Shorts, 4/30.

"I've been on a Welles kick the last couple of weeks," writes Girish as he revisits the films and a few books about them. "All these years I didn't quite realize just how formally daring - transgressive, even! - his movies can be." He also points to, among other things, Jonathan Rosenbaum's entry at the Chicago Reader, gathering "recent finds... especially worthy of notice," including a 9-minute trailer for F for Fake. And, if you buy the same sort of books I do, you'll also have heard from your friendly bookseller that Rosenbaum's Discovering Orson Welles is out tomorrow.

"[Slavoj] Zizek is typically, and willfully, perverse in his praise of 300 (found via Dejan)," writes Steven Shaviro. "[E]veryone else on the Left has denounced the film as a fascist spectacle, allegorically praising militarism and the American war in Iraq, so of course Zizek must instead praise the film as a revolutionary allegory of struggle against the American evil empire." Shaviro then pinpoints where he feels Zizek's gone wrong, adding that "the denunciation of 'hedonist permissivity' is certainly not the way to go - Zizek's loathing for this, like the similar loathings on the part of fundamentalist Christians and Jihadist Muslims, is a false response, based upon a misrecognition of the basic problem."

Stuart Klawans is "the best film critic in America." Looker lays out the evidence for his argument.

Matt Riviera on The Witnesses: "Revisiting the rise of the AIDS epidemic with the wisdom of distance and hindsight enables [André] Téchiné to use the disease as a narrative device, a tool to explore the dual subject of honesty and activism. Doing so with the same urgency as if the film had been made back in 1985 gives the film the seductive aura of a great political thriller."

Paul Harris reports in the Observer on Jodie Foster's Leni Riefenstahl biopic: "The on-again, off-again project has been in the works for at least seven years, but now a script is being written - by British writer Rupert Walters - and a director is being negotiated." Related: Taylor Downing on Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl.

Also in the Observer:

• What do we really know about the child soldiers of Africa? "His ubiquity is a manifestation of how far Africa, with its wars, post-colonial dilemmas and ethnic rivalries but also its hope, vibrancy, cultural and linguistic diversity, has moved from the margins to the centre of western consciousness; of how Africa has become the cause celeb, as it were, of our new globalisation," writes Jason Cowley, who considers the films Blood Diamond and God Grew Tired of Us; the novels Beasts of No Nation and Allah is Not Obliged; and first-person accounts A Long Way Gone and What Is the What.

• "Sharman Macdonald is an established playwright and screenwriter, and her relationship with her Oscar-nominated daughter is about to become even closer," writes David Smith. "Macdonald's new film, The Best Time of Our Lives, inspired by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, will feature [Keira] Knightley in a leading role."

• "Despite fast approaching his 80th birthday, [Ken] Russell still has the air of an enfant terrible." Mark Kermode listens to a few stories.

• Oliver Marre profiles Hugh Grant.

• Kelly Grovier finds The Children of Hurin to be "a worthy addition to one of the most cherished mythologies in English literature."

Cathy Pryor profiles John Sayles for the Independent: "Though he's often thought of as an old leftie beating the drum of social concern, that idealism coexists with a supreme pragmatism. There are possibly few directors as resourceful or as capable of matching their ambitions to their budget as he is."

At Cinematical, Ryan Stewart previews The Shark is Still Working, "an epic documentary about all things Jaws - the making of, the fan community, the legacy, the whole damn thing."

In the Los Angeles Times, Chuck Culpepper tells the story of how Danny Boyle and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo found each other and how the Spaniard ended up directing the sequel to 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later.

In the New York Times:

• Jesse Green profiles Angela Lansbury, "one of the few actors it makes sense to call beloved."

• Focusing on Hostel: Part II, Michael Cieply looks into the question of whether audiences will still have a taste for torture porn in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings. Related: Matt Singer and Alison Willmore's annotated list at IFC NEWS of movies that "have used the contrivance of the death-tournament as a vehicle for commentary on our violence- and voyeurism-obsessed culture, as its own excuse for copious violence and voyeurism, or, sometimes, both."

• Caryn James: "Autism has become to disorders what Africa is to social issues, the celebrity cause du jour."

• Jon Pareles talks with Björk about Volta, "a 21st-century assemblage of the computerized and the handmade, the personal and the global." More from Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker. Both pieces feature audio clippage.

• Brad Stone: "Vudu, if all goes as planned, hopes to turn America's televisions into limitless multiplexes, providing instant gratification for movie buffs."

• Richard Siklos: "Sony is, curiously, the land of the rising stock."

• Two Russians, remembered: Daniel J Wakin on Mstislav Rostropovich and Bill Clinton on Boris Yeltsin.

At DVD Panache, Adam Ross has ten questions for Dennis Cozzalio. Sample: "On the worst day of your life, what movie will you put in?"

Gautaman Bhaskaran sends another "Bollywood Dispatch" to the Lumière Reader.

"[Hilary] Brougher has shaped Stephanie Daley in a way that asks viewers to look into themselves and consider how they might handle a situation infused with such moral ambiguity," writes Gary Dretzka at Movie City News. More from Kenneth Turan in the LAT.

Also in the LAT, Michael Ordoña profiles Margarita Levieva (The Invisible) and Charles McNulty reviews System Wonderland, "David Wiener's new play about a young screenwriter's entanglement with a successful middle-aged writer-director whose career has stalled and his fading-actress wife."

Online viewing tip. Interviewing Hollywood.

SFIFF, fests and events, 4/30.

"Quentin Tarantino will be live in person for one final send-off of the Alamo Downtown on May 10, 11 & 13 with a different Grindhouse triple feature each night," reports the Austin American-Statesman's Chris Garcia - and he's got the lineup.

"For years a joke has been circulating online that a Chinese law exists requiring Daniel Wu to be featured in every Hong Kong film." For SF360, Jennifer Young talks with him about The Heavenly Kings, screening Friday in San Francisco.

In Boston, Cynthia Rockwell sees the "admirable" Year of the Fish and the "beautiful and bizarre" Kinetta.

In Indianapolis, Nathaniel R sees Milk and Opium ("In the film's last act in New Delhi, the themes become crystal clear: die out or be assimilated") and: "Eventually I came to grips with the realization that all of the lives within L'Heritage are unexplored. The story is in the gaps and the frisson between them."

At the Reeler, Elena Marinaccio previews BeFilm: The Underground Film Festival, opening tomorrow and running through May 5.

Acquarello is still savoring the films of Carlos Saura.

"If a great photograph is one that is symbolic, inviting us to project our wide-ranging interpretations onto them, then the images selected for deconstruction by Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman throughout Looking for an Icon are almost beyond reproach," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. Icon screens with The Day You'll Love Me at the Film Forum May 9 through 22.

Jette Kernion at Cinematical and Todd at Twitch note that the Rolling Road Show sets off in July.

"Don't expect a lot of elbow room at Cannes this year," warns Variety's Alison James. "Everyone wants to come this year," a staffer tells her. Via Jeffrey Wells.

The question of which films are and which films aren't "In Competition" at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival should not be fuzzy. And yet, for three years now, it has been, as AJ Schnack explains.

"As Filmfest DC closes its 21st year tonight, it has maintained a steady-as-she-goes familiarity with locals, as synonymous with April as cherry blossoms," wrote Desson Thomson in the Washington Post yesterday. "But the festival has failed to create any visibility beyond the Beltway." Good or bad thing? Thomson looks into it; via Sujewa Ekanayake.

Online viewing tip. Jim Emerson shoots Roger Ebert introducing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls at Ebertfest. For more, see Kristin Thompson's big entry - pix and reviews galore.

Tribeca Dispatch. 3.

Chávez is one of the "buzz films" of Tribeca's opening weekend, to hear indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez tell it; here's David D'Arcy's take. A cascade of notes and pointers follows.

Al Gore and Jon Bon Jovi aside, "green-is-the-new-black" environmentalism is far from the only theme de saison at the Tribeca Film Festival. This year we also have sports, in the form of a new section of the event, the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival.

It would be wrong to echo the skeptics and dismiss this new theme as a sponsor's naming opportunity, which it also is. Sports have been part of the independent film scene for longer than most of he audience at Tribeca will remember. Hoop Dreams and When We Were Kings are the most obvious examples. And let's not forget Chariots of Fire (from the studio perspective) and Werner Herzog's short masterpiece from 1974, The Great Extasy of the Woodcutter Steiner, about a young ski-jumper (sky-flyer, he calls him) who talks as if he walked right out of Woyzeck and makes his living crafting wooden objects by hand. (Perhaps it's not such a coincidence that Herzog is present at the Tribeca Festival this year in The Grand, an ensemble comedy set around the poker tables of Las Vegas, where he plays a German professional gambler. I guess poker can qualify as a sport, at least formally. Television airs it, people earn money playing it and people watch it.)

Most of our experience of sports comes through moving pictures, and, like it or not, most of sports - even the Olympics - is supported by the revenues that come from bringing advertisers to those images. Film should be a natural step ahead. Think of the writers who have written about sports as well as other topics like war and politics. It's a shame that David Halberstam died suddenly last week, on his way to interview the New York Giants' hero quarterback YA Tittle, before any of his sports stories were made into films. I suppose we have to assume that Halberstam wanted it that way.

So far, and we're still just starting, the sports film to watch at Tribeca is Chávez, a documentary about the Mexican boxer Julio Cesar Chávez by the actor Diego Luna in his directing debut.

For years in the late 1980s, when Chávez (born in 1962) was fighting in the super featherweight division, he was considered to be among the finest fighters in the world. He weighed less than 130 pounds, and at that weight you don't get that much attention from anyone but diehard boxing fans or from your compatriots, whom you represent all over the world. It turned out that Chávez (career record of 108 wins, six losses, and two draws) earned an army of fans, which meant that he got plenty of attention from all the wrong people, like the now-disgraced Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the Saddam Hussein of boxing, Don King.

Diego Luna is a fine actor, and this first film is nothing if not a story told from the heart. Chávez was, and still is, a cherubic presence. He is all of five foot seven, and he comes from a middle-class family in Sonora, Mexico, which means that he grew up poor. From an early age, he and his brothers boxed. Their father coached them, until he was beaten by stowaways on a train and seems never to have recovered. At times, Chávez and his family were living in the railroad yards. If that can't teach you survival instincts - and the notion that the best defense is a good offense - what can? Once Chávez got his career off the ground, all of Mexico saw that this boy was something special - gentle, courteous, and unwilling to surrender. Luna has breathtaking shots of him coming back to win over favored opponents, inter-cut with soft-spoken reflections on being in the ring when hope appeared to be gone. Chávez is an extraordinary subject.

As his career flourished, other people wanted part of him. This is the iron law of boxing. Usually other people want that part as quickly as possible, because boxers don't last that long at the top generally, although Chávez did, belying his beatific presence. One of his public supporters was Salinas (who later fell from power in assassination and corruption scandals). The president was seen everywhere in pictures with the innocent-looking champion, images which for a while cleansed him of association with the institutionalized kleptocracy of his ruling party, the PRI. Chávez seemed not to know any better. It's a flaw of Luna's film that the director didn't provide more context about Salinas or go deeper in the scandals that tore Mexico apart, but Mexicans don't need any help to get the picture.

With Don King, who took over Chávez's career later and gobbled up whatever money was to be made before he let the boxer lose his future in the ring, we see a cruder kind of exploitation. King took everything - this is something that those of us who followed boxing knew - and Chávez wasn't just robbed of his money. The fighting schedule imposed by King set the young man on a downturn that ended his career. It happens again and again. Funny how King's name is associated so frequently with such a trajectory. On camera, the motor-mouthed King (a convicted murderer and George Bush supporter) tells Luna that he doesn't seek out boxers. Needy boxers come to him. For once, the man is mostly telling the truth. It's a truth about the sport that Luna would have done well to explore in more depth.

At the end of the film, Julio Cesar Chávez Jr is fighting, coached by father. He doesn't have the father's natural ability, but even at a young age, he seems to have learned some out-of-the-ring preservation skills that passed his father by. As Chávez senior loses his last fight at 150 pounds in Phoenix in 2005 on a technical knockout (in an abrupt humbling end to what was supposed to be a victory lap around major cities, followed by a definitive retirement), the son is there to comfort him. It's a tender moment. If only other boxers could have been so lucky. Luna, who will surely make a better film with this one under his belt, should be thinking about a sequel.

- David D'Arcy

---

"A new documentary about a Mexican boxing hero (Chávez) and a pair of titles making the trip to Tribeca from European festivals (2 Days in Paris and We Are Together) were among the buzz films during the fest's opening weekend," writes Eugene Hernandez, rounding up coverage at indieWIRE.

"Exactly how and when did the United States of America become a police state?" asks Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "Even Alex Gibney's elegant and terrifying documentary Taxi to the Dark Side can't exactly answer that question. But it sure gives some clues." Also, first looks at Suburban Girl ("a moderately sophisticated, not-too-sweet cocktail") and " the enjoyable low-budget black comedy," You Kill Me.

More on Taxi from Anthony Kaufman (as "harrowing and upsetting as Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib"), who also sees I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq With the 101st Airborne ("helps expose the way 9/11 has been exploited by the military to justify their abusive actions overseas") and Beyond Belief: "I wept like a baby throughout the film."

"Vivere plays like a demonstration exercise for How to Sucker an Arthouse Audience," writes Steve Boone at the House Next Door.

Erik Davis at Cinematical: "Featuring an all-star cast of talent, and some of the funniest on-screen bits I've seen in a long time, The Grand marks [Zak] Penn's second mockumentary - a no-holds-barred look at the highly-comedic (at times), yet painful world of high-stakes tournament poker." Also, Ryan Stewart on Napoleon and Me and the panel The Kid Slays in the Picture.

More insanely paced coverage from the Reeler:

• Michelle Orange on Suburban Girl ("New York's publishing industry is certainly ripe for its own Network (or perhaps more likely, Broadcast News), and this is just as certainly not it"), Postcards from Tora Bora ("thoughtful but otherwise uneven"), Lovesickness ("more shrill than funny"), Live! (Eva Mendes "can't freshen the essential staleness of the concept"), Heckler ("begins with promise" but soon "gives way to [Jamie] Kennedy's ax with film critics") and A Guest of Life, "film composer Tibor Smezö's instructive account of a Transylvanian explorer named Alexander Csoma de Korös's journey into the Himalayas in the early nineteenth century."

• ST VanAirsdale: "One of the most authentically New York films of this year's festival, the Midnight number Mulberry Street features humanoid-rat zombies, crowd chaos and media panic around the snug locus of a Lower East Side tenement marked for an upgrade."

• And more Michelle Orange: A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory ("The jewel in [Esther] Robinson's documentary is a cache of previously unseen films shot by Williams, a budding filmmaker at the time, and editor of the first Maysles brothers film"), The True Legend of Tony Vilar ("sweet, sometimes enervating, bizarro documentary about the vanishing of a young Calabrian crooner"), Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer (she's "the kind of broad I'd love to see get the silver screen treatment, but [Ian] McCrudden and [Robbie] Cavolina's tribute is better than fine for now"), Doubletime ("a nice job of building the competitive tension") and: "Sports seem to be the repository for myriad sublimations in both Sons of Sakhnin, United and Unstrung, films about an Arab-Israeli soccer team and the American junior tennis circuit, respectively."

• Vadim Rizov on Half Moon ("outright bizarre by any standard"), The Road to San Diego ("almost too cute to tolerate in summary form" but "it works"), The Premonition ("very bland, very boring"), The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez ("a kind of unofficial companion piece to Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which used the disgraceful incident analyzed here as a jumping-off point for a much better film") and: "The only reason The Matrimony isn't as bad as Black Butterfly is that it's shorter."

• Jennifer Merin talks with Tricia Regan about Autism: The Musical and with Talia Lugacy about Descent.

• On Reeler TV: King of Kong director Seth Gordon and West 32nd director Michael Kang.

At Zoom In Online, Christina Kotlar finds Nobel Son to be "a tightly wound, fast paced, avant garde thriller with an equally thrilling film score that keeps the pulse racing at every twist and turn."

Daniel Kasman on Passio: "Though by no means a prescriptive film, [Paolo Cherchi] Usai's unique and deliberate staging of the experiencing of his film—both in terms of the live music and in the religious setting—is certainly an attempt to find a middle-ground for the spiritual evocation of film between photography and the world outside it."

New York's special section is still hopping.

John Seabrook's snapshot of Julian Schnabel in the New Yorker has little to do with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but still.

For the New York Times, Mickey Rapkin spends "a night out with" Fred Durst (The Education of Charlie Banks).

The Film Panel Notetaker has pix - and of course, notes. More and more.

Spider-Man 3 and the previews of summer.

And so, the long hot summer begins: "Spider-Man 3 is the latest quasi-religious comic-book superhero epic to demonstrate that with extreme power comes extreme spiritual torment, that there are grave psychological dangers when the mask (in the Pirandellian sense) supplants the face, and that the practice of throwing around insane amounts of cash while getting absurdly rich off 'tent-pole' studio franchises can make even an ecstatic horror maven like Sam Raimi a little flabby," writes David Edelstein. "The movie isn't a dud: It has exuberant bits and breathtaking (money money money) effects. But it's supposed to be fun and inspirational, and it's too leaden for liftoff."

Also in New York, Logan Hill gets to the gist of five summer offerings.

Updated through 5/4. Plus: LAT's "Summer Movies."

"If Spider-Man 3 is a shambles, that's because it makes the rules up as it goes along," argues Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. The problem here is "not that it's running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying - or calculating - that some of them will fly."

David Poland sorts through the movies and the studios and predicts the winners and losers of Summer 07. Meanwhile, Movie City News has its chart ready.

More summer previews: Philip French picks 10 "hot" ones for the Observer. Film Threat's run-through is laced with trailers. Among the Blogcritics, Tall Writer has the release schedule and Ian Woolstencroft predicts the top 11 at the box office. Bill Gibron sniffs out "Summer's Stinkers" for PopMatters.

Blogging for the Guardian, David Thomson assesses what all's riding on Spider-Man 3 and adds, "My hunch is that the ads are more excited than the audience. A three-year project's fate will be known in a few hours on its first Friday." And Nikki Finke explains how Sony will be squeezing all the screenings it can into opening weekend to ensure a $100+ opening.

Susan King glances at the three-decade-long friendship of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell for the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: Eric Kohn for the Reeler; and "Peter Parker goes to Tokyo."

Updates, 5/1: "The 3 in Spider-Man 3 is no exaggeration," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Everything's been tripled - to diminishing effect. There are three times the villains, three times the backstories, three times the psychological baggage, three times the special effects, three times the soul-searching, three times the webslinging, three times the three-cheers-for-New York, three times the desperation to entertain. Given that Spider-Man 2 was twice as fun as the first, it's triply disappointing what an overwrought bore S3 turns out to be."

"How do I dislike thee, Spider-Man 3?" asks David Poland. "Let me count the ways..."

"There's some tipping point where a big movie just topples under its own weight," suggests Anne Thompson. "It's all too much, too big, too grand. All human scale stops registering."

Updates, 5/2: Aaron Sagers, Ethan Alter and Kelly Federico present "A Guide to All Things Spider-Man" in PopMatters, launching its summer preview, rolling out through Friday.

"[T]his is a film that commerce mandated, a marketing puzzle that insisted on a solution, an über-franchise whose north of $250-million budget and sky-high expectations make it a master that must be served, a monster to be fed, an imperious creature with its own needs and drives," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "In the face of those unbending commercial imperatives, it is simultaneously encouraging that this Spider-Man actually attempts to bring some originality to the table and disheartening that those attempts are not enough."

"Kicking off the summer blockbuster season with a sigh of disappointment, Spider-Man 3 only proves that more is less," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

Robert Wilonsky, here in City Pages: "It all just feels so... Fantastic Four, so dopey and forgettable and crafted out of second-rate cheese."

The AV Club presents its "Summer Movie Preview Fall DVD Preview 2007," introducing each film with comments divided into four categories: "What it's about," "Why it might be worth seeing in theaters," "Why you're probably better off waiting for the DVD," and "Possible special feature on that DVD."

The Economist takes a look at how "the economics of blockbusters have changed.... Over the years the hillock of box-office revenues became a downward slope, then a cliff face. Given this year's crowded schedule, the drop-offs will be vertiginous."

"What was fun, campy, and grave in the first two Spider-Man films has been transformed into something rather noisy, flippant, and explicitly declamatory," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

"If a student in Screenwriting 101 introduced conflict by writing 'black evil goo falls from the sky and out of all of Earth's inhabitants, latches onto our hero by chance and turns him into an evil person,' they'd get an F," growls Matt Riviera. "That the costliest film ever satisfies itself with such cheap narrative tricks is testament to Hollywood's inverted value system, which says it's harder to make a good, cheap film than it is a bad, expensive one."

Writing in Christianity Today, though, Jeffrey Overstreet quite likes it, and what's more: "We'll have to hope that, against all odds, the director and the key members of his cast will return to make this the first franchise with four straight triumphs."

"Spider-Man 3 could have worked much better if the entire Sandman story had been jettisoned," proposes Edward Copeland.

Jürgen Fauth: "As far as megabudget superhero adaptations go, Spider-Man 3 delivers exactly what it promises: more of the same."

"If the first two Spider-Man movies soared above the banal realm of the Hollywood franchise, the third finds the series falling back to earth," writes Elbert Ventura at Reverse Shot. "Motivations are left unexamined; unaccountable changes of heart are the norm. Some might argue that such is the case with comic books anyway, but what made the earlier Spider-Man movies effective was how fantastical contrivances were rooted in the characters' dispositions and relationships."

"It breaks my heart to tell ya not to break a twenty trying to check out Sam Raimi's newest but I wouldn't even bother seeing this again in Imax," writes Canfield at Twitch.

Ben Walters interviews Raimi for Time Out.

It's Spider-Man Week in NYC, and ST VanAirsdale attended the premiere in Astoria, Queens; Topher Grace wasn't the only one who was "a little overwhelmed."

Update, 5/3: "[Y]ou keep hoping for young Peter Parker to wake up in a sweat, realize it was all a dream, and for the real movie to begin," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "No such luck.... Very few movie franchises, of course, make it to part three with the same vim and vigor with which they started, and watching Spider-Man 3, you more than once get the impression that, for the principal artists and technicians who’ve been with the series from the get-go, the thrill has somehow gone out of it for them this time around."

"Since the movie isn't going anywhere, really, Raimi goes internal; he spends almost two and a half hours contriving an ethical conflict for its played-out protagonist," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "But Spider-Man 3 never transcends tentpole movie triteness."

Neil Morris, writing in the Independent Weekly, isn't as down on S3 as many, "Nonetheless, much of the webbing is starting to look threadbare."

Drew Lazor, writing in the Philadelphia City Paper, isn't terribly down on it, either, though he's hardly enthused.

"Spidey 3 is essentially a romantic drama punctuated by SPFX chases," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "I can hear the fanboys shouting, 'There's no crying in action movies!' I can't imagine them hugging this movie to their man-bosoms. Which could be why I liked it."

"In the grand scheme of things, Spider-Man 3 might not be a big deal," writes Erik Davis at Cinematical. "But getting to experience a major film like this in a packed auditorium with hoards of screaming fans is something to remember."

Updates, 5/4: "Aesthetically and conceptually wrung out, fizzled rather than fizzy, this latest installment in the spider-bites-boy adventure story shoots high, swings low and every so often hits the sweet spot, but mostly just plods and plods along, as if its heart were pumping tired radioactive blood," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"[W]hat makes a movie add up to $300 million?" asks Time's Rebecca Winters Keegan. Consider that "a couple of this summer's most anticipated movies, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, will hover in the $260-$300 million range, not including the marketing costs. To put it in perspective, the most expensive film of all time adjusted for inflation is Cleopatra, which nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox in 1963 and would have about cost $295 million today." So she adds up the expenses.

For the Los Angeles Times, Josh Friedman looks over the summer schedule and talks to some rather nervous studio folks.

Also in the big "Summer Movies" package in the Los Angeles Times:

• The complete, annotated, chronological list of releases.

• Deborah Netburn asks the pundits which movies'll be winners and which'll be losers: David Poland, Garth Franklin, Jeffrey Wells, John Wilson, Berge Garabedian (aka JoBlo), Steve Mason, Erik Davis, Leonard Klady, Mark Lisanti and Kimberly Lawson.

• "Just as Proust's Madeline brought him immediately back to his childhood, the knowledge that Judd Apatow tackled pregnancy in a film called Knocked Up triggers a 'that's going to be a hit' response that leaves us vaguely giddy." Deborah Netburn on how seven seasonal offerings "smell."

• Mary McNamara has a here-come-the-Pirates piece.

• Mark Salisbury talks with director David Yates about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

• Michael Ordoña looks into what'll probably be Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer's only asset, its effects.

• Rachel Abramowitz profiles Hairspray's Nikki Blonsky.

• John Horn talks with Michael Bay about Transformers.

"Your first thought as the credits roll isn't 'Wow, what'll happen next?' but 'Where is there left to go with this?'" writes Dana Stevens. "Raimi and his Spidey team may be spending and making money by the forklift, but they're nickel-and-diming their hero out of a story." Also at Slate, a slide show from Dan Kois addressing the question, "How did Spider-Man get to be a brooding vigilante?"

For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, this one's "more of the same - except better." It's "a vast improvement on the last picture in the franchise - in which the chemistry between MJ and Peter was barely an afterthought - and it's a deeper, richer picture than even the first Spider-Man."

"Ultimately, it's hard not to like these films, even this one," concedes Jim Tudor at Twitch. "I've finally settled into the grove of these films, but now it appears this may be it (at least for the Raimi/Maguire incarnation of the character). But we'll see."

"It's weird to try to apply a 'less is more' critique to a Hollywood blockbuster," writes Matt Singer for the Reeler. "As a Spider-Man fan since childhood, it's equally weird to think that there could be a thing as 'too much' in a Spidey movie, but again, it's seemingly true."

At 10 Zen Monkeys: "Ten Worst Spider-Man Tie-ins."

The Washington Post has its big summer package up and running, too. As for the movie at hand, Ann Hornaday is disappointed to see "an overlong, visually incoherent, mean-spirited and often just plain awful Spider-Man 3, a tangled web of special-effects overkill and self-indulgence that all but destroys the fun and goodwill created by the first two movies." And Ellen McCarthy profiles Topher Grace.

For the New Republic's Christopher Orr, this is "the most exhausting mass entertainment since Peter Jackson's King Kong.... Even viewers who enjoy the movie - and for fans of the franchise there's plenty to enjoy - may be relieved that this could be the last we see of the webcrawler for a while."

Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger on Peter's dance routine: "It's the sort of astonishingly awful scene that can sink an entire film, and it marks an unfortunate turning point in Spider-Man 3. Up until that moment, director Sam Raimi had delivered a painless, if overly familiar, third installment to the franchise. As Peter makes like a touring member of Chicago, however, the vessel springs a major leak, quickly turns aft in the air, and sinks."

"The film's biggest problem is the same one that dogs every action-hero series," notes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "How long can you keep upping the ante before turning into self-parody?"

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw isn't the first to remark that the "series is now beginning to resemble the Christopher Reeve Superman movies at their later sequel stage: a fair bit of zip, and some terrific-looking Manhattan streetscape battle scenes, but no satisfyingly unified story, and muddied by the fact that the love interest now knows the hero's secret identity."

Ryan Gilbey proves in the New Statesman that what one reviewer sees as a fatal blow is, for another, the saving grace: "On the rare occasions that I could make out what was going on through the breakneck editing, the action sequences looked up to par, but personally, I found Peter's dance routine at a jazz club to be shot with more aplomb and ingenuity than any of the countless airborne fight scenes."

"Raimi has opted to turn Spider-Man 3 into a fairground ride," sighs James Christopher in the London Times. "It's a shame." And Kate Spicer meets Tobey Maguire.

The Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu on Sandman: "[T]he idea of evil as wispy and environmental has a certain resonance in this era of avian-flu panics." Otherwise, "The film doesn't teem; it just seems cluttered - a collection of scenes, and occasionally great visuals or gags, strung together by an inadequate plot."

"They play it all with the straightest of faces," observes Derek Malcolm in the Standard. Mostly, "it doesn't quite work."

A "great bellowing bore of a film," sighs Noy Thrupkaew in the American Prospect, "the perfect opener for what's sure to be a summer of diminishing cinematic returns."

Bilge Ebiri at Nerve: "Rarely has a storyline felt so overstuffed and so thin at the same time."

Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Spider-Man 2 was a textbook example of how to make a sequel: Deepen it, make it funnier, give it more heart and come up with a strong villain and a good story. Spider Man 3, by contrast, shows how not to make a sequel."

Zinnemann @ 100.

"It's not that [Fred] Zinnemann, who would turn 100 years old today, didn't make quite a few good and great films and at least one bona fide classic, but is there something you can point to as a Zinnemannesque film the way you might say Hitchcockian or Hawksian?" asks Edward Copeland. "Not really. He simply was a solid, workman-like director who ended up making movies worth watching far more often than he made clunkers." So begins an overview encompassing 14 features.

"Zinnemann became a crucial test case - and cause celebre - for the evolving auteurist theory in the 1960s, as [Andrew] Sarris wrote: 'I will not trade one shot of Orson Welles for the entire oeuvre of Fred Zinnemann,'" recalls Emanuel Levy. "Talk to young and current critics today about Zinnemann's status as a filmmaker, and you'll get the following pejorative adjectives: plodding, uninspired, humorless, and emotionally distant - if they remember who he is."

That said, "Zinnemann, even more so than William Wyler, was the 'perfect' Oscar director. As noted, two of his films won Best Picture: From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons, and four were Oscar-nominated: High Noon, The Nun's Story, The Sundowners and Julia.... No less than 18 actors were nominated for work a Zinnemann film.... With their "sensitive" subjects and issues, humanistic orientation, and middlebrow sensibility. Zinnemann's movies were perfect "Oscar material." His films display good deal of consistency in their narrative concerns and moral dilemmas. Asked to describe the kinds of stories that attract him, he said: 'I just like to do films that are positive in the sense that they deal with the dignity of human beings and have something to say about oppression.'"

Marking the Austrian's centennial in the German-language papers: Christoph Egger (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), Michael Omasta (Freitag), Bert Rebhandl (Berliner Zeitung) and Hanns-Georg Rodek (Die Welt).

SFIFF, 4/28.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's Hana [site] screens at the San Francisco International Film Festival today, Wednesday and next Saturday, and just up is Cathleen Rountree's talk with the director she feels "should be considered one of Japan's Living Treasures."

"Emanuele Crialese's on-stage ebullience at the opening night screening of Nuovomondo (Golden Door) helped kickstart the celebratory spirit of SFIFF50," writes Michael Guillén. "I asked him to speak to his creative decision to present this immigrant dream so literally that it veered into the surreal."

For further exploration of the festival's history as well as for video, photos and recommendations on what to catch through May 10, another starting point, besides the SFIFF site itself, is the San Francisco Chronicle's special section.

Tribeca, 4/28.

"At least the Tribeca 'Film Festival' is becoming more brazenly honest about what it is and what it is not, first in [S James Snyder's piece in the New York Sun] and now in Gregg Goldstein's Hollywood Reporter interview with Jane Rosenthal," writes David Poland, noting that the real goal here seems to be "not a working film festival at all, but building the public support to help push through the $626 million pier project.... Shame on media that allows this potential cash cow to masquerade as an event intended primarily to benefit the community." What's more: "They do their best to damage other real festivals that have existed for much longer and really have been built on the communities they service. The most significant infliction of damage is to the San Francisco International Film Festival, America's oldest."

"Yes, I'll admit to being both a crank and an elitist snob," offers Filmbrain. "Why, you may ask, shouldn't there be room in a festival for the likes of both Jia Zhangke and (sigh) Adam Carolla.... Still, buried between the Hollywood tripe and yet another Ed Burns film, there are some gems to be found at this year's festival, and I've been lucky enough to catch three of them so far." Go and see.

At the Reeler:

• Vadim Rizov on Shotgun Stories ("a genuinely exciting debut"), Between Heaven and Earth (another "startlingly good out-of-nowhere film"), A Dirty Carnival ("a generic but smoothly assembled entertainment"), Born and Bred (suffers from "heavy-handedness and tonal schizophrenia"), Miss Universe 1929 ("a TV documentary and it shows") and Diego Luna's Chávez: "Vigorous and entertaining if not entirely convincing, the documentary posits Julio Cesar Chávez not just as a great boxer but as a key to understanding Mexico during the 90s."

• Eric Kohn on I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne ("provides far more insight than the majority of recent nonfiction offerings dealing with the current generation of troops"; related: Marc Pitzke talks with director John Laurence for Spiegel Online - in German), RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World (Ken Jacobs's "transition into the realm of digital filmmaking is a slightly awkward one"), The Animated World of John Canemaker (featuring Canemaker's "finest shorts"), Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist ("a crash course on the evolution of the seminal comic book auteur"), Two Embraces (a "mediocre Mexican drama") and Tuya's Marriage ("a gorgeously shot narrative about a fierce Mongolian woman forced to divorce her aging husband and find a new suitor").

• Elena Marinaccio takes notes on the Bringing Home The Bacon panel: "Joined by Slate editor and panel moderator Jacob Weisberg, Julie Delpy, Eva Mendes, Julia Stiles, Mary Stuart Masterson and Rosario Dawson described their separate struggles as aspiring women filmmakers, owning much of their inspiration to fated meetings with strangers on the street and being open to all different prospects, in addition to, of course, lots and lots of elbow grease."

• Jennifer Merin talks with Abby Epstein about The Business of Being Born.

• Fred Durst and Jesse Eisenberg talk about The Education of Charlie Banks on Reeler TV.

"Picture Entourage if it was set in New Jersey and revolved around a group of guys who, instead of being hot-shot Hollywood play-makers, were simple blue-collar offspring with drug habits and no career aspirations," suggests Erik Davis at Cinematical. "Gardener of Eden isn't for everyone, but if you're looking for something original - something funny, dark and painful - then this is a film I highly recommend."

For the New York Press, Eric Kohn listens in on The Kid Slays in the Picture, a panel moderated by David D'Arcy and featuring, among others, John Carpenter, who noted that the "torture porn" of films along the lines of Saw and Hostel "doesn't bother him one bit. In those movies, 'you identify with being tortured, not the torturer,' he said. 'That's what the media doesn't understand.'"

Weekend shorts.

"While clearly of a piece with [Bruce] Weber's still photography, the style of the film is fairly unconventional for a doc of its vintage, shot, as it was, in alternately underlit and high-contrast black and white, with interviews set and lit like photo shoots and the highly stylized directorial touch of the filmmaker evident throughout." For the Austin Chronicle, Anne S Lewis talks with Weber about Let's Get Lost, heading for the Film Forum in June and DVD in December.

Nick Curtis has a longish backgrounder on 28 Weeks Later for the Evening Standard and opens his review with: "This stunning sequel matches Danny Boyle's 2002 London horror hit 28 Days Later in almost every way."

"With Hulk, [Ang] Lee brings what has been churning in his Å“uvre for a decade to a boil," writes Gina Marchetti in Film International. "An Orientalist fantasy gone awry, Hulk shows that within the white, Western, establishment male (and, by extension, the American body politic) lurks the repressed man of color, perpetually angry, on the margins and on the loose, waiting to emerge as the apocalyptic destroyer of Western civilization or, perhaps, its ultimate salvation."

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij talks with Manuel Huerga about Salvador (Puig Antich), which premiered at Cannes last year, stars Daniel Brühl and Ingrid Rubio and was nominated for 11 Spanish Goyas. But the first item of business: "European filmmakers have more possibilities in terms of themes, cultures and artistry, but because of its position of submission to Northern American capitalism, Europe is almost forced to sacrifice its identity, its particularity, its cultural richness and variety and its filmmaking talents."

"German cinema used to be the preserve of beret-toting university lecturers and media pseuds," writes Ed Caesar in the Independent. "Now, it seems, it has become the opiate of the popcorn masses. And not just German masses. Punters in Britain, America, Spain and Italy are forking over to see some extraordinary German films, of which The Lives of Others, Downfall and Goodbye Lenin! are only the most successful." The turning point? "Run Lola Run changed everything."

"Things have been looking up for Australian film," writes Garry Maddox in the Sydney Morning Herald. He does take note of the naysayers - George Miller and Fred Schepisi, among them - but counters with numbers and a list of films coming up from down under. Via Movie City News.

Jonathan Kiefer in the Sacramento News and Review on Year of the Dog: "You know a movie is humane when the main character becoming a petulant nutjob somehow only moves you even more deeply. This is not the italicized-and-underlined satire of rotting suburban normalcy that you see coming for miles and already have seen a zillion times anyway (thanks so much, American Beauty). Instead, it's a braver and more accurate reflection of how we live now - less like people in movies than we'd hoped to be, more apart from each other than we care to admit."

In a special issue of Film&Music edited by Björk, Ryan Gilbey talks with Darren Aronofsky about The Fountain ("Björk says:... maybe it was a relief to see him portray a spiritual world that was so idiosyncratic at a time when I feel so overwhelmed by religion") and Kira Cochrane considers "one of the key themes of the fantasy genre - the use of a young or adolescent girl as a protagonist." The occasion is Pan's Labyrinth, about which Björk says, "It really got me. I walked straight home and wrote 'Pneumonia.'"

Also in the Guardian:

• Stephen Poole reviews Brian Preston's Bruce Lee and Me: A Martial Arts Adventure and Matthew Polly's American Shaolin: One Man's Quest to Become a Kung Fu Master: "A question that both of these books ask is: why does the idea of 'kung fu' still hold such glamour and mystery in the west?... As Preston's title suggests, the answer is partly the legacy of Bruce Lee, who was not a particularly outstanding martial artist by Chinese standards, but who was gifted with great beauty and charisma and a willingness to show off some stunts that western audiences had rarely seen. The other part of the answer is a kind of Orientalist spiritualism: a new-agey pick'n'mix adulation of 'ancient Chinese wisdom' and meditation - which very often turns the western teaching of taiji, in particular, into flowery, non-violent nonsense."

• "Spidey goes emo!" exclaims Steve Rose. "It's not just Spider-Man though.... Previously sunny and harmless areas of pop culture are gradually being cast into shadow, as if a giant pair of Ray-Bans is being lowered over the world." In other words, black is the new black. Even so: "What we're getting in Spider-Man 3 and elsewhere isn't actual darkness, it's the suggestion of it. It's darkness lite."

• John Patterson finds the American Library Association's list of "The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990 - 2000" and urges more film adaptations: "You have to believe that annoying these censorious, yet subliterate bigots is a very good thing."

• Peter Bradshaw on Away From Her ("a deeply impressive and intelligent film"), Andrew Pulver on The Painted Veil ("faultless, powerful filmmaking"; related: Rhoda Koenig in the Independent on Somerset Maugham) and Steve Rose on The Puffy Chair ("Promising stuff").

• David Thomson on the Richard Linklater movies he likes and those he doesn't.

"Moments like the one Frenhofer has when sketching Marianne's face can be a godsend to an artist, no matter what his medium." Paul Clark dwells on that one, from Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse. Also at ScreenGrab, DK Holm on the work of film scholar Ginette Vincendeau, Anthony Lane's Barbara Stanwyck piece in the New Yorker and Rolling Stone's 40th anniversary issue: "Portions of the interview with Steven Spielberg are online along with random audio excerpts, though when Spielberg's or Scorsese's will show up is a crapshoot: cunningly, RS is parceling them out piecemeal."

"It's a boys' era. And the market is driving that," producer Lynda Obst tells Sharon Waxman, who notes that as fewer women run studios, fewer "women's pictures" are getting made. Glenn Kenny and David Poland comment.

Also in the New York Times:

• "Snow Cake, directed by Marc Evans (Resurrection Man) from a screenplay by Angela Pell, partly camouflages the banality of its concept with its meticulous performances," writes Stephen Holden. Sigourney Weaver "is convincing precisely because she doesn't oversell the upbeat life lessons her character imparts to Alex... [Alan] Rickman's Alex is a pill." More from Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon and Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

• Nicolas Cage "these days seems all too content to waste his and the audience's time in tacky genre throwaways," while Julianne Moore is "yet another performer who seems intent on breaking the hearts of the faithful." Otherwise, notes Manohla Dargis, Philip K Dick's "story and Next have so little to do with each other that the writer's die-hard fans can relax: the great man's reputation has not been tainted by yet another knuckleheaded adaptation." More from Carina Chocono in the Los Angeles Times, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, Brian Orndorf at Hollywood Bitchslap and Andrew Pulver in the Guardian.

• Matt Zoller Seitz on a doc about the first US soldier killed in Bush II's ongoing war in Iraq: "Directed by Heidi Specogna, The Short Life of José Antonio Gutiérrez bypasses the official narrative and builds a new one that's more complex and less flattering to America's self-creation myths."

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Tailor-made for those who like their violence multifaceted and their women monosyllabic, The Condemned tosses a selection of action movies - Con Air, The Running Man, Series 7: The Contenders - into a blender and serves up the resulting mush." Also, The Invisible: "[T]his latest recycling of foreign-grown frights shows less interest in horror than in healing." More on that one from Nick Schager at Slant.

• Andy Webster on Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace, "a Big Chill for today's 36-year-olds."

• For Neil Genzlinger, Kickin' It Old Skool "is actually much more amusing than it has a right to be, considering that you know exactly what's coming." More from Rob Humanick at Slant.

• Andy Webster finds Wind Chill to be a "a moody, spooky tale, rendered with laudable economy."

• Rachel Saltz: "Ta Ra Rum Pum, about the rise and fall of RV, the 'best, best, best racer in the world,' may take place entirely in New York, but that doesn't stop it from being a classic example of Bollywood family values."

• In an editorial on the "nutritional wasteland" in US schools, the NYT notes that Shrek is being used in PSAs "urging youngsters to exercise as an antidote to the worsening childhood obesity epidemic" while also appearing in ads for "all sorts of candies, cookies, soft drinks, sugary cereals and other high-calorie 'junk foods.'" Related: Emanuel Levy on the state of the franchise.

Jack Patrick Rogers lays out a history of James Bond. Also at PopMatters, Chadwick Jenkins enjoys the new James Cagney collection. On a related note, DK Holm rounds up several of this week's DVD releases at ScreenGrab.

"Platform is a portrait of a country that was as marginally aware of the world outside its borders, as many were unaware of what life was truly like within China," writes Peter Nellhaus.

For JewReview.net, Shmuel Reuven talks with "one of the nicest guys in Hollywood, Lee Arenberg," who plays Pintel in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: "When I met Keith Richards on P3, he reminded me of a modern fuckin' pirate, he really did."

For the London Times, Will Lawrence talks with David Fincher about Zodiac.

Sujewa Ekanayake calls for a Beats & Film Blog-a-Thon.

The Onion: "Despite the existence of cinema classics such as Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Seven Samurai, the 2004 film Garden State starring Zach Braff and Natalie Portman is some poor fuck's favorite movie, according to a posting on imdb.com." Via Jason Kottke.

Online listening tip. Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with Variety's Anne Thompson.

Online viewing tip. Bilge Ebiri finds John Cleese as a psychiatrist on At Last the 1948 Show. Stay for the interlude. Also, a clip from How to Irritate People.

Online viewing tip #2. Rex Sorgatz: "In a four-part interview (1, 2, 3, 4) Michel Gondry interviews Charlotte Gainsbourg, in which they both speak English and it sounds ridiculously sexy. [via]"

Online viewing tip #3. Zach Campbell posts a clip of Quentin Tarantino talking about Chungking Express and comments, "Tarantino's invocation of the French New Wave, about movie love bypassing the rules of filmmaking, is in one sense, of course, good and celebratory.... But I feel like, in my generation, what this means is essentially now a carte blanche to always defend Hollywood against any attack.... Is it just me, or do invocations of nobrow, high-low-boundary-transgressing more often than not come from quarters that wish to defend Hollywood or otherwise corporate product, and almost never in defense of the stuff that doesn't have millions of dollars backing it up?"

Online viewing tips. 10 Pulp Fiction parodies at 10 Zen Monkeys.

Weekend fests and events.

"Entering closing weekend in Toronto, juries at Hot Docs have announced this year's honorees, with Best International Feature Documentary going to Ulrike Franke & Michael Loeken's German film Losers and Winners," blogs AJ Schnack. "A special jury prize went to Michael Skolnik's Without the King. In the category of Best Canadian Feature Documentary, the award went to Bryan Friedman's The Bodybuilder and I."

For the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews sketches a brief history of the Cannes Film Festival and then asks, rhetorically:

Why is it the most resonant annual junket in the world (measured by media coverage) after the Oscars and the Olympics? Because it exists as a unique set of paradoxes fashioned by a unique race, the French.... The contrariness works because of Descartes and Pascal. The Cartesian principle that thinking demonstrates existence is enacted every time we grapple with great art in Cannes, heedless of the beckoning sun and sea. (Those spurned temptations only make us feel more righteous and revelation-graced.) The Pascalian principle that wagering on a notional truth is as good as treating it as a certainty holds for the determination we have at Cannes to outstare a basilisk movie, or to die in the attempt.

Via Movie City News.

The Seattle Theater Group presents a Harold Lloyd retrospective - 9 films in 5 nights, starting Monday - and David Jeffers previews the series for the Siffblog.

Nathaniel R previews a few features lined up for the Indianapolis International Film Festival.

Susan King heralds another revival of "the Star Wars for young women," Dirty Dancing, "returning to theaters nationwide" on Tuesday and Wednesday. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight recommends WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary through July 16.

Over at ScreenGrab, Bryan Whitefield wishes he could go to the "Futuro Presente Festival in picturesque Rovereto, along the Northeast coast of Italy, where they will be honoring legendary filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci." May 3 through 12.

SFIFF, 4/27.

On the occasion of the US premiere of All in This Tea, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Jonathan Marlow talks with legendary documentarian Les Blank. The first part of a two-parter's now up at the main site.

"Plutonium and an opera chorus. Physics and poetry. Baudelaire and the Bhagavad-Gita. Babies born while the "father of the bomb" works on the ultimate destroyer of life." Judy Stone in the Los Angeles Times on Jon Else's Wonders Are Many: The Making of Dr Atomic: "The documentary features the patrician, New England-born and bred, white-haired composer John Adams, an eminence with a self-deprecating sense of humor, and the opera's director Peter Sellars, an impish dynamo, full of passionate persuasion. On Sunday, after delivering his optimistic 'State of the Cinema' address, Sellars will fly to Amsterdam to prepare the international premiere of Dr Atomic."

James Rocchi at Cinematical: "David and Edie Ichioka focus their camera, more or less, on film and sound editor Walter Murch as he talks about the craft of editing and the film's he's applied it to. And really, any 'talking head' documentary stands or falls on whether or not the head doing the talking has interesting things to say - and by that standard, Murch is a movie lover's delight."

Michael Guillén on Heddy Honigmann's Forever: "If it is true that the etymological root of religion is the Latin religare - which means 'to tie, to fasten, to bind' - then perhaps it is memory itself that binds the living to the dead, accounting for what I've long accepted as the religiosity of memory. Honigmann skillfully captures the nature of that religiosity, its faithfulness, its evocation." Also, notes on Graham Leggat's Opening Night remarks.

SFIFF will be screening four films by Rob Nilsson this year; at SF360, he offers "not a 'top 10,' but a list of films which deeply affected him."

Jeffrey M Anderson previews about a dozen entries.

Tribeca, 4/27.

Passio "was assembled from found material by the Italian filmmaker and silent-film scholar and archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai," notes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "[T]he film compiles a damning 'secret' history of human cruelty retrieved from the cultural scrap heap of the 20th century." The music, Arvo Pärt's St John Passion, is performed live by the Trinity Choir at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine tonight and twice tomorrow.

Karina Longworth introduces "Tribeca 2007: The Buzz-O-Meter" at the SpoutBlog - what films they're talking about, and the odds of each of them living up to the buzz.

Daniel Kasman on the latest from Kira Muratova: "Each story, as well as their combination into Two in One is hard to make sense of, as neither segment stands alone, the first acting like a long-running conceptual joke rather than any kind of Altman-style social whirligig, and the second like a good play overextended and stripped of several necessary characters."

"Gardener of Eden is one of those self-consciously dark indies that feel like a mash-up of numerous hipster films of yore," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "As for The Hammer, which was developed by [Adam] Carolla and directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld (Kissing Jessica Stein), the audience enjoyed it fine, and I've certainly seen worse." I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq With the 101st Airborne is "high-integrity, foursquare journalism of the old school, which reminds you how good straightforward nonfiction storytelling can be in the right hands." Further on that one, Tobi Elkin nabs comments from director John Laurence for the Reeler.

Times and Winds is "certainly not as profound nor powerful as its overused Arvo Pärt score portentously commands," writes Aaron Hillis for Premiere. It "may revel in its own beauty, but it clearly doesn't pass the 'exoticism test,' which is: would anybody watch the film if it were in English, with American actors?"

Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door on Black Sheep: "The film aims high and misses often; it clearly aspires to a prominent place in the midnight movie hall of fame, though its constantly inelegant shuffling between aesthetic innovation and plain ol' ineptitude dooms it to little more than footnote status." Related: For a Reeler piece on the popularity of the fest's Midnight screenings, John Lichman talks with director Jonathan King and Voice critic J Hoberman.

More Reeler:

• "There's a vague Last King of Scotland vibe to Napoleon and Me, Paola Virzì's fleet-footed costume drama, although no one - thank Christ - is strung up by his nipples, and Daniel Auteuil foregoes Whitaker's frothy flash for a creepy calm as Napoleon," writes Michelle Orange. Also: "Vivere is writer/director Angelina Maccarone's fourth film, and she plays with narrative and perspective in a way that only superficially resembles that of her countryman Tom Tykwer's calling card, Run Lola Run.... Although the Armenian/Russian conflict in 1994 may not be one that has stayed within the consciousness of most Americans, A Story of People in War and Peace, Vardan Hovhannisyan's document of both the battlefield and the aftermath for some of the fighters could not be more relevant." And Jerabek, Alexis Arquette: She's My Brother and The Workshop.

• "At once hilarious and movingly tragic, [Lost in Beijing] taps into the deep personal codes of relationships and expounds on their destructive tendencies," writes Eric Kohn for the Reeler. Also: "While the remarkable Planet B-Boy which showcases the world's greatest breakdancers in an international competition, comes from New York-based director Benson Lee, its global scope gives it a sense of ingenuity." And: "Former indie slasher director Sam Raimi's latest entry in the lucrative franchise carries a drove of good intentions and comes up short in almost every regard." Related Spider-Man 3 interviews: Alice Jones (Independent) and John Hiscock (Telegraph) with Tobey Maguire and Hadley Freeman (Guardian) with Kirsten Dunst.

• Jennifer Merin talks with A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory director Esther Robinson.

Lily Oei presents "Eating, Drinking, and Shopping in New York: An indieWIRE Insiders Guide."

"As festivals go, this is an odd one thus far," blogs Cyndi Greening. "The press corps is omnipresent here... far more so than at Sundance."

Christina Kotlar gets into the swing of things for Zoom In Online.

William Speruzzi's there.

Matt Dentler recommends "Some SXSW Films to See at Tribeca."

Online listening tip. Alex Gibney talks about Taxi to the Dark Side on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online viewing tip. Reeler TV with Vitus director Fredi Murer.

Fests and events, 4/27.

The Boston Globe's Ty Burr: "Support your local festival, folks: The fifth annual Independent Film Festival of Boston launched on Wednesday and runs all weekend and into next week at the Coolidge, the Brattle, and the Somerville Theatre." Blogging from the fest: Matt Dentler and Michael Tully. And! Cynthia Rockwell.

"'It's my happening, and it freaks me out!' Chaz Ebert exclaimed on behalf of her husband, Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, on stage Wednesday at opening night of the ninth Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign-Urbana," writes Jim Emerson. "The line (memorably quoted by Mike Myers in the first Austin Powers movie) is from the Ebert-penned screenplay for Russ Meyer's 1970 cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which is among the titles in this year's festival."

More from the Chicago Tribune's Mark Caro: "As though in one of those movies that Roger Ebert would praise as long as the emotions rang true, the applause started softly near a rear entrance of the historic Virginia Theatre on Wednesday night and rippled outward until all in the crowd were standing on their feet smacking their hands together.... Chaz Ebert "explained that he won't be leading this year's onstage discussions because 'my speaking voice is disabled, pending another surgery.' But, 'I will fulfill a lifelong dream to have my own La-Z-Boy chair in a movie theater.'"

Why has Cannes snubbed Britain this year? In the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab asks around.

The Telegraph's John Hiscock talks with Quentin Tarantino about taking Death Proof to Cannes.

This weekend: The 7th Annual Chicago Anarchist Film Festival.

The UnionDocs Documentary Bodega series launches on Monday with Eric Metzgar's The Chances of the World Changing. Every Sunday in NYC.

The Columbia University Film Festival runs from Monday through May 10 in NYC and June 6 through 8 in Los Angeles.

In the Stranger, Jen Graves and David Schmader talk about the "best romantic comedy ever," Annie Hall, screening at the Northwest Film Forum through May 3.

Programmer Tom Hall posts his robust "Sarasota Film Festival Diary."

PopMatters opens a three-part special package on the 10th Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Poison Friends.

"Poison Friends revives a rare pleasure of moviegoing: articulacy." Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE: "Ten years ago Phillip Lopate diagnosed a 'Dumbing Down of American Movies,' and the disproportionate praise given to reactionary 'realism' in recent indies suggests that, as expectations shrivel, things have gotten stupider across the board. But Poison Friends, written by frequent Arnaud Desplechin scenarists Emmanuel Bordieu and Marcia Romano, defies the tendency, investing the same raucous humanity into the world of ideas that marked the academic milieu of Desplechin's My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument."

Updated through 5/1.

It's "atmospherically and unmistakably French," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It also has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies. André and his acolytes may be pretentious and self-dramatizing, but there is nothing slack about them, or about this film."

"The real triumph of Bourdieu's disciplined plotting is that he never condescends to his characters by turning them into wisecracking miscreants for the sake of enlivening every frame," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Earlier: Leslie Camhi in the New York Times; "Wrapping NYFF." and "Cannes. Les Amities Malefiques."

Update, 4/28: "[T]he milieu is fascinating, the performances are casually terrific across the board, and Bourdieu's knack for hyperliterate gamesmanship partially fills the void left by Whit Stillman, whose Metropolitan is an unmistakable influence — though the tone here is less affectionate, more corrosive," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

Update, 5/1: Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic: "The story's conclusion verges on the grim, and it underscores Bourdieu's presumable theme: student life and talk are the last real vacations in many lives."

Diggers.

"This very particular movie has a lyrical feel for place, period, and the rhythms of a small-town community trying - and tragicomically failing - to run in place while the world around it opens its arms to creeping corporatism," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Diggers is not a film you watch—it's a movie you live in, and when time's up you feel the same sense of loss as do these guys, who realize they have no choice but to move on."

"This minutely observed period piece, set in 1976, has the brave, mournful tone of a Bruce Springsteen song ('My Hometown,' say) set in Billy Joel territory," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Directed by Katherine Dieckmann from a screenplay by Ken Marino, who plays one of the principal characters, the film makes you contemplate the passage of time. When was it exactly that the recent past slipped into the more distant past and began to seem so poignantly out of reach?"

Updated through 4/30.

"So many political prejudices infect recent indie films that it's unusual to see one that avoids them," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "This refusal is key to the pleasures found in Diggers, the small-scale social comedy directed with almost unerring tact."

In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Crust finds it to be "one of those dialogue-heavy, character-driven films that always seem to attract good actors. Featuring Paul Rudd, Maura Tierney, Josh Hamilton and Ron Eldard, among others, it's a generally well-executed - if overly familiar - tale of a vanishing America, one where the hard-working middle class falls under the heel of a corporation that endangers its way of life."

Annie Wagner in the Stranger: "As a movie, Diggers is affable and lazy - its purpose obscured by a swarm of clichés. As a comic sketch about Frankie [Marino] and Julie [Sarah Paulson], it's great."

"It's a small movie that feels small instead of intimate," writes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online. "Even so, it's a triumph that Diggers has made it this far, and it's worth supporting for bucking trends so completely."

Ellen McCarthy talks with Rudd and Marino for the Washington Post.

Update, 4/28: Peter Smith, writing for Nerve, finds Diggers "affectionate and sometimes funny, but unsurprising to the point of lifelessness."

Update, 4/30: IndieWIRE interviews Dieckmann.

This Is England. In England.

"Like [Shane] Meadows's earlier pictures, Dead Man's Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass, This Is England is about younger, vulnerable figures being taken under the wing of older, flawed men, and this personal theme here finds its richest and maturest expression yet," writes Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. "As to whether we should buy its implied leniency about skinhead culture: that is another question.... However agnostic I confess to still feeling about his work, there's no doubt that Meadows is a real filmmaker with a growing and evolving career, and with his own natural cinematic language. When I think of his films, I think, for good or ill: this is English cinema."

Updated through 4/30.

"While This Is England is steeped in home-grown imagery, it conforms to an American style of storytelling best described as the 'things-were-never-the-same-after-that-summer' film, in which a naive teenager encounters the adult world, usually in the shape of sex (Summer of '42) or death (Stand By Me), and gets a crash course in maturity," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "Meadows does a vivid job of bringing the 80s to life, but his attempt to make an insightful statement about England ultimately fails."

"The cast, especially [Thomas] Turgoose and [Joseph] Gilgun, are major finds," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "What's especially praiseworthy is their ensemble acting, the ebbs and flows of who's in and out being handled with confidence and control. Danny Cohen's photography recaptures the dowdy, pebbledashed ambience of those times.... Meadows has a rapport with his casts, a winning tone and an intimate knowledge of neglected British landscapes; what he desperately needs are new and more complex ideas. Until then, his films will continue to be pleasing but fatally lightweight confections."

Louise Jury talks with Meadows for the Evening Standard, where Derek Malcolm writes, "It is as if, in trawling through his own past again, he has hit upon some basic truths and pointed them up in a self-penned script with obvious emotional honesty."

"Few directors tap their damaged past as brilliantly as Meadows," writes James Christopher in the London Times. "This is England is by far his most personal and powerful testimony."

"This Is England is beset with the usual flaw of Meadows's film-making: his uncertainty with actors," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent. "The performances are mixed, with some responding to the loose, improvisational atmosphere better than others. Turgoose is a real find, but many of the ensemble scenes look awkward."

Jason Solomons has a good long talk with Meadows for the Guardian.

Time Out's Q&As: Chris Tilly with Stephen Graham, Vicky McClure and Andrew Shim.

Earlier: Jon Savage in Sight & Sound and Aaron Hillis for Premiere; "Weekend Brits" and "This Is England. And Englishness."

Update, 4/30: "His films have become increasingly accomplished over the past decade without, fortunately, becoming polished," writes Philip French of Meadows in the Observer. "Starting with his first fully professional picture, TwentyFourSeven, in 1997, his films have been painful letters from Middle England about life on rundown estates populated by people who are rarely gainfully or happily employed: bullies, loners, eccentrics and assorted thugs, living lives of desperation both quiet and noisy. Meadows never sentimentalises or aggrandises these people. He understands their frustration and despair in communities that in this post-industrial era have lost their soul and purpose." And This Is England is "one of his best."

Brando.

"It's probably safe to say that Marlon Brando - a confounding, wildly talented movie star often tagged as the most influential film actor of the 20th century - would have detested Brando, the two-part tribute doc that Turner Classic Movies is running Tuesday and Wednesday," writes Robert Abele in the LA Weekly. "That doesn't mean Brando isn't entertaining for the rest of us, though. For starters, the package is anecdotal catnip for cinephiles, a greatest-hits parade of the Nebraska native's explosive stage beginnings, meteoric rise in film, on-set eccentricities, passion for political causes and mercenary approach to movie roles as he segued into a final act as a corpulent island poobah."

Updated through 5/2.

"Marlon Brando was simultaneously blessed and cursed, and, maybe worst of all, he also possessed a perversity that caused him to curse his blessings and embrace his curse," writes Mick Farren in the LA CityBeat. "When his power was flowing, Brando was mesmerizing - and Brando provides enough archival material, some previously unseen, to demonstrate it."

Update: "While his honest work in Bernarndo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris allowed autobiographical elements to seep into the frame, it's a wonder he never worked with more independent filmmakers, which leaves us to contemplate what could've been," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler.

Update, 5/1: "Brando fans may watch this program, as we watch the Brando movies or read the Brando books, in hopes of deciding the question of whether the big man was mostly a genius or mostly a fat fool. A decisive clue is not here," writes Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times.

Updates, 5/2: "Brando is most original and inspiring when it looks at Brando's other work," writes Cynthia Fuchs at PopMatters. "As [Bobby] Seale remembers, 'If I said, 'Constitutional democratic civil human rights,' I mean, it lit him up.'"

"While Brando is a fine primer—running, with clarity and care, through Stanley Kowalski, Marc Antony, Terry Malloy, Sky Masterson, and onward to Don Vito, Col. Kurtz, and poor old Jor-El—it also gives pause to the long-standing fan," writes Troy Patterson in Slate.

Michael Guillén talks with David Thomson about the doc and its subject.

Hari and the pomos.

"Zizek! is a painful film, almost the record of a philosophical nervous breakdown," writes Johann Hari in the New Statesman (which, for whatever reason, chooses to illustrate the review with a shot from The Pervert's Guide to Cinema). Hari catalogues Slavoj Zizek's endorsements of Lenin and general disdain for liberal democracy and then really gets going:

This kind of thought can only be entertained because nobody would ever take it seriously enough to act on it. When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say we should all become schizophrenic, when the gay Michel Foucault embraces the murderously homophobic Ayatollah Khomeini, when Zizek suggests a return to Leninist terror - these very positions are admissions that postmodernism is merely an unserious confection by intellectuals. It leads nowhere except to demoralisation and disaffection.

Whatever your position, this is a fiery Friday read.

Jack Valenti, 1921 - 2007.

Jack Valenti, who became a confidant of President Lyndon B Johnson and then a Hollywood institution, leading the Motion Picture Association of America and devising a voluntary film-rating system that gave new meaning to letters like G, R and X, died yesterday at his home in Washington. He was 85.

David M Halbfinger, New York Times.

For 38 years until retiring in 2004, Valenti headed the Motion Picture Assn. of America, guiding the trade organization from a clubby group of movie studios led by autocratic moguls into a collection of global media conglomerates involved in television, the Internet and an array of other media businesses.

Updated through 4/30.

[...]

With his silver mane, custom-tailored shirts and suits, and polished cowboy boots, Valenti was one of the most recognizable figures in the nation's capital. Despite being a loyal Democrat, he skillfully worked both sides of the aisles, possessing one of the town's best Rolodexes. Along the way, he became nearly as much a celebrity as the stars - such as Kirk Douglas - he befriended, addressing the worldwide Academy Awards TV audience each year.

James Bates, Los Angeles Times.

Jack Valenti had, for better or worse, as profound an impact on American cinema as almost anyone this side of Orson Welles. And while I know it remains fashionable to dis Valenti (and the MPAA itself) for allegedly stifling free speech and repressing freedom of expression, I nonetheless find myself begrudgingly grateful for his efforts during the 1960s, when he found himself "caught between Hollywood's outdated system of self-censorship and the liberal cultural explosion taking place in America," and yet somehow "abolished the industry's restrictive Hays code, which prohibited explicit violence and frank treatment of sex, and in 1968 oversaw creation of today's letter-based ratings system." Trust me: Without the MPAA ratings system, we likely would have seen dozens (if not hundreds) of local censorship boards popping up throughout the United States from 1966 onward.

Joe Leydon.

Updates: Richard Corliss for Time: "He politicked hard and heartily with his old Washington friends for favorable tariff rulings, and in the process maintained Hollywood's status as one of the few national cinemas not subject to government censorship. (It's also one of the few to receive no direct government subsidies for film production, so I guess that's a fair swap.)... With the build of a miniature bulldog and his fondness for a wildly ornate, orotund oratory, he was a throwback character out of Preston Sturges or Allen's Alley. He may have raised winces on the faces of the new-breed, laid-back moguls. But I'm guessing Valenti didn't mind being smiled at. If he was a figure of fun, he had fun being that figure."

"I always admired his tenacity and skill set," blogs David Poland. "The guy was a perfectly coiffed bulldog. And he protected the film business more aggressively and more successfully than 99.9% of people can begin to imagine."

Nikki Finke collects comments from "Studio Moguls."

Nick Dawson at Filmmaker: "Jack Valenti's death is a reminder that his legacy, namely the system he created at the MPAA, has always favored studio films while, as [Kirby] Dick's potted history of the MPAA's 'quirky' decisions reveals, indie filmmakers have been the ones disadvantaged by the censors' double standards. And no doubt will continue to be."

Updates, 4/28: In the NYT, Michael Cieply assesses Valenti's legacy, the ratings system: "For the major studios the system has been a bulwark against outside interference, though it has often galled filmmakers and hasn't done enough for many parents, who increasingly want to know more about what their children are going to see in a picture.... Yet it was Mr Valenti's genius to have devised an apparatus that is not bound by precedent, changes its definitions at will and, ultimately, serves the motion picture industry by becoming, at any given moment, as permissive or restrictive as the prevailing climate seems to demand."

Vanity Fair runs an "expanded version" of George Wayne's interview with Valenti that ran in the March issue.

Updates, 4/30: "We were both privileged to work with Jack Valenti and to know him well," begins an appreciation from Sherry Lansing and William Friedkin in the LAT. "Jack was a leader and a healer. He was persuasive but never offensive. He loved movies. He was our greatest cheerleader, and he accomplished more for the industry than anyone ever has."

Leonard Klady at Movie City News: "As far as the public was concerned the prime purpose of the organization was to rate movies for theaters when in reality that part of its work maybe amounted to 5 percent of its energy. Film theft aka piracy similarly is not the primary focus of the organization. It is now and forever about hammering out favorable trade agreements. Entertainment is, after all, America's biggest export industry."

"Abroad, he was a tenacious and often successful fighter for retaining and opening markets to Hollywood entertainment," writes Christopher Reed in the Guardian. "This made him an irritant in Europe with his incessant skirmishings against domestic film subsidies and quotas, and his implacable defence of US 'cultural dominance.'"

"Valenti seldom objected to a film industry that was content sometimes to turn the movies into a kind of ghetto for violent dreams," blogs David Thomson. "We don't know exactly how that climate leads to events like the Virginia Tech shootings - but an enquiring mind is bound to wonder. Valenti's grin seldom had such a mind for company. He was a PR flack for an industry that has little respect for the imaginations it reached." Yes, he really wrote that. Click his name and see.

Zoo.

"Did the Enumclaw zoophiles pervert the nature of their animals any more than some Chihuahua-toting bimbo?" wonders Nathan Lee out loud in the Voice. "I can't believe I'm thinking about this stuff, but weirdly grateful to Zoo for going there. The beautiful and beguiling new film by Robinson Devor meditates on the Enumclaw incident through a hypnotic blend of original reporting, staged reenactment, testimony of involved parties (both zoophiles and local law enforcement), and pervasive, somewhat precious lyricism."

Updated through 4/28.

It's "very easy to hide behind aestheticized imagery, as Zoo soon proves," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Much has been made of the film's look, and it's easy to see why. The cinematographer, Sean Kirby, who also shot Mr Devor's Police Beat, a fiction film about a lovelorn Seattle bicycle cop, has done some striking work here.... Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely because Mr Devor refuses to acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film, because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night."

"Devor succeeds because he's created a film depicting a lifestyle scandalous and controversial to the mainstream that's completely disinterested in fomenting scandal and controversy," writes Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE. "It's obvious that he's wise to the macabre curiosity that surrounds zoophilia - the way it's furnished hours of late night gross-out enjoyment in freshman dorms nationwide. But Zoo's more The New World than Jackass."

"Personally, I have problems with it." Aaron Hillis's interview with Devor is a refreshing break from the usual "What was it like to work with..." junket pandering. "If you present a sensational story with good intentions and restraint, is that enough to do away with its tabloid appeal?" Also at IFC News, Matt Singer: "I walked away from it feeling like I didn't entirely understand these men and their motives. One of the animal rights workers says that investigating Mr Hands's case let her approach an understanding of these people without actually achieving one. Perhaps that's exactly where Devor wanted to take us as well."

"I'm not sure Zoo is a great film, but it is a morally significant one, precisely because it invites us to suspend judgment (however briefly) and consider that guys who like to get slammed by horses are people too, with complicated life histories and motivations we hadn't thought about," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "For reasons I won't pretend to understand, it might almost be more difficult to raise such issues about a zoophile than about a Nazi death-camp guard or a child molester." He talks with Devor, too.

"Devor, who cites Tarkovsky and Resnais among his influences, eschews the conventional talking-head interview in favor of an allusive, poetic visual style, layering voiceover with Paul Matthew Moore's moody (if occasionally intrusive) piano score and gorgeous 16 mm images of the landscape around Enumclaw," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "For him, what's most interesting is what the horses represent to the men who (gulp) love them: the wildness and purity of nature itself."

The "heavily filtered, often slow-motion reenactments [suggest] Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line done underwater," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

"There are a select group of documentaries that should be seen on the big screen, and Robinson Devor's Zoo is definitely one of them," writes Anthony Kaufman.

"The artiness - and the ambient drone - of Zoo becomes oppressive, but it's still a ride like no other," snickers David Edelstein in New York. "I guess I couldn't suppress the urge to make dumb jokes. Call me a neigh-sayer."

IndieWIRE interviews writer Charles Mudede, and earlier: "Interview. Charles Mudede. Zoo."

Update, 4/28: Bryan Whitefield talks with Devor for Nerve, where Akiva Gottlieb writes, "This audacious film isn't testing the limits of good taste; it's testing the limits of human compassion."

Jindabyne.

"It's easy to see how a filmmaker could read one of Raymond Carver's spare little stories of domesticated males attempting to reassert their primacy and think, Why don't I flesh that out a bit? - and then discover, too late, that Carver has said all he needs to say and anything else is bloat," writes New York's David Edelstein. "Scene by scene, Jindabyne has dramatic force, but it's an awfully long slog. Carver's smartest tactic was never outstaying his welcome."

"Like more than a few Australian movies, it's haunted by the primal crime committed against the Aborigines and is something of a ghost story," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Like [Ray] Lawrence's previous films, it's also very much a literary adaptation. As Lantana was blatantly Altmanesque in structure, Jindabyne references the master indirectly."

Updated through 4/30.

"Jindabyne wears its class politics lightly, weaving them into a ghost story about the intimate connection between how we treat our living and our dead that will hover around your shoulders long after you leave the theater," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly, where Scott Foundas talks with Lawrence.

"If you can speak of a Lawrence formula after just two pictures, it involves a couple of intriguing actors with Hollywood credentials (Barbara Hershey and Anthony LaPaglia in Lantana; Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne here) in a domestic situation that grows ever darker and more enigmatic," writes Andrew O'Hehir, who talks with Lawrence for Salon.

"Thoroughly deliberate in its exposition, the film unfolds at a pace as expansive as the landscape it depicts," proposes Jason Bogdaneris in the L Magazine.

Brandon Harris finds it to be "the first film to do justice to the late Mr Carver's sublime prose."

For Annie Frisbie, writing at Zoom In Online, it's a "sharply observed, superbly crafted joyride of a character study."

In the New York Press, Armond White recommends catching Boy Culture instead; not for thematic reasons but simply because, in his mind, it's a better adaptation.

Susan King talks with Byrne for the LAT.

Earlier: "Cannes. Jindabyne."

Updates, 4/27: "There are few actors who convey the wounded intelligence of an ordinary person in distress as well as Ms Linney," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The characters she portrays are often, at first glance, satellites to a central male drama - the mother in The Squid and the Whale, the wife in Kinsey, the sister in You Can Count on Me - but in each of these cases it turns out that her psychological precision holds the key to the story." As for Jindabyne: "The real flaw is that the movie's best features - the aching clarity of its central performances - threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification."

In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan finds it "as slow getting started as a leisurely weekend fishing trip, but it ends up having an almost unbearable impact."

"Like Lantana, Jindabyne ponders the ways people connect or drift apart in fits of wounded emotion that break through its thriller format," writes Fernando F Croce at Slant. "Also like the earlier film, it shatters its own best effects with a lecturing tidiness that undercuts the ambiguity Lawrence strives for."

Nick Dawson talks with Lawrence for Filmmaker.

Sighs Michelle Orange at the Reeler: "It's not that this story of a corpse discovered and ignored on a fishing trip, and the ensuing repercussions for a marriage and an entire community, is a drag - God knows I am always up for a cracking drag - it's that it's a draaaaaaag."

"[I]f Jindabyne doesn't quite coalesce like its taut predecessor, it comes close enough; its unevenness is made up for by its ambitious wanderings through trickier, thought-provoking terrain, and, although it goes slack occasionally, clocking in at just over two hours, the film resonates with rhythmic momentum," writes Kristi Mitsuda at Reverse Shot.

Update, 4/30: Aaron Hillis talks with Lawrence for IFC News.

Election and Triad Election.

"One of the greatest action directors working in the world and one of the most excitingly prolific, [Johnnie] To amassed a notable list of credits in the 1980s and 1990s before his films started showing up on the festival circuit," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "In its size and uneven quality, his recent output can bring to mind those golden-age Hollywood professionals who, come hell, high water or inferior script, would reliably do their part to meet the studio's sausage quota."

Ostensibly, she's reviewing Triad Election as a followup to AO Scott's review of Election, but both end up recommending both films. Scott: "Triad Election, which takes place two years later, has a higher quota of action-movie set pieces and is therefore more likely to be a crowd-pleaser. But while the two films stand alone perfectly well, they also enrich each other."

Updated through 4/27.

The occasion for the doubled doubles is the double feature at Film Forum, running through May 8.

Michelle Orange in the Voice: "To's rangy camera circles its cagey subjects like prey, sometimes drawing in for a close, almost tender framing of his cut-out characters, sometimes yanking back to find them swallowed by the grandeur of both urban and rural China; each angle - and To's take on the plight of the modern gangster - is inspired."

Mark Asch in the L Magazine: "Election and Triad Election are less an evolution of To's (eminently Netflixable [and of course, GreenCineable] and highly recommended) back catalogue than proof-of-concept, demonstration he has it in him to make credible versions of the movies he's been riffing on all along."

Earlier: David Austin's talk with To for Cinema Strikes Back; Andrew O'Hehir (Salon); "Wrapping NYFF" and "PIFF Dispatch. 2."

Update, 4/27: "To is the foremost genre auteur working in the world today, and Election 2 is emblematic of the kind of classicism, purity of filmmaking, and forthright slickness at which To excels as a storyteller," writes Daniel Kasman.

Cannes and elsewhere, 4/26.

Many expected to see Hou Hsiao-hsien's Red Balloon lined up in the Competition at Cannes; instead, it will open Un Certain Regard on May 17. With the addition of Roy Andersson's You, The Living and Ana Katz's Una Novia Errante in that program and a special screening of Mehdi Charef's Cartouches Gauloises on an evening devoted to Algeria, Artistic Director Thierry Frémaux has finalized the Official Selection.

At indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez has the lineup for the International Critics' Week sidebar. The Hollywood Reporter's Rebecca Leffler detects "a taste of Latin America with a French twist."

Adam Nayman previews the Polish Film Festival Los Angeles, tomorrow through May 3. Guess which David Lynch film they'll be screening.

Also in the LA Weekly, Holly Willis on the work of Larry Gottheim, whose work will be screening at the Los Angeles Filmforum on Sunday and at REDCAT on Monday.

More LA goings on: Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times.

"As two films screening [in Edmonton] on the eve of May Day show, seemingly distant labor struggles can hit close to home," writes Brian Gibson in Vue Weekly. The films: Mother Jones: America's Most Dangerous Woman and Lockout 484, both by Laura Vazquez and Rosemary Feurer.

"This Day is a series of programs of short films and videos featuring international artists whose work relates to the Middle East within a cultural, social, historical and political context." May 4 through 13 at the Tate Modern in London.

"The Maison Du Japon in Paris, France will be the home of a rather impressive retrospective of one of Japan's most acclaimed cult directors, Seijun Suzuki," reports Aaron at Kung Fu Cult Cinema. May 31 through June 30.

Anthony Kaufman's "The Premieres Race; Rival Fests (Tribeca, SXSW, LAFF) Put Pinch on Filmmakers and Regional Showcases" at indieWIRE has sparked some thoughts from AJ Schnack and Andy Spletzer.

Today at indieWIRE, Jonny Leahan looks back on the highlights of the just-wrapped Sarasota Film Festival.

And Sam Adams looks back to Full Frame in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Tribeca Dispatch. 2.

David D'Arcy on Tribeca's new color scheme. A few notes follow.

Has the Tribeca Film Festival gone green? I'm not talking about the color of money (to drop a film allusion), the color of the American Express Card, but the green of environmentalism, of Al Gore, and of a campaign to broaden awareness about global warming.

Updated.

In New York, where the required garb is black, the farther downtown you go, there was more "green" last night at the opening of the festival than at the St Patrick's Day parade. This is a good thing, in an event that could otherwise reek of consumerism. Nothing (or almost nothing) is as seductive as a beautiful landscape. And there's almost nothing as gruesome as the sight of a landscape that's been ravaged and ruined. Short films by (among others) Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady from the SOS series that will accompany a series of fundraising concerts were shown, scrutinizing the wreck of the earth. A South African choir sang about being in this world "together." Jon Bon Jovi sang. And Al Gore spoke.

The festivities took off last night with the call to preserve the world - just as the landscape of Lower Manhattan has been preserved, festival officials said. Was this Sundance, which has always incorporated a world-saving rhetoric into its public cinema-saving utterances? There's another troubling parallel with Sundance. Tribeca has been remarkably effective in revitalizing its surrounding neighborhood downtown, where construction cranes are everywhere and prices (feared to fall after 9/11) are leaping skyward with the condos, hotels and office towers. Is this the way to save the rest of the world? I hope not. It certainly has not been the way to save Park City, Utah, which is one of the few places on the planet where prices are higher and real estate is more expensive than it is in Tribeca.

You can blame a lot of it on a film festival. It's now a Tiffany and traffic jam resort that few independent filmmakers can afford to visit. What a pity. What a greater pity that Sundance signed on to hold its festival there through the year 2018.

The cry of "noblesse oblige" will no doubt be raised about Tribeca's message last night. After all, Tribeca is later to the party on this one than either Sundance, or Town & Country, which had a green issue earlier this spring (you can find my piece on "green" film in that one) or Vanity Fair, which put Knut the polar bear cub of the Berlin Zoo, who was threatened with environmental euthanasia, on the front cover with Leonardo DiCaprio. In case you didn't know, the DC Environmental Film Festival has been leading the way for years, and ought to have more attention for that.

Better late than never for Tribeca, I would say, although I'm concerned about comparisons with the Live Aid concerts and movement - or non-movement. Does anyone remember anything about those efforts but the logo and the t-shirts? Look at Africa now. Did Live Aid accomplish anything? I'd love to hear that one defended.

Does anybody rent Silkwood these days? Just yesterday, a New York Times story by Stephen Labaton about the evisceration of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration examined the case of workers in a popcorn factory in Missouri who inhaled chemical so toxic that one of them has to have both of his lungs removed. Management blamed the workers for their injuries. OSHA under a Bush-appointed head who prepared for this by fighting union organizing in South Carolina, has not called for the inspection of all factories using the chemical in the US. Let's not forget that environmentalism begins with the home and the places where we work.

Al Gore gave a wooden speech last night, even for a politician, and even by his standards, in which he hauled out the usual clichés and praised artists for carrying the torch on the environment and for broadening public awareness. I think Gore was too generous, that he was giving the artists too much credit. It was thanks to politicians like Gore that the issue of global warming has been fore-grounded. Artists are following him on this one, as they should be. Will it amount to much? It will if Tribeca recognizes that the threat to the world is more than a marketing slogan. Perhaps the thing to do would be to run a two-minute film on threats to the environment before each feature film, and to have enough of those shorts so the audience isn't bored out of its mind. None of the shorts shown last night would be hurt a bit if it were shortened down to two minutes, even Rob Reiner's stupefyingly unfunny Spinal Tap sequel, in which the boys from the band ham it up for a reunion that will take place at one of the SOS concerts. Each was essentially an info-mercial for a good cause. No one wants to watch a commercial that's too long.

Time will tell if Tribeca's commitment is serious. I hope it is. Lou Lumenick in today's New York Post raised some legitimate concerns about Tribeca, and asked that Robert De Niro step down as head of an event that Lumenick called a "street bizarre." De Niro should stay, and prove the critics wrong - that is, if they are wrong, and I hope they are. Only someone from an oil company could possibly think that "green" films and "green" thinking will be any less urgently necessary next year.

-David D'Arcy

---

Aaron Hillis for Premiere: "Taxidermia is an intense, disgusting, and probably brilliant experience, its aesthetics as excessive as its themes. A word of warning: though you probably shouldn't see this one on a full stomach, you might also consider one last meal for fear of never wanting to eat again."

"Tribeca sometimes seems like the film-fest equivalent of the endlessly protean product in that old Saturday Night Live commercial, the one that was a floor wax and a dessert topping," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "This year's Tribeca event is a significant post-Sundance indie marketplace and a massive hype event for the release of Spider-Man 3 - and a rapid-fire showcase for numerous off-the-radar documentaries and foreign films as well.... Maybe a thoroughly obnoxious scale of ambition is the only one that makes sense for Tribeca. Why shouldn't New York, the world capital of obnoxious ambition, have the biggest, starfuckingest, most artistically ambitious and most expensive film festival in the world?... If that's the goal, I have three words of advice for [Jane] Rosenthal, De Niro, festival director Peter Scarlet, et al: Show better movies."

"With not a little irony Jia Zhangke staged the drama of his film The World at the amongst replicas of famous buildings from around the world, and the contrast between the World Park's simulated setting and the neo-realism of Jia shooting his latest film Still Life around the actual Three Gorges Dam, is stunning," writes Daniel Kasman. "It is a fresh, relieving change of course from the previous film's overwrought, allegorical setting."

More from Premiere's Glenn Kenny, who finds Still Life "beguiling and discreetly moving... a breathtaking cinematic experience."

Online viewing tips. It's early yet, but there are already Tribeca reports from LXTV and Reeler TV.

Tribeca, 4/26.

"The great discovery of the festival is Turkish director Reha Erdem's Times and Winds," announces Howard Feinstein, who then offers quick takes on ten more offerings in his latest "Critic's Notebook" for indieWIRE.

Festival-goers on the opposite coast may want to know that Times and Winds is screening at SFIFF on May 8, 9 and 10. More from Michael Guillén, J Robert Parks and, in Sight & Sound, Hannah McGill.

Also at iW: Eugene Hernandez covers the opening goings on, including the screening of nine "SOS Films," green-tinted shorts introduced by Al Gore. Related: Agnes Varnum asks, "Are Green Docs Hot?"

More on that opening from ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler, where Michelle Orange offers her takes on Golden Door, Blue State, The Killing of John Lennon, Gardener of Eden, Beyond Belief and L'Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio.

Aaron Hillis for Premiere on This Is England: "British writer-director Shane Meadows (Dead Man's Shoes) would have made the late filmmaker Alan Clarke proud with this must-see, partly autobiographical dramedy about working-class skinheads, circa 1983." Related: Jason Solomons's longish interview with Meadows for the Guardian.

And now, a little point-counterpoint. Mark Asch's comments in the L Magazine sound familiar: "I'm not really sure what Tribeca does for the movies it shows, or the viewers who want to see them: it started as a way of revitalizing a post-9/11 downtown, and now seems to exist solely to draw attention - to the neighborhood, to the sponsors, to the festival itself. And as such, the films, whichever kind of the films you want to see, are kind of drowned out."

"[N]one of the fundamental complaints leveled at the festival differ from general qualms about the current state of New York as a whole, with its ballooning real estate and increasingly claustrophobic space to accommodate the proverbial 'starving artist,'" counters Eric Kohn. "The genuine argument, one of utmost importance, tends to get lost in the chaotic shuffle of tired art-versus-commerce squabbling: Do the movies have room to breathe? In fact, most filmmakers involved designate the festival as a veritable oxygen tank." And he talks with directors ranging from Ken Jacobs to Mary Stuart Masterson to prove the point.

Also in the New York Press, Sara Karl: "Tribeca Teaches is a new, five-week program taught by Tribeca Film Institute Teaching Artists and visiting filmmakers, during which students will produce their own films and create a 'classroom snapshot.'" In the South Bronx.

SFIFF. Preview.

Jay Kuehner surveys the offerings of a golden anniversary edition.

While the collective (and by now bloodshot) eye of the cinemonde turns its gaze in anticipation to the �granddaddy of all film festivals� that is Cannes, another coastal celebration is getting underway that can claim such august status. The San Francisco International Film Festival is turning 50, and a preview of its golden edition leaves the impression that the fest is old enough to know better (about film history) and still too young to care (about its boundaries). In translation, this means tributes to forebearers obvious (George Lucas, Spike Lee) and less so (Heddy Honigmann, with her latest, Forever), while pushing film out of the theaters and showcasing recombinant trends, such as the �live cinema spectacle� Arrows of Time by Ken McMullen, which alights on Derrida, Beuys, Borges and Stanford physicists alike. Less heady but hybrid still: Guy Maddin'’s extravaganza Brand Upon the Brain, with live orchestra (and castrato), and a seemingly unholy pairing of Victor Sjöström'’s surreal silent Swedish classic The Phantom Carriage with live score by reknown Scandinavian composer Jonathan Richman (that’s a joke).

Updated.

For those who take the festival in stride, inside, and sitting down, ensconced in the Kabuki’s all too familiar theaters, it's the strata of international films comprising the bulk of the program that inform their festival experience. A glance at the lineup reveals a lean, even discreet survey of the year in international film. Lean because the program is not overstuffed; you get the sense that there are no films unaccounted for (i.e., programmers fought for their choices). And discreet, well, because there is a lack of conspicuous films in lieu of some that too easily could have slipped by in their upstream swim of the festival circuit (in hopes of spawning distribution). For example, two standouts that come to mind are Barbara Albert's Falling, following her kinetic Free Radicals and again employing ensemble performance to great effect (she also co-wrote fellow Austrian Michael Glawogger's Slumming, a compelling morality tale that outwits its eurotrashing protaganists). And Pablo Trapero's Born and Bred, which finds the Argentine - who practically jump-started a new wave with his grainy lament to unemployment in Crane World back in 1999 (SFIFF 2000) - maturing in unforeseen ways.

Likewise, the program is encouraging to new directors, some making return trips to SFIFF with fresh work. Auraeus Solito moves out of the barrio of his charming debut The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (SFIFF 2006) and into the lush Filipino countryside with Tuli. Veronica Chen (Smokers Only, SFIFF 2002) is back with Agua, a prizewinner at Locarno and Palm Springs that one colleague wryly dubbed The Loneliness of the Long Distance Swimmer.

Virtual unknown Takushi Tsubokawa, returning with Aria, may be welcome to those who caught his somnambulistic Clouds of Yesterday last year. Karim Aïnouz, who thrust the sinuous Madame Sãta at audiences in 2003, again considers marginality in Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky (gorgeously rendered by the estimable cinematographer Walter Carvalho). And the winner of last year's SKYY Prize for best new director, Ying Liang - for Taking Father Home - used some of his prize money to fund his latest, The Other Half. Ying sticks with video, but his sense of formal interplay is conceptually rich, marking him as one of the more auspicious Chinese talents since Jia Zhangke.

This fidelity to director’s' nascent or continuing careers is a benevolent sign that, even at a ripe 50, the festival still has a nurturing instinct. Not only toward directors, but audiences as well. The sense of continuity is naturally a consequence of the flow of film exhibition, but a keen viewer will be rewarded for prior risks. Case in point: Eduardo Coutinho, the not-so-nascent Brazilian documentarian whose Master: A Building in Copacabana was a sleeper at SFIFF 2004, is again represented with The End and the Beginning, his foray into northeast Brazil in search of a subject. Blink (or step out for food) and you may have missed the connection.

From there the links are myriad. While you're in Brazil, why not catch the doc about indefatigable tropicalista musician Tom Zé (Fabricating Tom Zé, by Décio Matos Jr)? Or possibly resent the fact that Sundance Documentary Award winner Manda Bala, about the cycle of corruption in Brazil, isn't here, meanwhile realizing that a host of other standouts from Sundance are? Busker love in Once (John Carney, Ireland) won the hearts of the staunchest of critics in Park City, and features a sweet duet from its pair of nonprofessional actors. The Devil Came on Horseback (Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern), which also kicked up dust at Sundance, comes across as a formally conventional documentary about genocide in Darfur, but morphs from a consideration of its message to its messenger - an ex-marine who becomes lone witness to atrocity in Darfur while serving as an unarmed observer.

Ghosts of Cité Soleil (Asger Leth, Denmark), features a similarly complicated relation to its subject(s), here two rival gang leaders who are also brothers, in Port-au- Prince's notorious slum under Aristede's dubious execution of democracy. At Telluride, the film was highly divisive, seen as a disguised gesture of cultural tourism or conversely a fearless portrait of survival. Either way, the film offers some rather astonishing footage - perilously ripe for a Hollywood makeover.

Typical of SFIFF, French films get good billing. Both Pascale Ferran's César-winning Lady Chatterley and Olivier Dahan's Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose are welcome but have secure futures beyond SFIFF. Better perhaps to gamble on lesser-knowns such as Claire Simon (On Fire) or Christophe Honoré, whose follow-up to the Bataille-inspired Ma mère, Dans Paris, is a far more tender affair than its predecessor. A mercurial and fractured look at the bond between two brothers, this nouvelle vague-inflected bagatelle is played by two of France's indelible young actors, Romain Duris and Louis Garrel. Other French faces worth following, both behind and before the camera: Jean-Pascal Hattu's 7 Years, fresh from New Directors/New Films, features Bruno Todeschini (seen in last year’s Perfect Lovers by Nobuhiro Suwa), and Jeanne Waltz, whose A Parting Shot stars Isild Le Besco, who graced the Kabuki last year for a screening of Emmanuelle Bercot's study of idolatry, Backstage.

Pedro Costa's cryptic, demanding, and spectral Colossal Youth is among the more inspired choices from last year's Cannes competition. It's an austere work poverty, time and longing - see it at your own risk, miss it at your peril. It finds an unwitting companion piece, methodology wise, in Rob Nilsson's anthology of scenes from his work with the Tenderloin yGroup's acting workshops for street people, to be screened at SFIFF's outdoor venue. Another Cannes alumnus, Abderrahmane Sissako, inveighs on African - and by extension, global - politics with his fierce polemic Bamako, offering a platform for SFIFF's Picturing Development dialogue, presided over by the film's executive producer, Danny Glover.

Hot topics inevitably abound, but arguably the most anticipated address is to the state of cinema itself, delivered by Peter Sellars, the pioneering theater and artistic director. Locals may recall his collaboration with composer John Adams for the San Francisco Opera production of Doctor Atomic (which, in an instance of festival fortuity, is documented in Jon Else's Wonders Are Many). More recently, in Vienna, Sellars produced an unprecedented achievement with his New Crowned Hope series, in which several directors were commissioned to make films in commemoration of Mozart's anniversary.

SFIFF is privileged to be screening two of the series’ seven films - a small quotient, admittedly - but happily one of them is among the cinema year's real gems. Once I acclimated to Garin Nugroho's bewitching Opera Jawa, a retelling of a Sanskrit legend, nothing struck me more than the unfurling of an epic swath of crimson linen through the Indonesian jungle, by which macho butcher (and killer dancer) Ludiro attempts to seduce the beautiful, married Sita. The film is replete with ravishing visual sequences, and as a lament for victims of the Southeast Asian tsunami, it offers salve to sufferers anywhere. Its inclusion in SFIFF's 50th edition is good news indeed, enough to make me forgive a minor grievance, the absence of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Call it Syndromes and Half a Century.

-Jay Kuehner

---

To see the highlights all over again from another angle, check Dennis Harvey's "SFIFF50" at SF360.

Update: Michael Hawley has quite a preview at the Evening Class, where Michael Guillén asks David Thomson for his take on The Deal.

Shorts, 4/25.

Glenn Kenny asks Stephan and Timothy Quay "whence the fascination with such Eastern European artists as Svankmajer and composer Leos Janacek sprang." Turns out it was an exhibition of Polish posters from the 50s and 60s: "I think it was a revelation to us that typography could be integrated very powerfully into the whole design of a piece," Stephen tells him.

Stanley Kauffmann lays out the early triumphs in the career of Alain Resnais and notes that, for some, the past few decades have been one long denouement. That said: "No Resnais film that I have seen has struck me as a sell-out. At their direst, Resnais's films have seemed the work of an avant-gardist who, like avant-gardists in other arts, has exhausted his innovations and is needy. His new picture, Private Fears in Public Places, isn't even quite that poignant."

Also: "It is too weak to say that [Werner] Herzog disregards conventions of narrative structure and editing: he is there to punish us for attending his film and to make us enjoy it. Other directors have at times made masochists of us: Herzog excels at this, and he doesn't often do it more stunningly than in Cobra Verde." And then there's After the Wedding. "Morten Søborg's camera here is so lucid that it almost seems to be producing the light that it captures." Nonetheless, "We watch this film like a puzzle being unraveled, rather than as a shared experience."

Just up at Order of the Exile: Jacques Rivette:

• Rivette comments on Don't Touch the Axe at this year's Berlinale.

• Rivette on Jean Cocteau in 1960 and on Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in 1957.

• Claire Clouzot's 1969 review of La Religieuse.

"Poison Friends, written and directed by Emmanuel Bourdieu, is a literary film about literary pretensions," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The movie is largely unclassifiable - at once a psychological study, an exceedingly dry comedy, and a moral tale in which stories are purloined and frauds perpetrated." More from Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

Also in the Voice: Julia Wallace on Tekkon kinkreet, Brian Miller on The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez, Jessica Grose on Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace (more: Nick Schager, Slant), Robert Wilonsky on Something to Cheer About (more: Nick Schager, Slant) and Ella Taylor on Snow Cake and Diggers.

Keith Uhlich: "Something of a homecoming for the writer-director, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is [Tsai Ming-liang's] first production set in his native Malaysia (in a decrepit metropolis soon to be blanketed by poisonous smog), and suggests a literalist exploration of Goethe's famed Faust observation, 'Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast.'"

Also in Slant, Ed Gonzalez on Ten Canoes: "Directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr, the film is an intricately layered jangle of melodramas and anecdotes, suggesting the dexterous stream of consciousness of William Faulkner."

In the New York Times:

• Farley Granger, "in his star-studded personal life and in his nearly 60 years as an actor, has made an art form of keeping one foot in each of two worlds. Film and theater. American and Italian. Gay and straight." Neil Genzlinger talks with him.

• Matt Zoller Seitz on The Collector: Allan Stone's "taste in art was breathtakingly eclectic, from African fetish pieces and cigar store Indians to works by Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Wayne Thiebaud and John Chamberlain." More from Charles Petersen in the Voice.

• Ratatouille faces a potentially crippling challenge in this upcoming summer of sequels: originality. In the New York Times, Michael Cieply describes the lengths Disney will be going to in the next few weeks to make the film seem as familiar as Spider-Man, Shrek and the Pirates. Related: Scott Balcerzak at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope on what might be worth looking forward to this summer.

Emanuel Levy gives Spider-Man 3 a "B": "[A]dding more villains and a new femme simply means having more characters, subplots, and emotionally tangled web of relationships, but doesn't necessarily translate into a more engaging or enjoyable film."

"A statistic told me by Bat: the only area in Britain that has a non-white majority is above the fifth floor," writes Owen Hatherley in a followup to his earlier entry, "London - Cine-City (Part 1)." "One of the few recent films to try and chart at least some of this space is Michael Caton-Jones's Basic Instinct 2.... Interestingly, the film has an utter lack of any actual sexual tension, of any thrill or eroticism... The Hitchcockian or Brandtian city of seedy allure is entirely absent: and perhaps it is from London as a whole."

Spike Lee was in Austin yesterday and Chris Garcia took notes on his comments regarding Don Imus, Matty Rich and Wesley Snipes, whom Lee wants to play James Brown "in his biopic, which he's still trying to get greenlit. Snipes, Lee said, is a trained dancer."

"Julia Stiles will produce and star in an adaptation of The Bell Jar, the only novel written by poet Sylvia Plath," reports Chris Tilly.

"The spoof heavy-metal band immortalized by the mock documentary This is Spinal Tap has reunited to join a campaign to save the world from global warming." For Reuters, Claudia Parsons reports on the new Rob Reiner-directed short.

"Following news that Brad Pitt is set to star alongside George Clooney and Frances McDormand in Burn After Reading, comes word from Variety that the Coens will follow up that pic with one called A Serious Man," writes Erik Davis at Cinematical. "Described as a 'dark comedy in the vein of Fargo, both Ethan and Joel intend on being credited as writers, producers and directors on the two films."

Kung Fu Cult Cinema looks ahead to the horror films slated for release in Korea this summer.

"After decades of stalling, it seems that science fiction is finally, rapidly, becoming fact - just as the first pulp writers and movie-makers were convinced it would, back in the 1920s," writes Gwyneth Jones. Also in the Guardian, Alfred Hickling interviews Pete Postlethwaite.

Interviews in the Independent: Geoffrey Macnab with Julie Christie and Stephen Applebaum with Ethan Hawke.

Garry Maddox talks with Terry Gilliam for the Sydney Morning Herald. Via Jeffrey Overstreet.

At Pixel Vision, Johnny Ray Huston has a wishlist: "50 Movies That Have Yet to Hit the Bay Area."

Noy Thrupkaew on Red Road in the American Prospect: "Despite the contrivances behind its creation, [Andrea] Arnold has made a film that is wonderfully, and organically, disturbing - thanks largely to the intensity of [Kate] Dickie's performance."

Joanne Laurier at WSWS on The Situation: "[Philip] Haas and screenwriter Wendell Steavenson have accomplished something quite rare in contemporary filmmaking, creating a living drama out of social and political relationships."

Edward Copeland on My Country, My Country: "as with many documentaries that didn't even make the final cut [in the Oscar race], this look at the months leading up to Iraq's 'landmark' elections is a powerful, riveting documentary that damn sure deserved the prize over Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation."

"The Naked City probably works much better for modern audiences than it ever did for it's contemporaries," writes Tom Huddleston. Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Adam Balz on This Filthy World: "[E]ven when [John] Waters's speech becomes unpalatable - a short mention of 'ultimate nudity' and 'blossoms' has the audience audibly squirming - no one leaves; everyone remains seated, waiting for more, even laughing in wild disgust. In making some of the most reviled, ridiculous, and downright repulsive films ever, Waters has also secured for himself an enduring and devoted following that, ten years ago, made Pink Flamingos the second-most popular video in the country."

"[W]hile Pulp suffers in comparison to [Get Carter] - name a movie that wouldn't - it's still worth watching," recommends Vince Keenan.

Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore of IFC News talk about the movies they're looking forward to this summer.

Online viewing tip #1. Jerry Lentz finds a clip from a doc on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Includes an interview with Daniel Richter, the actor in the ape suit who picked up the bone and jump-started human evolution.

Online viewing tip #2. Sean Penn and Stephen Colbert face off for a Meta-Free-Phor-All.

Online viewing tips. Brendon Connelly points to the AFI's YouTube channel. Why? Because they've got clips - lots of clips - of famous folks naming their favorite movies.

Other fests, other events.

A round of cheers for Roger Ebert, who's going to Ebertfest, the paparazzi be damned: "Being sick is no fun. But you can have fun while you're sick. I wouldn't miss the festival for anything!"

"Bono, members of New Order and Depeche Mode will be among guests - and some of them might perform - at the opening night bash of the Cannes Film Festival sidebar Directors Fortnight on May 17, after a gala screening of the Ian Curtis biopic Control," reports Variety's Alison James.

Starting with the Barbara Stanwyck Centennial, J Hoberman has notes on what else is going on in New York this week besides Tribeca.

And Looker advises: "New York readers, here's something to do between Tribeca Film Fest screenings: get thee to Louise Brooks and the 'New Woman' in Weimar Cinema at the International Center of Photography before it closes on Sunday."

Nathaniel R is heading to the Indianapolis International Film Festival, which opens tomorrow and runs through May 4. Though he'll be a juror, he'll also be blogging at the Film Experience.

A "political film festival" in Berlin from May 9 through 16: globale07.

AJ Schnack: "Sarasota holds fond memories." More from James Israel.

Ray Pride shot some very fine pix at Hot Docs.

Tribeca Dispatch. 1.

David D'Arcy on one doc and one dramatic feature - two takes on the Middle East. Tribeca notes and pointers follow.

As the Tribeca Film Festival opens, and the stars pile into town, I'll take a deep breath and look at films that may not make it through the hype. There are plenty of them at the festival.

One is 9 Star Hotel, Ido Haar's documentary from Israel about Palestinian workers, building Modi'in, a new city there on the site of an ancient Jewish town that is said to have been home to the Maccabees. They work illegally, passing from the Occupied Territories into Israel (although everyone, including their bosses, seems to know it) and they live illegally in settlements built from what artists like to call found materials in the hills above their construction site. The title is a joke. Not much else in this film is.

Updated.

The story builds irony upon irony, layering myths on the myth of Sisyphus. Palestinians, displaced and cut off from land which they once owned, have lost the source of their livelihood. Most of those whom we see have no formal education, and some are illiterate, so they work in the traditional masonry trades that Palestinians have practiced for years - although some have second jobs, believe it or not, as security guards. One of them, Ahmed, scrounges through garbage to make an extra five dollars a day. Mohammad, his handsome chain-smoking friend, provides political commentary throughout, talking mostly about working conditions and police. Both end up putting their lives at risk.

The jobs, no surprise, are with the Israelis, who are building everywhere, scarring the Holy Land with new towns, and highways to and from those places, all protected by various levels of Israeli law enforcement.

The workers live in shantytowns, built mostly with cardboard and trash, with no heat or water, not so different from what you can now see in and around every major city in the United States or Europe. This is an immigration story, after all, and almost all immigration is economic.

These "settlements" are illegal, hence another irony, that their illegality is prosecuted, while illegal West Bank settlements at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are permitted by the government, or ignored as the disputes between Jewish settlers and their government await a "political solution." The laborers' labor is also illegal, yet that seems largely tolerated, because the illegal workers are an integral part of the construction economy, although the men are constantly on the watch for police. After all, the Palestinians are infiltrators.

It's all about land, and about the roles that the strong and the weak have in shaping the landscape. We see the men running across the highways, dodging cars and Israeli cops. We see them at work, pouring concrete and applying plaster to what look like luxury apartments. When the wall now being constructed to separate Jews from Palestinians on the West Bank is finished, they say that sneaking onto building sites could be impossible, so they'll lose the little income that they have.

And these are the men who have jobs. Some talk of being breadwinners for their entire families. "I'd like to join the Palestinian police force," one them says, adding with chagrin, "they only take people who can read and write."

DA Pennebaker likes to say that you can only make documentaries if the people who are the subjects of your film are willing to cooperate, and Ido Haar got remarkable access to the men who camp in the hills and descend to build the homes of Israelis.

The workmen are not terrorists, nor are they saints. When the subject of the Holocaust comes up, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of the men observes that six million Jews were killed. "Six million?" another says, imagining that if six million more Jews settled in Palestine and had children, things would be far worse than they are.

Haar's film is shot, by the director, either on the run or at the hilltop encampment where available light means a campfire or a flashlight. It has the look of a video image running to keep up with its subject. Yet there are some cinematic touches. The film opens with shots of the sky and the landscape. We hear sounds that seem like machine-gun fire, which can be routine there. They turn out to be the noises from drills that are preparing the ground for houses. It's reassuring - or is it. There's no gunfire here. Over the course of the documentary, however, we see that construction and occupation are effective instruments of war.

9 Star Hotel isn't making its premiere at Tribeca, having played at Jerusalem, IDFA, Hot Docs and other festivals. Yet it's appropriate that this spare, unsentimental film about real estate and the anonymous workers who create its value is shown at Tribeca, a festival that began as a maneuver to shore up the values of land in lower Manhattan after September 11.

The Israeli dramatic feature My Father, My Lord, by David Volach (in the international competition at Tribeca), is another grim picture of a tiny slice of that country, seen through the family of an orthodox rabbi whose ardent adherence to strict laws of observance end up costing the life of his son on an excursion to the Dead Sea. The film is so well-acted that the dialogue is barely necessary, with the dean of Israeli actors Assi Dayan as the rabbi and father, Sharon Hacohen Bar as his dutiful but tenderly doubting wife, and young Eilan Grif as their curious son.

Boaz Yaacov's cinematography catches every nuance of tension in the family. There's a deliberate contemplative pace to the storytelling here that some will undoubtedly call Bergmanesque. Bresson comparisons will also surely come up. Yet Volach has made his own film, a fatalistic look at the clash of faith and humanity. Think of it the next time someone recommends faith-based initiatives to you.

The Last Jews of Libya by Vivienne Roumani-Denn, a new documentary at the festival, reminds you that the "refugee problem," as it used to be called, isn't only an Arab one. More in a future installment.

-David D'Arcy

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"I don't subscribe to the hype, but I do believe in the opportunity: 150-something features; six dozen shorts; a few clever panels; and a press pass to rule them all." ST VanAirdale lays out the many ways the Reeler will be all over Tribeca, including Reeler TV and a reviews blog, the Screening Room.

"Art and politics: two poles rightfully addressed by many of the selections in a film festival located (more and more virtually) near the festering hole that was the World Trade Center." A preview from Howard Feinstein at indieWIRE, where the special Tribeca section is revving up.

"They have to figure out who they are. They've got all the potential in the world, but haven't realized it yet," Sony Picture Classics co-founder and co-president Tom Bernard, who hasn't yet picked up a picture at Tribeca, tells the New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson.

Updates: "Is Alberto Gonzales stupid?" asks Alex Gibney at the Huffington Post, before answering: "I think that - within limited parameters - he's brilliant. And the proof is a moment from one of his performances in a hearing that I excerpted in my new film, Taxi to the Dark Side, about the Bush Administration's torture policy." Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

At the Reeler, Steve Erickson surveys the festival's other offerings from the Middle East.

Daniel Kasman on the revival of Gérard Blain's The Pelican.

"[T]he sad truth is that six years into the fest's history, I have yet to see a good movie there," writes Jürgen Fauth. "But we try... Napoleon and Me is intermittently amusing, but the film can't find its tone, theme, or center. With Monica Bellucci as full-bosomed Baronessa."

SFBG. SFIFF.

"The oldest film festival in the United States and Canada, the San Francisco International Film Festival reaches its golden anniversary this year," writes Johnny Ray Huston, opening the San Francisco Bay Guardian's preview package. "That's half a century of bringing movies from all over the world to one area of America that doesn't assume America is the world." His recommendations: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Daratt, Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa and Veronica Chen's "gorgeous" Agua.

Updated.

"Critic James Quandt dubbed it new French extremism, though cinema brut works just as well," writes Max Goldberg. "In SFIFF films such as On Fire, 7 Years and Flanders, this tendency is toned down but still embedded in narrative and character."

SFIFF "is offering a rare treat this year with its presentation of Otar Iosseliani's latest film, Gardens in Autumn, and Julie Bertuccelli's documentary about Iosseliani, Otar Iosseliani, The Whistling Blackbird," notes Jason Shamai. "The critic J Hoberman described one of Iosseliani's recent ensemble films somewhat dismissively as a 'genteel circus,' but the tag can also serve as an affectionate characterization of his best work. His latest exercise in modulated hedonism may not have much to say on the politics of happiness, but sometimes that can be a blessing."

"At the Castro Theatre, [Kevin] Brownlow (the recipient of the SF Film Society's Mel Novikoff Award, whose latest movie, Cecil B DeMille: American Epic, also screens at this year's festival) will present 1929's The Iron Mask," alerts Jeffrey M Anderson. "When The Iron Mask was restored, the great modern composer Carl Davis, whose work currently graces a number of silent movies on DVD, recorded a 42-piece orchestral score worthy of the film's energy and its melancholy. Fortunately, as Brownlow will no doubt demonstrate, it's possible to see the film with new eyes."

Also, an overview of the debut features in the running for the SKYY Prize.

Dennis Harvey scans the Big Names in town to pick up awards; and recalls winners past.

Previewing the Notes to a Toon Underground program, Kimberly Chun spotlights the work of Kelly Sears.

Cheryl Eddy: "The boy-band phenomenon of the early millennium has thankfully faded, but there's still parody meat enough for Hong Kong heartthrob (and San Francisco native) Daniel Wu, who makes his writing and directing debut with Heavenly Kings."

Matt Sussman on Colossal Youth: "Over the past decade, [Pedro] Costa has made a trilogy of films with the working poor of Fontainhas, a sprawling slum outside Lisbon. Trading [William T] Vollmann's pained self-consciousness for a meticulous formalism that favors rehearsal over reportage, Costa's remove sets into relief the humanity of his subjects, rather than objectifying or patronizing them."

"It's a tricky thing [Heddy] Honigmann is doing, engaging people about a profoundly internal process with a documentary technique that's necessarily obtrusive and spoken aloud," writes Max Goldberg, previewing Forever. "Her gift as a filmmaker lies in the moment-by-moment flow of interview and observation. Patience and curiosity: these are the stuff of Honigmann's persistence of vision."

Updates: A bit of anticipation elsewhere, too...

Michael Fox has a state-of-SFIFF piece in the SF Weekly, where he also previews works by Bay Area filmmakers in the lineup and contributes to the weekly's collection of capsule reviews.

At SF360, Katherin McInnis talks with Kerry Laitala, winner of the New Visions Golden Gate Award in 2005, about her new film, Muse of Cinema.

Cathleen Rountree posts her festival catalogue notes for The 12 Labors and Agua.

Michael Guillén previews La Vie en Rose.

Fests and events, 4/24.

Blogging from France, Scott Foundas looks over the titles lined up for the Competition in Cannes, notes the multi-national pedigree of many of those titles, and then tosses in the kicker: "[I]n Paris last week, I was able to attend a small advance screening of one competition entry, and I am happy to report that it is nothing less than superb. The film is called Secret Sunshine and it is the fourth to be written and directed by South Korea's Lee Chang-Dong, whose first three films - Green Fish (1997), Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis (2002) - pegged him as one of leading figures in his country's recent cinematic renaissance." The rave follows.

"In its 60 years, Cannes has managed to keep its identity intact and resist rampant commercialism," argues Agnès Poirier in the Guardian. "I'm obviously not talking of the parallel circus going on around diamond-laden and scantily clad stars walking up the famous red carpet each evening. I'm talking about films."

"The mood among Korean filmmakers in early 2007 is one of deep concern." Darcy Paquet's essay for this year's catalog for the Far East Film Festival (through Saturday in Udine, Italy) is now up at Koreanfilm.org.

"This year HotDocs has stepped up their embrace of new media and knowledge-sharing by recording almost their entire industry conference and posting the sessions online as free audio and video podcasts." Joel Heller's got the linkage.

At Twitch, Canfield's happy announces the launch of the site for June's Cornerstone Festival Imaginarium.

At indieWIRE, Steve Ramos takes stock of the highlights of the Nashville Film Festival, which runs through Thursday.

"Last night's Silver Jew screening was quite special," blogs Michael Tully from Nashville. "Our special guest introducer was Nashville's own cinematic wunderkind, Harmony Korine, who's latest, Mister Lonely, made it into the Un Certain Regard program in next month's Cannes."

Doug Block's zipping from festival to festival.

Picture House: Film, Art and Design at Belsay: May 5 through September 30.

David Lowery looks back to Sarasota - lots of pix!

At AICN, Scott Green's got lots of news from the Anime Boston Convention.

Erica Abeel looks back on last month's New Directors / New Films series for Filmmaker.

Tribeca run-up, 4/24.

With the Tribeca Film Festival opening tomorrow and running through May 6, Nathan Lee opens the Voice's package with "half dozen random, contradictory, but generally optimistic notes."

The preview: "25 movies that intrigued, annoyed, and greatly pleased our fest-happy critics." The interviews:

• Ed Halter with Esther Robinson (A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory).

• Michelle Orange with Andrew Piddington (The Killing of John Lennon).

• Aaron Hillis with Stephen Kijak (Scott Walker: 30 Century Man).

• Jessica Grose with Kevin Connolly (Gardener of Eden.

Even with the Spider-Man 3 US premiere, "in the years since 2004, Tribeca has been cannily paring down its blockbuster mentality and ramping up its cinephile appeal," argues Glenn Kenny, introducing Premiere's preview package. Besides the photos and such, it includes Aaron Hillis's festival picks.

In a New York Times piece headlined "The Man Who Made Mapplethorpe," Philip Gefter previews James Crump's directorial debut, Black White + Gray, a portrait of curator and collector Sam Wagstaff.

For the Wall Street Journal, Anthony Kaufman selects, as he puts it on his blog, "a dozen picks that I believe are safe bets for WSJ readers. And at indieWIRE, noting the numbers that count for many - "75 world premieres, five international premieres, and 30 North American premieres" at Tribeca - Anthony takes a moment to step back to scan the big picture: "'this ridiculous concern for premiere status,' as one festival programmer calls it, puts excessive pressure on filmmakers, limits their ability to generate momentum on the festival circuit, and arguably runs counter to the broader mission of film festivals in the first place: to showcase good films and cultivate cinephilia."

ST VanAirsdale talks with Mary Stuart Masterson about her directorial debut, The Cake Eaters.

Tim Murphy blogs for New York: "Festival followers are yammering about a generational turf war between Robert De Niro's by-now well-established Tribeca Film Festival, which kicks off tomorrow, and the inaugural year of the exquisitely edgy High Line Festival, which launches May 9, hard on the heels of its Big Daddy downtown." High Line, by the way, is curated by David Bowie.

SFIFF run-up, 4/24.

"Is there anyone who doesn't know that the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) is turning 50 this month?" asks B Ruby Rich. "The drumbeat in the Bay Area has been celebratory, from the Pacific Film Archive tribute program of films drawn from its history to the daily bulletins in the San Francisco Chronicle, where Ruthe Stein has been publishing 50 items over 50 days, all drawn from the festival's archive. Instead of focusing on the usual festival squibs, forecasts, and must-sees, then, this writer headed over to the fabled Presidio on an unusually sunny day to talk to the festival staff about the past."

Also at SF360, Michael Fox talks with Jon Else about Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic, screening at SFIFF.

Justin Lowe, too, looks back over 50 years for Filmmaker.

Renoir / DVDs, 4/24.

"To mark the release of the Jean Renoir Collector's Edition from Lionsgate, a three-disc set featuring five features and two shorts straddling the reaches of his career, I've taken the opportunity to look back on his career, or at least those films now available to us on DVD," writes Sean Axmaker at the main site. "Between Lionsgate (which secured its prints from Studio Canal in France) and Criterion, a rich collection of Renoir's cinematic canvases are available in superior home video prints."

Updated through 4/27.

In the New York Times, Dave Kehr explains why this set is such a bargain and pinpoints what's remarkable in the first and last images, chronologically, of the entire package. Also, though directed by Robert Stevenson, the 1944 version of Jane Eyre can pretty much be seen as an Orson Welles film "in disguise."

Hacking Democracy is "a terrifying HBO doc about the slow ascension of computerized voting machines, and how much rank dirt has been dug up in the process about how ineptly they're programmed and how much outrageous political skullduggery gone into the deal, leading to inevitable accusations (let's make that 'criminal charges') about the degree to which machine-makers like Diebold had been conceiving of these modern miracles as election-stealers from their very inception," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "Sometime before the primaries begin, the movie should be seen by every client of American democracy." Also, another fine rant sparked by Al Franken: God Spoke.

"One of the best scenes in last year's best movie - Children of Men - is in the deleted scenes." Nick Rombes explains.

Arthur Ryel-Lindsey on James Cagney: Signature Collection at Slant: "No actor had more fight in such a small package. None was as scrappy or as capable at throwing his weight around with menace or grace, depending on the scene.... If the cinema were a boxing match, Cagney would be the pound-for-pound champ. And he'd be sure to mention Brooklyn along the way."

"I had the opportunity to meet [Kenneth] Anger in Telluride in 1975," writes Peter Nellhaus. "While keeping a respectful distance from them, I watched Anger and Stan Brakhage, two old friends, conversing. I felt like I was a privileged observer of two artistic giants. For Anger and Brakhage, it was a personal moment, while for myself it was witnessing the reunion of the two most revered names in personal filmmaking." As for Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume 1, "While others have perceptively written about Kenneth Anger, it's nice to be able to see or re-see the films with Anger himself discussing his work."

John Adair on A Moment of Innocence: "There is something false in the filming of any image, but [Mohsen] Makhmalbaf attempts to drive at the truthful portrayal of his actors even as they exist in the midst of this false environment."

"Overlord is striking in its originality and meditative tone and just cynical enough to acknowledge the beauty that often accompanies the most horrible acts of mass human cruelty," writes Josh Rosenblatt in the Austin Chronicle.

Nick Davis watches Martha Fiennes's Onegin, "a gorgeous and beautifully judged rendering of Pushkin's classic novel in verse."

The Self-Styled Siren watches Macao: "Like Come and Get It, this is a movie that was taken away from one celebrated director and finished by another, Nicholas Ray. Unlike the logging epic, with this one you don't get a clear stylistic delineation. There are Sternberg moments, and Not Sternberg moments. Little or nothing suggests Ray's innovative framing, his characters' intense sexuality or his interest in the psychology of violence. The younger director appears to have phoned in Macao from a very, very long-distance connection."

"Despite a shoestring budget, hokey models, and slapdash special effects, The Atomic Submarine delivers enough creative storytelling techniques and efficient acting to transform potentially inane set pieces into engrossing adventures," writes Thomas Scalzo. Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Rumsey Taylor on Corridors of Blood.

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker at MSN Movies, DVD Talk, Bill Gibron at PopMatters, Movie City News and Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 4/25: Premiere's Glenn Kenny on the Renoir set: "Yes, the appeal to Renoirphiles is substantial — one wouldn't want to recommend this as a starter set to those who haven't yet seen Illusion or Rules. But one doesn't want to identify its value as strictly academic either. Le Marseillaise is, in particular, a revelatory picture. It's a humanistic but hardly uncritical look at Versailles and the seedbeds of the French Revolution that anticipates both neo-realism and that bit of dialogue from Rules stating that everyone has their reasons."

"The Siren registers polite disagreement with Dave Kehr of the New York Times, and his review yesterday of new DVDs. I hope he didn't mean it when he said that the 1948 Anna Karenina and the double DVD set of the 1935 and 1952 Les Misérables were destined to sit 'somewhere on a back shelf in high school libraries, to be shown whenever an English teacher feels like taking an afternoon off.' Both releases have a great deal to offer film lovers."

Update, 4/27: Susan King reviews the Renoir set for the Los Angeles Times.

Online viewing and a tip.

You may remember Ray Carney's search for and discovery of the "first version" of John Cassavetes's Shadows; if not, he tells the story here, and I summed up the situation as it stood in May 2004. Now, in the middle of this page, he's posted three brief clips from that version.

On that same page, by the way, Carney is pointing to an archive at Euroscreenwriters featuring over 60 interviews with European filmmakers: "From the obvious masters like Kieslowski, Buñuel or Hitchcock to the modest contributors like Benigni or Andersson." Thanks, Alex!

Jump Cut. 49.

As if the new issue of Jump Cut weren't offering enough reading on "China and China disapora film," Chuck Kleinhans introducing that special section, adds an annotated list of recently published books for further reading.

Anyone prepping for Cannes, whether or not you'll actually be going, will want to get in the mood for Wong Kar-wai (whose My Blueberry Nights opens the festival) with Allan Cameron's piece on the films "which deal most specifically with cultural translation and travel: Chungking Express (1994), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004)."

Stephen Chow, whose latest, A Hope, has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics, has been invited to consult on a Japanese sequel of sorts to Shaolin Soccer, Shaolin Girl. Here, Kin-Yan Szeto examines how Kung Fu Hustle "depicts an imaginary China in ways that commingle various historical and political meanings."

For many, Curse of the Golden Flower, just out on DVD in the US and now opening in theaters in Europe, finds Zhang Yimou teetering on the edge of a rut. Just five years ago, though, Hero heralded "a new era in Chinese filmmaking, one that single-mindedly pushes for market success," writes Jenny Kwok Wah Lau. "Thus, we need to ask what conditions in Chinese cinema affected the emergence of films such as Hero and what does that film's success mean for Chinese films' future?"

In Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, June Yip "addresses Taiwanese identity within a broad framework of theoretical discussions on the relation between popular culture and collective identity, the tension between local and global, and issues of exile and displacement," writes Li Zeng.

Tan See-Kam aims to show "the contemporary discursive relevance of a now-defunct film genre" - Huangmei opera films - "in relation to current transnational film studies, star studies, diasporic studies, and queer studies."

Poshek Fu looks back to the 50s and the Shaw Brothers' rival studio in Singapore and Hong Kong: "I focus on one of its most celebrated films, Air Hostess (Kong zhong xiaozhe), to bring to light the ways Cathay-MP&GI production was intricately intertwined with the changes in gender relations and the Cold War politics of postwar Hong Kong and Chinese cinemas."

Similarly, Kenny KK Ng, who focuses on the studio's "North vs South" comedies of the early 60s and "their pioneering efforts to 'break the barrier between Mandarin and Cantonese films,' as well as [the way they envision] the city as a melting-pot of pluralistic languages and cultures, and its fellow citizens as 'travelers on the same boat.'"

"[T]he use of a specific dialect in a film pertains to nothing less than the symbolic construction of the modern Chinese nation-state," writes Sheldon Lu, who explores "the use of dialects in varieties of Chinese-language films in the early 21st century."

Esther MK Cheung talks with seven critics from the PRC and Macau: "These critics generally share strong convictions in upholding the oppositional nature and critical role of independent cinema."

Who knows where Brett Ratner will take Rush Hour 3, slated for August, but Wendy Gan notes a shift between the original and 2, namely, that Hong Kong "tends to become marginalized in the film's imagining of global relations as US-centric.... Do we find alternative renderings of transnationality in Hong Kong cinema and of what kind?" she asks. "My argument here is that we do and the examination of the Hong Kong films, Comrades: Almost a Love Story and One Nite in Mongkok, reveals a complicated world order where there is more than one center of power and where the tensions of difference are played out in ways that reveal globalization's deployment and maintenance, not erasure, of difference."

"Despite the fact some of the early Hong Kong films dealt with social injustice, inequities, and the gap between rich and poor, Hong Kong cinema has rarely taken as its theme the concept of class," writes Wimal Dissanayake. "Only with the work of Fruit Chan do we begin to see the persuasive articulation of class in cinematic terms." And Chuck Kleinhans sees Dumplings as "a disturbing social satire using creepy taboo topics of cannibalism and abortion to pump up the shock and to underline ethical issues of capitalist culture. With a foundation in class politics, the feature interweaves grotesque horror imagery and a critique of the cult of youth and the commoditization of beauty in contemporary consumer society."

Wrapping up the special section, Ting Wang examines how Hollywood forged inroads into the Chinese market long before China's accession to the WTO in November 1999.

One special section is not enough, evidently; there's also a "Spotlight on horror" in Issue 49, opening with Justin Vicari's piece on The Addiction. Having listened to launch of Adrian Martin's translation of Nicole Brenez's Abel Ferrara and having read Girish praise it ("simply a jaw-dropper"), I have little doubt that the neglect of Ferrara in the US which Edward Colless referred to during that launch simply cannot last.

Caetlin Benson-Allott has some provocative thoughts as to why "The Ring takes as its bugaboo VHS."

"As with Buffy, Ginger Snaps subverts the horror genre by providing an alienated cum kick-ass high school chick as its heroine," writes Patricia Molloy. "Yet whereas it is Buffy's reluctant transformation into the Slayer, the overwhelming responsibilities of being the 'Chosen One,' which is the source of her teen angst, Ginger's outsider status as geek is overcome with her transformation into a hypersexualized werewolf."

Stephen Harper takes aim at the "racist, sexist and homophobic elements" in Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse.

Nicola Rehling: "I would like to insert the whiteness as well as the maleness of serial killing into my analysis of the contemporary serial killer movie in order to explore the anxieties that the genre articulates about contemporary US, white, heterosexual masculinity."

Two pieces on "Audio in film and video": Giovanna Chesler on why she teaches sound production before image-making and Andrea Hammer asks, "[H]ow might a habit of listening deeply to what Don Ihde calls 'the noise and voice of the environment, of the surrounding lifeworld' lead to new forms of documentary expression and alternative habits of perception?"

Essays on narrative features:

• Nina K Martin: "Underneath Down with Love's candy-colored, giddy veneer is the beating heart of a very traditional femininity coupled with a seemingly empowered view of sex."

• Bert Cardullo offers a "brief history" of "interrupting narrative" before turning his attention to Last Days, Tony Takitani, 3-Iron, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Me and You and Everyone We Know.

• Justin Vicari: "By concentrating on spectacular human failure rather than the unlikely overcoming of adversity, [Brokeback Mountain] suggests that our society's compassion toward its minority groups must be measured not by the anomalous, hit-or-miss success stories that spring up now and then in spite of discrimination, but by the people who drown along the way, the nameless ones who fail to survive."

• Carter Soles on how Chuck & Buck "engages with male homosexual desire in a way that renders its queer male characters and thematics at least potentially palatable to non-queer-identifying audiences while taking its viewers on a 'stalker's odyssey' that marks the film as pervasively queer."

• Thelma Wills Foote: "By critically examining the interplay of race, gender, sexuality, class, and age within the context of the contemporary black lesbian subject's relationship to the past, [Cheryl] Dunye's The Watermelon Woman ventures into a territory that the mock-documentary genre has rarely explored."

• Intan Paramaditha: "Through its cinematic language, Pasir Berbisik explores the dimensions of female gaze and female voyeurism as well as reappropriates the Oedipal narrative structure. It thus offers a new feminine aesthetics that one could hardly find in Indonesian cinema since 1926 until the end of the New Order era."

• Frank P Tomasulo looks at how Michelangelo Antonioni "uses mise-en-scène and other formal articulations" in L'Avventura "to convey both disgust and sympathy for the Italian bourgeoisie during the postwar 'boom' years."

In Hollywood, gossip has an economic impact. It always has. Anne Petersen examines "the gossip blogger" - and one in particular, Perez Hilton - "in relation to five key aspects of star production - economics, manipulation, fashion, magic/talent, and the nature of the medium - but also... how each element of production is (or is not) influenced by Hilton's status as a gay man. I go on to assert that the gossip blogger's use of new media is, in fact, a stripping of mechanisms mediated directly by Hollywood."

For Jyotsna Kapur, "a recent film/ performance, Mutual Conversations 1979 - 2005 (Mike Covell, 2005)... gets to the heart of confronting the image with the real." And this is relevant, even urgently so because: "In war, the reduction of distance between the image and the real, between the generals in their war rooms and the destruction of life on the battlefield is brutal and irrevocable."

"Such feature-length independent documentaries as Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland offer intriguing accounts of how the war is being represented as it is still taking place and, therefore, how it is likely to be remembered," writes Tony Grajeda, who examines the "limits and possibilities of their historicity" and "their formal and rhetorical framing of truth claims, in part by contrasting them with such Vietnam-era documentaries as the early in-country films The Anderson Platoon (1966-67) and A Face of War (1967), as well as the more well-known In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Hearts and Minds (1974), films noted for their historical contextualization of the Vietnam War and now recognized as documents of the past themselves."

"Mohamed Soueid's passion, compassion, love of lost or unlikely causes, and taste for slapstick are all aspects of a certain approach to the virtual that this filmmaker embraces in his personal documentaries," writes Laura U Marks. "Soueid is a central proponent of the experimental video documentary movement, which is perhaps Lebanon's greatest contribution to contemporary Arab and world cinema."

Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann argue "that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth mainly succeeds not because of its predictions but because of the eco-memories it evokes. Like eco-disaster films from the 1970s, Gore's film argues most powerfully when it draws on environmental nostalgia, a nostalgia we share for a better, cleaner world."

Francisca da Gama presents "a discussion of two feature films: Francisco Lombardi's The Lion's Den (1988; La boca del lobo) and Marianne Eyde's You Only Live Once (1993; La vida es una sola), in the context of Peruvian historiography and intellectual cultural production."

Book reviews:

• Angelica Fenner on Women Filmmakers Refocusing.

• Shannon Gore on Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955 - 1969.

• Susan Ericsson on Porn Studies and More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power.

In his "media salad," Chuck Kleinhans considers Notes on Marie Menken, a feature-length doc that "combines samples of Menken's short, intense lyrical films which influenced other makers such as Stan Brakhage (who honored her as the major influence on his own style), and interviews with friends who remember her life and work such as Kenneth Anger, Alfred Leslie, Peter Kubelka, Gerard Malanga and Jonas Mekas." Even so: "This film would have been much better at half the length." Also, a quick review of Russell Campbell's Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema.

Julia Lesage traces the path that's led her to "a new social use for bookmarks or favorites, previously accumulated on individual web browser software," which isn't exactly "participating in a new kind of community," though, of course, there's nothing wrong with that. "My own process of exploring the Internet, especially the social web, has made clear just how located we are historically in our own time and place as learners, and thus also as teachers."

And finally, a "last word" from editors Chuck Kleinhans, John Hess and Julia Lesage: "Today the US has lost strategic focus, pissed away international prestige and credibility, and crippled its ability to respond militarily in the future, while increasing debt, further wrenching trade imbalance, and compromising the domestic economy. With the recent shift in US public opinion, evidenced in the November 2006 Congressional elections, and the subsequent ramping up of US media skepticism regarding the Bush agenda, there seems to be a new terrain for thinking about popular political films." And, as they explain, realism, too.

Midnight Eye. Anime.

"The big question (apart from the obvious one of why all three of us are still interested in Japanese cartoons now that we're all the wrong side of our mid-30s) is what has changed" since Midnight Eye was launched online over five years ago, writes Jaspar Sharp in a review of a new "Revised & Expanded Edition" of the volume that "led directly to us starting our book review section," The Anime Encyclopedia. In commercial and pop cultural terms, it's a whole new world, of course, but "has the language and discourse surrounding anime really changed that much"? After wading through the Encyclopedia's sea of infobits, Sharp turns to a collection of essays, Mechademia: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, for interpretation, but: "Anime and manga may now be global phenomena, but from the evidence presented here, [the contributors'] scholarship has adopted a resolutely US-centric perspective."

Johannes Schönherr emails Hiroshi Harada to ask about the "incredibly elaborate 'freak show' events which encompass live theater, live music, acrobatic acts, wild stage settings, freaky characters let loose on the audience" that would frame screenings of Shojo Tsubaki in the 90s - all of which would be sprung as a surprise on the audience. As for the film itself, "it's animated, it's on celluloid, it is about a poor young girl who lives a hard life in a freak show circus, and its scenes often switch from being extremely kawaii to extremely graphic, violent, and at times oozing into the territory of far-out sexual fetishism."

Outside of Japan, only "obsessive manga-heads or art film fanatics" are aware of the work of Kihachiro Kawamoto, supposes Dean Bowman. "Kawamoto's embracing of puppet animation is... imbedded in a culturally specific Japanese tradition of Bunraku puppet theatre.... Despite the cultural specificity of his work, which might act as a barrier to the kind of popular appeal [Hayao] Miyazaki has enjoyed often in spite of his rather abstract approach to narrative, it is nonetheless fitting that The Book of the Dead was premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival during a retrospective of his work in 2005. In 1963 Kawamoto studied for a year in Prague under the Czech animator Jiri Trnka (The Hand), a period that was to cement his passion for the medium and exert a considerable influence on his style."

Catherine Munroe Hotes: "Released in 2005, Thinking and Drawing features a wide selection of animation styles from line drawing to CGI manipulated photographs. The subject matter ranges from feminist allegory to ghostly tales. Although each film has a short running time of between 5 and 17 minutes, the depth of meaning in each is truly astonishing. The films have shown together and separately at festivals in Europe, North America, and Australia."

Paul Jackson finds Koichi Chigira's Brave Story "so steeped in the genre traditions of fantasy cinema and video games, flaws and all, that its characters, settings and storytelling rarely rise above their familiar confines."

Shorts, 4/23.

"The timing of [Michael] Moore's film is propitious," writes Alternet's Don Hazen. Sicko "targets drug companies and the HMOs in the richest country in the world - where the most money is spent on health care, but where the US ranks 21st in life expectancy among the 30 most developed nations, obviously in part due to the fact that 47 million people are without health insurance."

Ed Gonzalez on The Short Life of José Antonio Gutiérrez in Slant: "[Filmmaker Heidi] Specogna evinces scant outrage for the gangsters running our government because her commentary on the complicated role Latino immigrants play in this country is largely implicit." Also, Nick Schager pans The Last Time.

Carol Kino talks with the sons of Alice Neel and her grandson, Andrew Neel, who's made a documentary on the painter. "To position Alice Neel in 20th-century art history, he interviews contemporary artists and scholars, including the painters Marlene Dumas, Alex Katz and Chuck Close; the art historians Richard Brilliant and Linda Nochlin; and the curator Robert Storr. Yet the film's emotional core lies in Mr Neel's intimate conversations with the family and friends who knew his grandmother best, most particularly his father and uncle."

Also in the New York Times: A "troupe of seasoned filmmakers and impassioned amateurs struggle to capture [Buddy] Bolden and his world in not one but two, related, movies." Michael Cieply.

"Thailand's ministry of culture has drafted a new Thai Film Act to be submitted to national legislators in an effort to update the kingdom's currently archaic censorship system," reports the Bangkok Post, passing along an item from the DPA. "The debate over film censorship became a news items last week when the award-winning Thai film Saeng Sattawat (Syndromes and a Century) missed its local debut in Thai theatres on Thursday because Thailand's board of censors insisted on cutting several 'sensitive' scenes." Thanks, David! Related online viewing tips. At Big Screen Little Screen, Ted Z points to trailer for Syndromes and Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. Earlier: "petition" and "Syndromes."

David Austin talks with Johnnie To about Triad Election for Cinema Strikes Back.

"Centered on the lives of the oiran, elite prostitutes working in official red light districts of the Edo era, Sakuran has been a surprise hit with Japan's style-conscious young women," writes Bruce Wallace. "[Mika] Ninagawa took her story from a 1990s manga and, on a budget of just $2.5 million, turned it into a mash-up of flamboyant colors, exuberant music and over-the-top fashion."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "[Darryl] Roberts says he came up with the idea for America the Beautiful after seeing a news report about a photographer who murdered a beautiful model because "if he couldn't have her, nobody could,'" writes Elizabeth Kaye McCall. "The question he's ultimately getting at is whether the preponderance of Americans have become so swayed by appearances that the old adage that true beauty comes from within no longer rings true."

And: "Green is now officially big business in Hollywood," reports Meg James.

"Claire Denis supporters are warned upon approaching Jacques Rivette, le veilleur: the imagery for which we have come to love her is only here in embryonic form," warns Travis Mackenzie Hoover at the House Next Door. "Still, Denis's tactile, environmental approach is clearly in evidence here; of a piece with her early work, it suggests both the location specificity and the unmoored personalities that dot films from Chocolat to I Can't Sleep."

Ignatius Vishnevetsky: "The Quiet Man is the sequel to an imaginary film noir: the movie that details John Wayne's life as a boxer in America prior to his return to Ireland."

Some jobs are tough, but someone's got to do them. Matt Riviera's in Morocco.

"The best readings of Inland Empire have rightly stressed the film's labyrinthine, rabbet-warren anarchitecture," writes k-punk. "Yet the space involved is ontological, rather than merely physical."

Robert Altman wasn't playing "the cynic's card" with The Long Goodbye, argues Nathan Kosub in Stop Smiling.

Books:

• "Sarah Bernhardt won't go away. She was born in 1844 and died in 1923, long past her glory days and well out of our reach. Her few silent films are awkward and off-putting. Yet she remains the most famous actress the world has ever known." Robert Gottlieb takes over 60 books into consideration for his piece in the New York Review of Books.

• Jürgen Fauth reads Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir: "Leni's extreme unreliability (I had the uncanny sense that she started lying around page 5, about a playground incident) adds a layer of uncertainty that makes the book even more intriguing, down to the heartbreaking (or calculated?) last sentence."

• "In Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948 - 1961, James L Baughman performs the basic historian's function of taking a story whose conclusion we all know and showing that it didn't necessarily have to turn out that way," writes Nicholas Lemann in a piece for the New Yorker that also touches on NBC: America's Network, Harry Reasoner: A Life in the News and Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media.

"Offside, for all its humor, has something quite serious in mind: the pain of being an outsider in one's own country," writes Amaya Rivera for Mother Jones. More from G Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle.

For Entertainment Weekly, Joshua Rich looks forward to "15 Summer Movies We Can't Wait to See." Nathaniel R, who can barely make it past the cover of the new issue. Related: At Cinematical, Erik Davis asks: What'll be the summer's most disappointing blockbuster?

Also, a list from Jeffrey M Anderson: 7 overrrated actors, "all currently working, and each could use a serious career adjustment."

ScreenGrab lists 10 great British directors the Telegraph looked over.

Online browsing and reading tip. Alan Sondheim remembers his lost films with shots of the Canyon Cinema catalog - back when Canyon still handled them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Online listening tip. Karina Longworth lounges on Spout's FilmCouch. Plus, Gregg Araki talks about Smiley Face.

Fests and events, 4/23.

First, award-winners. From Syracuse, Dante A Ciampaglia's got the list. And Sarasota? Film Threat lists them and Tom Hall's kaputt.

Film by film, Peter Sobczynski previews Ebertfest (Wednesday through Sunday) at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Darren Hughes lists the films he's looking forward to catching at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which opens Thursday and runs through May 10. Cathleen Rountree previews The Old Garden and Flandres.

Acquarello carries on filing from the Commitment and Grace: The Films of Carlos Saura series, running through May 3, with reviews of Mama Turns 100 Years Old and Elisa, My Love. Related: Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling recommends Cria cuervos, " certainly one of the best Spanish films of its era."

"Odd couple Henry Rollins and Janeane Garofalo bonded last summer over their shared disaffection with the Bush administration and have now teamed up with comedian Marc Maron for an evening of impassioned storytelling titled It's Not a Play and There's No Music," writes Hugh Hart in the Los Angeles Times. "The triple bill played this month in New York and opens Tuesday at the Silent Movie Theatre with a straight-ahead format: three expert talkers performing three solo monologues."

The VES Festival of Visual Effects takes place in Beverly Hills from June 7 through 10.

At indieWIRE, Charlie Olsky files at dispatch from the recently wrapped Wisconsin Film Festival.

Tribeca run-up, 4/23.

The Tribeca Film Festival opens on Wednesday and Not Coming to a Theater Near You is ready.

Sandra Guzman previews one of the fest's world premieres for the New York Post: "Benicio Del Toro's latest film project, Maldeamores (Lovesickness), explores matters of the heart, but don't expect a happy ending. The film's tag line says it all: 'Whatever your age, love is a pain the ass.'"

In New York, Logan Hill has a dozen recommendations for anyone making Tribeca plans.

This Is England screens on May 2, and ST VanAirsdale notes that, with the film facing an "18 rating - the equivalent of the MPAA's NC-17," Shane Meadows "is hitting the Guardian's arts blog to make his appeal."

"The Tribeca film festival will feature some fascinating documentaries," writes Marshall Lewy at Alternet. "But as I read about the range of interesting subject matter covered by these docs, it got me thinking more about what the place is for exploring social issues and political ideas in films."

Barbara Stanwyck Centennial.

"You couldn't tell who Barbara Stanwyck was just by looking at her; it took a little trouble to get to know her, and she had the ability - a star's ability - to make millions of viewers believe she was worth the trouble," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "In honor of her centennial, the BAMcinématek at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is offering a modest retrospective - it starts Wednesday and runs through May 6 - and what's striking about the series is that every one of the dozen movies in it depends at least to some degree on the ambiguity of the heroine's character."

Updated through 4/27.

More - much more - from Anthony Lane in the New Yorker: "It was a face that launched a thousand inquisitions: the mouth too tight to be rosy, and a voice pitched for slang, all bite and huskiness. When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck."

Earlier: Jim Emerson, as the centennial was being celebrated in Chicago.

Update, 4/27: "I think science fiction was the only genre she didn't attempt, which was just as well, as she would have told any fearsome bug-eyed monster where to get off." Robert Cashill surveys the series.

Shakespeare Blog-a-Thon.

The Bard goes Bollywood at Coffee coffee and more coffee, where Peter Nellhaus is hosting the Shakespeare Blog-a-Thon.

Related: Observer literary editor Robert Crum recommends William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, "the first to have the exceedingly good idea of providing a fully edited version of Shakespeare's work, as it first appeared in print," and Rene Weis's Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography.

Update, 4/24: Daniel Garrett at cinetext: "Shakespeare Behind Bars: On Crime and Punishment, Literature, and Film Technology."

Update, 4/27: "This month opportunity knocks like the porter at the gate in Macbeth - a stack of Shakespeare books released to coincide with the playwright's birthday on April 23," writes William Grimes in theNew York Times. "Such onslaughts are a time-honored ritual, but this year the pickings are unusually rich."

Filmmaker. Spring 07.

"Mumblecore," "Slackavettes," "neo-slacker," "bedhead cinema." It's tough to find a name for an entity that's so nebulous, so diverse and so new it's hardly an entity at all - and yet, something's going on. In the Spring issue of Filmmaker, Alicia Van Couvering does a damn good job of sketching a moving target, and she does so by first asking the right questions: "When is it time to demarcate a filmmaking 'movement'? What if the filmmakers in this movement don't want to be grouped into any kind of movement at all? And what if the films in this movement revolve around the crisis of self-definition? Could it get any worse for one of its members than to have to talk about feeling self-conscious about being in a movement?"

And there's a sidebar: Joe Swanberg talks about making LOL, and he's followed by "a selective list of some, but not all, of the films that might comprise the mumblecore movement."

James Ponsoldt: "This notion is at the core of Killer of Sheep: what it means to be an adult, and how children learn and internalize grown-up behavior and responsibilities through lectures, through tears, but mostly by silently observing, peeking around corners, usually unbeknownst to their parents. The children of Killer of Sheep are witnesses, sponges - loved and shielded, but not ignorant." He then talks with Charles Burnett.

Steve Gallagher on Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis: "A delirious documentary portrait of the artist, Mary Jordan's film immerses the viewer in Smith's work, captured here through film clips, audio recordings and stills, while forcefully arguing for the continuing relevance of his philosophies on art and politics." And he talks with Jordan.

Scott Macaulay meets Marion Cotillard, whose outstanding performance as Edith Piaf is the single saving grace of La Vie en Rose.

Justin Lowe has five online viewing tips, you might say, but there's more to it than that. He asks Little Miss Sunshine filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, The Foot Fist Way director Jody Hill, writer-directors Cory McAbee (The American Astronaut) and Maria Maggenti (Puccini for Beginners) and Finishing the Game director Justin Lin about the films they made for mobile phones as part of the Sundance Film Festival Global Short Film Project - and links to those shorts.

Meanwhile, at the blog: "If you can't do Cannes..." Nick Dawson notes that there are new films on the way to stateside theaters from Takeshi Kitano, Aki Kaurismäki, Shane Meadows and Lars von Trier.

Sight & Sound. May 07.

The May issue of Sight & Sound simply has to have a piece on This Is England, so the editors have made a smart move: Get Jon Savage, author of England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, to write it. (He has a new one out, too: Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture.) So read about The Clash, the general milieu of England in the 80s, and of course, the movie - "Made with tenderness and humor, it is a film about not just national identity and manhood, but also early adolescence, that key moment in identity formation" - and then catch up with the just-updated entry, "Weekend Brits."

To the Italians, with Guido Bonsaver: "Roberto Rossellini's Francis, God's Jester (1950) is one of those rare films that help define not only a director's philosophy, but a national trait and a cultural climate too.... [A]fter the elections of 1948, Italy was fast becoming a more hedonistic, Americanized society. It might have been a cry for help. And it was one that struck a chord in subsequent generations."

Reviews:

• Tim Lucas considers "a compelling artefact," Schoolgirl Report #1: What Parents Don't Think Is Possible. "Nakedly exploitative on one hand, educationally minded and idealistic on the other, it also has the ring of a revolutionary act, lending its voice to the tensions that had developed by the end of the 1960s between the post-war youth of West Germany and their overly strict, beer-chugging, Hitlerjugend parents."

• To Germany again, but the other one, with Geoffrey Macnab: "Is it plausible that he could change so fundamentally? Whatever these quibbles, The Lives of Others has a maturity and breadth of vision rarely found in a debut feature."

• Nick James on Scott Walker 30 Century Man: "[T]he film catches various commentators - Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Alison Goldfrapp et al - as they listen to, and are often visibly shaken by, Walker's music. The emotions here are so exposed you would have to be allergic to every aspect of Walker's singing not to experience at least a wobble of empathy. Remembering that existential symphony of the melancholy modern self that is a Scott Walker song gives us pause, as if all other rock music should somehow be ashamed of itself for being so unambitious."

• "Critics and viewers may be split over the merits of the historical epic 300, but its technical achievement is beyond question," argues Andrew Osmond.

The French, 4/22.

So the French are voting as I type. Turn out, evidently, is high. If you haven't been following the campaign but you've got 5½ minutes, the audio slide show that accompanies Ariane Bernard's piece in today's New York Times is a fine overview of the candidates and the stakes. If you've got a bit more time this Sunday, see Jane Kramer's piece in the New Yorker; and if you've got all day, there is, of course, the Guardian's coverage.

Cahiers du cinéma, which recently polled the candidates regarding their politique pour le cinéma, lays out its "12 Objectives for Cinema in France." After all, "everything is not very well. As the surveys in Cahiers point out month after month, the problems lie predominantly with aberrations in the support measures that make up our rightly famous "French film system" - aberrations that have ended up reversing the effects they originally intended."

Also:

• Antoine Thirion explains where the title of Jacques Rivette's Don't Touch the Axe comes from, draws several parallels to Out: 1 and a few more to Histoire de Marie et Julien before settling to dwell on what Rivette dwells on: obsession and "the certainty of death."

• Hervé Aubron reviews Belles toujours, in which "Manoel de Oliveira imagines in it the reunion, forty years later, of two Belle de jour survivors - the blonde Séverine, now a widow (Bulle Ogier, Catherine Deneuve having withdrawn), and the libertine Husson (Michel Piccoli).... Belle de jour displayed a double life, a back and forth between two spaces, compartmentalized yet symmetrical... In Belle toujours, the boxes remain, vestiges of the past compartmentalization, but the double life no longer is. Life has unified itself onto a single plane, in a Paris which resembles a cemetery for brothels."

• "'I am an artiste!!!' Olivier Dahan's Edith Piaf does not miss a single opportunity to shout this out, like an insult or a calling card," writes Emmanuel Burdeau. "However La Vie en Rose reveals rien, non, rien de rien, of this art, why people love it, why it plucks at the heartstrings of the French."

"Paris is the city of lights but also of love, and in Paris je t'aime, 18 renowned directors contribute star-studded vignettes about amour, each set in a different metropolitan neighborhood," begins Nick Schager at Slant. "Typical of such compilations, results tend to vary wildly, though despite roughly an even number of slight successes and minor misfires, the bad nonetheless tends to outweigh the good courtesy of a few preachy and/or ugly episodes that spoil the otherwise light, affectionate mood."

Via Movie City News, Philippa Hawker reflects in the Age on the century-plus-old love affair between Paris and the cinema.

In the NYT, Leslie Camhi previews Emmanuel Bourdieu's Poison Friends. Thibault Vinçon plays André, "the brilliant ringleader of a band of Parisian graduate students... Perhaps only in France could people's literary impulses appear so widespread and insistent that, according to André, they must be controlled, like a physical itch or a psychological compulsion."

Philip French calls this week's DVD club in the Observer to order: Last Year in Marienbad.

Earlier: James van Maanen's coverage of this year's Rendez-Vous With French Cinema: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.

Jack @ 70.

"Jack Nicholson is the greatest American movie actor since Cagney, Bogart and Stewart, and he's as much a part of his time as they were of theirs," writes Philip French, introducing the Observer's salute to the rebel-turned-Hollywood ambassador. Wishing Jack a happy 70th: Dennis Hopper, Kathy Bates, Rob Reiner, Susan Sarandon, Robert Towne, James L Brooks, Danny DeVito and Tim Burton.

Xan Brooks blogs: "There are numerous performers who might lay claim to being the ultimate American screen star (I admit to still holding a candle to Brando). But I don't think any of them has enjoyed the sustained run of great performances in significant films that Nicholson boasted in that golden period between 1968 and 1976. This was an astonishing spell, kicking off with Easy Rider and running through Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, Marvin Gardens, The Last Detail, The Passenger and Chinatown before wrapping up with his Oscar-winning turn in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Marc Hairapetian had a birthday chat with Nicholson on Thursday for the Frankfurter Rundschau (in German). More congrats in the German-language papers: Michael Althen (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), Tobias Kniebe (Süddeutsche Zeitung), Gerd Midding (Die Welt), Jan Schulz-Ojala (Der Tagesspiegel) and Michel Bodmer (Neue Zürcher Zeitung).

Weekend shorts.

Edward Copeland looks back on Annie Hall as it turns 30 - and sets off a string of fine comments.

Thaicinema.org reports that Apichatpong Weerasethakul is receiving support from some considerable heavyweights in the Thai political and cultural scene in his bid to see the law changed not just so that Syndromes and a Century can screen in its homeland but for the sake of other Thai filmmakers - and audiences - as well. Thanks, Peter! Earlier: "petition" and "Syndromes."

Anne Thompson notes that reviews of Spider-Man 3 by Todd McCarthy and Michael Rechtshaffen (Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, respectively) are up; you'll find a couple more here.

Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "Though the film is mostly interesting as a tour of the cliquey art world and [Allan] Stone's relationship to it, The Collector still feels redundant of documentaries like Who Gets to Call It Art? that have been all the rage in the past few years."

Daniel Kehlmann, author of Measuring the World, "my novel about [Carl Friedrich] Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt and their endeavour to quantify and survey the world, about Enlightenment figures and sea monsters, and about the grandeur and comedy of German culture," reflects on daring to place a fiction in the past. For a moment, too, he lingers on Barry Lyndon, "which reconstructs a lost world in intricate detail. It does so by focusing not on what has survived from that period, but on its most ephemeral moments, and by choosing to highlight not the things that we still have in common with that era, but precisely that which separates us from it."

Also in the Guardian:

• John Sayles likely has more than a few stories to tell about his experiences as a "day player"; he tells the one about pumping fake blood from a sedated hog. Related, and via Movie City News: Creative Loafing's interview with Sayles and Maggie Renzi.

• Simon Hattenstone interviews Natalie Portman.

• John Patterson: "The auteur theory, I've finally decided, can kiss my ass." Also: Next will do no favors for anyone involved, least of all, Philip K Dick.

John S Rad, née Yeghanerad, the accidental auteur of the cult film Dangerous Men, has died," announces Paul Cullum in the LA Weekly. "The film itself defied description: Ostensibly a generic revenge drama begun in 1985, then modified with new characters and plot elements in 1995, the final product - released 20 years after its inception - was governed by a supremely eccentric vision and an aesthetic sensibility somewhere between David Lynch and Ed Wood.... Learned and soft-spoken, Rad was deferential to a fault, while remaining resolute in his personal vision."

"[P]eople who look upon cinema as an art don't necessarily share the same conceptions of what kind of art it is," writes David Bordwell, gently warning that what lies ahead in that entry "will be a bit more theoretical than most. Don't let that scare you off, though; I'm trying for clarity, not murk."

Meanwhile: "[A]lpha fans are enjoying an unprecedented era of influence, through blogs, podcasts and movie-news sites that have become trusted sources of movie information for millions of filmgoers," writes Time's Rebecca Winters Keegan. "And not just on casting decisions. 'They're the new tastemakers,' says Avi Arad, a producer behind this summer's Spider-Man 3 and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. 'Hard-core fans represent a small piece of the viewing public, but they influence geek culture, journalists, Wall Street. You don't want them to trash your project.'"

Adds Richard Corliss: "To [Variety editor Peter] Bart, who once was a Paramount Pictures executive, and to other Hollywood sachems, the ascent of the fanboy critics must be like manna falling from above. They rose from the culture they speak to, they're as obsessed with horror films and special effects as the industry currently is, and they love nearly everything they see. Whereas the mainstream critics - they're so damn critical." What's more, they've never made smash hits; what they can do, he argues, is launch films like Pan's Labyrinth "into the public conversation" and "put films in context."

In Triad Election, "the portrait [Johnnie] To paints of relations between Chinese state capitalism and Hong Kong organized crime, a decade after the former British colony was returned to mainland control, could scarcely be bleaker," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.

In the New York Times:

• "The fascinating documentary Alice Neel - a biography of this influential, emotionally troubled painter by her grandson Andrew Neel - could easily have been titled 'Form Follows Function,'" writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "It achieves the documentary format's basic goal of illuminating history while also demonstrating, through filmmaking choices, how an artist's style reveals his or her personality." Also, "A Dios Momo, directed by Leonardo Ricagni, is to melodrama as corn syrup is to sweeteners: efficient but crude."

• "A hackneyed melodrama partly redeemed by a cast convinced that it's performing Tennessee Williams, Downtown: A Street Tale follows a bunch of stereotypically damaged people in an abandoned building in New York," sighs Jeannette Catsoulis.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader on Offside: "[Jafar] Panahi becomes more of a master with every movie, combining fiction with documentary so adroitly that we can't tell which is which. In this respect he remains the sharpest of Abbas Kiarostami's disciples."

Ray Pride: "Interminable, morally and psychologically incoherent, it is a soulless bore. Brightly lit, bluntly framed and criminally dim, Year of the Dog is Todd Solondz light, as infuriating as a stone in a shoe on a 90 minute walk somewhere you wouldn't want to go."

"A shameless rip on Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, The Condemned unseats Slow Burn as the most hilariously inane film of 2007," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

"Thus the Western world was saved, at least for a while, from what the film calls 'mysticism and tyranny.' Mysticism? That's what you call fanaticism when you're trying to be creepy rather than dogmatic." Michael Wood in the London Review of Books on 300. Related: "Why is genocide dampening crevices and stirring pocket-linings in a cinema near you?" asks Lenin's Tomb. And John Powers in Art Threat: "300: Racist War Propaganda with Septic Timing."

"If anything, Death Proof proves Tarantino incapable of making a film, however derivative the source material or expansive his scholarly, esoteric film memory, that doesn't directly address the realm of his personal obsessions and aesthetic motifs. He is an auteur," writes Brandon Harris. "His film, despite its modest aims, is a by turns uproarious, disquieting and completely satisfying revenge cartoon."

Matt Bartley inducts James Stewart into the Hollywood Bitchslap/EFilmCritic Hall of Fame.

"By encompassing the social, political and economic conditions that caused the problems associated with alcohol addiction and national prohibition, The Wet Parade is markedly different from pictures like Little Caesar that typically don't bother looking at causes at all," writes Thom at Film of the Year.

"Despite [Erich] von Stroheim's dismay at the forced cut of Greed from nine hours to two, the end product is superlative," writes Billy Stevenson.

"[T]he lasting intrigue of The Haunted Strangler remains [Boris] Karloff's villain, how his transformation deprives him of judgment and bestows him with adrenaline-fueled strength," writes Rumsey Taylor. Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Thomas Scalzo: "[W]here the slew of alien- and creature-centric sci-fi/horror movies of the 50s focused largely on external terrors, here we have a film [First Man Into Space] presaging the stories of internal torment that would come to dominate the horror genre in years to come - a film centered on a monster that is also a man, an Other that is also us."

Online browsing tip #1. "Italian movies. Posters and publicity." Via Rashomon. Related: Coudal Partners' "Posterpalooza," parts 1, 2 and 3.

Online browsing tip #2. Fun with movie posters and Photoshop at Worth1000. Via Movie City News

Online viewing tips. ScreenGrab's top 10 this week: "The Most Historically Inaccurate Films Ever Made." Parts 1 and 2.

Weekend Brits.

"On 30 April 1978, more than 80,000 people took part in a 'Rock Against Racism' carnival in Victoria Park, east London," writes Patrick Sawer in the New Statesman. "Who Shot the Sheriff?, a documentary by Alan Miles that will be screened at the Glastonbury Festival this summer, shows how the movement was sparked by an Eric Clapton concert in Birmingham in 1976 at which, to the dismay of black fans such as the future author Caryl Phillips, the guitarist urged his audience to back Enoch Powell's anti-immigrant stance." Recollections of RAR from the likes of Billy Bragg and others follow.

Updated through 4/22.

Kevin Maher talks with Stephen Graham, "the nervous one in TV's Band of Brothers, the funny one in Guy Ritchie's Snatch, the tough one from Scorsese's Gangs of New York, and the aggressive one in Arctic Monkeys' promo video for their song When the Sun Goes Down. And now, thanks to a role in what is undoubtedly the best British movie since Trainspotting, Stephen Graham, star of This is England, is about to become, simply, the One."

In the Guardian, Shane Meadows remembers the 80s: "As a kid growing up in Uttoxeter, Staffs, it was a time of great music, brilliant fashion and a vibrant youth culture that makes today's kids look dull and unimaginative by comparison. It was also a time of massive unrest when British people were still prepared to fight for the stuff they believed in. My new film, This Is England, is about all of these things.

Also, Beryl Bainbridge on Distant Voices, Still Lives: "After a lapse of almost 20 years, I am still mesmerised by its originality of structure, its use of music, its attention to detail."

"The Wind That Shakes the Barley is [Ken] Loach's best movie," declares Charles Mudede in the Stranger. "If any criticism is to be leveled at Loach's new film, it's not on the grounds of his simplistic moralizing but on these other grounds: the film's stunning landscapes, handsome actors, and cozy interiors dominate the content. The political message is here reduced to the function of being nothing more than a stage for the real star: the exceptional beauty of Ireland itself."

"British Airways cut a cameo by Richard Branson from its in-flight version of the latest James Bond film and blurred out the tail fin of a Virgin Atlantic plane seen in the movie." D'Arcy Doran reports for the AP.

Earlier: "This Is England. And Englishness."

Updates, 4/22: The Independent asks Meadows and This Is England producer Mark Herbert "to pick their favorite young [British] actors, writers, directors and producers, and to tell us why we might soon be seeing their names up in lights."

Chris Sullivan talks with Meadows for the London Times, Bernadette McNulty with Thomas Turgoose, "the 15-year-old star of This Is England," for the Telegraph.

Also in the Telegraph, Sheila Johnston talks with Terence Davies about a film that had a profound impact on him when he was a teen: "'It was extremely brave to make the film at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offence. Changing the law took another six years. But I think Victim helped: it was part of a general move towards being more liberal.' Did it make Davies feel militant himself? 'Well,' he replies wryly, 'Dirk Bogarde making a stand in the Inner Temple was a bit different from being the youngest of 10 in a working-class family in Liverpool.'"

Back to the Independent: "The films of Terence Davies remain a unique, marvellous anomaly in British cinema," writes Jonathan Romney. "Released in 1988, his first feature Distant Voices, Still Lives had some sort of a context then: it echoed a lineage of British films about working-class life, but also had some kinship with the deeply personal, poetic (and more explicitly avant-garde) films of Derek Jarman and contemporaries. Now re-released, Davies's feature strikes you as not having dated at all - partly because it was never 'of its time' - but also as a melancholy instance of a path opened up in British cinema, and barely followed since."

Weekend fests and events.

"Thus far I've heard the Institute alternatively characterized as a 'boot camp,' a 'fantasy camp for film critics,' and as an 'immersion' in the world of film criticism," blogs Andy Horbal. "In aggregate I think these descriptions give you an idea of the heady mixture of intensity and fun our hosts have concocted for us. This is, basically, the toughest vacation I've ever taken."

Goldring Arts Journalists are blogging from the Syracuse International Film and Video Festival, running on through tomorrow.

Andy Spletzer: "The Hidden Life of a Festival Programmer."

A "funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century," writes Rachel Saltz in the New York Times. "As India Now, a series of nine features and two shorts beginning tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art, shows, the boundaries between Bollywood and not-Bollywood began to blur.... The films at MoMA, none more than two years old, include a documentary, an animated short, a Shakespeare adaptation, a movie inspired by TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, a drama about the 2002 Gujarat riots, comedies, tragedies and, of course, some glorious melodramas."

On a related note, the big event: "It has been dubbed Bollywood's wedding of the decade," writes Randeep Ramesh in the Guardian. "Following Hindu tradition in northern India, actor Abhishek Bachchan, 31, rode in on a white horse leading his wedding procession in Mumbai, before circling a fire to marry one of his leading ladies, Aishwarya Rai, 33.... The bride is a former Miss World who became India's favourite actress, while her husband, part of a new wave of heartthrobs, is the son of actor Amitabh Bachchan, who was named the Greatest Star of the Millennium by a BBC online poll, ahead of Marlon Brando, Sir Laurence Olivier and Charlie Chaplin." Also related: Gautaman Bhaskaran's big Bollywood dispatch for the Lumière Reader.

Dana Parsons profiles Le Van-Kiet, whose Dust of Life premieres tomorrow night at the Vietnamese International Film Festival: "[I]t's a gritty look at Vietnamese gang life and the crimes and violence it produced, set against family relationships that provided balm but, unwittingly, also sowed some of the seeds of the teenagers' alienation."

Commitment and Grace: The Films of Carlos Saura runs through May 3 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and acquarello is there: "In The Garden of Delights, Carlos Saura infuses his now familiar, archetypal elements of financial crisis, physical disability, infirmity, and game hunting that were introduced in his seminal film, The Hunt as subversive, iconic symbols for the rigidity of Francoist corrupted ideology, with a healthy dose of blunt, tongue in cheek - and pointedly allegorical - Buñuelian absurdity to create a perversely wry, acerbic, and trenchant indictment of the bourgeoisie, whose unwavering support of General Franco enabled his ascension to (and retention of) power in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War."

Campbell Robertson talks with Frank Langella about playing "an unbelievable bag of neuroses" in Frost/Nixon, opening on Broadway this weekend. Related: Scenes from the play and the original interviews at NPR.

"When thinking about the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival, music may not be the very first thing that pops into your head," writes SF360's Susan Gerhard. "It may not be the second. But, says SFIFF programmer Sean Uyehara, 'The festival provides one of the best ways to check out amazing performances, whether those performances are live or on film.'" He got a list of ten places to look.

AJ Schnack has a big Full Frame wrap-up - with pix.

Iggy @ 60.

Iggy Pop is 60 today. To celebrate, Mark Beech reviews Paul Trynka's "fast-paced biography, Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed, which comes as the Stooges are touring together to promote their first studio album in three decades."

More well-wishers: popnutten and Neva Chonin in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Online viewing? You bet.

Interviews. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

"With Hot Fuzz, we're drawing attention to the formal quality of action movies by sticking it in a different context, so there is a gentle ribbing, but it's all done with a complete reverence," Simon Pegg tells Jeffrey M Anderson. This is a pretty special edition this time around. Not only do Pegg, director Edgar Wright and Nick Frost make for a fun read as they riff off each other, you can also watch them riff on, thanks to Cabinetic.

"The meta-movie silliness works well enough for the crisp setup," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But since Mr Wright and Mr Pegg are essentially parodying self-parodies (see Con Air ad infinitum), they have also smartly kinked up their conceit by setting most of the film in a sleepy village that might as well be called Ye Old English Towne, thereby wedding one of the most irritating British exports (see Calendar Girls ad nauseam) to one of the most absurd American ones. Think of it as The Full Monty blown to smithereens."

Updated through 4/27.

"The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Hot Fuzz is fun, and it's nice to see all the English character actors who aren't busy in Harry Potter films, but it lacks its predecessor's freshness.... The ramshackle Shaun of the Dead was held together by more than just gags. It was, at heart, the story of a child-man who gets the courage to grow up—to take responsibility for his life, commit to a woman, and make peace with his mother. That he could do this and still get to blow off the top of her head with a shotgun - that's the magic of movies."

"At a running time of more than two hours, it's a wee bit lengthy," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "And yet to see it once is to fall in love and want to pay up immediately for another screening, so abundant are the poker-faced gags that race through the quaint village of Sandford in which the would-be-wannabe Bay-'n'- Bruckheimerian blockbuster is set. Hot Fuzz is a cult film writ humongous - a send-up of Hollywood spectacles that's far bigger and better than anything to which it pays homage."

"Hot Fuzz may not quite hit the same level of raucous mayhem [as Shaun]," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But I think it's even sharper and funnier, and Wright and Pegg never run out of ideas: The movie is streaming with them, and just when you think there really can't be anything left to laugh at, a baddie holds a gun to a poor, runty redheaded kid and sneers, 'Stay back, or the ginger nut gets it!'"

"One week ago in this very space the subject was Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's painstakingly fetishistic, overlong ode to the trashy movies they grew up with," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "Now we've got Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's painstakingly fetishistic, overlong ode to the trashy movies out right now. Oh well - at least this one's funnier."

In the New York Press, Armond White sees this as a comparison crying out to be made as well: "Grindhouse - a fanboy bacchanal - ignores the real world and is politically obtuse, while Hot Fuzz mixes the fine English comedy tradition of social and behavioral observation with audacious pop references."

"Hot Fuzz's basic comic strategy," as defined by Adam Nayman at the House Next Door: "the reupholstering of pop detritus into something even tackier.... And while it might sound like heresy to suggest it, Hot Fuzz is quite simply a more enjoyable (and less grueling) experience than Grindhouse. Its trashy affections come unencumbered by sky-scraping pretensions. Put simply, the two films demonstrate the difference between being tipsy on your own cleverness and irretrievably shitfaced."

Dennis Harvey at SF360: "Odd that it took some Brits to finally, definitively satirize a style that's plagued mallflicks for over two decades now - at least in a form without puppets (I will always love you best, Team America: World Police). But there you are."

"Some of the parody here is way past its due date," notes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "But keeping within what you do best - in this case, a self-deprecatingly English tweak on the blockbuster - without letting the stiffness of routine show is, by itself, an accomplishment."

Jürgen Fauth: "It takes a while for Hot Fuzz to ramp up the action, but in the meantime, the spectacular supporting cast keeps things very entertaining: Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Bill Nighy, and a slew of other familiar faces populate the town with characters that range from oddly endearing to cheerfully creepy."

"[T]he comedy is less Airplane!-style parody than a trickier, subtler mix of affectionate ribbing and fond re-creation," writes Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene. "Cop movies, after all, are reassuring for the same reasons as cozy mysteries: they restore order."

"Although it sounds odd, Hot Fuzz is like watching a classic Agatha Christie novel stuffed into a semi-automatic weapon, and strapped to the side of some of the best comedic talent working today," writes Erik Davis at Cinematical. It's "an adrenaline-fueled, balls-to-the-wall cup of simmering tea, served up to resemble everything you love about those big-budgeted run-and-gun movies, but with enough British flavor to have this Yank itching for more."

"It is hard to parody material that is already beyond parodying," notes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly, "so when Wright fashions an extended finale that recreates scenes from Point Break and Bad Boys II or replicates the visual gimcracks of Michael Bay and Tony Scott, it is difficult to divine where the setup ends and the punchline begins."

"Sad as it is to say," though Andrew Wright will say it anyway in the Stranger, "there're more than a few long stretches of just waiting around for a punch line."

Vadim Rizov, writing at the Reeler, finds it "disappointing only according to the high standards set by its predecessor."

But the LA CityBeat's Andy Klein finds it "every bit as funny" at Shaun.

"Whereas the US movie parodies are content to string together gags, often without so much as a segue, Wright and Pegg are storytellers who weave their naughty bits into genuine characters and a plot," notes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

Shaun Brady, writing in the Philadelphia City Paper, finds it more "amiable than hilarious" but "still a worthy successor" to Shaun.

"Hot Fuzz isn't a film without problems but its charms far outweigh them," writes Canfield at Twitch.

"One of the pleasant surprises of the Hot Fuzztival was that Edgar Wright... introduced every single one of the movies that day." Jette Kernion writes up her impressions.

Cheryl Eddy has a fun talk with Wright, Penn and Frost for the San Francisco Bay Guardian blog, Pixel Vision. Keith Phipps has a similar blast at the AV Club.

Robert Abele chats with Wright and Pegg for the Los Angeles Times. More from Marc Savlov in the Austin Chronicle.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Edgar Wright "about his first forays in film, making one of the Grindhouse trailers, and why Robocop makes him cry."

Online listening tip. At IFC News, "Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss some of their favorite film cop clichés, from turning in your badge to seizing the cars of private citizens for official police business."

Earlier: British reviews and Nick Schager in Slant; and Sean Axmaker's interview with Pegg and Wright in 2004.

Update: "Here's just the movie for the weekend after the Va. Tech killings: a gun-love comedy about a rural town where, by the end, nearly everyone has been mowed down in a tsunami of bullets." But Time's Richard Corliss manages to catch himself: "We interrupt this rant for a review of the best, surely the smartest, English-language movie of the year to date."

Updates, 4/23: "Consider it the filmic equivalent of a bacon double cheeseburger with a big side of greasy fries," writes Jason Morehead. "It doesn't necessarily attempt to subvert or deconstruct the action genre (though there are scenes that could possibly count as such). Rather, it attempts to simply relish in the genre, to tease out and enjoy every single one of its ludicrous aspects. To that end, it's a wild success - and the fact that it also features some of the most memorable characters, some of the best dialog, and some of the funniest moments of any movie so far this year is just an added bonus."

"[T]hink of Miss Marple pulling a .44 Magnum from beneath her tweeds to waste the local curate, and you're almost there," suggests Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

Or: "Imagine having a nice quiet dinner with Emma Thompson followed by a violent trip into the Ultimate Fighting Championship octagon with Chuck Liddell," offers Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle. "The movie succeeds on both levels, even if the transition is a bit abrupt."

Update, 4/24: Mike Russell has a good long talk with the trio, too.

Update, 4/25: "[F]or all the constant, if somewhat muted comedy, the feeling of the film is very... odd, because for all its humor the movie is essentially playing it straight, and not in the Dr Strangelove sense of reality being so absurd as to be comedic," writes Daniel Kasman.

Updates, 4/27: Stop Smiling gets Rusty Nails to do their Q&A.

In the London Times, Ken Russell - yes, Ken Russell - asks, "How do you sell a movie about the British constabulary in a couple of nervous lines to a board of hardheaded American businessmen?"

Paul Fox. Video Q&A.

Everything's Gone Green. "What is the meaning of the title?" is just one of the questions Cabinetic puts to Paul Fox, who's realized Douglas Coupland's screenplay.

"If Generation X spoke aptly to Coupland and his cohort's experience of a more uncertain and impermanent future than that faced by preceding postwar generations," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly, "the harmless, modestly charming Everything's Gone Green feels like a slightly stale rehash of his earlier themes of diminishing opportunities in love and work and a surfeit of false choices in a high-tech world governed by shiny appearances."

"Coupland and director Paul Fox seem to have arrived at the hipster-comedy party about a decade late, and their case of Pabst Blue Ribbon has gotten warm," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "As tepid and profoundly unoriginal as Everything's Gone Green is, it's got a wistful, winsome Canadian-ness that might give it some shelf life. Fundamentally, it's a well-executed formula movie, perfect for first-date couples or miscellaneous group outings. Is it wrong to expect more?"

"Much of it plays like a Don DeLillo novel by way of a sitcom, with good-looking 20-somethings fretting about consumerism and the yuppie mentality and cracking wise about existential predicaments," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times.

"The film's tone is on the sitcom side," agrees Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times, "but its likable cast and zany subplots make it palatable."

"Everything's Gone Green is far from revolutionary," writes Matt Singer at IFC News, "but it is light and fun and won't tax you too much in exchange for ninety entertaining minutes."

"Everything's Gone Green feels fresher than it is, aided by a most appealing cast, and if it doesn't have quite the energy to make a lot of green itself, it deserves a look," writes Craig Phillips at Guru. "If nothing else, it'll make you want to visit Vancouver."

IndieWIRE interviews Fox.

Earlier: Jason Clark at Slant.

Vacancy.

"With no zombies, Asian ghost children or clattering symbols of post-9/11 uncertainty, Vacancy feels remarkably pure, almost naive, in its thrill seeking," writes Tim Grierson in the LA Weekly. "As a rebuke to so many horror films, where the terrorizing element springs from some sociological or personal demon, the motel's mask-wearing, knife-wielding psychopaths are blessedly free of subtext, which makes David and Amy's predicament all the more arbitrary and therefore traumatizing.... Happily, the movie is exactly what you think it's going to be, only better."

Updated through 4/22.

"At first glance, Vacancy seems to be the latest entry in the lamentable 'torture porn' genre, whose films mainly involve waiting for the next vaguely sympathetic character to have his or her vital organs pulled out with a fork," writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "But director Nimród Antal and writer Mark L Smith are up to something a bit cannier as well as more devious."

"Vacancy runs a very brief 80-odd minutes, but uses its time wisely," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

But for the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, it's little more than a "banal horror retread."

More from Nick Schager in Slant and Eric Kohn, who interviews Antal for the New York Press.

Update, 4/22: Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "[T]he spying that's bothering us in recent films seems to have more to do with the sort of ad hoc, vigilante monitoring we subject one another to than any kind of organized, institutional effort. What concerns them is not Big Brother but the ways in which we've internalized voyeurism, prurience, violence, schadenfreude and self-policing. The fear these new films are expressing is a fear of the spy we know, the person in the next room, at the desk beside us, in the same bed. The fear of the spies we are becoming." Films touched on besides Vacancy: Red Road, Disturbia, Alone With Her, The Lives of Others, Caché and, harking back, The Conversation and Blow Out.

Stephanie Daley.

"[T]oo many independent films seem pathologically allergic to melodrama, as if the greatest works of the Western tradition didn't involve war, murder, sexual betrayal and unlikely coincidence," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. Not this one: "Despite an overly abrupt and oblique conclusion, this is a major American film, announcing the arrival of an independent director who deserves all the hype."

Updated through 4/26.

"There is a fine line between a human drama with its own life and an issue-oriented dramatic essay," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "And if Stephanie Daley, written and directed by Hilary Brougher, didn't have its ear so perfectly tuned to intergenerational dialogue, and to the severe language of sex education in schools where abstinence is taught as the only acceptable form of birth control, it would come across as just such an essay."

"By remaining physically and emotionally attuned to her actors (as they are, in turn, to their characters) and not simply the considerable melodramatic heft of her story, Brougher avoids the towel-wringer this unfortunately topical story could have been had it been called, say, The Ski Mom," writes Michelle Orange. "Between [Tilda] Swinton's wounded, watchful eyes and [Amber] Tamblyn's soft internality emerges something that transcends the inherently stale nature of their transactions."

Also at the Reeler, ST VanAirsdale talks with Brougher.

Earlier: Karen Durbin's interview with Brougher for the NYT.

Update, 4/21: "An examination of the Sundance lab films of the 21st century reveals an alarming trend towards homogenization, and Stephanie Daley, a product of the Directors Lab, is a near-perfect example of the negative effect that Hollywood-style development has had on independent film," writes Annie Frisbie in a fine analysis at the House Next Door. "To begin with, Stephanie Daley uses tight causality in a classic setup/payoff dependent structure. Story choices are limited to those that advance the plot, and the tighter the causality, the less able the viewer is to construct alternate meanings."

Update, 4/23: IndieWIRE interviews Brougher.

Updates, 4/26: "There is so much to admire and empathize with in Stephanie Daley that it feels almost boorish to quibble about whether the film needs to come packaged as a murder mystery," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Stephanie Daley is most persuasive as a realist family drama made by a writer-director whose forte is the accretion of quotidian detail that, as much as any crisis, tells us who her characters are. It is also, with luck, a career-clinching showcase for Tamblyn, daughter of my first-ever movie crush Russ Tamblyn."

Jennifer Merin talks with Brougher for the New York Press.

Susan King talks with Tamblyn - Amber, of course - for the Los Angeles Times.

In the Land of Women.

"Jonathan Kasdan's In the Land of Women is a gentle, sweet-spirited picture about the bewildering qualities of love, about the conflicts that arise in families even when everyone (or nearly everyone) has the best of intentions, about how it's possible to reinvent and reenergize a life," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "The problem is that the picture is so gentle, it barely leaves an impression."

It's "a softer, fuzzier Garden State," pronounces Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

Updated through 4/23.

"Kasdan (son of Lawrence) isn't much of a director but he's even less of a writer, and his debut's schmaltz plays out like a corny Lifetime-for-men TV movie," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

The San Diego Reader's Duncan Shepherd finds it "a relationship thing at about the Cameron Crowe level of wit and wisdom, although perhaps that name offers itself as a reference point because of the way in which every significant mood or moment is swept up, and along, by a pop song on the soundtrack."

"This is supposed to be a character-driven film, but few of the characters are complex or interesting," writes Jette Kernion at Cinematical.

But for the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan, Kasdan uses "sweetness and concern to make this story of looking for love and finding your way through life unexpectedly interesting."

Quint talks with Adam Brody and Kasdan for AICN.

Updates, 4/23: For the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, it's "an appealing and emotionally satisfying film. But [Kasdan] doesn't know what he's talking about, not really, and though he structures the film around his areas of ignorance, that only works partially."

Sarah Bardin finds it "an engaging, gentle-humored film."

Fracture.

"Directed by Gregory Hoblit from an enjoyable knotty script by Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers, Fracture isn't a great movie," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly, "but it hums with the insidious smarts and theatrical flair that made Hoblit's debut feature, Primal Fear, a classic of its kind." The real revelation here, though, seems to be Ryan Gosling: "He's the kind of actor who makes other actors look lazy. He is Brando at the time of Streetcar, or Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, and altogether one of the more remarkable happenings at the movies today."

Updated through 4/21.

Michael Guillén adds: "His hotshot sexiness and seemingly insouciant and disheveled intelligence begin to burn quite darkly by film's end and I was pleased to see him follow up his celebrated performance in Half Nelson with a performance at least half as good, though again his moral dilemmas noticeably harken back to his previous performance. This actor can do more with a glint of humor in his eyes - and its removal - than most young actors working today, save perhaps Robert Downey, Jr."

"Anyone who can credibly threaten to steal a movie from Anthony Hopkins has seriously got it going on," agrees Dana Stevens in Slate. "[C]asting Gosling opposite Hopkins in a big-budget legal thriller is clearly Hollywood's way of saying, 'Here he is folks: the next big thing.'"

"Gosling earned the respect of critics in 2001 with The Believer, scored box-office cred in 2004's The Notebook, and an Oscar nomination, Spirit Award and a slew of other kudos for Half Nelson," adds Kevin Crust. "But what Fracture gives Gosling is the kind of pairing that helped elevate Tom Cruise and Kevin Costner to superstardom 20 years ago. Cruise squared off against Paul Newman in The Color of Money and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, while Costner was tangling with Gene Hackman in No Way Out and Sean Connery in The Untouchables. Forget romantic chemistry, it's the mano-a-mano, passing-of-the-torch fireworks that really launches an actor into the stratosphere in the age of the blockbuster."

"Mr Hopkins and Mr Gosling navigate the film's sleekly burnished surfaces and darkly lighted interiors, its procedural twists and courtroom turns without breaking stride or into a sweat," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Fracture isn't a movie about ideas; it's about slick surfaces and suggestive adjectives like rich and poor, good and evil, weak and strong."

Tim Robey in the Telegraph: "There's a touch of Schadenfreude in Hopkins's devious little game, and in the film's: it has picked a hero who needs taking down a notch or two. But it's Gosling who rises, wittily and nimbly, to the challenge."

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "The picture is clever, somber, quiet: There's just no reason it has to be as deadly boring as it is."

"Fracture isn't horrible, but it tries way too hard to be clever, and as Spinal Tap once said, there's a thin line between clever and stupid," writes Zack Smith in the Independent Weekly.

On the other hand again, Ryan Stewart at Cinematical: "A refreshingly simple, Grisham-style legal thriller, Fracture lays out its agenda early on and never feels the need to delve into absurdities or tack on sixteen endings in order to complete its business."

Elaine Lipworth has a longish talk with Hopkins in the Independent.

Update, 4/21: For the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz meets Hopkins and Gosling in a coffee shop in Santa Monica.

Interview. Francis Veber.

"As flamboyant and bubbly as vintage Krug, The Valet is typical [Francis] Veber: often populated with despicable characters and washed in world-weary cynicism, but ultimately exuding the optimistic, innocent energy of first love," writes Michelle Devereaux, introducing her interview with the director. "In Veber's world, the 'little' guy is never nearly as little as everyone thinks."

Updated through 4/25.

"Francis Veber has been an industrious source of chipper, very lucrative French screen farces for well over 30 years, working first as a screenwriter, then as a director, amassing credits on such popular titles as La Cage aux Folles and The Dinner Game, as well as a smattering of American remakes," notes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "The Valet, his latest product, is yet another inconsequential roundelay of playacting and ostensibly comic misunderstandings - there's no cross-dressing or hiding in wardrobes, but it's essentially that kind of movie. Odds that some critic will call it 'as light and flaky as a fresh croissant' are about 2:1."

"If you love to hate the superrich, The Valet, a delectable comedy in which the great French actor Daniel Auteuil portrays a piggy billionaire industrialist facing his comeuppance, is a sinfully delicious bonbon," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Because its structure and the targets of its satire - vanity, greed and lust - hark back to Molière, The Valet offers a reassuring vision of a fixed social order, bourgeois to the core, in which virtue is rewarded and hubris exposed. For all its cynicism about sex, money and power, it doesn't rock any boats."

"While some of the sight gags on view in The Valet have roots that go back to the great silent clowns, Veber's innate understanding of what makes people laugh, his gift for impeccable timing and for getting his cast to work together like interlocking parts of a fine machine, are difficult to resist," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"After the vaporous whimsy of Avenue Montaigne and now the drippy antics of The Valet, Paris really could use more Gaspar Noé leather infernos," suggests Fernando F Croce at Slant.

Jennifer Merin talks with Veber for the New York Press.

Earlier: "Rendez-Vous. 12."

Updates, 4/21: "Considering that the plot is the thing," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical, "it's somewhat disheartening to find that the film doesn't contain a single moment that would qualify as a bona fide surprise."

"I put down Robert Zemeckis's Used Cars as the funniest movie I had ever seen in my responses to the personal movie quiz I posted earlier this week, but if I had thought about I might have picked Veber's The Dinner Game (1998), which come to think of it may be the funniest movie I have ever seen in a theater, to judge by the constant laughter that greeted the film when I saw it," recalls Robert Cashill. "The Valet is a milder film, still funny, but rarely explosively so. It's comforting to know that somewhere in a world that seems colder and crueler by the week someone is still writing doctor jokes, and still wringing chuckles from them."

Update, 4/23: "Veber films in general give a strong, time-puncturing hint of what it was like to sit in a Paris theatre in 1907 and watch a Feydeau farce," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "To be honest, The Valet does not show Veber at his best. His palate for misunderstandings of every vintage is as refined as ever; what he has lost is his taste for human failing."

Update, 4/25: Peter Sobczynski talks with Veber for Hollywood Bitchslap.

Fests and events, 4/20.

"More than any other American film festival it operates from the premise that the movies wouldn't be the movies without some Barnum & Bailey razzle-dazzle and Hollywood tinsel." In the New York Times, Stephen Holden previews the Tribeca Film Festival, opening Wednesday and dominating New York through May 6.

ST VanAirsdale talks with author, NYU prof and Telegraph film critic Sukhdev Sandhu about the South Asian Underground Film Festival, which he's organized and which runs through Sunday - and with Anna Paquin, who stars in Blue State, set to premiere at Tribeca.

Also at the Reeler: Christopher Campbell listens to Slavoj Zizek introduce Duck Soup.

Film-Makers' Cooperative Third Annual Benefit Concert: Monday evening in New York.

Hamburg's Thalia Theater sees the world premiere of a stage adaptation of From the Life of the Marionettes, "my only German film," as Ingmar Bergman calls it.

The Chicago Palestine Film Festival opens today and runs through Thursday; the Chicago Reader previews the highlights. Also, reviews from the ongoing Chicago Latino Film Festival (through Wednesday), Earth Day (Sunday) in Chicago and Version 07 (through May 6).

"It has to be acknowledged that the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival is not terribly exciting," writes Annie Wagner at the Stranger. "But recently Three Dollar Bill Cinema, which produces SLGFF, has been programming brief, carefully considered series at Northwest Film Forum in which every film is worth seeing."

Bryan Hendrickson rounds up more Seattle-area goings on for the Siffblog.

Great to Be Nominated honors "the film from each awards year that received the most nominations without winning best picture," notes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. On Monday, the Academy's screening of Star Wars features "a post-movie discussion with [George] Lucas as well as editor Richard Chew, visual effects wizards John Dykstra, Richard Edlund and Robert Blalack and art director Leslie Dilley."

The Miami Beach Film Society's Francis Ford Coppola series in May will feature screenings of his forthcoming Youth Without Youth and a new documentary, CODA: Thirty Years Later, which is described as more than just a making-of-YWY. That'll screen on May 23, followed by a Q&A with Coppola. Rene Rodriguez had more at the Miami Herald's Reeling.

The Philadelphia Film Festival wrapped on Wednesday and Scott Weinberg's been reviewing up a storm at Cinematical: Unholy Women, Taxidermia, The Kovak Box, Dead Daughters, Cages, American Fork, Wicked Flowers, Exiled, The Living and the Dead and End of the Line.

Kerem Bayraktaroglu wraps the Istanbul International Film Festival at indieWIRE. The top award went to the Norwegian festival darling, Reprise.

Up-n-coming, 4/20.

"Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes has announced he plans to make the first big-screen version of the George Eliot novel Middlemarch." The BBC reports.

Variety: "Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman will star in Doubt, the screen adaptation of the John Patrick Shanley play for Miramax Films that begins production in New York on Dec 1."

"Fresh from their roles in Ocean's 13, Brad Pitt and George Clooney are preparing another co-starring venture in the new film from the Coen brothers," reports the Guardian. Burn After Reading is "a black comedy that is based on the brothers' first original screenplay since 2001's The Man Who Wasn't There."

"For the sake of a friend in need, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is stepping back in the cast of John Woo's The Battle of Red Cliff after Chow Yun-fat's sudden departure." Wolf's got the news at Twitch.

Meantime, once again, Alison Willmore does lots and lots of up-n-coming heavy lifting at the IFC News blog.

More news of productions in the works from european-films.net, where Boyd van Hoeij has more details on each of these:

• Sangue pazzo (Crazy Blood). Marco Tullio Giordana (Best of Youth) directs Monica Bellucci and Luca Zingaretti.

• Previously mentioned, but still: Cristóvão Colombo: O Enigma (Christopher Columbus: The Enigma). Manoel de Oliveira reclaims the explorer for the Portuguese.

• Barcelona (un mapa). Ventura Pons directs Rosa María Sardà, Núria Espert, Josep Maria Pou, Jordi Bosch, María Botto and Pablo Derqui.

• Notre univers impitoyable (Our Merciless Universe). Léa Fazer directs Alice Taglioni, currently on view in, as they say, selected cities, in The Valet, Jocelyn Quivrin and Thierry Lhermite.

• Parlami d'amore (Talk to Me About Love). Silvio Muccino (younger brother of Gabriele) directs himself, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Carolina Crescentini.

• No me pidas que te bese, porque te besaré (Don't Ask Me to Kiss You, Because I Will). Albert Espinosa directs himself, Eloy Azorín, Teresa Hurtado, Alberto Amarilla, Alex González and Pablo Rivero in an adaptation of one of his own plays.

Also at european-films.net, Boyd talks with Morten Hartz Kaplers, whose mockumentary AFR "sees him play a rent boy and squatter who has a stormy relationship with the current Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is seen in archive footage and whose initials make up the title, JFK style."

"Having made the monstrous mess of a movie that was Boxing Helena, one would think that writer-director's Jennifer Lynch's career was over before it had even begun, but this week, disturbing news reaches Time Out towers," reports Chris Tilly. "After nearly 15 years in the cinematic wilderness, Lynch will be allowed back behind a camera to shoot a supernatural thriller entitled Surveillance.... [H]er father David will produce, and the cast includes Pell James, Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman (who must be a glutton for punishment having also appeared in Boxing)." Is he thinking of Bill Paxton?

Full Frame Dispatch. 3.

A postscript from the cinetrix.

For the second year in a row, inclement weather drove the Full Frame Awards Barbecue off the plaza and into the Durham Armory. No matter: pulled pork and the vinegary tang of east North Carolina-style sauce taste good anywhere. The buzz of anticipation was underscored by a string band and anxious conversations about how - and whether - attendees would be able to fly out of Raleigh-Durham in the midst of an April Nor'easter.

First-time director Pernille Rose Gronkjaer had no worries on the weather front. She'd stayed home in Demark, leaving producer Sigrid Helene Dyekaer the happy task of accepting The Charles E Guggenheim (yes, those Guggenheims) Emerging Artist Award for The Monastery on Gronkjaer's behalf. A beaming Sigrid held up her cell phone so that Pernille could hear the audience's wild applause. After she hung up, Gronkjaer must have headed right out to find some celebratory champagne, because she didn't answer when Dyekaer took the stage a second time to accept the Grand Jury Award from Ric Burns, John Sinno and Kirby Dick.

The other big winner was Annie Sundberg, whose already acclaimed Darfur doc, The Devil Came on Horseback, shared Walter Mosely's Seeds of War prize with another African documentary, Uganda Rising, and scored the Full Frame/Working Films Award, which grants filmmakers cash and in-kind promotional support. Both films were part of this year's sidebar, Africa Stories. As Full Frame director Nancy Buirski noted in the program: "Festival sidebars are typically planned years in advance, researched and curated with expertise and care. I wish we could claim credit for such foresight. In the case of the film series we are calling Africa Stories, we can only claim wisdom for recognizing a dynamic trend in filmmaking that revealed an urgent need to deliver stories about the continent."

On a personal note, the cinetrix had her worst awards ceremony showing yet, managing to see exactly none of this year's winners. (What can I say? It's a gift.) Yet I still saw a slate of astonishing films - truly not a disappointment in the bunch - which speaks to Full Frame's impressive depth of programming. Granted, some were once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, like La Vie Commence Demain and Superstar (on 16mm!). But you too can catch plenty of standouts in the coming months. To name only a handful: Jessica Yu's Protagonist and Asger Leth's Ghosts of Cite Soleil play next at the Atlanta Film Festival. Helvetica is slated for Hot Docs. And Alex Gibney's riveting Taxi Driver to the Dark Side, which officially debuts at Tribeca, is not to be missed.

Laurens Straub, 1944 - 2007.

In 1970, Dutch writer, producer and occasional director Laurens Straub was, along with Fassbinder, Wenders, Volker Vogeler, Hark Bohm and others, one of the founders of the Filmverlag der Autoren, a milestone in the early history of the New German Cinema. It was, in essence, a DIY distribution cooperative. In the 80s, he and Horst Schier produced, among other films, Frank Ripploh's Taxi zum Klo, Richard Blank's Friedliche Tage, Radu Gabrea's Ein Mann wie EVA and Herbert Achternbusch's Rita Ritter.

The German Press Agency reports that Straub has died at age 62. For last year's celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Hof Film Festival, Straub recalled some of his best years at one of Germany's most vital annual gatherings and it's there that you can get a sense, in English, of what he held dear: "Unity of place and film utopia. Dreamlike. Congenial. Brotherliness.... The most important thing is that our films exist."

Jean-Pierre Cassel, 1932 - 2007.

French actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, who shot to fame as the star of film comedies by director Philippe de Broca in the 1960s, has died after a long illness, a statement from his entourage said Friday.... During his career in which he starred in more than 110 films, Cassel worked with some of the biggest names in film including Claude Chabrol, Robert Altman, Luis Buñuel and Richard Attenborough.

[...]

His son, actor Vincent Cassel is married to the Italian actress Monica Bellucci.... Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres praised Cassel as "a perfect example of an accomplished artist whose aura was as refined as it was popular."

The AFP.

See also: Wikipedia (English and French).

Black Book. Again.

"As someone who undervalued the political smarts of Basic Instinct and Showgirls when they first appeared, I'm probably not the best one to fault others for not taking [Paul] Verhoeven seriously, but I still have to say that, ethically speaking, Black Book seems far less vulgar than a feel-good Holocaust movie like Schindler's List," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. "In fact, part of what I admire about Black Book is how it offers a kind of bracing rebuke to Schindler's List, providing a much darker vision that refuses to let its audience off the hook so easily, though ostensibly it's more fictional."

"Within 30 seconds of meeting Verhoeven, it's immediately apparent that the potent and sometimes uncontrolled life force that pulses through his films comes directly from him," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. Also: "In some ways, Black Book is a dangerous movie, but it's the right kind of dangerous."

The LA Weekly's Ella Taylor might disagree: "[W]e live in dodgy critical times when aesthetic sophistication trumps moral and political discrimination. And when pop aestheticism reaches all the way from effusing over the ritualized violence and reverse feminism of a Sin City or a Grindhouse to heaping laurels on a movie that pits sensitive Nazis against treacherous resisters, it may be time to get uncool and start pointing the finger."

Noir City. Video Q&A.

Noir City: Los Angeles vs New York: The 8th Annual Festival of Film Noir barrels on at the Egyptian and Aero theaters in Los Angeles through May 2. Now at the main site, Cabinetic presents an onstage Q&A with Marsha Hunt (Raw Deal, Kid Glove Killer) conducted by Eddie Muller during the San Francisco edition of Noir City in January.

For the Los Angeles Times, Susan King talks with Muller, who tells her "that one of the differences between New York and LA noir is that in the former, 'the characters want to escape the big city, the teeming metropolis. In LA, you get to the Promised Land and you realize there's no escape. I find the most effective LA noirs are always set in places where there is an horizon, which you don't see in New York noir.'"

Fests and events, 4/19.

For the Independent, Charlotte Cripps previews the East End Film Festival, which opens tonight with Julian Cole's With Gilbert and George.

Looks like quite an event: The Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing. The schedule, with those speakers and journalists, ought to be pretty productive. Tomorrow through Tuesday.

Dispatches from the Sarasota Film Festival: David Lowery and Michael Tully.

Scott Foundas reviews the highlights of the final days of this year's City of Lights, City of Angels festival. Through Sunday. Also in the LA Weekly, Holly Willis: "Before his death in 2005, avant-garde filmmaker Mark Lapore spent many years traveling the world documenting people and places with a rare intensity and unequivocal gaze." The Intimate Distance: A Tribute to Mark Lapore takes place Monday night at REDCAT.

And Susan King points out some of the best of what else going on in and around LA for the Los Angeles Times.

"The 2007 Boston Cyberarts Festival takes place April 20 - May 6 at museums, galleries, theatres, universities, and public spaces in and around the Boston area."

Britspotting, a festival of British and Irish films, opens tonight in Berlin and runs through Wednesday before moving on to Munich (May 10 through 15) and Stuttgart (May 17 through 23).

Visions du Réel, tomorrow through April 26 in Nyon.

Dead Channels' final Sleazy Sunday offers "an eccentric, tasteless, and delightful triple bill of movies that passed well under the mainstream radar when first released," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360.

Michael Hawley lays out his "SFIFF50 Gameplan" at the Evening Class. April 26 through May 10.

The Subjective Camera is a "series of retrospective film screenings of six film artists whose work examines subjectivity with an analysis of film language. Emerging within the context of the London Filmmakers' Co-op during the 80s and 90s, these artists each developed an independent practice that at once built on and countered the principles of the Structuralist film movement of the 70s." Wednesdays in London, beginning next week.

The San Francisco International Arts Festival: May 16 through 27.

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij has the first four titles in competition and more from the first round of announcements from the Karlovy Vary Film Festival (June 29 through July 7).

"Winning a festival's audience award is getting to be old hat for Guido Thys's Tanghi Argentini, which followed up its amazing success at this year's Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival with a similar triumph at the 16th Aspen Shortsfest," writes Kim Adelman at indieWIRE.

Online viewing tip. Scott Westphal-Solary posts a teaser for The Reeler's Tribeca coverage.

Wrapping Full Frame.

"By almost all accounts, Full Frame's 10th anniversary was a smashing success," writes Neil Morris. "Yet, the record turnout does not jibe with the feeling of many perennial attendees that there was a perceptible drop in the energy level at this year's festival." Also in the Independent Weekly, Fiona Morgan: "The selection of frameset films included everything from tedious, personal video journals to virally popular humor to serious international reporting."

"Despite the Full Frame's growing number of world premieres, market action remains minimal here, which helps explain the unusual sense of calm at this festival, one where academics and activists outnumber autograph-seekers 10 to one, and where legendary documentarians can be seen lining up alongside ordinary folks for both film and food," writes Rob Nelson in the Voice, where he describes a few choice offerings, including one hand-picked by DA Pennebaker, "La vie commence demain, an obscure French intellectual primer from 1950 in which the likes of Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre appear eminently approachable to our host, a film noirish tough guy who scratches his head and shows up on the Parisian doorsteps of various implausibly gracious geniuses." Also: What Enron director Alex Gibney's been up to.

Hammer.

"So, the New York Times has identified the guilty party, and it's Park Chanwook." Dave Kehr's terse comment: "Ridiculous, as well as faintly racist."

"And if you want to argue that this violent film provoked this disturbed young man to commit this atrocity, you should be prepared to explain why all those who saw Oldboy, and The Matrix, and Saw, didn't do the same," adds Time's Richard Corliss.

"I really didn't like Oldboy," writes Robert Cashill, "but can better see what Park was driving at regarding love with the other two films [in the 'revenge trilogy']. Alas, the shooter does not seem to seen the forest for Park's trees." And: "In the spirit of inquiry, and to shed a little light on the subject for anyone unfamiliar with the films, I've decided to post a discarded draft of an article I wrote for last summer's Cineaste." The first question in the interview: "Some audiences find it difficult to look past the violence of your films. Is your main intent to shock and provoke?"

Updated through 4/23.

On a related note, Chuck Olsen: "Cho was not a vlogger."

Update: Mike Nizza, the NYT blogger who got all this going in the first place, steps back: "With Mr Cho expressing so many other reasons for his shooting spree, it is hardly time to start blaming movies."

Updates, 4/20: Well, for Gerald Kaufman, opining in the Telegraph, there's no question - Cho was "directly inspired by a recent South Korean splatter movie, Oldboy," and the MP feels it's high time to revoke "the apparent God-given right of every film-maker to depict what was described in the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange as 'lashings of the old ultra-violence.' In fact, the so-called ultra-violence in that movie, though deeply unsettling, was as nothing compared to the sanguinary content of Oldboy or of the John Woo murder movie Face/Off, which Cho seems also to have seen and, Heaven help us, been inspired by."

"A Virginia Tech professor, Paul Harrill, alerted us of the similarity between images," wrote the NYT's Mike Nizza in the blog post that set off the storm. The Paul Harrill who writes Self-Reliant Filmmaking came to mind, but I had no idea he was one and the same. Now he's posted a "Last Word on the Subject": "Let me be clear: My comparison of these two images was not meant to suggest in ANY way that movies, any movie, 'made him do it.' Likewise, my comparison of these two images is IN NO WAY an attempt to make ANY generalizations based on racial, nationalistic, or any other sorts of lines.... My point in all of this, however misguided the effort, was to initiate a conversation about what Jill Godmilow calls 'the pornography of the real' - in this case, news outlets using a mass murderer's fantasies as sick spectacle and - let us never forget - as a source of revenue."

Grady Hendrix at Slate: "In the end, Oldboy bears no more responsibility for the Virginia Tech shootings than American Idol, but it's fortunate that it has come up. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter a few years ago, Oldboy's director Park said, 'My films are the stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves.' And that's one of the smartest things that anyone's said so far about the motives of Cho Seung-Hui."

Update, 4/21: "One of the most jolting moments at this year's Sundance Film Festival came in the closing sequence of a movie called Dark Matter: A disaffected Asian college student abruptly snaps and goes on a bloody rampage, killing professors, classmates and, finally, himself. The audience was plainly shocked, and some critics attacked the finale as a jarring gimmick that, narratively, came out of nowhere." Jeff Goldsmith reports in the Los Angeles Times: "At the close of Sundance, film distributors seemed unsure what to do with such a bleak film, and it was uncertain whether it would be released theatrically or go straight to DVD. Now the film is getting interest again as a theatrical release."

Update, 4/23: "We have been here before," writes AO Scott in the NYT. "The extreme, inexplicable actions of a tiny number of profoundly alienated, mentally disturbed young men have a way of turning attention toward the cultural interests they share with countless others who would never dream - or who would only dream - of committing acts of homicidal violence." He then goes on to address the outlandishly absurd piece Stephen Hunter dribbled onto the pages of the Washington Post last week.

RWF/TLS.

Leo A Lensing seems to hang with a different crowd here in Germany than I do: "Even if Fassbinder's homeland has been slow to recognize his high standing in film history, the rest of the world has not," he writes in the Times Literary Supplement. If Lensing means - and I don't think he does - that it's only in Germany that RWF was, during his lifetime, as reviled by conservatives as he as revered by the left, he might have a point. Regardless, his review of three newish books is an important reminder to cinephiles of the work that engaged RWF's feverish energies before he devoted them to his films.

The books:

• Referring to the essay Fassbinder wrote on Alfred Döblin for Die Zeit in 1980, the piece Justin Vicari explored so rewardingly for the Film Journal a year ago, Lensing reminds us that RWF was a voracious reader. "Im Land des Apfelbaums (In the Land of the Apple Tree), an elegantly edited collection of unpublished texts from the rich archival trove of Fassbinder's literary juvenilia, demonstrates that the young reader also became a precocious writer."

• "The new edition of Fassbinder's dramatic works has been given the more provisional title Theaterstücke (Theatre Plays), presumably in anticipation of further unpublished plays and fragments surfacing from the archives."

• "Even if one divides Fassbinder's writing for the theatre neatly into obvious categories - the unpublished early problem plays, the radical experiments at the limits of linguistic performability, the aggressive adaptations of classical and traditional plays, and the late operatic melodramas - it is not easy to make sense of the breakneck evolution of his theatrical and dramaturgical ideas or of his place in the literature of West Germany.... Thanks to David Barnett's new study, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre, the first book devoted exclusively to the full range of what he calls Fassbinder's 'theatrical activities,' we now have the framework for a more dispassionate investigation into just how much more complex and interesting this part of his career actually was."

Austin Chronicle. Cine Las Americas.

"With 10 years under its belt, the Cine las Americas International Film Festival continues to perfect the balance between film festival and cross-cultural education. Universal, human themes abound textured by the unique and wildly varying cultures under the umbrella of 'the Americas.'"

The Austin Chronicle presents an extensive preview of the fest that opens today and runs through April 26.

Cannes. Lineup.

First, click and take a look at that poster. If that doesn't put a smile on your face...

Anyway, the lineup. The buzz was in tune: Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights will indeed open the Cannes Film Festival (May 16 through 27).

Also lined up:

• Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite.

• Catherine Breillat's Une Vieille Maitresse.

Updated through 4/23.

• Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men.

• Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales.

• David Fincher's Zodiac.

• James Gray's We Own the Night.

• Christophe Honore's Les Chansons d'amour.

• Naomi Kawase's Mogari No Mori.

• Kim Ki-duk's Breath.

• Emir Kusturica's Promise Me This.

• Lee Chang-Dong's Milyang (Secret Sunshine).

• Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days.

• Raphael Nadjari's Tehilim.

• Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

• Carlos Reygadas's Luz silenciosa (Silent Light).

• Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park.

• Julian Schnabel's Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

• Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export.

• Aleksandr Sokurov's Alexandra.

• Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

• Béla Tarr's The Man from London.

• Andrey Zvyagintsev's Izgnanie (The Banishment).

And Denys Arcand's L'Âge des ténèbres will wrap the festivities.

Screening out of competition: Michael Moore's Sicko, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen and Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart.

The feature films jury: Stephen Frears (prez), Maggie Cheung, Toni Collette, Maria de Medeiros, Sarah Polley, Marco Bellocchio, Orhan Pamuk, Michel Piccoli and Abderrahmane Sissako.

CineÌ?fondation and short films jury: Jia Zhang-ke, Niki Karimi, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, JMG Le Clezio and Dominik Moll.

Un Certain Regard:

• Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi's Le Rêve de la nuit d'avant (Bad Habits).

• Carmen Castillo's Calle Santa Fe (Santa Fe Street).

• Chung Lee Isaac's Munyurangabo (Liberation Day).

• Lola Doillon's Et toi t'es sur qui?.

• CeÌ?sar Charlone and Enrique Fernandez's El Baño del Papa.

• Eran Kolirin's Bikur Hatizmoret.

• Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely.

• Kadri Kousaar's Magnus.

• Li Yang's Mang Shan (Blind Mountain).

• Daniele Luchetti's Mio Fratello é Figlio Unico (My Brother Is An Only Child).

• Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin' (Nesfarsit) - California Dreamin' (Endless).

• Jaime Rosales's La Soledad (Fragments of Loneliness).

• Barbet Schroeder's L'Avocat de la Terreur.

• CeÌ?line Sciamma's Les Pieuvres.

• Robert Thalheim's Am Ende kommmen Touristen (And Along Come Tourists).

• Ekachai Uekrongtham's Kuaile Gongchang (Pleasure Factory).

More titles, more events, more sections: indieWIRE.

Comments and notations so far: Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

Updates, 4/20: The Guardian's Xan Brooks: "British cinema was effectively shut out of the Cannes film festival with the announcement that no domestic titles are to feature in this year's competition."

Simon Crerar's headline in the London Times: "Americans dominate Cannes line-up."

Deutsche Welle (in English) on Fatih Akin's entry: "His film tells the story of six people whose lives take unexpected turns. As he did in Head-On, Akin explores the often emotionally laden points where Turkish and German culture intersect."

"[W]ith due respect to a very good film festival, it seems anxious to become more irrelevant to the American marketplace every year." David Poland explains.

Jeffrey Wells hears why Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream won't be at Cannes - and a bit more about the film, too.

Geoffrey Macnab picks out the films to look forward to... "But why - Winterbottom aside - the absence of Brits? Given that Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or last year, this perhaps shouldn't be a cause for concern. Then again, it is always at least a slight embarrassment for the UK film industry when there are no local movies to cheer on."

Updates, 4/21: Nathaniel R comments on every film lined up for the Competition.

Glenn Kenny's got notes on some of those films - and on the films he thought might make it but didn't.

Update, 4/23: Fabien Lemercier has a quick overview of other goings on during the festival at Cineuropa.

Hot Docs. Preview.

Doc producer, writer and director Shannon Gee is off to Canada.

I personally may be flying from Seattle, Washington to Toronto, Ontario, but at this year's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, which runs from April 19 through 29, people will go to the moon.

The opening night film is David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon, the story of the Apollo astronauts. As the largest documentary festival in North America, Hot Docs will also take audiences to World War II, (Nanking, Wings of Defeat), Darfur (The Devil Came on Horseback), rock and roll camp (Girls Rock!), Andy Warhol's Factory (A Walk Into the Sea), a Chinese circus (Circus School), the voting booth (a special program lineup called Doc the Vote!) and the very specifically titled To Costco and Ikea Without A Car (it's a five-minute short, but it's as intriguing as a lunar landing as far as I'm concerned.)

With a 129 documentaries to choose from, there's definitely something for everyone. The opening weekend includes the world premiere of Let's All Hate Toronto, a look at the hows and whys Canadians love to hate their most metropolitan city; Zoo, the sex-with-a-horse doc that premiered at Sundance 2007 and surprised many with its poetic and non-exploitative take on the subject; Yoga, Inc., an examination of the westernization of the ancient practice; Helvetica, a documentary about the world's most used font and its role in history; King Corn, the story of two college buddies who decide to try their hand at growing America's most productive and government-subsidized grain; and Miss Universe 1929, a profile of the only crowned Miss Universe from Austria, as told by her cousin Marci.

The festival will also showcase a retrospective of work by Canadian documentary filmmaker Kevin McMahon (The Falls, In the Reign of Twilight, Intelligence, McLuhan's Wake), and recognize Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (Crazy, Metal and Melancholy, Private) with an Outstanding Achievement Award.

Shorts, 4/18.

"In his debut feature Rules of Dating, director Han Jae-rim transformed a relationship drama into something unexpectedly real and frank, while also exploring issues of power, gender and sexual harassment," writes Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org. "There was an underlying tension in that film - sexual, moral, aesthetic - that propelled it forward. In the gangster film The Show Must Go On, it's not so much tension as a sense of irony." Also, Cruel Winter Blues: "Director/screenwriter Lee Jeong-beom's debut feature, like the now-classic Korean melodrama Failan, drags us deep into the psyche of an emotionally shattered gangster in the hopes of uncovering a hint - but perhaps only a hint - of human warmth."

Jeannette Catsoulis: "Wang Bing's epic, three-part documentary, Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks, is an astonishingly intimate record of China's painful transition from state-run industry to a free market."

Also in the New York Times:

• Julia Moskin has a piece in the Dining & Wine section on the pies in Adrienne Shelly's Waitress. Jenna, played by Keri Russell, "invents an I Hate My Husband Pie (bitter chocolate drowned in caramel), then Baby Screaming Its Head Off in the Middle of the Night and Ruining My Life Pie (cheesecake, brandied pecans, nutmeg), and finally Earl Murders Me Because I'm Having an Affair Pie (juicy crushed berries in a dark chocolate crust)." As you watch, keep this in mind: "All the pies on the set were edible."

• Alan Riding talks with Julie Christie about growing older, shunning celebrity and why she agreed to play Fiona in Sarah Polley's debut feature, Away From Her.

• Matt Zoller Seitz has a brief review of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, "a dazzling, rambling, often incoherent satire on consumerism, militarism and the exploitation of third world cultures by the West."

"This is not a biography at all. It is a fiction," Milos Forman tells Geoffrey Macnab for a piece in the Independent on Goya's Ghosts.

Christopher Orr in the New Republic: "Curse of the Golden Flower (now out on DVD), does not kowtow to tyranny as explicitly as Hero, but the similarities are difficult to miss: another murderous emperor, another rebellious hero, another devious conspiracy - and another concluding moral that is, at best, morally dubious."

"Anyone's who's seen a Michael Haneke film will know where Benny's Video is headed from its opening VHS images of a pig's slaughter," writes Nick Schager. He's none too happy with The Seventh Continent, either.

"Why has everyone written about Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen's film Zelig, but no-one has written about Eudora Fletcher?" asks Irene Dobson at Flickhead. "The film is a tribute to her." (Side to Ray: Is that the actual poster? I seem to remember that it is. Regardless, just brilliant.)

Over at the Siffblog, E Steven Fried seems to have had a horrible time - but an intriguingly horrible time - watching the 1969 doc A Married Couple (more).

Peter Nellhaus on Who's Camus Anyway?: "Unlike the name-dropping in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, [Mitsuo] Yanagimachi's dialogue is smarter in its references, more interesting to listen to, and organic to the narrative." It "begins as a cheerful celebration of films and filmmaking, but concludes as an inquiry into how art and reality collide, affecting our selves and each other."

Everyone's pointing to Josh Horowitz's interview for MTV with writer and director Frank Darabont, who tells him, "I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about [the screenplay for Indy 4], working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I and he felt was terrific. He wanted to direct it as his next movie, and then suddenly the whole thing goes down in flames because George Lucas doesn't like the script... I said, 'You have a fantastic script. I think you're insane, George.' You can say things like that to George, and he doesn't even blink. He's one of the most stubborn men I know."

Hillary Frey explains the difference between It Girls, Is Girls - and the Wuz Girls on the cover of the New York Observer this week: Claire Danes, Chloë Sevigny and Parker Posey. "A Wuz Girl has talent - talent enough to keep herself in front, talked about. She will never be a mega-star, but she will always be an original. No media concoction, her self-possession and character carry her through." Also: Andrew Sarris on Johnnie To's Election and Triad Election.

A list from the AV Club: "13 Films With Wildly Mismatched Romantic Pairings."

Because his blog is about literature, Ed Champion has had more of an "in" when it comes to speaking about the unspeakable - the shootings at Virginia Tech. Of course, movies have come to mind while watching and reading news in the past couple of days, but at the moment, it is still to early for that sort of doodli