Shorts, 6/8.

"Jack Clayton's 1961 film The Innocents has a fair claim to be the most terrifying British horror film ever made." Geoffrey Macnab tells the story of its making in the Independent.

Andrew Dignan at the House Next Door on Deadwood and The Godfather, parts I and II: "The surface similarities are unmistakable.... Both works also serve as microcosms of America, allowing us to watch the nation develop from within the confines of a tightly-knit community. Look deeper and the similarities become even more pronounced."

Over at the naked gaze, Carlos Rojas sees overlapping concerns at work in Nicholson Baker's novel, The Fermata, the 1992 Peter Hyams film, Stay Tuned and the upcoming Adam Sandler vehicle, Click. In all three, "the fantasy/nightmare... revolves around a paradoxical conjunction of absolute mastery over one's domain, on the one hand, and absolute loss of control over that same domain, on the other."

Time once again for Jason Guerrasio to check in on five indies in production for indieWIRE: 100 Films and a Funeral, Bill, Death Walks the Streets, Friends (With Benefits and Kisses.

"For a film about death and endings, A Prairie Home Companion is a cracking good time - a warm, golden bauble within which to shelter, like the radio show that inspired it, from the misery and ennui that engulf us in and out of the multiplex," writes Ella Taylor for the LA Weekly, where Scott Foundas meets Robert Altman to talk about the "ongoing serial" that he's been working on for nearly 50 years now.

In the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams takes on both the review and the Altman interview. More from Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly, Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot, Martha Fischer at Cinematical and Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix, who also chats with Kevin Kline - as does MaryAnn Johanson.

Also in the LAW: David Thomson finds Olivia de Havilland at 89 "as alert, quick-witted, good-natured, funny and attractive as many people half her age." What's more, he reminds us that she "was a movie star in 1935, when she was only 19."

And Ella Taylor on Cars, "cheerfully [hitching] cutting-edge animation to a folksy narrative plugging friendship, community and a Luddite mistrust of high tech."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir sends "Get well soon, Bob!" greetings to Altman and reviews Agnes and His Brothers, "a grand, angry entertainment, absolutely free of the airless dreariness that affects too much European art cinema.... See this one, whenever and wherever you can." (A second opinion: Jürgen Fauth.) Also, Autumn "is actually pretty damn good. It's a defiantly odd work, a movie-movie set more in the crime-film Paris of Jean-Pierre Melville or Jacques Becker or early Godard than in the real 21st century city." What's more, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul is "a joyous revelation."

"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls manages to cram more hedonistic debauchery and grandiloquently campy pseudo-moralizing into 109 minutes than any other film [Russ] Meyer did before or since," writes Marc Savlov, who calls up ,a href="http://www.greencine.com/character?cid=432411">John LaZar and Erica Gavin. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Taylor Holland on Louis Malle.

John McElwee looks back on the 1956 premiere of The Searchers at Greenbriar Picture Shows.

24 Lies a Second editor Jim Moran introduces Peter Gelderblom's "Nighthawks: A Celluloid Fantasia," "an unconventional tale spun to stimulate readers to consider their privileged position and responsibility as spectators—but surprisingly, through the subjectivity of some classic (and some nearly forgotten) movie characters encountering each other in a surreal New York City landscape."

For Wired News, Annalee Newitz looks into "several fan-created online films and TV series set in the so-called Whedonverse, the special land where Joss Whedon's three canceled shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, take place. With the official Whedonverse put out to pasture, fans have taken the reins on a stable of unofficial spinoffs."

At Mindjack, Donald Melanson revisits The Quiet Earth, "one of the best last-man-on-earth movies (at least for the film's first act)."

Up-n-coming:

• Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt in Sean Penn's adaptation of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild.

• Via Movie City News, Catherine Hardwicke directs Keisha Castle-Hughes in The Nativity Story.

• Altman's fictional adaptation of Hands on a Hard Body.

• James Cameron's Project 880.

Waggish remembers Shohei Imamura.

Today's first Inconvenient Truth mention is short and sweet: Jonathan Chait at the New Republic. For more, though, see Garance Franke-Ruta in the American Prospect.

Owen Gibson reports that Hello!, the magazine that paid an estimated $7 million for the first shots of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby, will be taking legal action against web sites that've run the photos. Also in the Guardian, Duncan Campbell: "The New York taxi driver's licence used to prepare for the part of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and two leather jackets, one with bullet holes, worn in the movie Ronin are among some 3,000 items from Robert De Niro's film career that he has donated to a Texas university." The Reeler grumbles.

Jeannette Catsoulis: "Whether in the whorehouse or the sanitarium, Psychopathia Sexualis is an exercise in unrelenting dullness." Also in the New York Times, Nathan Lee on Nicolas Philibert's Animals and More Animals; and David Leonhardt explains why "what's saving Netflix - allowing it to thrive when the technology to obliterate it already exists - is yet another attempt by Hollywood to hold onto a fading business model."

"[M]y seven-year-old son promptly declared the movie 'lame,'" writes Steve Ramos. "Godzilla, he told the people exiting the cinema, just wasn't scary enough. Of course, that didn't stop him from having nightmares later that night."

Not all that film-related actually, but brilliant: Greg Allen.

Posted by dwhudson at June 8, 2006 3:16 PM