Contents Films of 2008: Sight & Sound asked 50 critics to choose their films of the year. The lists that they came up with reveal a surprising panoply of titles. And the top ten films are...PLUS Nick James on how 2008 has been better than expected and Ali Jaafar o

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Sam Peckinpah
Taking a walk through the director's bloody flick Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, David Thomson explores Peckinpah's love/hate relationship with Mexico. PLUS David Weddle on his influential television work


Mumbai risi

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From romance to ritual
Barry Lyndon takes its inspiration from Thackeray's source novel. But in Kubrick's hands the tone - and the hero - are transformed. By Kim Newman


Hall of mirrors
Kubrick's unmade 1990s project Aryan Papers has now

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A brief history of cinematography
Barry Salt charts the technical and artistic developments in lighting that have transformed the look of cinema over the past century


Prince of darkness
Il Divo's portrait of former Italian prime ministe

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The New Wave at 50: The star reborn
Half a century after a group of young French directors changed forever the way films are made, we assess the legacy of the nouvelle vague. The movement also transformed film acting, introducing a new kind

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Joseph Losey & Harold Pinter: In search of poshlust times:
From Venetian decadence and British class war to Proustian time games, the collaborations of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter in the 1960s and 1970s introduced a new, high-culture kin

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Stars in his eyes:
David Lynch's new music collaboration sees him use singing and photography in his continued exposing of the dark psyche of suburbia. He talks to James Bell


Inflammable desires:
As Kenneth Anger's legendary 'Magick L

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Gangsters special, part 3: Thunder roads
Since the 1960s, independent-minded US film-makers have been revisiting the Great Depression. Michael Atkinson explores the era's enduring appeal


Seeing red: restoring The Red Shoes
With a little

Contents The wild bunch:
They make films that are uncategorisable, in which cinematic language, taste and even reality itself are bent to their will. Mark Cousins hails the 50 revolutionary auteurs from around the world whom we have dubbed the 'Wild Bunch'.

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Going underground:
Billy Elliot screenwriter Lee Hall digs into the BFI National Archive's extraordinary collection of films about the mining industry, which offer a provocative and often moving celebration of everyday labour


Crossing

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Within a closed world: Jacques Audiard talks to Ginette Vincendeau about his follow-up to 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped', prison drama 'A Prophet'

#Electric 'Underground': Director Anthony Asquith has long been dismissed as a lightweigh

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Unexpected tenderness:

Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winner The White Ribbon is a tale of cruelty set in a north German village in 1913. Despite its monochrome austerity, Catherine Wheatley sees hints of a new softness in the director's work<