Wrapping NYFF.

Considering the honed selection, the New York Film Festival surely sees more online coverage per film than any other festival, so there's plenty to catch up with on this, the closing day - including two more of our own dispatches, going up shortly.

First, though, mention should be made of probably the most discussed assessment of this year's edition, appearing as it did in the #1 publication of the nation's media capital. "There are reasons for including The Queen, Marie Antoinette and Little Children in the lineup this year," acknowledges Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But it is harder to justify programming all three in a festival with just 25 slots in its the main section... [I]f the New York Film Festival is going to remain relevant in these difficult movie times, it needs to work harder to secure the best, and it needs to nurture a new audience, not just dine out on the faithful. Whether it scales up or retains its modest proportions, it needs to embrace the very exclusivity that makes it occasionally maddening and generally indispensable."

The piece generated links throughout film blogdom, and when indieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez pointed to it, adding, "she's often at her absolute best when reporting from an international film festival," he drew a slightly quibbling but respectful comment from Dave Kehr, though we can probably assume he agrees with the gist of the piece.

At any rate, Manohla Dargis also had an overview of Views from the Avant-Garde, with particular emphasis on Saul Levine; more here from Michael Sicinski - and Stephen Holden noticed this: "'The ladies will save us.' Those quaint words, spoken by an old man in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, evoke the formidable resilience of many of the female characters who dominate the 44th New York Film Festival and the matching talents of the actresses who portray them."

For those of us not there, once again, the most fun to be had during the NYFF is to be found in Jamie Stuart's video pieces and, with four episodes up, we can look forward to one more.

So some films generated either so much or simply particularly noteworthy reaction since the last roundup around here that they'll get - or have already gotten - entries of their own. But of course, it's not always the most controversial films that are most worth noting.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "I'm not sure anybody has quite captured the overheated intellectual intensity that can arise between college friends who all believe they're about to change the world the way Emmanuel Bourdieu does in his new film Poison Friends. Maybe it takes a Frenchman." Also, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates is "a meticulous study of a crumbling relationship, marked by many luminous small moments and a startling interruption of violent eroticism," while "the gruesome climax of [Johnnie To's] Triad Election [Election 2] is not to be forgotten. To can be grateful that Chinese authorities have left Hong Kong's movie biz alone; I don't think his portrayal of corrupt, criminalized mainland authorities will be playing in Beijing anytime soon."

"So while everyone else was off taking in Scorsese's new film, I was watching (among other things) a film by one of the director's cinematic scions, Johnnie To," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Triad Election benefits from a good deal of cultural and historical specificity in a way that (one presumes) Scorsese's film distinguishes itself from Infernal Affairs by importing its plot to Boston. For all its emulation of American gangster films, Triad Election is first and foremost a portrait of Hong Kong, painted in great swaths of black and red, with a surprising formality and lack of glibness." More from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog and Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

Robert Cashill jots down notes on the films he's caught at the festival.

In Paprika, acquarello finds "a bold, provocative, mind-bending, and fiercely intelligent exposition into the nature of terrorism, the demystification of the subconscious, and the psychology of fetishism and objectification." Nick Schager gives it an A-.

Tom Hall's got capsule reviews of Poison Friends, The Host, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen and Falling, "one of my favorite movies at the New York Film Festival." Acquarello finds that one "a thoughtful, elegiac, and sensitively rendered zeitgeist portrait of passage, regret, community, friendship, and survival." Alison Willmore was "pleasantly surprised"; more from Nick Schager in Slant.

"Coeurs is perhaps [Alain] Resnais's most satisfyingly cerebral film since Mon Oncle d'Amerique," declares acquarello. Nick Pinkerton, writing in Reverse Shot, is not seeing it that way; he finds it "a work which shows no designs on being anything more than faint filmmaking - or 'gentle,' if you're feeling generous. Its tone is benevolent and melancholy, it features a cast of firmly controlled, careful performances, and it takes an earnest, gawky stab at humor that, while never good for more than a ripple of polite titters, is certainly affable enough." More from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog, Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You and earlier, here, Andrew Grant.

Volver "is part noir-comedy, part ghost story, but it's mostly a potent reflection on how where we come from shapes us, in ways we can't understand until we've been away for a long, long while," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "The picture is so full of life that it seems less a product of the imagination than of the soil."

Blank Screen has pix of the Volver press conference. The Reeler's taken notes. Related: The Boston Herald's Stefan Schaeffer listens to Pedro Almodóvar's thoughts on Penélope Cruz's relationship with Tom Cruise: "It was very difficult for me to see, not just in the American press but also in the Spanish press, how they saw her as an arriviste."

"Pedro Almodóvar's incomparable eye for detail and delightfully subversive dark humor suits his recurring paean to the strength, resilience, communality, nurturing, intuitiveness, and ennobled beauty of women especially well," writes acquarello. More from Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot: "If cinema's highest, most proper calling is as the ultimate repository for images, dreams, and mad, unkempt visions, then El Topo could well be argued as the most quintessentially cinematic film ever made." Even so: "Welcomed with 'whistles, catcalls, and cheers' at its Cannes premiere in 1973, The Holy Mountain is Chilean-born auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky's greatest and most ambitious midnight movie, a wickedly outrageous masterpiece that towers over its better-known precursor El Topo," writes Aaron Hillis, where he was also recommending another revival, Mafioso.

In Reverse Shot, James Crawford, too, calls for more attention to be paid to Mafioso, "a bifurcated drama amused by the sudden, frequent, and subtle switchbacks made between comedy and tragedy. To wit: [Alberto] Lattuada plumbs material that a director like Visconti would mine for social realism, and takes a much more lighthearted view." More here from David D'Arcy.

Acquarello on Offside: "Structured in the framework of a situational comedy, the film's deceptive facileness proves to be its most irresistibly potent weapon in a brewing (and perhaps, inevitable) ideological revolution, upending the laws of inequitable social convention into a rote reflection of its own incomprehensible - and untenable - contemporary absurdity." More from Keith Uhlich at Slant, Chris Wisniewski at Reverse Shot and Nick Schager.

"The flipside of girl power is weak masculinity, which the Turkish drama Climates rains down with the subtlety of a monsoon," writes Aaron Hillis for Premiere. "Written, directed and starring Nuri Bilge Ceylan as a contemptible professor whose passive-aggressive ego makes him impossible to date, Ceylan's follow-up to 2002's Distant continues to showcase an existential tranquility and slow burn that might make Tarkovsky proud. However, where Distant deepened from a drollness that underscored the contrary dynamics of that film's lead city boy and country-cousin roomie, Climates grimly centers around flat, unknowable characters who brood before a perfectly still camera, sometimes without understanding why." More from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Syndromes and a Century "may well be [Apichatpong Weerasethakul's] most assured, complex, and rewarding film to date," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot. "I hate to praise a director I love with such milquetoast terms of approval as 'gentle' and 'lulling' ('visionary' and 'bold' are certainly much sexier), but Weerasethakul's films approach a level of calm hugely unfashionable in a culture attuned to the hyperactivity of Park Chan-wook." More from acquarello.

Filmbrain on The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: "[T]his quiet, moving portrait in all of its digital beauty is one of the festival's real treasures, and a film that finds tremendous warmth in the coldest of climates." It "may not be as coherent or accessible as The Fast Runner but it is still a fascinating and deeply compassionate film," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. More from Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot and Aaron Hillis at Premiere, where he also considers the "eccentrically lovely and frequently horrifying" Our Daily Bread. More on that one from acquarello.

"In the Bedroom worked as pulpy melodrama because [Todd] Field worked small and made smart choices," writes Matt Singer for the Reeler. "In Little Children, he takes chances that rarely pay off."

Keith Uhlich at Reverse Shot: "Best not to go into Reds expecting anything but the most superficial insights into its social movements of choice: early 20th-century America's bohemian culture and the correspondent Bolshevik uprising in Russia. Beatty pitches everything at the same tenor, illustrating artistic and political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic as a series of perpetual, unintelligible shouting matches. The case could be made that he's attempting immersion in distinct milieus, but for that to take, Reds would have to be something other than the Warren and Diane show." Anne Thompson has more Warren Beatty Q&A quotage.

In the Independent, David Thomson talks with Stephen Frears about the festival's opener, The Queen.

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2006 9:03 AM