Cover feature: MINOR QUAY Since leaving his native Finland, director Aki Kaurismäki has broadened his canvas with Le Havre, but his deadpan vision remains the same. Michael Brooke talks to him, and surveys his career to date

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A MAN APART Artist-filmmaker Ben Rivers’s feature debut Two Years at Sea is a mesmerising portrait of life on the margins. He talks to Andréa Picard

WHIT AND WHIMSY Fans of Whit Stillman have had a long wait for another taste of his acerbic dialogue and wry social portraiture. He talks to Nick Pinkerton about his first film in 14 years, Damsels in Distress

REVOLT INTO STYLE From Futurism to Dogme, filmmakers have felt the urge to pronounce new laws of their art. Nick James charts a brief history of the mianifesto

BLOOD AND SAND In the first of two pieces on contenders for S&S ’s upcoming Greatest Film of All Time poll, Hannah McGill revisits Beau Travail, Claire Denis’s rapturous 1998 exploration of male identity

THE GREAT ESCAPE In past polls, Jean Renoir’s WWI classic La Grande Illusion has tended to lose out to the director’s later La Règle du jeu. It’s time to reconsider, says Ginette Vincendeau

MOON KAMPF Timo Vuorensola’s satirical sci-fi comedy Iron Sky takes Nazi scientific theory to its illogical conclusion. By Kim Newman

A CANADIAN IN PARIS What is Winnipeg’s most famous director Guy Maddin up to in the basement of the Pompidou Centre? Jonathan Romney pays his respects to The Seances Project

Plus

Roger Clarke interviews director Dominik Moll about The Monk

Patrick Russell reports from the IVCA Awards

Charles Gant on The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s success with an older audience

Vlastimir Sudar rediscovers a European classic by Aleksandar Petrovic

Geoffrey Macnab on the Sundance festival’s London spin-off

Mark Cousins on reactions to his 15-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey

Nick Roddick on our changing relationship to the moving image

Letters Lynch and Narnia, responses to Hugo, Googie Withers

FILM OF THE MONTH

Goodbye First Love/Un Amour de jeunesse

Girl meets boy, girls loses boy, girl meets older man… The new film by Mia Hansen-Løve confirms the promise of Father of My Children with a frank – and very French – look at the pangs of young love, says Philip Kemp

• 39 other cinema releases reviewed

DVD FEATURES

Brad Stevens welcomes the release of four films by Mizoguchi Kenji

Geoffrey Macnab revisits a quartet of post-war classics from Poland

Tim Lucas is captivated by a new film that brings Bruegel to life

• 17 other releases reviewed

BOOK REVIEWS

Nick Pinkerton savours a film-by-film appreciation of Barbara Stanwyck

John Wrathall evaluates tips from yet another guide to the art of screenwriting

Michael Atkinson hails a pioneering survey of the career of Russian director Alexander Sokurov

Jane Giles relishes a good-natured account of Hollywood sexual excess from the 1940s to the 1980s

READER OFFERS

Greta Garbo: Five biographies to be won

Ingmar Bergman: Four classic collections on DVD or Blu-ray to be won

Las Acacias: Five copies of Pablo Giorgelli’s film