Shorts, 12/10.

"Let the backlash begin somewhere, and during this holiday season, let it begin with me." Anthony Kaufman is left way underwhelmed by Dreamgirls and gets an "Amen, brother" comment from Scott Tobias.

Elbert Ventura for indieWIRE: "The kind of movie that makes a pejorative of words like 'tasteful' and 'intelligent,' Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering arrives just in time to give the faint-hearted a refuge from the untidy pleasures of Casino Royale and Borat." More from Matt Singer of IFC News, who finds that its "discouragingly Crash-ian premise slowly develops into an impressively un-Crash-ian film of subtle acting and surprising humanity."

David Ansen races through the holiday movies for Newsweek:

• Children of Men: "The filmmaking is so accomplished you wish it were matched by the script."

• Pan's Labyrinth "unfolds with the confidence of a classical fable, one that paradoxically feels both timeless and startlingly new." More from David Lowery.

• The Good German: "Soderbergh has produced a movie so self-conscious that it's drained of all life."

• Letters From Iwo Jima is "a sorrowful and savagely beautiful elegy that can stand in the company of the greatest antiwar movies."

• The Pursuit of Happyness: "I respect the movie's tact, its honest exploration of homelessness, its surprising refusal to exult in the rags-to-riches aspects of Gardner's story, but I can't say I was transported."

• The Good Shepherd: "For the film's mesmerizing first 50 minutes I thought De Niro might pull off the Godfather of spy movies.... But the unvaryingly solemn tone begins to wear, and the elaborate flashback structure becomes confusing in the last act."

• Venus is "a heartbreaking comedy that is simultaneously funny and sad, raunchy and sweet, funky and elegiac."

• "Notes on a Scandal is a wicked delight."

AJ Schnack: "At ceremonies Friday night at the Directors Guild in Hollywood, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments took the IDA prize for best documentary of the year."

"Mariane has all the reasons in the world to be blinded by hate, but she has chosen not to be," Angelina Jolie tells Anupama Chopra on the set of Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, an adaptation of Mariane Pearl's book, which "focuses on the four weeks of investigation, negotiations and leads that preceded a horrific end": the very ruthless and very public murder of Daniel Pearl.

Also in the NYT:

• Grace is Gone is a "a tiny, taut and, the makers hope, affecting entry in the dramatic competition at next month's Sundance Film Festival," and David M Halbfinger tells the story of its coming together. John Cusack and James C Strouse are collaborating on the film, which centers on a man whose wife is killed in Iraq; now he has to break the news to his daughters.

• "Lytton Strachey once said that The Painted Veil, which was published in 1925, was a novel at the top of the second rank, and the same could be said of most of Maugham's work," writes Charles McGrath. "He was a novelist of a sort that scarcely exists anymore: a serious, highbrow (or highish-brow) entertainer, who for a while was even more successful as a playwright than as a novelist." Astonishingly, nearly 50 films have been made based on his work, "and that's not including made-for-TV movies or foreign films, in which case the total runs into the hundreds." And now, of course, here comes the new Painted Veil.

• Sylviane Gold gets together with Christopher Quinn, director of God Grew Tired of Us, and one of the doc's subjects, John Bul Dau.

• Michael Joseph Gross profiles David Kirkpatrick, former president of both Paramount and Disney, who now runs Good News Holdings, which will produce Christian-themed films, beginning with an adaptation of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.

• "Even for those who embrace opera as a celebration of excess, it seemed almost a provocation to open the Teatro alla Scala's season on Thursday with an extravagantly lavish new production of Aida created by Franco Zeffirelli," writes Alan Riding in the New York Times. "Indeed, after the buildup that preceded the show, how else could the audience respond but by cheering the singers, the orchestra, the director, La Scala - and themselves for being there?" More from John Hooper in the Guardian, from Chiara Beria di Argentine in La Stampa (in Italian) and from Peter Hagmann in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in German). Update: Scandalo! Alex Ross is on it. Update, 12/11: The latest.

• Both Charles McGrath and Charles Isherwood review the Atlantic Theater Company's "crisply acted, largely engrossing revival of Harley Granville Barker's Voysey Inheritance, in a canny new adaptation by David Mamet" (Isherwood), and Michael Stuhlbarg talks about performing in this one a few other recent productions.

• Christian Moerk reports on what the dragon animators kept in mind during the making of Eragon. Related: John Patterson in the Guardian: "I was sick of all this before I was 10, the exact moment of my disillusionment arriving, if memory serves, about 15 minutes into Pete's Dragon. Enough."

• Isaac Chotiner reviews Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey Into the Disturbing World of James Bond>. First chapter.

• "Indie Sitcoms"? David Haskell presents one of many fresh ideas in this year's special issue of the Magazine.

• "What we're really interested in is the year that wasn't: the trends that seemed as if they would change the world but instead reminded us that behind the frenzy - and there's no better word for it - the wheels of change turn more slowly than we think." Richard Siklos takes a quick look at "three contenders for the year that wasn't." Hi-def, for example.

JSPERB at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope: "In A History of Violence, I would argue that we have here a counterpoint to Videodrome; whereas once the body had become pure image - the 'new flesh' - in A History of Violence, the body has now become a site for the inscription of the past. The newer new flesh is not simulation here, but time."

Flickhead raids the vaults of DEFA while Tom Sutpen reviews Barbara Loden's Wanda, "one of the seminal (if little-revived) works of America's independent cinema in the 70s."

Jonas Mekas's Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania "traces a seemingly divergent, often contradictory, and inevitably irreconcilable personal odyssey that, nevertheless, instinctively converges towards the filmmaker's acute and inescapable awareness of his own spiritual displacement, sense of otherness, and perpetual exile," writes acquarello.

Robert Cashill: "There are other Christmas-set shockers (Black Christmas, which has been remade; the original was directed by Bob Clark, the future director of A Christmas Story) and non-Christmas flicks set on the holiday for irony (Gremlins, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard). But You Better Watch Out is the one that really exploits Yuletide imagery and lore."

Marshall University never wanted to see a movie like We Are Marshall get made. Matthew DeBord explains how they were won over.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Rachel Abramowitz profiles Tobey Maguire.

• Sheigh Crabtree on how Templeton the rat was brought to life for Charlotte's Web. Related: Book Review editor David L Ulin on EB White's classic.

• "In the world of books and publishing, it was a very good year," writes Ulin. The Review's lists: 25 fiction and 25 nonfiction titles.

"So why did Flags not become a massive hit while Borat did?" asks Joe Queenan in the Guardian. It's a rhetorical question, naturally: "I have a theory." Taking time to quote Susan Sontag and referencing "a postwar guide for American wives," Neal Ascherson has a leisurely paced piece on the film in the Observer: "Still apparently a Republican, though presumably a pretty individual one, Eastwood shrugs off complaints that his film is anti-patriotic."

Also in the Observer:

• "Mariko Ishihara, Japan's best-known actress of the 1980s, sparked a media frenzy this weekend with the publication of her tell-all book, which lifts the lid on widespread sexual abuse and bullying in the upper echelons of the country's entertainment industry," reports Justin McCurry.

• "[I]f Gwyneth Paltrow suddenly thinks she 'fits in' with Britons, then where are we going wrong?" asks Barbara Ellen.

• Stephanie Merritt may have inadvertently provided one possible answer in her ode to Richard Curtis movies: "The most cliché-ridden, mawkish, winsome travesty of human love ever portrayed on celluloid, with the most tin-eared, trite and implausible dialogue committed to paper. And yet I love them. Oh, I do!"

• Mark Kermode on Stray Dogs: "Commencing with the talismanic rescue of a stray mutt, Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini's film trips poetically from pillar to post, buoyed up by an impressively spontaneous cast of seemingly ad-libbing non-professionals."

• Philip French recommends The US vs John Lennon.

Susie Bright remembers Gary Graver. Via Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay.

Non-film-related read: Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture.

Online fiddling around tip. The Fountain Remixed.

Online viewing tip #1. For Cinematical, Kevin Kelly talks with Crispin Glover about What Is It?.

Online viewing tip #2. Illeanarama, created by and starring Illeana Douglas. Via Brendon Connelly.

Online viewing tip #3. At filmtagebuch, a Ray Harryhausen bestiary - in chronological order, no less.

Online viewing tips. At Twitch: Todd's got two scenes from Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo; a trailer for Lars von Trier's The Boss of It All; a trailer for Lasse Spang Olsen's The Black Madonna; another for the omnibus film Die Silbermaske; and another for Derek Yee's Protégé.

Posted by dwhudson at December 10, 2006 9:16 AM