Sight & Sound

The Mummy review: Tom Cruise’s monster movie shuffles off all signs of life

Universal Studios’ mission to reboot its classic monster cycle as a new cinematic Dark Universe begins in chains with this desperately enervated first instalment, says Kim Newman.

Sunday 11 June 2017

Reviews and recommendations

Film of the week: My Life as a Courgette, a joyful cartoon about damaged children

Claude Barras’s marvellous stop-motion feature juggles the troubles, dreams and fortitude of a boy in a children’s home with deft realism, says Hannah McGill.

Friday 2 June 2017

Reviews and recommendations

Twin Peaks: the Return episodes 1-4 recap – so far, so wayward

David Lynch’s game-changing TV mystery show Twin Peaks is back on our screens after 26 years – and on the evidence of the first episodes, it’s a shiftier beast than ever. Tom Huddleston joins the investigation.

Thursday 8 June 2017

TV

Guru Dutt: such sweet sorrow

In this piece from the Sight & Sound archive, Mark Cousins highlights “one of the great, brooding figures in post-Independence Indian cinema”: an actor-director who brought stillness, self-criticism and unexpected pessimism to the whirl of Indian melodrama, making himself its Orson Welles.

Friday 2 June 2017

Features

Lost in the filters: social media past and present at Oberhausen 

The German short film festival celebrated examples of ‘social’ media before the age of Twitter, Facebook et al. So how better for Kevin B. Lee to report on the event than via Instagram?

Tuesday 6 June 2017

Festivals

Daughters of the Dust review: a transportive, transformative colonial rites-of-passage movie

As Julie Dash’s rare masterpiece returns to cinemas as the centrepiece of Sight & Sound’s latest Deep Focus season Visions of the Black Feminine, here’s Lizzie Francke’s original review of this “balletic, operatic… elemental” film, from our September 1991 issue.

Friday 2 June 2017

Reviews and recommendations

Review: Wonder Woman defies the warring bores

Gal Gadot’s empathic anti-warrior puts the hero back in ‘superhero’, and a chink of likeability in the Warners/DC cinematic universe, says Kim Newman.

Thursday 1 June 2017

Reviews and recommendations

Gallery: the island imagery of The Red Turtle

Michael Dudok de Wit’s dialogue-free castaway reverie The Red Turtle enfolds its lone human figures in the environment of a deserted tropical island that’s given magisterial presence by de Wit’s richly pellucid animated drawings. Here are 12 frames from the film.

Friday 2 June 2017

The pictures

Film of the week: The Red Turtle is a dream of a desert island movie

Delicate, elegant and profound, Michael Dudok de Wit’s collaboration with Studio Ghibli is a touching tale of man’s uneasy relationship to nature, set in a sinister paradise, writes Kate Stables.

Friday 26 May 2017

Reviews and recommendations

Roger Moore obituary: the star who gave James Bond a martini-dry wit 

The endearingly modest actor with famously flexible eyebrows claimed he did little more than learn his lines and avoid the scenery, but his talent helped him to segue from TV’s The Saint to become a beloved 007, noted for his easy charm and sex appeal, says Kevin Lyons.

Thursday 25 May 2017

Obituaries

Auteur at sea: Mike Nichols’ docu-thriller The Day of the Dolphin

This marine-themed actioner from 1973 is full of surprises, writes Brad Stevens. As a presidential assassination plot takes over an educational film about wildlife, are witnessing a draft of the director’s emotional autobiography?

Wednesday 24 May 2017

Bradlands

Film of the week: Spaceship takes a trip to a more vibrant dimension

Alex Taylor’s debut feature is a psychedelic, part-improvised tale of dreamy teenagers looking for lift-off, writes Philip Kemp.

Thursday 18 May 2017

Reviews and recommendations

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword review – this sword stays in its stone

Charlie Hunnam struggles to lead Guy Ritchie’s geezers of the Round Table in a flashy but callow origin story from which little may arise, says Nick Pinkerton.

Thursday 18 May 2017

Reviews and recommendations

Lav Diaz: “Art is a commitment to the beauty of the soul”

The Filipino director of rich and often extraordinarily long films tells Jonathan Romney about his spiritual approach to filmmaking.

Thursday 18 May 2017

Interviews

Jonathan Demme obituary: a cinema of heart and soul, funk and fight

From the Roger Corman pumphouse to The Silence of the Lambs’s Oscar triumph, Stop Making Sense’s concert-doc ingenuity to portraits of social-justice fighters, Jonathan Demme left a legacy of richly independent movies celebrating life’s underdogs, writes David Thompson.

Tuesday 9 May 2017

Obituaries

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

Hollywood icon/oclast: the art of Jack Nicholson

From New Hollywood rebel to arch Hollywood devil, Jack Nicholson has been our gold-standard baby boomer, on the run from his demons even as he upends the world – and hounds down the last laugh. As he turns 80, Leigh Singer looks back at the art of Jack.

Friday 21 April 2017

Video

Video: Scorsese NYC

It’s complicated: Martin Scorsese’s irresistible passion for the mean streets of his hometown show us not just the psyche of a city, but the soul of a nation, says Leigh Singer.

Friday 3 February 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