Other fests, other events, 10/4.

Two festivals open today and run through October 14: Mill Valley and Sitges. Dennis Harvey has an overview of the MVFF at SF360, while Blake Ethridge launches Twitch's coverage of Sitges.

Speaking of the MVFF, Jeffrey M Anderson celebrates a screening of Battleship Potemkin that'll be accompanied by a live performance of Shostakovich's score.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Olivier Assayas's films are both strange and engrossing, so much so that they may evade broad comprehension on the first go-round," writes Max Goldberg, previewing Olivier Assayas in Residence: Cahiers du cinéma Week (at the Pacific Film Archive through October 11). "Whereas instigating French new wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut played fast and loose with tone and narrative structure to create jarring juxtapositions, Assayas does so to effect a subtler, more mysterious sense of illumination."

"It's subtitles galore this week as the Danish Film Festival, the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Cinema Italian Style IV and New Chinese Cinema arrive," announces Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

Scott Foundas previews Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation, a series running at MoMA through October 15: "Haneke, whose debut theatrical film, The Seventh Continent, was released in 1989, spent the first 15 years of his movie career working exclusively for the small screen - not, he told me in a 2001 interview, for lack of offers to make theatrical features, but by his own choice. 'I wanted to find my own language,' he said. Seeing the films now, finally, it's obvious that Haneke figured things out rather quickly."

Also in the Voice: "The two-weekend retro Arnaud Desplechin in Focus pairs four of Desplechin's movies with the classics he loves," notes J Hoberman. "Nothing compares to his Esther Kahn, starring Summer Phoenix as an aspiring diva." October 7 through 14. Also noted: The Emotional Camera: Mikhail Kalatozov, through October 14.

For the Reeler, Ben Gold previews New York's South Asian International Film Festival (through Tuesday). Also: "For a month typically associated with horror films and the dawn of award season, this October offers one of the year's most significant surges of French cinema New York has seen in a while," writes Clémentine Gallot.

"Challenging the modernist notion of 'medium-specificity,' in which each medium is understood as an autonomous entity that operates around its own properties, [Vertigo: The century of off-media art from Futurism to the web] argues that 'it was the progressive incursion of new media that fostered a strong contamination of classical aesthetics, rejecting the presumed division between painting and cinema, sculpture and architecture, theatre and music, design and dance, to affirm an interdisciplinary language' within art practice," writes Miguel Amado at Rhizome. Through November 4 in Bologna.

In the Boston Phoenix, Michael Atkinson welcomes The New Romanian Cinema, a series running tomorrow through Sunday at the Harvard Film Archive, but also asks, "where's Lucien Pintille? After the overthrow of Ceausescu in 1989, Pintille became the international auteur face of Romania, and his inaugural feature, The Oak (1992), remains a defining, damned-laughter vision of the landscape under dictatorship: risibly suicidal despair, explosive violence, Strangelovian military madness, post-industrial decay."

In the Independent Weekly, Zach Smith previews Durham's Escapism Film Festival (tomorrow through Sunday).

The Austin Chronicle previews the Austin Film Festival (October 11 through 18). Also:

• Joe O'Connell asks Scott Prendergast where the idea for Kabluey came from.

• Shawn Badgley talks with Jeff Nichols about the very fine Shotgun Stories.

• Spencer Parsons talks with John Fiege about Mississippi Chicken and with Anne Lewis about Morristown.

• Sofia Resnick talsk with T'chaka Sikelianos on A Yeti in the City.

• And Anne S Lewis on the docs coming to town.

At the Austin Movie Blog, Matthew Odam passes along news that the Flaming Lips are planning to debut their long-awaited feature, Christmas on Mars at SXSW. Those who caught Fearless Freaks at SXSW a few years back got a sneak peek.

Diane Keaton and DJ Waldie will be discussing their new book, California Romantica: Spanish Colonial and Mission-Style Houses at the San Diego Museum of Art on November 14.

Janet Pierson's had a marvelous opening weekend at the New York Film Festival.

Related: A couple of films screening at the NYFF rattle Dan Sallitt's faith in his calling: auteurism. "It's possible, of course, to sniff out similar themes among the films at this year's NYFF," writes Erica Abeel at Filmmaker. "But what blows my mind in the fest's early days are not the similarities among films, but the gulfs; the elasticity of a medium that embraces works that face in opposite directions and speak separate cinematic languages." Michael Buening presents his first roundup at PopMatters.

David Bordwell carries on dispatching from Vancouver. Related: At Hollywood Bitchslap, Jason Whyte interviews Tricia Regan (Autism: The Musical), Jiri Menzel (I Served the King of England) and Brad Hennegan (The First Saturday in May).

The Compass of Resistance International Film Festival: October 21 through November 9 in Bristol.

"The late avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman is to be the subject of a new exhibition curated by his friend and fellow artist Isaac Julien at the Serpentine Gallery, London, next February, 14 years after Jarman's death," reports the Guardian.

Michael Z Newman reflects on several films he caught at the Milwaukee International Film Festival, which wrapped on Sunday.

William Speruzzi shares his copious notes from the IFP Conference.

At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth has the Melbourne Underground Film Festival award-winners.

Joanne Laurier reviews another round of Toronto titles for the WSWS.

Online listening tip. Robert Davis and J Robert Parks talk Toronto.

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2007 4:16 PM