May is for Spanish brain-teasers with the theatrical release of Fermat’s Room, an inventive take on the locked room mystery, and the DVD release of ingenious time travel thriller Timecrimes. We have an interview with Timecrimes director Nacho Vigalondo who tells us about his love for genre cinema and playing god in his own film.

Also at the cinema this month are Azazel Jacobs’s touching low-key drama Momma’s Man, about a thirty-something man who regresses to childhood, delicate Hungarian tale of incestuous love Delta, and O’Horten, Bent Hamer’s understated meditation on old age and death.

In the DVD releases we have Pasolini’s ‘trilogy of life’, which includes The Decameron, Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales, taut, intense French drama The Last of the Crazy People, and the first instalment of the live action manga adaptation 20th Century Boys. The controversial French horror film Martyrs is also released this month and we have an interview with director Pascal Laugier. And we review Alex Cox’s book X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker.

Lovers of Asian cinema should keep May 21-24 free for the Terracotta Far East Film Festival, which promises many delights, including films by Johnnie To and Kim Ki-duk. And we have an interview with Ulrike Ottinger, femme terrible of German cinema, who we met last month at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

In the Short Cuts, we review the Sex on Screen panel and the erotic shorts that followed the discussion, which took place at the Birds Eye View Festival in March. And chic pop chanteuse Theoretical Girl picks her favourites in the Film Jukebox.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

The wonderful Swedish vampire romance Let the Right One In is released this month and you can read our interview with author John Ajvide Lindqvist in the spring 09 issue of Electric Sheep. Also on UK cinema screens this month are Werner Herzog’s unique take on the nature documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Tony Manero, a Chilean murder story involving a John Travolta impersonator, and micro-budget British urban drama Shifty.

John Williams’s accomplished first feature, Firefly Dreams, is released for the first time on DVD. An evocative tale about the pains of growing up made by a Welshman in Japan, it is a little-known gem worth rediscovering. Two new box-sets got our attention this month: first is the Red Riding Trilogy, adapted from David Peace’s moody Yorkshire crime dramas and recently seen on Channel 4. We also review Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, the first instalment of the Female Prisoner Trilogy, which includes all three films of the 70s exploitation Japanese series directed by Shunya Itô and starring Meiko Kaji as the fearless female avenger.

We have an interview with Nicolette Krebitz, whose The Heart Is a Dark Forest opened the Birds Eye View Film Festival last month, as well as previews of the Sci-Fi London Festival and Glimmer, Hull’s international short film festival. We take a look at Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, the acclaimed book by Electric Sheep contributor Jack Sargeant, which has recently been published by Soft Skull in a revised edition. In the Film Jukebox, Sleeping Years‘ Dale Grundle tells us about his favourite films. And we report back on the Flatpack Festival, which was the best film fun we’ve had in a while!

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

The spring issue of Electric Sheep focuses on Tainted Love to celebrate the release of the sweet and bloody pre-teen vampire romance Let the Right One In, with articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, François Ozon‘s tales of tortuous relationships, destructive passion in Nic Roeg‘s Bad Timing, Julio Medem‘s ambiguous lovers and nihilistic tenderness from Kôji Wakamatsu. Also in this issue: Interview with Pascal Laugier (Martyrs), Berlin squat cinema, screen vamps, the Polish New Wave that never existed and comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation! It is available from the specialist book store Cinéphilia, at selected retailers and cinemas or online from Wallflower Press for a 15% discount!

In March we turn our attention to Berlin with a report on the 59th Berlinale and a feature on Julia Ostertag, a guerrilla filmmaker from the underground scene that exists on the margins of the German capital’s film industry. Exclusive to the print issue we also have an article on squat cinema in Berlin.

New cinema releases include the Watchmen adaptation, Paolo Sorrentino’s exquisitely ironic take on Italian politics Il Divo, Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen, Bronson, Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylised biopic of ‘Britain’s most violent prisoner’, and Ozploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood. Do not miss the John Samson retrospective at the London International Documentary Festival at the end of the month!

In the DVDs, we take a look at Isidore Isou’s 1951 avant-garde tour de force Traité de bave et d’éternité, the new box-set of films by French master of hard-boiled fatalism Jean-Pierre Melville, Herk Harvey’s 1962 seminal horror movie Carnival of Souls, Royston Tan’s heartbreaking meditation on loneliness 4:30, and the collection of short films by British experimental filmmaker Jeff Keen.

We have an interview with Paolo Sorrentino and a review of the best and rarest films seen during the Wild Japan season at the BFI in December, including Blue Film Woman, Gushing Prayer and Secret Acts behind Wall. In the Short Cuts, we preview the wonderfully eclectic Flatpack Festival and the supremely stylish Ipso Facto tell us about their favourite films in the Film Jukebox.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

This month has a very definite oriental flavour, starting with no less than two Asian Westerns competing for our attention: in the ridiculously enjoyable The Good, The Bad, The Weird, Kim Ji-woon does Leone Korean-style while Takashi Miike takes on another 60s Italian cult classic in Sukiyaki Western Django. In our interview with Kim Ji-woon, the director explains all about ‘kimchi Western’ and why this spicy cabbage dish is the perfect symbol for Korean people.

For the second year running, the ICA is hosting Reality Fiction, a season of Japanese films inspired by real-life events. And if that’s not enough Asian thrills there is also the DVD release of the controversial Korean thriller The President’s Last Bang and the Shaw Brothers’ classic kung fu movie The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.

In other cinema releases, Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns with Three Monkeys, the eagerly awaited follow-up to Climates, the British thriller Franklyn experiments with an innovative hybrid of real-life drama and fantasy, and Jean-Claude Van Damme plays himself in the bizarre, hilarious, sincere, self-reflexive JCVD. On DVD, Kim Longinotto’s Divorce Iranian Style takes a warm and honest look at the lives of Iranian women. And we have a feature on the thoroughly brilliant West London Fantastic Film Society.

In Short Cuts, we have a report on the Club des Femmes strand of the London Short Film Festival while songsmith Eugene McGuinness tells us about some of the films that have impressed him.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

The film year is starting with the release of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s subtle domestic drama Tokyo Sonata, the South Korean retelling of the Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, Frost/Nixon, adapted from Peter Morgan’s intelligent play, atmospheric Hitchcockian thriller The Broken and poetic-realist British rural drama Better Things. Not to forget Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, showing as part of the BFI Southbank’s Sam Peckinpah season.

In the DVD releases, we look at the exuberant Japanese pop melodrama Memories of Matsuko, Jim Jarmusch’s masterful take on the Western Dead Man, Marcel L’Herbier’s 1928 ambitious depiction of greed L’Argent, the controversial Vietnam vets documentary Winter Soldier and the Flaming Lips’ space oddity Christmas on Mars.

The screening of Code 46 as part of the Architecture on Film season at the Barbican was the occasion for an interview with Michael Winterbottom. We also bring you a preview of the brilliant London Short Film Festival and reports of Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival and Discovering Latin America 7.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team