Shorts, 6/2.

Guardian readers have spoken, choosing their top 50 adaptations; Peter Bradshaw and Xan Brooks add their takes on the top 20 and Mark Lawson considers what sort of literary texts make for good movie material.

Sometimes John Patterson is just loud, but today's he's loud and right on (except for that remark about Cassavetes): "A group of American actors in a bar are more likely [than a 'conclave of luvvies in a London pub behind the Old Vic'] to be deadly earnest and dead serious about their 'craft,' their 'journey' and - oh hateful term! - their 'process.' No wonder half of them end up in the Church of Scientology, which traffics so heavily - and so remuneratively - in this kind of pseudotherapeutic linguistic horse manure." Sing it. Patterson also talks with Haskell Wexler, vigorous as hell at 84 and "like a Zelig of the post-second world war American left." Related: Andrew Pulver on Tell Them Who You Are.

Der Spiegel's Alexander Osang has quite a piece (and in English, too) on HBO's Baghdad ER centered on Paula Zwillinger, whose son dies at the end of the one-hour documentary.

The Telegraph's Jasper Rees talks with Jafar Panahi about Offside and blurbs a few other soccer movies.

Darren Hughes: "While watching Birth's opening sequence I was struck by a feeling I've experienced again and again in the months since, as I've caught up with [Jonathan] Glazer's first feature film, Sexy Beast, and with his many television advertisements and music videos: I was watching a filmmaker whose mise-en-scene was purposeful, controlled, surprising, and stylized (in the sense that 'stylized' is now commonly used to describe films by Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, for example) but always in the service of story and character. I trusted Glazer immediately and completely."

Girish goes to the movies: "I was looking forward most to the new Chris Marker, and while it was terrific, it was the Kieslowski on the bill that unexpectedly proved to be the knockout of the evening."

Nick Davis: "Ross McElwee's Sherman's March may be the most convincingly lovelorn movie I have ever seen."

Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "A Prairie Home Companion is surely the bounciest, cheeriest musical I've ever seen on the subject of death and failure." NP Thompson offers a dissenting opinion.

Via Jeffrey Overstreet, Robert Davis in Paste on The New World: "It's indeed a movie about new worlds - chosen worlds - and life's left turns. And it's one of the boldest movies to come out of Hollywood in a long time, not because it flirts with controversy but because it asks patience of its audience and sacrifices dramatic conventions to explore a greater truth."

"Minutes later, I walked out of the studio, my only profit this absurd but true story." At Nerve Bilge Ebiri passes along an anonymous screenwriter's account of the first pitch. Also: "Reviewing the Reviewers."

Clarencecarter gathers "terrific" reviews for A Lion in the House all in one nifty Reverse Shot entry.

Teddy Blanks at Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Husbands: "Cassavetes was interested in emotional truth, and for him, truth and realism were mutually exclusive."

"[I]t's been 1940s cinema a-go-go around here," jots Tim R on the run.

Tim Lucas at his Video WatchBlog on Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence: "This is decidedly not a horror film - don't expect scares - but if you can be content with a magic realist story that is insinuated rather than told, rooted in intriguing questions rather than answers, and which may be an allegory or a fantasy situated in the Afterlife or in pre-natal memory, this is for you."

Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot: "I've now watched four films starring Sasori, and I could tell you remarkably little about her as a human being aside from her superhuman capacity for absorbing, thriving on, honing, and venting hatred, her penchant for visualizing orgasm as a gradually spreading red blob, and her physical description."

You may have thought the albino's time would be up by now, but not quite. On the New York Times Op-Ed page, you have Paul Fortunato writing, "As a member of Opus Dei, I would like to thank Dan Brown and Ron Howard for The Da Vinci Code." In Slate, Kim Masters warns that a prequel of sorts is all but inevitable (David Poland comments), while in the San Diego Reader, Duncan Shepherd practically apologizes to his readers - for reviewing the thing at all and for being a week late about it.

Also in the NYT, reviews, naturally. It's Friday:

• AO Scott on The Break-Up and The War Tapes.

• Manohla Dargis on The Cult of the Suicide Bomber.

• Nathan Lee on District B13 (more from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog, where she calls it "Euro action by way of Ong Bak) - and: "For those who found the recent documentary Zizek! spoiled by an excess of action sequences, there is now Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual, in which the Slovenian intellectual of the title sits in front of a camera and does nothing but talk. And talk."

• Jeannette Catsoulis on La Tropical and 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous; Laura Kern on Typhoon; and Neil Genzlinger on Woodenhead.

"The Salzburg Festival: A Brief History is a 195-minute celebration of phenomenal music-making by luminaries such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim, Placido Domingo, Mitsuko Uchida, Simon Rattle and more. It is also a riveting tale of power, glory, Mozartkugeln and the Nazis." Jessica Duchen talks to director Tony Palmer. Also in the Independent: Gill Pringle interviews Mia Farrow.

Your daily dose of An Inconvenient Truth begins with the Stranger's Annie Wagner talking with Al Gore (he found Stephen Colbert's appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner "brilliant," by the way) and reviewing the film.

More Gore:

• Pointing to Dervala's notes on the background behind Spike Jonze's campaign video (it was never shown but it's a must-view now, in particular, for our purposes here, when it comes to his daughter's description of Gore's movie-viewing habits), in which we learn, among other things, that Gore's a Being John Malkovich fan, and to Garr Reynolds notes on the background to Gore's global warming presentation, in which we learn, among other things, that Gore's an Apple guy, Jason Kottke reminds us just how tragic (in the Weisbergian sense of the word) it is that we never saw the real Gore in 2000.

• Steve Ramos relates a coincidental event at one screening worthy of William Castle.

• An excellent roundup of yet more recent coverage from Chuck Tryon.

• More reviews: Jeffrey M Anderson (who also talks to Gore), Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle and William Goss and Peter Sobczynski at Hollywood Bitchslap.

IndieWIRE takes the email interview format it used during Sundance and Cannes and launches a weekly series pegged to new films of interest; this week: Cavite directors Ian Gamazon and Neill dela Liana.

Arthur Asiimwe for Reuters: "Rwandan president Paul Kagame on Wednesday dismissed the Oscar-nominated drama Hotel Rwanda as an attempt to rewrite the history of the central African country's 1994 genocide."

Reviews of Kino's new Swedish classics releases at Slant: Ed Gonzalez on The Saga of Gosta Berling (an "essential addition to any DVD collection") and Sir Arne's Treasure and Eric Henderson on Erotikon.

Winona Ryder has signed onto Sex and Death 101, to be written and directed by Daniel Waters, who wrote Heathers, according to Sheigh Crabtree in the Hollywood Reporter. Also: Anne Thompson on the waning influence of film critics. On her blog, Risky Biz, she gathers several more takes on the issue.

Stephen Metcalf, looking for just the right cartoon for his three-year-old daughter, may well have found it in Charlie and Lola: "Its brilliance lies in capturing childhood instead of manipulating it: by which I mean, it neither panders to an adult's ideal of childhood innocence nor to a child's fantasy of adult mastery and power," he writes in Slate.

Mary Ward Menke reviews Samantha Barbas's The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons for January.

Christopher Bray reviews Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans in the New Statesman.

Daniel Robert Epstein talks with Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman for SuicideGirls.

Online viewing tip. The Republican Strategy.

Online viewing tips. iMomus: "Home Movie Depot is the YouTube of Super 8 home movies - a collection of fragile, stereotypical, unedited memories from about 1950 to about 1980. As you watch the films in the archive you're filled with a sense of reassurance, uneasiness, conflicting impressions of freedom and determinism. Here are eight thoughts about Super 8." Via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at June 2, 2006 3:55 PM