April 2012

Please view our back issues page for more information about obtaining previous months issues, dating back to 1995.

Features

#Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces

As S&S counts down to the September issue’s once-a-decade poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time, French critic Nicole Brenez makes the case for one of the key revolutionary activist films of the 1960s, The Hour of the Furnaces

#Lost and found: Gervaise

Mark Le Fanu pays tribute to 1956’s Gervaise, a great example of Zola on film – and of the work of its neglected director, René Clément

#The hand that rocked the Kremlin: Jirí Trnka

Born 100 years ago, the Czech artist Jirí Trnka spent his career bringing fairytales magically to life, in book illustrations and puppet animation – until his last film turned his talents to a devastating allegory of Stalinism. Peter Hames surveys his career

La comedie humaine

The Kid with a Bike is the latest of a series of extraordinary features with which the Dardenne brothers have turned a bleak industrial town in Belgium into a microcosm of all human life. By Jonathan Romney

Journey to the end of the night

With Once upon a Time in Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan turns his contemplative eye on a murder investigation. The Turkish director talks to Geoff Andrew

PLUS extracts from Ceylan’s diary of the editing process

The 400 hits

Lena Dunham is one of a new breed of directors who find their first audience on YouTube, but her debut feature Tiny Furniture shows there’s more to her than navel-gazing, says Melissa Anderson

Platz entertainment

A very public battle for the Golden Bear divided this year’s Berlin film Festival, says Nick James

Act of faith

In 1954, a student hung out with Carl Theodor Dreyer on the set of Ordet, and transcribed his conversations with the great Danish director. An extract from the new memoir by Jan Wahl

The hand that rocked the kremlin

Jirí Trnka brought fairytales to life in spellbinding puppet animation – until his last film took on Stalinism. Peter Hames celebrates the centenary of the great Czech animator

Cover feature: On the road again

A bold blend of rock-star hip and Holocaust hauntology, Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place is an oddball vehicle for Sean Penn. By Jonathan Romney

PLUS John Wrathall on what US stars learn from Italian auteurs

PLUS Paul Mayersberg on the enigma at the heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s four Italian films

Selected reviews

#Film review: In Darkness

Agnieszka Holland’s third engagement with the terrors of WWII is a hard-hitting portrait of national and class divisions amongst fugitive Jews in the sewers of the Lwów ghetto. By Michael Brooke

#Film of the month: Into the Abyss

Into the Abyss is not just a compelling documentary about a convicted murderer on Death Row, but a further chapter in Werner Herzog’s obsessive exploration of the American way of life – and death. By Tony Rayns

#DVD feature: On the Bowery

Nick Bradshaw revisits Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery, a pioneering drama-doc shot on the mean streets of New York

Reviews in this issue:

  • 21 Jump Street
  • Act of Valour
  • Babycall
  • Bill Cunningham New York
  • Black Gold
  • Blank City
  • Bonsai: A Story of Love, Books and Plants
  • Chronicle
  • Contraband
  • Corman’s World Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel
  • Corpo celeste
  • Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance
  • Headhunters
  • How to Re-establish a Vodka Empire
  • ID:A
  • If Not Us, Who
  • Film review: In Darkness
  • Film of the month: Into the Abyss
  • Intruders
  • The Island President
  • Journey 2 The Mysterious Island
  • The Kid with a Bike
  • A Man’s Story
  • North Sea Texas
  • Once upon a Time in Anatolia
  • One for the Money
  • Return
  • Safe House
  • StreetDance 2
  • This Is Not a Film
  • This Means War
  • This Must Be the Place
  • Tiny Furniture
  • Trishna
  • The Vow
  • We Bought a Zoo
  • Wild Bill
  •  
  • DVD feature: Kim Newman on the closest we can get to the director’s cut of The Devils
  • DVD feature: On the Bowery
  • DVD feature: Tim Lucas on the one-off collaboration of Nicolas Roeg and Dennis Potter
  • DVD: Chung Kuo – China
  • DVD: The Conformist
  • DVD: Dellamorte Dellamore
  • DVD: Dracula Prince of Darkness
  • DVD: Films by Wojciech Jerzy Has
  • DVD: In a Glass Cage
  • DVD: Leon the Pig Farmer – The Kosher Edition
  • DVD: Letter Never Sent
  • DVD: Liverpool
  • DVD: La Morte Rouge
  • DVD: Moses and Aaron
  • DVD: NCIS – Season
  • DVD: North Square
  • DVD: Outcast of the Islands
  • DVD: Rare Films by Raúl Ruiz
  • DVD: Three Outlaw Samurai
  • DVD: Who Pays the Ferryman?
  • DVD: Zift
  •  
  • Book: Edward Buscombe finds new revelations in a biography of pioneer producer Thomas Ince
  • Book: Sonia Mullett weighs up a new critical take on Ozu’s Late Spring
  • Book: Dan Callahan hopes for more from a biography of Loretta Young
  • Book: Peter Tonguette relishes the memoirs of Orson Welles’s love-child
Last Updated: 20 Dec 2011