Sight & Sound, the Times and the LFF.

Just as the most recent issue of Film Comment is geared to its institution's fest, the New York Film Festival, so, too, is the new issue of Sight & Sound shaped by the Times bfi London Film Festival (October 19 through November 3). There's even a little sidebar highlighting the magazine's top ten picks to catch at the fest.

Naturally, the Times has set up a special section at its site and it carries on bulging with profiles, previews and interviews, such as Wendy Ide's with Fernando Meirelles; The Constant Gardener opens the festival. And Times critic James Christopher writes, "This remarkable event is book-ended by the strongest opening and closing films I've ever seen. Lord knows how the artistic director, Sandra Hebron, hopes to top it when the festival celebrates its 50th birthday in 2006."

The closing film is Good Night, and Good Luck; Geoffrey Macnab: "[George] Clooney's film has the same edge and intensity as the live US television dramas of the 1950s (Marty, Requiem for a Heavyweight)." More from Kevin Maher in the Times.

Not sure what a "Centrepiece Screening" is exactly, but Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang will get the treatment; Edward Lawrenson writes in S&S, "[Shane] Black handles this dense narrative with a light comic touch and yet the film also probes the darker impulses behind the easy glamour and alluring fantasies of the movie world... One of Hollywood's most sought-after screenwriters from the late 1980s (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight), Black enjoys sending up the conventions of the blockbuster thriller he himself pioneered."

Also late in the schedule: The Death of Mister Lazarescu, which "grips like an Arthur Miller play," writes Mark Cousins.

The rest of the issue is not a direct tie-in. Jim Jarmusch is on the cover even though Broken Flowers isn't screening (it opens in UK just days after the festival does) and, while Nick Roddick's feature isn't online, Liese Spencer's review is: "Jarmusch's achievement is to riff on themes of intimacy, emptiness and disappointment in a hugely enjoyable way."

The other reviews: Philip Kemp on The Beat That My Heart Skipped ("So could we just possibly be looking at the first frisky sparks of a rekindling of the traditional Franco-American love affair?") and Ryan Gilbey on 4 ("transparently a showreel to launch first-time director Ilya Khrzhanovsky into the marketplace").

And then there's the one big bulky online read, Andrew Collins on Gene Hackman: "'Everyman' is an overused term best employed to describe Jimmy Stewart or his natural heir Tom Hanks; it doesn't fully account for Hackman's skill - or indeed his intermittent bankability. To be a big-screen everyman you must to an extent offer a blank canvas on to which an audience's own hopes and fears can be painted. You must be able to play a bank clerk, but Hackman is more likely to do a bank job than have one."

Posted by dwhudson at October 12, 2005 10:23 AM