The delightfully paradoxical topic of the ‘liveness’ of cinema gets excellent airing in this collection of essays drawn from Atkinson & Kennedy’s important Live Cinema project. Here, in all their complex glory, are case studies on popup cinema, secret cinema, event cinema, rural cinema, street food cinema, classic pier cinema, film festivals, and more – all of them attesting that different kinds of audience participation are nothing new, even if they are currently taking a whole variety of startling revitalised forms. The editors, their contributing researchers and practitioners offer us not just a rich array of kinds of liveness, but also some vital analytic tools we need to make sense of the range of experiences these offer audiences.