Sight and Sound: the November 2024 issue

It was important to me that the movie be an epic. The reason it was important is because of scale… Seeing the Second World War through the eyes of a prepubescent child was important to give us a refocusing of where and who we are now. It is echoed in wars going on now – not just in Ukraine or Israel and Palestine, but elsewhere too. And with the recent race riots in the UK, the film has so much relevance to what’s going on now, even though it’s set in the 1940s.

— Steve McQueen on Blitz, for our cover feature

Steve McQueen’s epic tale of innocence lost, Blitz, examines the trauma suffered by Londoners at the hands of the Luftwaffe in World War II through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy and his mother. Here the director explains the origins of his fascination with the era, the painstaking research the film required and why he wanted to portray a populace who weren’t just at war with an enemy but also with themselves. Words by Arjun Sajip. Photography by Brad Ogbonna.

Throughout his career as a video artist and filmmaker, Steve McQueen has been preoccupied by risk and by stories of ordinary people facing dangers at the hands of corrupt or venal authorities. The social historian and literary critic Clair Wills explores Blitz’s key themes and looks at the ways they chime with the director’s wider work.

Sean Baker’s film Anora – about a lapdancer who stumbles into marrying an oligarch’s son – is another in his sequence of brilliant chronicles of the struggle to survive at the margins of American society. He talks about mixing genres and languages, and writing for the faces in his head. By Beatrice Loayza.

Sean Baker’s portrait of a New York sex worker, Anora, follows in a rich tradition of films exploring life inside the sex trade. Here we pull back the covers on eight landmark films. By Pamela Hutchinson.

At 75, Pedro Almodóvar has made his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door, a moving drama about friendship and mortality starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. He talks about the Bergmanesque quality of the film, the place of pain and death in his work, and the importance of listening. By Maria Delgado.

Although it wasn’t a vintage year on the Lido, a host of very fine films by established directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Fabrice du Welz, as well as by relative newcomers like Dea Kulumbegashvili, Maura Delpero and Yeo Siew Hua, ensured there was plenty to enjoy at the festival. By Kieron Corless.

The award-winning documentary No Other Land brings together two Israeli and two Palestinian filmmakers to show the world what daily life in the West Bank under brutal military rule looks like. By Jonathan Romney.

New films by Bi Gan, Gregg Araki, Baz Luhrmann and Christian Petzold.

Coming out on the eve of the US election, The Apprentice explores Donald Trump’s relationship with the lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn in the 70s and 80s. The film’s writer, Gabriel Sherman, discusses his dark origin story. By Lou Thomas.

An opulent two-volume set by Taschen that mines the archives of Life magazine shows there was more to the weekly’s famous photojournalism than glamorous portraits, as snappers went behind the scenes on vast sets, capturing filmmakers and the inner workings of the studios. By Isabel Stevens.

The Wild Robot, a tale of an android stranded on an island filled with life, is about how kindness can be its own survival skill, says director Chris Sanders. By Nick Bradshaw.

Steve Coogan’s starring role in the stage version of Dr. Strangelove looks set to be a blast. By Pamela Hutchinson.

No other film of its era matched the merciless nihilism of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. By Jessica Kiang.

Why the faultless reliability of Slow Horses is a boon in an era of dubious high-concept television. By Andrew Male.

The surreal 1971 film version of Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is uncategorisable in its weirdness. By Nicole Flattery.

A new documentary examines the creation of an AI afterlife, but it’s less a digital heaven and more a hell on earth. By Mike Williams.

Is it a folk horror? Certainly there is straw and mud and a lot of Irish rural landscape, not to mention a faerie fiddler and goat girls. More to the point, there is great acting and mystery, in a film now rescued from 40 years of undeserved obscurity. By Katie McCabe.

Once reckoned a founding masterpiece of Hungarian cinema, George Hoellering’s quasi-documentary, a lyrical epic about the lives of the horsemen of Hungary’s great central plains, has mystifyingly slipped out of sight in recent decades. By Michael Brooke.

By charting the tumultuous social upheavals of the 1970s and beyond in India, a major London retrospective of the country’s films since 1970 shows how a political nadir helped usher in what many see as a cinematic golden age, noteworthy for its formal innovation and restless energy. By Ben Nicholson.

French director Jean-Pierre Melville made some of the most unforgettable gangster noirs in post-war cinema, in particular Le Samouraï, starring Alain Delon as the enigmatic hitman. In 1968, soon after the film’s release, Melville spoke to Sight and Sound about why he regarded his works merely as rough drafts and why he turned down 54 offers to make a film in the US.

The close of Arthur Penn’s moving portrait of the early life of the disability rights advocate and author Helen Keller sees the young deaf-blind girl discovering the magic of language for the first time – and the director discovering the language of film. By Noel Hess.

Our critics review: Dahomey, Megalopolis, The Wild Robot, Emilia Pérez, The Front Room, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, Black Box Diaries, Sountrack to a Coup d’État, Timestalker, Small Things Like These, Anora, The Room Next Door, Milisuthando, Children of the Cult, Wolfs, Layla, Strange Darling, The Apprentice, The Crime Is Mine, Joker: Folie à Deux.

Our critics review: Daiei Gothic: Japanese Ghost Stories, A Quiet Place in the Country, Mildred Pierce, Happiness, Dogra Magra, Two films by Val Lewton, Vital, Single White Female, Emanuela 77 (La Marge), Michale Powell: Early Works. 

Our critics review: Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction, Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops, One Shot Hitchcock: A Contemporary Approach to the Screen.