bio. Thanks to everyone who has read and followed us this year, popped by one of our events, picked up a print copy, supported us as a subscriber, or otherwise contributed as we continue to grow as a publication. We couldn't do it without you! - #2025 #top10 #themastermind #onebattleafteranother #dryleaf

NOT BY LYNCH: The Lynchian Before and After David Lynch Presented by Arta Barzanji in association with Cinema Year Zero, Not By Lynch is a new screening series exploring the “Lynchian”: an often-used but rarely examined term whose lineage stretches before, around, and after David Lynch’s own cinema. While Lynch’s films offer the clearest expression of this sensibility, the roots and afterlives of what we call the “Lynchian” extend across film history. From haunted noir and ghostly Americana to experimental digital worlds and paranoid Los Angeles labyrinths, nine films—spanning the nine decades of Lynch’s life—trace different facets of the Lynchian: dream-logic beneath everyday life, the uncanny invading domestic space, identities slipping or doubling, worlds that bend at the edges, and dread that mingles uneasily with play, humour, and desire. Beginning 16 January 2026, the first anniversary of Lynch’s death, the season unfolds monthly at The Cinema Museum. Each screening features a new commissioned essay and an introduction by a Cinema Year Zero writer. Programme: 🚪 16 Jan: Secret Beyond the Door (1947) 🔥 7 Feb: Kiss Me Deadly (1955) 👻 20 Mar: Carnival of Souls (1962) 🎩 22 Apr.: Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) 👽 8 May: The Hidden (1987) ⚡ 12 Jun.: Spontaneous Combustion (1990) 🌀 10 Jul.: Corpus Callosum (2002) + Sshtoorrty (2005) 🕵️‍♂️ 4 Sept.: Under the Silver Lake (2018) 🪞 23 Oct.: Coma (2022) At @the_cinema_museum Curated by @hairyabao Essays by @cinemayearzero Poster by @jj_designed

Faces of cinema at London Film Festival 2025. All of our coverage is now live at cinemayearzero[dot]com and via the link in bio. Including: @hairyabao on After the Hunt @kush__tea on The Testament of Anne Lee @manlikeflan on The Fence and Fwends @lochrxven on Alpha and The Voice of Hind Rajab @yesitsalistair on No Other Choice @blaiseradley on Sirāt @postcard.pop on La Paga and Afterlives @noblesheeat on Blue Moon @esmepartii on Sound of Falling @kitramsayisdead on Reflections in a Dead Diamond Thanks to all our contributors, we'll see you at the next one 🫡

"A lot of the best 'bad movies' are the ones with a certain amount of tension." Check out @esmepartii 's interview with cinephile extroardinaire @willsloanesq , where they discuss his new book ED WOOD: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD USA from @or_books Read the full interview now at cinemayearzero[dot]com or via the 🔗 LINK IN BIO 🔗