LAW. Lions, AFI Fest, Fall Film.

AFI Fest opens this evening with Lions for Lambs and, in his profile for the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas writes that, throughout a career spanning half a century, director and star Robert Redford "has stayed on the lookout for the subtle fissures in seemingly flawless façades, whether it be the American government's veil of inviolability (All the President's Men), broadcast television's carefully stage-managed reality (Quiz Show) or the stiff upper lips of a tragedy-stricken suburban family (Ordinary People)." His latest "meets the War on Terror and a grab bag of other sociopolitical issues head-on, making for one of the year's most provocative and polarizing moviegoing experiences."

To hear Kim Masters tell it in Slate, the first round of reviews "are not good," though, based at least on intriguingly mixed reviews in the German papers, it seems that reaction is bound to be a little more nuanced than thumbs down across the board. But what Masters is really interested in is what'll happen if this "first film released under the United Artists banner since Tom Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner, took over" bombs - to the studio and to Cruise's long-term bankability.

A couple of related notes before moving on: At cinemaattraction, Robert Levin writes that Lions, "though it stars such icons as Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and the director, is about as far from mainstream as movies get. It is, in fact, a quasi-experimental piece, focused entirely on the ebbs and tides of two crucial conversations... Yet, despite also being brazenly political and didactic, the picture resonates long after the end credits roll." And for the Financial Times, Emanuel Levy listens to Redford, Cruise and Streep talk about what drew them to the project.

Meanwhile, the "tide has turned at AFI Fest, from embarrassment to embarrassment of riches," writes Foundas, introducing the LAW's whopping guide - around three dozen features get capsule reviews. The Los Angeles Times preview withers in comparison, but Margaret Wappler does agree with the LAW's upbeat assessment of the festival overall: "With new artistic director Rose Kuo at the helm, the festival has bolstered its intelligence factor with panel discussions and salons, in addition to the usual star tributes." Also, in the LAT, Susan King talks with festival honoree Laura Linney.

LAW critics pick six must-sees: 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Chop Shop, Chris & Don: A Love Story, Confessions of a Superhero, The Duchess of Langeais and The Tracey Fragments. As for that last one, Mike Plante, blogging for Filmmaker, notes that director Bruce McDonald has "launched Tracey: Re-Fragmented, a re-editing initiative surrounding the release of his latest award-winning feature film... In a bold move, he has made the entire film and score (by Indie Collective Broken Social Scene) available for download for users to make their own version."

When he saw Silent Light in Cannes, Scott Foundas was impressed but did have "ome reservations about the two-and-a-half-hour length and what I perceived as a certain emotional opacity on the part of [Carlos] Reygadas's nonprofessional actors. But "on second viewing, those things I initially found distant and somewhat studied now felt overwhelmingly immediate in the way great art can be. Movies, of course, are not fixed objects - they are highly variable, depending on where and when we see them. Rarely, though, has a film grown so much in my estimation from one viewing to the next as Silent Light - one of many subjects I took up with Reygadas when we met again in New York last month."

Foundas, you may remember, was among the first to get word out that Lee Chang-Dong's Secret Sunshine was going to be one of the highlights of the year. Now he talks with Lee, "who may well be the most gifted Korean director of his generation. Void of extravagant bodily dismemberments or elaborate torture-revenge schemes, Lee's films favor the perils and pitfalls of everyday life, the search for belonging, and the tension between the past and the present."

"For several years now, I've been writing that Israeli cinema is growing up," writes Ella Taylor in an overview of a handful of films screening at the festival. "A pox on my condescension: It's not that Israeli movies have abandoned their preoccupation with the Arab-Israeli conflict. They're just less obsessive and self-serious about it, and more inclined to integrate those concerns into a broader investigation of personal and national identity."

Ousmane Sembène, Edward Yang, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni are all subjects to tributes at the fest. "One cannot mourn such artists, for in terms of imaginative force and philosophical weight, they haven't died," writes FX Feeney. "They will be with us for centuries to come, just as we will continue to approach their films, free of theory and preconception, to see what new riches they yield."

There's even more than all this in the LAW's "Fall Film," beginning with Ella Taylor's terrific profile of Tilda Swinton, in which, besides plenty on her past, we get a glimpse of her immediate future:

After she's done promoting Michael Clayton, Swinton heads to New York to star opposite George Clooney again in the Coen brothers' CIA caper Burn After Reading, and next year she'll appear in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And that's just Hollywood. Aside from John Maybury's upcoming Come Like Shadows, in which she'll play (about time, too) Lady Macbeth, Swinton rarely works within the English film world anymore. She's too disgusted by a new funding structure that ties the movie business to the national lottery and the tourist industry. But she has a bunch of projects on the go in Europe, including a meaty lead role as an extortionist in a new movie by The Dream Life of Angels director Erick Zonca. Swinton calls Zonca 'the real deal,' but you never hear her talk about working for a director. She makes movies with them.

Also, a piece on movies for kids expands to a broader consideration of a cultural phenomenon: "When and why did we become so neurotically split about our children?"

Somewhat related is John Anderson's piece on the gradual fall of one of the last taboos: "The death of children isn't new to entertainment - Shakespeare's Richard III kills the little princes, and right now, on my television, a half dozen little girls are being killed on Law & Order. But the big screen is much more of a barometer of public acceptance, tolerance and taste: We watch movies in public, after all."

Ella Taylor: "The brilliance of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - and finally its limitation - is that it's never clear whether this is the stuff of melodrama or [Sidney] Lumet's gnomic little joke."

Posted by dwhudson at November 1, 2007 8:01 AM