Fests and events, 12/28.

"Next to renowned directors like Laetitia Masson, Brad Anderson or Lucia Murat, newcomers like Javier Gutierrez from Spain or Ozgür Yildirim from Germany will present their works in the Panorama 2008," announces the Berlinale. "Music star Madonna will give her directorial debut alongside the works of underground star Bruce LaBruce and TEDDY winner 2007, Zero Chou from Taiwan."

For the Austin Chronicle, Belinda Acosta previews 3 Mexicanas en Hollywood: Dolores del Río, Lupe Vélez, and Katy Jurado, a Tuesday evening series running January 8 through February 12: "While it seems a shame to limit the roster to these three actresses, there's a reason: They are the three most visible Mexican actresses who built successful careers in Mexico and in Hollywood, navigating cultures, challenging stereotypes, and becoming icons on both sides of the border." And Kimberley Jones has a note on the Agrasánchez Film Archives.

Jones also tallies up the titles so far confirmed for SXSW Film.

"I've got no beef with anyone who considers this Chaplin's masterpiece - it's certainly the movie most suffused with economic and romantic pathos." J Hoberman previews the week-long run of City Lights at Film Forum and mentions a couple of other NYC-area events: Silly Symphonies at the Museum of the Moving Image (through Sunday) and All That Fosse at the Walter Reade (through Tuesday).

Related: Bob Westal at the House Next Door: "Lenny is a fascinating, beautifully wrought black and white film with a number of outstanding scenes, but I think it's for more than gonadal reasons that I keep returning to that early sequence featuring 'Hot Honey Harlow.' Like so many sequences in Fosse's films, it strongly hints that a show business and human dignity are unavoidably at odds, but also beautiful."

And: A "movie musical is more than the sum of its numbers," writes Lauren Wissot. "Fosse knew this, which is why his own film version of another Kander and Ebb musical, Cabaret, shot over three decades ago, feels less dated than Marshall’s 2002 Academy darling," Chicago.

Back in the Voice, Michelle Orange on Chuck Close: An Elegant Portrait of the Art World's Leading Portraitist, "an open, vivid symposium on not just Close's career, but that of many artists of the same vintage: Kiki Smith, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Brice Marden speak eloquently about Close, but [the late director Marion] Cajori goes further, constructing a primer on the work of those individuals as well, who define their own aesthetics by setting themselves in relief to Close."

Close's process "entails blowing up photographs by way of a grid system and rerendering each section as a huge, abstracted square," notes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "The technique somehow combines uncanny intimacy and intellectual distance, much like Ms Cajori's splendid movie, which captures Mr Close at work via a combination of probing close-ups of paint-daubed canvas and wide shots that situate him within his work space."

"Film Forum is kicking off 2008 with a far-from-complete but nonetheless welcome retrospective of the formidable Otto Preminger, one of the most distinctive sensibiities in the history of American cinema," writes Dan Sallitt. "Just in case anyone out there is looking for guidance, here are my two cents about which titles in the series are required viewing." January 2 through 17.

"[H]alf a century after his death, mention of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, another great musical son of Vienna, often draws blank stares here and elsewhere - despite his legacy as the founder of the 'Hollywood Sound,'" writes George Jahn for the AP. "The city's Jewish Museum is devoting a major exhibition to the man whose classical career fell victim to a triple whammy: a domineering music critic father, the advent of atonal music and, finally, the rise of Hitler that perpetuated his self-exile to the US."

Michael Guillén previews Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven, which'll be opening Berlin & Beyond: New Films from Germany, Austria & Switzerland, running January 10 through 16 at San Francisco's Castro.

In the Independent Weekly, Neil Morris notes that the resignation of Nancy Buirski as head of the Full Frame Documentary Full Frame Festival "comes amid speculation about the financial stability of the Durham mainstay."

Online listening tip. Errata looks back on the New York Film Festival.

Posted by dwhudson at December 28, 2007 4:18 PM