Fests and events, 11/4.

"With And Along Come Tourists, writer-director Robert Thalheim has made an understated film about a particularly sensitive place where past and present collide with unforgotten atrocities: the present-day town of Oswiecim, Poland, site of the Auschwitz extermination camp," writes Jürgen Fauth, noting, too, that the film's opened Kino! 2007, Featuring Kino! Berlin at MoMA, running through November 14.

Related: Dan Sallitt recommends catching Maria Speth's Madonnas.

"Walther Ruttmann's Symphony of a City, screened twice at Zankel Hall on Saturday, was conceived as an abstract exercise in composition: think Rodchenko turned to film (though Ruttmann does not quite have Rodchenko's eye for a detail that is both telling and original)," blogs Anne Midgette from the Berlin in Lights Festival for the New York Times. "But though avant-garde in 1927, today it awakens primarily a voyeuristic response: what was life like then?"

"The Croatian series at the Walter Reade is turning up a lot of interesting work that isn't well known here in the US," writes Dan Sallitt. "My favorite so far is Veljko Bulajic's Train Without a Timetable, from 1959."

The exhibition Jeff Wall: Exposure is open at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin through January 20 and includes a film series programmed by the photographer.

"A new British Film Institute season provides the opportunity not just to reassess a remarkable outsider, but to reflect on the place of music in the cinema," writes David Thomson for the Guardian. "I cannot say that every [Jacques] Demy film is as good as Lola or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The Pied Piper, a fairy tale made in Britain with music by Donovan, is not as lyrical or inspired as it needs to be - it is not as good as The Magic Donkey. A Slightly Pregnant Man, in which Marcello Mastroianni is expecting, proves too broad for Demy's style. But Bay of Angels is as good as anything he did." Through November 29.

The Observer's Jason Solomons has a suggestion for the London Film Festival: "Some form of competition would, I think, lend the festival a narrative and create that vital elixir of all film festivals, 'buzz'.... A Golden Nelson or a Golden Pigeon would make London a festival worth winning on the global circuit."

Posted by dwhudson at November 4, 2007 3:05 PM