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 that Lars von Trier will be turning from comedy (The Boss of It All) to horror by picking up his Antichrist project again. Shooting starts in the summer of 2007. Christopher Campbell has more at Cinematical.

Screen Daily's also reporting that Jonathan Demme will making a film based on Jimmy Carter's forthcoming Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Paul Arendt in the Guardian: "Nick Broomfield is making a film about the alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians and insurgents by US marines in Haditha."

Variety: Gavin Hood will direct Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon in Rendition, a "Middle East political thriller."

Empire reports on Invisibles, a portmanteau film to feature the work of Javier Bardem, Wim Wenders, Fernando León, Isabel Coixet, Mariano Barroso and Javier Corcuera: "Their various entries will tackle the world's overlooked conflicts and the human suffering they cause. The subjects include sleeping sickness in Africa, Uganda's young soldiers, a documentary about displaced Columbians and Wenders' film about violence against women in the Congo."

Books, 9/27.

Introducing an excerpt from Christine Vachon's A Killer Life: How and Independent Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond, Eugene Hernandez pronounces it a "must read." Eugene's got more recommendations at his blog.

There's a chapter in A Killer Life that's "an hour by hour account of a day at Cannes," notes David Lowery, and so, from the set of Yen Tan's Ciao, "I thought I might give a similar breakdown of an average shooting day, from the editor's perspective."

In the New York Observer, Scott Eyman reviews Donald Spoto's Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn, whose "performances in Funny Face (1957), The Nun's Story (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Two for the Road (1967), Robin and Marian (1976) and, yes, Love in the Afternoon have a luminosity that's nowhere to be found in this book." Well, except on the cover. Related: Dan Glaister reports in the Guardian that "Audrey Hepburn has been reincarnated as the latest muse for Gap, brought back to life to help sell one of the clothing chain's staple products - skinny black pants."

DK Holm at Quick Stop Entertainment on David Thomson's Nicole Kidman and Lee Server's Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing: "Thomson's Kidman is a happy narcissist who loves the camera. Gardner was a woman with animal charisma who personally didn't know what all the fuss was about. Once Mickey Rooney introduced her to sex, her life was changed, and she appeared in movies primarily to fund her hedonism and work in political causes. She rejected America, hated the movie business, and was kicked out of more European hotel bars than a drunken sailor on a binge." Heavens, no wonder God doesn't want us having sex. And probably especially not with Mickey Rooney.

At Zoom In Online, Annie Frisbee talks with Blake Snyder about his Save the Cat!, "a screenwriting book that goes beyond the same old reworkings of three-act structure to get to the heart of the matter: what is the movie about?"

The Last King of Scotland.

Michael Joshua Rowin opens Reverse Shot's round on The Last King of Scotland at indieWIRE: "What starts out as an awkward, wide-eyed bildungsroman and travelogue transforms (through more untamed verve than directorial precision) into a frantic, disorienting tragedy about the seduction of power, one that would make proud this film's not-so-unlikely pair of guardian angels, Joseph Conrad and Oliver Stone." Neither Keith Uhlich nor Nicolas Rapold agree.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "Furiously paced, with excellent performances by Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as the foolish Scotsman who becomes the leader's personal physician, the film has texture, if not depth and enough intelligence to almost persuade you that it actually has something of note to say."

More from Ella Taylor in the Voice and other alt-weeklies across the country, from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times and David Denby in the New Yorker.

Earlier: David D'Arcy from Toronto.

Update, 9/28: Dana Stevens considers two films written by Peter Morgan, The Last King of Scotland and The Queen, in light of each other: "He's interested in the way tradition and sycophancy shield the powerful from criticism, and how reality eventually finds its way through that shield. Both movies remind us of the simple but easily obscured truth that politics, in the end, always comes down to people: not just 'the people' but real, living individuals, with their appetites, histories, fears and desires."

Fresh air.

One of the things we try to avoid in interviews for GC is the standard junket effluvia such as "What was it like working with...?" which inevitably leads to pained and painful replies hinging on the words "great" and "a real privilege" or any other question that might get a mention of a character's "journey." With a few welcome exceptions, links to interviews elsewhere around here are usually brief simply because, well, you've read one... But how's this for an opener:

Ferenc Varga for Filmklub: "Most of these omnibus-films that look interesting beforehand turn out to be pretty horrible. Why do you think Paris, je t'aime works and the others don't?"

Olivier Assayas: "I'm not so fond of Paris, je t'aime. To me a lot of the stuff in the film is very conventional and I'm not so fond of the postcard side of Paris it presents. I'm perfectly okay with being part of it but I can't say that the film is some kind of spectacular achievement."

Merci.

Online viewing tip. Jamie Stuart: NYFF. Episode 1.

One of the highlights of each year's New York Film Festival for those of us who can't be there is the series of video reports/diaries/essays Jamie Stuart makes and lets us watch - and this is the amazing part, given their quality - for free.

Episode 1 opens with echoes of Adaptation., Manhattan and previous series and segues through not-quite-snide (but pretty funny) remarks on a few other DIY filmmakers into comments on Little Children and snippets from the press conference.

The man knows how to frame and when to hold his camera steady. Looks like this is going to be another great run.

DVDs, 9/27.

DK Holm gathers DVD specialists' takes on Hard Candy.

One of the most controversial films of 2006, or at least potentially controversial, has been David Slade's Hard Candy, from a script by former teacher Brian Nelson. Essentially a two-person play, Hard Candy recounts what happens after a 14-year old girl (Ellen Page) in a red hoodie goes home with a slick 32-year old photographer (Patrick Wilson) whom she first encounters on the Internet. The film's guileful trailer suggests that Hard Candy is a slasher or horror film but it turns out to be a psychological drama in which the teen is on an intricate revenge trip.

Surprisingly, Hard Candy did not provoke the sort of protests one usually associates with films that tread the ambiguous terrain of adolescent sexuality. Now out on DVD, Hard Candy receives a brief review at Entertainment Weekly in which Jeff Labrecque lauds the film's "visual ferocity" and the way it "craftily tests the audience's sympathies for an Internet pedophile and a seemingly helpless 14-year-old," adding that a "superb making-of explains how a then-bald Ellen Page beat out 300 other girls for her role by interpreting Hayley as Joan of Arc."

Brett Cullum at DVD Verdict kicks off with the admonition that "Strangers should never talk to little girls," before praising Hard Candy as the "slickest sick thriller to come along this year." Noting that the film "got a limited run and disappeared quickly," Cullum points out that Slade craftily "lets you wonder who the predator and the prey is every step of the way, and it ends exactly how it should. It's a film about vigilantes, sexual justice, and hard questions.... You'll question, you'll debate, and you'll find yourself writhing all the way."

At DVD Talk, Francis Rizzo III begins confessionally by rightfully praising the film's merchandising: "When I saw the trailer for Hard Candy, I knew I had to see this film. It's not that I'm a big fan of movies about pedophiles, but the look of the preview (and the poster) was so striking and the concept so intriguing, that I couldn't wait to check it out. Unfortunately, it didn't get a wide release and never made it to a theater near me. Now though, I've experienced Hard Candy, and I'm glad I did." He goes on to add that the "best aspect of this intimate film (there [are] only four speaking roles, including Sandra Oh's inquisitive neighbor), is the lack of a hero." The extras also summon up praise: "Considering the controversial topic at the heart of the film, it's ripe for some bonus material, and Lionsgate didn't let anyone down, giving the DVD a good spread of extras," especially that hour-long making of, which constitutes "a very engaging look at how the film was made," while an additional nine-minute short, "Controversial Confection: The Soul of Hard Candy," "goes deeper into the movie's content and everything that goes into making a movie about such a topic."

Finally, there is Mike Russell at the DVD Journal. Russell is relatively silent on the supplements but praises the films opening sequences, especially the first scene, depicting what we soon learn is the first meeting between Jeff and Haley. "Their coffee-shop conversation is one of the more skin-crawly interactions to be seen in a movie in a good long while, and everything - from Jeff's too-smooth manner to Hayley's woman-child naiveté to the brightly lit close-ups of faces and forks cutting cakes - is designed to unsettle." But at the 25-minute mark, "the movie changes into something tricky and merciless. The remainder of Hard Candy deals in wince-inducing surgery, revealed secrets, power struggles, surprise twists, and no-win ultimatums. As in the original permutations of another, older story featuring a girl in a red hood, the lines between predator and prey blur when both parties turn out to be cunning." But, unlike the other reviewers, Russell is not uncritical. "Unfortunately, the story does lose quite a bit of its queasy power as the revelations start piling up, and there's so much monologuing by Hayley and Jeff that you wonder if Nelson's script wasn't first written for the stage," but nevertheless concludes that Hard Candy "still works as a smarter-than-usual cat-and-mouse deathmatch."

Other fests and events, 9/26.

October will be "a month of horror, terror, and general mayhem" at the Pioneer Theater in lovely New York City.

"Who, with the exception of its creator Leonard Schein, could have guessed that Vancouver's nascent film festival would grow from a one venue event showing 40 films in 1982 into one of the largest festivals in the world?" asks Greg Ursic at Hollywood Bitchslap in his preview of the 25th Vancouver International Film Festival.

Shawn Levy: "The 26th Cans Film Festival, a benefit for the Oregon Food Bank Network, will be held on Thursday, September 28, at all Regal Cinemas in Oregon and Clark County, Washington."

Ed Halter in the Voice: "[Su] Friedrich is one of the most accomplished avant-garde filmmakers of her generation, with a career of films and videos whose masterful construction and precise beauty attest to the positive aspects of her self-criticism, and her stature only makes the humbling existential crises in Seeing Red more poignant." MoMA's series runs through Saturday.

Brian Brooks previews the 14th Raindance Film Festival, opening in London tomorrow and running through October 8. Also, Kim Adelman has notes and links on "Ten of the Most Buzzed-About Films from Two of Southern California's Largest Shortfests."

Brooklyn Information and Culture's Rotunda Gallery and New York Magazine launch a free series on October 5 as Logan Hill moderates a discussion with Steven Shainberg (Fur) and Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints). Don R Lewis has a rave for Saints at Film Threat; more from Rob Nelson in the Voice.

Camillo de Marco at Cineuropa: "There will be 20 female directors throughout the various sections (four of which are competition) of the International Rome Film Festival." October 13 through 21.

More new lineups, these via Grady Hendrix: The Pusan International Film Festival (October 12 through 20) and the Chicago International Film Festival (October 5 through 19).

"Of the eight TIFFs I've attended, I think this year's was probably the strongest," writes Girish, introducing his reviews of Jia Zhangke's Still Life and Dong, Lisandro Alonso's Fantasma and Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. More on Toronto from David Walsh at the WSWS.

The Animated Films That Got Away made for a "somewhat disappointing" weekend for Doug Cummings.

Wanna be in a movie? Talk to Jerry Lentz.

NYFF, 9/26.

The New York Film Festival opens on Friday and runs through October 15. Besides highlighting three films to be screened during the first week - Mafioso, Woman on the Beach and Bamako - J Hoberman reviews the opener, The Queen, finding it "more fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring."

Also in the Voice, Michael Atkinson previews the 31-film sidebar, 50 Years of Janus Films, "a crash-course Cinema 101 of international masterpieces. Many are available on lovely Criterion DVDs already, but a substantial hunk remains, in this century, rarely screened and all but forgotten in modern film culture."

Tom Hall has sampled two: "Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water (in a stunning new print) followed by a screening of Ingmar Bergman's little-seen (by me anyway) Summer With Monika. Seeing both films back to back, projected in luminous black and white on the Walter Reade's screen, was quite a shock if only because of they felt completely modern and relevant; neither film has lost an ounce of timeliness."

Aaron Hillis opens his across-the-board preview for Premiere by noting that this year's edition "might be one of their richest line-ups in years based on the sweeping diversity of its 35 hand-picked features."

Daniel Kasman has set up a special section and has reviews of Marie Antoinette, Syndromes and a Century, Little Children and: "How unexpected is it that Belle Toujours, ostensibly a sequel (although called an homage) to Luis Buñuel's surreal classic about an posh Parisian wife up-and-deciding to work in a brothel in her spare time, would not only work, but work simply, sweetly, warmly, and wisely?" More on that one from Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

In his preview of the Views from the Avant-Garde series for Slant, Keith Uhlich focuses on Saul Levine and Paolo Gioli.

Jürgen Fauth has first impressions of August Days, Mafioso and Belle Toujours.

Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Marie Antoinette: "Coppola's interpretation is so simple it threatens to fall apart at any moment, and never congeals into anything beyond a beautiful, hollow sketch."

Fantastic Fest, 9/26.

"William Friedkin's Bug is a brilliant, unsettling, perfectly timed film that checks the pulse of a rapidly disintegrating national consciousness," writes Wiley Wiggins of the film that ranks, along with The Host and Funky Forest, among his favorites at the Fantastic Fest so far. Also wild about Bug is Blake Ethridge at Cinema Strikes Back: "Michael Shannon is at the driver's wheel. It's the best acting performance I've seen in 2006 and careens off all roads of sanity."

At Cinematical, Jette Kernion gets a kick out of Frostbite and also reviews Tideland and The Hamster Cage.

Peter Martin's quick run-downs at Twitch: The Host, Broken, Venus Drowning and Northville Cemetery Massacre (Director's Cut).

At Slackerwood, Chris Holland's got some quick notes and photos.

Allison Hope Weiner reports on Mel Gibson's controversial (deservedly or not) comments in Austin; related: Harry Knowles.

Telluride. Video review.

Cabinetic presents "GreenCine: Telluride 2006."

The video report not only captures the overall air of the festival but also features the likes of new co-director Gary Meyer, writers Scott Foundas and Jay Kuehner and of course a few filmmakers, too, talking about what makes the festival unique.

Tetsuro Tamba, 1922 - 2006.

There don't seem to be too many reports out there yet, but Tetsuro Tamba died a few days ago at the age of 84. Japan Today has a brief item and, because he was in You Only Live Twice, so does MI6 News.

Tetsuro Tamba's IMDb pages testify to an amazingly prolific career; his Wikipedia entry may be brief but does a fine job of noting the highlights, including performances in Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri and Kwaidan, Yoji Yamada's The Twilight Samurai and several films by Takashi Miike, including The Happiness of the Katakuris, Yakuza Demon and Gozu. He was also the voice of the Cat King in Hayao Miyazaki's The Cat Returns.

Update: Just saw that David Austin has a very fine remembrance at Cinema Strikes Back.

Interview. Raúl Ruiz.

With the release of Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting on DVD, the vast and vital oeuvre of Raúl Ruiz, seemingly so far out of reach for most of us, is brought one small but welcome step closer. Jonathan Marlow met the Chilean director in Rotterdam.

Also: A talk with Elsa Zylberstein about working with Ruiz on Time Regained and That Day.

Related: Rouge 2, an annotated Ruiz filmography.

Shorts, 9/25.

"Why this bizarre insistence that any attempt to show any World War II leaders as less than stainless somehow represents an insidious left-wing all-American-wars-are-imperialist agenda? After seeing a trailer, for heaven's sake." The Siren is stunned by Libertas into writing one helluvan entry on WWII movies and "The Gym Class School of Film Criticism."

Three terrific entries from AJ Schnack, right in a row, addressing three questions: Is Jackass Number Two a doc? Is Magnolia screwing up Jesus Camp's chances? Is the MPAA the Vatican's poodle?

More on Jesus Camp from Annie Nocenti at Filmmaker, where KJ Doughton has a piece on American Hardcore.

Jesus Camp "has split the Christian community and horrified those who fear the ascendance of the religious right on the national stage." That much you probably knew. But Gina Piccalo tracks the film's impact so far on its key players.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

Updated.

• "What do people who didn't live through the late 1940s and the 1950s make of these noir movies?" wonders Thomas de Zengotita. "I have a hypothesis: They make pretty much what I make of them, only at one remove - a very interesting remove."

• Peter Rainer on Brian De Palma: "He's imprisoned by his own legend, but I'm betting he has the Houdini moves to escape and astonish us - astonish himself - once again." Related: That Little Round-Headed Boy on Scarface.

• "Fuji, which, in addition to being Japan's biggest commercial TV broadcaster, has become a prolific producer of the live-action feature films that are seriously cutting into Hollywood's share of the box office," reports Bruce Wallace. What's more, "Fuji is not alone. All four of Japan's powerful TV networks have entered the movie business, creating a new source of domestic film production that is changing the economics of Hollywood's biggest market outside the US."

• Having Disney, but only Disney in its movie store could be a problem for both Apple and the studio, argues Joseph Menn.

Nathaniel R calls for a Blog-a-Thon on October 30: Vampires.

John Hughes, argues Michael Weiss, "was never quite the antagonist of the status quo he made himself out to be. He was actually a political conservative, and his portrayals of down-and-out youth rebellion had more to do with celebrating the moral victory of the underdog than with championing the underprivileged. In Hughes' hormonal vale of tears, snobs and elitists were the ones who ruined wealth for everybody else."

Also in Slate, Dana Stevens on All the King's Men and: what "literary jujitsu" has George W Bush picked up from Harold Pinter's Betrayal, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along and Christopher Nolan's Memento? Michael Kinsley explains: "If you trace the concept of 'victory' in his remarks on Iraq, and those of subordinates, you discover a war that was won three and a half years ago, and today has barely started."

"The sex that cast members had in the service of the movie seemed to stay in that context; intimate scenes didn't appear to complicate relationships among the cast members. And [John Cameron] Mitchell asked as much of himself as he did of his cast. For a scene that shows writhing bodies in a sort of sexual mosh pit, he jumped into the fray." Frank Bruni has a longish backgrounder on Shortbus in the New York Times. David Amsden profiles Mitchell for New York.

Also in the NYT:

• Sarah Lyall calls up Stephen Frears and Helen Mirren to talk about The Queen. Related: David Edelstein calls the film "a small masterpiece" in New York.

• Lynn Hirschberg visits "Sofia Coppola's Paris."

• "In a wave of films now reaching the screen, digital elements are woven together with the real, vastly extending the filmmaker's reach and leaving the audience to guess where one ends and the other begins." Take Flyboys, for example, suggests Bryan Reesman.

• "[A]s Fred Turner points out in his revealing new book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, there is no way to separate cyberculture from counterculture; indeed, cyberculture grew from its predecessor's compost," writes Edward Rothstein.

• Sharon Waxman on why Jim Carrey's breakup with manager Nick Stevens is indicative of a "tectonic movement going on in the entertainment industry."

London Fashion Week's just over, but The Devil Wears Prada is about to open in the UK. In the Independent, Vera Rule highlights landmark moments in the history of fashion at the movies while David Thomson, who also writes a bit about Funny Face, worries about all those thin girls.

Emma Brockes has a long, spicy talk with Meryl Streep. Also in the Guardian:

• James Flint contacts "the League of Noble Peers" behind StealThisFilm (Part 1).

• "[A]t the heart of both The Field and The Quiet Man is the bitter irony of Irish Americans returning home, and using their cash to take property from those who stayed on the land," notes Tim Ecott in a piece from the travel section.

• Chrissy Iley interviews Juliette Lewis.

In the Observer, Paul Harris notes how TV's becoming more like the movies while Mark Kermode argues that the movies are becoming more like TV. Also, Philip French on Children of Men and Peter Conrad on David Thomson's Nicole Kidman; more on that one from Peter Bradshaw, who also has a few words on Iain Johnstone "simply rounding up the known facts" in Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage.

Tim Lucas takes PBS to task for "censoring not only [Ric] Burns, but Warhol's art itself."

Nelhydrea Paupér at Flickhead on Bob Dylan 1966 - 1978: After the Crash: "Not to oversell it - this is mainly for Dylan fanatics or Psych majors interested in fanaticism's celebrity-related manifestations - but it's smart and fun and interesting and ridiculous and insightful and definitely—definitely—well worth the price of admission." Related: Via Coudal Partners, outtakes from the Freewheelin' sessions at Aquarium Drunkard.

Jonathan Kiefer at Maissoneuve on Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man: "Cohen is so good that even an untimely, mediocre movie about him—in which he barely performs any of his own music—is going to resonate, and this one does."

Filmbrain: "Based on Wallace Markfield's cynical novel To an Early Grave, Bye Bye Braverman is one of the most New York City-specific films I've come across - where Manhattan neighborhoods are used to draw subtle distinctions between four nearly identical characters, and where a working knowledge of Brooklyn is virtually a requirement to fully appreciate the film. It also happens to be the most Jewish of New York comedies, to the extent that it makes Woody Allen look like a sheygets."

Enough with the "Madagascar knock-offs," writes Aaron Hillis for IFC News. "Finding life along the major festival circuit and even some noteworthy theatrical releases across the country, a fresh crop of animated features are demonstrating darker, more mature, and downright arthouse sensibilities."

For whatever reason - does he need a reason? - Jack Sommersby offers a lists of the best films of 1980 through 1986, ten for each year, at Hollywood Bitchslap.

James Flynn is working his way through the WGA's "101 Greatest Screenplays."

The BBC: "Composer Sir Malcolm Arnold has died in hospital after a brief illness at the age of 84." And tributes have been coming in for the man who scored Bridge on the River Kwai.

See the Banskys Angelina Jolie just bought at CityRag. Via Anne Thompson.

Online viewing tip #1. Tom Sutpen introduces Berthold Bartosch's L'Idée, a 1930/32 adaption of "a 1920 volume by Belgian graphic artist Frans Masereel" and "one of the most poignant expressions in all animated film."

Online viewing tip #2. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Variations V at the DVblog.

Online viewing #3. David Bowie on Extras. Via Ed Champion.

Updates: Viewable at Crooks and Liars, "Bill Maher and his panel - which included a Muslim (Reza Aslan), a conservative Christian (Sandy Rios), and a liberal Episcopalian (Bradley Whitford) - discussed the underlying issues of [Jesus Camp] and the notion of raising and teaching 'Christian soldiers' to fight in God's army."

And via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker, Jeffrey Overstreet in Christianity Today: "Some Christian media personalities are speaking out against the movie, but for differing reasons. A few accuse the filmmakers of trying to discredit Fischer and her camp, and they rush to the defense of the film's subjects, saying that their methods of worship and education are to be celebrated. Others are criticizing the film by saying that this documentary footage severely misrepresents Christianity, and that it has been framed to draw viewers into viewing Christians as lunatics."

Fests and events, 9/25.

"[T]he one thing of which Su Friedrich is incapable is thoughtlessness," writes Stuart Klawans in the New York Times. "Her video diary has now grown into a piece called Seeing Red, and when it has its New York premiere on Wednesday at the Museum of Modern Art, part of a four-day retrospective of Ms Friedrich's work, viewers will discover that she has mulled over her pained monologues until they have taken on a musical form."

From the ongoing Fantastic Fest in Austin:

• Blake Ethridge's takes on Blood Tea and Red String, Renaissance and Zhest at Cinema Strikes Back.

• At Slackerwood, Chris Holland's got capsule reviews of Abominable, Renaissance, Zhest, Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, Tideland, A Quiet Love and Shinobi: Heart Under Blade.

• Quick notes from Peter Martin at Twitch on Isolation, Simon Says and Hatchet.

• Jette Kernion reviews Gamerz for Cinematical.

• More pix and notes from Wiley Wiggins.

• And of course, lots, lots and lots of coverage over at Ain't It Cool News.

In the run-up to the SF360 San Francisco City Movie Night on Wednesday, Susan Gerhard talks with Ian Inaba about American Blackout.

Never mind the Century 9, Brian Darr's got ten other cinematic goings on more deserving of San Franciscans' attention.

New York Film Festival previews:

• Acquarello on Saul Levine: Notes from the Underground, October 7.

• Tom Hall: "I don't know if there ever was a time when America didn't feel compelled to stand at the intersection of celebrity, gossip, envy and art in our culture, but what I do know is how weary I am of the way in which people's real lives become fodder for the interpretation of their work, and no recent example is as striking as the completely unjustified smear campaign being waged against Sofia Coppola and her wonderful Marie Antoinette."

• Nick Schager at Slant on Little Children, "a piece of melodramatic malarkey that carries itself with an air of profundity unjustified by its contrived, pedantic, and phony narrative and aesthetic spine."

In the Guardian, Ian Jack surveys the offerings of the series Stop! Look! Listen! he COI & 60 Years of Public Information Film-making in Britain at the National Film Theatre through October 17.

More from Toronto:

• Doug Cummings offers capsule reviews of Bamako, Times and Winds, Woman on the Beach, Khadak, Colossal Youth and "two genuine disappointments," Day Night Day Night and Red Road.

• Matt Riviera has a Toronto top ten, plus a few good surprises and disappointments.

• MS Smith on Summer 04, "a powerful statement about guilt and the prices of individual freedom."

• Cinematical's Kim Voynar: "Fay Grim, director Hal Hartley's follow-up to his 1997 cult favorite, Henry Fool, is just about as sharp, dark and funny as a Hartley fan could wish for."

Online viewing tip. Clinton vs Fox.

Utterly riveted, I was preparing an online viewing tip for the next batch of "Shorts" ("If only anyone, anyone at all, in the current administration had half the grip on reality this guy has"), when I saw that this thing is burning faster and brighter than anything since Steven Colbert's roast.

Ray Pride's lead-in to his link is particularly nice: "I don't have a stock phrase to describe the fifteen minutes... but former President Clinton's reaction to a set-up by Fox News' [Chris] Wallace is the most dramatic thing I've seen anywhere in too long. (Maybe Clinton should have advised Steven Zaillian on All the King's Men instead of James Carville.)"

Rouge. 9+.

Though Issue 9 went up in August, there are two new additions definitely worth noting. Yvette Bíró visits Agnès Varda's installation in the Fondation Cartier in Paris on view through October 8, "L'Ile et Elle - 'The Island and She,' a pun on Il et elle or 'He and She.' Knowing her rich work it is, not surprisingly, full of emotion-filled ideas and original observations."

Michael Witt has quite a collection of photographs taken at that other widely discussed exhibition in Paris this summer, Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946-2006.

Fantastic Fest, 9/24.

"Wow," yelps Matt Dentler. "No one ever expected that tonight, audiences at Fantastic Fest would be treated to the first public screening of Mel Gibson's latest release, Apocalypto." Gibson was on hand for a post-screening Q&A as well (Blake's got an MP3 at Cinema Strikes Back), a departure from his approach to screenings earlier in the week in Oklahoma, according to reports in the AP that have him in a mask and wig so as not to be noticed by the public. But in Austin, Matt writes, "The 200+ audience members at tonight's screening seemed to shrug off any politics or scandal, in favor of simply experiencing Gibson's latest work.... [S]candal or no, Mel Gibson has delivered a highly entertaining and suspenseful action film. Properly positioned, it could be a big success."

Updated through 9/25.

Tim Basham's having a grand time: "You take the number one moviehouse in the country, throw in talent from SXSW programming and Ain't It Cool News [where you'll naturally find oodles of reviews of oodles of films] and let them hand pick films from around the world. How could that not be fantastic?" Quick takes on The Hamster Cage, Abominable, Tideland and Gamerz follow. Earlier: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

"I'm enjoying watching movies with people who know how to watch movies," writes Peter Martin at Twitch. His quick takes: Abominable, Unrest, Renaissance and Zhest. Also, The Living and the Dead and The Hamster Cage.

Meanwhile, Jette Kernion and Chris Holland are all over the festival at Slackerwood.

Wiley Wiggins is posting lots of pix and quick comments as well.

Updates: First impressions of Apocalypto from Peter Martin (Twitch), Scott Weinberg (Cinematical) and Harry Knowles and Darla Hood (AICN).

Update, 9/25: Blake Ethridge at Cinema Strikes Back: "It's Wages of Fear with the pulp adventure feel of the old serials and westerns. It's a lyrical powerhouse of epic proportions that harks back to the days when Hollywood made films on the scale of Ben-Hur. Decadent, rousing and rife with a macabre message of doom for civilizations that are ruled and controlled by fear."

Shorts, 9/22.

"[Lars] Von Trier being Von Trier, The Boss of It All has one very perverse twist: it was made without a cameraman." Geoffrey Macnab explains: "The director was using a new process, 'developed with the intention of limiting human influence,' which he has called Automavision. This entails choosing the best possible fixed camera position and then allowing a computer to choose when to tilt, pan or zoom." Not only is the new film a comedy, he's written another: Erik Nietzsche: The Early Years.

Also in the Guardian:

• Peter Bradshaw on the "explosively violent future-nightmare thriller," Children of Men: "[D]espite the stylisations and grandiloquent drama, there is something just so grimly and grittily plausible about the awful world conjured up here, and the full-on urban warfare scenes really are electrifying." More from Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman, where he finds it "makes silly errors in its treatment of non-English-speaking cultures... It's a disappointing oversight in a film that has much to recommend it, not least the proof it offers, as if any more were needed, that Alfonso Cuarón is one of the most visually inspired directors working today." And: Tim Robey's intriguingly mixed review in the Telegraph, Anthony Quinn in the Independent and James Christopher in the London Times. And Time Out gets Cuarón talking about the film.

• "To conquer racism in the present, we first need to admit its absolute cultural primacy and acceptability in the past." John Patterson argues against revisionist histories of cinema.

• "Blacking up has become acceptable in the same way that pole dancing is now sold to women as an empowering thing to do," fumes Hannah Pool; also, Patrick Barkham on the history of blackface.

• The editors remember Paul Robeson.

• Richard Williams on Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait: "[I]f their film tell us nothing about football, at least [Douglas] Gordon and [Philippe] Parreno give us a compelling study of the stillness that erupted into an historic crime passionel."

• Michael Hann talks with Cory Edwards about the unique animation process that resulted in Hoodwinked.

Signandsight translates a passage from Volker Hummel's talk with Jia Zhangke about Still Life for die taz: "Above all [the censors] didn't like the fact that the words 'Three Gorges' occur in the title ('Sanxia Haoren' means 'The good People of the Three Gorges' - ed). But when I asked what they had against the film taking place there, they didn't say. So the title remained. They also wanted to change one scene in a factory. Huge portraits of Marx, Lenin and Mao hung on the wall, and they wanted them to be cut because they suspected an ironic undertone. This shows how clueless the people in the censorship authority are about film. That they're just plain old party cadres. When I said I'd found the portraits there and asked if the three men were now frowned upon politically, the scenes were allowed."

"So I came in the next day and Jack's hair was all over the place. He was muttering to himself and the prop guy tipped me off that he had a fire extinguisher, a bottle of whisky, some matches and a handgun somewhere." That's Leonardo DiCaprio, telling one of several stories John Hiscock gathers for the Telegraph about the making of The Departed.

Erik Hedegaard has an odd conversation with Nicholson for the cover of the Rolling Stone.

The Bicycle Thief tops DiCaprio's annotated list of top ten film of all time.

Also in the Independent:

• James Mottram: "[W]hat is remarkable about The Long Good Friday is just how fresh it remains. It's also prophetic. Set on the cusp of the 80s, as [Bob] Hoskins puts it, 'What was extraordinary about it was that we were just on the verge of Thatcherism. It hit the nail so firmly on the head, of where the 80s were gonna go.'"

• Andrew Gumbel profiles George Clooney.

• Arnold Schwarzenegger on the agreement California has signed with the UK to tackle global warming.

• An excerpt from Ashley Judd's diary: "Today I have begun to see beyond Madagascar's physical beauty and into its extraordinary poverty."

• Lesley O'Toole interviews Adam Sandler.

Gary Oldman has quite a bit to say about Nil By Mouth in Time Out, where Dave Calhoun talks with Lodge Kerrigan about Keane.

"With stories ranging from 15th-century Central America to 18th-century France, from the early 20th century to World War I, World War II, post–World War II, the early Cold War, and the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, filmmakers seem to be turning their gaze from the present day. Who can blame them for not wanting to get involved in its ongoing confusion, controversy, chaos, and fear?" asks Peter Keough in his preview of the fall movie season for the Boston Phoenix.

"A big, booming spectacle that sprawls across oceans and generations, Flags of Our Fathers, which opens on Oct 20, was anything but a simple undertaking," reports David M Halbfinger, who maps the network of players involved, some of them competitors, with this one and Letters From Iwo Jima. But also:

Above all it is a study of the callous ways in which heroes are created for public consumption, used and discarded, all with the news media's willing cooperation. And it is imbued with enough of a critique of American politicians and military brass to invite suspicions that Hollywood is appropriating the iconography of World War II to score contemporary political points. Yet just when it verges on indicting the people responsible for exploiting the troops, the movie comes round to their point of view.

Also in the New York Times:

• AO Scott on All the King's Men: "Nothing in the picture works." Related: In the LA Weekly, Ella Taylor explains why Steven Zaillian is the wrong director for an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's novel; in the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keough talks with Zaillian and pans the film. More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

• Stephen Holden on American Hardcore, "a toned-down cinematic equivalent of the music: fast and loud, but not too loud." Also, Kelefa Sanneh: "Whereas punks sneered at a broader society, hardcore kids grappled with a narrower one." Related: Though he was "more Sonic Youth than Black Flag" at the time, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir is "profoundly grateful for this film." More from Eric Kohn in the New York Press. Also: indieWIRE's interview with director Paul Rachman.

• Holden on "the riveting documentary" Jesus Camp: "It wasn't so long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong's Red Guards, turned the world's most populous country inside out. Nowadays the possibility of a right-wing Christian American version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely far-fetched." More from Andrew O'Hehir at Salon, Gary Dretzka at Movie City News and Pete Aleska at Blank Screen.

• Nathan Lee on Jackass Number Two: "It is also too exhilarating to spoil. Debased, infantile and reckless in the extreme, this compendium of body bravado and malfunction makes for some of the most fearless, liberated and cathartic comedy in modern movies." More from Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

• Holden on Renaissance: "Effectively moody as it is, the style makes a convoluted story of corporate greed, high-tech espionage and science run amok even more difficult to follow. This is a plot that goes on as many tangents and wild goose chases as The Big Sleep."

• Lee: "Despite its empty head and arduous length, Flyboys is ever so nice, in the manner of a Norman Rockwell illustration.... In another context, such politesse might feel tonic. Given the state of things, it's nearly toxic."

• Lee finds that Nathan Lopez's "effortless charisma buoys [The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros] even when it goes heavy with contrivance."

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Train Man wants us to get off our computers and get out of the house; in a country as technocentric as Japan, the suggestion that it may be time to replace the cyber with the real is not just subversive, it's downright revolutionary."

• Catsoulis: "Few things in a democracy are more sacrosanct than the right to vote, and in his furious documentary American Blackout, Ian Inaba assembles compelling evidence to support his claim that African-Americans - who are traditionally more likely to vote Democratic - are being deliberately and systematically excluded from the political process."

• Neil Genzlinger dismisses Los Lonely Boys: Cottonfields and Crossroads as "a prolonged promotional video."

• Laura Kern: "A boxing tale, an interracial love story and a prison/mob drama devoid of suspense, spark or grit, the ambitiously genre-crossing yet disastrously executed They're Just My Friends is hands down the most excruciatingly inept film to creep its way into theaters in some time."

"My entry into Paolo Gioli's sublime cinema was through the infectiously exuberant, ingeniously constructed, and irresistibly seductive Filmarilyn, an elegant and mesmerizing film that remains one of my favorite experimental works." Acquarello reviews the entries in the Giolo program at the New York Film Festival's Views from the Avant-Garde sidebar. October 8.

Marie Antoinette gets a "B+" from Nick Schager. Also, at Slant, Syndromes and a Century "boasts an unanticipated measure of droll, deadpan humor... Nonetheless, it's the film's belief in the act of remembering as essential and ongoing that remains its most enduring and poignant characteristic."

According to Monkey Peaches, early reviews of Curse of the Golden Flower in Beijing are quite positive.

"Emerging Bosnian filmmaker Danijela Majstorovic addresses this crisis of women's lives - and the troubling lack of choices - in two films which premiered at the Bosnia-Herzegovinian Film Festival in New York City." Danielle Jackson talks with her for PopMatters.

"A Hollywood movie being shot in Bosnia about the hunt for a genocide suspect tries to ask the wider question of why wanted men like Radovan Karadzic and Osama bin Laden are still free, its director said on Wednesday." Nedim Dervisbegovic reports for Reuters on Flak Jacket, directed by Richard Shepard and starring Richard Gere.

"You Kill Me leads to what I have always thought about [John] Dahl," writes Steve Ramos about the mob comedy due next year. "He consistently makes the opportunity for one more triumph."

Don R Lewis interviews Joe Swanberg for Film Threat. Also, Eric Campos recommends Chalk, a mockumentary based on the idea of explaining why so many high school teachers - 50 percent? - call it quits within three years.

Jennifer Merin talks with writer-director Frank E Flowers about his first feature, Haven. Also in the New York Press, Mark Peikert finds Keeping Mum "much darker than the usual Brit comedy exports."

In Half Nelson, Ryan Gosling plays "the most believable protagonist in any American movie I've seen this year," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. More from David Fellerath in the Independent Weekly.

"Volver does not rely on mystery to sustain our interest," writes Vincent Deary in the Times Literary Supplement. "Rather, it provides an intensely compelling, rich and mythic vision of women." Related: Jeff Reichert on Law of Desire at Reverse Shot.

Though he's seen it three times and will likely see it again, Arthur C Danto explains his frustration with Ric Burns's Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film in the Nation: "[T]he breakthrough period of creative genius, (1961-65)... That period was really the 'Exploding Plastic Inevitable,' to use Warhol's name for his famous East Village nightclub - a condensed renaissance in which contemporary art was invented and the history of Western art up to that point definitively ended - and it calls for an equally innovative cinematic format."

Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "Aside from appreciating the film's love for Gotham, Shortbus is one of the most optimistic films discussing - not simply depicting - sex and relationships that I have seen in some time."

"As the talkies and the Depression hit Hollywood practically simultaneously, an old vaudeville trouper named Marie Dressler found the greatest success of her spotty career. Large, rumbly and rubber-faced, able to pile triple-take onto double-take, Dressler was a queen of schtick who was also able to create a disciplined sort of deep-seated pathos." Dan Callahan surveys a career at the House Next Door.

"Does anyone else share my longstanding affection for this show?" John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows on David O Selznick's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

"1956's Street of Shame, which was to be [Kenji Mizoguchi's] last film, will seem a curious work for those viewers only familiar with more majestic films like Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff," writes Leo Goldsmith at Reverse Shot.

Peter Nellhaus: "While The Quiet Duel can be categorized with Kurosawa's other socially concerned films, looking beyond the narrative is a critique of Japanese manners, especially the custom of indirectly addressing a concern in conversation, as well as the misplaced sense of shame."

Tim Lucas on The Man Who Changed His Mind: "The most surprising aspect of this mind-boggling melodrama is its keen and immediately apparent sense of fun."

Jim Emerson explains why he feels "the most exciting place for film criticism, and an informed film community, these days is on certain Internet blogs - where each individual blogger can write in detail (with digressions and tangents into other areas of related knowledge) - but that is just the beginning of the conversation, since others can post comments, continue the discussion, and elaborate upon the original post. The blogger also has the opportunity to clarify, refine, and move the discussion into a fruitful direction."

Chris Cagle recommends Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors, "a fun and thought-provoking read.... [James] Morrison is interested in reading larger socio-cultural formations (high culture, the art film, modernism) in certain key films, which if not representative moments are at least moments pregnant with significance."

C Jerry Kutner offers a "Brief History of Noir" at Bright Lights After Dark.

Eric D Snider presents a list of his top 50 films of the last ten years.

Andrew Krucoff has a few questions for Sydney Pollack about LA for the 92Y Blog.

European-films.net is tracking European submissions to the Academy as they're announced.

Online viewing tip. The dance of the ghosts sequence from Satyajit Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne at TickleBooth.

Online viewing tips. The Flash Animation 10, the most influential online Flash animation shorts, compiled by Aaron Simpson, with commentary, interviews, the works. Via Cartoon Brew.

Fests and events, 9/22.

"To say that this year's Fantastic Fest is a monumental, orders-of-magnitude, leapfrog-the-unicorn, severed-head-and-shoulders bypass of Fantastic Fest 2005 is zero hyperbole: 58 feature films, 30 shorts, and enough special guests (including Darren Aronofsky, who'll be premiering his ultra-anticipated The Fountain) to qualify it as fanboy (and -girl) heaven." Marc Savlov talks with co-programmers Harry Knowles, Cinemuerte Festival founder Kier-La Janisse, SXSW Film "overlord" Matt Dentler, Alamo Drafthouse co-owner Tim League and then picks a top five he's going to try to catch before the fest wraps this coming Thursday. Peter Martin has a quick rundown of the first day of screenings at Twitch.

Back in the Austin Chronicle: "When the People's Choice votes at this year's Toronto International Film Festival were tallied, University of Texas graduate Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's Bella was deemed the audience favorite." And Marjorie Baumgarten tracks other Hill Country successes as well.

More Toronto postscripts:

• Dave Kehr admires Jia Zhangke's use of HD in Still Life and finds Offside "probably Jafar Panahi's most light-hearted movie since he jumped on the world stage with The White Balloon in 1995 - though that's 'light-hearted' in a strictly Iranian context."

• Tom Charity for Time Out. "Most memorable night? Has to be the world premiere of Guy Maddin's delirious silent, Brand Upon the Brain!... Surely this is the sort of night film festivals were invented for?"

• Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Pages: "The festival's most exuberant shock... was Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, his first film since 2000's dismal Hollow Man. Less a return to form than a rebirth, the return to Verhoeven's native Holland cross-breeds the director's scatological cynicism with the World War II thriller, producing an ever-shifting examination of wartime morality which is, first and foremost, a cracking good yarn."

• Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix: "The best film of Toronto 2006? Jia Zhangke's Still Life... The best American feature at Toronto? Studio pictures came and went, but the film that stayed with me was Sleeping Dogs Lie, the scandalous and also unexpectedly sweet American indie written and directed by ex-Boston comedian Bobcat Goldthwait." Also, Peter Keough and Paul Babin's list of assassination movies.

• Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly on The Lives of Others and Deliver Us From Evil and then, briefly, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Grbavica, Private Fears in Public Places, My Best Friend and Little Children.

• Scott Foundas on the New Crowned Hope series.

• "If moviegoing is dying, you'd never guess it from the pushy throngs trying to see any and everything here during the last week and a half," observes Josef Braun. A pick from the overview: "Manufactured Landscapes, tightly controlled to emphasize scale in [Jennifer] Baichwal's work, might be this year's most vital and illuminating documentary, yet I wonder if it won't also limit readings of Baichwal's rich and multifaceted work to its environmental significance for many years to come."

• David Walsh at the WSWS: "One felt at the 2006 edition of the Toronto festival a far more substantial connection between world reality and cinema reality than was the case in 1994 or 1998."

• Many didn't spot a running theme in Toronto but the Toronto Star's Peter Howell certainly did: "the loss of American idealism." Via Movie City News.

• And for MCN, Stephen Holt for Movie City News: "The Toronto Film Festival, the undisputed greatest festival in North America, has now also become a queer touchstone par excellence."

Ella Taylor recommends Unshown Cinema: The Animated Films That Got Away, through Sunday, but don't take the kids to tonight's "Dangerous Visions" programm, "a terrific but disturbing collection of international short films that cover everything from family disorder to the death of the planet."

Michael Guillén talks with Susan Weeks Coulter, "chairperson of the Global Lens Initiative, about the Initiative's various aims and its ongoing traveling film series."

Michael Fox at SF360: "Fests, and touring programs such as the currently unspooling Global Lens series, cannily promote themselves as community events deserving of media attention. As such, they can attract press coverage that would never accrue to an individual film from Burkina Faso or Brazil by an unknown director with unknown actors. Forgive me for taking a marketing angle, for the great thing about the films in the Global Lens collection, as well as most of the movies in any festival worth its 501(c)3 status, is the way they value authentic cultural expression above commerce."

"Pop Montreal has a film festival buddy, and its name is - shockingly! - Film Pop." The imaginative lineup includes a series of shorts from local filmmakers paired with local bands. October 4 through 8.

For the Korean Film Commission, Nigel D'Sa reports on the lineup for the 11th Pusan International Film Festival (October 12 through 20). Writing in the Korean Times, Kim Tae-jong sees a PIFF challenger in the new Rome Film Festival (October 13 through 21).

"Putting my screenplays aside this past weekend, I attended the Northwest Documentary Association's DocFarm 06," writes Greg Brotherton at the Siffblog. "I wasn't sure what to expect, but the retreat exceeded my wildest expectations."

Interview. Jet Li.

"The philosophy, honor, responsibility, what kind of person learns martial arts, how to use martial arts to help people. It's more important than just kick ass, beat up somebody... I put everything already in this movie, so I having nothing to say in the future. That's why it's my last martial arts film." Jet Li tells Sean Axmaker about Fearless.

Related: Grady Hendrix not only interviews Fearless director Ronny Yu, he also reviews the film, finding it "a red-blooded, full-on, go-for-broke throwback to Hong Kong moviemaking of the early 90s" but also "one of those movies with a limp" - and points to yet more reviews.

"Li - as well as many of his martial arts contemporaries - is usually misinterpreted as a tough guy, a superbad fighter that can kick any behind in the room," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "But in reality, he's a poet, a dancer with the grace and sophistication of a Fred Astaire. Moreover, Li shares the same critical reception as most dancers or comedians, or artists who accomplish their cinematic work through physical means; he is ignored. But I maintain that in Fearless he has given performances worthy of awards." At Combustible Celluloid, Jeffrey interviews Li.

Updated through 9/24.

The LA CityBeat's Andy Klein likens Li's retirement from onscreen martial arts to "Gene Kelly permanently giving up dance for dramatic roles." As for the film, "I've seen Bergman films with more comic relief.... Leaving issues of tone aside, Fearless is, not surprisingly, beautifully crafted."

Andrew Wright finds that this film "serves as a rousing, philosophically high-minded reminder of the actor's glory days. If the subject matter occasionally cries out for a longer length - and how many action movies can you say that about? - it still feels like an appropriate capper to a career routinely defying the laws of physics." Wright also talks with Li.

"For the moment, the notion of a Chinese freedom fighter defending the honor of his nation against a seven-foot Yankee muscleman named Hercules O'Brien (Nathan Jones) remains more or less credible. But tomorrow?" asks Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "Such narratives may lose their punch when China rules the universe."

Steve Lillebuen, writing in Vue Weekly, finds Fearless "a satisfying swan song" though it's "not Li's best or most memorable performance."

And Kimberley Chun, too, has a quick chat with Li in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Earlier: Reflecting on Li's career in the NYT, Terrence Rafferty is also reminded of "sitting through a Hollywood studio musical of the 30s or 40s: you wait for Astaire and Rogers, or the Nicholas Brothers, or Donald O'Connor to take the stage, and you learn to endure the witless banter and clunky farce that fill the long minutes between numbers."

Updates: Yes, it's "a genre picture, with all the energy and life the adjective genre implies (it's never a pejorative in my book)," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Fearless is also one of the most beautifully made pictures of the year: The story is told so simply and clearly, and in such striking visual terms, that I can already hear people carelessly accusing it of being clichéd - although sometimes the things we so comfortably identify as clichés are also the very things that give us our purest movie experiences, allowing movies to reach us in the deepest and most essential way. And Li's performance - both in terms of its physicality and its emotional pitch - puts much of what's lauded as great contemporary movie acting to shame."

Nick Schager at Slant: "Beginning as a polished, visually ravishing capper to Li's illustrious action career, it ultimately sermonizes itself into something of a bloodlust-denigrating wet blanket."

Mike Russell: "It's simple stuff, but - and this is crucial - it's not dumb simple stuff."

Update, 9/24: Mike Russell not only has a good long talk with Jet Li, he's also got a good loooong talk with Ronny Yu.

Interview. Michel Gondry.

Following a slew of already-classic music videos, the remarkable Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the rousing Dave Chappelle's Block Party, French director Michel Gondry's playfully surreal new feature, The Science of Sleep, finally opens in US theaters. Sean Axmaker's got several question for him and, in turn, Gondry's got one for him.

Related: For AO Scott, writing in the New York Times, this new film, "for all its blithe disregard of the laws of physics, film grammar and narrative coherence, strikes me as perfectly realistic, as authentic a slice of life as I've encountered on screen in quite some time."

"Sweet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry's new feature The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Crosscutting between Stéphane's dreams and reality, reprising material in a variety of different contexts, The Science of Sleep is an extraordinarily playful movie. The mood is borderline fey. But no less than its hero, the movie is too strange and even infantile to be whimsical."

Todd at Twitch: "Those who get it... are likely to get it hard and so, while unlikely to further the cult of Gondry, The Science of Sleep should further cement his status among already existing acolytes."

Updated.

"A Gondry film has normally been a destination date for its dogged innovation and sui generis worldview," writes James Crawford, opening Reverse Shot's round on the film for indieWIRE. "[I]t pained me, then, to see that while it has craft in spades and a smattering of quietly charming moments, Gondry's latest is ragged and overfull - an undeniably singular, personal statement that paradoxically lacks any manner of focus or bearing, a mundane endeavour from one of contemporary cinema's most febrile and astonishing minds."

Brett Michel in the Boston Phoenix: "Unkempt pastiches of narrative transgressions threaten collapse, but Gondry wills his balancing act to work... a one-of-a-kind original."

"How can a film as witty and imaginative as The Science of Sleep be so unsatisfying?" asks Steve Erickson in Gay City News, where he finds the film "filled with concepts that would be dazzling - if they only lasted for three minutes."

Though, for whatever reason, he has to slap down Andrew Bujalski - twice - along the way, Armond White eventually gets to his point: "These days, given the (ironic) dumbing-down of technologically advanced digital-cinema, few films can equal Gondry's homespun craft.... He's what Tim Burton would be if Burton had never bonded with monster movies or gone Hollywood."

Eric Kohn writes the New York Press cover story on Gondry, but at his Screen Rush, he adds, "I've got more to say about this quintessentially quirky artist than the published piece might lead you to believe. So here's my extended version, which I think tells a much stronger tale of success and frustration in the limelight."

At AICN, Gondry talks with Quint not only about Science but also about Be Kind, Rewind. He's going to be taking a rather surprising approach to all those remakes.

"Much of Michel Gondry's talent derives from his being completely undisciplined as a filmmaker," observes Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger. Nonetheless, here: "Beneath all the visual trickery is a beating heart - unfortunately, Gondry is all too eager to send that heart into palpitations."

"Gondry's visual imagination could be the liveliest in movies today - and can you think of a more alluring vessel for that imagination than [Gael García] Bernal?" asks Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Earlier: Lynn Hirschberg's profile of Gondry in the NYT Magazine.

Updates: "This movie walks a fine line, and it's going to drive some viewers absolutely bats," warns Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "I think that's because, underneath its layers of fancy and confection, it cuts pretty close to the bone. But if you were ever a Stéphane or a Stéphanie, passionately in love but trapped in your own head - and if you're at peace with that part of yourself now - The Science of Sleep may hold you suspended in magical space, up there near the ceiling."

Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "The Science of Sleep isn't as intricately plotted as Eternal Sunshine, nor does it rush to quite as satisfying an end. It doesn't have anyplace in particular to go, and it takes its time not getting there. But the sightseeing is fantastic."

Matt Singer talks with Gondry for IFC News.

"Michel Gondry's work is so hip that it's easy to forget what a romantic he is," writes Marcy Dermansky. "[I]t's no surprise that The Science of Sleep is unduly clever. The cleverness, fortunately, comes off as fresh."

Robert Keser at Bright Lights After Dark: "As a cultural record, The Science of Sleep usefully brings to the surface a robust yet barely acknowledged undercurrent of American cinema, the Peter Pan conception of manhood as a Long Adolescence that dates back to the Star Wars movies but now powers pop hits like The Break-Up, Failure to Launch, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and all Jackass movies of the past, present and future. When Stéphane dream-broadcasts from his corrugated cardboard TV-studio, he's his own Anchorman, mining an emotional self-indulgence that prioritizes the individual while it shuts out responsibility to the community. For all this movie's charm, isn't it time to explore the art of being fully awake?"

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "[L]ike Stéphane, the film can't seem to get out of its own head, and it rambles along like a disjointed anecdote that makes more sense to the teller than the tellee. Why does Stéphane ram his head into the door? What the hell does Stéphanie want, anyway? Who let Gondry write the script for his next film, Be Kind Rewind?"

Cinema Scope. 28.

"Perhaps it's out of some unconscious will to put off new readers, but it's not from some misguided nationalism (and certainly not to please the funders), that I present a very modest 'Canadian Spotlight' in this issue," writes editor Mark Peranson, introducing the new issue of Cinema Scope. Two of those pieces are online, and we're in luck: in the first, Robert Koehler examines "Some Aspects of Norman McLaren."

These aspects include the currently ongoing canonization of McLaren, propelled by the National Film Board of Canada's "elaborately presented, meticulously realized, and exhaustively presented survey," Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition, the full impact of which is "like some kind of national holiday gone berserk." But as you read Koehler's history of McLaren's reception outside of Canada, you'll find that fairly easy to understand.

Adam Nayman talks with Ron Mann about his "terrific, up-tempo documentary Tales of the Rat Fink. The title refers to [Ed] Roth's most famous creation, a drooling, degenerate, pea-green rodent who was, briefly but genuinely, the most successful anti-establishment cartoon character of all time."

Two more interviews have little to do with Canada. Bug is the occasion for Andrew Tracy's talk with William Friedkin, though the conversation ranges far wider.

A Critical Cinema 5, Scott MacDonald's latest volume of interviews with experimental filmmakers, may (or may not) be the last of the series. Michael Sicinski sees an appropriate moment to "a good time to turn the tables a bit and interview the interviewer," Scott MacDonald.

Just what is this New Crowned Hope series we first heard about when Hamaca Parguaya screened at Cannes, then again all through Venice and culminating in Toronto? Christoph Huber lays out Peter Sellars's thinking and then takes a look at the films in the program.

"Sharing the designation which [Raúl] Ruiz frequently ascribes to himself, [Georgian filmmaker Otar] Iosseliani can be called 'the best known of the unknown directors,'" writes Quintín. "Both are considered minor masters in the French nomenklatur, and they share a sense of subtlety, irony, a love of long shots and a hatred for explanation, psychology, and conventional storytelling.... Iosseliani's films are far from being optimistic. On the contrary, they convey a deep sadness that has been especially apparent in his last few films."

Tom McSorley on a "New Wave from Slovenia": "[O]ne of the most exciting developments in contemporary European cinema in the last decade is the very impressive arrival and persistence of a distinctive, accomplished body of work from this country of two million people."

Jonathan Rosenbaum once again tells you how to get your hands on DVDs you might not have known even existed. Among the stars of this column: Oskar Fischinger, John Berry, Michel Brault, Miklós Jancsó, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ken Jacobs, William A Wellman, Nagisa Oshima, Jean-Luc Godard, FW Murnau and Sam Fuller.

Andréa Picard: "[Josef] Dabernig's short films have concurrent themes and motifs, each recognizably, unmistakably his. A cross between Béla Tarr, Jacques Tati, Samuel Beckett and Aki Kaurismäki, these works ranging in length between seven and 24 minutes rely on minimalism to fashion portraits of modernist decay and the banal scenarios that occur amidst their structures."

Jerry White focuses primarily on Swiss cinema in his report on the Locarno Film Festival.

Andrew Tracy: "Babel's globetrotting is nothing but the rankest, bloated provincialism, all the more unfortunate in that [Alejandro González] Iñárritu and [Guillermo] Arriaga, artistically adrift on their sea of international co-production dollars, no longer have a province, or a universe, to hail from."

DVDs, 9/21.

Once again, DK Holm checks in with the DVD specialists..

Among a relatively light load of DVD releases this week are Criterion's discs of Victor Erice's highly esteemed Spirit of the Beehive from 1973 and Nobuno Nakagawa's maudit horror film Jigoku from 1960. Reviewer Fusion3600 at DVD Authority comes to the conclusion that the "genesis of the fear and dread" in Spirit of the Beehive "is Frankenstein's monster from the movie, but this movie doesn't focus on a monster, the real focus is death. The subject is dealt with in an honest fashion, but still a quite childlike fashion. There is fear to be sure, but there is also deep fascination, as the children delve deeper to try to uncover the truth." Fusion also found the supplements light but effective.

At the DVD Journal, Mark Bourne, in a lengthy consideration of the film, determines that "looking for Erice's coded subversive critiques of the Franco government is one of the film's headier pleasures," and that the film is "a visually striking sketch of childhood at the place where childhood fantasy and bullet-hard reality come together. How those two opposites blend and shape one another gives us a graceful, lyrical masterpiece wound around one of the most natural and engrossing performances by a child actor we've ever seen."

For Jigoku, DVD Verdict's Brett Cullum traces the film's influence on later J-Horror films. "This film defined Japanese horror for many years to come. Strange camera angles, spiritual torture, and crazy narrative edits are all in place as the reels unfold. Westerners may find the symbols and subtle clues impenetrable, but interests will pique once the torture begins," adding that "Jigoku is entertaining and completely over the top. Anyone expecting a slow-paced, classical-feeling foreign film will be shocked to find out that the plot writhes and turns at an almost breakneck pace." DVD Talk's Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, determines that "Nakagawa's Hell is an almost random array of ghastly, garish visions laid out in widescreen tableaux," and notes that the film actually predates similar gore films such as those by Herschell Gordon Lewis. Erickson also helpfully tracks the history of the Criterion disc: "Disc producer Marc Walkow began work on the title over two years ago, when Criterion was planning a second branded label called 'Eclipse' to handle genre cinema. The focus was eventually changed to include more general overlooked and lesser-known cinema, a category for which Jigoku certainly qualifies. Eclipse hasn't been abandoned altogether, but both this film and Equinox were re-routed to the standard Criterion banner."

And finally, over at the DVD Journal, Gregory P Dorr takes a look at The Devil and Daniel Johnston, calling it "one of the best recent musical documentaries," adding that director Jeff Feuerzeig "fashions an exceptional profile of this most bizarre character - whose cult-fueled career has been defined by his severe bouts with mental illness - in a portrait that should deeply touch Johnston's fans while also relating to the uninitiated why this offbeat and troubled performer is held in such high esteem by his peers."

---

Earlier: In Rouge 9, Alain Bergala and Miguel Marías on Erice and Kiarostami; in Rouge 4, Erice himself; in the Voice, Michael Atkinson on Spirit; Peter Lennon's 2003 interview for the Guardian.

And then there's David D'Arcy's interview with Jeff Feuerzeig.

Toronto. Wrap-up.

Michael Sicinski wrote some of the sharpest short reviews out there throughout the Toronto International Film Festival. Here, he closely considers a few highlights and one "failure... worth arguing with and against."

Over the past few years, the Toronto International Film Festival has worked noticeably hard to shed its former "Festival of Festivals" mantle, striving to feature more world premieres alongside the expected titles from Cannes, Venice and, to a lesser extent, Sundance, Berlin and Karlovy Vary. Although this strategy has produced mixed results in the past, it seems to me that somehow TIFF 06 got the balance right. Brand new films from major artists shone forth alongside gems from the "weak" Cannes line-up which, in a different, less rarefied context, could be judged again on their own merits. Throw in a "secret," last-minute Venice winner, and some timely dispatches from the avant-garde, and this year's TIFF actually started looking a bit like one for the ages.

First things first: among those lucky enough to have made time in their cramped schedules for the fifth "Wavelengths" experimental program, consensus seemed to form almost immediately. Nathaniel Dorsky's new film Song and Solitude was probably the best film in the festival overall, and a major breakthrough in the development of his art. After making the leap with his 1999 film Variations from formally mediated abstractions into observational slices of poetic time, linked by a non-associative editing style, Dorsky spent nearly a decade making, well, variations on this style. Lovely as they were, they lacked the revelatory power of the first film in the series, the sense that the artist was developing a new way of seeing, allowing it to slowly detonate in his viewers' consciousness.

Variations

Song and Solitude, which world premiered at Toronto (and will play in October at the New York Film Festival "Views from the Avant-Garde" sidebar), finds Dorsky expanding his visual vocabulary once again. As with his earlier films, Dorsky's latest is presented in pure silence and projected at 18 frames per second. But although Song does contain recognizable images of daily life, Dorsky has produced a film predominantly composed of shimmering registrations of fleeting light, the sun peering through dense foliage or patterns of color and texture glinting off a glass surface. In short, Song and Solitude captures the momentary visual phenomena that define the interstitial moments of our lives, those that hover in the unconscious, fragile and half-perceived. The only real point of comparison for this film is the work of Stan Brakhage, and even then, Dorsky is working in the realm of Brakhage's least-compromising, most intensely materialist efforts, such as the Arabic Numeral Series (1981) and The Text of Light (1974). But in terms of unique qualities of luminosity and density that Dorsky manages to capture, Song and Solitude is a singular achievement.

Several films in the festival were notable for shifting our usual concepts of what counts as "political art." Like Dorsky's films, these features are committed to exploring the formal boundaries of cinema, but in addition their cumulative impact provides a different set of arguments on behalf of the subaltern and the underprivileged. One such film was Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako, which had its North American premiere at the festival. I'll admit that I felt some trepidation regarding the film's premise - the citizens of Bamako, Mali, conducting a trial to prosecute the World Bank and the WTO -, not because I disagree with Sissako's political agenda (I wholeheartedly agree that neo-liberal economic policies have been disastrous for the developing world), but because the premise led me to suspect that the film would be an artless piece of well-intentioned agit-prop. As it happens, my fears were completely unfounded.

Sissako does stage a mock-trial of recent Western intervention into African affairs, but deftly enfolds it into the fragmentary observational style that characterized his previous film, the lovely Waiting for Happiness (2002). Through gentle rhythms and repetitions, the earlier film gradually provided a picture of day-to-day life in the West African nation. Stylistically, the film resembled early Kiarostami, but with a more disbursed narrative framework. In Bamako, Sissako takes his game to a new level, making the trial into one among many events marking daily life, albeit an important one whose impact is felt on all concerned.

The trial itself allows the rehearsal of some familiar arguments regarding African debt forgiveness and Western hegemony. But Sissako's "witnesses" deliver their testimony with such passion that it is as though we are really hearing these arguments (and the voices who make them) for the first time. (One of Sissako's biggest formal gambits is in the final third of the film, when an elderly Malian delivers his testimony as a mournful folk song. Sissako doesn't bother with subtitles, since the plangent musicality tells us everything we need to know.) So, instead of dryly educating his audience about African politics, Sissako employs the poetic skills of his earlier work in order to give these political arguments greater social force. He shows us what Malian society is, and what is at stake if the West allows unchecked capitalism to assimilate or even destroy it.

Two other films used the power of the aesthetic to allow their political interventions to reverberate well beyond mere reportage. Scott Foundas and Mark Peranson have already ably defended Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, but it bears repeating that this film is an engrossing immersion into lives most of us know nothing about. In the rubble of a Lisbon public housing bloc, Costa's non-professional actors live out their lives, with dignity as well as mental and emotional turmoil. "Ventura," the tall Cape Verde immigrant with the depressive yet regal demeanor, struggles to find a place in the material world, just as his wife has opted to leave him behind. Costa employs long takes and highly stylized framings to allow his viewership adequate time in the presence of the Lisbon underclass, but his is not the usual "kitchen sink" cinema of liberal reform.

Instead, Colossal Youth affords its subjects greater dignity by allowing their beauty to emerge unscathed. Usually, "Ventura," "Vanda" and the other denizens of the Fountainbas housing project are shot in the classical, almost holy light one associates with religious icon painting. And yet, these shafts of hieratic illumination are usually present because of gaping holes in the subjects' ceilings. Likewise, what Costa's grainy videography loses in crisp definition is more than gained in intimacy, as well as an ability to register light as a slowly shifting, almost sculptural phenomenon. Costa's is a Heideggerian cinema, allowing society's outcasts to shine forth in their full human presence rather than slotting them into the standard categories that both cinema and bureaucracy customarily reserve for them.

In a somewhat different vein, Jia Zhangke's Venice prize-winner Still Life also used formal invention to register the seismic shifts in the lives and geographies of his homeland. Using documentary footage shot in and around the area rapidly being destroyed by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, Jia has not only recorded and dramatized the major changes in Chinese topography under accelerated capitalist development. He has achieved a subtlety of scale that allows Still Life to represent lives disrupted by social forces without reducing those lives to mere epiphenomena of those larger shifts. (To my mind, Jia was moving in this direction with Unknown Pleasures [2002] but backslid into somewhat deterministic schemas with 2004's The World.)

Adequately unpacking Still Life would require more space and attention than I can expend here. But suffice to say that Jia's patient portraiture of his two protagonists - Han, the miner returning home years later only to find it submerged, and Shen Hong, a woman seeking out her husband to obtain a divorce - attains a new level of richness and complexity. Jia's characters achieve depth through cumulative details, a Cubist composition of interstitial moments. Venice was wise to reward Jia's finest film since his 1997 debut, Xiao Wu.

Of course, despite the generally high level of the films I encountered at this year's TIFF, not everything was rosy. The latest work from two of world cinema's masters, Aki Kaurismäki's Lights in the Dusk and Guy Maddin's silent feature Brand upon the Brain!, both find their directors treading water, rehashing themes and formal procedures better explored in earlier films. But perhaps the most interesting failure on display was Bruno Dumont's Flandres. After the Antonioniesque Twentynine Palms (2003), with its abrupt helter-skelter coda, where Dumont would go next was anyone's guess. As it happens, Flandres is Dumont's most conventional film, and his most wrongheaded. A story of rural French shlubs who sign up to go fight an unnamed war in a foreign land, Flandres attempts to delve into universal questions of war, violence and xenophobia, but does so at a moment when any such intervention will inevitably be measured against the invasion of Iraq. After a series of masterful tableaux depicting his leads' daily lives on and around the farm, Dumont heads to war, recycling images and gestures from Full Metal Jacket but in the director's awkwardly Bressonian mien. As a parallel to his rednecks' adventures abroad (which include torture and rape), Dumont shows how the local boys use the town "slut," a young woman so inured to her social position as to almost reflexively drop her pants in the presence of the menfolk.

There's much to admire formally about Flandres - Dumont's control of framing and figure / ground relationships is graceful as always, and in terms of narrative pacing, this is Dumont's most compulsively watchable film. (And I say this as someone who considers 1999's L'humanité a flat-out masterpiece.) But in the end, Flandres' view of the human animal admits of two rather unsatisfactory conclusions. Either Dumont is formulating a simpleminded, uninstructive parallel between woman and the ethnic Other (both unthinkingly abused at the hands of men), or else he is putting forward a doggedly ahistorical representation of human conflict ("mankind had always been a warlike creature") that, in the present circumstances, is rather unconscionable in that it serves to bolster social and political forces Dumont no doubt opposes. Perhaps more troublingly, from the standpoint of Dumont's art, the latter orientation is airily abstract and contravenes his cinema's greatest strength, its deep materialist immanence.

At any rate, like Mike Judge's rather incoherently neo-conservative comedy Idiocracy (not in TIFF proper but seen in Toronto by many, since its commercial run there was one of its few anywhere), Flandres is a political film worth arguing with and against, since its simplistic formulations still evince more intellectual rigor than those currently guiding our foreign policy. Poets and filmmakers, pace Shelley, may in fact be the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be voted out of office every now and then.

Sven Nykvist, 1922 - 2006.

Oscar-winning Swedish filmmaker Sven Nykvist, who was director Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer of choice, has died after a long illness, his son said. He was 83.

The AP.

Their pioneering work concentrated on the emotional impact of lighting and color levels, Winter Light (1963) and Cries and Whispers (1973) being perhaps the most obvious examples of this approach. Having won an Oscar for best cinematography with the latter film, Nykvist, who had worked abroad only sporadically since the 1950s, found himself in increasing demand outside Sweden. The many celebrated directors with whom he worked include Louis Malle, Roman Polanski, Paul Mazursky, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Brook and Woody Allen.

[...]

His work with Bergman continued parallel to his international career, and it was another Bergman film, Fanny and Alexander (1982), that won him his second Oscar.

Ingmar Bergman Face to Face.

Updated through 9/22.

See also: Chris Fujiwara in the Boston Phoenix (2000) and the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award citation.

Updates, 9/22: Ronald Bergan in the Guardian: "Nykvist lit the sets and worked the camera himself. Scenes From a Marriage (1974), shot with only one camera held by Nykvist, included 10-minute takes with as many as 20 zooms per take, plus complex camera movements. 'When you are operating the camera, you forget all about the other people around you. You just see this little scene and you live in that and you feel it. For me, operating the camera is a sport and it helps me do better lighting. I prefer to shoot on location because in the studio you have too many possibilities, too many lights to destroy your whole picture.'"

Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "In his films, especially those with Mr Bergman, light assumed a metaphysical dimension that went beyond mood. It distilled and deepened the feelings of torment and spiritual separation that afflicted Bergman characters. But in scenes of tranquillity filmed outdoors, the light might also evoke glimpses of transcendence."

More from Edward Copeland, cnw at Reverse Shot and Joe Leydon.

From signandsight daily feuilleton roundup, Bergman as quoted by Daniel Kothenschulte in the Frankfurter Rundschau: "Sometimes I mourn the fact that I no longer make films, and more than anything else I miss working with Sven Nykvist. Perhaps because we were both so obsessed with the problems of light, this tender, dangerous, dreamy, alive, dead, misty, hot, fearful, naked, sudden, spring-like, falling, straight, slanting, sensuous, muted, poisonous, calming, sallow light."

Shorts and fests, 9/20.

"The diamond industry has begun a campaign to safeguard its lucrative Christmas trade from what it fears will be a blitz of negative publicity resulting from a forthcoming Hollywood film about the trade in African 'conflict diamonds'," reports Jeevan Vasagar in the Guardian. "De Beers, the world's biggest diamond company, plans to spend £8m on publicity this autumn, in advance of the release in December of Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which threatens to make diamonds as unfashionable as fur." A diamond industry FAQ follows. And via Movie City News, the film's trailer.

Also via MCN, Camille Paglia in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Marie Antoinette saga presents daunting problems to any adapter. Where should our sympathies lie: with the plucky, fun-loving 14-year-old girl torn from her home at the Habsburg court in Vienna to serve as a broodmare for French royalty - or with the impoverished French proletariat whose taxes underwrote the ostentatious luxuries of a parasitic aristocracy?"

Meanwhile, Jürgen Fauth finds Marie Antoinette "caught up within the bubble of decadence it describes. There's plenty of cake and champagne, but there is precious little news about aristocracy, wealth, history, celebrity, pleasure, revolution, or anything else."

But the "prissy disdain for the vintage of [Sofia] Coppola's films in some circles could be described as an act of sexual terrorism - the kind that has conveniently spared Wes Anderson, another maker of eccentrically hermetic cine-artifacts," suggests Ed Gonzalez, awarding the film three-n-a-half out of four stars: "Marie Antoinette compares favorably to The New World and, more so, to The Lost City - two tales of Edens stripped of their fruit." Also in Slant, Nick Schager on Feast and Gonzalez on Conversations With God.

In die taz, Dietmar Kammerer asks - and signandsight translates - director Tom Tykwer about the general perception that Perfume is primarily producer Bernd Eichinger's film. Tykwer: "This is about the hundredth time I've had to answer this question, because obviously everyone believes there's a conflict between us. To that I can only say, you've all seen the film. I can't imagine that Perfume looks like the result of compromises. It's a film that I identify with one hundred percent."

Charles Taylor previews the fall festival, theatrical and DVD season for the New York Observer.

Leo Goldsmith and Jenny Jediny clear space at Not Coming to a Theater Near You for New York Film Festival Coverage. Also, Chiranjit Goswami: "In sketching an unreliable account of his personal past, Brand Upon the Brain! is yet another work within [Guy] Maddin's oeuvre which attempts to envision an imaginary history and clings to the prospect that these memories could be reliable enough to replace reality. However, what makes the experience a memorable, nearly unforgettable, event for the viewer is that each live performance of Maddin's silent film can hardly ever be created with such satisfying results in any other time, place, or medium."

Doug Cummings offers his takes on the docs he caught in Toronto: Manufactured Landscapes, Blindsight, Dong and Remembering Arthur.

"Politically - and, sadly, aesthetically - the 12-month American film distribution forecast calls for pain from some of the fest's highest-profile titles, whose social conscience is as admirable as the films themselves are regrettable." In the City Pages, Jim Ridley looks back to Toronto.

Jason Morehead recaps his Toronto experience; Cinematical's Kim Voynar recalls "Five Gorgeous Films and One Ugly One."

AFI Dallas: March 22 through April 1. Details from Peter Martin at Twitch and Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE. Joe Leydon wonders how this'll effect SXSW, which wraps in Austin just days prior to this one's opening: "It's hard to believe there won't be some extremely intense power-playing and backroom-dealing when the two festivals start competing for world premieres of major inide and mainstream movies."

That Little Round-Headed Boy reviews Matt Zoller Seitz's Home, "the kind of movie that makes you wonder why more movies can't be like this. It's got that shimmering quality, and cool observational tone, of Matt's obvious inspiration, Robert Altman."

Up-n-coming:

• Variety's Chris Gardner reports that Bennett Miller will follow Capote with The Immortalist, "a contemporary, character-driven drama set in the world of life extension," written by Dante Harper.

• Saw yesterday that Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lector prequel will be on bookshelves in December, but I didn't know that a film adaptation's already been made. Nikki Finke's got details.

• Blank Screen has an ever-so-brief word on Gael García Bernal's directorial debut.

• David Poland and Anne Thompson are making The Departed sound very much like something to look forward to.

Heavens, look at this. Nathaniel R isn't just tracking the many ways in which the Foreign Language Oscar may shape up; he's got easy-on-the-eye tables, links and news.

William Friedkin "is not a name commonly associated with opera. But since 1999, he has been quietly developing a second career, directing productions in Tel Aviv, Florence, Turin and Los Angeles." Geraldine Fabrikant talks with him.

Also in the New York Times:

• AO Scott on Alfonso Cuarón's first feature: "Mr Cuarón never quite finds the tone that would allow him to fuse belly laughs with the horror of illness and death, but then perhaps Pedro Almodóvar is the only filmmaker able to mix darkness and light in that way... The promise [Cuarón] showed in Sólo Con Tu Pareja has already been realized and exceeded, but there is something gratifying about witnessing such talent in its fledgling state."

• Jeannette Catsoulis on Home, "Jeffrey M Togman's marvelously revealing documentary about the psychology of poverty."

• Robin Pogrebin talks with Ric Burns about Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film.

"[David] Thomson has long assumed the role of critic/stalker, a perpetual outsider who imagines himself an insider, who fantasizes himself an intimate of the people he writes about and makes few distinctions between them as movie characters, public figures, or actual human beings." And this bugs Jim Emerson.

What's bugging Matt Zoller Seitz is Thompson's characterization of Brian De Palma. And the AV Club's Noel Murray takes you on "Brian De Palma's World Tour."

Nathan Hogan at Facets Features on Henning Carlsen's Hunger: "[Knut] Hamsun's landmark 1890 novel - about a starving writer who wanders the streets of Kristiania (Oslo) in a delirious, ravaged state - is a radically subjective work whose action occurs largely within the mind of its irrational hero. I... discovered that Carlsen does a serviceable job of tackling the book's first-person challenges, but it's the lead performances, set pieces, and photography that make the work exceptional."

"Thanks to MySpace, YouTube and lots of lesser-known new media channels, anyone with an idea now has the ability to communicate it to millions of people around the globe," writes Cassidy Hartmann in a cover story for the Philadelphia Weekly. "Add to that the proliferation of technology like digital video and photography, recording equipment and computer editing software - all of which have made it possible to create a fully realized product for little cash - and you have all the makings of a revolution."

Also, Matt Prigge on the Viva Pedro series and Sean Burns on All the King's Men and The Black Dahlia.

Don't you know Jay A Fernandez is loving the hoopla? Also in the Los Angeles Times, Stuart Silverstein reports on the $175 million George Lucas is giving USC.

"[T]he Pioneer I encountered this year was a well oiled machine, easy to work with and very responsive," writes Sujewa Ekanayake. "The Voice should be celebrating the Pioneer instead of publishing sloppy articles that unfairly criticize a valuable member of the US indie film scene." More from The Reeler.

"Russell Metty (1906-78), one of America's outstanding cinematographers, was born 100 years ago today," notes Tim Lucas. "He's perhaps best known for executing the most celebrated sustained shot in movie history: the opening "bomb in the trunk" sequence of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, but he has much, much more to his credit."

Online browsing tip. Celebrating Sophia Loren's 72nd, a Magnum Photo collection at Slate.

Online viewing tip #1. Borscht Belt Horror. A trailer at Heeb.

Online viewing tip #2. Back and Forth Films showreel.

Online viewing tips. TCM and Hermès present Behind the Camera: The Shorts Circuit, with homages to classics by Griffin Dunne, Peter Gilbert, E Elias Merhige, Mario Van Peebles, Mary Sweeney and Floria Sigismondi. Via Erik Davis at Cinematical.

Toronto. Conversation and postscript.

Looking back at the Toronto International Film Festival, GreenCine's Jonathan Marlow and producer and writer Shannon Gee compare notes; Shannon adds a postscript.

Gee: I was completely baffled by the Takeshi Miike film Big Bang Love, Juvenile A. It's a real set piece about two convicted murderers who meet in prison and one is found over the other's dead body. It also has Mexican pyramids, a space ship and tattoos that seem to disappear off of one of the character's skin.

I'm getting ahead of myself when I say it's the companion piece to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (which has a Mayan temple and a space-bound bubble rising to a dying star) but I think it is: it's got the same sort of mystical mumbo jumbo dry-walled around an impossible love story within a questioning of political conscience. I might have cut both films a break if I hadn't seen Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, which sets the bar pretty high for combining fantasy elements with interpersonal relationships and political climes. Pan's Labyrinth is the new guide post for phantasmic metaphor in filmmaking of this type.

Marlow: I'd go one further and claim that Lisandro Alonso's Fantasma operates in the same space, although without any of the special effects that dominate the other three. I suspect that some folks would disagree, since it finds the fantastic in the absolutely ordinary. It, Andrea Arnold's Red Road and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century are easily among the finest films that I was able to see at Toronto. I'd include Zidane: un portrait du XXème siècle but we were able to see that a few months prior to the festival.

Conversely, the Miike film and The Fountain were among the worst. It might be worth mentioning that Johnnie To's Exiled was the most entertaining of the two dozen films that I caught in the TIFF program (either there, at Telluride or elsewhere) and quite in contrast to his two Elections, also at the festival and similarly worth seeing. Exiled was a real throwback to the John Woo HK films of the late-1980s/early-1990s. Of course, if I'd seen Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, my "favorite" might be different.

Gee: Borat was a favorite of at least two critics I talked to. The festival seemed light on the comedy for the most part - I guess we don't feel like making funny films so much these days.

Marlow: Or, in the case of Severance, the inclination is to gravitate from comedy to horror and back.

Gee: I did catch the wedding send-up Confetti and For Your Consideration, which felt like Christopher Guest-lite (Is Hollywood too easy a send up? Can you even send up Hollywood anymore?) but was enjoyable after a day of grim film.

Speaking of grim, Toronto always gives us a chance compare actors against themselves. Parker Posey was in Consideration and Hal Hartley's sequel to Henry Fool, reprising her role as the title character in his latest, Fay Grim. The story picks up fourteen years later with Henry possibly dead and Fay scooting from New York to Paris to Turkey to try and find him. It's a Hal Hartley espionage film, complete with an explosion at the end. It's not quite a return to form, but Posey is an easy watch and pitch perfect with the Hartley patter.

James Urbaniak is back in his role as Simon Grim and he also appears in the hot button film of the festival, Death of a President. Honestly, his casting (along with Becky Ann Baker, aka the mom from Freaks and Geeks) as a forensic scientist questioning the evidence in this imagined documentary of President Bush's assassination, blew the illusion of the film for me. That and the way the film was made (too many narrative techniques in what is supposed to be "archival footage" and an ending that doesn't ring right to me). Some audience members applauded after the film and it won the FIRPESCI prize "for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth." I'm not sure if a larger truth was revealed... I'm beginning to think the point of the film is that, at least policy-wise, it wouldn't make a difference whether Bush is president or not as long as Dick Cheney is in power.

Other multiple actor appearances include Martin Freeman in Confetti and Breaking and Entering, Jacinda Barrett in The Last Kiss and The Namesake, and the Three Gorges area of China in Jia Zhangke's Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life and the accompanying documentary Dong.

Marlow: Outside of multiple appearances by certain actors and locations, were you aware of any themes that coincidentally connected the various films? A certain dislike and/or distrust of the US of A was on evidence in DOAP, Day Night Day Night and The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, among others. Granted, the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth provided the conceptual starting point for I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and Syndromes and a Century.

The inevitable, questionable actions in the midst of war were well noted in Bruno Dumont's Flandres and Laurent Herbiet's Mon Colonel, a satisfying first-time feature directorial effort written by Costa-Gavras and produced by the Dardenne brothers. I suppose that you could even claim a thread of youthful discovery from Guy Maddin's latest, Brand Upon the Brain! and Alexis Dos Santos's Glue. Or its opposite, Belle toujours, a case of "mature discovery" in an homage to Belle du jour 38 years later.

Gee: Theme-wise, yes, there were links. Ideas and images were literally taken from other works (or in addition to other works?) and put into others. Dong and Still Life shared shots that appear in both films, which made the experience of watching the narrative film much richer for me (I saw the documentary first) in terms of what the film was saying about urban development. James Longley's documentary short Sari's Mother was crafted from footage he shot while making the feature length Iraq in Fragments - was it a story that didn't make it into the final feature doc?

Marlow: From what I understand, yes.

Gee: Jem Cohen had three films in the festival, the shorts Blessed Are the Dreams of Men, NYC Weights and Measures and Build a Broken Mousetrap. Though Mousetrap was essentially a concert documentary of the band The Ex, it incorporated footage from the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden (which was happening at the same time), various shots in front of a New York City electronics store and construction cranes littering the skyline. The short films all incorporate cityscapes and city scenes with people sleeping on trains as the scenery whizzes by in Blessed, and a ticker tape parade visually stimulating us in a quite different way in this post-9/11 age in NYC. These themes, of having a constant political backdrop in your neighborhood, catching a few blissful moments of sleep-induced ignorance of the outside world, reexamining the image (where paper flying through the air once meant celebration, it now also means disaster) and gentrification seemed to run deep with everything from the epic Babel to the slow-burning I Don't Want to Sleep Alone to the improbable Breaking and Entering.

Marlow: Volver, which screened at both Telluride and Toronto, could easily fit on that list as well. What Almodóvar effortlessly achieves with coincidence, Minghella squanders. He is not among the most subtle of directors, clearly. The kindest word that I have for Breaking and Entering is that, between this and The Departed, the talented Vera Farmiga appears to be getting a more substantial per-film pay-day. Of course, she had to suffer through a relatively thankless part, a slight step forward (or a side-step) from her role in Running Scared.

Gee: In the world of audio, Kurt Cobain About a Son created its entire narrative voice from over 25 hours of interviews with Cobain, initially for Michael Azerrad's 1993 book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. The film is quite an experience in itself. What did you think of it?

Marlow: I wager that I'm too close to the subject matter. I lived in Seattle for a decade and spent a few years of undergraduate study in Olympia, two of the three locations. I have an emotional connection to these images that would likely be lost on most people. Besides, it was as if they borrowed my music collection to make the soundtrack! I was ultimately impressed with their choices. I could say the same for most of the documentaries that were there. Remembering Arthur, about the unfortunately little-known-outside-of-Canada NFB filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. I wasn't all that familiar with him myself, outside of the brilliant Very Nice Very Nice, until an ATA/Other Cinema mini-retrospective in March of this year. I don't believe you can consider Zidane as a documentary, exactly.

Gee: Possibly not, but it definitely documented something. I get interesting reactions when I describe Zidane to people. Many think the idea of filming 17 angles of our generation's greatest soccer player over the course of one match is intriguing. It truly does "document" a person at an event. It's somewhat fetishistic, but that's a lot of film in general, not just this single focus on one person. Reactions have ranged from slight disagreement to total enthusiasm. The thing I like about it is the way it shows just how good Zidane is - even though the soccer action is mostly at the other end of the field (and we never see it). I also liked how the supporting "characters" (Beckham, Ronaldo, the whole Real Madrid club) barely register in the frame. I don't know if a talking head doc or a verite-style doc could do the same thing. Between Zidane and Cobain, with its painterly compositions of the three cities Cobain lived in, these docs are presenting a new way to experience hearing a subject's voice and seeing a subject's actions, which I can appreciate.

Shannon Gee: A Postscript

The process of watching a movie is odd to begin with. In its mechanics, you're paying a fair amount of money to sit in a row of chairs and stare at a wall for a couple of hours... but magic happens when the images moving in front of you are funny, transporting, revealing, surreal.

When you're at the Toronto International Film Festival as press and industry, things are even odder than a Saturday evening at the movies.  Each screening is like opening night - there is a lot of energy in the line to get in, every seat is packed and people are bristling. Folks working on their fourth film of the day are sucking down coffee rather than munching on popcorn. We're all wearing identical lanyards and badges around our necks. There are more cell phones glowing in the theater before the lights dim than at these rock and roll concerts kids go to these days.

After the first four days of the festival, these become regular, everyday images and routines. Sometimes, in this wacky arena, there are stranger moments in and out of the theater.

Take for instance, the gala world premiere screening of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! This silent, black-and-white story about a mysterious orphanage, a brother and sister and the teen detective that divides their affections, played to a packed house and was backed by members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, three foley artists, a castrato, and a narrator (this time Maddin regular Louis Negin - Isabella Rossellini will have the honors when the film mounts at the New York Film Festival.) It had that signature Maddin quirkiness, humor and expressionistic jump cut style. It's full of the stuff that people say alienates "general" audiences, but this audience laughed at every beat and delighted at the old-timey ways of generating sound and music for a silent movie.

I didn't think anything could top an evening like that, but when I met with Maddin the next morning for an interview, I was greeted at the hotel suite by a large armed guard with a large assault rifle in hand. It was puzzling and a little unnerving until Maddin and I asked what the deal was... and then we saw the jewelry on loan (for red carpet events) displayed in the corner. Maddin then launched into a true account of a jewel thief and grisly murderer in his hometown of Winnipeg that sounded like something straight out of one of his films. My interview questions seemed paltry at best after such a lead in, but I did get to talk to him about Brain! and the other film he has in the festival. Nude Caboose is his latest short film, shot entirely with a cell phone. It's a three-minute film that took two hours to make and lists four writers in its credits. "And here I was following around a naked woman with a cell phone pointed at her," he described, holding my tape recorder up at around ass level.

Next odd encounter: I was eating dinner with a fellow film reviewer and, as we were comparing the day's movie fare (All the King's Men? Looks like they delayed its release for all the reasons we feared), and we started to reminisce about Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud, which we both saw together last year and were suitably traumatized by (in a good way). I got up from the table and headed for the front door to make a phone call when I was stopped short in my tracks. Outside was a man crouched over a busted open watermelon; he scooped out the flesh with his bare hands and was eating it as fast as he could. Now anyone who's seen The Wayward Cloud can attest to how freaky it would be to see such a thing right after invoking Tsai Ming-Liang. I don't suspect I will see any mattresses floating on lakes later (although maybe if I trek over to Lake Ontario I might be surprised) but if I did, the images and messages in this year's entry, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, would help keep me from freaking out. They might actually soothe me.

In Sleep Alone, a group of men have found a discarded mattress and are hauling it across town. Meanwhile, a young man (played by Tsai regular Lee Kang-Sheng) is beat up by a gang of con artists and passes out in front of the mattress haulers. One of them takes him in and nurses him back to health on the mattress he has carefully cleaned and nested up. In the same building, a paralyzed man (also played by Lee) is cared for by a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi). Once she and the now healthy man meet, an odd love triangle/quadrangle/quint-tangle ensues between them, the paralyzed boy, the boy's mother and the mattress hauler. The last image of three of the characters sleeping on the mattress is one of the more uplifting endings of Tsai's films. Make no mistake though - the world he creates here is still on the brink of crumbling, from an abandoned, half-built cement tower to a choking haze that permeates the city. People may find love and comfort in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, but it sure looks weird.

Old Joy.

At Reverse Shot, Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega talks with Kelly Reichardt about what remains one of my favorite films of the year so far, Old Joy.

J Hoberman, writing in the Voice, calls it "a diminished, grunge Easy Rider.... Coming in the same year as Andrew Bujalski's similarly understated and character-driven Mutual Appreciation, it attests to a new strain in Amerindie production - literate but not literary, crafted without ostentation, rooted in a specific place and devoted to small sensations."

Adam Nayman opens the Reverse Shot round at indieWIRE: "It can be read as many things: as a sorrowful account of liberal alienation, as a gentle rebuttal of weekend-warrior movie tropes, or as a muted tragedy of unrequited affection. Old Joy is complex, but it is not a carefully attenuated Rhorshach test like Gus Van Sant's Gerry, one of several films to which it will inevitably be compared (the others are Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours and, more tenuously, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain)."

Updated through 9/25.

Dave Kehr, by the way, has a fine piece on Old Joy in the print version of the current issue of Film Comment.

Update, 9/20: A "triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "[I]f Mark and Kurt’s excursion resembles any number of classic adventures across time and space, the film is also insistently about this specific moment in time and space. Namely, an America in which progressive radio (actually, snippets from Air America) delivers the relentless grind of bad news that Mark can only listen to without comment and with a face locked in worry, a face on which Ms Reichardt invites us to project the shell shock, despair and hopelessness of everyone else listening in across the country."

Updates, 9/22: Alison Willmore: "[T]he film accomplishes more in its subdued 76 minutes than others have with casts of dozens and globe-spanning sets."

Armond White in the New York Press: "Old Joy's gentility could be called a woman's take on Deliverance, but it's really just indie persnicketyness. Old Joy stays high-minded about human behavior, and yet one walks away thinking, 'I have no idea who those people really are.'"

"Some viewers may well be bored, or monumentally irritated, by this," warns Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "I found it masterly, riveting."

Michael Joshua Rowin interviews Reichardt for Stop Smiling: "I know I'm not capable of making an out-and-out political film, but I did think there were elements in the film of what I was experiencing - ineffectualness - and I saw in the characters' relationship a metaphor: two lost liberals trying to find their way. But I concentrated on the friendship - the other stuff were ideas for myself, ideas that make you feel like you're doing something relevant."

Daniel Kasman: "Director Kelly Reichardt lets the film drift too much on standard cinematic tropes of buddy films and pastoral getaway narratives (towards the end I began to wonder if Old Joy was leading up to a murder), and the well-composed but unsatisfying look of the film further drains away a texture of realness from an already gaseous scenario."

Dan Persons talks with Reichardt for IFC News.

"Why aren't we seeing more independent films like these? Are there more Bujalskis and Reichardts in hiding somewhere?" asks Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "After the studios co-opted the independent movement with their specialty divisions (Fox Searchlight, Warner Independent Pictures, Focus Features, etc.), has the door completely closed for true independent films? Are directors who could be making low-key films such as Mutual Appreciation and Old Joy having to tailor their art in order to appeal to these studio divisions?"

Update, 9/25: It took forty years, argues Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic, but the literary Beats finally found their cinematic equivalent in what he calls the "Listless Film," the first of which would be Slacker. A "good Listless Film carries a double melancholy for all: it makes us sad for its characters and sad for the world that has thus affected them. Old Joy is such a film... About [Reichardt's] directing, after praising her simplicity, one has to praise her daring. To make this film took considerable conviction - and, for an artist, conviction usually entails courage."

Fests and events, 9/19.

Blank Screen: "Richard Sandler makes New York proud. An experimental photographer and filmmaker (he recieved a Guggenheim fellowship for filmmaking this year!), Sandler's films' subject is often this crazy city, particularly the fringe elements of some touristy areas. He will be screening 5 of his films at this Monkeytown series," tomorrow through September 27. If you're nowhere near New York, you can watch The Gods of Times Square online.

At Reverse Shot, Robbie Freeling urges New Yorkers to see the Kenji Mizoguchi series at the Film Forum (you'll have to hurry; offer ends Thursday!): "[E]ach film is a revelation."

"Bradford is fast becoming an unlikely trailblazer in world cinema," writes Sarah Birke in the Independent. "Its National Museum of Photography, Film and Television is the only venue in Europe enabled to screen every film format under one roof, and this month it plays host to the seductively named Bite the Mango film festival." Friday through September 28.

MS Smith's first entry on the Toronto International Film Festival focuses on the Wavelengths series and Andrea Arnold's Red Road.

In the Voice, J Hoberman touches on the media sensations Borat and D.O.A.P. but allows himself enough room for compact takes on Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! and The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Dennis Lim offers capsule reviews of Black Book, Still Life, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and Monkey Warfare.

More quick takes from James Israel.

"In Between Days is 'first love is beautiful hurt' Korean-style." Following his appreciation, Michael Guillén presents notes taken during the Q&A that followed the screening in Toronto.

How does a residency at the Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center in NYC sound, artists? Deadline for applications is November 1.

"Let's say it right away, since it is so obvious: mourning is at the root of both projects; mourning for a beloved who would be a man in Varda, the cinema in Godard." In Cahiers du cinéma, Jean-Michel Frodon looks back on Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc Godard 1946 - 2006, In Search of a Lost Theorem and L'Ile et Elle is at the Fondation Cartier, still open through October 8.

Online viewing tip. David Poland in Toronto.

Interview. Michael Tucker.

[T]he photographs taken at Abu Ghraib really obscure everything else that happened there. The Army and the government got off quite easily. They can say, "We handled that, we're punishing those soldiers, everything else is ok." And meanwhile, detainee operations went on. I believe now that there are between 14,000 and 16,000 detainees being held. At various times, over the last few years, Army officials have said that up to 70 percent of those people could be innocent. Of course, they are releasing people, but the process is quite slow. They've got massive detainee issues that the media hasn't looked into.

Michael Tucker, in conversation with David D'Arcy.

Back in the summer of 2004, I met with Michael Tucker to talk about a documentary he was editing, Gunner Palace, which would go on to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and become widely regarded as one of the best depictions of what day-by-day, hour-by-hour life is actually like for American troops serving in Baghdad. Of the many scenes that struck me, one stood out: "an Iraqi journalist speaks directly to the camera, claiming his innocence, as a soldier forces him at gunpoint to squat down, keep his hands behind his head, and above all, 'Shut up.' 'Yes, "shut up,"' the journalist tells the camera. 'You see this. You see what's happening.'"

Nearly two years later, this journalist, Yunis Khatayer Abbas, and Tucker met again, this time in Jordan. Abbas and his two brothers had been at Abu Ghraib and other facilities for nine months. The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, premiering at TIFF this year, tells his story. David D'Arcy spoke with Michael Tucker in Toronto.

Earlier: Michael Tucker's post to TIFF's Doc Blog.

TIFF, 9/18.

The backward glances and Toronto International Film Festival wrap-ups roll on. The LA Weekly's Scott Foundas sees in Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth "a brave and nightmarishly beautiful achievement, in which marginalized people who so rarely have a voice in cinema are give one, unbound by the shackles of sanctimony or self-important 'social realism.' This is something close to the cinematic equivalent of blank verse, a new language of expression to which we must constantly readjust as the movie is playing across the screen."

That it screened at Toronto and probably won't at most other festivals on the continent is "a compelling reminder that, despite the easily gotten impression that it is little more than a glam press junket for some of the Hollywood's highest-profile fall releases, Toronto remains the largest and most important film festival in North America." He then turns his attention to Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter, "a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet. Oh, and it's also scary as fuck."

"I can't tell you how many women in their 60s I saw taking sandwiches out of their purses and eating in line, because those were their only free minutes for the next 12 hours - if I'm doing that when I'm 65, my grandkids damn well better realize how kickass their grandma is." At Cinematical, Martha Fischer looks back on her Toronto experience and revisits her five favorites. As you'll see, she's kickass now.

Like Martha, Tom Hall kept hearing that this was an "off-year"; but it certainly wasn't for either of them. Tom looks back at seven films.

"Modest" and "sedate" are among the first words to hit you in Jason Clark's Toronto roundup for Slant, but then, he doesn't seem to have caught the films winning raves at sites like Twitch or from the likes of Doug Cummings, Darren Hughes et al. But he has seen a few "weirdo pics, none stranger than Tony Gatlif's Transylvania, which pairs possibly the looniest actor and actress in current cinema, Head-On's Birol Ünel and Asia Argento, as a pair of self-destructive gypsies wandering the Romanian countryside finding adventures in the small details of life. A defiant wackjob of a movie, it's also one that you may find yourself referring back to at the most peculiar moments, which is better than letting it fade from memory."

The festival has the AV Club's Noel Murray thinking about "the characteristics that would allow anybody who knows my taste to say, 'This would be right up your alley.' I came up with a list of ten."

Movie City News points to wrap-ups from Peter Howell and Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star.

Newsblitz.

It's The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). And not, for example, Perfume (Das Parfum). The trade association German Films announced today that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's feature debut, winner of seven Lolas (German Oscars, more or less), an audience award at Locarno and much positive buzz in Telluride and Toronto, will be sent to the Academy as the country's entrant into the Best Foreign Language Film sweepstakes (full story in German here).

Sony Picture Classics looks set to release the film in the US on February 23, just three days before Oscar Night - in other words, when all the attention will be on what the American and British stars will be wearing - and a full month after the nominations are announced. I hope that's smart. Of course, gearing the release to the Oscar schedule would be a crap shoot anyway; it has to get nominated in the first place for any such speculation to matter.

Meanwhile, plenty of consolation for Perfume producer Bernd Eichinger, whose Downfall (Der Untergang) was in the running two years ago (it lost to Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside [Mar adentro]). Downfall's opening weekend drew just over 480,000 Germans to theaters; Perfume's opening weekend: 950,000.

Midnight Eye. Returns.

Tom Mes has a long talk with set designer Noriyoshi Ikeya, "whose career spans everything from Ultraman to Rampo Noir." And in between: "There were several ideas I suggested that Seijun-san used in the films. The scene in Kagero-za where Michiyo Okusu is in the bath and the flower appears from her mouth, that was my idea. The director liked it and decided to do it. We only did one take and nailed it straight away."

"When Jasper Sharp invited me to write something 'personal' for Midnight Eye as it hit the 5-year mark, I decided it would be the perfect place to review Nippon Connection," writes Abé Mark Nornes, author of Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima and editor of the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications Program's Motion Picture Reprint Series. "Both the German event and Midnight Eye itself are symptomatic of exciting shifts in film culture, shifts that I will narrate in my own experience of Japanese film as a distant observer of sorts."

Reviews:

• Mes on "a jawdropping collision of unrelenting grimness ([Miki] Nakatani spends much of the running time sporting a black eye or a limp) and a fantastical, candy-coloured lightness that makes Memories of Matsuko play like a fusion of Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. [Tetsuya] Nakashima deserves kudos for daring to juggle such extremes and pulling it off."

• Mes on Sway, "the only Japanese feature film selected for the 2006 Cannes film festival," a film "about Japan today - questioning, investigating, challenging, perceptive."

• Nicholas Rucka: "Too strong for cable TV! The sales angle is brilliant! Fans of Miike and his extreme side will rejoice; Imprint is twisted. But it doesn't work."

• Johannes Schönherr tells the story of and the story behind Yoshihiko Matsui's "radically nihilist" 1988 film, Noisy Requiem.

• Mike Dillon: "Half a Confession introduces itself as a thriller and abruptly changes gears, transforming into a tale of morality with deeper insights into its characters than we had anticipated."

And Mes, author himself of a book on Miike, Agitator, reviews Anime Perdute, a collection of essays published in conjunction with a Miike retrospective at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin in April. The book is "entirely in Italian, but then, you're never too old to learn."

Shorts, 9/18.

Wiley Wiggins on Camille Paglia's entry in the BFI Film Classic series, The Birds: "Paglia completely sidesteps the academic circle-jerking of most film theory and bites right into the meat of the film, getting her hands dirty in it without ever compromising or hiding her formidable intellect."

Michael Guillén talks with Renaissance director Christian Volckman about, among other things, Hinduism. At Twitch, Opus admires the film's look but wishes it were cloaking a better story.

Also at Twitch, where reviews of films screened in Toronto keep pouring in, Mathew Kumar talks with Shane Meadows about This is England.

Cinematical's Martha Fischer: "The problem with [Kim Ki-duk's] Time is that every character in the film is so fundamentally repulsive it's impossible to care about any of them."

Anne Thompson profiles Todd Field for the Hollywood Reporter.

Josef Adalian in Variety: "Producer Tony Krantz (24) is teaming with scribes Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Erik Jendresen (Band of Brothers) to turn Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation into a weekly series for ABC." Also, Michael Fleming reports that Nicholas Jarecki will adapt the Bret Easton Ellis story collection, The Informers. Jarecki and Ellis are writing the screenplay.

"Infamous is funnier and gayer than Capote, and it also shows a lot more of the author's New York life amid his society-lady 'swans,'" writes John Seabrook, who talks with Douglas McGrath. Also in the New Yorker, Judith Thurman: "No other queen, except perhaps Cleopatra, was more intent than Marie Antoinette on dressing for history." Don't miss the gruesome snapshot of Versailles. And Anthony Lane reviews The Science of Sleep and Renaissance.

More on Science from David Edelstein: "[Michel] Gondry has devised a loopy and original language for portraying a soul in ferment.... But in the great madcap love stories (among them Eternal Sunshine), the magic carpet flies over the abyss: You get a great view, but you don't take the plunge. Gondry loses faith in his carpet—which is to say, his own artistry. He drops you like a stone." Also in New York, Logan Hill has a few questions for Alfonso Cuarón.

Lynn Hirschberg has a long profile of Gondry in the New York Times Magazine. And, via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker, a series of Photobooth self-portraits that Gondry's done for Jamie Stuart.

"If you thought Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant touched the bottom of the long dark well of corrupt cop movies then [Kinji] Fukasaku's two police flicks will show you that you merely reached the top of the layer of scum on the bottom of that particular pond." Grady Hendrix on Cops vs Thugs and Yakuza Graveyard. Also, "a typical week in the life of Kaiju Shakedown so you can see that it contains all the thrills and drama that you, the American people, want to see on TV." Funny because it's... well, you know.

"Even on the attack, you make me want to see more of Nicole." David Thomson and Shane Danielsen debate the merits of Nicole Kidman in the Independent, where, of course, Thomson has his own column to see to, and this week he suggests that Peter O'Toole and Vanessa Redgrave may score Oscar nominations for their performances in Venus. Movie City News has come across a trailer.

Also, Liz Hoggard maps the slow-burning success of Withnail and I and gets a few words with director Bruce Robinson, Richard E Grant, Paul McGann and Ralph Brown.

The cinetrix takes in two films set in New Orleans, By Invitation Only, "a sort of bayou Born Rich," and Happy Here and Now: "[Michael] Almereyda gets the locations and the local legends in various roles just right, but even though the action is unfolding in the city that care forgot, the film feels a little too langorous and elliptical."

Richard Corliss in Time on Shut Up & Sing and The Ground Truth: "I wouldn't for a second equate losing airplay for your new CD (which went platinum anyway) with losing a limb, your innocence, your mind or your life in a war. But both docs trace a similar journey: the awakening of political activism among young folks from the heartland who feel they must speak out against the war, come what may." Related online viewing. Ground Truth director Patricia Foulkrod discusses her film at Alternet.

At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow posts a rave for This Film is Not Yet Rated.

At the Siffblog, Kathy Fennessy talks with Lynn Shelton about We Go Way Back.

"Modern viewers are generally uneasy with Mae West," writes John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows. "She's harder to warm up to with each passing generation. There's an unearthly quality about her appearance and personality that belongs to an era and mindset our culture will never again embrace."

Bookends? Sujewa Ekanayake watches Cassavetes's Shadows and Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha.

"Much attention has been focused on the economics of selling digital versions of Hollywood movies (like in Amazon's new Unbox service) as an alternative to DVD sales and rentals and to stem piracy," notes Richard Siklos in the NYT. "But what has yet to be exploited - what Google, Yahoo and many other aggregators are vying for - are pieces of the $60 billion or so that will be spent on television advertising in the United States this year."

Online viewing tip #1. Three clips from Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration at the Risky Biz Blog.

Online viewing tip #2. The Race, an anime mashup. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: "It's characters from over 100 cartoons participating in a rotoscoped 'Whacky Race,' while high-octane music jabbers in the background."

Online viewing tip #3. sMull's 1K Project II. Dazzling machinima via Greg Allen.

Fests and events, 9/18.

With seven of the films already reviewed, Slant clears a corner for its coverage of the New York Film Festival, opening September 29 and running through October 15.

Nikki Finke: "Robert Greenwald is in Washington today for Senate Democratic oversight hearings on Iraq war profiteering, and the DC movie premiere of his latest documentary, Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers."

New Yorkers: The Reeler hosts a preview of Jesus Camp, followed by a Q&A with directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, tonight and a screening of Heights, followed by a discussion with Chris Terrio, tomorrow night.

Global Photography Now is a weekly series of discussions beginning this Friday at the Tate Modern - and online.

Also on Friday: Alexander Kluge Film Night at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Still in London: Schostakovich on Film opens Saturday at the Barbican and runs through December 10. Ed Vulliamy: "What these scores unveil above all is a mercurial, ambivalent, sometimes mischievous, sometimes romantic, often humorous and always human side to Shostakovich's character and working life that is so often missing - sometimes by didactic design, or out of hunger for misery - from the way he is usually portrayed in the West."

Also in the Observer, Justine Elias looks back on Toronto.

Darren Hughes arranges the films he saw in Toronto into groups. "Stand Outs," for example, or "Frustrations and Disappointments." At the top are two "Masterpieces," both of which "will likely end up on my short list of favorite films of the decade": Jia Zhangke's Still Life and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century.

Logan Hill has a few capsules in New York.

Back to London: October 15: Film-Philosophy founding editor Daniel Frampton in conversation with Harmony Korine.

Then, on October 16, Bringing Pictures to Life: Japanese Animation and the World of Koji Yamamura at the Japan Foundation.

Toronto Dispatch. 7.

Focusing primarily on Deliver Us From Evil, David D'Arcy offers a few parting thoughts on the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.

Deliver Us From Evil in the Real to Reel section is that rare film about the topic of priest abuse of children in which the filmmaker actually gets the priest who abused those kids to talk. In this case, the priest is Oliver O'Grady, an Irish cleric who worked in parishes in California in the 1970s and 1980s. He is interviewed in Ireland, where he has gone presumably to avoid having charges brought upon himself, and to avoid having attention brought to the superiors who enabled him to stay in parishes for so long while they knew he was abusing children. In this case, the abuse victims were girls.

What we have is a case history, or case histories, with a spectrum of elements that add up to a troubling story - a priest who violates a position of trust; teenage girls, now women, whose lives were taken from them; devout parents who resisted for a long time in believing that priests could be the predators that so many of them turned out to be; and a church hierarchy, including the present cardinal of Los Angeles, Roger Mahony, whose priority still seems to be escaping any kind of accountability.

Why Father O'Grady chose to talk to the filmmaker, Amy Berg, is a mystery that only his confessor must know. But the fact that he speaks frankly about sexually abusing girl after girl doesn't explain the reasons why he did it in the first place. Everyone has sexual urges. Not everyone is a rapist. The account of encounter after encounter with vulnerable parishioners is a trail of tears when you hear the victims talk about it. As much as we hear about the same abuse from O'Grady himself - who has been described as "charming" in a few of the reviews that I've seen - the mystery of predation still remains a mystery. (It's also a mystery in Little Children, Todd Field's drama in which a convicted pedophile lives under siege from a man who wants him dead.)

There is no film about priest abuse that's gotten this kind of access before. The only parallel, imperfect as it is, was Twist of Faith, Kirby Dick's film of two years ago, which looked at the effect on a young firefighter, now a father in Ohio, who was preyed upon by priests. Dick got access to the victims, poignant access. But the priests avoided him, as did the bishops who supervised them. What they couldn't keep him from was a videotaped deposition in which priests discuss their misdeeds under oath. It's rare.  In most cases that are settled out of court, these depositions are closed and locked away, if not destroyed. So we're often left just with the victim's version of things and language often fails when a person is talking about a tragedy that's ruined his or her life. In Deliver Us From Evil, the sinner speaks and forgiveness won't come quickly.

It was pointed out by a friend of mine, who went to the Galway Film Festival, that news of the doc and of the priest's name was published in the Irish press just as the festival opened. The Irish, who had resigned themselves to being powerless as priests abused their power, were appalled. I imagine Father O'Grady's phone is still ringing, if he hasn't disconnected it.

See Deliver Us From Evil if you want to get deeper into the details of yet another crisis that's been pushed off the front page as each crisis of the week usurps that media space. Be forewarned that the film includes a sanctimonious trip by the victims to the Vatican to hold the church hierarchy accountable, to no avail. If you're still interested in finding out more, go to the Boston Globe, whose investigative team led by Walter Robinson broke open the story of priest abuse and the tolerance of that abuse in Boston. The newspaper coverage shamed the church. It helped sustain lawsuits by victims that broke the bank of the archdiocese and drove Cardinal John Law out of town to Rome, where he was given a comfortable job by the Pope.

A brief note on Black Book, Paul Verhoeven's thriller about duplicity and survival in war-time Holland under the Nazis. I've heard from people - who didn't see the film, of course - that Verhoeven's melodrama is just another exploitation film. That seems to be the conventional wisdom out there. The cliché of choice is that this is one Holocaust film with a lot of nudity. You can't expect people who haven't seen a movie to be anywhere close to accurate when they start trashing it and its director, but I'll warn any of you that, if you think you're going to see Shoah Girls, you'll be extremely disappointed, although you've probably already heard through the rumor mill that there is a scene in which a character dyes her pubic hair blonde to avoid being detected as a Jew.

You'll certainly be disappointed with the Dutch, if you think most of them behaved admirably either during the Nazi occupation or during the months immediately following the liberation. Verhoeven can expect to make about as many friends in Holland as he has in Hollywood these days. Yet I still think Verhoeven has made an admirable film. As for my colleagues who take issue with the nudity, this is a film about a Jewish woman who uses sexuality to survive, going undercover into an affair with a Gestapo leader. The improbable element here is that she falls in love with him. The sexuality and the nudity that we see from time to time are part of that story. (Funny that these prudes aren't squeamish about horrifically violent scenes of mass murder in Black Book.) I'm sure there's a more prudish version of the same story that could be made. There always is, once the studios, the MPAA raters, and the critics have something to say about it. It would not be as worth watching as Verhoeven's drama. Let's hope it gets distributed in the US.

Toronto Dispatch. 6.

David D'Arcy looks back on murder and assassination at TIFF, onscreen and off.

Out of the many messages in the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, there was the limp assurance that, even if you can't protect (or elect) leaders like Robert F Kennedy or John Lennon, at least you can mourn them on the screen.

If you're tempted to think that Robert F Kennedy was not a special politician, just try to name another politician these days who is known by his or her first name. Hillary? That says it all. She's risen through hard work and icy calculation. Charisma is not the word that comes to mind.

RFK had charisma, and unlike his brother Jack, he seemed to have developed a sense of integrity along the way. It took him a while to get to that point, having served as a hatchet man for Senator Joseph McCarthy (at the bidding of his father, the monstrous power broker Joseph P Kennedy), as a vindictive anti-union investigator, and as sergeant at arms for his president brother. After John Kennedy's death, RFK became a senator from New York State, even though, like Hillary, he probably didn't even have a driver's license from the state that he wanted to represent.

By 1968, RFK had become the "Bobby" that Emilio Estevez admires in his worshipful film. (I use worshipful here as a description, not a reproach.) This RFK marched with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers. He called for an end to poverty and racial inequality in the US. He condemned the war in Vietnam. He might well have been elected president if he hadn't been assassinated on the June day in Los Angeles during which Bobby takes place. Would the charisma ever turn into leadership? We would never have a chance to know. The promise of Bobby Kennedy has been the stuff of TV docudramas for years.

And Martin Sheen, a rich retiree in this one, has played a politician or two. Estevez's competently made ensemble drama stands above the TV movie stuff, although there's schtick and some real preaching here and there. Between bookends of archival footage with  voice-overs of Kennedy's speeches, some of which are eloquent (especially given the poverty of oratory in our time), we see the lives of people brought together simply because they are in the same hotel at the same time, whether it's in the kitchen or the bridal suite. We start in the kitchen, where Mexican busboys complain about working double shifts, and we end in the kitchen, where RFK is shot by Sirhan Sirhan when the candidate goes in on a victory lap to shake hands with the staff after winning the primary.

There are homages to Grand Hotel here, as Estevez weaves between the trivial and the universal among retirees who can't leave the place (Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte), Kennedy volunteers introduced to LSD on the premises, a drunken cabaret singer and her frustrated husband (Demi Moore and Estevez), a good hearted manager (William H Macy) who's cheating on his manicurist wife (Sharon Stone) and sleeping with a cute telephone operator (Heather Graham) who hopes screwing the boss will get her a promotion. As the Kennedy crowd fills up the hotel, also staying there is a young girl (Lindsay Lohan) who is about to marry a draftee (Elijah Wood) in an arranged deal to keep him from being sent to Vietnam.

Even the humble roles are played well. Given the number of stars who signed on to this project, there don't seem to have been divas in this dream-team cast. Laurence Fishburne leads the way as a sous chef (working for a bastard of a boss, Christian Slater) who's dealt with his racial anger, and lectures his angry younger co-workers about it. Of course, in the larger scheme, anger triumphs, putting a bullet in RFK's head.

The production design takes you back to the feel if not the premises of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, an enclosed world unto itself, or so we thought. You feel nostalgic for the times and for the fashion, or at least the style that Sharon Stone, Heather Graham and Joy Bryant can bring to it. Yet films that reconstruct history are more about our time than about the history that they reassemble. In Bobby, set in a time that we associate with political upheaval, most of the characters in the hotel are looking at politics obliquely, if at all. Perhaps they're looking for leadership beneath the charisma.

Every era looks to another time for wisdom and leadership. Few eras have found so little of either in the leaders that we have before us now.  This longing for leaders or even for slogans that sound right may help explain why John Lennon's congenial nostrums in The US vs. John Lennon sound as good as they do, more than 30 years later, even though the authorized documentary that premiered in Toronto was a missed opportunity to analyze Lennon's gentle politics and the venality of the campaign against him. (See the doc anyway - part of the Lennon story is a lot better than nothing, and there's music.)

Stand this longing for the dreamy 60s on its head, and you'll see at least part of the appeal of Death of a President directed by Gabriel Range, which won the FIPRESCI award in Toronto. Having seen the film about the gunning down of Bush and the killing's aftermath (and liked it much more than some of those who now deplore it), I find it's not the kind of film that usually wins an award at a major film festival. The film is a thriller with a tactile volatility to its scenes of a street demonstration that flies out of control (and a believable integration of archival footage and dramatized scenes) - but it's the kind of project that gets downgraded into sub-cinema as it's lumped in with journalistic docs and TV movies. I admire the refinement of a project that could have been crude, yet I'm still surprised that critics are honoring it as cinema, out of so many films from which they had to pick. Bush antipathy has to play a role here somewhere. When you see the film, you see that there's nothing out-for-blood or exultant about it. Its real concern is the Bush legacy of fear-mongering and reduced civil liberties. Notwithstanding the friends of Bush who are condemning the film - without seeing it, I'm sure - it's a legacy that Bush will be defending (or ignoring) into his old age. The film ends on a mournful note - not for Bush, but for the country that his presidency diminished.

Another odd reflection on Toronto this year. Eclipsed by the gun-fest in Montreal was a triple murder at the Delta Chelsea Hotel. When details were even sketchier than they are now, it was announced that three tourists were dead on the 19th floor, with blood on the walls. Two were Swiss, and one was German, and the bloodbath seemed to be a revenge-killing on the part of the Swiss man, who found his companion in bed with the German. The killing was achieved, in a ghoulishly appropriate way, with a Swiss Army knife, the same tool that was used for the killer's suicide. Soon a rumor emerged, printed by the Toronto Globe and Mail, that all three of the dead were deaf - hence, no screams. These were plot twists that some of the scripts in the program could have used, but the story seemed to die in all but the tabloid Toronto Sun. Were the other papers fearful that news of three murders would send other tourists packing? The front pages featured threesomes of actresses on the red carpet who had no doubt played murderers and murder victims in films. Once again, cinema won out over reality.

Weekend shorts.

"Do you like Hollywood?" Kera Bolonik asks Michael Tolkin. He does. When he arrived, "I felt like I understood that Shakespeare didn't need to know anything more than show business to understand rivalry, envy, and feelings of failure." Also in the new Bookforum, James Shapiro on, as it happens, Shakespeare and on how the wars over how to interpret him have pretty much simmered down; and Alex Abramovich reviews Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

"It's easy to be a fan; to really appreciate literature takes a stronger temperament. So I confess it was with some skepticism, too, that I turned my attention to a recent documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars, directed by Hank Rogerson," writes Joseph Campana at the Kenyon Review's blog. Of course, he's won over: "The movie is a kind of gift to its audience, and the gift it gives us - in an age in which almost no one wants to make strong claims for the power of literature - is painful relevance."

"On the eve of its 10th anniversary, RES is shutting down. Is it a victim of its own success?" asks Anthony Kaufman.

Before he abandoned his film canon, Paul Schrader must have been aware that, by taking on Harold Bloom's model, he would also be taking on criticisms of the exclusionary elitism inherent in Bloom's approach to the very idea. Zach Campbell opens a few early rounds of fire. By the way, you've seen the cover of the new Film Comment, yes? Have you seen the ad on the back cover? Now, I love the magazine and the Coppolas as much as the next cinephile, but this does give one pause.

"[T]he announcement that [Fernando] Meirelles will direct a film adaptation of Blindness by José Saramago was big news [on Wednesday] in Brazil," writes Michael Gibbons, who translates a short interview with the director focusing on the project.

Grady Hendrix not only interviews Thai action choreographer Panna Rittikrai, he also reviews The Yakuza Papers: "It's a 634-minute movie, split into five parts, that teaches an alternate history of post-War Japan: one where honor died in one mushroom cloud and humanity died in the other."

Bruce Robinson in Time Out on Withnail and I: "A week later, we're in New York for a screening and they all come in, lots and lots of Americans, a harsh audience and it's, 'Does comedy travel?' I had no idea. We put the film up and they start laughing. Not immediately, but ten minutes in. There's that sense of, 'Oh this is a funny film.' 'Is it funny' 'Yeah.' There were two girls in front of me. By about 30 minutes in, they were standing up to laugh, hanging over the seats in front of them. I thought they were going to choke to death and it was the best noise I've ever heard."

Filmbrain: "Pan's Labyrinth is a perfect, wholly remarkable film - an uncompromising, emotionally moving adult fairytale that reminds us that the scariest monsters are the human kind. Be sure not to miss one of the great cinematic pleasures of 2006." More from Opus at Twitch. Related online viewing tip. Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with Guillermo Del Toro.

Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Playtime: "This film (due in accordance with its very failure) is a masterpiece of post-modern cinema."

"Reds, Warren Beatty's massive portrait of John Reed, the man who documented the Russian revolution with his book Ten Days That Shook the World, caused a stir at the time of its release and won Beatty the Best Director Oscar," Dan Callahan reminds us. "[T]hough it has been absurdly over-praised by some, there are a lot of enjoyable things in Reds aside from the use of the witnesses." It's "finally just an appealingly conventional epic movie-star romance with radical trimmings, but it contains several sharper elements that suggest the colorful period it seeks to recreate."

Also in Slant:

• Keith Uhlich: "If Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant is Andrei Tarkovsky directing a sham-spiritual Odd Couple, then his high-definition follow-up Climates is Neil LaBute directing an apolitical rendering of Hiroshima, Mon Amour."

• "How to explain The Decay of Fiction?" wonders Ed Gonzalez. "Here's a start: Imagine the human pawns from the naughtiest B noirs superimposed atop a tour of The Shining's Overlook Hotel." Also, Our Daily Bread is "a unique audio-video sensory experience, most striking in the exactness of its aloofness and monotony."

• Preston Jones on Broken Bridges, "just as pointless and hollow as one might expect."

• Nick Schager: "With The Aura, Argentinean director Fabián Bielinsky - who died this past June at the age of 47 - replaces Nine Queens' flashy Mamet-esque posturing with downbeat Melville/Antonioni noir existentialism, an inapt substitution for a director whose films are characterized less by their contemplative complexity than by their silken surface sheen." Also, Gridiron Gang.

Jeffrey Wells: "Esquire has finally put up [John Ridley's] delicious making-of-Bobby piece on its website."

"Welcome home, Paul Verhoeven!" exclaims Peet Gelderblom. "Zwartboek, Verhoeven's first Dutch film in over twenty years (if you include 1985's Euro-pudding Flesh & Blood), is the work of a director doing exactly what he wants, and nothing else. So it's good, then? Oh yes. I'd go so far to say it's Verhoeven's best."

The New York Times. Let's start with the book reviews this weekend:

• Lawrence Levi on David Thomson's Nicole Kidman (first chapter): "Ostensibly a critical biography, it comes off as a weird and unseemly mash note.... He imagines the non-obsessed will want to hear his bizarre fantasies about casting Kidman in remakes of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and François Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid, or his dream - recounted over three excruciating pages - about stumbling across his beloved in a Paris brothel. (She's wearing 'a very revealing white brassiere, a size or two too small,' as she cavorts with a Gestapo officer and an 'elderly Chinaman.')" Yikes. Anyway, related is a new review from Kim Voynar at Cinematical: "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, is a beautiful, elegant, poem of a film, and yet, like Arbus (Nicole Kidman) herself, it's so strange it almost defies description."

• It's hard to know where to pull a quote from Joe Queenan's marvelously funny review of Joe Eszterhas's The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!. Just go, read and enjoy. Related: Will Doig interviews Eszterhas for Nerve.

• "Remember that White House aide, quoted by Rich in his introduction, who said that a 'judicious study of discernible reality' is 'not the way the world really works anymore'?" asks Ian Buruma in his review of Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina. "For him, the 'reality-based community' of newspapers and broadcasters is old hat, out of touch, even contemptible in 'an empire' where 'we create our own reality.' This kind of official arrogance is not new, of course, although it is perhaps more common in dictatorships than in democracies."

Also in the NYT:

• "An actor's task of course is to become what he is not, and [Adrien] Brody... does that better than most. But in playing a Spanish bullfighter, he may have found, on and off screen, his most complicated role yet," writes Geoff Pingree, reporting on Manolete: "Mr Brody's dedication earned him uncommon respect from the matadors who tutored him, and his willingness to immerse himself in the role, coupled with his startling resemblance to the actual Manolete, led to a warm reception by ordinary Spaniards."

• "[I]t's fairly alarming news that [Jet] Li is calling his new picture, Fearless (set to open Friday), the 'conclusion to my life as a martial arts star,'" writes Terrence Rafferty. "Going to the movies seems a little less exciting already."

• Regarding The Departed, "it is the Nicholson-Scorsese match-up that catches the eye, and reminds us how much the game has changed in the last decade," notes Dennis McDougal, who then wonders, "will it simply provoke nostalgia for an era when Nicholson and Scorsese together would have been a sure thing?"

• Stephen Holden: "Amid the continuing deluge of documentaries about the war in Iraq, Patricia Foulkrod's film The Ground Truth stands out as an especially pointed indictment of the American military's treatment of its own people on and off the battlefield." (More from Dana Stevens in Slate.) Also, Keeping Mum.

• Mark Olsen on the comeback of Jackie Earle Haley.

The LA Weekly's Ella Taylor on The Last Kiss: "[Screenwriter Paul] Haggis can write a good one-liner, but he has a bad habit of shouting at the audience, and what worked for the over-the-top hysteria that was Crash feels like too much information, too loudly offered in a putative chamber piece. As for [Zach] Braff, on whose performance the movie's drama and its comedy depend, he has schleppy charm to burn but no range whatsoever." (More from AO Scott in the NYT and Andrew O'Hehir in Salon). Also: "Despite its title, Confetti, a chaotic mockumentary in the finest tradition of English vulgarity, has nothing whatever to say about marriage."

And John Payne: "[I]llustrating in vivid pictorial the remarkable detective work of Jon Wiener's book Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, The US vs John Lennon is a gripping and moving homage that brings in some new-old faces to flank the usual suspects in telling the story of Lennon and his badgering by the FBI: Mario Cuomo, George McGovern, John Dean, a comforting Walter Cronkite, a scarily unrepentant G Gordon Liddy and a surprisingly cogent Geraldo Rivera." More from AO Scott in the NYT, Andrew O'Hehir in Salon and Gary Dretzka at Movie City News. Related online listening tip: Fresh Air reruns a 2000 interview with Jon Weiner.

Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on This Film is Not Yet Rated: "Documentaries have begun reaching more viewers in recent years, but few take on the many-fangled foibles of the Bush era in an imaginative manner. Dick's new film does, in addition to providing a lesson about the intersection between film history and American history, a convergence that isn't as petty or easily dismissed as one might think." He's also got an extensive talk with Kirby Dick. Related online listening tip. Kirby Dick is a guest on Fresh Air.

Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones: "Disney was one of the great American visual artists, ranking with Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper. But where their art is local, his has conquered the world, apparently for all time, or as long as children watch moving images. Does this scare you? It honestly doesn't scare me."

Also:

• "Alan Bennett is a stylist as recognisable, in his way, as Oscar Wilde," observes Nicholas Hytner in a piece on adapting his second Bennett play, The History Boys (the first was The Madness of King George).

• 21 years after My Beautiful Launderette, "we are about to be served up Nina's Heavenly Delights, or as Art Malik, one of the stars of the film, calls it, 'My Beautiful Restaurant.' Set in a Glaswegian Indian restaurant, this PG-rated comedy includes an unapologetically upbeat lesbian relationship, which suggests that times have seriously changed for queer British Asians." Sara Wajid talks with director Pratibha Parmar.

• John Pilger decries "the fear and loathing of the independent documentary's power to circumvent those who guard official truth." His plea for opening up television screens has been made in the New Statesman, but here he expands his argument and recommends several docs relevant to what's happening out there in the real world.

• Peter Bradshaw on The Queen: "The best moments of the film are probably the opening scenes, before the great crash, and also the final autumnal encounter between Blair and the Queen after the cataclysm has died down - when the Queen is not at bay, when she is extrovert, droll, forthright and very, very good at putting people not at their ease." Also, Destricted and DOA: Dead or Alive.

• Mark Oliver talks with Alan Berliner about Wide Awake, "a film investigating both insomnia in general, and his affliction in particular."

• "I am ashamed to say it took a movie to make me realise what, above all others, is surely the greatest political question of our time." Jonathan Freedland on An Inconvenient Truth; half a zillion comments follow.

• Ryan Gilbey meets Kevin Smith and Gaby Wood talks with Maggie Gyllenhaal.

• Simon Relph remembers Zelda Barron, 1929 - 2006, with whom he worked on several films.

• Ronald Bergan reminds us that there was more to Joseph Stefano than Psycho. Related: Part 2 of C Jerry Kutner's obit at Bright Lights After Dark.

• And the editors remember historian and Hitler biographer Joachim Fest; and David Cesarani objects.

"Why is a British film as good as The Queen such a depressing rarity?" asks Robert Hanks in the Independent. Also, Elaine Lipworth talks with Meryl Streep about The Devil Wears Prada and Gill Pringle talks with Armistead Maupin about The Night Listener.

More raves for The Queen: Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph and James Christopher in the London Times.

"Oriana Fallaci, the veteran Italian journalist best known for her startling interviews with some of the most famous politicians of the twentieth century, has died," observes the London Times. "She published her first book, an examination of Hollywood's ills, in 1958." More and more. See also Judy Harris at Direland, Ian Fisher in the NYT, John Hooper in the Guardian, Brendan Bernhard in the LA Weekly in March and Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker in June:

For two decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, Fallaci was one of the sharpest political interviewers in the world. Her subjects were among the world's most powerful figures: Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press," said that he had been flattered into granting it by the company he'd be keeping as part of Fallaci's "journalistic pantheon." It was more like a collection of pelts: Fallaci never left her subjects unskinned.

One more obit. Gabriel Shanks remembers Ann Richards.

We last heard word on the restoration of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz just over a year ago (from Franziska Prechtel in the Berliner Morgenpost); now Bavaria Film International has released an update with technical details and news that it "will be finished in early 2007" - but no mention of whether or not it'll be ready in time for the Berlinale, as was planned earlier.

Ray Young: "Directed by Michel Deville, with Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin at their prime and on screen for nearly all of the picture, Le Voyage en douce is a pastel reflection on memory, aging, sexuality, nostalgia, infidelity, dreams and dashed hopes, all in the guise of a summery, erotic confection."

Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org: "Kim Ki-duk has been known to occasionally drive home an obvious point - The Coast Guard perhaps being the best example - but in Time his film remains balanced enough to undermine easy conclusions."

NP Thompson in the Northwest Asian Weekly: Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles "functions as a comedy of errors, yet the movie cuts much deeper than that subgenre typically allows, because the things that go wrong are so tied up in the emotional pain of the characters."

Film & Video's Debra Kaufman gets "Five Minutes With Werner Herzog," just after he'd returned to the US from Germany: "Briefly detained by Homeland Security, Herzog has a new classification to enter the country: 'alien with extraordinary abilities.'" Via filmtagebuch.

In the Austin Chronicle, Marc Savlov talks with Ron Mann about Tales of the Rat Fink and Joe O'Connell profiles "Austin's busiest and happiest movie extra," Odell Grant.

A "red meat crime cycle"? There's no such thing, argues Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix.

"Transvestite Filipinos sing and dance in Tel Aviv!" Eric Kohn reviews Paper Dolls. Also in the New York Press:

• Jennifer Merin: "Baseball and Babe Ruth will undoubtedly draw audiences to Everyone's Hero, but you don't have to be a die-hard fan of the game or its all-time hero to fall in love with this charming animated film." Also, Jesus Camp.

• Justin Ravitz: "Thanks largely to [Juliette] Lewis and an authentic cast that avoids Northern Exposure clichés, Aurora Borealis frequently rises above straight-to-DVD paralysis, finding sparkly, pretty stuff where it's least expected." More from Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.

Kamera runs an extract from Don Shiach's Great British Movies and Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc's review of The Films of Tod Browning.

IndieWIRE interviews Sherrybaby director Laurie Collyer and Man Push Cart director Ramin Bahrani.

Is lonelygirl15 this month's Snakes on a Plane? Ryan Wu thinks not.

"The Wire, which has just begun its fourth season on HBO, is surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America," declares Slate editor Jacob Weisberg. "This claim isn't based on my having seen all the possible rivals for the title, but on the premise that no other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature." More from Shaun Huston at PopMatters.

"Will iTV rock your world?" asks Paul Boutin in Slate. "Not in the form I saw on Tuesday." Related online listening tip. A Macworld roundtable.

Meanwhile, IDG's Dan Nystedt reports that BitTorrent will be opening an online movie store for foreign films.

Online browsing, listening and viewing tip. The San Francisco Film Festival turns 50 next year, and they've just unveiled a History Site. Though it's still growing, it's already quite a browse.

Just a sample from the Great Moments section. Miguel Pendás sets the stage: "The Sixth Festival was unique in that the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening simultaneously." Would the films invited from the USSR and the Soviet bloc be allowed into the country? Surprisingly, just days after the crisis unwound, yes. "At a press conference, a man sitting at the end of the table, his chin resting on his hand, looked pensively at the floor. He was an unknown filmmaker whose first feature was about to be screened: Andrei Tarkovsky... The Soviets started by announcing that a film about the Cuban Revolution was being shot at that very moment in Moscow. 'It's not anti-American,' Soviet delegate Mikhail Romm rushed to say. Instead, it was being made because, 'There is a deep feeling for the Cuban Revolution.' We now know that the film was I Am Cuba."

And there's video and audio in the Close Ups section.

Online listening tip. Elvis Mitchell and Scott Simon wonder what's become of the musical.

Online viewing tip #1. Matthew Clayfield's disturbing Firelight, an "essay film about images, the people who make them, the people who collect them, and their potential uses and limitations in a world that's been inundated with them."

Online viewing tip #2. The trailer for We Go Way Back (it's at the site). The Slamdance Grand Jury prizewinner sees its theatrical premier in Seattle this weekend; Kathy Fennessy wrote about it at the Siffblog in June.

Online viewing tip #3. "Currie Ballard, a historian in Oklahoma, has just made what he calls 'the find of a lifetime' - 33 cans of motion picture film dating from the 1920s that reveal the daily lives of some remarkably successful black communities." Carla Davidson introduces a series of clips at American Heritage. Via Ed Champion.

Online browsing and viewing tip. The Shark is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws. Roll over a face, click and watch an interview clip. Great fun.

Weekend fests and events.

"The Jewish East End attracted curious, censorious and sentimental writers almost as soon as the Jews started arriving in the 1880s, but Carol Reed's 1955 film A Kid for Two Farthings - showing this weekend at the NFT - is one of the few movies set in the area," writes Matthew Reisz in the Guardian.

The Mill Valley Film Festival (October 5 through 15) has announced its lineup; Brian Darr makes his lists.

Grace Glueck reviews the "wonderfully engrossing" exhibition Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880 - 1910 in the New York Times. At the Grey Art Gallery through December 9.

The LA Femme Film Festival: October 5 through 8 in Beverly Hills.

"Fifteen entries made it into competition for the second year of The Stranger's amateur-porn festival," reports Christopher Frizzelle. Capsule reviews follow.

"The European Film Academy (EFA) announced the selection of the European Film Awards." Cineuropa opens its special section.

TIFF's last weekend.

There's no competition at the Toronto International Film Festival, but there are a few awards; indieWIRE's got a list and here's a news release with more. Meanwhile, though reviews will probably trickle on over the next few days, another sampling...

Though he saw better films - in his opinion, of course - "standing in line at midnight for The Host in a torrential downpour with lighting crashing around us was an atmospheric high point of the festival" for Doug Cummings. Also, Hamaca Paraguaya is "easily among the most intensely beautiful and moving films I've seen all week," while Still Life "is a profound, multi-layered dramatic examination of the irretrievability of the past."

"My last film of this five-film day is probably the strangest movie I’ll see this festival," writes J Robert Parks. "Opera Jawa is exactly what it's title suggests - an Indonesian opera. But in addition to the music and singing, it's also full of ritual dance, art installations, puppets and mannequins, costumes, and myth."

"Lake of Fire is one of the most important documentary films ever made," declares Tom Hall in a long and thoughtful entry on the film. More from David Poland: "This is a powerful, patient, serious film that should be seen by every high school junior and senior and college student in America, not to mention the adult world. It is not fun. It is not funny. It is going to be hard on you, no matter where your sympathies lie." Turns out, too, it's the festival favorite for the AV Club's Scott Tobias.

The Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein talks with Macky Alston about The Killer Within, "a riveting documentary" about "Bob Bechtel, a mild-mannered University of Arizona psychology professor, now in his 70s," who, in 1955, "as a student at Swarthmore College... armed with a cache of guns, went on a rampage, killing a fellow student and shooting up his dormitory before he turned himself in to police." Also, a talk with Emma Thompson about Stranger Than Fiction.

Martha Fischer at Cinematical: "Apart from its sharp screenplay, [Shane Meadows's] This is England derives its power from a pair of extraordinary performances. As Shaun, [Thomas] Turgoose is all loss, ego and cocky desperation.... Opposite Turgoose is a deeply impressive Stephen Graham."

At Twitch, Todd finds it "a masterful film: vibrant, complex, full of life, remarkably unsentimental and unflinchingly honest." Also, Mathew talks with S&Man director JT Petty, Opus finds The Island "fascinating," and Todd reviews Big Bang Love, Juvenile A: "Once again [Takashi] Miike has crafted a film that utterly rejects conventional narrative and film making conventions to instead try to break new ground while asking big questions about the destructive nature of humanity."

Matt Riviera: "Every year here in Toronto I come out of one screening where I just know the film's going to be a huge crossover success. It happened with Sideways two years ago, with Brokeback Mountain last year and with Penelope this morning." Also, Kim Ki-duk's Time "is a little too neat and clever for its own good, it's a solid addition to this auteur's impressive body of work." More from Todd at Twitch.

The New Crowned Hope program originally played Venice; signandsight translates Katja Nicodemus's piece for Die Zeit on Daratt, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and Syndromes and a Century.

Jim Emerson on Little Children: "[A]t Toronto people seemed to either love it or hate it. I know I did. It just depended on the scene."

Peter Knegt and Brian Brooks report on an onstage chat between John Waters and John Cameron Mitchell, in town for Shortbus and This Filthy World, respectively, "an event that rivaled the films themselves, at least in entertainment value." Also at indieWIRE, Jonny Leahan surveys the music docs and Anthony Kaufman offers his takes on Sarah Polley's Away From Her, Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and Jia Zhangke's Still Life and Dong.

The latest iW Discovery interviews: Reprise director Joachim Trier, Takva: A Man's Fear of God director Ozer Kiziltan and London to Brighton director Paul Andrew Williams.

Blogging for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, B Ruby Rich describes a few of her favorite moments at the fest.

Anne Thompson and Gregg Goldstein put the finishing touches on the Hollywood Reporter's Toronto coverage. Anne Thompson has more at the Risky Biz Blog, but, "To sum up: Borat killed. Nothing else came close." More on the Sacha Baron Cohen juggernaut from John Hiscock in the Telegraph and Kevin Maher in the London Times.

Furor in Venice.

Note: Andy's still gathering more information and has updated Kino Slang several times now, and so, accordingly, I've tweaked this entry ever-so-slightly.

At Kino Slang, Andy Rector has been following a story few of us have heard about, though, as Tag Gallagher explains, it "caused a furor at the [Venice Film] Festival and in the Italian press." In lieu of their attendance, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet sent the actors of their new film, Quei loro incontri (Those Encounters of Theirs), along with three messages. The first is a string of quotes from Cesare Pavese, from whose Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leuco) the dialogue of their new film is derived; the second recounts memories of the festival, most of them not particularly pleasant; the third's the one that set off the sparks: "Besides I wouldn't be able to be festive in a festival where there are so many public and private police looking for a terrorist - I am the terrorist, and I tell you, paraphrasing Franco Fortini: so long as there's American imperialistic capitalism, there'll never be enough terrorists in the world."

Gallagher: "Nonetheless the jury wanted to give a special Roaring Lion to the Straubs 'for invention of cinematic language in the ensemble of their work.' But one jury member, American Cameron Crowe, objected such an award was inopportune on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11 and consented to it on an understanding that the Festival would 'distance' itself from Straub's 'anti-American' message. (Apparently it's anti-American to oppose imperialism.)"

Fall Blog-a-Thons.

Dennis Cozzalio not only calls for a Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon on October 16, he's also sent along word of a few more coming up this season:

• At the Film Vituperatem, Hitchcock will be on the mind of Squish throughout October, and then, on November 15: the Blog-a-Thon.

• "To commemorate his ninetieth birthday this November 24, Flickhead proposes a Forrest J Ackerman Blog-A-Thon, a/k/a ForryThon."

• Andy Horbal calls for a "Film Criticism Blog-a-Thon" for December 1 through 3. He's even got a FAQ: "Q: Film Criticism - isn't that a little broad? A: Yes, intentionally so," and he explains.

Scriptland.

"I have the new Charlie Kaufman screenplay on my desk," announces Jay A Fernandez in the Los Angeles Times. "Ambitious doesn't even begin to describe the sublime and scary head-trip that is 'Synecdoche, New York.'" Sneak peaks at James Vanderbilt's screenplay adapting White House counterterrorism expert Richard A Clarke's Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror and William Monahan's screenplay for Martin Scorsese's The Departed follow.

And Nikki Finke thinks its stinks: "This may be the single worst idea in the history of the Los Angeles Times' Calendar section.... If you wanna get all artsy about it, you're reviewing a work-in-progress akin to the sheet music for a Sinatra song, or the first draft for an Updike book. If you wanna get all Hollywood about it, then you need to know which draft you are reading.... [T]his fanboy foolishness smacks of something that Ain't It Cool News does... I predict 'Scriptland' will soon become the most made-fun-of feature since the NYT's Style section became obsessed with LaLaLand."

Similarly put off are David Poland, Ryan Wu (though he is intrigued by the Kaufman project) and Jim Emerson, who writes, "I hope that movie critics, and actual journalists, will protest. Loudly." But Jeffrey Wells doesn't see what all the hoopla's about.

Interview. James Ellroy.

"After November of this year, I will never discuss the Black Dahlia murder case, Mr De Palma's movie, Mr Curtis Hanson's movie or my mother's murder again. I write big political books now, that's all I want to talk about." But it's still mid-September, and James Ellroy's still willing to talk with Hannah Eaves about which theory seems the likeliest key to the mystery of the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, an "ambitious and flawed" documentary about him and the case - and the moral system governing his work.

"Once De Palma's movie vanishes from theaters, Elizabeth Short, dead white woman par excellence, may find her tenure as a literary and artistic inspiration is finally coming to an end," suggests Seth Mnookin, who weighs the fruits of that inspiration in Slate. But The Black Dahlia's just arrived and the critics, for the most part, understandably can't help setting it for comparison next to Hanson's adaptation of LA Confidential or the other recently released LA story, Hollywoodland, or both.

Updated through 9/19.

Manohla Dargis, who wrote a book on LA Confidential, the film, for the BFI's Modern Classics series, writes in the New York Times that "De Palma has a flair for the frenzy of violence, specifically when visited on the female body... Blood runs through his work, but so does juicy life. In The Black Dahlia, though, that life has been drained from the filmmaking, much as the blood was drained from the victim's body."

Four out of four stars, though, from Keith Uhlich at Slant: "This is a fever dream vision of the City of Angels, the shared nightmare of its principal players whose every move, we realize in retrospect, is helplessly preordained."

Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical: "Brian De Palma arrives in the final third of 2006 with one of his best films, and yet no one will realize it for years to come."

"It's an ideal match of director, writer and subject, and The Black Dahlia has so many of the right moves, you wish the whole thing were better," sighs Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly.

Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix: "[O]nce the body turns up, the film turns into, well, a De Palma movie, with its narrative absurdities, its stylistic excesses, its hammy acting, and your uneasy sense that the whole thing might be a big joke."

"The sad thing about [The Black Dahlia and Hollywoodland] is that so much obvious talent, care and money were expended on results that are beautifully crafted but dramatically clotted and sometimes gratingly tedious," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "The weird thing about them is that they are so similar. Like freak show twins, they could be wearing signs emblazoned 'Bastard Sons of LA Confidential!'"

Matt Zoller Seitz: "At first the film plays like Chinatown-style modern noir, in which the investigation of a singular horror reveals corruption within families, institutions and communities. But The Black Dahlia soon reveals itself as something more: the story of a young man discovering his moral code, then realizing how useless it is in the face of society-wide indifference, greed and cruelty."

Armond White, writing in the New York Press, also makes his LA Confidential and Hollywoodland references, but only to claim they "look like child's play" in comparison. Even so, "The Black Dahlia feels like a two-hour trailer featuring chopped-up highlights of De Palma's entire oeurve.... [M]uch of The Black Dahlia's disappointment owes to the triumph of DePalma's previous film, Femme Fatale (2002); it was the most exhilaratingly avant-garde mainstream movie of the new century (rivaled only by Mulholland Drive)."

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw: "There is some gobsmackingly melodramatic thesping and the final revelations, when they eventually arrive, are at the wrong end of the bang-whimper continuum."

"With so much to wrap up in so little time, the film's central mystery - just who killed the Dahlia, and why - can only be presented in a form of half-assery, rushed to a conclusion that would ring hollow if it weren't so comical," adds Bradley Steinbacher, who talks with Ellroy for the Stranger.

"Ellroy's prose can be overheated, but it's also gripping, which is more than can be said for De Palma's film, which sits on the screen, mysteriously inert and uninvolving, no matter the amount of sound and fury," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

But the "film is full of De Palma's staple ingredients: wonderful camera lifts, body doubles, women dressed to kill, period pornography, and references to Hitchcock that will make film buffs squeal," writes James Christopher approvingly in the London Times.

The Telegraph's Tim Robey calls it "Brian De Palma's strongest since Carlito's Way and quite the best period noir since the (admittedly superior) LA Confidential. The sheer narrative muscle of that film isn't here, for sure, but it has its own virtues, and they're big ones."

Earlier: Venice reviews.

Update: "I could go on about the ratio of De Palma's fat to Ellroy's bone, but the hell with it. Let's hear what Ellroy thinks about Dahlia, LA, all of it..." The Reeler talks with Ellroy.

Updates, 9/16: AO Scott in the New York Times: "[O]ften the combativeness of Mr De Palma's committed admirers reveals more about the nature of cinephilic ardor than it does about the filmmaker himself. Rock stars have fans; opera singers have worshipers; but movie directors have partisans. Liking a given director's movies can feel like a matter of principle, not of taste; failing to appreciate them is therefore evidence of cretinism or, at best, a serious moral and intellectual deficiency." Further in: "No longer the playful postmodernist, he is now, in the eyes of his admirers, something of a classicist, his critical enemies not high-minded squares but soulless philistines."

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "It gives me no pleasure to say that The Black Dahlia is a listless, surprisingly dispassionate picture: With the exception of a few scenes, there's something glassy and glazed about it."

To its Black Dahlia special, the Los Angeles Times adds Carina Chocano's review:

• "[D]espite some amusing distractions, watching the big picture coalesce is not unlike watching someone complete a jigsaw puzzle. It all comes together eventually, but you already saw the image on the box."

• Larry Harnish's "Black Dahlia Primer."

• And Ellroy himself on "three incandescent minutes of Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short."

Jim Emerson: "By the end, lots of people are getting shot (in pretty unimaginative ways for De Palma), just so it seems the filmmaker can get the movie over with. Things fall apart. I didn't feel like De Palma cared about the movie anymore at this point, and so neither did I."

Michael Joshua Rowin at Stop Smiling: "Both J Hoberman and a friend/colleague have expressed disappointment that the film, to use Hoberman's words, 'rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).' One can't dismiss that point, and it's even least among the film's flaws. And yet there's so much to admire in this gorgeous, ridiculous, irreverent, disturbing, incoherent mess of cinematic brilliance."

DK Holm notes "a mark of the difference between Curtis Hanson, who wants you to believe his films, and De Palma, who is essentially drawing a cartoon and thinking about the set pieces."

Daniel Kasman: "It is a revisionist neo-noir, which is not a redundant statement, for De Palma's film is undercutting pristine productions like LA Confidential by way of its own sloppy, inconsistent, and dissatisfying result, a hollow and hollowing film that seems to call the bluff of the attraction of everything it is - or at least tries to be, and fails - and its kind represents. These latter qualities are what make The Black Dahlia all the more interesting - its failings - because sometimes a troubled production and an awkward final product can leak fascination from all its odd holes, bulges, and depressions."

Pete Vonder Haar at Film Threat: "The Black Dahlia isn't a return to form for De Palma who, let's face it, hasn't had anything approaching 'form' for almost 20 years. It looks stylish, sure, but the script is laughable and the acting is ridiculous. If Hollywood decides to adapt Ellroy's American Tabloid, hopefully they'll coax Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland back to take the reins."

Mike D'Angelo at Nerve: "The Black Dahlia can't match the legendary ineptitude of Bonfire of the Vanities, but it's certainly not for lack of trying."

Online viewing tip. Karina Longworth's review for "Netscape at the Movies."

Updates, 9/18: Nick Davis: "Days later, you may find yourself revisiting this stunted and often foolish film with an almost haunted interest—exactly the sort of gravitational pull on both memory and conscience that the film means to describe, and which, despite being something of a mangled corpse itself, the movie powerfully recreates." The full review.

Richard Schickel in Time: "The Black Dahlia is tired when it is not self-parodying, and it suggests that our nostalgia for its genre tropes has become idle and a vacuous waste of our time and of our filmmakers' energies."

David Edelstein in New York: "A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived), but I'm frankly stumped by the Brian De Palma thriller The Black Dahlia; I can't tell you how it ended up such a stiff."

Updates, 9/19: C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark: "The Black Dahlia is a far from flawless film, but as a whole, significantly greater than its dismembered parts. I was thrilled, chilled, and, ultimately, moved."

Online listening tip. Slate's "Spoiler Special."

Other fests and events, 9/14.

"Hollywood is all over Lever House! On Sept 12, artist Sarah Morris's Robert Towne installation, inspired by the famous screenwriter of mysterious, shadowy Chinatown and the dank, sequiny Shampoo, opened at the glassy modernist skyscraper on 53rd and Park."

For the New York Observer, Toni Schlesinger talks with Morris about, among other things, a chat with Warren Beatty in the restaurant.

Graham Fuller on the Josef von Sternberg retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image through October 8: "Cinema's Great Artificer built a world in seven Marlene Dietrich movies that reflected the bitter knowledge that love pined for is more exquisite than love requited - and that the torch of eroticism always outlasts the cigarette glow of romance." Also in the Voice, Elliott Stein previews Pola Negri: Life is a Dream, at MoMA from September 18 through 25.

"Like so many culture vultures who shouldered the weight of the 60s, Peter Whitehead burned out quickly, mostly abandoning documentary in favor of writing and a mysterious obsession with falcons," writes Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (and he's got more at SF360). "Although his legacy isn't as canonical as those of contemporaries Michelangelo Antonioni and Godard, his work still provides an important counterpoint to those comfortably established giants of 60s cinema." The Word and the Image: The Films of Peter Whitehead is a series beginning tonight and running through September 28. Also: Cheryl Eddy's overview of the MadCat Women's International Film Festival, through September 27.

In the Independent Weekly, David Fellerath previews Spark Con, "Raleigh's celebration of its creative class that will take place all weekend long in venues all over town."

Armond White in the New York Press: "Film Forum's current retrospective-salute to Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi reaches its peak with Sansho the Bailiff on September 15-16. This couldn�t happen at a better time. The rarely screened film initiates the new movie season with a reminder of why the art form matters."

Also, Eric Kohn: "Downtown Locals screens September 15 at Williamsburg's Automotive High School as part of the Rooftop Film Festival. Seeing it is practically a civic duty for the commuting New Yorker."

"A longtime fan of Cinematexas who has written about Austin's hometown festival for the Voice and other publications, [Ed] Halter was a logical choice to be the series' first-ever guest artistic director." So Josh Rosenblatt talks with him for the Austin Chronicle, where Marrit Ingman previews the fest's retrospective of the work of experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute. Cinematexas runs September 20 through 24.

In the Los Angeles Times, Robert Abele has an intriguing preview of Unknown Cinema: The Animated Films That Got Away, September 22 through 24.

"The blockbuster-packed programme for The Times BFI 50th London Film FestivalSimon Crerar, writing in the Times, is quite happy with it. But the Guardian's Xan Brooks seems pleased as well. The fest runs October 18 through November 2.

Stephen Holt looks back on the Montreal Film Festival for Movie City News.

TIFF, 9/14.

The LA Weekly's Scott Foundas on one of the best he's seen so far at the Toronto International Film Festival: "The movie is Lake of Fire, and it represents the culmination of some 15 years spent by the British commercials and music video director Tony Kaye canvassing the US abortion debate.... Make no mistake, Kaye suggests, we are living in times of civil war, and if you don't believe him, just look into the eyes of Emily Lyons, a nurse blinded and disfigured in the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham abortion clinic, and - whether you pity her or feel that she got what she deserved - try to feel otherwise."

Death of a President is "all setup and no payoff," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Fortunately, she was able to catch Jia Zhangke's Still Life: "What makes the film not only a formal but also a human triumph is the filmmaker's insistence on the primacy of the individual in even the most dehumanizing of contexts."

B Ruby Rich sends a dispatch into the Guardian, and she's far, far more impressed with DOAP, arguing that it's "centrally concerned with the death of civil liberties, the dangers of the Patriot Act, and the certainty with which secret investigations and round-ups can only find the wrong people, misunderstand every situation, focus on the wrong subjects, and, in the end, lead to a near-fascist government that endangers everyone.... Its other, equally important, agenda is to demonstrate how efficiently technology can be used to misinform." More from Jim Emerson and the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy.

Cinematical has pulled together a mighty helpful index to its extensive Toronto coverage so far. Seems unfair to highlight any one entry, but many will want to know about Scott Weinberg's interview with Bong Joon-ho, director, of course, of this year's gotta-see, The Host.

Following up on his review,