Our November issue is feeling festive. We've journeyed to Venice and Toronto, seen the sights (new films by the Coens, Soderbergh, Solondz, Moore, Rivette, Denis, Akin, Tsukamoto, not to mention several fresh discoveries – nor indeed two eye-popping new Herzog features), and now we're bringing it all back home. The 2009 London Film Festival is shaping up as one of the liveliest in many a year; we've an extended preview, including interviews with festival opener Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr Fox), Cannes Grand Prix-winner Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, an easy choice for our own Sight & Sound Special Screening), Jessica Hausner (Lourdes, a poker-faced religious 'fairytale'), veteran documentarist Frederick Wiseman (back on favoured stomping ground with La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet) and film-composer extraordinaire Neil Brand, who has scored Anthony Asquith's long-forgotten 1928 Underground.

Then there will be blood. Kevin Jackson talks us through the new breed of vampire films – Twilight, True Blood and Thirst – while James Bell interviews the latter's director, Park Chan-wook. If only the West African child soldiers of Johnny Mad Dog were mere myths. Linda Ruth Williams puts the film in context, while Jonathan Romney interviews its director, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire. And Nick James hears Peter Strickland's tale of the trials behind the making of his Transylvanian revenge fable Katalin Varga – and wonders if the result is the best British film of the year.

We also talk to Pete Docter and Jonas Rivera (Up), Robert Guédiguian (Army of Crime), Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) and video artist Deimantas Narkevicius. Kim Newman previews Frightfest, Charles Gant tallies the Tarantino effect on Inglourious Basterds' box office, Nick Roddick writes “thank you, Mr Murdoch” and we mourn young film critics Alexis A. Tioseco and Nika Bohinc.

Our elite platoon of reviewers this month round up 37 new cinema releases (including An Education, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno and Love Exposure) and 20 DVDs (including features on Cassavetes' Husbands, Zulawski's L'Important c'est d'aimer and Lord Nelson, Korda-style). And our Books pages whisk you from Gone with the Wind to post-Hammer British horror via the film writing of Alistair Cooke.