Shorts, 8/12.

"Of the important documentaries being released this month, [The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till] registers farthest to the left on the raw-to-cooked scale. You watch it for what it tells, not how it does the telling; for what it might accomplish in the world, not for what it is." Four docs, four compact reviews in a row from Stuart Klawans in the Nation. Had Winter Soldier been released a year ago, it probably wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election, Klawans suggests; "But I believe most people know the face of truth when they see it." As for A State of Mind, "you will simply stare in appalled fascination"; "And now, to conclude, a documentary that is a fully realized work of art: Grizzly Man, by Werner Herzog."

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader: "Less dreary than Van Sant's Gerry but far less interesting than his Elephant, Last Days founders as a programmatic, mannerist experiment because it offers so little content apart from vague intimations of the Cobain myth." Related: Dan Halpern interviews Michael Pitt for the Guardian.

"Among [Jonas] Mekas's many achievements, one of the finest remains Lost, Lost, Lost (1976), a beautifully constructed diary film consisting of material from three decades, beginning in 1949 and ending in 1963." Manohla Dargis recommends catching it if you can. Of course, there are all kinds of cinematic pleasures; Dargis finds The Skeleton Key is "[o]ne of the most enjoyably inane movies of the season."

Also in the New York Times:

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "In their fascinating documentary The Goebbels Experiment, the director and writer Lutz Hachmeister and the writer Michael Kloft provide a rare and chilling glimpse into a brilliant but toxic mind.... Some of the film's most engrossing moments deal with Goebbels's exclusively utilitarian ambitions for German cinema. 'We can learn a lot from these Bolsheviks,' he reluctantly admits after a viewing of Sergei Eisenstein's 1927 epic, Ten Days That Shook the World."

• Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self presents "a complex and ambitious argument that it manages to sustain over its four-hour running time," writes Dana Stevens. "In essence, the film argues that Sigmund Freud's seminal theory of the subconscious has been successfully deployed over the past century as an instrument of consumer manipulation and social control."

• Electric Edwardians: The Films of Mitchell and Kenyon, a collection restored by the British Film Institute, offers "an amazingly clear window into a horse-drawn society, the view unobscured by movie stars prancing in the foreground, or by the dust speckles and scratches that inventively attached themselves to much-used old movies," writes Dave Kehr. Also: A terrific piece on Busby Berkeley's "infinitely delightful, effortlessly inventive" The Gang's All Here, including the tale of its initial revival in 1972.

• Stephen Holden: "About the only thing to be said on behalf of The Great Raid, "a tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand, is that it illustrates a depressing similarity between reckless war-mongering and grandiose moviemaking."

• Ned Martel on Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo: "[T]here is an essential meanness to the entire project." Related: In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert recalls Rob Schneider's ad war with Los Angeles Times critic Patrick Goldstein and declares: "Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."

David Poland's fall preview continues: November/December.

Deutsche Welle runs a quick backgrounder (in English) on Tom Tykwer's Perfume.

This time around, Andrew O'Hehir's "Beyond the Multiplex" column takes on Grizzly Man, "one of the most hair-raising films you'll ever see," Pretty Persuasion ("Skander Halim's screenplay has a far-reaching ruthlessness, along with a grand ambition to turn a movie that starts as dark satire into something approaching Greek tragedy"; more from the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE and The Reeler), The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, "a vital documentary," Tony Takitani, "more a tribute to Murakami than an attempt to capture him in a bottle, but for those so inclined it's 75 minutes beautifully spent," and briefly, Lustre, an "odd but often lovely spiritual odyssey through the streets of Manhattan in the year following Sept. 11, 2001."

Also in Salon: Stephanie Zacharek on Four Brothers ("Even when it wobbles off-track, it has some juice to it") and The Skeleton Key: "No director yet has found the best use for [Kate] Hudson, the role that will tap those terrifying and thrilling reserves that are just lying in wait. But [Iain] Softley comes closer than anybody has."

Flickhead's all about The Wild One.

"Meyer was one of the movies' most instinctive image-makers, and his looming, low-angled compositions are instantly recognisable." But Jimmy McDonough's Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, writes Christopher Bray in the New Statesman, "never really gets beneath the surface of things."

Looker's "Hustle & Flow Life Lessons."

"I'm actually going to go from the Venice Film Festival with [The Brothers Grimm] to Toronto with Tideland, so I've got two films in two festivals in one week!" Phil Stubbs, who edits Dreams, has a longish talk with Terry Gilliam; mostly about Tideland. Via Ian Dawe at Mindjack. Related: Photos Jeff Bridges shot on the set of Tideland.

Alexandra A Seno profiles Anthony Wong Chau-Sang for the International Herald Tribune.

For Creative Screenwriting, Deirdre McGill talks to Hans Weingartner about writing The Edukators.

At Twitch, Todd reviews The Way to Fight, "a period piece set in the hardscrabble working class neighborhoods of 1970s Japan, the environment that [Takashi] Miike himself grew up in.... Highly recommended."

Dan Glaister gleams Hollywood stories from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Also in the Guardian: Peter Bradshaw on The Rising.

In the Independent, Charlotte Cripps previews Frightfest, "the UK's biggest horror and fantasy film festival" (August 26 through 29), Fiona Sturges revisits Jaws thirty years on, Matt Wolf interviews Joan Allen and James Mottram gets Dennis Hopper to talk through his life and career.

For the New York Observer, Blythe Sheldon mills around with John Pierson, Kevin Smith... basically, the Reel Paradise crowd.

Today's Daniel Robert Epstein interview for SuicideGirls: Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza.

From mobile phones to "a great black beast of a computer made by Toshiba," a team for the London Times tests a variety of players of downloaded movies.

"Artaud: A Staged Life." Films, drawings, documents, at the museum kunst palast in Düsseldorf: "[F]or the first time, this multimedia show will show the artist in all his film roles." 22 in all. The exhibition is open through October 16 and moves on to Milan in November.

Walken 2008. Via Screenhead.

Online listening tip. Cinematical's Karina Longworth is podcasting again.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Jarhead. Via Quint at Ain't It Cool News.

More online viewing tips. Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "Anyway, IFC's introducing three original series this month: Greg the Bunny, puppet parodies of films... Hopeless Pictures, an animated show about being an indie film studio that features the voices of many Christopher Guest alums... and The Festival, a... 'vérité satire' about an idealistic filmmaker debut his first feature at a small festival.... [T]oday through the 17th we have the premiere episodes of Greg and Hopeless up in their entirety online in downloadable Quicktime.... and see a sneak preview of The Festival."

Posted by dwhudson at August 12, 2005 12:59 PM