Fests and events, 6/20.

The first-ever New York City Food Film Festival also opens tomorrow and runs through Saturday. Cathy Erway has a preview at the Reeler.

For the Los Angeles Times, Sheigh Crabtree previews a Los Angeles Film Festival entry: "Like a hyperbolic tale ripped from the cover of Weekly World News, the documentary film Cat Dancers is steeped in exotic animal fur, nude portraits, a love triangle, spandex, headbands and rhinestones and the mauling deaths of Joy and Chuck - exotic-animal trainers who were each killed by Jupiter, a white Bengal tiger with a bad attitude." The fest opens tomorrow and runs through July 1.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, on the occasion of a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts retrospective (click for erratic dates), Michelle Devereaux offers unabashed "semicoherent ravings of a Muppet-philiac [Jim] Henson fangirl." Cheryl Eddy chimes in on this as well.

At Cinema Strikes Back, David Austin previews two more New York Asian Film Festival titles: The Banquet and Hard Boiled.

More capsule reviews from Canfield at Twitch: Retribution, Death Note and Death Note: The Last Name and Nightmare Detective.

Matt Riviera's caught Wolfsbergen at the Sydney Film Festival: "The discreet forces at play in this film - both in form and content - sneak up on the viewer almost imperceptibly. Their cumulative effect packs a mighty emotional punch, all the more powerful for its subtlety."

Firecracker names just a few of the highlights from the freshly announced lineup for the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (July 12 through 21) and Darcy Paquet names more in Variety.

At the Stranger Song, Paul Schrodt reports on the Clearwater Festival, "held this past weekend, is situated about an hour north of New York City, where the hot sun beats down on the shore of the Hudson River, bringing out all the sights and smells of nature and those who love it. Once a year, hippies young and old gather here to groove to folk music and announce their environmental consciousness to the world - or, more likely, to their friends."

AJ Schnack's got stories and pix from CineVegas, "one of the very best festivals I've been to during this nine month festival run I've been on."

At Silverdocs, Sujewa Ekanayake caught Kurt Cobain About a Son, "a wildly creative, original, and beautiful portrait of a talented artist who captured the admiration and the imagination of millions of young people around the world."

Harriette Yahr wraps the Maui Film Festival for indieWIRE.

Bryan Whitefield looks back on the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series for ScreenGrab.

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2007 9:23 AM