Fests and events, 10/30.

Minnelli's Melodramas runs at the Harvard Film Archive through tomorrow. "Diverse as they are, the [Vincente] Minnelli melodramas share this common ground: their mise en scène of excess and release happens inside what looks like a blandly normal and conventional framework," writes Chris Fujiwara at Moving Image Source. "If their social criticism gets redirected to a relatively safe area, defined by plots that hinge on renunciation and retrenchment, the very obviousness of this displacement - the fact that it was felt to be needed at all - acts as a form of criticism."

"No director seems less likely to inspire consensus than the late Stanley Kubrick, who would have turned 80 this year.... Over the next six weeks, The Belcourt presents the entire Kubrick feature repertoire - including a free, likely never-to-be-repeated showing of his 1953 debut Fear and Desire, the film he hoped would stay hidden." Five writers for the Nashville Scene argue the case for one Kubrick each. Tomorrow through December 15.

"The London film festival comes to a close this evening with a showing of Danny Boyle's much-fancied new film Slumdog Millionaire," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "For me, this has been an accessible, stimulating festival, richly and inventively programmed.... I think it is the best I can remember for a while. And this is because I consciously set out to find and (where I could) blog about some left-field films. I hoped for serendipitous discoveries and, as it were, news-bulletins from creative minds around the world. El Cielo, la Tierra, y la Lluvia - or The Sky, the Earth and the Rain - by the 33-year-old Chilean filmmaker José Luis Torres Leiva is a case in point." More from Henry Barnes and Jack Arnott.

"Opening at the Roxie this Friday, Christmas on Mars extends a long, lately rising number of narrative features made by musicians," notes Dennis Harvey at SF360:

They've always run a gamut from the terrible (Bob Dylan - please stop making movies! Prince - please don't go back to making movies! Madonna - just leave cinema alone! It hates you!!!) to the inspirationally oddball (a wide range encompassing Neil Young, Yoko Ono, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, Rob Zombie and R Kelly, to name just a few). Such crossovers should be encouraged, simply because filmmakers coming from other media (think Miranda July or Julian Schnabel) often bring fresher ideas to the table than your average film-schooled Hollywould-be who's been primarily shaped by movies, movies and more movies. As one might expect, the [Flaming Lips'] maiden contribution lands firmly on the quirky/pleasurable rather than pseudo-quirky/excruciating end of this scale.

Carole Zabar's Other Israel Film Festival, running Nov 6 to 13 at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan "is not to be confused with the 23rd Israel Film Festival, which... runs through Nov 13 at the Clearview Cinema, on Broadway at 62nd Street," notes Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times. "Ms Zabar's festival, in its second year, focuses specifically on the experience of Israeli Arabs, which makes it somewhat less mainstream and certainly more of a hard sell to its core audience, New York Jews."

Josh Rosenblatt preps Austin Chronicle readers for Avant Cinema 2.3: In Honor of Conner, a one-night-only retrospective of films by Bruce Conner. November 5.

Migrating Forms, which has grown out of the New York Underground Film Festival, has issued a call for entries. The deadline's December 1.

Marilyn Ferdinand wraps the Chicago International Film Festival, while, blogging for the Chicago Reader, Pat Graham looks back on the highlights.

Online viewing tip #1. Craig Keller offers a close reading of Godard's trailer for the Viennale.

Online viewing tip #2. "Wunderkind Nik Fackler's feature film Lovely, Still, premiered at this year's Toronto International Film Festival." FilmCatcher: "We gave Nik a Flip Camera and sent him out to document his business of going to parties, doing interviews, being celebrated and hanging out with the crème de la crème of the indie world."

Posted by dwhudson at October 30, 2008 3:02 PM