NYFF, 10/4.

J Hoberman's highlights of the second week of the New York Film Festival in the Voice: Belle Toujours, Syndromes and a Century and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. At indieWIRE, James Israel and Eugene Hernandez measure viewer response to Little Children and Bamako.

Reds "may be less nostalgic now than it was in 1981," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And the reason for this, [Warren Beatty] believes, is that Reds is, in large part, a movie about American politics during wartime, and about the opposition to American hegemony at an earlier stage of its development." More from Robert Cashill: "'It's rather a sad movie, because it really isn't very good,' sniffed Pauline Kael, a Reds-baiter. But it's rather good enough. I'd go with David Thomson: 'Still a fascinating picture with passages of greatness.'"

The Reeler probably has the most fun entry, a longish report on what all Beatty said at yesterday's press conference about Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Maureen Stapleton and Jerzy Kosinski. On Keaton: "She can go light and dark, and I always felt that Diane and her subtleties and her sense of humor and her beauty and her intensity pretty much held the story together, because the story is a story that holds the politics and the dialectics of the thing together in the romance between a man and a woman."

Acquarello: "Ostensibly an homage to the principal creators of Belle de Jour, filmmaker Luis Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, Belle Toujours is, nevertheless, a quintessential Manoel de Oliveira film: formalist, dramaturgic, contemplative, and discursive."

At Reverse Shot, James Crawford: "Gardens in Autumn shares a lot of the same genetic material as Buñuel's later, for a lack of a better word, 'surrealist' films, which perhaps are better thought of as feverish works where nothing happens at a furious pace."

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Inland Empire calls for not one but two reviews. Leo Goldsmith: "Lynch wishes to establish a connection between a world that is astonishingly familiar and deceptively immediate with one that is utterly, horribly alien." Jenny Jediny: "It is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting to watch Inland Empire, but it is also genuinely revitalizing; with at least six more films to see at the NYFF and a fall/winter release schedule that is barely holding my attention, this is already ranking as the most engaging film I will see all year."

Also, Beth Gilligan on The Queen. Related: For the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz meets Helen Mirren.

And more from Aaron Dobbs, who also reviews Little Children: "Todd Field's film shouldn't come as a surprise. It possesses many of the same problems that existed in his breakthrough picture, the also-good but wildly overpraised In the Bedroom. But maybe Field should work on adapting more short stories before he moves on to the longer form of the novel."

Keith Uhlich at Slant: "It takes a long while to adjust to Journals' somnambulant rhythms, but this is a different kind of dull from Tian Zhuangzhuang's failed biopic, The Go Master, where a most intriguing clash of cultures is drowned in a prettified sea of stately pageantry. Tian isn't interested in illumination; [Zacharias] Kunuk and [Norman] Cohn are, and they're willing to take their time penetrating, at least to these culturally biased eyes, Journals' seemingly inexplicable veneer."

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog on Volver: "This is beyond the director's standard adulation of women; this is mythologizing a concept of femininity constructed from idealized maternal memories, Douglas Sirk, Sophia Loren and a touch of camp. That's not so much a criticism (though it does chafe a bit) as an observation; Volver is more indulgent and inward-looking than it first appears, a journey into Almodóvarian fantasyland."

More from Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega at Reverse Shot: "If Bad Education was a poor, excessively self-reflexive and indulgent remake of Law of Desire, Volver may be the same in relation to All About My Mother. After the layered humanism and supreme craftsmanship of that Academy Award-winner, Volver feels slightly redundant."

Anne Thompson spoke with Sofia Coppola before Marie Antoinette premiered at Cannes.

The New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson was mingling last Friday, then asked Peter Morgan how he liked the party: "'The opening night in New York befits the city,' he said. 'You feel it's a more discerning, sophisticated and yet somehow violent experience. Just the business of getting to the New York Film Festival - I'm not a religious man, but I always privately mouth 'Thanks' when I arrive anywhere in New York.'"

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2006 11:55 AM