Shorts, 3/23.

Matt Clayfield: "Every now and then you have an experience at the cinema that defies description, renders you shell-shocked, and makes other films - even very good ones - seem trifling and insignificant by comparison. Last night, I had one such experience, the film question being Orson Welles's remarkable Chimes at Midnight."

"We were talking about Bette Davis. I told The Smartest Man I Know that I thought the way she habitually flounced into a scene and seized it by the nape of its neck indicated that she was a bit of a ham. 'She wasn't a ham,' he replied, 'she was a hysteric.'" Scott Eyman reviews Charlotte Chandler's The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, a Personal Biography in the New York Observer.

Back in October, novelist Stephen Beachy blew the lid off JT Leroy's cover in New York; this week, Beachy reviews The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things for the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "The real stars of this film are the emotionally overwrought mental landscapes of the not-so–white trash women who dreamed it up: [Asia] Argento and Laura Albert... Why, exactly, the mommy and daddy issues of these two women have been projected, once again, onto characters from a completely different socioeconomic context is a mystery."

Also: Cheryl Eddy on the "occasionally sublime" Don't Come Knocking, Dennis Harvey on "perhaps the first major feel-bad musical," Oh! What a Lovely War!, and on Thank You for Smoking, which "gives good satire."

"Yousry Nasrallah is the cinema's most remote of unknown pleasures," writes Ed Gonzalez in the City Pages, and in Mercedes, "Nasrallah's mad, mad, mad, mad world is as giddy as it is hardcore."

Grady Hendrix has a Wong Kar-wai update.

David Carr profiles Steve Buscemi for the New York Times. Reviews: Nathan Lee on Shadow: Dead Riot, Stephen Holden on American Gun and Jeannette Catsoulis on Puzzlehead. Speaking of which, Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "Calling James Bai's promising feature debut, Puzzlehead, a Frankenstein movie is accurate up to a point, but it doesn't begin to capture the film's unnerving ambition."

Every once in a while, we need to be reminded of Nollywood, that is, Nigeria's film industry, the third largest in the world. Today's reminder comes from Jeevan Vasagar in the Guardian. Also: Tom Phillips remembers Brazilian producer Jarbas Barbosa.

Swept up in Andrew O'Hehir's "Beyond the Multiplex" column at Salon: Stoned (he talks with director Stephen Woolley; so, too, does Jennifer Merin in the New York Press; more on the film from Jessica Pallington), L'Enfant and The Beauty Academy of Kabul.

Recently at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Adam Balz on Joseph Sargent's The Man (written by Rod Serling) and Rumsey Taylor on Belá Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies.

Doug Cummings: "[Rakhshan] Bani-Etemad's Our Times is a personal and informative time capsule of a crucial moment revealing the ongoing cultural tensions in Iran between conservatism and progress, and the film strikes an effective and precarious balance between hope and despair. It's a portrait of Iranian life rarely seen in the West."

The Reeler: "Just when you thought that the non-starting amnesia documentary Unknown White Male and its condemned distributor Wellspring were getting to the front of the line on death row, the Washington Post's David Segal creeped in Wednesday with a new round of suspicion about doc subject Doug Bruce just in time for Unknown's DC opening."

Chuck Tryon reviews Gregory Greene's "important and timely documentary," The End of Suburbia.

Over the past few days, some unusually positive reviews of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut feature, Das Leben der Anderen (The Life of Others), have been appearing in German papers, culminating yesterday (the film opens today). See yesterday's English-language signandsight for a taste. All in all, with the strength of the German entries at the Berlinale, with the likes of Wim Wenders and Franka Potente returning from the US to work here... it's been quite a year for German film so far.

"Spanish-language films have often been a hard nut for US distributors to crack," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "Still, 2006 will see a steady rise of Spanish language movies (specifically from Mexico and Spain) - and the chance for another possible US breakthrough."

At Movie Poop Shoot, Kind Hearts and Coronets has DK Holm thinking about "why the British make better actors."

Jacques Audiard is working on the screenplay for his followup to The Beat That My Heart Skipped, reports Boyd van Hoeij at europeanfilms.net.

At Listology, grandpa_chum compares three (but essentially two) wildly varying cuts of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.

Bibi rounds up resources on the best of the bad. Via Coudal Partners. Meanwhile, the polls are still open over at Edward Copeland's place: Vote for the worst films to ever win a Best Picture Oscar.

Think you could work up a 30-second public service announcement to rouse support for international disaster relief efforts? The Center for International Disaster Information is running a contest you might be interested in.

The BBC: "Cuban singer Pio Leyva, who gained global fame with the Buena Vista Social Club group, has died at the age of 88."

Online viewing tip #1. Duane Crowther's Blum Blum, via MrDanteFontana at PCL LinkDump.

Online viewing tip #2. SUPER!ALRIGHT!'s remix of the trailer for A Scanner Darkly, via Screenhead, also pointing to Negativland's truth in advertising.

Online viewing tip #3. Apocalypse Pooh, a 1987 mash-up via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Two by José Carlos Casado at DVblog.

Online viewing tips, round 2. A batch of trailers at europeanfilms.net.

Posted by dwhudson at March 23, 2006 4:25 PM