Sight & Sound. September 07.

Mark Cousins has curated the Ten Documentaries That Shook the World season at BFI Southbank, running through the end of August, and in the new issue of Sight & Sound, he explains his choices, adding that, "as I write I realise what should have been obvious: that though these films were chosen because of their social impact, that impact is in part explained by aesthetics."

Geoffrey Macnab talks with Pascale Ferran about Lady Chatterley, "a delicately crafted paean to passion that does justice to her view of the novel as a utopian tale of intoxicating love written with uncanny subtlety and sensitivity." Related: Maddy Costa talks with Marina Hands for the Guardian, and so does Kaleem Aftab, for the Independent.

Reviews:

• "[I]n Born and Bred, [Pablo] Trapero explores a new brand of naturalism that eschews classical narrative models and character construction," writes Maria M Delgado.

• Tim Lucas praises Criterion's release of Lindsay Anderson's If..., "one of the most stimulating and visceral of all British films."

• For Michael Atkinson, 1408 "is far too self-consciously a coy CGI rollercoaster ride to leave any slap-prints on your cheeks - you can easily imagine it as a theme-park ride (Weinsteins, take note of this idea)."

• Tony Rayns on Opera Jawa: "Garin Nugroho's sensationally beautiful 'gamelan musical' is based on the single most famous episode from the Ramayana, the epic poem composed in Sanskrit, which is known throughout south-east Asia and revered as a quasi-religious text by Hindus.... The film is much more than a modernist re-reading of the story."

Posted by dwhudson at August 20, 2007 7:35 AM