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

Time to don your tin foil suit and X-Ray glasses: the Sci-Fi London Film Festival is back for its 7th edition! Read our preview and find out what’s in store – time travel and superheroes for sure but expect strange fantasies and visionary nightmares too. This month also sees the release of Park Chan-wook’s latest, I’m a Cyborg, a sort-of-sci-fi, wonderfully bizarre bonbon of a film. And we have an interview with Park Chan-wook – oh yes, we talked to Mister Vengeance himself.

Back on earth, it’s all politics and fanatics: we have a review of the sharply funny animated film Persepolis, which chronicles recent Iranian history through the eyes of an opinionated young girl, as well as an interview with the film’s brilliantly entertaining director Marjane Satrapi. The murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh’s political thriller The Sixth of May, which focuses on the real-life assassination of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, is also out on DVD. And there’s more mind-boggling political conspiracy on offer with Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy, showing at The East End Film Festival.

Elsewhere, we have reviews of Michael Haneke’s US remake of his own Funny Games, Belgian shocker Ex-Drummer (our rock’n’roll film of the month), a double shot of exhilarating ‘pinky violence’ with Sex and Fury and Female Yakuza, as well as two unsurpassable classics, Hitchcock’s Sabotage and Antonioni’s La Notte. We also talked to French provocatrice Catherine Breillat, whose latest, The Last Mistress, is released this month. And we report on the Berlinale Film Festival and on the first Midnight Movies night at the Curzon Cinema, and what a hoot that was!

In the Short Cuts, we have a profile of director Sean Conway while CJ Magnet muses on the similarities between Black Orpheus and Braveheart in The Last Word.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team

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

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