Weekend fests and events.

Although Ross turned down offers in the early 1950s to go to Hollywood and become a screenwriter, her knack for setting a scene and capturing a life in small gestures makes her best work read like documentary film on paper, with or without the screenplay tags and shot lists that mark some of her better known pieces. Her writing can be witheringly cold in its account of people making fools of themselves, but it's balanced with warm admiration for artists whose craft expresses their personalities.

Related: Ross is a recent guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Also at the House Next Door: Odienator previews Film Forum's RKO Lost & Found, through March 1.

The Oxford American is inviting anyone near Little Rock on March 15 to stop by for the premiere of the magazine's first DVD, "a 'visual mixtape' featuring short films, scenes from essential Southern movies, historic footage, spectacular surprises, and much more." The event will coincide with the release of the OA's upcoming "Southern Movie" issue. In the current issue, by the way, Barry Hannah: "In noir, doom rules the mood. It is perhaps the one consistent noun of the literature, running wild over both the good and the shady. The apt weather is one of destruction, with characters staring at a void, hands empty and reaching without a tool to confront the oncoming night where more grief and terror lurk."

"The UCLA Film and Television Archive has long wanted to audiences to know just how rich and diverse a collection it is," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. So they've come up with the idea of having film directors program series. The first: Curated By... Guy Maddin.

Acquarello previews two entries in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series: Flanders and Blame It on Fidel. Related, Daniel Kasman: "[Bruno] Dumont's formal minimalism rarely results in simple-minded films, but in Flanders the director has whittled down his content to a particularly inane, reductive fable based on the notion that people are beasts."

Michael Guillén: "On March 1-4, 2007, The International Center for the Arts / Doc Film Institute of San Francisco State University is presenting a four-day event, Witness to War: Documentary Perspectives: WWII to Iraq, that will feature two consecutive evenings of onstage appearances by acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns."

Filmbrain's third entry in his Berlinale diary: "Two names that stood out in this year's (dare I say it?) mediocre competition lineup were Jacques Rivette and Jirí Menzel - key figures from the French and Czech nouvelle vague that are, fortunately for us, still making fine films." Andrew all but apologizes for being so late with these reviews, but he's still got the jump on me. An entry or entries on the films I caught will appear, soon as I catch up with everything else.

Online viewing tip. You can tell a lot about a festival by the stars its producer chooses to hang with.

Posted by dwhudson at February 24, 2007 1:06 PM