Weekend NYFF roundup.

"The classic tug of war between tradition and modernization is quite apparent as the 44th New York Film Festival heads into opening night," wrote indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez on Thursday. "'For 44 years we've been accused of being demanding, inflexible and insanely selective,' states the trailer for this year's festival, adding the punchline, 'Remarkably like our audience.'" Now at iW: Howard Feinstein's quick critical tour of what all's been screened so far.

"Film festivals crowd the calendar and circle the globe, but New York's is different," notes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Instead of hundreds of films, it presents a few dozen, and it presents them, for the most part, one at a time, rather than in a frenzy of overscheduling. It is neither a hectic marketplace nor a pre-Oscar buzz factory, like Cannes or Toronto, or a film industry frat party, like Sundance. Its tone tends to be serious, sober, and perhaps sometimes a little sedate, even when the movies it shows are daring and provocative."

"Clearly, the ideal NYFF film is one that combines artistic ambition, social relevance and some degree of sexy marketplace sizzle (last year's centerpiece, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, being a perfect example)," notes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But as well as showcasing those pictures most likely to seduce upscale audiences during the cold-weather months, the NYFF also has a nobler, and more old-fashioned, mission. It programs several films each year with near-zero commercial appeal, hoping to focus the attention of New York's perennially distracted culture vultures, if only for an instant, on unexpected and unpredictable works with no bold-type names attached. It's a charming and paradoxical notion, but I'm delighted to play along."

"Many of the NYFF's most intriguing choices lie on its fringes," notes Steve Erickson in Gay City News, though he does offer his takes on many of the entries in the main program.

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As Andrew Grant notes below, the opening film on Friday night was, of course, The Queen, which the NYT's Manohla Dargis calls "a sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.... Actors need to be loved, but one of [Helen] Mirren's strengths has always been her supreme self-confidence that we will love the performance no matter how unsympathetic the character.... This toughness is bracing, at times exhilarating, and it also reminds you of just how very good a director [Stephen] Frears can be... The new film serves as a return to form for the director not only of Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters, both of which share with The Queen an interest in toxic tribal formations, but also of more freewheeling ensemble entertainments like Sammy and Rosie Get Laid." So glad she mentioned that last one; how many friends I dragged to the theater to see it all those years ago... Where's the DVD?

At any rate, in an accompanying audio slide show, Stephen Frears talks about his "cheeky" project and how pleasantly surprised he is that it hasn't upset anyone in Britain.

Acquarello sees "a trenchant, elegant, and compelling exposition into the nefarious role of the media as both creator (and self-generator) of news and manipulator public sentiment. By juxtaposing Diana's death within the framework of Tony Blair's recent election to the office of prime minister under the Labor Party platform of initiating a wide-range of sweeping reform ever to be instituted in the country after decades of Tory government (with visibly lackluster results), filmmaker Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan contextualize the atmosphere as a symptom of a broader social angst - a synchronicity that intrinsically transformed a family's private grief into a disoriented public's search for leadership and direction in a time of crisis."

Responding to a comment on his own review, Dave Kehr writes that he finds The Queen "distinctly reactionary, and like too many British movies these last few years, aimed at American audiences who have an affection for the English monarchy and class system that those of you who live under it may not share."

Almost as if in reply, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "I suspect plenty of moviegoers - Stateside but maybe especially in the UK - will read The Queen as an apologia for the monarchy. But I think that's giving the picture only its most superficial reading. As many of the detractors of Sofia Coppola's upcoming (and wonderful) Marie Antoinette have failed to grasp, being a humanist doesn't automatically make you a royalist."

Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot can't resist the pairing, either: "Side by side, the films are a study in demographic gap; Marie, overtly gaga for royal pomp and festooned with post-punk nuggets, betrays its biopic function, acting largely as a solipsistic 'poor little rich girl' fantasy of excess, a confectionary binge of a movie set between the dark chocolate Hapsburg court and puff pastry Versailles.... The Queen, by contrast, examines rather than exhorts.... its stodgy, solid craftsmanship suits its subject like one of Elizabeth II's crisp Burberry trench coats."

Then there's Tom Nairn at openDemocracy: "The 1997 revolution was weird, but real, and is now showing itself to be irresistible in another disconcerting form. Today, the adroit saviour of the crown from post-Diana wrath finds himself the victim of much greater popular resentment, his party torn apart by implausible successors fighting madly to (once more) restore a dying régime."

Richard Corliss in Time: "I hope it finds a wide and receptive audience - for beyond the tattle, it tells a parable of political wisdom: knowing when to listen to the people, and when to lead them."

The Reeler got a few questions in at the press conference. More on the film from Nick Schager in Slant, Erik Davis at Cinematical and, as noted below, Philip Kemp in Sight & Sound.

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Back in the NYT, AO Scott reviews another NYFF title that's seeing its (limited) theatrical release all but simultaneously with its showcasing here, Little Children. Scott calls it a "superb film adaptation of the novel by Tom Perrotta" and "a rigorous study of adult behavior": "[Todd] Field, with his second feature - his directing debut was In the Bedroom - proves to be among the most literary of American filmmakers, one of the few who tries to find a visual language suited to the ambiguous plainness of contemporary realist fiction."

"It's very Short Cuts, very Magnolia, a little American Beauty. That's exactly the problem," proposes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Why did I come out of Little Children... feeling so profoundly dissatisfied? Because Field has made a type of movie rather than an individual movie, an upscale formula picture that announces its own moral seriousness rather than something built organically from mind and heart."

Ed Gonzalez, blogging for Slant: "Expertly groomed for Oscar, this laughable concoction barely passes for satire - it is, nothing more nothing less, than the most pretentious film ever made about the problems festering in our suburban neighborhoods."

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Acquarello finds it "refreshing to see Hong [Sang-soo] crystallize his now familiar flat structured, mirroring triangulations on the ephemeral nature of human desire with Woman on the Beach."

"All the fuss that's been made in these pages and elsewhere about Andrew Bujalski and his sensitivity to the nuances of urban courtship could have been easily redirected to Hong," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot. "Something like Korea's answer to Eric Rohmer, Hong makes films that match the French master's in wry knowingness about sex, desire, and humankind's complicated maneuvering to achieve the former in order to satisfy the latter, but their outlook is more melancholy, their gaze often more cold and predatory."

"[M]y favorite film at the festival so far," announces Jürgen Fauth.

"[I]t's Hong's largely stationary, yet deftly composed, camerawork that gives Woman on the Beach its discreet power," writes Nick Schager in Slant, "working in tandem with the writer-director's dry, naturalistic dialogue to create an alternately humorous and forlorn mood situated somewhere amidst the collision between idealism and reality."

At the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore reminds us that this is "a comedy, and it is very funny, if also threaded with a sense of despair at the apparent futility of human connection."

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"[I]t is interesting to see Tian Zhuangzhuang's cinema converge towards the aesthetics of Hou Hsiao-hsien," notes acquarello. The Go Master is more impressionistic than biographical, allusive than anecdotal."

But for Keith Uhlich, writing at Slant, it's a "dull n' stately Zentenary."

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At Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin reviews Bamako, "a painful indictment of Africa's plunder at the hands of the West." The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein has good news: the film's been picked up for the US by New Yorker Films.

Alison Willmore finds it "profoundly didactic, and while we don't fault Bamako's message or the passion behind it, we also can't recommend it as a film." And of course, below, you'll find David D'Arcy's review.

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For Slant's Ed Gonzalez, Offside is "the highlight so far" of the fest, "another cyclically crafted jewel in the spectacular crown of Iran's national cinema - a sterling example of grace resonating from grueling cultural pressure."

Alison finds it "lighthearted, optimistic, even kind of cute(sy)." Below, David D'Arcy's review.

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"Alberto Lattuada irreverently - and uproariously - explores the nurtured regionalisms, preconceptions, and ethnic stereotypes between the more progressive, industrialized north and more conservative, old world traditions of southern Italy - and in particular, Sicily - that continue to pervade and shape the social attitudes between the two divergent cultures of contemporary Italian society in his underseen comic masterpiece, Mafioso," writes acquarello.

But Keith Uhlich harrumphs in Slant: "Mafioso is many things, but a good movie ain't one of 'em."

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At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Otar Iosseliani's Gardens in Autumn leaves Jenny Jediny disppointed in its "ineffectualness."

Jürgen Fauth on Paprika: "Japanese anime director Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress) always struck me as overrated, and this new film is no exception."

At Slant, Keith Uhlich reviews Marc Recha's "doc-fiction hybrid" August Days, which brings us back to Howard Feinstein, who calls the film "sublime... the revelation of the festival."

Weekend docs.

"Sorry, Ken Blackwell fans," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, "but Adam Del Deo and James D Stern's mole's-eye view of the 2004 presidential race in Ohio, ...So Goes the Nation, is not about how the Republicans gamed the system and stole the White House. (You can certainly find that perspective elsewhere.) This is a conventional political documentary with a conventional view of what happened in the Buckeye State and why, but it's no less fascinating for all that."

More from Ed Gonzalez at Slant: "You will never again hear this many Republicans admit to Bush using fear to regain control of the White House.... In expertly tracing how Republicans play a better game of politics than Democrats, it also provides the party of Kerry and Clinton with a handbook to switching the tables around in 2008."

O'Hehir again: "Even if you already know, or think you know, what a massive bonanza the Iraq war has been for private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater, Robert Greenwald's latest guerrilla-distribution muckraking effort, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, will disturb you profoundly."

"Jesus Camp doubles as a perfectly entertaining horror flick for secular progressives - or anyone outside the evangelical community, for that matter. But to leave it at that would be wildly off the mark and just as parochial as the triumphalist evangelicals depicted." And so, for Alternet, Evan Derkacz talks with directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. A torrent of comments follow. More on the doc from JR Jones in the Chicago Reader, James RocchiJames Rocchi at Cinematical, David Jeffers at the Siffblog and Richard Schickel in Time: "Jesus Camp seems to me most interesting (and poignant) as a portrait of denied and even desecrated childhood." And more on the "furore" it's unleashed from Dan Glaister in the Guardian.

Jeffrey Overstreet objects to Jeff Sharlet's review in The Revealer: "If this is 'the best work of journalism' on the subject, perhaps that says more about the state of journalism than it does about the subject of Christianity. Where is the great journalism about the kind of Christianity that I've encountered in a lifetime of Christian education, Christian community, and, yes, for all of its ups and downs, Christian conservativism? So far, I haven't seen it in the mainstream press."

Back at Slant, Jeremiah Kipp reviews Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple: "The film not only asks what went so maniacally wrong in Guyana, but more revealingly what were the good intentions that drove people there."

Michael Guillén has a good long talk with American Hardcore director Paul Rachman and screenwriter Steven Blush. Rachman: "Most importantly, this is the story of this generation that fell between the cracks. We weren't Baby Boomers. We weren't Gen-exers.... The hippies had Woodstock. My parents had Frank Sinatra. We had this and it hasn't been acknowledged."

The latest indieWIRE interview: Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin's doc loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies. "Boring people who made extraordinary music, the Pixies are inexplicable," notes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "The 'where are they now?' question is answered: nowhere very interesting."

Idiocracy.

"Idiocracy is easily the most potent political film of the year, and the most stirring defense of traditional values since Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France," argues Reihan Salam in Slate. "Rare is the movie that challenges your beliefs. Rarer still is the movie that tells you you're a fat moron, and that you should be ashamed of yourself. The unmarried adultescents swarming the cities, the DINKs who've priced families with children out of the better suburbs, the kids who never read - these are Hollywood's most prized demographics, and Mike Judge has them squarely in his sights. Is it any wonder 20th Century Fox decided Idiocracy would never be boffo box office?"

But people are wondering (still), and today on Weekend Edition, Elvis Mitchell was invited to explain why so few people have even heard of the film, much less seen it. He calls it "hilariously, horrifically ugly" and cracks up thinking about it right then and there on NPR.

Related: Drew and, via David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back, Joel Stein's story in Time on why Fox dumped the movie. Reviews: IMDb.

Update: Lots of email on this one. Clearly, Dennis Cozzalio argues for many when he wrote not all that long ago, "it deserves an audience. It's a simple as that."

San Sebastian. Awards.

The jury for this year's Donostia-San Sebastian International Film Festival, headed up by Jeanne Moreau, has made its choices, splitting the Golden Shell for Best Film between Bahman Ghobadi's Niwemang (Half Moon), which also picked up the Jury Prize for Best Photography for Nigel Bluck and Crighton Bone, and Martial Fougeron's Mon fils à moi, which also scored the Silver Shell for Best Actress for Nathalie Baye.

Tom DiCillo's done well with his new Delirious, winning the Silver Shell for Best Director and the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay. The Special Jury Prize goes to Carlos Sorin's El Camino de San Diego, while the Silver Shell for Best Actor goes to Juan Diego for Vete di mí.

See the fest's homepage for all the awards in all the sections.

Update: The BBC notes that several critics booed and "shouted 'No, no' and made thumbs-down gestures when it was announced that Mon fils à moi, or My Son, had won a Golden Shell. A second recipient, Half Moon by Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, proved a more popular winner."

Brothers of the Head.

"The book version of Brothers of the Head was published originally by Pierrot Publishing in 1977," novelist Brian Aldiss notes wryly in the Guardian. "It came decorated with startling illustrations by Ian Pollock. So immediate was it that Pierrot went bust. I cannot recall how many film options have been taken out on it since." Aldiss tells of being filmed, then winding up on the proverbial cutting room floor. But he still admires "this remarkable and artistically successful British movie." On Wednesday, Jeremy Kay interviewed directors Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton.

The Telegraph's SF Said also talks with the team behind Brothers, including screenwriter Tony Grisoni, as well as with Harry and Luke Treadaway, who play the twins.

Reviews: IMDb and MRQE.

New York Dispatch. 3.

In this latest dispatch from the New York Film Festival, David D'Arcy reviews Mafioso and Bamako.

When in doubt in Sicily, just remember the following terms - baciamo le mani (we kiss the hands), cornuto (horned one or cuckold), picciotto (little man or enforcer). Mafioso, by Alberto Lattuada, barely known today, is a warm dark satire about the dark customs of Sicilians.

There's a somber gritty neo-realist look to the 1962 film, as there was to much of what was filmed in the south of Italy through the early 1960s, as if these regions were foreign territory to the Northern Italians making the movies. They were indeed another world, and the film plays with the longstanding divisions and prejudices that separated Italians from each other.

The veteran actor Alberto Sordi plays the everyman Antonio Badalamenti, a soldier in the army of Sicilians who migrated to Milan and other Northern cities for work and a better life in the days when Sicily was a ruin of war. Antonio works in an automobile  factory, measuring efficiency - the notion of a Sicilian in such a job would have amused Northern Italians at the time, given the widespread prejudice that their southern compatriots were lazy and unreliable.

Antonio is the average guy, trying to be modern, alternately bumbling and showing off, with a blonde wife, two blonde daughters, and one foot still stuck in Sicily. He's all set to impress his family on his first visit home to the seaside town of Calamo, with its crumbling pavement and his sister who has a thick moustache. All his old friends are still there, most of them "sitting down," the local tern for unemployed. His gaunt father still wears a hat to bed. His stern mother rarely smiles, and certainly not at her blonde daughter-in-law, who looks like she arrived from another planet. Culture-clash jokes take you through at least a third of Mafioso. Even though the script exploits the clichés of the time in a way that would be politically incorrect today, the camera surveys the landscape as if it's on an ethnographic expedition, and you laugh. There's never a false note from the cast, thanks of course to Lattuada's hand with the ensemble, many of whom were native Sicilians.

We soon learn that the real power in Calamo is the local mafia don (played by Ugo Attanasio, Sordi's brother-in-law). Like any good local boy, Antonio kisses Don Vincenzo's hand, and more. Once it's clear that the Sicilian émigré never lost his skill at marksmanship, he's given a job: hit man. (The distributor of Mafioso has requested that certain details not be divulged.) Suffice it to say that Antonio does his job well; with a little reluctance, he's as good a killer as he's a pleasant employee in the Milan factory and a loving father to two girls. One's upbringing is hard to shake, even on a two-week vacation. Shooting a gun is sort of like riding a bicycle - so natural that you and your friends can make jokes about it.

Mafioso is a mordant tale about mob vassalage, never overplayed and always funny - long before Hollywod cashed in on mob stereotypes. As Antonio, Sordi is jolly and obliging, which makes his dutiful act all the terrifying when it happens. It's even more terrifying when the family man goes right on with his life after the crime. This is a film that Hitchcock would have loved, for its taut exquisite comic timing as much as for its cold look at local customs. After all, a hit man is a kind of terrorist, and Antonio is the kind of killer whom you'd invite home.

Bamako is an altogether different kind of journey, a journey home to the capital of the West African country of Mali, a return to the town of his birth for the filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako. The occasion is a trial, but as in Mafioso, understanding the trial means adjusting to some local customs. The courtroom is a courtyard into which children and chickens wander. A ram is tethered to one of the walls. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are on trial. We're not told how the court was formed, and the defendants are not there to argue on their own behalf. Yet while we don't hear from the accused, we hear about their crimes - economic ruin, the privatization of essential services, impoverishment of an entire continent, and the erosion of hope for the future. From time to time, a witness cries out in anger about sinking downhill after a life of struggle, or an old man just sings his testimony.

These are desperate charges, yet the film doesn't send a simple message of despair. Two scripts are wound together in the courtyard, one of high-minded rhetoric about suffering in the colonial and globalized worlds, another about people just going about their lives - marrying, separating, singing, raising children, living in spite of the bigger picture.

There's a lot of eloquence in Bamako, especially when witnesses raise the issue of indebtedness that requires countries to pay more to the banks than they pay for education or health care. When one witness raises the issue of the war in Iraq, she points out that a fraction of the resources that were poured into that war could accomplish extraordinary things in a place like Africa. Another reason not to have been there in the first place.

Ultimately, Bamako is more like an opera than a trial, a series of arias or jeremiads repeating the same chorus. The austere courtyard looks like a stage set, with the cameras and children and animals visible, as if to remind you that we're dealing with something painfully real. If the film audience is hearing it for the first time, it should listen carefully. But the grievances and denunciations have all been aired before. You get a sense of the power of cinema to bring drama to cries of help, and you're reminded of the futility of cinema to do much more.

Sight & Sound. 10/06.

Pro or con, the votes have pretty much been cast in the US with regard to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, but it's just now crawling across Europe, opening in Germany, for example, just the other day. American audiences didn't exactly embrace it, as B Ruby Rich notes in a piece for the new issue of Sight & Sound that raises all sorts of questions, among them, one that's bound to resonate quite differently abroad than at home: "[I]s it remotely possible to return the imagination, even in a movie theatre, to a time before the US government destroyed world sympathy with its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, before one disaster became many disasters?... Stone even reminds viewers of that time when the whole world felt for us, inserting a brief montage of ordinary people the planet over weeping in front of their TV screens as the news is announced in a multitude of languages. Ah, those were the days."

In an online-only interview, Ali Jaafar asks Stone, "To paraphrase Nixon, to what extent did 9/11 stop Americans seeing themselves the way they want to be?" Stone: "Ironically, I'm not so sure it did. I think there's a defiance about it.... If they hate us, then fuck them.... If I was al-Qaeda, George Bush is my best friend. What a crazy world."

Philip Kemp considers The Queen in light of screenwriter Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon, the play Ron Howard will be adapting for the screen, and The Deal, the teledrama, about the stormy relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that became Morgan and Stephen Frears's first collaboration. And then talks with him about it. "'I like writing about powerful people,' says Morgan, 'and the inner lives of powerful people. I always think my stuff is about friendship and betrayal, but it's also about unlikely love stories between unlikeable people.'"

Reviews:

• Richard T Kelly on on Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait: "[T]he mystique of Zidane probably deserves a film as elusive and taciturn as [Douglas] Gordon's and [Philippe] Parreno's, one that polishes his enigma rather than penetrates it, now that he has trudged from the pitch and into the pantheon for keeps." More from Paul Myerscough in the London Review of Books: "The point is made: the galáctico, like any modern celebrity, is available to us only through his mediation, and the more pervasive his image, the more frustratedly we recognise that he remains finally opaque, unreachable.... This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling." And yet more from Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.

• Tim Lucas on Six Moral Tales: "Rohmer's brand of morality is subjective and non-judgemental; his characters include students and petits bourgeois and the idle rich, Catholics and atheists, singles and marrieds-with-children, and their standards vary. The point is 'to thine own self be true' as the series depicts the ways in which thoughtful people can meet themselves in the mazes of their own stratagems, and how their true selves are sometimes at odds with the people they think they are or aspire to be."

• Liese Spencer on The Devil Wears Prada, "in which the fun is all to be had on the slippery slide into corruption." More from Daniel Garrett in the Compulsive Reader.

• Tom Charity compares cuts of Keane: "Soderbergh's structure is arguably more rational, while [Lodge] Kerrigan's is both more demanding and more powerful." And then, Keane with Kerrigan's earlier feature: "Almost unwatchable at times, Clean, Shaven is a more extreme, expressionist exercise in paranoia, but it's also inherently schlocky and sensationalist, a bit of a cheap trick."

Online viewing tip. Meetin' WA.

Must viewing. No kidding.

Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: "One of the least remarked upon attributes of Jean-Luc Godard is how thoroughly he mastered the medium of video production... The chat itself is amiable enough... It is, perhaps, the only occasion where Woody Allen seems as neurotic as the persona he wrote for himself was always said to be."

New York Dispatch. 2.

David D'Arcy, who's seen Offside three times now, offers his observations before noting that the NYFF "opens as a political farce in New York threatens to upstage it."

As the New York Film Festival begins, I'll recommend one film rather than weigh in on the opening night gala or any general themes.

The title of Offside by Jafar Panahi conjures up a sports metaphor. On the most literal-minded level, the metaphor is apt - Panahi is looking at girl soccer fans disguised as boys at a Tehran stadium, detained by soldiers who prevent them from watching a game between Iran and Bahrain that eventually takes Iran, the victor, to the World Cup. It's literally apt and poignant as it follows those girls from their cleverly conceived (and concealed) entry into the stadium, to their confrontation with the soldiers who detain them, to their celebration of the team's victory as a bus takes the "offenders" to a jail run by the Vice Squad. It also reveals layers of insight into the Iraq regime's domination of its citizens, and into the rationalizations that citizens make for their own circumstances.

Panahi is working here the way he has in The Circle, about women working as street prostitutes, and Crimson Gold, about a pizza delivery man turned robber and murderer - no stars, no professional actors, no shooting permits. As always, his stories are about outsiders whose very lives violate the rigid laws of the Islamic Republic. In this case, girls are banned from attending soccer games. It's as simple as that - until they start asking their enforcers questions about it and an oblique political conversation begins. Most women dutifully stay away. The intrepid ones dress as boys with baseball caps and paint their faces in the colors of the national flag. Some make it in after scalping tickets at extortionate prices. We meet the ones who never see the game, or those who are arrested when someone spots them. They're kept outside by soldiers who pen them into a small corner of concrete on the perimeter of the stadium for the duration of the game. One who wore a soldier's uniform and found her way to seats for officials is in handcuffs the entire time. (Why not just take them away?)

Panahi begins his film on a bus traveling grey monotonous streets to the game, where an anguished father is searching for his daughter and planning to give her a beating for breaking the rules. (He doesn't find her, but he will later.) We follow that girl (unnamed, as all the characters are) through the boisterous crowd outside the stadium where she's arrested and taken to the detention pen.

Then the battle of words begins. The girls ask a soldier guarding them to explain why they can't be allowed in. The young man from the provinces is no match for the city girls who laugh at his comments. Once he's ridiculed for his response that women simply shouldn't attend games with men, he simply admits to them that he would rather be back in his village, caring for his mother and taking cows to pasture. From time to time, there's the reminder that a good beating will keep girls and women in line. The girls are undeterred and emboldened. They point out that Japanese women were permitted to watch when Iran played Japan, and note that women can sit in cinemas - dark rooms! - with men.

Not to overplay the obvious metaphors, but Panahi is presenting Iranian women unveiled. Not uncovered, since they're in boys' clothes. No one's claiming that these fans represent all Iranian women - a claim that would be far too abstract or didactic for a filmmaker of  Panahi's refinement - yet there's a determination and a women's solidarity here that the regime surely isn't going to welcome. You'll be struck by the earthiness of what they say. There's nothing like the right jeer to deflate pomposity.

Of course, what's really unveiled is also Iran, especially its interior divisions between urban and rural, men and women, old and young, military and civilian, religious and irreverent. No mention is made of the government, of God, or of the United States. The enemy here is Bahrain, on the field. The enemy is also the network of strictures that rule Iranians' lives which force Iranians to persecute themselves and each other.

That persecution is also a joke much of the time, even for the film's aggrieved girls, who do end up heading to jail, albeit singing on the way. It's best seen in a sequence where one of the detained girls begs to go to the bathroom. A soldier leads her to the men's room (there's no ladies' room), but not before he puts a mask over her face and he empties the toilets of one couple that seems to be gay, plus a long-haired man and a grandfather in a wheelchair who is suspected of doing something sinister in one of the stalls. The soldier then worries that his prisoner will be corrupted if she reads obscenities on the bathroom walls (what else would be up there, quotations from the Koran?), and he forces her to close her eyes, while a crowd of angry young men barred from toilet forms. If law breaks down into a free-for-all in the bathroom, what's next? Most of the long sequence is shot without a single edit - a masterful turn in an un-cinematic space, even for a director like Panahi who is drawn toward locations that seem anything but cinematic.

I've seen Offside three times now - in Berlin, Toronto and New York. Those who saw it in Berlin and Toronto were fortunate to have Jafar Panahi there to discuss his film. He won't be in New York, because he couldn't get a visa to visit the US. It's a pity. On an earlier passage through JFK airport, Panahi refused to be fingerprinted and was detained. This visible mistreatment which got him lots of press coverage may well endear him to the Iranian government. Let's hope that means his film will have a wide audience there. I'm not holding my breath. None of his films has been released in Iran so far.

Another note. The NYFF opens as a political farce in New York threatens to upstage it. Just yesterday, the press revealed that Jeanine Pirro, the Republican candidate for New York State Attorney General, is being investigated for planning to wiretap the boat of her husband, whom she suspected of having an affair. The alleged plot was discovered in another wiretap, this one on the phone of Bernard Kerik, the former and now-discredited NYC police commissioner, who withdrew from consideration as Bush's nominee for Homeland Security Secretary when news came out that Kerik had not only misused funds in the past, but also had mob ties. Kerik may now be best-known for his sexual trysts with the book editor Judith Regan in hotel rooms in lower Manhattan reserved for exhausted 9/11 firefighters. He's still under investigation. (Pirro has called for an investigation of the leaked information.) Their listening gambit already has a cinematic name, "The Love Bug." Remember, this woman is running for Attorney General of the State of New York.

Sound complicated? It gets messier. Pirro's libidinal husband, Al, with his own mob connections, already did prison time for tax evasion and fathered a child with another woman while married to his wife. Her opponent, Andrew Cuomo, is another cuckolded candidate, having been abandoned in full tabloid glare for another man by his ex-wife, Kerry Kennedy. Welcome to the cock fight.

Add the Republican public nostrums about the sanctity of marriage (even from the wronged Jeanine Pirro herself) and about the sanctity of wiretaps and torture, and this story has Mel Brooks written all over it. (It's probably too commerfcial for a future New York Film Festival.) Barring some other cataclysm or new sex scandal, there should be a Pirro sequel on the tabloid front pages every day for the whole festival.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.

Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly: "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is like a piece of naif art - a movie by someone who scarcely seems to have seen a movie before, let alone made one. And perhaps for that very reason, it's forceful and alive and spilling over with crazy poetry."

"What sets the film apart, and makes it one of the more remarkable American directing debuts in recent years, is [Dito] Montiel's passionate, almost reckless engagement with the possibilities of the medium," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Adapting his impressionistic, often rambling memoir for the screen, he demonstrates an autodidact's exuberant self-confidence and the eye of a born filmmaker. Working with a large, mostly young cast, he has made a picture so full of life and feeling that the screen can hardly contain it."

Updated through 10/5.

Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times: "There's a quality of daring in Montiel's approach, trusting that the intensity of his feeling for his characters can become contagious, and in the distinctive way he backs into his story and its scenes, moving from jagged, intimate moments to large-scale images that imbue the film with a sense of the beauty and magic of memories."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir dissents: "I suspect this guy can make a good movie if he learns the right lessons; he's made about half of one here. But the praise heaped upon A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is way too much, way too soon."

Earlier: Scott Macaulay's interview with Montiel in the summer issue of Filmmaker.

Update, 9/30: Michael Guillén talks with Montiel and - this is a welcome twist - his editor, Jake Pushinsky.

Update, 10/2: Online listening tip. Montiel, producer Trudie Styler and Chazz Palminteri are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 10/5: Jennifer Merin interviews Montiel for the New York Press.

The Reeler.

The Reeler, known to many who read, say, the New York Times or Filmmaker as ST Van Airsdale, has, after camping out at indieWIRE for a while and then Movie City News, set out on his own on a freshened-up site with a clean layout and one snazzy font. "[N]othing much has changed," The R writes in a "Welcome Back" message, "except that I have accrued extra piles of crap that I will never get done." He means the new blogs, the new spaces for reviews, festival coverage and so on. "But it all still pertains to the sphere of New York cinema that you have (hopefully) been following here for a while now, where the city's films, filmmakers and events will receive an increasingly comprehensive look as the site accommodates extra contributors and content." Hear, hear!

NYT. Janus Films.

There'll be more on the New York Film Festival as the day wears on, but for the moment, you've got to browse this: Manohla Dargis introduces what I suppose you might call a special featurette on the remarkable sidebar, 50 Years of Janus Films. No matter how often you've seen however many of these before, she writes, "it's time to discover them again, where they belong: on the big, bright, beautiful movie screen."

So each title on these pages is accompanied by showtimes, naturally, but also by a quote from the director regarding the film. Ingmar Bergman, for example, on The Seventh Seal: "I believe a human being carries his or her own holiness, which lies within the realm of the earth; there are no otherworldly explanations. So in the film lives a remnant of my honest, childish piety lying peacefully alongside a harsh and rational perception of reality."

Updated, 9/30.

Click the title and you land on a page which in turn directs you to the trailer, reviving all those memories of seeing that starkly essential imagery for the first time, and to the NYT's original review, in which Bosley Crowther, writing nearly half a century ago, 1958, proclaimed that the film was "as tough - and rewarding - a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year."

Good thing the weekend starts this evening. Earlier: Michael Atkinson in the Voice on the series and Ray Pride here on The 400 Blows, "uncut, Janus Films logo and all, on late night TV."

Update, 9/30: An audio slideshow in which Manohla Dargis, AO Scott and Stephen Holden talk about a few of their favorites in the series.

Austin Chronicle. aGLIFF.

The Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival opens today, runs through October 8, and the Austin Chronicle has a nifty package:

• Marc Savlov talks with Jan Dunn about her first feature, Gypo, which has "secured a UK theatrical release, a feat near-unheard of in British indie cinema," been short-listed for a Bafta and "is, simply put, a stunner."

• Carson Barker emails Darryl Stevens (who's just undergone throat surgery), appearing in two aGLIFF features, Boy Culture and Another Gay Movie, about which Jeremy Martin writes, "For all the gross-out body-fluid gags, gerbil stuffing, and vegetable-drawer raiding, the movie manages to tap some of the same sexi-/sweetness as the American Pie series."

• Marjorie Baumgarten gets a few words with Maria Maggenti about her latest, Puccini for Beginners, a "screwball mash-up that uses gender identity and sexual politics as the bedrock of its comedy."

Short takes: Sofia Resnick on Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, "a fun commentary on reverse psychology and hormonal rivalry," and Loving Annabelle, "inspired by the 1931 German film Maedchen in Uniform"; Martin on For the Love of Dolly, which "will probably ruin the songstress's sleep for quite some time"; Barker on Mom: "[Director Erin] Greenwell takes the palette of a small, bland cityscape and draws it out with in-depth characters, provocative dialogue, and real personalities"; and Mark Fagan on Saint of 9/11: "Like its subject, it leaves a positive impact."

New York Dispatch. 1.

We're going giddy over the NYFF this year, with not one, not two, but three dispatchers. Andrew Grant (Filmbrain), who recently interviewed Joe Swanberg for us, launches the run with his take on The Queen.

For the New York City cinephile set, autumn is heralded not by crimson foliage or a hint of chill in the air, but rather by the arrival of the New York Film Festival. A "best-of" fest, it's a chance to catch the films you first heard about at Cannes, Berlin, Rotterdam, etc. Back for its 44th year (and my own personal 20-year anniversary), its lineup includes many familiar faces, and a surprising number of titles arriving with distribution deals intact. And while it's wonderful to see films like Belle Toujours and Offside at the festival, I'd gladly trade them for titles that might never find their way here - such as Still Life, Dong or Colossal Youth. Still, it is a remarkably solid year, and save for some obvious Oscar bait (Little Children), the majority of the sixteen films I've seen so far have been impressive.

One of the most impressive (partly due to lowered expectations) is this year's opening night film, Stephen Frears's The Queen. Quite frankly, I imagined this would be another bog-standard biopic, where a stellar lead performance is mistaken for a good film - i.e, this year's Ray or Capote. Yet The Queen is anything but - it's a masterfully written acerbic dramedy that is less about individuals than it is institutions. And though it's clear which side of the political divide Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan reside, they cleverly avoid easy targets and clichés.

The film opens with the Blair landslide that ushered in the dream of new era and a more modern Britain. (Remember Cool Britannia?) Buckingham Palace is displeased from the outset, and the Queen is quick to correct a staff member: "He's only the Prime Minister-to-be. I haven't asked him yet." Blair (spitting image Michael Sheen) is portrayed as the young overzealous idealist who forgets nearly all protocol on his first formal meeting with Her Royal Highness, and who speaks to her on the phone while wearing his number 10 rugby jersey, his Stratocaster just inches away.

The death of Princess Diana becomes Blair's first challenge as Prime Minister, and the bulk of the film focuses on the events that transpire in the days following the accident, and the right royal nuisance her death becomes for Elizabeth Regina & Co. The growing resentment by the public towards the Queen for her refusal to return from her hideaway in the Highlands or to issue a public statement is immediately seized upon by Blair's people as an opportunity to curry favor with the masses.

Morgan's deft handling of the characters provides the film with a certain vitality that doesn't let up for a second. Though the private faces of these public figures is based on little more than speculation and conjecture, he's not working in a satirical vein, but rather striving for the all-too-human moments, even from those who believe their sovereignty to be by the grace of God. We see Blair as a reluctant leader with mommy issues, while his wife Cherie (Helen McCrory) is a borderline Lady Macbeth who likens the royals to a group of "freeloading, emotionally retarded nutters." His shifting loyalty is most interesting, especially in light of his current situation.

Far from the image of the dainty lady in the black hat mechanically issuing her trademark cupped-hand wave, Helen Mirren's Queen is a headstrong, cellphone-carrying, Range Rover-driving monarch for whom compromise is a last resort. It's the rest of the royal family that are the nutters, including her slightly deranged mother (Sylvia Syms), socially awkward, paranoid son (Alex Jennings) and dangerously antiquated husband (James Cromwell), who believes anything can be solved with a good walk.

Mirren's performance is the one to beat this year, and it will be a surprise if she doesn't walk away with a gold statue next February. Daring for its depiction of a living monarch and sitting Prime Minister, and bound to stir up controversy, The Queen is an endlessly entertaining peek into a 1200-year-old institution that was nearly brought down by the power of the media.

Interview. Bader Ben Hirsi.

A New Day in Old Sana'a, a tale of magic realism and the first full-length feature from Yemen, has been winning over audiences and juries at festivals around the world. Now, it hits a big one: the just-opened Vancouver International Film Festival, which runs through October 13.

Harvey F Chartrand talks with British-Yemeni writer and director Bader Ben Hirsi about the difficulties of making a film in a country highly suspicious of cinema and with next-to-no industry of its own as well as about his documentary, 9/11 Through Saudi Eyes, and his next feature project.

Operatic.

Meanwhile, the Idomeneo hoopla in Berlin. For all that's been written over the past several days, Alex Ross sums it up best: "The situation is idiotic to the core, but, yes, [Hans] Neuenfels must be defended; millions have died fighting for democracy so he can put his pap onstage."

Vancouver. Preview.

The Vancouver International Film Festival opens today and runs through October 13. Jay Kuehner, most recently spotted in "GreenCine: Telluride 2006," offers an overview. A note about film titles: click one, accept the cookie and you'll see VIFF's info for all the other films thereafter.

Decamping from this year's Telluride Film Festival (September 1 through 4), the salutory refrain among critics and industry was, "See you in Toronto." While the North American feast of festivals warrants compulsory attendance each fall, it's that other Canadian film destination that inspires rabid devotion among cinephiles. The 25th annual Vancouver International Film Festival runs over two weeks and the program reads like a rejoinder to cine-lamenters anywhere.

To wit: here you can see not one but two films from the formidable Chinese director Jia Zhangke (whom Vancouver practically introduced to the world after his Xiao Wu won the coveted Dragons and Tigers award in 1998), the documentary Dong and the Venice Golden Lion-winning feature it inspired, Still Life; new films from the symbiotic Taiwanese duo Tsai Ming-Liang (I Don't Want To Sleep Alone) and his muse Lee Kang-Sheng (My Stinking Kid, co-directed with Tsai); a new film from Pedro (Portuguese maverick Costa, that is, although Almodóvar's Volver is here, too), the critically-annointed Cannes fave Colossal Youth; two medium-length shorts from directors I personally couldn't live without, Signes by Eugène Green from France and About Love by Darezhan Omirbayev from Kazakhstan; slices of South American minimalism in Fantasma by Lisandro Alonso (Argentina) and Paraguayan Hammock by Paz Encina (the first Paraguayan feature in over 30 years); the highly awaited Host (Bong Joon-Ho, whom VIFF has been faithful to since screening his 1995 short Incoherence); the hotly anticipated Shortbus by John Cameron Mitchell (with its star and CBC personality Sook Yin-Li introducing the film, this could prove to be the, uh, hardest ticket to come by since the mob scene for Wong's In the Mood for Love years back).

The list goes on. Obviously, consummate programming is chief among VIFF's attractions. Many consider the Dragons and Tigers program, "the largest showcase of East Asian films outside of Asia," to be a festival unto itself and travel here for that purpose alone. The Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema has become a virtual role-call of who's who in Asian film (Kore-eda Hirokazu, Jia Zhangke and Hong Sang-Soo were all feted here), and who won't soon forget last year's winner, the astonishingly economical Oxhide by Chinese director Liu Jiayan? You can prod programmer Tony Rayns to tip you on the short list, but he remains equivocal about the wealth of talent he unearths annually. Perhaps a documentary about Yokohama Mary, a Japanese hooker who prowled the streets until she was 83, may not make it on to your card of must-sees, but the pleasure of Dragons and Tigers is all about the act of discovery. In an instance of reaping what it sows, this year VIFF has the pleasure of screening new films from Kore-eda Hirokazu (Hana - yes, it's a samurai film!), Hong Sang-Soo (Woman on the Beach) and Miike Takashi (Big Bang Love, Juvenile A - yes, it's a prison movie!).

As the largest survey of Canadian films anywhere, VIFF's Canadian Images program is sorely without Guy Maddin's The Brand Upon the Brain! (snatched up by the New York Film Festival) but includes other highlights such as Monkey Warfare, Reginald Harkema's Jury Award-winner at Toronto, and Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal's portrait of photographer Edward Burtynsky as he documents the wages of globalization in China's unprecedented capitalist thrust (Burtynsky's vision is complemented by the estimable cinematographer/director Peter Mettler [Gambling, Gods and LSD]).

The Spotlight on France section features new films from Claude Chabrol (A Comedy of Power, with Isabelle Huppert in her seventh role for Chabrol), Benoît Jacquot (The Untouchable, teaming again with the luminous Isild Le Besco), and Xavier Beauvois (the sleeper policier Le Petit Lieutenant, with an unforgettable turn from Nathalie Baye). The anthology film Paris, je t'aime features 18 world-class directors paying homage to the city of lights. As a producer's wet dream, such films are always a mixed bag, but with names involved such as Christopher Doyle, Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant and Suwa Nobuhiro, who can resist a little vicarious travel? Crowning the French selection is a special presentation of Jacques Rivette's 743-minute New Wave opus, Out 1: noli me tangere, never before screened outside of Europe. The film screens over the course of two days and will be introduced by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Like reading Proust or watching Wagner's Ring cycle," extol the program notes; the film's phantom life 35 years later gives new context to the notion of "target audience."

Given the state of global politics as defined by US interests, where better for an American to get perspective than Canada? The VIFF online program guide even has an interests menu that includes Terrorism and War, and the list is heady (as Paul Arthur notes in a recent Film Comment piece, "[O]ur most cogent representations of the Iraq conflict are clearly taking place on the big screen"). That James Longley's plangent and poetic Iraq in Fragments has languished this long without distribution is criminal; here you can catch it alongside Laura Poitras's My Country, My Country, "The definitive non-fiction film about the Iraq occupation" (according to the Village Voice). Not only the stuff of documentary, the topic of terror is examined in visceral minutiae by Julia Loktev in Day Night Day Night. Mining similar territory as Paradise Now, albeit wholly stripped down, Loktev's film tirelessly follows a young girl on a suicide-bombing mission in Times Square. Physically detailed but ideologically abstract, Day Night Day Night should ignite debate well into the film year. See it at VIFF before the rhetorical smoke clouds your view.

If the aforementioned isn't compelling enough, consider the context in which VIFF unfolds. Asked what makes VIFF special, associate programmer Mark Peranson (editor of Cinema Scope) doesn't hesitate to single out the festival's prosaic virtues: "In short, a moviegoer truly gets his or hers money's worth at the VIFF, and in a convivial atmosphere; most of the theaters are within walking distance of each other, with numerous options of filmgoing available at any time, from 10 am to 10 pm." If you factor in the post-screening after-hours cocktail with a first-time Russian director of an experimental black comedy, that clocks your film day in at around seventeen hours. In the dream logic of festival time, one can conceivably still get a good night's rest.

Peranson confirms VIFF's reputation as both populist and uncompromising. "It's a festival for the people that manages to straddle the lines of high art and popular entertainment, and attempts to program with an eye on what its audience wants, as well as present the best artistic achievements of the film year." This means having whatever you consider your cake - from Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates to a sneak preview of Todd Field's Little Children; from Aki Kaurismäki's Lights in the Dusk to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. As for eating it too, VIFF is well-attended, but seats are not impossible, nor ticket prices prohibitive. The new Vancouver International Film Centre is a plush state-of-the-art theater and optimum viewing venue; both Claire Denis's L'Intrus and James Benning's 13 Lakes, which screened at last year's festival, took on new life in this setting.

It's a good sign for VIFF 06 that the number of eagerly anticipated titles far exceeds those that, probably not for the festival's lack of trying, couldn't make the trip. Among the myriad on my list to see are Jafar Panahi's Offside (Iran), Manoel de Oliveira's Magic Mirror (Portugal), Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century (Thailand), Ulrich Köhler's Windows on Monday (Germany), Valeska Grisebach's Longing (Germany) and Albert Serra's Honour of the Knights (Spain). These ought to allay my curiosity for the few missing in action: Barbara Albert's Falling (Austria), Pablo Trapero's Born and Bred (Argentina) and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (France). Still, this is mere grumbling. Summarizing the Vancouver experience, I'm reminded of an encounter with a European critic (who writes better in a third language than I can ever hope to in my first) at last year's edition. His description of a film I was about to see struck me as a gesture of deference: "It is quite okay," he said, which I took to mean "middling." But the film in question, Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, was rather staggering. That's when I understood that quite okay meant just that. Similarly, VIFF's modest profile belies its continued depth and sense of purpose. Upon departing VIFF's two-week immersion in Same Planet. Different Worlds, it's now common to say to the filmgoers you've met here, "See you next year."

Shorts, 9/27.

"Martin Scorsese's The Departed, from a screenplay by William Monahan, based on Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs, provides an electrifying entertainment for this fall moviegoing season in its police-mobster machinations and deep undercover penetration by both sides of the law," trumpets Andrew Sarris. "In this respect, The Departed strikes unexpectedly deep chords of tragic poignancy with the emotional fallout from an atmosphere of perpetual paranoia so characteristic of our post-9/11 world. No one can completely trust anyone else." Also reviewed: Le Petit Lieutenant and Marie Antoinette. As for The Departed, Tim Robey gives it a "C+."

But also in the New York Observer: "It is very important that we as a free country don't become what we despise in an age of such palpable threats," Ken Burns tells Rebecca Dana. "There's always a tendency that in trying to eradicate evil in the world, we sometimes come to resemble the thing we're trying to eradicate." The issue at hand: out of fear of the FCC, PBS is preemptively censoring itself. Update: Dick Kreck reports in the Denver Post that Rocky Mountain PBS has cancelled the documentary Marie Antoinette. RMPBS prez James Morgese says the questionable scenes, 200-year-old drawings of nekkid people, are "nothing worse than what you see on TV elsewhere, but in this era of heightened sensitivity by the FCC, fines are pretty stiff."

Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes "opens in Paris [today] amid a furious row over France's racist treatment of colonial troops and a political battle over pensions worth millions of euros that surviving veterans are still owed," reports Angelique Chrisafis. Related: Cineuropa's "film focus" features interviews with Bouchareb, producer Jean Bréhat and the cast.

Also in the Guardian:

• Natasha Walter: "Of all the statistics that show that the world is still weighted towards the boys, there are few quite as telling as the percentage of major feature films that are directed by women - we're still talking just 7 percent."

• Mark Lawson traces the various permutations of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood from 1697 to the present day.

• Ronald Bergan remembers Miklos 'Mickey' Hargitay, 1926 - 2006: "It was appropriate that Schwarzenegger played Hargitay in the television movie The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980), with Loni Anderson as Mansfield."

• Laura Smith on Borat vs Kazakhstan.

• Geoffrey Macnab talks with Emilio Estevez about Bobby.

• Lindesay Irvine has a backgrounder on Quinceañera, known in the UK as Echo Park LA.

"[P]erhaps no film sums up the spirit of the Czech New Wave as Ivan Passer's light and breezy masterpiece, Intimate Lighting," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Michael Gibbons at indieWIRE: "The survival of Brazilian filmmaking largely depends on government incentives, and politics inevitably enter into an already complicated debate about how to consolidate a market that is vulnerable yet full of potential." Plus, an interview with American Hardcore director Paul Rachman.

Speaking of which, Rob Harvilla: "The flick succeeds in lending 80s hardcore punk some gravity and importance but not, by any means, aesthetic beauty or mass appeal. You would most likely have not enjoyed this in person."

Also in the Voice, Michael Musto talks with John Cameron Mitchell about Shortbus (more from Ed Gonzalez in Slant) and Ella Taylor finds Little Children an "verly long movie, made sluggish by a superfluously novelistic narrator, [which] feels divided against itself, driven by opposed impulses of tragedy and dark humor that make it impossible for us to identify with these lost souls' break for freedom or wait for them to grow up."

"In the course of covering Fantastic Fest, I've seen 25 features so far, with more to come," writes Peter Martin at Twitch. "My mind feels like it's reaching capacity with blood, body parts, savage killers, and psychic traumas doing battle within my cranium. Yet I keep coming back to Head Trauma as one of this year's touchstones."

Grady Hendrix on Dragon Tiger Gate: "Stupid and shallow but really, really hot and crammed with hard bodied action." Makes for a good drinking game, too, evidently.

"The Black Dahlia doesn't seem like work for hire - I don't think De Palma is capable of hack work," writes Dennis Cozzalio in a long, considered entry. "It does feel like the work of a man who hasn't quite figured out how to realize those desires to take his filmmaking in a different direction."

"Fascinated disgust and aghast amusement are two feelings I don't experience often enough," writes the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy. "Jesus Camp elicits both in spades." she interviews directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who, along with the now-(in)famous Pastor Becky Fisher, are also guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Back in the SFBG, Johnny Ray Huston talks with video and audio manipulating artists Bryan Boyce (full interview), Derrick Beckles, Animal Charm (full interview) and Gregg Gillis, while Cheryl Eddy meets documentary filmmaker Aron Ranen - and Andrew Bujalski.

Jason Clark in Slant on Copying Beethoven: "Will there ever be a decent movie made about any part of Ludwig van Beethoven's life?"

That Little Round-Headed Boy indulges in Cecil B DeMille's 1934 Cleopatra, "which quickly reminds you how the word "lavish" has disappeared from Hollywood's dictionary. This film is a calling card for the pleasures of the old studio system and its irrepressible craftsmanship. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, 'They had sets then!'"

What, Frankenstein and Dracula again? Yes, and as Dave Kehr writes, "For collectors it's a good news/bad news moment. The new transfers are the best yet, with grain and contrast much improved, but you'll have to shell out for them one more time, $26.98 each." Also in the New York Times, Caryn James on bad buzz.

"The fact that audio in motion pictures is often overlooked can be largely explained by its abstract nature," argues Peet Gelderblom. "You can point out the lipstick on a husband's collar, or spot the bad guy holding a gun in the crowd, you can freeze a frame and enlarge it, but it's hard to put a finger on the disturbing effect of a faintly detectable bass drone accompanying a sequence of seemingly ordinary shots."

Michael Fox at SF360: "While the cinema is recognized - nay, embraced - as a catalyst for discussion of political and social issues in France, England, Israel, and throughout the developing world, any American movie that exposes the rotten parts of our system is considered in bad taste. These days the subject of politics has been relegated to documentary makers, with mixed results."

Matthew Clayfield addresses "the ongoing noise (can it really be called a discussion?) surrounding the unnecessarily prickly question of what a videoblog actually is, a question with a very straightforward answer that shouldn't be nearly as controversial as it continues to be."

"Memories of some movies are inseparable from where you first see them," writes Ray Pride at Movie City News. "My prime Chicago example: Oak Street's 70-year-old deco dowager, the Esquire." It "closed last Thursday: as the developer who's bringing the wrecking ball phrased it to the Sun-Times, the up-up-upscale environs of Prada-era Oak Street are missing 'a restaurant component.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Jay A Fernandez profiles screenwriter Allan Loeb; and Dennis McLellan: "Edward Albert, the actor-son of the late screen veteran Eddie Albert who first gained fame co-starring with Goldie Hawn in the 1970s film Butterflies Are Free and later became an outspoken environmental activist, has died. He was 55."

Always great fun: another trailer roundup from Gwynne Watkins at ScreenGrab.

And my, just look at some of the DVDs coming out over the next several weeks, hand-picked by Joe Bowman.

"On principle, The AV Club hereby refuses to do a fall movie preview. Oh, all right, fine, we'll do one. But we aren't going to try very hard."

Kamera.co.uk has redesigned and has fresh reviews of theatrical and DVD releases.

It has next-to-nothing to do with film, but I can't help but chime in on Andreas Tzortzis's piece in the NYT on Berlin's retiring building director, Hans Stimmann. If anyone's proven that urban planning can have a severely detrimental effect on a city's economic prospects, it's Stimmann. I wish Tzortizis had been able to work in a little more quotage from Niklas Maak, as he's currently one of the best and most forward-thinking writers on architecture and design in Germany.

Online gazing tip. "There can never be enough Pre-Code at the Greenbriar!"

Online browsing tip. At Radar, Michael Musto introduces a collection from Warhol's World, " a tubby little book featuring snapshots of his countless acquaintances, all taken by the alleged social-phobe himself." Via Jason Kottke.

Online viewing tips, round 1. The best of August at no fat clips!!!

Online viewing tips, round 2. A slew of new trailer finds at Twitch.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Antonio Pasolini: "The organisers of the Rio de Janeiro film festival have teamed up with the popular Porta Curta streaming site to show 17 of the competing films from the festival's Première Brasil section. You can also vote for your favorites."

Fests and events, 9/27.

George Maciunas, 1953 - 1978: Charts, Diagrams, Films, Documents and Atlases: at the Maya Stendhal Gallery in New York through October 28. Related online viewing tip. Jonas Mekas's Zefiro Torna: Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas.

The work of Harun Farocki is the focus of an exhibition at Index, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, through November 5.

Recent New York Film Festival previews:

• Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "What Apichatpong [Weerasethakul] offers with his new film, Syndromes and a Century, often seems like an exotic, more polished, and higher budget version of Michael Snow's Wavelength, albeit with multiple locations and characters, and an even less dramatic plot."

• Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "Bamako doesn't correct the injustices committed by The Constant Gardener, reversing them by flaunting an all-brain-no-heart attitude."

• Nick Schager: Insiang "channels its Sirk/Fassbinder melodrama through the filter of neorealism, its story's heightened emotions kept at a simmer by an aesthetic at once verité-blunt and yet shrewdly, meticulously composed."

• Also, Keith Uhlich on Gardens in Autumn: "Figures that on the day I publish an article on The House Next Door stating my preference to rarely, if ever, walk out of a movie, I go and do exactly that."

• But Uhlich stayed for another, and for THND: "Buñuel tears the gates of perception asunder; de Oliveira, at least in Belle toujours, keeps us decidedly earthbound. This might be part of the point: to show, essentially, how the characters' unhinged fantasy lives have been tempered by age, with all the resultant hemming and hawing about lost youth that, placed within a slightly different framework, might well be entitled Trip to Bountiful."

• Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog on Marie Antoinette: "here's no way around it - it just looks so good."

And from the Fantastic Fest, wrapping tomorrow, at Twitch, Peter Martin offers quick takes on Roman, The Woods, Wilderness and Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell.

Up-n-coming, 9/27.

"An explicit still image is a nude, but an explicit movie is hard-core," notes Jim Lewis as he opens his consideration of Destricted in Slate. Before the disclaimers - he knows just about everyone involved - he argues that "if Destricted proves anything, it's that art is more powerful than porn (and that artists, thankfully, don't take well to assignments), for each of the seven participants simply enlarges his or her own concerns just far enough to include concupiscence." Did you know: there'll be a Destricted 2.

Which leads us to news of the up-n-coming: Grady Hendrix has news of Feng Xiaogang's next film, The Assembly, "a war flick set during the end of China's civil war and the start of the Korean War about a commander who is ordered to fight until he hears the assembly call... but the call never comes."

Screen Daily - I don't have a link because I don't have a subscription - reports tha