Shorts, 5/8.

Peter Nellhaus: "Day Watch is almost like watching a film with all of the action sequences of a Joel Silver production as reimagined by Terry Gilliam with the retro-future of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, with bits of Luc Besson's Fifth Element, the cold weather fashions of Aki Kaurismäki, and a moment of soft-core lesbian porn reminiscent of Russ Meyer."

Girish ponders Damnation - "it is the form of this film that is truly revelatory" - and the intriguing case of Béla Tarr in general.

"[O]ne of the fascinating things about Vampyr," writes Zach Campbell, "is not only its aesthetic circularity (that it fundamentally refers back to itself, its own time, its own materials, rather than the projected fiction [the Symbolic?]), but that in so doing, it can pull apart the object of identification (the protagonist) in a really fascinating way."

Before you watch Knife in the Water, watch Polanski's early shorts, suggests Ronald Wilson in Film International.

"David Holzman's Diary is a good portrait of the 60s and of filmmakers in New York who were giddy with the influence of the French New Wave, and it's a movie you owe it to yourself to track down," writes David Thomson, who wonders whatever happened to Jim McBride. Also in the Independent: Chris Sullivan meets Gael García Bernal.

José Teodoro for Stop Smiling: "Fox's new four-disc Robert Altman Collection looks conceived as a clearinghouse tie-in to A Prairie Home Companion, but with any luck it will remedy the unjustified neglect of three forgotten works forged in a genuine spirit of adventure."

At Koreanfilm.org, Kyu Hyun Kim reviews Bloody Tie, "one of the most harrowing criminal thrillers to come out in Korea for some time."

Producer Robert W Cort opines in the New York Times: "Hollywood's continued insistence on a theatrical release window does not make economic sense." Also:

• Sharon Waxman: "A veteran agent, manager and producer, best known for having helped build the career of the director Steven Soderbergh, [Patrick] Dollard, 42, has spent the last five months in one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq, in the Sunni Arab stronghold of Ramadi, on a solitary mission to make a documentary about marines living in the combat zone."

• With two Indian films screening in Lahore, there may be "a gradual thaw in a four-decade cinematic cold war between India and Pakistan," reports Salman Masood.

• Susan Dominus on the "late-career revival" of Rip Torn.

• Walter Kirn reviews AM Homes's Hollywood satire This Book Will Save Your Life.

Jerry Beck at Cartoon Brew: "Animator and cartoon historian (not to mention a friend of mine for over 30 years) Mark Mayerson has started a blog. And this is big news. Mark is one of the most intellegent writers on history of animation as well as the current state of industry - and he's also an astute critic."

For Cinematical, Robert Newton talks with Danny Huston about The Proposition. Related: Jamie Stuart snaps photos for Movie City News.

Peter Sobczynski interviews Chen Kaige for Hollywood Bitchslap.

Austinist Reed talks with Jeff Feuerzeig about The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Via Wiley Wiggins.

Interviews in the Observer: Harriet Lane with Gillian Anderson and Lynn Barber with Ray Winstone. Also:

• Jason Solomons, noting that hundreds of films are released in the UK each year, asks, "for whom are all these films being released? I've hardly got time to see them all and it's my job, so Lord knows how you, the occasional moviegoer or even the most avid cinephile, can keep up."

• Philip French: "Fateless is remarkable, vivid, shattering, emotionally and intellectually engaging." More from Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

• French again, this time on Orson Welles: Hello Americans: "Eleven years have passed since the publication of The Road to Xanadu, the first volume of Simon Callow's life of Orson Welles. This second part confirms that, when completed, his project will not only be the best book on Welles but also one of the great biographies in the field of cinema and the performing arts."

• Ranjit Bolt reviews Richard E Grant's The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film - related: Slant's Ed Gonzalez reviews the film and Liesl Schillinger chats with Grant for New York - and Anna Massey's Telling Some Tales.

New reviews at Slant:

• Nick Schager on Cédric Klapisch's Russian Dolls, "an insistently cute follow-up to his UN-flavored coming-of-age comedy L'Auberge Espagnole."

• Ed Gonzelez on Shane Meadows's Dead Man's Shoes, Mendy: A Question of Faith, Guilani Time and Saving Shiloh.

• The DVDs: Ed Gonzalez on Battle in Heaven, Viridiana, The Goebbels Experiment and Who Gets to Call It Art?; Eric Henderson on special editions of 70s disaster flicks: The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno; Fernando F Croce on Modern Romance and films by Michael Haneke: The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and Funny Games.

The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann reviews American Dreamz - "a moderately engaging satire, some of it amusing and some of it strained, but in considerable measure it reflects a strange circumstance in all our lives" - and Stolen: "The film has no ending. What's worse, [director Rebecca] Dreyfus doesn't use this fact to her (let's say) philosophical advantage."

"The Matrix Trilogy represented a largely adult view of society, one that recognizes the need for compromise with force as a political principle and takes seriously the cost of failure to do so," writes Jim Rovira in Metaphilm. "This compromise made the ending of Revolutions, and the Matrix series itself, unsatisfactory for much of its adolescent-boy audience. V for Vendetta gives the adolescent boy the ending he wants and consequently takes a big step backwards into silly political melodrama."

Up-n-coming:

• Susanne Bier will direct Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro in Things We Lost in the Fire.

• Anand Tucker is off and Chris Weitz is back on The Golden Compass, the first adaptation from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, due November 2007.

• Josh Lucas will play Daniel Pearl.

• Derek Yee's Blood Brother.

The latest United 93 review comes from Flak's Sean Weitner.

In the Guardian, Ronald Bergan remembers screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, most famous for her adaptations, which include Marnie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cabaret.

Séan Captain in Slate: "[T]he very properties that make the Internet great make it a lousy video-distribution network, especially for the high-def era."

Pet Owners Online reports: "Two black Labradors have become the world's first dogs to be trained to search for counterfeit DVDs." Via Waxy.org, where Andy adds, "Sure, but can they smell the difference between letterbox and pan-and-scan?" The current status of this story at the Museum of Hoaxes: "Strange, but true."

Online listening tip. Ed Champion notes: "For the month of May, Deadpit Radio offers "May of the Dead," a series of interviews with actors from George A Romero's zombie tetrology."

Online viewing tip #1. At Twitch, Todd points to the trailer for Anders Morgenthaler's Princess.

Online viewing tip #2. Over fine photos by Kate Brooks, Lawrence Wright talks about the rather desolate filmmaking scene in Syria. The talk does end with a slight ray of hope, though.

Online viewing tip #3. Anthony Kurtz's Which Side is Real?. Via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at May 8, 2006 11:08 AM