A personal essay about the specific seduction of David Fincher’s films — beginning with a line from Fight Club the author still uses to calm herself down. What is it about Fincher’s protagonists, these obsessive, brilliant, deeply damaged men, that makes them so compelling to follow? The essay traces this fascination through Se7en, Zodiac, and The Social Network: an honest account of falling for a filmmaker whose films are, on close examination, about the very seduction they enact on their audience.

Beginning with a high-school encounter with Le Petit Prince and the word ephemere, this essay builds toward a question that cinema has been circling for decades: what is it about Tilda Swinton? An actor who refuses categorisation, who seems to occupy a different ontological register from the other bodies on screen, who makes every film she appears in feel as though it’s been waiting for her specifically. An essay about ineffability — about how some performances can’t be described, only pointed at.

For over 40 years, movie fans have eagerly awaited the arrival of summer and the Hollywood blockbusters that defined it. From Jaws to Star Wars to The Dark Knight, the summer blockbuster has been both a commercial institution and a cultural ritual — and its history tells the story of Hollywood itself. This essay traces the evolution of the blockbuster from its origins in the 1970s to the present, asking what the summer season reveals about what audiences want from cinema, and whether the golden age of the event movie is behind us.

But even if ‘retro’ has replaced ‘renaissance’ and, like Hugo put it rather eloquently, mainstream filmmaking can sometimes feel like a calzone of familiar ideas being folded on top of each other over and over again, we shouldn’t condemn our personal sense of nostalgia for the films that we remember so longingly, and in some cases rather naively, helped shape who we are as grown ups.

As I lie here waiting for these lonesome, dreadful days to pass, pacing the cage of my homely confines, flipping through my film collection and returning time and time again to the same classics I’ve watched dozens of times, I began to wonder what it is that I miss so much about the cinema.