Fests and events, 2/27.

"When I got in touch with Paul Festa to find out if I might take a look at his 2006 film, Apparition of the Eternal Church, in which a group of people listen to a piece of organ music by Olivier Messiaen and describe their reaction, I introduced myself as a film critic first and then, more importantly, as a full-blown Messiaen obsessive," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "'Join the club,' came his knowing reply." Screens tonight "with live organ accompaniment at St Bartholomew's Church as part of a centenary celebration program that includes the New York premiere of Messiaen's 'Fantaisie' for violin and piano, with Festa himself manning the bow."

Also tonight: A free preview screening of Kimberly Peirce's Stop Loss in Chicago. The Reader's JR Jones has details.

Back in the Voice, J Hoberman: "It's been half a century since A Face in the Crowd had its premiere, but there's a sense in which this 1957 Elia Kazan flick remains the founding movie of postmodern times. Election years make it only too evident that our popular culture and electoral politics are symbiotic; A Face in the Crowd was the first to dramatize it." Budd Schulberg and Patricia Neal will be on hand for a screening at Film Forum on March 5. Somewhat related: Peter Nellhaus on The Arrangement.

"Of all the documentaries premiering at this year's South by Southwest Film Festival, we're probably most excited about seeing Second Skin [site], an up close and personal look at the lives of seven MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) players and the fictional worlds they inhabit." Austinist's Matthew Smith talks with producer Victor Piñeiro. Via Matt Dentler. Earnest Cavalli talks with him, too, by the way, for Wired.

Karina Longworth's SXSW preview today: Natural Causes. And Chris Garcia has more SXSW news.

Michael Guillén has begun posting reviews from Cinequest 08. So far: Around the Bay (site) and La Antena (The Aerial). The festival runs through March 9.

"On the same day in 2006 that Zhang [Yimou] (born 1951) premiered in China his Curse of the Golden Flower, Jia Zhangke (born 1970), the most important 'Sixth Generation' director, opened his Still Life, a blustery act of provocation," writes Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix. "The films couldn't be more different. Zhang's lavish action-romance costumer is the most expensive Chinese picture ever. Still Life, which plays at the MFA March 6 - 16, is tough, lean, pessimistic, documentary-like."

"On Wednesday, April 30, the San Francisco International Film Festival, with Platinum Sponsor Vanity Fair, will present its annual Directing Award to Mike Leigh, whose history with us stretches back to 1986 when the Festival held this country's first retrospective of his gritty and unsparing, often bitingly funny work."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey previews this weekend's Cinema Piemonte.

For indieWIRE, Michael Gibbons files a dispatch from Brazil focusing on how the country's reacting to the Berlinale awarding Elite Squad its Golden Bear.

And Daniel Kasman wraps his Berlinale coverage.

At Screengrab, Phil Nugent rounds up more goings on in New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

Online viewing tip. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has "Why Film Festivals Don't Work," a video that explains the thinking behind From Here to Awesome.

Chicago 10.

"If the [1968 Democratic] convention was a tragedy, the trial was a farce," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Revisiting events at once overly familiar and impossible to imagine, [Brett] Morgen's impure mix of documentary footage and rotoscopic computer animation is unrelenting Sturm und Drang. Chicago 10 has a deliberate and irritating absence of context but a full appreciation of antics."

"It's like seeing images from 1956 Budapest, except it's the streets of the city I've lived in most of my adult life," writes Ray Pride in Newcity Chicago. "Almost, just almost, the fragments of historical material are pungent enough, iconic enough, to stand out against the underwhelming animation. It ain't Boondocks, an accomplished feat of animation which is also far more incendiary and subversive while beguiling the eye."

"Chicago 10 is a reminder of a time when the counter-culture was out on the street making noise - a history lesson so removed from our present political climate it feels almost like science fiction," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant.

"Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair and a producer of The Kid Stays in the Picture, produced Chicago 10 with Mr Morgen," writes Adam Liptak in the New York Times. "He said it was the product of political frustration in the early days of the Iraq war - an anger that has infused his monthly editor's note and the contents of his magazine - and an attempt to rouse young people to action. 'I became incredibly upset,' he said, 'that this young generation of Americans seemed to have no interests at all in the origins of the war in Iraq, the rightness of the war or the possibility of ending the war.'"

"Though by all accounts it is scrupulously accurate in its details, some of the original participants take exception to its revolution-can-be-fun angle," notes Phil Nugent at ScreenGrab:

"This is an Abbie Hoffman story." says Tom Hayden. "Abbie was a great rebel, but there is a danger in theatricalizing history." To which Leonard Weinglass adds, "The film is entertainment, but it is not a political education." (It should be noted that the idea that the trial could best serve its political purposes as an example of living satire also dates back to the time of the trial itself; as early as 1970, just months after the trial ended, Bantam published a paperback collection of comic highlights from the court transcripts. It was titled The Tales of Hoffman and included a chortling introduction by the radical "political critic" Dwight Macdonald.)

"It's safe to say that no one has ever seen a historical documentary shot quite this way - live-action mixed with animation, grainy archival footage juxtaposed with polished Hollywood impersonations," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "'But that's exactly the point,' Mr Morgen said. 'You want audiences to experience this story, not just to sit through a dry recital of the facts.'"

Collider talks with Morgen, and Karina Longworth is struck by how much his next project, "a Courtney Love-approved documentary about Kurt Cobain," resembles AJ Schnack's Kurt Cobain About a Son.

The Boston Phoenix's Peter Keough tells Morgen he has a few problems with Chicago 10.

And the Reeler talks with Morgen, too.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance 07.

Updates: "As restless and flashy as the radicals it valorizes, Chicago 10 is an apocalyptic dispatch from the past refashioned as a slick flyer for the present," writes Elbert Ventura in Reverse Shot. "With both eyes trained on his audience, Morgen frames his movie as a piece of agitprop, an antiwar exhortation to dormant youth, complete with contemporary rabble-rousing songs (Rage Against the Machine, Eminem, Beastie Boys). The result is less history written with lightning than by lightning: the occasional flash illuminates, but a lot of times you're just left in the dark."

"In all respects, Chicago 10 is maddeningly uneven," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "Morgen isn't interested, as a conventional documentarian might be, in critiquing 1960s ideology. Ultimately, the film scans best as a Rorschach exam, testing the limits of your patience for unreconstructed hippie nostalgia."

Updates, 2/28: "Morgen displays obvious admiration for the Yippies' festive mentality in the shadow of authority, but he makes a valiant effort to avoid treating them as relics," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Important questions are raised, but for all the boldness of its design, Chicago 10 falls short of providing a solution."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Morgen. So does Jamilah King for Pixel Vision.

"The cultural rift in America that year makes today's red state/blue state divide look rather like a petty marital spat, and Sirhan Sirhan's shooting of Kennedy, coming a scant two months after King's death, pushed everything into near-apocalyptic territory," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "You'd never know that from Morgen's film, though it does have its moments; how could it not, given the epochal nature of the events covered and the fascinating personalities involved?"

"2008 is not this generation's 1968," declares Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. "Without acknowledging the obviously apparent intent, Chicago 10 is actually appreciable as one of the most creative and entertaining documentary films in years. And it could indeed be viewed as significant on its own, if we let it exist as such."

Updates, 2/29: In a cover story for the Chicago Reader, JR Jones reminds us, "The Democrats are still feeling the aftershocks of '68 today. Back then, only 13 states held Democratic primaries, and Humphrey skipped them all, taking advantage of the party machinery to wrap up the nomination. That fueled the rage of the demonstrators, and as news of their being beaten and gassed filtered into the International Amphitheater, delegates approved a convention plank to reform the nominating process." A succinct history of the consequences of that reformation follows, and then: "You won't learn any of this from Chicago 10, because Morgen isn't interested in measuring the distance between 1968 and 2008 - he wants to erase it." Which, he finds, isn't necessarily a bad thing. The film is "actually packed with information, its barrage of colorful images culled from both amateur and news footage." Then:

For those of us who weren't there, one revelation of Chicago 10 may be the character of the crowds that turned out to oppose the war. Some fit the description of radical freaks, but most seem like normal middle-class taxpayers.... The record Democratic turnout at this year's primaries and the nearly one million people who've donated to the Obama campaign demonstrate once again that the movement empowers the leader, not the other way around. For dramatic purposes Morgen focuses on ten people, but the real story is the tens of thousands.

"It is a narrow, glib dollop of canned history, an affirmation of received thinking rather than a challenge to it," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Squandering 40 years of hindsight, Mr Morgen is content to trot out the tired mythology of the era one more time. His mélange of styles and techniques shows visual ingenuity, but not much in the way of historical insight. He takes the intricate, frequently self-contradictory theater of the New Left at face value, and panders to the credulity of the audience by breathing new life into old clichés. Groovy! Power to the people!"

"Morgen's stated goal of firing up young viewers elides the fact that, at the time of the trial, the five key defendants already represented an older generation, with many younger anti-war activists entrained by the militant posturing of Weathermen, or perhaps rededicating themselves to cultural activism, environmentalism, feminism, or gay liberation," writes Ioannis Mookas in Gay City News. "Politically engaged young people today, it seems, might sooner be wont to pass a spare hour stumping for Obama than waxing nostalgic over a thrilling display of legal vaudeville that, on balance, wasn't terribly decisive."

"[I]t haphazardly attempts to both provoke boomer nostalgia and contemporary apprehension while harkening to heroes from 90s pop music and motion capture animation in order to attract youth audiences the filmmakers assume would ever be drawn to material of historical or social importance," writes Brandon Harris. It in the process it shirks off the responsibility to deliver something more comprehensive, ideologically cohesive and clearly relevant to the here and now that Morgen seems to at pains to address. Not for lack of curiosity, Morgen's inability to connect our politically fraught times to the past leaves the whole project with a sense of overwrought miscalculation."

"To round out the modern feel, the director also assembled an impressive pool of voices (Mark Ruffalo, Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Jeffrey Wright, Dylan Baker, Liev Schreiber and, in a valedictory performance, Roy Scheider as Judge Hoffman) and secured the rights to an iPod-ready playlist of tunes by the likes of Rage Against the Machine, the Beastie Boys and, for some historical relevance, the MC5 - which often turn this montage-laden project into so much glorified MTV fodder," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun.

But for the Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano, "The director wants to bring recent history to life for people who weren't around to witness it, and in that he succeeds pretty admirably."

For the AV Club's Tasha Robinson, it's "a hugely entertaining piece of pop fluff."

"The irreverent attitude of Chicago 10 is in synch with the times it portrays," writes Jim Emerson. "As an activist documentary with a contemporary agenda, it doesn't pretend to be 'objective' (whatever that means), but to find inspiration in the passion and irreverence of its heroes."

Online listening tips. James Rocchi talks with Morgen for Cinematical; and Morgen's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Updates, 3/1: "What makes Chicago 10 such an arresting experience is that Morgen truly doesn't give a damn about providing historical context," writes Mike D'Angelo. "He's filmmaker enough to assume that you already know the pertinent details - and that if by some chance you don't know them, you shouldn't be learning them from a goddamn movie."

More interviews with Morgen: Sara Cardace (Vulture) and Eric Kohn (indieWIRE).

Update, 3/5: "Despite its gimmicky attempts to appeal to non-boomers, Chicago 10 is still weirdly enjoyable," writes Gary Moskowitz in Mother Jones.

Fests and events, 2/26.

"Burton Stephen Lancaster (1913 - 1994) was one of the most paradoxical figures in Hollywood history," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "Depending on the account, he was either a vainglorious and very hammy movie star or a sensitive and subtle actor; a sports-loving jock or a man of culture who had once wanted to be an opera singer. Some contemporaries talk about how tough he was to work with. Others revere him and credit him with launching their careers." The Lancaster season is on at BFI Southbank through March 24.

"The 7th edition of !f, the Istanbul Independent film festival, ended today and has confirmed the event's rising importance in the country's cinematographic landscape," blogs Agnès Poirer for the Guardian. "Shadowed for a long time by its elders, including the Antalya and International Istanbul festivals, launched respectively in 1964 and 1976, the young festival is the fruit of a Turkish cinematic renaissance." More from Kerem Bayrak at indieWIRE.

Pitchfork previews a slew of music-related films screening at SXSW between March 7 and 15.

Karina Longworth puts a set of questions to Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie director Jay Delaney - and she's on her way to the True/False Film Festival, which runs Thursday through Sunday.

Stefan Steinberg begins a series at WSWS on this year's Berlinale. Of the Golden Bear-winning Elite Squad, he writes:

When criticism is raised of his film, director José Padilha wants to have it both ways. Against accusations that his film glorifies the work of the elite squad he responds by pointing to those sections of his film that reveal the dehumanising training of the unit, as well as the squeals of protest by leading Brazilian police officers over the negative presentation of their own police units in the film.

But the fact remains that the film is dominated by the standpoint that the extremes of violent crime and social decay in Brazilian cities can only be dealt with through muscular, authoritarian measures. Part of the problem, the film seems to argue, are pot-smoking, pacifist, middle class students. The vicious denouncement by an enforcement officer of a young student as a piece of scum, "like the whores, the pimps, the abortionist..." is left unchallenged in the film as a whole.

Parallels are then drawn with There Will Be Blood, for which Paul Thomas Anderson won a Silver Bear: "Padilho stresses the political relevance of his movie; Anderson is desperate to play it down in his. It appears as if their films are worlds apart, but in fact they do share a common denominator - their misogynistic view of the world." But Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure - another Silver Bear winner - "is an important film."

Cineaste. Spring 08.

Putting together a syllabus for a course at Dartmouth - Queers, Queens, and Questionable Women: How Hollywood Shaped Post-War GLBT Politics and Vice Versa - Michael Bronski was amazed "at not only how brief, and fast moving, the history of specifically queer criticism has been, but also how protean it has been." His brief history begins with "the brilliant, and now largely forgotten by younger queer writers and academics, Parker Tyler," and takes Richard Dyer, B Ruby Rich and Vito Russo into consideration on his way to the present: "Academic queer film studies now finds itself in the sometimes awkward position of responding both to a need to continue to professionalize its work as well as to wrestle with the changing state of the market, which is now utterly different than it was a decade ago, never mind three decades. This cultural shift is, to varying degrees, apparent in the three volumes of recent queer film writing under review." And they are: The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers, The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows and Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film.

Also in the new issue of Cineaste, the Editors appreciate "the humor, clever dialogue and engaging performances" in Juno and Knocked Up, but they "also worry not only about critical arguments that seem either willfully blind or shockingly naive about the mediating role of cinema in our culture, but also about the aversion to abortion as an important issue."

Which leads us to the interviews, though Richard Porton's with Cristian Mungiu is headlined, "Not Just an Abortion Film." And of course, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days isn't.

As noted earlier, Cynthia Lucia talks with Woody Allen about Cassandra's Dream; and David Archibald talks with Stefan Ruzowitzky about The Counterfeiters. Also available as a PDF: Gary Crowdus's December 1987 conversation with Oliver Stone.

Recently in theaters:

• Rahul Hamid on Persepolis: "Through the caricature of her countrymen, [Marjane] Satrapi sends the subconscious message that she and other moderate Iranians are Westerners at heart. Although for some this may be a pleasant-to-watch liberal salve for strained Western sensibilities, I would recommend buying the books."

• Robert Koehler on Funny Games US: "The arguably courageous attempt by [Michael] Haneke to effectively smuggle his polemical work of antigenre into the commercial mainstream of American movies is almost certain to be undone by the very forces he has openly despised, and perhaps no amount of critical explication will reverse it since the movie - by its position inside a genre that it nevertheless wants to subvert - is being sold as something that it's not."

• Herb Boyd finds "a few troubling things about The Great Debaters that go beyond its predictability," but approves overall.

DVDs:

• David Sterritt celebrates British distributor Cinema 16 and its first foray into the US market, European Short Films: Special US Edition.

• Rahul Hamid on I Am Cuba, "one long passionate plea in favor of form over content and an affirmation of the transcendence of film style."

• "[A]lthough [Sam] Fuller's first three films - I Shot Jesse James, The Baron of Arizona and The Steel Helmet - contain some flashes of brilliance, what may be most interesting about them is the contrast they make with Fuller's 1944 novel, The Dark Page," writes Martha P Nochimson.

• Phillip Lopate on Raymond Bernard's Wooden Crosses and Les Misérables: "[T]ogether they make a compelling case for admission into the canon."

• "Lost and Found: The Harry Langdon Collection offers a strong case in support of Langdon as deserving a firm and lofty position among the silent screen's finest comedians," argues James L Neibaur.

Criterion's Pierrot le Fou.

"Seen today, particularly in the crystal-clear, brightly saturated print offered on the Criterion disc, Pierrot le Fou remains a great movie, masterly on a number of levels: the subtle abstraction supplied by the red, white and blue color scheme (the colors of the French flag, of course); the postmodern ease with which it mixes and matches genres, moving from shootouts to improvised musical numbers; its rich network of high and low cultural references, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to children's comic books; its theme of alienation from a lost, natural world and banishment to a universe of cheap consumer goods and advertising slogans. But Passion (1982) in the Lionsgate set is no less great." In the New York Times, Dave Kehr points out the many changes - geo-political, changes in moviegoing and in Jean-Luc Godard himself - that took place between the release of Pierrot le Fou in 1965 and the period represented by that box set (1982 to 1993).

Update, 2/27.

"My love for Pierrot le fou is so fresh, so passionate, so alive and so completely unabashed that I feel a little like a silly schoolgirl with a terrible crush on the cute new boy in class," confesses Kimberley Lindbergs. Besides great pix and comments (followed by readers' comments), she's got a gallery and a tune.

"Pierrot le Fou is a road movie, a crime fantasy, a cultural satire, a tale of consumerist alienation and bourgeois apathy, and a femme fatale noir in Technicolor and CinemaScope, shot in the bright sunlit canvas of broad daylight," writes Sean Axmaker for TCM.

"It might be a good entry point for Godard neophytes, made at a moment where he could still celebrate American directors like Frank Tashlin, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller (who makes a cameo) and rage against American foreign policy, maintaining an uneasy balance of experimentation and accessibility," suggests Steve Erickson in ScreenGrab.

"Riotously anarchic, almost casually violent, and technically masterful, this is a great crime picture by any measure, and leaves you, well, breathless over how much Godard accomplished in his early and arguably most fertile period," writes Jon Danziger at digitallyObsessed.

"Where the Criterion vaults ahead [of other editions] are in the 2nd disc of supplements," notes Gary Tooze at DVD Beaver.

Earlier: Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times and Glenn Kenny's "Annotated Bibliography," parts 1, 2 and 3.

Update, 2/27: Ray Pride has a bit of online viewing.

Chop Shop.

"Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop is a low-budget vérité triumph, set in Queens beyond the sight of baseball fans in nearby Shea Stadium," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Bahrani's concentration is close to supernatural as he tracks the young, prepubescent Ale (Alejandro Polanco) from job to soul-numbing job, some legal, some extralegal, to the point where you're forced to suspend altogether your moral judgments and watch with a mixture of pain and awe."

"As in his stunningly assured debut, Man Push Cart, Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani uses Chop Shop not to sentimentalize the travails of one of NYC's multitudinous, ignored underclass, but to discover, as Arthur Miller once said of The Bicycle Thief, 'Everyman's search for dignity,'" writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "Or in this case, Everyboy's. Comparisons to Italian Neorealism in general and De Sica in particular (Shoeshine comes most immediately to mind) will inevitably keep surfacing in reviews and discussions of Chop Shop, so it's important when calling upon these references to emphasize the moral attitude of that movement as well as its gritty, unadorned style."

Updated through 2/29.

Nick Dawson talks with Bahrani "about his distinctive creative process, making the camera invisible, and Queen Latifah movies."

Earlier: Nick Schager in Slant and reviews from Toronto.

Updates, 2/27: "Mr Bahrani was born in the United States and lived for a while in Iran, his parents' native country (and [co-writer Bahareh] Azimi's), and the influence of recent Iranian cinema on Chop Shop is unmistakable," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The oblique, naturalistic storytelling, the interest in children and the mingling of documentary and fictional techniques - these have been hallmarks of the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, but they are rarely deployed with such confidence or effectiveness by American filmmakers."

"Chop Shop derives much of its value from the sense of being found, not made," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "As signaled by the transparent naming of his characters, Bahrani inflects his drama with documentary, grabbing sights and sounds directly from the street in a dexterous update of neorealist strategies." Also: Lisa Katzman talks with Bahrani.

And so do Logan Hill for New York and Lisa Rosman for indieWIRE.

"Whatever its artistic roots may be, Chop Shop, along with Bahrani's almost-undistributed debut, Man Push Cart, announces the arrival of a director radically out of step with the dominant conventions of American moviemaking, one who blends a social-realist vision and a passion for cinematic poetry," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

"Chop Shop is driven by a sense of impending doom," writes Marcy Dermansky. "Alejandro is such a good kid and the adults in his world take everything he has to offer and give little in return. Much to the film's credit, Bahrani doesn't provide the expected tragedy; instead, Alejandro wakes up to face the next day. And the next. You're left to wonder, what will he do, come winter."

"Anyone who goes into Chop Shop expecting some kind of stealth statement about class divisions in American society will probably be disappointed because Bahrani, unlike those Italian neorealist directors of old, isn't all that interested in social criticism," writes Kenji Fujishima at the House Next Door. "Poverty and loneliness, he seemingly acknowledges at the outset, is a fact of life; his focus is more specifically on how poor individuals try, don't try, or fail to work out of it. In other words, he's more interested in universals than in topical relevance, and it is on that universal level that both of Bahrani's films gain their emotional resonance."

Updates, 2/28: "[T]he confidence with which Mr Bahrani plunges us into the milieu is paired with an odd anxiety when it comes to plot details and dialogue," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Some of the most stilted lines and transitions aren't even necessary to convey what's happening, while frantically glued-together sequences sink the movie's meandering final third. Similar weaknesses kept Man Push Cart from achieving its potential."

Aaron Hillis talks with Bahrani for IFC News.

Update, 2/29: "Shot with breathtaking immediacy and featuring casts of non-professionals in real-life locations, Bahrani's films give narrative shape and compelling character shadings to documentary worlds," writes Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab. "The result is something that feels like a new language being born, even though it owes a conscious debt to both non-fiction filmmakers like Shirley Clarke and realist narrative masters like John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica. Which is all just a fancy way of saying you really, really should not miss Chop Shop."

Shorts and fests, 2/25.

Previewing The Gates, Richard Lacayo recalls meeting David and Albert Maysles back when they were editing Running Fence in the 70s: "What I realized even then was that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a perfect Maysles subject. They've always insisted that the social processes involved in getting their work approved and built - all the bureaucratic hassles, community forums and press conferences - were an integral part of their art. And the Maysles love all those processes."

Word is, Warner Bros wants a pretty thorough reshoot of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. "[T]his is bad news for those who were looking forward to Spike Jonze making a Spike Jonze film," write the folks following such developments at Where the Wild Things Are. Via Mark Hooper, who recalls the full troubled history of this adaptation for the Guardian.

Bourne 4? Yep. Jessica Barnes has details at Cinematical.

Festival roundup:

• "The inaugural Marfa Film Festival runs May 1 - 5," notes the Circuit's Michael Jones. Yep, that Marfa.

• From firsts to lasts: Ray Pride passes along confirmation that this year's New York Underground Film Festival (April 2 through 8) will indeed be the last, though the organization behind it will live on.

• Danielle DiGiacomo files a dispatch from the just-wrapped Big Sky Documentary Film Festival at All These Wonderful Things.

• Karina Longworth asks Daniel Stamm about A Necessary Death. Speaking of SXSW, Wiley Wiggins has a finger in three pies.

• The The SouthSlam Film Festival? "Sort of like Slamdance, but in Austin," explains Chris Garcia.

"Barton Fink may remain the key Coen Brothers film, the gateway to all their concerns, such as language, social hierarchies, and the ability to weave tales," proposes DK Holm, blogging for the Vancouver Voice.

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Cullen Gallagher enjoys a 1935 comedy: "What makes Baby Face Harrington stand out is not its clever satirizing of gangster movies, nor its status as a mid-period film of director Raoul Walsh, nor its cast that reads like a 'Who's Who' list of underappreciated character actors, but that its very premise is about the elevation of these 'character actors' to star status: the foregrounding of what is normally merely background ephemera."

With his novel Monster, 1959, David Maine "has concocted a sly, minimalist pastiche of monster-movie clichés, rendering them with perfect mimickry," writes Janet Maslin.

Also in the New York Times: "[T]he victory of Sony's new Blu-ray high-definition disc over a rival format, Toshiba's HD DVD, masks a problem facing the studios: the overall decline of the DVD market," report Brooks Barnes and Matt Richel.

Related: The Economist on how Hollywood's fears are keeping it from reaping the potential rewards of online distribution. Via Steve Bryant.

"In narratives that have long-fascinated the American imagination, heroes of color sacrifice themselves so that white characters may live more freely, implicitly absolved of the original American sin of racial oppression." In PopMatters, Derik Smith riffs on I Am Legend and Barack Obama's candidacy.

Logan Hill profiles Christina Ricci for New York.

Online browsing tip. Vanity Fair posts its "Hitchcock Classics" portfolio.

Online viewing tip #1. Gabriel Wardell has Jimmy Kimmel's response to Sarah Silverman.

Online viewing tip #2. Chris Anderson discusses his Wired cover story, "Free!" Via Fimoculous, also pointing to Jad Aburmrad's "Video Digest" for the Morning News.

Frieze. March 08.

In the new issue, frieze co-editor Jörg Heiser notes that about 100 yards separate that set of stone steps in Philadelphia Rocky runs up triumphantly and Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau, 2. Le gaz d'éclairage: "This connection between [Sylvester] Stallone's famed filmic moment and Duchamp's final work would be negligible if it wasn't for the fact that the figure in Étant donnés holds up a lamp; a gesture that corresponds with Rocky's. In their own ways, both frame the contradictions of the American Dream – its desires and frustrations, its confusions of sex and power – as seen through the eyes of an expatriate French artist and the son of an Italian blue-collar immigrant.

Polly Staple considers "the shifting nature of public art" via the examples of Pawel Althamer's Film, Seth Price's essay "Dispersion" and Paul Chan's New Orleans production of Waiting for Godot.

Peter Doig writes this month's "Life in Film" column; you do have to register to read it, but it's free. Doig and a Trinidadian artist, Che Lovelace, run the StudioFilmClub in Port of Spain. They've chosen some fine films, have a dedicated audience, and what's more, Doig paints posters for most of the films they screen. In Trinidad. Sounds like a life.

"You could argue that [Roxy Music] - never a world stadium act, never a commercial success at the [David] Bowie level - were nonetheless crucial in defining so much of the attitude and aesthetic that are mainstream Postmodern UK," writes Peter York. "And you could go on to argue that their particular kind of dandyism was socially conservative and even contributed to the Thatcher mood. You could argue all those things, but Michael Bracewell doesn't in his book Re-make/Re-model (Art, Pop, Fashion and the Making of Roxy Music). He knows the readers can do that for themselves. He starts from the assumption that Roxy Music's first album is very important in the great scheme of things, and that his readers know it."

"Since 2006, Hongjong Lin has been re-imagining [George] Psalmanazar in a series of new guises, from architect to linguist," writes Douglas Heingartner after telling the story of the 18th century impostor. "And in his video installation Yeeha Formosa (a pun on the original Portuguese name for the island [of Taiwan]), exhibited during the recent International Film Festival Rotterdam, Lin reinvented Psalmanazar as an international fashion designer."

Also: Brian Dillon on Donald Barthelme, Ross Wilson on Walter Benjamin, Tirdad Zolghadr on class and, of course, much more.

Oscars. Winners.

"No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen's chilling confrontation of a desperate man with a relentless killer, won the Academy Award for best picture on Sunday night, providing a more-than-satisfying ending for the makers of a film that many believed lacked one," write David M Halbfinger and Michael Cieply in the New York Times. "No film ran away with the night, however, as the 80th Academy Awards gave a bruised movie industry a chance to refocus its ever-inward gaze on laurels instead of labor strife."

"The show, with Jon Stewart as host, seemed less polished than usual but not much more spontaneous," writes Alessandra Stanley.

And here's the list of nominees and winners.

Updated through 2/29.

A Los Angeles Times photo gallery parades "the highlights - and lowlights - of the three-hour, 22-minute love-fest." Another pairs shots of the winners and what they had to say.

Also:

• "It used to be that violence, even more than comedy, was the kiss of death for Oscar movies," writes Patrick Goldstein. "Then came blood-saturated films like Crash and The Departed, which overturned some of those rules. But perhaps no movie exemplifies how the Oscars have changed than this year's best picture winner, No Country for Old Men, a dark, disturbing thriller from the Coen brothers."

• "Hollywood took on a new role in Sunday's 80th annual Academy Awards: bit player," writes John Horn. "In a series of startling upsets and a few expected triumphs, almost all of the top Oscars were handed to foreigners and iconoclastic show business outsiders."

• Profiles: Rachel Abramowitz on Daniel Day-Lewis and Mark Olsen on Marion Cotillard. Plus, a Diablo Cody timeline.

• Mark Olsen's got Alex Gibney's reaction to winning Best Documentary Feature for Taxi to the Dark Side.

• Geoff Boucher and Chris Lee on "The Rules of the Red Carpet."

• Paul Brownfield's jotted down a few of Jon Stewart's jokes.

• Gina Piccalo covers the backstage buzz.

• What they wore.

"[T]he show was so overstocked with clips from movies - from this year's nominees and from Oscar winners going back to 1929 - that it was like a TV show with the hiccups," writes Tom Shales in the Washington Post.

Initial reactions in general: Aaron Dobbs, Jim Emerson, Jonathan Lapper, David Poland, Gabriel Shanks and Anne Thompson.

They live-blogged it: Ty Burr and Wesley Morris; Nikki Finke; Christian Hamaker; Peter Hartlaub; the House Next Door; Glenn Kenny; Harry Knowles; Jason Kottke; Mick LaSalle & Co; Joe Leydon; Lou Lumenick; Jeffrey Overstreet, Nathaniel R and Television Without Pity.

And of course, here's the full transcript of the GreenCine live blogging event (click "Replay").

"Oscar turned 80 tonight, and his birthday party, aka the Academy Awards, had the tone and pace suitable to an octogenarian's temper," writes Time's Richard Corliss.

"Logically, the so-called Foreign Language Film Oscars category should be eliminated, and all films regardless of language (as for performers) should qualify for all the awards," argues Ronald Bergan. Also blogging for the Guardian, Ken Levine: "We ended the writers' strike for this? Jesus!" Also: "Is there now a chance - and a danger - that Tilda the magnificent maverick could become mainstream?" wonders David Thomson.

Jon Stewart learned a few things from his first time out and was pretty good this year, argues Aaron Barnhart.

"There was a strong appetite for normalcy this year, and the Oscars mostly delivered, partly by not deviating from a big tent philosophy in which all categories were treated equally and homage to the lions of Hollywood was assumed to be of general interest," writes David Carr.

"So what happened?" asks ST VanAirsdale at VF Daily. "Was the writer's strike just too much to overcome? Was the extinguished beacon of Vanity Fair's Oscar party an insurmountable psychic burden for all involved? Was it just an off year? Indeed, I'm putting last night together one minute at a time—literally, in fact, thanks to Mahalo Daily, which offers this short, handy highlight reel for delicate memories."

David Edelstein evidently took notes throughout the evening and the result is a pretty amusing email to Lynda Obst.

Premiere has a linkage roundup. Glenn Kenny: "Good gosh, there's just no pleasing some people. You give 'em pageantry and they complain that there's too much pageantry, it's too long, the pageantry is boring. You give 'em brevity and you get Finke's 'This wasn't an Oscars. This was a slightly longer version of the Golden Globes.' Great. You know what. I really hope they do bring Pilobolus back next year."

Flickhead captions a few photos.

FishbowlNY rounds up reviews of Stewart's night.

"Hollywood is always a lopsided reflection of the political situation we're in," writes Cintra Wilson in Salon. "In this sense, performing artists, classically a fairly high-strung, hypersensitive lot, have always been pretty effective canaries in the cultural coal mine. What they've been telling us, lately, is that we have a very, very sick culture on our hands." Oh, and she writes about the Oscars, too.

"Like Martin Scorsese last year, the Coens are beloved of film critics and movie geeks but not necessarily mass audiences," writes Shawn Levy. "But Hollywood is running out of unsung heroes to award with prizes."

"What do you think about [Brad] Renfro being shut out of Oscar's 'In Memorium'?" asks Kim Voynar at Cinematical.

"The peculiar and sometimes tense dynamic between the Coens and the media is not a vaudeville act, or a false front," writes Andrew O'Hehir. "It's driven, in large part, by the private relationship between them. I still don't think No Country for Old Men is anywhere near their best work, but, you know, so what? Here's a news flash: Oscars get given out for all kinds of funny reasons. Those guys have made good and great films and almost no bad ones. Long may they wave."

Scott Kirsner wonders why the Academy won't let people watch the YouTube clips from the telecast they so obviously want to see.

Among Yair Raveh's highlights: "Isn't is incredible to realize that the roaring monster of a man that was Daniel Plainview was actually played by a soft-spoken, shy and gentle pirate sporting a haircut worse than Anton Chigurh's?"

Bill Maher's entry at the Huffington Post, in full: "My favorite movie of the year was the one about the heartless con man who's obsessed with finding oil. Its called No End In Sight."

David Carr gathers quotes worth noting.

Michael Sippey started "iveblogging reading some of the liveblogging of the oscars." Then, he stopped.

ST VanAirsdale hands out "The 2008 Oscar Liveblog Awards."

Updates, 2/26: "The three-plus hour show plunged to a record-low average of 32 million total viewers, according to early figures from Nielsen Media Research," reports Scott Collins. "That's a 21% dive from last year's ceremony, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, and the least-watched Oscars in more than 20 years. It sank even beneath the mark set by the 2003 Academy Awards show (33 million), which was marred by the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan argues that those who still watch do so not to find out who'll win but to wallow in their emotional outbursts when they do.

"[T]here is more to No Country's Oscar supremacy than the Academy getting over the Coens' hermetic weirdness," writes the Guardian's Andrew Pulver. "Principally, you would guess the film's success is largely down to voting demographics. No Country's basic message is that old geezers are wiser than young geezers: a theme perfectly attuned to the silver-surfer generation that comprises the Oscar votership."

Stop the presses! "With attention focused on glamour and celebrity, little of the reality of daily life in the US found expression in the broadcast," reports Hiram Lee at the WSWS.

Bob Turnbull shares his random notes.

"Here's one writer who can stay on strike for good, as far as the Siren is concerned: the one who decided it would be a kick to mock Sunrise during the Oscars." Similarly, the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

Updates, 2/27: "I need the Oscars," writes Michael Musto in the Voice. "I need the unmitigated joy of seeing four people lose in every category."

"I went completely crazy when Tilda Swinton won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar on Sunday night," writes Nick Davis. "Jubilation crazy. Rhapsodic crazy."

Dennis Cozzalio comments on that one - and other awards, too.

The Oscars need a "face-lift," argues Patrick Goldstein. "Like the evening news broadcasts, the Oscar is a relic, a cobwebby holdover from a bygone media age when Big Events earned Big Audiences. Those days are going, going, gone.... In an era where everyone's lives are twice as busy and their attention span has been cut in half, it is simply suicidal to put on a pokey three-hour-plus award show."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Deborah Netburn asks editors and bloggers how the Oscars might be saved.

Variety's Anne Thompson finds a few post-Oscar nuggets.

Nathaniel R's been having fun.

Online listening tip. For NPR, Madelaine Brand talks to a few comedians about livening up the show.

Update, 2/29: "There is good news and bad news about the 80th Academy Awards," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. For him, the bad news is No Country's four wins. The good news, though, may be longer lasting: "It isn't just that the calibre of filmmaking is improving; it is also the case that the Academy is acknowledging this creative shift, just as it did in 1968 (when the counter-cultural hits Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate made the cut) and 1975 (when The Towering Inferno resembled a damp squib next to Chinatown and The Godfather: Part II)."

Oscars. Live!

It's Oscar Night and GreenCine's live-blogging event begins at 4:30 pm PST (7:30 pm EST) and rolls on until the last dog dies. Filmbrain's joined the roster of featured commentators and host Craig Phillips is ready to feature your commentary, too.

If you're reading this a bit early, you can kill the time before the action begins by playing with the New York Times' "The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 - 2007" interactive doohicky. Via Greg Allen.

Update, 2/25: And here's the full transcript (click "Replay").

Shorts, 2/24.

"As with Ten Skies and 13 Lakes before it, James Benning's new film RR forms great ideas and unexpectedly voluptuous beauty out of modest and strict means, content, and style," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Also: "I'm not sure [J'entends plus la guitare (I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar)] is any more or less distinguishable from Garrel's other films, or more or less personal. Instead, it is another Philippe Garrel film, which may already say it all—or, at least, say enough. In other words, a masterpiece much like the rest."

Filmbrain recounts the struggle to get into a screening of Brad Anderson's Transsiberian at the Berlinale. Turns out it was worth it, since the film "is a brilliant genre exercise in white-knuckle tension and suspense that avoids the grand third-act set piece that has become practically obligatory these days."

Jesse McKinley profiles NBA superstar and movie producer Baron Davis. Stacy Peralta tells him that Davis was crucial to realizing Made in America, Peralta's doc about gangs in Los Angeles. "Davis acted as a liaison to the neighborhoods where a white, 50-something ex-skater like Mr Peralta might not be exactly welcomed with open arms, especially when bearing a camera."

Also in the New York Times:

• David L Stern reports from Kazakhstan: "Call it, if you will, the Revenge of the Borats. Flush with oil profits, led by a prideful autocrat, this emerging petro-state is experiencing a cinematic boomlet led by KazakhFilm, the state-run movie company. Mongol, which was financed privately and directed by a Russian, is the country's first Oscar nominee, a visually lush work that depicts the early years of the Asian steppes' most famous ancient leader with graphic battle scenes to make Sam Peckinpah blush."

• Caryn James looks ahead to a new season in New York theater: "At the top of my want-to-see list, mostly because it pairs a first-rate actor with one of our best playwrights, is Stephen Rea in Sam Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horse, a one-man, one-act, one-horse play in which the horse's death sets off a Beckettian existential crisis." Speaking of Beckett, John Turturro will be appearing in Endgame. Then there's Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand in Clifford Odets's The Country Girl, Laura Linney and Mamie Gummer in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, "the revival of Christopher Hampton's version of the 18th-century novel about a femme fatale who schemes to ruin a young woman's honor, for pure sport," and Ellen Burstyn in Stephen Adly Guirgis's Little Flower of East Orange, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

• "Variety, Publishers Weekly and dozens of other trade publications are going up for sale as the publishing company Reed Elsevier looks to get out of the uncertain advertising market," reports Brian Stelter.

In a strange piece for Newsweek, Richard B Woodward argues that There Will Be Blood is a mess because Paul Thomas Anderson wrote it as well as directed it.

"Economics in Motion Pictures." If you're in the 11th or 12th grade and you think you've got an essay on this topic in you, see the Dallas Fed's contest announcement. Via Tim Hanrahan, who's got a few ideas in the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog. Via Paul Krugman, who suggests one more.

Some of Jean-Dominique Bauby's friends are not happy with the liberties taken in the telling of the now-famous story in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Beth Arnold talks with them for Salon. Related: Andrew Gumbel profiles Julian Schnabel for the Independent.

Which is where James Mottram talks with Brian De Palma.

United Artists won't turn 90 until next January, but it's celebrating now. David Thomson tells the story behind the studio. Also in the Guardian: Ronald Bergan remembers cinematographer Edward Klosinski.

And: "The names of directors Richard Lester, Ken Russell and Tony Richardson conjure up a time, in the 1960s and early 70s, when British films were refreshing, lively and innovative. The Oscar-winning cinematographer David Watkin, who has died of prostate cancer aged 82, made almost as much of a contribution to this rich period as they did, particularly on the eight films he shot for Lester."

Cinematical's Kim Voynar talks with No End in Sight director Charles Ferguson.

Lynn Barber meets Anita Pallenberg for the Observer. "I am officially here to talk about Anita's role in a film called Mister Lonely directed by Harmony Korine." But of course, the Stones aren't exactly going to go unmentioned.

FilmInFocus is running a bit from Peter Cowie's 2006 talk with Jeanne Moreau.

Online listening tip. Rob Davis talks with Mike White about Year of the Dog and with Marjane Satrapi about Persepolis.

Online viewing tip. David Edelstein and Alex Gibney discuss Taxi to the Dark Side on Bloggerheads.tv.

Order of the Exile @ 1.

Order of the Exile: Concerning the Films of Jacques Rivette celebrates its first anniversary with its heftiest update yet. For starters, there's a 1981 interview with Rivette conducted by Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, appearing in English for the first time, thanks to Louisa Shea.

David Pratt-Robson, assisted by Jeremi Szaniawski, translates two pieces by Rivette, "On Abjection" and "The Kill."

Another quick punch comes via Andreas Volkert.

Liz Heron translates Rivette's "Age of metteurs en scene," which appeared in Cahiers du cinéma in 1954.

Sally Shafto has something of a Rivette primer, "Noli me tangere: Jacques Rivette, Out 1, and the New Wave."

Craig Keller translates excerpts from Jean-Marc Lalanne and Jean-Baptiste Morain's March 2007 interview with Rivette for Les Inrockuptibles.

Books, 2/24.

"Only Fellini could dream this: 'Sophia Loren has drowned in her bathtub. Weeping, I'm the one who has to tell Carlo Ponti.... I note that he has a wig of thick hair on his head, and that he looks pretty good with it on.'" For Vanity Fair, Bruce Handy previews The Book of Dreams.

David Mamet is "the greatest American playwright of his generation," declares Jeremy McCarter, but Ira Nadel's David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre isn't the biography we need: "The definitive biography will need to cut more finely, separating not just successes from failure but success from success. Mamet has written a scathing play about sexual politics, Oleanna; the screenplay for a brilliant and (I'd wager) timeless political satire, Wag the Dog; and an uproarious courtroom farce, Romance. But these all pale next to American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross." What's more, "the definitive Mamet biography will above all need to give a full accounting of his voice. Mamet, according to [Gregory] Mosher, 'worked the iambic pentameter out of the vernacular of the underclass.' For all the comparisons to [Harold] Pinter, there is nothing like Mamet's profane poetry in modern drama."

"Relying almost exclusively on secondary sources, Nadel has constructed a very shaky edifice upon which to discuss Mamet's singular career," agrees Marc Weingarten in the Los Angeles Times.

Back in the New York Times: Upton Sinclair "flirted with Hollywood for most of his long life," notes Anthony Arthur, who lists several of the writer's projects ranging from 1914 through 1967 as well as his friends: Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Sergei Eisenstein. "But Sinclair, the author of more than 90 books, never made the big movie strike he hoped for." Now, of course, There Will Be Blood. "What is there about Oil! that has made it, by proxy, such a gusher?" Related: Jennifer Schuessler at Paper Cuts.

"I've never been a fan of [Derek] Jarman's art or even his films, many of which feature in a new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery," writes Michael Collins. "As a native Londoner with a link to the neighbourhood that Jarman made his home in the 1970s, and with a passion for the Kent coast around Dungeness where he lived in the years before his death in 1994, I prefer his diaries (Modern Nature, Dancing Ledge, Smiling in Slow Motion) and the early Super 8 footage in which he documents his impressions of these landscapes."

Also in the Guardian: Simon Callow on Patrick Newley's The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick: The Life of Rex Jameson and Michael Coveney on Michael Munn's Richard Burton: Prince of Players.

The Observer's Philip French recalls meeting Paul Bowles and becoming an advocate: "I once tried to persuade John Boorman to film The Sheltering Sky, and even offered to collaborate on the screenplay, but he thought it was unfilmable. Fortunately Bernardo Bertolucci didn't agree."

Charles Matthews on Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood:

The conventional way of writing about five movies would be to devote a section of the book to each. But [Mark] Harris does something more difficult and far more illuminating: He weaves together the stories of how each movie was conceived, crafted, released, critiqued and received. He writes about the five or six years in which the filmmakers, some of them old pros and some of them rank novices, struggled with a studio system in collapse, an audience whose tastes and enthusiasms seemed wildly unpredictable, and a culture being transformed by volatile social and political forces.

Related online listening: Harris is a guest on On Point.

Back in the Washington Post: "Charlotte Chandler's new book, Not the Girl Next Door, tries to refute the image of [Joan] Crawford as a domestic fiend by telling the star's side of the story as gleaned from extended interviews with her in the mid-1970s," writes John Epperson (Lypsinka). "Perhaps it's very Joan Crawford of me to expect a book to be tidier and more disciplined (imagine the neatness hell that Crawford put her editors and co-authors through when she wrote her own books, A Portrait of Joan and My Way of Life), but I will give in to my (possibly neurotic) desire for perfection and report that a fully satisfying Crawford biography has yet to be written."

And Mark Athitakis reviews Dennis McDougal's Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became The Biggest Movie Star In Modern Times and Eric Lax's Conversations With Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking.

Anticipating SXSW, 2/24.

Dreams with Sharp Teeth (site), "titled after the author's omnibus edition, shows [Harlan] Ellison twice circa 1981, in an upfront interview and during one of many occasions when he scripted a short story entirely on display in a bookstore window," writes Matthew Sorrento in Identity Theory. "While such footage would be essential in covering Ellison, we are in good hands to know that [director Erik] Nelson shot the footage himself as a young man and has been documenting the author ever since."

"Jumping freely from coast to coast, Bi the Way (2008 [site]) examines the apparent trend in bisexuality in the new millennium," writes Flickhead. "The commenting writers, clinicians and analysts vary in age, but the 'test case' participants are all under 30 - as are [filmmakers Brittany] Blockman and [Josephine] Decker."

Cinematical's Erik Davis is weirded out by the trailer for A Necessary Death.

Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks with Michael Lerman, co-writer and co-director of the SXSW Emerging Visions selection Natural Causes.

Spirit Awards.

Juno has won Best Feature, Best Female Lead (Ellen Page) and Best First Screenplay (Diablo Cody) at this evening's Film Independent's Spirit Awards. The Savages picked up two awards, one for Philip Seymour Hoffman and another for Tamara Jenkins for her screenplay.

For a complete list of the winners, take your pick: Cinematical or indieWIRE.

Updated through 2/25.

Before the winners were announced, Kim Voynar posted a fine overview of probably the most interesting category: "The five nominees for the John Cassavetes Award at this year's Film Independent Spirit Awards are a diverse lot representing five very different films: Chris Eska's August Evening [which won], Stephane Gauger's Owl and the Sparrow, Aaron Katz's Quiet City, Jeff Nichols's Shotgun Stories and Chris Smith's The Pool. indieWIRE spoke with each of the nominees about their acclaimed films, their backgrounds, and their future plans. The prize honors the best of the low-budget films produced each year, singling out five films each made for under $500,000."

Updates, 2/24: Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay comments on the winners and the show itself.

AJ Schnack's got pix from the scene.

Update, 2/25: Matt Dentler spent two and a half hours on the red carpet with Alison Willmore - and he's got pix.

Sight & Sound. March 08.

The Frat Pack's in the cover of the new issue of Sight & Sound and Henry K Miller roots out the origins by tracing the many ways Indiewood and Saturday Night Live/MTV have cross-pollinated. For example:

The resemblances between The Cable Guy and Fight Club were not down to personal connections between their makers or to direct influence, but to some more diffuse generational synchronicity. Nonetheless, the comedic tradition [Jim] Carrey, [Ben] Stiller and [Judd] Apatow had all been schooled in flowed through [David] Fincher's film. With its rituals and para-situationist pranks, Tyler's 'Project Mayhem' is as much fraternity as terror cell, and Fincher himself has cited National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) as inspiration, Bluto duking it out with Jake La Motta for paternity rights. Edward Norton has characterised the film's controversial second half as 'so obviously about what goes wrong when a bunch of frat boys start taking themselves too seriously' - and much the same is true of the film that gave the Frat Pack its unfortunate name, Todd Phillips's Old School (2003).

David Thomson on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist: "[H]ere is the thing that's striking in a film from 1970: Clerici is not brave, reckless, outgoing or charming but is ingrowing, cold, a snob, a coward, a tragic figure who shrugs off his own pain with constant assumptions of superiority. He is a fascist. And I think it's worth noting, if only historically, that there are ways in which the shock of The Conformist - and no one was really ready for it - enabled the ocean-liner team spirit of a film that came only two years later, and for which Al Pacino might have been advised to study [Jean-Louis] Trintignant (I'm just guessing)."

Kim Newman on Diary of the Dead: "While many film-makers have taken the suspense mechanics, gore or panicky-nasty characters of [Night of the Living Dead] as models, its satirical social commentary, which reappears here, remains [George] Romero's own."

"Criterion's handsome high-definition digital transfer, boasting a tumultuous mono mix and fully revealing the film's Panavision vistas for the first time on video, goes a long way towards promoting The Naked Prey as an important chapter in the history of independent US filmmaking," writes Tim Lucas. "Michael Atkinson's notes are a forceful defence of a truly hellbent film which, he writes, is 'not quite politically correct' but 'caring nothing for aesthetics and everything for surviving [its own] experience.'"

Catherine Wheatley on The Edge of Heaven: "Billed as the second instalment in [Fatih Akin's] 'Love, Death and the Devil' trilogy, it offers a technically accomplished and deeply compassionate meditation on loss and consolation, as its mosaic narrative follows the intersecting lives of six characters travelling between Istanbul and Hamburg."

Mark Sinker on Helvetica: "[W]hat's lovely about Gary Hustwit's documentary is that it not only gets across the passions, absurd and detailed, that shape this world [of fonts and such] (passions about effects few of us can name and some never notice at all) but also sketches a timeline in changing technologies and fashions over a half-century."

Césars. Winners.

"Edith Piaf biopic La môme (La Vie en Rose) from Olivier Dahan went home with five Césars, the French national film prizes, yesterday evening, making it the biggest winner, but it was Abdellatif Kechiche's immigrant tale La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) that was the real winner, going home with four Césars including Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay." Boyd van Hoeij has more at european-films.net.

New-York Ghost. Film issue.

"The Ghost's yearly film issue features writing by Luc Sante - Craig Keller - Victoria Nelson - Jason McBride - Toni Schlesinger - Christoph Huber - Ed Park - B Kite - D Cairns - Bill Krohn - and more. (Actually no: that's it!) Read about some of the best American and foreign movies of 2007, plus video treasures, and the Guy Maddin movie none of us will ever see."

Reminder. Live-Blogging the Oscars.

As we head into the weekend, I wanted to drop a reminder that on Sunday night - Oscar Night, of course - GreenCine will be staging a live-blogging event hosted by our own Craig Phillips and featuring commentators such as Karie Bible, Erin Donovan, Vince Keenan, Stacie Ponder, Agnes Varnum and a few surprise stoppers-by. And of course, you.

Right on up to Sunday night, keep up with goings on all over with the Oscars countdown.

Interview. Stefan Ruzowitzky.

The Counterfeiters, nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category, is based on true events: the Nazis planned to destabilize the American and British economies by flooding the markets with fake dollars and pounds. And they enlisted prisoners in concentration camps to counterfeit the bills. This presents a dark dilemma to the prisoners: cooperate and survive - or sabotage the project and possibly pay with their lives.

"I don't think there is the right way to behave in a situation like that," director Stefan Ruzowitzky tells Michael Guillén.

Meantime, reviews are still being collected here.

Update, 2/25: And then, the Oscar: "Ruzowitzky hopes the international success of his critically acclaimed The Counterfeiters will push Austrian officials to take the country's film industry more seriously," reports Spiegel Online.

State Legislature.

"Opening at Anthology Film Archives this Friday, the hypnotic, beautiful State Legislature clocks in at nearly four captivating hours. It's another seminal entry in [Frederick] Wiseman's lifelong project of depicting the inner lives of American institutions, and it's also a remarkable affirmation of the 78-year-old filmmaker's continuing relevance and creativity." Bilge Ebiri talks with "the legendary documentarian" for New York.

"State Legislature is an impeccably constructed illustration in depth, ceaselessly alert and cumulatively profound," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Given the subject, spells of monotony are to be expected; vital as they are, the mechanics of workaday democracy lack the obvious dramatic voltage of, say, Domestic Violence (2001). Given the particular tenacious genius of Wiseman, however, even the most listless passages here (water policy, zzzz...) produce unexpected sparks."

"Shot during the 2004 legislative session (and on 16-millimeter film), the 217-minute documentary constitutes the latest chapter in Mr Wiseman's decades-long inquiry into American institutions from schools to prisons, an inquiry that is at once a detailed and expansive vision of a modern bureaucratic state and its people," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "This is democracy in action from the ground up, wholly unheroic and absolutely mesmerizing."

Fests and events, 2/22.

"MoMA's Documentary Fortnight 2008 continues this weekend with the first of two sidebars devoted to Joan Churchill, the pioneer female director / cinematographer who produced a prolific body of work in the 1970s, when both professions were almost exclusively male," writes Rich Zwelling in the Reeler.

When the Independent asked Colin MacCabe to write an obituary of Derek Jarman - well before the man was to actually die, it turns out - he realized that "an obituary without images seemed inadequate," he recalls in the New Statesman. "We agreed to spend a day recording in images his own account of his life, which I would then use in future to make a film obituary. This footage would eventually form the basis of Derek, which goes on show this month at the Serpentine Gallery in London." And the exhibition, curated by Isaac Julien, will be on view through April 13.

The Film Panel Notetaker talks with Ed Pincus and Lucia Small about The Axe in the Attic, screening at the Museum of the Moving Image on Saturday.

"Effectively (intentionally?) playing the scares for laughs and eschewing the oversaturated confectionary palette of his two previous films - Tears of the Black Tiger and Citizen Dog - Thai director Wisit Sasanatieng's third feature The Unseeable maintains a menacing enough atmosphere, primarily through a fantastic haunted country house and its surrounding compound, the shift to a shadowy grey-green palette, and a cascading 'wait there's more!' finale." Michael Guillén begins his coverage of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. March 13 through 23.

Vince Keenan's double-barrelled reviews keep on coming from the just-wrapped Noir City Northwest.

Anticipating SXSW, 2/22.

Crawford [site] is a smart and absorbing documentary about the changes within the small Texas town George W Bush moved to while running for President in 2000," writes Flickhead Ray Young. "No one since Richard Nixon has divided the American people as sharply, and Bush extended his bulldozing effect to neighbors he never knew in a remote corner far beyond his station. Director David Modigliani, here making his feature debut, captures roughly six years' worth of the heat and heartbreak in Crawford in the President's chaotic wake."

"First a traveling museum exhibition and book, Beautiful Losers [site], is now an unique documentary celebrating the independent and DIY spirit that unified a loose-knit group of American artists who emerged from the underground worlds of skateboarding, graffiti, punk and hip hop," notes the Hype Wire.

Hollywood Bitchslap's series of interviews conducted in anticipation of SXSW rushes onward:

• Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs (Humboldt County; site).

• Stephen Higgins and Nina Gilden Seavey (The Matador, site).

• Brandon Linden (Bootleg Wisconsin, site).

• Rachel Goslins ('Bama Girl).

• Mary Bronstein (Yeast).

• Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss (Full Battle Rattle, site).

• Emily Hubley (The Toe Tactic).

• And Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza (Second Skin, site).

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin are following up Kamp Katrina with Intimidad (site), a doc about a couple living on the border between Texas and Mexico. Karina Longworth interviews them at the SpoutBlog.

And this just in: More from Karina Longworth, who talks with Barry Jenkins about Medicine for Melancholy (site), a "beautifully shot examination of 24 hours in the lives of a boy and girl who hook up at a party in San Francisco, Jenkins's film has already been compared to certain other handmade movies about the personal dramas of lost urban youth. But Melancholy is politically engaged and formally ambitious in ways that films of this budget level often are not. More than a relationship drama, it's a portrait of the city in which its set, a grafting of tentative romance onto the city's very real, very rocky terrain of race, class and cultural conflict." Earlier: Michael Guillén.

Shorts, 2/22.

"'You really think No Country for Old Men, that movie was better than ours!' [Paul Thomas] Anderson hooted. 'C'mon, do you really believe that?' The Bagger was flattered that anyone cared about his opinion on films, even if it was someone who kept telling him that he knew nothing. Mr Anderson laughed one more time, clapped the Bagger on his back and wished him on his merry, misguided way."

As Michelle Orange might put it, Zachary Wigon drops the S-Bomb in a piece at the House Next Door on "the effusive critical praise of No Country" before dropping another:

The critical reaction to the Coen Brothers' film was symptomatic of the same kind of post-ideological shifting that Zizek referred to in his numerous examples [in "Passion In The Era of Decaffeinated Belief"] - it was symptomatic of criticism shifting its emphasis from content to form, from dominance over the work of art through interpretation to submissiveness beneath the work's formal powers. To submit to a film's aesthetic workings without thinking about what those workings imply, as [AO] Scott so happily did, is to turn off the critical faculties of one's mind. It is the same kind of turning-off that allows propaganda films, which can contain reprehensible content but gorgeous stylization, to work so powerfully.

Stuart Jeffries meets Bernardo Bertolucci: "Significantly, it was during the making of The Conformist that Bertolucci went deeply into Freudian analysis. Up to that point, his earlier films such as Before the Revolution, The Spider's Stratagem and even The Grim Reaper, had been made under Godard's influence. Do you feel you grew up in making The Conformist? 'Completely. At a certain moment I had to be careful not to be imitating, not to be a forger, to do Godard fakes. I think it's not only my experience but the experience of a lot of people of my generation.'"

Also at/in/etc the Guardian, David Thomson on Jennifer Jason Leigh; and Chris Wiegand introduces a series of clips from La Dolce Vita.

"Since 1985, with his first novel, Days Between Stations, and now with Zeroville, his eighth - and best - novel, [Steve] Erickson has been a singular voice in American fiction, for my money our most imaginative native novelist," writes Charles Taylor in the Nation. Zeroville is "about what happens when the idea of movies as communal experience gives way to the idea of movies as private obsession."

"In embarking on the mammoth, open-ended project that is The New Cult Canon, I face the scary and exhilarating prospect of a journey with no set course and no planned destination, but there was never a question that I'd be leaving port with Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "To my mind, Donnie Darko is the quintessential cult movie of the last 20 years."

The Telegraph draws up a list of "the 100 best films" of all time.

"Like strange desert creatures, a little girl and her blind grandfather emerge from storm-shifted sands, dust themselves off and set out on a journey with no map or timetable in Bab'Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul, a film steeped in Sufi mysticism and as transcendent as that opening sequence," writes Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times.

Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm "may lay it on too thick with its You Go, Girl! message, but in the end it does bring to life a remarkably amusing and strange secret history," writes Tamara Strauss in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey reviews My Blueberry Nights, "a below-par film from Wong Kar Wai," and The Boss of It All, which "has a devilish central idea, and a bone-dry comic tone reminiscent of [Lars] von Trier's masterful TV serial The Kingdom." And Sheila Johnston talks with von Trier for the Telegraph, where Sukhdev Sandhu reviews the same pair of films.

Christian Johnston is in Lebanon, shooting a film "about a group of armed foreigners who come to Beirut and almost set off a factional war by mistake." Robert F Worth reports from a nervous set.

Also in the New York Times:

• Jennifer 8 Lee's got a list: "City Room, after polling experts, friends, family and the guy in the next cubicle, picked out a list of films (one for each decade) which, like Michael Clayton, seemed to capture the contemporary New York of the eras in which they were made."

• "If the attention span of Charlie Bartlett didn't wander here and there, the movie might have been a high school satire worthy of comparison with Alexander Payne's Election," writes Stephen Holden. "But as it dashes around and eventually turns soft, it loses its train of thought." Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in the Chicago Reader, is reminded of Pump Up the Volume: "[I]t may provoke audiences as much as [Allan] Moyle's movie did 18 years ago." More from Carina Chocano (LAT), Jim Emerson, Ella Taylor (LA Weekly), Scott Tobias (AV Club) and Elbert Ventura (indieWIRE); and Cinematical's Erik Davis talks with screenwriter Gustin Nash.

• Manohla Dargis has seen Rashomon. She knows Rashomon. Rashomon is a favorite of hers. Vantage Point, you're no Rashomon. More from Brandon Fibbs (cinemattraction), Shawn Levy (Oregonian), Scott Tobias (AV Club), Kenneth Turan (LAT) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon).

• "The flesh is weak but the spirit is indestructible in Cover, a ham-fisted morality tale eager to prove that infidelity may be bad but playing with a member of one's own team is infinitely worse," writes Jeannette Catsoulis.

"In a recent story in the Nation, Chris Hayes used 2,200-plus words to argue why progressives should back Sen Barack Obama," notes Brian Cook in In These Times. "I'll use only seven: Obama's favorite TV show is The Wire. It's certainly true, as Hayes noted, that Obama, like every presidential candidate, won't be saying one word about the prison-industrial complex or the disastrous consequences of the 'war on drugs.' But it's heartening to think that at least he's tuning in to one of the few public forums that fiercely drags such issues into our consciousness."

Conrad Veidt has Erich Kuersten at Bright Lights After Dark thinking "that the twisted end product of sexual repression can actually be beautiful; longing even at its most wretched and stunted can still be transfigured into art."

New blog on the block. David Cairns's Shadowplay, via Girish.

Rob Humanick's VHS Blog-a-Thon is on through February 28.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Ed Hardy Jr.

Online quick snicker. Cory Doctorow's got one at Boing Boing.

Online gander. "More Stars Than There Are in HUAC" at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

The Edge of Heaven in the UK.

"Fatih Akin, whose Head-On (2004) is one of the great films of the decade, returns to scour the same vexed ground of exile and migration in The Edge of Heaven," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent. "His obsession with the relationship between Germany and Turkey (his roots lie in both) is becoming as intense as Sam Peckinpah's with the US and Mexico, only with less blood and whisky."

"This is an intriguing, complex, beautifully acted and directed piece of work, partly a realist drama of elaborate coincidences, near-misses and near-hits, further tangled with shifts in the timeline - and partly an almost dreamlike meditation with visual symmetries and narrative rhymes," writes Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.

Updated through 2/24.

In the Evening Standard, Derek Malcolm notes that of Akin's five features, "This is his least melodramatic and most assured."

"As in Head-On, fate dominates proceedings, but there’s no escaping the contrivances of Akin's script," writes Dave Calhoun for Time Out.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 2/24: "If you dislike The Edge of Heaven you could, as I've suggested, sneer at the use of coincidence," writes Philip French in the Observer. "If you think well of it, as I do, you will accept it as a carefully patterned narrative of parallels, echoes and fateful encounters that reflect on the relationships between father and son, mother and daughter, on the themes of duty, obligation, sacrifice and redemption, and above all on the nature of family, exile, roots and national identity."

And, as noted above, Catherine Wheatley reviews Edge for Sight & Sound.

Be Kind Rewind.

"Like his previous feature The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry's gently outlandish Be Kind Rewind is a fantasy about fantasy - a fragile, somewhat precious celebration of DIY filmmaking and cult-film consumption that, given its gaps in logic, spectators are more or less obliged to mentally assemble on their own." J Hoberman in the Voice.

"Be it whimsy overload or muddled politics, Be Kind Rewind contains reminders of the limits of this brilliant artist," writes Elbert Ventura in Reverse Shot. "That the movie still enthralls is a testament to the fact that Gondry's starting point - an aesthetic in which each frame bears its maker's sensibility - is miles ahead of where most filmmakers aspire to be."

Premiere's Glenn Kenny finds Rewind "slight and finally unconvincing, alas.... Part of the problem's the writing: Gondry's just not that good at it." And here, "one feels he wants you to buy something he himself can't be bothered to believe in."

Updated through 2/25.

"Gondry's comedy, which can't seem to get either [Mos] Def or the normally robust [Jack] Black out of second gear, is never able to transcend the illogical underpinnings of its plot and its numerous anachronisms, no matter how much fanciful whimsy the gifted Frenchman and his collaborators can conjure from the settings and their performers," writes Brandon Harris.

"If it weren't so genuinely ramshackle, Be Kind Rewind would be a terrific, brainy thesis film masked as shabby, pop fantasy lark," writes Vadim Rizov in the Reeler. "Gondry-lovers will want more from their boy, Black stalwarts will definitely want better for theirs."

"To call the narrative shambling and the acting amateurish is not wholly an insult, because Be Kind Rewind is determinedly unslick," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Gondry, like many French-born filmmakers, has the Big Deconstructionist Idea. He's exploring the gulf between the democratization of moviemaking and the daunting amount of money, technical resources, and personnel it takes to make anything that the mainstream audience will want to see. He's also showing how far a little bit of wit and humanity can go."

"In good whimsy - [Pushing Daisies], say, or Amélie - you have colorful art direction, larger-than-life characters, and charming but not particularly realistic situations, but it all works because there's a core of believability to the storytelling," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "And then there's bad whimsy, which brings us to Be Kind Rewind. Bad whimsy has all the great art direction and nutty plot setups, but they all get shoehorned into a real-world context, whereby the characters can only exist in this bell jar of kookiness by acting like they've all had frontal lobotomies."

"The surprisingly nostalgic sight of VHS boxes is the most poignant thing in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "It's like the closetful of stacked-away board games in The Royal Tenenbaums: the detritus of our youth or of once-shared passions.... Like Tim Burton turning the biopic Ed Wood into the loony story of communal activity, Gondry uses his nostalgia for the outmoded form of movies-on-videotape to reinforce a sense of social solidarity."

"A George Méliès for the age of infinite possibilities, Michel Gondry, like the music-hall conjurer turned f/x pioneer of cinema's infancy, takes 'the magic of movies' as a literal proposition, a matter of process," proposes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

"While the film does have a sweetness to its goofball comedy that is often quite warm, the 'heart' that a perfectly cast Mia Farrow laments is missing from most movies is here missing as well," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"This idea that people are capable of creating their own entertainment that not only they enjoy but other people can enjoy [is what drives this film]," Gondry tells the Vue Weekly's Brian Gibson. "And in the process they become really creative and they change the course of pop music or art or whatever. It's been going over and over in music. And I was imagining this phenomenon happening in film."

"It's a film that seems unwilling to go an inch out of its meandering way to impress you or make you smile, which may be why it's such a surprise when it occasionally manages both," writes Rob Davis in Paste.

Paul Matwychuk: "This is what you call a movie with its heart in the right place - it has an affection for the mongrel, homegrown culture of those pockets of the United States into which the corporations haven't yet penetrated that reminded me of those great Jonathan Demme movies of the 70s and 80s: Melvin and Howard, Citizens Band, Something Wild, Married to the Mob.

For the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, the film's got "a charming conceit, designed as a paean to the ramshackle; sadly, every minute of Gondry's film is irrefutable proof that charm is not enough."

"The established phenomenon of fan fiction has found new life in the intersection of film and the internet, spawning a vast parallel filmography of no-budget, DIY doppelgangers." Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian on Rewind and Son of Rambow.

Sara Cardace (Vulture), Brett Michel (Boston Phoenix), Keith Phipps (AV Club) and Nicolas Rapold (New York Sun) all interview Gondry.

Online listening tip. Spout's Kevin Buist and Paul Moore put ten bucks on the table and call up Gondry.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 2/22: "Sweet-natured and likable as the movie is, it never really delivers on the promise of its ingenious premise, which hints at a subversive retelling of mainstream Hollywood movies but stops short at goofy homage," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"It is propelled by neither the psychology of its characters nor the machinery of its plot, but rather by a leisurely desire to pass the time, to see what happens next, to find out what would happen if you tried to re-enact Ghostbusters in your neighbor's kitchen," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"Gondry isn't an especially skilled storyteller," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "The film has energy but no real pace. The characters don't grow so much as hang around, and his script frays into a bunch of loose strands. But the visual wit, game performances (including a glowing turn by Melonie Diaz as a neighbor roped into small-scale movie stardom), and overflowing humanity have more than made up for the shortcomings by the time the film finds a final moment that's simultaneously abrupt and magical. And clearly not designed by committee."

"It absolutely is not a rib-tickling movie-movie mashup, featuring affectionate, hilarious takedowns of movies you love and movies you love to hate," warns Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. The point, rather: "All of us have had our imaginations so thoroughly colonized by corporate entertainment product that to set ourselves free we have to exorcise it all first."

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian: "If you can imagine a movie-maker who sustained a career while never leaving his teenage bedroom - putting each completed film outside the door on a breakfast tray for his mum to collect on her way down to the kitchen - then you can imagine the work of Michael Gondry."

"This is a movie that takes place in no possible world, which may be a shame, if not for the movie, then for possible worlds," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Steve Erickson talks with Gondry for Film & Video.

Update, 2/23: "Be Kind Rewind, while erring just this side of too adorable for its own good - it's nothing if not enjoyable for once again showcasing Gondry's ingenious guerilla filmmaking tactics - is still a bit of a setback," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling. "Gondry may be a one-of-a-kind visualist, but he's far from a seasoned writer, and even with his new film's grassroots bid for racial harmony and take-back-the-neighborhood organizing there's something missing here on basic levels of character and story that prove Be Kind Rewind more a wishful nostalgic fantasy than the playful assaults on reality that have defined Gondry's previous efforts."

Update, 2/25: "[T]he most striking holdover from Gondry's work as a short-form director is his miniature montages - such as the vanishing memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the delusional dream sequences in Science of Sleep," writes AJ Goldmann, who also interviews Gondry for the New Republic.

Shorts, 2/21.

"I think [John] Ford is a great filmmaker, but I'm not used to thinking of him as a philosopher," writes Dan Sallitt. "And yet the most likely way to resolve the dissonances of Tobacco Road is to postulate that Ford simply has an unusual tolerance for the vicissitudes of the human condition."

In 1925, make-up meant encasing the face in grease and powder before stepping out into blinding carbon-arc lights. The Self-Styled Siren quotes a passage from Mary Astor's A Life on Film and follows up with a few delicious biographical tidbits. Side to the Siren: Vanity Fair's just handed its "Proust Questionnaire" to Joan Fontaine.

"If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today?" David Bordwell on His Girl Friday and the critical reassessment of Howard Hawks: "Scholars and the public discovered a masterpiece because they had virtually untrammeled access to it, and perhaps its gray-market status supplied an extra thrill. Thanks mainly to piracy, His Girl Friday was propelled into the canon."

"With the Oscars coming up, it felt like a great time to look at one of the best movies about movies I know - or, rather, if not necessarily the best, but certainly one of the juiciest." At SFGate's Culture Blog, James Rocchi recommends The Bad and the Beautiful.

Trevor Griffiths (site) is best known for having written Reds with Warren Beatty. "He was part of group of new writers including David Mercer, Ken Loach, Jim Allen and Dennis Potter who were associated with Tony Garnett, who brought a new realism to British television in the 1960s," writes Ann Talbot in a profile for the World Socialist Web Site. "In the theater, where much of his work has been done, he is one of a group of politicized playwrights that includes David Hare, Howard Brenton and David Edgar." His latest screenplay, recently published by Spokesman Books, is These are the Times: A Life of Thomas Paine, and Talbot argues it'd make a "great film." An interview accompanies her piece.

What "West Wing fans stunned by the similarity between the fictitious Matthew Santos and the real-life Barack Obama have not known is that the resemblance is no coincidence," reports Jonathan Freedland. "When the West Wing scriptwriters first devised their fictitious presidential candidate in the late summer of 2004, they modelled him in part on a young Illinois politician - not yet even a US senator - by the name of Barack Obama.... What's more, the West Wing had the Republicans choose between a Christian preacher - a pre-echo of Mike Huckabee - and an older, maverick senator from the American west whose liberal positions on some issues had earned the distrust of the party's conservative base: a dead ringer for John McCain."

Also in the Guardian: David Jenkins wonders why, in an age of crystal clear digital sound, we can't understand what actors are saying. Jenkins's major offender: Philip Seymour Hoffman.

"One particular subtext in all [Wes] Anderson-[Owen] Wilson collaborations recalls the work of Oscar Wilde - that is, life, through the medium of creativity and troubled genius, imitates art," writes Will Lasky at 24 Lies a Second. "Mapping the idea of 'life imitating art' onto Owen Wilson's biography and Wes Anderson's films reveals their startling convergence."

Paul Haggis and Michael Nozik have optioned Joseph Weisberg's CIA novel An Ordinary Spy. Josh Getlin looks into it for the Los Angeles Times.

David Fincher will direct an adaptation of Charles Burns's graphic novel, Black Hole, reports Variety's Tatiana Siegel. Via New York's Vulture, which has more up-n-coming news. Meantime, goldenfiddle points to Rick Kleffel's review of the novel.

Chris Barsanti is a bit taken back by "Warner Bros' announcement yesterday that they were backing a two-part live-action adaptation of Akira, set to star Leonardo DiCaprio whenever he takes time off from his next Scorsese film."

From a special issue of Transformations on "Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture," Catherine Russell on "Dialectical Film Criticism: Walter Benjamin's Historiography, Cultural Critique and the Archive" and Kristen Daly on "The Dissipating Aura of Cinema," in which she quotes Amos Vogel:

What kind of art is this that depends so heavily on the nature of its presentation, and to which access in a form close to its "original" becomes ever more impossible? What shall we do with the evanescence of film stock?... It is as if King Lear were available only one day per decade in one city per continent, in 50th-generation, pirated, Hong Kong copies of which entire pages were missing, individual paragraphs not quite readable, portions of characters obliterated with frustrating intimations of potential greatness; the stuff of Borges, of Kafka, of Marquez.

Via Bookforum.

"There are a variety of exercises in logic one can run though to demolish the theory that violent entertainment correlates to violent activity," notes James Rocchi in the Huffington Post. Among them: "Economically and demographically similar audiences are watching these films, and yet, viewers in other nations aren't making the leap to arming themselves and shooting people as the final possible act of film appreciation."

"Ramin Bahrani looked ecstatic when his sophomore feature, Chop Shop, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year," notes Eric Kohn, who talks with him for the New York Press. "Turning around to face the cheering crowd, the New York–based filmmaker was greeted by an enthusiastic Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian auteur whose neorealist aesthetic had a profound impact on the 37-year-old Bahrani."

"Israeli films serve as both conscience and instigator, possibly because artists are able to exert influence in a country of just 7.3 million people," writes Michael Fox at SF360. "But Israeli movies have been exposed to even bigger audiences in recent years, garnering praise, prizes and distribution deals on the international festival circuit. With the current and imminent release of The Band's Visit, Beaufort and Jellyfish in the US, on the heels of last year's Close to Home and The Bubble, the wave has reached our shores."

FilmInFocus interviews Brandon Harris of Cinema Echo Chamber.

"Taxi to the Dark Side uncovers no smoking gun," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "But better than any recent film, it demonstrates how the combination of hoo-rah slogans and amoral leadership translates into atrocity on the ground." Also, an interview with Alex Gibney.

Time's Joel Stein has had George Clooney over for dinner. Naturally, he's still getting over it. You can watch Clooney climb into his attic, too. Also: "George Clooney swears he has never lost an Oscar pool." Check out his picks and the pretty amusing quips that introduce them.

Steven Shaviro weighs in on the Daniel Plainview debate: "Everything that [Stephanie] Zacharek deplores about the performance is precisely what, to my mind, makes it so great. Day-Lewis's performance 'lacks spontaneity, fire, life,' because Daniel Plainview as a character is entirely devoid of these attributes. He's an empty shell, a hollow man, a mask without a face, a collection of annoying tics and raging drives with no interiority behind it."

"Here is a movie to stop the auteur theory dead in its tracks," offers Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Clearly, the British-born [Pete] Travis was recruited for Vantage Point on the basis of his excellent 2004 debut feature, Omagh, which restaged the events leading up to and following a devastating 1998 car bombing on a crowded retail street in the titular Northern Irish town. Produced by Paul Greengrass, and conceived as something of a companion film to his own Bloody Sunday, there wasn't a moment in Omagh that rang false. There's not a single one in Vantage Point that rings true."

Kyle Ryan talks with Amy Ryan at the AV Club.

More on Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood: David Ansen (Newsweek) and Mary Kaye Schilling (Los Angeles Times.

In the Independent, Stephen Applebaum revisits the Cruising brouhaha.

"[T]he Internet movie download era is more distant than pundits think, for four colossal reasons." David Pogue lists 'em in the New York Times.

Online viewing tip #1. At Shooting Down Pictures, Girish Shambu comments on The Woman in the Window and the cinema of Fritz Lang in general.

Online viewing tip #2. "Tight dresses and rhine-stone rings, drinkin' up the band's beers..." Flickhead's got Joni Mitchell backed by an all-star band in their prime.

Online viewing tips. At retroCRUSH, Robert Berry's got clips of the 25 "Greatest Duets of All Time." Via Fimoculous.

Fests and events, 2/21.

Miklós Jancsó will be in London on the weekend of March 14 through 16 to talk about his work at a series of screenings. The next day he'll be in Cambridge and then, on Wednesday, March 19, in Edinburgh. "This is a must-see event for UK cinephiles, and a rare opportunity to engage this formally innovative, politically and poetically adventurous filmmaker," writes Doug Cummings, who has details at Masters of Cinema.

"The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art this morning announced the line-up for the 37th edition of New Directors/New Films," and ST VanAirsdale's got it at the Reeler. March 26 through April 6.

"Separation is the myth and the reality of Ritwik Ghatak's cinema. His work screams it, shouts it, sings it in image and sound." In the Boston Phoenix, Chris Fujiwara previews Politics and Melodrama: The Partition Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak, running tomorrow through Sunday at the Harvard Film Archive.

"Last year's Nevermore Film Festival eschewed the flesh-carving, bone-crunching gore of mainstream cinema's torture-porn craze in favor of psychological terrors to die for," writes Kathy Justice in the Independent Weekly. "This year's lineup is a continuation of the festival's preference for subtlety and nuance in horror." Tomorrow through Sunday.

"Even when they put [Sergei] Paradjanov in the gulag, he still drew on scraps of paper and made beautiful dolls from mailbag sacking. He couldn't stop the flow of ideas and images that poured from his innately visual mind; but the state tried its best, destroying his health and ensuring that he completed only four features in the last 26 years of his life, which should have been his creative prime. These four movies are the primary focus of LACMA's welcome retrospective of Paradjanov's breathtaking mature work." John Patterson previews the series for the LA Weekly. Tomorrow through February 29.

"Metro's annual Prairie Tales is consistently reliable in sharing a courageous set of films and videos that deserve to be witnessed with a clear eye, as hard as it may be to achieve," writes Jonathan Busch in the Vue Weekly. "The program provides a satisfying window into the uniquely Albertan filmic sensibility, a heavily debated blend of cityscapes, history, smooth topography, loneliness and oil. Like last year and the one before that, it's a selection with a preference for films that locate a specific personality at the centre of fresh ideas and visions." This Saturday.

Karina Longworth's latest SXSW preview at the SpoutBlog: Bootleg Wisconsin. Director Brandon Linden tells her: "My concept of it would read something like this: 'If a Swedish director watched too many Naruse films drunk and then decided to do a near silent remake of Brief Encounter in a Midwest outlet mall you would have my film.'"

The Voice's J Hoberman takes note of the Tribute to IFC Films at the BAMcinématek from February 29 through March 6.

"If there is a kindred spirit to Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget a stark and brooding portrait of aging, mortality, and loneliness, it is probably Ventura Pons's contemporary film, Barcelona (A Map), a rumination on architecture and empty spaces as a reflection of internalized, decaying emotional landscapes," writes acquarello. Film Comment Selects runs through February 28.

The Counterfeiters.

"At its best - and queasiest - The Counterfeiters asks disturbing questions more commonly found in the survivor literature of Primo Levi or Bruno Bettelheim than at the movies," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Without resorting to the crassly relativist reversals in Paul Verhoeven's idiotic Black Book (treacherous resisters! sensitive Nazis! who knew?), [director and co-writer Stefan] Ruzowitzky quietly asks what counts as moral behavior under fascism, and whether or not one's first duty is to survive."

"Nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Counterfeiters manages to be devastating without a hint of sentimentality," writes Raphaela Weissman in the New York Press. "Ruzowitzky's straightforward approach to this unusual story and cinematographer Benedict Neunfels's documentary-style immediacy transcend the now well-worn Holocaust genre, bringing another side of the tragedy into unflinching focus."

Updated through 2/22.

"Though once Holocaust dramas were considered something of a tough sell, for art-house crowds this genre is the closest thing to a known quantity," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "And Ruzowitzky's technique is as predictable as his subject... [W]hat else would one expect from the director of the gross-out German horror flicks Anatomy and Anatomy 2? Exploitation, it seems, comes in many forms."

"On its own limited terms, it's watchable if unedifying," writes Robert Cashill. "As an Academy Award nominee, it's a phony."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Ruzowitzky "about the movie's moral complexities, his Nazi grandparents and rescuing his school play aged 10."

The Reeler meets Ruzowitzky as well; and Robert W Welkos profiles him for the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: Reviews from the UK; and Bill Weber in Slant.

Updates, 2/22: "The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "I suppose that is a built-in dilemma of the Holocaust movie as a genre. Filmmakers either try to take the full, horrible measure of the subject, at the risk of overwhelming or alienating a modern audience, or else, in trying to make the story bearable, they subvert its truth. The Counterfeiters, in the manner of its flawed, fascinating hero, tries in good faith to navigate this ethically treacherous ground. That it succeeds more than it fails owes something to Mr Ruzowitsky's skill and good sense, and even more to his lead actor's instinct and conviction."

"While Ruzowitzky's script occasionally suffers from the theatrical instinct to give each character his big breakdown - the chance to overturn or break something in a frenzy of despair - the story is tightly woven and urgently drawn," writes Michelle Orange in the Reeler.

"The Counterfeiters' look at the mechanics of currency duplication is fascinating, but the real drama of the film is the conflict that develops between Sorowitsch [Karl Markovics] and another member of the team, printer Adolf Burger (August Diehl)," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

"Like Schindler's List, it's a Holocaust movie... with hope," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "It's serious, but it's also conventional and commercially slick."

"The contest between the idealist and the survival artist seems to me the heart of this movie," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "The former is willing, even eager, to sacrifice all of his fellow prisoners (or should we call them his colleagues?) for his principles. The latter insists that a man's first duty is to live, which is the natural precondition for - perhaps - doing something useful later, should the opportunity arise. I'm with Salomon. When you're dead, you're dead."

The Signal.

"If Paddy Chayefsky and Newton Minow had ever bonded over too many cocktails - secretly spiked by Neil Postman - the result might have been The Signal, a grungy warning to anyone who would rather watch than engage," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in Reverse Shot. "Exuberantly merging sci-fi, horror, and black comedy, three writer-directors each take responsibility for one third of the narrative; and if the outcome is more zealous than lucid that's not to say the experiment lacks merit. There's nothing like the combination of low budget and high anxiety for liberating the id."

Updated through 2/22.

"It seems there's a new, derivative horror movie hitting the multiplexes every week these days, drawing the usual audiences who know exactly what to expect and like it that way," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "Here's hoping they find their way to The Signal, which has something those movies don't: Originality."

"[T]his uneven but impressive shot-on-digital shocker earns a marker in the mausoleum of apocalyptic horror - a genre that's proving (un)surprisingly durable in the new century," notes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "Employing its interlocked multipart narrative more convincingly than anything Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu has done since Amores Perros - the appearance and recurrence of characters in each other's stories seems organic and unforced - The Signal borrows the most potent trope from the late-90s Japanese horror craze: the transmission of unspecified evil along the electronic teats plugged into every surge protector and car jack (TVs, radios, cell phones). Amusingly, The Signal - a radar blip at South by Southwest 2007 and a fanboy word-of-mouth sensation ever since - is busy insinuating itself into households using the same methods: MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube."

At FEARnet, Scott Weinberg talks with directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry; producer Alexander Motlagh; and actors AJ Bowen, Justin Welborn and Scott Poythress.

Online listening tip. Ed Champion also talks with the cast and crew.

Updates, 2/21: "The recent commercial success of Cloverfield showed that Hollywood could easily exploit 9/11 anxieties for entertainment value, overruling the need for narratives exploring the frighteningly intangible threat of media saturation," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Fortunately, there's The Signal, the brilliant independent production from a close-knit gang of Atlanta-based filmmakers released this week. It takes this frequently neglected issue to task with McLuhanean efficiency, but it's also one badass horror film."

And the Reeler talks with the group.

Updates, 2/22: "A union of three 'transmissions,' each the work of one of the individual filmmakers, The Signal combines Pulp Fiction-style multi-plot storytelling with dystopic satire and enough body rending to satisfy the most discriminating torture porn enthusiasts," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Nevertheless, The Signal sparks with its own original energy even as it revisits and indulges its influences."

In the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz briefly considers the three parts of The Signal. More from Jim Emerson.

Shorts, 2/20.

"Finding the original sources for Redacted is a difficult task," write Stéphane Delorme and Jean-Philippe Tessé, blogging an ongoing project for Cahiers du cinéma. "Only approximations come out of our genealogical study: tracking down images to their source is tantamount to a grand fishing party. For every big fish (the full text of the imprecating young punk on YouTube,) we came across multiple schools of fish, of micro-films shot by American soldiers unconsciously aggregating in motifs and sub-genres. In the end, the crossing of this war in images is closer to Jackass than Platoon."

"There should be no question that Godard has been to his medium what Joyce, Stravinsky, Eliot and Picasso were to theirs - utterly unique, rule-rewriting colossi after whom human expression would never be quite the same." Michael Atkinson reviews Pierrot le Fou for IFC News: "Of the Godardian 60s, this effervescent, self-mocking, effortlessly iconic masterpiece may be the filmmaker's quintessential work, the ultimate commentary on how life and movies fuck and spawn spectacularly beautiful children." He then segues into Hélas pour Moi, part of that new box set and "a creative nonfiction essay, built from multi-layered tableaux of random incidents and gestures and dramatic dialogues and arguments with God on love, devotion and memory, which to Godard all translate to regard for The Past, and our pitiful disregard for it."

Written by Dave Eggers and to be directed by Sam Mendes, This Must Be the Place is "a light-hearted movie about a couple on a road trip around America in search of a new home," according to Francesca Martin.

Also in the Guardian, Ronald Bergan: "Quantum of Solace, the title of the new James Bond movie, got me thinking on film titles in general: the good, the bad and the ugly." And: "Is Naked Britain's most under-rated film?" asks Ben Meyers.

Harry Knowles passes along word from Spike Jonze: That Where the Wild Things Are clip floating around out there has very, very little to do with what the movie will look like. Related online viewing: Again, the "Flashing Lights" video, but this time with commentary from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog and Brandon Soderberg at No Trivia.

Timothy Sun at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "To view Tokyo Drifter as just an especially rambunctious yakuza riff on the American gangster film is to deny half of its genealogy - the film is as much a western as it is a gangster film."

In Newcity Chicago, Ray Pride contemplates the many shifting forms of contemporary glamour.

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek chimes in on an ongoing debate: "The tragedy of [Daniel] Day-Lewis's performance in There Will Be Blood is that it defies the naturalism that made him a great actor - and I use the word 'great' unequivocally - in the first place, as if he'd decided that naturalism is boring, that it no longer presents a challenge for him."

Meanwhile, in Slate, Jan Swafford reviews the soundtracks for Blood and No Country for Old Men.

The Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns gets irritated by "the crummy, incredibly annoying Vantage Point."

With Indiana Jones returning this summer, Rob Gonsalves at Hollywood Bitchslap looks back at other series that have been revived throughout cinematic history.

"The ricochet effect from the Hollywood writers strike might be more far-reaching and long-lasting than first thought," reports Elizabeth Guider for Reuters. One economist estimates that Los Angeles County's out about $2.5 billion.

Online browsing tip. The Leonard Schrader Collection of lobby card, as introduced by Peter Biskind in Vanity Fair. Via Movie City News.

Online listening tip #1. At Music for Robots, Mark is mightily impressed with Brad Breeck's anthem for the film One Too Many Mornings.

Online listening tip #2. For NPR, Mike Pesca talks with DA Pennebaker, Albert Maysles and Robert Drew about their 1960 collaboration, Primary.

Online listening tip #3. Stephen Fry launches a series of "Podgrams."

Online viewing tip #1. Issa Clubb posts a couple of clips that won't make it into the documentary that'll be included on Criterion's release of The Ice Storm.

Online viewing tip #2. Ray Pride's found a 1975 NBC profile of Francis Ford Coppola.

Fests and events, 2/20.

"In the autumn of 1996, the newly installed Taliban decreed that moving pictures were heretical and had to be destroyed. This was obviously very bad news for Afghan Film, the Kabul-based organisation that both promoted Afghan cinema and housed the Asian republic's entire film and TV archive. One hundred and eighteen of its 120 employees fled; the two who remained, lab technician Khwaja Ahmadshah and a colleague, resolved to risk their lives in defence of cinema." In the Guardian, Erlend Clouston tells their story and previews the Reel Afghanistan festival starting tomorrow in Edinburgh.

"Terence Davies is coming to town. For anyone who loves the cinema, this is news of paramount importance - and MGM-level musical magnitude." In anticipation of Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies (through February 27 at the Pacific Film Archive), the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston places a call to the director.

In the SF Weekly, Jennifer Maerz presents "he Let's Get Killed guide to getting your Noise Pop rock 'n' roll film fix." February 26 through March 2.

From the Film Comment Selects series, running through February 28:

• Daniel Kasman reviews Inside, the highlight of which is evidently Béatrice Dalle, Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export, "all influences, no inspiration," and: "[W]hile the contents and progression of [Nanouk] Leopold's Wolfsbergen seem nothing particularly worthy of attention, it is in its cast—exemplary in their ambiguousness; there are almost no caricatures here—and most especially in the direction of the film that the scenario gains its weight, its solemnity, its emotion."

• Acquarello on Luis Estrada's A Wonderful World, "a dense, darkly comic, and provocative, if mean-spirited sardonic fairytale on the politics of poverty, charity, globalization, and social reform."

• For Gleb Sidorkin, writing in the Tisch Film Review, Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Banishment is "an incredibly beautiful strip of celluloid and contains some of the best acting by children of any film in recent memory."

Paddy Johnson catches the Oscar-nominated animated shorts for the Reeler: "Considering the range of animation technique - puppets to broadcast design to painted animation - it's hardly surprising that the first question I had exiting the theater was why anyone would attempt to determine 'the best' animated short when the skill sets and results are so entirely different."

At SF360, Eve O'Neill files another entry in her SF Indiefest diary.

For Vince Keenan, it's still two films a day at Noir City Northwest.

Shorts, 2/19.

"Castro's out the door, so the introductory title for our new DVD of the Day feature is a no-brainer," writes Phil Morehart at Facets Features. "Waiting for Fidel is a documentary classic that unfortunately fell through the cracks. Luckily, Facets' exclusive DVD label picked up the slack a few years back to re-introduce this essential film to the masses."

Kimberly Lindbergs's marvelous "Favorite DVD Releases of 2007" list is now complete.

"Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell will appear as Heath Ledger's character in [Terry Gilliam's] unfinished film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the BBC has learned."

"For better or worse, [Larry] Clark has created at least two signatures: the raw, unflinching imagery of the Tulsa photographs, and the meandering, observational, but seldom illuminating style of his films." Sean O'Hagan talks with him for the Guardian.

For the Independent, Karen Wright talks with Isaac Julien about Derek. Earlier: Brian Darr.

Patrick Radden Keefe in Slate on Michael Clayton: "[B]eneath the expertly deployed suspense lies something more interesting: an indictment of the mercenary universe of white-shoe law firms and a devastating - and unusually accurate - look at the demoralized lives of the lawyers who work for them."

For the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein profiles producer Scott Rudin, who "makes films he believes in. Perhaps that's why No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, the two Oscar best picture contenders with the darkest, most uncompromising vision, share a common denominator - Rudin's role as a producer of No Country and executive producer of Blood." Via Movie City News.

So, Daniel Day-Lewis in Blood: Greatness or... not? Kathleen Murphy and Jim Emerson, pro and con, respectively, hash it out at MSN.

Brian Orndorf talks with director Jon Poll about Charlie Bartlett at Hollywood Bitchslap.

"For Deleuze, the plane of experience is about motion, movement, and images. There is no subject, and no ideology. There are no "correct" ideas or images, just ideas and images." Ted Pigeon offers excerpts from Negotiations.

Online listening tip #1. Slavoj Zizek: Embedded in Ideology: The Case of Cinema. Via infinite thØught.

Online listening tip #2. Ed Champion talks with Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville.

Online viewing tip #1. Kevin Lee has video of Jonathan Demme introducing a screening of Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude.

Online viewing tip #2. Chip Kidd's "5 Experiments in Form and Content," via Jason Kottke.

Fests and events, 2/19.

At ScreenGrab, Phil Nugent has details on Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies at the Pacific Film Archive (tomorrow through February 27) and Six Films by Sergei Paradjanov at LACMA and (Saturday through February 29).

The New York International Children's Film Festival "one of the biggest events of its kind in the world, with tickets selling out weeks before the first film reaches the screen," notes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. February 29 through March 16.

"For today's SXSW Preview, we're taking a look at Present Company, the latest film by Frank V Ross," announces Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Frank, who appeared in this episode of Butterknife, had two films in last summer's New Talkies program at the IFC Center, and like Quietly on By and Hohokam, Company is a lo-fi character study about the everyday traumas survived by young people far removed from urban hipster culture." The festival runs March 7 through 15.

"Evening Class contributing writer Michael Hawley reviews the lineup for this year's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF). Along with Brian Darr's own anticipations over at Hell on Frisco Bay, local audiences should be primed for choice." March 13 through 23.

"The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival (April 24 - May 8) announces a highly anticipated special event of the Festival - Black Francis of the Pixies performs the world premiere of his newly composed original score for the 1920 German expressionist silent film masterpiece The Golem. The program premieres at the historic Castro Theatre on Friday, April 25 at 9:30 pm."

From Film Comment Selects, acquarello's take on Grant Gee's Joy Division.

For Kamera, Thessa Mooij looks back to Rotterdam.

Online listening tip. Orphans: A Film Symposium will take place at NYU from March 26 through 29. Founder and curator Dan Streible is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Interview. Jay Jonroy.

Jay Jonroy's David & Layla, currently playing in New York, has been tickling audiences in various US cities since it launched its tour of theaters last July.

David D'Arcy introduces his interview with the director: "Jonroy's feature debut is a romantic farce with an American Jewish man and a Kurdish refugee of the Halabja gas attacks of 1988 as its protagonists. The script is based on a true Jewish-Kurdish romance, and the real David and Layla are happily married in Paris. In Jonroy's version, David (David Moscow, who played the child in Big) is a neurotic Jewish guy whose fitness-addict fiancée is predictably more interested in kick-boxing and stretching than in sex. He encounters Layla (Shiva Rose) on the street while filming for a cable show, and the ball gets rolling, with lots of meals and discourses on food and sexual pleasure. It will do wonders for your appetite."

The Duchess of Langeais.

"Jacques Rivette returns to the rigorous formalism and claustrophobic interiors of La Religeuse [The Nun] to create a refined, bituminous, and cooly smoldering tale of seduction, obsession, and manners in The Duchess of Langeais," writes acquarello.

"Like Truffaut's The Story of Adele H, Rohmer's The Marquise of O, and Rivette's own The Nun, this Balzac adaptation is a costume drama that bristles with measured passion," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Masterfully wrought and superbly acted (especially by [Jeanine] Balibar, who excels at Antoinette's increasing hunger for emotional violence), the film is a piercing pas de deux that excoriates romance even as its doomed characters are consumed by it."

Updated through 2/22.

"Rivette has pared the story down so that there isn't a wasted frame," writes David Edelstein in New York. He "has aged into one of cinema's most ingenious minimalists."

"[W]hile it's often hard to stomach the whiplash-inducing pace Rivette sets for the story, it's part of the sly, self-mocking nature of the narrative to mix tragic romance with barbed humor," writes Simon Abrams at Twitch.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto - and Steve Dollar (New York Sun), Bryant Frazer, Phil Nugent (ScreenGrab), Andrew Sarris (New York Observer), Nick Schager and Benjamin Strong (L Magazine).

Updates, 2/20: Nathan Lee in the Voice: "'A vast melodic phrase,' Rivette once wrote, 'a continuous arabesque, a single implacable line which leads people ineluctably towards the as yet unknown, embracing in its trajectory a palpitant and definitive universe.' He was writing about Roberto Rossellini, but the words serve as well as any to describe the elusive enchantment of his own mise-en-scène."

"For much of the film, I was impressed by Rivette's ability to present characters who were both boldly up-front about their passions and desires, and yet too distant to be empathized with," writes Zachary Wigon in the Tisch Film Review. "However, by the film's end this admiration turned to puzzlement."

Updates, 2/21: "The first masterpiece of 2008 - at least by American release date standards - the latest film from master French director Jacques Rivette is a masterful, multilayered, sometimes enigmatic work of dark irony, an assured tragicomedy of manners and more," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The rhythms are slow, yes, but they have an undeniable, almost perverse pull. This is aesthetic bliss on a dizzyingly high level."

"If one of the more popular New Wave directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer - even Nouvelle Vague student [André] Téchiné) had directed The Duchess of Langeais, it might have emphasized Antoinette and Armand's sensual feints," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "But Rivette sticks to the melodrama of manners, as if observing a war of social proprieties. Each rendezvous - or missed meeting - of the would-be lovers becomes a game of one-upsmanship. These people are trapped in conventions that they adhere to more than anybody else. They're tragic 19th-century fools - figures from an unfamiliar age who test a modern audience's patience."

"Is it wrong to be more entranced by the floors the actors are dancing over than the dance?" asks the Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "Duchess isn't all bad, but it runs too short on surprises - once the premise is laid out, there's little to do but wait for the worst."

"A once damningly oddball second-tier New Waver, Rivette's continued vitality and lissome touch has made him ripe for rediscovery," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "And no director has depended more heavily upon his women; the genius attributed to him is really his chemistry with Juliet Berto, Emmanuelle Beart in her more malleable years, or Bulle Ogier (who appears in Duchess, along with Michel Piccoli, for old time's sake) - what they pull out of him, and he them. Balibar, whose tremulant, doe-like loveliness has never been so well admired, is one of his best, fluttering with concentrated life every moment she's on-screen."

Updates, 2/22: "Jacques Rivette's Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art - beautiful, true, profound," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Much is often made of [Rivette's] abiding interest in the theatrical - certainly in evidence here - but this doesn't preclude an interest in life. It deepens it."

"The picture is stiff and awkward in places - even Rivette's signature meditative camerawork feels more static, less fluid, than usual," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But the picture has an unsettling, haunting quality that I haven't been able to shake."

"In an intellectual sense, The Duchess of Langeais comes to a devastating place, but the emotion is a little absent," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Like Rivette's camera moves, Duchess is restrained and tasteful. As [Guillaume] Depardieu tells one of his comrades about his fitful love affair, it's 'not a book, but a poem.'"

"Rivette eschews the Brechtian, modernist touches a director like Manoel de Oliveira might have brought to Balzac," notes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Even his French New Wave compatriot Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astree and Celadon goes further in updating its source material by including deliberate anachronisms and a hip sexual fluidity.... By offering such a faithful interpretation of an old-fashioned vision of love, The Duchess of Langeais challenges us to ponder whether our own relationships might not be equally tortured."

For Mike D'Angelo, writing at ScreenGrab, this is one " superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills.... Rivette matches the author's emotional precision with one subtly stunning composition after another, buttressed by a handful of short yet heartbreaking lateral pans that move us from master to close-up without the violence of a cut. (It's the cut afterward that draws blood.)"

DVDs, 2/19.

"More than 30 years after her death, Joan Crawford continues to exert a fascination that has little or nothing to do with her gifts as an actress, a fact that is one working definition of the term 'movie star.'" The New York Times' Dave Kehr reviews the second volume of Warner Home Video's Joan Crawford Collection. More from Dan Callahan in Slant.

Dennis Lim talks with Alex Cox about Walker, "one of the boldest and strangest political films ever made for an American studio." More from Jeremiah Kipp in Slant.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Sheri Linden on Kurt Cobain About a Son, "a work of startling intimacy."

Mike Everleth on Codex Atanicus: "[Carlos] Atanes proudly follows in the footsteps of fellow Spanish surrealist filmmakers Luis Buñuel and Fernando Arrabal and has crafted a trio of bizarrely demented short films that eschew comprehensible plots, character motivation and just plain logic. They're also all a hell of a lot of fun."

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker (MSN) and DVD Talk.

Shorts, 2/18.

Pedro Almodóvar "is to film the tender autobiography of a communist poet who spent 23 years in prison during the darkest years of the Franco dictatorship," writes Elizabeth Nash in the Independent. "Marcos Ana, now 88, was 19 when General Francisco Franco had him thrown in jail in 1939.... Yesterday, Ana told El Pais newspaper that he and the flamboyant filmmaker, 58, had formed a close friendship 'like in the finale of Casablanca.'" Related: For those who read Spanish, Almodóvar's piece accompanying the El Pais interview.

"Help a Good Filmmaker Do Some Good." Shawn Levy explains.

"For those of us who have followed Julian Schnabel's larger-than-life career as an artist for nearly thirty years, watching his new movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a doubly extraordinary experience," writes Sanford Schwartz in the New York Review of Books. "It is a film that presents a nightmarish and almost unbearable medical case history that has been handled with humor, a lyrical deftness, and a remarkable absence of sentimentality; and if you have more than a passing sense of Schnabel the person and his work as a painter, your mind is running at the same time on a parallel track, one full of amazement and almost disbelief that, with no apparent training in theater arts or the directing of actors, or even a feeling for photography, he has turned himself into a sometime moviemaker - this is his third film - of such drive and sensitivity."

David Denby has a longish piece on No Country for Old Men: "Watching the movie, you feel a little like that gas-station owner - impressed, even intimidated. That's a strange way to feel at a Coen brothers movie. For almost 25 years, the Coens have been rude and funny, inventive and tiresome - in general, so prankish and unsettled that they often seemed in danger of undermining what was best in their movies. Have they gone straight at last?"

And the New Yorker's also brought out Pauline Kael's 1985 review of Blood Simple; scroll down and read on, unless you'd like to see, too, what she had to day about Peter Weir's Witness that same week.

For New York, Logan Hill profiles Chop Shop director Ramin Bahrani.

"Rife with such pungent musings, Hollywood's Hellfire Club is as morbid (and morbidly amusing) as that amazing Drew Friedman artwork on the cover," writes Ray Young.

Dennis Cozzalio highly recommends U2 3D, "probably the best movie out there right now."

Whether or not you find the very idea of Step Up 2 the Streets at all interesting, its director's story certainly is. David M Halbfinger tells it in the New York Times.

The latest list from the AV Club: "22 film remakes dramatically different from the originals."

AJ Schnack notes the "launch of Cinelan, a short film content producer and publisher, which comes on the scene with the backing of an impressive roster of filmmakers and partners, including commitments from noted filmmakers Steve James, Morgan Spurlock, Jessica Yu, Eugene Jarecki and Ross Kauffman. Each will make short films for Cinelan and serve on the company's advisory board."

Online listening tip. Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot discuss their favorite film soundtracks on Sound Opinions.

Posted by dwhudson at 2:21 PM | Comments (2)

Fests and events, 2/18.

Karina Longworth launches a series of entries at the SpoutBlog previewing films lined up for SXSW by presenting a set of questions to Yeast director Mary Bronstein.

As part of the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series, Michael Tully presents - tonight! - "The Best Short Films of the 21st Century." Via Brandon Harris.

"Roman Polanski will be feted by the Turin Film Festival, the indie event headed by Italo helmer Nanni Moretti, who is using his clout to boost its profile," reports Nick Vivarelli for Variety. The two directors met on the set of Quiet Chaos, the feature recently screened in Competition at the Berlinale starring Moretti and featuring a delightful cameo by Polanski.

Michael Jones posts the "Top five things about the 3rd annual Redcat International Children's Film Festival in downtown LA, running now through March 2."

At the SF Indiefest, Michael Guillén gets a kick out of Stuart Gordon's Stuck.

"Passion & Power, the Technology of Orgasm, opening this week at the Roxie New College Film Center and the Smith Rafael, gives Rachel Maines's entertaining academic book on the subject a new life onscreen," writes SF360's Susan Gerhard, who talks with filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori "about the passions behind their project, as well as using jellyfish as a metaphor and the unexpected audiences taking a shine to the film." Update: At Hell on Frisco Bay, Adam Hartzell highly recommends Passion, one of his favorite films of 2007.

Simon Abrams's latest takes from the Film Comment Selects series at Twitch: Olivier Assayas's Boarding Gate and Alex Cox's Searchers 2.0.

More from Brandon Harris: "A lower key, appealingly absurd riff on the same erotic, globalization era techno thriller he first brought us in 2002's explosive Demonlover, meta-auteur Olivier Assayas' newest fun house of pomo woman in trouble mess Boarding Gate is nothing if not art cinema made fun and sleazy. Fortunately it's so much more."

Meanwhile, acquarello contrasts Nanouk Leopold's Wolfsbergen with Jaime Rosales's Solitary Fragments.

Vince Keenan carries on filing dispatches from Noir City Northwest.

Online listening tip. Milos Forman is on the Leonard Lopate Show, talking about the retrospective at MoMA.

Online viewing tip. "In the past decade, more websites have brought attention to young filmmakers by mounting online short film festivals, and the currently-in-progress Now Film Festival is no exception," writes Paul Clark at ScreenGrab. "There have been a number of worthy films to date, but the best of the lot thusfar is this week's featured short, Lucas McNelly's gravida."

Online viewing tips. Seemingly hours worth of Trailers for films screening at SXSW.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1922 - 2008.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French writer who pioneered the so-called "new novel" genre in the 1950s, died Monday at the age of 85, the Academie Francaise (French Academy) said.... In a series of essays published in 1963 Robbe-Grillet developed the theory of the "new novel" which sought to overturn conventional ideas on fiction-writing....

He was also associated with the "New Wave" of French filmmaking, writing the screenplay for Alain Resnais's L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) and making several films under his own name.

The AFP.

Updated through 2/25.

See also: Books and Writers, Mark Hamstra (Scriptorium), Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica on Slow Slidings of Pleasure, Thomas McGonigle (interview for Bookforum, 2003) and Wikipedia.

Online listening tip. Robbe-Grillet reads "Jealousy" (1957) at Ubuweb.

Updates: "Were Robbe-Grillet's convoluted narrative strategies merely subterfuges to excuse what the literary critic Roger Sale called (when writing of another controversial novelist, John Hawkes) a 'vile imagination'?" A must-read entry, top to bottom, from Glenn Kenny.

Kimberly Lindbergs recommends Robert Monell's entry on Robbe-Grillet's films and a bibliography.

Mike at EEP: "His work has forced me to think about narrative in a way that I undoubtedly would have taken a longer time to come across; and his visual-textual collaborations have been particularly pertinent to the development of my own work."

Updates, 2/19: "It was Robbe-Grillet's example that taught me, more than either Burroughs or Ballard, that a novel can be a psychological playground where the narrative possibilities are limited only by the author's own imagination and capacity for candor," writes Tim Lucas. "The emphasis placed by Robbe-Grillet's films on nudity, sadomasochism, fetishism, ghosts and vampires have led them to be included in written overviews of Eurohorror such as Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs' Immoral Tales - an identification that the filmmaker resented and resisted.... He also insisted throughout his career that there was no psychological content in his objectivist fiction, stories that were allegedly about places and things rather than people. But, as his fan Vladimir Nabokov happily brayed in response, 'Robbe-Grillet's claims are preposterous!' - their entire substance is psychological, in the best possible tradition."

In his autobiographical trilogy, "he restates, more moderately this time, his youthful grievances about realism in fiction and the cinema, but concedes that the imagination has its virtues, that it is not going to wither away in favor of science," writes John Sturrock in the Independent. "Indeed he now claimed that fantasising in novels or in films is good, if it stops us acting out our fantasies in life itself."

"The turn to autobiographical writing was a polemical gesture aimed at keeping the spirit of controversy and invention alive, and in Robbe-Grillet's hands this shows as a mix of frank confession, half truths, fiction and overt fantasy," adds the London Times.

"[A]s Roland Barthes perceived so early on in the author's career, Robbe-Grillet is a visual novelist for whom perception is intrinsically fascinating but fraught with uncertainty," observes the Telegraph. "In the course of his career he collaborated with numerous artists and photographers, amongst them Magritte, Rauschenberg, David Hamilton and Irina Ionesco. His films contained the same themes as his books: camp eroticism, violence and self-deluding quests through labyrinthine cityscapes. His most popular film was The Trans-Europ-Express (1966), a pseudo-Hitchcockian whodunnit comedy that parodied detective films and international thrillers."

These last three are all via the Literary Saloon, which is also collecting remembrances in French and German.

Updates, 2/20:"When I was in college, Robbe-Grillet's early novels and the essays that comprised For a New Novel were, for all their severity, extremely seductive texts." And Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay recalls meeting him, too.

Mubarak Ali posts an excerpt from The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews With Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films and comments on Eden and After, "a film that contains some of the most striking images of all within this catalogue of seductive, haunting, mind-boggling imagery constituting his cinema."

Update, 2/23: "Whatever the qualities of McEwan, the Smiths Zadie and Ali, and any other contemporary English-language writer one cares to cite, can it honestly be said of them that they have reinvented the novel?" asks Gilbert Adair in the Guardian. "Even when, in the decades following the nouveau roman, novels of formal experimentation have been published - Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (a novel about what it actually means to read a novel), Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars (a novel in the form of a dictionary), Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa (a novel in alphabetical order), John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (a novel which came complete with its own critical apparatus) - they have tended to be received, generally well, as eccentric one-offs with no significant bearing on the future of the genre. On the whole, the British literary establishment is indifferent, when not downright hostile, to authentically innovatory fiction."

Update, 2/25: "His attempts to wrest fiction free from 19th-century constraints like plot and character, and to wrest objects free from imposed meaning, were never entirely popular with readers but had a decisive influence on critical theory and on the art of the novel, as well as on film, art and even psychology," writes Rachel Donadio in the New York Times.

Oscars countdown.

"There's a reason why this idea that the Oscars have become a snobbed-up, limousine-liberal affair, out of touch with ordinary Americans, never goes away," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It has a grain of truth, however teensy and elusive, at its core."

"We all know that the Oscars are a dirty not-so-little pleasure," nudges David Carr. "We pretend to watch them ironically, but they really are beyond the reach of irony."

Updated through 2/24.

"This year, apart from some suspicious choices in the Best Song and Foreign Language categories, the nominees are sound, and the length of the writers' strike mercifully forced party planners to ratchet down their sickening displays of gluttony and self-love," writes Gary Dretzka at Movie City News. "Even so, by successfully turning December into the only month that matters, the studios have limited exposure to the worthy finalists to such a degree, only a small percentage of the television audience will have seen the movies in contention."

"With two movies - Away From Her and The Savages - dealing with Alzheimer's and dementia, respectively, up for Oscars on Sunday, Alzheimer's experts hope emcee Jon Stewart and the celebrity presenters and winners will avoid any humor about the disease," reports Robert W Welkos. Also in the Los Angeles Times: Rachel Abramowitz profiles Tom Wilkinson.

"When Hollywood needs Western desolation, it comes to Marfa." Michael Graczyk visits the town that served as a location for No Country for Old Men and There will Be Blood. Via MCN.

Erik Davis launches Oscars Week at Cinematical.

Glenn Kenny and Arion Berger begin a week-long dialogue at Premiere, discussing who should win for what and who will win: "Here's how it's gonna work - every day between now and Friday, Arion and I are going to square off on the major categories - Supporting, Screenplay, Acting, Director, Picture."

More ongoing Oscar predictions: Film Threat; GH Lewmer and Paul Matwychuk; Craig Phillips; and Slant.

Want to try it yourself? "Call it, friendo," dares Yair Raveh.

Meanwhile, the Film Experience has issued a modest call for help.

"I get a kick from guild awards shows, particularly the art directors, because they not only celebrate the current year's best - No Country for Old Men took the contemporary prize, There will Be Blood the period, and The Golden Compass the fantasy - but they look to the past to honor the pioneers who went before." Variety's Anne Thompson reports on a fun evening out and points to the winners of the Cinema Audio Society's awards as well.

Among the winners of the American Cinema Editors' Eddies: "In the film categories, Christopher Rouse won for his work on The Bourne Ultimatum in the dramatic category, Chris Lebenzon won in the comedic category for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, while Geoffrey Richman, Chris Seward and Dan Swietlik won for Sicko in the documentary category," reports indieWIRE's Peter Knegt.

Updates: "Do the Oscars really matter?" Not a new question, of course, but this time it's being put forward by Richard T Jameson, who takes a long historical look at the Academy's hits and misses at MSN Movies.

Richard Corliss looks back ten years and picks the nominees who should've won.

Spout and the Reeler are throwing an Oscar party - with Oscar cookies!

And I'll have another reminder on this one in a few days, but: GreenCine will be live-blogging the night, and of course, you're invited.

Updates, 2/19: "Salon writers and special guests weigh in on their favorite performances and movies of the year - and the ones they couldn't stand."

"Every year, the Academy tries to stop Oscar films from leaking online. And every year, they leak all the same. I've been tracking Oscar piracy since 2004, but I've decided to up the ante, releasing all the underlying data and extending it to 2003." Andy Baio's got charts, spreadsheets, the works.

In Vanity Fair, Peter Biskind looks back to the spring of 1979: "As Bruce Gilbert, associate producer of Coming Home, puts it, 'The war may have been over, but the war over the interpretation of the war was just beginning.' Both movies vacuumed up Oscar nominations - The Deer Hunter nine, Coming Home eight - setting the stage for the war to be refought at, of all places, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in Los Angeles. It was a battle that would echo the real one in its bitterness."

"Who Will Drink Whose Milkshake?" David Edelstein and Lynda Obst talk Oscars from now through Friday.

Observations on the Oscar race worth following: First, I haven't mentioned Carpetbagger David Carr in general yet, and I certainly should've; second, Little Gold Men, "VF's Daily Guide to Oscar Season," with the VF standing for Vanity Fair.

Scott Kirsner lists "Five Oscar Wins That Shaped the Movies."

Updates, 2/20: The New York Observer's all excited.

Blogging at Filmmaker's site, Nick Dawson argues against the prevailing winds of condemnation blowing around the selection panel nominating films for the Best Foreign Language category: "Persepolis, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and The Orphanage were denied a shot at the Oscar, yet by that stage all three were already internationally acclaimed movies with US distribution deals.... [T]his year Oscar has all but guaranteed us the new films from Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrzej Wajda and Sergei Bodrov - three undeniably great directors - in addition."

In the New York Times, Bill Carter talks with an almost eerily relaxed Jon Stewart about having just a bit over a week to prepare to host "the Super Bowl of entertainment shows."

More predictions: Erik Childress (Hollywood Bitchslap), Dennis Cozzalio and Bill Gibron (PopMatters).

A list from Stephen Salto at IFC News: "Fake Names, Real Oscars: Five Nominees Who Didn't Really Exist."

Christian Hamaker for Crosswalk: "Humans are 'by nature objects of wrath' and 'dead in transgressions' (Eph. 2:3, 5) 'There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins,' says the author of Ecclesiastes (7:20).... This year's Oscar nominees show this biblical condition in the extreme."

More on Oscar's shorts: Kim Adelman (indieWIRE) and Andrew O'Hehir (Salon).

Updates, 2/21: "Every year as we move toward the cusp of Oscar night, a couple of Vue film critics sit down to hash out their responses to the Academy's choices and, more importantly, acknowledge the great work that didn't get recognized in the past year." And this year it's Josef Braun and Brian Wilson.

Via MCN: "Scott's Oscar Almanac," a wall chart or something - if your printer can handle it.

Online viewing tip. MTV puts Josh Horowitz in an Oscar montage that, as Anne Thompson puts it, is "pretty funny."

"George Clooney swears he has never lost an Oscar pool." Check out his picks and the pretty amusing quips that introduce them at Time.

Joe Leydon's got a "mild case of Oscar fever" - enough to prompt him to make his predictions.

More predictions? Sure: Phil Nugent at ScreenGrab.

Updates, 2/22: More predictions: Andrew Bemis; David Carr; the Guardian critics (PDF); Peter Knegt (indieWIRE); and Jeffrey Wells.

At InContention, Kristopher Tapley lists the "Top 10 Shots of 2007." Via Anne Thompson.

Online listening tip. John Lichman and Vadim Rizov and ST VanAirsdale talk Oscars at the House Next Door.

Slate's got something going on with Kim Masters, Troy Patterson and Dana Stevens that's sort of like the "Movie Club," only it's all about the Oscars.

The New Republic's Chris Orr explains his predictions.

Chicagoist's Rob Christopher's got predictions and a recipe for Pink Panther Punch.

The Chicago Reader's critics drop their ballots.

Nathaniel R makes his final predictions.

Updates, 2/23: "I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I found myself hoping that the strike would shut the Academy Awards down; that for once, in a year of such cinematic bounty and variety, appreciation for the best movies could be liberated from the pomp and tedium of Hollywood spectacle," writes AO Scott. "It's not that I'm against the spectacle as such.... The Oscars themselves may be harmless fun, but the idea that they matter is as dangerous as it is ridiculous."

"As juicy a target as the Oscars are - the bacchanal is like the large-chested blonde in the horror movie who always gets mauled first - they continue to occupy an important and irreplaceable role in our culture," counters David Carr. And you can listen to these two New York Times writers hash it out, too, via an MP3 downloadable from both pages. Via Movie City News.

Robert Koehler at filmjourney.org: "Garbage In Garbage Out, or Why the Foreign Oscars Need to be Blown Up."

"[T]he docu-Oscar nominees of the last two years tell us something about how heartily sick of George W Bush and his brilliant geo-strategic adventures even the constitutionally controversy-averse human beings of the movie industry have become," writes Andrew O'Hehir. Also in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek and Matt Singer discuss the cinematography nominees - as well as who should have been nominated.

More on the nominated docs from Tom Roston at the POV Blog.

Craig Phillips rates the nominated screenplays.

The Atlantic Monthly points to a piece Raymond Chandler wrote for the magazine in 1948: "Oscar Night in Hollywood."

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy states his "Picks and Preferences."

Gabriel Shanks lays out his will and should wins, too.

More from Mike at Goatdog.

"Each art form has its good and its bad years. But whoever collects those cherished golden statuettes, we do seem to be in the midst of a new golden age for movies," argues the Independent. Also: Andrew Gumbel on marvelous Marfa and Hermione Eyre on the exhilarating insanity of Oscar Night.

Online scrolling tip. Movie Poster Addict has "a compilation of the posters for all of the best picture winners so far." Via Coudal Partners.

Updates, 2/24: The Steak Knives: The Flak Film Also-Ran Awards.

In the Los Angeles Times:

• "To glance at the Academy Award nominees for lead actor is to get a quick but thorough lesson in the major themes that dominated American movies last year," writes Carina Chocano. "Almost to a man, Daniel Day-Lewis, Johnny Depp, George Clooney, Tommy Lee Jones and Viggo Mortensen played avenging anti-heroes in an immoral, amoral or morally relativistic world. They were grim, compromised and pessimistic, embodiments of the queasy morass we find ourselves in and a reflection of the national mood. To glance at the Academy Award nominees for lead actress is to get nothing of the sort.... Either the roles are archetypal in a way that Oscar voters recognize as 'worthy,' or the nominations feel like an attempt to honor a film or an actress for impressive box office returns or a nostalgic comeback."

• "In voting for Michael Clayton, Hollywood would in essence be voting for itself, voting for thoughtful, adult studio films crafted in the heart of the system," argues Kenneth Turan. "I can't think of any other movie-making constituency that needs more help right now."

• Dennis Lim: "To commemorate the occasions when the academy does get it right, here are a half-dozen best picture winners (in reverse chronological order) that have not only held up over the years but can also be found in decent-to-excellent DVD editions."

• Mark Swed profiles Marion Cotillard.

• "Two films that featured their stars in multiple roles - Lindsay Lohan's I Know Who Killed Me and Eddie Murphy's Norbit - combined today for a near-sweep of the 28th annual Golden Raspberry Awards, a feat that may leave them feeling as if they wound up in a dumpster," reports Lee Margulies.

Critics for the Observer set the odds. And for Rachel Cooke, There Will Be Blood "stands apart from such frivolous competition, a ravenous beast prowling at the edge of a particularly lavish and decadent party."

"A very British invasion: UK hails its 21 Oscar nominees." Jonathan Romney and Neil Norman report in the Independent.

Big Oscar roundup at the House Next Door.

Nick Davis makes his predictions. So does Newsweek's David Ansen.

AS Hamrah has a preview in n+1.

MovieMaker contributors lay out their predictions.

Jim Emerson at MSN: "Your Oscar speech: How not to blow it."

Brooklyn Rail. Feb 08.

"What aberration allows bad artists to make terrific films?" asks John Yau in the latest issue of the Brooklyn Rail. "Why is it that the clichés that make for turgid art become acceptable and engaging when they are translated into celluloid? I am thinking of Julian Schnabel and Jean Cocteau, who, besides being self-aggrandizing artists who have made interesting films (all of Schnabel's films focus on a male hero who must overcome external and internal obstacles but ends up dying young narratives that seem of a piece with his histrionic painting style), also share a misguided obsession with Pablo Picasso."

As for Schnabel's latest exhibition, Navigation Drawings, "Paint on canvas and drawing on paper, not to mention conceptual rigor and curiosity, are not among this artist's strong suits. He is good at other things, but not the basics."

Josh Morgenthau on Chuck Close: "Distilling her film from over 100 hours of raw footage, [Marion] Cajori builds a powerful emotional and intellectual key with which we can begin reading the hieroglyphics of [Chuck] Close's paintings."

Williams Cole talks with Alex Gibney about Taxi to the Dark Side.

Jesi Khadivi on The Yacoubian Building: "At first glance, the film is a morality play with high dramatic flourishes. It's shot like television and has the narrative engine of a soap opera. In spite of, or perhaps because of these traits, the film is surprisingly compelling."

"Juno is another in a long line of pandering, derivative, indecisive Hollywood films that parade themselves under the guise of indie-cred," argues John Oursler.

"In its first 90 seconds Teeth makes every point Juno labors over for its entire 90 minutes," writes Sarahjane Blum:

1. The periphery of American society is fossilizing dangerously.
2. Biology is destiny.
3. Bereft of sage advice from adults until far too late, sex is becoming monstrous for the younger generation.

After summarily addressing these points, the film picks up a story that makes broad points succinctly and develops characters who act like humans, and talk about themselves mercifully little. It does this all while riffing successfully on all of the mutilated women conventions of horror and pornography.

Sarah Kessler on Caramel: "Those of us dying for a decent woman's film may now—at least temporarily—curtail our pining."

"Radio On represents a melancholy requiem from another time, another place," writes Rudy Wurlitzer. "Inside its relentless alienation the bleak compositions of its ruined and soulless landscapes become isolating and yet strangely elegiac; a hypnotic and intimate embrace relating image to language to sound, with no one expression upstaging the other. The film becomes a circular spiral turning in on itself, a rhythm that transcends the whole notion of what it means to go anywhere in particular."

"Some artists torture themselves striving towards perfection: Stanley Kubrick, say, or Joseph Heller, who spent eight years writing Catch 22. Not [Woody] Allen. He churns out crap film after crap film in the hope that, one day, he'll get lucky." And Sophie Gilbert's hoping Cassandra's Dream will be his last set and shot in London.

David Wilentz on the Japan Society's Dawn of Japanese Animation series: "These are not the direct antecedents of anime or prototypes of Speed Racer. The series features films from the late 20s through the 40s that are more parallel to the early cartoons of the west."

I've been wondering who'd raise this point and when. Turns out it's Tessa DeCarlo here and now, reviewing The Bucket List: "Ever since Barack Obama emerged as a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, it's been clear that not least among his many qualifications for high office—his intelligence, good looks, oratorical skill, and political smarts—is how neatly he appears to fit the stereotype of the Redemptive Black Friend."

Even the Rail can't resist the list-making urge. Before David N Meyer elaborates on his "Eleven Best Films of 2007," he slaps down a couple of other people's favorites: "Tim Burton chose a flashier set of hammers with which to pound us over the head, but Sweeney Todd remained, like There Will Be Blood, inert on the screen, dead on arrival, forcing us away from the story, turning us into mere spectators. The best films 2007, whether brilliant or moronic, offered sufficient embrace to make us all participants."

NCTATNY. Sally Potter.

"Accomplished in dance and choreography, a composer and singer, and most recently a director for the English National Opera, [Sally] Potter has managed to combine multiple practices and disciplines into her filmmaking, creating a handful of nonetheless dissident works that consistently question ideas and images that are de facto in mainstream cinema."

Jenny Jediny introduces "The Lyricism of Sally Potter," a special feature at Not Coming to a Theater Near You that includes her own pieces on Thriller, The Gold Diggers and Orlando; Rumsey Taylor on The Tango Lesson; and Beth Gilligan on Yes.

Interview. Cao Hamburger.

While some celebrate and others decry the Golden Bear that's just been delivered to José Padilha's Elite Squad, another Brazilian film from the Berlinale Competition lineup last year is currently on screens in New York and Los Angeles: The Year My Parents Went on Vacation.

As we saw just the other day, it's garnering quite nice reviews, too.

At the main site, Francine Taylor talks with director Cao Hamburger about working with kids and getting the look and sound of 70s-era Brazil just right.

Wrapping Berlinale 08.

First, once again, the Forum has selected seven films for repeat screenings over the next two weeks.

Second, more entries on individual films are on the way, but in the meantime, all awards-related news and commentary will be noted here, while this entry will serve as a catch-all for overviews, cris de coeur, notes, manifestos and so on, to be updated throughout the week.

Updated through 2/22.

In earlier entries, I've already noted two overviews, but they're worth mentioning again: Sight & Sound editor Nick James's for the Observer and Dennis Lim's for the New York Times.

"[O]ne of the things that Berlinale did particularly well in this, its 58th year, was keeping one eye cocked firmly on the cinema of bygone years while pushing headlong into the future," writes Chris Barsanti in an overview for Filmcritic.com that includes takes on Dusan Makavejev's "1971 neo-Marxist sex satire" WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Kent Mackenzie's "nearly-forgotten 1961 film," The Exiles as well as Isabel Coixet's Elegy, Majid Majidi's The Song of Sparrows, "a treat in every sense of the word," Benjamin Gilmour's debut feature Son of a Lion, Laetitia Masson's Coupable, which "takes a snappy premise and some sharp imagery and seems determined to waste it," Natalie Assouline's Shadida: Brides of Allah, "a rough-hewn video documentary shot inside an Israeli prison holding Palestinian women convicted of assisting or participating in suicide bombings," Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi's Heavy Metal in Baghdad, Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss's Full Battle Rattle, Juan Manuel Sepúlveda's The Infinite Border and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg.

"Overall, this particular critic was rather disappointed and underwhelmed by the 58th Berlinale's film offering," writes Maxine Harfield, who offers her views on the Competition lineup at cinemattraction.

The consensus among many who caught it, Dennis Lim and myself included, is that Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army was the most significant viewing experience at the Berlinale this year. Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook: "Bookended by an encyclopedia's worth of archive footage, title cards, dates, events, and names, the film sets the rigor and tone of the students' intensified isolation and political self-cleansing with a historical background as extensive and detailed as Wakamatsu's eventual - and total - submergence into cabin-fevered radicalism in the throes of creative self-destruction."

Also: "Wonderful Town, the promising first film by Aditya Assarat, has a great amount of outer spirit, though what it truly lacks is an expressive inner life."

Meanwhile, Blake Ethridge actually got to meet Wakamatsu.

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long) "may sound like the stuff of a Lifetime movie, but Kristin Scott Thomas's performance kept me from fleeing," writes Jürgen Fauth. Also: "A trashy pageant that delivers what it promises, The Other Boleyn Girl is also the perfect prequel to Elizabeth; the final image of the former seems custom-made to line up with the first scenes of the latter." And: "I can tolerate capable entertainment dressed up in historical costumes, but I found the affected minimalism of Ballast difficult to sit through."

Reminders of publications with special Berlinale sections: indieWIRE, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

And there's been more coverage at Cineuropa.

Blogging the German-language press: angelaufen.de and film-zeit.de.

More in German: Thomas Groh and Ekkehard Knörer.

Updates, 2/18: "In 2008, yet again, it was anything but a pleasure for a critic to have to sit through the films in the festival's Competition section," writes Ekkehard Knörer at signandsight. "Only on paper did things look rosier this year, with the return of lost son Erick Zonca, Johnnie To's pet project, Martin Scorsese's opening concert film and a general avoidance of the usual mass of pseudo-political clap-trap of which the creative director and head of the selection board for the Competition, Dieter Kosslick, is so enamoured."

"The trouble this year was that the Ingredient X - the vital catalyst that causes a film to begin foaming and bubbling to thrillingly unpredictable effect - was in short supply, at least judging by the route I took through the program," blogs Phil Hoad for the Guardian before writing up (and occasionally down) a couple of handfuls of films.

"Jean Epstein's 1926 silent film Mauprat is a wonderful discovery, thriving with unexpected, lovely impressionism to tell a seemingly old-fashioned story of brigands, unrequited love, wrongful accusation and amour fou," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "A number of the film's stylizations are particularly striking for the era."

Another page from the Auteurs' Notebook and Daniel Kasman: Götz Spielmann's Revanche "shows just how successfully one can transpose the plot and character based drama of Hollywood to the refined style of European art-house cinema without hampering it with a sense self-importance."

Updates, 2/19: "Yousri Nasrallah's Aquarium - the only Arab entry in all the Festival's sections - was screened on Friday in the presence of Nasrallah and Hend Sabry, the lead actress in the film," notes Samir Farid in the Al-Ahram Weekly. "This screening was attended by almost all the Arab participants and by many Berlin-based Arab diplomats, including the Egyptian ambassador.... Following the Berlin screening of his film, Nasrallah received more than one invitation to participate in other international film festivals, including the Tribeca in New York to be held next April, the Taormina Festival in Sicily next June and the Abu Dhabi Festival next October." Related: Derek Elley's review for Variety.

"Mike Leigh films frequently patronise their characters, but never so painfully as in Happy-Go-Lucky," blogs Helen Oldfield for the Guardian. Whereas Madonna's Filth and Wisdom "wasn't so bad. I went with the lowest of expectations - always an advantage if you want to enjoy a movie, and so I did."

Updates, 2/22: Patrick Z McGavin has more - and more - for Stop Smiling.

Jürgen Fauth wraps up his festival with reports on the films he caught on Days 10 and 11.

Shorts, 2/17.

Dennis Lim has met Jacques Rivette for the New York Times and the resulting piece interweaves need-to-know background on the French New Wave icon as a critic, filmmaker and cinephile with Rivette's comments on the contemporary scene and Jeanne Balibar's fond remembrances of the making of The Duchess of Langeais.

As it happens, Dennis Lim also has a piece in the Los Angeles Times today, this one on Jean-Luc Godard, who "was not just a central figure of the French New Wave, he was arguably the definitive filmmaker of the 1960s." All praise due to Criterion's release of Pierrot le fou is given, and then: "Even more essential, though, is Lionsgate's new Godard box, which assembles four of his underappreciated films from the 80s and 90s."

And now glance over to the Observer, where Sight & Sound editor Nick James wraps his overview of this year's Berlinale with this: "It used to be that all the world wanted to make American indie cinema; now, many want to make New Wave French cinema. Neither seems a forward-looking option."

"The film first impinged on the world at large in February 1960 when foreign journalists reported back to their readers, listeners and viewers on the controversial reception in Italy, where it divided audiences, critics and clerics, and led to Fellini being both spat on and cheered at the Milan premiere." Following Philip French's assessment of La Dolce Vita are a list of "10 facts" about the film and Mark Kermode's list of five films bearing the marks of its impact.

Also in the Observer:

• David Hare tells Nick Fraser that Richard Yates "belongs with Fitzgerald and Hemingway as the three unarguably great American novelists of the 20th century. The highest compliment I can pay him is to say that he writes like a screenwriter, not like a novelist." The occasion for Fraser's piece: "A Yates revival is currently under way and some sort of commercial recognition appears imminent. His seven novels are being reissued. Later this year, a film of Revolutionary Road (part-financed by the BBC), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and directed by Sam Mendes, will be released in America (and in January 2009 in the UK)."

• Amy Raphael has a long, wide-ranging talk with Mike Leigh and a shorter talk with cinematographer Roger Deakins.

• Susannah Clapp reviews the Old Vic's production of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow featuring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum.

• French has a brief biographical note on Burt Lancaster.

Los Angeles Times books editor David L Ulin considers "what makes the current crop of books-to-movies so compelling, the idea that Hollywood may be developing a more consistent approach to literature. For me, this is a matter of sensibility, of complexity and nuance, the way these works take on bigger issues, the uncertainties and irresolution that mark our passage through the world."

Also: John Horn meets Sarah Polley and Rachel Abramowitz profiles Brad Bird, whose next project is 1906, a live-action drama set in the San Francisco earthquake of that year."

Michael Guillén previews Medicine for Melancholy, slated for SXSW: "Whether the film's meandering mode will engage audiences enough to pay attention to the subtle thematic traction underscoring its casual demeanor is the crucial pivot; but, whether it succeeds or fails, I must commend those themes and hope audiences will take the time to feel them out and to think them through."

On Wednesdays in Los Angeles, from February 20 through March 26: Film Independent's Director Series. Thanks, Jerry!

Back in the New York Times: "Men who fall from grace are treated with gravity and distance, while women in similar circumstances are objects of derision, titillation and black comedy," notes Alex Williams in a piece on tabloid coverage. "Some celebrities and their handlers are now saying straight out that the news media have a double standard." And for Ada Calhoun, Andrew Morton's Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography "feels about as reliable as the tabloids and yet, astonishingly, somehow meaner."

Online listening tip. The Errata team on 12 films.

Shorts, 2/16.

"Artist William E Jones has made films about a pornstar (Finished), the Southern Californian Latino fans of Morrissey (Is It Really So Strange?) and the unlikely documentary and/or narrative moments within sex films (v.o.), among other hypnotic and subtle works," writes Bruce Hainley, introducing his interview for the new issue of Bidoun. "Through vivid photography, film, and video, as well as considered and considerable prose (see his website: www.williamejones.com), Jones brings to attention modes of being and behaving almost on the brink of obsolescence."

In There Will Be Blood, we watch Daniel Plainview "for the myth-history of capitalism, the invisible force whose logic 'speaks' his every action, subverts or destroys his every companion, dominates his environment by draining it dry ([Paul Thomas] Anderson claims he was thinking of Dracula when writing the screenplay), destroys a community by turning it into a city, and eventually leaves his body a withered husk, to flake and die like a leaf in wintertime," writes traxus4420 at culturemonkey. "'I don't like to explain myself.' The film's trappings often resemble the Gothic, the genre of secret histories, but it's all appearance; there is nothing to explain."

"[R]eading Oil! in 2008, one is constantly aware of how clever Anderson has been in mining the screenplay from the dense, deep rock of [Upton] Sinclair's novel," writes Mark Lawson. At first glance, you may think you've seen a dozen such pieces comparing the novel with Blood, but this one is primarily a solid backgrounder on Sinclair.

Also in the Guardian: Ryan Gilbey meets Chloë Sevigny and Damon Wise interviews Michel Gondry.

Andrew Gumbel talks with Selma Blair for the Independent.

Girish passes along a query from Christian Keathley, who's "interested in the often uncanny ways in which one film's diegesis trespasses onto another's. Here's an example..." Go read it; it is uncanny.

For the Los Angeles Times, Richard Schickel reviews Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, a "deeply researched, well-written book..., portraying the tidal wave of change breaking dramatically against the sea wall of Hollywood tradition."

In the New York Times:

• "Jodhaa Akbar, a historical romance directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, is filmmaking on the grand scale of Cecil B DeMille, with romance, stirring battles, a cast of thousands and enough elephants and gold to sink the Titanic," writes Rachel Saltz.

• Charles McGrath dares us to consider "a heretical thought" by asking, "Is PBS Still Necessary?"

• Anita Gates offers a list of memorable Oscar Night moments.

For Stop Smiling, Andrea Gronvall talks with Martin McDonagh about In Bruges.

What does the triumph of Blu-ray over HD DVD actually mean, if anything? Sean Axmaker looks into it.

Online downloading tip #1. Arthur Magazine, Issue 28, via John Coulthart.

Online downloading tip #2. Giles Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, via wood s lot.

Fests and events, 2/16.

"Richard Fleischer remains among the least known and least honored of major American filmmakers, in part because of the sheer volume of his output," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. Fleischer "still has not been given a major New York retrospective, but three of his best films will be turning up in the next couple of weeks. The annual Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center will include his 10 Rillington Place (1971) and scandalous Mandingo (1975) this week, while Violent Saturday, his 1955 color and CinemaScope film noir, will begin a weeklong run at Film Forum on Feb 29."

"I haven't crunched all the numbers on this, but my sense is that the SF International Asian-American Film Festival is currently the best in town at consistently showcasing new work by directors whose films have been programmed there before." Brian Darr explains why this is a good thing indeed. March 13 through 23.

"Night one of Noir City was a tribute to a man not credited on either movie on the bill, the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo." A report from Vince Keenan.

For Cinematical, Scott Weinberg talks with "SXSW Master Chief Matt Dentler."

Humboldt County will be screening at SXSW, which runs March 7 through 15. For Hollywood Bitchslap, William Goss talks with directors Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs.

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress will open the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, reports indieWIRE's Brian Brooks. April 24 through May 8.

Berlinale. Bears and other awards.

A few of the International Jury's awards wrapping up this year's Berlinale - there's just one more day of mostly repeat screenings tomorrow - will not sit well with many of the people I spoke with or the critics I read throughout the festival, starting with the Golden Bear for José Padilha's Tropa de elite (Elite Squad). Dennis Lim, for example, writing in the New York Times this morning, calls the film "a violent, cop's-eye view of Rio's favela drug wars that registers more as glorification of the fighting than as critique." I don't entirely agree, but again, that's an opinion I've heard and read often this past week.

Updated through 2/20.

A Silver Bear, the Jury Grand Prix, goes to Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, whose leading proponent is probably David D'Arcy. His four-star review in Screen Daily led to a lively discussion on a cold Thursday afternoon. We heard each other out, though I'm not sure either of us budged much from our original positions.

The Silver Bear for Best Director goes to Paul Thomas Anderson, and few will argue with that decision. There Will Be Blood picks up another Silver Bear, too, going specifically to Jonny Greenwood for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Music), and again: agreed all around, I'm sure. Those of you who read German may be interested to know that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is running director Tom Tykwer's interview with PTA today.

Silver Bear for Best Actress goes to Sally Hawkins for her performance in Mike Leigh's popular favorite, Happy-Go-Lucky. Many have pegged Happy as a frontrunner for the Golden Bear. Considering the contribution Leigh's actors make to his films, and considering, too, how much this one rests on Hawkins's shoulders, this runner-up award is running just about as up close to the top prize as Happy could get without actually taking it.

Silver Bear for Best Actor goes to Reza Najie for his performance in Majid Majidi's Avaze Gonjeshk-ha (The Song of Sparrows), a decision I personally find about as bizarre as awarding the Silver Bear for Best Script to Wang Xiaoshuai for Zuo You (In Love We Trust).

The Alfred Bauer Prize goes to Fernando Eimbcke for Lake Tahoe, and I'm very, very happy to see him not fly home empty-handed.

Meanwhile, "Eran Riklis's Lemon Tree has won the 10th Panorama Audience Award," announces Variety, which points to a full list of awards from a slew of independent juries.

Update, 2/17: Filmbrain is so infuriated by the Golden Bear decision, he's entertaining the notion of foul play: "Easily the worst film in competition, this ultra right-wing (bordering on fascist) Police actioner set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro had nothing going for it, except for its pushy American distributor, Harvey Weinstein.... Did Harvey in any way influence this win? We'll never know for sure, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to believe this was the result of an honest vote." Seems kind of out-there to me. On the other hand, in a world in which Barack Obama can score zero votes in Harlem, maybe I'm simply naive.

Update, 2/18: "For the past two weeks, I had the honor of serving as the jury president for the Berlin International Film Festival's Teddy Awards, the oldest (of two) major mainstream world film festival LGBT film awards." Basil files a report for NewFest.

"Brazilian director Jose Padilha, winner of the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival for his movie Elite Squad, hit back at critics on Monday with all the force of its antihero, police captain Nascimento," reports Pedro Fonseca for Reuters. Padilha: "To call the film fascist is to ignore what the word fascist means."

Updates, 2/20: Teddy Awards juror Vicci Ho files a diary entry for Variety's Circuit.

Reeler ST VanAirsdale talks with both Fernando Meirelles and Paolo Morelli about Elite Squad. Interesting stuff. Meirelles: "[E]ven in Brazil, critics called it fascist. It isn't." Morelli: Padilha's "not condemning the torture. We know it's a bad thing, but the film needs to condemn it. That's how the problem started."

Berlinale Dispatch. 4. Katyn.

David D'Arcy on Wajda's latest, a major event in Poland and a nominee for the Foreign Language Oscar, screening Out of Competition at the Berlinale. A few comments and notes follow.

It is tempting to see an epic like Katyn by Andrzej Wajda, which played in the Competition at the Berlinale, as a lot of fuss over a matter that was settled quite some time ago. In 1940, after the Soviet army invaded eastern Poland in late September of 1939 as part of its Non-Aggression Pact with the Nazis, huge numbers of Polish soldiers were taken prisoner and shipped East. After the rank and file were sent home, the officers (most from the elite of the Polish intelligentsia) remained confined, and in 1940 some 20 thousand of them were executed under orders from Stalin in the forests of Katyn. Most were shot with a single bullet to the back of the head. Their bodies were bulldozed into mass graves.

When the Nazis broke their pact with the Russians and headed East, they came upon the graves and announced the truth to the world, complete with visits from the International Red Cross and services for the dead performed by the Catholic clergy. It was easy for the Russians to undermine what the Germans were saying, in spite of the overwhelming evidence. Official word from Moscow was that the Germans had exterminated the Polish officer corps, just as the Germans had exterminated Polish partisans and thousands of Polish villages, not to speak of industrial killings of millions of Jews from all over Europe in death factories located in Poland. Why take the word of Nazi mass murderers on mass murder?

The Russians and the Polish postwar government repeated those lies until the end of the communist period (when they spoke of Katyn at all), although by the 1980s you would hear about it all the time in Polish conversations. No one believed that the Germans had slaughtered the officers, but no one believed much of what the governments in either Warsaw or Moscow were saying. In the 1990s, when Russian documents ordering the execution of the officers were released, the facts were confirmed once again. Boris Yeltsin even issued an apology. And now Andrzej Wajda, whose father was one of the officers killed, has made a convoluted and cumbersome film that dramatizes the story of the killing of the officers and the communist regime's systematic efforts to cover up that killing.

Why single out Katyn in a war epic? It's tragic and dramatic, and Polish officials spent decades denying it. And yet more Poles died in Soviet camps after the invasion than were executed in Katyn, and Russian troops were given orders by the NKVD to seize (and in many cases kill) the clergy and educated elite of every town that they occupied in 1939. Also, as the Nazis retreated back to Berlin five years later, just as Poles were rising up in Warsaw against them, the approaching Red Army stopped and stayed a few kilometers away on the east bank of the Vistula River rather than intervene in a way that would have saved hundreds of thousands of Polish lives, and saved most of Warsaw, which was burned along with its inhabitants.

If that weren't enough, vast sections of what had been Poland became part of the Soviet Union after the war - these were some of the very same regions that were overrun by Red Army troops as part of the deal with Hitler in 1939. The Russians eventually did get what they wanted.

With an exception or two, all the Poles that I ever met in the 1980s and since knew these facts, and had no illusions about the Soviets. Yet the Polish government denied them as long as it felt that it needed to.

Since 1990, Katyn has been accepted as a national tragedy, and volumes of documents confirm that. You will see some of those documents appear in English, and more attention paid to the massacres now that the film is a finalist for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. (It is curious that such a film would get the Holocaust-sensitive Academy's nomination. At no point in the film is there ever a mention of the Jews who were being slaughtered in Poland at the same time.) If the film wins, it won't be for any cinematic virtues. The script is all over the place, that facts are assumed (as they would be in an epic repeating an oft-told story for an audience that already knows it well), and the significance of this story today isn't always clear. Was this Poland's "greatest generation," as American pop mythologists might call it?

If the film's only effect is to show a massacre and to call it just that, then this is already a welcome event, even though the movie is a far cry from the early work (Ashes and Diamonds, Samson, Kanal, The Wedding, Landscape After the Battle, Promised Land, etc) that made Wajda one of Europe's great directors. And those films were made at a time when making them in Poland really took courage.

Katyn should also remind us that genocides aren't always called by that name, even when the evidence is overwhelming. Would the same Academy whose members nominated Katyn for an Oscar nominate a film about the Armenian Genocide, which George W Bush now seems to think did not happen? Screamers, by Carla Garapedian with System of a Down, comes out on DVD later this month. Watch it for a modern approach to depicting gaps in memory that is an encouraging alternative to Wajda's clumsy teleplay. We know what Poland's excuse was for so many years in denying the facts about Katyn. What is America's in denying another genocide?

- David D'Arcy

To David's comments, I'd simply add that the most debilitating problem with Katyn is its screenplay. The core of the project is the sequence toward the end depicting the actual executions of the officers - and it is indeed as horrific as it needs to be. But the roughly 90 percent of the rest of the film leading up to decrescendo-ing from that sequence is, unfortunately and unnecessarily, the rote stuff of countless WWII dramas. Wives and mothers wait for their men in uniform to come home - and then suffer the shock of the bad news the audience has known all along. A surviving officer cooperates with the Soviets, tries to drown the voice of his conscience in vodka, and then, once drunk, speaks the unspeakable at a bar before walking outside to blow his brains out. Attempts at resistance by one young woman and one young man are brutally put down. Sadly, all this comes off as a hodge-podge collage of war movie clichés.

Wajda these days is reminding me a bit of another well-intentioned European, Volker Schlöndorff - though, of course, the past glories of the former are richer than those of the latter. Still, in the past couple of decades, both directors have taken on projects so inherently honorable as to seem irreproachable. They aren't, exactly; when the telling doesn't measure up to the story, that story is somehow tarnished after all.

- David Hudson

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"First work in five years by Andrzej Wajda, Polish cinema's leading eminence grise, doesn't feel like the personal project one might expect from the son of one slain at Katyn," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety. "Instead, this plays almost like an academic master class, meticulously exploring the event's ramifications but only catching full fire at the end."

"This is a very Polish story with deep resonance for Wajda's countrymen but it may have trouble attracting a wide audience elsewhere," suggests Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter.

Film Zeit rounds up reviews and related stories in the German press.

Earlier: Excellent piece by Anne Applebaum in the New York Review of Books.

Berlinale, 2/15.

"Iranian-themed pics won big at the Berlinale's Teddy Queer Film Awards, on Thursday, with two documentaries taking a number of prizes," reports Ed Meza for Variety. And here's the full list of winners as a PDF.

And the Berlinale announces the winners of the Crystal Bears, awards in the Generation14plus program.

Shane Danielsen, former Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, lets the Berlinale have it full blast, both barrels blazing, at indieWIRE. Madonna and the Stones? Fine. "Every film festival, after all, must court the attentions of the press, if only in order to please their sponsors. But when the rest of your program fails to measure up - and this year's most definitely has not - such plays at populism stop looking like the gilding on the frame, and begin instead to resemble the polish on a turd."

I was talking with friends about all this today - this year, the core group, give or take, has consisted of Andrew Grant, Jürgen Fauth, Daniel Kasman and myself - and it does seem to me that one possible measure that might help would be to "promote" Dieter Kosslick to General Director or some such, someone who calls the long shots as he's done so well for eight years now (launching the Talent Campus, for example), while creating a new curator-type position for the Competition. In other words, an Artistic Director.

"Berlin occupies a singular place on the festival circuit," writes Sheila Johnston in the Telegraph. "Its competition is often - as this year - desperately unexciting, a mix of stately art films and second-rate American dramas.... Yet the sidebar sections are a wild and teeming morass of out-there stuff for which neither Cannes nor Venice would deign to find space."

"[A]lthough the red carpet was trod by quite a few stars this year, cinematic gems were rare," writes Naomi Buck. Also at Spiegel Online, Olaf Sundermeyer reports on the remarkable reception Andrzej Wajda's not so remarkable Katyn received in Poland. Related: For Reuters, Mike Collett-White reports that "Wajda said on Friday he had made enough films about war and his native Poland's past and would turn to modern themes instead."

"My favorite competition film is Night and Day, by the great South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo," announces Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. Also, Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky "moves so nimbly it might mistakenly be thought of as light, even disposable; it has depth and weight." And: "Despite the artistry and intelligence behind it, Standard Operating Procedure feels strangely bloodless and unconvincing."

"[Tilda] Swinton's performance as the heroine of Erick Zonca's film Julia is an arthouse tour de force," argues James Christopher in the London Times. "The official competition films for the Golden Bear have yet to produce a likely champion, but Swinton is an exceptionally good bet for the Best Actress award."

Writing in the Evening Standard, Derek Malcolm agrees with Gavin on Happy: "If the film may seem at first to be about nothing very much, you don't have to look far into it to see that it covers a great deal of ground about how ordinary people live their lives." He also has quick notes on Julia and Elegy.

Fabrizio Maltese has more terrific shots at european-films.net.

Shorts, 2/15.

"For five centuries Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper has stood majestically still on the walls of a Milanese friary, the only disturbance the slow flaking of its priceless paint," writes Robert Booth.

"Now Peter Greenaway, the iconoclastic British filmmaker, has been granted permission to wheel in projectors and bring to life the hidden stories he sees in the masterpiece."

Also in the Guardian:

• "Built inside a converted railway carriage, and located in a back garden in Gorseinon, South Wales, La Charrette has been screening movies to packed houses of 23 people since 1953." And Mark Kermode's helped to give it a proper send-off by arranging for a screening of Danny Boyle's Alien Love Triangle, complete with a special appearance by Kenneth Branagh, on February 23.

• Phil Hoad interviews Fatih Akin.

• "The Bank Job is just the latest in a long line of British films that, sometimes successfully, sometimes disastrously, try to capture the essence of an actual crime or a real criminal," writes Duncan Campbell. Related: For the Telegraph, Will Lawrence talks with screenwriter Dick Clement.

• "Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC who resigned in the wake of the Hutton inquiry, has been appointed chair of the British Film Institute," reports Xan Brooks. "He takes over from Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient and Cold Mountain, whose tenure saw the launch of the new BFI Southbank centre in London."

Brian Darr's been busy. But he's finally gotten around to that list: "My top ten new-to-me and new-to-Frisco films of 2007 are as follows, in alphabetical order with superficial commentary but more substantial links."

On that note, the Skandies have now counted all the way down (or up) to #1: There Will Be Blood.

Another list? Ok: Dan Sallitt's "favorite Japanese films of the last decade."

And another, via several folks out there: Tom Roston's "Top 10 Sexiest Documentaries."

"Bollywood is still ignored, regardless of quality or success," tsk-tsks Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "Part of the problem is that the distributors have no incentive to appeal to a wider audience when their fan base is so loyal and lucrative. The pictures are rarely screened for critics, which is why I visited a London multiplex to see two current Bollywood hits, Sunday and Taare Zameen Par: Every Child Is Special." Related: Laura Irvine at SF360 on the best spots to see Bollywood features in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Le Doulos "is made of elements Melville said he came to love in the B&W American crime movies of the 1930s: shadows, night, trench coats, guns, tough guys, cigarettes, slinky dames, cocktail bars, crooked cops, betrayal, loot and a plot shutting out the world and confining the characters within their own lives and space," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Jason Scott claims that The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters is "loaded with falsehoods. And by loaded, I mean packed, and by packed I mean like the last Japanese subway car before they have to shut down the line." Via Megan McArdle at the Atlantic.

In the New York Times:

• Caryn James has an overview of the documentary feature category in the Oscar race. "This year all five nominees [No End in Sight, Operation Homecoming, Sicko, Taxi to the Dark Side and War/Dance] are politically charged, four are about war, and amazingly, only one feels like homework. Spurred by global conflict and by technology that allows filmmakers to turn out movies in months rather than years, these works carry urgent messages. With their pointed arguments, though, this year's nominees also raise an inescapable question: Can they have any real political impact?"

• "It would be a mistake to assume that the 10 movies nominated this year for best live-action and animated short film in the Oscar sweepstakes are the kind of cinematic amuse-bouches often shown before the main feature at film festivals," writes Stephen Holden. "Most are not trifles, and some range from 30 to 40 minutes long." More from Sam Adams (Philadelphia City Paper), Kevin Crust (Los Angeles Times) and S James Snyder (New York Sun).

• Matt Zoller Seitz: "The star-crossed romance David & Layla tells of a beautiful young Iraqi Kurd named Layla (Shiva Rose) who is threatened with deportation from her adopted home, Brooklyn, and pins her hopes of staying on a suitor named David (David Moscow), an American-born agnostic Jew who has a public-access cable show about sex and is trapped in an unsatisfying relationship with a snooty fiancée (Callie Thorne of the television series Rescue Me)." More from S James Snyder in the New York Sun.

• Jim Shepard reviews Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, "which focuses on the nominees for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night (the eventual winner) and Doctor Dolittle. Yes, you read that last title correctly. For [author Mark] Harris, a columnist at Entertainment Weekly, that array is not just a historical 'collage of the American psyche' but also well beyond diverse, 'almost self-contradictory'; a movie like The Graduate was seemingly designed to demolish the values on display in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The generational divide could not have been starker, and the central issue was what an American movie was supposed to be."

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Eva Holland on It's All Gone Pete Tong and Victoria Large on The Signal

For indieWIRE, Howard Feinstein talks with Stefan Ruzowitzky about The Counterfeiters.

For Filmmaker, Ray Pride talks with Tamara Jenkins about