BFI | Sight & Sound | February 2008

February 2008

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Features

Burt Lancaster Charmer Chameleon

Whether embodying a roughened cowboy, a swashbuckling daredevil, a small-time crook or an Italian prince, Burt Lancaster brought a sharp intelligence and physical grace to his roles. Philip Kemp profiles a great actor, shrewd Hollywood player and the man who dangled Michael Winner over a cliff

Brothers In Harm

In Before the Devil Knows You're Dead Sidney Lumet has made a heist thriller that plays like an elemental Greek tragedy transported to Manhattan. The veteran director talks to Geoffrey Macnab

Tarantino Bites Back

Quentin Tarantino tackles Nick James about the negative comments Death Proof received in Sight & Sound

Casualties of war

2007 saw cinema turn its gaze on the Iraq conflict, with hard-hitting films by Brian De Palma, Nick Broomfield, Paul Haggis and others. By Ali Jaafar PLUS How Iraqi film-makers see the war and Guy Westwell investigates a century of battles on screen

Norman inquests

A man kills his family, a film-within-a-film and a portrait of French bucolic life: Back to Normandy may sound like fiction, but Etre et avoir director Nicolas Philibert weaves his ingredients into a powerful documentary, says Geoff Andrew

Black gold

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis in a role that confirms his status as the finest physical actor of our age, P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood captures the greed and danger that fuelled oil prospecting in 1890s California. By Nick James PLUS The director talks to Ben Walters about oil and fundamentalist religion and composer Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead talks to James Bell

Transformer

Fassbinder and Herzog apart, the pioneers of 1960s Young German Cinema have been largely eclipsed. So let's remember Alexander Kluge, whose political, formally innovative and funny films chronicle German life like no others, says Olaf Möller