John Pierson: Dear Mike...

"With the hugely entertaining and highly effective Sicko opening nationwide today, you probably think that dredging up and examining bits and pieces of your storied past is nothing but a petty, narrow-minded distraction," writes John Pierson in an open letter to Michael Moore at indieWIRE. "Since your op/ed piece (your post-documentary coinage) on the healthcare industry is a fantastic polemic and your best filmmaking by far, I almost agree with you. Almost. But still I find myself taking a stand for the only smart and even-handed documentary that's been made about you, Manufacturing Dissent."

Because this is John Pierson, who was so instrumental in the ground-breaking success of Roger & Me and wrote about the experience in Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes, you really do need to read the full letter - and Doug Block's comment as well.

Meanwhile, the updates keep coming in the Sicko entry.

Cinema Scope. 31.

31 is the issue of Cinema Scope that wishes a happy 60th to Cannes.. Sort of. "By all accounts, as befitting a place where superlatives are flung about like cheap lingerie in a low-rent strip joint, this was the hottest, stickiest, busiest, and most film-filled Cannes in recent memory.... Cannes at 60 was also widely proclaimed by the major media outlets as the best Cannes in ages." Naturally, editor Mark Peranson does not surprise: "Of course it's left up to me and my (w)rap to assert that this is a bunch of hogwash - but I really mean it."

Because he really, really does, this year's round of target practice is all the more engaging, whether or not you cheer every shot fired (or suspect you will or won't if, like me, you won't have yet seen most or even any of the films he salutes or trashes). There is praise, though, for Gus Van Sant's "exquisite" Paranoid Park and for Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine, "the only other Competition film I saw at Cannes that I'd label great."

"The motto of this year's Competition might as well have been 'running on empty' given the abundance of dubious exercises in style from patented postmodern pastiche (how could anybody take the Coens' last-quarter bid for profundity seriously?) to straight-faced self-parody (Wong, Kim, etc)," begins Christoph Huber. "So all the more ironic that it was Ulrich Seidl's standout Import Export - whose sudden, shocking interest in the real world, mid-festival, dwarved the puny distractions that preceded - opened with this appropriate image: a man in a snowy field in front of some dull concrete slab of architecture trying to start his motorcycle by foot pedal. Again and again."

Kent Jones's piece is labeled as a consideration of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon and Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, and it is, but the first half or so focuses on the intriguing differences between French and American opinions of David Fincher's Zodiac and James Gray's We Own the Night. But: "I'm not going to chide anyone in France for loving a James Gray film." Because: "The cultural one-upsmanship card is played often, and mercilessly, in movie culture." Yes. It is. And of course, national boundaries offer only one of many patterns for the delineations of separate cultures. At any rate, further along this rewarding line of thought, the "beautifully bouyant" Balloon and Blueberry, "hardly the disaster it was cracked up to be," are considered in the light of these ideas.

Dennis Lim talks with Abel Ferrara about Go Go Tales, "his first flat-out comedy," but "also an allegory: a portrait of the artist as a hustler, a gambler, a performer, a dreamer, an addict, a throwback, a holdout, and, of course, a purveyor of good old-fashioned T&A, navigating the screw-or-be-screwed questions common to all exploitative professions, indeed to modern capitalist systems. You could say this one comes from the heart."

Robert Koehler interviews Wang Bing, whose Fengming: A Chinese Memoir he reviewed for Variety: "With virtually a single-camera set-up and absolute attention paid to a woman who survived the horrors of Mao's China, Wang Bing continues his run as one of the world's supreme doc filmmakers." Here, he argues that, by the time the festival wrapped, "there could be no denying that Wang had not only made one of the few Cannes films that mattered, but that this, combined with his stunning short, Brutality Factory (as part of the Gulbenkian Foundation-supported The State of the World), made Wang the best-of-show director at Cannes."

Tom Charity revisits the career of that "compelling and problematic icon," John Wayne.

Andrew Tracy argues the case for the "still underappreciated and misrepresented Cornel Wilde, whose eight-film career as producer and director transformed him from plodding if pleasant leading man to purveyor of blood and gore par excellence."

Once again, Jonathan Rosenbaum offers an invaluable DVD shopping guide, but this time focuses on prices.

Then, Jessica Winter: "Knocked Up is hard to dislike: it's a reliable laugh factory, it really loves babies, etc. But like so many films that gestate in Hollywood, it breathes the uncirculated air of the gated community. Maybe it wouldn't evaporate on contact - maybe it would have been funnier still - if it weren't so bizarrely insulated from some of the gnarled dilemmas that Ben and Allison's flesh-and-blood counterparts face every day."

Sight & Sound. July 07.

Tuesday will be Ken Russell's 80th birthday. Linda Ruth Williams talks with him about his life-long passion for photography, his recent foray into online distribution and, of course, his films: "[L]ong after his audiences have forgotten the baroque twists of his picaresque tales, it is individual images that linger in the memory: Oliver Reed trailing through the blue-frozen hell of the Alps in Women in Love; Glenda Jackson tossing her head back against a sunburst in the same film; Jackson (again) in a frustrated sexual frenzy on the train in The Music Lovers; abstract Busby Berkeley-esque body patterns whirling through The Boy Friend; Leslie Caron's cloak swept across the corpse in Valentino; Roger Daltrey's glam-angelic spaceship in Lisztomania; Gabriel Byrne decorated with leeches in 1986's Gothic, the story of the night Mary Shelley gave birth to Frankenstein; the widow walking from Loudon as The Devils' end credits roll."

Also in the July issue Sight & Sound, Mark Cousins tells the story behind the batch of films that have been featured in festival lineups for over a year now, the New Crowned Hope works, and notes along the way:

France, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany have put all money into the co-production pot, but the US seems not to have contributed a cent - not even to Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon, which celebrates the fall of Saddam. Given the billions of dollars ploughed into the war in Iraq, the American championing of the Kurds and the winning optimism of parts of Ghobadi's beautiful film, it seems absurd that the US couldn't see fit to back such a cultural initiative. The fact that Europe is less isolationist and still racked by post-colonial guilt probably explains the continent's funding for films by Ghobadi, Tsai Ming-Liang (Taiwan-Malaysia), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Paz Encina (Paraguay), Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Chad), Garin Nugroho (Indonesia) and Teboho Mahlatsi (South Africa).

Britain's Simon Field (formerly both a director of the Rotterdam Film Festival and director of cinema at the ICA) and Keith Griffiths (a director and producer for Chris Petit, the Quay brothers and Jan Svankmajer) provide curatorial star-power, but it seems that national institutions such as the UK Film Council, Channel 4 and the BBC also kept their wallets shut. Which would not matter so much if it weren't that the New Crowned Hope movies represent one of the most exciting commissioned cinema projects of our times.

Reviews:

• Tim Lucas on the relatively new release of Don't Look Back: "DA Pennebaker's impressionistic black-and-white documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 British tour, his farewell to purely acoustic performances, somehow retains a sense of immediacy in its fifth decade while other music films of its time have succumbed to nostalgia or irrelevance." Also: "For a film composed of 'things that didn't seem important at the time but now, looking back, do,' [Bob Dylan 65 Revisited] has surprising structural integrity of its own."

• "Lunacy's raw material comes from Poe, one of Svankmajer's long-term influences," writes Michael Brooke. "But de Sade's influence is most keenly felt at a more fundamental level."

• Hannah McGill on Flanders: "While the film's humourlessness is a bar to emotional engagement, there's focus and intelligence here, conspicuously lacking in [Bruno] Dumont's 2003 misfire Twentynine Palms. Sparsely and elegantly shot, with punishing battle scenes, Flanders engages pertinently with the emotional dynamics of war and the concept of sacrifice."

• Sam Wigley on Wild Tigers I Have Known: "Cam Archer's stunning debut film pulses with the libidinous fever of adolescence.... It would be easy to damn Wild Tigers as an uncomfortable alliance of avant-garde tropes and advertising chic if its insistent gorgeousness were all one remembered later, but there is more here..."

Revisiting Ghosts of Cité Soleil.

David D'Arcy has a few comments to add to those gathered in the earlier entry.

In Ghosts of Cité Soleil, Asger Leth has made a strikingly cinematic documentary, but there's another compelling story in the filmmaking process and in the politics of its reception at film festivals. So far, it's also one of the best documentaries of the year.

Shot in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) in 2004, before and after the flight of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as his regime collapsed, the doc surveys the atmosphere of anarchy as it follows young heavily-armed chimeres (ghosts) who were once enforcers for Aristide but now vie for territory in the city's vast slum, Cité Soleil. (It remains a hotbed of support for the dictator who was removed from power, many say, by the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of his enemies, and the hope many placed in Aristide, the former Haitian leader, now living in South Africa, is revered as a substitute Fidel Castro.) <

Underneath the semblance of armed anarchy in Leth's doc, shot on the run by Milos Loncarevic, is more deadly anarchy, an infinite black hole if you're unlucky enough to be born there. Dozens of people are killed every day. The young protagonists who tell Leth their stories, Winson "2Pac" Jean and James "Bily" Petit Frère, are now all dead.

The look of the film draws on the mythologies of gangster music videos, action futurism, and gladiator movies - except it's all real, from the gang-bangers to the guns. Leth's characters, as you might expect, are seeking to mythologize themselves. One of them is a would-be Port-au-Prince rapper, for whom hip-hop records seem to have been English-language instructional tapes. He auditions his raps over his cell phone to a receptive Wyclef Jean in New York. He'd like to go to Miami, yet Haitians are among the most unwelcome of unwelcome immigrants. So much for violence or poverty as a reality check.

It all raises questions. Leth had remarkable access - although he says it's too dangerous to go to Cité Soleil now. How do you make a realistic documentary in (and about) circumstances that threaten your life and the lives of your subjects? How do you bring coherence to anarchy once your cameras record hundreds of hours of footage? That's part of the story. (There's a much more tactile immersion here than in Iraq in Fragments, War/Dance or even Gunner Palace.) Leth is the son of Jørgen Leth, the Danish cameraman, documentarian (his work is featured in the much-admired The Five Obstructions) and teacher of Lars von Trier.

Another element of the story is the odd balance that Leth strikes between the visual seduction of the squalid Cité Soleil (the chimeres could qualify as Benneton models, and I can only imagine what Caravaggio would have done with these guys) and the horror of the place and many places like it, from Manila to Gaza to various neighborhoods of Mexican cities. Despite the throbbing Wyclef Jean soundtrack, the documentary doesn't buy into the myth of buffed men in armor - far from it - but it does build a disturbing sub-plot - all true, of course - on the story of a pretty French aid worker who does. She sleeps with one of them, and tries with everyone else from the non-governmental organizations to stop the violence, or just to bring food.

Another thing to consider is the film's accuracy, especially when images of Haiti become a substitute for much-needed journalism at a time when dozens of Haitian deaths at sea are eclipsed in the news by higher or more topical body counts in Baghdad or Tripoli or Darfur. The events addressed by the film's "journalism" are more than two years old. That didn't keep Leth from coming under attack a month ago at the San Francisco International Film Festival from furious Aristide supporters (all white Americans) who called the film seriously inaccurate. (For some die-hard radicals, as I said, Aristide was their generation's Fidel Castro - it's ironic that the aging and ill Castro is a lot more alive than most of the chimeres - and ought to have been treated with the proper veneration, as they saw it, but that's another story that would probably involve being on the ground in the Cité Soleil for a while.) Is Ghosts of Cité Soleil the prophetic image of the "failed state" that we hear so much about, presented through a close look at its eloquent failures? Or was Leth thrown off by the tight focus of his gritty doc? I think Leth is right on target.

Vitus.

"Of the thin trickle of foreign films that ever see proper US release, the 'subtitled moppets' subgenre seems to me the most superfluous," writes Nick Pinkerton for indieWIRE, and when a film like Switzerland's Vitus comes along, press kit boasting an Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote on the cover, one can only prepare to be cloyed to death.... Vitus doesn't even manipulate with a modicum of skill."

"This film about a brilliant boy pianist fighting to shape his destiny was Switzerland's entry for the 2006 Oscars, and you can see why," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "Like most award-seeking crowd-pleasers, it places uncomfortable impulses in opposition - in this case parents' desire to develop a child's latent genius, versus the child's desire to have a 'normal' childhood and find his own way - then dramatizes them in the most unchallenging way imaginable."

Updated through 7/2.

"Awesome as Vitus's orchestrations may be, the film pushes an off-putting message about unchecked privilege that reeks of capitalist pigdom," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

Update, 7/1: "Blissfully devoid of both sentimentality and melodrama, the story takes a few fantastical turns toward the end that dampen the realism but serve the film's larger message," writes Jean Oppenheimer in the Voice.

Update, 7/2: Susan King talks with director Fredi M Murer for the Los Angeles Times.

Shorts, 6/28.

"For those entranced by the essay-films of, say, Chris Marker, the documentaries of Adam Curtis may seem rather vulgar," begins Brian Holmes in a post to Nettime. "[D]espite the intellectual depth and visual complexity of Curtis's work, there is no comparison with the aesthetic subtlety of the essay-film, and cinephiles can go back to their darkened theaters. This is TV, made for the anxious postmoderns with their zapper and their 36-inch screen. But what great TV!... Curtis, like Foucault, consistently asks: 'Do you want to be governed like that?'... These are alarm-clock films, wake-up calls for passive populations whose only recourse would be to think sociologically: but not as their masters do."

"It is impossible to exaggerate the critical importance of the role that political bloggers have cut out for themselves in Egypt," writes Sarah Carr in the Al-Ahram Weekly. "[T]he French Resistance of the information age, they exploit the speed and anonymity of the Internet to bear witness to, and publicise, transgressions which the mainstream media - emasculated by draconian laws and self-imposed red lines - can or will not touch." The Goethe Institute in Cairo has "sought to build alliances between bloggers and another marginalised group, independent filmmakers." Four short films were screened a few days ago for a modestly sized audience of bloggers; Carr wishes more had been there to see them.

The Self-Styled Siren, Flickhead and Thom at Film of the Year all list five bloggers who make them think.

Karina Longworth launches a "Micro Five" feature at the SpoutBlog with "Improbably Werner Herzog Anecdotes." Related: "Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is the kind of feel-good film that makes audiences want to stand up and cheer," writes Lewis Beale. "It's also seriously racist." Well, also at the Reeler: Christopher Campbell listens in as Danny Boyle talks about Sunshine and Christopher Campbell reports on the NYC premiere of Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State.

Michael Guillén has a long talk with Richard Schickel about his newest doc, Spielberg on Spielberg, scheduled for broadcast on TCM on Monday, July 9.

"Over the GW is a disturbing look at reprogramming that masquerades as rehabilitation," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "Having been forced to drink the Kool-Aid, [director Nick] Gaglia has produced a work that's as much an act of emesis as of filmmaking." More from Rob Humanick at Slant.

Also in the New York Times:

• "The first revival of Stalag 17, the 1951 comedy-drama about American prisoners of war written by two former POWs, Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, is scheduled to arrive on Broadway in late spring next year," reports Campbell Robertson. "And in one of the more surprising combinations in recent Broadway history, the director of the new production will be Spike Lee. Yes, that Spike Lee."

• Alan Riding sees Le Temps des Gitans (Time of the Gypsies), Emir Kusturica's adaptation of his film for the Bastille Opera in Paris: "Closer to riotous spectacle than lyric opera, the 100-minute one-act show is held together as much by imaginative staging as by a score alternating between folksy Gypsy music and hard rock. The voices blasting out of banks of loudspeakers in turn seem closer to those of musical comedy than in Mozart or Verdi."

• Michael Cieply: "Though it's unclear whether the forthcoming contract expirations of the entertainment industry's writers, actors and directors will lead to a work stoppage over the next year, Hollywood is nonetheless frantically hedging its bets."

Acquarello on The Ties That Bind: "Eschewing the interview format by replacing oral questions and observations with scratch film, the prominence of her mother's lone voice ironically reflects [Su] Friedrich's own process of personalization, introducing a physical self-imprint - the figurative ties that bind - that connects her mother's life experience with the formation of her own identity."

"British animation powerhouse Aardman have announced a slew of stop frame and CG animation projects, following on from its new feature film deal with Sony Pictures," reports Naman Ramachandran for Cineuropa.

Michael Fleming reports that Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) has written a screenplay, The Box, based on a Richard Matheson short story, that he'll direct. The "PG-13 horror film" will star Cameron Diaz. No mention in the piece of Southland Tales.

Also in Variety: "Russell Crowe will join Leonardo DiCaprio in Body of Lies, the William Monahan-scripted adaptation of the David Ignatius novel that Ridley Scott will direct for Warner Bros," reports Fleming. And Fleming and Pamela McClintock: "Ryan Gosling is set to star opposite Rachel Weisz in Peter Jackson's feature adaptation of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely Bones for DreamWorks."

The Guardian has a bit of news regarding Righteous Kill: "De Niro and Pacino will be onscreen together for nearly the entire film." And 50 Cent will "play a drug dealer who helps two detectives... as they try to catch a serial killer."

Also:

• "Fans of the genre have long known that quality sci-fi and its sister genre fantasy hold up a mirror to the times in which they were created, but never before have the TV shows involved seemed so resonant or indeed so influential," argues Gareth McLean. "Science fiction has never been more now, fantasy never more real." Related: Rashomon points to the SF Cover Explorer.

• Another up-n-coming item: "The Alchemist, the bestseller by Paolo Coelho, is heading for the big screen, with Laurence Fishburne at the helm."

• David Ondaatje will direct a remake of Hitchcock's The Lodger.

• Composer Victoria Borisova-Ollas and librettist Edward Kemp have written an opera based on Salmon Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Mike Figgis "will provide filmic allusions that echo both story and score," reports Stephen Moss.

• Peter Bradshaw comments on that weird, weird remark Tony Blair made at the Labour Party Conference last year when he first began his long, long goodbye: "Today, as Blair bids farewell to the faithful and to the faithless alike, he could be mentally starring in his own religious film, one with the most uplifting ending imaginable."

• Zoe Williams scoffs at Brett Ratner's stated reasons for making a movie about Hugh Hefner: "If you can't see that this is icky, and that your overblown self-justifying sounds a bit tinny, you're going to make a really bad film." Like it'd be his first.

• "The name of Mala Powers, who has died of leukaemia aged 75, usually rings a bell as a beautiful, dignified Roxanne in the 1950, Stanley Kramer-produced version of the Edmond Rostand verse drama [Cyrano de Bergerac, for which José Ferrer, in the title role, won the best actor Oscar," writes Ronald Bergan. "Yet, despite this achievement, for which she won a Golden Globe nomination, and having studied with Michael Chekhov (nephew of the playwright), of whose acting methods she became a passionate advocate, Powers' film career was, on the whole, a curiously undistinguished one."

• Francesca Martin has several stories, and pretty interesting ones, too: Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) explains why he's given up trying to adapt Patrick Hamilton's play Gaslight and is instead "jetting off to Hollywood instead to direct a drama about schizophrenia and homelessness starring Jamie Foxx"; Benedict Cumberbatch, "nominated for a Bafta for the title role in the BBC's Hawking... will appear on the big screen alongside Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman in The Other Boleyn Girl, due next year"; "Bruce Willis has signed up to appear in a black comedy called Assassination of a High School President with his 18-year-old daughter, Rumer"; and "Juergen Teller has embarked on a two-year odyssey to photograph creative types living in east London."

In One to Another, Michael Koresky, writing for indieWIRE, finds "a teasing, half-formed approach to character, and the film, tiptoeing around its own narrative and ideas of sexuality, feels not fully formed." More from Armond White in the New York Press: "Youth exploitation is the rule in Hollywood, but for art filmmakers Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr, it's a convenient rationale for porn."

With his first feature, Mala Noche, one can see that Gus Van Sant "possesses a penchant for pure lyricism that puts him in league with Terrence Malick," posits Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Via Movie City News, the AFP: "Forget Freddy Krueger and Norman Bates - here comes burqa man. The first serious Pakistani horror flick for a quarter of a century features a psychopath dressed in a blood-soaked version of the traditional garb of Islamic women." Zibahkhana, it's called, Hell's Ground.

Jacques Rivette's Duelle (une quarantaine) "draws from classic genre films as much as it does from the canonized arthouse," writes Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica.

Craig Keller on CinderFella: "This 1960 film is the third work by Frank Tashlin to feature Jerry Lewis somnambulantly broadcasting the treasures of his dreams; therefore, it's Tashlin's most psychoanalytic film to date."

At Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, Scott Balcerzak finds a pleasingly "unspectacular" number featuring Eddie Cantor in the 1933 picture Roman Scandals: "Even if his suggestion to 'Build a Little Home' is intensely optimistic and trite, there is something comforting in watching a chorus of the Depression-era families encircle their populist comedic hero."

Marsha McCreadie in the New York Press on Dr Bronner's Magic Soapbox: "If you missed the whole thing first time around - the 1960s - here's a chance to catch up. For others it's a nostalgic hoot, even if they never used the all-purpose, 'all-one' soap."

"With zero dialogue and none of Daft Punk's own propulsive beats, Electroma has been met with some ire by critics and fans expecting one of the group's high-energy music videos, such as the Michel Gondry-directed 'Around the World' or Spike Jonze's 'Da Funk.'" But as Margaret Wappler reports for the Los Angeles Times, that's not what they were after.

David Lowery on A Mighty Heart: "[Angelina] Jolie was attached to the project before [Michael] Winterbottom was, which puts the entire film into perspective: it's not so much the work of an auteur as it is that of a celebrity doing her best to subjugate herself to her material."

J Robert Parks recommends The Boss of It All: "Fans of [Lars] von Trier's meta-approach will find much to appreciate." Also, Once: "Don't miss it."

"Drama/Mex is the best film Alejandro González Iñárritu never made," writes Paul Schrodt of this "lean, 93-minute picture of life's delicate dramas uncoiling before Acapulco's burnished vistas." Also at Slant, Rob Humanick: "Steadfast tradition and encroaching progress lock horns in the surprisingly cheerful Hula Girls."

Pointing to the TCM Movie Database, Dave Kehr asks, "Am I the last person in the world to notice that Turner Classic Movies has been quietly constructing a much-needed alternative to the error-plagued Internet Movie Database?"

For the Globe and Mail, Gayle Macdonald reports on the concerns of Canadian filmmakers and cinephiles as Alliance Atlantis prepares to sell its massive library to Goldman Sachs.

Online listening tip. Nobuhiro Hosoki takes part in a roundtable with Christian Bale at Hosokinema.

Online viewing tip #1. Of the many offerings at the invaluable Ubuweb, wood s lot chooses to highlight Orson Welles: The One Man Band, directed by Vassili Silovic in 1995 in cooperation with Oja Kodar. Ubu: "Granted exclusive access to Welles's heretofore unseen archives - and drawing from almost two tons of film cans containing fragments, shorts, project ideas, and sketches - the filmmakers are led by Kodar through the rich but unfulfilled Welles legacy."

Online viewing tip #2. MoMA's one-minute video of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) and Intersection II (1992) being installed in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, via Bryan Whitefield at ScreenGrab.

Online viewing tip #3. "New York City ate the identity of the Public Theater, in a way." Paula Scher: Type is Image, via Darren Hughes.

Online viewing tip #4. The trailer for David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Via MCN.

Online viewing tip #5. Anthony Kaufman introduces Incarcarex at the Daily Reel: "Created for the Drug Policy Alliance by Brooklyn-based artist Haik Hoisington, this brilliant and satirical faux ad-spot highlights the wonders of a fictitious drug."

Online viewing tips, round 1. Louis CK's got clips all over his site.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The films and videos of GJ Echternkamp, via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Phil Hoad's got some horror clips.

Online viewing tips, round 4. Jerry Lentz rounds up all sorts of things to spend time with.

Fests and events, 6/28.

Lots of festival news has piled up, so I'll start with a couple of items relevant to today, run more or less chronological for a bit and then wrap with a few reviews of events that've already wrapped.

"A documentary critical of South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, will finally be shown to the public today more than a year after it was made and after it was twice pulled from the state broadcaster amid accusations of political censorship," reports Chris McGreal for the Guardian. "The program, which portrays President Mbeki as paranoid and vindictive, will be screened at an international film festival in Durban, coinciding with an African National Congress conference." The fest runs through Sunday.

"Overlooked Aldrich, a six-film series that begins [today] at Brooklyn's BAMcinematek, may help put Ulzana's Raid on more Ten Best lists, or at least reveal a gem hidden for 35 years," suggests Robert Cashill. Also: "The cinema side of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Afro-Punk Festival kicks off tomorrow with a novel choice, 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth in the popular Apes series." Much more on the festival, which runs through July 7, from Annaliese Griffin at the Reeler.

Susan King in the Los Angeles Times: "The Bicycle Film Festival, which pays homage to all styles of bikes and biking, pedals into the Vine Theater in Hollywood this weekend for its third year in LA." Through Sunday.

Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix: "The Harvard Film Archive's second annual New American Cinema series provides a rare opportunity to sample the work of [over a dozen] slacker underground auteurs: films about troubled heterosexual relationships, with quirky, quotidian details, tongue-tied protagonists with nowhere jobs and in marginal circumstances, and a vague, sometimes bemused recognition of life's absurdity." Saturday through July 10.

Matt Dentler's heading out to Marfa, Texas, this weekend to screen Double Dare, a doc featured in the SXSW lineup in 2005. Related: Sujewa Ekanayake's interview with Matt.

The New York Asian Film Festival carries on through July 8 and at Twitch, Michael Wells reviews After This Our Exile and City of Violence. At Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince highly recommends Takashi Miike's Big Bang Love, Juvenile A.

Blake Etheridge calls Sion Sono's Exte "[e]asily one of the funnest and jaded films I've seen so far in 2007." Catch it at NYAFF or at the Fantasia International Film Festival, which opens in Montreal on July 5 and runs through July 23. At Twitch, Todd has a huge post, all about that lineup.

"The Cambridge Film Festival 2007 programme and website are both now live and heading out there at speed," notes sneersnipe editor David Perilli. "As the print programme describes: 'The Cambridge Film Festival has gone all Web 2.0...'" July 5 through 15.

Tribeca 798 Film Festival Beijing: July 10 and 11.

"Thailand has caved in to pressure from Iran and withdrawn the animated movie Persepolis, about a girl growing up and feeling repressed under Islamic rule, from next month's Bangkok International Film Festival." Reuters reports, via the Literary Saloon. July 19 through 29.

"It reeks of Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite and Me and You and Everyone We Know. It could turn out to be a disaster," warns Matthew Clayfield. "But somehow, Eagle vs Shark, which is screening at next month's Melbourne International Film Festival, manages to avoid becoming another self-absorbed foray into pseudo-sentimentality or cynical hipsterism." July 25 through August 12.

"With her video installations, photographs, and short films, Australian artist Lynette Wallworth creates communal environments that respond, like natural ecosystems, to human presence." For Rhizome, Marcia Tanner reviews Hold: Vessel 2, 2007, on view in London through September 2.

At the Siffblog, David Jeffers looks ahead to a splendid season of silent features screening in and around Seattle and at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

"Petter Næss's new film Gone With the Woman (Tatt av kvinnen) with 'the Bothersome Man,' Trond Fausa Aurvåg in the lead, has been chosen to open the 35th Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund on August 18." Annika Pham has more at Cineuropa.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur and Cate Blanchett's followup to Elizabeth, will see its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, reports Variety's Brendan Kelly. At Filmmaker, Benjamin Crossley-Marra will point you to the trailer. IndieWIRE's Brian Brooks has a full list of "32 international selections that have screened at festivals globally, set for this year's TIFF, taking place September 6 - 15."

What's more: "Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited will open the 45th New York Film Festival." September 28 through October 14.

Chapliniana. Through October 30 in Bologna.

Boyd van Hoeij at Cineuropa: "The 27th edition of the Dutch Film Festival (NFF) will open on September 26 with the premiere of Duska, the latest work by Dutch veteran director Jos Stelling." Through October 6.

"At this year's edition, its sixth, the competition section of the Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF) offered twelve first or second films of which nine were from Europe, allowing for a snapshot of the current state of European cinema as seen through the eyes of its promising new directors." Boyd reports at european-films.net.

Michael Guillén and Michael Hawley wrap Frameline 31.

For Movie City News, Andrea Gronvall reports on the Jackson Hole Film Festival, while Stephen Holt files from the Newport Film Festival.

Andy Spletzer wraps the Seattle International Film Festival.

LAFF, 6/28.

The Los Angeles Film Festival "is a short but sweet concoction," writes Doug Cummings. "So far, I've seen a strong and diverse selection of films, with more on the way. The festival wraps on Sunday." And he reviews Opera Jawa, The Paper Will Be Blue, The Elephant and the Sea and It's Winter.

David Lowery catches Tsai Ming-Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone: "Once again, longing and the need for physical connection are Tsai's overriding themes, and one might ask how many hilariously awkward sex scenes between Lee [Kang-Sheng] and his usual costar Chen Siang-Chyi he can get away with before he starts repeating himself. But that's sort of the point, I think: Tsai is one of those directors who has found a way to circumvent traditional modes of progression. He swims ever deeper into the same waters, and his films, familiar as they might be, keep getting richer."

IndieWIRE profiles Scott Prendergast, whose debut feature, Kabluey, has premiered at the fest.

DVDs, 6/28.

"La Jetée coheadlines a new DVD from the Criterion Collection that's an early candidate for disc of the year," announces Matt Zoller Seitz in Time Out New York. "Delightfully, the La Jetée/Sans Soleil disc is an imaginative tribute to a great filmmaker, conceived in the spirit of his work. For instance, rather than simply interviewing French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, a contemporary of [Chris] Marker, and then editing his remarks into a linear documentary, Criterion has laid out the best bits on a full-page menu of onscreen windows that overlap in a more fragmented, free-associative way." Also: Pacino: An Actor's Vision and This is Tom Jones.

Vue Weekly's Josef Braun recommends Alain Resnais's Muriel, "a film that counterbalances a strong but conventional narrative with a deliriously unstable structure, an uneasy marriage that's initially jarring, then jazzily fun, then mesmerizing, and finally deeply troubling and more than a little melancholy," and Claude Chabrol's Comedy of Power, another "typically scathing survey of the bourgeois and their sense of entitlement."

Updated through 6/29.

Tim Lucas can't wait to take in the 7-disc Thomas Mann Collection; in the meantime, he's enjoyed the "puckish entertainment" of The Old Dark House, William Castle's "one-shot collaboration" with Hammer.

Good reading: Dave Kehr walks us through a collection of a dozen films Warner Home Video is releasing as Cult Camp Classics; many aren't, as he points out, but: "If the condescending 'cult camp' label gives them a commercial hook, I guess that's for the good, at least as long as it means getting prints as carefully restored and transfers as technically perfect as these." More from Dan Callahan and Eric Henderson at Slant.

Recent DVD roundups: Cinema Strikes Back and DVD Talk. And as always, keep an eye on the Guru.

Update, 6/29: Steve Erickson on the Chris Marker package at Nerve: "After watching Sans Soleil, you realize that the paths Marker blazed for documentarians remain largely unfollowed."

Books, 6/28.

J Hoberman in the London Review of Books on Daniel Leab's Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm: "[H]owever the CIA's fervent call for an anti-Soviet revolt (with 'help from the outside') was received by the world, it was rendered moot some eighteen months after Animal Farm's European release by the much encouraged and subsequently abandoned Hungarian uprising."

In the Austin Chronicle, Ken Lieck reviews Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film: "One might expect the contents to be drier than James Bond's martini. Surprisingly, given the blurbs' overwrought sense of urgency, the quintet of academically sound essays within has much to offer all cinephiles."

"The Shamus has never really thought much about Bruce Dern.... But I'll want to see a lot more of Dern's work after reading his smart, breezy, stream-of-ego memoir, Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have. Its subtitle is 'An Unrepentant Memoir' and boy, is it ever."

Jeanine Basinger reviews This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood: "Just as he kept a lid on fear under combat stress, a lid on President Johnson (no doubt a lid the size of Kansas) and a lid on the leaders of Hollywood, [Jack] Valenti keeps his memoir firmly under control. He tells only what he wants to tell, disappearing behind platitudes or quotations from Emerson, Faulkner and others when camouflage is needed."

Also in the New York Times, Motoko Rich: "As the diehard fans of Harry Potter count the minutes until they can get their hands on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the monumentally successful series by JK Rowling, they are engaging in a frenzy of speculation and rumor-mongering about what will happen to their beloved characters."

Just so: The Philadelphia City Paper's Summer Book Quarterly.

Online listening tip. The Washington Post Magazine's Summer Reading Issue. Ann Patchett, Terry McMillan, Nathan Englander, Rick Moody and Nicholas Montemarano read their nonfiction memoirs of summer. Via Bookforum.

Le Doulos.

"There certainly were French crime films before Jean-Pierre Melville's 1962 Le Doulos, and plenty more got made later, but you can make a pretty good argument that the genre never got any better," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Without Le Doulos and Melville's 1967 Le Samouraï, you don't quite get Reservoir Dogs or Oldboy or John Woo's classic Hong Kong films."

"Le Doulos is a movie in which just about everything and everybody proves false," writes J Hoberman, previewing the highlights of the week in NYC for the Voice. "According to Melville, 'It was only when Le Doulos was finished and [Jean-Paul] Belmondo saw himself on the screen that he realized, with great astonishment, "Christ! The stoolie is me!"'"

It's "a classic, black-and-white noir, highlighted by an eight-minute interrogation sequence shot in a single panning take in a glassed-in room - but something of a disappointment, if you compare it with the elegantly abstracted films that followed, like Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge," writes Robert Cashill. Even so: "Haberdashery meant the world to Melville, and if there is a better-attired character than Jean-Paul Belmondo's possible doulos ('stoolpigeon') in a picture of this type than it was probably in another Melville film.

In Between Days.

"In Between Days the sensitive, modest, thrillingly self-assured first feature by So Yong Kim, was one of the standouts of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival - exactly the kind of thoughtful, independent work one hopes to find there and too rarely does," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Its theatrical release today is an encouraging sign that there is still room, even in the midst of the summer glut, for a small, serious, unpretentious film."

Updated through 6/28.

The Voice's Nathan Lee finds it "an intensely specific film about the universal yearnings of adolescence, here rendered doubly resonant through a fluent synthesis with the immigrant experience."

At the Reeler, ST VanAirsdale talks with Kim: "[S]he had just returned from a trip to Korea, where she is in development on Treeless Mountain, her semi-autobiographical follow-up about two young sisters growing up with their extended family in a small town in the 70s."

Updates, 6/28: "An exception within the still roughly circumscribed realm of Asian-American narrative cinema, So Young Kim's lovely debut succeeds in blending cultural specificity with generic humanity for a quietly revelatory portrait," writes Kristi Mitsuda at Reverse Shot. "As simplistic as that sounds, few other representations of Asian Americans - Eric Byler's Charlotte Sometimes comes to mind, along with (yes, that's right) Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle - manage to acknowledge both difference and similarity at once."

"Kim's film runs like a mistier version of Kids with a few poignant twists and clunky clichés of its own," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix.

iPhone.

"We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country," write Walter S Mossberg and Katherine Boehret. "Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer."

David Pogue reviews the iPhone, too, and finds it "amazing," but of course, "not perfect." Also in the New York Times, Katie Hafner talks with Apple watchers like Jeremy Horwitz, the editor in chief of iLounge: "Ask yourself how many companies can announce a product six months in advance and not just sustain public interest but even build the frenzy. It's staggering to me."

So what's it to cinephiles? For New City Chicago, Ray Pride has a few thoughts: "While much ink's been spent on the changes that no one can predict in the weeks and months to come in the movie industry, less has been written about how exhibition - from the multiplex to the rare, preserved movie palace - can survive and subsist in a world of broadband Internet and handheld devices with wireless connections and downloads, legal and not. Is it worth building bricks and mortar anymore?"

Update, 6/29: "Whatever else it does, the iPhone does bring a little 3-dimensional, visual transparency to technologies that have flattened out as they have become familiar," editorializes the New York Times. "It creates the illusion of looking into it rather than at it, as if you were peering into the depths of a clear electronic pond. It is also a multifunctional device that illustrates its multifunctionality - revealing and demonstrating the transformations it undergoes as it changes jobs. This is perhaps the iPhone's cleverest trick: dramatizing its cleverness for the user."

Updates, 7/1: "When I go back to using my Macbook Pro, I want to fling stuff around the screen like on the iPhone. It's an addictive way to interface with information." Jason Kottke reviews his new "amazing device... After fiddling with it for an hour, I know how to work the iPhone better than the Nokia I had for the past 2 years, even though the Nokia has far less capabilities.... Wasn't it only a year or two ago that everyone was oohing and aahing over Jeff Han's touchscreen demos? And now there's a mass-produced device that does similar stuff that fits it your pocket. We're living in the future, folks... the iPhone is the hovercar we've all been waiting for."

Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing: "It lives up to the hype. All the rules just changed."

Mike Curtis is all over it.

And: The iPhone Blog.

Online viewing tip. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay watches magician Marco Tempest demonstrate a few unadvertised features.

Update, 7/5: "[T]onight I'm leaving for Munich, and I would ordinarily want to bring along my iPod (for the plane and visits to the hotel gym), my cellphone (for brief, exorbitantly expensive calls home), and my laptop (allegedly for writing, mainly for checking e-mail and retrieving contact information)," notes Alex Ross. "This time I'm bringing only the iPhone, loaded up with my address book from Abramovich to Zalewski, itineraries for the Munich Opera Festival, representative works of Unsuk Chin and Wolfgang Rihm, favorite Dylan and Radiohead playlists, the Furtwängler Tristan und Isolde, two episodes of the show Friday Night Lights, and, yes, Chinatown."

Live Free or Die Hard + summer movies.

"Life or age or something has mellowed [Bruce] Willis, writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "He no longer enters a movie like God's gift... He's making a point and so is [Live Free or Die Hard], namely that McClane (and Mr Willis) is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before. And look, he's not laughing, not exactly, even if the film ends up a goof."

"The central idea in Live Free or Die Hard - a modern, summer-blockbuster-scaled echo of what we see in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch or in later John Wayne westerns - is that McClane is an older guy in a young person's game, and every bump, bang and gash hurts a little more," writes Salon's Stefanie Zacharek. "Part of the fun of Willis' performance in Live Free or Die Hard is its unremitting, if grimacing, optimism in the face of the inevitable: that time's winged chariot is eventually gonna bust your ass."

"The ace up the sleeve of these films has always been their wry, sarcastic attitude, one defined by star Bruce Willis and typified by its first sequel, whose SNL parody-worthy title - Die Hard 2: Die Harder - is so upfront about its flippancy that it damn near preempts serious consideration of the series," writes Nick Schager at Slant. Even so, he can't help noticing that the film, "unsurprisingly headlined by a celeb Republican - is cast from the genre's time-honored conservative mold." Added to that is "the misogyny that creeps into Mark Bomback's script."

"Director Len Wiseman, who most recently perpetrated the dreadful Underworld movies on an unsuspecting public, does a pretty good job at what's most important in Live Free or Die Hard: deliver the whammies on a regular and, with a little luck, surprising basis," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. "With the bad guys here representing technology at its most insidiously powerful, the filmmakers set themselves up as the champions of all that is analog, old school and authentic; thus, the stunts in Live Free or Die Hard have the snarling crunch of a junkyard dog."

"In the canon of movie heroes, I've always viewed McClane as the cartoon extension of Clint Eastwood's nameless gunslinger in Sergio Leone's Dollar trilogy, replete with snarls and unstoppable survival tactics, yet incessantly playful and eager to amuse," writes Eric Kohn for the Reeler. "Willis was in his 30s in the first Die Hard, and at 52, he's no less daunting or smug than the finicky private eye he played opposite Cybill Shepherd on Moonlighting. His persona has only improved with age. Unfortunately, the Die Hard dialogue hasn't."

"[D]espite considerable odds, not only does McClane stay alive, his movie does too," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Inevitable lapses in plausibility and an inflated two-hour, nine-minute running time aside, Live Free or Die Hard is a slick and efficient piece of action entertainment, fast moving with energetic stunt work and nice thriller moves."

"Make no mistake... it is an epic piece of shit," counters David Poland. "I mean, wow! Once I got past the eye-rolling of the first act, I found myself laughing out loud much of the rest of the way."

"Justin Long is to Willis what lanky teen James Francis Kelly was to Stallone in Rocky Balboa, what the young mercenaries are likely to be to his John Rambo, and what Shia LaBeouf's character will probably be to Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones," notes Eric Lichtenfeld, author of Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle and the American Action Movie - and that "Yippee-ki-yay" piece in Slate.

Lou Lumenick in the New York Post: "Like the latest Stallone film, this is not so much a reboot as a sort of greatest-hits selection that homes in on the original concept of the character - in this case, a no-nonsense cop who, through sheer brawn, specializes in outwitting bad guys much smarter than he - and plunks him down in the post-9/11 world."

"Maybe McClane, in 80s action parlance, is too old for this shit," suggests Rob Nelson in the City Pages.

"Head shaven and still in fine shape, Willis has no trouble convincing that he's still capable of handling heavy action," counters Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Set pieces' outlandishness notwithstanding, pic's physical aspects feel convincingly real."

Susan King profiles Wiseman for the Los Angeles Times.

Rob Humanick revisits Die Hard 2 and gives it a C+.

The New Republic's Christopher Orr sees that a "selection from the Die Hard collection will be on temporary display in the museum's Treasures of American History exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum beginning July 12." Related: Robin Pogrebin reports in the NYT on the leadership shakeup at the Smithsonian.

For the New York Times, Maria Aspan reports on how Fox realized how stupid it was to knock a Die Hard fan video off YouTube; they've now paid its makers to repost it - as well as a new version, naturally, featuring clips from the new movie.

David Foxley covers the local premiere for the New York Observer.

Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore of IFC News chat about Willis.

Via Movie City News, the latest on Transformers, opening next week: Peter Howell attends an appearance before "a Beverly Hills hotel ballroom full of movie scribes" by Michael Bay and the result is actually a fun, quick read; Simon Ang caught the Michael Bay Show on its stop in Seoul and reports for Singapore's Electric New Paper.

"Paramount Pictures has taken over the campus of Yale University to film the forthcoming fourth installment of the popular Indiana Jones series." Spencer Morgan has the fast-breaking story for the New York Observer.

Updates: Richard Schickel on Live Free: "In its primitiveness, its refusal of anything like psychological nuance or big ideas, lies its dubious glory. It is a movie born to be forgotten - except as something that against your better judgment, you had a pretty good time watching back in the summer of '07. Which is more than you can say for other elephantine sequels moping dolorously around us this year." Also for Time, Joel Stein profiles Willis.

"Like McClane himself, this is an analog movie in a digital world - proudly outdated, yet guaranteed to get the job done," writes Aaron Hillis for Premiere.

At Hollywood Bitchslap, Peter Sobczynski watches Willis suffer the slings and arrows of "entertainment" "journalists": "To be fair, the press-oriented people asked reasonably intelligent questions and Willis, who has made no secret in the past of his dislike of the entertainment press, answered them in kind. Alas, the radio people seemed to be having some kind of personal contest to see who could ask the most inane thing possible in an effort to prove why most people no longer listen to terrestrial radio. I'll put it this way - one woman pulled out a harmonica and asked him to play a little bit for her and that was only the second dumbest question that she personally asked."

"This is how you revive a movie franchise." For Edward Copeland, Live Free is "the best popcorn action film I've seen in quite some time."

"As a high-octane action film starring Bruce Willis, Live Free or Die Hard is really quite spectacular," writes Erik Davis at Cinematical. But "you have to ask yourself this: Am I here for the popcorn action or am I here to spend two hours with one of my all-time favorite movie characters? If it's the latter, then you might find yourself slightly disappointed."

Updates, 6/28: "No point arguing cinema vs gaming," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "In Live Free or Die Hard, the latter has usurped the former. All that matters now is figuring out the new hybrid's ultimate value."

For the Los Angeles Times, Mike Flaherty gets 60 seconds with Timothy Olyphant, who plays the cyber-terrorist.

Live Free "brings back 80s action filmmaking through sheer muscle," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "This is a movie that believes in doing things the old-fashioned way, hurling real cars at real helicopters and dangling real SUVs down real elevator shafts. Sure, there's computer-generated enhancement, but only as much as necessary to keep those hurtling vehicles from killing the equally real (and certifiable) stuntmen and women who agree to climb behind their wheels.... Though the movie's at least 20 minutes too long, it's deeply satisfying, full of old-school buddy banter and the kind of action sequences that make you burst out laughing at their sheer audacity."

Transformers reviews are coming in... and they aren't too good: Jay at Funky Duds (via Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing) and, at Twitch, The Visitor and Mike McStay.

Hold the phone. Xeni Jardin's back on the line with positive reviews: Joel Johnson and Bonnie.

Via Anne Thompson, the London Times is running what it claims is the first review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Leo Lewis writes in from Tokyo: "The film itself is a solid, occasionally spectacular set-piece that struggles unsuccessfully to give us thrills and fun we have not already had in previous instalments. It is far crueller than its predecessors and begins to introduce properly the idea that we are no longer in an amusing magical playground, but are en route to an epic confrontation with real victims."

DK Holm explains "why the Die Hard series and its new entry Live Free or Die Hard need to be viewed as fundamentally comedies. They hark back to Keaton and the physical comedians as improvisers out of cunningly constructed binds, where mind is as important as the body, where indeed it fuels the body."

Updates, 6/29: "Most self-respecting film critics shy away from graven-in-stone statements, but here goes: I consider Die Hard to be just about the perfect movie, boasting a nigh-unbeatable combination of explosions, humor, and the seminal performance of Bruce Willis, who came as close to an ordinary schlub as the action genre would permit - a guy who cursed a lot, bled even more, made bad jokes, and genuinely didn't want to be in the middle of the action." So begins Andrew Wright in the Stranger. As for this new one, "Even accounting for some major flaws - lumpy storytelling, an unfortunate decision to dilute the carnage into PG-13 land, the presence of Kevin Smith - it still manages to deliver an agreeably retro kick."

"He was human back in 1988; now he's the Terminator," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "The everyman from Die Hard isn't 'one of us' anymore."

"He's a middle-aged Energizer Bunny, this guy," suggests Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

"[T]he problem with Live Free or Die Hard is that it's a sequel to Die Hard," agrees Peter Smith at Nerve. "No movie's ever gotten that right."

Kaleem Aftab talks with Willis for the Independent.

Ellen McCarthy profiles Justin Long for the Washington Post.

David Poland points out the many ways Michael Bay's gotten Transformers wrong, while in the Los Angeles Times, Deborah Netburn reports on the mobs at the Transformers premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Variety's Todd McCarthy opens his review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by making many of the same points Leo Lewis has made in the London Times. Then: "Altered feel this time around stems in large measure from the new blood recruited to push the franchise into ever-darker domains. Director David Yates, heretofore known mostly for his television work (and already engaged to helm the sixth film); screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, replacing series perennial Steve Kloves; and composer Nicholas Hooper, whose vigorously dramatic music uses only a smidgen of John Williams's themes, make the most decisive difference in steering the focus away from flights of fancy and in-house intrigue in favor of elaborate and sometimes heavy-handed foreshadowing of the inevitable showdown between Harry and Lord Voldemort."

Another new Variety review, this one from Dennis Harvey: "Director-choreographer Adam Shankman's buoyant stage-to-screen translation of Hairspray may not equal the comic zest of its 1988 root source, John Waters's first and still-finest mainstream feature. Nonetheless, it's one of the best Broadway-tuner adaptations in recent years - yes, arguably even better than those Oscar-winning ones."

Related: Will Lawrence talks with John Travolta for the London Times.

Updates, 7/1: "[A]s much as I enjoyed the sequels, I wish they hadn't been made," writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. "They make the extraordinary seem ordinary."

In the New York Times, David M Halbfinger profiles Tom DeSanto, a fanboy and idea guy instrumental in making the Transformers movie happen. More from Josh Friedman in the Los Angeles Times, where Cristy Lytal profiles Shia Labeouf.

Transformers is "a worthy summer popcorn blockbuster which delivers and satisfies," writes Stefan at Twitch. Matt Dentler's got several bullet-pointed notes on the film as well.

Anne Thompson on Hairspray: "While New Line Cinema is nervous about opening this 60s period movie musical on July 20 against the summer onslaught, it should be effective counterprogramming because it is a total crowd-pleaser. It's the kind of movie that puts a smile on your face and leaves it there. And most important, after such duds as The Producers, Rent and Phantom of the Opera, it should prove that the movie musical is alive and well. It works!"

The Guardian has a few words of praise for Hermione Granger. And in the Observer, Kate Kellaway offers an enthusiastic endorsement of Order of the Phoenix.

Also in the Guardian, John Patterson: "Watching Die Hard 4.0 suggested to me a useful method of selection that would not only kill off or horribly injure enough out-of-shape action hacks to clear the decks a tad, but also put a serious and necessary crimp in the action movie genre itself: let them do all their own stunts."

The New York Post's Lou Lumerick on Transformers: "The bombastic Armageddon director’s refusal to take the material too seriously - along with another funny and appealing performance by rising star Shia LaBeouf (Disturbia) - turn out to be the saving graces of an uneven, overlong and at times overbearing flick."

Update, 7/3: Caryn James in the NYT: "Grafting media manipulation onto techno-terror, the latest Die Hard expertly captures a current fear: What if we’re disconnected from our information overload?"

Updates, 7/4: "[I]f Live Free or Die Hard sounds suspiciously like a cocky slogan that might have been batted around in Bush speechwriting bull sessions, it could be because John McClane has been a neocon all along," argues Michael Serazio at PopMatters.

Blogging for the Huffington Post, Lawrence Levi notes that "the government is totally unprepared. ('It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome,' the hacker reminds us.) That's what makes this George W's Die Hard: it's explicitly Homeland Security's incompetence and indifference that make the nation so defenseless. In fact, the terrorist mastermind is a former government security expert who wants to prove the network's vulnerability."

LAFF, 6/27.

"For all its style and ambition, The Fall - which screens Saturday at 9 pm in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum as part of the LA Film Festival's Secret Screening series - is exactly the kind of film that is overlooked in an era in which marketability trumps originality," writes Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times.

"In many ways it's a throwback to the 'Raging Bulls' era of filmmaking, when directors pursued personal visions with such pictures as Nicolas Roeg's Performance or Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart. 'This is an obsession I wish I hadn't had,' Tarsem explained during a recent stay in Los Angeles.'"It was just something I needed to exorcise. You have to make your personal films when you're still young. I knew if I didn't do it now, it would never happen.'"

Opus reviewed the film for Twitch in September.

"With two midnight sections and horror films for both the centerpiece and closing night selections, the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival certainly loves its genre film." Michael Lerman reports on the highlights for indieWIRE.

More from the LA Film Festival from AJ Schnack.

New Romanians, 6/27.

"Of the three hits that managed to impress both critics and cinema lovers in Bucharest last year, Catalin Mitulescu's Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii (The Way I Spent the End of the World) is definitely the most ambitious and, no doubt, the most controversial," writes Silviu Mihai at european-films.net. As for what he's looking forward to, "Little is known about Corneliu Porumboiu's next production, but, judging by his first feature, A fost sau n-a fost? (12:08 East of Bucharest), one thing is clear: the director can really work wonders on an incredibly low budget, handling a very well mastered plot with an almost classical rigour in concept and cinematography.... Now, the director has announced a change in style for his next production."

Updated through 6/29.

Mitulescu, in the meantime, "is going to make Un balon in forma de inima (A Heart-Shaped Balloon), a love story about Anechitoaia, a 17 year old orphan, in love with Veli, a girl a little older than him," film journalist Stefan Dobroiu tells us. And his recommendation for what you can watch now is The Death of Mr Lazarescu.

"Romania hasn't been a dictatorship since 1989, but it still suffers from appalling economic misery, a blighted industrial landscape, and massive government corruption," blogs George Packer. "Naturally, it's enjoying a golden age of movies."

Earlier: "New Romanians."

Update, 6/28: Boyd van Hoeij presents an alphabetical "Cheater's Guide to Recent Romanian Cinema" and gets film critic Anca Gradinariu to write up Palme d'Or-winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and as for what she's looking forward to, "I don't know exactly what Cristi Puiu is up to next. Everyone is anxious, everyone is waiting.... Some months ago, after a huge scandal with the CNC, the National Council of Cinematography, he decided to give back the money he received for his third feature Hrana pentru pestii mici (Scenes of a Murder). The rumours are saying he is working on a completely new script that he hopes he'll be shooting with foreign investment."

Update, 6/29: European-films.net wraps its Romanian week with freelance journalist and critic Mihai Fulger, who casts another vote for The Way I Spent the End of the World and explains why he's looking forward to Cea mai fericita fata din lume (The Happiest Girl in the World), "the first feature film from the Radu Jude, the director of Lampa cu caciula (The Tube with a Hat) from 2006, the most awarded short film in the history of Romanian cinema."

BOMB's 100.

With its 100th issue, BOMB Magazine launches a beta version of its new site. Not everything from this issue is available online, of course. You can read Fionn Meade's introduction to an interview with Béla Tarr, for example, but not the interview itself. Same goes for Matthea Harvey's conversation with Kara Walker.

But David Salle and Sarah French's talk with Kate Valk is all there: "We sat down with Valk shortly after the Wooster Group's production of Hamlet at St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. Staged with the Wooster's familiar yet still confounding juxtaposition of film and video with live action, Hamlet takes as its template the film of Richard Burton's legendary 1964 modern dress, Broadway production. The Group re-edited the film - fast forwarding through and obscuring parts - and channeled its performances, acting alongside and in front of its projections."

BOMB's hitting the big One-Oh-Oh is a fine reminder, too, that there's a lot to discover or rediscover in the archives, directly film-related or not.