Sight and Sound: the September 2024 issue

Not content with being one of the great iconoclasts of American cinema, David Lynch has also been a trailblazing musical adventurer – and in recent years, it is music that has come to dominate his creative output. As his latest album is released, he talks about the sounds that have influenced him, being a non-musician working with musicians, and why he really doesn’t like to call the process improvisation. Words by Sam Wigley. Photography by Josh Telles/August.

Rich Peppiatt’s raucous Irish-language debut feature, Kneecap, a semi-fictionalised biopic of the Belfast hip hop band, is fast, funny and thrillingly political. The three members of the band, who play themselves in the film, discuss Irish oral traditions, storytelling and celebrating their mother tongue. By Mike Williams.

A tabloid journalist who publicly resigned over his objection to his newspaper’s Islamophobia, Rich Peppiatt’s route to his debut feature has been unconventional. He explains how he met the band Kneecap and his approach to documenting their fictional life.

Since the turn of the millennium, film music has been transformed as digital technology has allowed musicians to embrace new, sometimes strange sounds. We asked a selection of film composers and critics to choose the best, the most influential and the most individual film scores of the century so far. By Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

With his swooningly lovely scores for Wong Kar Wai, Zhang Yimou and Tom Ford, the Japanese musician has established himself as one of the world’s leading film composers – and the go-to guy for melancholy waltzes. By Alex Dudok de Wit.

For the trumpeter and composer, who has been writing Spike Lee’s soundtracks for over 30 years, the most important ingredient in a film score is trust between filmmaker and composer – and his favourite score is a surprise. By Stephen Dalton.

Has any modern composer had more influence on film than the godfather of minimalism, who in a few scores in the 1980s created an entirely new sense of what film music was there to do? By David Thompson.

Gary Hustwit’s documentary Eno uses generative AI to create a biographical portrait of the pioneering ambient musician that changes day by day. Here the artist, who has produced David Bowie and David Byrne and written numerous scores for film and television, talks to the sound designer and editor of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The English Patient about the uncanny magic of recorded sound and their shared passion for the art of noise – and silence. Moderation and introduction by Sam Davies.

Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s documentary Daughters takes a painfully moving journey into the consequences of jail time for the children of four American prisoners. By Nick Bradshaw.

New films by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Mia Hansen-Løve, Emerald Fennell and Benny and Josh Safdie.

The waters surrounding the Edinburgh International Film Festival seem to have calmed ahead of its 77th edition, which runs 15-21 August. By Thomas Flew.

On the eve of the BFI’s Stop Motion season, filmmaker and guest speaker Henry Selick talks about the imperfections of the art, why Coraline’s seams got painted out and what it’s like animating a little chef made of dough. By Alex Dudok de Wit.

The Italian festival, a feast of retrospectives and restorations, spotlit works this year from Iran, Japan, Ukraine and old Hollywood. By James Bell.

The brilliant morality plays of Inside No. 9 offer a devastating portrait of life under the Tories. By Andrew Male.

Secretary might offer a spanking good time, but it loses the darkness of Mary Gaitskill’s story. By Nicole Flattery.

The bad words and good intentions that lie behind the comedy of Blazing Saddles. By Jessica Kiang.

Daniela Zahlner’s witty burlesque offers a queer, camp reimagining of early erotic cinema. By Pamela Hutchinson.

David Lynch remains an enigma. As his output evolves, music is now key to our definition of Lynchian. By Mike Williams.

The Leeds-born crime writer John Wainwright never found much of an audience at home. It took a French screenwriter and director to see the potential of his novels, and turn one of them into this smart, twisty and beautifully acted crime drama. By Adam Scovell.

While his more famous predecessors moved on from neorealism, throughout the 1950s Vittorio De Seta continued to celebrate, and weep for, the lives of Italy’s poorest in a series of short documentaries, and then in his miraculous first feature. By Hannah McGill.

The films of this little-known Dominican director, who came of age in the late 1960s alongside the directors of the LA Rebellion, are bold, provocative works of camp pleasure that anticipate Pedro Almodóvar and Guy Maddin. By Jonathan Ali.

A spellbinding exhibition by Brass Art – the artists Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneke Pettican – explores the fragility of matter itself to tease out the border between reality and illusion. By John Beagles.

James B. Harris’s taut, minimalist cult thriller, about a detective on the trail of a serial killer, closes with a scorching moment of frontier justice. By Adrian Martin.

Reviews of: I Saw the TV Glow, Kensuke’s Kingdom, Twisters, Blur: to the end, Hundreds of Beavers, Eno, Daughters, Fly Me to the Moon, In a Violent Nature, Kneecap, Longlegs, Only the River Flows, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter One, Sing Sing, Chuck Chuck Baby, Dìdi, Tuesday, Janet Planet, Sky Peals, The Echo.

Reviews of: The Small Back Room, Remembrance, A Bittersweet Life, The Valiant Ones, The Landlord, Crumb, The Music Lovers, Obsession, The Agitator: Three Provocations from the Wild World of Jean-Pierre Mocky.

Reviews of: Corpses; Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema; Xala; Music Films: Documentaries, Concert Films, and Other Cinematic Representations of Popular Music.