September 2011

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Features

#Green screen: what’s happening to Irish cinema

The economy may be shattered, but Ireland’s filmmakers continue to come up with the goods. Trevor Johnston surveys the current Irish scene

#The man with the scalpel: mad movie plastic surgeons

Banderas’s doctor in The Skin I Live In is only the latest in the movies’ proud heritage of gothic medics. By Kim Newman

#Lost and found: Station Six Sahara

David Thompson remembers his youthful discovery of Station Six Sahara and the unfulfilled promise of its director, Seth Holt

Cover feature: Flesh and the devil

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In marks both a bold excursion into horror and a return to old obsessions. He talks to Maria Delgado

PLUS Kim Newman charts horror’s tradition of mad plastic surgeons

PLUS Paul Julian Smith untangles Almodóvar’s dense web of references to his past oeuvre

Playmates and primates

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In marks both a bold excursion into horror and a return to old obsessions. He talks to Maria Delgado

PLUS Kim Newman charts horror’s tradition of mad plastic surgeons

Charting an experiment in which a chimpanzee was raised by humans, James Marsh’s Project Nim tells us less about the science than about the ethos of the 1970s. By Nick Roddick

Domestic violence

With its unsettling blend of visceral genre and everyday realism, Kill List more than confirms the promise displayed in Down Terrace by up-and-coming director Ben Wheatley. He talks to Nick Hasted

Green screen

The economy may be devastated, but Ireland’s filmmakers continue to come up with the goods. Trevor Johnston surveys the scene, and talks to John Michael McDonagh, writer-director of The Guard

Dirk Bogarde: a class act

A lightweight British comedy star in the 1950s, Dirk Bogarde reinvented himself as an icon of European arthouse. By Nick James

The last of England

David Gladwell worked with Lindsay Anderson’s on If.... before directing Requiem for a Village, his haunting 1975 evocation of English country life under threat. Michael Bracewell welcomes its reissue

Paris by night

After an unhappy interlude in Hollywood, 1955’s French Cancan was a triumphant return home for the great Jean Renoir. David Thompson celebrates the film’s rerelease

Selected reviews

#Film of the month: The Interrupters

The new film from Hoop Dreams director Steve James chronicles a daring initiative to tackle violence on the streets of Chicago. It’s as compelling as The Wire, says Michael Brooke – and it’s all true

#DVD: Two documentaries by Tsuchimoto Noriaki

Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s films are immersed in the language, perceptions and environments of his subjects, says Chris Fujiwara

#Film review: In a Better World

In Susanne Bier’s twin-track drama of virtue and violence in the schoolyard and in an African war zone, morality shifts and heaves beneath the surface sermons, argues Lisa Mullen

#Film review: Super 8

Henry K. Miller on expert retromaniac J.J. Abrams’ homage to 1970s backyard filmmaking, “a Spielberg pastiche of uncanny precision and sublime pointlessness.”

Reviews in this issue:

  • Arrietty
  • As If I Am Not There
  • Beautiful Lies
  • A Better Life
  • Cars 2
  • Delhi Belly
  • The Devil’s Double
  • Fright Night
  • Got to Run
  • The Guard
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
  • The Hedgehog
  • Horrible Bosses
  • Horrid Henry The Movie
  • Film review: In a Better World
  • Film of the month: The Interrupters
  • Just Do It
  • Kill List
  • Knuckle
  • Mr. Popper’s Penguins
  • One Day
  • One Life
  • Our Day Will Come
  • Powder
  • Project Nim
  • The Referees
  • The Salt of Life
  • Sarah’s Key
  • The Skin I Live In
  • Film review: Super 8
  • A Tale of Modern-day Outlaws
  • The Taqwacores
  • Transformers Dark of the Moon
  • The Tree
  • Villain/Akunin
  •  
  • DVD: Two documentaries by Tsuchimoto Noriaki
  • DVD: Tim Lucas checks out Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro and Black Moon
  • DVD: Nick Pinkerton dives into the absurd comic universe of Ernie Kovacs
  • DVD: Carmen
  • DVD: Chelsea on the Rocks
  • DVD: Coeur fidèle
  • DVD: The Colossus of New York
  • DVD: Dark of the Sun
  • DVD: The Great White Silence
  • DVD: Korkoro
  • DVD: The Makioka Sisters
  • DVD: No Surrender
  • DVD: Obsession
  • DVD: Pigs & Battleships/Stolen Desire
  • DVD: Resurrected
  • DVD: Tales Out of School: 4 Films by David Leland
  • DVD: The Terence Rattigan Collection
  • DVD: They Went into Space? DVD: Went the Day Well?
  • DVD: Wind Across the Everglades
  •  
  • Books: David Thomson wants more from the ?rst English-language biography of director Raoul Walsh
  • Books: Philip French celebrates the collected reviews of one of America’s most gifted critics, Dave Kehr
  • Books: Claire Monk wishes a study of modern English cinema went further
  • Books: James Bell salutes an authoritative study of Claude Lanzmann’s holocaust documentary Shoah
Last Updated: 20 Dec 2011