Film Comment. May/June 06.

There are a couple of ways to approach this one. Head directly to the TOC of new issue of Film Comment as it's put together in print or to the homepage with its "Online Exclusives."

With Cannes opening tomorrow, let's go through Door #2. Besides Mark Cummins's talk with Cristi Puiu, which, like Gavin Smith's piece on United 93, has already been mentioned here, and details on an event (Pine Flat, May 25), Kent Jones offers a "First Look" at Fast Food Nation, one of two films Richard Linklater is taking to Cannes.

Just a reminder, so you can brace yourself: Criterion's edition of Dazed and Confused is out on June 6. Take a look at Wiley Wiggins's advance copy - a thing of beauty. A Scanner Darkly is in theaters on July 7; Fast Food Nation in October.

Alright then. Jones: "I'm not sure if [Greg Kinnear's] ever been as touching or as believably human as he is here, in Richard Linklater's casually insightful and terribly, terribly sad fictional version of Eric Schlosser's best-selling book.... The keynote moment of this unassuming film, one of the most politically astute to come out of this country in quite some time, might be Kinnear stopping by the side of a road and gazing off into the vast western expanses."

To the selections from the print version:

• Alex Cox, who's been writing a lot lately about conspiracies and their theorists, looks back on Tonino Valerii's The Price of Power: "The film painstakingly recreates the events in Dealey Plaza in the guise of a revenge Western."

• Cécile Boëx takes stock of the current state of Syrian cinema, an excellent backgrounder, in a way, for Lawrence Wright's recent slide show for the New Yorker.

• Paul Arthur reviews Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo: "[W]hile we can hardly doubt the veracity of what unfolds - it certainly comports with what we've seen and read of conditions at Gitmo - we also feel Winterbottom squeezing our vital organs of empathy in a stylistic vise."

Posted by dwhudson at May 16, 2006 2:12 PM