Cineaste. Fall 06.

In addition to four features from the current print issue, Cineaste offers twice as many "Web Exclusives," a first. Because it's sampled from a hefty supplement on "Acting in the Cinema," let's start with Patrick McGilligan's "reflections on what is 'great' screen acting, why there is so little of it, and how the topic is inseparable from the sad state of Hollywood today." They eventually lead to a list of "criteria for 'great' acting."

Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews the second volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles biography, Hello Americans: "[T]his is a far better book in the depth of its sympathetic understanding of Welles. Without ever discussing it, Callow has responded so well to criticisms regarding his first volume - notably his inadequate treatment of Welles's leftist politics and some unwarranted slurs on his ethics, flaws that are in fact interconnected - that some of the most solid strengths here derive from his thoughtful and conscientious attention to these issues."

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis reviews Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows: "This is his signature: the gritty masculine universe of ambivalent heroes, of heroic ambivalence."

"One of the most confounding of film cultural mysteries is the neglect shown in this country to the work of Maurice Pialat, a filmmaker revered in his native France but barely known in the US." Jared Rapfogel: "Pialat made only ten features in his lifetime, all of them essential, but À nos amours is in some ways the ideal place to start, thanks to the unforgettable performance by a young Sandrine Bonnaire as Suzanne, but above all because of the presence of Pialat himself in the crucial role of Suzanne's father - it seems appropriate that those unfamiliar with Pialat should begin with a film in which he is doubly present."

The "Web Exclusives":

• Emilie Bickerton talks with Laurent Cantet about Heading South.

• Richard Neupert on Robert Stam's François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation: "This accessible text often reads as if it were a transcription of a course investigating how to conduct an adaptation study by focusing on Jules and Jim (1961) and Two English Girls (1971)."

• Travis Miles: "One can only hope that [The Walerian Borowczyk Collection] will begin both a renewed and reevaluated interest in Borowczyk's career."

• Richard Armstrong: "Free Cinema tends to be written about as if the impulse sprang from nowhere, a lurch toward verisimilitude after decades of studio escapism. But what many histories overlook is that these Free Cinema programs at the NFT between 1956 and 1959 were the culmination of several shifts in British audiovisual culture."

• Brandon Wee reviews Chinese Restaurants, "an ambitious documentary series detailing the dynamics of ethnicity."

• Chris Long on Mark Desmond Nicholls's Scorsese's Men: Melancholia and the Mob: "Using theoretical preconceptions supplied by both Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, with a dash of Walter Benjamin thrown in for good measure, Nicholls focuses on what he views to be a prominent figure in Scorsese's work: the male melancholic."

• Christopher Sharrett reviews Sheldon Hall's Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It, "almost as much a labor of love as the film itself... a painstaking account of the film's realization through the various stages of its production and marketing."

• Richard Porton looks back, way back to this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Thanks - again! - to Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog for the heads up on the new issue.

Posted by dwhudson at September 13, 2006 1:45 PM