Humankind has been flying almost as long as it has been filmmaking, but we’re only just waving farewell to the cinema’s greatest poet of flight. Studio Ghibli’s resident genius Miyazaki Hayao has made pigs, witches, post-apocalyptic princesses, catbuses and castles fly, in wild, fantastical, heroic fables that have made our hearts soar. Now, with The Wind Rises, he has signed off with perhaps the film he has spent his career trying not to make: a resolutely sad, realist period fable of a boy who dreams of flight, and pursues that dream into adulthood – becoming the designer of Japan’s famous Zero fighter plane, with which his country launched, kamikaze-style, the War in the Pacific.

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As Nick Bradshaw explores in our special issue saying sayonara to Miyazaki-san, this fictional biopic of the real-life Horikoshi Jiro is Miyazaki’s most personal as well as his most pessimistic. It honours the era of Miyazaki’s father, who manufactured parts for the Zero plane, paying close heed to the traumas of the age (from earthquakes to tuberculosis) as well as of Japan’s transition to modernity, and recreates all this through a weave of allusions to modernist art and literature. Helen McCarthy investigates that wide web of influences on Miyazaki’s work, from Kurosawa and manga to Moebius, Russian landscape painting and Swallows and Amazons, while two of Miyazaki’s long-term Studio Ghibli collaborators, Kosaka Kitaro and Suzuki Toshio, relate their experiences of working with the master. Meanwhile, Jasper Sharp scans the horizon for the anime talents who might step into Miyazaki’s shoes.

The clouds of modern history and politics darken much of this month’s features. “We are mobilised and we have been for 100 years just as we are accustomed now to the regularity of senseless destruction,” writes David Thomson at the conclusion of his survey of a centenary of movies about the First World War – finding much of that cannon guilty of sentimentality, clichés, romanticism, political simplicity, ignorance and an inability to capture the fear or chaos. Still, he gives us a mammoth and salutary survey.

And the best of this month’s new features consider the present-day violence in two countries still undergoing new forms of modernisation and its attendant dislocations, China and Mexico. A Touch of Sin (which you may remember riding high in our critics’ poll of the , even before its UK release) is Jia Zhangke’s return to scripted fiction filmmaking after eight years of experiments with documentaries and docudramas. It’s a quartet of torn-from-the-social-media-headlines stories of violence from up and down China, abstracted partly through the style of martial-arts genre films of King Hu (Dragon Gate Inn, A Touch of Zen) and partly through that of traditional Chinese-temple murals. “My aim is to emphasise the inevitable but hidden connections between people rather than the randomness of our encounters,” Jia tells Tony Rayns. “The essence of a martial-arts film is a story of rebellion against a social order or against social taboos, A Touch of Sin reflects real-life violence.”

In Heli, meanwhile, Mexico’s Amat Escalante (Sangre, Los bastardos) takes the opposite tack, aiming to reflect the reality of the violence of Mexico’s drug wars with unflinching realism. “Cinema is to see things, you know?” he tells Jonathan Romney. One thing is the idea of those things, when you read it in a newspaper – it’s different if you see it and are confronted by it, and you almost feel it viscerally.” In this drama of a working family rent asunder by the advent of a drug package in their home, there’s a particular, unforgettable scene of gang-torture which threatens to overwhelm the rest of the film – but beyond it, Romney finds, there are complexities, respite and compassion to cling to.

Our final feature is the Sight & Sound Interview with art-horror’s own Dario Argento (Suspiria, Tenebrae), who talks Pasquale Iannone through a career that has ranged from co-writing Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West with Bernardo Bertolucci via collaborations with George A. Romero to recent work in television and with 3D. But there’s more! And it spans Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Borzage, Hollywood directors in World War II, McCarthy exiles in Europe, Henri Langlois, the sounds of Nashville, Tessa Ross, Ryan Trecartin and Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit – plus Mark Cousins on class, and Hannah McGill on shoes…