Cover feature: ON THE ROAD AGAIN A bold blend of rock-star hip and Holocaust hauntology, Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place is an oddball vehicle for Sean Penn. By Jonathan Romney PLUS John Wrathall on what US stars learn from Italian auteurs PLUS Paul Mayersberg on the enigma at the heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s four Italian films

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PLATZ ENTERTAINMENT A very public battle for the Golden Bear divided this year’s Berlin Film Festival, says Nick James

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT With Once upon a Time in Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan turns his contemplative eye on a murder investigation. The Turkish director talks to Geoff Andrew PLUS extracts from Ceylan’s diary of the editing process

THE 400 HITS Lena Dunham is one of a new breed of directors who find their first audience on YouTube, but her debut feature Tiny Furniture shows there’s more to her than navel-gazing, says Melissa Anderson

ACT OF FAITH In 1954, a student hung out with Carl Theodor Dreyer on the set of Ordet, and transcribed his conversations with the great Danish director. An extract from the new memoir by Jan Wahl

LA COMEDIE HUMAINE The Kid with a Bike is the latest of a series of extraordinary features with which the Dardenne brothers have turned a bleak industrial town in Belgium into a microcosm of all human life. By Jonathan Romney

LIGHT MY FIRE Could the Argentinian revolutionary classic The Hour of the Furnaces be a contender for S&S’s Greatest Film of All Time poll, asks Nicole Brenez

THE HAND THAT ROCKED THE KREMLIN Jirí Trnka brought fairytales to life in spellbinding puppet animation – until his last film took on Stalinism. Peter Hames celebrates the centenary of the great Czech animator

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Roger Clarke talks the Holocaust and The Wire with Polish director Agnieszka Holland

Sue Woods mourns the passing of the Central Office of Information

Charles Gant assesses the box-office fate of this year’s Oscar contenders

Mark Le Fanu pays tribute to Gervaise, a key example of Zola on film

Ryan Powell heralds the rediscovered super-8 shorts of gay underground pioneer Peter de Rome

Mike Leigh pays tribute to US indie stalwart Bingham Ray

Nick Roddick on the gulf between cinema’s “two cultures”

Letters Googie Withers; film culture wars; Hadewijch’s theology lesson

FILM OF THE MONTH

Into the Abyss A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life Into the Abyss is not just a compelling documentary about a convicted murderer on Death Row, but a further chapter in Werner Herzog’s obsessive exploration of the American way of life – and death. By Tony Rayns

• 36 other cinema releases reviewed

DVD FEATURES

Kim Newman on the closest we can get to the director’s cut of The Devils

Nick Bradshaw rediscovers the street-life docs of Lionel Rogosin

Tim Lucas on the one-off collaboration of Nicolas Roeg and Dennis Potter

• 18 other releases reviewed

BOOK REVIEWS

Edward Buscombe finds new revelations in a biography of pioneer producer Thomas Ince

Sonia Mullett weighs up a new critical take on Ozu’s Late Spring

Dan Callahan hopes for more from a biography of Loretta Young

Peter Tonguette relishes the memoirs of Orson Welles’s love-child