Shorts, 2/13.

Criterion will be releasing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou on DVD next week and Premiere's Glenn Kenny offers "An Annotated Bibliography, Pt 1." Updates, 2/14: Parts 2 and 3.

"Director of the legendary hip-hop documentary Style Wars, Tony Silver, died last weekend after battling an irreversible brain condition for several years," notes Jen Carlson at the Gothamist.

In the Tisch Film Review: Dene-Hern Chen on Citizen Havel, a documentary about "the last President of Czechoslovakia (and the first President of the democratic Czech Republic)."

"David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow is infinitely more than a brutal satire on Hollywood," writes Michael Billington in the Guardian. "It is a study of male panic and the denial of redemptive grace. And in Matthew Warchus's exhilarating revival we not only get some bravura, high-octane acting from Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum but a also sense of the ultimate hollowness of an industry, and a society, based on buddy-buddy values."

Also in the Guardian, Martin Hodgson: "Steven Spielberg has resigned as artistic adviser to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, in protest at China's failure to distance itself from genocide and human rights abuses in Darfur."

And Francesca Martin reports on Martin Scorsese's plans to make a documentary about Bob Marley.

Scott Eyman reviews Charlotte Chandler's Not the Girl Next: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography for the New York Observer: "Am I alone in finding something poignant in this driven, now unfashionable creature? Am I alone in thinking that, at her best, she was extraordinarily effective?"

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey talks with Olivia Hussey, "just 15 when she was chosen to play li'l miss Capulet in the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet," which, he adds, "made underage sex look extremely hot, virtuous, and stick-it-to-the-man rebellious."

Plus, Tre: "A semisequel to writer-director Eric Byler's 2002 debut feature, Charlotte Sometimes, this low-key but quietly devastating relationship meltdown in the mode of Harold Pinter and Neil LaBute is his best work to date."

For Reuters, Charles Masters: "Jim Jarmusch has enlisted past collaborators Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton along with Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal for his upcoming thriller The Limits of Control."

Masters also reports on "the launch in April of a Europe-wide video-on-demand platform bringing together content from 37 film archives and cinematheques across the continent. And the good news for film buffs is that it's free."

"Daniel Bruehl (Goodbye Lenin!, The Bourne Ultimatum) has committed to topline 14, to be directed by Andrucha Waddington (House of Sand)," report John Hopewell and Emilio Mayorga in Variety. "Bruehl is up to play Spanish playwright Lope de Vega."

In the L Magazine:

• Cullen Gallagher on The Signal, "an apocalyptic amalgamation of several far better films."

• Cathy Erway on Charlie Bartlett.

• Kate Folk on The Counterfeiters.

• Heather Struck on Definitely, Maybe.

"Sony's new Stanley Kramer Film Collection - containing five films that he produced, two of which he also directed - will not do much for his reputation, though to be fair, it also doesn't adequately convey the scope and topical ambition of his early career," writes Dennis Lim.

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "Directors like Rob Marshall, Bill Condon, Adam Shankman and Tim Burton might be the latest filmmakers to craft engaging cinematic musicals, but, back when sound was new to the art form, it was German emigre director Ernst Lubitsch whose breezy, clever style and sophisticated story lines redefined the genre," writes Susan King.

And Claudia Eller and Richard Verrier have the story we've all been waiting for: "The strike is over."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir offers a different sort of DVD roundup, "a one-stop shopathon for relatively new and highly eccentric discs from the darker tidepools of the pop-culture economy."

Chris Barsanti is anticipating eight big movies due in 08.

"David Bowie has sung on two tracks on actress Scarlett Johansson's debut album, a tribute to singer Tom Waits," reports the BBC.

In the London Review of Books: Michael Wood on No Country for Old Men.

Posted by dwhudson at February 13, 2008 3:30 PM