Venice. Redacted.

"Brian De Palma's filmmaking skills have seldom been as razor sharp as they are in his sensational new film about members of a US Army squad who rape and murder a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and slay her family," writes Ray Bennett for the Hollywood Reporter. "Made on HD video and employing images from digital cameras, video recorders, Internet uploads and old-fashioned film, [Redacted] is a ferocious argument against the engagement in Iraq for what it is doing to everyone involved."

"Redacted packs an extraordinary emotional punch," writes the Telegraph's David Gritten. The final montage "left the audience at a Venice press screening stunned, silent and in a few cases tearful. The combination of De Palma's visceral style and the horrifying subject matter left me reeling."

"De Palma told reporters after the movie screened that he hoped the film would help bring an end to our country's occupation of Iraq," notes Adam Howard at Alternet. "'The pictures are what will stop the war,' said De Palma."

Updated through 9/6.

Update: Looks like this one might be one of those films that severely divides audiences into two opposing camps. For Variety's Derek Elley, Redacted is a "[d]eeply felt but dramatically unconvincing 'fictional documentary' [... that...] has almost nothing new to say about the Iraq situation and can't make up its mind about how to package its anger in an alternative cinematic form. HD-lensed item, largely using thesps with legit experience, feels more like a filmed Off Broadway play than a docudrama, and has trouble establishing a consistent dramatic tone."

Updates, 9/1: "The critics seem to like it; the public is snubbing it, making faces. What about us? We are more and more convinced that it is a masterpiece." Eugenio Renzi blogs for Cahiers du cinéma.

"Designed to resemble an American's soldier video blog from Iraq, with additional footage from a French-language pseudo-documentary, YouTube clips and reports from local TV crews, Brian de Palma's attempt to reveal some of the expurgated truth behind the media coverage of the war in Iraq ultimately backfires on him," writes Dan Fainaru for Screen Daily. "The evidence of a well-honed professional sensibility behind the camera is too obvious to make the such a fiction actually believable."

Mark Salisbury, blogging over at Glenn Kenny's place, finds this one "a film of noble intentions but unsatisfactory execution. It’s also, very much, a Brian De Palma movie, in that it feels like a 'movie' (which, in this case, is a problem)... Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93) and Michael Winterbottom (In This World, Road To Guantanamo) have shown how this stuff should and can be done, making films that blur the lines between documentary and drama to recreate a reality. De Palma has merely restaged one, and none too convincingly."

Meanwhile, Glenn himself posted last night, with the press screening not even "48 hours old, and the movie is drawing the wrath of pro-war blog personalities who, unlike Mark, haven't laid their eyes on a single frame." Linkage follows... to a very strange world indeed.

Online viewing tip. De Palma talks to Yael Lavie of Sky News. Via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

"[T]his dogpile on DePalma also reminds me that the neo-neocons are ingrates who fail to recognize one of their prophets," adds Glenn Kenny, who can't seem to pull his eyes away. Screencaps and a few good snickers follow.

Updates, 9/2: "De Palma has been investigating the question of visual veracity for most of his 40-year career," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "Redacted takes him back, back, past the Hitchcock homages and the action epics, back to his earliest films: Greetings and Hi, Mom!, two innovative satires on the Vietnam War.... His new movie has torrents of words and goes heavy on macho posturing; at times it suggests a ragged off-off-Broadway play.... But Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept 11, and his strongest cinematic and political statement at least since Casualties of War, his Vietnam film of 1989. The movie is a cry of national shame; for De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet."

"About 10 people walked out of this afternoon's Telluride screening of Brian DePalma's Redacted, most during a horrific rape scene right in the center of the picture," reports Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "The bulk of those who stayed gave the HD dramatization of the real-life rape and murder of a 15 year old Iraqi girl by US soldiers an overwhelmingly positive reception.... But regardless of his intentions, it's hard to imagine the film DePalma has made having any positive impact on the anti-war movement. With the exception of the final montage of real photographs, which DePalma indicated may be 'redacted' from the final cut for legal reasons, it's far too stagey to have any real emotional impact. If anything, it's going to further enrage the side that continues to insist that anyone who questions the war or the way its been fought loves the terrorists, hates our troops, should be executed for committing treason, etc. DePalma aims to hit the jugular, but his approach makes someone like Charles Ferguson seem all the wiser for aiming for the brain."

"The job of the filmmaker is no longer to put other images than the media's in front of you; it is no longer to put the truth behind the images that are hiding it; it is not the search for the right point of view, the quest for the initial shot of the film to be as thrilling as it is impossible," writes Emmanuel Burdeau in Cahiers du cinéma's Venice diary. "We are no longer in a Brian De Palma film. The task at hand is simply to offer a certain way of laying out existing visuals: horizontally, as flat and glistening as the screen these lines are written on."

At AICN, Mastidon has a few spoilers and a warning: "I must caution you not to see this movie on a full stomach as it is EXTREMELY violent. However, if the violence was removed or somehow cut back, the movie would lose its message."

Updates, 9/3: "[T]he film isn't particularly well acted and relies on irritating improv (i.e., it feels scripted) while it also loses focus," writes the Observer's Jason Solomons. "Yes, this is a stupid war. Yes, there are lots of media outlets. And people are dying on both sides."

"When director Brian De Palma took the stage at the 64th Venice Film Festival yesterday after the screening of his controversial film Redacted, he wept quietly as the audience of 2000 gave the New Yorker a 10-minute standing ovation. Behind him - equally weepy - were two relatively unknown Canadians, Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss, whose company, the Film Farm, produced the movie that was the toast of Venice." Gayle Macdonald profiles them for the Globe and Mail. Via Movie City News.

"During the screening [in Telluride], some audience members noticeably averted their eyes during graphic moments and after a striking coda of Iraqi casualty photos, one attendee began wailing loudly before being gently escorted out of the theater by a companion," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez. "Probed about the film's stance, and addressing the issue of whether the film demonizes US soldiers, DePalma countered emphatically, 'Hey, it's a big bad war out there and we need all the help we can get. If I can make a fiction film that will help, more power to me.' Concluding the thought, he added, 'We are all on the same team, we hate this war and want it to end.'"

"The problems I have with the film are myriad," writes David Poland. "If the film didn't steal so freely from the many quality documentaries that actually put documentarians in harms way to attempt to get a more accurate picture of what is happening on the ground in Iraq, I don't think I would have found it so grating.... But in the end, as offensive as the simplistic portrait of the soldiers is aside from a nascent look at checkpoint politics that is embodied by a fake French doc, my biggest reaction was a 'What does this movie actually add to the conversation?'"

Update, 9/4: "The look of seemingly fly-on-the-wall footage can sometimes give a story a gritty immediacy - surely what De Palma is seeking - but it can also create an air of improvisation, playfulness and even comedy, and that's what happens too often here - which isn't very helpful when you're trying to convey the real horror of a street-kidnapping or a decapitation," writes Time Out's Dave Calhoun. "The greatest flaw is that the actors generally aren't up to the task and so don't convince as US soldiers - they play like actors playing US soldiers."

"[W]hat Mr De Palma may really inspire audiences to do is not to watch his patchwork film, but to make their own." New York Times television writer Virginia Heffernan gathers a little online viewing.

Update, 9/6: Ray Pride passes along Mark Cuban's reply to an "o'reilly factor request": "The movie is fully pro Troops. The hero of the movie is a soldier who stands up for what is right in the face of adversity."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Venice. Michael Clayton.

"Tony Gilroy, fed up with writing what he calls errands for everybody else (e.g., the Bourne films), has written and directed a highly accomplished first feature in this moralistic thriller," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "Gilroy orchestrates his attack on the morals of corporate lawyers with considerable skill and provides [George] Clooney with a part that brings out the best in him."

"Spare and unhurried..., Michael Clayton features strong performances and a solid story, drawn from the familiar well of faceless corporations grinding ordinary people through their profit-making machinery," writes Brian Lowry for Variety. "Yet Gilroy's fidelity to his script comes at the expense of the pacing, which initially lumbers forward so assiduously as to feel like a throwback to an earlier era. If George Clooney's recent choices have oscillated between serious showcases (think Syriana) and moneymaking endeavors (the Ocean's series), this falls squarely into the former camp."

Updated through 9/6.

Update, 9/1: "As with the Bourne films, Gilroy has a knack for creating strong characters and situations that resonate with tension," writes Kirk Honeycutt for the Hollywood Reporter. "It may be formula, but the guy is a solid chemist as he crafts excellent set-ups and payoffs, and he has mastered those 'ah-hah' moments when everything locks into place."

Updates, 9/3: "It would be no surprise to see Clooney back at the Oscars for playing the title role in Michael Clayton," suggests the Telegraph's David Gritten. "It's a sophisticated entertainment, offering few easy resolutions. Gilroy is confidently in charge of his material, and [Tilda] Swinton truly shines as a nuanced character rather than a one-note villain."

"Though stylishly lit by Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck camerman Robert Elswit, it's poorly edited and tries too hard to be a Seventies-style conspiracy thriller - it even co-stars Sydney Pollack," notes the Observer's Jason Solomons. "Perhaps most disappointingly, George is slightly underpowered here, a bit too much Danny Ocean and not enough Erin Brockovich. It might soon be time to decide: does he want to act or be a politician?"

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that Clooney's been "presented with the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres medal at the Deauville American Film Festival over the weekend."

"The opening voiceover from an unseen Edens ([Tom] Wilkinson) somewhat sets the tone of the whole film, but also sets up a disorientation from which the film never quite recovers," writes Roger Clarke for Screen Daily. "Wilkinson is entirely believable as a man having a mental breakdown, and his friendship with Clooney's character feels nuanced and genuine. Cast against type, Tilda Swinton makes for a good corporate villain, with a genuine whiff of decay about her fighting against another odour, that of moral sterilisation."

Updates, 9/4: "As it goes with so many films with an anti-corporate bent attached to standard thriller practices (think of The Constant Gardener, although that was a much better film), no one ever bothers to get to grips with what it is that the rogue company is supposed to be doing wrong," writes Time Out's Dave Calhoun. "A recent review of Fast Food Nation in the New Yorker noted that the left offers better ideas than it does movies, and with [Redacted and Michael Clayton] on the menu at the Venice, I'm inclined to agree, at least when it comes to the American variety."

"Deliberately paced, with a strong supporting cast (Wilkinson, Sydney Pollack, Tilda Swinton) and a smart script that harks back to corporate thrillers of the 1970s - Clooney compared it to Three Days of the Condor - this, despite a few minor plot contrivances, expertly captures the shadowy side of corporate America," writes Mark Salisbury at In the Company of Glenn.

Update, 9/6: "Walking into Michael Clayton, I was hoping for a film along the lines of classic 70s Sidney Lumet or Alan J Pakula; what I got was something more along the lines of an above-average 90s John Grisham adaptation," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi from Toronto.

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón.

"Like Ocean's Eleven, if directed by Robin Hood and financed by Telemundo, Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón is an effervescent comedy coasting on the charisma of its stars," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

"For once, a plausible ethnic range of Angelenos, playing Angelenos!" exclaims, oddly enough, the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips in the Los Angeles Times. "Joe Menendez directs this genial lark. His TV credits include Real Stories of the Highway Patrol and Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, and though there's nothing flashy or complex about the way Menendez works with crowds or lays out a suspense sequence, he keeps everybody in the same movie."

"Powered by a brisk pace, lively supporting cast, clever script, and handsome leads, Ladrón offers a good time and a lecture on the dangers of greed and the oft-overlooked importance of immigrants, in roughly that order," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

Earlier: Susan King talks with Menendez for the LAT.

Death Sentence (and a bit on The Brave One).

"By late summer, when director James Wan's Death Sentence is playing side by side with Neil Jordan's The Brave One at many of our nation's multiplexes, moviegoers will be forgiven for thinking that they've traveled through a time warp and landed in the late 1970s, when first-class cinemas and seedy grindhouses alike were flooded with urban-crime dramas about ordinary citizens taking the law into their own hands," writes Scott Foundas, who talks with Wan for the LA Weekly.

"And yet the differences between the two are like Chardonnay and rotgut: Jordan's is a somber, elegantly wrought mood-piece, while Wan's aims straight for the stomach lining," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "It's tempting to call Death Sentence the more 'honest' of the two, since it's less ashamed to paddle around in the muck, but Wan often lets his guileless enthusiasm get the better of him."

Updated through 9/2.

"Based on Brian Garfield's novel - a sequel to the book that spawned the 1974 film Death Wish - Mr Wan's film is a middle-class white man's payback fantasy, leavened with phony references to class difference," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "Aside from a stunning three-minute tracking shot as the gang pursues Nick through a parking garage, and [Kevin] Bacon's hauntingly pale, dark-eyed visage, Mr Wan's film is a tedious, pandering time-waster."

The best part of Roger Ebert's review - basically, he likes the movie - actually deals with the Death Wish series and the Chicago-set sequel that was never made.

"In the press notes, the director ponders the film's 'Shakespearean' qualities, while a producer loftily compares it to Greek tragedy," observes Newsday's in the Los Angeles Times. "One seriously wonders how much time either of them has spent slumming at classical theater: Exactly which Sophocles or Shakespeare dramas do they have in mind? To give credit where it is due, the fetishizing of gun violence, the cynical distrust of the jury system and the prioritizing of one's own family over the welfare of others are hallmarks that American popular culture should rightfully be able to claim for itself."

"Bacon, Hollywood's go-to heavy, can usually make the most loathsome characters - including killers and child molesters - seem poignantly human," writes Desson Thompson in the Washington Post. "But his thin-lipped intensity can't bring this character to life."

As for The Brave One, Justin Chang writes in Variety that "Jodie Foster unleashes her rage on the mean streets of New York with the same mesmeric intensity and steely resolve that have characterized her very best performances... Jordan neither subverts the pleasures of seeing lone-ranger justice onscreen, as David Cronenberg did in A History of Violence, nor panders overtly to the audience's baser instincts; instead, The Brave One attempts to tap into post-9/11 anxieties and comment on the very American idea of righteous payback."

In the Hollywood Reporter, Michael Rechtshaffen adds that Foster and Jordan's "considerable attributes go a long way in compensating for problematic plot mechanics that ultimately trip up the good intentions, especially in its portrayal of a New York that looks and behaves more like Charles Bronson's old stomping grounds than its modern-day incarnation."

Back to Death Sentence: "Obviously you've seen this story a dozen or so times by now, but Wan and Bacon do all they can to bring a little new color to the concept," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "There's a fantastic foot-chase sequence that leads to an excellent action scene in a parking garage - which is promptly followed by a rather sobering scene in which Bacon's character starts to really unravel. The dual approach elevates Death Sentence beyond 'just another action flick' - but the tonal shifts also do some damage in the flick's final act. At an overlong 110 minutes, the movie feels like it would definitely benefit from one more trip to the editing booth."

Update, 9/1: Karen Valby talks with Jodie Foster for Entertainment Weekly. It's actually quite a good interview, and I'm glad SXSW's News Reel has pointed it out.

Update, 9/2: "A surprisingly sturdy and effective genre picture, [Death Sentence] has style and energy to spare, but ultimately fails in rectifying its own central conflicts, serving as a warning to the costs—emotional and otherwise—brought about by attempts to satiate one's desire for revenge while also hypocritically encouraging and reveling in violent, shoot 'em up confrontations," writes Rob Humanick at Slant.

Halloween.

"Rob Zombie knows and loves horror films," begins Jeffrey M Anderson. "Given that, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect his new remake of Halloween to have some kind of expert enthusiasm, or at least some kind of subversive slant. How disappointing, then, to see a film as callous, noisy and stupid as any of the other horror remakes that have been cluttering up multiplexes as of late."

"Halloween is brilliant," counters Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "It's a stroke of slice and dice genius. It represents some of the most solid film work this growing fright night giant has ever brought to the big screen, and it argues for putting real fear aficionados behind the lens of your latest take on a tale of terror."

Updated through 9/1.

Brian Orndorf: "Before anyone takes a dump all over Rob Zombie's remake of the John Carpenter classic Halloween, let me remind the picky bastards out there that the last time we saw Michael Myers on that big screen, he was trading karate chops with Busta Rhymes. Yeah, now this update doesn't seem so bad, does it?" More at Hollywood Bitchslap from Mel Valentin and Peter Sobczynski: "[W]hat Zombie has done to Halloween is roughly akin to what its central character does to virtually every other member of the cast - he hacks away until all we are left with is a bloody and virtually unrecognizable mess that lingers around painfully for a while before mercifully expiring."

"[T]he first half of Zombie's Halloween works," argues Noah Forrest at Movie City News. "It just doesn't work as a Halloween movie."

"Apart from the stale atmosphere and complete lack of tension in this film, there's also a generally low level of technical sophistication that leaves the viewer with a sense that no one involved with the production was really operating on all cylinders," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "The film isn't incompetently made or anything, it just stinks of being unnecessary and doesn't really hit its mark on any traditional level."

Chats with Zombie: Cheryl Eddy (San Francisco Bay Guardian), Richard Harrington (Washington Post), Aaron Hillis (IFC News), Jennifer Merin (New York Press) and Chuck Wilson (Voice).

Updates, 9/1: Halloween "wants us to care about Myers - who busts out of a mental institution 17 years after murdering most of his family and goes home to reconnect with the baby sister he spared - even while it depicts him as a mute, literally faceless grim reaper. The two impulses cancel each other out," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "That's too bad, because the case study part of the film re-establishes Mr. Zombie's status as modern American horror's most eccentric and surprising filmmaker."

"Rob Zombie's gut understanding of what makes 70s horror so great - its volatility, its nihilism, its unrepentant, take-no-prisoners viciousness - is unfortunately glimpsed in only short, sporadic bursts in Halloween," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Unlike The Devil's Rejects, which captured the grungy spirit of his favorite grindhousers, the musician-turned-filmmaker's updating of John Carpenter's seminal 1978 slasher flick skews in the opposite direction, attempting to tonally distance itself from its source material by replacing Carpenter's eerie, otherworldly menace with grim, brutal realism."

Tasha Robinson for the Chicago Tribune/Los Angeles Times: "It's a more polished, high-fidelity version of a story that's played out on screen many times since 1978, but once Zombie runs out of subtext, he's right back to the same old slasher text: 'Blood. Guts. The end.'"

José Luis de Villalonga, 1920 - 2007.

Spanish actor José Luis de Villalonga, who appeared in over 60 movies including the 1961 classic Breakfast at Tiffany's has died at his home on the island of Mallorca, Spanish media reported today. He was 87.

Among his other films was Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and Louis Malle's The Lovers (1958)....

A firm opposer of the right-wing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, Villalonga lived in France between 1950 and 1976 where he studied at Biarritz and Arcachon. In Paris he worked for magazines like Paris Match, Vogue and Marie Claire and developed a reputation as a playboy amongst the jet-set crowd he belonged to.

The West Australian, via Movie City News.

Venice. In the Valley of Elah.

"The Iraq war has proven as nettlesome to Hollywood moviemakers as it has to Washington policymakers, and In the Valley of Elah continues the trend," writes Robert Koehler for Variety. "Working overtime to be an important statement on domestic dissatisfaction with the war and the special price paid by vets and their families, Paul Haggis's follow-up to Crash is too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations."

But for Michael Rechtshaffen, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, Haggis has "avoided the dreaded sophomore slump... In the Valley of Elah is a deeply reflective, quietly powerful work that is as timely as it is moving." The film's also "graced by an exceptional Tommy Lee Jones lead performance that would have to be considered one of the finest in the 60-year-old actor's career."

Updated through 9/6.

Updates, 9/2: "Those of us who weren't crazy about Crash thought it reduced each of its dozens of characters to one small virtue and big flaw," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "This time Haggis is more open to his characters' drives and demons. The good guys, the ones so well played by Jones, [Charlize] Theron and [Susan] Sarandon, have nuances worth noting; and even the ones capable of committing the most heinous crimes seem like decent people to whom some awful thing happened. (Special mention to Wes Chatham, who could be Matt Damon's younger, cuter brother, as a soldier testifying to Hank about the killing.) The combination of dedicated actors and a superior script helps make Elah a far more satisfying film than Crash."

"The message that the American people and military families in particular are affected by and dissatisfied with the Second Iraqi War feels old and the idea of The Good War does not really need to be slayed anymore," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "The screenplay by the director never touches a raw nerve that could bring some sparkle to an otherwise odd mix of patriotism and criticism of contemporary US society."

"[T]he proximity of In the Valley of Elah to Redacted is a beautiful gift that the Venice Film Festival has just given our eyes and our thoughts," writes Emmanuel Burdeau in Cahiers du cinéma's Venice diary.

The BBC takes note of Haggis and Theron's thoughts on the war.

Updates, 9/3: "While Lee Jones's expressive face becomes an emblem of pain and regret, the film's most controversial image is its final shot: of the US flag hanging upside down and in tatters," writes the Observer's Jason Solomons. "In the Valley of Elah sympathises with American troops yet criticises their involvement in a war they don't understand."

"The really fascinating aspect of Paul Haggis's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Crash is the way it uses Hollywood conventions as a Trojan horse to deliver a radical, anti-war message to a mainstream audience," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily. "Elah is a denunciation of a dirty war disguised, for much of its length, as a murder mystery about the killing of a US soldier, newly returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.... The challenge of this approach, of course, it that more demanding viewers may be alienated by the sheer conventionality of that Trojan horse casing, before the film starts to reveal its true colours in the final stretch."

Updates, 9/4: "It's Jones's film: his performance will surely see him nominated for an Oscar," predicts Time Out's Dave Calhoun, and Elah "is largely a solid and effective addition to the spate of films about Iraq emerging from America."

"It's a thought-provoking film with a powerful message and some very fine performances - not just from the always dependable Jones and Theron, but newcomer Jake McLaughlin, himself an Iraq veteran, who plays one of Mike's platoon buddies," writes Mark Salisbury at In the Company of Glenn. "[T]his is a solid, emotive and moving film, with Haggis using the tropes of the thriller to smuggle across political points with laudable subtly and skill."

"Haggis suggests the Vietnam veterans, who were themselves set adrift when they came home, now have a new sense of purpose in 'trying to steer these men through this terrible morass,'" reports Geoffrey Macnab. "The US director is now planning special screenings of In the Valley of Elah to raise money for veterans."

Update, 9/6: "In the Valley of Elah is one of a ever-growing class of movies - released in the last quarter of the year, festooned with talent, and ostensibly about something - that desperately want to be seen as 'political' and 'important' modern moviemaking," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical from Toronto. "But we've already given Haggis rewards for his lazy storytelling, his cheap sentimentality, his glib and clumsy narrative tricks - so who could fault him for coming back to them again and again? In the Valley of Elah is very much in the mold of Million Dollar Baby - where an older man uses his lifetime of experience to try and do the right thing even though doing the wrong thing would be a hell of a lot easier. It's also got Crash's delusions of moral grandeur. Yes, In the Valley of Elah is about great and mighty topics, but it's somehow both self-satisfied and self-righteous, both preachy and predictable."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Venice. Sleuth.

"The wicked bitchiness between two men is pitched darkly perfect in Sleuth, Kenneth Branagh's incisive tête-à-tête remake of Joseph Mankiewicz's final film Sleuth (1972), based upon Anthony Schaeffer's 1970 Tony Award-winning play and given a whole new set of teeth by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter," writes Michael Guillén. "This is absolutely one of the few times I can say without reservation that I prefer the remake to the original. It bites much deeper and draws blood."

"[T]hose who know the original may wonder after awhile if their minds aren't playing tricks on them," suggests Robert Koehler in Variety. "The results will be received with a large, loud yawn by all but the most loyal fans of Pinter and hard-working co-stars Michael Caine and Jude Law... Just as Shaffer intended to remodel the creaky [Agatha] Christie model of the English manor mystery into something a bit more au courant for the early 70s when it first appeared on the West End, so Pinter - possibly the greatest living playwright in the English language - apparently wished to remodel Shaffer's play.... Immediately, though, this is a radically different Sleuth, one that feels at times like Pinter self-parody."

Updates, 8/31: Sleuth "loses its grip in the third act and let's the air out of what might have been a memorably gripping film," writes Ray Bennett for the Hollywood Reporter. "The idea of Caine doing a remake of the 1972 production in which he costarred but playing the Laurence Olivier role, and Jude Law, who has already stepped into Caine's shoes in Alfie, doing Caine's part will no doubt intrigue audiences. The quartet of big names and a tight 86-minute running time also will help, but the film's downbeat tone won't encourage huge boxoffice."

Martin Wainwright catches the press conference for the Guardian: "Law volunteered a comparison between Sleuth and Alfie, telling critics: 'Michael is many, many, many actors' heroes and he is certainly an acting hero of mine. The modern version of Alfie to me was a challenge because I hadn't played a character like that before. I don't know that I did it particularly well.'"

A "treat," reports a delighted Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "Although the work of the late Anthony Shaffer may seem like an unlikely source for Branagh after his adaptations of Shakespeare and Mozart, the 1970 play as reworked by Pinter is a perfect fit for the actor-turned-director and the two actors that make up the entire casting list of Sleuth."

"[B]leaker and blacker," notes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "[I]f it would look more comfortable on the stage, at least Branagh's 85-minute film is wise enough to keep things short and sharp."

"It's agreeable, but doesn't add up to much," sighs the Telegraph's David Gritten.

"Despite what Martin Wainwright writes in the Guardian today, the feeling, at least among European film critics, was of huge disappointment if not scorn," blogs Agnès Poirer. "The real hindrance comes from the direction: Kenneth Branagh is no Joseph L Mankiewicz, and his style is as flat as the Venitien Laguna on a quiet day. The audience should be gripped, on the edge of our seats, yet we're left simply bored, hardly interested in what should be a sparring firework."

The Italian media, though, has given Sleuth "pretty positive notice," reports Mark Salisbury at In the Company of Glenn. For him, though, the film "is sunk by a woefully unconvincing Law performance, terrible (and terribly distracting) production design from Tim Harvey... and Branagh's failure to make the one location and two men work visually."

Update, 9/3: "[H]ow could it fail?" asks the Observer's Jason Solomons. "Let me count the ways. Although well received by the Italians, Sleuth was excruciating, like some dreadful school play in which the old English teacher (Caine) has a go and the golden head boy (Jude) embarrasses himself. A tasteless set, dated dialogue and flailing direction add to the misery."

Update, 9/6: "Sleuth isn't incendiary or ground-breaking; it's a chance to see two very good actors (who also happen to be movie stars) work with very good material under the direction of a very good director," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi from Toronto. "Depending on your standards, that's either not much, or it's plenty. Sleuth is light entertainment made by heavy-hitters, and your initial reaction to that seemingly-contradictory fact will probably be the best prediction of whether or not you'll see it, and whether or not you'll enjoy it."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Shorts, 8/30.

"Tone is at the center of a new approach to film studies that is beginning to make itself felt in a wealth of excellent books and articles," writes DK Holm at Quick Stop Entertainment. "Well, it's not exactly new, really, having roots in the work of the Movie writers from the early 1960s onward. And it's not exactly sweeping the universities, as semiology, deconstruction, and other French imports did in the 1970s. But there is already a substantial body of work representing this new approach.... The best introduction to Tonal Studies is the new, second issue of a Close-Up." Further down that same page, DK interviews Douglas Pye, one of the editors of the issue, and George Wilson, author of Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View.

"Abbas Kiarostami makes only one half of his films. The rest is up to the audience to create themselves." Launching Subtitles to Cinema - this'll be one to keep an eye on - Karsten Meinich talks with the director.

For Digitally Obsessed, Mark Zimmer asks Tim Lucas about his monolithic new book, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark: "It is his story, but it's also the story of the period of Italian popular cinema to which he and his family were witness - pretty much its first century. So the book encompasses silent films like Quo Vadis? and Cabiria, into the Mussolini period with its fantasy classic The Iron Crown, the birth of neorealism, the 'Hollywood on the Tiber' years that saw the rise of celebrities like Totò, Gina Lollobrigida, Marcello Mastroianni and Steve Reeves (all of whom worked with Mario Bava)... and then the Bava career that people already know something about, but there are still many, many surprises."

"Patricio Guzmán, the great Chilean documentary director, recently returned home after many years in exile to make Salvador Allende, a biographical tribute to the democratic socialist leader, overthrown as Chilean president in a 1973 military coup, whose ghost continues to haunt Latin America (and should haunt our own country as well)," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "He humanizes one of the last century's most enigmatic and tragic figures, and makes an almost forgotten episode of modern history come vividly to life."

Charles Ferguson's "superlative" No End in Sight is "the Iraq movie everyone should see, and surely the one to see if you're only going to see one," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "Ferguson's reexamination of the occupation's crucial phases not only proves strikingly synoptic and clarifying, it also demonstrates cinema's unique value in grappling with the Iraq meltdown. Unlike the stacks of books that delve into the same issues, the film gives us the look of the Baghdad streets as well as the characters who populate this wrenching drama." But for Christie Schaefer, writing at WSWS, "Ferguson presents much valuable and harrowing material. His notion that such a neo-colonial adventure could be done 'properly' is what needs to be rejected."

Ella Taylor on Private Property: "[Joachim] Lafosse, who co-wrote (with François Pirot) the semiautobiographical script, is at pains to spread the wealth of infantile futility, but beneath his studied evenhandedness there's no mistaking the feverish Freudianism - all too common, and all too unconscious, in male directors of family dramas - of his ambivalence toward Pascale [Isabelle Huppert, who] has played more than her share of haughty bitches, and at 54 she remains as careless of her durable beauty (with her, one never feels that dropping the makeup is a bid for Oscar) as she is precise about pugnaciously unilateral, yet fragile character."

"It's extraordinary to see Hitchcock's distinctive cinematic vision emerge at such an early point in his career." Billy Stevenson on Blackmail.

David Bordwell, who's sparked quite a discussion with an entry on The Bourne Ultimatum, has gone back and rewatched Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum: "My opinions have remained unchanged, but that’s not a good reason to write this followup. I found that looking at all three films together taught me new things and let me nuance some earlier ideas."

At SF360, Michael Fox talks with Miles Matthew Montalbano about Revolution Summer: "It was the start of the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, 9/11, all of these things were at the forefront of a lot of people's minds. I don't feel like I have any answers politically, or that that's the filmmaker's place, but it came from a personal place of feeling so angry some days and frustrated other days. 'Why aren't we all out in the streets right now? Why aren't we throwing bricks and bottles? No one cares, this is always the way things are. Let's just go get a beer and have a good time.' I was trying to reconcile those feelings in myself, and wondering what should we be doing now."

IndieWIRE interviews Vanaja director Rajnesh Domalpalli.

In the New York Times, Michael Cieply reports on all that riding - for New Line, for director Chris Weitz - on The Golden Compass.

At the Reeler, ST VanAirsdale responds to Anthony Kaufman's Voice piece on distribution and exhibition woes in NYC: "Maybe the larger issue is not too few screens for too many movies, but too many distributors whose gatekeeping mechanisms - let alone their release platforms - need repair. There absolutely are too many bad films being made, bought and foisted upon audiences that can afford less and less to visit the cinema in the first place."

A fresh list at the Evening Class: "Michael Hawley's 'Tabulation of Deprivation' (AKA 50 Films He Wishes Would Come to the Bay Area)."

Other fests, other events, 8/30.

"When I first learned that the Indian director Shyam Benegal would be the subject of a tribute at this year's Telluride Film Festival (August 31 - September 3), I had seen exactly none of his films," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "Now, I have seen nearly a dozen, and I hunger for more. Benegal is a giant of India's 'parallel cinema' movement, sometimes referred to as 'new cinema' or 'middle cinema' - in short, films whose style, subject matter and themes run quietly alongside, but rarely intersect with, the dominant concerns of mainstream Indian cinema (aka Bollywood)." Three films by Benegal will be screening at the Pacific Film Archive on September 5, 6 and 7.

Meantime, surprise: As Mick Jones reports in Variety, Telluride has "announced a lineup heavy with Telluride regulars and echoes from this year's Cannes fest."

On Wednesday, September 5, Filmmaker will host a special screening of Ronald Bronstein's Frownland at the IFC Center in New York. For the magazine, David Lowery talks with Bronstein about his "grimy, manic masterpiece of black comedy that buries its humor beneath layers of egregious discomfort." It's "one of the most confrontational and uncompromising visions to emerge from the American independent scene in recent memory."

"Following its successful Mods & Rockers Film Festival in July, the American Cinematheque is back this weekend with Rock Doc: A Celebration of Rock Documentaries at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "It kicks off tonight with the Los Angeles premiere of actress-filmmaker Rosanna Arquette's 2005 movie All We Are Saying."

"Cinematexas will be greatly missed," writes Marc Savlov, "though that festival's passing alleviates, if only to a small degree, the annual scheduling nightmare that awaits legions of both local and visiting cinephiles, industry pros, and anyone else with plans to attend Fantastic Fest (Sept 20 - 27), the Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival (Sept 28 - Oct 6), and the Austin Film Festival & Conference (Oct 11 - 18), plus, this year only, the nonprofit National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture Conference (Oct 17 - 20)."

Also in the Austin Chronicle, Josh Rosenblatt looks ahead to the six-film series Blokes 'n' Birds: British Realist Cinema (1958 - 1965) - Tuesdays, September 4 through October 9 - and Toddy Burton previews a September 6 program of William Wegman shorts.

In Variety, Tatiana Siegel reports that Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs will open this year's AFI Fest (November 1 through 11) and Darcy Paquet announces, "The Pusan Film Festival will open with the world premiere of Feng Xiaogang's epic Chinese war movie Assembly on Oct 4 and end with the international preem of Japanese anime Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone on Oct 12."

"Documentarian Stanley Nelson, one of the most prolific nonfiction filmmakers working today, will attend SXSW 2008 next March to take part in a discussion of his work and his process." Matt Dentler has details.

"Clear and balmy nights have only heightened the jubilant atmosphere around the first week of the Montreal World Film Festival, rebounding from the funding ordeal in 2005 that nearly sounded (erroneously it turned out) the death knell of the 31-year fest overseen by the tenacious Serge Losique," reports Robert Avila for indieWIRE. "Unusually high attendance, full theaters, and enthusiastic crowds are all cheering signs that the controversies of 2005 are history."

The news isn't new, but the quote's worth noting: "My film was requested by every single film festival, but I didn't want to send it to any of them. I think film festivals are a thing of the past, completely obsolete. All they are good for is stirring up controversy. There's no real interest in the movies; they're just the film critics' sacrificial victims. On the contrary, in Rome there seems to be a sincere desire to choose and screen films for the audience." That's Francis Ford Coppola, telling an Italian monthly in an upcoming interview why he's decided to come to the RomeFilmFest with his Youth Without Youth. And he won't be alone: "Along with Coppola, in attendance at the RomeFilmFest there will be the leads Tim Roth and Bruno Ganz as well as the director's family: his wife Eleanor, his son Roman (who has taken part in the making of the film) and his daughter Sofia." Read on for more titles screening October 18 through 27.

Venice. Lust, Caution.

"Too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, a 2½-hour period drama that's a long haul for relatively few returns," writes Derek Elley for Variety. "Wartime Shanghai was far more realistically drawn in Lou Ye's Zhang Ziyi starrer Purple Butterfly, which also conveyed a stronger sense of resistance and collaborationist politics.... Lee's 40s Shanghai, though immaculately costumed, has a standard backlot look; the Hong Kong sequences, largely shot in Malaysia, are much more flavorsome."

"The Taiwanese director's adaptation of a novella by Eileen Chang is an uncompromising and incredibly seductive piece of filmmaking that is too long but has so many good elements going for it that it is hard to really care that on certain points the director seems to have thrown caution to the wind," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "Acting and technical credits are more than first-class and newcomer Wei Tang, starring alongside veteran Tony Leung, is simply riveting."

For the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett, Lust, Caution "brings to mind what soldiers say about war: that it's long periods of boredom relieved by moments of extremely heightened excitement.... The plot is much like Black Book, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's tale of a young Jewish woman who sleeps with a Nazi on behalf of the resistance, although it has none of the flair of that film."

Updates: "Had Lee accepted that his film is about the conflict between duty and desire, and worked smoothly on this premise, this could have been a far more focused and precise film," suggests Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "Hitchcock, whose work is mentioned several times in his picture, applied a similar approach to films such as Suspicion or Notorious (whose plot bears more than just a little resemblance to Chang's story). But by wishing to expand the story into a vast period portrait, first of Hong Kong, and then of Shanghai, Lee opens up avenues that he never has time to follow up."

"It would be no surprise if Ang Lee opted to cut it slightly, and perhaps clarified some early explanatory scenes," suggests the Telegraph's David Gritten. "But it must be a contender for major prizes here; Leung is once more an impossibly suave presence, and it's not too soon to proclaim Tang Wei in her first role as a new Gong Li in the making."

Update, 8/31: "It's a magnificent piece of filmmaking, albeit one that takes some time to click into gear," blogs Geoffrey Macnab at the Guardian. "Other directors condense huge novels into tidy 90-minute features. Lee's method is to take short stories and slowly expand them into epics." And as for the rating...

What is likely to make Lust, Caution difficult for the US censors to push under the carpet is its sheer artistry. This is palpably not an exploitation picture. The sex - which isn't shown until relatively late in the movie - is not gratuitous but is fundamental to the characterisation of the two leads. To cut it would be to undermine a core part of the storytelling. Thanks to Lee's reputation (topped by that directing Oscar for Brokeback Mountain), Lust, Caution now stands at least a chance of becoming one of the first NC-17 title to be taken seriously and contend for major awards. As a foreign language movie, it remains a tough sell. Nonetheless, you won't see many performances this year that are better than Tony Leung's chilling but melancholy turn as the mysterious Mr Yee.

Updates, 9/3: "Lee's new star Tang Wei is a revelation and a cert for Best Actress in her first film," writes the Observer's Jason Solomons. "Shot by Mexico's Rodrigo Prieto, this is a beautiful cinematic experience, an old-fashioned, handsome picture that nods to the seductive power of movies - posters for Destry Rides Again here, a clip of Ingrid Bergman sobbing there - indeed, it's on the way to the pictures that Leung first instructs his chauffeur to bring Wei to the secret apartment that will become their sex nest. Lust, Caution is like a Ming vase, though, and while it's a wondrous object to behold, it somehow lacks a sense of passion."

The BBC reports that, though Lee's sticking withthe NC-17 rating for the film's US release, he "will remove sex scenes from the thriller ahead of its release" in China.

Online listening tip. Eileen Chang translator Karen Kinsbury on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 9/10: Lust, Caution "is in a way the perfect blending of Ang Lee's two most popular films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain," proposes Time's Richard Corliss. "Like the first, it returns the Taiwanese native to China for a tale of political intrigue; like the second, it locates the passion, melancholy and power struggles of two complicated people.... Lust, Caution has not been so widely admired as Lee's other famous films. But it should be, for it mixes daring and delicacy with a master's touch."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Venice. The Girl Cut in Two.

"Much like Woody Allen, French director Claude Chabrol seems unable to live without making movies and, after a glory period that decidedly belongs to the past, he now makes a new film of varying quality each year," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "His latest film La fille coupée en deux (The Girl Cut in Two) however, could be dubbed Chabrol's Match Point (to continue the Allen metaphor); a deliciously dark and well-observed tale that marks a fine return to form."

"It's cynical business as usual for Claude Chabrol, who offers plentiful style and psychological finesse, if few surprises, in his latest jaundiced and sophisticated entertainment," writes Jonathan Romney for Screen Daily, where he also has a few good words for the "[s]trong performances by the increasingly confident Ludivine Sagnier and the ever-dependable François Berléand - plus a flamboyant, somewhat less believable one from Benoît Magimel."

"With language and mannerisms that are laugh-out-loud funny, Lyons-set story of a local TV weather girl who is simultaneously pursued by two very different men eviscerates the non-charm of the bourgeoisie," writes Lisa Nesselson for Variety. "While not a classic, this is a pleasantly disturbing, nominally voyeuristic romp in the territory Chabrol knows best."

"Chabrol's starting point is the 1906 murder of Stanford White, the architect of Madison Square Garden, whose killing by the husband of his actress mistress gave rise to what was described in its time as the 'trial of the century,'" notes Bernard Besserglik in the Hollywood Reporter. "The borrowed story is a pretext for Chabrol to revel in the incidential details of French social life and its sexual undertones: the publishing world in which Charles moves (Mathilda May is particularly eye-catching as his publicist Capucine); the shallow, predatory world of television in which the pert, pretty Gabrielle is irresistible bait to middle-aged middle management; and the world of refined manners and inherited wealth that turns out monsters like Paul and his siblings."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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The Nines.

The Nines is "an intriguing, episodic film that starts out genuinely creepy and funny and ends up like an overblown Twilight Zone episode," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "Hell, at least it's a good Twilight Zone episode. [John] August's directing debut - he's a veteran screenwriter who's penned several films for Tim Burton, including Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride - occasioned a certain amount of yammer at Sundance last winter, but I honestly can't see much here to discuss. By all means see the film; it's an ingenious, interlocking construction worthy of Agatha Christie, with tour-de-force performances from Hope Davis, Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy and a clever backstage-Hollywood premise (several movie-biz personalities play themselves). But David Lynch this ain't; you'll go to bed with all your questions answered, and answered with a kind of moon-faced, altar-boy earnestness."

Updated through 9/4.

"Though the barrier separating reality and fiction is flimsy, Reynolds's triplicate performance is strapping, nimbly segueing between frustration, cockiness, and existential confusion while nicely keeping his trademark sarcasm in check," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Even when August's ability to wrap up his interrelated narratives and Big Issues proves slightly lacking, Reynolds is never less than commanding, his exhibition of genuine acting ability provoking a shift in perception at least as great as that brought about by The Nines' mind-bending finale."

"It's strange to complain about a rare case of ambitious Hollywood filmmaking, but The Nines frustrates one's enlightenment by not fulfilling its true subject: the delusions and aggravations of company-town high living," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Instead, August substitutes false substance. Reynolds' gift for cute mischief (as in National Lampoon's Van Wilder and his role as the snarky vampire of Blade Trinity) ideally suits him to a parody of movieland's pretty persuasions. Flip irony is Reynolds' ace, but August chooses to play the profundity card."

"[A]t least when [Charlie] Kaufman, David Lynch, or Michel Gondry invites us on a tour of his chaotic subconscious, it's a fascinating place to visit," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Plunging into August's gray matter is more like a season in vacation hell."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with August "about the world of The Nines, drawing on his own experiences for inspiration, and his continuing love of The Muppet Movie."

David A Keeps in the Los Angeles Times: "Few directors would surrender their personal living space to a crew of 40, let alone reveal it to the general public exactly as it is in real life, not one room disguised with props or other fakery. But it is August's unaltered interior design - finishes, furnishings and all - that lends intimacy and emotional veracity to the story. He wouldn't have it any other way, especially when scenes were conceived with particular rooms in mind."

Update: "A late-night stoner conversation that has inexplicably bypassed the dorm room and headed straight into theaters, The Nines offers up one of the most incompetent would-be mindfucks in a time already saturated with aspiring Mementos," writes Vadim Rizov after a spoiler warning at the Reeler. "The reasons are manifold, but the irreparable error is in the foundation; everything else just hurts all the more."

Updates, 8/31: "Like David Lynch's recent Inland Empire, The Nines scurries down a labyrinth of rabbit holes, compounding the mystery to the point of no return, and never really comes back," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Still, August never descends into the psychedelic mire of that movie, or of, say, the metaphysical bowl of oatmeal that was The Fountain. On the contrary, it dispenses about a minor epiphany a minute and hooks you like a flounder. In the end, though, perhaps very much like a flounder, you're left flapping in the breeze with nothing more than a lure in your mouth, the painful realization there's always a bigger fish out there somewhere, pulling the strings and, for what it's worth, a deeper insight into the interconnectedness of it all. Which, on reflection, has got to be worth at least the price of admission."

"The Nines isn't a neatly packaged mind game like Mr Kaufman's cleverest films," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Instead it playfully tosses out ideas, then leaves it to the viewer to read the pieces like tea leaves."

Update, 9/2: "The loose threads holding The Nines together unravel with any interpretation; actually, the film only ever felt stitched together in the first place," writes Marcy Dermansky. "2 stars."

Update, 9/4: For IFC News, Nick Schager talks with Reynolds: John August "said, 'Expose me, warts-and-all.' A lot of what that character is dealing with is hubris, and that's not a flattering trait to be portraying in somebody who's standing in the same room as you."

Shorts, 8/29.

"More than two decades ago, in his well-known book The Culture of Time and Space (1983), Stephen Kern wrote that 'the two pioneers of Cubism, Picasso and Braque, incorporated the innovations of Cézanne and the cinema and brought about the most important revolution in the rendering of space in painting since the 15th century,'" recalls Malcolm Turvey in Artforum.

"What the PaceWildenstein show [Picasso, Braque, and Early Film in Cubism] did for the first time was put this claim to the test by placing early films and Cubist paintings side by side; the evidence, however, was unconvincing.... Universal Language and the Avant-Garde at Maya Stendhal Gallery, meanwhile, was a smaller, more modest endeavor than the PaceWildenstein exhibition - and much more successful. The main part of the show was devoted to [Viking] Eggeling and [Hans] Richter, who began collaborating around 1918 in drawings, scrolls (not one of which, unfortunately, was on display here), and eventually films before Eggeling's premature death in 1925."

The September issue has at least a few other pieces you'll likely want to know about but which are, unfortunately, not online: P Adams Sitney on Robert Beavers and Scott MacDonald's interview with James Benning. Both Artforum and frieze, by the way, cover the big art world events of the summer - the Venice Biennale, Documenta 12 and the Sculpture Projects in Münster - and both, in fact, have the same cover: Bruce Nauman's Square Depression, 1977/2007.

Filmbrain reviews "a major document in the history of German avant-garde cinema.... Perhaps owing to its use of non-actors, People on Sunday has a remarkably modern feel to it, and the cast never employ the exaggerated gestures or acting style one tends to find in silent cinema. If anything, the film has more in common with the French New Wave than it does the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) that was dominating German cinema at the time (Lang, Pabst, Jutzi)."

"It's so refreshing to read a Hollywood book about somebody with such a jaunty, head-first spirit," writes the Shamus, who's just finished Douglas Fairbanks, Jr's The Salad Days:

It's almost as if he decided to live the life that his more famous father played on screen.... He took steam baths with Charlie Chaplin and played tennis with Maurice Chevalier. Worshipped John Barrymore and helped a destitute Ethel pay off a hotel bill. Confided in Noel Coward. Laughed off a seduction attempt by Clifton Webb. Played footsie with Jean Harlow. Bumped into Lawrence of Arabia - twice. Became good friends with "Larry" Olivier and David "Niv" Niven....

Fairbanks had the kind of high-gloss life that you read about in Fitzgerald stories: summers overseas, writing casuals for Esquire and Vanity Fair, trips across the country on the Super Chief, sailing across the Atlantic, attending opening nights and endless cocktail parties and spending weekends at country estates with titled Brits, or at the White House, where buck-toothed Eleanor would sit on the bed and chat with Fairbanks and his wife. It's the kind of world that will never be seen again.

"Paul Verhoeven's next project to actually get before cameras is to be an adaptation of Pete Dexter's The Paperboy," announces Brendon Connelly. "We can expect The Paperboy to shoot early in 2008, while Verhoeven's '19th Century Basic Instinct,' The Winter Queen and another Dutch production, an adaptation of Jan Siebelink's Kneeling on a Bed of Violets are apparently still on course, and likely to follow in the next couple of years."

Michael Fleming reports that Oliver Stone will likely direct Pinkville, "a drama about the investigation of the 1968 My Lai massacre," with Bruce Willis in the lead. Stone will be in San Francisco on October 11, by the way. And the Guardian's Ed Pilkington reports that Stone's doc on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be back on after all.

More up-n-coming news from Variety:

• Vicki Rothrock: "Ziyi Zhang is in talks to star in Waiting, based on Ha Jin's National Book Award-winning novel."

• Michael Fleming again: "George Lucas has hired John Ridley to write Red Tails, a WWII action adventure about the Tuskegee Airmen based on a story by Lucas... He hired Ridley after reading LA Riots, the Universal/Imagine drama Ridley just turned in to director Spike Lee."

• Diane Garrett: "Warner Bros has tattooed Zack Snyder's name on its redo of The Illustrated Man."

• Dade Hayes reports that the Cinema Guild will be distributing Laura Dunn's SXSW and Sundance favorite, The Unforeseen. Also in the pipeline for US theaters: Christian Petzold's Yella.

At Twitch, Collin A reviews The Last Winter, "Larry Fessenden's most expansive, thought-provoking work to date, The Last Winter. A love-him-or-hate-him multi-hyphenate (he acts, edits, produces, co-writes, and directs here) whose films - built on shifting mixtures of genre trappings and deeply personal commentaries - have consistently polarized audiences since the early 90s, Fessenden's hot-button parable about the quest for 'energy independence' and the price civilization must pay for ignoring nature's warning signs achieves a chilling, spectral tone amidst its understated plea for environmental awareness."

"I've watched countless horror films and thrillers in my lifetime and I rarely get the urge to look away from the movie screen or turn a film off before I'm finished watching it, but the events depicted in [Yoshitaro Nomura's] The Demon are so realistically presented and relentlessly horrific that the film became incredibly hard for me to watch all the way through," writes Kimberly Lindbergs.

"Now that The Frodo Franchise is out, I've started a separate blog for it," announces Kristin Thompson.

"[W]hose fault is it that [Glenn] Close and [Holly] Hunter are on television? Or Lili Taylor, Parker Posey, Mary-Louise Parker or Kyra Sedgwick?" asks Mary McNamara. "A few years ago, these were all film actresses and now they each have their own series. Even Susan Sarandon is back as the bodacious babe on Rescue Me. Which is, don't get me wrong, totally terrific for us, the audience members, but unless the movie industry has made peace with being the purveyors of blockbusters, Judd Apatow comedies and not much else, why are they letting go of some of their best talent?"

Also in the Los Angeles Times: Amy Kaufman on the Inner-City Filmmakers summer program, "an intensive, eight-week film boot camp for underprivileged youth. ICF gives a select pool of just-graduated high school seniors access to professionals and elaborate technical equipment, allowing those interested in movies to further their passion without concern for finance."

"Gotham may be famous for its indie films, but the exhibition landscape is an increasingly contentious and competitive space, with too many movies struggling to stay alive on too few screens." Anthony Kaufman draws a map.

Also in the Voice:

• Nathan Lee pops a Balls of Fury quiz. Related: At Slant, Nick Schager congratulates Christopher Walken for "a performance that's a parody of a parody of himself." He's become "an actor far too aware of his own eccentricity, though his embarrassingly self-conscious comedic turn is still the 'best' thing about this lazy farce." And the NYT's AO Scott pleads, "Can summer please be over now?"

• "Self-Medicated reveals itself as a narcissistic fantasy about the misunderstood kid with a heart of gold who finally figures out how to get his shit together: Good Will Hunting with a side of Capracorn," writes Scott Foundas. More from Ed Gonzalez at Slant: "A man for all seasons, writer-director Monty Lapica is the star of his own turgid after-school special, which stretches out the ludicrous 'I Learned It from Watching You' anti-drug PSA from the '80s to feature length."

• Ed Gonzalez: "Pity so little of [Vanaja's] heft registers past the graceless fog of the movie's stilted thesping, overreaching directorial ambition, and unintentional comic pacing."

• Aaron Hillis on 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama: "It's a slog."

Lynn Rapoport in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Featuring a score by Jonathan Richman and real-life footage of protesters and riot cops, [Miles Matthew Montalbano's Revolution Summer is lightly plotted and heavily atmospheric."

"Delirious (2006) is one the worst movies I've ever sat through, at least one that was compounded by someone old enough to shave, and should be recommended only to connoisseurs of abjection," writes Ray Pride for New City Chicago. "It's so bad, I've got a 3000-word draft of this review filled with insults that still does not do justice to the rank incompetence, cultural ignorance and sullen lack of comedy on display. There are positive reviews of Delirious. They are wrong. [Tom] DiCillo's latest, in a career littered with dolorous work, offers an insult to the merely incompetent of the world."

In the Philadelphia Weekly, Sean Burns reviews Them, "a well made, if extremely hollow, technical exercise. Truth be told, this French/Romanian chiller from first-time co-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud is so wafer-thin, I'm a little wary of calling it a movie. It's more like a photographed premise."

"I'm a Cyborg But That's OK indulges in the cute and silly, but Park [Chan-wook] always keeps one foot firmly planted in the horrible reality his characters are trying to escape," writes Jürgen Fauth.

"While as much of a celebration of movie fakery as his debut, Tears of the Black Tiger, Wisit Sasanatieng's Citizen Dog might be more easily embraced by those who were put off by the violence of the previous film," writes Peter Nellhaus. "A film about the magic of the world, of finding love in a candy colored environment, Citizen Dog is like the contemporary version of the kind of film one might have seen from Jacques Demy or Vincente Minnelli."

"[T]here is only one entertainment entity that completely understood what living inside a gloomy Gothic reality was all about," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "And its name was... Dark Shadows."

While Rowan Atkinson developed a "cult following" in the US with his Blackadder series in the 80s, Mr Bean's Holiday hasn't performed nearly as well stateside as in just about every other part of the world. In the NYT, Dave Itzkoff considers "the baffling question of why a taciturn comic character who communicates in the international language of pratfalls and sight gags hasn't been able to attract the attention of a wider American audience."

Owen Wilson is "a good-time shaman; when he appears, you smile, because know you're about to have fun," writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. "He makes good films better and bad films tolerable. Onscreen, he's a human sunbeam.... Wilson might have been sad as hell about any number of things, but comic actors aren't inherently more depressive than dramatic actors, novelists, police officers, schoolteachers or bus drivers. People are people, and each one is unique.... I wish Owen Wilson good luck in his ascent from the abyss, which I am sure will be willful and permanent."

StinkyLulu's hosted another round of "Supporting Actress Smackdown." This time, the year is 1971.

"Hilly Kristal, who founded CBGB, the Bowery bar that became the cradle of punk and art-rock in New York in the 1970s and served as the inspiration for musician-friendly rock dives throughout the world, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. He was 75," reports Ben Sisario for the New York Times. Matt Dentler has an online listening tip.

Robert Cashill bids farewell to the DVD Journal.

Online browsing tip. Paintings of Klaus Kinski for movie posters, posted at Scarecrow by Laird, via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

Online browsing and reading tips. Endangered Machinery: The Industrial and Industrial Heritage Photography of Haiko Hebig. Via Joel Johnson at the newly launched Boing Boing Gadgets. Also, at the newly relaunched Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow points to a site for Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, edited by John Joseph Adams.

Offline reading tips. Jason Sperb and Jonathan Lapper have a few.

Online gazing tip. Magnum shoots Ingrid Bergman.

Interviews and profiles, 8/29.

For the Telegraph, Harriet Lane profiles David Thewlis, who's just seen the publication of his first novel, The Late Hector Kipling. Via Movie City News.

In the Los Angeles Times, Susan King talks with Joe Menendez about Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón: "The caper comedy revolves around two veteran thieves who reunite in Los Angeles to rob a TV infomercial guru/con man who has made a fortune selling useless health items to poor Latino immigrants."

"Two years ago, when Dario Fo (the Nobel Prize-winning jester and satirist) launched a campaign to become mayor of Milan, one of his most vocal supporters was London's mayor, Ken Livingstone." I Am Not a Moderate documents the short-lived campaign, giving Geoffrey Macnab good read reason to talk to the playwright for the Independent.

"I don't think most people who watched the show really got a sense of what a remarkable feat all of us engaged in week after week," On the Lot contestant Mateen Kemet tells Matt Sussman at SF360.

For the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Maria Komodore calls up Jorge Gaggero to talk about Live-In Maid.

For the Guardian, Patrick Barkham talks with David Mackenzie about Hallam Foe. And he's "now working on two scripts, including a western, and hopes to direct both. 'I feel like I've done sex, so I'm going to move on to money now,' he vows."

For Hollywood Bitchslap, Peter Sobczynski talks with Julie Delpy about 2 Days in Paris, while, at Cinematical, Ryan Stewart talks with Adam Goldberg. For the New Republic's Christopher Orr, the movie's an "absolute riot."

Other fests, other events, 8/29.

In Austin? Mike Everleth insists you go see James Fotopoulos's Back Against the Wall tonight at 9:30 pm.

"Yo La Tengo, Saint Etienne, the Smiths: funny how the seeming dreariness of British bedsit movies inspired maybe even more great pop acts than did the French new wave visions of and for the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston previews the Pacific Film Archive series Look Back at England: The British New Wave, opening Sunday and running through October 26.

"The unique cachet of Telluride - which derives from the isolation and beauty of its location, the absolute secrecy that cloaks the program until mere hours before the opening program and the small number of passes... - is something neither [co-founder Tom] Luddy nor [new co-programmer Gary] Meyer wish to mess with," writes Michael Fox, with both for SF360.

"The New Crowned Hope festival, with which theater director Peter Sellars helped Vienna celebrate Mozart's 250th birthday last year, produced six features and a short that, having made the rounds of film festivals over the past year, now reach the MFA." Chris Fujiwara preps Boston Phoenix readers for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century, Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Paz Encina's Paraguayan Hammock, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Daratt, Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa and Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon.

NewFest carries on interviewing filmmakers lined up for NewFest@BAM, a series slated for September 7 through 9.

Acquarello posts the lineup for the New York Film Festival's Views from the Avant Garde sidebar. September 28 through October 14.

Venice, 8/29.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw's in Venice, looking forward to "a sparkling set of films," and floats an idea: "I haven't seen Nightwatching yet. I have no idea what it's like. But for sheer shake-up value, giving [Peter] Greenaway the Golden Lion would probably be the most gratifying."

Emmanuel Burdeau opens a Venice diary for Cahiers du cinéma, "to give voice - voices - to incertitude. That's the way it is, and we intend to stick to it. An effort will be made not to give in to judgment and opinions. We will strive to give the films their freedom. We will talk about the enthusiasm, the perplexity, the interrogations. We will change our minds. We will erase the tracks of evaluation."

Via Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, "some key moments" from 75 years of the festival's history from Reuters. Related online browsing tip: a slide show at the International Herald Tribune.

Earlier: "Venice. Atonement."

Anticipating Toronto, 8/29.

Update: Michael Guillén's had to tweak the page that bore his review of David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises due to a frustrating set of circumstances - i.e., 'tain't his fault - and for now, I refer you to Tom Huddleston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, where he writes, "this is terrific, completely ludicrous but utterly enthralling, taking the pseudo-subversive preoccupations of it's predecessor and running with them."

Updated.

More from Fabfunk at AICN: "I would say it's one of his weaker films, but even his least charitable critics have to admit that this one has a strong hold."

Next stop: Twitch's gargantuan "One Stop TIFF Trailer Shop," sorted by program. Yowza.

Jonathan Rosenbaum picks three films he's looking forward to catching in Toronto. And that's just one quick entry picked from the roaring Doc Blog. Picking up these days are the Canadian Film Programmes Blog, the Continental Drift Blog, the Midnight Madness Blog and the actually quite hopping South Facing Blog. Then, of course, there are all these. September 6 through 15.

Tom Hall's looking forward to Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret's Meduzot (Jellyfish). Related: Cannes reviews of the Camera d'Or winner.

And now's a good time to be tracking TIFFReviews.com.

Lee Marvin Blog-a-Thon.

Richard Harland Smith notes that the Lee Marvin Blog-a-Thon he's hosting at Movie Morlocks "commemorates the 20th anniversary of the great actor's death, on August 29, 1987."

Linkage will take you to new blog posts, an "essential" overview of Marvin's career and even some online viewing.

The Monastery: Mr Vig & the Nun.

"Despite some pretty seasonal photography and evocative scenes of the nuns' rigorous daily rituals, which involve many hours of prayer, The Monastery: Mr Vig & the Nun is a flighty, disorganized film with a blurry timeline and a wandering attention span," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The movie only snaps into focus when Mr Vig, who bought [Hesbjerg Castle] 50 years earlier, intending eventually to turn it into a monastery, reminisces about his life."

"When the renovations of his castle begin and a group of nuns arrive to oversee the conversion of the building, Sister Amvrosya's loving but commanding presence provides a clashing force for Mr Vig's set-in-stone attitudes and general naiveties, their bantering recalling Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart's chemistry in John Huston's The African Queen," writes Rob Humanick at Slant.

Updated through 8/31.

"Unlike far too many human-interest docs today, director Pernille Rose Grønkjær's fantastic little character portrait doesn't rest on the strength of its personality," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

Updates, 8/30: "This isn't a movie about God or spirituality or monastic life, except in passing," notes Salon' Andrew O'Hehir. "Instead, The Monastery is an oddly graceful combination of fairy tale and romantic comedy, set in a forgotten corner of the world. If you took Beauty and the Beast and The Honeymooners, blended them and planted the result in overgrown Danish swampland, I guess this is what you'd get."

"Grønkjaer is also the sole photographer for The Monastery," notes Michelle Orange at the Reeler, "recalling in technique (and a few other things, including the masterful use of natural light and a steady, hypnotic eye for the quotidian) the one-man crew of the other monastery documentary from earlier this year, Into Great Silence. Though she can be heard off screen occasionally, prodding the naturally withdrawn but hardly reticent Vig with questions, and steps into the frame once or twice when the old man requests her help, Grønkjaer's camera is a patient, sometimes wry, sometimes tense and tactful observer, recording the touching decline and reinvigoration of the castle, Vig and his mysterious guests with an equalizing curiosity."

Update, 8/31: "The Monastery is one of the few documentaries that might've gotten closer to the reality of its time, place, and people had it been refashioned as a feature film," proposes Noel Murray at the AV Club, adding that it's "like the opposite of Into Great Silence."

Exiled.

"Johnnie To may not be the last man standing, but he is the lone Hong Kong action director who's done his best work in the aftermath of the crown colony's reversion to China," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "In a sense, the feverishly active To is out of step with history—and, as its title suggests, his latest gangster opus, Exiled, revels in that sense of anachronism."

"Get ready for shoot-outs, and you better like them absurd-slash-borderline ridiculous," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "Though the action is a bit murkier than, say, To's Breaking News (2004), the characters are richer and the story more satisfying than his recent (and arguably over-praised) Election and Triad Election."

"From the twilit last-reckoning setting of Macau at the time of the Chinese handover, to a pace that alternates lush set pieces with breather stretches, Exiled evokes a tighter Leone western with its cinematic confidence shared by filmmaker and gangsters alike," writes Nicholas Rapold in the L Magazine.

Updates, 8/30: "It's a remarkable combination of everything expected from an action movie: bad guys in trench coats, women in peril, bullets galore," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "But it's also infused with surprisingly effective ingredients that rarely appear in this kind of fast and furious amusement: Sincere, affable characters, light-hearted humor and an entirely believable fondness for the innate beauty of life and death."

"The most entertaining movie released so far this year was made in Hong Kong in 2006," announces R Emmet Sweeney at the Reeler. "A Wild Bunch riff in love with the pure, plastic beauties of the medium, Exiled is also a glistening showpiece of sinuous tracking shots, fetishistic slow motion, and a ritualistic sense of gun-play."

Updates, 8/31: "I still meet people who praise The Departed (an entertaining and beautifully made picture) but who draw a blank when I mention Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs, the extraordinary cop drama on which The Departed is based," notes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "I don't blame their reaction on ignorance: I just think that a lot of movie fans who might enjoy the work of some of the Hong Kong filmmakers are intimidated by the clubby insiderishness of so many of the fans. It's hard to know what you might like when you don't even know where to start. That's why I'd put To's Exiled - which opens in New York today, in Los Angeles next week, and in other US cities over the next few months - into the category of Hong Kong movies that even people who think they don't care about Hong Kong movies should see."

"This tale of childhood buddies turned hit men squaring off against a malevolent gang boss in 1998 Macau - on the eve of that former Portuguese colony's absorption by China - is the kind of film where flames roar, waves crash and dropped bullets thud like bowling balls," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "Mannered as it is, however, Exiled is a tonic - a film that delivers all the visceral satisfactions of a super-macho action picture (close-quarters gun battles; slow-motion Wild Bunch-style side-by-side struts) and unabashedly sentimental depictions of loyalty and tenderness as well as plot twists that are surprising, often bizarre, yet feel just right."

"Nothing about Exiled is as resonant as To's best work, but it's a clever homage to Sam Peckinpah, right down to the clouds of bloody mist that fill the barroom as To's anti-heroes make their last stand," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"As in last year's Triad Election, the shadow of China looms over Exiled with a 'party's over' vibe," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "The gun battles are the best part of To's film, which, despite its refreshingly tender treatment of male friendship, seems attenuated otherwise, the pensive final chapter of some longer epic that was never made."

"To has moved well beyond the parody of the John Woo school of grandiose male melodrama action cinema he scathingly exhibited in A Hero Never Dies (1998)," writes Daniel Kasman. "It may come as a shock after the resolutely anti-romantic Election 2 that Exiled’s first scene is of stoic, trenchcoat-clad men in paramilitary coiffures flicking cigar ash and silently waiting the arrival of their target photographed in stately crane shots and Kurosawa-style widescreen blocking.... If he is going to go back to these standards for entertainment, it is going to be done with a full acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of the caricatures and of their on-screen glory, even when the film whole-heartedly does what it can to give them their magnificent worth."

Updates, 9/5: "At his best, [To's] films are glossy, stylistically impeccable exercises in transcendent shallowness (Running Out of Time) or canny referentiality, as in the deliberately outsized nocturnal poetics and macho Super-Mann gestures of A Hero Never Dies," writes Mark Asch for Stop Smiling:

For a long time, though, he couldn't play it straight without resorting to the kind of slapstick interludes that marred his tone-deaf Stray Dog remake PTU, or the too-many-balls-in-the-air overreaching of his undercooked media commentary Breaking News. For that matter, The Mission was less than the sum of its parts, all set pieces and no connective tissue.

Eventually, To found his voice by reaching back further, with the grim viscerality, Gordon Willis-aping palette, and operatic scale - founded, like the Godfather movies, on father-son plots and the underworld's inexorable corruption - of Election and Triad Election.

"How many times am I gonna have to rave about Exiled before you go see it?" asks Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Updated, 9/6: "Buoyed by humor in all the right places, the script is dryly funny," writes Craig Phillips at the Guru. "To isn't just winking at American genre films, but at other Hong Kong action flicks, and his own filmography. By the time we get to scene around a campfire after the men pull of their heist, with one of them blowing on a harmonica, it all makes perfect sense."

Quiet City.

"For all its air of casualness and the actors' unerring ability to deliver semi-improvised dialogue that sounds overheard, Quiet City is a formal movie, elegantly edited, whose images, both still and moving, are conjoined to a soundtrack that reduces the noise of the city to an evocative background hum, quiet but not silent," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The mumblecore genre, with its minimalist aesthetics, minuscule budgets, home-movie casting of friends and acquaintances and its fly-on-the-wall, quasi-documentary spontaneity, is so wide-open for parody that it is a sitting duck for the most withering send-up. Quiet City is fortunate to arrive just before the inevitable demolition crews arrive to tear it to shreds. Tender and sad, it is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry."

Updated through 9/4.

IndieWIRE, which has already run Michael Koresky's review, pointed to earlier, interviews director Aaron Katz.

And so, this entry now takes over from "Weekend mumbles" and "Matt Dentler and Andrew Bujalski."

Updates: "[I]f the longings of Katz's reluctant adults are still inchoate, they're depicted with unfaltering eloquence," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

"With its unforced, shot-on DV pace and erratic jumps between and within scenes, it'd be easy to accuse [Joe] Swanberg of being a talented eavesdropper with a short attention span," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi of LOL. "But when a minor moment from earlier in the film comes back with deliberate timing and real intent - over and over and over, as our three high-tech boys make the same mistakes over and over and over - and you recognize Swanberg's got something to say and a fresh voice to say it with."

Online viewing tip. Joe talks about dealing with the mumblecore backlash and his next project (after Nights and Weekends, that is), Butterknife, on ReelerTV, where Karina Longworth follows up with another reminder to not overlook three of her favorites in the New Talkies: Generation DIY series.

As suggested by Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, David Lowery "borrow[s] a page from the New York Times' old 'Watching Movies With...' series, in which filmmakers would watch and discuss a favorite film, relating it to their current body of work" and gets on the phone with Katz and McFadden to talk about Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay notes that Quiet City "has its own very distinct sensibility that's quite different from some of the genre's other filmmakers.... It's delicate, wafer-thin at times, but, like the best minimalist narratives, it winds up saying something memorable with the slenderest of means."

"That a bunch of slovenly, misshapen movies (not necessarily a pejorative) has come to be so closely grouped together, so quickly and forcefully, speaks to the intense need of the current independent film community to feel part of and champion something in the American independent landscape," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot. "I chide these guys (where are the girls? or the minorities, for that matter?) a bit not because I find mumblecore some kind of aesthetic blight - I'm actually somewhat in awe of how they've played their hand thus far - but because I've only caught glimpses in these films of the wanton playfulness and voracious need to experiment that characterized the Nouvelle Vague or early 80s American indie. Maybe this desire isn't there, and maybe it doesn't need to be, but forgive me if I wouldn't mind an American filmmaker standing up and announcing him or herself as the heir to Jacques Rivette or Alain Resnais.... For this writer, there's hope in the modest pleasures of Quiet City that this all isn't an aesthetic dead-end waiting to be taken out with the trash."

Matt Dentler talks with Quiet City's other producer, Ben Stambler, "who many in the indie-film biz know as an aquisitions exec at THINKFilm (and shortly before that, Magnolia Pictures)."

Updates, 8/30: "Where Hannah Takes the Stairs is talky, itchy, sleepless, self-regarding, Quiet City is a contemplative widescreen experience that views its landscape - the borderline-industrial hipster neighborhoods of Brooklyn, NY - with painterly patience," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Swanberg is usually right on top of his characters, seeking a Bergman-esque intensity, while Katz's characteristic gesture is more the Terrence Malick long shot or the Edward Hopper midnight tableau."

Michael Tully sees good things in store for Quiet City, insists that you catch Ronald Bronstein's Frownland if you can and bumps into - no, really - Abel Ferrara.

"I just had my fourth year anniversary of living in New York, and I've spent most of that time living either in Brooklyn, or just across Newtown Creek in Long Island City," writes Karina Longworth. "Quiet City captures the odd beauty of the outer boroughs on a good day in a way that makes me nostalgic for my own very recent past."

There was a Quiet City Q&A last night and the Film Panel Notetaker was there.

For Filmmaker, David Lowery talks with Ronald Bronstein about Frownland, "a grimy, manic masterpiece of black comedy that buries its humor beneath layers of egregious discomfort" and "one of the most confrontational and uncompromising visions to emerge from the American independent scene in recent memory." On Wednesday, September 5, Filmmaker will host a special screening at the IFC Center.

Updates, 8/31: "Katz has a good feel for the low-key rhythms of everyday life among the slackerati," writes Nathan Rabin of Quiet City at the AV Club. "Hopefully next time out he'll figure out a way to transform that into something approximating art."

"I'm starting to think that grouping themselves into a promotable 'movement' is both the smartest thing any of these filmmakers have done for their careers and the dumbest thing they could do for their art," writes Phil Nugent. He argues his case for quite a while, and then notes that David Lynch spent three years of his life making Eraserhead:

Now Lynch, who has done as much if not more than any American filmmaker to aim past the perceived limitations of his medium and bring tantalizing new audiovisual feats to his fan base, has caught the DV DIY bug; he can't get over how much easier it is working in DV and swears that he'll never go back to film, though his DV epic Inland Empire is the most shapeless, unfocused, ultimately wearying mess to which he's ever signed his name. In this fast-evolving technological age we live in, even people who you'd expect to know better seem more and more inclined to lose sight of the fact that what makes things easier for the artist and what's best for his art may not necessarily be the same thing.

Online listening tip. It's an all-mumblecore edition of Spout's FilmCouch.

Update, 9/4: Don R Lewis talks with Katz for Film Threat.

Venice. Atonement.

"Tonight's opening movie at the Venice Film Festival certainly features the most glamorous young talent that the British film industry has to offer," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, offering a first impression of Atonement. "Keira Knightley and James McAvoy star as the tragically sundered wartime lovers in an epic directed by Joe Wright, adapted from the bestselling novel by Ian McEwan. Could it be The English Patient for the noughties?"

Wright's next project will be The Soloist, a "fact-based drama about a violin prodigy," reports Michael Fleming for Variety. Robert Downey, Jr and Jamie Foxx are on board.

Updated through 9/4.

Earlier: Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. And then, there are the Wright interviews and profiles: David Gritten (Telegraph), Hermoine Eyre (Independent) and Jason Solomons (Observer). Screenwriter Christopher Hampton has blogged about adapting McEwan, and Jeff Dawson has spoken with Wright and Hampton for the London Times.

Updates: "Composer Dario Marianelli has created a wonderfully inventive score," blogs Ray Bennett. "Marianelli is one of several from the Pride & Prejudice team that Wright re-assembled for his screen version of the Ian McEwan novel. The composer picked up a Classical Brit award and an Academy Award nomination for his Austen score. He's worked with directors Bille August, Michael Winterbottom, Michael Caton-Jones and Terry Gilliam, and did the music for Neil Jordan's upcoming revenge thriller The Brave One starring Jodie Foster."

Atonement is "for its first half at least, a towering achievement, a compelling, richly detailed, moving examination of morals, lies, and class prejudice, beautifully acted, and strikingly shot by Seamus McGarvey," writes Mark Salisbury for Premiere. "[I]t's when the story leaps forward five years to war-ravaged France, that, for me, the film relaxed it vice-like grip, as the Brideshead Revisited/Gosford Park flavourings of the first act surrenders to the horrors of combat, with McAvoy's soldier stuck behind enemy lines, struggling to make it to Dunkirk and a boat to England.... There's such a stiff upper lip quality to much of this, one can only assume that Brief Encounter must be Wright's favourite film."

Emmanuel Burdeau, writing for Cahiers du cinéma, finds Atonement to be a "disappointment... The film is of the dreary genre, the sophisticated British melodrama."

Updates, 8/30: "Rarely has a book sprung so vividly to life, but also worked so enthrallingly in pure movie terms," writes Derek Elley for Variety:

Where Wright's debut took a relatively free hand in reworking Jane Austen's classic in more youthful terms, Atonement is immensely faithful to McEwan's novel, with whole scenes and dialogue seemingly lifted straight from the page in Christopher Hampton's brisk adaptation.

And where Pride & Prejudice took a more realistic approach to Austen's universe, Atonement consciously evokes the acting conventions and romantic cliches of 30s/40s melodramas - from the cut-glass British accents, through Dario Marianelli's romantic, kinetic score, to the starchy period look.

It's a gamble that could easily have tilted over into farce. But Wright's approach is redeemed by his cast and crew, with leads like Knightley, McAvoy and young Irish thesp Saoirse Ronan driving the movie on the performance side and technicians like DP Seamus McGarvey and designers Sarah Greenwood and Jacqueline Durran providing a richly decorated frame for their heightened playing.

"This is a textbook example of literary adaptation; breathtakingly beautiful in its craftsmanship, impeccably acted and quietly devastating in its emotional impact," writes Allan Hunter for Screen Daily. "It should also be considered the first front runner for across the board consideration among both Oscar and BAFTA voters."

"[I]t ranks with the best novel adaptations of recent times," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett.

Updates, 8/31: James Christopher finds "the buzz, Oscar and otherwise, around this world premiere of Atonement is only partially merited." Also in the London Times, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, author of Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man, talks with Julian Fane, who, in 1940, was a 19-year-old 2nd Lieutenant in the Gloucestershire Regiment and whose experiences are echoed in McAvoy's character.

Geoffrey Macnab profiles Knightley for the Independent.

Update, 9/1: Online listening tip. John Mullan profiles McEwan for the BBC. Via the Literary Saloon.

Update, 9/4: For Time Out's Dave Calhoun, Atonement is a "noble, well-made, superbly performed and photographed (by Seamus McGarvey) semi-failure then, but still one that shows Wright to be one of the more imaginative filmmakers of his generation, capable of winning over large audiences with daring endeavours."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Ferrara, 8/29.

"At this point, I think that [Abel] Ferrara has created a more powerful, and also (despite his obsessiveness) more varied body of work than even Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee, let alone others of his American contemporaries. But he is probably too on the edge, with too anarchic and obsessive (even if these terms seem contradictory to one another) an imagination, to ever transcend his (merely) cult following." This comes at the end of Steven Shaviro's entry on Go Go Tales, "almost Ferrara's version of a Capraesque 1930s comedy, a pomo update of one of those films that was designed to make people feel good despite the Great Depression." There may be a spoiler in there; Shaviro's caught the film at the Montreal World Film Festival, running through Monday.

Jay A Fernandez has read Billy Finkelstein's screenplay for Bad Lieutenant '08 - that's right, a remake - and reports in the Los Angeles Times: "Veteran producer Edward R Pressman (Badlands, American Psycho), who developed and produced the first movie, is poised to revisit the Lieutenant and 'try to reinvent the film in a way that would be relevant again,' as he puts it." '08 "is less a sequel or a prequel than an attempt to take the raw material of the original film and weave it into 21st century, post-9/11 New York.... Pressman has discussed the new version with Ferrara and [Harvey] Keitel, although neither is attached to the project."

Meanwhile, the Oldenburg Film Festival (September 12 through 16) will stage a Ferrara retrospective, reports Ed Meza for Variety.

Fests and events, 8/28.

The Chicago Cinema Forum will be screening Roberto Rossellini's India Matri Bhumi on Friday and Sunday. Related: Doug Cummings and Girish.

"This year the Vancouver International Film Festival expands its Dragons & Tigers: The Cinemas of East Asia series to include a special spotlight on China." That's quite a lineup. Here's a briefer overview; the festival runs September 27 through October 12.

Joshua Hurtado catches 16 films at the Asian Film Festival of Dallas (through Thursday) and sends a report into Twitch.

"Flash Point is the third consecutive collaboration between [Donnie] Yen and director Wilson Yip, the film that began life as a sequel to their first collaboration, SPL released on these shores as Kill Zone," writes Todd Brown, in an early Toronto preview for Twitch. "Any feeling of disappointment in the first half disappears quickly in the second."

Another Toronto preview: Tom Hall looks ahead to Lee Isaac Chung's Munyurangabo.

"As I approach my 12th Telluride experience and reflect on my favorite film experiences it strikes me how many of those highlights were in black-and-white," notes Kjolseth at Movie Morlocks.

"'World premiere' just doesn't have the heft it used to," writes Ali Jaafar in Variety. "With so many festivals crowded into the fall calendar, and new events emerging every year, the small pool of sought-after films is being siphoned in every direction. Bigger titles are increasingly doing double-, and even triple-duty, hopping from one fest to another for ever-less-meaningful premieres.'" Via Movie City News.

DVDs, 8/28.

Dave Kehr in the New York Times on the re-release of the original 3:10 to Yuma: "This is a psychological drama, as intense as a Bergman marital duel, but played out in a forceful exchange of looks and gestures rather than in Bergman's torrents of words.... Here is some marvelous filmmaking in the classical Hollywood manner, without an ounce of waste in it." Also, DW Griffith's True Heart Susie is "one of his most beautiful films, and one of his most rhetorically complex: at once absolutely sincere and a self-tweaking parody of his sentimental streak."

Related: "[Glenn] Ford and Yuma director Delmer Daves had a taut Western run in the 50s, so check out the original and the two that bookended it." Mike Clark in USA Today on Yuma, Jubal and Cowboy via Joe Leydon.

"As wonderful and mature a film as Hannah Takes the Stairs might be, I don't think it would be in the position it is right now had not Joe Swanberg's previous feature LOL provided such a shot in the arm to the festival circuit in 2006," writes David Lowery. "An exuberantly scrappy, handmade little film about being a young dude in this digital age, LOL is - even more so than Hannah - both a product of and herald to its generation." More from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

"This is the way it's done, US-indie-filmmaking-wise: Zoe Cassavetes's Broken English is so far 2007's reigning small Ameri-movie, by simple and lonely virtue of the mature intelligence and respect it pays to its characters and life at large." Also reviewed by Michael Atkinson for IFC News: Buñuel's The Young One "fits thematically right alongside Las Hurdes, Los Olvidados and even chunks of Diary of a Chambermaid, with its vision of humankind living on the level of predatory animals (there's lovely footage of a raccoon eating a chicken alive, amid the doomed tarantulas, crabs, bees and rabbit cadavers). A must-have for Buñuelians, this rarely-seen detour is now officially DVD'd alongside his truly forgettable debut in Mexico (and his first full-on feature), Gran Casino (1947)."

"Inland Empire, a notoriously digital movie because its director was known in previous movies for images that were so filmic, is a commentary not so much on Hollywood (a la Sunset Boulevard) as it is on the process of selection that is editing," writes Nick Rombes. "Or, more precisely: what happens when it is not the director who imposes choices upon a film, but rather a film that imposes its choices upon a director?"

"The Lives of Others aims to flatter its audience - a quality typical for a film whose emotional posturing is only skin deep," writes Rob Humanick.

Phil Hall talks with Jason Carvey about A New Wave for Film Threat.

Brendon Connelly connects the dots.

DVD roundups: Cinema Strikes Back, DVD Talk, Bryant Frazer, Paul Harrill and Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

Friedkin 07.

"In a way, 2007 is shaping up as the year of director William Friedkin," writes ST VanAirsdale, introducing a tight and terrific interview at the Reeler. "In addition to May's unsettling paranoiac melodrama Bug, the coming weeks promise theatrical revivals of his Oscar-winning 1971 cop thriller The French Connection (opening this Friday at Film Forum) and his controversial 1980 leather-bar detective epic Cruising (opening Sept 7 before finally arriving on DVD Sept 18)." And let's not forget that he's recently been made an Officer of the French Order of the Arts and Letters.

In the Voice, J Hoberman looks back on that "newfangled genre flick, fraught with urban decay and racial tension," The French Connection, which, in 1971, "seemed like glorified Don Siegel... While Dirty Harry provided audiences an anti-establishment legal vigilante, The French Connection introduced the notion of the heroic working-class narc."

Updated through 9/3.

"When Cruising came out in 1980, pretty much everyone hated the movie," the San Francisco Chronicle's Peter Hartlaub, noting that it'll also be screening at the Castro. "The film has since developed a cult status, with some giving the movie historical significance for its detailed (albeit skewed) look at gay culture in the early 1980s." Greg Marzullo recalls the brouhaha for the Houston Voice.

Update, 8/29: Paul Wilner talks with Friedkin about the return of Cruising for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 8/30: "Because the stunning centerpiece [i.e., that landmark chase sequence] looks like an extravagant feat of guerilla filmmaking, The French Connection feels new again," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "In the wake of its acclaim, Pauline Kael deemed The French Connection 'what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks.' True, but as the rest of equation comes into view, the message behind those jolts has grown retroactively enlightening. The movie's original tagline heralded 'an out and out thriller,' but now it's the sort of thriller that rarely gets in: a smart one."

"Both on a conceptual level and in practice, Cruising buys into and advances some of the most dangerous myths about homosexuality and the homosexual lifestyle - and you don't need Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet to tell you that," blogs Slant's Ed Gonzalez. " Walking out at the end of yesterday's screening, still suffering from a rather nasty cold, I felt as if I had been fisted - without the Crisco!... Cruising is completely ridiculous, but Friedkin's homophobia gives the film a strange chill. The director is fascinated with the subliminal, but the way he imbeds sounds and images into the film is frightening only in the sense that it exposes his own warped views of gay sexual behavior."

"In a strange way, Cruising has come full circle and become a part of gay history, a creepily affecting time capsule of a subculture the mainstream otherwise ignored completely," blogs Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Today, it's compelling primarily as a sociological document of a dirty, dangerous New York where sex and death seem inextricably interlinked even before AIDS. In its shameless excavation and exploitation of the killer-queen archetype - the homosexual so riddled with self-loathing and guilt that they feel an insatiable urge to kill and punish others - the film is bad politics and dodgy, flawed filmmaking, but it's weirdly resonant and thoroughly haunting all the same."

Update, 9/1: "How could such a pandering film be described as uncompromising?" asks Matt Zoller Seitz of The French Connection. The film "was widely hailed as an aesthetically fresh, socially relevant new entry in the cops-and-robbers genre. It was lumped together with two other 1971 touchstones, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs, as an example of the new fascist populism - a subgenre that combined studio production values and exploitation tactics. Friedkin's film is the least of the three because it's got almost nothing on its mind but rattling the audience."

Update, 9/3: "The gay blogosphere has largely treated the re-release of William Friedkin's 1980 ode to fisting, faggotry, and flash cuts with a level of indifference nearly equal to the fury of the disco era's gay community," notes Eric Henderson at Slant. "Our culture has now scaled Brokeback Mountain and breathed in the thin, undernourished, Oscar-hungry air thereabout. For all its bad judgment, questionable portrayals, and arrogant artsploitation aims, Cruising is precisely what Brokeback and all excepting a small handful of eternally rewarding fringe gay movies (Tropical Malady, Bad Education, Mulholland Drive) are not: an interesting film."

Bizarro Blog-a-Thon.

"Welcome to Bizarro Days, friends," smiles Piper at the Lazy Eye Theatre. "For the next three days, tell me how you really feel by not telling me how you really feel about a movie, a director, an actor, whatever you want."

Philosophy, 8/28.

"Is philosophy fun?" asks David Sterritt in PopMatters. Open Court's "thriving" Popular Culture and Philosophy series is "based on the premise that philosophy is the most uproarious pursuit in the world, and it's determined to make you agree.... Hitchcock and Philosophy: Dial M for Metaphysics doesn't mention Hitch's fine 1954 thriller Dial 'M' for Murder, and more to the point, it doesn't privilege metaphysics over such other branches of philosophy as ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology." Nonetheless, "you'll find that the essays assembled by editors David Baggett and William A Drumin are often engaging, entertaining, and enlightening."

Also via Bookforum: John Morreall's review of Vittorio Hösle's Woody Allen: An Essay on the Nature of the Comical, "a refreshing counterbalance to the traditional neglect of humor and comedy by philosophers," for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

And via wood s lot, editors Fiona Jenkins and Robert Sinnerbrink introduce a new issue of Scan, a journal of media arts culture hosted by the Media Department at Macquarie University in Sydney. This one's devoted to "film as philosophy." After sketching a brief history of the relationship between philosophy and film, they note that the essays here "consider how film itself engages in different kinds of thinking using sound, image, time, memory and narrative."

Havi Carel on David Cronenberg's The Fly: "[I]nstead of seeing Seth's illness as a metaphor for monstrosity, I suggest that monstrosity is a metaphor for illness... I argue that the notion of the monstrous that is so central to the film in fact supports the health / illness dichotomy, in which the two states - health and illness, or human and monster - are posited as mutually exclusive. Instead of accepting the dichotomy and focusing on the dialectic between human and monstrous, as many interpretations have, I claim that the film in fact demonstrates the fallacy of this dichotomous view, showing that ultimately we all have 'the disease of being finite.' I propose to understand the film as a tragedy portraying the terminal illness of a decent man. As such, the film dupes the viewer into accepting the human / monster and healthy / diseased dichotomies, only to grasp their illusoriness by the end of the film."

For Jenkins, Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother raises a series of questions: "How do we give an account of ourselves? How does our exposure to loss figure in this telling, even if only through what is partial or absent? And what is it that makes such telling difficult or even inevitably thwarted and displaced?"

Catherine Summerhayes "explores Chris Marker's interpretation of memory as time and space in his experimental essay film Sans Soleil."

In Lars von Trier's Dogville, Robert Sinnerbrink finds "a political, moral, and aesthetic experiment: one that aims to show the violence inhabiting liberal democracy, but which also explores the forms of desire that underlie contemporary morality and politics... Dogville enacts a cinematic questioning of two dogmas of democracy: the role of morality in the constitution of democratic community, and the primacy of exchange relations in liberal democracy. The film critically challenges these dogmas by exposing the underlying libidinal economy of desire that organises and maintains the democratic community."

Drawing on, among others, Umberto Eco and Jacques Lacan, Matthew Sharpe argues that "a promise is held up in reality television which already animated the sadists' always-flagging desire in Sade's boudoirs: that here at last, via the conflicting demands the reality games bombard their 'stars' with, we might confront something irreplaceable in the Other."

"[F]ilm needs to be understood both as an adoption and modification of existing technical forms of the industrial reproduction of experience, and as a form that has itself been adopted and modified by the newer media based on information technology (film itself having been radically modified by digital technologies)," writes Patrick Crogan. The editors point to where he's taking this: "[A]ll thought is cinematic: perception, understanding, and so forth all involve selection from a 'tertiary' form of memory, deposited in the mnemotechnical archive of audiovisual culture."

Daniel Ross considers the "cinematic condition of the politico-philosophical future."

Meanwhile, though I haven't mentioned the journal in a while, Film-Philosophy has a relatively new site - cleaner, clearer and easier to navigate, with articles available as PDFs.

Shorts, 8/27.

Lust, Caution is set to screen in Venice and Toronto before opening on September 28. Dennis Lim talks with Ang Lee and James Schamus - and even exchanges a bit of email with Tony Leung: "'Brokeback is about a lost paradise, an Eden,' Mr Lee said this month, taking a break from a final sound-mixing session in Manhattan. 'But this one - it's down in the cave, a scary place. It's more like hell.'" Related: Glenn Kenny on how Lee and Schamus have reacted to the NC-17 rating; and on how the story's been reported.

Also in the New York Times:

• In the wake of this summer's deluge of sequels, "most of which scared up satisfying revenue if not critical approval," Jeanette Catsoulis argues that "only three films succeeded on both fronts: The Bourne Ultimatum, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Live Free or Die Hard. Though hardly artistic milestones, or even unanimously feted, all three were smart, entertaining and - most important - keenly attuned to the expectations of their audience."

• Death Sentence, The Brave One, Outlaw. David M Halbfinger looks into "why revenge movies are making a comeback this season, as politics bleeds over into another film genre."

• "To some observers, [José] Saramago's exile has made him less relevant than other contemporary Portuguese greats like Antonio Lobo Antunes, who, using the polyphonic techniques of high modernism, continues to explore the psychic wounds left by Portugal's recent political history," writes Fernanda Eberstadt in a profile for the Magazine. "To others, Saramago has taken on the role of a more universal conscience, giving his literary fables about the failures of democracy or the tyranny of corporations a broader reach. For the director Fernando Meirelles, who is making the film of Blindness, this universalism was the great achievement of that work. 'It's an allegory about the fragility of civilization,' Meirelles told me."

• And for T Magazine, Lynn Hirschberg interviews Abbie Cornish and Cathy Horn observes Harvey Weinstein among the fashionistas.

Michael Guillén talks with Jamaa Fanaka about his 1975 film, Welcome Home, Brother Charles: "I wanted to have my films affect people in an entertaining way but also make strong statements. Sometimes, in order to get to people, you got to use some kind of instrument to get their attention. I wanted to debunk that myth of Black sexual superiority based upon the size of the sexual equipment. I felt that in order to get that attention I had to do something obscene that was so outrageous; that would take the myth and blow it up for the lie that it is. It was so new and so shocking that people didn't know how to take it."

"Im Sang-Soo's The Old Garden (Orae-doen jeongwon) returns to the political themes explored in his recent satire The President's Last Bang," writes Matt Riviera. "While there is a love story at its heart, The Old Garden is a bittersweet tale of a love affair aborted tragically by the fateful clash of political conscience and historical inevitability."

Scott Derrickson will direct Keanu Reeves in a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, reports Michael Fleming for Variety.

"Georgie Fame's song 'The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde,' written after seeing the film, was top of the charts and performed on TV by a chorus of boys and girls toting machine guns and wearing 1930s gear. 'The Speakeasy Look' and 'The Bonnie Parker Look' began to appear in the fashion pages." The Observer runs a long and fun piece by Philip French on the making and immediate reception of Bonnie and Clyde and follows it with a where-are-they-now list of primary cast and crew and a few items comparing and contrasting 1967 and 2007.

Also, according to Paul Harris, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There is "at the center of the biggest Oscar buzz of the year." Well, let's not go overboard. I'm probably looking forward to this one more than any other film this season, but please. I'm thinking: Palindromes, only, you know, fun. At any rate, Film Forum director Karen Cooper has seen it, of course (it'll open there) and tells Harris, "It leaps off the screen. The director has created something here that is just so unusual."

And Amy Raphael meets Ryan Phillippe.

Hermoine Eyre profiles Atonement director Joe Wright for the Independent.

At Cinematical, Ryan Stewart talks Halloween with Rob Zombie.

Fests and events, 8/27.

"This year, for the first time ever so far as I know, TIFF is holding a limited number of advance press screenings here in NYC," writes Mike D'Angelo. "None of the dozen titles in question is especially high-profile, but I'm planning to see at least the first two reels of all of them, by way of revvin' the ol' motor." Comments on eight films follow. Via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

Online viewing tips for those anticipating Toronto. "For your viewing pleasure, here are trailers and clips from a few of the films that have caught my attention," offers Darren Hughes at 1st Thursday. By "a few," he means about three dozen.

12 films screening in Venice will be eligible for the Queer Lion Award, notes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. And Boyd's got a Venice preview at the Film Experience.

Fanny Ardant has been asked to stay away from Venice this year, reports John Hooper in the Guardian: "The actor unleashed a torrent of anger with an Italian magazine interview in which she called the activities of the Red Brigades 'enthralling and passionate.' Ardant, 59, said she admired Renato Curcio, who helped to found the group, for having stuck to his principles unlike many leaders of the 1968 student revolt in France: 'He didn't become a businessman.'"

Cinecon, the annual celebration of film rarities, started inauspiciously in 1965 in Indiana, Pa - the hometown of Jimmy Stewart - as a way for 8 millimeter film collectors to congregate and show their films," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. Now in its 43rd year, the gathering, which kicks off Thursday, has morphed into a five-day festival, memorabilia show and book fair in Hollywood, and virtually all the films screened are 35 mm." Thursday through September 3.

"No doubt counting its own blessings after the government-funding crisis two years ago that nearly toppled the festival founded and overseen for three decades by Serge Losique, this year's Montreal World Film Festival kicked off Thursday with the world premiere of the French Canadian comedy Bluff," reports Robert Avila for indieWIRE. Through September 3.

At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth has the lineup for the Sydney Underground Film Festival (September 7 through 10).

Midnight Eye. Masao Adachi.

"This year sees the long-awaited return to our screens of Masao Adachi, one of the most challenging, thought-provoking and controversial figures ever to emerge from the world of Japanese cinema. His new film Prisoner/Terrorist is his first feature in over thirty years." Jasper Sharp talks with "one of the leading figures in the underground experimental scene of the 60s" who would go on to work with Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu.

Midnight Eye's also featuring new reviews of five films and a book:

• "Japanese cinema has no shortage of martial arts films that deal with the philosophical challenges of learning how to kill and maim," writes Tom Mes. Shunichi Nagasaki's "Black Belt follows firmly in this tradition, since it tries to give expression to the mindset behind the martial arts and explore the social ramifications of following that line of thought through."

• "Love and Honor isn't a bad film at all, but it's not nearly as good as Twilight Samurai," writes Nicholas Rucka, who also takes note of "a concerted and well orchestrated plan for hailing Yamada as a living legend; a call into the wilds of the film world that Japan still makes those classic samurai films of old and they're deserving of attention. The man who makes them is named Yoji Yamada and he should be remembered in the same breath as Akira Kurosawa or Masaki Kobayashi. The thing is, of course he's not as good - but he can't be disregarded as bad, either."

• Focusing on writer Kankuro Kudo, Tom Mes finds that Maiko Haaaan!!! "has the potential to appeal to both the otaku crowd looking to satisfy their thirst for extravagant pop cultural ephemera and those who like something with a bit more meat on the bone. As long as they don't mind their meat a very lurid shade of red."

• "The surreal ensemble comedy has become one of Japan's most endearing and original genres in recent years," writes Dean Bowman, reviewing Nobuhiro Yamashita's "deliciously absurd" Matsugane Potshot Affair.

• Sion Sono is on something of a tear all of sudden, notes Tom Mes, and "Noriko's Dinner Table surely ranks as one of the best among this recent wave. Presented as a prequel, though actually more of a wrap-around spin-off, to Suicide Club, it is going to confuse quite a few fans just for its sheer restraint. The director commands respect for making the follow-up to his satirical splatter freak-out a subdued, rhythmic, two-and-a-half hour family drama with surrealistic overtones."

And Tom Mes also reviews Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, a memoir by Kurosawa's personal assistant, Teruyo Nogami: "Her story is peppered with revealing anecdotes and entertaining asides that give rare glimpses into life on a movie set... But in addition to trivia, she also gives us invaluable first-hand accounts of the making of Rashomon, of filming in the tick-infested forests of Siberia on Dersu Uzala, and of the falling out between Kurosawa and Shintaro Katsu on Kagemusha.... For any fan of Japanese cinema, and not just those of Kurosawa, Nogami's delightful memoirs are a genuine treasure trove."

Fall previews, 8/27.

In this week's fall preview issue of New York, Logan Hill profiles Christian Bale (3:10 to Yuma and I'm Not There) and Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises, "which Mortensen calls 'a well-crafted and complicated poem'"). There's also a No Country for Old Men Q&A with Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, a quick chat with Nicole Kidman (Margot at the Wedding), another with Jodie Foster (The Brave One, another with Reneé Zellweger (Bee Movie), a just-as-quick guide to five of the season's politically tinged movies - and Bilge Ebiri mentions the New York Film Festival (September 28 through October 14).

Updated.

Only somewhat related to film but worth noting is Justin Davidson's preview of Carnegie Hall's Berlin in Lights, a series of events in November. "[O]n November 3, for instance, musicians re-create the music from the 1927 silent film Symphony of a City."

Blurbing well over a dozen movies, Newsweek previews the fall season.

Ray Bennett looks ahead to what September has in store for the UK.

Meanwhile, Dennis Cozzalio asks, "What are your thoughts on the summer movie season? Any big surprises? Any disappointments? And is there anything on the horizon that looks to shake up your expectations and pull you away from that ever-growing stack of DVDs that you haven't gotten a chance to see yet?"

Earlier: "EW. 'Fall Movies Preview.'"

Update: Online listening tip. At IFC News, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore "pick out ten films we're looking forward to in the upcoming months."

Senses of Cinema. 44.

"As many of the articles that comprise this issue slowing unfurled over the past few months, in one way or another, they kept invoking [Jonas] Mekas [site] and his inestimable legacy," write Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray, introducing Senses of Cinema 44. "That in itself is not surprising given that the bulk of this issue is dedicated to what is variously referred to as avant-garde, experimental, underground, alternate or, as the French filmmaker and writer Raphaël Bassan puts it, 'different' cinema. As the interview that kicks off this edition of the journal justly testifies, Mekas is a living witness to that cinema in all its myriad history."

That interview is conducted by Brian L Frye, who, in his introduction, explains why Mekas is widely known as "the godfather of the American avant-garde cinema."

"Like Mekas before him, Bassan was instrumental, with others, in the establishment of the French filmmakers' co-operative movement in the early 1970s, which, as he freely admits, was based on Mekas' New York model," write Caputo and Murray. "As to Christian Lebrat, he is not only a filmmaker of considerable stature but also an active disseminator of critical writing on the avant-garde through his publishing house, Paris Expérimental....

In a different vein, Lebrat is also responsible for the recent publication of Sally Shafto's Zanzibar: The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968 [more], a volume that sheds light on one of the true blind spots in film history (certainly for those outside France). Though many may be familiar with individual careers - those of Philippe Garrel, Pierre Clémenti and Zouzou, for example - Shafto provides the invaluable work of bringing them together around the constellation of activity known as the Zanzibar collective and the cultural and political backdrop that defined them." And the book is reviewed by Keith Reader.

SoC 44 documents this network of influence in part by including Viviane Vagh's conversations with Bassan and Lebrat as well as her translations of Bassan's "Identity of Cinema: Experimental and Different" and Lebrat's "'I Have Always Been Attracted to Painting': Handwritten Notes Taken to Answer a Friend's Questions, Written in 1984."

"In the films of Stan Brakhage, we find a sympathetic and compatible cinematic analogue to [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty." Alex Cobb explains.

"Who is Michael Betancourt?" asks Rey Parla, introducing an interview. "For most artists, this is a simple question readily answered by looking at their artwork, but in the case of Betancourt it is complicated by the coexistence of a large, seemingly independent body of historical and theoretical writing that complicates any attempt to answer this question only by looking at his movies and other art." See also: Betancourt's avant-garde film and video blog, cinegraphic.net.

"Aside from a brief involvement with Bonnie and Clyde (eventually directed by Arthur Penn, 1967 [see, for example, Philip French's piece in today's Observer]), there is no area of Jean-Luc Godard's North American career in which Tom Luddy does not figure." Brad Stevens talks with Luddy about "a collaboration stretching back almost 40 years... fascinating, not just in terms of the films actually realised, but also of those that were never made, or left incomplete."

Tina Wasserman reviews Abigail Child's This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film: "Using film as a privileged site of theory and praxis, it is through the complexity of cinema - its ability to move through time and space as well as its capacity to incorporate sound and language -that gives Child an entry point from which to engage in an ongoing discourse on art, language and ideas."

"[W]e must piece together Artaud's revolutionary film theory from a number of unproduced film scenarios, a handful of essays and scarce interviews." Lee Jamieson does his part here and in his new book, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice.

JM Magrini has one of the few rather longish pieces in the issue. He aims to "clarify the Surrealists' position on cinema as the supreme aesthetic means by which to experience and know the world as it really is, in all of its mysterious and inexplicable sublimity, and to subsequently communicate this fragile, intuitive understanding through a 'new mode of pure expression.'"

It's an easy segue then to Sebastian Manley's consideration of Jan Svankmajer's Lunacy, "the director's finest and most penetrating foray yet into the forest of contradictions and cruelties that constitutes Western society today," and to Amir Mogharabi's essay on the Brothers Quay, whose puppetry "represents a reverse form of hysteria, in which the anatomical body affectively constructs and animates the fragmented body. Cinema is the medium through which the Brothers work. Simultaneously, cinema is the medium through which an impossibility inherent in psychoanalysis is surmounted."

Matthew Clayfield emails Ben Hackworth: "Perhaps one of my favourite things about Corroboree is the way you shot the interiors, creating a labyrinth out of the house and never allowing us to get our bearings within it. The choreography of entries into and exits out of the frame at different planes within the image - the rhythmic nature of which is realised best in the opening scene of the film, in the bus depot - is particularly impressive. In this, I was reminded - and I know I’m clutching at straws here! - of films as varied and diverse as those of Jacques Tati and James Benning."

SoC 44 also includes seven festival reports and six book reviews. There's one new addition to the Great Directors critical database this time around, Sandra Koponen on Tony Richardson.

Edinburgh. Awards.

The award-winners of the 61st Edinburgh International Film Festival have been announced:

Anton Corbijn's fantastic Control was a double winner - the director picking up the prestigious Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film and lead actor Sam Riley winning the PPG Award for Best Performance in a British Feature Film....

There was a surprise winner for the Standard Life Audience Award, as documentary We Are Together (Thina Simunye) scooped the prize voted for by festival-goers....

Updated through 8/27.

The EIFF began life as a documentary film festival and remains committed to non-fiction film, as signposted by the Sky Movies Best Documentary Award, which was won by Jennifer Venditti's Billy the Kid....

The Skillset New Directors Award went to Lucia Puenzo for the remarkable XXY, a teen drama about a 15-year-old hermaphrodite.... Other winners included The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island by James Griffiths which won the UK Film Council Kodak Award for Best British Short Film. A special mention was given to Paddy Considine's directorial debut Dog Altogether.

At Filmmaker's blog, Nick Dawson comments on the awards.

Updates, 8/27: "What differentiates Control from other biopics of popular musicians such as Taylor Hackford's Ray and James Mangold's Walk the Line is that it's more a portrait of an artist than that of a cultural icon or object of mass adulation," writes Francis Cruz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg reports on a "surprise" screening of The Kingdom in Edinburgh.

Sarajevo. Awards.

"A Turkish film about fear overwhelming a true believer when he is caught up in religious corruption has been chosen as the best movie at the 13th Sarajevo Film Festival," reports Daria Sito-Sucic for Reuters. "The jury, headed by British actor Jeremy Irons, awarded A Man's Fear of God (Takva) by director Ozer Kiziltan with the 25,000 euros ($33,920) Heart of Sarajevo award at the closing ceremony on Saturday night." But Kiziltan, who evidently didn't expect to win anything, had already left town; co-producer Fatih Akin accepted the award.

Also: "Saadet Isil Aksoy was awarded the best actress for her role in Egg by Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu. Macedonian film I'm From Titov Veles by Teona Strugar-Mitevska won the special jury award."

More awards: Sasa Petrovic, best actor, for his performance in Srđan Vuletić's It's Hard to be Nice and a special mention for Maria Varga for her performance in Iszka's Journey.

Weekend shorts.

Samuel Adamson has adapted Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother for a stage production that opens at the Old Vic on Monday for a limited 13-week engagement. For Time Out, Ben Walters talks with Adamson and Almodóvar. Via Movie City News.

"Producers Graham King and Martin Scorsese have assembled a heavyweight British cast for their royal biopic The Young Victoria," reports Naman Ramachandran at Cineuropa. "Emily Blunt plays the titular role of Queen Victoria in the film that charts the monarch's tumultuous ascension to the British throne."

"[Jodie] Foster, the Yale grad, perhaps one of the best talkers in all of showbiz, insisted she's not advocating simple-minded revenge," writes Rachel Abramowitz, who talks with her about The Brave One. "She certainly would prefer that audiences leave with a higher-minded message about the cost of violence, about the fear that has lurked in the hearts of Americans ever since Sept 11. 'There's something incredibly true about the rage and fear that we don't lay claim to, but once you experience it, you know it's been there all along and everybody else walking down the street is lying to themselves,' she said recently over a cup of coffee.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Cristy Lytal recalls a visit to the set of John August's The Nines: "The film's largely improvised Part 2, a making-of documentary about a fictitious television pilot titled 'Knowing,' allowed August and his actors to co-write characters in the most immediate and collaborative way possible. August even posed questions to the actors as the pseudo-documentary's off-camera interviewer."

• Sharon Mizola talks with Raúl Ruiz about Klimt: "Ruiz, 66, who has made more than 50 films in the last 20 years in Chile and Europe, firmly established himself as a cinematic maverick with his use of nonlinear storytelling, dramatic color effects and unexpected points of view, and his work here is inspired by the fragmented, circular narratives of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler - a Klimt contemporary. In other words, it's not the usual biopic."

• Patrick Day's attended the premiere of Rob Zombie's Halloween: "[O]ne suspects the wild, growling Zombie of concert fame is quite a bit removed from the devoted horror movie fan who lovingly casts his favorite character actors in all his films."

• "The allure of a romantic two-hander in which an attractive pair of strangers spend a lot of time walking and talking and - audiences usually hope - heading in the direction of Happy Ending Land has made movie favorites out of everything from Roman Holiday to Before Sunrise to this year's indie hit Once," writes Robert Abele. "Striving for that connective tingle but falling all too short of something swoony or deep or wittily satisfying, though, is American writer-director Evan Richards's London-set In a Day, which devotes most of its brief 80 minutes to the morning-to-evening conversational ramble of a struggling female jazz musician and a male graphic designer."

• John Anderson on Blood and Tears: The Arab-Israeli Conflict: "The strategy seems to be: Talk to as many august heads as one can gather in a feature-length film and give what seems like equal time to both Palestinian and Israeli points of view, until the end, when you cast the Israelis as patient and the Palestinians as crazy."

• Jay A Fernandez and John Horn report on why the studios are scrambling to get next summer's blockbusters in the can now: "The studios' contracts with the Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild of America expire June 30. Their deal with the Writers Guild of America runs out this October, but the WGA is expected to work without a new pact temporarily, hoping the delay will give it more clout as the DGA and SAG contracts also expire. While the guilds have separate demands, they are united in their quest for revenues from new media such as video on demand, Web downloads and cellphone content. To beat the strike deadlines, the studios must start filming by March 1."

"A whole slew of Hollywood stars is rapidly becoming not merely irrelevant, but obsolete." And John Patterson's celebrating. Also:

In each month between now and March, however, American cinemas will release two movies dealing in different ways with Iraq, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the war on terror, "extraordinary rendition" and returning war veterans, among other topics - which include grief, desertion, battlefield murder, rape, post-traumatic stress disorder and so-called "blowback", repercussions from botched, covert interference abroad - until recently considered too raw to be recreated on film for a nation at war.

Yet most of these big-budget movies seem weirdly apolitical in this deeply political time, never addressing the heart of the matter. The hard work of criticism and political analysis is actually being left to the small-budget, indie realm, or is done instead, like much other labour that Americans should be doing for themselves, by foreigners.

And also in the Guardian:

• "I can't help wondering how much of the current enthusiasm for what was once known as world cinema is purely that - and how much a rejection of Hollywood at a time when the wider America is so reviled," blogs Danny Leigh. "In other words, is George Bush responsible in some odd tangential way for the rediscovery of Jean Renoir and Fassbinder?"

• Sam Delaney looks back on a turning point in the late 70s and early 80s when British ad directors started landing features: Alan Parker, Ridley and Tony Scott, Hugh Hudson and Adrian Lyne.

• Tamsin Evans concentrates on the present: "Britain is awash with film talent, including brilliant script writers and some of the world's most skilled technicians. However, arranging finance remains an often insurmountable task for producers."

• Bobbie Johnson talks to the Swedes behind the Pirate Bay about their run-ins with the studios: "The three-year campaign to bring down the website is almost an epic of Hollywood proportions, sprinkled with high-flying lawyers and accusations of political extremism. And yet, so far, the chase has failed to bring the pirates down."

"Recently we went to see Ratatouille and both loved it. We thought it was the best Hollywood movie we've seen this summer." Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell exchange ideas and links. The cinetrix has recently caught the film, too, and she's reminded of another.

"Could there be anything more thankless than taking over a project tailor-made for your genius father, a master of animation renowned for his grace and deep humanity, and attempt to match his best work?" asks Jürgen Fauth. "When it was announced that Goro Miyazaki, son of anime legend Hayao, was directing the adaptation of Ursula K LeGuin's Earthsea novels, you didn't have to be Yubaba the witch to know that it would end in tears. And so it has. LeGuin is disappointed, Miyazaki father and son are embroiled in a public feud, and the movie is a wasted opportunity that can't help but show occasional glimpses of the greatness that might have been."

Gerald Howard had waited for decades to see Norman Mailer's Maidstone before he finally caught it in July, when it hit him "like a video transmission from the faraway Planet 60s - a civilization in the throes of a crackup.... For reasons its creator could hardly have anticipated, this lurid, ludicrous, lunatic spectacle was worth the wait. At one level, Maidstone is a Norman Mailer version of a Rat Pack movie, albeit in the manner of Artaud."

Also in the New York Times:

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "More vérité than cinema, the documentary Skid Row is so raw that it's virtually unwatchable. Unwisely choosing a recognizable hip-hop artist (Pras Michel of the Fugees) as their avatar, the directors, Niva Dorell, Marshall Tyler and Ross Clarke, have all but erased the line between social investigation and celebrity stunt." Robert W Welkos profiles Pras Michel for the LAT.

• And: "Luridly earnest and laughably immoral, Illegal Tender is an old genre movie with a new look. Call it Hispanixploitation." More from Walter Addiego in the San Francisco Chronicle, Lael Loewenstein in the LAT, Eugene Novikov at Hollywood Bitchslap, Nick Schager at Cinematical and Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

• Stephen Holden on Resurrecting the Champ: "As the story takes a predictable turn from disgrace toward redemption, the film sacrifices credibility for a weepy, pandering pseudosincerity." More from Kevin Crust in the LAT.

• Matt Zoller Seitz: "The maudlin, grotesque western September Dawn, about the massacre on Sept 11, 1857, of about 120 settlers by Mormons (and their Paiute Indian mercenaries), apes Schindler's List in hopes of creating a Christian Holocaust picture." Yikes. More from Mark Olsen in the LAT, James Rocchi at Cinematical and Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE.

• "[D]espite their quirks, the three real estate agents and their clients - three couples in search of a dream home - featured in Closing Escrow are improbably endearing," writes Laura Kern. More from David Wiegand in the San Francisco Chronicle.

• Andy Webster on Mr Bean's Holiday: "The kids at my screening loved it." More from Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. Also: "War squanders the considerable merits of its leads." More from Joe Leydon in Variety: "The teaming of action stars Jet Li and Jason Statham may raise audience expectations for a lean, mean ass-kicking machine, but War turns out to be a flabby and formulaic programmer." And Nick Schager at Slant and Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

For Peter Nellhaus, Geoff Andrew's The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall "provides a fairly good overview... For those who are more familiar with Ray's films, the book may not provide as much information as might be desired."

JR Jones in the Chicago Reader:

Two new independent features - one dramatic, the other documentary - show how badly fear eats away at the national psyche and how easily the government can become as threatening as any terrorist. Right at Your Door, the debut feature from writer-director Chris Gorak, imagines what might happen if terrorists detonated a series of dirty bombs across Los Angeles, releasing a lethal virus and forcing people to duct-tape themselves into their homes. [More.] It's pretty scary stuff, but not nearly as unnerving as Lynn Hershman-Leeson's Strange Culture, the true story of a mild-mannered conceptual artist whose purchase of harmless bacteria got him fingered by the FBI as a bioterrorist. Watching them side by side, you realize how unprepared we are for a genuine bioterror attack, partly because the feds are so willing to squander time and money prosecuting an innocuous left-wing artist.

"There are two movies opening this week about screwed-up young men struggling with romance in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and, as it happens, both of them are directed by actors," writes Slate's Dana Stevens, referring, of course, to The Hottest State and Dedication. "The resemblances in story and theme between the two movies may be purely casual (though their common location does suggest that Williamsburg is becoming romantic comedy's new Manhattan, the place angsty heroes go to pine for their Annie Halls). But watching the two films makes for an object lesson in what tends to happen when thespians get behind a camera."

"Director Nanouk Leopold is a rare species in film land: a female auteur from the Netherlands." At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij talks with her about Wolfsbergen.

"It wouldn't be accurate to call Private Property a thriller, but it has a slow-burning intensity that's oddly suspenseful, and it shifts gears effectively once the tense family dynamic suddenly changes," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Michael Fox talks with Julie Delpy about 2 Days in Paris for SF360. So does Kevin Maher for the London Times. More on the film from Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle and Christopher Orr in the New Republic.

Kathy Fennessy wraps her interview with John Sayles at the Siffblog: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Tasha Robinson interviews Alan Alda for the AV Club.

In the Independent, Lesley O'Toole talks with Kevin Bacon about Death Sentence and Stephen Applebaum reviews Jesus Camp. Related: Pam Spaulding at Alternet: "Ted Haggard's Back, He's 'Completely Hetero' and He's Begging for Cash."

"[T]he horror genre remains the only genre in which women are guaranteed to save the day." Jeremy Griffin explains at PopMatters.

Nick Pinkerton at Stop Smiling on The Invasion: "I can say without any great excitement that the movie is better than its reviews: As straight-ahead, propulsive, reptilian-brain action, it 'works' as often as not. But it's unworthy to stand with its predecessors."

"Where Harvey Weinstein goes, Hollywood follows. And Harvey Weinstein is jetting off to Asia." Adriane Quinlan reports for Time.

At Movie Morlocks, Richard Harland Smith reminds us that the Lee Marvin Blog-a-Thon takes place on August 29.

On a non-film-related note, Michael Atkinson. Can he get an Amen? Absolutely, from me: Amen.

Online fiddling around tip. Nathaniel R reinvents Exquisite Corpse.

Online viewing tip #1. At Facets Features, Phil Morehart posts the trailer for Fantoma's October 2 DVD release, The Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume 2. Or click the title for higher definition.

Online viewing tip #2. Matt Dentler's got a trailer for Great World of Sound.

Online viewing tips. "You can't really call yourself a fan of the movies, or humanity for that matter, if you've never stopped and asked yourself: What the hell is Christopher Walken doing?" For Esquire, Daniel Murphy lines up and introduces six clips.

Weekend lists.

"What makes up a 'personal daydream movie,' you might ask? It is the type of movie that inspires - whether during the movie, days afterward, or both - a mood in the viewer of wanting to linger in the film's particular world for hours on end, in the same way one might desire to linger in a dream at night before having to wake up to eye-crust-ridden early-morning reality." Kenji Fujishima presents an annotated list of five at the House Next Door.

Ken Russell, who knows a thing or two about music in movies, picks his favorite soundtracks. Also in the London Times, James Christopher wraps a "Modern Greats" contest with The Godfather.

Jonathan Lapper's got a list of firsts.

"[F]ew writers have turned actor with pleasing results." At ScreenGrab, Leonard Pierce lists five notable moments. On a related note, John Coulthart reminds us that Steven Soderbergh's "Kafka is one of a small group of works wherein well-known writers become embroiled in stories which exactly parallel their fiction. Joe Gores's Hammett (filmed by Wim Wenders in 1982) did this with Dashiell Hammett while Mark Frost in his novel, The List of Seven, had a pre-Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle becoming involved in a Holmesian mystery.... Kafka is also the Prague film par excellence."

At Cinematical, Patricia Chui lists the "25 Best High School Movies of All Time" and Monika Bartzel picks seven "Big Jerks of High School Movies."

Jim Emerson comments on Total Film's list of 100 "Greatest Directors Ever."

Weekend fests and events.

"2007 marks a year of massive change for Colorado's four-day Telluride Film Festival, which unfolds every Labor Day weekend." A preview from Variety's Anne Thompson. If you're going, and you want to be surprised by the lineup, don't click.

Stanley Kubrick, Director is a series running at SIFF Cinema in Seattle through September 6 and the Stranger runs a no-holds-barred assessment from Charles Mudede: "[This] is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation. In Kubrick's movies, progress, sustained enlightenment, and moral improvement are impossible because the powers of reason, love, and religion are much weaker than the forces of generation and degeneration, desire and destruction, sex and death."

All over the festival circuit this season will be Sidney Lumet and his Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Martin A Grove has a longish backgrounder in the Hollywood Reporter. Via Movie City News.

"Swerve Festival is a new annual festival dedicated to celebrating West Coast creative culture and its community inspired by art, film, music and action sports." September 28 through 30 in Los Angeles.

"Starting on September 28, the Japan Society in New York will be running a monthly series of 8 classic Nikkatsu action films." Cinema Strikes Back has details on the series curated by Japan Times film writer Mark Schilling, whose new book is No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema.

Neil Young carries on reviewing films he's caught in Edinburgh. The festival wraps tomorrow.

New York: States of Mind has just opened in the newly restored House of World Cultures in Berlin. The exhibition and film program runs through November 4. Related: Cameron Abadi for Spiegel Online.

On the occasion of the BFI's Warhol season, running through the end of September, the Financial Times' Nigel Andrews imagines a conversation with the artist in 1987 - about 2007.

Weekend critics.

For the Minnesota Monitor, Paul Schmelzer reports on the "Tumult at City Pages: Film Editor Axed, Cost-Cutting Memo Leaked." That film editor is the excellent Rob Nelson, who himself contributes some of the liveliest reviews you'll find in the Voice media chain. In a comment posted to the entry, former CP staffer Britt Robson speaks for many:

Remember all that bullshit about New Times investing heavily in the quality of their newspapers? On a staff that desperately needs experience and credibility, Rob Nelson was one of the few remaining stalwarts. He is one of only 55 members of the National Society of Film Critics, which requires election by the other members for entry. The Get Real documentary film series he founded and has curated since 2001 has been an artistic feather in CP's cap since 2001, and, not incidentally, a moneymaker for the paper. His own prose, and the stories he recruited and edited as the paper's film editor, were always spotless and required minimal effort from the otherwise beleaguered CP copy editor.

Now he's shown the door. No class. No grace. These assholes continue to make me look smart for bugging out at the first sight of their weasly, frat-boy, penny-pinching m.o.

Via Movie City News.

"This is not good," comments Dave Kehr. "Soon, we will have a choice between the re-animated Paulettes who dominate the print media and the Knowles-nothing fan boys who dominate the internet. Which in my book isn't much of a choice at all."

"Contrary to Disney's press release, I did not demand the removal of the Thumbsâ„¢." Roger Ebert responds to an AP story; David Poland comments.

"In a decade-plus of Web exploration, nearly every daily has felt the growing pains that any new news tool requires." At Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp considers 12 lessons learned. Via Anne Thompson.

Anticipating Venice, 8/25.

Let's start with an online viewing tip, a trailer for Eric Rohmer's Venice-bound Les amours d'Astrée et Céladon. That's via european-films.net, where Boyd van Hoeij reviews Claude Chabrol's La fille coupée en deux (The Girl Cut in Two), "a deliciously dark and well-observed tale that marks a fine return to form. For his story of a girl torn between two men Chabrol works with many of the reliable members of his extended film and real family, though the addition of two women, actress Ludivine Sagnier and Cécile Maistre, the director's stepdaughter and first assistant director who debuts as a screenwriter on the film, are new assets that might have triggered this renewed confidence and sharp wit."

"Critics who have seen Atonement have reacted with breathless superlatives." The Telegraph's David Gritten interviews Joe Wright, who, at 35, is the youngest director to open the Venice International Film Festival. Gritten also talks with Philippe Aractingi, whose Under the Bombs, also premiering in Venice, was shot in Lebanon, at times even as Israeli bombs fell around them.

"Stateside censors have slapped Ang Lee's follow-up to Brokeback Mountain with the harshest possible rating after deeming the film too erotic for US audiences," reports the Guardian. "However in a startling show of solidarity with its filmmaker just days ahead of Shanghai-set wartime spy tale Lust, Caution's world premiere at the Venice film festival, US distributor Focus Features has decided not to contest the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) NC-17 certification."

"A lot of ink has already been spilled analyzing the 64th Venice Film Festival lineup, with special focus on the undeniable preponderance of English-language pics," writes Jay Weissberg for Variety. "Maybe fest topper a target="_blank" href="http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/director/en/5743.html">Marco Müller's argument can be taken at face value: The Anglophone world at the moment just happens to be making films strong on innovation and star power." Meanwhile, Colleen Barry talks with Müller for the AP.

Weekend mumbles.

"Surveying the Mumblecore-manic media coverage of the last week or so, three features are in danger of slipping through the cracks," warns Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Totally coincidentally, these are the three films of [The New Talkies: Generation DIY, through September 4] that I'm currently most interested in.... I'm crushing heavily on Team Picture (directed by Kentucker Audley, who appears to be the same person as the film's star, Andrew Nehringer), and Frank V Ross's Hohokam and Quietly on By. These are the least-known films on the schedule for sure, although all three have made appearances at Harvard Film Archive's Independents Week. Seen as a unit, the three films point in an exciting new direction: towards the suburbs."

Updated through 8/28.

Before carrying on with this entry, a follow-up to this one, a brief observation. Though mumblecore and the so-called Berliner Schule are dissimilar in all sorts of ways, they do share a few characteristics. First, there's the perfectly understandable reluctance of the filmmakers themselves to be seen as part of a "movement," even though the respective labels certainly haven't hurt, that is, they've brought a little free PR to some films that might have slipped by unnoticed otherwise. Second, neither of these, let's say, wavelets would be happening if it weren't now possible to make films relatively cheaply. And third, there's the "reality" factor. You can make a genre flick on the cheap, too, but that's not what we're dealing with in either case here. The headline over Steve Dollar's mumblecore piece in the New York Sun is "Reality Never Looked So... Real," while Hanns-Georg Rodek, in one of the few pieces on the Berliner Schule to appear in English, writes, "reality is the key to the Berlin School." Anyway; a line of thought to pursue some other time.

Meantime, Premiere's Glenn Kenny has no problem with these filmmakers getting a little press and making a modest living: "Insofar as I understand the term, 'selling out' means betraying your own principles for profit. It does not mean betraying the untested principles of a portion of your early audience that, for some particular and likely pathological reason, believes it owns you."

"Because of the speed with which such hype takes off, flies and dies with the blogosphere cinerati, the American-born movement is likely to crash and burn before it ever reaches Australia," writes Matt Riviera in Sydney. "That may not be a problem, as the hip kids down here are not necessarily film-savvy and they wouldn't know an indie film backlash if it whipped them on the backside. Harsh. But true."

"Viewers' tolerance for Hannah Takes the Stairs will depend greatly on how much they can stand the characters," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "And the movie would be nothing without [Greta] Gerwig, one of the rare improvisatory actresses who cuts right to the truth of a scene, and doesn't try to feign confidence by filling her camera time with a lot of chatter."

At indieWIRE, Michael Lerman reports on Hannah's premiere at the IFC Center. There was a Q&A and the Film Panel Notetaker was there.

A fun one from Todd Rohal: "Google Buys Mumblecore for $1.6 Billion."

Updates, 8/26: David Lowery reviews Hohokam and Team Picture, noting that "Karina cites Ray Carney's notes on Hohokam from the Harvard Film Independent Week, in which he poses the question: 'is this the future the characters in the other works have to look forward to?' Maybe, maybe not - the socio-economic disparity between the various character sets predicates a wide variety of potential downfalls - but in a less material sense it's certainly a possibility, and one that's very pointedly underscored by Joe Swanberg's cameo in the film."

"Mumblecore may have aesthetic/film technique differences from mainstream American film & television, but, when it comes to not collaborating with minority talent, Mumblecore is like 1950s Hollywood or mainstream television from that era," blogs Sujewa Ekanayake.

Updates, 8/27: Eugene Hernandez talks with producer Anish Savjani (Hannah, Old Joy): "Now, through his own company Film Science, he hopes to foster a "family of filmmakers" that he can work with over the longterm. To that end, Savjani is currently producing Kelly Reichardt's next film, Train Choir with Neil Kopp (it wrapped production last week) and also Joe Swanberg's next movie, Nights and Weekends."

"What connects LOL to past films is that essentially the film is about the sense of connection, or lack of connection, that young people feel, to each other as well as themselves," writes Peter Nellhaus.

"Aaron Katz's second feature (after last year's Dance Party USA) Quiet City evokes a memorable aesthetic to surround its minor-key maybe-romance, focusing almost as much attention on lovely, video-sculpted natural formations and cityscapes as its two main characters," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "For every overly precious moment as manufactured as anything in a studio film..., there's a corresponding instance of loveliness: Katz's aural design, with its reduced traffic noise and disconcerting urban hush, for instance; or the texture of the sunlight blazoning through a city park. One sometimes wishes Katz would weave these compellingly wrought spaces into a film devoid of people altogether."

In an entry entitled "Is Mumblecore Too White? Too Straight?," AJ Schnack reminds us of where these questions have been raised and then assesses "what the debate here is all about":

A feeling that a generation-defining indie film movement (a sentiment that is over-simplistic at best) has, in the Bush Aughts, shied away from the complexity and diversity of the urban lives of most Americans, backtracking on the cinematic statements of Lee, Arteta, Araki, Haynes and the rest. Making a-political films in these most political times.

Yet, here are these characters. Sheltered, yes, but also taking refuge within their own interconnected groups - both real and virtual - and hoping to find a way out.

In some ways, isn't that a view of America today that's all too real?

Updates, 8/28: "As wonderful and mature a film as Hannah Takes the Stairs might be, I don't think it would be in the position it is right now had not Joe Swanberg's previous feature LOL provided such a shot in the arm to the festival circuit in 2006," writes David Lowery. "An exuberantly scrappy, handmade little film about being a young dude in this digital age, LOL is - even more so than Hannah - both a product of and herald to its generation."

"I just got my official Mumblecore rejection letter in the mail today. The reason? Cocaine Angel had three black people in it." A nice entry from Michael Tully.

Matt Dentler talks with Aaron Katz about Quiet City.

Continued here.

The Bothersome Man.

"Based on a Norwegian radio play by Per Schreiner (who also wrote the screenplay) and directed by Jens Lien, The Bothersome Man is either a creepy comment on Scandinavian depression or a sour glimpse of the afterlife as yuppie fantasy," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "Quiet desperation has never looked so gorgeous."

At the AV Club, Noel Murray finds it to be "a fairly well-worn pastiche of several 'individual vs utopia' stories with some deadpan Northern European comedy of the Aki Kaurismäki/Roy Andersson variety, all topped with a pinch of Groundhog Day."

"The Bothersome Man is intriguingly bizarre, but only in the most superficial, what-the-hell's-going-on-here? sort of way," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve. "Half-baked and coyly vague, the movie itself, while often very funny, can be as impassively irritating as its title character."

Earlier: Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

Kamp Katrina.

"Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, a vital crop of documentaries has emerged to present both impressionistic (South of Ten, God Provides) and pointedly sociological (When the Levees Broke, NO Cross, NO Crown) perspectives on the storm's aftermath," writes ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler. "Somewhere between styles is Kamp Katrina, Brooklyn-based directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's riveting glimpse of an impromptu New Orleans tent community established in the backyard of the disarming, unsinkable local fixture Ms Pearl.... It's hard to overstate the impact of Kamp Katrina's honesty; fresh off their acclaimed venture Mardi Gras: Made in China, the filmmakers' six-month survey arguably captured the city's wounded spirit more frankly than any of its contemporaries." And he interviews Redmon.

Updated through 8/29.

The doc's screening at the Pioneer for two weeks and, in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz recommends it. Ms Pearl and her husband's "blunt-spoken decency is inspiring. So is the movie's portrait of New Orleans after the flood, a debris-strewn ghost town where human kindness is overflowing."

Somewhat related: "Two years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the networks are planning a wide range of coverage to mark the anniversary and look in on the long recovery process." Paul J Gough scans the lineup for Reuters.

Amanda Terkel for In These Times:

We all remember "Brownie," the incomprehensibly incompetent FEMA director Michael Brown, who had no idea evacuees were using the New Orleans convention center as an evacuation shelter. But [Karl] Rove was the man President Bush quietly put in charge of overseeing the administration's response plan....

Rove used Katrina to push the administration's failed ideologies on the Gulf Coast, advocating segregated schools, reduced pay for low-wage reconstruction workers, and limited government health care. Political allies received large no-bid contracts. Americans were outraged. A CBS News poll six months after the hurricane found that just 32 percent of the public approved of the way Bush handled the disaster.

"When the Gulf Coast desperately needed a massive public works program, what it got was a stronger dose of the very same toxic neoliberal policies that laid the groundwork for the Katrina disaster," write the Nation's editors. "With such a perversely skewed economic development strategy, the spiraling social crisis that followed - documented by the articles in this issue - was probably inevitable. Still, it was helped along by yet more bad policies.... The solutions to these problems are almost too obvious to mention - but they all depend on the creation of a very different sort of public sector, one that works for the people, not for business elites and Washington ideologues. That does not seem to be in the cards right now. Instead, communities, aided and inspired by outside volunteers and charitable donors, are taking matters into their own hands. They are fighting to restore their neighborhoods, keeping in mind the delicate ecology around them. They are preparing as best they can for the next storm."

Back to Kamp Katrina, which Stuart Klawans calls "an urban platoon movie. Its setting, in the Bywater section of New Orleans, looks like a combat zone. Its characters, who are numerous at first and varied, get picked off by ones and twos until only a couple are left. You settle in with these people and become immersed in the chaos, brutality and surreal humor of their situation, seen close-up and often in fragments. This isn't the heartening experience of [Jonathan] Demme's [Right to Return], nor is it a comprehensive picture like [Spike] Lee's - but it seems appropriate enough to a war of attrition."

"Coincidence or not? This month, 10 of Time Inc's magazines are running articles about New Orleans." Brian Stelter reports in the NYT on how this has come about.

Updates, 8/25: "[T]he movie winds up being all the more fascinating because race isn't an issue as tensions rise among earthy folks in close quarters," blogs Joe Leydon.

"Whereas Low and Behold is a character drama that draws strength from documentary elements, Kamp Katrina is a documentary with an uncommon feel for character and an incredible narrative focus," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "As co-directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon buzz like flies around the action in the tent city, their handheld cameras are set to low shutter speeds to compensate for a lack of natural light. The resulting image is slightly slowed, tinted neon pink, and at times, it almost seems to float off the screen. The hallucinogenic spin brought by the video amplifies the feeling that post-Katrina New Orleans might as well be on another planet, in as much as it resembles the 'normal' American city."

Updates, 8/29: Chris Barsanti rounds up some of the best Katrina anniversary coverage.

Phil Nugent:

Given my own experience of the days leading up to Katrina, I'll admit to being surprised when the president, once he'd been persuaded to interrupt his vacation to comment on a major American city having been flushed down the tubes, actually seemed to take the position that no one could have been expected to have seen this one coming. Given the times in which we live, I was a lot less surprised to hear the victims blamed for having been there in the first place, to the point that the mother of the President of the United States could be heard trying her best to sound good-natured and tolerant while mooing that the charity extended to these lucky duckies had made the whole thing a windfall for certain members of our layabout wastrel class. Not surprised, but no less enraged.

[...] Tragedy may be the only word for the city now. As a tourist trap, New Orleans cultivated an image as a free-for-all, anarchic party town were the rules don't apply, so maybe there's a sick joke in the fact that it now stands as the living demonstration of George Bush's dream of an America where government has no responsibilities to its citizens: a city where the veneer of civilization has been washed away and nothing has been put in its place. New Orleans got through the civil rights era with a minimum of racial tension, and when I was there it was a place where people of all races and even of wildly different income brackets lived within blocks of each other in "checkerboard" neighborhoods. Now it's a place where a fair number of black residents, desperate to believe that their lives weren't upended out of incompetence and indifference, think there's something to the rumor that The Man dynamited the levees; a place where white politicians have taken to using coded racist rhetoric to try to turn the spiralling crime figures to their advantage, something that would have been nearly unthinkable when the city was stable (and the electorate mostly black). "If it helps people understand my life and the lives of other people here in New Orleans," one man told Larry Blumenfeld, "if it makes them think about why we're here and we won't leave, let 'em have an anniversary." As Blumefeld puts it, those who actually live in New Orleans now "hardly need to mark calendars. Every day is an anniversary, a stark reminder of nature's wrath and more so of the very unnatural disasters of levee failures, insurance shortfalls, and a tide of bureaucratic red tape that rivals even the water for its ability to stall lives." Everyone I know who was in New Orleans when Katrina hit made it out okay, but I lost a friend to post-Katrina New Orleans, the ongoing tragedy that has its heroes and its villains but no end in sight.

Shorts, 8/23.

For an Austin Chronicle cover story, Marc Savlov dips into "life in Kat Candler's cinematic world: The wiry thrum of teenage misfit melancholy - so much like the whine of the titular insects in her 2000 breakout feature, cicadas - is never far from her characters' hearts and minds, no matter how good they are. Death happens, communication breaks down, tears flow, and then getting your film distributed and out to the public turns out to be the toughest hurdle of all. And then, as if by sheer, grappling humanity, her characters go on, her films garner awards, become guideposts for other people, other filmmakers. They survive. They get better." Following up on jumping off bridges, she's currently braving capital letters, working on a comedy, Brain Brawl, and teaching at the Austin School of Film.

On a related note, a few words on New Day Films, "a sort of proto-feminist correction to the nominally available Hollywood distribution and exhibition channels."

Also in the Chronicle: Spencer Parsons talks with Julie Delpy about 2 Days in Paris.

Brett Morgen's Chicago 10 "brings to life the various voices of dissent - including Yippie founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, peace activists Rennie Davis, David Dellinger and Tom Hayden, and Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale - that have come to define the multivalent nature of the opposition," writes Nancy Spector. "These individuals and organizations embodied the spectrum of countercultural resistance, from pacifism to an Absurdist theatre of pure revelry to armed militancy. What comes across most clearly in Chicago 10 is their ability to cause a momentary breach in the political system, which simultaneously underestimated and overreacted to this call for change. Almost 40 years later such mass disturbance is impossible to imagine. The political machinery of the neo-con right, born out of the anarchy of 1968, has come to anticipate and control most forms of political protest."

Also in frieze, novelist Brian W Aldiss considers the long tradition of apocalyptic scenarios in literature and film and then writes, "The future itself has receded like a departing tide, leaving us on the dangerous sands of the present, where authors such as Geoff Ryman, Ken MacLeod, Iain Banks and Philip Pullman write of much that is happening now: if not a present, then an alternative present. It is no longer science fiction as we used to know it. The present has become our contemporary launch pad. Never has the transitory seemed more permanent."

Why are we "drowning in quirk," as Michael Hirschorn puts it for the Atlantic? "David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985 - halfway between his 'Psycho Killer' beginnings with the Talking Heads and his move to global pop - when he sang the song 'Stay Up Late': 'Cute, cute, little baby / Little pee-pee, little toes.'... Jon Cryer's 'Duckie' Dale in Pretty in Pink came a year later, and quirk was on its way." All your Sundance-launched favorites then come in for a good drubbing, though particular attention is paid to the ways Wes Anderson has wandered astray. Via Chris Barsanti.

"Condemning the Fox News Channel as a warmonger that's agitating for a US attack on Iran, documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald and independent US Sen Bernie Sanders announced an 'online viral video campaign' Wednesday calling on television news organizations 'not to follow Fox down the road to war again.'" For the AP, John Curran reports on Fox Attacks.

For the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams talks with Annie Sundberg about The Devil Came on Horseback. Also: "An Inconvenient Truth is a much better movie than The 11th Hour, but The 11th Hour is a far more important one." More on that one from Jennifer Merin in the New York Press.

Also in the NYP, a take on the first three quarters of 2007 from Armond White: "Because the best movie this year so far has been Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, the next-best entertainments from Norbit to I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry plus the audacity of both Resnais's Private Fears in Public Places and Verhoeven's Black Book, then several brilliant segments of The Ten and the expected excellence of The Simpsons Movie all give the impression that we are experiencing a renaissance of both high and low comedy. But now Death at a Funeral opens and wrecks the party."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Jon Voight "about September Dawn and his thoughts looking back over an illustrious, and ongoing, career."

Matthew Hays tells the story behind Manufacturing Dissent. Also in the Guardian, Ronald Bergan: "The most glamorous of the studios, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, which made 'beautiful pictures with beautiful people,' was where William Tuttle, who has died aged 95, worked for 35 years. He was head of the makeup department there from 1950 to 1969."

"Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose acclaimed short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, VT," writes Margalit Fox for the New York Times. "She was 84 and lived most of her life in Manhattan before moving to Vermont in 1988."

The BBC: "Oscar-winning Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore is in hospital after being attacked and mugged on a street in Rome, according to local reports."

Suddenly, I'm modernly fabulous. Or at least I hope to be some day. Gabriel Shanks interviews me for his terrific Modern Fabulousity.

Online listening tip. For NPR, Karen Grigsby Bates reports on Bruce Watson's book Sacco & Vanzetti and Peter Miller's doc of the same name. Related: Novelist Andrea Camilleri in the New York Times.

"Listen and see." From Marc Lafia, Daniel Coffeen and Michael Chichi, the creators of artandculture, comes 3THINGS.

What is it? Lafia explains at Vinyl Is Heavy.

Online viewing tips, round 1. How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made. Via Coudal Partners, also pointing to Saul Bass's title sequence for Seconds.

Online viewing tips, round 2. "Two short films by Maya Deren's husband [Alexander Hammid] are now available for viewing at Ubuweb," notes John Coulthart. "Of the pair of films, Na Prazskem Hrade (At Prague Castle, 1931) is the most interesting for this Prague fetishist, a disjointed study of the architecture of the city's castle which turns the building into an expressionist collage."

Fests and events, 8/23.

"While hundreds of new independent festivals commence every year around the United States - some as economic boons for their communities, others as the equivalent of art-house substitutes in small markets - New York is saturated, with niche events often carved inside other niches," writes ST VanAirsdale. Nonetheless, as he reports in the New York Times, Tom O'Malley and Luke Szczygielski, having decided that New York "needed a home for modest American independents overlooked by mainstream monoliths like Tribeca and smaller festivals with more thematic or international interests," are giving it a go, launching the American Cinematic Experience this weekend.

And for Michael Cieply, Toronto's lineup shows "a skew toward markedly somber topics among Hollywood's offerings... During the last decade, the festival, now in its 32nd year, has emerged as the unofficial beginning of a six-month movie-awards cycle that culminates with the Oscar ceremony in late February.... This time around, the opening notes are a bit intense."

"Today marks opening day of the 2007 Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films & Short Film Market, also known as ShortFest," notes Lisa Rosen in the Los Angeles Times. "Running until Aug 29, the fest features more than 300 shorts from 40 countries, and 50 programs with themes ranging from romance to horror."

The North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival opens today and runs through Sunday. Neil Morris and Kathy Justice have a backgrounder and preview in the Independent Weekly.

Brian Brooks files from the Sarajevo Film Festival for indieWIRE: "Now entering its teens, SFF may not have yet reached the cache of some of its older and richer Western European brethren in Berlin, Edinburgh or San Sebastian, but for a city that only a little over a decade ago emerged from a three year siege that left thousands dead in its wake, SFF has amassed a world class event luring top-notch filmmakers and others for its relatively young 13th outing."

From Edinburgh, it's Nick Dawson at Filmmaker on a couple of late night screenings. Shrooms "takes five American college students and their English friend in an eerie wood in a deserted corner of Ireland, adds some near lethal mushrooms, inbred locals and some seriously pissed-off ghosts and has a lot of fun with the situation." Weirdsville "is much more unconventional than Shrooms but has a sweet-natured, offbeat charm that I personally found irresistible."

Joe O'Connell tracks local goings on for the Austin Chronicle.

Focusing on depictions of women in the Middle East, Cathleen Rountree previews three Bay Area festivals, the Arab Film Festival (October 18 through November 4), the United Nations Association Film Festival (October 24 through 28). and the Global Lens film series (in November).

Critics, 8/23.

"What more insulting for New York critics and their acolytes than having the season's pet movie open in Texas and across the South prior to saturation in urban markets far better able to appreciate such ground-breaking artistry? The fact [that] Bonnie and Clyde went wide first in the South was something camp followers would never get over. To this day, they call it a black mark against Warners." John McElwee has a fascinating entry at Greenbriar Picture Shows on the studio's rollout and a few myths surrounding a long-faded revolution.

The Boston Phoenix's Gerald Peary lands a role in the movie, has fun with it and recalls past onscreen performances by film critics.

You may have heard about the Windmills of My Mind incident. If not, DK Holm will fill you in at the Vancouver Voice Blog. This, though, is the interesting part:

Updated through 8/25.

I don't know how many others are going to pick up on this story and pontificate on it, but one thing that needs to be said is that plagiarism of the gross kind that Mr Arlyn engaged in is not the real problem in contemporary film criticism. There is another kind, that is more pervasive and insidious and nearly invisible. That's the group think that sweeps across the nation as certain reviews and reviewers set the tone and limit the terms of response to a film. What these writers are doing is plagiarizing a tone, the way the Paulettes from long ago, and even to this day, took their cues from Pauline Kael's New Yorker reviews and her private exhortations. Plagiarists such as Mr Arlyn are always eventually caught out. Plagiarists of the second kind never are, yet can unduly influence the fortunes of a film. In this light, perhaps it's a good thing that no one pays attention to movie reviewers any more.

Your first thought might be: Are these really plagiarists - or simply pushovers? But passing off an idea, maybe even a tone as your own, unattributed... well, it's probably not actually plagiarism, but DK's is a provocative thought.

Update, 8/25: a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/08/the_stepford_critics.html">Jim Emerson comments and then asks, "Are established critics and reviewers, and relatively new bloggers, plagued by unoriginality and sameness? Do they emphasize a restrictive or uniform perception for some films?"

Russians, 8/23.

"The battle between good and evil gets quite a workout in the 2007 Russian Resurrection Film Festival, the annual showcase of contemporary Russian cinema," writes Rosalie Higson in the Australian. Scroll down to the bottom of the article or sideways along the rather nifty site for the fest for dates; it's wandering all over the continent, as festivals tend to do down there. Via Movie City News.

"Now in its sixth year, the Pusto festival is being held this week at Dom Kommuny, a Constructivist student dormitory built in 1929 on Ulitsa Ordzhonikidze," reports Marina Kamenev for the Moscow Times. "The films are projected onto an outside wall of the building. The festival showcases the work of both Russian and international artists, including such Pusto veterans as director Yakov Kazhdan, who has participated in the festival from the start." Today through Saturday. Also: Alastair Gee on Andrei Konchalovsky's Gloss and Vladislav Lipovich talks with screenwriter Alexander Mindadze about the directorial debut he's taking to Venice: "Life in today's Russia is life in the wake of a major shock, he said, and exploring this 'aftershock existence' is one of the goals of Detachment."

Ignatius Vishnevetsky is "currently in my father's home town, Rostov-on-the-Don, a hilly city on built along the banks of a river in the South of Russia." He's been catching some TV - after all, some of it's quite good - and most recently, The Foundling, a film that's "childish in the most beautiful sense of the word."

For SF360, Dennis Harvey checks in on From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema, at the Pacific Film Archive through the end of the month: "Some of these movies have kitschily dated aspects, occasionally because they resemble similar, familiar Hollywood flick-reflected through a cultural funhouse mirror. Many remain fascinating and delightful because they are just so profoundly different from the vast majority of such adventures made anywhere else, certainly in the West."

DVDs, 8/23.

Eyes Wide Shut is to see a new, unrated release on Region 1 DVD, and yesterday at Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson argued the case for the defense; today, Karina Longworth tells us she's been thinking off and on for some time about writing a book about Kubrick's last film, but...

Every time I gear myself up to actually do the writing, I inevitably lose confidence - something happens and I think, "Oh, nobody cares about that movie."

Jeffrey's post - and, especially, the comments it has engendered - has possibly convinced me otherwise. It's one thing for a couple of critics to remain fascinated by a widely-reviled film ten years after its release, but those comments suggest a common relief among Eyes Wide Shut lovers: they're all basically saying, "Finally, it's okay for me to come out of the closet about this."

Inland Empire "was an overwhelming experience on the big screen, a three-hour waking nightmare that derives both its form and its content from the splintering psyche of a troubled Hollywood actress, played by Laura Dern," writes Dennis Lim for Slate. "But the natural home for this shape-shifting epic may in fact be the small screen.... [Y]ou sense that this lurid, grubby fantasy springs from deep within the bowels of YouTube as much as from inside its heroine's muddy unconscious. The DV that Lynch has come to cherish is the medium of home movies, viral video, and pornography - the everyday media detritus we associate more with television and computer monitors than movie theaters, more with intimate or private viewing experiences than communal ones."

"Kino's new box set The Films of Michael Haneke, covering the German-born, Austrian-raised director's major works from The Seventh Continent in 1989 to The Piano Teacher in 2001, is its own seductive and treacherous lotusland," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "It's a must-have item for cinephiles, but beware: Once you enter Haneke's world, it's not easy to get out." Also, The Call of Cthulhu is "sometimes funny but never a spoof."

In the New York Press, Matt Peterson blows a kiss to Facets and reviews American Revolution 2 and The Murder of Fred Hampton: "It feels alien to us now, but these films show a time when protests were literally dangerous—back when slang cut like a knife, the leaders were charismatic and convincing and 'the man' was genuinely fearful of what might happen."

"Hou [Hsiau-hsien]'s Three Times, which I've been viewing repeatedly in parts, is politically and historically informed like much of Hou's work and embodies his characteristic formalism," writes MS Smith.

Blake Ethridge vs Deep Discount DVD: Parts 1 and 2.

DVD roundup: Cinema Strikes Back.

Deep Water.

"In its calm and expert way, Deep Water confirms all the mythical terrors that lurk in our dreams of the sea, and the best person to watch it with would be Melville," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

"What really happened out there on the trimaran christened Teignmouth Electron, as it drifted toward South America and [Donald] Crowhurst began falsifying logbooks and transmitting unintelligible telegraph messages?" asks Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "It is the point - and the power - of Deep Water that the vast, unknowable fathoms of the sea are rivaled only by those of the human psyche."

Updated through 8/24.

"Given that the tedium of months on the open seas could and did drive a man insane, co-directors Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell have done a commendable job of making Deep Water... well, not boring," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice.

And Susan King talks with them for the Los Angeles Times.

Update: "Engrossing and insightful, it's a gut-wrenching case study in fatally boxing oneself into a corner," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

Updates, 8/24: Rachel Saltz in the New York Times: "Again and again you want to shout at the screen: 'Turn back. All will be forgiven.' This tale of risk, though, ends not with man conquering nature but in calamitous failure."

Online listening tip. Kenneth Turan on NPR; he's also got a review in the Los Angeles Times.

Interview. Jason Kohn.

"Every single documentary offers its own perspective on the truth. That's what makes cinema cinema. Right? If you're just looking to document completely dispassionately the evidence, cinema, movies - even documentaries - probably should not be where you're looking to work."

That's Jason Kohn, talking to David D'Arcy about his Grand Jury Prize-winner at Sundance, the viscerally visual essay on contemporary Brazil, Manda Bala (Send a Bullet). Questions of style aside, Kohn also tells him, "Corruption is actually one of the most violent crimes in the entire world, especially when the victims of this theft are amongst the poorest and most impoverished people in the world. You can't steal $2 billion from people who are hungry and don't have enough food to eat without there being unbelievably horrible repercussions. It's akin to war crimes, just in its scope and in its scale. To re-associate what corruption means, whether it's in Brazil, the United States, wherever, especially in the developing world - that ended up being the real point of the movie."

Updated through 8/24.

Earlier: "Manda Bala."

Update, 8/24: "Even with its occasional faults, Manda Bala does what documentaries do best - illuminate a intellectual or social situation that our otherwise narrow Western viewpoint would never even consider," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "The visual beauty in the film - Brazil is one of the most inviting looking regions in the entire world - contrasted with the cynical, almost comic approach to the problems, lends to moments of well earned epiphany, as well as frequently flops back into directorial self-indulgence."

Shorts, 8/22.

Ray Bradbury turns 87 today, and he's "taking something of a victory lap, partly the result of mining his extensive files for rare and unfinished work," writes David Shaftel, who interviews the writer for the New York Times. "He will publish several long-forgotten works this summer, including experimental drafts and his earliest writings."

So Rod Lurie will be remaking Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Premiere's Glenn Kenny outlines the many ways he simply does not get the original. Meanwhile: "Whenever you're dealing with the plot keywords 'fathers and sons' and 'sports,' the potential for emotional molestation is daunting, and Resurrecting the Champ doesn't defy any expectations on that count," writes Nick Pinkerton for indieWIRE.

FishbowlNY reports that New York Daily News [TV] film critic David Bianculli will be let go from the paper in October. He'll still have his NPR gig, though.

Acquarello reviews Alexander Kluge's The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, "an organic and fractured, yet humorous, intuitive, and poetic rumination on the integral - and correlative - nature of technology and (urban) identity, the intersection of film and new media in the creation of art, and the delusive quest to manipulate time."

Andrew Gilstrap talks with the Film Crew for PopMatters. Also, Bill Gibron reviews the soundtracks for Once, You're Gonna Miss Me and Kurt Cobain About A Son.

"The Devil Came on Horseback is a shattering experience," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "It's a call to arms, an indictment of indifference, and a pointed answer to that nagging question we all seem to find ourselves shrugging our shoulders and asking these days: 'What good can one person do?'"

Nick Schager at Slant on Mr Bean's Holiday: "Rowan Atkinson's latest venture as the fumbling, bumbling British boob Mr Bean simply delivers more of the same awful mugging and simplistic pratfalls that have endeared the character to absolutely no one I know."

Online browsing, reading, listening, viewing and contemplating tip. "This is a web version of Aspen, a multimedia magazine of the arts published by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. Each issue came in a customized box filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards - one issue even included a spool of Super-8 movie film. It's all here." Via wood s lot.

Online viewing tip. Brendon Connelly points to the trailer for Martin Scorsese's Stones doc, Shine a Light. As Brendon notes, there are some "truly hilarious" moments in this thing.

Lists, 8/22.

As part of the San Francisco Bay Guardian's "Fall Arts Preview," Cheryl Eddy and Dennis Harvey each present an annotated list of ten movies they're looking forward to catching. Similarly, at Movie City News, Noah Forrest: "10 Movies To Keep An Eye On This Fall." And there's very little overlap, so that's nearly 30 movies to read about. Earlier: "EW. 'Fall Movies Preview.'"

Michael Atkinson carries on curating the "Long Take Hall of Fame."

A list that goes to 100: Total Film's "Greatest Directors Ever." Via Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

"Here's ten biographical pictures I'd love to see," lists Nathaniel R. "Some are really happening. Others are lost dreams."

Fests and events, 8/22.

"349 films from 55 countries are set for the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, organizers are revealing this morning in Canada," reports Eugene Hernandez. "'There is a lot of soul-searching and a lot of extremely gifted, overwhelmingly passionate cinema in the festival this year, TIFF co-director Noah Cowan told indieWIRE in a conversation yesterday. 'These are filmmakers who are out to transform the way we see the world, they are out to make a difference.' As previously announced, the event will kick-off with Canadian Jeremy Podeswa's Fugitive Pieces on September 6 and close with Paolo Barzman's Emotional Arithmetic on September 15, 2007."

"The old, weird Sound Unseen Music & Film Festival - of course I mean that as a compliment - kicks off at the Riverview on Wednesday night with 7 Nights in the Entry, Rick Fuller's latest rock-doc as archaeological dig, culled from a week's worth of videotapes shot at the 7th St Entry in 1981 and thus eligible for future repackaging as The Decline of Midwestern Civilization," notes Rob Nelson, introducing the City Pages preview of the fest that runs through Sunday.

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij notes that Amos Gitai's Désengagement (Disengagement) with Juliette Binoche has been added to the Venice lineup.

In the run-up to The Best of NewFest@BAM (September 7 through 9), NewFest launches a series of short interviews with a few of the featured filmmakers.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston has "58 ways to rep Bay Area film this fall."

Neil Young indexes his Edinburgh coverage.

At SF360, Claire Faggioli talks with "our very favorite Hostess with the Mostest, the exceedingly lovely Peaches Christ."

Shorts, 8/21.

"Nicole Kidman and Ralph Fiennes will star in love story The Reader for the Weinstein Co," reports Michael Fleming for Variety. "Stephen Daldry will direct David Hare's adaptation of the bestselling novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink."

Also, "Rob Marshall and Harvey Weinstein have begun assembling the cast for Nine." And they're talking to Penélope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem, Sophia Loren and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Michael Tolkin's adapted the original Broadway musical inspired by Fellini's 8½.

Meanwhile, Anne Thompson reports that Sony Pictures Classics has picked up North American rights to Jonathan Demme's Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains: "Invited by Participant to follow ex-president Carter's recent controversial book tour for Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Demme and a camera crew led by Declan Quinn filmed an intimate portrait of Carter as he dealt with the slings and arrows generated by his provocative public appearances across the country."

"Richard Stanley's strange and tortuous career seems in many ways to typify the erratic trajectory of an artistically inclined genre director struggling on the fringes of the mainstream," writes Tom Huddleston, introducing his extensive interview at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "His edgy, self-serious but steadfastly entertaining apocalyptic narratives resist easy categorisation, as do his playful, shambolic documentaries."

"How could MGM's premiere laugh team of two seasons and an unbroken chain of seven hits come to be so utterly discarded and forgotten? How does a leading Metro star in 1929 end up selling hot dogs just outside the studio gate five years later?" At Greenbriar Picture Shows, John McElwee retraces the story of the team of Karl Dane and George K Arthur.

"A spectre is haunting contemporary cinema: the shaky shot," notes David Bordwell, who offers some "some historical perspective and a little analysis."

"Fatwas and Islamist fury have not deterred Pakistani audiences from queuing up in record numbers for Khuda Kay Liye (In the Name of God), a slickly packaged three-hour-long polemic that is riling the mullahs and has become the Pakistani film industry's biggest blockbuster, counting even Pakistan's president, Gen Pervez Musharraf, among its fans," reports Fasih Ahmed for Newsweek.

"The Norwegian national film awards, the Amandas, were handed out during a ceremony at the Haugesund Film Festival last Friday," notes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "Big winner of the evening was Joachim Trier's Reprise with three awards: Best Film, Best Director for Trier and Best Screenplay for Trier and screenwriter Eskil Vogt." Also, a preview of Hans Weingartner's Free Rainer (Reclaim Your Brain).

Michael Guillén has a good talk with Jack Hill about Warners, Francis Ford Coppola and the film he's been trying to realize for 20 years.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin (and in German), Max Fellmann and Jan Heidtmann have a long talk with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus about the reasons he's leaving Hollywood: "The decision was actually made two years ago, during the filming of The Departed. I'll turn 72 this year, I've shot nearly 100 films, I've actually accomplished just about everything one can accomplish in this vocation. And Departed was a very stressful, very hard shoot. We shot up to 18 hours at a stretch. At my age, you're up and on the set at 4 in the morning and you think to yourself: Is this really necessary anymore?"

For Film International, Amy Lai offers a close reading of Crying Out Love, In the Centre of the World, "one of the major jun'ai [pure love] films of 2004" in Japan.

"It's clear that Venom and Eternity is a philosophic film of an unusual order," writes Alex at motion picture, it's called.

Cineuropa's new "Film in Focus": Philippe Leclerc's Princess of the Sun.

"Even in a town as enamored of hyperbole as this one, it is probably true, as his agent likes to say, that at 91 Horton Foote is the oldest living screenwriter in Hollywood." A profile from Alex Witchel for the New York Times Magazine.

And in the paper:

• John Anderson talks with Harvey Weinstein about his strategy for opening Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. Once it opens at Film Forum on November 21, it "will be opening the movie in just three other theaters, one more in New York and two in Los Angeles, giving it the kind of debut that might be afforded a Mexican documentary." But Weinstein argues, "With a movie like this you have to build it." And as many are alerting even now, the trailer's out.

• "Like Douglas Sirk without the throw pillows, Sunflower is a shamelessly old-fashioned melodrama performed with such sincerity that resistance is futile," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "Following a troubled father-son relationship over more than 30 years in post-Cultural Revolution Beijing, the movie utilizes a simple dramatic structure to support a narrative filled with tumultuous social change." More from Rob Humanick in Slant: "Were the film's visual aesthetics a match for its emotional ones, Sunflower might have been something for the books."

• Matt Zoller Seitz on Them: "It has no larger agenda. It's not an allegory, a satire or a commentary. It's just a modestly relentless suspense picture that propels its characters through a series of dreamscapes: a haunted house, a spooky forest, a dungeon of sorts. A large part of its effectiveness stems from the initially inscrutable nature of the threat." More from robbiefreeling, blogging for Reverse Shot: "In a summer of garbage like Hostel Part Two and Joshua, Them isn't a revelation for horror, but it's a welcome return to form."

  "The Last Legion, a sword-and-sandal spectacle from those epic-loving De Laurentiises, invokes a lot of better movies on its circuitous trip from the Roman empire to the Arthurian legend, but it doesn't do the one bit of borrowing that could have made this journey enjoyable," sighs Neil Genzlinger.

• "Thor Halvorssen, a half-Norwegian Venezuelan, is a conservative operating in fields more often associated with liberals, a scion of wealth and privilege who champions the underdog and the powerless, and a polemicist who loves a lively argument," writes John Strausbaugh. "Since 2005, having already founded two nonprofit organizations focused on free speech and human-rights issues, Mr Halvorssen has made the movie business part of his portfolio of controversy-stirring efforts. Established with a small amount of his money, his nonprofit Moving Picture Institute has raised about $1.5 million in donations to date to pay for, promote and seek distribution for documentary films."

• Reviewing As You Like It, Virginia Heffernan focuses on how Kenneth Branagh has "slashed passages of the repartee that defines Rosalind." Related: "In concept and execution it's a pale reflection of Branagh's earlier work, suggesting that the director himself, like Shakespeare's wanderers in the Forest of Arden, may have gotten lost in the woods," writes Andrea Gronvall in the Chicago Reader.

• "Suddenly a renewed fascination with matrimony spans the spectrum from premium cable networks like HBO and Showtime to even the flimsiest of celebrity reality shows on VH1," writes Alessandra Stanley. "Colder, unsentimental, almost cruel in their gaze, these shows have replaced the solipsistic pillow talk between Hope and Michael on Thirtysomething with tableaus of repression and neurosis."

• Luc Sante reviews On the Road: The Original Scroll: "It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.... The novel that On the Road became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time." Also, Matt Weiland on John Leland's Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think): "This is Post-it note criticism."

• "Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940's and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners' expectations, died early today in Manhattan," writes Peter Keepnews. "He was 83." More from Ronald Atkins in the Guardian: "Bebop's doubling the number of beats created space that encouraged the drummer to overlap between bars, and Roach did so with an endless array of fill-ins and paradiddles. Inventiveness and technical dexterity were equally balanced in his solos, which he built with impeccable logic." Related online listening: All Things Considered, a 75th birthday tribute in 2001 and a 1987 appearance on Fresh Air. More from Premiere's Glenn Kenny and from John Andrews at the WSWS.

• Randal Stross reports on the state of video-on-demand: "All is ready - except an unstinting supply of movies. The studios have balked."

• "Hollywood's squabble over which of two technologies will replace standard DVDs reignited Monday with two studios throwing their weight behind one format and several rivals ramping up support for the other," reports Brooks Barnes. "Paramount, part of Viacom, and the publicly held DreamWorks Animation said they would exclusively back the HD DVD format for the release of high-definition movies on disc," even though "Blu-ray titles are sharply outselling HD offerings, major retailers like Target are stocking only Blu-ray players, and Blockbuster recently said it would carry Blu-ray exclusively."

• "As video games have surged in popularity in recent years, politicians around the country have tried to outlaw the sale of some violent games to children," writes Seth Schiesel. "So far all such efforts have failed."

"Gangland violence shreds a community and shatters a family in Splinter, the feature debut of Michael D Olmos," writes Lael Loewenstein. "Despite some imaginative elements and a knockout performance by Tom Sizemore, Splinter feels very much like a first effort. With its recycled themes and muddled storyline generating a cascade of unanswered questions, the film is more about style than substance."

Also in the , Sam Adams on Drama/Mex, whose "fatal weakness for melodrama sinks any pretense at realism," and Mark Olsen on 7 Días, "the disappointingly flat debut feature from Mexican writer and director Fernando Kalife"; at any rate, Reed Johnson talks with Kalife.

"These Foolish Things is a rather foolish little movie, but eventually almost charming in spite of itself," writes David Wiegand in the San Francisco Chronicle. "They don't make 'em like this anymore. Come to think of it, they never did. Come to think of it, they probably shouldn't.

"Could there be any more pitiful irony than that cinematic godhead Kenneth Anger, visionary master of the dark arts, has been trapped within a slapdash blue-screen-and-talking-head documentary that could barely past muster as a DVD bonus feature?" asks Ed Halter. "Anthology can't be blamed for running Anger Me... But there's little here that will inform the true avant-fan, and much sloppy filigree that will annoy."

Also in the Voice:

• "Shot in a style that might be termed Americana gravitas, September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials," writes J Hoberman.

• Rob Nelson on The Bothersome Man: "[D]irector Jens Lien (Jonny Vang) mostly favors the clean and bland, succumbing to much of the same pod-person impassivity that the movie purports to critique."

• "Kamp Katrina begins as a tale of resourcefulness, generosity, and compassion, then quickly clouds over," sighs Nathan Lee.

• "With Closing Escrow, a mockumentary about three couples' search for their dream dwelling, the biggest problem is that within minutes, you know precisely what you're in for - and it's an eyesore," writes Tim Grierson.

• Robert Wilonsky on Resurrecting the Champ: "Ace in the Hole this ain't; Sweet Smell of Success neither."

Acquarello: "Intentions of Murder bears the characteristic imprint of Shohei Imamura's recurring preoccupations: the sensuality and resilience of women, the manifestation of individualism in a codified society, the idiosyncrasies and primitive instinctuality that define human behavior."

"On a scale of one to 10, The King of Kong scores one million," writes Robert Cashill. "This open-hearted account, with its fallible, funny cast of quintessentially American oddballs, understands that everyone has a reason, and gives them their due." More from Dennis Harvey at SF360. Related: Matt Singer talks with director Seth Gordon for IFC News.

"Although the obituaries of cinema have been somewhat premature, it is, paradoxically, those who have proclaimed its death who have done most to revivify it," blogs Ronald Bergan.

In the Guardian itself:

• Steve Coogan, who played Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People, remembers the man from Manchester: "Tony was the apotheosis of those baby boomers who wanted to reach beyond their background and find the poetry in this post-industrial landscape. He gave confidence and legitimacy to an army of haltingly insecure men."

• "Sparkle is funny, likable and watchable, with some nice performances, particularly from Bob Hoskins as a lovelorn older man," writes Peter Bradshaw. "But I couldn't help feeling that [Neil] Hunter and [Tom] Hunsinger have been encouraged down a slightly unchallenging rom-com route."

• "[W]hy can't women in action movies ever do anything useful?" asks Sarah Churchwell. "The most amazing thing Julia Stiles does in The Bourne Ultimatum is get second billing."

• "The doorstop novel, the all-day theatre marathon, the three-and-a-half-hour film - all seem to be a bigger draw than ever before," observes Mark Ravenhill.

• Emma Brockes meets Jamie Bell.

• Peter Bradshaw recalls some of the worst screen chemistry he's ever had to bear.

"I'm Through with White Girls has cleaned up on the black film fest circuit this summer, taking home prizes at the Hollywood, Roxbury and Martha's Vineyard black fests." Brandon Harris talks with producer Phyllis Johnson and director Jen Sharpe.

Chrissy Iley meets Aaron Eckhart for the Observer.

Gill Pringle profiles Chris Cooper for the Independent.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Joe Valdez.

Kevin Lee makes a strong case for a DVD release for Johnny Got His Gun.

"Because of Rain Man, a lot of people think having an autistic child is a life sentence to frustrated yelling and unrequited affection, with the occasional feat of mathematical wizardry," blogs Noel Murray at the AV Club. "[W]hat bothers me about Rain Man is the same thing that's bothersome about nearly every autism film of recent vintage. With the pointed exception of Snow Cake - which at least acknowledges that its autistic heroine takes genuine pleasure in her stereotypy - autism-themed dramas are primarily about the non-autistic."

"Like an alcoholic prone to binging, I go through a Carnival of Souls jag every couple of years," writes Richard Harland Smith at Movie Morlocks.

Cashiers du Cinemart: the first issue in nearly three years, #15, is out and about.

"Gauri Sathe and Shreekant Pol, my friends, mentors, and Indian cinema gurus whom I met during my days at Metropolitan College of New York's Media Management program, are now collaborating with Indiepix to bring their Indie India Collection direct to viewers via DVD and Download-to-Own technology," writes the Film Panel Notetaker.

Signandsight translates a bit of Tamas Vajna's interview with Miklós Jancsó for the Hungarian magazine HVG.

"It's a simple, unpretentious and endearing film about a now unfashionable game, and the underdogs who play it - be they Muslims, tribals, small-town girls or hailing from obscure corners of the country's Northeast." Namrata Joshi opens Outlook India's package on the international hit Chak De India. Also: interviews with screenwriter Jaideep Sahni and director Shimit Amin and another interview with Shah Rukh Khan, while Alam Srinivas draws parallels between the coach he plays with real life hockey coach Greg Chappell.

Online snickering tip. Yesterday's Doonesbury.

Online gazing tip. Howard Schatz shoots Joan Allen.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Freedom on the Fence, "a documentary project about the history of Polish posters and their significance to the social, political and cultural life of Poland." Via wood s lot.

Online viewing tips, round 1. "Screen Legends" on Charlie Rose.

Online viewing tips, round 2. A music video and a trailer for The Shadow Effect accompany Mike Everleth's consideration of the work of Jared Varava.

Online viewing tips, round 3. The Guardian's Kate Stables has got seven.

DVDs, 8/21.

"The exact moment when I decided to study cinema is very clearly imprinted in my memory," writes Maria Komodore at Pixel Vision. "It occurred three years ago while I was watching Man Ray films.... Independent Exposure's Animation Edition 2007 - a series of short animations series that Microcinema Inc has compiled on DVD and will also be showing all around the world - made me relive that moment."

"On August 27, 2007, our friends at the Mondo Macabro DVD label will be releasing The Blood Rose, another obscure horror film that they have rescued from the dustbin of history, given a digital clean-up, and unleashed upon an unsuspecting public," writes Jeff at Cinema Strikes Back. "The Blood Rose is an interesting variation on Eyes Without a Face that will be of particular interest to fans of atmospheric Euro-horror."

"What better way to celebrate a happy ending to the Bava book auction, and to start a new week, than to make an important announcement about Anchor Bay Entertainment's forthcoming October release of Mario Bava's Erik the Conqueror (Gli invasori, 1961)?" asks Tim Lucas.

"Rob Zombie is a genre archivist," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Name an obscure or forgotten horror/exploitation film from the 30s - 80s, and he's probably seen it, memorized it, and pulled the best bits out to form his own unique aesthetic." Also, The Lives of Others.

For IFC News, Michael Atkinson reviews Inland Empire: "Set aside the consideration of things 'Lynchian' - an art-culture realm that will doubtless survive us all - and you're still faced with perhaps the most defiant and uncompromised voice in modern American cinema." Then James Bai's Puzzlehead is honorably mentioned.

"Padded with stock footage, diluted with studio-dictated second-unit material, and saddled with a whack-ass, flag-waving ending, the 1962 Merrill's Marauders is one of director Samuel Fuller's more compromised films," writes Glenn Kenny in a "Foreign-Region DVD Report." "Still, it's got a relentless forward push and more than a few moments of pure Fuller force."

"Personally, I'd take Fuller's films over the complete oeuvres of Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan or Frank Capra," declares Patrick Z McGavin. " For this reason alone, the new stripped-down box set from Criterion, The First Films of Samuel Fuller, is essential viewing."

Also at Stop Smiling: For Sean Howe, Volume 4 of Warners' Film Noir Classics Collection is a "clutch of films that center on the everyman (postmen, druggists, physicians and vets)." And then there's Michael A Gonzalez's "Ode to Shaft."

DVD roundups: DVD Talk, plus a "Huge Anime Review Roundup."

Lists, 8/21.

"Move over Hollywood. Step aside Pinewood. Foreign films are moving into the mainstream and attracting cinemagoers as never before." Okay. Almost as if it were timed to coincide with Edward Copeland's foreign film poll, Rob Sharp gets all bullish on foreign-language movies and, further down that same page, Robert Hanks lists his top ten.

"Like some monstrous regiment hell bent on celebrity and the perfect Caesar salad, chefs have marched out of the kitchen and on to the big and small screen in unprecedented number," notes Jan Moir, an award-winning chef himself, in the Financial Times.

Related, and via Bookforum: Victorino Matus in the Weekly Standard: "How did we get from Julia Child and Jacques Pépin to the more than 30 celebchefs now featured at the local bookstore? What was the turning point and who caused it? What of the impact of this celebrity chef culture on future generations of culinary school students? Won't they all want to skip restaurant work and demand their own shows? In short, have we gone completely and irrevocably insane over food and the people who make it?"

At Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson offers a list of seven "Great Directors Working as Actors for Other Directors." Related: Matt Singer and Alison Willmore's IFC News podcast.

For PopMatters, Bill Gibron lists ten directors who once "had success branded on their backside, and nothing could stop them from achieving their place among the savants of cinema - nothing except a single horrendous film."

"Favorite Pacino performances? Pacino or Nicholson? Show all work." Carrie Rickey draws in a string of comments.

Fests and events, 8/21.

"[L]ong before I had made it to Cannes, Berlin or any of the other old-world European fests, it was the NYFF that most seemed to me like a temple where cinema was worshipped with due reverence," writes Scott Foundas at the Reeler. "When Richard Peña called me this past spring to invite me on to the selection committee, I did not hesitate. Of the selection process itself, I suspect what may surprise people most is that it is not fraught with compromise - at least not this year, when the overall quality of movies was so high that our most difficult discussions centered around which titles to exclude from the final program, rather than trying to make cases (as I am assured happens in many years) for inclusion. Does that mean we all love each of the 30 films equally? Of course not. But speaking just for myself, there is not a single movie in that lineup that I feel doesn't belong there."

At the House Next Door, Keith Uhlich previews one of those 30 films, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: "Reaching for the stars, he ends up with little more than a Miramaxed pastiche: The Sea Inside by way of Lady in the Lake."

Back at the Reeler:

• The Other Claude Chabrol, running at MoMA through Monday, "showcases both the pulpy (Fritz Lang remake Dr M, 60s spy films Code Name: Tiger and An Orchid for the Tiger) and the literary (adaptations of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James and Julio Cortazar) sides of his work," writes Steve Erickson.

• "From Aug 21 to Sept 2, the Korea Society's sixth annual New York Korean Film Festival will bring Korean film to an international audience - specifically Gothamites - with a line-up that goes out of its way to include a little bit of everything," writes Simon Abrams. "Spanning three different locations (BAM, IFC Center and Cinema Village), the festival boasts gangster films, romantic comedies, short films, documentaries, political melodramas, an Im Kwon-taek retrospective, a Tartan Horror sidebar, a period piece and a biopic."

• ST VanAirsdale takes note of who'll most likely not be making a personal appearance during the Warhol's World retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image.

"The UCLA film archive is in the midst of its Festival of Preservation, and last weekend, it exhibited two rare short features Satyajit Ray released in 1965 as a double bill," writes Doug Cummings. "Kapurush (74 minutes) and Mahapurush (65 minutes) are narrative sketches that allowed Ray to subtly experiment with form and style; as such, they worked against expectations at the time ('Many of Ray's critics think that Ray is making too many films in too short a span of time,' scoffed one Bengali journalist) and were largely dismissed upon their release. But according to Andrew Robinson's book on Ray, the filmmaker said, 'These are twin films I have considerable affection for; I have a pretty high opinion of Kapurush myself and I was disappointed by the response.' I'm leaning toward Ray's assessment."

Dead Channels, the San Francisco Festival of Fantastic Film, wrapped last week, and now, the winners of the audience awards have been announced: Best Feature Film is Chris Stapp's The Devil Dared Me To (site); Best Short Film - it's a tie: Richard Gale's Criticized and Simon Rumley's The Handyman.

And for those in the San Francisco Bay Area, once again, Brian Darr has your essential roundup. Meanwhile, the celebration of the Castro's 85th anniversary carries on at the Evening Class with Adam Hartzell's five favorite memories minted at the theater.

For the Independent, Charlotte Cripps previews the London International Animation Festival, opening today and running through Sunday.

The Lumière Reader files another batch of dispatches from the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals.

"Controversial British film Brick Lane will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month," reports the BBC. "Attempts to film Monica Ali's acclaimed novel drew protests from residents of the real Brick Lane in east London, who said the book was 'insulting.'"

Reviewing Beneath the Rooftops of Paris, Dan Fainaru catches up with Locarno leftovers for Screen Daily: "This study of old age and solitude finds exiled Kurdish director Hiner Saleem divesting himself of the mischievous drive and wicked sense of humour which permeated such earlier efforts as Vodka Lemon and Kilometre Zero." Also, The Drummer: "Conceived as a vehicle for Jaycee Chan (Jackie Chan's son) but more likely to serve as a showcase for the talents of the U Theatre drummers, this gangster-movie-meets-rites-of-initiation picture has a hard time deciding which way to go among the variety of options it attempts to explore."

At indieWIRE, Brian Brooks previews the Sarajevo Film Festival, running through August 25.

The first Croatian Film Festival will take place in New York from September 13 through 16.

Online viewing tips. Mike Everleth's got the trailer for the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival, which launches at 12:00 am on September 1, "as the concluding event of Midnight Mass run by the indomitable Peaches Christ." Then, another one, a gory one, for the Sydney Underground Film Festival (September 7 through 10).

Dedication.

"Inland Empire's Justin Theroux pops his directorial cherry with this obnoxious Sundance throwaway, a by-the-numbers romantic comedy that mistakenly believes it's either too quirky or too irreverent to be a by-the-numbers romantic comedy," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

"Though smug and attention-grubbing in equal measures, inviting comparisons to Burr Steers's abhorrent Igby Goes Down, Dedication at least deploys the darling chemistry between [Billy] Crudup and [Mandy] Moore to good effect, softening the blow of the dialogue's mean-spiritededness," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

Via SXSW's revived News Reel: Edward Douglas talks with Theroux for ComingSoon.net.

Updated through 8/24.

Updates, 8/23: Eric Kohn, writing in the New York Press, notes the point at which "the seams of Dedication start to come apart. Replacing his passion for writing with a hopelessly juvenile romantic wild goose chase, Henry makes a decision that alters the movie's initially engaging trajectory."

"Dedication wants to be an endearingly quirky character study in which expressionistic aesthetics lend lyricism to the saga of weird individuals struggling to attain personal contentment and fulfillment," writes Nick Schager for Cinematical. "What it actually is, however, is an unoriginal romantic comedy that vainly attempts to mask its conventionality with all manner of eccentricities."

"Women in romantic comedies always choose the fucked-up guy at the end," notes Annaliese Griffin at the Reeler. Dedication "paints a darker, more intellectually driven picture for its mismatched-but-perfect-for-another lovers, but nonetheless sticks to the girl-falls-for-disaster formula." More from Michelle Orange: "Between Julie Delpy two weeks ago and Ben Affleck this coming fall, you'd think the cream of the mid-90s indie sweetheart scene was having a midlife career crisis. Judging from most of these efforts, the directors are having a crisis - a mid-90s, indie sweetheart crisis."

Update, 8/24: "Following on the wildly successful antifeminist heels of Knocked Up, Hollywood is falling over itself to introduce beautiful, smart young women to useless, possibly brain-damaged young men," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Dedication is almost saved by David Bromberg's tart dialogue and exceptional acting from its three leads." But, no.

The Nanny Diaries.

"The Nanny Diaries, based on Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's best-selling novel (a roman à clef), is a grim slog," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Most American movies downplay issues of class and privilege; this one creates museum tableaux to illustrate them. But what follows is nothing but stereotypes - and an argument for why anthropology should inform drama rather than shape it. Your first look at a character tells you everything you need to know. As you watch the nannies mistreated and the children left to cry themselves to sleep, the only surprise is that there are no surprises. It's zombie-land."

Also: Bilge Ebiri's "guide to how accurately (or implausibly) other films have tackled New York worlds."

Updated through 8/27.

The movie actually improves on the book "in several key respects," argues Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Chiefly, it makes Nanny into a more appealing figure (and not just because she's played by Scarlett Johansson)... [Shari Springer] Berman and [Robert] Pulcini, former documentarians who segued to features with the beautifully rendered American Splendor, can spin only so much cinematic silk from literary leather."

Earlier: Melena Ryzik's interview with Berman and Pulcini for the New York Times.

Updates, 8/22: "Shifting between broad farce and tender romance, the comedy throws off some droll barbs on the emotional poverty of Manhattan's rich, but delivers few genuine laughs," writes David D'Arcy for Screen Daily. "[S]entiment disappointingly eclipses satire, and the movie's promising edge surrenders to a happy ending as a nanny saves the world, one over-privileged family at a time."

"Annie is introduced to a New York City environ whose rituals she pours over with the awe of someone who's never ventured above Union Square or never seen a Woody Allen movie in her entire life," notes Ed Gonzalez in his two-out-of-four star review for Slant.

Alonso Duralde, writing for MSNBC, American Splendor is "one of the best movies made in this country in the last five years. And while Nanny Diaries doesn't represent a horrible sophomore slump, it's certainly a letdown by comparison.... Here's hoping that the very talented Springer and Pulcini get a crack at a script that's worthy of their talents for their third time at bat."

Updates, 8/23: In the New York Press, Armond White argues that the film "restore[s] Johansson's humanity" and "breaks movie culture's unspoken taboo against class consciousness."

Reviewing the movie for Time, Richard Schickel finds it "much better than a slick adaptation of a best-selling novel has any right to be."

Ryan Stewart interviews Berman and Pulcini for Cinematical.

"[M]iddle-class strife is contrasted with Park Avenue snobbery, but a complacent tone homogenizes both realms," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "A blatantly parodic moment finds Mr X's mother on the beach reading the Diaries novel, practically suggesting that the filmmakers, devoid of new ideas, are desperately trying to tap a well that was dry in the first place."

"It should have been a snappy, catty diversion on the order of The Devil Wears Prada," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Yet watching the movie is a nonexperience - like the Upper East Side apartment where most of the action takes place, it's lavishly appointed but joyless."

Updates, 8/24: It's a "plodding and generic adaptation, which by rights should have been pure, eat-the-rich summer fun," writes Carina Chocano, notes a few changes the story's undergone on its way to the screen in the Los Angeles Times. "Morphing Nanny from a college student gaining valuable experience in her chosen field to an insecure, directionless post-grad comes off as the mother of all pulled punches. It was interesting to ponder the shock and awe of a well-adjusted member of the liberal meritocracy as she sank deeper into the maw of the insanely privileged classes. It's considerably less so to be presented with a classic master-slave dichotomy."

"As this exposé of the rich and miserable on the Upper East Side wobbles along uncertainly, it rests on the tense, squared shoulders of Laura Linney," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Ms Linney defies a screenplay that paints her character, Mrs X, a Park Avenue socialite, as a monstrous control freak. She is a smart, flexible actress who invests her role, a composite of former employers of the novel's authors, with enough humanity to arouse some pity."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek finds Nanny "more enjoyable than slick, aggressively hyped duds like The Devil Wears Prada. It may be polished, but unlike that picture, it doesn't feel canned."

Update, 8/25: Sandy Cohen talks with Johansson and notes that she isn't the only indie actress who occasionally breaks out in song.

Update, 8/27: "We wait for some sort of commanding narrative to take hold," sighs David Denby in the New Yorker. "Alas, none does."

The Hottest State.

"Unsurprisingly for a film written and directed by Ethan Hawke that's also based on his vaguely autobiographical 1997 novel, The Hottest State is thoroughly infused with its creator's pretentious indie-bohemian persona," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

"Although I drive past the corner of Bedford Avenue and Broadway (the Brooklyn one) on a daily basis, I've yet to encounter two hipsters whose cultivated inauthenticity is quite as palpable and grating as Catalina Sandino Moreno and Mark Webber's couple in Ethan Hawke's overlong and mildly indulgent adaptation of his own source material," writes Brandon Harris.

Updated through 8/27.

But for Aaron Hillis, writing in the Voice, "Hawke quite capably taps into the bittersweet complexities of young, love-struck idiocy." Sure, "It's achingly sincere, which isn't to say that Hawke's Tennessee Williams–quoting, overwrought script isn't as purple as Prince's rain and littered with dramatic shortcuts... Give the guy some credit, though: When you hit rock bottom with your first feature, the only way to go is up."

Updates, 8/23: "Like Julie Delpy, Hawke's costar in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (whose current release 2 Days in Paris also tracks a troubled couple), Hawke has examined the semi-cynical take on long-term relationships put forth in the aforementioned Richard Linklater-directed yarns and transplanted it into an unhappier situation," notes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "The ongoing intimate blabber eventually gets tiring - once we see it coming there's nothing left to happen except the inevitable argument and acceptance - but State remains perceptive."

Online listening tip. Hawke's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Michelle Orange at the Reeler: "It's difficult to determine how much of the erratic behavior on display in The Hottest State... is meant to be attributed to love, and how much to being 21, but at a certain point irritation (or hindsight) takes over and it hardly matters."

Updates, 8/24: "Hawke knows where his own strengths lie," argues Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "This is tender, fragile stuff, and it does flirt with overt solipsism, yet Hawke, who also does some nice supporting work as William's gravelly-voiced absentee father, pulls it off. The storytelling isn't necessarily fluid, but each scene moves ahead with the force of its characters' desires, confusions and yearnings."

"Nearly two hours long, with a tenuous narrative continuity, The Hottest State, whose title refers both to passion and to Texas, is far more coherent than Mr Hawke's 2001 directorial debut, Chelsea Walls," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "At around the halfway point, however, its characters' haranguing voices begin to grate on you. People in their early 20s, even pretty people, lose their appeal when they dwell this obsessively on their own inchoate turmoil."

"As a director, Hawke has a tendency to gild the lily until it's hard and heavy as a bludgeon," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "But as William's feckless dad, who remarried and all but forgot about his unmoored son, he is quite touching."

Update, 8/25: ST VanAirsdale talks with Webber at the Reeler.

Updates, 8/27: "The Hottest State is one of the most inauthentic films I've seen in a long time," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

Catalina Sandino Moreno "has near top billing in two major upcoming productions: Mike Newell's adaptation of the Gabriel García Márquez novel Love in the Time of Cholera and Soderbergh's Guerilla," notes Marcy Dermansky. "For now, however, it's a simple pleasure to watch her face in Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State... It's one hundred percent understandable why young William falls hard for Sarah.... It's when the two fall out of love that the tedium takes hold."

All these wonderful docs.

In the thick of the International Documentary Association's 11th annual DocuWeek (through Thursday), AJ Schnack, who's taken his own film to LA, Kurt Cobain About a Son ("one of the very best films of the year," says David Lowery), snaps pix and is running Tom White's talks with Alex Gibney about Taxi to the Dark Side, Joan Brooker-Marks about Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone and David Sington about In the Shadow of the Moon.

Then a few bones are picked with Gina Piccolo regarding her recent piece on docs in the Los Angeles Times: "Are we really still talking about whether or not the options are Al Maysles's vérité purity or nothing at all?"

Updates, 8/21: First, the entry's been tweaked a bit; see comments. And second, another interview, this time with Irene Taylor Brodsky about Hear and Now.

Another: Paul Taylor, director of We Are Together. And Chops director Bruce Broder.

Updates, 8/22: Peter Raymont, whose A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman sees its official premiere in Toronto in a couple of weeks. And Nanking directors Bill Gutentag and Dan Sturman.

Update, 8/23: It's AJ Schnack himself this time.

Updates, 8/25: War/Dance directors Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine and The Price of Sugar director Bill Haney.

No English Spoken Here.

"Over the past several weeks, I invited (or by extension invited) various people from critics to bloggers to professors and just plain movie fans to submit lists of their top 25 non-English language features so I could compose a list for a survey of all interest film fans to determine a Top 25 list similar to what the AFI does or what the Online Film Community recently did," announces Edward Copeland. "I now see how difficult list compiling can be." Nonetheless, the nominations are in from the committee and now you can choose 25 from the list of 121 films and get your ballot in by September 16.

The good news for Edward is that he's also got a nice batch of films to catch up with as well.

Posting their own lists with comments: Dennis Cozzalio, Jim Emerson, Jürgen Fauth, Ryland Walker Knight, Jonathan Lapper, Kimberly Lindbergs, Karina Longworth, Paul Matwychuk, Peter Nellhaus, Matt Zoller Seitz and the Self-Styled Siren.

The Shamus writes up a list to set alongside all these. Another from Dan Eisenberg. And Ted Pigeon comments on the project.

Again, more on Antonioni.

"The impression delivered even by those who admired him is not just that Antonioni films were bleak but that the bleakness was unleavened; worse still, that the man himself was above all an intellectual, who happened to choose film as the medium in which to vent the results of his cogitation," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Neither of these judgments is accurate, and, taken together, they are guaranteed to send novices scurrying for cover. All I can say is: hold your nerve, go online, order a stash of Antonioni, lie back with a grappa, and stare.... [T]his great director, whose characters are said to be glazed with spiritual death, forged something intensely alive, as if celluloid were as strokable as skin."

Online viewing tip. Glenn Dunks has found a clip of Jack Nicholson presenting the honorary Oscar to Antonioni. Via Movie City News.

Earlier: "Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912 - 2007" and "More on Antonioni."

Update, 8/22: Edward Copeland still isn't entirely won over.

Sight & Sound. September 07.

Mark Cousins has curated the Ten Documentaries That Shook the World season at BFI Southbank, running through the end of August, and in the new issue of Sight & Sound, he explains his choices, adding that, "as I write I realise what should have been obvious: that though these films were chosen because of their social impact, that impact is in part explained by aesthetics."

Geoffrey Macnab talks with Pascale Ferran about Lady Chatterley, "a delicately crafted paean to passion that does justice to her view of the novel as a utopian tale of intoxicating love written with uncanny subtlety and sensitivity." Related: Maddy Costa talks with Marina Hands for the Guardian, and so does Kaleem Aftab, for the Independent.

Reviews:

• "[I]n Born and Bred, [Pablo] Trapero explores a new brand of naturalism that eschews classical narrative models and character construction," writes Maria M Delgado.

• Tim Lucas praises Criterion's release of Lindsay Anderson's If..., "one of the most stimulating and visceral of all British films."

• For Michael Atkinson, 1408 "is far too self-consciously a coy CGI rollercoaster ride to leave any slap-prints on your cheeks - you can easily imagine it as a theme-park ride (Weinsteins, take note of this idea)."

• Tony Rayns on Opera Jawa: "Garin Nugroho's sensationally beautiful 'gamelan musical' is based on the single most famous episode from the Ramayana, the epic poem composed in Sanskrit, which is known throughout south-east Asia and revered as a quasi-religious text by Hindus.... The film is much more than a modernist re-reading of the story."

Again, more on Bergman.

"In the middle of the phone call, it popped out: 'Listen, I have a room here at Fårö, it's five by five meters. Here I've collected everything imaginable, you see, it's a damned kitchen midden. Would you like to take a look at it?' How can you answer such a question? You figuratively and almost literally curtsy over the telephone and say, 'Yes, please, Mr Bergman.'" Maaret Koskinen, who would find that "the rewards were beyond all expectation," has an intriguing piece on Bergman the writer, an excerpt from her book, In the Beginning Was the Word: Ingmar Bergman and His Early Writings.

Also in Film International: "Despite Bergman's ultimate repudiation of the trilogy concept, the release of the three works together as a set by Criterion indicates that, while their lineage is now uncertain, the union of these films is not easily ignored, and the tendency to view them as a whole quite illuminating." Liza Palmer on Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence.

Meanwhile, Premiere's Glenn Kenny explains why it's taken him a while to get around to responding to Jonathan Rosenbaum's New York Times op-ed and then why he feels "this piece winds up being one of those things out of which no good can come." In the comments section, JR responds. And Harry Tuttle's still sorting through the aftermath.

Earlier: "Ingmar Bergman, 1918- 2007" and More on Bergman."

EW. "Fall Movies Preview."

Entertainment Weekly gets the jump on just about everyone with its "Fall Movies Preview." Some of the entries on various films are mighty brief, though, so I've added a few more links where possible. For example, with the help of Girish's post at 1st Thursday, I'll point to relevant Toronto International Film Festival pages for some of these films (September 6 through 15); same goes for the New York Film Festival (September 28 through October 12), reviews from earlier festivals and so forth.

For EW's cover story, Benjamin Svetkey talks with Reese Witherspoon about Rendition, "a sober political drama about a pregnant Midwestern woman who discovers that her Egyptian husband (Omar Metwally) is being secretly held by the US government. (Jake Gyllenhaal plays the rookie CIA agent overseeing the interrogation, and Meryl Streep the official who orders the covert abduction.)" Trailer. Released October 12. Related: Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian on the season's post-9/11 movies.

Karen Valby meets Laura Linney: "In the dramedy The Savages [more; Toronto; trailer; release: December 26], she and Philip Seymour Hoffman play siblings taking care of their aging father (Philip Bosco). For the movie adaptation of the best-seller The Nanny Diaries, she stars as spoiled New York wife Mrs X. And then she goes back in time to appear as Abigail Adams in HBO's John Adams miniseries, based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography." For more on The Nanny Diaries, see Melena Ryzik's interview with directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini for the New York Times. And that one's due out this Friday.

"Emile Hirsch (Lords of Dogtown) will topline Into the Wild [more; Toronto; trailer; September 21]], which writer/director Sean Penn adapted from Jon Krakauer's 1996 book about the mysterious Alaskan adventure of wanderer Christopher McCandless," writes Chris Nashawaty. "The 22-year-old rising star phoned from Berlin - where he's shooting the Wachowski Brothers' live-action Speed Racer update - to talk about getting stuck in the snow, Penn's unorthodox casting process, and Kurt Cobain's favorite monkey." Speed Racer comes out on May 9, 2008.

Christine Spines talks with actor-turned-director Peter Berg about The Kingdom: "I was nervous it would be perceived as a jingoistic piece of propaganda, which I certainly didn't intend." Trailer. September 28. Related: Via the House Next Door, Andrew Dignan asks, "When did Peter Berg become a better filmmaker than Michael Mann?"

"It's kinda difficult to feel like you're the last man on earth when you're shooting in New York." Jeff Jensen talks with Will Smith about I Am Legend. Trailer. December 14.

Gregory Kirshling on Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited. Oddly, a second page on the film has more. Trailer. NYFF. London.

Vanessa Juarez: "Jessica Alba took a break from shooting her forthcoming horror movie, The Eye [February 1, 2008], to chat with EW about her comedic chops, some of her many upcoming projects - including Good Luck Chuck (opposite Dane Cook [more; September 21]) and The Love Guru (opposite its writer/director, Mike Myers [June 20, 2008]) - and, apropos of nothing, menudo."

Steve Daley tells the story behind "a lavish, PG-rated Disney movie," Enchanted, with Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey. Trailer. November 21.

Daniel Fierman talks with Jerry Seinfeld about The Bee Movie. More. Trailers and clips. November 2.

Then come the anonymous briefs. Let's arrange them according to EW's release calendar:

September 7

• A backgrounder on 3:10 to Yuma. And just yesterday, I pointed to the first round of reviews. Trailer.

• A few words with Will Arnett and Will Forte about The Brothers Solomon.

• Griffin Dunne directs Anton Yelchin, Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland in Fierce People. EW's bit.

• "Consider us intrigued." The Hunting Party, with Richard Gere and Terrence Howard. The trailer suggests a standard operating procedure political thriller, but I would like to know how that CIA twist turns out.

• A bit on In the Shadow of the Moon. The trailer's exhilarating. Earlier: the Sundance reviews.

• "It's the most heightened, ridiculous movie violence," Clive Owen says of Shoot 'Em Up. Trailer's at the site, and Clive Owen is right.

• Not blurbed by EW: Jeff Garlin's I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With and Eytan Fox's The Bubble.

September 14

• "Almost no director has final cut anymore." Julie Taymor on Across the Universe. Trailer. Toronto.

• Very briefly indeed, The Brave One. Variety's Anne Thompson has a much longer conversation with Jodie Foster about Neil Jordan's revenge drama. Trailer's at the site.

• A word with Daniel Radcliffe about the 2005 Australian drama, December Boys. Trailer.

• "All of my movies have dealt with crime in the sense of transgression," says David Cronenberg. "In the last two, it's been more traditional. But creatively, there's a real continuity amongst the films." Much more from Liam Lacey in the Globe and Mail and via Movie City News: "With Eastern Promises, [David] Cronenberg has delivered what appears to be a second almost-conventional thriller in a row. Not only will it play the Toronto International Film Festival in September, but it will open two other major international film festivals, The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival and the 55th annual San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain." The conversation also turns to the films he's not making. Trailer.

• A few words with Charlize Theron and Paul Haggis about In the Valley of Elah. Trailer. Toronto. Jeffrey Wells is standing by this one.

• "'Charlie's flat-out nuts,' says [Michael] Douglas." Briefly, King of California. And the trailer's right there, too. Related: Variety's John Anderson caught this at Sundance.

• "Why do we suspect this doesn't have a happy ending?" Silk. Trailer.

• Not blurbed by EW: Ira and Abby, Dragon Wars and Moving McAllister.

September 21

• A backgrounder on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, "three years, 34 different cuts, and five test screenings" in the making. Trailer's at the site. Toronto.

• A bit on The Jane Austen Book Club. Trailer.

• Marco Kreuzpaintner tells EW, "I want people to get angry." Trade. Trailer.

September 28

• Allison Burnett adapts Charles Baxter's novel, Feast of Love; Robert Benton directs; Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear and Alexa Davalos. The blurb and the trailer.

• Briefly, The Game Plan. Trailer.

• A tad on Lust, Caution: "'You do the best you can and still take risks. I didn't play it safe because,' [Ang] Lee says, laughing, 'there's no safe ground after Brokeback anyway!'" Trailer.

October 3

• Ever so briefly, Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire. Earlier: Tom Hall and David Poland.

October 5

• A few words with Gwyneth and Jake Paltrow about The Good Night. Earlier: the Sundance reviews.

• A snippet of a chat with John Cusack about Grace Is Gone. Earlier: the Sundance reviews.

• A little on Ben Stiller and the Farrelly brothers' return to R-rated territory, The Heartbreak Kid. Yes, it's a remake of Elaine May's 1972 comedy. Trailer.

• Quick quotes from writer-director Tony Gilroy, George Clooney and Tom Wilkinson about Michael Clayton. Trailer. Related: The Book Covers blog.

• Not blurbed by EW: My Kid Could Paint That and Finishing the Game.

October 12

• The trailer's schmaltzy, but Steve Carell's rarely seemed so appealing. Dan in Real Life. The paragraph.

• "Roles like these, that require someone of your capability and daring, don't come along that often." Geoffrey Rush pitches Elizabeth: The Golden Age to Cate Blanchett. Steve Daly has more. Trailer.

• With Hitman, Timothy Olyphant hopes to become John Woo. No, really. Trailer.

• A glimpse at Lars and the Real Girl.

• It's back - and so is Michael Caine: Sleuth. Trailer.

• A line from James Gray on We Own the Night. Earlier: the Cannes reviews. Trailer's at the site (with French subtitles).

October 19

• "Can vampire movies really rise from the dead? 30 Days of Night, an adaptation of the spine-chilling 2002 graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith attempts to resurrect the worn-out genre with something sorely missing after years of campy spoofs and stylized suckfests: realism." Trailer's at the site.

• Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone. Trailer.

• A few words on Reservation Road. Trailer.

  Not blurbed by EW: Wristcutters: A Love Story and Darfur Now.

October 26

• Martian Child is mentioned. Trailer.

• A few words with first-time director Alison Eastwood (yes, she's his daughter) about Rails & Ties, with Marcia Gay Harden and Kevin Bacon.

• David Schwimmer directs Simon Pegg in Run, Fatboy, Run. The bit. Trailer's at the site.

• Sigh. Saw IV.

• "Something cataclysmic happens and he's plunged into a vortex," Anthony Hopkins tells EW. Slipstream. Earlier: the Sundance reviews.

• "The first English-language film from Oscar-nominated Danish director Susanne Bier (After the Wedding), [Things We Lost in the Fire] is a drama about a woman (Halle BerryDavid Duchovny), invites his heroin-addicted best friend (Benicio Del Toro) into her home." Trailer.

• Not blurbed by EW: Funny Games, Michael Haneke's remake of his own film, this time with Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt.

November 2

• The story of how Ridley Scott revived American Gangster after it'd been left for dead for two years. Trailer.

• "Afghanistan in the 70s was a beautiful country." Marc Forster, briefly, on The Kite Runner.

November 9

• Not so between the lines: no one will bother with Fred Claus. Trailer.

• "The first release from the new, Tom Cruise-run United Artists is a rumination on war, education, and politics from one of our most socially minded actor-filmmakers: Robert Redford, whose liberal college-professor character provides the film's title." Which is, of course, Lions for Lambs. Trailer.

• Too brief: No Country For Old Men. Trailer. NYFF. Earlier: the Cannes reviews.

• Not blurbed by EW: Richard Kelly's long-awaited curiosity Southland Tales and Amy Heckerling's I Could Never Be Your Woman.

November 16

• "We fickin' love it." Beowulf, written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Trailer.

• Mike Newell directs an adaptation of Gabriel GarcÃ?a Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. MySpace.

• Words with Jennifer Jason Leigh, re: Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding. Trailer. Toronto. NYFF.

• An introduction to Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium, with Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman. Trailer's at the site.

November 21

• Kirsten Sheridan (yes, she's his daughter) directs Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Keri Russell in August Rush. The bit.

• "I wanted to explore Bob Dylan's almost violent need to reject the thing that everybody expected him to be," Todd Haynes tells EW. I'm Not There. I am, though. Clip. Toronto. NYFF.

• A soundbite from Frank Darabont about Stephen King's The Mist.

• A few words with This Christmas writer-director Preston A Whitmore II.

November 30

• A hint from Hayley Atwell regarding Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream. At AICN, Moriarty points to a trailer. Toronto.

• Not blurbed by EW: The Christmas Cottage and Pathology. Now there's a double bill.

December 7

• Atonement. We turn immediately to... "After enchanting the world with his first feature film, a masterful and refreshing adaptation of the Austen literary classic Pride & Prejudice, the 35-year-old British directorial prodigy Joe Wright again teams up with his star actress Keira Knightley for another accomplished adaptation of a British literary work: Ian McEwan's Atonement," writes Boyd van Hoeij in an early review at european-films.net. "Closely following the novel (adapted for the screen by playwright Christopher Hampton), Atonement is a fully formed pleasure of a film that only really stumbles in its editing and its closing moments, compressing McEwan's haunting epilogue into too small a sequence to allow especially those unfamiliar with the novel the time to fully absorb its devastating meaning." Toronto.

• "If you thought Harry Potter was blasphemous, wait till you get a look at the His Dark Materials trilogy." As you've heard, the first film'll be The Golden Compass. Trailer.

• "[George] Clooney, who earned an Oscar nod for his last directorial effort (Good Night, and Good Luck), led a four-month shoot in the Carolinas that emphasized efficiency." Leatherheads.

• A quote from Paul Schrader on The Walker. Trailer. Earlier: Berlinale reviews. Currently playing in the UK: Xan Brooks in the Guardian and Philip French in the Observer.

December 14

• A quick, quick talk with Francis Ford Coppola. Youth Without Youth. Earlier: Peter Nellhaus on Coppola's appearance in Miami in May.

• Not blurbed by EW: Jason Reitman's Juno.

December 19

• A remark from Julian Schnabel regarding The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Trailer at the site (in French). NYFF. Earlier: the Cannes reviews.

December 21

• "She was like a kid, I tell you. A kid!" Jon Voight can't get over Helen Mirren's enthusiasm in her "first-ever action-adventure film," National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Trailer.

• It's Hilary Swank in PS I Love You.

• "The look is fantastic." But of course, Helena Bonham Carter would say that about a Tim Burton movie, wouldn't she. And she won't hear any objections from me. Sweeney Todd. And EW reruns Whitney Pastorek's chat with Burton about the 3D version of A Nightmare Before Christmas since it'll be back in theaters in the fall.

• John C Reilly "has recorded more than 30 songs in character - which the team hopes to collect onto a CD set titled, naturally, A Box of Cox." Walk Hard. Trailer.

• The Bucket List is "Rob Reiner's Christmas dramedy," starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

• "Mike Nichols decided to steer clear of political allegory." Charlie Wilson's War stars Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

• Denzel Washington appears, however reluctantly, in his own second directorial feature, The Great Debators.

• A short talk with Marjane Satrapi about Persepolis. Trailer's at the site. NYFF. Earlier: the Cannes reviews.

• The Loch Ness Monster gets cute. The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep. Trailer.

December 26

• A chat with Paul Thomas Anderson about There Will Be Blood. Trailer.

December 28

• A bit on The Orphanage. Trailer. NYFF. Earlier: the Cannes raves.

Release dates are subject to change, of course, and here's one without one at all yet: "Immigration is the key issue in the latest from The Cooler director Wayne Kramer." Crossing Over stars Sean Penn, Harrison Ford, Alice Braga and Ray Liotta.

More seasonal anticipation: QTA, Nathaniel R and Gabriel Shanks.

3:10 to Yuma.

"3:10 to Yuma is a tense, rugged redo of a film that was pretty good the first time around," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Reinforced by a strong central premise, alert performances, a realistic view of the developing Old West and a satisfying dimensionality in its shadings of good and evil, James Mangold's remake walks a fine line in retaining many of the original's qualities while smartly shaking things up a bit."

"The western has become the most unfashionable of genres, with a reputation for box-office poison that persists despite the relatively recent success of Open Range (2003)," writes Allan Hunter for Screen Daily. "The 50th anniversary remake of 3:10 to Yuma is sturdy enough to withstand the jinx. Handsomely crafted, it represents a largely successful fusion of old-style storytelling virtues with a modern Hollywood ethos in which action speaks louder than words."

Updated through 8/29.

Online listening tip. Peter Fonda's a guest on Fresh Air.

Earlier: David Bordwell sits in on a sound editing session.

Updates, 8/20: "The Shamus has been unhappy about this remake of 3:10 To Yuma for over a year now. Why remake a perfect film? Because Hollywood has run out of ideas, apparently. So do yourself a favor: Delmer Daves's atmospheric original is being reissued on DVD on Aug 28. Get it. Watch it. Savor it."

"While a good part of the 1957 version was confined to a single hotel room and Mangold's decision to open up the piece considerably doesn't always work in its favor, [Russell] Crowe, [Christian] Bale and the rest of the crack ensemble keep the trip intriguing, even over those occasional bumpy parts," writes Michael Rechtshaffen in the Hollywood Reporter.

Marigold.

"Marigold is Bollywood For Beginners, offering a crash course in Indian cinematic themes and tropes without ever providing more than a small taste of the genre's gaudy, vibrant pleasures," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Writer/director Willard Carroll "knows his Bollywood stuff and, refreshingly, doesn't apologize for, or waste time explaining, an industry and a style that most Americans still regard as silly. Instead, he honors them," counters Rachel Saltz in the New York Times.