Features

Film history, trends and analysis.

 

Listomania!

Ahead of our Greatest Films of All Time poll, Michael Atkinson anatomises critics’ obsession with enshrining cinema’s ‘top ten’.
31 July 2012 (from our June 2012 issue)

Great wide open: L’avventura

Antonioni’s L’avventura is now more influential than ever, argues Robert Koehler in the latest of our series on contenders for our Greatest Films of All Time poll.
27 July (from our August 2011 issue)

Forever falling: Vertigo

In our series on contenders for our forthcoming Greatest Films of All Time poll, the renowned Spanish critic Miguel Marías finds himself falling once again for the fathomless mysteries of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
25 July 2012 (from our May 2011 issue)

Christopher Nolan: escape artist

In the space of just over a decade, Christopher Nolan has shot from promising British indie director to undisputed master of a new brand of intelligent escapism. Joseph Bevan anatomises his body of work.
18 July 2012 (from our August 2012 issue)

‘Working with Hitch’: Neil Brand on scoring Blackmail

Writing a score for the restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s last silent film, 1929’s Blackmail, gave composer Neil Brand new insight into the master’s techniques.
5 July 2012 (from our July 2012 issue)

Brighton bombshell: Jeff Keen

In memory of the late “Peckinpah of the South Downs”, who died on 21 June 2012, we reprint Will Fowler’s profile written for the BFI’s 2009 retrospective of the artist’s work.
22 June 2012 (from our March 2009 issue)

4DX: Here come the feelies

Just when you thought it was safe to shed your 3D glasses, the South Koreans have added another ‘dimension’ to the movies. Jasper Sharp returns from the east in some physical confusion.
21 June 2012 (web exclusive)

The world at sea: The Forgotten Space

Kieron Corless hears film essayists (or are they?) Noël Burch and Allan Sekula chew over their epic and sobering new portrait of high-seas globalisation at Tate Modern.
19 June 2012 (web exclusive)

Christoph Schlingensief: against taste, defying complacency

Agata Pyzik explores the life’s work of a versatile provocateur who straddled art and exploitation.
19 June 2012 (web exclusive)

Classical virtues: Shindo Kaneto and Yoshimura Kozaburo

Japanese director Shindo Kaneto, famed for ghost classic Onibaba, died on 29 May at the age of 100. Alexander Jacoby pays tribute.
31 May 2012 (from our July 2012 issue)

The battle of Chicago: The Spook Who Sat by the Door

The Spook Who Sat by the Door might long have been recognised as one of the great African-American calls to arms – had it not been suppressed by the FBI, says David Somerset.
23 May 2012 (web exclusive)

The mark of Kane

With Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade Greatest Film of All Time poll looming in 2012, David Thomson launches a series of occasional debates on the canon, here wondering whether Citizen Kane will – or should – retain its top spot.
8 May 2011 (from our January 2011 issue)

Blood and sand: Beau Travail

In the latest of our essays making the case for contenders in S&S’s poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time, Hannah McGill revisits Beau Travail, Claire Denis’s rapturous 1998 exploration of male identity in crisis.
20 April 2012 (from our May 2012 issue)

Garlands and cobwebs: Vincente Minnelli’s ecstatic vision

Vincente Minnelli at his best made his gilded surfaces resonate with the undercurrents of his characters’ inner lives. Keith Uhlich picks out the gems from the trinkets.
18 April 2012 (web exclusive)

Maciej Drygas: a forensics of the public unconscious

Leading light of a new generation of Polish filmmakers, Maciej Drygas is a modern master of archive documentary. Basia Lewandowska Cummings tracks his development.
6 April 2012 (web exclusive)

The great escape: La Grande Illusion

In past S&S polls of the greatest films of all time, Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion has lost out to his later, allegedly more personal film La Règle du jeu. It’s time to reconsider, says Ginette Vincendeau.
5 April 2012 (from our May 2012 issue)

Where the mountain meets the street: Terayama Shuji

Poet, playwright and avant-garde filmmaker maudit, Terayama Shuji was both infamous and ubiquitous in late 60s and 70s Japan. Tony Rayns recalls a legend.
15 March 2012 (web exclusive)

Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces

As Sight & Sound counts down to the September issue’s once-a-decade poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time, French critic Nicole Brenez makes the case for one of the key revolutionary activist films of the 1960s, The Hour of the Furnaces.
9 March 2012 (from our April 2012 issue)

History in the making: Black Gold and the Jasmine revolution

Ali Jaafar on the set of a fictional epic about a 1930s Arab uprising, filming in revolutionary Tunisia.
23 February 2012 (web exclusive)

Remain in light: Mulholland Dr. and the cosmogony of David Lynch

As our ten-yearly poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time gets ever closer, B. Kite considers David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. in the light of the Vedanta-inspired spiritual philosophy that underpins all the director’s work.
10 February 2012 (from our March 2012 issue)

Jean Vigo: Artist of the floating world

The sole full-length feature made by Jean Vigo, L’Atalante was a bridge between the surrealism of 1920s French cinema and the poetic realism of the 1930s. Graham Fuller makes the case for its inclusion in S&S’s forthcoming ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ poll.
19 January 2012 (from our January 2012 issue)