Cannes. Three Monkeys.

"An ostensibly routine noir-style psychological thriller vaults into the realms of high art in competition contender Three Monkeys [site]," writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily.

"Cannes has been kind to Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan in the past, with Uzak and Climates establishing his auteur credentials here in 2003 and 2006. His new film represents a bold departure from his past style: it's best described as introspective melodrama, yet both visually and tonally, it's still quintessential Ceylan."

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Senses of Cinema. 47.

Editors Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray tip their hats to May 68 and cede the floor to Dušan Makavejev, who opens the new issue of Senses of Cinema with a question: "How did I get Otto Muehl and the AA Kommune (Actions-Analytic Kommune) into Sweet Movie?" They weren't rough on him, but they didn't make it easy, either. And then: "At a screening in Taormina, within a minute or two of the Commune scene a few dozen people stood up and ran out of the screening room. And minutes later another three, five and a dozen people left. They were ugly moments. When I went out to hear what they were saying, I found them all watching the film through the exit doors. When the Commune scene ended, they all went back to their seats."

Continue reading "Senses of Cinema. 47."

Cannes. Hunger.

"A visceral, violent and deeply disturbing vision of life in the Maze prison, set during the 'dirty' protests and the second hunger strike of 1981, is offered up by Britain's most prominent entry in the Cannes film festival," writes Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian.

"Steve McQueen's Hunger, which focuses on the death of Bobby Sands after 66 days without food, prompted both applause and walk-outs as it premiered today, opening the prestigious Un Certain Regard section of the festival."

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Cannes. Kung Fu Panda.

"Cartoons at a super-serioso film festival?" asks Time's Richard Corliss. "Mais oui, if the festival is Cannes, which has been hospitable to animation from the start; Walt Disney's Make Mine Music and Dumbo won prizes the first two years.... Today DreamWorks unveiled its latest ani-movie, Kung Fu Panda [site]. As cunning visual art and ultra-satisfying entertainment, it proved an excellent choice."

Variety's Todd McCarthy finds it "a nice looking but heavily formulaic DreamWorks animation entry. The tale of a bumbling, pot-bellied, black-and-white bear who has greatness thrust upon him when anointed to protect his community, the vocally star-laden effort features an abundance of broad, buffoonish slapstick that will play perfectly well with kids to desired BO effect. But overall mild impact will likely prevent this from joining the top commercial tier of animated attractions."

Updated.

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Fests and events, 5/15.

"He captured a society in flux, one making a jarring transition from contentment to discontentment, and he did so from uncommon perspectives," writes Steve Dollar, previewing Celebrating Robert Frank, an evening - this evening - at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. "One oft-cited review deemed his work a “meaningless blur.' But as Jack Kerouac (who served as narrator on Pull My Daisy) wrote in his introduction to the Grove Press edition of The Americans, published in 1959, 'Robert Frank. Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the great tragic poets of the world.'"

Updated.

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Cannes. Lion's Den.

"In his breakthrough film Crane World (1999), Pablo Trapero displayed his mastery at depicting wide open urban spaces and liberating patches of sky in his native Buenos Aires," writes Howard Feinstein for Screen Daily.

"Then, in Born and Bred (2006), he created a parallel world in nature, capturing the endless, intoxicating landscape of Patagonia. Now, with Lion's Den (Leonera) he successfully and gracefully shifts in the reverse direction, creating a suffocating, claustrophobic environment within women's prisons - specifically those that house mothers and their young children."

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Cannes. Four Nights with Anna.

Four Nights with Anna is "the first film in 17 years from the great Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who mostly has spent his time recently acting (he was Naomi Watts's racist Russian uncle in Eastern Promises)," writes Ty Burr.

"The film's small, bleakly funny, quite sad, and beautifully controlled - a tale of peeping-tom passion about a hospital handyman who drugs his favorite nurse's nighttime tea so he can sit and watch her as she sleeps. Creepy, yes, but the film teases the pathos and even nobility out of this wretched man."

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Eno @ 60.

"The quietest revolutionary in rock is 60," writes Nick Hasted in the Independent. "Elvis, Dylan, James Brown, even Oasis, have set more souls alight. But, by working for Microsoft (he wrote the Windows start-up theme), Bowie, U2 and Talking Heads, Brian Eno has parlayed outlandish musical ideas into a ubiquitous and lucrative career."

But of course, Eno's much more than just a musician and producer. He's also shot his own video works, mapped his own scents, exhibited art works... for starters. And now, among other things, he's collaborating with David Byrne again; recent online viewing tip: Eno on Barry Lyndon.

Cannes. Waltz With Bashir.

"Ari Folman's animated documentary could easily turn out to be one of the most powerful statements of this Cannes and will leave its mark forever on the ethics of war films in general," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily.

"Dealing from a very personal point of view with the Israeli incursion into the Lebanon in 1982 and culminating with the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre, which the Israelis did not perpetrate but surely tolerated, this is not only a tremendously potent anti-war movie but also a formidable moral indictment of Israeli conduct at that time."

Updated through 5/16.

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Cannes, 5/15.

It's a bit early in the day for a roundup, but Gregg Goldstein packs so much Wow! in his hot little item at the Hollywood Reporter that this entry cannot wait and will simply have to serve as a sort of Cannes ticker until this long day is done. The lede: "Werner Herzog and David Lynch are teaming for My Son, My Son, a horror-tinged murder drama based on a true story."

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Yella.

"Set in a German nowheresville of conference centers and anonymous greenery, Yella has been lauded as a stringent portrait of disaffecting 'dog-eat-dog' business, like some late-capitalist Western counterpart to Still Life," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "But Christian Petzold's stripped-down, lucid-dreamt drama is more slippery than that.... Despite some superficial overlap, like the formal attention and Yella's red suit, the film has little to do with the 2003 French office film She's One of Us; Petzold's film is more controlled and embodies a conflicted state of mind and being."

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Sangre de mi Sangre.

"In Sangre de mi Sangre, Christopher Zalla serves up an old-fashioned, sentimental weeper with a sucker punch of urban-immigrant horror," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Zalla, a graduate of Columbia's film school, is talented and single-minded. He needs to lighten up, literally. He frames his characters to bring out all their sweaty desperation, and his palette is dark with splashes of muddy brown; even the street scenes look as if they were shot in a dungeon. The director really piles on the grotesquerie."

"Dark and clamorous, never less than tastefully lurid, Sangre de Mi Sangre intimates Luis Buñuel's classic slum drama Los Olvidados - not in terms of the narrative per se, but in the way it deals with conflict and characterization, as though Zalla had recast Buñuel's types (the confused good boy and his delinquent alter ego, the contested woman and the blind miser) in another drama set in another corner of society's basement," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. All in all, it's "contrived, but compelling."

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Shorts, 5/14.

"The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber & Faber), a studious, informative, often astutely argued new book by Phoenix contributor Chris Fujiwara, abounds with horror stories of Preminger's sadistic ways," writes Gerald Peary. Those stories told, "he leaps boldly from tainted biography to the purity of Preminger's artistry, seeing mastery and even a moral vision in the filmmaker's Hollywood oeuvre."

At the AV Club: Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon) and Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie, The Postal Service) talk about, among other things, of course, their respective minor roles in movies.

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Critics, 5/14.

Sigh. Another one. Or almost. "[I]f you've been following my adventures as a film critic for a long while, as I know many of you have, be advised that that lengthy chapter of my life seems to be on the verge of closing," blogs Mike D'Angelo. From home. And not from Cannes.

"I think that some of the current discussions about the souring state of movie criticism would benefit from some thoughts about what criticism is and does." David Bordwell steps back to take in the long view.

Updated through 5/15.

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Fests and events, 5/14.

Chicagoist Rob Christopher has admired the work of William E Jones for some time. "The uncanny feeling that comes from peering into a vanished world is in full force in Jones's newest video, Tearoom, which screens on Sunday at White Light Cinema." Jones will be on hand - with his accompanying book.

"Rarely screened, Rome 78 - part of this week's James Nares retro at Anthology Film Archives - has nevertheless built up its own aura over the years, no doubt due to its subcultural provenance," writes Ed Halter. "Seen now, Rome 78 collapses three layers of dead civilization: The script conveys the waning days of the Roman imperium; the sets evoke the Empire State's 19th-century robber-baron capitalism; and the cast memorializes the last days of urban bohemia's counter-kingdom."

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Cannes, 5/14.

Here we go. Wall-to-wall Cannes, from today through May 25. If the items noted in the "Anticipating Cannes" entry, updated through last night, are any indication, the mood over there is nowhere near as festive as it was when last year's 60th anniversary edition opened. "Everyone may be expecting the bounty of good and even great films from around the world over the next 12 days, but the excitement is tempered by a sense that those films are facing unusually difficult prospects back in the United States." Manohla Dargis and AO Scott open the New York Times coverage on more or less the same downbeat note that Anthony Kaufman did indieWIRE's yesterday.

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Cannes. Blindness.

"Blindness [site] may well be the bleakest curtain raiser in the history of the festival, a nightmarish parable of the apocalypse, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles and just as impressive in its way as his career-making City of God," writes the Guardian's Xan Brooks.

"Blindness feels like a curious mix of highbrow literary aspirations and lowbrow genre fiction," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "[I]t'd be easy to dismiss Blindness as Dawn of the Dead for NPR listeners or Outbreak for grad students.... But while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort; Blindness shows us a world of wide-eyed sightlessness, and it does so through a fierce vision that only occasionally loses focus."

Updated through 5/16.

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Jennifer Jones.

"During a long career, celebrated by the Film Society of Lincoln Center this week, [Jennifer] Jones managed to avoid typecasting and appeared in roles ranging from the innocent and saintly to the wild and hysterical, working with a number of major directors - Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, and Vittorio de Sica, to name a few. Yet, never secure with stardom, Jones was driven to pursue it by [David O] Selznick's Svengali-like obsession with her." For the Voice, Elliot Stein previews Saint and Sinner: The Tempestuous Career of Jennifer Jones, running Friday through May 24.

Updated through 5/16.

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Reprise.

"Joachim Trier's dazzlingly kinetic tale of two aspiring Norwegian cult novelists is bounded by fantasies of what might have become of the friends and literary competitors after the publication of their first novels," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "But Reprise - a masculine story whose women come off best - is less a hermeneutic finger in your face (though it aims wonderfully low blows at literary celebrity) than a savage, funny, tender, tragic, and strangely beautiful riff on growing up in a broken world."

Updated through 5/15.

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Paraguayan Hammock.

"While gore-fests may get the most attention in the realm of horror films, perhaps not enough is given to that darkness of art-house cinema, the secret repose for the most suggestive kind of horror: the ghost story," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Paz Encina's New Crowned Hope entry, Hamaca paraguaya (Paraguayan Hammock) is an excellent example, where-in what is nominally dubbed a pretentious or at the very least plodding aesthetic and focus is really just looking at the same picture the wrong way.... [H]aunted by what's not there, we are always hoping that which is missing will appear, that which is longed for will be relieved."

Continue reading "Paraguayan Hammock."

Sinatra.

"Comes a report that Martin Scorsese might be doing a film about Frank Sinatra - and not a documentary but an honest-to-God biopic," notes Shawn Levy. "I've written a book about Sinatra, so I know that there's more than a ton of material there for a movie."

"The life and work of Frank Sinatra, who passed away 10 years ago tomorrow, will be celebrated in film, television, radio, and even a commemorative 42-cent Sinatra postage stamp, which will be issued today," notes Charlotte Cowles. Two DVD sets are out today, too, the Early Years and the Golden Years. "His film work is often remembered as an adjunct to a musician's career," writes Gary Giddins:

Updated through 5/14.

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DVDs, 5/13.

"Had it been even marginally successful, Raoul Walsh's 1930 epic western, The Big Trail might have changed the course of film history." Dave Kehr explains in the New York Times. Fascinating stuff. Also: reviews of two films by Mitchell Leisen, "[t]he very model of the crack studio director": "the 1937 Easy Living, with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland in a romantic comedy written by Preston Sturges, and the 1939 Midnight, a Parisian farce with Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and John Barrymore, from a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett."

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Godard, the 60s and 1968.

Following this one, the most recent entry on May 68 has fallen off the page. Reflections on that particular 40th anniversary will likely subside and the series 1968: An International Perspective wraps tomorrow; but Godard's 60s rolls on at Film Forum through June 5. Hence the tweak in the entry title.

"A major contradiction of Jean-Luc Godard's 60s films is that for all their difficulty, abrasiveness, unconventionality, and 'distance,' they are largely pleasurable works," blogs Reverse Shot's mjr. But not all of them. "Universally trashed by critics and audiences alike upon its release, Les Carabiniers still hasn't been successfully rescued or rediscovered in recent years. What caused it to be so rejected then and forgotten now?" This one's "ripe for reevaluation."

Updated through 5/15.

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Fests and events, 5/13.

"Miranda July is making another movie?" asks the Playlist. "Yes. We tried to ask him about it afterward, but got cockblocked from some wealthy, air-kissing sycophants, but during the Q&A following a Brooklyn screening of Ken Park, the co-director and lauded cinematographer Ed Lachman revealed his next project would be lensing July's next film."

Andrew Hultkrans was there, too, for Artforum, and writes of Ken Park, "As with Kids, it's hard to know what to make of this stuff. The characters and situations are compelling, and Lachman's cinematography is masterful throughout, with sickly green lighting for interiors and crisp, bright sunny exteriors heightening the contrast with the teens' dark lives."

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Robert Rauschenberg, 1925 - 2008.

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82....

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he... helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.

Updated through 5/16.

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Olivier Debroise, 1952 - 2008.

At e-flux, Cuauhtémoc Medina remembers Mexican critic, curator, novelist and activist Olivier Debroise, who died on May 7, by presenting "an incredible, though incomplete, list of the roles he played, shots he fired, and crossfire in which he was caught."

On that list: "The experimental filmmaker who, having worked on Jodorowsky's La Montaña Sagrada, absorbed the actoral improvisation of Claude Lelouch and the intellectual poetics of Godard and Pasolini, and succeeded in producing one of the most audacious feature-length experimental films ever: Un Banquete en Tetlapayac (A Banquet in Tetlapayac, 1997-1998), a re-interpretation and tableau vivant that addresses the paradoxes of Mexicanism, communism and homosexuality within Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Qué viva México! (1931-2)."

Outook. Bollywood.

"Outlook's Bollywood Special this year looks at the very core of commercial cinema - the Hindi film star, the one who makes or breaks a film, box-office records, and people's hearts, whose appeal is of the moment, and enduring, time-tested and timeless, give or take a bomb or two." Namrata Joshi introduces the package with polls and a talk with Amitabh Bachchan, who, hardly surprisingly, has come out on top of the "Favourite Star of All Times" poll.

Sex and the City in... London?

"It was coarse, sentimental, and outrageously materialistic - just as we hoped and expected it would be." Sex and the City: The Movie premiered in London last night and Celia Walden was there. Also in the Telegraph, John Hiscock talks with Cynthia Nixon.

"If the atmosphere inside the cinema bordered on the devotional and the theatre was filled with the sounds of women emoting, outside the atmosphere was hysterical," writes Will Pavia, who gives the movie itself two out of five stars in the London Times.

Updated through 5/15.

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Turner. Shortlist.

"Sculptors and filmmakers reign on the shortlist for the 2008 Turner prize, which was unveiled this morning," announces Andrew Dickson in the Guardian. "Three women are in the running for this year's prize, which is awarded to a British-based artist under 50 for work created in the past year. They are sculptor Cathy Wilkes, Runa Islam, who works primarily in film, and Goshka Macuga, who has been described as a 'cultural archaeologist.' The final artist on the shortlist is Mark Leckey, who was nominated for his solo exhibition Industrial Light & Magic and works in a variety of media, including video."

Jonathan Jones is rooting for Leckey: "I find this artist irresistible. He haunts the secret parts of modern culture, where memory and emotion linger by a rusting abstract sculpture. He is represented by the same galleries that have nurtured almost all the artists I've called subjective anthropologists."

SFIFF Dispatch. 9.

Brian Darr Bruce Conner's Cannes-bound - and possibly last - film.

According to the Walker Art Center's 1999 volume 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II (there is no Part I,) the first screening of Bruce Conner's first film, the seminal A Movie, was held in 1958 at the East and West Gallery in San Francisco. That year, the first West Coast solo exhibition of his painting, drawing and collage work was hung at the venue. Now, 50 years later, Conner's work is coming into the light once more. An exhibition of photographs he took in 1977-8 at the epicenter of San Francisco punk rock, Ness Aquino's Mabuhay Gardens, will display at the Berkeley Art Museum June 4 through August 3. And for the first time ever, a Bruce Conner film will be going to the Cannes Film Festival. Entitled Easter Morning, this 10-minute-long work takes a piece of 8mm film called Easter Morning Raga, which had been intended to be looped and projected at a variety of speeds in installation settings, and locks it to a newly-selected piece of music by Terry Riley. I had the good fortune to see it at the San Francisco International FIlm Festival in a program co-sponsored by SF Cinematheque entitled Alternate Geographies.

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SFIFF Dispatch. 8.

David D'Arcy on two docs at the recently wrapped festival.

At a San Francisco International Film Festival full of surprises (mostly on the small side), Forbidden Lie$ was one of the most satisfying. The Australian documentary by Anna Broinowski tracks the story of Norma Khouri, a Jordanian woman, with a disarmingly American way of speaking, whose best-selling book, Forbidden Love, about an honor killing in Jordan turned out to be a hoax. So did Khouri's story about being a Jordanian, as did her story about not being married, and her stories about everything else. It was only the beginning of a documentary, filled with the stylistic characteristics of page-turning fiction, that revealed a string of hoaxes conducted by a woman with a frightening gift for winning the confidence of her victims.

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Shorts, 5/12.

Has a movie/real world analogy ever been taken quite this far?

In a kind of smart, kind of kooky yet undeniably enjoyable piece for the National Interest, John C Hulsman and A Wess Mitchell argue that "given the present changes in the world's power structure," The Godfather "becomes a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems of our times." Following the shooting of Vito Corleone, "Tom Hagen, Sonny and Michael approximate the three American foreign-policy schools of thought - liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism - vying for control in today's disarranged world order." Via Andrew Sullivan.

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Fests and events, 5/12.

At indieWIRE, Peter Knegt has the lineup for the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Film Festival (Newfest), running June 5 through 15.

"The most exciting Korean films scheduled to appear in theaters this May all happen to be made decades ago," writes Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilms.org. "This is because the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) is holding a festival to commemorate the official opening of their new cinematheque and film museum."

"Ironically, the big winner of the 13th It's All True International Documentary Film Festival, Pan-Cinema Permanente directed by Carlos Nader, features a subject that declares, 'I don't need truths! Just lies. Essential lies.'" Michael Gibbons: "That pretty much sums up poet Waly Salomão's over-the-top attitude in this film that is a loving portrait made by a dear friend. Salomão was an excessive personality who made life a performance."

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Banja Luka Dispatch.

Ronald Bergan's just served on a jury at a promising new festival.

Banja Luka (pronounced Banya Looka) in the Republic of Srpska (pronounced Srepska) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And there is no doubt that the BLIFF (Banja Luka International Film Festival) can be pronounced a success. The name of Banja Luka is probably associated for many with the tragic period of the 2003 war in the former Yugoslavia but it is to be hoped that in future it will be synonymous with the film festival instead.

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Bright Lights. 60.

"The 20th anniversary of the publication of [Roger] Ebert's Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook - perhaps the best book ever written about experiencing the Cannes Film Festival - gives us an excellent occasion to revisit this classic and consider just how the Cannes of today has changed, or failed to change, since the 1980s," writes Kenneth T Rivers in a timely piece for the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal (in which editor Gary Morris suggests that something big and, above all, bright is in the works, details of which are to be divulged shortly).

"The harshest thing the French have to say about themselves is that they aren't serious," writes Alan Vanneman in a close reading - and reconsideration - of a classic that no longer bowls him over. "The Revolution, after all, which many French still like to believe was the most important event in human history, which was supposed to change everything, actually changed nothing. If the Revolution didn't matter, how can anything matter? In The Rules of the Game, Renoir satirizes this languor, but ultimately doesn't escape it."

Continue reading "Bright Lights. 60."

Brooklyn Rail. May 08.

The Flight of the Red Balloon has Ara Osterweil revisiting Hou Hsiao-hsien's oeuvre in the new issue of the Brooklyn Rail: "[A]s anyone who has watched Hou's films knows, history ain't like pornography: you don't always know it when you see it. Distracted by Hou's roving camera, or by objects obscuring the 'action' in the foreground of the frame, it's easy to miss the elephant in the room. What is inescapable for people actually living through violent shifts of political power is almost impossible for belated viewers to see. That, of course, is the point."

Continue reading "Brooklyn Rail. May 08."

Fests and events, 5/11.

"London's second Fashion in Film Festival kicks off, with the theme 'If Looks Could Kill: Cinema's Images of Fashion, Crime and Violence.' To mark the event, we asked four top designers to choose the films whose fashions have inspired their own creations." Rhiannon Harries in the Independent. Related: "Who are your most fatal femmes?" asks Lauren Cochrane in the Guardian.

"The Reeler dropped by BAM Friday for the opening night of its retrospective celebrating cinematographer Ed Lachman, who was on hand to introduce his and co-director Larry Clark's controversial, rarely screened 2002 directing debut Ken Park."

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PopMatters. Godzilla @ 50.

"'Godzilla was once, as conventional wisdom would have it, a stand-in for the unspeakable violence of the atom bomb and by extension humanity's perennial, inscrutable drive toward self-destruction,' says PopMatters writer, Mike Ward, "But the history of Godzilla is also one of a gradual cultural transformation, whereby this self-destructive drive persists, but awareness of it is gradually lost - replaced by collective hubris...'" Karen Zarker introduces the 14-essay package: "Our writers contemplate his transition from bringer of Armageddon to bringer of agathon, a fierce and ironic comfort to children who sense that theirs is a dangerous world. Godzilla understands."

SFIFF Dispatch. 7.

David D'Arcy on an award-winning short.

One of the discoveries at the San Francisco International Film Festival was an essay on an icon who barely had the 15 minutes of fame to be a shadow on the media record of his moment in history. Death Valley Superstar takes us back to Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni's epic 1970 meditation on the American landscape and American culture at the height of the war in Vietnam, which is never mentioned in the film.

The male lead of the movie, inspired in part by a young man who stole an airplane for a joy ride in the desert and was gunned down by the police on his return, was Mark Frechette, who was "discovered" when he was spotted in a fight at a Boston bus stop. Death Valley Superstar is a 27-minute elegy to Frechette by Michael Yaroshevsky, a Russian living in Montreal. (Before showing at San Francisco, Death Valley Superstar premiered at the International Festival of Film on Art [FIFA] in Montreal.)

Continue reading "SFIFF Dispatch. 7."

Israel @ 60.

Israel officially turned 60 on Thursday, but celebrations and commemorations carry on, culminating in a visit from George W Bush on Tuesday. Ostensibly, he's still planning to bring lasting peace to the Middle East before his term is out.

Regardless, I've been struck all week by resonances, however weak or strong, between coverage of the anniversary (see, for example, this week's Nation, Magnum's photos at Slate or the edition of On Point featuring Etgar Keret) and a number of films opening this weekend that have a little or a lot to do with Israel, Jewish identity or even, perversely, Holocaust-envy (The Memory Thief).

Updated through 5/15.

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SFIFF Dispatch. 6.

The San Francisco International Film Festival may have wrapped on Thursday, but there are still a few dispatches on the way. Here, from Craig Phillips...

After seeing both too many films and too few, seeing many very good films and probably none that I'd deem superb, and after picking errantly for my next to last film (I won't mention which, nor will I fully blame it for my dozing off as it unspooled), I finished the 61st SFIFF's impressively diverse, respectably not-too-Hollywood slate with a memorable if uneven debut feature from Israel.

Mushon Salmona just won the SFIFF's New Directors Award (after winning the Special Jury Prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival) for Vasermil, a striking, edgy drama about three teenage boys whose lives in a working class neighborhood in Be'er-Sheva, Israel, intersect via soccer. Shlomi (Nadir Eldad) is the captain of the school's team but also a pizza delivery boy working for a psychotically abusive boss and whose brother is a gangster.

Continue reading "SFIFF Dispatch. 6."

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies.

First, James Van Maanen's take; then pointers follow.

I don't usually consider such a crass notion as "marketing" when I sit down to pour out my thoughts about a new movie. Isn't it "the thing itself" that should concern us critics? However, since viewing this "thing itself," OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a question has lodged in my brain and will not go away: What are they thinking, importing a film like this to the US? I can fully understand a French audience going ga-ga for the movie. But Americans? Even the art house crowd? We shall see.

Where to start? That felicitous, marquee-hogging title? The setting: Egypt 1955? (You just know how familiar most Americans below the age of 60 will be with that time and place.) WWII still has a certain draw and cachet, but Nasser and the Suez? Now we get to the good part: Exactly what type of movie is OSS 117?

Continue reading "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies."

Shorts, 5/10.

"The first screen portrayal of Dracula was so eerie, some critics asked whether the actor himself could be a vampire. But since his death, little has been done to resurrect Max Schreck's reputation - until now." For Reuters, Dave Graham reports on Stefan Eickhoff's biography, Max Schreck: Gespenstertheater.

Jason Wood in FilmInFocus on the state of Mexican cinema: "[P]eriods of cinematic famine lead to ones of high productivity and critical and commercial success before local talent migrates to Hollywood and the cycle begins all over again." A historical overview follows. Also, Architect and designer Calvin Tsao picks five films for their design.

"Alexander Payne is turning to TV, signing on to direct HBO's dark comedy Hung," reports Michael Schneider for Variety.

Continue reading "Shorts, 5/10."

Fests and events, 5/10.

"The Danish director Henning Carlsen has Max Roach to thank for the revival of Dilemma, his debut feature from 1962," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "Screening as part of Jazz Score, the Museum of Modern Art's survey of movies with original jazz compositions, this black-and-white drama gets a blast of vitality from a soundtrack hopped up on Roach's bebop and the infectious swing of Gideon Nxumalo, a South African composer adept in the style of indigenous jazz known as marabi." Trailer.

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The Memory Thief.

"With a committedly unpleasant but spastic performance from [Mark] Webber, The Memory Thief is the least sentimental 'Holocaust film' on record," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. "Writer-director Gil Kofman moves past 'we must never forget' into weird and thorny territory, in which sympathy for the tragic becomes a masochistic form of emotional self-gratification."

"Using actual survivor testimonies, [Kofman] confronts the ghoulish underbelly of the human impulse to sympathize, addressing our fascination with suffering in eloquent, often wordless scenes," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "As Lukas sinks deeper into insanity, the film becomes an exploration of the way empty souls will fill themselves with whatever is at hand, even profound pain."

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Before the Rains.

"It must have sounded like a good idea to somebody, sometime, to hire an actual Indian filmmaker - Santosh Sivan, director of 1999's The Terrorist and the 2001 historical epic Asoka the Great - to make one of those English-people-in-hot-weather, Merchant Ivory-style costume potboilers set in India," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "What we get instead in Sivan's Before the Rains is a perfectly matched combo of Western exoticism at its most dull-witted and Bollywood filmmaking at its most superficial."

"Before the Rains is adapted from Red Roofs, the longest of three unrelated stories in the Israeli director Dany Verete's 2002 film, Yellow Asphalt, which explored the collision of modern customs and tribal traditions in contemporary Israel," notes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "In that movie a wealthy Jewish farmer who has an affair with his Bedouin housekeeper forces his assistant, a Bedouin tribesman, to initiate drastic damage control once the relationship is detected... Before the Rains has been to moved to colonial India in 1937. The transition from one culture to another is seamless."

Updated through 5/14.

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Frontier(s).

"There's enough blood in the unrated French horror film Frontier(s) to satiate even the most ravenous gore hounds," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The real surprise here is that this creepy, contemporary gross-out also has some ideas, visual and otherwise, wedged among its sanguineous drips, swaying meat hooks and whirring table saw."

"Xavier Gens may pledge allegiance to 70s grindhousers, but like the garbage hauled out at least once a year from Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production house, or the two-headed, razor-studded dildo formed by Hostel and Hostel II, the style of the French director's career-making torture porn is very much a sign of our times: a capitulation to base pop appetites," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

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Turn the River.

"You can almost smell the clammy atmosphere inside the New York pool hall to which Kailey Sullivan (Famke Janssen), a tough cookie from upstate, periodically repairs to regain her bearings in Turn the River," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

"Turn the River plays it cool - not bad, when you realize that Chris Eigeman, normally an actor, is making his début here as a writer and director, and when you weigh the mass of sadness that sits upon his film," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Skip the coda to this movie, with its tiny upswing of hope, and remember the days at the tables, as dim and endless as nights, and the click of the dialogue."

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Surfwise.

Dorian Paskowitz, or Doc, is "the paterfamilias of what is lovingly and at times enviably described as the first family of surfing," notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, and the subject of Surfwise, "Doug Pray's wonderfully engaging look at love and family and the relentless pursuit of happiness, personal meaning and perfect waves. At least half the battle in the documentary is finding a worthy subject, and few live up to their screen time as easily as Doc, a born pitchman, part carny, part evangelical, who even in his 80s continues to spread the Paskowitz gospel (clean living, clean surfing) with fervor."

"Paskowitz isn't scary just because he's an abusive father, but because he's an absolutist - and, like most absolutists, he's a self-absorbed perfectionist, blind to the differences between himself and anybody else, let alone his own wife and children," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "[A]s a Jew, I find another Jew's obsession with physical perfection and cleanliness ('We all had scrupulously clean assholes,' one of the children tells Pray with bitter mirth) profoundly disturbing."

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Noise.

"The story of a New York yuppie who embarks on a one-man vigilante campaign against sound pollution, Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries."

"Tim Robbins should get out and stretch those funny bones more often, if it results in a performance as luggishly nutty as he gives in this likable - if intellectually overstuffed - urban comedy from writer-director Henry Bean," suggests Ella Taylor in the Voice.

Updated through 5/12.

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Previewing Prince Caspian - and Summer 08.

The trail of Summer 08 linkage picks up here. It began with the entry on Iron Man and carried on last week with previews of Speed Racer and the summer season in general, followed by yet more Speed. And now, a sequel and more build-up to more blockbusting.

"The lion is back, the witch puts in an appearance, but that musty old wardrobe has been put out of commission in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, a worthy if somewhat less wondrous successor to that 2005 phenomenon," writes Michael Rechtshaffen in the Hollywood Reporter. "Several shades darker in tone than the previous edition - which, to be fair, didn't carry the burden of expectation that a sequel must bear - the return to Narnia still casts a transporting spell that should nicely build on that $745 million worldwide foundation."

Updated through 5/15.

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More on Speed Racer.

Picking up where we left off...

"Like so many other expensive, technologically elaborate big-screen adaptations of venerable pop-culture staples, this movie sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity," writes AO Scott, reviewing Speed Racer for the New York Times.

"Are the Wachowski brothers the new George Lucas?" asks the New Republic's Christopher Orr:

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Vertigo @ 50.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, #2 in Sight & Sound's 2002 "Critics' Top Ten Poll," premiered in San Francisco on May 9, 1958.

Updated through 5/11.

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