Fests and events, 7/15.

Michael Jones hears that Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or-winning The Class will open the New York Film Festival, which'll be running from September 26 through October 12. Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Chantal Akerman's Hotel Monterey is screening at the Camden Arts Centre alongside two installations, To Walk Next to One's Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge and Women from Antwerp in November, "more than a record of a dying habit," as Adrian Searle puts it in the Guardian. "It celebrates smoking's conviviality and the splendid isolation of the smoker, the smoker's exhibitionism and her pensive introversion. Meanings curl and writhe and disappear into the night. After a while, the idea seems stale and repetitive; it leaves you empty but hungry for more. That's smoking for you."

"In the end, [Alain] Robbe-Grillet will be best remembered as an artist undaunted by the charges of sexism leveled against him, undaunted by his failures at the box office, and entirely focused on freeing cinema from its reliance on comfortable stereotypes and narrative assumptions," writes T Jefferson Kline in Artforum. The Immortal Alain Robbe-Grillet is wrapping tonight at BAM, but Memory/Montage/Mondernism: Alain Resnais & Alain Robbe-Grillet runs at the Cinematheque Ontario from July 25 through August 20.

Steve Dollar tells the story behind 3epkano: "The band has created musical accompaniment for 11 films and 12 shorts during the past four years, with a special focus on German Expressionist masters such as FW Murnau, Fritz Lang and GW Pabst, whose Pandora's Box gave the band an occasion for its American debut last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMcinématek. The group returns this week for shows at BAM, where it will perform with Murnau's Sunrise tomorrow night, and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where it will accompany Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary on Friday night."

Also in the New York Sun, Martin Tsai: "The Museum of Modern Art's Premiere Brazil, 2008, which starts July 17, seems to go out of its way to prove that there's more to the country than favelas riddled with drugs and violence."

And Bruce Bennett: "All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green, a film retrospective that showcases Mr Green's elegantly evolving work, begins today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Cinematek. It will appropriately climax with Mr Green introducing a screening of Pineapple Express in advance of the film's multiplex debut."

"In spite of the earnest attempts of academic critics to problematize both the conception and consumption of filmed representations of indigenous 'others,' filmmakers have been drawn to exotic cultures and landscapes since the Lumière Brothers first introduced lightweight cameras," writes Max Goldberg at SF360. "Bengali filmmaker Arghya Basu didn't have too far to travel to reach the Northeast Indian state of Sikkim, but the Buddhist population nestled into its ancient Himalayan landscape must have seemed remarkable to him. A Listener's Tale is first and foremost a sensuous evocation of this place's unique historical-spiritual-geographical coordinates." Thursday and Sunday at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

"The fourth edition of the Cinemalaya Film Festival opens with a film by Adolfo Alix, Jr," notes Francis Cruz. "Ever since Alix debuted his first feature film Donsol in the 2006 edition of Cinemalaya, he has never stopped working, directing at least nine feature films during the span of three years. The screening of Alix's Adela coincides with the festival's tribute to Anita Linda, an actress who works just as hard as Alix, having appeared in more than a hundred movies since before the early 40's up to the present." The festival's on through July 20.

Twitch has a Fantasia 2008 category going so you can follow all the genre film goings on through July 21. And the reviews are coming in hard and fast.

Posted by dwhudson at July 15, 2008 12:53 PM