December 2006

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Features

#Girl Interrupted

Set against a backdrop of the vicious reprisals that marked the end of the Spanish Civil War, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth creates a beautiful and terrifying fantasy netherworld for the young girl at its centre. Could it be an update of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Mark Kermode asks the director

#Isabelle Huppert: The Big Chill

Veering between intellectual coldness and perverse sexual passion, Isabelle Huppert has become the face of the French arthouse. Ginette Vincendeau surveys her career to date and asks what her performances tell us about the state of contemporary French womanhood

The Grand Illusion

Told in the director's trademark flashbacks, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige is a story of two Victorian magicians locked in poisonous rivalry both on and off stage. It's magic, says Kim Newman

All Together Now

German cinema of the past three years has produced a crop of new films that interrogate their country's past and present, says Nick James. S&S picks the best. Plus: A round-table of critics and directors analyse the conditions that have swelled the latest new wave; Katja Hofmann surveys the state of the industry; and James Bell talks to Hans-Christian Schmid, the director of Requiem

Red River

Memories of Murder director Bong Joon-ho has cannibalised Hollywood creature features and contemporary Korean reality to produce the top-grossing The Host. It's enough to remind you why you started going to the movies in the first place. By Nick Roddick

Selected reviews

#DVD review: The Big Animal

Tim Lucas enjoys a delightful realisation of an unfilmed Krzysztof Kieslowski screenplay

#Film of the Month: Gabrielle

What happens when the foundations of a marriage are split apart? In Patrice Chéreau's artful reading of a Joseph Conrad novella, it's the images and silences that do the talking. By Robin Buss

#London to Brighton

#The Prestige

Reviews in this issue:

  • 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep
  • All the King's Men
  • The Aryan Couple
  • DVD review: The Big Animal
  • Big Nothing
  • Breaking and Entering
  • Candy
  • Children of Men
  • Deep Water
  • The Departed
  • Film of the Month: Gabrielle
  • The Gigolos
  • A Good Year
  • The Guardian
  • Havoc
  • Hollywoodland
  • Joy Division
  • KZ
  • Lage Raho Munna Bhai
  • London to Brighton
  • Middletown
  • Open Season
  • The Page Turner
  • Pan's Labyrinth
  • The Prestige
  • Puritan
  • Requiem
  • The Rocket Post
  • Shortbus
  • Sixty Six A True...ish Story
  • Snuff
  • Special (RX) Specioprin Hydrochloride
  • Stick It
  • The Story of the Pamir Kirghiz
  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre The Beginning
  • Twelve and Holding
  • We Shall Overcome
Last Updated: 20 Dec 2011