Fests and events, 3/27.

"In making my film on the Dalai Lama I wanted to see if Beijing could justify its claim that he is duplicitous," writes Joshua Dugdale in the Independent. "If China's leaders could see the results, I have no doubt that it would challenge some of their preconceptions about him." The Unwinking Gaze opens the London International Documentary Festival on Saturday. Paul Tatara comments on the Guardian's blog.

"United Artists will turn 90 next year, having survived countless transformations and takeovers since the company released its first feature, [Douglas] Fairbanks's His Majesty, the American," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "Although the first agreement called for the four principals [Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, DW Griffith and Mary Pickford] each to release four films a year, they soon found it impossible to keep up that pace, and United Artists turned to other independent-minded creators to fill its schedule. Among them were Buster Keaton, Norma Talmadge, King Vidor, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, Samuel Goldwyn, Walter Wanger, Alexander Korda, David O Selznick and many others who will be featured in a five-week tribute to United Artists that begins Friday night at Film Forum."

The Chicago Reader offers a guide to this week's offerings at the European Union Film Festival.

The Independent Film Festival Boston has just unveiled its lineup. The Boston Globe's Ty Burr picks out a few highlights. April 23 through 29.

Josh Rosenblatt previews Ascending Dragon: Films of Greater China, a Tuesday-night series running through May 20.

Also in the Austin Chronicle, Raymond Blanton: "During the month of April, the HRC will present a series of 16 films ranging from shorts to documentaries and features that showcase the influence of the Beat Generation on the movies. The series will run in conjunction with the ongoing On the Road With the Beats exhibit, which examines the literary and personal journeys of prominent beat figures like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs and Neal Cassady."

"Shot as the vinyl LP was nearing the offramp to oblivion, as rap and MTV were shoving jazz even farther to the margins, Let's Get Lost stands as a gorgeous gravestone for the Beat Generation's legacy of beautiful-loser chic," writes Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene. "Bruce Weber's transfixing 1988 portfolio of the artist - ravaged jazz trumpeter Chet Baker - as a junkie wraith unmoored in time seems doubly poignant 20 years later, when the bloom of its own newness is gone." At the Belcourt for a week starting tomorrow.

"There is a towering force pulsing through Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli), Luchino Visconti's celebrated 1960 epic drama, as wild, forbidding and fearsome as it is transfixing," writes Josef Braun in Vue Weekly. "That force is called family." At Edmonton's Metro through Wednesday.

"[Manoel de] Oliveira has said that he considers cinema to be the sum of all other art forms, and the achievement of his own films is that they embody that synthesis while managing to preserve their literary, theatrical, musical and painterly component parts." Scott Foundas profile is running in the LA Weekly in conjunction with The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira, at UCLA through April 27.

Once again, SXSW (and to think that I still have plans to look back on the films that I caught, too) - and once again, Aaron Hillis for Premiere. This time he talks with Mark Webber about Explicit Ills, which picked up both the Audience Award for best Narrative Feature and a Special Jury Award for Cinematography.

Posted by dwhudson at March 27, 2008 12:19 PM