Fests and events, 10/31.

"Thursday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's Linwood Dunn Theater, The Trespasser will have its first screening in Los Angeles in decades." This is a movie with a great story behind it and Susan King tells it. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Mark Olsen previews AFI Fest, opening tomorrow and running through November 11.

Romania "has no business being so exciting onscreen because (a) it's Romania, for god's sake, still hobbling out of Nicolae Ceausescu's 20th-century dark ages, and (b) it only produces six features per year. They can't all be good, can they? Oh yes, they can." Dennis Harvey previews Revolutions in Romanian Cinema, running at the Pacific Film Archive from Saturday through December 9.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Cheryl Eddy: "Marking National American Indian Heritage Month, the American Indian Film Festival kicks off with a pair of ballet-dancer biographies." Friday through November 10. More from Eve O'Neill at SF360.

Plus, Harvey on Red State Cinema: Rural Auteurs, tomorrow through November 16.

"Ostensibly an annual plunge into the Jewish diaspora as it has taken seed all over the planet, the Boston Jewish Film Festival has always been more about the tenuous experience of that global community than about great films," writes Michael Atkinson in the Boston Phoenix. Tomorrow through November 11.

"In the film Videogrammes of a Revolution (1992) by the German experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki and his Romanian colleague Andrei Ujica we are catapulted back into the events in Romania in December 1989, which led to the execution of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Yet the film shows that what we don't see may be just as important as what we see." See Us Act is an exhibition at the Lunds Konsthall through November 11.

Michael Guillén reviews three films from Lebanon that have screened at the Arab Film Festival.

The Observer's Jason Solomons reviews the highlights of the London Film Festival. Also: "There is now an established cinematic language of stripped-down, jittery naturalism that is a good fit for investigations into the harsh brutalities of the current Middle East conflicts, but it's not easy to get it right: even [Michael] Winterbottom allowed it to get horribly diluted on A Mighty Heart," writes the Guardian's Andrew Pulver, reviewing Battle for Haditha. "But [Nick] Broomfield, as he showed in his anti-gangmaster fusillade Ghosts, is a true adept."

"Somerset may be about to earn the title of Britain's sauciest county: it is to host the first ever British erotic film festival next June," writes Francesca Martin in the Guardian.

For the Independent, Charlotte Cripps previews the Bath Film Festival, running Thursday through November 11.

The Denver Film Festival (November 8 through 18) turns 30 this year and the Denver Post's Lisa Kennedy counts the ways the city'll be celebrating. Via Movie City News. More from Peter Nellhaus.

"The Gijón International Film Festival, in the Spanish region of Asturias, has recently unveiled portions of the main programme of its 45th edition, which runs from November 22 - December 1," reports Vitor Pinto. Also at Cineuropa, Fabien Lemercier: "Having opened last Friday with Emir Kusturica's Promise Me This, the 29th edition of the Mediterranean Film Festival in Montpellier will be in full swing until November 4."

"Although one may instantly presume that Turkey has only one international film festival to offer, in the form of Istanbul, it is in fact Antalya that garners the most prestige and respect, as the country's oldest and more lavishly funded," writes Kerem Bayraktaroglu at indieWIRE.

At Filmmaker, Jason Sanders has the award-winners from the Hawaii International Film Festival.

"Genna Terranova, former Vice President of Acquisitions at the Weinstein Company, has joined the Tribeca Film Festival as senior programmer," notes Gillian Reagan at the New York Observer. "Co-founder Jane Rosenthal also announced that the festival will create a year-round department."

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/31.

"I asked the world to send me a list of 31 films that scared the pee out of them," writes Ed Hardy Jr. "Many more people than I would have thought possible heard, and answered, the call. 183 films were nominated and voted on. The resulting list is not perfect, but it is a fascinating picture of what our little community considers canonical horror cinema."

"From fetid canals to glitzy high rises, the physical aspects of his home city of Amsterdam repeatedly inform [Dick] Maas's [site] work..., at once serving to ground his films in the believable everyday world, display how the everyday can be horrifying, and present a distinctly Dutch take on the horror/thriller genre." Not Coming to a Theater Near You wraps its 31 Days of Horror with Dark Passages: The Films of Dick Maas, a collection of four pairs of succinct takes on four films: Leo Goldsmith and Thomas Scalzo on The Lift; Adam Balz and Rumsey Taylor on Amsterdamned; Balz and Jenny Jediny on Silent Witness; and Goldsmith and Jediny on The Shaft.

Updated.

"Fuck hyperbole - George A Romero's debut film Night of the Living Dead may be the purest horror film ever made," proposes Rob Humanick, capping off his 31 Days of Zombie! Related: a double bill at Facets Features: "Remakes generally fall into the "bad idea" category, but on occassion one comes along that holds its own against the original work," writes Phil Morehart. "Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead (1990) is one such film. Yes, George A Romero's 1968 original is an untouchable zombie masterpiece, but Savini brings a unique flair to the events, most notably regarding the undead."

"Like Bram Stoker's Dracula, its much more successful companion piece, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein aspires to combine the intellectual depth and philosophical preoccupations of art with the visceral, lurid sensuality of pulp - a feat Coppola, who produced Frankenstein, also pulled off in The Godfather," blogs Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Instead Frankenstein combines the ridiculousness of pulp with the pretensions of art."

"[T]he modern haunted house film is fundamentally about gentrification," argues Sam J Miller in PopPolitics. "Again and again we see fictional families move into spaces from which others have been violently displaced, and the new arrivals suffer for that violence even if they themselves have done nothing wrong."

"Now this is how to make a list," writes Jim Emerson, pointing to Richard Corliss's "Top 25 Horror Movies" for Time. "Argue all you like with RC's choices (that is the point), this list strikes me as a brilliant balancing of the expected and the unexpected, the mainstream and the marginal, from 1896 to 2004." Also, there's his own "4 undervalued scary movies on DVD."

"Over the next six months, a crew of able young women will be duking it out for audience affection in an array of horror-thrillers that will showcase the power of the Y chromosome," writes Rachel Abramowitz in the Los Angeles Times. Among them: Rachel Nichols (P2), Jessica Alba (Awake), Emily Browning and Arielle Kebbel (A Tale of Two Sisters, "a redo of the highest-grossing Korean horror film of all time"), Brittany Snow (Prom Night, "the remake of the Jamie Lee Curtis artifact from the 1980s") and Sarah Michelle Gellar (Possession, "another Asian redo").

At Bright Lights After Dark, C Jerry Kutner casts a ballot: "This is my ranked list of 31 Essential Horror Films culled from Ed Hardy, Jr's 183 Official Nominees for the 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies List." Also, Erich Kuersten recommends Let's Scare Jessica to Death: "A fine example of a 'is she is or is she ain't a nutcase' horror picture that's lived a consistently below-the-radar life since its brief theatrical premiere in 1971, Jessica contains almost no gore but watching it alone late at night a few months ago, I finally understood the term 'spine-tingling.'"

Doug Cummings has a recommendation, too. The Testament of Doctor Cordelier is "a pretty fun and fascinating film, both as a dark variant on Renoir's typical themes and as a technological experiment: the film was shot with multiple cameras and long takes to capture the actors' energy with few interruptions and prove that feature films could be made cheaply with television methods. (Hitchcock would himself use a black-and-white television crew to film 1960's Psycho.)"

For Craig Keller, the last 15 minutes of Michael Curtiz's Doctor X "are among the greatest in all of American cinema."

The Hollywood Bitchslap team names their Halloween picks.

For the Guardian, Jeremy Dyson pits Christopher Lee's Dracula against Max Schreck's Nosferatu. Related: At Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson on Murnau's Nosferatu and Richard von Busack on Werner Herzog's Nosferatu. Meanwhile, the Dracula Blogged project rolls on, a reminder from Thom at a Film of the Year, where he's also pointing to Frankensteinia and Final Girl, devoted to "the slasher flicks of the 70s and 80s."

"As someone who's required to pay attention to cinematic trends, I think it's reasonable to assume that studios and other purveyors of film and video products now anticipate the weeks leading up to Halloween with same drooling relish they once reserved for the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas," writes Gary Dretzka at Movie City News. "Although there's never been a drought in the supply of fresh horror flicks, the quantity, quality and diversity of niche titles has never been greater."

Michael Guillén notes that Herschell Gordon Lewis will be on hand for two "outstandingly rare screenings of The Wizard of Gore in San Francisco at midnight on Friday and Saturday. And Cheryl Eddy talks with him for the Bay Guardian.

Dennis Cooper's been posting Halloween entries and tops off the series today with a 1991 essay on the Friday the 13th movies.

"The Others directly recalls and inverts Jack Clayton's masterful Deborah Kerr vehicle The Innocents," writes cnw for Reverse Shot. "Like that film, it relies almost entirely on cinematic form - shot composition, sound, and lighting - to evoke fear, and hinges on a remarkably effective, histrionic star turn from its female lead, as well as formidable supporting performances, particularly by the children."

"The Tall Man has to be one of the best original monsters of the past few decades." Adam Ross revisits Phantasm.

David Austin's got three capsule reviews at Cinema Strikes Back: The Manitou, Feast and Them!

At Cinematical, Monika Bartyzel lists seven "Halloween Flicks That Could Ruin Relationships." And James Rocchi rounds up Cinematical's Halloween madness. It's been going on all month, you know.

Catch up with Sam Katzman, suggests the New York Post's Lou Lumenick.

For Shahn, it's Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase.

Ted Pigeon looks back on "Memorable 'Slasher' Title Sequences."

Via Dwight Garner comes news that John Updike is writing a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick: The Widows of Eastwick.

John Coulthart's got a Halloween playlist, a followup to last year's list. Related: Kenji Fujishima at the House Next Door on Gustav Mahler's "unsettling" Sixth Symphony. Michael Tully's got a scary tune for you, too.

Online browsing tip. I Am as You Will Be: The Skeleton in Art at Cheim & Read, via Coudal Partners, where you can read and/or listen to Jim's essay, "All Hallows'."

Online browsing tips. Kimberly Lindbergs rounds up several fun links.

Online viewing tips, round 1. 10 Zen Monkeys presents "10 Best Monster Ads."

Online viewing tips, round 2. The Guardian's Kate Stables has eight shorts for you. And more from Phil Hoad.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Andrew Bemis's Halloween trailers.

Updates: Really fine piece from Noel Vera:

An especially vivid passage from Dickens's Oliver Twist gives us, I think, a clue as to why Romero's zombies are so much more memorable [than the running kind]:

- these fears were nothing compared to the sense that haunted him of that morning's ghastly figure following at his heels.... He could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of wind came laden with that last low cry. If he stopped, it did the same. If he ran, it followed - not running too - that would have been a relief - but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and borne on one slow melancholy wind that never rose and fell.

See, it's those words, "it followed - not running too - that would have been a relief," that nail it for me. Romero's zombies are frightening because they're never in a hurry; they operate on a different sense of time from our own, and we feel, no matter how fast we run, that they will somehow overtake us - if not now, later; if not today, tomorrow. With today's sprinting zombies, you feel as if a tranquilizer and a long hot shower might help improve their mood. Not so with Romero's undead: they seem as inevitable as the cold that will someday creep up our bones, and invariably, inevitably claim us for its own.

"So, the big question, of course, and it's a valid one, is why?" At Reverse Shot, robbiefreeling on Rob Zombie's Halloween: "[L]ike Tarantino, who with the great Kill Bill Vol 1 and Death Proof has been moving toward ever-more inventive ways of reappropriating pop culture, Zombie is smart about playing with audience's expectations as well as emotions. Kill Bill seemed the ne plus ultra of epic pop collage (it created its own symphony of colors, sounds, and cinematic intuition); and Death Proof took seemingly familiar 'trash' tropes and then stretched and pulled time like taffy, creating an entirely new experience, almost a visual essay, on the very films Tarantino only seemed to be aping. Halloween isn't quite so heady an experience, but in subtly shifting perception, in making us identify with Michael Myers (a shocking, sickening prospect for the audience), we engage with the film's mythology in new, invigorating ways."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth has more online viewing - fun stuff.

Croatian Cinema. 3.

On Monday, James Van Maanen reviewed three films screening as part of Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema. Today, he talks with the directors. See, too, Nick Pinkerton's overview of the series for the Voice and Kinoeye's Croatian archive.

I'm sitting in a kind of combination storeroom/interview room at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's NYC offices. Gathered round the table are three extremely affable and talented Croatian filmmakers who almost perfectly represent three different generations and whose command of the English language is shockingly good.

At age 73, Krsto Papic has been making movies since 1965 (his 1973 A Village Performance of Hamlet is part of the current FSLC series, Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema). Dejan Sorak, 53, directed his first film in 1979 and is represented here by his award-winning 2005 feature Two Players from the Bench. The youngster of the bunch is Ognjen Svilicic, 36, whose first full-length feature arrived in 1999 - and this year's Armin (site), which makes its US debut here at the festival, is Croatia's choice to compete for this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar. As Mr Papic is the senior in the group, we'll start the conversation with him.

Papic: I was born on the border of Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, so I have three mentalities - and... [laughing] three of them very bad! In the ex-Yugoslavia, as we now call it, we had six republics and each republic had its own productions and its own small film industry. When a film would be released, it would be known as "Yugoslavian," but the general public would always know from which specific republic that film had come.

Svilicic: Even in the US, a New York filmmaker such as Abel Ferrara still refers to himself as a Bronx filmmaker!

JVM: For most Americans of an adult age (and perhaps others around the world), hearing the words Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and the like brings to mind the war and the atrocities of a decade past. After seeing several recent films from your part of the world - Armin, Two Players from the Bench and Vinko Bresan's Witnesses - I can't help wondering if there is anything except the war and its aftermath for modern Croat filmmakers to explore?

Svilicic: I think it goes both ways. Yes, you see the effects of the war, but Croatian cinema has always been so good about developing relationships between characters. Armin is basically about a father/son relationship. But as a journalist you have to make connections, and so you make the connection with the war because that is all you have seen on CNN. But it is not fair to the movie to do just this. My character Armin is an accordion player first. But in all movies, you do start with a set of circumstances. In a western, you have the wild West. And in Armin, you have a movie-within-the-movie being made about the war. So, yes, you do make those connections. But still, we try not to make a political statement. We try to stick to characters. We feel we should use our movies to tell stories rather than make political statements.

JVM: This seems true particularly about Armin, while Two Players from the Bench does seem to make more of a broad political statement.

Sorak: Yes, this does seem to be, but still I hope it isn't. It's a sort of paradox because my purpose as filmmaker is not to send a message, not to be a postman, not to change the world. With Two Players from the Bench, I want to create a fictional world that is entertaining and touches you that also attends the question of human destiny. I am taking the reality I see around me in my world and creating a story with it. After this war, when the International War Crimes Tribunal was set up by the UN, this became a very politically hot issue and very interesting to all the regions of the former Yugoslavia - the question of guilt and innocence for the war. We had our first screening in the biggest outside cinema in all the world, in front of thousands of people and the audience was delighted. Both sides, Serbia and Croatia, liked the film. The film seems to be about politics but the reality is that it is really about the mentality of an open mind and open eye without prejudices. And though audiences delighted in it, the media did not. Perhaps because the film does not spare anyone or anything. It is ironic and has something of a cathartic effect.

JVM: The ending of the film struck me a hugely cathartic. I was also impressed with the technical achievements of Two Players; everything from the sound to the music, the photography, editing. It's a big canvas and it looked as good as anything Hollywood might have done on maybe 20 times the budget.

Sorak: When you have a big production, you need to get all the details correct. Then, even if you are doing a low-budget movie, it is going to look high-budget. We do professional work!

Svilicic: Every Croatian movie now tries to achieve this level.

Sorak: Nowadays in Croatia, we are living in the golden age of moviemaking.

JVM: That's funny, because I had heard that the golden age of Yugoslav moviemaking happened back in the 60s, 70 and 80s.

Papic: Well, that was the first golden age! Now it is the second.

Sorak: And you [pointing to Papic] have lived through both of them!

Papic: Well, it is a very good thing right now, I think, because the government gives us the money to pay for the budget for the film and they don't ask any kind of questions.

JVM: In the press materials for the festival, there is mention made that the Yugoslav film industry had become at one point almost extinct. Was this due to the war, or to something else?

Svilicic: Yes, the war, but more for our filmmaking, because we ceased to make any money from the films.

Papic: We never really had any "industry" the way you have in Hollywood. It's not like that in Europe. It always had to be supported by government money. Here you have a big film industry, big corporations and a very big audience. You are competing better than anyone else in the world in the field of cinema. In Europe, film is considered part of culture, so governments help pay for that culture.

JVM: I don't think so many people over here - at least the ones making most of the mainstream movies - consider film as part of culture. It is primarily something to make money from. Culture may follow if we are lucky.

Papic: Also, there is a difference in our countries because we were formerly a socialist country and now we are not, so it is a long story and depends on a number of things. Also, our cinema has always been different from that of Austria, Denmark and the rest. Originally, Yugoslavian cinema was part of one system, and each of our republics - Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia - competed against the others for who would be the best of all. It is also about living under a one party system without democracy. Now we have democracy, but we have new problems.

JVM: Do the people of the former Yugoslavia ever long for the past and the days of Tito, in the way that some countries of Eastern Europe now seem to long for the relative "safety" of communism again?

Papic: I think our communism was not equal to the Russian communism. It was a more "soft" communism. We had passports and the freedom of traveling all over the world - as long as you were not a political enemy. Tito was constantly dancing between the Russians and America, between East and West and between NATO and the Russian power, so sometimes he was more pro-Russian, sometimes more pro-America. When he was pro-Westen, this was good for us filmmakers. And in general, for the artists because we had more freedom. When he turned toward the Russians - not himself really, but the hard-liners - then we had difficult and hard times.

I had a different experience because I began my film career in the good period when everything was easier in the 1970s. At the end of the filming of A Village Performance of Hamlet, everything changed. We had the Croatian Spring and suddenly Tito stopped everything. The film was attacked - blocked for two years from being shown anywhere. I could not go to the foreign festivals - Cannes, Berlin, Venice - and I could not represent my country. After almost two years, however, the selector for the Berlin festival came to Zagreb and he saw the film and liked it and so he put this condition in front of the government: "If you are not going to give me this film to show in the Berlin festival, then I will not take any Yugoslav film for maybe the next five years."

JVM: Blackmail!

Papic: Yes. And so finally I did go the Berlin festival with the film that year.

JVM: Let's talk about the ironic use in Armin of a filmmaker wanting to make a documentary of the boy and his family's experience in wartime. This is both funny and a real slap at filmmakers, in its way. And yet, it is not really their fault, as they are simply doing what they do.

Svilicic: Of course! They are trying their best. Usually filmmakers from these "big" countries have good thoughts, good wishes to do these things. But it is superficial. I did not mean this as a comparison between the West and the East but between the rich and the poor countries. When you are a rich country, you can just do everything.

JVM: In addition to writing and directing, you also did some of the music for your earlier films, right?

Svilicic: Yes. But it wasn't such a good idea. So I don't anymore.

JVM: The music used at close of Two Player from the Bench is exceptional, I think. It is simply gorgeous, rich and moving.

Sorak: Yes. We had a very talented composer who did this. In fact, this person is a very good screenwriter as well. He has written scripts for some of Papic's films.

Papic: He is very, very good. His name is Mate Matisic, and you should mention this because then perhaps he will get some work! Here, I will write it down for you. [And he does.]

Sorak: He composed the entire score, the folk song, the song sung at the beginning and the wonderful piece that closes the film.

JVM: Have any of these films been picked up by a distributor?

Sorak: No, but last year Two Players had a screening at the Tribecca Film Festival, and the New York Times wrote that this film should be picked up. Also Variety, and Richard Brody in the New Yorker placed this film as among the five best undistributed movies. But still, nothing.

Papic: Getting distribution for a foreign film in America is more difficult now than it used to be.

JVM: Maybe we'll have the chance to see these on DVD?

Svilicic: One of my movies - Sorry for Kung Fu - is now on DVD from a small company here in New Jersey. You can order it from Amazon. You can get a really, really cheap price. Maybe one dollar.

Sorak: DVD or the internet is the only way to see most Croatian movies.

JVM: Anything else you would like to add?

Papic: Yes. I think this festival is really very important for us. A very good thing to have it here at the Lincoln Center Film Society and especially here in New York. I think this festival is the most important thing to happen to Croatian cinema so far - in my opinion.

Sorak: Also, Croatia has just been made a member of the United Nations Security Council for the first time. This, too, is a very good thing.

Svilicic: This is all part of a kind of renaissance for this little unknown country. Maybe we are going to be a big thing, like America's film industry. Or India's.

JVM: There might be Hollywood, Bollywood - and Croatia-wood?

Papic: Once, back in the 70s and 80s, we did have one of the biggest film studios in the world in Yugoslavia. Film companies would come from all over to use it. Now it looks like a Roman ruin. So we lose the great studio. But maybe we'll become something again.

JVM: Now I must ask a really stupid and naive question. But I can't help it. Do you think it possible that something like what happened in the 90s could happen again? Or has the war, the atrocities, been put to rest somehow?

Papic: I think it is not possible to happen again.

Svilicic: I would say for Croatia, not. But I am pretty sure it could happen again in Bosnia because it is still unresolved. In my opinion, there is a reason that the Second World War did not happen again. You had Nazis killing Jews. They were stopped. We knew what had happened. It all came out. But in Bosnia, this is not true. Things are still hidden. They have not all come out.

Papic: Still, I think that this will not happen because the European community will not allow it. It is not in the interest of Europe or the new rich or the big corporations to allow this.

* * *

At this point, our time is up, and the Film Society representative clears us out and readies the room for the next interview. But I thank these wonderful filmmakers for their time, energy and talent. And hope more of the world has the chance to see examples of their excellent work.

Shorts, 10/30.

JC Gabel and James Hughes introduce an interview for Stop Smiling: "In June, filmmaker Thom Andersen opened the doors of his home - a Schindler house tucked in the hills of Silver Lake - and spoke eloquently, if not mordantly, about the city he's been chronicling for decades (see [Sam Sweet's] piece for more on his authoritative 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself). Looming beyond the windows of the kitchen where Andersen quietly sat, pinpointing his replies to each question, was a clear view of the famed Hollywood sign, the seemingly eternal landmark that takes on a new shape after sustained exposure to Andersen's forensic analysis of the movie business and its endless byproducts."

"Heath Ledger and Sean Penn are in talks to star in Tree of Life, with River Road Entertainment finally bringing writer-director Terrence Malick's long-gestating drama to life." Gregg Goldstein has more in the Hollywood Reporter. Via Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. Related: Sarah Manvel at kamera on The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America.

The New York Observer's Gillian Reagan points to Leslie Simmons's HR item on Rebecca Miller's adaptation of her own novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, starring Robin Wright Penn, Julianne Moore and Winona Ryder. Related: Chris Stangl wishes Ryder a happy birthday.

Shawn Levy has a friend who's seen a very rough cut of Pixar's Wall-E.

A "cache of theater-related photographs, scrapbooks, journals, scripts and more" related to Katharine Hepburn's stage career being donated to the New York Public Library "offer a revealing glance at her personality, profession and obsessions," reports Patricia Cohen in the New York Times.

"In Naked Spaces: Living Is Round, Trinh T Minh-ha expounds on the themes of postcolonial identification and the geopolitical (and social) apparatus of disempowerment in Reassemblage to create dense, thoughtful, and articulate ethnographic essay film on indigenous identity, the impossibility of translation, and architecture as cultural representation," writes acquarello.

Hollywood's writers may well be on strike starting Thursday. "While a spate of not-so-good movies is likely to emerge from the 2007/2008 strike-film bubble, a boom in original scripts will only be good for the movie industry," blogs Anne Thompson. "But many people will lose money in the meantime. The cost of the five-month 1988 writers strike was some $500 million."

If the Cheney administration really is cooking up an attack on Iran, its "Hollywood Revenge" is going to be a harder sell in the UK than in the US, argues the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

Also: Christopher Hawtree remembers screenwriter Marc Behm and Eric Shorter remembers Moira Lister, "an elegant, intelligent and funny actor who enchanted connoisseurs of postwar comedy on stage, screen and television."

Every evening next month, a different celeb programmer will be presenting a film on TCM. Robert Cashill has the match-ups.

Shirley MacLaine fills out Vanity Fair's questionnaire.

Stylus Magazine lists the "Top Films of the Millennium." So far, of course. Via Jason Morehead.

Not film-related, but still: Elatia Harris interviews BibliOdyssey's Paul K for 3 quarks daily. Via wood s lot.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/30.

"It's almost too late for Halloween movie recommendations, but I want to mention a few past and current DVD releases that will give you a good spooky night indoors," blogs David Edelstein. "[T]ry Gregory Jacobs's little-seen Wind Chill, a trim, claustrophobic, and unnerving little ghost story." This, after a few fun stories starring Robert Duvall and Isabella Rossellini, among others.

"Claire Denis isn't generally ranked amongst horror's foremost auteurs, but if she were to be judged solely on the basis of her overlooked (yes) masterpiece from 2001, Trouble Every Day she'd far outshine the competition," argues clarencecarter at Reverse Shot.

David Cronenberg's The Brood and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds "use the pretext of horror to deal with something far closer to home, something not even terribly far removed from the experience of the normal, non-psychotic members of the film's audience," writes Leo Goldsmith in a piece for Not Coming to a Theater Near You that also compares and contrasts The Brood with David Lynch's Eraserhead.

An airplane, a school, a hospital. It doesn't have to be a house to be haunted. IFC News has got 11 examples. Also, Nick Schager presents a list of five collections "which in their own special way epitomize the good, the mediocre, and/or the sublimely ridiculous that horror anthologies have to offer."

"Neither the Sea Nor the Sand is not a great film and many people won't enjoy its atypical plot or be impressed with its strange charm, but it manages to create a somewhat unnerving atmosphere and sustain it throughout its 110-minute running time," writes Kimberly Lindbergs. "It also makes great use of its coastal locations and offers viewers an interesting look at love after death."

Bob Turbull wraps Toronto After Dark.

At Movie Morlocks, Medusa points to In My Arms, a site devoted to monsters and robots carrying nubile young women (often unconscious) off to who knows where.

Ryan Stewart lists "Horror Movies to Watch for in 2008." Also at Cinematical, Jette Kernion revisits Tim Burton's Ed Wood.

"Much has been written about George Romero's Dawn of the Dead," begins Rob Humanick. True. At any rate, he's watched it again and finds that "Romero's carefully calculated deconstructions on social woes of the time seem most brilliant in their simultaneously identifying the film as a distinctly American work rooted in the cultural anarchy of the 1970's as well as one packed with universal truths on the human condition, borders of time and place notwithstanding."

At the AV Club, Andy Battaglia's got suggestions for what to serve at your It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown party.

Online listening tip. The Drive-In Speaker Box Halloween Special.

"Ghost Story is a spooker that always seems to fall through the cracks when "scary movie list time" rolls around," writes , introducing today's clip at Facets Features. "Not only is it genuinely creepy, but it also features a powerhouse quartet of old school stage and screen legends Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr."

DVDs, 10/30.

"A seven-hour-long film about Hitler caused quite a stir when it was shown in New York in January, 1980," writes Richard Brody in the New Yorker. "Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Our Hitler (a two-disk set from Facets) is anything but a bio-pic. Its original German title, which translates as Hitler, A Film from Germany, makes clear the scope of the director's ambition: to investigate Hitler as a psychic and aesthetic phenomenon, or, as is said in the film, as 'fantasies of the mind and their blood realization.'"

"An unlikely, perhaps unrepeatable phenomenon, Twin Peaks went from national sensation to ratings pariah in just over a year," writes Dennis Lim. David Lynch's "singular sensibility made the show an object of instant fan ardor, but for the general public - and certainly for the network, ABC - it soon proved alienating. Twin Peaks, in other words, was a cult item that somehow found a mass audience and almost immediately suffered the consequences." More on the Definitive Gold Box Edition from Keith Uhlich and Ed Gonzalez in Slant, who agree that it's just that: definitive.

Somewhat related is Bill Gibron's piece in PopMatters on ABC's followup to Twin Peaks with Lynch and Mark Frost, On the Air: "As filtered through their revisionist mindset, and with the critical acclaim they’d accumulated, they were being rewarded with a half hour of primetime real estate to, essentially, do anything they wanted. The plan was to have something that resembled a 30-minute laugh-a-thon, the normal situational contrivances leading the perfectly timed punchlines and acerbic pop culture critiques. What they got, instead, was anarchy posing as programming." Not on legit DVD, unfortunately.

Back in the Los Angeles Times, Kate Arthur talks with My So-Called Life creator Winnie Holzman and exec producer Marshall Herskovitz. More from Ginia Bellafonte in the New York Times.

"Criterion's Eclipse label debuted early this year," writes Doug Cummings, and Raymond Bernard's Les Misérables "is my favorite discovery of the series so far, a richly conceived and fully-formed adaptation that does admirable service to the novel's timeless moral and social themes. A forgotten masterpiece not to be missed."

"Criterion released [Lindsay] Anderson's brilliant If... (1968) on DVD earlier this year and they recently announced their plans to release This Sporting Life (1963) in early 2008," notes Kimberly Lindbergs. "Now Warner has entered into the Anderson DVD arena with their impressive Deluxe 2 Disc release of O Lucky Man! which as I mentioned over at Cinedelica earlier this week, promises to be one of the best DVD releases of the year."

"There's a fascinating tension in [Into Great Silence] between what [Philip] Gröning wants to show us and exactly how little he can - that is the point, after all, of the monastic life, that what happens in the material world is irrelevant. Yet it's all you can film," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "The technology of cinema is, therefore, standing in for spiritual struggle itself, the desire for the atheists and agnostics and wannabe devotees among us to genuinely commune with the heavens, and our straining failure to accomplish the task." Also reviewed is Adanggaman, "an Ivory Coast historical micro-epic that claims to have been the continent's first movie about the slave trade, as it was experienced on African soil, where the victims and enslavers were both native peoples."

"No one would be more surprised than the shy, self-denigrating Mario Bava, who died in 1980, to learn that he had become one of the best-known Italian filmmakers in America." Dave Kehr reviews the second volume of Anchor Bay's collection.

The Shamus enjoys "the jumpy, gun-popping nature" of Godard's Masculin Feminin, "But more than the nostalgia, the film seemed to resonate with who we are as a modern species: Self-absorbed. Nothing's changed."

"Even if you're used to the edgy sleaze of precode movies like 1933's Baby Face, it's stunning to see how the activist films of the early 20th century engaged head on with social issues that today's films go to comical lengths to avoid." The Stranger's Annie Wagner reviews Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900 - 1934.

DVD roundups: DVD Talk and the DVD Savant; Bryant Frazer; JA at the Film Experience; the Lumière Reader; and Peter Martin at Cinematical.

Darfur Now (and related bits).

"Darfur Now, Theodore Braun's infectiously optimistic, if perfunctorily realized, documentary about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Sudan arrives in theaters at a crucial moment," writes Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE. "While the civil war in that wartorn region rages unabated, demanding more international visibility, the wave that brought documentary film (and a host of media-silenced issues) to commercial prominence here in the US seems to have crested.... The fact remains that if documentary is going to remain politically relevant, it must maintain commercial viability.... [I]deologically Darfur Now is unimpeachable. Aesthetically, not so much."

Jesse Ashlock talks with directors Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern about The Devil Came on Horseback, out on DVD today. Also at Tribeca's site, a list of "Social Justice Documentaries" on DVD.

Updated through 11/5.

"I'll wager that President Bush hasn't done anything about Darfur not because he has acquired humility about the projection of American power, and not because his sissy White House aides won't give him a plan with cojones, and not because the Darfur portfolio keeps passing from one desk to another, and not because the Pentagon and the State Department are dragging their feet," writes Timothy Noah in Slate. "Rather, I would guess that Bush hasn't done anything about Darfur because the vice president won't let him."

The New York Observer's Gillian Reagan has news of the lineup for MySpace's November 10 Rock for Darfur concert.

Updates: "If you evaluate Darfur Now against the goals it sets for itself—as a stirring call to action—it must be considered lacking," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice.

"Despite the picture's noble intentions and blessedly non-aggressive approach to a very strong subject, there's very little here you couldn't learn from a casual glance at Time magazine now and then, and its 99 minutes could have easily been about 65 if you removed all of the celebrity do-gooder filler," writes Jason Clark in Slant.

Updates, 10/31: "Darfur Now's most noteworthy accomplishment is taking a subject like the genocide in Darfur - to which the most natural human responses are empathy, horror, and anger - and, for an hour and a half, making it almost impossible to care," writes Neal Solon at cinemaattraction.

Howard Feinstein interviews Braun and Don Cheadle.

Updates, 11/2: "The United Nations has estimated that by 2007, 200,000 people had been killed and 2.5 million displaced from their rural villages in Darfur," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "What Darfur Now offers is a collective vision of actions, small and large, taken on many fronts, to end the crisis. The movie is a quiet, methodical call to action."

"The best material is the result of the rare opportunity to shoot inside those refugee camps: hearing firsthand testimony from victims about the catastrophic horrors inflicted on their villages is forceful and persuasive," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Though they are completely committed and are doing difficult, meaningful work, the Americans in the film just do not hold the screen with the same force and power."

"The film is undeniably on the side of the angels, but any of its subjects' stories might have worked better if told in greater depth," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"Each of the six stories is surprisingly optimistic, and if there's one flaw with the film, it's that it almost conclusively portrays the Darfur problem as no longer a problem," writes Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. "But even if so, Darfur Now is not really a film about the Darfur problem, anyway. It is solely about the power and the conviction of these people, which extends to other featured activists, celebrities ([George] Clooney), Darfurians and, most essentially, the Sudanese representative to the United Nations, His Excellency Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, who serves as the antithetical force of the documentary, offering that one bit of negativity in an otherwise positive forum."

Update, 11/5: "[T]he depressing subtext is that even with detailed proof of ongoing genocide, it takes movie stars to get to the movers and shakers, and to get worthy movies like this one into theaters," writes David Edelstein in New York.

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.

"Tales of meteoric rise, inevitable burnout and slow climb back to something resembling normalcy are familiar from the biographies of a thousand haunted artists, but Julien Temple's The Future is Unwritten stands out for its extraordinarily smooth filmmaking, which incorporates clips from contemporary films, photos, [Joe] Strummer's own artwork, and music from his BBC radio show to good effect," writes Jürgen Fauth.

At Slant, Nick Schager finds it, "for the most part, some sort of incredible. In a fashion similar to his 2002 Sex Pistols portrait The Filth and the Fury, Temple confronts not only his legendary punk rock subject but also the cultural and political upheaval of the 70s and 80s British culture from which they emerged."

Updated through 11/4.

"It's the film equivalent of what journalists with elusive subjects call a 'write-around,'" suggests David Edelstein in New York. "[Y]ou only get a taste of what made the Clash for a brief period the most exciting band on that side of the Atlantic (the Ramones dominated ours) in an early live performance of 'I'm So Bored With the USA,' which makes you want to pogo up and down and throw up your fists. It doesn't matter who Joe Strummer was. He was that moment, and will never die."

"You can see why someone would make such a moony doc on this (multi) culture warrior - and why it'd be so inadequate." Mark Asch explains in the L Magazine.

"Old punks are just as bad as old hippies," Temple tells Aaron Hillis in an IFC News interview. "But the ideas are part of a ground rebel human tradition that become more and more important as we get closer to maybe [becoming] the first species to design our own extinction. If you want to be human, you should have some of those ideas aired again."

And indieWIRE interviews Temple, too.

Updates: In another interview, this one at the Reeler, Temple tells ST VanAirsdale, "I never understood that [Martin Scorsese] was such a nutty Clash fan. He was showing me pictures of his parents having dinner with The Clash at their house."

"Temple's engrossing portrait of the Clash's late frontman uses endlessly suggestive montage to show how he kept punk's precepts alive, even after he left the music and eventually the earth itself," writes Jim Ridley. "The Future Is Unwritten is less a eulogy than a wake, and one in which the subject is startlingly present."

Updates, 10/31: Nick Dawson talks with Temple "about his unusual first meeting with Strummer, keeping his punk sensibility and why he wishes he'd made Méliès's A Trip to the Moon."

"The Future Is Unwritten is no radical departure in content from most print-the-legend rock docs: that is, it burnishes down complex social frustrations, individual crises, and years of bad beer and crap gigging, to create one smooth, aerodynamic entertainment," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "What merit it has comes mainly through hooking onto the momentum of the Clash's music--the editing decoupages archived rehearsal video over excerpts from Zero de conduit, Orwell adaptations, and streetfighting footage, making for a crackling melange of generalized 'rebellion' that fits the band's own fist-in-the-air bosh."

Updates, 11/2: "[I]nsofar as I can drag myself back from raving fandom to some kind of detachment, I think The Future Is Unwritten - which is Temple's preferred title; the distributors have added Joe Strummer over his objections - is the most powerful documentary I've seen all year, and one of the two or three best films ever made about an artist or musician," writes Andrew O'Hehir, who has a good long talk with Temple for Salon.

"It's history, criticism, philosophy and politics, played fast and loud," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"Strummer's story is less exciting than the Sex Pistols (whose isn't?), but it holds interest as a classic tale of how life happens to youthful aggression," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

"A large part of what made The Clash superior to other Class Of 77 bashers was Strummer's wit and curiosity, and after absorbing the whole of The Future Is Unwritten, fans will better know where that side of Strummer came from, and how it evolved before he died," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"The curious Mr Temple is the closest thing the UK has to a national music historian," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler, and Unwritten is "a nuanced and comprehensive biography; like most music docs, you have to care about the subject to care at all, but that's the only stumbling block."

"A beautiful, evocative collage composed of concert footage, photographs, interviews and film clips, as well as interviews with people who knew him, the film is a rigorously thorough biography and an impassioned accolade," writes Carina Chocano. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Natalie Nichols talks with Temple.

"It's a great story arc, and this alone makes the movie worth seeing, but Temple's filmmaking may frustrate more than it enlightens," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical.

Update, 11/4: Phil Nugent:

When London Calling came out, just as the 70s were collapsing into the 80s (as Greil Marcus put it at the time), I remember there was a huge push by the rock press to pronounce it not just a good album, not just a great album, but the kind of cultural event of which new beginnings and significant shifts in the wind are made. It was much like the hype that had surrounded Apocalypse Now a few months earlier, and I think it came from the same impulse: a desire to write off what people were seeing as a dead-ended culture and kick-start something exciting and new. But it just didn't happen; Apocalypse Now wasn't as good as The Godfather and wasn't fated to be the same kind of blockbuster hit, and while London Calling had some terrific songs on it, it didn't signal, as some in the rock press wanted it to, the transformation of the Clash into the Beatles in terms of mass popularity, and the ability to affect a whole generation on a deep and visibly detectable level. Neither the movie nor the record headed off the conservative takeover of the culture at the pass; instead, both signalled that doing work in the popular arts that wasn't aimed straight at the lowest common denominator was now a niche activity, aimed at cultural consumers who saw themselves, even congratulated themselves, on their cultishness.

Interview. Joss Whedon.

"Joss Whedon's 'Buffyverse' included both his brilliant series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel," notes Richard Harrington in the Washington Post. "Factor in Firefly, the space cowboy series canceled by Fox in 2003, and you've got a good case for Whedon being one of television's visionaries."

On the occasion of the DVD doorstop, Angel: Complete Series, Sean Axmaker asks Whedon, "What is it about TV vampires that they all want to become detectives?" But there are more questions, too, of course - about what else he's been up to lately and about the movie he's "finishing a polish on" even now.

Update, 11/1: "Whedon and Buffy buddy Eliza Dushku (Faith from the show) will be launching a new series, Dollhouse, with Fox," blogs Jevon Phillips for the Los Angeles Times. "Though a writers' strike could delay production, it's scheduled for fall 2008."

Shorts, 10/29.

"I've been re-reading Michel Marie's book, The French New Wave: An Artistic School," writes Girish. "Even though it's a slim 140-page text, this book is packed with 'bloggable' ideas. Let me focus on one: the role that scriptwriting played in the aesthetic of the French New Wave."

"Cinema is in the head, not in the projector," writes Harry Tuttle.

"Jihad; torture; suicide bombings; terrible things done by and to American soldiers; official secrets and government lies; the failures and responsibilities of journalists, politicians, law enforcement officials and ordinary citizens in the face of terror - such matters will be hard to avoid in movie theaters between now and Christmas," writes AO Scott. And of course, as widely reported, these movies aren't doing very well at the box office, at least so far. "It may also be that even the most zealous opponents of the president and his policies don't want to be preached at when they go to the movies." That said, "What is notable about this new crop of war movies is not their earnestness or their didacticism - traits many of them undoubtedly display - but rather their determination to embrace confusion, complexity and ambiguity."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Part of me feels like I got away with murder," Richard Kelly tells Dennis Lim. "It's a film some people might consider an inaccessible B movie, and it's been slaughtered at the biggest film festival in the world. They could have been like, 'You want more money now?" But Southland Tales, now 19 minutes shorter than the version screened at Cannes and outfitted with new prologue and voice-over, will indeed open on November 14. "Citing the viral popularity of Donnie Darko, [Kelly] said: 'We're hoping with this to get kids turned on in a more political way. You can use subversive humor as your delivery mechanism.'"

• Caryn James talks with prolific screenwriter Peter Morgan about The Deal, about the mid-80s to mid-90s rivalry between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, about Frost/Nixon and a bit about the script he's working on now, depicting Blair's relationship with Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

• Michael Cieply on what ails Indiewood: "[I]f the movie business is to keep making these smart little dramas in which ambitious actors and prize-hungry filmmakers take their annual shot at the gold, it will have to start doing what car makers and packaged-goods companies have always done: sharpen the message and narrow the targets." To heighten the challenge: "One of the film industry's dirty little secrets is that its nearly obsessive reliance on testing of movie trailers and ads has been undercut by the relatively primitive methodology of some research techniques."

"In some ways, newspaper and magazine critics are more like reporters than proper critics: We record our reactions in the heat of the moment, and hope that history will vindicate us." Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"Unsurprisingly, given the depth of his experience as a filmmaker in Peru, a fisherman in Alaska, a restauranteur in New York and other disparate activities, reflected in the breadth of topics explored in his documentaries, [King Corn director Aaron] Woolf is well-versed on any number of subjects," writes Jonathan Marlow, who talks with him for, oh, about two or three pages or so at SF360. Somewhere, there's more. "The excerpt that follows was excised from 55 pages of transcripts."

"Cate Blanchett's impending debut as artistic director of Australia's national theatre company has not been widely welcomed, amid reservations that she was given the role ahead of more experienced candidates, and [on Saturday] the controversy surrounding her appointment deepened," reports Barbara McMahon.

Also in the Observer:

• Andrew Davies, "master of the period television adaptation," has now tackled EM Forster's A Room With a View and "immediately thought that Timothy [Spall], 50, and Rafe [Spall], 24, would be perfect as Mr Emerson and his son George: the working-class father desperate for his isolated, detached son to fall in love." Amy Raphael meets father and son.

• Tim Adams talks with Jane Birkin: "When we meet she's just back from Luxembourg where she was launching her autobiographical film, Boxes, and taking the opportunity to talk about Burma and her friend Aung San Suu Kyi."

• The Review's got a theme this week: Paris. Philip French: "For a century, films have stamped into our brains the Seine, Notre Dame, the Sacré-Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe, l'Opéra (as in The Phantom of), the Moulin Rouge, the steep steps of Montmartre, the Art-Nouveau entrances to the metro and, literally above all of these, the Eiffel Tower, where Gustave Eiffel entertained Thomas Edison in his office located near the top." A list of "10 Paris Film Classics" follows.

• Jason Solomons talks with Julie Delpy about her favorite hangouts. In Paris, of course.

• Also: Philip French on Eastern Promises, Mark Kermode on Golden Door and French reviews Ten Bad Dates with De Niro: A Book of Alternative Movie Lists: "It's certainly a splendid bedside book."

"How could anyone say 'No, thanks' to David Mamet?" Nancy De Los Santos tells the story of how her house became a location for Mamet's martial arts flick, Redbelt. Via Movie City News.

Also in Written By, Marc Norman writes and talks about his book, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting, and Georgia Jeffries addresses her fellow screenwriters: "The vital question - the one I believe we are duty-bound to ask-is this: What messages are we sending?"

"There are many Philip Ridleys," writes Hermione Eyre in the Independent:

There is the children's author, winner of a Smarties Book Prize and creator of well-loved characters such as Poppy Picklesticks. There is the playwright of the apocalypse, feted and reviled in equal measure, who so terrified the bourgeoisie with Mercury Fur (2005) that Faber and Faber refused to publish it and theatre-goers walked out nightly. There is the filmmaker: author of the screenplay of The Krays, the mesmerising 1990 biopic starring the brothers Kemp, and director/writer of the cult classic The Reflecting Skin, with Viggo Mortensen in the lead. Then there is the St Martins-trained performance artist, photographer and painter. Philip Ridley is akin to a hologram: different every way you look at him. And the first thing this intimidating polymath says, when I meet him in his rehearsal space at the Pineapple Dance Studios? "Hello. I'm Phil. Doesn't it smell like the school gym in here? Terrifying."

"A script and just two minutes of footage were enough to sell upstart distribution company Summit Entertainment on North American rights to the unfinished sophomore feature from filmmaker Rian Johnson (Brick)," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez. "In one of the most aggressive acquisitions ever, Summit poached The Brothers Bloom, a movie that many expected would go on the market at the Sundance Film Festival early next year."

The Golden Compass puts New Line Cinema "in a precarious spot, trying to please fans who relish [Philip] Pullman's philosophical and theological puzzles without alienating the very bankable Christian masses." Gina Piccalo maps the battle lines.

"Ang Lee's spy thriller Lust, Caution leads the nominations for the Chinese language Golden Horse Awards." The BBC reports. Related: a story from Criterion's Lee Kline: "Like many filmmakers, Ang Lee knows that it’s as important to grade the video master as it is the prints."

Not film-related, but still: Gerry Canavan, briefly yet arrestingly, on 1973.

Online viewing tip #1. "One of the films featured at the International Museum of Women's Online Film Festival is Melis Birder's fascinating documentary short, The Tenth Planet: A Single Woman's Life in Baghdad," writes Chuck Tryon.

Online viewing tip #2. "In an industry where filmmakers continue to play by the same tired rules, it's always refreshing to see someone come along and mix things up like Michael W Dean has done, making his documentary fully available to watch on YouTube and, consequentially, here as well," notes Film Threat, noting that you can also order DIY or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist on DVD as well. Thanks, Jerry!

Online viewing tip #3. The trailer for Dreams with Sharp Teeth: A Film about Harlan Ellison. Via John Coulthart, who notes, "The film site has nearly an hour of clips to watch, including a tremendous speed-reading of Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish."

Online viewing tip #4. "Last week, I posted this magnificent promotional poster that comic artist Jaime Hernandez created for Bob Dylan's XM satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour," writes David Pescovitz. "Boing Boing reader Simon Nielsen was so taken by the poster and the show that he made a short movie tribute using Hernandez's artwork and the audio from Ellen Barkin's noir voiceovers that open each episode of Theme Time Radio Hour."

Online viewing tip #5. Rare footage of Charlie Chaplin, "relaxed and doing mocking imitations of his contemporary Hollywood stars," at the Guardian. Via Javier Espinoza.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/29.

Bob Westal finally watches Dawn of the Dead. But there's no review here. It's the journey that counts, and what an entertaining journey it is (well, for everyone but Bob, I'm guessing). "I was just happy I'd finally met it head on and endured the entire 126 minute running time. After all, Edmund Hillary didn't review Everest." If it's any consolation, Bob, Dawn was the very first zombie movie I ever saw. Before Dawn, I'd never seen any film, clip or series of flickering images of any sort with a gore factor that would even register when set against Dawn of the Dead. The theater was packed and yelping and shrieking and generally having a grand old time, but I was simply stunned to silence. That housing project scene you describe? That's when I turned to the lovely friend that'd suggested this movie: "I'm leaving, ok?" "Ok." My first walkout. Over the many years since, I've calloused up quite a bit, but I'm not sure how I actually feel about that.

Rob Humanick: "Unlike Night's evocations of racism or Dawn's attack on consumerism, Romero's zombies here aren't terrorists or AIDS or any single meaning to be interpreted. To this point, my colleague Eric Henderson summarizes Romero's matter-of-fact approach so perfectly that I simply must recount it here (kudos to him, too, for his brilliant review of the film, which can be largely thanked for my current involvement with the online film community). 'With Day of the Dead, Romero is through fucking around with allegory.'"

Blogging at PopMatters, Bill Gibron counts the many possible reasons zombies are so damn popular:

Maybe it's the monster's malleability, its ability to be anything to anyone at anytime. Vampires and poltergeists come with certain situational truths, be it nighttime only visitations or projections placed within the ethereal plain. In order to accept them as terrifying, we have to fall into their traditions and buy into their entire heritage. Not true with the undead. Aside from one or two simple rules, they remain transient, capable of taking on any form we feel is necessary. And they keep on coming - never giving up or lessening their resolve (quite a capitalist conceit, when you thing about it). In truth, we love zombies because they are flawless reflections of our own inner fears. No other creature can claim that mantle of meaning. Like their prehistoric need to feed, the undead are forever - and we will always celebrate them as such. When other monsters have lost their snap, the living dead will continue to haunt our darkest nightmares. And we can't get enough.

"Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Don Siegel's rightfully beloved 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers has always been embraced as a successful reimagining of the classic existential terror of identity theft made sci-fi - yet has it ever gotten its full due?" asks Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling, who finds it "an almost perfect intermingling of the physical and the psychological, a horror film that functions as an emotional, humane allegory on the difficulty of maintaining the self as well as a confrontation with the sickening realities of the flesh." Also: Paperhouse, "a not-quite-supernatural, almost-horror, killing-free, absolutely terrifying late 80s British film."

In a recent "long workday chat," Dennis Cozzalio and Don Mancini "touched on everything from the movies of the year, to the state of the horror genre (as evinced by this past weekend's Saw IV grosses, it's apparently still alive and kicking), to critics and criticism, and finally what's coming up next for the writer-director. But in the first segment we talk about Seed of Chucky - how the movie was received, the philosophy behind the direction of the Chucky series, and what it's like to be an award-winning director."

At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg rounds up more of the "Best Horror Movies You Haven't Seen Yet."

"Horror and underground film go together like chocolate and peanut butter, but it's more difficult to find pure avant-garde and experimental/abstract films that are composed solely of horrific theme," writes Mike Everleth. "That curator Noel Lawrence found enough to fill up a totally kickass DVD for Other Cinema's Experiments in Terror 2 is a spectacular achievement."

The first horror film? Jonathan Lapper on the myth and reality behind The Golem.

Sam Raimi's "vigorous methods have always produced a uniquely dynamic style that exudes an effervescent energy, but his earliest films appear fuelled by undiluted creative instincts, displaying a distinctive willingness to act on any artistic impulse," writes Chiranjit Goswami at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Regrettably, Army of Darkness appears to be last project in which Raimi was allowed such creative autonomy, having now become thoroughly entrenched within the Hollywood blockbuster system and apparently content to operate within its artistic restrictions."

In the Age, John Elder checks in on Greg McLean, who's following up Wolf Creek with Rogue, which "isn't nearly as scary," nor is it meant to be. "There's even a kind of well-worn naughty fun to be had in waiting to see who, in a small party of tourists, gets chomped next by a giant territorial crocodile."

"Alone is an incredibly effective piece of filmmaking," writes Bob Turnbull. "Perhaps Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom's follow-up to 2004's well received Shutter is not the most original piece of cinema you'll see, but it succeeds in just about every way in scaring and entertaining the audience." Also, in Nightmare Detective, Shinya Tsukamoto "brings... his unique view of humankind, technology and death."

s "I had to made sure that these were two different films," writes Peter Nellhaus, having just viewed Andrea Bianchi's Malabimba and Mario Bianchi's Satan's Baby Doll. "Both stories take place in huge remote castles. The nubile daughter is possessed by the angry spirit of her dead mother. Both girls have uncles confined to a wheel chair. Both films have Mariangela Giordano in similar roles, wearing almost identical nun's habits. And both films are directed by guys with the same last name, both using the time-honored tradition of signing their films with Anglo pseudonyms."

Online viewing tip. Phil Morehart's clip at Facets Features today comes from Dead Alive.

More online viewing. Paul Clark's got a few trailers at Screengrab; earlier: a spoilerific movie moment from Takashi Miike's Audition.

American Gangsters, 10/29.

Before getting into American Gangster, opening this week, and perhaps catching up with a few stray reviews of Mr Untouchable, which opened last week, you've got to see this: "During the Harlem heroin plague of the seventies, few dealers were bigger than Frank Lucas and Leroy 'Nicky' Barnes," begins Mark Jacobson in New York:

When the possibility emerged that these two old-school street rivals might be willing to engage in what could only be called a historic conversation - they haven't spoken in 30 years - it was easy to envision yelling, phone slamming, and maybe even a death threat or two. Lucas, as I knew well (from writing in this magazine the original piece upon which American Gangster is based), could go off at any moment. And Barnes, who likes to quote Moby Dick and King Lear, mocks Lucas's "country boy" lack of education and perceived lack of finesse in Mr Untouchable. When it came down to it, however, the two old drug-kingpins-in-winter revealed a familiarity that bordered on a kind of love. Or at least respect for a fellow tycoon.

Updated through 11/4.

Alright then, to the movies: American Gangster "unfolds in the 60s and 70s in a New York plagued by drug abuse and police corruption, by the trickle-down effects of the Vietnam War, Nixon, racism, and, implicitly, the internal contradictions of capitalism," writes New York's David Edelstein. "But for all the sprawl, American Gangster feels secondhand. It's like Scarface drained of blood, at arm's length from the culture that spawned it."

"Our loyalties are split between the hero of virtue and the hero of vice," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "We don't have to choose, which is fine—irresponsibility is one of the pleasures of narrative movies. But can we accept the movie's glorification of Frank Lucas in the terms in which it's offered?... Frank's ascent is presented simply—not with irony, or as a mini-tragedy, or as a cruel joke on his own community, but as a long-delayed victory of black capitalism."

"Not only is American Gangster dumb as a rock, but it's also far too convinced of its import to be any fun," growls Nick Schager in Slant. "There may be no other prestige pic this year as mistakenly convinced of its own weightiness, with its title and subsequent scenes featuring Frank positing himself as the embodiment of can-do Yankee spirit ('My country!,' 'This is America!') failing to elevate the tale to the realm of the symbolic, but succeeding in giving this already klutzy, derivative gangster saga an added measure of pomposity."

Josh Rottenberg talks with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Also in Entertainment Weekly: Simon Vozick-Levinson tells the story of the making of Jay-Z's American Gangster, "a new CD embracing the very theme he built his reputation on: the risks and rewards of slinging drugs, familiar to a rapper who long ago spent his days dodging cops on the streets of Brooklyn.... It's not the film's soundtrack; Jay played no part in the entirely separate set of Vietnam-era hits that fits that bill. Instead, Jay's Gangster tale follows a striking, dramatic arc of its own, transporting listeners from a young hustler's ambition ('Pray,' 'No Hook') to a kingpin's arrogance ('Roc Boys,' 'Ignorant S---') to a career criminal's inevitable ruin ('Fallin'')."

Susan King offers "a look at some seminal gangster films, as well as some unusual twists on the traditional mob story."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "With roles in two of winter's most eagerly anticipated films - a small part as an evil narc in Ridley Scott's drug dealer epic American Gangster, which reaches theaters Friday, and a breakout performance in the Coen brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, out Nov 9 - [Josh] Brolin is poised to convince audiences and A-list directors alike that his sudden multiplex ubiquity is no fluke," writes Chris Lee.

Earlier: "American Gangsters, 10/21."

Updates, 10/30: "At the American Film Market, which begins here on Wednesday, no fewer than three prospective movies about the [Medellín] cocaine cartel and its kingpin, Pablo Escobar, are expected to vie for attention," reports Michael Cieply in the New York Times. "Escobar was killed in a 1993 shoot-out with the law in Colombia. For nearly 14 years, his story kicked around the film world, inspiring the Entourage plot line about a movie that can't quite be made. But suddenly, and for no obvious reason, the real-life drug tale has inspired a cinematic battle, pitting players like Oliver Stone and Joe Carnahan against one another."

"American Gangster doesn't add anything new to the dialogue between the cop and criminal archetypes," writes Matt Singer. "It's not as pensive as Heat, not as dynamic as Hard Boiled, not as sardonic as The Departed." Also at IFC News, Singer and Alison Willmore discuss Scott's director's cuts.

"Ridley Scott - Overrated?" asks Noah Forrest at Movie City News.

Ryan Stewart's got a junket report at Cinematical.

"American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Still, for all of American Gangster's discreet period markers and cleverly cobbled-together locations, it doesn't get the period's putrid exhilaration - the sense of irreversible decay and giddy disorder.... Albeit directed with high-powered panache, American Gangster lacks The French Connection's messy human drama and, a choreographed final bust notwithstanding, thrill-machine set pieces. The movie never spins out of control."

Updates, 10/31: "The charisma projected by both Mr Washington and Mr Crowe makes American Gangster the most felicitously magnetic dual vehicle of the year," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "It is also perhaps the most damning account ever of the longest and most disastrous war in our history, the 80-year war on drugs, which has jailed so many of our citizens while, in effect, enriching the criminal gangs around the world and multiplying the menaces of addiction."

"The whole thing is derivative, by the numbers and shamelessly entertaining," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "Just between you and me, [Crowe's] is the awesomest Al Pacino performance I've seen in years. Crowe acts exactly the way all my friends and I do whenever we get drunk and watch Heat for the 4,000th time, and I desperately love him for it."

"American Gangster is quite a high-caliber affair, with a star-studded cast (including several hip-hop artists) and close attention to period details — but it's overlong, a little too morally precise, and spends too much time on Crowe's character, who is hardly as interesting as Washington's smooth, sinister schemer," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Updates, 11/2: ST VanAirsdale talks with Scott and Mr Untouchable co-producer Damon Dash about the "real Harlem" at the Reeler, where R Emmet Sweeney writes, "American Gangster has the feel of a once-cherished idea that lost momentum with every script rewrite and director change," writes at the Reeler.

"It's hard not to fall for these men pumping like pistons across the screen, which is as much part of the movie's allure as its problem," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Mr Scott doesn't escape the contradiction that bedevils almost every Hollywood movie about gangsters, which cry shame, shame, as they parade their stars, crank the soul and showcase the foxy ladies, the swank digs and rides."

"American Gangster offers only the stingiest platform for its actors, and as a piece of storytelling - built on the foundation of a great story - it's an epic that's been sliced and diced into so many little morsels that almost nothing in it has any weight," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "The script... is by Steven Zaillian, writer of Schindler's List and Gangs of New York, and, more recently, the director of the deadly, prestige-bloated All the King's Men. Zaillian's credit is supposedly one of the movie's big selling points, but the picture comes together as an abstract clutch of scenes rather than a fluid whole, or even a jagged one. Its serrated, corroded edge never cuts clean."

"It takes nerve to call a film American Gangster: It's more than a movie title, it's the name of a venerable genre that dates to cinema's beginning," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "But once you see this finely made and richly satisfying film, you understand it's the only title possible."

"If you think the title American Gangster sounds generic, wait until you see the movie," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "A shopworn compendium of charismatic crooks, scruffy cops, corruption, temptation and absolution, the film makes one regret that Denzel Washington already made a movie called Déjà Vu, since that's what he's trafficking in here."

"Not since Spike Lee's Malcolm X has there been such an over-scaled, all-star, studio-financed film set in black America - and Scott's impetus is as questionable as Lee's," argues Armond White in the New York Press. "Being a Ridley Scott film, American Gangster is no more a critique of social history or political behavior than 1492 or Gladiator. It's basically a big-budget glorification of ambition as in the current documentary Mr Untouchable, director Marc Levin's latest white-negro obsession."

"Director Ridley Scott is going for 70s grime and sprawling 70s pacing, but Washington comes across as a slumming 90s film protagonist, a New Jack City star enduring the cast of Serpico with barely contained contempt," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

"There's just too much talent and compelling material here for anything to go seriously wrong," writes Bilge Ebiri for Nerve. "Nothing does: American Gangster moves well, its acting is solid, the direction elegant. But it turns out there's a drawback to making a movie about a subject who seems to have walked straight out of a movie, a kind of odd, off-putting familiarity that renders much of it lifeless."

"In the final analysis, it's just another mega-budget Hollywood movie that repackages familiar genre moves with A-level stars for a result that proves dismayingly hackneyed and poorly imagined," writes Geoffrey Cheshire in the Independent. "Of course it will make boatloads of money. Indeed, that's the kind of gangster movie it is - one determined to make out like a bandit, no matter what else may be said of it."

"[T]he movie is never quite pop enough to get audiences hooting and hollering and quoting favorite lines, nor smart enough to inspire passionate post-movie debate," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Scene by scene, the film is unassailably well-crafted.... But there's something oddly dull, even respectable, about Scott's adherence to the rules of gangster-film grammar."

Scott's "goal is epic, and he would gladly drag his feet to get there," writes Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader. "At two and a half hours plus, he indeed does get there. Washington, to pay him a backhanded compliment, is never quite as credible as a through-and-through baddie, even though that seems to be the way to the Oscar (i.e., Training Day). Crowe on the other hand is a perfectly credible crusader, overcoming no greater obstacles on the road to respectability than his buoyant white sneakers and his unflattering, inexpensive period haircut, framing his face with folded wings."

"This is an engrossing story, told smoothly and well, and Russell Crowe's contribution is enormous," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"As corny as this relationship may be, it returns again to the movie's central problem: It loves Frank but has to hate him, too," writes Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Will Lawrence talks with Scott for the Telegraph.

"Our love affair with wealth and fame is now untrammeled by doubts," writes Richard Schickel, following a brief overview of American gangsters past in Time. "It is our big good thing, and eventually Crowe's character, like the rest of us, must surrender to its cheerful demands. That makes American Gangster, which is rather leisurely paced but richly detailed in the way it pursues the minutiae of conspicuous criminality as well as consumption, a more disturbing movie than its makers may have intended."

"[I]t can be classed as a respectable second-tier entry, our decade's equivalent of Michael Mann's Heat," writes the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle.

Update, 11/4: "The film's best scene... comes when the two confront each other one-on-one," writes Rob Humanick. "Its quality could be the result of the two actors finally being allowed to play off one another, or it could be the fact that it comes near the tail-end of this lifeless stretch of empty craftsmanship. Take your pick."

Croatian Cinema. 2.

With three reviews - and an interview on the way - James Van Maanen picks up where he left off here.

Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema (through November 14 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater) got off to a splendid - if depressing - start with its initial offerings. I say depressing for two reasons: the content of the three films I was able to see - chosen because the director of each would be present and "up" for an interview - and because the audience for this series appears to be remarkably tiny. This is a shame, considering the quality of these first three movies and, I will presume, much of what is to follow.

In describing one of these films, Two Players from the Bench, Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker, refers to the film as "what the West calls black comedy and the Balkans call life." Well said and too true. While there are things to savor, enjoy and laugh at in all three movies, the underlying feelings of gloom, disappointment and discouragement are simply too strong to exorcise. The miracle here is an ability to persevere.

Armin (site), which is Croatia's entry in the Foreign Language Oscar race, is the least bleak of the three. With very little exposition, it tells a tale of a father and son journeying from a small town to a larger one where the son hopes to audition for a role in a movie. Dad is among the "stage mothers" of all time, but in an exceedingly Croatian manner. Despite his persistence (and his son's great embarrassment), you will not mistake him for Momma Rose.

Little by little we learn the details - some of them, at least - of these two lives. And yet, what many might consider the most important details (certainly the film crew making the movie-within-a-movie does) remain hidden.  This is a daring thing to do, particularly as it concerns, we suspect, past war experiences. But this is also how director/writer Ognjen Svilicic keeps his slim story focused on relationship and character. We come to know about as much as possible about this father and son, given the long weekend time frame and the truthful parsing of exposition (the minimal dialogue allows us to see and hear only what, in reality, might occur).

By film's end, we've traveled back and forth with our duo, experienced a slice of Croatian life today in various venues, and have come to understand what separates - and finally unites - our pair of protagonists without a false moment or undue sentiment.

If Armin is the least depressing of this trio of films, Two Players from the Bench is the most - at the same time as it is hugely funny, nasty, shocking, ugly and full of life. From almost the beginning, when a policeman orders a car trunk opened, sees a bound man inside, and does absolutely nothing about the situation, you'll know you're in strange (yet uncomfortably believable) territory.

Writer/director Dejan Sorak has crafted a gangbusters story - twisty, rich in irony and surprise - in the service of a political/philosophical statement that is extraordinarily humane. Sorak is on record as saying his film is not political. But this is only in terms of not specifically pointing a finger at one side or the other. For anyone who sees the political as constantly impinging on the personal, the economic and everything else, Two Players will seem about as "political" as it gets.

The story unites two unlikely men needed by the state for their similarity in appearance to two other men who could provide an alibi for a Croatian military man accused of war crimes. By the time the film reaches its conclusion, the concept of identity (the individual's and the state's) has been given a shake-down that calls into question the actions of everyone in the film - and by extension its viewers, whom I suspect, will be asking themselves what they might have done in this most nasty and stupid of wars.

In addition to the first-rate concept and execution of the story, I was equally impressed with the quality of filmmaking: everything from the cinematography to the sound, editing, performances (the two leads are terrific) and music. The wondrous finale, which manages profundity and catharsis, will bring you about as close to the continuing aftermath of the destruction of Yugoslavia as you are likely to experience.

Seeing these two modern movies and then watching an equally fine 34-year-old Yugoslav film makes for a fascinating juxtaposition. The now-legendary A Village Performance of Hamlet, directed and co-written by Krsto Papic (from the play by Ivo Bresan) takes a great idea and makes hay with it. The leader of a hick "cooperative" hears about the play Hamlet (or, as they call it here, "Omlete") and decides that his village must produce it. Of course, nobody can fathom the dialog, so the leader then forces the village school teacher to rewrite Shakespeare so that he can be better understood.

Simultaneously, one of the prominent villagers has been falsely accused of embezzlement, and his son tries to come to his rescue. As this story begins to mirror that of Hamlet's, the movie takes on dimensions of social and political critique, in addition to the fun it has with the play itself and how the villagers insist on turning it into a hack political tract. In the lead role, a young Rade Serbedzija, who came to international prominence as a very handsome middle-aged leading man in Macedonia's Before the Rain in 1994 and now works mostly in Hollywood (The Saint, Space Cowboys, TV's South Pacific) here proves an equally handsome young man and helps carry the film as its would-be Hamlet.

As usual, with movies made decades previous, the pacing may seem a bit slow for the modern viewer. Were it shot today, even at its relatively short 98 minutes, it would probably move more quickly and include additional scenes and details. As it is, A Village Performance of Hamlet remains a kind of hallmark of Yugoslavia toward the end of Tito's reign, with Communism deteriorating but nothing quite ready or able to replace it. The penultimate scene - full of feasting and dance - is so festively shocking and unpleasant in its awful celebration of the corrupt status-quo, it's little wonder that the film (which began production during one of Tito's pro-West spells but ended production when he had moved entirely toward the Soviets) was removed from circulation for nearly two years. In any case, A Village Performance is a treat - one that I'd like to think even Shakespeare could enjoy.

Interview. Carla Garapedian.

When a resolution calling on the president to "accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians [between 1915 and 1917] as genocide" was introduced, debate raged in the House of Representatives until, just this past week, sponsors of the measure decided to postpone a vote on the issue. Among those bound to be deeply disappointed are System of a Down, the multi-platinum, Grammy-winning band and centerpiece of the unique film, Screamers.

The documentary is something of a hybrid between an uproarious concert film and a brisk and urgent history lesson, linking that first genocide of the modern era to the all too many that have followed. The congressional resolution may be tabled, but campaign for recognition of the atrocity is far from over. David D'Arcy talks with filmmaker Carla Garapedian about becoming a Screamer.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/28.

"Horror films are regularly (and forgivably) derivative of lores of varying prestige, and although Near Dark does not deny its precursors in horror, it doesn't pronounce them either," writes Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "The result is a horror film of rare substance, poetic in ways that many of its contemporaries fail to be."

Are you voting in Shoot the Projectionist's "31 Flicks That Give You the Willies" poll? You have until midnight to get your ballot in. Here's Bob Turnbull's.

For a snapshot of the current state of horror, see Twitch's collection of reviews from the recently wrapped Toronto After Dark Festival.

"[A]fter you've watched Bride of Frankenstein and Nosferatu ad nauseam, the thrill has a tendency to fly out the window." So Flickhead's been looking for fresh Halloween viewing and finds "Two tricks, two treats."

Rob Humanick's zombie movie today: Evil Dead II, "something of a masterpiece unto itself; with a substantially larger budget at his disposal, director Sam Raimi essentially remade the film that jumpstarted his career, largely cutting down on the horror quotient and instead recasting the tale as one of frightful slapstick. Laughs notwithstanding, however, the film is just as unforgiving as its darker predecessor; viewers with heart conditions may want to keep their thumb near the pause button, lest their own health be put at unnecessary risk."

At Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson lists seven of the "Funniest Horror Movies," while Christopher Campbell delights in a reviewing of the #1 film on that list, Shaun of the Dead.

"The 1957 Hammer Films horror classic The Curse of Frankenstein meets Destiny's Child." And another clip from Phil Morehart at Facets Features: The Bride of Frankenstein.

Online browsing tip. Jonathan Lapper's "All Hallows Feast of Photos."

Shorts, 10/27.

David Bordwell's Poetics of Cinema is out, and he's got all sorts of news about book sales and thoughts on whether or not he'll publish the next one as a book. As for this one, though:

I argue that we ought to study how films are constructed architecturally, as revealed for instance in plot structure or narration.... I want to know how filmmakers have confronted problems set by others, or created problems for themselves to solve. I want to know how they draw on the past to borrow or modify or reject creative strategies. I want to know filmmakers' secrets, including the ones they don't know they know. And I want to know how all this creative activity is shaped to the uptake of spectators in different times and places.

"Thousands of passers-by watched Doug Aitken's monumental video Sleepwalkers last winter when it was projected nightly across the facade of the Museum of Modern Art for nearly a month," writes Carol Vogel in the New York Times. "Now Mr Aitken is adapting Sleepwalkers for the Miami Art Museum's new building, designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron and scheduled to open in 2011."

"The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music." Reviewing Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, Geoff Dyer finds the point at which "the debate at the conceptual heart of Ross's undertaking is thrown into sharpest focus: is the history of music self-contained or can a larger, extramusical history be distilled from it? Actually, as Ross makes clear, the alternatives are mutually implicated and imbricated: 'precisely because of its inarticulate nature,' music is 'all too easily imprinted with ideologies and deployed to political ends.'" And here's another parallel with the history of film: "Who could have imagined that, as a 'surreal' consequence of the rise of fascism, many of the giants of European classical music - Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov and Otto Klemperer (to say nothing of Mann and Adorno) - would end up living on each others' doorsteps in Los Angeles?" The parallels, in fact, converge: "[S]coring music for films became one of the principal ways in which new orchestral music maintained a viable position in the cultural marketplace."

And this leads off a special music issue of the Book Review with all sorts of good stuff.

"Beautiful Sunday has encouraged me to watch out for Jin Kwang-kyo in the future," writes Adam Hartzell at Koreanfilm.org.

"Three women from Germany unexpectedly end up in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam over the holidays in Angelina Maccarone's assured drama Vivere," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"The similarities to Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her are striking." At chained to the cinémathèque, Dave McDougall offers a few thoughts on Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room.

For the Financial Times, Emily Stokes talks with François Ozon about Angel - and about why he became a filmmaker in the first place.

Monica Ali, who wrote the novel, Brick Lane, and Sarah Gavron, who directed the adaptation, "are responding to a public hunger for some insights into British-Bangladeshi life," editorializes the Guardian. "They are providing reportage from an under-reported community. There is a price for that, and it comes in treating one's subjects with greater care than if they were made up."

Also, Holly Griggs on Machinima.

Indiewood's faring far better this year than the Los Angeles Times tells it, argues David Poland at Movie City News.

Online urban adventure. Ray Pride's "Impact of the Cities."

Online viewing tip #1. That conversation between Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson.

Online viewing tip #2. Via Wiley Wiggins, the Zellner Bros's video for The Octopus Project.

Fests and events, 10/27.

The RomeFilmFest, wrapping today, has announced a slew of awards-winners, including Juno (Best Film), Rade Šerbedžija (Best Actor, Fugitive Pieces), Jiang Wenli (Best Actress, And the Spring Comes) and Hafez (Special Jury Award).

Neil Young's rating films he's caught at the Viennale, running through Wednesday.

Michael Guillén talks with Lotfi Abdelli, who plays the lead in Nouri Bouzid's Making Of, which opened the Arab Film Festival. Abdelli had been detained for five hours at San Francisco International Airport and Michael asks him about the incident:

They are respectful but they ask me questions for five hours and sometimes the same question, sometimes I didn't understand which kind of question. They ask me why I come here and I explain to them that I am invited by the festival. They tell me why you come here again and I explain again, "I'm here for the festival." What is your job? I explain what is my job. What is your business? I explain what is my business. What kind of film? After they take the DVD and they see the film they ask me, "You are encouraging and glorifying the fundamentalist in your film," and I said, "It's not true. We are against this and it's very nice for American people to see this film because we explain how it's fragile to become terrorist. It's good to know about this." They ask me what I think about America. After, they take my telephone and they go through the [contacts list] and they ask me what is this names? Who are these people? What is my relation with these people? Sometimes they left me waiting for half an hour and they come back and they ask me again the same questions.

Steve Dollar looks back at Sitges 07 for Paste.

David Walsh opens the WSWS's review of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/27.

"Fifty years ago, in a cramped studio on the banks of the Thames in Berkshire, the director Terence Fisher called the shots on the Hammer version of Dracula," writes Matthew Sweet in his history of the vampire on screen for the Guardian. "The original print has just been restored by the British Film Institute and is now ready to manifest itself again. Its color palette, which always looked crude and garish on television, is now a rich mix of autumnal browns and priestly purples. Only the fake blood - which gathers inside Christopher Lee's vampire contact lenses, spurts from staked hearts and spatters inexplicably from the air - reads as improperly, unnaturally bright, like Kathleen Byron's tarty lipstick in Black Narcissus."

"Why watch Terence Fisher's Dracula when you can watch Browning's, Murnau's, Herzog's, Maddin's, or even Coppola's instead?" asks Nathan Kosub at Reverse Shot. "For Lee, of course." Which is also why he's just watched The Devil Rides Out.

Back in the Guardian, Kate Mosse on Algernon Blackwood and his "readership hungry for his peculiar blend of nature and the supernatural."

"Although the social relevance of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is likely to have had greater impact (and well-earned shock value) during its initial release, its intelligence in approximating the cultural conflicts of the day has since earned it the quality of timeless relevance, even if the film itself is relatively unknown compared to many of its 70s horror brethren," writes Rob Humanick.

Louis Bayard reviews Susan Tyler Hitchcock's "delightful" Frankenstein: A Cultural History: "No one, it seems, can quite agree on what this monster means, and for more than a century, no one could be sure what he looked like - until director James Whale tapped a minor, 40-something actor named Boris Karloff for the 1931 film adaptation."

Also in the Washington Post:

• Alan Lightman's Ghost "is by no means the scariest supernatural tale you could read on Halloween - King is still king - but it may be the smartest, and for that reason it ends up being a hell of a lot more unsettling than a horde of flesh-eating zombies," writes Ron Charles.

• In his collection 20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill's "subject matter is steeped in the pop culture and tabloid detritus of the last 50 years: serial killers, abducted children, families living on the fault lines between divorce and poverty, horror movies and supernatural fiction," writes Elizabeth Hand. "Yet his real focus is an almost obsessively nuanced exploration of the nature of American manhood." More from Chris Bolton at Powell's.

• "By finding the horrors that exist in everyday life - always the most fertile source for fear - [Joyce Carol] Oates has crafted a suspenseful and satisfying collection," writes David J Montgomery. "Some of the stories in The Museum of Dr Moses hew more closely to mystery than to the macabre, but they are all a ghoulish delight."

• And April Austin reviews Susan Warren's Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever.

"Night of the Lepus is one of those movies in which a fabulous premise is realized in exactly the wrong way," writes Megan Weireter at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "A few major problems prevent us from having too much fun with this. For one, there's not one single instance of anyone saying, 'Giant killer rabbits? That's crazy talk!'"

I Married a Monster from Outer Space "is much better than you’d ever expect," writes Jeff at Movie Morlocks. "Imagine a feminist sci-fi version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where all of the men in town are slowly replaced by these hideous imposters (they drop their 'human' disguises occasionally, especially during electrical storms)."

The Telegraph lists the "31 Scariest Moments in Film."

Saw IV.

"Over the course of two sequels, the Saw franchise took a novel, if distasteful, idea and basically tortured it to death," begins Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

"[S]ince the sole justification for Saw IV's existence is potential box-office riches, it's hardly surprising that the story is merely an excessively convoluted rehash of its predecessors, and that its signature set pieces both lack ingenuity and posit only facile, exploitative photocopies of actual ethical quandaries," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

Updated through 10/30.

"If the original Saw was the kernel of a potential terror universe, Saw IV is, by this time, a series of satellites and lesser celestial bodies bound together by some of the best bloodletting in modern macabre," writes Bill Gibron for PopMatters. "Call this the 'fill in the blank' film, a movie made to specifically address the minor issues still hanging from the previous three installments."

"If the terrible craft of [director Darren Lynn] Bousman's film doesn't turn your stomach, the borderline pornographic violence will," writes Scott Schueller for the Chicago Tribune. "It's disconcerting to imagine anyone enjoying the vile filth splashing the screen."

But of course, as Reuters reports, Saw IV will be the weekend box office champ.

Online grinning tip. Potentially, a fan's accessory.

Update, 10/30: "As with the Friday the 13th films, critics sit in front of the Saw movies but they don't see them," writes DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "They also tend to review the audience rather than the movie, fret over the demise of the culture, and attempt to figuratively cleanse themselves after the experience by making sure we know that they garnered no pleasure from watching people being tortured. But any film series this popular demands more serious consideration. Sadly, the sobriquet 'torture porn' doesn't accurately reflect what happens in these films, as the characters are tortured per se but put in excruciating situations and asked to make a choice. Be it Hobson's or not, it is a choice. And it must reflect something of the weird culture we find ourselves living in."

Shorts, 10/26.

"Jem Cohen's lyrical, observant documentaries, Chain and Building a Broken Mousetrap, offer a fleeting glimpse of how we inhabit public space in the early 21st century, well over a century after the Paris Arcades that Benjamin so attentively studied throughout the last two decades of his career," writes Chuck Tryon in Art Signal. "Cohen's films self-consciously evoke a Benjaminian approach to mass culture that builds upon and extends the cine-essays of Chris Marker, focusing his lens on the contemporary equivalent of the Paris Arcades, the shopping malls, theme parks, and chain restaurants that dominate our landscape."

Acquarello on Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room: "Composed of long take, stationary shots, often of cramped interior spaces or narrow alleys framed against neglected building façades, doorways, and even gouged walls that reflect the characters' economic bondage and spiritual captivity, the film's oppressive moral landscape and interminable stasis are also revealed through repeating episodes of inarticulate, idle conversations, hardscrabble drug use, door to door peddling, acts of petty theft, and habitual rummaging (most notably, in Vanda finding an antique model ship that had been inadvertently left outside that alludes to the country's own historical change in fortune from colonial empire to increasingly marginalized country within the economic homogenization of a borderless European Union)."

"Costa's first film, O Sangue... while stunning to look at, doesn't quite work aesthetically or even at a basic narrative level," writes Darren Hughes. "By contrast, Casa de Lava is much more assured and coherent. Costa claims to have begun the project out of anger with Portugal's turn to the right amidst the formation of the European Union, which precipitated a dramatic restructuring of the nation's economy, including the privitization of television."

With the Edition Filmmuseum release of Class Relations in a package that includes "two major short films... that offer rare and illuminating glimpses of the filmmakers' working methods... the number of films on DVD (with English subtitles) about Straub and Huillet now outnumber the films on DVD by Straub and Huillet, which is unfortunate given the importance of their work," notes Doug Cummings.

"Alain Resnais gives no signs of retiring anytime soon," reports Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "After his well-received choral work Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places), which premiered at Venice last year, the 85-year-old director is currently in pre-production on L'incident (The Incident), an adaptation of the eponymous novel from Christian Gailly."

Ted Z passes along news that Michel Gondry is working on a documentary about his aunt.

Glenn Kenny has a fun entry on what happened when he, "Stephanie Zacharek of Salon, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, Armond White of the New York Press, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, Scott Foundas of LA Weekly, the venerable David Sterritt and the venerable Phillip Lopate and moderators Richard Porton and Cynthia Lucia of Cineaste" all "ad a grand time arguing over the course of three 150 minute panels over two days." Heavens. "It was kind of exhausting."

Michael Snow gets Girish thinking about how we perceive what we see (and hear) when we watch.

"Ring the bells! Storm the gates! Raise the flags! And spread the word over the mainstream, fascist-controlled media!" yelps Josh Rosenblatt in the Austin Chronicle. "Friday, Oct. 26, Alex Jones, Austin's greatest freedom fighter, radio-show host, filmmaker, and "speculative historian" (my term; copyright pending) is releasing his latest movie, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, on his website, InfoWars.com."

"This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Hollywood 10 and the Hollywood Blacklist, an epidemic of censorship in the movie industry that set the stage for 'McCarthyism,' a term that evokes the fearful and oppressive mood of that bygone era and resonates with our current age of repression under the Bush regime." Ed Rampell looks back at Truthdig. Via Bookforum.

"The conventional cinematic portrayal of unconventional parents, particularly those of a left-wing bent, is as wacky, irresponsible people who place bizarre ideals above their progeny's need for a nutritious supper and regular music practice," writes Melissa Benn. "From Mrs Banks, the mother in Mary Poppins who would rather campaign for 'Votes for Women' than stay at home and tidy the nursery, to Hideous Kinky, the tale of a hippie chick (played by Kate Winslet) who hauls her two young daughters through a series of exotic adventures in North Africa, film has captured the clash between adult self-absorption and the childish need for security and attention. Blame It on Fidel, a low-key masterpiece out now on selected release, is the latest addition to the genre."

Also in the New Statesman: "The overwhelming majority of black actors of my generation have found that their only hope of a career lies in America (an old maxim states that 'in Britain, white actors have careers and black actors have jobs')," writes Kwame Kwei-Armah. "This is not just an issue about acting. It also presents a huge problem for my work as a playwright, and for the visibility of stories from the black community in general.... So, how can we begin to turn this inequality around? There is hope, as we have proved in the past that it can be done."

From David Byrne's Journal: "Dinner at the home of Susan and Leonard Nimoy. They are big art collectors and a Joseph Beuys piece in their living room features a photo of the Beuys clan sitting in a room all gazing up at the TV, giving it their full attention. They're watching Star Trek."

"Redacted is an act of voyeurism that becomes a part of the thing that it claims to denounce," blogs George Packer for the New Yorker. "If the pictures from Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi's homemade videos are war porn, Redacted is film-theory porn—a stylized snuff film inside a meta-critique of the media." Via Movie City News.

"Steve Buscemi and Daniel Bruehl (Good Bye, Lenin) have joined the cast of John Rabe, Florian Gallenberger's true story about a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937 - 38," reports Ed Meza.

Also in Variety:

• Michael Fleming: "Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will reteam early next year on Shutter Island, a Dennis Lehane novel."

• Also, Michael Mann will direct an adaptation of Don Winslow's The Winter of Frankie Machine starring Robert De Niro.

• The Deal, something of a prequel to The Queen by writer Peter Morgan and director Stephen Frears, has been acquired for broadcast on November 8 by HBO, reports Dominic Schreiber.

Michael Mann will also likely direct a film about Alexander Litvinenko, reports the AFP.

Screenwriters are racing to wrap up their first, third or final drafts before their Guild's contract runs out on Halloween night. Rachel Abramowitz and Robert W Welkos report in the Los Angeles Times.

Also: Indiewood's having a rotten year, reports Rachel Abramowitz: "[T]he specialty divisions en masse are having a down cycle. So far, 2007 has not borne any breakouts like Little Miss Sunshine, Brokeback Mountain or The Queen. 'We're all suffering. It's the entire business,' says Focus Features Chief Executive James Schamus. 'At least someone should be succeeding. It's as bad a fall as I've ever seen.'"

And: "In a year that has seen a veritable logjam of movie musicals, rockumentaries and biopics about famous singers - and at a time when more such films are being green-lighted every month - it was bound to come along: a magazine dedicated to the intersection of pop music and moviemaking," writes Chris Lee. "Enter Movies Rock, a custom publishing supplement that will be mailed to about 16 million subscribers of 14 Condé Nast magazines - such as Vanity Fair, Vogue and GQ - beginning Nov 1."

In the New York Times:

• "Hollywood directors have been doing commercial work for decades - usually to bring in extra cash, turn a project around quickly and show the range of their talent," writes Claire Atkinson. "These days, however, there are new reasons people with boldface names make ads: to keep up in a multimedia world where the ability to master various platforms is at a premium and where consumers are as likely to see their work on YouTube or TiVo as at the multiplex."

• "Although the Walt Disney Company has always had a bit of a translation problem in France - remember those pitchfork-wielding farmers who showed up in force to protest the 1992 opening of Euro Disney? - the company seems to have found a new ambassador in Remy the rat," reports Brooks Barnes.

• Lia Miller reports that Wes Anderson's short Hotel Chevalier will be screening in theaters after all as The Darjeeling Limited opens wider.

• And David M Halbfinger reports that Ed Burns's Purple Violets will be the first feature to make its commercial debut on iTunes.

• Jordana Lewis reports that New York's Legislature will soon be considering a version of California's Dead Celebrities Bill, which ensures that families of, yes, dead celebrities will maintain control over rights of publicity.

Revamped theaters: Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly and Elina Shatkin in the LAT on the Silent Movie Theatre and Andrew Repasky McElhinney in the Philadelphia Weekly on the Ambler Theater.

"The Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta - more commonly truncated to FAVA - is hardly a standard arts organization," writes David Berry. "Founded in 1982 by a group of 16 Edmonton filmmakers trying to find a way to make film equipment more accessible, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the organization maintains a certain kind of boundless creativity—after all, it still boasts an impressive number of original members." Also in the Vue Weekly, Josef Braun talks with filmmaker Gary Burns about why co-ops matter.

The Observer's Jason Solomons talks with Buscemi about Interview, his remake of a film by Theo van Gogh, whose career Kate Connelly reviews while looking ahead to further planned remakes.

More interviews: Boyd van Hoeij with Nocturna directors Victor Maldonado and Adrià García at european-films.net, Patrick Barkham talks with Cate Blanchett for the Guardian, Will Lawrence meets Clive Owen for the Telegraph and Gill Pringle interviews Josh Hartnett for the Independent.

"Jan Kounen is a French music video and feature film director who has specialized in bringing the spiritual world to the screen." Rak Razam talks with him for Filmmaker.

Online browsing tip. From Jim Emerson: "Guy Budziak makes film noir woodcuts in high-contrast black and white."

Online viewing tip. Ryland Walker Knight's got a string of clips from the night in 1970 when John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara were guests on the Dick Cavett Show.

Online viewing tips. The Guardian's Phil Hoad rounds up clips sampling fashion on film.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/26.

"More than 80 years after its completion, FW Murnau's Nosferatu remains among the most potent and unsettling horror films ever made," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "Among the reasons the film remains so resonant to contemporary audiences is its fascination with the links between sex and disease, its anatomy of physical and moral corruption, and the way it plays on the fear of the 'other.'"

"Can my jaded 7-year-old be scared, or at least have his pulse set racing, by a little old-fashioned smoke-and-mirrors, black-and-white moviemaking?" wonders Wendell Jamieson in the New York Times. "So for the last several weeks he and I have watched a series of clever horror movies from the 1940s, including a few exciting recent releases. I'm happy to report success. Dean has learned to allow his imagination to frighten him, and he doesn't seem any the worse for wear."

In the San Francisco Chroncle, Violet Blue counts down her top ten lesbian vampire flicks - a well-annotated list.

The Saw movies are "radically conservative," argues Grady Hendrix in Slate. "Like the creaky old Republic serials of the 1930s, they're full of deathtraps, nerve gas, slow-acting poisons, and a complete misunderstanding of how electricity works. But their greatest crime is rejecting the anarchic thrills of the slasher movie in favor of reinforcing modern-day corporate culture."

"This time last year, enervated by the hollow experience of watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and then energized by a late-night viewing of John Carpenter's lovely and terrifying The Fog, I began a week-long blog expedition to reclaim horror for myself," blogs robbiefreeling for Reverse Shot, and he's off: "Even more so than in its gruesome, creative killings, Inferno locates its fear through hallways, basements, shadows, colors, and crawlspaces." Also: "With her mix of panic and pity, [Dee] Wallace gets what makes Cujo such a thoroughly untraditional horror movie: the central monster lacks motivation, it's just a lumbering, besotted animal, yet its insatiable hunger forms a nearly insurmountable obstacle."

"An unapologetic amalgam of sci-fi monster schlock, college campus comedy, and, of course, gory zombie horror, [Night of the Creeps] avoids the hazards of genre mingling by pitting its heroes against a believable undead threat, and not allowing its audience many uneventful moments to dwell on the film's inanity," writes Thomas Scalzo at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Even when a joke falls flat or a bit of dialogue is especially painful, the frenetic pace, occasional hilarity, and solid horror set pieces overcome the letdown, and pull us irresistibly deeper into this manic tale of cops and coeds fighting to kick the ever-increasing numbers of undead permanently off campus."

At Cinematical, Ryan Stewart explains "Why I Don't Care for Zombie Movies" and argues that Candyman "h does so many things right I can hardly list them all. This is a horror movie that gets depressing right - how many movies can hit that note?"

"Despite the strongly emphasized exoticness its Haitian scenery, The Serpent and the Rainbow may be Wes Craven's most pedestrian film," writes Rob Humanick. "This says a lot about a director who has defined his career largely through the presentation of everyday scenery perverted by the unexpected and the supernatural, from Freddy Kreuger's creepy distortion of his surroundings to the tight, uncanny claustrophobia of the seemingly innocuous Red Eye."

Eric Alt introduces Premiere's DIY Halloween Film Fest, 24 hours of disturbing home viewing.

The Chicago Reader rounds up local screenings of Halloween movies.

Online browsing tip. "I'd like to direct you to some of my favorite sites, and their thoughts on the looming All Hallows." Movie Morlocks' Richard Harland Smith is your guide.

Online sing-along tip. The AV Club presents "14 Songs About Vampires."

Online viewing tip. At Facets Features, Phil Morehart posts "a disturbing, disorienting, panic-filled seven minutes" from the real Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Fests and events, 10/26.

"Ozu's project was to uphold the traditional Japanese family; Imamura's was to explode it. The rebel's dynamite? The will and sexuality of the poor Japanese female." For the Stranger, Charles Mudede previews A Man Vanishes: The Legacy of Shohei Imamura, a series running at the Northwest Film Forum through November 12.

"The sky over Vienna remains dark and ominous today." Cyril Neyrat carries on filing Viennale journal entries for Cahiers du cinéma. "Last night, a capacity crowd gathered at the Filmmuseum to listen to [Jean-Pierre Gorin's] improvised lecture on Vertov and got more than their money's worth. A summary in four points..."

"The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) will open on November 22 with Richard Robbins's Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, based on the letters, poems, essays and diary entries of American soldiers in Iraq," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez.

AJ Schnack notes that the Denver Film Festival has unveiled its lineup. November 8 through 18.

The Chicago Reader previews the Chicago Humanities Film Festival (Monday through November 8) and remaining highlights of the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema and the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (both through Sunday).

The Tate Modern will be showing five programs of films by Ernie Gehr from Friday, November 2, through Sunday, November 4.

"The Retrospective of the 58th Berlin International Film Festival will honor Spanish director Luis Buñuel." February 7 through 17.

Lists, 10/26.

Premiere unveils its "Power List 2007," a top 50.

Doug Block has now posted all "Ten Rules of Personal Documentary Filmmaking."

"Five years ago on the IMDb Classics Board long-time poster bkamberger hosted an extensive poll on the best LGBT films," notes Jesse Ataide. "Fast forward, and he's at it again." An annotated list of his own follows.

Screengrab's got a new list: "Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents." Parts 1, 2 and 3.

Croatian Cinema. 1.

Launching his coverage of another promising series, James Van Maanen has a quick preview Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema.

This evening marks the debut of a 20-day festival of 25 films from Croatia: eleven recent examples (including Armin (site), the movie Croatia is submitting to qualify for this year's Best Foreign Film), 13 more that span the past five decades, and a compilation of some of the best shorts from the world-class "Zagreb school of animation." Half a century of cinema from a land that was only a part of what most of us beyond the age of 20 used to call Yugoslavia. Who knew?

Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema is the title given to the series by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and it turns out that this is just the beginning: the first of a four-part look at the national cinemas of the former Yugoslavia that the FSLC will host over the coming years. Richard Peña, program director at the FSLC calls Croatia "an extraordinary crossroads between east and west, north and south, and for many years the entry point for new waves and modes of filmmaking while part of the former Yugoslavia. Its long-standing tradition of innovation has helped a vibrant, critical cinema emerge, making Croatian films popular not only at home but increasingly with international audiences."

Three Croatian directors, representing three generations of filmmakers, will appear at the festival to introduce their films: Krsto Papic (whose 1973 A Village Performance of Hamlet screens Sat, Oct 27 and Sunday, Oct 28); Dejan Sorak (Two Players from the Bench, 2005, Saturday, Oct 27 and Monday, Oct 29); and Ognjen Svilicic (Armin, 2007, Sunday, Oct 28 and Monday, Oct 29). An interview with the three directors, along with reviews of their films, will appear soon.

In a surprise move that may encourage more viewers to take a chance on a cinema that is probably quite new to them, FSLC is issuing an unusual series pass ($40; $30 for Film Society members) for Beyond Boundaries, which admits one person to five titles in the series and is available for purchase (cash only) at the Walter Reade Theater box office, a savings of $3 off the single ticket price ($11) for non-Film Society members and $2 off the $7 single ticket price for members.

Rails & Ties.

"It's probably not the easiest thing in the world to direct your first feature film when your dad is an icon like Clint Eastwood, but with her feature debut, Rails & Ties, helmer Alison Eastwood makes some smart decisions, most of which involve surrounding herself with people who know what they're doing," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical, where she talks with Eastwood and Marcia Gay Harden.

"Ms Eastwood's smartest move was to tap Kevin Bacon for one of her leads," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "As Tom Stark, an emotionally tamped-down railroad engineer with a dying wife, Mr Bacon gives the film gravity and energy. Unlike Marcia Gay Harden, an appealing actress who takes on the role of the terminally ill wife, Megan, with rather too much enthusiasm, Mr Bacon plays it as cool as he can."

"The acting is great," agrees Ella Taylor in the Voice, but "there's no saving this mawkish tale - whose best feature is its sense of railway life, and whose worst is its reduction of life's common hurts and losses to puppetry."

"Eastwood opts for the tried-and-true approach of tearjerkers past," writes the AV Club's Keith Phipps, who disagrees with the accolades for the performances: "Bacon in particular is so ungiving here that it's never clear if he's grieving for his wife's plight or preparing to track the cancer down for some vigilante-style justice. That points to the biggest problem with Eastwood's film: Nobody feels anything they're not explicitly told to feel. Not even the audience."

The "one-track thematic obsession that brings everything back to trains... make it hard to resist employing railroad-related clichés generally used to describe things that go badly wrong," writes Carina Chocano. "Having had enough of those to last me a while, I think I'll resist the temptation."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "The Premise: Megan Stark (Marcia Gay Harden) is suffering from stage 4 (metastatic) breast cancer that, though being "cured twice," has spread to her bones." For the Los Angeles Times, Marc Siegel, an internist and an associate professor of medicine at New York University's School of Medicine, examines the realistic chances for her recovery.

Dan in Real Life.

"Dan in Real Life isn't crap, but it's about as pleasant as a movie can get without actually being any good," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "The movie is so warm and cozy it might as well be wearing a big, fuzzy sweater."

"Steve Carell's pursed-lipped awkwardness and sweet buffoonery are both in fine form in Dan in Real Life, but those endearing qualities aren't nearly enough to salvage Peter Hedges's incorrigibly hackneyed film," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"Dan in Real Life is neither wildly farcical nor mockingly cruel, but rather, for the most part, winningly gentle and observant," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Yes, there is the maudlin back story of Dan's widowhood, and the familiar scenario of all that quirky kin stuffed into one house for a few days. But Mr Hedges, a seasoned screenwriter, showed in his directing debut, Pieces of April, that he could infuse tired conventions of domestic comedy with fresh life and real intelligence. And here, working in a less self-consciously eccentric mode, he does it again."

Updated through 10/28.

"There's nothing remotely real about this over-confected romantic comedy, in which Carell plays a newspaper advice columnist and single dad who falls in love with his brother's girlfriend during a weekend at the family beach house," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. "Come to think of it, that house - a magnificent shake-sided pile on Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay - might be the only believable character in a movie in which the idea of resolving a scene is for everyone to engage in some adorable group activity, whether it's a crossword puzzle contest, charades, aerobics, a Kennedyesque game of touch football or, heaven help us, a too-cute-for-words talent show. (What, no potato-sack race?)"

"It's a much funnier and moving film than that description would suggest," counters Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"There's nothing groundbreaking about Dan in Real Life - it's a picture that could have been made 10 or 20 years ago - and yet its easygoing, affable nature is exactly what makes it pleasurable," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

"Steve Carell of The 40-Year-Old Virgin has a personality, or maybe it is a lack of personality, that is growing on me," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "He is content to exist on the screen without sending wild semaphores of his intentions, his uniqueness and how funny he is. He's an everyman like a very (very) low-key Jack Lemmon."

Robert Wilonsky in the Voice: "One could fill this entire space with the titles of films from which writer-director Peter Hedges nicks his story, but for the sake of expediency, we'll narrow it down to a desert-island handful: Home for the Holidays, The Family Stone, Sleepless in Seattle, What About Bob?, and Hedges's own excellent Thanksgiving-dinner-flavored Pieces of April."

"If we could remotely believe in any of these characters or situations, a cast this strong might have pulled this movie off," sighs Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

"[I]f what you want is a star-driven sophisticated romantic comedy that is successfully aimed at actual adults, the wait can seem like forever. Until now," heralds Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Dan, in real life, is a jerk," writes Mike Russell. "Seriously: In no universe (other than the precious little microcosm created by this film) would Dan be considered anything other than a self-involved, passive-aggressive, stalkerish, pathetic, traitorous emotional amateur."

Update, 10/27: Bryant Frazer offers a bit of advice.

Update, 10/28: "The men in dude comedies are Neanderthals," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "he men in chick comedies have evolved into losers.... A mainstream comedy with an indie vibe, Dan hopes to be the film that gets couples back in the theater for something they'd both respond to.... One of the effects of the rowdy, guy-centric Judd Apatow movies is that, by establishing new rules for movie comedy, they've make milder romantic ones seem like relics from the 1950s."

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song "reminds us, with admirable thoroughness, why we shouldn't take Pete Seeger for granted," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "He is, for one thing, more complicated than he might seem at first, much in the way that the folk music he adores reveals hidden nuances beneath apparently simple stories and tunes.... The son of an academic musicologist and a gifted violinist, he has always looked and sounded less like the product of Eastern boarding schools than like a figure out of 19th-century legend: gangly, with a deliberate manner of speaking and the zealous gleam of true belief in his eye."

"Shallow, very officially sanctioned, and overly compressed, The Power of Song plays like a PBS infomercial for the inevitable DVD box set, which will surely include even more archival footage," writes Brian Miller in the Voice.

But writing at cinemaattraction, Robert Levin finds it a fascinating portrait of a man driven to do more than make his mark on musical history. To Seeger, his music served the greater purpose of providing a source of unification for those outside the societal mainstream, a means for communal healing and a place for peaceful dissent from the injustices promulgated in Vietnam and elsewhere."

Tribeca has a video interview with director Jim Brown.

Music Within.

"A bad movie with a good heart, Music Within is a biography of Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston), a debating champion who suffered severe hearing damage in Vietnam, then reinvented himself as an activist for the handicapped," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times.

"Pimentel's story of perseverance is a worthy and inspiring one, but on-screen it never comes together as a fully actualized dramatic narrative, despite the presence of strong performances by Ron Livingston, Michael Sheen, Melissa George and Yul Vázquez," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

"Sheen is often the saving grace of Music Within, thanks to an aggressively profane wit that gives an otherwise tapioca-bland story a little edge," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

For Robert Wilonsky, writing in the Voice, "a little earnestness goes a long way, and Music Within has a little too much of it."

At indieWIRE, Michael Joshua Rowin concurs: "[T]erribly earnest and mostly forgettable."

Steven Sawalich's "TV movie-grade direction isn't up to the task of enlivening material that eventually settles into a predictable, torpid narrative structure," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Total Denial.

"Total Denial is, to put it lightly, a niche film," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice. "Directed, produced, and edited by the Bulgarian journalist Milena Kaneva, it tells the story of human-rights abuses committed by the Burmese military on behalf of Unocal, an American oil company laying a pipeline there."

"Its central figure, Ka Hsaw Wa, is the stuff heroes are made of (even if the film only narrowly escapes overglorifying him)," writes Laura Kern in the New York Times. "Documentaries like Total Denial are less interested in exhibiting a particular filmmaking style than in telling stories that cry out to be heard."

How to Cook Your Life.

"A documentary about Edward Espe Brown, a Zen priest and cook who wrote the popular Tassajara Bread Book, How to Cook Your Life may gently preach about organic cooking—and the bonds shared by eater and food - but gentle preaching is still preaching," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"In typical [Doris] Dörrie fashion, the film is wry, ingratiating, and ultimately ambitious in ways too low-key to announce themselves," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "However, viewers are advised to bring along at least a casual interest in Zen philosophy - the unsympathetic may find themselves rolling their eyes at the seemingly flat simplicity ('When you wash the rice, wash the rice') of the many wisdoms offered here."

The Living and the Dead.

"A bizarre psychological study of degeneration and dependency, The Living and the Dead is a horror movie only in the most literal sense," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Skirting genre conventions, Simon Rumley's twisted feature inhabits shores where the gore is minimal and the demons unseen - neither of which makes it any less disconcerting."

"Part neo-gothic horror, part empathetic schizoid freak-out, The Living and the Dead suggests an unlikely cross between Spider and Requiem for a Dream, albeit one whose whole is less than the sum of its parts," writes Rob Humanick at Slant. That said, "Rumley - who wrote the film in response to his mother's short-lived battle with cancer - is a great humanist. The Living and the Dead, then, is most effective as a promise of greater things to come."

"The Living and the Dead is not an easy movie to sit through, and its darkness may be a little mannered, but it's an elegant construction with real emotions buried deep inside," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. It's also "a combination of the crumbling-old-house and protagonist-gone-mad genres that utterly lacks ghosts or monsters but might be an indie-horror classic of the future."

For Nick Pinkerton, writing in the Voice, the film "superficially recollects superior art shockers like In a Glass Cage and Fists in the Pocket, but substitutes jittery, unconvincing "in the mind of a madman" foolishness for the hard work of psychological acuity."

Lynch.

The lesson of the new documentary Lynch - well, one lesson, along with the sound advice not to perforate a bloated cow with a pick-ax - is that producing a fugue-state apocalypse ripped bleeding from the subconscious isn't as easy as it sounds," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "Chronologically vague and associative rather than linear in its linkage of sound and image, the film intersperses fly-on-the-wall footage of Lynch brooding, joking, and tending his website with the minutiae of the director shaping his unclear vision - from personally distressing a set with hammers and wheat paste to coaching Laura Dern on how to best fake a knifing on the Hollywood Walk of Fame."

Updated through 10/26.

"Lynch would make a great character for a straightforward portrayal, but that's not the intention of the documentary's director. But who is the director?" asks Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "The credit has been attributed to 'blackANDwhite,' leading curious sorts to speculate that it was helmed by Lynch himself. Whether or not that's the case, it certainly looks like an element of his universe."

"At his request, I have kept blackANDwhite's identity secret, and so the mystery surrounding him remains, and we can shift focus to his excellent film," writes Nick Dawson. "Filmmaker conducted a (typographically distinctive) interview with blackANDwhite over email, and corresponded with him about spending two years filming David Lynch, his shadowy identity, and fond memories of childhood cinemagoing with his grandmother."

"Lynch offers a fascinating view of Lynch's irascible personality (and insatiable appetite for coffee and cigarettes," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "I suppose you could say that Lynch's creative process also comes into clearer focus - in this case, he was making the shit up as he went along, and it shows, too."

But for Rob Humanick, writing at Slant, "this slipshod creation feels like a special feature rightfully nixed from the Inland Empire DVD.... [T]he film would be better entitled Lynch for Beginners."

Updates, 10/26: "[I]t's precisely the worshipful feel of Lynch - including scenes in which the camera points up at Mr Lynch from what seems to be the floor, as if it were a faithful dog — that makes the movie so sweet and so appealing," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It's like watching a schoolgirl crush unfold, through a glass darkly."

Online viewing tip. "Revisiting Twin Peaks." David Lynch narrates an audio slide show for the Washington Post. "I think the Internet will be the place for continuing stories."

Slipstream.

"What in the name of...?" asks Nick Schager at Cinematical. "Anthony Hopkins goes way, way, way off the deep end with Slipstream, a straight-outta-crazyland film written and directed by the actor in some sort of feverish attempt to mimic the work of former The Elephant Man collaborator David Lynch."

"Amazingly, Sir Anthony Hopkins has raised the bar to batshit insanity with this maddening passion project, which he wrote, directed, scored, and stars in with as much slack-jawed discombobulation as he's likely to inspire in his audience," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

Updated through 10/30.

"[I]f this were a sonata, it would be called 'Mulholland Drive in Oliver Stone Flat," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Blaring its pretense to Lynch-ness, Slipstream crumbles under the weight of Hopkins's self-indulgence, yet there is some measure of sincerity to this senseless upchuck."

"I thought the talking spider was kind of cool, but the movie as a whole is nonsense," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "I'm glad that Hopkins has apparently been using the bland, middlebrow stage of his acting career to experiment with massive doses of psychotropic chemicals and open the doors of perception and all that. Next time, maybe he'll just write a manifesto."

"Slipstream calls to mind David Lynch's Inland Empire gone horribly awry," writes Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE. "Lynch, an expert in bending cinematic reality to his will, had the good sense to masterfully seduce audiences into his rabbit hole. Hopkins, seemingly less sure of himself, hyperactively assaults from the start."

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 10/26: "Anthony Hopkins has written and directed a very peculiar film. He is the first to say so," writes Roger Ebert, introducing his interview for the Chicago Sun-Times. In his review, Ebert writes:

I trust you enough, dear reader, to tell you something I should keep private: During a period after my surgical emergency, when I was on what Mr Limbaugh so usefully describes as prescription medications, I had dreams more real than my waking moments. Then the fog cleared, my health returned, the medication stopped, and I resumed writing brilliant and lucid reviews like this one. But I know Hopkins gets it right, because I've been there.

"[F]or an actor like Mr Hopkins, disappearing into another character, especially a historical figure, must be a far more unsettling deconstruction of reality than for the casual moviegoer observing the transformation," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "That is a notion Slipstream might have explored more fruitfully, had it focused its wandering attention span, kept its camera steadier and figured out what it wanted to say."

"Slipstream is an experiment in visual stream-of-consciousness, but stream-of-consciousness fares better as a literary form than a cinematic one, possibly because the Parallax View-style atrocity montage has long been such a favorite among film students, possibly because literary stream-of-consciousness better mirrors the thought process," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"Perhaps one could find a prose equivalent in Joyce or Beckett, but basically this is 'all cinema, all the time,'" writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "I'm a sucker for this sort of narrative playfulness, so I fully enjoyed Slipstream. Perhaps it's best thought of as Inland Empire Lite: At half the length, it's easier going down but less filling. And there is pleasure to be had in watching [Christian] Slater and [John] Turturro chew the scenery. Most of all, for any died-in-the-pod film buff, there's the thrill of seeing old fave Kevin McCarthy on screen, looking remarkable at 92."

"What do we know about Anthony Hopkins, really?" asks Noel Murray at the AV Club. "If nothing else, Slipstream is astonishing just for the way it lets us in on what Hopkins has been thinking about all these years. Turns out, he's been pondering the slipperiness of identity among people who make their living pretending."

"Hopkins's film offers modernism without any rigor or discipline, and experimentation based on other people's ideas," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "I haven't seen such a pseudo-avant-garde muddle since Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers."

Online listening tip. Hopkins is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"I suspect most viewers will find that the only enduring outcome of Hopkins's admittedly bold but nonsensical film is an acute headache," writes Emily Condon in Reverse Shot.

Update, 10/27: Peter Sobczynski talks with Hopkins for Hollywood Bitchslap.

Update, 10/30: "This is a screen artist wrestling with the memories, fears, dreams and regrets that rage at the twilight of a brilliant career - and of life," writes Steven Boone in the Star-Ledger. "It is also, sad to say, unwatchable."

Interviews, 10/25.

With Hannah Takes the Stairs set to open in Austin, Spencer Parsons has a few points to make before getting his Chronicle interview started: "'Improv' has often been too often invoked in discussions of independent filmmaking since Cassavetes put that prankish title card at the end of Shadows, but no other American filmmaker I know, mumbling or not, engages in such radical and rigorous improvisation on every level. It's a dangerous sort of process to discuss, sure to be used as ammunition by detractors or to become the downfall of would-be disciples who think it can be easily imitated.... So I talked with Joe [Swanberg] and some of his chief collaborators about how they wouldn't have it any other way."

Meanwhile, dave at chained to the cinémathèque: "Hannah Takes the Stairs is one of the finest American independent films I've seen."

Shooting People "is helping filmmakers collaborate not just by accessing virtual communities, but also facilitating live gatherings, expanding into book publishing and even selling a DVD or two," writes Susan Gerhard, introducing her SF360 interview with Ingrid Kopp.

This week it's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Next month, The Savages. Then there'll be Charlie Wilson's War. We're seeing a lot of Philip Seymour Hoffman and, as William Georgiades notes in his profile, we'll be seeing a lot more, too. "In the last few months, he's wrapped production on screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, and directed a play in Australia and is now preparing to film Doubt, alongside Meryl Streep, after which he'll direct a play in New York."

In the LA Weekly, Ella Taylor talks with Amy Ryan about Gone Baby Gone.

For the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries meets Ben Kingsley. Also: Ed Pilkington on how Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire is being received in the US and Sarfraz Manzoor on the making of In the Shadow of the Moon.

Kim Voynar profiles Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody for indieWIRE.

James Mottram talks with Viggo Mortensen for the Independent.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy talks with Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman about, yes, The Darjeeling Limited.

In the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams talks with Anton Corbijn about Control.

Lagerfeld Confidential.

"With Lagerfeld, of course, what [director Rodolphe] Marconi has as a subject is not just an enormously successful man or an ingenious talent but what every documentarian hopes for: a full-blown creature," writes Michelle Orange, reviewing Lagerfeld Confidential. "A self-constructed cipher whose supreme confidence and supreme artifice interact on a sliding scale of psychic codependency, Lagerfeld has clearly mastered the art of answering prying questions with perfect frankness while revealing absolutely nothing." Also at the Reeler, Ben Gold meets Marconi for coffee at the Soho Grand.

Updated through 10/27.

In the Voice, Nathan Lee notes that Marconi's "indifference to detail extends to any consideration of what, exactly, Lagerfeld does for a living, not to mention the history of his rise in the fashion world."

For the New York Times' Stephen Holden, it's "simply an extended interview, without talking-head commentary," and what's more, "the designer continually eludes his interrogator."

The doc "allows its subject to dictate the terms of his portrait," writes Felicia Feaster in the New York Press. "In an era of ever-present spin, it's a popular - though less than satisfying - approach."

Updates, 10/26: IndieWIRE interviews Marconi.

"We barely even get to see what Lagerfeld does for his paycheck, let alone why it's so large," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"Karl Lagerfeld, like so many among the impossibly rich, famous, and creative, is very proud of himself. And why not?" asks Sarah D Schulman in Gay City News. "After decades of success as the creative director of Chanel - with fingers in other haute couture pies such as Fendi and Chloë - his career shows no signs of slowing down. He speaks fluent German, French, and English, and in 2001 he dropped an astounding 92 pounds in just a little over a year. And now, thanks to French director Rodolphe Marconi and the documentary Lagerfeld Confidential, he has a whole 88 minutes of screen time in which to showcase his brilliance and snark."

Update, 10/27: "Nicole Kidman, who was the face of Chanel when the documentary was shot, is a shadowy presence throughout too, with Lagerfeld repeatedly fretting about where Nicole is, when she'll be there and, most agonisingly, what bit of the carpet she should walk on," writes Hadley Freeman in a piece for the Guardian on matching Hollywood stars and fashion brands. "When she does show up I finally understand why Lagerfeld chose this actress, who always struck me as cold, sexless and dull, for his label: she looks exactly like him. It's extraordinary seeing them stand next to one another for the first time: equally pale, equally facially frozen, equally ignorant of the concept of eating for pleasure and both wearing too-tight suits making them look like a pair of 1920s Weimar lesbian twins."

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/25.

For the WSWS, Christie Schaefer reviews World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War: "Unlike much of the work in science fiction and horror genres today, Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft) approaches his work with a straight face—there is not the expected and desired wink that would make it seem 'all right' and less frightening. From the first pages of this book, which is written as a series of interviews with survivors of a future 'zombie war' from every level of society, Brooks is in character."

The New-York Ghost presents its Halloween issue.

When Not Coming to a Theater Near You's 31 Days of Horror got rolling this year, David Carter placed dibs on Thursdays for a mini-series on cannibal movies. This week, he's made a pretty surprising choice, and a thought-provoking one, too. In a good way.

In The Testament of Dr Mabuse, Fritz Lang "takes M's disembodiment of evil to its logical conclusion, allowing Mabuse to be both everywhere and nowhere; or, rather, transforming him into an omniscient, invisible eye - the presence, rather than evidence, of surveillance," writes Billy Stevenson.

Today at Rob Humanick's Projection Booth, The Evil Dead: "Sam Raimi's grueling debut feature toys with the viewer not unlike its own doomed characters, simultaneously playful and merciless."

"The Horror of Fairy Tales." A list from Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical, where Erik Davis lists the "Most Easily Escapable Movie Monsters" and Peter Martin looks back at Wolfen.

Bill Gibron lists "10 Outsider Genre Gems" at PopMatters.

Another list: "he 10 scariest characters in literature according to visitors to AbeBooks." Via Dwight Garner.

And Jason Kotte's got another scary list.

Scott Kirsner notes that the Devil Music Ensemble is touring with Nosferatu.

Mike Everleth has info on Saturday night's Experiments in Terror 2 screenings at Artists' Television Access in San Francisco.

At the Reeler, ST VanAirsdale talks with Dr Reinhardt van Nostrand, Professor Emeritus of Schlechtendingen at the University of Wurms in Germany, about the Pioneer's 4th annual Month of Horror, Terror and General Mayhem.

Bob Turnbull reports on Z-Day (for zombies, of course) at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, wrapping tonight.

"Tim Lucas has made a believer out of me. As much as I've enjoyed Bava films over the years I really had no idea of the scope of his career or contributions to cinema." At Twitch, Canfield reviews Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark.

Online browsing tip. Jonathan Lapper's got some nice artwork for The Most Dangerous Game.

Online viewing tips. Phil Morehart's got a double feature today: Ed Wood directs Bela Lugosi; Tim Burton directs Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi.

More online viewing. The trailers keep coming at Cinevistaramascope.

Bella.

Now here's something you don't see every day. Governor Rick Perry is encouraging his fellow Texans to go see Bella and has even sent a guest review into the Austin American-Statesman: "Not only will Bella give you hope that Hollywood can still make an inspirational movie, it might also renew your faith in humanity."

"Bella, the People's Choice Award winner at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, is already getting some buzz among Catholics and pro-lifers in the blogosphere, who've pinned it as the crossover anti-abortion hit they've been waiting for," writes Julia Wallace. "Sorry to break it to you guys, but... no."

Updated through 10/26.

In the Austin Chronicle, Joe O'Connell profiles director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde.

Certainly readable but not handily quotable: Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

Updates, 10/26: "This is a movie that wears its bleeding heart on its sleeve and loves its characters to distraction," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Nothing - not even significant plot glitches and inconsistencies - is allowed to get in the way of its bear-hugging embrace of sweetness and light."

"Despite the presence of a lovely leading lady and an impossibly handsome co-lead, the most dazzling star of the quixotic Bella is actually New York City," writes Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "Director Alejandro Monteverde presents the melting pot that is 21st century Manhattan with an infectious vibrancy that makes you want to hop on the next plane and partake in the Big Apple's colorful ebullience. If only that vitality carried over to the film's wispy script, which Monteverde wrote with Patrick Million and Leo Severino."

The AV Club's Scott Tobias can't believe "this gooey pro-life advertisement, masquerading as a cheap-looking Mexican telenovela, robbed the likes of Volver, Away From Her, Borat, Rescue Dawn, and other popular favorites" in that afore-mentioned People's Choice race.

Books, 10/25.

"[J]ust as Match Point opened up Allen to a new generation of moviegoers and brought him a return to critical relevance, so too should Eric Lax's Conversations With Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking," writes Tod Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. "Compiled over 36 years of interviews, conversations and experiences one could only glean from gaining Allen's confidence and respect, Conversations is essential reading for aspiring filmmakers and those who wish to eventually put finger to keyboard in hopes of telling a story, but it is no less intriguing for simple cinephiles." And for the New York Press, Eric Kohn talks with Lax.

"There have been thousand of books about actors and hundreds about directors, but you can practically count the number of books about screenwriters on two hands. This latest is the best - by far." In the New York Observer, Scott Eyman reviews Marc Norman's What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting.

Bookforum points to the Introduction to Shyon Baumann's Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art.

Fests and events, 10/25.

"As the war in Iraq grinds on, one of the era's most iconic happenings continues to be Camp Casey, the makeshift encampment erected by Gold Star mom and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan during August 2005 in Crawford, Texas, just a stone's throw from a vacationing President Bush," writes the Independent Weekly's Neil Morris, noting that a 45-minute trailer for a doc-in-progress, Crawford, Texas, will be screening tomorrow evening at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Via Wiley Wiggins:

"Since its inaugural year in 2002, the Global Lens film festival has gotten around, rather restlessly around, crisscrossing the country from Manhattan to Vashon Island with many far-flung points in between like a Beatnik with a yen for riding the rails," writes Robert Avila at SF360. "Which is more or less the idea. Except that instead of setting out to discover America, the traveling series of recent Third World cinema - a cornerstone of the nonprofit Global Film Initiative (GFI) - is out to help overwhelmingly passportless Americans discover the world."

"Is cinematic love, like, so last century?" Looking back over 15 films caught at the New York Film Festival, Filmbrain may have spotted a trend, but he's not sure. Even after drawing up a chart (which you really should go take a look at).

"In the past few months, I have visited four festivals much apart geographically and in the length of time they have been established," writes Ronald Bergan in roundup for the Guardian: "55-year-old San Sebastian in Spain; a 12-year-old youngster, Pusan in South Korea, which offers the widest possible window on Asian cinema; and babies Copenhagen and Reykjavik, five and four respectively. All of them were exciting in their own way. Besides the cream of the year's crop of world cinema, they offered the best of their own national products, the opportunity to question many film directors and tasty retrospectives."

Ken Russell grabs some free stuff at the London Film Festival. Related Tom Huddleston's been reviewing about a movie a day at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. The Guardian's special section rolls on, and of course, so does that of the co-presenter, the Times.

At the Reeler, Mat Newman has an overview of DocFest 07. New York, through November 1.

Frieze. Nov - Dec 07.

Bert Rebhandl on the Romanian wave:

The praise these films have received is well-deserved, because their achievements constitute a striking example of a Modernist form of "national cinema": their approach to examining Romania's recent history encompasses the entire experience of European auteur cinema since Roberto Rossellini started filming in Rome in the early 40s. Narrative cinema (like any other art, but more so because of its potential to "write history" in its own way) has a threefold task in "liberated" or "revolutionary" societies: to remember and reconstruct the time before the change, because the overthrown regimes have usually been audio-visually restrictive; to remember and re-evaluate the "revolutionary" events themselves; and to chronicle the aftermath (the new era) and measure it against what preceded it. Now, 18 years after the revolution, Romanian filmmakers assume these tasks with a confidence and a variety of formal strategies that is all the more astounding for the fact that, with the exception of the work of director Lucian Pintilie (The Afternoon of a Torturer, 2001, for instance), there is really no tradition of this kind of filmmaking in Romania.

Also in the new issue of frieze:

"Oh, and this morning I saw another amazing film," writes James Benning:

I was at my school, which has been rented out to a high school summer arts programme. The halls were filled with teenagers. Off to the side in one of the main galleries a young man was playing Erik Satie's Vexations (1893), a piano piece with 840 repetitions that is composed to go on for ever. I went in and listened for a few hours. What a treat and surprise to hear this being performed. Occasionally a few students would come in, most of the time for less than a minute, and then wander off. Two young girls stood in the doorway for 30 minutes, mystified and perhaps a bit afraid to enter the genius of this work. They reminded me of myself, the first time I saw and heard John Cage. Then a blind student came in and sat down. He carried a red and white cane that folded into itself. He listened intently and was still there when I left. Imagine what he saw.

Claire Gilman on Corey McCorkle: "Film is a growing component of McCorkle's production, not least because of its presumed transparency."

Dominic Eichler on Haris Epaminonda: "In the last few years, the artist has produced a series of radiant, emotional, audio-visual vignettes, which are long enough to soak into the viewer's consciousness yet short enough to assume the qualities of a vision: they come and go fleetingly, but linger in the head like an afterimage. Reality is kept at arm's length, its absence not particularly noticed, while the present is lost in a fictionalized past."

Catrin Lorch: "In front of [Bojan] Šarčević's two new films, one can submit to nostalgia for the magic of celluloid: this is what it might have looked like, back when cinecameras were still blithely pointed at goodness and beauty in any form; an earlier age, before the links between sculpture and electronic image had been subjected to art-historical fine-tuning."

Nicola Harvey on "the rudimentary domestic bliss of [Guy] Ben-Ner's video work Stealing Beauty (2007)."

"The glow of 65 televisions outlines the nave of a deconsecrated church, the sound from each jostling in the musty air." Chris Fite-Wassilak on Andrew Kötting.

"The British artist Lucy Skaer works between these two poles of mystery and decipherment with a practice that includes drawing, sculpture, film and a number of collaborations." A monograph by Melissa Gronlund.

Amanda Coulson on new work by Bjørn Melhus: "Known for his adept procedure of using snippets of dialogue from television and film - himself lip-synching to the often-recognizable sound bites - to create video works that are comic yet socially pertinent, visitors expecting more of the same will not be disappointed."

Christy Lange contextualizes Nedko Solakov's Quixotic attempts to use a camera "to resolve the heated ten-year dispute between Russia and his native country, Bulgaria, over who owns the right to produce one of the world's most popular automatic weapons, the Kalashnikov rifle."

"It is hard to convey the uncanny effect of American English slowly and, it seems, irrevocably becoming the first language at Berlin openings," writes Tirdad Zolghadr.

NYFF. Views. 3.

Following up on his first and second pieces on the Views from the Avant-Garde sidebar of the New York Film Festival, Michael Sicinski focuses on five "modern masters at mid-career."

In film criticism, exposure (and overexposure) is relative. Certainly where experimental cinema is concerned, any reasonable and nominally sympathetic observer would have to concur that no one working in the field has ever received the attention they deserved. Fortunately no one except Matthew Barney makes experimental film in the hopes of conquering the universe and getting a spread in GQ; the respect of a small but devoted audience is usually enough to sustain most of the a-g's hardcore lifers. Naturally it's difficult to sustain one's career as grant monies become increasingly scarce, film stocks are discontinued left and right, and the demands of academia (where many experimentalists find refuge) inevitably pull one's time away from the work itself.

In short, it's hard out there. Over two decades ago, a major American critic quipped that Ernie Gehr "need[ed] critical attention like Bob Hope needs real estate." Try, for a moment, to imagine a world in which the cinema of Ernie Gehr is ubiquitously over-praised, discussed to death over espressos in movie house lobbies and parsed into deconstructive oblivion in the halls of academe. Has anyone actually glimpsed this Bizarro-world? (If so, perhaps you could also let me know how President LaDuke faired at the G8 Summit.) One of the indispensable functions of Views each year is its family-reunion vibe, which is due in no small part to the fact that anyone making challenging, defiantly uncommercial artworks is fighting an uphill battle. Yes, the invited filmmakers come to the Walter Reade to show their latest, but even if they've been given a one-person showcase program, they're still "the featured filmmaker" for a tiny fragment of the weekend. The rest of the time, they're the audience. What do they see?

There is a group of filmmakers, all pretty much of the same generation, whose profile is woefully inadequate to the order of their achievement. In this essay I'd like to focus on five filmmakers who, to my eyes, are modern masters at mid-career, whose work should absolutely be better known and whose contributions to Views 2007 were, as usual, among the finest selections overall. I am tempted to call them "filmmakers' filmmakers," since all of them are widely recognized as major artists by their peers and colleagues and have been for quite some time. But that phrase, "filmmakers' filmmaker," could give the mistaken impression that their work is abstruse or arcane, reliant on intricate historical knowledge and / or formal training for full (or even partial) appreciation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The visceral pleasures their cinema provides, and in particular its openness to the uncertain textures of the everyday, actually make it some of the most directly engaging filmmaking around. These five demonstrate an all-too-rare combination of accessibility and rigor.

Fred Worden's films have distinguished themselves over the years with their ability to provoke a unique ocular agitation while exhibiting bone-dry humor. His inkwash animations, such as Automatic Writing (2000) and The Or Cloud (2001), play on the spatial terms available through basic drawing, such as density and fragmentary depth. These films turn brushstroke or the individual calligraphy of the painter's hand into scenarios for anxiety and, eventually, systematic breakdown. In his recent digital works, Worden has reintroduced concrete imagery in order to reduce its power of signification. In 2005's Here, a static proscenium and the horizontal drive of costumed Hollywood knights combine and alternate to enfold space and pin down the would-be actors within it. Worden took a bold step towards an aggressive, almost primal formalism in last year's Everyday Bad Dream, a flickering, clanging, semi-abstract animation that moved from the eyeball out and locked onto the frightening face that banality seldom shows you. That piece was a mean comic gem that grabbed you by the lapels. His 2007 selection, North Shore, once again moves in a new direction. A confounding pool of viscous semi-images against jet-black, the video flickers to generate opposing, symmetrical forms which become complementary receptacles for one another's oozings. Soon, spots and slashes cut away at the vast black expanse, and eventually Worden is hitting us with a full-tilt barrage of viscous semi-forms, some horizontal, like liquid spills across an eye-level coffee table, some vertical and pendulous, like motor oil pooling around an elongated, amber-colored disc. These forms mutate and flow, always flickering by so quickly as to prevent any actually visible motion. Tiny shifts of light glinting across the black field are the only hints that objects are there. Incomplete concentric circle-slashes, like the stains left by the bottom of a coffee pot, swirl and evaporate as well. Is Worden taunting us, seeing just how little solidity is necessary for the human brain to perceive an on-screen form? Although far less scathing than Bad Dream, North Shore is a throbbing, shimmering mirage that bears its own traces of a deep nightmare logic.

Perhaps gentler at first glance but possibly harboring a wicked passive-aggressive streak, the recent video works by Vincent Grenier have consistently been highlights of the Views line-up, and this year was no exception. Grenier has been making witty, elegant experimental films and videos for over 30 years, and his approach has always been defined by its eclecticism. His earlier film works partake of the orthodoxies of experimental film history but refuse to be defined by it. For example, 1978's Interieur Interiors (To AK) is a high-modernist exploration of adjacent geometrical planes, an intimate domestic study, and a collection of wry perceptual miscues organized not unlike a series of blackout sketches. Works from the early 90s such as Out in the Garden and You display a sensitivity to portraiture that allows figure and landscape to merge and separate in a kind of mitosis / meiosis. And most recently Grenier's career has been characterized by a rigorous exploration of digital video and its unique properties. Rather than attempting to duplicate the style of his films by other means, as many film-turned-videomakers have done, he has embraced video's defining traits - relative flatness, a capacity for inner framing and image juxtaposition, and a more tightly controlled capability for superimposition - in order to produce video artworks distinguished by their subtlety and grace, to say nothing of their quirky humor. Where video has been an impediment to others, it has expanded Grenier's creative vocabulary.

The last four years of Views have included videos by Grenier. 2004's Tabula Rasa fragmented but deepened our apprehension of a particular space, a high school in the Bronx through staggered sound and internal superimpositions. 2005's North Southernly is a single view from a window slowly transformed, although discerning rack focus from digital manipulation is quite tricky, perhaps a sly acknowledgment of DV's relative indifference to older avant-garde traditions of fussy handicraft. 2006 brought us This, and This, a tape which can only be described as a comedy of the horizontal wipe. In it, numerous less-than-flattering views of the so-called natural world bump against one another, get in each other's way, and yet refuse to actually connect through genuine montage. Reminiscent of Scott Stark's video SLOW from 2001, Grenier's piece is less complicated, more straightforward, resulting not in ambiguous space but in a confounding metonymy of images, splashing us with a puddle then driving on. This year's Grenier video, Armoire, is one of his briefest (three minutes), and its humor is so deadpan I actually didn't immediately recognize it as such - a true "way homer." In it, Grenier has "trapped" a bird in a reflection on the water and essentially chases it around the screen with increasingly narrow frames-within-frames, pinning it down, making it sing for the artist's own supper. Its sense of eventual claustrophobia recalls the glass box sculptures of Joseph Cornell, tight spaces where imaginary living things went to gain immobility / immortality. But here, we're so used to equating the very image of a bird in a tree with absolute freedom that Grenier's comic aggression is a slow-burn, provoking a tense grimace of discomfort by minute three, and a chuckling nod of assent by the second viewing. Even those of us fiercely devoted to the field of experimental cinema know all too well that it can be rather humor-impaired. No surprise, then, that a stealth anarchist like Grenier is like a breath of fresh air.

Speaking of anarchy, or at least the breakdown of established order, it was delightfully perverse this year to find two films, made almost in answer to one another, by two filmmakers whose sensibilities could hardly more divergent. Both Jim Jennings and Henry Hills were represented in Views this year by films shot in the heart of Prague, and according to Mark McElhatten, it was Hills who tipped him off to the existence of Jennings's film and suggested the unlikely two-fer. Played back to back, it was a rare opportunity to observe two masters at work on outwardly similar material. But their remarkably dissimilar handling of it exemplifies the working methods of these two exacting, meticulous craftsmen. Working in cinema since the 1970s, Jennings is in many ways the preeminent New York City film poet. Although he has worked in color on occasion (for example his 2001 Venice film Impossible Love), and sometimes with sound, the majority of his films are silent and shot in luminous black and white, accumulated from scenes Jennings observes during his day-job rounds. His films are a balancing act between a transformative, camera-stylo approach which abstracts small segments of the urban environment, and a commitment to rendering that street life with a fidelity that keeps the shadows of its lives intact. 1998's Painting the Town is an at-first-confounding swirl of lights in the night sky that, over the course of the running time, coax the viewer into embracing their swooping and diving patterns and discerning a loose but tangible method. From the same year, Silvercup may be Jennings's finest work of a particular sort. It lets movement and the built environment do much of the work as it observes elevated trains, old billboards, and other urban features against the sky and ground, cutting their dense, darkened forms into the celluloid. (A sign shown in the film bears the slogan, "Quality is not an accident," and this could be said of Jennings's exquisite filmmaking as well.) Jennings has consistently challenged himself to expand his technique and turn his attentions to a vast array of the world's surfaces. 2004's Close Quarters is a domestic interior and, in its combination of exacting visual detail and stark emotional vulnerability, is a flat-out masterpiece; last year's spry, funky Silk Ties took to the streets once more but with a percussive in-camera editing scheme that lent Jennings's Manhattan a feel almost equivalent to stop-motion animation.

In fact, before this year, Silk Ties is probably the only Jennings film that would ever in a million years prompt someone to think of Henry Hills. A polymath steeped in multiple fields of avant-garde creativity and a key figure for the consideration of "composition" as a practice across disciplines, Hills's filmwork is inseparable from his involvement with the (sorry to use the contested term) "language poets" as well as the Downtown NY experimental music and dance scenes. The music of John Zorn, Christian Marclay and Tom Cora wends its way throughout Hills's key films, along with fragments of writing and speech by Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman and Bruce Andrews. Hills shares with these highly distinctive artists a focus on the structures of signification, the poetics of colliding fragments, and above all a Futurist commitment to the intellectual power of clamor and speed, only this time - this is crucial! - harnessed for the political left. Hills's films display a preference for what Peter Kubelka called "strong articulations," extreme differences between edits and even frames which push our capacities for understanding to the limit and then some. A film such as Kino Da! (1981) takes a single poetic performance (or possibly several - it's admittedly hard to tell) and, through jump cuts and manic compression, squeezes meaning from the speech like juice from an orange, with only key words and primal hiccups coming through the flurry. His Porter Springs films, which are personal favorites of mine, find Hills applying his jagged, staccato editing style and phoneme-level sonic manipulations to home movies from what once was a quiet lakeside retreat. Nature becomes processed and reprocessed into a series of semiotic gestures and code-images while retaining the very qualities that distinguish any good landscape study - attention to specifics of light and shadow, depth and shallow space. However more than any other single film, Money, from 1985, is probably Hills's clearest statement of purpose. Slicing and dicing a vast collection of street scenes, conversations, readings, public dance works, skronky avant-jazz riffs and the occasional dab of urban negative space into a rapid-fire turntablist extravaganza, Hills breaks up nearly every linguistic and imagistic unit of comprehension he can find and reconnects them as interlocking language Legos, forming an entirely new logic of organization based on formal affinities (shape, timbre, gesture, framing) rather than mundane rules of communication. Henry Hills is such a form-buster that watching his films inevitably prompts a momentary disquieting thought: what's it like inside this guy's head?

So, naturally, Jennings and Hills went to Prague, rode the same inner-city rails, and found completely different worlds. However, they are surprisingly complementary. Jennings's Prague Winter is a relaxed, not quite melancholy effort that slides between two related poles. The title, of course, refers to the post-68 Soviet crackdown on liberal reform, but also on the time of year Jennings's film depicts. He shows us the cityscape, the rusty, trusty tram system, the cobblestone streets, all bathed in the shadows that almost always preoccupy his films. In between, Jennings focuses in on the faces of individual citizens, mostly seniors who have withstood the political turmoil of the last century, along with the uncertainties of today's post-Communist economic shock-therapies. Although it's a cliché, I know, these men and (mostly) women have this history indelibly etched upon their faces. Jennings's film attends to their uniqueness while returning to the larger urban situation, resulting in a firm part / whole structure. In fact, Prague Winter is one of Jennings's most clearly organized films, giving the sense that his outside-observer status made him too reticent to indulge in more thorough abstraction.

Hills's Electricity (a video work which appears to have been begun on film) perhaps deals with the same dilemma but in an entirely different way. The piece is a crackling montage of the tram wires just above the city streets, with the tram's diamond-shaped electrical conductors poking in and out of the image with brusque periodicity. As per usual, these enjambed fragments form a kind of concrete poetry of shape and noise, a Prague city symphony that averts its eyes from most of the city and its inhabitants in favor of the sort of once-triumphant technology over which Vertov, at least, would have openly wept. As a contrapuntal image, Hills shows us the Zizkov Television Tower, a Soviet-imposed device for jamming Western TV signals. So in one respect, Hills's semiotic is just as manifest as Jennings's. We're looking at the transmissions and dis-transmissions, energies and invisible waves of communication and isolation. In zeroing in on that which we can't see but know is there, Hills reminds us of Prague's history, still lingering in its aftereffects. And, as befitting a film entitled Electricity, the work just sizzles, its percussive editing and tape-funk soundtrack belying any stodgy preconceptions about "the old country." It's hard not to think that perhaps this is how the original Prague Spring felt, and I could easily see bookending a rep screening of Vera Chytilóva's Daisies with these films, Hills at the front and Jennings at the back. Or maybe vice versa. At any rate, the trip abroad finds these two modern masters accepting new challenges, handily rising to meet them, and passing the complex results along to us.

The films of Jeanne Liotta likewise pose their own perceptual challenges. But Liotta's style and tone has tended to avoid the grand gesture in favor of subtle transformations. The standpoint evident from her films often recalls the amateur scientists of the 19th century, taking it upon themselves to break the world down into its component parts and see what's inside. Muktikara, Liotta's 1999 masterpiece, exemplifies this approach while embracing sheer pictorial beauty. In it, Liotta trains her camera on a lake and the sky above it, photographed in grainy, hazed-out black and white. Time-lapse and minor aperture adjustments make the mostly still image of the landscape pulse and tremble, as if this scene by the water were being presented to us in time as a series of invisibly replenishing photocopies. In fact, what Liotta's flutter does tell us is that this "stable" environment is renewing itself endlessly. Eventually, Liotta flattens out the space of the image, its reflected double-form of the shore in the lake turning a bulbous black void into a solid entity. Muktikara resembles nothing so much as a filmic riff on Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic, his canvas-splitting mega-form replaced by Liotta with a natural feature and the perceptual discrepancies it gathers around itself. Operating in an entirely different register, 2003's Loretta displays a woman's shadowy form against a canary yellow background, as an aria strains to sweep the figure into a drama disproportionate to her physical circumstance. Liotta exposed the film with a flashlight, marking shadows directly onto the strip.

This jewel-like miniature points the way toward Liotta's work becoming more intimate, which makes her 2007 film Observando El Cielo all the more breathtaking. In her latest, which many in attendance considered to be the best film in the entire festival, Liotta assembles seven years' worth of field recordings from her astronomical observations - accelerated night skies in over a dozen distinct locations, all with their own unique character. The film is remarkable for its meticulous, neo-Constructivist organization; her edits feel both agile and inevitable, like stonemasonry achieved through light. We see stars streaking by, stars in frozen time, slices of the sky at differential moments of the night. Sometimes a sky is shown bare unto itself, sometimes offset with a jutting red roof or the horizontal jab of a tree branch. These non-sky images are astonishing in themselves; the searing red interior of a planetarium dome or the alternating light on a house façade, first amber and then a harsh neon green, represent gorgeous cinematography that any narrative filmmaker would kill for. But perhaps the film's most typical maneuver is to show the stars slowly arcing past at a 45° angle to the frame, only to have a countervailing movement - stratus clouds or a comet-like streak - bisect the screen from the opposite angle. These images do more than transform the familiar; they practically vanquish the familiar, preconceived images of the skies we've accumulated over time, along with their needless symbolic freight. Observando El Cielo asks us to watch the skies for themselves, as an ever-shifting set of locations, trajectories and triangulations. The soundtrack, composed by fellow filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, is a dense yet buoyant collage of broadcasts, short waves, and palpable interference. If there is anything up in these skies, it isn't God or Superman but human communication, the invisible traffic of modern technological endeavor. In every possible way, Liotta's film scrupulously resists metaphor in favor of attentive, awe-struck empiricism. And in this regard, Observando El Cielo exemplifies a capacious but strictly rationalist aesthetic sensibility. Once, science and the aesthetic were not considered opposing epistemologies. Both rely on a partially distanced stance that steps outside the everyday; only with increased professionalization and the subsequent battles for funding did these attitudes decisively part ways in the public imagination. But before that point, the beauty and elegance of natural phenomena was a necessary component of the drive to examine, to learn more. (Near the end of the film, Liotta inserts a droll but telling shot of a sign outside a planetarium: "OBSERVATION IN PROGRESS.") Liotta's latest film casts its lot with this fröhliche Wissenschaft. Whether or not Liotta intended to make a celestial symphony for agnostics and atheists, I do not know. However, at a time when both science and art are under attack, and we're continually asked to supplicate ourselves to the heavens instead of subjecting the world to legitimate human inquiry, Liotta's film certainly has a political dimension as well.

Fests and events, 10/24.

"There are few films one can, in all seriousness, call perfect," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "A personal list might include Sunrise, Rear Window, a few films by Fellini and Bresson, and that's about it. Except there's Russian visionary Sergei Parajanov's 1964 masterpiece Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors." And it opens on Halloween for a week-long run at BAM Rose Cinemas.

As noted in some dark obscure corner of "Books" entry days and days ago, War and Peace is haunting the zeitgeist again, primarily because two translations have just appeared (New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus is currently moderating a discussion of one), but also because Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate is back on our minds as well (it's just appeared for the first time in German, for example, and the papers over here are agog). As John Lanchester writes in the current issue of the London Review of Books, "War and Peace hangs over Grossman's book as a template and a lodestar, and the measure of Grossman's achievement is that a comparison between the two books is not grotesque." But that's not all: "Sergei Bondarchuk's seven hour epic is currently enjoying an ultra-rare theatrical run at New York's Film Forum - with a national tour certain to follow," writes Kevin Lee, introducing an entry on Part III. Naturally, this follows entries on Parts I and II.

"When will we finally see a Peter Hutton retrospective in France?" Cyril Neyrat writes a journal entry from the Viennale for Cahiers du cinéma.

For the Voice, Nick Pinkerton previews New French Films: "BAMcinématek's five-film showcase - the latest incarnation of an annual series that premieres a selection of recent French films as yet without stateside distribution - offers an alternative to the brand-name auteur output and harmless, dorky comedies that routinely make the Atlantic crossing."

"As we docu-nerds know, there exists a thriving community of documentary aficionados in our city, and [Thom] Powers saw an opening to 'build continuity from the past to the present,' conceptualizing a night at which 'film is half the experience, and the other half is the discussion.'" For the L Magazine, Danielle DiGiacomo has an overview of the Stranger Than Fiction series running Tuesdays at the IFC Center.

"Much of [William E] Jones's work has an air of intended distance - it can range in effect from the warm, generous irony of 1997's Finished to the sensual parsimony of 2004's too-tentative Is It Really So Strange? - but his new film [Tearoom], also screening this week, is so detached that he didn't even make it." Jason Shamai previews a weekend of screenings at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey previews a screening of The Silencers, starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm: "In Donald Hamilton's original books Helm is a tough customer involved in relatively realistic adventures. But the Helm movies - the prime inspiration for Austin Powers - are consummate 60s expressions of Playboy middle-class-male masturbation fodder, surrounding the leather-skinned, martini-slurred star (Martin's line readings often suggest he'd been propped up for the take) with chesty starlets half his age, clad in the loudest possible peekaboo showgirl or allegedly mod attire." At the Mechanics' Institute on Friday.

Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding "screens at the UCLA film archive this week, and it's not to be missed as a rare and important portrait of black, lower-middle class life in south central Los Angeles during the early-80s," writes Doug Cummings; "its seriocomic tragedy suggests provocative consequences to the kind of existential pressures so memorably introduced in Killer of Sheep]."

The Chicago Korean Film Festival runs from November 1 through 4.

In San Francisco, Extraordinary Cinema from Asia: Classic to Contemporary, November 8 through 18.

Beur is Beautiful: Maghrebi-French Filmmaking, November 10 and 11 in New York; via Robert Cashill.

To Die in Jerusalem opens the Paley Center for Media's documentary festival tonight before HBO broadcasts it on November 1. In the New York Times, Elizabeth Jensen tells the story behind the doc about the mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber and the mother of an Israeli victim of that bomb.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/24.

"Frankenstein would go on to create new life in subsequent Universal sequels, but director [James] Whale, in congress with Karloff's brilliant portrayal, would assure that their achievement in The Bride of Frankenstein, a masterful blend of supreme emotional resonance and mordant wit, truly bringing life to the dead, would never be equaled," writes Dennis Cozzalio.

As part of Entertainment Weekly's "Halloween 2007" special, Mike Bruno talks with John Carpenter: "In addition to sharing with us his encyclopedic knowledge of the original vampire movies, like Nosferatu and Bela Lugosi's Dracula, Carpenter also weighs in on the so-called 'torture' horror genre, touches on Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween, and explains why he thinks the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is ''hilariously funny.'" Via Movie City News.

"In anticipation of Halloween, we invited [Eli] Roth to program a virtual 24-hour horror-film festival for AV Club readers," writes Keith Phipps. Via Vince Keenan, who got linkage to other Halloweenish goodness and notes that Roth's "line-up starts with John Carpenter's remake of The Thing, includes a surprising but fully justified appearance by Fellini, and ends with a little gem called Torso. He also makes the supremely idiotic suggestion that you watch Dario Argento's Suspiria at two o'clock in the morning. All that's missing is a handy list of local sanitariums you can check yourself into when you're finished." Related: John Lichman at the Reeler: "Dark and stormy nights aside, one of October's best local draws is the New York City Horror Film Festival, now in its seventh year with only the finest in terms of slashers, thrillers, ghost stories - and Eli Roth." Tonight through Sunday.

"Women are regularly degraded in film, but seldom, if ever, with so little subtext as in Boxing Helena," writes Rumsey Taylor. "It is so blatantly misogynistic that it becomes something of a marvel - a film rigidly intent to spin a tale of gothic sexuality, and failing on that promise, emerging as something impressively tasteless and ridiculous. It's elitist camp, an accidental work of art, captivating for reasons for which its author did not intend."

"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, directed by Bill Melendez and written by Peanuts creator Charles M Schulz, provides us with one of American filmmaking's most lucid depictions of the struggle between existentialism and religious determinism," writes Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot.

A top ten from Nathaniel R: Witches.

At Twitch, Canfield talks with Tim Lucas about Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark. And look at this: Jason Gargano's cover story for Cincinnati's CityBeat.

At Cinematical, Matt Bradshaw lists seven "Science Fiction Horror Films" and Peter Martin revisits The Howling.

Ted Pigeon reflects on "the wonder of horror as a genre. It's both amazingly versatile as well as inherently nostalgic, limitlessly calling upon audiences desires to feel fear deep in their blood."

"Occupying that unfortunate space between the not-quite-painful atrocity and the so-bad-its-good spectacle of disaster, The Dead Pit instead stuns with its ineptitude around every corner without ever giving in to the trashy joys potentially affording by its bottom-of-the-barrel decor," writes Rob Humanick.

"The Blood-Splattered Bride is as much about masculine power and the fear of the feminine as it is about a vampire seeking revenge," writes Peter Nellhaus.

Online listening tip. "Haunted Bela."

Phil Morehart's clip today at Facets Features: Lucio Fulci's Zombie, "awesome for many reasons."

Totally Unrelated Blog-a-Thon.

ST VanAirsdale hopes that the Totally Unrelated Blog-a-Thon will serve as "a useful diversion for film bloggers and film blog readers who feel like mixing a little variety into their days.... [T]he idea is to aggregate a collection of what we think about when we're not thinking about film. I think it'll be fun. I've gone ahead and fired the first shot with this appreciation of Dionne Warwick. Yes, you read correctly."

This very welcome vacation from cinephilia will carry on at the Reeler through November 1 (and I, too, will be submitting an entry once this blessed week simmers down).

Online viewing, listening, etc. Lumet and more.

One shot, 18 minutes. Jamie Stuart talks with Sidney Lumet not just about Before the Devil Knows You're Dead but also about what makes shooting in New York unique and about what we all owe Jonathan Demme.

More fun stuff:

Online browsing tip. "00s Indie Rock as Depicted by Old Elektra Sleeves" at Marathonpacks.

On or offline reading tip. Jason Thompson and Atsuhisa Okura's "How Manga Conquered the US, a Graphic Guide to Japan's Coolest Export" at Wired, via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, where he's also noting where you can pick up your Dumbledore Pride tees.

Online listening tip. On NPR: "The Danny Elfman Gemini No Way Can I Ever Decide Anything List."

Online listening tips. MM Serra's interviews with the likes of Philip Glass and Bill Morrison, Jonas Mekas and Carolee Schneemann. Scroll down; via Jennifer Macmillan.

Matt Singer and Alison Willmore of IFC News "consider the sophomore slump, whether literal or just in spirit, and take a look at how and why it's affected some of our favorite directors."

And more online viewing. "'It's a really simple film, I promise,' director Richard Kelly (of Donnie Darko) assured a crowd at an indieWIRE event at the Apple Store in Soho last Friday, where IFC News caught up with him to find out a bit more about the 'pop fever dream' that is Southland Tales."

Jimmy Carter Man from Plains.

"[E]ven someone as astute as [Jonathan] Demme could not have predicted that after he agreed to make the movie, [Jimmy] Carter would re-enter the news in a big way by titling his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," writes David Carr in the New York Times. "Mr Demme had planned to travel with Mr Carter to Iran and the scene of the 1979 hostage-taking that doomed his presidency, to ask whether that crisis was really the defeat it had been portrayed as. But what might have been a nice bit of hagiography and re-contextualization was overtaken by the debate that roiled around the former president and his not particularly felicitous choice for a book title."

Updated through 10/26.

"Demme reveals Carter as a highly intelligent, dedicated, religious, humble, and concerned man constantly engaged with the world around him, and for that the film is time well spent with a human being who, even if one doesn't agree with his ideas, must be at least admired for his unwavering integrity," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "Nonetheless, [Jimmy Carter Man from Plains] is a limited documentary, unavoidably dependent on Carter's public speaking appearances and talk and radio show interviews for much of its material, making Man from Plains a compromised product and nowhere near a full accounting of Carter's legacy."

"Carter is scarcely the first commentator to characterize the enforced, unequal separation that exists in Israel's occupied territories as apartheid—the Israeli left has called it that for years," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "But, waving the term like a red cape before the American public, Carter has been notably disingenuous in exploiting it." As for the film, "a book tour isn't even a political campaign, and traveling with Jimmy Carter isn't exactly going backstage with the Rolling Stones."

At Slant, Ed Gonzalez finds the doc, "like Neil Young: Heart of Gold and The Agronomist... a poignant portrait of a great man."

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

Updates, 10/25: "I'm still not quite sure why it's so compelling," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "I think this movie's appeal is overdetermined, as we used to say in sophomore Marxist-theory class, meaning that it derives from so many sources you can't keep track of them all. If Jimmy Carter Man From Plains sometimes feels like the portrait of a saint, it also reminds us that saints are strange and private people pursuing a personal compact with an invisible deity, in solitude and often in sadness."

"As a feature-length experiment in point-of-view, Man From Plains ranks alongside Demme's paranoia-tinged remake of Keith Uhlich at the Reeler.

"Like a scientist studying some unspecified virus, [Demme] shows Carter weathering the ire of political correctness," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Man from Plains portrays a powerful man struggling to maintain humility in the face of political tyranny."

Updates, 10/26: "Man From Plains isn't about engagement; it's about disengagement from Mr Carter's critics and his more provocative beliefs," argues Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"Jimmy Carter is still Jimmy Carter: A measured man of principle, given more toward substantive policy discussions than soundbites and fiery rhetoric, and inclined to find common ground rather than pick fights," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "These may be the qualities of a great man, but they're not exactly the stuff of a great documentary subject, especially given how hard Carter works to defuse the emotions stirred up by his book."

"[T]his admiring documentary is more interesting than you might think, though not as interesting as it should be," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

Midnight Eye. A book and five films.

Jasper Sharp reviews Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary, a...

fabulous new book from Abé Mark Nornes, whose previous publications include Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima, and The Japan/America Film Wars: WWII Propoganda and Its Cultural Contexts, a collection of essays which he edited with Yukio Fukushima. It should be pointed out right away, that Nornes's latest is not strictly about Shinsuke Ogawa, who died on 7 February 1992 from cancer of the colon, but about Ogawa Pro, the collective that bore his name. This is an important distinction; it is not often made clear where the dividing line between the man and those who congregated around him has been. Certainly Ogawa alone could not have immortalised the turmoil faced by Japan's more rural communities against the threat of a new, more economically-driven modern reality without the support, assistance and sacrifice of the loyal entourage that gathered around him, as becomes very clear in the opening chapters of this fascinating chronicle.

Film reviews:

• "In a 1993 interview with Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Ruoff, Kazuo Hara was quoted as saying that documentaries "should explore the things that people don't want explored," writes Lindsay Nelson. "His own documentaries have become famous doing just that, and for displaying images that the public doesn't necessarily want to see. Though his inaction in the face of the violence and potential suffering that happens in front of his camera raises serious ethical questions, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On should be applauded for its sheer audacity, and for the important questions it raises about the roles and responsibilities of filmmaker, audience, and subject."

• "With its pan-European cast and Umbrellas of Cherbourg-director [Jacques] Demy behind the camera, Lady Oscar is hardly recognisable as a Japanese movie," writes Jasper Sharp. "However this lavish Toho production is in fact based on one of the most phenomenally popular shojo mangas (girls' comics) ever released."

• "I was beginning to worry that Shinya Tsukamoto was becoming lazy and more impulsiveness and imprecise as a filmmaker," writes Nicholas Rucka. "Nightmare Detective has made me reconsider that notion."

• "Before discussing The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai by Mitsuru Meike it might be prudent to consider the peculiar story of its journey from the far from glamorous sex theaters of Tokyo to the relative respectability of Cinema Village in New York, where it recently became the first Pink film to gain a theatrical release in the American art cinema circuit," begins Dean Bowman.

• And again, Dean Bowman: "Jun Ichikawa's film version of one of Haruki Murakami's most elegant short stories, Tony Takitani, somehow manages to redefine the whole process of literary adaptation, though with the same quiet, unassuming grace of the original story."

Sight & Sound. November 07.

Online, the new issue of Sight & Sound opens with a questionnaire. The four questions: "What is Bresson's significance for you?," "What is your favorite Bresson film and why?," "What, if anything, have you borrowed from Bresson's cinema?" and "What do you see as Bresson's true legacy?" Following Michael Brooke's quick primer, filling out the form are Olivier Assayas, Bruno Dumont, Paul Schrader, Eugène Green and Aki Kaurismäki.

Nick James looks back on the Venice Film Festival: "This has been a strong year for American cinema, but a weaker one for its alternatives. And if festival director Marco Müller's program reflected that problem, it was so rich in star-encrusted excitements - most of them packed around the opening weekend to satisfy anyone departing for Toronto midweek - that we can already say that Venice has trounced its main rival, the nouveau riche Rome festival, in both the quality of the selection and the glamor it flaunted."

Reviews:

• Written and produced by Robert L Joseph and directed by Charles Crichton, The Third Secret "perhaps belongs most of all to cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, in whose filmography it stands as the third panel of a psychologically themed triptych, following John Huston's unjustly neglected Freud (1962) and Joseph Losey's masterpiece The Servant (1963)," writes Tim Lucas. "Like those earlier films, The Third Secret embodies an exciting time in movie history when the delineation of character became more penetrating, less concerned with star iconography, more self-aware, self-conscious and conflicted."

• "As his first film explicitly centred on male homosexuality, The Witnesses marks a watershed in [André] Téchiné's career," argues Ginette Vincendeau.

• Superbad, writes Ryan Gilbey. "The movie treads identical ground to American Graffiti (1973) and Dazed and Confused (1993), but what distinguishes it is a post-Porky's sensibility that simultaneously satirises and celebrates pre-PC smuttiness."

• "James Mangold's achievement is to fashion his remake of 3.10 to Yuma in a traditional, yet compelling way," writes Geoffrey Macnab. "The screenplay does depart from Delmer Daves's 1957 original (which was based on an Elmore Leonard short story), but the changes it makes are more to expand the scope of the story than to distort it."

NYFF 07. Index.

Coverage of the coverage of the 45th New York Film Festival.

Feature Films:

• 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. Podcast!
• Actresses.
• Alexandra.
• The Axe in the Attic.
• Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.
• Blade Runner.
• Calle Santa Fe.
• The Darjeeling Limited.
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
• Flight of the Red Balloon.
• A Girl Cut in Two.
• Go Go Tales Podcast!.
• I Just Didn't Do It.
• I'm Not There. Podcast!
• In the City of Sylvia.
• The Last Mistress.
• The Man from London.
• Margot at the Wedding. Podcast!
• Married Life.
• Mr Warmth.
• No Country for Old Men.
• The Orphanage.
• Paranoid Park. Podcast!
• Persepolis.
• Redacted.
• The Romance of Astreé and Céladon.
• Secret Sunshine.
• Stellet Licht. Podcast!
• Useless.

And then there've been Michael Sicinski's overviews of the Views from the Avant-Garde "sidebar": 1, 2...

NYFF. Honorably mentioned.

To wrap up coverage of the coverage of the New York Film Festival, here are some loose ends, tied.

Feature Films:

Calle Santa Fe:

• Calle Santa Fe - "whose ostensible goal is to exhume lost leftist political history and provide a framework for future progressive movements - is the political equivalent of a rambling, numbingly-long lecture from a smug 60s boomer who wants you to understand that music peaked in 1967 and no one will ever be as awesome as Jimi Hendrix," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler.

• "As a portrait of one woman's difficult attempts to reconcile with the past, and as a study of the long-term efficacy of revolution (and revolutionary zeal), Calle Santa Fe draws out its arguments until they no longer have any impact," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

A Girl Cut in Two:

• "Not unlike Chabrol's recent works, Merci pour le chocolat and The Flower of Evil, A Girl Cut in Two takes a pragmatic, almost laidback approach to its sensational narrative, situating scandal as something of a given within such privileged settings," writes Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot. "Though superficially similar to his 1994 film L'Enfer, which depicted the unraveling of a untrusting husband's psyche as a headfirst plunge into fiery, sweaty derangement, the jealousy on display here is naturally dispassionate, a fact of life for those who never felt the need to learn to trust."

• "An opening sequence in which red visual tinting and opera music are abruptly replaced by natural light and sound conveys the director's aim for de-romanticized inquiry, but there's almost no insight to be gleaned from the subsequent story other than that the wealthy are priggish snobs and intellectual artists are selfish pigs," writes Nick Schager.

• Earlier: Reviews and previews from Toronto and NYFF and a first round of reviews from Venice.

Useless:

• "Useless, the new documentary by Jia Zhangke, avoids grand statements about fashion or the apparel industry or the rapid changes that are transforming Chinese life, though it is decidedly about all of these things," writes Chris Wisniewski at Reverse Shot. "Clocking in at under 90 minutes, and deploying no voiceover, Useless is actually a deceptively modest piece of work - some may call it 'minor' - but its modesty should not be taken for lack of ambition or for a failure on Jia's part to grapple with his film's subjects."

• "This isn't the first time Jia has bifurcated his structure this way (Still Life does the same thing, though it eventually ties together its threads), but Useless has about four distinct stories, which is at least two too many," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "The film goes from the hypnotic formalism of the fashion world to the slow, less-aestheticized world of the village. The mystery departs. The most surprising revelation of the press conference following the screening is that Jia sincerely admires Ma Ke's work, taking it at face value as 'an engagement with critical thinking about the state of China from the point of view of fashion.' She's his on-screen alter ego, her brand name his plight."

  Earlier: Reviews and previews from Venice, Toronto and NYFF.

Special Events:

Fados:

• "Fados is Carlos Saura's art-gallery fête of a popular genre of Portuguese music whose influence can be traced to the Moors," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Saura's latest exaltation of a native dance may not frazzle the nerves, but its hybridization of interplaying cinematic and musical techniques is still an orgy for the eyes and ears."

• Saura "wonderfully attunes his film to bodies in motion, superimposing silhouettes of people over bustling street crowd imagery as a means of fostering a sense of collective cultural harmony," writes Nick Schager.

• Online listening tip. Keith Uhlich interviews Saura at the House Next Door.

Hamlet:

• "Vengeance as a woman or a prince? This 1921 version of Hamlet, starring Danish silent screen goddess Asta Nielsen, poses that intriguing question," writes Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Originally created and supported through Nielsen's own production company, this interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy proposes that Hamlet was in fact a woman, forced by her family from birth to disguise herself as a man in order to inherit the throne.... Full credit deservedly goes to Nielsen for the film's success, as her embodiment of the tragic prince is as visually exciting as it is provocative for its time period; her melancholy yet astute prince seems as aware of not merely the character's place in history, but her own unforgettable performance."

Leave Her to Heaven:

• "The story of a manipulative bride who destroys everyone around her with an all-consuming need to be loved, the film felt extremely contemporary and was a a hoot," writes Tom Hall. "I watched the movie with nothing but sympathy for Gene Tierney's portrayal of the 'crazy' bride and something just this side of eye-rolling contempt for über-stiff Cornel Wilde's 'marriage-by-numbers' groom."

• "If [John M] Stahl seems close to Carl Dreyer in his 30s work, with Leave Her to Heaven he plunges headfirst into a sort of cruel, thin Daliesque landscape where an inscrutable beauty's liberating vengeance has no limit whatsoever," writes Dan Callahan at Slant.

Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:

• "I did it: I survived Peter Bogdanovich's 4 hour and 15 minute Tom Petty documentary, Running Down a Dream," announces Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "I cannot call myself a Tom Petty fan - in fact, I'd probably be more inherently receptive to a four hour documentary about Peter Bogdanovich - but there's something about this film that fascinates me. I think maybe it's that, in terms of the nature and total efficiency of the production, it actually achieves Bogdanovich's apparent lifelong ambition to emulate Howard Hawks."

• "Whether or not you consider Petty a major artist, the fact that he's walked the walk, integrity-wise, most faithfully over his entire career is no small thing, and he comes off here as a far more personally appealling non-compromiser than, say, John Mellencamp," writes Glenn Kenny. "He's also a good storyteller himself, and he gathered a lot of interesting pals in his travels - Dylan, coupla Beatles, Roy Orbison. So while this is more Petty than I ever imagined I would want to sit still for, I actually had a really good time with this one."

• At IFC News, Bogdanovich tells Aaron Hillis that "Tom's a big movie fan. He watches Turner Classic Movies all the time. When he goes on tour, the hotel has to have TCM or he won't stay in the room. One of the first things we talked about was Rio Bravo, which is the first clip [shown in the doc]. He loves that movie, and I do too. I think westerns, Hawks and Ford were a bonding element."

Underworld:

• "Josef von Sternberg's Underworld is a fascinating early cornerstone of both the director's worldview and the gangster genre," writes Fernando F Croce at Slant.

• "I know Underworld may be more exceptional than typical, yet it's a good reminder that Sunrise or other more widely seen silent classics are not alone in what they do," writes Chris Cagle.

"Chinese Modern: A Tribute to Cathay Studios, nominally a retrospective celebrating one of the seminal production companies in Hong Kong cinema, could just as well be a celebration of a seismic talent known as Ge Lan, aka Grace Chang," writes Kevin B Lee at the House Next Door. "Ensconced in cosmopolitan culture, from airliners to mambo clubs, Cathay's urbane entertainments envisioned a Hong Kong jet set that presaged the city's eventual ascendance as an economic powerhouse. Central to this modern vision were the stable of actresses who portrayed headstrong, independent leads in these films, not the least of which was Chang. Of the seven films in the sidebar, five feature Chang, she of the sultry, man-eating gaze and volcano voice." And he concentrates on Mambo Girl and The Wild, Wild Rose.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

"Most directors do not go on to make one of their best films after receiving their lifetime achievement Oscars," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. Sidney Lumet's "first feature, 12 Angry Men (1957), earned him an Oscar nomination for directing. His latest, a bracingly bleak crime melodrama called Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (set to open Friday), has been upstaging filmmakers less than half his age on the festival circuit this fall.... While slipping from one genre to another he has remained very much a New York filmmaker, not just in his preferred locations but also in his politics, his temperament and his work ethic."

Updated through 10/28.

"On the occasion of his bloody and tumultuous new film," writes New York's David Edelstein, "critics have hailed the 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet as an American master, generously neglecting to mention that for every great picture (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon), there have been maybe four breathtaking stinkers (The Wiz, Equus, Deathtrap, Family Business, Guilty As Sin, Gloria, A Stranger Among Us, Garbo Talks...). I note Lumet's batting average to underscore his present achievement. His touch in Before the Devil is so sure, so perfectly weighted, that it's hard to imagine him capable of making a bad movie. The thing is just enthralling. It's a crime-and-punishment story that is finally about (to borrow an earlier Lumet title) family business: primal injuries that lead, inexorably, to primal sins."

"Despite the oscillation between past and present, Devil is so feverishly acted that it feels as if it were always hurtling into the future," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Devil is devoted to the chaos unleashed by a single terrible idea. The fractured time scheme brings out the unsurprising but still enlightening lesson that crime should be left to the professionals, and that greed humbles smart-asses like Andy, who think they're invulnerable."

"Philip Seymour Hoffman has carved out a special niche for himself as a character actor in contemporary Hollywood, and his Andy Hanson in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is quintessential," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Pervy, belligerent, self-loathing, substance-dependent, greedy, oily, spiteful, pathetic — he is an omnibus of Hoffman types and tropes." Even so, "For all of their greed and stupidity, and all of the usual rashness that money inspires in those who need it (and need it quickly), Hank [Ethan Hawke] and Andy are still highly sympathetic (if pitiable) characters."

"As embodied by Hoffman, Andy is a clusterfuck of First World Problems - a failing marriage, financial overextension, and piteous delusions of grandeur," writes Brendon Bouzard at Reverse Shot. "It's a showy role, yes - Hoffman pounds on tables, weeps pathetically, shouts wildly - but Lumet's elegant staging and Hoffman's commanding presence depict one of the most recognizably tragic figures on screen in recent memory."

"Kelly Masterson's relentless script takes a turn into near-Greek tragedy, which the film can't quite sustain; the final developments beggar belief, and a fetching Marisa Tomei, as a femme sort-of fatale, is stranded by indecisive screenwriting," writes Robert Cashill. "But this slick, sick picture, with a gallery of supporting rogues including Brian F O'Byrne, Amy Ryan and Michael Shannon, is largely satisfying."

"It's a bluntly effective, methodically detailed B movie that proves Lumet's continued fidelity to a tried-and-true credo: all institutions corrupt," writes Akiva Gottlieb at Slant. "In the case of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, that institution is the American family, and its victims are everywhere."

For Brandon Fibbs, writing at cinemaattraction, this is "very possibly his strongest work in decades."

"The robbery goes horribly wrong, and the tension that Lumet builds around the events that unfold in jagged, perspective-driven shards works beautifully - until it doesn't," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

Earlier: Reviews from early September and then Toronto and NYFF.

Updates, 10/23: "Auteurists who look down their noses at Lumet's half-century career can reject him on the grounds of his seeming lack of distinctive visual technique, but that sort of tunnel vision ignores his almost unparalleled skill with actors," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "His characters are big and broad, and actors, even good ones, could easy turn into their parts into enormous slices of ham. If the man can keep Al Pacino and Vin Diesel in line, he must be doing something right."

"Hawke's need to ingratiate himself as an actor usefully informs his character; he makes an excellent baby brother, a frisky pup and appealing nitwit whose moist smile and frightened eyes are impossible to resist," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead doesn't always compute, but there's little chance to complain. Even as the shuffled chronology adds to the angst, it's the location of murderous violence within a single family that pushes the action toward Greek tragedy.... Shot like a bleary morning after, full of powerhouse scenes and over-the-top situations in nondescript locales, it's a pulverizing experience."

Updates, 10/24: "If our cultural arbiters are to be believed, the 70s are back," writes Elbert Ventura at indieWIRE. "Directed by someone who actually defined the period, [Before the Devil Knows You're Dead] is no homage by a 'last golden age' devotee - it's the genuine article."

"After Tarantino's genre-remixing Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction inspired a legion of inferior knockoffs, two tropes that many film lovers became quite skittish about seeing combined were 'heist movie' and 'narrative that plays with the timeline.' But a great film can certainly vindicate genres that have been botched by lesser filmmakers." And for Alonso Duralde, writing for MSNBC, this is one of those.

"While a lesser actor might have perished in the subtext, Hawke is lately coming into his own and brings a courageous amount of vulnerability to a performance begging to be picked apart for clues to his private life," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

At Stop Smiling, Lawrence Levi breaks with the crowd. Noting all the film's assets, he asks, "So why is it so bad?"

"Hoffman and Hawke both overact to their hearts content, but Lumet's direction is crisp and brutal," writes Nick Schager. "And if the filmmaker's desire to elevate his story to the realm of epic tragedy is neither justified nor successful, his latest nonetheless proves to be a triumphantly brisk, bleak B-movie."

Updates, 10/25: For Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, Before the Devil is "a Rorschach test for filmgoers. What you see in it says more about you than it says about Lumet and his straightforward, throwback-style entertainment, which is richly played and dazzlingly blinged up with sex and drugs, but virtually devoid of human insight or narrative ambition."

"The surge of critical praise for his newest entry in this career-length exploration, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, comes across as appreciation for a devout moralist whose beat hasn't changed after all these years," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "The only element of the film that doesn't work is Lumet's most unexplored terrain: experiments with tension.... Structural flaws aside, the movie contains a flurry of richly directed scenes."

The film opens with "an image meant to shock but is just gruesome" and "goes down the toilet from there," finds Armond White in the New York Press.

Scott Foundas meets up with Lumet for the LA Weekly. So, too, does Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Online listening tip. Lumet, Hawke and Hoffman are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Updates, 10/26: "Mr Lumet takes what might have been a claustrophobic genre exercise and gives it both moral weight and social insight," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "His great New York movies of the 1970s and 80s - Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, Q & A - were realist fables, often based on true stories and always full of dense local knowledge. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is relentlessly focused on the terrible events of a few days, but as it zigzags back and forth in time it takes in a larger, longer story, a history of upward mobility and family displacement."

"Lumet's fascinated by lived-in spaces - from suburban kitchens with food containers stacked near piles of books, to high-rise drug dens that look hermetically sealed - and he and Masterson continually emphasize how in New York everything costs more than even rich people can afford," writes Noel Murray at AV Club. "Ultimately, the film is just a smart caper picture with some good performances, but at times it's very smart, and Hoffman's performance in particular is one of the most natural and unexpectedly affecting that he's given in years."

"Stop to think of it and you realize that Before the Devil Knows You're Dead... is some kind of ultimate answer to the 'family values' poppycock that has polluted our socio-political discussions for so many years," writes Richard Schickel for Time.

Updates, 10/27: "Fall 2007 is shaping up to be the season of illogical movies," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "First there was the much-praised Gone Baby Gone, which has a third act twist that's logically crazy and impossible in practicality, and now there's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a film from the aging non-master Sidney Lumet that twists its narrative into a pointless and annoying timeline-pretzel and in doing so drains every ounce of energy and motivation from the piece, only to arrive at a Greek tragedy climax that has a plot hole so large you could drive a Hummer through it."

And Looker passes along a friend's complaint.

Updates, 10/28: Mark Olsen profiles Lumet for the LAT.

"When I think about Lumet and the tragedy, I flash back to Long Days Journey into Night (1962)," writes Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog. "More so than his '70s-era police pictures and corruption classics (Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, etc), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead evokes Eugene O'Neill, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, and even a few of those Greek guys."

Shorts, 10/21.

In the New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry marvelously captures 28 years of friendship with Diane Keaton in a few brief sentences, and then:

Over the years, sometimes with the help of the New York writer-curator Marvin Heiferman, Diane has sniffed out collections or archives of photographs that she feels are unjustly overlooked, neglected, or lost—like, very often, the tarnished human beings who appear in them. Once convinced, she mothers these archives and attempts to arrange for their exhibition and safekeeping and, so far, publication in five books to which she's written prefaces. They include pictures of actors doing publicity stills in the Technicolor era (Still Life, 1983), clown paintings (Clown Paintings, 2002), salesmen in training (Mr Salesman, 1993), tabloid photographs from the long-defunct Los Angeles Herald Express (Local News, 1999), and citizens of Fort Worth, Texas, as captured over a quarter of a century by the commercial photographer Bill Wood (to be published in the forthcoming Bill Wood's Business). All these groups are, in the eyes of Keaton and Heiferman, about to be sucked forever into the labyrinth of oblivion, to take their places among the billions of the forgotten.

Cormac McCarthy "is famous for two things: his omnivorous curiosity and his extreme reclusiveness. In his 74 years, he's given a total of three interviews. But here he chats freely with the Coen brothers, who have a tendency to finish each other's sentences. Time's Lev Grossman was invited to observe." Also via Movie City News, Adam F Hutton in the Brooklyn Paper on how the Coens are giving back to the neighborhood that's put up with them, not to mention George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand, during the filming of Burn After Reading.

"[T]o help you tell your Rendition from your Redacted, Salon has compiled this handy guide to the current (and upcoming) spate of movies dealing with the war." A cute chart, presented by Eryn Loeb.

Ron Rosenbaum notes a coincidental connection between Hillary Clinton Chinatown fundraising mini-scandal and, well, Chinatown, "the greatest American movie of the past half century." Watching it again, he recalls an amusing Jack Nicholson anecdote.

"B-movie superstar Bruce Campbell and Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson first met on the set of 1992's Army of Darkness," blogs Mike Russell, who chats with both. The occasion: "Richardson is producing My Name Is Bruce, a forthcoming horror-comedy in which a sleazy actor named 'Bruce Campbell' is kidnapped by small-town yokels in the fictional town of Gold Lick, Oregon; they believe the thespian really is the zombie-slaying hero of the Evil Dead series, and want him to battle a real-life Chinese demon. Campbell co-wrote, directed and stars in the movie, and shot much of it on his property in Jacksonville, Oregon."

Also, a talk with Karen Black following a screening of Brand Upon the Brain!.

Nehemiah Persoff studied at the Actors Studio under Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg and went on to rack up credits in around 50 films and 400 TV shows. "At 88, the retired actor admits to feeling conflicted and wonders if perhaps he should have ignored the siren song of Broadway and Hollywood and returned to Israel to help build the country," writes Harvey F Chartrand in the Jerusalem Post.

Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net on The Secret of the Grain: "With this third film, [Abdellatif] Kechciche establishes himself clearly as one of the primary voices of immigrants in Europe, a French equivalent, at least in spirit, to Germany's Fatih Akin."

"Lars and the Real Girl may be a self-consciously cute, low-budget art-house comedy, but its central conceit is a perfect metaphor for what's happened to male and female characters in mainstream comedies," argues Carina Chicano. "He's a schlub, she's beautiful. He's active, she's passive. He's maladjusted, she's placid. He's unreliable and immature, she's patient and forgiving. He's funny and charming, she's conventional and dull. He's the subject, she's the object."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• "Director Michael Verhoeven has dealt with the issues of Germany's heritage from World War II in such fiction features as The Nasty Girl and The White Rose," notes Mark Olsen, "but [in The Unknown Soldier] he turns to documentary to examine the emotions stirred up by a museum exhibition that not only explored the accepted villainy of the SS but also questioned the extent to which common foot soldiers had knowledge of and were culpable for the Holocaust and related crimes and atrocities."

• Lael Loewenstein argues that "as compelling as The Price of Sugar is, it also represents a squandered opportunity. A stronger connection could have been made between the film's subject and our own responsibility as consumers."

The New Statesman's put Michael Moore on its cover:

• "Moore's deftness and dark humour in Sicko, which is a brilliant work of journalism and satire and filmmaking, explains - perhaps even better than the films that made his name, Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 - his popularity and influence and enemies," writes John Pilger. "Sicko is so good that you forgive its flaws, notably Moore's romanticising of Britain's National Health Service, ignoring a two-tier system that neglects the elderly and the mentally ill."

• "Journalism and documentary-making are about the truth - otherwise they would be called fiction - and if either of them presents untrue information, it is betraying its reason for being," writes Brian Cathcart. "Yet the idea that people must always get their facts right, like almost everything that is labelled common sense, is incomplete and unsatisfactory."

• Jonathan Beckman asks seven professionals: "Michael Moore: hero or villain?"

In the New York Times, Dave Itzkoff talks with Jerry Seinfeld ahead of the November 2 release of Bee Movie, "by far the most substantial project that this 53-year-old comedian has taken on since pulling the plug on his Seinfeld television sitcom in 1998." Also, Lynne Hirschberg talks with Marion Cotillard and Deborah Solomon asks Marjane Satrapi all about Persepolis.

Ed Gonzalez at Slant on The Island: "After exorcising a demon from a young woman, a person from Anatoly's past appears, and though the stage seems set for an examination of the man's regret for having wasted his life, director Pavel Lungin has long blown his load on the chilly vistas of the White Sea to care much, and so Anatoly's crisis never feels resolved, simply dissolving into the gauzy ether of the film's Orthodox pageantry."

"For a lot of actors, not being able to act would be an obstacle, but Jean-Claude [Van Damme] has transformed it into his trademark." At Slate, Grady Hendrix turns in an oddly amusing tribute.

Alice Jones talks with Mark Strong, who plays Septimus in Stardust and is "currently shooting Ridley Scott's new Middle Eastern epic, Body of Lies, in which he plays the smooth-talking, Savile-Row-suit-wearing head of the Jordanian Secret Service. 'A fantastic wildcard,' he admits." Also in the Independent, James Mottram talks with David Cronenberg.

"It's official: the Harry Potter movie franchise has now made enough money to buy a small planet (£2.2 billion worldwide!), making it the highest-grossing film series ever, topping 22 Bonds and six Star Wars films," writes Daniel Etherington. "It's no wonder then that there's a gold rush among the movie studios to find 'the new Harry Potter.'"

Also in the Guardian:

• Peter Bradshaw tries to imagine what that new Star Wars TV show's going to look like.

• It "may be that the very idea of any national New Wave is a relic," suggests Danny Leigh, "that in a world this tech-accelerated and truly global (for good and for bad), the best and most radical filmmakers are now unlikely to appear en masse from Bucharest (or Tehran, or Bangkok), but to be getting their inspiration from all corners of film history, with their peers scattered across the planet."

• A bit of up-n-coming news: "The screenwriter David Benioff is to adapt Charles Cross's biography, Heavier Than Heaven, which is partly based on [Kurt] Cobain's unpublished diaries as well as interviews with friends and family members."

• Emma Brockes meets Naomi Watts.

In the Observer, Susannah Clapp reviews London stage productions of Glengarry Glen Ross and Swimming with Sharks.

Online viewing tip. Arthur Lipsett's first film, Very Nice, Very Nice, a must-view via Doug Cummings.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/21.

Muoi: Legend of a Portrait "is a serviceable horror film with two or three effective jolts, but the real reason for any viewer to watch it to the finish is to gawk at its two incredibly beautiful lead actresses," writes Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org. "Don't expect anything like a thoughtful, self-reflexive take on the (potentially ironic) position of Koreans now exploiting Viet Nam as an exotic land of the ghosts with unrequited love." More (plus a trailer) from luna6.

"Even though it is marketed as another J-Horror entry, Vital indicates that Shinya Tsukamoto has more on his mind than frightening his audience with another genre exercise," writes Peter Nellhaus.

31 Days of Horror roll on at Not Coming to a Theater Near You:

• "Part supernatural mystery, part psychological thriller, part grisly zombie horror, [Lucio] Fulci's City of the Living Dead is a multifaceted, character-driven tale of terror that manages the impressive feat of creating an appreciable atmosphere of fear while holding its death-defying denizens in check for the bulk of the picture," writes Thomas Scalzo.

• For Megan Weireter, The Wicker Man "resonates with a sadness that we as a species can't live up to the beauty of our rituals, our music, our poetry—that all this has no bearing on the fact that we are an immoral scourge on the earth. Everyone is so full of faith, and still they can't be bothered to just be nice to everyone else. The outlook for humanity is bleak."

• "Unsurprisingly, Maniac Cop is not one for the wine-and-cheese crowd," writes Victoria Large. "But for those willing to roll with the B-movie punches, including the straight-faced delivery of some unabashedly hackneyed dialogue ('This isn't about romance. This is about murder.'), Maniac Cop does have its pleasures. It is essentially an 80s slasher picture dressed up in a blue uniform, but that very premise carries a glimmer of originality and even subversion."

"It's a mark to writer/director Robin Campillo's singularity that They Came Back only incidentally recalls the works of Romero (the shots of the slowly returning dead marching through the city streets eerily recalls the opening of Day of the Dead), for his film is one of primarily intangible horrors," Rob Humanick. "The living dead may not be an immediate threat, but outside of their tucked away graves they remain a constant reminder of our imminent mortality." Also, "Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a good bad bad movie, or something like that."

"The Mummy plays out certain anxieties about British imperialism, but it's hard to tell where its sympathies ultimately lie," writes Billy Stevenson.

"Blacula is more about empowerment than exploitation," writes Eric D Snider.

Also at Cinematical:

• An American Werewolf in London "holds up very well and its influence can be seen in many of the horror comedies that followed in its wake," writes Peter Martin.

• Jeffrey M Anderson lists seven of the best horror films of the 1930s and looks back on Night of the Living Dead.

• Matt Bradshaw revisits seven films based on stories by HP Lovecraft.

• Kim Voynar lists the "Hottest Slashers of Horror."

In the Los Angeles Times, Susan King reports on a revival of Poltergeist, newly struck print and all.

"The inventive and unnerving DIY shocker Mulberry Street may seem to take its cues from 28 Days Later, but since Danny Boyle's zombie-virus hit was the British response to George A Romero's very-American undead allegories, director Jim Mickle and his resourceful collaborators can be excused for taking a little something back thru Ellis Island: all is fair in love and the zombie war, it can be supposed," writes Robert J Lewis.

At Facets Features, Phil Morehart posts two clips from Ed Wood's Orgy of the Dead. Also, Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera; and the shower scene from Psycho: "50 cuts, between 71 to 78 angles, screeching strings, chocolate syrup and casaba melons."

More online viewing from Todd Brown at Twitch: a trailer for the newly restored version of Dario Argento's Suspiria; and another for Deaths of Ian Stone, "aptly described as the Groundhog Day of horror films."

Fests and events, 10/21.

"Through Nov 11 the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is presenting a 33-title retrospective of [Andy Warhol's] work, including new prints of films like his 1966 sensation The Chelsea Girls; a sampling of the 472 Screen Tests he shot of Susan Sontag, Lou Reed and other fabulous scene-makers; and excerpts from early minimalist epics like the eight-hour Empire (1964) and the 5-hour 21-minute Sleep (1963). The museum will also present A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, a documentary about a filmmaker who had been one of Warhol's intimates, and Beautiful Darling, a work in progress about Candy Darling, a notable figure in what the museum is calling Warhol's World," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "For film lovers there is no more important show in town."

For Gay City News, Ioannis Mookas presents 13 ways of approaching Warhol's films; via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

"Now 70 and light years from the era when he and his New York University film school buddy Scorsese collaborated on Mean Streets, New York, New York and Raging Bull, [Mardik] Martin is not bitter seeing the great heights to which Scorsese has ascended in the intervening years," writes Robert W Welkos in the Los Angeles Times. Mardik: From Baghdad to Hollywood, a doc screening as part of the Hollywood Film Festival, "chronicles what the filmmakers note is Martin's unlikely journey from Iraq to NYU film school, from busboy to writing Raging Bull, from being the hottest writer in New York to losing it all in LA, and from forsaking his craft to becoming a favorite screenwriting teacher at USC."

The Chicago Reader has recommendations for what to catch during the Chicago International Children's Film Festival (through October 29); also, Andrea Gronvall on the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema (through October 28).

Doug Cummings catches the Academy's animation tribute. "I was particularly glad [critic Charles] Solomon highlighted the difference between the loving, handmade feel of all of the works in the program versus the kind of homogenous CGI work that increasingly defines the genre today, short form as well as long form." He's also checked out The Art of the Motion Picture Illustrator: William B Major, Harold Michelson and Tyrus Wong, on view through December 16.

The Observer's Jason Solomons has newsy bits from the London Film Festival, including one on a short that reunites Withnail and I's Richard E Grant and Paul McGann.

Lists, 10/21.

"On January 26, 1958 (the date is written in pencil), I began keeping a list of all the movies I'd seen, using lined notebook paper that I further divided in half so that I could get upwards of 50 movies per page. I was 12 years old." Newsweek's David Ansen is still updating that list and he's closing in on 8000 titles:

It's the diary of my life: the titles transporting me back to the theaters and cities I saw them in, the people I saw them with....

These titles defined my generation: they told us who we were, what others thought we were supposed to be (John Wayne, Doris Day), who we wanted to be (Bogie, Audrey Hepburn, Brando, Kim Novak, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor). Between the lines of my list I can read the convulsions of a country that was radically redefining itself as it passed from the big, affluent, homogenized Eisenhower 50s through the roller-coaster ride of the 60s, all the way up to our fragmented and fearful present. It's a long way from Prince Valiant and Three Coins in the Fountain to Borat and Brokeback Mountain.

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell presents an "alphabetical and highly subjective list of the 10 coolest movies currently in production." Via Movie City News.

In the Independent, Anthony Quinn counts down the "10 best film endings."

"Far from being the wilful travesty, [Todd] Haynes's [I'm Not There] actually taps into a great tradition of 'out-there' pop movies." In the Financial Times, Ben Thompson lists five.

Queens on film. No, not what you're thinking... real blue-blooded royalty: Bronwyn Cosgrove picks the ten best for the Guardian.

American Gangsters, 10/21.

Leroy "Nicky" Barnes "was the heroin kingpin, dubbed by some the Al Capone of Harlem, an underworld superstar who had tauntingly posed for the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1977 with the headline 'Mister Untouchable,'" writes Robert W Welkos in the Los Angeles Times. "Barnes, who is now 74, is the subject of a documentary from director Marc Levin titled Mr Untouchable." Its "premiere comes only a week before the arrival of director Ridley Scott's feature-length film American Gangster starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Washington plays Frank Lucas, who in real life was a key competitor of Barnes. Lucas, who became a prosecution witness, is also now a free man. Even today, debate rages over which of the two was Harlem's bigger drug kingpin. 'And there was a third guy too,' Levin pointed out. 'His name was Frank Matthews. [He] was also a legendary character. No one knows what happened with him, whether he escaped, ended up living in a villa in Africa, or if he was killed.... They were contemporaries and, in a sense, I guess, business competitors."

Updated through 10/26.

As for American Gangster, Kirk Honeycutt's got a review for the Hollywood Reporter: "[T]his is a gangster movie focused on character rather than action and on the intricacies of people's backgrounds, strategies and motivations. Whether it means to, the film plays off a clutch of old movies, from The Godfather and Serpico to Superfly and Shaft. But Scott and writer Steven Zaillian make certain their Old Gangster is original and true to himself and his times rather than a concoction of movie fiction. Consequently, the movie is smooth and smart enough to attract a significant audience beyond the considerable fan base of its stars."

Updates: American Gangster "is absorbing, exciting at times and undeniably entertaining, and is poised to be a major commercial hit. But great it's not," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Maximizing a gritty big-city story requires a credibility composed of thousands of small details, and this is one area where a citizen-of-the-world director like Scott can't excel. It's akin to asking Lumet or Scorsese to make a definitive film about crime in 70s Newcastle - they could do a respectable, even exciting job of it, but it probably wouldn't ring deeply true."

Jeffrey Wells respectfully disagrees: "But it does ring true. For me, anyway. Brits are famous for delivering American-set crime dramas with great chops and authenticity (as Karel Reisz managed with Who'll Stop the Rain and John Boorman did with Point Blank), and this is one of those cases. I believed every New York second of American Gangster. For my money, Scott has not only skillfully chanelled Lumet and Scorsese but the entire hallowed universe of 70s urban filmmaking itself."

Back to Mr Untouchable. Levin "may avoid outright idol-worship, but any restraint exhibited by his film is disingenuous, since its preference for gangster tall tales over law enforcement realities - as well as its goofily staged interviews with Barnes himself - reveals an uninhibited, fawning fascination with the infamous criminal," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

Update, 10/23: Reviewing Mr Untouchable for the Voice, Michelle Orange notes "the uneasy balance that this film strikes between telling the straight story and glorifying a stone-cold snake in the grass."

Update, 10/24: Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine on American Gangster: "Somehow the fact that Jay-Z, inspired by a sneak preview, has returned to record a tribute album, seems entirely apt for this handsomely mounted display of well-rehearsed ironies and insights."

Update, 10/25: At the Reeler, Vadim Rizov finds Mr Untouchable "so blinkered and unthinking (and its filmmakers so imaginatively bankrupt) in portraying its title subject that a potentially unique story is retrospectively flattened into yet another gangsta crime saga, blander than the blandest of 50 Cent songs.... Mr Untouchable's ultimate achievement is to flatten a real, colorful life into something less original than its fictional equivalent. Scarface is the documentary; this is the pale imitation."

Updates, 10/26: "Mr Levin's film, though it duly includes testimony from police officers, prosecutors and journalists who covered the crime beat in those bad old New York days - how filmmakers seem to miss them - takes a tolerant, even admiring view of its subject" and "clings to the standard hip-hop mythology of the pusher as entrepreneur, rebel, celebrity and folk hero," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "That narrative is complicated somewhat by the fact that Mr Barnes was also a snitch" and "a true capitalist hustler who will use anyone, criminal, lawyer or documentary filmmaker, to serve his own interests."

"Levin makes sure to highlight the devastating human cost of the heroin epidemic, yet the gorgeous girls, fancy clothes, and expensive cars on display illustrate that the wages of sin can be pretty damned irresistible," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "If Barnes ultimately emerges as a heartless, duplicitous villain, he's nevertheless got the devil's slippery, seductive charm."

The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan finds it "less a dispassionate examination than a celebratory infomercial on its central character."

"It isn't that American Gangster is an empirically bad film or is even unenjoyable," writes Brandon Fibbs at cinemaattraction. "While the lights are down and the screen is aglow, you're sure to be perfectly entertained. But don't be surprised if, when you walk out of the theater, you forget the film ever existed."

Online viewing tips, 10/20.

As a contribution to the ongoing Close-Up Blog-a-Thon hosted by the House Next Door (and just look at that thing - it's huge!), Jim Emerson has put together an amazing "movie/essay/dream" based on an earlier "free association dream sequence."

Jonathan Rosenbaum introduces a clip from Orson Welles's Don Quixote. Stick with that clip; it crescendo's into something pretty damn rousing.

At Filmmaker, Nick Dawson points to a batch of videos for Ola Podrida by Todd Rohal, Michael Tully and Joe Swanberg.

Rome. Youth Without Youth (and related bits).

"The most awaited film of the RomeFilmFest may also be its most divisive," writes Natasha Senjanovic at Cineuropa. "Although it screened today to a lukewarm reception from the press, Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth has everyone talking."

"Long stuck on completing his unrealized Megalopolis project, Coppola found Romanian philosopher/author Mircea Eliade's novella about the limitations of time a compensating balm for his own frustrations," writes Jay Weissberg in Variety. "Perhaps Eliade's investigations into Jungian theory and a nascent form of New Age spirituality also appealed, not to mention the excitement of getting back to the kind of artistic control only possible with low-budget filmmaking. Decamping to Romania (with a small section shot in Bulgaria), Coppola used mostly young local talent and had the Balkan nations stand in for Switzerland, Malta and even India. Unfortunately, the results are as phony as the back projection and lack the kind of Eastern European magical realism that would have made it resonate."

Updated through 10/23.

The AP's Marta Falconi has quotes from Coppola's press conference: "[P]art of being an artist who wants to look at new areas (is knowing that) it will take a while for people to be familiar with the film. I only ask you to think that my film was interesting."

Meanwhile, as Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay notes, there's quite a discussion going on at Hollywood Elsewhere regarding the out-of-nowhere news that Hearts of Darkness will finally see a release on DVD. One of the thread's participants is George Hickenlooper, officially listed as one of three of the doc's directors. For him, too, this news is a big surprise. He thought he was getting close to a deal with Criterion, "who are dying to put it out," but evidently, the matter's been out of his hands for some time. Still, he has stories to tell and hopes to be able to at least record a commentary some day.

And as for those comments regarding Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson, the AP reports that Coppola's claiming they were taken out of context and that he has "nothing but respect and admiration" for all three.

Update, 10/21: "Ten years after the polished, anonymous professionalism of The Rainmaker, Francis Ford Coppola returns with an epic, magic realist tale of miraculous rejuvenation," writes Allan Hunter for Screen Daily. "Anyone who hoped that life might imitate art will be sorely disappointed by Youth Without Youth.... It may have moments of great beauty and tenderness but it overall it is a jumble of half-baked metaphysical musings and disjointed story threads that mainstream audiences will find as unfathomable as Kurtz's mumblings in the jungles of Apocalypse Now."

Update, 10/23: The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett finds Youth to be "a muddled fantasy about the transmigration of souls. Handsomely made on a low budget, the film has the polished look of a Coppola film with expert contributions from some master craftsmen. But the story is full of arcane references that many will find nonsensical, and the performances are a letdown. Lacking coherence and suspense, the picture is likely to attract a cult following while disappointing Coppola's fan base."