Issue 22

The winter issue of Electric Sheep explores celluloid snow with articles on Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Aki Kaurismäki’s Calamari Union, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Christmas slasher movies and cult Japanese revenge tale Lady Snowblood. Plus interview with Asif Kapadia and Jerzy Skolimowski, preview of the London Short Film Festival, and a comic strip review of Kamikaze Girls! It is available from Wallflower Press for a 15% discount!

Asif Kapadia’s tale of love and revenge in the Arctic Circle, Far North, triumphantly ends the cinematic year. Also out this month are Béla Tarr’s long-awaited incursion into noir territory The Man from London, melancholy samurai tale Love and Honour and two documentaries on American icons, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr S Thompson and Patti Smith: Dream of Life.

In the DVD releases, we have Lotte Reiniger’s exquisite animated Fairy Tale Films, 60s Brazilian master Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil, psychedelic Polish fantasy Hourglass Sanatorium, Strangers on a Train-themed giallo The Designated Victim, George A Romero’s fascinating feminist horror Season of the Witch and documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore.

We have an interview with DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about their documentary The Return to the War Room, which screened at Sheffield Doc/Fest last month. We celebrate the wonderful project of The Close-Up Video Library and preview the ICA cinema’s 40th anniversary season as well as the very exciting Wild Japan season at the BFI Soutbhank. And as 2008 draws to a close we review the best and worst cinematic moments of the year.

In the Short Cuts we review the Cinema16 collection of world short films, and in the Film Jukebox we have The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, the New York indie pop band that is currently making even the most jaded critics giddy with excitement.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Electric Sheep Magazine Winter 08

The winter issue of Electric Sheep explores celluloid snow with articles on Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Aki Kaurismäki’s Calamari Union, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Christmas slasher movies and cult Japanese revenge tale Lady Snowblood. Plus interview with Asif Kapadia, preview of the London Short Film Festival, reviews of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata and B&#233la Tarr’s The Man from London, and a comic strip review of Kamikaze Girls!

Also in this issue: Interview with Jerzy Skolimowski, Lotte Reiniger’s animated fairy tales, Seeing Double review of Sal&#242 or the 120 Days of Sodom.

The magazine is no longer in print. Back copies are available for reference at Close-Up Video Library.

Issue 21

Cinema this month is all about Baader-Meinhof, with the release of the controversial drama The Baader-Meinhof Complex and the screening of Andres Veiel‘s acclaimed 1993 documentary Black Box Germany at the German Film Festival on November 30.

This month also sees the release of one of the year’s best films, the astonishing Israeli animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, which is included in our round-up of the best of the 52nd London Film Festival. Also out this month is lo-fi Japanese charmer Fine, Totally Fine, the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Choke and sharp observer of French social mores Agnès Jaoui’s Let’s Talk about the Rain.

In the DVD releases, we have the mighty Joseph Losey Collection, Johnnie To’s schizophrenia thriller Mad Detective, and Hitchockian suspense story The Clouded Yellow. And we review Starfish Hotel, a captivating East meets West dark fairy tale, and interview its Welsh-born, Tokyo-based director John Williams.

At this year’s Raindance film festival we were able to interview Peter Greenaway, who told us about his multi-media project around Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch. Elsewhere we have a feature on Dolly Mixture, who were the subject of a film shown at the Barbican’s Pop Mavericks season. And we report from the Colombiage festival, which makes us very much look forward to the Discovering Latin America film festival, opening on November 27.

In the Short Cuts we review the Future Shorts DVD. And in the Film Jukebox, indie popsters with an edge Shrag tell us about their favourite films.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Issue 20

To psyche ourselves up for the scares and thrills of Halloween, we focus on the black and white French animated film Fear(s) of the Dark, in which celebrated illustrators and comic book artists explore our most profound phobias. Comics expert Paul Gravett reviews the film for us and we also have an interview with Charles Burns (the author of the acclaimed Black Hole), whose section is one of the highlights of the film.

In the cinema releases, we look at the perversely pleasurable Korean thriller A Bloody Aria, twisted female-centred indie anti-rom-com Good Dick, Tarsem’s visual feast The Fall and socially conscious Mexican thriller La Zona

DVD releases include the warped dream world of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, John Carpenter’s anti-apathy B-thriller They Live, psycho-political western Terror in a Texas Town, explosive black British youth manifesto Babylon, Abel Ferrara’s gangster tale King of New York, the two sci-fi classics Westworld and Logan’s Run and more B-movie fun with Killer Klowns from Outer Space. And we celebrate the re-release of Eraserhead and discuss David Lynch’s shorts, now available on DVD, in relation to his entire career.

As the festival season closes, we have a preview of the London Film Festival and a report on the Toronto Film Festival. And fuzzy folksters Christy and Emily pick their favourite films in the Jukebox.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Issue 19

Our autumn issue is available now at selected retailers and cinemas or online from Wallflower Press for a 15% discount! The theme is cruel games, from the politics of human blood sport in the Corman-produced ultra-violent Death Race, to sadistic power play in Korean thriller A Bloody Aria, fascist games in German hit The Wave and Stanley Kubrick’s career-long fascination with game-playing. Plus: an interview with comic book master Charles Burns about the stunning animated film Fear(s) of the Dark and a fantastic London Film Festival comic strip, which surely is worth the price of the issue alone!

This month’s film releases include Wong Kar Wai’s sumptuous Ashes of Time Redux, acclaimed documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, taut South Korean thriller The Chaser, superb animé The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Hong Kong experiment in collective filmmaking Triangle, directed by Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To.

In the DVD releases, we look at Carl Dreyer’s masterpiece of eeriness Vampyr, the Walter Hill Collection, which includes minimalist thriller The Driver and urban subculture shocker The Warriors, art documentary Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, Judex, a surreal treat from George Franju, the Ennio Morricone-scored giallo Who Saw Her Die?, more Italian exploitation with Inglorious Bastards, soon to be remade by Quentin Tarantino, and a discussion of seminal sci-fi movie Dark City.

We also preview the 16th Raindance Film Festival and the Compass of Mystery Film Festival, report on Film4 FrightFest 2008, investigate the MacGuffin Library and talk to Helen McCarthy about Japanese manga and animé master Osamu Tezuka. And we have an interview with Ivan Kavanagh, whose Tin Can Man was the talk of last year’s Sydney Underground Film Festival.

In the Short Cuts, we have a profile of Sebastian Godwin and Tom Harper, who both won awards at last year’s Raindance Film Festival. In the Film Jukebox, Greg Weeks from Espers regales us with psychedelic folk and erudite film choices.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Issue 18

Fright fans rejoice, FrightFest is back, and what a line-up! Organiser Alan Jones talks us through the goodies on offer at the bank holiday festival, from the subtle poetry of teen vampire story Let the Right One In (a film we totally fell in love with at the EIFF) to the splatter fest of Tokyo Gore Police. For the more sensitive souls among you, the bank holiday weekend offers another kind of cinematic treat: Asia House is putting on an oriental feast that stretches from the Gulf to the Far East.

August is shaping up to be a great month for film fans in the UK, with some very exciting new releases. Top of our list is Sakuran, the gorgeous, exuberant, pop-punk story of a rebellious prostitute by photographer Mika Ninagawa – definitely one for our ‘Rock’n’Roll Movie’ category! Also out is Man on Wire, James Marsh’s documentary on Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire stunt walk between the Twin Towers, Ben X, the visually inventive and touching story of a computer-game-playing Asperger teen bullied at school and Shane Meadows’s latest film Somers Town. And at the BFI Southbank you will be able to see one of our all-time favourites, Badlands, which really deserves to be seen on the big screen.

Jesus Christ Saviour, which documents Klaus Kinski’s ill-fated 1971 New Testament stage monologue, was another remarkable film that screened at the Edinburgh Festival and we were lucky enough to talk to its director, Peter Geyer. We also caught up with the great British director Peter Whitehead at the Biograph Film in Bologna. And to celebrate the summer and outdoorsy cinematic fun, we chart the rise and fall and furtive pleasures of the drive-in.

In the DVD releases, we review the new Jeunet/Caro box-set, which gathers Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, look at more French sci-fi with Eden Log, rave about Kisses, the first feature by the brilliant Yasuzo Masumura, rediscover the early work of Kinji ‘Battle Royale‘ Fukasaku, enjoy the atmosphere of South Korean supernatural tale Spider Forest and look back at the Lynch classic The Elephant Man.

In the Short Cuts section we have a feature on Uncut, the excellent film forum for young directors that runs monthly at the ICA. And in our Film Jukebox 21st-century Renaissance woman Crazy Girl tells us about her top films.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Electric Sheep Magazine Autumn 08

In our autumn issue we look at cruel games, from the politics of human blood sport in the Corman-produced ultra-violent Death Race, to sadistic power play in the disturbingly funny Korean thriller A Bloody Aria, fascist games in German hit The Wave and Stanley Kubrick’s career-long fascination with game-playing. Plus: interview with comic book master Charles Burns about the stunning animated film Fear(s) of the Dark, preview of the Raindance Festival, reviews of Tarsem’s The Fall and Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux. And don’t miss our fantastic London Film Festival comic strip, which surely is alone worth the price of the issue!

Also in this issue: Compass of Mystery Festival, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, Jan &#348vankmajer’s Alice and a Seeing Double review of Alex Proyas’s Dark City!

The magazine is no longer in print. Back copies are available for reference at Close-Up Video Library.

Issue 17

If you are yet to experience the madcap brilliance and perverse beauty of Guy Maddin’s films, now is your chance to see them in their full glory on a big screen. To coincide with the release of the Canadian director’s latest, My Winnipeg, a uniquely oblique celebration of his hometown, the BFI Southbank are holding a retrospective of his work this month. Having been seduced, thrilled and enchanted by Maddin’s surreal, silent-period-inspired films, we are incredibly excited to be able to devote our July issue to him: we have a feature on his mythologising of Winnipeg, an interview with Cecilia Araneda, director of the Winnipeg Film Group and an interview with Maddin himself.

We also report from the Edinburgh Film Festival, which moved to an earlier June spot this year, with features on the new Under the Radar section and a round-up of the best films of the festival. We also have a review of Errol Morris’s new film Standard Operating Procedure, released this month. Morris appeared in Edinburgh for an on-stage interview, in which he discussed the ramifications of his documentary on the Abu Ghraib torture photos. And we have interviews with actors Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter as well as director Olly Blackburn, part of the team behind Donkey Punch, one of the eagerly awaited new British films that premiered in Edinburgh.

This month’s cinema releases also include a classic of 60s Cuban cinema, Memories of Underdevelopment, Tom Kalin’s beautiful, risqué Savage Grace, terrific new animé Origin: Spirits of the Past, and Nicolas Roeg’s latest, Puffball. In addition, we review one of the most notable films screened at the Tiger Festival last month, The Case, and we have a report on the Fashion in Film Festival.

In the DVD releases, we continue our exploration of Nagisa Oshima’s early work with Violence at High Noon and take a look at slick French sci-fi thriller Chrysalis and Žižek! a documentary on the Slovenian philosopher.

In the Short Cuts, we talk to the mastermind behind the brilliantly innovative straight 8 competition while Bochum Welt is our guest in the Film Jukebox.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Issue 16

Electric Sheep has re-launched in print as a quarterly magazine published by Wallflower Press. To celebrate the belated recognition of Charles Burnett’s jazz-scored monochrome gem Killer of Sheep the first issue explores the influence of jazz on American film with articles on Shirley Clarke, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, Beat cinema and much more! It is available from Wallflower Press for a 15% discount. We have a couple of jazz-themed tasters online: a review of the Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost, which is re-released in UK cinemas on June 5, and an extract from the Charles Burnett interview published in full in the print magazine. As an extra, we also look at Space is the Place, a mytho-politico Blaxploitation sci-fi oddity starring Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

We have reviews of Romanian Cannes prize-winner California Dreamin’, wonderful Gothic fairy tale Eyes Without a Face, French Jim Thompson adaptation Coup de torchon, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s masterwork Mother Joan of Angels, which screened at the Polish Film Festival Kinoteka in April, as well as a Nagisa Oshima double bill with the radical political analysis of Night and Fog in Japan and the nihilistic youth movie The Sun’s Burial. To round it all up we finish with a discussion of ground-breaking animé series Paranoia Agent.

We also have a feature on the Tiger Festival, which is now under way at the ICA, London, and will move to Brighton on June 18. We talked to the brilliant programmers of Flipside who told us about their psychedelia night coming up on June 21, and to thoughtful animé filmmaker Makoto Shinkai who will be attending the BFI’s Animé Now weekend on June 20-22. And we also have festival reports from Cannes and Udine Far East Film.

In the Short Cuts section we preview what’s on offer at the Edinburgh Film Festival. In the Film Jukebox, we have Congregation, whose nerve-jangling, heart-stopping old-time blues has been wowing audiences across London for over a year.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Issue 15

As most of our readers must be well aware by now given the amount of media attention it is generating, it is 40 years since May 68 and to do our bit to mark that most tumultuous of years we have turned our attention to Czech cinema and the Prague Spring. We also have reviews of four key 1960s Czech films: Jan Nemec’s subversive satire of authoritarian rule The Party and the Guests, the formidably creepy nightmare that is The Cremator, the sumptuous and brutal epic Marketa Lazarova and Romeo, Juliet and Darkness, a melancholy love story under German occupation.

New cinema releases include Barbet Schroeder’s Terror’s Advocate, which probes the complex personality of France’s most controversial lawyer, defender of both resistance fighters and war criminals, American backwater revenge tale Shotgun Stories, slick CGI animé Vexille, wonderful Argentine silent fantasy La Antena, and intelligent French drama Heartbeat Detector, which draws parallels between Nazi terminology and modern-day business. In the DVD releases we review Chris Petit’s haunting British road movie Radio On(our rock ‘n’ roll movie of the month by virtue of its great soundtrack) and the jaw-dropping, must-see-to-be-believed Italian art-cum-sexploitation spectacular Femina Ridens (The Frightened Woman).

We have an interview with Xavier Mendik, organiser of the Cine-Excess festival, which explores cult cinema through a mix of academic conference and film screenings. We also preview the Fashion in Film Festival, which this year focuses on fashion and crime, and review sweet Taiwanese queer love story Spider Lilies, which showed at last month’s London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

In the Short Cuts section we look at some early works by François Ozon, best known for features such as Swimming Pool and 8 femmes. Picking their favourite films in our Film Jukebox are The Mai 68s. We didn’t make this up, there really is a band called The Mai 68s.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team