Weekend fests and events.

"Starting today, the Museum of the Moving Image presents a weeklong series titled The Real Edie Sedgwick that further burnishes her legend and her importance as a muse," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Ms Sedgwick's beauty, fame, bad habits, bed partners, early death and continuing postmortem notoriety have helped turn her into the representative face of Warhol's film work, his ultimate superstar. But what often gets left out of the discussion about her proverbial 15 minutes is that she was, quite simply, a dazzling film presence."

David Bordwell fills us in on local news and offers capsule reviews of ten films he's recently seen at Filmart and the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

"When Josef von Sternberg, born in Vienna in 1894 as the son of orthodox Jews, passed away in Hollywood in 1969, he had become one of the inimitable 20th century artists - a poète maudit of cinema." The Austrian Film Museum stages a retrospective featuring a few extremely rarely seen films, "the first presentation in Austria of the recently recovered 'Prater Fragments' from The Case of Lena Smith (1929)," lectures, special guests, the works. Starts tomorrow in Vienna and runs through April 27.

"In Erich von Stroheim's films, the world is a slaughterhouse." The exhibition This Monster Stroheim! is on view at the Filmmuseum Potsdam through May 13.

"UCLA Film and Television Archive's 17th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema is the largest in the program's history with five narrative features, five documentaries and two short films," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "Surprisingly, none of the films has a theatrical distribution deal in the United States."

Michael Guillén has quite an update on what all will be on offer at the San Francisco International Film Festival (April 26 through May 10).

At this moment, Reel Distraction is enjoying the Hot Fuzztival at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin.

At Bad Lit, Mike's got the Boston Underground Film Festival award-winners.

The newly revamped site for the Toronto After Dark Festival is up and running. October 19 through 25.

The New York Post's Lou Lumenick notes the justifiably furious reactions from David Poland and Jeffrey Wells to Eugene Hernandez's indieWIRE report that the Tribeca Film Festival is slapping a 50% increase on ticket prices this year over last: from $12 to $18. Lumenick adds a few comments of his own as well: "Those of us who have covered the festival over the years have largely turned a blind eye to the issue that the bulk of the offerings are mediocre or worse - largely films that were rejected by Sundance or New Directors/New Films, many of which are never heard from again. The steep ticket prices may force the media to abandon our previous civic boosterism and start looking at Tribeca's offerings from a more consumerist point of view - are these flicks really worth $18?"

Posted by dwhudson at March 31, 2007 2:20 PM