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.

Slate. Summer Movies.

"We hear the sound of a Michael Bay movie in the distance. Bruce Willis is blowing up stuff with that guy from the Mac ads. We finally finished Proust. It must be time, then, for another edition of the Slate Summer Movies issue."

Four pieces are up today and it looks like there'll be more throughout the week (so watch for updates to this entry). While we give Slate V time to figure out what it wants to be, this'll more than tide us over.

"Since the Die Hard franchise, and its catchphrase, have been absent from the screen for 12 years, a question arises: do the words 'Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker' still matter? And why did they resonate in the first place?" Eric Lichtenfeld looks into the matter and, along the way, revives memories of "the golden age of the one-liner" in action movies, the 80s.

Updated through 7/2.

You already know Grady Hendrix knows how to tell a story. Here, he's got a great one: ninjas, from their introduction to Western pop culture, courtesy of Tetsuro Tamba as Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice through "the most important moment in ninja history: Israel's Six-Day War" all the way to Naruto the Movie: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow.

Instead of ahead to how Sam Mendes, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio might adapt Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, Blake Bailey, author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, looks back at how the novel and its author got kicked around Hollywood off and on all those years ago, often more off than on: "From the beginning, ambitious filmmakers couldn't help being tempted by the book - a 'tough' look at the squalid heart of the American Dream - but only tempted. In the end, would people really pay good money to see a movie in which almost everything ends badly?"

The title of Marisa Meltzer's contribution says it all: "Leisure and Innocence: The eternal appeal of the stoner movie."

Updates, 6/28: "There have been bright spots, but given that this season's last hope for delivering a summer-defining blockbuster involves a decades-old toy franchise, it might be time to start thinking about next year." Keith Phipps takes an entertaining look ahead to next summer's contenders.

"[C]laiming a macho film friendship is not-so-secretly gay has become its own kind of silly convention, a fake-subversive cliché," writes Matt Feeney. "It is better - sounder both aesthetically and sociologically - to view the masculine pathos in films like Point Break in light of the tradition of heroically minded philosophy that runs from Aristotle to Nietzsche. If Point Break is homoerotic, in other words, then so is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit."

What'll terrorists think up next? Denis Seguin reads the winners of the second annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest, dreamed up by Bruce Schneier.

"[T]he notion of the action hero as a pop icon isn't entirely a Hollywood invention," writes Elbert Ventura. "In the 1960s, Sergio Leone made a string of Westerns that introduced to audiences a new sensibility - gloriously baroque, self-consciously iconic, and steeped in movies. The release this month of The Sergio Leone Anthology, a box set composed of remastered versions of the Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and the little-seen Duck, You Sucker, gives us the chance to reacquaint ourselves with a blockbuster director who pioneered that now-familiar archetype: the film buff as artistic savant." More from Keith Uhlich at Slant.

Jill Hunter Pellettieri offers a "Short History of Movie Theater Concession Stands. Plus: A Candy Quiz!"

Updates, 7/2: A Ratatouille double: "Brad Bird, Animation Auteur," a slide show from Josh Levin, and Troy Patterson races through a brief history of rodents on screen before concluding, "Remy will succeed partly by emerging as an anti-Mickey and partly because the big guy has taken him under his arm."

And Geoff Anderson rounds up readers' commentary on the Summer Movies collection.

"What is Animation?"

Who's asking: Not Coming to a Theater Near You in another one of their collectively written extravaganzas: "[W]hat seems to have begun as an amusing scientific parlor trick, a simple optical illusion, now amounts to a vast range of technical possibilities, visual aesthetics, genres and subgenres in cel, stop-motion, and digital animation. This means that while we often use it to refer to a genre, the term 'animation' encompasses an unimaginably large spectrum of films that may have substantively little in common. The limitless variety in animation is in this way both its greatest strength and its Achilles heel."

In "Magic Kingdoms," Rumsey Taylor and Leo Goldsmith write that while there are "many immediate discrepancies between both men, fostered largely by the geographical and temporal distance between them..., a thematic similarity persists between the work of Walt Disney and Hayao Miyazaki..., and this similarity is the more remarkable phenomenon that emerges in a comparison between them."

Jiri Trnka has also been compared with Disney, notes Adam Balz in an introduction to reviews of the puppet films, but when critics saw the first feature, "they saw Trnka as someone who could succeed in combating Disney's monopoly over animation."

Jenny Jediny considers another Czech filmmaker: "There is no doubt that Prague is regarded as a hub of animation in the European film world, primarily due to the genius of Jan Svankmajer." But the "issue of availability has kept a number of Svankmajer's colleagues out of sight for some time, both his influences and protégés. Jirí Barta is one such study."

Teddy Blanks looks over to neighboring Poland to consider the work of one of my own favorite filmmakers in any genre, Zbig Rybczynski: "Seeing just one of his music videos out of context might lead you to underestimate them: many are hilariously dated, and their bright, throwaway look blends seamlessly with the bulk of VH1 Classic's other offerings. But watch a few in a row (with some digging, most of them can be found online), and you begin to realize that his videos constitute a body of imaginative, technologically brilliant work as worthy of canonization as his short films."

Also: "In Praise of Pixar."

"As an animated feature, Fantastic Planet's significance is in how this European film asserts a more artisanal style in opposition to the smoother felicities of the American one," writes Ian Johnston. "Yet even more important to the film is the way its director, René Laloux, is operating here as a kind of enabler of another artist's vision, that of the artist and writer Roland Topor."

"[I]t is chaos that inspires [Don] Hertzfeldt's ingenuity as an animator," writes Rumsey Taylor, who also interviews the filmmaker. "His films are irreverent and anxiously humorous - watching one, one is often prompted to laugh because the visuals conjure no other particular response. It is a nervous, uncertain laughter."

"Sylvain Chomet's turned to filmmaking after completing several award-winning graphic novels, and his The Triplets of Belleville is in many ways a bande dessinée produced on celluloid," writes Jenny Jediny.

Back to puppets and a wide-ranging survey from Leo Goldsmith: "Setting aside the fact that nearly all stop-motion puppet cinema incorporates some amount of live-action footage, there is nonetheless a single, fundamental difference between stop-motion puppet films and live-action ones: Illusion."

Ten years and counting... Tom Huddleston: "There are moments of true horror in South Park, images and viewpoints so extreme you can almost hear the complain and creak of boundaries being stretched. But there's also clear-headed insight and inarguable intelligence, a bull-headed determination to resist censorship, and a quality of writing unparalleled in American comedy."

"Dismissed by purists because it involves tracing over live-action film images rather than hand-drawing from scratch, rotoscoping is nevertheless of great historical significance within the field of animation," argues Beth Gilligan who considers "Lucid Dreaming in the Films of Richard Linklater."

Ratatouille.

"After last year's Cars, Ratatouille is a return to form for Pixar - a boisterous ode to culinary delights, artistic inspiration, egalitarianism, camaraderie, family, and Paris, marrying unparalleled CG splendor with humor that's part classical Disney cartoonishness, part Jacques Tati-style physical drollness," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

"Pixar manages to achieve something that few other big Hollywood films do these days: a convincing reality. The body language & emotions of the characters, the machinations of the kitchen, the sights and sounds of Paris, and the dice of the celery, Ratatouille gets it all right, down to the seemingly insignificant details." So begins a must-read entry from Jason Kottke, referencing Meg Hourihan and Christopher Alexander's concept of the "quality without a name," put forward in his book, The Timeless Way of Building, and wondering out loud how director Brad Bird got the characters "(especially the rats)" acting more realistically than many actors in live action films.

Updated through 7/3.

"Ratatouille is Pinocchio for foodies," enthuses New York's David Edelstein. "It's Anthony Bourdain and Bill Buford with chases. Jaw-dropping chases: With a hero who's a rat and enchantingly light on his feet, the space is endlessly subdivided. The world is constantly opening up and whizzing by. Now we're dropping to the floor, flipping under a table, bursting through a crack, racing along a pipe... Bird clearly knows the great silent clowns: The slapstick he devises is balletic."

Earlier: "June 29."

Update, 6/27: Bird "deserves to be considered one of the most inspired storytellers at work in American movies," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "With Ratatouille, he takes the raw ingredients of an anthropomorphic-animal kiddie matinee and whips them into a heady brew about nothing less than the principles of artistic creation."

Updates, 6/28: "Brad Bird offers a luminous third feature act on the heels of his equally superb Iron Giant and The Incredibles and firmly ensconces himself as Hollywood's animated film laureate," writes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly. "Here, the Parisian setting is the film's appetizer, an enchanting first course before an entrée of complex, even poignant life lessons."

"Although Ratatouille is a technical delight, right down to the texture of a freshly chopped red onion, there are times when its story falls surprisingly flat," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "For all its technical wizardry, Pixar's chief achievement has been at the level of elementary storytelling.... Bird, by contrast, has taken sole writing credit on his two Pixar films, and they don't seem as finely honed."

For the Austin Chronicle, Marrit Ingman talks with Janeane Garofalo "about art, food, some spoilers from the film Variety anticipates will be 'a gastronomical success worldwide,' and why Christopher Hitchens and Ann Coulter are like Anton Ego, Ratatouille's evil critic." Also, a quicker chat with Patton Oswalt, the voice of Remy (pictured above).

In the Los Angeles Times, Susan King talks with Bird about how, when he took over, he rewrote the script and "re-rigged" the rats.

"Ratatouille moved me to tears because it was just so well-done - not kinda cute, not OK-for-a-kids'-movie, but a work of art crafted with as much passion and attention to detail as its hero, Remy the rat chef, puts into every vat of soup he makes," writes Dana Stevens at Slate. "And the animation, oh, the animation. Every hair in Remy's coat, a shimmering field of blues, grays, and greens, appears to have its own life.... I have no question that Ratatouille will be both a great critical success and a durable children's classic on DVD. But I wonder whether it will draw summer audiences to theaters in the numbers it should."

Online listening tip. Brad Bird and Patton Oswalt are guests on Fresh Air.

Updates, 6/29: "Ratatouille is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised."

"One of the great pleasures of Brad Bird's Ratatouille - just one of many in a picture that is itself about the rewards and the frustrations of seeking pleasure - is its inherent lightness, the way it seems wholly unaware that it's a grand achievement of animation, even though it is," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Bird is one of the great modern animators - as well as an astonishingly gifted filmmaker, period - precisely because he doesn't set out to wow us."

"In addition to ranking among the greatest animated films in recent years, Ratatouille is a foodie movie on par with Big Night, and puts the first original spin on the Cyrano story since Steve Martin's Roxanne," writes Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"If we are living in a golden age of animation - and we are - one of the reasons is writer-director Brad Bird," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, where Susan King talks with Oswalt and Garofolo.

Tasha Robinson at the AV Club: "Ratatouille never hits the heights of The Incredibles, if only because it's operating on a much smaller and less mythic, culturally resonant stage, but it's solid enough to prove that Bird hasn't let success, critical or otherwise, go to his head."

It "will certainly be the best comedy of the year," claims Charles Mudede in the Stranger.

Update, 7/1: "Why are so many animated features bursting with wild imagination, coherent characters, glorious visualizing - all we should expect from film - and 'real' movies aren't?" asks Time's Richard Corliss. "[A]nimation directors don't get the respect they deserve," he argues, and quotes Brad Bird: "An animation director has never been nominated for best director. Ever. People don't understand what directors of animated films do."

Newsweek's David Ansen: "Brad Bird, the unconventional creator of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, has come up with a film as rich as a sauce béarnaise, as refreshing as a raspberry sorbet, and a lot less predictable than the damn food metaphors and adjectives all us critics will churn out to describe it. OK, one more and then I'll be done: it's yummy."

"God bless Pixar for doing it the hard way," writes Bryant Frazer. "There's a new wave of banal, aggressively condescending talking-animal cartoons being shoveled out of the Hollywood CG-image factories these days, but Ratatouille is everything those films aren't and it's nothing that kids raised on lowest-common-denominator cartoon pablum expect."

Updates, 7/2: "It wasn't the home run launch of Pixar's biggest successes, but Ratatouille left Walt Disney Co's Pixar Animation Studios with an enviable Hollywood streak: eight movies, eight hits." Josh Friedman reports for the Los Angeles Times: "The G-rated tale of a young rat who dreams of becoming one of France's finest chefs took in $47.2 million in US and Canadian ticket sales to easily rank No 1 for the weekend, according to Sunday's studio estimates."

"Remy will succeed partly by emerging as an anti-Mickey and partly because the big guy has taken him under his arm," writes Troy Patterson after racing through a brief history of rodents on screen. Also at Slate, "Brad Bird, Animation Auteur," a slide show from Josh Levin.

Online viewing tip. "CG food has the potential to look... really disturbing?" Cooking up CG Food. Via Jason Kottke.

"Ratatouille is sweet and charming and I had a grin on my face and laughed throughout, but what does that really tell anyone?" wonders Daniel Kasman. "So perhaps I'll try to approach the movie from a different angle: Brad Bird's Ratatouille is the first Pixar film that feels like a studio film and not an event picture. If that doesn't sound like praise I assure you it is."

The other night, Jürgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky pretended they weren't reviewers and had a grand time: "The crowd roared, gasped, and applauded on cue, clearly enjoying the ride, giving itself over to the movie. Like redeemed food critic Anton Ego (voice of Peter O'Toole), we were delighted not to be holding our pens. From where we were sitting, rumors of the death of the theater experience have been greatly exaggerated - as long as the movie's any good."

"I have seen 'serious' films that feel less believable than this fairy tale," writes Tom Hall. "Ratatouille is a tremendous accomplishment; An animated fable that feels more painstakingly true to life than most movies dare attempt."

Update, 7/3: Noel Murray at the AV Club: "[M]y only significant quibble with Ratatouille is that I don't think Bird really believes in the movie's most prevalent theme: 'Anyone Can Cook.' A cynical person might even say that Bird waves that theme around to quiet some of the outcry about The Incredibles, and to distract from the fact that Ratatouille says, essentially, the opposite."

Ghosts of Cité Soleil.

"The almost complete eschewal of social and political contextualization aside, there are occasions when the film comes through on the level of pure visceral experience - as a portrait of jumbled, sordid life in the lower depths wracked by cataracts of senseless violence, a human hell to recall Stephen Crane's slum stories," writes Nick Pinkerton, reviewing Ghosts of Cité Soleil for indieWIRE.

"[T]he real story is real life," director Asger Leth tells Annaliese Griffin in the Reeler. Nick Dawson talks with him as well for Filmmaker: "The strangest thing was doing The Five Obstructions, because I wrote part of it and shot most of it, and [it was] doing a film where you really didn't have any clue where the fuck the film was going, and the only one who knew was Lars von Trier. That was kind of weird, because it was three years where we had no idea where this thing was going. That was three strange years."

Updated through 6/28.

Earlier: Robert Keser at Slant.

Update: "Startling in its immediacy (just how did a filmmaker get that close to these guys, anyway?), it's a scary but compelling nonfiction look at the kind of violent, charismatic characters who often populate narrative films," writes Bryant Frazer.

Updates, 6/27: "The glimpse afforded into their world is impressive in its intimacy," agrees AO Scott, writing in the New York Times. "But Mr Leth also seems to have been seduced by 2pac and Bily, the sometimes rivalrous brothers whose words and actions dominate the film. And while they are certainly charismatic figures, the absence of critical distance adds an uncomfortable dimension of myth-making and romanticism to Mr Leth's chronicle of their violent lives."

J Hoberman in the Voice: "One citizen of Cité Soleil stares dispassionately into the lens and tells the filmmaker, 'I feel like killing you to take the camera.' It's not difficult to believe he would. Every documentary has its own process; in this case, that backstory might overwhelm the film."

Update, 6/28: "Leth's film takes no overt position on the contentious question of Aristide and his unfinished Haitian revolution, nor on the coup - perhaps supported by the United States - that forced him from office," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's a shocking, fatalistic, street-Shakespearean drama that happens to be true, about two brothers on opposite sides of Haiti's civil war, with a woman between them.... What some leftists may have a tough time absorbing is that Ghosts of Cité Soleil casts all of Haiti's grim situation in the same stark, amoral light." Leth "suggests that Haitian politics - perhaps all politics, period - always boils down to brutal, territorial gangsterism, and that in this respect Aristide was no better or worse than his enemies."

The Scientologists are among us.

Tom Cruise is not a movie star who happens to be a Scientologist. He's a Scientologist who happens to be a movie star. The difference is crucial to understanding why his arrival here in Berlin last week was greeted, let's say, less than enthusiastically by several government officials and more than a few citizens who've been wrangling with the racket that calls itself a church for years.

A decade ago now, in a piece for Salon, I reported on a particularly ugly run-in between Germans and Scientologists. Berlin was a year away from becoming the new capital of the recently reunified country and everyone was expecting boom times. Scientologists, too. They were buying up apartment buildings, kicking out the tenants and selling the spruced up units as condos. When the government came to the tenants' defense, Scientologists took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and so on, sounding the alarm: Germany's persecution of Scientologists bore echos of its persecution of the Jews in the 30s and 40s. That's right: Cracking down on ruthless real estate speculation equals... Holocaust. What's more, those ads were signed by Hollywood celebrities, Oliver Stone and Dustin Hoffman among them. That dirty little operation was run by lawyer Bertram Fields, something of a celebrity himself who, at the time at least, counted Tom Cruise among his clients.

I'm wading into this again, albeit briefly, because there's a meme out there that's in danger of getting out of hand. The New York Post's Lou Lumenick writes, "Germany, which takes a dim view of Scientology, has banned a new movie starring the cult's most famous member from shooting in Deutschland." Nope, not true, actually. The Reuters story he points to gets it right; Matthias Oloew, reporting for Der Tagesspiegel, has more detail.

Long story short, Antje Blumenthal, party spokesperson for the Christian Democrats on sect issues, has asked Defense Minister Franz-Josef Jung to assure her that Bryan Singer and crew would not be permitted to shoot scenes at military sites for Valkyrie as long as Tom Cruise is playing the lead: Claus von Stauffenberg, a Colonel in the German army who was a key figure in the attempt to assassinate Hitler in the summer of 1944.

Thing is, Blumenthal has jumped the gun a bit. The production hasn't actually requested permission to shoot in the Bendlerblock, a building that would become known as a center of military resistance against Hitler, or at any other military site and, in fact, according to the most recent reports I've seen, hasn't even completed negotiations with the studios in Babelsberg; in other words, it's still possible that the film might not be shot in or around Berlin at all. On the other hand, Cruise is said to have picked up a nifty little villa in an upscale neighborhood.

Cruise's intention to take on the role of a resistance hero is irksome and the objections of Stauffenberg's son, Berthold Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (yes, it brings the Monty Python sketch to my mind, too), are understandable. Click his name for a story in English from Spiegel Online; the full interview was conducted by Martin Zips for the Süddeutsche Zeitung (in German, naturally).

Even so, the rhetoric of some opposed to the very idea is beginning to take on a slight whiff of hysteria. It's nowhere near as laughably overblown as Scientology's in 1997, but still. Oloew quotes Frank Henkel, another Christian Democrat, for example: "We cannot allow the resistance against the National Socialist dictatorship to be misused by a dangerous and totalitarian psycho-organization like Scientology." Social Democrat Klaus-Uwe Benneter is also offended by the notion that Stauffenberg would be portrayed by an actor belonging to a sect whose "dubious methods aim to seduce and manipulate people." This would be a "slap in the face to all upright democrats, all resistance fighters and all of Scientology's victims."

Well. I'll simply stick with "irksome." But the fact that Cruise whisked in and out of the city last week, ostensibly to see to this or that Valkyrie-related item of business, spent three hours in Scientology's brand spanking new center here in Berlin, surely knowing full well that the city-state had done all it could to stop the damn thing from opening here in the first place, pretty much says all that needs to be said about his priorities. He's a Scientologist. Who happens to be a movie star.

Shorts, 6/25.

"Anyone tempted to dip a toe into dramatic silent waters might profitably begin with America." At Greenbriar Picture Shows, John McElwee tells the remarkable story behind DW Griffith's take on the Revolutionary War and comments:

People today imagine silent viewers were better satisfied with less. In fact, the opposite was true. If we could sit for presentations the equal of what they had in 1924, I've no doubt a lot of us would find emotions turned loose in ways unexpected. My own (admittedly limited) experience with silent films and live orchestras are among my best remembered in theatres. Ben-Hur with seventy musicians once brought tears to these jaded eyes. Could I have stood such pounding on a weekly basis in palaces seating thousands, with dynamic accompaniment a commonplace? Likely I'd have sought treatment for an excess of bliss, for that is the only word I can summon for the movie going encounters those lucky people routinely had.

"Bantsuma: The Life of Tsumasaburo Bando is obligatory viewing for everyone interested in Japanese cinema," writes David Bordwell. "Not only does it handily trace Bando's remarkable career through stills, interviews, and surviving footage. It also supports something I've tried to show for some time: that the Japanese action cinema of the 1920s and 1930s was one of the most powerful and creative trends in world filmmaking."

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij asks film critic, writer and visual artist Alex Leo Serban to recommend a recent Romanian film and suggest which upcoming Romanian project he's most looking forward to.

Girish: "I've read quite a bit of [James] Naremore over the last few months, and thought I'd draw up a little guide of reading recommendations from a range of his work."

"God, piety, fear and malevolence have made the stew of politics bitter, unironic and pleasureless, in government and in the cultural crockpot," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "It was not always so - Criterion's completely uncalled-for double-trouble DVD release of Serbian barn-burner Dusan Makavejev's two most notorious films, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974), reminds us how the lava-hot mid-Cold War years fueled an almost limitless variety of untamable flames." Also: Obie Benz's Heavy Petting (1989), "a fond look back at the American mid-century's teen and his/her discovery of sex in the postwar years."

"25 years ago, the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner became an instant science fiction classic," writes Adam Savage for Popular Mechanics. "Set in a sodden, squalid Los Angeles of 2019, the neo-noir masterpiece influenced a generation of filmmakers and video-game designers. Long before I teamed up with Jamie Hyneman to form the MythBusters, I was a special-effects modelmaker, and Scott's cyberpunk gem almost instantly became the most important film in the canon of movies I love." Via Xeni Jardin, who's got more related linkage at Boing Boing. Related: Phillip Martin.

"Frank Oz transplants his sitcom sensibilities to the UK drawing-room comedy with Death at a Funeral, a strained farce in which lots of one-dimensional Brits converge at the memorial service for their family's patriarch and proceed to act like buffoons." Nick Schager at Slant.

"With her feral magnetism, [Asia] Argento, 31, is indeed sexy and, for some, undoubtedly scary," writes Dennis Lim. "But her taste for the outré, easy to dismiss as provocation, hints at a deeper fearlessness, apparent in her headlong performances as well as in her willful career choices.... Ms Argento's latest films, which prompted festivalgoers to crown her the 'queen of Cannes, are the most generous showcases yet of her charms. An Old Mistress and Boarding Gate feature the trademarks that have made her an all-purpose mystery lady - her salacious scowl, her damaged-goods vulnerability, her unplaceable exoticism, her many tattoos - while also throwing fresh challenges in her path."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Existentialism long ago went out of fashion," writes Adam Cohen. "But [Woody] Allen remains, in his way, one of its most prominent exponents. He has not let the increased religiosity of the times, or his own advancing years, shake his firmly held uncertainty." More from Scott Eyman in the New York Observer.

• Dave Itzkoff meets Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the screenwriting team behind Mission: Impossible III, Transformers and a projected Star Trek prequel. Kurtzman: "'It doesn't matter if people think what you're doing is camp,' he said. 'You have to take your genre seriously. If you write it tongue-in-cheek, the audience will see it, and they'll feel they're being talked down to. And,' he added, 'they'll kill you.'"

• "National Lampoon is trying to escape its doldrums," reports Andrew Adam Newman, and now "plans to release four of its own movies annually and acquire up to eight more for distribution."

• Michael Cieply: "Having already provoked parents, women's groups and the ratings board with explicit ads for the coming torture movie Captivity, [Courtney] Solomon and his After Dark Films now intend to introduce the film, set for release July 13, with a party that may set a new standard for the politically incorrect."

• 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 Live Free or Die Hard.

• The iPhone arrives on Friday and, "in Hollywood," reports Laura M Holson, "where [Steve] Jobs's convention-defying tactics are all too familiar, media executives are eagerly preparing for a new era as they hope to position more content where consumers want it: in their hands."

• Allison Hope Weiner: "TMZ.com has become the celebrity handler's worst nightmare."

"[Werner] Herzog's new film is something of an event, being his first widely distributed feature since the early 1980s. Due out July 4, Rescue Dawn is another one of his fables about the dark recesses of human nature." Patrick Goldstein talks with him for the Los Angeles Times. Related: In New York, Logan Hill talks with Herzog, too, and David Edelstein finds Rescue Dawn "so good it makes you wish that Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career."

Also in the LAT, John Clark profiles Dennis Farina and Susan King watches Cult Camp Classics.

"[P]erhaps we should rightfully consider Brueghel, Bosch, Fuseli, Munch, Goya, Dore, Rembrandt and Dalí as vital forgers of horror culture," suggests Marco Lanzagorta at PopMatters.

The Guardian launches an annotated list of "1000 Films to See Before You Die," 200 a day for five days - and of course, a quiz. Andrew Pulver, blogging on how the list was put together, insists it's not about "great" films: "if it is moving, funny, clever, beautiful to look at, then it at least deserved consideration for our list."

Also:

• Robert McKee's Story "could only have come out of America, birthplace of Fordism," writes Mark Ravenhill.

• John Patterson: "I like to think of myself as a veteran of the gore-wars of the last 30 years, but I may finally have hit my tolerance threshold."

• "Earlier reports had suggested it could be 15 years before Tarantino got round to making sequels to Kill Bill, but [producer Bennett] Walsh's comments, if confirmed, suggest the process might begin somewhat earlier than that."

• Gavin Gaughan remembers Herman Stein: "As a staff composer at Universal Studios, he contributed to more than 200 films."

A touching tribute: Richard Harland Smith wishes his friend, Adrienne Shelly a happy birthday.

Sujewa Ekanayake talks with Jennifer Fox about Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, a "six-part documentary that explores the life of Fox and her female friends around the world as they deal with major issues as well as minor challenges and interesting details that come their way. Among other situations, the movie deals with Fox's own debate regarding getting married and also regarding having children, her romantic relationships, a major illness of a friend, and a divorce of another friend."

Paul Matwychuk: "I talked with Guy Maddin last week about Brand Upon the Brain!, the chronic unreliability of Lou Reed and the universal evilness of children - and in the process he more than lived up to his reputation as one of the most entertaining interviewees in cinema today."

For Stop Smiling, Mark Asch reports on a recent screening of Killer of Sheep with Charles Burnett in attendance.

The latest from the Film Panel Notetaker: a Q&A with Revolution '67 filmmakers Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno and Jerome Bongiorno.

IndieWIRE interviews Taggart Siegel, director of The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

Shane Danielson talks with Eli Roth for the Independent.

Jason Whyte's list at Hollywood Bitchslap: "The Best Films of 2007 - So Far, Anyway..."

Nick Schager: "Bug is William Friedkin's best film in at least two decades, a compliment that must be tempered by the disclaimer that, after its first thirty minutes, this adaptation of Tracy Letts's stage play (written by Letts) begins to lose its sure-footing."

Online purchasing tip. From Tim Lucas: "I recommend the Twisted Sex compilations, and also another equally fascinating comp called The Late Late Show, because - at their best - they are like archaeological digs into a buried world of lost, or nearly lost, cinema. No one who truly loves movies can fail to become absorbed in the revelations they have to show and tell us."

Online viewing tip. The Manny's not nearly as good as the story behind it, as told by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker. Much funnier than that video is Jack Handey's treatment: "My Nature Documentary."

Alamo Downtown Blog-a-Thon.

Austin's Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, the original "on Colorado St will be closing its doors after a final triple-feature on June 27. The movie theater will be moving to Sixth Street in the newly renovated Ritz Theater. While we're looking forward to the new digs, we want to remember and celebrate the old Alamo Drafthouse that we've been visiting for the past 10 years."

And so, Jette Kernion and Blake Ethridge are hosting today's Alamo Downtown Blog-a-Thon.

On a related note, Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles reports on last night's Half-Ass-a-Thon, the last event of many he's hosted at the Alamo, and passes along more reviews from "The Legman." As Harry notes, the hit of the overnight festival was Stardust, "the real surprise. People just aren't really aware of it, but throughout the film there was applause, not of just visual effects moments, but applause to the greatness of dialogue, sequences and for just getting caught up into the film."

Fests and events, 6/25.

The Sydney Film Festival has wrapped and not only does Matt Riviera list the awards, he also has notes on the 33 features he took in during those couple of weeks.

Brian Darr looks ahead - and far and wide - to events throughout the Bay Area through to the end of August.

Michael Wells is sending reviews from the New York Asian Film Festival into Twitch; so far, he's caught The Banquet, Retribution, Exiled and Dog Bite Dog.

At Cinema Strikes Back, David Austin has quick reviews of Retribution and Dasepo Naughty Girls; plus Freesia: Bullets Over Tears and I'm a Cyborg But That's OK.

Farley Granger will be "discussing his career - and no doubt his love affairs with such luminaries as Ava Gardner, Leonard Bernstein and Shelley Winters - at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on Wednesday after a screening of one of Granger's best-known films, the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock classic thriller Strangers on a Train," notes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times

Michael Guillén: "The morning after Frameline31's sold-out screening of Out at the Wedding at the Castro Theater, Mink Stole and I met over coffee at the Hotel Rex."

Evening.

"This is one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "In the course of it, in both the past and the present, all the characters have to spill their feelings about everyone else, and the pileup of hurt, rue, and guilt—confessions and reconciliations and partings—becomes oppressive. The structure that the filmmakers have created is too complicated and fussy for their fairly simple story and what it has to say about time and memory, and some of [director Lajos] Koltai's directorial touches... turn poetry into kitsch."

"People here don't just talk too much; they say, 'There's something I have to tell you' first," warns David Edelstein in New York. "Evening only bestirs itself when Meryl Streep in old-lady makeup pays [Vanessa] Redgrave a visit: The way these two great actresses breathe the same air and adjust their rhythms to each other seems almost holy."

In the New York Times, Celia McGee talks with Michael Cunningham and Susan Minot - separately - about his adaptation of her novel and with producer Jeff Sharp about why Cunningham was brought on.

For New York, Sara Cardace talks with Mamie Gummer, Streep's daughter about, gulp, playing the same character at a younger age.

Earlier: Ed Gonzalez at Slant and Brandon Harris.

Update, 6/26: Paul Cullum profiles Gummer for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 6/27: Paul Cullum has a long profile of Koltai in the Los Angeles Times.

"Remembering is a novel's business, and notoriously difficult to translate to the screen," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Only Raoul Ruiz's dazzlingly free adaptation of Proust's Time Regained (whose frame of a dying man trying to unscramble his memories Minot lifted more or less wholesale) has come close to replicating the creative role of recall—sparked by fear, desire, and regret—in giving shape and significance to the experiential jumble that we call the past.... Stripped of the rhythmic lilt of Minot's prose and her delicate probe into the treacheries that time and memory work on our lives, Evening tips over into farce."

Updates, 6/28: "[I]n its pursuit of superior craftsmanship and high-minded lyricism, Evening constantly risks sliding down the slippery slope into inept sentimentality and self-caricature," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "With a high-wattage female ensemble cast, dreamboat Rhode Island locations and a respected European director, Evening feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies. Even considering it in that light, I found it miscalculated and overcooked, although Claire Danes's glowing, gawky, oddly appealing performance... should announce her arrival as a major star."

At the Reeler, Michelle Orange finds that Evening "suffers from the same problem as a certain ex-boyfriend of mine: All emotion registers as melodrama, though in this case the flushed and flustered parts do not cohere into a melodramatic (i.e. generic) whole."

"Here's the thing: no matter what I write, a lot of you, and you know who you are, are going to see this movie," acknowledges Marcy Dermansky. "Not see Evening? It's like having to say no to a Jane Austen adaptation.... The over-the-top sentimental story, however, will wear you down, ruin any pleasure derived from watching luminous Danes and illustrious others - all those famous people acting their hearts out in such enviable surroundings."

Updates, 6/29: "At first, second and final glance, Susan Minot's Evening, a claustrophobic 1998 novel about a woman in her 60s remembering the days and few torrid nights of her life while slowly, very slowly dying, doesn't seem as if it would translate easily to the big screen," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It hasn't. Stuffed with actors of variable talent, burdened with false, labored dialogue and distinguished by a florid visual style better suited to fairy tales and greeting cards, this miscalculation underlines what can happen when certain literary works meet the bottom line of the movies. It also proves that not every book deserves its own film."

"An impressive pedigree doesn't always guarantee a felicitous outcome, as any number of Hapsburgs or Hiltons will confirm," agrees Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"[I]t's hard to think of a more miserable movie in recent months," sighs Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Bilge Ebiri's experience is quite different: "Evening starts off as something of a bust and winds up tearing you apart. I may be mixed on it, but I can't wait to see it again."

"[T]he film arrives at a pessimistic and almost nihilistic view of life as something not very important - and then invites us to take strength and comfort in the notion," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's not what you'd expect, and it's certainly not the typical message. It might be most interesting thing about the picture."

Updates, 7/1: A "schmaltzy nostalgic fusion of clichéd melodrama and carpe-diem lessons about regret, love and courage," sighs Nick Schager at Cinematical.

"The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's semi-powerful ideas impossibly trite," writes Mike Russell. "It gets so bad that one Oscar-winning special guest star eventually wanders in to tell us the moral, and that moral is, and I quote, 'We are mysterious creatures, aren't we? And at the end, so much of it turns out not to matter.' Ugh."

Update, 7/5: Jennifer Merin talks with Koltai for the New York Press.

Weekend shorts.

"For nearly a decade, director Alexei Balabanov and producer Sergei Selyanov have ridden a rising wave of nationalism in Russia to box office success with tales of local heroes triumphing over Chechen separatists, American crime bosses, and underworld hit men," writes Andrew Osborn in the Wall Street Journal. "But their latest film, set in 1984, has left audiences feeling uncomfortable by taking aim at a new target: the Soviet Union. The gritty thriller, set in 1984 in the USSR's twilight years, has triggered controversy with an unremittingly bleak and violent portrayal of the period." The film: Gruz 200 (Cargo 200).

"For all of its wonders, anime is all too often riddled with cliches, hackneyed plots, unoriginal characters, and shallow eye candy," writes Jason Morehead. "Of course, not everything can be a Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, or Satoshi Kon title, but even so, one has to wade through an awful lot to get to the good stuff. Which is why it's always refreshing when someone new comes along, someone who feels like breath of fresh air. Someone like Makoto Shinkai." And he points to trailers for the upcoming 5cm Per Second, headed for theaters before a release on DVD in December.

With the addition of "Montage," by Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques Rivette, The Order of the Exile now has the complete Rivette: Texts and Interviews, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, online. And this is just one of many new features on the site, including Peter Harcourt revisiting his 1977 piece on Rivette's early films and Tom Milne's 1969 piece on L'amour fou.

Joni Mitchell, filmmaker. Jim Emerson argues the case.

DK Holm, blogging at ScreenGrab, hears how Kenneth Anger livened up Curtis Harrington's funeral - in ways Harrington might not have appreciated.

The Los Angeles Opera's 2008-09 season will open with a trilogy of one-act operas by Giacomo Puccini known as Il Trittico. The first two acts, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica, will be directed by William Friedkin, which isn't much of a surprise. But the third, Gianni Schicchi, will be directed by... Woody Allen? The BBC reports and quotes him: "I have no idea what I am doing. But incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm."

"I went to a screening of Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn fighting off one of those desperately lonely, uncertain states we all find ourselves in at times," writes Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "Two hours later, I came out of the theater flying, simply too in love with life to fret over some ground-level personal nonsense. Herzog's film about torture and starvation is the feel-good movie of the summer."

John Patrick Shanley will be directing an adaptation of his play, Doubt. Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman are on board and, according to Danielle Hine at Time Out, Amy Adams may take the lead.

"The Weinstein Co is going into business with 24 producer Tony Krantz and Infernal Affairs co-director Andrew Lau for a trio of Hong Kong action pics." Steven Zeitchik reports for Variety. Via Peter Martin at Cinematical.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince has a long talk with Malik Bader about Street Thief.

"Most of the stuff in Mexican Sunrise is based on personal experience and some near-death experiences that I've had," filmmaker Rowdy Stovall tells Carson Barker in the Austin Chronicle. The film's done quite well at festivals and will screen next week at the Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek. Speaking of which, Marc Savlov bids farewell to the original Downtown location.

"At 74, he is ever the provocateur, the man who kickstarted the blaxploitation genre, the man who once punched out an audience member who insulted his film, the infamous Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song." Sarah Hepola talks with Melvin Van Peebles for Nerve.

For the New Statesman, Daniel Trilling listens to the radio: Christopher Eccleston "pays homage to the films that became known as the British new wave" in Angry, Sexy and Working Class and, in his radio debut, Blackpool: The Greatest Show Town, Ken Loach conjures a world that "has long since vanished, but these fleeting glimpses created a kind of intimacy that radio so often fails to deliver." Also: Ryan Gilbey reviews La Vie en Rose and Paris, je t'aime.

Longing "intrigues because it presents an outwardly decent man falling equally in love with two women but eschews simplistic judgments and doesn't pander to viewers by telling them whom they should root for or why the characters do what they do," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. More from Daniel Kasman. Also in the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis: "Firmly anchored by its protagonist's love of the land, The Real Dirt on Farmer John offers one man's extraordinary life as a gateway to a larger history of tragedy and transition. It's an unflinching account of what farming takes - and, more important, what it gives back."

Ryan Fleck tells the Telegraph about his favorite Robert Altman movie, McCabe and Mrs Miller. Also: Benjamin Secher talks with Sydney Pollack and Frank Gehry.

Nigel Andrews profiles Guy Maddin for the Financial Times.

For the London Times, Stefanie Marsh profiles Antonio Banderas and Alan Franks talks with Marianne Faithfull.

Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot on Hostel: Part II: "[Eli] Roth's tactic isn't really to scare viewers, to create new frissons in movie watching, or even to gross them out necessarily, but to play ever escalating games of one-upmanship. In other words, he asks how he can top what he and other genre directors have previously done; filmmaking becomes a pissing contest, a frattish clique in which the biggest castrated cock wins."

"Once has something for everyone: a scrappy indie sensibility for the aesthetes, a sex-free romance for the prudes, a smart-as-a-tack script for intellectuals, and sympathetic characters for the rest of us," writes Gabriel Shanks. "Let's not dismiss the songs, however; 'When Your Mind's Made Up' reveals a startlingly talented composer in [Glen] Hansard, whose impassioned voice and fragile performances form the film's emotional center."

For the Guardian, David Thomson calls up Robert De Niro to talk about The Good Shepherd.

Also: "[Tom] Stoppard is in Moscow to oversee the production of his trilogy The Coast of Utopia, and I am here to see what a Russian director and Russian actors bring to plays written by a foreigner about their own radical thinkers of the 19th century, Belinsky, Bakunin and Herzen. Nina Raine asks him, "What is the Russian theatre like? 'It's romantic,' he says. 'It's all sloping wooden floors and overflowing ashtrays. It's everything you want it to be.'"

"Jhoom Barabar Jhoom is, so far, the best of 2007's mainstream Hindi films. For all of the family reunions, however, it disappoints a bit in comparison to [Shaad Ali's] last effort [Bunty aur Babli]. Still, it's diverting," writes Laura Boyes. Also in the Independent Weekly, Godfrey Cheshire on La Vie en Rose and Crazy Love.

"One to Another cannot be appreciated without some measure of guilt," writes Ed Gonzalez. "This oh-so-French account of a pretty boy's murder makes a spectacle of its young twentysomething cast's plump buttocks, pert nipples, uncut sausage, and striking Gallic features." Also at Slant, Eric Henderson on Criterion's release of Chris Marker's La Jetée and Sans Soleil.

"Watch [Last Tango in Paris] today, and you can't help but be slightly surprised by the trail of controversy it left in its wake," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "'This is a movie that people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies,' [Pauline] Kael wrote back in 1972. Three decades on, as it is re-released, Last Tango in Paris remains a fascinating case study, but Kael's remarks appear a little overstated. Was this really the 'most liberating film' ever made? Does the debate about it continue? By contemporary standards, the sex scenes no longer seem extreme."

"What may be most amazing about Panic in Needle Park is to look back, knowing that this film came from a major studio," writes Peter Nellhaus. "Even today, the so-called independents would be nervous about making a film as downbeat or as marginally experimental."

David Marin-Guzman on Deja Vu: "Tony Scott's latest isn't just a simple time travel film. It's actually a thinly veiled apology for George Bush incompetence over Hurricane Katrina."

"[O]ne of the basic joys of Gigi is pure escapism," writes Farisa Khalid for PopMatters. "The picture has a buoyancy and playfulness that few movie musicals have. The glorious saturated Technicolor of [Vincente] Minnelli's images: the oxblood red of the brocade walls of Mamita's apartment; the vivid green and purple tartan of Gigi's dress; the sleekness of the men and women all taken from images out of Renoir's paintings, (the stately tour of Parisian high life is like a two-hour slide show for art-history majors); Cecil Beaton's lush costumes, all lace and crinoline (he transferred his memories of Edwardian England onto 1900s Paris); the energy and dynamism of the score, jaunty and robust in its musical depiction of fin-de-siècle Paris, which evokes Bizet and Offenbach."

"[N]atural mysteries and their entwinement with the mechanical cinematic recording, selection, and editing of [James] Benning's film are what is most intriguing and even sensorially affecting about Ten Skies, the refinement of a view one may take for granted and an appreciation for the metaphysical subtleties of cinema through such a simple focus," writes Daniel Kasman.

"Unlike Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986), Killer of Sheep has been seen too rarely to influence as many filmmakers," writes Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog. "John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood (1991), for example, also takes place in South Central, but that's where the comparisons end. David Gordon Green's George Washington (2000), however, was clearly influenced by it—too clearly for my taste."

Variety: "10 Screenwriters to Watch."

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Evan Waters.

Interviews in German: Thilo Wydra (Der Tagesspiegel) with Werner Herzog and Günther Lachmann (Die Welt) with Wim Wenders.

"It's the time of reflection on what matters, the time of the political artist. This summer's great stage belongs to them. And they get to play twice - at the Venice Biennale and the Documenta in Kassel." Signandsight translates Hanno Rauterberg's piece for the June 14 issue of Die Zeit. More on Documenta 12 from Holland Cotter in the NYT.

Related Artforum diary entries: David Velasco: "If you leap headfirst into the decadent fray of Venice or Basel, Documenta - with its serious (so German!) demeanor and this year's notable dearth of private parties - is frequently approached with trepidation. 'No one wants to be the Documenta scout,' noted one New York dealer.... Once a bastion of the Enlightenment (Documenta's central exhibition site, the Fridericianum, was the first public European museum), and heavily reconstructed after World War II, Kassel is an uneven city, with pockets of dismal, austere buildings offset by some serious Caspar David Friedrich-worthy Landschaften." And Nicolas Trembley and Sarah Thornton have been running around Basel.

Ray Pride snaps shots of directors with movies currently in theaters.

Online grinning tip. The second installment of Matthew Guerrieri's Strauss and Mahler Re-Enact Your Favorite Movie Moments, via Alex Ross.

Online viewing tip. Jem Cohen directs Patti Smith covering "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Supposedly. I can't be sure: "We're sorry, content protected by Digital Rights Management is not available on the Macintosh." How very AOL. Anyway, that's via Rex Sorgatz, who also has an online browsing tip, a Steampunk slide show at Wired News, introduced by Gareth Branwyn.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Kate Stables has half a dozen at the Guardian.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Boyd van Hoeij's got five trailers at european-films.net.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Momus has found clips from John Berger's "brilliant, polemical 1972 television series Ways of Seeing." Via Owen Hatherley, who suggests, "Lines could be drawn from here to Chris Marker and Adam Curtis."

Critics, weekend edition.

"Roger Ebert, who's 65 this week, began writing on movies 40 years ago, mainly as a critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, but syndicated to some 200 newspapers," writes Time's Richard Corliss in a lengthy and personal appreciation. "He's created a body of work - virtually all of it available on his handsome, helpful website - that is as broad, deep, reliable and rewarding as it is insanely prolific.... No one has done as much as Roger to connect the creators of movies with their consumers. He has immense power, and he's used it for good, as an apostle of cinema."

Meanwhile, Jim Emerson, who edits that terrific site, notes that Ebert has published his first "Answer Man" column in a year. It's great to see America's best known movie evangelist on the up and up.

"[T]alk to filmmakers, no matter what their stripe, and all the talk of new media fades fast," reports Variety's Anne Thompson. "They want the same things indies wanted a few decades ago: reviews from established critics."

Matt Riviera lists five bloggers who make him think.

There's no comfortable segue into this: David Poland and Ray Pride remember entertainment journalist Andy Jones. Jeffrey Wells points to two more remembrances.

Online listening tip. Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with William Goss of eFilmCritic and Hollywood Bitchslap.

Other fests, other events.

The International Film Festival of Catalonia, known to most as Sitges, has announced several titles lined up for its 40th anniversary edition, October 4 through 17. The opening film will be Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage, produced by Guillermo del Toro (more on that one here), and the poster's imagery is dedicated to Blade Runner.

"'How can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?' So asked Jean-Luc Godard, and that for me, too, is the essence of the John Wayne problem." In the Voice, J Hoberman previews MoMA's tribute (through June 30) and other NYC goings on.

Michael Guillén talks with Alan Cumming about his Frameline 31 entry, Suffering Man's Charity. Also: A talk with Eytan Fox about The Bubble.

Frameline runs through tomorrow, and at SF360, Claire Faggioli talks with producer Andrea Sperling, recipient of this year's Frameline Award. Also: "Yerba Buena Center for the Arts over the next two weeks hosts the series Muppets, Music, and Magic, a Jim Henson career retrospective designed by The Jim Henson Legacy and Brooklyn Academy of Music to please not only Muppet-lovers but also people whose tastes stretch beyond."

Mike Everleth at Bad Lit: "First it was Austin's turn earlier in the month and now this weekend is the San Antonio Underground Film Festival."

"This weekend, the Long Now Foundation will host the North American debut of 77 Million Paintings, a new digital art installation by renowned visual artist and musician Brian Eno." Michael Calore has the story - and great pix - at Wired News.

The Badischer Kunstverein will launch its program under the new director Anja Casser on June 28 with the group exhibition Projecting Time (through August 26), featuring, in cooperation with the Kinemathek Karlsruhe, a presentation of The Halfmoon Files.

For Vue Weekly, Carolyn Nikodym previews the Edmonton Film Society's series, Noteworthy Musicals, opening Monday with The King and I and closing on August 27 with Singin' in the Rain.

"On June 12, 2007, Hollywood Industryites packed the Directors Guild of America Theater, eager to view the seven winners of UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television's Directors Spotlight competition," reports Kim Adelman for indieWIRE. "With a roster of past student winners including Alexander Payne (Sideways), Todd Holland (Malcolm in the Middle), Shane Acker (9) and Gil Kenan (Monster House), the annual screening has a reputation for being a do-not-miss event for those interested in identifying student filmmakers with big league potential."

Online viewing tip. Monocle talks with architect and author James Sanders about Celluloid Skyline, the exhibition at Grand Central Station that's just wrapped. Via Coudal Partners.

LAFFing weekend.

"Press is quite possibly what could turn the tide" for the Los Angeles Film Festival, suggests Leonard Klady. Also at Movie City News: Picks for the weekend.

"Everyone I know who sees it tells other people to see it. It's totally a word-of-mouth experience," Hot Docs programmer Sean Farnel tells Gina Piccalo in the Los Angeles Times. The film is SXSW jury prize-winner Billy the Kid (site).

Also in the LAT: "By most accounts, the American versions of [Theo] Van Gogh's emotionally candid movies about troubled relationships never would have been made had Van Gogh not been slain." John Horn on Steve Buscemi's remake of Interview. Site. Sundance reviews.

Updated.

"They are of the cinema of acute, penetrating observation and nuance rather than explicit exposition." Kevin Thomas on the seven New Crowned Hope films: Tsai Ming-Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century, Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa, Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Dry Season (more from Sheila Johnston in the Telegraph) and: "South African filmmaker Teboho Mahlatsi<'s 20-minute Meokgo and the Stickfighter is a lush, economical tale of magical realism that looks as if it could be taking place in a Yosemite winter a century ago. Paz Encina's Paraguayan Hammock evokes the anguish of an aging peasant couple coming to terms with the loss of their son in a 1935 war with Bolivia."

Update: AJ Schnack has notes and pix from his second day at the festival.

Platform. Preview.

"On Monday, the first edition of the Platform International Animation Festival will kick off at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, bringing hundreds of out-of-town and local animators together in a one-of-a-kind conclave of competitions, exhibitions, lectures, panels, workshops and parties," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy. "Platform's creators have taken pains to place special emphasis on techniques that go beyond the cinema: Internet animation; animation for cell phones and other small-screen devices; video game animation; and, uniquely, large-scale installations that literally take movies out into the streets. There's nothing like it anywhere else."

He also talks with founding director Irene Kotlarz and presents an annotated list of highlights.

Catch Drawn!'s Ward on one of two or both panels, too. Through June 30.

HRWIFF + Manufactured Landscapes.

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival rolls on in New York through June 28, while one of its selections, Manufactured Landscapes, carries on playing at Film Forum through July 3.

"The screening of the New Visions program at this year's HRWIFF marks the inauguration of the series showcasing upcoming documentaries that were made in collaboration with the Sundance Documentary Film Program." Acquarello samples two previews. As for Manufactured Landscapes, "Inevitably, what emerges from [Edward] Burtynsky's sublime, yet implicitly ignoble transformed landscapes is an uneasy self-reflection that exposes our own implication in perpetuating these insatiable cycles of consumption and (non)disposal, a reminder that the price of industrialization is not a finite measure, but a fulcrum point in a zero sum ecological balance."

"Our Daily Bread discovers otherworldly environments and depersonalized regiments behind the curtain of modern agricultural processes; Manufactured Landscapes investigates those of the entire world," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for indieWIRE.

"Manufactured Landscapes may tell you more about how the 21st century world actually works than you really want to know, but it's a heartbreaking, beautiful, awful and awesome film," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

"When put into a broader social context—specifically, when [director Jennifer] Baichwal explores the origins and consequences of all the waste Burtynsky finds—the movie becomes yet another 'isn't it a pity' doc, where the damnable inequity of globalization provides an occasion for muted, impotent rage," writes the AV Club's Noel Murray. "There have been good documentaries made in that mold, but they all explored the subject in more depth."

"Its attention to visual style, rare for a contemporary documentary, pays off," writes Steve Erickson at Nerve. "Like some of the best recent Chinese films (Still Life, West of the Tracks), Manufactured Landscapes offers a unique perspective on the country's industrial revolution."

Recently: Manohla Dargis (New York Times), Gerald Peary (Boston Phoenix), Jason Bogdaneris (L Magazine) and Jim Ridley (Village Voice).

Earlier: Brian Darr at Sundance.

NYAFF, 6/22.

The New York Asian Film Festival is set to open any minute now with Zhang Yang's Getting Home.

For the Voice, Nathan Lee previews a high-kicking chorus line of the fest's offerings: Park Chan-wook's I'm a Cyborg But That's OK, Takashi Miike's Big Bang Love (more from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog), Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Retribution, Shinya Tsukamoto's Nightmare Detective, Chalerm Wongpim's Dynamite Warrior, Johnny To's Exiled, John Woo's Hard Boiled, Patrick Tam's After This Our Exile and Kenta Fukasaku's Yo-Yo Girl Cop.

For more on many of these titles - plus Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet, Ryu Seung-wan's City of Violence, Cheang Pou-soi's Dog Bite Dog (more from David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back), Zhang Yang's Getting Home and Han Jae-rim's The Show Must Go On - see Mark Asch's overview for the L Magazine.

Meanwhile, for the Reeler, Steve Erickson talks with Johnny To.

Update, 6/23: Steve Erickson's overview for Gay City News.

LAFF, 6/22.

Doug Cummings introduces Robert Koehler's Los Angeles Film Festival recommendations with an observation worth noting: "With everyone lamenting the death of newspapers - premature though it may be - it amazes me that serious bloggers continue to get shut out of many festivals. I know I'm not the only cinephile who considers the internet my lifeblood for festival news and commentary, so we can only hope festivals continue to adapt to such cultural developments as quickly as possible. Thanks go to the LAFF publicity office for being ahead of the curve."

"Author James Carroll is an idiosyncratic Catholic, a former priest who still celebrates his faith yet rejects the very roots of its doctrine, viewing Christianity's promise of eternal life as 'destructive' and the cross as a symbol of Roman Emperor Constantine's lust for power," writes Gina Piccalo. "This unorthodox perspective drives Constantine's Sword, a documentary premiering Sunday at the Los Angeles Film Festival about Carroll's personal discovery of anti-Semitism in the Catholic church and its influence in today's evangelical Christian movement."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Fred Schruers on Rodger Grossman's debut, What We Do Is Secret, in which Shane West portrays Darby Crash.

And Sheigh Crabtree on the documentary Second Chance Season: "One part inspirational family sports drama and one part wrenching struggle between forgiveness and revenge, director Daniel H Forer's documentary is a sure-footed account of a gregarious mother and father who raise one athletic prodigy but lose two other sons to the streets of Los Angeles."

"Thursday night's opening film was the hugely entertaining period biopic Talk to Me, starring Don Cheadle as loudmouth streetsmart Petey Green, an ex-con deejay in 60s and 70s Washington DC, and suave suit Chiwetel Ejiofor as his boss/manager." Anne Thompson has more at her blog.

Film Music Blog-a-Thon.

Scheduled to begin yesterday and continuing through the weekend, the Film Music Blog-a-Thon hosted by Damian at Windmills of My Mind got off to an early start on Wednesday and has already crescendo'd impressively, with over a dozen voices raised so far.

Damian's also contributed entries on "a few 'personal musical journeys' with film composers that I think are significant (John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and Danny Elfman)."

Colma: The Musical.

"A sort of anti-High School Musical, [Colma: The Musical] follows three friends in the flush of their new post-high school freedom, who are also caught in the headlights of their as-yet-uncertain-yet-fast-approaching-futures." At SF360, Matt Sussman talks with director Richard Wong and composer/writer/actor HP Mendoza.

Glen Helfland also meets them - for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where Dennis Harvey writes: "The worthy underdog is usually a little overrated; one current case in point is another movie musical, Once. But in the case of Colma: The Musical, over the past 15 months a number of newspaper writers and people at subsequent festivals have been as surprised and delighted as I was at that first screening. Now Richard Wong's movie is at a theater near you - at least in San Francisco, with New York City and Los Angeles showings soon to come - and it's possible it could become a feel-good sleeper around the nation. Like, well, Once."

Jeffrey M Anderson finds it "surprisingly delightful, hilarious... The acting is all above average, but Paul Kolsanoff as Billy's boss is a comic standout."

"Although nowhere near as technically accomplished as American Graffiti, Diner or even Clerks, Colma: The Musical shares with them a convincing empathy for what it's like to be on the precipice of adulthood, totally rattled about making the leap," writes the San Francisco Chronicle's Ruthe Stein. "And Colma offers something the earlier coming-of-age sagas don't: musical numbers and graveyards. It deserves to be seen for its sheer originality and audacity."

Schwarzenberger. Berlin Alexanderplatz.

First, it's an honor to have as a regular reader someone who works with the probably the greatest DVD label in the world, the Criterion Collection. Pointing to the June 10 entry, "Fassbinder's legacy @ 25," Issa Clubb comments that I've been "mostly laying out the case for the plaintiff, as it were," which is true insofar as I've been following and reporting on coverage in the German press of what more or less amounts to two ongoing stories: a rift between the Fassbinder Foundation and several people who worked with Fassbinder; and a dispute over the level of brightness in the restoration of Berlin Alexanderplatz. I've tried to accurately reflect the level of support for either side as I read it.

In the meantime, too, I've been wondering if Criterion, which reportedly plans to release its Alexanderplatz package before the end of this year, has been hearing from concerned cinephiles who've been tipped off, one way or the other, regarding the brouhaha. According to Issa Clubb, they have. One possible and certainly significant response is a translated interview with Alexanderplatz cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger, who, supervising the restoration, has undoubtedly worked with tremendous dedication and passion. "This is the result, which I can endorse from the bottom of my heart. If someone has a different opinion, he's entitled to that - but then his or her vision has nothing to do with the film as we shot it and as it was meant to be."

No single voice in the debate can carry more weight than Schwarzenberger's, but whether it'll withstand the pressure of collective critique is still an open question. It doesn't help, unfortunately, that the rather fawning questions in this interview have been posed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which, as pointed out in that June 10 entry, has a vested interest in this restoration.

AFI 100. Again.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of that controversial list of the top 100 movies of all time, itself a celebration of the 100th year of movies back then, the American Film Institute (celebrating its 40th anniversary) has gone and conducted its poll and done that list right up all over again. Edward Copeland posts both lists for comparison and comments: "Some additions are welcome, some omissions are shameful and some newcomers are a joke. Other deletions are welcome (Sorry Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Fargo, but you didn't belong.) The rise and fall of some titles are interesting, more for the drops than the sudden rises (though I have to ask how, in the new list, The Deer Hunter jumped so many spots when it only grows weaker over time). My happiest news: The General's rise from not on the list all the way to No 18. The Searchers' huge leap is also welcome and impressive."

Updated through 6/27.

Jeffrey Wells points to more math going on at Wikipedia and remarks: "The AFI has been whorishly shopping its once-distinguished brand on the tube for years with best-this and best-that presentations, and none of their efforts at self-promotion signifies a damn thing (except for their own diminishment)."

More commentary: Brendon Connolly (film ick), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Drew Morton (Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope), Chuck Tryon (Chutry Experiment) and Patrick Walsh (Cinematical). And at the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz adds a few more lists.

Updates, 6/22: More commentary: ST VanAirsdale (Reeler), Kevin Lee, Michael Newman, Nathaniel R and - here's a must-read: the Self-Styled Siren.

Glenn Kenny lists 100 "great American movies" that didn't make the list.

Update, 6/23: Keith Phipps gets a conversation rolling at the AV Club.

Update, 6/24: A few of Dave Micevic's mentions of what films should be on the list but aren't what films are but shouldn't be may surprise you.

Updates, 6/25: Edward Copeland presents his own 100.

The Siren's Alterna-List: "This list is not, most definitely not, a gathering of the All-Time Greats, though there are certainly some that could qualify.... So, organized by category, here are 100 American films the Siren would love to see get some love from the AFI."

Adam comments at Another Green World.

Update, 6/26: The Alliance of Women Film Journalists draws up their own list, too.

Updates, 6/27: The Shamus posts his own 100.

"I filled out the AFI Top 100 ballot," writes Variety's Anne Thompson, and of course, she posts that ballot on her blog. "I realized that some movies had slipped in my estimation over the ten years since I last filled out the same list. But one director had come up in my estimation considerably, which surprised me: Capra. His oeuvre is holding up really well."

Flickhead presents his 100 - in chronological order, no less.

Damien's got 100 at Windmills of My Mind.

"European sensibilities and styles - imported via Sjostrom, Stroheim, Curtiz, Wyler, Wilder, Lubitsch, so many, so many - were essential to the evolution of Hollywood, and hence, American moviemaking," argues Glenn Kenny.

Black Sheep.

"Equal parts The Birds, Jurassic Park and The Host, Black Sheep is more a satire on the horror genre than it is a cautionary tale about genetic engineering-gone-wrong in the New Zealand countryside," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine. "It continually reinvents the most clichéd elements of the horror genre, using easily recognizable and iconic shots from any number of other films... but this time with sheep."

Updated through 6/22.

"The cartoonish overkill that often makes Black Sheep a hoot proves wearying over an entire movie: The broad comedy and one-note characters eventually cancel out the horror, leaving elaborate set pieces that are more frantic than funny," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "But writer-director [Jonathan] King deserves credit for wringing every ounce of ovine mayhem from his sheep-for-brains premise. There is no such thing as an unfunny cutaway to a sheep."

"Black Sheep partisans have continuously noted the similarities between King's impressive debut and the nutty low-budget mayhem that sustains Peter Jackson's Dead Alive and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies, and the comparisons are apt," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "But Jonathan King also applies the subtler technique of an older forebear - Val Lewton, the visionary producer behind significant creepers of the 1940s like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie."

"King wants to sizzle your biscuits a little, like any decent horror-phile, but his bloodshed and impressive creature effects (by the WETA Workshop, of Lord of the Rings fame) are folded into a good-humored pastiche whose ingredients are a bit of Night of the Living Dead, a little Island of Dr Moreau, a fair dose of The Fly and a topping of self-deprecating Kiwi humor," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It reminds me more than a little of Frogs, a 1972 movie with Ray Milland and Sam Elliott whose half-intentional comedy I did not appreciate at the time."

Updates, 6/22: "The gold standard for the modern monster movie remains Tremors, which combines genuine thrills with clever plot twists and distinctive characters," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "By contrast, Black Sheep has a bunch of one-note living jokes running around willy-nilly while being chased by killer sheep."

"[T]he movie is less a running gag than an ingenious prank," counters Sam Adams for the Los Angeles Times. "As if fulfilling the terms of an undisclosed bet, Black Sheep sets out to prove that the response to horror-film grammar is so ingrained that the right combination of signals can set our hearts racing even as our minds giggle."

"Turning a notoriously docile, none-too-intelligent species into a source of menace is an impressive, if improbable, feat of filmmaking," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"Black Sheep does manage to generate some suspense in the midst of its general silliness, though not as successfully as Shaun of the Dead, which remains the current gold standard of the genre," writes the LA CityBeat's Andy Klein.

Bilge Ebiri at Nerve: "In the end, Black Sheep delivers just what it promises: A movie about killer sheep. For better, and for worse."

"I laughed, my guilt over what I might be doing subsiding with each new shock comedy bit, usually something involving severed limbs munched on by the newly deranged wool providers, a twist on a familiar horror movie cliche, or the inevitable sheep shagging jokes, which the movie takes a while to get to," writes Robert Cashill. "There is also the entirely incidental beauty of the setting, shot in ravishing widescreen by Richard Bluck, and a cheerful rubbishing of eco- and psychiatric-speak as Henry and his hippy-dippy 'lunatic greenie' girlfriend Experience (Danielle Mason) find love on the run from herds of ravening sheep."

LAW & LAT. LAFF.

The Los Angeles Film Festival, opening today and running through July 1, is "emerging as our most intelligent and ambitiously programmed - indeed, our most essential - annual film event," declares Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "It's also the one with the greatest sense of connection to the city itself."

Keep clicking on from that page for overviews of the various sections: music videos, Larry Fessenden, "the most gifted American horror auteur to emerge since the g(l)ory days of John Carpenter and George Romero" (Foundas), appearances by Paul Mazursky and Ulu Grosbard, "two provocative and artfully made political films," Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent and Penny Woolcock's The Death of Klinghoffer (James C Taylor), a spotlight on Romania, the "LA Destroys Itself" series of disaster flicks and the arrival of New Crowned Hope in Los Angeles.

Then, the individual films get blurbed in the LAW's "From A to Y" listings and "Prisons, Punks and Don Quixote," the critics' guide to the best of the fest.

As noted earlier, the Los Angeles Times, a major sponsor, began its LAFF tracking a few days ago. Today, Susan King has a fine overview for those who don't have the time to comb through the LAW package and Chris Lee talks with this year's artist in residence, Pharrell Williams.

1408.

"There was every reason going in to believe that 1408, based on a Stephen King short story, would be nothing but a Shining rip-off made on the cheap," begins Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "The screenwriters are collectively responsible for Reign of Fire, Problem Child 3 and Agent Cody Banks; John Cusack has proven he's not above taking a gig for the paycheck; and director Mikael Håfström's sole English-language film was the dreadful Derailed. Yet it's a surprisingly effective movie."

Updated through 6/22.

"[E]ven lightweight King has some pulpy verve to offer, and 1408's mixture of supernatural hullabaloo and spiritual awakening is sturdily propped up by Cusack, whose performance is equal parts caustic cynicism and empathetic turmoil, and whose presence in yet another efficient B movie (after The Ice Harvest) confirms an admirable dedication to genre craftsmanship," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

Mark Olsen has a good talk with King for the Los Angeles Times. King's pro-Hostel: Part II ("it makes you uncomfortable, but good art should make you uncomfortable"), but he has his reservations about Captivity ("an exploitation film about Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, and I don't want to see it"), and of course, he remains teed-off at Kubrick for The Shining. As for 1408, "I thought it was terrifying. It works on that level and it should."

Update: "Fairly typical of Stephen King's short stories, 1408, which playfully concerns itself with the culture of paranormal tourism, has some terrific ideas, an intriguing set of establishing circumstances, and gradually fizzles out when the spooky stuff inevitably takes over," writes Josef Braun in Vue Weekly. "1408 the movie is the same but more, particularly the fizzling out part."

Updates, 6/22: "Originally written as a how-to exercise for his book On Writing, 1408 (add the numbers, folks) stands as one of King's best short stories," writes Andrew Wright in the Stranger. "Rather surprisingly, the inevitable movie adaptation doesn't suck, due to relentless pacing and direction that finds some ingenious methods of visualizing the story's literary whim-whams. Before it finally succumbs to CGI bloat in the last act, it offers up one of the creepiest hours in recent memory, boosted by a central performance by John Cusack at his most endearingly neurotic."

"[M]ore psychological thriller than outright horror," notes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

Carina Chocano, writing in the Los Angeles Times, concurs and adds: "Considering that 1408 is essentially a movie about the relationship between a man and a room, the ever more squinty and solid Cusack seems a felicitous casting choice. What evil hotel suite worth its salt could resist trying to rattle that supercilious squint?"

"Whether what's happening is real, a hallucination, or something between ceases to matter at a certain point, because the ever-changing rules follow no particular logic, and the bubble bursts on these illusions just as arbitrarily," writes a disappointed Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"For its first half, 1408 is genuinely scary, filled with off-kilter framings, images glimpsed only briefly, and continual hints that Mike's ordeals are linked to his former traumas," writes the LA CityBeat's Andy Klein. "But there's a certain point about halfway in when the setting moves from a believable universe to a wholly unrecognizable one and our ability to connect emotionally with what we're seeing is weakened."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek goes along with it a tad further: "For the first two-thirds, 1408 worked on me, largely because of Cusack's performance: His face is so searchingly earnest that you hate to see the horrors of this nasty little room - and of his own past - wreak havoc on him. But the movie attempts a false ending that doesn't quite work; the picture feels prolonged, dragged out, and its ennui lessens the impact of some of its more terrifying fillips."

"1408 is actually one of the best Stephen King adaptations in quite some time," writes major King fan Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

"For the most part, it gleefully scalpels your nerves," writes Mike Russell.

"In 1960, 1408 would have been 70 minutes long, (Vincent Price would have played the [Samuel L] Jackson role), which is the right length for a cheeky, spooky movie based on a short story about a demented hotel room," writes Matt Singer for the Reeler. "Today, the thing has to run 95 minutes, and be loaded with lots of added gags and special effects that pad its length but actually diminish its total effect. There are only so many things a killer domicile can do to a man before you just throw up your hands."

Broken English.

"Zoe Cassavetes's Broken English is really just a Whit Stillman-like rendering of an episode of Sex and the City (imagine if Carrie Bradshaw and the gang went to Film Forum instead of Cafeteria), but every time it lets [Parker] Posey take center stage with her inimitable range of expression (which in this case, is more often for dramatic effect), you're convinced you're watching something more than a chick flick without KT Tunstall tunes," writes Jason Clark at Slant.

Updated through 6/25.

"There are key similarities between Nora's foggy neurosis and the characters Posey recently played in Fay Grim and The Oh in Ohio; if urban female confusion is the new suburban male confusion, surely Posey's lost and wary eyes are the face of that angst," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. And she's also not the only one to mention that "in paraphrasing the final lines of [Before Sunset] for Broken English's closing scene, the director only highlights how her film suffers in comparison."

Posey's "performance just about makes up for a leap-of-faith ending that is hard to embrace," writes Nicolas Rapold for the L Magazine.

Robert Cashill finds it "a tough-love charmer, with Posey's finest performance to date."

Earlier: "Sundance. Broken English."

Updates, 6/21: Susan King talks with Cassavetes for the Los Angeles Times.

"This is an itchily neurotic film that fights its genre to a draw, with a female protagonist so steeped in pharmaceutical despair she's one short step away from a Jacqueline Susann novel or an early Pedro Almodóvar movie," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Broken English is interesting exactly to the extent that Cassavetes can't control it; I doubt she realizes how repellent and terrifying her main character really is, or that the pair of female best friends depicted in the film can't stand each other and just haven't realized it yet."

Updates, 6/22: Broken English is a "textbook example of an Indiewood film: a Hollywood fantasy wrapped in plain brown paper," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "It departs from the studio-financed romantic-comedy template in just one, unfortunately fatal respect: it makes a point of pride out of rejecting cliché, then swoons into its embrace."

"A simple, empathetic script and calm, assured directing display a level of emotional honesty and character development that's confoundingly rare these days, especially when it comes to female characters," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"The surprising part is how ridiculously pleasing Broken English manages to be," writes Marcy Dermansky. "The first third and then the last fairly sing: funny, smart, well-paced, with Parker Posey at her finest."

Update, 6/25: For IFC News, Aaron Hillis talks with Zoe Cassavetes: "[I]t was so nice to have Gena Rowlands in the movie, but it was also nice to share that experience with my mom. I talked to my brother a lot, and he said, 'You gotta call her Gena. It's not going to go down well if you call her Mom.'"

You Kill Me.

"High-concept and very low-impact, You Kill Me is almost quaint in its unassuming take on humanizing a hitman with life-crisis black humor, a gambit so old it's got whiskers," writes Nicolas Rapold for the L Magazine. "A modest affair, You Kill Me offers [Ben] Kingsley the chance to linger over what otherwise might be a side character, and lets director John Dahl revisit with a softer heart, the small scale and odd coupling of underworld and real world that good old The Last Seduction played for devilish castration fantasy."

Updated through 6/23.

For the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas, though You Kill Me "has the outward appearance of a return to form, it may in fact be the worst thing [Dahl's] ever done - an inert, tone-deaf mélange of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under."

"Co-writers for a dozen years now, [Christopher] Markus and [Stephen] McFeely, both 37, are among the blessed few - about 1800 are counted in any given year by the Writers Guild of America, West - who get paid to write Hollywood pictures," writes Michael Cieply. They're the team behind the Narnia pictures, and now, and You Kill Me "was written years ago by the pair, who dreamed up its premise in 1995 while finishing a master's program in writing at the University of California, Davis."

Interviews with Dahl: Capone (AICN), Nick Dawson (Filmmaker) and Andrew O'Hehir (Salon).

At the Reeler, Chris Willard reports on the New York premiere and points to the first eight minutes of the film.

Updates, 6/22: "With its shadows and gallows humor, You Kill Me goes about as dark as a comedy can go before turning into tragedy or self-parody," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Extra special: "Téa Leoni, whose sexy, shaded turn as Frank's improbable inamorata, Laurel, makes you regret all the roles this talented actress hasn't nabbed - or perhaps aren't being written for women. Under-realized, with no apparent friends and farcical taste in men, the character makes no sense, but it doesn't matter. You believe her, partly because Ms Leoni makes cozying up to danger seem like the most natural thing in the world, partly because it's just nice having this actress around."

"We've seen the inner lives of hit men and mobsters rendered innumerably in recent years on film and television, but You Kill Me does it in a satisfyingly comedic way, loaded with easily identifiable idiosyncrasies," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

"Best known for sly neo-noirs like The Last Seduction and Red Rock West, Dahl chooses to dial down the tone until it's dry enough to kindle a brushfire, but the film is one of those rare occasions where going too low-key means missing many comic possibilities," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"It's small scale, low budget and not straining for big yuks," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "On the other hand, it's an unprepossessing delight, especially after Frank meets Laurel (Tea Leoni)."

Update, 6/23: Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with Dahl and Leoni.

Shorts, 6/20.

Nikki Finke hears that Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese have teamed up for a 9th time.

"Before he gets started on those two new Pee Wee Herman movies, Paul Reubens will have a role in a new Todd Solondz film. And no, that's not a joke," Erik Davis assures us at Cinematical.

Ted Z has news regarding Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr Fox.

"Woody Allen has held a secret premiere of his new film Cassandra's Dream in Spain," reports the BBC.

More up-n-coming news via Jeffrey Overstreet: "Theo Angelopoulos's Dust of Time will star Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz and Valeria Golino."

"Clive Owen is to play Philip Marlowe in the first of a planned series of films about Raymond Chandler's classic private eye, to be directed by graphic novel writer turned director Frank Miller."

Also in the Guardian:

• Ginou Richer lived with Edith Piaf for 15 years - "sometimes she'd mother me, sometimes I'd mother her" - and served as a script consultant on La Vie en Rose. She tells Hannah Westley that Marion Cotillard "has it exactly, the way she walks, talks, her way of laughing."

• "British women are flocking to Bollywood right now, desperate to be the next Aishwarya Rai," writes Wersha Bharadwa. "Despite the fact that few of them are fluent in Hindi or have an acting background, many producers and directors seem keen to cast them in leading roles, often over and above the thousands of Indian women who pour into Mumbai's Film City each month."

• Mark Lawson talks with Matthew Macfadyen about, among other things, Frost/Nixon and keeping his flesh firm during the making of Pride & Prejudice: "[Y]ou don't want a flabby Darcy. But it was quite a shock. As soon as I wasn't in a scene, I'd be taken running round the park. And I was put on a low-fat diet. Every morning, this black cool-box would arrive with everything I was allowed to eat for the day. It was reassuring to find that I could get in shape quickly if I needed to, but it made you think about what women go through in this business."

Aaron Hillis on Longing: "Deceptively minimal, as if anticipated sequences were excised from the final cut, Valeska Grisebach's magnificent and moving chamber drama is a roaring mouse that offers ample room for extrapolation though its episodic editing, with Dardenne-style observations so astute that typically inexpressible passions and angst become raw and visible."

Also in the Voice, Julia Wallace on the "absorbing" The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

"The most intriguingly circumscribed romance of the year," announces Ed Gonzalez at Slant, "In Between Days is also an oddly gripping show of sexual one-upmanship, and something of a fuck-you to reprocessed cheese like When Harry Met Sally that passes for an authentic depiction of the way genders relate to one another."

"The term 'sports film' doesn't do justice to the director Szabolcs Hajdu's movie White Palms, a punishing, beautiful drama about a troubled 30-something Hungarian gymnast who gets a job as a coach training 2001 Calgary Olympic hopefuls," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. More from Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on 12:08 East of Bucharest: "[Corneliu] Porumboiu's film, sadly funny though it sometimes is, is an act of daring in itself, challenging our expectations of drama in order to show us that, for most people most of the time, life is not dramatic; it is only - if they are lucky - sequential." Further down that same page, you'll find takes on Private Property and Ten Canoes.

Some of the most important things a director can do are practically invisible even to specialists," writes Dan Sallitt. "Case in point: Pretty Poison, directed by Noel Black from a script by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.... Black has a pleasing penchant for serene long shots that not only place the characters squarely in the bucolic-but-industrial small town environment, but also give full play to Anthony Perkins's unique bodily grace."

Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "American Cannibal the documentary proves far more fascinating than American Cannibal the failed reality show ever could have been."

Dave Misevic posts notes on The Saragossa Manuscript, Day of the Jackal, Vanishing Point and Tristana.

In the L Magazine, Jason Bogdaneris reviews Anthem: An American Road Story, which features "some compelling footage with the likes of Studs Terkel, Hunter S Thompson or George McGovern, along with more obscure activist types who thankfully have a more cynically tinged view of 'The American Dream,'" and Nixon: A Presidency Revealed. Plus, Phillippe Aghion's DVD roundup.

"If celebrity is a credit card, then I'm using it," George Clooney tells Tina Daunt who asks him about his political activities for the Los Angeles Times.

For the Scotsman, Jackie Hunter talks with Nicole Kidman about turning 40. Via Movie City News.

The Independent's Paul Taylor has caught the ferociously expensive musical The Lord of the Rings: "Is it now the one show to rule them all? I wonder what the Elvish word is for 'no'."

"What's your personal best - or worst - of food movies? And why?" Variety's The Knife asks and the answers are pouring in.

YouTube on your iPhone? You bet. Reuters reports.

Online viewing tip #1. Harry Knowles points to the trailer for The King of Kong.

Online viewing tip #2. A rerun, yes, but Michael Tully recommends watching Four Eyed Monsters. For free. "As if these kids weren't already indie film trailblazers for the 21st Century, this month they have taken things to a whole 'nother level."

Online viewing tips, round 1. Phil Hoad gathers some colorful musical numbers.

Online viewing tips, round 2. More musical numbers. In this roundup from David Chute, they're from Bollywood classics. Via Anne Thompson.

Fests and events, 6/20.

The 7th Young Guns International Student Film Festival opens in Singapore tomorrow and runs through Saturday.

The first-ever New York City Food Film Festival also opens tomorrow and runs through Saturday. Cathy Erway has a preview at the Reeler.

For the Los Angeles Times, Sheigh Crabtree previews a Los Angeles Film Festival entry: "Like a hyperbolic tale ripped from the cover of Weekly World News, the documentary film Cat Dancers is steeped in exotic animal fur, nude portraits, a love triangle, spandex, headbands and rhinestones and the mauling deaths of Joy and Chuck - exotic-animal trainers who were each killed by Jupiter, a white Bengal tiger with a bad attitude." The fest opens tomorrow and runs through July 1.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, on the occasion of a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts retrospective (click for erratic dates), Michelle Devereaux offers unabashed "semicoherent ravings of a Muppet-philiac [Jim] Henson fangirl." Cheryl Eddy chimes in on this as well.

At Cinema Strikes Back, David Austin previews two more New York Asian Film Festival titles: The Banquet and Hard Boiled.

More capsule reviews from Canfield at Twitch: Retribution, Death Note and Death Note: The Last Name and Nightmare Detective.

Matt Riviera's caught Wolfsbergen at the Sydney Film Festival: "The discreet forces at play in this film - both in form and content - sneak up on the viewer almost imperceptibly. Their cumulative effect packs a mighty emotional punch, all the more powerful for its subtlety."

Firecracker names just a few of the highlights from the freshly announced lineup for the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (July 12 through 21) and Darcy Paquet names more in Variety.

At the Stranger Song, Paul Schrodt reports on the Clearwater Festival, "held this past weekend, is situated about an hour north of New York City, where the hot sun beats down on the shore of the Hudson River, bringing out all the sights and smells of nature and those who love it. Once a year, hippies young and old gather here to groove to folk music and announce their environmental consciousness to the world - or, more likely, to their friends."

AJ Schnack's got stories and pix from CineVegas, "one of the very best festivals I've been to during this nine month festival run I've been on."

At Silverdocs, Sujewa Ekanayake caught Kurt Cobain About a Son, "a wildly creative, original, and beautiful portrait of a talented artist who captured the admiration and the imagination of millions of young people around the world."

Harriette Yahr wraps the Maui Film Festival for indieWIRE.

Bryan Whitefield looks back on the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series for ScreenGrab.

HRWIFF, 6/20.

Briefly previewing a slew of films screening at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival for the New York Press, Jennifer Merin notes that, in effect, all 24 "put human faces on pressing current social and political issues."

"The recipient of this year's HRWIFF Nestor Almendros Prize (as well as the Grand Jury World Cinema Prize for Documentary at Sundance Film Festival), Eva Mulvad and Anja Al-Erhayem's Enemies of Happiness [site] is not only a remarkable portrait of Malalai Joya, but also a bracing and illuminating glimpse into the fragile democracy and uncertain peace that now shape everyday life in Afghanistan," writes acquarello.

Also: "Shot in stark, elegantly composed black and white images, The Violin [site]tonally evokes Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear in its creation of tension through the performance of the mundane." And James Longley's Sari's Mother is "an impassioned and potent reminder that, even in its resigned inevitability, dying with dignity is still a fundamental human right."

"Directed by Jennifer Baichwal and sensitively shot in 16-millimeter film by Peter Mettler, Manufactured Landscapes [site] (which is also the name of a 2003 book of [Edward] Burtynsky's photographs) is partly a Great Man documentary, a record of an artist immortalized at the moment of creation: point, shoot, voilà!" writes Manohla Dargis. "Rather more interestingly, at times, it also appears to be a rather tentative, perhaps even unconscious, critique of that same artist and his vision." More from Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix, Jason Bogdaneris in the L Magazine and Jim Ridley in Voice.

The festival runs on in New York through June 28.

Ambitious Failure Blog-a-Thon.

"No man or woman sets out to make a bad film.... What makes a film that aspires to reach beyond the boundaries of entertainment go down in flames? Who gets to determine its demise? What is an ambitious failure? That's what we're here to find out."

William Speruzzi introduces the Ambitious Failure Blog-a-Thon, running through Sunday. In his own terrific entry on Apocalypse Now, he concludes, "So... ambitious? As all hell. A failure? Not by a long shot but there was a time when it was considered to be, by its creators and by its naysayers and critics. We all came around."

Evan Almighty + summer movies.

"Evan Almighty signals a passing of the torch, as Tom Shadyac's follow-up to his 2004 Jim Carrey vehicle Bruce Almighty heralds Steve Carell as the new face of big-screen comedy," begins Nick Schager at Slant. "As proven by the plummet of Carey's box-office star, it's a station not easily maintained, and one that necessitates far better - and funnier - films than this toothless biblical-themed sequel."

Updated through 6/25.

"At 89 minutes that last a lifetime, it's a sanctimonious sitcom dolled up as the most expensive comedy ever made - $175 mil, so they say, no doubt choking - and marks an unfortunate low point in the history of recent American comedy, as it proves that Steve Carell can't make a Bible school lesson funny. There goes his perfect game," writes Robert Wilonsky in a variety of McVoice titles.

"Evan Almighty runs out of comic invention early, and the filmmakers fall back on what real politicians do when they exhaust their small stash of ideas: brainless piety," writes David Edelstein in New York.

"If Evan Almighty turns into a summer hit, as several competing studio executives predict, the movie could put Hollywood back in the business of making big-budget movies that intentionally embrace sacred subjects," write John Horn and Sheigh Crabtree in the Los Angeles Times. "Christian moviegoers have been an increasingly hot target since [Mel] Gibson's [Passion of the Christ] grossed more than $370 million in 2004. In assembling Evan Almighty, Universal and Shadyac endeavored to create a crowd-pleasing, but nondogmatic, parable. The goal was to appeal not only to fans of star Steve Carell - last seen searching for a willing woman in The 40-Year-Old Virgin - but also liberal environmentalists and more socially conservative audiences who rarely venture into the multiplex."

Meanwhile, also in the LAT, Claudia Eller notes that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - for those of you without kids, that's the book, the 7th and final installment - hits stores 10 days after Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - the movie, based on #5 - hits theaters on July 11. "Warner doesn't expect any spoilers to hurt box-office sales of its upcoming film. Indeed, the flurry of publicity surrounding the release of a new movie and book could feed sales for both of them. But there are two Harry Potter sequels to go over the next three years. Could knowing how it all ends dissuade moviegoers from turning out to see them?"

Jim Hill has lots - lots - more on Pixar's Wall*E, slated for next summer. Via Jeffrey Overstreet.

Updates, 6/21: "With September and the rest of the fall now bursting with major Hollywood releases and Academy Award aspirants, the previously uncrowded terrain of summer no longer looks so hospitable for more serious movies," writes David M Halbfinger in the New York Times. In other words, it's crowded out there.

"Chances are good, [John] Travolta figures, that his name will also help Hairspray at the box office this summer. 'You have to trust that people want to see me be this big fat woman who can sing and dance,' he says." Kevin West talks with him for Style.com. Via Movie City News.

Bill Gibron at PopMatters on Evan Almighty: "Part of the problem lies with the film's tone. This is a subtle smile maker that believes it's an uproarious farce."

"Evan Almighty feels market-researched within a cubit of its life, from its strategic mix of biblical homilies and save-the-planet platitudes to the inevitable heartstring-tugging about how building an ark turns the career-obsessed Evan into a more devoted family man," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "What makes the film transcend its limitations is Carell, whose square, Father Knows Best demeanor belies a supreme comic self-confidence and whose implacability in the face of the movie's CGI-intensive animal antics can be marvelous to behold."

"Of all the summer's big-budget action sequels, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is the least painful," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "At 94 minutes, it not only gets out of your face the quickest, but it seems to have the most light-hearted approach."

Updates, 6/22: "God may be in all things, but lately he seems especially at home in a certain kind of big-budget studio comedy aimed at a very particular market," notes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "That would be, apparently, the market that loves its zingy Bible puns and its adorable CGI versions of all God's creatures but doesn't want to be made to feel too bad about driving that SUV or heating 6,000 square feet in a just-sprouted development."

Evan "combines bland religiosity and timid environmentalism into a soothing Sunday-school homily about the importance of being nice," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, where he's got a few ideas for further installments in the franchise.

"It's a rare movie that offends and bores at the same time," writes Nerve's Bilge Ebiri.

"In Evan Almighty, Carell is on the fast track to becoming Robin Williams, a guy who lost the plot far too early on and began pouring his considerable comic gifts into brain-dead heart-warmers," warns Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "Historically, throwing money at a comedy has never made it funnier, because there's nothing more cost-effective than a joke, and nothing more ruinous than a spectacle trampling all over it."

At the WSWS, David Walsh places Oceans's Thirteen in context of Steven Soderbergh's career.

The Independent talks with Jeffrey Katzenberg about Shrek the Third.

"[L]ike a megachurch pastor in a loud sweater, Evan Almighty excels at telling you unchallenging things you already knew while leaving middle-class assumptions unstirred," writes Mike Russell.

"More a marketing tool than a movie, Evan Almighty attempts to court evangelicals, environmentalists and shots-to-the-groin enthusiasts in a schizophrenic comedy that should please none of them," writes R Emmet Sweeney at the Reeler.

"You're aware that the dialogue is dumb and the situation is lame and yet, thanks to the actors, you laugh anyway," writes Jette Kernion at Cinematical. "And after the movie is over you feel almost like you've been conned, and you're not entirely sure what was so funny in the first place."

Updates, 6/23: In the Telegraph: "The cast of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on what it's like to be a child actor, kissing Daniel Radcliffe, and keeping secrets for JK Rowling."

At AICN, Quint talks David Yates, who'll be directing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

"If it's true that there's an 8-year-old boy inside every man, Transformers is just the ticket to bring the kid out," writes Jay Weissberg for Variety. "Big, loud and full of testosterone-fueled car fantasies, Michael Bay's actioner hits a new peak for CGI work, showcasing spectacular chases and animated transformation sequences seamlessly blended into live-action surroundings. There's no longer any question whether special effects can be made more realistic: The issue is whether disposable actors can be trained to play better with bluescreens."

Update, 6/24: For the Observer, Amy Raphael asks Harry Potter 5 and 6 director David Yates, "Without wishing to sound rude, how did he get the job? 'You're not the first to ask,' he laughs. 'David Heyman, who produces the Harry Potter films, was a big fan of the TV work I'd done. There were certainly other directors in the frame, such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed Amélie. But as Order of the Phoenix is quite edgy and emotional, and it's got a political backstory, the studio saw a fit with me. I think they wanted to wake it up a bit, make it real.'"

Update, 6/25: Quint's visited the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix set and files a long, long report for AICN.

Shorts, 6/19.

James Campbell, in a piece for the Times Literary Supplement calling for the publication of James Baldwin's letters, quotes from one written during an ill-fated Hollywood adventure:

Towards the end of 1968, he commented on his lengthy battle with producers at Columbia Pictures, by whom he had been hired to write the script for a film about Malcolm X:

I hope that they have finally understood the point of my intransigence and are reconciled to the fact that, in essence, they are merely privileged to pay for a movie which I have been hired to make. I have never encountered among any group of people a more eery sense of reality. The California sun has scrambled their brains, the swimming pools have clogged their ears.... They are not wicked: they are simply sublimely incompetent.

The film was never made, though the script was published in 1972 as One Day When I Was Lost (Spike Lee's 1992 film about Malcolm X included a credit to Baldwin).

Via Dwight Garner. Very related, good stuff: An entry from Peter Scholtes, posted last year and chock full of further pointers.

Darren Hughes raises a glass and calls for "A Toast to Cinephilia!" Why? Let him tell you. Terrific story.

Wishing Roger Ebert a happy 65th yesterday, Facets Features pulled up a 1979 one-on-one with Ebert and Werner Herzog.

"Marc Forster will direct the 22nd James Bond film." And of course, Daniel Craig's on board. Michael Speier reports for Variety, where Peter Gilstrap has this: Michael Apted will direct The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third installment in the Narnia series. Andrew Adamson, who directed the first, has also directed the second, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

Tom Hall has a first peek at "Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte De Noël (Tale of Christmas), starring long-time Desplechin collaborator Mathieu Amalric and the luminous Catherine Deneuve."

"William Friedkin's notoriously lurid 1980 thriller Cruising will be getting a theatrical run in New York, LA and San Francisco the first week of September just prior to its debut on DVD." The New York Post's Lou Luminick has more.

David Bordwell considers how late 19th century narrative painting informed early cinema's approach to staging and composition.

"[F]or all the time and dedication [Yoichi] Sai gave to the project, it's a shame to report that the resulting film is a tremendous disappointment." Filmbrain on Blood and Bones.

"A frequent candidate for the finest martial arts movie ever made, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin has at last been rescued from the video bargain bins (where it has long languished under the title Shaolin Master Killer) and given a first-class release by the Weinstein Company's new Asian action label, Dragon Dynasty," cheers Dave Kehr, noting, too, that the "extras include an interview with Gordon Liu (recently seen in two roles in the Kill Bill films) and a commentary track by the musician RZA of Wu-Tang Clan (a Shaolin scholar of some standing) and the Los Angeles film critic Andy Klein."

Also in the New York Times: Though it isn't due in theaters until September, The Kingdom will be popping up here and there throughout the summer, evidently to test audience reactions. According to Michael Cieply, people are reacting well so far to a "popcorn movie" set in Saudi Arabia. Screenwriter Matthew Carnahan "said he wrote drafts that were far more political and 'nihilistic' than the finished film. And he fretted for a time that [director Peter] Berg's insistence on honoring basic values of the buddy-cop genre might be 'dumbing this movie down.' But, Mr Carnahan said, he also came to believe that wrapping his notions about shared responsibility for the world's ills 'in conventional movie plot and conventional movie characters' was the way to reach people."

And Thomas Lin profiles character actor Kim Chan, now in his 90s.

"After a few hours of labor pains, [Knocked Up] climaxes with the birth of what looks like a real live baby. Are newborns allowed to work in the movies?" Turns out, yes. Kathryn Lewis explains in Slate.

"It has been easy to underestimate and underappreciate Ken Loach, by far the most distinctive, profound and consistent filmmaker to work in Great Britain in the last 40 years," writes Michael Atkinson, reviewing the "paradigmatically Loachian" Raining Stones. Also, Andrew Leman's The Call of Cthulhu is "a 'new silent' film, scrupulously faithful to HP Lovecraft's seminal Cthulhu tale (first published in 1928), that runs only 47 minutes but packs enough storytelling and energetic incident to fill out a miniseries."

"Ostensibly a film about the German occupation of Poland during World War II, [Andrzej] Zulawski takes a treatment written by his father (based on his personal experiences) and turns it into an emotionally loaded trip through the guilt of a young man, Michael, who has witnessed the death of his wife and child, himself escaping." Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica on The Third Part of the Night, Zulawski's feature debut and "one of the most powerful war films that I've ever seen at least."

"[S]he's an iconic figure in a country's consciousness, a figure known to millions in a cinema mad country, and one of their great artists. She is Helena Ignez, in New Zealand to celebrate the Cinema Novo at the Film Society, and is impressively known as the Muse of Cinema Novo." And Brannavan Gnanalingam talks with her for the Lumière Reader.

Emine Saner interviews Guillaume Canet for the Guardian.

"The filmmaker who's plunged headfirst into the brutal world of ultimate fighting is... David Mamet." Patrick Goldstein visits the set of Redbelt for the Los Angeles Times.

Dead Silence has Flickhead "spooked and amused from beginning to end."

"Cinematographer Alex Thomson passed away on the 14th," notes Faisal A Qureshi at ScreenGrab. "Thomson's work on Excalibur led to collaborations with some well-known directors such as Michael Mann (The Keep), Ridley Scott (Legend), Michael Cimino (Year of the Dragon) and David Fincher (he was brought in at the last minute on Alien 3). For me though, Thomson's finest work was on Kenneth Branagh's underrated Hamlet."

13 screenplays are set for this fall's Central European Pitch Forum.

Online grinning tip. Karl Hubbuch's 1932 drawing, The Film Star Spends Two Minutes in Her Parents' Garden.

Online browsing tip. Grace Weston's photography, via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #1. Larry Blamire "is currently having "way too much fun" writing, directing, and occasionally acting in his latest creation, Tales From the Pub, six episodes of which are presently available for free viewing on YouTube," reports Tim Lucas.

Online viewing tip #2. "[R]eal places, real people. For the travelogue alone, this gets my full five stars," writes Jason Scott. But the point of the "fantastic" Good Copy Bad Copy, of course, is its wide-ranging pulse-taking of the current state of intellectual property right now. And it's free to view, too. Via Waxy.org.

Online viewing tip #3. The Clintons.

Online viewing tips, round 3. "While it's morbidly amusing to imagine candidates groveling for LonelyGirl15's endorsement, YouTube is slyly attempting to appear democratic without actually accomplishing anything." At 10 Zen Monkeys, Lou Cabron rounds up "YouTube's 5 Sorriest Questions for the 2008 Presidential Candidates."

Online viewing tips, round 2. Mike Plante argues the case for Apart From That. Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Fests and events, 6/19.

At the Lumière Reader, "Tim Wong previews with enthusiasm a winter savior, the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals program, due out to much anticipation this week."

From the Newport International Film Festival, AJ Schnack files "Part 2 of 4 in my series of reports from the June Film Festival Frenzy (TM). Q. Whatever happened to part 1? A. No one promised these would be in order."

Also frenzied these days is Matt Dentler: "It was a blizzard of festivals around America this past week/weekend. You had Silverdocs, CineVegas, Seattle and Nantucket. In some cases (like The Devil Came on Horseback) films and filmmakers attended all four... as exhausting as that may sound." And watching from afar, keeping score, is Michael Tully.

From the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, in New York through June 28: "Combining elements of documentary, re-enactment, serial comics, and even metafilm, Strange Culture poses the integral question of artistic freedom in an age of aggressive and increasingly emboldened federal government prosecution," writes acquarello. Watch the trailer at the DVBlog.

Recent takes on Manufactured Landscapes: Robert Cashill and Bryant Frazer and, at IFC News, Matt Singer.

"Roaring into town to punish evil-doers and please all lovers of the esoteric, the weird and the wonderful, the New York Asian Film Festival returns with a line-up of films from Korea, Japan, China, Pakistan, Thailand and Hong Kong." Matt Singer and Alison Willmore celebrate at IFC News.

The Los Angeles Times previews the Mods & Rockers Film Festival, running July 13 through August 1.

At filmjourney.org, Robert Koehler lists his "final rankings of the films across all sections that I saw before, during and just after Cannes, from best to worst."

The Pop View Silverdocs reviews: Chicago 10, Big Rig, Fredrick Wiseman's State Legislature, Hip-Hop Revolution and Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

Andy Spletzer wraps his SIFF coverage.

Lady Chatterley.

From a French adaptation in 1955 with Danielle Darrieux through, let's say, less auspicious reworkings at the hands of Ken Russell, Sylvia Kristel and dozens of others, DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover hasn't fared too well on film, notes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "The newest Chatterley - a nearly three-hour French-language adaptation, directed by Pascale Ferran - effectively wipes the slate clean," he announces. "Lady Chatterley, which opens Friday, is both sober and sensual, not just a world away from the high-toned smut of its predecessors but also, in its directness and simplicity, an anomaly in the elaborately ornamented genre of the costume drama. In France it has won widespread critical acclaim and five César Awards."

Updated through 6/23.

"Dice it any way you want, this material was, is, and will always be pretty cheap," counters Jason Clark at Slant. "[I]n the pretentious, nondescript hands of Ferran, you're left with a pastoral douche commercial... Since the movie has no expressive qualities, it all just sits there on screen, like a limp phallus."

"I found the first half-hour a snooze, but once I adjusted to the movie's rhythms, I was completely enraptured," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Ferran weaves the love affair into nature, but not in the mystical, sanctified manner of Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. The look is rough-hewn, the feeling casual yet supremely alert."

Earlier: Emmanuel Burdeau in Cahiers du cinéma.

Updates, 6/20: Cathy Erway in the L Magazine: "While some of the pedestrian English gruffness of [Jean-Louis] Coulloc'h's Parkin may be lost in translation, Ferran eschews class divide as a major motive for Connie's [Marina Hands] carnal impulses. The subtle power play between the lovers instead becomes so modern, in fact, that you may not realize how the time has passed."

"The montage-based spectacle of the world joyously blossoming along with the lovers' libidos was the basis for two previous movies that provocatively glossed Lawrence's story: Czech director Gustav Machaty's famously uninhibited Ecstasy, the outrage of 1932, and, 20 years later, Douglas Sirk's necessarily repressed—but more subversive—American version, All That Heaven Allows, J Hoberman reminds us. "Ferran revels in the objective correlative as a means to restore something of the novel's archaic essence. Lady Chatterley's Lover is, after all, a straightforward adult fairy tale about a spellbound princess who wanders into the deep woods and discovers the enchanted rustic cottage where the solitary Green Man makes his home.... This is not so much a love story (and even less a story about love) than it is a movie of passionate loveliness."

Also in the Voice: Leslie Camhi talks with Ferran.

For those in France and Germany: Lady Chatterley will be broadcast Friday evening at 8:40 on arte.

Updates, 6/21: "I defy anyone to watch the closing scene, when Constance and Parkin speak their hearts, without misting up," writes Erica Abeel, introducing her interview with Ferran for indieWIRE.

"Ferran very simply anticipates a future for human relationships with a rush of man-to-woman communication that makes the film - despite its excessive length (nearly three hours) - totally winning," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Ending with the best love scene since George Washington is not proof of Ferran's innocence but of emotional truth."

"It's not just a film in the French language; it's also a French interpretation of a fundamentally English story about class and sex and liberation," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "As presented by Julien Hirsch's moody camerawork, the lush, dripping forests of Clifford Chatterley's estate, so suggestive of somethingness, don't look quite like any English woodlands I've ever seen. While Ferran certainly imbues this landscape with a sort of immanent eroticism, there's also a philosophical, almost diagrammatic element to her film. This is DH Lawrence rendered in the metric system."

With few exceptions, "there's no sense that these characters exist among 'the ruins' of the cataclysmic 'tragic age' Lawrence paints in the book's very first sentences," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot. "So when Lady Chatterley winds up in the arms of the quiet, Brandoesque Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h) nothing is at stake."

Updates, 6/22: "In stripping Lady Chatterley of some of its mystique, Ms Ferran has rediscovered both the novel's originality and the source of its durable appeal, which is not salaciousness but candor," writes AO Scott in the NYT. "She has made a love story that stands on its own, a film whose imaginative freedom perfectly matches the liberation experienced by its heroine."

"Ferran does supply sex as well as sexual symbolism, but the two are equally placid and ruminative, and the Better Homes and Gardens visual approach makes for a mighty sleepy film," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Nicole Ankowski at Nerve: "I admit my MTV-addled brain mometarily cringed when I realized the running time was almost three hours long, but Ferran's ability to immerse her lens in Lady Chatterley's woodsy otherworld makes each minute worthwhile."

Update, 6/23: "Lady Chatterley. Is. One. Of. The. Most. Sluggish. Erotic-Lit. Movies. Ever." Writes. Nick Schager. At Cinematical.

June 29.

As Jeffrey Wells has noted, this coming weekend looks to be a good one for moviegoing in the US, at least on the coasts, and particularly for the summer. At the moment, though, there's quite a hubbub clamoring around two films opening the following week, Ratatouille and Sicko. Write your own rats and health insurance companies punchline.

Updated through 6/24.

I've already noted Justin Chang's rave for the first in Variety, and today, David Poland adds: "Ratatouille is not only the best animated film of this year and the best animated film to land in American theaters since Spirited Away, it is the best work of Brad Bird's already legendary career, and the best American film of 2007 to date."

As for Sicko, Kyle Smith blasts Michael Moore in the New York Post ("Even Moore does not believe what he says, and his films don't bring about change"; oh, well then...), Moore blasts the team behind Manufacturing Dissent, saying, yes, he did interview GM chairman Roger Smith, but long before he started working on Roger & Me, and then, of course, there's the matter of the leaks, Sicko in full, floating around the ether. The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein has the basics; Glenn Kenny, the entertaining commentary.

Update: "Like Stephen Daldry's The Hours, Evening's pseudo-intellectual tone hardly disguises its presumptions about female identity," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Made by dilettantes, for dilettantes, the film might be considered a gay man's fetish art—another opportunity for the Pulitzer Prize-winning [Michael Cunningham] to flaunt his facile understanding of female torment, grotesque class condescension, superfluous preoccupation with time, and reduction of gay experience."

Earlier: Brandon Harris.

"Hyped in Cuba, unveiled in Cannes, pirated on YouTube, and rallied around last week in Sacramento, Calif, by nurses chanting for the health insurance system's demise, Michael Moore's documentary Sicko is finally ready to meet its American audience - or at least some of it - a week ahead of schedule," reports Michael Cieply in the New York Times. "Executives of the Weinstein Company, which provided backing for the film, a documentary indictment of America's health care system, said Sicko would open Friday on a single screen at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square theater in New York."

Updates, 6/20: For Jason Bogdaneris, writing in the L Magazine, Sicko "is vintage Moore, with all that entails: ironic archival footage, maudlin case studies of 'ordinary Americans' caught up in a corrupted system and his trademark aggresive disingenuousness.... But as with his indictment of the gun lobby or the military industrial complex, his assembled half-truths still constitute an unrefutable larger one."

AJ Schnack details the Sicko storm as it gurgles along on several fronts at once. One that hasn't been mentioned here yet: Sicko, according to some, is supposed to pull docs out of some sort of genre slump - which AJ isn't buying into at all. The slump, that is.

Eric Kohn posts a brief clip from Moore's press conference in New York on Tuesday.

Moore will be on Capital Hill today. Kim Masters reports for NPR.

Sicko "presents a devastating indictment of the US healthcare system by letting victimized patients speak for themselves," writes Robert Weissman.

S James Snyder talks with Moore for Time.

Updates, 6/22: Sicko "is the best film in the Moore canon," blogs David Corn for the Nation. "I say this as one who had a mixed reaction to Fahrenheit 9/11. (See here.) This time around, Moore has crafted a tour de force that his enemies will have a tough time blasting (though they will still try). It's not as tendentious as his earlier works. It posits no conspiracy theories. The film skillfully blends straight comedy, black humor, tragedy, and advocacy. You laugh, you cry - literally. And you get mad."

More from Stuart Klawans: "I don't think he's ever before relied so heavily on so many people. They help him make his argument about the failures of American medicine (or, rather, the successes of American insurance-gouging). But to Moore's great credit, the debating points never seem more important than the individuals who back them up."

"Mr Moore has hardly been shy about sharing his political beliefs, but he has never before made a film that stated his bedrock ideological principles so clearly and accessibly," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "When he plaintively asks, 'Who are we?,' he is not really wondering why our traditions of neighborliness and generosity have not found political expression in an expansive system of social welfare. He is insisting that such a system should exist, and also, rather ingeniously, daring his critics to explain why it shouldn't."

"It's perfectly valid to agree with Moore's thesis and still have problems with his filmmaking, his choices of what to put where, his way of eliding certain realities lest they weaken his (already considerably strong) case," argues Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "And while Sicko is, in my view, the most persuasive and least aggravating of all of Moore's movies, it still bears many of the frustrating Moore earmarks - most notably, a deliberately simplistic desire to render everything in black-and-white terms, as if he didn't trust his audience enough to follow him into some of the far more complex gray areas."

"Sicko is creating an awkward situation for the leading Democratic presidential candidates," reports Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in the Los Angeles Times. "Rejecting Moore's prescription on healthcare could alienate liberal activists, who will play a big role in choosing the party's next standard-bearer. However, his proposal - wiping out private health insurance and replacing it with a massive federal program - could be political poison with the larger electorate."

Robert Greenwald: "Michael has used visits to other countries to great effect, making crystal clear that it can be done here, it should be done here, and we have to make sure that it is done here."

"Moore is no shit smear like Ann Coulter, but it's easy to see why people on the right regard him with such contempt," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "His films, like the reportage that tries to pass for legitimate journalism on FOX News, lack for balance. This is not to say that Moore is a liar or isn't critical of his kind (he praises Hillary Clinton's efforts to overhaul health care during her husband's stint as President, then calls attention to how she accepted money from the health care industry while trying to build her political clout as a senator), but he is prone to showing us only one side of any given coin."

Howard Feinstein interviews Moore for Filmmaker.

Moore is "the PT Barnum of human misery who, going back to Roger & Me, has never been one to let details interfere with a good story," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "And yet, as Moore builds his case that health insurance in America is essentially a profit-making enterprise based on bilking the afflicted, the cumulative effect of this material is devastating."

"At first, Sicko comes off as the ultimate distillation of the Michael Moore formula," blogs Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "ut then something interesting happens: the movie ends before Moore can directly confront his boogeyman. There seems to have been a conscious decision on the part of the filmmaker to avoid conflict."

"The high point of yesterday's hearing—the part that most resembled a scene in a Michael Moore movie—occurred when Rep John Conyers (D-Mich), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, spotted Rep Darryl Issa (R-Calif) standing quietly in the back of the room," reports Brian Beutler for Mother Jones. "Conyers thanked Issa 'for making this a bipartisan issue,' and invited him to stand in front of the crowd. Issa gestured in protest, making a cut-throat gesture at his neck, but to no avail. He was cowed into standing with Moore and the Democrats anyhow.... After the hearing, Moore headed out to a theater in Washington's Union Station to hold yet another free screening - food and drink provided - for anybody in the city who has a career lobbying on behalf of private health care companies. No word yet on how many people attended."

Meanwhile: "Brad Bird has done it again," announces Matt Dentler. "And, if the screening we attended means anything, the kids are gonna love it even more than the grown-ups.... Ratatouille is unlike any other Pixar feature before it, yet embodies the distinct tone and spirit that has made them an animation powerhouse."

Updates, 23: Online viewing tips. David Poland lunches with Ratatouille composer Michael Giacchino, plus an accompanying behind-the-scenes featurette.

Jonathan Cohn, author of Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis - And the People Who Pay the Price (site), writes in the New Republic: "[B]eyond all the grandstanding and political theater, the movie actually made a compelling, argument about what's wrong with US health care and how to fix it. Sicko got a lot of the little things wrong. But it got most of the big things right."

"The subject matter is so inherently powerful and frustrating, and the horror stories Sicko relates are so relatable to American audiences, that one almost wishes that Moore had simply allowed his participants to just speak: to let the running camera record these everyday people's woes, to create a nonstop ethnographic view of contemporary American life from the point of view of those who've been let down by its bureaucracies and greed," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Yet asking Moore to unyoke himself from his identity as an entertainer is like imploring Michael Bay to try his hand at EM Forster: it's not gonna happen, and, regardless of our own aesthetic criteria, do we really want it to?"

"As Hillary Clinton found out the hard way, health care isn't a particularly sexy topic, but with his usual populist's touch, Moore has crafted a film that's intellectually and emotionally gripping from start to finish," writes Jürgen Fauth.

Moore "embodies the dumb American abroad in Europe, but his mock astonishment at other health care systems is hugely entertaining. Even the trip to Cuba which has received all the right-wing criticism is much funnier than you would expect," writes J Robert Parks. "And the movie flows beautifully from scene to scene, while never forgetting that the audience isn't a bunch of policy wonks but regular Americans wondering what needs to happen. What needs to happen is that people need to see Sicko. It's a gloriously unbalanced piece of agitprop and required viewing."

Update, 6/24: "As he moved from Sacramento to New York and on to Washington this week, Mr Moore has not just set out to sell tickets to Sicko, his cinematic indictment of the American health care system," reports Kevin Sack for the NYT. "He has also pushed his prescription for reform: a single-payer system, with the government as insurer, that would guarantee access to health care for all Americans and put the private insurance industry out of business. Whether embracing Mr Moore's remedy or disdaining it, elected officials and policy experts agreed last week that the film was likely to have broad political impact, perhaps along the lines of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's jeremiad on global warming. It will, they predicted, crystallize the frustration that is a pre-existing condition for so many health care consumers."

East German Cinema.

"There's a fair amount of barbed wire and bitterness in the films of the German Democratic Republic, but there's much more," writes Robert Horton, introducing our newest primer, "East German Cinema."

Preparing a lecture on Cold War cinema, he's "had the chance to delve into the world of GDR film and found it arresting in many ways - an island unto itself, yet connected to the greater flow of movie history in unexpected flashes."

Shorts, 6/18.

Two recommendations from Mick LaSalle: Antonia Quirke's Choking on Marlon Brando, out next month: "It's a memoir of a woman's love life and how it was influenced by her obsession with male movie stars. But, really, unless you're really, really, really interested in a stranger's sex life, the book is in truth a smart excuse - a shrewd way of arranging - one film critic's best thoughts and ideas about watching movies, and her best comments and observations about particular stars, especially actors.... Quirke is a gifted describer and observer, a genuine and intelligent talent, and a welcome new voice. She's about three seconds from becoming very famous." And the second? Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings.

Another title you might want to seek out for these long summer days: Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton's A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941 - 1953. Girish introduces a few excerpts: "Being Surrealists, Borde and Chaumeton tirelessly hunt for a handful of qualities in these films: oneirism, strangeness, eroticism, moral ambivalence, cruelty, death, sensation. It makes for a delicious read."

Speaking of noir, Cyberpunk Review has details on an upcoming 5-disc Blade Runner "Ultimate Collection" DVD release. Via Fimoculous, also pointing to the "100 Best-Reviewed Sci-Fi Movies."

Speaking of detectives who may or may not fully realize who they are, Twin Peaks, the full series, pilot and all, the "Definitive Gold Box Edition." David Lambert reports for, appropriately enough, TVShowsOnDVD.com. Via Jeffrey Overstreet.

Kung Fu Cinema hears that there will be a Host 2 - but Bong Joon-ho won't be directing it.

"Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Mark Rydell, Owen Roizman and Haskell Wexler are among the film industry veterans slated to be interviewed for inclusion in a new documentary about two of the community's most influential directors of photography, Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond." Carolyn Giardina has more in the Hollywood Reporter.

A dog, a lawsuit, an 11-year-old movie director, and yes, Kevin Bacon. Dana Goodyear tells the odd story in the New Yorker. Also, John Lahr on Neil LaBute's In a Dark House.

For the Los Angeles Times, Bruce Wallace files a profile from South Korea: "A mere two years after arriving in South Korea with a single suitcase and a one-shot contract for a TV commercial, [Daniel] Henney, 27, has become one of the country's most famous TV and movie stars, a heartthrob who can't go out for coffee in Seoul without attracting a (mostly squealing female) crowd."

"Power of Art teaches as much about the power of storytelling on television as it does about the history of art," writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times. "[Simon] Schama, who most recently undertook A History of Britain for the BBC and the History Channel, is taking a faster and more furious look at Western civilization."

At Slant, Nick Schager finds September Dawn's "Mormon characters demonized with such laughable gusto, and its Christian victims cast in such a holy, noble light, that the project quickly feels less like an attempt at historical truth-telling than like shameless anti-Mormon propaganda."

Rob Humanick: "I declare the week of July 15-21 the official 'Movies I've Borrowed for an Unreasonably Long Time' Blog-a-Thon. This date will give anyone interested in participating a full month to get around to those dust-collecting DVDs and tapes - extra props to anyone who can beat my own personal record of a whopping four years (that's right - I borrowed my friend's copy of WarGames at the end of my senior year in high school, and now I'm applying for graduate school)." Via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

And a reminder from William Speruzzi: The Ambitious Failure Blog-a-Thon is still set for Wednesday through Sunday.

Wagstaff's "5 for the Day" at the House Next Door: "My five is heavy on car chases, but anything on wheels may qualify, as long as someone is being chased or doing the chasing."

PopMatters starts listing the "50 DVDs Every Film Fan Should Own."

Online browsing tip. Penguin Design Award winning entries and shortlist. Via the CR Blog.

Online listening tip. "Enemies of Happiness premiered at IDFA last November, where it won the Silver Wolf Award," writes Joel Heller at Docs That Inspire. "The film went on to win the Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary at Sundance in January. I never imagined that six months later I'd be sitting across from the inspiring subject of the film, a 28-year-old woman named Malalai Joya, whose moral courage and strength I deeply admire."

Online viewing tip #1. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay passes along links to Scott Kirsner's conversation with Peter Broderick: "Peter has always been a thoughtful, ahead-of-the-curve commentator on independent film distribution, so I suggest you check these out on Google Video."

Online viewing tip #2. At AICN, Moriarty has a trailer for Jay and Seth vs the Apocalypse. That would be Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen.

Online viewing tip #3. Jim Coudal finds "appropriately silent movie about Colin Ord's forthcoming book on animated optical illusions."

Online viewing tips, round 1. Ed Champion rounds up a heavy handful of apocalyptic downers.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Filmschatten, "films that made (no) history," via wood s lot.

Fests and events, 6/18.

"Bernardo Bertolucci will receive an honorary Golden Lion award at this year's Venice Film Festival," reports the AP.

Acquarello finds the contemporary relevance in The City of Photographers, a documentary about a group that "sought to document the atrocities of the Pinochet regime from within the country." Also caught at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is The Railroad All-Stars, "a thoughtful and poetic tale of self empowerment."

The Los Angeles Film Festival opens Thursday and runs through July 1, and the Los Angeles Times, a major sponsor, is already running a couple of pieces in anticipation. Peter Rainer previews the LA Destroys Itself sidebar: "One big reason the typical disaster movie, as opposed to the film noir, has never quite worked for LA is because, in the popular imagination, the city is already rotted out from the inside. Its demolition is redundant."

And Cristy Lytal talks with Don Cheadle about the opening film, Talk to Me - and about Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene.

Then, unrelated to the fest, Susan King: "Friday at the Aero Theatre, the American Cinematheque pays homage to [Freddie] Francis with a double feature of films he shot for [David] Lynch: 1980's atmospheric black-and-white The Elephant Man and 1999's exquisitely pastoral The Straight Story. Lynch will introduce the screenings and discuss Francis."

"Kino Fist returns triumphant with a Sexpol special." June 30 in London.

"So Richard, how did you feel about your recent world premiere of Man From Earth at San Francisco's Holehead Film Festival?" Michael Guillén talks with director Richard Schenkman and posts a related YouTube gallery his take: "For those who like to flex their brain, Man From Earth is a rewarding workout."

Matt Riveria asks "10 questions inspired by" the Sydney Film Festival.

Mark Bell wraps CineVegas for Film Threat.

Anticipating NYAFF, 6/18.

"Horror is over, gangsters are losing ground, and the coming thing is camp comedy dressed up in electric pink," proclaims Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "At least those are a few conclusions that can be drawn from sampling this year's edition of the New York Asian Film Festival, which begins Friday." And runs through July 8.

Park Chan-wook "is a prodigious pop filmmaker, and while I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK doesn't zip along like his earlier work, it offers a snappy, sun-soaked view of the shelter from an unkind world," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Also: "The Banquet, directed by Feng Xiaogang, is a Gertrude-centric Hamlet transposed to tumultuous 10th century China and cut through with generous dollops of balletic, wired-assisted fight scenes. It's a categorically sumptuous film — from cavernous palace halls to the elegant unfurling of blood in forest stream, there's no chance at visual extravagance passed up. It's not enough to make up for the film's almost complete lack of vitality, but it sure is nice to look at."

At Cinema Strikes Back, David Austin gives 3 out of 4 stars each to Johnnie To's Exiled and Jo Boem-jin's Aachi & Ssipak.

ST VanAirsdale notes that the Reeler is "a proud sponsor... like 'really proud,' like if I had a respectable kitchen I'd cater lunch for Grady Hendrix and the gang every day for two weeks to pitch in one less thing they'd have to sweat."

Logan Hill has a touch more on the fest in New York.

SIFF Dispatch. 4.

Sean Axmaker wraps the Seattle International Film Festival, "the longest, largest and most well-attended film festival in the country."

So it's over. First, one rule veteran SIFF-goers have learned is that the "World Premiere" stamp on American offerings is better seen as a warning. We seem to get the American productions that Sundance and Tribeca turn down. I missed the rare films that got good buzz (the supermarket sport spoof American Shopper [site] and the space race flashback The Fever of '57) and instead suffered through such films as Walk the Talk [site], a bland DV feature that satirizes the culture of motivational speakers and self-help programs with all the wit of a sitcom rerun.

Updated through 6/19.

I did, however, catch up with the World Premiere of Sex and Death 101, a deviously dark comedy written and directed by Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters, who wrote the role of an avenging dark angel known as "Death Nell" for Winona Ryder. True to the title, there is plenty of both sex and death as "devilishly handsome" bachelor Simon Baker discovers an email featuring the names of every woman he ever slept with and, apparently, every woman he will sleep with, and watches his spiral from tomcatting euphoria to out-of-control sexaholic to depressed prisoner of fate dreading the next joke of destiny the list spring on him. Audiences seemed divided on the film, either loving or loathing it, while to me either response seems excessive for a film that lacks the conviction of the often hilarious route it takes: sexual degradation and alternately spurned and embraced idealism with regard to true love and parenthood.

The most engaging production I watched all week was the delicious discovery A Cottage on Dartmoor, a dynamic 1929 dramatic thriller from the end of the silent era (the film cheekily has characters go on a date to a soundie) and the most visually expressive film I've ever seen from the career of Anthony Asquith (who makes a cameo as a man in Harold Lloyd glasses). It played at Telluride last year and is headed for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in July, where it looks like it will be the find of the fest.

San Francisco's "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller was also back with a film noir double feature that included a newly restored print of Joseph H Lewis's The Big Combo, one of the toughest and most visually striking noirs every made. The evening was in many ways a promise of things to come, as SIFF Cinema will launch its new calendar of year-round programming with the Muller's Noir City festival, 14 films in seven nights in what has become a traveling package hosted by Muller himself. The program can be found here.

Closing night film Molière, directed by Laurent Tirard and starring Romain Duris as the shabby young pre-playwright actor Molière in flouncy duds and a disastrous mane of shaggy black hair, is a tiresome attempt at a French Shakespeare in Love that inadvertently offers up perfect self-critiques in its own text. "This is like a bad play," complains one character forced to play out a farce within the farce, while another proclaims: "I know what touches me and I know what bores me." I do, too.

Molière brought to close (symbolically if not quite literally, as screenings continued in the final 9:30 pm slot) the longest, largest and most well-attended film festival in the country. This year programming grew to a record 405 features, documentaries and short films over 25 days; attendance was up once again, and box-office grew by an estimated 6 percent.

Audiences watched globally but voted locally when it came to the Golden Space Needle awards, handing out Best Film to Seattle filmmaker John Jeffcoat's Outsourced [site], a locally produced comedy shot in India (appropriately). "Hometown boy makes good" may have been a stronger motivation that the production itself, which I found to be too cute, conventionally colorful and utterly predictable in its tepid tale of the culture clash between an American call center manager and his India crew. Jeffcoat was also a runner-up in the Best Director category, which went to another American director, Daniel Waters. Best Documentary went to For the Bible Tells Me So [site], an examination of the campaign by religious conservatives to stigmatize the gay community, which just beat out the audience-pleasing first runner-up King of Kong, another Seattle-connected production.

Cannes and Venice and other top festivals have their critics polls and FIPRESCI awards. SIFF has the "Fool Serious Awards," an independent poll run by and limited to the Full Series Passholders, which gives a fan's eye take from the more obsessive members of the audience. Over 160 ballots were collected, counted and run through a program to determine "Likability Ratings." Neither Outsourced nor Sex and Death 101 made the top 10 (in fact, Sex and Death fell into the negative numbers of the likability scale), whereas the German drama Emma's Bliss [site], the East African-set Sounds of Sand [site], the Edith Piaf biopic La vie en Rose [site] and another German film, Four Minutes [site], topped the "Most Liked" list. Passholders did agree with the general audience, however, on For the Bible Tells Me So as top documentary (it scored the second highest likability rating of the list).

A complete list of "Golden Space Needle" winners, runners-up and special mentions can be found here.

I was also invited to write the Festival wrap for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where I delved into a few other aspects of SIFF. That's one of the reasons I hit burnout earlier in the week, though I still came out having seen a respectable 66 films. Of course, that's still only about 20 percent of the features in the program.

---

Updates: Anne Thompson wraps the festival, too: "Every movie we saw over the fest's last weekend, no matter how obscure, was packed."

And of course: the Stranger and the Siffblog.

Updates, 6/19: Brandon Judell has an overview at indieWIRE.

Andy Spletzer wraps his SIFF coverage.

A Mighty Heart.

"A Mighty Heart tells the story of the hunt in Pakistan for kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl through the eyes of his pregnant wife, Mariane, played by Angelina Jolie dipped in caramel," writes David Edelstein. "It is practically a policier, although the suspense is mitigated by our knowledge that the investigation will end badly. There's surprisingly little in the way of politics (the director is the Brit Michael Winterbottom, who's not known for reticence in that area) and no overarching message - apart from Pearl's shining example as an investigative journalist. The conclusions we must draw for ourselves. The most obvious is that in late 2001 and early 2002, we (by which I mean the American media and its consumers) had little idea of the deadly labyrinth into which the 'war on terror' would lead us."

Also in New York: Logan Hill talks with Dan Futterman, who plays Daniel Pearl.

Updated through 6/24.

Anthony Lane opens his review in the New Yorker with half a dozen wisecracks - seriously, they're numbered - about Angelina Jolie before remarking, "We brace ourselves for a star turn, a hundred minutes of vanity project, but here's the thing: it never happens. Jolie slips into the part, ducks in and out of the action, and generally plays second string to the onrush of events."

It was a famously rocky shoot; talking with Jolie and others, Sean Smith tells the story as part of a Newsweek package that includes his interview with Mariane Pearl, David Ansen's review ("Though we know the outcome, we still hang on every false lead, hoping against hope, like Mariane, that the story will have a different outcome") and Fareed Zakaria on the "Real Problem in Pakistan": "If there is a central front in the war on terror, it is not in Iraq but in Pakistan.... One explanation for why the military has retained some ties to the Taliban is because they want to keep a 'post-American' option to constrain what they see as a pro-Indian government in Kabul. If Washington were to dump Musharraf, the Pakistani military could easily sabotage American policy against Al Qaeda and throughout the region."

Michael Guillén talks with Winterbottom for SF360.

Earlier: "Cannes. A Mighty Heart." And David D'Arcy has interviewed Winterbottom for the main site regarding Tristam Shandy and The Road to Guantanamo.

Updates, 6/19: Matt Singer at IFC News: "Despite the fact that anyone who pays even a whiff of attention to current events knows the outcome of the film's story before they step foot in the theater, A Mighty Heart plays like a breathless thriller."

Ron Rosenbaum has some fun in Slate:

But the joke of it all - the Angelina Jolie contract and the revolt against the contract - was that anyone was foolish enough to think a written contract was really necessary. When was the last time you read a celebrity profile that was "disparaging, demeaning or derogatory"?

[...]

But when it comes to fawning, there is nothing quite like the elaborate, elevated, wannabe-highbrow fawning that "gentlemen's magazines" (mainly Esquire and GQ) do when they produce a cover story on a hot actress. And in the history of fawning gentlemen's-magazine profiles, there is unlikely to be a more ludicrous example than the profile in the July Esquire of - yes - Angelina Jolie, which spends many thousands of words and invokes grave national tragedies to prove to us that Angelina Jolie is not just a good woman, not just an enlightened humanitarian, not just a suffering victim of celebrity, not just strong and brave, but, we are told, "the best woman in the world."

City Pages runs J Hoberman's review before the Voice does: "A mondo-global, insanely urgent, staccato procedural in which each shot arrives like a bulletin, A Mighty Heart is characterized by sensational, quasi-documentary location work in swarming Karachi and a sense of near-constant frenzy." Meanwhile, "Jolie is Our Lady of Humanitarian Narcissism: Not we but she 'are the world,' good deeds illuminating her divine person in a blinding blaze of glory.... Jolie's Pearl is an almost mystic presence. Not since Lara Croft has the actress had so apposite an avatar."

Updates, 6/20: For the Los Angeles Times, Gina Piccalo meets Dan Futterman, who talks about contacting Daniel Pearl's parents: "'It wasn't their decision to make a movie of this,' Futterman said. 'But once it was being done, they wanted to be as helpful as they possibly could. They showed me photos and talked about his upbringing. I was curious to hear from them about his Jewish upbringing. It had become such an iconic thing. What did it mean to him? What did it mean to them?'"

Hillary Frey talks with Winterbottom for the New York Observer; Kimberly Chun for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

"Jolie delivers a performance that's astonishing in its control," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "She's dialed down her natural histrionics and gone for something much quieter and deeper than expected."

"[W]ith all the muscle behind this film, something more fundamental has been left missing: ironically, a heart," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "Like United 93, A Mighty Heart is so focused on achieving nearly flawless verisimilitude to real events and processes that it never stops to ask what it has accomplished with such realism."

"No doubt all involved in making the film - which Mariane gave her full endorsement and cooperation - had the best intentions," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "Nonetheless, it verges on exploitation, a voyeuristic indulgence in grief and violence. Part tearjerker, part 24-style ticking-time-bomb thriller complete with brutal interrogations, and part Oscar-campaign highlight reel for Angelina Jolie's portrayal of Mariane, it's one of Winterbottom's most incoherent and conventional films - and it will probably be his most popular and successful one."

Updates, 6/21: "Pearl's death was an affront to all humanity, and I was holding my breath to see whether Winter­bottom would use the occasion to slag off on American foreign policy, as he did in his credulous The Road to Guantanamo by converting Guantánamo inmates from victims into heroes," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Here, though, Winterbottom is completely up-front about the naked anti-Semitism of Islamic jihad, and the fact that Pearl died as much because he was a Jew as because he was an American. If nothing else, this simple, decent docu­drama offers a forceful counter to the repugnant argu­ment, heard not only in the East but faintly echoed on the European far left, that whatever happens to Ugly America and its acolyte Israel, they have it coming."

"Winterbottom's handheld camerawork and quick-cut editing lend a needed sense of forward momentum to the storyline, but he never allows individual scenes the opportunity to breathe or flesh out any gradation in the characters," argues Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly.

"Pitt and Jolie bungled their compassion by hiring one of the worst contemporary filmmakers, Michael Winterbottom, to advance a modish perspective that denies the war on terror," argues Armond White in the New York Press, just as you'd expect. "Winterbottom's films get praised by critics who approve his flashy political stance but don't question his imbecilic style or notice his penchant to bamboozle. In terms of winning hearts and minds, A Mighty Heart is a disaster."

"Winterbottom never resorts to melodrama, cloying sentimentality or jingoism," writes Carolyn Nikodym in Vue Weekly. "And you could even argue that the film's cloudy center only reflects the complexity of the issues at hand. Despite the many voices to the contrary, the idea of 'good guys' and 'bad guys' is rarely that cut and dry—and this fact adds to the film's tension."

"Winterbottom sticks to the idea that making the movie was like making any other." Sam Adams talks with him for the Philadelphia City Paper.

Ray Pride talks with Winterbottom about his cinematographer, Marcel Zyskind, who's "become Winterbottom's right-hand collaborator, and they've evolved a working method across several films, especially in the more fleet, limber formats of digital video."

Updates, 6/22: "Now that scores of journalists have died in Iraq, it's easy to forget how shocking it was to see terrorists treat a reporter as a combatant," JR Jones reminds us in the Chicago Reader before recounting the controversy sparked by how various media dealt with the execution video and grimly concluding, "if not for the video, A Mighty Heart probably would never have been made."

Nation film critic Stuart Klawans also focuses on that video: "The Slaughter belongs to the most dishonest of genres, propaganda, shot to satisfy hatred and incite further violence. Since its release, it has also circulated (in image and description) as a kind of pornography, enjoyed by those Westerners who get hot and bothered at the thought of Muslim hordes. But even though A Mighty Heart acknowledges (without showing) this film-within-a-film, it does so without sensationalism, fathoming the horror of The Slaughter yet refraining from any attempt to crank up the audience. This is a moral choice made possible by the creation of a certain aesthetic distance - and I'm not sure anyone but Winterbottom could have pulled it off."

The film is "is effectively fashioned, as jolting as it is polished, as well as a surprising, insistently political work of commercial art," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "[W]hat distinguishes A Mighty Heart is its assertion that politics and ideology play a part in poverty and terrorism, in the way some men exploit human misery in the name of God and righteousness. It's the movie's insistence that politics are integrated into the warp and woof of life, rather than something you wear like a campaign button, which gives pause."

A Mighty Heart "is notable for what it leaves out," writes Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times. "Although we do meet the possible suspect Omar (Aly Khan), there are not any detailed scenes of Pearl with his kidnappers, no portrayals of their personalities or motivations, and we do not see the beheading and its video. That last is not just because of Winterbottom's tact and taste, but because (I think) he wants to portray the way Pearl has almost disappeared into another dimension. His kidnappers have transported him outside the zone of human values and common sense. We reflect that the majority of Muslims do not approve of the behavior of Islamic terrorists, just as the majority of Americans disapprove of the war in Iraq."

"[U]nmooring, bleakly beautiful," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "There's no safety here: A Mighty Heart understands, deeply and intuitively, the nature of the changed and in some ways unfathomable world we now live in."

"Though a series of big close-ups often places her front and center, Jolie resists the temptation to push too hard or overplay her part," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Rather she uses her charisma and skill to express not only weariness and fear but also the hard-edged fierceness and lack of patience that are crucial to seeing Mariane as a real person, not a biopic saint."

"Jolie is such an expressive actress that there's always a danger she'll overplay the part, but one major misstep aside, she slips into Winterbottom's wide-ranging procedural and asserts herself only when dramatically necessary," writes the AV Club's Scott Tobias. "She simply exercises Mariane's persistent will, and honors her in the process."

"Jolie gives a fine performance, but the film still would have benefited from the casting of someone more obscure," argues Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "The better she is, the more aware of her we are: 'What a seemingly natural accent!' we think. It's simply impossible to forget that this is, indeed, Jolie, and not Mariane Pearl."

At Nerve, Jessica Haralson calls the film "an oasis of gravitas in a sea of superheroes-gone-emo and little green ogres."

Winterbottom chatted with Washington Post readers last week.

Nick Schager finds the film "doesn't quite know what it wants to be, which means that it ultimately winds up being not very much at all."

"Unlike United 93, which was devoid of context and took liberties with known facts, A Mighty Heart, based on Mariane Pearl's book, constantly refers to events before and after, to people's motivations, to reasons, arguments, and possible explanations," writes Jürgen Fauth. "The film is dedicated to the Pearl's son Adam, and like the child that never met his father, we have much to gain from a better understanding of the complexities of what happened, and why."

James Parker profiles Winterbottom for the Boston Phoenix.

"Ironically, Danny's murderers were eventually found, tried and punished; although we can take muted pleasure in that fact, it does not really satisfy us," argues Richard Schickel in Time. "We can, as well, admire his widow carrying on, building a new life, which includes creation of a foundation that seeks to protect endangered journalists everywhere (some 250 of them have lost their lives in action since Pearl's death). But again that cannot quite compensate us for our disappointment in this earnest, well-made, consistently interesting chronicle of death we know to be foretold."

Michelle Orange is looking forward to the adaptation of Bernard Henri-Lévy's "exhaustive and exhaustingly impressionistic dossier," Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, currently in production. For her, A Mighty Heart prompts the question, "So why does this film, an account of someone who actually was there, and was shot largely on actual locations, leave one wishing for the passion and outrage of the French philosopher's would-be eyewitness account?"

"The movie demands your full attention as it unspools reams of information: names, places, events, and questions that must be answered if the crime will be foiled," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "I'm sure this is a true reflection of those sleepless weeks as Mariane Pearl remembered them in her book, but the sheer tonnage of investigative info A Mighty Heart presents us ends up crowding out Mariane and Daniel as people: their habits, their convictions, their unusual way of life. I know as little about those things now as I did before seeing the film."

Updates, 6/23: For the LAT, Rebecca Trounson reports on "an interfaith discussion that followed a screening of "A Mighty Heart" at Paramount Studios this week."

Via Movie City News, Peter Howell's conversation with Winterbottom for the Toronto Star.

Update, 6/24: "There is one problem with Michael Winterbottom's film of A Mighty Heart - it's not the book." Peter Nellhaus explains.

Brooklyn Rail. June 07.

"Director Kazuo Hara is known for raw, transgressive documentaries that boldly attack the repressive mores of Japan," writes David Wilentz, introducing his interview with the filmmaker on the eve of the New York premiere of his first narrative feature, Many Faces of Chika. The title of the resulting piece for the June issue of the Brooklyn Rail, "More Freedom and More Shocking," comes from what Hara says he always writes right alongside his autograph.

"If 2006 was the year of Werner Herzog, then 2007 belongs to Rainer Werner Fassbinder," declares Jesi Khadivi. "Fassbinder is perhaps the least accessible of New German Cinema," she continues. Really? Regardless, as it happens, Jed Lipinski has a piece on the recent series of Herzog's documentaries at Film Forum: "What Herzog wants has nothing to do with irony, ideology, or abstraction. 'I am not so much influenced by films,' he said one night, 'as by pure, raw life.'"

"A major success in Switzerland and that nation's official entry for the 2006 foreign language Oscar, Vitus is a movie about childhood rebellion against adult expectations that is itself exceedingly eager to please," writes Tessa DeCarlo. Also: "While Jindabyne doesn't aspire to be high art, it's an artfully made film that deserves credit for all that it does so well, including the way it sidesteps cheap tragedy and the predictable ending we long for."

Warren Fry reports on Larry Miller's Homage to Nam June Paik, "held at James Cohen gallery on April 14th, which treaded a tenuous line between museological nostalgia and unabashed Fluxus banner waving."

SIFF. Awards.

The Seattle International Film Festival has announced the Jury Award and Golden Space Needle Audience Award winners. From the Jury:

• New Director Award: Eric Richter Strand for Sons. Here's to new Norwegian cinema, Karsten!

• New American Cinema Award: Shotgun Stories, written and directed by Jeff Nichols.

• Best Documentary: Austrian Harald Friedl's Out of Time.

Audiences have voted to give the Lena Sharpe Award to Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's The Devil Came on Horseback. Also:

• Best Director: Daniel Waters for Sex & Death 101.

• Best Actor: Daniel Brühl for Salvador.

• Best Actress: Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose.

• Best Film: John Jeffcoat's Outsourced.

• Best Documentary: Daniel Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So.

• Best Short Film: Dan Brown's Pierre.

And here's the full list of winners and runners-up.

Silverdocs. Awards.

Silverdocs was supposed to have wrapped today, but three cheers for this festival, which has announced that it's "had more demand for shows than ever before and, to accommodate the extraordinary response from local audiences, extended screenings through Monday." The awards ceremony went ahead as scheduled yesterday, and Sujewa Ekanayake has the fully annotated list of winners.

Updated through 6/19.

Updates, 6/18: Juror Matt Dentler has another round of pix.

The Film Panel Notetaker was there: "'What's It Worth': Value vs Values" and a Q&A with The Gates co-director Antonio Ferrara.

Tom Hall posts a full-blown overview.

Updates, 6/19: Agnes Varnum has an overview at indieWIRE.

The Pop View Silverdocs reviews: Chicago 10, Big Rig, Fredrick Wiseman's State Legislature, Hip-Hop Revolution and Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

Observer, 6/17.

The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair is a three-hour series that will begin airing on Channel 4 this coming Saturday. In the Observer, writer and presenter Andrew Rawnsley details the tragic turning point, focusing particularly on Blair's scoffing at warnings from his closest advisors and fellow heads of state:

Over lunch, Jacques Chirac warned the Prime Minister that he knew what to expect because the French President had been a young soldier in Algeria. Sir Stephen Wall, a former ambassador and one of Blair's senior advisers, was privy to this conversation. He recalls Chirac telling Blair that there would be a civil war in Iraq. "We came out and Tony Blair rolled his eyes and said, 'Poor old Jacques, he doesn't get it, does he?'" Wall remarks: "We now know Jacques 'got it' rather better than we did."

Earlier:

Worse for his legacy, and for the world, Iraq has wreaked terrible damage on the cause of liberal interventionism, for which Blair became such a compelling and passionate advocate during the Kosovo conflict. In the Balkans, he found a moral purpose for his premiership that he then amplified as a vision of a world in which states would not be free to slaughter their own citizens with impunity. In the killing grounds of Iraq, that ideal lies bleeding to death.

And in conclusion: "The casualties of war are to be found not just in Iraq. The deaths will also be counted in Darfur and future Darfurs, Rwandas and Bosnias, where murderous regimes will put people to the slaughter with much less to fear from western intervention. That is the most rending victim of Iraq."

Related: Nicholas Watt's front page story.

Ok, also in the Observer. Introducing a wide-ranging survey of cinematic comedy (for a contest and poll you can read about at the bottom of the page), Philip French races through a history ranging from the Lumière Brothers through Chaplin and Tati, Hollywood's screwball comedies and Ealing Studios only to sort of strangely peter out in the 70s with Woody Allen and Steve Martin. But then the names pick and riff on their favorites: Bill Bailey on This is Spinal Tap, Rob Brydon on Midnight Run, Meera Syal on Some Like it Hot, Martin Freeman on Sons of the Desert, Zoe Wanamaker on M Hulot's Holiday, Lucy Davis on The Jerk and - get this - Judd Apatow on Terms of Endearment, Edgar Wright on Raising Arizona, Charlie Skelton on Fletch, Laura Solon on Spaceballs, Dan Mazer on When Harry Met Sally, Annie Griffin on Groundhog Day and Penny Woolcock on Bringing Up Baby.

"The last time I interviewed him, in sunny Los Angeles, he managed to get himself shot on camera, receiving a small wound to his abdomen from a randomly fired air-rifle," recalls Mark Kermode. "'It's no big deal,' he intoned dryly as he stood there, unfazed, quietly bleeding into his underpants. 'It is not a significant bullet.'" Now Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder is opening in the UK and Kermode recommends catching it, calling the oddity "a deceptively slight affair which mischievously hijacks documentary footage of space travel and underwater exploration and reworks it into a fanciful tale of alien invasion."

"Hammer gave us a world all their own, a place with Home Counties woodland masquerading as Transylvania (it was Black Park near Slough), heavily cleavaged vampire women, lashings of fake blood with a strange milkshake texture, and the occasional bad sets, particularly in the later films, as if Dracula lived in a branch of the Angus Steak House," writes Phil Baker, reviewing A Thing of Unspeakable Horror: The History of Hammer Films. "It's immediately recognisable, this land where 'the inns are full and boisterous only until someone mentions a certain word', and [Sinclair] McKay does a tasty job of evoking it."

And then there's...

• Robert McCrum's long profile of Gore Vidal.

• Jay Rayner's interview with Rob Lowe.

• Daniel Whitaker on a proposal to give London its own "Walk of Fame."

• Film-related odds and ends from Joe Neumaier.

• Kelly Grovier's review of Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated Life and Dalí and Film.

• Stephen Bayley on Global Cities, an exhibition at the Tate Modern from Wednesday through August 27.

• Lynn Barber's profile of Peter Blake, "the grandfather of British pop art."

• Alice Fisher on the White Stripes.

Laura Cumming sends in a dispatch from the Venice Biennale, good enough reason to mention a few others: Randy Kennedy and Michael Kimmelman (New York Times), Richard Lacayo (Time), Walter Robinson (Artnet) and Linda Yablonsky and Sarah Thornton (Artforum).

Weekend shorts.

"Rumors that 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment was planning a John Ford set have been rumbling through the community for months," writes Dave Kehr. "I've just received confirmation from a Fox publicist that the rumors are not only true, but the project sounds bigger and better than I'd dared to hope."

Related: The Self-Styled Siren. I'm not going to clip a quote from this entry. You'll simply have to go and read it, is all.

And related to that. Fire up your feed reader. Dennis Cozzalio writes up five blogs that make him think.

"Ball of Fire is back in print on DVD; it's a movie for paupers, authors, kings, and you," writes Nathan Kosub at Stop Smiling. "Hollywood, very possibly, never made a gentler film."

Most of the parts of Roger Corman's Tales of Terror are top notch, argues Tim Lucas. "So why doesn't Tales of Terror hang together better?"

"[S]cale is too easy an answer to the problem of filming Tolstoy," writes Catherine Bray in the Liberal. "Long films can be triumphs - see the 282 minute version of Das Boot for proof - and lengthy books may be adapted successfully for the silver screen, as with Peter Jackson's popular Lord of the Rings epics. Although size undoubtedly matters, it is on a more elusive level of style and structure that Tolstoy challenges us."

"I asked Vincent more questions, and his answers became longer and longer until they hit a kind of cruising altitude and I didn't have to ask, he just orated. It was unexpected, like suddenly finding oneself at work on a weekend." The Guardian runs a story by Miranda July, "The Shared Patio."

Also: Michael Coveney on Donald Spoto's Otherwise Engaged: The Life of Alan Bates and Neil Bartlett on Armistead Maupin's Michael Tolliver Lives.

Related: Josh Getlin in the Los Angeles Times: "This fall, the Barbary Lane Communities for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender seniors will open on Lake Merritt in Oakland. The fully renovated Art Deco building, taking its name from Maupin's fictional community set in San Francisco's Russian Hill, will offer 46 units renting for $3,295 to $4,295 per month. It is one of the first urban retirement communities catering to such a middle-income clientele [!!!] - and the only one known to draw its name from a series of bestselling books."

Glenn Kenny: "In the prose, the consistency of the mode of humor - which involves, among other things, [Woody] Allen treating the entire universe as if it's a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, as we'll see in a minute - is its strength, whereas that very same consistency tends to weaken the movies. This is an interesting formal concern that bears further addressing." He doesn't, but Aaron Aradillas more than makes up for it in a comment that follows: "Allen's work in the 90s is his most consistent and revealing of his film career. From 1992's Husbands and Wives to 2000's Small Time Crooks it would be very hard to find a dud during that time period."

Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times on DOA: Dead or Alive: "Notwithstanding the success of Paul Verhoeven, [Corey] Yuen has yet to learn that all that jiggles is not cinematic gold." But for Joe Leydon, "if you show up with sufficiently lowered expectations, you can enjoy the flick as an exuberantly trashy trifle, the sort of nonstop, wire-worked kung-foolishness in which increasingly elaborate set pieces are interrupted only sporadically by something resembling a storyline."

Also in the NYT, Rachel Saltz on Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, "a giddy romantic comedy with star power (the father-son team of Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan; Preity Zinta; Bobby Deol; Lara Dutta), wanderlust (I see London, I see France, and, yes, isn't that India?) and a charming can-do, why-not-the-kitchen-sink spirit." More from Abhishek Bandekar at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Mark Olsen meets Parker Posey: "'There's no precious preciousness to it,' she said of her willingness to get things done. 'I like getting involved. "I'll take care of it." It comes from independent film, I got used to it - there's tape on the floor, pick it up. It's just an awareness you have, like peripheral vision when you're rollerblading in traffic. It comes from being on a lot of sets.'"

Also in the Los Angeles Times, John Horn and Sheigh Crabtree reports on the pirated copies of Sicko floating around out there: "Some have found a certain irony in any protest from [Michael] Moore's camp. The filmmaker has been vocal in his support of downloading pirated movies as long as pirates do not profit."

IndieWIRE interviews Unborn in the USA directors Stephen Fell and Will Thompson.

Via Movie City News, two where-are-they-now pieces: The Scotsman on Dana Carvey and Mick Brown in the Telegraph with Sylvia Kristel.

Also in the Telegraph, Marc Lee talks with John Curran about one of his favorites, Catch-22: "It's ridiculously funny, but that's the horror of it."

Online viewing tip #1. Ted Z finds a trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.

Online viewing tip #2. At Twitch, Kurt points to a trailer for James Mangold's remake on 3:10 to Yuma.

Online viewing tip. Matt Bradshaw rounds up more trailers for Cinematical.

Weekend fests and events.

Austin's Fantastic Fest has unveiled more titles in its lineup and Blake's got them at Twitch: "Perhaps the biggest surprise in this wave of new titles is a retro and extremely rare screening of Sogo Ishii's super sonic punk film meets Mad Max (made while he was in college), Crazy Thunder Road."

The Jan Svankmajer season runs at the BFI Southbank in London through June 23 and Marina Warner has an appreciation in the Guardian: "Svankmajer has emphasised how the fantastical needs intense realistic detail to bring it to life, and his way with fantasy can be hallucinatory in its vividness. Yet he's a film-maker in fertile and powerful dispute with his medium: battling against the disembodied immateriality of film with the fleshy sensations he excites, and overturning the deadness of things with his endlessly inventive animation."

"[T]here's a growing movement to expand movie-watching venues in the multiplex/home-theater era," notes Susan Gerhard at SF360, where she lists 10 Bay Area spots where you might not expect to find screenings - but will.

"CineVegas is disarming," reports Mike Jones, probably indieWIRE's best contributing writer. "It is impossible to be a spectator here. Part of that is artistic director Trevor Groth, relaxed and smooth, who won't let you walk by without a handshake and a smile. His Sundance stripes help, too. And while the selection was more hit than miss, judging the program is almost meaningless."

Shorts, 6/15.

"You could call it The Hours 2 and you'd only be half wrong," writes Brandon Harris. "Strangely satisfying despite its myriad flaws, Oscar nominated DP turned director Lajos Koltai's Evening makes for a fascinating dip into the pseudo feminist/queer fetishization of WASPy leading ladies, trapped, regardless of class, with unfeeling or under-equipped men, that encompasses the entire Michael Cunningham cinematic oeuvre."

"Giuseppe Tornatore has won the Best Film and Best Director David di Donatello Awards - Italy's top film honors - for The Unknown, whose leading lady Xenia Rappoport also walked away with the Best Actress prize." Camillo de Marco has more at Cineuropa. James van Maanen reviewed the film, screened as The Unknown Woman as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series, last week.

"As the four-year-old Iraq War becomes increasingly divisive in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Hollywood is betting that moviegoers are ready for a dose of harsh reality," writes Variety's Anne Thompson. "At least six films touching on the hotspot Middle East and its conflicts will roll out between June and early next year. The titles that pop up here: The Kingdom, A Mighty Heart, The Kite Runner, In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone, Lions for Lambs, Charlie Wilson's War and Stop Loss.

Why did the first generation of auteurists reject William Friedkin? Dan Sallitt has more than a few ideas. Related: Kevin Lee on how you can watch Dan Sallitt's films.

And somewhat related to that: For William Speruzzi and doubtless many others, HD For Indies Premium is a "steal" at $9.95.

"On Monday, at age 102, Rudolf Arnheim died. You can read his obituary here, and this is a lovely website devoted to his work. He was one of the most important theorists of the visual arts of the last century, and he had enormous impact on how people, including Kristin and me, think about film." A tribute from David Bordwell.

"On June 8, 2007, American philosopher Richard Rorty died at the age of 75.... Slate has asked a number of philosophers and intellectuals to share reminiscences of Dick Rorty, personal and otherwise, so I thought I'd try briefly to summarize why his philosophy deserves to have immodest claims made on its behalf—claims that Rorty, whose characteristic attitude was a shrug and a ho-hum, would never have made himself," writes Stephen Metcalf. Thoughts follow from Richard Posner, Brian Eno, Mark Edmundson, Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Daniel C Dennett, Virginia Heffernan, Michael Berubé and Stanley Fish.

The cinetrix discovers the "cinematic equivalent of the human genome project," the HOMER Project.

"To Live is To Learn: Kenji Mizoguchi on screen, on DVD." Ryland Walker Knight and Steven Boone's e-conversation at the House Next Door.

"Sumurun shares with Anna Boleyn Lubitsch's taste, in many of the major films made in his native Germany, for the lavish spectacle, large casts, and elaborate sets of the historical epic," writes Ian Johnston. "Although, in the case of Sumurun, we should speak more of an ahistorical epic, for its setting is a never-never fantasy world of the Arabian Nights - not for nothing was it re-titled One Arabian Night on its original US release during the silent period - peopled by a bevy of harem girls, a cruel and lascivious sheikh, a platoon of shaven eunuchs, a slave trader, an exotic-erotic dancer, and so forth."

Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Megan Weireter gets a kick out of a flick with "Vincent Price and Frankie Avalon and a bunch of anonymous gold-bikini-clad starlets with a predilection for breaking into the mash-potato": Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.

"In my apparent capacity as, and I quote, 'female horror enthusiast,' I've been asked what I think of the level of violence towards women in the current wave of mainstream horror movies, usually referred to as 'torture porn,'" writes Adele Hartely in the Scotsman. "First, I think I might just have been demoted. Female horror enthusiast? Rather than the spotter's equivalent of a gore-hound, I tend to think of myself more as the director of Dead by Dawn, Scotland's International Horror Film Festival (running since 1993) and Curator of the Beautiful Books imprint, Bloody Books, which publishes collections of classic and contemporary short horror fiction." At any rate, "I don't believe that 'torture porn' is a valid term. Nor do I reckon the current concern takes into account the phases of the genre or its far nastier history." Via Movie City News.

Though the Chicago Reader's JR Jones reveals himself to be something of a "publishing nerd," he's sure you won't have to be to find Helvetica fascinating: "It turns out that the story of Helvetica encapsulates the postwar struggle between individuality and the common good, as a typeface created in the spirit of democracy gradually became a symbol of blind obedience."

Vince Keenan enjoys Bruce Campbell's Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way, a novel about what happens when "Bruce - yes, he's the star of his own novel - finally gets his shot to bust out of the low-budget ghetto when he's cast in Let's Make Love!, an A-list romantic comedy directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Gere and Renée Zellweger."

In the New York Times:

• "There is a delicious poetic justice in the way [Volker] Schlöndorff, in telling part of the story of Poland's Solidarity movement, has used some of the crude, effective techniques of Socialist realism to depict the collapse of socialism," writes AO Scott. "He calls [Strike] 'a ballad inspired by true events,' and its occasional bouts of clumsiness and sentimentality are inseparable from its power." More from Nicole Ankowski at Nerve. Related: Jeff Reichert interviews Schlöndorff for Reverse Shot.

• Manohla Dargis: "As a music document and as a labor of unabashed love, the nonfiction feature Gypsy Caravan could hardly be better; as a movie, it could stand some improvement."

• "And Then Came Love is "an inept romantic comedy that for reasons known only to God drew Vanessa Williams, Eartha Kitt, Ben Vereen and Stephen Spinella into its swamp of clichés," writes Stephen Holden. Also, Czech Dream.

• Matt Zoller Seitz: "Unborn in the USA is billed as a rigorously objective look at the anti-abortion movement, and that's accurate - but only to a point." More from Nerve's Bilge Ebiri: "[O]ne of the best documentaries released so far this year, and regardless of your stance in the abortion debate, you owe it to yourself to see it."

• Matt again: "Beyond Hatred, a documentary about a murder victim's family struggling to heal, is an example of a film whose style doesn't merely suit its story but amplifies its meanings."

• "Any attempt to elucidate the most vitriolic turf dispute of our time in just 73 minutes may seem insanely ambitious, but Isidore Rosmarin, the documentary filmmaker and producer, was not deterred," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "In Blood and Tears: The Arab-Israeli Conflict, he methodically traces the battle from its biblical origins to the fragile present through the eyes of everyone from fundamentalist Muslims to committed Zionists."

The Telegraph's Tim Robey reviews Tell No One ("one of the most glossily pleasurable French imports in some time"), Opening Night ("30 years old and hasn't aged a day"), Vacancy (an "irritatingly cheapjack snuff-horror thriller"), Exiled ("[Johnnie] To proves himself the snazziest choreographer of those coats-flapping, bullets-flying, aerial-view slo-mo showdowns since John Woo left the continent"), Frankie ("borderline unwatchable") and Messages: "Quite the worst supernatural thriller ever made starring Jeff Fahey. This is saying something."

"I found Johnny To's last film, Election, to be clotted and slow-moving, with characters who were humourlessly drawn," writes Peter Bradshaw. "But [Exiled] is miraculously different, with a gang of five whose thumbnail-sketched identities are delineated with great efficiency, and differentiated quite well enough for their lives to be interesting and exciting."

Also in the Guardian, Andrew Pulver interviews Charlotte Gainsbourg and