Sight and Sound April 2018

April 2018 edition of Sight and Sound. The cover image is a photograph of American film director, Wes Anderson, posing with stop motion figurines featured in his animated feature, 'Isle of Dogs'. The cover feature sees Anderson and his co-writers, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Kunichi Nomura, interviewed on their process of producing a futuristic fantasy film with a script written half in English and half in Japanese. Other main features are a piece by Leigh Singer on British female director's latest character-study thriller, 'You Were Never Really Here', starring Joaquin Phoenix as an American veteran marine struggling with post traumatic stress disorder as he takes on an underground sex-trafficking ring; an article by Trevor Johnston on Warwick Thornton's revisionist Australian western, 'Sweet Country', investigating themes of colonialism, racism, and the persecution of indigenous Australians in the 1920s; Jonathan Romney investigates the satirical elements of Swedish director, Ruben Ostlund's recent dark comedy drama, 'The Square', which portrays the pretensions of the art world, curation, and social shaming in contemporary Stockholm, and an essay by Pamela Hutchinson on the star persona of Hedy Lamarr, which examines Hollywood typecasting, the marketing of eroticism, and the unsung history of Lamarr as an amateur scientist and inventor. This feature also includes a short article by Christina Newland on other intelligent female figures in wartime Hollywood, including screenwriter, Catherine Turney, producer, Gilda Van App, and screenwriter-producer, Joan Harrison. In his editorial, Nick James charts a growing trend of the portrayal of 'cold', difficult to like protagonists. He focuses primarily of female characters written by men, and investigates the screen presence of various actors including Frances McDormand, Claire Foy, Suranne Jones, Christian Bale and Jimmy Porter. Other articles include an archive piece which sees Matthew Harle and Jack Wormell chart institutional threats to London's Cinema Museum; Mark Cousins compares the lives and legacies of middle-class, African-American singer and actor, Lena Horne, and the lower class, white Hollywood film star, Susan Hayward, charting the sidelining of women in 20th Century America, as well as discourses around racism and social class, and Nick James reports from the 2018 Berlinale, Berlin Film Festival. In the 'Wide Angle' section, Luke McKernan argues a case against the colourisation of Second World War footage in the wake of Peter Jackson's feature-length documentary, 'They Shall Not Grow Old'. In 'The Numbers', Charles Gant investigates the economic performance of leading British cinema venues, and there is a chart of 'Individual Venue Performances at the UK Box Office'. The films of the month are Marvel superhero film, 'Black Panther' led by a majority black cast and starring Chadwick Boseman as the lead role; Japanese director Koreeda Hirokazu's legal crime thriller, 'The Third Murder', and American director, Stephen Soderbergh's horror film, 'Unsane', which is notably shot entirely with the use of iPhone cameras. Other films reviewed include 'I Got Life!', Blandine Lenoir's romantic comedy about ageing women; Maze Runner: The Death Cure; Fifty Shades Freed; Sandy Suri's documentary, 'Around India with a Movie Camera'; Henry K. Miller's 'The Cloverfield Paradox', which is the third instalment of the science-fiction, 'Cloverfield' franchise, and is produced by J.J. Abrams; music documentary, 'Here to Be Heard: The Story of The Slits', and the recent animated adaptation of the Beatrix Potter, children's story, 'Peter Rabbit'. Book reviews include ' Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film' by Alan K. Rode; 'Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood' by Sherri Snyder; 'Hitchcock and the Spy Film' by James Chapman, and 'The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness' by Robert B. Pippin. In 'Endings', Andrew Gutman revisits the closing sequence of Edward Yang's 'Yi Yi'.