Shorts, 4/5.

"The planet is ill, everyone knows that," Alejandro Jodorowsky tells the Guardian's Xan Brooks. "But I need to be optimistic, otherwise I would just be adding to the negativity. So every night I come on Madrid TV and read a piece of good news." Really. He does. At any rate, Brooks has a good talk with him in Paris and catches up with the midnight classics: "I watch El Topo and it stands up pretty well; a shotgun wedding of Sergio Leone and Federico Fellini: primal and pretentious in about equal measure. Then I watch The Holy Mountain and it's as though the world has gone widescreen. It's astonishing, outlandish; unlike anything made before or since."

Also in the Guardian, a "new generation of Arab film-makers are emerging across the region intent on breaking taboos and challenging audiences both at home and abroad," writes Ali Jafaar. "Whether Djamila Sahraoui's Algerian civil war road movie Barakat!, which won the inaugural Best Arab film prize at last year's Dubai international film festival, Ghassan Salhab's Beirut-set vampire story The Last Man, or Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaidi's genre-busting tale of a love-struck Casablanca assassin in WWW: What a Wonderful World, Arab cinema is experiencing something of an awakening."

And Brian Logan asks, "Has Sam Mendes lost touch with British theater?"

"We can finally announce that Godard's elusive Histoire(s) du cinéma is available for order (really!)." A gleeful Jon Pais. Also at Twitch, Canfield posts a huge "March DVD Wrap-up."

More DVD recommendations? Shawn Badgley's got several in the Austin Chronicle.

For Jason Clark, writing in Slant, Everything's Gone Green is "a trite comedy that examines Gen Y-ish ennui and the futility of believing a middle class exists, a perfectly ripe subject for any film these days, but this one buries its good intentions in a deluge of missed opportunities."

Los Muertos is "an extraordinary film from the young Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, which premiered at Cannes and Toronto in 2004 and has yet to find North American distribution," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's a gorgeous, troubling odyssey through the South American jungle... It's a tremendous experience, whatever it is; the kind of thing supposed art-movie audiences used to tolerate and pretty much don't anymore." Also: "After a precisely crafted first hour with nary a detail out of place, Whole New Thing comes unglued toward the end, spiraling into melodrama without ever escaping its whiny, indie-rock soundtrack."

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times on The Reaping: "The only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks, swaying Spanish moss, creeping blond kids and swelling décolletage, creatively presented from various angles in various contexts, is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market." More from Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times.

For acquarello, "The Ceremony is a provocative and excoriating satire on the amorphous nature of modern Japanese identity that could only have been forged in the wake of Nagisa Oshima's increasing disillusionment with the impotence of the left movement."

Jason Sperb, writing at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, finds Barbara Klinger's Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies and the Home to be "a crucial piece of scholarship, which offers a satisfying account of expanded sites for interrogating contemporary American film cultures. As her title succinctly suggests, Klinger's book is interested in how film exists beyond the theater - beyond urban movie palaces, run-down small-town venues, has-been mall theaters, and the newest suburban 30-screen multiplexes. Instead, she is interested specifically in how the home is a central space for the construction of film cultures."

Updates on the up-n-coming at Cinematical: Christopher Campbell on Danny Boyle's Slum Dog and Erik Davis on Richard Kelly's Southland Tales.

"The world's oldest working film director, 98-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, has begun shooting his latest pic, Christopher Columbus: The Enigma, produced by Francois d'Artemare of Filmes do Tejo," reports Martin Dale for Variety.

Asia Argento, Mathieu Amalric and Laurent Lucas are set to star in Bertrand Bonello's De la guerre, reports Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa.

"For viewers interested in the Franco-Algerian question but put off by the intellectual puzzle that was Michael Haneke's Caché or the simplistic indignity of the colonial soldiers drama Indigènes (Days of Glory), Thomas Gilou's comparatively breezy Michou d'Auber might be the perfect antidote," suggests Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"The period, the predicament, the politics are all utterly palpable," writes Robert Avila at SF360. "Still, the power of The Wind That Shakes the Barley lies in the immediacy of the subject matter of war, occupation, and empire - especially in the way [Ken] Loach brings these themes to bear locally, on the lives of ordinary persons in a specific community."

"Not only did I find my mind wandering during [Two or Three Things I Know About Her], but I felt like I was being hectored," writes Kathy Fennessey at the Siffblog. "I didn't enjoy the film as essay or rant, but I did appreciate it as a time capsule of a particular time, place, and sensibility."

"Is drug use a distinctly American movie theme?" An annotated list from Josef Braun in the Vue Weekly.

David Byrne explains why an increase in the performance royalty rates for 'non-interactive streaming services' is a bad, bad idea.

Online viewing tip #1. The Hollywood Reporter's Steve Bryant has found MK12's The History of America.

Online viewing tip #2. At Filmmaker, Nick Dawson finds Ileana Douglas's Supermarket.

Online viewing tips. Brendon Connelly: "A huge archive of footage from the Cannes film festival has gone online today."

Posted by dwhudson at April 5, 2007 3:16 PM