Other fests, other events.

For the Phoenix, Brett Michel previews the Korean Film Festival running at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston through Sunday: "Rather than focus on the fountainheads of modern Korean cinema, this new series relies on the emerging voices, a generation that appears content to explore similar themes from film to film. This is not a criticism; Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi spent entire careers doing much the same thing, to stunning effect."

Speaking of whom. The Stranger's Annie Wagner previews the Long Take on Mizoguchi series running through February 27 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle: "Famously ambivalent in his personal life (he's said to have broken up with his muse, the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, around the time she became the first Japanese woman to direct a film in 1953), his films are unequivocally feminist. They're also despairing about the possibility of social change."

"Last week, not far from the Artic Circle, a group of film programmers and journalists huddled around a fire in a Sami tent at Norway's Tromsø Wilderness Center following an exhilarating dog sledge ride in the bracing below zero cold. After a luncheon feast of reindeer stew, they discussed the definition, history and future of film festivals." Alissa Simon files a report on the Tromsø International Film Festival for Facets Features.

Susan King checks in on the Through the Looking Glass (and Down the Rabbit Hole) series. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Alex Chun talks with Santa Barbara International Film Festival director Roger Durling about this year's edition, which runs through February 4.

Among the events J Hoberman highlights for New Yorkers this week: "Decasia was created for live performance; it's showing at a former synagogue on the Lower East Side, accompanied by TACTUS, the Manhattan School of Music's contemporary ensemble." Related: Alex Ross.

Also in the Voice, Ed Halter on Feedback, a program running at MoMa through January 31, and "a tribute to Chicago's nonprofit distributor Video Data Bank and its founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, sheds light on a time when video remained, as Horsfield told the Voice recently, 'the stepchild of the artworld' - a rough new technology, proudly outside the gallery market system, inextricably bonded to political movements like feminism."

"Ah, subtext!" exults Armond White in the New York Press. "That hidden meaning Method actors emphasized is brought out into the open by British actors Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton in the 1964 film Becket," screening at the Film Forum through February 1. More from Ed Gonzalez in the Voice.

Posted by dwhudson at January 26, 2007 9:36 AM