NYFF, 10/2.

First, the second episode of Jamie Stuart's New York Film Festival video series is up. And more online viewing: New York offers five NYFF shorts.

"Mulholland Drive, possibly the greatest work of American film art since Altman's Nashville, is an impossible act for Lynch to have to follow, but the bug-eyed director—pupils dilated and imagination tripping in almost inconceivable directions—has made the Atlas Shrugged of narrative avant-garde films, compulsively watchable and insanely self-devouring," writes Ed Gonzalez in a four-out-of-four-star review of Inland Empire for Slant.

Jürgen Fauth: "Some of the shivers are all too real, and I'll admit that the film contained moments of subconscious recognition that frightened me to the core. At the end of Inland Empire, prostitutes lip-synch Nina Simone's 'Sinner Man' while a pet monkey frolicks and a man in a red wool cap saws a log. I have no idea what it means, but I'm glad that as unique a visionary as Lynch can still get funding (in Europe) to make exactly the movie he wants. A fertile and overwhelming work of art."

"While Satoshi Kon's Paprika couldn't be called the film with the most emotional depth at the festival (or of Kon's career), it's probably the most deliriously pop fun," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog, where she also reviews Syndromes and a Century.

Grady Hendrix: "It's too bad that Paprika is basically a sci-fi flick, because this is a movie that would appeal to a far wider audience than sci-fi fans or anime heads.... And the entire flick is practically an anthem for working woman, doing far more for the professional gal than Melanie Griffith did in Working Girl.... It's a movie that manages to dissect the state of the world completely and totally, and you don't even realize that's what it's done until you're walking out of the theater. If I was some kind of freakish mutant with three hands Paprika would get all three thumbs up."

"Smart, electrifying, and proudly unhinged, this Japanimated gem definitely belongs in the fold, and might even win over a few older art-house patrons with its very adult, transhumanist premise of interactive dream therapy run amok," writes Aaron Hillis for Premiere, where he also reviews Woman on the Beach.

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In Bamako, acquarello finds a "critical, impassioned, caustic, and uncompromising approach to examining the repercussions of globalization and subsidized trade on the developing nations of post-colonial Africa."

Also: "Marc Recha channels the spirit of Lisandro Alonso's primitivistic, metaphoric journey of interiority in Los Muertos (a derivation made all the more transparent by an extended river exploration sequence) to a visually sublime, but soporific and tediously unoriginal effect in Days of August." But there's praise for Gardens in Autumn.

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At Reverse Shot, James Crawford rages against "the abjectly awful Little Children, which is neither insightful, nor so shabby and low that its generates grotesque interest. However, in being infernally—bewilderingly—certain of its own profundity and moral rectitude, it does accomplish a rare feat: as a point of comparison, it turns Sam Mendes's indefensible American Beauty into a creature of poise, subtlety, and gracefully executed revelations." More from David Edelstein in New York.

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Tom Hall has been given a homework assignment: Revisit Lady in the Water, "that colossal failure of a film in the context of [Guillermo] Del Toro's success," Pan's Labyrinth. Also, capsules: Belle toujours, Gardens in Autumn and El Topo.

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2006 2:58 PM