Shorts, 9/25.

Staring Back is Chris Marker's "beautiful new collection of black-and-white photographs and video stills taken between 1952 and 2006," and Doug Cummings pages through it. "It's a rare token of the work of one of our most elusive but commanding of filmmakers, and a revealing portrait of the unspecified faces lingering in his - and now our - ongoing memories."

"[A]s I grappled with my own ambivalence about taking on an art form so steeped in tradition, so strangely lumbering and usually so expensive, and - above all - performed for so few, I asked myself how I could possibly hope to conquer and reinvent a form within the really tight restrictions opera seems to impose." Sally Potter, on how she eventually came to decide to direct Carmen for the English National Opera. And look, she's blogging.

Also in the Guardian:

• Directed by Jose Padilha (Bus 174) and produced by Marcos Prado, Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad) "has taken Brazil by storm - even though it has yet to be released," reports Tom Phillips. "Based on the life of a special forces operative in Brazil's capital, the film is already proving one of the most controversial pieces of cinema in the country's history. Tens of thousands of pirate copies have been distributed by street hawkers as far away as the Amazon, while a group of Rio police officers reportedly tried to ban it from cinemas."

• Chrissy Iley talks with Samantha Morton about, oh, all sorts of things, among them Control, Mister Lonely, Longford and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. Ah, and Harvey Weinstein: "'He reportedly said to somebody, "Who'd fuck that?" Quite a few people, thank you very much.' She has a naughty smile."

• With Michael Moore's latest set to open in the UK, the Guardian has taken "16 NHS workers to an advance screening of Sicko and asked them: is the British way of medicine really that good?"

Chris Cagle recommends Yannis Tzioumakis's American Independent Cinema: "he book manages to grasp and present the varied and competing definitions of 'independence' without either getting bogged down in the definitional questions (they do interest me, but only up to a point) or assuming a trans-historical essence of independence (as if Cassavetes leads, like a genetic strain passed on, to Jarmusch and Hartley)."

"There are some very interesting things over at Culture Monkey, a blog you should definitely check out," advises Zach Campbell.

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij previews Jean-Jacques Annaud's Sa Majesté Minor (His Majesty Minor), starring José Garcia and Vincent Cassel, and notes, too, that Annaud's got a blog and the movie's got a trailer.

So here's fall, the season we've been waiting for. So why, wonders Nick Davis have the films so far "just been so... blah"? Summer's offerings, particularly the docs, gave him more to get excited about.

"The War on Democracy is a great primer on Latin American politics," advises Matt Riviera.

"In Banished, Marco Williams investigates, with even-handed and nuanced precision, the shameful and suppressed history of white communities banishing African-Americans from their homes between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s," writes Lisa Katzman. "Exposing a Gordian knot of racial injustice, Banished shows the descendants of the dispossessed as they wrestle with themselves and with those who now inhabit their ancestral property over questions of collective memory, statutes of limitations, and reparations."

Also in the Voice: Abigail Deutsch on The Man of My Life, Tim Grierson on Good Luck Chuck, Aaron Hillis on Charlie and Brian Miller on Outsourced.

David Koepp's written a remake of The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3; Tony Scott will direct it and Denzel Washington will star. Variety reports.

Clive Sinclair in the Times Literary Supplement on James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma: "The truth is that if you put a new engine on old tracks you'll get but one thing: derailment."

At Bright Lights After Dark, Erich Keursten defends The Brave One against many of its critics:

[I]f you read Manny Farber's in-depth analysis of Taxi Driver (written shortly after the film's initial release) you can read a lot of the same criticism, the inconsistency of characterization, moral ambiguity, how De Niro's character, for example, changes from scene to scene, from a moronic obsessive to a smooth-talking lothario, etc. Similar criticisms are leveled at Foster's character here, who is a shaky mess of nerves and regret by day and Dirty Harriet by night. Farber is savvy enough to see this inconsistency as part of the film's effectiveness, what makes it unique. Modern day film writers with a certain class of reader in mind have to apparently pre-masticate rather than just tell if the films worth seeing (it is - just in the opening scenes, the naturalistic, playful rapport between Foster and her soon-to-be-dead boyfriend blows half the romantic comedies of this past decade clean out of the water).

Resident Evil: Extinction "wasn't screened for critics," notes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times, "but that seems less a tacit admission of a dip in quality than of the fact that all the films are just noisy time killers, about as engrossing as watching someone else play a video game." More from Jim Ridley in the Voice.

At Slate, Jessica Winter looks back on Wall Street two decades on: "Somehow, an oleaginous villain meant to embody the worst excesses of his era became a folk hero and highly persuasive career counselor. Wall Street was intended as a cautionary tale, but oddly enough, it endures as a possibly timeless model for success."

"To mark the centenary of someone like Anne Desclos, and more particularly Pauline Réage, is somehow more profound, I find, than marking the centenary of an actor or filmmaker, as I usually do on this blog," writes Tim Lucas. " It reminds me that time and history claim more of us than our names and the broad outlines of our biographies; they also absorb the secret and powerful stories, told and untold, of our most violent passions."

As various countries send their films into the Oscar race, Nathaniel R's keeping track. His chart features posters, links, details on the films and stats on each country's past nominations and wins.

Bob Westal has put out the call for a Bob Fosse Blog-a-Thon: November 10.

Online browsing tip. The Movie Timeline "is the history of everything, taken from one simple premise: that everything you see in the movies is true - the real mixes with the fictitious, so long as it's reported in a movie somewhere." Via Shawn Levy.

Online viewing tip. Paper managing editor Rebecca Carroll introduces the October "Un-Hollywood Issue." Via ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler, where he also has a quick review of Mike Mills's Does Your Soul Have a Cold?, a magnificently shot documentary on depression in Japan showing as part of the magazine's Un-Hollywood Film Series.

Online viewing tips. The Shamus finds Sofia Coppola. "In a can."

Posted by dwhudson at September 25, 2007 3:39 PM