San Sebastian. Awards.

As Harold Heckle reports for the AP, the San Sebastian Film Festival has wrapped with a slew of awards (you can download a 5-page list right there from top of the site's homepage). Because many of the winners screened in Toronto, we already know a bit about them, so let's take a look.

Winners of the Golden Shell for Best Film and Silver Shell for Best Actor are Wayne Wang's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and its lead, Henry O.

A few voices from Toronto:

• "Meticulously paced and beautifully shot, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers brings us into the life of Mr Shi (Henry O) at the moment he walks into a train station in Spokane, Washington, where he is greeted with seeming lack of affection by his adult daugher, Yilan (Faye Yu)," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "Director Wayne Wang, getting back into indie film after making films like Maid in Manhattan and Because of Winn-Dixie, has made a lovely film here about the often complicated relationship between fathers and their adult daughters. The film, adapted by Yiyun Li for the screen from her short story of the same name, has much in it that was written specifically about this dynamic in Chinese families, but most anyone watching the film will find something to relate to in the interactions between Mr Shi and his daughter."

• "In The Princess of Nebraska... Wang tackles adapting another short story by Yiyun Li," notes Kim Voynar in another entry. "Wang uses an edgier style to show us 24 hours in the life of a college student some 15 years younger than Yilan, who lives in Omaha but has traveled to San Francisco. The two stories are unrelated, but Wang uses them to contrast the subtle generational differences between a woman raised in 'old-Communist' China against a younger woman raised in the post-Tiananmen Square China infused with an influence of Western capitalism and Paris Hilton."

• This pair of films "was touted in the program book as a back-to-basics return to independent filmmaking after a long losing streak in Hollywood," notes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "That may be true, but it's certainly not a return to form."

Looks like the jury, headed up by Paul Auster, who, that's right, collaborated with Wayne Wang on Smoke and Blue in the Face, disagrees.

Well, the Special Jury Prize goes to Hana Makhmalbaf's Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame. J Robert Parks caught this in Toronto: "Both a shocking allegory (Ken Morefield, whom I saw the film with, equated it with Lord of the Flies) and a reflection on what children in Afghanistan are really learning, it's absolutely riveting and makes up for any awkwardness in Makhmalbaf's writing and direction."

The best director award goes to Nick Broomfield for Battle for Haditha, which David D'Arcy wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

Best actress: Blanca Portillo in Siete mesas de billar francés (Seven Billiards Tables). Click your way into the site for info in English (bottom right-hand corner). Screenwriters Gracia Querejeta and David Planell share the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay with John Sayles for Honeydripper; here's that Toronto entry.

The cinematography award goes to Charlie Lam for Cheut ai kup gei (Exodus). Twitch covered this one in Toronto: "Hong Kong's Pang Ho-Cheung has lived something of a charmed cinematic life," writes Todd Brown. "Still in his low 30s, the writer-director has turned out a string of popularly beloved and critically acclaimed hits.... Exodus is the first major misfire of his still-young career." Again, mileage varies, evidently. Online listening: Todd talks with Pang Ho-Cheung.

NYFF. Blade Runner @ 25.

"Even as it deliberately harks back to 40s pulp fiction and many of its elements now appear creakily dated byproducts of the 80s (hello, Sean Young's hair!), the radiant image and sound clarity helps reconfirm Blade Runner (loosely based on Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) as a landmark achievement in inventive prognostication," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Whether it be its narrative fatalism or its haunting evocation of its urban setting, a multicultural techno-grunge hellhole drenched in rain, infested with advertising and shrouded in mist, the film continues to be the mother of modern sci-fi, blending disparate genres with philosophical queries to produce a work that remains, 25 years and reams of critical analysis later, the style-over-substance [Ridley] Scott's only substantive text."

Updated through 10/6.

"For the new director's cut, the special-effects footage was digitally scanned at 8,000 lines per frame, four times the resolution of most restorations, and then meticulously retouched," explains Fred Kaplan, who talks with Scott for the New York Times. "The results look almost 3-D. The film's theme of dehumanization has also been sharpened. What has been a matter of speculation and debate is now a certainty: Deckard, the replicant-hunting cop, is himself a replicant. Mr Scott confirmed this: 'Yes, he's a replicant. He was always a replicant.'" And there's an audio slide show that touches on Scott's visual influences.

"Let's face it: The re-release of the film in this new form has been occasioned by a desire for closure - Scott finally completes his masterpiece - but also money," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in Stop Smiling, reminding us, too, that a five-disc blow-out DVD set is due in November. Even so, "what can be said in favor of the final cut is that it gives one an excuse to return to Blade Runner at least one more time. Watching it yet again, it's nearly impossible not to appreciate its unique place in Hollywood filmmaking - a big-budget sci-fi epic molded in the cast of a Chandleresque noir, and more influenced in rhythm and atmosphere by the work of Kubrick than that of Lucas. Time has been very kind to Blade Runner."

"The latest revision is barely altered compared to the 1992 cut, which had been a remarkable change from the film's original release," explains Christopher Campbell at the Reeler. "Scott has erased some wires here, cleaned up some goofs there and updated some special effects - basically all the good things George Lucas did for the Star Wars special editions without attempting ill-conceived additions.... The true beauty of the cut, which the NYFF is showing in high-def video, is that it looks so perfect it's hard to believe the film is 25 years old."

"The new cut confirms Blade Runner's status as a major achievement and the high water mark of Ridley Scott's career," writes Jürgen Fauth.

Ted Greenwald talks with Scott for Wired; you can also read the full transcript or listen to the audio version. Via David Pescovitz at Boing Boing.

Updates: "Watching Blade Runner: The Final Cut, anyone who lives in Los Angeles today would be struck by how prescient the film was about the direction of society and culture," writes Geoff Boucher in the Los Angeles Times. "To Edward James Olmos, the film, set in 2019, amounted to a crystal ball in many of its details. 'What you see now is how unique this image of Los Angeles is and, in hindsight, how correctly it predicted so much, such as the mix of urban Latino and Asian cultural influences in the city,' said Olmos, who portrayed a taciturn cop in the movie. 'About the only thing in the film we haven't gotten yet is those flying cars.'"

Blade Runner comes in at #5 on Snakerati's list of the "Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time." Via Fimoculous.

Updates, 10/4: "It all plays more smoothly than the 1992 release, with the unicorn sequence and the ending now entirely organic to the picture, and every image with magnificent, tactile textures," writes Robert Cashill. "I still don't buy that Ford's Deckard is a replicant, which is more a case of director Ridley Scott trying to get the unicorn back in the barn once the door had shut than anything concrete in the film, but you can speculate more easily on the notion now."

In the L Magazine, Nicolas Rapold revels in the revival as well.

At the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz rounds up a handful of linkage and Steven Boone lists "10 images, sounds and ideas from Blade Runner that stand out in 2007 and/or HD."

Update, 10/6: Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent:

One actor for whom the film has never lost its mystqiue is [Daryl] Hannah. While others in Venice recalled a difficult and sometimes fraught production, she spoke in openly nostalgic terms of her experiences as a teenage actress on Blade Runner. "It's my favourite film that I have ever been in. My inspiration to be in movies was to live in another reality, and in this case it was built for me to the most detailed, beautiful extent. The sets were exquisite, the costumes were exquisite," she said as she proudly displayed a scar on her elbow from one of the scenes in which she slipped on set fell through a window. "I didn't have to work at all to be transported to another reality."

Hannah's remark is instructive. The reason that Blade Runner is still being talked about 25 years after it was made is precisely that it takes viewers into a bewitching but highly unsettling futuristic world.

Vancouver Dispatch. 1.

Sean Axmaker sends word from way west; looks like David Bordwell's having a good festival, too.

The timing of the Vancouver International Film Festival is one of its greatest strengths. Mere weeks after Toronto has launched the North American premieres of scores of American, Canadian and international films, it ends up with almost as many major films as New York. Opening night was Atonement, while Paranoid Park closes the festival on Friday, October 12.

Among the screenings between those poles are 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Flight of the Red Balloon, A Girl Cut in Two, Go Go Tales, I Just Didn't Do It, The Last Mistress, The Man From London, Persepolis, Redacted and Secret Sunshine, all screening in New York - some days before, some days after, but for all intents and purposes playing at the same time. And for every film New York has that Vancouver doesn't (like No Country For Old Men, say, or The Romance of Astreé and Céladon), Vancouver has something as enticing in its own way, like Tamara Jenkins's The Savages or Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais or Roy Andersson's wickedly funny You, the Living.

And that barely touches on what has brought Vancouver it's own small fame in the festival world: the Dragons and Tigers showcase of Asian cinema. Where other festivals vie for prestigious world or national premieres, Dragons and Tigers is more concerned with finding new talent from Asia (as well as keeping up with already established directors) and providing a showcase for their little-seen works. The competition is reserved for first or second feature films. The sidebar of 45 features and shorts programs as a whole, however, is a small snapshot of the cinematic currents of China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc, both commercial and underground.

The showcase Special Presentations spot belongs to the commercial side, but The Sun Also Rises (China) from Jiang Wen, respected actor (The Emperor's Shadow) and director (Devils on the Doorstep), is decidedly unconventional and playfully imaginative for a mainstream Chinese feature. It's essentially a trilogy of loosely connected tales in rural Communist China that weave their crisscrossing strands into a glorious and magical pattern, a piece of Chinese magic realism filled with humor and irony and inexplicable events that border on make-believe yet play as simply another element of everyday magic. And yet for all the laughter and love and color, including a magnificent coda of multi-cultural brotherhood between the Chinese and the Russians in the far reaches of Mongolia, this is no celebration of Communist idealism, but rather, of the magic of human resilience in absurd situations. Anthony Wong (surely the hardest working man in Hong Kong) is endearingly deadpan as a local teacher and Joan Chen a giggly delight as a village doctor smitten with the oddball professor in the middle story, but Jaycee Chan (Jackie's son) and newcomer Zhou Yun, who play devoted son and quite possibly insane mother in the first story, and Jiang himself, who moves from supporting player in Wong's tale to star of the third act, are equally good; throughout, Jiang's direction is buoyant and beautiful, with stabs of tragedy to remind us that this is no lost paradise.

The Matsugane Potshot Affair (Japan) from Yamashita Nobuhiro, the director of Linda Linda Linda, could be Japan's answer to the Coen Bros' Fargo. This deadpan crime comedy, this bizarre black farce opens on a hit-and-run with a wickedly perverted twist and moves into a blackmail, a small fortune in stolen gold bullion, and a family whose dysfunction finally pushes the only centered member of the clan, young policeman Kotaru (Arai Hirofumi) into madness. The opening scrawl claims that it's all inspired by "events which we ourselves witnessed," a claim made more dubious with each tawdry turn. Yamanaka Takashi is priceless as Kotaru's shiftless screw-up of a twin brother Hikaru, whose face freezes into a maniacal grin whenever he's on the spot - which is most of the time.

Interview. Béla Tarr.

Michael Guillén just comes right out and asks: "What is it about the long take that you love so much? You're famous for this and your long takes are sinuously eloquent. Why do long takes serve your vision?" And Béla Tarr's direct reply may not be immediately satisfying, but over the course of the interview, he does get an answer across.

The New York Film Festival will screen The Man from London tomorrow (Sunday) and Wednesday.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and Toronto and Jay Kuehner's talk with Tarr about Werckmeister Harmonies.

Update, 9/30: "[I]f the core of the film seems hollow, thin, and strangely vacuous - sporadically populated and hazily set in an anonymous port, this film will not be burdened with the interpretations of national allegory Tarr's last two features were burdened with - one of the benefits is seeing the director handling uninspired material with his personality intact," writes Daniel Kasman. "The Man From London may not be Béla Tarr's best but it certainly is Béla Tarr's, which makes it a wonder in and of itself."

Update, 10/1: For Vadim Rizov, writing at the Reeler, the film "seems like a transitional work - a weird thing to say, seeing as Tarr has made exactly three features in the last 15 years. Nevertheless, In his own way, Tarr is as much of a maximalist as, say, James Cameron: every frame of Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies is calculated to stagger the eye, an orgy of complicated lighting, tracking shots and staging marvels. The Man from London, if not a clean break, is the most determinedly minimal feature Tarr's made since 1988's Damnation."

Updates, 10/4: Jürgen Fauth: "Some may argue that the complex movements and spatial relations, along with the extreme shadows and rough-hewn textures they reveal, shed light on the characters' emotional realities, but I found the pleasures of this drowsy film noir limited to externalities: dreamlike vistas of wet brick walls and the ghostly shine of street lamps through the fog."

"If we are to deal with Tarr that's merely 'good,' it should be acknowledged that even on this level he remains better than almost anyone else," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot. "No, The Man from London isn't Werckmeister Harmonies or Sátántangó, but it doesn't need, nor want to be. It's a Béla Tarr film, and that's more than enough."

Update, 10/16: "The Man From London finds Tarr's camera (literally) drifting closer to the realm of the subjective," writes Dave McDougall at chained to the cinémathèque. "While still autonomous, it resembles the viewpoints of his characters with a greater fidelity and frequency. There's also a greater commitment on Tarr's part to representing the mechanisms of observation, which also brings us closer to the subjective realm in that we approach information from the perspectives of the film's characters."

NYFF, etc. The Darjeeling Limited.

"The Darjeeling Limited amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "I don't mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And [Wes] Anderson's eye for local color - the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular - is meticulous and admiring. But humanism lies either beyond his grasp or outside the range of his interests." Also, in an audio commentary, Anderson discusses the evolution of one scene.

"Darjeeling is no departure from Anderson's previous work. Instead, and better yet, it's a vast improvement," argues Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot. "[T]he film is the first sign of creative integrity from Anderson, America's most overpraised young auteur."

Updated through 10/4.

Michael Tully explains his "shock and awe about the movie's overall vibrancy and resonance, two things I was convinced Anderson had lost forever."

"The Life Aquatic (in which the question of whether Owen Wilson's character is Zissou Jr turns out to be a brilliant red herring) was Anderson's deeply poignant first attempt at growing up a bit, whereas Darjeeling, with its obsessive rituals and inherited mannerisms, represents a sad regression," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

"Anderson still primarily constructs a character by putting an actor in a costume, still illustrates a life by ticking off the decorative stuff in it," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It's this kind of style-as-substance that has earned Anderson a lot of flack over the years, but I've come to the point where I don't think it's necessarily fair to fault the guy for pursuing his balls-out personal vision."

"Each of Anderson's films has displayed progressively more distance, not merely between characters but also between the characters and the viewer, and therefore the melancholy emitting from Darjeeling is noticeably uneven," writes Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "It's strange to feel like Margaret Mead, observing these characters through binoculars, especially when there are moments that feel as though they are asking for our empathy and an acknowledgement of the brothers' buried grief."

"[I]ts strong similarities to Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, which dealt so movingly with family bonds and fissures, suggest that Darjeeling may be doomed to wilt in its shadow," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"[T]he twee one's fifth film flashes edifying signs of a slow, stubborn evolution," writes Michelle Orange. "[T]he film's small moments of beauty and wist make it worthwhile." Also at the Reeler, Ben Gold talks with Anderson.

"For die-hard Wes Anderson fans, The Darjeeling Limited is the film you've been waiting for all year," writes Erik Davis at Cinematical. "Sadly, everyone else might want to get off at the first stop... although I strongly suggest staying on till the very end."

"Darjeeling has great moments for sure, but they works better as vignettes... You'll have favorite chapters on the eventual DVD," suggests Nathaniel R at Awards Daily.

Earlier: NYFF previews; and the first round of reviews from Venice.

Updates, 9/30: "At bottom, Darjeeling is about the world of rich white boys, a throwback to those 19th century aristos who owed themselves a trot around the globe," blogs Erica Abeel for Filmmaker.

"Anderson is too ironically deadpan to embrace any sudden transformations in his characters, so they don't seem remarkably changed by [an event by a river], which effectively reduces it to a plot point with an emotional patina, rendered impotent by a filmmaker who seems to think that he can compensate for the emptiness at his film's core just by pulling away from sentimentality," writes Robert Davis. "He's trying to fill one void with another."

Update, 10/1: "Is Wes Anderson's schtick getting tired, or am I simply getting tired of Wes Anderson's schtick?" wonders Matt Singer at IFC News.

Update, 10/2: Glenn Kenny takes issue with Jonah Weiner's Slate piece: "Weiner doesn't come out and call Anderson a racist, but the piece's rhetoric does play to the very special, considered self-righteousness of its ideal reader."

Update, 10/4: Gary Susman talks with Anderson for the Boston Phoenix.

Weekend shorts.

"Rereading The Dark Page, I hear Sam [Fuller]'s voice, very clearly, as if he was talking to me, intense, excited, passionate, honest," writes Wim Wenders. "I never met anybody else who would actually talk the same way he would write, let alone anybody who would also make movies with that very same impetus and attitude. For most authors, these are very different waters to swim in, talking, writing, or directing. For Sam it was just one and the same element: storytelling."

Also in the Guardian, Michelle Pauli talks with Neil Gaiman; Ewen MacAskill reports on how some of "the world's best-known atheists" were duped into appearing in a pro-creationist doc; Damon Wise talks with John Waters; and a slasher quiz.

"As America's involvement in World War II unfolds on TVs across the country in Ken Burns's latest mega-doc, The War, Facets looks at the experience as depicted in non-American cinema." That's quite a list.

Somewhat related, and via Movie City News, the Economist on Andrzej Wajda's Katyn: "[F]or all its passion and authenticity, the film is disappointingly muddled, and too narrowly focussed on a Polish audience.... What is really needed is a film with the broad sweep of Schindler's List that will explain the full horror of Soviet dictatorship both during and after the war."

"The gang's all here, as are their usual concerns, explored with all the self-conscious, self-censoring agony of youth in the post-slacker age," writes Carina Chocano. "The young strivers in Hannah Takes the Stairs have nothing in common with the depictions of young urban bohemia that come out of Hollywood, and as an emotional snapshot of a narrow demographic during a brief life phase, it's really quite evocative." At the same time, "For a movie so vested in youthful verisimilitude, it's conspicuously lacking in misery."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan: "Enthusiastically received at Sundance, Great World of Sound is an intriguing look at our obsession with being successful and famous, at the deals we make that we fool ourselves aren't really with the devil." And: "When people think about World War II, wondering what it meant for the fate of museum-quality art is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet as the documentary The Rape of Europa demonstrates, this is a surprisingly vast and involving topic.... It also tells a series of wonderful stories, many of which are fascinating enough to inspire movies of their own."

"What good is geopolitical turmoil if you can't have some fun with it?" teases AO Scott. "The Kingdom takes the breathless visual precision of the Jason Bourne movies - what the film scholar David Bordwell calls 'intensive continuity' - out of the abstract hall-of-mirrors universe of intra-CIA skulduggery and into a semiplausible world of international tension. Rather than explore that tension, as some other, more ostentatiously serious movies coming out shortly seem poised to do, [director Peter] Berg and Matthew Michael Carnahan, the screenwriter, do what they can to relieve it with fireballs and frantic chases. The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: Syriana for dummies." And you can watch 3½-minute review.

More from Chris Barsanti (Film Journal International), Steven Boone (House Next Door), Bill Gibron (), Rob Humanick (Projection Booth), Leo Goldsmith (Reverse Shot), Mick LaSalle (San Francisco Chronicle), James Rocchi (Cinematical), Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times) and Scott Tobias (AV Club). And then there are the earlier reviews.

Back to the New York Times:

• "Outsourced, in which a Seattle call center manager named Todd (Josh Hamilton) is fired and then dispatched to India as a consultant to train his own replacement, is a wonderful surprise," announces Matt Zoller Seitz. "[T]he filmmakers treat Todd's story as a springboard for a smart look at the effect of cultural difference on work, friendship and love, and the global economy's impact on national and personal identity." More from Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "Outsourced is not a great movie, and maybe couldn't be this charming if it was."

• And more from MZS: "There's nothing surprising about The Game Plan, in which a quarterback named Joe Kingman, played by Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, learns to love the young daughter, Peyton (Madison Pettis), he never knew he had."

• "A campus comedy with a dirty mouth, an innocent heart and a surprisingly wise mind, Freshman Orientation uses identity politics as a road to romance and emotional maturity," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "The naked breasts are a bonus."

In the Independent, James Anthony Pearson looks back on the experience of playing Bernard Sumner in Control, Al Jolson biographer Michael Freedland revisits the impact of sound on the movies and Andrew Gumbel considers the durability of the Western.

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij has news of nominations for the European Film Academy's nominations for the Discovery Award (for best first feature) and of another honor for Andrzej Jakimowski's Sztuczki (Tricks).

"To his enormous credit, [Andrew] Dominik has thrown caution to the wind - stylistically, narratively, and thematically - in order to lay bare whatever simple truths more than a century of myth-making have obscured," writes Wade Major, reviewing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford for the LA CityBeat. "From a professional standpoint, that's the kind of high-wire act that can make or break a career. Whether Dominik's film becomes Days of Heaven or Heaven's Gate, only time will tell. But there should be no doubting the achievement of bringing a film of this magnitude and vision to fruition, especially from within a studio framework."

"[W]hen it comes to Matthew Barney, knowing what it's about isn't really what it's about," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "Drawing Restraint 9 showcases a more serene Barney than was evident in the Cremaster series, although the new film has that same sense of epic space."

At the AV Club, Kyle Ryan reviews Leslie Mann's career - with Leslie Mann.

Lars-Olav Beier and Matthias Matussek's interview with Fatih Akin for Der Spiegel was good for several German wire stories, as I noted earlier. Now Spiegel Online's translated it.

As Britain braces for As You Like It, Sleuth and The Magic Flute, Jasper Rees profiles Kenneth Branagh; Ed Potton talks with Jon Voight about Deliverance; and the London Times critics select their favorite scenes. That's it, just scenes, any movie, ever.

Will Lawrence talks with Ben Stiller about The Heartbreak Kid for the Telegraph.

"Francis Ford Coppola has appealed for the return of his computer backup device following a robbery at his studio in Argentina on Wednesday," reports the BBC. "He told Argentine broadcaster Todo Noticias he had lost 15 years' worth of data, including writing and photographs of his family."

Edward Copeland's posted a list of upcoming Blog-a-Thons.

Online viewing tip. "A lot of my work is like frustrated filmmaking." Joni Mitchell talks about her new album, Shine. Via Will Layman, who writes at PopMatters, "Returning to past glories is not an option for a legend. Better to move forward on your own terms, as Joni has. Better to risk being too serious or risk reaching too far. May she keep it up for as long as her voice will carry her."

Other fests, other events, 9/29.

"Although the British Council has been showcasing British cinema in Russia for six years, London has never hosted a similar event." Until now. For the Independent, Alice Jones previews the Russian Film Festival, running through Wednesday.

The Arts on Film Archive series at the Tate Modern runs from Tuesday through October 16.

Previewing the highlights of the upcoming London Film Festival (October 17 through November 1): Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times and Sheila Johnston in theTelegraph.

Girish offers "not 'reviews' but instead a few thoughts sparked by a few films" he caught in Toronto.

And Joanne Laurier continues the WSWS's survey of the festival.

NYFF, 9/29.

"Proudly, at times lazily, this is a festival that always demands discrimination from its audience, a sense of adventure, even as it also relies on no small amount of brand loyalty," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, surveying the program before segueing into an explanation as to why this "is an important year for the New York Film Festival."

Updated.

Perhaps as early as 2009, "the Film Society will have a new public home on the south side of 65th Street called the Elinor Bunin-Munroe Film Center. This large new space will include an education center, gallery, cafe, indoor amphitheater and two theaters (90 and 150 seats) to complement the recently refurbished 268-seat Walter Reade Theater across the street and up one flight of stairs.... The question is how the Film Society will rise to the occasion of these new digs: notably, will it expand beyond its cozy core constituency?" And there's an accompanying audio slide show.

For Variety, John Anderson offers an inside view of the selection process. Also, David Hafetz talks with programmer Richard Peña.

The NYT and Variety pieces spark a few comments from the cinetrix, who's been "trying to help a hardy band of undergrads find their way into a panoply of world cinema classics":

Thank God for DVDs. The cinetrix can serve up some of those big names - Bergman, Truffaut, Antonioni, Forman - that the NYFF has championed over the decades, in far better condition than the shitty Swank 16mms she watched in school. The kids may never have seen anything like 'em before, but they're down for whatever. They ask good questions that demand more than the 'because I said so' cant answers rooted in reputations and history.

A "Halfway Re-cap" from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog: the reviews so far.

In his overview for Gay City News, Steve Erickson sees an emphasis on American films and documentaries.

Update: Glenn Kenny puts on a tux and mingles through the opening night party.

NYFF podcast. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.

In our first podcast from the New York Film Festival (through October 10), Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis talk with Charles Taylor, a columnist at the Newark Star-Ledger and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Newsday, Slate and the New York Observer, about 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days [site]. To listen or download, click here.

You may notice that Aaron says this is "another" podcast, and yes, that's because there's a healthy batch of these to appear throughout the festival, each one a conversation with a different film critic. I'm posting this one now because the NYFF will screen 4 Months tomorrow afternoon and again on Monday evening. Earlier: Toronto and NYFF reviews and previews; and the first round of reviews from Cannes, where, of course, the film would go on to win the Palme d'Or.

Updates, 9/30: "Mungiu's film is not only an understated allegory for the inviolability of humanity and solidarity in times of profound crisis, but also a personal testament to a forgotten, recent past that has been suppressed from a society's collective consciousness in the wake of profound social transformation," writes acquarello. "In essence, rather than recreating an interesting, but archaic national artifact, the film remains contemporary and exceedingly relevant, not only in its attempt to exorcise and come to terms with an unreconciled history, but also as a cautionary tale on the preciousness of earned rights and personal freedoms that have been taken far too much for granted in a social climate of expected liberties, political herding, comparative wealth, and cultural apathy."

"[W]hat makes [The Death of Mr Lazarescu] such a freakish miracle is how it is both deathly serious and hilariously alive at the exact same time," writes Michael Tully. "I just reread Crime and Punishment and am more convinced than ever that [Cristi] Puiu's film is the closest to Dostoevsky cinema has ever come. Still, I can't recommend 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days highly enough. It is, without question, one of this festival's true must-sees."

Updates, 10/1: "It is no surprise at all that the tensions of a Dardenne-style social realism and the MacGuffins and unseen horrors of Hitchcock's brand of thriller would work so well together, but Mungiu makes certain by leaving no anxiety unexposed, no outrage unspoken," writes Tom Hall.

"It's a riveting, wrenching, horrifying and beautifully told story," adds Marcy Dermansky.

Update, 10/4: At Reverse Shot, Michael Koresky argues that 4 Months is "unerringly fixated on matters of female self-preservation, survival, togetherness and alienation." What's more, "Whether ensconced in grim realism or, at times, bathed in almost noirish shadow, 4 Months displays a true film artist at work.... Mungiu's instincts are on-target nearly scene for scene, but its aesthetic is not as rigorous (read: alienating, for some) as those in [Lazarescu and 12:08 East of Bucharest]; focused on character, motivation, and universal notions of marginalized sisterhood, 4 Months could bring the Romanian new wave a lot closer to mainstream art-house acceptance."

Update, 10/6: "[T]he final shot of 4 Months is devastating in its summation of what the film is really about: the tenuous bonds of youth - the friendships and love that are rumored to never again be so strong - that when tested will either snap along with what's left of your innocence or cement you together forever," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

Update, 10/13: Online listening tip. Keith Uhlich talks with Mungiu for Zoom In Online and the House Next Door.

Update, 10/19: "Mungiu's technical choices (the film takes place over the course of a single day and grippingly feels it) and the fierce commitment of his cast are so impressive in the moment that they near-completely obscure the hollowness at the film's center; if we were to measure movies solely by immediate experience, 4 Months would be, most decidedly, a masterpiece," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "Yet retrospect forces a more temperate and considered view, for 4 Months' heavily practiced mise en scène (by Mungiu's own admission it was repeatedly drilled and rehearsed - as it turns out, to within an inch of its life) finally emphasizes a deep disconnect between form and meaning."

Fantastic Fest. There Will Be Blood.

Though it's unlikely that either intended things to play out this way, today sees an Anderson vs Anderson PR showdown. With all the bluster the New York media establishment can muster, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited opens the New York Film Festival tonight and 4000 New Yorkers have lined up accordingly, "at upward of $40 a pop," according to Manohla Dargis in the New York Times - for-ty dol-lars! - while down in Austin, that humble haven of true movie fandom, the Fantastic Fest has sprung a surprise screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Variety's sent out a "Breaking News" email alert about just one of these events. Guess which.

There will be Twitter. Good Twitter.

Updated through 9/29.

"Certain to be rewarded with year-end accolades, Anderson's film is a true American saga - one that rivals Giant and Citizen Kane in our popular lore as origin stories about how we came to be the people we are," writes an evidently pretty worked up Marjorie Baumgarten immediately following the first full public screening of Blood. "Daniel Day-Lewis is at his brilliant best as the story's Daniel Plainview, a man whose humanity diminishes as his fortunes increase.... Essential to the success of the movie is the original score by Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist and BBC composer in residence.... Though the film hardly belongs to the science fiction, fantasy, animation, and crime genres that attendees had been snacking on all week, [Alamo Drafthouse founder and festival host Tim] League attested in his introduction that the film is undeniably 'fantastic.'... [I]t took Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles to point out during the Q&A that Plainview was the 'best monster' he had seen all week."

Updates: At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg spells out what makes Blood "such a stunning surprise. It's more than a 'departure' for the director; it's a monumental display of 'evolution' that'll wow the established fans and impress a helluva lot more new ones. This is a dark, compelling and effortlessly engrossing film, one bolstered by a lead performance that ranks among the very best of Lewis's impressive career."

"Paul Thomas Anderson has demonstrated tremendous instincts as a filmmaker in his previous four features, but, for me, he's always been more of a promising director with great potential than a master," writes Peter Martin at Twitch. "There Will Be Blood shows that he has absorbed the lessons of those directors that have inspired him - notably Robert Altman - and found something new to say, and a new way to say it. He's built on everything he's done before and surpassed his previous achievements. It's definitely not perfect, but it is sweeping and majestic as it moves down a lonely, powerful path."

"Make no mistake, this is an amazing work of art," writes Matt Dentler. "[C]o-star Paul Dano delivers a delicious and demented performance that could earn some serious award consideration a few months from now."

Michael Lerman wraps Fantastic Fest for indieWIRE; he mentions Blood, but the surprise may still be a little too fresh for an opinion to have gelled just yet.

Fantastic Fest announces its awards.

Blake Ethridge has posted pix.

Updates, 9/29: "There Will Be Blood embodies everything that I want from a film at Fantastic Fest," writes co-programmer Harry Knowles at AICN. "This is a film about the dark places in men's souls. It is a film at the highest possible quality - comparable to many of my favorite films of all time. Movies about monsters on quests like Citizen Kane, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Gone With the Wind, Giant, Oldboy, The Godfather and Taxi Driver.... PTA has created a masterpiece."

"Partially shot in Marfa, Texas, and stretching across three decades - just enough time for an infant to rise up and defy his father - it begs comparison to another Marfa production, Giant," writes John DeFore in the Hollywood Reporter. "Blood has none of that film's melodramatic sprawl, though. Instead, it pares allegory-friendly material down to the elementals. It shows not the birth of the American oil business but the origin of a certain kind of oil man - self-made, hands-on, destined for great wealth but doomed to not enjoy it - then pits this capitalistic force of nature against its Bible-thumping mirror image, hinting at the culture-shaping sibling rivalry between the influence of God and of Mammon in America."

Shorts, 9/27.

"There is a quality of science fiction to the landscape: Quatermass (Nigel Kneale's occultist sci-fi teledrama of the mid-1950s) by way of urban Brutalism. In short, it's the terrain that will comprise the mythic landscape of Punk." Michael Bracewell has been watching a two-DVD set, The BBC in the East End 1958 - 1973; he then turns to With Gilbert & George "made over an astonishing 17-year period by one of their former models, Julian Cole... The fact that Cole has made his tightly edited, yet epic film out of nearly two decades of filming, lends a fascinating sense of temporality to the finished piece."

Also in the October issue of Frieze, Rosemarie Trockel has evidently been quite impressed by 2001 and Christy Lange reviews Miranda July's collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You and Melissa Gronlund: "Keren Cytter's works play the role of being films but deliberately miss the mark... Films that should be standard love triangles, Western gunfights or neo-noir murder–suicides descend into joyous cacophonies of filmic clichés done just wrong."

"If the story was good enough, even the Americans would sit still for the preposterous idea that there might be another country that spoke their language but looked different, with tiny cars and plates with hardly any food on them," writes Clive James, looking back on the BBC's Summer of British Film for the Times Literary Supplement. "There for a triumphant moment and then gone again, exultant at the black-tie awards ceremony and then back scrambling for a pittance, the British Film Industry has always been a creature in oscillating transit, somewhere between a phoenix and a dead duck."

What's fresh at Order of the Exile:

• David Ehrenstein in 1978 on Rivette's Duelle and Noroît.

• Kevin Jackson in 2002 on La Religieuse (The Nun), "once the most notorious film in France."

• Updates to Andreas Volkert's photoessay, "On the Streets: Le Pont du Nord."

"This year marks the 20th anniversary for POV/American Documentary, a curated strand of documentary films shown on American public television each summer." Agnes Varnum considers the impact of the series for indieWIRE.

"Variety may characterize some genres more adeptly than Horror, but Horror is indisputably the most perennial. In response to this trait (as well as our annual boost in traffic during the month) we introduce 31 Days of Horror." And it's Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

"Armed bandits raided Francis Ford Coppola's Argentine headquarters and stole a computer with the screenplay for the upcoming feature film Tetro, according to local news media." Bill Cormier reports for the AP.

"Martin Scorsese has committed to direct an untitled documentary about the life of George Harrison," reports Michael Fleming. Also in Variety, word that Robert Redford has signed on for an adaptation of Richard A Clarke's Against All Enemies.

Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle "featured at Cannes in May and Edinburgh in August, and will play at film festivals in Vancouver and Rome in the next few weeks," notes Kirsty Scott in the Guardian. "But [director Simon Miller and producer Christopher Young] wanted its British public premiere to be in the heart of the Gaelic community, before it goes on release across Scotland, with arthouse appearances in England later in the month. The Screen Machine, Britain's only mobile cinema, has parked up outside the Benbecula hotel where Miller is staying, and later that evening will expand into a 102-seat auditorium."

"From the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, many rural communities systematically purged their black residents," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Banished offers a startling tour into an unforgotten history that remains invisible to most Americans, with the erudite [Marco] Williams, who is simultaneously polite and confrontational, as our host. It would be ludicrous to suggest that he doesn't take sides: Williams clearly believes that a major historical crime has been swept under the rug, and his film is loaded with moments of understated emotional power." Also, in Outsourced, John Jeffcoat's "depiction of the call-center world is funny, fascinating and almost anthropological; he never preaches at you on the morality, or lack thereof, of this distinct late-capitalist phenomenon."

IndieWIRE interviews Angels in the Dust director Louise Hogarth.

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song "offers an inspiring portrait of America's most enduring folk artist," notes Peg Aloi in the Boston Phoenix.

In Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn's The Deadman, "All of Bataille's brilliantly profane ideas are simplified to somewhat naive transgressive images," writes Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica.

"Quiet City is a key film for understanding the Mumblecore attitude toward narrative and filmmaking," writes Dave at Chained to the Cinémathèque.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson celebrate one year of Observations on film art and Film Art.

Online viewing tip. Jack Schafer's Rupert Murdoch Film Festival at Slate.

Online viewing tips. Arianna Huffington introduces a clip from War Inc: "It delivers a wicked punch in the gut, making you laugh, wince, and get outraged all at the same time. Naomi Klein, whose writings on Iraq helped inspire [John] Cusack, feels the same way. "War Inc is one of those rare satires with the danger left in,' she told me. 'It cranks up the dial on the state of privatized war just enough that we can finally see our present clearly. As you're watching it, you can't help wondering: can these guys really get away with this? Are we all going to get in trouble? It's an extremely good feeling. It's what risk feels like.'" Also at the Huffington Post, Cusack asks Klein about The Shock Doctrine.

Other fests, other events, 9/27.

"In this, their 20th year, the aGLIFF [Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival] once again throws open the doors of the Arbor Cinema at Great Hills and invites you to one of the most inclusive occasions on the calendar," writes James Renovitch. "[Programming Director Lisa] Kaselak, in her first year, deserves the praise for casting a wide cinematic net and, just by being herself, an even wider sense of welcome." And the Austin Chronicle previews around a dozen or so features. Tomorrow through October 6.

"Every year I remain in awe at what is my favorite festival," writes Jason Whyte, previewing the Vancouver International Film Festival for Hollywood Bitchslap. Today through October 12.

"The filmmakers represented in the Boston Palestinian Film Festival at the Museum of Fine Arts [Saturday through October 7] confront the troubles of that hellish area with documentary, fiction, allegory, and combinations of the three," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "In his obsessive study of impoverished Cape Verdeans living on the margins of Lisbon, Pedro Costa resorts to those genres and more, including some of his own that I don't think anyone has quite put a name to yet." Colossal Works: The Films of Pedro Costra runs Friday through Sunday at the Harvard Film Archive.

With the SF DocFest set to open tomorrow (it runs through October 10), the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Kevin Langson and Cheryl Eddy highlight, respectively, Ghosts and Numbers & Luchando and Golden Days and A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake.

Robert Avila previews a slew of titles, too, for SF360.

"We're always up against the New York Film Festival," Coney Island Film Festival founder and programmer Rob Leddy tells John Lichman at the Reeler. "It's a different audience anyway. I think we attract more of an arts crowd than they ever will." Tomorrow through the weekend.

"The Rome Film Festival has announced its full lineup, featuring a rich mix of quality crowdpleasers and more esoteric fare, peppered with plenty of stars, including Robert Redford and Tom Cruise, who are expected to come tubthump Lions for Lambs," reports Variety's Nick Vivarelli. October 18 through 27.

More lineups in place: Mill Valley (October 4 through 14) and the Hamptons (October 17 through 21).

Helen Hill "became an important figure in the New Orleans independent filmmaking scene until her violent death last January," Holly Willis reminds us in the LA Weekly. On Monday, October 1, REDCAT will be screening several of her short films as a memorial.

"The more than 60 faces on display at Ace Gallery Beverly Hills belong to some of the most photographed people in the world," writes David Ng. "But this solo exhibition by Martin Schoeller isn't your ordinary paparazzo blitz. The German photographer, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, Vogue and many other magazines, looks to turn celebrity portraiture into an act of contemplative scrutiny and artful asceticism." Through October 13.

Also in the Los Angeles Times: A roundup of local goings on from Susan King.

"Protest, tourism, politics, and labor tend to figure at the center of Romania-born, Paris-based artist Mircea Cantor's short films, but for work that hinges on the display and distribution of power, they are far from didactic," writes William Hanley at Rhizome. "The exhibition marks the beginning of a season with a film- and video-heavy schedule at the [Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden] that culminates in February with the first installment of a two-part exhibition titled The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image." Through December 9.

Todd Brown posts Twitch's "TIFF 2007 Round Up!"

Anticipating NYFF, 9/27.

Once the NYFF opens tomorrow, keep an eye out here for good things coming from Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis. Now, on the eve, David D'Arcy previews a few highlights - and a cluster of links follow.

This year's New York Film Festival has been covered by everyone, even before its first public screening, calling your attention to the stars, the honorees and the greatest hits, so I'll concentrate on some of the lesser-hyped attractions that should not be missed.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is part of a new crop of life-affirming dramas from Romania, if your idea of affirming life is getting an illegal abortion so you can get on with your own, which brings it close to what life used to be like in Romania before communism fell and people could emigrate. I suppose that it's also life-affirming to learn that there is a medical system out there that is worse than the one we have in the US, if you can get access to it. (You saw a more modern version of Romanian medicine in the unforgettable The Death of Mr Lazarescu, which played at the NYFF, after Cannes, like this one, two years ago.) Cristian Mungiu has the right instincts here for realism. Add superb acting, fine story-telling, dead-on production design (which I can't imagine took too much of a stretch in Bucharest), shake with emotion, and you have a film that reminds us that Romania is one of cinema's promising places right now, and Mungiu should be watched for the next two installments in what he says is a trilogy.

Make sure not to miss the restored Leave Her to Heaven by John Stahl. In the 1945 film, with stunning locations and a production design by Thomas Little and Ernest Lansing to match, Gene Tierney plays a beauty whose selfishness goes far beyond her allure, and that's saying something. We travel from Maine to the New Mexico of the 40s (though far from Los Alamos) to discover the depths of her character, who can pull a credulous writer played by Cornel Wilde in her trap and then watch his crippled brother die in another trap that she sets. "But he's a cripple," she laments, in a pre-PC plea to her husband that he not accompany them on a vacation. Ultimately, she throws herself down a staircase, fearing that the baby she's carrying will wriggle its way between her and her husband. Tierney is as cold as can be, with every hair and stitch in place. Remember, this was 1945, when even Americans had a hard time getting their hands on nylon stockings or much of anything else. Why Tierney's character had no problem doing so may be the story that the next remake of the film will tell. Her emotionless expression as young Danny (Darryl Hickman) drown as she sits in a boat a few feet away behind the most elegant of sunglasses is so cold that it could be in a fashion ad today. Wilde, who finally cools to her, has the well-meaning demeanor of Tom Hanks. Over the top doesn't come close to describing this one. Just be thankful that it's campy enough to keep you laughing through much of the torture that Tierney practices so easily.

I was surprised to see a Mexican film with the aesthetic of large-format German photography - that is, if you think that Stellet Licht by Carlos Reygadas is a Mexican film. The slow deliberate drama about a Mennonite farmer's anguish over a love affair - illicit, of course - is described as the first feature ever to made in the Plautdeutsch dialect, a form of German that settlers from religious sects brought to the New World between the 17th and 19th centuries. I've heard the film's dramatic approach compared to Dreyer and to Terrence Malick. Slow it down a bit and that might hit the mark.

With the film's long opening sequence in which the camera follows a star through the sky, from what seems to be a mountaintop - it turns out to be a farm in a wide northern Mexican valley - you are prepared for what is largely a silent movie, albeit one in which the tersest of comments in a language that no one outside this community understands make for performances that expand the vocabulary of stoicism. I was reminded of head-on shots by Bernd and Hilla Becher of buildings standing alone in their environments; the pictures often resemble architectural equivalents of Mennonite garb. I also thought of the mute photographs of Thomas Struth and Rineke Dijkstra, photographers with a high profile in the contemporary art scene, who take pictures of "expressionless" subjects looking straight into the camera against a background that is as spare as the feelings they reveal. (If you can't find pictures by these photographers, who were omnipresent on the art scene a few years ago, you'll find some of Struth's work in the new photo galleries that just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dijkstra is Dutch, actually, although Plautdeutsch, also called Plattdeutsch, was spoken in the lowland ares of Germany north of Holland.) Your natural reaction to these pictures is to imagine a narrative that goes beyond the single image. Reygadas has put this kind of imagery - these images really, since the pictures are moving, despite the glacial slowness - in the service of a story built on a wide silent landscape and on the spareness of expressed emotion. The Plautdeutsch is the added novelty. Don't expect to understand any of it. It won't matter. The drama here is visual.

Back to the main event. I'm not sure what was behind The Darjeeling Limited by Wes Anderson - there's probably an interview with him somewhere that explains it all in fascinating and allusive detail. As everyone knows by now, the NYFF opening night film is a road movie, a train movie, actually, set on an Indian line that three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) travel to reach something. I guess that had instant comedy written all over it. Of course, they get only a certain distance on the train and then set off for the real goal, what surfers (which is what these guys might have been if this film were made 40 years ago) would have called "The Big Kahuna," except it's their mother. It's a shame the film isn't funny, although the soundtrack is a nostalgic pleasure as it mixes classic music from the films of Satyajit Ray with the Rolling Stones. So is the prologue, Hotel Chevalier. Should Anderson be advised that his real calling is for short films? This one makes you long for Moe, Larry and Curly. Did I notice an homage to the much-underappreciated Three Stooges in Orbit, or was I just dreaming that I was watching another movie?

- David D'Arcy

---

"If the larger film festivals around the world are competitive workshops for filmmakers willing to fight for distinction, the New York Film Festival (Sept 28 - Oct 14) is the class assembly - a place where only the finest craftsmanship gets a spot on the stage," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "That's the idea, anyway, but it's worth noting that this year's rich program at Lincoln Center has traces of unconditional love for old-school talent, as though elders of the art form gain inclusion simply for their perseverance."

"I've grumped sporadically over the years about the NYFF's slightly snooty, Manhattan-centric tone of cultural superiority, so it's time to confess to some warm and fuzzy feelings toward the grande dame of American film festivals (this year is its 45th)," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "For one thing, as festival programmer Richard Peña observed in a recent interview with ST VanAirsdale of the Reeler, the NYFF is actively and aggressively curated. 'The public really feels that this is a festival that is carefully selected,' Peña said. 'They might disagree violently with our selections, but they feel like somebody has selected these films - that somebody has said, "This film and not that film."' Peña is taking a none-too-subtle dig at his neighbors to the south, the programmers at the Tribeca Film Festival, who have jostled their way to some degree of global prominence (and/or notoriety) by seemingly screening any damn movie that's less than four hours long and pretty much in focus. There's a lot to be said for his approach."

"Comparing movies is a drag, especially in a noncompetitive event, but the choices in this famously selective fest (28 'official' features on top of the sidebars) vary in merit," writes Howard Feinstein at indieWIRE. "Here's the skinny on 13 of the 14 full-length narrative... and the one doc showing during the first nine days; a follow-up on the second half appears next Friday."

Online viewing tip. An NYFF-heavy edition of ReelerTV.

Trade.

"From its flagrant exoticization-cum-demonization of Mexico City to its predictably trendy, faceless aesthetic to its uproariously hammy acting, Trade is a disaster from the top down," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Obviously the work of a filmmaker who has genuinely no ideas about the ethics of storytelling or representation, Trade is essentially Hostel Part Two but designed to make you feel good for having learned about 'something.'"

"German director Marco Kreuzpaintner's movie looks like Traffic and Syriana - clearly his role models - but is little more than our generation's version of 1979's Hardcore," writes Robert Wilonsky.

Updated through 9/28.

"It doesn't shy from the facts or the complexities but might still attract viewers with its genre dynamics and appealing performances," suggests Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix.

In the Los Angeles Times, Robert W Welkos tells the rough and tumble story of the film's making.

Update, 9/28: Kreuzpaintner's "intentions may be laudable but his goals are conflicted: in seeking to educate as well as tease, he ends up doing neither," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

"The US State Department estimates as many as 800,000 people are trafficked internationally each year for purposes of sexual exploitation. Of those, 80% are female and 50% are minors," notes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "This mostly effective dramatization paints a suitably ugly picture of the dehumanizing depths people are willing to go for money."

"Like Crash, Trade is a pulpy Hollywood-style melodrama disguised as a harrowing message movie about Important Social Issues," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "It labors under the delusion that it's this year's revelatory, eye-opening Maria Full Of Grace, when it's little more than a B-movie with an overwrought conscience."

The Price of Sugar.

"The tainted relationship between the dessert on our tables and the suffering of those who produce it gets a horrifying workout in Bill Haney's multi-layered account of Haitian cane-cutters in the Dominican Republic," writes Ella Taylor, reviewing The Price of Sugar in the Voice.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir notes that "the Vicini family, sugar barons of the Dominican Republic, have hired Patton Boggs, a major Washington law firm, to try to halt the film's release, or at least paint it as slanted and defamatory. Narrated by Paul Newman, Haney's film follows an Anglo-Spanish missionary priest, Christopher Hartley, as he tries to bring some justice to the slavery-like conditions under which Haitian immigrants cut sugar cane in the Vicini fields."

Updated through 9/28.

Nick Dawson talks with Haney for Filmmaker.

Earlier: Nick Schager at Slant.

Update, 9/28: "Like most documentary polemics, it simplifies the issues it confronts and selects facts that bolster its black-and-white, heroes-and-villains view of raw economic power," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. But what facts. Holden runs down a list himself; if you doubt you'll be able to catch the doc, read the review for that alone.

Cinema Scope. 32.

"John Gianvito's Profit motive and the whispering wind recovers the lost history of class struggle in America by filming, in simple, static shots, the monuments left behind: commemorative plaques, statues, and, most often, cemetery headstones," wrote Darren Hughes from Toronto. "Fascinating." Gerald Peary, too, writing in the Boston Phoenix, is impressed with this "pensive and beautiful" doc: "'I was making this film looking for hope and inspiration,' [Gianvito] told the Toronto audience. 'Lots of the people buried in these graves we don't know. But because of them, we have the eight-hour work day, child-labor laws, integration.'"

Now, in the new issue of Cinema Scope, Michael Sicinski talks with Gianvito, noting first: "Inspired by Howard Zinn's magisterial People's History of the United States, Gianvito's leftist vision is righteously ecumenical, encompassing Eugene V Debs and Frank Little, Sojourner Truth and Malcolm X, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Cesar Chavez, and many, many others whom mainstream historical accounts have buried far more comprehensively than their undertakers. In addition to forging a radical remapping of the American terrain, Gianvito's film provides its audience with the rare opportunity to pay our respects by proxy."

"We Own the Night features some of the best American filmmaking currently on display, a virtuosity tied directly to its understanding of the possibilities offered by classical narrative," writes Andrew Tracy, introducing his interview with James Gray. Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Jason McBride on Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg: "Of course, this is no way to dispatch ghosts. And that's not really Maddin's aim. What he's really trying to figure out is how Winnipeg made him and how he, in turn, made it.... It's an incubator, a refuge. The train he rides keeps chugging along, its lethargic passengers lost in their dreams." Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

"Though often acknowledged as one of the most important avant-gardists of his generation in Europe, Alexander Kluge does not think of himself as such," writes Christopher Pavsek:

He considers himself a partisan of an "arriere-garde" whose project is not to push into new aesthetic territory or be the vanguard of a new kind of film art, but to "bring everything forward" - to bring forward all the lost utopian aspirations of past political and aesthetic projects, all the wishes and hopes that history has left unrealized. His is a project of redeeming past failures.

[...]

Kluge's influence on German cinema extends far beyond the formal or stylistic influences he has exerted over filmmakers such as Harun Farocki. Without Kluge's untiring activism on the part of the newly emerging Young German Film in the 60s, the system of public funding and training infrastructure that helped produce some of the most recognizable names in German cinema - Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff - never would have come into being.

"[I]f one's cognitive abilities are in full working order, it becomes immediately apparent upon seeing I Just Didn't Do It that the film's fetishistic attention to the policies and procedures of the Japanese court system is precisely what gives it an added layer of perverse fascination if you happen to be watching it through foreign eyes," writes Scott Foundas. Earlier: Previews from the New York Film Festival.

"[I]t's always interesting to consider what gets canonized or else excluded from consideration just because it is or isn't available on DVD," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in his latest "Global Discoveries on DVD" column, this one opening with a relatively longish riff on Adam Curtis, "trilogy about intellectual perversion in the West and what it's wrought has the potential of elevating our discourse about a great deal of what's currently ailing us."

"Bruce McClure is an artist both increasingly known and unknown," writes Andréa Picard, introducing an interview. "His pieces are unique, but not in the sense of an object d'art, rather as an ephemeral experience.... McClure has been called a para-cinema artist, a proto-cinema artist, an expanded-cinema artist, and even a vaudevillian."

"La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo) is an improbable re-enactment of daily life in a Peruvian prison, circa 1989, among women inmates, combatant followers of Abimael Guzman's Maoist revolutionary-terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path)," writes Jay Kuehner. "Grounded in historical record, the film nevertheless reflects the director's desire for 'the bootleg video that I would have wanted to find in a market in Lima.'... La Trinchera sees [Jim] Finn's nearly-patented sense of irony bordering on sincerity for the duration: so firmly has the director's oft-quoting tongue become embedded in cheek, any traces of a smirk have taken on the appearance of a scowl."

The Darjeeling Limited "is foremost a male weepie (as one farseeing commentator wrote of 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums), chronicling an aching love lost and won between three men," writes Edward Crouse. "As a wigged-out affecting text built boldly on uncertainty, it takes cues from other odd melodramas: Renoir's The River (1951) (accidental epiphanies in a ribbony freefloat); Cassavetes's Husbands (1970) (the grief of three professional men gangways into a surreal Olympian bender, pushing women away and around); and Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (1954) (ugly, petty tourists stumbling onto a vision about themselves via some earthy, 'spicy' place)." Earlier: Reviews from Venice and previews from the NYFF.

"In a kind of unexpected loop back to [David Cronenberg's] past, [Eastern Promises'] vastly ranging social contexts of in-grown Russian émigrés, isolated Turkish circles and thoroughly Anglicized Russian ethnics acknowledges a far larger world and communities of people that's visible in his early horror films from The Brood to Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983)," writes Robert Koehler. Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

Toronto and Stranger Than Fiction. Operation Filmmaker.

"Director Nina Davenport set out to document the experience of a 20-year-old Iraqi whose brief MTV appearance inspired Liev Schreiber to hire him as an intern on the Prague set of Everything is Illuminated," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. "Ultimately, Operation Filmmaker is an essential study in intercultural communication and the ways that it can go so very wrong."

Operation Filmmaker has opened Toronto doc programmer Thom Powers's Stranger Than Fiction series at the IFC Center and ST VanAirsdale, the Reeler, attended last night's NYC premiere and took notes on comments from Powers and Davenport.

"Whether her subject is serious about the movie business or not, Davenport gives Muthana's plight extra resonance by cross-cutting between footage of real, blood violence in Iraq, and scenes of Muthana on the fake blood-soaked set of Doom," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Can you blame the guy for pulling out all the stops to stay in the realm where the piles of corpses are only make-believe?"

"Operation Filmmaker, much like My Kid Could Paint That, is one of those documentaries that were conceived one way and turned out much differently than anyone intended," notes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Davenport does a nice job rolling with the punches."

"Not since Luis Buñuel have we had such a wonderful joke on do-gooder liberalism," writes Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix.

Shorts, 9/26.

"Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933), by Jean Vigo, had a massive impact on me," writes Steve McQueen (no, this Steve McQueen). "It's just 45 minutes long and depicts a rebellion in a French boys' boarding-school. The film says everything: it's inventive, it's magical, to some extent it is sexually ambiguous, it's political, it's bizarre and it has a great narrative at the same time. All these ingredients add up to something that's huge, almost too big." Also brought up in the "Life in Film" in this month's frieze: Andy Warhol's Couch and: "I shoot films, but I do other things; at the end of the day it's got to be about the ideas, not one particular medium."

"There are ghosts haunting Marco Williams's quietly sorrowful documentary Banished, about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War," writes Manohla Dargis. "There is so much more to the story than can be told by this 87-minute movie, which only casts glances at Reconstruction, the question of reparations and the bitter, enduring, living legacy of slavery. Although Mr Williams somewhat overstates his case when he says that racial cleansing has 'remained hidden,' there's no denying that this ugly chapter deserves more than an occasional well-meaning documentary." More from Rob Humanick at Slant.

Also in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz on Charlie, a movie with "guts and soul, and a keen appreciation of grown-up pain - qualities sorely lacking in American independent film today."

Most of us are aware of the danger in relying too heavily on photographs for a sense of final certainty as to what's actually happened. Proposing "a contest to the Times' readership," Errol Morris, in consultation with a handful of curators who've thought long and hard about a pair of photos taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, presents two opposing views - or rather, two sets of views more or less in opposition - on the events of one day in 1855 and considers the varying implications should either side win out.

Yesterday, at the bottom of the entry on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I pointed Nick Dawson's interview with director Andrew Dominik for Filmmaker - but that entry's slipped, so I'm pointing to it again. Dominik considers the split critical reaction to his own film in light of the initial reception that met Raging Bull and Portrait of a Lady, champions Kubrick, particularly Barry Lyndon, and speculates about what he might do next.

Liv Ullmann "will star as a grandmother in the Norwegian film In a Mirror, In a Riddle, which is based on a novel by Jostein Gaarder," reports the Guardian. "Ullmann, whose most recent screen appearance was in Bergman's 2003 swansong Saraband, said she had not intended to act again, but had been swayed by the brilliance of the script." This will be her first Norwegian film in 38 years.

"Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter isn't the first global-warming horror film, and it surely won't be the last, but it's unlikely there will be a better one anytime soon - or a better horror movie this fall," writes Dennis Harvey, who also reviews Into the Wild for the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "As with the book, opinions may diverge on whether the protagonist was a tragic, noble dreamer or a chip-on-the-shoulder brat with a lot of self-mythologizing, imitative literary pretensions. Either way, this lyrical road trip - which bears the mark of heavy influence from Penn's The Thin Red Line director Terrence Malick - is compelling throughout." More on that one from Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

"It's a trifle, [The Trouble With Angels], and done on the cheap, but, oh, to have been a fly on the wall on that set," smiles the cinetrix.

"A film that is by turns shocking, observant, picturesque, and thought-provoking, The Violin is a moving expression of the tumultuous existence of countless Mexican lives," writes Doug Cummings.

Mr Shoop popped a quiz this summer; Dennis Cozzalio's got his answers now.

Not exactly film-related (though not entirely un-film-related, either; take a look at the TOC), but still: Leon Neyfakh in the New York Observer on the launch of Paper Monument:

Dushko Petrovich and Roger White did not think art was dead, but there was no question in their minds that it was seriously ill. The gallery shows they went to were dull and derivative, the writing they read in the big art magazines either thoughtless, breathless or reactionary. All anyone seemed to want to talk about was how a work blurred this or that distinction, or challenged this or that perception. "Then you'd go see the art," Mr Petrovich said last week, "and you'd think: It's not really doing that! It's actually behaving pretty conventionally."

Fed up but hopeful, the two painters decided to take action. And so, with help from their friends at n+1 - a literary journal founded in 2004 with the modest intention of broadly rehabilitating American thought - Mr Petrovich and Mr White set to work on a new magazine about contemporary art. They called it Paper Monument, and decided that it would come out twice a year.

Online browsing tip. Patrick at Creative Review on Scott King's How I'd Sink American Vogue at the Herald St gallery in London.

Online viewing tip. J'Attendrai Le Suivant at Subtitles to Cinema.

Toronto and the UK. Michael Clayton.

"Does [George Clooney] deliver?" asks Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Yeah - enough to make you forgive plot holes and emotional string-pulling that could have sunk a film that didn't have him in it."

"I guess you could describe [Michael Clayton] as a Manhattan 'legal thriller' - most of the main characters are corporate lawyers - that strikes a delicate tonal balance between the cynical political paranoia of the Bourne movies, the satirical paranoia of Network, the corporate paranoia of The Insider and the legalistic paranoia of Erin Brockovich," writes Jim Emerson. "And, as in all these movies, when you're feeling paranoid, it doesn't mean somebody isn't out to get you."

Updated through 10/1.

"Michael Clayton is the kind of intelligent, entertaining cinema you thought Hollywood had forgotten how to make," writes Matt Riviera. "[Tony] Gilroy takes his time, refusing to rush into a complex story, getting through the exposition cleverly rather than quickly. He can't afford to take any short cuts: his three-dimensional characters are conflicted, the likeable ones do unspeakable things, the dogy ones surprise us with their intelligense and common sense. Nor does he attempt to pimp his talky script with romance or car chases, sentimentality or even heroics. He trusts the material enough, not to mention the smart and eloquent dialogue."

Interviews? Oh, yes. James Mottram (Independent) and David Gritten (Telegraph) talk with Clooney; Kate Muir (London Times) and Charlotte Higgins (Guardian) meet Tilda Swinton.

At the Reeler, Christopher Campbell finds this one "a crackling legal thriller so tightly written (by Tony Gilroy, also the film's director), plotted and acted that it's a bit cold, even intimidating," and he, too, gets a few words with Clooney and Swinton.

Updates, 9/28: "Tony Gilroy's corporate conspiracy thriller opens with such a powerful sense of foreboding that the ceiling could cave in and you'd still be sitting there, gripped," writes the Independent's Anthony Quinn.

"Perhaps it could be objected that Clooney's style and body language as a loser are not so very different from when he plays a winner," supposes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It's an arresting performance none the less: muscular and pain-racked at once."

"Clooney has seldom been better as Clayton, a man beginning to feel that his skill is not exactly being put to good uses, while [Tom] Wilkinson, as the attack-dog lawyer now convinced he's wasting his talent and collapsing under the strain, is as good as ever," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "But it is Swinton, as the nervy chief counsel for the chemical company, who trumps them both. To see her faced by Clayton with the enormity of her position is to see a great actress at work in a film that's good enough to keep her at full stretch."

"Clooney is a haunted marvel as Clayton," adds James Christopher in the London Times.

"[Y]ou sometimes wonder if Clooney himself would prefer to be admired than loved," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. Michael Clayton is "a weighty, sophisticated feature... But it's so self-consciously adult, so deliberately downbeat. You wonder: does Clooney look down on his abilities as a comic actor?"

John Horn profiles Clooney for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 9/30: "What we have at the heart of this excellent thriller is a story of greed, the misuse of the law, the contempt of the powerful for the weak and the small window of decency through which such things can be corrected," writes Philip French in the Observer.

John Horn profiles Clooney for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 10/1: Gilroy "makes Swinton a fascinating face of evil," writes New York's David Edelstein. "She'll do anything to measure up to her boss and mentor (Ken Howard) - which drives home the point that it's the people who are least secure in their power who tend to abuse it so impulsively."

"Gilroy is an entertainer, and he wants to show us everything - dirty secrets held by prestige law firms, the moral squalor of big-time corporate power and what it does to people, the moments of conscience and decency in messed-up lives," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "He's good with actors, and Michael Clayton has pace and drive - it's enormous fun. But I hope that as Gilroy continues directing he will let his movies breathe more.... Tony Gilroy has produced a screenwriter's film, which assumes that people who move through different worlds will alter their speech without losing their idiosyncratic style. Against all Hollywood wisdom, he trusts the audience to enjoy the texture and the power of words."

Toronto. Smiley Face.

"Gregg Araki plays a very special role in my personal cinephilia," begins Matt Riviera. "The Living End, Totally F***ed Up and The Doom Generation were my introduction to independent queer cinema. They played a key role in my own coming of age, sexually, intellectually and politically.... It took 2004's Mysterious Skin to establish Araki as an A-list director, perhaps America's answer to Almodóvar." Smiley Face "is not the complex multi-layered follow up to Mysterious Skin I was hoping for. If that film was a step towards maturity, this one is pure regression."

But for Cinematical's Monika Bartyzel, this one shows Araki "can leave many of his usual, challenging themes behind and make an easy-to-serve, and completely fun, mainstream comedy." And just now, Christopher Campbell passes along news that, after a brief run in LA, this one's going straight to DVD.

Brooklyn Rail. September 07.

"Realism and fantasy collide in Les Enfants Terribles, the 1950 collaboration between celebrated directors Jean Cocteau and Jean Pierre Melville," writes Jesi Khadivi. "Cocteau adapted the film from his successful 1929 novel which he wrote in a week-long haze of opium withdrawal. He commissioned Jean-Pierre Melville to direct after seeing Melville's directorial debut, La Silence de La Mer. They're an unlikely pair. Cocteau was known in literary circles as the 'frivolous prince' for his willowy line drawings, poetry, and romantic, navel-gazing films featuring a high beef-cake factor. Melville became famous for his war pictures and hard-boiled Zen noirs. The result is like Bertolucci's The Dreamers with no sex."

Also in the September issue of the Brooklyn Rail:

• David Wilentz on Exiled: "Johnnie To has taken over; his name is now synonymous with Hong Kong cinema." Also, a talks with Shusuke Kaneko "about Death Note, roman-porno ('romantic porn': Nikkatsu Studios brand of soft-core films), art films, kaiju (rubber monster movies such as Godzilla and the like), Nietzsche and the state of the industry today."

• "Viewed together, this summer's romantic comedies show a peculiar obsession with the intersection of romantic love and family loyalty," writes Sarahjane Blum. "With heroines navigating between their own interests and those of their kin, three prominent offerings betray a cultural anxiety about how to be a responsible adult woman in love." And they are: Becoming Jane, No Reservations and 2 Days in Paris.

• Sarah Kessler on Patricio Guzmán's "epic documentary" and "rough-edged, open narrative," The Battle of Chile.

• Cullen Gallagher on Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection: Vol. 4.

• Mark Asch looks back on last month's New Talkies: Generation DIY series at the IFC Center.

• And Jed Lipinski on The Young One and The Milky Way: "Though formally quite different, they show Buñuel's affinity for the grey areas between innocence and sin, and his distaste for the easily psychoanalyzable. He was most at home with what he called 'the fundamental ambiguity of all things.'"

A related reminder: The Buñuelathon hosted by Flickhead carries on through Sunday.

Toronto and NYFF preview. Paranoid Park.

"The last four Gus Van Sant movies - Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and this gorgeous reverie on adolescence - have the quality of a dream, slipping so fluidly through time and space that they practically float on air," writes Scott Tobias. "Perhaps by tethering the movie to some measure of conventional plot tension - the young hero's involvement in the accidental death of a Portland security guard - Paranoid Park [French site] has the weight of real insight that the other movies (which I think are all accomplished in other ways) can't really claim."

Also at the AV Club: "Paranoid Park is perhaps Van Sant's most accessible film since he returned to the art-film circuit, because its people and emotions are the most recognizable and relatable—even when the plot takes a turn toward the lurid," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"As was the case with Gerry, Elephant and Last Days, I'm not sure why Van Sant is so fixated on violence, and I'm not totally convinced that he has anything particularly meaningful to teach us about it," writes Darren Hughes. Nonetheless, "Paranoid Park is my new favorite of Van Sant's films."

"Van Sant - aided by the masterful camera of cinematographer Christopher Doyle - treat the specifics of the narrative as details of marginal importance, completely honing their focus on navigating an increasingly turbulent emotional landscape," writes Jesse Ataide at DVD Verdict.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Toronto and NYFF preview. Persepolis.

"Recounting her early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood living in (and out of) Tehran in the years following Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 Iranian Revolution, [Marjane] Satrapi's books - to borrow a phrase from Maus - bleed history, their raw confrontation of the monumental, tumultuous changes that swept the country during the 80s and 90s drenched in intimate, inflamed, and often unpleasant memories and emotions," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "They're stunning works of exposure, and thus it comes as little shock to discover that Satrapi's cinematic version of her stories - co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud - radiates brutal honesty. A hand-drawn 2D triumph produced in France (where Satrapi now lives) by the country's few remaining traditional animators, and shot primarily in black-and-white, Persepolis [site] feels ripped straight from its creator's heart, a sore, scathing, warts-and-all account of her formative years bolstered by its formidable aesthetic inventiveness, and elevated to the near-apex of its art form by its unguarded sincerity."

"The film is yet another standout in a year rife with ambitious animated films like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Tekkonkinkreet and Paprika, but for my money it's the most consistent, humanist, and historically relevant of them all," writes Doug Cummings.

"More than anything, Persepolis shows us what happens when religious fundamentalism and intolerance - of any stripe - is allowed to be the foundation on which a country's leadership is built," writes Cinematical's Kim Voynar.

"It's a very personal and even profound story, and even though the movie loses some of the digressive, impressionistic structure that made the books so charming, it adds a sense of comic whimsy that a single drawing can't exactly replicate," writes Noel Murray. "Persepolis is a crowd-pleaser, and a model for how graphic novels can be filmed."

Also at the AV Club: "Persepolis could hardly be more winning," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "The overall impression to Satrapi's coming-of-age adventures is just how vulnerable the individual can be to the forces of history."

"A lot of films can break your heart - a precious few can enlarge and renovate it," writes Kenneth R Morefield at Looking Closer. Persepolis "is one of those precious few."

"Persepolis streams by in no time, yet manages to convey the sense of an entire childhood into early adulthood," writes Jim Emerson. "Upon getting back to my room I immediately ordered the books, Persepolis and Persepolis 2."

France is sending this one into the Oscar race, reports Alison James for Variety.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Shorts, 9/25.

Staring Back is Chris Marker's "beautiful new collection of black-and-white photographs and video stills taken between 1952 and 2006," and Doug Cummings pages through it. "It's a rare token of the work of one of our most elusive but commanding of filmmakers, and a revealing portrait of the unspecified faces lingering in his - and now our - ongoing memories."

"[A]s I grappled with my own ambivalence about taking on an art form so steeped in tradition, so strangely lumbering and usually so expensive, and - above all - performed for so few, I asked myself how I could possibly hope to conquer and reinvent a form within the really tight restrictions opera seems to impose." Sally Potter, on how she eventually came to decide to direct Carmen for the English National Opera. And look, she's blogging.

Also in the Guardian:

• Directed by Jose Padilha (Bus 174) and produced by Marcos Prado, Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad) "has taken Brazil by storm - even though it has yet to be released," reports Tom Phillips. "Based on the life of a special forces operative in Brazil's capital, the film is already proving one of the most controversial pieces of cinema in the country's history. Tens of thousands of pirate copies have been distributed by street hawkers as far away as the Amazon, while a group of Rio police officers reportedly tried to ban it from cinemas."

• Chrissy Iley talks with Samantha Morton about, oh, all sorts of things, among them Control, Mister Lonely, Longford and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. Ah, and Harvey Weinstein: "'He reportedly said to somebody, "Who'd fuck that?" Quite a few people, thank you very much.' She has a naughty smile."

• With Michael Moore's latest set to open in the UK, the Guardian has taken "16 NHS workers to an advance screening of Sicko and asked them: is the British way of medicine really that good?"

Chris Cagle recommends Yannis Tzioumakis's American Independent Cinema: "he book manages to grasp and present the varied and competing definitions of 'independence' without either getting bogged down in the definitional questions (they do interest me, but only up to a point) or assuming a trans-historical essence of independence (as if Cassavetes leads, like a genetic strain passed on, to Jarmusch and Hartley)."

"There are some very interesting things over at Culture Monkey, a blog you should definitely check out," advises Zach Campbell.

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij previews Jean-Jacques Annaud's Sa Majesté Minor (His Majesty Minor), starring José Garcia and Vincent Cassel, and notes, too, that Annaud's got a blog and the movie's got a trailer.

So here's fall, the season we've been waiting for. So why, wonders Nick Davis have the films so far "just been so... blah"? Summer's offerings, particularly the docs, gave him more to get excited about.

"The War on Democracy is a great primer on Latin American politics," advises Matt Riviera.

"In Banished, Marco Williams investigates, with even-handed and nuanced precision, the shameful and suppressed history of white communities banishing African-Americans from their homes between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s," writes Lisa Katzman. "Exposing a Gordian knot of racial injustice, Banished shows the descendants of the dispossessed as they wrestle with themselves and with those who now inhabit their ancestral property over questions of collective memory, statutes of limitations, and reparations."

Also in the Voice: Abigail Deutsch on The Man of My Life, Tim Grierson on Good Luck Chuck, Aaron Hillis on Charlie and Brian Miller on Outsourced.

David Koepp's written a remake of The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3; Tony Scott will direct it and Denzel Washington will star. Variety reports.

Clive Sinclair in the Times Literary Supplement on James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma: "The truth is that if you put a new engine on old tracks you'll get but one thing: derailment."

At Bright Lights After Dark, Erich Keursten defends The Brave One against many of its critics:

[I]f you read Manny Farber's in-depth analysis of Taxi Driver (written shortly after the film's initial release) you can read a lot of the same criticism, the inconsistency of characterization, moral ambiguity, how De Niro's character, for example, changes from scene to scene, from a moronic obsessive to a smooth-talking lothario, etc. Similar criticisms are leveled at Foster's character here, who is a shaky mess of nerves and regret by day and Dirty Harriet by night. Farber is savvy enough to see this inconsistency as part of the film's effectiveness, what makes it unique. Modern day film writers with a certain class of reader in mind have to apparently pre-masticate rather than just tell if the films worth seeing (it is - just in the opening scenes, the naturalistic, playful rapport between Foster and her soon-to-be-dead boyfriend blows half the romantic comedies of this past decade clean out of the water).

Resident Evil: Extinction "wasn't screened for critics," notes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times, "but that seems less a tacit admission of a dip in quality than of the fact that all the films are just noisy time killers, about as engrossing as watching someone else play a video game." More from Jim Ridley in the Voice.

At Slate, Jessica Winter looks back on Wall Street two decades on: "Somehow, an oleaginous villain meant to embody the worst excesses of his era became a folk hero and highly persuasive career counselor. Wall Street was intended as a cautionary tale, but oddly enough, it endures as a possibly timeless model for success."

"To mark the centenary of someone like Anne Desclos, and more particularly Pauline Réage, is somehow more profound, I find, than marking the centenary of an actor or filmmaker, as I usually do on this blog," writes Tim Lucas. " It reminds me that time and history claim more of us than our names and the broad outlines of our biographies; they also absorb the secret and powerful stories, told and untold, of our most violent passions."

As various countries send their films into the Oscar race, Nathaniel R's keeping track. His chart features posters, links, details on the films and stats on each country's past nominations and wins.

Bob Westal has put out the call for a Bob Fosse Blog-a-Thon: November 10.

Online browsing tip. The Movie Timeline "is the history of everything, taken from one simple premise: that everything you see in the movies is true - the real mixes with the fictitious, so long as it's reported in a movie somewhere." Via Shawn Levy.

Online viewing tip. Paper managing editor Rebecca Carroll introduces the October "Un-Hollywood Issue." Via ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler, where he also has a quick review of Mike Mills's Does Your Soul Have a Cold?, a magnificently shot documentary on depression in Japan showing as part of the magazine's Un-Hollywood Film Series.

Online viewing tips. The Shamus finds Sofia Coppola. "In a can."

Lust, Caution.

For the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas, Lust, Caution "plays like the kind of rough assembly that directors sometimes screen for studio executives and trusted confidants when they're mid-way through the editing process. It is, I think, a work of extraordinary hubris - the kind of megalomaniacal enterprise that can spring forth from a director coming off of a major critical and commercial hit (in [Ang] Lee's case, Brokeback Mountain) and allowed by producers to indulge his every whim."

It's "a kind of reverse Notorious," suggests Robert Cashill. "Not to spoil anything, but imagine that the Ingrid Bergman character in the classic Hitchcock picture decided to bail on Cary Grant and ally herself with Claude Rains and his neo-Nazi scheming. That roughly approximates the storyline of the film, which should have emerged as perverse but instead registers as sloggy and distasteful."

Updated through 10/1.

"Yawns were no sooner stifled in the Lush, Comatose screening room when word arrived from the Venice Film Festival that Se Jie, as it's called in Chinese, had tamed the Golden Lion," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Whether or not jury president Zhang Yimou was stirred by patriotism or merely a boob, I'm amazed he convinced fellow jurist Paul Verhoeven to throw support behind a film he'd already made in Black Book - which has twice the passion and way better beaver shots." More from Robert Wilonsky, who finds it'd have been better "boiled down to half its running time."

"Lee's attempt to do a revisionist version of a World War II film - with Japanese-occupied China subbing for Nazi-occupied France and charged-up young resistance fighters trying to snare a collaborationist Chinese kingpin (Tony Leung) - is overall a failure, albeit with tell-tale moments of dazzling creativity," blogs Howard Karren at In the Company of Glenn.

"Wong and Mr Yee's sexual trysts give Lust, Caution an interesting psychological nuance," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Tang, an actress with a great future, gives haunting expression to Wong's conflictions and sense of entrapment, even as the film begins to give pathetic leverage to the notion that diamonds are a girl's best friend."

"Paul Verhoeven's Black Book had a similar scenario (Resistance lass seduces Axis bigwig), but the heroine's Gestapo lover was a sweetie under those jackboots and swastikas," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Leung's Yee has been coarsened by presiding over tortures and executions, and those bad habits come out in the bedroom. He knows that Tai Tai might be a spy - he has ferreted out other would-be lovers/assassins. But the risk brings him out of his paranoid-authoritarian little shell."

"If Lee's methods are restrained and conservative, his subsequent career choices have nonetheless exhibited a persistent dedication to risk-taking," writes Nick Schager at IFC News. "Lust, Caution doesn't significantly renovate or subvert spy movie conventions or expectations. During its steamy, highly charged centerpieces, though, it does radically upend the director's usual nippy detachment."

"Like the fight sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the sex scenes in Lust, Caution push the story into increasingly feverish and complex directions," writes Anthony Kaufman. "Explicit, yes, but utterly necessary, to depict the use and abuse, or l'amour fou (depending on how you look at it), between the characters."

"Lust, Caution revolves around a plot, like a thriller, and we try to read it like that; but it also revolves around character and nature, like a drama, and we see it through that perspective," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi. "The movie - and the audience - jumps from intimate drama to glossy thrills." And an online listening tip: James talks with Lee.

For a long backgrounder in the Los Angeles Times, Paul Lieberman talks with Lee and Leung.

Logan Hill talks with Lee for New York.

Nathaniel R's got pix of the Taiwan premiere.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Update, 9/26: "Lee and his collaborators (including, here as elsewhere, screenwriters James Schamus and Wang Hui-Ling) have built a pedigreed short story up into a Ralph Bellamy of a period piece: forgettably handsome and sympathetic to a fault," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

Updates, 9/27: In "Ang Lee's cunningly effective new period piece, the two main characters contort and distend across bed sheets with serpentine intensity, their motions caught in unvarnished close-up," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "Every move in these hypnotically immersive scenes informs the story, imbuing it with an authentic sense of drama that gives the film a distinctly menacing tone. What might seem like gratuity is actually a strikingly eloquent form of psychological expressionism."

"It's the real Eastern Promise - the movie Ang Lee has always been working toward," writes Armond White. Also in the New York Press, Jennifer Merin talks with Lee.

Erica Abeel interviews Lee for indieWIRE.

Updates, 9/28: "Lust, Caution - a truer title would be 'Caution: Lust' - is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Like too many films that try to put a human face on history without really engaging with it, Lust, Caution feels at once overpadded and underdeveloped: it's all production design and not enough content." In an accompanying audio slide show, Lee discusses the film.

"For nearly an hour, Lust, Caution plays like an exceedingly well-made but conventional wartime spy drama," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "But when the student group's plans are foiled by a sudden act of violence, which Lee shows us in a mercilessly protracted scene, the film turns into something rawer and stranger.... In the end, the movie suggests, both politics and love may be inseparable from the lies we tell ourselves about them."

"For more than a decade, Lee has been quietly building an impressive canon about the erotic experience," writes Sarah Hepola. "Sex isn't really the throughline of Ang Lee's films; after all, he did direct Sense & Sensibility. Instead, his running theme is the conflict between what a person wants and what society deems acceptable." Also at Nerve, Gwynne Watkins: "Ang Lee's espionage drama unfolds as a luxurious period piece, but by the end, its loose coils have been pulled as taut as a hangman's noose."

"Conceptually, Lust, Caution has been thoroughly thought-through, down to every lipstick stain Wei leaves on her teacups," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "And maybe that's what keeps the film from becoming truly affecting."

"I got the impression, here and throughout Lust, Caution, that director Ang Lee just arbitrarily set up his shots without much consideration for what they meant," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "His only concern is the story, not the art behind it."

"I went into the screening with trepidation. The trepidation was not necessary," writes Marcy Dermansky. "Lust, Caution is a gorgeous film, sweeping you away to a different time and place." And Jürgen Fauth argues, "The story simply wouldn't add up if we hadn't seen what happens between Tony Leung and Wei Tang during the NC-17 scenes."

In the Los Angeles Times, Lorenza Muñoz reports that many hope the film will help dissolve the stigma of the NC-17 rating: "'If Ang Lee does well, then maybe others will follow and we can get rid of these myths that have created challenges for this rating,' said John Fithian, president of the National Assn of Theatre Owners."

The NYC premiere on Thursday has become ST VanAirsdale's "favorite red-carpet event of the year."

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

Update, 10/1: Via Movie City News, Anthony Kaufman gets Lee to list his five favorite "favorite dark film romances" for the Wall Street Journal.

Anticipating NYFF, 9/25.

"The 45th New York Film Festival is something of a family affair here at the Village Voice," writes Nathan Lee, pointing out that J Hoberman and Scott Foundas are on the selection committee and then referring to a column Jonas Mekas wrote in the weekly back in 1966, listing "arguments against and pro" the then-4-year-old festival.

As for 2007, "We can quibble all we want about who's hot and who's not when it comes to the grand old men of the movies - why choose the latest from Rohmer (The Romance of Astree and Celadon) but not Rivette (Ne Touche Pas le Hache)? Why include a film indebted to Manoel de Oliveira (In The City of Sylvia) but not a film by Manoel de Oliveira (Christopher Columbus, the Enigma)? - yet it seems churlish to do so given a year when 'the death of cinema' has moved from the think piece to the obituary page."

ST VanAirsdale, the Reeler, interviews NYFF programmer Richard Peña.

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth has newsbits from the NYFF front: a Brian De Palma no-show and a screening cancellation: John Ford's The Iron Horse.

Fests and events, 9/25.

Millais, an exhibition of work by Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais opens at the Tate Britain tomorrow (through January 13).

"Many of the paintings do have that 'freeze-frame' quality: like stills taken from an imaginary film that Millais is shooting in his head," blogs the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "I have to say, however, Ophelia is the most cinematic painting, conceived in pin-sharp deep focus. This picture really does shock me. And I have only just realised quite why I am so fascinated by it."

"One of the basic elements of the moving image is the light source and a current exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Project, Transform, Erase takes this simple element as its theme," writes Caitlin Jones at Rhizome. Through Sunday.

Michael Hawley picks eight titles to feature in his preview of the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (Friday through October 10) at the Evening Class: What Would Jesus Buy?, Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa, American Scary, Cowboys & Communists, Orange Winter, Manufacturing Dissent, Hell on Wheels and Luchando.

At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth has the lineup for the Coney Island Film Festival, running Friday through Sunday.

"The 400 Blows still resonates through Truffaut's isolation of essential details, which stand out with the focus of unblemished memory: that ancient, gouged, chalk-coated classroom that's seen a thousand wiseasses sent to its corner; the horror of impending discipline as a teacher's called into the hallway; the tactile, gasping chill from the milk that Antoine quaffs from a stolen bottle during a night on the street," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "It is the nature of the film for those who love it to recognize themselves in it, and so it never fully recedes into history." At Film Forum from tomorrow through October 9.

Acquarello is turning in more reviews from the just-wrapped series, Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz.

Jason Morehead looks back on the Cornerstone Festival.

Toronto. Juno.

"I don't know when I've heard a standing ovation so long, loud and warm as the one after Jason Reitman's Juno, which I predict will become quickly beloved when it opens at Christmas time, and win a best actress nomination for its 20-year-old star, Ellen Page," writes Roger Ebert.

"[H]ere's why I dug this movie so much that I wanted to crawl up on the screen and give it a big sloppy kiss." Scott Weinberg presents a bullet-pointed list at Cinematical, where Kim Voynar talks with Reitman and with screenwriter Diablo Cody.

"[A]s much as I steeled myself against the wisecracking whimsy of Juno, by the end it had mostly won me over," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "This is an indie crowdpleaser that's much more enjoyable - in other words, not nearly as horrifying - as Little Miss Sunshine."

Updated through 9/30:

At the AV Club, Noel Murray offers a dissenting opinion: "[T]hough some of the movie is laugh-out-loud funny and even moving almost despite itself, the parade of not-quite-of-this-world characters and their not-in-the-least-believable behavior makes it a trifle at best, and insulting at worst."

"10 minutes into Reitman's follow-up to Thank You For Smoking, I definitely wasn't feeling it: The too-quirky dialogue, singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson's cloying music, and the snide attitude carried over TYFS all put me off completely," admits his colleague Scott Tobias. "But from the scene in which Ellen Page... confesses her pregnancy to her family and then later meets a upper-middle-class couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) anxious to adopt, the film permanently wore down my defenses."

"The Juno screening was a total madhouse!" reports Ali at the Film Experience. "I have certainly experienecd my share of chaotic movie experiences at TIFF, but this is what is must have been like when Borat premiered at the Ryerson last year."

ST VanAirsdale talks with Page for the Reeler.

Update, 9/30: And the Winner Is... talks with Reitman and Cody.

Toronto. Lou Reed's Berlin.

"Berlin is especially controversial among Reed-ophiles, both for its prog-rock pretensions - it's a song cycle about a drug-addicted German prostitute and her children, with contributing performances by the likes of Steve Winwood and Jack Bruce - and for its fashionable nihilism," writes Noel Murray. "Lester Bangs bashed it as 'a gargantuan slab of maggoty rancor,' and fans of the more pop-minded Transformer by and large didn't care to take Reed's journey into the colossally morose in 1973. Me though, I've always loved Berlin.... If nothing else, Julian Schnabel's concert film Lou Reed's Berlin presents the album's ten songs with a force they've rarely shown before.... I'd hardly place Lou Reed's Berlin in the pantheon of great concert films.... But for Reed fans - heck, for rock fans - the movie is an essential document of a noteworthy event."

"Praise due again to Jonathan Demme's groundbreaking Stop Making Sense, which convinced directors like Schnabel to keep the cameras tight on the stage and treat moviegoers as the audience," adds his AV Club colleague Scott Tobias.

"Julian Schnabel's supple visual instincts perfectly preserve Lou Reed's own rock-opera concept album in Lou Reed's Berlin, a deeply satisfying record of his live performances at St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, 33 years after the album's failed initial release," writes Stephen Garrettt at indieWIRE.

The San Sebastian Film Festival's got the trailer.

Toronto. Schindler's Houses.

Heinz Emigholz's Schindler's Houses is "a special delight for Angelenos like myself," writes Doug Cummings. "Composed of slightly canted, static shots (creating a playful 'movement' in their juxtaposition) depicting scores of houses designed by RM Schindler in the Los Angeles vicinity, the film becomes a meditation on an artistic persona permeating buildings all around the city, aesthetically joining disparate classes, locations, times and functions."

"The form of the homes and the form of the film reflect and suit Los Angeles perfectly," writes MS Smith. "Los Angeles is the antithesis of the concentrated city, the contrary and modern answer to classical design, and the lines and angles of Schindler's houses jut out in varying directions like the city itself. As the film implies, these homes mark not only the history of an architectural movement, but the socio-economic history of this region."

Toronto and NYFF preview. Stellet Licht.

"Silent Light [site] is by far the best film I've seen at this year's festival, marking a maturity in [Carlos] Reygadas's vision and a striking purity of the cinematic image," writes Michael Guillén.

"Carlos Reygadas disappoints with his follow-up to the brilliant two-fer Japón and Battle in Heaven," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "At worst, Reygadas films his subjects with the indifference Bruno Dumont showed to landscape and character alike in Flandres."

Updated through 9/26.

"Many have called Silent Light an extended homage to Carl Dreyer's 1955 transcendentalist classic Ordet, but they're only half-right, in ways that are telling," writes Scott Tobias. "Yes, the film is set in isolation among the religiously devout. And yes, it closes with a moment of grace that unmistakably connects the two movies. But where Dreyer's world is narrow, suffocating, and punishingly austere - not that there's anything wrong with that, considering that I nearly wrote my Master's thesis on Ordet - Reygadas often proves himself a sensualist with more in common with Terrence Malick than Dreyer."

But his colleague at the AV Club dissents: "If I'm going to talk about the nagging artificiality of indie-twee movies like the apparently much-beloved-by-everyone-but-me Juno, it's only fair to note that I have a similar problem with syrup-paced art movies like the latest from the director of Japón and Battle in Heaven," writes a target="_blank" href="http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/toronto_film_festival_07_day_thre_0">Noel Murray. "But a lot of my cinephile friends - ones whose opinions I respect - really love this movie, so take my eye-rolling with a dose of mitigation."

"It might very well be a perfect film on its own accord, but for me its implications and staying power fall considerably short of Dreyer's masterwork," writes Doug Cummings.

"Silent Light, easily the best film I'll see at this festival, is a masterpiece of tone and form made by a talented man in full control of all his gifts," writes Steve at the Film Experience.

Update: "Though much ink has been spilled on Silent Light's magnificent opening and closing shots, it's hard to isolate one image in this film as being more powerful than the last," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "One after another, Reygadas' long, slow ultra-wide shots, occasionally sprinkled with psychedelic lens flares, took my breath away. It's more like watching grass grow than paint dry, but either way, it's undoubtedly a film that rewards a certain viewing temperament. But If Reygadas seems to take a while to get from cut to cut, it's not because he's wasting time: he fills the spaces created by his characters' silences (awkward, intimate) with thunderous diegetic sounds, which themselves become catalysts for furthering the story."

Update, 9/26: "A work of singular cinematographic splendor, Silent Light is also a regression for Reygadas as an artist and activist thinker," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "It's unfortunate, at once depressing and funny, that the ballsy Battle in Heaven, a tragic story of a kidnapping that cannily zeroes in on the effects a country's racial and class strife has on the consciousness of a lower-class people, gets called pretentious while this aloof, almost condescending study of emotional grief and spiritual conviction gets a free pass."

Toronto and NYFF preview. Margot at the Wedding.

"Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding [site] is one of the scariest films ever," declares Jim Emerson. "If I describe it as a horror movie - torture porn about a long-obsolete and class of super-self-conscious but utterly un-self-aware white East-Coast intellectual trash - I trust that also conveys how bitterly, nastily funny the movie is. It's like a Neil LaBute picture co-written by Jules Feiffer. Scalpel-sharp. Merciless. Cruel. Uncompromisingly misanthropic. And really getting off on being so."

"A mild disappointment in the wake of the near perfect Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding still has enough sour humour and sharp insight to encourage viewers and critics to keep their faith in Baumbach's abilities as one of the more interesting American directors of his generation," writes Allan Hunter in Screen Daily.

From Emily Nussbaum's profile of Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh for New York: "'It's funny, but in a really scathing, brutal way,' Leigh says about the movie, which she praises for the way in which its cruelty rises out of real behavior, a character-centered sensibility she suggests has become a rarity. 'Just to see people so exposed, and the undoing that happens, the destruction that ensues. It all could happen over the course of a breakfast. It's that way in families.'"

"[B]ecause Baumbach's style is reminiscent of dynamic French filmmakers like Louis Malle, Margot at the Wedding has a restless energy that culminates in a nerve-jangling final scene," writes Noel Murray. "And Baumbach continues to show an acute understanding of how narcissists need their families to validate their mini-dramas." Also at the AV Club: "Baumbach firmly posits himself as an Eric Rohmer acolyte (naming Jennifer Jason Leigh's character 'Pauline' couldn't have been mere coincidence), specializing in talky, fine-tuned relationship comedies that have some bite to them," suggests Scott Tobias

"Noah Baumbach has emerged as possibly the most wrenching and impressive young American filmmaker," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "His elliptical new film centered on an impending marriage — made without transitions or exposition — synthesizes John Cassavetes and Eric Rohmer, the drama built around the dramatic and emotionally painful events of a long weekend in the Hamptons."

"The absolute highlight of the daring film is the loving way in which Baumbach directs his spouse Leigh to perhaps the most nuanced, relaxed role of her accomplished career," writes Matt Mazur at PopMatters.

"The film doesn't quite reach the heights of The Squid and the Whale (which, to me, felt heavily influenced by Wes Anderson), but it's filled with the kind of uncomfortable moments only someone with a lovingly fucked-up family can truly understand," writes the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy.

For Cinematical, Patricia Chui interviews Baumbach.

Toronto and NYFF preview. Secret Sunshine.

"After several plot turns that I refuse to spoil, Secret Sunshine [site] becomes, among many other things, the truest depiction of evangelical Christianity I've seen on film," writes Darren Hughes. "Fortunately, [Lee Chang-dong's] film is not evangelical itself and, instead, wrestles with the strangeness and disappointments of faith in a way that The Mourning Forest, with its contrivances, could only mimic. Damn, I love this film."

"The film is brave and unsparing (as is Jeon [Do-yeon]'s performance) and asks some challenging and disquieting questions, among them whether human values such as love, mercy, morality, meaning and forgiveness still have meaning if we shift the ultimate responsibility for them away from human beings onto some (Christian, in this case) concept of God," writes Jim Emerson. "It's a hard film to write about without using superlatives."

"My problem with the movie is that I kept resisting the narrative, never quite able to give myself to a story that deals in extremes," writes J Robert Parks. "[F]or now, it's a film I admire more than I like."

"It's hard to reconcile the temporal and emotional virtuosity of the first half with the dissipation into rote spitefulness of the second," writes Kevin Lee at Slant.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Toronto and NYFF preview. I'm Not There.

"[T]he one film at Toronto with a possible claim on masterpiece status is the one that managed to generate the greatest intensity of feeling through the most preposterously complicated means," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. After checking off the list of leads, he continues, "More amazing still is how harmoniously [Todd] Haynes arranges and sustains this semiotic free fall through the Dylan history and myth without losing dramatic momentum or indulging the hagiographic impulse. But the deep wonderment of this strange and wondrous picture is how language so aggressively mediated, so insistently postmodern, and so apparently nostalgic can speak with such eloquence about the world right now. A movie about the struggle to negotiate freedom, creativity, and political integrity in a media-addled culture at a time of war, I'm Not There [site] has everything and nothing to do with Bob Dylan."

Updated through 9/29.

"In some ways, it's the natural companion to Don't Look Back (actually re-enacting some scenes and interviews from that documentary in a new context), the movie Dylan probably wanted Reynaldo and Clara to be, and in other ways the movie Haynes wanted Velvet Goldmine to be," suggests Jim Emerson. "It actually goes back inside these films (Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and Petulia, Godard's Masculin-Feminin, Fellini's 8½ and others, too) - and the old stories, the album covers, the liner notes, the newspaper and magazine clippings - and recapitulates and reinterprets them in new contexts. I was thrilled by it, moved, dazzled, entranced. I love this movie."

"Todd Haynes' new film is, as they would say in semiotics class, a dense text," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Generally, the depth of the film's referentiality is kind of astonishing—more so when you consider the artists covering the Dylan songs on the soundtrack ([Cate] Blanchett opens her mouth, but Steve Malkmus comes out of it).... I really need to see this film again in order to get deeper into it, but I can't help but note that, given the emotional connection that so many feel to Dylan's work, I'm Not There is awfully cerebral."

"I'm Not There may be a brilliant myth-making exercise, a fearsome piece of pop art, a truly fascinating film," proposes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "It may also be a hollow jumble of post-modern pick-up-sticks - a chaotic stack of signifiers and images and in-jokes with nothing at the heart. Part of me wants to see it again as soon as possible; crack its codes, follow the arcs, catch anything I missed. I also wanted to not see it ever again - to let it be a dream, a blur, like a few notes of music that find you at an unexpected moment and you hear the rest of your life." And here's an online listening tip: James interviews Haynes.

"I'm still not sure how Haynes pulled it off," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "I only know that I can't wait to see it again. In fact, I'm afraid I'm going to be one of those freaks who see it half a dozen times before it drifts out of the theaters, not necessarily to parse its many allusions and inside jokes (although that's fun) but simply to bask in its crazy, warm glow."

"I'm Not There is brilliant, a visual and aural feast that is so complex in structure that it boggles the mind that he or anyone else could stitch it together," writes Howard Feinstein for Filmmaker. "Sure, Haynes was enamored of artifice in Superstar, Poison, Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven, but he amplifies the strategy here. Todd Solondz's Palindromes was unsuccessful in its use of multiple actors for a single character, but Haynes's gamble pays off."

"Even for a Dylan fan like me, there's a lot of 'huh?' to I'm Not There," blogs Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But there's just as much 'wow.'"

For his fellow AV Club member, Scott Tobias, "Haynes's movie smartly sidesteps any attempt to explain the Dylan enigma; on the contrary, the film embraces it, collapsing multiple timelines into a 135-minute soup that I found both intriguingly and frustratingly allusive/elusive."

"Styles change from persona to persona, from the Don't Look Back B&W cinema verité look of Quinn's England tour (along with salutes to A Hard Day's Night and Fellini movies) to the steeped Hollywood cinema colors of the actor's life to the mock-doc survey of the early folksinger (with Julianne Moore in the Baez role)," blogs Sean Axmaker for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "As spun by Haynes, they are all different people in the same musical universe rather than steps along a journey. Haynes opens the film on the singer's death and autopsy."

"This was maybe the only movie at the festival where I got that overwhelming, I'm-enveloped-by-this-film feeling... which is not to say I was one hundred percent in love with it," blogs the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy. "But it was plenty stirring."

"Haynes comes out of the dream-like I'm Not There a resounding winner," writes Matt Mazur at PopMatters. "The film looks astonishing. If there is anything missing from the idyllic, disjointed re-telling of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan's life, it is emotional truth; but there is enough present to let Haynes' vision slide."

"[E]asily one of the best and most ambitious films of the year, [I'm Not There] fragments the many chapters of the folk-rock troubadour's life and reshuffles the cards to form a fascinating meditation on identity and personal responsibility, transforming the pop prophet's intimidating, cryptic life into a deeply empathetic and surprisingly accessible journey," writes Stephen Garrettt at indieWIRE.

For the London Times, Stephen Dalton gets a comment from Haynes on the 60s: "Vicariously, nostalgically, retrospectively, it doesn't matter. It's worth continual reexamination. We are still unpacking the 1960s. It was great because it was a time that demanded you take a stand on what you thought about things. That meant being aware politically and culturally."

"The movie's terrific, among the best I've seen in Toronto, but it's not for the casual Dylan fan," warns the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

"This exhilarating experiment addresses the question at the root of any biography: Can anything authoritative be said about any person?" writes Time's Richard Corliss. "I'd enjoy sitting through a cut of I'm Not There if it were twice its current length, or half. At 135 mins (about the same as Across the Universe), the film almost dares a viewer to choose favorite parts, and others for pruning. The section in which [Richard] Gere as an older Bob hunts for his lost dog baffled and bored me; the [Marcus Carl] Franklin and [Christian] Bale parts I found quite moving; Blanchett is worth watching through her characters triumphs, disasters and longueurs. Overall, I'm glad I was there."

Online viewing tip. At Boing Boing, David Pescovitz points to a clip from Don't Look Back, the infamous interview Horace Judson conducted with Dylan for Time in 1967 1965.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Update, 9/29: For the Oxford American, Sean Wilentz on the making of Blonde on Blonde. Via Coudal Parters.

Toronto and NYFF preview. At Sea.

"I discovered Friday night that what I had wanted from Jennifer Baichwal's [Manufactured Landscapes] was, in fact, something closer in spirit to Peter Hutton's At Sea, a 60-minute, silent triptych about the birth, life, and death of a modern ship," writes Darren Hughes.

"Of the many films worth anticipating in the New York Film Festival's eleventh annual Views from the Avant-Garde (including new works by Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs and Peggy Ahwesh), two that can already be considered highlights come from veteran artists Robert Beavers and Peter Hutton," writes Kevin B Lee, reviewing At Sea and Beavers's Pitcher of Colored Light at the House Next Door. "While one film is shot within the safe confines of a single home and the other depicts a maritime odyssey with epic views of endless ocean, both employ vivid palettes of light and color to evoke feelings of adventurous movement through time and space, underscored by a creeping sense of mortality."

"Hutton finds visual patterns in waves and ocean rain that no one let alone James Cameron seems to have thought of before," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "Two shots in particular stand out: One is of the boat's deck red-painted awning repeatedly swinging over and covering the sea, red and blue battling it out for on-screen color supremacy. The other is an astounding, desaturated shot of black-and-white waves forming patterns so dense and shimmery it seems like if you stared long enough, a secret 3D image might pop out. At Sea isn't consistent from beginning to end, but at least a portion of it is some of [NYFF's] must-see viewing."

Toronto and NYFF preview. Married Life.

"[Director Ira] Sachs and [co-screenwriter Oren] Moverman cop to their influences (to these eyes, Married Life's obvious cinematic touchstones are the multifaceted melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with shadings of Ophuls, Hitchcock and Preminger), yet they never succumb to them," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "Rather, they understand the important ways in which art acts as a stimulus to life, and how cinema, an inherently two-dimensional form, can be revelatory, if never entirely explanatory, of human psychology."

"Chris Cooper is sublime, as always," writes David Poland. "He just isn't capable of walking through a film. Patricia Clarkson has become a true master of the camera. You can actually see her using the angles and light with her own instincts sometimes. Rachel McAdams finds yet another character to play who is completely different than what she has done before. But it is Pierce Brosnan who really struck me in the film."

Brosnan's "work as a committed bachelor who takes an interest in best friend Chris Cooper's mistress (Rachel McAdams) - and the performances of the other actors... - give Sachs' melodrama, set among people of privilege in post-war America, the precious distinction it needs," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

For Jürgen Fauth, this is "the first film at this year's New York Film Festival that I wish I had walked out of."

"Never mind... that the narration in Married Life is redundant or that it provides the would-be suspenseful crime drama with a playfully misdirected tone; the major issue is that Sachs appears to misunderstand the purpose of using voiceover as a storytelling device in which point of view is established," writes Christopher Campbell, who goes on at the Reeler to quote Sachs defending the use of the voiceover at Friday's press conference.

NYFF preview. Go Go Tales.

"Like Prairie Home Companion, Go Go Tales [site] is a serio-comic survey of a community on life support, and as Ferrara's elegantly camera prowls the Paradise's rooms and hallways, we catch glimpses of people whose survival depends on the subsistence of the club and the resolve of its emcee, Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe)," writes Ed Gonzalez, who finds the film to be Abel Ferrara's "most confessional since Dangerous Game."

Updated.

"Expectedly, some of the improvised scenarios fall flat (a man recognizing one of the strippers as his wife feels like a worn-out premise), but this is definitely one of those films made of moments greater than the whole," writes Kevin B Lee at the House Next Door. "I don't buy the grander claims made for Go Go Tales as an incisive view into the struggle of art versus capitalism, commerce and addiction (there just aren't enough ruminative moments for those themes to come through), but as an object lesson in cinema at play, it's got as much life as the constantly roving and redefining frames of Fabio Cianchetti's camerawork, or the dense, multifaceted nightclub soundtrack. This is a film that's about being alive and cavorting like crazy through both good times and bad."

"The press conference was an occasionally hilarious dialogue about the film that offered a glimpse into the sort of tug-of-war of personalities that must have made for a lively movie set," reports Eugene Hernandez. And at the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth has just a whole lot of quotage from Mr Ferrara.

Earlier: Steven Shaviro and reviews from Cannes.

Update: "The ensemble (and, I suppose, dancing naked ladies) doesn't hurt," writes ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler. "I asked Ferrara at Monday's press conference how he worked with his cast to develop and corral the surrogate family whose psychodramatic chemistry somehow resulted in perhaps the festival's best comedy." The answer's a long one.

DVDs, 9/25.

For the New York Times' Dave Kehr, Criterion's release of the relatively recently restored 3 Penny Opera, directed by GW Pabst in 1931, is "a revelation."

Steven Shaviro describes the ways "Zodiac creates a overwhelming, but distanced, sense of flatness, mobility, and creepiness: a kind of low-key affectivity that is as much an expression of our general mediascape as it is of the mind of a serial killer."

A terrific annotated list from Kristin Thompson: "DVD supplements that really tell you something."

For The Boss of It All, Lars von Trier "decided to semi-automate the creative procedure, and leave the camera angles and placement up to a computer program, nicknamed Automavision," Michael Atkinson reminds us at IFC News. "[T]he affect works wonders: however 'unmotivated,' the movie's disruptive, off-kilter syntax fits the story like a rubber glove.... and suggests yet again that von Trier's yen for experimental penitence may be merely the smoke of his sideshow, obscuring his real achievements in storytelling and directing actors (there hasn't been a misjudged performance in a von Trier film in the two decades since Medea, and there's been a wealth of world-beaters)." Also recommended is Red Road.

"I have a confession to make," offers Kimberly Linbergs. "I love British historical dramas." Yes, me, too. And she writes up two I remember fondly (though it's been years and years): Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary Queen of Scots.

"Kino's first Avant-Garde set was an essential release that concentrated on silent cinema," writes Michael Barrett at PopMatters. The "follow-up crosses into the sound era with a few major pieces and some tantalizing minor works from major names."

"[T]he only other 'problem film' that is as interesting as The Intruder is Luis Buñuel's The Young One," writes Charles Mudede in the Stranger. "Deeper consideration will surely show this to be the reason why both are fascinating treatments of American racism: They are not products of the Hollywood system." More from Dave Kehr in the NYT and Susan King looks back on early Roger Corman in the Los Angeles Times.

Jim Emerson on Zoo: "It's not that director Robinson Devor and his co-writer/-researcher Charles Mudede didn't necessarily get what they needed to make a movie. It's that they only used whatever they got to make this movie, and that didn't feel like enough to me."

"The great DVD edition of The Princess Bride contains not one but two worthwhile commentary tracks, one by director Rob Reiner and another by screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote the book upon which the film was based," writes Edward Copeland. "If it weren't already obvious, Goldman spells out clearly his intention with both the book and the movie: He wanted to celebrate good old-fashioned storytelling and it's a joyous tale to be told."

"To enjoy Red Dawn from scratch in 2007, think of the film as a Reagan-era mirror of hyperbole, reflecting straight back at us the current Bush Administration's agenda of instilling paranoia and fear in its people," suggests Jason Woloski at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "If Red Dawn was remade today, writer-director John Milius's imagination for Right Wing derangement would juggle the current war on terror by making viewers believe in the possibility of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan teaming up and sneak attacking the US on a mass scale."

"Released in 1979, Alien is very much a film of its decade - cynical towards corporate thinking, distrustful of authority, very much in favor of sex, drugs and rock and roll," writes Andrew Bemis. "And while I love its sequels to varying degrees..., it's the original that retains an iconic perfection."

DVD roundups: Cinema Strikes Back, DVD Talk, Facets Features and Kamera.

Sight & Sound. October 07.

Kind of cute: Eastern Promises opens the London Film Festival on October 17, right? So the October issue of Sight & Sound opens with "Eastern Promise," Nick Roddick's survey of contemporary Romanian cinema. Celebratory as it is, the piece ends on a note of warning: "However great the acclaim that greets its films internationally, a national cinema without a national audience is living on borrowed time."

This month's cover is enticing, but the three-piece package on Control (which opens in the UK on October 5, that is, well before the LFF) is not online. If it's any consolation, this entry is still being updated (and a Toronto index is forthcoming, by the way).

"I think since 9/11 there has been a desire on both sides for more hostility, a cruder division of the world into right and wrong," Michael Winterbottom tells Ali Jaafar, who sees in A Mighty Heart a film "marked by contradictory tensions on almost every level."

"Considering the challenges it poses, Syndromes and a Century is an exceptionally easy and pleasurable watch," writes Tony Rayns. "The more you pinpoint the film's central dualities - female/male, country/city, sunlight/electric light, then/now and so on - the more it starts to sound like one of Apichatpong's gallery pieces or installations: an art object rather than a movie. The paradox is that it plays just fine in the cinema." Also: "[I]f Death Proof isn't a proper grindhouse movie, what is it? First and foremost, it's a game of two halves - sort of like an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, but less so."

Tim Lucas reviews The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Hara Kazuo's acclaimed documentary on Okuzaki Kenzo, "a Pacific War veteran, one of only 30 survivors of a thousand-strong regiment, who dedicated his post-war life to forcing other survivors of Hirohito's imperialistic campaign to admit the crimes they committed against their fellow men in order to emerge alive.... The day after viewing it, while watching television, I happened to surf past Master of the World, a 1961 film of Jules Verne's 1886 novel Robur-le-Conquérant starring Vincent Price, and was struck by many pronounced parallels. Okuzaki, I realised, was Robur come to life, a man who felt world peace must be achieved by any means necessary, his soul so eclipsed by that quixotic quest that he failed to see the monster he had become and the common sense that peace can only be achieved by living in peace." On a related note, John Adair agrees that the film "serves as a cautionary tale to those so deeply angered and embittered by the injustices of the world."

"The giant of the French star-system, the man who has made more than 170 films, the star of Le Dernier Métro and Cyrano de Bergerac, had lately become known primarily for his dodgy, though lucrative, business ventures, his speeding offences and his cameos in blockbusters like La Vie en rose," writes Ginette Vincendeau. "The Singer, by young director Xavier Giannoli, gives [Gérard] Depardieu a wonderful opportunity to display his colossal talent (and physique)."

Interview. Robert Benton.

"Forty years after co-writing Bonnie and Clyde, nearly 30 years after winning a fistful of Oscars for writing and directing Kramer vs Kramer, [Robert] Benton, who turns 75 this month, is now an éminence grise, standing a step behind Clint Eastwood as one of our last remaining masters of humanist drama," writes Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "As Hollywood films have grown increasingly noisy and sterile, Benton's have become more resonant and serene. Most of his best work explores common lives and the connections between family and community, be it the small-town clan of Nobody's Fool or his affectionate portrait of life in his hometown of Waxahachie, Texas, that occupies the center of Places in the Heart."

And just up at the main site is Sean Axmaker's talk with Benton about his new film, Feast of Love, about what all he owes Robert Altman and about the ongoing debate over violence in movies.

Updated through 9/28.

"[I]ndeed, there is much love in the [Feast of Love]," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "Too much, in fact. If this is a feast, it is one in which the host bought an enormous quantity of food, and now the guests feel obliged to stuff their craws until they're nauseous and bloated. This sort of movie and that sort of meal calls for a kind of moderation that director Robert Benton appears unwilling to provide."

"Competent staging and serviceable performances are about the only compliments I can think to pay the film, which charts the romances of some Portland, Oregon simpletons with such laughable pretentiousness that, were it not for everyone involved playing the material for straightforward uplift, it would feel like a parody of Grand Canyon, Playing by Heart, and its faux-profound ilk," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

Updates, 9/25: At indieWIRE, Nick Pinkerton empties both barrels before concluding, "All this rancor towards an undoubtedly well-meaning movie may seem a bit much, but when you live somewhere with one 'art'-house option, and a steamer like this clogs up a precious screen for five weeks, it can really ruin your life."

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy, too, talks with Benton.

"The cast performs as expected," writes David D'Arcy at Screen Daily. "[Margan] Freeman is a stoic sage. [Greg] Kinnear is a bumbling romantic. Jane Alexander has a mature forbearance. Toby Hemingway has the eager radiance of a youth destined for martyrdom. Fred Ward is the odd man out as Oscar's violent alcoholic father Bat. He is a drunk, and hence the nastiest of misfits in this movie about sweet neurotics who do nothing worse than overdose on coffee and then overdose on talking about themselves."

Benton's "decided to serve up a film feast consisting only of sweets: a smorgasbord of cream puffs and treacle tarts, all topped with a bracing smear of marshmallow fluff," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice.

Updates, 9/26: "Mention the name Robert Benton to anyone who has worked with him and then duck while the superlatives fly," writes Sara Vilkomerson, who profiles him for the New York Observer.

Matt Prigge meets Benton for the Philadelphia Weekly.

Everyone may love Benton, but Feast is "offensively silly," declares Cathy Erway in the L Magazine.

"[I]f a lot of the characters in Feast of Love seem a little too good-hearted to be true, Benton and screenwriter Allison Burnett (adapting a novel by Charles Baxter) make sure that enough bad things keep happening to them to keep the film from getting too cloying," writes Paul Matwychuk.

Updates, 9/27: "Feast of Love is a perfectly serviceable romantic drama that slowly builds into something much stranger and even wiser," writes R Emmet Sweeney at the Reeler. Yes, it's "unabashedly sentimental, but also manages to be clear-eyed about the spotty, earth-bound motivations that can drive such sentiment."

"Feast of Love is the Fear Factor of romantic dramedies, forcing audiences to endure one false moment of saccharine sentimentality after another until viewers will find themselves wishing they'd opted to stick their head inside a bucket of scorpions," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Not as incisive or suspenseful as his breakthrough, Kramer vs Kramer, Feast of Love still shows that male directors and writers can get at relationship matters quite well," proposes Marsha McCreadie in the New York Press.

Chuck Wilson talks with Benton for the LA Weekly.

Updates, 9/28: "Remarks about Greek gods and the foibles of humanity may have their place over brandy and cigars," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But despite the kindly gravity Mr Freeman puts into them, they sound portentous and condescending in the context of Feast of Love, a hollow contrivance masquerading as a wise and witty contemporary gloss on A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"I can't remember when I last saw a movie so maddeningly inconsistent, with incisive observations and credible behavior pressed right up next to material so stupid it practically drools," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

"[I]n the Arcadian, storybook Portland, Ore, in which the movie is set, love is a simple binary system - it's either on or off, pure or compromised, hot or age-appropriately snuggly," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "What it's not is complicated, or nuanced, or interesting."

"Maybe Benton's serenely dull time-waster should take a cue from one of its main settings, and become the first Hollywood film released directly to coffee shops," suggests Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

John Patterson talks with Freeman for the Guardian.

Fests and events, 9/24.

"The UK's largest independent film festival will this week become the first to simultaneously show its movies via the web, claiming the initiative could help establish a new revenue model for independent filmmakers," reports Owen Gibson for the Guardian. "The Raindance Film Festival in London has done a deal with broadband provider Tiscali to make six of its films available to all via the web at the same time as they premiere in London cinemas." Tomorrow through October 7.

And Mick Jones - yes, that Mick Jones - explains why he's looking forward to serving on the jury: "Looking back, it strikes me that the Clash were always a very cine-literate group. We'd seen all the right films and knew all the references. People always talk about punk as this Year Zero thing, whereas all popular culture is always stealing from itself, feeding off itself - like Soylent Green."

The Mumble Without a Cause series rolls on at the Northwest Film Forum through October 3 and, at the Siffblog, Kathy Fennessy's caught up with Hannah Takes the Stairs. Well, she's not won over: "I didn't find the scenario implausible. Nor did I think the acting was terrible. I just didn't care."

Reports from San Sebastian keep coming into Variety's Circuit.

"Once again, the Hollywood Film Festival granted Film Threat the opportunity to program and curate their Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy film festival sidebar, and we took to the task with rabid glee," writes Mark Bell, presenting the a target="_blank" href="http://hollywoodawards.com/horror.html">lineup they've put together. Dates for the festival: October 17 through 22. And the sidebar: October 19 through 21.

Online viewing tip. For later, that is, 1 pm ET, September 28 through October 5. IFC News will be broadcasting live from the New York Film Festival.

Online viewing tip. Philip Roth.

Below the jump, five minutes with Philip Roth. You can spare these five minutes.

Via Dwight Garner, who, in his previous post, writes, "The Sunday Times of London provided a service for its readers on Sunday, publishing a kind of 'Philip Roth for Dummies,' timed to the release of his new novel Exit Ghost. The Roth Primer was written by the talented novelist Stephen Amidon, who calls Roth, in his first sentence, 'America's greatest living novelist.'"

The likelihood that you'll agree with every word Roth says in these five minutes can't be too high. For example, when it comes to his remarks on the Iranian president, I myself am probably camped a little closer to Alex Ross's position. At least Roth does recognize that Ahmadinejad is a "monster." At the same time, though, I find it astounding how, in just five minutes, Roth doesn't simply describe but calmly emanates a frustration that, yes, is akin the despair many of us have almost unconsciously sunk into now, I think, long after the shock of the 2004 election has worn off and not quite as long after giving into the realization that electing a majority of Democrats to Congress will have next to no effect.

A related note on the subject of Al Gore (as of May 2006, Roth believed he's the only Democrat who could win the presidency). Christopher Hitchens, as always, delights in goading far more than in his own argument, but as (nearly) always, I can't resist reading him.

To steer all this back to movies a bit, Michael Fleming's got some news at Variety: "Kevin Spacey, Laura Dern, Denis Leary, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and Ed Begley Jr have been set by HBO Films to star in Recount, the drama about the controversial Florida results in the 2000 presidential election. Jay Roach is directing a script written by Danny Strong."

NYFF preview. I Just Didn't Do It.

"In I Just Didn't Do It [site], Ryo Kase (dancing Takefumi from Funky Forest) plays Teppei, an alleged groper of a schoolgirl who finds himself up against a legal system that boasts a 99.9% conviction rate," writes Filmbrain. "Though shouted at and browbeaten by detectives and prosecutors alike..., he still believes the truth will set him free.... Back in 1996 I decried that the god-awful Shall We Dance (director Masayuki Suo's previous film) would result in the death of Japanese cinema as we know it. Fair enough, I was wrong. Still, it's wonderful to see what a difference ten years makes. I Just Didn't Do It is the antithesis of that film, devoid of the feel-good syrupy sentimentality that oozed from every frame. Exposé, cautionary tale, and procedural all rolled into one, I Just Didn't Do It is a study in the abuse of state power that no fan of Foucault should miss."

Updated through 9/27.

"It's a tragic tale of a society at large, one so obsessed with the micromanagement and/or eradication of vague behaviors that it frequently loses its ability to mete out proper and considered justice," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "That the film's actions are couched in a familiar and fascinating vein of Japanese politeness only makes its defiant closing passages (as much an appeal to a higher power as to a mortal one) that much more powerful."

"Suo's critique of the Japanese legal system is devastating, though he refuses to single out any one group for blame," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. The film makes for "a fascinating, provoking glimpse into a Kafkaesque system we were complete unaware of. Our blood boiled, and for once, a jury of our peers seemed appealing."

Update, 9/27: "[I]f one's cognitive abilities are in full working order, it becomes immediately apparent upon seeing I Just Didn't Do It that the film's fetishistic attention to the policies and procedures of the Japanese court system is precisely what gives it an added layer of perverse fascination if you happen to be watching it through foreign eyes," writes Scott Foundas in Cinema Scope.

Toronto and NYFF preview. No Country For Old Men.

First, a bit of fun: the Coens josh in Esquire about casting Josh Brolin.

Now then: "There is a polished, poetic plainness to some of Cormac McCarthy's prose in which his admirers might hear echoes of Flannery O'Connor but which usually leaves me exasperated," begins Kenneth R Morefield at Looking Closer. He explains, and then: "One could, I think, rewrite the first two paragraphs of this review by crossing out 'Cormac McCarthy' and inserting 'the Coen brothers' and substituting Fargo (or O Brother, Where Art Thou) for No Country for Old Men." Goes on a bit more, and then: "Since I've no doubt offended the two groups most anxious to see the film, let me hasten to say it did work for me, if only just."

"No Country for Old Men is one of those movies I think provides a critical litmus test," proposes Jim Emerson. "You can quibble about it all you like, but if you don't get the artistry at work then, I submit, you don't get what movies are."

"The film is somber, austere, yet rich in feeling," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The Coens don't wink at you, but you know they're there and grooving on the barbed-wire witticisms and the actors' Weirdo Factor: [Tommy Lee] Jones's hangdog face; Woody Harrelson's doofus air of infallibility as a cowboy-hatted bounty hunter; and especially [Javier] Bardem's Prince Valiant haircut, basso-Lurch voice, and dark, freaky stare in the extended foreplay before his killings."

The "unsatisfyingly rapid narrative closure... may just be a sign that No Country is one of those totally involving stories that one just hates to see end," blogs the Austin Chronicle's Marjorie Baumgarten.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Goings on in Babelsberg.

Busy days for the studios that once saw the likes of Lang and Dietrich working here. Tom Tykwer has now begun shooting The International with Clive Owen, Naomi Watts and Armin Mueller-Stahl, reports the AP (in German).

Fatih Akin up following up his The Edge of Heaven (opening here in Germany on Thursday; it's Germany's pick for the Oscar race) with, would you believe, a Western, for which he's building a replica of Ellis Island in the studios (the story moves west after the immigrants arrive). The DPA (German Press Agency) reports.

And in Die Welt, Peter Zander's got a shamelessly speculative piece about what might happen when Nicole Kidman arrives in Babelsberg to begin work on Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. Tom Cruise, you see, will still be here, working on Valkyrie. Sheesh.

New York. NYFF.

"For the first time in a long while, the New York Film Festival, which opens this Friday, is truly a New York film festival," announces, yes, New York in a cover package fronted by Andrew Eccles's shot of Joel and Ethan Coen, Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson. Other New Yorkers in the NYFF lineup: "Peter Bogdanovich, Abel Ferrara, Murray Lerner, Sidney Lumet, Ira Sachs and Julian Schnabel. Filmmakers from Hollywood: one. You may not have noticed that you are living in a new heyday of New York film, but you are."

Bilge Ebiri's got a timeline, "A Short-Cuts History of New York and Film."

David Amsden takes a train ride with Anderson, entering "what those close to him affectionately refer to as 'Wes's world,' which resembles a vaudevillian family by way of Evelyn Waugh." As for The Darjeeling Limited, the opening night movie, David Edelstein finds it "hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained." He seems to prefer the short that precedes it, Hotel Chevalier. And just about everyone who's reviewed Darjeeling has remarked that it's a shame that that 13-minute short won't be shown in theaters as well. Turns out, as Peter Sanders reports in the Wall Street Journal, it'll be available for free via iTunes starting Wednesday. Via Jason Kottke, who comments: "Three words: Natalie Portman nude. Portman, Anderson, and Jason Schwartzman will be at the Apple Store in NYC to premiere the short. If you go, expect a freakin' mob scene of twee hipster horndogs."

Back to New York: David Edelstein recalls bouncing insights off the Coens; they came back as nothing. "Their cinematographer at the time, Barry Sonnenfeld, told me, 'Topics are incredibly unimportant to them - it's structure and style and words. If you ask them for their priorities, they'll tell you script, editing, coverage, and lighting.'"

Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh "are clearly aiming for something different from their parents' lives (she's the child of artists who split up as well): marriage as an idyllic, never-ending brainstorm among supportive equals." Emily Nussbaum probes.

"I think it's a great time right now for New York film, actually," Lumet tells Logan Hill.

John Homans: "Below us and slightly to the north is the meatpacking district, where Jack Schnabel, Julian's father, spent much of his working life. Jack died of prostate cancer in 2004 at the age of 92, and lived with Schnabel for the last year of his life. Schnabel drew heavily on that experience in making The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In one scene, Bauby's children play ball on the wide Normandy beach as he sits mute and bundled in a wheelchair, his face a fearsome Cubist mask. Another flashes back on a visit to his own invalid father, in which the younger shaved the older, as the older lectured him on his failed marriage. There's a disturbing physicality to these images, the forced intimacies that infirmity imposes on people."

Luis Buñuel Blog-a-Thon.

"Few filmmakers have held my attention, respect and admiration for as long or as deeply as Luis Buñuel," writes Flickhead, introducing Buñuelathon '07. "A surrealist, a wandering spirit, a cynic, a recovering Catholic... Buñuel used the cinema to explore these areas and took special delight in society's inexorable draw to the seven deadly sins—especially pride, lust and greed. Among the very few masters capable of channeling elevated social and cultural criticisms into popular cinema, he took aim at the whole of humanity, recognizing the folly of our desires."

In preparation for the linkage that'll be appearing later in the day, Flickhead reviews the odd double feature recently released on DVD, Gran Casino and The Young One; posts a nice shot with Oscar and another with a few friends; a shot snapped by Dalí; a huge poster gallery; and a sort of bibliography.

Toronto. Chop Shop.

"From the moment I saw Ramin Bahrani's Man Push Cart at Sundance a couple years ago, I knew I'd found a filmmaker I was going to like," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "I was disappointed it didn't do better off the fest circuit; it was one of the best independent films I saw that year, and I eagerly waited to see what Bahrani was going to do which his next film, and I'm pleased to be able to say that with Chop Shop, Bahrani has a solid follow-up." And she interviews Bahrani.

"Chop Shop is another film about making a hard living in New York City, and with more time to film and stunning performances by his very young actors, Bahrani has made an even more powerful film," writes Roger Ebert. "Now we have an American film with the raw power of City of God or Pixote, a film that does something unexpected, and inspired, and brave."

Updated through 9/26.

"I've written quite a bit about how much I loved Bahrani's debut feature, Man Push Cart," adds Jim Emerson, "from its opening shot to its final ingenious moment, and Chop Shop is a piece of filmmaking that is every bit as observant and assured."

"Though Chop Shop is an American film, it feels more like an Iranian movie or the Dardenne Brothers' Rosetta; Bahrani introduces something like a plot point in the late-going, but he mostly focuses, to riveting effect, on how his young hero hustles and claws through everyday life," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

ST VanAirsdale talks with Bahrani for the Reeler.

Update, 9/26: David Walsh talks with Bahrani for the WSWS.

Toronto and NYFF preview. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

"The best surprise here is a splendid comeback from 83-year-old Sidney Lumet, which will be even more surprising if you've seen anything he's made in the past decade," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is raggedly brilliant, sensationally acted, and Lumet's most vital work in 20 years or more."

Updated through 9/26.

"Both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are in fine form as brothers who attempt to knock off a mom-and-pop jewelry store that happens to be owned by their actual mom and pop," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "And also: Michael Shannon, last seen as the mentally disturbed stranger in Bug, has quickly risen to my shortlist of favorite character actors. Definitely someone to watch." Adds AV Club colleague Noel Murray: "[W]e don't watch crime stories to see the plot points fall into line, we watch them to see how people behave when they're misbehaving, and it's here that Before the Devil excels."

"Lumet shuttles back and forth in time, juggling narrative blocks in order to examine and re-examine each situation from various points of view," notes Karina Longworth. "The gimmick becomes somewhat tiresome as the film wears on. Paradoxically, though the repetition does offer Lumet and his actors the opportunity to really take each character apart, the chronological shuttling works as a distancing device, forever preventing any real audience engagement with the people on screen. Hoffman's performance could best be described as bloated (and not in a totally negative way), but Hawke, [Marisa] Tomei and Albert Finney are doing some really fascinating, nuanced work, and it's all just slightly diluted by Lumet's formal agitations." Also at the SpoutBlog, a clips of Lumet talking about "the rise of HD, why he thinks 'naturalistic photography' is an oxymoron, and anecdotes on the how the drawbacks of celluloid stifled both Dog Day Afternoon and John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy."

"Sidney Lumet's 45th film is a classical addition to his oeuvre," writes David Poland. "Lumet is no stranger to complex narrative, but here, in his 83rd year, he is playing with time sequencing to tell a story that is more complex than almost any that others proclaimed for the effort have tried, yet narratively clean as a whistle."

"If Lumet intended to make a tragedy or even an effective melodrama, he would have done well to expend just a little bit of empathy," suggests Jürgen Fauth. "Tragedy shows a good person who makes a bad choice, but Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a tale of just desserts. Though the ending is pitched at an intense level of drama, it doesn't register emotionally: the bastards had it coming anyway."

"Devil has a bare-bones speed and agility that recalls the director's groundbreaking work in early 1950s TV," writes the Boston Globe's Scott Heller. "An inside-the-park home-run for Lumet, who I hope has at least a few more movies in him."

"Despite unexpected pacing and awkward plot twists, Lumet's movie works so well because of his emphasis on domestic drama in the midst of pulp content; and expert acting from a nimble cast combine to make a forceful, haunting thriller," writes Stephen Garrettt at indieWIRE.

At the Reeler, Vadim Rizov gathers comments from Lumet's NYFF press conference following a screening of the film that is "for an hour, at least,... as strong as anything Lumet's done. The reasons have as much to do with the cast... as with Lumet's typically low-key approach, a reliance on non-flashy shots and unobtrusive edits that become compellingly bravura the more angles Lumet finds to shoot in claustrophobic situations."

Cameron French talks with Lumet for Reuters. Via Movie City News.

Deborah Solomon talks with Hawke for the New York Times Magazine.

Earlier: The first round of reviews hit about two weeks ago.

Updates, 9/24: "They get mean when they get old, these great directors," begins Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "Hitchcock made the merciless, despairing Frenzy at 73. Woody Allen wrote and directed the godless-universe tragedy Match Point at 70. And now 83-year-old Sidney Lumet damns us all with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. But just like Frenzy and Match Point, Lumet's crime saga pulsates with a sense of its creator's pure joy of filmmaking. 'Unimaginably pleasurable to make,' Orson Welles once told Peter Bogdanovich of the former's ecstatically grim Touch of Evil. Well, even as the bodies slump over bleeding in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, you can almost hear Lumet giggling."

Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore of IFC News discuss the film, Lumet and Hoffman.

Updates, 9/25: "It's all dark, dreary and pretty captivating until the blood-soaked conclusion, in which the story goes off the deep end and takes any sense of engagement we had with it," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Jeffrey Wells takes a close look at the new poster.

Update, 9/26: "It's a straight-up melodrama at its best, which, as Lumet stated at the post-screening press conference, is when the story defines the characters," writes Erik Davis at Cinematical. "The script (written by playwright Kelly Masterson) in other hands, with other actors involved, most likely would have churned out a decent, but easily forgettable drama. But with Lumet, and this cast, we get a film that's exceptional in every way - from its execution to its acting - and is sure to go down as one of Lumet's best in years."

Toronto. Angel.

"About half the films in [François] Ozon's prolific career... pay tongue-in-cheek, feature-length homage to other movies: See the Sea to Hitchcock, Sitcom to John Waters, Water Drops on Burning Rocks to Fassbinder, 8 Women to Technicolor musicals, etc," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "His latest, Angel, is a cheeky nod to the lavish David O Selznick productions of the 30s and 40s - rich in color and period decadence, swelling with florid melodrama and romance, and concerned with the dreams of a plucky ingénue who goes from rags to riches."

"The story of an absolutely tasteless wretch of a provincial teenager named Angel Deverell (a very over-the-top performance by a terrific Romola Garai) whose solipsism allows her to create drivel-laden novels which sell like wildfire in turn of the century England, Angel is a movie that is as of our cultural moment as any of the myriad of finger-wagging films about Iraq playing here," wrote Tom Hall from Toronto. "The film is a pastiche of every melodramatic style imaginable, from the trash of Victorian era theater and literature through mid-century 'women's cinema' to early 21st century celebrity meltdowns while Ozon's lush visualizations and cribbing of everything from Douglas Sirk to Merchant Ivory create a hilarious piss-take on the melodramatic form."

"Angel feels less self-conscious than Todd Haynes's faux-Sirk Far From Heaven; thanks to Romola Garai, it is also more engaging," writes Jürgen Fauth.

"The unexpected pleasure of the film is that you come out loving Angel - and wanting to strangle her at the same time," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

Toronto and NYFF preview. Redacted.

"What [Brian] De Palma may be trying to do here - as he did in his greatest picture, the 1989 Casualties of War to which Redacted is something of a companion piece - is sharpen our moral sense into something more personal, and more cutting," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "He wants us to be informed, but he also wants to make us feel more. Compassion is worth nothing if it doesn't bleed. Over and over again in his movies, De Palma has revisited one crucial question (a question that also obsessed Alfred Hitchcock before him): What happens when human beings fail to act? Redacted is a troubling picture about the price we pay for standing still, and for not standing up."

"[T]he connection to his Vietnam movie Casualties of War seems obvious," writes Jim Emerson. "But the stronger connection, I think, is to Greetings (1968) and Hi Mom! (1970), two then-counter-cultural comedies, more influenced by Godard than Hitchcock, that toyed with our perceptions of Vietnam, terrorism, law and order, Black Power and other issues of the day as they were filtered through the mass media.... I don't know when De Palma has ever been accused of being sincere, but Redacted feels to me as close as he's ever come."

"The movie is too interesting to dismiss but too muddled to take seriously - which, come to think of it, is my reaction to virtually every De Palma movie," blogs Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out Chicago. "At least there aren’t any obvious cribs from Vertigo."

"[I]ts weaknesses should be fatal, but they're not," blogs Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The version of Redacted that plays back in one's head resonates more than the movie that actually screened has any right to."

"De Palma wants to rankle audiences, especially those who may enter the theater anticipating some genteel, hand-wringing, good-little-liberal lament about the physical and emotional scars of wartime," blogs the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "Redacted is unapologetically angry and direct, and De Palma does very little to ease you into the movie. Some have suggested that this is evidence of haphazard construction, or shoddy acting by the film's largely unknown cast, but it is the entire point of Redacted that we are observing crude, found video objects, and that their subjects, aware of the camera that's recording them, assume the awkwardly self-conscious stances of people in vacation pictures and birthday-party videos."

"The tricky thing about Redacted is that a lot of what's wrong with it is, I'm convinced, intentional," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "If ever a war could use some movie-movie tricks to help audiences feel the terror, it's this one. I respect what DePalma's trying to do, but as much as it hurts to say, I just don't think it works." For his colleague Scott Tobias, all in all the film "sounds like a better idea than it turns out to be."

"In certain respects, Redacted has more in common with George Romero's Diary of the Dead than it does with the recent onslaught of documentaries harrowing the war in Iraq," writes Michael Guillén. "Both parry and thrust at the many-headed Hydra known as mainstream media coverage to demonstrate how - as soon as one lie is revealed - five more spring into place to control the spin, let alone the masses. Both turn to the democratized press of blogs and YouTube footage to texturally diversify reportage from the front. How I wish I could have sat down with Romero and DePalma at one of Toronto's ubiquitous Second Cup cafes with a videocam and a laptop to edit together today's version of the truth. Wouldn't that have been a truth and a half?"

"Redacted felt like an episode of America's Most Wanted-style cornball re-enactments," writes Mike White. "The film was like making an after school special on the Mai Lai massacre with a handful of C-List actors, a camcorder, and a script banged out the night before."

"This crap shared the Venice prize with I'm Not There. So much for the validity of juries," grumbles Howard Feinstein at Filmmaker.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Toronto. Frontiere(s).

"Yes, Xavier Gens is treading very familiar ground with Frontiere(s), his debut film, and yes, just about all of this has been done before, but by god there's just so much of it here and all of it executed (pun intended) so well that the film defies any horror fans to not have a good time with it," writes Todd Brown at Twitch.

"The characters are exhaustingly unlikable from minute one and the handheld camera work is enough to make any mumblecore filmmaker cringe," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE. "Frontier(s) is a violent jolt to the senses, not because of its unpolished grotesque imagery which saves the film in the campy final act that plays like the dying breath of a good premise, but because of its anti-human disconnect."

"Plot-wise, it's all very familiar and frequently quite predictable - but boring? Absolutely not," declares Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

"To say that this French thriller is derivative would be a compliment," writes Mike White.

Toronto. The Band's Visit.

"Israeli writer director Eran Kolirin's first feature The Band's Visit, a deceptively modest comedy about an Egyptian police orchestra's trip to Israel, comes as sweet balm in a season of terrorist thrillers and vigilante splatter-pics," blogs the LA Weekly's Ella Taylor. "Played mostly by Palestinian actors, the band gets misdirected to a hole-in-the-wall development town where they're hosted in with varying degrees of good grace by local Sephardi families, among them a sexy but lonely free spirit beautifully rendered by Ronit Elkabetz, whom you may remember from another excellent Israeli comedy, Late Marriage. With its arresting powder-blue palette and gentle wit, this goofy charmer, which Sony Pictures Classics will release in 2008, offers the sweet credo that the road to conciliation begins not with politicking but with conversation, tea and sympathy, and a little bit of cross-cultural nookie."

Updated through 9/24.

"The Band's Visit may be a bit too small-scale to flourish outside of the rarefied atmosphere of a film festival or an art house," writes James Rocchi, but it "plays out remarkably like the event it depicts: Unexpected, but more than welcome."

"[H]umorous, touching in spots, and completely understated," blogs the Enzian Theater's Matthew Curtis.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update, 9/24: "The Band's Visit has just swept Israel's Ophir Awards (the equivalent to that country's Oscars) so this means it should be Israel's submission for the Academy Award's Best Foreign Language Film," notes Nikki Finke. "But even with the Kodak Theater ceremony still 5 months away, there's already controversy in this category. Rivals are claiming that the political movie, about an Egyptian police band that mistakenly ends up stranded overnight in a small Israeli town, has more than 50% English dialogue and therefore must be ruled ineligible for the nomination."

Toronto. Chronicle of a Summer.

"As someone with a special interest in documentaries, I found it thrilling to finally be able to see Jean Rouch's highly influential 1961 account of Parisian life where the question 'Are you happy?' is posed to random passers-by," writes Doug Cummings. "Despite the years, [Chronicle of a Summer] has aged very well, and the playful, inquisitive energy behind its observations and observations of its observations is positively infectious."

"It's more of a film to admire than to really love - but the film does manage to transcend its dusty historical importance through the reverberations, for better or worse, that we are still being felt today," writes Jesse Ataide at DVD Verdict.

Toronto and NYFF preview. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

"Just like The Death of Mr Lazarescu and 12:08 East of Bucharest, [Cristian] Mungiu's debut feature [4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days] is first and foremost a performance piece," writes Noel Murray. Also at the AV Club: "4 Months unfolds like one of those street-level Dardenne Brothers movies (Rosetta, L'Enfant, etc)," writes Scott Tobias. "But just as often, Mungiu keeps the camera running for much longer than other directors would, usually in tight, constricting spaces where the audience can feel the characters' anxiety grow deeper."

Updated through 9/27.

Mungiu "simply puts his camera in exactly the right spot and lets the scene unfold," writes J Robert Parks. He, too, is reminded of the Dardennes, "though stripped down even more to the basics of character and dialogue. But what dialogue! Exploring the themes of trust, responsibility, friendship, truth, and sex, the film is rich, dense, and compelling."

The film, "set in 1987 and centering on the efforts of two female students to procure a pregnancy termination for one of them, is a remarkably engrossing and thoughtful picture, beautifully rendered in an artful mode of realism," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"The work is steady, controlled, disciplined," writes Jim Emerson. "And, like several impressive films at this year's Toronto Film Festival (including No Country for Old Men, Chop Shop, Persepolis, Paranoid Park) it chooses just the right moment to cut to black at the end. (That's a favorite device of mine, and it seems to be quite popular about now.)"

"Mungiu's work as the film's screenwriter and director is without fault; he trusts his audience enough to let them work out lapses on their own," writes Ali at Cutting Room Reviews. "Brimming over with sympathetic (but not saintly) characters and a demandingly entangled (but not overstuffed) narrative, Cristi Mungiu's acclaimed film is a rarity."

Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with Mungiu.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update, 9/27: "Masters of horror should marvel at Mungiu's masterful deployment of red herrings," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Like Death of Mr Lazarescu, which is only outwardly about the difficulties of securing health care in modern-day Romania, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an allegory that speaks to the struggles of freedom fighters gripped by the terror tactics of a political machine."

Toronto. Vexille.

Vexille, "the latest by Japanese filmmaker Fumihiko Sori (Ping Pong) is cleanly-plotted and enjoyably accessible. Relatively speaking, anyway... Plus it has some of the most eye-popping animation this side of Miyazaki," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

"The animators had their fun, but the downtime between cool gadgets and loud chase sequences holds very little weight," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE.

"Vexille is gorgeous and stunning," writes Mack at Twitch. "Where Vexille, and ultimately Japan, is falling short is in the stories. We're still incorporating the same archetypes and plot devices we've seen in countless other animated films and series coming out of Japan."

"Haven't we all been on this mission before - and not only in anime?" asks Mark Schilling in the Japan Times. "This familiarity wouldn't matter so much if the film's execution was more imaginative, but the various plot tropes (two tough chicks put aside rivalry for a higher cause, etc) feel mechanical."

Toronto. Atonement.

"Big, classy, Oscar-bait World War II dramas don't really get much better than Atonement," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

"A sweeping historical drama in the English Patient/Cold Mountain mode - no small coincidence that Anthony Minghella, the director of those two films, makes a cameo appearance - Atonement offers up the stock romantic majesty of lovers kept apart by war and treachery, yet it ultimately plays more to the head than the heart," writes Scott Tobias.

Also at the AV Club: "It's surprising to me that four of my five favorite movies at TIFF so far have been literary adaptations, given that good books so rarely translate into good movies," wrote Noel Murray about halfway through the fest. "But No Country for Old Men, Persepolis, Into the Wild and now Atonement all translate their source material in ways that retain what made them special in the first place, while adding something uniquely cinematic."

Updated through 9/26.

"Set on a beautiful country estate, the movie's first half is similar to director Joe Wright's earlier film, the amazing adaptation of Pride and Prejudice," writes J Robert Parks. "It's both wonderfully funny and romantic. But when the movie shifts to World War II and specifically the area around Dunkirk, Wright is on less surer footing and it shows. I was thinking during the movie's opening scenes how much I was enjoying it and that I was wondering when Wright would spread his wings and try something different. But after watching the second half, I'm not sure that's such a good idea."

"Atonement is an intelligently, evocatively directed movie in every aspect, from the adoring ways in which the romantic leads are photographed (who would have thought James McAvoy could be filmed as gorgeously and lovingly as Keira Knightley?), to a long take along the shore at Dunkirk that is one of the most complex and emotionally shattering single shots in movies," writes Jim Emerson.

"Chalk up another stunning achievement for Joe Wright, who must now be recognized as an auteur with few equals of his age and experience in world cinema," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

"The story's emotional gravity is magnetic - and you just know that once the big misunderstanding that fuels the rest of the picture happens, that it will all play out tragically," writes Matt Mazur at PopMatters. "Wright has masterfully set the mood."

Ryan Stewart interviews Wright for Cinematical.

For Cinematical, Ryan Stewart interviews Christopher Hampton.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice and Atonement's UK run.

Update, 9/26: "James McAvoy will break out big time with Atonement," predicts Variety's Anne Thompson. "That's because this is his first role in the classic romantic tragic leading man mold. Think Warren Beatty in Reds, Omar Sharif in Dr Zhivago, Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic." And she points to Rachel Cooke's interview for Esquire.

Toronto. Dai Nipponjin.

Scott Weinberg at Cinematical on Dai Nipponjin: "I could rattle off the film's catalog of lunacy (and I will) but it still wouldn't adequately explain how outlandishly, amusingly weird the thing is. Definitely one of those 'not far all tastes' imports, but if you're a fan of Japanese action flicks, monster movies and strangely amusing mockumentaries... then this is one you're going to want to search for."

"An attempt to be a This is Spinal Tap for the kaiju crowd, this mockumentary directed by and starring Hitoshi Matsumoto posits what life might be like for a hapless superhero in a world where giant monsters have lost their appeal," writes Mike White. "The film lags on occasion - feeling like the jokes are too far between - and, sadly, it feels like Matsumoto simply ran out of ideas before the film comes to its bizarre conclusion."

Updated through 9/24.

"Matumoto has, quite possibly, the most incredibly deadpan approach to absurdist humor in the history of the world," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Nobody cracks a smile. Nobody winks at the camera. The whole thing plays out with a sort of ho-hum, another day at the office vibe that heightens the ridiculousness of it all to even further heights."

"In typical TIFF Midnight Madness fashion, this Japanese superhero mockumentary takes a winning premise and a handful of great scenes and almost squanders them with its fitful pacing and varying depth," finds Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"[T]here's no earthly reason that a lark like this should stretch to two hours," writes Steve at the Film Experience.

Update, 9/24: "Much of the film felt like it was told very softly at an almost whisper," writes Blake Ethridge.

Toronto. The Virgin Spring.

"If asked to choose the highlight of the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival, despite the plethora of exciting new work I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything finer than the screening of a 47-year-old film presided over by a 78-year-old actor," writes José Teodoro at Stop Smiling.

"At the final Friday night screening of The Virgin Spring, the effortlessly charismatic Max Von Sydow discussed at length his decades-spanning collaboration and friendship with the late Ingmar Bergman, and had the by-then film-weary audience engrossed in a fluid, open dialogue about lives fully given over to filmmaking of the most passionate, personal sort. Rather than suffuse the festival air with twilight nostalgia, the event was genuinely inspirational, not the least because Von Sydow himself is very much alive and well and working - with two new films screening that week."

"Dramatically shot by Sven Nykvist (it was the first of many collaborations between director and cinematographer), the film is certainly not among my favorite Bergman films, but contains a lot of moving, quintessential Bergman moments, particularly von Sydow's harrowing spiritual (and physical) breakdown," writes Jesse Ataide at DVD Verdict.

Earlier: Ingmar Bergman, 1918 - 2007.

Shorts, 9/23.

"Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer - sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly - in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen," writes John Wray in a profile of Michael Haneke for the New York Times Magazine. "This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema's most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month.... Funny Games is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film's story in the slightest." In an accompanying audio slide show, AO Scott talks about Haneke's "sado-masochistic approach to filmmaking."

In the paper:

• Dave Itzkoff traces Bill Hader's rapid rise from "a backyard in Van Nuys" to SNL and Superbad.

• Anthony Minghella has just directed an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's novel The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Michael Wines has visited the set and talked with him and the lead, Jill Scott, about her role: "'You have to love Botswana, because that's how she feels,' she continued. 'And if you see it more than one day, you'll see why she loves it.'"

• Dan Barry meets Jeff Frank, who's been running the Drexel movie theater in Bexley, Ohio for 26 years. In an accompanying audio slide show, we see how other theaters have been turned into storefronts or medical centers.

And in the Book Review, Dale Peck looks back on SE Hinton's The Outsiders, 40 years on.

"Initially I was dead against visiting the set of Control, the film about my father's life directed by photographer Anton Corbijn," writes Natalie Curtis in the Guardian. But she did go, met Sam Riley, who plays her father, and hung with Samantha Morton, who plays her mother, and stayed around long enough to be an extra in a few scenes, too. Related: Brian Brooks profiles Riley for indieWIRE and Craig Mclean interviews Morton for the Independent.

"After the worst summer of movies on record, in which my usually enjoyable stint standing in for Philip French as this paper's film columnist had seen me groaning through Hostel Part II, Shrek the Third, Die Hard 4.0 and other such bores, the Observer demanded that I finally put my anti-television snobbery to the test," writes Mark Kermode. "The mission: to shut me in a room with a truckload of DVD box sets representing 'a cross-section of modern TV' and see whether, at the end, I could still sensibly claim that cinema had the upper hand."

Also:

• Caspar Llewellyn Smith introduces an annotated list of the ten best concert movies. Related online viewing: trailers for the current batch of musician biopics and docs from Kimberly Lindbergs at Cinebeats.

• Peter Conrad profiles Tom Hardy.

• Eva Wiseman reviews Helen Mirren's In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures.

• More books: Kate Kellaway: Roddy Doyle's The Deportees and Wilderness, the first a collection of stories for adults, the second a novel aimed at children, show him writing at the top of his form." For Will Hutton, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is "a lost opportunity." Francesca Segal on The Late Hector Kipling: "[David] Thewlis has taken the turn-of-the-millennium London art scene and eviscerated it and the resulting gore makes for wonderful entertainment."

• Jay Rayner recommends Ratatouille, "the first big-budget Hollywood picture to put the food right at the heart of the action and to give a realistic portrait of what stove life is like."

For the Lumière Reader, Alexander Bisley talks with Noland Walker about his documentary, Citizen King: "People forget that [Martin Luther King] was actually very controversial and unpopular at the time of his death. And the ideas and reasons why were important to get on film, and to get a record from the people who participated at the time, many of whom are still alive today."

Alternet's Don Hazen introduces an excerpt from Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity: "In his new book, Robert Jensen forces the reader to face the music about the effects of a porn industry gone gonzo and the need to reassess the trappings of masculinity as the source of increased violence against and degradation of women."

Another excerpt: Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture: "Movie-making and war-making would now be intertwined. The location of this production would be Iraq. The director would be the Pentagon. The production staff would be situated at that quarter-million-dollar set for war briefings at centcom headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and Americans would see our troops advance in triumph just the way they were supposed to, just the way they had on-screen all those long, glorious years ago."

Also at Alternet: "As they pack into theaters to watch the blockbuster Resident Evil: Extinction this weekend, moviegoers may first want to play one of the many blockbuster video games on which the film is based," suggests Roberto Lovato. "[I]n what looks like it could be a training video for a white supremacist race war or another US military adventure in one of the increasing numbers of deserts on the planet, players of the soon-to-be-released Resident Evil 5 video game are placed in what could be an African country or Haiti as they blow up armies of black zombies." Related: Rob Humanick at Slant on the movie.

Blog-a-Thon reminders: Buñuel at Flickhead's place, starting tomorrow; Film + Faith at Strange Culture, November 7 through 9; It's a Wonderful Life at Cinemathematics, December 16.

Fests and events, 9/23.

"For 12 days Almost Cinema 07 at the Vooruit Arts Centre, in Ghent, celebrates the variety of contemporary art that can rightfully be called cinema-esque - if not cinematic. A preview from William Hanley at Rhizome. October 9 through 20.

"I can't think of a recent NYC retrospective with a higher concentration of great cinema than this one." Dan Sallitt recommends Arnaud Desplechin in Focus, presented at the Museum of the Moving Image with Cahiers du cinéma from October 6 through 14.

"The movie has its historical significance as the first great popular success of the freer-form style of filmmaking that came to be identified with the French New Wave, but if you go to Film Forum in Manhattan, where, starting Wednesday, a nice fresh print of The 400 Blows will be showing, you probably won't get the unpleasant sensation of having wandered into an old argument between spluttering, red-faced cinéastes," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "Although a certain polemical ardor may have helped stoke Mr Truffaut's creative fires while he was making his debut film (he was very French), the smoke from those life-and-death aesthetic debates has long since cleared. What remains is a lyrical and surprisingly tough-minded little picture about a 12-year-old troublemaker named Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), as seen by a sympathetic and slightly more seasoned troublemaker named François Truffaut."

"The Artists Television Access center in San Francisco is hosting their 2nd annual blowout festival next month, Oct 10 - 12, showcasing 26 short works by a variety of underground and independent filmmakers," notes Mike Everleth at Bad Lit.

"As the Madcat Women's International Film Festival heads into its final stretch this coming week in San Francisco, SF360.org felt it was important to catch up with its chief curator, Ariella Ben-Dov," writes Susan Gerhard.

Acquarello: "Notes on the Panel Discussion on Turkish Cinema with Zeki Demirkubuz." Also: "Block-C is a flawed, yet seminal film in Demirkubuz's body of work - a complex character study that provides the psychological and visceral paradigm for his subsequent films."

"German Currents: New Films From Germany, which opens Friday at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theatre, offers six recent features and one documentary from some of the country's established and new voices," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. Runs all weekend.

Fantastic Fest. Southland Tales.

"The first of this year's secret screenings was unveiled tonight with Richard Kelly's long delayed follow up to Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, playing to a packed house with Kelly himself in the audience," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "It is overly ambitious, incredibly dense with ideas often obscured by stylish diversions," but "for those who make it through the initial overload of information and can latch on to Kelly's vibe, Southland is also a dazzlingly smart, funny, and engaging work, one that fuses political fears with apocalyptic religiosity and techno-dread and wraps it all in a glossy, colorful package. Southland Tales is far from the mess it has been made out to be, a work that rewards as much as it challenges and succeeds in finding the human, emotional core lurking beneath all of its high concepts."

Updated through 9/25.

"Richard Kelly has set out to create a film of the same ilk as Candy or Slaughterhouse 5 or the original Casino Royale," proposes Harry Knowles at AICN. "These have always been controversial films for a very niche crowd. Films so packed with detail and nuance that to the average viewer it becomes simply a mess, but upon further inspection, you can find a method to the madness."

Jette Kernion has "no idea how I'm going to review this movie, it's so strange."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes 06.

For more updates on Fantastic Fest, check the blog at the site itself; and a few notes here.

Updates: "A movie about (among other things) the end of the world, pop-culture depravity, revolution and interdimensional time travel, it was right at home at the fest," writes John DeFore at the Austin Film Blog. "The sci-fi-steeped audience was clearly delighted to see the film, even if they didn't always seem to connect with its brand of satire. (Dead silence greeted many of the movie's jokes.) Still, they stuck around to ask thoughtful questions of its director, including many that noted the thematic similarities between this and Donnie Darko. Kelly good-naturedly owned up to his proclivities, and promised 'no more movies about the apocalypse.'"

Online listening tip. Twitch's Todd Brown talks with Kelly.

Updates, 9/24: "Southland Tales managed to captivate and hold my attention despite the fact that I sometimes felt lost or confused," writes Jette Kernion at Cinematical. "It's not hard to see why it's often accused of being self-indulgent and messy. But I would rather see filmmakers (and studios) taking risks with films like this than have to sit through more Hollywood cookie-cutter sequels and remakes. Besides, I like a movie I can watch with a group of friends, then head off to a coffeehouse or bar and have an interesting discussion about what exactly happened and what it all meant. Southland Tales will have us debating through dinner, drinks and dessert... maybe for several meals."

It's "essentially Donnie Darko on a global scale with a really engaging post 9-11 discussion," writes Blake Ethridge.

Via Karina Longworth, Mike Curtis: "One wonders if the whole thing were just a huge joke on us the audience, the investors, Hollywood, and everyone else desperately watching to see how he'd follow up on Donnie Darko. A big 'Psych!' shout out to all of us - and we stand here confused - was this a joke, a mess, or just a failed multi-layered thingamabob?... And it most definitely isn't worth taking the time to make sense of - life is too short - even though there is a ton of stuff in there."

Update, 9/25: Online viewing tip. Matt Dentler points to the Drafthouse's talk with Kelly.

Marcel Marceau, 1923 - 2007.

Marcel Marceau, the world's best-known mime artist who for decades moved audiences around the world without uttering a single word, has died aged 84.... Marceau traced his ancestry back through US silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of the Commedia dell'Arte, a centuries-old European tradition, and to the stylized gestures of Chinese opera and the Noh plays of Japan.

Francois Murphy, Reuters.

Ed Champion has a bit of online viewing; If Charlie Parker... tips its hat. The Wikipedia entry.

Toronto. The Duchess of Langeais.

"So it has finally come to this, Jacques Rivette adapting a Balzac novel about the Thirteen, the mysterious group of do-gooding conspirators that a May '68 cabal tried and failed to emulate in the imagined pre-history of Rivette's magnum opus Out 1 and whose existence would obsesses Jean-Pierre Léaud's character in that film as representative of a secret, hidden order behind things," writes Daniel Kasman. "In contrast to that film's sprawling ambitions and literal evocation of the conspiracy, Don't Touch the Axe [Ne touchez pas la hache, also appearing in Toronto as The Duchess of Langeais] seems downright quaint and cozy, a chambered period piece about the sexless courtship between the Duchess Antoinette de Langeais (Jeanne Balibar) and General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), the latter of who is a member of the secret cabal in Balzac's book but whose association is not uttered in the film." And his verdict: B+.

Updated through 9/23.

"One of the best films I saw at Toronto - which showed in Berlin and is inexplicably missing from New York - is Jacques Rivette's eccentric romance," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The tilt of the duchess's head suggests a thousand and one nightly intrigues; the ravaged contours of the general's face invoke other, more distant torments, while Mr Rivette's direction affirms that he remains at the height of his artistic powers."

"I found Rivette's film a masterful, multilayered, sometimes enigmatic work of dark irony, an assured tragicomedy of manners and more," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Rivette's camera is as sure and engrossing as it's ever been, and Depardieu and Balibar give deeply palpable performances."

"[T]he film is constructed as a dazzling array of dances, literal and figurative, in which the man and woman conduct an elaborate pas de deux of flirtation, gamesmanship and erotic possession," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "Rivette's lighting and camerawork is typically severe and exquisite; the storytelling is also hypnotic, using interpolated material from the novel in the form of intertitles that function as literary jump cuts, exploding time and space."

Update, 9/23: "[T]he film is a perfectly timed and highly nuanced evocation of Balzac's romantic tragedy cum secret society thriller rumination on the sexes; why it has received negative reviews elsewhere is beyond me," writes Doug Cummings. "The adaptation itself virtually transcribes Balzac's prose paragraph by paragraph, taking great care to accentuate the author's attention to physical detail, 19th century social mores, and shifting emotional registers.... It may not showcase the experimental Rivette we all know and love, but that merely accentuates the diversity of his talent."

"[T]his was the film that baffled me the most out of all of the films that I saw at TIFF," writes Jesse Ataide at DVD Verdict. "Not because it's a difficult or extremely complex film, but because I was completely at a loss as to why I liked it so much. But some time for reflection and a really insightful article in the last issue of Film Comment (currently is not available online) helped me to realize that a large part of what makes Rivette's film so fascinating is how he dissects and depicts the mechanics of performance and theatricality, but instead of bracketing it in the form of the theater-within-a-film that define much of his most famous work, he strips away the framing device and lets the 'play' perform as the film itself."

Venice, Toronto and NYFF preview. Useless.

"Jia Zhang-ke's latest, Useless, is an odd one," writes Darren Hughes. "Like last year's documentary, Dong, Useless is a portrait of an artist, though in this case Jia is less concerned with fashion designer Ma Ke, specifically, than with what she represents to China's leap into consumerism.... [I]t's the finer points - the visual echoes that reverberate throughout the film, the ironies and ambivalences - that make the film so fascinating."

Updated through 9/23.

Jia "uproots the very issue of individuality and personal expression and cautions against larger dehumanization of mass production," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "In weighing the physical and natural deterioration of China's resources, Useless is a revealing and frightening portrait of industrialization. It also proved that whether working in nonfiction or fiction, Jia is one of the world's essential filmmakers. He proves that against all odds, his brand of cinema must not only exist though flourish, by whatever means necessary."

"Though at times painfully slow and fairly loosely cut together (in what may have been a bit of a rush job to meet the Venice deadline [where it won the Horizons documentary prize]), Useless is however superbly shot by Jia's regular cameraman Yu Likwai (a film director in his own right) and by Jia himself," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "Jia's film looks ultimately as a sort of impressionistic creation, which needs to be approached like a large painting whose various components are to be gazed upon at leisure."

"Useless... was one of my most anticipated films of the fest, given his triumph last year with Still Life and Dong," writes J Robert Parks. "And there are flashes of brilliance in his latest documentary.... Another six months of filming and hour of film could've created another masterpiece."

Updates, 9/23: "Like Jia's previous documentary on an artistic persona, Dong, it's tempting to read his juxtapositions as critique, but I'm not so sure that's what he has in mind," writes Doug Cummings. "Instead, he seems interested in supplying viewers with ideas and contrasts and entrusting them with the task of interpretation and judgment. It's a free flowing, organic investigation of the form and function of clothes in China today, and a work of tantalizing, lingering complexity."

"With Useless, Jia's approach to his social agenda achieves new levels of dexterity, being less obtrusive in announcing its intentions than in Unknown Pleasures or The World," writes Kevin Lee at Slant. "Light on its feet without being lightweight, Useless is a shape-shifting work that overturns expectations at every turn and leaves behind an open-ended consideration of value - of clothing, of human labor, of human life."

Toronto. Disengagement.

"Juliette Binoche, who is battling Nicole Kidman in the race to see who can do more work with the world's artiest, most intellectual filmmakers, stars as an Israeli-born woman in Paris who returns to the country of her birth to find the daughter she gave up for adoption 20 years before," writes Howard Feinstein, reviewing Amos Gitai's Disengagement for Filmmaker. "Being an Oscar winner and therefore valued prop, Binoche wanders through an Orthodox settlement, even among praying men in a synagogue for no discernible reason, and it is clear from reaction shots in several scenes that she hasn't a clue what people addressing her in Hebrew or Arabic are saying. These misfires and Gitai's usual pretense irritate."

Binoche is "fantastic in Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and she's the only reason to watch Amos Gitai's Disengagement," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "The Israeli-born, French-based Gitai has talent and verve, but his best films (Kadosh, Kippur) are very specific and precise. Of late, he's been fascinated by the issue of Israel's existence, as a moral and spiritual issue.... The movie's a train wreck, but you can't take your eyes off of [Binoche]."

Karl Rozemeyer has a long talk with Binoche for Premiere.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Toronto. Nightwatching.

Hello, distributors: Stroke while the brush is wet. With The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art open through January 6, Rembrandt is very much on our minds. See, for example, Holland Carter's personal tour in the New York Times, alongside an audio tour, a note on New York's "other rich holdings in Dutch 17th-century art, some on permanent view, some not," and a reading list. Then there's Julian Bell's piece in the new issue of the New York Review of Books on the exhibition catalogue, Gary Schwartz's The Rembrandt Book and Michael Taylor's Rembrandt's Nose: Of Flesh and Spirit in the Master's Portraits.

How about a little synergistic action, distributors (or, for that matter, NYFF programmers)? Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching has just added a few more favorable notices to the generally thumbs-up reviews from Venice.

"[I]t was with enormous trepidation that I decided to give Greenaway another chance with Nightwatching," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Finally, finally, finally, here's a biopic about an artist that actually reflects in a substantive way about his art! For that, and [Martin] Freeman's surprisingly robust performance, I'll give it a pass."

"A welcome return to form for a man who seemed hopelessly mired in the formalism of multi-screen, hyper-texted images, Nightwatching has a surprisingly conventional narrative that concentrates on Rembrant's heartbreaking devotion to his wife - and yet never lacks for the thematic complexity of the artistic process that the eminently theatrical and wildly cinematic director's best films exemplify," writes Stephen Garrett for indieWIRE.

"The staging is both highly theatrical - like much of Greenaway's work - but also thoroughly cinematic," writes Aaron Dobbs. "His storytelling may still lead to some moments of confusion, but the overall experience is fairly breathtaking."

Toronto. Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who.

"Paul Crowder and Murray Lerner have packed 40 years of history into two hours and created the definitive historical archive of The Who, arguably one of the greatest rock bands there ever was, is and forever will be," writes Mack at Twitch.

"Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who features a wealth of archival footage and snappy interviews with the surviving bandmates and shows how a bunch of working-class lads can inspire each other to transcend enduring rock anthems and create the high pantheon category of rock opera," writes Stephen Garrettt at indieWIRE.

November 6 sees the DVD release, but not just any DVD release, evidently. The doc itself is two hours long; an accompanying disc runs another two hours. Amazing Journey: Six Quick Ones features just that: four shorts on each of the band members; another on the Mod and Pop Art visual history of the band; and a sixth, Who's Back, shot by DA Pennebaker, captures a 2003 recording session.

Toronto and NYFF preview. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

"A textbook example of a director prizing himself over his material, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly finds its true story about paralyzed Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby hopelessly smudged with artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel's fingerprints," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "It's Johnny Got His Gun (or, at least, the portions used in Metallica's 'One' video) via My Left Foot, stylistically Miramax-ized to within an inch of its life."

Updated through 9/27.

"Julian Schnabel's third feature is an almost excessively beautiful aestheticization of misery," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "[T]he film is strikingly painterly in a way that Schnabel's actual paintings often aren't."

"This was the most purely emotional experience I had at the festival, and it makes me think the movies rather than art may be Schnabel's enduring legacy," writes the Boston Globe's Scott Heller.

"What makes The Diving Bell and The Butterfly unique is that Schnabel has taken an idea that, while perfect for literature, seems antithetical to the cinema and turned it into a thing of absolute beauty," writes Tom Hall. "The story of an interior life, forged by a terrible medical condition, that is essentially an act of self-reinvention."

At the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore finds it "all bittersweet enough to be bearable."

ST VanAirsdale catches Schnabel's appearance at a pre-New York Film Festival press conference.

In Esquire, Julian Schabel sings praises of Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Seigner and Marie-Josée Croze.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update, 9/24: "The imaginative promiscuity in Schnabel's paintings that has so galled critics has here found a context to which it is perfectly suited," writes John Homans in a profile of Schnabel for New York.

Update, 9/27: Nathaniel R: "12 Things I Learned (or was reminded of but had forgotten) While Listening to Julian Schnabel at the Press Conference and Watching His New Film The Diving Bell and Butterfly (and how I feel about those things I learned and remembered)."

Toronto. Munyurangabo.

"[Robert] Koehler's Variety review penned from Cannes motivated me to catch Munyurangabo at its sole Toronto International P&I screening. Koehler proclaims that Munyurangabo is the flat-out 'discovery of this year's Un Certain Regard batch' and 'is - by several light years - the finest and truest film yet on the moral and emotional repercussions of the 15-year-old genocide that wracked Rwanda.' I couldn't agree more," writes Michael Guillén, who then interviews the director and screenwriter Samuel Anderson at the Evening Class.

"To this point in the festival, my favorite of the entire week has been Munyurangabo, which more than lives up to the weighty expectations I had for it," wrote Tom Hall mid-fest. "Lee Issac Chung has done something absolutely remarkable, creating a moving, powerful film about the Rwandan genocide that combines hope and reconciliation with a visual and narrative style that wouldn't be out of place in George Washington; It's an African film that doesn't feel like an 'African film,' a hybrid of styles (American independent film aesthetic and an African storytelling sensibility) that against all odds works magically."

"Unlike Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April, Munyurangabo plays out the horrendous conflict (Hutus massacred Tutsis and moderate Hutus) on an intimate scale, without the foreign stars the other films found de rigeuer," writes Howard Feinstein for Filmmaker. His verdict: "astonishing."

Shorts, 9/21.

Michael Atkinson Flickipedia: Perfect Films for Every Occasion, Holiday, Mood, Ordeal and Whim "is not a crazy, sophisticated filmhead enterprise," writes co-author Michael Atkinson. "It is instead something devised for the average filmgoer... Hardcore cine-nuts can take no prisoners in their love for Godard and Hou and Antonioni and their disdain for anyone who'd pass up a chance to see Out 1 and would instead attend their child's soccer game or go fishing or read poetry. This book is not for them (my next book, Exile Cinema: Filmmakers At Work Beyond Hollywood, coming in 2008 from SUNY Press, kinda is). Flickipedia is about movies and life - how they intersect, interact, cross-pollinate."

Belá Tarr couldn't stay as long in Chicago as originally planned but a discussion of his work at Facets Multimedia carried on without him last weekend. Besides the audience, participants were Facets' Susan Doll, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Scott Foundas and David Borwell, who writes, "I do agree with my fellow panelists that the later films have a significantly different look and feel, and it's on them that Tarr's place in world film history will chiefly rest. As I indicated at the end of Figures Traced in Light, he stands out as a distinctive creator in a contemporary tradition of ensemble staging. Like Tarkovsky, he shifts our attention from human action toward the touch and smells of the physical world. Like Antonioni and Angelopoulos, he employs 'dead time' and landscapes to create a palpable sense of duration and distance. Like Sokurov in Whispering Pages (1993), he takes us into an eerie, Dostoevskian realm where characters are cruel, possessed, mesmerized, humiliated, and prey to false prophets."

Apropos of 3:10 to Yuma, The Assassination..., and yes, Sukiyaki Western Django, Richard Corliss offers a history of the Western for Time.

"Since his triumph in 1990 with The Civil War, [Ken] Burns has a made an art out of wringing tears and sighs from a nation whose lack of interest in history ranks among its most salient characteristics," writes Beverly Gage at Slate. "Now, 17 years to the day since PBS broadcast The Civil War, he returns this Sunday night with The War, a sprawling account of the American experience in World War II. At 14 and a half hours, The War is a whopper of a film, and often revelatory. It is also manipulative, nostalgic, and nationalistic. Imagine that Burns had narrated The Civil War solely from the Union perspective, and you'll have a sense of both what's right and what's wrong with this latest epic: It's rousing and meaningful and not technically inaccurate, but not exactly the whole truth." And in the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley asks, "The war was necessary, but is this approach?"

Also in the NYT:

• "[T]he world of Thelma and Louise, I think it's fair now to say, is not the one that we inhabit psychologically or physically today," writes Judith Warner.

• "By inserting a gay man into a heterosexual milieu familiar from countless French depictions of the bourgeoisie at play, The Man of My Life wants to rejuvenate the Gallic genre I call déjeuner sur l'herbe with contemporary themes," writes Stephen Holden. More from Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "[T]hough occasionally its strength is sapped by heavy-handed symbolic gestures, The Man of My Life is a surprisingly unsentimental take on somewhat dubious character types. Just when it seems like [director Zabou] Breitman's made another case study in how much the free-spirited homo can teach the sheltered hetero, the director actually manages to free her two main men from the burden of most cliches." Earlier: James van Maanen.

• "A bold Brazilian melodrama that moves to the rhythm of the streets, Antonia traces a year in the lives of four young women who form a rap group and fend off tragedy," writes Jeannette Catsoulis of a film that "pulses with color and movement.... When the group sings an a cappella version of 'Killing Me Softly,' you may forget to breathe." Related: indieWIRE's interview with director Tata Amaral.

• Matt Zoller Seitz on Honor de Cavalleria, "a virtual definition of the phrase 'acquired taste.' But if you invest yourself in [Albert] Serra's vision, the film's emotional payoffs are devastating." Related: "Lensed by Christophe Farnarier and Eduard Grau, Quixotic uses entirely natural light for its photography, and Serra's images feel loose and happenstance: avoiding precision in composition, strict or dramatic blocking, and picturesque motivations, Serra lets his scenes play out visually, and if, on the off chance, a moment of movement on the part of the actors is evocative, a particular focal length of the camera catches a grass or flower in the foreground, or the angle and light of sun or moon are just right, Quixotic becomes momentarily beautiful," writes Daniel Kasman. "But there is just as much visual banality in the knight's life: one lengthy shot at night is so dark that the screen literally appears black for a minute, while in another instance Quixote and Sancho's slumped, exhausted bodies are immobile in a lovely but almost as obscured image where the only on-camera motion is the arcing, and very slow movement of the moon behind them."

• Again, Jeannette Catsoulis: "Incubated at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Adrift in Manhattan is an all-too-familiar wallow in urban woe and artfully photographed isolation."

• AO Scott on Good Luck Chuck: "The intended viewership seems to consist of guys who fantasize about sleeping with [Jessica] Alba, which may represent a reasonably large share of the population. The actual paying audience, however, will more likely be those poor, deluded souls — they've Hi-lited all the relevant passages of that notorious pickup manual The Game - who think they might really have a shot."

• Laura Kern on Sydney White: "[T]here's nothing sophisticated about the comedy in this peppy, ultra-PC variation on Snow White."

• Michael Cieply reports on friction between DreamWorks and its corporate parent, Paramount, that's led to speculation that Steven Spielberg and David Geffen would leave the company when their contracts expire at the end of next year.

• "Jay-Z, the rap superstar and president of Def Jam Records, has quietly returned to the studio to record an album of new songs inspired by the forthcoming movie American Gangster, his first 'concept' album and second CD in less than a year," report David M Halbfinger and Jeff Leeds.

The Telegraph's John Hiscock comes to Berlin to talk with Tom Cruise about Valkyrie: "It is the first time Cruise has talked publicly about the film [well, in the English-language press; he's been all over the German papers - dwh], and, as far he is concerned, everything is going superbly well, despite being having initially been banned by the government from filming at one important historic site."

Glenn Kenny responds to Richard Kelly's "bitching and moaning about the people who didn't 'get' his overbaked would-be magnum opus," noting he's "now pulling an ageist card."

In a piece on the new Russian blockbusters, Phil Hoad jumps around in time a bit, appropriately enough, from his raucous visit to the Day Watch set in 2005 to the present and back again. "[N]o one is sure what the third film, Twilight Watch, is going to be. [Producer Konstantin] Ernst says the vampires and psychics will move beyond their Moscow stomping ground to spread the franchise to the likes of New York and Tokyo. There's talk of the whole thing being in English, and Hollywood stars climbing on board.... If it feels like there's no one behind the wheel of the Russian film juggernaut, it's enormously exciting."

Also in the Guardian, John Patterson: "If Sally Field at the Emmys wasn't enough, and you want more evidence of how entertaining, ridiculous and excruciating it can be to watch actors getting involved in politics, you need only cast your eyes over the tempestuous struggle now going on for the presidency of the Screen Actors' Guild, where it's actors-in-charge-of-everything, all day, every day." And Charlotte Higgins talks with Tilda Swinton.

"A love triangle set in the late 1940s, as Mao Zedong's People's Army is about to sweep the old order of China away, Ann Hu's Beauty Remains is distinguished by a ghostly, intimate atmosphere that will linger with you long after the plot has faded," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, and on that same pages, he notes of Honor de Cavalleria, "Some commenter on IMDB has dubbed this movie as 'Beckett meets Cervantes,' and that about captures it."

"The Jammed is an effective and at times harrowing low-budget drama written and directed by Dee McLachlan about sex trafficking in Australia," writes Richard Phillips at the WSWS. "While there have been numerous local movies made about Australian immigration, none investigates the plight of women sold into prostitution. The Jammed - a social-realist style thriller - is the first." Also, a talk with McLachlan.

"Winona Ryder and Mickey Rourke have joined the ensemble cast of Gregor Jordan's The Informers, an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel." Carly Mayberry has more in the Hollywood Reporter.

A "lot of recent writing and posting shows a strange resentment in the air which writers are constantly, compulsively confessing and describing and concerning themselves with their process rather than that of filmmaking, and it's a strange breed of writing, too meta to ever become meaty." Ray Pride on the state of media, old and new, for New City Chicago.

The San Diego Reader's Duncan Shepherd returns from a 4-month sabbatical.

"By this time of year, I've usually seen twelve to fifteen films that were really worth recommending, without reservations; but in 2007, it's a struggle to come up with ten," writes Noah Forrest at Movie City News.

"So what's the 'best' comedy in the last five years?" asks Pat Graham at the Chicago Reader. "My own vote goes to - whoa, credibility alert! - Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy."

For Radio Prague, Ian Willoughby reports on the revival of Kinoautomat, a system that allowed for an "interactive" cinema that was invented 40 years ago in the then-Czechoslovakian capital. Hollywood studios actually expressed interest in licensing it, but the socialists were having none of that. Via Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing.

Online viewing tip. The Shamus has found "nice two-part documentary on how a young Tom Waits came to write his soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola's One From The Heart. Enjoy."

Online viewing tips. Blu at SiouxWIRE.

Toronto. Death Defying Acts.

"Lately, [Gillian Armstrong's] been losing herself in well-appointed but dull prestige pictures like Oscar & Lucinda and Charlotte Gray, and I'm sad to report that her latest period piece, about the relationship between Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) and a Scottish psychic (Catherine Zeta-Jones), isn't a return to form," blogs Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"When Armstrong focuses on the Houdini character and runs (randomly) through some of the stories that made him famous, Death Defying Acts is pretty effortlessly diverting," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "Unfortunately, the longer the film wears on, the less 'fun' and the more 'dour' it gets."

"Last year's The Illusionist and The Prestige located an audience for costume dramas revolving around stage sleight-of-hand and gimmicky suspense narratives, rather than the usual drawing-room or court intrigue," writes Dennis Harvey in Variety. "Death Defying Acts might benefit from whatever appetite those pics whet, but it lacks their revenge-driven mystery hooks, offering instead romping and romance that feel half-baked."

Fests and events, 9/21.

"Seeing Mala Noche for the first time in 2007 is a revelation," writes David Schmader in the Stranger. "More than any of his subsequent films, [Gus] Van Sant's debut weaves together the themes that will preoccupy him for the duration of his career so far: youth and danger, the desperate adventures of the American demimonde, and the intricacies of male-on-male lust and love." At the Northwest Film Forum through September 27 and out on DVD from Criterion on October 9.

As Strange Culture comes to the Roxie (through Sunday) and the Smith Rafael (through Thursday), Michael Fox exchanges some rapid-fire email with Lynn Hershman Leeson for SF360. "Fiction in art can have a more profound element of truth than documented evidence," she tells him.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You opens its NYFF section. September 28 through October 14.

"The Chicago Film Festival, despite a paucity of big premieres and a shortage of national coverage, is a pretty top-flight shindig and it's right in my neighborhood." Nick Davis has his itinerary "all kinds of together." October 4 through 17.

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian on Syndromes and a Century: "Profoundly mysterious, erotic, funny, gentle, playful, utterly distinctive, it is the work of the Thai director and installation-artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who now has a claim to be approaching the league of Kiarostami and Haneke, one of modern cinema's great practitioners. He deserves his current retrospective at London's BFI Southbank." Through September 30.

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy passes along Esmerelda Bermudez's interview with Maria Osterroth Sussman, who's organized the very first Portland Latin American Film Festival, running through Sunday.

Toronto. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains.

"[Jonathan] Demme's latest doc [Jimmy Carter Man From Plains] follows President Carter on a publicity tour for his controversial book on the Middle East, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid," begins James Israel. "Carter comes off as an extremely thoughtful, intelligent person... The film also confirms that at least one reason Carter lost the 1980 election was his refusal to pander to extremist views and kneejerk reactions."

"At the age of 81, Carter seems more vigorous than many people half his age," blogs the Austin Chronicle's Marjorie Baumgarten. "The film is a revealing portrait... and is greatly enhanced by the original music contributions of Austin treasure Alejandro Escovedo, whose background guitar work and arrangements help provide a connective through-line for the movie. Escovedo's work as a rock & roller, orchestra conductor, and solo musician all coalesce in this project, and offer great promise for Demme's next documentary project, which is reported to be a film about Escovedo that will be shot in Austin. Can't wait."

Updated through 9/22.

"Despite Carter's reputation as a wimpy chief executive, he's pretty tough when it comes to making his arguments understood and dispelling other people's distortions," writes the Chicago Reader's JR Jones. "[T]he movie covers a lot of ground, including not only the ex-president's upbringing in Plains but his 1980 electoral defeat to Ronald Reagan, his ultimate vindication with the Nobel peace prize, and the Carters' recent work with Habitat for Humanity building homes in New Orleans. At Ryerson, Carter recalled that their last building project was supposed to take five days, but after Brad Pitt showed up to help, they had so many volunteers that they were finished in four."

"It's fascinating during Demme's doc to see the implacable faces that question Carter, with respect, but with the determination to prove him wrong," writes Anne Thompson.

"'I fervently support Israel's security, but it's counterproductive for them to persecute the Palestinians,' summarized Carter in Toronto." Brian Brooks and Peter Knegt report in indieWIRE on the appearance by the fest's special guest.

As Eric D Snider notes at Cinematical, the film picked up three awards in Venice: "The international critics' jury give the film its top award, while the Human Rights Film Network gave it a prize for best feature film. It also received the Collateral Award for Best Biography, which is presented by the Bologna Film Festival in conjunction with the Venice fest."

Update, 9/22: "Carter's 'constituents' here are his eager readers and his mostly-Jewish critics," notes David D'Arcy in Screen Daily. "His job is to make his arguments exciting and acceptable as he moves through media interviews from New York to Los Angeles, and exciting is not a word that describes Jimmy Carter well. Nor is he a particularly good advocate for his own positions, which was Carter's crucial flaw as president. Two hours with the well-meaning man is very long."

NYFF preview. The Darjeeling Limited.

"Wes Anderson, we love you, but you're bringing us down," sighs Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "The hermetically sealed world of your films - the man-children, the inexplicable melancholy, the flat, wide shots, the fetishized artifacts of adolescence and carefully chosen vintage pop soundtracks - has always resonated so strongly for us. We shrugged off all accusations of tweeness, we defended The Life Aquatic against the most virulent of critics, we saw in that AmEx commercial promising signs of self-awareness and gentle self-mockery. But with The Darjeeling Limited you may have finally vanished into your own well-contemplated navel and, we're sorry to say, lost us entirely."

Updated through 9/27.

"I believe those who complain about the emotional indirectness of this film, that its carefully controlled visual style sterilizes material that would be better served raw, kind of miss the point," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Withholding the prospect of a direct connection between the viewer and the brothers is evidence of Anderson's larger purpose - this movie is as much, if not more, about the construction of fictions as it is about its ostensible plot."

"Safe is the best way to describe Darjeeling, though a touch of laziness can also be discerned, especially by the umpteenth slow-mo shot of the men set to a from-the-vault pop song," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Seeing Bill Murray is always nice, the fanciful Godardian pan through the train is enchanting, and the short prologue Hotel Chevalier that will not accompany the film in theaters but will appear on the DVD (featuring Natalie Portman doing her best Jean Seberg) is amusing, but Anderson needs to do like the film's brothers do during the (embarrassingly literal) climax and, once and for all, ditch some of his old baggage."

But for Jürgen Fauth, this is "his best work since Rushmore."

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Updates, 9/25: "Even a ten-year-old could point out the aesthetic and narrative similarities between Anderson's films, so consistently do they deploy the same visual tricks and emotional turnarounds, yet to observe The Darjeeling Limited from a simple evaluative distance would deny the immersive pleasures therein," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Asking Anderson to change (or 'grow,' as some critics would call it) ignores everything that's right with the artistic fluidity from Bottle Rocket to here. If The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou seemed too mechanical, too locked-in to its director's gambits, then with Darjeeling Anderson has found a way to overcome his own limitations without forgoing his expected style."

"A companion piece to [The Royal Tenenbaums] more than a step in new directions, Darjeeling is a movie about people trapped in themselves and what it takes to get free - a movie, quite literally, about letting go of your baggage," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "We bring our own to the movies, so let me cop to mine. I was moved by Darjeeling, flaws and all, but if my job is to explain why, I find it difficult for reasons that are none of my business. From the minute Wilson walks onscreen, face covered in scars, eyes full of trouble, Darjeeling is warped by the gravitas of his recent suicide attempt. Anderson and Wilson are old friends and frequent collaborators, of course, and it's hard not to sense them working through more than one impasse here."

Update, 9/26: "[T]he director's films are mistreated by being rated or hated as a series of dioramas (even if you feel like someone explaining about a terminally fey friend that 'you just have to get to know him')," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "A tacked-on ending (starring Anjelica Huston as Mom) suggests that Anderson may think he's made a richer movie than he has, but the filmmaker's past grandiose efforts (and, like Tarantino, his enervating descendants) shouldn't condemn his latest, minor journey."

Updates, 9/27: The Darjeeling Limited "is foremost a male weepie (as one farseeing commentator wrote of 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums), chronicling an aching love lost and won between three men," writes Edward Crouse in Cinema Scope. "As a wigged-out affecting text built boldly on uncertainty, it takes cues from other odd melodramas: Renoir's The River (1951) (accidental epiphanies in a ribbony freefloat); Cassavetes's Husbands (1970) (the grief of three professional men gangways into a surreal Olympian bender, pushing women away and around); and Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (1954) (ugly, petty tourists stumbling onto a vision about themselves via some earthy, 'spicy' place)."

"The Darjeeling Limited... showcases an obnoxious element of Anderson that is rarely discussed: the clumsy, discomfiting way he stages interactions between white protagonists - typically upper-class elites - and nonwhite foils - typically working class and poor," writes Jonah Weiner at Slate. "The film is gorgeous to look at: The color palette is riotous, and Anderson's rapacious eye for bric-a-brac binges on the Hindu prayer altars and crowded street markets of Rajasthan. But needless to say, beware of any film in which an entire race and culture is turned into therapeutic scenery."

"The Darjeeling Limited is more than a movie-buff's grabbag," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Instead, the film's premiere at this week's New York Film Festival reaffirms the importance of a filmmaker's personal sensibility - an often-forgotten essence in contemporary film culture."

Online viewing tip #1. Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman are on ReelerTV.

Online viewing tip #2. Jason Kottke's got your Hotel Chevalier link.

Toronto. Obscene.

The subject of Obscene is Grove Press and Evergreen Review founder Barney Rosset, who "continually faced courtrooms and politicians who were offended and/or threatened by things that are embarrassingly tame and bland compared to what we've got nowadays," writes Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. "Rosset was the one who fought to get books like Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and others onto American bookshelves and later to get films like I Am Curious (Yellow) into American theaters.... Unlike their subject, the makers of Obscene seem far from broke, as the film is possibly the most over-produced documentary since Inside Deep Throat."

"You may not know Barney Rosset but the world we live in would be radically different without him," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Rosset is a fascinating subject, still possessed of a remarkably nimble mind well into his 80s, and gives refreshingly frank interviews. Better yet, he's also a bit of a pack rat and has maintained a sizeable archive of family movies, radio interviews, television appearances and the like, all of which have been made available to the filmmakers."

"Visually, however, the film never treads into the territory of he innovation and modernism that embody Rosset's life's work, instead limiting the story to an orthodox, chronological summary of what happened," adds Tom Hall. "I liked this movie a lot, especially because I believe so strongly in Rosset's principled stance that adults should be able to make up heir own minds about what books they read and images they care to take in... but I felt it could use an extra 'oomph' that more concern about the visual strategy (and the better integration of some of the film's talking heads in to the movie's storyline) might have delivered."

ST VanAirsdale - you know, the Reeler - talks with directors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor, "themselves veteran New York publishers whose close alliance with Rosset (not to mention chats with the likes of Gore Vidal, John Waters, Jim Carroll and others) offer unprecedented access to the 85-year-old's archives and reflections on life, love, business and the perils of publishing the word 'cunt.'"

Toronto and NYFF preview. A Girl Cut in Two.

"A Girl Cut in Two isn't exactly a crackling suspense film, though it does contain some hairpin twists, and it hints at a world of secret deviance dwelling behind elegantly carved doors," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "It's mainly a take-off-your-coat-and-stay-a-while piece of storytelling, where all the characters and their motivations get revealed in due course, and in the meantime the audience is expected to ponder the deeper meaning of all the dualities the movie keeps running past us.... It's just another good Chabrol film to throw on the pile."

Updated through 9/24.

"In 115 calm, non-judgmental minutes, Chabrol tells the story of a TV weathergirl (Ludivine Sagnier) whose affair with an aging, celebrated writer (François Berléand) somehow leads her into the arms of a young, possibly psychotic rich boy (Benoît Magimel)," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "There are no moral messages here - when has Chabrol ever hit us over the head with a stick? - but only human animals elegantly chewing off their own legs."

"How both these guys and those around them use their power to screw Gabrielle over is the real subject of this film, which is shot and cut with the ineluctability of a mathematical proof," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"A Girl Cut in Two is almost documentary-like in its examination of bourgeois rituals of wining and dining and modes of self-preservation, but its intriguing bits of psychological observation are not engineered into a particularly sensible or pulsating whole," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Paling next to Raul Ruiz's nutty Chabrolian parody That Day, the film is only as artful, amusing, and thoughtful as the last Woody Allen picture."

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Update, 9/22: "The movie is gloriously 'French,' using the serpentine and voluptuous language as a point of attack that stratifies all lines of demarcation about honor, masculinity, sexual role playing and independence," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "Chabrol remains the most acid-toned of the original Nouvelle Vague directors; he's a brisk and incisive portraitist of hypocrisy and social mores that balanced with a visual imagination that gives the movie's title a particular snap."

Update, 9/24: "Traditional wisdom holds Chabrol's constant theme to be withering critiques of the hypocritical, mendacious bourgeoisie, yet Chabrol's obviously been one for a while..., and Girl hedges its bets," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "The first hour is as conventional and sharp as any of Chabrol's early work; hardly a scene goes by without awkward sexual tension... and Chabrol pushes things along speedily. It's like a mean-spirited screwball comedy. The second hour slacks back into Chabrol's recent passive-aggressive house style, and the merger isn't entirely satisfying. But Girl picks up steam in its finale, meaning it's an awkward merger of Chabrol's old and new styles that won't alienate as many viewers as his recent work, but not as formally unified either."

The Kingdom.

"The Kingdom, about terror against Americans in Saudi Arabia, will confirm some of the worst American prejudices about the Middle East - that most Arabs there hate the US, and that America could eliminate threats there if bureaucrats got out of the way and if a few good men (and a woman) went in with the gloves off and guns ablaze," writes David D'Arcy for Screen Daily. "You can guess who comes out on top in this action movie."

"America, fuck yeah, knows how to bring the thunder to terrorists," growls Nick Schager at Slant. "All you have to do is send over a quartet of FBI agents, give 'em five days to smooth out relations with the po-po and a richy rich prince, and ka-boom, ka-blam, ka-pow, national security reestablished!"

Updated through 9/27.

"If you're a filmmaker planning to juice up an FBI thriller by setting it in the contemporary Middle East and using visceral, highly charged images of suicide bombings and violent religious fundamentalism to drive the story, you'd best be on top of your game, brother," advises Bryant Frazer. "There is an interesting political story to be told here - and, to be fair, the graphic précis of recent events in the oil-rich Saudi Kingdom that opens the film, covering everything from the discovery of oil in the 1930s to the 2001 attacks by al Qaeda under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden, is almost scarily effective - but the screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan is little more than a blueprint for a spin-off TV series: CSI Saudi Arabia."

"The issue is whether trained investigators - contending with rogue elements that represent no sovereign nation - would be more effective than full-scale military action in terms of nailing an Osama bin Laden-style evildoer," writes John Anderson in Variety. "Where pic goes astray is inturning anonymous, indigenous peoples into ducks at a shooting gallery. In Black Hawk Down, the alleged good guys mowed down hundreds of faceless Africans; here, it's Arabs, in what seem like comparable numbers. The sense of vicarious sport is the same; anyone in a caftan or a kepi is fair game."

David Walters talks with director Peter Berg for Esquire.

Earlier: John Horn's backgrounder for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 9/23: Newsweek's David Ansen suspects that "Berg and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan don't know what kind of movie they've actually made - or would like to pretend they've made another kind."

For the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz talks with Ashraf Barhom, "one of a wave of talented actors from the Middle East and South Asia getting a break from Hollywood's newfound interest in geopolitics. With movies such as Syriana, Munich, United 93 and A Mighty Heart as well as the upcoming Rendition, actors such as Ifran Khan, Omar Metwally and Igal Naor have landed some of the most complicated, fraught male roles of the year."

Updates, 9/24: "The trouble with Berg's film is not hard to pin down," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Since he made a sour little black comedy called Very Bad Things, in 1998, he has become adept at the marshalling of multiple figures, and the boom and stutter of the action sequences in the new film - whether on the freeway or in the claustrophobic back alleys of Riyadh - leaves you thoroughly winded and wiped. Even in the midst of that response, however, you realize that what whips up the melee is vengefulness. This is not to be confused with justice; the film has nothing but contempt for the traditional methods of diplomacy and international law, and the true villains of the piece are not the terrorists, whose patient bombmaking we watch in horrified detail, but Schmidt, the sweating wimp from the State Department, who is nauseated by the sight of blood, and, even more heinous, the US Attorney General (Danny Huston), with his quibbling reluctance to unleash the FBI on foreign soil."

David Edelstein in New York: "[Chris] Cooper has become a master at staying in the background yet upstaging everyone, and [Jennifer] Garner is the ne plus ultra of action heroines: Those pillowy lips say at once 'Kiss me' and 'Kiss my ass.'"

Update, 9/25: "Halfway through the movie, the FBI agents go Marine," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "United in vengeance, the combined American and Saudi forces eventually eschew dull procedure for thrilling car-chase action, ending with a firefight in a very bad neighborhood. (Call it 'Black Hawk downtown.') A hand-to-hand slamming-gouging-stabbing denouement got a mild rise out of the preview audience at the Loews 83rd Street, but the movie's main satisfaction is the utopian spectacle of wounded Americans heading home, mission accomplished."

Update, 9/26: "One critic's oversimplified drama is another's thriller with a touch of class," suggests Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine.

Updates, 9/27: "There have been enough Middle East / Iraq War-based movies trickling out in 2007 to comprise a film school mini-symposium on what will surely prove to be the most ubiquitous topic and setting over the next decade," writes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly. "Surprisingly, the best of this year's lot thus far is The Kingdom, an action movie with characters filled by Hollywood central casting."

"Out of context, the latter half of the movie would look like a propaganda film for the war on terror," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "In context, however, it adds nothing to the ideas about jumbled international cooperation introduced in the first act."

"If The Kingdom were satisfied with being a crackling action movie and police procedural about federal agents trying to find the culprits behind a bombing in Saudi Arabia, it would offer an entertaining night at the movie with overtones of current events," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "But this latest film from director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) has bigger terrorists to fry, and it fails in its attempt to be a serious drama with important things to say about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East."

Ella Taylor profiles Ashraf Barhom for the LA Weekly.

William Wyler Blog-a-Thon.

Heavens, that Mike "Goatdog" Phillips knows how to send invitations. Just take a look at these.

At any rate, the William Wyler Blog-a-Thon runs today through Sunday, celebrating the man who scored three Oscars and 12 nominations. Wyler "directed 38 films between 1928 and 1970, from romantic comedies (Roman Holiday) to Westerns (The Westerner) to documentaries (Thunderbolt) to historical epics (Ben-Hur) to social problem films (Dead End) to musicals (Funny Girl) to thrillers (The Desperate Hours) to costume dramas (The Heiress) to cop films (Detective Story)."

The Jane Austen Book Club.

"The Jane Austen Book Club's light, slight and clever entertainment is occasionally too-clever, but the cast's performances and [Robin] Swicord's sense of tone give it just enough charm to work," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi.

"I have to admit that I found writer/director Robin Swicord's adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler's popular novel pretty often charming despite it being not my bag, baby, and despite my [Amy] Brenneman phobia," confesses Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"The Jane Austen Book Club isn't any better or worse than the recent Becoming Jane, a fantasy of Austen's youthful love life," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Like the other movies and television projects in a Jane Austen boom that continues to gather momentum, it is an entertaining, carefully assembled piece of clockwork that imposes order on ever more complicated gender warfare."

Updated through 9/23.

This is "a widget carefully engineered to comfort, console and sell like hot cakes since it was but a gleam in the author's eye, and Swicord doesn't mess with the formula," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"[T]here's a difference between connecting to a writer's work and reading too much of yourself in it, and the banal film version of Fowler's book crosses the line six too many times," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"The movie is a celebration of reading, and oddly enough that works, even though there is nothing cinematic about a shot of a woman (or the club's one male member) reading a book," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Such shots are used as punctuation in the film, where they work like Ozu's 'pillow shots,' quiet respites from the action. The only drawback to them from my point of view was that all the characters seem to be reading standard editions - not a Folio Society subscriber among them."

"You can't outright hate a movie that stars Maria Bello (even as the capable singleton who can't commit) or the excellent Emily Blunt (even as the nervous Nellie unable to see the good stuff right under her upturned nose) or Kathy Baker, predictably cast as the much-married port in a storm," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "As for me, I eagerly await the mad bitches of Nicole Holofcener's next movie."

"It was love and money that Austen wrote about, because, as she herself observed, what else is there? The second in that equation is acutely absent from the problems of these affluent northern Californians, and it's too bad," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler. Nonetheless, "Time was clearly taken here to do better than fine with material that had a sizeable no-brainer audience built right into the title. It's an effort as touching (if not anachronistic) as that taken to sit down and write a letter - those critical time capsules so rarely rendered tactile anymore, so rarely labored over with one eye on personal history."

"There's nothing particularly stylish about Book Club, which won't lose much in translation to the smallscreen," writes Dennis Harvey in Variety. "But it's expert in matters more crucial to the source material: managing a highly eventful narrative in brisk terms without seeming rushed; drawing moderately complex characters and conflicted relationships with economy and feeling. In those regards and others, the pic is much more satisfying than recent femme-centric adaptations The Nanny Diaries or Evening, let alone the pandering, formulaic likes of Because I Told You So." And Anne Thompson profiles Swicord.

"What would Jane do?" asks Sean Axmaker at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Write more nuanced characters and a less contrived script than this, I'm sure."

At IFC News, Matt Singer finds it "so thoroughly anti-dude for most of its running time that the only sensible male reaction to it is guilt."

"The self-deluded, Lifetime fantasy of Swicord's film can be felt from the outset," writes Paul Schrodt at Slant. "Each character's story conveniently dovetails with an Austen novel, as they all superficially peck away at the parallels between their own woes and those of characters in the books."

"Swicord's literary sense isn't exactly Camille Paglia; her movie is less 'literate' than it is almost frighteningly ill-cinematic," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

"If this one doesn't find an audience and/or spawn The Arthur Conan Doyle Book Club, The Bronte Sisters Book Club, and so-on spinoffs for different demographics, I'll eat my hat and read Mansfield Park again," writes Robert Cashill.

"The Jane Austen Book Club is both a testament to Austen's continued relevance and a fine example of classroom particulars converted into entertaining banter without losing any of its oomph," writes Brandon Fibbs at cinemaattraction.

Online listening tip. Swicord and Hugh Dancy are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Liz Hoggard talks with Dancy for the Independent.

Update: "Throughout The Jane Austen Book Club, a clear, if bewildering blueprint emerges," writes Emily Condon at Reverse Shot. "It goes something like this: an emotional arc starts to swell, the action nears climax, and then just before it gets there, the camera cuts to something whimsical or silly. Repeatedly executing this pattern, Swicord (who wrote and directed) undercuts nearly every scene that has the potential to resonate deeply just before the moment where catharsis would (i.e. could) occur."

Update, 9/22: IndieWIRE interviews Swicord.

Update, 9/23: Swati Pandey talks with Swicord and other major players for the LAT.

More on Eastern Promises.

"Good as all the actors are - [Vincent] Cassel, in particular, brings a few more tones to his portrayal than I suspected he had - this is [Viggo] Mortensen's show," writes Robert Cashill.

"It's remarkable how extraneous Mortensen's character, Nikolai, is to the early proceedings, because from the beginning he looms over the film," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr.

Updated through 9/27.

"[G]eneric labels are relatively meaningless in describing the sensation experienced when engaging with [Eastern Promises]," writes Drew Morton at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope. "While the film begins rather conventionally with the rather gruesome murder of a Russian mobster that evokes both to the murder of Luca Brasi in Coppola's The Godfather and Cronenberg's earlier more visceral efforts, the pacing of the film dodges the rather typical three-act structure of most crime dramas. Instead, he lingers on sudden bursts of violence but, unlike his last film, Cronenberg does not seem as concerned with punishing the audience for their voyeurism. This time, he shifts focus to the faces of the men committing the deeds, derailing the forward momentum that violence normally has on the narrative."

"[I]t's a brisk and exciting film for the most part, Viggo and Vincent Cassel are a lot of fun to watch together, and, once again, it's only about 100 minutes long," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Hardly a glowing recommendation, I know, but middling Cronenberg is still more appealing than Russell Crowe's Glenn Ford impersonation or Jodie Foster's Charlie Bronson."

"To discuss Eastern Promises as another of [David] Cronenberg's body-horror shows is to somewhat obscure the fact that, as with 2005's A History of Violence, the film is firstly an underworld thriller emblazoned with an intense performance by Mortensen," writes Nick Schager. "But the urge to confront it on thematic terms is also driven by the fact that its subtextual currents are more compelling than the actual narrative itself, which never wholly coheres into something satisfyingly suspenseful."

"It's a movie that's a perfectly good drunken shag with an average partner, nothing that will blow your mind and nothing you haven't seen before," writes Grady Hendrix in a funny but also spoiler-ridden review for Twitch.

"I had just about given up on gangster films as a genre." But C Jerry Kutner lists fives ways this one works at Bright Lights After Dark.

"Eastern Promises is a sleek, claustrophobic thriller that's disappointing only because it's the follow-up to A History of Violence," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Paul Matwaychuk talks with Cronenberg.

In the UK: "Audiences will shortly have the chance to see two brilliant films, both made by North American directors, which explore the seedy underbelly of London in a poetic and atmospheric way," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. One is Eastern Promises. The other: "London is shown in an equally forlorn light in Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), which portrays a post-war London in the grip of hoodlums and racketeers. Thanks to the Blitz, there is rubble all over the place. Dassin throws in several sequences in which his lead character, the small-time US nightclub tout and would-be wrestling promoter Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is seen scurrying like a beetle across grey, decaying cityscapes with heavies in pursuit. Again, the Thames is where the bodies are dumped."

For Amazon, Cronenberg makes a list of " some things that I read and watched in preparation for the making of Eastern Promises."

Earlier: "Interview. David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen."

"Mortensen is absolutely brilliant: stoic and sarcastic and threatening and, at moments, curiously soft," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy. "He somehow presents his face as a meerschaum topped with a subtle pompadour, and he makes three-course meals out of lines like "Sentimental value: I heard of that.'... Cronenberg has, as Guillermo del Toro did in Pan's Labyrinth, crafted both a drama and a fairy tale - and he's done it in an entertainment as cracking as you could wish for."

Updates, 9/23: "[T]he glaring difference between his two most recent films is that A History of Violence fetishized mechanical weaponry and its effects on bodies; malforming and mutilated them," writes Ted Pigeon. "However, there is not a single gunshot to be seen or heard in Eastern Promises, and yet many people lose their lives. It does not contain so much as one composition of an automatic weapon of any sort. Here, Cronenberg more explicitly focuses on bodies mutilating bodies and colliding with one another other."

For the first time, the Shamus is impressed by Viggo Mortensen:

He's dominating, he's sexy, he's mesmerizing, he's impossible to turn away from. He goes so deep into the role that he isn't anybody but this tatted-up, ex-con, Russian mobster harboring a dangerous secret.

But why listen to me? Here is what Geoffrey Rush, unbidden, told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival while he was supposed to be promoting his own movie:

Viggo Mortensen gives a great screen performance. He's completely inside his imaginative world, creating a character using invisible technique. There's a great kind of personal stamp that's idiosyncratic for the character. He explores extreme parameters within the character on his own terms and therefore creates someting entertaining and thrilling for an audience to get involved with on their own imaginative level.

What's interesting is that Eastern Promises is far from a great movie....

Martin Tsai talks with Cronenberg for cinemaattraction.

Update, 9/25: "Eastern Promises is not about the brutal, multi-cultural underbelly beneath London's surface nor the society and culture of immigrant Russians, nor does it unexpectidly turn on its subject and corrode it from within, as with A History of Violence - surprisingly, neither the script nor the film seems to have thematic pretensions," writes Daniel Kasman. "But it is fascinated by this movie surface world it is indulging in, like an old Hollywood film..."

Update, 9/27: "In a kind of unexpected loop back to [Cronenberg's] past, the new film's vastly ranging social contexts of in-grown Russian émigrés, isolated Turkish circles and thoroughly Anglicized Russian ethnics acknowledges a far larger world and communities of people that's visible in his early horror films from The Brood to Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983)," writes Robert Koehler.

Venice and Toronto. Sukiyaki Western Django.

Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django "carries its influences on its sleeve," writes Tom Mes - the author, you'll remember, of Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike - at Midnight Eye. "[T]here is a lot of Kurosawa and a lot of Leone, a generous sprinkling of Corbucci, a touch of Okamoto, and a whiff of Gosha. More than just a reminder of the debt the Italians owe the Japanese through the Yojimbo-Fistful of Dollars connection, the film adheres to the far wiser stance that cross-cultural pollination is the essence of cinema and that there is no such thing as a one-way street of influence. As university professors everywhere like to phrase it, cinema is inherently transnational, and Sukiyaki Western Django is that statement made flesh."

Mes also hung with Miike and what can only be described as his entourage (of more than 20) in Venice and his report is a medley of nifty little moments that add up to a mighty enjoyable read.

Sukiyaki Western Django "is a loopy explosion of energy, the most overtly crowd pleasing effort from the prolific cinematic freak show since Zebraman," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Bright, brash, violent, and intentionally camp Sukiyaki Western Django is that rarest of things: an intentional cult film that succeeds on all fronts."

"Both Miike and Tarantino, overpraised and overindulged for years, are now in the baroque phases of their careers, strenuously embellishing by-now familiar themes with ever more convoluted arabesques of cinematic referencing and auteurist posturing," writes Mark Schilling in the Japan Times. "I count myself as a fan of both - but I also think they have both reached an impasse, like aging rockers who jazz up their stage shows as vehicles for their decades-old riffs.... Unlike Tarantino, Miike also has a macho sentimental streak, expressed in Sukiyaki by the gunman's selfless championing of the traumatized boy, his much-abused mother and other decent townsfolk. But the operatic clowning undermines the drama." Via Jeffrey Hill at the House Next Door.

This is a "misguided cowboy tale with no twist," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE.

"Even with a wealth of past ideas to pilfer, Sukiyaki Western Django can't sustain itself for its full two hour running time," writes Mike White. "Things slow down about an hour into the proceedings. In order to inject some life into the faltering action, Miike breaks into the cartoon sound effects library and attempts to make SWD a life action anime film. These instances feel completely out of place, even after the highly stylized pre-credit sequence starring living cartoon character Quentin Tarantino."

Fests and events, 9/20.

The Variety España team has landed in San Sebastian, where the festival has opened with David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Currently in rotation at the site are umpteen fine photos of Viggo Mortensen in various poses. The fest runs through September 29.

"By most accounts, this year's New York Film Festival is one of the strongest in years." Slant revs up its coverage well over a week ahead of time. They're not alone; already, we're seeing previews at the House Next Door, the IFC Blog, the Reeler, the SpoutBlog and from Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

Lots of blogging going on from the IFP Filmmaker Conference at Filmmaker - and the Film Panel Notetaker's at work, too.

"When the Portuguese director Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, a nearly three-hour movie about the displaced residents of a gutted Lisbon housing slum, emerged as the most divisive film - among critics, audiences, reportedly even the jury - in the competition of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, the fracas underscored something that many admirers of Costa's work had already realized: namely, that the debate over Costa (whose six feature films will be screened this weekend at REDCAT) is no ordinary case of some people 'liking' a certain filmmaker and others not," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "Rather, Costa is a kind of cause - a mission - that you either believe in or don't."

"Maybe the trauma of another intractable war has sparked the movies' recent interest in 60s headliners: the Beatles in Across the Universe, Dylan in I'm Not There, Vietnam everywhere," suggests Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "This flashback wouldn't be complete without a look back at the film œuvre of Norman Mailer. If nothing else, a Mailer retrospective provides a window, however distorted and monomaniacal, to a time when writers could be cultural icons as well-known as Paris Hilton is today, a time when movies were analyzed with a passion now reserved for fantasy football. In the 60s, Norman Mailer was not only a writer, he was a cultural icon. And he aspired to make art movies." The Cinematic Life of Norman Mailer runs at the Harvard Film Archive Sunday through Tuesday.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston notes that Midnights for Maniacs programmer Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is "reviving one of the greatest space vampire movies ever, Tobe Hooper's 1985 Lifeforce. Now you can ponder space vampirism in its full, bodacious 70mm splendor, as primarily embodied by naked alien Mathilda May, who brought anarchic madness to London almost 20 years before 28 Days Later." Sunday at the Castro.

John Waters comes to Duke University tomorrow night. Zack Smith talks with him for the Independent Weekly.

Rob Christopher has a brief preview of this year's Chicago International Film Festival (October 4 through 17) at the Chicagoist.

Miami's edition of the Italian Film Festival opens October 4, too, runs through October 9, and the lineup's up.

Fall previews, 9/20.

"As the coming-out party for the fall film season, the Toronto International Film Festival inevitably has its share of dazzling debuts and catastrophic face plants, but the balance was distinctly tilted toward the high end of the scale this year," writes Sam Adams, whacking two birds, fest review and season preview, with one annotated list in the Philadelphia City Paper.

"After a $4 billion summer of fun, the film industry now focuses on the real world. It's time to take things seriously and cram for the finals: the Academy Awards." Peter Keough presents the Boston Phoenix's fall preview.

Sean Burns previews a healthy handful of highlights for the Philadelphia Weekly.

Zack Smith picks the don't-misses for the Independent Weekly.

Piper Weiss turns Radar's preview into a quiz: "Can you tell the difference between real movies and fakes?"

Fantastic Fest 3.

Austin's Fantastic Fest opens today for a week-long run and the Chronicle's Marc Savlov has quite a bundle of previews, all unstrung out on the same page:

• A talk with Tim League, "Alamo Drafthouse Cinema bigwig and prime mover" behind the fest, in which he picks a Top 5 must-sees.

• A chat with George A Romero about Diary of the Dead: "There's always a chance there'll be another Dead film as long as I'm still walking. And then after that, maybe I'll come back and do another one."

• Ryan Thiessen's co-directed Five Across the Eyes with Greg Swinson. "This pair of kidhood pals parlayed a whopping $4,000 and a love of the genre into what's probably going to be the only five-cheerleaders-in-Mom's-minivan-meet-hell-on-a-budget feature-length white-knuckler - shot in real time, no less - to snake out of the foothills of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains... ever."

• "Together with his childhood friend Marko Zaror, aka 'the Latin Dragon' (best known stateside as the recipient of the 2004 Stuntman of the Year award for his work doubling the Rock in The Rundown), [Chilean director Ernesto Díaz] Espinoza has helmed two of the most exhilarating martial-arts films ever made: Kiltro and Mirageman."

• "Canadian filmmaker Karim Hussain's third feature film, La Belle Bête, is a thing of immense, rapturous beauty, a dreamlike tale of children, parents, incest, love, and, yes, death, that's as far from the simplistic, retro-cool wave of current film horror as Lucky McKee's May is from Marquis de Sade's Justine."

• "I'm going to go out on a very short limb here and tell you right up front that Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is the most disturbing film you'll see at Fantastic Fest 2007." And Marc Savlov's got a quote from Stephen King to back him up on this.

Also: Wayne Alan Brenner on Shusuke Kaneko's Death Note, which "functions best as a sort of extended trailer for the manga."

Matt Dentler points to Chris Garcia's big juicy preview for the Austin American-Statesman: a bit of history, a lot of quotage, a genre breakdown, a guest list and more gotta-sees.

More sites to keep an eye on through September 27: Ain't It Cool News and Cinema is Dope; the Austin Movie Blog and Slackerwood.

Updates, 9/21: At Twitch, Peter Martin takes in Diary of the Dead, Hell's Fever, Timecrimes and The Ferryman.

"Aachi and Ssipak is the movie my friends and I would have made if you had introduced us to psychedelics before we hit puberty and then put us in charge of an animation studio," writes Wiley Wiggins. "That's not meant as an insult either, it's unrestrained, juvenile, raunchy, violent fun, with some genuinely well choreographed action scenes."

Jette Kernion reviews selected shorts for Cinematical.

Blake Ethridge has a few recommendations.

At the Austin Movie Blog, John DeFore: "The three films of No Borders, No Limits may not be enough to turn Nikkatsu's stable of stars into local celebrities, but maybe it'll whet Austin's appetite for future, non-festival screenings - which one suspects the Alamo would happily book, if they thought a receptive audience was out there."

Jette Kernion's got an opening night entry at Slackerwood with lots of pix.

Updates, 9/23: "So far my annual Funky Forest Award for sheer insanity in asian cult cinema goes to Korean WTF-fest Never Belongs to Me," writes Wiley Wiggins.

At Twitch, Peter Martin has capsule reviews of Moebius Redux: A Life in Pictures, Five Across the Eyes and Flight of the Living Dead.

Watch the Alamo Drafthouse's Henri Mazza chat with George Romero over at Matt Dentler's place.

Jette Kernion reviews more shorts for Cinematical.

More from Peter Martin at Twitch. First, briefly: "Princess immediately engaged me with its storytelling and I was moved rather than offended by the subject matter; Flash Point looks smashing on the big screen and the action sequences more than make up for the dramatic shortfalls; Postal is so funny that it renders critical opinions pointless." And then more extensive notes follow on "the very funny Maiko Haaaan!!! and very challenging Offscreen."

Updates, 9/24: "The Austin audience tonight for Crazy Thunder Road was amazing," writes Blake Ethridge. "For what I guess is basically a college senior project makes for one hell of a nice little punk film that can."

"To say that screenwriter Daniel Waters has had an 'up and down' career would be a very accurate observation," notes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "After penning the cult classic comedy that is Heathers he moved on to The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (ugh) and Hudson Hawk (whoa) before earning a credit on the excellent Batman Returns. Then he co-wrote Demolition Man, vanished for eight years, and made a small comeback with an indie comedy called Happy Campers, the movie that marked his directorial debut. So which Waters would show up in Sex and Death 101? Well, let's just say we're not nearly in Heathers territory, but Waters's latest represents his very best work in a very long time."

Peter Martin's latest roundup at Twitch: Uncle's Paradise, "a stew composed entirely of oddball scenes, yet somehow it all hangs together," Wolfhound, "a serious Slavic swords and sorcery epic that's heavy on the slashing blades and light on the fantasy," and Crazy Thunder Road, "another 'Blake Special,' as he's been raving about it since he saw it at a European festival months ago. I hate to feed his ego, but he was absolutely correct about this little-known movie."

Scott Weinberg on Wrong Turn 2: Dead End: "This flick is a whole lot of good, gory fun."

Updates, 9/25: "It may only be year three for Fantastic Fest, Austin's very own premiere fantasy, action, horror, sci-fi festival, but they seem to have ironed out many of the kinks in event planning very quickly," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE. "Located all in one central location of the world famous Alamo Drafthouse, Fantastic Fest boasts a myriad of premieres, guests and screenings, not to mention a homey atmosphere that would put any film geek in heaven. Unlike other premiere festivals, Fantastic Fest not only celebrates its cinema, it also celebrates the communal viewing process."

Wiley Wiggins compares and contrasts The Girl Next Door and Offscreen.

Wiley again, with a snappy, to-the-point entry on the Nikkatsu Action Retrospective.

"A Colt is My Passport, the kick-off to the three-film Nikkatsu Action series, was every bit as good as I hoped it would be. It was so good that about halfway through I was thinking how much I wanted to see it again," writes Peter Martin at Twitch. Also: Aachi and Ssipak and The Rug Cop.

"I looked forward to seeing Aachi and Ssipak just for the weirdness factor, and I wasn't disappointed," writes Jette Kernion at Cinematical.

Update, 9/27: Jette Kernion rounds up all of her reviews (so far).

Shorts, 9/19.

"For a born Southerner such as myself, hailing from northwest Alabama, there are basically two kinds of movies set in the Deep South: authentic and inauthentic ones," begins Jonathan Rosenbaum's piece for Stop Smiling's "Issue 31: Ode to the South." "The former are those done by filmmakers who consider it worth the trouble to film in the right locations, with the right actors, using the right accents while giving some attention to the local folkways. The latter are basically those who don't know or don't care about such distinctions."

"Though directors of this 'Fifth Generation' once created films like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell, My Concubine, which exposed cruel realities of country life and the Cultural Revolution, their biggest concern these days is box office numbers," writes Rebecca Chang, mapping a rift in current Chinese cinema for PopMatters:

On the other side of the game has been China's industry underdogs; this "Sixth Generation" of directors, often working at odds against censors, have cultivated a pop aesthetic and depiction of quotidian ennui Martin Scorsese has hailed as "some of the finest, toughest, most vitally alive work in modern movie-making." Against a state-run system aiming to reel in ticket sales, the Sixth Generation's work has documented the socially marginalized in urban dystopias, calling attention to a China that the government would just as soon not acknowledge. The filmmakers often shoot without approval or permit (thus earning the nickname of "underground directors"), regularly braving passport revocation and darkroom raids. Zhang Yuan's 1993 Beijing Bastard, Ning Ying's 1995 On the Beat, and Lou Ye's 2006 Summer Palace have all been exemplary works of the movement, though it is Jia Zhangke who has received the loudest acclaim, domestically and internationally.

"You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War," writes Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker. "But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done with their 15-hour series The War, which will begin on September 23rd, on PBS. They've taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting."

Politics or business? Bit of both? Reed Johnson looks into the conflicting takes on why Warner Bros won't be distributing Luís Mandoki's La Democracia Simulada (The Simulated Democracy), a documentary on that incredibly contested election in Mexico last year.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Jay A Fernandez talks with screenwriter Brad Kane about the umpteen pans he's got on the fire - a Richard Pryor biopic; a screenplay for Antoine Fuqua; an "assassin-in-exile action film 'Matt Helm,' DreamWorks' answer to Universal's Bourne blockbusters" (and they really want to call him Matt?); and an adaptation of Elizabeth Kostova's bestselling The Historian. On that same page, Fernandez talks with John Sayles and assesses the state of negotiations between Hollywood's writers and producers.

• Mark Olsen talks with Richard Kelly about what all's happened to Southland Tales since its raucous reception in Cannes in the summer of 2006. Set to open November 9, it's been trimmed down to 2 hours and 24 minutes and jazzed up with hundreds of special effects. Even so, it remains "purposefully byzantine for even the most attentive of viewers. Characters have multiple names and identities, plot strands ebb, flow and intersect. Add to that Kelly's casting choices - drawing together such pop figureheads as Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and Mandy Moore into a kaleidoscopic swirl - and the experience of simply taking it all in, and it's pretty overwhelming." Who knows, could be a blast.

• "[W]hile Philip Kindred Dick was a disaffected loner in life, in death his ideas turned out to be pitch-perfect for a Digital Age that wanted science fiction not just about aliens but also about the alienated." Geoff Boucher considers PKD's posthumous Hollywood career. Related: David Gill talks with Jonathan Lethem about PKD for Article. Via David Pescovitz at Boing Boing.

• Patrick Goldstein meets the filmmakers behind All Ages Night, about ridiculously young and savvy musicians: "What fascinated me about this low, very low budget film was that it captures the Tell-All Culture of kids who live online as well as their rejection of the record industry's outdated star-making machinery."

• "As a wry screed on the military-style consumerist push that preys on our susceptibility to having our desires articulated for us - and too often lets us down - Czech Dream has an impish effectiveness," writes Robert Abele.

As Andrzej Wajda's Katyn, depicting the Soviets' execution of thousands of Polish officers in 1940, now opens across Poland, it's be "one of the largest releases in Polish film history," writes Jan Cienski. Also in the Financial Times, Peter Aspen meets Julie Delpy to talk about the bizarre love-hate relationship between the US and France.

Andrew Sullivan holding a contest: "Best. Movie. Line. Ever!" And he points to Raymond Chandler's piece, "Oscar Night in Hollywood," which ran in the March 1948 issue of the Atlantic.

New piece at Film International: John Orr's "Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs Antonioni's The Passenger."

Le Monde Diplomatique editor Truls Lie, too, has a piece prompted by the double whammy of the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni: "The wandering through thought's essential nature, through the history of the world's unruly abundance of experiences, practices, and thoughts (what many would describe as God) - in philosophy, or through the films of Resnais, Lynch, or many of the deceased film auteurs - brings together the thought, its absurd powerlessness, and the world," writes . "But instead of stepping out into a religious hinterland or mediocre media illusion-production, the challenge of thought is the ability to believe in the world."

Craig Keller's been thinking about Bergman as well.

Via Bookforum, Daisuke Miyao in American Sexuality Magazine on Sessue Hayakawa and Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton arguing - in the Wall Street Journal, naturally - that "the global economy in general - and the entertainment business in particular - is absolutely not turning the world into an American shopping mall." Well, that's a relief.

For the Telegraph, Sheila Johnston talks with Peter Hewitt about one of his favorites, Dead of Night.

So is Norma Khouri's book, Forbidden Love, about the "honor killing" of her best friend, a hoax or not? For the Age, Philippa Hawker talks with Anna Broinowski about her documentary, Forbidden Lie$: "I'm suspicious of playing amateur psychologist and giving you closure, I'd be wary of summing Norma up, I don't think that's possible."

"[A]s an exposé of corporate and state exploitation of the poor, [Bill Haney's The Price of Sugar] is nothing short of blistering," writes Nick Schager at Slant. Also: "Once upon a time, Amanda Bynes made a movie called Sydney White that so lazily transplanted Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to a college setting that it made one pine for a poison apple."

In the Voice:

• Scott Foundas on Honor de Cavalleria, "writer-director Albert Serra's extraordinary, minimalist/naturalist take on the Don Quixote story."

• Aaron Hillis on Beauty Remains: "[T]he film plays like the work of a fifth-generation Chinese hack faking a lavish Hollywood saga on an indie budget: It's all soft focuses, sax flourishes, and silky slo-mos." More from Ed Gonzalez at Slant: "Director Ann Wu has Wongian aspirations, and though she means for the film to be opulent and woozy, it mostly registers as a stilted dream state." But Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in the NYT, finds it a "delicate figurine of a movie."

• Julia Wallace on Adrift in Manhattan: "[Y]ou can't build a movie around lingering, soulful shots of the No. 1 train zooming up and down the West Side. There's no there there." Related: For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with director Alfredo De Villa " about his transition into filmmaking, his cinematic homages to William Friedkin and David O Russell, and how Darth Vader changed his life."

• Aaron Hillis on My Name Is Alan and I Paint Pictures: "Tastelessly hyper-stylized, the film tries to reflect the disease that ails its acrylic-smearing subject - schizophrenia - but only ends up exploiting his mental illness with cheesy animation and noisy, erratic segues." But for Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in the NYT, while the story of Alan Streets "is sympathetically told, it's ultimately a springboard for the movie's lucid explanation of how creativity and mental illness interact within the brain."

• Jean Oppenheimer on the "engaging, female-centric melodrama," Antonia.

• Aaron Hillis again, enjoying Darkon, "Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer's clever, lo-fi dorkumentary about fantasy role-players in Baltimore who dress up in makeshift costumes and wage elaborate territorial battles in suburban fields." Adds Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times: "Eloquent and occasionally touching, Darkon is haphazardly photographed but unfailingly generous toward subjects who exhibit an astonishing degree of self-awareness. 'It's like watching the TV, but you're the hero. Who doesn't want that?' one enthusiast asks. Who indeed?" But "Darkon is respectful to a fault," argues Peter Smith at Nerve. "Disastrously, the filmmakers have centered the narrative not in the real world, but in the fantasy world the gamers prefer to inhabit."

• "With the stylish simplicity of its namesake font, Helvetica keenly distills the eternal aesthetic battle between the classical and the baroque and explores what happens when a revolution goes mainstream," writes Julia Wallace. "Gary Hustwit - who also directed the mesmerizing Moog, about the analog synthesizer - has a knack for finding a universe within a narrow topic," adds Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times.

"Comingsoon.net have posted a memo which they say was leaded via an un-named talent agency: it's a list of productions to be fast-tracked in order to beat the impending actors' strike." So Andrew Pulver looks it over and selects seven projects he finds promising.

Also in the Guardian:

• Xan Brooks considers the pros and cons of Jon Stewart's return as host of the Oscars.

• "The nation's favourite teddy, Paddington Bear, is to hit the big screen," reports Francesca Martin. "Producer David Heyman, best known for the Harry Potter films, has just gone into production with screenwriter Hamish McColl on a film based on Michael Bond's 11 books about the marmalade-loving bear from Peru."

• Antony Sher heard about the murder of actor Brett Goldin, he called his friend, the documentary filmmaker Jon Blair: "He was drawn to the idea of investigating this murder together on camera, but felt we should broaden the canvas. In the bad old days, we'd both actively opposed apartheid, but maybe now was the time to talk about the New South Africa's appalling crime figures. In 2006, for instance, there were 18,500 murders, compared with 750 in England and Wales. Although our film would begin with the murder of two white people, the majority of these victims are black." Their film is True Stories: Murder Most Foul and it screens on More 4 on September 25.

• "Unless it is a very convincing joke, Dan Aykroyd most definitely believes in the existence of UFOs," writes... wait for it... Emine Saner.

• With A Mighty Heart now opening in the UK and Europe, the paper runs a piece by Judea Pearl, Daniel Pearl's father, that ran in the New Republic back in July. A torrent of comments follow.

• "Racist performances in film are hardly new: Hollywood has always trafficked in stereotypes, and cast from its comparatively small gene pool. Yet when we consider these souvenirs of a less enlightened age, perhaps the most startling fact is that the worst offenders were often the biggest names..." Shane Danielson draws up a list of eight.

• "Without getting too culturally nationalistic about it, why is Le Serpent not a British movie?" asks John Patterson. "Why did it take a foreigner to discern a superb film property within an out-of-print novel written three decades ago in another language? I only ask because it happens a lot." Also: "This summer saw a long-overdue Triumph of the Nerds at the American box office." And Patterson argues that Harvey Weinstein has ruined the Grindhouse experience for European audiences. Related: "Quentin Tarantino is one of the most arrogant film directors alive and once upon a time he was equal to the boast," writes James Christopher in the London Times. "But the brat pack ego that buoyed him through the 1990s is wearing thin." Anyway, Sheryl Garratt talks with Tarantino for the Telegraph

Overall, John Carvill is disappointed with Bogie: A Celebration of the Life and Films of Humphrey Bogart, and he's got a lot to say in PopMatters about what goes missing.

"The thoroughness with which The Unknown Soldier expunges the last traces of innocence from the citizens of the Third Reich may inspire some sympathy for those who came after," writes AO Scott. "In this country, after all, we are accustomed to looking back admiringly on the achievements of the Greatest Generation. Germans, in contrast, must grapple with the legacy of their worst." More from Rob Humanick (Slant) and Julia Wallace (Voice). Related online listening: Michael Verhoeven is a guest on the