Shorts, 1/22.

The Telegraph's Andrew Murray-Watson: "The board of Pixar Animation Studios, the digital animations company, is set to meet tomorrow to approve the company's $7bn (£3.9bn) takeover by Disney." Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, where he's also pointing to Penn Jillette's radio show.

Steve Rosenbaum is justifiably upset that John Kerry refuses to see his film: "I made Inside The Bubble for you. It's not a whitewashed public relations approved view of the 2004 Election. But it's honest. And it is truthful. And while it's not the last word on why the Democrats lost - I'd suggest that for people trying to figure that out, it's required viewing."

For the Northwest Asian Weekly, NP Thompson previews Weathering the Storm: The Enduring Cinema of Mikio Naruse, at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle through February 26:

The critic Susan Sontag phrased it like this: Naruse "creates an ardently materialist world where the social pressure for money acts like a vise to the head." And indeed, in works such as Late Chrysanthemums (1954) and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), both of which claustrophobically portray the (mis)fortunes of aging prostitutes and unhappily retired geisha, the endless emphasis on economics is almost overwhelming. Naruse's women, at least in these two films, seldom speak of anything except money, and the director is well attuned to the intricacies of social Darwinism, so much so that the movies have a disturbingly contemporary feel to them, despite the milieu of a defeated, post-World War II Japan in which they take place.

Charles McGrath observes that Michael Winterbottom "thrives on filming the unfilmable, and to make Tristram Shandy he simply dusted off that handiest of postmodern devices: his film is about a film crew making a film of Tristram Shandy.... For once, though, this ancient wheeze actually comes off - in part because this kind of self-reflexiveness really is in the Sterne spirit, and in part because nobody takes the meta-movie idea too seriously. This film is more in the spirit of Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, say, than 8½ or Day for Night."

Also in the New York Times:

• Americans are watching fewer and fewer foreign films and Anthony Kaufman has the numbers to prove it. Talking with distributors, he discovers that the competition coming from the studios' specialty houses, with their "mini-major pseudo-indie productions," the rise of docs and the fact that foreign-born directors switch to English-language productions with American stars the moment they get the chance is simply all too much to overcome.

• Christopher Cain is hard at work on September Dawn, "about one of the darkest moments in Mormon history, the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, in which 137 pioneers from Arkansas were killed in Utah by a raiding party whose ties to the Mormon church are still in dispute." John Anderson reports.

• Wyatt Mason reviews Colin McGinn's The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact: "His chapter 'The Metaphysics of the Movie Image' is as enlightening as the book's earlier pages are undistinguished."

• Jeannette Catsoulis pans Underworld: Evolution, "a monotonous barrage of computer-generated fur and fangs." More from Nick Schager in Slant.

For the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries talks with William Boyd about the differences between writing novels and writing screenplays - and about adaptations: "Boyd quotes approvingly Nabokov's dictum that films should be 'vivacious variants' of the original."

"In 1994, the San Francisco-based filmmaker and artist Dean Snider decided to end his own life, possibly in front of a camera." Rebecca Cleman reviews The Will of Dean Snider. Also at Flickhead: Ray Young on The End of August at the Hotel Ozone: "Now on DVD from Facets, this unpleasant but spellbinding gem may finally find the audience it deserves."

Acquarello on Bell Diamond: "Few filmmakers capture the complex landscape of rural America in all its strong-willed self-determination, insularity, and dispiriting sameness as pointedly and eloquently as Jon Jost."

Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, you can imagine the field day Joanne Laurier has with Fun With Dick and Jane.

Second-life news at Twitch: Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Mark Caro's Delicatessen is headed to DVD; Futurama will indeed return.

Rotterdam previews from The Gomorrahizer at Twitch: Hiromasa Hirosue's The Lost Hum, Simon Rumley's The Living and the Dead, Noriko Shibutani's Bambi♥Bone, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's Green Mind, Metal Bats and Ryûichi Hiroki's It's Only Talk.

Nick Davis picks his 2005 top ten.

Is Sarah Silverman truly "anti-Asian"? Sujewa Ekanayake looks into it.

Daniel Robert Epstein SuicideGirls interview roundup: Steven Soderbergh (related: Chuck Tryon comments on Mark Cuban's defense of Bubble's unconventional release), Jeremy Kasten and Bryce Dallas Howard.

William Shatner will be hosting the Golden Groundhog Awards on February 2. Thanks, James!

André Soares remembers Anthony Franciosa, 1928 - 2006.

Park City Dispatch. 2.

On Thursday, David D'Arcy sorted through some of the general themes running through this year's edition of the Sundance Film Festival and took closer looks at The Trials of Darryl Hunt and Thank You for Smoking. Today, he considers festival opener Friends with Money, the "porn-athon" Destricted and Alan Berliner's Wide Awake.

I've been thinking about the opening night film, Friends with Money. You have a lot of time to think when your shuttle bus is in limo-lock behind a Hummer-load of tech execs of the year or studio bureaucrats.

The ensemble cast of Friends with Money, malcontents in over-comforted Los Angeles - with Jennifer Aniston as the odd friend out, who quit a teaching job and now lives hand-to-mouth as a maid - made me think of another film set in LA thirty years ago. This film was Welcome to LA, by Alan Rudolph, and the characters were loners whose paths crossed either in business or by chance. By chance once again, Rudolph, who started out as an assistant to Robert Altman, is on the Sundance jury this year. Back in 1976, Rudolph's story of isolated characters driving to and from empty encounters in sun-baked LA showed disconnected people connecting through sex. Sissy Spacek plays a maid who, innocent enough, also gets her share. Rudolph's characters are charged particles, or as charged as particles can be when you factor in pot, Quaaludes, alcohol and Los Angeles itself. It was aimlessness in a town of intense but hollow ambition.

If you watch Welcome to LA, I'd bet that it would seem nostalgic now. This was an era before AIDS, the earthquake, the riots. It was when Schwarzenegger was a muscleman who did occasional nude shots. It was an era when you worried about what you didn't get from casual sex, not what you did get.

The setting of Friends with Money is that LA world of charity events, private schools with lots of kids named Max, farmers markets, Spanish-speaking domestic help, house renovations and hybrid cars. Unlike the characters in Welcome to LA, these characters are nothing if not connected - dependent might be a better word, co-dependent might be even better. They're comfortable, in the economic sense, not the psychological sense, and they're intensely competitive as they watch each other age more slowly or have more sex with a spouse more often.

The settings are houses, cars and restaurants - what could be more LA?

It's truly a Cinderella story, although I'm much more interested in the cinders than in the salvation of Jennifer Aniston that does indeed make Friends with Money a fairy tale. Frances McDormand's character sets the grim tone; she's a clothing designer who can't make herself look good, and she shares her anger with anyone around. It's too late for her to buy beauty or happiness with money, but there's nothing else there to buy it with.

The ensemble is the sit-com staple. We're talking about a film whose star made her reputation on the idiotic TV show, Friends. Yet Aniston's character here is complex, proud but self-mocking, lonely to the point of dragging around three-timing personal trainer Scott Caan (we used to call these guys "heels") and acceding to his demand for his "take" of the pittance that she's paid after he wipes off a shelf or two. She even wears the skimpy French maid's costume that the generous guy buys as a Christmas present for her. She has the you-take-what-you-can-get attitude of someone who knows better.

(There's second ensemble here, too, the Spanish-speaking gardeners, housekeepers, nannies and construction workers who watch this emotional pageant like a mute Greek chorus on minimum wage, incredulous as Mr and Mrs suffer through the day.)

Eventually, Aniston's character is redeemed after she's forced to follow her heart and go for simple things, like a nice guy. If this isn't romance, I don't know what is. But for me, the life that romance lifts her from tells us much more about the real Los Angeles than love does.

Not to put too much of a meta-narrative spin on this, Friends with Money can also be a metaphor for what the independent film scene has become. (House-cleaning could just as easily be another.) At Sundance, you might say, there's plenty of money, but the friends are harder to find. Has the infusion of money made independent films better films? The jury's still out as to whether the infusion of money into Sundance has made this a better experience for those of us who don't have it. Money certainly doesn't make you any more free if you're one of Nicole Holofcener's characters, although the dilemma of how to be happy if you have money is a luxury that most of the world would love to try. We comfort slaves are lucky to have such "problems."

But where there's money, there's usually art, and there was art at the Library Center in Park City Friday night, January 21. In Destricted, there was sex, too, in the art. (It's funny to think of this, because Utah is a place where authorities are vigilant about the kinds of books that they allow into their libraries, and sometimes fierce about throwing "offensive" books out. Anything that could penetrate the human body was in action on the screen this time.)

With roots protruding from his body, an unidentified man gets intimate with machines - a truck, to be exact - in Hoist, Matthew Barney's contribution to Destricted, a group of short films by six directors doing independent pornography. Each film in Destricted, by such contributors as Sam Taylor-Wood, Richard Prince, Larry Clark, Marina Abramovic and Gaspar Noé, was offered as "cerebral" work that reinvigorates erotic cinema.

Make pornography, the filmmakers were told, "do anything you want, as long as you do it in less than 20 minutes," said Larry Clark, who pairs a novice would-be porn stallion with a forty-ish veteran in Impaled.

Clark's cast for his odd short was assembled from casting calls for male and female porn performers. The males, all first-timers, most of them younger than twenty, were experienced porn watchers (everyman a porn star?) and the women were all in the business, but also very young. Most of the young men not only watched porn, they got it from their parents. Clark, as we know, has a way of getting youth to be candid and compliant. Is it exploitation? You decide. It works once again as his interviewees talk about sex for money on the screen - the men talking about their particular sex preferences and ego needs, and the women talking more about the job as a job. The second half of Impaled is the coupling of Clark's Odd Couple, a pale skinny sullen kid of twenty and a giggling nympho twice his age. Not knowing whether the performers were in on the joke or not makes the joke even better.

The project renews Sundance's mission to push the boundaries of sex and gender in a pro-Bush state where some locals still practice polygamy and Brokeback Mountain was banned in a town nearby.

Sam Taylor-Wood chipped with Onan: Death Valley, failed self-stimulation in a majestic landscape. Destricted elicits the question, "Is pornography better if it's made, not by porn pros, but by artists, especially hot cross-over personalities like Barney and Sam Taylor-Wood?" Another inevitable question follows: "Is cinema better when those artists make it?"

Did the mostly young crowd screaming for more porn know that Harry Reems, hero of Deep Throat, the classic of porn's golden era, is living and selling real estate in Park City? That fact never came up at the screening that I attended.

Sharing the art bill at Sundance are a documentary about Sally Mann and a wry adaptation of Dan Clowes's graphic novel, Art School Confidential, by Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Bad Santa). More about those and other films on art in a later installment.

At the other end of the fashion spectrum from the art stars and the fans who sustain them is Alan Berliner, a filmmaker who's been at Sundance several times with films like Intimate Stranger and The Family Album. I've always liked his work, which has had at its core the rapid-fire succession of still images to make movies that sometimes looked like old-fashioned flip books, sometimes like the torrent of images from within the brain that race ahead of what we would call consciousness. (One of the few inspiring moments of the Destricted porn-athon was Sync, Marco Brambilla's breakneck compilation of porn scenes, a cinematic salute to the idea of the "quickie." Was he trying to out-Berliner Berliner? If so, it was a very nice try.)

Wide Awake tells you what Berliner's film is about. He can't sleep, and this ailment touches everyone he's close to - his mother, his sister, his wife, even his newborn child. Berliner tries everything for his insomnia. We learn that he's been taking sleeping pills in quantities that are far more than what his doctor prescribed. We also learn that physicians who are sleep specialists know far less about sleep than we might think, which doesn't keep them from treating hard cases like Berliner's.

Ultimately our hero decides that he has to be positive, and he accepts that his insomnia gives him more time in which to be productive. Getting to that conclusion takes us through Berliner's creative process of fatigue and energy, and through his family - it's nothing if not a personal film.

But it's more than that. Insomnia isn't AIDS or cancer, so journeying through it with a man who can even have a sense of humor about his affliction doesn't tear us inside out as so many of the disease-of-the-week movies do. As a malady, insomnia is disease-lite. One out of three Americans suffers from it, and Berliner explains that we make all sorts of allowances for an affliction that we're forced to live with. There's a great line that he uses to illustrate this accommodation: "If you boil a frog slowly, the frog never knows there's anything wrong." Remember that. It helps us understand a lot.

There's even more. If this is a film about a Jewish family, and it is, among many other things, since so much of the discussion of insomnia takes place at a table with Berliner and his mother and sister, it's also a story that's a twist on the formula of helping a schlemiel fall in love. In this case, family members are stumbling over each other (or just yelling), trying to help a schlemiel fall asleep, which we learn is harder than love. It's like life, or like the family. Berliner can't slay the dragon. He has to manage the dragon.

As you might have guessed, for a prodigious cinema collagist like Berliner, archival textures are woven, sequenced, overlaid and just piled on. His own filming gives the film a special glow because so much of it happens with night vision, the same kind of technique used to hunt insurgents in Iraq or to observe nocturnal species in their active hours. Berliner himself is an odd twist on the nocturnal species, seen by himself, watching his family watch him. As sick as he is, if insomnia is indeed a sickness, first-person filmmaking is alive and well.

Munich, 1/21.

Tony Kushner in the Los Angeles Times:

In the last month, the co-creators of Munich have been accused of being apologists for the Palestinians, apologists for Israel, defamers of Palestinians and of Israel, softheaded Hollywood liberals, dupes of the radical left, dupes of the radical right, even of being anti-Semitic or self-loathing, for showing Jews talking about receipts and handling money. We're morally confused, overly complicated, simplistic. We're cowards who refused to take sides. We took a side but, oops! the wrong side.

Updates: 1/28.

And so, he addresses the questions most commonly raised: What about that book the film's based on, why are the Mossad agents troubled and is he out to destroy Israel. His cousin-in-law, "and about 100 other people, suggested that maybe, in the midst of this storm of opinion, I could venture to speak a little for the film." What follows is an absolute must-read. But if you're in a hurry (e.g., racing between screenings in Park City), here's the crux:

In the film, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is presented not as a matter of religion versus religion, or sanity versus insanity, or good versus evil or civilization versus barbarism or Judeo-Christian culture versus Muslim culture, but rather as a struggle over territory, over geography, over home.

[...]

[W]e believe that one aspect of the struggle against terrorism is the struggle to comprehend terrorism. If you think understanding the enemy is unimportant, well, maybe there's a job in Washington for you.

Meantime. Here in Germany, we're still days away from the film's opening but the feuilletons have already been soaking in it for weeks. You can imagine that there's a plethora of complex reasons for all this interest, given the role of the Holocaust in speeding up the foundation of the state of Israel and the tragically botched handling by the German police of the crisis in 1972 that gives the film its name. And that's just for starters.

I know pointing to items in German is only going to be of interest to a few Daily readers, so I'll keep it short. Filmz.de has quite a collection; in today's papers alone, David Denk talks with Hanns Zischler about working with Spielberg while, also in die taz, Jan Feddersen addresses another German component of the story the film does not: Black September demanded not only the release of 232 Palestinian prisoners but also the release of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, who were being held in German prison at the time. In the Berliner Zeitung, Jochen Arntz reconstructs events leading up to the early morning of September 5, 1972.

And there's Spielberg on the cover of Der Spiegel. Going by the online TOC, it looks as if 20 or so pages are devoted to the film and related issues. We'll see when it hits newsstands tomorrow. Hopefully, at least a few of those pages will be appearing in English as well.

Update, 1/22: The Observer is claiming that Andrew Anthony's is going to be the only interview Spielberg gives in Britain; we'll see. There aren't a great many revelations here. Reaffirmation, mostly: "I made this movie out of love for both of my countries, USA and Israel.... I tried to avoid making it and yet I feel that my filmography would not have been complete without this story in some fashion being realised on film.... I have to rely on my intuition, and as a filmmaker I had to commit to my feelings that the real Avner was the real deal, and I really in my heart and soul believe he is." And then, this: "I grew up in a world of potential nuclear holocaust. And for some reason I feel that the age of terrorism is more frightening to me than nuclear terror."

More from Edward Copeland.

Updates, 1/25: Spiegel Online is indeed running Christopher Sultan's translation of the cover story; it's not the interview, but it's a solid piece.

A quick run-down of relevant pieces in the German-language papers on the eve of the film's opening here: Adrienne Woltersdorf and Sven von Reden in die taz, Daniel Kothensculte in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Alexandra Stäheli in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Hanns-Georg Rodek and Hanns Zischler in Die Welt. That's just online. The FAZ and Süddeutsche have much more, but only in print.

Updates, 1/26: And now, Spiegel Online is running the interview, too. What's more they've translated an editorial that ran in the weekly's September 11, 1972 issue.

As the film opens in the UK, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Black report in the Guardian on two docs that "undermine some of its central claims. Operation Bayonet, on BBC2 on Tuesday, and Munich: Mossad's Revenge, on Channel 4 tonight, include detailed testimony from retired Mossad agents the broadcasters claim were directly involved in the killings. Their version of events is very different to Spielberg's."

Update, 1/27: Stephen Howe in openDemocracy: "[W]hile Munich may be a soaraway success as a magnet for political controversy, as a film it's as near to total artistic failure as Spielberg has ever come."

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian: "The movie is all about the homeland of Israel-Palestine, but there's no doubt where its emotional homeland is: and that is the United States."

Berlin & Beyond.

Koreanfilm.org contributor Adam Hartzell samples a few German-language offerings in San Francisco.

I don't think I'm all that unique in the expectations I come with to the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival every year, or any festival that focuses on the cinema of any particular country or region. In its 11th installment, bringing San Franciscans an opportunity to see "New Films from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland," I don't expect to be blown away by all of them, if any. Of course, I'm happy to watch great cinema, but I also come simply to recall my time spent with good friends who grew up in some of the cities shown on screen (in my case, Munich and Stuttgart in Germany and Salzburg, Vienna and Villach in Austria) and to be exposed to cultural issues my country's mainstream news media are unwilling to address. I am not so naive to assume that what I see on the screen truly represents these countries and the lives of their citizens, but I come to world cinema for the same reasons I read books, magazines and online newspapers from lands other than my own - to educate myself. All I ask is that the films, in my street critic parlance, don't suck.

Johannes Brunner's Oktoberfest (Germany, 2005) came closest to not meeting my extremely lenient qualifications. In the intertwined stories meant to represent a dodge-'em car amusement ride of lives bouncing off each other, there are some interesting interactions, but too many of the efforts to push the plot along seem contrived. The film begins on the last day of Oktoberfest and we follow this day in the lives of Germans and Africans working the beer gardens, young women from Hamburg down on holiday, a Japanese couple on honeymoon, three generations of a family running a haunted house ride, a divorced father spending the day with his reluctant older daughter and excited younger son, a young German man playing cat and mouse with security, and Italian tourists. Players in each storyline will intermix at some point in the film. Many of these random trajectories are believable, considering the dizzying mass confusion that such an event allows.

The film is not a celebration of Oktoberfest; instead, it primarily focuses on the pathetic goings on behind all the pretty lights and carnival noise. Oktoberfest the movie definitely leaves you with more reservations about getting reservations to attend Oktoberfest the event. Similarly, I'm reluctant to recommend the film simply because there are too many weak moments, such as the lack of motivation behind the infidelity of the leader of the oompah-pah band in the main beer hall and several love-at-first-sights that seem to happen way too easily. Oktoberfest is a ride better avoided, unless you have your own memories of Oktoberfest you'd like to revisit.

Next rung up the critical ladder is Hannes Stöhr's Night on Earth-inspired One Day In Europe (Germany/Spain, 2005). Stöhr takes us to four different locales on the final day of the European Soccer Championships. Connecting all our stories are not Jarmusch's taxi cabs, but alternating legitimate and illegitimate insurance claims that require assistance from the local police. An English woman robbed of all her luggage is befriended by a non-English-speaking Russian grandmother in Moscow. A German tourist fakes the loss of his possessions while in Turkey in order to acquire cash from his insurance company and stumbles into the taxi cab of a Turkish citizen who, rather than rush him to the police station, offers to beat the living crap out of the individuals who never mugged the German in the first place. A too-friendly Hungarian will meet a Spanish police officer after naively asking a stranger to take a picture of him standing in front of a major tourist spot in Santiago de Campostela, losing his digital camera and all 500 photos of his pilgrimage in the process.

And finally, French street performers in Berlin fake a mugging so as to attain insurance money to repair their broken down vehicle. Evident of the little effect this film had on me, I had trouble recalling what happened in the final story. (The friend I brought with me reminded me that it worked off the efficiency for which the Berlin police are apparently known, an efficiency this story desired to emulate because it seemed to be the quickest of the four and ended quite abruptly.) Stöhr is obviously serving up his own L'Auberge espagnole in exploring the comic possibilities of the emerging European Union identity. The highlights for me were the first two stories, particularly the second where laughter erupted from the audience when the Turkish cab driver begins speaking not only German, but German of the Schwäbisch dialect, which many linguists argue is the most divergent of German dialects from the mainstream Hochdeutsch taught in schools. As Stöhr commented in the Q&A afterwards, you couldn't make up a character like the real-life Turkish-born actor Erdal Yildiz who played that character. Yildiz indeed learned his German in the Swabian regions and he has appeared in many German television and film productions.

Speaking of Turkish-Germans, Anno Saul's Kebab Connection (Germany, 2004) was the film I was most excited to see at this year's Berlin & Beyond. Thankfully, this film, co-produced by Fatih Akin (Head-On) lived up to my hopes and was the perfect introduction to German film for the friend who accompanied me. Ingrid Eggers, organizer and co-founder of the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival, introduced the film as one of the rare comedies playing the festival this year, which brought a laugh from the audience well aware that German films are more known for looking at our shadows than our jesters.

A young Turkish Tarantino named Ibo (Denis Moschitto) directs stylish splatterfest commercials for his Uncle's kebab stand that generate serious traffic after being screened at the local Kino. As his star begins to rise, he discovers that his German girlfriend's belly is beginning to as well. Ibo's father has been lenient about Ibo messing around with German girls, asking only one thing - not to get them pregnant. Having failed that one request, Ibo’s father disowns him. Ibo's indecisiveness about how to resolve all this family and career confusion begins to frustrate his girlfriend and the comedy definitely milks this confusion for all its worth. Cultural inside jokes abound (add to the mix that Ibo's uncle's main competitor is a Greek restaurant across the street), but even if one is hip to neither the Turkish nor the German references, the film has enough universal humor about young adulthood, young parenthood and family politics that even the most apolitical could find the humor in this flick.

Wanting to see a film based in Salzburg so I could have the pleasure in recognizing sights from that lovely city, I caught another of the rare comedies, Wolfgang Murnberger's Silentium, which we were told was a huge hit in Austria in 2005. This dark comedy takes some definitely cavernous routes to unearth humor, working off the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. We meet the unemployed private investigator Brenner (Josef Hader) just as he becomes unemployed and quickly stumbles into getting hired by the daughter (Maria Köstlinger) of a famous festival promoter. She wants Brenner to find out who murdered her husband. Her husband had accused the archbishop of sexually molesting him when he was younger and the town has been led to believe that her husband committed suicide. Brenner finds much more than he bargained for as he digs deeper and deeper into the goings on of the local diocese and the festival promoter.

For the most part, the film is a laugh riot. The topic allows for some hilarious irreverence involving multiple Catholic icons. Plus, there's an expertly done parody of North by Northwest. But the film loses itself in the resolution of all the secrets hidden in the catacombs of Salzburg's Da Vinci Code. When the puzzle pieces fall into place, the picture is just too outlandish to be believable. Plus, Silentium continues the long tradition of limiting the roles available to actresses of Asian descents, something that has tainted films of otherwise exemplary quality such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. (One thing I learned from Silentium is the German language variant of that schoolyard racist taunt 'Chinese/Japanese.' Perhaps there are English variants I'm not aware of, but the German translation we were given of the final couplet "Dirty knees/Look at these" was replaced with "Owl/Fowl." The person reciting the rhyme uses his fingers to widen his eyes when saying "Owl" and then the person the rhyme is being recited to is bonked on the head when he says "Fowl." Some universals divide more than unite, I guess.) The same old, same old that rears its ugly Western eyes here is a tired cliché if not offensive. I'm not for censorship, so Murnberger can do whatever he wants, but I don't have to like this part of the film. Unfortunately, I can't reveal a more detailed argument about the problems with this aspect of the film because it is part of a crucial twist in the plot. Therefore, I can't deflect dirty knee jerks from calling my comments mere political correctness. Like the confessional ethics of priests, I have my own ethical code of silence when writing about films in a forum bounded by the same decorum as a review.

But enough of disappointment; the best of the bunch I caught was the film awarded Best New Feature at the festival, Robert Thalheim's Netto (Germany, 2004). Netto follows a divorced father, Marcel Werner (Milan Peschel) with impulse control problems exacerbated by his drinking problem. We meet him ordering a Clausthaler at a local Chinese restaurant and his conversation demonstrates how Marcel has difficulty properly discerning social cues, going on and on about his delusional life when it is clear no one at the restaurant is really interested in what he has to say. Although unemployment is a problem affecting everyone in Germany, we can see why this particular man has trouble keeping a job. His son Sebastian (Sebastian Butz) re-enters Marcel's life in an effort to avoid changing schools after his mother moves into the home of her new husband. Sebastian ends up being his father's surrogate father by assisting him in getting the security-related position his father fantasizes about.

Butz's portrayal is impressive and Peschel puts in a quality performance as well. Thalheim makes some nice shot choices, such as Marcel bike-peddling past important sites in Berlin as if staking them out for security preparations. There is a hilarious scene when Marcel acts out his secret service fantasies that Thalheim gives us from a surveillance camera overhead shot that wonderfully underscores the scene. (What's this about the Germans not being funny?) Weaving in and out of the film is the country music of the "Johnny Cash of East Berlin," Peter Tschernig, and it works nicely throughout the film. The only other films I saw up for the Best First Feature award were the aforementioned poor Oktoberfest and a film I saw in Busan, Benjamin Heisenberg's compelling Sleeper (Germany, 2005), so I can't speak for all of them but I find Netto a more than worthy choice.

I was limited in what I could watch over this three-day weekend by a cold or flu or something else I'm self-diagnosing. (On the phone, my father on the phone advised me to "make sure it's not that bird flu.") Particularly disappointing was missing Curt and Robert Siodmak, Edgar G Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann's silent film, People on Sunday (Germany, 1929). And I felt obligated to catch at least some of the Michael Verhoeven films featured since The Nasty Girl was the first film I ever saw with subtitles, catching it back during its initial release in the US at either the Tivoli Theatre or the Hi-Pointe Theatre in St Louis. I now prefer to read my films and Verhoeven can take some of the credit for that. At least I got to see films like Netto and Kebab Connection that will be staying with me longer than this cold, hopefully.

Shorts, 1/20.

"Like the best of his still image work (the Disaster series and the big Marilyn and Elvis paintings), Warhol's silent films and some of his early 'talkies' exist in the tension between presence and absence, assertion and denial. Fetishistic in the extreme, they allow the receptive viewer access to the fundamentals of cinematic pleasure. Their surfaces open onto the depths of your psyche." That's Amy Taubin's take now; but she's actually in a few of these films: "I was fascinated by Warhol's work process - how he made himself a still point in the midst of a chaos that fed him even as he kept himself apart from it - but I found the Factory scene as clique-ridden and unpleasant as high school."

Also in the City Pages: Rob Nelson on The Last Waltz and Matthew Wilder on Match Point. More on that one from AO Scott in the New York Times: "You would have to go back to the heady, amoral heyday of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder to find cynicism so deftly turned into superior entertainment." But then, Jack Stoller: "The central flaw of this film is a theme reminiscent of Crimes and Misdemeanors, that people who do unjust things in a godless universe can get away with it. An important difference is that Crimes and Misdemeanors portrayed this as a bad thing." Update: NP Thompson simply despises Match Point.

Lists definitely worth waiting for: Brian Darr, Dennis Cozzalio and, at Twitch, Dave Canfield.

DK Holm has a massive all-Japanese column up at Movie Poop Shoot, reviewing five Kurosawa films, four samurai films, two "elder sister" exploitation films, the Pinky Violence Collection, a few films by Donald Richie as well as Richie's books A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Film and The Japan Journals: 1947 - 2004 - and Alain Silver's newly revised The Samurai Film. Heavens.

Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper: "Fond of barren landscapes, blackout gags and Sisyphean slopes, [Luc] Moullet is, like the Parisian rebels of May 1968, 'Marxiste, tendence Groucho,' a slapstick anarchist who expresses his hostility to the modern world by refusing to take it seriously."

Girish: "The Passenger is ultimately and clearly a director's movie but I have to say that Jack Nicholson's performance in it is a thing of wonder: it’s scrupulously minimal, completely instinctive, and you could write a small book about its profuse subtleties." Also: "Naruse's Repast (1951) moves me because of the insistent way in which he focuses on the petty details of 'balancing the domestic books' that each day demanded in a household like our own."

"He may have been one of the great auteurs, but many of his films still have the spontaneity of home movies," writes Geoffrey Macnab in a piece with a sidebar by Leslie Caron. "While critics and fellow film-makers have long revered Renoir and films like La Règle du Jeu and La Grande Illusion nestle high up in many top 10 lists, few of his 40 or so other features are in active circulation." Also in the Independent, Judy Meewezen praises Elizabeth McGovern's performance in the indie thriller, The Truth.

At the newly redesigned site for the LA Weekly, there's a box, top and center, labeled "Foundas vs Ebert." It is, in a way, a mini-blog, linking to all the stops necessary to follow Scott Foundas's response to Roger Ebert's defense of Crash in the wake of Foundas's attack on the film in the latest (last?) round of Slate's "Movie Club." For good measure, the LAW tosses in Foundas's appreciation of Ebert this summer when the Chicago-based critic got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. So why would you follow all this? One of the points at hand is the question of how critics best serve their readers. In a sense, both could claim to be "right" since their readerships probably differ considerably; but that doesn't settle it entirely, either, of course.

Brian Brooks unveils the third edition of indieWIRE's "Guide to Acquisitions": "The list is designed, we hope, to give insight to indieWIRE readers, especially emerging filmmakers and producers, who may not be familiar with some of the people behind this fundamental aspect of the film business."

The New York Press film critics do their bit for the Brooklyn issue. Armond White looks back: "By putting Black Brooklyn on the big screen, [Spike] Lee followed the footsteps of preceding borough ambassadors who won prominence without instituting change."

"[W]hat's happening in Brooklyn is still very much under the radar. It's less a fullblown Renaissance than a percolating scene that has yet to erupt into national view," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. Also: Jennifer Merin interviews Richard Shepard, director of The Matador.

Charles Taylor: "Few recent movies offer the sense of being deeply engaged with the world, or the quiet, enveloping elation, that Mr Hou's Café Lumière does." More from Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader and Scott Tobias in the AV Club. Also in the New York Observer: Andrew Sarris on Fun with Dick and Jane.

Nick Davis resumes picking flicks.

For the Los Angeles Times, Reed Johnson visits the set of Nacho Libre, "a bruising comedy" directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) and starring Jack Black, now scarred for life. Literally. Related in a roundabout sort of way: "There's more to Mexican superheroes than masked wrestlers," notes Sean Spillane at Bitter Cinema.

When the great production designer Ken Adam sits down to talk with the Telegraph's Mark Monahan about a favorite movie, he chooses Casablanca.

The Bafta nominations are in and, as the Guardian reports, The Constant Gardener is the front-runner, with Brokeback Mountain and Crash close behind.

"When we launched our competition for films shot and edited on home computers - what we termed "laptop movies" - we had very little idea of what we were going to find," writes Guardian film editor Andrew Pulver. Turns out, 140 DVDs came in and the "10-strong final shortlist included some powerful work... But the winner was absolutely clear; it won in a walk... One Night in Powder is the brainchild of Jason Attar and Phil Jones, and is a brilliantly realised film. It's genuinely funny - and if you've sat through as many comedies as I have, you know the real thing as soon as you see it."

Also in the Guardian:

• Peter Bradshaw on Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story: "[Michael] Winterbottom generates an almost delirious atmosphere by making us breathe two different sorts of heady fume: postmodernism and celebrity." Still, "The film might date quicker than the book." More from James Christopher in the Times of London, Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph and Anthony Quinn in the Independent, where John Walsh offers an A-to-Z of the book.

• Mark Lawson: "[I]t's my contention that Hidden is one of the first great movies of the 21st century." More from Kevin B Lee in the Chicago Reader. Related: James Mottram talks with Michael Haneke for the Independent.

• "What we need is more women writers, writing for older women," Kathleen Turner tells Sharon Krum.

• Dan Glaister talks with Paradise Now director Hany Abu-Assad, Will Hodgkinson with Joaquin Phoenix.

• Howard Guard remembers cinematographer Adrian Biddle and Christopher Reed remembers film historian Dave Holland.

• Guy Dammann on prostitution in film history. Onscreen, that is.

• Seven online viewing tips from Kate Stables.

Matt Zoller Seitz introduces a new feature, "offerings from the three dozen or so film and TV-related books that I never tire of reading." More than that, though, he comments throughout. First up is a clip from David Mamet's On Directing Film.

Dave Kehr reports on Showtime's cancelation of the broadcast of Takashi Miike's Imprint, which was to have been part of the Masters of Horror series; it does sound pretty gruesome, actually, and will probably do well on DVD.

Also in the New York Times:

• David Carr dips into the aftermath of the Globes and finds and odd mix of "What in the world was Drew thinking wearing that!" and celebs spending "an awful lot of time talking about gay-bashing, about the role of film in public discourse and whether the president should be impeached."

• Alpha Dog, its director, Nick Cassavetes, and its researcher are entangled in the legal fallout of the real-life events the film tackles. David M Halbfinger reports.

• Stephen Holden finds End of the Spear "inspiring enough to make you wish that the filmmakers had reined in their sentimental excesses." Also: Go for Zucker is "the rare German movie calling itself a comedy that is actually funny, even if only in bits and pieces." But: "Perception "is not funny; it's hardly anything at all." More on Zucker from Jürgen Fauth.

• Then: "In Le Pont des Arts, [Eugène] Green's propensity for throwing in academically heavyweight references and concepts may seem intimidating, but it is more than an exercise in name-dropping. The movie is an audacious, mythically slanted inquiry into the place of high art in today's chaotic culture and an assertion of its primacy."

• AO Scott: "The Fall of Fujimori offers, among other things, the latest proof that nonfiction filmmaking can be stranger than any make-believe."

• Manohla Dargis on 24 Hours on Craigslist, "primarily a stroll through human desire as manifested on the popular site."

• Nathan Lee: "Pizza is a thin slice of flavorless whimsy heavily garnished with contrivance."

• Caryn James on trailers for political satires: "How do you capture a movie's irreverence without alienating the audience in advance?"

• "[T]his the year of gender malcontent in the cinema," claims Joyce Wadler, who writes up a little spoof about Dracula as a cross-dresser: TransSylvania. The more rewarding read is Kaley Davis's piece in the Stranger on Transamerica: "My life story isn't much like Bree's, but [Felicity] Huffman's work reflected the essence of my experience so acutely I often felt like I was looking into a mirror."

Neil Jordan's on-again, off-again Borgia is on again. Hannah Eaves interviews the director for PopMatters. Also, Terry Sawyer: "Mind Over Matters: Meta-Bullshit: The Trouble with Sarah Silverman and the Fawning Cult of Meta-Bigotry."

Somewhat related: Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat on The Aristocrats on DVD and the two hours-worth of new stuff: "A perfect example of a bit that is hysterical but was omitted for good reason is Kevin Pollak telling the joke in the persona of Albert Brooks. It's just as funny as the scene in the film where Pollak does the joke as Christopher Walken; but it would have seemed redundant and structurally strange for [Paul] Provenza and [Penn] Jillette to have included two lengthy Pollak impersonation routines, no matter how great they are."

Daniel Robert Epstein's latest interviews at SuicideGirls: Wayne Wang and Melvin Van Peebles. Related: AO Scott in the NYT on How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It): "The story that emerges is a fascinating historical document."

Rick Curnutte: "With whip-smart writing, quirky characters (and actors) and a propulsive, addictingly playful aesthetic, The Land of College Prophets has the potential to be a sleeper cult film in the future. It's the greatest Alex Cox film that Alex Cox never made."

Steve Erickson: "As satire, Manderlay hits home in a way that Dancer in the Dark and Dogville never did."

Crashcam Films: Very, very busy, up to all sorts of mischief, reports Marc Savlov. Also in the Austin Chronicle: Spencer Parsons previews the Austin Jewish Film Festival, January 21 through 27, and Raoul Hernandez reviews The Bad Sleep Well.

"I think in every season we've based our A-story - which is the main terrorist story - on plausible scenarios. But just because it's plausible doesn't make it probable." 24 writer Michael Loceff talks to James Surowiecki in Slate.

Grady Hendrix on The Promise: "Chen [Kaige]'s focused on is how things look, and they look gooood."

"Who knew?" At the Culture Blog, Amy Moon passes along an observation from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chuck Nevius as to who's watching Brokeback Mountain. Related: James Wolcott on conservatives' reactions so far; Mark Steyn, via Jason Morehead; via Gabriel Shanks, Nell Minow in the Chicago Tribune on last year's most homophobic onscreen moments; and Patrick Macias: "This just in: American girls are mining the missing link between gay cowboys and fruity J-pop from the Johnny's jimsho."

Trying to steer clear of the Oscars before they become unavoidable (all too soon now, I'm sure), but this is too good to pass up: David Kronke talks with Alonso Duralde, author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men, about, yes, the Oscars.

Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "The American Astronaut is an experiment in genre-bending. It's a western without any high-noon shootouts, a sci-fi work of art with musical numbers, a drama with exaggerated characters."

Peter Nellhaus: "[W]hile [Derek] Jarman made his film about his own country twenty years ago, The Last of England has resonance for contemporary American viewers."

Producer Ted Hope pitches 1000 Bloody Red Pieces of Sarah to Filmmaker.

Getting their kicks at Noir City: Natalija Vekic at Scene and Unseen and Sara Schieron at Filmshi.com.

Online browsing tip. Famous for 15mb. Via Screenhead.

Online listening tip. Harry Nilsson's soundtrack for Otto Preminger's Skidoo at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...

Online going-deep tip. The Tulse Luper Journey. Thanks, Ed.

Online viewing tip #1. Nathaniel Stern reworks Woody Allen at DVblog.

Online viewing tip #2. A teenaged Jodie Foster sings. Harmonizing with herself. In French. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #3. That UK Honda Civic ad; links gathered at Boing Boing.

Online viewing tips. "Top 65 Music Videos of 2005," a different batch from m3 online via Waxy.org.

Docs, 1/20.

Why We Fight "stands out for its passion, ambition and clarion-call sincerity, even amid the contemporary onslaught of political documentaries," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon, leading into his interview with director Eugene Jarecki, who also talks to indieWIRE's Jason Guerrasio and is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"Every documentary-maker today walking the planet at one point or another gets the question about Michael Moore," Jarecki tells The Reeler. But that's ok; Moore has "lifted all the boats," and besides: "There was just kind of a coincidence in the past couple of years, which is that right when the world was becoming far more complicated and the public was sensing that needed to understand it that much more clearly - right at that time, thanks to the forces of corporatism in media, there was a collapse of trust in the source we usually turn to."

Updates: 1/22.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "[E]ven those of radical political persuasion might find it hard to accept Mr Jarecki's argument that American militarism is, underneath the talk about freedom and democracy, a simple question of dollars."

More in the Los Angeles Times from Susan King and Kevin Crust, who writes, "[T]he last 12 months have been full of revelations that generally add to the film's persuasiveness."

Cinematical's Karina Longworth finds it a "solid, classy film, but its Frontline-esque obsession with 'fairness' (the polar opposite of Fox News' cocksure 'Fair and Balanced' pretense) prevents Jarecki from producing anything particularly intellectually devastating."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Johnny Ray Huston and AC Thompson recommend After Innocence. More from Laura Barcella at Alternet, where Rory O'Conner writes, "If the lessons of Peru's State of Fear continue to go unheeded, we may all soon be living in the 'United States of Fear.'"

Cinematical's Kim Voynar interviews Rachel Grady, who made The Boys of Baraka with Heidi Ewing.

Update, 1/22: Michael Joshua Rowin in Stop Smiling: "Better now than never but still unable to shake a heavy feeling of inconsequentiality, Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight arrives one year after the beginning of George W Bush's second term to challenge the pretender-in-chief's foreign imperialism and provide historical context for the systemic militarism that has led to it."

More from Kevin Canfield at Nerve.

From Korea, 1/20.

At Twitch, X translates highlights from Film 2.0's interview with Kim Sung-soo. Topic #1: Running Wild.

Paolo Bertolin interviews Cho Chang-ho, director of The Peter Pan Formula, for Koreanfilm.org.

Filmbrain: "With its sepia-toned nostalgic look, The President's Barber is certainly an interesting film, if only to witness director Lim [Chan-sang] unique look at the Park years. However, its awkward mixture of feel-good dramatics and miscalculated attempts at dark comedy result in a film that is neither biting satire nor emotionally involving drama."

Jason Morehead's glad Park Chan-wook will be moving on now: "Whereas Sympathy For Mr Vengeance spirals downwards into despair, drawing ever closer to a tragic conclusion, and Oldboy moves with a laser-like intensity, Sympathy For Lady Vengeance slowly meanders all over the place, with odd tonal shifts and plot turns that make sense but are completely nonsensical."

Brian Darr in San Francisco: "The fourth, and so far, biggest SF Korean-American Film Festival runs February 7 - 12 and will include a special focus on North Korea, including a rare screening of a film made there in 1972, The Flower Girl."

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.

Nathan Rabin: "Like The Aristocrats, Looking succeeds smashingly both as a comedy and as a savvy deconstruction of comedy." Also in the AV Club: Scott Tobias interviews Albert Brooks, who also appears on Fresh Air and talks to Hollywood Bitchslap's Peter Sobczynski (his review).

The LA Weekly's Scott Foundas gets Brooks on the phone ("He is, others have suggested, the most hermitic director since Stanley Kubrick, who was himself said to be a Brooks aficionado."): "The movie's called Looking, not Finding. That's a big difference. It's never claimed in the title that a goal is going to be reached. You know, in the cartoon I did, it was Finding Nemo."

Cue AO Scott in the New York Times: "Mr Brooks likes to deprecate both himself and the work for hire he does in Hollywood, but the difference between Nemo and his own films may not be as great as he pretends."

Updates: 1/22.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader: "His film is especially welcome now because it frankly admits that most Americans are ignorant about Muslims and have a lot to learn, in contrast with the few other Hollywood movies dealing with Muslims - Syriana, Munich - which seem to suggest that non-Muslim viewers can emerge knowing the score."

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "Veteran Brooks-watchers will be able to hear the secret melodies and appreciate the way he throws away even the throwaways."

Nope, counters the Oregonian's Mike Russell: "[I]t's hard to figure out who "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" is supposed to entertain, much less enlighten."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek finds the film "timid and unshaped." For the Los Angeles Times' Kevin Crust, it's "not Brooks' funniest film, but it possesses his trademark wry humor and is slyly observant."

Stephen Metcalf in Slate: "But, oh, this premise. It is every bit the albatross it sounds."

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "Despite the title, this may be the safest film Brooks has ever done."

Updates, 1/22: Noy Thrupkaew for the American Prospect: "There's a way to critique myopia without being myopic, of course."

At World/Independent Film, Marcy Dermansky finds it "a genuine disappointment."

The New New World.

FX Feeney in the LA Weekly: "Speaking as one who feels Terrence Malick's latest was not just the best film of last year, but one of the greatest I have ever seen, I didn't want him to cut so much as a frame from the version that opened in limited release over Christmas. Happily - if strangely - the new, leaner version, opening nationwide on Friday, is not merely a 'shorter cut,' but a whole new draft of the film."

Max Goldberg disagrees in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "The New World really is what it seems: a fascinating failure with brilliant flourishes weighing against strained seriousness and muddled lyricism." Kimberly Chun meets the film's star, Q'Orianka Kilcher, also profiled by John Harlow in the Times of London and interviewed by Cinematical's James Rocchi.

Updates: 1/22.

Via Movie City Indie, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Malick uses cinema in a way no one else uses it, in a way that no one else has ever used it. Through elliptical and seemingly oblique methods, he forges moments of staggering emotional power."

For the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, even this edited version is "the first necessary film of this young year." More praise from Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times and Anhoni Patel at Scene and Unseen.

Update: Jeffrey Overstreet in Christianity Today: "Ultimately, The New World defines true love as something more than desire, nostalgia, or sexual chemistry. It boldly condones a higher love characterized by selflessness and fidelity, love that shelters, protects, honors, and heals."

Update, 1/21: Dana Stevens in Slate: "It makes sense that Malick never finished his thesis in philosophy at Oxford. In a way, he's still writing it, using his films as scratchpads to work through questions like the one John Smith poses to himself, early in the film: 'What voice is this that speaks within me, guides me toward the best?'"

Update, 1/22: Peter T Chattaway for Canadian Christianity and Joshua Gibson at Fagistan.

Park City. Elsewhere, 1/20.

Sundance, Slamdance and all the other hoopla going on in Park City give us all a breather between the Globes and Oscars to, as Manohla Dargis puts it, "partake in that collective fiction known as the American independent film movement." The crux of her tone-perfect preview of the festival that's become "wildly annoying, but invaluable": "The [studios'] special divisions have been good for American mainstream cinema, but they seem to have been murder on the little guys."

Also in the New York Times: Lorne Manly tells the story behind Awesome! I Fuckin' Shot That!, the Beastie Boys movie shot by 50 fans screening Saturday night at Sundance.

Ok, the online hubs to keep an eye on throughout the fest (besides this one, of course):

• IndieWIRE, naturally. Besides the news, the blog and the pix, the most recent interviews are Patricia Foulkrod (The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends), Juan Carlos Rulfo (In the Pit), So Yong Kim (In Between Days), Malcolm Ingram (small town gay bar), Auraeus Solito (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros), Rex Blumstein (KZ), Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer (Quinceañera) and Aaron Dobbs previews the standout shorts. Also: Eugene Hernandez reports that IFC Films has picked up Caveh Zahedi's I Am a Sex Addict (Sujewa Ekanayake comments) and Cedric Klapisch's Russian Dolls.

• Movie City News collects its own coverage and its plentiful links outward all on one page.

• Cinematical's Karina Longworth, Kim Voynar, James Rocchi and Jason Calacanis (recently profiled by Eryn Brown in Wired) seem to be having a blast.

• Flavorpill, with entries posted by the cinetrix, Jürgen Fauth, Marcy Dermansky and more.

• The Hollywood Reporter and Variety have opened up their special sections.

• Roger Ebert's got his special section up and running, too.

John Horn: "It's considered the Sundance Film Festival's ticket to stardom. But for any number of its past winners, nabbing the festival's Grand Jury Prize has been more like a kiss of death." Also, Stephen K Wagner interviews festival director Geoff Gilmore.

Also in the Los Angeles Times: Tina Daunt on An Inconvenient Truth, a doc capturing Al Gore's views on global warming, and Kenneth Turan's preview: "The festival invariably ends up both better and worse than anyone anticipated."

Anthony Breznican previews ten films screening at Sundance for USA Today. One of them is Moonshine, which has a total budget of "$9,200, including the cost of a Panasonic camera, a PowerBook G4 and website hosting," reports Jason Silverman at Wired News. At Sundance, "a total of 90 movies - including Moonshine and 24 of the 32 works in the Independent Film Competition - will be projected digitally. That's double the number in 2004."

Denis Seguin previews Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated for the Times of London.

Amazon is using the fest as a launching pad of sorts for its foray into online TV, Amazon Fishbowl With Bill Maher. The AP's Allison Linn reports: "The company plans to record the first show at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend, with guests including authors Stephen King and Armistead Maupin, musician Rob Thomas and actress Toni Collette. It will then preview tidbits of that show beginning Tuesday and leading up to the June 1 launch."

For those of us who can't make it to Park City, MaryAnn Johanson suggests a few ways to throw yourself a DIY Sundance: "Don't forget to overcharge yourself for snacks, and consider hiring some hip neighborhood teenagers to come in and snub you."

SF Indie Fest. Lineup.

Via Todd at Twitch comes news that the SF Indie Fest (February 2 through 14) has announced its full lineup. Once again, the site is excellent. Select a film title - Filmic Achievement, for example - and just look: Necessary info right at the top, link to the official site, description, and along the side, links to all the other films. Bravo.

Berlinale. Forum, Perspektive, Retrospective.

Two more announcements from the Berlinale today. The program for the Forum is complete: 40 films, 21 of them world premieres and 15 of them debuts. 40 is too many to list and link here, but among the filmmakers represented are Chantal Akerman, James Benning, Fujiwara Toshi, Amos Gitai, Cho Chang-ho and on and on.

Also complete is the program for the Perspektive Deutsches Kino and special events for the Retrospective have been announced as well. One stands out. A newly restored version of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael will be screened at the Volksbühne on February 11, accompanied by music from ensembleKONTRASTE under the direction of Pierre Oser.

Park City Dispatch. 1.

Between David D'Arcy and Jonathan Marlow, along Hannah Eaves following the fate of Iraq in Fragments, we should be posting dispatches from Park City just about every day through the festivities. Today, David D'Arcy previews several of the films he's caught so far.

The Sundance Film Festival has shown amazing staying power. Everything from the Soviet Union to Enron to Miramax has crumbled in the years since I started coming to Park City in January.

Sundance 2006 opens tonight with the comedy Friends with Money by Nicole Holofcener. And every year we're tempted to spot trends - all the more so since a growing number of marketers and studios are watching closely, not just for films, but for anything new that can be sold to the people watching those films.

Independence is not just an attitude (or lack of funds) that filmmakers bring to the making of a movie. It's now a set of preferences found in a certain kind of consumer who buys cars, clothes, computers, food (for humans and dogs), and snowboards. More about that in another installment.

It's too soon for me to suggest what trends are here (if anyone actually cared) so I'll just concentrate on subject matter.

Politics. There are always politics at Sundance, partly because the position of independence presupposes that you have to be independent from something. This year films deal with Iraq, global warming, the complicated figure of Ralph Nader, racism in the courts, the Middle East and corporate power. Panels will surely fill in any gaps. The issue that strikes me as important and different this year is the border between Mexico and the US and the way in which the border has become the locus for our concerns about the much-deplored growing business of human trafficking, but also about crime, drugs, security and the "invasion" that threatens to transform the United States into a country that's not necessarily white and doesn't necessarily speak English. (Take the example of Park City. Everyone serving you in a low-wage job speaks Spanish.) In Crossing Arizona, Joseph Matthew tries to take the complex issue apart - character by character. It's a start.

Sex. At Sundance there always seems to be a quest for the New New Thing in sexual matter. This is the festival that brought us Sex: The Annabelle Chong Story, a portrait of the young woman who set the record for the number of sexual partners in a limited time period. I can't remember the details, but I can remember the lines of men who answered ads in the newspapers for a chance to be part of this historic event which has since been surpassed. Sundance also first screened Larry Clark's Kids, the grimly prophetic look at teenagers and sex. But these are films, and sex isn't just sex, it's performance. I'm looking forward to Destricted, in which different directors try their hands at pornography - from art world players like Matthew Barney and Sam Taylor-Wood to veterans like Larry Clark and Gaspar Noé who'll be mining old veins.

Gender. Not the same as sex, obviously. Look for The Night Listener, a collaboration between Armistead Maupin and Patrick Stettner about longing and deception. Robin Williams, always good, plays a writer for radio, just dropped by his lover, who's drawn to a young boy, a casualty of abuse. But does the boy really exist, or is this just another level of exploitation?  There's also Small Town Gay Bar, produced by Kevin Smith, a story of a bar in the woods of Mississippi near Tupelo that the evangelicals couldn't kill - at least not yet - although a young gay man's death becomes part of the story. In both cases, Williams and Smith helped get these films made, carrying on a tradition of older, more successful independents giving back to a newer generation.

Investigation. Two films catch my fancy. This Film Is Not Yet Rated penetrates the hidden recesses of the MPAA's rating process, and all the pompous child-saving rhetoric that we've endured over the years. Kirby Dick shows that there's no reason why solid investigative journalism can't be funny. When you see who's making these decisions, and you hear the decisions explained by these people, you can't do anything but laugh - or tear your hair out. Also look for Who Killed the Electric Car? Anyone who had a chance seemed to stick a knife into the dream (and the manufactured reality) of a car that could be used every day without causing pollution or making noise. Your corporate friends at work, and the political officials who could have made a difference.

Art. I'm told that the Sundance Film Festival Director Geoff Gilmore has said that films about art submitted to the festival have grown at an alarming rate. And why not? Artists are assumed to be complicated characters and, in a society that has lost respect for just about everyone else, they're still revered. They're also as hot as anything in fashion. The selection here is mixed - By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston, a French doc and another of many about the photographer who seems to have caught on hard and fast with independents, the afore-mentioned group-porn Destricted and What Remains, Steven Cantor's portrait of the photographer Sally Mann. There's also Terry Zwigoff's funny Art School Confidential, with a script by graphic novelist Dan Clowes, and The Giant Buddhas, a doc with inside footage of the demolition of the Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. There are sure to be new docs on the antiquities trade soon, giving the media frenzy now brewing over scandals at the Getty. They'll be lucky to get this kind of access. With so many films submitted and accepted, you have to wonder what they turned down.

There are some staples this year on the Sundance program. One welcome story that rarely worsens from wear is the investigation of the wrongly accused, wrongly convicted, wrongly imprisoned innocent man (although there have also been some women.) We all know that this story is as old as any story gets (remember Jesus Christ?), but in independent film it seems to have begun with The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris's spare emotionless reconstruction of a man's wrongful conviction and death sentence for murder.

This year the "justice denied" film to watch is The Trials of Darryl Hunt, the chronicle of a black man's trial, conviction and imprisonment for the brutal rape and stabbing murder of a white woman journalist in Winston-Salem North Carolina in 1986.  Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say? Sure, but it reminds us of what seems to be the widening gap between justice and the justice system, and it has the kind of emotional hold on you that fiction aspires to and rarely reaches.

It's emotionally gripping because even though the genre seems to require redemption at the end - with either a live prisoner or a dead body honored for courage and fortitude - this documentary, directed by Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg, is truly an extreme case. It's been a while since I've come across a case in which law enforcement from top to bottom has been so determined to keep a wrongly convicted man behind bars, and we never really learn why. Perhaps that's another film. But I suspect that it's far from the most extreme. There are plenty of cases that are worse.

There's a can-you-top-this element to the "justice denied" genre. You find yourself incredulous at the corruption and stupidity that seems routine in law enforcement. And then there's the next film takes it to a higher level. In The Trials of Darryl Hunt, the wronged man defies your expectations about the nature of a criminal and keeps defying those expectations at every stage of his mistreatment. Somehow I doubt that we're even being told all that may have happened to him in prison, where guards offered to bring skinheads drugs if they agreed to kill him.

Hunt, who we're told had no family, seems unnaturally calm and gentle, which the jury should have noticed before it put the then-teenager away on the testimony of a prostitute who was well known to have problems telling the difference between fantasy and reality. In this case, rather than line up the usual suspects, they lined up the usual witnesses. A television correspondent tells us that the prosecutor spoke so convincingly that she could have been persuaded of anything. To be fair, it was also the press at the local newspaper that finally brought the government's case down.

As the film moves along, the young defendant/prisoner has the serene grin of a Buddhist monk and the patience of Job, as his lawyers first talk tough, and then break down in tears when the system fails at every level. Is Hunt all there, you wonder. Is it fatalism, or serenity? At one point, when a DNA test shows that Hunt's semen was not in the dead woman's vagina, prosecutors suggest, improbably, that it must then have been in some other orifice. At another point, when a man in prison for another brutal attack in Winston-Salem at the time confesses to the crimes that Hunt is jailed for committing, prosecutors assume that the rape and murder must have been committed by a team that included Hunt. I found myself laughing at the absurdity. Yet the defense lawyers stick with him, knowing that they are his only hope.

I won't give away the ending, which you can surely guess. See it for yourself, and be aware that the reality of the justice system is not the OJ verdict, as shameful as that was, but the imprisonment of innocent men in the face of overwhelming evidence. And remember, too, that this is North Carolina - the real Mayberry. Yet it seems to happen everywhere.

One other film worth seeing: As injustices go, Thank You for Smoking takes a lighter tone, although by sheer coincidence the great city of Winston-Salem figures in this one, too. It's a capital of the tobacco industry, and the hero of this satire practices one of the most-hated of all professions - he's a tobacco lobbyist.

If you've seen the trailers for this film, which seem to be playing everywhere, you know that it's about a lobbyist, which puts a fictional feature in an odd position, given the journalist glare on lobbying right now which could reach pretty close to the President. Normally, an issue is in the newspapers, and then a year later documentaries on that issue turn up at Sundance and at other film festivals. I'm sure that there are a dozens of teams trying to make the film about the evils of Jack Abramoff and the politicians that he and his cronies bribed. (For all I know, they've cleaned local stores out of black hats and trenchcoats for their re-enactment scenes.) I'll leave it to them to figure out how to keep any of those films down to feature length. How about an epic? The cast and the script should be no problem.

But here we're in a situation where the documentaries that I assume are being made are a year or so from being shown, and the feature, Thank You for Smoking is overtaken by events in the news. And when that happens, it's hard to compete with C-SPAN.

Jason Reitman, who directs his own script, can't be blamed for timing or for any other circumstances outside his control (now that really sounds like a lobbyist talking), and the film rings with more than laughs. There's lots of wry truth to it, starting with the volubly appealing frat snake of a protagonist who can smile his way through any kind of lie. He becomes the champion of kids with cancer, noting all the time that no direct link has been made between smoking and the disease. There's plenty of Orwellian double-speak here (although you can get that on the evening news for free) or it may be just that spin, which used to be called lying, has become such a fact of life that we analyze the techniques of spinning the same way we watch figure-skating, judging the argument as a performance rather than evaluating its elements of truth. Gun supporters become "Americans for Safety," or something like that, and a whiskey "institute" has another world-saving title.

There's more than a glimmer of the rogue Jack Abramoff in Nick Naylor, the rakish hero played by Aaron Eckhart. When a starlet of a journalist (Katie Holmes) whom he's slept with exposes his techniques and his unrepentant attitude toward them, he plays it for laughs at first, just like Abramoff used to imitate Marlon Brando in The Godfather. (I kept thinking, imagine what secrets Katie Holmes might get out of Tom Cruise when she sleeps with him.) As you'll see, our hero in Thank You for Smoking also had a glimmer of a conscience. We'll have to wait and see if Abramoff does.

One thing we know is that we'll be seeing more films about corruption in politics - the material is just too good to pass up - although I doubt that independents, because of their youth and inexperience, will be making the best ones. But that's a presumption, not a hard rule - give them a chance. There are plenty of stories. Corruption is the gift that keeps on giving.

Berlinale. Competition lineup, round 2.

The Berlinale has announced 14 more Competition entries; add the nine announced in December, and that makes 23. Just three more to go before the program's complete. The new ones:

• Matthias Glasner's Der freie Wille (Free Will), with Jürgen Vogel, and Valeska Grisebach's Sehnsucht (Desire) make a total of four German films seeing their world premiere at the fest. The other two, announced earlier, are Oskar Roehler's Elementarteilchen (The Elementary Particles) and Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem.

• Another world premiere, though hardly a surprise, is Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, rolling on to SXSW in March for its North American premiere. The Berlinale's got to be tickled with Altman's honorary Oscar; this'll be an entry with artsy cred and a touch of the glamour the city and festival sponsors persistently call for. Two more American films will screen out of competition: Capote and, as many Austin cinephiles have already heard, V for Vendetta.

• Claude Chabrol's L'ivresse du pouvoir (Comedy of Power), with Isabelle Huppert. World premiere. I'll be thinking of you, Flickhead.

• Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, with Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg and the somewhat familiar premise of a man who "begins to confuse his dream world with reality," as the Berlinale puts it. Gondry's doc, Dave Chappelle's Block Party will be screening in the Panorama section.

• I'm beginning to suspect there are two or three Michael Winterbottoms. How can one man keep up that pace, like some British Miike, while holding the bar so high? His new one will be The Road to Guantanamo, mixing "elements of fiction, authentic reports and interviews." World premiere. Related: Lisa Bear asks Winterbottom about the film - and Tristram Shandy as well, of course - for indieWIRE.

• Michele Placido's Romanzo Criminale (Crime Novel), with Kim Rossi Stuart, Anna Mouglalis and Stefano Accorsi, based on a novel by Giancarlo De Cataldo.

• Pernille Fischer Christensen's debut, En Soap, with Trine Dyrholm and David Dencik.

• Michael Glawogger, whose doc, Workingman's Death, has impressed the few who've seen it, has a second feature: Slumming, starring August Diehl.

• Rodrigo Moreno's debut as a solo director, El Custodio. World premiere.

• From Iran, Rafi Pitts's Zemestan (It's Winter).

• Pang Ho-cheung's Isabella. World premiere.

One more European note before spending much of the rest of the day watching the Sundance watchers. In Die Zeit (and in German), Katja Nicodemus and Thomas Assheuer have a long interview with Michael Haneke. A snippet:

Haneke: Austria - I don't know how it is in Germany - is nothing more than a cultural province of America. Volker Schlöndorff wrote in your pages: "In my day, everyone looked to France." France was the focal point. There was Sartre, Camus, the New Wave, and so on. When I was studying, you could turn on the TV after 10 pm and watch a film by Resnais or Bresson. Not anymore. In France, for example, there are DVDs of all the classics with subtitles. If you walk into a DVD store in Austria, you get nothing. There's no market for it. My students have never had the opportunity to be introduced to anything like this.

Zeit: Are you saying that the market is erasing cultural memory?

Haneke: Of course. It's comfortable. Memory is always uncomfortable because it entails effort.

GC article roundup. 3.

Since this is the third monthly roundup of articles that have recently appeared at the main site, this can now officially be called a regular feature (and here are roundups 1 and 2).

Two interviews by David D'Arcy have appeared in the past few weeks, and his introductions are always as engaging as the conversations themselves. As Munich opened, David first considered the film and the critical reaction to it before talking with Avi Mograbi about his film, Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, making for an intriguing juxtaposition.

On a related note, by the way, Tony Kushner, quoted at length at the end of that piece, defends the screenplay he co-wrote with Eric Roth for Spielberg's feature in an interview with Peter von Becker of Der Tagesspiegel today; that's in German, of course, but signandsight has a crucial paragraph in English.

If you were wondering why David D'Arcy's Tirana dispatch was numbered "1" when a second never appeared, well, it did, actually. At the main site in the form of an interview with Fatmir Koçi, best known for his award-winning Tirana Year Zero.

Two of our longest pieces in a while come from Sean Axmaker and Jonathan Marlow. Both interviewees have been working for decades and, while neither is known first and foremost as a director, both have directed unconventional and, in their own ways, unforgettable science fiction features. Odd, isn't it. Sean talks with special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbell (Silent Running and Brainstorm), Jonathan with LQ Jones (A Boy & His Dog).

And two seasoned writers each contributed their first piece for us around the turn of the new year: Heather Johnson talks with Judy Irving and Mark Bittner, the director and subject, respectively, of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill; and John Esther speaks with Emily Mortimer about her role in Woody Allen's Match Point.

Sight & Sound. 2/06.

Tristram Shandy may be touted on the cover of the new issue of Sight & Sound, but online, the focus is clearly on Korean cinema. Grady Hendrix opens things up by addressing Western pre- and misconceptions:

The problem is that we've mistaken a discussion about violence for its glorification; we've stepped into the middle of a long-running conversation and thrown in our two cents with no idea of what was said before we entered the room. Korean movies do play rougher than we're used to, but what Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk's recent films represent is only the latest collision between Korean cinema's class-consciousness, anti-authoritarian impulses and a long-standing taste for melodrama.

Speaking of Park, Ali Jaafar speaks to him. Briefly. About the trilogy. And James Bell has a shortish talk with Kim Jee-woon about A Bittersweet Life.

"So the spectator is both subjected to [Michael] Haneke's film and asked to take responsibility for it: he or she is at once the victim of the film and the guilty party." Catherine Wheatley on Caché.

Reviews:

• Amy Taubin: "It is the intensity of Pocahontas' search for meaning and the curiosity and courage with which she pursues it that make The New World so moving and ultimately tragic."

• Peter Jackson's King Kong is ultimately "a more timid, less primal version of the tale," writes Kim Newman.

• Mark Kermode on Walk the Line: "After the feather-light foolishness of [James] Mangold's recent efforts Kate & Leopold (2001) and Identity (2003), this marks a weighty return to the character-based storytelling of Copland (1997), and ?nally cashes in on the overdrawn promise of 1995's Heavy."

Shorts, 1/17.

"The wondrously weird creatures who inhabit the films of French director Eugéne Green don't hail from earth as we know it," writes David Ng in the Village Voice. "They're the haloed offspring of two distinct but overlapping realms, the tangibly modern and the deliciously sublime. With three features and a short film, Green has staked out a small but fertile cinematic fiefdom where the spirits of Bresson and Ozu mingle with the eclectic likes of Monteverdi, the New Testament, and the Gap." A series runs at the Anthology Film Archives January 20 through 29.

Another filmmaker, another series (this one at the IFC Center, January 20 through 26), another assessment: Michael Atkinson on Lars von Trier. Also, Joshua Land on How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), a doc on "a remarkable life": Melvin Van Peebles.

Larry Doyle's pitch:

It's about more than an alien invasion, or a big dance contest, although if you're a fan of invading aliens or professional choreography you won't be disappointed. It's also a love story, born of deep space and lived on a underwater dance floor; and it;s about the characters: the hero, the babe, the bad guy, the black guy, the guy who was funny when he was on SNL, and others. More than anything, though, it's about freedom - the idea of freedom, as opposed to any specific exercise of it - and liberty, which is a different word than 'liberal,' and about the special effects, which are more special than ever before, and Crest Whitestrips, which - SPOILER ALERT - save humanity.

Also in the New Yorker: David Denby on Go for Zucker and Why We Fight. More on Zucker from J Hoberman in the Village Voice: "[Director Dani] Levy's project to restore a Jewish dimension to German culture is extremely circumspect in addressing that culture."

More on Why We Fight: Rob Nelson interviews director Eugene Jarecki for the Voice. Good question: "The film argues that the forces now at play in Iraq aren't a few years old or 15, but 50 or 60. Why is that perspective so rare even among progressives in the US?" Hoberman: "Jarecki's film forcefully argues that the much abused word freedom cannot paper over the conflicts between capitalism and democracy." And more from the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE and Nick Schager at Slant.

David Edelstein's first review in New York begins: "In Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Albert Brooks makes his alter ego ('Albert Brooks') the butt of every joke, which generates big laughs and progressively smaller returns." Related: "Woody Allen may bestride the world like a colossus, but - the brilliance of Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost in America notwithstanding - not even the French have shown any interest in Albert Brooks." Why, wonders J Hoberman, before hazarding a guess. Meanwhile, Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Brooks for SuicideGirls.

"On a trip back to Senegal, Sembène was struck by or reminded of the high levels of illiteracy. This convinced him to turn to film rather than literature as a means of communicating with wide layers of the population." At WSWS, Joanne Laurier recounts Ousmane Sembène's story before turning to the 1963 short film, Borom Sarret and the 1966 feature, Black Girl.

Richard Linklater on the 20th anniversary of the Austin Film Society in indieWIRE: "Looking back over 20 years, I can say I now feel we were meant to be.... Like in so many areas of life, once you remove the profit motive and just want to make something cool happen because life would simply be better or more fun, it's amazing what you can do and who will jump in and help you do it." More (plus pix) from Blake at Cinema Strikes Back.

Cinematical's Kim Voynar interviews Favela Rising directors Matt Mochary and Jim Zimbalist.

Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated is set to premiere at Sundance and David M Halbfinger has quite a background story on the detective work behind the project, even as he writes, "Mr Dick's one-sided smackdown of a movie wallops the ratings board - the brainchild of Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association - every which way but evenhandedly."

Also in the New York Times:

• Dave Kehr on new DVDs: "Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has released three black-themed films that provide an interesting counterpoint to the three titles released last week by Warner Home Video."

• John Clark on the clever ways marketers find to push "movies with an 'overcome'": "The overcome often involves difficult subject matter, unconventional storytelling, an unfamiliar cast or a combination of these things."

• Product Invasion: Doreen Carvajal reports.

• Lia Miller reports on Walden Media's acquisition of the rights to adapt Isabel Allende's children's trilogy: City of the Beasts will be directed by Taylor Hackford; the other two books are Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies.

"For decades, the Gray Lady eschewed celebrity and the movie biz (very different from film culture)." No more, reports Steven Zeitchik in Variety: "As circulation has begun to tilt toward a national readership, arts coverage also has shifted toward celebrity and pop-culture stories that play outside media power centers."

In Fanzine, a personal take on all three Kongs from Benjamin Strong; you may be surprised by which of the three means the most to him.

David Thomson has two new pieces in the Independent and one in the NYT. In the first, he revisits HUAC as a way to introduce a recommendation: "To see Force of Evil today is like a cold shower. You can hardly believe the perilous lucidity that is unfolding." In the second, he evaluates the current crop of young male actors. For the NYT Book Review, Thomson writes, "Marshall Fine's Accidental Genius is, really, the first full life of Cassavetes, who died in 1989 at 59 and who is easily offered as a kind of godfather to the independent film movement in America." After an evidently disappointing beginning, "as soon as we get to Shadows, this book jumps to life."

Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic:

Whatever else can be said about it, Schindler's List is masterfully directed. Every scene, every shot has been conceived with an almost angry simplicity, with a passion for truth that discards both the trite and the clever. I know few other films - and I'm remembering Bergman and Bresson and Antonioni, among others - that more authentically elevate form to the level of content. The very making of Schindler's List incises its subject powerfully.

This is woefully untrue of Munich.

Yossi Melman and Steven Hartov, a reporter for Ha'aretz specializing in Israeli intelligence and the editor-in-chief of the Special Operations Report, respectively, have a different concern: "[W]hat we find disturbing is that it is substantially a fiction - which, given Hollywood's influence, may soon be regarded as a definitive account.... [Spielberg's] conduct in this case resembles that of a cub journalist who chooses to run a great story rather than confuse us with the facts."

Also in the Guardian, Jonathan Gibbs: "There must be a novel, somewhere, mustn't there, that is truly unfilmable?... I nominate as the ultimate unfilmable novel the final part of Beckett's Trilogy: The Unnamed." And Lisa Allardice interviews Sam West.

Jürgen Fauth: "Factotum is hilarious, sobering, and inspiring, often at the same time."

Richard Corliss in Time: "Bubble is, in a few ways, Soderbergh's most radical and invigorating experiment yet."

The cinetrix on Mutual Appreciation: "It continues to astonish me how Andrew manages to capture these moments as he lives them. I suspect it stems from his genuine affection for the friends he casts. That may be why there are no traditional villains in his films - Bujalski's eyes and ears are finely attuned to the ardor and self-destructive urges in everyone."

Acquarello reviews Judith Mayne's Claire Denis.

Grady Hendrix has news of the next feature from Gu Changwei, whose Peacock "was one of the oddest and best movies of 2005." Also: "Zinda [that Bollywood remake of Oldboy, you may remember] was sufficient punishment for any sins I may have committed in a previous life."

At Twitch, The Gomorrahizer has a bit on each of the three projects Takashi Miike's working on.

The Voice's brief reviews and "Tracking Shots": Matt Singer on Last Holiday and Glory Road; Pete L'Official on Tristan & Isolde; Mark Holcomb on End of the Spear; R Emmet Sweeney on 24 Hours on Craigslist; Ben Kenigsberg on Pizza and Drew Tillman on The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyyam.

At MCN, Gary Dretzka looks over the plethora of new ways to watch stuff.

In Slate, Edward Jay Epstein explains the economics behind "the starlet's dilemma in babeland."

Online listening tip #1. Pamela Yates, director of State of Fear, and Ellen Perry, director of Fall of Fujimori, on the Leonard Lopate Show. Reviews: Michael Atkinson in the Voice.

Online listening tip #2. Steve Coogan on Fresh Air.

Online connect-the-dots tip. Hitchcock, Zizek and Iran at Subject Barred. Via k-punk.

Online browsing tip. At Cinematical, Adam Finley collects links to four blogs run by DreamWorks animators.

Online browsing, listening and viewing tip. WFMU lists the latest additions to UbuWeb.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Idlewild, the Outkast movie, via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tips. Video for the Heavy Ammunition Project. Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, where Mark Frauenfelder points to Cartoon Modern - because Amid Amidi is featuring the work of Victor Haboush all week long.

Towards Sundance.

With half a dozen profiles of New Yorkish films and filmmakers heading to Sundance, all gathered conveniently at one address, The Reeler previews Salvage, Half Nelson, Flannel Pajamas, Hold-Up, Man Push Cart and American Hardcore. Update: The Reeler talks with Hilary Brougher (Stephanie Daley).

Logan Hill looks ahead two more features in New York. "Every year at Sundance, there’s at least one racy sex film. This year, you get seven for the price of one in Destricted." The filmmakers: Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noé, Larry Clark, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor Wood and Marina Abramovic.

And: "[W]hat makes James Longley's Iraq in Fragments so powerful - and why it's likely to be one of the most-heralded films at Sundance - is that he spent enough time there for unpredictable ideas to incubate and shot enough footage to explore them." More from Hannah Eaves.

More filmmaker interviews to catch up with at indieWIRE: Christian Frei (The Giant Buddhas), Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) and Jocelyne Saab (Kiss Me Not on the Eyes).

Cyndi Greening is gearing up fast for the fest.

The Salt Lake Tribune launches a special Sundance section. Via Anne Thompson.

Fests and events, 1/17.

Kino wie noch nie is an exhibition "to be perceived as a cinematographic laboratory" at the Generali Foundation in Vienna from January 20 through April 23.

The Berlinale unveils this year's International Jury. With Charlotte Rampling presiding, the other jurors are American artist Matthew Barney (IFC will be distributing Drawing Restraint 9, notes Cinematical's Martha Fischer), Indian producer Yash Chopra, Dutch director Marleen Gorris, Polish cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Korean actress Lee Young-ae, German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl and American producer Fred Roos. Related: Cineuropa reports on the third Berlinale Co-Production Market.

Transmediale06 has announced its Film & Video Program, which runs February 3 through 7 in Berlin, though the Exhibition will remain open through March 19.

The Blowin' Up a Spot Film Festival, "showcasing women of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds," runs in Austin from April 27 through 30.

Lists, 1/17.

The Hong Kong Film Critics Society has named Johnnie To's Election the best film of 2005, reports the Guardian.

At Cinemarati, Campaspe (who has an excellent entry on Luise Rainer at Self-Styled Siren) passes along a challenge: "Pick ten films (and only ten) that you could use to explain the USA to a foreigner who has never been here." Update: Flickhead's list.

At Hollywood Bitchslap, Scott Weinberg has more than just one top ten: "I thought it'd be fun to go the extra mile and bang out nine more lists, partially because I love to write, but mainly because I'm what you call a Pathetic Movie Geek."

Jeffrey M Anderson selects "ten best unheralded productions of 2005" at Mindjack.

Movie City News has the list of the Online Film Critics Society's awards.

Tim Lucas: "The much-anticipated ballot for the Fourth Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards - recognizing outstanding achievement in genre film, video, and journalism during 2005 - is now posted on the Rondo website."

Globalization.

By now, you've heard the names of the big winners of Golden Globe Awards; the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has the full list, naturally, and a numbers breakdown.

The Los Angeles Times is, of course, very excited, placing a big box showcasing its coverage - which is fairly massive - at The Envelope front and center on its homepage.

The Carpetbagger, spotted in Jeffrey Wells's string of impressions and photos, went celeb-spotting and quips away for the New York Times. Sharon Waxman handles the straight-up story, Cathy Horyn ogles the dresses, Alessandra Stanley rates the show as it played on TV and there are two slide shows: 1, 2.

More reportage from Gregg Kilday in the Hollywood Reporter.

The Guardian's Xan Brooks reminds us that "the relationship between the Globes and the Oscars is not quite as simple as it first appears."

So. With all that out of the way, the other stuff: "Did they get that party started right or what?!? Don't answer that." Josh Horowitz posts the lyrics of show's opening tune.

Cinematical staged a virtual party; if you skipped the show or want to relive all the thrills and spills, only this time with running textual commentary, Karina Longworth has gathered all that live blogging into one link pileup.

One joke was pretty good, thinks Jim Emerson at rogerebert.com; two, though, were especially awful.

George Clooney's comments give Alternet's Evan Derkacz hope for the Oscars.

Updates: Edward Copeland; Troy Patterson at Slate; Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog; Anne Thompson at her Risky Biz Blog; and Gabriel Shanks links to a few more spots where live-blogging was going on.

Long weekend shorts.

From January 20 through 26, Film Forum films by and about or in the general neighborhood of Melvin Van Peebles, a fine reason for a fine piece from Greg Tate in the Village Voice: "He continues to be the indomitable, upbeat, energetic workaholic he's always been.... This is especially the case with the new film, a project for which he's yet again done the unthinkable and recorded his audio track first - sound, narration, music, dialogue, the whole megillah - without an investor in sight."

Doug Cummings favorite catch at the Palm Springs International Film Festival this year so far is Alicia Scherson's "magnificent debut film about love and loss in contemporary Santiago," Play.

"As well as providing an extremely rare chance to revisit an example of portmanteau filmmaking that engaged the talents of the directors Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch and Chris Marker, the Dutch-born documentarist Joris Ivens and the American photographer William Klein, [Loin du Viêt-Nam] offers a reminder of how muted the opposition to the present war in Iraq has been, by comparison with the chorus of anger that eventually helped to undermine the American government's belligerence," writes Richard Williams.

Also in the Guardian:

• "The Museum of Cinema is now among the homeless of Moscow this winter," laments Ronald Bergan. "'It's a typical story of post-Communist Russia where property speculation and financial interests override everything else,' said Naum Kleiman, the inspirational director of the museum." The building's been sold to a developer who has plans for a casino and strip club. World-renowned directors, critics and even ex-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder have protested to no avail.

• Blake Morrison presents a historical primer for Making History: Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now, an exhibition at the Tate Liverpool from February 3 through April 23.

• John Patterson begs rock and rap stars to stay off the big screen.

• And the Review runs excerpts from Kurt Vonnegut's memoir, A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America.

"I was on the Observer during the later 1960s, as our senior writers vainly warned the West that Palestinian suffering and desperation would become a spreading cancer," writes Neal Ascherson, who does express some frustration with Munich, but: "It's in pride and love that, through this film, [Spielberg] asks what has become of that ancient Israel which invented righteousness and reverence for law and how long a nation can survive which believes it must take because nothing will be given."

Also, Mark Kermode on Capote and In Cold Blood, on journalistic irresponsibility and the horrific banality of most serial killers. And Nick Greenslade reviews Altman on Altman: "The difficulty facing David Thompson in his interviews with Robert Altman is that the Hollywood director's films are notoriously hard to categorize."

In the wake of a screening of Sátántangó, Waggish scopes out a spot for Béla Tarr: "Tarr is too often compared to Tarkovsky, when the two are almost polar opposites, and not just in their view of humanity.... There is a bit of Bresson in the tableaux, but the influence of (late) Carl Dreyer is more apparent in their lack of flash.... But the decentralization of the people from these scenes comes from another source entirely: Antonioni." Via Zach Campbell.

One of the reasons movies are longer these days, suggests Dave Kehr, is the ease with which editing digitally makes it possible to drop all sorts of shots into scenes: "Paradoxically, an increased running time seems to require an increased agitation within scenes - a barrage of often pointless shots that exist, not to convey information, but to physically stimulate the spectator's nerve endings - producing violent, exaggerated rhythms, serving up a psychedelic flood of colors and textures that are often optically exciting but intellectually and emotionally vacant."

Mike Hale assures New York Times readers that some anime series are actually pretty good. And Charles Solomon scans Twitch readers' reactions to the news that Hayao Miyazaki's son, Goro, will be directing Studio Ghibli's adaptation of Ursula K LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.

Also: To accompany an awards season slide show depicting Ralph Fiennes wearing his trousers rolled (but not necessarily growing old), Lynn Hirschberg talks to the actor about clothes.

Sundance interviews to catch up with at indieWIRE: Andrucha Waddington (The House of Sand) and Joseph Mathew (Crossing Arizona).

Christopher Campbell at Cinematical: "It took me three invites over a few months before I decided to attend a screening for On the Outs, mainly because I expected a cheap, badly acted and preachy little film, and then I only went because it was feeling like a squeaky wheel sounds. Well, it got my oil in the form of respect and praise. Hopefully you won't need me to tell you three times to see it."

Nathan Kosub in Stop Smiling on 2046: "Wong's picture is the perfect counterpoint to Linklater's [Before Sunset]: no two directors so clearly differentiate memory from time, time from memory."

Ray Pride's roundup at Movie City News: "Match Point, Munich, Caché, Innocence, Runin, and conversations with Marc Levin about The Protocols of Zion and Richard Shepard about the giddy, profane Matador."

Mike Russell: "Okay. So The Matador doesn't work. But I'm actually embarrassed for Hoodwinked."

For Jeffrey Wells, Down to the Bone is "a profoundly honed and life-like low-budgeter about a mom with two kids coping with drug addiction, and Vera Farmiga, who plays this withered young woman like she's not playing her at all, is the absolute shit."

Berlinale press release: "The first films in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino programme are a surprise package of recent German cinema: they include Franka Potente's directorial debut, a silent film, road movies and melodramas taken straight from life, and a documentary film about a distant world that is still so near."

"Despite studio attempts to prevent leaks online this year, and the threat of jail time and steep fines for movie pirates, at least four screeners are on file-sharing networks already." In Slate, Xeni Jardin reveals how those who leaked them might be caught - even though some 'xperts believe the studios still might have trouble arguing a case against them. For accompanying images, see Boing Boing.

"What happens when theory finds itself outwitted by cultural objects themselves?" asks Nick Rombes. "McSweeney's, no 11 (2003; edited by Dave Eggers) includes a DVD whose contents are made up entirely of deleted, extra-deleted, behind the scenes of deleted scenes, and outtakes from the deleted scenes..." For PopMatters, Roger Holland reviews the latest DVDs aimed at kids.

New York's Pioneer Theater might get a bit rowdy next month. Andrew WK will present Andrew WK: Who Knows? on February 3 and 4 and Malcolm McDowell will present Evilenko on February 6.

Online listening tip #1. Werner Herzog is a guest on Fresh Air. Related: Vince Keenan, who found Grizzly Man "the most dense film I've seen in ages," would disapprove, but all the kids are clicking it, so you can't be left in the dark: Grizzly Bear Man, a spoof from Travis and Jonathan.

Online listening tips #2 and #3. On DVD Talk Radio, Geoffrey Kleinman talks with Alex Gibney, director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Craig Brewer, director of Hustle & Flow.

Bloggish, 1/15.

IndieWIRE has launched a Park City blog, where filmmakers with works screening at Sundance and, hopefully, Slamdance, too, will be checking in. So far, there are nine confirmed contributors.

Sujewa Ekanayake has fired up yet another blog, this one called Art Indie Film Venues USA, where he'll be tracking screenings of true indies coast to coast.

And then there's this incredible online browsing, lingering, let's-get-lost tip from Sean Spillane at Bitter Cinema, just perfect for a long weekend: Greenbriar Picture Shows, "a wonderful new blog that specializes in presenting publicity stills, art and press books." John McElwee calls it "A Site Dedicated to the Great Days of Movie Exhibition." Now more than ever.

Adaptations, 1/15.

Via Todd at Twitch: Europeanfilms.net is hosting the trailer for Elementarteilchen, Oskar Roehler's adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles with Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu and a host of other German stars, set to premiere in competition at the Berlinale.

There's a possible sneak peek at the screenplay for Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, an adaptation of Christopher Priest's novel with Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale and David Bowie, at AICN. Via Martha Fischer at Cinematical.

So far, James Ellroy is very pleased indeed with Brian De Palma's adaptation of his novel, The Black Dahlia, reports Matt Zoller Seitz.

Shelley Winters, 1920 - 2006.

Shelley Winters, who once described her life as a 'rocky road out of the Brooklyn ghetto to one New York apartment, two Oscars, three California houses, four hit plays, five Impressionist paintings, six mink coats and 99 films,' died yesterday. She was 83, although some sources says she was 85.

[...]

Tough-talking and oozing sex appeal, Ms Winters was blowzy, vulgar and often pathetically vulnerable in her early films. In movie after movie, she played working-class women who were violently discarded by men who had used them.... Even when she became the dominating force in many of her later movies, Ms Winters often played vulnerable monsters.... Off screen Ms Winters lived with an equal gusto.

Aljean Harmetz in the New York Times.

Updates through 1/17 below.

[W]hat first comes to my mind is the part she played in Pete's Dragon. That was one of the first movies I ever saw in a theatre. I loved it.... Man, she was a nasty piece of work in that movie.

Jeffrey Overstreet.

For some strange reason [her star in Hollywood is] on Vine Street, with Charles Laughton and Melvyn Douglas. I think all the liberal Democrats are on Vine Street. I think the Chamber of Commerce... (laughs) they put us on Vine Street.

[...]

99 percent is doing work you love. That's 99 percent of life. The people who can make a living doing what they love are indeed the fortunate of the earth.

Shelley Winters, interviewed by Harry Governick in September, 1992.

Updates: Edward Copeland and Josh R remember notable performances.

And it's good to hear that voice again in Allison Keyes's report for NPR.

Update: Campaspe: "She was an utterly fearless actress... They tried to turn her into a glamor girl, and she didn't give a damn. She wanted to act."

Updates, 1/17: Guy Flatley's 1971 interview and Veronica Horwell in the Guardian.

Weekend lists.

The Cinemarati countdown is complete. Along with ten best performances and ten best directors, the Cinemarati have put Good Night, and Good Luck at #3 (MaryAnn Johanson explains), A History of Violence at #2 (Brian Darr explains; shimes dissents) and, at #1: Brokeback Mountain.

Bryant Frazer explains: "It's simply expert, big-hearted filmmaking in the grand tradition." Nick Davis dissents: "Audiences are invited at every turn to project a depth of passion and tragic romance that [Ang] Lee simply never substantiates."

Another list at Hollywood Bitchslap: Greg Ursic's annotated ten is in alphabetical order. Also: Chris Parry talks to Brian Raftery, who's written up Giant Magazine's list of the 50 greatest soundtracks of all time.

Updates: Matt Clayfield: "Unable to come up with any original ideas of my own, I'm stealing this one from Acquarello, whose recent pillow list of one hundred titles, 'like a pillow book entry, describes a temporal point of convergence - the films that are meaningful to me at this juncture - each a memory, a mnemonic, a biography, a resonance... to be taken with a grain of salt.' The same applies to my list."

"Chiming in a few weeks late on some favorite films of last year": Wendy Mitchell.

LAT. Sneaks 2006.

While the New York Times takes one last long look back at 2005, the Los Angeles Times looks ahead to the year already underway. If you've really got a lot of time on your hands this long weekend, you can click through 51 photos in the gallery; other might want to head straight for the 18 shots from the Australian set of Superman Returns, most likely taken when Geoff Boucher was there nabbing quotes for his long piece on the summer hopeful.

After noting that Sony has high, high hopes for The Da Vinci Code, Elena Howe and John Horn list the "plenty of other white-hot movies headed to screens this year." That opens things up for the big annotated lists of 2006 releases sorted by genre: comedy, animation, horror, drama, documentary, thriller, musical, action and adventure.

Elena Howe presents "a look at the genesis of some of the sequels planned for the year," that is, how the original scored at the box office and the logic behind giving it another go.

Susan King is busy in this edition, offering summaries of what we might expect from A Scanner Darkly, The Break Up, Poseidon and Cars, while Elaine Dutka does the same for Eight Below.

Bryce Dallas Howard has three movies coming out this year, so Mimi Avins meets her, presumably over a cup of tea.

NYT. Red Carpet.

The Carpetbagger suddenly has a lot of company as the New York Times runs another walloping weekend package, this one geared toward the Oscars. One nifty idea brings out the best in each of the paper's three critics as they write up "The Unforgettable Moment."

• Choosing the staircase scene in A History of Violence, the "scene that brings the sex-violence nexus to the boiling point," Manohla Dargis cracks open Cronenberg's film in such a way that it resonates across America and beyond.

• AO Scott revisits Syriana and "a backyard barbecue somewhere in Texas" where we get a glimpse of "how the business of the world gets conducted... The ones who really know how to acquire, use and preserve power express themselves obliquely, in whispers, riddles and incomplete sentences."

• Stephen Holden selects not a moment exactly but a scene that seems loaded with them, and this after making clear that choosing just one from nine in Nine Lives is tough enough as it is.

Also in the NYT this weekend:

• Hilary de Vries calls - on the editorial page, no less - for an end to awards show swag: "For a growing number of companies - Stila and MAC cosmetics, Palm Pilot and Roomba vacuums come to mind - gift bags have proved to be nothing more than an expensive hoax that they are now spurning.... Which leaves me wondering when Hollywood is going to wise up and realize that greed not only isn't good; it's seriously bad PR."

• David Edelstein storms into his profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman a bit over-excited, which is understandable, but soon calms down enough to get the actor to reveal the contours of his commitment: "Ultimately, you have to create such a layered understanding of how your characters function and why they function that you have the confidence to step forward and open your mouth."

• Dana Stevens discovers that Claire Danes "lights up at the chance to discuss Stage Beauty (2004)." And so, they talk about where she might place herself on "that spectrum" between "the extreme stylization represented by [Billy] Crudup's deliciously artificial Desdemona - and on the other, the more 'natural,' expressive, almost Methodesque style that emerges at the end, when Ms Danes takes over the same role."

• The paper's audio slide show feature is put to one of its best uses for Jon Burlingame's piece on composer John Williams. Clips from the four scores he's written this year for Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha, War of the Worlds and Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith fade in and back out again, revealing how they compliment each film's imagery.

• In another audio slide show, the three critics are back, talking about how they'd hand out Oscar nominations in an ideal world: Dargis on her five favorite pictures of the year, Holden on directors and Scott on screenplays. Another silent slide show depicts their complete ballots sliding from a wax-sealed envelope.

• Three films - Good Night, and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain and Capote - began their Oscar campaigns with their trailers, argues Caryn James. In another piece, James writes, "The best-picture winner is often a movie with a marshmallow soul and a brain to match."

• Charles Solomon: "Hollywood executives keep insisting that Americans want to watch only computer animation. But the likely candidates for the Oscar for best animated feature defy this assumption." And those candidates are Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Howl's Moving Castle.

• Stuart Klawans proves once again that at least a few in the Nation have a sense of humor. "What are the odds that some of these based-on-a-true-story movies (let's call them Boats) might emerge as winners?" Watch how that plays throughout the rest of the piece.

• "This year's field is peppered with writers who happen to hold down day jobs as performers," writes Ross Johnson, who then notes historical precedents from Shakespeare through Dan Futterman and the sheer variety of the results.

• Mark Olsen checks back with a selection of films released earlier, some way earlier in the year, to see how they've fared since.

• The paper runs excerpts from the screenplays for Brokeback Mountain, Crash and The Squid and the Whale.

Meanwhile, in the Book Review (where you'll also find Terrence Rafferty on Julian Barnes's Arthur & George), Scott reviews Louis Sachar's Small Steps, a "follow-up and partial sequel to Holes."

Shorts, 1/13.

The RES newsletter teases, promising that the January/February issue, out next week, will tell the story of the making of Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly.

The January issue of fps, the "Magazine of Animation," is available now, though, which is to say, the handsome preview is free and you may well be tempted to splurge all of 99 cents for the full issue in all its PDF splendor.

Doug Cummings reviews four more films he's seen in Palm Springs, including Richard Dembo's The House of Nina with Agnès Jaoui.

Sujewa Ekanayake has not only enjoyed The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah, he's also noted that Kelley Baker, the Angry Filmmaker, is touring the US and Europe and, inspired by recent events, written up a list of "4 films that were inspired by the war in Sri Lanka."

For SuicideGirls, Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Kent Williams, who's illustrated (and somewhat adapted) Darren Aronofsky's screenplay for The Fountain.

Big fans of V for Vendetta: David Poland and Jeffrey Wells. Related: Peter Wilkinson in Rolling Stone on "The Mystery of Larry Wachowski," via Anne Thompson.

X at Twitch: "It took 11 years, but they're finally back: Director Zhang Yimou and Gong Li will work together again."

Zach Campbell: "Cinema has given us the world in a coffee cup (Godard) and an ashtray (Brakhage)."

"These will not be films 'about' something, but films that 'run into' something." The Bernadette Corporation's Pedestrian Cinema, via Greg Allen who assesses the results so far.

"There's a reason [Michael] Haneke was named best director at Cannes, why Caché got a prominent slot in the most recent New York Film Festival, why at the end of 2005 various critics' groups and the European Film Awards cited Caché as the year's best picture," writes Stuart Klawans in the Nation. "There's also a reason to resist Caché - but to propose it, I'll need to conduct a quick review of Haneke's career."

Related: Benjamin Secher interviews Haneke. Also in the Telegraph: David Gritten visits Peter O'Toole on the set of Venus and Jasper Rees basks in the luxury of the Rex Cinema.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader: "Some critics are saying that Match Point is essentially a remake of Allen's 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors. There's obviously some connection, but having just seen these movies back-to-back, I find the differences more striking than the similarities."

"Arab cinema has yet to acquire a strong sense of identity, both for itself and in the eyes of international audiences," writes Sheila Johnston, though that of course can be taken as a healthy sign of its diversity. Also in the Independent: Robert Sellers talks with Neil Jordan about Breakfast on Pluto.

Jonathan Freedland on Munich: "[L]ook, it says, Israel is not some brute military power, but a country of real, morally conflicted human beings. This is a contribution several doveish Israeli artists - like the novelists Amos Oz and David Grossman - have made to their country before: by revealing Israel's internal dissent, they show their nation in its best light."

Also in the Guardian: Hordes of British comedians are storming the screens, notes Jon Bentham, who wonders if that's a good thing. Relax: it is. And John Patterson looks back and sighs, "The world of the old Katharine Graham Washington Post, and of the New York Times in its Pentagon Papers glory years, is gone forever... Back in 1976, All the President's Men was a eulogy for something that was already passing away, while Network was showing us all the things to come."

The indieWIRE Sundance interviews roll on: Nick Francis on his and Marc Francis's Black Gold and Paul Fitzgerald on his Forgiven.

Signandsight translates the Gerhard Midding interview with Patrice Chéreau mentioned yesterday.

For the LA CityBeat's Andy Klein, After Innocence isn't particularly artsy, but it's effective. Also: Criterion's release of Shoot the Piano Player is "first-rate."

Movies are too damn long these days, complains Caryn James. To the reviews in the New York Times:

• Stephen Holden on "the small but stately" Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye, the Oscar-winner Marjoe and When the Sea Rises, "a serious romantic comedy with surreal touches." More on that one from Steve Erickson at Gay City News.

• AO Scott on the "marvelously overripe 1922 silent melodrama starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino," Beyond the Rocks and on Glory Road, "this season's obligatory inspirational coach-centered sports movie."

• Manohla Dargis on Tristan & Isolde, which "has nothing new to say about either love or filmmaking, but that... isn't necessarily a bad thing" (more from Ed Gonzalez in Slant) and Last Holiday: "Queen Latifah has a beautiful smile and the sort of relaxed screen presence that can take some performers decades to hone, but even this superflack for Wal-Mart can't gold-plate junk." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

• Jeannette Catsoulis on April's Shower, "a lighthearted comedy with an appealing cast."

• Nathan Lee on "the superb documentary" That Man: Peter Berlin and on Hoodwinked: "Less sassy than shrill, more crass than clever, the maiden cartoon from the Weinstein Company turns the Little Red Riding Hood legend into a sub-Shrek bummer that appears to have been manufactured for the pleasure of tone-deaf kids with a thing for sarcasm, extreme sports, and Andy Dick." More from Martha Fischer at Cinematical.

• Dana Stevens: "Unfortunately, the story behind the making of The Keeper [The Legend of Omar Khayyam] is more inspiring than the film itself."

Brilliant Korea is a series running at the ICA in London from January 20 through 31. Victoria James gets New Statesman readers in the mood.

Programs for the Berlinale's Kinderfilmfest and 14plus are set. The site's also featuring an interview with section head Thomas Hailer.

Will the Twin Cities' only repertory theater shut down? Paul Demko looks into it at Culture to Go.

For Slate, Paul Boutin picks out the highlights of the Consumer Electronics Show.

Carroll Ballard will be on hand at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco for two afternoon showings of Duma tomorrow.

Online browsing and viewing tip. Vasulka.org. Via the DVblog.

Online listening tip. Mark Romanek's keynote address at Resfest in LA. Via Ben at the Whine Colored Sea.

Lists, 1/13.

"I'll admit to being drawn to the idea of a Sei Shônagon-styled pillow book as a means of capturing passing thoughts that would otherwise be lost." Acquarello lists one hundred "films that are meaningful to me at this juncture - each a memory, a mnemonic, a biography, a resonance."

More than a list, Erik Childress's "Best and Worst of 2005" at Hollywood Bitchslap is a survey.

Critics of Central Ohio have spoken. Mark Pfeiffer's got the results.

At Gladsome Morning, John has what basically amounts to a top five. But "to compensate for the shorter list, I'd like to offer a list of older films I've seen for the first time, all of which surpass virtually everything new I've seen this year."

Shorts, 1/12.

Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death is subtitled Five Portraits of Work in the 21st Century. "Each episode comes with its own unique, vivid sense of place, of colour, sound and even of smell," writes Carolyn Nikodym, who calls Glawogger for Vue Weekly. He tells her he'll be expanding the Nigeria segment for the DVD, "And with this film, I have the feeling that people are astonished, sometimes, what the world looks like - that they think that I go to extremes. But what I show is not so extreme - the world looks like that a lot of the time. If that’s understood, then I would be happy."

In the new issue of Mute, Stewart Home defends Melvin Van Peebles seminal 1970 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song from attacks from all quarters, including those close to, well, home: "There are, of course, purists who will bemoan the fact that the BFI are 'recuperating' revolutionary culture... I see the BFI attempting to absorb Sweetback into the institution of art as a progressive step from a proletarian perspective, since it results in the bourgeoisie having to address some of its own contradictions and limits."

Right at Your Door, premiering at Sundance, will present a grand scale catastrophe on a small budget. David M Halbfinger meets accomplished production designer and first-time director Chris Gorak: "In his bleak envisioning of a day in Los Angeles that begins like any other, bombs go off downtown, in Beverly Hills and at the airport; countless people are killed as toxic ash carrying a deadly virus falls like snowflakes; the air becomes unbreathable; thousands are driven from their homes; confusion and misinformation reign; and ordinary citizens are victimized not just by the unseen terrorists but also by their own overwhelmed and unprepared government."

Also in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis: "In [Béla Tarr's] Sátántangó, life is beautiful and grotesque by turns, and never less than mesmerizing." More from J Hoberman in the Village Voice: "Despair has never been more voluptuously precise. Sátántangó has cast its spell on cineastes as varied as the late Susan Sontag and the rejuvenated Gus Van Sant. If you have a day to devote to it, the same might happen to you."

And Jeannette Catsoulis: "Moving from the breathtaking beauty of the Peruvian Andes to the graceful sweep of coastal Lima, Pamela Yates's harrowing documentary State of Fear chronicles 20 years of terror, brutality and repression." More from Michael Atkinson in the Voice, Scott Tobias in the AV Club and Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.

At Alternet, Onnesha Roychoudhuri talks with Purpose Films co-founder Nick Bicanic about Shadow Company, a doc that explores the alarmingly rapid rise of private military contract employees (mercenaries, more or less) in contemporary warfare.

J Hoberman: "Revisited today, Billy Wilder's 1961 farce One, Two, Three is a Cold War poltergeist, rattling chains in the vanished spook house that was West Berlin." The film "celebrates as it satirizes American cultural imperialism."

Also in the Voice:

• Michael Atkinson: "An introverted yet eccentric French road movie–romance, When the Sea Rises possesses a scattershot charm, a distanced attitude toward comedy and context that is less likely a conscious style than the result of neophyte filmmakers testing their thin ice." More from Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "It doesn't attempt anything revolutionary, but it's sweet, sad and engaging, and part of its appeal lies in its willingness to enter the characters' world and loiter there, letting us see what they see and hear what they hear."

• Atkinson on the 1972 doc, Marjoe: "[W]as he an insincere aberration, or are evangelists all con men?" More from Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer: "[T]he film exposes something else now, something about the innocence of that world compared to the Politics of God that dominate the contemporary evangelical world - indeed, the rest of the world as well."

• And the "Tracking Shots": Matt Singer on Hoodwinked, Nick Sylvester on That Man: Peter Berlin, Darren Reidy on Liberty Street: Alive at Ground Zero (more from Laura Kern in the NYT), R Emmet Sweeney on I'm Taraneh, 15 and Henri Cartier Bresson: The Impassioned Eye, Carla Blumenkranz on BloodRayne, Ben Kenigsberg on April's Shower and Joshua Land on the series, Bearing the Unbearable: Israeli and Palestinian Films About the Conflict at Symphony Space from January 15 through 31.

"Watch your back around anyone who likes Woody Allen's Match Point," warns Armond White, reviewing it in the NYP right alongside with another murder movie: "Both films pander to simple-minded malevolence, but only Hostel is upfront about it." Related: Rogerebert.com editor Jim Emerson rounds up pro and anti reviews of Hostel. A bit more from Marc Holcomb in the Voice.

Filmbrain: "One of the darkest portraits of American suburban life in the post-WWII boom of the 1950s is Martin Ritt's all-but-forgotten No Down Payment (1957)."

What would you screen for Intro to Film classes, asks the cinetrix.

Another columnist debuts at PopMatters: Dante A Ciampaglia looks back at "one of the most acerbic [films] to ever come out of Hollywood," Sweet Smell of Success. It's also "one of the most noted films highlighted by filmmakers as being a primary influence on their work. Barry Levinson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Scorsese — they've all referenced or "quoted" the film in their efforts."

Also: Bill Gibron on what actor Giuseppe Andrews has been up to over the past few years: "In order to pass the time and explore his burgeoning interest in filmmaking, Andrews decided to get a camera and cast his fellow trailer park residents in a series of experimental narratives. The results have been nothing short of monumental, the kind of cinematic shockwave that is destined to be ignored by the current pop culture mindset, but praised a few decades from now."

David Poland maps Munich, "sequence by sequence... In the process of doing this, a lot of the detail work becomes clearer."

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price director Robert Greenwald at the Huffington Post: "You would think by now that Lee Scott, the $13-million-a-year failed CEO of Wal-Mart, would know better than to send confidential memos to his employees, many of whom are happy to share them with those fighting Wal-Mart." Via Craig Phillips.

This Divided State "deserves to be a part of the ongoing conversation about politics, popular culture, and polarization," writes Chuck Tryon.

Ed Champion: "I like the idea behind Wolphin, which involves collecting a good deal of film shorts and assorted narratives that don't really have a place outside of their initial small venues. But unfortunately, like almost anything that comes from the McSweeney's Empire, the DVD carries the uncomfortable stamp of films that are just too safe to be innovative." Speaking of, and via Eugene Hernandez, Chris McCoy: "A Selection from George W Bush's Eavesdropping Tapes: Matthew Barney and Björk Place an Ikea Phone Order."

"Excerpted in Following Sean, [Ralph Arlyck's 1969 short, Sean] is still a remarkable document nearly 40 years later," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "At the time it made even nonsquares worry about what would happen to the flower children's children when they grew up, and it's not hard to see why." More from Mark T at Scene and Unseen. Also, Glory Road.

Matthew Wilder: "Malick is the first artist in movies who has managed to translate Whitman's ecstasy - the bliss of connectedness to all creatures and things - into sound, music, and images." Also in the City Pages: Caroline Palmer on Ballets Russes, "an invaluable record."

Matt Clayfield: "For me, the film can be more or less situated on the same continuum as films like Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Virgin Suicides, and those of David Gordon Green - it's a slight, quotidian drama, almost fragile, almost breakable - only I don't like any of those films and yet adore Funny Ha Ha. What's the go?" More from John at Gladsome Morning.

The WSWS's