Beauty may be truth, and truth, beauty, as the poet says, but in our December issue they come with anguish moist and fever dew. The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s portrait of fear and loathing in a German village a century ago, for instance, is evasive about the perpetrators of its cruelties. The director opens up in an extended interview, however, and we investigate hints of a newfound softness in the film.

Haneke – our cover star – is just one of several exacting auteurs profiled this month. Henri-Georges Clouzot, the French master of suspense – who wasn’t above slapping a starlet to ensure the right shocked expression – is also featured in the context of his unfinished, newly resurrected L’Enfer (we also remember his lead actress Romy Schneider, and interview the film’s belated saviour, archivist Serge Bromberg). Sergey Dvortsevoy, meanwhile, tells us how he made his cast live on a Kazakh steppe for a year to make the extraordinary Tulpan. And we have an appreciation of films of the materialist, ‘artisanal’ husband-and-wife team Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

Jane Campion, director of the sweeping Keats love story Bright Star, took a more gentle approach – she made her actors read poetry. We comb the dreamily inspired results, and hear Campion tell how she avoided the trappings of the costume biopic. And Steven Soderbergh discusses his back-to-back new movie adventures The Informant! and The Girlfriend Experience.

We’ve festival reports from San Sebastian and Pordenone – plus Mr Busy’s call for festivals to renew their cultural purpose, a report on The September Issue’s gossamer-thin cinema-release window, and a look at the new model of movies made by videogame companies.

Our crack team of reviewers this month scour 40 cinema releases (including the Coens’ A Serious Man, our film of the month, The Informant! and the brutal Johnny Mad Dog) and 31 DVDs, including features on overlooked Brigitte Bardot movies, Dusan Makavejev’s cheeky provocations and Habs-Jürgen Syberberg’s autopsies of German history. Plus two new books about Britain’s tireless Sally Potter, the first English-language study of Taiwanese master Hou Hsaio-Hsien, and a new take on Ingmar Bergman.