Fests and events, 2/6.

"Frosted Yellow Willows tells the story of [Anna May] Wong's birth in her father's laundry in Los Angeles, her single-minded devotion to the movies, her rise to fame, her dealings with a crazy extortionist who threatened her family, her tireless war work," writes Matthew Sweet in the Guardian. "But it seems confused about how we should now regard her. The film celebrates her as a pioneer, but invites the viewer to despise much of her work - all those 1930s crime dramas in which she plays a gangster's moll, a beautiful assassin or the knife-wielding offspring of Fu Manchu. It offers her as a victim - enumerating the painful moments when she was passed over in favour of western actors with unconvincing makeup, or cast, improbably, as an Inuit or a Native American - yet the footage from her pictures shows that she transcended this status." The doc screens at the National Portrait Gallery on Friday and at the BFI Southbank on Saturday.

"The film historian Walter Kerr claimed that: 'No comedienne ever became a truly important film clown,'" notes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "The stars were supposed to be beautiful and glamorous – the object of the gaze. Clowning Glories and Screwball Women, a season of comedy films screening during the festival Birds Eye View, a celebration of women in film, seeks to challenge this hoary old chauvinistic thinking."

For the Voice, J Hoberman previews Film Forum's three-week Sidney Lumet retrospective (Friday through February 28) and Anthology's week-long Charles Burnett series (Friday through February 14). Related: Noel Vera on Burnett: "He's no mere realist; he's a poet of realism."

In the Philadelphia Weekly, Matt Prigge rounds up local goings on.

Wrapping Rotterdam, sudden string of reviews Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net: Janja Glogovac's "colorful, almost fairgroundesque" L... kot ljubezen (L... Like Love), Rithy Panh's Le papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise, a "heartbreaking portrait" of "women of joy," and Paula van der Oest's Tiramisu, "a sly subversion of the values that the average Dutch men and women pride themselves on: quiet success, careful with money, conformist."

Posted by dwhudson at February 6, 2008 9:02 AM