Sight and Sound: the October 2024 issue

Megalopolis offers an abundance of striking images and ideas about this juncture in the historical moment, its relation to the past and future(s). It’s also, often, quite funny, and I’m surprised, when [Francis Ford] Coppola talks to me from California, just how convivial the old man is. His answers are punctuated with laughter, often at his own expense. He sometimes rambles, but his digressions – about Russian nuclear fusion, for instance – are always fascinating. He’s made a film about the courage required to take the next leap, a film about the paradigm shift society will need to take in the very near future, and the movie itself embodies that leap of faith in its very DNA. What more can we ask of a filmmaker?

— Tom Charity, introducing his cover interview with Coppola

At 85, Francis Ford Coppola has finally released his dream project, Megalopolis – a New Roman epic so ambitious, so individual and so full of contraries that it seems designed to make consensus impossible. In this wide-ranging conversation, the great director talks about the creative principles that underlie his filmmaking and the ambitions – for humanity, as well as for the films he has yet to make – that still drive him. Introduction and interview by Tom Charity.

From Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre, one of many recent folk horrors planted in the toxic soil of 1970s Britain, to Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, which turns on memories of an eerie television show from the 1990s, contemporary horror seems to have a fascination with the past. But what is it about these two eras that seems to resonate so strongly with directors and their audiences? By Roger Luckhurst.

Coralie Fargeat’s razor-sharp feminist horror film The Substance explores the issue of ageing in a society that equates women’s worth with their looks. The French director discusses misogyny, metamorphoses and placing her own experience of being a woman at the centre of her work. By Catherine Wheatley.

When the Last Night in Soho director Edgar Wright wrote to Martin Scorsese during the pandemic, asking for tips on lesser-known British films, Scorsese responded with a list of 50 of his personal favourites. With a season of films selected from that list due to kick off at BFI Southbank in London, the pair sat down to discuss these critically neglected classics and the defining influence they have had on his 60-year career in film. Introduction and interview by James Bell.

As well as making several classic films, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein was one of cinema’s greatest theorists. In this 1947 piece, published shortly before he died, he took American cinema to task for its reactionary tendencies.

This year, the world premiere of Steve McQueen’s World War II drama Blitz is the jewel in the capital’s crown, while Sight and Sound presents Payal Kapadia’s lyrical Cannes winner All We Imagine as Light. By Isabel Stevens

In a London Film Festival programme crammed full of the best of new cinema from across the world, many films – some by established auteurs, others by exciting new voices – are still seeking a distributor for UK theatrical release. Here, we select eight titles you might not get a chance to see anywhere else

New films and series by Alex Cox, Michaela Coel, Matt Johnson and Kristoffer Borgli. By Thomas Flew.

The Iranian duo on My Favourite Cake, a sweet septuagenarian romance. By Thomas Flew.

On the occasion of a two-month BFI stop-motion season, the director of Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas talks Aardman, Harryhausen and hot peppers. Interview by Alex Dudok de Wit.

Trying to put her in context, admirers have compared Gena Rowlands, who has died at the age of 94, to this or that star of Hollywood’s Golden Age, or even found echoes among her contemporaries. But to me it was precisely her resemblance to no one, her jagged rhythms, her refusal to fit into any known category, which marked her extraordinary and often discomfiting career. By Molly Haskell.

In praise of Mark Cousins: activist, historian, curator and artist. By Mike Williams

An anomalous entry in Kurosawa Akira’s filmography, this portrait of a civil servant who discovers he will soon die and realises that he has not begun to live was for the director a form of therapy. Seven decades on, its warmth and deep humanity still have healing powers. By Philip Kemp.

The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s final novel, about a young woman without qualities or prospects, was transformed by her compatriot Suzana Amaral into a film of radical simplicity – and one that spoke directly to Brazilians. By Laura Staab.

A book of essays and interviews from this critically important limited-edition magazine celebrating queer cinema explores everything from underground curios like Andy Warhol’s Taylor Mead’s Ass to more familiar works by Desiree Akhavan and Andrew Haigh. By Alex Davidson.

The latest Eastern European gems to appear on the ever-expanding streaming service Klassiki are a trio of Czech New Wave classics and a pair of intriguing recent Ukrainian and Russian features. By Michael Brooke.

The wordless finale of Asghar Farhadi’s tale of an Iranian married couple starring in a production of Death of a Salesman offers an eloquent portrait of a relationship in a state of flux. By Hannah McGill.

Reviews of: In Camera, Firebrand, The Goldman Case, The Outrun, Between the Temples, The Count of Monte Cristo, Alien: Romulus, Close to You, Black Dog, Paradise Is Burning, Girls Will Be Girls, My Favourite Cake, The Substance, Me, Red Rooms, Will & Harper, Notes from Sheepland, The Teacher, Starve Acre, A Different Man, Lee.

Reviews of: Laurel and Hardy: The Silent Years, A Man on His Knees, The Crazy Family, The Tin Star, Two films by Tsai Ming-liang, Against the Storm: Herbert Kline in a Darkened Europe, Viva la muerte, Bruiser, Tattooed Life, Never Open That Door

Reviews of: Miss May Does Not Exist; Armchair Cinema: A History of Feature Films on British Television, 1929-1981; Erased.