It’s been one year since Electric Sheep came into this world, first as a webzine, then mutating into a print-web hybrid last September. We started off with the aim of celebrating dark, wondrous and magical cinematic worlds, and over the past year we’ve had Jean Painlevé‘s erotic molluscs, Yasuzo Masumura‘s convulsive heroines, René Laloux‘s shape-shifting aliens, Monte Hellman‘s melancholy anti-heroes and Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s anarchic concoctions. Yep, mission accomplished, now let’s have some more.

Carrying on our joyfully revisionist look at cinema, we’ve chosen as the focus of this anniversary issue a filmmaker that we’ve liked for a long time and who is just not getting the attention he deserves: supreme purveyor of cinematic weirdness Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Despite the current trend for all things Japanese and horror, Kurosawa’s films have rarely been shown in the UK and only two of them are available on DVD. Too subtle for horror fans, too creepy for art-house types, Kurosawa’s work seems to be condemned to obscurity simply for resisting categorisation. We hope this spotlight on his work prompts our readers to go and explore an oeuvre of astonishing complexity and frightful beauty.

In the cinema reviews we have Nick Broomfield’s controversial Battle for Haditha, Wong Kar Wai’s disappointing My Blueberry Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s oil epic There Will Be Blood, Lars von Trier Office-style comedy The Boss of It All, Japanese bubble-gum oddity Kamikaze Girls as well as Bernardo Bertolucci’s still dazzling The Conformist and classic noir The Killers. And we have a feature on the forthcoming End of the Pier Festival.

In the DVD releases, we find the ramifications of Fritz Lang’s space travel movie Frau im Mond fascinating, take a look at Nagisa Oshima’s rebel teen flick Naked Youth, learn our lesson in the spooky Phantom Carriage and wonder whether to laugh or cry at Der Letzte Mann. We also indulge in psychedelic horror in Experiments in Terror 2, released by underground San Francisco label Other Cinema and talk to the label’s co-founder Noel Lawrence.

In our Short Cuts section we review the risqué treats that The Smoking Cabinet offered last December while CJ Magnet gets somewhat fixated on The Bourne franchise in The Last Word.

Fans of all things mysterious and magickal, Sir Francis Dashwood and the Hellfire Club pick their favourite films in the Jukebox.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

As we anticipate that we’ll be far too dazed and fuzzy-brained to write anything coherent between now and the New Year, this will be our last issue until February 2008. But fear not, we’ve packed it with enough goodies to make it last until the next one.

In an effort to be seasonal, we’ve made excess the overriding theme of the issue. First, we gorged ourselves on RW Fassbinder’s 15-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz, a fascinating chronicle of the murky, unwholesome world of 1920s Berlin: hard on the stomach and queasiness-inducing at times, but certainly worth the resultant hangover. And for a hair of the dog, there’s always the Fassbinder Volume 1 and 2 DVDs. Then, we looked at ten takes on gluttony, from the stuffing-centric Taxidermia to Oldboy‘s infamous live-octopus-devouring scene via Marco Ferreri’s 1973 gross-out consumption satire La Grande bouffe.

And that’s only for starters. The full à la carte menu includes reviews of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, Romanian Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ classic satire on stardom All About Eve, labyrinthine Polish tale The Saragossa Manuscript, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Mexican horror hit KM31 and cerebral French thriller Hotel Harabati.

In the DVD side orders we have Murnau’s delicious Tabu, London noir Night and the City, anti-porn animé Princess, Jerzy Skolimowski’s cult horror movie The Shout, double Japanese act The Duel Project, Satoshi Kon’s Paprika and Sigur Rós’ live DVD Heima.

We talked to Pamela Jahn, curator of Baader’s Angels, a season about women in German terrorism films and to Anders Morgenthaler, director of Princess. We also caught up with the organisers of the London Short Film Festival (formerly Halloween) – we are looking forward to starting the New Year feasting our eyes on their very exciting programme of shorts and live music events.

JANUARY EXTRAS: We have an interview with Anamaria Marinca, leading actress of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and with George Clark, curator of ‘ICO Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema’. We have reviews of No Country for Old Men, Sweeney Todd, Beat Girl. In the DVDs we take a look at eye-popping Korean oddity Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine and Alex de la Iglesia’s 800 Bullets. And we have a report on the very first Secret Cinema screening.

Citing Suspiria and Rosemary’s Baby among their influences and with one single, Foreo, based on Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, The Violets were obvious candidates for our Film Jukebox.

CJ Magnet thinks up a ground-breaking new kind of exercise class in the Last Word section and in the Review of the Year we look at the best/worst films of 2007 – post a comment to let us know what you think.

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! This month we have a big bumper prize courtesy of Tartan Video comprising three DVDs – Taxidermia, Super Size Me and Oldboy – together with a copy of Get Stuffed: The Home Taxidermist’s Handbook. Five runners-up will each get a copy of the book. To enter the competition just spin the Film Roulette! Closing date for entries: Monday 17 December.

The next Hectic Peelers film club, organised jointly with Resonance FM, will be on Tuesday 4 December at the Roxy Bar and Screen, London. We’ll be showing Häxan, an outlandish Scandinavian silent film on witchcraft that was much admired by the surrealists (courtesy of Tartan Video). The night starts at 6:30pm, film at 7:30pm, admission is free. Further details here

Resonance FM have now re-launched from their new studio so check out their website for a full list of the new programmes. Check out details of forthcoming programmes and podcasts of previous shows here.

Electric Sheep exists in print too! Pick up a free copy of the magazine at selected cinemas, cafes, arts centres and universities. Details of stockists here.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Our focus this month is on the wondrous world created by French animation master René Laloux. Although Fantastic Planet and Gandahar have been hugely influential they have been rarely screened in the last two decades. Eureka have now released all three of Laloux’s features in the UK, making their other-worldly visual delights and philosophical musings finally accessible to a wider audience.

Unsurprisingly, it’s all ghosts and ghouls in cinemaland this month, with the BFI dusting off Terence Fisher’s 1958 Dracula, Eureka bringing Nosferatu back to life, while elsewhere The Black Cat and The Raven, two Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, are resuscitated. Among new releases, Weirdsville provides a different twist on Satanists and we review a dramatised reconstruction of the life of infamous Edwardian magus Aleister Crowley. To complete this ghastly feast we have an interview with Rigoberto Castañeda, the young director of KM31 (released next month), who tells us how he was scarred for life by 70s Mexican horror movies.

For less horror-inclined cinema-goers we also review Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, Tsai Ming-liang‘s The Wayward Cloud and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, released simultaneously this month, as well as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem and paranoid cold war thriller The Mind Benders. We also have an interview with Iraqi director Mohamed Al-Daradji, whose film Ahlaam, made just after the start of the war in 2003, paints a heart-rending picture of a country caught in a hellish nightmare. In our Short Cuts section we have a feature on last month’s Rock’n’Roll Cinema event.

Picking films in our Jukebox are purveyors of horrorifying punk-rock Zombina and the Skeletones. Guitarist Doc Horror takes us on a hilarious ride through hardcore Z-movies and reveals a particular fondness for wrestling Japanese girls in spandex costumes as well as films that have ‘living dead’ somewhere in the title.

And in our Last Word column, a documentary on the air guitar world championship gives CJ Magnet food for thought.

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! We’re pleased to announce that our Halloween Dracula competition winners are Andrew Rogers and Raewyn Yee. We still have one pair of Dracula tickets to win – closing date Monday 5 November (see here for the full list of participating cinemas). This month we have a DVD of Sigur Ros’ film Heima (reviewed next month) + their latest CD + a poster to win. We also have a CD + poster for the runner-up. To enter the competition just spin the Film Roulette! Closing date for entries: Sunday 25 November.

The next Hectic Peelers film club, organised jointly with Resonance FM, will be on Tuesday 6 November at the Roxy Bar and Screen, London. We’ll be showing Takashi Miike’s twisted horror-comedy-musical The Happiness of the Katakuris (courtesy of Tartan Video). The night starts at 6:30pm, film at 7:30pm, admission is free.

Resonance FM have now re-launched from their new studio so check out their website for a full list of the new programmes. Check out details of forthcoming programmes and podcasts of previous shows here.

Electric Sheep exists in print too! Pick up a free copy of the magazine at selected cinemas, cafes, arts centres and universities. Details of stockists here.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Adhering to the cheap-and-fast work ethic of his producer Roger Corman, Monte Hellman made some of the most singular American films of the 60s and 70s. Hellman is best-known for his melancholy road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, a film of sterile dreams and missed opportunities in which the open road leads nowhere. The film flopped on its release in 1971 but for the next three decades its reputation propelled it to the top of any self-respecting film lover’s must-see list. Rarely screened, it was a difficult film to catch until its recent UK DVD release. Two-Lane Blacktop was top of our dear friend Burhan Tufail’s list too, but sadly he died shortly before the film screened at the NFT. This issue of the magazine is dedicated to Burhan, whose absence we feel keenly and who would no doubt have played a major role at Electric Sheep had he not left us so suddenly.

As the Raindance Festival closes the 51st London Film Festival opens – read our preview of what it has to offer. We review David Cronenberg’s eagerly awaited Eastern Promises, which opens the festival, while we talk to British filmmaker Asif Kapadia, whose Far North is one of the highlights of the LFF, and to Canadian director Allan Moyle, whose Weirdsville opened Raindance last month. And in our Short Cuts section the two programmers of the LFF shorts tell us about their selections.

In the cinema releases we review the pleasingly complex German drama The Counterfeiters, and to mark the Sex and Censorship in the Cinema season that runs at the Barbican this month, we take a look at Kenneth Anger’s poetic gay gang rape fantasy Fireworks. Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control is our rock’n’roll movie of the month.

DVD releases include the first volume of Tartan’s Eisenstein collection, wild Japanese revenge tale Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable, Irezumi, Yasuzo Masumura’s ambiguous story of a predatory geisha, the Mamoru Oshii-scripted animé Jin-Roh and Nicholas Ray’s The True Story of Jesse James.

Picking films in our Jukebox this month are Black Time, a shadowy trio from London who play feedback-saturated raw garage tunes. Frontman and film connoisseur Lemmy Caution tells us about the films that have influenced him.

And in our Last Word column, CJ Magnet ponders British cinema’s use of the most contentious word in the English language.

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! We’re pleased to announce that our October winners are Ronan Quinn, Pepe and Katie McCristal. Well done, you’ve each won a pair of tickets to a film of the Sex and Censorship season. Being the first person to enter, Ronan Quinn also won a copy of Sex and the Cinema, published by Wallflower Press. On to our November competition: to celebrate the re-release of Dracula on Nov 2, the BFI is offering three pairs of tickets to attend the special Halloween previews in a participating cinema of your choice (see here for the full list of cinemas). To enter the competition, just spin the Film Roulette! The first person to respond not only wins a pair of tickets but also gets a copy of The Lure of the Vampire, published by Wallflower Press. Closing date for entries: Oct 26 for the Halloween screenings, Nov 5 for further screenings. So get spinning!

The next Hectic Peelers film club, organised jointly with Resonance FM, will be on Tuesday 6 November at the Roxy Bar and Screen, London. We’ll be showing Takashi Miike’s twisted horror-comedy-musical The Happiness of the Katakuris (courtesy of Tartan Video). The night starts at 6:30pm, film at 7:30pm, admission is free.

Resonance FM have now re-launched from their new studio so check out their website for a full list of the new programmes. Check out details of forthcoming programmes and podcasts of previous shows here.

Electric Sheep exists in print too! Pick up a free copy of the magazine at selected cinemas, cafes, arts centres and universities. Details of stockists here.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Electric Sheep now exists in print too! From now on you’ll be able to pick up a free copy of the magazine at selected cinemas, cafes, arts centres and universities. We celebrated the launch of our first print issue at the first of our monthly Film Clubs (co-organised with Resonance FM) on Wednesday 5 September at the Roxy Bar and Screen, London. We showed Melvin van Peebles’ 1971 incendiary ghetto tale Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a source of inspiration for Electric Sheep not only because of its radically independent spirit but also because of van Peebles’ unshakable determination in the face of adversity. Our guest speaker Joel Karamath (who runs the Uncut film forum at the ICA) introduced the film and the screening was followed by a very lively Q&A. If you missed it you can now listen to the Resonance podcast of the talk and Q&A. Next Film Club is on Tuesday 2 October.

Resonance FM are currently in the process of relocating to new studios so live broadcasts won’t resume until September. However, I’m Ready For My Close-Up podcasts are continually updated so don’t forget to check them out! Now online is a podcast featuring an interview by Alex Fitch with Pete Tombs, producer of ‘Bolly Horror’ film Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground).

This month we have a special feature on Raindance, one of the most exciting film festivals in the UK, celebrating original, unconventional and daring cinema. In the theatrical releases we review Tarantino’s homage to 70s exploitationers Death Proof, intricate German drama Yella, travelogue-cum-vendetta tale Legacy, Indonesian musical extravaganza Opera Jawa, Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, part of the BFI Warhol season, and silent Indian classic A Throw of Dice.

In the DVD releases we look at the work of eccentric French poet-scientist Jean Painlevé as well as the gritty world of Shane Meadows, Japanese animé Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society, eco-horror thriller The Last Winter and Sam Peckinpah’s first western The Deadly Companions. And we’re very excited to announce that Häxan, which we reviewed in our May issue but was until now only available as a US DVD, will be released in the UK on 24 September.

We talk to Opera Jawa director Garin Nugroho, who tells us how he coped with the making of a film that includes no less than 60 songs, 70 dance routines and 7 art installations.

Picking films in our Jukebox this month are Wild Billy Childish and the Musicians of the British Empire, who take up where the Buff Medways left off, offering more of Billy’s very own brew of radical punk spirit and raw garage-blues.

And we have two brand new sections! Short Cuts is our short films section, which this month looks at the Raindance Shorts programme; The Last Word is a film column created especially to showcase the unique observations of the mysterious CJ Magnet.

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! We’re pleased to announce that our August winner is Stuart Gardner. Well done Stuart, you’ve won a magnificent Seijun Suzuki prize, including 7 DVDs + a poster of Princess Raccoon signed by the director, very generously given away by Yume Pictures! This month we have a truly unique prize – a copy of Jean Painlevé‘s strangely erotic documentaries on the mating rituals of molluscs, courtesy of the BFI! (Please note that this is a region 2 DVD) So get spinning!

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

First some very exciting news: Electric Sheep is launching as a print magazine on September 1st! From now on you’ll be able to pick up a free copy of the magazine at selected cinemas, cafes, arts centres and universities – or you can subscribe to receive it every month. Go to our Events page for details.

We’re also starting a joint Film Club with Resonance FM at the Roxy Bar and Screen. The first one will be on Wednesday 5 September and we’ll be showing Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Join us for a night of provocative film and talk – film at 8pm, admission is free. The night will double up as a launch party for the print magazine so you’ll be able to pick up your free copy then.

Resonance FM are currently in the process of relocating to new studios so live broadcasts won’t resume until September. However, I’m Ready For My Close-Up podcasts are continually updated so don’t forget to check them out! Now online is a podcast featuring a review of Running Stumbled. Look out for the podcast of Electric Sheep‘s interview with Running Stumbled director John Maringouin, which will be online on August 9.

This month our focus is on the delirious pop cinema of Seijun Suzuki while in the cinema releases we review Hallam Foe, the new film by David Mackenzie (Young Adam), 12:08 East of Bucharest, a wry post-communist comedy and French supernatural thriller Ecoute le temps. DVD releases include Exiled director Johnnie To’s PTU, cult TV series Deadwood Season 3, revered Czech animator Jan Å vankmajer’s shorts, Pedro Almodóvar’s outré eighties melodrama Labyrinth of Passion, three gritty noirs by French director Jacques Becker and the animate! book. As a warm-up for our forthcoming Raindance Festival special, we have London to Brighton, which won best UK feature at last year’s festival. And we talked to Running Stumbled director John Maringouin.

Picking films in our Jukebox this month are Le Chat Noir, whose ‘dark tales of violence, desperation, alcoholism and life at the bottom’ are influenced as much by film noir as by the Wild West. They’re about to release their first album, called Deadwood, which fits in rather nicely with this issue of Electric Sheep!

If you missed our Alejandro Jodorowsky programme on Resonance FM last month, you can now listen to the podcast. More programmes on Resonance to be announced soon – go to our Events page for more details.

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! We’re pleased to announce that our July winner is Angie Smith. Well done Angie, you’ve won a Clouzot box set, including The Wages of Fear, Quai des orfèvres and Le Corbeau, courtesy of Optimum Releasing. This month we have a fantastic prize comprising no less than seven Seijun Suzuki DVDs + a poster of Princess Raccoon signed by the director, very generously given away by Yume Pictures! So get spinning!

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

This month it’s all greed, corruption and cruelty as we focus on the blacker than black vision of Henri-Georges Clouzot, the misanthropic genius of French cinema, with reviews of the atmospheric crime thriller Quai des orfèvres, the brilliantly pessimistic poison-pen noir Le Corbeau and the teeth-grindingly suspenseful The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur), which follows four desperate men driving a nitro-glycerine truck down a dangerous South American road.

The Wages of Fear is one of the movies listed in the latest BFI screen guide 100 Road Movies and to guide us around the other 99, we talked to author Jason Wood, a man whose knowledge of cinema is as phenomenal as his enthusiasm and rapid-fire delivery.

Also in the spotlight is Hungarian director György Pálfi whose grotesque shocker Taxidermia is released this month. It is the occasion to take another look at his 2002 debut Hukkle, an original low-key murder mystery of sorts.

In the cinema releases we have controversial Cannes-winner French drama Flanders, hard-hitting Haiti documentary Ghosts of Cité Soleil, twisted home-movie Running Stumbled and Daratt, a revenge tale from Chad. As the BFI hosts a season dedicated to the work of little-known Japanese master Mikio Naruse we review his sophisticated female-centred sixties opus When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.

As the John Travolta-led Hairspray remake is about to invade our screens we have a feature celebrating John Waters’ 1987 original, which more than qualifies as our Rock’n’Roll Movie of the month. And we also review Mongolian charmer The Cave of the Yellow Dog.

If you missed our Alejandro Jodorowsky programme on Resonance FM last month, you can now listen to the podcast. More programmes on Resonance to be announced soon – go to our Events page for more details.

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! We’re pleased to announce that our June winner is Verena Stackelberg. Well done Verena, you’ve won a DVD of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, courtesy of the BFI. This month we have a Clouzot box set, including The Wages of Fear, Quai des orfèvres and Le Corbeau, courtesy of Optimum Releasing. So get spinning!

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

To coincide with the BFI’s Black Screen Icon poll that celebrates black cinema we look at Melvin Van Peebles’ 1972 incendiary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and at Horace Ové’s Pressure, the stirring tale of a youth caught between West Indian and British cultures. We also have an interview with Melvin Van Peebles and his actor and director son Mario, who made a docu-drama about the making of Sweetback in 2005.

Also in the spotlight this month is the great Werner Herzog, who has a recent documentary on general release, The Wild Blue Yonder, and one of his seventies classics Fitzcarraldo re-released on DVD. If you’re in London don’t miss the Werner Herzog season at the ICA!

And we review Lunacy, revered Czech animator Jan Å vankmajer’s latest foray into live action, the delightful Aboriginal tale Ten Canoes and John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, part of a retrospective of the über-indie director’s work at the BFI Southbank.

DVD releases include the latest collection of shorts from the acclaimed digital festival onedotzero while our Rock’n’Roll Movies of the month are a batch of sixties pop films – Catch Me If You Can, Gonks Go Beat and Pop Gear.

Playing with our Film Jukebox this month are Bearsuit, a ‘stop-start boy-girl cutie-killer six-piece with everything from cinematic waltzes to catchy electro disco and hard punk screaming riot grrl noise.’ Take a look at their selection here!

Starting this month we’ll be making regular contributions to I’m Ready for my Close-Up, Resonance FM’s excellent weekly show on cinema and visual culture. Our first broadcast is on June 21 and you’ll be able to hear our interview with the inimitable Alejandro Jodorowsky. You can listen on the radio (104.4) or on line. Go to our Events page to find out about upcoming radio broadcasts.

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! We’re pleased to announce that our May winner is Richard Todman. Well done Richard, you’ve won a DVD of El Topo, courtesy of Tartan Video. This month we have a DVD of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, courtesy of the BFI (Please be aware that it’s a Region 2 disc). So get spinning!

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Why has Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura been so completely and utterly ignored in the West? Although credited with sparking off the Japanese New Wave in the 1960s, and recognised as a major influence on directors such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, over here Masumura has remained little more than an obscure curio. The stunning audacity and hysterical beauty of his work certainly deserves a closer look and the release of some of his major films on DVD – for the first time in the UK – provides us with the perfect opportunity. Last month we reviewed Manji, this month we have Red Angel and Blind Beast.

Cinema releases include Norwegian black comedy The Bothersome Man, Nanni Moretti’s Berlusconi satire The Caiman and Ray Lawrence’s follow-up to Lantana, Jindabyne. Our rock’n’roll film of the month is Julien Temple’s documentary on the Clash singer, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. Also out is the sharply intelligent Spanish thriller The Night of the Sunflowers – read our interview with the director Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo. And don’t miss sixties revolutionary classic The Battle of Algiers, which is re-released nationwide. Read our interview with Saadi Yacef, who starred in the film and on whose memoirs the script was based.

In London the Barbican’s Roman Polanski season kicks off with his masterful debut Knife in the Water. Also at the Barbican is the rare legendary silent Häxan (Witchcraft Through the Ages), screening with a hammered dulcimer score performed by Geoff Smith. And we review Surrealist silent The Seashell and the Clergyman, which screened at the Union Chapel last month with a soundtrack performed by Minima.

In the DVD section we have Nic Roeg’s perverse erotic thriller Bad Timing and Roger Corman’s Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death

Picking their top films in our Jukebox is Airport Girl, a downbeat country-pop combo hailing from the Midlands. Take a look at their selection here!

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! We’re pleased to announce that our April winner is Abigail Brown. Well done Abigail, you’ve won our big Masumura prize, which includes DVDs of Blind Beast, Red Angel and Manji, courtesy of Yume Pictures. This month we have a DVD of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s legendary surreal Western El Topo, courtesy of Tartan Video. So get spinning!

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Hooray for April! King of mavericks Alejandro Jodorowsky is coming to town and we can barely contain our excitement. The BFI Southbank will be screening three of the master fabulador’s films in anticipation of their DVD release next month and they are all reviewed here: Jodorowsky’s provocative first feature Fando Y Lis, his legendary surreal Western El Topo and the absurdist spiritual quest The Holy Mountain. These films have long been unavailable so this is a rare opportunity to see them on a big screen. We caught up with Jodorowsky during his short visit to the Uk – read the interview here!

In the general releases Danny Boyle tries his hand at sci-fi with Sunshine while Shane Meadows takes on skinhead culture in This is England. Scott Walker 30 Century Man is our Rock’n’Roll movie of the month, charting the elusive singer’s career from sixties pop star to obscure experimentalist. And as part of their ‘Silent Film and Live Music’ series the Barbican are presenting Tod Browning’s outlandishly poetic The Unknown with live accompaniment by DJ Nacho Martin.

DVD of the month is Manji, a wild tale of lesbian love, adultery and deceit from the criminally underrated Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura – look out for our special Masumura issue next month. Also out is Fighting Delinquents, a thoroughly enjoyable early rebellious-youth flick by Seijun Suzuki.

Picking their film faves in our Jukebox this month is Headless, another all-girl London band – yes, we are rather partial to all-girl bands… Take a look at their selection here!

Every month we’ll give you the chance to get your cinephile hands on a film prize – all you have to do to win is spin the Film Roulette! We’re pleased to announce that our March winner is Joao da Silva. Well done Joao, you’ve won a DVD of The Brothers Quay Shorts, courtesy of the BFI. This month we have a big Masumura prize to give away as Yume Pictures have very nicely thrown in Blind Beast and Red Angel as well as Manji. So if you fancy a feast of unhinged sixties Japanese cinema, get spinning!

The Electric Sheep Magazine team