The Summer Journal is now available (for free!) in all Curzon cinemas. Read Yasmin Omar’s editor’s letter here, and don’t forget to pick up your copy of the magazine next time you visit us.
Five years ago, I sat in a cinema, enraptured, watching Tom Cruise pilot a
helicopter through a valley in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, while Ving Rhames works to disarm two nuclear bombs and Rebecca Ferguson takes out rivals in a fist fight. I turned to the friend beside me – similarly gobsmacked by what was unfolding before our very eyes – and stage-whispered, ‘How the hell did they do that?!’ This is the question that animates the Summer Journal, the magazine where we dig into the craft that underpins the season’s new films, whose towering spectacle and sky-high stakes have always been a personal highlight of the annual cinema calendar.
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
Naturally, with a new Mission: Impossible out, I was excited to speak with editor Eddie Hamilton about how he cut Dead Reckoning Part One together, catching up with him minutes after the movie was finished. And we’re declaring ourselves Switzerland in the battle of Barbenheimer – the portmanteau designating Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan’s breathlessly anticipated 21 July releases – by celebrating both films in the issue. Christina Newland discusses pink lipstick, spray tans and hair dye with Barbie’s hair and make-up designer Ivana Primorac, while Ian Haydn Smith marvels at how Oppenheimer replicates an atomic-bomb explosion using practical effects.
Of course, being Curzon, we love independent films as much as blockbusters, and this edition of the Summer Journal features conversations with casting director Shaheen Baig (she who discovered Florence Pugh) about finding new talent for British coming-of-ager Scrapper; Fyzal Boulifa, the writer-director of Morocco-set melodrama The Damned Don’t Cry, who opens up about projecting himself onto his script; and Daniel Rossen and Christopher Bear on how they composed the mellifluous score for Sundance breakout Past Lives. Elsewhere, Michael Leader reflects on the summertime pleasures of Studio Ghibli’s magical animations; and, as 2023 becomes the unofficial year of the product biopic – with everything from Air Jordans to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos receiving cinematic origin stories – Stuart Jeffries weighs in on what this trend has to say about contemporary society.
Air (2023)
We hope you enjoy this issue of the magazine, and its poppy cover design by
Laura Whitehouse. If you like what you read in these pages, don’t forget to pay us a visit over on curzon.com/journal, where we publish all manner of articles, all year around. Now, round up your friends, head to the cinema and make some summer-movie memories of your own.
Yasmin Omar
Co-editor, Summer Journal
Pick up your copy of the Summer Journal in your local Curzon for free while stocks last.
