Fests and events, 11/22.

The Third Annual Heeb Film Festival runs today and tomorrow in New York and Lawrence Levi has a few recommendations in Nextbook.

Also in New York, the Macedonian Film Festival runs for two more days; FilmCatcher's Damon Smith has an overview.

"Perhaps no director is quite as under-the-radar termitic as Howard Hawks (the only director in the current Manny Farber series at Lincoln Center to be represented in two separate programs, His Girl Friday and Scarface, both playing this weekend)." Miriam Bale at the House Next Door. Update, 11/23: Miriam notes that two films by Raoul Walsh have also screened in the series.

"For the fourth consecutive year Filmmaker Magazine will present its nominees for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theatre Near You at MoMA, in prelude to the announcement of the winner at this year's Gotham Awards," writes Brandon Harris, who then offers plenty of linkage related to many of the films screening in the series running through Monday.

"Punk 'n' Pie, an awfully named but well-programmed UK punk retrospective at BAMcinématek, gathers ten features and documentaries from the thirty-plus years since the class of '77 first stuck a pin through the queen's nose and pilloried Tory and hippie culture alike with equal ire." An overview from Andrew Hultkrans for Artforum. Through November 30.

"The Touch is Ingmar Bergman's orphan film," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. Elliott Gould, who appears in the 1971 film with Bibi Andersson and Max Von Sydow, "believes it's a masterpiece. Still, he adds, 'for whatever reason, and that was Ingmar's prerogative, way after the fact in his autobiography The Magic Lantern, he dismisses the picture. I think it possibly was somewhat of an embarrassment to him in relation to letting another world come in that couldn't care less about how brilliant he is...' Tonight, UCLA will screen the print at the Billy Wilder Theater, and Gould will discuss the film with LA Confidential writer-director Curtis Hanson, who is chairman of the archive."

"[T]he Pacific Film Archive's month-long survey of his lesser known work, A Dirty Dozen: The Films of Robert Aldrich should be as fun and worthy and illuminating as it is to imagine how challenging it would be for today's marketeers to extract selling-point slogans from those movies' reviews," writes Jonathan Kiefer for KQED. Through December 20.

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam runs on through next Sunday; for coverage, see indieWIRE's Brian Brooks and Eugene Hernandez and David Poland.

Quickie previews in the Guardian: Andrea Hubert on the 7th Discovering Latin America Film Festival (Thursday through December 7) and Phelim O'Neill on the 11th Festival of German Films (Friday through December 4).

"I've already mouthed off about The Contenders, the muddled, irrelevant new film series at MoMA," blogs Nathan Lee at WNYC. "My beef is twofold. First, it's dispiriting to see MoMA capitulate to awards-season hype.... Second, their choices are generally predictable and unadventurous.... As a corrective, I'm going to propose my own alternative program of 2008 highlights."

Posted by dwhudson at November 22, 2008 9:14 AM