CineMasters

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What makes a CineMaster?

Years of experience, global renown, a career of landmark films and a public fascination with every move they make – and that’s just for starters.

Our ongoing season celebrates directors and key figures from filmmaking history, and gives you the opportunity to watch their work on the big screen.

Explore the CineMasters archive on Letterboxd

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CineMasters: John Woo

June 2026

John Woo is one of the most influential filmmakers in modern action cinema, renowned for his balletic approach to violence and his distinctive visual and thematic style. Emerging from the Hong Kong film industry in the 1970s and 80s, Woo redefined the action genre.

Instantly recognisable for their stylised gunplay, slow-motion choreography, and poetic use of space and movement, Woo's films often feature doves, dual-wielded pistols, and explosive set pieces. Beyond the spectacle, his work is driven by deeply human concerns: loyalty, honour, sacrifice, and the complex bonds between men on opposite sides of the law.

Throughout his career, Woo has maintained a unique ability to blend visceral action with emotional storytelling, elevating genre filmmaking into something almost operatic in tone and intensity. This season of screenings celebrates a true master whose work continues to resonate, thrill, and inspire, decades after it first burst onto the screen.

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CineMasters: Clio Barnard

July 2026

British director Clio Barnard, whose fifth feature I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning premiered to acclaim at Cannes earlier this year, has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British cinema.

Our latest CineMasters season looks back at Barnard’s previous four feature films, beginning with her experimental documentary The Arbor. Focusing on the life and work of playwright Andrea Dunbar, the film combines documentary and performance, with actors lip-syncing to recordings of Dunbar’s family and friends. It earned Barnard the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2010. We'll also be screening Rita, Sue and Bob Too, directed by Alan Clarke and adapted from Dunbar’s work.

Barnard’s social-realist films include The Selfish Giant, a beautiful and heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in Bradford. She returned to the region for the tender cross-cultural romance Ali & Ava, while in Dark River—loosely adapted from Rose Tremain’s novel Trespass—she explores grief, trauma and family conflict through the story of a woman returning to her rural Yorkshire home following her father’s death.

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