Before the lights go down: a guide to independent film magazines

The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opens on 2 September with Danny Boyle's Ink and closes on 12 September with Giovanni Veronesi's Dio ride. For the eleven days in between, the Lido does what it does every year: it turns cinema into a picture problem, then hands that problem to photographers. Independent film magazines are the part of print that takes this seriously — not reviews and star ratings, but the image culture that forms around a film and outlives it.

Boutique Galleria has shelved film titles alongside fashion and art since the beginning, because in practice the readership is the same person. What follows is a guide to the film and image-led magazines worth reading in the run-up to Venice, and where each one sits.

Venice, and the shape of September

Alberto Barbera has directed the Venice Film Festival long enough that its rhythm is legible in advance. The competition slate arrives, the Lido fills with photographers, and for a fortnight the most reproduced images in the world are of actors standing still on a red carpet while several hundred shutters go off at once.

That is the raw material independent film magazines work with, and they work with it slowly. A festival generates its pictures in a week. A magazine spends three months deciding which of them meant anything. The titles below were all made before Venice opened and will still read well after it closes, which is the point.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a thin category. Film has never supported independent print the way fashion and art have. The reviewing function moved online early and completely, and what survived on paper did so largely by refusing to review anything at all. What is left reads closer to a quarterly essay collection with very good picture editing — which is also why these titles hold their value on a shelf, and why back issues of them still sell.

A Rabbit's Foot: the film magazine, properly

A Rabbit's Foot is the closest thing print currently has to a serious general-interest film magazine, and Issue 15 is its science-fiction issue — timed to Cannes and built around a nod to Tarkovsky's Solaris. It carries a rare conversation with George Lucas, a long visit with Alejandro Jodorowsky, and interviews with Terry Gilliam, Siri Hustvedt and David Hockney in the same volume.

The features are where it earns its 230 pages: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Walt Disney's utopian-city project, and the influence of the French comic Métal Hurlant on the look of cinema. It reads like a magazine edited by someone who assumes you have seen the films and would rather discuss what they were made of. UK cover price £20.

Hero: when the interview is between two actors

The Hero Summer Zine reaches Issue 10 with a format that has quietly become the most useful in film publishing: the interview conducted by another actor, with no journalist in the room. Finneas talks to Carey Mulligan about the score he wrote for the second season of a Netflix anthology. Camila Mendes and Adria Arjona discuss the physical preparation for Masters of the Universe.

Spike Fearn and Renée Zellweger talk about Finding Emily, and Havana Rose Liu describes working with Nicolas Winding Refn on Her Private Hell to Hunter Schafer. The conversations run differently to press-junket transcripts because both parties have done the job. There is a limited-edition Spike Fearn cover. UK cover price £15.

The face, and who photographs it

Festival season is fundamentally about portraiture, which is why the fashion biannuals belong on this shelf. AnOther Magazine's Spring/Summer 2026 season runs its usual spread of covers — Vicky Krieps, Alexander Skarsgård, Solange shot by Gabriel Moses, Alex Consani in Gucci, and a Dior package with Charlize Theron. Each is a separate argument about how an actor's face can be photographed in 2026. UK cover price £9.99.

Re-Edition Issue 25 goes further into the craft. Under editor Jo Barker it opens with Nadia Lee Cohen's "Great Party, Isn't It?", shot by Chloe Chippendale, and follows with Charlotte Gainsbourg photographed by Alec Soth in Epping Forest. Juergen Teller contributes twice: a 24-page study of a single Prada coat, and a portfolio of Marina Abramović rehearsing Balkan Erotic Epic. This is fashion print treated as cultural document rather than seasonal commentary.

Teller appears again on the cover of Sotheby's Magazine, photographing Mariacarla Boscono in Athens — a reminder that the auction house has been running one of the more considered image magazines in circulation, and that the collecting audience and the film audience overlap more than either would admit. UK cover price £9.

Where to start with independent film magazines

If you are buying one title before Venice opens, make it A Rabbit's Foot — it is the only one of these that is a film magazine first. If you are buying two, add Hero for the actor-to-actor interviews, which will read as a document of this particular cast of people in five years' time.

If what draws you is the photography rather than the films, start with Re-Edition or AnOther and work outwards. Our guide to independent art magazines covers the adjacent shelf, and the note on Dazed, Wonderland and Hero explains where the youth-culture titles fit.

Buying before the festival rather than after is a small practical point with an editorial reason behind it. The issues on the shelf this fortnight were closed over the summer. The ones that respond to Venice will not reach us until late October or November. If the aim is to read alongside the festival rather than about it six weeks later, now is when the shelf is right.

The full range sits across Cinema Magazines, Photography Magazines and Culture Magazines, and everything ships worldwide from the UK.