Lists, 12/31.

'Tis an honor to serve on Modern Fabulousity's Cinema Jury. Voted best film: No Country for Old Men. Best performance: Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton. And Gabriel Shanks writes up his own bests, adding "a few snarky awards" to boot.

Good Lord, look at Michael Tully's list. That's a page to spend some time with.

Anyone who's been following Filmbrain's entries over the past couple of weeks will not be surprised to find There Will Be Blood at the top of his list; but that doesn't mean there aren't other surprises. His Benten Films cohort Aaron Hillis always finds a fun way to present his list. This year, it goes to 30.

Zach Campbell presents a "diaristic, quick-and-dirty breakdown of the things I liked, as a cinephile, in 2007."

"Lumière Editor Tim Wong recaps a year's worth of highlights, frustrations, and small triumphs in the world of film, with Top Ten lists from David Levinson, Alexander Bisley, Philip Matthews, Jacob Powell and Darren Bevan."

Opening a list of "Top 5 Thai films of 2007" at Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal, Curtis notes of his #1, Syndromes and a Century: "Thai authorities had no good reason to pick on this gentle ode to [Apichatpong Weerasethakul's] parents. But, the censorship of the film galvanised the Free Thai Cinema Movement, which formed to call for a change in the way films are treated by the government."

Via Peter Martin at Cinematical, where:

• James Rocchi lists "the films that made me exclaim 'Cinema!" in 2007, in no particular order after #1" - which is No Country for Old Men.

• At the top of Scott Weinberg's 10: The Orphanage: "I'll be doing a separate list for my horror faves, but there's no way I was removing this stellar little ghost story from my #1 spot."

• Kim Voynar tops her list with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

• Christopher Campbell lists his "Five Best Theatrical Experiences of 2007."

• Richard von Busack lists "Ten Really Bad Moments in 2007 Cinema."

Nick Dawson rounds up "choice tidbits" from the Director Interviews he's conducted this year for Filmmaker, adding: "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was, for my money, the best film of this year, but frustratingly my request for an interview with its writer-director, Andrew Dominik, was not responded to until after my deadline. Ultimately, I did the interview after the movie had already opened, and ran an almost unedited transcript as a Web Exclusive. To this date, it remains the only interview I am aware of that Dominik has done in the American press, a sign of just how little desire Warner Bros had to publicize the film."

"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is easily my choice as best film of the year with Andrew Dominik best director," agrees Ray Bennett. Also: favorite performances of the year.

Nathaniel R lists the top three "Over-Appreciated Films" before opening the 2007 Cinematic Hall of Shame. A deluge of comments ensues.

"[G]rab a stiff drink and revisit the lowlights of a thoroughly depressing year as we recap The Top 5 Issues in Nonfiction 2007," advises AJ Schnack.

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth takes issue with Bryan Appleyard's suggestion in the London Times that "greatness" died in 2007: "Does preserving the future of auteur theory really require such advantageous amnesia?"

"The Best New Film seen in a Theater: Exiled," says Peter Nellhaus.

In the Guardian, Steve Rose looks ahead to the highlights of 08.

For the Evening Class, Sergio De La Mora lists his "Top 10 Mexican Films." #1: El Violin, most recently reviewed by Sheila Cornelius at cinemaattraction. And Michael Guillén talks with director Francisco Vargas.

Koreanfilm.org contributor Q lists ten favorite DVDs of 2007.

"Some of 2007's finest films arrived in the final stretch - Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, fractured Dylan biopic I'm Not There - and so, for that matter did two of the worst, Richard Kelly's Southland Tales and Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth, both convoluted, bombastic and downright barking," writes Jonathan Romney. Also in the Independent: Nicholas Barber.

"American cinema produced one flat-out masterpiece this year - Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood - and at least three more great movies that might legitimately be called "art," if you'll pardon the expression." Tom Charity introduces his list for CNN.

The New York Post's Lou Luminick and Kyle Smith discuss the best and worst films of the year.

Bob Turnbull's "Favorites of 2007" is a casual sort of thing - performances, moments, viewings of older films.

David Walsh posts two lists at the WSWS: films released and not yet released in the US.

Yair Raveh notes that this was "The Year of the Anton."

"Year in Review," Ilya Bernstein in n+1.

The New York Times looks back on the "Notable Deaths of 2007." When your time comes, will you make this list?

Shorts, 12/31.

"After globetrotting through England and Spain for his recent films, Woody Allen says he's returning to familiar terrain," writes Steven Zeitchik. "The director, whom Risky Biz caught up with last week at the premiere for his Cassandra's Dream, let slip that he will shoot his next project in the Big Apple."

"Following on the success of Paris, Je T'Aime, the powers that be have opted to repeat their formula of love stories set in famous cities, this time anthologizing stories set in New York in a collection titled, surprisingly enough, New York, I Love You," notes Todd Brown at Twitch. Among the directors on board: Park Chan-wook and Fatih Akin. Todd's got more names.

Sacha Baron Cohen will play Abbie Hoffman in Steven Spielberg's The Trial of the Chicago 7, notes Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

The AP is reporting that Tom Hanks will soon begin shooting Comrade Rockstar, a biopic of Dean Reed, the "Red Elvis," in Berlin.

Journey "will see [Daniel] Radcliffe play Dan Eldon, a 22-year-old who was among four journalists stoned to death by a mob in Mogadishu in July 1993," reports David Smith. "His mother, Kathy, says that she has rejected numerous bids for film rights to the story, and met but turned down leading actors including Orlando Bloom, Heath Ledger, Ryan Phillippe and Joaquin Phoenix, all of whom were eager to play the part. But then she sat down with 18-year-old Radcliffe and his parents at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles." Radcliffe "has a puckishness, sense of humour and energy inside him which remind me of Dan," she says.

Also in the Guardian: "The Lady Vanishes is one of the least analysed pictures in the Hitchcock canon; critics have always preferred to pick over the railway-bookstand Freudianism of his American films," writes Matthew Sweet in a piece centering on Charters and Caldicott, "the men who hold the key to the mystery of the title - and yet refuse to yield it and save the heroine.... And while swastikas flying over Whitehall were a real and frightening possibility, it's easy to understand why these two characters became so attractive to audiences sitting in the dark of the Essoldo, dreaming of peace - dreaming of living in a country fit for fools like Charters and Caldicott."

"At Dennis Cooper's blog, the novelist has posted a long and detailed 'oral history' of the cult actress Tuesday Weld," notes DK Holm at the Vancouver Voice. "Perhaps the most interesting revelation of the oral history is the comment on Miss Weld's hidden life as a Satanist."

"There would seem to be an enormous distance between the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where the central events in Taxi to the Dark Side take place, and Enron's headquarters in Houston, where the machinations of white-collar criminals brought down the giant energy company and became the backdrop for [Alex] Gibney's entertaining 2005 documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," writes Adam Liptak in the New York Times. "But Mr Gibney said the two projects have common themes. 'The subject of corruption unites my films,' he said. 'Enron was about economic corruption, and Taxi is about the corruption of the rule of law.'"

In Taschen's Cinema Now, "Andrew Bailey takes us on a guided, visually-articulated tour through today's world cinema. Along with his directorial profiles and capsule reviews of their respective films, the volume includes a DVD with such extras as trailers, music videos and short films by Alexander Payne and Carlos Reygadas." And Michael Guillén talks with him.

In the New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma calls for a fresh translation of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. Meantime, "Those who are not blessed with the good fortune to be able to read the novel in German can still enjoy Fassbinder's great film." Buruma speculates as to what Döblin may or may not have owed Joyce and what Fassbinder may or may not have owed Douglas Sirk and Max Beckmann.

For the New Yorker, Lillian Ross meets James Thiérrée, grandson of Charlie Chaplin, to talk about his latest show, Au Revoir Parapluie.

52 Pick-Up is not exactly a good movie," writes Vince Keenan. "It's an enjoyably unpretentious one. It's mean and it plays dirty. It's trashy and it knows it. And sometimes that's exactly what you're in the mood for."

In the Los Angeles Times, Chris Lee explains the "Sweding" campaign for Be Kind Rewind.

James Robinson profiles Ang Lee for the Observer, where Barbara Ellen talks with Laura Linney.

Online grinning tip. "Proving once again the centrality of James Bond to contemporary British identity, the Royal Mail releases these stamps on January 8th, 2008, the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming's birth," notes John Coulthart.

Fests and events, 12/31.

"Starting on Wednesday with a double feature of Laura (1944) and Daisy Kenyon (1947), Film Forum in Manhattan will present 23 films by Otto Preminger over 16 days," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "Even today, more than 20 years after his death, Preminger is remembered less as an artist than as a Teutonic tyrant, famous for his glistening bald head, piercing blue eyes and volcanic temper - an image partly drawn from his occasional acting appearances as a heel-clicking Nazi (as in his own 1943 comedy Margin for Error) and partly from reality, as Foster Hirsch illustrates in his fine new biography, Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King.... But as the personality fades, the films remain and seem to grow in stature."

"No doubt the programmers of the British Film Institute's forthcoming Wim Wenders retrospective didn't plan it this way. But dividing the German director's 40-year career across two months has left a distinct 'before and after' look to his work." A preview from James Mottram in the Independent.

Earlier this month, Brian Darr saw Intolerance at the Castro Theatre, "courtesy of the SF Silent Film Festival and Photoplay Productions, whose Patrick Stanbury brought a tinted print from London, introduced the screening, and performed 42 manual projection speed changes to ensure that we had the best presentation of the film possible. What a revelation it was to see the film exhibited this way! For the first time, I felt I was starting to understand not only the technical scale and skill involved in the film's making, but also the way the four interlocking stories joined to create a unique and modern narrative." Recommendations for upcoming events in the Bay Area follow.

The House Next Door on runs another piece in conjunction with All That Fosse, the Film Society at Lincoln Center series on through tomorrow. Aaron Aradillas: "On stage, choreographing sexual-playful spasms of intricate movement, Fosse seemed to revel in his naughty-boy sense of play. But on film, he examined the self-destructive component of celebrity and asserted that self-loathing was the driving force of show business."

Anthony Hopkins @ 70.

"Childhood friends of Oscar-winner Sir Anthony Hopkins are joining celebrities at a New Year's Eve 70th birthday party near his south Wales birthplace," reports the BBC.

In German: Johannes Bonke interviews Hopkins for the Berliner Zeitung. More congrats and such from Alexandra Stäheli in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Christiane Peitz in Der Tagesspiegel and Peter Zander in Die Welt.

NCTATNY. 07 in Review.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You has a new special feature up: "Two-Thousand Seven in Review."

As usual, it's splenderifically designed.

Matt Bailey: "The only movies that really surprised me this year were Breakfast for Two, an uncelebrated 1937 Barbara Stanwyck screwball comedy (which I only discovered because I have an Eric Blore wishlist on my TiVo), and Cria cuervos, Carlos Saura's spooky 1976 film about they way they fuck you up, your mum and dad (which I only discovered because I still have a compulsion to watch every film released by the Criterion Collection)."

"[A]ny year I get to see some of my favorite actors and actresses in some of their best roles is an undeniably great twelve months," writes Adam Balz. And he opens with well-justified praise for John Carroll Lynch's performance in Zodiac, the film at the top of his list.

Among the events that have run through David Carter's mind this year: "The Rise and Fall of the Boutique DVD Label" and "The Death of 'Cult' Film Magazines."

"I thought I'd take this space to mention a few things that I saw this year that you, in all likelihood, didn't," decides Leo Goldsmith. "Given that you probably saw all the same good and bad films that I saw this year – and more – I thought this might be a better use of both your time and mine." What follows is primarily derived from viewing work by Harun Farocki and Adam Curtis.

After remarking on all the swollen bellies this year had to offer, Chiranjit Goswami writes: "While it might be more acceptable to choose something obscure, exotic, or classic as the pinnacle of this year's achievements, in my mind, no film in 2007 examines, exhibits, and exemplifies the concept of exhaustive determination better than David Fincher's Zodiac." Lists and "Memorable Moments" follow.

"2007 was a year of revelations: a year of discovering previously-overlooked films, actors, even whole genres that I had ignored or written off, and a year of learning about myself, through film," writes Eva Holland. An example: "Revelation #3: I do like thrillers."

Tom Huddleston goes for the "Heroes & Villains" approach: "It may not have the authoritative stamp of a 10 Best countdown, but it's a lot more fun to write." Among the heroes: Harmony Korine. Among the villains: "Critics and Awards Judges - For me, 2007 will forever be remembered as the Year of the Bizarrely Overrated."

Jenny Jediny presents a list "alphabetized by title, and highlighted with designated 'award' categories of sorts (some serious, but mostly for amusement)." Example: "Most Lovable Dysfunctional Family: Love Streams."

"What was the stand-out moment for film in 2007?" asks Ian Johnston. "In one sense for me it was the almost simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, a symbolic passing of two giants from another age of cinema. It's not that there aren't great directors at work today but they're working in a wider film culture that's been transformed, above all in two respects. Firstly, in Bergman and Antonioni's day there existed in the general culture an awareness of and an interest in the directors of foreign subtitled films that simply does not exist nowadays. And secondly, it's impossible to imagine any arthouse director today being given the opportunity as Bergman was of developing his craft through ten years of experimentation involving as many outright failures as successes." Further down, a list follows, topped by Aleksandr Sokurov's Alexandra.

"I laughed and whooped through Edgar Wright's comedy-actioner Hot Fuzz (more than once); I tried not to breathe too loudly at a screening of Philip Gröning's meditative documentary Into Great Silence," writes Victoria Large. "I have no desire to sum up twelve months of moviegoing with a list that I will inevitably grow to regret. So in lieu of that, I'll zero in on one genre - the musical - and the welcome growth I saw in it this year."

"By nature I am a nostalgist in regard to film, and this marks the third consecutive year that I've refrained from listing my contemporary favorites in any form, and this year I find it especially daunting and uninspiring. Great cinema is often, and perhaps implicitly, something that is to be sought, and we live in an age in which the availability of film has taken precedence over the opportunity to discover it." That's how Rumsey Taylor wraps a lovely remembrance of a man he never met, Dennis J Arruda, owner of Video Oasis, a store in East Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Interview. Gregg Araki.

With Smiley Face screening at the IFC Center through Tuesday and out on DVD on January 8, David D'Arcy talks with Gregg Araki about stoner movies in general and about why this one simply had to be carried by Anna Faris.

Araki also looks back to Cannes ("When I'm on my deathbed, I'll be thinking about that screening") and ahead to his next film: "I'm working on a forward-looking project that's an internet series, but also functions ass a feature movie, along the lines of Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks - sort of a multi-platform thing which can exist as a little series that you can watch on your iPod or your cell phone or whatever, but then it also can exist as a movie that you can watch in a big theater."

Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1922 - 2007.

Oscar-nominated Polish film director Jerzy Kawalerowicz died aged 85 in the Polish capital Warsaw late Thursday after suffering a hemorrhage, Poland's Association of Cinematographers confirmed Friday. Among the fathers of the 1950's "Polish school" of cinematography, Kawalerowicz directed 17 feature films during his life-time.

The AFP.

The films of Kawalerowicz are uneven; it is as though the filmmaker, after momentary triumphs and outstanding artistic achievements, would lapse into a crisis that prepared him for yet another masterpiece.... Only in a very few directors' works do we find such range, from the realistic film to the profound psychological drama, from the historical epic to the political drama.

Vacláv Merhaut, Film Reference.

See also: Ray Privett interviewed Kawalerowicz for Kinoeye in 2001; acquarello reviews Night Train and Mother Joan of the Angels; and then, of course, there's the Wikipedia entry.

Weekend books.

"The nostalgia for old Hollywood often seems to point to something beyond a desire for the comforting regularity of the well-run factories, for those assembly-line films that satisfy just by virtue of their refined craft, perfect lighting, unpalsied camerawork, spatial coherence and unrushed rhythms," writes Manohla Dargis, reviewing Jeanine Basinger's The Star Machine (excerpt). "From the outside, the old studio system seemed to run effortlessly, its gears slicked and slippery smooth, but in truth it was always plagued by cycles of uncertainty and retrenchment; it was a perpetual mutating machine."

Also in the New York Times: "In a new book, Carmontelle's Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment, the historian Laurence Chatel de Brancion steps back into prerevolutionary France to explore the pastimes created by Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, in his role as resident entertainer at the court of the duke of Orléans," writes Kathryn Shattuck. "At the heart of the volume are Carmontelle's experiments with light and moving images: rouleaux transparents, or 'rolled-up transparent drawings,' a precursor to modern cinema."

And: Jeremy McCarter on Andrew Lycett's The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a new collection, Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters; and Tom Shone on Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved.

Glenn Kenny's been reading Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism, "the first compilation of movie writing by the great Kent Jones, whose ever-probing acuity illuminates not just individual films and filmmakers but the condition of cinema in the here and now." He quotes a bit on Wes Anderson and remarks: "Damn. That is movie criticism."

"Is [Detour Edgar G] Ulmer's statement about the failed American dream? Does it echo the hazily Marxist Frankfurt school of philosophy?" In the Austin Chronicle, Joe O'Connell reads The Philosophy of Film Noir and The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, noting that the "two books meet over Blade Runner, which is described as a 'future noir.'"

"American fiction lost three of its most warmly admired figures this year, all dead at the age of 84 after long careers," writes Morris Dickstein in the Los Angeles Times. "Critics love the idea of literary generations, but it would be a challenge to find themes or ideas to link the disparate work of Norman Mailer, Grace Paley and Kurt Vonnegut."

Guardian readers pick their books of the year and the Review looks ahead to the books of 08.

In the NYT, Janet Maslin, Michiko Kakutani and William Grimes make their selections.

Interview. John Sayles.

"From his home base in New Jersey to Louisiana, Texas, Alaska and Florida, novelist-turned-hyphenated filmmaker John Sayles has crisscrossed the country weaving sprawling stories in such films as City of Hope, Passion Fish, Lone Star, Limbo and Sunshine State," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "Unique among his peers, Sayles travels his own road dramatizing an Americana streaked with social realism and a touch of the magical.... Changing times are a dominant theme in Sayles' work and most of his films put forth very specific social issues, but in Honeydripper, these matters are mostly percolating beneath the surface. The film evocatively charts a time and place where change has been a longtime coming and buoyantly imagines a turning point where, at least musically, anything is possible."

Looking back on her September conversation with Sayles, Cathleen Rountree notes "he displayed his impressive encyclopedic knowledge of music, expounded on 'comic book movies' and border politics, and shared a liberal's fears about the final days of the Bush administration."

Updated through 12/31.

"Honeydripper, John Sayles's shambling fusion of pop mythology and social mosaic, imagines the world-changing moment, around 1950, in the rural South when a blues guitarist first plugged in his ax and rocked the joint," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. Sayles "is primarily interested in fusing archetypes from the Jim Crow South, both black and white, with mythic dimensions. An affable blind bluesman, Possum (Keb' Mo'), whose enigmatic smile hints at his possession of secret knowledge, turns up now and again. Everywhere and nowhere at once, his elusive presence helps push the movie toward the realm of fable."

"The movie's less interested in maintaining an accessible narrative arc than in presenting what's essentially a verité depiction of segregated life in rural Alabama, circa 1950," writes Robert Levin at cinemaattraction. "The screenplay contains a wealth of lived-in, authentic dialogue, expressed with natural precision by the gifted ensemble, and the gold hued cinematography perfectly captures the setting's wooden buildings, dusty roads and sun-drenched fields. The particular genius of the filmmaker, then, lies in his evocation of the recognizable emotions latent beneath that unfamiliar surface."

"Honeydripper so slowly builds up to its climax - the excitement only begins as the townsfolk doll up and descend upon the club en masse, the vivid colors of the weekend-best clothing providing a lovely visual jolt - that when Sonny finally plays, the film too feels like it has suddenly, literally, gone electric," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE. "Sadly, Honeydripper ends just as it gets going."

"Honeydripper is more hopeful than Sunshine State but possibly more naïve: Music saves the day and racial strife is no more dangerous than Stacy Keach's almost huggable Sherrif Pugh arresting a young musician, Sonny Blake (Gary Clark, Jr), and putting him on cotton-pickin' duty for 'gawkerry with intent to mope,'" writes Nick Schager at Slant.

"When tracking the career of John Sayles, who began writing and shooting low-budget independent movies long before it became fashionable, it's clear he can be as much a muckraker as a filmmaker," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "But Mr Sayles's new film, Honeydripper... doesn't feel like an Op-Ed commentary or a yellowed news clipping sprung to life. It has a more intimate, down-home agenda." But for Nicolas Rapold, this one's "a slog, replete with thudding characterization, bankrupt direction, and childlike plotting. And there's not nearly enough electrified music for one to just wait out the rest of the movie."

"Writer/director John Sayles takes a relaxed approach, letting characters congeal, and [Danny] Glover is the keystone in an ensemble of very human performance," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "But that same leisurely attitude becomes a problem when the plot starts demanding attention again - the twists of the film's final section will feel excruciatingly inevitable to anyone who's seen a movie before, and the payoff isn't there."

"Sayles's films are generally celebrated for their leavened characterizations and authentic grit; Honeydripper, produced with a much larger bankroll than his previous work, lends credence to the notion that independents need to hover around the poverty line to produce anything substantial," writes Leah Churner in Reverse Shot.

For Robert Cashill, Sayles "would make a better playwright than filmmaker. When a friend told me that his latest film as writer and director was 'a John Sayles movie, like every other John Sayles movie,' it wasn't really a dig; it's just that Sayles, at the vanguard of American independent cinema, has been tilling this soil for 30 years now, and hasn't much changed."

"For all his good qualities, Sayles has never been much of a sensualist, and that's the problem at the root of Honeydripper," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "It needs to be electrifying, and instead, it's a John Sayles movie."

Choire Sicha talks with Sayles and his partner and producer Maggie Renzi for the Los Angeles Times.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has an online viewing tip: "At the recent Monterey Jazz Festval, two film legends - Clint Eastwood and John Sayles - talked about about the blues in an onstage discussion."

Stephen Saito talks with Sayles for IFC News.

And Patrick Z McGavin talks with Sayles for Stop Smiling.

Update, 12/31: "Like some of Sayles's earlier films - Passion Fish and Sunshine State, in particular - Honeydripper is at its best when the characters sit around, dither, and ruminate," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Moviemaking seems to have become almost magically easy for this independent writer-director. He builds a detailed atmosphere, brings his good people and his bad together, and lets them jabber at one another; the virtuosity is rhetorical rather than visual."

Lists, 12/28.

"I always root for the underdog and grade on a curve in this annual exercise, and this year more than ever I practiced affirmative action on behalf of adventurous, difficult-to-categorize pictures that fared poorly in the marketplace," writes Andrew O'Hehir, introducing his top ten at Salon. His #1: Bamako.

From the Art of Memory, the year's best music, DVDs, movies and books.

As Dana Stevens opens up her top ten - an alphabetical list - she reminds us that Slate's "Movie Club" will be convening next week.

"Putting Cristian Mungiu's 4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) on the top spot of the Best of 2007 might seem both risky and conservative," writes european-films.net editor Boyd van Hoeij somewhere in the middle, actually, of his list of the "Best European Films of 2007." "Conservative because it is the one film everyone else has been praising ever since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d'Or. Risky because adding to the hype is never a good thing and going into a film heaped with so much critical praise from all corners might set viewers up for a disappointment. But here's the thing: it is the best film of 2007."

Marcy Dermansky agrees, topping her list with this "riveting, wrenching, horrifying and beautifully told story."

Heavens, here's a batch: "The contributors to SF360.org were asked to ponder the best and worst movies of the past 365 days, to organize their thoughts about film moments into discrete categories, and/or offer prognostications for 2008," writes Susan Gerhard, and ten lists, a few from names you'll be glad to see again, follow.

"As 2007 closes, we thought it appropriate to wish happy birthday to the most powerful and pervasive approach to filmic storytelling the world has yet seen. That would be classical continuity cinema, synthesized in what was coming to be known as Hollywood." Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell celebrate 1917 - and yes, there is a list.

"It was touch and go at times, but 2007 shaped up to be a pretty good vintage," writes Nicolas Rapold, introducing his top ten (#1: Day Night Day Night). "Notably, American auteurs of the 90s resurfaced - with a vengeance: Haynes, Fincher and Anderson (Paul Thomas, but we still love you, Wes) were joined by their predecessors, the Coen brothers, on the marquee. Equally striking was the little-remarked success of female filmmakers, including Pascale Ferran (Lady Chatterley), Tamara Jenkins (The Savages), So Yong Kim (In Between Days), and the late Adrienne Shelly (Waitress). 2007 also boasted innovative popcorn flicks: Sunshine, The Host and The Bourne Ultimatum all bucked the implications of the fourth straight year to see a sequel as the leading grosser."

Also in the New York Sun:

• "With major retrospectives devoted to Max Ophuls, Rouben Mamoulian, Mikhail Kalatozov and Fritz Lang, 2007 was the repertory year of the moving camera," writes Bruce Bennett. "Mindful as always of cineaste-turned-director Paul Schrader's observation that 'list making is the junk food of criticism,' let us nevertheless unwrap this year's 10 most toothsome classic-film-going experiences."

• Grady Hendrix presents "a list of the best 10 movies that came and went before anyone had a chance to see them."

• S James Snyder writes up his "top four movie moments of the year."

• Steve Dollar: "Not so much a fearless prognostication as a tip sheet tilted toward the cinematic promise of the next dozen months, here's a list of the 10 best movies of 2008."

"The 2007 Bad Lit Movie of the Year is: Mike Z's Wanted: New Talent! The Walt Gollender Story," announces Mike Everleth. "This is also the most simply shot film I've seen year. Basically, it's just a close-up of the film's subject, Walt Gollender, as he relates the epic story of his life as a struggling songwriter and talent scout in New Jersey from the early 60s to the present. However, the depths of Walt's story and the background of the filmmaker make this a highly complex documentary."

"Our big Best of 07 stories run Sunday, but because I'm such a smug gasbag there wasn't enough room to bloviate about the acting I loved this year," writes the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. But of course, this, too, is what blogs are for.

The Guardian's Danny Leigh lists his "film blog highlights of 2007."

At the Guru, James Van Maanen presents his list of the "Best Gay-themed Films of the Year on DVD (in alphabetical order)."

Alonso Duralde tops his list at MSNBC with 4 Months... while Dave White compiles a different sort of list: "[T]he bad movies that blow your mind, the kind that plop into your life like magical bird droppings on your brain, those that excel at badness in a virtuosic way, the kind that make you wish you could peer inside the brains of the people who made them so you can see what crazy actually looks like, the kind that make you glad you’re alive and living right now and able to scratch your head in puzzlement over their very existence, instead of having to live back in the olden days, back when life was boring and they didn’t have movies at all, those are the ones I bring to your attention here."

At AICN, "Fathergeek lays out the 25 Films he found most enjoyable over the last twelve months."

Michael Guillén lists ten favorites of the many interviews he's conducted this past year.

"Reviewing this year's best films, it's tempting to summon up the spirit of the early 70s, fondly remembered as a veritable golden age in which a new generation of American filmmakers threw off convention and produced a series of iconoclastic movies," writes Gregg Kilday in the Hollywood Reporter. "This year's movies almost seemed to beg for the comparison." Via Matt Dentler.

Andy Klein didn't have such a great year. "[I]t's been about six months since a single film made me want to rush out and evangelize... and then just barely." His and Amy Nicholson's lists are alphabetical, while lists from the other LA CityBeat critics (appearing on the same page) are ranked.

Cinematical's Erik Davis: "[I]nstead of giving you another top ten list, here are my official awesome awards for 2007."

"All we can say is hooray for the DVD," sighs Chicagoist's Rob Christopher. "On Monday we'll present a list of the ten best movies we saw this year, but for now here's ten that we wished we'd seen."

"Another look back at 2007" at indieWIRE, "this time featuring top ten lists from industry insiders and bloggers."

"[T]here were some major events in 2007 that didn't happen, creating an effect that was arguably even more profound." A list from Timothy M Gray and Variety.

Gabriel Wardell lists his "Top Ten 'Best of 2007' Lists."

Variety's Circuit declares Telluride the "Best Fest of 2007."

"The votes are in for the Best Film Noir of All Time (1941 - 1945)," announces Noir of the Week.

MS Smith's "Year of Listening."

Online viewing tips. YouTube's "Most Memorable Online Videos of 2007" get Steve Bryant thinking: "Of all the facets of online video, one that's consistently unremarked upon is the degree to which videos' appeal is confined to niche audiences."

Shorts, 12/28.

Happy birthday, Greenbriar Picture Shows!

The Austin American-Statesman's Chris Garcia spots news of the spaghetti western the Coen brothers are planning. Sounds like there will be gore.

"Filmmakers create meaning and context through montage," writes Dave McDougall at Chained to the Cinémathèque. "The image, like the word, contains meaning only in the interplay between context and image, whether the context is intrinsic or extrinsic to the image itself."

"What is it with all these movies showing New York City utterly obliterated?" asks Sewell Chan. "To be sure, movies showing New York being destroyed are nothing new — and have a long history in cinema. (New York Magazine's Vulture blog recently had an item on the Top 10 movie destructions of New York.) But the resilience of the urban-destruction theme seems notable - and, after a brief post-9/11 lull, the theme seems more prevalent than ever."

Also in the New York Times:

• "To a degree that would make any adult desperate to get into the film industry jealous, [Malcolm Mays, 17] has mustered the support of studio executives, a powerful producer and a top talent agent," writes David M Halbfinger. "It would be easy to tell this as the story of a bunch of Hollywood people doing a good deed in time for Christmas, except that it isn't. They all say they hope to get as much out of Mr Mays as he gets out of them."

• For Neil Genzlinger, Alien vs Predator: Requiem "may not be classic sci-fi like the original Alien, which it has in its DNA, but it's a perfectly respectable next step in the series."

• Joanne Kaufman reports on Paramount Vantage's efforts to make all its releases carbon neutral.

Daniel Anker "should be commended for bringing up the debate over whether 'Holocaust movies' are inherently suspect, or if it's worse to avoid the topic altogether," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But [Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust] merely mentions the controversies; it doesn't really engage them."

The celebrity screenwriter was about to go the way of onscreen smoking until - in the year of the writers' strike, oddly enough - along came Diablo Cody (Juno) and her media-ready backstory. In one of the chapters in that story, she was an editor at City Pages. Matthew Smith conducts the homecoming interview: "Following her Golden Globe screenwriting nomination earlier in the day and a media marathon around town, Cody arrived a little worn out but game. Within minutes she was on a roll and ready to talk about the upside and downside of sudden fame, her second thoughts about calling herself 'Diablo,' and why she showed up drunk to her first meeting at City Pages."

"In less than a decade the Iranian Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi has become one of cinema's most potent lyric poets," writes Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times. "From an amalgam of broad comedy, gentle absurdity and the harrowing consequences of war, he sparks a deeply humanist alchemy in unsentimental tales peopled by nonprofessional actors. Half Moon, Ghobadi's fourth feature since his 2000 debut, A Time for Drunken Horses, strikes a more forthrightly elegiac tone than any of his preceding work."

Stephen Applebaum talks with Tony Leung for the Independent.

The Washington Post's Bonnie S Benwick talks with Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney about King Corn.

"Noel Coward wrote a musical for her, she was wooed by Hollywood, and Kenneth Tynan declared her legs to be 'the eighth wonder of the world,'" writes Sam Jones in the Guardian. "But the British actor and singer Pat Kirkwood, who died on Christmas day aged 86, was equally famed for her friendship with the Duke of Edinburgh - a friendship that was the subject of gossip and innuendo for decades."

"If Atonement registers as a disappointment, unmet expectations can be partially ascribed to outsized anticipation," writes Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot. "Joe Wright's highly successful debut, the Academy Award–nominated Pride and Prejudice, tagged him as a legitimate filmmaker sensitive but never fully enslaved to the rhythms of literary adaptation, while Ian McEwan's source book was one of the more universally and justly lauded contemporary novels in recent memory."

A Sweeney Todd roundup:

• "Just in time for Christmas, director Tim Burton is painting theaters across the country red and green: red with gallons of movie blood, green with the faces of queasy moviegoers when they discover just what kind of gorefest they've wandered into," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "Burton's turned Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's musical Sweeney Todd into a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie for the Schubert Alley set."

• For Josef Braun, writing in Vue Weekly, "this morbid tale has become strangely bloodless."

• Mark Salisbury talks with Helena Bonham Carter for the Los Angeles Times.

• Blogging for the Guardian, David Thomson predicts and Oscar win for Johnny Depp.

"Although Charlie Wilson's War is more watchable than such dreck as In the Valley of Elah or De Palma's discombobulated Redacted, it is worse than either just because it is so slickly watchable," writes Armond White. But Dan Sallitt's pleasantly surprised by Charlie.

At the AV Club Kyle Ryan talks with Reilly and Kasdan about Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

In I'm Not There, "[Todd] Haynes may be on to something, about Americans' 'changeability,' but, unhappily, the idea is never pursued in any depth," writes James Brewer at the WSWS.

"What makes a star?" asks Ken Russell. "In my experience, there are ten attributes, which one is either born with or learns, to qualify for stardom." Also in the London Times, Ed Potton talks with Harry Connick Jr.

In Slate, Constance Casey notes the ways some movies get gardening right, while many get it wrong.

Online listening tip. The December 17 edition of the BBC's On Screen features an interview with Andrew Piddington (The Killing of John Lennon), a report on Berlin's "thriving film industry" and a talk with producer Graham King (The Departed, Young Victoria). Thanks, Jerry!

DVDs, 12/28.

"Arguably the last half-century's least seen, least documented, and most marginalized filmmaking master, ex-Englishman-cum-global-exile Peter Watkins has finally emerged on the public radar as a titanic figure to be reckoned with, a slow burn that began when his six-hour epic La Commune (Paris, 1871) began touring world festivals in 2001 after being, typically, dumped by the French TV networks for which it was made," writes Michael Atkinson in the Stranger. "Up to then, and having endured every form of media and bureaucratic blackout conceivable, Watkins was famous here only for Edvard Munch (1974), a massive, Norwegian-made historical tapestry that is an easily declared champion in the Greatest Artist Biopic Ever drag."

"What's in Your DVD Player, David Cronenberg?" asks Sean Axmaker at MSN.

Why did Two-Lane Blacktop die "a quick death at the box office" in the summer of '71, never to be seen again, at least on video, until 1999? Elbert Ventura offers a theory or two in Slate: "Two-Lane Blacktop held up a mirror, and the audience didn't like what it saw: a counterculture whose rejection of society had curdled into soul-killing solipsism." It was "a meditative and elliptical mood piece in a crowd of rowdy and flashy peers - a sui generis convergence of Antonioni and Americana."

"Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and the first animated film to ever be considered for such an honor, Fantastic Planet made an unprecedented impact upon its initial release, though its handful of elements that are inappropriate for kids - like the nudity, philosophical digressions and rampant death - probably handicapped it in terms of its staying power in the cartoon canon," writes Josef Braun in the Vue Weekly. "Neither an easily digestible family film nor a raunchy, Ralph Bakshi sort of R-rated film, it hovers in its own bizarre little universe, slowly nurturing its small cult following, which will hopefully continue to grow with the release of Accent Cinema's nicely supplemented new DVD."

Wells Dunbar in the Austin Chronicle on Kino's edition of the restored Nosferatu: "One of the most influential films of all time, it's almost superfluous to discuss the film itself and its considerable merits. But if anything, this crystalline edition imprints Murnau's fascination with nature's grotesqueries - carnivorous plants, plague rats, and tentacled polyps, not to mention the titular bloodsucker - even deeper on the psyche."

"In my opinion, It's a Wonderful Life is a masterpiece, but a disturbing one," writes Graham Fuller in the Guardian, tracing the history of the critical reception of "the beloved Christmas movie, one of the most iconic and misunderstood in American cinema."

DVD roundup: Peter Sobczynski at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Fests and events, 12/28.

"Next to renowned directors like Laetitia Masson, Brad Anderson or Lucia Murat, newcomers like Javier Gutierrez from Spain or Ozgür Yildirim from Germany will present their works in the Panorama 2008," announces the Berlinale. "Music star Madonna will give her directorial debut alongside the works of underground star Bruce LaBruce and TEDDY winner 2007, Zero Chou from Taiwan."

For the Austin Chronicle, Belinda Acosta previews 3 Mexicanas en Hollywood: Dolores del Río, Lupe Vélez, and Katy Jurado, a Tuesday evening series running January 8 through February 12: "While it seems a shame to limit the roster to these three actresses, there's a reason: They are the three most visible Mexican actresses who built successful careers in Mexico and in Hollywood, navigating cultures, challenging stereotypes, and becoming icons on both sides of the border." And Kimberley Jones has a note on the Agrasánchez Film Archives.

Jones also tallies up the titles so far confirmed for SXSW Film.

"I've got no beef with anyone who considers this Chaplin's masterpiece - it's certainly the movie most suffused with economic and romantic pathos." J Hoberman previews the week-long run of City Lights at Film Forum and mentions a couple of other NYC-area events: Silly Symphonies at the Museum of the Moving Image (through Sunday) and All That Fosse at the Walter Reade (through Tuesday).

Related: Bob Westal at the House Next Door: "Lenny is a fascinating, beautifully wrought black and white film with a number of outstanding scenes, but I think it's for more than gonadal reasons that I keep returning to that early sequence featuring 'Hot Honey Harlow.' Like so many sequences in Fosse's films, it strongly hints that a show business and human dignity are unavoidably at odds, but also beautiful."

And: A "movie musical is more than the sum of its numbers," writes Lauren Wissot. "Fosse knew this, which is why his own film version of another Kander and Ebb musical, Cabaret, shot over three decades ago, feels less dated than Marshall’s 2002 Academy darling," Chicago.

Back in the Voice, Michelle Orange on Chuck Close: An Elegant Portrait of the Art World's Leading Portraitist, "an open, vivid symposium on not just Close's career, but that of many artists of the same vintage: Kiki Smith, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Brice Marden speak eloquently about Close, but [the late director Marion] Cajori goes further, constructing a primer on the work of those individuals as well, who define their own aesthetics by setting themselves in relief to Close."

Close's process "entails blowing up photographs by way of a grid system and rerendering each section as a huge, abstracted square," notes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "The technique somehow combines uncanny intimacy and intellectual distance, much like Ms Cajori's splendid movie, which captures Mr Close at work via a combination of probing close-ups of paint-daubed canvas and wide shots that situate him within his work space."

"Film Forum is kicking off 2008 with a far-from-complete but nonetheless welcome retrospective of the formidable Otto Preminger, one of the most distinctive sensibiities in the history of American cinema," writes Dan Sallitt. "Just in case anyone out there is looking for guidance, here are my two cents about which titles in the series are required viewing." January 2 through 17.

"[H]alf a century after his death, mention of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, another great musical son of Vienna, often draws blank stares here and elsewhere - despite his legacy as the founder of the 'Hollywood Sound,'" writes George Jahn for the AP. "The city's Jewish Museum is devoting a major exhibition to the man whose classical career fell victim to a triple whammy: a domineering music critic father, the advent of atonal music and, finally, the rise of Hitler that perpetuated his self-exile to the US."

Michael Guillén previews Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven, which'll be opening Berlin & Beyond: New Films from Germany, Austria & Switzerland, running January 10 through 16 at San Francisco's Castro.

In the Independent Weekly, Neil Morris notes that the resignation of Nancy Buirski as head of the Full Frame Documentary Full Frame Festival "comes amid speculation about the financial stability of the Durham mainstay."

Online listening tip. Errata looks back on the New York Film Festival.

Interview. Juan Antonio Bayona and Sergio Sánchez.

"The Orphanage is a film that often makes something out of nothing - something being scaring the bejesus out of you. Director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G Sánchez ratchet up the tension to such excruciating heights that, while you're watching the film, your impulse is to scream out loud just to feel some sense of release," writes Mark Olsen in the LA Weekly.

At the main site, Michael Guillén talks with Bayona about his debut feature and with Sánchez about the screenplay everyone'd told him was "wrong, wrong," and with both about their producer, Guillermo del Toro, and their touchstones, ranging from Henry James to Steven Spielberg.

Updated through 1/1.

Back to Olsen in the LAW: "[T]here's not really a bogeyman in The Orphanage and not much blood; just insane intensity and a building sense of bad vibes. Staring into that face of inky blackness is actress Belén Rueda." He talks with her, while Ella Taylor interviews Bayona.

"Even though The Orphanage is Juan Antonio Bayona's first feature film, there is no doubting his skill," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But like his patron Guillermo del Toro (who is both producer and 'presenter' of this movie), Mr Bayona is interested in using the horror genre to explore emotions beyond mere fright. Though there are plenty of sudden jolts and eerie atmospherics, The Orphanage is ultimately concerned with grief, remorse and maternal longing."

"If The Orphanage were boiled down to a few isolated moments of skillfully executed terror, Bayona would surely have crafted a masterpiece," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Because its pace-heavy plot goes too many directions and fails to pick up all the pieces, the result is something less than that - but admirable nonetheless. Let the anticipation of Bayona's next move begin."

"The Orphanage gets steadily more engrossing - and scary, as Rueda's performance takes hold," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "Wandering the empty house in jittery despair, Rueda gives as gripping a screen solo as Will Smith in I Am Legend (the season's other ice-bath in the isolation of parental grief)."

"Although Bayona shows a surprisingly steady hand for a first-timer, his horror flick - neither incompetent (admittedly, I screamed out loud at one point) nor particularly imaginative in fulfilling its generic aims - simply doesn't leave much of an impression, no matter its artier, Cannes and New York Film Festival-anointed veneer," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE.

"It's a bedtime story: if you let Bayona and Del Toro scare you, they'll reassure you that there's nothing to be scared of," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Bayona "about ghost stories, growing up on a diet of great movies, and the inherent appeal of Stephen King's Sugar in the Raw.

For the Los Angeles Times, Geoff Boucher talks with Bayona - and Sánchez, who tells him, "We've made a horror movie for grannies. Seriously, the film is difficult to describe to people. It's not a drama; it's not a horror film. But it is also both."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto and New York.

Updates: "There's a single gory scene in The Orphanage, and it's so fleeting and uncannily naturalistic - it happens in broad daylight on a crowded street - that you almost long to see it again just to confirm what you think you saw the first time," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Bayona can distill more dread from a simple party scene with attendees wearing creepy face masks than the usual horror film can wrench from a chain saw."

"When I first saw The Orphanage, I found it an overly clinical genre exercise whose sentimental moments felt forced, but it will also plant roots in your subconscious and linger there for weeks," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

For Bruce Bennett, writing in the New York Sun, "the film almost feels like Spanish Scary Movie's Greatest Hits Volume One."

"The Orphanage's joys come from the experiential: Bayona's cultured technical skills, including some phenomenal sound design, and sustained anxiety," writes Aaron Hillis for Premiere. "It's about as healthy as junk food gets."

"[W]hile some of the trappings and even some of the plot elements could easily be called unoriginal, Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G Sánchez arrange them in a fresh way, crafting an emotionally resonant, nerve-jangling experience," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"So lovely and lyrical is the film's opening shot - a group of small children playing a stop-and-go variant of tag, with the pursuers advancing a few menacing steps at a time - that few seem to have noticed that the remainder amounts to little more than the usual grab-bag of cheap shock effects and pro-forma eerieness, plus subtitles," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

"Agnosticism has killed the horror genre in the United States. Take away the afterlife, take away a belief in the spirit world, and horror becomes about nothing but the fear of death and stories about sadism," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Add in those ingredients, and horror can return to its real subject - the line between the seen and unseen, where the living meet the dead and the mysteries of life are revealed. Until we figure that out, we may have to keep importing our horror, and if that means more movies like The Orphanage, all the better."

"Now here is an excellent example of why it is more frightening to await something than to experience it," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"It's been exactly a year since the release of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, the best movie of 2006," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "Now, del Toro is back, this time as producer only, of this genuinely creepy ghost story - Spain's entry for the Foreign Language Oscar - which, if not the year's best, is certainly among the best."

Update, 12/30: "When the star of The Orphanage, Belén Rueda (The Sea Inside), said in a telephone interview that her film should be thought of as 'something that could happen in real life,' she meant losing one's way, losing one's child or losing one's mind: not the stuff of the everyday, perhaps, but far more plausible than blood-sucking ghouls, flesh-eating viruses or 'torture porn,' techniques that work on the nervous system the way a reflex hammer works on a kneecap," writes John Anderson in the NYT. "What Ms Rueda is talking about is a fear of the possible."

Update, 1/1: "It seems to be a rarer and rarer thing to actually watch a film that gives you the creeps (in a good way) and gets you to jump," writes Edward Copeland. "The Orphanage follows the basic template of horror stories, but first-time director Bayona still manages to build some surprises and suspense within the formula."

Lists, 12/27.

"If there's one common theme that continues to surface in these year's selection, it is probably the idea of 'ghost people' - living in the periphery, taking refuge in the shadows, abandoned and forgotten in their desolation, or who, in their absence, continue to haunt the imagination of those left behind." Acquarello presents a top ten (in preferential order; #1: Alexandra) and ten honorable mentions.

"Wherever my travels have taken me this year..., the sentiment has been the same: What a banner year it has been for American movies," writes Scott Foundas. "And at a time when there isn't much about our country that everyone the world over can agree on, these words of praise have been spoken by critics, filmmakers and just plain moviegoers of myriad tongues and nationalities. Far be it from me to argue: Of the 17 titles I've managed to shoehorn into the 10 slots below..., all but four are American or American co-productions." His #1: There Will Be Blood.

Also in the LA Weekly, and also warming up for the Voice/LAW poll in works: "[T]he only trend worth mentioning in 2007 was the unseemly war of words between print critics and bloggers, the former an endangered species and the latter an emergent group with all the testy insecurity that entails," writes Ella Taylor. "To my mind, this battle goes nowhere [Amen!], not just because sooner or later we'll all be bloggers, but because I can't remember a year of such across-the-board consensus in Top 10 lists on and off the Web - mine included, unranked, arbitrary and subject to change."

And Robert Abele presents an annotated list of the best of what was new on TV this year.

Harry Knowles springs a surprise on us all with the Ain't It Cool Awards. He, Moriarty, Massawyrm and Capone each name their "AICN Discovery of the Year"; consensus has decided the rest of the traditional categories. Those Discoveries include Danny R McBride, Diablo Cody, Time Crimes and Mongol. Click to see who was wowed by what.

"Sure, 2007 took quite a while to get rolling, and I believe it was about halfway through Transformers that I started seriously considering a career in real estate," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "But then sometime around August the damnedest thing happened - movies started getting good again. Really good." Top of his list: I'm Not There.

Kathy Fennessy presents her list of "Movies for Music Lovers" (for the list alone, see the Siffblog) and Songs for Swingin' Cineastes!

"This year, the desire for revenge ripped free from its moorings, catching innocents in its unfriendly fire," writes Sam Adams, introducing his list. "More frightening by far than Rendition's chest-beating was The Bourne Ultimatum's casual depiction of innocents being snatched off the street: a hypo in the neck, a hood over the head, and into the unmarked Suburban you go." But his overriding theme goes like this: "In No Country for Old Men, in There Will Be Blood, in We Own the Night and Into Great Silence, actions spoke louder than words."

Also in the Philadelphia City Paper, Cindy Fuchs: "This year's best films are structured as quests. While they rarely achieve their stated aims - truth, justice, a sense of moral order - they find in their seeming failures more remarkable ends."

"The critics have spoken, and the American West is winning in many year-end polls," writes Susan Gerhard. "But a quick survey of Bay Area programmers, curators, distributors, and filmmakers reveals a much richer picture of 2007's best movie events, from avant-garde showcases to locally programmed extravaganzas. SF360.org offered some of the Bay Area's leading voices a chance to weigh in on their film favorites and disappointments for the year, as well as their hopes for the next."

IndieWIRE editors and contributors add comments to their top tens.

Kirk Honeycutt introduces the Hollywood Reporter's collection of top tens by its reviewers: "Only one film made all six lists. Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a remarkable work about a seemingly unfilmable subject."

"Top ten lists do not represent the ideal model for reminiscing on a cinematic year," argues Ted Pigeon. "But their flaws and their strengths enable them to endure; keeping us in eager anticipation of writing and reading them each year, and informing the perspectives of others interested in this medium we - critics - so passionately value."

At Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, Drew Morton's got a "Highly Subjective List of 2007's Best Media Offerings."

"Every year I read a lot of commentary on how the prior twelve months haven't produced any music of lasting value, and every year I disagree." Michael Tully charts his "Year in Music: 2007."

Modern Fabulousity presents the "Heroes of 2007."

Online browsing tip. For the Independent Weekly, Derek Anderson presents the year in pictures.

Michael Kidd, 1915 - 2007.

Michael Kidd, the award-winning choreographer of exuberant dance numbers for Broadway shows like Finian's Rainbow and Guys and Dolls and Hollywood musicals including The Band Wagon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles.... "I always use real-life gestures, and most of my dancing is based on real life," Mr Kidd said in an interview. He defined his choreography as "human behavior and people's manners, stylized into musical rhythmic forms."

Patricia Eliot Tobias, New York Times.

In addition to directing for stage and television, Kidd worked sporadically as an actor - most memorably, in Michael Ritchie's 1975 cult-fave Smile, masterfully playing Tommy French, a sly, sardonic beauty pageant choreographer ("No, dear, if you kick and bend at the same time, you're going to knock yourself out!") whose inspirational speeches to comely teen-age contestants are somehow all the more effectively uplifting for being transparently (to the audience, at least) bogus.

Joe Leydon.

In his half-century career as a dancer, choreographer and director, Michael Kidd won friends and awards with equal alacrity. And he lived long enough to see some of his best films acknowledged as classics. He even aged gracefully, never settling into a role as the grand old man of Broadway and Hollywood dance but rather staying energetic, perceptive, witty. His stories about working with pop diva Lena Horne on a revival of the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey could curl your hair, and his death from cancer on Sunday at age 92 deprived the dance world of one of its most sunny raconteurs.

Lewis Segal, Los Angeles Times.

GP Sippy, 1915 - 2007.

Veteran Bollywood film producer GP Sippy has died in the western Indian city of Mumbai at the age of 93. Mr Sippy was best known as the producer of Bollywood's biggest ever commercial success, Sholay (Flames).

The BBC.

Directed by Mr Sippy's son Ramesh, Sholay revolutionized Hindi filmmaking and brought true professionalism to Indian script writing. Written by Mr Sippy's favorite scriptwriting team, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, Sholay was loosely styled on The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, and has been called India's first "curry western."... On its release, the film ran for a record 286 straight weeks at the Minerva Theater in Mumbai, then called Bombay.... Sholay made Mr Sippy and many of its cast members — including Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Sanjeev Kumar, Hema Malini, Jaya Bhaduri and Amjad Khan - into some of Bollywood's biggest stars.

Haresh Pandya, New York Times.

Oscar Peterson, 1925 - 2007.

Oscar Peterson, whose dazzling piano playing made him one of the most popular jazz artists in history, died on Sunday night at his home in Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto. He was 82.

Richard Severo, New York Times.

Though Peterson has sometimes been criticised as a musician in thrall to his own runaway technique, he remained a great virtuoso of piano jazz, and an equally effective populariser of the music among those who might otherwise not have encountered it. He was the kind of jazz musician who invited a sometimes-daunted general public in, and he always performed as if making the music was the most fun it was possible for a human being to have.

John Fordham, the Guardian.

Perhaps not a maverick like Art Tatum or Thelonious Monk, Peterson nevertheless brought a new level of sophistication and a higher standard of musicianship to his instrument that many have learned from, but few have mastered.

Stephen Cooke, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

See also: Drawn! posts Begone Dull Care, the groundbreaking abstract animated film from 1949 by Norman McLaren, featuring the music of the Oscar Peterson trio."

And of course, the Wikipedia entry.

Jonathan Rosenbaum turns a leaf.

I did not know this. Via Steve at Film Damaged comes news, reported by Time Out Chicago's Hank Sartin, that Jonathan Rosenbaum will be retiring on February 27, evidently his 65th birthday. "This is not, contrary to your first assumption, one more sign of new [Chicago Reader] owners Creative Loafing trimming the budget," notes Sartin. "In fact, Rosenbaum tells us that his new bosses at Creative Loafing will be setting him up with a website of his own so that even in 'retirement' his writings on film will continue to be part of their franchise. He's not the sort to lounge on a beach, so expect a lot more thoughts on film from JR."

That, at least, is good news for most of us, including Steve @ FD: "Rosenbaum is one of those writers who has become like a friend for me, certainly like a beloved professor, his thought-provoking opinions something I'd miss terribly.... Rosenbaum caused two major controversies this year - the first when he wrote in the Times that Ingmar Bergman needed to be reassessed, the second when he ran a review that disagreed with the general acclaim for No Country for Old Men.... Blogs and message boards oozed vitriol and the more opponents... frothed, the worse they looked by comparison."

National Film Registry 07.

"The 25 titles to be added this year to the National Film Registry were announced this morning by the Librarian of Congress, James H Billington," announces Dave Kehr, who's got the list. "Once again, it's a diverse, wide-ranging selection, not intended as any kind of 'best' list (though inevitably it is interpreted that way) but instead as a reflection of American film culture in all of its forms and fashions, from home movies (the extraordinary Our Day, a 1938 film by Wallace Kelly of Lebanon, Kentucky, that displays a more sophisticated sense of mise-en-scene than the great majority of current Hollywood features) to the most expensive and elaborate industrial products (Back to the Future, Close Encounters of the Third Kind)."

More on There Will Be Blood.

"There Will Be Blood is very much a personal endeavor for [Paul Thomas] Anderson; it feels like an act of possession," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically constructed history, specifically with films - Greed and Chinatown, but also Citizen Kane - that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the movies themselves.... But the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself."

Updated through 1/1.

For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, Blood "is an austere folly, a picture so ambitious, so filled with filmmaking, that its very scale almost obscures its blankness.... An epic stands or falls on the strength of its emotional details, and by that measure, There Will Be Blood, sprawling and grand as it tries to be, fails. There Will Be Blood only pretends to be elemental and raw: It's really tempered and wrought, to the point of dullness. It rings with false humility, something I never thought I'd see in an Anderson picture."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth confesses that Blood "has pretty much slain me.... I feel like the first step to defining what this film is, and why it's had such an impact on me, is to figure out what it isn't. So, I'll now proceed to blatantly rip off Filmbrain, and review TWBB in more-or-less list form." She offers an "analysis of five common misconceptions about this film."

"It's important to remember that [Upton] Sinclair was as much a committed socialist as a novelist, someone who probably wrote for political purpose more than for dramatic effect," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "So while [Daniel] Day-Lewis's gorgeous acting largely disguises it, the people in Blood tend to be schematic and the film as a whole has a weakness for the didactic. In its willingness to push everything, even personality, to extremes, this is a film with the defects of its virtues, so it's fortunate that those virtues are very great indeed."

"Now that Brando is gone, no other actor can match Day-Lewis for sheer wacko mystique," writes Mike D'Angelo in Esquire. "There Will Be Blood only serves to confirm him as the screen's most gifted ham."

Earlier: Reviews and such in entries launched on 12/19, 12/10, 12/5 and 11/9.

Updates: "It is the genius (and I use that word advisedly) of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance to slowly, patiently, show the madness replacing his former rationalism, to prepare us for the film's astonishing ending, an ending one dare not reveal, but that contains what I - resistant as I am to superlatives - consider to be the most explosive and unforgettable 10 or 15 minutes of screen acting I have ever witnessed." And overall, for Time's Richard Schickel, this is "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made."

"The past few months have hardly lacked for audacious exercises in cine-hubris - The Assassination of Jesse James, Southland Tales and I'm Not There, to name three excellent examples - but, as bizarre as it often is, There Will Be Blood is the one that packs the strongest movie-movie wallop. This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The last 20 minutes are as shocking in their way as the plague that rains from the sky in Magnolia's finale. By the time the closing words 'There Will Be Blood' appear (with a burst of Brahms) inscribed in heavy gothic letters on the screen, Anderson's movie has come to seem an Old Testament story of cosmic comeuppance and filicidal madness - American history glimpsed through the smoke and fire that the lightning left behind."

Updates, 12/27: "For all its measured pacing, exquisitely framed long takes and parched period beauty, There Will Be Blood finally cannot contain the reservoirs of Day-Lewis's intense melancholy," writes Michael Koresky in one of the longest pieces Stop Smiling's ever run on a single film. "Not so much a slow burn as a damning accumulation of moments, unforgiving in their spareness, the film seems structured like a two-and-a-half-hour self-denial capped by a horribly therapeutic self-actualization."

"If the style of There Will Be Blood is decidedly naturalistic, its resonances are distinctly mythopoeic," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "The story feels less invented than divined, as if it were lying there all along, like the oil in the ground, waiting for Anderson to discover it.... It is hard to overstate the case for this movie.... With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has taken a stab at making The Great American Movie - and I daresay he's made one of them."

For Matt Zoller Seitz, Blood "isn't perfect or entirely satisfying, but it's so singular in its conception and execution that one can no more dismiss it than one can dismiss a volcanic eruption occurring in one's backyard. It cannot be diminished - as Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia could, and to my mind, rightly were diminished - as another instance of a facile, energetic director hurling homage at the audience." Spoilers follow, just so you know.

Also at the House Next Door, NP Thompson declares it a "debacle" and "a bomb, and an overwrought one at that."

"There's a biblical simplicity to these events, as brother turns against brother, father betrays son, and son strikes back at father," writes Jeffrey Overstreet of this "masterpiece" for Christianity Today. "If there were categories in the video stores called 'The Wages of Sin' or 'The Nature of Evil,' this film could fit perfectly in either section."

Ray Pride's got a link to the screenplay and steaming audio of selections from Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack. And he adds: "Highly recommended: don't read the script until you've seen the film."

Updates, 12/28: "More than anything, There Will Be Blood is a breathtakingly well-made film," writes Bilge Ebiri for Nerve. "Dramatic, suspenseful, and with real sweep, for most of its running time it's the kind of film you'll want to take your grandparents to; just hustle them out of the theater before it comes to its stark conclusion."

"Part of the reason I am less enamored of There Will Be Blood than most of my colleagues is that I'm not sure there is any central anything here," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "For roughly two and a half hours, we watch things happen - incidents that are generally interesting, but which seem of more or less equal dramatic weight.... The throughline seems to be the souring of Daniel's soul, but whatever transformation takes place is (if you'll pardon me) hiding in Plainview."

Blood is "what Scorsese's Gangs of New York should have been," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "As long as money retains the power to poison men's souls, Anderson's uncompromising masterpiece will continue to resonate as a harrowing cautionary warning to a country with oil pumping through its veins, clouding its judgment and coarsening its soul."

Update, 12/29: "Me, I agree with Anderson himself who once said something to the effect that Magnolia was the best film he ever made or ever would be capable of making," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark. "I admire There Will Be Blood, but like it somewhat less than the ensemble films, finding it to be a flawed but compelling work by one of America's most singularly talented filmmakers."

Update, 1/1: "What Blood doesn't have is much in the way of politics - so much for social justice," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "Instead, Anderson offers up sophomoric satire, but with a redeeming, anarchic mirth."

Smiley Face.

"Despite its laid-back script, Smiley Face is as prankishly political as [Gregg] Araki's Doom Generation, evincing a deep unease with the media-saturated capitalist nation that Jane crawls inside her bong to escape," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. As for Anna Faris, her "freakishly committed performance as Jane F suggests Amy Adams's princess from Enchanted dropped into a Cheech and Chong movie."

"What's going on here, I think, is mumblecore through a marijuana haze," proposes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "Behind Jane's surprisingly depressing hijinks is post-grad malaise: a rare copy of the Communist Manifesto drives a lot of the plot, with Jane occasionally delivering moments of lucid intelligence to remind us that she must've learned something in college." Still, "despite the hit-and-miss jokes that keep Smiley Face consistently engaging and occasionally hilarious - it's the most depressing comedy of the year."

Updated through 12/28.

"A rambling, rudimentary, profoundly unoriginal stoner comedy, Smiley Face falls apart by its third scene, imploding not only due to a lack of solid material, but also due to the existence of another film that, three years ago, reminded us of just how good the stoner comedy can be: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun.

The Reeler interviews Araki. And speaking of the Reeler: Stu and I have exchanged email over this, and we can't seem to figure out what's going on: Is anyone else having problems accessing the Reeler? Drop a line; it might help us figure out what the problem is. Thanks.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance and Toronto. And Craig Phillips's notes on a Sundance roundtable featuring Araki, Hal Hartley, Tamara Jenkins and David Gordon Green, who, of course, is working on his own stoner comedy (of sorts), Pineapple Express.

Update: "Truth is, in a perfect world pot wouldn't turn my mouth into a sandbox and my nervous system into one giant, uptight twitch," offers Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Can't stand the stuff, frankly, so I'm not exactly an ideal candidate to evaluate the blunted verisimilitude of Smiley Face, stoner farce par excellence. On the plus side, 100 percent sober when I watched it, I can say with some authority that Dylan Haggerty has written an eleventh-hour candidate for the funniest movie of 2007, that Gregg Araki has directed his finest film since 1997's Nowhere, and that Faris, flawless, rocks their inspired idiot odyssey in a virtuoso comedic turn."

Update, 12/27: Smiley Face was originally to be called "The Being John Malkovich of All Pot Smoking Stoner Movies," notes Eric Kohn, who tells the story of its long trip to theaters in the New York Press, noting, too, that "it's virtually impossible not to read Smiley Face as a loopy generational statement."

Update, 12/28: "It's a fittingly loose, shambling little nothing of a comedy that's occasionally inspired, but at least a draft or two short of its potential," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Still, it's a pleasure to watch Faris - a gifted, likeable comedian who tends to be the best element of many terrible movies - wander slack-jawed through a surreal day in Los Angeles."

Spanish Cinema Now. 10.

James Van Maanen wraps the series with one day left to go.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Spanish Cinema Now series comes to a close tomorrow, Thursday, after three full weeks of films new and old. 2007 was the first year in which I managed to see every single - count 'em: 28 - piece on the program. Not coincidentally, I think, this was also my favorite SCN of the ten or so I have attended. While the experience can sometimes seem daunting during those 21 days, the payoff is immense. The more you see, the more there is to like (or not) and, most importantly, the more there is to understand. The personality of a country's present and past begins to come together - culturally, politically, economically, socially, artistically - and, while you'll never comprehend the entire package, you'll certainly be wiser going out than coming in. What has been happening in the country over the past year? This fest certainly offers a kind of barometer, together with some of the themes that were on the mind of moviemakers and, most probably, of the populace at large.

Nothing like this opportunity exists anywhere else that I know. SCN lasts longer than either the French or Italian yearly series sponsored by the FSLC, perhaps deservedly so. The energy, enthusiasm and talent of Spanish filmmakers young and old is pretty extraordinary. Unlike Cannes, Toronto and many other noted festivals, where you must choose among many more movies than a single body is able to view, here, you can actually see them all. And if a "specific country" festival such as SCN does not have the caché of the FSLC's New York Film Festival or New Directors/New Films, that's all the better because it renders the programs more available, with tickets easier to procure. (The French fest does seem to be selling out more rapidly year by year, so book early for that one). Moreover, your chances of discovering films you like (or don't) are no less here than at any festival. But since you or I are not calling the shots as to which films are chosen, there'll be plenty of disagreement, as usual.

Take, for instance, the retrospective of films by the late Pilar Miró. Going into it, I knew little of her work. Now that I have seen seven of her films, I am not a fan - though I did find much to appreciate in two of them: The Cuenca Crime and The Dog in the Manger. Further, I am enormously grateful to the FSLC for giving me the opportunity to sample her work - which, with one exception, does not seem to be available in the US on DVD. Ditto La Guerra filmada, the Spanish television series on the Civil War that saw its US premiere during the series. I found it a missed opportunity, yet looking back, even at this short distance of time, I realize that I did learn from it (though perhaps not quite enough to match the eight hours I spent watching).

One accomplishment of La Guerra filmada was to help link Spain's present with its past - which seemed a particularly strong theme at this year's fest. It surfaced in a myriad of ways, some of them more obvious than others. Watching La Guerra filmada's newsreel footage of the war, then seeing Miró's Your Name Poisons My Dreams and its investigation of the Fascist aftermath, then watching Icíar Bollaín's new Mataharis, with its look at a present-day (and just as insidious) method of keeping the powerful in power is to note a rather disturbing-but-typical timeline. If the Miró retrospective offered a look into the mind of (particularly) women in the period during and after the Franco years, new films like Judith Collel's 53 Winter Days and Rodrigo Cortes's Contestant showed us the somewhat precarious state of urban Spain today.

Other more charming links from past to present can be found by observing certain actors in both their early and current films. Blanca Portillo makes a lovely gentlewoman in Miró's The Dog in the Manger; twelve years later, here she is in a terrific performance as an angry but wonderfully decent ex-con in Gracia Querejeta's new Seven Billiard Tables. Likewise, the lovely Emma Suárez can be seen in Miró's Manger, Your Name Poisons My Dreams and the new Under the Stars. Both actresses (plus Ms Portillo's Billiard costar Maribel Verdú) have been nominated for Goya awards this year - the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars. SCN often hosts a number of Goya-nominated films, and this year I counted some 27 nominations among the 17 new films in the SCN roster, from best production to direction, acting, writing, editing, cinematography and score.

Speaking of the Goya awards brings us to the one possibly great film of this festival, Jaime Rosales's La Soledad. I hesitate to use the word masterpiece for a movie I have seen only once. Time will tell. Meanwhile, this new work from the maker of The Hours of the Day uses an often stationery camera (abetted by the occasional split screen) plus a visionary screenplay (with its dialogue given life by a wonderful acting ensemble) to allow an observation of life that we have rarely, maybe never seen. A young woman whom I met at the SCN luncheon told me that her parents, who live in Spain, called La Soledad the best film in the SCN festival, although she herself felt it was "more art than cinema." I found it both: high art that is rigorous yet accessible. That it has been nominated for a Best Picture Goya is most encouraging, although it is up against the enormously humane Seven Billiard Tables, 13 Roses (which I have not seen) and The Orphanage, soon to be released here via Picturehouse and already Spain's top-grossing movie of the year (also as yet unseen by me).

If the Goyas function as anything like our Oscars, the outcome, I should think, is foregone. "Entertainment" is still king internationally, of course, but unlike your average city cineplex, the FSLC's Walter Reade Theater offers its patrons the increasingly rare and precious opportunity to think, feel and learn - in addition to being entertained. Still, this Goya nomination might bring La Soledad one step closer to a deserved release here in the US.

Immigration, a hot topic in most of the western world, figured importantly in much of the SCN roster, including Barcelona (A Map), Doghead, The Education of Fairies, 53 Winter Days, Mataharis, Scandalous, Septembers, Under the Stars, Yo and Said's Journey (part of the Shortmetraje program).

Another link from past to present in this edition of SCN occurs via, of all things, the two musicals on offer, one distinctly old style (Lola, la película), the other quite new (Scandalous). Though neither is anything like a conventional musical, both feature musical numbers. The former, set in the 1930s and 40s, gives a rich sense of period (even if it manages to completely leave out the Spanish Civil War!) and a look at the phenomenal actress/singer/dancer Lola Flores, brought to wonderful life by Gala Évora (another Goya nominee). The latter, directed and co-written with an unusual combination of reticence, spirit and charm by Álvaro Begines, has almost nothing in common with the Lola film, except perhaps its own Lola, via the wonderful Lola Herrera, an integral part of the acting ensemble who possesses the flamenco spirit and hauteur.

These two movies, one concerned with Spain's past, the other with her present (and perhaps future) make a lovely pair of bookends to the festival. I can't help imagining Lola Flores herself, looking down on (perhaps up at?) Spanish Cinema Now - and smiling with surprise, pleasure and approval.

More lists, 12/25.

"[A]s we should all know by now, fewer films can be (or at least are) affordably shown theatrically than ever before, and as a result, scores of worthwhile movies see their first 'release' in the US on DVD every year." So at IFC News, Michael Atkinson salutes "The Best Non-Theatrical Debuts of 07," topping that list with Ryuichi Hiroki's Vibrator: "Urban cool, until it sneaks up to your soft side with a sledgehammer." And at his own site, Michael Atkinson posts his annotated top ten.

Stephanie Zacharek presents a top ten, "somewhat in order of preference, although beyond the top three I always find making such distinctions difficult." And those three are: I'm Not There, Control and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Also in Salon, Andrew O'Hehir and Matt Singer look back at the year's best documentaries and Tom Tomorrow presents "2007: An Incomplete, Subjective and Altogether Inadequate Year in Review, Part the First."

Matt Riviera lists 20 films, "a mental snapshot," with No Country for Old Men at the top. "Some of my favourite filmmakers turned in slightly underwhelming pictures (Van Sant, Ozon, Anderson, Winterbottom, Araki) but newcomers dazzled. Debuts by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories), Matthias Luthardt (Pingpong), John Carney (Once) made my heart beat faster for an hour or two, and Ryan Gosling, Ellen Page, Casey Affleck and Eva Green became stars (at least in my eyes)."

The "2007 Top Tens" chart at Movie City News is now thick enough to provide an overview of critical consensus.

"I decided to compile a tiny list of Malaysian films, but not pertaining solely to their quality or box-office performance," writes The Visitor at Twitch. "They're just a small bunch of films that got notable attention for whatever reasons."

The Creative Review Blog Top Ten.

Online listening tip #1. Back at IFC News, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore "look ahead to 2008 and list some of the things we're looking forward to, from the bad movie month of January (hello, two films from Uwe Boll!) to upcoming work from our favorite directors to fabulous films we caught at festival in the past year that are finally making their way to theaters."

Online listening tip #2. On Fresh Air, John Powers weighs in on the "Top 10 Cultural Trends of 2007."

DVDs, 12/25.

'Tis the season, so how about starting off this roundup with a list: "There were so many impressive DVDs that it was hard to whittle the releases of 2007 down to just the ten top discs. For that reason the review staff at DVDTalk decided to expand their list to the Top 20 DVDs of 2007." And topping that list is Ace in the Hole: "Billy Wilder's cynical, noirish tale of a big-city newspaper reporter (Kirk Douglas) manipulating the news for a small-town rag has been a sort of holy grail for film fans for decades now.... Snappy dialogue, excellent performances, and a compelling plot that was ahead of its time and still socially relevant today, the movie more than lives up to its mythical reputation."

Speaking of Wilder, Noir of the Week's running an excerpt from Ed Sikov's On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder.

On the surface, Eastern Promises... is one of [David] Cronenberg's most straightforward films: a gangster thriller about blood ties and Oedipal tensions, set in a damp, noirish London," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times. "But in almost every aspect, from the sumptuous atmosphere to the nuanced characterization, the film is richer and stranger than its contours suggest."

"Last year at this time Walt Disney Studios announced that it would be discontinuing the limited-edition Walt Disney Treasures series, but thanks to a grass-roots write-in campaign, fans have been rewarded with a seventh group of three releases," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. And this one's "a good crop."

"The Wire is a show that builds up your heart, even as it's breaking it," writes Chris Barsanti at filmcritic.com.

DVD roundup: Peter Martin at Cinematical.

Lists. Girish and STP.

Via Girish, who himself has just posted an alphabetical list his favorite new films, a chronological list of his favorite older films seen for the first time, plus films he's revisited this year "that look better every time" and "10 great writers I had been aware of but only started reading seriously this year":

"As part of Screening the Past's tenth anniversary, we invited about 300 colleagues around Australia and the world to nominate the most important contributions to the field in the past decade - books, articles, reports, conferences, archival work, DVD reissues or commentaries, documentaries, online material, software - anything, not limited to any particular source, certainly not STP." Culled from 60 responses, "What we have is a semi-random, semi-self-selecting mosaic showing us what we, as a field, are thinking about, valuing, and using. It's also a great reading list."

And here and there, just plain good reading, too.

Interview. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.

"Persepolis is a simple story told by simple means," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Like Marjane Satrapi's book, on which it is based, the film, directed by Ms Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, consists essentially of a series of monochrome drawings, their bold black lines washed with nuances of gray. The pictures are arranged into the chronicle of a young girl's coming of age in difficult times, a tale that unfolds with such grace, intelligence and charm that you almost take the wondrous aspects of its execution for granted."

At the main site, David D'Arcy talks with Satrapi and Paronnaud about the importance of humor, perils of miserabilisme, the current state of comics and animation, and the ways the world sees (and often misunderstands) Iran.

Updated through 12/28.

"The pleasingly simple, hand-drawn characters, and flat, often abstractly patterned backgrounds show the influence of everything from Charles Schulz to German Expressionism to Persian miniature painting to shadow puppetry," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "But the resulting mood is never cerebral or self-consciously postmodern. The story of Marjane's coming of age has the emotional directness (a cynic might call it sentimentality) of a classic of adolescent literature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or The Catcher in the Rye."

"A familiar story set in an unfamiliar context, it's a paean to the universality of human experience, a testament to the endurance of individuality during great political and fanatical upheaval, and a reminder that even the most complex situations, identities and stories are heartbreakingly simple," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"In his review of Persepolis in the current issue of Cineaste, my colleague Rahul Hamid nails what bugged me about the film, a wholly worthwhile endeavor that I enjoyed watching despite a creeping dissatisfaction," writes Robert Cashill. "Rahul says the books are much more time- and place-specific; the film is more of a gloss, humorous and poignant, but too simple, more of a primer. The Western, 'just-like-us' side of the film dominates."

Matt Singer talks with Satrapi and Paronnaud for IFC News.

This entry'll pick up where last Tuesday's entry leaves off; earlier: reviews from Cannes, Toronto and New York.

Update, 12/26: "[B]y some strange and fortunate circumstance born out of vision, patience, luck, and sheer unmitigated talent, [Satrapi and Parannoud] have managed to incorporate each of [the books'] weighty topics into a work of art that's light as a feather, in the manner of the true masterpiece," writes Chris Barsanti at filmcritic.com.

Updates, 12/28: "At times, the film Persepolis resembles a succession of moving political posters, graphically simple and profound; and at times, it's like an old UPA cartoon, cutesy and funny," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Though there's a bit too much 'and then this happened' to the structure, Paronnaud and Satrapi succeed smashingly in translating the original's spirit into animation."

"As one of the great things about the world of an animated film is that it's a totally created one, there's not even a hint of the disconnect that would have been unavoidable in a live-action picture," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "[T]he story brims with incident and pertinence. As awful as the things that happen in it are, the viewer is happy to be in its world anyway, because Satrapi is such a companionable guide through it."

"Everyone who hasn't read Persepolis should see it, and anyone who's felt misery or shame about America's place in the world lately will probably come out comforted; in me, at least, the film induced a profound gratitude for life in a free society," writes Peter Smith at Nerve. "Yes, this decade has been a bit of a hell-ride, government-wise, but trust Satrapi: things could be a lot worse."

Spanish Cinema Now. 9.

James Van Maanen offers his take on a last couple of films screening in the Spanish Cinema Now series before his final wrap-up.

Foolishly, as it turns out, I was putting off watching Septembers (Septiembres), the new documentary by Carlos Bosch, because I had been unimpressed with his Academy Award-nominated Balseros of a few years back. That fleeing-from-Cuba film was so disjointed and all-over-the-place that I could not keep up with who was who, where we were, or just about anything else I saw through the miasma of crummy photography and editing. Granted, that whole documentary must have needed to be filmed on the sly, since everyone involved, including Bosch, was breaking Cuban law.

No worries this time out, as Bosch appears to have gained legal entry into several Spanish prisons to tell his story of various inmates who compete in and hope to win the yearly Festival of Song contest, in which they karaoke to wonderful songs, some known here in the US, most not. As fine as a few of the performers are (particularly the woman who has won these contests for several years running - by the finale when she sings "Fly Me to the Moon," never one of my favorites, I was a convert), Septembers is not really about the songs or the contest but is instead about the performers.

One fellow, gay but closeted here in prison, is awaiting extradition back to Argentina where he embezzled money. He makes periodic phone calls to his beloved grandmother, explaining that he is working on a cruise ship. Another, serving time for knifing his ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend, plans to marry another girl prisoner he's met and fallen for. A gypsy drug trafficker pines for his wife and family, while a Lithuanian forger forms a bond with a woman incarcerated for trying to provide her drug-addicted children with what they need.

Comparisons may be odious, but I defy viewers not to hold up our own prison system against what we see here (and it does not appear to be whitewashed - it's prison, after all, and the inmates are not too keen on it). I can think of only one American documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars, that depicts prison life stateside as anywhere near as humane. Without any sugar-coating, Bosch captures so much about these people - their needs, wants, sorrows, joys and regrets - that you will probably wish them as well as I did, while realizing very clearly that, for most of them, life on the outside will be no picnic, either. Septembers will be shown again on Thursday, December 27, at 8:30 pm.

At last: a Pilar Miró movie I can whole-heartedly embrace - even if I do not call it a masterpiece. The Dog in the Manger (El Perro del hortelano) from 1996 is a genuine treat, especially for those of us who love the classics - and rhymed couplets. Lope de Vega, who wrote the original play on which Miró based her movie, was a contemporary of Shakespeare. Given the plot of this romantic comedy of manners, I would guess they were familiar with each other's work and probably cribbed a bit, too. (One of the final lines of dialogue also makes me wonder if Oscar Wilde didn't do a little cribbing of his own.)  In any case, the play and film are full of le mots just and phrases picked up for use by Bartlett. So fast, in fact, does the dialogue fly by, that you may have a little trouble keeping up with it. I did - but found it so much fun and the performances so delightful that I didn't mind at all.

What a joy it is to see Carmelo Gómez in particular do such a fine job in a buoyant, humorous role. We're used to him in darker films (Días Contados, Entre las Piernas, Nos Miran, El Método, as well as Miró's Your Name Poisons My Dreams), so it's lovely to see him lighten up and cut loose. Emma Suárez is his equal as the noble lady who's having trouble accepting a commoner as her mate. The supporting cast is fine, as well, and includes Blanca Portillo (from this year's Seven Billiard Tables) and a very funny Fernando Conde.

Having now enjoyed two of the seven Miró's movies included in SCN's retrospective - this one and El Crimen de Cuenca - I am tempted to suggest that the late director worked better with "period" pieces and on projects for which she may have felt more "bound" to keep within a certain framework: the "facts" regarding The Cuenca Crime, and the already rather "known" and certainly beloved dialogue of Lope de Vega. (It's been years since I've read The Dog in the Manger, but it seemed to me that Miró did not stray too far from the original but simply gave the Rafael Pérez Sierra version used here a little gloss.) In any case, her story-telling comes across best in these two movies; make of that what you will.

The set and production design by Félix Murcia and costumes by Humberto Cornejo and Pedro Moreno also give enormous pleasure, and the locations are simply dynamite. (Part of my trouble keeping up with the subtitles was due to my eyes trying to take in more of the gorgeous tile work in some of the scenes.) I believe the movie was filmed partially in one of Portugal's famous historic castles/homes, and the often non-stop visual glories here are extravagant indeed.

The Dog in the Manger, which will screen again on Thursday, December 27, at 2 and 6:15 pm, concludes for me this edition of Spanish Cinema Now: a total of 28 individual programs of varying quality that, taken together, offered one of, very probably the most worthwhile film experiences of my movie-going year. This past weekend I received a phone call from a friend who'd read some of my postings and told me, "Well, I guess this was not one of your favorite years for Spanish film." But no: it was, as usual, a vital and generally splendid compilation that offered a fine overview of Spanish film today - and yesterday. But my friend's comment made me realize even more strongly that, just because I did not like a film - or two or ten - does not mean that I was in any way sorry to have had the experience of viewing it. More on this next time, together with a wrap-up of the entire festival - and why it is so important to those of us who treasure international film.

Merry Christmas, all.

"Godard's controversial take on the gospel story of Mary ranks in my mind as his most sensual work, startlingly direct in its exploration of the aching rift between material and spiritual reality," writes Kevin Lee, introducing a collection of perspectives on Je vous salue, Marie (Hail Mary).

"One of the most unusual putatively-hoiday-themed pictures ever made, Robert Siodmak's 1944 Christmas Holiday features beloved child/teen songstress Deanna Durbin in pretty much her first real adult role, and a doozy it is, too." Glenn Kenny's "Very Special Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report."

"For many people the holidays wouldn't be complete without a viewing of It's a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street or some version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol whether it features Reginald Owen, Alastair Sim or Mr Magoo. But there's no reason why Preston Sturges's Christmas in July shouldn't became a regular seasonal favorite as well," argues Jeff at Movie Morlocks. And Dave Kehr would probably agree.

"Santa Claus has assumed many guises in the cinema," writes Odienator at Edward Copeland on Film. "Last year, I wrote about some of his naughtier instances. This Christmas, in order to avoid another year of coal in my stocking, I thought I'd talk about one of his nicer incarnations." I'll bet you can guess which one.

Have you been keeping up with the "12 Days of Cinematicalmas"?

Facets Features has been celebrating all month.

Why Christmas, why now? A euro|topics roundup.

At Boing Boing, Jasmina Tešanović sends season's greetings from Serbia.

Kimberly Lindbergs has loads of online listening, browsing and a bit of viewing as well.

Online gazing tip. "'Xmas Tree, Madison Square' circa 1915," at Shorpy.

More online gazing from shahn.

And Jason Morehead has quite an online listening tip.

Online viewing tip #1. Sujewa Ekanayake's got some Tom Waits for you.

Online viewing tip #2. Raymond De Felitta offers "the complete Brats, Laurel and Hardy's brilliantly funny 1930 short comedy where, with the help of a couple of modest in-camera superimpositions and a lot of magnificent oversized sets, they play their own children. This has always been, along with The Music Box, my favorite L&H short and, to me, represents them at their zenith."

Online viewing tip #3. "Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander offers one of the great Christmas movie sequences ever," writes Variety's Anne Thompson.

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep.

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep is "family-friendly escapist fare that should enthrall, without insult, fantasy-minded viewers of any age," writes Laura Kern in the New York Times.

For Ella Taylor, writing in the Voice, this is "the best kiddie picture of the season and, along with Ratatouille, of the year.... Drawing on just about every tough and tender rite-of-passage fairy tale worth its salt, The Water Horse is a graceful meeting of talents between screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs, the digital effects team that juggled cute and scary so deftly in The Chronicles of Narnia, and director Jay Russell, who already has the children's classics My Dog Skip and Tuck Everlasting under his belt."

Updated through 12/28.

The "fondly cherished folk myth [of the Loch Ness Monster] becomes a rite-of-passage adventure for the somber young protagonist, Angus MacMorrow, affectingly played by freckle-faced Alex Etel (Millions)," writes Steven Winn in the San Francisco Chronicle. Russell "has a keen sense for the emotional fluidity of his main character. He uses the film's fantastical elements and surging special effects (by the Lord of the Rings and King Kong team of Weta Digital and Weta Workshop) to conjure up a realm of rhapsodic bravery for Angus."

Update, 12/28: "For a modern take on Pete's Dragon by way of The Secret of Roan Inish, it's surprisingly dense and meaty," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Shorts, 12/24.

"For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early 20s then, working off and on, driving a cab, setting up the stage at rock shows, writing occasional pieces for the Village Voice." So begins a memoir of sorts by Mark Edmundson in the American Scholar.

He had two obsessions: "[Robert] Altman and [Woody] Allen are in their ways adroit anti-filmmakers. The medium they worked in is all about Titanism. It loves amazing acts, heroic leaps, kisses of world historical grandeur. Allen and Altman ran against the formal predispositions of movies without being any less entertaining." Good reading, via Bookforum.

Chris Stangl opens Pt II of The Ballad of the Hermeneutic Circle.

New blog on the block: Intense Guys: "Great Movie Moments, One Clip at a Time."

Craig Keller: "I've translated into English the following excerpts from the greater part of an interview with Jacques Rivette, conducted by Jean-Marc Lalanne and Jean-Baptiste Morain for the March 20th, 2007 edition of French culture-weekly Les Inrockuptibles."

At AICN, Capone interviews Cloverfield director Matt Reeves. In the London Times, Christopher Goodwin recounts the series of events that've kept movie buffs talking about the movie for months.

Twitch's Todd Brown strongly suspects that Lars von Trier's Antichrist is on again. Related: the trailers for all of LVT's features.

"It's OK to be confused by Richard Kelly's Southland Tales," Thomas Rogers assures us in Salon. "In the hopes of helping you make sense of the movie, we've decided to unravel Southland Tales as we've done for Mulholland Drive, The Wire and, of course, Donnie Darko." A synopsis and FAQ follow.

Also: "What kind of year was it for independent film?" Andrew O'Hehir takes that question to publicist Jeremy Walker, IFC Entertainment prez Jonathan Sehring, superheroine producer Christine Vachon and Facets Multi-Media director Milos Stehlik and observes, "[O]ver the three years I've been conducting a year-end survey of the indie biz, one grand theme has emerged. You could almost call it a gigantic free-floating anxiety, rather than a theme: Nobody has a clue how audiences will be watching adventurous, modestly scaled, sub-Hollywood films in five or eight or 12 years, but everybody's pretty sure they won't be watching them the way they are right now." Karina Longworth comments at the SpoutBlog.

Scott Foundas visits the set of Changeling, the 28th film Clint Eastwood's directed and finds state-of-the-art technology being used to keep things quiet and almost eerily efficient.

Also in the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas meets Homayoun Ershadi.

"Does every Brazilian love a fascist? That's the question raised by the new film Tropa de Elite, which is on its way to becoming one of the country's most popular movies of all time," writes Holmes Wilson for In These Times. "The protagonist in Tropa de Elite, or 'elite squad,' is a cop who kills for revenge, executes corrupt cops and tortures suspects - including children - for information. And the film's phenomenal success is frightening."

"There's plenty to admire in Jeff Nichols's debut feature, Shotgun Stories. I grew up in southeastern Arkansas and often wondered why nobody ever set a movie in a world I could recognize. Now, somebody has tried. And bless his indomitable heart." Derek Jenkins, who guest edited that excellent "Southern Movie Issue" of the Oxford American earlier this year, is one of three Arkansas Times staffers to weigh in on the film.

The Vatican has now officially condemned The Golden Compass, reports Philip Pullella for Reuters.

Variety's Adam Dawtrey reminds us that JK Rowling, Philip Pullman and Roald Dahl's widow all wanted Terry Gilliam to direct Harry Potter, The Golden Compass and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, respectively, but the studios nixed the idea at the outset each and every time. "That's the story of Gilliam's career. He's loved by fellow creatives, but he scares the suits to death." Now he's shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, "his first wholly original screenplay, and his most personal statement, since Brazil in 1985." And Brendon at film ick's got the first couple of pix.

"For his upcoming film Paris, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the French capital, [Cédric] Klapisch regular Romain Duris will play the pivotal role of a possibly terminally ill Parisian, while the director has also recruited some of France's finest talent to star alongside Duris, including Juliette Binoche, Albert Dupontel, François Cluzet, 2007 French Shooting Star Mélanie Laurent, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard and Gilles Lellouche. The film will premiere in France in February 2008." A preview from Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"Sold internationally by Wild Bunch, the French/Irish co-production Dorothy Mills by Agnès Merlet is already shaping up to be one of the big titles of 2008," reports Fabien Lemercier for Cineuropa.

"The bravest and most important movie musical of the last several years isn't even close to being the best film musical this year - the mysteriously perfect Once is probably going to be my favorite, with an honorable mention for Hairspray, and however I wind up reacting to Sweeney Todd fitting in there someplace as well," writes Bob Westal. "Colma: The Musical - which had only a token theatrical release in San Francisco and San Diego, after a healthy run on the festival circuit - is flawed in the way of most films from first-timers, but it reconstructs the modern musical in ways none of those other films dare. There are moments in it that just may outshine any musical made in decades."

Dustin Luke Nelson talks with No Country for Old Men cinematographer Roger Deakins for InDigest. Via Movie City News.

Nathaniel R meets "Jennifer! Jason! Leigh!"

Steven Boone's conversation with Armond White? There is a Part III. Earlier: Parts I and II.

For Apple, Joe Cellini talks with Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch about editing Youth Without Youth. Via Movie City News. At the AV Club, Scott Tobias talks with Coppola.

"New York street photographers and indie filmmakers say their First Amendment rights are still at risk under newly revised regulations put forth by the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting," reports Anthony Kaufman in the Voice. "Following a summer-long outcry from artists and activists over the first draft of rules published on May 25 - which largely prohibited shooting in the city without a permit and $1 million insurance policy - the city redrew its guidelines and released a friendlier version on October 30. But the battle is far from over."

Also in the Voice: "As befits a movie that enjoyed cult status virtually from the moment it premiered in late 2003, Bad Santa exists in multiple versions," notes J Hoberman. "There's the original release, sanitized by anxious elves at then-Weinstein-owned Miramax; there's the so-called Badder Santa, released on DVD the following summer, which claimed to restore a number of deleted scenes; and there's the director's cut, which appeared on DVD late last year and is now having its theatrical premiere.... This third Bad Santa may be the shortest version but, in every way, it's the strongest."

Raymond De Felitta's been writing up an appreciation of Jane Russell.

Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica on Jean Rollin's Lost in New York: "After a series of failures in attempting to get new projects off the ground in the mid-80s, Rollin made one of his most personal films yet, and, as Pete Tombs and Cathal Tohill argue in Immoral Tales, 'a final salute to his twenty five year struggle to find a place of his own inside the commercial film world.'"

Girish:

So, here are my concerns: (1) If silent film accompaniment exists primarily to fill the void of silence, we can probably agree that's an aesthetically weak raison d'etre. (2) Irving Thalberg once said: "There never was a silent film." Can we use this as evidence to claim that it's natural for every silent film to be accompanied by music? The history of silent film development demonstrates this to be not so (more on this in a moment). (3) Does silent film music exist to echo or underline moods and feelings during the course of a film? If so, isn't this kind of musical accompaniment somewhat redundant? Worse, can't such an approach actively dilute the power of image-driven silent cinema?

As always at Girish's place, comments - good comments - ensue. And somewhat related: John McElwee's fascinating entry on the Vitaphone.

Mainland Chinese have been flocking to Hong Kong to see the uncut version of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, reports Howard W French: "The phenomenon of so many people voting, as it were, with their feet has highlighted the public's rapidly changing attitudes toward the long unquestioned practice of government censorship of the arts, and prompted debate about the way films are regulated in China."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Had it been made a decade ago, Steep would have been relegated to ESPN or the video sections of sports stores," writes David Browne. "Steep is a sign of how legitimate so-called action sports have become, and the peculiar ways that this mainstream crossover manifests itself." Browne looks into how this has come to pass. While Steep "often sounds like a promotional film," it's "undeniably impressive," offers Stephen Holden. In Slant, Nick Schager calls Steep "a skin-deep history lesson on extreme skiing." And writing in the Voice, Aaron Hillis wonders, "Is the lifestyle of an adrenaline junkie any less self-destructive than a drug addict's?"

• "A business course on cutthroat capitalism disguised as a slacker comedy: That's the kindest way to describe Michael Lehmann's Flakes, a movie that shares the smug, hipper-than-thou sensibility of its sour protagonist, Neal Downs (Aaron Stanford)," writes Stephen Holden. "One look at Aaron Stanford's chain-smoking, long-haired musician in a Hanes t-shirt and you know Flakes wants so badly to be hip," sighs Paul Schrodt in Slant. More from Julia Wallace in the Voice and John Lichman at the House Next Door.

• "The hyperactive sequel National Treasure: Book of Secrets sends its archaeologist hero, Ben Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage, flexing his deadpan), on a globetrotting quest that might have been devised after a long night of Wikipedia surfing," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "Like its predecessor, National Treasure, this sequel amounts to a bunch of crossword puzzle answers stitched together with explosions, chases and displays of intuitive reasoning that the Twin Peaks FBI agent Dale Cooper would reject as too right-brained."

• "PS I Love You looks squeaky clean and utterly straight and very much removed from the shadow worlds in which [Hilary] Swank has done her best work," writes Manohla Dargis. "Yet as directed by Richard LaGravenese, who shares screenwriting credit with Steven Rogers, it has a curious morbid quality." Then there's Nick Schager in Slant: "[I]t's hard to think of any female star who could salvage PS I Love You, a bromide-filled contrivance in which Swank's Holly gets over the death of her beloved Irish husband Gerry (Gerard Butler) with the help of letters written by Gerry and then sent to her after his death." For the sake of all Voice Media publications, Ella Taylor's suffered through this one as well.

• "To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master." Michael Cieply mulls that one over with a few industry folk.

• Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann bicker amicably over what actually constitutes a real Christmas present.

"For Andrew M Gordon, an associate professor of English at University of Florida, Spielberg's canon is deserving of the best in Freudian and Jungian consideration," writes Phil Hall, introducing his interview with the author of Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg.

Also at Film Threat: Don R Lewis talks with Aaron Katz about Quiet City.

Which Kevin Lee quite likes.

David Lowery proves that it is possible, ten years on, to fondly remember Titanic for good reason.

"My impression is that the general direction of the pans in The Passenger are from left to right," notes Zach Campbell. "[I]t is as though the camera is reading the material of the image it is creating, that is, analyzing its framing as it simultaneously records."

For SF360, Laura Irvine talks with Ivan Jaigirdar about his new Bollyhood Café.

"When it comes to blaxploitation horror films, the genre doesn't get any better than Sugar Hill," writes Kimberly Lindbergs.

"How weird is John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes?" asks Carina Chocano. "Almost indescribably weird, though also strangely involving." And Andy Klein has a good long talk with Turturro for the LA CityBeat.

Back in the Los Angeles Times: "A little history: In the 1950s, aspiring American writers declaimed poetry in smoky cafes," writes Seth Greenland. "A decade later, they were writing songs for bands that materialized at the nexus of inspiration and dissipation before disappearing in a fog of 'bad vibes.' By the 1970s, all this had been supplanted by that bastard stepchild, the screenplay." But now, it's novels. Greenland, himself "a recovering screenwriter who is now a novelist," has an idea or two as why this has happened.

Also, interviews with Oscar hopefuls: Mark Salisbury with James McAvoy and Michael Ordoña with Keri Russell and Ellen Page.

"[A]mong Juno's distinctive charms is that it seems to have disarmed both sides of the family values debate," notes Ann Hulbert in Slate. "And the feat gets pulled off in the wry style of the eponymous hero: The film doesn't offer up a formulaic or fervent call for family harmony. Instead, it takes idiosyncratic aim at everybody's pieties." Related online viewing: Shadowplay's opening titles for Juno, via Drawn!.

"We're just ending a season in which a series of highly touted dramas about the Iraq War and its domestic consequences have flopped both critically and commercially," notes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "Meanwhile, the real ground zero of our geopolitical distress, Afghanistan, like Freud's 'return of the repressed,' reappears as the setting and subject of two works that unequivocally deserve to be hailed as among the year's most fascinating, worthwhile and successful entertainments." And they would be The Kite Runner and Charlie Wilson's War. More on Kite Runner from Steve Erickson in the City Paper: "A competent director with little personality, Marc Forster never finds a style appropriate for the tension underlying the period."

In the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams talks with Tamara Jenkins, whose The Savages is recommended by Shaun Brady. More on that one from Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger and Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

James Mottram talks with Mischa Barton for the Independent, where Sheila Johnston interviews Josh Brolin.

Interviews in the Guardian: Matthew Hays with Gus Van Sant, Laura Barnett with Mickey Rooney, Andrew Purcell with Jason Bateman, Patrick Barkham with Henry Winkler, Xan Brooks with Tang Wei (Lust, Caution) and John Patterson with Joel and Ethan Coen. Also, Paranoid Park gets Steve Rose thinking about skateboarders in movies.

Steven Shaviro: "I've been reading Steve Erickson for quite some time; he is one of my favorite living American writers. His new novel, his eighth, Zeroville, is one of his best ever - I am inclined to say it's the best thing he's written since Arc d'X (1993)."

Wired has brought David Byrne and Thom Yorke into the same room to talk about the future of the music industry. You can listen to audio clips from the conversation as well. Then Byrne lays out a few "Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists - and Megastars." Via Rex Sorgatz.

Also Wired is Michel Gondry, as profiled by Jennifer Hillner.

Welcome to the NHK "represents the rise in the new anime fan, a Neo-Otaku," writes John Lichman at the House Next Door. "Someone who is painfully self-aware of what they are watching, yet refuse to admit it is anime."

"Much like other overlooked greats - M Emmet Walsh, Dylan Baker, Timothy Spall - [Philip Baker] Hall has taken roles destined for notoriety without ever eliciting much renown," writes Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Duck is above all else Hall's film, and rightly so: he is never absent from sight for more than a few seconds, and the role is delightfully atypical."

The Walker "seems to be the operative word. [Paul] Schrader's work refers only in passing and under duress, so to speak, to the political repression and moral degradation associated with the Bush administration," argues Joanne Laurier at the WSWS.

"Leukemia has claimed the life of Floyd Red Crow Westerman, the Native American activist, actor and country/folk singer best known for his roles in Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (as Sioux leader Ten Bears) and TV's Walker, Texas Ranger (as Uncle Ray Firewalker)," notes Joe Leydon. More from Michael Carlson in the Guardian.

Browse this: Dennis Cozzalio's "favorites out of the 80-some full responses to Mr Shoop's Surfin' Summer Quiz." Plus: "Professor Bertram Potts's Hella Homework for the Holidays Christmas Break Quiz."

Online seasonal desktop tip. "February 1940. Shoveling snow away from the movie entrance in Chillicothe, Ohio." At Shorpy.

Online browsing tip. The Art of Memory presents "some examples from Robert Motherwell/George Wittenborn's documents of modern art (1944-1972), covers and typography by Paul Rand."

Online viewing tip #1. Drawn! points to a short clip from Coraline, Henry Selick's feature based on the book by Neil Gaiman. Also, Ronald Searle's title designs for the 1970 Ronald Neame film, Scrooge.

Online viewing tip #2. Vulture listens and watches as the Beatnix, slipping into Hard Day's Night mode, cover "Stairway to Heaven."

Online viewing tips. At Filmmaker, Benjamin Crossley-Marra posts a couple of music videos by Cam Archer and Aaron Platt.

Fests and events, 12/24.

"It seems appropriate that Film Forum is observing the 30th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's death this month by showing the great filmmaker at his liveliest," writes Darrell Hartman in the New York Sun. "Perhaps more than any other Chaplin film, City Lights was shaped by its creator's manic perfectionism. For nearly three years, Chaplin choreographed its physical routines down to the last detail and nearly tore his hair out trying to get the story to make sense." More from David Denby in the New Yorker.

"[T]he film programming at the Gallery Theatre at the National Museum of Singapore has quietly, over the last year become really rather essential for cineastes," notes Ben Slater. And "on January 8th, the first film in the series for 2008 is going to be a British film, Chris Petit's criminally undervalued late-70s-into-the-80s black and white road movie, Radio On, showing for the first time ever in Singapore, alongside Chris' impressionistic revisiting of his debut feature Radio On remix (Click that title to read about my involvement with that particular project). And this time I'm honored to be doing the intro and Q&A. Rather than blather on about how wonderful Radio On is in this space, here's a link to someone else doing that."

Michael Guillén looks over the lineup for Berlin & Beyond: New Films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, running January 10 through 16 at San Francisco's Castro.

There's a rumor running around that Madonna's directorial debut, Fifth and Wisdom, will see its world premiere at the Berlinale. Patrick Goldstein reports for Die Welt (and in German).

The Great Debaters.

"The Great Debaters has the ingredients for a great motion picture: starched collars, a sweaty speakeasy, a teacher who will become a serious poet, rousing rhetoric, dog-eared Bibles, ferocious battles of wits," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "But there are two influences at work on this story, weighing it down like damp laundry on a line: its completely competent director, Denzel Washington, and its totally unimaginative screenwriter, Bob Eisele. Together, they take most of the bounce out of the story."

"[T]he film avoids potentially interesting frictions by always letting the team debate (and win) on the 'correct' side of every issue - that which aligns with generally accepted modern liberal sympathies," notes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "The kids follow their party line all the way to the big game, a ridiculous, fallacy-riddled face-off against Harvard. Nobody gets to root for their teammates from a hospital bed, but I'll bet the idea was at least floated."

Updated through 12/28.

"Washington's second directorial effort is a threadbare affair, his tale about the triumphs achieved by the 1935 debate team from Texas's all-black Wiley College proving barely more than a litany of rote personal and social conflicts and victories," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Such cozy familiarity extends not only to screenwriter Robert Eisele's plotting and Washington's respectably nondescript direction but also to the latter's lead performance as professor, debate team coach, and union-organizing rabble-rouser Melvin B Tolson, a role which, after American Gangster's villainous posturing, lets the star slip back into the comfortable skin of a noble, wise mentor with a gift for bellowing oration."

"Although all of its characters are based on actual persons, screenwriter Robert Eisele (working from a story by himself and Jeffrey Porro) does quite a bit of concocting here, the better to enhance the, shall we say, 'movieness' of the story," notes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Nothing wrong with that, on principle, except that the embellishments tend instead to enhance the triteness of the story as our heroes advance with standard inexorability to a bittersweet triumph. Which isn't to say the picture's not without both its moments and a good amount of backbone."

"Washington knows that to get what he wants he must first give the financiers what they need, and that's his name up on the marquee as an actor," writes Jason Guerrasio. "He talked about this dilemma, along with taking artistic liberties with this lesser-known historical moment when Filmmaker interviewed him over the phone a week before the Golden Globe nominations where announced (the film got a nomination for Best Picture)."

"Actress Jurnee Smollett knew from the moment she read Robert Eisele's script that the role of Samantha Booke embodied all the dramatic elements that young black actresses of our own era crave but so seldom get to play on-screen." Robert W Welkos talks with her. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Welkos meets Nate Parker, whose "career is receiving a big boost in the new film The Great Debaters, in which he portrays Henry Lowe, a member of the 1930s-era Wiley College all-black debate team."

Updates, 12/25: "I've seen many of Washington's eloquent and dignified performances over the years without quite grasping, until now, that his defining characteristic as an actor is anger," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "This is a raging cliché to apply to a black actor, and borderline offensive to boot. That doesn't stop it from being true. His is a controlled, inner anger, contained behind his hooded eyes and amused, superior expression, but it's anger all the same. You might almost call it contempt: As Malcolm X or Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter or the corrupt Alonzo Harris of Training Day, Washington's demeanor always suggests that he understands the way the world actually works, and one day he'll manage to pound it into our thick and stupid heads."

"Its steadfast humanity, its literacy, its passionate belief in education, its faith that history teaches invaluable lessons and its strong, emotionally grounded performances: There are enough things to admire about The Great Debaters, the heavily fictionalized true story of The Little Debate Team That Could, that your impulse is to forgive the movie its shortcomings," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

"Resolved: The Great Debaters is an emotionally and dramatically satisfying piece of work, solidly crafted and intelligently affecting," writes Joe Leydon in the Houston Chronicle.

"It's a great family movie, if not historically perfect, and something that a lot of people are going to like a lot," writes Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post.

"Working hard on both sides of the camera, Washington has grafted his intensity onto this production, giving it a kind of backbone it would not otherwise have," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"[M]ake no mistake: Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters is every bit the sports flick that Hoosiers, The Natural and Remember the Titans are," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "It's only the extra-curriculars that have changed. Whether or not that's a good thing is entirely up to you, but if you're a big fan of totally predictable yet effectively entertaining 'competition' movies, then there's very little chance you won't dig what's offered here. And even if you find the screenplay to be the pinnacle of all things obvious, the performances are still pretty excellent. Plus, hell, if cheerleading is a sport, then so is debate."

Update, 12/26: "The film may be manipulative in its construction, and cliché-ridden in some of the incidents it recounts, but it has a good, large heart," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "You could do worse, this holiday season, than to take your children to see this movie and encourage them to reflect on where we have quite recently and shamefully been in this country - when it comes to matters of race - and, perhaps, on how far we have yet to go."

Updates, 12/27: "Denzel Washington's sanctimonious The Great Debaters makes one look back in gratitude to Clarence Brown's 1949 masterpiece Intruder in the Dust," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Of course, it would take Denzel Washington's transparent, do-gooder attempt at balancing the affront of his American Gangster to turn a movie about lynching into a pious bore, but it is The Great Debaters' distance from those historical atrocities that causes it to fall so short of Intruder in the Dust's authentic, haunting details."

Patrick Walsh files a junket report for Cinematical.

Update, 12/28: "[F]or a movie about a debate team - one with the word 'debaters' in the title, no less - Denzel Washington's second effort as a director doesn't have that much interest in what a debate looks and sounds like," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "It's like a karate movie in which the fight scenes have been cut to a couple of punches, and it's sadly indicative of Debaters' unwillingness to engage the issues it raises with any depth."

The Bucket List.

"You go to a studio and say: 'I've got this movie about old guys dying of cancer. Give me $45 million,' they're not going to do it so fast," Rob Reiner tells David M Halbfinger in the New York Times.

"This terminally ill, terminally awful dramedy marks a sad cinematic milestone: The Bucket List is the first film in history to feature a truly wretched [Jack] Nicholson performance - and we're not talking about the character he plays," sighs Aaron Hillis in Premiere.

"Not since Patch Adams has a film more insistently aimed to convey a life-affirming sentiment and instead ended up advocating euthanasia," writes Eric Henderson in Slant.

Updated through 12/28.

"At the heart of the movie is, of course, the Jack and Morgan [Freeman] Show," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice. "Nicholson seems to be gunning hard for another Oscar nomination with a frenetic, tic-y performance, full of grunts and heavy breathing, that just screams CANCER PATIENT. And Freeman's Poor But Wise Man, who narrates in plummy tones, is as mournful and wry and knowing as ever."

Updates, 12/25: "Any moron can make a bad movie," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.... [E]ven if you can gloss over the things about The Bucket List that are merely boring, you'll still have to reckon with the things that are reprehensible - or so absurd that they defy parody."

"The Bucket List arrives on Christmas Day to remind us to live life to its fullest and leave no cliché unturned," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "Its watchability almost entirely depends on your tolerance of Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson doing the things that made them stars and won them Oscars, only much more so."

"The Bucket List operates on the hope that two beloved stars rubbing their signature screen personas together can spark warm, fuzzy box office magic," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "I wouldn't count on it."

Update, 12/27: "The actors—distracting recognizable idiosyncrasies intact—exhibit an unwarranted level of jubilance as terminally afflicted hospital roommates intent on experiencing their unrealized dreams before heading to the grave," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Their faux denial translates into nonchalance. Watching Nicholson trade ratty grins with Freeman's shrewd mannerisms engenders a cheap thrill, working against the bleak nature of the material. There's a reason why Bob Hope and Bing Crosby never made a movie about getting cancer together."

Update, 12/28: "Let's face it: with a movie like this, audiences should already know what to expect," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Both characters are bound to learn a few important life lessons on their way to the grave, and they'll be grumbly and vulgar in calculatingly endearing ways. The trick for any filmmaker with an assignment like The Bucket List is to punch through those presets as painlessly as possible, which for the most part, Reiner does."

More on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

"Although it bears a passing resemblance to any number of generic stories of trial and uplift, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is sui generis," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "It is a chronicle of death that is robustly alive, never bowing to defeat but never hiding the truth of what it confronts. It is terrifying and exhilarating, morbid and vivacious, sardonic and sentimental. Like Jean-Do's existence, it is something of a miracle." And he talks with Julian Schnabel.

"But what's more significant than the visual style of this film is the way Schnabel can take a static sequence - almost a painting, really, with a soundtrack - and make it shake with emotion," writes the Stranger's Annie Wagner. "It's the essential problem of a movie about a paralyzed man, and Schnabel nails it." And she, too, talks with Schnabel.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a film about a man who experiences the catastrophe I most feared during my recent surgeries: 'locked-in syndrome,' where he is alive and conscious but unable to communicate with the world," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. The film "not what you could call inspirational, because none of us would think to be in such a situation and needing inspiration. It is more than that. It is heroic. Here is the life force at its most insistent, lashing out against fate with stubborn resolve."

"Thanks to Bauby's courageous and honest writing, and Schnabel's poetic interpretation, what could have been a portrait of impotence and suffering becomes a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post, where Hank Stuever profiles Schnabel.

"A new kind of art movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly fuses experimental techniques with a highly accessible and sometimes humorous narrative; it’s deeply personal yet universal in its humanism," writes Andrea Gronvall in the Chicago Reader, where she notes two significant departures Schnabel's taken from Bauby's actual story.

Paul Brownfield meets Schnabel for the Los Angeles Times and finds him to be quite a fan of Mexican food.

I'm Not There in the UK.

The Observer's Philip French calls I'm Not There "a challenging film, but a rewarding one. It demands patience from the viewer and invites exegesis of a sort that was once thought obligatory for the understanding of Eliot, Pound and their contemporaries. Back in 1963, someone wrote dauntingly of Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V, that you shouldn't open the book unless you were prepared to read it twice. There's something like that about I'm Not There, but you've always got the music."

"True to Rimbaud, [Todd] Haynes the director is never remotely 'himself' in the film," writes Jonathan Romney. "Just as the film resembles an oddly selective Dylan compilation set on shuffle, tentatively gesturing at linear biography while scrambling and distorting it, Haynes's own style zips around crazily: one moment he's pastiching DA Pennebaker's Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, with additional splashes of Fellini, Godard and Richard Lester (there's a lovely Beatles-as-Chipmunks gag here); the next he's illustrating 'Ballad of a Thin Man' in disconcertingly literal MTV style. As for Robbie and Claire's divorce, it's set in a domestic-realism mode that may or may not be deliberately evoking the banality of Kramer vs Kramer."

Also in the Independent, Kaleem Aftab interviews Haynes; so does Howard Feinstein, but for the Guardian.

And so does David Gritten in the Telegraph, where Sukhdev Sandhu writes that "this is as much a film about Haynes's obsessions as it is an obsessive film about Dylan: his very first picture was Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (1985), about the poet whose line 'Je suis un autre' prefigures the title and conceit of this one.... Dylan may not always be visible in I'm Not There, but Haynes's distinctive vision clearly is."

"It's a crazy film which shouldn't work, but for most of the time does," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard, where it's Larushka Ivan-Zadeh who interviews Haynes.

4 Months... in LA.

"The extraordinary Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, more comfortably known as 'that abortion movie that won this year's Palme d'Or,' sheds its secrets slowly, a high-end realist drama quickening skillfully into a thriller," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly.

"The reason 4 Months, which has a one-week run in Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar consideration, has such resonance is because it believes with fearless audacity in the power and possibility of the medium," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Writer-director [Cristian] Mungiu has an almost old-fashioned faith that film can explore the most painful subjects, ask the deepest questions, deliver the most important meanings."

And Hugh Hart talks with Mingui.

Lists and awards, 12/23.

"It was a time of wonders, an autumn of miracles, one of the best years in recent movie history," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "One great film after another opened, and movie lovers found there were two or three, sometimes more, must-see films opening on a weekend. I gave up rationing my four-star ratings and went with the flow." His #1: Juno.

While we're in Chicago, how about an online viewing tip? Jim Emerson presents his "10 best list: the movie (WGA strike/Antonioni edition)... Ten movies, two or three shots apiece (more or less), 76 seconds, no dialog, no annotations."

Twitch's Todd Brown presents "a baker's dozen of my favorite films, one I loathed, and a stack I'm looking forward to in 2008."

"From where I sat, 2007 was a breakthrough year for movies, no matter that the very best of them - Charles Burnett's American independent classic Killer of Sheep - came out a full 30 years after it was made," writes Rob Nelson in the MinnPost.

The Independent asks the likes of Stephen Frears, Edgar Wright, Ken Loach, Gurinder Chadha and others for their favorite films of 2007.

Jürgen Fauth laces his top ten (#1: There Will Be Blood) with quick descriptions of a favorite scene in each.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford tops Jeffrey M Anderson's list: "I think I can honestly say that I've thought about this film every day since I've seen it." Jeffrey's also got a list of the year's worst films.

Movie City News tracks another couple of rounds of critics circle award-winners: San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Florida and Detroit.

A round of top tens in the Oregonian: Shawn Levy (whose #1 is The Lives of Others), Marc Mohan (Children of Men) and Mike Russell (There Will Be Blood). And Mike's "director's cut" of his list at CulturePulp's a lot of fun.

In the New York Times, Dave Kehr presents "not a Top 10 list per se, because by what cosmic criteria could you rank Murnau over Griffith, or Charles Burnett over Kenneth Anger? Here are my choices for the most notable DVDs of 2007, in alphabetical rather than hierarchical order."

In the Los Angeles Time, Jen Chaney offers a list of DVDs that "provide an alternative to the typical It's a Wonderful Life - A Christmas Story - Miracle on 34th Street trifecta. Every one of these choices fits in tonally with the holiday season and includes at least one crucial scene set at Christmastime."

Yair Raveh's decided that Control edges ahead of There Will Be Blood for the #1 spot on his top ten - but only just.

At the AV Club: Nathan Rabin's "Favorite Movie Year" is 1994.

Observer readers write up the highlights of their year.

Chuck Tryon: "21 Media Moments in 2007."

From Matt Dentler, "The Top 45 Albums Worth Your Dime in 2007."

Online viewing and listening tips. "Hooray. It's time, once again, for my definitive guide to the best music of the year." Fraser Lewry's got your clips.

Online viewing tips. Alternet lists its "Top Ten Hottest Videos of 2007."

Lists. New York Times.

"I know it's hard to believe, but during the past 12 months I sometimes went two or three weeks in a row without finding anything to mock, deflate or be disappointed by, and my inner curmudgeon was frequently elbowed aside by a wide-eyed, arm-waving enthusiast," writes AO Scott. His list is topped by 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, then Ratatouille, then a slew of "pairs (and in one case a trio) of films that complete, complement, contradict or otherwise engage each other."

"More than anything [lists] are a public ritual, which is their most valuable function," writes Manohla Dargis. "I tell you what I liked, and you either agree with my list (which flatters us both) or denounce it (which flatters you). It's a perfect circle." And she's got a top two - There Will Be Blood and Zodiac, which "shook up my world in the best possible way" - and 21 more.

"The betrayal of the body, decrepitude and death: in 2007 an unprecedented number of serious films, along with the usual slasher movies, contemplated the end of life," writes Stephen Holden, introducing a more traditional top ten. His #1: There Will Be Blood.

Rounding off the New York Times lists package this Sunday is Caryn James declaring that "2007 was a year when stars broke free of their confining boxes, when the most appealing work often came out of nowhere, while big names landed with giant thuds."

Spanish Cinema Now. 8.

Once again, James Van Maanen.

Back-to-back delight was provided yesterday at Spanish Cinema Now with double showings of a frothy, funny musical and a richly rewarding extended-family drama - bringing to an almost-close another memorable visit by Spain to New York City.

It's been a while since I have heard so many individual patrons laughing out loud at odd moments all around a movie theater - not with huge "group" laughs you'd hear at something like Superbad, but the smaller sort, arising from a moment that's tickled an individual's fancy. For his first full-length feature, Scandalous (¿Por qué se frotan las patitas?), director/co-writer Alvaro Begines has chosen a musical comedy - not the easiest of genres to tackle early on. Yet his utterly captivating, non-pushy style works well to draw us in and, by virtue of his grasp on character, humor and happenstance, keeps us consistently interested and amused.

Three generations of women have had it up-to-here with their men and, unbeknownst to each other, stage individual coups. At the same time, a group of free-floating, squatter musicians have intersected with two of the women (in one case, rather vitally), causing disappearances that involve a private detective, a nosy neighbor, a TV talk show and more. In this giddy, sweet film, Begines smartly balances social comment with song and comedy. His tone is easy-going and off-the-cuff, yet his terrific ensemble knows how to make the most of its many memorable moments. The cast includes some of Spain's most interesting actors from all three generations: Lola Herrera and Carlos Álvarez-Novoa, Antonio Dechent and Manuel Morón, and Raúl Arévalo as the lonesome loner who holds the movie together and asks the question that comprises its original Spanish title: "Why do they rub their feet together?" The subjects here are flies, and the answer we learn at the finale is sweet, sad and symbolic.

Ms Herrera, in particular, is a commanding presence, with such a load of barely buried fire, that she makes her grandmother a thing of beauty, as well as someone to contend with. A few years ago, Señor Dechent seemed to be in every other SCN film. We don't see early enough of him these days, so his reappearance here is most welcome. Señor Morón (who also appears in this edition's Theresa, the Body of Christ and Mataharis) nearly steals the movie with his precise and hilarious turn as Manolete, the private eye. And Señor Arévalo - who opens, closes and, in a sense, carries the movie and its many themes via his ample talent and slightly crazy charm - is a young man we're sure be seeing more of. In this fest alone, he appears in Scandalous, Seven Billiard Tables, and the short subject Traumalogia.

In Seven Billiard Tables (Siete mesas de billar francés), Raúl Arévalo registers strongly again, but so differently from his role in Scandalous that I failed to recognize him until midway through the movie. He's part of a large ensemble that works with precision and polish in Gracía Querejeta's enormously likeable drama that takes off from that sad point at which a parent becomes so life-threateningly ill that a child and grandchild must travel immediately and fast. In the three of Ms Querejeta's movies I have seen (Cuando vuelvas a mi lado, Hector and this new one - the latter two co-written with David Planell), I've been struck with how cleverly and gracefully this writer/director parcels out exposition. This is done bit by bit throughout her movies so that the mystery of who her characters are comes to us over time, with little and large surprises along the way.

Each film of hers I've seen seems more accomplished than its predecessor, though all are quite good. Seven Billiard Tables is an extended-family drama that takes in a rather large cast of characters, giving each his/her due. It's already shared a Best Screenplay award at the San Sebastian fest, and last week was nominated for six Goyas: best actress nods for Maribel Verdú and Blanca Portilla, best director, and best supporting actor and actress (Señor Arévalo and Amparo Baró). Everyone does such as good job - including little Víctor Valdivia, lately of The Education of Fairies, who plays the Verdú character's son - that choosing among them all must have proven difficult.

All of Querejeta's movies are character-driven, and when the direction, writing and acting is on a level this high, enjoyment is a surety. We learn quite a bit about billiards and family ties along the way, but mostly we grow to understand and love these people - for their faults as much as their occasional kindnesses and humor.

Seven Billiard Tables will be shown again Sunday, Dec 23, at 7 pm. And because the movie opens with that very familiar Universal logo, there may be hope that a US distribution deal is in the works.

Dream DVDs.

Berlin Alexanderplatz. Witchfinder General. Killer of Sheep. Duck, You Sucker.

It's been a great year for DVD releases, and Sean Axmaker's got no complaints. But he does have dreams. What special editions and box sets could we hope for in '08 and beyond? Sean's drawn up a wish list. And it's based on what's actually feasible, too: "This is no fantasy of lost films found (like the 132-minute version of Magnificent Ambersons, the 40-reel Greed, or magically rediscovered prints of London After Midnight or Four Devils), but a modest proposal to pull out films from the vaults, restore and remaster them where necessary, and give them the presentation they deserve on DVD."

Take this list, he offers, "not as a provocation but an invitation: let us know what is at the top of your wish list."

Spanish Cinema Now. 7.

Another round from James Van Maanen. Spanish Cinema Now runs at the Film Society of Lincoln Center through December 27.

Icíar Bollaín's Take My Eyes (Te doy mis ojos) won some 39 international awards, including a bundle of Goyas in 2004/05. Her earlier film Flowers from Another World (Flores de otro mundo) managed a half-dozen awards back in 2000. A triple threat, Bollaín boasts an even longer career as an actress, with leading roles in films as diverse as They're Watching Us (Nos miran) and Ken Loach's Land and Freedom. In this year's SCN series, she is represented as writer/director by the new movie Mataharis (site; and yes, it's the plural of that famous femme fatale spy). I caught up with Flores de otro mundo only a couple of years ago and found it quite special: as real as it was charming and honest about loves present and past, foreign and domestic. If I was not as bowled over as were most Spaniards by Take My Eyes, that is probably due to being earlier inundated here in the US by far too many movies and too much television nonsense on the subject of wife abuse. Granted, Bollaín's version placed some of the responsibility on the wife - not for the abuse itself but for returning to it time after time - and its mountain city setting and art museum ambience added immense beauty to her film.

Mataharis, interestingly enough, deals in an off-kilter manner with a subject even more timely: surveillance. The setting is a small Madrid detective agency run by a fellow (a very believable Fernando Cayo) as stupidly macho as he is sure of himself and staffed by three very different women. We learn about the three - their lives and their cases - as the film progresses, slipping deftly and quickly in and out of their stories. Bollaín forces us to look at surveillance a bit differently because we don't, at first, see what is going on here in the same manner as we might look at, say, the Bush Administration's unwarranted trampling of our civil rights. Instead, we perceive it, as does the oldest of the three women, as a private company simply doing what it has been paid to do. But then one of the cases turn out not to be what it initially appeared to be, and we - like the characters - are caught up short.

Bollaín and her casting director Eva Leira have assembled a very good group led by Najwa Nimri (Asfalto, Lovers of the Artic Circle, Sex & Lucia, The Method) and Tristán Ulloa, as the young marrieds-with-children, Nuria Gonzáles and Manuel Morón as the oldest couple, and María Vázquez and Diego Martín as a problematic detective and her prey. The entire cast is fine, and Bollaín keeps her story moving well. She tamps down the emotions and melodrama so that events that could go over the top stay grounded. In the end, you may feel, as I did, that being any kind of spy goes so thoroughly against the social contract as to leave one bereft of humanity. This was shown most clearly by Robert De Niro's fine film The Good Shepherd. Ms Bollaín, in her own simpler, quiet way, brings the point home just as well - while stirring up a meaty stew of economics, corporate policies, family lives and sexual attraction.

On the other hand, sitting through two movies in the current Pilar Miró retrospective, back-to-back, as some of us Spanish Cinema Now fans did last Wednesday (the only day these two were shown), proved pretty heavy-going. In the first of these, Mercedes Sampietro stars as what I'd guess might be a Miró surrogate (she plays a TV director given her first chance to make a theatrical motion picture) in the delightfully titled Gary Cooper, Who Art in Heaven (Gary Cooper, que estás en los cielos). Unfortunately, the title is the only delightful thing about this 1980 film. You might expect something light, a bit of charm, perhaps a laugh or two. Forget it. On the basis of the Miró films included in this retrospective, I would suggest that the woman, as a writer/director, had no sense of humor. This, as much as anything else, accounts for my opinion that her movies simply can't reflect much more than the - understandably - stunted perspective she must have had on what life offers.

Added to this are her generally woeful filmic vocabulary and storytelling skills: lots of close-ups but no more than a cursory sense of composition, color, editing, music or much else. After an unusually off-the-cuff beginning in which the lead character greets friends and co-workers in the TV studio, everything else comes across as "hard work." The dialogue especially seems forced and expository; people talk about ideas and feelings as if they were from some book or other (often, they are). The plot, as such, has the Sampietro character discovering that her body has become a medical emergency, to which she responds by bringing in, one way or another, just about everyone important from her past. I find it odd that a movie dealing with love, death, career and more should fail so thoroughly to engage us on any visceral level. Instead, we - and the film - just plod along toward a finale that is, well, let's call it very "expected."

In 1992, with Beltenebros, Miró tried her hand at film noir, which apparently she understood to mean, "Don't turn on the lights." This is one of the danker movies I can recall. Faces, thank goodness, are lit up enough to register and, as they belong to the likes of Terence Stamp, Patsy Kensit and Geraldine James, we enjoy watching them.

The film was shot in English - no surprise, given the lead actors - and this adds yet another layer of distance to Miro's usual, somewhat inert dialogue. Toward the end, there is a silly and unbelievable showdown/shootout in a boarded-up movie theater in which the antagonists shout at each other in language that borders on camp and sounds more like the libretto to an opera than anything "real" people might utter. In this scene, an actual movie is screening behind the man on stage. Why - since there is no audience in the theater? For art's sake, I would guess, and if so, the movie misses by a mile. The FSLC program notes that Beltenebros is based upon a "taut thriller." If Miró ever knew the meaning of "taut," the seven films in this retrospective certainly do not prove it. Moments that should last a single beat go on for several and this builds and builds until the viewer is nearly nodding off.

The Spanish Civil War and its aftermath hovers here, as in so many movies by Miró and other filmmakers of this period. The question of who is a traitor is raised, along with the consequences of acting on this knowledge without the assurance of its veracity. This is a perfectly valid premise, and it makes an interesting bookend to Miró's penultimate feature, Your Name Poisons My Dreams, in which vengeance is seen to destroy a life almost as thoroughly as does the initial crime around which the story is based. Miró certainly knew how to zero in on interesting themes for her movies. I only wish she'd had the skill to do better by them. Her final theatrical film, The Dog in the Manger, rated by some as her masterpiece, will be shown beginning this Sunday. I maintain high - well, mid-level, at least - hopes.

Jane Fonda @ 70.

On Jane Fonda's 70th, Ronald Bergan looks back to a recent tribute in Vienna and on a remarkable life and career. A few notes follow.

In Hal Ashby's Coming Home (1978), Jane Fonda plays a politically naïve, conventional army wife, who works at a local hospital while her gung-ho husband (Bruce Dern) is away in Vietnam. There she meets former high-school classmate and ex-athlete (Jon Voight), now an embittered war veteran, paralysed from the waist down. This doesn't seem to have affected his sexual prowess and they become lovers. She becomes more liberated, changes her hairstyle and goes for rides along the beach with Voight in his wheelchair. She is made aware of the shabby way that the veterans are treated and even begins to question the war. Her transformation echoes, to a certain extent, the politicization of Jane Fonda.

Coming Home was shown at the Viennale (the Vienna International Film Festival) in October this year as part of a slightly premature 70th birthday tribute to Jane Fonda who, bewilderingly, becomes a septuagenarian today, December 21. (1937 was a vintage year for Hollywood stars. Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman were all born in the same year and are still active.)

When the lights came up after the film in Vienna, Fonda stepped onto the stage to enormous applause. Wearing a silver lame trouser suit, she had hardly altered from the 41-year-old star we had just seen on screen. Taking the microphone, she tearfully declared, "What is so sad for us seeing the film now is to realise that we Americans have learned nothing. We are still sending our young men and woman to die in Iraq. And that we're doing nothing for them when they come back. Not forgetting what we're doing to the Iraqi people. Although there was a draft back then, there is now a poverty draft. Poor people are being bribed by the military to go to war." This was the Jane Fonda that ex-hippies like to remember.

How did the privileged daughter of Henry Fonda, brought up in a totally film oriented environment in California, turn into an iconic radical figure? Her mother was Frances Seymour Brokaw, the widow of a multimillionaire who married Henry Fonda in 1936 and who died, when Jane was 12, by slitting her throat in a sanatorium where she had been confined after a series of nervous breakdowns. Jane, it is said, only discovered the facts of her mother's suicide when a school-mate casually handed her a magazine containing the story.

Notwithstanding this early trauma, her childhood was a relatively happy one. In 1955, when her father took the lead in the hit Broadway play Mister Roberts, she and younger brother Peter (born 1940), moved in with their grandmother who owned a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. At this period, acting for Jane was solely confined to high school plays, except for a couple of appearances with her father in an Omaha Community Theater production of Clifford Odets's The Country Girl and a summer stock performance of James Thurber and Elliott Nugent's 1948 play The Male Animal. In the latter, the professor character, played by Henry Fonda, confronting his Red-baiting trustees, says, "You can't suppress ideas because you don't like them. Not in this country. Not yet."

But Jane's early ambitions lay elsewhere, and though she dutifully attended and graduated from Vassar, there was enough nascent rebellion in her to make her decide to go to Paris to study art. On her return to the US, she decided that she was, after all, her father's daughter and, encouraged by Lee Strasberg, she signed on at the famed Actors Studio, paying for her courses by modelling. (She was twice featured on the cover of Vogue.)

1960 was the breakthrough year, but she didn't exactly make it on her own. Joshua Logan, a good friend of her father's, who had directed Mister Roberts, allowed Jane to make her Broadway debut in his production of There Was a Little Girl which, despite running a mere 16 performances, won her the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the magazine Theatre World's award as the season's most promising actress. Logan then cast her in her first film, Tall Story. With false eyelashes and falsies, she was quite pleasing in an irritating role as a girl with only marriage on her mind - a long way from the feminist she was to become. Though both the play and the film were received with indifference, they gave her the push she needed into stardom. Other films followed that exploited her persona as an All-American girl.

Her personal and professional life drastically changed direction in 1964 when she went to France to make La Ronde, a new version of the Schnitzler play which had been turned into a classic film in 1950 by Max Ophüls. The director this time was Roger Vadim, celebrated as the Svengali of "sex kitten" Brigitte Bardot. Fonda fell under his spell, married him and settled in Paris. Vadim then set about trying to turn her into another Bardot. Father Henry was reportedly mistrustful of his new son-in-law, and there was a great deal of sensationalist publicity; but Fonda remained friendly with her ex-husband after their divorce and, although critical of the way he treated women as sex objects, never made any slighting remark about him personally.

It was in France that she became radicalized. "All over French television one would see tens of thousands of American people in the streets protesting the war. It was the people on the streets of America that forced me to think of Vietnam." Another turning point was when she visited India in 1969. "I had never seen people die from starvation before or a boy begging with the corpse of his little brother in his arms... I met a lot of American kids there, hippies from wealthy or middle-class families in search of their individualist, metaphysical trips. They accepted that poverty. They even tried to explain it away to me."

On her return to California, where the contrast with the spectacle of wretchedness which she had just witnessed couldn't have been more flagrant, and emboldened by Marlon Brando, she began to speak out on various burning issues in the United States: the plight of Native Americans, the Black Panther movement, her support for which earned her numerous enemies and even alienated her father who once commented with disdain at her tendency to champion every social issue imaginable, calling her "Jane of Arc"; and, of course, the anti-war movement.

In 1970, she told a University of Michigan audience of some two thousand students, "If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist." At Duke University in North Carolina, she repeated what she had said in Michigan, adding, "I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism."

In 1971, at the risk of surveillance and blacklisting, she founded an anti-war troupe, Entertainment Industry for Truth and Justice, which toured Southeast Asia, and went on to produce a film entitled FTA (Foxtrot Tango Alpha, Free the Army, Fuck the Army). This was intended to counterpoint the USO shows put on by Bob Hope and other performers who gave positive support to American soldiers.

Three years later, in defiance of government restraints and at the expense of alienating her public, she went with her future husband, the political activist Tom Hayden, to North Vietnam. A documentary of the trip, co-directed by herself and the cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who shared the platform with her in Vienna, calling her "a true patriot"), was made under the title Introduction to the Enemy.

The moving film, demonized at the time, was never released and only got shown at some university campuses. Screened again in Vienna, it revealed that, despite rumours to the contrary, the journey was far from being an ego trip for Fonda. She listens carefully to what the Vietnamese have to say, sometimes translating from the French, keeping herself very much in the background. But she was reviled by conservatives and called "Hanoi Jane." Especially shocking to many was the photograph circulated of Fonda sitting smiling on a Vietcong anti-aircraft tank, something which she apologized for many years later. As late as 1984, protesters picketed a department store in Chicago when she appeared there to promote a new line in exercise clothing.

In Paris, her political instincts drew her to the radical filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard for whom she made Tout Va Bien (1972), which co-starred her with the then-Communist sympathising French singer and actor Yves Montand. Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who founded the Dziga Vertov Group in 1968 as a Marxist alternative to commercial cinema, made Letter to Jane (1972), a 52-minute film, in which the two directors discuss, in terms of what could be called applied semiology, a photograph of Fonda talking to a North Vietnamese soldier. They ask how we can assess a Vietnamese who is subject to the war daily and an American star, who is deeply concerned and has come to support him. How can reality and symbol co-exist? "Is it the film star who is making history or the people?"

It was only in the late 70s that Jane Fonda was able to paddle in the mainstream again when America was falling victim to a kind of collective amnesia. Few of her later movies echoed her social concerns, though she said, "I believe it's important to make responsible films," at the time of The China Syndrome (1979) - concerning the danger of a meltdown at a nuclear plant - presciently made just before the near meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

Although her image gradually mellowed, she still spoke up on women's issues. In a speech about patriarchy given at the National Women's Leadership Summit in Washington DC in June 2003, Fonda said: "It is altogether possible that we are on the verge of a tectonic shift in paradigms - that what we are seeing happening today are the paroxyisms, the final terrible death throes of the old, no longer workable, no longer justifiable system... It's patriarchy's third act and we have to make sure it is its last."

However, many have seen her embracing of capitalism (her fitness empire is worth millions of dollars, and her marriage to media mogul Ted Turner, from whom she separated) as a sign of hypocrisy and/or betrayal. Nevertheless, her melding of a political consciousness with an acting career has been hugely influential. It was heartening in Vienna, as she fulminated against the war in Iraq, to see that she had lost none of her political passion on reaching the age of 70.

- Ronald Bergan

---

Congrats in the German-language papers: Michael Althen in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Daniel Kothenschulte in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Rita Neubauer in Der Tagesspiegel, Susanne Ostwald in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Susan Vahabzadeh in the Süddeutsche Zeitung - and Mariam Schaghaghi talks with Fonda for the Berliner Zeitung.

Online listening tip. Kulturwoche's podcasts are usually in German, but they do have an edition featuring Jane Fonda speaking at the Viennale - in English, of course.

Earlier: David D'Arcy caught FTA last month in Amsterdam.

Lists, 12/20.

Five of the great folks who run the SXSW Film Festival have each chosen a "Top 7 of 07." The mix shows more docs than most lists do - and Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World makes a fine showing.

"Vulture Salutes the Wangs of 2007."

Glenn Kenny's top 25 "has been posted on Premiere's 'proper' website, here, in slideshow form, with pretty pictures once you click the prescribed geometric shape[s]." But he's also posted it as a blog entry to get a conversation going - and lo, it is going.

Guardian readers have voted The Lives of Others to the top of their list. Related online listening tip: Jason Solomons hosts a Guardian/Observer roundtable discussion of the highlights of 07.

Marcy Dermansky and Jürgen Fauth pick their "Most Talented Newcomers of 2007."

At First Showing, Alex Billington presents "54 reasons why 2008 will be an awesome year for movies and an even better year than 2007." Via Coudal Partners.

"Which cultural events - books, films, television shows, operas, plays, concerts - have been most overrated and underrated this year? We put this question to over 50 Prospect writers." Via the Literary Saloon.

Rex Sorgatz presents a list of 30 of the "Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading."

From Forbes, the "Web Celeb 25," via Gabriel Shanks.

Regret the Error presents "The Year in Media Errors and Corrections." Via Jim Coudal, who advises, "make sure to check the 'Apology of the Year.'" Yes.

Online viewing tips. Antville's "500 best music videos," via Listmaster Rex Sorgatz.

Fests and events, 12/20.

"A roster of 222 films from 66 countries are on tap for the 19th Palm Springs International Film Festival, including 69 premieres (4 World, 40 US and 25 North American) in addition to 55 of the 63 films submitted for best foreign language Oscar consideration," reports Brian Brooks at indieWIRE. "As previously announced, Helen Hunt's US debut Then She Found Me will open the festival taking place in the California desert community January 3 - 14. Romantic comedy Priceless by French director Pierre Salvadori, starring Audrey Tautou and Gad Elmaleh will close the festival January 13."

Also: "Director Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2 has been added to the non-competitive Premieres section at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival."

Lou Reed will be the keynote speaker at this year's SXSW Music Festival - and Julian Schnabel's Lou Reed's Berlin will be screened as well.

"American artist Christian Marclay turned to video in the 1980s. His work has featured in two Venice Biennales and in major exhibitions at the Tate, Pompidou and Guggenheim Museums. As a musician and DJ, he has collaborated with groups as diverse as Sonic Youth and the Kronos Quartet." Replay Christian Marclay is on view at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image through February 3.

"1,2,3... Avant-Gardes - Art as Contextual Art is the next stage of an exhibition and research project that explores the 'continuous' history of experimentation in film and art and the interaction of both fields." At sala rekalde in Bilbao through March 30.

The Berlinale's Perspektive Deutsches Kino will open with 1. Mai - Das Ende vom Lied (1st of May - All Belongs to You: "This episodic film directed by Jakob Ziemnicki, Sven Taddicken (Emmas Glück/Emma's Fortune), and duo Carsten Ludwig and Jan-Christoph Glaser recounts legendary and true tales about Labor Day in present-day Kreuzberg. 24 hours set between a local square and a hospital, the Lausitzer Platz and the Urban Krankenhaus; something between a political pageant and a carnival of afflictions. Three stories - unfolding at the same time and place - merge into a film."

Blade Runner, 12/20.

"The prevailing meme - that over time, scales fell from prejudicial eyes, and Blade Runner's true value as an extraordinary act of filmmaking bravado was recognized - is appealing, but also incomplete," writes Stephen Metcalf in Slate:

It may not have flattered the times, but in one sense Blade Runner benefited, and benefited enormously, from them. Blade Runner is among the first movies - if not the first - whose fortunes revived in the new channels of "ancillary distribution." This is no accident. The movie's unalloyed virtue, admired even at the time of its release, is an assaultive and wildly original production design, a mix of that rain, nuzzling gouts of smoke, and an eternally shifting kaleidoscope of artificial lights - all of it suggestive of a richly dystopic society and a wretchedly fatigued planet Earth. If nothing else, Blade Runner is mesmerizing when caught in pieces; it murmurs beautifully in the background. Unloved on the big screen, Blade Runner found its perfect medium in VCRs and cable TV - in the fragmented, ambient multiplatform afterlife that has become, over the past 20 or so years, the common stuff of movies.

"Last Thursday I caught the last local theatrical screening of Blade Runner: The Final Cut and it took my breath away," writes Peter Martin at Cinematical. "As much as Blade Runner's graphic schemes have been appropriated by and influenced others, the original maintains a great deal of authentic power, a bold mix of past, present and future."

Online listening tip. Ridley Scott is a guest on Fresh Air.

Docs, 12/20.

"Every film has a backstory just like every life has a history, but rarely do the two commingle to such a fantastic and phantasmagoric degree as they do in Austin filmmaker Steve Bilich's 13-minute short Native New Yorker, which took home the Best Documentary Short award at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival." Marc Savlov tells that story in the Austin Chronicle.

Also: "Turns out there's money to be made in selling supplies to people bringing drugs into this country and in incarcerating those unlucky enough to get caught holding them." Josh Rosenblatt previews American Drug War.

"Today is the 4th day of our 5-day online discussion on The D-Word with key staffers from the Independent Television Service (ITVS)," notes Doug Block. "It's a rare opportunity for doc makers to get their questions answered and glean insights into the submission and decision-making process of one of the biggest funders around (and not just for US projects)."

"Nancy Buirski, the founder, CEO and Artistic Director of the influential Full Frame Film Festival, announced yesterday that she is stepping down from the festival." AJ Schnack has more.

For the Los Angeles Times, Addie Morfoot talks to a slew of documentary filmmakers and discovers: "When the cameras stop, many filmmakers find the relationship with their subjects goes on - for better or worse - sometimes for years."

Les Blank's "enthusiasm and fun practically radiate from the screen; a documentarian for nearly 50 years now, he doesn't seem to be interviewing or investigating his subjects so much as amiably hanging out with them," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "[T]he vast majority of Blank's movies have been celebrations of good-time music and good food, sometimes both at once. Really, who wouldn't like this guy's job? His latest, All This in Tea (which was co-directed with his editor Gina Leibrecht), is typical Blank."

In the Voice, Nick Pinkerton finds Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, "a survey of how American cinema has historically interpreted Nazi atrocity," to be "a serviceable, abridged guide to his subject, though some omissions do rankle."

For the New York Times, Felicia R Lee talks with Jamie Kastner about his doc, Kike Like Me, which he calls "a black comic road movie about identity."

"The occasion of the Berlin Philharmonic's 125th anniversary November 4 saw the premiere of the documentary film Das Reichsorchester (The Reich's Orchestra), directed by Enrique Sànchez Lansch (Rhythm is it!, 2004)," notes Verena Nees at the WSWS. "The question hung in the air—how could such an outstanding orchestra, which embodied the heights of a developed culture, allow itself to be used by barbarous dictatorship? Unfortunately this question remained largely unanswered after the film."

indieWIRE. Critics Poll 07.

"Still unseen by the general public as the year comes to a close, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood dominated indieWIRE's annual survey of more than 100 North American film critics," announces Eugene Hernandez. "Set for a limited US release starting next week, the exceptional fifth feature by PT Anderson was named best film of the year.... Notably, the film topped five categories: Anderson was singled out for best director and best screenplay, while Daniel Day-Lewis's role as oil man Daniel Plainview was named the best performance of 2007 and Robert Elswit was singled out for best cinematography."

So here's the master list, and it's so thoroughly criss-n-cross-referenced, with every title, name and critic linking to ballots and lists that you could lose hours in here. It's worth it, though. This is one of the major events of the cinematic year. Hopefully, Eugene and Dennis Lim won't mind my quoting this bit at length:

Updated through 12/23.

Developed to celebrate film culture and criticism, the second annual poll by indieWIRE, conducted in recent weeks with critics casting their ballots online, focuses primarly on film critics who write for alternative outlets and online publications, including blogs. Inspired by a similar poll previously launched by the Village Voice in 1999, iW continued the survey last year after the Voice abandoned its popular poll, hoping to give North American cinephiles a direct opportunity to highlight the best in international cinema. The Village Voice is working with sister publication the LA Weekly on a film poll this year.

"When we did our first poll in '99, it was before the explosion of film blogs and websites," noted former Village Voice film editor Dennis Lim, who administered the iW poll last year. "There was no real counterpoint to the groupthink of critics' circle awards and there were many critics and writers whose tastes and opinions weren't represented in the year-end accounting." Continuing in comments to indieWIRE yesterday, Lim added, "Obviously it's a different landscape today and at this time of year especially, it can seem like there are too many lists, too many blogs, too much white noise. But even more so, you could argue, the poll serves a valuable aggregating function, by trying to tease out a consensus from a loosely defined community of serious, cinephilic writers."

On a minor note, in your crissing and crossing, you might run across my ballot. First, please read the comments; they'll explain why, when I post another top ten here at the Daily in another week or so, that list will look fairly different, as I'll be including films that haven't yet seen a US release.

Update, 12/23: And now, the critics' comments: "In Part 1, a look at some of the orphan #1 picks from the critics, while in Part 2, feedback on the best and worst of the year. Finally, in this edition, thoughts on the business side of things, as well as insights on films about the war in Iraq, considering Apatow, and talk about some of the year's stand-out performances."

John Harkness, 1954- 2007.

We at NOW are hurting at the sudden loss of our founding film writer, John Harkness, who, we believe, was the greatest Canadian film writer of the last 26 years. John was the kind of live-large guy you would hope worked at an alternative newspaper, and yes, a great screenwriter making a movie about NOW would have to have invented him. Fortunately for us, Harkness invented himself and walked through our front door.

Michael Hollett.

Updated.

John Harkness was - is - Canada's most important film critic.... Born in Montreal, John Harkness grew up in Halifax and Sarnia, and studied under Andrew Sarris in Cinema Studies at Columbia University. As well as writing for NOW, John also wrote for publications including Sight & Sound and Take One. He was a huge supporter of the Toronto International Film Festival and Cinematheque Ontario. He was also, we're told, really, really good at poker.

Matthew Kumar, Torontist.

When I was editor of Take One, I asked John for his considered opinion on the current state of affairs in the Canadian film culture. His response is reprinted here. Needless to say, it ruffled a few feathers, but that's what John was all about. [Toronto Sun film critic and Toronto Film Critics Association president] Bruce Kirkland called him a "truth serum."

Wyndham Wise, Northern Stars.

As passionately articulate on vintage American movies and European art cinema as he was on the most recent commercial Hollywood releases, Harkness was also known for the resoluteness of his judgements. Once he'd arrived at a rating for a movie, it stuck.

Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star.

Update: "Canadian film critic John Harkness and I crossed paths many times over the past quarter-century during my annual trek to his Toronto turf for the world's greatest film festival," writes Joe Leydon. "And while I would not presume to describe us as close friends, I must say I always enjoyed our spirited conversations - during which, more often than not, John did most of the talking, and made by far the funnier wisecracks (which, of course, I would later repeat and claim as my own) - even as he gleefully trashed a movie I meekly admitted to half-liking. He was an excellent writer with a devoted following. Indeed, I remember one of my film history students appearing extremely impressed when I told her I knew the author of her favorite book, John's The Academy Awards Handbook. Later, when I told John about this, he smiled wickedly and inquired: 'So, did that help you get laid?' That it most certainly did not seemed to genuinely disappoint him."

SAG. Nominations.

The road-trip drama Into the Wild received a leading four Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations Thursday, including honors for lead actor Emile Hirsch and supporting players Hal Holbrook and Catherine Keener," reports the AP's David Germain. Update: David Carr posts the full list.

Related: Tim Grierson profiles Holbrook for the LA Weekly.

There Will Be Blood.

"There Will Be Blood is a chamber drama on the scale of an Old Testament allegory, an epic Western, a parable of rapacious capitalism," writes David Edelstein in New York. "It's sublime - beautiful and ghastly at once.... [Paul Thomas] Anderson's fearless, bighearted filmmaking is an antidote to the toxic cloud of Manifest Destiny. He has made a mad American classic."

"What a relief when Daniel Day-Lewis, in the final reel of There Will Be Blood, at last makes good on the title's promise," whews Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "Relief because for two and a half hours director P.T. Anderson sustains an atmosphere of potential threat so unremitting that even I, a dyed-in-the-wool horror enthusiast, cowered at every one of Day-Lewis's menacing sidelong glances."

Updated through 12/25.

"Call it being coy, humble, or maybe even naïve, but Messrs Anderson and Day-Lewis seem genuinely surprised by the gushing accolades and the minute analysis the film has invited," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun, where he weighs the critical response so far to the film that's still a week away from showing itself to non-credentialed audiences.

"There Will Be Blood is the sort of film you stumble out of, desperately searching, like a drowning man frantic for air, for an adjective that is both descriptive enough to encompass your experience and distinctive enough to convey your stratosphere-bound senses," writes Brandon Fibbs at cinemaattraction. "There was but a single word for me: gobsmacked."

The New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson talks with Day-Lewis: "'Paul thought we were making a blockbuster... I thought we were making a film that would have us sort of drummed out of town with bell, book and candle...' A blockbuster? The 158-minute film is slow, detailed to the extreme and has almost no dialogue for the first 20 minutes. Mr Day-Lewis laughed heartily and shook his head. 'It's just so great Paul thought that. I just love it: There's no woman, no romance, no nothing - just fucking filthy guys digging holes in the ground.'"

The Los Angeles Times meets Anderson and Day-Lewis: "In a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills to talk about the movie, which opens in Los Angeles on Dec 26, the two notoriously media-shy artists are disarmingly loose and engaging.... Anderson is unshaven and rumpled, and radiates the youthful energy of someone who is still very much in love with film." Well, that's good news.

Online listening tip. Anderson is a guest on Fresh Air.

Earlier: About a week's worth of reviews and impressions beginning on 12/10; more dated entries: 12/5 and 11/9.

Updates, 12/20: "You might expect the man behind the mask to have at least some of Plainview's fire. Or a flicker of that fixed, maniacal stare. Or at least a little bit of that thrust-out lower jaw set hard against the rest of humanity. But it's not so." Judith Lewis profiles Day-Lewis for the LA Weekly.

"It is actually not hyperbole to say Lewis creates here one of film history's greatest performances," writes Chris Barsanti at Culture Cartel. "[T]his is a film that has been directed with a skill and grace that one just doesn't honestly see anymore."

"I'll admit it - I've become obsessed with Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, easily the best film of the year," writes Filmbrain. "It's been burning inside my brain for weeks now, and I've spent countless hours dissecting Anderson's stylistic, thematic and directorial nuances, for I believe this to be that rarest of things - a perfect film. There isn't a wrong note, or single unnecessary moment, shot, or line of dialogue throughout.... I've decided to post some of these miscellaneous thoughts in the hopes of encouraging discussion."

It "very well be the best American film of the year," but Kevin Lee does have his reservations.

Updates, 12/23: "There Will Be Blood, a nerve-racking American epic written and directed by PT Anderson, is so remarkably self-assured, so fully realized - hell, it's such a flat-out masterpiece - that it's surprising to think that this Anderson, this ferocious, uncompromising genius, is the same pastiche artist who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia," writes Bryan Frazer.

In the Los Angeles Times:

• Paul Lieberman tells the lively story of the casting of Dillon Freasier as HW.

• Michael Ordaña talks with Day-Lewis.

• Reed Johnson: "The planetary and human costs of overconsumption reemerged as a major cultural theme this year, but it's an idea with deep roots in the national psyche, as evidenced by two of the year's best films: Sean Penn's Into the Wild and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood."

"Together, Messrs Anderson and Day-Lewis, two exacting auteurs doing some of their best work to date, have crafted what is at once a mesmerizing, slow-building tragedy and an effortlessly atmospheric and beautiful historical piece, redolent of sunbaked earth, oil spurts, and Plainview's bristling walrus whiskers," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "There Will Be Blood is the sort of sure-handed, well-composed movie that is rounded out with just the right detail, and you sense you're in good hands from the first shot."

"It could be argued that the two most corrupting influences on humanity today are oil companies and organized religion, and as There Will Be Blood demonstrates, 'twas ever so — or at least since the turn of the 20th century," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

Update, 12/24: "With his fifth film, There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson goes from the brainy poet of new American cinema to its deranged visionary," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Even those of us who've always admired Anderson's work (for me, Boogie Nights was one of the best films of the 90s) never suspected he had anything like this in him. This two-and-a-half-hour saga of frontier capitalism resembles the parched Western landscape in which it takes place: a vast, craggy, forbidding expanse, rife with potential danger. It was shot in Marfa, Texas, the location of George Stevens's 1956 oil epic Giant. Elsewhere, Anderson has cited The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as his favorite film, and no portrait of an isolated, half-mad American tycoon can escape the shadow of Citizen Kane. But influences be damned: There Will Be Blood looks and, especially, sounds like no movie you've seen before."

Updates, 12/25: "Why not combine Altman's panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick's formal bravura with John Cassavetes's messy candor?" asks Dennis Lim in a piece for Slate on what sets PTA apart from other American filmmakers of his generation. "While Anderson fits the profile of a 'hysterical realist,' to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He's a born showman - his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit 'A PT Anderson picture' - but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.... Anderson's detractors may be right when they complain that he can work only at a grandiose pitch. But there are worse challenges for a young director than having to find new ways to satisfy his enormous appetites - and his appetite for enormity."

"Sitting down with indieWIRE earlier this month in New York City for a one-on-one conversation about There Will Be Blood, the exceptional new film that dominated iW's 2007 film critics' poll, American auteur Paul Thomas Anderson caught a first glimpse of Upton Sinclair's re-issued 1920s novel, Oil! resting on a small table nearby," writes Eugene Hernandez. "Examining the book's cover, he groused briefly about the need to place an image of Daniel Day-Lewis on the front of the book, explaining that he had intially hoped the promotional item could be re-released with that same simple cover that first caught his eye in a London bookstore years ago. Picking up the book back in Britain started him on the long journey to making his epic new film."

"I wish There Will Be Blood had a bit more blood - not literally, but figuratively," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "As terrific as both stars are, there is something a bit inevitable about their conflict, and as convincing as [Paul] Dano is, he's never really a true equal or rival for the power that Plainview craves and eventually wields. Their battle is a little one-sided and so the ending, however appropriate, is also bit of a foregone conclusion."

Online viewing tip. "[T]he bulk of Charlie Rose's 54 minute conversation sidesteps Paul Thomas Anderson in favor of his There Will Be Blood star," writes Ted Z. "Rose, who has interviewed Daniel Day-Lewis a couple of times, was fixated on trying to crack the shell of the tight-lipped enigma, to varying degrees of success."

DVDs, 12/19.

Wendell B Harris Jr's Chameleon Street "won the grand jury prize at Sundance but has barely been seen since, perhaps because it so stubbornly refuses to conform to art house ideas of what a black independent film should be," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "The great mystery of this accomplished, erudite film is why it had no follow-up; Mr Harris's only other screen credits are for small roles in Out of Sight (1998) and Road Trip (2000). With luck, this well-produced DVD will refocus attention on his mercurial talents." Also reviewed this week are Two-Lane Blacktop and a giant thunker from United Artists: "Containing 90 films on 110 discs, packaged in a metal container that tips the scales at 30 pounds, this has got to be the biggest DVD bundle of them all - and possibly the most soporific."

This week in IFC News, Michael Atkinson explains why it's hard not to overhype Once and watches Feed, "a found footage portrait of the 1991 campaign circus, in and around the New Hampshire primaries, that eventually led to Bill Clinton's party nomination and presidency. The primary visual tool at work here is the satellite feed, the video footage sent out to the networks (and therefore out into space, only to be captured by satellite geeks) during the unbroadcast moments of the candidates - Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, George HW Bush, Bob Kerrey - combing their hair, making lame jokes, picking their noses, chatting inanely with makeup people, and often sitting and doing nothing at all. The upshot is access to precious visions of our ostensible leaders, whose political machines work so hard to exalt them as leaders, as little more than opportunists, showbiz canards and empty-headed buffoons."

"There are very few 'perfect' films," begins an entry at the Vancouver Voice from DK Holm. "The handful that exist are a precious resource to viewers who, say, suffering from the flu and numerous aches and pains, require an entertainment to delight and distract them. There is The Apartment. There is The Searchers. There is North by Northwest and Charade and LA Confidential and The Seven Samurai. The Lady Vanishes is another member of this elite group, and it now enjoys a re-release as part of the Criterion Collection in a new double disc set. It is a joyful opportunity to reacquaint oneself with this wholly American entertainment."

Diablo Cody lists her top ten Criterion releases.

Howard Hawks's Scarface "gets away with giving us enormous pleasure from unspeakable actions because it promotes in us a sense of intellectual and emotional mobility," writes Dan Sallitt. "It does not have to romanticize violence or violent people to get its effects; it does not have to create a narrative that denies us one perspective or another on the violence. In this context, our thrilled response to killing registers simply, a fact among other facts."

"Climates is partly about encroaching isolation and separation, about the growing distance between two people in a doomed relationship," writes MS Smith. "But on a more precise level, the film centers on the enduring ambivalence that results from separation; parting is not sweet sorrow, but a prolonged, painful exercise full of compromises, equivocations, lies, advances, and regressions."

Mala Noche "harkens from a time when independent cinema was often regional cinema and films could grow from within a community, drawing identity and color from the crucible of local culture and the physical world of its environs," notes Sean Axmaker at TCM. In the interview included with this Criterion release, Gus Van Sant "describes his most recent films - Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park - as a return to the freedom and evocative simplicity of Mala Noche."

For Ed Howard, Lola "is Fassbinder at his witty, delirious best, deftly blending political satire and overwrought melodrama, with a stunning set of performances from some lesser-known lights in the director's stock company."

"[I]f the 1929 novel is Fassbinder's primal scene, then [Berlin Alexanderplatz] is his monumentally encompassing dream-work," writes Michael Joshua Rowin. "And it's a dream that has as much to do with studying the Weimar origins of fascism as it does with using its colossal canvas to push the exploitation and suffering Fassbinder explored in every one of his other films into deeper psychological, political and aesthetic territory."

Also in the L Magazine, Nicolas Rapold on John Ford's "breakout 1924 epic," The Iron Horse: "Ford can capture in a single shot so very much: early on, a manifest-destiny pioneer gazes warmly at a mountain pass - perfect for dynamiting as a railroad shortcut - like he's fallen in love."

Bob Turnbull watches the Eclipse collection, Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy: "I popped in the first of the three Saura films with pretty high expectations - and had them all exceeded."

Mike Everleth finds Other Cinema's Xperimental Eros to be "a nice mixture covering a wide range of sexually contemplative positions. True, there are some pieces that may induce arousal, but for the most part watching these shorts may cause one to never look at sex quite the same way again."

"I don't know much about anime, per se, nor do I know much about film history, per se, but I know plenty about both to know that Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress is one of the best movies I've seen about either subject," writes Ryland Walker Knight.

The Cat and the Canary is "a mildly amusing horror-thriller-comedy hybrid, but what really makes the film is the visual look that it has been given," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker for MSN, Bryant Frazer, Peter Martin at Cinematical and Peter Sobczynski's "Happiest DVD Column On Earth" at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Fests and events, 12/19.

"The wisecracking, self-reliant, brash, and bubbly blonde acted in nearly 100 features in a career that spanned over 50 years. She could play gold diggers and dumb bunnies, but was most memorable as warm and honest Depression dames who knew the score." For the Voice, Elliott Stein previews Joan Blondell: The Bombshell from 91st Street, running from tomorrow through January 1 at MoMA. More from Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. Update: Charles Silver, associate curator of MoMA's Department of Film, and Matthew Kennedy, author of Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes, are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"An exciting chapter of recent German film history is the focus of a special Berlinale series, 'Rebellion of the Filmmakers' (Aufbruch der Filmemacher). The starting point is the documentary film Gegenschuss - Aufbruch der Filmemacher (Reverse Angle - Rebellion of the Filmmakers) which deals with the origins, development and crises of the legendary film publisher, Filmverlag der Autoren, in the early 1970s. Producers and authors such as Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Thomas Schamoni, Michael Fengler, Veith von Fürstenberg, Hans W Geißendörffer and Hark Bohm are synonymous with this turbulent, vibrant and also contentious period in the history of German film."

Also: a preview of this year's Generation 14plus program.

"It seems almost ungrateful to complain that a 400-plus-minute film adaptation is too short, but when the book in question is Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, seven hours is not enough," writes in the Boston Phoenix. "The adaptation is Sergei Bondarchuk's celebrated 1967 effort, which the Museum of Fine Arts is showing this month in four installments; if you go on Thursday December 27, you can see all four, in order, on the one day."

"Carlos Reygadas's Stellet Licht (Silent Light) made a sweep of the 29th Havana International Film Festival of New Latin American Cinema, winning nods for best picture, director, cinematography and sound," reports Anna Marie De La Fuente for Variety's Circuit.

"Two international film festivals wrapped things up on Sunday with the traditional awards ceremonies: the 9th Jakarta fest and the 4th Dubai fest." Eric D Snider's got winners at Cinematical.

Ahmed Atef's Al-Ghaba "is an unsettling portrait of Cairo today, brutally exposing the disheartening conditions of those living at the edges of a society that has become highly polarized," reports Noha El-Hennawy for the Los Angeles Times. "The 90-minute movie was screened for the first time at Egypt's major annual cultural event, the Cairo International Film Festival, which wrapped earlier this month."

More lists and awards, 12/19.

"From the murder of an underage Ukrainian sex slave in Eastern Promises to the family carnage in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, the best films of 2007 hold their own when it comes to despair, evil, and treachery," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "So am I being a cockeyed optimist in thinking they also offer a glimmer of hope?" His #1: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

The votes are in: Witchfinder General is Video Watchdog's DVD of the Year 2007.

"Taking the top slot this year is Lionsgate's The Silent Partner," writes the DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson), unveiling his list of "Most Impressive DVDs of 2007": "I chose this modest thriller not only because it's terrific, but to represent the fact that no single release of 2007 jumped out and said 'pick me.'" There's a top ten, yes, but also a looong supplemental list of "discs or disc sets from 2007 that Savant heartily recommends."

Topping Paul Matwychuk's list: Bug: "I'm as surprised as you are to see this one sitting in the top slot, but William Friedkin's claustro-phobic thriller about two lonely people succumbing to paranoia and madness inside a dusty motel room is the movie I find myself thinking back to more than any other film from 2007."

The AV Club blasts away at the worst of 07: "[H]ere are 16 films we hope never to see the likes of again."

In the New York Sun, S James Snyder offers "a chronicling not of 2007 movies but of 2007 moviegoing: the year's six best experiences, as compiled by one compulsive movie buff."

No surprises from the Southeastern Film Critics Association; Movie City News has their list and the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association's as well.

The Association of Women Film Journalists echoes pretty much all their choices in their round of EDA Annual Achievement Awards. What they bring fresh to the table are the EDA Female Focus Awards and the EDA Special Mention Awards.

Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus will be receiving a Bavarian Film Award for his life's work in January, report the German wires.

For the Voice, RC Baker surveys the year in comics and graphic novels.

Online browsing tip. Via Jason Kottke, Billboard's "25 Best Rock Posters of All Time."

Online listening tip. David Edelstein discusses his top 11 on Fresh Air.

Online viewing tips. Director File's top ten music videos, via Jason Kottke.

Skandies. Best Undistributed Films of 2005.

Your first question might be: Skandies? The short answer is: a poll among a modestly sized group of cinephiles who've known each other for some time now. As he's the one who does the conducting and the math, Mike D'Angelo explains.

Your second question might be: Don't you mean 2007? No, as Mike D'Angelo explains again, the list he's posting today is comprised of films that appeared in 2005 yet still remain undistributed. The poll itself is fresh, see; it's the movies that aren't anymore - from a marketer's standpoint only, of course.

As Anthony Kaufman points out, introducing indieWIRE list of best undistributed films (released in 07, but still orphans as the year closes), Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach topped last year's list. At the top of the Skandies list is Hong's Tale of Cinema; what's more, notes Mike D'Angelo, "This is the criminally undistributed Hong's second victory in this category, following 2002's Turning Gate."

MPAA vs Gibney.

"The MPAA has rejected THINKFilm's initial poster for Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, one of the year's most acclaimed films, over a Corbis photograph of a two US soldiers leading away a hooded prisoner." AJ Schnack talks with Gibney and points to Anne Thompson's report in Variety on the decision that's quickly drawn fury and flame from a, well, variety of voices (see, for example, the cinetrix, Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, Ray Pride, Chuck Tryon, Patrick Walsh at Cinematical and so on).

The problem, evidently, is the hood. Which, of course, is nuts. Talking with AJ, Gibney "likened the MPAA's desire to eliminate the hood to political figures denying that torture or mistreatment occurs in US facilities. 'Removing the hood is the ultimate cover-up. (The US) didn't use to do that sort of thing. Removing the hood sends the same message as the Bush administration with the CIA tapes. It's OK to do it, it's just not OK to show it.'"

indieWIRE Critics Poll: Ten Best Undistributed Films of 2007.

"What is it about Korean auteurs that have critics salivating and distributors running for the exits?" asks Anthony Kaufman. "Last year, Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach topped indieWIRE's best undistributed films list for 2007. This year, Hong compatriot Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine was far-and-way the winner of the honor."

Tomorrow sees the results of the whole shebang, not only the complete list of more than undistributed 250 films that received at least one vote in iW's poll of over 100 critics but also the results for best film, director, first film, performance, supporting performance, screenplay, documentary and cinematography.

Earlier: Reviews of Secret Sunshine from New York, Toronto and Cannes.

AV Club. "The Year in Film 2007."

"We at the AV Club spent much of the spring and summer suspecting that 2007 would offer only a modest helping of great films. Then, almost as soon as the leaves started to turn, 2007 transformed from an okay film year to a pretty good film year to the best film year in recent memory."

No Country for Old Men tops the "Master List," the conglomerate of all five Club film writers' votes. The notes on each film are fine, but the fun starts with the individual lists, each featuring a top ten, naturally, but also "The Next Five," a notable performance (e.g., Scott Tobias praises Carice van Houten's in Black Book), notes on an overrated and an underrated film (Keith Phipps defends The Darjeeling Limited}, a "Most Pleasant Surprise" (for Nathan Rabin, it's The Year of the Dog), a "Guilty Pleasure" (Tasha Robinson picks Across the Universe) and a "Future Film That Time Forgot" (Noel Murray tags Slipstream).

TFCA. Awards.

The Toronto Film Critics Association has a blog, but again, it's Movie City News that's got the list of awards. No Country for Old Men wins Best Picture, Best Supporting Performance, Male (Javier Bardem), Best Director and Best Screenplay (Joel Ethan Coen).

Away From Her is named Best Canadian Film, Best First Feature (for Sarah Polley) and Julie Christie ties for Best Performance, Female, with Ellen Page (Juno).

Viggo Mortensen wins Best Performance, Male, for Eastern Promises, a film that appears as a runner-up in a few more categories.

Cate Blanchett wins Best Supporting Performance, Female, for I'm Not There.

Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille.

Best Foreign-Language Film: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Best Documentary Feature: No End in Sight.

AFCA. Awards.

The Austin Film Critics Association has a site, but it's Movie City News that's got the list of their awards - pretty much a sweep for There Will Be Blood: Best Film, Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Best Cinematography (Robert Elswit) and Best Original Score (Jonny Greenwood).

Juno fares well, too: Best Actress (Ellen Page), Best Supporting Actress (Allison Janney), Best Original Screenplay (Diablo Cody) and Breakthrough Artist (Michael Cera, also mentioned for Superbad).

No Country for Old Men scores Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Joel and Ethan Coen).

Other awards:

• Best Foreign Film: Black Book.

• Best Documentary: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

• Best Animated Film: Ratatouille.

And there's a top ten - and an Austin Film Award, which goes to Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez for Grindhouse.

Rouge. 11.

Nicole Brenez, author of one of the most superlatively praised film books in recent memory, Abel Ferrara, opens the new issue of Rouge with "Shops of Horror: Notes for a Visual History of the Reification of Emotion in a Capitalist Regime, or (to put it more bluntly) 'Fuck the Money,'" a piece so musical it's got an overture. The parameters are laid - "Three low-budget auteur films" - before we head out on explorations within them, circling first close to home, then wider. Not too far along, for example: "The Shop Around the Corner takes, as its premise, the female fantasy of the Ideal Man - in order, finally, to describe the relations of force in the world of work. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie invents nightmarish narrative forms and deconstructs its narrative so as to liberate figurative possibilities linked to the female body. Go Go Tales addresses - under the cover of a lighthearted reverie - the nightmare that human relations have become in a capitalist regime."

"Chiloé is a world of wonder and a normal, quiet island at the same time - which makes me think of Ruiz's films," writes Gonzalo Maza. "Raúl Ruiz may have been born in Puerto Montt, but he is chilote. His stories seem like lies, but they are not. Or at least we can say they are straight-faced, as if they are about to burst into laughter."

"In Sylvia's City is, in its very modesty, a very ambitious film," writes Miguel Marías, "since it is something which cannot be imagined in any other art form: not enough fiction or plot even for a novella; too much reality and cityscape for a theatrical piece; made wholly of movements and gazes as several human bodies wander through the space of a city, mostly outdoors - where the spectator is asked only to watch and listen attentively as things happen naturally and unhurriedly before him on the screen. Precisely what spectators may have become increasingly unaccustomed to do - so they may have to learn anew how to sit through a movie."

"The non-Iranian audience in the US who have been exposed to a good dosage of post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema are probably unaware of the rich pre-Revolutionary film culture of Iran," writes Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa. "One has to know the sacred place of literature - in particular poetry - and the important role of cinema in Iranian culture to appreciate the significance of [Ebrahim] Golestan as a writer and filmmaker. In the late 60s, many Iranian youths wanted to be poets; in the early 70s, with all the publicity about films and film festivals, every young person I knew dreamt of becoming a film director."

"There is a survivors' Chinatown, and a victims' Chinatown, a Chinatown of the committed and a Chinatown of fatalists," writes Ross Macleay. "In the canon this is registered as an overpraised Chinatown and an underexamined Chinatown; or one Chinatown dismissed by its doubters and another unappreciated by its devotees. And in my own aesthetic judgement there have been two Chinatowns."

"If 'the air is on fire,' as David Lynch states in the title of his hugely successful exhibition in Paris, then it is also the author who is part of this flame," writes Yvette Bíró. "Lynch's work is different from the surrealists, the Magritte-like, playful inversion of limbs. Neither is it Bacon's flesh-penetrating, screaming distortions, his famous 'cry.' The stiff aura that strikes us in Hopper's quotidian, chilly-vacant characters does not come readily to mind, though all three are Lynch's admitted inspirations."

"As much or more than anyone associated with Theory - be it Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard - it was she who most effectively mobilised and practiced its principles. And it was she who worked through it with unequalled care and acumen. It might even be said the history of theory can be understood in view of her career with which this person became familiar, alas, at a moment after it had begun."Tom Conley remembers the late Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, two of whose texts appear in this issue. Editor Adrian Martin introduces the 1960 essay "A Cinematic Language," in which "the guiding theme of her lifelong exploration - into the complex interchange between literary language and cinematic language - is already evident; "On Filmic Rewriting: Contamination of the Arts or Destruction of Art's Identity?" would appear 47 years later.

In September 2005, George Kouvaros had a very long conversation with Paul Schrader.

A poem by Donald Phelps: "Homage to Carole Landis."

A piece from Roger Tailleur, written in 1963: "Markeriana: A Scarcely Critical Description of the Work of Chris Marker."

A painting by James Clayden: Chinese Bookie - After Cassavetes.

RougeRouge gets pretty fancy this issue, with more animated sequences and a few traced vectors. Richard Misek examines "Wrong Geometries in The Third Man."

The District!

"The Hungarian cartoon feature The District! is a last-minute shoo-in for the title of 2007’s most original animated film, no small triumph in a year that also included the releases of Persepolis, Ratatouille, Beowulf and Paprika," declares Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "The movie is a sexually explicit, scabrously funny portrait of multiethnic European urban culture, similar to Ralph Bakshi's early-1970s adults-only animated movies Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, but richer and more coherent... On top of its other considerable achievements, this is a dazzlingly assured piece of filmmaking. Merging seemingly hand-drawn, two-dimensional characters and deep-focus, intricately shadowed, simulated 3-D backdrops, The District! is like a dirty, thrilling pop-up book you can step into."

"Eye-popping as The District! is, the overarching geopolitical satire is a haphazardly lobbed grenade too dim-witted to be explosive," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

"This consistently mesmerizing Hungarian film follows in South Park's footsteps, artfully hitching cogent social commentary to an absurd, offensive and hilarious narrative," writes Kate Folk in the L Magazine.

This film's been around since 2004, so you'll find more reviews at the IMDb.

Lists. L Magazine.

The L Magazine's year end blowout features five "Best Films of 2007" list, plus art quotes, albums and singles (and disappointments), Nate Brown's overview of the "Year in Independent Publishing," the "Eli James Theater Awards 2007," and New York bars and restaurants, fashion and parties.

But. To the movies:

• Film editor Mark Asch's top ten is alphabetical and ranges from 12:08 East of Bucharest to Southland Tales.

• If Jesse Hassenger's list is ranked (and it seems to be), his #1'd be Zodiac.

• Nicolas Rapold may be moving thematically through the year, perhaps chronologically. Maybe the biggest surprise here are his picks for the worst of the year: "Knocked Up (Judd Apatow): Worth hating because of the defenders it inflicted upon us and the imitators it will spawn. This is a half hour of salvageable bits, the rest a mix of pottymouth ha-ha and 'candor.' Also, you know what? King of Kong is a crap documentary."

• Michael Joshua Rowin's list opens with The Decomposition of the Soul.

• Benjamin Strong's got a list, but a longer introduction: "The so-called art film died this year with Antonioni and Bergman. Or so the obituaries would have us believe, though try telling that to David Lynch or Hungarian director Béla Tarr, whose glacial noir, The Man from London, still unreleased here, will be remembered long after Rush Hour 3, Wild Hogs and Fred Claus have been forgotten. Dig it or not, we all suffer from Antoniennui now."

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

"John C Reilly hops aboard the Judd Apatow gravy train with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a parody of biopics that finds the comedic impresario working in the absurdist mode of 2004's Anchorman rather than the vulgar-sweet rom-com vein of this year's Knocked Up," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"As Dewey Cox, a hard-livin', hard-lovin', hard-everythingin' singer with a Zelig-like proximity to every major music figure of the past 50 years, Reilly cuts a hilarious and electrifying figure - live," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "On a recent promo tour, playing Nashville's Mercy Lounge in a concert that was part Spinal Tap, part Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and completely riotous, Reilly slipped hungrily into the guise of a surly, self-obsessed spotlight hog.... [H]e was funny as hell. Sadly, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story isn't."

Updated through 12/23.

But Dennis Harvey, writing at SF360, finds it "pretty funny.... Incongruously, 2007 has given us a bumper crop of good movie musicals: Dreamgirls (a 2006 film that didn't reach most viewers until the new year), Hairspray, Sweeney Todd, Enchanted, the low-budget local indie Colma: The Musical and others raised the bar for a genre many had thought extinct. Walk Hard isn't strictly a 'musical' - at least no more or less so than This Is Spinal Tap - but it is hands-down the funniest of the bunch."

"While Walk Hard isn't the most gut-busting product ever to tumble from the Apatow factory, it's got some priceless moments," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "[A]ccomplished warbler Reilly is nothing if not totally committed to the role, and the supporting cast (including big-name stars portraying the Beatles, Elvis, and others) make damn sure they bring the funny, including some extraordinarily gratuitous full-frontal nudity."

For the New York Times, Eric Wilson talks with costume designer Debra McGuire: "The best way to make the clothes funny from my perspective was to make them as real as possible."

Update: For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with director Jake Kasdan "about his wide-ranging work, the comic potential of the name 'Cox,' and the current WGA strike."

Updates, 12/20: "Could we be so lucky that the Judd Apatow revolution that ruled Hollywood last summer with Knocked Up and Superbad is already over?" asks Armond White in the New York Press. Walk Hard "has considerably less smut humor to flatter the TV-bred audience's own sexual insecurities, so Apatow's desperation is exposed."

Brent Rolen talks with Reilly and Kasdan for the Nashville Scene.

"It is, perhaps, difficult to keep gags afloat for 90 minutes when a show like Robot Chicken can smartly satirize all six Star Wars movies in 22 minutes, and the strain of keeping the plates spinning definitely shows in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which starts out brilliantly playing with the tired tropes of musical biopics before utterly losing its way," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

For Cinematical, Ryan Stewart files a junket report.

"[T]his is unabashedly a goof from the get-go, and the presence of past and future Saturday Night Live alums ensure that 10 seconds do not go by without another joke," writes Eric Alt in Premiere. "Such rapid-fire silliness, as you might expect, results in some jokes hitting, some falling flat, but very few moments of absolute boredom. There are certainly a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, which is more than can be said about a lot of alleged comedies."

Updates, 12/23: "Born to be mild, Dewey is cuddly and cute, not Iggy or pop," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Partly as a consequence, the film is more funny ha-ha than LOL."

"Walk Hard is pieced together from scraps of agreeable silliness; at moments it shows a certain throwaway brilliance," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But in the end, it's just a concept decorated with jokes, more of an extended sketch than a canvas with every inch filled in."

"Apatow and Kasdan are skilled at getting the most out of gifted ensembles, but there's a world of difference between the sweet, character-based comedy of Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and the vaudevillian wackiness of Walk Hard," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Fortunately, they're blessed by having John C Reilly, an endlessly nimble and endearing performer, to lead the film through its rough patches."

Reilly "can do plausible versions of Johnny Cash, Elvis, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and on and on," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "He's like a kid who locked himself in his room singing along with his record collection and finally made it pay off."

"[T]his gleefully jaundiced skewering of American popular music in general and biopics like Walk the Line and Ray in particular knows that humor comes from both loving your source material and knowing it inside out," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Not since This is Spinal Tap have I had such a good time watching amiable idiocy stumble on toward uncertain glory," writes Richard Schickel in Time.

Spanish Cinema Now. 6.

Once again, James Van Maanen.

A quiet little fairy tale that might easily get lost in the shuffle of bigger, bolder films at Spanish Cinema Now, The Education of Fairies (La educatión de las hadas) plays only twice more (tomorrow, Thursday, at 2 and 6:15 pm), so I'm giving a quick shout-out to a movie that doesn't shout at all. Instead, it sneaks up, lays out its odd plan and gently sets it in motion. Expect no "real" fairies here, nor any special effects.

From its first frame to its last, director José Luis Cuerda, adapting a novel by Frenchman Didier Van Cauwelaert, offers up a storybook look. His characters: a King, a Queen, their little Prince, and a very unusual immigrant fairy. Immigration is all over the place at this festival; here, it's both as benign as you might want and exceedingly rough, too. There is coincidence aplenty (as in most fairy tales), secrets withheld and bared, and a lovely "bird" motif that doubles as one of the principal's occupations and a metaphor for flight and freedom.

Interestingly, this bird motif plays an important role in one of the films covered yesterday, Chaotic Ana, as does one of its leading actresses. Using the single name Bebe, this striking woman looks a bit like the pre-surgery Cher. She's a chanteuse, too (that's her voice over the end credits, singing last year's Goya-winning song "Tiempo Pequeño"). Bebe herself was nominated for a Goya for her role in Fairies as an Algerian supermarket cashier who's short-listed for a place at the Sorbonne. (In Chaotic Ana, she's part of a small ensemble, in a much gruffer role as a man-hating, daddy-damaged video artist.)  We'll probably be seeing more of her in future SCN fests.

In the role of the daddy/King, Argentine actor Ricardo Darín gives another of his effortlessly glamorous, utterly sexy incarnations. At 50, Darín (The Aura, Kamchatka, Son of the Bride, Nine Queens) may be one of the most comfortable-in-his-body actors currently visible, and he easily brings this quiet, hesitant character to life. Irene Jacob (The Double Life of Veronique, Three Colors: Red, and the shamefully under-seen but tremendously fun Incognito) plays the Queen with gentle class and usual beauty. Most pivotal of all is the Prince-ling, played by Víctor Valdivia (he's also in the upcoming Seven Billiard Tables). If his character does not convince us that he buys into his stepfather's "fairy" tales, we'll never buy into them, either. The young actor comes through beautifully: he's smart, suspicious, needy and hopeful, and he, as much as anyone, brings the movie home. A sweet film about sweet characters, The Education of Fairies is a film for which it might be best to check your excess cynicism at the door.

FilmInFocus. And a Jamie Stuart alert.

I'd heard the rumor, and now the cinetrix has confirmed it: FilmInFocus, a new site from Focus Features, working in collaboration with Faber and Faber and Filmmaker (smarts and alliteration!), is up. James Schamus himself states its purpose: "Rather than devote our resources to the usual film marketing sites for our movies (though you'll get lots of great Focus film-specific content here, don't worry!), we decided to create a place that expresses our joy in movies, our admiration for great filmmaking, and our insatiable curiosity about film and the discussions that truly challenging films engender, wherever they may come from."

Now then. On top of everything thing else I'll get to in a moment, you need to know that the highlights here are four shorts by Jamie Stuart, all of which are accessible here. His challenge is to rethink the promo clip, and not terribly surprisingly, he's done so with fearless originality.

I also need to go ahead and mention that there's an interview with me here, but also! Andrew Grant (Like Anna Karina's Sweater), who, once again, shows me how it's done.

Here's a nifty feature: "Week That Was," milestones in film history, one for each day of the current week. There're also news and events roundups.

And of course, there are pieces tied into Focus Features releases. You can learn a lot about Atonement, for example:

• Bill Schwartz, who teaches at Queen Mary, University of London, looks back on England between the wars.

• In These Times editor and publisher Joel Bleifuss considers the mutually influential relationship between war and film.

• Richard T Kelly takes another look at adaptations of Ian McEwan's novels.

• There's an extract from Alistair Owen's Hampton on Hampton, meaning, of course, an interview with screenwriter Christopher Hampton.

• Nick Dawson talks with James McAvoy and lists some of the greatest war films.

• Peter Bowen talks with production designer Sarah Greenwood.

• Scott Macaulay talks with composer Dario Marianelli.

Eastern Promises will be out on DVD next week (and finally in German theaters on December 27). Let's see...

• Scott Macaulay interviews David Cronenberg - and finds a wealth of Cronenbergania on the Web.

• Another extract, this one from Kevin Conroy Scott's Screenwriters Masterclass. Here, Patrick McGrath talks about adapting his own novel, Spider - and another from Cronenberg on Cronenberg.

• Jonathan Romney considers the Cronenberg oeuvre: "[H]is stories evoke worlds that are manifestly unlike ours, confronting us with horrors and extremities that, as 'ordinary people,' we might prefer not to contemplate. Yet it doesn't take much reflection to realize, with alarm, that Cronenberg's imagination ruthlessly corrodes the dividing line between the ordinary and the alien, the familiar and the nightmarish, 'our world' and its underside."

• Nick Dawson presents an annotated filmography.

• Peter Bowen talks with stunt coordinator Julian Spencer about that Turkish bath scene.

The Lust, Caution package:

• Here we see what a sharp move it is to team up with a publishing house, especially one as prestigious as Faber and Faber: "Sealed Off," a short story by Eileen Chang. And Ang Lee: "To me, no writer has ever used the Chinese language as cruelly as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), and no story of hers is as beautiful or as cruel as 'Lust, Caution.'"

• Novelist Rick Moody, whose The Ice Storm became a film directed by Ang Lee (a film that'll be getting the full-on Criterion treatment in March), considers himself lucky.

• Novelist Alan Furst goes looking for a good espionage movie.

But wait, there's more! No, really, there is. And that'd be just the reading material. You'll also find extensive linkage... and again, all that online viewing.

Persepolis.

"At a moment in history where Iran, famously dubbed one-third of an 'Axis of Evil' by Dubya, has again been making headlines as the next country with whom the Republicans wanna preemptively rumble (though the NIE's latest report on its lack of a nuclear weapons program throws this political gambit into a tailspin), Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical and surpassingly exquisite Persepolis, co-written and directed with fellow comic book artist Vincent Paronnaud, is a corrective bomb of beauty launched lovingly into a terrified world," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE. "Based upon Satrapi's likewise superlative graphic novels and detailing her upbringing in Iran and eventual departure to (and return from) Austria amidst the Islamic Revolution, the personal-is-political telling deconstructs the absolute Otherness attributed to Iranians in an era scarred by boys who cry terrorist, even as the film rises to the status of coming-of-age classic."

Updated through 12/24.

"Satrapi and Paronnaud say they were inspired in part by silent-era German Expressionism, which is evident in the film's dynamic gouges of black; some of their most striking scenes are in silhouette, suggesting Lotte Reiniger's lacework-detailed Orientalist animation of the 20s," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice, where he also notes that "many a scene open-ends onto a lingeringly poignant coda (the emotion, I should say, never feels chintzy)."

For New York's David Edelstein, Persepolis "feels as if it had jumped right from the page to the screen. And since the novels feel as if they had jumped right from Satrapi's head to the page, the immediacy is startling. If only The Kite Runner could have been freed from its clunky realism!"

"I found it, if anything, too simple," sniffs Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "I was left with the nagging, if ungallant, impression that I had been flipping through a wipe-clean board book entitled Miffy and Friends Play with Islamic Fundamentalism."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto and New York.

Updates, 12/19: "The variety-platter structure is entertaining but scattered; Satrapi gives us history lessons, first loves, human faces of the Iraq-Iran conflict and the occasional Western culture reference (little Marjane buys Sabbath tapes on the black market), and all of it stays on the film's gorgeous surface," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine. "Despite its vague present-day relevance, Persepolis turns out to best address another, less hot-button cultural concern: the idiosyncratic power of hand-drawn, '2-D' animation."

Michael Guillén talks with Parannaud.

Updates, 12/20: "Satrapi is eager to make another movie with Paronnaud, but after pounding the promotion trail for weeks, she says, 'My soul is poor. I'm empty. I need to lie down and read, sit on my balcony, look, smoke my cigarette and think. When I have a rich soul again, then I will be generous enough to write another story.'" But as Ella Taylor discovers in the LA Weekly, she's not all talked out yet.

"Satrapi (both storyteller and star) makes an engaging memoirist," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Since the movie remains within the confines of her selective recollections, it never becomes dogmatic, nor does it present clear-cut alternatives to religious fundamentalism. Satrapi leaves those questions aside, settling to champion the perseverance of the human mind."

Erica Abeel talks with Satrapi and Paronnaud for indieWIRE.

Updates, 12/23: "When I first saw Jafar Panahi's Offside, I was startled by its combination of feminism and Iranian nationalism," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Persepolis shows that one can rebel against Iranian misogyny without capitulating to 'Axis of Evil'-style rhetoric or idealizing the West."

"Persepolis doesn't pretend to have grand answers about Iran or geopolitics; it tells a very simple story about an ordinary girl caught in extraordinary circumstances," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "Yet there's nothing ordinary about Satrapi's skills as an artist or storyteller, and her film does justice to both of those gifts."

Geoff Boucher talks Satrapi for the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 12/24: Satrapi's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Peter Jackson and The Hobbit.

"After months of bitter legal wrangling, Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc have agreed to make two movies based on the book The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien," reports Reuters. "In a statement Tuesday, the companies said Jackson, the director of the smash hit Lord of the Rings movies, and producer Fran Walsh will executive produce both a Hobbit movie and a sequel, but Jackson was not named as the director."

Updated through 12/19.

Looking forward to commentary from Kristin Thompson, author of The Frodo Franchise: "The Lord of the Rings" and Modern Hollywood.

Updates, 12/19: David M Halbfinger has more details on the deal in the New York Times.

Blogging for the Guardian, Jeremy Kay asks: If Jackson won't be directing, who should?

Spanish Cinema Now. 5.

Around round from James Van Maanen; a few notes follow.

Spanish Cinema Now continues its mixed bag of attractions with Shortmetraje, a program of seven short subjects of unusually diverse style, subject and length. I am not a particular fan of shorts, but this combination, gathered by film curator Marta Sanchez strikes me as about as interesting a blend as you're likely to see in any 90-minute sitting. 

Libra (yes, the astrological sign) begins the program on a brief, quizzical note, as a young woman faces her questioner and explains the problem she has with taking her final law exams. In only four minutes, writer/director Carlota Coronado and her two-person cast Helena Casteñeda and José Angel Egido manage to hold us rapt and then surprise us.

Updated through 12/19.

At the screening I attended, an audience favorite, garnering spontaneous applause, appeared to be Lucina Gil's fourteen-minute The Happy Man. Concerning three foreign anthropologists studying the phenomenon of happiness in Spain, this would get my vote as the clinker in the bunch due to its utterly simple-minded approach and conclusion. Our learned educators discover an elderly married man who is happy, yet - shock, shock - does not own the latest hot sports car or vacation property and is not even famous. Can Spaniards - or Americans or any Europeans - really be so dense as to imagine that some people might find happiness elsewhere? Guess so. There's no mention, either, of the basics of life - food, shelter and so forth - being necessary to achieve this much-vaunted state of being. Produced and acted pleasantly enough, this is, I presume, the work of a very young filmmaker.

Weird and oddly memorable, Avant pétalos grillados harks back to those low-budget, black-and-white sci-fi films of the 50s - and appears to have been pieced together from found footage having to do with slaughter, space aliens and laundry. Beginning in the middle of things (ending there, too), Velasco Broca's ten-minute compilation is utterly bizarre and occasionally hilarious (intentionally? who knows?). But it's short and, in its freaky manner, quite fun.

Claymation gets a 12-minute Spanish slant in Said's Journey, a lovely fable of imagined immigration from North Africa to Spain by Coke Riobóo. Full of bright color, music and charm, this little gem is at once a "Welcome to Spain/You Have No Idea What You're In For" warning and a short subject interesting enough to mull over, post-viewing. Is it an anti-immigrant statement posing as advice? A slap-on-face to the Spanish immigration system? Maybe a sweeter version of the old Monkey's Paw saw about being careful what you wish for. All three, I think, and all the stronger for this special combination.

The longest piece in the program is also one of the most accomplished: Traumalogia, from writer/director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo. If the usual eight minutes of commercial breaks were added to this 22-minute narrative, it would qualify as a clever, classy, half-hour sit-com, and I would not be surprised to learn that the filmmaker is already working on a full-length feature based on what's here. Why not? He already possesses a keen understanding of character, storytelling, dialogue, cinematography, composition, editing and more, as he spins a funny, witty, quick-paced tale of family, wedding and hospitalization. We'll be hearing more from Señor Arévalo soon, I suspect.

That old misogynistic chestnut comparing a woman to a dog walking on its hind legs gets a kind of comeuppance in the penultimate short on the program. Cristina Lucas's ten-minute You Can Walk, Too begins with a young woman (perhaps the director herself) musing on this ineffably stupid quote, and then provides a visual compilation of dogs, all kinds, walking on their hind legs. It's funny as hell and, after a while, you ask yourself, Why is this quote so famous? This is, I would guess, Ms Lucas's point. The "comparison" is clever, nasty and stupid. Replace women with blacks, gays, Irish - your pick - and the result is the same. Still, the idiotic aperçu continues to haunt us. Which may also be Ms Lucas's point.

The final segment, Fuego de angel (Angel's Fire), a documentary about the child labor in the Peruvian brick industry, is brief (13 minutes), quiet and compelling, as it uses visuals of the children at work and play, along with bits of their own explanation, to create a portrait of lives mostly harsh and unfair. The film's most evocative moment comes as one child, with a tact that seems extraordinary, given the circumstances, tells the filmmaker that he would prefer not to speak about the beatings he gets from his father. By simply allowing us to watch and listen, writer/director Marcelo Bukin contributes more than do certain famous documentarians who prefer to sermonize and scream. The program of Spanish shorts was screened last Saturday and will be screened twice today, Monday.

One of the most annoying, forcefully random movies I've had to endure in awhile, Bolboreta, Mariposa, Papallona (site) could drive one bonkers (or asleep, if you're already a tad tired). After its 87-minute running time, you still don't know who half the characters are or what the point of it all might be. (Here's one reason we don't know who's who: In the scene in which several of the school kids introduce themselves by name and interest, the director keeps the camera focused on the actor playing him and his assistant, rather than on the children he is "interviewing.")

The film's description in the FSLC program notes that it "moves back and forth between fiction and documentary" but I challenge anyone to figure out which is which. Which may be the point. Or one of them.  Gosh, I enjoy watching differing forms and formats, too, but I guess I need more discipline and rigor than writer/director Pablo García Pérez de Laura chooses to use.

There is certainly beauty in the land/seascapes and in the faces of all the townsfolk - what a good-looking bunch is here assembled! Among the "actors" are Fele Martínez (Bad Education, Darkness) who plays (behind a scruffy little beard) the visiting film director. The three-word title, explains one helpful villager, aided by the assistant director, means the same thing ("butterfly") in Galician, Spanish, Catalan and maybe Portuguese (there was a bit of disagreement on this point). Bolboreta, Mariposa , Papallona will be screened Monday, December 24, at 4 and 7:45 pm.

Juan José Ballesta, the 20-year-old actor who made his motion picture debut in the terrific (and multi-award-winning) El Bola back in 2000, has already appeared in ten films, including Carol's Journey, The Shanghai Spell and (from last year's SCN) Seven Virgins. One can easily understand why he chose to appear in Doghead (Cabeza de perro): the chance to flex his acting chops in a story about a neurologically damaged young man who must suddenly pull his life together, on his own, and in a new city.

Ballesta grows more gorgeous with each new role, possessing the kind of face over which the camera creams ("Muy guapo!" croons an older woman in the film, as she sits on his lap and begins to grind.) The actor's approach to this role is understated and questioning - his usual style - and he allows us to enter the character via a tabula rasa tactic. This works fine, to an extent. Or perhaps writer/director Santi Amodeo insisted on it, using camera tricks to take over whenever Ballesta's Samuel has one of his "attacks." (The most inventive camera work occurs as Samuel begins his first day on a new job, and this is a lovely, energized moment indeed.)

Subsidiary characters are given not much more than cursory attention; they keep the incident-laden "plot" moving along. The roles are acted with aplomb by Adriana Urgarte, as the would-be girlfriend; Manuel Alexandre as the old man for whom Samuel becomes caretaker; and (I believe) Alex O'Dogherty as the old man's reprobate son. Amodeo did a superior job with his earlier Astronautas, which also featured a lead character with problems who becomes a care-giver. But that film featured a 40-year-old character (played by Nancho Novo, who had both maturity and stronger acting ability) and, odd as it was - more inventive, too - it also managed to be more believable. In this movie, Samuel's parents appear to have simply given up finding him, and he them, which I find pretty hard to swallow. I've been around families with children who have physical/behavioral problems; there are many ways to deal with this, none of which these rather well-off characters seem to have encountered or applied.

Doghead diddles around, piling incident upon incident without allowing us to understand its lead character any better than we did at the beginning. Finally, rather than coming to an end, it simply stops, and not in a particularly satisfying manner. While one might say that this prevents undue sentimentality, I might counter that it's difficult to feel sentimental about a near-cipher. Doghead will be screened Saturday, December 22 at 7:20 and Monday, December 24, at 2 and 6pm.

Aside from Pedro Almodóvar and, to a much lesser extent, Alejandro Amenábar (Open Your Eyes, The Others, The Sea Inside), I suspect Julio Medem (Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Sex & Lucia) may be the Spanish filmmaker most recognized by American cineastes. This year Medem comes to SCN with his new film, Chaotic Ana (Caótica Ana), touted as a kind of homage to his late sister. While I've enjoyed this filmmaker's works, I've also found his visuals to finally be more interesting than his content.

Chaotic Ana is yet another such movie, although this time Medem's subject is the life/lives - over centuries - of an unusually creative young woman, as unearthed via hypnotism. I place reincarnation theory at approximately the same gimme-a-break level as I do the nativity story and other religious myths, but for art/entertainment's sake, I'll willingly watch a film with these subjects and treat them as acceptable fantasies that may have other meanings and uses. In his new film, I think Medem is putting forward an argument for the empowerment of women and the downtrodden - which is certainly an idea whose time has come (and gone and come again) a number of times.

To get his point(s) across, however, this writer/director uses an awful lot of incident and shortcut, buoyed by intermittent exposition. How much of what we see is real or fantasy, I'm not too sure, nor do I think it probably matters much. The art used here - the originals were evidently done by Medem's late sister, with recreations by another Medem (maybe his daughter?) - is colorful and sumptuous in its somewhat primitive manner. The performances from his young, attractive and talented cast, most of whom play art/video students (and one hypnotist), are very game. These kids seem to give themselves over fully to the reincarnation/hypnotism/spirituality thing. Adults might find it a bit more difficult, as can be sensed in Charlotte Rampling's performance. For an actress this intelligent and accustomed to tacking some heavy-duty roles and coming through splendidly, this turn as an "arts patron" must have bored her to tears and is reflected in a perfomance that she could have phoned in (and from the looks of thing, did).

Medem does have one ace up his sleeve, however, and he saves it for near the finale. It is still relatively early in the worldwide filmmaking game of discovering new and creative ways to bash the highly deserving Bush administration. But if anyone tops the moment of glory delivered by Medem (via Ana), I'll be very surprised. A special note of commendation must be given to Gerrit Graham (remember him: Phantom of the Paradise, Tunnel Vision, Used Cars and so many more) for his selfless turn as a ruthless pig. Chaotic Ana, which might just get a theatrical or video release (sexual envelope-pushing often does) was shown last Saturday and will be screened twice today, Monday.

- James Van Maanen

---

"Based on playwright Lluïsa Cunillé's Barcelona, Map of Shadows, Ventura Pons's richly textured nocturne, Barcelona (A Map) [Barcelona (un mapa] is an intimate and atmospheric rumination on urban architectures and shared spaces as integral projections of anonymous, emotional landscapes," writes acquarello.

Also: In Lola, la película, "[Miguel] Hermoso's demythologized approach to [Lola] Flores's biography is perhaps best illustrated in rumba guitarist El Pescaílla's (Alfonso Begara) repeatedly derailed courtship of Flores (played as an adult by Gala Évora), insightfully framing her artistic accomplishments as everyday milestones in an all too human search for unconditional love and acceptance."

Update, 12/19: Acquarello reviews the program of shorts.

Sight & Sound. Jan 08.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, you'll remember, tops Sight & Sound's "Films of 2007," the results of the magazine's annual poll (and again, you can download the handsome collection of dozens of individual ballots as a PDF). As much as I'd have liked to be more original about it, Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or and European Film Award winner will be at the top of my own year-end list as well. And now it's S&S's "Film of the Month" for the January issue. Ben Walters: "A technical tour de force, gripping in its awful banality and not without deadpan wit, the film works as a companion piece to Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu (winner of Un Certain Regard in 2005); together, they form mordant bookends to life, stringent redresses to sentimental fantasies of birth and death."

Jonathan Romney reviews another film that'll be going on my list, Jacques Rivette's Don't Touch the Axe, "a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Balzac's 1834 novel La Duchesse de Langeais, the central part of his trilogy L'Histoire des Treize - the conspiracy motif of which provided the underpinning of Rivette's vast experimental drama Out 1 (1971).... Elegantly staged and meticulously paced, right down to the suspensefully extended penultimate act..., Don't Touch the Axe, for all its austerity, offers a more satisfying and direct emotional reward than many of Rivette's films."

Tim Lucas follows up (well, in a way) his choice of If... as the top single-feature DVD of the year with a review of Lindsay Anderson's own followup, O Lucky Man!: "[N]owhere else in cinema will you find such a bleak worldview infused with such infectious, ebullient, indomitable joy, attentive to the magical propensities of life even when at its darkest."

One more review before popping up to the features. Mark Fisher notes the references to Taxi Driver and The Catcher in the Rye in The Killing of John Lennon and notes that "the film works best as an analysis of assassination as plagiarism. Chapman appears as a kind of bad but spectacularly successful postmodern author, synthesising his influences not into an act of artistic production, but murder, acting out in the (hyper) real what had previously only happened on the page and on the screen."

"Wenders's early work proved that the spirit of the American road movie could be imported into films that were truly European," writes Nick Roddick. "It wasn't a case of pastiche, like Sergio Leone's Westerns - rather, this was a genuine reinvention, the assimilation of the language of one culture with the experience of another. From his 1970 graduation film Summer in the City (dedicated to the Kinks) to his 1984 Palme d'Or-winner Paris, Texas - and maybe even up to Wings of Desire in 1987 - Wenders reworked American cinema tropes (with just a hint of Ozu) into something profoundly European."

And editor Nick James talks with Ang Lee about Lust, Caution. For Lee this one and Brokeback Mountain "are almost like sister works. At the age of 45, I started to have a midlife crisis because of the way I was living out my childhood fantasy. So I got into subject matter I'd never paid attention to before, namely romance. Both films are based on stories that are not much more than 30 pages long, both tales of impossible romance written by gutsy women."

Lists. IFC News.

You'll find three top tens all on one page at IFC News. Matt Singer's whittled his down from a first draft of 49 movies. The #1 he's settled on: No Country for Old Men. Alison Willmore concurs on that one, but she's got a #2 that doesn't even appear on Matt Singer's list: Rescue Dawn. And Michael Atkinson tops his list with Syndromes and a Century.

Aaron Hillis lists "Five Shamefully Overlooked Performances," among them, Kate Winslet in Romance & Cigarettes and Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood.

Nick Schager lists the "Five Best Directorial Debuts": "Amidst all the new features from established auteurs, it would be easy to overlook the fact that 2007 was a banner year for debuts."

R Emmett Sweeney lists the "Five Best Retreads": "From the silent period when film serials were the rage, whether it be The Perils of Pauline to Les Vampires, to the Charlie Chan and Mr Moto cycles of the 1930s, the Thin Man films of the 1940s, and all the way up to the James Bonds and Jason Bournes of today - the film business is built on regurgitation - and the key is in how it is presented rather than what."

And there's about half an hour of listening to go with all this. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss "the trends and themes of 2007."

Lists and awards, 12/17.

Tim Lucas unleashes his massive year-end best-of DVD list, which is actually a couple of lists. At the top of the "Single Film Releases" list is If...: "Of all the DVDs I viewed in 2007, this is the one that lifted my heart highest." Of the "Multi-Title Releases," Berlin Alexanderplatz takes the top spot; and "12 Notable Restorations" are, well, noted.

Tim's list follows more lists from Video Watchdog contributors not yet noted here: novelist, comics artist and blogger Steven R Bissette's (whose #1 is Kino's Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928 - 1954), novelist and audio commentator Kim Newman (site; an all-Region 2 list, topped by Life on Mars: Series One and Series Two and filmmaker Shane M Dallmann's (who goes alphabetical).

"Variety columnist and In Contention owner Kris Tapley has chosen his top ten films of 07," notes Jeffrey Wells. Tapley's #1: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

"Spain's foreign language Oscar candidate, Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage, has nabbed 14 nominations for the country's 22nd Goya Awards, in a tie with Emilio Martinez Lazaro's 13 Roses, also up for awards in 14 categories," report John Hopewell and Emilio Mayorga for Variety, where they've got the full list of all the nominees.

Lauren Wissot opens her list at the House Next Door, "2007: Six Camp Highlights (and One Lowlight)," with an "Ultimate Rediscovery": "The many critics who panned Myra Breckinridge decades ago when it was first released were as clueless as John Huston's Buck Loner, for the film is nothing less than a brilliantly, thoughtfully, stupendously conceived work of art."

Edward Copeland's got the list of the International Press Academy's Golden Satellite award-winners.

Online browsing tip. AdFreak's "Freaky Ad Moments of 2007." Via Coudal Partners.

Online browsing and reading tip. Esquire's "What I've Learned" feature turns 10.

Online viewing tips. Pitchfork's "Top 50 Music Videos of 2007."

Powell and Pressburger Blog-a-Thon.

At Beyond the Valley of the Cinephiles, Justine is hosting a Powell and Pressburger Blog-a-Thon that runs through Saturday.

I've come across it via Jonathan Lapper's entry: "For Powell and Pressburger, artificiality was the path to reality."

St Clair Bourne, 1943 - 2007.

"Acclaimed filmmaker St Clair Bourne [site and blog] passed away [Saturday] at the age of 64," reports indieWIRE. "Bourne's many films included Making "Do the Right Thing", Paul Robeson: Here I Stand!, Let the Church Say Amen, In Motion: Amiri Baraka, The Black and the Green, Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper, New Orleans Brass and John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk, among numerous others." IW follows its report with a remembrance from friend and filmmaker Floyd Webb.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay points to Agnes Varnum's entry at Renew Media, where she makes note of a New York Times video in which Bourne discusses his work, past and present. Agnes Varnum comments: "His passing is untimely and I predict more delving into his work and significance to the documentary and black communities he served so intently."

"Bourne was in Durham to screen the doc as part of the Power of Ten program [at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival], which looked back over the fest's first decade," notes the cinetrix, who runs an excerpt from his program note for Making "Do the Right Thing."

"While most making-of docs are often treated as supplements to the original film, Bourne's treatment of DTRT also serves as a larger meditation on the process of making independent movies, as well as reflecting on the evolution of Brooklyn and the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood where Lee filmed," writes Chuck Tryon.

More from Bill Egbert in the New York Daily News.

Update: AJ Schnack notes that "in a posting for Mediarights.org, Bourne came up with a shortlist of films that had an impact on him as a filmmaker and an activist." And he presents them, with Bourne's commentary.

Operation Filmmaker.

David D'Arcy issues a call for distribution.

We're back at that time of year when talk runs to the best and worst of the past dozen months, and to the growing number of films that won't qualify for the races because they never made it to theaters. It's a long list, and near the top of mine, simply because I can't determine which film is most aggrieved for being undistributed, is Operation Filmmaker by Nina Davenport. It's a comic documentary allegory of the US adventure in Iraq, seen through the misadventures of a would-be Iraqi filmmaker who learns that American charity can be the black hole that nourishes the right con-man.

The Toronto International Film Festival showed Operation Filmmaker, as did Woodstock, Denver, Sheffield and others, all to their credit. (Apologies to those whom I left out.) Where are the distributors on this one? Huddling somewhere, wondering why almost nobody went to theaters to see documentaries this past year. (We can also lament unseen distributed docs like Manda Bala, Crazy Love, Zoo and Terror's Advocate.)

The protagonist is Muthana Mohmed, a young guy with what looks like a grin of innocence, who turns up on camera in an MTV report from Baghdad that lists the destruction of his school's screening room among the many unforeseen consequences of the US invasion. One of the couch potatoes all over the cabled world who watched the MTV coverage was Liev Schreiber, the actor and director who was moved by Muthana's testimony and decided to help him by hiring him on to the crew of Everything Is Illuminated, which Schreiber filmed in the Czech Republic in 2004. I guess Schreiber was just doing his part, as they say, post-9/11. Nina Davenport was initially hired to document the endearing Muthana's transformational experience - a sort of "making of... homo Iraqus novus cinematicus."

Like just about everything in movies, war and nation-building, nothing goes according to plan once the smiling Muthana is greeted in Prague with hugs and tears. He's cocky, and he's lazy, and he's not allergic to the camera. Muthana screws up every task he's given - sort of like the Iraqi government - and gradually wears out much of the good will that brought him to the Czech Republic in the first place. Things start going downhill when he tells the liberal producer of the film that he "loves George Bush." Yet he worms cash out of people, and somehow gets his Czech visa extended when work on Everythihng Is Illuminated comes to an end. His pitch to credulous film types is that he can't possibly return home because he'll be a target for retribution in Iraq for having worked with Americans on the film - all the worse because the subject matter and the company were "Jewish." Muthana lands on his feet miraculously with work on another movie, Doom, starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, which features mass machine-gunnings and piles of bodies daubed with blood. (Think of the film factories of Prague as another low-budget US deployment. It looks like some version of the military, but it's just a movie.)

Muthana befriends The Rock and even finds a girlfriend in Prague with whom he can't communicate, as he borrows money right and left, eventually getting The Rock's blessing to enter a film school in London that he can't afford.

It's not all air-kisses and handouts, though. Intercut is footage from Baghdad of carnage and dead-end musings on the devastation by friends of Muthana to whom Nina Davenport has sent cameras. Also in the story are arguments between Davenport and Muthana when he asks her for more money, while refusing to get a job. After threatening repeatedly to quit the film - presumably a maneuver to get more money out of her - he does just that.

We end with Muthana down and out in London, operating the camera on a small film, but the remarkable thing is how far he's managed to travel on guile, a nice smile, and the kindness of credulous strangers. In one scene, the administrators of the New York Film Academy consider him for a scholarship. They watch Muthana's audition tape with the worst acting this side of Tony Danza, and all agree that there's a film career of infinite possibilities in store for him. Bear in mind that Muthana is not necessarily a bad actor; it's just that, like Ronald Reagan, the only role he can play convincingly is himself.

The parallels are unnervingly comic. Good intentions, bad intelligence, a charity case who won't work at a plumb job, endless requests for money, and excuses at every turn from the recipient of largesse and the foolish good-hearted people who are providing his life-support. Just before the credits roll, Davenport says that she's looking for an "exit strategy." You have to wish her luck.

Why are we not seeing this film? Part of it may be due to the poor performance of films about Iraq this year, although the larger and more troubling fact is that audiences aren't going to see any documentary films, with a few exceptions. Another problem is that Muthana is now in London (we have to wonder how he's supporting himself there), and he is now reportedly warning (or is the proper word threatening?) that screening the film anywhere will once again put his family in Iraq at risk - and that Davenport faces a potential lawsuit, since his friends in Baghdad did not sign releases for the footage she's got of them. Davenport says she has the signed releases. Let's hope that this dispute won't deter distributors.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

"Once you get past the absence of the immortal 'The Ballad of Sweeney Todd' (hard) and the fact that the leads, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, have little in the way of pipes (harder), Tim Burton's film of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd is spellbinding," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Most directors open up Broadway musicals - adding meaningless busyness - to make them more 'cinematic,' and they end up diluting them. Burton, bless him, constricts the space and concentrates the melodrama; he finds the perfect balance between the funereal and the ferocious. Above all, he treasures these ghouls: He digs both their bloodlust and their melancholy. You can imagine the moment he decided to make the movie: 'Edward Scissorhands is out for revenge, with no time for topiary! He cuts hair and throats!'"

Updated through 12/23.

"The whole work drips with a camp savagery (hence the presence of Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli, a rival barber and faux-Italianate fop), which in turn relies on the conviction that death itself, like sexual desire, exists to be sniffed at and chuckled over," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "That is fine for a film like Beetlejuice, but Sondheim is serious about the misanthropic malice of his hero, whereas Depp's Sweeney comes across as one more mournful Burton wacko.... The best reason to see Sweeney Todd is Toby (Edward Sanders), a boy from the workhouse who helps, in all innocence, to dish out the pies. Some of the gravest performances this year have come from children - Shélan O'Keefe as John Cusack's daughter in Grace Is Gone, and Dillon Freasier as Daniel Day-Lewis's son in There Will Be Blood - and Sanders, like them, has the extraordinary gift of appearing to age, in sorrow as in knowledge, with the unfolding of the film."

For the New York Times, Jesse Green talks with Sondheim, who understood "that remaking Sweeney would be risky and involve major surgery. Still, he eagerly wielded the razor on perhaps his greatest work."

And by the way, congrats are in order for Burton and Bonham Carter. As the AP reports, their 4-year-old, Billy, now has a little sister.

Earlier: "Sweeney Todd, 11/30."

Updates, 12/18: "Burton's richly atmospheric evocation of the nightmarish metropolis with its grimy alleys and dismal byways is no surprise, but the director redeems past wobbly-toned disappointments like Big Fish and Sleepy Hollow (let alone Planet of the Apes), by working here with iron focus, no doubt responding to the composer's on-set presence throughout shooting," writes Robert Keser in Slant. "Together with Johnny Depp's commanding performance in the title role, they impressively sustain the single-minded momentum of an anvil dropping and succeed in elevating Sweeney's revenge from mere payback to earth-turning tragedy.... Keeping every performer on point, Burton draws the strongly structured material together to produce a black comedy and still blacker tragedy surging with jugular urgency. It haunts the mind for days."

"Burton has taken Sondheim's quasi-operatic, mock-penny-dreadful exercise in Dickensian-Brechtian Grand Guignol as the pretext for something highly personal and typically obsessive," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "From its magnificently gory credits to its climactic bloodbath pietà, the director makes it clear that this is his meat. As much as he's a filmmaker, Burton is also a graphic artist in the tradition of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey - and here he's successfully incorporated Sweeney Todd into his own distinctively dank and spidery gothic world."

"Sweeney Todd isn't just a work about splintered morality that requires the ability to sing. It's high culture, full of deliciously bitter contradictions, made of concert-caliber music, sharp words and a pentameter that would send mainstream theater singers running for a Wicked audition. And it's low culture, based on a 19th century legend of a serial killer who slices throats." For the Los Angeles Times, Adam Baer talks to the main players to get the story of the film's making.

Updates, 12/19: "Sondheim's characteristic mix of sentimentality, misanthropy, and high art is as Broadway as an $18 souvenir program," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "And Burton's best movie since Ed Wood 13 years ago succeeds precisely because it finds ways to be faithful to the source material in particular details while turning the whole into a Tim Burton film - a black comedy–cum–horror movie, albeit one blacker and more horrific than any he's made before."

"Burton's gotten his groove back," agrees the Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns. "Depp and Bonham Carter are wonderful, save for one teensy caveat: They can't sing.... I guess it's testament to both the gonzo power of the source material and the completeness of Burton's vision that Sweeney Todd still works in spite of this rather large and crippling flaw."

"After a run of baggy tall tales and mannered creepy-looniness that's felt thuddingly familiar from frame one of each film, Tim Burton is clearly crafting to scale and to order here instead of working over Sondheim's much-loved musical into another 'idiosyncratic' extravaganza," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

In the Boston Phoenix Brett Michel revels in "the thrill of Burton and Depp making music again, for the very first time."

Online viewing tip. Erik Davis introduces a clip featuring Burton and Depp talking about their working relationship.

Updates, 12/20: Burton's Sweeney Todd "isn't a groundbreaking or innovative piece of filmmaking, but it's as satisfying a screen version of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Grand Guignol operetta as I can imagine," writes the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "And of all the new-generation Hollywood musicals (Chicago, Hairspray, et al), it's the only one that succeeds both musically and cinematically. It breathes new life into the genre by dousing it in buckets of blood."

"Burton is at his best using flesh-and-blood figures for his comic-macabre visions (Mars Attacks, Sleepy Hollow) and his eccentric empathy for outsiders might have redeemed composer Stephen Sondheim's ghoulishly unfunny theatrical conceit about 'The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,'" writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Instead, this well-sung and perfectly acted adaptation falls way short of a triumph because Burton misplaces his sense of humor."

"Burton and Depp continue to evoke the silent film-era partnership of director Tod Browning and actor Lon Chaney, vivifying a shared love of the macabre and creating a gallery of doomed heroes," writes Laura Boyes in the Independent Weekly. "But, in spite of some tasty bits, Sweeney Todd is a disappointing holiday treat."

"Sweeney Todd ranks among this year's most intense, haunting, and startling films; the fact that it also features great songs by Stephen Sondheim is just gravy on the meat pie," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Like Atonement, this season's other high-profile adaptation of a highbrow contemporary text once thought to be unadaptable, Burton's crack at Sweeney Todd works best when it serves to support the inherent perversity of its source," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "The director's mashup of Steven Sondheim's musical with his own, patented, teenage Goth sketchbook aesthetic may play like German Expressionists-do-Torture Porn, but the brutality is mostly farce. As in Sondheim, Burton's Sweeney Todd is most disturbing when it's talking about love."

"Burton has been trying to get this project off the ground for two decades, but unlike so many Hollywood directors' pet projects, this one doesn't feel locked up in its creator's head," writes Paul Matwychuk. "It's got a mad, slashing excitement that hopefully will get people past their squeamishness at the sight of blood. As Sweeney himself cries out, 'I'm alive at last, and I'm full of joy!'"

"[A]udiences accustomed to the comparatively more restrained musical will be covering their eyes and ears and not noticing the absence of 'Ah, Miss' and 'Parlor Songs,'" writes Robert Cashill. "I suggest leaving them open, simply to enjoy the lush orchestrations (by Jonathan Tunick, wisely retained from the Broadway original) and the ripely decayed and decadent Victorian atmosphere conjured by production designer Dante Ferretti, in Hammer horror mode. Using the 'bleach-bypass' technique that gave 1995's Se7en its sickly serial killer sheen, cinematographer Dariusz Wolski has all but drained the imposing imagery of its color, the better for the red to stand out."

Sweeney is "one of the odder and, certainly the most compelling of the short stream of Broadway-to-Hollywood transplants of recent years," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The interweaving of the music and the visuals casts an unusual, restive spell of delight and unease, and the performers - Depp the most protean of them - have a grand time with it all. Sweeney Todd is an apt cinematic paradox, a beautiful nightmare."

Updates, 12/23: "It must say something about my mood of late that it wasn't until the sprays of arterial red splashed the screen en masse in Sweeney Todd that I felt an inkling of Christmas spirit." David Lowery.

"Sweeney is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme - I am tempted to say evil - genius."

The Stranger's Dan Savage: "If I were less of a fag, I wouldn't have the original 1979 Broadway cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on my iPod. If I were less of a fag, I wouldn't have watched the 1982 Emmy Award–winning television broadcast of the national tour of Sweeney Todd - featuring Angela Lansbury and George Hearn - seven or eight thousand times.... In short, if I weren't such a great, big, huge, fucking faggot... I might have enjoyed Tim Burton's new film version of Sweeney Todd more than I did."

"Sweeney Todd the musical is filled with death but it will never die," writes Nathaniel Rogers at Zoom In. "No matter which production you see: the grand and comically-tinged Harold Prince original Broadway production; the recent John Doyle Broadway revival which used minimalism and haunting abstract suggestions; and now Tim Burton's (mostly) deadly serious and macabre telling, you're still seeing Sondheim's masterpiece.... This is Tim Burton's best film in years... and in every way it's a Tim Burton film. But Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is still blessedly always the work of the greatest living musical theater composer, Stephen Sondheim."

For Tom Hall, this is "towering achievement, a near-perfect cinematic interpretation of one of the theater's most staggering compositions."

"[T]here's a note of discomfort to the film that grows as the ghoulish humor finally drops away," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "There's no space at all for softness in the latter part of Sweeney Todd, and as a result the film seems a little lost, uncertain in what, to avoid spoilers, we'll leave as a very unhappy ending."

Noel Murray presents a Sondheim primer at the AV Club, where Keith Phipps writes, "Though it took 28 years to make it to the screen, this musical about revenge and its repercussions seems fitting for our revenge-steeped times."

"Sweeney Todd might have been written for Burton," suggests Richard Corliss in Time. "Batman: a mysterious crusader prowls through the night, administering justice as he sees it. BeetlejuiceSweeney, "it's bloody great."

"[N]o matter what I think of the music in Sweeney Todd, I'm willing to believe there have been terrific, entertaining stage productions of the show that both make the most of the story's grim wit and make you feel something for the characters," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But in this Sweeney Todd, Burton has ground those possibilities into a grayish chalky powder. The picture throws off no feeling, not even the misanthropic kind; at best, it manages a dull, throbbing energy, as if Burton were dutifully pushing his way through the material instead of shaping it."

"Critics seem to have settled on 'Grand Guignol' as operating principle here, but Sweeney Todd is maybe a bit too Grand for its own good," writes Mark Asch in Stop Smiling. "It's all danse, no macabre."

"Many have dismissed Tim Burton as a goofy Goth visionary who has never met a narrative he couldn't defang," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Even worse, some have suggested that, as his mainstream acceptance has grown, his artistic acumen has faded. Not true - and his brand new version of Sweeney Todd is more than enough proof. As the perfect marriage of maker and material, this dark, disturbing splatter-etta stands as the best film of 2007."

"Sweeney Todd may be the most outrageously macabre piece of musical theater ever created, but Burton can't help but make it pretty too - from the gloomy, rain-slicked streets of Victorian London, to the moony Goth stylishness of its leads, to the split-open pomegranate throats of Sweeney's unsuspecting victims and the various torrents, geysers and wellsprings of glow-in-the-dark blood that spurt from them," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

In the Washington Post, Peter Marks approves of the pruning: "If anything, John Logan's screenplay homes in more deftly on the psyche of Sweeney, who in the handsome Depp's smudgy eye makeup and deathly pallor somehow seems more Byronic, less demonic than his Broadway predecessors."

"Had Baz Luhrmann directed, we might've had something sensational," suggests JJ at As Little as Possible. "Instead, with fauxteur Tim Burton at the helm, Sweeney Todd is a makeup-caked dirge, an Edward Gorey strip come to life, the type of musical a depressed and/or homicidal high-schooler might enjoy."

"[T]here is an exhilaration in the very fiber of the film, because its life force is so strong," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Its heroes, or anti-heroes, have been wounded to the quick, its villains are vile and heartless, and they all play on a stage that rules out decency and mercy.... As a feast for the eyes and the imagination, Sweeney Todd is... well, I was going to say, even more satisfying than a hot meat pie made out of your dad."

"Yes, the sung dialogue tells the story, but having it whispered insinuatingly into your ear stops it feeling horribly unrealistic," writes David Benedict in the Observer. "Instead, the music amplifies the characters' thoughts and dramatizes their deeds."

"Depp - the most extraordinary film actor of his generation - has the luxury of closeups and carefully controlled lighting, so he can act in infinitely subtler gradations," adds Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "As a result, his Todd is simultaneously far scarier and far more poignant."

"Depp's intense committed performance along with Sondheim's music and lyrics (most likely his best score) upstage Tim Burton's direction, and that's as it should be," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

For Edward Copeland, it's "nowhere near as bad as I feared, but neither is it as good as it could have been."

"Stylized but spasmodic, this Sweeney seems more interested in distancing than captivating an audience," writes Steven Winn in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Sweeney starts off strong but outstays its welcome by half an hour," writes John Constantine at Nerve.

Charlie Wilson's War.

"Whole chunks of rapid-fire exposition tumble from the mouths of Washington politicos, Central Asian despots, and Texan bluebloods in Charlie Wilson's War, unmistakably the artificial rat-tat-tat of Aaron Sorkin, who adapted the true tall tale of an alcoholic, womanizing East Texas congressman operating behind the scenes to arm Afghanistan's mujahideen guerrillas against the brutal Soviet occupation of the 1980s," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "With its chickenshit elisions, and despite the last-minute feint at reversing its celebratory Cold Warrior tone, Charlie Wilson's War is Gumped-up history."

"It has hustle and colorful talk and snappy acting and peek-a-boo insights into How Things Work in the free-for-all corridors of power," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Philip Seymour Hoffman carries the movie. As the CIA operative who hates Communists and his myopic superiors in equal measure, he has a wily, don't-give-a-shit drive that makes you wish he'd been in Baghdad in 2003."

Updated through 12/23.

Sorkin's "scripts operate on the principle that there is no affair of state, however tangled or burdensome, that cannot be breezed through at a brisk dramatic pace," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "That breeze is enviable (you feel it in an idealist like Capra, as well as in a cynic like Preston Sturges), but it comes with a risk: watch too much TV, relish the ease and aplomb of a movie like Charlie Wilson's War, and you may start to wish—even to believe—that all government can be run this way, with so little friction and such style." And as for PSH: "[Director Mike] Nichols has a problem here, in that, ever since Hoffman slid over the hood of a car in The Talented Mr Ripley, he has developed a habit of bursting into well-behaved movies and taking them hostage."

"Comedy or not, the spin from its creators is this: Don't lump us with those box office disasters with ponderous Iraq-related messages." Richard L Berke talks with the film's makers for the New York Times.

Glenn Kenny profiles Nichols for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 12/18: So Mike Nichols "has now made a movie about how his wife's ex more or less put an end to the Cold War without anyone really noticing," notes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "The big-screen Charlie Wilson's War, clocking in at 93 fly-by minutes, is dark and funny and mean and sexy, damned near pitch-black-perfect considering that at the end of this boozy comedy you wind up with, oh, Osama bin Laden. And Nichols is suited to the tale - this being the Mike Nichols of Catch-22, The Graduate and Primary Colors (which is to say, the satirist), not the Mike Nichols of Working Girl, Postcards From the Edge and Regarding Henry (which is to say, the moralist)."

"Had the US invested in a devastated Afghanistan's post-war reconstruction and democratization one whit as enthusiastically as it funded the war itself, the world we live in today might well be a different, better, safer place," notes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "That substantial point, which reportedly delivered quite a wallop in Sorkin's original script, is pretty much a whispered afterthought in the Charlie Wilson's War you'll see starting this Friday. A few tactful lines toward the very end, so low-impact most viewers will probably just take the whole film as an incongruous gung-ho throwback to the Cold War anti-Russkie satires of yore. Taken as is, this War is trivial and irresponsible. Even what it likely intended to be, it's less contemptible than pitiable - an emasculated movie."

Update, 12/19: "Mike Nichols turns in a brisk and undoubtedly entertaining episode, er, movie; it’s over before it has a chance to really sink in," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine.

Updates, 12/20: "Largely performance-driven, Charlie Wilson's War will delight anyone old enough to remember [Tom] Hanks's debut on television's Bosom Buddies or his scene-stealing turn as the gruff coach in A League of Their Own," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Levity becomes this fine actor, and his cheery élan as Charlie relieves him of a certain stuffiness when he takes on soldierly heroes or mentally challenged innocents.... Laden with broad shtick..., Charlie Wilson's War is a rollicking populist caper that panders shamelessly to America's love of the maverick."

"Like most great Hollywood comedies, of course, this isn't primarily a film of ideas but of character," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "And Charlie Wilson's War matches its wonderfully eccentric trio of main characters with the expertly engaging performances of Hanks, Roberts and Hoffman; it's the kind of movie that needs stars as much as they need it."

"As it turns out, the previous Nichols movie this one most resembles is the 1988 romantic comedy Working Girl," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Charlie Wilson's War is a funny, sprightly tribute to the American can-do spirit, with a bleak ending that suggests that our plucky protagonist may have just dug his own (or, in this case, his country's) grave. This film does have glaring faults. Its storytelling verges on the slapdash, and its vision of politics as a game of personal brinksmanship can ring sentimental and shallow. But like its priapic hero, the movie charges forward with a lusty vitality that helps the viewer forgive it a multitude of sins."

"There's a potential for wicked satire here - particularly since a line can easily be drawn from the US support for those Afghan rebels to Al Qaeda and 9/11 - but Nichols would rather show us Hanks slapping his secretaries' fannies while Robert sports a truly awful wig and an even worse Texas accent," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Aaron Sorkin's script is alternately witty and too on-the-money, as always, while Mike Nichol's direction is so deft and brisk you'd think he was adapting Noel Coward or something," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "He's not. But he is making something that critics like to call 'a grown-up entertainment.' I myself used to find the invocation of that false category nauseously banal; War is good enough, and rare enough, to make me almost appreciate it."

Updates, 12/23: "This movie probably gets the Washington process better than any since Otto Preminger's underrated Advise and Consent back in 1962," writes Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. "It's not about men of virtue doing the impossible, but men of flaws doing the doable, but just barely. You don't want to look too carefully at the process, which is haphazard, greased by alcohol and a barter system of favors and flattery, big moneybags in the home state, and a lot of gumption and git-'er-done ingenuity."

"[I]f this movie succeeds in convincing Americans that the US support went to Ahmad Shah Massoud alone, it will have effectively let the CIA and Wilson off the hook for their contribution to the circumstances leading up to 9/11," argues Melissa Roddy at Alternet. "During the 1980s, Wilson engineered the appropriation of approximately $3.5 billion to help the Afghans fight the Soviets. According to Milt Bearden, CIA chief of station to Pakistan, Massoud received less than 1 percent of it. So, if Massoud was not receiving the $3.5 billion that Congress was sending, who was? There were seven factions based in Pakistan who were the recipients of American largesse, but about 40 percent of it went to a blood-thirsty, fundamentalist, loudly anti-American bastard named Gulbaddin Hekmatyar."

Still, the New York Times' AO Scott finds that Charlie "may be more of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahedeen has any right to be."

But for the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan, this "is an anachronism, the wrong movie at the wrong time. Not only does it tell its tale in a style that feels dated and artificial, the story itself focuses on events that history has overtaken. The moving finger has written and moved on, and not even the combined star power of Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, writer Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols can do anything about it."

"Nichols doesn't turn this story into an essay on political morality; he's more interested in telling the story of a couple of rogue guys (and one rather upscale rogue woman) who put their shoulders to the wheel in the service of their principles," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Agreeing with those principles isn't the point; Nichols is more interested in exploring their urge to take action as something quintessentially American."

For Time's Richard Corliss, Charlie "is that seemingly impossible object these days: a picture about war and politics that has manages to be both rational and inspirational. It is also the year's funniest smart movie."

"It's the first legitimate marriage between Nichols the comedian and Nichols the commentator," argues Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Witty, wacky, and wildly inappropriate for our Puritan PC times, this story of a lecherous Congressman and his anti-Commie compunction sails along on breezes of effortless engagement, filled with performances so potent they act like double shots of soothing Southern Comfort."

"It isn't quite Three's Company Goes To Kabul, but Mike Nichols and Aaron Sorkin's leering adaptation of George Crile's too-strange-for-fiction bestseller boasts a lightness of touch that proves both a strength and a weakness," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"Charlie Wilson's War is pretty entertaining - and thus, in a way, that much more obscene," writes Bilge Ebiri at Nerve.

Brooklyn Rail. Dec 07 / Jan 08.

"It would seem a safe bet to dismiss Alex McQuilkin's Joan of Arc out of hand," writes Thomas Micchelli. "Regarded in passing, the 27-year-old artist's short video, a mirrored homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 masterwork, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, appears to mark a disappointing backslide into the stewpot of cultural cannibalism.... The cut-granite purity of Dreyer's images and the spiritual obsession incarnated by Maria Falconetti in the role of Jeanne should by all rights overwhelm whatever context they're boxed into. That McQuilkin's project manages to avoid these pitfalls is an accomplishment in itself; that it fails to strike a single false note, and is in fact quite moving, is another story altogether."

DA Pennebaker's 65 Revisited "gives insight into how unhinged and strangely enchanting Dylan's world could be," writes Sophie Gilbert. As for I'm Not There, "the kooky collage effect and obvious symbolism jars. Hyper-naturalism is what Haynes does best, and that mixes poorly with his psychedelia and heightened realism. As a portrait of Dylan, the film is an accurately fragmented jumble of ideas that doesn't quite make sense."

Sarahjane Blum on The Future is Unwritten: "The surprise here is not that a rock documentary trades in clichés, it's that director [Julien] Temple trades in such uninspired ones.... Temple has taken on punk before, and with different emphasis, most notably in The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury. He's made a career (and a number of enemies) re-envisioning the story of punk rock and its antiheroes. Here, he relegates the movement to irrelevancy because few of the relevant parties had anything to say which fit into Temple's revisionist take on [Joe] Strummer."

"Caligula could have been a contender," writes Sarah Kessler. "A description of its storyline makes the film sound campy, sexy, tragic and, best of all, perverse. Unfortunately, Caligula's attempts at depravity are not polymorphous enough to remain captivating."

"If... remains a riotous pleasure, but plays too farcical for someone of my generation to find foreboding," writes Ben Popper.

"The combination of media drama and political impact determines the winner." Theodore Hamm explains why Larry Craig is the Brooklyn Rail's Person of the Year for 2007:

Throughout his three terms in office, Craig, of course, has been an ardent foe of gay rights; in 2004, he received a rating of zero from the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group. Yet the ongoing revelations about his proclivities have made it difficult for the Republicans to renew the gay-bashing agenda that worked so well for them in 2004. True to form, Republicans have since moved on to demonize a new group, undocumented immigrants, or a constituency unable to vote. Shifting his party's focal point of hatred was certainly not on Craig's mind at the Northstar Crossing that fateful day. But the genius of American politics is that even a visit to the airport john can transform our national debate.

And then, also not particularly film-related but nonetheless interesting are Jed Lipinski's thoughts after hearing David Byrne and Geoffrey Miller in conversation: "Connections between biology and culture, sex and beauty, genes and creativity."

AFI Awards 2007.

10 movies, 10 TV shows. The juries.

Shorts, 12/16.

"Even if you're not that interested in Godard, everybody should be aware of what video cropping can do to the film image." But here, David Bordwell turns to the example of Godard to explain why and how aspect ratios matter.

"Can singing change history?" asks Matt Zoller Seitz. "The Singing Revolution, a documentary by James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty about Estonia's struggle to end Soviet occupation, shows that it already has." More from Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun and Nick Schager in Slant.

Also in the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis on Arranged: "Packed with the stereotypes it aspires to challenge, Diane Crespo and Stefan C Schaefer's well-meaning but oblivious film presents ostensibly modern young women who are nevertheless defined solely by their faith." More from Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun.

And Andy Webster has made it through Alvin and the Chipmunks: "Despite its shout-outs to the holiday season, this is essentially airplane fodder, not a perennial. Don't hold your breath waiting for the sequel."

Starting Out in the Evening "induced me to read [Brian] Morton's beautifully realized novel, which is