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May-June 2009

Kent Jones on The Limits of Control, plus an interview with director Jim Jarmusch by Gavin Smith, Amy Taubin on Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Oliver Sacks’s examination of Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, Hot Property: Can Go Through Skin by Chris Chang, National Film Board of Canada website, a review of Departures by Tony Rayns

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Featured Articles

Issue Details

FEATURES

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
By Oliver Sacks
A neurological take on Powell & Pressburger’s heavenly fantasy

JIM JARMUSCH
By Gavin Smith
The director of The Limits of Control talks about going out on a limb
Plus: Kent Jones on a trance film for our times

THE HURT LOCKER
By Amy Taubin
What makes Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War procedural tick

SECOND IMPRESSIONS
By Phillip Lopate
Reversals of opinion, about-faces, flip-flops, and other acts of wanton revisionism
Plus: nine critics fess up to changing their minds

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
By Kent Jones
Movies rarely depict the realities of the workplace but Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 classic gets it right

CINEMA’S AFTERLIFE
By Chris Petit
If cinema as we know it ended sometime last century, it lives on as a succession of haunted screens, unmade films, and empty rooms

DEPARTMENTS

EDITOR’S LETTER

OPENING SHOTS
News, Hot Property: Esther Rots’s Can Go Through Skin by Chris Chang, Alex Cox’s 1,000 Ways to Die: Marco Ferreri’s Don’t Touch the White Woman!, Site Specifics: The National Film Board of Canada by Paul Fileri, The Trivial Top 20® (expanded to 40): Best Directors Who Died Young

OLAF’S WORLD
Vlado Škafar by Olaf Möller

CRITICS CHOICE
Eight critics rate 25 new releases

SOUND & VISION
Peer Raben by Chris Chang and Jane & Louise Wilson’s Kubrick installation by Chris Darke

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
Agnès Jaoui by Harlan Jacobson

ENCORE
The Small Back Room by Megan Ratner

FESTIVALS
Berlin by Olaf Möller

SCREENINGS
The Girlfriend Experience by Melissa Anderson, Away We Go by David Zuckerman, Departures by Tony Rayns, Pontypool by José Teodoro, Tetro by Nathan Lee, Chéri by Phillip Lopate, Three Monkeys by Can Eskinazi

SHORT TAKES
Easy Virtue by Laura Kern, Eldorado by Nicolas Rapold, Empty Nest by Nicolas Rapold, Food, Inc. by Nicolas Rapold, Moon by Laura Kern, O’Horten by Laura Kern

HOME MOVIES
Pigs, Pimps and Prostitutes: Criterion’s Imamura box set

READINGS
Thorold Dickinson: A World of FilmLife as We Show It

CLOSING SHOTS
Who’s who at recent Film Society events