Other fests, other events, 3/12.

"Cinema of cruelty, cinema of the absurd, cinema of extreme situations - French filmmaker Georges Franju (1912 - 1987) combined them all in a cinema of bile," writes J Hoberman. "Anthology Film Archives' survey Le Grand Franju opens Friday with Franju's 1959 Head Against the Wall, an account of rebellion and delusion inside a mental hospital that serves as an appetizer for Eyes Without a Face."

More from Dan Sallitt - and from Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine, where Benjamin H Sutton notes: "The eight films having their New York premieres during MoMA's annual survey of new Canadian cinema resort alternately to personal drama, political satire and clever genre manipulation, but propose a consistently cynical outlook."

Manoel De Oliveira, or Cinema, The Art of Enigma runs at the Harvard Film Archive from Saturday through March 29. Michael Atkinson in the Boston Phoenix: "He may be an unassailable mandarin, but his films - often beautiful but rarely stylish or innovative or thematically fresh - are wickedly difficult to make a case for. What's more, they vary in form and tone, from formula melodramas to documentaries to meta-docs to post-mod Pirandello-isms to straight-on literary adaptations that long to be books rather than films."

Michael Hawley previews the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival for the Evening Class. Tomorrow through March 23.

Jennifer Reeves's s movies are personal wishing wells, each a repository of dreams and worries," writes Max Goldberg. "'I want to counter the turncoats who say film's dead,' Reeves announces on her excellent new blog. 'Try telling a painter that she can only use digital paint on a Mac for the rest of her life. She'd be pissed.'" See the San Francisco Cinematheque for details on this weekend's events.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Matt Sussman on Kenji Fukasaku's Black Lizard, "one of queer cinema's unsung gems. Which is precisely why freelance curator T. Crandall chose the film to kick off his rep series, The Revival House: Classic Queer Cinema, at Artists' Television Access."

"The Malaga Spanish Film Festival unveiled the full line-up for its 11th edition today. The event - which is one of the most important in the country - will be held from April 4 - 12." Sergio Ríos Pérez reports for Cineuropa.

Posted by dwhudson at March 12, 2008 10:12 PM