In the December issue of  Sight & Sound Geoff Andrew interwievs the director Michael Haneke. Geoff Andrew interviewed Michael Haneke in summer 2009, aftter his latest film The White Ribbon had won Palme d’Or in Cannes Film Festival. Recently in the European Film Academy’s annual Awards ceremony, which was taking place in Bochum, Germany on 12th December, it received even more prizes. The White Ribbon received both main prizes: Best European film of 2009 and Best European Director for Haneke.   

As a playwright, Harold Pinter had a unique and unmistakable voice. But as a screenwriter, argues Ian Christie, he was a meticulous and highly sensitive adaptor of other writers, including Fitzgerald, Kafka – and himself. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Harold Pinter actually wrote almost as many screenplays as stage works. As a screenwriter he is probably best remembered for the ingenuity of his John Fowle’s adaptation The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), with its intertwined parallel stories, and for his unfilmed adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu,

The New Wave at 50: A priest and his flock When cinephiles think of the critic and co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma André Bazin, a number of given concepts arise: according to his disciple François Truffaut, he “wrote about film better than anybody else in Europe”; he was perhaps the first to form a coherent theory of cinema: he championed the auteur theory, argued for the moral and spiritual superiority of deep-focus realism over the associative poetics of Soviet

April issue of Sight and Sound is cinematography special with a title “Seeing the Light”. S&S contributors Roger Clarke and Edward Lawrenson at Poland’s Cameraimage festival (held in December in Lodz) had the chance to interview international cinematographers about their craft and currently ongoing debate on digital and analogue cinema. Viewpoints of  a baker’s dozen cameramen are assembled in the cover story “Cinematography. Talking Shop.”

(..) No wonder he is thought of as more cerebral than sensual. (..) Yet Kubrick made several films examining psychosexuality and violence (A Clockwork Orange, The Shining), and at least two films showing sex sublimated through national violence (Dr Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket), as well as Lolita and Eyes Wide Shut, which focus on fraught sexual relations. (..) But is Kubrickian sex actually sexy? As the exemplary analytic auteur, he is seen as more eccentric starchild

Hannah Petersen talks to Kim Longinotto, whose films celebrate the evryday heroics of women around the world. With its observational approach and deceptively simple camera style, the work of British documentary-maker Kim Longinotto is a world away from the muscular, headline-grabbing films of Michael Moore and his imitators. Devoid of talking-head interviews or contextualising facts, figures and dates, her films opt for

Once the techical, economic and cultural phenomenon of the early 2000s, the DVD now seems to running out of stream. Yet, now more than ever, it plays an essential role in the creation of a living relationship to cinema. While recent releases demonstrate the wealth of offerings, if an appropriate strategy is set in place, the DVD still has some bright days ahead of it. Invented in the mid 90s, homologated in 1995, the DVD took three years to impose itslef in the United

In Venice recently I was sitting in a cinema gazing at other people watching cinema. But I wasn’t a bored viewer checking out the audience around me. I was watching Shirin, the new feature film by Abbas Kiarostami, and the audience I was looking at was up there on the screen. The film begins with illustrations that summarise the story the onsceen ‘audience’ will be watching. It’s Khosrow and Shirin, an epic by the Persian poet Nezami, about a love triangle between an Armenian princess

The 1914 War Remains the Matrix Jean-Michel Frodons interview with Laurent Veray [..] You are a specialist regarding films about WWI; why was this period so crucial? Above and beyond the obvious chronolgical reasons, this particular was has remained an ever-present theme in the cinema, with varying approaches, which are significant in themselves. The first stage, during

Loving One’s Fatherland In Vain Ljubova Arkusa’s conversation with Aleksei German MI on the film “Paper Soldier” How come 1960-ties? Why the launch of the first man into space? How come the main characters become background players in your film, and those – never been the focus of films and cameras before, become the front players?