CineVegas @ 10.

"CineVegas, celebrating its tenth year with a steady turnout and lively festivities to accompany the program, hosts one of the strangest big budget showcases of American independent filmmaking this side of Sundance," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. "It's less a matter of quality than ingenuity, and ultimately an object of wonder and excitement precisely because of that."

For the Las Vegas Weekly, Josh Bell collects memories of the festival's first year from organizers, participants and attendees. Also, Jeffrey M Anderson talks with Abel Ferrara about Go Go Tales and Chelsea on the Rocks (site; review) and John Katsilometes profiles Hank Greenspun, the subject of the doc, Where I Stand.

Updated through 6/22.

Also all over CineVegas: Mark Bell (Film Threat), Cinematical and Michael Jones (Circuit), who notes that B-Side is tracking audience ratings. Riding the top slot at the moment is South of Heaven (site), which Todd Brown reviews at Twitch.

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth reviews a "heartbreaker," Finally, Lillian and Dan (site), which "shares some production tropes with thematic cousins like Kissing on the Mouth and Yeast - namely shaky handheld low gauge lensing and improvised performances - but director Mike Gibisser so perfectly and versatilely weds form to content that his use of such stylistic touchpoints seems less like the result of a low budget and micro crew than deliberate, and often brave, aesthetic choices."

The festival runs through Saturday.

Updates, 6/17: "I have no idea what to do with Josh Fox's Memorial Day, a sporadically engaging - but far too simple-minded to be as troubling as it wants to be - hypothetical slice-of-life which exists to explain away Abu Ghraib via spring break," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It seems to be consensus that this is, at the very least, the ballsiest film at this festival, although it certainly has fewer defenders than detractors."

"Your enjoyment of Your Name Here might depend on your tolerance for mind-bending narratives and acid-trip weirdness," writes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "Mine is low, I'll tell you that up front. But Your Name Here deserves credit for being different, and Bill Pullman's central performance is probably the most bizarre and demanding of his career."

Eric D Snider at Cinematical: "If a comedy troupe like Broken Lizard or The Whitest Kids U Know had made Lars and the Real Girl, it might have turned out like Happy Birthday, Harris Malden, a sweet, funny, and very odd comedy about growing up and accepting reality."

Update, 6/19: "When filmmaker Michael Albright returned to his hometown of Reno, Nev, following a stint working under legendary documentarian Albert Maysles in New York City, he found himself casting about for something creative to do in a city whose chief artistic claim to fame is its proximity to freak-flag Valhalla the Burning Man festival," writes Marc Savlov in the Austin Chronicle. He found it. "[A]long with seven untested kids from the Reno-area high school where he landed a substitute teaching gig to help make ends meet," he "has crafted one of the most intimate and aesthetically pure rock & roll documentaries to come out in years: Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake."

Updates, 6/21: "Most of the individual components of Visioneers [site] are not new, nor are the film's ideas particularly deep," writes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "Yet somehow the combination, written and directed by brothers Jared and Brandon Drake - in their first film, amazingly - feels fresh and invigorating. It's a high-concept comedy, but it's down-to-earth and accessible, even a little touching."

Also: "There are many things to admire about Dark Streets, a film noir set against a 1930s backdrop of jazz, blues, and booze. Unfortunately, the story isn't one of them."

Film Threat's Mark Bell has lots of pix of celebs and... well, more.

Update, 6/22: The Circuit's Michael Jones has the award-winners.

Posted by dwhudson at June 16, 2008 8:23 AM