AFI Fest, week 1.

Tonight, "AFI Fest, now in its 22nd year, will open with the world premiere of Doubt, starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times, but as Scott Foundas explains in the LA Weekly, just over a week ago, this was not the plan. The story behind the withdrawal of The Soloist from that opening night slot (the film's been bumped to March) is good fun, but "the real value of any festival is measured not by, but, rather, in-between opening and closing night.... And on that account, this year's AFI Fest can be deemed a triumph even before the first foot of film has been exposed to a projector's bulb."

Along with its "comprehensive guide to more than 40 AFI Fest titles," the LAW features:

Updated through 11/5.

• FX Feeney on the Milestones sidebar, with its tributes to Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Sydney Pollack, Heath Ledger and Anthony Minghella.

• Diego Lerer:"2008 will be remembered as a landmark year for Argentine cinema, beginning with the selection of not one but two local films for the official competition in Cannes. Those two movies - Pablo Trapero's Lion's Den and Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman - anchor AFI Fest's five-film Showcase on Argentina."

• "In his best films, [Arnaud Desplechin] seems to squeeze all of life's unruly pains, pleasures and lunacies into the boundaries of a single, sprawling celluloid canvas," writes Scott Foundas. "And Desplechin's latest, A Christmas Tale, which kicks off a six-film retrospective co-presented by AFI Fest and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is no exception."

• Again, Scott Foundas: "In a typically offbeat piece of casting, [Albert] Serra enlisted the Canadian film programmer and critic (and my longtime editor at Cinema Scope magazine) Mark Peranson to play Birdsong's dyspeptic Joseph, and when Peranson wasn't in front of the camera, he set about documenting the production for his own feature-length film, Waiting for Sancho, which makes its US premiere alongside Birdsong in the AFI Fest program."

• And... Scott Foundas, this time on the three-film Showcase on Kazakhstan.

The festival runs through November 9.

Updates, 10/31: Doug Cummings passes along Robert Koehler's picks.

Moriarty previews the festival for AICN.

Updates, 11/2: Movie City News has opened up a special section devoted to the festival.

In the Los Angeles Times, Mark Olsen talks with Steven Soderbergh about Che and John Horn tells the story behind Witch Hunt.

Update, 11/5: Talking with Rafael Monserrate about PoundCake and Duane Hopkins about Better Things, Peter Knegt files a dispatch for indieWIRE.

Posted by dwhudson at October 30, 2008 2:00 AM