Shorts, 10/31.

Just up at the Mother Jones site is the feature-length interviewer's extended cut of Rob Nelson's conversation with Richard Linklater, three times longer than what you may have already seen in print. Related: Matt Dentler on what's in store for the Austin premiere of Fast Food Nation.

David Lynch's self-distributed Inland Empire is slated for a two-week run at the IFC Center in New York starting December 6. "That was quick," notes Anthony Kaufman.

The Rules of the Game. There it sits at #3 in the most recent Sight & Sound Critics' Poll, #9 for the Directors'. And now that it's been restored from a master print, it's seeing a rerelease. J Hoberman: "It is required viewing, if only to understand the ideal that filmmakers from Robert Altman to Woody Allen have been after. And even if you think you know it, see it again for its newly rediscovered depth of field, and even more, for its infinite wellsprings of character and empathy."

Also in the Voice, Wondrous Oblivion "not only vacillates between innocuous fancy and real menace, sometimes awkwardly, but also maintains a rather nervy balance between a light coming- of-age drama for children and a darker, more adult story of deferred passions," writes Jim Ridley.

One of the projects Stanley Kubrick never got around to making was Lunatic at Large, based on a treatment he commissioned in the late 50s from Jim Thompson. Charles McGrath reports that not only have Kubrick's widow and son-in-law found the manuscript but producer Edward R Pressman and director Chris Palmer plan to realize the film. The story? "It's a dark and surprising mystery of sorts, in which the greatest puzzle is who, among several plausible candidates, is the true escapee from a nearby mental hospital."

Also, Dave Kehr on a collection from Paramount: "Audiences loved the Freudian conflict between [Dean] Martin's slicked-back, self-assured embodiment of adult sexuality and the explosive id of [Jerry] Lewis's little-boy character, as artfully uncontrolled as Mr Martin's polished charm was the product of self-conscious calculation." Related news from the BBC: "EMI Music have signed a deal with the estate of late singer Dean Martin to use his name, image and likeness."

Variety's Michael Fleming reports that Steven Soderbergh is set to shoot not one but two films with Benicio Del Toro as Che Guevara. The Argentine "begins as Che and a band of Cuban exiles (led by Fidel Castro) reach the Cuban shore from Mexico in 1956. Within two years, they mobilized popular support and an army and toppled the U.S.-friendly regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The second film, Guerrilla, begins with Che's trip to New York, where he spoke at the United Nations in 1964 and was celebrated in society circles."

Production Weekly: "Brian De Palma is set to direct The Untouchables: Capone Rising, a prequel to his 1987 hit film about lawman Eliot Ness' takedown of Al Capone."

Robert Keser on the new Will Ferrell movie: "This certainly counts as director [Marc] Forster's best work yet, as he deftly achieves and sustains all the fanciful notions with a much lighter hand than he used in Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland, but in the end Stranger Than Fiction suggests far too many other films for its own good."

Also in Slant:

• Jason Clark on The History Boys: "A fine stage craftsman, [Nicholas Hytner's] films range from choppy (The Crucible) to dull (The Madness of King George, also penned by [Alan] Bennett) to downright insipid (The Object of My Affection). It's quite amazing, then, how this translation still manages to hold up, most likely because Bennett's marvelously subversive writing remains intact." Earlier: "Plays, 10/13."

• Nick Schager: "Shottas regurgitates worn-out gangsta tropes in telling the story of two hoods trying to make it big in both Jamaica and Miami's crime worlds."

• Ed Gonzalez: "[T]he tenor of The Magic Gloves reveals a certain kinship to the deadpan cinema of Aki Kaurismäki and Jim Jarmusch."

"Few experiences are stranger than sitting in a cinema and seeing an almost exact recreation of your teenage bedroom." David Nicholls watches the adaptation of his novel, Starter for Ten. "I'm also struck, frequently and painfully, by the realisation that things I experienced as a young adult now constitute a period movie. Many of the film's cast can't remember a time when Nelson Mandela wasn't free, and I'm still processing the fact that the Smiths bear the same relation to 2006 as Gerry and the Pacemakers did to 1986."

Also in the Guardian: "Jackie Chan and Jet Li, the two biggest stars of Hong Kong action cinema, are to face off in a film." More from Wolf at Twitch. So, with all that talk about retiring from martial arts after Fearless, Li must have been referring specifically to Wu Shu after all.

Owen Hatherley has a suggestion as to why Daniel Frampton's Filmosophy "falls short."

Since the purge of arts writers at the Village Voice, Michael Atkinson has appeared in the Stranger, at TCM and now has a new DVD column at IFC News to boot. This week, he reviews Down to the Bone and Hands Over the City.

"A number of influential film critics, including the <Ford scholar Tag Gallagher and Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, consider 7 Women to be one of the director's finest films.... Why, then, the widespread indifference to 7 Women?" asks Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab. "Perhaps because it seems, on its surface, such a departure from the prototypical Ford film." Related: An Anne Bancroft recollection from David Ehrenstein.

"In Hombre Kabuki, a short film directed by Leo Age, some dude tries to convince his significant other that her wearing a Mexican wrestling mask may spice up their dull sex life," writes Mike Everleth at Bad Lit. The film "subverts the notion of fetish sex by shifting the power from one partner to the other."

"Hollywood is always being accused of having a pernicious influence on our personal values, of preferring to promote sex, violence, moral equivalency and other horrible perversities," writes Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "Yet two of the fall's best films - Flags of Our Fathers and The Queen honor an especially timely traditional value: people who choose reticence over shameless exhibitionism."

Chris Tilly: "The TOMB attended the Breaking and Entering Blackberry gala screening and after party on Friday, both of which were rather lacklustre affairs."

Erin Torneo sends a dispatch into indieWIRE from the Hawaii International Film Festival.

Online viewing tip #1. Via Coudal Partners, Peter Greenaway harrumphs.

Online viewing tips #2 and #3. Moscow 1908, via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing, where he's also pointing to John Kricfalusi's NSFW video for Tenacious D.

Docs, 10/31.

The European Film Academy has announced that this year's documentary award (Prix Arte) goes to Philip Gröning's Die Grosse Stille (Into Great Silence). "As the jury explained, 'for almost three hours, we were taken into another world - Into Great Silence. And we appreciated it.'" The European Film Awards ceremony will be held December 2 in Warsaw.

It's been fascinating watching a documentary as personal and moving as Tara Wray's Manhattan, Kansas move from production (when I interviewed Tara) through its first screenings (when I reviewed the film) through to this latest stage: self-distribution: "Each DVD comes packaged in a limited edition hand-made origami case." Recommended.

Paddy Johnson for the Reeler on Absolute Wilson: "Maybe I'm asking too much from a documentary that is essentially done in collaboration with its subject, but I would have liked to have seen more critical analysis of the work; in the end, you have to put aside the limitations of filmmaking and evaluate the film on its own terms. And I, for one, can't pretend that a cold documentary pairing a lineage of the artist's productions and his superficial personal biography is the same as a portrait of the artist, his life and work." Related: Robert Wilson's video portrait of Brad Pitt. At Vanity Fair via Alex Ross.

"Art docs are the new black," suggests Ed Gonzalez, opening a review of Who the $#%& is Jackson Pollock?. More from David D'Arcy.

At IFC News, Dan Persons notes "The Rise of the Fanumentary," e.g., 95 Miles to Go, The Outsider, Sketches of Frank Gehry and Wrestling with Angels.

Time's Richards Corliss and Schickel offer their takes on some of the most interesting docs out there right now: S&Man, 49 Up, Jesus Camp, Deliver Us From Evil and, in general, Werner Herzog (at the end of last year, Corliss named The White Diamond the best film of 2005; Schickel, Grizzly Man).

In the meantime, the "Jesus Camp" itself, that is, Kids on Fire, is closing down following acts vandalism and threats to safety directed at the organization. Pointing to an AP report, Jessica Barnes has more at Cinematical.

"A case study in documentary dialectics," suggests J Hoberman: "In opposition to the death cult of Stanley Nelson's sensational Jonestown, we have the positive vibes of Jonathan Berman's mellow account of Black Bear Ranch, Commune."

Also in the Voice:

• Jordan Harper finds Romántico "moving almost to the point of exploitation."

• R Emmet Sweeney on As the Call, So the Echo, a "stealthy love letter from son to father."

• Drew Tillman on Deeper Than Y, "a lithe documentary about the trials and rewards of reaching advanced age, as well as a gentle rebuke to a society that has little time for the elderly."

Brian Brooks has an overview of the Sheffield Documentary Festival at indieWIRE.

How are all these docs doing at the box office? An overview from AJ Schnack.

Online listening tip. For NPR, Christopher Johnson talks with James Spooner about Afro Punk.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for What is Said About Arabs and Terrorism.

Horrors, Halloween.

"We are gathered here at the final end of what Bradbury called the October Country: a state of mind as much as it is a time. All the harvests are in, the frost is on the ground, there's mist in the crisp night air and it's time to tell ghost stories." And Neil Gaiman whispers a few in the New York Times.

"As a Halloween special, Cinema Strikes Back brings you a double dose of scary HP Lovecraft goodness - a review of The Call of Cthulhu and an interview with co-creator Sean Branney."

Dennis Cozzalio offers an "attempt to guide the discerning horror film aficionado, as well as the average viewer in search of a good movie, whatever the genre, toward some favorite titles that haven’t really seen their share of the limelight over the years," a list of "13 Underrated, Ignored or Forgotten Horror Movies," followed by honorable mentions of 13 more and a list of "10 Under-Appreciated Horror Films" from writer-director Don Mancini. All these titles are generously and smartly annotated, too.

Wisit Sasanatieng's The Unseeable has, in fact, been seen. Wise Kwai's caught a sneak preview: "Though Wisit restrains the colorful style he displayed in Tears of the Black Tiger and Citizen Dog, this intelligent, spooky ghost thriller still oozes old-timey Siamese atmosphere, and for that alone, it's a beautiful film to watch." Via Grady Hendrix, who points to another trailer.

Bill Gibron's been sprinting these past few days at PopMatters:

• A horror top ten, "films that function as both macabre as well as a mirror on the modern world."

• On Ganja & Hess: "When we hear it was supposed to be a combination of blaxploitation and bloodsucker, we settle in and expect the worse - or perhaps Blackula Part 2. Instead, we get a devastating art film that raises more intriguing philosophical questions than hairs on the back of one's neck."

• "Now more than ever the suffering category of scares needs jaded jesters like James Gunn. Slither is the perfect cure for such cinematic stagnancy."

• "Dead Heat is an inventive, inviting horror comedy that avoids formulas while it deconstructs clichés to make what has to be the first action-adventure-living-dead comedy ever conceived."

• On Plaga Zombie: Mutant Zone: "Here it is, all you home-movie hopefuls - 100 percent proof positive that epic entertainment can be crafted out of a camcorder, a cast and crew of friends, and a great deal of cinematic creativity."

"The kind of film Maya Deren would've whipped up for Sam Arkoff, Dementia began as a ten-minute short by novice director John Parker," writes Flickhead. "Although dismissed by the New York Times for its "lack of poetic sense, analytical skill and cinematic experience,' John Parker snagged a plug from Preston Sturges, who called it 'a work of art. It stirred my blood and purged my libido.'"

Quint visits the Prague set of Eli Roth's Hostel 2 for AICN.

Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell have a horror top ten at Kamera. Nice touch: each film comes from a different country.

Tony Kay on Jack Clayton's The Innocents: "As a horror tale, as a psychological study, and as a work of art, it rivals anything produced by any major studio at the time. Only Robert Wise's nigh-peerless The Haunting comes close." As it happens, that's Edward Copeland's pick for the day: "It takes some skill to make a film this creepy when very little concrete happens, but director Robert Wise accomplished it, even with an overuse of strange camera angles and an overblown musical score by Humphrey Seale. Two factors though make The Haunting more than worthwhile: the exquisite black and white cinematography by Davis Boulton and a great performance from the legendary Julie Harris."

Scott Weinberg: "Probably best recommended only to those who already like Saw and Saw 2, Saw 3 delivers more of the same mayhem, plus an appreciable dose of dark chills, morbid thrills, and just enough in the 'ultra-sick morality tale' department to keep the brainier horror geeks happy."

Also at Cinematical:

• Jeffrey M Anderson lists the seven best black and white horror movies.

• Chris Ullrich lists a few of the worst horror films of all time.

• Kim Voynar rounds up more tricks and treats.

"Fred M Wilcox's 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet may seem an odd addition to our Halloween spectacular," confesses Reverse Shot's clarencecarter. "But I'll proudly stand up and say that my regular childhood viewings, even those on sunny weekend afternoons, were marked with liberal doses of sheer terror."

Looking for even more suggestions as to what to watch? Robert Cashill suggests that "you could do worse than watching the films listed in the 'Science Fiction' song" that opens The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

"I think watching Tim Burton movies is one of my favorite family activities. Epecially in a house decorated with cobwebs and skeletons and such, which I find pernnially comforting," writes David Lowery.

Those fluent in German who also happen to have an interest in both German media law and Dario Argento are encouraged to read Thomas Groh's tip in his filmtagebuch - and catch Suspiria on arte tonight.

Online viewing tip. "It's Halloween, Charlie Brown!" At ticklebooth.

NCTATNY. "Neverending Nightmares."

Not Coming to a Theater Near You wraps its "31 Days of Horror" series with an all-encompassing retrospective of the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street movies, 18 features in all.

A "a foolproof formula the engine driving each, they begin to veer in wildly different directions, before - to the delight of many fans - merging in 2002's Freddy vs Jason," writes Rumsey Taylor, introducing the survey. "One has as its routine slasher killer a durable, taciturn and deformed son, who forever seeks vengeance for not only his mother's death, but his own. The other has a maniacal, effeminate, and outspoken child molester, burned alive at the hands of angry parents, and who vows to forever torment their children in their sleep. Each character has made for a great, even if critically derided, variety of scenarios, illustrating the very extent of a subgenre over the course of the past quarter-century."

Interview. Matt Kennedy.

"As president of Panik House Entertainment, a Chicago-based DVD distribution company specializing in obscure Asian horror films, sexploitation epics and notorious Pinky Violence shockers, Matt Kennedy is a disarmingly cheerful aficionado of nightmarish visions and unspeakable acts," writes Steven Jenkins, introducing a conversation that touches on the appeal, the packaging and the future of the extreme.

Shorts and fests, 10/30.

Girish reminds us of what else a blog can do and introduces "a new feature called Archiveology devoted to unearthing valuable writing on the web that is not brand new. Today: an homage to five voracious cinephiles whose curiosity, open-mindedness, energy, intelligence and appetite I find truly inspirational."

When he saw The Matrix in the spring of 1999, Darren Aronofsky asked himself, "What kind of science fiction movie can people make now?" For Wired, Steve Silberman traces the seven-year-long evolution of Aronofsky's answer, "The Fountain - equal parts sci-fi, swashbuckling adventure, and medical thriller - [it] tries to be three blockbusters in one." That much you may already know. But there's more: "The Fountain - an allegory about the promise of eternal life - died several ugly deaths on its way to the screen. The inside story of the film is a classic tale of a prodigy tempted to excess by Hollywood megabudgets and the commercial potential of boldface names. But in the end, Aronofsky's determination to reinvent sci-fi without CGI helped save The Fountain and his own indie soul."

"Iranian artist Shirin Neshat plans to shoot a film about the United States overthrowing a democratically-elected government in Iran to gain control of the nation's vast oil supplies," reports Marguerita Choy for Reuters. "The project is not based on the West's ongoing standoff over Tehran's nuclear program but rather on the US Central Intelligence Agency's first overthrow of a foreign government, 53 years ago."

At Koreanfilm.org, Darcy Paquet reviews Jang Sun-woo's 1996 film A Petal, dealing with the Gwangju Massacre in May 1980: "Ultimately this event more than any other would come to shape the future political development of Korea.... Despite the intensity of many scenes, what stands out most from A Petal is a black-and-white flashback at the film's end, which has to rank as one of the most powerful, heartbreaking moments contained in any Korean film."

In its fourth year, the Morelia International Film Festival has already become "the most important fest in Mexico," writes David Wilson at indieWIRE. "Though Mexico is in the midst of an especially creative and prolific film renaissance, there is still relatively little money to fund feature films. Thus, short films have become the dominant form of expression for young Mexican filmmakers looking to make their mark. Many function as 'calling cards' for commercial work, but plenty offer fully realized, pocket-sized visions of Mexican life."

Also: an interview with Cocaine Cowboys director Billy Corben.

"The Kuala Lumpur depicted in Ho Yuhang's Rain Dogs is bustling, seedy, unfinished, on a slow brew threatening to boil over," writes The Visitor at Twitch. "This is the underbelly of KL rarely seen in local productions."

Studs Lonigan, notes Zach Campbell, "isn't avant-garde or experimental, it isn't a profoundly subversive take on the H'wood narrative - it simply wants to render it less invisible, less taken for granted."

Nick Davis: "Illusions, though it lacks any trace of [Daughters of the Dust's] dazzling visual palette, and though it concentrates on a smaller and simpler cast of characters, clearly prefigures the pliable and critical perspectives on history that would characterize [Julie Dash's] justly famous feature."

"Eugène Green seems ideally suited to interpret Flaubert's La Première éducation sentimentale (the first version of L'Éducation sentimentale), re-adapting the themes of first love, the intoxication of desire, and failed ideological revolution (that culminated in the Revolution of 1848) to the May 68 generation through a chronicle of the parallel lives of a pair of childhood friends," writes acquarello in a review of Toutes les nuits.

In the Independent, David Thomson shifts his gaze to Isabelle Huppert, "one of the great actresses on the screen, and one who has steadfastly pursued the best and the most daring of directors."

"'[W]atch borderline personality decompensate over course of two hours' isn't on my to-do list anywhere, but I can't un-know what it looks like now." Sarah D Bunting can't help but revisit five performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh at the House Next Door.

Two movies that have been talked about, blogged about, feted, festival-circuited, online-clipped, previewed, reviewed, the works, practically all year long, finally see their theatrical releases this week. But of course, that won't be the end of it. As noted yesterday, awards season, now stretching out to a full half-year, has only just begun. We will be seeing more of Volver and Borat. For today, know that David Edelstein reviews both for New York (where Logan Hill has a brief talk with Pedro Almodóvar), and so does Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

Shawn Levy adds one childhood story from Todd Field to his piece in Sunday's Oregonian on Little Children.

SF360's Susan Gerhard talks with Stanley Nelson about Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple.

Online browsing tip. Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, via Coudal Partners, also pointing to the Newspaper Movie Ad Archive.

Online viewing tip. On the Edge of Blade Runner, hosted by Mark Kermode. Via Waxy.org.

Blog-a-Thon: Vampires!

Last month, Nathaniel R called for a Blog-a-Thon on my own favorite cinematic creatures of the season, vampires, and we can look forward to watching it seep along today. Update: That's not seeping, that's gushing. Halloween Update: 53 participating blogs so far. Fantastic.

Halloween Update #2: Nathaniel's drawn up an index of the Blog-a-Thon that looks like the Table of Contents to an excellent anthology on vampire movies. Extraordinarily well done.

Introducing write-ups of half a dozen vampire movies, Flickhead notes that "the age of AIDS has lent a stultifying nihilism to the genre, making the contemporary vampire pictures seem less concerned with simple-minded escapism than harrowing and incurable diseases."

Richard Gibson has a string of entries related to his "Dream Double Bill #17": Martin and The Addiction, "the two most interesting modern day Vampire films."

"There are no brides. There is no Dracula," writes Peter Nellhaus. "Looking past the misleading title, this is one of my favorite Hammer films."

Updated.

As it happens, the subject of today's entry in Not Coming to a Theater Near You's "31 Days of Horror" extravaganza is a vampire movie. Chiranjit Goswami returns to The Hunger "without much anticipation only to be surprised at how the film's shamelessly sumptuous style remains so utterly absorbing and expertly effective. It also made me realize I had become somewhat of a biased blockhead. Though the claim that [Tony] Scott's film lacks sufficient substance may hold merit, The Hunger constantly displays itself to be crafted remarkably well."

Updates: Nick Davis: "For me, Bram Stoker's Dracula distills and sacralizes a form of aestheticized passion, the kind that insists on both the virtuosity and the foolishness in artistic experiment and self-exhibition. The film finds its director living on the outward edge of his mind's eye and inviting a plethora of fellow artists to join him there, all of them enraptured with the arts that constitute the cinema if also a bit skeptical, maybe even a bit cynical, as regards the final product.... It's as though Coppola, his own career all but scuttled and his chosen medium increasingly eulogized, is throwing every new and old inspiration he can find at the screen, and saying, baying, crying, laughing, joking, fuming, declaiming, 'Here, for better and for worse, is a movie that's alive.'"

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij reviews "a rollicking ride that is funnier than it is scary, though the tone of Frostbiten remains admirably on the spooky side of Scream and Scary Movie, never stopping to knowingly wink at the audience."

And Nathaniel's tracking dozens more.

Horrors, 10/30.

On the eve of All Hallows' Eve, viewing recommendations trickle on in, with the most recent rounds coming from Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas and the staff of Film Threat, where Don Lewis recommends Rosemary's Baby; so does David Jeffers at the Siffblog.

After plugging Slither, Vince Keenan points to Tony Kay's Pop Culture Petri Dish, "where he's in the midst of his second annual Horrorpalooza. He's got you covered from A (Argento, Dario) to Z (Zombies, Nazi)."

From a highly entertaining primer-like piece by Jeffrey Hill at the House Next Door: "From about 1940-48 - the prime years for mummy movies - if you were a young woman who, through coincidence, was the spitting image of Princess Ananka and happened to be near the Universal lot, chances were that you would end up on the sacrificial table of one of these looney birds."

Thomas Scalzo at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "A splatter-generation take on the reviled-monster tale, Basket Case modernizes the gothic locales of Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the like with scenes of the grimy city, transporting the maltreated centerpiece from crumbling castle to dingy New York City hotel. And while Basket Case's Belial is cut from the same cloth as the classic horror showstoppers, writer/director Frank Henenlotter brings the idea of the abhorred abomination to a new level, weaving a tapestry of cruelty that rivals anything endured by the fiends of yore."

Also, Teddy Blanks on Shivers: "In retrospect, it's almost too perfect that this was David Cronenberg's first widely-seen picture, but its intense exploitation of deep human sexual desire and angst must have been quite shocking at the time. Which is not to say that it doesn't still shock. The mere idea of a building terrorized by sex zombies is taboo, even - no, especially - in today's horror landscape, which is gore-and-dismemberment friendly, but still treats sex as something that happens only to girls with boob jobs right before they get stabbed."

Häxen is "one of the most visionary - and lethally pointed - horror-comedies ever made," writes brotherfromanother at Reverse Shot, where, for Robbiefreeling, Poltergeist is "something like a particlarly gruesome Little Golden Book; it could be subtitled 'My First Horror Movie.'"

"Horror movie fans will take it on faith that an evil transplant has a life of its own; which is why the Hands of Orlac story has been done again, and again," writes Richard von Busack at Cinematical. "A scholarly round-up by Kinoeye's Ruth Goldberg notes the various versions, except the one she neglects, the satire, 'My Bloody Hand' on SCTV. Mad Love is the best, because of the way [Peter] Lorre fleshes the bizarre fable out."

"Just in time for Holloween come two erotic horror films from Jesus Franco, with a greater emphasis on the erotic." Peter Nellhaus reviews Macumba Sexual and Mansion of the Living Dead.

"Tobe Hooper inaugurates the second season of Showtime's Masters of Horror by rotating, whirling, and shaking his camera with what feels like desperation," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Chris Tilly for Time Out: "The world's first made-for-mobile horror series hit the very small screen this week in the shape of When Evil Calls."

Jonathan Marlow at the Guru: "Over a two-year period (1971-2), [Robert] Fuest released among the most original pair of horror pictures ever made, both starring the legendary Vincent Price as Anton Phibes: The Abominable Dr Phibes (amazingly, Price's 100th movie appearance), and the less successful Dr Phibes Rises Again."

That Little Round-Headed Boy is no fan of horror, but that won't keep him from appreciating Boris Karloff.

Online viewing tip. Jerry Lentz's Security Cam Ghost.

Interview. Wendy Flower.

This is Gary McFarland "is easily one of the best music documentaries of the year," wrote Jonathan Marlow in the Daily this summer.

Before he died mysteriously in 1971, musician, composer and arranger Gary McFarland collaborated with the likes of Gerry Mulligan, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Clark Terry, Cal Tjader - and Wendy & Bonnie.

Filmmaker Kristian St Clair talks with Wendy Flower about her memories of "the jazz legend who should have been a pop star."

Cabinetic and GreenCine present a screening of This is Gary McFarland on Wednesday night, November 1, at 7:30 pm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Kristian St Clair will be there and, if you can make it, you should be, too.

Interview. Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

In its fourth edition of the series On Set with French Cinema, UniFrance is sending seven directors to the two American coasts to speak and present films in university film departments this and next month and then in January as well. Click those green italics for a schedule.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet will be at Stanford University tonight for a screening of The City of Lost Children, and tomorrow, he'll screen his own print of Amélie along with the charming, complimentary short Foutaises, at the Smith Rafael Film Center. He was an honoree at last year's Mill Valley Film Festival, which is when and where Hannah Eaves and Jonathan Marlow spoke with him and found him to be a lively, generous and often humorous talker.

Sunday shorts.

Todd McEwen in Granta: "North By Northwest isn't a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it's about what happens to his suit." Via wood s lot. Related: GQ presents the "25 Most Stylish Films of All Time," a list better than it has to be.

"British filmmaker Peter Watkins' nearly six-hour film, La Commune (Paris, 1871), made in the year 2000, is without a doubt one of the best and most important films of the decade," writes Doug Cummings. "Watkins offers a bracing critique of mass media by imagining how Commune life would have been represented by competing modern news sources, the National TV Versailles and the independent Commune TV. The result is a multilayered and thoroughly absorbing work that is as informative and thought-provoking as it is feverishly dramatic, suspenseful, and surprisingly brisk despite its length."

Nicholas Wood reports from Sarajevo and the set of Spring Break in Bosnia, "a black comedy loosely based on an actual attempt by a group of journalists to track down [Radovan] Karadzic. The filmmakers say they hope the movie, due out next year, will shame the international community into making his arrest a higher priority, so that he will finally go on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity." Richard Shepard directs Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Diane Kruger and Jesse Eisenberg. More from Ian Traynor in the Guardian.

Also in the New York Times:

• Cara Buckley visits the set of Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind - in "Passaic, NJ, "a struggling, multiethnic city about 12 miles west of Manhattan."

• Sharon Waxman reports on how Harsh Times has fallen through the cracks. First-time director David Ayers, though, is described by MGM chief operating officer, Rick Sands, as "the next Quentin Tarantino."

• John Leland visits the set of Ridley Scott's American Gangster, "based on the real-life heroin kingpin Frank Lucas [Denzel Washington] and the detective-turned-prosecutor Richie Roberts [Russell Crowe]," and contemplates the evolution of the genre: "In a nation of immigrants, the movies pit audience sympathy for the new immigrant against fear of the unassimilated ethnic clan. They are epics of nonassimilation: no one is more Italian than an Italian Mafioso and his kin."

• David M Halbfinger on the consequences of last week's weak opening for Flags of Our Fathers: "For Paramount, which inherited the movie when it bought DreamWorks last year, the combination of a weak opening and good reviews made for a problem that has become all too familiar to major studios offering big dramas at awards time: it now will have to mount a costly Oscar campaign, but it hasn't yet made the money to pay for it."

• Halbfinger again: "Hollywood appears to have hit upon a fail-safe strategy for getting attention for just about any kind of film: get someone, anyone, to try to suppress it, and then rush to the news media with breathless warnings about the First Amendment coming under attack." The problem with this approach: if, for example, ads for Shut Up & Sing had run on NBC, tens of millions of people would have seen them. I seriously doubt tens of millions have heard that they aren't running.

• "The universal Bollywood hit is becoming increasingly difficult to pull off," writes Anupama Chopra. "A decade ago, the Hindi film market was largely considered a homogenous monolith. What worked in one town was likely to work in another. But over the years the business has splintered dramatically, forcing industry pundits to create new labels for films."

• "When the 30-year-old singer Jeff Buckley, best known for his haunting 1994 album Grace, walked into a Memphis river fully clothed in 1997, he wrote a Hollywood-ready end to a brief but compelling life story." Mary Guibert, his mother, has turned away several film projects that would tell that story. Now, she's "working with a young producer, Michelle Sy, and an even younger screenwriter and director, Brian Jun, to develop a film she plans to call Mystery White Boy." Kimberly Brown reports.

• It's time to assess just how very good an actor Leonardo DiCaprio actually is, argues Caryn James.

• Jeannette Catsoulis endures Saw III: "The most depressing thing about this series is not the creativity of the bloodletting but the bleak view of human nature, specifically our talent for ruining the present to avenge the past. In the opening scene, a man frees himself from an ankle restraint by pulverizing his foot with a brick; fortunately, all we have to do is get up and leave." More from Richard Corliss in Time. Related (and recommended) online listening: the BBC's Mark Kermode.

• Laura Kern on 20 Centimeters, "a brash, vivacious concoction of dark comedy, light drama and musical performance written and directed by Ramón Salazar."

• Conversations with God, writes Andy Webster, is basically "a feature-length commercial for a popular series of inspirational books, ostensibly depict[ing] the life story of the series' author, Neale Donald Walsch."

"There are feel-good films and feel-bad films," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "And then there are feel-downright-uncomfortable films that leave you squirming and gasping for two hours. The British thriller Red Road belongs in the latter category: it's a wonderful surprise that's full of nasty shocks." More from Tim Robey in the Telegraph: "[Andrea] Arnold's film is laced with an ambiguous menace that sets it apart - it's one of the most impressive films of the year, and certainly the strongest British debut." And more from Philip French in the Observer.

Happy Feet vs Fred Astaire? "Let's see how tap dancing looks with legs," suggests Colin Giles. Via Amid at Cartoon Brew, who comments, "It's a testament to Astaire's talent that using only a cane as a prop, he can outdance $100 million worth of flashy CG effects."

"[F]or roughly 15 minutes we follow Clive Owen as he navigates three blocks of intricately choreographed urban warfare in a deconstructing British society, circa 2027, as envisioned in director Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men." Sheigh Crabtree describes the difficulty of pulling it off, especially given the unusual choices Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki made going in. Related: Nathan Kosub in Stop Smiling on Sólo con tu pareja: "In short, there is none of Y tu mamá también's spark or discovery, none of its reserve or humility."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Josh Kun: "If all arts aspire to the condition of music, as Walter Pater once wrote, then [Penélope] Cruz's art, most recently on display in Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, aspires to the condition of flamenco."

• Will a legal tussle delay the release of Alpha Dog? Andrew Blankstein and Jessica Garrison report.

• Robin Abcarian interviews Hugh Jackman.

• Lisa Rosen talks with Bobby's production designer Patti Podesta about the Ambassador Hotel.

Awards season, now so long (October through March!) and repetitive (the number of awards handed out each year now surpasses the number of films being made; this is a verifiable fact) that the coming months can only be greeted with utter dread, has begun. The British Independent Film Awards has announced its nominations. Meanwhile, at indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman rounds up reactions from industry types to the already-controversial shortlist of nominees for the Gotham Awards. Example: "'I am confused about what the Gothams are supposed to represent,' agreed Gary Meyer, new co-director of the Telluride Film Festival and a co-founder of Landmark Theaters. 'I am a big fan of both The Departed and Marie Antoinette, but was quite surprised to find them as nominees in a competition I thought was to celebrate independent films." Related: Reid Rosefelt's modest proposal at Zoom In Online.

Cynthia's got the nominations for the Golden Horse Awards at Twitch.

"2006 has proved to be the year of the concert film," writes Jason Jackowski.

The Guardian launches a slew of arts blogs, one of them, of course, devoted to film. If I can get the feed to work for my reader, it'll be perfect. Meantime, in the Guardian and Observer:

• Joe Queenan: "The rerelease of John Huston's classic film noir The Asphalt Jungle should be a cause of jubilation for trainee thugs and hoodlums-in-waiting. No motion picture ever did a better job of addressing the problems a master criminal faces when assembling a gang of strangers hell-bent on making a real killing."

• John Patterson: "I hate to face the fact, but, after an enormously fulfilling relationship of nearly 30 years, it may be all over for me and Martin Scorsese."

• Esther Addley meets Juliette Binoche and Hannah Pool quizzes Stephen Merchant.

• Jason Solomons's London Film Festival roundup covers This is England, Breaking and Entering, 12:08 East of Bucharest and, briefly, several debuts.

• Borat roundup: Rob Fitzpatrick interviews the journalist from Kazakhstan; Jason Solomons reviews the film; Katie Toms talks with Grace Welch of the Veteran Feminists of America about being duped. Related: Borys Kit in the Hollywood Reporter: "Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up movie to Borat, triggered an intense bidding war in Hollywood on Thursday."

• Liz Hoggard on Bowie as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige: "[Y]ou won't see a more magnetic performance this year." Ba-da-boom.

Geoffrey Macnab talks with Isabelle Huppert for the Independent.

George Wayne interviews Carrie Fisher for Vanity Fair. Via ScreenGrab.

"Is there some sort of a Jedi master of auto-fellatio?" Jason Shawhan talks with cast members of Shortbus for the Nashville Scene.

Peter Smith interviews Crispin Glover for Nerve. Related online viewing at ScreenGrab: Glover on Letterman in 1987 and 1990.

Michael Guillén talks with Deliver Us From Evil director Amy Berg.

Up-n-coming:

• Boyd van Hoeij at europeanfilms.net: "A stellar cast is on the cards for Paris, the ninth feature by Cédric Klapisch, which will bring together two big stars, Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris, as well as François Cluzet, Fabrice Luchini, Albert Dupontel, Karine Viard, Mélanie Laurent, Gilles Lellouche, Julie Ferrier and Zinedine Soualem."

• Production Weekly: "Legendary British director Ken Russell, is set to helm the thriller Kings X, starring Robert Carlyle, Kevin Spacey and Ray Winstone."

• Michael Fleming in Variety: "Charlize Theron will star in indie drama Ferris Wheel, starring alongside Nick Stahl, AnnaSophia Robb, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Hopper and Deborra-Lee Furness."

• Also: Fox Animation has revived Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox.

• Dave McNary on why Rush Hour 3 might actually be worth trying to catch, at least on DVD: "[Roman] Polanski's been cast as a French police officer who harasses [Chris] Tucker and [Jackie] Chan's characters in several scenes while the stars battle a wing of a Chinese organized-crime family."

"It may say something wild about present times that the gravest constitutional business can best be played out as situation comedy, but there are enough laughs in The Queen to make you think so," writes Andrew O'Hagan in the New York Review of Books. "If one chose two dysfunctional families struggling with image problems, big appetites, and tearful neighbors, it would be difficult to slide a cigarette paper between the Windsors and the Simpsons, yet [Stephen] Frears's movie pays Britain's first family the supreme compliment of taking it seriously, and it's hard not to feel that the results will enjoy a long and fruitful reign in the affections of moviegoers."

MS Smith on Marie Antoinette: "[T]he real question about the value of this film does not center on its historical specificity, but on its emotional specificity."

Gautaman Bhaskaran in the Lumière Reader on The Wind That Shakes the Barley: "Loach never loses sight of the fact that his stories are essentially of ordinary men and women, and though socio-economic events may engulf and overtake them, it is the personal that triumphs over the political."

Matt Riviera on Johnnie To's Exiled: "[T]he film's saving grace is its refusal to take itself too seriously."

In the New York Press, Eric Kohn reviews Conventioneers and Jennifer Merin finds Sleeping Dogs Lie "at considers the question of whether complete honesty in a relationship is a good thing or will cause disastrous confusion and hostility between lovers."

Cinematical's Kim Voynar talks with Augusten Burroughs about seeing his bestselling memoir, Running With Scissors, become a movie.

"As for The Bridesmaid, it isn't Chabrol's best film, but it may be the funniest," writes Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog.

Filmbrain on Pauline Kael on John Cassavetes: "That the realism in Cassavetes's films is not [to] her liking is acceptable, but her attitude towards those genuinely moved by them is nothing short of condescending."

"Forty years before Michel Gondry shot The Science of Sleep, Czech New Wave director Vaclav Vorlicek unleashed what may be the greatest film ever created about dreams intruding on the real world," writes David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back. "Who Wants to Kill Jessie? truly has something for everybody – the arthouse crowd, fans of science fiction and fantasy cinema, political junkies seeking coded criticisms of the faltering Communist regime, and those just looking for a superior piece of light entertainment."

Nick Davis: "[M]aybe [Boyz in the Hood - scripted, shot, acted, and edited with a clenched and gathering force that excuses its occasional gracelessness - derives its very potency from [John] Singleton's first-timer energy, and the proper response is therefore not to mourn the disappointments that followed but to preserve our marvel at the might and the moment that Boyz so definitively embodied."

Dave Kehr spells out what makes Michael Curtiz's The Lady Takes a Sailor worth catching if you can.

Gabriela-Sylvia Zabala and Ismet Redzovic at the WSWS: "Anna Kokkinos's first feature Head On - an adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas's novel Loaded, although also heavily relying on 'shock tactics' of explicit sex and drug taking (like the novel itself) - while quite flawed, nonetheless had certain endearing qualities, in particular the treatment of the migrant Greek family life in Melbourne and the difficulties facing the gay son. The Book of Revelation seems a step backward."

As Tower Records closes down, taking its video outlets with it, Craig Phillips recalls his days as a clerk.

Yesterday, Tom Sutpen celebrated what would have been Don Siegel's 94th birthday at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

Robert Cashill sees five lessons to be learned from this fall's releases; Nathaniel R's got a top ten for 2006 - so far; Matt Riviera lists the top ten dance scenes ever in non-musicals.

Just out: Volume 5 of the Journal of Short Film.

Online viewing tip. Morgan Spurlock on the CBS Evening News. Via Ed Champion, who has a few sharp words for Spurlock in reply.

Review. Off Limits.

David D'Arcy reviews a documentary about why photography may become a less potent art form than it was in the 20th century.

If the restrictions on freedom of expression are just behind Iraq as a concern for people these days, the news in a new film from Canada will not be encouraging. Off Limits looks at "image rights" (droit de l'image) that are being asserted by people who have their pictures taken on the street. The film begins to write the obituary of a rich field of photography.

One of photography's virtues has been its ability to bear witness to the human landscape. Some of the best photographers to do that have come from France - Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Doisneau, William Klein, Willy Ronis and Marc Riboud are a few of those who have documented France and Paris. Their pictures are part of the visual record of the last hundred years. If one application of photography was to document and celebrate powerful men, another involved putting the means of documenting ordinary men in the hands of these ordinary men and women, and in the hands of photographers who took pictures of everyday life. Our images of our times come from them, from what we call street photography or humanist photography.

Off Limits (La Rue: Zone Interdite), a 61-minute documentary by Gilbert Duclos, examines the new clash between the right to take a picture and the right of the person being photographed to control that image, regardless of how the image is being used. The film was shown in New York last week at the Dahesh Museum as part of a selection from the Festival International du Film sur l'Art (FIFA), an annual festival in Montreal of films about art, architecture, photography and almost any related field. FIFA is a festival that should get far more attention than it does.

This is Gilbert Duclos's first film, but it looks anything but amateurish. After years of shooting still pictures, he knows how to compose a shot, and he knows how to tell a story. He begins with his own.

In 1988, Duclos published a photograph of a girl sitting in the street in the journal, Vice/Versa, which is based in Montreal. When the girl in question saw her picture, she claimed that her school friends had laughed at it. She and her parents sued Duclos for violating her right to her own likeness by publishing the picture without her consent. The case went through three levels of the legal system of Quebec, and Duclos lost. The plaintiff's right to her image was affirmed - over the opposition of the news media of Quebec, who rallied to Duclos's side - and, Duclos argues, the field of photography called street photography or humanist photography was put at risk. Duclos's own contributions to this field can be seen in his book, Gilbert Duclos: Photographies, 1977-2001, which can be sampled at www.gilbertduclos.com.

He's not the only one who feels that way. Judgments affirming the droit de l'image, or the right to one's image, have been handed down in France, with even broader effects than have been felt in Canada. In Paris, Duclos looks at the impact of those rulings, interviewing photographers like Marc Riboud, the American William Klein (also a filmmaker) and the nonagenarian Willy Ronis, all of whom are deeply pessimistic. Duclos, who is also a character in his film, goes out on the street to test the willingness of the public to sign releases to be photographed. He gets nowhere, proving the point made by his colleagues that the medium has been damaged.

As a result, French photojournalism now removes the faces of people in the street or in any other public setting, or pictures are simply staged. Editors at major magazines tell Duclos that they simply avoid publishing pictures that might trigger lawsuits, which means publishing far fewer pictures, which means that the street photography which has documented much of the 20th century has nowhere near the vitality in the country where it once seemed strongest. Duclos begins the film with scenes of people on the street or in public parks wearing paper bags over their heads. It's corny, but accurate. Add a few opportunistic lawyers, and you've really got an industry - and a problem.

The response by some newspapers and other media has been to stage pictures of public events in public places. It's cheaper and more convenient, one editor says, but it's not life, which is exactly what street photography captured. "We're in quicksand," one photographer tells Duclos.

At a time when Americans are concerned about threats to freedom of expression, Gilbert Duclos sees the United States as a crucial protector of the freedoms that he sees threatened in France. In the US, the use of candid photographs for commercial purposes can be restricted, but editorial use comes under the umbrella of the First Amendment. You don't have to ask for permission to take a person's picture on the street, and you don't have to get that person's permission to publish that picture, as long as that picture is not being used to sell something. The right to privacy that keeps coming up in Off Limits is extremely limited in the US. Should the soldiers whose misdeeds were revealed by the picture of Abu Ghraib have been permitted to sue their fellow GIs who made them public?

Not so in Europe, where the droit de l'image is balanced with free speech. Bear in mind that support for the right to privacy was bolstered by an appalled reaction to the death in a car crash of Princess Diana as she was being pursued by journalists. Add to that the growing exaggerated fear of pedophile voyeurism and the exploitation of adolescents' images on the internet, and you have an atmosphere in which broad decisions can be made that make broad restrictions on press freedoms, especially for photographers.

Duclos joins the ranks of still photographers who have gravitated toward the moving image - Raymond Depardon, Albert Maysles, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Frank, Robert Benton and others. Yet he also has a gift for storytelling, and for letting other storytellers speak. Photographers like Willy Ronis are eloquent when they (and their pictures) demonstrate how important photography has been for our memory of recent history. "We liked to set out to record life's happenings at random," Ronis tells Duclos. It's not about simply taking a photograph, but publishing a photograph. It's the sharing of the image that is crucial, and it is the sharing of images that is now most under threat.

Think about that the next time you see pixilated faces in the news coverage of a public place.

As of now, Off Limits has not been distributed theatrically in the US or in English-speaking Canada. You can obtain the DVD through www.virage.ca.

Weekend books.

"Neal Gabler steps into a biography of the legendary Walt Disney with substantive credentials," writes Fred Schruers in the Los Angeles Times. "His An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood (1988) was a signal achievement in art-versus-commerce storytelling that still resonates, as does his 1994 biography of Walter Winchell and, to a lesser extent, his 1998 book Life: The Movie, How Entertainment Conquered Reality. In Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, Gabler confronts long-standing suspicions that Disney was a Red-baiter (yes, though ineptly and ineffectually, he writes) and an anti-Semite (a much more complicated answer, though he says it is largely 'guilt by association')." In the end, "part of the author's formidable achievement is to take the intricacies of Disney's devoted artistry and intertwine them with his ultimately rather forlorn life."

The London Times runs an extract from Brian Sibley's biography of Peter Jackson, the bit where the director and Fran Walsh meet Bob Weinstein.

Updated through 11/1.

Allen Barra in Salon: "The Return of the Player is about the anesthetizing mind-set that Hollywood has inflicted on the country, blurring both intellect and instinct and leaving us vulnerable to men skilled in selling us the simplistic version of reality that they know in their hearts we all yearn for - bland, amiable predators whose moral sense is akin to cancer cells, men like Griffin Mill who can rationalize murder in the name of the great audience. 'I know who you are,' Griffin tells us at the end, 'because I know what you want.'"

William Cook on Michael Palin's Diaries 1969 - 1979: The Python Years: "Palin calls his diary an antidote to hindsight, and it's amazing how a show that looms so large today seemed almost incidental at first ('John and Eric see Monty Python as a means to an end - money to buy freedom from work')." Also in the Observer, Geraldine Bedell reviews Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam.

Ray Young at Flickhead on David Thomson's "odd but heartfelt homage": "It may be a sign of impending breakdown when, scattered throughout the pages of Nicole Kidman, he invents imaginary scenarios for her to act in, as if he were playing with dolls."

Online listening tips. Ed Champion talks with Joe Eszterhas and Nora Ephron about their new books. Related: "The time has come for a Jade Special Edition," argues Vince Keenan.

Update, 10/30: An online listening tip. Neal Gabler is a guest on Fresh Air.

Update, 10/31: "But if Walt Disney was made for Hollywood, he himself questioned whether Hollywood was made for him." Salon runs an excerpt.

Updates, 11/1: Gabler's is "an ocean liner of a book - bulky and a trifle slow," writes Scott Eyman in the New York Observer. That said, "I think Neal Gabler is right to characterize Walt Disney's life as a triumph, and a quintessentially American one at that. In his relentless, grinding allegiance to work, in his preference for a brilliantly processed metaphorical gloss on reality rather than the thing itself, Disney was a man - and an artist - absolutely in the American grain."

Gabler's next radio appearance is on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Weekend online viewing.

"Due to the recent unpleasantness, Baton Rouge has eclipsed New Orleans as the largest city in Louisiana. Is the city destined for greatness?" asks Evan Mather, whose Scenic Highway is now viewable online. For Matthew Clayfield, it "remains the best I've seen this year."

At If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger..., Tom Sutpen introduces Max Linder's Max reprend sa liberté (Troubles of a Grass Widower): "Though never as wildly successful in the States as the pantheon comics (Chaplin, Arbuckle, Keaton, Lloyd, etc), each of these eminences nevertheless took away something from Linder's work, without which their work, indeed the soul of American screen comedy itself, would have assumed a very different, possibly less charming form."

Amid at Cartoon Brew's got YouTubery of Fleischer Studio artists at work in the 30s.

Tetris: From Russia With Love. Via Coudal Partners.

Jan Svankmajer's Food trilogy: viewable at WFMU.

At panopticist, Andrew Hearst posts "a screen test some talentless young actor sent in when Stanley Kubrick was casting Full Metal Jacket in 1984. The hubris on display here is magnificent and awe-inspiring."

Vincent Gallo, Republican. At ScreenGrab.

Meanwhile, Comedy Central takes a page from the current administration's playbook and drops its bad news bomb late on a Friday: No more CC content on YouTube. Xeni Jardin's gathering commentary at Boing Boing.

Weekend fests and events.

The Tokyo International Film Festival? It's got a blog, and a very fun browse it is, too.

Open City "is the ideal film with which to launch LACMA's Mamma Roma: The Films of Anna Magnani, a 14-film retrospective featuring numerous unfamiliar titles - and running through Nov 24 - that will reveal why Magnani remains one of cinema's greatest actresses," writes Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times.

In conjunction with Enduring Myth: The Tragedy of Hippolytos and Phaidra, an exhibition at the Getty through December 4, Gregory Markopoulos's Twice a Man and Jules Dassin's Phaedra will be screened next week. David Ehrenstein previews the pair for the LA Weekly.

Previewing Resistance and Rebirth: Hungarian Cinema, 50 Years after '56 (through November 15) for the L Magazine, Mark Asch catches three films by Miklós Jancsó: The Round-Up, The Red and the White... "But Electra, My Love, made nearly a decade later in 1974, tops 'em both for direct-address didactics and stylistic exceptionalism."

Before delving into another extensive guide to what all to see and do in the San Francisco Bay Area, Brian Darr urges you to vote for the Roxie.

In the Independent Weekly, Zack Smith has an overview of the Masters of French Cinema Series at the North Carolina Museum of Art (Fridays through December 15).

Kira-Anne Pelican blogs for the London Times on A Portrait of London, the project overseen by Mike Figgis: "For the most part, this was an event to remember. Less because of the individual nature of the shorts, which when viewed together resembled a Ken Livingstone, 'We are London' style promo, but more because watching film, in the magnificent setting that is Trafalgar Square, with all the spontaneity of the comings and goings of a live crowd, was in itself something to celebrate."

At Twitch, Todd's got the list of award-winners coming out of Toronto After Dark, plus a wrap-up press release.

The Heartland Film Festival, wrapping today, "is a thematic festival, one focused on the human spirit." Steve Ramos reports for indieWIRE.

At Twitch, Canfield wraps the Chicago International Film Festival: "Bottom line? A less than stellar lineup, as noted by many critics, was simply one of several reasons to feel less excited about covering what should be the local film event of the year."

Screenwriter William Martell lambasts what he sees as the film festival racket. Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Climates.

"Although the film's provenance and the calamitous distribution climate for foreign-language cinema in America mean that it's destined for eye-blink runs at a handful of art-house theaters, Climates isn't difficult or obscure," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Its metaphors are transparent, its narrative structure uncomplicated. It's a satisfyingly adult film about men and women and relationships that might seduce audiences more easily if it were French, though in that case it would probably be three times as chatty."

Anthony Kaufman: "[T]he film is a quiet stunner, and for me, most likely the best movie of the year."

"[W]hat's exciting about it has more to do with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's inventive use of high-definition video than the rather familiar plot," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "His work suggests that he's intimately familiar with the current canon of festival auteurs, to the point where some cynics have suggested he's deliberately making films for the international arthouse circuit."

Updated through 10/30.

Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot: "Ceylan is not Pialat, not Antonioni, and certainly no 'master.' But he is a diligent artist who squints and picks and digs and waits for tonal specificities in scenes (aided by hyper-crisp foley sound), he has a fine eye for dolorous landscapes, and he has more of a sense of humor than you might expect... And if you're willing to drift out and get a little lost, you may find his very sad, slack movie inhabiting you for some time to come."

"[T]he messiness of the world intrudes only rarely," notes Bilge Ebiri in Nerve.

"Ceylan's work must be seen in a theater, because its tactile quality couldn't be reproduced in the average household," pleas Scott Tobias at the AV Club, so if you get the chance...

Earlier: Cannes reviews.

Update, 10/30: "It is fair to ask if Climates would be as effective if it were set in a country from which we expect films of this tenor," writes the New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann. "Admittedly, the setting does heighten interest, but this film is much more than an ideational travelogue. Like all good art, it evokes a supranational affinity. And there is an unsurprising paradox: this drama of personal uncertainties is lodged in a certainty of form."

Weekend horrors.

"Maybe it isn't an accident that Halloween and national US elections fall in such close proximity. Fear is a powerful driving force for both," suggests the AV Club, segueing into a list of eight horror movies for left-wingers and four films and an entire subgenre for right-wingers.

Also: Noel Murray and Scott Tobias discuss the current state of horror. Tobias: "I find that even bad horror movies often have more to say about the times - or least, they reflect the times better - than their more respectable counterparts in other genres." And Murray agrees that "the most relevant-to-American-youth horror films today are torture-fests like Saw and Hostel, and I agree that the relevance is tied to 9/11, but I think it goes beyond the fear of unexpected tragedy. If you look closely at Hostel - and Wolf Creek, for that matter - what they're really about is what happens after everything goes to hell."

The LA Weekly's Scott Foundas has an admiring profile of Tobin Bell, who plays John "Jigsaw" Kramer in the Saw series. Related: Nicole Sperling in the Hollywood Reporter on Lionsgate's high hopes for Saw III's opening weekend.

Dennis Cozzalio: "[I]t is a pleasure to report that screenwriter Leigh Whannell and director Darren Lynn Bousman, well aware of the temptation to amp up the violence to the exclusion of all else, have fulfilled the potential Saw II by creating, with Saw III, not a perfunctory sequel but a superior piece of shock entertainment that takes the series off into yet another narrative direction while expanding on the second film's impulses to enrich the back story of Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) and his demented, self-loathing assistant Amanda (Shawnee Smith)." And he interviews Smith a second time, too.

But for Nick Schager, writing in Slant, "Saw III simply peddles gruesomeness of a disgusting rather than frightening order, its intricate deathtrap set pieces only barely complemented by the tense rapport between Jigsaw and Amanda, and eventually impaired by the filmmakers' desire, through furious flashbacks, to link all three Saw movies together into a grand Jigsaw-masterminded plot that's elaborate to the point of absurdity."

"Dark and mysterious are the twin paths Italian director Dario Argento travels on. It’s a duality that has come to define, and in some cases, confine, one of macabre’s most meaningful artisans," writes Bill Gibron for PopMatters. "[P]erhaps the most telling argument against his later works is the abject brilliance of the movies he made in the past." Also: the "Top 10 Worst Horror Films of All Time."

"Zhang Bingjian, with his first feature length film, may believe that elements of a diegesis are indistinguishable from elements arising from a character's psychological projections, but it's a disingenuous approach to storytelling and induces mistrust in any attentive viewer, to say the least," writes Marlin Tyree. "On the other hand, there is so much visual artistry to Zhixi (Suffocation, as it's called here in the States) that one may dispense with narrative logic and proceed with delight, all while the main character is hounded by demons of his own devising."

Catching up further with Not Coming to a Theater Near You's 31 Days of Horror: Jenny Jediny on Return to Oz and Beth Gilligan on Witches.

Robbiefreeling at Reverse Shot on Creepshow: "The quick-witted, fleet comic book storytelling is a perfect match for Stephen King's dime-store sense of vengeance and tidy resolutions, which in turn provide a neat little stage on which Romero can hone his comic gross-out skills."

Monsturd director Dan West lists his top five horror films and the film critics at the San Francisco Bay Guardian each make a recommendation.

At SF360, Dennis Harvey offers "a partial survey of the scary unreelings available on [San Francisco] screens - and a list of recommended rent-ables if you're really hellbent on staying in whilst goblins, ghoulies, and over-excited inebriates are roaming about."

For those of us who've never slogged through the sequels, Joe Leydon has a terrific primer on the Halloween franchise.

"What movie ad really got you spooked?" asks Wagstaff at the House Next Door.

The Chicago Reader has a terrific guide to Halloween movies screening in the area.

In the Los Angeles Times, Alex Chun reports on the making of the 3D version of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Scott Timberg takes Tim Burton's "tour of frightening spots in Los Angeles."

In the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger reviews a remake of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: "[W]hat David Lee Fisher has accomplished in his unusual semi-remake is rather startling: he has out-disoriented the original. Probably not in the way he intended, but still, interesting, and kind of dizzying." More from R Emmet Sweeney in the Voice.

Peter Nellhaus catches up with the Caligari remake, but not that one; Roger Kay's 1962 version.

NYT advertising columnist Stuart Elliott: "Madison Avenue is dreaming of a white-knuckle Halloween, just like the ones we used to know." Also, Virginia Heffernan on the second season of Showtime's Masters of Horror anthology and the Sci Fi Channel's Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes.

Cinematical's James Rocchi's got a guilty pleasure: David Cronenberg's Shivers.

For guides to the scary stuff recently released on DVD, turn to Glenn Abel in the Hollywood Reporter and Jen Chaney in the Washington Post.

Online viewing tip. Brendon Connelly's got Tim Burton's video for The Killers. Update: Well, he did. Now, as DeK points out, you can catch it at Shots Ring Out.

Docs and hybrids.

Sara Schieron in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Building on the ideas explored in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media and Why We Fight, Tonje Hessen Schei's documentary Independent Intervention is the single most staggering doc yet made about the unholy matrimony of the military-industrial complex and the media."

Jonny Leahan at indieWIRE: "With the midterm elections less than two weeks away, a crop of documentaries are collectively trying to get a message across that has largely been passed over by the mainstream media - your vote might not actually be counted. Or it could be counted several times over, depending on which county you're registered in, and which type of electronic machine you'll be using to cast that vote." Among the docs discussed: Stealing America, Vote by Vote, So Goes the Nation, Hacking Democracy, Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System and American Blackout.

"Mark Becker's Romántico may be the documentary of the year," declares Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "This sensitively detailed surveillance of one man's personal misfortune illuminates a national crisis, complementing Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven; though both films share the same social setting, it's their vigilant aesthetic that most unites them."

Also in Slant: "[D]espite an uplifting coda, the tragedy of God Grew Tired of Us comes from the sense, conveyed by the determined yet still haunted eyes of its admirable survivors, that the horrors of their tragic past may never be fully overcome," writes Nick Schager. And: "Fuck mainly serves as the latest example of the atrocious devolution of mainstream documentary filmmaking into hollow aesthetic flash and superficial sensationalism."

It's nearly all docs this week for Andrew O'Hehir's "Beyond the Multiplex" column in Salon: Death of a President, Absolute Wilson and Cocaine Cowboys, with a few quick words for The Wild Blue Yonder.

Though it isn't exactly, Armond White, writing in the New York Press, claims that Blue Yonder is "[e]ssentially a documentary - comprised of mostly factual, almost reportorial footage - [and] it comes at the right time, when the documentary feature is in disarray." What's more, "Werner Herzog's self-proclaimed 'science fiction fantasy' is one of his very best films." Manohla Dargis, writing in the New York Times, finds that it "works better as an experience than it does conceptually." Even so: "There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker's imagination." More from Nick Schager in Slant and Noel Murray at the AV Club.

Also in the NYT:

• Stephen Holden finds watchnig the "somber" Exit: The Right to Die "like visiting a funeral home and being bombarded with the soothing voices of salesmen spouting euphemisms that obscure the fact of death as surely as the scent of lilies obscures its smell." More from Rob Nelson in the Voice.

• Again, Stephen Holden: "The Bridge an eerie and indelible documentary about suicide, juxtaposes transcendent beauty and personal tragedy as starkly as any film I can recall." More from Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle and Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com. Cheryl Eddy interviews director Eric Steel for the SFBG.

• AO Scott on Absolute Wilson: "It is curious, but perhaps also inevitable, that someone who is so willing to dispense with conventions of realism and narrative continuity in his art should inspire such a conventional film." More from Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Overlong, overexcited and over the top, Billy Corben's bottom-feeding documentary, Cocaine Cowboys, would be more enjoyable if it weren't so impressed with its subject matter and so devoted to pictures of dead bodies." The AV Club's Noel Murray disagrees.

Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly on Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple: "In the photos and footage of clapping, singing members, you can see an epitaph being written for the brief utopia of the 60s counterculture... But the larger lesson of Jonestown is that its leader, who billed himself as a socialist, stepped into a breach left by an American antipathy to socialism so profound and generalized, it readied a space for that ideology's most perverted expression." More from Kenneth Turan in the LAT.

Clare Hurley at the WSWS: "Primarily made up of interviews with returned Iraqi veterans, Patricia Foulkrod's documentary, The Ground Truth: After the Killing Fields, unflinchingly exposes one of the human costs of the US occupation of Iraq."

For the Guardian, Helene A Aasen asks a human rights campaigner, an academic, a Jewish writer, a donkey expert, a Kazakh and a black journalists for their thoughts on Borat. Critic Peter Bradshaw finds it "so funny, so breathtakingly offensive, so suicidally discourteous, that strictly speaking it shouldn't be legal at all." More from Alf Garnett and Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph and Nick Schager at Slant.

LFF midway.

For the Independent, Kaleem Aftab tracks the London Film Festival so far, finds it's going well and notes a running motif: Africa. James Christopher has another half-time report in the London Times, very upbeat as well. There, too, Richard Owen enthusiastically previews Shane Meadows's This is England.

"Shane Meadows is Britain's greatest living filmmaker," declares Tom Huddleston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "This is England marks some sort of culmination, drawing together disparate threads from throughout Meadows' filmography and weaving them into something brave, distinctive and powerfully personal." Also, Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (more from Kira-Anne Pelican, blogging for the London Times) and Anders Gustafsson's Percy, Buffalo Bill & I.

More praise for England from Time Out's Chris Tilly.

Screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg knew RFK and, as Bobby screens in London, he recalls a few conversations for the Times: "'Bobby, if you don't make it here in Washington, I think I may be able to get you a job as a screenwriter in Hollywood,' I told him. 'I hear you have to be a pretty good politician for that,' he said. I found he had an understated and delightful sense of humour. Self-deprecating. Of all the negatives I had heard about Bobby Kennedy, I was finding not one of them to be true."

James Christopher quite likes the film, by the way. Good thing, too, because the Times has a big gala screening tie-in package.

For the Guardian, Will Hodgkinson talks with Mike Figgis about A Portrait of London, "the latest in his series of attempts to prove that cinema need not be a costly, lumbering beast. Only this time, he's also setting out to see whether a movie can be fused with theatre and turned into a live show." Also, Katrina Onstad meets an entertaining talker, Kenneth Anger: "All totaled, his oeuvre amounts to less than three hours of footage, and his films can be hard to find, but UCLA Film and Television Archive recently completed 35mm restorations of four Anger shorts, set to screen at the London film festival."

Shut Up & Sing.

"[W]atching Shut Up & Sing, you're always aware that [Barbara] Kopple and [Cecilia] Peck are painting a portrait for us, in brushstrokes of words, music and pictures, as opposed to telling us what to think. As a piece of political filmmaking, Shut Up & Sing pulls off the feat of being subtle and direct at once," writes Stephanie Zacharek, introducing her interview with Kopple for Salon. And indieWIRE sends its list of questions to Kopple.

Harvey Weinstein reacts to NBC's laughable refusal to air ads for the doc, as quoted by Pamela McClintock and Josef Adalian in Variety: "It's a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America.... The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is profoundly un-American."

The doc "offers a revealing case study of the relationship between politics, celebrity and the media in today's polarized social climate," writes Stephen Holden.

"The filmmakers' respectful distance from their subjects never evolves into the voyeuristic intimacy of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, a much more revealing look at superstars working through a crisis," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "[Natalie] Maines' big mouth and winning candor got her into trouble, but Shut Up & Sing suffers from filmmakers who are intent on playing it safe."

Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly: "Truculent, effortlessly funny and congenitally mutinous, Maines is a bull in a china shop with the voice of an angel, and you can’t help but cheer her fuck-you to a kow-towing music industry, and to all the bullies who picketed her concerts, wanting her dead."

Earlier: Kevin Haher in the London Times and, here, David D'Arcy.

Updates: Rob Forsyth, blogging for the London Times: "The film runs disappointingly short on documenting the period in which the band made the comments - the political climate, for example, is almost entirely reduced to tee-shirt slogans. Rather, the piece works best as an insight into the three band members and their collective working method."

If there's one area where the film trips up, it's the decision to give short-shrift to the mechanics that go into managing a group in the middle of a publicity storm," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "The film is a little eager to get back to the personal drama. Also, some direct interviews might have added something to the film's fly-on-the-wall format."

Arthur Hill, 1922 - 2006.

Arthur Hill, who brought engrossing complexity and understated intelligence to hundreds of roles on stage, screen and television and won a Tony Award for his performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, died on Sunday in Pacific Palisades, Calif. He was 84.

Douglas Martin in the New York Times.

[If you] remember him from such movies as Harper, The Andromeda Strain and A Bridge Too Far... well, you may wonder: Hey, where has he been all this time? Alas, Alzheimer's disease kept him from working in his chosen field for several years.

Joe Leydon.

Interview. Noyce, Robbins, Slovo.

"Patrick Chamusso's story - one of a political awakening of will - resonates with such vigor that, when the credits roll, it may take a while before you realize that not only have you just watched a 'message' movie, you've also had an incredibly good time," writes Chris Wiggum, introducing his interview with Catch a Fire director Phillip Noyce, screenwriter Shawn Slovo and supporting player Tim Robbins.

Related: In the Stranger, Annie Wagner takes note of "two inflammatory theses. One: Terrorism is not an absolute evil; it's an extra-military tactic that can be put to noble use. And two: Oppressive governments create terrorists by imprisoning and torturing innocent men. The folly - or perhaps the commercial capitulation - of the film is that it tamps down these fiery ideas with pretty, docile cinematography, shallow characterizations, and by-the-numbers action sequences that would put even the most inquisitive mind to rest."

"It's a film that wants to play as if it were ripped from today's headlines, but has been shredded into near incoherence," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, where Noyce narrates a fine audio slide show.

"Though the drama plays out with Biblical justice - a weak man and his people grow stronger, while a bully and his regime are fatally weakened - Chamusso is no cardboard hero, and his oppressor's cruelty is complicated by insufficiently suppressed doubt," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly.

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "Catch a Fire has everything going for it: a smart director, good actors, a writer who's a proven storyteller and who has a deep emotional stake in the material. But scene by scene, Catch a Fire just doesn't spark."

But for Kenneth Turan, Derek Luke saves the picture: "The young American actor gives such an intense, passionate performance as South African Patrick Chamusso that he just about dares you not to be involved with the tale he is telling." Also in the Los Angeles Times is Susan King's profile of Luke.

"Although Noyce manages a persuasive picture of South Africa in the last throes of apartheid, including some sterling battle scenes, Catch a Fire doesn't have the impact of Rabbit-Proof Fence," writes Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix.

Jennifer Merin talks with Noyce for the New York Press.

Earlier: Robert Wilonsky in the Voice and Robert Keser in Slant; Scott Foundas's interview with Noyce for the LA Weekly.

Updates: Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "The problem with Tim Robbins' dreadful turn as a South African 'anti-terrorist' official in Catch A Fire - and it was also a problem with his sniveling Bill Gates impersonation in Antitrust - is that he can't hide his distaste for his own character."

Marc Savlov disagrees in the Austin Chronicle: "Robbins, despite the fact that he's playing a man who easily could have come off as a sadistic bastard (the torture of both innocent and not-so-innocent South Africans plays an emotionally critical role throughout the film), imbues chilly [Nic] Vos with the vagaries of self-doubt, however slight, ultimately rendering him as ensnared in history's pull as his quarry. It's always odd to see Robbins, a political activist in his own right, playing at villainy (see Arlington Road, Bob Roberts), but here he descends into the role so thoroughly that the lopsided smile becomes less a notation of cockeyed boyishness than a treacherous Cheshire smirk."

"The tragic pull of the story is hard to resist," writes Jürgen Fauth, but the film "comes up short compared to the more ambitious Paradise Now, which raised the bar on showing the inner struggles of men who confuse caring for their families with setting bombs."

Interview. Gabriel Range.

"Death of a President, the documentary-style speculative fiction about the assassination of the 43rd President of the United States, is seamless, intelligent and maybe even necessary to an understanding of George W Bush's role in the world today, and his place in the wider scope of history," wrote Jim Emerson last month. Now at the main site, John Esther talks with director Gabriel Range.

Related: "The idea provokes, the computer tinkering of archival images startles, but the overall impact, argument, and narrative are as dithering as the past six years of Democratic opposition," writes Peter Keough, who also interviews Range for the Boston Phoenix.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader: "Death of a President wants to function as a mindless thriller that eventually makes us think - and only after the film is over question the form that encouraged us to be mindless. These are incompatible agendas, and in the end neither is fully successful."

AO Scott in the New York Times: "The best that can be said about Mr Range's opportunistic little picture is that, at least in its first half, it faithfully recreates the tone and rhythm of a second-rate American television program."

"In a way, it's as much an advertisement for allowing Bush to finish out his term as the words 'President Cheney,'" writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "Range begins with an outlandish premise and works steadily back toward the center.... The movie's biggest problem isn't what it imagines, but what it fails to."

"When Fipresci (The International Federation of Film Critics) gave a prize to Death of the President at this year's Toronto Film Festival, citing 'the audacity with which it distorts reality,' it was a film journalism catastrophe," declares Armond White in the New York Press.

Andrew Wright in the Stranger: "When judged against the real-life outlandishness piling up on a near-daily basis, this what-if scenario can't really measure up. Bring on the ray-gun-toting aliens."

Writing at Guru, Craig Phillips finds the film "convincing but not exactly radical.... Perhaps its overall lack of impact is the scariest aspect: The scenarios presented here are all too believable."

"Range turns out to be a painfully weak political filmmaker," finds Nerve's Bilge Ebiri.

Earlier: Filmbrain and David D'Arcy.

Update: Robert B Reich hasn't seen the film, but writes in the American Prospect nonetheless: "I'm a libertarian when it comes to what people can see or hear but this film tests my libertarian principles. This is exploitive trash. To release it just days before a mid-term election is shameless."

Daniel Robert Epstein talks with Range for SuicideGirls.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Cheryl Eddy recalls past presidential assassinations in the movies.

At Slate: "Dear Prudence, I am a twentysomething American musician living in Europe.... I'll meet a group of people, we'll chat about two minutes, and someone will make some comment about how my president should be killed (really!).... I'm still not sure what the best response is to this statement. I don't want to share my politics with a complete stranger, and I don't want to do anything to further any American stereotypes they already have. However, I want to convey how this statement is inappropriate and makes me uncomfortable."

Ray Pride at Movie City Indie: "[W]hile DOAP proposes the existential quandary of a fear of 'terrorists' dictating entirely the course of a country's decisions, the film's follow-through, while compelling, never reaches the heights of irresponsibility attained by numberless politicians and business leaders."

Slate's Dana Stevens: "It's the Joe Lieberman of fake documentaries."

Interview. Guillermo Arriaga.

With Babel seeing a limited release this weekend, we're running a slightly altered version of Michael Guillén's summertime conversation with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga about this final installment of the trilogy (also his final work with director Alejandro González Iñárritu), about The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and about adapting his own novels. Look for a second part when Babel opens wide in two weeks.

Related: "Babel has an undeniable power, even (or perhaps especially) when it's at its most contrived and implausible," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "[T]he most provocative thing about Babel isn't its cacophony of foreign tongues or those funny little words on the bottom of the screen, but rather Iñárritu and Arriaga's aggressive suggestion that we Americans and white Europeans are something less than exemplary citizens of the world, particularly in times of crisis."

Updated through 10/29.

Earlier: Jim Ridley in the Voice, Ed Gonzalez in Slant and the first round of reviews when Babel screened at Cannes.

Updates, 10/27: AO Scott in the New York Times: "Babel is certainly an experience. But is it a meaningful experience? That the film possesses unusual aesthetic force strikes me as undeniable, but its power does not seem to be tethered to any coherent idea or narrative logic. You can feel it without ever quite believing it."

"All those who were smart enough to avoid Syriana and The Constant Gardener should brace themselves for another wave of nauseating political arrogance in Babel," growls Armond White, and he's off again in the New York Press.

In the LA CityBeat, Andy Klein offers a "Make Your Own Alejandro González Iñárritu Movie kit!"

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "Our actions may have consequences we can't imagine, halfway around the world; when a butterfly bats its wings a baby is born, and all that. OK, but in the case of Babel what that produces is two powerful and intriguing mini-films whose only connection to each other is a third one that's barely half as good."

"The beauty of this film is in its lapidary details, which sparkle with feeling and surprise," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "González Iñárritu and Arriaga... are particularly attuned to the vulnerability of the foreigner abroad - whether that vulnerability is real or imagined.... Clearly, González Iñárritu knows his Weltschmerz, and he burrows deep into the existential loneliness of each character to create a kaleidoscope of cumulative human sadness and grief over the state of the world."

Dana Stevens in Slate: "Things in this movie's world happen because of physics, economics, and individual bad decisions, not because of fate. And unlike many movies with multiple-thread plotlines, Babel handles all of its storylines equally well."

Nick Schager: "[T]here isn't a second when Iñárritu's film feels as if it's replicating life's coincidental nature; rather, it just comes off as another of his beautifully shot, evocatively scored multi-character ventures in which his sincere interest in probing grief and tragedy... takes a back seat to his pseudo-profound, oh-so-convenient plot manipulations."

Marcy Dermanski: "Unrelentingly, unremittingly sad, excruciatingly painful, all for no valid reason, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel is a movie to avoid at all costs."

A Cinematical collection of reviews.

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "You can't fault Babel for its ambition - the far-reaching film ties together storylines in Morocco, Mexico and Japan to reassure us that we are all united in our human misery. Here's what you can fault it for: grievous self-seriousness and self-importance, and the squandering of some of the year's finer performances."

Michael Guillén reports on a Q&A at the Mill Valley Film Festival. His question, naturally, concerned Arriaga:

Iñárritu looked me straight in the eye and graciously responded that their's has been a very beautiful and provocative nine-year relation, a strong and intense collaboration, that began with Amores Perros. Every film, he conjectured, is made in different stages and the first stage—which is so great—is when you dream and theorize about what film you can make. At that stage, Iñárritu offered, Guillermo has been an extremely amazing collaborator because of their shared vision. Even when they obviously saw things differently, when they argued about things, about what was good or what was wrong for one character or one story, that intensity ultimately was of benefit to the story itself. It's an intense interminable exchange of ideas and processes that has been good. Iñárritu added that Arriaga is now interested in producing a film, and wants to direct, so from now on he will explore that while Iñárritu explores stories he has been working on independently for some time and which now he can pursue more thoroughly. "But we are very proud, both of us, of what we have accomplished in this relation."

At Slate, Doree Shafrir sketches out a bit of historical background, re: Terrence Rafferty's NYT piece on the tiff between the writer and the director.

Update, 10/28: Sorina Diaconescu profiles Rinko Kikuchi for the LAT.

Update, 10/29: Peter Sobczynski talks with Alejandro González Iñárritu for Hollywood Bitchslap.

Filmmaker. Fall 06.

Bit by bit, the Fall 2006 issue of Filmmaker seeps online.

So far, Scott Macaulay talks with Todd Field about not wanting to talk about Little Children, Annie Nocenti talks with Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady about Jesus Camp.

Rebecca Leffler reports on the making of "the raw, harrowing and unforgettable documentary Ghosts of Cité Soleil."

DW Leitner answers the question, "Who would be interested in low-cost uncompressed HD capture and post, if such a thing were possible?"

Iraq & Pollock.

David D'Arcy considers a feature and a doc screened recently in the Hamptons.

I wasn't at the Hamptons International Film Festival, but I did get the chance to see two of its premieres on tape, The Situation, a grim drama set in Iraq by Philip Haas; and Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?, a doc by Harry Moses about a woman who makes a purchase in a thrift shop of what people tell her is a painting by Jackson Pollock. Neither of these is a masterpiece - far from it. But each sheds light on its subject in a way that merits our attention.

The Situation, which refers to the mix of confusion and corruption that defines the US-led occupation of Iraq, follows Anne, a pretty blonde journalist (Connie Nielsen), as she struggles to probe the complicated ties between US intelligence and the local insurgency, while dead bodies keep piling up in the town of Samarra. The "human" side of the story is a love triangle involving Anne, her CIA agent sometime-boyfriend (Damian Lewis), and an Iraqi photographer (Mido Hamada) with whom her platonic relationship risks becoming a lot more physical. Things get even more complicated. She doesn't just lose a close friend who tries with the best of intentions to build ties between the insurgents and the Americans. She loses at love after an attack on Samarra that has the futility of Vietnam written all over it, complete with helicopters.

The film begins with an element of what looks like a subplot, but ends up as the painful truth about US attitudes toward Iraq that can't be avoided.  Two Iraqi men crossing a bridge in violation of a curfew are thrown off the side by young soldiers, who have all the charm of racist cops in the 1950s in Mississippi. One of the young men drowns. An investigation follows; the soldiers say they never harmed the men, a rogue major backs them up and things move on. For the US army, it's just another dead Arab. When Iraqis start talking about revenge, you begin to see the grudges and jealousies that divide and unite factions in the insurgency, the tribal leadership and the corrupt police. Everything that starts out badly just gets worse. It's timely, just as Bush and his advisers have abandoned "stay the course" for talk of the Iraq-isation of the war.

Shot on location in Morocco, with a production design that seems far too clean for the chaotic landscape of war, The Situation looks like a composite of film stereotypes intended to depict a place, a "situation," that's beyond being shaped or even endured under the best of intentions. We have tough young soldiers with all the attitudes of corrupt cynical cops from urban American detective films. We have a well-intentioned earnest CIA officer with some of the well-meaning awkwardness that we got in films about the Cold War and Vietnam. We also get bureaucratic villains, like a bow-tied competitive CIA underling, new to the country, whose youthful arrogance is at the level of his ignorance.

Yet the film that seems most echoed in Wendell Steavenson's script is Chinatown, the Roman Polanski/Robert Towne collaboration about a detective, finally liberated from the terminal corruption of Chinatown, who finds himself in a scandal involving wealthier participants whose relationships are just as labyrinthine and whose emotions are far more base. Our good CIA guy enters the story as he tries to pressure his military peers to install incubators for the hospitals in Samarra. It's nation-building, after all. At first, it seems logical enough. The people of Samarra fit into another film template; these are the "villagers" that have populated Hollywood films for decades, families in some exotic place just trying to live their lives, if only the US soldiers, the insurgents and the police would go away. Of course, that never happens, and more bodies pile up. And the bodies waiting to be born in the miserable town seem destined to be nothing more than part of the same mess. (A former Baathist informant makes sure you don't miss the point, trading information that will kill a man for a promise that he'll be posted at the Iraqi embassy in Sydney. He says the Foreign Ministry is run by Kurds who hate him, and Baathists just can't get a break without help from the right American.)

The parallels aren't as literal as they could be and the situation here, no pun intended, is different enough from Los Angeles of the 1930s to ensure that the audience will see something more threatening. Iraq, as it appears, in The Situation, is a poisoned landscape taken down a few more notches by the Americans who have disdain for the place that they've forgotten about building and are now occupying. Verisimilitude aside for the moment, this is a deeply anti-American film, with murderous soldiers, CIA agents who are either credulous or just nasty, and Iraqis who, however opportunistic themselves, are portrayed as victims of the United States. When the Americans invade Samarra in humvees and tanks, guess whom the audiences in the United States will be rooting for? It won't be their friends in the National Guard.

Haas and Stevenson have created a context, in which, if you follow the logic of the story, it is near-impossible to have much empathy for any of the Americans. It doesn't help that armed, uniformed, helmeted young American men seem uniformly faceless, while the Iraqis don't. It's just fiction, the filmmakers might say. In this world where cinema about "real" events is as close to that reality as most of the audience will come, it becomes the audience's reality.

And that's the point. This picture of chaos and despair is getting to be the way that most Americans view Iraq. Whatever you think of what appears to be the film's partisanship in its depiction of events on the ground in Iraq, you can't help but view The Situation, an entertainment crafted from hopelessness, as a sign of something broader - that the filmmakers think they can draw the public to a story of an un-winnable war (or an un-winnable peace), made more un-winnable by American arrogance and incompetence. They are not just making this argument, they're selling it, and the audience seems ready for that perspective on the war.

Two years ago, the view of Iraq as a hopeless place (and the image of Americans as indifferent occupiers) might have been received differently, with some disputing the unflattering depictions of soldiers. Haas's film is scheduled to be released early next year. By then, hopelessness could old news. Remember just a few years back, when the Bush White House described the invasion of Iraq as an experience that seemed a lot like winning the lottery for Iraqis. Iraq was invaded by the Americans, so it was only logical that soon would come prosperity, democracy and baseball (which soldiers taught to uncomprehending children for the cameras.)

Something like this syndrome is going on in Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?, in which a truck-driving grandmother in Southern California has an epiphany that promises to be a lot like winning the lottery. The doc, directed and narrated by the former actor and current 60 Minutes producer Harry Moses, is something of a fable about the inevitable complications of what looks like good fortune. Teri Horton buys an abstract painting for $5 at a thrift shop, and a local art teacher tells her it looks a lot like a Pollock. Teri doesn't even know who Pollock was, and she says she thought paintings were supposed to be beautiful (which she thinks this one isn't). Yet believing is seeing, especially when money is involved, some $50 million of it if the "Pollock" is real, and her presumed good fortune snowballs into a campaign to determine whether the picture was really made by the master of abstract expressionist drip painting.

The roguish Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a doubting expert. So is Ben Heller, the dealer/collector who bought and sold Pollocks decades ago. Try expressing doubt, though, to someone who thinks she's won the lottery. Teri finds a scientist who claims that he's found Pollock's fingerprint on the back of the canvas, and a fast-talking dealer, Tod Volpe, just out of prison for an art-scam conviction, who champions the Pollock attribution and tries to put a group of investors together to buy it. (These investors are too smart for that, or at least most of them are.) The strongest believer in the picture's authenticity is Teri Horton, who didn't know Pollock from Paris Hilton when it all started. She turns down $2 million in cash, because she's convinced she's entitled to the $50 million.

The film never delivers. We never get a determination that the unsigned painting is by Pollock, and we're not told at the end of the film where the painting is. But we do see another eager American seduced by the dream of a windfall.

Tales of Americans getting rich overnight (The Beverly Hillbillies, Christmas in July, etc) are a staple of Americana and American films. Part of that myth is the notion that the recipients of good fortune come to believe that they deserve it, or that they earned it somehow. It also tells us something about art. The appreciation of Pollock's drip technique has not percolated down into the general population, but the fact that these paintings are worth many millions has. This shouldn't come as a surprise; people can read price tags better than they can analyze a work of abstract art. And why not? After all, the gambling magnate Steve Wynn, arguably the most important art collector in America, just put his elbow through a Picasso painting valued at $139 million, because Wynn is blind from retinitis pigmentosa. How does this art expert know which Pollocks to buy?

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? is a Picturehouse film. Perhaps we'll know more about the painting's fate when the film gets closer to release.

DVDs, 10/25.

DK Holm has been watching DVD 'xperts react to major releases over the past several weeks; it's high time to catch up with the highlights.

It's not like he's Garbo or anything. Billy Wilder, especially in his later years, would just as soon talk to reporters, students, panels, fellow filmmakers and whomever else as anything. But in Billy Wilder Speaks, he does so, most often in German, and fellow director Volker Schlöndorff was there to catch it.

The time-frame was during two weeks in Los Angeles in 1991 and the then-85 year old director apparently felt so comfortable chatting with Schlöndorff in his original language that he began to speak "out of school," violating the oath of omerta that rules over Hollywood, even decades after events. Schlöndorff vowed to release the resulting film only after Wilder's death, which occurred in 2002. Schlöndorff edited the material into six 30-minute episodes for German television collectively called How Did You Do It, Billy?. Later it was broadcast on British television in three one-hour episodes, and this version is a reduction by half of that broadcast. Kino has released the film on DVD (the street date was October 17), with about 70 minutes of extra footage and other materials.

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, as is his wont, explains how the film came about. "Wilder was working with another documentarian in his little writing office in Beverly Hills when Schlöndorff piggybacked his camera for a 'rehearsal' for a possible interview. He ended up getting two weeks of excellent on-camera reminiscences from the great director." Writer Hellmuth Karasek was also interviewing Wilder on for of his future biography. Erickson goes on to say that the "71-minute film is a delight." The interview proceeds chronologically, "right through his career from Germany to his early days in Hollywood, skipping over ground covered too well by others," with "even the Cameron Crowe book [stacking] up as a compendium of old stories compared to the freshness of the content heard here." There is some "breaking news" in the chat: "Wilder offers a number of observations not heard or read elsewhere, such as his description of Jack Lemmon's work ethic and Shirley MacLaine's doubts that The Apartment will be a success."

Jon Danziger at Digitally Obsessed begins by saying that there's "nothing quite like listening to a master talking shop, and that's exactly the opportunity we're given with this documentary," but finds that many of Wilder's anecdotes are "familiar, especially if you've read Conversations with Wilder." Adding that the "most intriguing part of the film, in some respects, is Wilder's discussion of Death Mills, which he directed for the Department of War in 1945, a look at the concentration camps that killed most of Wilder's family along with millions and millions of others," Danziger concludes that the film is "a modest disappointment that this is only just over an hour long - but then, nobody's perfect." Also, the transfer is "workmanlike" though "the clips from Wilder's films actually look pretty slick."

Fernando F Croce at Slant is the most negative, dubbing the disc a "surprisingly thin session" and that it is "surprising, for all of Wilder's puckish volubility, is how slight this series of interviews feels, providing bite-sized movie-buffish info but little insight and even less of the intergenerational portrait and 'aural history of the movie business' promised by interviewer Volker Schlöndorff." For Croce, the film "feels as wispy a project as Cameron Crowe's softball book with Wilder in the mid-90s." On the transfer, Croce finds that the "interview footage offers a variety of faded tones, but movie footage remains sharp and clean. The sound is a bit better, though subtitles struggle to keep up with Wilder's energetic language-hopping."

The extras on this Kino disc include 17 trailers for Wilder's films (The Major and the Minor, Five Graves to Cairo, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Love in the Afternoon, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, One, Two, Three, Irma La Douce, Kiss Me, Stupid, The Fortune Cookie, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Avanti!), plus two TV spots (one for Sunset Boulevard, the other of Jack Lemmon summoning extras to Cleveland's Municipal Stadium on behalf of The Fortune Cookie), and 21 "deleted scenes." Also included in the package is an essay by Schlöndorff. Writes Croce, "Most fun is a nearly complete gallery of Wilder trailers, which taken together suggest the smarmiest filmography of all time."

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It's one of the most long awaited DVDs, and one of the most unusual examples of a typical "important" Hollywood movie. Reds, Warren Beatty's biopic of radical journalist John Reed, the only American buried in the Kremlin, and his relationship with Louise Bryant, arrived in Region 1 on October 17 with an excellent transfer of Vittorio Storaro's superb, classical imagery in a fine 25th Anniversary Edition package consisting of a double-disc set with a short array of extras (about an hour's worth of "making of" material, broken up into seven discreet thematic units). Upon original release, the $36 million dollar movie garnered twelve Oscar nominations and won three, one to Storaro, one to Maureen Stapleton for best supporting actress and one for Warren Beatty for best direction. The DVD itself appeared to an explosion of reviews.

For Karen Valby of Entertainment Weekly, Reds is "political, educational, provocative, difficult, and long (clocking in at well over three hours). It is also intellectually stirring and emotionally soap-operatic in the best sense of both those terms, and stars three actors at the very top of their game." Digitally Obsessed's Jon Danziger concludes that "Reds, like its hero, is courageous almost to the point of foolhardiness - it's politically committed, culturally knowing, historically relevant, and almost unimaginably poignant. It's got a vibrancy that comes only from art of the first order, and features actors and filmmakers of the highest rank turning in some of their very best work. Rejoice, comrades - finally it's on DVD, and it looks spectacular."

At DVD Beaver, Yunda Eddie Feng, after a thorough summary of the movie's history (and pointing out that "there is a thematic reason why Reds is being released in October rather than in any other month"), settles down to one of the site's characteristically detailed analyses of the transfer. "A few years ago, Paramount restored the Reds film negatives, though the studio and Warren Beatty decided to put off the DVD release until 2006. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen image is impressively free of debris such as dust and scratches, and it is generally sharp and clear. However, I saw a few defects that appeared briefly, sometimes for only one frame."

At the DVD Journal, the acronymal JJB asserts that Reds's near banishment from Oscar achievement by Chariots of Fire marked "the end of the New Hollywood," going on to say that Reds was "the last of its kind - a lavish, highly detailed, over-budget, epic-length historical drama shot in multiple countries for millions of dollars, and yet a singular artistic vision." After a detailed account of the film's political background, JJB notes that Reds "becomes a story that isn't about a singular mass of people, but just two - Jack and Louise - who find that their love for each other sustains them more than art, writing, or political ambition."

Deeming it a "handsome, unsatisfying DVD of a handsome, unsatisfying epic," Slant's Dan Callahan argues that the movie is at odds with itself: "There's an attempt to correlate the 'free love' theories of the 1910s with the ethos of the swinging 70s, but this parallel is mitigated by the mushy home life scenes between John and Louise, where it always seems to be Christmas or someone's birthday and cute puppies clamor to watch them make lingering love in silhouette."

In a feature story at the New York Times, AO Scott chatted about the DVD release with Beatty, who maintained that Reds was "the last Hollywood picture to be released with an intermission," with Scott adding that the film "does, in retrospect, seem to come at the end of a line of grand, sometimes grandiose movies that stretches back from the Godfather series, through Lawrence of Arabia, to Gone With the Wind." Scott concludes that Reds "remains a superior history lesson, thanks to Mr Beatty's thorough command of the material and to his inclusion of real-life 'witnesses' to the life and times of Reed. Their faces and voices give this romance some documentary ballast, and make it, now that they are gone, a moving archive of faded memories."

Ah, the witnesses. If there was one thing that Reds fanatics yearned to have on the DVD, it was the unedited footage of the remarkable interviews with such historical figures as Henry Miller, Rebecca West, Hamilton Fish, George Jessel, and Adela Rogers St Johns, among others. Unfortunately, the viewer gets only a small taste of the unedited footage in the course of Laurent Bouzereau's typical talking-heads-and-clips "making of" job. Entertainment Weekly finds that the "biggest treat of this special edition, though, is [Jack] Nicholson," who "explains [Diane's] Keaton's absence from the extras. 'She would find probably a lot to find fault with in this particular approach to making a documentary and getting poopsy about the period,' he says admiringly. 'Too much of this "Ooh! You made a movie!" blah.' Viva Diane."

DVD Beaver finds that "though very polished, Bouzereau's bonus materials are usually sterile and superficial; this explains why filmmakers with fragile egos like to work with him. He makes everyone look like a heroic, visionary artist struggling against incredible odds, which is essentially dishonest considering that even Beatty himself acknowledges that all of the major Hollywood studios were willing to finance his movies back in the late-1970s and early-1980s (and considering that the only odds that Spielberg faces nowadays are ones that he creates for himself)."

Digitally Obsessed complains that "one feature that's not included but that would have been very welcome would be identifying the witnesses." Callahan at Slant also complains that "using these 'witnesses' as a framework was an inspired idea, but the John Reed we hear about in these testimonies is not the one we see on the screen," and adds further that the extras are "fairly unilluminating, and mainly feature the near-70-year-old Beatty looking great and revealing little."

One of the biggest advocates of a Reds DVD release is Jeffrey Wells, and the writer got a chance to interview Beatty for his site, Hollywood Elsewhere. Beatty has become a real advocate for DVDs, which may be a harbinger of the future (as Beatty seemingly always is) as other directors such as Steven Spielberg still remain disdainful of the medium. Wells quotes Beatty: "DVD releases and the obviously long shelf life that comes with the DVD market are the replacement for the long theatrical life that films used to have in theaters, plus it saves the audience from having to experience the mall experience, which is largely a hormonal matter these days."

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Mid-October saw the release of Robert Altman's adaptation of the American public radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, slaking the veteran filmmaker's thirst for audio games and big and varied casts (Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Kline, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, John C Reilly and Garrison Keillor among them), and Terry Zwigoff's collaboration with comic artist Daniel Clowes, Art School Confidential, which provided the dyspeptic director with another platform from which to rail against human mediocrity.

Tanner Stransky at Entertainment Weekly gave A Prairie Home Companion short shrift, but noted that "Altman and a tour-de-force cast elevate A Prairie Home Companion's dreamy elegy about an antiquated radio variety show into a twangy, rewind-worthy lullaby." Ed Gonzalez at Slant found that "Altman's graceful camera, the movement of characters across the frame, and the overlapping voices collectively convey a genial sense of place," but had to admit that "in spite of its lovely and limber exoskeleton, Prairie Home Companion is lighter than Light FM. Altman drops in and out of his character's lives as if he were switching between radio stations, but the transmission he picks up isn't always deep, the hee-haw music that dominates the film doesn't profoundly connect with the off-stage drama as it does in the director's little-seen gem A Perfect Couple, and the acting is off-center." Meanwhile, Dawn Taylor at the DVD Journal noticed that A Prairie Home Companion was "an interesting choice for Altman to make in his twilight years, being a film overwhelmingly about death," but also warns that both Altman and Keillor are "artists who inspire either passionate adoration or intense loathing of their work - just as there are people who can't stand Altman's pictures, there are those who find Keillor's particular brand of folksy entertainment to be corny and overly sentimental." For Taylor herself, though, the film is "a delight - a gentle, thoughtful, warm visit with people who are passionate about what they do."

Taylor also pulled the Art School Confidential card at the DVD Journal, concluding that the film, "while very funny, doesn't succeed at either the sort of deeply wrought characterization that marks the rest of Clowes's work nor at the pitch-black, suffering-based humor of Zwigoff's. Unfortunately, the entire film just feels like an extended, very mean joke about how silly art school students are." Preston Jones at DVD Talk also traces a decline: "What begins as a scabrous satire devolves into ham-handed clichés that sabotage an otherwise darkly humorous work... Art School Confidential is a flat, overlong exercise in taking down those smarmy art kids a peg or two. While it might be fun for Clowes and Zwigoff, it's downright dull for those in the audience." But Jeremiah Kipp and Ed Gonzalez at Slant scrape away the surface to find that Art School Confidential is really "a tale of demolished idealism appropriate for any creative job market," and asserting that the "matter-of-fact filmmaking style is made up for by the vitality of the all-around fantastic performances, the striking use of color (much of the movie looks like an eye-popping comic book panel), and dialogue that's as tasty as an Ernest Lehman/Clifford Odets cookie full of arsenic." They add that the Sony disc's image is "pristine, boasting pleasant, film-like textures, smooth skin tones, excellent color saturation, with no evidence of edge haloes, dirt, or flecks."

Slant was also one of the few websites to cover the New Yorker Video release of Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary, made in 1985 but still controversial. Fernando F Croce finds the film to be a "profoundly felt, gravelly beautiful work of faith, where the potentially parodist aspects of the premise (the Nativity story recast in modern-day Geneva) are consistently tempered by august contemplation." However, Croce goes on to say the "sensuousness of Godard's images is not quite damaged by the somewhat slapdash transfer, though the full-frame dents the supernal quality of the framing. The sound almost makes up for it, capturing the dense aural mosaic of voices, music, and the murmurs of nature."

What Region 1 lacked, though, Region 2 made up for with Second Sight's recent release of Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman, one of four films in its Max Ophuls Collection. In a lengthy review at DVD Times, Gary Couzens tracks the director's career, his critical standing, and his all-too-small DVD filmography. Couzens's analysis is that Letter from an Unknown Woman is "very much Lisa's story, and it's a measure of Ophuls's stylisation that we accept it totally, when looked at from another angle her behaviour becomes highly dubious - egotistical and deluded at best, that of a stalker at worst. [Joan] Fontaine gives a remarkable performance, aging from early teens to thirties and is utterly convincing. There's a self-belief matched with a vulnerability that Hitchcock had seen earlier in the decade in Rebecca and Suspicion which Ophuls makes full use of. This was, by the way, Fontaine's favorite of her own films." Couzens also observes that the film enjoys a "generally good transfer, though some scenes are a little too dark. Otherwise it shows all the shades of grey in [DP Franz] Planer's photography, and there's a pleasingly film-like grain." The disc also includes a 23-minute video essay by film historian Tag Gallagher. "Gallagher is an eloquent speaker, and it's a sure bet that you will find out things you didn't know about this film, however familiar you may be with it - I certainly did."

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"Not just anyone could turn a slick, glib tobacco industry lobbyist into a sympathetic character," begins Betsy Bozdech in her review of Thank You for Smoking at the DVD Journal, before going on to announce that the film succeeds at that task admirably. Thank You for Smoking is, of course, the political satire that is also the coincidental product of scions. It's based on a novel by Christopher Buckley, son of the conservative columnist and author William F Buckley, and adapted and directed by Jason Reitman, son of director Ivan Reitman, shaper of Bill Murray's early screen persona (Meatballs, Stripes). Buckley's 12-year-old novel concerns a tobacco industry lobbyist kidnapped and abused with nicotine patches ostensibly by anti-smokers, but the movie is somewhat different, with a focus on the relationships between the lobbyist, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), and his son (Cameron Bright) and a reporter, Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes).

Bozdech goes on to ask, "How does Nick sleep at night? Very well, thank you; he's a champion debater with a self-described 'moral flexibility' that allows him to find satisfaction in doing what very few others would be able to (or, for that matter, would want to). For Nick, it's the easiest thing in the world to stand up for smoking as a personal choice - who is he to tell anyone else what they should or shouldn't do?" For Bozdech, the high points of the film are Naylor's occasional meetings with fellow lobbyists (Maria Bello and David Koechner) representing other despised industries, alcohol and firearms, who informally call themselves the M.O.D. Squad (for Merchants of Death).

Preston Jones at DVD Talk prefers to approach Thank You for Smoking (by the way, shouldn't that title be Thank You for Still Smoking, to more better match the rhythm of the catch phrase it is refuting?) as an Aaron Eckhart film, first summarizing his career before asserting that "Eckhart hasn't found another part that gave him as much to sink his teeth into as the one crafted by [Neil] LaBute [in In the Company of Men]. Say hello to Eckhart's triumphant comeback role: Nick Naylor, Big Tobacco's chief lobbyist, a slick sonofabitch," before concluding that "Thank You For Smoking is a razor-sharp satire that swipes at Hollywood, lobbyists, parenting and half a dozen other topics with the faintest whiff of conscience - whip-smart and hysterically funny." And Ross Johnson at Digitally Obsessed lobbies for the movie, which he found "brisk, and moves through its relatively short running time without ever really slowing down... There's a charmingly light touch throughout."

The anonymous reviewer at Current Film emphasizes the performances, noting that they are "absolutely terrific," and that "Bright and Eckhart are believable as father/son," but avers that the film "doesn't hit its targets as fiercely as it could have (partially due to the fact that it plays things a little too safe at times)." And Kirven Blount at Entertainment Weekly complains that Reitman "undercuts the satire by hard-pedaling Nick's relationship with his son."

Thank You for Smoking garnered some attention at the Toronto Film Festival because of a bidding war, won by Fox Searchlight over Paramount Classics (which subsequently shed two of its executives), and then more at Sundance, where a sex scene between Eckhart and Holmes was cut. The DVD Journal's Bozdech, in discussing the supplements, which include a solo commentary by Reitman and his participation in a group chat, notes that "in both, Reitman discusses the circumstances surrounding the Eckhart-Holmes sex scene, which caused a stir at the Sundance Film Festival when it was accidentally dropped from the screening print and speculation about Scientology censorship ran rampant." Jones at DVD Talk calls the supplements a "veritable bonanza," and finds Reitman "candid, engaging," while Verdict's Masri rules that Reitman's solo commentary is an "amiable affair." But Obsessed's Johnson finds that the extras contain "more quantity than quality," and EW's Blount shows impatience with the supplements: "Reitman heaps profane abuse on those looking to point out continuity gaffes, and says he introduced himself to Buckley as 'the guy they hired to f--- up your book.' In another, he repeats himself, Eckhart quietly watches the film, and David Koechner (gun lobbyist Bobby Jay) tries to liven things up."

Shorts, 10/24.

A must-read: Matthew Clayfield's appreciation of Adrian Martin - as well as the discussion that follows.

Kristin Thompson offers what for many, myself included, will be an introduction to the work of self-described "aca/fan" (i.e., an academic who's also an in-there-with-all-four-feet fan) Henry Jenkins. One of his books, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, "is unusual, perhaps unique, in offering an overview of the entertainment industry from the perspective both of the big corporations that control popular media creations and of the fans, who often appropriate those creations for their own purposes."

"Don Hertzfeldt is one of my favorite short filmmakers." And so, David Lowery interviews him.

"Jean Harlow scares me when she shouts, and she shouts a lot." John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows, parts 1 and 2.

"To some degree, both ideas remained as I worked: the encyclopedia and the novel. I had this image of a library, where the characters resumed their life after ours. But the Biographical Dictionary of Film had already made me see the inadvertent beauties in alphabetical order." With his novel Suspects seeing a re-release, David Thomson talks with Kamera's Antonio Pasolini.

"Death of a President is really a movie about 9/11 - an essay on a national tragedy used to create an even greater tragedy." Even so, J Hoberman notes, "There's a far more subversive political mock-umentary coming next week. I invite President Bush, Senator Clinton, and all politicians to get down with Borat." Also: "A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers."

And also in the Voice, Ed Halter seems disappointed with Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder and Jim Ridley, reviewing Babel, suggests: "Time perhaps scrambling it's for Alejandro González Iñárritu to stop his narratives."

Geoffrey Macnab reports on Nicole Kidman and director Steven Shainberg's ideas going into Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus.

Also in the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw on YouTube's lure - for viewers, other companies and for filmmakers: "Documentaries like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man and Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans have YouTube qualities, in that the footage was shot by the participants themselves, but needed a professional cinema practitioner to bring it to light. If the unhappy heroes of these films were making their videos now, they would probably bypass these directors and take them straight to YouTube."

Meanwhile, I've only just noticed that the Hollywood Reporter has an online viewing blog, Reel Pop. The new design is working. Steve Bryant's entry today: "The 2006 Midterms According to YouTube."

"The long and winding road that Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain took on the way to the big screen, where it opens Nov 22, reveals the challenge an independent filmmaker faces when he encounters a big studio's moviemaking process," writes Anne Thompson. Also in THR, Greg Kilday: "Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson led the list of nominees for the 2006 Gotham Awards, announced Monday in New York by the Independent Film Project and its executive director, Michelle Byrd."

Right. And the other four films nominated for best feature are: Old Joy and... Little Children, The Departed and Marie Antoinette. Anthony Kaufman comments: "While it may help bring in the bucks for the humble nonprofit, the studio choices are an embarrassment to New York's independent film community." More from ST VanAirsdale.

At Twitch, logboy reflects on the state of the "cult" film and, in general (as well as quite specifically), all things Twitchy. New reviews: Marco on Giuseppe Tornatore's La Sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman) and logboy on Herman Yau's Hack Bak Do (On the Edge).

If you skipped Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece on computers predicting what in any given movie will make for how much in returns at the box office, Vince Keenan's got the gist in a fun entry.

"Syrian cinema, although characterized as a progressive one that tackles social and political issues, still cannot be compared to the Egyptian film industry," writes Nazim Muhanna in Asharq Alawsat. "To the present day, despite the changing times, Syrian cinema is still monitored and controlled by a 13-member intellectual committee that receives screenplays to read and access in advance. Provoking the anger of many in the field, their main objection being that some of the committee members have no background or knowledge of cinema."

Also via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau," Hani Mustafa in Al-Ahram Weekly on "the fabled Ramadan soaps watched by millions."

For IFC News, Dan Persons talks with Phillip Noyce about Catch a Fire and what it shares thematically with The Quiet American and Rabbit-Proof Fence. Related: Robert Wilonsky's review in the Voice.

A "difficult, human, and powerful film" or a doc in tandem with "the worst shock tactics of desperate filmmakers"? A Reverse Shot trio clashes over The Bridge at indieWIRE. More from Robert Cashill: "This should have been a pro-barrier advocacy picture, one that I think would have had a greater galvanizing effect on the legislature (and would have doused discussion that the movie, which does not take a strong editorial stance, perpetuates suicidal ideation by susceptible viewers)." Related: For SF360, Michael Fox interviews director Eric Steel.

Production Weekly: "Andre Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Ray Liotta and Martin Henderson are set to star opposite Charlize Theron in Battle in Seattle."

Ed Champion: "It's telling that a slightly lesser Scorsese mob film, sizzling with the kind of punch and life that few contemporary films seem capable of these days, stands so distinguished against its multiplex brethren."

Infamous? It's "not half bad," writes Alan Vannemann. Also at Bright Lights After Dark, C Jerry Kutner adds three monologues to Edward Copeland's five.

Among the DVDs Dave Kehr reviews this week for the New York Times is Hands Over the City, Criterion's "fine treatment of an overlooked film."

Gabriel Shanks on The Last King of Scotland: "No English-language film released this year, with the possible exception of United 93, has offered such exhilarating performative tension."

Over 25 years, Body Heat has aged quite nicely, argues Christopher Orr for the New Republic.

Had a rough day? Take solace. You are not in James Urbaniak's shoes. Some actors have stalkers; he's got Karen Strang.

Jeffrey Overstreet bestows the first "If Jesus Came Back..." Award to Stephen Baldwin.

Another trailer roundup at ScreenGrab. This time it's John Constantine pitting what the studio wants you to think against what you're actually thinking.

Online listening tip. Leonard Lopate talks with Peter Falk about his autobiography, Just One More Thing.

Online viewing tip #1. Nearly a dozen trailers for new films at european-films.net.

Online viewing tip #2. Ian McKellen reveals the secrets of acting to Ricky Gervais. Ajit at ticklebooth.

Fests and events, 10/24.

"Tomorrow, Malaysian filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad leaves for the Tokyo International Film Festival [through October 29], where a retrospective of her work is being presented, as well as the world premier of her new film, Mukhsin." The Visitor interviews her at Twitch.

For Time Out, Ben Walters talks with Kenneth Anger, who's seeing four of his films being screened at the London Film Festival.

Kira-Anne Pelican, blogging for the Times from the fest: "Whilst The Namesake doesn't have the same individuality and flair that [Mira] Nair showed in Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding, it's an enjoyable watch all the same."

Tom Huddleston from the fest for Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "For Your Consideration makes one important alteration to the [Christopher] Guest formula - instead of the usual fake documentary this is a straight comic fiction (albeit with occasional to-camera interviews, for old time's sake). But in every other aspect, absolutely everything, this is business as usual."

Focusing on The Fall, Kathy Fennessy previews the Northwest Film Forum's Peter Whitehead retrospective (November 3 through 12).

The 40th Hof International Film Festival opens tonight with Marcus H Rosenmüller's Schwere Jungs.

Tiffany Shlain's The Tribe will be screening this weekend at Stanford as part of United Nations Association Film Festival; Michael Guillén previews the "entertaining, satisfying and - frequently - laugh out loud funny" short.

For the Independent, Ben Walsh previews the UK Jewish Film Festival, starting its trek across London next month before touring the UK early next year.

Among the things Grady Hendrix learned at the Asian Film Market in Busan: "Horror sells" and "Cluelessness is pandemic."

R Emmett Sweeney for IFC News on Guy Maddin's The Brand Upon the Brain!: "Like Alain Resnais's superb [New York Film Festival] entry Private Fears in Public Places, which is diametrically opposite stylistically, it is an adult story about loneliness that leaves its characters adrift in the final scene, enclosed in Spartan spaces filled only with regret. Resnais opted out of the cannibalism scene, though."

Michael Buening wraps NYFF coverage at PopMatters.

At Bad Lit, Mike has the winners of the Coney Island Film Festival.

The Byron Bay Film Festival issues a call for entries.

Horrors, 10/24.

"[E]very once in awhile - even at this time of year, when all's I wanna do is mainline candy corn and park my ass at every dang midnite-movie spook show in town, and god bless San Francisco, there's a living-dead army of 'em - I get the urge to raid my bookshelf for some supplementary reading." The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy offers a few seasonal suggestions.

The "month of horror, terror and general mayhem" at the Pioneer Theater in NYC reaches a shrieking cresendo this weekend with an "all night cinematic seance of witch and warlock movies."

Robbiefreeling at Reverse Shot: "[W]hat Roeg and Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie were able to accomplish in Don't Look Now still feels unmatched in the horror genre: the ultimate coupling of love and death, both represented in their extremes."

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Chiranjit Goswami explains why Ghostbusters is "a tremendously nerdy film.... Ivan Reitmans buddy-comedy innately exudes an inordinate amount of anxiety regarding a variety of qualms and insecurities that are thought to typically hound frequently obsessive, often introverted, intellectual males."

For two nights only, October 30 and 31, Halloween returns to the big screen. Via Brendon Connelly.

Shorts, 10/23.

"If we begin to understand how film 'thinks' we will start to understand how moving images affect our life and being," writes Film-Philosophy editor Daniel Frampton, who's got a new book out, Filmosophy, from Wallflower Press. "As the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs wrote back in 1945: 'We must be better connoisseurs of the film if we are not to be as much at the mercy of perhaps the greatest intellectual and spiritual influence of our age as to some blind and irresistible elemental force.'"

Also in the Guardian:

• Saima Raza on celebrations marking the end of Ramadan: "Having spent the month praying for eternal salvation, worshippers decide to take a brief intermission and visit the gods of Bollywood."

• Watching Notting Hill, Jacques Perreti is struck by a realization: "Jesus, I say to myself, this film isn't about Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant at all! It's about Madonna meeting Guy Ritchie."

• Stephen Moss remembers wildlife filmmaker Heinz Sielmann, 1917 - 2006.

If you think you're going to get a shot at seeing I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed - and how you would in the foreseeable future, I have no idea - you need to read Philip French's review, which is more than just a review, actually. More like a historical primer. Also in the Observer, Killian Fox profiles Vera Farmiga and Jason Burke reports that a French distributor has picked up The Schoolgirl's Diary, a film from North Korea for which Kim Jon-il himself is credited as an advisor.

On first viewing, David Bordwell has eight notes on Satantango.

"It is interesting to note that throughout the evolution of Belgian cinema, the reality captured on film is not only rooted in the physical, but also in the interiority of the imagination." Acquarello reviews Philip Mosley's Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity.

Shi Guori turns a truck into a camera obscura; Jori Finkel tags along for the New York Times as he photographs the Hollywood sign.

David Edelstein: "Ryan Murphy's jaunty screen version of Running With Scissors proves that nothing consecrates one's depiction of a narcissistic mother like having her embodied by Annette Bening." Also in New York, the magazine: "New York may be in the middle of a Hollywood moment, but when it comes to the X-rated-movie business, the city will never rival the Valley," writes William Van Meter. "We have few porn kings living among us, much to the chagrin of just about no one. In fact, now that Bob Guccione has been stripped of his townhouse, we may have only one bona fide member of porn royalty, self-styled emperor though he is: Michael Lucas, age 34, the president of New York's largest gay-adult-film company, Lucas Entertainment, and its biggest star, and a man perfectly incapable of keeping his inner monologue to himself."

David Thomson remembers Gillo Pontecorvo - and of course, The Battle of Algiers, "one of the seminal films about purposeful violence in the 20th century." Also in the Independent, Tom Rosenthal on the two adaptations of All the King's Men.

Nick Schager in Slant on Death of a President: "[Gabriel] Range's aesthetic trickery isn't nearly as seamless or as clever as that found in Kevin Willmott's CSA: Confederate States of America, but it's his project's total lack of ingenuity that dooms it to irrelevance."

At Twitch, James Maruyama recommends Tetsuya Nakashima's followup to Kamikaze Girls, Memories of Matsuko.

Production Weekly is reporting that George Clooney and Joel and Ethan Coen will be reuniting for an adaptation of Admiral Stansfield Turner's novel, Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence. Via Chris Ullrich at Cinematical. Also: "Kathryn Bigelow has been tapped to helm the Iraq-set action drama The Hurt Locker which follows the exploits of an elite bomb disposal unit."

"The Subversive Nub was started in Nov 2005 by Philip Hood as an easily accessible place to find the films from Amos Vogel's influential book on film as a subversive art." Via filmtagebuch.

"What makes a great movie monologue?" asks Edward Copeland. Whatever your definition, he offers five of the best at the House Next Door.

Both Daniel Robert Epstein (SuicideGirls) and Aaron Hillis (IFC News) talk with Bobcat Goldthwait about Sleeping Dogs Lie.

Jaspar Rees meets up with Peter O'Toole for the London Times.

A week ago, Variety unveiled its new site; today, it's the Hollywood Reporter's turn.

Online browsing tip. Vintage tech via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #1. Jack Black on piracy. Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Online viewing tip #2. James Israel's got the first four minutes of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Horrors, 10/23.

"[Darren Lynn] Bousman and [Rob] Zombie are both members of an emerging and collegial band of horror auteurs - unofficially known as the Splat Pack - who are given almost free rein and usually less than $10 million by studios or producers to make unapologetically disgusting, brutally violent movies," writes Rebecca Winters Keegan in Time. "If they get it right, there's a fervid fan base, composed mostly of people far too young to take death seriously, who will send those movies into almost gruesome profitability (some of the films have made more than $100 million). The group is loose knit, and other members include the director of the first Saw movie, James Wan, and his co-writer, Leigh Whannell; Hostel writer-director Eli Roth; The Descent's Neil Marshall; and Alexandre Aja, who remade Wes Craven's 1977 cannibalistic film, The Hills Have Eyes."

"So how did it happen, actually?" asks Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Where indeed did Tobe Hooper go wrong?"

Joe Leydon on The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: "[N]either director [Robert] Wiene nor producer Erich Pommer felt altogether comfortable with the ramifications of the original script. They feared retaliation by any powerful people who might interpret the allegory as a personal attack. More important, they worried that audiences would respond unfavorably to anything that reminded them, even indirectly, of the everyday horrors lurking just outside the movie theater."

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Ian Johnston considers each of the four stories of Kwaidan. Also, Teddy Blanks: "Frenzy is funny. Something about dry British wit launches Hitchcock's ever-present dark humor to laugh-out-loud status. Or maybe he was just having a hell of a time."

Robbiefreeling at Reverse Shot: "[T]here's really no finer example of Carpenter's elegance than... The Fog. A more effective example of how setting and composition can make a scary movie than even Halloween, The Fog is one of just a handful of horror films I would call 'beautiful.'"

Fests and events, 10/23.

"Taking a break from his sermonising trilogy on American values, The Boss of It All finds Lars Von Trier in amiable and comedic mood, spinning out a plot that explores several of his favourite hobbyhorses: following individuals attempting to escape from reason, poking fun at group dynamics, and deflating actors' egos." Rob Forsyth blogs from the London Film Festival for the Times.

The Observer's Jason Solomons offers an overview of seven films at the festival; and at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Tom Huddleston reviews Venus and Stranger Than Fiction.

"The LFF's 'Treasures From The Archives' strand brings newly-restored prints back into circulation. And while it's always wonderful to see classics like Dr Strangelove or Great Expectations on the big screen again, it's more thrilling that the BFI and equivalent archives around the world breathe new life into half-forgotten gems that could have been lost forever," writes Sarah Cohen for Time Out. "Distant Voices, Still Lives is one of these rescued treasures."

E Steven Fried interviews Coleman Miller for the Siffblog: "The words 'funny' and 'experimental film' are not often found in the same sentence, but his latest piece, Uso Justo, transforms a Mexican medical melodrama into one fucking funny experimental film. The 87-minute program will be presented at the NWFF Tuesday evening at 8 pm."

Follow Toronto After Dark at Twitch.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Blake's found the lineup for Portland's Grindhouse Film Festival (November 4 and 5).

Adam Hartzell's full review of Kim Dae-seung's Pusan International Film Festival opener Traces of Love is up at Koreanfilm.org; indieWIRE's Brian Brooks surveys the awards and trends at this year's PIFF.

Similarly, Eugene Hernandez from the Hamptons.

At WSWS, David Walsh carries on looking back at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Online viewing tip. David Poland on the beach.

Jane Wyatt, 1910 - 2006.

Jane Wyatt, who reigned as America's ideal suburban mom during the 1950s when she starred with Robert Young in the television sitcom Father Knows Best and who nearly lured Ronald Colman away from diplomacy and into a lamasery in Frank Capra's 1937 film Lost Horizon died on Friday at her home in Bel Air, Calif. She was 95.

Robert Berkvist in the New York Times.

Wyatt... disagreed with latter-day critics who complain that Margaret Anderson was always subordinate to her husband. "She was the power behind the throne," she said. "She helped her husband out. Mother always knew best, too."

Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times.

See also the Wikipedia entry.

Busan Dispatch. 5.

An invaluable retrospective, a documentary and an intriguing story feature in Koreanfilm.org contributor Adam Hartzell's final dispatch from the Pusan International Film Festival.

"Japanese imperialism stuck a knife in old Korea and twisted it, and that wound has gnawed at the Korean national identity ever since. That is the fundamental reason why so little modern history is written: and that is what so dignifies those few Koreans and Japanese who have stood outside this death urge toward silence and written good history anyway." (Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun, p.140).

This year's retrospective on older South Korean films at PIFF focused on films from the Japanese Colonial Period (1905-1945). Before 1989, there were believed to be no extant films from this period, but some vault-digging still needed to be done. The Japanese company Toho Film provided the Korean Film Archives with three films from this period in 1989, whereas the Russian National Film Archives Gosfilmofond provided another one in 1998. But in 2003, that extant number was almost tripled when seven were unearthed from the Chinese National Film Archives. Of the eleven films available from this time in Korea's cinematic history, the following were shown at PIFF: Sweet Dream (Yang Joo-nam, 1936, the oldest Korean film in existence and a sort of pre-Madame Freedom about a woman who begins to appreciate the opportunities emerging for women at the time), Military Train (Suh Kwang-je, 1938, a film produced by the Japanese colonial government to encourage greater train security), Anchor Light (Ahn Chul-young, 1939, about a country girl being taken advantage of in Seoul), Angels on the Street (Choi In-gyu, 1941, about boys at an orphanage), Spring of Korean Peninsula (Lee Byung-il, 1941, a self-reflexive film on the film industry of the time), Volunteer (Ahn Sug-young, 1941, about a Korean soldier anxious to be allowed to enlist in the Japanese army) and Straits of Chosun (Park Ki-chae, 1943, about a soldier enlisting to prove his manhood). What the re-discovery of these films offers scholars of film and multiple other fields is truly priceless.

I was able to catch three of these films, Anchor Light, Volunteer and Straits of Chosun. Although it could be explained as the effect of seeing over 20 films at PIFF, I still had trouble differentiating what happened in the latter two when reflecting back on my experience with them before re-checking my notes. However, released in the early 40s as the Japanese colonial government began to exert more and more control over the populace, it makes sense that I'd have trouble discerning differences between the two because the intent the Japanese colonial government had with them was the same: Get Koreans in a locked mindset to fight for the Japanese empire. Cho Young-jung, program coordinator at PIFF, noted in the program produced along with the retrospective, The Time of Change and Choice: Discovery of films from Japanese colonial period, "While watching films from the Japanese colonial period, Koreans instinctively try to look for traces of national resistance." At first glance of these two latter films, however, one sees only a lockstep view. I recall no character stepping up against the mass mindset imposed by the film that everyone from Korea would aspire to fight for the Japanese empire; even mothers are proud to send their children off. We don't even have a character who expresses doubt or disagreement in order to provide symbolic punishment. Everyone is of one mind in Volunteer and Straits of Chosun because if they weren't, those associated with the film would have a deadly price to pay from the Japanese colonizers.

Anchor Light, produced much earlier, is a very different film that actually never mentions the military, let alone the Japanese as far as I could tell. Part of its immense value to scholars are the depictions of life in Seoul at the time and documentary footage of bus systems and other bits of street life, demonstrating how film is so much more than just narrative and how writing about film is so much more than upward or downward thumbs.

The only intended documentary I saw while at PIFF was Hwang Yun's One Day on the Road. If you think it's all been done before in the world of cinema, how 'bout a film about roadkill? Seen that? Well Hwang applies a deeper focus than you realized could be spent on roadkill, such a ubiquitous sight on our roads that we begin to ignore its everyday presence. Hwang seeks to see what this snapshot of these everydays says about us.

We follow three men who have been commissioned by the South Korean government to study the roadkill on three roads, part of a nexus that surrounds the Jiri Mountains to the point of making this region a literal island for the ecosystem that resides within the manmade borders. The documentary does a good job of answering the questions that might be forming in our heads, such as, "Um, how do birds become roadkill? Can't they fly away?" Hwang and her subjects show us how speeding, big trucks can suck away the flight paths of birds and how the ignored roadkill of important insect species entices the birds to stop on the road for a nibble, much to their peril. (And then the insects return to these carnages, which they then join as roadkill, and the unending cycle goes on.) We see the carnage grow each day as more than little bits of data on a computer-generated map. What the film concludes is that there is no pattern. The tiny red dots that represent the findings of roadkill along the roads become the road itself. Roadkill happens because of roads. It's that simple.

An added extra of this documentary is that it was the first one I've seen chronicling animal species indigenous to South Korea, making this even more of a perfect film for your environmental film festivals out there. Although I could do without the cutesy displays of anthropomorphizing, I know I have friends who would love that very aspect of the film and this does allow Hwang to underscore her points. Such is the challenge of documentary. Do you go for beauty and subtlety or do you insure the information is conveyed to the audience however clumsy and lacking in subtlety? To Hwang's credit, she left me with the thoughts and feelings with which she intended me to leave. She even had me empathizing with snakes!

Strangely enough, it is a Belgian, Canadian and French co-production that provides the best note of closure on the 11th edition of PIFF for me, Congorama, helmed by Quebecois Philippe Falardeau. Michel (Olivier Gourmet) is a failed inventor and failed man who lives in the light of the success of his father. Discovering he's adopted, he heads to the barn of his birth in Sainte-Cecile, Quebec on a whim to find anyone still connected to his birth family. Finding this search more challenging than he's up for, he heads home but not before he becomes part of an incident from which he won't be able to completely run away. While in Sainte-Cecile, Michel meets Louis (Paul Ahmarani), and his story is intertwined in this larger story about colonialism, intellectual property, family, nationality and all the history connecting the in-betweens.

Congorama had me thinking about the intersubjectivity of all knowledge. It underscored for me the need to credit my sources and to remember that all I wrote here is due to the visible and invisible talent that makes all these festivals happen, from the volunteers who humor my weak attempts to transact in Korean, to the cars racing around corners that didn't run me over in the crosswalk, to the availability of kim bab franchises that provide a healthier alternative to fast food in burrito-like form, to all the film laborers who keep providing fascinating and not so fascinating films to sift through. I am not an island on this peninsula. I am a product of all the histories that rush passed barely noticed, walk up briefly to try their English, and to stay imprinted within my head and heart for years to come over conversations late into the night accompanied by the score of the seashore. I'll come back for all that and more.

Weekend shorts.

"He is a lovely man, but a gruelling interview." Evidently, but Terence Davies's rants do make for a highly entertaining read. "You're up against people who know nothing, who have done a media degree or, worst of all, have done the Robert McKee lectures."

"Why is that worst of all?" asks Simon Hattenstone (probably while ducking). "Because they've done a great deal of damage. Who can turn round and say it's good to have a climax on page six? Who said so? Robert McKee, and his theories are based on Casablanca, which was being written as it was being shot. So you're up against that level of philistinism. It beggars belief."

The man may or may not be a pain, but his films are unique and vital experiences and it is an all but literal crime that he hasn't been able to get a film off the ground in six years.

Also in the Guardian:

• "All the King's Men, as one early reviewer noted, posed the question of the age: 'Can the man of ideas work with the dictator in the interests of historic change?'" J Hoberman tells the eventful story behind the first adaptation: "[Robert] Rossen's All the King's Men makes no specific references to Louisiana or even the south. But in its combination of rough populist politics, orchestrated hoopla and a hypnotised electorate, the movie comes closer than any other in imagining a fascist America."

• "You think the plot revolves around Iraq or the culture of corruption or the botched response to Katrina, and then - poof! - it turns out that the Republican Congressional majority achieved in 1994 by Newt Gingrich will now be swept away not for all its real and quantifiable sins, but because of some minor elected representative feeling up the Congressional page boys," writes John Patterson. "The Mark Foley scandal sends me back to the first bona fide Washington DC bestseller, Allen Drury's Advise and Consent, published in 1957 and filmed, very well indeed, by Otto Preminger in 1962." He's also reminded of "Gore Vidal's political melodrama, The Best Man, made in 1964, in which Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson vie for the presidential nomination." Also: "It's time to persuade humorless actors like the ones listed below that they have no place in the serious realm of comedy."

• "From making one or two feature films a year throughout the 1990s, Colombia has almost 70 on recent release or in the pipeline," reports Maya Jaggi. "After decades of civil war involving the army, paramilitaries and guerrilla groups, the military 'solution' pushed by President Alvaro Uribe has made the cities, and main corridors, safer."

• Peter Bradshaw on I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed: "Serge Le Péron's 60s-set Paris movie has something of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Rivette: a tale of paranoia and conspiracy which is an intriguing essay in the secret history of films."

• "For more than 30 years, Danièlle Huillet, who has died aged 70, and her husband, Jean Marie Straub, worked as an indivisible entity, directing, writing and editing some of the most personal, rigorous, challenging and ultimately rewarding films in cinema history," writes Ronald Bergan. "Their films resembled no others. Now, with Huillet's death, we will probably not see anything like them again." Earlier: "Danièle Huillet, 1936 - 2006."

• Paul Arendt explains why screenwriters love architects.

• Mark Brown profiles Tim Curry.

• Eva Wiseman finds some fun trailer mashups.

Christopher Frizzelle unveils the "2006 Stranger Genius Awards." One of them's going to James Longley, and Annie Wagner writes up the profile - and the Film Shortlist.

Debating the auteur theory is one thing, but the tiff between Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga "is shaping up as something more like one of those ugly, acrimonious rock-band breakups. Or a dogfight," writes Terrence Rafferty. "[T]his particular snarlfest seems more interesting than most because it might actually illuminate something about the mysterious (and terribly fragile) nature of collaboration in the movies."

Also in the New York Times:

• Randy Kennedy has a piece on the influence of Jerome Liebling on "a generation of nonfiction filmmakers - what [Ken] Burns describes as 'all of us coming within Jerry's radiational sphere," including "Roger Sherman, Kirk Simon, Karen Goodman and Amy Stechler, who have several Emmys and Academy Award nominations among them. Sometimes called the Hampshire Mafia, they all attended Hampshire, the experimental college in Amherst, Mass, which has produced an unusual number of successful filmmakers and photographers." And Burns has a solemn video tribute.

• Roberta Smith on Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, at the Brooklyn Museum through January 21: "In the show's introductory wall text, Ms Leibovitz is quoted as saying: 'I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.' But saying it doesn't make it so. This exhibition ends up refuting the premise on which it seems to be built: that an artist's life is as interesting — or in the end, even as personal - as her best work."

• James R Oestreich on Bruno Monsaingeon's Glenn Gould: Hereafter: "The film will carry you deep inside Mr Gould's musical mind: an awesome place to be, and not always a comfortable one."

• In a terrific backgrounder on Absolute Wilson, Sylviane Gold talks to both the subject, Robert Wilson, and the director: "[Katharina] Otto-Bernstein was a Wilson fan, but not by any means a scholar. And she thinks a lot of the intellectual constructs that have been proffered to explain his work are, well, hooey. 'The missing link between Dada and contemporary, the continuation of Artaud, the Wieland Wagner of the present time, tra-la-li, tra-la-lo,' she says. 'I think a lot of things were happenstance. Jacques Derrida was working with the deconstruction of language. I'm sure Bob was aware of it. But he didn't go, "Oh, deconstruction of language - let's put that on the stage."'"

• Mark Russell talks with Daniel Gordon about his third documentary about North Korea. This one, Crossing the Line focuses on four American soldiers who defected to the North decades ago: "Three of the four... came from broken homes, with missing or abusive fathers. They made homes in the most extreme totalitarian state in the world, where Kim Il-sung is portrayed at the ultimate father figure for the entire nation."

• Dennis Lim on The Bridge, Exit and a few others: "To varying degrees, these films grapple with heightened versions of a question that vexes all filmmakers, not least documentarians: What are the limits of what can be filmed and shown? They point to a new development that not long ago may have seemed unthinkable: the respectable snuff film."

• The "problem" with Running With Scissors, suggests AO Scott, "is that the efforts of the actors don't add up to much more than a series of uncomfortable, funny-horrible vignettes in a scattered, shapeless movie." The LA Weekly's Ella Taylor agrees, finding it "[s]tudded with stars giving their all to nothing very much." More from Robert Cashill. Related: Rob Kendt profiles Brian Cox for the Los Angeles Times, where Maria Elena Fernandez talks with director Ryan Murphy.

• Neil Genzlinger on Bill Plympton's "gleefully outrageous" Hair High: "Plympton nicely walks the border between ridiculously gross and outright offensive." More from Brian D Schiller at Slant. ScreenGrab has the trailer.

• Stephen Holden: "Sleeping Dogs Lie doesn't pretend to be more than it is: a blunt, provocative comedy sketch whose visual look is almost as bare as that of an episode of the underappreciated Home Box Office series Lucky Louie." More from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Balancing [Sandra] Hüller's astonishingly physical performance with an intimate, naturalistic style, Requiem is a moving study of a tortured young woman more at peace with medieval ritual than with modern medicine. Throughout, [Hans-Christian] Schmid remains agnostic, suggesting that Michaela's problems, whatever their origin, prove only that a mind in torment is a terrible thing." Also, Sweet Land.

• "[T]he achievement of [Conventioneers] has less to do with guerrilla tactics (Haskell Wexler pulled the same thing off in his 1969 landmark, Medium Cool) than with its shrewd interface of the personal and political," writes Nathan Lee.

• Laura Kern on Masai: The Rain Warriors: "[T]he boys, like the film, come off as very human: flawed, frequently awkward, but full of goodness at the core."

• Anita Gates: "Jaan-E-Mann (the title means 'beloved') has many of its genre's shortcomings, including a shaky hold on the line between farce and stupidity and a soapy, melodramatic denouement.... Still, there is something good-natured about Jaan-E-Mann that makes it possible to forgive its many faults."

In this month's Prospect, Frederic Rafael, co-writer of the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut, tears David Thomson's Nicole Kidman to itsy bitsy, teensy weensy pieces.

"What would [Diane] Arbus have made of [Nicole] Kidman in Fur?" asks Dan Callahan in Slant. "My guess is that she would have recognized a Vogue fashion model when she saw one and sent Kidman over to be photographed by her husband." 2½ out of four stars anyway.

Also in Slant, Ed Gonzalez finds Commune "loose-limbed and not at all artful - which is to say, it's scarcely bourgeois and just as the Black Bear Ranch people would like it." And, in As the Call, So the Echo, "we're reminded that there are doctors out there who pride charity above payback."

Nick Schager: "What ultimately gives Inland Empire its dark enchantment, however, is Lynch's combination and reconfiguration of aesthetic and narrative components until what remains... is a sense of hidden, inextricable connections intertwined in ways both clear and obscure - an impression that lends this, the director's most challenging and rich work, a through-the-rabbit-hole mystery saturated with endless interpretive possibilities."

Matt Riviera on Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men: "A bleak and gritty political thriller disguised as a blockbuster, this is a relentlesssly depressing work whose narrative restraint is frustrating and admirable in equal measure."

"All the King's Men, The Last King of Scotland, The Departed, The Queen, Marie Antoinette, Death of a President, Apocalypto - these are not movies in which a Republican administration and Congress could find much comfort," writes the Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "Rather, they chart deep and growing discontent, the dismay of a people who have suffered patiently through years of deceit, incompetence, abuse of power, and arrogance. On the surface, perhaps, their outrage has been muted, even silent, because that is how good Americans behave in times of trouble. But on a deeper level, in those places where doubt and anger grow, places explored by dreams and movies, changes are already under way."

Also: Gerald Peary on Time to Leave.

Filmbrain: "With a twist ending that somehow manages to be both poignant and maudlin at the same time, Death of a President can best be described as an opportunity wasted. Neither polemic nor satire, it's a film that will only offend those who refuse to see it. The decision by Regal Entertainment Group and Cinemark to ban the film outright from their cinemas says more about life in Bush's America than the film itself."

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston actually goes back a while with Jon Raymond, who wrote the original story and co-wrote Old Joy with Kelly Reichardt. And so they talk. Todd Haynes's name comes up here and there, it should be mentioned. Then, at SF360, Huston writes about another acquaintance from his Portland days, Miranda July.

Owen Hatherley: "Safe is the edge of hysteria in Joan Didion's neurasthenic LA teased out and emphasised to the point of total psychosis, which shouldn't obscure the fact of how prevalent its mysterious 'environmental illness' has become." Via Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay.

"There are few great filmmakers - and Fellini certainly was one - who went so wrong so resolutely," argues Charles Taylor. It was La Dolce Vita, "one of those enormous critical and commercial successes that, as 2001 did with Stanley Kubrick, set a director on a path that negates everything that had been good about his work." Heavens. That said, "in Amarcord, for once, Fellini's self-indulgence doesn't overtake the movie, doesn't wear you out. You can see everything that's wrong with the picture and it remains a pleasure to watch."

Roger Ebert talks with Michael Apted about 49 Up.

"What would you do if asked by a well-known film director to re-create a musical scene for which the fate of the whole project hinges?" asks Mark Rubin. "How about hiring and rehearsing a band, working out a musical arrangement long distance, then booking the recording date at a studio you've never even heard of while not being able to tell anyone who's on the session? How about setting up said recording session with a vocalist you've never heard sing, with no chance of rehearsal, and no one to tell you what key she likes to sing in? That's precisely where I found myself the first week of January 2005." The movie was Infamous and the singer, of course, Gwyneth Paltrow. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Liz Welch Tirrell interviews Douglas McGrath.

"It's always a shame to see revolutionaries spinning their wheels, stuck in a shallow groove," sighs Brian Gibson in Vue Weekly. "Back in 1963, Larry Kent made Canada's first indie film, The Bitter Ash. Now, more than four decades later, he's made The Hamster Cage, a stale slice of dark suburban comedy."

Tom Sutpen at Bright Lights After Dark on Sleazoid Express: "[T]his book could not be a more crucial document in the canon of film writing. I mean, perhaps it's only me, but there's just something fundamentally American about troubled individuals in a vast urban setting gathering together in a falling-apart movie theatre originally designed to look like La Scala and watching Cannibal Holocaust on a screen the size of a midwestern liquor store."

Up-n-coming:

• "Sacha Baron Cohen is set to join Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's forthcoming screen version of Sweeney Todd."

• "Sam Shepard is attached to star in Descending From Heaven: The Strange and Extraordinary Tale of Claude Eatherly, A-Bomb Pilot for director Sandy Smolan and producer Marcia Nasatir."

"What has happened that has made images (and by image we mean any sign, work of art, inscription, or picture that acts as a mediation to access something else) the focus of so much passion? To the point that destroying them, erasing them, defacing them, has been taken as the ultimate touchstone to prove the validity of one's faith, of one's science, of one's critical acumen, of one's artistic creativity? To the point where being an iconoclast seems the highest virtue, the highest piety, in intellectual circles?" Bruno Latour on the "Iconoclash." Also via wood s lot, Kurt Easterwood makes a personal recommendation: My Country, My Country. The recommendation is recommended.

Adam Hartzell profiles Indian-Canadian documentary filmmaker Ali Kazimi at Hell on Frisco Bay.

"Certainly the most hardened New Zealand film to emerge since Once Were Warriors, Out of the Blue is signposted by a series of innocuous coastal panoramas that belie its underlying trauma," writes Tim Wong for the Lumière Reader.

"Which other great American director has reached a point in his career where we’re this damn grateful for a half-decent movie?" Tim Robey explains why he doesn't get The Departed.

Michael Helke for Stop Smiling: "In The Sacrifice, we see the lasting benefit Tarkovsky got out of his tentative collaboration with the West in the form of his working relationship with many of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's own associates: cameraman Sven Nykvist (who died last month at the age of 83); the actor Erland Josephson, who portrays Alexander; and designer Anna Asp, responsible for the film's interior sets. The film itself, perhaps as a consequence, is in many respects Bergmanesque."

"The Clay Bird, [Tareque] Masud's memoir of 1960s Bangladesh—a land about to be torn apart by civil war—is an engrossing and at times touching film. But its sensibility has more in common with Richard Attenborough's epics than classical cinema," writes Nelhydrea Paupér at Flickhead.

"[I]t is tempting to assert that Herzog's theses in Aguirre are completely realized in the film's opening and closing scenes," suggests Dan Jardine at the House Next Door. "Of course, to do so would be to underestimate the power, magnificence and importance of the film's intervening 90 minutes, but still, the temptation remains. As I am, like Oscar Wilde, able to resist everything except temptation, why not explore it?" More from Martha Fischer, who's back at Cinematical.

Blondie of the Follies "has been overshadowed by [Edmund] Goulding's other film of 1932, Grand Hotel (and Blondie contains a sequence in which Jimmy Durante sings a song of Goulding's composition, 'Don't Take Your Girl to "Grand Hotel"' and [Marion] Davies offers a deadly Greta Garbo impersonation)," writes Dave Kehr, "but it's a far livelier picture than that overcrowded star vehicle."

"With a DVD viewing of Mr Klein last night, I think I'm finally starting to get Joseph Losey," writes Zach Campbell.

Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "Scream proved a number of things about [Wes] Craven to critics and audiences alike: that he knew a great deal about horror films, and how and why they work; that he knew how to manipulate and recycle generic mainstays and to use them to great effect in spite of their conventionality; and that all of this can be highly profitable and can spawn a seemingly endless chain of sequels. But in fact, Craven had already proved this with A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that, when viewed today, may strike one as among the most originally unoriginal films ever made."

Time Out's Geoff Andrew talks with Nuri Bilge Ceylan about Climates.

Grant Rosenberg talks with Rachid Bouchareb about Indigènes (Days of Glory) for Time Europe. Via Propagndin at Twitch.

James Christopher of the London Times talks with Christiane Kubrick about her husband and about Dr Strangelove.

In the Independent, James Mottram talks with Paul McGann about Withnail and I and his new one, Gypo, which sees generally positive reviews from Anthony Quinn and the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

For Twitch, Jon Pais translates a generous swatch of a DVDrama interview with Satoshi Kon.

Michael Guillén talks with Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob about Al Franken: And God Spoke.

Arianna Huffington notes that Democrats are incorporating Robert Greenwald's Iraq for Sale into their campaigns.

Chuck Tryon: "Anytown, USA offers an important, refreshing, and sometimes humorous glimpse into local political campaigns and their implications for the communities where they take place."

For the Telegraph, Andrew Perry talks with Stewart Copeland about Everyone Stares - and about Sting.

Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins, authors of Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital, talk with Paul Rachman and Steven Blush, the director and writer, respectively, of American Hardcore, for the Washington City Paper.. Via Sujewa Ekanayake, who, as it happens, has been talking with GreenCine's Jonathan Marlow about the future of VOD.

Ray Pride: "The world's stroppiest actors."

Reid Rosefelt at Zoom In Online: "The best performance I have seen by an actor so far this year is Jackie Earle Haley as the child predator in Todd Field's Little Children."

"Sid Adilman, Sid Adilman, the long-time Toronto Star entertainment writer widely regarded as one of the greatest champions of Canadian movies, music, books and television, died yesterday," wrote Isabel Teotonio in the Star on Sunday. Moving remembrances come from Joe Leydon and Leonard Klady.

"Nina Saxon. Main title and title designer for feature films and television. She also designs company logos." Susan King profiles her for the LAT. Also, Valerie J Nelson remembers Spoony Singh, who built the Hollywood Wax Museum.

Online browsing tip #1. "Last month we asked you to choose 10 artists from the web for a unique reader-curated exhibition," writes the Guardian. "As it opens, Jonathan Jones introduces the finalists."

Online browsing tip #2. Do You Want Lies With That?

Online browsing tip #3. Flickr photoset for Amid Amidi's Cartoon Modern.

Online listening tip #1. An excerpt (accompanying a full transcript) of Geoff Andrews's conversation with Gael García Bernal at the National Film Theatre.

Online listening tip #2. The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #11 at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

Online viewing tip #1. Rick Silva's trailer for Recap, "a remix of the cult classic graffiti movie Wild Style (1982) where every piece of graffiti in the original film has been digitally crossed out and tagged over with the Recap tag." Via Michael Szpakowski at DVblog.

Online viewing tip #2. Various people talking at the New Yorker Festival.

Online viewing tip #3. Borat's Friday press conference. Via Anne Thompson.

Online viewing tip #4. Michel Gondry's video for Beck's "Cell Phone's Dead." Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tip #5. "Sean Smith, the Guardian's award-winning war photographer, spent nearly six weeks with the 101st Division of the US army in Iraq. Watch his haunting observational film that explodes the myth around the claims that the Iraqis are preparing to take control of their own country."

Online viewing tip #6. Frontline: The Lost Year in Iraq.

Weekend fests and events.

"The Best Film Award at the RomeFilmFest has gone to Izobrajaya Zhertvy (Playing the Victim) by Kirill Serebrennikov."

"This weekend is Crispin Hellion Glover weekend here in Frisco," writes Brian Darr. "Not only is the multifaceted artist bringing to the Castro Theatre three evening presentations of his controversial, finally-complete experimental film What Is It?, accompanied by his slide show presentation and a question-and-answer session with the audience, but there will also be an eight-film retrospective of his acting work matinees and midnights." So Brian talks with him: "Do you feel you're part of a tradition of oppositional cinema?" Absolutely. Glover talks extensively about Fassbinder and Buñuel.

Toronto After Dark Film Festival is off and running through Tuesday, and Mack opens Twitch's coverage with his take on Special.

The Chicago Reader's JR Jones previews the touring Resfest, making its local stopover for the weekend; Also, the Chicago International Children's Film Festival, running through October 29.

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has been filing dispatches from the Hamptons International Film Festival, which runs through the weekend.

Susan King previews From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema, opening tonight and running through October 25, for the Los Angeles Times. Also, The Blood Is the Life: Vampires on Film, from Wednesday through Saturday, and... the Nihilist International Film Festival? Yep. Robert W Welkos meets organizer Elisha Shapiro.

The Hollywood Film Festival? Not really. Anne Thompson explains.

Robert Avila recommends ten to catch at the United Nations Association Film Festival at Stanford (October 25 through 29).

Kira-Anne Pelican, blogging for the Times from the London Film Festival, on The Lives of Others: "In this exploration of those who manipulate and the world at their hands, Henckel von Donnersmarck creates a taut thriller with a devastating conclusion. Not the easiest watch at midday on the first full day of the festival, but if it sets the standard of this year's programme, we're in for something very special." Also: Rob Forsyth on Taxidermia.

In the Guardian, Blake Morrison reflects on In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century, open at the Barbican in London through January 28.

Brian Darr was not alone in Lone Pine. Dennis Cozzalio presents a diary with lush pix.

Acquarello files the last round of reviews from the New York Film Festival, noting in a comment that...

• "Coppola's visual style" in Marie Antoinette "gives a kind of (blatantly) artificial, candy colored glazing to Marie Antoinette's environment, a bit like the way a child (since she was only 14 when she came there) would see this baroque wonderland of Versailles."

• Insiang: "[W]hile there is the temptation to characterize Lino Brocka's cinema through facile comparison with the works of contemporary filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder through the commonality of incorporated elements of melodrama and kitsch..., there is also a stark divergence in Brocka's more classical aesthetic of gritty, social realism and subversive politicization that eschews the overt stylization and formalism intrinsic in Fassbinder's critical, yet introspective cinema."

• And Pan's Labyrinth "is an intelligently rendered, provocative, and incisive cautionary tale on barbarism, repression, narcissism, rigid ideology, blind obedience, and inhumanity."

The Nation's Stuart Klawans wraps NYFF as well with notes on Marie Antoinette ("the concoction goes a little flat"), Climates ("the film's most memorable images, by far, are its faces; its most powerful forces are confused, unstoppable desires"), Little Children ("[Todd] Field's effortlessly fluent, impeccably timed direction moves the film along as if it were all freshly observed, while [Kate] Winslet and [Patrick] Wilson, in a triumph of nuanced, unshowy acting, bring the shadow of desperation and dangerousness to the surface of good, normal people") and: "The wonder of 49 Up is its unfolding, within a little more than two hours, of so many specific lives: the taxi driver, the librarian, the barrister, the college professor, the mother on disability, the recovering madman. They've mostly followed the paths you might have predicted in 1964; and each of them is a surprise."

At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg has a fun talk with Colin Geddes, who programs the Midnight Madness program for the Toronto International Film Festival, and they're joined by filmmaker JT Petty.

The Prestige.

"The Prestige is a triumph of gimmickry, a movie generous enough with its showmanship and sleight of hand to quiet the temptation to grumble about its lack of substance," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. Director Christopher Nolan narrates an accompanying slide show.

"Anyone who has followed Nolan's career can see both why he was attracted to the book and why he has changed it in this manner," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "The film's thematic concerns are similar to those in all of his earlier films (excluding Insomnia, which is the closest he has come to an impersonal work for hire): the definition of identity, which is the very center of Memento and also crops up in Batman Begins; play-acting and showmanship (in Batman Begins and Following); multiple betrayals and layers of deceit (in all three). There are many interesting implications about these issues within The Prestige... almost none of which can be discussed without committing numerous sins of spoilage."

Updated through 10/22.

"In its first half, The Prestige works as a clever diversion, a darkly glittering, if mechanical, showpiece," writes Stephanie Zacharek, but it turns out to be "a trick box with too many false bottoms. Ultimately, the last one simply gives way - leaving us with a hole, and a little residual darkness, but not much else." Also in Salon, Andrew O'Hehir has a stop-n-go conversation "with the guy who, even after just five feature films, looks like the premier cinematic sleight-of-hand artist of our time."

Zack Smith in the Independent Weekly: "The Prestige pulls a few narrative rabbits out of its hat at the end that leave the audience with much to think about, but these magicians would be better off if more of their secrets had been revealed."

The Stranger's Annie Wagner: "There's no sleight-of-hand here, just sick magic (not slick, mind you, sick), and it's tremendous."

"Part factual, part fictional, part fantastical, what results verges on being too tricky, on mixing too many genres, but the filmmaking is of such a high order it is hard not to be impressed and entertained," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

At the Reeler, Michelle Orange finds it "a ridiculously, almost uncomfortably engaging film; you can almost hear the sizzle and pop beneath excellent editing, and the humdinger pace and constant switcheroos weave the film's heftier ideas seamlessly into the breathable fabric of a great thriller."

Cinematical's Ryan Stewart didn't find guessing the film's secret all that tough.

Online viewing tip. ScreenGrab has Nolan's early short, Doodle Bug.

Earlier: Scott Foundas in the Voice, Nick Schager in Slant and John Horn's profile of the Nolan brothers in the LAT.

Updates, 10/22: Mike Russell: "[I]t's a little strange that Nolan has finally made a movie about magicians, a film about the trickery that clearly obsesses him... and it contains the sloppiest misdirection of his short career."

"To be perfectly honest, The Prestige is wildly overplotted and it contains a final gimmick that you're going to kick yourself for not recognizing sooner," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "Yet for all the film's murky misdirections, it is very enjoyable."

Flags of Our Fathers.

"Flags of Our Fathers concerns one of the most lethal encounters on that distant battlefield, but make no mistake: this is also a work of its own politically fraught moment," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "If Flags of Our Fathers feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It's because [Clint] Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines Flags of Our Fathers, not exultation."

"The stink of Crash hovers over Flags of Our Fathers," fumes Ed Gonzalez at the House Next Door, sparking a quite a conversation already. "If Clint Eastwood's personality barely shines through it's because [Paul] Haggis's cartoon politics strongarm the director's vision." Rob Humanick, writing at the Stranger Song, agrees: "Flags of Our Fathers is a sad witness to a great director's vision being slowly strangled by the work of a hired hack."

Updated through 10/23.

But there's another problem that probably has nothing to do with the screenplay, reports Dan Glaister in the Guardian: "While the film's battle scenes show scores of young soldiers in combat, none of them are African-American. Yet almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima."

"For an American icon, Clint Eastwood makes movies with some very un-American sentiments," notes Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail. "In the land that trumpets the pursuit of happiness and the dream of self-invention, his best films — Bird, Unforgiven, Mystic River — are dark odysseys where free will chafes in the shackles of the past, a burdensome past that weighs down the protagonists as heavily as in a Faulkner novel, saturating their present and circumscribing their future.... [I]n a time when the flag-waving of the sons is wreaking no small havoc in the world, it was intriguing to wonder what Clint would do in Flags of Our Fathers. Answer: Some fine things, but not nearly enough to make a fine film."

The Stranger's Andrew Wright finds it "a rather puzzling misfire. The canvas here may be too large, or the history too weighty, for the director to find an in. Whatever the reason, as both war epic and historical character piece, it feels weirdly insubstantial."

In the Independent Weekly, Neil Morris finds Flags "an earnest, informative tome on a military and cultural touchstone.... It is most unfortunate, then, that this potential gets eroded by a torrent of over-editing and the chronological hop-scotching in an obtrusive screenplay credited to William Broyles Jr and Paul Haggis."

"The flaws in Flags of Our Fathers are at least partly attributable to Eastwood's attempts to do too much," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Still, even when he overreaches, he somehow hits the mark."

"A narrative like this requires a measured, classical style to be most effective, and it couldn't have found a better director than Clint Eastwood," counters Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Also, Tony Perry reports on vets' reactions - overwhelmingly positive.

"Eastwood's film succeeds more fully in asking profound questions than providing any satisfying answers," writes Jeffrey Overstreet for Christianity Today.

More from James Rocchi at Cinematical, Eric Kohn in the NYP, Matt Singer for the Reeler and, in the New York Observer, both Andrew Sarris and Rex Reed.

Earlier: Scott Foundas in the Voice, Richard Schickel's talk with Eastwood for Time, Michael Koehn in the LAT on Letters From Iwo Jima and the Siren on "The Gym Class School of Film Criticism."

Update, 10/22: "[A]nother mature, tempered work by Eastwood," writes That Little Round-Headed Boy, "somewhat cool on the surface but raging with fiery conviction underneath.... If Eastwood is using his pulpit to tell us something about our foreign blunders in Iraq, it is just that: We never learn. We make war and then hide from its bloody consequences beneath a rippling flag of patriotic imagery and political cravennness."

Updates, 10/23: David Denby in the New Yorker: "Flags of Our Fathers is an accomplished, stirring, but, all in all, rather strange movie. It has been framed as a search for the truth, yet there isn’t much hidden material to expose.... The movie has a fine, sensitive temper, but it lacks an emotional payoff."

David Edelstein in New York: "A director known for his casual approach (little rehearsal, few takes, setups that summon comparisons to a jazz musician's affectless cool), Eastwood has never directed anything this fluid or upsettingly beautiful."

Marie Antoinette. Yes, again.

Ready or not, here's more on Marie Antoinette. I'd have ignored this round if there weren't a few fresh angles here; the Los Angeles Times in particular has come up with a couple of new ways to exploit interest in the film and its subject.

"Although the book, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, was published five years ago, [Antonia] Fraser's take on one of history's most reviled women is again attracting attention," writes Rachel Abramowitz who goes off to pay the Lady a visit in her "cozy, English sort of house," and we learn about how she served as something of an advisor to Sofia Coppola.

Updated through 10/23.

Charles Taylor picks up several historical novels set in Versailles and finds their writers furiously swatting down one myth after another about the reviled queen.

And then there's Carina Chocano's review: "The movie is at its strongest when it focuses on Marie Antoinette's private, sensual world, which - as she drifts into her much-mocked Rousseau-inspired pastoral phase, in which she attempts, in her inimitably artificial way, to connect with her natural self - becomes ever more abstract and cut off from reality. [Kirsten] Dunst's sleepy, detached quality is perfectly suited to the character. What Marie Antoinette wants is to lose herself in a dream."

Also, Roger Ebert has a review; it's good to see him back and with a fresh approach to boot: "Ten things that occurred to me while watching Marie Antoinette."

Michael Atkinson has crossed coasts, even if only virtually, to write a review for the Stranger: "Inadvertently, Coppola has painted a pathetic portrait of a spoiled kitten not unlike herself, born into unlimited resources and without a thought in her pretty head, before she lost it entirely."

"Like licorice, Marie Antoinette is a confection you either love or hate, and both affects seem tied to your feeling about the director herself and her apparent identification with Louis XVI's bride," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "For my part, I can definitely say that I love licorice and hate Marie Antoinette. But I'm still wrestling with the enigma of Sofia Coppola."

The LA Weekly's Ella Taylor finds it "has none of the high spirits that lent Lost in Translation its goofy charm."

Steve Erickson for Gay City News: "Coppola lets the music carry most of the burden of her film's social criticism, but unfortunately, it can only go so far to redeem this muddled project."

The Brits: Gill Pringle in the Independent, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Wendy Ide in the Times and Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph.

And more from Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper (pro) and Armond White in the New York Press (con); and from Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat and Matt Singer for the Reeler.

Meanwhile, Cinematical overhears some pretty off-the-wall questions at a recent press junket stopover.

Earlier: "Marie Antoinette. Again."

Updates, 10/23: Deborah Netburn in the LAT on the making of a scene: "With 10 actors and 250 extras sporting well-powdered, tightly curled, seven-inch high coiffeurs the masquerade ball scene is less about plot and more about a dizzying display of period fabulous hair."

Rob Humanick at the Stranger Song: "[I]t questions our attitudes towards history and how what once was has been interpreted and re-interpreted over time, it equates an otherwise unfamiliar environment with more relatable cultural norms of the moment, and it corrects the misguided, stuffy attitude that often permeates the genre of the historical character study. It's also fucking cool. Sofia Coppola may be the greatest living feminist filmmaker."

Weekend lists.

So the Academy's whittled its list of contenders for Best Foreign Language Film down to a lean and manageable 61. The best way to browse this round is to head to Nathaniel R's excellent chart, with its links, synopses and various countries' histories with Oscar all laid out perfectly clearly. Anne Thompson: "Here's my sense of the top ten contenders based on festival buzz and reviews." At Twitch, Todd takes a look at the five entries from Arab countries.

"I'm going to watch every last DVD in the Criterion Collection." Matthew Dessem is now up to #61, Monty Python's Life of Brian.

The Independent presents "the best (and worst) lines in the history of film," which seems to be an extract from Paul Wellings's Sex, Lines and Videotape: Famous Film Quotes.

At the AV Club, Tasha Robinson lists "8 Films Illustrating That Oral Sex And Cars Don't Mix."

ScreenGrab offers an annotated list of "five movies in which magic, real magic, is awesome."

At Twitch, Toffy's got a list of the top Thai films at the box office so far this year.

Online viewing tip. YouTube's on Slate's collective mind. Paul Boutin offers a "video history," basically nine greatest hits; Josh Levin explains how YouTube "reveal[s] what we're losing when we watch games on television"; and Troy Patterson: "Web video is the ideal medium for a world populated by instinctual exhibitionists who double as full-time voyeurs."

Pinter/Beckett.

"The old man rose painfully as the performance ended. The applause built slowly from a single clap of hands to a tumult. Harold Pinter, playwright and actor, weakened by the years and by illness, had just performed Krapp's Last Tape, by his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett." Alan Cowell reports from London for the New York Times.

This is one of two events marking "the most momentous week of this [centenary] celebration for the finest, funniest and wisest dramatist-novelist Ireland has produced," writes Paul Taylor in the Independent, the other being a set of productions directed in Paris by Peter Brook. "That's the measure of the momentousness. The greatest living English playwright and the greatest living English director are concurrently celebrating the greatest dramatist of the 20th century." Also, more on Pinter's performance.

Updated through 10/22.

The Guardian's Michael Billington finds that Pinter "offers the harshest, least sentimental reading of Beckett's play I can recall." It is a performance "that will be written up in theatrical history," writes Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard.

"[I]n every key respect this is surely a performance that would have delighted Beckett," writes Benedict Nightingale in the London Times. "And all along Pinter makes you feel the gravity, the meticulousness, the sheer power of his endeavour. This is an old man's last-gasp search for a meaning that he knows he'll never find."

Update, 10/22: "Here is the playwright often thought of as Beckett's inheritor giving a new life to his words," writes Susannah Clapp in the Observer. "The audience laugh - it looks for a minute as if Pinter has suddenly blasted his way out of Beckett, and is using his own script - before recognising this as Beckett to the letter."

Busan Dispatch. 4.

We've got some catching up to do with Koreanfilm.org contributor Adam Hartzell's dispatches from the Pusan International Film Festival. The highlight (and overriding theme) of this one: No Regret.

I am rocking two computers at a Descansso Caffe in the Busan turf claimed by both Kyungsung and Pukyong Universities. I have my laptop in front of me and a computer on the wall to my right. South Korea is one of the most internet connected countries. (Last I checked Iceland ruled.) And the wall unit beside me that allows me to verify the knowledge I drop here at GreenCine underscores not only how South Korea is where the internet is headed - which is why Google is headed here to open up a research and development office, and yes, I googled that just to make sure I'm correct - but it also underscores the public culture that abounds here.

Just as I go to coffeehouses to read in public, in South Korea I can also surf the net in public, this wall placement allowing everyone to see exactly what I'm surfing like the cover of the book I'd normally be reading while sipping a sweet potato latte. I'm a total city mouse, itching to be out in public with the rest of the public, which is why I prefer my films in the theater than on DVD. Part of what I love about South Korea is how all ages are out throughout the day and late into the night. But as much as South Korea has a vibrant public culture, there are still some things that aren't permitted public expression.

For example, Queer culture. In spite of the fact that I've been told by my friends, that "everything Queer is hot right now," what they mean is that commodified forms of Queerness, such as Queer Eye, are hot right now. For the most part, Queer culture is still hidden away in select neighborhoods. You won't see it as part of the public conversation of bodies out the window of the cafe I'm in right now. But if upon the release of No Regret the theaters stay as packed as the screening I attended where the aisles were filled with an excited audience, things just might be changing for the better here in that regard, thanks to director Leesong Hee-il and the amazing cast of his feature debut, No Regret.

I would have missed this incredible film if it weren't for a conversation I had with Italian critic Paolo Bertolin, who urged me to rework my film schedule for the next day. And I'm glad he convinced me to do just that. No Regret follows Su-min (played expertly by Lee Han) as he leaves his country orphanage to find a space in the extra-large city of Seoul. Financial circumstances result in Su-min taking a gig as a host at a club for men. (The way class is dealt with in this film is part of what makes this film so refreshing.) This host club is full of well-developed characters that refuse to cliché away your day with caricatures. The film is hilarious without requiring the sharp tongue of the queen so demanded of gay characters on US mainstream sitcoms. Some of the jokes will slip by non-Korean audiences, but the film will entertain nonetheless. Plus, it's the type of film that makes you want to know more about the inside jokes and references. It is universal without removing itself from not only the local, but from the even deeper subculture from which it arises. Yes, the self-loathing mixed in might frustrate the Western audience which is beyond that in their Queer film, but there are enough different characters here to permit the occasional character to hate themselves. Plus, don't give up on the film, it's not headed to the cliché of all clichés of Queer film you think it is. This film shouldn't just be on the radar for Queer film festivals, it should be on the shortlist for every festival.

Such as all the festivals I'm sure Ten Canoes is paddling its way towards. Narrated in English by the great David Gulpilil with the characters speaking Ganalbingu dialogue, Ten Canoes takes us on several tales in one towards endings we weren't and were expecting. I love the cinematic portraits of the characters when they are introduced. I love how the black and white is used to represent the closer past while color is used to represent the past passed the closer past. And I simply love that this film was made. Big ups to all involved.

I was hoping to catch Aki Kaurismäki's latest, Lights in the Dusk, but it sold out fast and I wasn't in the mood to sit in the aisle as all the young adult Koreans were for No Regret. (Guess the fire codes are different in South Korea.) But no complaints, because this just enabled an opportunity to see the latest by Austrian director Barbara Albert, Falling, before it comes (I hope) to a German film festival near me in January. Falling has a lovely beginning that caused me to emit sustained laughter that I'm sure annoyed my neighbors. A funeral brings five female schoolmates back together after a significant absence. Failed dreams float amongst them like the cinders of the campfire they surround, but this only serves to re-meld a bond of adult friendships. Some of the scenarios seem too outlandish for me and a bit too quickly stepped away from, but there is enough here that intrigues me, especially the first German song played in the car by the one character's younger daughter.

It was my third chance to catch the Danish film A Soap, and it finally worked into my schedule here at PIFF, so I figured I'd pocket the charm in its third appearance. Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) makes a dash for a new life and leaves her live-in boyfriend for a new flat below which resides Veronica (David Dencik), a transgender who is awaiting approval for her sex reassignment surgery. Both Charlotte and Veronica have a lot to learn about each other, that "other" being their respective selves, and each is the unfortunate object of some transference of each other's issues. But the story that transpires transfixes and transcends the self-loathing that presents itself initially.

...Just like No Regret, which is exactly what I felt about my selections of what was on offer on this Thursday at PIFF, no regrets.

Interview. Stanley Nelson.

"This is a movie to make you shudder," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "How many of us are so desperate for a charismatic leader claiming to have the answers that we will surrender our basic instincts for survival, along with our reason?... [T]he horror of Jonestown was caused by people's willingness to surrender their reason to a madman who was also a charismatic manipulator. And that can happen anytime and anywhere."

Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple, which has been playing to sold out audiences on the festival circuit, now begins its theatrical trek throughout the country. Michael Guillén talks with director Stanley Nelson.

Updated through 10/21.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, who also talks with Nelson, saw the film months ago at the Tribeca Film Festival: "I knew it was a powerful film when I saw it, and it's stuck with me more than any other documentary this year." People's Temple, he reminds us, "did not begin as a creepazoid apocalyptic cult," though most don't remember that aspect of the tragedy. "The idea that 909 brainwashed wackos followed their nutjob leader into death in a South American jungle is easier to swallow, perhaps, than the idea that those people were a group of essentially normal, loving, idealistic Americans who tried to build a realm of hope in the aftermath of the civil rights era, and ultimately surrendered to despair."

Online listening tip. Nelson has also been a guest recently on the Leonard Lopate Show and Annie Frisbie spoke with him in May for Zoom In Online.

Earlier: J Hoberman in the Voice, Jeremiah Kipp in Slant and Aaron Hillis in Premiere.

Update, 10/21: QuickTime trailer.

Interview. Ron Mann.

"The career of Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth is a perfect fit for pop-culture documentarian [Ron] Mann, whose previous work includes titles such as Comic Book Confidential, Grass, and Go Further," writes the Austin Chronicle's Marjorie Baumgarten.

Another great fit: ArtCar Fest co-founder Philo Northup and Mann for a speedy exchange on Tales of the Rat Fink.

Updated through 10/21.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy has long fun talk with Mann as well.

The doc "speculates too much, and perhaps credits Big Daddy more than necessary," suggests Omar Mouallem in Vue Weekly. "To say that his work inspired Bart Simpson, Chewbacca and iMacs is a bit of an overstatement. It is an essay turned opinion article."

Earlier: Jeanette Catsoulis in the New York Times and Ian Sands in the Boston Phoenix.

Update, 10/21: "You've got to give props to any documentarian who steps outside the Ken Burns box of archival footage + omniscient narrator + soporific soundtrack = high-minded hagiography," writes Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog. "Further, Tales of the Rat Fink corrects a problem I have with many documentaries and docu-dramas - it provides context."

51 Birch Street.

AO Scott calls 51 Birch Street "one of the most moving and fascinating documentaries I've seen this year." Doug Block "confirms what the best novelists know: that marriage, among the most common of human arrangements, is also among the most complex and mysterious.... At the same time, a window opens onto the history of the postwar American middle class, as its placid suburban idyll is buffeted by the cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s: feminism, psychotherapy, drugs, the sexual revolution.... Mr Block has put his parents' life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "I found myself reflecting on the peculiar, half-hidden stories of pain and betrayal in my own family, and you will too. Although there's a tremendous current of sadness and loss in Block's film, which extends, perhaps unconsciously, to the way he presents himself, learning the truth (or as much of it as he can) turns out, at least in this case, to be both liberating and redemptive."

Michael Tully finds it "filmmaking at its most enthralling and provocative, non-fiction or otherwise."

Updated through 10/21.

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "As the film progresses through a series of increasingly heart-rending and crushingly candid interviews with the older Mr Block, it draws out a compassionate portrait of the man that seems unexpected even to the filmmaker, who in the end finds the camera turned, touchingly, on himself."

"On one level, 51 Birch Street is a well-made, if somewhat conventional, autobiographical documentary," writes Paul Harrill. "But the movie is about looking beneath the surface, and on that meaningful score 51 Birch Street succeeds."

Earlier: My own first take and interviews with Doug: John Anderson in the NYT, Anne S Lewis in the Austin Chronicle and indieWIRE.

Update, 10/21: Gary Dretzka at Movie City News: "Some critics have compared 51 Birch Street to Capturing the Friedmans, but that's a stretch. Mostly, they share a style that leans heavily on family photo albums and home movies; a Long Island setting; and similar ethnic backgrounds for the key players. The Blocks' secrets are unnerving, but no where as profoundly creepy as those of the Friedmans. Both are, however, compelling in their patient explorations of family dynamics."

Horrors, 10/19.

"Wicked, sexy, utterly out of control, she epitomized proto-goth bloodlust, and I dug it like it was my own gorgeous grave, with a satin-lined casket built for two. I mean, which boneyard did this erotically rotting babe-thing come from?" Linnea Quigley is coming to Austin, and the Chronicle's Marc Savlov recalls when he first saw her in The Return of the Living Dead.

Bill Gibron at PopMatters: "In a career that has spanned three decades, several sensational films, and a genre-defying approach to narrative, Cronenberg has managed to locate the fear inside the most fundamental aspect of existence – life itself – and as a result he created a canon where being human is the most potentially precarious thing a person can do."

Also: An annotated list of "craftsmen who found a way to make their sole scary movie attempt effective," five films that "stand out as perfect examples of horror's 'one hit wonders'."

"[T]he combination of Nightbreed's monumental scope, superb production design, and amusingly forgivable flaws warrant its reevaluation," argues Brian Elza at Facets Features.

Slant's Ed Gonzalez on Imprint: "Everything you've heard about this Masters of Horror episode, which was too violent for Showtime to air on cable television, is true, though I imagine some of its carnivalesque gore may even come as a shock to Miike cultists."

"Braindead is the magnum opus of Peter Jackson's early career, retaining the stop-motion and bloodletting of Bad Taste and the puppetry and slapstick sexual exploits of Meet the Feebles," writes Rumsey Taylor. "The film's craftsmanship is ingenious, but the enterprise is not in service to thrill or frighten (as, I say very generally, Jackson's films that follow are) in as much as it is to separate more callow viewers from their lunch." Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Jenny Jediny on The Wizard of Oz: "Has there been a better death scene for a fantasy villain? The Wicked Witch shrieks like a banshee as soon as the water hits, and she is angry."

At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg has the winners of the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards.

Philip Strick, 1939 - 2006.

Tim Lucas notes the passing of critic Philip Strick, author of Science Fiction Movies and frequent contributor to Sight & Sound: "Here, for your reading pleasure, are links to The Matrix, The Ninth Gate, The Sixth Sense, Mission to Mars, What Lies Beneath and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, as reviewed for Sight & Sound by Philip Strick - clearly one of our most thoughtful and eloquent explorers of speculative cinema."

See also Strick's notes on Bergman's Persona, Port of Call and The Silence.

Chronicle. AFF.

The Austin Film Festival opens tomorrow and runs through October 26. Naturally, the Austin Chronicle runs a hefty preview package this week.

Toddy Burton talks with Mike Akel and Chris Mass about their "Austin-produced microbudget Chalk."

Then, briefly:

• Belinda Acosta: "Like most classic satire, Military Intelligence and You appears to be about one subject while brazenly lampooning another." Also, the "subversively cheery documentary" Pirate Radio USA.

• Darcie Stevens on Mario's Story, documenting "every twist and turn that keeps the young, intelligent writer [Mario Rocha] behind bars." Also, the "engrossing Sounds of Silence [which] documents the maturing music industry in Tehran, Iran." And: "Milena Kaneva's poignant Total Denial tells the horrific story of the construction of a gas pipeline in Myanmar (Burma) by a company conglomerate comprised of American oil giant Unocal and France's Total."

• Marrit Ingman on Steel City, which "creates an atmosphere of working-class middle America that feels lived-in and real." Also, Third Monday in October: "Imagine Vote for Pedro: The Documentary, and you've got half the appeal of this lively and insightful chronicle of middle school class elections, backdropped by the 2004 presidential elections."

• James Renovitch finds The Garage "doesn't break the coming-of-age mold but instead fills it out adeptly." Also, Urban Scarecrow, where "the line between escapism and escape disappears." And Duncan Removed: "Ken Marino (Wet Hot American Summer) and Mackenzie Astin (The Last Days of Disco) have a particular chemistry as the man and the-man-behind-the-man, respectively."

• Mark Fagan on Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story: "At times it is hard to believe this film is a documentary and not fictional due to the Megumi's unbelievable saga." Earlier: Jonathan Marlow's interview with Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim.

• Josh Rosenblatt on The Hip Hop Project, a doc about "Chris 'Kharma Kazi' Rolle, a reformed troublemaker from the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who discovered himself in hip-hop and then set out to help other at-risk kids do the same."

• Sofia Resnick on the "sincere" doc Runners High.

• Marjorie Baumgarten praises Michael Rapaport's performance in Special.

• Jeremy Martin on The Land of Shadowed Sand: "Think of it as West Texas Confidential."

And the shorts programs are previewed by Kimberley Jones, Sofia Resnick, Darcie Stevens and Jeremy Martin.

The festival's got a blog, by the way, and MySpace page loaded with trailers.

Brooklyn Rail. 10/06.

"Now, you know the title of the book is The Impulse to Preserve," filmmaker Robert Gardner tells Brooklyn Rail interviewer Brian L Frye. "And the rest of Philip Larkin's line there is 'lies at the bottom of all art.'... And we can never share exactly our experiences. You can't have my experience, I can't have your experience. I may be able to experience you having an experience, but what good is that? I can't get inside your skull. And this is the dilemma of all filmmaking."

From October 26 through 29, Film Forum presents Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund: A Tenth-Anniversary Film Festival, and Williams Cole, for one, is celebrating: "Since it began, the Fund has supported films like the Academy Award-nominated Long Night's Journey Into Day, about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee; Calling the Ghosts, which considers the plight of Bosnian women who were victims of rape during the war in Yugoslavia; and Life and Debt, an examination of the IMF's negative impact on Jamaica."

Thomas Micchelli: "Only after cinema has freed itself from linear narrative can it do justice to the multifaceted, fluid and metacritical phenomenon we define as reality. Or so goes the premise of the alternately frustrating and fascinating book, Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative: 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken."

Erin Durant traces the lines between Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" and Old Joy.

Sarahjane Blum: "The Black Dahlia isn't about The Black Dahlia, and it isn't about sex."

Nora Griffin on Andy Warhol: A Documentary: "Critical analysis has never resembled a cheerleading squad quite so distinctly as in [Ric] Burns's film."

Sara Mayeux: "The hard-boiled, creepy Capote of Capote deserved whatever he got. The Capote of Infamous is harder to fault. Barely hiding his insecurities beneath a caviar-and-scotch veneer, this Capote doesn't stand a chance in negotiation with the devil."

"The Protector seems content with recycled ideas," writes David Wilentz of Panna Rittikrai's actioner with Tony Jaa, "often informed by Jackie Chan's later, less inspired films."

Times. S&S. LFF @ 50.

The full title of the festival opening tonight and running through November 2 is The Times BFI London Film Festival, so it's only natural that the Times has an elaborate special section devoted to the fest and that the November issue of the BFI's Sight & Sound offers its recommendations and a few related pieces. Let's start there.

• Hannah McGill: "Red Road doesn't just team the social-realist douleur of the Dardennes with the convoluted plotting of the girl-on-top revenge thriller. At times the relationship between Jackie and Clyde steers the film towards such classic melodramas as Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession... If Red Road sometimes seems generically jumbled, this may reflect its unusual development process." Related: Stephen Dalton talks with Kate Dickie, who plays Jackie, for the Times and Danny Leigh talks with director Andrea Arnold for the Guardian.

• Nick James on Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako: "it's the trial that provides the real drama and the glimpsed shards of lifestyle only illustrate, even if they're filmed with all the quiet attention of a Kiarostami."

• McGill on Times and Winds: "If the fourth feature from Turkish writer-director Reha Erdem covers some not-unfamiliar territory - rural families misalign, local conflicts flare and die, and children wrestle with the mysteries of puberty while goat bells clamour and seasons slip by - it does so with sufficient grace and forthrightness to render its content breathtakingly fresh."

The Last King of Scotland opens the 50th LFF tonight and Times reviewer James Christopher greets it with four out of five stars. More from Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. Related in the Times: Kevin Maher talks with Forest Whitaker and a profile of James McAvoy.

The festival "is hosting the world's largest surprise screening to celebrate its 50th anniversary this year," reports Amber Cowan. "On the evening of Sunday, October 29, 50 cinemas and venues across all boroughs of the capital will be unveiling a mystery film, which could be a movie from the Festival itself, or simply a classic."

"Is Austria the new Denmark?" asks Ian Johns. Features at the fest in which Austrians have a hand at least if they haven't directed them: Falling, Fräulein, Esma's Secret, Taxidermia, Babooska, Our Daily Bread and Slumming.

More profiles and pieces:

• Christopher sees Abbie Cornish (Candy) going places; meets Emilio Estevez (Bobby).

• Tom Charity talks with Juliette Binoche about Breaking and Entering.

• Stephen Dalton talks with Day Night Day Night filmmaker Julia Loktev.

• Maher recommends Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing.

• James Bone talks with Mira Nair (The Namesake).

• Wendy Ide recommends Shortbus.

• Burhan Wazir on Lewis Milestone on A Walk in the Sun and Of Mice and Men.

The paper also looks back on the highlights of 50 years, offers eleven trailers, a chat with artistic director Sandra Hebron, recommendations from Christopher and Ben Hoyle and a blog.

Non-LFF-related pieces in this month's Sight & Sound:

• James Bell looks back on the highlights of the Venice Film Festival.

• Mark Sinker: "For all its promise, [Brothers of the Head] becomes a trudge through unrealised ideas, and is strangely afraid of enjoying its own extremism, let alone its hypocrisy."

• Tim Lucas on 49 Up: "[T]his series has become increasingly about the impact of the program on its participants."

• Henry K Miller finds that Lukas Moodysson's Container's "74-minute run-time feels arbitrary: you could walk in at any point and get the gist of the thing. For all that, it shares with Persona the central theme of the fragmented self in a violent, godless world."

• Ryan Gilbey: "Should Peter Greenaway ever film a script by Bruno Dumont featuring characters conceived by Mike Leigh, the result might resemble The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael."

SFBG @ 40.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian turns 40, and publisher Bruce Brugmann and editor Tim Redmond have more than a few words to say about it, to which we'll add one: Congratulations!

Tommy Amano-Tompkins surveys 40 years of arts coverage.

Also:

• Dennis Harvey: "The Last Movie isn't the balm for stoner egos that Easy Rider offered. It incriminates everybody - colonialists, swingers, industry suits, the greedy (like our hero's covetous Indio girlfriend), and filmmaking itself. Periodic 'scene missing' titles help make this a deconstructive metamovie well ahead of its time. It's an antiaudience picture, now more breathtaking than ever in sheer gall."

• Also, Running With Scissors: "[Ryan] Murphy's "first directorial feature is a tad uneven... But overall it does a pretty fine job with tricky material, especially within the all-important area of casting.... It's particularly cheering to see [Jill] Clayburgh, who hasn't had this significant a big-screen part in 20 years - and owns it."

• Julien Poirier on I Like Killing Flies: "[Matt] Mahurin's film makes this clear: genius has something to do with food if the cook is a genius and everything to do with doing what you must do."

• K Tighe talks with Crispin Glover about What Is It?, which "he describes as 'being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home. As tormented by an hubristic racist inner psyche.' However tenuous a tagline that may seem, it hits the mark dead-on."

• Chuck Stephens: "Few American independent features in recent memory have seemed as truly capable of turning something old into something surprisingly new as Old Joy."

• Cheryl Eddy on Marie Antoinette: "Coppola is 100 percent sure of herself, her vision, and her eye for hipster glamour... it's pretty, but pretty vacant." More from Max Goldberg at SF360 and Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

Busan Dispatch. 3.

Fresh takes on seven films at the Pusan International Film Festival - take it away, Adam Hartzell.

I realized I had reached the point of film festival sensory overload when I was reading "The Promise of Beauty," an an excellent article written by Pico Iyer about director Terrence Malick in the September 06 issue of the Walrus. At least I'm sure it was an excellent article, this is Iyer I'm talking about here. But I can't fully verify its excellency because my mind could only process blurbs as I rushed through the bowels of Busan on the hour-or-so subway ride from Haeundae to Nampo-dong for my three screenings Monday. Iyer was commenting on the importance of the mystical resting space Malick provides, where nothingness and silence are anything but that. I wasn't able to appreciate Iyer's words as much as I should have because I wasn't rested, I wasn't still. My mind was racing as fast as the subway train.

But there was hope for a calmer mind because my first screening Monday was Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century. I was sure that Weerasethakul would take me to the place that bypasses "the realm of words and sense entirely, to speak to something deeper," wherein Iyer writes both Malick and Sigur Ros reside. And, indeed, that hope was realized.

Weerasethakul provided exactly what I needed midway into PIFF, a marker to appreciate all that resonates around me. As soon as the screen expanded with the fields of green behind the doctor, my mind was settled. Each time the camera floated around the statues and multi-colored uniforms, I had a content little smile on my face. Like Filmbrain, I smiled a lot during this film even though I'm not clear if I "get" what Weerasethakul wants me to get. Regardless of whether I understand Weerasethakul's intent, the repeating country and city mice of doctors, monks, patients and staff of this film were the cinematic herbs my racing mind needed to calm down from the heightened visuals in the theatre and the neon-ing and bustling outside. Jazzercise has never looked so lovely.

My racing mind from earlier in the day was well visualized by Sound Barrier. Amir Naderi, an Iranian director (who has since moved to New York) I was unfamiliar with until now, was one of the featured directors in the Asian Auteurs section of PIFF. The festival notes claim his continuing subject matter is "...psychologically unsettled individuals who compulsively pursue the object(s) of their obsession," and that indeed occurs in Sound Barrier. A young deaf boy whose mother has died has the key to the locker of one of her obsessive listeners who has recorded the boy's mother's shows (along with many other local radio personalities) on tape and carefully catalogued each with a brief commentary. Filmed in black and white with rushed images and often dampened noise, the editing ups the frantic factor considerably as the child scrambles to find a particular show his mother made that is dear to him. The purpose of the Asian Auteurs series is to "discover, introduce and support directors in Asia who are little known abroad." Although I don't know if PIFF has "discovered" Naderi here, they've definitely introduced him to me and I'll be looking for other chances to see his films based on this effective bit of minimalism in Sound Barrier.

I'm going to make a guess, considering the speed that blogging requires prohibits a full survey, but I believe my experience with The Host was very different from the experiences linked up here at GreenCine. I'm assuming the theaters at NYFF, MVFF and Toronto were packed, whereas my screening was sparsely filled. I'm being generous when I say that about a tenth of the theater was full. Over 13 million South Koreans have seen this film already, so the screening I attended at PIFF was more for foreign guests than the Busan populace. Such a dearth of people affected the energy of the film. The merging into one mass of being that happens when a crowd watches such thrills on screen was missing here in Busan. I still liked The Host, but this is the type of film as spectacle one wants to share with a community larger than a handful of people.

But back to packed houses. Just Like Before by Filipino director Mike Sandejas is included in the New Currents Award series. It is a fictional film about the real-life Filipino new wave band from the late 80s and early 90s, The Dawn. Sandejas begins at the end with the band, several years after their lead guitarist was murdered (which indeed happened in real life), when their star had faded. Lead singer Jett Pangan experiences a head injury that causes him to forget everything after 1988 before the band lost their lead guitarist and mass popularity. The film follows Pangan as he revisits his rockstar devils, a common theme of all rock biopics and fictional films.

Sandejas was not working in an industry that has access to high production values like South Korea and the United States. So the film is filled with aspects that would be filtered out of more well-funded works. Room noise buzzes and dubs are often poorly positioned. In spite of this, I still greatly enjoyed the story. Yes, the acting is sub-par at times, but as my day job colleagues in the Philippines would say, "it's so heart," that is, it is sincere in its hope for better ways. And although some might say the film drags at the end, I was happy to see that time was permitted for a fuller reconciliation with wife and child rather than a typically quick, falsely wrapped-up resolution. I doubt Just Like Before will end up winning the New Currents Award, but it definitely deserves to be here.

While I didn't really "get" Syndromes and a Century yet thoroughly enjoyed the film regardless, Suh Myung-soo's Butterflymole I simply don't get. (Although I like the title, but, as if to underscore my point, I don't see how the title relates to the film.) This debut on digital video follows two subway conductors as they struggle with their romantic and familial relationships while emotionally dodging suicides on their tracks. The film does a good job presenting the weariness of such work, and for someone like me who loves riding subways throughout the world, you might appreciate the visuals of rushing through tunnels and the sounds of thock-thocking across tracks. But the film leaves me no better stationed as to where I'll arrive at life's next stop than when I stepped onto to this train in the theater.

Shin Dong-il's Host & Guest was one of the highlights of last year's PIFF for me. And Shin returns to PIFF with his second feature, My Friend & His Wife. Ye-joon (Jang Hyun-sung) and Jae-moon (Park Hee-Soon) established their adult friendship where many Korean men do, during their required military service. The two are so close that Jae-moon's wife Ji-sook (Hong So-hee) sometimes wonders whom Jae-moon loves more. A good thirty minutes into this film, I was unclear where this film was going to take me. But then the turning point arose and I realized Shin was going to force me to face my worst fear. I'm not going to say exactly what happens. Not because I'm worried you'll blackmail me with that knowledge, but because it will ruin the shock the incident causes when watching it yourself. I'll just say that the incident confirms whom in this triangle Jae-moon truly favors. Shin wrote the screenplay here as well and, although it's not as impressive as his debut, Shin's work still intrigues me as he continues to explore visions of hope found sifting through pits of despair.

I almost passed on Before the Summer Passes Away, but I managed to fit it into my viewing schedule at the last minute and I'm very glad I did. This debut feature for director/screenwriter Sung Ji-hae is a well-constructed tale of a woman who wants something bad for her because there's something good for her in it. So-yeon (Lee Hyun-woo) is juggling romances with two men, one she's willing to lie and reschedule plans for; another she's willing to see when the other isn't available because she knows she "should" see him. Sung could have presented us with easily caricatured props in place of the ambivalent, complicated individuals we see here. So-yeon's handsome-to-lie-for lover isn't a complete ass with all his requirements surrounding their clandestine meet-ups but he's still a jerk. And So-yeon's willingness to meet his demands doesn't play her out as a victim lacking agency. There is something powerful she gets out of her lack of power in this relationship. Even though everyone around here sees her lover as wrong for her, she doesn't find herself fully desiring the "Mr Right" who desires her. When lesser directors and writers would require punishment of a flawed character like So-yeon for making the "wrong" choices, Sung allows her character to be alone to think things through, to reflect on what direction she'll choose next. Although So-hyeon would claim such reflection is not "Korean," it's exactly what's had me following South Korean film so intently for the past ten years. It is nice to see that it's still there as I begin my next decade.

UNAFF. Preview.

Back across the Bridge from Mill Valley, Hannah Eaves previews another Bay Area event starting in San Francisco today, moving on to Stanford next week and then out across the country.

Our world is run by organizations, from nefarious behemoth multinational corporations and nefarious national governments right down to tribal committees meeting out in grass fields. Each time we work with others, a new group of personal rules is improvised, established and rapidly institutionalized. Beneath the overt themes covered by the United Nations Association Film Festival, such as women's rights and the war in Iraq, lurks an engaging subtextual inquiry. How exactly do organizations of various sizes work? The power of these documentaries is that they emphasize the individual personalities working within the rules and conditions of these organizations.

The UNAFF has no direct relationship with the United Nations other than that they have decided to bring the philosophical concepts of the UN to a local level and operate internationally through chapters. But the festival, featuring 31 documentary films of vastly varying lengths dealing with issues from all around the world, almost seems as if it were the result of some UN mandate. A sampling of a handful of films suggests an exceptionally well-curated group. It is also refreshing to see that the UNAFF has happily decided to make no programming distinction between a film that is eight minutes long (Beyond Iraq, Tom Eldridge and Annalia Hodgkins) and one that is 100 minutes long (Thin, Lauren Greenfield, RJ Cutler, Amanda Micheli, Ted Stillman). Films also play in programmed groups, rather than in the usual short-then-feature or featurette-featurette festival formula.

One of the longest entries is The Peacekeepers, a glacial but important Canadian examination of the UN's mission (MONUC) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Peacekeepers focuses on the UN's efforts to secure the eastern, mineral-rich Ituri region which remains unstable thanks to the ceaseless efforts of regional war lords and an illicit arms trade with neighboring Uganda. When crises arise like the war in the Congo (the bloodiest since World War II), we often wonder, "Where is the UN? Isn't this what the UN is for?" Such questions were also at the crux of 2005's under-distributed Canadian film, Shake Hands with the Devil. As in Rwanda, the DRC's troubles have some basis in the tribal class system institutionalized by Belgian rule, and in the DRC this has mutated into an incredibly complex struggle for precious mineral resources. Shake Hands with the Devil traced the consequences of the UN's inaction in Rwanda and also in the psyche of that mission's leader, Lieutenant-General Roméo Dalliare. The Peacekeepers approaches its subject from the other end: the offices of the UN and their struggle for financial support from unwilling member states. Beyond this, the only real understanding the film offers of the conflict is that, like the bureaucracy of the UN itself, the problem too big and messy to for one film to take in. But what is essential, beyond bringing the mechanics of the UN to light, is the portrayal of the people within the bureaucracy who continue to hold true to their moral compass within the stifling flood of indifference that surrounds them.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, bringing aid relief down to a manageable, tangible level is what the subjects of Beyond the Call are all about. In 1995, Ed Artis, Jim Laws and Walt Ratterman formed Knightsbridge International, whose mission is to bring aid directly to manageable groups in dangerous areas, often where other aid organizations fear to tread. When clipboard-wielding people harass you on the street and ask you to give money to some organization you haven't had the chance to research, take this documentary as an antidote. Just watching it will make you want to give to Knightsbridge. The founders do not take salaries and give all they can to the projects they fund, delivering the goods personally. They are self-admitted eccentrics in America's best tradition of kooky well-meaning compassionate entrepreneurs. Ex-army, isolationist, they are what you think of when you think of what the liberal elite is not. But this is a life-affirming documentary in the least saccharine sense. While the subjects of Beyond the Call are no doubt in search of adventure and some sense of emotional gratification, they are good in the way that we often dream all regular Americans could be, with no sights set on glory or riches - just on helping others.

Another portrait of "good" Americans can be seen in Baghdad ER, an absolutely essential film to which everyone should bring at least one handkerchief. Filmmakers Jon Alpert (laden with Emmys) and Matthew O'Neill were given unlimited access to the 86th Combat Support Hospital for two months in 2005 and pretty much recorded exactly what they saw before coming back to do a reverent and tasteful edit. The cases they focus on are largely the result of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), a reflection of the war itself, and are at times gruesome, giving the audience little time to look away. But there is no sensationalism in these operating room scenes, just the genuine desire to create a portrait of a place and the good people working within it. Wounded troops in Iraq have a 90 percent chance of survival, the highest rate in US history. If the US is going to fight an insane war, at the very least the soldiers should be able to trust in and respect the people they will be delivered to if the worst happens.

A country that never had that chance is Rwanda, where neighbor hacked neighbor to death in a three-month-long genocide that killed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans, largely Tutsis, the previous "upper class." In some cases these neighbors still live next door to each other and it is this seemingly impossible reconciliation that is the subject of In the Tall Grass. The title is a reference to the informal community courts, gacaca, that have developed in Rwanda. Roughly translated, gacaca means "justice on the grass." These outdoor courts are based on traditional tribal methods of law enforcement and aim not only at weeding out which genocide cases should be passed along to regular criminal courts, but also at uncovering the truth of what really happened within villages so that perpetrators and victims who continue to live together can be reconciled and witnesses may come forward before their friends and neighbors. In the Tall Grass focuses on one particular case where a survivor, Joanita Mukarusanga, has accused her neighbor of killing her husband and four children. Joanita's husband was hacked to death with a machete in front of her and her children were beaten with nail-studded clubs and buried alive. Like many other survivors, Joanita wants to be able to find and bury her dead children just as much as see the confession of their killer. Unfortunately, In the Tall Grass lets itself down with an obnoxious narration, which could easily have been replaced with interview footage from officials and the other articulate English-speaking witnesses that already pepper the film with relevant commentary.

Throughout all these films, organizations - and particularly the good individuals within them - strive to do their best in tenuous, war-ravaged circumstances. What they make clear is that humanity houses people capable of both outrageous horrors and certain moral fortitude.

There will be screenings in San Francisco starting today at the Delancey Screening Room and on Sunday, October 22 at the Roxie. The UNAFF officially runs from October 25 to 29 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, with films grouped in the themes "Women's Issues," "War and Peace," "Health and Environmental Issues," and "Securities and Liberties."

Many filmmakers will be in attendance, including the directors of The Peacekeepers, Beyond the Call (by local director Adrian Belic whose Genghis Blues won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award) and Baghdad ER.

Online viewing tip. MVFF.

The past couple of weeks have seen a slew of dispatches coming in from around the world - NYC, Pordenone, Vancouver, Busan, Lone Pine - and yet, since the preview was posted, you've seen next to nothing from a festival running concurrently right next door to GC HQ, the Mill Valley Film Festival. Why? Because those same previewers, Hannah Eaves and Jonathan Marlow, were busily working on video rather than textual coverage of the festival - because, to paraphrase Sofia Coppola, they could.

Now you can watch Robin Wright Penn and Sydney Pollack talking about Breaking and Entering, Rob Nilsson about his Direct Action Cinema, Douglas McGrath about Infamous and Christopher Quinn about God Grew Tired of Us.

Shorts, 10/17.

Reverse Shot's cnw does an fine job of spelling out what's so sadly legible between the lines of the Voice's call for a new film editor. ST VanAirsdale piles on.

With or without a film editor, this week's issue is out, and J Hoberman's got an interesting pairing: Aguirre, Wrath of God, "not just a great movie but an essential one," and another jungle story, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, which is "both the death rattle of 60s utopianism and - predicated on the desire to found a New Jerusalem in the wilderness - a very American saga." In between, mention is made of Werner Herzog's "longtime champion, former Voice critic Mike Atkinson." Klaus Kinski, by the way, would have been 80 tomorrow; Jochen Förster marks the occasion in the Berliner Morgenpost (and in German).

The rest of the reviews are written by people from all over the country. Scott Foundas's LA Weekly review of Flags of Our Fathers, for example, appears two days earlier than it will in print on the west coast. It's not difficult to imagine all Village Voice Media titles being, in the relatively near future, identical in the middle with local wraparounds (local stories in the front, local classifieds in the back). And of course, being published on the same day. The story of the alternative weekly is a chapter in American media history coming to a close faster than most of us imagined it would, but as Jonathan Rosenbaum and many others have suggested, the hole it leaves is being filled just as quickly - online.

At any rate, the movie: "To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western - a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains." In short, it's "one of his best films - a searching, morally complex deconstruction of the Greatest Generation that is nevertheless rich in the sensitivity to human frailty that has become his signature as a filmmaker." But for Slant's Nick Schager, this is one "creaky history-class lecture" bearing here and there, as he sees it, "[Paul] Haggis's Crash fingerprints."

Back to Scott Foundas: "[W]here most stories that are this narratively sliced and diced leave you wishing they'd simply been laid out from A to Z, you don't long to see [Christopher] Nolan's Möbius strip movies any other way.... The Prestige, filmed with a minimum of digital chicanery, is at once a lament for the loss of the manual and analog and an awestruck marveling at the possibilities of electricity and mechanization." Back to Nick Schager: "[C]cinema's most compelling trick isn't simply superficial deception, but the ability to elicit emotional engagement in something that's inherently artificial - a feat The Prestige, for all its razzle-dazzle duplicity, never pulls off."

Besides the "Tracking Shots," what's left in the Voice is Rob Nelson's review of Running With Scissors: "[T]one is everything in a dark-comic farce, and [Ryan] Murphy pulls it off. Like the book, this deadpan celebration of neurosis makes a valiant effort to repress its comedy - which of course makes it funnier."

"Here's my nomination for best film composer of all time," announces Jan Swafford in Slate. He takes a while getting there, but it's such a fine tour, I won't tell you who it is. Start from the top.

At Midnight Eye, Nicholas Rucka talks with Takashi Yamazaki about "his first non-science fiction film to date - and coincidentally his most popular and critically successful work," Always: Sunset on Third Street.

IFC News has redesigned its site and currently features Aaron Hillis's interview with Terry Gilliam.

Recently up at cinetext: Joerg Sternagel's two pieces on acting, "Sensations of a Breakthrough Performance: Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line" and "Weight Watching: Method Acting as a Label and Subtext in The Machinist"; and Daniel Garrett offers "A reading of Elizabethtown: Ruining plans; reconciling aesthetics and life."

David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back: "Exiled is not a true sequel to Johnnie To's 1999 fan favorite, The Mission, but it is a follow-up in spirit."

Sean Uyehara at SF360: "With only two issues under its belt, Wholphin is already making itself known as an eclectic collection of works you've always wanted to see, but were never sure how to find."

Stories going round and round and round: what's next for Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese.

At Cineuropa, Camillo de Marco explains how legislative reforms, "inspired by the so-called 'French model,'" might be good news Italian cinema.

Online browsing tip. "Haunted When It Rains," Victorian post-mortem photography (à la The Others), via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Horrors, 10/17.

'Tis the season. Ray Young at Flickhead on a new special edition of an indie landmark: "Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess is an oddity, often maddening, frustrating, fascinating, riddled with both flaws and beauty, and bursting with revelations."

Dave Kehr reviews a slew of new horror DVDs in the New York Times. More from Bill Gibron at PopMatters, where he also writes, "There probably isn't a more unique filmmaker in the genre of horror than José Mojica Marins."

Writing for the Evening Class, Michael Hawley finds Calvaire and 13 Tzameti "each deliver a unique vision of Hell on Earth, marking the emergence of two very promising filmmaking talents."

Marlin Tyree explains what a review of Lars von Trier's Medea is doing in Not Coming to a Theater Near You's "31 Days of Horror" extravaganza.

Peter Nellhaus on Lucky McKee's The Woods: "Look past the story, and McKee reveals himself to be one of the more interesting visual stylists working in film today."

Grady Hendrix gets all Halloween on us.

Jette Kernion presents Cinematical's list of seven funniest horror movies.

Fests and events, 10/17.

For the Reeler, Lauren Wissot previews CineKink NYC, opening tonight and running through Sunday.

The Hamptons International Film Festival opens tomorrow and also runs through Sunday.

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez looks back on the Woodstock Film Festival and Brian Brooks files another dispatch from Busan, focusing on the first annual Asian Film Market.

Still coming in from the New York Film Festival:

• Aaron Hillis wraps his coverage at Premiere with his takes on Pan's Labyrinth, that "magnificent and moving horror-fantasy for adults," and Inland Empire, "my favorite film of the entire festival and the year (thus far)... a viscerally unrivaled love letter to the transformative powers of cinema that can't be controlled nor comprehended."

• Acquarello on Poison Friends, "an intelligent and insightful, if oddly sterile and empirically rendered chronicle of academic life as seen through the perspective of a loose knit group of university-aged students." Also, "Climates exquisitely (and indelibly) maps a spare, elegiac, and achingly intimate meditation on the ephemeral seasons of the human heart."

• At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Leo Goldsmith on Our Daily Bread and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.

At Midnight Eye, Eija Niskanen looks back on this years edition of the Pia Film Festival, "one of the most important channels of nurturing new talent for Japanese cinema."

CIFF. Awards.

Fireworks Wednesday has won the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival. Says the jury: "The creative energy of the director, Asghar Farhadi, sweeps us into the heart of paradoxical humanity."

The Silver Hugo, Special Jury Prize, goes to Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory, the other Silver Hugo to György Pálfi's Taxidermia. Jürgen Vogel picks up another award for his courageous performance in The Free Will and the Silver Hugo for Best Actress goes to "Darya Moroz, Victoria Isakova and Anna Ukolova (Russia) for their portrayals of Moscow prostitutes in the Russian film The Spot."

"Plaques" go to the Israeli film Aviva My Love, Kim Ki-duk's Time and, making another appearance on an awards list, Requiem.

FIPRESCI jury members have honored Day Night, Day Night in the New Directors Competition.

Iraq in Fragments scores another award for James Longley: Gold Hugo for Best Documentary Feature. Silver: Exile Family Movie; Special Jury Prizes: The Trials of Darryl Hunt and Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing.

And here's a full list. So far. The audience awards will be announced when the fest closes on Thursday.

Interview. Lodge Kerrigan.

Both Clean, Shaven and Keane focus on men teetering on the edge of mental stability in search of their daughters. And yet the point of view of that focus is radically different.

Sean Axmaker talks with Lodge Kerrigan about these two unique features and the film he shot in between, Claire Dolan.

Shorts, 10/16.

"Humanism" is the key word in both Kristi Mitsuda and Michael Koresky's reviews of Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem. Only two takes from the Reverse Shot team this time around at indieWIRE, but they're embracing ones.

Also: indieWIRE's interview with Doug Block as his moving 51 Birch Street begins its trek across the country and a dispatch from the Pusan International Film Festival from Brian Brooks.

For SF360, Michael Fox talks with Joseph McBride about his new book, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career, in which he "catalogs Welles' amazing output in the last 15 years of his life, demolishing the widely held perception of Welles as a debauched clown."

"[W]hat makes Reign of Terror great isn't necessarily how well it adheres to, or shakes up, various genre conventions," writes Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab. "It is, quite simply, an incredibly well-put-together, gripping film - a true showcase for the visual and narrative expertise that would serve [Anthony] Mann so well in his later career."

Matthew Clayfield ruminates on Susan Shineberg's recent profile of Peter Greenaway in the Age: "Greenaway seems to me to be the perfect excuse for distinguishing auteurism, which is about films, not directors, from dead-end fascination with authorial rhetoric, which is an entirely different, far more limiting, thing."

David Bordwell recommends Backstory 4 and selects a few choice bits from the interviews.

Substantial discussion of The Departed going on over there at scanners.

Grady Hendrix: "Shochiku has announced the next Yoji Yamada film and - surprise! - it's a period piece. But what's genuinely surprising is that it's set not in the distant past like Twilight Samurai or The Hidden Blade, but in the 1940s."

Douglas Coupland will be creating a sci-fi series for television, reports Todd at Twitch. Also: Asia Argento's online video project.

In an appreciation of The Fly at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Tom Huddleston notes, "Cronenberg is consistently undervalued as a writer."

David Brusie talks with Justin Rice about Mutual Appreciation at music (for robots).

Amos Posner at PopMatters: "In terms of quality, 2006 is on pace to be the slowest since 2000, which was so bad that Chocolat and Erin Brockovich could be passed off as two of the year's best efforts. But no matter how much this year needs autumn to redeem it, it's worth examining the previous nine months, and shedding light on the hidden gems, dreck, and mundanity found within. After that, it will be easy to see why Oscar season is more crucial this year than any in recent memory."

Suddenly, MS Smith presents the third installment of his reflections on Toronto with his takes on Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako and Jia Zhangke's Still Life.

Brian Liloia has a good long talk with Sujewa Ekanayake about making Date Number One.

In the Independent, Andrew Gumbel asks Eric Steel why he made The Bridge.

Logan Hill profiles Christian Bale for New York.

Variety's redesigned its site, and they've done an outstanding job. So many different categories of information, and yet it's clear, clean, easily navigable and loads several times faster than it used to. Bravo.

Meanwhile, the Gray Lady lets her hair down a tad more.

James Wolcott remembers CBGB's.

Roger Friedman's reporting that Scarlett Johansson's going to be recording an album of Tom Waits covers. Via Waxy.org.

Online viewing tip. Erik Davis has your Hot Fuzz teasers and more at Cinematical.

New York Dispatch. 12.

Ok, so we're not quite through with the NYFF. For one thing, Jamie Stuart has posted his fifth and final episode of video works, this one built around Guillermo Del Toro's and Sofia Coppola's press conferences. For another, David D'Arcy has a thought-provoking take on Pan's Labyrinth. Update: Filmbrain's posted an excellent wrap-up: "Interestingly enough, my top three picks of the festival - Syndromes and a Century, Woman on the Beach and Climates - all contain a bifurcated narrative structure."

Even if Pan's Labyrinth were not a poignant fable, the New York Film Festival should be commended for showing it as the festival's closing film, if only for the purpose of washing out the taste of Marie Antoinette. Guillermo Del Toro's film is anything but blithe, nor is it nostalgic in the vein of another NYFF period celebration, the revival of Reds.

Del Toro hasn't only made a fable, a delicate story of fantasy within the larger landscape of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War; he's made a moral tale about childhood and innocence. Too put it mildly, that's not the easiest thing to do these days. To understate the matter, Del Toro has done it magnificently. (Pan's Labyrinth will be released a few days after Christmas.)

The story is simple enough. Ofelia, 12, is traveling with her mother and a contingent of army troops to an old mill that has been converted into a house in a forest in the north of Spain. Her mother is pregnant with the child of Ofelia's adoptive stepfather, a captain in the fascist forces. He is a man known for his cruelty, much of which we will see. We can only imagine what he was like in a war. Outside, the forest has a life of its own, as you might expect from a forest in a fable. In part of that life is a band of partisans who are still resisting the fascists who fought their way to power at the end of the 1930s, in a bloody war that was watched by the rest of the world. Yet also in the forest is an imaginary life that Ofelia creates for herself, an alternative world that she has willed into existence, having seen the sacrifices that her own mother has made to survive under the worst of circumstances. Those circumstances will get much worse before the film ends.

This is a fable, but it's a fable that is not completely given over to fantasy. The mill where the family has taken refuge (or which has been occupied by the soldiers) is real enough to be terrifying. Think of the castle of a villain whose fist you can feel. So is the captain's brutal tactile control over Ofelia and her mother, Carmen. The fantasy world of the forest is just as tactile, oozing with mud from the endless rains. Del Toro has populated it with odd creatures - Pan, for one (Doug Jones). Yet this isn't a film overloaded with special effects. The creatures seem mechanically constructed, rather than created with computers. Ofelia's fantasy world is always rooted in her own emotions, ultimately posing the question of whether the power of imagination has a chance against the power of guns. See the film to probe that question further.

Del Toro has many talents. In a field ruled by overstatement, he can give you the delicate gesture and elicit the same from his actors. He can mix palettes of realism and fantasy to bring plausibility to a story that you might otherwise find outrageous. In his world, the fabulous creatures are struggling as much as anyone else.

Bear in mind that this story is set against the background of a war that was won by Spanish fascists, killing millions of civilians and forcing many more into exile, all with the support of Hitler and Mussolini. (We'll have to wait for Sofia Coppola to make a lavishly-costumed saga about those lonely misunderstood fascists.) This is not a film into which you can escape. Purists (if there are any left out there, especially in the world of commercial cinema) might wonder whether a subject as serious and little-known among Americans today as the Spanish Civil War should be addressed through the lens of horror. Picasso certainly thought so. Remember Guernica, Picasso's monochromatic look into the hell of a village literally torn apart by a German bombing in 1939. The Nazis were all too happy, not just out of ideological kinship, to put tanks, bombers and troops in the service of Spanish fascism. This was the testing ground for the horror that was to come. And Guernica, horrifying as it is and certainly was at the time, is just the most famous of those images. Picasso deliberately chose grotesquery as the way to portray what was happening in Spain at that time, even in obscene cartoons that he drew of Francisco Franco. It would be a prelude to the palette and the imagery of his work during the darker times of World War II.

In other words, Guillermo del Toro has company, not just in his signature grotesquery mourning the loss of innocence that he shares with (among others) Picasso. The fabulously rich popular culture of Republican Spain drew on the same visual vocabulary. (Use the occasion of Del Toro exhuming this moment in history in Pan's Labyrinth to discover it.) This was the land of Salvador Dalí, ever the opportunist, who made image after transgressive image scorning and ridiculing the Church, and then chose the side of power when he sensed which way the wind was blowing. Dalí only painted what he thought was the edge. He didn't live there.

Even before Picasso painted Guernica, the Spanish Republicans (remember, these Republicans were the anti-fascists) printed posters by the thousands showing the post-mortem faces of children killed in fascist bombings and demanding the world outside Spain act on its moral revulsion. A Mexican working in Spain, making a child his protagonist, in a country ravaged by war but not fully defeated, Del Toro is well within the tradition of that visual (and) moral war for hearts and minds. What he seems to be saying here, is that, after losing the war on the battlefield (for the most part), all that the moral survivors in Spain were left with were their hearts and minds. For Ofelia, and for Del Toro, that's still quite a lot.

More on Del Toro and a lineup of NYFF favorites in a final dispatch.

Busan Dispatch. 2.

Koreanfilm.org contributor Adam Hartzell reviews several shorts, two features and a couple of worthwhile conversations at the Pusan International Film Festival.

So far the best film I've seen is a short, BomBomBomB!!! by the dynamic directing duo of Kim Gok and Kim Sun. You may have caught University of Irvine Professor Kyung Hyun Kim writing a bit back about these guys in his contribution to the Film Comment issue focusing on South Korean Cinema. The Kims did a fascinatingly weird film titled Capitalist Manifesto: Working Men of All Countries, Accumulate! (They seem to like exclamation points in their titles!), a film of repeating motifs that's available on DVD if you're curious. BomBomBomB!!! is their contribution to the third installment of the If You Were Me series. (Actually, there have been four in the series, but one featured animators, so, technically, this is the third live action installment.) Commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, the series asks directors of note to create a short film around various human rights issues.

This year the shorts focused on illegal immigrants, teen-headed households, unequal labor between married partners, racism, Queer rights, and contract workers. (The latter was a topic of two films in If You Were Me 2 which screened at last year's PIFF. Obviously the treatment of these workers - poor pay, little leverage for time off, job insecurity, and other exploitative practices - is a heightened concern these days amongst Koreans and I'm curious to find out what changes are being made to better their conditions.) Jung Yoon-chul's short on illegal immigrants, Mohammed, the Diving King, was an inspired contribution with a nice performance by Chaiyan Koolsak as the illegal Thai immigrant who is capable of holding his metaphorical breath throughout his entire journey of dangerous labor conditions. Unfortunately it fails where Kim Hyun-phil's The Girl Bitten By Mosquito (about teen-headed households) and Hong Ki-seon's An Ephemeral Life (contract workers) fail, including too much didactic dialogue that diminishes the power the statements could have.

Lee Mi-yeon's GaP appears to know of the disempowering nature of didactic dialogue, because she brings it in at the end of GaP (about unequal labor between married partners) in the purposely humorous, kitschy style of a public service announcement, helped along in its effect by the performance of the PIFF-ubiquitous Kim Tae-woo (his third appearance on screen at PIFF this year, performing in Woman on the Beach and Sa-kwa as well). Noh Dong-seok's A Tough Life tackles Korean prejudices towards people of the African diaspora. (Thankfully, this topic received a greatly needed public discussion when Hines Ward made his appearance in South Korea following the Steelers' Super Bowl win. Ward's mom was quick to take Koreans to task for the racism her son would have faced had she stayed in South Korea to raise Ward.) Noh provided his child actors with some witty dialogue within a clever structure, but it falters a bit due to the need to direct too many child actors who aren't completely up to the task.

BomBomBomB!!! is definitely the short to write home about. Centered around a teen who begins to feel for his classmate, a gay teen who is the object of ridicule, threats and other verbal tortures, the film depicts this teen's solidarity (or love, it's never really clear nor need it be) shifting back and forth with regard to this fellow outcast. The Kims orchestrate a tight short that never drags as it drives towards a wonderful crescendo that rocks out like any teenage dream beyond the wasteland in which teens often find themselves stuck.

Director Noh Dong-seok didn't just contribute a short to If You Were Me 3 this year, but also had a feature screened, his second, Boys of Tomorrow. His first feature, the black and white My Generation, was one of the few films that impressed me from South Korea in 2004, leading me to hope that Noh might be yet another director to watch in a widening field.

I can't say I was disappointed, but the day after seeing Boys of Tomorrow, I realized I will come to Noh's next film with less anticipation. Venturing into color, the story follows another brother taking care of his brother, although in My Generation it was a younger brother financially saving an older brother, whereas the roles are reversed here, an older brother swooping in to rescue his younger brother from further physical harm. This younger brother has a penchant for getting himself in trouble. This has something to do with the younger brother having lost a testicle, but I'm not really sure about that. And speaking of lacking testicles, Noh is showing himself as someone who might have some trouble with developing stronger female characters, because the mother is caricatured in her craziness and the other female character is presented even more meekly than Noh's female protagonist from My Generation.

Hopefully this will simply be a wrong turn on Noh's part, similar to director Lee Yoon-ki's trajectory. After his lovingly crafted This Charming Girl, deservedly winning that year's New Currents Award at PIFF, Lee appeared to rush too fast into an awkward film about the Korean ex-pat community in Los Angeles, Love Talk, screened at last year's festival. This PIFF feature by Lee isn't a full return to the competent character study of his debut, but Ad Lib Night shows the possibility for a return to form.

An excellent incident of mistaken identity begins this film based on a Japanese novel. A young woman named Bo-kyoung is approached by two strange men who think she is someone from their past, a schoolmate whom they are trying to locate since her father, from whom she's been estranged, is on his death bed. Realizing they are mistaken, they continue to push for Bo-kyoung to come anyway since, well, she resembles the woman and the father is so far gone on morphine, why not pay her to pose as the long lost daughter they haven't found. The highlight of Love Talk was the bitching session that arose during the obligatory (for a Korean film) drinking session. Such re-appears in Ad Lib Night as well, but isn't the highlight since there is much more to see here, too, such as the delightfully feisty dialogue when Bo-kyoung resists propositions from the family's representatives. I'm back in Lee's corner with this effort, hoping Love Talk was the fluke in his quickly emerging oeuvre (three films in three years at three consecutive PIFFs).

These all night drinking sessions carry over from the screen into the non-diegetic spaces of the bars and restaurants at the Haeundae beach area and Nampo-dong commercial strip, for these scenes in the films reflect a reality that exists in South Korea itself. But it's not all drunken banter and dishing. My own drinking time with friends has been tempered in libations, instead fully drunk in the discussions of film. Saturday night I stayed up until 4 am with my friend and her friends talking passionately about the films and filmmakers we admire and those we don't. It all proved for me how much film is not just an escape but can be as much a social lubricant as alcohol.

What was great about this conversation, besides the fact that it gave me pleasant flashbacks of college years gone too far by, is that none of us made false claims about the other's preferences, setting up straw points to blow down again. One woman couldn't stand one of my favorite films (Hong Sang-soo's The Power of Kangwon Province) and another woman was a strong advocate for oeuvre of Kim Ki-duk, a director I can't stand. The discussion took as many different turns as one finds one taking in the Haeundae beach area to get back and forth from the Megabox multiplex to one's hotel to the non-stop parties (of which I've attended barely ten minutes' worth) and events without forgetting to stop by the beach for a spell. But each direction was taken with a respect for each individual present. See, like I said, for the most part, I can't stand Kim Ki-duk's films. I only watch them because I have to, having committed myself to South Korean cinema. But this new friend sees so much to praise in his work. I don't agree with her viewpoint, but I don't have to hate on her to challenge her arguments. Nor does the woman who'd be hard pressed to check out another Hong Sang-soo film feel a need to ridicule me for finding treasure in the roughness of Hong's characterizations. She and I would find out later as the conversation rolled on, including yet another conversation Sunday night, this time until 2 am, that she hates a lot of the films I like. But we could still talk fully engaged in the interests of the other without a need for fusillades of personal attacks on the other's preferences.

I guess this is important to me because, after six years of focusing my writing on film, I've been getting a little jaded. There's a necessary asocial slant to writing about film, and it can lead to anti-social perspectives where we forget about the real people in the audiences. The commercial conditions that seek out the witty pull-quote for the poster parallel a critical condition that enables the clever put-down. Sometimes such is warranted on both ends; the film inspires us to sincere poster-worthy praise or demands harsh, principled responses. But sometimes it seems to be more of that alpha-male mounting in verbal or written form that has always made it difficult for me to connect with many of my fellow males. Most writers about film are, like me, men, and these fascinating conversations I'm having here in Busan are with women, a point that can't be ignored. Thankfully, there are some men with whom I can have such conversations but there often seem to be more with whom I can't.

Again, it may be because I've gotten a little jaded over the years. But just as there are films like those by Kim Gok and Kim Sun that make the time inside the theater worthwhile, there are the new friends and conversations with them that give me hope about the world outside.

Pordenone Dispatch. 4.

Sean Axmaker wraps the Giornate del Cinema Muto.

The Giornate straddles the scholarly and the celebratory in its survey of silent cinema every year. On the one hand, it is cinema archeology on display, bringing the lost and neglected back to life with the light of a projector and the home of a screen and an audience (and always accompanied by live music). On the other, it is a gathering of silent film-lovers eager to experience the good, the great and the transcendent films of our beloved pre-sound era, when movies told stories with a different language and sensibility.

The consensus this year was that the latter gave way to the former. Many programs were more interesting as historical revelations than as cinematic art, notably the Danish retrospective - and discovering that Griffith spent much of 1919 just coasting through uninspired stories done up with his not inconsiderable talent (but not his passion) isn't exactly the kind of revelation that makes you stand up and cheer.

But there were joys, great and small, throughout the festival, and one of the greatest was simply being plunged in purity of silent film storytelling for a week. Griffith's cast-off films such as The Idol Dance (1920) and Scarlet Days (1919) had their moments (most of them involving the delightful ball of fire Clarine Seymour, who died soon after shooting The Idol Dancer), and the final-day showing of Way Down East (1920) was a reminder that Griffith was a master when he was engaged with his material. It also is an illustration of the importance of restoration, and not merely in the case of missing scenes (identified and described in intertitles). The quality of some of the scenes in the print (from the Museum of Modern Art) and some dubious editing distractions demand a comprehensive look for sharper source material and a serious look at the choices made in the reconstruction.

The Silly Symphony showings, played in front of the nightly "Musical Events," were also a revelation of Disney's animation at its most creative and graceful and, in shorts like the 1939 The Ugly Duckling, rich and emotional. The sheer creative ingenuity of Music Land and its war of musical instruments blasting rival kingdoms (a Classical and a Jazz kingdom, with the Sea of Discord between them) with musical notes, was terrific fun. These shorts were produced with a rich soundtrack of music and sound effects, but no dialogue, creating not so much a link between the silents and soundies but an animated choreography of dance, slapstick and drama.

It's said that it is possible to see every program. I don't believe that's the case, but even if it is, you sacrifice leisurely meals, animated conversations, sleep and the time to digest it all in order to made it happen. I don't think it's worth it, so I make sacrifices, in some cases literally. By all accounts, I missed the highlight of the festival, a screening of a newly restored print of King Vidor's brilliant The Big Parade (1925). The glory of that hour (or rather, 2½ hours) was shared with Neil Brand, the beloved festival pianist whose inspired accompaniment brought the audience to their feet for a five-minute standing ovation (the only such display in the festival). Where was I? Writing up a dispatch, I'm embarrassed to say, and taking a break from an otherwise non-stop day of screenings.

My musical highlight was the rollicking score that the high-energy fourteen-piece combo The Flat Earth Society brought to Ernst Lubitsch's burlesque of a social satire The Oyster Princess (1919), a frenzied farce that spoofs the vulgarities of the nouveau riche and the pretensions of the penniless aristocracy. The match of music and movie was perfect; the combo's mix of swing, music hall and circus sounds matched the attitude and the pace of Lubitsch's runaway comedy, notably in an extended dance sequence that spins out of the ballroom scene to the entire mansion during an impromptu wedding party. It's silly and absurd and often hilarious, and directed at such a clip that it sweeps up the audience in its knockabout insanity. Sadly, the promised 35mm print of the film did not arrive and their live blast of a performance accompanied a video projection that lacked the intensity and contrast of a film print.

When it comes down to it, this is why I come to the fest. The masterworks stay with me forever, but these glimpses of silent cinema at its most purely entertaining keep me going between the peaks. Tod Browning's gypsy carnival melodrama The Show (1927) with John Gilbert as a rogue of a carnival barker, Louise Brooks's final silent film performance in Prix de Beauté (1930, France), William Wellman's unfortunately titled circus romance You Never Know Women (1926) with Clive Brook as a dour magician and escape artist and Lowell Sherman in his patented role as the glibly seductive millionaire whose sense of privilege is topped only by his arrogance, and even the New Zealand romantic adventure A Bush Cinderella (1928), an unexpectedly deft little production with a rich sense of place and spirited comic relief - these are the films that keep me coming back to the festival. Beautifully crafted, inhabited by performances attuned to the art of silent acting, directed by pros whose grace and visual sensitivity add layers of details to otherwise simple stories, they are artifacts of a cinematic storytelling tradition developed to perfection by the mid-1920s and long lost in the sound era. For a few short days every year, Le Giornate brings the tradition alive once more.

Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon.

Dennis Cozzalio is hosting "the day-long celebration of one of Hollywood’s true mavericks, a director who rarely hid the rough edges of his films or his sensibility, whose films teem with vitality and power even when they stumble and fall, who deserves a whole lot more recognition 24 years after his death than he has managed to muster among all but the most dedicated cinephiles," and notes that Robert Aldrich will be getting a bit of that recognition when the Torino Film Festival stages its retrospective next month. Dennis's own contribution: an appreciation of Emperor of the North, "a movie I loved unconditionally when I saw it upon its initial release back in 1973."

Updated through 10/21.

That Little Round-Headed Boy offers his takes on 4 for Texas, The Flight of the Phoenix, Vera Cruz and Hustle.

Peter Nellhaus has more on that one, "something of an homage to Aldrich's film noir roots," but also overtly political: "If film was to do more than entertain, it allowed Aldrich to speak on behalf of those people for whom the American Dream seemed elusive."

On the other hand, John McElwee on The Dirty Dozen: "Oliver Stone missed the boat when he had Born on the Fourth of July's Tom Cruise watching Sands of Iwo Jima before rushing off to enlist. If he'd substituted The Dirty Dozen, I might have found the scene more convincing. John Wayne makes a softer target for post-60s filmmakers scoring political points, but the truly insidious pied piper might well have been Robert Aldrich. No wonder viewers still have to make excuses for liking this movie."

More on the Last Supper tableau in that film from Andy Horbal.

Check Dennis's Aldrich Blog-a-Thon Central for more as it appears throughout the day.

Related: Profiles from RJ Thompson in Screening the Past and Alain Silver in Senses of Cinema.

Updates, 10/17: Tom Sutpen: "There's absolutely nothing elegiac about Attack. Setting its central conflict deep within the American Army's officer class during the least controversial military engagement in its history, exploring the underlying insanity at the heart of all warfare, seeing it as an institution virtually designed to exploit the absolute worst in everyone it touches, Robert Aldrich emerged with nothing less than the most radical war picture of the 1950s." More from Wagstaff at Edward Copeland's site.

C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark: "While the rest of the blogosphere is celebrating director Robert Aldrich, I thought I'd put in a word for one of my favorite - and least discussed - Aldrich films, The Flight of the Phoenix."

Brian Darr: "[N]othing could really have prepared me for the utter preposterousness of seeing Apache's stars Burt Lancaster and Jean Peters in Technicolor 'redface' makeup for ninety minutes."

John McElwee recalls what went wrong with 4 for Texas.

David Lowery on Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte: "Bette Davis is Bette Davis, of course, but Joseph Cotten turns in a pretty sly turn and Agnes Moorehead pretty much steals the entire movie."

Updates, 10/19: Michael Guillén: "I thought it would be fun to explore a bit why Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? has had such an impact on 'gay sensibility' and why - even for [former] Advocate [arts] editor Alonso Duralde - it required inclusion into his 101 Must-See Movies For Gay Men."

"Calling Kiss Me Deadly one of the darkest detective thrillers ever made, or the ultimate film noir, doesn't do it justice," writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. "Director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter AI Bezzeride's 1955 version of Mickey Spillane's novel - in which our thug hero chases a mysterious, all-powerful "Great Whatsit" in pursuit of fortune and glory - doesn't merely exemplify those two genres and identify the places where they overlap. It defines the difference between cynicism and nihilism, then throws down with the nihilists, if for no other reason than to show you what it means to live in a world where nothing matters."

Update, 10/21: Girish on The Grissom Gang: "Aldrich is examining institutions—family, parenthood, romantic union—that have been represented in countless other films. Well aware of this, his view of these institutions is unconventional, distanced and sardonic but nicely complicated by sympathy. In this sense, his eye is not unlike Chabrol's: a touch entomological, although not, I would argue, misanthropic." Also, notes on Hustle.

Lone Pine Dispatch. 2.

Following up on his first dispatch, Brian Darr looks back to the Lone Pine Film Festival.

Spending Columbus Day, a.k.a. Indigenous Peoples Day, weekend attending a film festival comprised mostly of