Fests and events, 5/11.

"The Seattle International Film Festival, set for May 24 - June 17, 2007, will open with Garth Jennings's Sundance '07 premiere Son of Rambow and close with Laurent Tirard's Molière, described as a 'sumptuous historical comedy' about the famed French satirist. A whopping 405 films will screen at the festival, which touted its 48 world premieres and 39 North American premieres in an announcement." Brian Brooks has the line-up at indieWIRE. At the Siffblog, David Jeffers highlights the silents.

"As if Quentin Tarantino's recent Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival 2007 wasn't enough, the America Cinematheque is ready to shine a little more light on that much-hashed-over golden age of American movies, the 70s," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "It is for good reason that the series has been called The Seventies: The Good, the Bad and the Strange - because many of these movies, some of which haven't been screened in 20 or 30 years, are good, bad, and strange, and often simultaneously." And he comments on each entry.

At Bad Lit, Mike's got the lineup for this weekend's New Haven Underground Film Festival.

For the New York Times, Manohla Dargis previews Lee Marvin: The Coolest Lethal Weapon, opening today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and running through May 24: "In real life Marvin had been a good guy, but with his hooded eyes and a voice that sounded as if all the gentleness had been scraped from it, he seemed destined for villainy. He was, certainly. But the best of these are not cartoon creeps or thrill-kill sadists. They are generally complex men, interested, trigger tempered, yes... but also nimble-witted and at times dry-as-dust funny."

Related: Girish has seen Point Blank three times now: "[T]he things that once smacked strongest of modernism - the Resnais-ish temporal fragmentation, the non-naturalistic sound design, the dream/reality shuttlings, and most importantly, the aggressively abstract and expressionist use of architecture - now seem harmoniously blended, coherent."

For more NYC goings on, see Michael Lerman at indieWIRE.

Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth will see its official world premiere at the RomeFilmFest in October, reports Nick Vivarelli in Variety.

The Chicago Reader previews the Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival, opening today and running through Thursday.

"As great as the Siskel's Jacques Rivette: Cinema As Adventure retrospective will be, the must-see event - which requires some advance planning - is the one that should claim Saturday and Sunday of your Memorial Day weekend." Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out Chicago: "Out 1 provided Rivette with his largest canvas, and the results are proportionally spectacular."

Johan Grimonprez's Looking for Alfred is on view at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich through August 19.

Bill Viola: At the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Poland, tomorrow through July 1.

The B Movie Celebration: August 17 through 19.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is back home from the 53rd International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany: "Part of what made the event interesting was the same default position that sustained me through the 64 shorts I saw: the notion that at a festival as genuinely international as this one, a certain education was possible, however limited, in how people in other parts of the world were living and thinking - all of which provides a potential context for better understanding some of the choices involved, conscious or otherwise, in how Americans live and think."

PopMatters' series on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival rolls on. While she was there, by the way, the cinetrix picked up on an odd motif: helicopters.

Posted by dwhudson at May 11, 2007 8:18 AM