BFI | Sight & Sound | November 2009

November 2009

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Features

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 lightweight. But his restored 1928 silent is a revelation, says Jay Weissberg

Cover feature: London Film Festival

As Wes Anderson's anarchic fairytale Fantastic Mr Fox opens the Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival, Sam Davies interviews the director about how he used stop-motion animation to bring Roald Dahl's much-loved children's classic to the screen.

PLUS Austria's Jessica Hausner talks to Geoffrey Macnab about the pitfalls of filming Lourdes

PLUS Veteran documentarist Frederick Wiseman turns his all-seeing camera on the Paris Opera Ballet. By Nicolas Rapold

Autumn almanac: Venice & Toronto

Overlapping as they do every September, the two festivals have often been seens as rivals. But with so many films appearing on both programmes - including bold new works from Herzog, Solondz and Denis - they are coming to seem like complementary partners, though each creates a different mood. Jonathan Romney reports from the Lido, and Nick James from Toronto

The vampire next door

Park Chan-wook's Thirst is just the latest in a recent ?urry of vampire films and TV shows from around the world that shun the old gothic trappings. Kevin Jackson asks what else this new breed have in common

PLUS Park Chan-wook tells James Bell how he laid the clichés to rest

The sound of silence

Transcending the new genre of western-produced 'African atrocity film', Johnny Mad Dog takes an un?inching look at child soldiers in West Africa. By Linda Ruth Williams

PLUS Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire talks to Jonathan Romney