Sight & Sound

A cinema-in-the-moment: Sam Green on A Thousand Thoughts and the ‘live documentary’

Sam Green grew tired of making “fixed and permanent” documentaries, so now he performs them – his latest, A Thousand Thoughts, alongside its subjects the legendary Kronos Quartet. He talks to Robert Greene about the history, economics and politics of standup cinema.

Wednesday 16 May 2018

Interviews

Film of the week: Redoubtable falls out of love with Jean-Luc Godard

Michel Hazanavicius recounts the breakup of the New Wave icon and his muse Anne Wiazemsky in this playful, irreverent and occasionally scathing movie, writes Philip Kemp.

Thursday 10 May 2018

Reviews and recommendations

Realities in progress: four highlights of Cinéma du Réel 2018

From a Parisian high school and Berlin’s airport to a Portuguese fisherman and Uruguyuan street protesters, the best films at the 40th edition of Paris’s international documentary festival found ways to engage with their chosen realities as much as with their own artistic complexities, reports Celluloid Liberation Front.

Friday 11 May 2018

Festivals

Reagan’s bastard children: the lost teens of 1980s American indie films

Away from the ersatz, self-satisfied rebelliousness of Reaganite pop teen movies, a more independent strain of US cinema scratched at the darkness on the edge of mainstream adult society. Christina Newland revisits the orphans of the American Dream.

Monday 30 April 2018

Features

Film of the week: Lean on Pete, an intimate teenage oater

In the hands of 45 Years director Andrew Haigh, Willy Vlautin’s story of a boy and a horse reversing the Oregon trail on a self-rescue mission has big vistas and better interior drama, says Philip Kemp.

Saturday 5 May 2018

Reviews and recommendations

Yonebayashi Hiromasa on Mary and the Witch’s Flower: “We want to make films that give people courage”

The Arrietty director has teamed up with fellow Studio Ghibli veteran Nishimura Yoshiaki to start a new company, and fittingly their first film is all about taking a leap into the unknown, they tell Andrew Gutman.

Sunday 8 April 2018

Interviews

Looking backwards, moving forwards: 10 of the best at Sci-Fi-London 2018

This year’s festival contains a paradoxical set of films that merge progression and retrospection to mind-bending effect, from the imaginatively unhinged mind games of Nothing Really Happens to movies exploring retrofuturism, resurrection and regression, writes Anton Bitel.

Friday 27 April 2018

Festivals

Film of the week: Beast is a fairytale with more than one monster

Michael Pearce’s bold debut feature conjures a tantalising mix of eroticism and paranoia, as its heroine struggles with agonising doubts about her mysterious new lover, writes Philip Kemp.

Thursday 26 April 2018

Reviews and recommendations

Avengers: Infinity War review: Marvel’s space mosaic punches for the stars

Marvel’s most bumper saga yet harks back to 1940s serials with its many-chaptered ambition to crowbar every super hero and villain possible into a superfranchise. Its vistas are almost as impressive as its vaulting ambition, says Kim Newman.

Friday 27 April 2018

Reviews and recommendations

The unkindest cut of all: gay expression, indigenous cultural rights and the fight over The Wound (Inxeba)

A violent controversy over the award-winning South African film The Wound points to a tense global debate about the rights of indigenous peoples to protect their collective forms of cultural expression. Where does the defence of traditional culture become censorship, asks Bertrand Moullier?

Wednesday 25 April 2018

Features

Delusional Albion: how foreign directors saw Swinging 60s Britain

From Repulsion to Blowup and beyond, 1960s movies made in Britain by foreign directors had something unsettling to tell us about a nation in flux – a warning that may yet reflect on our Brexit era, writes Brad Stevens.

Tuesday 24 April 2018

Bradlands

The Old Dark House archive review: a peculiarly acute English horror story

As James Whale’s pre-code horror-comedy returns to the big screen, we share John Pym’s review from a previous re-release, which praises the film’s many riches, and sets the record straight.

Friday 27 April 2018

Reviews and recommendations

Uncertain countries: rethinking the landscape film at Frames of Representation 2018

This year’s festival of cinematic nonfiction at the ICA probes the theme of ‘landscape’ – less as a discipline than a metaphor for the ways we build our worldview, says Ben Nicholson.

Friday 27 April 2018

Festivals

Vittorio Taviani obituary: a poetic witness to Italy’s political drama

From Allonsanfàn to Padre Padrone, Night of the Shooting Stars to Caesar Must Die, Vittorio and his surviving brother Paolo distilled their country’s post-war convulsions with a weightless eloquence and imagination, says Celluloid Liberation Front.

Wednesday 25 April 2018

Obituaries

Women on a Bergman screen – a video essay

Swedish master Ingmar Bergman’s fascination with female experience and emotions underpinned one of the cinema’s greatest virtual communities of women on screen. In this video study Leigh Singer invites Bergman’s talented actresses and their creations into closest possible correspondence.

Friday 2 February 2018

Video

In her eyes: notes on Gloria Grahame (a video essay)

With a curl of her lip and an arch of her eyebrow, Gloria Grahame was the actress who stood up to both Humphrey Bogart and Lee Marvin in their most violent roles. In this video essay, Serena Bramble explores the burn mark Grahame left on the silver screen.

Friday 24 November 2017

Video

Wrapped in plasticity: Twin Peaks’ myriad Laura Palmers

Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin conduct a forensic examination of the slippages at play in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s surrealistic investigative series.

Friday 28 April 2017

Video

Video essay: What is neorealism?

kogonada pits the director of The Bicycle Thieves against the producer of Gone with the Wind on the same movie material.

Friday 17 May 2013

Video