Our September issue looks at the irresistible rise of Latin American cinema over the past decade. International breakout successes such as The Motorcycle Diaries, City of God and Y tu mamá también are but the tip of the iceberg as an outstanding new wave of daring yet vividly real film-making has swept from Mexico to Chile, as Sergio Wolf reports. We also interview the directors of two new Latin American films opening this month – Chilean upstairs-downstairs drama The Maid’s Sebastián Silva and Oscar-winner The Secret in Their Eyes’s Juan José Campanella.

One sign of a great director is the ability to discover a side to an actor or actress that no one else has explored before. So it is with South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host), who in the gripping Mother unearths depths of obsession in the veteran soap star and national treasure Kim Hye-ja. Bong talks us through the film in five key scenes.

Bob Rafelson tells David Thomson how he spotted an uncouth heckler in a Los Angeles cinema and set him – one Jack Nicholson – on the road to stardom in Five Easy Pieces.

Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, meanwhile, turns his famously oblique gaze away from the women of his native land and on to arthouse siren Juliette Binoche in his first European film, Certified Copy. Director and star both tell us about the experience. We also chase the threads of neorealism, modernism and postmodernism in the director’s past masterworks.

Long revered in his Czech homeland, the late Frantisek Vlácil’s international reputation is finally rising with the recent restorations of his Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees. With a near-complete UK retrospective due in September, we investigate his work beyond those two visionary medieval epics.

Plus: arts funding in crisis, Mr Busy’s guide to an impoverished career in the film biz, the rise of Secret Cinema, the Karlovy Vary film festival, early John Ford at Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato and Kim Newman disinters the pioneering Japanese monster movie Mothra.

We’ve reviews of 38 new film releases – including Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, our film of the month – and 19 new DVDs, including Australian outback classics Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Shaw Brothers’ mid-1980s Scala Cinema favourite Five Element Ninjas and Raquel Welch rape-revenge Western Hannie Caulder. And our Books section covers new tomes on South American Cinema, early Japanese cinema, ‘Global Art Cinema’ and cameraless ‘direct’ cinema. Phew!

September issue competitions

Win The Godfather Family Album, Satyajit Ray DVDs, The Faber Guide to New South American Cinema, Lymelife DVDs and a portable DVD player