Fests and events, 2/26.

"[T]he 20 films on view in Pimps, Prostitutes, and Pigs: Shohei Imamura's Japan, a monthlong retrospective beginning Friday at the BAM Rose Cinemas at the Brooklyn Academy of Music [through March 29], display a pretty spectacular variety of human qualities - mostly failings," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "It's a compendium of barbarities, both primitive and thoroughly modern, a vision of life reduced to its brutal basics: violence is constant; sex is urgent, sloppy and profoundly unromantic; and the struggle to survive makes men and women appallingly creative in inventing ways to mistreat one another."

Film Comment Selects wraps tomorrow; a few of the latest reviews:

• "Avant-garde or not, 13 Lakes held me the same way any other movie does," writes Mike D'Angelo. "I stuck around because I wanted to see what would 'happen' next."

• "While James Benning's 13 Lakes captures the materiality, self-equilibration, and memory of water," writes acquarello, "the film's equally rigorous and abstractly hypnotic companion piece, Ten Skies, illustrates the mutability, ephermerality, and transience of nature."

• Daniel Kasman on Lights in the Dusk: "The strong emphasis on [Aki] Kaurismäki's staging places the plot at such a distance that the story and acting seem banal and overworn while the look is utterly refined."

"Africa's biggest film festival has opened in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkino Faso, showcasing some of the best films from across the continent," reports the BBC. "The Pan-African Film and Television Festival, Fespaco, is a biennial event that has been running since 1969."

Matt Riviera catches three romantic comedies at Australia's French Film Festival.

Posted by dwhudson at February 26, 2007 11:59 AM