Cover feature: SEX AND THE CITY Steve McQueen’s Shame reinvents the cinematic New York loner as sex addict. He discusses sexism and racism with Nick James

• Shame star Michael Fassbender talks about working off the rails and the cruelty of siblings

Plus

THE ICEGIRL COMETH Kim Newman questions whether David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo does justice to the Swedish story’s icy heroine

PLUS John Wrathall on Hollywood’s love affair with all things Nordic

MYTHOMANIA Following his death last November, Linda Ruth Williams and Mark Kermode celebrate the maverick exuberance of Ken Russell

LOST HIGHWAY As Two-Lane Blacktop celebrates its fortieth anniversary, Ian Penman hails Monte Hellman’s cult road movie

‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE There’s more to Bertrand Bonello’s brothel-set House of Tolerance than sex, he tells Catherine Wheatley

ARTIST OF THE FLOATING WORLD Graham Fuller proposes Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante for consideration in S&S’s ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ poll

ONE FROM THE HEART John Akomfrah, director of Handsworth Songs, is back with The Nine Muses. He tells Kieron Corless about fusing Greek myth and black British experience

CHARLIE’S GHOST As Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday arrives, Matthew Sweet asks why his work isn’t seen more often on today’s screens

THE SWEEP OF HISTORY As his oeuvre is released on DVD, Theo Angelopoulos revisits his career with David Jenkins

Plus

David Thompson pays extended tribute to the late critic, novelist and screenwriter Gilbert Adair

Edward Lawrenson celebrates A Useful Life, an off-beat portrait of a Uruguayan movie obsessive

Tony Rayns hails the rediscovery of André Delvaux’s The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, a 1960s Belgian landmark

Roger Clarke reports from a ghostly post-Berlusconi Turin Film Festival

Charles Gant considers the year’s highest-earning prestige pictures

Nick Roddick smells something fishy in the notion of festivals as a new model of distribution

Letters: The joys of DIY distribution, the respective vagaries of Straw Dogs and digital projection, the trouble with The Thing

FILM OF THE MONTH:

The Descendants Alexander Payne’s follow-up to About Schmidt and Sideways is a characteristic mix of funny and painful, with Hawaii lawyer George Clooney struggling with family baggage as his wife lies in a coma. By Philip Kemp

• 33 other cinema releases reviewed

DVD FEATURES:

Michael Brooke reappraises Francis Ford Coppola’s surveillance tale The Conversation

Kate Stables reassesses the charms of popular child star Sabu

Tim Lucas revisits Gerard Depardieu’s sexually charged breakthrough Going Places

• 15 other releases

BOOK REVIEWS:

Philip Horne delves into a new book of conversations with Martin Scorsese

Michael Brooke commends a whistle-stop tour of the GPO Film Unit

Kim Newman asks whether on-screen boxers lose even when they win

Maria M. Delgado on the wide-reaching influence of Elías Querejeta