Shorts, 11/2.

"The Kite Runner, based on the bestseller novel by Khaled Hosseini, pushes those [Marc] Forster buttons: political fear and sexual panic," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Forster's titillating approach keeps the story provocative rather than complex. Politics aside, it recalls sexual and political themes in Vincente Minnelli's great 1960 melodrama Home from the Hill. But Forster's mix of topicality and sensationalism makes The Kite Runner sentimental, not profound."

"Boldly and magnificently strange, There Will Be Blood marks a significant departure in the work of Paul Thomas Anderson," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "The film's zealous interest in a man so alienated from his brethren can be alternately read as a work abnormally fascinated by cold, antisocial behavior, or as a deeply humanistic tract on the wages of misanthropy. Either way, Anderson has embraced his study of a malign man intimately, as has [Daniel] Day-Lewis, who, as always, seems so completely absorbed in his role that it's difficult to imagine him emerging between takes as just an actor playing a part. Daniel is a man who will stop at nothing to achieve the unnatural state of becoming an island onto himself, and Day-Lewis makes him his own."

David Poland would agree - up to about the second hour, when it starts tumbling toward "the absolutely disastrous last major scene in the film." At any rate, Karina Longworth notes at the SpoutBlog that Variety's got a coupla more reviews, too.

"Southland Tales, re-cut since its world premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, is apocalyptic vaudeville, as politicians, cops, Iraq veterans porn stars and an amnesiac actor scramble to fulfil or forestall conspiracies in Los Angeles, culminating in a world-ending Fourth of July," writes David D'Arcy in Screen Daily. "It's an incoherent cataclysmic comedy, and often a wildly funny one."

For Emerging Pictures, Charles Burnett posts an entry on Honeydripper: "[I]t is a joy to watch [John] Sayles, as he does in his other films, work socially relevant issues into his stories without compromising the narrative.... Race is an ongoing issue that good people are not afraid to tackle. John Sayles' films are out front on that issue."

More stars than you can shake a wish at turned up at the Guggenheim last Saturday evening for Francesco Vezzoli's staged reading of Pirandello's 1917 play Right You Are (If You Think You Are, but according to Artforum's Linda Yablonsky not too many seemed happy to be there.

Up-n-coming:

• At Cinematical, Peter Martin may well have news of David Cronenberg's next film. It'd be based on Christopher Hampton's The Talking Cure, "a play about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and the earliest days of psychoanalysis," as the complete review describes it.

• Ray Pride's got a titillating press release: Focus Features is taking on Jim Jarmusch's next film, The Limits of Control, to be shot by Christopher Doyle.

• Nora Ephron will direct Julia & Julia, starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams "as a mastercook wannabe," reports Tatiana Siegel for Variety.

• Noted in the Los Angeles Times: "Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer and Tom Waits will costar in director Terry Gilliam's modern-day fantasy-adventure The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, set to begin production next month in London."

If Black Irish "is predicated on some threadbare Irish-American clichés, it's saved by some compelling and committed performances," writes Mike Miliard in the Boston Phoenix. "The story was originally set in New York, but after scouting locations in Boston, [director Brad] Gann writes that he 'immediately understood that these neighborhoods, infused with Irish culture, have retained customs and mores that have remained virtually impervious to outside influence.'" Also, you may remember that gathering of top-o'-the-line critics Glenn Kenny blogged about last week; Gerald Peary gets some good quotes.

In his Austin Chronicle cover story on the resurrection of the original Alamo Drafthouse, one of the best-loved movie theaters in the country, Marc Savlov offers a brief history of its new digs: The Ritz.

"Not since Garbo has an actress transfixed the camera with a more unwavering, uncompromising stare than Isabelle Huppert," blogs James Wolcott. "Where Garbo's gaze was an opaque window into the supreme indifference of a deity fatigued by centuries of boredom - a sublime abstraction ('that magnificent mare's head of hers will puzzle our descendents,' wrote Graham Greene) - there's nothing transcendental in Huppert's death-ray stare; it's very much nailed in the here-and-now, the expressionless expression of a temperamental force whose motives are enigmatic even to herself."

"Why is it that these films feel so urgent today, when a decade ago I found them unwatchable?" For Nerve, Bilge Ebiri revisits the work of Kenneth Anger.

"John Huston has three of the greatest film noir efforts ever on celluloid to his credit." At Noir of the Week, William Hare takes a three-part look at the director's career: parts 1, 2 and 3.

"Love and Honor, the final episode in Yoji Yamada's samurai trilogy, maintains the grace and resonance of its predecessors as well as their focus on class inequality," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. But for Aaron Hillis, writing in the Voice, "Yamada's refined Merchant-Ivory approach to the Edo era (slow pace, genteel storytelling, restraint) produces more yawning than fawning."

Back in the New York Times:

• "The ocean is just large enough to contain the ambition of Sharkwater," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "This beautiful and horrifying debut feature by the underwater cameraman Rob Stewart of Toronto characterizes the depletion of the world's shark population as an ecological catastrophe with dire consequences for humanity." Aaron Hillis, once again in the Voice: "Stewart is his own star, a would-be Speedo model and whoa-dude narrator whose droning reflections (one finned shark feels 'like part of my family is dying') get in the way of his stunning underwater cinematography."

• "A triptych of short films set on and immediately after 9/11, A Broken Sole is based on a stage production by its screenwriter and co-producer, Susan Charlotte," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "One hopes the material played onstage, because it dies on screen."

• Did the Beaufort team alert the Israeli film academy to the percentage of dialogue spoken in English in The Band's Visit, thereby ensuring its disqualification in the race to be Israel's representative in the Foreign Language Oscar race? Or is the Visit team simply making a fuss for the sake of free PR? Isabel Kershner talks to both sides. But that's not all: "The Arab world's ban of The Band's Visit seems to be less personal, more clear-cut."

• "The mesmerizing ghost of Richard Burton, at the height of his fame, materializes and dissolves again and again in the Wooster Group's meticulous re-creation of a production of Hamlet staged on Broadway 43 years ago, starring Burton and directed by John Gielgud," writes Ben Brantley. "This downtown troupe's sometimes ravishing, often numbing homage to a fabled theatrical event turns Burton's performance as the Prince of Denmark into a tantalizing on-screen disappearing act at the Public Theater, where the show opened last night."

• And Douglas Martin remembers Robert Goulet.

"Along with the equally pessimistic and misanthropic A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Blade Runner sets the standard for movies about androids in the post-Metropolis era," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. "Blade Runner's long journey from commercial flop to cult classic is a complicated, slapstick saga. All but this most recent chapter is recounted in Paul M Sammon's exhaustive Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (1996)."

"Wagner's influence on cinema is much more pervasive than you might expect," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "The real measure of his influence is that it can be felt everywhere, from war movies like Apocalypse Now to the work of determinedly offbeat and experimental directors like [Harmony] Korine." Also, an assessment of the strange state of British cinema at the moment.

"Numbed by all the fleshy and opulent come-ons, eternally frustrated and restless, many Americans cannot even be sated with an open-ended snuff show that's Iraq, now in its fifth season," writes Linh Dinh in Dissident Voice. "Many are clamoring for a sequel in Iran, so they can channel surf between a Kobe slam dunk, nuclear war and American Idol." Via wood s lot.

"An exposé of a controversial and rarely seen subculture, Meeting Resistance in theory should have been a revealing documentary," writes the Los Angeles Times. "In truth, however, the measures taken to protect the informants' identities dilute the potency of their statements and diminish the film's efficacy as a historical document."

Also:

• "A flotilla of LA residents gathers in an unlandscaped recreation area in Baldwin Hills to canoodle, attempt suicide, plot revenge and dig into one another's psyches in writer-director Kurt Voelker's high-spirited if slight comedy, Park," writes Kevin Crust. "Set almost entirely in and around a quartet of vehicles parked on the parched bluffs southwest of downtown, the film's expediently connected vignettes are played out as loud and broad farce with flurries of social commentary but work best when Voelker gets around to humanizing some of his characters at the 11th hour."

• Borzou Daragahi and Raed Rafei report that The Kingdom won't be playing in Saudi Arabia, which, of course, is no surprise since the country has no public movie theaters. But it's also being shut out of Kuwait and Bahrain: "'The film vilifies a brotherly country, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,' the Bahraini official said in a phone conversation from Manama. 'It attempts to show Saudi Arabia as a country that supports terrorism or helps propagate it.'"

• "When Primo Levi was liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945, he wanted to return immediately to his birthplace in Turin, Italy," writes Kenneth Turan, reviewing Primo Levi's Journey. "That journey of a thousand miles ended up taking 10 months as Levi crossed country after country before finally making it back home.... Italian documentary filmmaker Davide Ferrario, who specializes in what he calls 'on the road' documentaries, decided to retrace Levi's steps in modern Europe. It was a wise choice."

• Dennis Lim on 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days: "Among other things, [Cristian] Mungiu's film provides an unsettling counterpoint to the squeamishness with which American movies tackle the subject of unwanted pregnancy: See Knocked Up, Waitress, the forthcoming Juno."

• Cristy Lytal talks with the Juno team about Jason Reitman.

"Weeks after catching Secret Sunshine at the New York Film Festival, I'm still at a loss for something original to say about it," writes Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "Many have already reviewed the film at Cannes and Toronto, returning roughly the same verdict: This flick takes a chain gun to the old maxim, if the actor cries, the audience does not."

Jeffrey Overstreet spots a theme for the year so far: "The elusive nature of evil. No matter what folks try to accomplish, the dark side is getting the better of things, and escaping every strategy we devise... if we even get around to fighting back at all. The big screen seems to be a giant sandwich board shouting THE END IS NEAR."

Everything's Cool "is notable for continuing where An Inconvenient Truth left off, delving into the political censorship that has kept global warming a non-issue in the United States for so long, and doing so through a uniquely character-driven method that shows how foot soldiers like Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan and Weather Channel climate expert Heidi Cullen continue to fight the good fight against ghouls whose hands are in the pockets of the country's gas and oil companies," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. Also, Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037: "For sure, no human has been conceived and reared with as much fuss, but this idea that grands are like snowflakes is repeated almost ad nauseam."

In the Guardian:

• "Video may not have actually killed the radio star, but celebrity magazines are killing the box-office power of the A-list," argues Hadley Freeman. "Now there is blanket coverage of celebrities, why pay £10 to see them in the cinema?"

• Stephen Moss talks with Shekhar Kapur about Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

• Leo Bendedictus talks with Albert Watson about a Malcolm X-inspired fashion shoot.

• A video interview with Frank Oz.

"The academic community appears to concur that the behavior of fans can be better understood as a thriving desire to achieve a type of symbolic ownership of their favorite characters and movies." At PopMatters, Marco Lanzagorta offers an overview of the development of the technology that's made ownership more feasible and tractable than ever.

"Actress Cate Blanchett has said she hopes the Sydney Theatre Company 'flourishes' when she and husband Andrew Upton take over as directors," reports the BBC. "Her comment follows the resignation of one of the theatre's actors, Colin Moody, in protest at the appointment."

At Film of the Year, Thom takes stock.

"As of today, Stylus Magazine is closing its doors," noted Jason Morehead, well, yesterday. They've gathered some of their best work in "The Bluffer's Guide to Stylus" and, though you'll probably find something to distract you along the way, if you scroll about three-quarters down that page, you'll hit a baker's dozen of their favorite pieces on the movies.

For Tribeca, Mulberry Street director Jim Mickle picks "13 Awesome Independent Horror Movies."

Online viewing tip. The Boston Globe's Ty Burr points to an onstage chat between Errol Morris and Werner Herzog. The quality of that stream may be a bit strange now and then, but it seems to catch itself. After crashing your browser.

Online browsing and viewing tip. "Dougal Wilson's Bat For Lashes video ['What's a Girl to Do?'] is nominated for the Best Video award at this year's MTV Europe Awards, which will take place tomorrow night in Munich." Creative Review has more than the video itself; they've also got Wilson's sketches for it and a few comments on its making as well.

Posted by dwhudson at November 2, 2007 5:29 PM