Afterschool was one of the best films we saw at last year’s London Film Festival so we’re very pleased that it is now getting a theatrical release in the UK. Other theatrical treats this month include Mesrine, a two-part epic about the charismatic criminal who terrorised France in the 70s, with a phenomenal Vincent Cassel in the title role. Germany offers its own take on the seductive gangster type with Chiko, set in the Turkish community of Hamburg. Sin Nombre is a powerful drama that combines illegal immigrants and Mexican gangs – read our interview with American director Cary Fukunaga to find out more about the unusual and dangerous making of the film. Beautiful Losers documents New York’s Alleged Gallery and the outsider artists such as Harmony Korine and Mike Mills who gravitated around it in the early 90s – we have an interview with director and Alleged Gallery founder Aaron Rose. Finally, Home is an intimate drama that looks at the coming apart of a family when a new motorway opens near their house.

Film4 FrightFest returns at the end of the month with a fantastic programme of chillers and shockers and we are particularly looking forward to Triangle, Pontypool, Heartless and Black. We are planning to attend assiduously and will report back in our September issue.

In the DVD releases we look at two new films from Terracotta, the exuberantly macabre The Fox Family and the understated ensemble drama God Man Dog from Taiwan. We also take a look at Rolf de Heer’s infamous Bad Boy Bubby, Paul Schrader’s Mishima and Orson Welles’s The Stranger.

We have an interview with Baek Seung–bin, director of the remarkable Members of the Funeral, which impressed us at the Edinburgh Film Festival, although it is yet to secure a UK release. In the Short Cuts we have a report on the Soho Rushes Film Festival while The Nightingales are this month’s Film Jukebox guests.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

This month we look at disastrous Danish relationships with neo-noir Just Another Love Story and Lars von Trier’s latest, Antichrist. Two of our writers try to fathom von Trier’s extreme narrative of conjugal meltdown while in our interview with the director he explains some of the ideas behind the film.

Also out at the cinema in July is Duncan Jones’s Moon, a great new addition to British science fiction cinema. In the DVD releases, we take a look at Roger Corman’s Depression-era crime saga Bloody Mama and discover Jacques Tati’s little-known Parade.

We talk to Claire Denis about her new film 35 Shots of Rhum, report on this year’s Sydney Film Festival‘s focus on female directors and assess the state of gay cinema through an account of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and a review of Boys on Film 2: In Too Deep.

We are also very proud to have an interview with Dario Argento, who was a guest at Cine-Excess last month. And in the Short Cuts section, we talk to artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard about the films they made to accompany the re-release of the whole back catalogue of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

Substitute is the theme of the summer 09 issue of Electric Sheep, with articles on the fraught relationship between Takeshi Kitano and ‘Beat’ Takeshi, the various cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, interchanging identities in Joseph Losey’s films, the dangers of false impersonation in Danish neo-noir Just Another Love Story, the paradoxes of black and white twins in offbeat lost classic Suture, not to mention cross-dressing criminals, androids and body snatchers. Also in this issue: interview with Marc Caro, profile of whiz-kid animator David OReilly, comic strip review of Hardware, and The Phantom Band’s favourite films! It is available from the specialist book store Cinéphilia, at selected retailers and cinemas or online from Wallflower Press.

As the ICA hosts a season of new British cinema, we take a closer look at some of the young directors who are steering clear of narrow social realism and genre clichés to carve their own individual filmmaking paths. We have reviews of gritty supernatural drama The Disappeared, imaginative quotidian crime drama The Blue Tower and an interview with Julian Richards, director of the intelligent hoodie horror thriller Summer Scars. We also revisit Gerald McMorrow’s stunningly ambitious debut Franklyn to mark its DVD release this month.

From the new to the established, if somewhat underappreciated, names of film history: we are very proud to present an interview with the legendary Kenneth Anger, whose films have been collected as the Magick Lantern Cycle in a superb BFI two-disc set. And we have an article on Joseph Losey, who is the focus of a major retrospective at the BFI Southbank throughout June and July.

Other cinema releases include slick French thriller Anything for Her while in the DVD releases we review the mondo-style documentaries Primitive London and London in the Raw, Věra Chytilová’s exhilarating Dada-inflected Daisies, Walerian Borowczyk’s exquisitely absurd Goto, l’ile d’amour, Dziga Vertov’s sound experiment Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass and Italian exploitation movie Baba Yaga, based on Guido Crepax’s comic Valentina.

We report back on the Cannes festival and preview Club des Femmes‘ summer programme of swinging lesbian films. We also have an interview with Bulgarian director Javor Gardev, who was presenting his brilliant Eastern European noir Zift at the Istanbul Film Festival in April.

In the Short Cuts we talk to shorts producer Rob Speranza who was a guest at the Glimmer 09 Festival. And Scottish innovators The Phantom Band are in the Film Jukebox guiding us through their favourite films.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

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