Contents "Our November festival special issue brings you the best of Venice, Toronto and the upcoming London film festivals: Ben Walters explores the strain of “British bathetic bucolicâ€ in Ben (Kill List) Wheatley’s cover black comedy Sightseers, Jacques Au

Contents Our October issue kicks off with an illuminating look at Holy Motors, the daring and unclassifiable new film from provocative French maverick Leos Carax. David Thompson decodes the complex web of cinematic homages and references at play in Carax's dazzlin

Contents Cover feature: The 2012 Critics' Poll


Once a decade we ask critics to select the Greatest Films of All Time. This year 846 of them responded. We unveil the Top 100, plus 100 personal top tens from David Thomson, Camille Paglia, J. Hoberman, Mark Ker

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Cover feature: The genius of Hitchcock: Since his twenties, when he wrote a book about Hitchcock, Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro has returned to his films again and again. He offers a director's POV on what we can learn from the

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Cover feature: An island of his own:Set on an island off the coast of the US in the mid-60s, on the eve of that decade's upheavals, Moonrise Kingdom is the latest of the self-contained worlds created by Wes Anderson. Nick Pinkerton talks to t

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The great escape: La Grande Illusion: In past S&S polls of the greatest films of all time, Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion has lost out to his later, allegedly more personal film La Regle du jeu. It's time to reconsider, says Ginette Vincend

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Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces: As S&S counts down to the September issue's once-a-decade poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time, French critic Nicole Brenez makes the case for one of the key revolutionary activist films of the 1

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Remain in light: Mulholland Dr. and the cosmogony of David Lynch: As our ten-yearly poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time gets ever closer, B. Kite considers David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. in the light of the Vedanta-inspired spiritual phi

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Theo Angelopoulos: the sweep of history: As his oeuvre is released on DVD, Theo Angelopoulos revisits his career with David Jenkins

Jean Vigo: Artist of the floating world: Vigo's sole full-length feature bridged the surrealism of 1920s

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Lost and found: Spring Night, Summer Night: J.L. Anderson's backwoods Appalachian love story is a forgotten classic of 1960s indie neorealism, says Ross Lipman

2011: The year in review: In a strong year for arthouse cinema, Terrence Malic

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Michael Shannon: trouble in mind: For years Michael Shannon has been building a reputation as an intense, risk-taking actor on stage and in supporting roles. But his compelling turn as the dream-haunted everyman in Take Shelter proves he can

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Tarnished angel: Miss Bala: The story of a would-be beauty queen who falls foul of Mexico's drug gangs, Miss Bala is more than just another document of Latin America's social ills, says Paul Julian Smith

Cover feature: BFI London Film Fes

Contents ,

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Lost and found: Across the Bridge:

A model of adaptation, Across the Bridge cleverly expands Graham Greene's original short story, says the screenwriter Paul Mayersberg

The old soldier: Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme:

More than hal

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Bernardo Bertolucci: Just like starting over


To mark a comprehensive Bertolucci retrospective, Tony Rayns looks back at the early 1960s, when the great Italian director hit his stride and emerged from the shadow of his mentors, Pasolini

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The pride and the passion: 25 years of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival


After a groundbreaking quarter of a century, the LLGFF is still relevant, says programmer Brian Robinson

Lost and found: The Red House


Filmmaker Cha

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Lost and found: The Watcher in the Woods: What's the missing link between Tron, The Legend of Hell House and a big blue alien? For Joseph Stannard, it's Disney's cult 1980 fantasy The Watcher in the Woods

Jafar Panahi: the green badge of

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Howard Hawks: Slim and the silver fox: The years Howard Hawks spent with his second wife Nancy - aka 'Slim' - were the richest of his film-directing career, as her style and influence inspired him to live out a recurring dream of their relati

Contents 2010: The year in review: Nick James introduces the results of this year's annual S&S poll, in which 85 contributors from around the world pick the top five films they saw in 2010, and their other movie highlights of the past 12 months

Memento mori: O

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Capra before he became 'Capraesque':

Celebrated each Christmas for the 'Capracorn' of It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra deserves reappraisal as a director in the light of the restoration of his 1920s silents and his luminous talkies of the

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Carlos: five hours of the Jackal: An epic biopic of legendary terrorist Carlos marks a change of pace for Olivier Assayas. By David Thompson

English pastoral: Robinson in Ruins: 'Robinson in Ruins' marks the return of director Patrick Kei

Contents The life and death of the UK Film Council


From 'Cool Britannia' to coalition cold comfort, Geoffrey Macnab unravels the circumstances surrounding the recently announced demise of the UK Film Council


PLUS Palme d'Or-winning producer Keith Griffit

Contents Out of the past: Frantisek Vlacil: Less celebrated internationally than his near contemporaries Forman and Menzel, the late Czech director Frantisek Vlacil's visionary medieval epics have recently been rediscovered in the West. But there was more to him t

Contents Britain's secret Brazilian:

More than any other director bar Hitchcock, the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti had a profound influence on British film-making in the 1930s and 40s. But he remains an unjustly overlooked figure, says Nick James.

Cover featu

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Kurosawa on Kurosawa:

The director whom Steven Spielberg once described as "the pictorial Shakespeare of our time" was famously reluctant to discuss his films, but he opened up to Donald Richie in an interview first published in Sight & Sou

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The Film Book poll: Writing about the art of cinema can be an art in itself. Having polled a wide range of leading international critics, we reveal our survey of the best film books ever published. Nick James browses the results.

That was

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Italian Cinema: Maestros and mobsters:

Cinematic nostalgia, endemic corruption and the deadening hand of Silvio Berlusconi have prevented Italy's real story from being told on film for 30 years, says Nick Hasted. But now a new generation of

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Alice through the lens


Mark Sinker compares the various artistic visionaries - from John Tenniel to Dennis Potter to Jan Svankmajer - who have put their stamp on Alice since 1865


PLUS (in the magazine) Go ask Alice: Tim Burton is on

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Obituaries


Sight & Sound's comprehensive survey of the actors, directors, writers, producers and technicians who died during the course of 2009, compiled by Bob Mastrangelo. PLUS:


Betsy Blair by Kieron Corless (online exclusive)

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Syndromes of a new century


How have the first ten years of the 21st century changed cinema? From Argentina to Romania, from AlmodOvar to Weerasethakul, Nick James introduces Sight & Sound's selection of the 30 key films of the past decad

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Von Sternberg - six chapters in search of an auteur:
The six films Josef von Sternberg made with the star he 'created', Marlene Dietrich, are a triumph of pure style and sensual excess over novelettish plots. To welcome a new season, David T

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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<

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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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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

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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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

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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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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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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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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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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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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

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

Contents Radical Chic: Is The Baader Meinhof Complex a thoughtful examination of Germany's recent past or does it glamorise terrorism? By Andrea Dittgen. PLUS James Bell talks to producer Bernd Eichinger.


Game for a century: As the great Portuguese director M

Contents The London Film Festival: Liverpool - A trilogy of closely observed characters: In his latest film the Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso varies and expands on his unique realist vision, argues Quint?n.


The London Film Festival: Liverpool - Intervi

Contents Who needs critics?: Critics need to show more passion and conviction if they're still to matter in the internet age, argues Nick James PLUS our panel of leading critics select examples of the great writing that inspires them; Mark Fisher on the vital role

Contents Popcorn Patter: Terrence Malick's Badlands now seems less a study of alienated youth and more like a screwball Western,argues David Thomson.


Reflections In A Golden Eye: Frederick Wiseman's dedication to chronicling American civic life should not dis

Contents Dream Tickets: With their inventive double bills, repertory cinemas once entertained and challenged their audiences. Sight & Sound asks 52 critics and programmers to do the same by choosing their own fantasy pairings. Introduction by Jane Giles.


Fami

Contents Cannes 2008: A royal rumpus:

British cinema held its head high at this year's Cannes, with remarkable debuts from Steve McQueen and Duane Hopkins, and a moving return from Terence Davies. By Nick James.

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