Fests and events, 7/1.

"Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point is often cited as one of the greatest follies made by a great filmmaker, but have any of those writers watched it lately?" wonders Ray Pride. "While its 1960s youth-culture-on-the-run-story, with echoes of Kent State (credited to Antonioni, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra and Claire Peploe) is often blunt and the acting wooden, it’s one of the most striking uses of light and space in a filmography built upon such concerns." Screens tonight in Chicago. Related: Rato Records.

From Wiley Wiggins's program notes for a Tuesday evening screening in Austin: "That the story of Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been retold so often in cinema shines a light on its position in our collective unconscious, along with the grandest and oldest of myths. Each retelling has been unique in its tone and message, but, in my opinion, the 1978 version you are about to see is the most unique, the most immediate, and the most relevant."

"Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, a documentary made for television in six one-hour segments, will open as a two-part film starting Wednesday at Film Forum in New York," notes John Anderson in the New York Times. "The documentary is a delicate construction asking a delicate question: Is there anything in common between [director Jennifer] Fox, a liberal, middle-class Manhattanite, and, say, a prostitute in Cambodia? Flying contends that there is."

For those in the San Francisco Bay Area, Brian Darr has three thick paragraphs' worth of goings on to choose from.

A Mikio Naruse season runs at the BFI Southbank throughout July. "Since his death there have been periodic attempts to thrust this most reticent of figures into the limelight, and every decade or so his films are revived and Western critics proclaim him the equal of his better-known contemporaries, such as Yasujiro Ozu (who also served his apprenticeship at the Shochiku film company in the 1920s), Akira Kurosawa (once Naruse's assistant) or Kenji Mizoguchi (who also made films about doomed geishas)," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "Despite their efforts, Naruse remains an almost obscure figure."

Meanwhile, the Marlon Brando season runs throughout July as well, and Ray Bennett's come across "an article about Brando I came across that I wrote almost 20 years ago for a now-defunct magazine called Orbit Video."

In the Los Angeles Times, Susan King previews the Disney Live-Action Classics series. July 11 through 15.

Daniel Kasman catches Big Bang Love, Juvenile A at the New York Asian Film Festival: "Whether there is discernable rhyme or reason to Miike's prison fable is beyond the point, as the film unexpectedly and poetically seems to make up its own scattershot rationale, as if this bizarre portrait of imprisoned young men was really just like the space shuttle and pyramid outside their windows: a strange and allegorical extension of the mind." Then there's David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back on Dynamite Warrior and Zebraman. More on Big Bang Love and Dynamite Warrior from Michael Wells at Twitch.

At Cineuropa, Bénédicte Prot has the list of award-winners announced at the end of the 25th Munich Film Festival.

Michael Guillén's got another Frameline31 interview: "Seth Randal was thoroughly enthused when we met. He had been putting up announcements of the added screening of The Fall of '55, necessitated by the rapid sellout of his first screening at the Roxie Film Center."

Posted by dwhudson at July 1, 2007 6:42 AM