The next Sight & Sound is out, with my name adorning the following pieces:

Cinema reviews of:

• Esma’s Secret (d. Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia/Austria/Croatia/Germany)
• Lives of the Saints (d. Rankin/Chris Cottam, UK) – also available online

Short DVD reviews of:

• Blind Husbands (d. Erich von Stroheim, US, 1919)
• The Cranes Are Flying (d. Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR, 1957)
• Ballad of a Soldier (d. Grigori Chukhrai, USSR, 1959)
• The Star (d. Nikolai Lebedev, Russia, 2002)

But the real labour of love was a full-page survey of virtually all the DVD releases currently available of Sergo Paradjanov’s films. Not that the job wasn’t frustrating at times – despite three separate editions of The Colour of Pomegranates, none manages to be entirely satisfactory (the Japanese one has the best picture by far, but no subtitles and is of the Soviet cut, while the others have significant visual and aural flaws). But the new French edition of Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors is the best I’ve seen it since my enraptured discovery of the film nearly twenty years ago (coincidentally, in a French cinema).

The latest Sight & Sound is out, and I just about scrape the achievement of having a piece in an entire year’s worth of issues for the first time – though the only piece bearing my name this time round is a short review of Second Run’s DVD of Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (d. Avi Mograbi, Israel/France, 2005).

But next month should more than compensate, as I’m currently knee-deep in Sergo Paradjanov DVDs from France, Japan, Russia and the US, which I’m comparing for an upcoming feature.

The latest Sight & Sound is out, complete with the following pieces by me:

• report from the 2006 Sarajevo Film festival, with mini-reviews of All for Free, Chicken Elections, Das Fräulein, Kythera, The Melon Route, Mum’n’Dad, My Neighbour Tanja, Nafaka, The Paper Will Be Blue, Seven and a Half, 1208: East of Bucharest and Vukovar: Final Cut;
• London to Brighton – review of Paul Andrew Williams’ pulverisingly effective thriller about an underage girl on the run (also available online);
• Passenger – review of Second Run’s well-contextualised but unfortunately cropped edition of Andrzej Munk’s daringly original Holocaust swansong.

The latest Sight & Sound is out, complete with my reviews of two very different British films: Richard Laxton’s intermittently engaging but ultimately frustrating south London youth movie Life & Lyrics, and Stephen Frears’ surprisingly engrossing The Queen. The latter has the shortest synopsis I’ve written for a S&S fiction film review, given that very little of the historical background needed to be filled in.

The latest Sight & Sound is out, in which I tackle two highly distinctive films from Hungary and France (via Czechoslovakia). The Hungarian one is Kornél Mundruczó’s Johanna, an ambitious transposition of the Joan of Arc legend onto a scenario set in a murkily-lit present-day hospital – oh, and it’s a full-length opera written directly for the screen, courtesy of composer Zsofia Taller. The French/Czechoslovak one is René Laloux’s legendary Fantastic Planet, one of the most effective attempts at bringing the artist Roland Topor’s vision to the screen – my favourite is still Henri Xhonneux’s Marquis (1989), but it’s a close-run thing.

The latest Sight & Sound is out, complete with my news item on the re-emergence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger and the bizarre chain of circumstances that kept it out of circulation for so long, plus the mildly enjoyable but disappointingly unambitious British comedy-thriller Out on a Limb.

The latest Sight & Sound is out, complete with my review of The Jealous God, a quixotic attempt by writer-director Steven Woodcock at reviving the spirit of the British New Wave – although, as I argue in the piece, the highly televisual result closer to watered-down heritage cinema than the socially and culturally groundbreaking work being produced by Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson et al in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and it’s the palest shadow of John Braine’s original novel. Still, the commission gave me an excuse to read it, so at least I got something worthwhile out of the experience.

My second full-length Sight & Sound review has just appeared in print, of György Pálfi’s almost dialogue-free debut Hukkle (2004). Or, “I’ve got this weird Hungarian film that no-one else has taken on – do you fancy doing it?”, which is roughly how the commission went.

Unsurprisingly, I did fancy doing it, and I loved it. To some extent it suffers from the usual calling-card syndrome (there are a couple of CGI effects that, while undoubtedly show-stoppers, are a misjudgement for that reason), but the premise is so strong that it could survive a lot more than that. Essentially, it’s a study of village life, the twist being that Pálfi draws no real distinction between its human, animal and insect inhabitants: they’re all stared at with the same quizzical, quasi-anthropological eye. And then it gradually becomes clear that the female humans are treating their menfolk with the same ruthlessness as certain insect species…

The new issue of Sight & Sound is out, complete with my second contribution to the magazine (the first being way back in September 2002). Actually, it’s a double helping, since I interviewed Guy Maddin for the main feature (and asked him to caption favourite stills, though the subs stripped out most of the idiosyncratic punctuation) as well as reviewing The Saddest Music in the World. This is my first S&S cinema review, which also posed the challenge of synopsising a Maddin scenario with a straight face.

The interview was conducted over the phone, and I treasure the signoff – Maddin told me that if my deadline was coming up and I needed to check something and I couldn’t reach him in time, I had his permission to just make something up. I didn’t take him up on his offer, but it wasn’t half tempting.