Shorts, 3/24.

Paul Vallely meets documentary filmmaker Sorious Samura: "The man Time magazine put on its list of 30 people 'who had made an outstanding contribution to world affairs' a couple of years back, has made something of a speciality of putting himself into gruelling situations."

Also in the Independent:

• Louise Jury talks with James Ivory about making films without Ismail Merchant - he'll soon be adapting Peter Cameron's novel, The City of Your Final Destination - and about their company after he's gone as well.

• An upbeat piece from James Mottram: "Hollywood is awash with filmmakers willing to fight the good fight from within."

• Kaleem Aftab meets Felicity Huffman. Reviews of Transamerica in the British press: Anthony Quinn in the Independent, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Victoria Segal in the New Statesman and James Christopher in the Times.

For the LA CityBeat, Rebecca Epstein reviews Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative, "an engaging and surprising new book by celebrated Southern California video installation artist Doug Aitken."

Matt Zoller Seitz introduces his good and long talk with Puzzlehead director James Bai: "It's not a crash-and-burn action picture or a gory shocker; rather, it's an unsettling psychological drama, scored with a mournful harpsichord, that reimagines Frankenstein as an existential potboiler about a coldly patriarchial scientist who invents monstrous-yet-childlike servant and heir named Puzzlehead."

A big roundup in the Nation from Stuart Klawans: L'Enfant, V for Vendetta, Shakespeare Behind Bars, Toro Negro, The Devil's Miner and Mardi Gras: Made in China.

The Hollywood Reporter's Martin A Grove gets to peek at Marco Kreuzpaintner's next film, tentatively entitled Welcome to America and starring Kevin Kline. Stateside, the Kreuzpaintner's Summer Storm is currently sneaking into a few theaters. See, for example, Nathan Lee's review in the NYT.

The leading contenders for the German Film Awards (the Lolas): The Lives of Others, Requiem and Summer in Berlin. Scott Roxborough reports for Reuters. More from Boyd van Hoeij, who also interviews Drømmen director Niels Arden Oplev.

Tim Lucas was hoping the work he's done sorting out the origins of Orson Welles's Mr Arkadin might be mentioned in Criterion's soon-to-be-released packaged, The Complete Mr Arkadin. He's still looking.

JR Jones in the Chicago Reader on Nick Naylor, the lobbyist propelling Thank You for Smoking: "He doesn't undergo any dark night of the soul or squishy redemption because there really is a guiding principle behind his chicanery: grown adults should be expected to take responsibility for their own actions."

Besides starring in the most-talked-about movie of the season, Samuel L Jackson will be narrating Bob Saget's Farce of the Penguins, reports Chris Tilly for Time Out.

Doug Cummings met Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall and shows us the resulting piece, now running in the current issue of Paste. More on L'Enfant from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times and Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

And more reviews in the NYT:

• Stephen Holden on Lonesome Jim and Stoned.

• Laura Kern on The Lady in Question is Charles Busch and Mardi Gras: Made in China.

• Jeannette Catsoulis on The Beauty Academy of Kabul.

• Anita Gates recommends catching George A Romero's 1977 film, Martin.

Marco Lanzagorta picks up his history of special effects at PopMatters: "[I]n spite of the interesting visual tricks created for the films of Murnau and Wegener, it was Fritz Lang who truly revolutionized the use of large-scale special effects."

"Because V for Vendetta is the most expensive Britain-as-totalitarian-dystopia film ever made, it provokes comparison with the greatest BATD film ever made, Terry Gilliam's bleak 1985 comedy Brazil," proposes Matt Feeney at Slate. "While V for Vendetta marks the Wachowskis' continued slide into mediocrity and self-importance, Brazil is Gilliam's most fully realized work. In no other film has Gilliam been able to put his penchant for baroque set design and elaborate comic digression to such exquisite use."

Larry Gross at Movie City News: "V for Vendetta forwards the gay political agenda far more vigorously, unapologetically and, one might say, passionately than Brokeback ever did."

For the Age, Jim Schembri lists "25 must-see, easy-to-find films designed to cure any case of pop-culture poverty." Also: Alex Tibbitts meets Gael García Bernal and a Reuters report on Benicio Del Toro's next one: The Wolf Man.

David Serdlick at Alternet: "Just as lesbians have tuned in for three seasons to see themselves in prime time, biracial Americans are keeping up with The L Word to follow Bette's story - our story - each week as Bette's triumphs and setbacks add up to a real and affirming portrait of a community that has infrequently had a voice in popular culture."

John Turturro was recently onstage at the National Film Theatre in London, being interviewed by Mark Kermode. The Guardian runs the transcript.

Also:

• Patrick Barkham on Julien Temple's Glastonbury: "Deluged with 54,000 minutes of footage, he whittled it down to 128 that knit together an uncompromising tale of Glastonbury that comes as close to touching, hearing and feeling it as possible."

• How did Caché become that rarity of rarities, a foreign-language hit in the UK, wonders Jon Bentham.

• John Patterson notes that small and big screens in the US are full of rage at Bush.

At WSWS, Ruby Rankin reviews Joyeux Noël, "a deeply affecting work and one that canvases a number of important and timely themes: the backwardness and eventual deadly trap of nationalism, the commonality of ordinary people, the complete lack of concern and even open hostility of the ruling elite for 'their' own soldiers and the importance of art and culture in human society."

Spike Lee's Bamboozled is far better than its rep, argues Marcus Gilmer at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

At Cinematical, Martha Fischer describes Kevin Smith's fresh take on the now-usual MySpace marketing campaign, while Erik Davis reports that Smith will be replacing Jorge Garcia, the largish guy in Lost, to take on the role of Harry Knowles in Fanboys.

In the International Herald Tribune, Eric Pfanner surveys the major studios' next ventures into VOD in Europe. More from the Hollywood Reporter.

At SFist, Eve rounds up linkage on the sale of the Kabuki 8, a local theater (where I saw Howl's Moving Castle last summer) to Sundance Cinemas. Quick commentary: Anthony Kaufman.

A DIY Film Group at indieWIRE? Sujewa Ekanayake explains.

Posted by dwhudson at March 24, 2006 8:13 AM