Shorts, 9/15.

In the Village Voice, you'll find Michael Atkinson claiming Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is "surely the retro auteur's sublimest elegy for lost time next to Ed Wood."

But for the New York Press's Matt Zoller Seitz, "It's not quite funny enough to get by with just being funny, and it lacks the assured mix of whimsy and melancholy that made Burton's last two movies, Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, feel like evolutionary leaps forward."

Atkinson also reviews Liev Schreiber's Everything Is Illuminated, "substantially less ambitious than its source material, but that may be what saves it from implosion." More from Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly (where she also interviews Tom Wilkinson), who finds the film "a romp" but also a "brave and loving movie."

Also: Film Forum will be screening both Mikhail Kalatozov's "masterpiece" I Am Cuba and Vicente Ferraz's "addictive chronicle" of its making, I Am Cuba: Siberian Mammoth.

Also in the Voice:

• Jessica Winter: "With his confused, distended latest, [Andrew] Niccol relocates from the desert of the real to the global killing fields, but as slick, flashy public-service announcements go, Lord of War is no Constant Gardener." More from More from Cheryl Eddy (who prefers The Baxter) in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Armond White in the NYP, following many, many words of praise for Côte d'Azur.

• Again, Winter: "In a different filmmaking climate - less dependent on proven formulas, less lab tested and producer oriented (Thumbsucker has nine), less flushed with book-option fever - one wouldn't necessarily expect an established short-film director, designer, and gallery artist like [Mike] Mills to choose Donnie Darko Redux as his first feature any more than you'd anticipate Miranda July to make a movie lightly redolent of Todd Solondz."

• Dennis Lim on the "competent, monotonous" Proof. More from Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

• "Tracking Shots": Atkinson on One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern; Jorge Morales on Finding Eléazar; David Ng on Garçon Stupide; Laura Sinagra on Separate Lies; R Emmet Sweeney on Hard Goodbyes: My Father; Matt Singer on The Thing About My Folks; Pete L'Official on Human Error; and Joshua Land on Just Like Heaven and Hellbent.

In the City Pages, Terri Sutton brings up a few issues about Winter Soldier that usually get lost in the brouhaha over its more obvious provocations.

David Fellerath in the Independent Weekly: "What emerges in Occupation: Dreamland is a surprisingly intimate portrait of remarkably ordinary young men with complex feelings about their calling as soldiers and the utility of their mission."

Back to the NYP: Jim Knipfel on Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Michael Margolies on Pierre Rehov: "With six films already to his credit and another on the way, this serious, never boring, and above all else courageous documentarian is starting to make some serious waves."

"[W]e're both trying to say the things that nobody wants to even say to their own friends, the most embarrassing truths we know about ourselves and generally hide from the public. Things that don't come out in narratives or documentary films because everyone is trying to justify themselves rather than show human weakness." That's Jennifer Reeves (The Time We Killed) in conversation with Jenni Olson (The Joy of Life). The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston had the excellent idea of introducing them to each other. Also: Chuck Stephens on Jia Zhang-ke's The World; Fiona Ng calls up the director.

With Peter Cowie's talk with Alan Parker, Kamera continues its series on sound in cinema.

Also:

• Antonio Pasolini on two books in the Kinofiles series, Brigit Beumers's Nikita Mikhalkov: Between Nostalgia and Nationalism and Jane Taubman's Kira Muratova.

• Steven Yates on Gustaf Molander's Eva, co-written with Ingmar Bergman.

• Edmund Hardy: "I've just begun watching Heimat 2 for a second time; it's compelling in its generous, brimming-over nature, like an enormous mansion one is free to wander through."

• Tim Keane on the Criterion release of Jules et Jim.

Zadie Smith, whose new Booker-nominated novel, On Beauty, is reaping praise, though she herself has been running into trouble with the press (Ed Champion has the details), has a piece on Greta Garbo flagged atop today's edition of the newly redesigned Guardian. Evidently, like Bono or Colette or, of course, Garbo herself, she only needs one name now. At any rate: "Post-Garbo, we have taken what resonated in Garbo's fluid sexuality and mystery and hardened it, made it a commodity."

Also:

• Ken Loach: "Architecture is the most public of the arts, and that is what we need to re-evaluate most urgently."

• "Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do. But it is far too late for me to try it." Xan Brooks interviews Hayao Miyazaki.

• Three European festivals (in Locarno, Pula and Taormina) are thrilling audiences with giant screens, perfect sound and popular films, writes Ronald Bergan.

• Sim Branaghan remembers Eric Pulford, "the single most important figure in the history of the British film poster and responsible for some 1,000 designs during almost 50 years."

At Twitch, X breaks down Film 2.0's survey of who moves and who shakes the Korean film industry.

Lola Ogunnaike previews The Showbiz Show With David Spade, "which mercilessly ridicules the entertainment industry at large, leaving no celebrity unturned." Also in the New York Times, a brief blurb from Lawrence van Gelder on another Godfather novel and the midweek reviews:

• Stephen Holden on The Future of Food and Chain. More in the Voice from, respectively, James Crawford and Ed Halter.

• Jeanette Catsoulis on Piggie. More from Joshua Land in the Voice.

• Dana Stevens on The Weeping Meadow. More from Michael Atkinson in the Voice.

The Philadelphia City Paper's Sam Adams: "[Peter] Falk has been working on his autobiography for the last several years (he hopes to have it completed for a fall 2006 publication), and has been reluctant to share thoughts and stories that he's saving for the book. But his enthusiasm for Cassavetes is such that he takes only a moment to pause and make sure he's not using the same words he's just written before diving into the subject."

The Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns looks ahead to the fall season.

Back to the LA Weekly: Ron Stringer reviews Taschen's The Stanley Kubrick Archives and Holly Willis talks to video artist Doug Aitken.

"As long as aspartame kills fewer than 300 people per year in the United States, the American Food and Drug Administration will continue to consider it 'safe.'" Christopher Thrall is rattled in the Vue Weekly by Cori Brackett's Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World.

Terry Sawyer isn't buying the supposed link between Star Trek and pedophilia. Also at PopMatters: Bring back the grim in the Brothers Grimm, argues Jennifer Makowsky.

The Economist snickers at "Celebrity Culture: An Interdisciplinary Conference."

Stop Smiling rounds up September's DVD releases.

At the AV Club, Keith Phipps and Nathan Rabin: "Films That Time Forgot Revisited."

Online viewing tip. Brendan Dawes experiments with ways of allowing audio to edit video. Via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at September 15, 2005 4:27 PM