Sight and Sound: the October 2023 issue

We mark the release of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon with an honest, insightful and wide-ranging interview with the director, in which he discusses how he came to make the film, his respect for the Osage Nation and his Greatest Films poll picks. Elsewhere in the issue are Celine Song on her quiet but powerful directorial debut Past Lives, Ken Loach on what may be his final film, The Old Oak, and Shane Meadows looking back at Dead Man’s Shoes twenty years on.

Plus: Lorenza Mazzetti, an Italian director in London; Ira Sachs’s Passages and sex on screen; a classic Bernard Herrmann interview; and much, much more below…

Martin Scorsese discusses the long genesis of Killers of the Flower Moon, his epic tale of the systematic exploitation and murder of members of the Native American Osage community by white Oklahomans in the 1920s. By Philip Horne.

In her directorial debut, the quiet romance Past Lives, Celine Song draws on her Korean-American background to ponder the roles that destiny and dumb luck might play in our choices. Here she talks about crossing from one country and one artform to another, and why the film is a Rorschach test for her audience. By Guy Lodge.

Shane Meadows’ powerful films offer nuanced and ambiguous portraits of life on the margins. As his blistering revenge drama Dead Man’s Shoes is rereleased in cinemas, 20 years after it was made, he talks to Rachel Pronger about comedy, brutality, class and his recent forays into the world of television drama.

The rediscovery in a US archive of an early short film adaptation of a Franz Kafka story by the Italian director, novelist and painter offers an opportunity to place her British-made films in context and leads directly back to the wartime trauma that scarred her life. By Henry K. Miller.

Ken Loach’s The Old Oak is a tale of Syrian immigrants, racism and community-building in the north-east of England. Here the director and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty discuss the wisdom of age, the risks of cultural appropriation and the battle to hold on to hope. By Nick James.

The musical scores of maestro Bernard Herrmann featured in several entries in the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll last year, but when he gave this career interview in the early 1970s, Taxi Driver, one of his most striking pieces, was still in the future – a fitting culmination to a jaw-dropping career.

The 67th BFI London Film Festival, running from 4-15 October, brings Andrew Haigh’s Irish love story, Emerald Fennell’s satire of the aristocracy Saltburn and the welcome return of David Fincher. By Thomas Flew.

New films by João Pedro Rodrigues, Jessica Hausner, Ladj Ly, Alice Diop and Danny and Michael Philippou. By Thomas Flew.

A new season at the Barbican Cinema in London this October is set to explore seven decades of the cinema of Haiti, from early documentary works by American visitors through to the latest generation of Haitian talent. By Thomas Flew.

Hilarious sitcom Dreaming Whilst Black depicts both the struggles of a Black filmmaker trying to make it and a tender love story. Interview by Leila Latif.

Regime change and worlds ending and beginning in an Alpine dreamscape. By Caitlin Quinlan.

With Ira Sachs’s Passages given an NC-17 rating in the US, censors still seem shy of frank depictions of sex on screen. But whether they choose to use intimacy coordinators or not, many filmmakers are finding new ways to show eroticism. By Christina Newland.

What do you do when a loved one turns into an animal? By Isabel Stevens.

A collection of films and shorts by the French director that have been out of circulation for years is being screened at BFI Southbank in September. By David Thompson.

Twins Roger and Derek Young come from a dynasty of film exhibition and have a combined service of almost a century as projectionists. Interview by Douglas Weir.

Buster Keaton was born to fly, but his real skill was in learning how to land. By Pamela Hutchinson.

A true test of an all-time film may be that its value transcends its place in film history. By Kevin B. Lee.

Forty years on from its first episode, ’Allo ’Allo! remains a beautiful blend of farce and comic timing. By Andrew Male.

Which comes first, the novel or the film screening in the writer’s head as they toil? By Nicole Flattery.

With Hollywood talks in deadlock, hit-maker A24 strikes back. By Mike Williams.

Come to laugh at the abysmal production values, scripting and acting! Stay to marvel at the sheer dedication and religious fervour! Get out before you start wondering have you actually died, and is this hell or heaven? By Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

A re-encounter with the once massively popular bionic dramas suggests that whatever a nuclear-powered upgrade might do for a person, it doesn’t necessarily make the drama any better, stronger, faster. By Robert Hanks.

In Eugène Green’s stripped-down version of a medieval tale of courtly love, things are not what they seem but what the director and characters say they are. Is this fantasy, or another kind of realism? By Jonathan Romney

This year’s festival sees a host of galleries and historical venues across the city feature a range of moving-image pieces that investigate notions of inheritance and ancient wisdom. By Ben Nicholson.

The unsettling, intoxicating final sequence of Bob Fosse’s autobiographical musical drama offers a fantasy vision of his own death, ending with him being zipped away in a body bag. By Hannah McGill.

Our critics review: R.M.N., The Old Oak, Klondike, Fremont, Brother, The Great Escaper, Once upon a Time in Uganda, Dumb Money, A Cat Called Dom, BlackBerry, Love Life, Rotting in the Sun, The Future Tense, Gran Turismo, The First Slam Dunk, It Lives Inside, Meg 2: The Trench, The Nettle Dress, A Life on the Farm, Otto Baxter: Not a F***ing Horror Story/The Puppet Asylum, Cassandro.

Our critics review: Foolish Wives, Young Soul Rebels, Following, Three Ages, Muriel Box comedies, Mexican Gothic: the films of Carlos Enrique Taboada, The Iron Prefect, Cross of Iron, The Dead Mother, Commedia all’Italiana: Three Films by Dino Risi.

Our critics review: Arabian Nights of 1934, The Story of Victorian Film.