Shorts, 2/6.

"Agnès Varda has a new film, Les plages d'Agnes, and a sales agent home," reports John Hopewell in Variety. "Currently in post-production, and looking set to be ready for delivery by Cannes, Plages is an autobiographical docu feature by the vet French auteur, whose 1962 film Cléo From 5 to 7 gave a female tint to France's Nouvelle Vague."

In David Bordwell's latest entry, a discussion of analytical vs constructive editing segues into a an analysis of a scene in Godard's Hail Mary.

"There is no country on earth which gratifies the cinéphile (or cinéaste) more than France," argues Ronald Bergan.

Also blogging for the Guardian, Kavita Amarnani: "The possible lifting of Pakistan's ban on Bollywood signals a dramatic twist in what has become a dispiritingly predictable tale of south Asian hostility."

And for the paper, Emine Saner talks with Naveen Andrews.

At the AV Club, Nathan Rabin has a good long talk with John Cleese.

"[Pauline] Kael herself often demonstrated that criticism is autobiography - and her assumption that people emerging from a movie should instinctively and definitively know 'whether they liked it' is a perfect example of that," writes Jim Emerson.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince tells the story behind Veit Helmer's Absurdistan - and much of the actual story, too, even though "it's not really about the fundamental story — its fairly easy to spot the inevitable happing ending - but about the creative twists and the laugh-out-loud path the story takes in getting there.... It's whimsical and silly, but it had the Sundance audience roaring with laughter and I suspect even the pickiest of audiences will find it enjoyable."

Jürgen Fauth on The Rich Have Their Own Photographers: "Ecstatic worshipers in store-front churches, steel workers in their homes, the down-and-out inhabitants of Buffalo's skid row: social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin was never interested in the well-to-do. Thus, the quote that serves as the title of Ezra Bookstein's sharp and fully realized portrait of Rogovin, now 98 years old."

In Moscow, Sophia Kishkovsky talks with the director, Olga Zhulina, and producer, Anatoly Voropayev, of This Kiss Is Off the Record: "The title of the movie might well be 'Love Story: The Putin Chronicles,' yet the producer is curiously adamant that it has nothing to do with [Vladimir] Putin and his wife, Lyudmila. Sure, he was an intelligence agent in Germany and she was a flight attendant before they were married. Yes, Mr Putin has spoken in the past about how he rescued his daughters from a fire. But no, this is not about Mr Putin."

Also in the New York Times: "In a battle waged with popcorn, floodlights, chalk and star power, science and art squared off at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology one night last month." Dennis Overbye reports on the screening of a few clips of Jumper at MIT and the discussion of the physics of teleportation that followed.

In a clip-sprinkled piece for the Independent, Rebecca Armstrong looks into where more computing power might take Pixar.

Over three decades after the publication of Prince Among Slaves, "the amazing, nearly lost tale of an African royal forced into slavery will finally get its due as the basis of a PBS documentary premiering Monday," writes Madison Gray for Time.

Bob Turnbull is fascinated all over again by A Perfect Candidate, "the story of Oliver North's run for a seat in the Senate in 1994 representing Virginia."

FilmInFocus asks Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (The Boys of Baraka and Jesus Camp) where they go for news online.

"Perhaps [Casey] Robinson's familiar script and [Jacques] Tourneur's lyrical filmmaking were simply out of step with developments in war pictures by 1944," writes Thom at Film of the Year. "Perhaps the criticism heaped on Days of Glory reflects desire to see a more accurate depiction of the everyday people who fought and died (or survived) in the war instead of a typical Hollywood picture framed around war events. Or perhaps critics and audiences, fed on war reports, war newsreels and combat report documentaries for four or five years, yearned for Hollywood filmmakers to reproduce the conflict as it really was albeit in a narrative form in the relative safety of the movie theater."

And the Ship Sails On "is perhaps the closest Fellini has come to making (as well as parodying) a Visconti film," writes Kevin Lee. Related: the video essay.

In the Voice:

• Jim Ridley on Bab'Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul, Nacer Khemir's "mystical, meandering, marvelously photographed ode to his Sufi faith and the power of story-telling, intended in part as a corrective to the West's impression of fanatical Islam."

• Nick Pinkerton on A Walk to Beautiful: "This is emotionally arduous stuff, which doesn't mean anything by itself; the world lacks for neither pain nor camera crews. But there's something quite rarefied here, in the experience of commiseration these refugees find with their fellow patients."

• Again, Nick Pinkerton: "So objectively awful it ceases even to be a reflection of writer- director Andrews Jenkins's non-talent, How to Rob a Bank calls into question the distribution filtration process that should protect delicate consumer eyes from things like this. WTF IFC?"

• Scott Foundas: "Fool's Gold is the sort of movie that makes you look more kindly upon the WGA strike. It isn't merely bad - it's so desperate that the actors can scarcely conceal their contempt for the material."

• Aaron Hillis on the "innocuously awful, February-dumped comedy," Strange Wilderness.

• And: Nick Pinkerton on Over Her Dead Body, Nathan Lee on The Hottie and the Nottie, Chuck Wilson on Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Jim Ridley on The Eye and Robert Wilonsky on Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights: Hollywood to the Heartland.

Dan Sallitt saw Michael Clayton "on Saturday night and fell a little bit in love with it - it's probably my favorite American film of 2007.... I am not indignant at the restrained reaction to this amazing movie in my usual circles. On the contrary, I'm forced once again to wonder whether 'amazing to me' bears any relationship to 'amazing.'"

"Quiet City is an exquisitely filmed fairytale of New York, centering around a pair of twentysomethings," writes Jette Kernion at Cinematical. "Jamie (Erin Fisher) arrives in NYC from Atlanta to spend the weekend with a flaky friend who never shows up to meet her. She asks directions from a stranger on the street, Charlie (Cris Lankenau), and they end up having dinner together, discovering they get along very well. They spend a day having fun around the city. You can't watch a man and woman who become fast friends like this without wondering whether they'll hook up, which provides a small amount of suspense. But you get so caught up watching these people and their friends that the romantic potential hardly seems to matter most of the time." Related: Maya Singer talks with director Aaron Katz for the style file.

"The four Ernst Lubitsch musicals collected in this box set mark a transitional period in his work, a bridge from perfectly judged silent films like So This is Paris (1926) to the risky, spare achievements of later movies like To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Cluny Brown (1946)," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door. "Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald are the nominal stars of this early talkie series, either together or paired with other players, and you just have to accept and even embrace the former's full-frontal 'ooh la la!' chortles and the latter's not-yet-calcified operetta hauteur if you plan to make it through these pictures alive."

For the Washington Post, Adam Bernstein profiles cinematographer and frequent Bergman collaborator Gunnar Fischer.

J Robert Parks gets around to his "Top 10 (and then some) of 2007." Meanwhile, Evan Davis has wrapped up his long-running best-of-07 series.

Joe Leydon remembers Barry Morse, 1918 - 2008.

Online browsing tip. Bob Willoughby's photos snapped on the set of The Graduate.

Online listening tip. Leonard Lopate, Richard Corliss and John Belton discuss Duck Soup, Dr Strangelove and Dave.

Posted by dwhudson at February 6, 2008 9:45 AM