Visionary

In 1989, Dolly Parton joined Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukakis and a young Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias — a film about friendship, grief and the women who face life’s worst moments with a well-timed wisecrack.Nearly four decades later, it is a Hollywood classic. But when Steel Magnolias arrived in cinemas, plenty of critics were less impressed. Its overwhelmingly female world was dismissed as sentimental, frivolous and lacking a “strong male figure” — criticisms that now say almost as much about Hollywood as they do about the film.In this edition of Future Vision, we look at why Dolly Parton was perfectly cast as Truvy, how Steel Magnolias turned a deeply personal tragedy into one of the era’s most enduring films, and what happened to the Hollywood movies made unapologetically for grown women.Writer and critic Hadley Freeman, author of Life Moves Pretty Fast, explains how the economics of Hollywood changed — and why studios increasingly turned their attention towards the teenage boys they believed could deliver a blockbuster opening weekend.From Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment to Moonstruck and Baby Boom, this is the story of a kind of mainstream cinema that once flourished — and then almost disappeared.

There are cult films, and then there are films that seem almost to disappear. For this special edition of Visionary, part of our Future Vision summer series, we unearth a conversation with the late Mike Hodges, the director who gave British cinema Get Carter, to revisit its stranger, more playful follow-up: Pulp.Hodges tells Benjamin Wilson how the 1972 film grew out of his fascination with B-movies, postwar Italy, political extremism and the strange scandals of the paparazzi age, before taking shape with an extraordinary cast led by Michael Caine and Mickey Rooney.But at the heart of the conversation is Lizabeth Scott. One of film noir’s most distinctive stars, Scott had largely retreated from the screen when Hodges persuaded her to return for what would become her final film appearance. He recalls their delicate first meetings, her anxieties about returning to the camera and the moment she decided to take the role – before dismissing some of the rumours that have followed her performance ever since.A rare encounter with a great British filmmaker, looking back at a forgotten Hollywood star and one of the most curious films of his career.

What does the end of civilisation look like when you strip away the Hollywood spectacle?In this episode of Future Vision, our special series exploring the future of creativity and filmmaking, film journalist Caspar Salmon examines Sirāt — Oliver Laxe’s haunting vision of a world coming apart at the seams, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2025.Set among ravers travelling through the deserts of North Africa as war unfolds somewhere beyond the horizon, Sirāt approaches the apocalypse at an unusually human scale. There are no collapsing skyscrapers or armies of extras. Instead, Laxe draws on non-professional actors, documentary-style filmmaking, an unforgiving landscape and a story deliberately untethered from conventional geopolitics.From its echoes of Mad Max: Fury Road to the remarkable performance of Sergi López, Caspar explores how Sirāt blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality — and how its small-scale, independent approach creates a depiction of societal collapse that feels all the more immediate, elemental and unsettling.

Hand-drawn animation changed cinema forever. Long before CGI and artificial intelligence transformed the screen, pioneers like Max Fleischer proved that imagination, craftsmanship and technical invention could create entire worlds from pencil and paper.In this special edition of Visionary's Future Vision series, Jane Fleischer Reid, granddaughter of the legendary animator, reflects on the extraordinary legacy of the Fleischer Studios – the creative force behind Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman and some of the most inventive cartoons ever made. She tells the story of Max Fleischer's restless curiosity, the invention of the rotoscope, the studio's surreal artistic style, and the painstaking restoration of more than 100 classic films from original archive materials.As digital tools make image creation easier than ever, Fleischer's work feels even more relevant. In an era of AI-generated content, audiences are rediscovering the value of artistry you can feel in every frame. The imperfections, ingenuity and unmistakably human touch of handcrafted animation are becoming a premium once again – reminding us that the future of entertainment may depend as much on preserving creative craft as inventing new technology.

Gattaca imagined a world where every aspect of human potential could be measured, optimised and ranked. Nearly 30 years later, that future feels uncomfortably familiar.In this narrated exploration, writer Caspar Salmon revisits Andrew Niccol's 1997 science-fiction classic to ask whether Gattaca was really about genetics — or whether it foresaw today's culture of relentless self-improvement, biohacking, productivity and optimisation.As AI, genetic testing and performance-enhancing technologies become part of everyday life, the film's central question feels more relevant than ever: what happens when the pursuit of perfection becomes society's defining value?Future Vision is Visionary's special summer series focussing on the future of cinema and what it tells us about the direction of our real world. Brought to you by Here East, London's home of innovation.

We're pausing our usual format over the summer to bring you Future Vision — a special series exploring the changing film and television industry. Over the coming weeks, we'll examine everything from visual effects and production design to the rise of the creator economy.We begin with Supergirl. Not the version currently in cinemas, but the original 1984 film that first brought Superman's cousin to the big screen.Helen Slater was just eighteen when she landed the title role, fresh out of drama school. She was flown to Pinewood Studios to train in trampolining, sword fighting and horse riding before joining a cast that included Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole and Peter Cook.Recorded before the release of the 2026 reboot, Slater reflects on a film that has since become a cult classic. She recalls the technical challenge of its ambitious flying sequences, the script rewrites that reshaped the production and the experience of carrying a major studio franchise at such a young age. She also offers a candid assessment of why Supergirl failed to match the success of its Superman predecessors, and what that says about Hollywood's long struggle to build enduring female-led superhero franchises.With the new Supergirl also filmed in the UK, the conversation offers a timely perspective on how blockbuster filmmaking has evolved — and on the pressures that still accompany launching a superhero franchise.

For centuries, buildings were designed with a single purpose in mind. Theatres staged plays, factories manufactured goods and railway stations moved passengers. Many have since found new lives through adaptation, but today's most successful spaces are increasingly conceived to do far more from the outset.Georgina Godwin speaks with Alex Wills, co-founder of Interval, about why flexibility has become one of architecture's most valuable assets. Drawing on a career spanning live events, immersive technology and spatial design, Wills argues that the next generation of buildings will succeed not because they can be repurposed decades later, but because they are designed from day one to accommodate changing audiences, technologies and uses.From the engineering behind the Las Vegas Sphere to the evolving campuses of Canary Wharf, 180 Strand and Here East, the conversation explores how developers are rethinking the relationship between space and experience. For Wills, the most important question is no longer what a building looks like, but how it will be used – not just on opening night, but for years to come.

Britain has three of the world's top ten universities and the third largest tech sector outside America and China. So why does it often feel like we're stuck? Jeremy Hunt left office after bringing inflation down and steering the economy out of recession. Now, with a new book and a new Prime Minister about to enter Downing Street, he has some blunt things to say about what it will take to finally unlock the country's potential — and what happens if the moment is wasted.In this episode, presented in partnership with CapX the Centre for Policy Studies, Marc Sidwell speaks with the former Chancellor about his book Can We Be Rich Again?, which sets out both a diagnosis of Britain's economic inertia and a prescription for breaking it. Hunt is direct about the central challenge facing Andy Burnham: welfare reform is the defining test, and ducking it — as Keir Starmer discovered — doesn't make the problem go away, it simply hands a veto to the backbenches. He argues that political capital drains away like an egg timer, and that the only leaders who leave office proud are those who act boldly in their first weeks, not their last.