Festivals

The Sight & Sound festival blog

A history of violence: After Lucia

Demetrios Matheou on this year’s Un Certain Regard winner, a powerful study of grief and abuse

Muddy waters run deep

Geoff Andrew sees Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols close out this year’s Competition with an impressive Southern river adventure that owes a debt to Mark Twain

Slow war cinema and Bollysploitation

Jonathan Romney hails the Tolstoy-esque simplicity of Sergei Loznitsa’s possibly bleak, certainly slow In the Fog – and the meta-Troma invention of Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely

Cinema-chewing:
Leos Carax’s Holy Motors

Demetrios Matheou wonders at the French former wunderkind’s madly eclectic meta-movie – and, less happily, at a directorial feature debut from actress Sandrine Bonnaire

Still dreaming wild things:
Bernardo Bertolucci goes underground

Geoff Andrew sees the veteran master make his long-awaited return with a modest, subterranean two-hander

Last works and wakes:
Alain Resnais in the underworld

Amy Taubin hopes death succeeds patriarchy as the flavour of this year’s festival

Love by Michael Haneke

Nick James checks his notes: the festival’s most tender as well as telling film so far comes from the Austrian disciplinarian

Mortal mischief:
Raúl Ruiz’s La Noche de Enfrente

Jonathan Romney on the late Chilean master’s fond farewell to a life of artistic delinquency

Sex on tap: Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love

The Austrian director’s sex-tourism drama could be his richest film yet, says Pamela Jahn

Nuns on the verge of a nervous breakdown: Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills

Geoff Andrew on the Palme d’Or alumnus’s return to the Competition

‘No’ for a lighter, nicer Chile

Demetrios Matheou sees Pablo Larraín close out his trilogy about Chile’s years of dictatorship with wit and verve

The wrong earlobes: The Imposter

Tom Charity on a smart doc fresh from Toronto’s HotDocs and Sundance – and Bernard Rose revisit Tolstoy in Hollywood

Crime and punishment in Kazakhstan

With the festival’s slow start continuing, Geoff Andrew singles out a quietly resonant new riff on Dostoevsky in the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar

Simple versus simple: After the Battle

Yousry Nasrallah’s instantly derided melodrama of Egypt’s 25 January Revolution may simplify, says Nick Roddck – but at least it does so differently…

Fleeting pleasures: Moonrise Kingdom

Day one, and Nick James is in two minds about Wes Anderson’s scout-island fantasia

Great expectations

Cannes is where all the best directors are, says Geoff Andrew

Introduction: Hello boys

Nick James is on the plane to a man’s man’s man’s man’s Cannes

Greek to me: mafia Shakespeareans win the Golden Bear

Nick James considers the worthy awardees for best film, best director and innovation, and a couple of notable disappointments

O masterpiece, where art thou?

Geoff Andrew tries to master festival hype around the M-word

Building unease: Bence Fliegauf’s Just the Wind (without subtitles)

Jonathan Romney reflects on his hits, misses and near-misses – including a sombre response to Hungary’s rising spate of Gypsy murders

Silver valentine: Miguel Gomes’s audacious movie medley Tabu

Nick James on the Portuguese former critic’s intricate, near-transcendental homage to film history

Time for outrage:
Tony Gatlif’s Indignados

Demetrios Matheou on cinema-burning in Athens, and Tony Gatlif’s powerful and creative “dramatised account of a Europe in revolt”

Two small gems from Jordan and Austria

Geoff Andrew blows cool on the official competition so far, but hotter on two Forum finds, Yahya Alabdallah’s The Last Friday and Ruth Mader’s What Is Love

Starship stormtroopers: Iron Sky

Demetrios Matheou makes a beeline for Timo Vuorensola’s lo-fi Nazis-in-space sci-fi comedy, this year’s quite pleasurable guilty pleasure

Distribute these!
Watching and workshopping

Suzy Gillett on the film attractions set to distract her from her day gig at the festival

The grim Werner:
Herzog does Death Row

Jonathan Romney spends his first festival night watching Werner Herzog’s three-hour, four-part TV project about American prisoners condemned to death

Introduction: I am just going outside…

Nick James gears up for the unknown quantity that is this year’s edition of the Berlin film festival

It’s a wrap

Our writers tally their best discoveries, on- and off-screen moments and personal encounters of the festival

The new new Argentine cinema

Mar Diestro-Dópido on six new films that suggest the rise of a new generation of Argentine filmmakers forging their own identity

They live! Treasures from the archive

James Bell’s festival journey through the restored cinematic past, from Georges Méliès and ‘Wonderful London’ to Barbara Loden’s “anti-Bonnie and Clyde” and a masterfully edited archival exposé of Joseph McCarthy

Across the universe: Braden King’s HERE

Davina Quinlivan on an experimental exploration of Armenia’s countryside, the romance of travel, the art of map-making and the path of love

The lost Left: My Back Page

Japan’s late-60s political turmoil is explored in a gripping – and properly messy – story of ethics, betrayal and idealism, says Frances Morgan

Albert Serra: “I am the best one”

The director of Honour of the Knights and self-proclaimed “greatest director in Spain” talks to Kieron Corless

Mystic Mathieu: The Screen Illusion

Davina Quinlivan probes actor-director Mathieu Amalric’s rich screen-age transplant of Pierre Corneille’s meta-theatrical play L’illusion comique

Five (not) by Ben Rivers

The British artist filmmaker talks Kieron Corless through his London Film Festival highlights

Around the world in 14 films

Nick Hasted visits new films from Iceland and Italy via Norway, California, Belgravia and Stratford

The book of cult

Jane Giles explores the world of cult movies with the panellists at a launch of BFI Palgrave’s new 100 Cult Films book

Welcome guests

Geoff Andrew on this year’s filmmaker visitors to the LFF, including Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Dardenne brothers, Terence Davies and Footnote’s Joseph Cedar

Rich and strange: The First Born

Thirza Wakefield on a gala screening of the BFI’s new restoration of Miles Mander’s 1928 infidelity drama, a “violent and libidinous affair” co-written by Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville

Correspondences: Jonas Mekas, José Luis Guerín, Jafar Panahi

Mar Diestro-Dópido finds unexpected dialogue and moving kinship between Mekas and Guerín’s visual ‘letter’ exchanges Correspondence and Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s defiant diary This Is Not a Film

Chicken with Plums: over-plummed?

Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s follow-up to their hit comic-book adaptation Persepolis is not quite Amélie, finds Sophie Mayer

Toons for all

Dylan Cave and Nick Bradshaw survey the festival’s short animations for kids and adults

Let’s start giving: early ups and downs

Nick James on 360 and ‘We Are the World’ movies, 17 Girls, Alps, She Monkeys, Rampart, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia… and an undercover festival sub-theme

Whose waste?
Mercedes Álvarez’s Futures Market

Sophie Mayer on a documentary that contrasts the flimsy dreams of the postmodern economy with the world of flea markets and junk wares

She’s gotta have it: Pariah

Dee Rees’s story of a young Brooklyn lesbian’s trials of self-definition sports the energy and attitude of Spike Lee’s early movies, says Sophie Mayer

Scraps and gems

Kieron Corless on Hermes Paralluelo’s Argentine refuse-collection documentary Yatasto, and the art of rare-gem hunting

Introduction: Starter’s orders

Dusting off his penguin suit and dreaming of free chocolate, Nick James notes the boons of the LFF

Venice Film Festival 2011

Day ten: Eccentricities of American college life

Gabe Klinger on Whit Stillman’s buoyant, off-kilter youth comedy Damsels in Distress, and the festival prizes

Day nine: The sacred and profane

Barbara Wurm on reverence and devotion in Romuald Karmakar’s change-of-the-popes documentary The Flock of the Lord, two Biennale exhibitions and Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s movie-Hitlers montage Conference

Day eight: Exoduses

Kieron Corless on migration and cross-pollination in Ermanno Olmi’s The Cardboard Village, the Spanish documentary Hollywood Talkies and Nicolas Provost’s The Invader

Day seven: Vamps, migrants and apocalypse

Guido Bonsaver on disappointing adaptations of The Moth Diaries and Wuthering Heights, two breakthrough portraits of Italian immigration and Abel Ferrara’s end of the world

Day six: The old and the new

Neil Young on Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Ann Hui’s A Simple Life – and two genuine discoveries featuring ancient Brazilian widows in remote and picturesque backwaters

Day five: Dark nights of the soul

Jonathan Romney on Steve McQueen’s Shame, two striking portraits of female abjection from Russia and France, and Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse

Interlude: Venice film family values

Inspired by restorations of Roberto Rossellini’s India: Matri Bhumi, Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alpis, Gabe Klinger muses on the imposing grandparents, rigorous fathers and mothers and disobedient sons and daughters of the cinema

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The Sight & Sound festival blog