Weekend shorts.

"This little box I'm holding contains 32 years of my life and 65 years of Mario Bava's." Go take a look at Tim Lucas holding the makings of Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, "1128 pages, full color, 12 pounds per copy."

DK Holm launches a new project at ScreenGrab. He'll be writing up "brand spanking new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Andrew Sarris's template," that is, the one you'll find in the 1968 classic, American Cinema. "Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out these dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris's book, looking like its long-lost patchwork cousin." Doug begins with Lucky McKee.

"So, consider this: There are upwards of 70,000 streets in the Greater London area and Alan Conway, who is impersonating Stanley Kubrick, lives opposite a girl who knows someone who works for him. Could Conway be a bigger loser?" For Stop Smiling, Anthony Frewin, Kubrick's personal assistant for over 30 years, recalls the series of events to led to his writing Color Me Kubrick. It all happened around the time "he was working on a Holocaust project that was subsequently abandoned ('Schindler's List is a hard act to follow,' he said), as well as the film that would eventually be bequeathed to Steven Spielberg as AI: Artificial Intelligence."

John Walsh has a good long talk with Cillian Murphy about Sunshine. Here's Murphy on his character:

While Capa would be, I'm sure, an atheist and would believe only in science, at the end of the movie he's overwhelmed by the beauty of the universe and it becomes to him something other than science. Einstein talked about "God," and a lot of theologians latched on to that, but he wasn't talking about religion - he was talking about the way science and physics work coherently, in a beautiful and delicate system. I think Capa suddenly sees his place in the universe like that. It's not a religious thing. It's more a communion with nature.

In a similar vein, Andrew Mueller has a piece in the Guardian, a Sunshine tie-in that isn't really about Sunshine at all, on what happens to astronauts, psychologically and otherwise, once they get out there. And when they come back.

Also in the Guardian: One of John Patterson's favorite photographs shows four filmmakers in Cannes in 1971 "on the cusp of what should have been majestic, transformative, transgressive careers in cinema that by and large never came to fruition":

Kenneth Anger radicalised mainstream cinema from his burrow in the avant garde underground; Dennis Hopper gave great service in the form of Easy Rider and the underrated The Last Movie, and Donald Cammell's Performance is one of the four or five most challenging and audacious movies ever made in Britain.

The fourth is the Argentinian-Jewish-Mexican-French visionary-film-maker-comic-book artist-psychotherapist Alejandro Jodorowsky, the one who promised the most, but found himself battered and broken by many of his film-making experiences.... The evidence of El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Fando Y Lis suggests that we have lost three decades of a truly brilliant and demented genius - and really, that's the only kind of genius worth knowing.

"While occasionally succumbing to contrivances, Hilary Brougher's second feature (her first is The Sticky Fingers of Time, an ultra-low budget sci-fier from 10 years ago) is all movie, but more intriguing is how it tells a distinctly (sometimes wrenching) feminine tale without making it only relative to Oprah watchers and talk-show bingers." Jason Clark at Slant on Stephanie Daley.

"Critics have been summarily referencing Spirit of the Beehive (1973) in reviews of Pan's Labyrinth, but [Carlos] Saura's [Cría cuervos] - at once a sister work to [Victor] Erice's classic in theme, tone, even shared actress (Ana Torrent) - is no less rich a reference point," writes Doug Cummings.

"Part elegy on the dying of a rural village, part exposition on mortality and obsolescence, and part exaltation of quotidian grace, Mercedes Ã?lvarez's El cielo gira (The Turning Sky) is a serene, contemplative, and indelible rumination on the permanence of landscape, the transitory nature of existence, the imprint of history, and the eternal cycle of natural transformation." Acquarello.

Three new reviews at Koreanfilm.org:

• "If Korean society often portrays itself as being homogenous, Dasepo Naughty Girls explodes that notion in favor of diversity," writes Darcy Paquet. "Ultimately Dasepo becomes an odd and fascinating sort of utopian vision of modern Korea, though not the utopia that most Koreans would imagine for themselves."

• 200 Pounds Beauty is "just an entertaining comedy with nothing particularly new to say," claims, again, Darcy Paquet. "Nonetheless, Korean audiences were certainly charmed, as they bought a stunning 6.5 million tickets, for a box office take of about $45 million. It may be 'hard to be a beauty' (the original Korean title of this film), but it certainly doesn't hurt ticket sales."

• "There is hardly any doubt that Hanbando is the worst Korean film of 2006," writes Kyu Hyun Kim, "and possibly the worst Korean film to deal with a historical subject made in the last ten years (Yes, it's worse than Heaven's Soldiers!). What makes Hanbando such a bloated turkey is actually a question many times more interesting than the movie itself."

"Simply put, Fist of Legend is Jet Li at the very pinnacle of his career." And now, Jason Morehead is pleased to hear that "Dragon Dynasty, the Asian-focused branch of The Weinstein Company, will be releasing a two-disc 'Ultimate Edition' of Fist of Legend in December."

Matt Bartley ushers Hammer into the Hollywood Bitchslap Hall of Fame.

At Cinematical, Ryan Stewart has news of an adaptation of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.

IndieWIRE interviews The Hawk is Dying director Julian Goldberger.

"Despite having [Harvey] Weinstein's roomy shoes to fill, [new Miramax head Daniel] Battsek not only has held the company together, he also has it flourishing and attracting top talent." A report from Claudia Eller. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Fleishman profiles the wildly successful Russian painter Nikas Safronov. "He recasts his country's tycoons and politicians as dukes, earls and other nobility from the past." Pop and movie stars, too. A gallery.

"The struggle for faith and financing are universal themes in the global film industry, but directors in Germany say they find it especially hard in a country known for being risk-averse." Andreas Tzortzis reports in the International Herald Tribune. Via Movie City News.

Talking with Alain Resnais in German: Michael Mönninger in Die Zeit and Margret Köhler in film-dienst.

Offline reading tip. Geoff Manaugh in the Next American City: "Citing Andy Warhol, John Cage, Bernard Tschumi, William Whyte's 'film analyses of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces,' Chris Petit, and a variety of other sources, the article makes the claim that 24-hour surveillance of urban space is a tool being used by the wrong industry: it shouldn't be private security firms installing these cameras in the name of public safety - but architects and urban planners, putting them up for the purpose of spatial research..."

FishbowlNY finds Michael Showalter and Paul Rudd reenacting the I ♥ Huckabees meltdown.

Online viewing tip #2. "The American Cinematheque had a fantastic showing of the film Bangkok in the historic Hollywood Egyptian Theatre." Jerry Lentz has video. "I had a blast seeing old friends I haven't seen in years!"

Updated recently: "Grindhouse, 3/28.," with full reviews from Jeremiah Kipp at Slant and Jürgen Fauth.

Also, "The critics. Yet again.," "Chicago and docs.," "Mr Bean's Holiday." and Interview. Charles Burnett."

Weekend fests and events.

"Starting today, the Museum of the Moving Image presents a weeklong series titled The Real Edie Sedgwick that further burnishes her legend and her importance as a muse," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Ms Sedgwick's beauty, fame, bad habits, bed partners, early death and continuing postmortem notoriety have helped turn her into the representative face of Warhol's film work, his ultimate superstar. But what often gets left out of the discussion about her proverbial 15 minutes is that she was, quite simply, a dazzling film presence."

David Bordwell fills us in on local news and offers capsule reviews of ten films he's recently seen at Filmart and the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

"When Josef von Sternberg, born in Vienna in 1894 as the son of orthodox Jews, passed away in Hollywood in 1969, he had become one of the inimitable 20th century artists - a poète maudit of cinema." The Austrian Film Museum stages a retrospective featuring a few extremely rarely seen films, "the first presentation in Austria of the recently recovered 'Prater Fragments' from The Case of Lena Smith (1929)," lectures, special guests, the works. Starts tomorrow in Vienna and runs through April 27.

"In Erich von Stroheim's films, the world is a slaughterhouse." The exhibition This Monster Stroheim! is on view at the Filmmuseum Potsdam through May 13.

"UCLA Film and Television Archive's 17th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema is the largest in the program's history with five narrative features, five documentaries and two short films," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "Surprisingly, none of the films has a theatrical distribution deal in the United States."

Michael Guillén has quite an update on what all will be on offer at the San Francisco International Film Festival (April 26 through May 10).

At this moment, Reel Distraction is enjoying the Hot Fuzztival at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin.

At Bad Lit, Mike's got the Boston Underground Film Festival award-winners.

The newly revamped site for the Toronto After Dark Festival is up and running. October 19 through 25.

The New York Post's Lou Lumenick notes the justifiably furious reactions from David Poland and Jeffrey Wells to Eugene Hernandez's indieWIRE report that the Tribeca Film Festival is slapping a 50% increase on ticket prices this year over last: from $12 to $18. Lumenick adds a few comments of his own as well: "Those of us who have covered the festival over the years have largely turned a blind eye to the issue that the bulk of the offerings are mediocre or worse - largely films that were rejected by Sundance or New Directors/New Films, many of which are never heard from again. The steep ticket prices may force the media to abandon our previous civic boosterism and start looking at Tribeca's offerings from a more consumerist point of view - are these flicks really worth $18?"

Interview. Scott Frank, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Matthew Goode.

"As all screenwriters eventually must, the talented Scott Frank makes his directorial debut with the dramatic thriller The Lookout," writes Jeffrey M Anderson, who has plenty of questions at the main site for Frank and two of his stars, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Matthew Goode.

"With the crime genre still struggling to work through its post-Tarantino hangover, The Lookout is maybe more notable for what it isn't: namely, bloated, flashy, or dependent on pop-culture riffs as a life-support system," writes Andrew Wright in the Stranger. "[T]his is a lean, to-the-bone, expertly acted small-town noir that takes unusual care to cast the moral compass of its characters in various shades of gray. There's just no fat on it." Also: An interview with Frank.

Updated through 4/5.

"For a movie about the effects of profound brain damage on a young man with a whole life still to be lived, The Lookout is funny, tender and littered with elegantly written characters played by actors cast for goodness of fit rather than star wattage," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. Noting that the project bounced around for 10 years before Frank took the helm himself, she adds, "In Sam Mendes's hands, the movie would have been too clever and referential by half, while David Fincher would have sucked the warmth out of it. Either of those directors would have made shorter, snappier work of the heist than does Frank, who does a perfectly competent, if unremarkable, job. Still, The Lookout is inescapably a screenwriter's movie and, for those of us who can't stomach poorly written dialogue even in an action picture, none the worse for it."

"Scott Frank's The Lookout is so refreshingly straightforward that at first you may not know what to make of it," suggests Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "The Lookout is like a well-made garment turned inside-out: The structure, the dialogue, the characters - these aren't just part of the movie. They are the movie."

It's a "writer's thriller," agrees Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "True, it's cleanly and efficiently directed, and it showcases some crackerjack acting, but the reason it's a real pleasure to watch is that a writer's sensibility is the foundation everything is built on."

"Mr Frank's screenplay for The Lookout was long considered one of Hollywood's great unproduced scripts," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "The end product doesn't justify that buildup.... Still, there's a lot to like here, and the film's bleak setting and empathetic tone add interest to what could have been a by-the-numbers affair."

"Gordon-Levitt is a major tabula rasa actor," writes New York's David Edelstein. "It's simpler to say what he doesn't do wrong—anything—than what he does right. As in Mysterious Skin and Brick, he's a minimalist: no fuss, no placards, no Method sense-memory exercises.... As a fan of sharp razors and clean whistles, I enjoyed The Lookout - yet I did feel let down by the climax, which ought to have been blunter and messier and crazier and more cathartic."

"[I]t has a few plot holes," admits Robert Wilonsky in the Voice, "but when considered as a whole, when appreciated and absorbed from hypnotic start to thrilling finish, The Lookout works. It takes its time, saves its breath, lets us know these people before putting guns in their hands and tossing them in a tiny bank vault on a winter's night. Frank likes his story, but he loves his characters."

It's "a film that's enervating in the way that only top-to-bottom mediocrity can be," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "Veteran screenwriter Scott Frank's directorial coming-out is a bricolage of screen-tested 'indie' junk - a 'smart, complex' performance from Gordon-Levitt, a beardy Jeff Daniels, exhaustingly competent filmmaking suffused with low-key melancholy - which is to say it risks absolutely nothing, and never threatens to be unexpected."

Michelle Orange for the Reeler: "The Lookout taps into that familiar vein of backwater desolation and the gnarled up, snowed-in, small-time plans of smaller-time crooks, but with Gordon-Levitt's eerily self-possessed, pitiful but never bathetic dupe as our conduit, the heist tropes take over without letting you to slip into plot auto-pilot."

"This is a character study that focuses on what happens when someone gets tired of his life," writes J Robert Parks. "That distinction is why The Lookout is being distributed by a small studio with little fanfare.... I'm not arguing The Lookout is some kind of masterpiece. The bank robbery is fairly paint-by-numbers, and the blind character is one we've seen many times before, despite Daniels's charisma. But this is the sort of movie Hollywood should be making - and getting behind. Movies that don't insult your intelligence or make you feel dirty for watching. But because The Lookout has a small marketing budget, this is a movie where it's up to the critics to let you know what you shouldn't miss."

Annie Frisbie, writing at Zoom In Online, calls it "a rare bird: a perfectly structured film that exudes spontaneity and risk.... It must have been a delight to read on the page - and how wonderful to report that it's also a delight to watch."

"You could easily have the Hollywood meal ticket if you wanted it. What makes you choose smaller and independent projects instead?" Aaron Hillis asks Gordon-Levitt for IFC News, where Matt Singer writes, "Never terribly outstanding (except when Daniels is on screen), The Lookout is nonetheless a solid genre picture, carefully plotted and acted, with a nice balance of style and substance. Unlike most modern day stabs at noir, it's more reserved than flashy." Scott Tobias talks with Gordon-Levitt, too - for the AV Club.

"Except for its lead performance," writes Robert Cashill, "the film is unexciting - a little too respectable - and as flat as its Midwestern landscapes."

For the New York Press's Armond White, this is just "another of those indies that mistake 'dumb' for 'edgy.'"

Jonathan Busch in the Vue Weekly: "Somehow it stays afloat, while staying remarkably unambiguous about its lesson."

"[U]ntil the story gives way completely, into bloody retribution set against a snowy vista (something like Fargo meets Reservoir Dogs meets Brick), [Gordon-Levitt] makes his erratic efforts to read himself appear engaged and engaging," writes Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper.

"Call it townie noir," suggests Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine.

Darcie Stevens interviews Frank for the Austin Chronicle; Nick Dawson for Filmmaker; Leonard Klady profiles him for Movie City News.

Ellen McCarthy profiles Goode for the Washington Post.

Online listening tip. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Gordon-Levitt.

Updates, 4/4: "It's impossible to watch The Lookout without thinking of Memento," writes Scott Tobias for the AV Club. "In fact, there's nothing terribly original about The Lookout at all, especially once it breaks down into a rote but efficient heist picture with gears that click a little too smoothly into place. Yet writer-director Scott Frank - who scripted Malice, Out of Sight and Minority Report, among other solidly crafted Hollywood thrillers - has cleverly cross-pollinated the genre with a rich character study, raising the stakes considerably."

Canfield talks with Goode for Twitch.

Update, 4/5: Kim Voynar talks with Gordon-Levitt and Goode for Cinematical.

Shorts, 3/30.

"In the midpart of the 20th century, the problem progressive Hollywood films confronted was American racism; the social-problem films of the 21st century confront an abstract evil. These films ask: How can a God allow so much evil to exist? Is evil simply human and apart from God? Is God even in the world?" Charles Mudede, in the Stranger, on Beyond the Gates, Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond and a handful of other films set in Africa: "If the love of all love (European humanism) can overcome the evil of all evils (Africans who have totally gone bananas) then it can overcome anything, and that is the core message of these films."

Werner Herzog's next feature will be The Cheese and the Worms, based on the book by Carlo Ginzburg, "an account of a 16th Century 'heretic,' a peasant named Menocchio who, to put it simply, did not buy into the prevailing religious philosophy," as DK Holm describes it in his introduction to an interview with screenwriter Alan Greenberg, who's put his "fascinating and gripping" screenplay online.

"Easily among my favorite films of all time, Chris Marker's perplexing documentary/travelogue Sans Soleil, stretches the genre to its breaking point," writes Dave Micevic, pleased as punch to hear that Criterion will be releasing it on DVD in June.

"For Stalin admirers, of whom there are many in Russia, the series [Stalin Live] is an entertaining and educational look at the man who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower," writes David Holley in the Los Angeles Times. "To critics, it is a dangerous distortion of history that threatens to misinform a younger generation about a leader responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and reinforce a trend toward greater authoritarianism in politics."

Waggish watches five films: "For me, they all point out the fallacy that formalism must restrict itself to addressing the limits and variations of its own form. It cannot; instead, formalism must invoke other media and forms - real life being only one of them - in a way that is not explicitly representational. This is evidently not easy to do, but one glance at Godard and Jancso reminds me of the ever-fruitful possibility."

Filmbrain on another one of those "Forgotten Gems of the 70s," Dynamite Chicken: "The roster of names in the opening credits is impressive to say the least, and it includes major boho figures such as Paul Krassner, Peter Max, Allen Ginsberg, Al Goldstein, Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez, Malcolm X, The Velvet Underground and John & Yoko. The film consists of a series of thematic segments, loosely (very, at that) linked by footage of Richard Pryor (who is listed as the 'star' of the film) riffing directly into the camera while wandering around a beat-up playground somewhere in New York City." Sounds like a must-see.

At Bad Lit, Mike heads out in search of more than just a passing knowledge of Kurt Kren and comes across some fine material indeed.

"Hyping David O Russell's upcoming adaptation of Sammy's Hill to the Hollywood Reporter, producer Doug Wick said, "It will do for Washington DC what Talladega Nights did for race car driving." Oh... I'm not entirely sure Russell will see it that way." Brendon Connelly runs an excerpt from the novel, written by Kristin Gore. And yes, she's Al Gore's daughter.

Tim Lucas discovers a possible antecedent to Pan's Labyrinth.

For Time Out, Mark Salisbury recalls a visit to the Sunshine set.

While Manhattan, Kansas carries on touring the country, director Tara Wray is also taking her company from NYC to Vermont to begin work on a documentary on the Center for Cartoon Studies.

"The smug yuppie centerpiece of Whit Stillman's pro-bourgeoisie gabfests, Chris Eigeman switches gears in The Treatment, embodying an erudite prep school English teacher beset by ambivalence about his upper-crust professional milieu," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

In the New York Times:

• "Meet the Robinsons is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time," writes AO Scott. "Zippy if forgettable," agrees Dennis Lim, though he focuses his review for the LAT on the 3D version, which "is simply an excuse to have characters and objects lunge in the general direction of the viewer."

• Will Ferrell and Jon Heder "stake an early claim to being the comedy couple of the year," writes Stephen Holden. "It comes as a huge relief to find that as Blades of Glory speeds along, it avoids going to the obvious, ugly place for cheap laughs." It "has enough vestiges of that kind of creative cheek to keep you contentedly in your seat." More from Nick Schager in Slant, Richard Corliss in Time, Kevin Crust in the LAT, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, Erik Davis at Cinematical and Dana Stevens in Slate, where Josh Levin answers the question, "Why is Will Ferrell Funny?" with a video slide show.

• Stephen Holden: "Summer in Berlin, Andreas Dresen's microscopic examination of the humdrum lives of Katrin (Inka Friedrich) and Nike (Nadja Uhl), best friends who live in the same Berlin apartment building, is a pointedly unglamorous slice of life that could be set in any urban neighborhood where real estate prices haven't gone through the roof."

• "The Hawk Is Dying is a dreary study of male angst groaning beneath the weight of its own symbolism," writes Jeannette Catsoulis.

• Matt Zoller Seitz on Sacco and Vanzetti: "[T]he movie's meat-and-potatoes style seems less a failure of imagination than a means of putting in the foreground its subject matter." Related: indieWIRE interviews director Peter Miller.

• For some time now, visitors to the Filmhaus on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin have been able to view letters exchanged by Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich, but as Ashley Parker reports, a new round of about 30 more is being made public, and they're rather sweet. Hemingway: "What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I'd bring the nickel."

• Ben Brantley: "The substance is in the silences in The Year of Magical Thinking, the arresting yet ultimately frustrating new drama starring Vanessa Redgrave that opened last night at the Booth Theater."

• "Those who don't like a rogue's progress, preferring to cluck from a distance over the skeevy habits of today's rich bachelors, should skip Sons of Hollywood," writes Virginia Heffernan. "But then they should also skip the novels of Henry Fielding, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, not to mention Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II."

"There's no shortage of Iraqi war documentaries, which actually works to this film's advantage," writes Peter Hartlaub. "The Prisoner doesn't try to put the entire war in context or offer broad solutions. It's a focused slice of the war, covering an issue that you've probably wondered about but haven't seen in many other places. What happens to Abu Ghraib prisoners who didn't do anything wrong? What is life like in the prison? How does someone like Abbas feel about the United States now?" Also in the San Francisco Chronicle, Walter Addiego and G. Allen Johnson on Grbavica, Nomad and A Zen Life: DT Suzuki. Related online listening tip: Joel Heller talks with Prisoner filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein and Benjamin Thompson, "who as a member of the 391st MP Battalion, Army Reserve in Columbus, OH, was sent in Feb 2004 to Abu Ghraib," and is featured in the film.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Mike M talks with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg about Hot Fuzz and many other movies as well.

John Davidson reviews John Heilpern's John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man for Stop Smiling.

"Did The Caiman decide the [Italian] election?" wonders Patrick Barkham out loud. "[Nanni] Moretti, who won lavish praise and the Palme d'Or in 2001 for The Son's Room, laughs. 'I tried to make a good film - that was my intention,' he says. 'If some people changed their minds, then that's good.' Unlikely to succumb to false modesty, Moretti is more like a minister side-stepping a spending commitment, unwilling to make definitive statements."

Also in the Guardian:

• Peter Bradshaw on Days of Glory. More from Tim Robey in the Telegraph, Anthony Quinn in the Independent and Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. Related: "Thousands of Gurkha veterans hope an Oscar-nominated film which helped to change French law to provide proper pensions to Algerian troops who fought in the second world war will have a similar effect on the British government," reports Duncan Campbell.

• David Thompson profiles Hilary Swank. Related: "Hilary Swank is developing a remake of Patrice Leconte's Intimate Strangers for Paramount Pictures with an eye to star and produce," report Dave McNary and Pamela McClintock in Variety. Also, Time readers have ten questions for Swank.

• M Night Shyamalan's "paranoia thriller The Happening... will star Mark Wahlberg as a science teacher whose family flees an apocalyptic force threatening humanity."

• Jake Horsley: "Mobile phone movies are the latest development in the ongoing war against teenage boredom, and the first is coming soon, distributed by O2, Orange and T-Mobile."

Cahiers du cinéma has ten questions for each of the five candidates in France's presidential race. In French, naturally.

Online browsing tip. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: "Today on the Modern Mechanix blog, an incredible, five-page spread about the making of Snow White, from the January 1938 issue of Popular Science."

Online viewing tip #1. Nathaniel R finds the original edit of his She's a Bitch... At the Movies.

Online viewing tip #2. trailer for Novel Reflections on the American Dream. Via the Literary Saloon.

Online viewing tips, round 1. David Lynch on product placement. Via Fimoculous, also pointing to Manufacturing Consent.

Online viewing tips, round 2. ScreenGrab's "Most Important Nude Scenes of All Time."

Fests and events, 3/30.

"While the official selection of the 60th Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27, 2007) will be revealed on April 19 and French director Pascale Ferran has been named president of the Un Certain Regard jury, rumours have been intensifying about the festival competition line-up." Fabien Lemercier passes them along at Cineuropa, and they are juicy.

"Fifty years after Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido splashed at the premier San Francisco International Film Festival, the Bay Area again plays host to the maestro's moody chronicles of bourgeoisie malcontent through April with a major retrospective at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco's own Castro Theatre," writes Max Goldberg, who then rounds up a series of examples of "the early critics struggling to define (and celebrate) Antonioni in terms of what his films are not, and then the inevitable backlash (capped by a hyper-lucid Manny Farber passage in which the critic laces Antonioni's own 'white elephant art'). Decades later, critics like Stephen Holden and Phillip Lopate chase after Antonioni with reflection rather than polemic - whatever the angle, it's clear that with these films, there's still plenty to talk about."

The UCLA Film and Television Archive's series For Ever Godard opens tomorrow and runs through June 2. For the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas whisks through the oeuvre and writes, "Riding all the currents coursing through contemporary life, as well as observing the eternal verities from new angles, Godard films capture the moment in which they are made so thoroughly that they bristle with an immediacy that makes them timeless. The reputations of many important directors ebb and flow, but it's hard to imagine Jean-Luc Godard ever becoming dated or going out of style."

"Film director and former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam is to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Fantastic Film Festival in Amsterdam," reports the BBC. April 18 through 25.

Another new lineup: Filmfest DC, April 19 through 29.

"Getting ready to head off to the Turin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in a few weeks where I will be presenting a bunch of film prints from my archive," writes Jenni Olson.

"Starting Tuesday, the NWFF will be showing four films of the Canadian New Wave," notes E Steven Fried at the Siffblog. "As befits a country split between Anglo and French identity, two of the films are in English and two are in French."

"The films at the 21st London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival come in every conceivable form: there are polemical documentaries, romantic comedies, melodramas, thrillers, shorts, horror movies, comedies, and even one or two non-gay films," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. Through April 4.

The Subtitle Film Festival: April 12 through 15 in LA.

13 films and several distinguished guests: Jim Emerson previews Ebertfest, April 24 through 29.

"It dawns on me that I've been flown here by the HK Trade and Development Council to admire the market stalls, not to enjoy the cultural thrills of a festival that has procured an unprecedented 16 world premieres," writes James Christopher in the London Times. "'It's a cynical business,' grins Matthew Scott, one of the more colorful minders who is steering me around the festival.... If the proximity of serious money and glamorous stars has yet to generate the magical alchemy of Cannes or Berlin, it's not for want of trying."

Michael Lerman covers New York goings on for indieWIRE. An event to add to the list: On April 5, the Stoop Series features moderator Logan Hill in conversation with filmmakers Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart), Julia Loktev (Day Night Day Night) and Chris Zalla (Padre Nuestro).

"Swanberg. Bujalski. Duplass. Katz." For fun, Aaron Hillis draws - literally - connections among the "mumblecore gang," limiting the chart only to those films screened at SXSW 2007, "since if I put in every name/film with overlap, I'd be playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon all the way back to Dziga Vertov." And a reminder: Aaron will be on panel about film blogging on April 10. "I'll be taking part while I'm down in Texas to screen Fish Kill Flea again, and with me in the discussion will be Joel Heller (DocsThatInspire.com), Jette Kernion (Cinematical.com) and Mike Curtis (HDforIndies.com). Come check it out, Austinites!"

Interview. Philip Haas.

Hannah Eaves talks with Philip Haas about working with artists vs actors, directing scenes in Arabic and about how journalists and soldiers have reacted to The Situation.

"[I]t's not enough to replace ideological certitude with sophomoric relativism," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "This tells us that Iraq is fucked and we have helped make it so. But at this point, it's attacking a view that no longer exists, at least among people who might be even slightly convinced by watching it."

Michael Fox talks with Haas for SF360, where Robert Avila writes, "As the Iraq War enters its fifth year, with the debacle continuing to grow worse by the month, Haas's film makes up for its formulaic character and slick but generally basic-cable look with its unusually sophisticated and pointed depiction of resistance and occupation politics in Iraq - a hopeless tangle, and an impossible life for average Iraqis, that everyone calls simply 'the situation.'"

After the Wedding.

"After the Wedding, from the Danish director Susanne Bier, isn't an especially showy film (although it's luminously photographed, in the post-Bergman Scandinavian tradition), and the story it tells is classic family drama, even if you might not see all its twists coming," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "A wanderer long absent from his homeland, who has found a surrogate family elsewhere, reluctantly returns to discover that the past still has a surprising hold on him. What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language."

Vadim Rizov, writing for the Reeler, could hardly agree: "The plot is an outrageous and manipulative confluence of worst-case scenarios; offensive because it begs to be taken seriously, After the Wedding beats an emotional reaction out of the viewer by any means necessary."

Updated through 4/5.

For Manohla Dargis, writing in the New York Times, this is "a fine and, on a scene-by-scene basis, often better than fine, if effectively unadventurous work, in which a man's anguished cry is met by a finale designed to ease the pain."

"Like all Bier's work, After the Wedding is frankly a melodrama, a film where the emotions are huge and the coincidences larger still," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "But more important, it's that paradoxical melodrama that point-blank refuses to acknowledge that it's being melodramatic, conveying its scenario with enough intensity, psychological acuity and forceful acting to ignore labels and flat-out overpower audiences."

"[W]e are in soap opera country," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "And maybe we are, but that reckons without the easy naturalism of Anders Thomas Jensen's script and the brilliance with which it is played by its perfectly cast actors."

"Similar to the Danish director's last film, Brothers, big moments remain grounded with elusive, elliptical camerawork," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE. Even so, the final turn "smacks of falseness."

Howard Feinstein has a good long talk with Bier for Filmmaker.

Update, 4/4: Noel Murray for the AV Club: "With its soapy earnestness and use of suffering souls as set dressing, After The Wedding could be the cinematic equivalent of a Coldplay song. And while that isn't necessarily a slam, it isn't a recommendation either."

Update, 4/5: "In the last few years, [Mads] Mikkelsen has played a dangerous Bond foil in Casino Royale, a thug seeking redemption in Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher II and now portrays the soulful manager of an orphanage in Susanne Bier's After the Wedding," notes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "That sort of chameleon versatility doesn't come along very often."

Warren Beatty @ 70.

"[H]e's my favorite modern movie star," writes That Little Round-Headed Boy. While he's "particularly drawn to the films he made in the late 60s and 70s," and you'll see that in his Warren Beatty top 5, you'll find plenty leaving comments arguing that Ishtar is a "great movie," even "the most misjudged movie of all time. It's a gem." Related: Elaine May, "perfect Almost Auteur." Bill Gibron explains in PopMatters; and Waiting for Ishtar.

At any rate, TLRHB has a Beatty-spotting story to tell and there's more at MovieMaker's blog.

Updates, 3/31: Michael Althen in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - and in German. Lots of pix, though. Also: Peter Zander in Die Welt.

Screenwriting Blog-a-Thon.

"For the next few days (or at least until April 2), we shall be rolling in our collective, euphoric love of those well-crafted screenplays, so please make yourself at home," writes the host of this one, Mystery Man on Film. "Personally, the screenplays that I treasure are the ones composed by true masters of the craft - that fail."

He'll be writing about one of those on Saturday and, in the meantime, he's already gathering linkage.

Related: Michael Guillén at SF360: "For my money, what has distinguished the past cinematic year has been an increased focus on the screenwriter."

Interview. Charles Burnett.

"Though its film stock had nearly turned to vinegar by the time UCLA stepped in with a timely restoration, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is of a vintage that only gets better with age," writes Susan Gerhard, introducing her interview with the filmmaker at the main site. "Its neorealist approach to the life of a neighborhood is rich, but the surprise is that it's also as fresh as the day it was made 30 years ago."

"There are first films like Citizen Kane or Breathless, which, as radically new and fully achieved as they are, unfairly overshadow an entire oeuvre," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "And then there are first films, perhaps even more radical, which haunt an artist's career not through precocious virtuosity but because they have an innocence that can never be repeated.... Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep, which was finished in 1978 and, despite its enormous critical reputation, is only now getting a New York theatrical release, belongs with these.... In retrospect, it can be seen that the two great independent features of the late 70s were Killer of Sheep and Eraserhead." There's a nice moment further in, as Hoberman looks back on a 1978 "blurb filed by a callow part-time third-stringer."

Updated through 4/1.

David Edelstein in New York: "[W]hy do so many of its black-and-white images feel as if they've always existed - as much a part of our collective unconscious as Walt Whitman or the voice of Paul Robeson?... Killer of Sheep can be seen (and reseen) as a great - the greatest - cinematic tone poem of American urban life."

"[A]n American masterpiece, independent to the bone," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Mr Burnett has a wonderful eye, and his ability to create harmonious compositions from the free-form chaos of the streets brings to mind the work of photographers like Helen Levitt and Robert Frank, best known for his collection The Americans.... [T]here is more to neo-realism than formalist gestures; context counts too, and much like the characters in Rossellini's Open City, Stan and his family are casualties of war. This may be Mr Burnett's most radical truth-telling. In Killer of Sheep, the characters' identities as African-Americans are material and existential givens, while poverty is the equal-opportunity destroyer."

"And what an inexpressibly sad, strange and lovely movie it is," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "I think the writer and filmmaker Michael Tolkin was right when he said that if Killer of Sheep had been made 20 years earlier in Italian, it would be dissected and argued over and memorized in every film-school classroom. But the world Burnett captures on the streets of Watts, circa 1976 - this was his thesis film at UCLA, shot on weekends, over the course of a year, for about $10,000 - is at least as distant to most contemporary viewers as the postwar slums of Rome or Naples."

Armond White throws down the gauntlet again in the New York Press: "Prediction: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep will not get the same self-intoxicated 'best picture of the year' acclaim that critics gave to Army of Shadows last year, even though Killer of Sheep - a far superior movie - is also decades-old and finally receiving belated theatrical release in the United States. The difference is that Killer of Sheep doesn't allow viewers to congratulate themselves on bygone political stances. Although set in the mid-1970s 'present,' Burnett's classic film is very much a distillation of the social and spiritual effects of American poverty (and racism). That's the ever-present subject critics used Jean-Pierre Melville's WWII soporific to escape."

"I worry about the outsized expectations that come with thirty years of buildup and the inevitable "it was good, but..." lobby conversations that will surely follow, and I'm loath to simply heap more praise upon it," worries Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE, "not that it doesn't deserve it, but because the film's brilliance is so singular and modest. In a moviegoing culture that valorizes the contrived self-importance of Crash and the glib indie 'charm' of Little Miss Sunshine, Killer of Sheep feels resolutely other, fashioned with an observational, almost verite aesthetic, a loose, episodic narrative, and a complicated, unsentimentalized approach to class, race, and family."

"A neo-realist silent comedy talkie with a post-Watts riot backdrop," writes Jesse Sweet in the L Magazine.

Earlier: Dave Kehr in the New York Times and Stuart Klawans in the Nation.

Updates: "Seeing Killer of Sheep is an experience as simple and indelible as watching Bresson's Pickpocket or De Sica's Bicycle Thieves for the first time," writes Dana Stevens at Slate. "Despite its aesthetic debt to European art cinema, Burnett's film is quintessentially American in its tone and subject matter. If there's any modern-day equivalent for the movie's matter-of-fact gaze on the ravages of urban poverty, it's the HBO series The Wire."

Scott Macaulay runs an excerpt from James Ponsoldt's interview with Burnett that'll be appearing in the upcoming Spring issue of Filmmaker.

ST VanAirsdale talks with Burnett for the Reeler.

Update, 4/1: Mary McNamara covers the return of Killer of Sheep from a local angle for the Los Angeles Times.

Mr Bean's Holiday.

"It has long been a mystery to the British, who consider Bean to be, at best, an ignoble secret weakness, that Rowan Atkinson's repellent creation is absolutely massive on the Continent." London Times critic Wendy Ide is rattled to hear that Cannes Film Festival director Gilles Jacob is a fan. Mr Bean's Holiday nods not only in Tati's direction but also "appears to be littered with art-house movie references.... What really riles here is not so much the plagiarism (although shame on you all) but rather the fact that the stolen sight gags - Bean overtaking Tour de France cyclists; Bean in drag to evade a road block - are simply not as funny with Atkinson at the controls."

Updated through 3/31.

"They're saying this is Mr Bean's last appearance, but if Rowan Atkinson hasn't got the heart to kill off the character, I'll gladly throttle him by his necktie myself," writes Steve Rose in the Guardian.

"[R]egardless of its quality, it will do huge business, given the apparently insatiable desire of half the children on the planet for the works of Rowan Atkinson's gurning, dysfunctional comic creation," sighs the Telegraph's David Gritten, and sure enough, Evening Standard critic Derek Malcolm slaps it with two out of five stars while the readers are giving it four. "Intriguingly," adds Gritten, "the story is credited to Simon McBurney, mainstay of the group Complicite and a paragon of physical theatre. But a series of over-elaborate sight gags and laboriously conceived comic routines are not quite the same as a coherent script, and consequently the film seems thin gruel."

Update, 3/31: "I sodding hate Mr Bean," grumbles Anna Picard at the Guardian. "He is - and I don't think I'm overstating my case here - the embodiment of pure evil."

Guardian. World cinema special.

Reaching back to 1995, Hannah McGill, director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, traces the path of the cinema's spotlight from Dogme to South America and its "crop of sexy, sweaty, socially conscious movies" to South Korea's "daring, convention-busting auteurs such as Park Chan-Wook and Kim Ki-Duk" to Japanese horror to Hong Kong and China, "providing punchy thrillers and spectacular martial arts epics." So what's next?

"If France has looked a little low on innovation in recent years, Germany is currently raising a host of interesting new directors, among them Fatih Akin, Birgit Grosskopf, Valeska Grisebach and Stefan Krohmer." Also mentioned: Christian Petzold, Hans Christian-Schmid, Stefan Ruzowitzky, Marc Rothemund and, of course, Oscar-winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

"The wider reaches of eastern Europe also seem fired with creativity... Further afield, Turkey is perhaps the country to have most recently produced a bona fide festival demigod," Nuri Bilge Ceylan. "Perhaps it's African cinema, however, that really qualifies as the story of the moment." Besides Hollywood's current infatuation, there's Nollywood and its 1000 movies a year and: "Established directors such as Dani Kouyaté, from Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako, from Mauritania, and the veteran Ousmane Sembene, from Senegal, are attracting new interest, as emerging names such as Burkina Faso's Fanta Regina Nacro and Mali's Salif Traoré find festival acclaim with fresh titles."

As an accompanying PDF, Andrew Pulver presents a "one-stop guide to which countries have produced the hippest filmmakers, and when they've done it." Basically, it's a map with film slate-like post-its all over.

On a somewhat related note: "As buoyed as I am by the industry's growing interest in foreign filmmakers, now would be a good time to offer a few words of caution," writes Patrick Goldstein. "While Hollywood history is full of outsider success stories, from Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder to Ang Lee and Alfonso Cuarón, it is also littered with failures and flame-outs."

Michael Hann announces a "Greatest Foreign Film" competition. Send 'em three titles and "explain why you like each one in a couple of sentences." There's even a prize.

Chicago and docs.

Critics for the Chicago Reader write up about 20 highlights of the Chicago International Documentary Film Festival, which opens today and runs through April 8.

"[D]ocumentary-only festivals have a special appeal," writes Austin Considine in the New York Times. "Audiences can expect a much wider range of styles and subjects than would be found at a general film festival, where documentaries are only a '10- or 20-film sidebar,' said Christopher Kamyszew, the Chicago festival's director."

Updated through 3/31.

Also honorably mentioned in the piece: the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (today through April 8), the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (April 19 through 29), the Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival (April 25 through 29), the Doxa Documentary Film Festival (May 22 through 27) and the Silverdocs AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival (June 12 through 17).

Earlier: Jonny Leahan at indieWIRE on the "Doc Blogs."

Update: AJ Schnack rounds up a preview of the docs on Tribeca's slate.

Updates, 3/31: Dan Mucha sends in a lengthy report to Facets Features and points to Tom Lynch's piece for Newcity on the Chicago festival's origins and future.

Interview. Jafar Panahi.

"Like his previous hits The White Balloon and The Circle, [Jafar] Panahi's soccer movie Offside is blatantly metaphoric and powerfully concrete, deceptively simple and highly sophisticated in its formal intelligence," writes J Hoberman, who also interviews Panahi for the Voice.

And as David D'Arcy notes, prefacing his interview with the Iranian director at the main site, "this time Panahi has added humor to the tenderness and poignancy of his earlier films."

"Perhaps because of censorship that limits what can be shown, Iranian movies are often propelled by argument, which Mr Panahi's restless camera turns into its own kind of action," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Denied official permission to shoot Offside, Mr Panahi went ahead under the pretext of making another, less provocative film. And he concludes with a remarkably exuberant sequence that doubles as a celebration of his own sneaky success."

Michael D'Angelo, writing for Nerve, suggests that ending might be called "Jafar Panahi's Block Party. Sexism may still be well entrenched in Iran, but it shrivels to insignificance amidst the euphoria of nationalism."

"Dissidence has rarely been such a kick," writes Stuart Klawans in the Nation.

"Recalling Fred Zinnemann's technique in High Noon, Panahi uses real time to structure the low-key plot," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "The comparison is apt mainly because Offside debates Iranian values in much the same way that the classic western interrogates loyalties to American mythos." More from Jason Bogdaneris in the L Magazine.

"Panahi is no friend to the theocratic regime in Tehran, which has barred almost all his films from any domestic exhibition," notes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Yet at this writing he can't get a visa to visit the United States either, despite the seemingly obvious propaganda value: We are the defenders of free expression, blah blah. I am shocked, shocked, to report that when it comes to genuine questions of liberty, the Bush administration and the Iranian mullahs are on the same side."

Dorna Khazeni has a longish talk with Panahi in the LA Weekly; Chris Wisniewski interviews him for Reverse Shot; and Jennifer Merin talks with him, too, for the New York Press.

Shorts, 3/29.

In the Independent, Louise Jury hails the launch of Dirk Bogarde.co.uk. Created by Bogarde's nephew, Brock Van den Bogaerde, its 600 pages "a reminder of the literary as well as the acting output of the star of films including The Blue Lamp, Darling and Death in Venice, but also a glimpse into the private world of one of the 20th century's more complex leading men."

The Telegraph's John Hiscock talks with Danny Boyle about Sunshine. Via Movie City News.

"Paul Andrew Williams made a startling debut with low-budget Brit flick London to Brighton last December," writes Chris Tilly, reporting for Time Out on his second project: "The Cottage focuses on two brothers who kidnap an underworld figure and then stumble on a dark rural secret. Andy Serkis and Reece Shearsmith have signed up to star, with Jennifer Ellison and Steve O'Donnell lending support."

It takes quite a while for the San Diego Reader's Duncan Shepherd to finally get around to actually reviewing Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso, but the getting there is good. Then: "I would be much happier in my work if every week of the year I had to see a dusted-off reissue from 1962. Not a lot of them could be more rewarding than this one."

"Since 1915, slavery has been at the heart of some of filmdom's greatest productions, created by top talents ranging from showmen to artistes to blockbuster filmmakers to the Hollywood Ten. The buying and selling of human flesh has appeared onscreen in various forms, including 'white slavery,' but motion picture human bondage appears primarily in four film genres." A primer of sorts from Ed Rampell and Luis Reyes.

Also in the New York Press:

• "One of the finest American film debuts of the new century (and one of the least appreciated) is Dito Montiel's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," declares Armond White. "Montiel turned a working-class memoir - an urban lament - into a poetic appreciation of the music, the almost-stifled feelings and near-tragedies of common life. All that is what's missing from Adam Sandler's respectful good try, Reign Over Me."

• Felicia Feaster: "Stupendously obvious in its divisions between patriot virtue and money-grubbing vice, Training Day director Antoine Fuqua's Shooter is cinema as purgative—a big-budget high colonic to the American political system and a sense of impotent rage against the machine."

• Jennifer Merin: "Air Guitar Nation's main thrust is fun, and it's a blast and a half of that."

• David Freeland on Music From the Inside Out: "The chief problem is that we never hear one extended orchestral piece without interruptions from the players themselves, who weigh in on such ineffable questions as 'What is music?'"

• While the movie at hand is The Hills Have Eyes 2, Eric Kohn asks Wes Craven about the future: "So you won't be sending Freddy Krueger to Iraq?" "Uh, no. But now that you mention it, can you sign this release?"

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Adam Mars-Jones recalls a scene in The Straight Story in which Sissy Spacek's character looks out a window.

We see a pool of light under a street lamp. A ball rolls into it. Nothing happens for a few moments, and then a boy trots up to retrieve his ball. Later in the film it is explained that Spacek's character was bereaved of a child, which accounts for the intensity of her gaze but not the effect of the image on the audience. At this moment, [David] Lynch seems to be saying, "Tell the truth - weren't the images more beautiful when you didn't know what they 'meant'?" Well, yes and no. The images float free of the story. But they need a story to float free of.

You can probably see where this is going: "The story in Inland Empire is everywhere and nowhere.... Eraserhead may have been his most private film, but he cut twenty minutes, unprompted, after its first screening at a Los Angeles film festival. That is the aspect of David Lynch that I missed most of all during the three hours of Inland Empire."

"So where is this vibrant online doc community headed?" asks Jonny Leahan once he's listed and linked to several hubs of documentary-related activity at indieWIRE. "'I think it's clearly moving towards online distribution and exhibition of documentary content,' says [Doug] Block."

DK Holm iChats with Mike Russell about Serenity Tales, a Firefly fan comics site: "Russell is, uncharacteristically so among the common run of reviewers, a happy-go-lucky fellow who proudly wears his nerd cred on his sleeve.... He is also an example of that recent Internet phenomenon, someone who is both a good writer and a good artist, the sort of person who could only have blossomed in a forum such as the world wide web, where such dual talents can be simultaneously employed."

Also at ScreenGrab: Cobra Verde is "one of those lunatic endeavors that is hard to describe in any way that doesn't make it sound more interesting than it is to watch," writes Phil Nugent. "I saw strong men and women charge into that theater with the excitement of a bunch of kids at the carnival, only to file out two hours later in need of rest, refreshment, and the director's head."

"[T]hough The Page Turner clearly aims for ambiguity of meaning, you'd have to be blind, or deaf to the strenuously long-faced score, to miss the signs and portents that keep piling up in this dispiritingly transparent movie, which brandishes its foregone conclusion 20 minutes in," writes Ella Taylor. Also in the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas talks with Paul Verhoeven about Black Book.

Identity Theory film editor Matthew Sorrento revisits "a landmark in France's redefinition of the crime film," Elevator to the Gallows.

Matthew Clayfield: "Like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (perhaps the closest thing to Black this side of Duchamp's Étant donnés, which is saying something when you remember that Duchamp was himself the subject of one of the many conspiracy theories swirling around the bifurcated girl at the time), Black is a kind of memory play, quietly chilling in its revelations. It submerges itself in the Hollywood dream factory and, confirming our worst, unspoken suspicions, reveals it to be an abattoir." At the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne through Sunday.

"Sidney Poitier is his name, and elevating the ethical consciousness of American cinema is his game." David Sterritt on what we and he think of him now that Oprah's put him back in the spotlight again. Also at PopMatters, Bill Gibron on Glen Morgan and his remake of Bob Clarke's Black Christmas.

Ray Winstone's joined the cast of the upcoming fourth Indiana Jones film, reports the Guardian.

Also:

• "For some people, the return of Prick Up Your Ears to cinemas next week will be of little significance," writes Ryan Gilbey. "But for me, this biopic about the short life of the playwright Joe Orton is the catalyst for a tidal wave of ambivalent memories associated with the film's original release."

• "Back in the day, Song of the South might conceivably have been read as a warm-hearted salute to America's 'coloureds,'" blogs the Guardian's Xan Brooks. "Since then it's become a shameful embarrassment for the company, the equivalent of a racist old relation who can't be introduced to polite company." Now that Disney's considering re-introducing it after all, Brooks, who wonders and worries about not being bothered by the film when he saw it at the age of 9, wants to see it on DVD with adult eyes. Also: What are your favorite London movies?

• Katie Allen: "Tax incentives, a wealth of skills and a strong film-making heritage are continuing to draw Hollywood studios to Britain, according to Pinewood Shepperton, which unveiled forecast-beating results yesterday."

Online viewing tip. Ray Pride: "With Julia Loktev's gorgeously restrained Day Night Day Night showing at New Directors / New Films, cinematographer Benoit Debie's showreel is worth a peek, as well as this excerpt from Loktev's film."

Fests and events, 3/29.

"Acting is what drives the selections for Method Fest, the indie film showcase starting its ninth year tonight in Woodland Hills and Calabasas and continuing through Wednesday," writes Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times. Paul Malcolm, writing in the LA Weekly, finds the essential concept "curious": "[H]ighlighting a part of the whole in such a collaborative medium as the movies only underscores how dependent one piece of the puzzle is on all the others." At the same time, "when the presence of actual people onscreen recedes in significance before a digital onslaught of fast-cut, CGI, blue-screen manipulation," that concept "seems more vital now than ever. Too bad that more of this year's films don't match their intentions with solid execution, despite the best efforts of their casts."

In Boston? The Phoenix's Gerald Peary has a week's worth of recommendations.

"During the next two months, as part of its ongoing Essential Cinema series, the Austin Film Society will be showing eight films by writer/director Michael Haneke," writes Josh Rosenblatt in the Austin Chronicle. "Nothing could correspond so perfectly with the arrival of spring - in all its regenerative, erotic giddiness - than eight suffocating movies that traffic almost exclusively in urban alienation, family trauma, and dispassionate ultraviolence."

"Triangle audiences nostalgic for the days of B-fright features can experience homegrown horror at its most bloody and barebones this Saturday during a screening of The Forever Dead at Raleigh's Volume 11 Tavern," alerts Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly.

"[T]he Bryn Mawr Film Institute hopes to prove that not all films flounder the second time around," writes Erin Brodbeck in the Philadelphia City Paper. "On March 31, the theater's The Art of the Remake will feature back-to-back screenings capped off with a post-festival gala to benefit the theater's $2.5 million remodeling project."

"Andrea Staka's Fraulein opened the 7th goEast Film Festival (March 28 - April 3) yesterday evening in Wiesbaden," reports Bénédicte Prot for Cineuropa.

"Christian Petzold is one of the more interesting directors currently working in Germany, and his latest film Yella stood out in the competition selection of this year's Berlinale," writes Stefan Steinberg at the WSWS.

AFI Dallas, 3/29.

"Four hours north from the Whole Earthy shops that sell 'Keep Austin Weird' merchandise, an upscale Dallas thread shop displays, for twice the price, their own T-shirt: 'Keep Dallas Pretentious.'"

So begins Mike Jones's excellent piece at indieWIRE on how the AFI Dallas International Film Festival's inaugural run. After hitting some of the highlights of the lineup, he returns to the theme:

While potshots at Dallas pretension are easy, it's as useless as shooting barrel fish. Dallas doesn't care what you think. They like their art and they like to pay for it. The Dallas Contemporary, The Nasher, and neighboring Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth are all well funded and arguably premiere destinations for modern art in the Midwest. And while Variety reported the fest's pricetag at $4 million, much of that money seemed spent on the filmmakers: from the first class airfare to the swank W Hotel rooms, complete with a 3-bottle gift of fine wine in a fancy Target-designed box (just one item among the avalanche of swag). And when Dallasites show up to see David Lynch present his three-hour, interior-view of Laura Dern's head, they do it in their Neiman Marcus best, they stay through the whole thing, and they applaud when it's over. There is pretension here, and there is also class.

At Cinematical, Jette Kernion extends a "Film Blog Group Hug" to half a dozen sites covering the festival besides, of course, Cinematical itself and the festival's own blog.

Philadelphia. Lineup.

The lineup and schedule of the Philadelphia Film Festival (April 5 through 18) are now online.

"I'm particularly proud of some of our program this year," blogs Michael Lerman as he posts plenty of pix as appetizers. "Some of you cinefiles have probably seen some of this stuff already, but that also means you know we did a pretty good job collecting some of the best from the last six months of festivals around the world."

Shorts, 3/28.

As Jacques Rivette's Ne touchez pas la hache (Don't Touch the Axe) opens in France today, european-films.net editor Boyd van Hoeij talks with Jeanne Balibar, who "has an interesting take on what the duel between the would-be lovers really is about at a deeper, more human and less politicised level: 'This film is about sex,' she says with the sincere seriousness that only a French actress could bring to such an explanation, 'and more particularly about two people trying to reach an orgasm at the same moment. The two hours of the film are really about synchronising their simultaneous orgasms.'"

"Hildegard of Bingen, one of the most important figures of the medieval Catholic Church, will be the subject of the new film by German director Margarethe von Trotta." Scott Roxborough in the Hollywood Reporter.

In the Los Angeles Times, Jay A Fernandez talks with Jonathan Nolan about that sci-fi screenplay he'll be writing for Spielberg.

Like Michael Tully, Glenn Kenny is wondering what Sam Mendes is thinking: "One of the many things about Revolutionary Road, besides the main thing, which is that it's a freakin' masterpiece, is that it's one of the most unrelentingly grim novels of its ilk. I would be overstating the case considerably if I were to aver that it makes John Barth's not dissimilarly-themed The End of the Road look like The Code of the Woosters, but the fact that the idea of saying it occurred to me at all ought to give you an idea of just how grim it is."

"Tazza, written and directed by Choi Dong-hoon, is, like his feature film debut Big Swindle, a fast-paced crime thriller, buttressed by a fantastic cast and a complex but never confusing plot," writes Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org, where Adam Hartzell has launched a new blog, Notes Inspired by the Film.

"[I]t is not the bizarre back story that marks out Rag Tag, the debut feature by Adaora Nwandu," writes Patrick Barkham. "The 29-year-old British-Nigerian director has entered territory that is still taboo in cinema: she's written and directed a story about a romance between two black men." Also in the Guardian: Stuart Jeffries asks Honor Blackman, "How did you get to be Pussy Galore?" The answer: "I was very, very hot at the time."

"Lou Ye, whose film Summer Palace was feted at Cannes last year but earned him and producer Nai An a five-year ban from making movies in China, is currently raising money to make The Last Hour," a film the Guardian describes as being about "a Palestinian who is abandoned by his wife after being imprisoned for 10 years in an Israeli jail."

In the Village Voice:

• Rob Nelson on After the Wedding: "Playing God, on one side of the camera or another, is the essence of Dogme. What happens after the wedding comprises a full three-quarters of [Susanne] Bier's epic, whose near-Biblical twists and turns - I wouldn't think of giving them away - are enough to fill four weepies." More from Marcy Dermansky.

• "German director Andreas Dresen (Grill Point, Willenbrock) has made an oddly buoyant little film about loneliness," writes Michelle Orange. "Part Sex in der City, part Dogme doldrums, Summer in Berlin is most affecting as a character study of two women in their late thirties, at the precise moment in their lives when, with middle age on the march, the fritterings and posturings of youth offer respite even as they throw its loss into relief."

• "No doubt about it, The Hawk Is Dying verges on the ludicrous, but it couldn't be otherwise," writes Nathan Lee. "This half-mad cine-Icarus risks a perilous Bressonian ideal: 'The greater the success, the closer it verges on failure.'" More from Katherine Folk in the L Magazine.

"Ultimately, The Hoax seems designed to appeal to the larcenous impulse in all of us," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Having invented his own relationship to his shadowy subject, [Clifford] Irving anticipates today's rampaging identity thieves, but for higher stakes."

More from Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine, where Nicolas Rapold writes, "The strategy of Black Book is blitzkrieg, for better and for worse."

"His films are too sick and mean to be guiltless kitsch and too weird to enjoy just for the laughs," writes Violet Glaze. "Let's put it this way – even ooky-kooky Tim Burton won't be making a biopic about sleazemeister [Dwain] Esper anytime soon." Also at PopMatters: Bill Gibron on Re-Animator.

Nick Schager has written a piece for SOMA Magazine entitled "From Inland Empire to Year of the Dog: The Many Reinventions of Laura Dern." Click his name to figure out how to read it.

"Of all the groundbreaking shows Norman Lear developed during the 1970s, none were stranger or more gradually rewarding than the comically abstruse Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," writes Eric Henderson at Slant. "[Louise] Lasser's Mary Hartman floats through her daily trials and tribulations either slack-jawed or with a vacuous death-grin affixed to her pigtail-flanked face, like Edith Bunker on Quaaludes." Also, Ed Gonzalez on Ping Pong.

"If you're looking for a documentary about the electronic music scene filled with historical lectures, performance clips and talking heads, Headspace... The Sound of Life... isn't for you and doesn't try to be," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "It's experimental rather than expository." Also: "No one can know whether Bizet, whose Gypsy opera, Carmen, is set in Spain and sung in French, would have approved of the movie musical U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha. But you suspect that he would have admired the filmmakers' gall." More on that on from Julia Wallace in the Voice.

"By the time News War concludes, the cumulative effect of watching pale-skinned men speak woefully into the camera about their deepest fears and regrets for 270 minutes is a little like polishing off an Ingmar Bergman double-feature," writes James Hughes in Stop Smiling of the Frontline series. "Fortunately [producer] Lowell Bergman continues to hunt for stories in the real world, with sources who share his air, not just his bandwidth."

Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE: "Sacco and Vanzetti, like Michael Winterbottom's wretched Road to Guantanamo, sets out to condemn an atmosphere of hysterical, flimsily supported accusation, but finally can't resist firmly establishing that those accusations, of course, definitively aren't true, changing the subject from the pure process of accusation to the need for vindication." More from J Hoberman in the Voice.

Today's Color Me Kubrick pointer will send you to Robert Cashill: "The director, Brian W Cook, and the screenwriter, Anthony Frewin, both associates of the real Kubrick, would have us believe that the more ridiculous Conway became, the easier it was for the swindled to believe that he was the Olympian director, who lived on his own unique plain, if not the gay fantasia Conway envisioned for himself. Maybe. But I suspect they fell hard for the comic Malkovich who emerged from Being John Malkovich, and let the performer, who has an affinity for rogues, fool them into more and more improbable masquerades within the Kubrick persona."

"Mira Nair did a lovely job adapting Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling novel The Namesake," writes Marcy Dermansky. "In fact, in one of those rare instances, the accomplished filmmaker (Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair) improved upon the book."

Joe Baltake: "For better or worse, Norbit is an authentic Jerry Lewis movie, an exhilarating throwback to the kind of movies that Lewis made, specifically the ones he made with director Frank Tashlin." Via Dave Kehr.

The Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns gives Blades of Glory a "D+."

At Greenbriar Picture Shows, John McElwee looks back on the many ways RKO flubbed the launch of Citizen Kane.

"Given Truffaut's disdain for British cinema (excluding his beloved Alfred Hitchcock), it's surprising how excited the French now appear to be about it," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "In recent years, French companies have been investing in every aspect of the British film business from production to distribution and exhibition. French money is paying for more and more of our most cherished British movies."

"There will never come a time when everything is available." Kristin Thompson argues that the dream of the "Celestial Multiplex," a fine name for what AO Scott, among many, have been dreaming would come to pass - won't.

Not film-related, but heavens. Time's Richard Lacayo: "Tomorrow the Hyatt Foundation will announce that this year's Pritzker Prize, architecture's most visible honor, will go to Richard Rogers, the British pioneer of high tech, designer of the furiously imagined Lloyd's of London headquarters in London and co-designer (with Renzo Piano) of the Pompidou Center in Paris."

Online browsing and viewing tip. Yahoo UK's got a fresh feature on The Bourne Ultimatum. Via Jeffrey Overstreet.

Online viewing tip #1. Bits of Incubus, the 1965 horror flick filmed in Esperanto and starring William Shatner. Via Jason Kottke.

Online viewing tip #2. At ScreenGrab, Faisal Qureshi comments on David Lynch's The Amputee.

Online viewing tip #3. At Bright Lights After Dark, Alan Vanneman finds the legendary Beat flick, Pull My Daisy.

Online viewing tip #4. The teaser for Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western; logboy explains how to see it at Twitch.

Online viewing tip #5. "Recently, filmmaker Joe Swanberg (Kissing on the Mouth, Hannah Takes The Stairs) told me he thought Demme's Stop Making Sense was as close to perfect a movie as he knows; directed by Jonathan Demme and shot by Henri Alekan, the video for New Order's 'Perfect Kiss' (1985) always struck me as a perfect film." I can't believe it. For years, I've argued that this is the best music video ever made. And not only does Ray Pride seem to agree, he's also found it.

Online viewing tips. At TickleBooth, Ajit finds clips to accompany Cinematical's list of "Seven Great Movie Conversations."

Fests and events, 3/28. Elsewhere edition.

"In the wake of SXSW, the spring regional festival season begins," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE. "First stop: Cleveland, OH. Despite the bleak weather and peculiar image that one is in a multiplex in a mall sandwiched between two five star hotels, the Cleveland International Film Festival draws large local crowds to a comprehensive survey of some of the best that the last year in world premiere festivals has had to offer."

Chris Tilly in London: "Rock 'n' Roll Cinema takes place at 93 Feet East this Sunday, and having attended the last event, I urge all the TOMB readers out there to head down as it's the best Sunday afternoon's entertainment I've had in ages."

Maxim Jakubowski visits The Air Is on Fire (through May 27 in Paris): "[T]he paintings are not the only element to provide insight into [David] Lynch's mental landscape: the whole exhibition is bathed in ominous music, actually composed by Lynch but reminiscent of his film soundtracks by Angelo Badalamenti."

Online viewing tip #1. Kent Osborne's South By Southwest 2007 Experience!.

Online viewing tip #2. Spout's Paul Moore talks with Quiet City director Aaron Katz and Hannah Takes the Stairs director and star, Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig.

Fests and events, 3/28. Left coast edition.

"A late entry into the SFIAAFF line-up was a proposed panel - 'Down and Dirty Pictures' - with the 'bad boys' of Asian American cinema: Gregg Araki, Roddy Bogawa and Jon Moritsugu, moderated by Marcus Hu," writes Michael Guillén, and before he presents a transcript, he passes along a terrific note from Bogawa explaining why he couldn't make it. Parts 1 and 2.

Adventure Poseidon The, Anne McGuire's remake-reversal of The Poseidon Adventure, screens tomorrow evening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Johnny Ray Huston finds it "a rare example of formal art practice that never loses touch with the pop appeal of its source material."

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Max Goldberg: "Given the feverish tenor of [Godard's] output, the relative quietude of 1967's Two or Three Things I Know about Her (playing at the Castro Theatre in a striking new 35mm print from Rialto Pictures) comes as something of a surprise 40 years on. Sandwiched between the hyperventilating back-and-forth of Masculine-Feminine and Weekend's apocalyptic moan, the film is the eye of the storm of Godard's 60s, that crucial moment between impact and explosion." SF360 rounds up related links.

And Dennis Harvey previews "A Month of Sleazy Sundays, four unholy nights of vintage exploitation gems beginning this April Fools' Day at the Mission District's lovable Victoria Theatre, brought to you by Another Hole in the Head and SF Indiefest's Bruce Fletcher, among others."

Fests and events, 3/28. Right coast edition.

"If the underground is defined not only by economic status but aesthetic opposition to mainstream culture, where are the escape routes in a mainstream culture that instantly commodifies and co-opts?" asks Nathan Lee. Previewing the New York Underground Film Festival (tonight through April 3), he never quite answers that one, and admits as much, but as mjr blogs for Reverse Shot, "Viva, the NYUFF's opening night (tonight) film, surely makes a good case that the current crop of underground directors are more interested in retro DIY rather than untrodded field mines of creativity." Which isn't to say mjr agrees with Lee: "There exist countercurrents inside countercurrents, and the NYUFF is diverse and rich enough to provide more substantial fare beyond the accessible, palatable 'works of homage, pastiche, and appropriation' Lee has chosen to focus on and which, yes, remain the underground's easiest sources of amusement and targets of criticism. Trust me, there's more, and better."

For the Reeler's preview, Elena Marinaccio talks with festival co-director Mo Johnston.

Back in the Voice, Elliott Stein hosts a roundtable chat on Film Forum's three-week series of B Musicals. Jessica Freeman-Slade previews the series for the Reeler and talks with Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum's director of repertory programming.

Besides Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates, most of what's on offer at the Boston Turkish Film Festival, opening tomorrow and running through May 13, is "a look at what the Turkish cineplexes might be showing and a reflection, perhaps, of what’s on the collective mind of Turkish culture," notes the Phoenix's Peter Keough. "The details and the trappings may differ from standard Middle American fare, but many of the themes remain familiar."

Grindhouse, 3/28.

Variety's Anne Thompson's caught the LA premiere of Grindhouse: "The audience groaned and screamed and ducked in their seats with sheer pleasure throughout the three-hour running time."

Kevin Kelly's got "Grindhouse Junket Reports" at Cinematical: "QT Talks Future Grindhouse Projects, Rose McGowan Talks Black Oasis, Zoe Bell Talks Stunts, Jordan Ladd On Hostel II, More!"

Part 2: "Kurt Russell On Remakes, Rosario Dawson Talks OCT Film, Marley Shelton Gives Deleted Scene Details, More!"

Also, Matt Bradshaw: "My Favorite Grindhouse Movies."

Updated through 4/3.

"After over ten years of denying myself the double features the New Beverly has routinely offered, I finally made it out to La Brea and Beverly Sunday night, March 11, for my first Grindhouse Fest double feature, John Flynn's Rolling Thunder and Charles B Pierce's The Town That Dreaded Sundown," writes Dennis Cozzalio. And he went back on March 25 for Roger Vadim's Pretty Maids All in A Row (1971) and Richard Lerner's Revenge of the Cheerleaders. Much is written about all four.

Lou Lumenick in the New York Post: "If you want to sample Times Square moviegoing in all of its raffish glory from the 1970s and early 1980s, you don't need a time machine - just take the M60 bus out to East Elmhurst, Queens, and be prepared to watch your back." Via Jeffrey Wells.

"So, what are going to be the films to make up the second Grindhouse double feature?" asks Brendon Connelly. He finds a few more dropped hints.

Online browsing tip. Says Rex Sorgatz: "Entertainment Weekly: Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez pick their Top 10 Movie Posters. (See also: Grindhouse cover story.)"

Updates, 3/29: Holding her nose, Nikki Finke points to Josh Horowitz's interview with Eli Roth, who's being encouraged by Tarantino and Rodriguez to turn his Grindhouse trailer for Thanksgiving into an actual feature. Though he feels that "terms like 'torture porn' are offensive," he also rails, "When I go see an R-rated horror movie, I want lots of violence. I want nudity. I want sex and violence mixed together. What's wrong with that? Am I the only one? I don't think so."

For the Los Angeles Times, Mark Olsen talks with Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright about their trailers. And to Tarantino: "To me the only thing missing from our grind-house movies is they are not quite sleazy enough... These guys brought the sleaze factor. They are coming from a sleaze place that me and Robert did not come from, but that needed to be there for the picture to be proper."

"Last night, at the historic Paramount Theater in downtown Austin, the Austin Film Society hosted the local premiere of this willdly anticipated new film in grand style," blogs Matt Dentler. "The theater was overflowing with attendees, many of the stars made an appearance, and we all sat down for three hours of insane genre film homage. It's fitting, given that almost all of the film was shot and is set, within the wonderful atmosphere of Austin." He's got thoughts on the film ("the entire experience is an assault on the senses") and lots of pix.

Updates, 3/30: Bob and Harvey Weinstein's "career-long investment in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez has yielded the $53 million Grindhouse, a daring gamble that puts the showmen where they like to be: on the edge," writes, once again Anne Thompson in Variety, where she and Sharon Swart also report: "Given Tarantino's Cannes history, it's possible Death Proof could land a competition slot at fest's 60th edition this year."

Blogging for the Guardian, Will Lawrence: "It's a dizzying double bill. Those who worry that Hollywood is devoid of creativity need to see Grindhouse: it's a scintillating sliver of shlock and shock, fired from two smoking barrels."

Jette Kernion and Scott Weinberg were at that Austin premiere for Cinematical: pix and audience reactions galore!

Nick Dawson finds more related online browsing and viewing and posts about it at Filmmaker.

Updates, 3/31: "Casually mean-spirited and purposefully dumb, Tarantino and Rodriguez treat sex and violence like one big cackling joke," writes Jeremiah Kipp at Slant. "It's disaffected and campy, but unlike a lot of those sleazy exploitation movies that stood the test of time, it lacks any real anger, machismo, or even sleaziness. In other words, it's difficult to invest in anything that's happening beyond regarding it as one big gooey lark."

"The double bill is wildly uneven, and you could be excused for cutting the night at the grindhouse short," writes Jürgen Fauth. Rodriguez's Planet Terror is "a four-star riot, bound to claim its place next to other cult zombie classics," while Tarantino's Death Proof "attempts an odd deconstruction of the streamlined seventies car chase film (Vanishing Point is quoted again and again) and fails miserably."

Online viewing tips. At Cinematical, Ryan Stewart points to Eli Roth's faux trailer for Thanksgiving, while, at Twitch, Mack points to five clips.

Updates, 4/1: Paul Cullum has a freewheeling interview with Rose McGowan in the Los Angeles Times.

"A pair of pictures devoted to re-creating their progenitors' grubby aesthetics and visceral kicks, but with vastly greater budgets, higher-end actors and a patina of hipster cool, they part company when it comes to talent and freshness," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "On the basis of sheer accuracy, Rodriguez's installment wins points for more exactly replicating the hollow, soul-sucking badness of many low-grade gore films, even as he raids Romero's great Dead cycle of zombie splatter epics. By contrast, Tarantino's road-rage opus so far exceeds almost anything made at the time in terms of dialogue and performance that it seems like a different beast, one half plotless gabfest, the other half insane car chase."

"Understand, I love my junk cinema," writes Vince Keenan. "I’m the guy who recently binged on Coffin Joe movies. But when it comes to true grind house, I may be out of my depth." Do read his reasons for his worry. Or pride, whichever way you cut it.

Reed Tucker and Henry Cabot Beck talk with Rodriguez and Tarantino for the New York Post.

Updates, 4/2: Cindy Pearlman has a fun long talk with Tarantino and Rodriguez for the Chicago Sun-Times. Via Movie City News.

"If you're not familiar with the 60s and 70s exploitation flicks that inspired Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to make Grindhouse, you might want to take a peek at Stephen Kessler's The Independent to prepare yourself for the three-hours-plus epic opening Friday at theaters and drive-ins everywhere," suggests Joe Leydon. "And if you are a connoisseur of schlock cinema - that is, if you're a guilty-pleasure-seeker who fondly recalls the low-budget, high-concept quickies of New World Pictures, American-International and other now-defunct manufacturers of full-tilt, down-and-dirty B-movies - well then you, too, likely will enjoy Kessler's overlooked and under-rated pastiche."

Online listening tip. Tarantino is a guest on The Treatment.

Another online listening tip. At IFC News, "Alison Willmore and Matt Singer take a look back at what grindhouse theaters were actually like, what kind of movies they showed, and where modern day films like Grindhouse fit in."

Jeffrey M Anderson lays out an interesting comparison at Cinematical: The friendship - and working relationship - between Rodriguez and Tarantino is not unlike that between John Huston and Orson Welles.

Updates, 4/3: "Certainly, there aren't specific requirements mandated to make a movie meet the grindhouse distinction, but it's fairly obvious that Tarantino and Rodriguez are using the moniker to make their standard scare fests appear far more scandalous than they are," argues Bill Gibron at PopMatters.

Movie City News points to Varaces: The Movie Car Chases Database.

DK Holm offers a "Beginner's Guide" to the music of Grindhouse at ScreenGrab.

"As a second-generation exploitation film junkie with a video stock pushing 1500, I have dedicated thousands upon thousands of hours to wading through the worst, vilest, most shoddily produced pieces of motion picture trash in order to find rare garbage that shines." At DVD Panache, Charles Fontaine offers "a back-to-back breakdown of two quintessential Grindhouse genres and summaries of some defining movies: the rare gemstones that shine through the mud."

Brendon Connelly has DVD and Cannes news. Look for the non-surprise of at least one round of double-dipping in July, evidently.

Interview. Herschell Gordon Lewis.

"What redeems your exploitive gore films - if redemption is even necessary - is their abiding sense of humor. Can you speak some about the strategic blend of horror and humor?" asks Michael Guillén.

"I can," replies direct marketing expert and "Godfather of Gore" Herschell Gordon Lewis, "and I'd be delighted to because - if we get to make Grim's Fairy Tales, and I've been in negotiation for months and months with somebody to produce this thing - it is in my opinion, at least for the time being, the ultimate blend between gore and humor. You see, we've come through future shock and rocketed out the other end of it. The day of just raw - what should I call it? - bloodletting is about to go into eclipse. We have movies that are unrelentingly unpleasant. For my stuff, I want the audience to sit there and realize that we didn't take any of it seriously and that they don't take any of it seriously."

ND/NF, 3/28.

"This Saturday and Sunday, the programmers for New Directors / New Films are presenting a selection worthy of the festival's storied history and the too-often-unmet promise inherent in its name: Reprise [site], one of the most passionately and intellectually uninhibited works from a young director I've seen in ages," writes Manohla Dargis. "Directed by Joachim Trier, who wrote the tender, funny, narratively ambitious screenplay with his fellow Norwegian Eskil Vogt, this galvanizing first feature traces the parallel adventures of two best friends whose twinned literary aspirations and everyday lives take the shape of a punk-rock bildungsroman." Two more recommendations: Lionel Baier's Stealth [site] and Craig Zobel's Great World of Sound.

Also in the New York Times, AO Scott's tips for the final stretch: Congorama [site], "a madcap melodrama, a wild jaunt through some of the backwaters of the Francophone world that somehow, without making a big deal about it, touches on quite a few of the central puzzles and anxieties of modern life"; Euphoria [site] "is vivid and baffling. I mean both of those descriptions as compliments"; and Day Night Day Night, "for its seriousness of purpose and exactness of execution, certainly counts as a pleasant surprise."

First Person. John Kovacevich.

Recognize that face? Did you see The Pursuit of Happyness? Remember Young Executive #2? That was John Kovacevich. And here's his site.

But now at the main site, and with self-deprecating humor (but not too self-deprecating!), he tells a few good stories about what happened when a major Hollywood production came to San Francisco.

ND/NF Dispatch. 1.

David D'Arcy recommends three films in the series running through April 1.

Rather than scrounge for a theme running through this year's New Directors / New Films Series, a festival that includes films from Brazil to Ireland, from China to Canada, I'll let others make those connections. There's enough to say about the films which I've liked so far.

Padre Nuestro, which premiered at Sundance, is the immigrant drama which gives the contemporary American immigration story, or at least this story, the cinematic power of the immigration tales that were told by the Italian neo-realists. Think of Sicilians coming north to work in Milan. At least Sicilians were citizens of the country where they were working.

Christopher Zalla's film is built around the crudest kind of identity theft. A Mexican youth, Pedro, who never knew his father, is heading in the back of a truck to New York when Juan jumps in, fleeing from a gang in Juarez. We never learn why, but he's anything but innocent. He steals a knapsack from the trusting Pedro, and with that he heads off to find the father, a bearish dishwasher, and to exploit the prospect of someone else to rob. The New York that both young men encounter, which is really Brooklyn, is a place of foul streets, crowded apartments, restaurant kitchens and shadows in which underpaid illegals live. It's a world that many in the film's audience might not know.

The mistrusting father is first scornful toward the youth who claims to be his son, and scorned by his co-workers in the kitchen where he's toiled for years, but eventually the paternal instinct kicks in, just in time to be betrayed.

Zalla's film tells two stories by following its two characters, an innocent looking for a parent and a petty criminal looking from a higher level of prey. Both fit into the immigrant food chain of New York, shot with a tactile elegance by Igor Martinovic in shadowy tones that make you think of neo-realism once again.

In Once, which I've missed at a few festivals, a busker (Glenn Hansard) sings his heart out at night about the girl he still loves, but sings familiar songs during the grey Dublin day so passersby will stand around for a few minutes and leave some money. By chance, a Czech immigrant (Marketa Irglova) who somehow found her way to Dublin, listens to one of his originals on the street. If she's not hooked, she's at least curious, in part because he can fix vacuum cleaners, and she has a broken one, which he fixes. The sight of her walking down the Dublin streets with him (we never learn their names), holding the hose of her vacuum as if it were the leash of a wheeled dog that was rolling behind her, is something you could imagine in a production of a play by Beckett. Here it's more innocent than absurd.

Soon there's love between the frustrated busker and woman who, with her daughter and mother, is part of the army of immigrants serving the newly-prosperous gentry of Dublin. Immigrants to Ireland? What sounds improbable to Americans (especially Irish-Americans) has been a fact there for more than decade now.

This film is all about sound. The sound of two very different voices getting to know each other, first on the wet streets, and then in the studio. There's also the sound of the busker's songs as they metamorphose from street songs into something more refined. There's no sex here. Love becomes friendship.

Once has been described by many critics as a musical, but it really isn't. The story is not told through songs, and the film is more about love and hope than it is about the creation of a band, if you're thinking of The Commitments, the group in which director John Carney was a member. Carney has turned out to be a sensitive director, who can make a touching kind of cinema out of basic ingredients in the surroundings and the script. Once is a genuinely tender story.

I suppose that borders and migration could be themes of this year's ND/NF, even though the US immigration debate seems to have slid off the front pages, now that there's another scandal for the Bush administration to defend. In Padre Nuestro, the story is obvious. In Once, the busker's plan is to leave his immigrant friend to make a career for himself in London - another Irish immigrant in search of a new life.

In Love for Sale, directed by Karim Ainouz, sexy and headstrong Hermila leaves Sao Paolo with her young son for the northeastern town of Iguatu, a place with great beaches but no economy. To raise money to go somewhere else, she turns to selling herself. On an economic level, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea. She's one of the prettiest girls in town. It all catches up with her as Ainouz tells the story as a mix of hard-edged realism (with bitter doses of family life) and lyrical shots of the landscape and the radiant blue sky. He can also show the boredom of provincial life without boring us.

In Madame Sata, Ainouz gave us a good look at sexual manipulation. Here he's introduced us to a new actress, Hermila Guedes. I hope we see more of her.

Shorts, 3/27.

Those who've taken to reading e-Cahiers du Cinéma can supplement this month's cover package on Jacques Rivette's Don't Touch the Axe with a new round of additions to Order of the Exile, which include Rivette's "Letter on Rossellini," new, or rather, vintage interviews and essays, all of which can, of course, be savored with or without the Cahiers.

"The most profound artistic statement made on music's new role in post-war, post-modern America did not come from a musician or writer," writes Eric Harvey at Pitchfork. "It came from Alfred Hitchcock, who in the 1950s was entering what would become the most significant creative peak of any American-based film director. Rear Window is frequently cited as one of his greatest works, but conversations regarding its profound social comment are typically restricted to voyeurism. There is, of course, plenty to talk about in that regard, but Hitchcock's incorporation of popular music into every square inch of the film's imagined urban courtyard setting adds intriguing depth and complexity to the conversation."

So Bill Clinton was talking about his favorite TV shows the other night, as Paul J Gough tells us in the Hollywood Reporter, and he made a few headlines when he included 24 on his list, adding, "even though an uber right-wing guy writes it." As it happens, the November 3rd Club has been engaged in a lively debate over 24 ever since the appearance of Jane Mayer's profile of the show's co-creator and executive producer, Joel Surnow in the New Yorker last month.

"Martin Scorsese is looking to direct Leonardo DiCaprio in the film adaptation of Jordan Belfort's upcoming tell-all autobiography The Wolf of Wall Street for Warner Bros Pictures, with The Sopranos scribe Terence Winter aboard to write," reports Pamela McClintock for Variety. Also, McClintock and Michael Fleming report that Darren Aronofsky may direct Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon in a boxing picture.

Speaking of adaptations (and DiCaprio), Michael Tully writes an open letter to Sam Mendes: "Please don't do it."

"Ricky Gervais has finally signed up for his first leading role in an American movie," reports Time Out's Chris Tilly.

"A forthcoming film about Adolf Hitler's would-be assassin has sparked criticism from the dead man's family," reports the Guardian. "Descendants of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg object to the choice of Tom Cruise for the lead role, fearing that the story will be turned into 'propaganda' for the actor's Scientology beliefs."

Also:

• More than a little perturbed by La Vie en Rose, Agnès Poirier argues that biopics "often come up at a time of national drought of imagination and inventiveness, revealing reactionary politics and cultural emptiness, if not downright ridicule."

• Michael Billington talks with Christopher Hampton, who's written the screenplay for the adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement "as well as an original script about Tokyo Rose, the Japanese-American woman trapped in Tokyo during the second world war and later tried by the Americans for treason on totally trumped-up charges. But the really cheering news is that Hampton has lately rediscovered his passion for theater."

• "Why is there increasingly such a gulf between prominent female public figures and the way they are portrayed in films?" asks Barbara Ellen. "One might even argue that there is a growing trend for the neutering of halfway interesting female characters in film and the first step is always wilfully inappropriate casting. Not just in the case of [Renée] Zellweger and [Beatrix] Potter, but also with Jane Austen and the recent movie, Becoming Jane."

Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein take indieWIRE's questions on The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair.

"Adam Curtis and BBC2 deserve much credit for keeping alive the idea of the ambitious, single-voice television essay," writes Max Steuer in a piece on The Trap for Prospect. "But there is something deeply worrying when the style of debate we are given plays with ideas without understanding them, and exploits our fascination with conspiracies."

"The story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti remains a clarion call for strict judicial oversight and the fierce protection of civil liberties." Annie Anderson for In These Times on Peter Miller's new documentary Sacco and Vanzetti.

"It's interesting to speculate about what a plagiarized film would be," proposes David Bordwell.

"To be honest, when I first set out to write this essay, I figured, 'I'll keep it real and drop bombs on Gandhi,'" admits Reihan Salam in Slate. "But watching the film again, I was struck by how much of it I remembered vividly. It's difficult to overstate Gandhi's impact on my life and on the world. Even now, veterans of the anti-apartheid movement praise the movie as an inspiration, and high-minded do-gooders have dubbed an Arabic version for screening across the West Bank. While Gandhi isn't about to bring peace to the Middle East, it's actually a pretty great movie."

"One of the most pleasurable movies I own," writes Girish, "is Alain Resnais's romantic-musical comedy On Connaît La Chanson (1997), in which Resnais, as an homage to Dennis Potter, uses French pop songs that actors lip-sync to."

Among the DVDs Dave Kehr reviews this week: Resnais's Muriel and Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp. Also in the New York Times: "The professor is first impressed with Liu's brilliance and diligence but turns against him when he begins to pursue a project that goes against his mentor's favorite theory. He pulls the rug out from Liu's doctoral thesis, meaning that the student will have to leave school and seek a job without his degree. Instead Liu, played by Ye Liu, gets a gun." Dennis Overbye looks into the real-life parallels behind the story told in Dark Matter, winner of the Alfred P Sloan Prize at Sundance.

Vibhuti Patel talks with Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake, about Mira Nair's adaptation. Also in Outlook India, Namrata Joshi: "In the book vs film debate, my vote goes to the book but the film too holds its own." And for Time Out, Ben Walters interviews Nair.

"Maybe only a German could make a film about these events, the oracles say, now that the film has been screened in Poland." Signandsight translates Fritz Göttler's piece for the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Volker Schlöndorff's Strajk. "He didn't want to make a docu-drama, he says, but a heroic ballad. And this is where the problem lies, the straightforwardness of his storytelling, the result of his intense engagement. We encountered this in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. And it's just as vexing here, because it lacks the moments of inconsistency on which cinema - which never renounces its Brechtian tradition - thrives."

Ruedigar Suchsland talks with German writer and director Anne Wild for Cineuropa.

"La Belle Captive is a brilliantly constructed mystery," writes Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica, "meticulously elliptical, repeatedly coming back to the same semi-ending... [Alain] Robbe-Grillet drops many clues, some of them add up to something, others just create more confusion."

Vince Keenan watches all four films in the Michael Shayne Collection in rapid succession: "Concocting disguises that fool no one like a proto-Fletch, tossing off sharp lines, engaging in deft physical comedy while still coming across as a man who can handle himself, [Lloyd] Nolan essentially creates the modern PI template out of whole cloth."

There'll be a DVD in May, notes Mike Russell, "But the biggest treat is getting a chance to discover, on a big screen, that Becket contains some hot-blooded, laugh-out-loud scene-chews by two of the greatest, drunkest actors in film history, Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton."

"Re-Animator is such a fierce, energetic, high-flying concoction that every aspect of it feels like a well-tuned joke - from its timeless, TV-tinged university setting to the iconic acting to the balls-out comic gore, which predated Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2 by a few years, and in any case set a new standard for discomfiting dismemberment satire," writes Michael Atkinson. Also: "Scabrous fun of a newer stripe, Ã?lex de la Iglesia's The Perfect Crime has this nasty Spaniard, in a crowd of nasty Spaniards, going more and more glitzily commercial." And also at IFC News, "Small Town Noir," An annotated list from Matt Singer and Alison Willmore.

"Which classic film would you most like to see given a proper DVD restoration?" asks C Jerry Kutner of "all you bloggers and cinephiles out there" at Bright Lights After Dark. His own answer: "The 1936 Alexander Korda production of Things To Come. Story and screenplay by HG Wells. Designed and directed by the brilliant William Cameron Menzies." The current version floating around, he argues, simply will not do.

J Robert Parks on The Lives of Others: "It's not that I believe people can't change, but this middle-brow film makes it sound like all you need is just to meet the right people. The movie even posits with a straight face that anyone who truly loves music can't be bad. Excuse me if I'm reminded of the great Simpsons quote about Sideshow Bob, 'No one who speaks German can be an evil man.'"

"After the Wedding is the weakest of the films nominated for the 2006 Foreign-Language Film Oscar," writes Robert Cashill. "But it's still pretty good, and the final proof of a strong year for that category."

"If talk about the best contemporary screen actresses wasn't pretty much limited to those who speak English, Moon [So-ri] would be considered as good, if not better than a number of her Anglo-American peers," writes Peter Nellhaus.

At Zoom In Online, Reid Rosefelt recommends the "searing, devastating" Peppermint Candy: "While there is no question that knowledge of Korean history adds resonance to the movie, pretty much anything you need to know is woven into the story of the film."

"Ah, Eurospy flicks," sighs David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back. "Cheap, cheerful, colorful, silly – cinematic Froot Loops for the soul. And they don't come much goofier than the Kommissar X films."

Nick Dawson talks with Color Me Kubrick director Brian Cook for Filmmaker; on the blog, he adds a couple of extras, too.

Also: Scott Macaulay quotes enthusiastically from Joshua Holland's Alternet interview with Maxed Out director James Scurlock.

Whatever happened to San Francisco's 17 Reasons sign - and how did it end up on The L Word? Jenni Olson has the story at OurChart.

"Should Film Festivals Out Their Problem Guests?" AJ Schnack has very mixed feelings about this - and two stories to tell as well. Gives him reason, too, to point to David Jay Lasky's profile of Derek Magyar for the Advocate.

More fests:

• "In its 9th year, the fest is a prominent destination on the international documentary circuit, falling on the calendar just after SXSW and before Hot Docs and Full Frame, [the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival] is emerging as a viable venue for European premieres of US docs, combining a core of smart and compelling programming with a filmmaker-friendly ambience," reports David Wilson.

• Also at indieWIRE, Reagan Alexander from the Bermuda International Film Festival, celebrating its 10th year: "This year's spirited line-up showcased festival winners from the past year alongside independent features, favorites of BIFF's past, and shorts without sacrificing any of the festival's unique charm or trademark intimacy."

• Chris Hansen took The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah to AFI Dallas and had a "really great experience. But also highly surreal."

• The Lumière Reader carries on covering New Zealand's traveling World Cinema Showcase.

Look at all those Blog-a-Thons. Edward Copeland marks up his calendar.

Online listening tip. Slavoj Zizek and Sophie Fiennes discuss The Pervert's Guide to Cinema on Open Source. Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tip #1. Meeting Paul Verhoeven, Jamie Stuart extends his exploration of alternatives to the tired and worn junket interview by "handing the reigns to a chirpy and obscenely animated E!-style news chick," as Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay puts it. Related: Jeff GP at the Six-Reel Shuffle on Black Book.

Online viewing tip #2. DVblog: "Elegant, witty & revealing re-edit of Hawks's His Girl Friday by Valentin Spirik."

Online viewing tips. Via wood s lot, three 50-minute BBC docs at Continental Philosophy from a series called Human All Too Human: Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The critics. Yet again.

"[W]hy are so many critics insistent on (and defensive about) tastemaking for the masses?" wonders Lewis Beale at the Reeler. "Let a panel of readers tell us whether 300 has what it takes; given the material and who it's playing to, they're as good a guide as anyone. That way our poor, overworked critics can get back to doing what they've been hired for: writing insightful pieces about movies that have something to say - not parsing Spartan abs or Eddie Murphy fart jokes." Comments ensue.

Blogging for the Guardian, Ronald Bergan lays out what he feels "should be the minimum requirements before anyone can claim to be a film critic." It's a pretty rigorous program. But then: "Learning to 'read' films is a complex, though enjoyable, business." Comments erupt.

Update, 3/31: The Boston Globe's Ty Burr agrees with Ronald Bergan about some things; disagrees about others.

Midnight Eye. History, an interview, reviews.

Addressing the post-war years, the second part of Roland Domenig's "History of Sex Education Films in Japan" has appeared at Midnight Eye. New reviews:

• "A look at the poster image of Anna Tsuchiya defiantly staring at us in full geisha garb is enough to know that this is the Kamikaze Girls reworking of Memoirs of a Geisha, with a bit of Marie Antoinette thrown in for good measure," writes Tom Mes. "Thankfully, there is more to Sakuran than meets the eye."

• Mes: "Originally made as an entry in the Love Collection series (whose other standouts were Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's Volatile Woman and Ryuichi Hiroki's Girlfriend: Someone Please Stop the World), Moon and Cherry is a lively, hugely enjoyable romp that reveals two unmistakable new talents," writer/director Yuki Tanada and Noriko Eguchi, "one of the most remarkable and exceptional actresses that Japanese cinema has had the privilege to entertain in years."

• Mes: "Of all the off-beat delights conjured up by the sorely missed Teruo Ishii, The Blind Woman's Curse must surely rank as one of the strangest."

Jamie Morris interviews Masashi Yamamoto and writes of his new film, "A Woman is Heard is billed as an 'Erotic-Pop-Suspense-Thriller' and stars the famous porn actress Sola Aoi.... For Yamamoto fans and Sola Aoi fans: this is a film that I don't think is his best (or hers?) but contains unique moments of, and investigations into, erotic fantasy and the daft 'love story' as we know it."

FIFA Dispatch. 2.

David D'Arcy follows up on Friday's dispatch with observations on a doc that tells just one chapter of a story he's been following for years.

There's something seductive about a movie that tells a story about stolen art - deliberately seductive, of course. The film that I saw at the International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal even had a happy ending.

The documentary is Klimt, or the Will of Adele (Klimt ou le Testament d'Adèle) by Michel Vuillermet (made for TV5 of France). It is less about Gustav Klimt than it is about the fight of a Jewish family to recover paintings by Klimt that the Nazis seized in the late 1930s and that Austrians kept in one of its most distinguished museums, the Belvedere Castle, until last year. After years in court, the paintings were returned to the family last year and sold for record prices at an auction at Christie's in New York. One of them, Portrait of Adele 1, brought $135 million privately, at that point the highest price known to have been paid for a single painting.

It's a complicated story. Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Jewish socialite in Vienna, was a patron of Gustav Klimt, who painted her portrait twice. He also sketched her many times in preparation for those paintings. Adele presided over a salon at her Vienna home where Klimt was a frequent visitor, and there are rumors that she was Klimt's lover. Before she died of meningitis in 1925, Adele, who was married to Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, wrote a letter stating that she wanted her paintings to go the Austrian Gallery, the country's national museum. It wasn't a will, just a wish. More than a decade later, things had changed for much worse.

The Nazis came to power in 1938, and most Viennese applauded when Jews were beaten in the streets and forced to pay extortionate taxes. The Jews' property was also Aryanized, or transferred to Aryans (gentiles). This happened to the Bloch-Bauer family, who were specially targeted by the Nazis for their wealth. Adele's husband Ferdinand fled to Prague, and then to Switzerland. Her niece, Maria Altmann, went to Holland, then to England, then to Los Angeles, where she lives today.

The paintings were seized, and turned up in the Belvedere Castle, a branch of the Austrian Gallery. When family members tried to recover them after the war, just as Austrians were creating a new identity as "victims" of the Nazis, the Bloch-Bauers were forced to donate works to the museum to get a few pictures back. Then they gave up trying. In the 1990s, when news emerged that Austria still held many paintings looted from Jews that were never returned, Maria Altmann considered trying again to recover her family's art treasures. She was encouraged after paintings on loan from Austria were seized while on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in 1997, and the MoMA scandal resulted in passage of an Austrian law intended to expedite the return of such looted work. (One of those paintings, Portrait of Wally by Egon Schiele, is the subject of a ten-year court battle in which MoMA has opposed efforts of a Jewish family to reclaim the work.) Through her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, Altmann requested that her paintings at the Belvedere Castle be returned. She was rebuffed, and told that she could file a lawsuit. When she sued, the Austrian court required her to leave a certain percentage of the paintings' value in escrow, which amounted to millions of dollars.

Instead, Altmann and her lawyer decided to file suit in the United States, arguing that Austria did business there and had legal standing, even though the Nazi-looted paintings were in Vienna. The Austrian government and the US government opposed her, but the case went to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the case could be heard in California. Austria insisted that the 1923 letter in which Adele had wished that the paintings would go the Austrian Gallery had the status of a will. Maria Altmann's lawyers argued that the letter did not constitute a will. After that, rather than go to court again in the US, Austria agreed to mediation in Austria, and an Austrian mediation board awarded the art to Mrs Altmann. No one expected such an outcome.

The family represented by Maria Altmann had more heirs than paintings. Naturally, the proposal arose that their needs might be met by selling the paintings. Last summer, the family sold Adele 1 to the collector and cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for $135 million. A sale of the other Klimts brought $190 million. Critics sniped that the paintings should have been donated to museums, but it seemed that justice had been done - or had it?

For Maria Altmann and the other heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family, there was some justice and lots of money after almost 70 years. Yet valuable films like Klimt, or Adele's Will and others on the same topic tend to celebrate the victory of Mrs Altmann, without pointing to the other cases that remain unresolved. A longer documentary, Stealing Klimt, by Jane Chablani of the UK, which showed at the European Film Market of the Berlin International Film Festival, is more comprehensive than Klimt, or Adele's Will, yet it makes the same point - that the Nazis were responsible for the greatest thefts in history, as well as the bloodiest campaign of mass murder.

Another film making the rounds of festivals and film clubs, The Rape of Europa, by Richard Berge, Bonnie Cohen and Nicole Newnham, focuses on the work of American soldiers who rounded up looted art throughout the zone where Americans operated and saved much of what the Nazis pillaged. (The film is based on the important book of the same title, published in 1995, by Lynn Nicholas.)

But there's another case that's ripe for another film, either a documentary or a thriller by Oliver Stone. Back in 1997, a Jewish family whose art was looted by the Nazis spotted one of those paintings, Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally, at the Museum of Modern Art, on loan from an Austrian government-funded foundation. For ten years, the family has tried to recover the picture, and the museum has dug in its heels, a surprising position in a city where the Holocaust is deplored every day. On one side of the dispute, there's the US Justice Department and the heirs of the Viennese Jewish family that owned the painting before World War II. On the other side are an Austrian government foundation and the Museum of Modern Art.

The case is in federal court and could come to trial this year. (In the interest of full disclosure, my contract with National Public Radio was terminated after I covered the case in late 2004, following complaints to NPR by MoMA that misrepresented the facts of the case. You can Google all about it. The story that brought down the wrath of MoMA, complete with a false "correction" posted by NPR, can be accessed here.)

The revelation that Portrait of Wally was stolen embarrassed Austria and led to an investigation which showed that many more works of art looted from Jews were on view in Austrian museums. MoMA has never seemed terribly embarrassed about borrowing the picture, and even less embarrassed about insisting that it go back to Austria, where the Jewish family will have a difficult time claiming it. The Schiele case raises troubling questions, since the Portrait of Wally is no less stolen than the paintings recovered by the heirs of Adele Bloch-Bauer. When the public reads about the case, which is rare, it tends to see the dispute in terms of right and wrong, and not as a threat to future art loans, which is the way it has been portrayed by MoMA and its allies among American museums. Why is MoMA digging in its heels in the face of so much evidence? Why has the same public which applauded the return of the Klimts to Maria Altmann ignored the Schiele case? Why has MoMA chosen to fight a war of attrition over the painting, rather than help resolve a Holocaust property crime? These are questions that the museum's director, Glenn Lowry, has tried to avoid for the past decade. (Check out Jed Perl's account of Lowry's reign there in the New Republic.)

Where is the documentary film on this subject?

Sunday shorts.

"This 534-page doorstopper is no ordinary kids' book, for sure. With its nods to the graphic novel, the flip book and the storyboard, it is an ambitious tribute to early cinema that some have already dubbed a masterpiece and a work of genius," writes Elizabeth Ward in the Washington Post, noting, too, that there are rumors claiming that Martin Scorsese is interested in adapting Brian Selznick's novel. "It's such a likeably earnest book that one wishes it were so. But the truth is that The Invention of Hugo Cabret is more about the razzle-dazzle of novelty than any particular artistic merit. The first movies transfixed people too, but that doesn't mean their plots weren't mostly pretty hokey and their characters stiffer than a girder. Just so, in Hugo Cabret, the method of telling outshines the tale."

"Jonathan Lethem's seventh novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, is a parable of sorts about the ways in which art is created and commodified by a process of borrowing, stealing and transformation," writes Amy Benfer, introducing her interview with the author for Salon. And of course, she asks him why he's offering the rights to the book "free to the filmmaker who presents him with the best proposal by May 15. In return, the filmmaker will agree to pay Lethem 2 percent of the film's budget when the film receives a distribution deal, and allow the rights to the novel to return to the public domain - for the free use of anyone, including other filmmakers - within five years of the film's release."

"As a sensory experience, it's overwhelming," proclaims Mark Kermode in the Observer. "But perhaps more importantly, Sunshine also harks back to a time when sci-fi turned its attention not toward the hallowed teen market but toward the heavens.... [I]t falls within a grand tradition of adult-orientated science-fiction which is haunted by the question of divinity, whether as a presence or an absence."

"[T]oday Killer of Sheep is widely acknowledged as one of the most insightful and authentic dramas about African-American life on film, as well as one of the earliest examples of the politically aware black independent cinema that was taking shape in the 1970s." Dave Kehr checks in on its restoration and learns why it's taken six years to secure music clearances alone.

Also in the New York Times:

• "[Joseph] Gordon-Levitt is something of a gastropodionado," writes Franz Lidz, pointing to the actor's site, HitRecord.org. Related: Nick Schager at Slant on The Lookout.

• Sylviane Gold profiles Susanne Bier.

• There sure are a lot of movies playing in New York City, notes Seth Kugel.

"No one can state with absolute certitude whether or not RFK took advantage of [Marilyn Monroe's] fascination with the Kennedys and then embarked on a short love affair with her," concedes Mel Ayton. "What can be stated confidently is that no credible evidence exists which can tie the Kennedys (nor, for that matter, the Mafia) into a murder plot." His case for the defense in a 2005 piece for Crime Magazine is far more thoroughly argued that any of the pieces I pointed to last week.

"Several factors have brought about an increase in the professionalism of Israeli filmmakers and a subsequent rise in the quality of Israeli-made films. First, let's look back at the history of the Israeli film industry." Hannah Brown for Israel21c.

"Beyond a doubt, it is the most eccentric movie you will see this year. Less expectedly, it's also one of the most enthralling." The Telegraph's Sheila Johnston talks with Rolf de Heer about Ten Canoes. Via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.

"You get the impression speaking to [Thelma] Schoonmaker, a bubbly, warm, vibrant woman, that perhaps she's just adept at dealing with difficult men," notes Cathy Pryor in her long profile for the Independent.

"It's hilarious and unsettling: The joke, which deftly avoids gay baiting, is on straight men." Gina Piccalo riffs on Blades of Glory and its contemporary "context. Sexual identity is more of a public and political issue than it's ever been."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Suzanne Rico: "[Ann] Reiner, 31, is trying to create a program through which the Sudanese can document their lives on videotape, telling their own stories, in their own words, to the people who could benefit most from them - other Sudanese. The project will put cameras in the hands of those who have experienced the genocides, the HIV epidemic or gender-based violence first-hand. Reiner believes the minidocumentaries they create will be invaluable teaching tools."

• Paul Cullum talks with The Hoax screenwriter William Wheeler: "No stranger to unseen forces, his first produced script was the criminally under-seen The Prime Gig, a con-man movie that pits Ed Harris against Vince Vaughn in his most calibrated performance and suffered from a surfeit of Mamet comparisons."

• Howard Ho on the making of Journey From the Fall.

• Susan King: "The five-disc set Early Bergman, set for release Tuesday, is the first offering from Eclipse, a new DVD line of the Criterion Collection, the digital arm of the foreign and art house distribution company Janus Films. Janus first brought Bergman to our shores in the latter part of the 1950s." Also: "Two silent rarities, The Curse of Quon Gwon and Her Wild Oat, are on the bill Thursday in Lost and Found, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' periodic series showcasing recently discovered archival prints or films that have been recently restored from new materials."

• "This is Hollywood, and one never knows what memorabilia may show up at Saturday garage sales." Deborah Schoch finds Joseph Schildkraut's Oscar. He won it for his supporting role in 1937's The Life of Emile Zola.

• Dennis McLellan: "Herman Stein, a staff composer at Universal in the 1950s whose best-known credits include horror and science fiction classics such as Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man, has died. He was 91." Joe Leydon comments.

Chuck Tryon on The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair: "Because the war in Iraq has now lasted well over four years, I'm not terribly confident that it will receive nearly the audience or attention that Gunner Palace did, but I think it deserves a wider audience, if only because it's telling a somewhat more difficult story about the war and its effects on Iraqi civilians."

Highlighting his own picks, Blake offers a "Quick Guide to AFI Dallas" at Cinema Strikes Back. And at Twitch, Peter Martin interviews Midlothia director Bill Sebastian, reviews the film - and Berkeley as well.

Jürgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky's DVD roundup comes with extras of its own. Look for "More."

Online listening tip #1. Egg City Radio: "Spotlight on John Carpenter." Via filmtagebuch.

Online listening tip #2. The Ruling Class at CineFile Video.

Online viewing tip #1. Frank Darabont sets off an earthquake on the set of The Mist and you can watch him at AICN. Via Jennifer DeFilippo at Cinematical.

Online viewing tip #2. Eugene Hernandez's SXSW Music in just 26 seconds.

Online viewing tip #3. At the DVblog: Seventeen Evergeen's "Haven't Been Yourself (Lucky Number Music)," directed by Encyclopedia Pictura. Wow.

Online viewing tips. "Famous Balloon Movies" at Cartoon Brew. Wow times 6.

Weekend shorts.

"Jean Genet's words have been put to celluloid in styles ranging from Fassbinder's cold Querelle to Todd Haynes's frigid Poison, but only once did Genet direct his own scenario," writes the Stranger's Annie Wagner. "The 25-minute semipornographic film Un Chant d'amour (1950), set in a prison lined with murderers and roses, is so removed from the mannerism of his disciples (but so close to his own novels) it's almost funny. Every scene is plump with romanticism, every soft 35 mm shot (by cinematographer Jacques Natteau, who had worked for Max Ophüls and Jean Renoir) suffused with a longing that's three parts eroticism for every one part pain."

"[Alain] Resnais's third feature, widely considered to be one of his best films (perhaps even his masterpiece), Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963), has finally been released on DVD, and its colorful, character-based immediacy might surprise those only familiar with his ethereal, black-and-white tone poems," writes Doug Cummings. "Although it can take several viewings to grasp the details of the narrative (it took me three), the film's staccato, elliptical construction ultimately seems completely natural and deeply compelling."

Jonathan Rosenbaum: "I'd like to beat the drum a little for a terrific new book just published by University of California Press, Catherine Benamou's It's All True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey, which is far and away the definitive book on It's All True, Welles's doomed documentary project about Latin America in the 1940s."

"Charles Burnett's debut feature, Killer of Sheep, resides so far outside the norms of movies-as-usual that I might as well review it as sculpture," begins Stuart Klawans in the Nation. "Killer of Sheep is one of those rare films that's so substantial, you feel you could walk around it, test its weight, observe how firmly and forthrightly it meets the ground.... I feel safe in calling it one of the best new films of 2007."

Ken Russell in the London Times: "So before each take, Oliver [Reed] would say: 'What do you want, Jesus?' (he always called me Jesus), 'Moody One, Moody Two or Moody Three?' The rest is history, including six films we made together, not forgetting his role as the martyred priest in The Devils, by which time the three moods had become infinite. And no, he never drank on the set nor came to work with a hangover. I unfortunately can't say the same."

"Paramount Pictures has set Jonah Nolan [Christopher's brother and collaborator] to write Interstellar, a space adventure that has Steven Spielberg attached to direct," reports Michael Fleming for Variety. "There is no hurry. Spielberg is prepping the fourth installment of Indiana Jones for a June start with Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett, and he is expected to follow with a film about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, based on the Doris Kearns Goodwin book. Spielberg wants his Schindler's List star Liam Neeson to play Lincoln."

James Cameron's Avatar "will be released in 2009 simultaneously with a massive, multiplayer, video game based on the film," notes Brendon Connelly at film ick.

Patrick Barkham meets Danny Boyle: "Today the director of Trainspotting is mostly raving about the sun, Kenny from South Park, student digs, acrobatic planes, CGI hamsters, cordless kettles, Dr Brian Cox, D:Ream, the God particle and Hugh Grant. Grant apart, these things all play a role in Sunshine, Boyle's new film and his first foray into science fiction." Earlier: Nigel Floyd with Boyle and Cillian Murphy.

Also in the Guardian:

• "Once again it is Shimon Peres who reminds us how thoroughly screwed the peace process is, by scheduling talks - his word - with none other than visiting Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio," fumes Marina Hyde. "Yes, I know. We all loved him in The Departed. I'll bet he has some really interesting stuff to say on West Bank disengagement." Related: DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are set to reunite in Sam Mendes's adaptation of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road.

• Ronald Bergan: "Despite having appeared in several films, and subsequently becoming an enterprising producer, Nicole Stéphane [1923 - 2007], who has died aged 83, will always be associated with the role of Elisabeth, the semi-incestuous sister, in Jean-Pierre Melville's adaptation of the Jean Cocteau novel, Les Enfants Terribles (also known as The Strange Ones, 1950)."

• Sarfraz Manzoor on "one of the most unusual Indian films ever," Namastey, London. "Although produced in India, it was filmed almost entirely in Britain and, uniquely for a Bollywood film, its plot concerns the struggles for love and belonging among second-generation Asians living in Britain."

• "The older audience is already the fastest growing sector in the market," notes Geoffrey Macnab, and exhibitors are catching on.

Bryan Whitefield catches a Q&A with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright after a screening of Hot Fuzz, which, by the way, "is fucking hilarious and completely exceeded my expectations. I honestly cannot remember laughing that hard or having that much fun in a movie theater in a long time."

The New York Times Book Review more than makes up for falling a couple of weeks behind on its coverage of the all but simultaneous appearance of two biographies of Leni Riefenstahl by getting a casually, almost flippantly argumentative - and therefore, highly readable - essayist, Clive James, to write the review. James, as you probably know, has a new book out himself, Cultural Amnesia, "876 pages on 107 figures in history and the arts... celebrating what he calls 'humanism,' by which he appears to mean historical memory unsullied by 'ideology' and dependent on 'liberal democracy,'" as Richard Locke notes in his review for Bookforum. Slate editor Jacob Weisberg is an unabashed fan - the magazine is running 25 pieces from the book over two months and webcasting several episodes of the Clive James Show - which makes sense. With the possible exception of Christopher Hitchens's frequent contributions, Slate has been arguing quite reasonably (albeit seldom passionately) that one can say no to both radical Islam and the neo-cons of the Bush administration and that, in fact, both extreme ideologies feed off of and strengthen each other. It's the 21st century version of saying no to both Stalin and Hitler, which brings us back to Riefenstahl.

The two books are Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, which "has the better pictures," according to James, and Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, which "has the better text." With a few exceptions, that's about all James has to say about them. The bulk of the piece is devoted to retelling the story his way, exposing Riefenstahl's lies at every turn, admonishing her "cinéaste admirers" (quite sternly in his final paragraph, too) and cutting her a little slack just once: "Susan Sontag later made a serious mistake in arguing that Olympia was entirely steeped in fascist worship of the beautiful body. But it's nature that worships the beautiful body. Fascism is natural. That's what's wrong with it: it's nothing else.... [E]verything she did in Berlin in 1936 was topped by what Kon Ichikawa did in Tokyo in 1964. Nevertheless, Leni, with her raw material handed to her on a plate, and unhampered by those requirements of invented narrative that she could never manage, had made quite a movie for its time."

"Intentionally or not, The Prisoner [or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair], which was directed by [Michael] Tucker and his wife, Petra Epperlein, addresses [Gunner Palace's] myopic point of view because this time out it's an Iraqi who dominates the camera, not an American," writes Manohla Dargis. Time's Richard Schickel finds that it "somehow - quietly, devastatingly - shows and tells you more than you may perhaps want to know about the dehumanization implicit in the mighty, blighted Iraqi adventure." For Cameron Scott, writing in Mother Jones, it's "an odd and even imperfect film, but one that ultimately rewards its viewer with an emotional account of the smaller tragedies and humanities of the war in Iraq."

Manohla Dargis again: "A would-be psychological thriller with next to no psychology and shivers instead of thrills, The Page Turner is a nervous-making, lightly amusing vengeance story that owes an obvious debt to Claude Chabrol."

Also in the New York Times:

• Color Me Kubrick "is a platform for John Malkovich to burst into lurid purple flame," writes Stephen Holden. "[I]t is obvious that the actor is having a wonderful time camping it up.... With a soundtrack built around excerpts from Kubrick film scores and an opening scene that parodies A Clockwork Orange, this arch, episodic movie is really an affectionate sequence of in-jokes conceived as a posthumous homage to Kubrick by two knowing insiders." More from Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com. Related: At ScreenGrab, Bilge Ebiri emails with screenwriter (and former personal assistant to Kubrick) Anthony Frewin.

• Stephen Holden again: "A pointed little thriller with metaphysical pretensions, First Snow is shrewd enough to approach basic philosophical questions in sneaky, offhand ways." More from Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "[Guy] Pearce is in every scene, and the movie rides almost completely on his fine performance; still, props must be given to William Fichtner, who is wholly memorable at Jimmy's exasperated best friend. First Snow is solidly made - which, for this sort of film, is nothing to sneeze at - but it doesn't leave that strong an impression either. It's a decent freshman effort." Related: Jennifer Merin talks with director Mark Fergus for the Reeler.

• Matt Zoller Seitz on Air Guitar Nation: "Like Spellbound, Murderball and other competition documentaries, it's a valentine to underdog dreamers: Rocky gone basic cable. But the movie's wild performances and droll humor are tough to resist." More from Rob Humanick at Slant.

• MZS again: "Gleefully sensationalistic and paced like an adults-only shoot-'em-up video game, [The Hills Have Eyes 2 is] ultimately less interested in subversion and subtext than in making viewers squirm, shriek and throw up into their popcorn bags." Related: For the Los Angeles Times, Deborah Netburn asks Wes Craven, "What do you think is scary today?" Answer: "The current administration. That's the standard answer now. Unfortunately I'm not even joking. But the basic themes of what is scary have always been the same. A murderous rage that builds up in a family, a neighborhood or a nation, those are things I think are scary."

• Also: Journey From the Fall "depicts one family's endurance in sturdy, old-movie style, with sweeping camerawork, a monumental and occasionally intrusive orchestral score, gorgeous yet forbidding natural vistas and enough shocking tragedies, brazen escapes and crowd-pleasing acts of defiance to fuel several action-adventure pictures." More from Rob Humanick at Slant.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Based on the novel by Matthew Rettenmund, Boy Culture is a slick and absorbing drama about an attractive gay hustler named X (Derek Magyar), with an extensive investment portfolio and a restricted clientele of 12 wealthy men." More from Michael Guillén.

• Also: "Invoking Lewis Carroll, E.T. and Tibetan Buddhism, The Last Mimzy is an overstuffed yet warmhearted sci-fi drama"; the "inane, sluggish mess" that is Memory; and then there's TMNT: "[O]ur superheroes on the half shell have been firmly co-opted by the industry their creators once sought to spoof." Related: Erik Davis interviews director Kevin Munroe for Cinematical.

• "Hollywood braces for a new government review of the marketing of violent entertainment to the young," reports Michael Cieply. "The Federal Trade Commission is putting the final touches on a follow-up to its September 2000 report on the marketing to children of violent movies, music and video games. The first such assessment in three years, it will examine the selling practices of a mainstream entertainment industry that in the interim has become increasingly dependent on abductions, maimings, decapitations and other mayhem once kept away from studio slates."

"In the wake of Jean Baudrillard's death, Ballardian presents Benjamin Noys's essay exploring the 'point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and JG Ballard.'"

"This, I think, accounts for much of Jodorowsky's power," writes David Lowery: "[H]e makes the grotesque and fantastic entirely tangible."

"The thing to know is that [John] Carpenter didn't like to outsource his soundtracks. Long past the point of repetition, they felt like his break from the hazards of filmmaking - his retreat. Sometimes Carpenter collaborated, but he rarely surrendered whole hog. Except, most notably, on The Thing." Nathan Kosub in Stop Smiling on Ennio Morricone.

Sheigh Crabtree in the Los Angeles Times on Haskell Wexler's political bid: "The firebrand filmmaker, who famously made Introduction to the Enemy in North Vietnam with 'Hanoi' Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden in 1974, has launched a pro-labor, anti-corporation campaign, in his bid to become the next president of Local 600, the International Cinematographers Guild. Now 81-years old, the cameraman (Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf) and documentary filmmaker (Medium Cool) sent out a mass mailing that included a free DVD screener of his latest pro-labor documentary to ICG members."

"I had a very minor role in Film Geek, playing 'myself' along with a few other local movie reviewers and pundits during the film's final fantasy segment," recalls DK Holm. "A mostly improvised sequence, it appeared to come off well, and I suggested to [James] Westby (begged, really) that if he had a part in any upcoming films to please contact me." He did. The new one's The Auteur and the new story's fun. Also at ScreenGrab, Vadim Rizov finds Close-Up "visually dull, endlessly talky, and not particularly rewarding, with Kiarostami ignoring his own strengths. But it's the fans he really hates."

"More relevant than the failure to adapt What Makes Sammy Run? is how close the production came to fruition." Eric Kohn tells the story in Forward.

"Javier Corcuera's The Back of the World is an understatedly observed, indelible, and provocative examination of the inextricable social cycle of poverty, exploitation, disenfranchisement, and disposability," writes acquarello.

Michael Guillén watches Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) and listens in on a Q&A with director Jason Kohn.

"There is no doubt that Amazing Grace, which depicts William Wilberforce's 18-year battle to outlaw slavery in the British empire, has its heart in the right place," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. Even so, "Amazing Grace is the sort of film best watched on the radio." More from Tim Robey in the Telegraph.

"Is it possible to make a comedy that's too smart for its audience?" asks Peter Nellhaus. "I had to wonder as I was the only person at the theater where The Sperm was playing."

Miljenko Skoknic talks with Grace Lee about American Zombie for SF360.

Homophobia is alive and well in advertising, television and the movies, notes Michael Abernethy. Also in PopMatters, Cynthia Fuchs interviews Mira Nair.

Willem Dafoe defends his appearance in Mr Bean's Holiday in David Usborne's profile for the Independent.

Debuting on the Sundance Channel on April 17: The Green.

Online listening tip. Rock in Reykjavik at CineFile Video.

Online viewing tips, round 1. David Poland talks with Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine about their doc, Manufacturing Dissent and asks John Pierson, "So what is it about Austin?" And of course, they talk about the state of the local film scene, what's happened to indies, Baltimore, why She's Gotta Have It still isn't out on DVD and more. Meantime, Cinematical's James Rocchi turns the tables and interviews David.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The best of February at No fat clips!!!.

Weekend fests and events.

"It's not surprising that residents of Mar Del Plata would be so committed to their Festival, as its existence has never quite been a sure thing," writes Dan Goldberg at indieWIRE. "While the de Chirico-esque posters all around town proclaim this to be the 22nd Annual Festival, the event has had an irregular presentation schedule that in many ways mirrors Argentina's turbulent political history." Related: AJ Schnack: "Photo Essay: An Evening in Mar del Plata."

"Fish Kill Flea, a little dream of a documentary that we fell in lasting love with during SXSW, is playing the Austin Film Society's Documentary Tour on April 11," notes Sarah Lindner at the Austin Movie Blog. Related: Matt Dentler rounds up a great bunch o'links to news and reviews from SXSW, Alison Willmore post four excellent SXSW capsule reviews at the IFC Blog, and an online listening tip: SpoutBlog's wrap-up.

Michael Fox at SF360: "Steve Polta of the [San Francisco] Cinematheque has programmed a show of work by [Dean] Snider and Greg Sharits this Sunday, March 25 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that he describes as an effort to revive two of the more shadowy figures in the Bay Area avant-garde."

Peter Martin previews AFI Dallas for Twitch. Through April 1.

Michael Guillén previews a month of "Sleazy Sundays" hosted by Dead Channels: The San Francisco Festival of Fantastic Film.

Brian Darr presents Jennifer Young's transcription of the Q&A with Hong Sang-soo at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

Sujewa Ekanayake has an update on this fall's Kensington Real Independent Film Festival.

The Chicago Reader has a few tips for the locals regarding the Traveling Film South Asia Festival (through April 13).

Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot on On the Bowery, screening for a week at the Anthology Film Archives: "The precedents for this film are all outside of cinema: Weegee's flash-flooded pictures of desiccated burlesque at Sammy's-on-the-Bowery (Arthur Leipzig, Fred Stein and Fritz Neugass likewise deserve mention); Joseph Mitchell's detailed portraits of downtown pariahs and eccentrics for The New Yorker.... As such, before admiring what one might call On the Bowerys artistic accomplishment, we should pay our respects to the very physical task of the film.... What may be most remarkable about [director Lionel] Rogosin is how so many currents of the cinema in his time seem to intersect through his small body of work..."

"[I]f you happen to be near Boulder, Colorado in a few weeks (April 9 - 13, 2007)," calls out Jim Emerson, "come by Macky Auditorium on campus at 4 pm and join us to sit in the dark and talk about detective movies, noir, the history of LA, the Department of Water and Power, William Mulholland and the St. Frances Dam catastrophe, Johnny LaRue, eyes, doors and windows, venetian blinds, orange groves, fish, monstrous evil, kitty-cats, and the nose on your face. (And that's just for starters.) It's free, and, as they say, so much fun it's a wonder it's still legal."

"As some of you will no doubt know, BLDGBLOG and Materials & Applications have co-organized an awesome event coming up on Tuesday, May 8, from 8-10pm, at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena," Geoff Manaugh reminds us. "It will be part of this year's Silver Lake Film Festival. The speakers? Ryan Church, James Clyne, Mark Goerner and Ben Procter, discussing artistic connections between film, architecture, science fiction, and the city. The venue? A converted wind tunnel, formerly owned and operated by Douglas Aircraft, recently rehabbed by Daly Genik Architects."

Online browsing tip. Ray Pride, back in Thessaloniki.

Anticipating SFIFF.

The San Francisco International Film Festival will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, so while it's still a month away - it runs April 26 through May 10 - there's a lot of news coming out early:

Updated through 3/26.

• The Opening Night Film will be Emanuele Crialese's Golden Door.

• Spike Lee will be presented with the San Francisco Film Society's Directing Award on May 2. The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris will interview him; then, Acts II and III of When the Levees Broke will be screened.

• This year's Peter J Owens Award goes to Robin Williams on May 4. There'll be an onstage interview followed by a screening of The Fisher King.

• The Kanbar Award for Excellence in Screenwriting goes to - who else this year - Peter Morgan. May 5. Following his onstage interview, there'll be a screening of The Deal, Morgan's collaboration with Stephen Frears prior to The Queen, which also stars Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. The screening could hardly be timelier, as many speculate that by May it should be clearer as to when Blair will be leaving office, making way the other half of "the deal," Gordon Brown, to begin his struggle in earnest to ward off what appears to be quite a serious challenge from Tory David Cameron.

• The fest will present the world premiere of Fog City Mavericks: "Iconoclastic filmmakers featured in this celebratory documentary include George Lucas, Philip Kaufman, Francis Ford Coppola, Brad Bird, Bruce Conner, Sofia Coppola, Carroll Ballard, Chris Columbus, Clint Eastwood, John Korty, John Lasseter, Walter Murch and Saul Zaentz. Several of these mavericks, including Lucas, Kaufman, Zaentz, Korty and Dominic Angerame, will appear for a special introduction and post-screening Q&A."

Online viewing tips. At the site, click "Featured Videos" to launch the "San Francisco Film Society Video Player" for "SFIFF trailers, appearances by filmmakers and actors and short films about the San Francisco International from past Festivals."

Update, 3/26: Heddy Honigmann, whose Forever will be screening at SFIFF and Full Frame (April 12 through 15) and who'll be receiving this year's Outstanding Achievement Award and an accompanying retrospective at Hot Docs (April 19 through 29), will also be honored with SFIFF's Golden Gate Persistence of Vision award.

Triangle.

"Three directors of renown collaborate on a single film," blogs David Bordwell from Hong Kong.

"To make things interesting, the director of part one doesn't tell the others what he's planning; he simply presents a finished third. The second director has to take that further, and the man at the end has to wrap things up. Hong Kong director Johnnie To came up with the idea for Triangle, and it's nearing completion. Tsui Hark has finished the first section, Ringo Lam the second." The kicker: He, Shelly Kraicer, Todd Brown and Antoine Thirion (of Cahiers du cinéma) were guided around the set on Thursday as To shot the conclusion of the film many are hoping to see in Cannes.

More on the project from Vicki Rothrock in Variety.

1927 Blog-a-Thon.

"Goatdog is Michael W Phillips Jr, a writer, editor, and filmmaker living in Chicago. He runs the projector at a revival house on the weekends. He has a master's degree in history, but doesn't use it much."

But as host of the 1927 Blog-a-Thon, he's certainly using it today.

Update, 3/25: As the Blog-a-Thon wraps today, I just wanted to note that if you're thinking, "1927? Eh...," think again. Some of the entries here are extraordinary. If your time's tight, at least bookmark the page. You'll be glad to revisit it later.

SFIAAFF. Awards.

Though the San Francisco International Film Festival runs on through Sunday in San Jose and Berkeley, the award-winners have been announced:

• Best Narrative Feature Award: Stephane Gauger's debut feature, Owl and the Sparrow. Site.

• Special Jury Award: Tre (directed by Eric Byler). Site.

• Special Mention: Ken Leung for his performances in Shanghai Kiss and Year of the Fish. Site.

• Comcast Audience Award for Narrative Feature: American Pastime (directed by Desmond Nakano).

• Best Documentary Feature Award: New Year Baby (directed by Socheata Pouev). Site.

• Special Jury Award: A Dream in Doubt (Tami Yeager).

• Comcast Audience Award for Documentary Feature: Na Kamalei: The Men of Hula (Lisette Marie Flanary). Site.

Shooter.

"Shooter is a generically titled studio action picture that turns out to be a surprisingly deft satire about Americans' loss of faith in their government following the 2000 election, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly.

"There is something unaccountably gratifying, at times reassuring about watching the screen - the bigger the better - become engulfed by surging waves of liquid orange, in the image of a car exploding into the air like a rocket, in a room, a building, a boat, a truck, you name it, shattering into confetti," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "[Director Antoine] Fuqua, the auteur of such rococo diversions as Training Day and Tears of the Sun, likes to keep the volume cranked and the action relentless. Like many contemporary action directors, he overshoots and overedits, cramming his films with inexplicable, unnecessary visual and aural noise. This maximalist approach can tax the nerves, though it has the benefit of keeping you on alert. It's also pretty enjoyable."

Updated through 3/26.

The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, Stephen Hunter, wrote the novel the film's based on, Point of Impact, so the honors in the paper go to guest reviewer Scott Eyman. "At bottom," he writes, "Shooter is not ballistic porn so much as a western in urban drag: The retired gunslinger lured out of retirement and promptly double-crossed, who proceeds to clean up the territory anyway, all the while ignoring both legal niceties and - given the amount of blood Swagger seems to lose - natural law. It's a story that can be transplanted from genre to genre, because we never grow tired of it, which is to say that it fits snugly into the paranoid drift of American movies, and the value we place on one honest man with a gun."

"A keyed-up, underwear-model sexy and above all hilarious slice of American badass, Mark Wahlberg is one of the few American actors who can consistently turn a mediocre movie into something momentarily transcendent," writes Akiva Gottlieb for Nerve.

"Jettison the handful of offhand references to current events (like 9/11 and other violent incursions) and you're looking at a screenplay that Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis would have climbed all over," suggests Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

"One of those elevated B-pictures that runs type across the bottom of the screen to identify cities, Shooter has its pro forma, paint-by-numbers elements, but it is executed with such efficiency and energy by action maestro Antoine Fuqua that ignoring flaws and becoming involved in the proceedings isn't a matter of choice," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Like most of the earlier conspiracy thrillers, this one proceeds from two warring premises: a synoptic cynicism about the men who run things, and a dewy belief in the myth of the lone hero," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "You're to accept on faith that the high-level perps are both deeply malevolent and supremely competent. (Uh-huh. Then why can't they run a simple Iraq occupation?).... It's too bad that Swagger is a fiction, and that the notion of one man who can right wrongs is less plausible than the conspiracy fears that summoned him up as a solo world police force."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek calls Shooter "a lefty fantasy dolled up in the kinds of thrills and frills a gun-toting right-winger could love."

"Swagger's personal war against genocidal, oil-rich politicos (namely, Ned Beatty's wicked senator) and their paramilitary henchmen (led by Danny Glover's evil so-and-so) contains a pungent whiff of anti-Americanism, with its Iraq and Abu Ghraib references clunkily updating 70s thrillers' Big Brother paranoia," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "However, if a brazen rage against our current administrative machine, Fuqua's film - like 24, it and every other topical thriller's kindred spirit - is also typified by the sort of conservative, lone ranger pro-vigilantism that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a Reagan-era Commando megastar."

John Hiscock opens his interview with Wahlberg for the Telegraph with recollections of The Departed: "They are a volatile couple: Wahlberg, the ex-convict and former street thug from the rough side of Boston, and Scorsese, the outspoken Italian-American former seminary student; and they both had firm ideas of how Wahlberg's scenes should be shot. Unfortunately they were very different."

Updates, 3/24: Dana Stevens in Slate: "Shooter is a video-game-fantasy version of the 2006 midterm elections, a howl of rage at the hypocrisy of the Bush presidency and the Iraq war (not that either is ever mentioned by name)."

"[T]he crushing two-hour-plus running time and Tom Clancy-for-dummies plot sabotage the film, which becomes particularly ridiculous in the last 30 minutes," writes Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle. "By the time Ned Beatty shows up late in the movie as the baddest of the bad guys, the makers of Shooter almost seem to be intentionally going for humor."

Cinematical's James Rocchi: "Shooter's a pretty, slick and pretty slick action flick; now and then, it may feel like a steroid-fed MacGyver episode, but when it's moving, it's alive."

Gill Pringle meets Wahlberg for the Independent: "Juvenile delinquent, hit rapper, international model, video director, Hollywood star, fearsome producer... Wahlberg is in no doubt who to thank for such bounty. 'I thank the Lord for all the blessings he's brought upon me,' he announces. 'I readily acknowledge Him as my saviour. I believe that there is a God, and that you will be judged for your actions, which presents problems for someone like me who has been a sinner in the past. I just hope God is a movie fan.'"

Online listening tip. On NPR, Stephen Hunter talks about being on the other end of the reviews.

Updates, 3/26: "[T]his standard industrial product does something strange," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "On the surface, the movie offers liberal ideological sentiments: it condemns covert overseas operations controlled by oil interests; it's angry at the higher-ups who escaped blame for Abu Ghraib; it exhibits a clear distaste for the person and values of Dick Cheney. But it places these sentiments within a matrix of gun culture and lonely-man-of-honor myths."

Variety's Anne Thompson meets Lorenzo di Bonaventura, "the alpha producer on the Paramount lot, with three big movies for 2007: Antoine Fuqua's conspiracy thriller Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg, fresh off his Oscar nom for The Departed; Michael Bay's summer tentpole Transformers, produced in partnership with DreamWorks; and Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, a whimsical fantasy adventure based on the Neil Gaiman novel and starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro."

FIFA Dispatch. 1.

City planners, collectors, writers, a photographer. David D'Arcy views a selection of docs.

The International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal (FIFA) which ended on Sunday is a rare event, a place where you'll see films about art, architecture, performing arts and literature that you won't see anywhere else. In the festival's 25th year, showing work made mostly for television, and most of it coming from Europe, it seemed that much of what I saw was French.

One of my favorites was Le Destin Des Halles (The Destiny of Les Halles), a documentary by Frédéric Biamonti about the destruction of the vast picturesque food market in the center of Paris and the failure of the buildings that replaced it to achieve much of anything, either commercially or aesthetically. The film, which tells its story with archival footage from the 1960s to the present, is a tale of error after error, with misjudgments that resulted in permanent losses to the built environment.

Back in the 1960s, Charles De Gaulle and his successor Georges Pompidou thought that demolishing the old market would make Paris more modern. It wasn't his only bad idea, but it was one of the last ones and, so far, one of the most enduring. We witness mute footage of bulldozers and steam shovels razing the place, and we see the kitschy design that replaced it, built with cheap materials that now need to be replaced. At one point there was an enormous hole where the market once stood with its steel frame and peaked rooves. The excavation was necessary because it was planned that Les Halles would be the new juncture for all the subways in town.

The hole was so huge that it dared anyone to do something even more brazen. That's just what the director Marco Ferreri did - he made a film there, a western based on Custer's Last Stand called Touche pas à la femme blanche (Don't Touch the White Woman!), with Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, which was intended to be a satire on the arrogant folly of the US war in Vietnam. There are wildly improbable horse stampedes and cavalry battles. See it if you can find it. Remember, Ferreri was the man who made La Grande Bouffe, a film in which characters eat themselves to death. Here they're acting out a western in a space that was shoveled out of Paris.

Then Jacques Chirac, the newly-elected mayor of Paris, entered the scene and took control of the design process, as government officials love to do, and rarely do well. What filled the hole was even more discouraging - a vast mall hemmed in by subways underground and umbrella-shaped motifs constructed of cheap materials that began deteriorating as soon as the place reopened.

Now the blunder that used to be Les Halles needs immediate renovation, and four top architects were auditioned for the job, including the French star Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands. David Mangin's plan, calling for a promenade between Les Halles and La Bourse (the Paris stock exchange), is the one that was chosen. We see their plans, and we see official France still stalling. It's an odd mix of rashness and inertia. Not the way to build or rebuild a great city. One woman in the documentary puts it bluntly - in the 1970s and 1980s, the French government was far more effective destroying Paris than the Germans were in World War II.

Another French documentary at FIFA, Palazzo Grassi, Le Palais du collectionneur looks at the art collecting of François Pinault, the French self-made wood billionaire whose contemporary art holdings are now on view at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Not much more than an infomercial produced for the French television channel TV5, it is still an illuminating look at how the rich are treated. We watch as breathless interviewees describe Pinault as a discerning art collector. In what has become part of the formula in documentaries about architecture and museums, the camera and insistent music create a Santa's workshop atmosphere of urgency and gentle perfectionsim, as yet another observer provides a flattering depiction of the boss, who is worth more than $7 billion. A visit to the studio of Jeff Koons is appropriately nauseating, but not more nauseating than the sight of Koons's gleaming Poodle in front of the palazzo on the canal.

Pinault, now 70, explains eloquently that one reason for collecting art is to postpone the anonymity that even he is likely to face after his death. People will talk about the artists he collected and the decisions he made, he reckons with surprising openness and vulnerability for a businessman. Yet you have to wonder whether anyone will have anything to say about Koons and Maurizio Cattelan by then.

In Art from the Arctic, a documentary that premiered on BBC4 last February, just weeks after An Inconvenient Truth made its debut at Sundance 2007, a team of artists travels to Spitzbergen in the Arctic Ocean above Norway. Anthony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Ian McEwan, the photographer David Buckland and others are accompanied and observed by the filmmaker, David Hinton. Their ship is locked in place as ice forms and they spend a few months on the island. Much of the snow in this once-pristine place is covered with soot from a mine that Russians operate there. To make things worse, the glaciers are melting, and our artists watch huge masses of ice drop into the sea.

Artists being artists, they think about how this experience will take shape in their work, and we see this as McEwan mulls a future text and a musician on the trip explores the interplay between wind and silence with wooden flutes. Gormley builds a casket in which he forms a man of ice, leaving the figure like a prophetic snowman when the group leaves. We never learn how long Gormley's creation took to melt. Whiteread eventually assembles a collection of cubes to replicate the landscape. Note that the one thing which you never find in nature is her trademark right angle. Yet it's still all a bit of a fool's paradise. Unlike the environment, with art, there is no risk involved in not getting it right.

FIFA doesn't limit itself to the visual arts. Also on the bill was James Ellroy: American Dog, by Clara and Robert Kuperberg. The hour-long film made for French television takes us along some familiar tracks, those of the LAPD investigating the death of the Black Dahlia, and those of the same LAPD in pursuit of the killers of Ellroy's mother, a divorced nurse who went to bars by herself to meet men whom she slept with. Judging by her mutilated body, she met the wrong one that night. Or the right one, suggests Ellroy, who narrates the film and admits to hating her.

In that realm where self-consciously hip pop culture meets literary fashion, Ellroy seems to have earned tenure from the French. He looks a lot like the new Bukowski, a foul-mouthed unapologetic veteran of bars and curbsides, whom the French have accepted as an American primitive, whether Ellroy likes it or not. Bear in mind that Ellroy is talking in this voice about his mother's horrific murder. Next to him, Bukowski sounds like Ira Glass.

From the beginning of this story, you know that the police will come up with a dry hole. You're told as much by "Boston" Bill Bratton, the Giuliani nemesis who now wears the black uniform of the LAPD chief. About a third of the 600 murders in Los Angeles go unsolved every year, says Bratton, who speaks without explanation from a lectern. Did he get this from Al Gore, or does he believe that he has a more authoritative air if he looks like he's presiding over a press conference?

Also conjuring up what may now seem to be old times is the documentary Robert Mapplethorpe, a profile by Paul Tschinkel of the photographer that was built around an interview done with him in the early 1980s. In case you don't remember Robert Mapplethorpe, he was the young photographer who combined a classic aesthetic with provocative gay subjects like fist-fucking and bullwhips up the ass. Those were the days when those things were controversial. If anyone were crucial to making gay themes more acceptable and more profitable, it was Robert Mapplethorpe.

Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989, before right-wing and religious opposition to The Perfect Moment, an exhibition of his work in Washington DC, led a timid museum director to call off the show and resign. Then the director of the Cincinnati Museum of Art was sued on obscenity charges in a trial that mobilized both sides of that issue. (He was acquitted and went on the head the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.)

Back then the name "Mapplethorpe" became synonymous with contemporary art and with the notion among its opponents that all contemporary art was depraved (and undeserving of government support). The battle over the funding of art and culture in the US has subsided for a while, in part because there isn't much government funding left, and because the Republicans had bigger fish than Mapplethorpe to fry once they came to power. Who cares about a few gay pictures when you can mobilize voters over their fears of gay marriage.

In the film, we see plenty of pictures - of flowers, men, even women. We also head from Mapplethorpe's father, who is still ashamed that his son died of AIDS, and from his lawyer, who recalls that Mapplethorpe sent him a bill for a portrait. Mapplethorpe was astonished that a lawyer would be shocked at receiving a bill for services. Mostly we hear from Mapplethorpe, who responds to questions from an inept interviewer with the composure and lucidity of a young man who knew then that he was on the winning side of an evolving zeitgeist.

Even then, Mapplethorpe seems to have been as much a businessman as a revolutionary. (Like Andy Warhol, he learned that there was a lot of money to be made from commissioned portraits.) The pictures that brought him overnight success carried a stigma, which risked hurting the sale of his mainstream flower photographs, so Mapplethorpe himself was reluctant to use an openly gay rhetoric when talking about the homoerotic images. He describes his nude photographs as works of sculpture, where the camera models the skin. Pictures of black men, he said, were like bronze sculptures. Sculptors wish they had it so easy.

Note that the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, formed after his death, has sought for almost 20 years to keep Mapplethorpe's gay work on the margins. This may help explain why the only major exhibition of his work in the last 15 years was Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Aesthetic, a show at the Guggenheim that brought him closer to Greece and Rome than to Christopher Street. The exhibition was so wholesome that it even played Las Vegas. The scheme has worked. Prices for Mapplethorpe's flower paintings have risen. So have those for the gay pictures.

Has Mapplethorpe had any influence among artists and photographers? Gay themes are certainly now easier to present publicly. To learn anything more, we'll need another documentary.

Reign Over Me.

"Like Spike Lee's 25th Hour, writer-director Mike Binder's Reign Over Me is less expressly about 9/11 than about how New Yorkers have tried (and in some cases failed) to reassemble life in the aftermath," writes the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas, "and if Binder has a considerably heavier hand when it comes to metaphor, his movie nevertheless remains buoyant because the feelings in it are immutable, and because [Adam] Sandler has never before held the screen with greater intensity."

"It's rare to see so many moments of grace followed by so many stumbles and fumbles, or to see intelligence and discretion undone so thoroughly by glibness and grossness," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And it is puzzling, and ultimately draining, to see a film that waves the flag of honesty - Face your demons! Speak from your heart! Open up! - turn out to be so phony." That said: "The best scenes are those that give [Don] Cheadle and Mr Sandler room to play against each other, to bring their very different temperaments into a workable syncopation."

Updated through 3/27.

"Like the Detroit-born writer-director's The Upside of Anger (2005), complicated emotions and generous digressions make for unusually intelligent and involving drama," writes Ray Pride; he also interviews Binder.

"Binder manages to prop up his story's sloppiest, sappiest moments by allowing Charlie [Sandler] to bluntly and effectively articulate his misery (and his means of handling it)," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "It's a saving grace that helps moderately buoy this bruised-and-battered portrait of inconsolable grief, and one that, to the film's lasting credit, is matched by a final display of faith not in feel-good recovery but, rather, in the less cheery, more realistic belief that some losses are so cataclysmic, it's next to impossible to ever truly emerge from the resultant rubble."

"[F]ew actors have enjoyed a promotional ride like Sandler has this week, most of it just like the film's tagline 'Let In The Unexpected,'" blogs Nikki Finke.

Updates, 3/23: Kevin Crust, writing in the Los Angeles Times, finds Reign "an ardent man-love ode to rock in both its soft and hard forms.... Binder uses rock - memorably the Pretenders, Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen - in a refreshing way to reflect the intricacies of the relationships. What pours out of Charlie's iPod might as well be coming from his broken heart, but Binder's choices keep things surprisingly spirited. Movies about male friendship are often trivialized with the 'buddy' tag, but this one resonates beyond that."

A "soppy, sentimental take on the aftermath of 9/11," writes DK Holm for Nerve. "Reign Over Me presumes that the only counterpoint to funny is sad."

"Feel left out because you didn't have a personal connection with anyone on one of those ill-fated flights, or with a firefighter who lost his life, or with any of the thousands who couldn't escape the World Trade Center?" asks Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Not to worry. In Reign Over Me, 9/11 victimhood is for everyone: You can feel the exhilaration of recovery without going to the trouble of suffering the pain that necessitates it in the first place.... Reign Over Me, ostensibly a drama about getting past 9/11, only turns the event into a shrink-to-fit tragedy, just big enough to fill a movie screen - barely."

R Emmet Sweeney, writing for the Reeler, finds it "a failure worth grappling with; deep wells of fury and compassion are secreted beneath its scattershot narrative."

Online viewing tip. David Poland lunches with Mike Binder.

Update, 3/25: "As wrongheaded as Reign Over Me is, Mr Sandler can always look to the [Bill] Murray career model: there is hope ahead, and depth in less pompous projects," writes Caryn James in a piece for the NYT on comic actors gone serious.

Update, 3/26: "Reign Over Me is the rare studio film with the fullness of a novel—a novel that reels and overreaches and never finds its footing," writes New York's David Edelstein. "Cheadle is a blessedly centered actor, and Sandler is up to his inevitable let-it-all-out Big Scenes. (The timing might be a tad unfortunate for the one in which he points a gun at two NYPD cops, who carefully disarm him instead of shooting him 41 times.) But the film is slick when it needs to be raw, tidy when it needs to sprawl, and amorphous when it needs to focus."

Update, 3/27: In a similar vein as Caryn James, Carina Chocano in the LAT: "Reign Over Me might have been a better movie with someone other than Sandler in the role of Charlie Fineman, just as I Think I Love My Wife might have benefited from better acting in the lead role. But that they exist at all is preferable to their not having been made. And if this is due in part to comedians wanting to get serious for a moment, maybe we shouldn't complain."

Shorts, 3/22.

"After seeing the picture, it's easy to understand why this was [Werner] Herzog's final collaboration with [Klaus Kinski] (reportedly the director afterward claimed that Kinski had 'become uncontrollable') but Kinski's performance nevertheless serves up a potent confusion of documentary and fiction that has long been an essential element of Herzog's filmmaking," writes Ed Halter of Cobra Verde in the Voice. "Kinski's character, however, is far from the film's only serving of astonishing insanity: Herzog depicts the 19th century as an insensibly violent era, with both Africans and Europeans given equal time for maniac brutality."

More from AO Scott in the New York Times: "Werner Herzog's great subject, or rather his dominant preoccupation - what paranoia was to Alfred Hitchcock or violence to Sam Peckinpah - is mania."

Doug Cummings pleas for a home video release of "Leo McCarey's sublime and shattering Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the last film screened in the UCLA film archive's Curated by... Guy Maddin series."

"[P]erhaps European cinema doesn't exist in Europe but it seems to be identifiable in the United States where they'll tell you that Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Pedro Almodóvar, Patrice Chéreau or Emir Kusturiça are 'European' auteurs with a sort of common language that is not necessarily perceptible when viewed from where we are," Cédric Klapisch suggests to Fernando Garcia Acuna and Ariadna Matamoro at Café Babel. Via Ray Pride.

"Looks like Amir Muhammad is on a roll now," writes The Visitor at Twitch. "The Appeals Commmittee of the Malaysian Censorship Board has made its final decision and upholds the ban on Amir's new documentary, Village People Radio Show (Apa Khabar Orang Kampung). This is the second film of his to be banned locally. Last year, The Last Communist was banned by the Home Ministry after it was initially approved for screening by the Censorship Board."

"Any doubts you might have about Amazing Grace - and I had plenty - are dispersed when you meet Youssou N'Dour, the Senegalese musician who makes his acting debut in the film, playing the freed slave Olaudah Equiano," writes Stephen Moss in the Guardian. Related: "Next Sunday marks the bicentenary of the abolition of one of history's greatest crimes - the transatlantic slave trade. The British government must formally apologise for it," demands London Mayor Ken Livingstone. And Josef Braun in the Vue Weekly: "Boldly, bluntly directed by Michael Apted, Amazing Grace should convince just about anybody that slavery was, you know, a goddamned abomination." And Time Out's Chris Tilly talks with Apted.

Also in the Guardian: "No one who ever ventured behind a camera has adopted a more unapologetically bleak view of the relationship between men and women than Ingmar Bergman." Joe Queenan watches the entire oeuvre - in chronological order. "I found the classic movies from the 50s and 60s even better than I remembered, even more arresting now than the first time I saw them two decades ago." But: "To me, everything from Cries and Whispers onward seemed absurdly depressing and monotonous; in many cases I found myself literally cringing in the presence of autumnal work by a once-great director who had simply lost his way and was not going to find it again."

And: Harriet Lane interviews John Hurt and Maxim Jakubowski wonders, "Why has Peter Greenaway gone so out of fashion?"

"With roughly six weeks to go before a certain webslinger signals the start of the summer blockbuster stampede, your multiplex offerings for the rainy season remain a scattered assortment of medium-budgeted odds and ends - movies too small, troubled or just plain sorry to compete with their presold franchise big brothers." Sean Burns dares to peek ahead for the Philadelphia Weekly.

"[I]n the tradition of the finest forms of American entertainment, both Air Guitar Nation and the geekcraft it chronicles go way beyond shtick and self-parody into some meta-meta-ironic zone, where it's never clear from one moment to the next what is a joke and what is deadly earnest, until the two concepts finally merge into a sort of Buddhist singularity," proposes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "I think it hardly needs saying that Homer Simpson would make a brilliant air guitarist (if only he would get off his lard ass and practice)." More from Michelle Orange at the Reeler. Online listening tip: Annie Frisbie talks with director Alexandra Lipsitz for Zoom In Online.

Max Goldberg, writing at SF360, is disappointed to find that "Colour Me Kubrick can't get past its conceit, a ten-minute character sketch dragged into feature length." More from Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Michelle Orange at the Reeler, Felicia Feaster in the New York Press and Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "Conway is a juicy role, and [John] Malkovich gnaws on it with all the gusto you'd expect from Mr Art-Movie Hambone Actor himself."

Back in Slant, Ed Gonzalez finds The Last Mimzy "rather special" (more from Rob Nelson in the Voice, where he riffs on Mimzy's director, New Line head Bob Shaye) and Sacco and Vanzetti [site] rather "dry" but worthwhile, and Jason Clark gives Fay Grim four out of four stars: "After the onslaught of political documentaries produced and released in the wake of the war in Iraq, the last place you'd expect to see possibly the most astute allegory about the US's role in our current war is in America's drollest, most deadpan comic indie director. But Hal Hartley's delirious, delectable sequel to his 1998 triumph Henry Fool is exactly where you'll find it."

Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE on The Page Turner: "Even Chabrol would have leavened the proceedings a bit with a few gags, and plumbed more fully the class stratification lurking around the edges in his revenge play. But [Denis] Dercourt... plugs resolutely, stubbornly forward, convinced that whooshing strings and portentous camera movements offer the potential to cover up for the utter lack of thrills." On the other hand, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir calls it a "fine example of the excellence of French genre film right now: A dark tale of revenge with an inscrutable heart, ice in its veins and an electric undercurrent of eroticism, it also might be the best-photographed picture I've seen so far this year."

DK Holm, writing for ScreenGrab, catches four documentaries by the Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay at Portland's Cinema Project.

In the New York Times:

• "A harrowing 20-minute sequence of nighttime combat in Blessed by Fire, a bitter remembrance of the Falklands War in 1982, captures battlefield chaos and confusion with a visceral force you won't forget," writes Stephen Holden. "[T]he film portrays the conflict as a mismanaged, vainglorious spasm of nationalism conceived by a fascistic military junta the year before it was voted out of power."

• Sharon Waxman reports on dueling versions of Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor's and executive producer Joe Roth's. "[W]hy did Roth hire Taymor in the first place?" wonders Nikki Finke. "I'm told everyone began the movie with Taymor expecting trouble.... [U]nlike what the NYT portrayed, the problems with Taymor's version of Across the Universe went far beyond length." On the other hand, Glenn Kenny: "Let Taymor Be Taymor."

• Powell's Books is "planning a new series of short films featuring authors, to be shown at bookstores, movie-premiere style." Julie Bosman reports.

"The saddest thing about Stranger Than Fiction is that it wants us to confess that none of it is real, even as it asks us to pretend it is," writes Nick Rombes of "one of those movies that is more inspired than its reviews suggest."

"To paraphrase Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, I've seen a lot of hard-boiled eggs, but Trapped is 20 minutes!" exclaims That Little Round-Headed Boy.

"In remarks which he himself described as 'high treason,' [Stephen] Fry suggested that Britons could be over-rated in the US because of their accent and the 'brittle contrivances' of their acting style," reports Cahal Milmo for the Independent. Ryan Gilbey comments: "There may be some truth in this, although Fry's argument would be strengthened if viewers of all nationalities weren't in agreement that his own performance in Gosford Park was the one element keeping that film from masterpiece status."

Besides, adds Toby Young in the Guardian, "On first hearing an English accent 50 years ago, Americans might have thought: stately home, private school, good manners. Nowadays, they think: low income, poor diet, alcohol problem."

Somewhat related: AA Gil in Vanity Fair: "The British in New York are not good mixers. We hunker together, forming bitchy old boys' and girls' clubs where we complain about and giggle over Americans like nannies talking about difficult, stupid children. An English girl, newly arrived, has been picked up by the expat coven and asked for tea. And rather nonplussed, she says, 'It's sad and sort of weird. This is the way our grandparents used to behave in Africa and India.'"

And then there's New York's "New York vs London" cover package.

"With Fight Club, whether he intended to or not, [Chuck] Palahniuk has shown us that fascism can be created right before our eyes, almost invisibly, and we won't even see it happening," writes Savannah Schroll Guz at PopMatters. Also: Bill Gibron on The Fallen Idol.

From Andy Spletzer's tales from the set: "It wasn't until well into the shoot that I found out that our lead actress Jessica Rose, was famous. You may be asking why it took me so long. Well, that's because I had heard about the whole Lonelygirl15 phenomenon without ever investigating."

Adam Nayman interviews Bong Joon-ho at Reverse Shot.

Sujewa Ekanayake's fired up yet another one: The Real Indie Film News Blog.

Michael Atkinson for the Philadelphia City Paper: "Daniele Thompson's Avenue Montaigne... is a pop-French movie-movie paradigm, performing like a racehorse at exactly the tasks we've expected French movies to do best since the salade days of Jacques Demy: intimate realism, effervescent romance, sly urban comedy, idealized Gallic savoir-faire."

First Snow is "dark," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press, "but a bright spot in [Guy] Pearce's career, who has needed a rebound since butchering Andy Warhol in Factory Girl." More from Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE and Nick Schager at Cinematical.

"Praise for The Lives of Others, particularly from Germany, comes partly at the expense of Goodbye, Lenin!, a 2003 box office success at home and abroad, which skipped lightly over the dark side of East Germany," writes Steve Crawshaw, author of Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century, in openDemocracy.

Owen Hatherley: "[A]t the risk of this blog tipping over into a general tribute to the aesthetics of a now defunct and sometimes rather questionable country, here's a link to a fascinating piece on Moscow's Kinopanorama." Olga Chernysheva for Artmargins.

Ben Slater keeps learning more and more about Saint Jack.

"This is an exercise in cynicism and meanness," announces Magazine Death Pool. "I am going to show all of you - on the heels of Premiere closing its doors - why the very same thing could happen to Entertainment Weekly." Related: Diego Vasquez in Media Life on the coming shakeout for celebrity magazines.

Via Fimoculous, WTFCNN?; related: "Does CNN really have no shame anymore?" asks Susan J Douglas in In These Times.

At the House Next Door, Ken Cancelosi remembers Calvert DeForest, aka Larry "Bud" Melman, 1921 - 2007.

Online non-film-related reading tip. Bookforum's never put so much of a single issue online before. Apr/May 2007.

Online browsing tip #1. Boris Kachka and Brigitte Lacombe (text and photos, respectively) in New York on The Year of Magical Thinking.

Online browsing tip #2. Suggesting three characters to take on, Howard Schatz adds John Malkovich to his "Actor's Acting" collection.

Up-n-coming, 3/22.

Kung Fu Cult Cinema has news of Pen-ek Ratanaruang's next project. Fortissimo co-chief Wouter Barendrecht describes Ploy, set in a hotel, as "intimate yet provocative." Lalita Panyopas and Ananda Everingham are on board, and Anthony Kaufman passes along word from Screen that the film may join "a rumored selection of Asian cinema that promises to be the strongest in years" in Cannes.

Updated.

"George Clooney's plans to bring John Grisham's nonfiction book The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town to the big screen are moving ahead with indie filmmaker David Gordon Green in final negotiations to write and direct the movie." Gregg Goldstein for the Hollywood Reporter.

Steven Zeitchik: "Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the team behind Half Nelson, will write and direct a pic about Dominican baseball." Also in Variety: "Emily Blunt, who made waves Stateside with her performance in The Devil Wears Prada, is set to star in The Young Victoria. Graham King's Initial Entertainment Group and Martin Scorsese are producing." Paul McClintock reports.

A casting update from Erik Davis at Cinematical: Barry Levinson will direct Robert De Niro, Catherine Keener, Robin Wright Penn, Stanley Tucci, John Turturro and Kristen Stewart in an adaptation of Art Linson's memoir, What Just Happened?.

"After the success of The Queen, it was probably inevitable," writes Duncan Campbell. "Thatcher - The Movie is under way." Michael White and Natalie Hanman comment.

Also in the Guardian: Tom Cruise and United Artists might distribute Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth: "If indeed the studio buys the film, it would be a neat reversal of roles for Cruise and Coppola: the Godfather director hired Cruise for a tiny part in his 1983 film The Outsiders." Nope! See update below.

Alison Willmore has more - and more! - news of what's up-n-coming at the IFC Blog.

Update: Sony Pictures Classics has picked up North American rights to Youth Without Youth.

Online viewing tips, 3/22.

Stumble Then Rise on Some Awkward Morning. Stunning work by Kurtis Hough.

There's quite a hubbub going on out there regarding a set of clips featuring NSFW unpleasantries David O Russell and Lily Tomlin exchanged during the making of I ♥ Huckabees. Dennis Cozzalio has gathered them in one entry, added his astute observations and sparked probably the most fruitful discussion to be read at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.

Updated through 3/23.

Tom Sutpen watches Sing, Bing, Sing, "one of the strangest Musicals ever made."

Chris Ware's animation for This American Life. Via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing, where Xeni Jardin points to Hometown Baghdad and Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog and Cory Doctorow finds A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead.

"The Ten Worst Accents in Movie History" at ScreenGrab.

Sample Takashi Miike's Happiness of the Katakuris at No fat clips!!!.

Henry Joost's Nachtmusic fur Linnea. NSFW and via TickleBooth.

Video art is very hard - but not impossible - to find online. A guide from Mia Fineman in Slate.

The Hollywood Reporter's Steve Bryant reviews Steven Bochco's "first foray into Web-only territory," Metacafe. "The videos have no script, no stars, no names. Just young faces, talking animatedly to a camera that holds steady for two minutes on their eye rolls, 'ohmigods' and other storytelling standbys as they talk about their first times, their weird families, their most embarrassing moments. Jerry Springer, you've been disintermediated."

Anthony Kaufman: "4 Years in Iraq and Counting; How Filmmakers Can Help."

Update, 3/23 For the Miami New Times, Frank Houston gets Tomlin's reaction to the leaked videos: "'I love David,' she said. 'There was a lot of pressure in making the movie - even the way it came out you could see it was a very free-associative, crazy movie, and David was under a tremendous amount of pressure. And he's a very free-form kind of guy anyway.... I know some people are more dignified in the world, that if you transgress against that kind of professionalism, that it's some kind of great sin, but I don't see it that way.'" Via Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab.

Fests and events, 3/22.

"This weekend the IFP and Filmmaker will be hosting four screenings of Michael Tucker's The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair," announces Scott Macaulay. I'll write more about this one later, but for now, let me just say: Do catch this one if you can. But don't take my word for it: see Michelle Orange's review in the Voice.

Meanwhile, Nick Dawson: "The force of nature that is Kelley Baker - better known as The Angry Filmmaker - is currently on tour bringing his screenings and workshops to universities and theaters around the country over the next two months or so." Both Filmmaker blog entries feature embedded online viewing.

"Back in my favorite city." David Bordwell's blogging from the just-opened Hong Kong International Film Festival (through April 11) and lists the winners of the first Asian Film Awards. More photos.

"Lionel Rogosin's 1956 movie On the Bowery, an account of skid row life that screens Friday and Saturday in a new 35mm print at New York's Anthology Film Archives, is a rare work that hasn't aged in any way that counts," writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. The Reeler has notes on more New York events.

On Sunday, Jonas Mekas will be at Pink Pony in NYC to sign books with his brother, Adolfas.

For SF360, Jennifer Young asks "actors and filmmakers roaming [the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival] to give props to their favorite Asian American artist, past or present." Also, Miljenko Skoknic: "The driving idea behind the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival GreenWorld Contest, presented by the SFIFF and Yahoo! Video, is to bring the vision of filmmakers to the forefront of environmental discourse."

Michael Guillén's taken extensive notes during the Q&A with Justin Lin and the cast of Finishing the Game. And: "It's truly heartwarming to see how much Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is beloved by his MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS fans and - more interestingly - how he cheerleads their adoration. The man knows how to work a crowd."

Tonight's double feature in the Fidelity and Betrayal: Variations on the Remake series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl (1983) and Michele O'Marah's Valley Girl (2002). Lynn Rapoport and Cheryl Eddy offer their fun takes in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

"The pickings this year at the ninth Boston Underground Film Festival are relatively slim," writes Peter Keough. "Perhaps the Internet has drawn off some of the more accomplished, daring, and transgressive filmmakers." Also in the Boston Phoenix, Steve Vineland on Claude Jutra and Michel Brault, "the twin subjects of the marvelous Harvard Film Archive series Candid Eyes, which begins Saturday and runs through April 1."

"This week, International House offers viewers unvarnished access to the cinematic heart of a nation whose filmmakers have long been underrepresented," writes Mary Wilson in the Philadelphia City Paper. " A three-day showcase of Syrian-made films - encompassing shorts, documentaries and full-length features - looks to provide honest glimpses into contemporary life in the Middle Eastern nation." Today through Saturday.

"At SIFF Cinema, the celluloid birthday party for Janus Films 50th continues!" Bryan Hendrickson reports on the third week at the Siffblog.

"Fiction, the Spanish winner of the best film award at Argentina's Mar del Plata film festival last night, didn't get the wild applause that greeted City in Heat, the film that won the festival audience's hearts and the electronic public vote," blogs Claire Rigby for the Guardian. "But while City in Heat's wisecracking, tango-drenched script had audiences roaring and clapping, Fiction - measured and thoughtful, with elegant, subtle performances from its cast - put down deeper roots, perhaps, in those who saw it."

Mike posts the lineup for the New York Underground Film Festival at Bad Lit. March 28 through April 3.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Blake notes that the full schedule for this year's Nippon Connection is up. April 18 through 22 in Frankfurt.

At Twitch, Mack notes that Hot Docs has announced its lineup. April 19 through 29.

Werner Herzog, Godard... in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King notes local goings on.

Jim Campbell's Home Movies, on view at the Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco through April 28 (via Jonathon Keats at Rhizome), while Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell is open at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma through June 3.

Art Daily has news of on an upcoming exhibition at the CCS Galleries of Bard College curated by Özkan Cangüven: "In We Love Cinema artists and filmmakers, including Javier Cambre, Jason Dee, Harun Farocki, Christoph Girardet, Gustavo Galuppo, Kara Hearn, Ömer Ali Kazma, Matthias Müller, Tejal Shah and Krassimir Terziev, use various strategies to analyze and question cinema."

The Rendez-Vous With French Cinema series moves on to London (March 29 through April 1). Charlotte Cripps has a preview for the Independent.

Geoff Manaugh has an amazing update on the architectural film fest that'll be part of the Silver Lake Film Festival in May.

If you're in Iowa at the time, you can make Memorial Day Weekend, May 25 through 27, a David Lynch Weekend.

"Tim Burton will be honored with the Golden Lion lifetime achievement award and a Tim Burton Day at the 64th annual Venice International Film Festival in the fall." Eric J Lyman has more in the Hollywood Reporter.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Donovan Slacks, set to premiere at the International Film Festival of Uruguay (Saturday through April 8).

Obama goes to the movies.

The role of the "Magic Negro," David Ehrenstein reminds us in the Los Angeles Times, is "to assuage white 'guilt' (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest. As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic - embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle." And now, Ehrenstein provocatively adds Barack Obama's name to the list.

Updated through 3/23.

"Ehrenstein's sad imitation of Armond White doesn't begin to stand up to any kind of scrutiny," comments Ryan Wu. "Obama is all about telling his own story, which is the opposite of what a Magic Negro should be doing, no? In movie terms, Obama is more like Denzel, the charismatic, likable protagonist whose actions drive the story."

Earlier: "Inventory: 13 Movies featuring magical black men," from the AV Club.

Somewhat related: "I did it. And I'm proud of it." Phil De Vellis, the fellow behind the anti-Hillary clip that basically inserts her into Ridley Scott's "1984" ad for Apple, outs himself at the Huffington Post. And now, with much less finesse, as Nick Dawson notes at Filmmaker, someone's hacked up a response.

Update: Rush takes Ehrenstein's op-ed to Limbaughland. Media Matters reports.

Update, 3/23: Thoughts from Chuck Olsen:

A nice fellow at SXSW kept making the same dinner conversation: "What if a foreign power made a persuasive online video to affect our elections?" Lots of thoughtful nodding... My God, you're right. Brilliant. After a beer I finally said, dude, so what? Who cares. Anybody can and will make persuasive online videos for all kinds of reasons, and we won't know who's responsible for half of them. Bring it on. If some foreign power can make a video so incredibly persuasive as to tilt our election toward a certain candidate, then frankly, that is the candidate we deserve to have.

What I may have underestimated is the media's retarded thirst for just such a thing to happen. In effect, the media can make an anonymous political video have exponentially more impact because they're dying for that juicy story. They've had the narrative written all along and have been waiting for a Hillary 1984 video. This troubling fact may deserve our attention more than the video itself.

The Earrings of Madame De...

"A rallying cry has pierced the earlobes of the New York film community, and it's centered on the restored print of Madame currently running at Film Forum," notes James Hughes in Stop Smiling. "Anthony Lane of The New Yorker accepts death as the lone excuse for missing it. In the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris left little room for interpretation with his headline - 'The Greatest Film of All Time' - and even tipped his cap to the late Pauline Kael, who dubbed the film 'perfection.' The highest-carat rave, however, remains courtesy of Dave Kehr, who has mused in the past that Madame may perhaps be 'one of the most beautiful things ever created by human hands.' Projectionists, take note!"

Updated through 3/27.

Further in, Hughes notes that Stanley Kubrick, when asked to list his top five filmmakers, he "offered this appropriately monolithic quote: 'Highest of all I would rate Max Ophüls, who for me possesses every possible quality.'" Then: "Tempting as it is for some to clutch Earrings of Madame De... close, or treat it like a secret handshake detected by only a vanguard of devotees, the re-release, albeit limited, presents an opportunity to stress the universality of the film's themes, and its closest admirers have heeded the call."

Madame "is a beloved period costume drama, but in terms of visceral impact and camera movement, it’s an action flick," writes Steven Boone in the House Next Door. "Madame de... is about love between men and women; between Ophuls and the terrible beauty of people maneuvering through cluttered spaces on the way to happiness that always seem just out of grasp."

A "masterpiece of film form," declares Eric Kohn in the New York Press. Earlier: J Hoberman in the Voice.

Update: "It starts out like a fable of frivolous upper-crust lives in 19th century Paris, then deepens into gale-force tragedy, without you ever really sensing it to the very final shots," blogs Robert Cashill. "My breath was literally taken from me."

Update, 3/26: "In nearly every way, The Earrings of Madame de... is jaw-dropping, with unmatched grace and visual splendor, acting... that's pleasantly but never overly melodramatic, and a complexity in blocking and camera movement that is so difficult to apprehend (or even to believe) that it becomes overwhelming," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Update, 3/27: Online listening tip. Max Ophüls speaks. 50 years after his death, Nicole Maisch considers the life for Deutschlandfunk. Highlights of the report: Recordings of Ophüls himself. Look for "Audio on Demand" in the right-hand column and choose either MP3 or Flash.

Pride.

"When Pride, the Lion's Gate film starring Terrence Howard and Bernie Mac, opens in Philadelphia this Friday, it'll join the ranks of this city's inspirational big-screen sports stories, and it'll surely clean up at the multiplex." But the film was not shot in the City of Brotherly Love and, for the Philadelphia Weekly, Cassidy Hartmann looks into the reasons why: "[T]he reason Pride producers chose Katrina-ravaged Louisiana over Philadelphia has little to do with Philly's development and lots to do with money. For many local industry professionals, that's cause for concern."

Updated through 3/23.

"Despite the constant interjection of helicopter shots swooping around Billy Penn's hat, that vintage SEPTA bus travels some pretty unfamiliar routes, unless someone can point me toward where all those plantation houses and willow trees are on the Main Line," grumbles Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. At any rate, "Howard holds the reins of the whole production, setting the pace with his deliberate timing. He's said that the one thing he most wanted to replicate from the actual Jim Ellis was the man's composure; whether that's what he does is irrelevant, but he does capture a man choking back his anger, recriminating himself for the times when it erupts." JF Pirro talks with that actual Jim Ellis, still a swimming coach.

"Though based upon a specific true story, Pride most closely resembles virtually every other inspirational Hollywood melodrama, its blueprint so conventional and creaky it's astounding that the film's actors manage to deliver their clichéd lines without rolling their eyes," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

But Dennis Harvey's take in SF360 is a bit more upbeat, and besides, "whether Pride becomes the sleeper hit it deserves to be or not, the soundtrack will be surely blaring out of car stereos for months to come."

For Armond White, writing in the New York Press, Pride is "a beautiful anachronism" and "nothing like the current fashion in black-themed movies. It's more like those hardscrabble movies of the 1970s blaxploitation era that no one talks about anymore - Melinda, The Bus is Coming, Georgia, Georgia, Book of Numbers, Aaron Loves Angela, Man and Boy, The River Niger."

"The set-up is so unbelievably formulaic that the genuine charm and aplomb of its players makes for several unexpected smiles," writes Josef Braun in Vue Weekly.

"[W]hile hackneyed in its 'triumph of the human spirit' content, Pride works within its own limitations and does its subject matter, well, proud," finds Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

Update, 3/23: It's "a silk ascot wrapped around an ear of corn," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "But when sinewy young idealists glide through water to the tune of 'I'll Take You There,' the heart still leaps."

Annie Frisbee, writing at Zoom In Online, finds Pride to be "an honest movie that means well, and even though this story has been told before, there's no reason not to tell it again with source material this inspiring."

SXSW, 3/22.

First, the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown is moving. Wiley Wiggins has the news and Reel Distraction shows us what it might look like in its new digs.

"Wandering round Austin, you could be in today's hip downtown-anywhere - not just Los Angeles and New York, but Park City, Prague, Moscow or Honolulu, all of which I've visited to attend film festivals, and all of which have convinced me that provincialism, for better and worse, is on its way out," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "The lone blue spot on Texas' redder-than-red map, Austin is the state's multi-culti liberal oasis, and nowhere more than at SXSW, which attracts thousands to its annual three-pronged festival." And she saw films. The focus of her report, naturally, is Hannah Takes the Stairs, the "entertainingly skittish piece about a romantically confused playwright" and this year's standard-bearer for the "mumblecore movement," a casually related group of films that "speak to a fragile culture of impermanence and addled identity crisis."

Updated.

More on Hannah from Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "[D]espite how sophomoric you may find its characters, or how indifferent you may be to their everyday conflicts, your response is simply one against the nine responsible for the making of this film."

Speaking of Joe Swanberg, the Austin Chronicle's Spencer Parsons tells the story behind (and links to) a most amusing prank he pulled on Quiet City director Aaron Katz.

A great string of highlights from Michael Tully.

Even though he was cut from the final version, the Boston Phoenix's Gerald Peary still finds Manufacturing Dissent "an engrossing, and convincing, indictment of [Michael] Moore's shady, manipulative tactics as a documentarian. And it shows him to be a thin-skinned, selfish-minded human being, with a dark history of screwing his friends on the left."

New reviews at Cinematical:

• James Rocchi: "Sisters has De Palma's original story and credits him, but a lot of the film's look, feel and sensibility are on loan from that other avatar of 70s horror, David Cronenberg."

• "Basically, me and Severance go way back," writes Scott Weinberg. "But what I remember most from that first screening way back in Toronto is this: 'Damn, this is a fun movie.'"

• "[Y]ou don't have to be Canadian or a fan of the show to get a kick out of Trailer Park Boys," advises Jette Kernion. "However, you do have to enjoy drug, alcohol and strip-club humor." Also, Running With Arnold "doesn't offer audiences much new information about the actor-turned-politician." And Jette posts photos she snapped at the festival.

In the Austin Chronicle, Toddy Burton talks with The Lather Effect writer/director Sarah Kelly and star Connie Britton.

Matt Dentler notes that a few Audience Awards were presented after the big awards night on Tuesday: Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher's Dirty Country in the "24 Beats Per Second" category and Marcy Garriott's Inside the Circle in the "Lone Star States" category. To review, then, the full list.

At AICN, a slew of reviews from Psychedelic.

"[R]oughly everybody that was in Austin last week is going to be in Florida for the 9th Annual Sarasota Film Festival in mid-April," notes David Lowery. "The just-announced lineup includes Hannah Takes the Stairs, Quiet City, Silver Jew, Great World of Sound, Kurt Cobain About A Son, and also, in the shorts programs, Some Analog Lines and The Outlaw Son."

Online viewing tip. Tamara Krinsky talks with Matt Dentler and Gregg Araki.

Update: The Hannah team's SXSW trailers are online. Download to own.

Independent Weekly. The Carolinas.

"North Carolina has always been a good chameleon when it comes to movie locations, although that's not the main reason Leatherheads [starring and directed by George Clooney] is being made here," writes Fiona Morgan, opening a package in the Independent Weekly on the boom in local production. "Universal Pictures is capitalizing on a new economic incentive, passed by the General Assembly last summer, designed to lure feature film production back to North Carolina. The film is also taking advantage of South Carolina's even more generous incentives.... And other stars are already in or on their way to North Carolina: Ben Stiller and Jason Schwartzman for a comedy called The Marc Pease Experience; Anthony Mackie and executive producer Wynton Marsalis for Bolden, a biopic about New Orleans jazz legend Buddy Bolden; and Richard Gere and Diane Lane for a drama called Nights in Rodanthe."

Also, a talk with Dale Pollock, a producer, film prof at North Carolina School of the Arts and member of the NC Film Council: "I want to really cultivate where I think things are going: these low-budget independents. There's been this revolution with the equipment that people can make movies with, and I think North Carolina's at the forefront of that."

And another with Dan Brawley, director of the "über-independent" Cucalorus Film Festival, and another with Leatherheads screenwriter Duncan Brantley.

Reviews: Zack Smith on God Grew Tired of Us, Reign Over Me and The Host.

Vue Weekly. Monkeys, sharks and turtles.

For a Vue Weekly cover story, Josef Braun talks with Reginald Harkema, Don McKellar and Nadia Litz "about their own radical histories, off-screen alliances and the murkier emotional subtexts that burrow under the cagey façade of Monkey Warfare."

Brian Gibson on The Rules of the Game: "Perhaps the best reason to watch is to watch again - from De Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), the cavalier hypocrite-king of the master-class, to Christine (Nora Gregor), that apple-eating temptress whom courtiers blame even as they pursue, there's too much to take in at one sitting with this satirical feast."

So today's World Water Day. Seriously. And there's a film program to mark it in Edmonton, too. Carolyn Nikodym has details. Also, the "stunning and horrifying" documentary Sharkwater.

"I'm sure many of my cohorts will agree that while our elders had Transformers, we had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." Omar Mouallem on TMNT: "My only complaint is that their hands are too big. I know it's probably proportionate to real turtles, but they have hands bigger than their faces and that's weird. Other than that, I can't imagine this franchise delivered in a better way." Also, Dead Silence, or rather, not: "Go see Fido, who, despite being a zombie, has a lot more brains."

Jonathan Busch whispers through Premonition.

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Blog-a-Thon.

"I finally realized just how much I'd misremembered it." Introducing the Blog-a-Thon he's hosting, Brian Darr recalls what it was that Hong Sang-soo planted in his mind the first time he saw Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors - and describes the revelations of a second, more recent viewing.

Earlier: "On Hong Sang-soo."

ND/NF, 3/21.

"Dedicated to the work of what the festival terms 'new or emerging' filmmakers, New Directors / New Films [opening tonight and running through April 1] has served as an early stopping point for former up-and-comers from Chantal Akerman to Spike Lee and Wong Kar-wai and many more filmmakers who faded from view or never finished emerging," writes Manohla Dargis.

"Whether because of the state of the world, the states of mind of the festival's half-dozen programmers or those of the filmmakers, this year's slate of 26 features - some of which have yet to secure American distribution - and miscellaneous shorts seems to mete out a greater abundance than usual of sorrows from around the globe. Some of these offerings feel as exploitative as anything produced by Hollywood at its most craven; a few veer close to unhappy art-house self-parody."

"As I watched the selections scheduled for its first week, I found myself wishing, in too many cases, that the movies would try harder, risk more, challenge themselves and their audiences," writes AO Scott, also in the New York Times, of course. "Instead, most of them seemed to hew to familiar themes and strategies, as though they were genre movies for an art-film crowd."

But for Howard Feinstein, writing for indieWIRE, the series "is a godsend... It does include a few old-fashioned clunkers, but a majority of the 26 features in this 36th edition, a joint venture of the Department of Film and Media of the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, exhibit a vital rebellious streak."

"Among the selections are dramatic narrative debuts by a trio of New Yorkers: Julia Loktev, a ND/NF alumna bringing her festival hit Day Night Day Night to the city for the first time; Christopher Zalla, whose Padre Nuestro claimed this year's Grand Jury Prize at Sundance; and Craig Zobel, the director of another well-received Sundance '07 pick, The Great World of Sound." The Reeler hosts a roundtable discussion with the three filmmakers. Parts 1 and 2.

The Village Voice blurbs half a dozen films; another, quicker preview: Logan Hill in New York. And a reminder: Slant's preview package remains the most complete.

Cinema Scope. 30.

"Halfway through editing this issue, I thought that it might be a good idea to commission even more opinionated pieces and just change the magazine's name to Polemics, but what follows will have to generate enough arguments until Issue 31 rolls around," writes Mark Peranson, introducing another wide-ranging and provocative must-read: Cinema Scope, Issue 30, featuring right there on that same page the editorial board's top ten for 2006. #1: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century.

Turning to the Web-only feature: Laurent Kretzschmar translates Serge Daney's 1981 piece on The Elephant Man: It's "as if [David] Lynch was saying: you are not the one that matters, it's him, the elephant man; it is not your fear that interests me but his; it is not your fear to be afraid that I want to manipulate but his fear to scare, his fear to see himself in the look of the other. The vertigo changes sides."

Two interviews are online. Robert Koehler talks with Paul Verhoeven about Black Book, first commenting: "As skillfully as any living director, he revels in cinema's powers of deception, to conceal and then reveal reality, to cover subversive ideas inside the armour of genre." And Rob Nelson talks with Robinson Devor, noting: "Disarmingly quiet and contemplative, challenging both itself and the viewer to sympathize with a rather different breed of animal lover, Zoo is the opposite of exploitation."

Christoph Huber: "What makes [Johnnie] To's work fascinating is its diversity, including aspects often overlooked in favour of his formalist bravado."

"How does one find a place for that which is more than craft competence yet significantly less than artistic personality?" asks Andrew Tracy. "[T]he striking oddities that dot [William] Wellman's diverse filmography make him a difficult object unto himself."

To the festivals. Peranson argues that "premiere-heavy festivals such as Berlin and Sundance do just as much harm as good to the world of cinema." Punctuated with propositions and drive-by pans and raves, this is a rousing collection of points well worth wrestling with. Scott Foundas devotes most of his Sundance report to his seemingly limitless loathing of Grace Is Gone, but the two final paragraphs are given to high praise for The Savages.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Global Discoveries on DVD" seems to grow more exhaustive with each issue; the running theme this time: you've got to buy certain DVDs and/or collections to get your hands on the accompanying texts which often make the package well worth the price - particularly in the case of a few essays he mentions that aren't available any other way.

Richard Porton: "Despite its enormous critical acclaim and popular appeal, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut The Lives of Others, recent winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, insists on sentimental narrative panaceas."

Jay Kuehner: "[J]ust what [Manoel de] Oliveira's agenda might be with Belle toujours is open to interpretation, which is both the source of its frustrating inscrutability and its strange enchantment."

Freddie Francis, 1917 - 2007.

Freddie Francis, who died on Saturday aged 89, was one of Britain's leading cinematographers, whose credits behind the camera included Sons and Lovers (1960), for which he won an Oscar; he also directed more than 25 feature films, including several horror cult classics.

"I don't know where this cinematographer Freddie Francis sprang from," wrote the American film critic Pauline Kael in the late 1950s. "You may recall that in the last year just about every time a British movie is something to look at, it turns out to be his [work] in each case, with a different director." Summing up his own professional philosophy, Francis noted that "there is good photography, bad photography and then there is the right photography."

The Telegraph.

Updated through 3/23.

Francis's achievements as a director, variable as they were, did not go unnoticed by his peers: Scorsese is quoted as saying that he wanted him to photograph Cape Fear because "the main thing was Freddie's understanding of the concept of the gothic atmosphere." ... As a photographer, Francis considered he had three mentors - the great cameraman Freddie Young, John Huston and Michael Powell.

Sheila Whitaker in the Guardian.

See also: The Wikipedia entry - and thanks for the photo, Jerry!

Updates:

Francis was the absolute master of one of cinema's most beautiful and seldom used palettes: black-and-white CinemaScope. He loved the scope ratio and delighted in experimenting with it, in the form of split-diopter shots (that would bring foregrounds and backgrounds in identical focus to jarring effect) and special filters that enabled him to manipulate the gray scale of black-and-white. For The Innocents, he worked with a special lens filter that framed the action inside an opaque iris, accentuating the vintage of the storyline while also relegating some of the image into a hazy periphery where ghosts might legitimately dwell.... By virtue of having Freddie Francis in control of its look, The Elephant Man 0 though written, directed and produced by Americans - became inextricably bound to the blood and sinew of classic British cinema, not only in terms of its look but its heart.

Tim Lucas.

"The Straight Story is remarkable not only for the pastoral serenity of its visuals, but because it featured an octogenarian leading man (former stuntman Richard Farnsworth) and was photographed by the octogenarian Francis (his last film), a striking exception to Hollywood's usual ageism," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

Update, 3/22: Robert Cashill: "John Simon once carped, 'the esteemed cinematographer, Freddie Francis, has lately taken to directing Tales from the Crypt, Tales That Witness Madness, and other tales told by an idiot." But with two enduring careers to his credit Francis was no dummy, and like the late Richard Fleischer, I spent many happy hours in his cinematic care."

Update, 3/23: "His second Oscar win was for the great look of 1989's Glory, prompted Haskell Wexler, a fellow 1989 Oscar nominee for Blaze to tell me in a 1990 interview that he was "so relieved that Freddie won,'" writes Edward Copeland.

On Claude Chabrol.

"The murderously genteel Claude Chabrol has been compared to Alfred Hitchcock by so many critics, capsule biographers, trailer producers and pressbook writers that the label 'France's master of suspense' is forever stuck to his lapel. The seed was planted back in the 50s when Chabrol co-authored an early book on the then-undervalued British filmmaker with fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic (and soon-to-be fellow Nouvelle Vague instigator) Eric Rohmer."

Chabrol and Godard in their Cahiers days.

As The Bridesmaid sees a stateside DVD release, Michael Fox offers an overview of some of Chabrol's most memorable works.

DVDs, 3/20.

DK Holm on a landmark noir and two new releases that surprise in that they aren't documentaries. A few notes follow.

When I was a budding film buff, there were a few common film books on everyone's shelves. If you went to the book store or to someone's house, you were likely to see Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, Arthur Knight's The Liveliest Art, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor by Murray Schumach and Karel Reisz's The Technique of Film Editing. Also among them was a bold book that had its author's name spelling down the thick spine like a theater or hotel sign: Hellinger. That's one book I never dipped into. In later years I learned, of course, that Mark Hellinger was a former newspaperman turned movie producer and, in fact, had his name attached to some superb early noirs, including Brute Force and The Killers.

In official cinema, however, Hellinger is best known for The Naked City, which Hellinger narrates himself, in his wise guy accent, which made famous the concluding sentiment, "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." Like many aspects of the film, this idea was borrowed later by the TV show The Untouchables, which was "narrated" by Walter Winchell. Naked City itself became a TV show, airing on ABC from 1958 to 1963. Reisz's Technique of Film Editing uses the final chase scene from Naked City up the Williamsburg Bridge as one of its premiere examples of fine editing. The influence of the film as a police procedural can be seen in works diverse as Ed McBain's 87th Precinct books and the various Laws and Order. Hellinger experienced none of this, as he died of a heart attack shortly after recording the film's narration.

The title of the movie comes from the book by Weegee, the photographer who inspired the Academy Award-winning look of the film's cinematography by William H Daniels. The film's claim to fame is that it took cinema back to the streets after a few decades of studio-bound if nevertheless convincing settings (Martin Scorsese says somewhere that Minnelli's Manhattan-set The Clock seemed more like New York to him than the city itself did, and he lived there). Written by Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz, and with lush music by Miklos Rozsa, The Naked City, in the experience, proves to be a contradictory thing. The seeming reality of the streets clashes with the artifice of the room sets, and the arch narration clashes with the sentimentally, a reporter's cynicism-coated sentimentality perhaps, but there nonetheless.

Most of the sentiment is bestowed on Barry Fitzgerald as Detective Lt Dan Muldoon, an isolate who is first seen singing along while preparing breakfast for himself. He may be a cop, but he is really a priest who has forsaken a private life for the selfless rigors of public service. He becomes mentor to raw recruit, the married Detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor, who would later fall into the clutches of Stanley Kubrick and eventually become a director himself; Kubrick may have met Taylor while hanging out on the set taking snaps for Look magazine). His mentorship is philosophical and even religious, like something out of a Janwillem van de Wetering novel. The wise old man showing a youngster the ropes is a trope of Hollywood at the time, as are subtle explorations of the effects of World War II subsequently on American society, which is one of the film's bigger themes. To this end, the film contrasts three men, Halloran, Frank Niles (Howard Duff), a sleazy user and con man who knew the deceased woman at the center of the film's case, and the frighteningly ethnic-sounding Willie Garzah (Ted de Corsia), a brutal killer who is much in the spirit of William Bendix, only scarier. In a sense, they represent a "response" to post-war America, one conformist, a second exploitative, and finally one in which a brutal and brutalized figure simply takes what he wants. Images of a death march are evoked in the sheer footwork that Halloran has to endure while tracking down seemingly trivial aspects of the case, which is loosely based on actual events (indeed, it was a case that may also have formed the basis for I Wake Up Screaming and its remake, Vicki).

The Naked City comes to us via the Criterion Collection, which lately has taken a special interest in its director, Jules Dassin. The company has already released Rififi, Thieves' Highway and Night and the City and will come out with Brute Force in April (Criterion tends to release its auteur-oriented discs in pairs). The film comes in an excellent black and white full frame transfer; sound production on most of the interior scenes has the tinniness one comes to associate with low budget drive-in films. A 16-page insert contains cast and crew info, chapter titles, transfer info, an essay by Luc Sante and a memo by Hellinger on the chase sequence. Its supplements are rich. There are two brief video interviews, with Dana Polan who gives background on the production, James Sanders who talks about the locations, and Dassin himself, filmed at a 2004 LA Museum appearance (with bad sound). There is also the trailer, plus a stills gallery, and the final supplement, a commentary track from an aged Wald. Sadly, it is not one of the best yak tracks you are ever going to hear. In content it is repetitious and in production value it is compromised by the screenwriter's speaking habits. Nevertheless, there is good information in this and the other supplements and the disc is a must-have for noir collectors.

Round the digital horn, reviewers have chosen to take the stance that The Naked City is a supreme example of Hollywood art.

Glenn Erickson at DVD Talk kicks off by noting that noir buffs "reserve a special place in their hearts for Mark Hellinger and Jules Dassin's The Naked City, a highly influential crime thriller filmed almost entirely in the streets of New York City," especially for its "omniscient POV narrator, who seems to be the soul of the city itself." Erickson finds the transfer "a bit grainy and the audio is fine. Also at DVD Talk, Jamie S Rich digs into the box to define the film as an "anti-noir," writing of Dassin: "While notably trading the impressionistic shadows that were a hallmark of the genre with the documentary look of Neorealism (swapping, in effect, the Germans for the Italians), he also extracts the dark cynicism from the crime picture, creating instead a police procedural where the good guys are clearly defined and the bad guys unambiguously punished." About the transfer, Rich notes that Naked City has been on DVD before and that the earlier inferior transfer has been improved. "The back-and-white camera work is rich and detailed, and Dassin's photography of New York is seen here with a remarkable clarity. For the nitpickers, there are still some imperfections, such as stutters where the reels would have changed and sometimes a line or two ingrained in the picture."

DVD Authority's Fusion3600 promises that if "you like realism in your noir, then you'll love this movie, as it is about as realistic as possible, given the limitations of the time period. So if you need flash or sensationalism, look elsewhere, as The Naked City is about realism and a natural atmosphere." Dawn Taylor at the DVD Journal admits that it is "fascinating in today's forensics-obsessed culture to watch detectives crack a case using old-school methods."

For nostalgia's sake, it is interesting to look at Bosley Crowther's New York Times review, a generally positive take that still must acknowledge "two of the memorable weaknesses of Mr Hellinger's works," one of which is the "largely superficial" drama, "being no more than a conventional 'slice of life' - a routine and unrevealing episode in the everyday business of the cops," and a "staginess which, flagrant in several instances, rends the 'actuality' disguise."

March 6 saw the release of two interestingly contrasting films, a fake documentary and a drama based on a nonfiction book. I refer, of course, respectively, to Borat and Fast Food Nation. Borat, aka Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is the latest recipient of critical group think, a film few criticize. It has a 90 per cent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes. So will the DVD reviewers be more skeptical, now that they've had time to think about the film, and absorb its various wins and nominations?

For a contrarian view, we naturally turn to... Harry Knowles? "I can't really recommend this. I'm that stick in the mud that [sic] doesn't enjoy Borat," he begins at Ain't It Cool News. For Knowles, the film is "R-rated cable bullshit polluting my local theaters." Knowles doesn't go into much detail about why he didn't succumb to Borat love, but Ken Tucker does at Entertainment Weekly. The writer predicts that "some people are going to feel a mild letdown, a sense of 'Oh, yeah, that was funny the first time around, but was it really such a pop culture event after all?'" and says, particularly of a deleted scene, that "I'm as much a sucker for mean jokes about cute animals as the next fellow, yet I felt sympathy for the woman at the animal control center who, after Borat describes what he wants to do with the puppy he's considering for purchase, grabs the little animal back and snaps, 'You're not going to kill or eat or have sex with my dog!'"

Matt Brighton at DVD Authority takes the more conventional view that Borat is the type of film "you just have to see in the theater acknowledging that, 'Yes, there are some questionable moments,'" but concluding that it all "seems to work. Borat is such a likeable personality that we overlook what he's actually doing and just enjoy the experience." Like Knowles, Brighton assumes, too, that "Fox is just getting this [bare bones] DVD out there so that they might double dip again later this year." Without reservation, Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits calls Borat "the funniest film I've ever seen. I honestly can't remember ever having laughed this hard in a movie before in my entire film-going life," and finds that the humor resides in the simple fact that "most of the Americans they meet seem to have no idea that Borat and Azamat are frauds, despite their often outrageous statements and behavior, nor do they quite ever know how to react to their antics." Even the slim supplements make for "very funny stuff," but like the other reviewers, he writes that "you just know that [more supplements] will be included eventually on some future 2-disc special edition."

Fast Food Nation is, of course, Richard Linklater's adaptation of Eric Schlosser's critique of American society, its eating habits, and how they are shaped by rich and powerful fast food chains. The film fell fast upon the director's previous film, A Scanner Darkly, and both the Philip K Dick and the Schlosser adaptations in their peculiar ways take Linklater back to the world of Dazed and Confused. But Linklater and co-scriptwriter Schlosser have chosen not to recreate the book as a documentary feature but to dramatize it and explore the book's facts and implications in a fictional context. Confounding expectations, the result has disappointed some of the DVD reviewers. Ian Jane at DVD Talk found the film to be a "wildly uneven satirical drama that doesn't stay focused long enough to work." The adaptation suffers by "narrowing [the book] down to a few hollow characters and changing the names of the guilty parties for this fictionalized version, [and] much of the sting has been taken out of the material and the film loses focus fairly quickly by mishandling a few subplots and failing to develop the leads enough for us to care about them."

Brett Cullum of DVD Verdict had "high expectations" for the film because "the book changed my life. When I put down Eric Schlosser's nonfiction look at the fast food industry, I swore off McDonald's and other quick-fix, junk-food chains that dot the American landscape," but found the resulting film "strangely dispassionate," a film that "shows little and says nothing clearly - those who skipped Schlosser's treatise will just scratch their heads wondering what the point is." What's more, "the anger of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me captures the spirit of the Schlosser book even better than this bizarre film treatment."

The anonymous reviewer at Current Film agrees, finding that, in comparison to Linklater's film, Spurlock's "remains a much more compelling and informative look at the fast food industry and its effects on our culture," because Linkater's film, among other things, "doesn't exactly get into the material in the way that one would hope," and that "subplots are never really developed and characters wander in and out." Extras for the disc include a commentary by director and writer, a making-of, and four short animated films that parody The Matrix series, all of which all the reviewers seem to like.

- DK Holm

---

Laura Poitras's My Country, My Country (2006) is "the most sensible film yet about the [American] occupation [of Iraq]," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC News, "and as a counterpoint against acres of corporate-spun non-news, it is indispensable.... [W]hat we see, remarkably, has the electric heat of a new experience, of seeing what has been heretofore officially proscribed. Best of all, the film is so immaculately constructed that it cannot be dismissed with charges of partisan subjectivity — Poitras covers the waterfront as she avoids ideology and cant, and yet everything that unfolds, from the combat-copter rides over Baghdad to the Arab TV footage of the Fallujah bombing, is first-hand evidence of an illegal occupation, an oppressed native people, and an abundance of needless pain and decimation. Without uttering a word herself, she calls the cards on every prevaricating pundit and politician blathering about 'the enemy.'"

Also reviewed this week is Lim Dae-woong's Bloody Reunion, "a simple but full-blooded Korean slasher film that probes the high-school-memories dynamic with a laser."

"Here's a notion to kick around: WC Fields is America's answer to Yasujiro Ozu." Dave Kehr keeps that notion bouncing longer than you might at first think possible. As for the WC Fields Comedy Collection: Volume 2, Dan Callahan, writing in Slant, finds it a "respectable second set, though Never Give a Sucker An Even Break is the only one you really need to own."

300. Again.

While James Wolcott and digby are having a ball watching "wingnut bloggers" go gaga over 300 - and why not - Patrick Goldstein writes the following with a straight face: "Sadly, our critics, who seemed content with hooting at 300, have lost touch with what makes movies different from other art forms. Hollywood's mass-audience films are not a literary or an intellectual genre. Never have been, never will be."

Carina Chocano, though, also writing in the industry's hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, refuses to check her brain in at the front desk: "The latest entry in the annals of Money Changes Everything is Zack Snyder's 300, which about a month ago was being discussed in terms of its allegorical message, but is now being closely inspected for its magical money-making properties.... The interesting question is how 'entertainment' has come to be accepted as a valid, irreducible argument against interpretation; how, in a broader sense, the act of putting things in context has come to be seen as inherently suspect."

Updated through 3/26.

Online listening tip. Once again, at least for Alison Willmore and Matt Singer of IFC News, the question arises: Do critics matter anymore?

Updates, 3/21: "Iran's president today attacked western filmmakers for portraying his country as 'savage,' echoing anger among his aides at the Hollywood film, 300." Mark Oliver reports for the Guardian, where Hywel Williams writes, "[I]t would be mean-spirited to deny 300's actors their buffed moments in the sun, having endured so many months of training. It's when their mouths open, however, that the film falls apart and becomes an American corporation's viciously misleading view of history - both ancient and contemporary."

Online viewing tip. Stephen Colbert: "A-Pop-Calypse: 300." Via C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

Reprinting Jason Morehead's review in full at Looking Closer, Jeffrey Overstreet explains why he won't be going to see 300.

Updates, 3/23: "The biggest laugh comes when Leonidas, while striding purposefully around in his dun-coloured pants, gruffly denounces the culture of Athens as 'poets and boy-lovers!' Oh Leonidas! Do you really want to go there, your Majesty?" wonders the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

"To judge this film's adherence to historical fact (insofar as we understand it) is to do it a disservice, for the film does not even pretend to be historically accurate." Nevertheless... via Movie City News, Eugene N Borza, professor emeritus of ancient history at Pennsylvania State University, for Archeology. He knows his film history, too.

Update, 3/26: "300 is startlingly anti-American." John Rogers has a little fun.

Berkeley and the SZMC.

At a 7 pm meeting tonight of the Berkeley City Council that'll be touching on subjects ranging from zoning districts for medical marijuana dispensaries, the sixth annual Peace Lantern Ceremony and opposition to the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program (keep Berkeley nuclear free!) as well as to Governor Schwarzenegger's proposed cuts in education and transportation budgets, another item will be added to the agenda as representatives of a 22-year-old community of independent filmmakers request that Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and the City Council intervene on their behalf.

Wareham Properties, the new owner of the Saul Zaentz Media Center is demanding rent increases ranging from 40 to 100 percent. Pay up or face immediate eviction.

In a piece that appeared in the Berkeley Daily Planet a couple of weeks ago, Judith Scherr sketched the back story leading up to tonight's request that the Mayor honor his "promise to create and maintain a strong arts community in Berkeley," as a press release puts it, adding a reminder of the stakes: "For over 22 years The Saul Zaentz Media Center has housed a community whose members have produced over fourteen Academy Award nominated documentaries."

Egyptian Cinema @ 100.

With a brief history and a not-so-brief list, Samir Farid introduces an Al-Ahram Weekly package marking 100 years of Egyptian cinema. The centenary will be celebrated with a new Silent Film Festival and, on June 20, "Egyptian Cinema Day, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina publishes a book on the [top] 100 films selected in over 400 pages edited by Ahmed El-Hadari, bringing together articles by a number of critics and historians on the importance of these films." #1: Al-Warda Al-Bida (White Rose, 1933, Mohamed Karim; more). And: "Director Salah Abu Seif came first with eight films, followed by Youssef Chahine, seven, and Henri Barakat, four."

There was a time when Egyptian writers "had the ability to produce a tightly structured script and credibly imbue it with an Egyptian flavor," writes Mohamed El-Assyouti. Now, though, "copying plot-lines, characters, situations and dialogue from popular Hollywood movies [they] make the Egyptian screen a cheap reflection of Hollywood reality." He lists dozens and dozens of examples. "The makers of these films presume that Egyptians are not willing to see themselves on screen and that they would rather live in this dream fantasy of being colorful, funny, singing and dancing."

Salonez Sami offers an annotated list of Egyptian firsts: feature, "talkie," documentary and movie theater.

Related: "Arab Cinema" at Arab Media.

Sight & Sound. April 07.

You'd like to read this, wouldn't you: "Is today's American indie cinema anything more than a refuge for slumming stars in tales of dysfunction and depression, funded by the very system it supposedly opposes? Mike Atkinson reports plus Amy Taubin, Howard Feinstein, B Ruby Rich and Hannah McGill offer their pick of US indie highlights." So would I. Unfortunately, it's not one of the pieces from the April issue that Sight & Sound has deigned to put online.

But fine. We do get to read David Thomson reflecting on which films Bud, the 11ish boy of Terence Davies's The Long Day Closes, might have seen and which it would have been impossible for him to have seen before he lounges "beneath the funnels of projected light where Beowulfs of cigarette smoke wrestled" and watches Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me. Then: "What Davies has created is not so much a celebration of those old movies as an oratorio on radio. It's a bit of an illusion that the American films stand near Bud's bed as his ancestors or ghosts. What the film really comes from is Humphrey Jennings and Listen to Britain."

Ali Jaafar on Days of Glory: "[W]hile Eastwood deconstructed the story of the planting of the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima and Spielberg raised the technical bar in capturing the horrors of war, it is [Rachid] Bouchareb who has proved that cinema can still make a difference."

Reviews:

• Tim Lucas on Yasuzo Masumura's Red Angel, just out on DVD: "Much as Blind Beast seems shocking to western sensibilities for the dark extremes of erotic fetishism it portrayed onscreen in 1969, this somewhat earlier film contains correspondingly intensive scenes in which bloodsoaked operating theatres are indistinguishable from abattoirs, the gruelling dramatisations of amputations somehow made more horrible by Kobayashi Setsuo's elegant black-and-white Daieiscope cinematography, beautifully preserved in Fantoma's spotless 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer."

• "Lee Myung-se certainly has no more commitment to the martial-arts genre than Zhang Yimou does, but he has a more credible history than Zhang of playing with genre for his own ends - and nobody has ever accused him of being opportunistic or insincere in his work," writes Tony Rayns. "Duelist is not his finest hour, but it develops an erotics of swordplay which is original, distinctive and finally rather touching."

• "Some [Aki] Kaurismäki aficionados might think Lights in the Dusk a disappointment after the more immediate appeal of The Man without a Past," concedes Ginette Vincendeau. "Nevertheless, Lights in the Dusk is a highly original, strangely fascinating and self-assured work by Finland's best-known film-maker and one of the most important auteurs in today's European art cinema."

• Ryan Gilbey: "The self-consciously gritty spirit of US independent cinema, and the marshmallow softness of the inspirational issue movie, are fused to unusual effect in Half Nelson, the story of Dan Dunne, a Brooklyn teacher who puts the 'high' into junior high."

Shorts, 3/19.

"I was in Rome in 1960 just as La Dolce Vita was happening and met [Federico] Fellini, Alberto Moravia, [Luchino] Visconti and [Paolo] Pasolini. Then I went to model in New York in 1963 and hung out with Andy Warhol and all the Pop artists, and met the Beat poets. And then I went to Paris."

The release of Performance on DVD gives Anita Pallenberg ample opportunity to tell the Independent's Chris Sullivan a few stories about its making.

Doug Cummings on Roberto Rossellini's India: "Godard once mentioned it in the same breath with Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico, Murnau's Tabu, and Welles's It's All True; like those works, it's a loving tribute to a foreign land by a traveling artist."

The Telegraph's John Hiscock talks with Danny Boyle about Sunshine.

Ghibli World's reporting that Hayao Miyazaki's next film will not be an adaptation of the Chinese story I Lost My Little Boy, but instead Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on a Cliff), due in Japanese theaters in the summer of 08. Via Scott Green at AICN.

David Bordwell revisits "my two favorite B film series," the Charlie Chan and Mr Moto films, in part "to trace some changes in the ways movies were made across the 1930s."

"Ignoring the sophomore slump that was Love Talk, there is remarkable progression in Lee [Yoon-ki]'s writing and directing between This Charming Girl and Ad Lib Night, and I'm both curious and excited as to where Lee will go next," writes Filmbrain. "Ad Lib Night is a tremendous film that positions Lee as one of the most absorbing directors working today."

Eric Henderson: "A fate-obsessive film that would nearly register as existential were it not so resolutely low-key, First Snow is the directorial debut of Mark Fergus, one of the quintet of screenwriters Oscar-nominated this year for Children of Men (another of the five, Hawk Ostby, co-wrote this one as well)."

Also in Slant: Ed Gonzalez on U-Carmen and Fernando F Croce on The Earrings of Madame de....

And at his own site, Nick Schager: "For those who dug Shaun of the Dead, rest assured that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's forthcoming follow-up Hot Fuzz is pretty kick-ass." More from Kurt at Twitch: "Hot Fuzz is comfort food of the highest caliber - both for fans of the both the Buddy Cop picture and British cinema in general. The ability to have many laughs at the expense of what you love while simultaneously reveling in it is a tight line to walk. Wright, Pegg and Frost do it very, very well."

Brigid Grauman meets Werner Herzog in a Brussels restaurant for an interview for the Financial Times.

It's "Back to Blogging" for Anne Thompson, only now for Variety: Thompson on Hollywood.

Zarah Leander would have been 100 on Thursday. Kate Connelly remembers "an unlikely heroine for the Third Reich" and "one of the first gay icons of the screen."

Also in the Guardian:

• "Mammoth advertising budgets enable distributors to swamp billboards and public transport with hyperbolic endorsements - can't they leave the blogs to the readers?" Evidently not. But Ryan Gilbey's readers know a plant when they smell one.

• Peter Bradshaw on The Family Friend: "The spirits of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ben Jonson come together in this terrifically stylish, angular, enigmatic new movie by the Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino, who showed us the same weird and captivating elegance in his 2004 film The Consequences of Love." More from the Observer's Philip French.

• Marco Bellocchio will direct a film "about a woman whom Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, tried to airbrush out of history," reports John Hooper.

• "[Woody] Allen has shown only a stilted understanding of the English and England. Can he fare any better in Spain?" wonders Mark Ravenhill. "I doubt it."

• Paul Arendt: "I'm a magical historian as well as a magician, so I suspect that I got more enjoyment out of The Illusionist than the general public, because the history of magic is built into the story."

• "So what happens when you cast a good-looking, multi-million-dollar Oscar contender, to play a real-life subject with a face like a bag of spanners?" A list from Shane Danielsen.

• John Patterson calls for a presentable Martin Luther King Jr biopic.

• Ancient Greece, A to Z, via the movies: Stephen Moss; also, Joe Queenan on 300. Related: Neal Stephenson in the New York Times: "Lefties can't abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women's rights)... Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens." At any rate, "Lack of critical respect means nothing to sci-fi's creators and fans. They made peace with their own dorkiness long ago."

• Ed Pilkington interviews Tim Robbins.

• The Guardian Review's running a previously unpublished essay by Susan Sontag and a remembrance by her son, David Rieff. Also, Samuel West on acting alongside Harold Pinter in one of his plays.

"I was in London the week that Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares documentary appeared on the BBC," Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, tells Stop Smiling's James Hughes. "He and I had dinner and he went so far as to deny the existence of Al-Qaeda. I said, 'Adam, I've got the foundation documents for Al-Qaeda in my briefcase.' And he didn't ask to see them. For me, that was a very telling moment." Related: k-punk on Curtis's The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom.

"Ritwik Ghatak's films are deeply haunted by the specter of the Partition of Bengal in 1947, and this sense of dislocation and self-inflicted human tragedy created by artificially imposed social division casts a pervasive sentiment of despair, instability, and perpetual exile through all the rended families and uprooted ancestral communities of Subarnarekha," writes acquarello.

In Journey Into Russia, "the one flaw [Laurens] Van der Post notes in the instinctual bullshit detector he ascribes to Russian citizens is in regard to their attitude toward America, which was entirely unbalanced: 'They admired America more than any other country in the world and at the same time they envied, disliked and feared it,'" quotes Robert Horning in PopMatters. "Animated Soviet Propaganda helps shed some light on why this might have been." Also, Michael Buening on the Cuban Masterworks Collection.

"[Pavel] Ruminov's new movie, Dead Daughters, is - partly by hype and partly by the vestiges of a former Soviet system that eschewed slasher meditations - arguably Russia's first true horror movie," writes Jeffrey Fleishman. "Ruminov's tale of three murdered sisters who rise from the grave with wicked vengeance is a dense, sometimes erratic whirl of morality, inner banshees and deadly darts that swarm across the screen like a hard silver rain."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Anthony Kaufman has a backgrounder on Jafar Panahi's Offside: "'At this particular time, he's one of the only filmmakers who is daring and not afraid to protest,' said Jamsheed Akrami, a film scholar who has made several documentaries about Iranian cinema. 'His films are direct attempts to expose inequality and injustice throughout Iranian society.'" In a blog entry, Anthony adds further quotage from Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami and notes: "Both filmmakers seem sincerely worried that the US will attack Iran, and they also both lament their own president for not fulfilling promises he has made to reinvigorate Iran's economy and help the poor." Related: Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "[N]ot only does Offside's very contemporary look at Iranian youth culture act as a nuanced corrective to Zack Snyder's conveniently 'unintentional' Iran invasion propaganda (known before the mid-Thirties as, you guessed it, Persia) but also both films are literal calls to action - Offside for young women to assert their independence in a hideously patriarchal society that's ever so slowly evolving due to burgeoning youth activism; 300 for Americans to stomp, slice, and hack their way through anything, or anybody, of a different color. The choice should be simple."

• "Like the stages of grief, there are four steps to accepting one's fate as a top screenwriter," proposes Rachel Abramovitz in a piece on this year's batch of writers' directorial debuts. Related: Paul Cullum on Scott Frank and The Lookout.

• "The boozehound reputation and endless quotability of WC Fields have ensured his place in pop culture history," writes Dennis Lim. "But that outsize persona and those cherished wisecracks, divorced from the context of his movies, tell only part of the story. Seen today, Fields's best films prove that time has not in the least blunted the originality and complexity of his comedy."

• A concept of "the immigrant experience" based on American movies "may be slightly behind the times," argues Carina Chocano.

• "It would be a mistake to dismiss the drama Beyond the Gates simply because it is another instance of telling an African narrative through white protagonist," argues Kevin Crust.

"Nick Broomfield's Ghosts, about the fate of undocumented Chinese workers in the UK, is a powerful work," writes Robert Stevens for the WSWS, noting that Broomfield has told the London Times, "I wanted to do a film about modern slavery. It's ironic that, 200 years since the abolition of slavery, there are more slaves than there ever have been, just in a different form."

"The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plains make a fascinating matched pair." David Austin elaborates at Cinema Strikes Back.

Three quick reviews from Matt Zoller Seitz:

• Dead Silence's [site] "playfully self-aware touches (like a grand old theater named the Guignol) distract from its leaden pacing, three too many final twists and various behavioral idiocies." More from Ed Gonzalez and Mark Olsen in the LAT and from Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

• Adam's Apples [site] "is one of the latest examples of the post-Pulp Fiction bloody comedy. It's also one of the weirdest, mixing glib humor with dead-serious spiritual inquiry."

• My Brother's [site] "earnest tone, moving orchestral score (by John Califra) and strong cast... carry it past the rough patches."

Also in the NYT:

• "If ever the premise for a movie sounded like a satirical article from The Onion, it would be Air Guitar Nation," suggests David Browne. Says one of the contestants featured in the film: "People think, 'OK, for the next 90 minutes I'm going to be subjected to stoners and idiots playing air guitar.' But one of the things I learned is that while it's a joke, it's one you have to take very seriously."

• Dana Kennedy traces Tatum O'Neal's most recent struggles to get "back in the game."

• For Neil Genzlinger, while Nomad: The Warrior comes from Kazakhstan, it "looks and feels like an old-school American western." More from Kevin Thomas in the LAT.

• Jeannette Catsoulis on Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon: "If Christopher Guest ever turned his attention to psycho killers instead of folk singers and dog breeders, this is exactly the sort of movie he would make."

• Stephen Holden: "The sloppy, absent-minded Premonition is a giant step backward for [Sandra] Bullock."

"Spencer Nakasako gets the credit (or blame, if you like) for starting the still-cresting wave of first-person camcorder documentaries back in 1995, but he claims it was largely an accident." Michael Fox talks with him for SF360.

Dennis Cozzalio's "Professor Irwin Corey's Foremostly Authoritative Spring Break Movie Quiz" has already drawn dozens of comments.

"[A]s with all great films, it's not the story itself that matters in Climates," writes Charles Mudede. "[W]hat matters is the approach, the style, the telling - the colors of the clothes and skin, the arrangement of furniture in a room, the rhythm of the editing.... Climates is a portrait of the kind of life we must in the end admire and desire."

Also in the Stranger: Annie Wagner on The Namesake, "a perfectly subtle story that stiffens with each new visual gimmick," and Michael Atkinson on a sampling of video "elegies" by Alexander Sokurov, "one of the modern age's most restless and uncompromised cinematic powerhouses."

"If you question why Hollywood actors get involved in politics, Mike Farrell can give you a whole book full of very persuasive answers." Dean Kuipers talks with him about "his engaging new memoir, Just Call Me Mike: A Journey to Actor and Activist." Also in the LA CityBeat: Andy Klein on Jodorowsky's El Topo and The Holy Mountain.

Kathy Brewis on Ingrid: A Personal Biography: "The director George Cukor told [author Charlotte] Chandler that Ingrid had 'a great sense of fantasy. Sometimes this works in her favor - in the films and on the stage. In real life, it may have been her undoing.'" Also in the London Times: Wendy Ide meets Andrew Bujalski (related: Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman on Funny Ha Ha) and Anil Sinanan with the latest from Bollywood.

"I'd forgotten how good it was. I'm being very honest with you. I was shocked at how good Kris Kristofferson was." John Clark talks with Paul Mazursky about Blume in Love for the San Francisco Chronicle. Via Movie City News.

The Gothamist interviews James Urbaniak.

Jens Balzer interviews Jung Ji-hoon (aka Rain) for the Berliner Zeitung - and signandsight translates.

Boyd van Hoeij talks with "European Shooting Star" Halina Reijn at european-films.net.

"Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar joined tens of thousands of people in a march through the Spanish capital on Saturday to protest the war in Iraq and to demand the closure of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba." Ciaran Giles reports for the AP.

Jim Emerson posts a few passages from Luis Buñuel's My Last Sigh.

Cathleen Mcguigan profiles Vanessa Redgrave for Newsweek.

Spiegel Online has the full list of nominations for the German Film Awards. The Lolas will be handed out on May 4.

The AP: "Cate Blanchett is in negotiations to star opposite Harrison Ford in the long-awaited fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series, her publicist confirmed Saturday."

Jeremiah Kipp on all things Christopher Walken at the House Next Door.

"The 1975 'blaxploitation' action comedy Dolemite will get to fight another day," reports Carolyn Giardina for Reuters. "The title character - created by comedian-writer-producer Rudy Ray Moore - is an ex-con who joins forces with a squad of 'kung-fu fighting girls' and other allies as he tries to regain control of his nightclub. Moore will executive produce and might have a role in the remake."

Peter Bogdanovich makes an unflattering appearance at the Smoking Gun. Eriq Gardner has the story for Reuters. Thanks, Jerry!

Online reading tips. Zach Campbell collects a few.

Online fiddling around tip. "In 1983 and 1984, bpNichol used an Apple IIe computer and the Apple BASIC programming language to create First Screening, a suite of a dozen programmed, kinetic poems." Via wood s lot.

Online listening tip. Jason Solomon and "an illustrious panel" discuss the Observer Music Monthly's list of the "50 Greatest Soundtracks."

Online viewing tip #1. Alfred Hitchcock's The Working Class.

Online viewing tip #2. Can We Kiss?. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #3. John Coulthart finds Moonlight in Glory.

Online viewing tip #4. Tom Sutpen at Bright Lights After Dark: "Gunvor Nelson's My Name is Oona emerged as one of the loveliest works in American cinema of the late 1960s (a time when you could use such terms as 'poetic' and 'cinema' in the same sentence and still maintain a straight face), and remains so to this minute."

Online viewing tip #5. Joao Ribas introduces Das Kleine Chaos (1967): "Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second 16mm short - made while still a theatre director in Munich - shows the young filmmaker clearly under the influence of the French nouvelle vague (complete with a poster of Juliette Greco), yet already hinting at the recurring themes of his mature work."

Online viewing tips. Thomas Groh watches Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek. Right next to that last one: Zizek on how Hollywood wants you thinking about sex.

Fests and events, 3/19.

"[Barbara] Stanwyck is my favorite movie actress," writes Jim Emerson. "Ever." To back up: "If you are in Chicago the next few weeks, and you feel like taking in a weekend matinee, then you are fortunate indeed because the Music Box Theatre is presenting a centennial celebration of the toughest, sexiest, smartest, snappiest dame ever to sashay across a cinema screen."

The New Directors/ New Films series, presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, runs March 21 through April 1, and Slant's previewed nearly every film on offer already.

"The official website for the 2007 edition of the Philadelphia Film Festival is now online and while I'm just beginning to dig through the program it's obvious that Danger After Dark programmer Travis Crawford has worked his usual magic," writes Todd at Twitch, where Peter Martin picks out highlights from the AFI Dallas lineup (Thursday through April 4).

The Diagonale Austrian Film Festival opens tonight in Graz and runs through March 25. Bénédicte Prot has an overview for Cineuropa.

For the Reeler, Elena Marinaccio previews the Fashion in Film Festival running at the Museum of the Moving Image through March 25.

Also: "Aspen-based filmmaker Wayne Ewing, whose [Hunter S] Thompson documentary Breakfast With Hunter premiered in 2003 (and whose making-of doc chronicling the author's literally explosive funeral, When I Die, debuted in late 2005), assembled another piece in 2006 around footage of Thompson's speeches on [Lisl] Auman's behalf at the Denver Capitol. Free Lisl: Fear and Loathing in Denver, also featuring interviews with a newly freed Auman and contrite observers from the Denver press, has its New York premiere tonight at Barbes as part of the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series." ST VanAirsdale interviews Ewing.

Sujewa Ekanayake is putting together a "DIY Film Festival Project '07."

"With films such as Provoked, Water and Namesake, the Tongues on Fire film festival [through March 31] puts 'Asian women in a deciding position, to feature films that discuss the issues we need to talk about,' says the festival's co-founder and psychotherapist Dr Pushpinder Chowdhary," writes Sara Newman in the Independent. "After visiting the annual Tongues on Fire festival four years ago, Images of Black Women (IBW) film festival directors Sylviane Rano and Betty Sulty-Johnson decided to 'make something for us.' They have been showcasing the work of black women at an annual festival for the past three years, at the Tricycle cinema in Kilburn, north London."

For the Financial Times, James Ferguson tours The Air Is on Fire, open through May 27 in Paris:

[David] Lynch designed the whole exhibition himself. His bigger, more significant paintings hang in the glass-walled, ground-floor space, on steel frames draped in curtains. Down in the basement gallery his early short films are shown in a Lynch-designed mini cinema, next door to which he has built an expressionistic, plywood living room based on one of his tiny sketches. Loudspeakers emit Lynch sound - rumblings and drones composed with his long-time sonic collaborator Alan Splet. There is no curatorial information on the walls. This is a low key Lynchian atmosphere. He is in control.

Daniel Kasman: "Screening Log Aggregate: Abbas Kiarostami." Similarly (but also quite differently, of course), Girish.

Filmfest DC (April 19 through 29) unveils a few highlights of its lineup.

Hal Hartley's Fay Grim will open the Independent Film Festival of Boston (April 25 through 30). This 5th anniversary edition also sees news work from IFFBoston alumni such as Andy Blubaugh, Eric Chaiken, Steve Collins, Don Hertzfeldt, Ted Hope, Matthew Lessner, David Redmon, Josh Safdie, Joe Swanberg and Michael Tully.

In the New York Times, Keith Schneider considers the implications of work by the likes of Noah Kalina, Jonathan Keller and Ahree Lee, all represented in We Are All Photographers Now!, a project on view through May 20. Somewhat related: Robert Hughes in the Guardian on "fast art" vs "slow art," via Matthew Clayfield.

Matt Riviera reviews a batch of new Australian films that screened at the Adelaide Film Festival.

SXSW, 3/19.

I'll have notes of my own as soon as I conquer jet lag (hell, I might even catch up with the Berlinale), but for now...

"I sat on the Narrative Feature jury at SXSW last week. As you know, we gave the Grand Jury Prize to Itty Bitty Titty Committee, Jamie Babbit's riot grrl riff on Lizzie Borden's early 80s feminist indie classic, Born in Flames.... But many of the press reports failed to mention the two Special Jury Prizes we gave out, so I want to say a few of words about these films." Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay on Ry Russo-Young's Orphans and Ron Bronstein's Frownland.

More on that one, too, from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog and Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Updated.

Among Paul Harrill's "final notes on my last day or so at SXSW": "I made it over to Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match. With all due respect to Frownland, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Quiet City, and the Zellner / Duplass shorts program, this was my favorite film of the festival."

What's this, the makings of a backlash already? Sujewa Ekanayake gets into a conversation with other commentators on Anthony Kaufman's "New Ultra-Indie Movement" entry - and points to Lance Weiler's interview with Joe Swanberg (that's an online listening tip, by the way). Related: "[T]his year's SXSW should've been re-named South by South-Swanberg, in honor of the filmmaker and friends who dominated the entire festival," writes Mark Bell in Film Threat's wrap-up.

"The real strength in the SXSW film programming this year lies in the surprisingly quiet, personal moments of several of the films on the slate," writes Michael Lerman. "Whether it be a studio blockbuster like Reign Over Me or a two-day-shoot DV documentary like Silver Jew, [event producer Matt] Dentler and [production manager Jarod] Neece's program finds its strength in telling true-to-life stories." Also at indieWIRE, Brian Brooks on the happy melding of music and film in Austin.

At Cinematical:

• James Rocchi on : "It's part High Fidelity, part Glengarry Glen Ross - the love of music and the war of business - and also has a subtle, Southern sensibility to it, as well as hints of everything from The Music Man to Robert Altman's Nashville to Death of a Salesman to Christopher Guest's stumbling, stammering mock-umentaries. Directed by Craig Zobel - and co-written by Zobel and George Smith - Great World of Sound might be the best American independent comedy of recent memory - funny and vital and tough." Also: "Undead or Alive combines two pretty well-formalized genres: The zombie movie and the western. They're both dense fields - but Undead or Alive skips merrily over their surfaces with the breezy glancing bounces of a well-thrown stone over a river."

• Scott Weinberg finds the "ferocious French import"