JLG. EFA.

First, an online viewing tip. Cahiers du cinéma and arte have an interview with Jean-Luc Godard. I can only gather the vaguest sense of what he's saying, but for those of you who really do understand French, enjoy.

The occasion is the honorary European Film Award he'll be receiving tomorrow night in Berlin, sort of a lifetime achievement nod (and, for heaven's sake, this is the European Film Academy's 20th year; it's about time), and the same goes for Katja Nicodemus's interview in Die Zeit this week; unfortunately, it's not online. It wouldn't be right for me to simply translate and post the whole thing (I'm hoping signandsight will see to that), but I have marked a few moments in the conversation I thought I'd pass along.

Updated through 12/1.

At 77, Godard seems to smile more easily than he used to. You can see that in the video and you can practically feel it between the lines in Nicodemus's interview. Which isn't to say that one of just-as-present subtexts of the talk isn't loneliness. He likes to say he's 80: "Old age shows you can persevere. Or that you'd like to carry on persevering."

It's the Zeit interview that the wires picked up on Wednesday and yesterday. For whatever reason, it was decided that the big story here is that Godard, as a young man, stole money to make films (and in at least one case, to help another director make a film, namely, Jacques Rivette). Which is ridiculous because, for starters, this isn't news at all; it's long been part of JLG lore. But more importantly, the conversation is riddled with passages that are far more interesting.

As the interview opens, Nicodemus is evidently fiddling with her recorder and Godard assures her that there's no reason in the world for her to be nervous. And - she's good - she reminds him that before Bernardo Bertolucci and Serge Daney met him for the first time, they barfed, they were so out of whack. "I really wouldn't know why," he seems to murmur in return.

Then, further in:

Godard: You know, it seems strange to me, receiving an award for my life's work in Berlin. For films that precisely these people who hand out awards in Berlin don't watch.

KN: Maybe that's the fate of all legendary directors.

Godard: You mean they're buried before they're dead?

KN: No, that the work disappears behind the name.

Godard: That may well be.

Several Qs and As later...

KN: What does the nouvelle vague mean to you now?

Godard: A feeling of youth. But youth wasn't really youth then, either. I shot Breathless in 1959. At the age of 30. That's not very young for a directorial debut. At 30, most people are in the middle of their careers. What I really liked about the nouvelle vague was the exchange among directors. It was a pretty happy time. These days, when I'm shooting, I only talk with the technicians, and I have no idea what they think about my film.

KN: What keeps you from calling up Jacques Rivette or Eric Rohmer?

Godard: We're not in touch anymore. And I don't like the films Rivette makes these days. I respect Rohmer. We were in touch for a while because I was living in the house in Paris where he worked. I'm alone, but I don't want to complain about it....

[...]

KN: When Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980, you wrote in your remembrance that it was the end of an epoch. And when, not too long ago, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died, the end of an epoch was declared again. How many deaths does cinema have?

Godard: Cinema, painting or literature - none of these die with their authors [he may have used the word "auteur"; the German is "Autor," used for both].... [same answer, but several sentences on...] The politics of the nouvelle vague auteurs concentrated on recognition of a director's contribution as a creator of images as opposed to the screenwriter. It was about treating the grammar of cinema as an independent visual grammar and saving [what] was invented by certain silent film directors - Griffith, for example. It's a grammar of narrative imagery which must constantly be renewed to ward off stereotypes and routine. And which places an image in relation to previous images. There are still films that stake claims for this position. But it's harder to make them. Not because it's harder to find the money. But the ideas that we had then have disappeared; they aren't being renewed. For me, it's become difficult to - have an idea, as they say.

[...]

Godard: It's not as easy as it used to be to use a camera to see something you otherwise wouldn't see. Directors are either confirming what they already know - or they're confirming themselves with the camera. Like a knight would confirm himself with a lance. I'm going to shoot my next film alone - but really alone. I'll adapt. I won't film the actors together, but instead, one after another. I'll make reservations in the hotel, too, if they come here to Switzerland. These are different films, but they're possible. Fortunately, I wasn't able to make all the films I wanted to.

KN: Why "fortunately"?

Godard: [laughs] Because they wouldn't have been good.

[...]

Godard: There's something that's stayed with me from the days of the nouvelle vague, even though it no longer exists in this form: arguing about cinema. Because the beautiful thing about cinema is that it still always allows us to argue. Fundamentally. You can get far more upset about an opinion about a film than one about a painting or a piece of music. For example, when I say to someone, "It doesn't surprise me at all that you like the new film by Robert Redford because I always knew you were daft." That sets things off immediately: "Who do you think you are! How dare you!" And if I want to get to know someone, let's say, for example, you, then I wouldn't ask for your opinion about Iraq or Yugoslavia or the train strike, but instead ask you to name a film you like.

KN: The Idiots, by Lars von Trier, what a coincidence!

The joke here is that, earlier, JLG pronounced The Idiots Lars von Trier's best. Which isn't exactly the same as saying he likes it, of course. (Probably does, though.) When Nicodemus asks him about his moviegoing habits these days, you do get the impression that he's seeing more on DVD now than in the theater.

Godard: And when it comes to the American DVDs, I always break off at the moment when I figure out how they're going to give the story a happy end after all. This dogged insistence on happy endings - I admire it quite a lot. And I'm like everyone else. I'd rather watch a bad American film than a bad Norwegian film.

Nicodemus asks him whether Anne-Marie Miéville will be involved in his next project.

Godard: She'll absolutely be involved in the next film. We imagine the film together. We call it forth into memory. It's as if clouds were, bit by bit, slowly taking shape. That's why I work best when I doze in my chair.

KN: How so?

Godard: I try to see things. With my eyes closed. Because you don't see the same thing with your eyes open. It's not any different with a camera. You use open eyes to see with closed eyes.

That's way less than a quarter of the conversation; just some passages I marked as I read through the first time, and I've translated here very quickly, very loosely. Here's hoping Berlin and the EFA give JLG a warm welcome tomorrow evening.

Update, 12/1: Spiegel Online is reporting that JLG has decided not to come to Berlin to collect his award. "If someone says I've created a life's work, I'll have to accept that. But my form of criticism is not to go."

For those who speak German: Click on the video link to see the arte interview with a German translation.

Shorts, 11/30.

White Sun of the Desert, a western, or rather, "eastern," made in the USSR during the Brezhnev era, remains one of the top five bestselling DVDs in contemporary Russia. Cosmonauts like it, too. "Bizarrely, White Sun has become a lucky talisman, ritually watched to this day before each and every launch." Lucy Ash examines its appeal in the New Statesman.

They've seen There Will Be Blood and they're all revved up: Jürgen Fauth, Glenn Kenny and Josh Modell.

Sneak peeks at French films in the works (Bruno Dumont, Alain Resnais and more): Fabien Lemercier (Cineuropa) and Boyd van Hoeij (european-films.net).

For Stop Smiling, Patrick Z McGavin talks with Marina Hands, who's "currently shooting her English-language debut, portraying French fashion icon Coco Chanel in William Friedkin's period drama Coco & Igor, which focuses on the relationship between Chanel and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (played by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen). She is also completing work on Agatha Christie's Le Grand alibi, the latest feature from Cahiers du Cinema critic and editor Pascal Bonitzer."

Also, Michael Joshua Rowin on I'm Not There, "an ambitious, rich, but unfulfilled film." Related: the Nashville Scene's Jim Ridley talks with Murray Lerner about The Other Side of the Mirror.

New blog on the block: Yair Raveh's Cinemascope.

"Everywhere a cynic turns, ready to dismiss this story as another Rushmore rip-off or Knocked Up knock-off, there Juno is waiting," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "[Jason] Reitman shatters those conventions swiftly and mercilessly, thanks in large part to his secret weapon, a young actress who, in just two leading roles, has convinced more than a few observers that she may be one of the greatest talents of her generation. Ellen Page, a 20-year-old Canadian, has used her unconventional looks and her razor-sharp flair for sarcasm and understatement to subvert the notion of a leading lady."

"Willard Christopher Smith Jr hatched his scheme for global supremacy at 16, after his first girlfriend cheated on him." A profile for Time from Rebecca Winters Keegan. "The math of moviemaking enthralls Smith, who calls himself a 'student of universal patterns.'"

"Miles Brandman's earnest Sex and Breakfast features two LA couples in their 20s who choose to chase away the relationship doldrums with the help of a group sex therapist (Joanna Miles) and approach it as if they were unlocking the mysteries of the universe," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "The results are predictable, but an attractive and willing cast eases some of the tedium."

Scott Foundas meets James Marsden, talks with him for the LA Weekly, likes him, then jokes that he'll probably like him less after 27 Dresses comes out. Which, of course, he means in the best way.

James Mottram talks with Robert Duvall for the Independent.

"When Woody Allen arrived in Barcelona in July to start making his latest film, he was greeted with open arms," writes Paul Hamilos in the Guardian. "Just how open those arms were has become the cause of a dispute that has led to the cancellation of the director's plans to film in Spain." Meanwhile, Woody Allen will be joining the "Speechless" parade next week, reports Andrew Wallenstein.

Also in the Guardian, Jason Wood interviews Nick Cave, David Teather sorts through the numbers in that widely discussed report, "Do Movies Make Money?," and: "What's the most overrated film of 2007?" asks Xan Brooks. His nomination: The Lives of Others.

At Tribeca: "12 Great Cross-Dressing Movies."

"[Robert] Zemeckis's Cast Away was a great, sadly underrated piece of minimal, elemental filmmaking," writes Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot. "Beowulf strives for similar elegant grandeur and, by virtue of its general allegiance to the spirit of its source material and occasional moments of restraint, brushes against success."

Chronicle of an Escape "belongs to that large, undistinguished subset of historical dramas that achieve little more than informing viewers that the events onscreen did in fact take place," writes Mike D'Angelo for Nerve.

"[T]here was something that depressed me about Enchanted, a grim reality that occasionally peeped through the whimsy like New York City glimpsed from the animated fields of Andalasia," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "This sinking feeling had little to do with what could be seen as the movie's retrograde affirmation of true love and happy endings—after all, if you're going to start complaining about marriage as a plot resolution device, you have to throw out every comedy from Shakespeare on down. No, that intermittent sense of yuckiness sprang from the movie's solemn celebration of a ritual even more sacred than holy matrimony: shopping."

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Kimberly Chun sits in on a spoiler-ridden Lust, Caution roundtable with Ang Lee and Wei Tang.

Now then. The only thing this next piece has to do with film, really, is that it's been written by a film critic, one of our best, Michael Atkinson. But it's astounding, and, in some horrific way, beautiful, and if you've only got time for one read today, skip everything above and read this one.

Online viewing tip. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay and the SpoutBlog's Karina Longworth comment on Harmony Korine's new ad for Thornton's.

The Magic Flute.

"The Magic Flute is Kenneth Branagh's third release this year after As You Like It and Sleuth, completing his most prolific directorial run since the early 1990s," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "It may well be the best of the three, but dare we ask him to get back to acting now? Plonking Mozart's phantasmagorical opera down in the trenches of the First World War is vintage Branagh - daring but silly."

"The horrors of Flanders provide a strange but satisfying glue," counters Charlotte O'Sullivan in the Evening Standard. "For the first time ever, the plot made sense to me."

Updated through 12/1.

"Despite the talent involved - Branagh is joined by Stephen Fry, who has written a new libretto - and the ambitious staging, this flute blows all right, but it's short on the magic," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times.

"It may not be pushing the envelope, exactly, and it perhaps won't find favour with purists," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "But it seemed to me that this Magic Flute is offered to the moviegoer in a generous, uncynical spirit, and what a refreshing change it makes to the relentless samey diet of dumbed-down formulae and charmless schlock often to be found sloshing about the cinema."

Earlier: Reviews from Venice 06.

Update, 12/1: "Fortunately the singing is uniformly amazing," writes Sarah Manvel at cinemaattraction. "Branagh and his casting director, Sarah Playfair have picked the cream of global operatic talent (the main cast of ten come from seven different countries) to provide a stunning soundtrack."

Fests and events, 11/30.

At Twitch, Ardvark spots a bit of news from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (January 23 through February 3): "The final list of films and showings will be released only a few weeks in advance but their website already lifts a corner of the veil."

"The 13 documentaries featured in Art on Screen 2007, a three-day festival of award-winning art documentaries from around the world running this weekend at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles, are a good deal more sober than the Hollywood biopics that usually exploit the turbulence lurking in the creative spark," writes Steve Dollar. Also in the New York Sun, Grady Hendrix previews Film Forum's Ousmane Sembène retro.

"Memories of Tomorrow is the first movie I've seen about [Alzheimer's] that is told from the sick person's point of view, not that of family members," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "The director, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, often uses a subjective camera to show the commonplace world melting into bewildering patterns and meanings." At Facets through December 6.

Sweeney Todd, 11/30.

"Well I'm just in from Sweeney Todd and it's utterly magnificent," announces David Ehrenstein. "A perfect melding of the sensibilities of Sondheim and Tim Burton in ways I couldn't quite imagine working until I saw the finished film. Johnny Depp is not only a great star he is a cinematic genius. Helena Bonham Carter is perfect as Mrs Lovett. Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall were born to play Judge Turpin and Beadle Bramford (respectively)."

For David Carr, "This film displays a director in his prime, with a fully realized execution - sorry about that - of one of Broadway's darkest fables."

Updated through 12/6.

"[T]he most important movie of 2007," declares Tom O'Neil. "Certainly, it's the best I've seen all year, although, of course, I'm a bit biased as a diehard fan of the Broadway show."

Updates, 12/3: "Sweeney Todd will earn a rash of Oscar nominations, including cinematography, production design, costumes, and Depp," predicts Anne Thompson, who also rounds up more reactions - not reviews!

"The movie's sense of humor, when not dripping blood, is a bit limited," writes David Poland - and yes, this is a review. "This is unusual for Burton, but the subject is more directly serious than any other film he's ever made. This is not a fairy tale. There is symbolism and non-literalism, but it's a harsh, brutal story about loss and revenge and the futility of our rage... and Burton has embraced that tone completely, along with his actors."

"Where much could have gone wrong, things have turned out uniformly right thanks to highly focused direction by Tim Burton, expert screw-tightening by scenarist John Logan, and haunted and musically adept lead performances from Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "schewing trademark mannerisms and flights of fancy, and yet fully imprinting the film with his signature, Burton strongly delivers the dark core of this story of a lower-class London barber whose thirst for revenge against a venal judge gives birth to a prodigious serial killer."

"The show couldn't have fallen into better hands," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "More akin to Burton's Sleepy Hollow, where heads rolled like so many bowling balls, his Sweeney Todd places its emphasis on Grand Guignol and the deeply human story of twice-lost love and the horrifying destructiveness of revenge." And so: "Depp is the movie's heart and guts."

"Depp and Rickman intone their lyrics like villains in a parable, with Rickman's guttural bass particularly haunting," writes David D'Arcy for Screen Daily. "Bonham-Carter has a flair for pies of dust and soot, but her small creaky voice doesn't put terror (or much of anything else) in your heart. The 'hole in the world that's a big black pit,' of which Sweeney Todd sings doesn't seem so threatening here. Where's the horror?"

Update, 12/6: Online viewing tips. Via everybody, 9 clips.

Docs, 11/30.

"Strolling the streets and alleyways of New Orleans in Wayne Ewing's The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press, Louise [Webb], lucid and lively in her 90s, points to the buildings and rooms where she and her late husband Jon Edgar Webb once lived and worked," writes Ray Young. "This hour-long documentary reflects back to her days as a sidewalk artist selling watercolors in the 1950s and 60s, when the locals gave her the nickname 'Gypsy Lou.' At home, she and Jon ran Loujon Press in their cramped apartment quarters, publishing books by Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, and editing and publishing Outsider, a legendary literary review."

At indieWIRE, Brian Brooks sends impressions of a string of docs he's caught at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

"I just had a chance to watch Chris Hansen's documentary short, Clean Freak, a follow-up to his feature-length mockumentary, The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah," writes Chuck Tryon. "Equal parts Morgan Spurlock and Caveh Zahedi, with a twist of Alan Berliner, Clean Freak documents Chris's somewhat obsessive need for a clean house.... [T]he film's sharpest move is his connection between his need to tidy things up in real life and his desire for narrative completion; in essence, filmmaking becomes a means of cleaning up the messes of everyday life."

"While comparing the loss of paintings and sculptures to human life may seem at first blush to be a facile subject, Rape of Europa makes clear that an attack on cultural history is as direct a strike against a people as a bomb dropped on their homes," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper.

"Rather than endorsing conspiracy theories, Oswald's Ghost studies them as anger-driven symptoms of cultural obsession," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. More from Noel Murray at the AV Club: "[Robert] Stone has assembled Oswald's Ghost well, with few of the stylistic tics that marred his Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst.... Late in the film, Stone interviews Norman Mailer, a one-time conspiracy-believer who eventually wrote a book that tried to get inside Oswald's head, explaining how Oswald's story is America's story. In less than a minute, Mailer describes the documentary Stone should've made."

Ryan Boudinot in the Stranger on Lynch: "What's on display here is [David] Lynch's work life, not his private life, and so be it. It's still pretty nifty to watch a fellow carefully dip a suit jacket in lime-green paint. Hot dog!"

Online viewing tip. The Key to Reserva.

"It's one thing to preserve a film that's been made. It's another thing to preserve a film that's not been made."

Scorsese does Hitchcock. Wow: The Key to Reserva.

Major league thanks to the Shamus.

The movies' (and Charlie Wilson's) war.

So there's the cover of the current Independent Weekly. David Fellerath's got the long list of miserable box office numbers and then suggests a few possible answers: war fatigue; our soldiers are too laden with gear to distinguish between them (no, really); Vietnam was "a more interesting visual setting" than Iraq or Afghanistan, though his heart isn't really in any of these - which is a good thing, because, for one thing, Afghanistan can be startlingly beautiful on the screen. "More importantly, I think, the American culture of the 1960s infiltrated Vietnam in ways that were conducive to movie drama." Then, even more ideas are floated before finally getting to the heart of the matter, the filmmaking: "What's missing from the GWOT films that are being made is a sense of poetry, a sense of genuine drama and, above all, a sense of the surreal and the absurd."

"Because it is so angry, Redacted is the first important fictional film on the subject of America's current and senseless occupation of Iraq," argues Charles Mudede in the Stranger. "Because it is so angry, the film crosses the line into hysteria. Yes, Redacted is out of control, out of its mind. But what other emotional register could adequately express the desperate state of things in Iraq - the hourly crimes, the daily murders of civilians, the rising weekly toll of American deaths, the monstrous monthly expense of this endless hell (over $8 billion)?"

"In a year when big-name Hollywood talent has plunged headlong into films about war, terrorism and politics, Charlie Wilson's War is both refreshing and disappointing," writes Mike Goodridge for Screen International. "Refreshing, because it tells its story with such brisk narrative skill and wit. Disappointing, because it assiduously avoids taking its subject matter into the more ambiguous territory which might risk alienating a wide moviegoing audience."

For Variety's Todd McCarthy, the film's "a smart, sophisticated entertainment for grownups. Based on the late George Crile's sensational bestseller about how an unlikely trio of influential and colorful characters conspired to generate covert financial and weapons support for the Afghan Mujahideen to defeat the Russians in the 1980s - and armed America's future enemies in the process - Mike Nichols's film is snappy, amusing and ruefully ironic."

A somewhat related online listening tip. On the Leonard Lopate Show, Craig Unger talks about his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future. Unger's not exactly a smooth talker, but that doesn't make what he has to say any less interesting - or for that matter, exasperating.

LA CityBeat. Holiday Film.

"Opening next week in extremely limited release (four theaters in four cities), [The Amateurs is] an intricately sweet comedy about a motley collection of small-town friends who band together to make an adult film. [Jeff] Bridges plays Andy, a middle-aged guy who's lost his job and family, but reclaims his self-worth as the plotter of the porn flick." So this gives Erik Himmelsbach an opportunity to talk with Bridges through his entire career; and of course, the conversation's one long build-up to the big one:

"God, I don't know how many times I've seen that movie," Bridges says. "Normally when a movie of mine comes on I'll turn the channel, but when Lebowski comes on, I'll say, 'I'll just wait until Turturro licks the [bowling] ball, then I'll change the channel.' Then he licks the ball, and I'll just wait until... it's just one thing after another coming at you. Great performances, wonderful writing. I often get people who say, that was all improvised, right? Oh no, that was all on the page, every ellipsis, every 'man.' I think it's great filmmaking. That's all there is to it."

Also in the LA CityBeat's "Holiday Film" issue:

"Back before Sex, Lies, and Videotape... before Reservoir Dogs... before there was much of anything that could be called an American independent film movement, John Sayles was the quintessential indie filmmaker. And, 27 years after his debut feature, Return of the Secaucus 7 (which, among other things, introduced David Strathairn to moviegoers), he remains resolutely outside the studio system with his latest, Honeydripper." Andy Klein:

Sayles has written films with mainly female characters and mainly Latino characters, but I'm curious as to whether he felt any discomfort writing dialogue for an essentially all-black cast.

He seems to think it's not the smartest question (and maybe he's right). "Look, you're always pretending to be a lot of different people and writing about a lot of people. I've written movies in Spanish, and my Spanish isn't even that good; I had to get help later making it better.... I mean, it's America. If you're a 25-year-old writer, you don't just write 25-year-olds. At least I hope not. You don't just write men if you're a man. I mean: Who's this straight Chinese guy who made a movie about gay cowboys? How does that make all the gay cowboy directors feel?"

Andy Klein also talks with Hadrian Belove about "Reviving the Revival House," the Silent Movie Theatre, now the Cinefamily, revisits Diva and reviews The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: "Much of the picture's power derives directly from the fact that the narrative is defined by relationships rather than events. It is through these scenes - notably those involving Bauby's estranged wife (Emmanuelle Seigner) and increasingly infirm father (Max von Sydow) - that a portrait of the real man takes shape.... It's an undeniably bold experiment by any measure, well worthy of the Best Director award [Julian] Schnabel picked up at this year's Cannes Film Festival. But it's also an imperfect experiment, too often undone by its own ambitions."

Rebecca Epstein talks with Schnabel.

Mick Farren welcomes the future: "All that Google lacks is full-length, original motion pictures, and if it takes their production out of the inept hands of Disney and its studio ilk, I won't experience the slightest pang of regret."

Fests and events, 11/29.

"Fusion, Outfest's program of films about LGBTQ people of color and the only festival of its kind, pulls in audiences like no other: Think queer theorists, questioning teenagers, the next generation's Vaginal Davis and, of course, your usual entertainment industry professionals," writes Margaret Wappler in her preview for the Los Angeles Times. Tomorrow through Sunday.

Also: Kevin Crust previews The Cinema Cabaret: Neo-Benshi Live Film Narration on Monday at REDCAT; briefly: the Jules Verne Adventure Film Festival, December 5 through 15. Plus, Edgar Wright's "Wright Stuff" at the New Beverly Cinema; and more.

It's SF360 Movie Night. As Susan Gerhard explains, Sandrine Bonnaire's Her Name Is Sabine will be screening all over the Bay Area tonight.

On the occasion of today's screening of Lav Diaz's Death in the Land of Encantos in Manila, Tilman Baumgärtel describes a previous screening of Heremias in the Philippine Inquirer: "Members of the audience were free to enter and leave the cinema as they wished - go to the bathroom, get something to eat, or take a stroll. When one returned, there was a good chance it would be the same scene - which was at once comforting and awkward."

Romanian Cinema: The Golden Age is running in Tribeca Cinemas from today through December 2, and Tribeca Film Festival director Peter Scarlett offers an overview.

In the Austin Chronicle, Louis Black introduces Marc Savlov's interview with Lou Perryman and Sonny Carl Davis, the stars of The Whole Shootin' Match; a restored version will be screening at the Alamo Drafthouse from tomorrow through Thursday.

Also, Josh Rosenblatt describes how the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival will be going out with a bang this weekend.

And Mark Fagan talks with Vincent Gallo, whose band RRIICCEE plays the Alamo on Monday night.

"In recent years, Peter Greenaway has vanished so thoroughly into self-willed obscurity that it's hard to remember he was once discussed with the attentiveness that contemporary scholars of gnomic, overstuffed cinema lavish on Guy Maddin," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "Dating back to the dawn of Greenaway's feature film career, The Draughtman's Contract (1982) and A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) are clockwork contraptions encrusted with weighty ideas and sumptuous tableaux, a feast for the eyes and a puzzle for the head." And they're screening tonight and tomorrow at the International House.

Also, Shaun Brady: "The title of this quirky, eclectic collection of animated films and music videos from Sweden - Daydream Nation - may simply refer to the country's apparent penchant for surrealistic diurnal imaginings. But the immediate reference is to Sonic Youth's landmark 1988 album, a comparison that isn't entirely off the mark, given the way that these films echo the record's blend of off-kilter experimentation and harsh noise with pretty pop leanings." Monday, Wednesday and Thursday at local theaters.

At the Siffblog, David Jeffers is looking forward to Saturday at the Castro in San Francisco and the screenings of Intolerance and Flesh and the Devil. Update: More from Robert Avila at SF360.

If you're in London anytime between now and January 19, the Guardian's Jonathan Jones recommends catching new work by Jeff Wall at the White Cube; and I'll add that Jeff Wall: Exposure's on at the Deutsche Guggenheim through January 20. Related, and via wood s lot: Shep Steiner on Wall in Image and Narrative.

The Berlinale has given its short films section, now in its second year, a new, more straightforward name: Berlinale Shorts.

2 plays.

BitchSlap! opens tonight at the Roxy Theatre in Edmonton and runs through December 9. For the Vue Weekly, David Berry talks with playwright and sound designer Darin Hagen, who also happens to play Joan Crawford, and Trevor Schmidt, the director - who plays Bette Davis:

"People ask why gay men love those women so much, and the reason is that in the 40s, when there was no such thing as gay rights, or at least they weren't very visible, people like Bette and Joan became the politicians in gay mens' minds," says Hagen, ably transitioning, as he frequently does in both person and script, from ribald outrageousness to sedate cogency. "They were the strong, feminine creatures, they got the man, they got the gigs, they got everything."

Updated through 12/2.

"I've got nothing against gay rights, there's just nothing in it for me," paraphrases Schmidt, joined by Hagen for the last bit.

"It goes beyond that, too," continues Hagen. "They were men in dresses, in a lot of ways, because they fought like men, they didn't take any shit like men, they basically played a game that very few women were willing to play; they'd risk everything to keep their career going."

"Othello is arguably the most intense and immediate of Shakespeare's mature tragedies," writes Paul Taylor in the Independent:

Casting is crucial to the chemistry that bubbles in a production between hero and villain. In this [sold out] account [at the Donmar Warehouse], Iago is played by Ewan McGregor, last seen on stage as charming, personable Sky Masterson in [Michael] Grandage's production of Guys and Dolls and better known as a screen actor who embraces both the indie end of the spectrum (Young Adam) and the mainstream (Star Wars, Moulin Rouge!).

The role of Othello is taken by Chiwetel Ejiofor who, though he has lately concentrated on movies (for directors ranging from Woody Allen to Ridley Scott), boasts an impressive list of theatrical credits.

Update, 12/2: More on Bitchslap! from Paul Matwychuk.

Sundance. Lineup, round 2.

"New films from Michel Gondry, Boaz Yakin, Mark Pellington, Brad Anderson and Barry Levinson fill out Sundance's star-studded Premieres section, which considerably ups the Park City glitz factor." At indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman's got the lineup for that one, plus the other non-competitive sections: Spectrum: Documentary Spotlight, Spectrum (the dramatic features), New Frontier and Park City at Midnight.

Updated through 11/30.

Updates, 11/30: Karina Longworth's got notes on this round, too.

Wiley Wiggins "super proud of and excited for David and Nathan." Zellner, that is.

"As noted in our commentary last week, neither the IDA nor Full Frame (nor, it should be mentioned, the Independent Spirit Awards) give any annual craft awards for documentary," writes AJ Schnack. "Sundance has taken the lead on this point for several years and boldly continues to recognize artistic craft in documentary filmmaking and should be applauded for doing so."

Amsterdam Dispatch. 3.

David D'Arcy on three more docs screening at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, running through Saturday.

As your morning paper's friendly travel writer might blithely put it, "If you're thinking of going to Turkmenistan...," The Shadow of the Holy Book (site) might be worth viewing before you book non-refundable tickets. Director Arto Halonen and writer/lawyer Kevin Frazier examine the eccentricities of one-man rule in the post-Soviet autocra-stan which sits on vast reserves of gas and oil, making it a friend these days of the United States and other countries who covet those energy sources. Turkemenistan has the world's third-largest gas reserves.

And you thought There Will Be Blood was the oil film of the season. From the fall of communism until 2006, Turkmenistan was ruled by Saparmurat Niyazov, who declared himself president for life. Like so many of his petroleo-crat peers, Niyazov built huge marble palaces and other gargantuan "architectural" tributes to himself. His own residence in Ashgabat resembled the Chateau de Versailles, or at least Frenchmen seeking to do business with him told him so. Like so much else in Ashgabat, it looked like a super-sized knock-off somewhere in Las Vegas or Orlando.

Niyazov even had a favorite French architect who became the Albert Speer of Ashgabat. Niyazov's taste looked a lot like Saddam Hussein's, with a special preference for what we might call Authoritarian Vegas. No coincidence that Ashgabat is in the middle of the desert. (Niyazov himself looked a bit more like Leonid Brezhnev, only larger.) As with Saddam, western countries tried to get as much of his oil, gas and money as they could.   Flattery was a sure way to open the door.

But Halonen and Frazier are more eager in Niyazov's grotesque uniqueness than in the generic life-style that befits membership in the dictators' club. Niyazov's delusions and his means to put them into practice made him his region's Kim Jong-Il. Niyazov was nutty enough to think that was a compliment. Citizens in kitschy folkloric costumes were required to swear allegiance to him at mass rallies. Part of that oath involved wishing that their body parts would fall off if, God forbid, they were to do anything to hurt their leader. (Once the police beat a confession out of someone accused of anything suspect, they'll know what to do next.)

Halonen and Frazier have fun with Ashgabat's contribution to monumental sculpture, a 30-foot illuminated book that opens to different pages. (It's something that the operators of Bible theme parks can only dream of.) The book is the gold, green and purple the Ruhnama, the official text of Turkmenistan since 2001. It makes claims for Niyazov - now called Turkmenbashi - which most religious texts wouldn't even make for God.

Turkmen citizens have to endure this, at the barrel of a gun, as the old saying goes. They also have to endure unemployment at 60 percent and quixotic policies from their leader, who closed rural libraries "because rural Turkmen don't read," banned opera, ballet lip-synching, and stashed some $2 billion away in a German bank.

But Niyazov's gospel is taken beyond his borders with dozens of translations of the Ruhnama, and it turns out that each of these translations is paid for by a major corporation. Halonen and Frazier set out to talk to these corporations like Siemens, John Deere, Caterpillar and Bouygues about the Ruhnama, and the firms respond by ignoring calls, hanging up, slamming doors, and throwing the filmmakers out of corporate lobbies. All of the search for accountability is captured on the jostling camera. If this sounds a lot like Michael Moore, there are similarities.

Yet if publishing the Ruhnama is a noble undertaking, why don't the companies funding it say so? It's the same reason that companies which bribe officials in other countries don't talk about. It's embarrassing, sometimes illegal, although translating the epic by Niyazov doesn't seem to be a crime against anything but sanity.

(To be fair, Turkmenistan isn't the only place where flattery is offered for a quid pro quo. Think of the film festivals that "honor" distributors with career achievement awards while they hold their noses, or put sales agents on juries, in order to ensure that they get the films that they want from these industry types.)

Deere and Company, the makers of John Deere tractors, puts a copy of the Ruhnama in its company museum in Moline, Illinois, but makes excuses when the filmmakers visit. An employee of Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois, sets up a web guide to the Ruhnama, complete with offerings of Ruhnama souvenirs, yet protests that his corporation had nothing to do with the site when the filmmakers go searching for him. The site now seems to be down, although Caterpillar is still doing business in Turkmenistan. You'll have to go to another global corporation for a Ruhnama t-shirt.

The businessman who seems to have profited most from Niyazov's vanity is Ahmet Calik, the head of a Turkish energy and construction conglomerate, who has worked his way up to the post of minister. No surprise, he commissioned the Turkish translation of the Ruhmana, and his firm is flourishing there. Again, no surprise: we never hear from him, although the dodging and evasion from his press spokesman could be inspiration for a skit on The Simpsons. Close behind him is French tycoon Martin Bouygues, whose industrial group has its signature on much of what is mock-monumentally new in the capital. Bouygues controls TF1, France's largest private television channel, which prepared a special laudatory program devoted to Niyazov. The program, presented as a TF1 production, only aired in Turkmenistan. Did Niyazov know this? When Kevin Frazier calls Bouygues to inquire whether the company sees an ethical problem in trading with a government that violates human rights, the firm's flacks decline comment with Gallic scorn, and hang up on him.

Those who do talk are critics - Farid Turbatullin, a human rights activist now in exile in Vienna, and his son, Ruslan, who makes satirical cartoons about Niyazov and oppression in Turkmenistan, and Boris Shikmuradov, Jr, exiled in Moscow, who has been searching for his father, a former official, since he was arrested in 2002. It would have been good to see something more concrete about human rights abuses. Naturally, the government wants to keep cameras far away from that.

One businessman who does talk is the CEO of the Finnish energy firm ESCO, who regrets any role his firm had in commissioning a Finnish translation of the Ruhmana. The executive is clearly embarrassed, but he's the only one who comes close to admitting it. Accountability among those doing business with this dictator is rare indeed.

The Shadow of the Holy Book was shot on the run, and looks like it, although it also has the no-budget research look, since Kevin Frazier often gets no farther than a hang-up from a major firm thwn he calls from his threadbare office in Helsinki.

The team almost lost their project in late 2006, when the Turmenbashi dropped dead of a heart attack. When hopes for a commitment to human rights in Turkmenistan collapsed under Niyazov's successor, the filmmakers knew they still had a movie. These days in Ashgabat, natural gas is worth more than ever, and the Ruhnama remains a sacred text. (The Shadow of the Holy Book was funded in part by ITVS, and will be shown on American television next year.)

Also at IDFA (and eventually to be seen on PBS, via ITVS) is Up the Yangtze (site), a Canadian doc by Yung Chang about jarring displacements of families in the Yangtze valley, as high-rises go up like monstrous weeds above the projected high-water line and cruise ships carrying comfortable tourists ply their way along the river.

There must be a Chinese translation of the Ruhnama. When it comes to oil, it sems that Beijing hasn't met a dictator it doesn't like.

What's filling up the Yangtze is water from a dam, which will cover many thousands of homes. It's great for the cruise ships that bring thousands of tourists. It's less encouraging for a young girl from a displaced family who gets a job washing dishes and serving on one of the ships. We follow her in her first contact with western consumer culture. This is progress? The culture clash has a standard PBS look, but even that is an achievement - Yung Chang shot his film without any official permits, which can get you into a lot of trouble.

There's a lot of testimony from aggrieved Chinese, who remind us of the project's huge human cost, and we see that cost on their faces, and on the riverbanks. This is not lost on all the tourists, who watch the rising river from the treadmills where they walk in place to elevator music in the ship's exercise room. Whatever happened to the old adage that a rising tide lifts all boats.

One of my favorites so far is Mechanical Love (DFI), a Finnish-Danish doc. If the title set you off looking for sex toys or for prostitutes in chains and futuristic chastity belts, you were in the wrong neighborhood in Amsterdam.

Phie Ambo's film looks at people creating and interacting with lifelike man-made creatures. The Paro is a stuffed seal robot, complete with a cry, if not a voice, that is given to patients with dementia. As a pacifier for people who can't be left completely alone, it's cheaper than a real babysitter. When patients in Japan, Germany and Italy take the seals and make them whine, scientists can record an intensity of brain activity. The seal enhances the life of the person holding it.

Yet there's something of a Frankenstein effect, which we can see in the case of the Geminoid, a life-like android that is sculpted to the likeness of the scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who is leading a team of scientists studying robots and the problems that arise when you bring them into a human community. Ishiguro cooperates with gentle good humor in the studies that he conducts, sitting with an android that looks just like him, and speaking through that android to his frightened daughter, who is also a guinea pig in the tests.

Will there ever be a time when human life is no longer necessary, the scientist asks, as a skittish poodle jumps around, dramatizing the undeniable inconvenience of living things. The scenes with Ishiguro are charming vignettes that remind you of the philosophical plays of Marivaux, with witty interplay among the scholars, soliloquies by Ishiguro on his family and work, tender family scenes, and experiments with the scientist's only daughter. Talk about a Faustian bargain. Few of the fundamental questions are answered.

It's a shame Mechanical Love won't be showing anywhere soon. You could see it along with the stage version of Young Frankenstein.

British Independent Awards.

"Control, the biopic about late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, has scooped five prizes at the British Independent Awards, including best film," reports the BBC. The other four: Most Promising Newcomer (Sam Riley), Best Director and the Douglas Hickox Award, given to the best debuting director (Anton Corbijn) and Best Supporting Actor/Actress (Toby Kebbell).

Other winners:

Updated.

• Best Actress: Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal.

• Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises.

• Special Jury Prize: Andi Engel, Pamela Engel and Robert Beeson of Artificial Eye.

• Best Screenplay: Patrick Marber, Notes on a Scandal.

• Best Documentary: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.

• Best Achievement in Production: Black Gold.

• Best Technical Achievement: Mark Tildesley, Sunshine.

• Best British Short: Dog Altogether.

• Best Foreign Independent Feature: The Lives of Others.

• The Raindance Award: The Inheritance.

• The Richard Harris Award: Ray Winstone.

• The Variety Award: Daniel Craig.

Update: The Guardian hosts a roundtable discussion with the jury. First question: "What have been the main advances in British film over the last couple of years?"

Shorts, 11/28.

"Lav Diaz's Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007) might be the possible result if you took Spike Lee's 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke, recast it in Andrei Tarkovsky mode, stretched it to Béla Tarr length, added a dash of Abbas Kiarostami-like meta-cinema, sprinkled it with a few ideas from Mario O'Hara, and set it in the Bicol region," writes Noel Vera. "Possible, though I wonder if said bastard offspring will be anywhere near as strange as this."

"[O]n a one-to-10 creep-o-meter scale, [Awake] gets a seven," writes Kent Sepkowitz, a physician, at Slate. But is there really such a thing as "anesthetic awareness"? "Yes, it happens, yes, it is awful, and while it doesn't happen as much as you might fear, it does so more often than the specialists think. But no, there is no vicious coverup. That part is all Hollywood."

"Writing about Laurel and Hardy comes easy. Finding previously unpublished photos is the challenge." But John McElwee's got a great batch at Greenbriar Picture Shows.

Hitchcock's I Confess is "actually an even stronger film than I remembered, one so claustrophobic that would be downright neurotic if it wasn't so tightly reigned in by a pious overlying Catholic sensibility," writes Jesse Ataide.

"Named after legendary flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla's groundbreaking record album (which, in turn, was inspired by the works of Andalusian poet, Federico García Lorca), Isaki Lacuesta's The Legend of Time melds the improvised encounters of Johan van der Keuken's ethnographic documentaries with the quotidian intimacy of Mercedes Álvarez's El cielo gira to create a understated, yet meticulously observed meditation on grief, identity, and self-expression," writes acquarello.

"He's the most visionary filmmaker of his generation, a genius toiling away in relative obscurity while others of his ilk milk the Internet and festival circuit for every last fame whoring morsel," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Yet when compared to their weak-minded (and -kneed) efforts, Damon Packard stands apart. Born in the 60s, reared in the 70s, and gifted with the amazing ability to channel post-modern moviemaking into a stream of savant-like subconsciousness, he is single-handedly reinventing the idiom of film."

In the Voice:

• The Rocket: The Legend of Rocket Richard "reminisces on the era of the homegrown, working-class, day-jobbing pro athlete," notes Nick Pinkerton. "There's not much, finally, to lift this thing above its necessarily niche appeal." Also: "A strong performance at the Argentine box office confirming its national-historical import, Chronicle of an Escape dramatizes the testimony of escapees from General Jorge Rafael Videla's right-wing junta, in power during the long 'Dirty War' years of the late 70s and early 80s."

• Michael Fox finds Oswald's Ghost "riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying." More from Vadim Rizov at the Reeler: "With virtually no fresh territory left to cover on the JFK documentary front, [Robert] Stone offers up a history not of the assassination, but of the many theories surrounding it. Dull but well-meaning, it neither adds to nor subtracts from that other Stone movie about JFK, but it's a necessary attempt."

• "An appalling mix of bird-brained satire, sub-protozoan thesping, and (non-)direction, Be My Oswald, about the attempted murder of Santa Claus, is a lame attempt at aping the looseness, sincerity, and campy surfeit of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol's film collaborations," writes Ed Gonzalez.

• "Never had a chance to catch the long-running Off-Broadway show Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding?" asks Julia Wallace. "Don't worry - the not-exactly-long-awaited movie version is here, trading in stereotypes just as ineptly as the original."

• Aaron Hillis on Badland: "Barely a ripple in this year's wave of returning Iraq War-veteran dramas (Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, et al), writer-director Francesco Lucente's overconfident, emotionally forced 160-minute opus offers trite antiwar platitudes - at best - in chronicling the anguished existence of a soldier who can't shake the horrors he experienced in Fallujah."

The Rape of Europa is "a documentary that's, in its way, as exciting as any superior Hollywood product," writes Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly.

Newsy bits from the Guardian: "Mark Ruffalo is joining Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of Shutter Island, a 50s-set crime thriller directed by Martin Scorsese." And "Gong Li and John Cusack could make sweet love in a second world war epic entitled Shanghai."

Many thanks to Jerry Lentz for these bits:

• The British man driving the car that killed Cristian Nemescu, director of the Un Certain Regard Award-winning California Dreamin', as well as his sound engineer and taxi driver back in August 06, will not be allowed to leave Romania.

• news that fashion designer Tom Ford is considering directing an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man.

• "Montreal filmmaker Mehrnoushe Solouki, who was arrested in Iran after stumbling across a mass grave, says she believes the government is using her as a warning to other dual citizens."

• Hannah Brown profiles Lost and Found director Savi Gabizon for the Jerusalem Post: "Asked how he feels about the renaissance in Israeli film over the past few years, he says, 'It's wonderful, like a miracle. I can't believe it's happening. Every festival all over the world has to have an Israeli film now, and Israeli films are winning all over.'"

• Joel Barkin talks with Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed, Wal Mart: The High Cost of Low Price) for Progressive States Network.

"[I]t's time to rain praise on [Ross] Lipman," announces Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Not only has he directed his and UCLA's attention toward [Kenneth] Anger and Charles Burnett - two filmmakers whose non-Hollywood artistry would have deteriorated and vanished otherwise - he's delivered superb restorations that will change the way you see classic works. Both Anger collections deserve a place next to the just-released Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection as one of this year's most vital and rewarding DVD collections."

At Cinematical, Peter Martin has a round-up of Asian films just out on DVD.

"Strand Releasing announced that it has acquired all US rights to Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven, Germany's entry for this year's Academy Awards," notes Peter Knegt at indieWIRE.

According to Michael Cieply in the New York Times, Disney and Pixar are "wrestling with a conundrum posed by" Ratatouille: "Any move to promote it as the year's best picture might lead to ballot-splitting that would diminish its chances of getting the less prestigious but more easily won Oscar for best animated film. More than a technical issue, the dilemma goes to the heart of Hollywood's evolving attitude toward animated movies."

Also: "The great relief of DA Pennebaker's 65 Revisited - which pulls together never-released footage shot for his documentary Don't Look Back - is that this time you can hear the songs in their entirety," writes Manohla Dargis. After all, "the songs were as much a part of this youthquaking sensation as his pipe-cleaner-skinny legs, his fuzzy 'fro, bobbing head, sly smile, riffs, rants, puns and playful, otherworldly genius." More from Bill Weber in Slant and Camille Dodero in the Voice. Related: Steve Dollar talks with Pennebaker for the New York Sun.

How bad did David Edelstein want to like I'm Not There? Bad. And he tried. A lot harder than other detractors, most definitely.

"[T]he notion among certain conservatives that Redacted's failure represents some sort of milestone in the imminent death of the entity they sometimes refer to as 'Hollyweird' is more than slightly ludicrous," blogs Glenn Kenny.

Gill Pringle profiles Paul Giamatti for the Independent.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with He Was a Quiet Man director Frank Cappello "about making Christian Slater bald, ugly and awkward, the best way to handle Russell Crowe, and how Dirt Bike magazine taught him how to write."

Nathaniel R's got a list: "10 Performances From 2007 That Deserved Better Films."

Erik Davis at Cinematical, Mr Skin's "Top 20 Movie Nude Scenes of 2007."

Online viewing tip. The Webby Awards' "12 Most Influential Online Videos of All Time," via Steve Bryant.

Sundance. Lineup, round 1.

"While the dramatic competition lineup for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival includes a few familiar names, such as the return to Park City by Half Nelson filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden or the new film from All the Boys Love Mandy Lane director Jonathan Levine, and even an American feature by Rain director Christine Jeffs, the roster of American independent features is dominated by first timers," writes indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez, who listens to festival director Geoff Gilmore's take on the lineup and, before unfurling today's list, notes, "The Sundance feature film roster is spread across the four competitive sections being unveiled today and five out-of-competition sections which will to be announced tomorrow."

Updated through 11/29.

Updates, 11/29: "Personal stories, individual solutions to society’s problems and an unexpected strain of optimism will supplant diatribes, exposés and gloom at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival in January." An assessment from David M Halbfinger in the New York Times.

Karina Longworth plucks out a few highlights at the SpoutBlog.

The Reeler spots the New Yorkers.

Karina Longworth has several good reasons to be optimistic about Isaac Julien's Derek, an "experiment in narrative" about Derek Jarman exec produced by Tilda Swinton and produced by Colin MacCabe.

Books, 11/28.

Ray Pride has news that Penguin Canada will be publishing David Cronenberg's debut novel.

The New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2007" is up.

"Polling our nearly 800 members, as well as all the former finalists and winners of our book prize, we asked, What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?" blogs John Freeman for the National Book Critics Circle. "Nearly 500 voters - from John Updike and Robert Hass to Carolyn Forché, Anne Tyler, Julia Alvarez and Cynthia Ozick - answered the call."

And Dwight Garner points to more lists and recommendations.

"The star system existed only because the movies used to be a volume business," writes Scott Eyman, reviewing The Star Machine for the New York Observer. "If a studio is making 10 or 12 movies a year, you can just go buy people, which is what happens today. But if you're making 40 or 50 a year, as was the norm in the 1920s, 30s and often in the 40s, it's much more economical to develop talent in-house.... That some of the types Jeanine Basinger writes about in her long, luxurious, often delicious book no longer exist - the classy WASP gentleman, for instance, exemplified on the high end by the miraculous, saucy William Powell, and on the low end by the frigid Robert Montgomery, or by distaff equivalents such as Irene Dunne and Claudette Colbert - doesn't negate what they meant to previous generations, and what they can still mean to us."

The Literary Saloon notes that Alberto Moravia would have turned 100 today.

And William Blake would be turning 250: If Charlie Parker... and wood s lot.

Fests and events, 11/28.

"Ousmane Sembéne, the Senegalese filmmaker who died last spring at age 84, was African cinema's founding father. More than that, Sembéne was a political organizer, a novelist, a self-taught intellectual, and the celluloid equivalent of a traditional taleteller, the village griot." The Voice's J Hoberman previews Film Forum's retrospective, opening Friday and running through December 13.

Miriam Bale writes up more NYC goings on at the Reeler.

"You can draw the time line of the Japanese new wave in scores of different ways - there were multiple possible launching points, and the big players evident in the 50s and 60s were young, old, and in between - but Shohei Imamura was an unarguably major, and quizzically ambiguous, figure in the landscape, an artiste among pulp mavens and a pop comic amid tragedians, a deep-dish cynic and a folksy absurdist," writes Michael Atkinson in the Boston Phoenix. "Dead last year at 79, the two-time Palme d'Or winner was one of the last of his slowly dying breed, survived still only by Seijun Suzuki, Kon Ichikawa and Nagisa Oshima." Vanishing Points: The Films of Shohei Imamura runs Saturday through December 14 at the Harvard Film Archive.

The Turin Film Festival, running through Saturday, is radically different from its old self now that Nanni Moretti's been put in charge. For better or worse? In Cahiers du cinéma, Eugenio Renzi sorts through a first round of mixed impressions.

Hannah Takes the Stairs screens tomorrow through Monday at the Red Vic in San Francisco and, in the Bay Guardian, Max Goldberg's got a preview: "[Joe] Swanberg's warts-and-all approach may not be for everyone, but it's an important redress of Knocked Up's mismatched fantasy. These kids are all right, even when they're not."

"On Thursday at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is presenting a 25th-anniversary screening featuring an onstage cast-and-crew reunion of Steven Spielberg's beloved fantasy E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." The Los Angeles Times' Susan King talks with Dee Wallace, producer Kathleen Kennedy and sound designer Gene S Cantamessa.

David Walsh wraps the WSWS's coverage of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The Golden Compass. London premiere.

"If Darth Vader wore a blond wig, a slinky dress and a dab of Chanel behind each ear, he could hardly be as evil as Nicole Kidman, playing the gorgeous villainess Mrs Coulter in this spectacular new movie version of [The Golden Compass], the opening episode of Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "This is the very best sort of part for her: statuesque, elegant, seductive, with a hint of cold steel. In many ways, it's her juiciest character since the sociopathic meteorologist in To Die For."

"When she walks down the hall of fictional Jordan College in a figure-hugging gold lamé gown, her honey-blonde locks permed into place, the men on screen fall silent - and my mouth fell open and an involuntary 'wow!' fell out," confesses Baz Bamigboye in the Daily Mail. "Now, that's what I call a movie star entrance, and I haven't seen it done with such aplomb in years."

Updated through 12/4.

For James Christopher of the London Times, "The books weave a magic that the film simply cannot match.... The power of Pullman's novels is that he invents an imaginary world just an inch out of kilter with our own.... The problem with the film... is the haystack of derivative film twists and the fatal lack of genuine drama."

Ray Bennett finds it "lacks dramatic structure, wit and charm."

"[T]here is one formidable obstacle in the path of the film, which opens to the public on 5 December: the intense antipathy of the American Catholic Church, which has turned its wrath on the production for promoting what it deems a viciously sacrilegious message that boils down to nothing less than 'atheism for kids.'" Ciar Byrne maps the battle lines for the Independent.

Peter Chattaway's POV: "Why the 'it's not anti-religious, it's only anti-abusive forms of religion' meme doesn't fly."

Earlier: Donna Freitas in the Boston Globe.

Update: "By casting [Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen], and in all sorts of other ways, Chris Weitz's movie bends over backwards to refit Pullman's saga as an effects fantasy for a Rings audience, and in this, it just about succeeds, conjuring a last hour of mounting excitements and leaving us hungry for more," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey, who's got his problems with the movie, but: "You can't fault the film for its pacing, which is fleet and often breathless - the way Weitz gets the characters tumbling into battle at the end is a nice, brisk rejoinder to all Peter Jackson's portentous martial foreplay, not to mention the galumphing finale of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.... Whether The Subtle Knife gets made is conditional on this film's success, and I think it'll be touch-and-go - there's a little too much compromise here, and only an embryonic feeling of soul." Via Lou Luminick.

Update, 11/29: Peter Chattaway has a longish email interview with Pullman.

Updates, 11/30: "Weitz (About a Boy), who has never directed a film with anything like these logistics before, is saddled with conveying loads of exposition but handles the big scenes competently," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Still, the prevailing tone is cold, which has nothing to do with the frigid settings of the second half, and the pic doesn't invite the viewer to enthusiastically enter into this new dramatic realm."

"Several grand fights, one key revelation, a rescue of Lyra's playmate plus an old-fashioned 'To Be Continued' ending make for a rousing finish," counters the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "Witches sweep out of the night sky, bad guys when shot vanish in balls of flame and the glories of free will get celebrated by championing a child who never does what she is told. What kid won't go for all this?"

In the Guardian, Harriet Lane meets Dakota Blue Richards. The Telegraph's Will Lawrence talks with her, too.

"A more well-tooled and expertly crafted beginning to a late-year franchise is hard to imagine, yet it's this very gleaming perfection that may leave The Golden Compass open to accusations of soullessness and artifice," writes Roger Clarke in Screen Daily. Even so, he argues, "it's a terrific adventure ride."

Updates, 12/1: For another version of the movie's making, see Charles McGrath's piece in the New York Times. And actually, if you haven't read any of the others and you're looking for a quick run-down of the need-to-knows, this will more than do.

"If there is indeed a 'deceitful stealth campaign' afoot to lure children to Pullman's books - as William Donohue, spokesman for the Catholic League, insists - it's remarkably short on stealth," writes Laura Miller in the Los Angeles Times. "What's really astonishing, and telling, is how long it's taken America's religious fear-mongers to notice Pullman."

Update, 12/2: "[W]hile New Line people play down the connection between The Golden Compass and The Lord of the Rings in conversation, they're quietly planting seeds all over the place, hoping for another bumper crop," writes Newsweek's Devin Gordon. "It's fortunate that the story of The Golden Compass is so singular, and that Weitz's film is an honest, admirable adaptation."

Updates, 12/4: "I want my children to understand that human beings and institutions are fallible," writes Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams, a Catholic:

That sometimes those who claim moral authority can traffic in corruption and abuse. I want them to be angry at every wrong perpetuated in the name of God. To question authority. To be feisty troublemakers for positive change. I've told my daughters that no one knows for certain that there's a God or a heaven. I always thought that was the beauty of faith - that it rests on our willingness to believe in the things we can't prove, to consider, when we look up at the stars or contemplate the elegance of a DNA sequence, the possibility of a higher architecture. I hope that my daughters will find contentment and community in their religion. But I would rather they grow up to be kind, generous unbelievers than sanctimonious, blindly dogmatic Christians.

Jerry Lentz sends along an online viewing tip. Pullman reads at Barnes and Noble. If you get Tom Brokaw first, just look down to the first box on the left in the second row and click.

More online viewing. The first five minutes.

Gotham Awards.

"The 17th Annual Gotham Awards were handed out tonight at Brooklyn's Steiner Studios, with no films taking multiple honors and Sean Penn's Into The Wild winning best feature of the year," report Eugene Hernandez and Peter Knegt at indieWIRE. "In addition to Wild, Michael Moore's Sicko was named best documentary feature, Juno's Ellen Page won the breakthrough actor award and Craig Zobel was named best breakthrough director for Great World of Sound. The casts of Talk To Me and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead tied for the best ensemble cast award, while Before the Devil's Marisa Tomei presented Gotham's unique 'Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You Award' to Ronald Bronstein's Frownland."

Updated through 11/29.

And they take note of several highlights of the evening; of the six tributes - six! - the one most remarked on elsewhere is surely Roger Ebert's. Sidney Lumet did the honors and "Ebert loved every second of it, his eyes dancing as he surveyed the crowd and gave a long hug to his old friend Mr Lumet," blogs David Carr. "And as he left the stage, Mr Ebert did a few steps in time with the band, smiling all the while."

Hours before the evening began, David Poland posted an open letter from Jeff Lipsky, an appreciation of Ebert well worth reading. You may already know the My Dinner With Andre story, but Lipsky tells it well.

Update: Anthony Kaufman on Roger Ebert: "Here is a guy whose voice has been synonymous with movies who can no longer speak. It's a cruel human tragedy that's sad and touching." And Noel Murray comments: "[T]hough I think he went through a creative lull a few years back, his work of late has been full of passion and vitality and keen observation. The man's a national treasure, and indirectly responsible for as much good criticism as he himself has generated."

Updates, 11/29: "For me, Ronnie's win is especially nice," blogs Matt Dentler. "It was almost precisely a year ago that I fished Ronnie's film out of the submissions, put it on, and was instantly hypnotized. For all those filmmakers out there who feel you have to have 'connections' and 'legacy' to get attention or noticed, Frownland is proof against that."

More congrats for Bronstein come from David Lowery, Joe Swanberg and Michael Tully.

Senses of Cinema. 45.

"Try writing an essay on 'leaving the movie theatre' in this day and age." Introducing their new issue, Senses of Cinema editors Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray pick up on the tone set by Chacun son cinéma (To Each His Own Cinema), the compilation of three-minute films by 33 renowned directors commissioned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Cannes this year: to enter a movie theater now is to pay a 21st century tribute, suffused with respect and nostalgia, maybe even mourning, to a fading 20th century custom as the films themselves slip out onto smaller, more portable screens or harrumph and go all 3D and loud. Nicholas de Villiers reviews the shorts themselves: "It is apparent that many share a strong 'cathexis' to the actual movie hall itself: the red auditorium chairs, the dust-motes in the cone of light from the projector, the architecture of old theatres."

"Curse of the Demon is a subtle exploration of the terror conveyed by the supernatural on the imagination," writes Pedro Blas Gonzalez. "Jacques Tourneur goes through great pains to offer a sophisticated script that raises the level of the film to much more than just a tale of spooks in the night."

"Sam Newfield is, in all probability, the most prolific director in American sound-film history, but very little archival material survives on his career." So Wheeler Winston Dixon does some digging, talks with Newfield's nephews and finds he's been "able to piece together a rough sketch of the man behind such a torrential output of work."

"Dreyer wanted mass catharsis, the way Greek theatre did, or maybe the way college basketball does, with thousands of pulses synched to that ball's movements," writes Tag Gallagher. "Curious it is, then, that some people complain Dreyer is slow and intellectual, talkie and dull, Gertrud particularly. They never spot the ball."

"The canonization of Kane as the great film has not only fossilized the film itself. It has fossilized its maker as well." Benjamin Kerstein assesses Orson Welles's last films.

"A self-made filmmaker without any film school education, Paul Thomas Anderson has written all of his films himself; he is the purest auteur of the contemporary movie industry - even obtaining the exceptional right of final cut on his projects," writes André Crous, who examines how "Anderson's tracking shots normalise the extraordinary with equally extraordinary panache."

Virginia Bonner aims to bring Agnès Varda's "documentary work into as prominent a position as her narrative films. I will focus here on Varda's recent and highly acclaimed documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) in light of her earlier narrative work and on its own unique terms, but I will begin by demonstrating that documentary practices have informed most of Varda's narrative films; in retrospect, these texts point the way toward Glaneurs."

"In exploring the relationship between nostalgia and history on film, I would like to look at four Chinese films, made between the early 1990s to the year 2000, that depict modern Chinese history," writes Jie Li. "The first two are both multi-decade historical epics made by two of the most famous representatives of the 'Fifth Generation': Zhang Yimou's Huozhe (To Live, 1994) and Chen Kaige's Ba wang bie ji (Farewell My Concubine, 1993). Against the grain of these two films, I would like to read in greater detail Yangguang Canlan de Rizi (In the Heat of the Sun, 1994) by Jiang Wen and Zhantai (Platform, 2000) by Jia Zhangke. Both Jiang Wen and Jia Zhangke are commonly referred to as members of the 'Sixth Generation' by film critics in China and abroad, but since neither of them willingly identifies with this designation, I shall refrain from using the term. However, I would like to argue that the two younger directors, in spite of huge divergences in style, engage in a more reflective and critical kind of nostalgia than their Fifth Generation forerunners."

"Sigmund Freud theorized that two forms of joking existed: innocent jokes and tendentious jokes," writes Arthur Rankin. "Charlie Chaplin creates a cinematic world where the innocent joke serves to focus of the tendentious comic intent."

There are three pieces in this issue's section on Australian Cinema:

• Glen Donnar considers the initial critical reception of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

• "Australia, a nation with distinctive origins as both a penal colony and an immigrant frontier, negotiates a unique discourse on feminism, race and colonialism, with the three issues often painfully entwined." Lorrie Palmer revisits Flirting.

• "Sarah Watt's film Look Both Ways was, at the time of its release in 2005, heralded as a sign of recovery for Australian cinema after several traumatic years of critical gloom and box-office flops," writes David Carlin. "The curative discourse we can detect associated with the film, in relation to the local industry, is apt, I would argue, given the articulation within Look Both Ways of a widespread contemporary preoccupation in Western culture with traumatic memory."

"Phantom India and Calcutta are definitely the major works in a new DVD box set, The Documentaries of Louis Malle, released by Eclipse," argues Peter Hourigan. "However, there are other riches as well."

Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928 - 1954 "is both a revealing and somewhat incoherent snapshot of American and French avant-garde cinema from the late 1920s to the early 1950s," writes Adrian Danks. "It is most valuable as a repository of several seminal and formative works by key figures in film history, and a partial resurrection of some relatively forgotten and under-represented figures like Willard Maas and Sidney Peterson." Special attention is paid here to "Isidore Isou's monumental, egotistical, maddening but undoubtedly influential Venom and Eternity (Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951)."

And the issue is rounded out by a dozen festival reports, five book reviews, 14 new annotations and one new addition to the Great Directors critical database: Anna Rogers on Sofia Coppola.

Resnais. Prix Fipresci.

Just now tumbling across the German wires comes news that FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics, is saluting Alain Resnais by awarding its "European Film Award of the Critics 2007 - Prix FIPRESCI" to Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places). For Christian Viviani, Resnais "treats the characters the way an affectionate puppeteer would treat his creatures. He contemplates their comings and goings with the benevolence of one who knows that agitation is vain, but who prefers that people find it out for themselves."

The prize will be presented during the European Film Awards ceremony on Saturday in Berlin.

Spirit Awards. Nominees.

Film Independent presents the full list of 2008 Spirit Awards Nominees.

At indieWIRE, Peter Knegt has already done the math and sees four films leading the pack with four nominations each: I'm Not There, Juno, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Savages. There nudges a nose even further ahead, though, as it's also won the inaugural Robert Altman Award, given to one film's director, casting director and ensemble cast.

Updated.

Updates: Karina Longworth's got a great round of first impressions at the SpoutBlog.

Matt Dentler counts the SXSW alums in the list.

"[D]oes this list really represent 'Independent Cinema' 2007?" asks David Poland.

"I would like to applaud the nominating committee members for spotlighting so much great work," blogs Michael Tully, following that ovation with a damn well-observed set of notes.

Jeffrey Wells makes his predictions.

"Now we're talking," smiles AJ Schnack. "Picking up where the Academy left off, the Independent Spirit Award nominations were announced today and - aside from two-timing Lake of Fire - the list of films in two separate categories steared clear of the 15 films Shortlisted last week by the Academy. In total, the eight features mark some of the most interesting and stylistic films of 2007." An in-depth look at each follows.

Shorts, 11/27.

Opening a special issue of the International Journal of Zizek Studies devoted to "Zizek and Cinema," Todd McGowan lays out the many arguments that have been made against taking Slavoj Zizek seriously. "Given Zizek's lack of attention to the specificity of filmic texts and of the filmic medium, it is difficult to understand his prominence in the film studies world, a prominence especially pronounced among young film theorists." Then, the turn: "Zizek has sparked a renewed interest in Lacan and psychoanalysis in the world of film studies because his thought opens up possibilities within the interpretation of cinema that that would otherwise not exist. It does so through the particular focus that runs through all of Zizek's filmic analyses. Though Zizek does often ignore textual and medium specificity, what he doesn't ignore is the way that films organize and deploy the spectator's enjoyment." Via Bookforum.

The Golden Compass opens next week and, in the Boston Globe, Donna Freitas offers her take on what Catholics are really afraid of:

These books are deeply theological, and deeply Christian in their theology. The universe of His Dark Materials is permeated by a God in love with creation, who watches out for the meekest of all beings - the poor, the marginalized, and the lost. It is a God who yearns to be loved through our respect for the body, the earth, and through our lives in the here and now. This is a rejection of the more classical notion of a detached, transcendent God, but I am a Catholic theologian, and reading this fantasy trilogy enhanced my sense of the divine, of virtue, of the soul, of my faith in God.

The book's concept of God, in fact, is what makes [Philip] Pullman's work so threatening. His trilogy is not filled with attacks on Christianity, but with attacks on authorities who claim access to one true interpretation of a religion. Pullman's work is filled with the feminist and liberation strands of Catholic theology that have sustained my own faith, and which threaten the power structure of the church. Pullman's work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox.

Via Brainiac Joshua Glenn. Related: Peter Chattaway in Christianity Today.

"Charlie Wilson's War is a very good-but-not-great political dramedy with a very solid and settled Tom Hanks, an agreeably arch and brittle Julia Roberts (in the finest sense of that term) and a brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman," writes Jeffrey Wells. More from David Poland: "It is a wonderful, misshaped, inspired, insipid mess of a good movie." And it "feels more schizophrenic than any [Mike] Nichols film I can recall." And Lou Lumenick asks, "Is it a coincidence that the fall's two most strenuously 'even-handed' war movies (and make no mistake, this is another war movie, no matter how entertaining) are released by Universal, whose corporate parent is a major war contractor?"

Nick Schager in Slant on Youth Without Youth: "Coppola so doggedly seeks to create a level of romantic/spiritual contemplativeness via formal experimentation that his reckless abandon - the plethora of repeated motifs, the oblique references, the deliberate artifice - does generate a modicum of intrigue and admiration. However, given his general failure to synthesize his ideas into either a compelling dramatic whole or an impressionistic conceptual treatise, the film principally stands as a great director's blast-off into crazy."

Also: "Oswald's Ghost only skims the surface of the short- and long-term social and political ramifications of JFK's death, and in the face of dueling conclusions - conspiracy buffs' staunch belief that Oswald didn't act alone, and others' conviction that he did - the film ultimately just shrugs its shoulders as if to say, 'Got me. You decide.'"

"I was dumped, flat broke, at a career low after watching my life fall apart in three months and working at a video store on New Year's Eve when I started to consider, In Search of a Midnight Kiss," writer-director Alex Holdridge tells Film Threat's Zack Haddad.

"Like [Wes] Anderson's typical heroes," suggests Evan Kindley at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, "the students in Godard's [La Chinoise] are both disciplined and listless at the same time: they do calisthenics to the rhythm of passages from the Communist Manifesto, then playfully grab each other's asses; they quiz each other about the fine points of dialectical materialism and shout down those of their number they consider 'revisionists'; they read aloud, always in that bored, sated way people read aloud in Godard movies; they do surprisingly little else.... And yet the kids are undoubtedly appealing - I don't think it's possible not to like Jean-Pierre Léaud - and their idealism and passion is in its way very moving."

"I have a confession to make: I don't much like Im Kwon-taek's films," admits Duncan Mitchel. "Oh, I respect them: the old man learned his trade doing hackwork, and worked his way up to arthouse fare and international fame.... Chang (aka Downfall) isn't one of Im's best-known films, but it's a good example of his virtues and his limitations." Also at Koreanfilm.org, Adam Hartzell: "D-War is more valuable as pedagogy for globalization than as entertainment."

Movie City News has ten questions for Roger Ebert.

"The buzz is that My Dream has the right stuff to earn an Academy Award." In the Los Angeles Times, John M Glionna tells the story behind the doc about the China Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe.

Writers' strike roundup:

• The strike "may have finally solidified [Nikki Finke's] position as a Hollywood power broker," reports Brain Stelter. For his New York Times piece, "more than a dozen executive producers, writers and agents offered to attest to her influence. But with those plaudits also come complaints - only anonymous ones - that Ms Finke plays favorites.... For many of her readers, Ms Finke's Web site has supplanted traditional media as a primary source of strike news. Before the strike, Ms Finke said Deadline Hollywood Daily averaged 350,000 page views a day. Since the beginning of the strike, she said the daily average had soared to about a million."

• Writers have kind of been having themselves a good time, to hear Brooks Barnes tell it, also in the NYT. What's more, they're winning on the PR front. Even Variety readers would agree, reports Cynthia Littleton, though her headline maintains: "WGA wins hearts; studios retain muscle."

• Online viewing tips. Scott Solary gathers links to the "Speechless" videos that've been posted so far at Deadline Hollywood Daily and points to Karina Longworth's take on the series at NewTeeVee.

At the House Next Door, Lauren Wissot finds I'm Not There to be "a beautiful wreck, one worth rubbernecking for." Related: The Shamus offers "20 Reasons to Be Stuck Inside a Multiplex with the Overpriced Popcorn Again." More from Ed Howard.

No Country for Old Men roundup: Alec Baldwin, Peter Chattaway, Edward Copeland, Glenn Kenny, Tasha Robinson and the Shamus.

In the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, Joanie Baker has a few fun stories about a local horror movie being made with a mere $25K. Thanks, Jerry!

"The most challenging and often the best-reviewed films of the autumn have all - almost without exception - done lousy business." Geoffrey Macnab looks into it for the Independent.

Online fiddling around tip. Dennis Cozzalio's word puzzle.

Online viewing tip #1. The trailer for In Bruges, the film that'll be opening Sundance. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #2. Video from Ray Pride: "Diego Luna on Los Angeles Vs Mexico and politics in Mexican filmmaking."

Online viewing tips. Creative Review rounds up a selection of music videos.

Fests and events, 11/27.

"The Greek-French director Costa-Gavras will be the President of the International Jury of the Berlinale 2008." And! The Homage "will be dedicated to the renowned Italian director Francesco Rosi," who "will receive the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement on February 14, 2008."

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez reports on an expansive state-of-the-doc program/party thrown by the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA, through Saturday), while Brian Brooks reports on a film anyone with any interest in documentaries is going to want to at least know about. In Wild Blue Yonder, Celia Maysles "exposes a deeper family rift that emerged after her father David Maysles's death, when her own mother battled Albert Maysles for control of previous films, against an internal pact made by the two brothers."

IndieWIRE also posts a heads-up for the busy week ahead: following an announcement of the Indie Spirit Awards in a couple of hours, the winners of the IFP Gotham Awards will be named; then, tomorrow, the Sundance competition lineup will be unveiled, followed on Thursday by lineups for the festival's other sections.

These "mumblecore" movies, they're "massively indulgent, irritating and aimless, or fantastically real, insightful and uncontrived. Either response is totally legitimate; these movies are totally a matter of viewer taste, mood, perspective," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "Hannah Takes the Stairs, which opens at the Red Vic this Friday, is the perfect case in point."

Kubrick at the Seoul Art Cinema: Through Sunday. Thanks, Jerry!

DVDs, 11/27.

"It was the autumn of 1952, and with a bad conscience, a rocky relationship, and little work for him in Stockholm, Bergman set to work on synthesizing all of this guilt, betrayal, and dissatisfaction into the first major work of his career." Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Sawdust and Tinsel: "[T]his is the world of all of Bergman's subsequent masterpieces, fully formed, if more savage on its surface."

More from Fernando F Croce at Slant: "It's easy to see why the film became one of Bergman's popular early successes: There's still a reliance on ponderous metaphors (phallic cannons, a scurvy old bear, a return-to-the-womb dream) that Bergman would prune as he moved toward the asceticism of the 1960s, but there's also a new intensity and directness of feeling, expressed in a series of powerhouse one-on-ones."

Updated through 11/28.

"It's been nearly two years since we started running our list of the '100 Greatest Films to Build Your DVD Collection,'" writes Tom Charity in the Vancouver Sun. "So, it's about time we confessed to a few infractions and inconsistencies." Take those into account and download the list as a PDF.

For IFC News, Michael Atkinson reviews Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Our Hitler, "an astounding, intellectually adventurous monument, and obviously a cinephile's required viewing, if in fact the cinephile in question wants to remain worthy of the label," and Peter Watkins's The Freethinker, "a four-and-a-half-hour essay on the life and legacy of August Strindberg, famed Swedish playwright, controversial misanthrope, notoriously disastrous family man and self-destructive genius. But it's not a straight-on mock-doc - like Syberberg's gargantua, it's a collage of formal ideas, mixing faux-documentary elements with cohesive dramatization, archival footage, photos, huge chunks of Strindbergian text, direct camera address, group discussions, documentary footage of the making of the film itself, texts by Watkins about Strindberg, the film and Watkins's outrageous, but indisputable, summary evaluation of modern media, and so on, at Herculean length and with the defiant seriousness of an obsessive Luddite."

This week, the New York Times' Dave Kehr reviews Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel, "his first to feel solidly like a Kurosawa movie" (more from Fernando F Croce in Slant), A Cottage on Dartmoor, revealing an Anthony Asquith who "still seems drunk on the possibilities of cinematic form," and Curtis Harrington's The Killing Kind, "an overlooked independent release from 1973... Harrington expertly balances camp humor and shocking cruelty to create a disturbing little movie that merits rediscovery."

"Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices is a typically ludicrous [Werner] Herzog production, stretching credibility to such a degree that I was surprised to find out, in research after the documentary, that a great deal of the film was actually true," writes Ed Howard.

"We, the viewers of today, like the viewers of yesterday (or the year the film was completed, 1977), can't see this film because nothing in it is recognizable." The film is Killer of Sheep. Charles Mudede explains in the Stranger. Related: Alex at motion picture, it's called on My Brother's Wedding.

"Visually there is plenty to appreciate and enjoy with Pickup on South Street but [Sam] Fuller's use of the close-up is the visual element that resonates deepest with me," writes Steve-O at Noir of the Week. Related: Annie Nocenti at Stop Smiling on Fuller's novel, The Dark Page.

Back in Slant, Rob Humanick recommends the Ultimate Edition of Nosferatu.

Dennis Lim spells out what makes for a good - and bad - set of DVD extras. Also in the Los Angeles Times: Casey Dolan's list of notable titles and sets slated for release just in time for Christmas and a shopping guide from Noel Murray.

"It's the dirty little secret that the DVD industry doesn't want you to know about, the scam that gives them more than one crack at your entertainment dollar while conning you into thinking you're getting more cinematic bang for your beleaguered buck." Bill Gibron at PopMatters on "The 'Unrated' Conspiracy."

DVD roundups: Bryant Frazer; and as always, keep an eye on the Guru.

Updates: John Waters has a list of DVD recommendations for NPR.

Jeff watches the second volume of The Films of Kenneth Anger at Cinema Strikes Back.

Bill Weber in Slant: "As part of this season's revival of Bobmania, 65 Revisited confirms the icon as a willing confessor of the calculation in his rich mythos." More from Camille Dodero in the Voice: "Watch these 63 minutes for the first time and you'll be haunted at least once by Cate Blanchett's Dylan avatar Jude Quinn."

Peter Martin writes up the "Indies on DVD" released today for Cinematical.

Dave Kehr on the state of the Ford a Fox box so far: "Having watched The Iron Horse in the new Fox version (with its excellent orchestral score by Christopher Caliendo), I can say with some confidence that Ford's first epic (the fourth of five features he would release in 1925) remains an astounding achievement, a suite of embedded narratives that expand and comment on each other, as audacious in its way as Griffith's Intolerance."

Update, 11/28: "[H]aving just watched Sawdust and Tinsel, a key developmental work for Bergman and yet probably the weakest of the many films I've seen by him, I nevertheless remain more convinced than ever that Bergman is a cinematic great," writes Ed Howard.

Interview. Jessica Yu.

Jessica Yu's followup to In the Realms of the Unreal, Protagonist, premiered at Sundance and we had two people on the ground who caught it and sent immediate word to the Daily. Brian Darr sets up the doc: "Posed with the problem of making a documentary with the great tragedician Euripides as an inspiration, Yu put out a call for people ready to tell their stories of a cathartic awakening that they had been traveling for too long down the wrong path." Craig Phillips noted that it "reminds me a bit of Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap, Out of Control, as it's an ambitious film with a quartet of subjects that don't always fully connect with each other but fascinate anyway."

Now that Protagonist is beginning a tour of theaters around the US, Aaron Hillis talks with Yu about interweaving four personal tales of catharsis and resolution.

Updated through 11/30.

"[E]ven if Yu is ultimately less interested in the intellectual, philosophical, or the spiritual than the strictly dramatic, her film makes for an engaging look at how we can lie to ourselves even as we search for an elusive truth," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE.

ST VanAirsdale talks with Yu, too, at the Reeler.

Updates, 11/27: "[F]ascinating, often touching stuff... is too neatly sculpted into highly intellectualized mounds of human observation intended for no other reason than to flatter Yu's fetish with Greek narrative plot structure and give her a platform to exhibit her latest animated achievements," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

In the Voice, Lisa Katzman tells the story behind Protagonist and Aaron Hillis follows up on his interview with a review: "Yu's rousing, difficult-to-classify exercise in parallel storytelling is surprisingly accessible, and all the more insightful for it."

Updates, 11/28: "Perhaps we're missing out on the whole classic-tragedy bit that is as true in contemporary society as it was in Euripides' time, but the film is at its best when it's allowing its subjects to tell their stories and not distracting us with, you know, puppets," writes Sara Vilkomerson in the New York Observer.

"[M]y respect for puppeteering has gone up tenfold," notes Robert Cashill. "Protagonist is a unique treatment of an unlikely subject, one that manages to be quite compelling even if you're at first a little resistant to its unorthodox aesthetic. But this was all, ahem, Greek to Yu as well, and that she approached the various aspects of the production with an open mind and heart makes for an absorbing, and fully cinematic, experience. She has pulled the strings extremely well."

Updates, 11/29: "Everyone in Yu's production has enough stories to fill an entire movie, but that's essential to its effectiveness," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "The plots follow similar trajectories, but the revelations are in the individual details."

Cathleen Rountree also talks with Yu.

For Filmmaker, Damon Smith talks with Yu "about Greek tragedy, human nature, and the creative challenges she faced making Protagonist."

Updates, 11/30: "The four men who relate their life stories in Protagonist, Jessica Yu's enthralling documentary exploration of people with obsessive needs for control and self-mastery, are all disillusioned (and extremely articulate) true believers," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "In all four men, the loss of certainty has far-reaching consequences."

"The film bears the mark of a real directorial talent, eager to push the documentary form in inventive directions, just like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, and for that alone, it deserves a nod of appreciation," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But while Yu is a hell of a filmmaker, her work to date has been ridiculously overdetermined. Where some documentarians approach their subjects and say, 'Tell me your story,' Yu seems to say, 'Let me tell you what your story is.'"

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

Protagonist and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might not seem to have much in common at first glance, admits Anthony Kaufman. "But perhaps proving Yu's point: the story of French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby is similarly Euripidean: brash workaholic womanizer suffers stroke and finds redemption and humanity in the end..."

The Savages.

"It's not something one often praises in a film, but there's a mundaneness to The Savages that is incredibly appealing," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "The film is about a brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a sister (Laura Linney) dealing with their ailing father (Philip Bosco). That is all. There is no wacky road trip where they all reconnect, or a romanticized bank heist that solves all their unaddressed problems. That simplicity is refreshing, even if the movie's tone is a little uneven."

New York's David Edelstein finds it "a delightful movie - the perfect companion piece (and antidote) to the year's other superb convalescent-dementia picture, Away From Her.... [T]he funny bubbles up from the sad, the sad gives the funny weight."

Updated through 11/30.

"[Tamara] Jenkins's sweet and tart sensibility is located halfway between the compassionate satire of an Alexander Payne and the comic sang-froid of a Todd Solondz," writes Newsweek's David Ansen.

"Linney, grinning like a teen-ager over her fibs, does her naughtiest, most secretive work yet," writes David Denby in the New Yorker.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 11/27: "Linney and Hoffman dutifully embody their roles, yet Jenkins never justifies having any interest in these cretins' plight," argues Nick Schager in Slant.

"An instinctive provocateur, Jenkins gleefully rubs the more graphic symptoms of dementia in our faces - as well she should, given the emotional fallout of dealing with a man who covers a bathroom wall with his own feces," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "But the movie also comes with the wistful sadness of a maturing filmmaker who understands that in matters of death, sorrow and black comedy often walk hand in hand."

Jenkins is a guest on Fresh Air.

"If any film comedy prior to The Savages so fully earns the characterization 'painfully funny,' I'd like to know about it," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Or maybe I wouldn't. Tamara Jenkins's long-awaited sophomore directorial effort - her debut, the sharp and strangely sweet Slums of Beverly Hills, is nearly a decade old - would be a farce of mortification were it not for the sad but stout heart that centers it."

Updates, 11/28: "Ms Jenkins has a gift for family brutality, but she herself isn't a savage talent," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "There isn't a single moment of emotional guff or sentimentality in The Savages, a film that caused me to periodically wince, but also left me with a sense of acute pleasure, even joy. It's the pleasure of a true-to-life tale told by a director and actors who've sunk so deep into their movie together you wonder how they ever surfaced."

"It's kind of a bummer, then, that Jenkins cops out a bit at the end, tying up things a little too neatly for characters who have been so wonderfully ragged around the edges," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "But thankfully, the climax isn't so awful that it wipes out all of the film's wonderfully snappy, snippy, spiky dialogue and relationships."

"One of the best movies of the year so far," declares the Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano. "For a tender, uncommonly perceptive look at sibling relationships and a profound meditation on death and the meaning we draw from experience, The Savages is singularly funny and seriously moving."

"In a welcome zap of cultural synergy, this week the Gallery Met opens an exhibit of artworks inspired by Hansel and Gretel, just in time to hold the sweaty, sibling hand of The Savages, Tamara Jenkins's warm, itchy, woolen jumper of a family film, as it sidles into the holiday fare fray," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler. More a series of snapshots than family portrait, one figure is conspicuously missing from the frame: the Mother Savage. Shrugged off in a single line, her handling (as well, to some extent, as that of Lenny, who bears allusions to misbehavior that are vague at best) is symptomatic of the parental misfire in a series of recent adult sibling movies, including The Darjeeling Limited and Margot at the Wedding."

Updates, 11/29: "[S]ince the movie only teeters on the brink of a pity party without relishing the mood, the grief doesn't venture beyond the point of softcore sadness," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

For Marcy Dermansky, "this well intentioned project... falls horribly flat."

Tribeca has video of Jenkins, Linney and Bosco talking about The Savages.

Ella Taylor profiles Jenkins for the LA Weekly, while Mark Olsen profiles Linney for the LAT.

Michael Guillén talks with Linney.

Updates, 11/30: Scott Tobias talks with Linney and Jenkins for the AV Club, where he writes: "As a sibling duo, Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman have a dynamic like Linney's with Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count On Me, at least in the sense that she's more together and responsible than her brother, though emotionally brittle in her own way.... The Savages charts their struggle with a humor and honesty that goes down surprisingly easy."

"The Savages has been rapturously received, not entirely without reason - Linney and Hoffman are both typically excellent, mining coarse nuggets of emotional truth from the sediment created by years of buried discontent," writes Mike D'Angelo for Nerve. "But I also think people are just inordinately happy that Jenkins - whose only previous feature, the ticklish comedy Slums of Beverly Hills, came out nine long years ago - has finally made another movie."

Mina Hochberg talks with Jenkins for Nerve.

Online listening tip. Jenkins and Bosco are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"There's much more wrong than right with The Savages," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "I can conceive of extended tortures more preferable to watching Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman (as Wendy's sad-sack professor brother Jon) play-act at sibling rivalry.... [T]here's no getting past the Actor's Studio performances of Linney and Hoffman, both awful, both confusing actorly tics and mannered tears for the subtlety and insight of a blood-tied familial relationship."

"I wouldn't call the film inspirational - it is too well observed to succumb to easy sentiment - but its realism is patiently engaging and subtly insinuating," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "And Linney and Hoffman are extraordinary; refusing to beg for our sympathy, they earn it moment by quotidian moment in performances so good, so lacking in showy effect, that they are almost certain to be overlooked this awards season. But that's OK. Honesty tends to receive its own, more lasting rewards in our remembering hearts."

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

"Whatever [Julian] Schnabel's posturings as a painter, he's a major film director, alive not only to light and texture but to characters' emotions - which twist the light and warp the textures and permeate the canvas," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Mathieu Amalric is heartbreaking in both his incarnations - as the lover in flashbacks and the légume (his word) in the present. It's his boyishness that gets to you: At 43, he has been hurled into the final stages of life before having had the chance to grow up, to atone, to contemplate his own mortality."

"You may think you've seen one too many 'uplifting' tales of handicapped heroes overcoming adversity: they are a staple of our therapeutically inclined culture," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "[The Diving Bell and the Butterfly] is something else: ravishing to look at, mercifully unsentimental, blissfully avoiding almost every cliché of the genre."

Updated through 12/1.

The New Yorker's David Denby finds "some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies.... [Jean-Dominique] Bauby's book is concise and lyrical; the film is expansive and sensual, pungent and funny - a much larger experience. The impossible subject has yielded a feast of moviemaking."

Michelle Orange talks with Amalric for IFC News.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto and New York.

Update, 11/27: "It's the most sensually assaulting movie in recent memory with the possible exception of Michael Bay's Transformers, and yet many of the same people who criticized Bay for his attention-deficient aesthetics are falling over each other to praise Schnabel," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Why? Because instead of ransacking the storehouse of commercial advertising for his inspiration, he steals his visual tricks from more highfalutin sources like Fellini and Stan Brakhage.... The Diving Bell and the Butterfly feels grotesquely calculated, especially the more Schnabel ratchets up the inspirational platitudes of exactly the sort that Bauby - who maintained an acerbic sense of humor about his situation until the very end - would have despised."

Update, 11/28: ST VanAirsdale has a note on Scott Foundas's review.

Updates, 11/29: "Painter, musician and general cultural dilettante, Schnabel shows genuine moviemaker instincts. Strangely, [Anton] Corbijn and other pseudo-biographers - such as Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant - don't." Armond White elaborates in the New York Press.

At the Reeler, ST VanAirsdale talks with Max von Sydow.

Jesse Ashlock gathers comments from a recent junket roundtable with Schnabel.

Online viewing tip. David Poland lunches with the bunch.

Updates, 11/30: "[C]uriously enough, a movie about deprivation becomes a celebration of the richness of experience, and a remarkably rich experience in its own right," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "In his memoir Mr Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy."

"With his unusually expressive and already slightly bulging eyes, Amalric makes an ideal Bauby; the disjunction between his sarcastic and penetrating thoughts (heard in voiceover) and his imploring, stricken gaze is genuinely heartrending," writes Mike D'Angelo for Nerve.

"The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly manages to be an exemplary film about the so-called triumph of the human spirit by largely upending every cliché the usual cinematic treatment of the triumph of the human spirit indulges," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"Much of the picture's power derives directly from the fact that the narrative is defined by relationships rather than events. It is through these scenes - notably those involving Bauby's estranged wife (Emmanuelle Seigner) and increasingly infirm father (Max von Sydow) - that a portrait of the real man takes shape," writes Andy Klein. "It's an undeniably bold experiment by any measure, well worthy of the Best Director award Schnabel picked up at this year's Cannes Film Festival. But it's also an imperfect experiment, too often undone by its own ambitions." Also in the LA CityBeat, Rebecca Epstein talks with Schnabel.

"Perhaps the most unexpected thing about Diving Bell is that this constant repetition of spoken letters, which sounds tedious in the abstract, becomes, because of the use of the supremely melodic French language, an almost sensual pleasure," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Finally finished with his pages, Bauby anxiously blinks the question, 'Does that make a book?' Indeed it does, and a most unexpected film as well."

"At times, Bell seems heightened and romanticized, particularly in the way everyone around Bauby remains supportive and attentive, even at their own expense," writes Tasha Robinson in the AV Club. "But that just prevents the film from becoming standard-arc disease-of-the-week fare, with its programmed trials and inevitable victories."

Online listening tip. Schnabel's on the FilmCouch.

Erica Abeel talks with Schnabel for indieWIRE.

"Schnabel has an alert, imaginative and unsentimental cinematic eye," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "He does everything he can to involve us in Jean-Do's struggle against stasis, which is perhaps less a 'triumph of the human spirit,' a fatuous phrase that ought to be banned from critical discourse, than it is a triumph of the human ego. This is all right with me - I don't think anything worthwhile is created without egotism pushing the effort along and it is good to see it functioning in such extreme circumstances. But still, somewhat shame-faced I have to admit that at some point in the film I began to hear a subversive voice whispering in my ear, and what it was saying was, 'Could you blink a little faster, pal?'"

Update, 12/1: "Amalric, previously best known in the United States as the neurotic, intellectual hero of the movies of Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queens, My Sex Life or How I Got Into An Argument) is a perfect choice for the part," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "A compact, cerebral actor, he's able to convey the brain at work behind that one left eye.... The figure Julian Schnabel cuts in the press - a Bacchanalian narcissist who openly revels in the money, power, and connections his artistic success has brought him - always makes me want to despise his movies. But his touch becomes finer with each one, and with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I have to cry 'uncle' - I don't know much about his paintings, but as a director, the guy is a true artist."

Thessaloniki Dispatch.

The festival wrapped yesterday, and Ronald Bergan takes a moment to fill us in on the highlights before heading out to Gijón tomorrow. See, too, his entry at the Guardian on the panel he was on in Greece, "Film Criticism on the Internet."

The buzz at the 48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival was around the big names, more of them than ever, that it managed to attract this year: John Sayles, John Malkovich, Danny Glover, William Klein, Alfonso Cuaron, Diego Luna, David Strathairn and Chris Cooper, all of whom gave master classes to packed houses. Giving the general public a chance to meet these luminaries and being able to question them is one of the strengths of this invigorating festival.

Updated through 11/27.

As usual, the accompanying exhibitions were an added attraction, one of them being photographs by the 79-year-old William Klein, the American (in Paris) director, photographer, painter and graphic designer. The exhibition could have been called, like the title of a recent book on portrait photography, The Theatre of the Face. There are wonderful faces that Klein has captured from all over the world, always seen affectionately. However, exceptionally, his eye on America is a savage one. They are mostly the faces of The Ugly American.

This was emphasized in his overwhelming feature-length film The Messiah, in which a fine performance of Handel's oratorio is illustrated, counterpoised, interrupted and contradicted by rhythmically cut images of contemporary life, mostly American, in which Las Vegas seems to stand in for Hell. The setting of one of the most sacred of texts by Klein, who announced that he was anti-religious and that Handel is his favorite composer, is almost more topical than it was in 1999 when it was made.

Apart from the guilty pleasure I had in watching as much of the 10-film Mikio Naruse retrospective as I could (guilty because I should have being seeing more Greek films), and realizing how modern his touching and humorous films are, I was able to see several of the movies in the international competition. Though the winner was the excellent Cai Shogun's The Red Awn, which won the Fipresci prize in Pusan a couple of months ago, when I was on the jury, by far the best and most original film, in my opinion, was an Indian film by Shivajee Chandrabhushan called Frozen (site). Shot in the northern Himalayas in superb black-and-white photography, as good as any in the past, it is a remarkably humane film that says much about ecology and politics without the slightest didacticism.

A curiosity was PVC-1 (site) by the 28-year-old Greek-born Spiros Stathoulopoulos. Shot in Colombia in one 85-minute continuous take, it shows the struggle of a woman to free herself from a time-bomb fitted around her neck. Intentional or otherwise, it comes over as a satire on the incompetence of the army and police rather than a thriller.

The best Greek film in competition was Thanos Anastopoulos's correction, which covered various themes such as redemption, immigration, nationalism and racism, in an understated manner. Although these themes, as treated, have a particular Greek significance, the film could be seen in a wider European context. At least it did not aim for an international market like the monumentally bad Greek-Spanish co-production, El Greco. The variety of Greek, Spanish and British actors struggle manfully against unspeakable dialogue in English and a dreadful screenplay, in which the narrator tells you throughout what you can see. It never for a moment suggests what made El Greco a great painter, and an upbeat ending is one that even Hollywood at its most puerile would have turned down. Incidentally, the big-budget movie is a huge box-office success in Greece.

- Ronald Bergan

---

More from Thessaloniki: Ray Pride on the Circuit.

Update, 11/27: Ray Pride's got more photos: parts 2, 3 and 4.

Shorts, 11/26.

"Director of stage and screen, Robert Lepage is criminally little-known by name in the US and yet he is arguably the most imaginative and talented multi-hyphenate of his generation," writes Jonathan Marlow, introducing his interview for SF360. Lepage's staging of The Rake's Progress can be seen at the San Francisco Opera through December 9.

"Though the infant mortality rate in filmed opera is high - famed fiascos include 1953's Aida with Sophia Loren miming to Renata Tebaldi's voice - we can think in compensation of Syberberg's Parsifal, Losey's Don Giovanni, Bergman's The Magic Flute," writes Nigel Andrews. "Next week we have the UK release of Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute: very different from Bergman's, possibly a candidate for smacking, but with moments of giddy grandeur."

Also in the Financial Times, Emanuel Levy talks with Daniel Day-Lewis about There Will Be Blood.

Here's a great idea for a list, and what's more, it's a fun read: Johnny Dee matches scientific theories - Hugo de Vries's Reality of Mutations, Schrödinger's Cat, for example - and matches them with movies based on, inspired by or simply inadvertently suggestive of. Even better is the news hook for the piece: Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, airing Monday on BBC 4, in which Mark Everett, better known as Mark E of the Eels, goes off in search of an explanation for his father's theory of many worlds. Matching movie: Sliding Doors.

Also in the Guardian: Emma Brockes talks with Ian McKellen and John Patterson dreads another season of Christmas movies. Related: Collin Souter's list of "the Worst Christmas Movies Ever!" at Hollywood Bitchslap.

José Padilha's Elite Squad, "a violent look at Rio's drug wars from the perspective of a SWAT team, has put him at the center of a furious debate over police violence and middle-class drug use and has become the most talked-about movie here since City of God in 2002. Critics have called Mr Padilha everything from an extreme leftist to a right-wing fascist." Alexei Barrionuevo talks with him about, among other things, the way the film has been "grossly misunderstood by some, in Brazil especially."

Also in the New York Times:

• Citing deals between HarperCollins and Sharp Independent and Random House and Focus Features, Rachel Donadio notes that the publishers "will get a cut of the box office sales, as well as revenue from DVDs, cable TV and other media. And the authors involved will get more say in choosing screenwriters, actors and directors. Some worry that the increasingly cozy relationship between Hollywood and publishing companies is changing expectations of literary success - and may even be changing the way novelists approach their work."

• "When Brad Pitt dropped out of the political thriller State of Play at the 11th hour on Wednesday, he did more than throw a wrench into the works of one of the highest-profile movie productions under way in a Hollywood already overheated by strike-related contingency planning. He might have helped tip the balance of power between actors and studios, at least temporarily, in the employers' favor." David M Halbfinger explains.

• David Carr lunches with Woody Harrelson: "He can riff on hemp, the dark ends of Big Pharma and the wages of conformity with alacrity. And he lives in Maui, a tough commute for a working actor, partly because he does not want himself or his family to be imprisoned by a grid of consumer culture and Los Angeles ambition."

• "When Sex and the City, the movie, began shooting in New York this fall, the sight of its stars was both commonplace and traffic-stopping, breathlessly chronicled by bloggers and gossip writers." Melena Ryzik, too, is on the set.

• Anna Kisselgoff remembers Maurice Béjart, "he French choreographer whose flamboyant and populist ballets made him the equivalent of a pop star in Europe.

"How do you solve a problem like a bloody, R-rated musical about a serial killer, starring movie actors who aren't professional singers?" Paul Brownfield tells the story behind Sweeney Todd and talks with Tim Burton.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, book reviews: Leslie S Klinger on Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters and Andrew Lycett's The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Arthur Conan Doyle; Erika Schickel on Steve Martin's Born Standing Up; and Nick Owchar on Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard.

Why would Peter Bart perpetuate the myth of "Bob Shaye the Gambler" in Boffo! How I Learned to Love the Blockbuster and Fear the Bomb, wonders Kristin Thompson.

"Over his entire career [Steve] Erickson has challenged readers with a fiercely intelligent and surprisingly sensual brand of American surrealism that can, at times, seem impenetrable," writes Jeff VanderMeer in the Washington Post. "For this reason, it surprised me that almost everything in Erickson's new novel Zeroville entertains so readily without seeming watered down or slight."

"Since 2000, the year Jimmy Corrigan was published, [Chris] Ware has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and the latest Penguin edition of Voltaire's Candide," writes Jeremy N Smith in the Chicago Tribune:

His work has been chosen for separate exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He has edited or helped edit at least three major anthologies of the best of the last century of American comics.

Now Ware has been called away once more from the drawing board, this time to edit The Best American Comics 2007, which includes exactly zero kids stories or superhero adventures. For several reasons, it is a strange book, and that strangeness speaks, I think, to why reading comics may currently be almost as challenging as it is rewarding.

And you'll have heard and/or seen that Ware's designed the poster for The Savages, a film we'll be hearing a lot more about this week.

An all-star list of avid readers chooses the best books of 2007 for the Observer, where Craig McLean profiles Natalie Portman and Jason Solomons braces himself for awards season: "Making art into competitive sport is clearly ridiculous - but you look a right curmudgeon saying such things when you're clutching a statuette and wearing a fancy dress."

The year is 1955... at StinkyLulu's place, home of the Supporting Actress Smackdown.

"[T]he burden of criticism, as an elucidation and not as an explanation, is not to build a film up (trumpet its many virtues) nor to tear a film down (harp its many deficiencies) - it is to simply offer the best (say the most interesting and comprehensive) picture of the object at criticism for the reader," argues Ryland Walker Knight.

It's not even December yet, but Entertainment Weekly has already chosen its "Entertainers of the Year: 25 Top Stars of 2007."

Damon Wise profiles Casey Affleck for the London Times.

Online listening tip. Colin Murray talks with Kevin Smith for the BBC. Thanks, Jerry!

Fests and events, 11/25.

"At the 48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival in the north of Greece, the moderator for a 'DIY' Masterclass with Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs) and Ry Russo-Young (Orphans, in competition here) begins precisely with the dread 'M' word, which the pair ably dismiss." At Filmmaker, Ray Pride introduces a clip and then describes what all happened next.

Ben Slater is organizing and moderating a panel on film blogs for the Singapore Writers Festival, running December 1 through 9. Click his name for participants and linkage.

For the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty previews The Cinema of Max Ophuls, running at BAM from Wednesday through December 18:

The consistency of his themes and his visual motifs from the first movie in the series - the elegant romantic tragedy Liebelei, made in Germany in 1933 - to his last completed work, the elaborate picaresque called Lola Montes (1955), is striking. Echoes of Liebelei can be heard very clearly in the American Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) and then again five years later in the French Earrings of Madame de...; and Lola Montes seems, in its less felicitous moments, just a gaudier version of Ophuls's 1934 Italian melodrama La Signora di Tutti.

In all these pictures, and in La Ronde (1950) and Le Plaisir (1952) as well, love and honor are tricky, maddeningly slippery things, and the camera, you often feel, has no choice but to remain in motion, framing and reframing the intimate moral geography of the characters' constantly changing situations.

Brian Darr's got a list: "Ten reasons to come to the Silent Film Festival's winter program at the Castro Theatre this Saturday, December 1."

"The title to Douglas Gordon's exhibit currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now - could mistakenly give the impression that it's a single compression, a montage, of elements of various moving-image works by various creators from the past five years," writes Marc Weidenbaum at Disquiet. "In fact, the works in question are all Gordon's own, and they're displayed..., not as a constant stream but as an installation, a darkened and nearly silent room full of monitors of varying sizes, some equipped with headphones."

Amsterdam Dispatch. 2.

David D'Arcy reviews three docs screened at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, running through December 2. For pix from the fest, look to indieWIRE.

At IDFA, there should be a special category for documentary comedy. The comedy tends to be unintentional, which is often the best kind.

Take Donkey in Lahore (site), an Australian documentary on what passes for love between a dreamer from Brisbane and a girl whom he encounters o the streets of Lahore, in Pakistan. You might as well call this doc The Life of Brian II. Faramarz K-Rahber's film follows star-eyed Brian as he travels from Brisbane to Pakistan to put on a puppet show. He's a talented puppeteer, but that isn't a craft that draws the groupies. In a huge square, he poses for a picture with a dark-eyed teenager named Amber who tells him teasingly that she wants to marry him. It turns out that this is one of the few sentences in English that she knows. No matter. Brian believes her, and he takes her up on it. And she's innocent enough to go along with it. And that's not the last stupid thing that he does.

In France, they call this kind of love-at-first-sight infatuation le coup de foudre - the thunderbolt. Brian is so dumb-struck after meeting the cute 15-year-old in Lahore with the big smile who asks him to marry her that he converts to Islam, taking the name Aamir. His hard-drinking wide-bodied Australian parents are amused. So are his lesbian sister and her partner. His fate is in Allah's hands.

Brian's hare-brained scheme to raise the funds to marry Amber involves building a puppet in the form of a donkey and convincing Pakistani television to film his puppet show. The puppet is a charming quirky creature in Brian's hands, but no one takes him up on the show, which leads to more miscommunication with a family that once thought all foreigners were rich.

This odd couple of Brian and Amber makes for the perfect extended sit-com. It's the clash of cultures where a quixotic man falls for a beautiful girl who turns out to be wrapped in several layers of tradition. When he's dealing with her family, half the time it's in translation with parents who speak no English.

The telephone calls between Brisbane and Lahore are skits in miscommunication that defy belief. Even more unbelievable, in the vein of Curb Your Enthusiasm, is Brian's resolve to go through with the marriage, even though he sells his house and spends most of his money while he waits dutifully for permission from Amber's parents. He rushes to Pakistan for his wedding, and then rushes back to Australia on his wedding night, because he can't afford the fee to change his flight. He's seen off by his wife in a wedding dress. Now that's a scene for a screwball comedy. In case you're wondering, they don't sleep together that night.

Sometimes the jokes come right out of a burlesque show. Brian shocks Amber and her parents when he tells them that his parents drink alcohol, as do his sister and her partner. When asked for more information about his sister, no one understands what a lesbian is, so Brian uses a vulgar Urdu word that is translated as "poofter." The jaws drop.

Donkey in Lahore is a fool's paradise in another way. Pakistan here is seen from inside Amber's family home, or from taxis taking Brian to and from the airport. It's a long way from the blocked streets of Karachi in A Mighty Heart, and it's odd to see a view from Pakistan that is so domestic, at a time when crowds are demonstrating in the streets and the government is condemned internationally for jailing its critics. But hey, at least our principal Asian ally in the war on terror is good for a few laughs.

The Western encounter with Islam, particularly its misperception of Iran, is what Mohammad Farokhmanesh wants to redress in Empire of Evil (site), a view into everyday life in Tehran through five people there. The director said that he made the film for a western audience in the hope of refuting the assumptions behind his title. (It's also for a western audience because it probably couldn't be shown in Iran.) You leave his film knowing more about Iran and Iranians than you might get from western media stories on the Iranian quest to make a nuclear bomb. For the whole picture, you'll have to see a lot more than this movie.

Yet Farokhmanesh won't let you forget that most Iranians are struggling with the strict rules of the Islamic Republic, and with an economy that keeps talented, motivated people underemployed. Serayesh, a young woman who teaches fencing to Iranian women, explains how she has been at a disadvantage in international competitions because she's forced to wear a headscarf under her helmet, and also required to wear an overgarment over her fencing suit. Married to a swimmer, she is not allowed to watch her husband compete. Her story reminds you of Offside, Jafar Panahi's brilliant film about girl soccer fans who dress as boys to sneak into matches at Tehran's largest stadium. When police catch the girls and cordon them off outside the stands, the guards are a captive audience for a debate on whether girls should be segregated out of sports events. You can guess who wins the argument, and you can also assume that nothing changes.

In one touching scene, young Golsa, a piano prodigy, is fitted for a headscarf that she will wear to school. A gentle mullah, another of the characters observed in the film, tries to argue that the veil honors women and does not demean them. None of the women interviewed in the film feels that way.

Women are also the most damaged economically by religious laws, but we follow characters through their daily lives and see that men, too, are hurting. Serayesh and her husband manage to get green cards, allowing them to live in the United States, but the two of them can't raise enough money to go there. She can't even find a part-time job. Abbas is a computer specialist who has to sell his computer for cash. He lives in a bare set of rooms with his retired father and disabled mother. He is also a Basiji, a volunteer to martyr himself in war. One brother, also a Basiji,  was killed in the Iran-Iraq War, and we visit his grave with Abbas. We also see Tehran on the national day to commemorate those martyrs, some of whom were between 13 and 15 when they were sent onto battlefields to die. Would a new generation of martyrs volunteer to fight in the event of the US invasion that we keep hearing about? The Bush administration would do well to consider that possibility before it declares that Iran will be the next "slam dunk."

Farokhmanesh, a resident of Germany for the last 15 years, spent a year (including 50 days of shooting), with official permission, to assemble his small "cast" and film The Empire of Evil. He admits that the title on his application for permission to shoot was The Wrong Picture, which may help explain why he got official clearance for a documentary that shows ordinary people chafing at the limits on their lives.

The Empire of Evil has a clean PBS look to it and a "balanced" tone in its gentle probe into the lives that Iranians actually live. No protesters are on-screen, no participants in the movements of students, women and bloggers who have been targeted for persecution by the regime. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it shows an Iran that stands somewhere between militant Islam and militant pro-Americanism. That's likely where most Iranians are.

For more on the West versus Islam, The Putin System, by Jean-Michel Carre and Jill Emery reminds us that Vladimir Putin mobilized his electorate in the wake of the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow that he blamed on Muslim Chechens whom Putin called "wild animals." It turned out that the wild animals were really trained agents of the FSB (former KGB), where Putin had received his training. It also turned out that Russians were willing to believe anything about Chechens. It didn't help that Chechen commandos were responsible for the attack on a school in Beslan in 2000 that took the lives of 334 civilians. It was Putin's 9/11, the doc's narrator tells us.

The inquiry into a system that returns Russia to Soviet-style repressive government (and vast wealth for a business elite) deploys interviews, archival images and first-person narration, Adam Curtis-style. Not quite at Curtis's edgy level, but worth a view for a one-stop primer, The Putin System shows you post-communist Russia in the hands of a hard-line communist. And Putin's approval ratings are at more than 60 percent. The film has already played on television in Australia and Canada. More to come.

Shorts, 11/23.

"With all the ink spilled over the resurgence of the western, [Sam] Peckinpah, the most influential and talented director of westerns of the past 50 years, and for my money the greatest of all American filmmakers, has received short shrift," writes Michael Sragow in the Los Angeles Times. "His erratic output and excesses, his long-declining energy and his pop-culture image as a purveyor of mindless (versus brainy) machismo long ago gave the genteel and ungenerous excuses not to take him seriously. In that way, and others, he was like Norman Mailer.... Peckinpah would have been the ideal director for movie versions of Mailer's most disreputable novels."

"Several years ago a producer approached me to make a feature film about Boudica (yes, Boudica, not Boadicea), the queen of the Iceni who gave the Roman invaders a bloody nose in AD 60." And then, several years went by. But, as he explains in the London Times, Ken Russell did eventually get to make his film and, if you click on his name, you can watch two clips from it.

"Reg Park, who passed away yesterday after a long struggle with cancer at the age of 79, was first and foremost a world champion bodybuilder, but his brief and all-but-accidental acting career in the 1960s brought to the screen the most fully realized portrayals of Hercules ever filmed," writes Tim Lucas, who's revisited Hercules in the Haunted World - with the sound turned off.

Michael Caine: "Can we stop for two minutes so I can have a glass of water. I haven't been this fucking nervous since I did live television." Kenneth Branagh recalls a real-time run-through of Sleuth with Harold Pinter on hand for the first time. Related: "It is unaccountable that Branagh, still under 50, has sunk so low and felt bound to accept the invitation to remake Sleuth," blogs David Thomson. "Perhaps he was over-praised once. Perhaps he was too willing to believe all his notices. It is a long way back, but half an hour of Conspiracy will convince you - this is a real firebrand of an actor with an uncommon sense of wickedness."

Also in the Guardian:

• John Patterson remembers Stanley Baker, "that transitional figure between the Richard Burton generation (Baker was Burton's drinking pal and understudy), and the regional actors who came after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He had the classical training of the former, and, with his impoverished background, his Rhondda Valley socialism and his air of menace and sexual confidence, he was not just 'authentic' like his regional juniors Finney, Caine and Connery; he was real."

• "[T]he Hollywood blacklist forced artists to purge themselves and inform, or use fronts, pseudonyms and/or go into exile. La-La-Land leftists relocated to sanctuaries in Mexico, France and even Franco's Spain to make movies. The Yanks came to Britain, too." And it's these UK stories that Ed Rampell, author of Progressive Hollywood: A People's Film History of the United States, tells.

• "Today, Hollywood is often derided for its liberal agenda, but is it switching sides on abortion?" asks Cath Clarke.

• "It used to be the case that studios would simply adapt a graphic novel for the screen, usually with dubious results," writes Ryan Gilbey. "Increasingly, though, the traffic is moving in the opposite direction, with film-makers themselves branching out into graphic novels, incorporating that art form as an alternative storytelling tool rather than simply an adjunct or cash-in."

• Peter Bradshaw likes Rescue Dawn - but not Sleuth. Related: James Mottram talks with Werner Herzog for the Independent.

• And: "The studio behind the long-awaited big screen adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass is to take the makers of a documentary with a similar title to court over claims they are are trying to unfairly cash in on the film's release."

For the Age, Philippa Hawker talks with Kriv Stenders about Boxing Day, "partly improvised, made on the tightest of budgets, shot on digital video with a single location and a cast of six."

Among the New York Times' "100 Notable Books of the Year" is Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, reviewed in March by Clive James, alongside an excerpt from Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life.

Also in the NYT:

• Another list: Boxed Sets. Of music, that is.

• With Who Is Norman Lloyd?, Matthew Sussman "has made a valentine to a show business legend," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "But luckily this is a rare case in which the subject is, by consensus, such an accomplished man and decent fellow that the director can't be accused of overdoing it."

• Also: "Based on a novel by Tetsuo Takashima, Midnight Eagle addresses the strained, unequal military relationship between the United States and Japan, likened in various subplots to that of a distant, inept or otherwise inadequate parent and his dependent child."

• "Everything's Cool, a documentary directed by Daniel B Gold (who narrates) and Judith Helfand, and adorned with clever animations by Jeremiah Dickey and Emily Hubley, traces the politics of global warming politics back to 1987, when the phenomenon was more commonly called the greenhouse effect," writes Stephen Holden. "According to the movie the issue didn't become politicized until the oil and coal industries recognized a threat to their economic well-being and undertook a misinformation campaign that continues to this day."

• Also: "He Was a Quiet Man, a surreal creep show with a scatological sense of humor, tosses out ideas about vigilante justice, sanity and madness, personal redemption and corporate duplicity with the abandon of a crazed juggler tossing pins too high to catch."

The pace has picked up again at A Film Canon.

"Why is it that museums can't get enough of [Kara] Walker's work?" asks Barry Schwabsky in the Nation.

Online viewing tip. The "Speechless" campaign is rolling out a video a day at Deadline Hollywood Daily.

Fests and events, 11/23.

"French director Philippe Garrel is one of the true enigmas of the film world," writes Josh Rosenblatt in the Austin Chronicle. "Born in Paris in 1948, an up-and-coming director by the time he was 21, friends with Godard and other big names in the New Wave, a longtime lover and collaborator of singer and Velvet Underground icon Nico, an award-winning director of more than 25 movies over the last 40 years, and still he's essentially unknown here in America." French Maverick, Rebel Auteur: Four Films of Philippe Garrel runs from Tuesday through December 18.

In Paris, through December 1, the 14th Rencontres Internationales will create during 10 days a space of discovery and reflection between new cinema and contemporary art at the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, the Jeu de Paume national museum, the movie theatre l'Entrepôt, the Beaux-arts de Paris, the Laboratoire." Quite the guest list, too.

"The City of the Future consists of 68 pieces of film footage, assembled after deep delving in the National Film Archive, shot around the turn of the 20th century," writes Robert Hanks in the Independent. "Most of the footage consists of single shots, lasting perhaps a minute, of street scenes in London, Bradford, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, Dublin and elsewhere. Crowds waving at trains, a ship being launched, the mayor of Halifax entering his carriage; or, more usually, crowds and traffic obliviously going about their business. It is, as you will know if you have seen any of Mitchell and Kenyon's films of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, utterly riveting." Through February 3 at the BFI Southbank Gallery.

"The African Diaspora Film Festival has grown each year since its genesis in a kitchen-table conversation between a couple of film fanatics frustrated by the shallow pool of black films in New York," writes Felicia R Lee in the New York Times. "Starting today the 15th edition of the festival will offer something for just about anyone interested in the global black experience: 102 films from 43 countries in a 17-day feast of documentaries, comedies, musicals, dramas and romances." Through December 9.

Pasolini, 11/23.

"Poet, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, Communist, Christian, moralist, pornographer, populist, artist: 32 years after he was murdered by a teenage hustler (who later tried to recant his confession), Pier Paolo Pasolini remains, perhaps above all, a subject for furious argument," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "No single institution, art form or political tendency could contain his angry, exquisite energies, so it makes sense that a New York retrospective of his work would be spread around the city, encompassing concerts, performances and exhibitions as well as film screenings. The program, called Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poet of Ashes and organized by the Italian Cultural Institute, continues through Dec 18. The heart of it - an 11-film program at the Film Society of Lincoln Center called Heretical Epiphanies - opens next Wednesday with a screening of Mamma Roma."

Updated through 11/29.

"Pasolini's shadow hangs over much of contemporary European art cinema," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Directors like Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé and Michael Haneke, who've combined sexual provocation with a grim view of consumerist culture, owe a great deal to him. Indeed, Haneke put Salò on a list of his favorite films for Sight & Sound magazine in 2002. He claims that his first viewing made him physically ill for weeks; he owns it on DVD but has yet to work up the courage to watch it again."

The Passion of Pasolini series runs on through December 1 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the East Bay Express blurbs The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights.

Update, 11/27: "A kindred spirit of Luis Buñuel, with an inferior sense of humor but more palpable existential compulsions, Pier Paolo Pasolini perpetually rebelled against moral hegemony, commiserating with outcasts and creating and dying as one." In the Voice, Ed Gonzalez walks us through the films slated for screening.

Update, 11/28: "No other major filmmaker from the 60s continues to seem as strikingly contemporary," Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Peña tells Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. Thanks, Jerry!

Update, 11/29: The series "summarizes how Pasolini went against the classical conventions of Italian cinema (heresy) and innovated ways to find the sublime in the lowest, meanest aspects of social experience (epiphanies in the sense of transcending ordinary Italian Neorealism)," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Amsterdam Dispatch. 1.

David D'Arcy on two films he's caught at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, which runs through December 2.

The IDFA is celebrating its 20th anniversary. I began my stay in Amsterdam by watching a film that was more than 35 years old, a relic of the anti-war movement from the early 1970s.

FTA, directed by Francine Parker, is a film of the tour of the Fuck The Army show, a theater revue put on by Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Holly Near (remember her?) and the singer Len Chandler in 1972. The troupe's goal was to broaden protest against the Vietnam War by performing at army bases in the US and in Asia - right outside the gates of bases in Okinawa, the Philippines and Japan. Local activists were happy to join in the fun.

The message was one of solidarity with the troops. Skits about the idiocy, brutality and petty tyranny of military life (with Fonda singing and dancing) are intercut with tour footage and often poignant interviews with soldiers about their opposition to the war. "FTA" also stands for "Free The Army." Crew members of the USS Coral Sea   aircraft carrier present a petition condemning the bombing of the mainland by planes from their ship. Len Chandler, a singer with an easy and friendly stage presence shares the duties of MC with a young Sutherland, fresh from the Robert Altman film, M.A.S.H.

Calling the film FTA must have seemed like just the right marketing approach. Using the abbreviation for the title meant that you could use the word "fuck" while not using it, satisfying your audience's predilection for shocking and being shocked, saying something provocative and unsayable (on screen) about the war and American politics, but not doing anything that would keep the film out of theaters.

What did keep the film out of theaters, until now, was Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi in 1972, which she made without telling anyone else involved in the movie, according to Len Chandler, who spoke briefly after the film was shown last night. Fonda went to Hanoi in July of 1972. Her photographs there, notably a beauty shot of her sitting at the controls of an anti-aircraft gun, were just the high-octane that the Nixon administration needed to fuel its campaign to discredit the anti-war movement among the huge mass of mute patriots that Nixon liked to call the "Silent Majority." Once the photos were all over television and on the front pages of every newspaper, and the reaction from Middle America seemed fiercely negative - the Nixon dirty tricks crowd made sure of that, in a rehearsal for its slime strategy in the 1972 presidential campaign - the film was pulled from theaters by its distributor at the time, American International Pictures. Bear in mind that AIP was the distributor of no-budget classics like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Wasp Woman, A Bucket of Blood, and the youth revolution saga, Wild in the Streets. You might have thought that mini-mogul Sam Arkoff of AIP would have had some sympathy for guerrillas, but not if it mobilized the folks in Nebraska against his films. You can also bet that Nixon had his friends in Hollywood apply the thumbscrews.

In the film, with her fist in the air much of the time, Fonda describes the show's improvisational theater as "political vaudeville." Its parodies of officious officers and dance numbers skewering male chauvinism in the military tend toward the earnest, yet you won't hear anyone (but soldiers) saying "fuck the army" these days. "Support our troops" is the mantra you get throughout most of the media - and certainly from all the presidential candidates. If there were a military draft, you'd be hearing "fuck the army" a lot more. But if we had a draft, there never would have been an invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration. Remember that it was the end of the draft in 1973 that brought most of the demonstrations against the war to an end.

Some of the music is poignant, especially "Soldier, We Love You," sung by its author, Rita Martinson - so poignant that it's haunting to see this revue at a time when the war in Iraq drags on, amid the completion of the largest US embassy ever, costing more than half a billion dollars in Baghdad, a long-term commitment if there ever were one - not to mention talk of a possible invasion of Iran. If you're wondering where Jane Fonda is now, she is a self-described "liberal feminist Christian." According to film web sites, FTA was not on the bill in the tribute to her earlier this year at Lincoln Center. It's a shame, but no surprise. These days, Fonda's battles seem to be with Botox.

Word on the Internet is that Fonda is the obstacle to releasing FTA again. No mention of her opposition to releasing the film was made last night by a heavier and greyer Len Chandler, who is in Amsterdam to show the film. Chandler, who noted the recent death of director Francine Parker, spoke optimistically about bringing FTA back to theaters, but said no deal had been made. Releasing the film is enough of a challenge, but don't expect much of an audience in the event that a miracle takes place and the film gets a theatrical distributor. When Rialto Pictures re-released Peter Davis's classic Hearts and Minds a few years ago, there was a chorus of approval from the press, yet barely anyone showed up.

Chandler told the audience last night that the film was in the hands of David Zeiger, director of the 2005 doc, Sir! No, Sir!, about the anti-war movement among the military during the Vietnam War.

Another war story is explored in The Champagne Spy, by Nadav Schirman, which tells one of the many adventure tales of Mossad agents in the early days of Israel who took on the most improbably identities as spies. This documentary is the story of Ze'ev Gur Arie, a German-born Jew who was set up in 1960 as Wolfgang Lotz, a German ex-SS officer who became a horse breeder in Egypt, where German atomic scientists after the war were at work on developing a nuclear bomb program.

The film is, in part, an adaptation of Lotz's autobiography, also called The Champagne Spy, which gives more details about the nature of his espionage than you'll get in the film. Here's a 1970 report from Time.

The Champagne Spy tells the spy's story from the perspective of his son Oded (Udi), who must be 50 now, living in the US with his family. Udi recalls living in Paris in the 1960s, with his father "away on business" most of the time. It didn't take long for the boy to figure out his father was a spy, although the details weren't all spelled out. We hear about the operation from a series of ex-Mossad officers who tell of how the charming Lotz found his way into the tiny German scientific circle, and into Egyptian society. Lotz loved the good life, and it was his new identity that enabled him to live it. His weakness was that he became addicted to that life of champagne and women, and to the character that enabled him to live a masquerade. Eventually he fell in love with a German woman in Egypt, and married her, a move which made his ruse even more credible, until a servant discovered a transmitter in a bathroom scale and told the authorities. What else made the servant turn in his master?

When Lotz, his wife Waltraud, and other Germans are arrested, Lotz maintains his German identity. He claims that he's been blackmailed, that he worked for the Israelis because they were threatening to reveal his Nazi past. It worked. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, not hanged, as he would have been if the Egyptians had learned that he was an Israeli. Once a prisoner exchange happens after the Six Day War, Lotz is hailed as a hero in Israel.

This documentary sees him as something different - a man who betrays his wife, even if it is in the service of spying for Israel. His son can forgive him for going to live in Germany, which Lotz does, but he never forgives him for abandoning his mother. Mossad commanders and agents confess regretfully that they knew about it all, and allowed Lotz to do as he wanted. There certainly seems to be a feature film here. If one has already been made, please correct me. Let's hope this one is better than Munich.

There's no denying that the personal story of The Champagne Spy is heartbreaking, which is what most dramatic feature producers are after. Missing from Schirman's documentary is a picture of the people whom Lotz was observing. Why did the Germans work for the Egyptians? Schirman suggests it was mere money, that there weren't too many jobs for Nazi nuclear scientists (although we now know that most of them did find employment, thanks to the US). I imagine that's partly true, although somehow I think there was probably more to it. How did the Germans feel about developing a bomb that must have been intended for use against Israel? Also, the action taken by Israel against the Germans in the film is limited to a few letter bombs, which indeed do plenty of damage. What information did Lotz get? What happened to the German community in Cairo after his arrest, and after his identity was revealed once the prisoner exchange was completed? Perhaps the Israeli audience that grew up with the Wolfgang Lotz myth knows these details all too well. The rest of us don't.

Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1921 - 2007.

Fernando Fernán Gómez, one of the most respected veterans of the Spanish stage and film industry, died in Madrid on Wednesday after several days in the hospital.... The multi hyphenate is mainly known as an actor but was also active as a director, screenwriter, novelist and poet. He starred in over 200 film and television roles and many more on stage and wrote and directed almost thirty features.

Boyd van Hoeij, european-films.net.

Hundreds of mourners filed past the casket of Fernando Fernán Gómez in Madrid on Thursday to pay their last respects to one of Spain's most important filmmakers. Fans, colleagues from the Spanish cinema and theater world and politicians all gathered at Madrid's Teatro Espanol.

The AP.

See also: Wikipedia (English), El Pais (Spanish) and Der Tagesspiegel (German).

Shorts, 11/21.

"[M]ore than the films that were selected for this year's Oscar Shortlist is the stunning list of films - both in length and in quality - that did not hear the Academy's call," writes AJ Schnack, who not only considers the each of the films now in the running for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar but also lays out "some of the important facts behind this list of 15." In a followup entry, AJ comments: "In one fell swoop, the Academy's decade-long campaign to repair its scandal-plagued 1990s reputation of nominating television-styled or extremely conventional films, was reversed."

"There Will Be Blood is a vivid, sprawling parable about greed and moral corrosion," writes David D'Arcy for Screen Daily. "[Paul Thomas] Anderson's film joins a long line of moral dramas about the allure of riches and the corruptibility of Americans in the stampede to accumulate wealth. Based loosely on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel, Oil!, it evokes the race for gold in John Huston's 1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It also calls the mind the exploitation of the desert in Giant (1956) and Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951), and, like Citizen Kane (1941), it culminates in the wretched gilded loneliness of a friendless tycoon." Related: PTA in Mean Magazine at goldenfiddle.

Peter Chattaway, who's been keeping an eye on The Golden Compass, spots what may be the first review. The Telegraph's John Hiscock writes that "the investors who put up the £90 million cost of the film can rest easy - though it lacks the impact or charm of The Chronicles of Narnia, the special effects are extraordinary and the film is sure to be a success with young audiences." Here's the bit many have been curious about: Director Chris Weitz "has changed the story's rejection of organised religion, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, in favor of a more general attack on an unspecified dogmatic authority that seeks to rid the world of 'free thinkers and heresy.'"

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly makes a strong bid to be the best foreign-language picture of the year, if not, flatly, the best picture in any language," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

The L Magazine's Mark Asch is less enthusiastic: "Beholden both to the whirling subjectivity of a cloistered mind and to the excruciating labor of blinking memory into words, the film achieves immersion in neither: too impressionistic to evoke paralysis and too process-oriented to offer more than a skim over lust-for-life shorthand by way of product."

Also, Cathy Erway on The Savages: "Tamara Jenkins's new film is not merely a sensitive, well-acted black comedy." Related: Ben Gold's report: "The Reeler squeezed into a cramped press pen Monday night near Union Square for the New York premiere."

"Eleven years since the publication of Poetics of Cinema Raúl Ruiz continues his articulate, erudite, and insightful rumination in Poetics of Cinema 2, a lithe and infectious, yet densely referential, cross-pollinated exposition on the art and nature of image-making in an age of an overexposed cinema that, in its aesthetic democratization and crass commercialization, has fostered a paradoxical culture that is both sacred and banal, rarefied and dying." Writes acquarello.

"Hollywood is to fill in the Bible's 'missing years' with a story about Jesus as a wandering mystic who travelled across India, living in Buddhist monasteries and speaking out against the iniquities of the country's caste system." Randeep Ramesh reports on the project to be based on the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ.

Also in the Guardian: "The arrival of the French nouvelle vague at the start of the 1960s seemed to have swept all before it," writes Ronald Bergan. "However, clinging to the wreckage were representatives of what François Truffaut and his new wave colleagues pejoratively called le cinéma du papa. The line of classic cinematic French storytelling was continued in the shape of Claude Sautet, Bertrand Tavernier and Pierre Granier-Deferre, who has died aged 80."

The BBC's planning to produce new versions of all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, report Chris Hastings and Stephanie Plentl in the Telegraph: "It has enlisted Sam Mendes, Oscar-winning director of American Beauty and Road to Perdition, and his Neal Street company to produce the entire canon over a 12-year period. Some of the country's biggest stars - including Kate Winslet, who is married to Mendes, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Jude Law, Dame Helen Mirren and James McAvoy - are being tipped to take part in what will be one of the BBC's most expensive and ambitious drama series." Via Jason Kottke.

Roger Ebert writes an open letter to Werner Herzog: "You have done me the astonishing honor of dedicating your new film, Encounters at the End of the World, to me."

Jürgen Fauth bumps into yet another reason one of greatest magazines in the US really needs to renovate its film department.

At the Reeler, Lewis Beale summarizes all that's wrong with "entertainment journalism," which "has practically become an oxymoron, often uttered derisively," and offers two suggestions as to what might be done about it.

"Based on the video game franchise of the same title, Hitman exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It's bang, boom, blah - action movies for bored dummies." More from Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "This may only be my quirky way of thinking, but if you wanted to move through the world as an invisible hit man responsible for more than 100 killings on six continents, would you shave your head to reveal the bar code tattooed on the back of your skull? Yeah, not me, either."

Raymond De Felitta's been reading Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King: "The main thing you come away with is how tough - really tough - old show-biz guys were."

Dennis Cozzalio's book of the moment: Theodore Roszak's Flicker.

For New York, Sam Anderson reads Steve Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up: "In the wildest and craziest decade of American pop culture, the only figure to emerge with the official tag of 'wild and crazy' was someone with the disposition of an accountant."

Cineuropa's new "Film in Focus": White Palms, from Hungary.

Boyd van Hoeij turns his attention at european-films.net to contenders for the Foreign Language Oscar.

Peter Nellhaus on Rivette's latest: "What perhaps wrongly bothered me was that [The Duchess of Langeais] resembled the kinds of films that the Cahiers du cinéma crowd objected to fifty years ago - too well mannered, too dependent on dialogue, and no surprises of any kind."

"Everyone knows what a Steven Spielberg movie is, or a Jerry Bruckheimer film. But few people could describe a Brian Grazer project, except to say that it will probably make a lot of money." Allison Hope Weiner profiles the producer for the New York Times.

Margot at the Wedding gets Dennis Harvey thinking about Jennifer Jason Leigh: "It's true that mainstream audiences never really embraced Leigh... Leigh resisted being ingratiating or easy to understand and consistently played gawky characters in difficult moral circumstances.... She's as gifted as any actress of her generation but hasn't quite scaled the high-profile heights of variably contemporary thespians such as Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, or Nicole Kidman." And Scott Tobias interviews Leigh for the AV Club - where Nathan Rabin talks with Jeremy Davies.

Back in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "By turns moving and excruciating, [Kurt Cobain About a Son raises as many questions as it answers," writes Kimberly Chun. "Eerily dovetailing with About a Son by way of a cover of Bowie's 'The Man Who Sold the World' and a Queen joke regarding ex-Germs guitarist Pat Smear, the Unplugged performance has long been loaded with the stuff of quintuple-platinum legend and fan speculation regarding Cobain's death, which occurred just four months after the program aired on Dec 14, 1993 on MTV."

Writers' strike roundup:

• "According to [one] theory, the writers strike seems likely to last a long time, pushing studios to grab promising material that's ready to go. Some even speculate that the demand could be a boon to the foreign-film market as buyers look for inexpensive movies of quality," writes Gina Piccalo in the Los Angeles Times. "That's one view of the upcoming festival season. The other is that dismal box-office returns from a string of fall indies have made some buyers more cautious than usual about festival films."

• "[A]s the writers strike enters its third week, I think the future belongs to a tantalizing new hyphenate: the writer-entrepreneur," writes Patrick Goldstein, also in the LAT. An example, he argues, can be found in filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, John Lasseter and George Lucas, "filmmaker-entrepreneurs, artists-turned-businessmen who helped start their own companies to further their work, became financially independent and created a world that operates under a radically different set of rules from the vacuous studio assembly lines. It's telling that the current strike is about new media yet both sides seem to be following old-school models. Writer Guild members, listen up. There is a lesson here."

• Mark Evanier offers a history of WGA strikes past in the New Republic.

• Online viewing tip #1. "David Poland sits down and talks with Oscar-winning Writer-Director Paul Haggis, Actor Scott Wilson, and Showrunner Marjorie David to discuss the current WGA strike." Parts 1 and 2.

• Online viewing tip #2. Starting tomorrow, that is. That's when Nikki Finke will be hosting a series of PSAs featuring movies stars - lots of movie stars, and big ones, too - in the WGA's "Speechless" campaign.

As the calendar drags us toward list-making season, it's heartening to see a fun one early on: Film Threat's "Frigid 50: The Coldest People in Hollywood."

"In a mystifyingly complex world, I think a British film should probably say something about our identity, or our past, or our shared vision of the future." James Nebitt, who'll be hosting the British Independent Film Awards next Wednesday in London, writes up a top ten.

Mike D'Angelo writes up Esquire's "six best performances of 2007."

In the Voice:

• Ella Taylor on the "gentle homage," Yiddish Theater: A Love Story. More from Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT: "[A]s we watch the dwindling audiences and desperate fund-raising attempts, the survival of the theater becomes the gateway to a passionate argument for the survival of an entire culture." And Vadim Rizov at the Reeler: "As Yiddish Theater jogs along, it becomes an unintentional time-capsule of a New York that has changed radically in just seven years (never more revealingly than when actor Joad Kohn offers up a brief tour of Hasidic, pre-hipster Williamsburg). For better or worse, [Zypora] Speisman (who died shortly after her theater) believed that people need their culture and their roots whether they know it or not; for everyone else, cultural flux is a frustrating but undeniable force."

• Julia Wallace on Everything's Cool, "a well-intentioned but glib documentary about global warming."

• Aaron Hillis on the "weirdly maudlin" Midnight Eagle and on This Christmas: "The cast has spirit, but the dialogue and situations are phonier than the Yule log on TV." More from Laura Kern in the NYT: "Boisterous and bittersweet, the film is not dull, but it does feel hopelessly overstuffed, with scant time to devote to any one story line."

Sheila Weller profiles Michelle Phillips for Vanity Fair.

"My favorite Hammer bad girl turns 70 today and I want to wish her a very happy birthday!" Kimberly Lindbergs salutes Ingrid Pitt.

In Slate, Troy Patterson revisits A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving: "It affirmed the conviction that Charlie Brown is not just a good man, but a beautiful loser."

"Nearly two years after his passing, two biographies - and we use that word in the most liberal sense - arrive to theoretically sort out the details and attempt to explain Thompson and his methods." Ray Young reviews Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour's Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S Thompson and Anita Thompson's The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr Hunter S Thompson.

Also only somewhat film related, but Ronald Jones comments in frieze on a 16 billion pixel image of Leonardo's The Last Supper. "What's the importance? The online version is 1,600 times more concentrated than an image taken with a typical 10 million pixel digital camera, meaning that it is literally more than the naked eye can see."

Online viewing tip #3. At Filmmaker, Jason Guerrasio's got the trailer for Teeth.

Online viewing tip #4. As you'll have heard, Cloverfield has a site and a new trailer.

Online viewing tip #5. "It's currently available only in a Spanish-dubbed form but the first trailer for Spanish cult director Alex de la Iglesia's English-language debut has arrived." Twitch's Todd Brown will point you to the trailer for The Oxford Murders.

Online viewing tip #6. Flickhead's got a fine montage by Slavko Vorkapich.

Online viewing tip #7. Amazon's infomercial for the Kindle. Seriously. It ain't cinema, but you do need to know about this device. For some quick yet sharp analysis, turn to Anil Dash. To really wallow in the implications of an e-reader from the most powerful company in the book business, see Stephen Levy's cover story for Newsweek. Meanwhile, Ed Champion asks, "Is Amazon Screwing Over Bloggers?" And he hears plenty of answers. And more.

Online viewing tips. "That Guy with the Glasses is a popular comedian who has mainly showcased his work on YouTube, consistently appearing in the top ten comedy providers on the site," blogs Anna Pickard for the Guardian. "And YouTube is, many would believe, the perfect medium for his satirical "five-second movies" - that is films reduced to, well, some small number of seconds, if not five, including the ever popular version of All the Rocky movies (in five seconds), and the even more succinct Titanic (in five seconds). These are very funny. And he's put a lot of work into them. Applause to that man."

Fests and events, 11/21.

"Bringing RKO back to the big screen, [RKO Lost & Found] features true rarities: six films made between 1933 and '38 that have pretty much gone unseen since then, due to a complicated series of rights issues." In particular, Dennis Harvey recommends A Man to Remember: "Written by Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun) and directed by Garson Kanin, it's an effective do-unto-others lesson with an offbeat structure that somewhat anticipates both Kane and It's a Wonderful Life. The New York Times considered it one of the best of its year, and if it's not quite an excavated masterpiece, it's certainly a moving yet unsentimental drama that packs a lot into 80 trim minutes." The series runs from Friday through November 29, and to read more about it, turn to Odienator's February entry at the House Next Door.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, for Glen Helfand, Takeshi Murata: Escape Spirit VideoSlime, on view at "the recently relocated and vastly expanded Ratio 3 gallery" through November 30, offers "videos, in which cinema - transferred to digital media - begins to transmogrify into something that slithers like mercury and soaks into our psyches."

Armond White in the New York Press on Who Is Norman Lloyd?: "It's one thing to see an elderly performer recall the Golden Age of Hollywood, but due to the sheer volume of Lloyd's work with iconic talent, he seems to represent it." At Film Forum, Friday through November 29. ST VanAirsdale talks with Lloyd for the Reeler; and Lloyd's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"It's a source of daily frustration that the films of Max Ophuls are not more widely available, and BAM's extensive retrospective comes like a long-awaited oasis of rare and incomparable cinema." Cullen Gallagher has an overview in the L Magazine. November 28 through December 18.

Dan Callahan saw Bibi Andersson introduce a screening of Persona last night at BAM and has a fine report at the House Next Door: "The novelist Jonathan Lethem asks her a few questions about working with Bergman, and she starts to talk about him in the present tense, then corrects herself. 'I have to remember that he's gone,' she says, again, with no fuss, no sentimentality."

Starting Out in the Evening.

"Faithful in style and spirit to the award-winning novel by Brian Morton, which [Andrew] Wagner adapted with Fred Parnes, this wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliché in the book," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

And in this corner: "Mostly, this film is a smug literati's interpretation of a May-December romance, with the not-very-celebrated, aging novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) agreeing to be interviewed by a pixieish, opportunistic grad student (Lauren Ambrose) and developing a rapport with her, all while trying to keep the faith of his middle-aged daughter ([Lili] Taylor), who is juggling two men while trying to decide if she wants one of them to raise the baby she desperately wants to have." Jason Clark in Slant.

Updated through 11/24.

As for Langella, "as William Paley in Good Night, and Good Luck and Nixon (onstage in Frost/Nixon), he was better than good; he was perfect," writes David Edelstein in New York. "As Leonard Schiller, a forgotten literary novelist in Starting Out in the Evening, he is better than that. This is what great screen acting is about."

"Starting Out never builds to the explosive climax it seems to be heading for, which I suppose is a good thing for its overall integrity, but maybe not so good for its motion-picture value," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"If not for the delicate craftsmanship of the cast and the sure hand of Wagner, whose HD shot movie has a lyricism and a brisk immediacy unusual for the infant format and without ever seeming flashy or manipulative, the material could have slipped into a rote unpacking of timeworn narrative strategies, but it doesn't, resolving to proceed into a tough and indecisive third act that left the audience unambiguously disliking one of the central figures, even as the filmmaking suggest the follies of youth are to be forgiven, or at least tolerated, especially by the wise, who, of course, are still learning, even in the evening of life." Writes Brandon Harris.

The Reeler's ST VanAirsdale gets Wagner to tell him the story behind the film.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance and Toronto.

Update, 11/22: "Starting Out in the Evening is unabashedly literary in its overall tone but never dead on the screen, and is in welcome contrast to the more bombastic entertainments being offered up for seasonal distraction," writes Robert Cashill.

Update, 11/23: For the New York Times' AO Scott, this is "one of the most delicate and peculiar romances recently depicted on film.... There are not too many screen performances that manage to be both subtle and monumental. Watching Mr Langella's slow, gracious movement through Starting Out in the Evening, I was reminded of Burt Lancaster in Luchino Visconti's adaptation of The Leopard. In some ways the comparison is absurd - Visconti's film is a sweeping historical symphony, while Mr Wagner's is a stately string quartet - but both movies concern an old man who has outlasted the social order in which his life made sense. And what is so remarkable about Mr Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard's intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man's every gesture and pause."

"Intelligent, involving and conspicuously adult, Starting Out in the Evening is almost shocking in its distinctiveness, its ability to create high drama from an unlikely source," writes Kenneth Turan. "If another American independent film deals with the nature of writing and a writer's life by focusing on the central relationships of a novelist in his 70s, it doesn't come to mind."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King talks with Langella.

"[I]t's rare to see a movie adaptation in which a filmmaker has taken so much care in translating the odd little qualities that make a particular novel special, to preserve the complex and fragile threads of feeling between characters that are often much easier to grasp on the page," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Starting Out in the Evening is a small picture - it was shot on location in New York City, in high-definition video, in 18 days - but it's from a filmmaker who's used his brains to make up for any monetary resources he might have lacked. The picture feels both intimate and immediate, a model for what smart young filmmakers can do with good material."

Online listening tip. Langella and Taylor are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 11/24: "Starting Out In The Evening is intended to be Schiller's story, an intimate portrait of a writer; instead, I was interested in his women, beaming and glowing and also talking their way into fully realized, flawed, fascinating characters," writes Marcy Dermansky. "Ambrose and Taylor's time on screen rarely intersects; that would have been a different movie, but one I would have preferred."

Enchanted.

"Enchanted, an unexpectedly delightful revisionist fairy tale from, of all places, Walt Disney Pictures, doesn't radically rewrite every bummer cliché about girls of all ages and their dreams," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But for a satisfying stretch, the film works its magic largely by sending up, at times with a wink, at times with a hard nudge, some of the very stereotypes that have long been this company's profitable stock in trade."

"[T]he energetic film eventually peddles the same old ass-backwards messages, equating physical beauty with goodness (and ugliness with vileness), and positing that a woman's greatest dream is that a hunk will materialize out of thin air and make her a contented homemaker and wife - corrosive ideas that aren't upended by the faux-girl power, Giselle-saves-Robert finale," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Updated through 11/25.

"The trailer... at least suggested that it aspired to Princess Bride greatness; if nothing else, it didn't look like something concocted in a test lab," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "But somewhere between conception and execution, what could have been so much smart, sharp fun turned decidedly pedestrian."

"[Amy] Adams, who was Oscar-nominated for her breakout role in Junebug, is equally splendid here as the ultimate Disney princess whose every step echoes Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Playing perky and gee-whiz, Adams never overdoes the earnestness or even hints at condescending to the role, and it is impossible to think of Enchanted without her."

For Roger Ebert, this is "a heart-winning musical comedy that skips lightly and sprightly from the lily pads of hope to the manhole covers of actuality, if you see what I mean. I'm not sure I do."

"In entertainments such as this, aimed, as the blurbs say, at 'the whole family,' there is always a tricky balance between earnestness and irony, between jokes intended for the kids and jokes intended for their parents," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "The makers of Enchanted have clearly opted to err on the side of the former, and while this results in a number of dull and/or groan-worthy gags throughout the film, it is nonetheless something of a relief from the pervasive knowingness and inside-jokery of our Shrek-soaked age."

Killian Fox talks with Adams for the Guardian.

Update, 11/22: The AV Club's Keith Phipps notes that "Disney's mostly live-action fantasy Enchanted briefly returns to the 2D animation of old; the scene is cheeky and self-parodying while still capturing everything great about the old approach.... Adams's winning performance and the light touch director Kevin Lima (a veteran of animation and live action) brings to scenes not tasked with advancing the plot all suggest that, silly as they may look once you take it apart, irony-free, romantic fantasy - animated and otherwise - still has a place on the big screen."

Update, 11/25: "Since Disney doesn't exactly lay out its playbook, Enchanted offers a rare window into the company's thinking about how one of the world's most powerful brands is best managed," suggest Brooks Barnes in the New York Times.

Hoberman. Haynes. Dylan.

"I'm Not There is the movie of the year - but to whom does Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan biopic actually belong, and when was it really made?" asks J Hoberman in the Voice.

Some pieces need an entry all their own, and this, most certainly, is one of them. Hoberman not only presents probably the closest and sharpest reading yet of I'm Not There (if you know of one that's closer and/or sharper, do drop a line), he also notes that it's "part of the larger, ongoing Dylan revival brilliantly orchestrated by his manager, Jeff Rosen." And he doesn't seem to mind. At all.

"[A]s Haynes's film opens at Film Forum, DA Pennebaker will premiere an hour's worth of outtakes from his 1967 Dylan portrait, Don't Look Back, at the IFC Center, and the Walter Reade will run Murray Lerner's The Other Side of Mirror, a straightforward documentary of Dylan's mid-'60s appearances at three consecutive Newport Folk Festivals." That one gets a smart review here, too.

But wait, as they say, there's more. A "Dylan and the Movies" primer is folded into all this, with special attention lavished on Renaldo & Clara, an endurance test I'll admit to having endured more than once.

As for I'm Not There: "It's an essay that derives its intellectual force from the idea of Bob Dylan, and its emotional depth from his songs. Haynes doesn't deny his subject's insistence that his authentic self could never be explained or portrayed - and might not even exist. 'I don't know who I am most of the time,' little Woody confesses in the midst of his compulsive mythmaking. We don't either, although, then again, we really do."

I'm Not There updates are happening here.

Fests and events, 11/20.

Host and Guest will be screening tomorrow evening at 9:30 and again on Thanksgiving Day at 5 pm as part of the Chinese American Film Festival in San Francisco. Yes, it's a Korean film, but Adam Hartzell explains how this has come about in his introduction to his interview with director Sin Dong-il at Hell on Frisco Bay.

William Kentridge's "art has an affecting, hand-made, do-it-yourself quality that is matched by a natural storytelling ability and a critical intellect," writes Adrian Searle in the Guardian. "If his adoption of stop-motion animation and his almost expressionist, graphic use of charcoal appear old-fashioned, they are purposefully so. The more one looks, the more references pile in." William Kentridge: Fragile Identities, an exhibition, symposium and performance series is taking place at various venues Brighton through the end of the year.

In an entry for Artforum's diary, Jennifer Allen describes Bruce LaBruce's "theatrical debut as both director and dramatist. In moving from behind the camera to behind the scenes, LaBruce - affectionately known as BLAB to friends, fans, and those in a hurry - mixed race, class, gender, and sexuality to make an explosive combination of the nuclear family." Cheap Blacky's just wrapped in Berlin.

Vadim Rizov attended Monday night's screening of David Fincher's director's cut of Zodiac: "[F]or my money, it's one of the finest films of the decade. Host and chief interrogator Kent Jones wasn't the only one confessing to having seen the movie five times or more; one man prefaced his question with such ecstatic praise that Fincher interrupted him before he could even get to the question: 'Thank God for you, sir.'"

Also at the Reeler: There's still a lot of Ingmar Bergman to be seen in NYC, notes Miriam Bale.

"As a Brooklyn-raised upstart in the 1930's New York theater scene, [Norman] Lloyd had the luck to work with some great directors, including Elia Kazan and Orson Welles," writes Julia Wallace. "The high point of his 70-plus-year career was his role as the saboteur in Saboteur, which will be paired as a double feature with Who Is Norman Lloyd? for the week of its run at Film Forum." And John Anderson talks with Lloyd.

Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog on The Landlord: "Though Harold and Maude would secure his reputation the following year - once it caught on, that is - [Hal] Ashby's first film proves he had the touch from the start." At the Northwest Film Forum from Friday through Thursday.

It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.

"Co-directed by David Brothers and written by its late star, a cerebral palsy sufferer named Steven C Stewart, It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is a hallucinatory, psychosexually violent, avant-garde fantasy that explores a disturbing theme: even the physically handicapped can act like tyrants." Aaron Hillis introduces his interview with Crispin Hellion Glover.

"A movie about a serial killer with cerebral palsy - as the brainchild of the long-suffering Stewart, it's hard to dismiss out of hand," writes Chuck Wilson in the Voice. "If you duck out early, you may meet Glover's gaze as you head up the aisle. All these factors—weird movie, tragic backstory, and the on-site presence of its maker—combine for a nerve-jangling hour-plus. Moviegoing is rarely this fraught."

Updated through 11/22.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Glover "about his unique writer-star Stewart, fearlessly tackling taboo subjects, and how he reacted when Robert Zemeckis stole his face."

Ben Gold talks with him, too, for the Reeler.

Earlier: John Constantine in Nerve.

Updates, 11/21: "Like last year's Part 1, What Is It?, this follow-up (with David Brothers as co-director) will attract only the most adventurous filmgoers, who will have to wade through some rather repugnant material to weigh the movie's merits," writes Laura Kern in the New York Times. "Ever the tireless, traveling showman, Mr Glover will again be on hand before each screening to present his hourlong Big Slide Show, which, like his films, is wildly impassioned and macabrely fascinating."

"Once you're past the shocking imagery, there is a poignancy to be found within the film, and it certainly makes a statement about living with a handicap (though we're not yet completely sure what that statement is)," writes Sara Vilkomerson in the New York Observer. "Mr Glover is clearly proud of the final result. 'This will be the best movie of my career,' he predicted."

"If Stewart were just an average Joe with a fetish for long hair and dreams of killing his partners, would anyone care?" asks Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "Doubtful."

"Conceptually, the merits of the process are apparent: Just as What Is It? gave actors with Down Syndrome a chance to indulge in creativity, It Is Fine allows an outsider's plight to define the mood and give significance to the art," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Yet it's hard to take that endeavor seriously when the movie operates under the guise of exploitation. Stewart comes across as an object of pity, but his descent into madness doesn't underscore his difficulties. It takes advantage of them."

Update, 11/22: David Wolinsky talks with Glover for the AV Club.

August Rush.

In the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab talks with Kirsten Sheridan: "The Dublin-based writer/director received an Oscar nomination for her contribution to the screenplay of her father Jim Sheridan's In America (2002). Now, barely into her thirties, she has directed her first Hollywood movie, the $30m (£15m) August Rush."

"This mawkish film pathologically adheres to the belief that musical ability is an innate thing, and so it is that when renowned cellist Lyla Novacek (Keri Russell) and Irish guitarist Louis Connelly (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) bump uglies during a one-night stand staged within eyesight of Washington Square Park's magical marble arch, they unknowingly collaborate on an embryo that will one day become an avant-garde musical prodigy with an uncanny ability to mix styles old and new (which basically comes down to playing a guitar as if it were a drum," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "In spite of its flabbergasting self-absorption, August Rush's devotion to following through on its screwy internal logic is almost genius."

Update, 11/22.

"Acclimate yourself to the frenzied vibe," advises Ella Taylor in the Voice, "and you'll feel the movie grow into itself as an urban fairy tale whose rapturous finale stakes a wishful claim on the redemptive power of love and art."

"While many films require a suspension of disbelief, August Rush asks viewers to terminate their disbelief without severance and have security escort it from the building," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"The problem with August Rush - much more than its unapologetically sentimental, melodramatic plot - is that the music in it isn't very good," finds Paul Matwychuk.

Updates, 11/21: "The movie... is acted in a style best described as overawed," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Oblivious to persecution and exploitation, [Freddie] Highmore's August glides through the movie with a beatific smile on his face. Mr Rhys Meyers and Ms Russell, who have no romantic chemistry, wander about in an emotional limbo."

Robin Williams plays "a Faginesque former musician who lives off the musical talents of his young, errant wards," notes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "How absurd is Williams in this role? He makes Patch Adams look like a good career move."

Jennifer Merin talks with Sheridan for the New York Press.

Updates, 11/22: "The film is what might be called a musical urban fairytale, which is to say its characters are one-dimensional archetypes (The Singer, The Musician) pumped full of saccharine and hot air," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

Robert W. Welkos talks with Sheridan for the Los Angeles Times.

The Mist.

"Frank Darabont ditches the warm and fuzzies for out-and-out cynicism about mankind's capacity for goodness and altruism with The Mist, the filmmaker's third feature-length adaptation of a Stephen King tale," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "[E]ven if it's not entirely convincing, The Mist's damn-everyone-to-hell finale still proves a refreshing rebuke to the Capra-esque pap peddled by the director's prior The Majestic."

For the New York Times, Charles McGrath talks with King and Darabont, and writes, "The Mist, originally published as part of Mr King's Skeleton Crew collection, is early, classic King. It's not a character study like Shawshank and Green Mile; nor is it, like so many recent King novels, about the tortures of the imagination, the horrors of being a writer. It's about a small town in Maine that is one day enveloped in a mysterious, impenetrable fog that isolates many of the residents inside the local market."

Updated through 11/27.

"How did a straightforward little tale about prehistoric monsters gobbling down the hapless citizens of a modern-day town become such a lumbering and depressing movie?" wonders Chuck Wilson in the Voice. He lists several possible routes, and then: "All this would be disappointing, but not infuriating, if the film's ending weren't so unforgivably bad.... The Mis made me want to scream, but for all the wrong reasons."

"The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "The finale - a cruel Stephen King joke - is designed to convince us that we have been watching something more than hokum, but I am unpersuaded."

Updates, 11/21: "Until the director Frank Darabont decides that he's saying something important instead of making a nifty horror movie, The Mist isn't half bad," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "In the haunting images of men and women cautiously venturing outside, their bodies melting into the mist, he offers a stronger, more palpable sense of what it means for human beings to be truly frightened than he does with any of the dialogue. He makes fear visible."

"As for that ending (very different from King's), well, it's certainly brave," writes the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips. "It's probably braver than it is dramatically effective. But the film is absorbing, and by the time the ending arrives, you may be willing to cut it a break, as I was, even if Darabont's nervy resolution cuts the audience no break whatever."

The film "features Marcia Gay Harden as a haranguing prophet of doom so obnoxiously over-the-top that she makes Jim Jones look like Jesse Jackson," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Harden's Mrs Carmondy would bring the whole production down if it weren't already flawed for other reasons."

"[G]ive her a break; it's not a plausible or playable role," counters Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"Darabont makes the switch from middlebrow Oscar-bait to the horror genre, but the result is just as overwrought and sentimental as his previous efforts," writes Eli Goldfarb in the L Magazine.

Updates, 11/22: "The Mist is a large-scale Twilight Zone episode," writes John Constantine for Nerve. "And despite some glaring missteps, it's a decent one."

Tasha Robinson finds it to be "one of the scariest King films since Stanley Kubrick's The Shining."

Updates, 11/24: "The Mist may very well be one of the most quietly subversive movies of the year," argues Ed Champion.

Gilbert Cruz talks with King for Time.

Update, 11/26: "The Mist builds toward a climax so wrenching that I hesitate to recommend the film, but I think Darabont earns his vision," writes David Edelstein in New York. "He touches on so many sore spots: schisms of class and religion, fear of the technology's impact on the environment, fear of God's vengeance—or the vengeance of people on behalf of their gods. The movie could be called The Miasma."

Update, 11/27: "The Mist... is a blend of horror cult films such as Them! (1954) and The Fly (1958, 1986) - among many, many others - and John Carpenter's The Fog," writes Maria Komodore at Pixel Vision. "And that's exactly why it's sooo good."

Other DVDs, 11/20.

"Born in 1931 to a peasant couple who'd moved into Bergamo in Italy, and learning his craft making documentary films while working as a clerk at the Edison-Volta electric factory, Ermanno Olmi kept the humanist spirit of neo-realism alive in the 60s and 70s with films featuring non-professional casts." The Observer's Philip French recommends Olmi's "masterpiece," The Tree of Wooden Clogs.

Glenn Kenny revisits Close Encounters of the Third Kind in order to focus on "Spielberg's reconception of [Roy] Neary [Richard Dreyfuss], which was instated in the Special Edition and remains in the Director's Cut. It really does change the whole timbre of the film, and does so in a fairly ruthless way."

Keith Phipps, too, reviewing the 30th anniversary edition for Slate, focuses on Neary rather than the spaceships. "[P]articularly if you haven't seen the movie in a while..., you realize the movie has a rather un-Spielbergian subtext. The protagonist, a young suburban dad penned in by the responsibilities of fatherhood, leaps at the first chance to leave those responsibilities behind. Given the opportunity, in the movie's final scene, to board the aliens' mother ship and fly away, he doesn't spare a thought for the wife and kids he's leaving behind. The stars await."

Kevin Lee offers an insider's glimpse into the making of extras for DVDs from New Yorker Films.

"The White Hell of Pitz Palu came by its title honestly, for making this was indeed a five month's hell on frozen earth, with primitive equipment there to record cast suffering unprecedented in movies before or since," writes John McElwee in another great entry at Greenbriar Picture Shows. "Much was mined from the frozen husk of White Hell. You could build entire serial chapters out of footage spectacular as this, and on at least two occasions, Universal did."

"Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes is the year's most chilling horror film, a cold-stare portrait of planetary waste that makes An Inconvenient Truth look like, well, an Al Gore lecture," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC News.

Dave Kehr in the New York Times on Susan Hayward: "Agony was her business, and she knew it inside out." More from Dan Callahan in Slant.

Ray Young watches Maurice Jarre: A Tribute to David Lean, a combination DVD and CD of the composer's 1992 concert with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It's a pleasure to watch him conduct and comment on his own work. Superbly orchestrated despite a limited rehearsal period, he plays selections from [Lawrence of Arabia], Dr Zhivago (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984), performed just months after Lean's death at 83."

DVD roundups: DVD Talk; Bryant Frazer and Peter Martin at Cinematical. And, as always, the Guru.

Online viewing tip. For the Guardian, Xan Brooks and John Domokos talk with Werner Herzog about Rescue Dawn. More (in text) from Related: Christopher Goodwin in Sunday's London Times.

Slant. Kubrick.

Warners' Stanley Kubrick Collection has practically sparked a mini-Kubrick festival at Slant. To follow the films' chronological order, start with Rob Humanick on 2001: A Space Odyssey: "Central to the profundity of the film is the notion that few things are more meaningful than a child's first steps, the emotive impact of this scenario manifest in every one of the film's dizzying set pieces, albeit multiplied to epic proportions. At its core, 2001 is a journey (or, as indicated by its subtitle, an odyssey), a summarization of those questions that are both the simplest in their inquisition and most profound in their answers: who are we, where do we come from, and where are we going?"

"If there's an inherent problem in Clockwork Orange, it's that Alex's cruelty is depicted with such bravura cinematic technique and such harsh irony that there's a whole audience that tunes in just for the shock and awe," writes Jeremiah Kipp. "But I don't hold that against Kubrick's film, which in fact is about uninspired moral negligence, and about its hero tuning into violence as entertainment and institutions using violence and brainwashing as a means of control. It's Kubrick's most prescient work, more astute and unsparing than any of his other films (and he had more where that came from) in putting the bleakest parts of human behavior under the microscope and laughing in disgust."

"It's the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror," writes Eric Henderson. "Having conflated the sadistic struggle between a man and his family into a horrific epic tragedy, Kubrick ultimately slaps the film back into a reversal of 2001: A Space Odyssey's coda, swapping accelerated evolution in favor of a regression so primordially violent it disrupts the fabric of time."

"Somehow after the decadence of Barry Lyndon and a philosophical look at horror in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick settled into a film of unrestrained vitriol and aggression, and - once again proving his genius as a cinematic storyteller - made it intellectual and appealing," writes Arthur Ryel-Lindsey. "Full Metal Jacket states its primary concern fairly loud: Private Joker (Matthew Modine) is grilled for wearing a peace pin on his combat uniform while having 'Born to Kill' scrawled across his helmet. He responds that it is a comment on the duality of man, warring and peaceable - or, in this case, the Marine-brand, courageous, thoughtless, instinctual killer, the human beneath it, and the difficulties if not the futility of one suppressing the other."

"The great joke of Eyes Wide Shut is that the star with the megawatt smile plastered across the covers of tabloid magazines as the sexiest man alive is made to run around the streets like a jerk, desperately in need of a good fuck," writes Jeremiah Kipp. "If the film seems to be a morality play drifting along with the erratic rhythms of a dream, then it begs the question of what is the moral, and how much we're meant to relate to these nervous cosmopolitans."

Milestone's I Am Cuba.

"The only thing that's missing from what may be the DVD release of the year, which comes to us inside a makeshift cigar box, is an actual Cuban cigar." At Slant, Ed Gonzalez opens up Milestone's I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition.

"Still, in my experience, the movie bedazzles regardless of its condition or format," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC News. "[T]here's just no acclimating to, or being blasé about, the famously superhuman cinematographic stunt work and the unearthly white-wheat-dark-sky exposures (achieved with infra-red stock), all of it mated to an unfettered revolutionary outrage that abstractly details life before and during Castro's rebel war, from decadent tourist pool parties to police brigade atrocities to guerrilla righteousness in the mountains."

Updated through 11/22.

It's "a stylistic exercise so inventively extravagant that it still provokes gasps of amazement," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "The Soviet government had commissioned the director Mikhail Kalatozov, whose 1957 Cranes Are Flying was one of the few postwar Soviet films to attract international attention, to create a stolid, Socialist Realist monument to the Cuban Revolution; what it got instead was an avant-garde freakout that continues to cast a spell over filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson."

"Disc two offers a fascinating 90-minute Brazilian making-of docu called The Siberian Mammoth," notes the DVD Savant. "Disc Three contains a two-hour docu on director Mikhail Kalatazov, featuring lengthy input from Claude Lelouch and many film clips. As with many another Soviet director, Kalatazov's career veered between 'accepted' status and long periods when he'd be forbidden to work because of perceived ideological flaws in his work. Finishing off the disc set is an insert booklet containing Milestone founders Dennis Doros and Amy Heller's annotated account of the film's eventual rediscovery."

Update: "What's most impressive about I Am Cuba is how effectively dialectical the film is." Dave McDougall illustrates his case at Chained to the Cinémathèque.

Update, 11/22: "In truly socialist fashion, Kalatozov and his screenwriters decided that no one character in their film would be more significant than any other; Cuba, rather, would be the star of the show," notes Josh Rosenblatt in the Austin Chronicle. "[T]here's no denying the daring at the heart of a film that laughs so loudly at convention." This set does "a convincing job of making the case for I Am Cuba as one of the most important artistic achievements of the last 50 years."

Fests and events, 11/19.

"Playwright Martin McDonagh's first feature, In Bruges will open the 2008 Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2008 in Park City," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez. "McDonagh's film, described as a 'twisted tale of two London hit men ordered to take a forced vacation in Bruges, Belgium,' stars Ralph Fiennes, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. In the words of a Sundance announcement, "their subsequent time in exile goes awry.'"

The Denver Film Festival's wrapped; indieWIRE has the award-winners and Matt Dentler has stories and pix.

SXSW and ON Networks are partnering to "recognize the best in digital entertainment with The Greenlight Awards, a competition aimed at discovering the next great, original and episodic Digital Series."

Online viewing tip. "Come, See, Experience, Real Time Movie, Borough Market, 30 Nov 07, 11.30am." The trailer, featuring Jude Law, is appearing in London cinemas. Creative Review's got it and explains: "The film, directed by Jason Martin, is one of a series of artworks by Pawel Althamer, and forms part of the exhibition The World as a Stage, currently on show at Tate Modern."

Docs, 11/19.

The Academy's released a short list of 15 contenders for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar; Steve Rhodes and Alison Willmore have taken that list and added links to each of the film's sites.

Titicut Follies, having been made in 1967, is, of course, not on that list. But it's "both a landmark piece of journalism and a landmark work of art," writes Jesse Walker in Reason. "It is also notable for two reasons that have nothing to do with its merits. It was the first picture to be directed by Frederick Wiseman, a former law professor who at age 37 was beginning a long series of rich and challenging films. And it is the only movie in US history to be banned for reasons other than obscenity or national security." And Walker talks with Wiseman about "free speech, complexity, and the trouble with Michael Moore." Via Bookforum.

"For those who are spending a lonely Thanksgiving in New York (I don't mean to presume that all of us film buffs are socially damaged; perhaps you are simply getting away from your extremely close-knit families for a few hours), think about seeing some of the Humphrey Jennings documentaries that Anthology Film Archives has programmed this Friday through Sunday," suggests Dan Sallitt.

Kevin Kelly recommends The Heart of the Game: "The great draw of this film is the marathon span of filming."

Queer Film Blog-a-Thon.

"I am of the opinion that gay film, in many ways, still seeks to operate within the margins of the system... queer film, on the other hand, does not cooperate. In fact, it wants to pervert the system."

At Queering the Apparatus, Damion introduces today's Queer Film Blog-a-Thon, already well over a dozen entries strong. This is a good one, folks. Go, explore.

Sight & Sound. December 07.

"With two films about to be released theatrically in the UK and a 50th-birthday retrospective scheduled at BFI Southbank, Tsai Ming-Liang seems suddenly back with the wordless, delinquent version of a vengeance," writes Roger Clarke in the new issue of Sight & Sound. "As well as the vaudeville and pornographic pleasures of The Wayward Cloud (2004) - like The Hole (1998), but with watermelons - British audiences will now get to see I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006), Tsai's first feature made in his native Malaysia. It's the latest in a series of cinematically refined, intensely personal films from one of the key figures of Taiwan's second-generation New Wave, whose members include the rather better-known Ang Lee."

"This magazine doesn't often look at television matters, but Channel 4 has had such an impact on UK culture since it crash-landed in 1982 into a staid broadcasting world that its silver jubilee can't be ignored. To assess its history and worth to us all, Alkarim Jivani talked to some of those involved in its creation."

Reviews:

• "Regardless of how one feels about Breathless - whether one sees it as a trashy pastiche or as the moment when self-consciousness first dawned in the cinema - it is in many ways one of the movies' most compelling invitations to dreaming," writes Tim Lucas, reviewing the "typically magnificent Criterion offering."

• Tim Robey on Into the Wild: "[E]ven [Sean] Penn's more indulgent flourishes seem to enhance the film's keen feeling. With its swooping hunger for landscape and new experience, it plunges headlong into the giddy, passionate convictions of its hero, then pulls back to show us what he's missing - and how badly he is missed."

• "The Darjeeling Limited isn't just complacent, though it is that: the stock elements employed by [Wes] Anderson for more than a decade - slow-motion shots set to 1960s British pop, former writing partner Owen Wilson as a melancholy loser, robotic tracking shots that glide sideways for comic effect, excitable whip-pans - have never felt less inspired, or more like a safety-net," writes Ryan Gilbey.

• Lisa Mullen on Lagerfeld Confidential: "[L]ike a favored puppy, the filmmaker revels in his privileged access to his master. And since Lagerfeld turns out to be an extraordinarily clever and monstrously interesting character, the film can hardly fail to be diverting."

Posted by dwhudson at 11:03 AM

White Mane and The Red Balloon.

Albert Lamorisse's White Mane and The Red Balloon are screening at New York's Film Forum through November 25 before floating out across the country in the coming weeks.

"The stories are simple, fablelike; the heroes are boys; the subject in each case is the purity and power of a child's imagination; and the tone of both films is that of open-mouthed wonder," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "Yet these movies are also shot through with a very adult melancholy, an awareness that life tends not to measure up to the glorious pictures in our minds. The young are enchanted by White Mane and The Red Balloon. Grown-ups, who know too well how fragile this beauty is, are likely to cry."

Updated through 11/20.

"For all the seraphic beauty of the boys, neither movie resorts more than briefly to cuteness; both are escape fantasies that pay homage to the inventiveness of children in the face of dour adult oppression," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

The boy who "got to run around Paris followed by a magical red balloon" was Lamorisse's son, Pascal, who's now 57. Susan King talks with him for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 11/20: "The Red Balloon is whimsical; White Mane (a small masterpiece) touches, in 31 minutes, all the emotions of a classic coming-of-age picture about a child and a legendary animal, like National Velvet, The Yearling, or The Black Stallion," writes Steve Vineberg in the Boston Phoenix. "In both movies, the object of the boy's affection is an embodiment of the spirit of childhood that can't be constrained by the traditions of bourgeois society (in Red Balloon) or repressed by the machinations of the self-interested, mercenary adult world (in White Mane)."

"There are some things you should never be too old to experience, and The Red Balloon is one of them," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "With very little dialogue and boundless charm, The Red Balloon transcends all cultural barriers - despite the flavorful specificity of its Paris setting."

Weekend fests and events.

"For the second year running, MoMA's Department of Film, in collaboration with Independent Feature Project (IFP) and its quarterly publication Filmmaker, will screen the five nominees for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award."

The screenings are happening as you read this (in fact, they started yesterday) and run through tomorrow. At indieWIRE, Kim Voynar introduces each of the nominees, while at Filmmaker, Jason Guerrasio's got a video intro. The films: August the First, Frownland, Loren Cass, Mississippi Chicken and Off The Grid: Like on the Mesa.

"Warhol Week Is On!!" at Facets in Chicago.

"Horror is not, nor has it ever been, my thing," clarifies Nancy Rosenbaum at the outset. "That's why when MovieMaker asked me to find out why so many horror film festivals have started up in recent years, I hesitated at first. But then I reconsidered: I thought that perhaps people like Belofsky could explain the appeal of this seemingly unseemly genre and shed some light on why so many indies are making films about zombies, slashers and headless horsemen on their own dimes." A related list: "Horror Fests in Your Neighborhood."

Among the highlights of this year's Viennale for Ronald Bergan: Hartmut Bitomsky's Staub, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Europa 2005, 27 October, a lecture from Jean-Pierre Gorin, "19 programs of mostly fascinating short films made from 1919 to the Anschluss, depicting various aspects of proletarian life in Austria," and a tribute to Jane Fonda.

Peter Zinner, 1919 - 2007.

Film editor Peter Zinner, who worked on the first two Godfather movies with director Francis Ford Coppola, has died in California aged 88.... Coppola paid tribute to Zinner's "great contribution" to his mob drama. Zinner went on to win an Academy Award for his work on The Deer Hunter in 1978, which also won best picture. Coppola told the Associated Press that the music which accompanied the film's final baptism sequence was Zinner's idea.

The BBC.

"Peter is definitely in the top rank of editors of two or three generations," said screenwriter-director Frank Pierson, whose A Star Is Born and four other movies Zinner edited.... Zinner considered "The Godfather" to be "the most classic movie" he ever worked on.

Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times.

Writers' Strike, 11/17.

"Hollywood's film and TV writers and its major studios have agreed to return to the bargaining table, offering the first glimmer of hope that a deal to end a costly two-week strike could be within reach," report Richard Verrier and Meg James in the Los Angeles Times. "The Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said late Friday that they would resume talks Nov 26 on a new contract for 10,500 writers to replace the one that expired Oct 31. The two sides announced the plan in identical statements, a rare show of unity."

Updated.

Updates: Broadway and Hollywood, GM and Chrysler: "Do the walkouts portend a resurgence of labor, even a new union militancy? The answer, for various reasons, appears to be no," writes Steven Greenhouse in the New York Times.

An online viewing tip from Virginia Heffernan: "Irving Brecher, who wrote Meet Me in St Louis and Bye Bye Birdie, weighs in on the writers' strike. He's 93. His agent died. He's seeking representation. He's mad."

Bookforum. Dec/Jan 08. (And a bit more on other books, too.)

"While you are reading The Leopard, and particularly while you are rereading it, you are likely to feel that it is one of the greatest novels ever written." So begins Wendy Lesser's fourth paragraph. The first three, by the way, are fantastic. At any rate, The Leopard "is as ephemeral as the state of mind it chronicles, which is, in turn, part of a vanishing civilization, and no amount of nostalgic remembrance or effortful evocation will do it justice. This is partly why the Luchino Visconti movie of the book, beautiful as it is, is such a betrayal: The movie cannot help celebrating in a rather simpleminded way the visual glories of the faded past, whereas [Giuseppe Tomasi di] Lampedusa's skill lies precisely in puncturing those glories with a pinprick of subtle wit."

Also in the new issue of Bookforum, John Banville reads The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age - The 20s, 30s & 40s: "[Raymond] Chandler perhaps labored too long and too hard at effecting the transmutation of life's raw material into deathless prose. A far greater writer, James M Cain, who was happy to keep it raw, who gloried, indeed, in the rebarbative, created a masterpiece, seemingly effortlessly, in The Postman Always Rings Twice.... Crime fiction flourishes in hard times.... At their best, and even, perhaps, at their worst, these yarns express something of the unforgiving harshness and dauntless optimism of life in America in the decades between the wars."

Related: "So what exactly is The Long Embrace?" asks Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "[Judith] Freeman lays out her goals in the first chapter: 'I did not want to write a biography of Chandler and his wife. But I did want to write a book about them... I was not looking to create a fictional relationship, and yet I did want to be free to imagine their lives.' That's a fair enough description.... It's the sort of balancing act that Joan Didion - an obvious model - can pull off brilliantly. While Freeman never quite falls off the wire, she also fails in the end to bring together her knowledge of Chandler, her own experience, and her insights into Chandler's work in any sort of revelatory way.

Back to Bookforum: "Fading in with an epigraph from Josef von Sternberg - 'I believe that cinema was here from the beginning of the world' - Steve Erickson adapts nearly the oldest story in the book (Abraham and Isaac), threads it through the projector through which all film history spins, and, having cast a hero who's part Being There's Chance the gardener and part 2001's Starchild (endowed, no less, with an infinite perspective worthy of Borges's Aleph), throws light and shadow onto the backs of our eyelids in this love letter to celluloid," writes Andrew Hultkrans. "The mash-up of cultural references in the preceding sentence gives you an advance sense of Zeroville, a novel that mingles Erickson's own characters with historical figures both real and reel. This conceit will make film geeks like myself weep with joy but may be daunting for those who can't tell Elizabeth Taylor from Natalie Wood - not only by appearance but by what they mean."

Noah Isenberg reviews Foster Hirsch's Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King:

As a director, Preminger will likely be remembered for his most critically acclaimed work (Laura [1944], Angel Face [1952], and Anatomy of a Murder [1959], among others) and, stylistically speaking, for his exquisite long shots and touches of seemingly uncharacteristic subtlety. Yet as "a genius for publicity," as Dwight Macdonald once called him, Preminger will be most remembered for his controversies: as the man who fought back against the Catholic Legion of Decency and defied the Production Code Administration (The Moon Is Blue [1953]); who boldly depicted drug addition (The Man with the Golden Arm [1955]) and homosexuality (Advise & Consent [1962]); who directed - and had an affair with - the first African-American nominee for best actress (Dorothy Dandridge, for Carmen Jones); who held a much-hyped international competition for the role of Joan of Arc, in which Iowan Jean Seberg, of later Breathless fame, rose to the top (Saint Joan [1957]); and who hired, fully credited, the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (Exodus [1960]). The portrait that Hirsch paints, showing the director in all of his guises, is appropriately rich in nuance.

"More than a full portrait of the man, [Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration] is a record of decision making, of rulings and reversals," writes Liz Brown. [Miracles and Sacrilege: Roberto Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in Hollywood], too, is more history than film analysis."

"Declaring the book inert - 'written by a dead man about dead things,' Sartre wrote in 1947, 'it no longer has any place on this earth' - he advised contemporary writers to 'learn to speak in images' and to work for newspapers, radio, and film," notes Sam Stark. "Tamara Chaplin's vivid, thorough, and irreverent cultural history Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television presents this moment and its consequences from an unfashionable point of view, not that of the editors of Tel Quel, but that of a Parisian couch potato.... Most important, she profiles and interviews the people who thought it was a good idea to put philosophy on television: the pompous technocrats, earnest producers, skeptical hosts, and baffled cameramen, as well as the often-inscrutable philosophers."

Plus: Kera Bolonik talks with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Peter Brooks and Colm Tóibín on Henry James, Marjorie Perloff on John Ashbery, Morris Dickstein and Lewis Dabney on Edmund Wilson, Albert Mobilio on Edward Burtynsky and, of course, much more.

"This is a legacy-burnishing project, plain and simple," writes David Kamp, reviewing Eric Lax's Conversations With Woody Allen for the New York Times Book Review before eventually moving on to Woody Allen's own Mere Anarchy and The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose:

Conversations reveals, happily, an Allen who's game to range freely over his oeuvre. We learn that his favorites of his own films are The Purple Rose of Cairo, Match Point and Husbands and Wives (the last one a bit of a surprise), with Stardust Memories and Zelig ranking a notch below. Sometimes Allen's assessments are bracingly contrarian. He expresses bafflement over the high regard in which Annie Hall and Manhattan continue to be held ("People really latched on to Manhattan in a way that I thought was irrational," he says) and makes a strong case for Manhattan Murder Mystery, his underappreciated 1993 reunion picture with Diane Keaton. In other moments, no less fascinating, he borders on the delusional. He can't fathom, for example, how Hollywood Ending, a patchy, forgettable effort from 2002, "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy."

Bob Balaban "has spent much of his five-decade film career playing unassuming nebbishes who seem to feel mildly embarrassed that someone has shooed them in front of a movie camera. But if anyone was born to be a star, it's Balaban: his family owned and operated an impressive empire of movie studios, including a number of legendary cinemas in his native Chicago, and his uncle Barney was the president of Paramount Pictures for almost thirty years." And now, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Nerve's Leonard Pierce talks with Balaban about his book, Spielberg, Truffaut & Me: An Actor's Journey.

Coppola. Interviews.

"I think it's good to be overly ambitious," Francis Ford Coppola tells James Mottram in the Independent. "I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!" As for Youth Without Youth, Mottram writes, "there's no doubt that this is the strangest film of Coppola's career. A Faustian tale of Nazi scientists, dopplegängers and Sanskrit-speaking paramours, it's as intriguing as it is baffling."

Updated through 11/23.

"A remarkably challenging and absorbing film that Coppola paid for himself, Youth Without Youth is a return to the intensely personal work that characterized his early career." Introducing its interview with Coppola, Bookforum notes that it's "also a rather faithful adaptation of Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade's 1976 novella.... The result is not only Coppola's most personal film in decades but also one of his most complex and haunting."

Earlier: Bruce Handy talks about his interview for Vanity Fair.

Updates, 11/23: John Hiscock talks with Coppola for the Telegraph.

Robert Levin at cinemaattraction on Youth Without Youth: "The ideas he posits about aging and the futility of recapturing one's lost youth must play better on Eliade's page, in a less immediately visceral medium more apt for intricate philosophical digressions. Here, in failing to provoke thought and reflection he leaves us with little beyond an overwrought, bifurcated narrative that transitions from a jumpy first half to a stagnant conclusion, in which most of the action plays out in an over the top theatrical fashion within a constrained setting."

Brick Lane.

"Sarah Gavron's feature version of Monica Ali's novel represents a modest slimming down of the original's dimensions; what emerges could almost be described as a chamber-piece, set in one cramped east London flat," writes Peter Bradshaw. "Perhaps venturing out into the real Brick Lane would have been impolitic, considering the unedifying row that surrounded its filming, and some might argue that there is a sense of withdrawal or retreat in the movie as a whole." The Guardian also offers an accompanying "quick world tour" of major cities as they've been depicted on film.

"In every respect, Brick Lane is a shadow of its source material," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "I was sure the film would show some guts once it turned to the post-9/11 hostility toward Muslims. But all that happened was that everyone started talking as though they knew they were characters in a film about multicultural Britain."

"Whatever the arguments against it - and we must remember that Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette was savaged in some quarters for suggesting that not all Pakistanis were heterosexuals - Gavron's debut is honest, sincere and sympathetic," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "In fact, it is the product of a first-time director who is clearly promising and probably more than that."

"Writers Abi Morgan and Laura Jones use regular flashbacks to contrast the grimy housing outside to her bucolic past in Bangladesh, an apparently eternal summer in which young children gambolled and plunged into picturesque lakes," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "Unfortunately the romance at the heart of Brick Lane never comes alive."

Wendy Ide talks with Gavron for the London Times.

Earlier: "There were threats of demonstrations, book burnings and even violence among some members of the Bangladeshi community. But was the controversy surrounding the filming of Brick Lane as heated as the media suggested? Not at all, writes author Monica Ali."

Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

"Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium was written and directed by Zach Helm, whose previous major credit was the screenplay for the Will Ferrell comedy Stranger Than Fiction, which envisions a sophisticated adult version of the same kind of magic," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But if the concept is ingenious, its execution is erratic. The story is arbitrarily divided into chapters of varying length that have no clear beginning, middle or end, and the movie's narrative drive is sporadic."

"Everything is wrong with this film," writes Charles Mudede in the Stranger. "In it, zero is new; dead tired are its plot, imagery, themes, and acting. The movie wants to look and feel fresh, but it instead presents us with a series of heavy corpses: the corpse of the music, the corpse of the set design, the corpse of the dialogue. Even the special effects are not special."

Updated through 11/20.

"Helm fills scenes with the organic trinkets in Magorium's store, but he doesn't give it any greater significance beyond the hodgepodge of clever special effects," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "[Dustin] Hoffman puts on the weirdest performance of his career, playing the crazed Magorium with vigor matched only by his goofy hairstyle, but there's nothing in the story to match that otherworldly sprightliness. He's like Willy Wonka without the chocolate."

"Beneath shrubby eyebrows and upswept hair, Hoffman is, at times, impishly charming," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "But Magorium feels more like a collection of eccentric ticks and mannerisms who slips in the occasional life lesson amid a stream of non-sequiturs than a fully realized character. One can almost imagine Hoffman, à la Michael Dorsey in Tootsie, building Magorium up bit by bit as the makeup, wig and false teeth were applied, then perfecting the affected, lispy intonation to complete the transformation."

"[T]he film grows tediously familiar, stuffed with PSAs about the importance of belief and the life you make for yourself until the time comes to croak without fuss," sighs Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"The plot is forever being upstaged by the emporium," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"Helm's directorial debut is such a fluffy cotton candy confection that it can't be bothered to manufacture any legitimate dramatic tension," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"So who is Zach Helm, anyway?" asks Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "He's been hailed as a prodigiously talented young writer, but two films into his career, it's hard to see much beyond a gift for mimicry."

Mary McNamara talks with Helm for the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 11/20: For Alonso Duralde, writing for MSNBC, "Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium represents some kind of miracle. The trailers make the movie look like the ickiest kind of whimsy, accompanied by obstreperous special effects, but the film itself is gasp-worthy. And who would think that a movie about the sheer joy and magic of life - and how we need to keep believing in it - could also be a moving and life-affirming story about death? For kids, even?"

The Life of Reilly.

"The funniest and most poignant documentary of the year is The Life of Reilly, the final will and testament of the great Charles Nelson Reilly," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

"Rambling, blithe, nostalgic, and out for revenge, Reilly presents a witty anecdotal timeline of his life, and the bittersweet milestones play like a Spalding Gray monologue loosened up with a few shots of tequila," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

"[I]t's one of the winning eccentricities of The Life of Reilly, a taped distillation of CNR's autobiographical one-man-show, that it - feigned modesty aside - takes for granted that its subject's accomplishments are worthy of our attention and esteem," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE.

Reilly's one-man show Save It for the Stage "treads lightly around the rich subject of Mr Reilly's experience as an out gay man in the pre-Stonewall era," notes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "The directors address it obliquely via man-on-the-street interviews asking strangers if they remember Mr Reilly. (Most do, and a couple of them attempt impressions.)"

"[E]ven abridged, The Life of Reilly is spellbinding," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"Reilly takes the stage, empty but for a set of chairs, and adeptly summons an entire span of existence that leaves the audience hushed and heartbroken," writes Steph Auteri for Nerve. ". And then, while all are on the edge of their seat, he just as adeptly cuts that mute tension with a look or a throwaway comment that brings both belly laughs and relief."

What Would Jesus Buy?

"Possibly the feeblest entry yet in the anti-corporate theatre-of-muckraking genre, What Would Jesus Buy? chronicles a prefabricated cross-country crusade led by the New York-based comedic agitator Reverend Billy (Bill Talen)," writes Bill Weber at Slant. "With lefty agitprop this tepid, the Bush and Clinton clans will be alternating presidencies well into the 22nd century."

"Neatly embedded in the Reverend's strident enunciations of unholy behavior lies the clear-cut delivery of brilliant performance art," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "His ability to raise the ire of authorities illustrates the nature of his brazen cause, but it also shows how his actions are often misconstrued as deleterious or harmful to the public. Ironically enough, the Church of Stop Shopping is mostly nondenominational and apolitical, but unequivocally on-message."

Updated through 11/23.

"Much like [producer Morgan] Spurlock's hit Super Size Me, this production is slick, well-paced, and tremendously entertaining," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice. "Unfortunately, WWJB never pushes past the surface of [Reverend Billy's] shtick to explore the deeper forces behind our impulse to buy."

"At the very least, the film might make a viewer think twice about that next purchase at the Gap," suggests Laura Kern in the New York Times.

IndieWIRE interviews director Rob Vanalkemade.

A collection of only somewhat related links from Bookforum: "Shopping for God."

"What Would Jesus Buy? is one of those all-too-common issue-docs that's so clear about its point that it's practically pointless," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Of course, ultimately What Would Jesus Buy? isn't about Van Alkemade's point of view, but about Reverend Billy's, and frankly, The Church of Stop Shopping's act ain't much."

Updates, 11/17: "What Would Jesus Buy? may be a kitschy title, but the film is anything but," writes Marcy Dermansky. "Would you buy those sneakers, that striped sweater, if you knew that children were working eighteen hour days in a factory in Indonesia to make them? The film explores the direct correlations between our compulsive consumption and the sweatshops across the world."

Dennis Harvey talks with Reverend Billy for SF360.

Update, 11/19: Michael Guillén talks with the Rev and his wife, Savitri D.

Update, 11/21: "Like global warming and other environmental problems that have been the focus of recent documentaries, the horrors and causes of what Rev Billy terms the 'Shopocalypse' are right in front of us - people living far beyond their means bombarded by hard-sell advertising and spurred on by promises of easy credit - but chronicled in documentary form they are a lot harder to ignore," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 11/23: Emily Wilson talks with the Rev for Alternet: "'We want to collapse the distance between the product and labor,' he says. 'Our present economy is based on alienation from products.'"