Fests and events, 11/28.

"Ousmane Sembéne, the Senegalese filmmaker who died last spring at age 84, was African cinema's founding father. More than that, Sembéne was a political organizer, a novelist, a self-taught intellectual, and the celluloid equivalent of a traditional taleteller, the village griot." The Voice's J Hoberman previews Film Forum's retrospective, opening Friday and running through December 13.

Miriam Bale writes up more NYC goings on at the Reeler.

"You can draw the time line of the Japanese new wave in scores of different ways - there were multiple possible launching points, and the big players evident in the 50s and 60s were young, old, and in between - but Shohei Imamura was an unarguably major, and quizzically ambiguous, figure in the landscape, an artiste among pulp mavens and a pop comic amid tragedians, a deep-dish cynic and a folksy absurdist," writes Michael Atkinson in the Boston Phoenix. "Dead last year at 79, the two-time Palme d'Or winner was one of the last of his slowly dying breed, survived still only by Seijun Suzuki, Kon Ichikawa and Nagisa Oshima." Vanishing Points: The Films of Shohei Imamura runs Saturday through December 14 at the Harvard Film Archive.

The Turin Film Festival, running through Saturday, is radically different from its old self now that Nanni Moretti's been put in charge. For better or worse? In Cahiers du cinéma, Eugenio Renzi sorts through a first round of mixed impressions.

Hannah Takes the Stairs screens tomorrow through Monday at the Red Vic in San Francisco and, in the Bay Guardian, Max Goldberg's got a preview: "[Joe] Swanberg's warts-and-all approach may not be for everyone, but it's an important redress of Knocked Up's mismatched fantasy. These kids are all right, even when they're not."

"On Thursday at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is presenting a 25th-anniversary screening featuring an onstage cast-and-crew reunion of Steven Spielberg's beloved fantasy E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." The Los Angeles Times' Susan King talks with Dee Wallace, producer Kathleen Kennedy and sound designer Gene S Cantamessa.

David Walsh wraps the WSWS's coverage of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Posted by dwhudson at November 28, 2007 6:09 AM