Fests and events, 1/10.

In about a week, the winter festival season begins in earnest, introducing "dozens of new movies from all over the world," notes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "Which ones are gems, destined to break out of their domestic borders and wow the globe? And which ones are over-hyped, big-budget Hollywood-wannabes fated to die an early death?" He scans the likely candidates for both categories.

"The question of Jewish identity," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, "exists largely as a matter of contradiction and debate. There is so much history in so many places, so many moods and forms of expression, that any coherent summary is impossible. And so the 16th annual New York Jewish Film Festival - not to be confused with the Woody Allen retrospective currently wrapping up downtown at Film Forum - presents an engagingly disunified program, with something to appeal to, or alienate, every taste."

"The festival can often seem a grab bag of Jewish experience," agrees Leslie Camhi in the Voice, adding, "This year's edition includes a number of films concentrating on the immediate postwar period in Europe, a subject still rare in cinema." The fest opens today and runs through January 25.

On Friday and Saturday, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be screening a program of films by Jean Genet and Kenneth Anger. "In compiling the showcase... curator Joel Shepard follows in famous fancy footsteps - none other than Jean Cocteau once showed both Anger's 1947 Fireworks and Genet's 1950 Un Chant d'Amour at an event called the Festival of the Damned Film," writes Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Back in the Voice: Elliott Stein on Sven Nykvist Remembered, January 12 through 14 at MoMA.

Paddy Johnson for the Reeler on Brent Green at the Bellwether Gallery: "[T]he success of this exhibition does not lie in the reinvention of the wheel, but rather that Green never confuses the maudlin with the poetic or inconsistency with falseness."

"It's difficult to judge, finally, just why Allen wrote Interiors, and just what he was trying to say with its sometimes tidy yet often unresolved and schematic domestic drama," writes Dan Callahan, continuing Reverse Shot's coverage of that Essentially Woody series. "But it's a film that stays with you, visually and emotionally, and it acts as a bridge to his assured, complex films of the Eighties."

In the Guardian, Laura K Jones picks up a story widely reported some time ago, but somehow I never got around to mentioning it: "Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti has quit his position as head of the Turin film festival after only two days."

IndieWIRE's latest Sundance interviews: Crossing the Line director Daniel Gordon and Girl 27 director David Stenn.

At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow notes that "USC's Interactive Media Program has withdrawn its sponsorship of Slamdance" in the wake of the Super Columbine Massacre hoopla.

Matt Dentler: "For 2007, the folks at the SXSW Interactive Conference are unleashing a mammoth-sized venture called 'ScreenBurn.' This is an initiative to embrace the gaming world, and all that it encompasses."

BLDGBLOG's "The First Million" event: January 13 in LA.

David Byrne will be performing one of my favorite works of his, The Knee Plays, at Carnegie Hall on February 1.

Posted by dwhudson at January 10, 2007 9:29 AM