Fests and events, 6/6.

"Subway Cinema has announced the lineup of this year's New York Asian Film Festival, which runs June 22 - July 8," notes Robert Cashill. "Of the selections, I've only seen Johnnie To's Exiled, a virtuoso piece of gangster filmmaking, though Korea's City of Violence seems like it could top it for sheer bad-assedness."

"The Brueghelian panorama of black-market profiteers, shopworn bar hostesses, American soldiers behaving badly, and amateur pornographers [Shohei Imamura] captured from the 1960s onward is on full display in the 12 remaining features of the Pacific Film Archive's current embarrassment of riches Shohei Imamura's Japan," writes Matt Sussman. Through June 30.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Now in its ninth year, the San Francisco Black Film Festival continues to expand its scope, with two long weekends of narrative films and documentaries plus several shorts programs." Cheryl Eddy picks a few highlights.

And: "For more than 25 years, Portland, Ore, film archivist, historian, professor, and writer Dennis Nyback has been searching for rare films in the catalog The Big Reel as well as in thrift stores and flea markets," writes Maria Komodore. "F@ck Mickey Mouse is the title of a 16mm film program Nyback has assembled to showcase, as he puts it, 'rare cartoon precursors that beat Disney to the punch, imitators that ripped him off, and parodies that made vicious fun of some of Disney's greatest animation shorts." Saturday evening. Michael Guillén talks with Nyback for SF360.

Peter Martin looks ahead to CineVegas (through June 16) for Cinematical.

Starting Friday, the films of Charles Burnett will be screening at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for ten days straight. The most well-known of these films, of course, is Killer of Sheep. For the Phoenix, Steve Vineberg previews many of the others.

"Let's Get Lost stands as a gorgeous gravestone for the Beat Generation's legacy of beautiful-loser chic," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "Bruce Weber's transfixing 1988 portfolio of the artist - ravaged jazz trumpeter Chet Baker - as a junkie wraith unmoored in time seems doubly poignant almost 20 years later, when the bloom of its own newness is gone." At Film Forum, Friday through June 28.

At Twitch, Todd rounds up a slew of trailers for films slated for the Worldwide Short Film Festival (June 12 through 17 in Toronto).

David D'Arcy will be hosting a summer series of Woody Allen films at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the way New York's Alexandra Peers sees it, this is an all-out "tweaking" of "its crosstown rival, MoMA." Ach, please. Maybe David just happens to be very good at this hosting, moderating and interviewing thing.

The Surreal Delicacy of René Clair: Tuesdays through July at the French Institute Alliance Française; Mark Asch has more in the L Magazine.

David Lowery's been to LA, where he's seen Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Unknown Forces.

"Overcoming jet lag and time difference, then plying through crowds to experience one red carpet event, one press conference, one party in a villa, one day trip and one big celebrity arrival is a must-do for every first-time goer." Hannah Eaves on the Cannes experience for PopMatters.

Reporting for Film.com from the Seattle International Film Festival, Andy Spletzer is surprised to find he actually likes Anthony Hopkins's "crazy little fever dream of a film," Slipstream.

More SIFF: the Siffblog and the Stranger.

Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2007 10:43 AM