Goings on in and around New York.

"Charles Burnett's Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation, about the country's decades-long fight for independence from apartheid-ruled South Africa, would make for a great PBS or HBO miniseries," suggests Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door. "Burnett, an efficient filmmaker with any budget, does his best to thoroughly tell the story of Samuel Nujoma (Carl Lumbly, in an impressively moderated performance), Namibia's first president and the founder of the SWAPO political movement, along with the many others instrumental to the cause, but simply can't fit the density of material into a 161-minute film." Namibia screens this evening at the New York African Film Festival tonight.

Previewing Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master, running at BAM from Friday through April 30, the L Magazine's Mark Asch tips a hat to Craig Watts's "deeply researched and analyzed Uchida bio" for Bright Lights Film Journal. "And yeah, 'that guy sure knew how to block a scene' sounds like auteurists slurping through the ice cubes at the bottom of world cinema - but the discovery of a fluid, consummately cinematic style in a genre journeyman from the middle echelons of his national film industry is cinephilia's purest rush."

"Of all the films about prostitution, Kenji Mizoguchi's Street of Shame, made in 1956 at the end of his career, is perhaps the greatest," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. The Films of Kenji Mizoguchi runs Fridays through Sundays at the IFC Center.

"Appreciation of [Campaign] hardly depends on an intimate knowledge of or interest in Japanese politics; the candidate and his prospective constituents don't manifest much of either," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Instead [director Kazuhiro] Soda uses tried-and-true fly-on-the-wall techniques to create a real-life satire. Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinéma vérité." At MoMA through Sunday.

Doug Cummings has been invited to the Moving Image in Film Criticism and Feature Writing: "With the demise of so many newspaper and magazine film critical positions, and the continual growth of serious film writing and discussion on the Internet, this is an interesting time to be reviewing the state of the art, particularly at an event sponsored by the New York Times. I'm sure this widespread cultural transition will be a recurring subject of discussion throughout the event." Thursday through Tuesday.

Alison Willmore has a first round of titles lined up for the New York Asian Film Festival, set for June 20 through July 6. More from programmer Grady Hendrix.

For the New York Sun, S James Snyder talks with Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal about the way this year's seventh edition will slim down after a bloated sixth edition.

Posted by dwhudson at April 9, 2008 1:14 PM