Fests and events, 1/31.

Good news from Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay: "On the 25th anniversary of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Cinemart, the prize for the 'best project' has gone to Sophie Fiennes's The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, a follow-up to her The Pervert's Guide to Cinema which also features philosopher Slajov Zizek."

More from Ian Mundell in Variety.

"Being part of the IFFR's Rotterdämmerung program, a section featuring amusing, hallucinogenic and sometimes downright scary films, Peur(s) du Noir [Fear(s) of the Dark] brings a mix of black and white animation logically aiming at the last: being scary," writes Peter van der Lugt at Twitch. "Several of today's best illustrators and comic-strip artists went back to the origins of their terrors and agreed to animate their drawings for this French omnibus feature which is obviously targeted at adults. The result is a 82 minutes viewing experience in which a total of 6 intertwined stories made by Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti and Richard McGuire, have been smartly crafted into one piece of work under the art direction of Étienne Robial."

"[W]hen you look at the script notes, production design elements and the sketches he would make of camera angles that would be elaborated upon by his cinematographers, you can really see how intensely collaborative he actually was." That's Ellen Harrington, who's programmed the Academy's exhibition Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film (through April 20), talking to Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

"Like a mirror the morning after, UCLA's series of restored pre-Code films from the Universal and Paramount libraries reflects a country stunned by a crushing post-Prohibition hangover, abashed and facing down ruin, but with enough mettle left to insist on righteousness before the Depression finally grinds its fight out and sends it running for fantasy." Hazel-Dawn Dumpert in the LA Weekly.

At SF360, Dennis Harvey has an overview of the Pacific Film Archive's series, The Medieval Remake, "a fascinating assortment of some of the less commercially-minded, artistically imaginative, philosophically thoughtful treatments the era has gotten from international filmmakers over a 60-year span. From the severe to the surreal to the serene, these are highly individual visions from a clutch of great directors." Through February 16.

"Exhumed Films is presenting a giallo double feature this weekend that grabs entries from two extremes of the tradition," notes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. "Be prepared for black-gloved killers, homicidal maniacs fueled by adolescent sexual traumas and key information just out of reach of a character's conscious memory."

In the New York Press, Eric Kohn looks back over Sundance: "While the documentary categories gleamed with calculated topicality and observant portraiture, quality among the narrative features was sparse. Fortunately, a relatively barren creative landscape left ample room for several contemplative works to blossom as heralded discoveries, and only a few remain in the chilly festival void without theatrical distribution."

David Wilson, filmmaker and co-founder of the True/False Film Festival, at FilmInFocus: "Five Things I Took Away From the 2008 Sundance Film Festival."

Posted by dwhudson at January 31, 2008 7:25 AM