BFI | Sight & Sound | The International Film Magazine

Sight & Sound

The international film magazine

Discover the best world cinema:

Informed and independent film news and comment
In-depth interviews with leading filmmakers
Retrospective articles vividly bringing film history to life
Reviews of every new cinema release

Features and interviews

Controlling the story:
Michael Winterbottom on fiction, observation and Trishna Interview

For his 20th film in 17 years – and third Thomas Hardy adaptation – Michael Winterbottom took Tess of the D’Urbervilles to modern-day India. Filming begets filming, he tells Nick Roddick. Read more…

Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces The greatest films of all-time?

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 1960s

King or pawn? On the trail of Mikhail Khodorkovsky Interview

Director Cyril Tuschi tells Thomas Dawson how he set about documenting the world’s once-wealthiest prisoner of conscience

Ordinary indecent paedophile: Michael Interview

Echoing the real-life cases of Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil, Michael is a portrait of a child kidnapper that refuses sensationalism and sentimentality. Its writer-director Markus Schleinzer talks to Thomas Dawson

» Only a dream: Gene Tierney The actors
» History in the making: Black Gold and the Jasmine revolution Location report

The current issue

Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place: the April 2012 issue

Sean Penn as a Nazi-hunting rock star, plus the Dardennes, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Carl Dreyer, Death Row’s Werner Herzog and YouTube star Lena Dunham

Reviews

If Not Us, Who New release

A melancholic addition to the canon of films about Germany’s 1960s radicalism, Andres Veiel’s biopic of lovers Bernward Vesper and Gudrun Ensslin ponders the rivalry of word and deed, says Catherine Wheatley

Manuel Mur Oti Lost and found

Spain’s Manuel Mur Oti had huge success under Franco. Since the fall of the regime he’s been written out of history. By Mar Diestro-Dópido

The Magpie Index: Roy Harper sings for the birds Artists’ video

Richard Grayson’s evocative video portrait places the songwriter in a complex lineage of British dissent, says Frances Morgan

» Blood Car New release
» Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin DVD
» Hadewijch New release

News and views

Mafia Shakespear-eans win the Golden Bear Berlinale blog

Nick James considers the worthy awardees for best film, best director and innovation, and a couple of notable disappointments

O masterpiece, where art thou?
Berlinale blog

Geoff Andrew tries to master festival hype around the M-word

» Read our full rolling Berlinale blog…

» The politics of ventilation: Arika’s ‘A Film is a Statement’ festival
» London Short Film Festival: Winners and rejects Postcard
» The Gilbert Adair files In memoriam

Polls and surveys

The DVDs of 2011
Year in review

23 critics and curators pick out their releases – and rediscoveries – of the year, including Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End, Zoltán Huszárik’s Szindbád, the several versions of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and ‘The Theo Angelopoulos Collection’

The films of 2011
Year in review

In a strong year for arthouse cinema, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life emerged as the clear winner of the S&S; poll of international critics’ best films of 2011, says Nick James

PLUS: see the full poll

» Forgotten pleasures of the multiplex