November 2011

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Features

#Tarnished angel: Miss Bala

The story of a would-be beauty queen who falls foul of Mexico’s drug gangs, Miss Bala is more than just another document of Latin America’s social ills, says Paul Julian Smith

#Clash of the wonderlands: 3D cinema

Two years on from Avatar, audience fatigue and critical scepticism may be peaking just as genuinely adventurous 3D work is coming our way. Don?t write off 3D yet, says Ian Christie

#Lost and found: The Mist in the Palm Trees

The Mist in the Palm Trees creates a haunting found-footage montage of 20th-century history, says Michael Atkinson

Cover feature: BFI London Film Festival 2011

Nick James introduces our in-depth coverage of this year’s Festival

Director Lynne Ramsay talks to Hannah McGill about her adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin

Outgoing LFF artistic director Sandra Hebron talks to Nick James

Bryony Dixon on the BFI’s restoration of The First Born, a 1928 silent rich in Hitchcock resonances

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne talk to Geoff Andrew about taking a step in a (slightly) sunnier direction with The Kid with a Bike

Paul Julian Smith on why Mexican drug-gang pic Miss Bala is more than just another document of Latin America’s social ills

Nick Bradshaw rounds up the festival’s documentary contingent

Isabel Stevens on the ambitious, three-part Dreileben project

Tony Rayns heralds the flowering of an ethnically Tibetan cinema

PLUS Our top 20 unmissable picks of this year’s festival

Angry bastards

Tyrannosaur, about a reformed alcoholic’s relationship with a victim of domestic violence, is the directing debut of actor Paddy Considine. Just don’t call it social realism, Considine and his leading man Peter Mullan tell Nick Bradshaw

Clash of the wonderlands

Two years on from Avatar, audience fatigue and critical scepticism may be peaking just as genuinely adventurous 3D work is coming our way. Don’t write off 3D yet, says Ian Christie

Do look now

The top award may have gone to a Russian, but British films made a remarkably strong showing at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Kieron Corless reports

Beneath the tinsel

Some of the big-name premieres disappointed, but the sheer scale of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival guaranteed some interesting discoveries, says Tom Charity

Selected reviews

#Film of the month: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Having discovered a goldmine of original footage of the Black Power movement in the archives of Swedish television, documentarist Göran Olsson has crafted it into a remarkable document of the times, says Mark Sinker

#Film review: Sleeping Beauty

A young woman sells her sleeping body for sex in Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s first film. Sophie Mayer pines for the expressivity of the film’s mentor Jane Campion

#Film review: Tyrannosaur

Boasting vivid performances from Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman, Paddy Considine’s sober, composed treatment of masculine violence and self-destruction marks an auspicious debut feature, says Trevor Johnston

#Film review: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return to filmmaking expresses a mother’s nightmare of raising a hell-child through a splatter of flashbacks and teasing use of the colour red. Tim Robey is impressed

#DVD: Harakiri

A fierce and thrilling critique of notions of honour, Harakiri is, says Michael Brooke, one of the greatest of all Japanese films

Reviews in this issue:

  • African Cats
  • Albatross
  • Anonymous
  • Apollo 18
  • Film of the month: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
  • Film of the month: The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975
  • Blood in the Mobile
  • Cane Toads: The Conquest
  • Children of the Revolution
  • Colombiana
  • Contagion
  • The Dead
  • Dolphin Tale
  • Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
  • Four Days Inside Guantanamo
  • Hell and Back Again
  • The Help
  • I Don’t Know How She Does It
  • The Ides of March
  • Johnny English Reborn
  • Midnight in Paris
  • Miss Bala
  • Monte Carlo
  • Newsreel 1
  • Parked
  • Perfect Sense
  • POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
  • Red State
  • Restless
  • Film review: Sleeping Beauty
  • Soul Surfer
  • The Story of Lover’s Rock
  • Film review: Tyrannosaur
  • Ultrasuede In Search of Halston
  • Warrior
  • We Need to Talk About Kevin
  • Film review: We Need to Talk About Kevin
  • Weekender
  • When China Met Africa
  • Will
  • The Woman
  • The Yellow Sea/Hwanghae
  •  
  • DVD: Harakiri
  • DVD: Philip Kemp takes a fresh look at the early work of Humphrey Jennings
  • DVD: Tim Lucas explores the erotic universe of Radley Metzger’s The Lickerish Quartet
  • DVD: Films by Claude Chabrol
  • DVD: The Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom
  • DVD: Colossal Youth
  • DVD: The Molly Dineen Collection: Volume 2 – The Ark
  • DVD: Films by Xavier Dolan
  • DVD: Golden Sixties
  • DVD: The Good Soldier
  • DVD: Heavenly Creatures
  • DVD: The Last American Hero
  • DVD: Macbeth
  • DVD: Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
  • DVD: More
  • DVD: Nostalgia for the Light
  • DVD: Philo Vance
  • DVD: Quatermass and the Pit
  • DVD: The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
  • DVD: The Soviet Inuence from Turksib to Night Mail
  • DVD: Tagore Stories on Film
  • DVD: Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938
  • DVD: Visions of Eight
  •  
  • Book: Alexander Jacoby immerses himself in an account of radical Japanese cinema
  • Book: Michael Brooke applauds an in-depth new study of Ken Loach
  • Book: Edward Buscombe welcomes an exhaustive examination of Italian westerns
Last Updated: 20 Dec 2011