This month is a girl special to coincide with International Women’s Day and the Bird’s Eye View Film Festival. While this year’s Bird’s Eye View focuses on women in comedy we thought we’d celebrate the bad girls of cinema – think Bonnie Parker, Foxy Brown and of course Tura Satana as Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! We also have a feature on women and filmmaking written by Club des Femmes co-founder Sarah Wood and a report on the London Short Film Festival’s Femmes Fantastique day in our Short Cuts section. We complete our female-centric coverage with reviews of Irma Vep, a riff on the original catsuited jewel thief from Louis Feuillade’s legendary Les Vampires, and the newly released Water Lilies, a beautiful, delicately sensuous look at the sexual awakening of a group of teenage girls in provincial France. And we asked the ladies from Ladyfest London to tell us about their favourite movies in the Film Jukebox.

In the cinema releases we look at Harmony Korine‘s story of celebrity impersonators Mister Lonely, and interview the enfant terrible of American indie cinema. We also review the latest instalment of George A. Romero’s zombie franchise Diary of the Dead, the Guillermo del Toro-produced subtle horror thriller The Orphanage and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Go Master, part of the China in London film season at the ICA.

DVD releases include Luchino Visconti’s classic Rocco and His Brothers, The London Nobody Knows, Geoffrey Fletcher’s 1967 flânerie through a rarely seen, disappearing London, which inspired St Etienne’s Finisterre project, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1926 The Lodger, a brilliantly realised early silent considered by the master of suspense to be his first real film.

CJ Magnet has The Last Word with his musings on Che Guevara, Christ and the significance of beards.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team