Sight & Sound. August 05.

"[S]omehow part of [Robert] Mitchum was always outside events, taking a dispassionate view of what was going on around him," writes Nick James in the August issue of Sight & Sound. "This quality was an intrinsic part of what made him such a superb actor. He was neither a theatrical technician nor a Method invoker of ghost emotions, but really did, as he claimed, make it up as he went along, a naturally gifted performer who seemed to know instinctively how to give minimum effort for maximum effect."

Jonathan Romney talks with Annie Griffin, director of Festival, "a cruel, highly intelligent and often bitterly hilarious comedy of showbiz manners that also displays a pitiless insight into the vanities of the performance world."

Reviews:

• Roger Clarke on Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy: "Godard once talked about needing a girl and a gun to make a movie; what happens, Vinterberg and von Trier want to know, when the girl is the gun?"

• Ginette Vincendeau on Robert Guédiguian's The Last Mitterand, which "deals with the difficulty of reclaiming, understanding and recording the past, hence the enhanced role of the writer, the importance of books, letters and photographs and the role of live witnesses, all of which are simultaneously evidence of the past and signifiers of its elusiveness."

• Leslie Felperin on Sally Potter's Yes; when "in full flow, its force approaches the torrential."

Update: Sight & Sound has redesigned its site and all the URLs have changed; these links should be working again, and hopefully, S&S will eventually be redirecting from the old addresses for its articles and reviews to the new.

Posted by dwhudson at July 27, 2005 1:48 AM