London’s coolest cinema

Plus: Ittai Gradel (1965–2026) ͏‌          Damian Thompson on how the Rio cinema has stayed true to its roots The curving porch, ribbed facade and boxy marquee of the Rio cinema, awash with colour after dark, is hard to miss – even in a thoroughfare as tumultuous as Kingsland High Street in Dalston, a stew of Turkish, West African and cool young London life. Within a week of landing in the area in 2002 I was anxiously puffing on roll-ups in its balcony as I flinched along to a late-night screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. At that point, I had no inkling that the place had been such a survivor, the oldest continuously operating cinema in the UK. And as Hackney dwellers celebrate its latest milestone, 50 years as a community-owned charity, it’s worth pondering how it has soldiered on when so many independents have bitten the dust or been gobbled up by mainstream art-house chains.   Read the full article       Yosola Olorunshola on the very American unease of Henry Taylor An untitled painting of Martin Luther King Jr. playing American football with a group of kids (2016–22) offers an imagined moment of freedom and play, but a cluster of white men in the background chips away at the sense of abandon. Another work, dating to the Obama presidency, presents a figure in a Colin Kaepernick jersey looking out on to a Brooklyn housing project, which is juxtaposed with the White House; meanwhile a group of Black men are led into a white police van. Somehow, in this small, contained painting, Taylor evokes the gulf between hope and reality, progress and stasis, as if to ask, ‘How far have we really come?’   Read the full article       Apollo on the public-spirited efforts of Ittai Gradel The Danish antiques dealer Ittai Gradel has died of cancer at the age of 61. It was Gradel who, in 2021, first alerted the British Museum to the possibility that gems from its collection were being sold on eBay. He was too modest to call himself a whistleblower but, as he told Apollo when he was this magazine’s Personality of the Year in 2024, he believed in ‘the importance of transparency’ and ‘openness, openness, openness’.   Read the full interview       Emilie Bickerton on Jean Painlevé, magician of Surrealism and science As a young student in comparative anatomy at the Sorbonne in the 1920s, Jean Painlevé made two early discoveries. The observational tools he was using offered insights into the natural and biological world that the human eye had never before been allowed, but they also required cutting up our way of looking – in slow or fast motion, through microscopes and in glass jars – and reassembling the results to present to fellow scientists. In anatomy the object was separated from its whole and, in the process, could be seen anew. These findings drew Painlevé closer to the Surrealist circle and the influence of figures such as André Breton and Louis Aragon, who advocated just this way of seeing and representing the world in art and poetry: make the object strange!   Read the full article       In Marrakech, Lucy Waterson meets Morocco’s representative at Venice ‘When we started thinking about the project, there was so much excitement. When we were selected, we felt this huge sense of responsibility,’ Amina Agueznay tells me in early April. By that point, at least some of the pressure had eased: 90 per cent of her textile installation for the pavilion had been shipped off to Venice. Titled Asǝṭṭa – Amazigh for ‘ritual weaving’ – the project comprises more than 150 hanging wool panels, each woven on a vertical loom and stitched with raffia with the help of 166 artisans based across Morocco. Working ‘in the field’, as Agueznay puts it – travelling between the ateliers of these makers, in the Middle Atlas mountains or Jerada Province in the north-east – is where she feels most at home. ‘When I got back in the field and started the project, the tension was gone.’   Read the full article     In the current issue…     Sheila Barker considers Raphael as a ladies’ man If Raphael was interested in women, they were interested in him too. Women such as Leandra degli Oddi, Atalanta Baglioni and the Poor Clares of Monteluce supported his career long before papal commissions brought him wealth. Remarkably, it was a woman, Giovanna Feltria della Rovere, who was the first person to credit him with artistic imagination when he was only 21; she also helped in his move to Florence, the city that was central to his intellectual and artistic growth. Whereas Michelangelo, according to the 16th-century artist and essayist Francisco de Hollanda, disdained the taste of ‘women and priests’, Raphael seems to have cultivated their appreciation of his art as well as of his person. If Vasari is right that Raphael’s death at the age of 37 was a result of ‘eccessi amorosi’, then it is a cruel irony that women were also his downfall.   Read the full article     In the next issue…   More from Apollo Current issue | Advertise | Podcasts   View this email in your browser   Follow us Apollo Magazine, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP. All Articles and Content Copyright © 2026 by Apollo Magazine. All Rights Reserved. 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