Fests and events, 4/30.

"Korean filmmakers reinvent Hollywood genres and conventions much the way their Asian counterparts do, but my sense is that they tend to put everything in a broader context, using the form to investigate the inexorable influence of the past, both personal and historical," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "That's the case at least with Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and the lesser-known Lee Chang-dong, who will be appearing at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend with four of his films."

"Wong Kar-wai made his debut feature 20 years ago - an event that BAM is marking with the movie's first non-Chinatown theatrical run," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Ostensibly a conventional tale of triad loyalty, As Tears Go By announced the presence of a genuine Hong Kong new wave - as well as an ambitious cineaste."

The Maryland Film Festival opens tomorrow and runs through Sunday; Sujewa Ekanayake has already fired up an entry collecting his coverage. Michael Tully recommends catching Yeast; and Paul Harrill notes that his Quick Feet, Soft Hands will be there, too.

Chicagoans! The Reader's JR Jones notes that Jonathan Rosenbaum is all over town this weekend, lecturing, chatting, introducing screenings.

"Some of Italy's cultural stars are already bemoaning the end of a golden age following the election of the rightist candidate Gianni Alemanno as Mayor of Rome, which has placed a question mark over the future of the city's lavish film festival." Peter Popham reports for the Independent.

Online viewing tip. "For music video fans, BUG, a bi-monthly event held at the BFI Southbank in London, has become a must-attend event," notes Eliza of Creative Review. "So much so that the show has a tendency to sell out long in advance, prompting the organisers to hold two nights in May, one on May 22 with regular host, Adam Buxton and another on May 27, with a special guest host, director Dougal Wilson."

SFIFF, Week 2.

Picking up where we left off, the Bay Guardian presents its guide to the second week of the San Francisco International Film Festival, running through May 8. Also: D Scot Miller insists that you see Medicine for Melancholy (and for good reason, too), while Erik Morse calls up Guy Maddin to talk about My Winnipeg.

Updated through 5/6.

"If any one thing unites the 22 winners so far of the SF Film Society's Founder's Directing Award, it's that they're all unique cinematic voices whose signature viewpoints and styles could never be mistaken for another's," writes Dennis Harvey. "Over four decades as a writer-director whose film, TV and stage work have created a distinctive ongoing insider's portrait of working-to-middle class English life, Mike Leigh now seems a natural 23rd addition."

Also at SF360, Michael Fox talks with graphic designer Someguy and director Andrea Kreuzhage about 1000 Journals.

Jeffrey M Anderson opens his current roundup for Pixel Vision with a bit of background on 10 + 4, Mania Akbari's sequel, made with Abbas Kiarostami's blessing, of Ten. Meanwhile, at Cinematical, Jeffrey reviews Just Like Home.

Michael Guillén was at the Q&A with Catherine Breillat when The Last Mistress opened the festival - and he's got notes.

Update, 5/2: Jeffrey M Anderson in Pixel Vision: Go Go Tales and I Served the King of England; also, Touching Home.

Updates, 5/4: Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical on A Girl Cut in Two: "I loved it. It's another superbly-made, highly enjoyable Chabrol film, but you probably won't see it on any top ten lists, nor will Chabrol be collecting any awards for it. I think 'consistent' is a bad word among film people; we're more easily impressed by change and diversity, or by the newest, latest thing. Actors like John Wayne were routinely overlooked in favor of actors like Marlon Brando, though Brando could never in a million years have pulled off what John Wayne accomplished in The Searchers. Brando could do lots of things, but John Wayne was the best at being John Wayne. That's my standard rant, and that's how I feel about Chabrol."

"The diners at Film Society Awards Night this past Thursday - including Warren Beatty, Jerry Brown, Willie Brown, Maria Bello, John Burton and Dede Wilsey - saw a mash-up of two opposing approaches to the art of great filmmaking in awards to Mike Leigh and Robert Towne," writes Susan Gerhard at SF360. "One shuns Hollywood, one helped create it. Leigh builds screenplays after a long collaborative process with an acting crew. Towne writes screenplay masterpieces he begrudgingly alters at the request of directors and actors, often (though certainly not always) to the detriment of his original vision. Both, of course, are keen observers of humanity, a fact that can be observed not only in their filmmaking, but also in their speechmaking."

For Pixel Vision: Jeffrey M Anderson on Cachao: Uno Más and Umbrella. More on that one, too, from Johnny Ray Huston.

Updates, 5/5: E Steven Fried rounds up the first week for the Siffblog.

Susan Gerhard talks with "film festival superfan Sue Jean Halvorsen... Her tastes are eclectic, from bleak nihilism to political nonfiction to big-budget entertainment to specific ethnic/national cinema niches. She calls the International 'my window on the world (cheaper than airfare),' adding, 'I love seeing the international community show up for various films - no matter how remote.' SF360.org sat down over a slice to find the method behind Halvorsen's madness in putting together a cinemaniacal film festival viewing schedule."

Updates, 5/6: When Mike Leigh received the Founder's Directing Award, some were surprised that he chose to screen Topsy-Turvy. At the House Next Door, Fernando F Croce recalls asking him why, "and he told me the film, uncharacteristic as it may appear in his oeuvre - 'the cuckoo in the nest,' he fondly dubbed it - had the festive spirit the event called for. Incidentally, it is this seemingly uncharacteristic quality that makes Topsy-Turvy my own favorite of his films."

At Hell on Frisco Bay, Sean McCourt looks back to the night Black Francis performed his new soundtrack as The Golem screened at the Castro and notes: "There is talk of the soundtrack possibly getting a future release, either with the film on DVD, or as a stand-alone album, both of which would be most welcome."

At SF360, Cathleen Rountree talks with Alex Gibney about Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson. More.

Tribeca, Week 2.

"Tribeca, rather than being a big player in the global film marketplace, has become a successful local event, partly because the organizers have avoided film elitism and mastered the high-low New York landscape," argues David Carr in the New York Times.

The festival runs through Sunday and, picking up from Week 1, here we go.

Updated through 5/7.

Sara Vilkomerson's got a roundup in the New York Observer.

"The real highlight of [Katyn] is Krzysztof Penderecki's magnificent score (his influence can be heard all over Jonny Greenwood's music for There Will Be Blood), which often works its discordant melodies just beneath the surface of the film, subtly affecting the mood and quietly amplifying the overall sense of horror," blogs Cullen Gallagher for the L Magazine.

In Slant: Nick Schager on Boy A and Before the Rains.

At the House Next Door: Lauren Wissot on that "incredible odyssey," My Winnipeg, and Zachary Wigon's interview with Guy Maddin (to read or listen to).

At Cinematical:

• "This Is Not a Robbery would've made for an excellent, award-winning short film," writes Erik Davis. "As is, it's just okay." Also, Ball Don't Lie.

• Joel Keller talks with War Inc director Joshua Seftel and reviews Man on Wire.

• Eric Kohn listens to Amy Poehler.

• Fermat's Room "is a strange but engaging Spanish thriller in which four well-established mathematicians convene after receiving a mysterious invitation, and then find themselves trapped inside a shrinking room. The only way out is to solve a bunch of math riddles, but the biggest question is this: Why the heck is someone trying to kill four mathematicians in the first place?" Scott Weinberg. Also, Seven Days Sunday and Gunnin' for That #1 Spot.

"Let the Right One In is the kind of film you like better a few days after first seeing it," writes the IFC's Alison Willmore.

At ScreenGrab: Phil Nugent on Idiots and Angels, Playing and Theater of War, My Winnipeg, Profit motive and the whispering wind (more from Ricky D'Ambrose in the Tisch Film Review), The Zen of Bobby V and From Within.

"Carlos Carcas's Old Man Bebo and Faramarz K-Rahber's Donkey in Lahore are both screening in the World Documentary Competition," and indieWIRE interviews both directors.

Erich Kuersten files a dispatch from New York to Bright Lights After Dark: "The question is, what are all these bleached Midwestern tourists doing this far down from Times Square? Suddenly it hits me like the cold rush off a dirty crack pipe: Am Ex and that stupid beer have turned Tribeca Film Festival into a tourist attraction, ala Mardi Gras, 'jazz fest' and - not long from now I imagine - Burning Man. Dudes!"

Updates, 5/2: "Winners were announced late yesterday evening for this year’s Tribeca Film Festival," reports S James Snyder, who's got the list in the New York Sun. "The long list of awards included a slate of stories about New York economics, war-torn African nations, and the pain of adolescent alienation - as seen through the eyes of a bloodsucking vampire."

Also in the New York Sun:

• For Darrell Hartman, Before the Rains and Ramchand Pakistani "hint at the shifting winds of today's Indian and Pakistani filmmaking scenes."

• S James Snyder on Head Wind, Kassim the Dream and Milosevic on Trial.

• Meghan Keane on The Wackness, Let the Right One In, Somers Town, Bart Got a Room, Savage Grace, Finding Amanda, Newcastle and This Is Not a Robbery.

"Now that I have seen dozens and dozens of films in this 7th Tribeca Film Festival, I want to correct myself," writes Howard Feinstein at indieWIRE. "I was wrong in my first report. Tribeca is unique, and occupies a certain niche in New York that belongs to it alone. It is neither film festival nor film market. It is closer to Las Vegas's Showest, or Orlando's Show East, which are more mainstream in their focus than, say, artier events like the New York Film Festival, although it is eclectic enough to include 'high art' movies, too."

"Guest of Cindy Sherman feels more like three or four docs fused into one entertaining (and sometimes squirm-inducing) concoction," writes Joy Press, who talks with director Paul H-O for Salon. "We get a sidelong view of the art world and its symbiotic relationship with commerce and celebrity, as well as an exploration of the awkward life of a famous person's 'plus one'... At the center of it all is Sherman, in a fragmented portrait of a woman H-O calls 'the most famous mystery girl of art,' a photographer who has used her own image as the basis for a hugely influential body of work."

Eric Kohn talks with Bill Plympton about Idiots and Angels. Also in the New York Press, Simon Abrams on Somers Town. More on that one from Bill Weber in Slant.

Somers Town also features in Aaron Hillis's new entry in his "Critic's Notebook" at Premiere - and so does Charly.

For VF Daily, Julian Sancton talks with Ben Kingsley, currently at work with Martin Scorsese on Ash Cliff: "At Tribeca this year, he changes gears once again with two very different comedies: War, Inc, a satire of the military industrial complex, and The Wackness, where he plays a pot-smoking, emotionally stunted psychiatrist against the backdrop of a changing New York in 1994."

Marcy Dermansky quite likes War, Inc.

For New York, Bilge Ebiri talks with José Padilha about Elite Squad.

At Cinematical:

• Erik Davis on Gotta Dance and Finding Amanda.

• Joel Keller on Tennesee, Life in Flight (Erik Davis talks with director Tracey Hecht) and Yonders Joe.

• Eric Kohn talks with Chris Bell about Bigger, Stronger, Faster.

• Scott Weinberg on Baghdad High.

At ScreenGrab: Phil Nugent on Bitter & Twisted, Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha, Finding Amanda, Boy A, Guest of Cindy Sherman and 3 docs.

In his latest dispatch at Stream, Eric Kohn covers Mike Figgis's appearance as part of the Tribeca Talks series, Wild Man of the Navidad and 57,000 Kilometers Between Us.

Alison Willmore has a "Rednexploitation!" roundup: Tennessee, From Within and The Wild Man of Navidad.

For Filmmaker, Jason Guerrasio on Chevolution; and Brandon Harris talks with John Magary (The Second Line).

At the L Magazine: Cullen Gallagher on Idiots and Angels and Sita Sings the Blues; and George Krzewski on Amos Poe's Empire II.

Online listening tip. Leonard Lopate talks with Robert Drew about A President to Remember: In the Company of John F Kennedy.

Online viewing tip. Jürgen Fauth has the first 20 minutes of "an extraordinary panel consisting of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, screenwriter Ann Druyan, artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky, and actor Matthew Modine." The topic is the 40th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Updates, 5/4: "Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues is a strange and beautiful little film, a potentially wispy slice of autobiography smartly elevated through irresistible, orgiastic style," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

"[Cindy] Sherman, already a sensation due to her Untitled Film Stills, happened to enjoy watching Gallery Beat, and while everyone in the haute art world clamored for interviews with her, she decided she’d prefer to talk to Paul H-O. This was like Nicole Kidman granting exclusive access to a pimply teenage blogger from some godforsaken dungeon in Secaucus." Andrew Hultkrans for Artforum on Guest of Cindy Sherman - and on The Universe of Keith Haring, too.

At Twitch: Simon Abrams on The Cottage, Let the Right One In and Fermat's Room.

At ScreenGrab: Phil Nugent on Man on Wire.

For the IFC, Stephen Saito talks up a This Is Not a Robbery roundtable.

At Zoom In Online: Keith Uhlich on Milosovic on Trial and Kicking It and Jim Rohner on From Within, Dying Breed and Killer Movie.

At Slant: Fernando F Croce on The Aquarium.

At Cinematical: Joel Keller on Head Wind.

Updates, 5/5: "I will gaze into my crystal ball right now and assure you that Tribeca did not premiere next year's big Oscar-sweeping triumph," writes Andrew O'Hehir. "But at least arguably, Tribeca screened the year's best films made in Britain, France and Sweden; at least two documentaries that will win multiple awards and draw loving audiences; a thriller that could be the latest Spanish-language hit; at least one American indie that's headed for cult status; and the latest work by the cinematic poet laureate of Winnipeg, Manitoba." He picks ten in all to watch out for.

Also in Salon, Amy Reiter talks with Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez about Chevolution.

"Though it's still very much in search (and need) of an identity, this year's edition of the Tribeca Film Festival is the first one that hasn't left me with a case of agita," writes Filmbrain.

In the New York Sun, S James Snyder looks back: "Most notable, perhaps, about this year's winners is that they were not the titles being widely discussed three weeks ago.... [T]here's a populist sensibility about Tribeca that is particularly appealing on the film-festival circuit."

Phil Nugent wraps the festival for Screengrab.

Brandon Harris rounds it up for Filmmaker.

"John Gianvito proves once again that in the cinema simplicity begets superlative richness." Daniel Kasman on Profit motive and the whispering wind in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Karina Longworth presents her "Tribeca 2008 Recap" at the SpoutBlog.

"Guest of Cindy Sherman is a true work of talent and artistry," writes Keith Uhlich at Zoom In Online.

Updates, 5/6: Aaron Hillis puts the finishing touches on his "Critic's Notebook" for Premiere: Guest of Cindy Sherman, "a riveting, witty and quite sophisticated portrait of three overlapping subjects of varying depths, which belies the self-serving sameness of most artist docs"; Sita Sings the Blues, "the beautifully audacious feature debut of long-time comic strip artist Nina Paley"; and a list: "Premiere's Top 10 Films of Tribeca 2008."

Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel were on hand for a Q&A following a screening of Lou Reed's Berlin on Sunday and the Film Panel Notetaker went to work. More on the Playlist.

"Days in Sintra is Paula Gaitán's meditative, sensory exercise," writes Ricky D'Ambrose in the Tisch Film Review. "It is also a documentary, dedicated to her husband, the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber RochaM.a<, who passed away more than 25 years ago."

The Cottage is "an enjoyably but fairly schizophrenic genre experiment that does a fine job with the horror and comedy as separate components - but, as is usually the case, the combination of the two proves to be a very difficult feat to pull off," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

Stephen Saito talks with James Mottern about Trucker for the IFC. More from Time Out New York.

IndieWIRE indexes its coverage.

Cinematical's index.

"Undoubtedly the best fictional film to play at the Tribeca Film Festival is Luc Moullet's fantastic, weird little short, The Milky Way, where-in the strangeness of the world blossoms in cinema’s simplicity," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

And Daniel Kasman indexes his coverage, too.

"Attendance appears to have dipped for the second year in a row at the Tribeca Film Festival despite lowered ticket prices, a 25 percent reduction in the number of features and an attempt to consolidate most screenings in the Union Square area," notes the New York Post's Lou Lumenick.

Updates, 5/7: For Movie City News, Noah Forrest talks with Julie Checkoway about Waiting for Hockney.

At Cinema Strikes Back: Charlie Prince on Fighter and Susannah Gora, briefly, on Finding Amanda and Yonkers Joe.

Mister Lonely.

"As a filmmaker, [Harmony] Korine - who made an instant sensation 13 years ago as the teenage author of the Kids screenplay, and earned the undying enmity of the entertainment press with his subsequent Andy Kaufman-esque mindfuck antics - combines an installation artist's eye with a Catskills comic's affection for the threadbare fringes of showbiz," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "Co-written with his brother Avi, Mister Lonely is startlingly straightforward compared to his earlier work. But, like that work, it stands or falls on each single, self-contained scene. And it falls, often.... But letting a movie keep its intimations of chaos... sometimes yields moments of wonder."

Updated through 5/6.

"Mister Lonely reveals that the punk abrasiveness of Korine's youth has been replaced by a lyrical self-pity - the apparent upshot of a decade on the skids," writes New York's David Edelstein. "I'm glad he has pulled himself together, but the film is pretty ramshackle, full of obvious group improvisations that fail to spark and an overdose of bathos."

"While the film falls short in comparison to his other films, Korine remains one of the most innovative and surprising new voices in American cinema," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "As a champion for the beautiful and the strange, I'll take bottom-shelf Korine over just about anything else currently playing in theaters."

"What to make of it all?" asks Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Hard to say. Just to take in the fact that its soundtrack is made up of music by both J Spaceman and Sun City Girls is to understand that this is a picture that's divided against itself in a way that's perhaps too hermetic to be comprehended."

"As he tells it now, the Harmony Korine of the 90s was not just a precocious upstart but also a thin-skinned kid," writes Dennis Lim, who met him recently for a New York Times profile. "Even then, he said, he realized that it was partly his youthful hubris and pranksterish humor that made him such a tempting target. 'It's one thing to understand it intellectually,' he said, 'but another to live through it.'"

Eric Kohn talks with Korine for indieWIRE.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and Toronto.

Updates: "All that Korine asks in exchange for his not passing judgement on characters is that the viewer does not either," writes Alex Ross Perry in the Tisch Film Review. "Considering the natural spectator/spectacle relationship that immediately arises when presented with a street performer or a celebrity, by giving you people who are pretty much both - at least as far as the film is concerned - Korine has already put the viewer at a distance from which judgement is difficult, if not impossible."

Mark Olsen profiles Korine for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 5/1: "Mister Lonely is enigmatic, its moods and meanings sometimes elusive in the way that dreams can be, but nearly every frame is an image of arresting clarity and beauty," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And even when it strays beyond the border of sense, you can’t help accepting its logic and its truth, much as you do when your unconscious spools pictures in your sleep."

"While Korine's earlier films contained many moments of sheer artistic brilliance, they never congealed into a deeper, unified feeling in the way that they do here," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "Sonically, visually, and structurally audacious, Mister Lonely firmly establishes Harmony Korine as a major voice in world cinema."

"I certainly don't mind if a filmmaker works with the same ideas and themes in more than one film, but while the two portions of Mister Lonely spoke to each other, I don't think they necessarily formed a single whole," writes Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "But the two films still operate as separate meditations on some of the same themes."

"Offbeat?" asks Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "Sure. But not as strange as, say, your average Charlie Kaufman screenplay. It's too bad, because for once Mr Korine has given audiences the sense that he was trying to create something that might play before midnight."

For the Guardian's Danny Leigh, Kids "still feels somehow under-appreciated to me, the combination of its teen-sex subject matter and the role of busted flush Larry Clark as director still keeping it from its rightful status."

"Mister Lonely has its moments of wonder and beauty, but the film is obscure by design, and meant to appeal to those who favor the alternative canon of directing greats: the one that includes the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, Crispin Glover, John Cassavetes, Claire Denis, Abel Ferrara and Vincent Gallo," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Korine clearly wants to be on that list too—though at the moment, the best he can do is pretend."

Korine is "a sideshow barker and Mister Lonely is his freak show," growls Armond White in the New York Press.

"Though Mister Lonely seems sweeter and more mainstream than Korine's other films, it still has that sense of randomness, of pathetic luck and habit and wisdom all combining to make up a life, or a collision of lives," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical.

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth talks with Korine about his media diet.

Andy Battaglia talks with Korine for the AV Club.

Erica Abeel talks with Mamet for indieWIRE.

"Mister Lonely is richer and sweeter than anything [Korine's] ever made," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

What it all boils down to, I think, is that Korine belongs more to the visual-art tradition of cinema than the psychological-drama tradition. It's simplifying only a little to say that all narrative filmmaking comes out of two strains of modernist theater, the Eugene O'Neill-Tennessee Williams strand in one direction and the Brecht-Artaud strand in the other. What most people expect in a movie, most of the time, is the O'Neill-Williams tendency, with naturalistic characters and cathartic resolutions. It's safe to say Korine isn't interested in that. He comes partly out of the more confrontational Brecht-Artaud tradition, and - like Godard and Jim Jarmusch and Peter Greenaway, to name filmmakers I bet he likes - out of photography and dance and advertising and postmodern art. It's not coincidence that he's spent the last decade making music videos and performance art projects rather than feature films.

Updates, 5/4: For Michael Sicinski, Mister Lonely is "a film riddled with as many good ideas as shoddy ones and in its own weird way all the more admirable for being such a sincere, ramshackle piece of junk."

"Although Harmony has never made a big deal of it, certain characters in his movies appear to have been influenced by people who appeared in his father's films," writes Gary Dretzka at Movie City News, where he also takes stock of recent developments in the distribution of art house movies.

Update, 5/5: "Korine's influence on American film culture has been minimal, all told," writes Nick Pinkerton in Reverse Shot. "I'm surprised to find myself thinking that this might not be entirely a good thing; slogging through any given season's slate of 'smart' indies, his spazziness seems a boon."

Update, 5/6: "Mister Lonely has gotten under the cinetrix's skin." And she's got some online viewing for you.

Matt Zoller Seitz.

The biggest news so far in an already eventful week is most certainly the announcement from Matt Zoller Seitz, by way of a conversation with new House Next Door proprietor Keith Uhlich, that he is leaving print journalism to devote himself to filmmaking full-time.

You can read or listen to that conversation as well as the comments that follow, and you'll sense immediately that Matt's thought this through and is more than comfortable with his decision. To which I say, congrats - and respect! I'll miss reading you in the papers, Matt, but hope that, as you say, you'll still be dropping in at the House, where you've always made all of us readers feel right at home. More, though, I look forward to watching your work.

Updates, 4/30: "Consider this a very short clip reel." Jim Emerson presents some of his favorite passages from Matt's reviews at the House. Because it was there that "he became a habit with me." I agree. Some writers gather strength when pressing up against limitations of form (call it the James Merrill Effect), while others flourish when cut loose (the John Ashbery Effect).

Keith Uhlich gathers more appreciations and best wishes at the House.

Shorts, 4/29.

"João César Monteiro directed 21 films from 1969 until his death in 2003," writes Craig Keller. "Most of them are masterpieces, even of the supreme sort. I'd like more people to know him, and to pursue seeing and showing his work, so over the next few years I'm going to write on Cinemasparagus about all of his movies."

Just up at First Monday: Michael Z Newman on "Ze Frank and the poetics of Web video."

"Steven Soderbergh will direct The Girlfriend Experience, a feature that focuses on the world of prostitution from the vantage point of a $10,000-a-night call girl," reports Michael Fleming in Variety.

Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, has told Tim Murphy that he's working on screenplay for a biopic of Dusty Springfield - to be played by Nicole Kidman.

Congrats to the Iron Sky team on its grant from the Finnish Film Foundation!

Acquarello in the Auteurs' Notebook on Jean EustacheMes petites amoureuses: "Rather than a chronicle of the serial misadventures of a wayward young hero, Eustache's penchant for distilled naturalism and rigorous attention to detail suggests even greater affinity with Maurice Pialat, a shared aesthetic that is further reinforced through Pialat's appearance in the film as a visitor who challenges Daniel on his academic knowledge (placing great importance on learning the fundamentals that also reflects their like-minded approach to filmmaking)."

"A College Woman's Confession is Shin Sang-ok's big hit of the 1950s, and indeed the film that established his commercial career," writes Darcy Paquet. "Aesthetically, Confession contains accomplished acting, an effective use of suspense (despite the slow manner in which it unfolds), and a keen feel for image and sound during an era when technical challenges dominated the filmmaking process." Also at Koreanfilm.org, Adam Hartzell on Lump of Sugar: "Although I can't say the film is a stellar piece of work, I resolve to let the film be what it is, a decent film within the young adult, coming-of-age genre."

In the New York Times:

• Elizabeth Vincentelli reports on the various reactions in France to the phenomenal success of Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks): "Many pundits have interpreted the praise of small-town living in an unglamorous, untrendy region as a rebuke to [President Nicholas] Sarkozy's pro-capitalist politics and his flashy lifestyle. Indeed, the movie is laying bare fault lines running through a France anxious at the prospect of losing its identity and cultural roots to a dehumanizing globalization closely linked to America.... Curiously, the few expressions of dissent in the sea of love have come from the intellectual left, which usually has no problem railing against big money and Hollywood."

• "Grand Theft Auto IV is a violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun," writes Seth Schiesel. "It calls to mind a rollicking R-rated version of Mad magazine featuring Dave Chappelle and Quentin Tarantino, and sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts. It is by far the best game of the series, which made its debut in 1997 and has since sold more than 70 million copies." And the Guardian's Bobbie Johnson reports that "the suits in Hollywood are anxious that it may dent the profits of their summer blockbusters." Andrew Osborne comments at ScreenGrab and, via the House Next Door, Adam Rosenberg reviews the game for UGO.

• "Kate Phillips, who played mostly supporting roles on Broadway and in more than 50 films in the 1930s and 40s and who later was a co-writer of the 1958 horror film The Blob, died on April 18 in Keene, NH," writes Dennis Hevesi. "She was 94." Related, at Slate: "In 2007, Torie Bosch attended Blob Fest and talked to Phillips about theories that The Blob represented America's battle against communism."

"The recent news that the board of Minnesota Film Arts has finalized a deal to sell the Oak Street Cinema to a developer isn't surprising, but it sure is heartbreaking," writes the Minneapolis Post. "The Oak Street was always a cinema of the heart, a cinéaste's equivalent of Hemingway's clean, well-lighted space. Its demise hurts." Comment here.

"If recent studio acquisitions are any evidence, then the fastest way to get a movie deal these days may just be to turn your next Big Idea into a graphic novel," writes Jay A Fernandez. "In a faddish frenzy, no fewer than 22 film projects born of graphic novels or comics have been announced in the last six weeks."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "How many nonagenarians, even those with their health, still consider glamour, grace and fantasy to be among the most important things in life?" Emili Vesilind on Hats Off, Jyll Johnstone's documentary portrait of Mimi Weddell.

"A funny thing happened while I was watching Shine a Light," writes DH Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "I got bored."

"I came across a stack of albums that represented five years in the life of one [Bette] Davis admirer," recalls John McElwee. "She'd maintained them between 1938 and 1942.... Coverage in these scrapbooks was exhaustive. You look through such labors of adoration and realize just how important movie stars once were."

Nathaniel R is celebrating Michelle Pfeiffer's 50th.

It's another "Supporting Actress Smackdown" at StinkyLulu's, and the year is 1953.

"Is Gus Van Sant the most consistently adventurous director in America?" asks Ryan Gilbey. Also blogging for the Guardian, Mark Hooper reminds us of "Cinema's greatest controversies."

"Juan Lopez Moctezuma's Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975) is one of those movies you watch and, after mentally cataloging all the things wrong with it, realize how cool it really is... mostly because of all the things you thought were wrong with it," writes Arbogast.

Troy Patterson in Slate: "You can contrast [Amy Poehler's Hillary with her far more acute SNL impersonations of Dennis Kucinich (a twinkling elf) and Britney Spears (gum-baring, gum-snapping). Those are projections of her core comedic identity, which is puckish, slightly feral, and not in any great rush to be house-trained."

Michael Guillén talks with Chen Shi-Zheng about Dark Matter.

In the Observer, Philip French looks back on the career of Walter Matthau; and Katie Toms gets a few quick words with Morgan Spurlock.

James Mottram has a long talk with Marianne Faithfull for the Independent Magazine.

There was a lot more to Bebe Barron than Forbidden Planet, Ed Halter reminds us at Rhizome.

"Amy Winehouse is working on a theme song for the forthcoming James Bond film with Mark Ronson, the producer has confirmed to the BBC."

Online fiddling around tip. Like riddles? Jonathan Lapper has a game for you.

Online listening tip. Rob Davis and J Robert Parks discuss the films of Michael Haneke.

Online viewing tip. Nick Dawson: "In 1965, Samuel Beckett wrote his one and only film script, an 18-minute short called, very simply, Film." Starring Buster Keaton.

Online viewing tips. Cineleet's "Directors' Cameos in Films," via Coudal Partners.

Fests and events, 4/29.

Sujewa Ekanayake is impressed by the lineup for the Maryland Film Festival, running Thursday through May 4.

"The Coen brothers' Burn After Reading will open the 65th Venice Film Festival," reports Nick Vivarelli. "World preem of the dark spy comedy, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton, will launch from the Venice Lido Aug 27, ahead of its UK release Sept 5."

Also in Variety: Adam Dawtrey on the Edinburgh International Film Festival's new "cult" sidebar, "Under the Radar," and Jay Weissberg, wrapping the 23rd Turin International GLBT Film Festival.

"On May 10, audiences will gather at screenings, online, and around cell phones and televisions in far-flung locales from Cairo to Rio de Janeiro. They'll be there to watch four hours of documentaries and short features made by people around the world, on pressing issues ranging from climate change to political repression." Corey Binns for Good Magazine on Jehane Noujaim and Pangea Day.

David Bordwell posts an extensive entry on the just-wrapped Ebertfest, prefacing his and Kristin Thompson's takes on offerings with this: "You can get a sense of what was happening by checking Jim Emerson at scanners and Peter Sobczynski at Hollywood Bitchslap and Kim Voynar at Cinematical and Lisa Rosman at A Broad View and PL Kerpius at Scarlett Cinema and Andrew Wells at A Penny in the Well and many others. There is some coverage at the News Gazette, although the most informative stories from the paper aren't on the net. Then there's Roger's own blog, Ebertfest in Exile, which in one entry goes off on an unexpected trajectory... toward Joe vs the Volcano."

Blake Ethridge rounds up Udine-related interviews.

More from Bob Turnbull at Hot Docs: Talking Guitars, Shot in Bombay and All Together Now. And then, a wrap up.

Also: "Every once in a while, a film arrives that calls upon its audience to question everything that it believes about film," writes AJ Schnack. "Tehran Has No More Pomegranates is just such a film. Director Massoud Bakhshi has built a daring essay doc out of scratchy black and white historical films, beautiful film images from present-day Tehran and a series of narrations that defy logic and good sense. It's madness, this picture, deconstructing every notion of film, propaganda and history."

In the Guardian: Jonathan Glancey on Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain. Wednesday through October 25 at London's Science Museum.

Recently updated entries: Cannes, Tribeca, San Francisco and Boston.

DVDs, 4/29.

Back in 2005, Marilyn Ferdinand issued a call in Bright Lights Film Journal: "Distribute This!" And now, Milestone is doing just that. A restored 35mm print of Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles, presented by Sherman Alexie and Charles Burnett, will begin its tour of the US at New York's IFC Center on July 11 - and a DVD will follow in late 2008 or early 2009.

"The 1960s had birthed the spaghetti Western, but by the early 70s - the 'Decade of Lead,' which brought neofascist bombings and Red Brigade assassinations - it was as dead as Dillinger, and the giallo and poliziotteschi were ascending. The latter genre, defined by rough and bloody crime thrillers, was inspired by such American cop films as Dirty Harry. But unlike American films, there were no good guys or bad guys - everyone was shaded gray." Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun on Pasquale Festa Campanile's Hitch-Hike, Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City and Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper.

"I get the sense after watching 5 Centimeters Per Second that [Makoto] Shinkai is at something of a crossroads," writes Jason Morehead. "Though barely an hour in length, 5 Centimeters Per Second is such a perfect encapsulation of the themes that Shinkai has been exploring in his work to date that one can't help but wonder what's left there for him to explore, and wonder where he'll go from here."

"A vast new box set from the British Film Institute, Land of Promise, which collects the most notable films of documentary-makers working between 1930 and 1950, is a compendium of what-ifs, in which the idea of a fair and equal Britain, one brought about by war but created in peace, seems so real and near as to feel graspable," writes Lynsey Hanley in the New Statesman. "In these richer but once more unequal times, it is hard to avoid nostalgia."

"There is, simply put, no film before or after Blast of Silence that uses the city as a character better or more knowingly, including the work of Jules Dassin, Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese," writes Brian Berger in Stop Smiling. More from Paul Matwychuk.

Stone Wallace, author of George Raft: The Man Who Would Be Bogart, has the Noir of the Week: They Drive By Night.

John Adair on Winter Light: "Bergman's camera and lighting move in unison with the burgeoning atheism of the film's central character to produce a scene that crystallizes the tension of faith present throughout the film."

"As [Miroslav] Tichý is a man with a very interesting past life who is now in his 80s and facing fame as an outsider artist, he of course would be the great subject for a documentary film," notes Mr Whiskets. "Luckily a director as sensitive to her subject as Nataša von Kopp came along first to create a portrait of the man before anyone else." Worldstar is now out on DVD in Germany.

"Ozu made a lot of films in the 30s, many of which are silent, some of which are lost, and these early films are seldom screened, so the new Eclipse series release, Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies, is valuable in that it lets us see the genesis of his refined late style," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door.

Also, Kevin B Lee on O Lucky Man!: "David Sherwin's screenplay seems to depend heavily on the audience taking its wry depictions of widespread dystopia at face value to attain an aura of verity." In the accompanying video at Shooting Down Pictures, Kevin and Dave McDougall discuss a scene.

With The Guatemalan Handshake, "[Todd] Rohal has whipped his world from the weedy ground up into a fiery, relentless storm of quirk, but he's original enough in his cataract of details to keep us in a constant state of enchanted disorientation. Why was Napoleon Dynamite with its relatively stereotypical uber-misfit, a hit, while this 2006 daydream foundered out of sight?" asks Michael Atkinson for the IFC. Also: "Another revelation, Lois Weber's Hypocrites is a deeply eccentric, troublingly lyrical vision, for its day - 1915! - and ours."

And in the New York Times, Dave Kehr reviews Kino's complete bundle, First Ladies: Early Women Filmmakers. But first, Gregg Araki's The Living End's "pop nihilism still packs a punch, its impact amplified by more recent mainstreamed, Oscar-friendly gay melodramas like Brokeback Mountain."

"[Julian] Schnabel's films - Basquiat, Before Night Falls (2000), and last year's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, out on DVD from Miramax this week - are stories of cruelly curtailed lives," writes Dennis Lim. "Not only is Schnabel respectful of his artist-heroes - and these are all unmistakably heroic films - he seems willing to absorb their aesthetic strategies." Also in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Spano presents a list of films that make Paris look lovely.

With the hype long dried up and blown away, "Cloverfield emerges now not as a hollow shell, but as some kind of brilliant conception, albeit one more than a bit too caught up in its calculated form to effectively indulge in the emotional undercurrents that made The Blair Witch Project one hell of a character study in addition to a representation of the moving image as point-of-view documentarianism," writes Rob Humanick.

At the Playlist: "True Romance 15 Years Later: A Look Back."

"Day Night Day Night isn't an easy film to watch, and it leaves you with more questions than answers," writes James Rocchi at the Culture Blog! "But as summer arrives at the movies with its fantasies wrung out of comic books and cartoons, and less complicated and more comforting forces of destruction battle for box office, think of Day Night Day Night as a chance to feel a chilling blast of something rich and dark before sinking into the cool, soothing air-conditioned embrace of big Hollywood."

"Does Billy Jack still work?" asks Paul Clark at ScreenGrab. "Nope."

With "The Mod Musicals of Lance Comfort," Kimberly Lindbergs not only does a terrific job of putting Live It Up! and Be My Guest high on your to-see list, she also tells you how to get your hands on the DVDs. Keywords: Joe Meek, David Hemmings and Steve Marriott.

Glenn Kenny's "Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: Letter From An Unknown Woman."

DVD roundups: The AV Club, Sean Axmaker, Paul Clark (ScreenGrab), DVD Talk, Bryant Frazer, Paul Harrill, the Lumière Reader, Peter Martin (Cinematical), Noel Murray (Los Angeles Times) and Slant.

And as always, watch the Guru.

David Lean, 4/29.

David Lean "had a fortunate life, and his last piece of good fortune lay in attracting Kevin Brownlow as his authorized biographer," writes Philip French in the Observer. "Brownlow has an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, a practical understanding of film-making and this outstanding 832-page biography is as lucidly written and carefully produced as his trilogy on the silent cinema."

"On Friday, as part of the BritWeek celebration commemorating the British consulate's 50 years in Los Angeles, the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre will present a centenary tribute to Lean hosted by film historian David Thomson, who will discuss Lean's career and influences on such directors as Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and the late Anthony Minghella," notes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "The evening will include clips and reminiscences with Lawrence of Arabia editor Anne V Coates, Great Expectations actress Jean Simmons and [James] Fox."

Earlier: "David Lean @ 100."

SFIFF Dispatch. 2.

Brian Darr on two revivals in San Francisco.

The San Francisco International Film Festival's first weekend of screenings arrived in conjunction with late-April weather that could be called summery, except that in San Francisco summer generally means cold fog, not blue skies and temperatures in the 70s. The festival staff introducing daytime screenings, at least the ones some of my friends and I attended, consistently thanked us for deciding to spend the afternoon in a darkened theatre. As if we really had any other option - I mean, how many opportunities does one get in a lifetime to watch a lustrous 35mm print of John Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven on a screen like the Castro Theatre's?

Movie buffs know how Leave Her to Heaven's sunny technicolor exteriors mask truly sinister impulses underneath. It's not for nothing that the film is frequently the sole full-color entry into the film noir canon. With such a reputation preceding, audiences don't have to guess whether Gene Tierney's longing stare at Cornel Wilde on their early New Mexico train ride portends eventual doom. Tierney's affection-starved green-eyed-monster is no simple rich bitch or cut-and-dried psychotic. Even in her most despicable moments, the audience is asked to empathize with the motivations, if not the twisted logic, behind her devastating acts. As a result, Leave Her to Heaven becomes as cutting an indictment of repression as anything by Ingmar Bergman.

Before the screening of the 1945 Fox picture, Schawn Belston presented a brief digital demonstration of how the film's restoration was accomplished, followed by a video introduction from Martin Scorsese. Scorsese reminded us that the archivist's job does not consist only of the restoration and preservation of film materials. Just as important is the proper exhibition of our cinema heritage, both to viewers already familiar with a particular work, and to newly appreciative audiences.

If the Leave Her to Heaven screening was a happy occasion to bridge the gulf between these two groups - classic cinema devotees and curious newbies - the previous night's screening of The Golem illustrated that trying too hard to connect a new audience with an old film can be fraught with complications. The Golem marked the 2008 edition of the festival's tradition of commissioning untraditional music scores composed and performed live by contemporary rockers. Launched in 2000 with Tom Verlaine's accompaniment of a selection of early 20th century avant-garde shorts, the series has joined Yo La Tengo with the films of Jean Painlevé, Superchunk with Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness, the American Music Club with Frank Borzage's Street Angel, and much more. Silent film music purists have learned to steer clear of these match-ups, as the music generally makes little or no attempt to sonically simulate the experience silent-era moviegoers had watching the films upon original release. But for those of us concerned with perpetuating a living tradition of the appreciation of silent film art, these experiments represent an intriguing alternative to a meticulously-researched in-period score performed by a top-tier keyboardist or orchestra. If I prefer the latter, I still leave room to appreciate something different.

I appreciated the musical accompaniment to The Golem, very much actually. It was composed and performed by Black Francis, best known as frontman for the Pixies, though he brought along a coterie of instrumentalists including prior collaborators Eric Drew Feldman and Duane Jarvis. Ralph Carney's flute provided the unexpectedly soprano sound of the shofar horn used at one point in the film, but this was one of the few instances in which the sound piped through the Castro speakers directly matched the action on screen. For the most part, the band's contribution was no score at all, but instead a set of ear-catching songs inspired by the 1920 German film. Francis would wail lyrics like "how did you get so screwed" and make references to the demon Astaroth, creating a parallel narrative that sometimes illuminated and sometimes dominated the images shot by Karl Freund.

Because I enjoyed the music so much on its own terms, I didn't so much mind the fact that the film was comparatively incidental to the experience. I did mind the attempted wisecracks about YouTube, the Castro Street Fair, and other irrelevant topics uttered by comic Roy Zimmerman, billed as "master of the ceremony" for the evening. These hapless attempts at wit, perhaps intended as bite-size benshi bits to help smooth over the alien experience of watching an 88-year-old film for Generation MST3K, thankfully did not draw much laughter out of the audience, and were infrequent enough that they didn't ruin the rest of the evening.

But honestly, The Golem is no masterpiece to desecrate; it's actually a rather thin telling of a well-known legend, and it takes a while to get very exciting. The Jewish inhabitants of a medieval Prague ghetto whose protection from an anti-Semitic emperor is a clay guardian come to life, played by the film's co-director Paul Wegener. The most interesting aspects of the film are its special effects, Wegener's earthen performance as the Golem, and the significance of the frizzy-hair, wizard-cap depictions of medieval Jews in a Weimar-era film that clearly is trying to appear sympathetic to the persecuted minority, even as it trades on superstitious stereotypes. I don't have my Siegfried Kracauer handy right now, but I'm curious to see what he says about the role a little blonde gentile girl outside the ghetto gates plays in the films denouement, and what it might have meant to audiences of the time.

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More from San Francisco here.

Tribeca Dispatch. 3.

David D'Arcy on three films at Tribeca.

If you've ever thought of moving to Florida, or wished that you grew up there, see Bart Got a Room, the debut comedy by Brian Hecker, a high school prom comedy in which senior Danny Stein (Steven J Kaplan) has everything but a girlfriend. Yet he's still determined to go the prom. Shake well and serve.

The film was shot in Hollywood - Hollywood, Florida, that is - Hecker's dystopian hometown, which makes Miami look glamorous. I don't whether he lives there now, but somehow I doubt it. Danny, no surprise, is Jewish, although the fact that his parents are played by arch-gentiles Cheryl Hines and a tightly curled William H Macy clues you in to the absurd dimension of Hecker's script. Think of the palette of magic realism, and then transfer it to a parking lot.

Danny's parents have just divorced, and are already casualties of the singles scene. The boy is prepared to follow in his parents' misbegotten footsteps, with a nose that only a plastic surgeon could love. Hence the endless schtick of everyone giving him advice on what to do - from the parents of his chubby and freckled friend, Camille, who expects to be taken to the prom, to portly Craig, a fat peer with divorced parents - everyone seems to have them - who is tanning himself, without much success, in his swimming pool in preparation for the main event. Each character here is more deluded than the next, each one adding to the fun of this wry observation of a rite of passage. Think of The Tender Trap (1955) with Frank Sinatra, or the little-known classic, The Plot Against Harry (Michael Roemer, 1969), in which a smalltime Jewish racketeer, just out of prison, is under siege in the kitschy Bronx from well-wishers who want to find him a wife.

The title comes from a line that all the boys who talk to Danny repeat. A room is a synonym for prom night "action," and even Bart, the school's biggest nerd, has reserved one. Hecker has a keen ear for dialogue and for the way kids talk - a rare thing, in spite of the endless number of high school movies out there. He has a delicate touch with his mostly-young cast, so the gags don't have to pile on top of the zinger lines and try to nudge a laugh out of you. In fact, Hecker's craft, still on the way up, could use some refinement. I found that scenes tended to be too short, that the laughs could have been extended, and that's rare in a commercial comedy. It's a good beginning for a young writer/director with plenty of potential.

From Colombia comes Paraiso Travel [site], an immigrant saga directed by Simon Brand about two attractive kids from middle-class Medellin who decide to move to New York. It's no small ambition, if you're starting out in Colombia. It will cost them $3000 just to get started, and in case you haven't guessed, the going is not smooth. We encounter Carlos and Reina when they are already living in the kind of subdivided basement that becomes home for thousands of illegal arrivals in the outer boroughs of New York City. They fight, Carlos goes out for a smoke, and when police stop him for littering, a chase follows which injures a cop and takes Carlos so far away from his basement that he can't find his way back - and he can't speak English.

Paraiso Travel shifts between two odysseys - Carlos's quest to find Reina, and the couple's initial trip through Guatemala and Mexico to get to the US. The first strand presents a pretty generic view of New York as a very cold town when you're Colombian, broke and unable to speak anything but Spanish. It's the second story that's harrowing, the best thing about this movie. Paraiso Travel has been a hit in Colombia since January, and Tim Padgett's gushing feature/review in Time saw it as an "honest look at illegal immigration," and an indication of the Colombian cinema miracle that's just over the horizon. That's about as realistic as saying that Raul Castillo, who plays Carlos, is the next Gael García Bernal - and people are saying that, although 99.9% of them are Colombian women. Angelica Blandon, who plays Carlos's sexy and impulsive girlfriend, may be someone worth watching as well.

From Mexico comes Love, Pain & Vice Versa, a formal exercise directed by Alfonso Pineda-Ulloa about a young woman architect, Chelo (Bárbara Mori), who decides to find the man who has been haunting her dreams for a year. She ends up running over the fiancée of the man in question, Dr Marquez, (Leonardo Sbaragli), who looks like an Armani-model posing as a cardiologist. Their two fantasies and attractions clash, all heading to a dark ending in faceless locations in Mexico City, with rain pounding like an endless Hitchcock loop, and music pulsing at every pivotal moment.

Pineda-Ulloa is a UCLA grad from the producers' program, and he studied photography in Mexico City. He has talent - a sure hand with the camera and with his actors, and a sophomoric need to impress whoever's watching. The film plays like a job application with an overcharged resume of someone seeking high-budget commercial work, and offers strong evidence that he would be able to shoot a music video, a fashion ad, or even a feature. Let's hope this talented young man makes a movie next time.

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More from Tribeca here.

Reverse Shot. 22.

"For this issue, we attempted a unique approach by asking our writers to select a filmmaker who's traditionally worked in film and has moved to digital video, as a brief sidestep or a career-changing ideological statement," announce Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert. "Then we asked them to contrast and compare this digital foray with their earlier cinematic style (unfortunately no one picked up the offered gauntlet of The Godfather vs Youth Without Youth).... Do we see differences in shooting style? Has digital editing had an impact? What does this all mean in terms of aesthetics? Or storytelling?"

Eric Hynes: "Coppola and De Palma went video in 2007. Lynch went video in 2006, Michael Mann in 2004. Eric Rohmer did it in 2001. Following technological strides in the late 90s, the above projects by established masters would seem to provide an historical time frame for an above-mentioned sea change. Except, when did Jean-Luc Godard first make a feature with video? That would be 1975, thank you very much.... By 1975 and Numero Deux (in the time it takes many filmmakers to complete a single film) he was through with propagandistic projects and pronouncements, and ready to address video not as an arm of the proletariat but as a vocational option, with benefits and drawbacks, as well as an aesthetic and mechanical tool to be pondered, tested, used, and abused."

"As the aesthetic-material history of cinematography goes, [David] Fincher's 2007 feature, Zodiac, shot by Harris Savides just might prove to be the turning point for rethinking the way the night is photographed, a revolution that comes about because of Savides's beautifully, ineluctably alien experiment with digital video," writes James Crawford.

"Contempt had bred familiarity." Kevin B Lee on how a 2004 screening of Saraband caused him to lay to rest "a decade of personal misgivings and outright scorn I had harbored against Ingmar Bergman." Why? "In a word, digital. Startling as it was to see [Erland] Josephson and [Liv] Ullmann together after three decades - like encountering one's high school enemies after years of separation - their appearance on HD doubled this perverse nostalgia effect. The sight of them awash in a strange new palette of colors and textures - drawn in hard contours but brushed in soft metallic pastels - suggested classic Bergman being beamed from a digital afterworld."

"To set a movie like Days of Heaven next to something like The New World is to compare two films that have been assembled with completely different technologies, products of two different filmmaking eras." And Chris Wisniewski concentrates specifically on editing - cautiously: "To speak of 'going digital' in the context of editing takes a conceptual leap of faith predicated on tenuous counterfactual speculation, a guess - that the tools and the process have impacted the final result in ways we can more or less deduce, even though we can never know with certainty that the film we're watching would have been different if the tools used to edit it were different."

Leah Churner opens up an interesting case: "Mike and George Kuchar have proudly marched in step with the consumer-grade vanguard for over 50 years. Their filmography, which covers big-ticket issues of the second half of the twentieth century (the atom bomb, thalidomide pregnancies, UFOs, the sexual revolution, AIDS, and F-4 tornados) is a tour of the 'puny' formats: 8mm, 16mm, Video-8, Hi-8, and now MiniDV. Their story helps to sully the film/digital divide. When they switched from Bolex to camcorder in 1985, it was a paradigm shift; when they switched from analog to digital video in the 90s, the difference was hardly discernable."

"The equipment is always improving, always refining, and will certainly overtake celluloid as the defining capture and delivery tool for movies, even if it retains a certain level of imperfection. If little of the audience can note the difference, does it even matter?" asks Jeff Reichert. "A generally disrespected figure like Robert Zemeckis may well prove to be a flashpoint for unlocking this moment."

"Like many directors (Hitchcock being only the most psychoanalyzed), Lynch is obsessive, even anal, about each aspect of his films," writes Leo Goldsmith. And Inland Empire "is all about self-control.... But if this is true, why is Inland Empire such a mess? Why is it a film that, unlike any previous Lynch film, seems to lack control entirely, that flits from scene to scene - indeed into and out of various diegeses - almost at random? Has Lynch in fact lost, rather than gained, control with this new medium?"

"[I]s there any 'filmmaker' who faces the shifts within his chosen medium with such blissful unconcern as Chris Marker?" asks Andrew Tracy. "Though Marker has been supplanted from his own experiences by the record he's kept of them, pushed even further away by the interpolation of the filmed records of others, it can be said that his aesthetic is founded precisely upon losing images - losing proprietorship over them, seeing them taken away and transformed by each successive incarnation.... Like his fellow recluse Godard, Marker is forever concerned with the meaning of the image, but where Godard's palimpsests overload those images with meaning both visual and aural, the meaning of Marker's images is being forever stripped away, and any trace of his 'authorship' with it."

"In his last two films, [Michael] Mann has used video to enrich and make palpable his earlier works' angular sheen," writes Ryland Walker Knight. "The familiar is foreign, the margin is focused, and action takes on a new weight in tandem with its new speed."

"Is it the use of video - its mobility, the allowance of endless takes and pickup shots, the cheapness of the tape - that has permitted [William] Greaves to construct [Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2 ½] with more traditional images?" asks Michael Koresky. "In other words, had the burden and cost of shooting on film in [Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One] forced him to forgo these familiar tropes, relying instead on whatever captured images he could assemble into a somewhat chronological whole? The answers aren't easy, but that the questions remain testifies to the thin line between invention and pragmatism in experimental filmmaking, as well as the fortuitousness that contributed to Take One's brilliance and the lack of spontaneity that makes Take 2 ½ more of an interesting oddity than an equally valuable work."

Benjamin Mercer notes that, all these long years after his 1989 debut, sex, lies and videotape, "Soderbergh still uses video as a medium of unbridled confession, a unique outlet for furtive unburdening. Full Frontal was even heralded as a kind of spiritual sequel to sex, lies, and videotape, and while it didn't come close to duplicating that film's immense financial (or critical) success, the claim is certainly more than a disingenuous sales pitch. Soderbergh still delights in playing the voyeur, and a look at his body of work suggests it's video that allows him to do so most freely."

"If we don't herald or appreciate [Robert Altman's] The Company as a revelation on the same level of In Praise of Love or Inland Empire it's because the film's innovation is so much absorbed into the process of the filmmaking that we can't immediately know its technical import," argues Michael Joshua Rowin. "But that process is the secret treasure which when once discovered makes us fully appreciate just what a miracle - a minor one perhaps, but a miracle - it really is."

"Writing in his film column for the Village Voice in 1963, [Jonas] Mekas predicted that 'the day is close when the 8mm home movie footage will be collected and appreciated as beautiful folk art, like songs and the lyrical poetry that was created by the people,'" notes Eric Kohn. "More than a prophetic statement, it was a declaration of aesthetic intent. Ever the fierce guardian of independent cinema, shielding it from the deleterious pressures of studio product, Mekas recognized cinematic redemption in the formal properties of thriftiness."

Frieze. May 08.

"Can we still imagine the uncanny pleasure of seeing pictures in motion for the first time?" asks David Campany in a compelling piece on the work of Mark Lewis in the new issue of Frieze. "If that pleasure lives on anywhere, it is in contemporary art, which seems compelled to spiral back to the beginnings of cinema. Indeed the theorist and curator Raymond Bellour has spoken of a 'Lumière drive' in much recent film and video art, with its preference for the long take, simple apparatus and almost forensic attention to duration and movement."

Mark Leckey opens this issue's "Life in Film" column with an appreciation of Blade Runner: "I love this film for the same reasons I love Roxy Music: they share a sense of yearning for the past and the future, for another place and another time, but it's flattened out, so everything seems to occur at the same time in the same space." The rest of his list is a fine mix; one I hadn't known about intrigues me - and it's on DVD, too: "A Bigger Splash (1974) is a strange, fake documentary made by Jack Hazan, a portrait of David Hockney... Hazan gets Hockney and his friends to act out real situations as well as recording events as they occur. It makes for such uncomfortable viewing I don't know why anyone agreed to appear in it."

Rosalind Nashashibi's films are "concerned with how selfhood mingles with or is dissolved into performance and codification," writes Martin Herbert. "Nashashibi points to the formative influence of watching groups of actors rehearse, seeing how fluently they slip from role-play to being relatively 'themselves,' and she's also confessed to artistic crushes on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Robert Bresson - who famously used non-actors in their films - but she proceeds from the opposite direction, locating the latently fictional in the factual."

Lars Bang Larsen: "Marine Hugonnier deliberates subjectivities and technologies of seeing with a film trilogy that she characterizes as an anthropology of images: Ariana (2003), The Last Tour (2004) and Travelling Amazonia (2006)." Honorably mentioned: Georges Perec, Jean Rouch and JM Coetzee.

Back in the late 90s, David Batchelor wrote a book called Chromophobia about "the fear of contamination or corruption through colour. It is found in the tendency to treat colour as somehow at odds with the higher workings of the Western mind, as feminine, primitive, oriental or infantile; as superficial, inessential or cosmetic. Somewhere between a meditation and a rant, I looked at the use and suppression of colour in art, architecture, movies, literature and philosophy." Four years after the book's publication, he heard about Martha Fiennes's film, Chromophobia, starring the likes of Kristin Scott Thomas, Penélope Cruz, Ian Holm, Rhys Ifan and, of course, Ralph Fiennes. An amusing story of his relationship with a movie that, really, has next to nothing to do him or the book follows. And then, of course, along comes Gui Boratto.

"Despite its limitations..., Is That All There Is? did succeed in providing an accurate dual picture of [Lindsay] Anderson as both a progressive maverick and, at the same time, a very British character," writes Richard Unwin.

George Pendle reviews Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, the movie and the recent show at the Deitch gallery, which is "problematic. After all, is such a show necessary when a quick trip to YouTube will reveal countless films made in exactly the guerrilla spirit Gondry seems to be trying to foster? The revolution has already been televised."

Online extras: Dan Kidner on If: people and places in recent film and video, Natasha Degen on John Currin and Chris Sharp on Owen Land: Logical Facades:

What makes this show special is its context: up until now, for various logistical and financial reasons, Land's films have only been shown in the context of the cinema, either individually or as part of a screening programme. Inserted into a white cube, they become both less and more themselves. Less in that, bereft of the big screen, they tend to shed some of their once radical, non-narrative recalcitrance. However, projected in easel-painting size proportions in close proximity to their projectors, they almost become objects, and their stunning celluloid presence and original concerns (illusionism, borders, materiality) are made all the more manifest through this intimacy.

And while the whole of this new issue is of at least tangential interest to cinephiles, let me put an extra word in for Kristin M Jones's piece on Barbara Bloom's show at the International Center of Photography.

Boston Dispatch. 2.

Once again, the cinetrix.

Is it truly already Day Six? How'd that happen?

The cinetrix had heard the rumors before arriving, but now she can confirm that filmmakers really do love the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Day and night you see first-timers and seasoned vets alike milling about the lobbies, bent in conversation at local bars and restaurants, and happily answering audience questions at Q&As right up until the next screening is scheduled to seat.

Long absent from the silver screen, director Tom Kalin brought Savage Grace to the Coolidge Corner Friday, the night before its Tribeca nod. He spoke candidly and at length about why it'd taken so long after Swoon to get Grace made, its genesis as a gift from producer Christine Vachon of the book on which the true-life tale is based, and how the vagaries of international financing can affect casting.

Robb Moss explained Saturday how he'd moved from autobiographical docs like The Same River Twice to shooting Secrecy with codirector Peter Galison. Moss wryly observed that "It's a really crappy idea" because you couldn't choose a less visual subject than what we are forbidden to see. The result, however, is a riveting and truly enraging look at the modern history of United States governmental secrecy policy, from the 1950s Supreme Court decision that set the precedent for the state secrets privilege clause to the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld et al. decision that upended the confidentiality culture shrouding military tribunals in the war on terror.

Following the screening of her debut doc Wild Blue Yonder, Celia Maysles also spoke frankly about a difficult subject, in this case the chilling effect of her uncle Albert's refusal to let her see or use any footage by or of her father, David Maysles, who died when she was seven years old. Now an expert in fair use law, Celia explained how Al's failure to cooperate pushed her to go deeper, unearthing Lois from the Grey Gardens birthday sequence, video of her father from the Larry Rivers foundation, even Olga Silverstein, her father's former therapist, to compile a portrait perhaps as personal as the solo film Blue Yonder that her dad was working on when he died. She noted, too, that had IDFA not accepted her film last fall, she doubted it would have ever screened in her father's hometown.

Nanette Burstein packed the house for Sundance fave American Teen, a film the cinetrix will predict right now will unseat Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and those penguins as the top-grossing doc of all time after it's released this August. Additional screenings of two other crowd-pleasers have been added to Monday night's line-up. Twelve, directed by twelve of Boston's best up-and-coming directors, sold out its World Premiere screening and packed a 900-seat theater. And Crawford, a look at the effect of the First Family's residency on the Texas town, sold out two screenings so far and is going for a third.

Still to come: Sunday and Monday highlights and the audience award winners.

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More from Boston here; earlier: Dispatch 1.

SFIFF Dispatch. 1.

Craig Phillips files a first dispatch from the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Animator Emily Hubley, the daughter of renowned animators John and Faith Hubley (A Windy Day, Voyage to Next), is perhaps best known for her work on Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but she's also director of a wealth of fine animated shorts. The Toe Tactic [site] is both her first feature and her first live action film and, as you'd expect and hope, that live action is interspersed with her wonderfully wobbly, colorful cartoons. In the post-screening Q&A, Hubley confessed that her original intent was to make an all-live action film, with one brief animated sequence, but then things took off, evolved... and now, animated dogs control the universe in playfully self-deprecating interludes that do a fine job of carrying the film forward.

The film stars lovely young actress Lily Rabe, who has a little bit of a young Laura Linney-ish vibe, and is the daughter of Jill Clayburgh and playwright David Rabe), along with Daniel London (Old Joy), who plays the shy elevator man who finds her appealing.

The Toe Tactic is also boosted by a wonderfully eccentric, recognizable cast of indie stalwarts - including the ubiquitous Kevin Corrigan as a neighborhood piano teacher, John Sayles as Rabe's landlord, the always reliably wacky Jane Lynch (the "fuck buddy" boss in 40 Year Old Virgin and several Christopher Guest mockumentaries) as a bitter open mic night hostess and Mary Kay Place as the worrying mother - along with voices provided by comics (David Cross, for example, as one of the animated dogs) and veteran actors (Eli "Yes I'm Still Alive" Wallach, Andrea Martin, Marian Seldes). A plot involving Rabe's friendship with an eccentric and lonely woman played by Novella Nelson gets a bit muddled along the way. The multiple character framework with the gentle comedy about yearning and loss may remind you of Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know and the melancholy Australian film Look Both Ways, and while it isn't as polished as either of those films, it's charm lies in its low-key humor (the open mic night is one highlight) and sweetness.

Toe Tactic has some decidedly awkward, amateurish moments in pacing and tone, and the thin story isn't really much to hang a cartoon hat on - young woman trying to finally move past the tragic death of her father years before - but Hubley mostly resists making things too mawkish or cutesy, and the film does grow into its own as it moves along. In short, it's slight and imperfect, but so lovely and lovingly made that it's hard to pick on, too.

The appropriately moody but sweet music score is by Yo La Tengo, by the way, one of the members of which is Emily Hubley's sister Georgia.

---

Online viewing tip. Crackle talks with Hubley (and shows a couple of clips from the film, too).

More on SFIFF here.

Interview. Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Fresh off its premiere at Tribeca, David Mamet's Redbelt sees a limited opening this weekend before screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival and opening wider on May 9.

Sean Axmaker introduces his interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor: "His body language and his carriage are essential to the way he inhabits his characters, whether they are calm and controlled men of strength and determination (Children of Men and Serenity) or casual and easygoing in volatile situations (Inside Man and American Gangster). His presence and his physical interactions with other characters define his character, Mike Terry, even more than Mamet's marvelous dialogue."

Updated through 5/4.

"So how's the Mamet Rocky?" asks David Edelstein in New York. "Fast. Lively. In your face. Very watchable. And, like its predecessors, so bizarrely convoluted it barely holds together on a narrative level. But the underpinnings are consistent. As Mamet has evolved into a confident and resourceful film director, his worldview has hardly budged.... Ejiofor is a great Mamet spokesman. He internalizes the lines - he internalizes everything - so you're not aware of all the finicky punctuation. Like Forest Whitaker, in Jim Jarmusch's ludicrous Ghost Dog, he can speak of the spirit and honor of the samurai without making you long for John Belushi."

"In the context of David Mamet's directorial career, Redbelt breaks no ground, signals no new direction, adds nothing to what he's done at the typewriter and behind the camera thus far," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "In taking up where 2004's largely ignored Spartan left off, Redbelt instead merely reconfirms the pros and cons of Mamet's unique brand of tough-guy dramatics."

"David Mamet may not be the visual stylist that Jean-Pierre Melville was, but in most other respects, his Redbelt is faithfully cast in the tradition of the great French auteur's Le Samouraï," argues Nick Schager in Slant. This is "a precise, invigorating portrait of the difficulty and nobility of remaining true to oneself."

"All fighters are sad." In the New York Times, Mamet himself recalls three examples: Stanislaus Zbyszko in Night and the City, Kola Kwariani in The Killing and Takashi Shimura in Seven Samurai.

"Chiwetel Ejiofor brings [to] his role a strong presence and the ability to convey complex thought and emotional storms going on beneath a placid surface," writes Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab. "He deserves a lot of credit for not appearing ridiculous when his character pounds away at the jujitsu formula that appears to be his all-purpose mantra for life: 'There is no situation you can't escape from. There is no situation you can't turn to your advantage.'"

Updates: Andrew O'Hehir's "advice is this: Don't give up the day job, Dave. The whole thing with misanthropic plays that bit your middle-class audience in the ass - that was working much better. Mamet turned up briefly onstage at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center to introduce the movie, and at age 60, with a full gray beard and translucent horn-rimmed spectacles, he now bears a totally unexpected resemblance to Allen Ginsberg. If you follow such things, you may have noticed that Mamet recently declared that his politics have diverged pretty far from, say, Allen Ginsberg's. But even I do not think it's fair to blame the badness of Redbelt on Republican ideology."

"[B]y my sights, the first 74 minutes of this 99 minute picture constitute Mamet's best effort as a film writer/director since, well, maybe, his indelible film writing/directing debut, 1987's House of Games," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Now, as you may have inferred, that is not to deny that there is a falloff, and that the falloff takes place not long after the 74th minute. And yes... that is true. But, by my sights, it's not nearly as egregious a falloff as the one that completely sunk Mamet's last film as writer/director, 2004's Spartan. For whatever its flaws, Redbelt offers up a good deal of Mametian red meat while also trying to break out of some of the strictures that Mamet's erected around his own work."

Update, 4/30: "Neither oppressive nor subtle in its symmetries, Redbelt is a cleanly constructed piece of work," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "In press notes so long, detailed, and repetitive they could only have been supervised by Mamet himself, the filmmaker is identified as a longtime student of, and purple belt in, jujitsu. Thus, Redbelt is a personal statement, as well as a sort of naturalized kung fu western and revisionist Popular Front boxing drama."

Updates, 5/2: Paul Matwychuk has the most fun review of Redbelt you'll read.

"In Redbelt, David Mamet has taken a sturdy B-movie conceit - a good man versus the bad world, plus blood - tricked it out with his rhythms, his corrosive words and misanthropy, and come up with a satisfying, unexpectedly involving B-movie that owes as much to old Hollywood as to Greek tragedy," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "That may sound like a perilous combination, but the film's visual moderation, contained scale and ambition keep it well tethered."

"What I like about David Mamet's movies is how lean and propulsive his characters are - clipped and sure of themselves," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Not particularly cinematic, clearly existing on the page through dialog and the determination of action through written word, it is nevertheless refreshing to see a film like Mamet's great Spartan (2004) and his less impressive Redbelt and hear someone speak. Because from the look of the actor and the shine of the words, we can know all there is to know about the character."

"In many ways [Mamet's] most straightforward film, Redbelt is a ruthlessly executed tale of cloistered warrior honor exposed to the open air of a fallen world," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "In other words, it's an old samurai story, but Mr Mamet's clockwork mechanism is downright cathartic and his leading man, Chiwetel Ejiofor, is charismatic enough to watch indefinitely."

For James Rocchi, writing at Cinematical, it's "not as impressive or thought-provoking as some of his other dramatic works, like Glengarry Glen Ross or House of Games or Oleanna; at the same time, it's an exciting, engaging mix of drama and action supported by an immensely appealing lead performance by Chiwitel Ejiofor."

"Redbelt is Mamet's richest film of the decade," declares Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Redbelt is "a contemporary noir with a samurai movie interior, as sincere, plaintive and strangely optimistic a movie as [Mamet's] made," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"[T]he film's intricate plot begins to collapse the moment the lights come up and you begin thinking about the story," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Mamet's self-seriousness stifles Redbelt's cinematic potential," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

Updates, 5/4: "Docile when you want it to snarl, slovenly when you expect it tighten, Redbelt is a confounder," writes Justin Stewart in Stop Smiling.

"The movie is my love letter to the world and philosophy of jiu-jitsu," Mamet tells Chris Lee in the Los Angeles Times.

May 68.

There are so many commemorative series in various cities marking the 40th anniversary of May 68 and so many writers revisiting films somehow related to that tumultuous month in various publications that it's high time for a sort of overview entry.

"New Yorkers can mark the occasion with two rich and wide-ranging programs that aim to capture, on screen, the spirit of that bygone age," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "One, at Film Forum (Friday through June 5), is devoted to [Jean-Luc] Godard in the 1960s, when he was at the height of his influence, productivity and creative power. The other, at Lincoln Center (Tuesday through May 14), stretches across geography, time and genre: from Paris and Chicago to Hungary, Japan and Brazil; from journalistic documentaries to agitprop and experimental theater; from defiant in-the-moment statements of revolutionary zeal to somber post-mortem contemplations of ideological exhaustion and political defeat.... To rediscover 40 years later some of the cinematic experiments of 1968 is to be amazed at how raw, how urgent, how disarmingly alive these films are."

Updated through 5/4.

There are two series in London as well. The current issue of the BFI's Sight & Sound has much to offer in print, though not online, as a supplement to the BFI Southbank season Pop Goes the Revolution: French Cinema and May 68, wrapping on Wednesday; last month, Gilbert Adair, who wrote the screenplay for Bertolucci's The Dreamers, based on his own semi-autobiographical novel, had a piece on the series in the Guardian. And Will Kane's gathered several related clips.

All Power to the Imagination! 1968 and Its Legacies is on through June 10, and just yesterday, I pointed to Sukhdev Sandhu's piece on that one in the Telegraph, accompanied by a list of his May 68 top ten. See, too, Sue Steward's introduction to an exhibition of 46 vintage street posters opening at the Hayward Gallery on May 1. Earlier: Daniel Tapper, blogging for the Guardian.

In Berlin, Kino Arsenal presents 1968//2008, a series of 98 films beginning on May 1 and running through July and including all the works of the Dziga Vertov Group (1967 through 1974). Kino Babylon Mitte's series Paris: May 68 runs May 9 through 16 and features an exhibition and an opening debate, "1968 in Today's Europe," between Daniel Cohn-Bendit and André Brie. And still on through the end of May: 68: Brennpunkt Berlin. For more, see Silvia Hallensleben in today's Tagesspiegel (and in German).

Recently wrapped is the Pacific Film Archive's The Clash of 68, and Michael Guillén had a terrific piece on Bertolucci's Before the Revolution.

Meanwhile, in today's Observer, Nick Fraser, editor of the BBC documentary series Storyville, argues that "agitprop is back in vogue." And he lists ten films, from Citizen Kane through Brokeback Mountain, that "made waves."

Updates, 4/29: For the New York Sun, Steve Dollar previews the Lincoln Center's 1968: An International Perspective (today through May 14) - and Film Forum's Godard's 60s (Friday through June 5).

Tom Hall looks over both series, too, and asks, "What is left for me, for my generation? Where do we stand in relation to this definitive experience that has shaped our collective imagination, an image of populism so powerful that we have been unable to replace its fundamental physical structure in the decades since its collapse?"

At the House Next Door: Lauren Wissot on It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives and The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp.

Ricky D'Ambrose in the Tisch Film Review: "There is a tremendous passion to revitalize the medium with these films, and an immense offering of images and sensations curious about the cinema's potential for being agitated, disrupted, transformed."

A symposium: "Many 68ers now feel ambivalent about their heritage. Was too much of value discarded? Were the hippies just carriers of a new strain of capitalism? What was the silent majority thinking? Prospect writers give their views." Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Hot Splice rounds up more linkage.

The Guardian asks, "Were you there?" And Daniel Tapper revisits Godard's Weekend.

The Creative Review takes a look at those posters.

Updates, 4/30: "Back then, it seemed as though life itself were a movie," writes J Hoberman. As for the Lincoln Center series, "the quintessential movie is: Dusan Makavejev's 1971 WR: Mysteries of the Organism is part counterculture doc, part New Left comedy, the saddest and funniest of 68 post-mortems, as well as the movie most redolent of the period—that is, everything at once."

Also in the Voice, Scott Foundas presents "A Necessarily Incomplete Guide to Godard."

"The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French," notes Steven Erlanger, reporting from France for the New York Times. "While a youth revolt became general in the West - from anti-Vietnam protests in the United States to the Rolling Stones in swinging London and finally the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany - France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike, and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behavior." And there's a slide show.

Cahiers du cinéma presents a book, Cinema 68. And speaking of books in French, Daniel Cohn-Bendit is stirring things up in France with his latest, Forget 68.

The L Magazine's Mark Asch on the Lincoln Center series: "Expect formally boundary-pushing metacinematic works and movies whose reels can be shown in any order, on-the-street documentation, and more and more and more. And Regular Lovers. (God, see Regular Lovers.)"

Update, 5/1: "Nearly every text in the current issue looks at May 1968 specifically in historical counterpoint, operating in a comparative and genealogical mode that brings the questions of 68 to bear on today," writes Artforum editor Tim Griffin. "To give an example that speaks to the contemporary art context: When independent scholar Sally Shafto writes of the Zanzibar group's intermingling of leftist politics and cinematic dandyism - and attributes a 'destabilizing potential' to their contradictory mix - one is bound to think as well of similar film- and video-making collectives working now and to wonder whether the potential of such seeming contradiction in culture remains the same."

Unfortunately, Shafto's essay is not online, but a few of this issue's May 68-related pieces are: Arthur C Danto looks back at the student revolt at Columbia University, Sylvère Lotringer talks with Antonio Negri, Tim McDonough revisits Henri Lefebvre's The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution (tipping his hat to Godard's La Chinoise along the way), Tom Holert surveys Germany's radical art scene at the time (Harun Farocki provides much of the imagery accompanying this one) and Liam Gillick argues that "1968 was the last instance of major change within the art context, supplying us with the critical tools we still use today."

Chris Kraus notes that "after 1968 the word liberation would have to migrate from a term used to describe anticolonial struggles to include almost all aspects of daily life. In the ensuing half decade, sexuality became central to these investigations..." This introduces a discussion of Suck: The First European Sex Paper, which "also produced the Wet Dream Film Festival of banned erotic and pornographic films in Amsterdam, which took place in 1970 and 1971, and published a book (Wet Dreams: Films and Adventures) commemorating the festivals in 1973. 'Everyone was lovely,' [Heathcote] Williams recalls of the era in [Jim] Haynes's 1984 autobiography, Thanks for Coming! 'Suddenly the vision of everyone Coming Together could only be physical... no longer intellectual. The sex politics of Reich, the belief of Auden that we must love one another or die, the holy orgiastics of Willie Blake, God's Rake, had to burst through... Suck was a display of pantheistic and revolutionary Schtupping. You cannot fuck everyone in the world, but at least you can try.'"

"Since 1968, the west has grown not only more prosperous but more sybaritic and self-absorbed, and even that cultural victory of the left hasn't turned out as intended, especially in terms of the sexual revolution that was arguably the true legacy of the age," writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian. "The 'bourgeois triumphalism' of the Thatcher (and Blair) era, the greed is good ethos which even the governor of the Bank of England now condemns, and our materialistic individualism, might just have had their roots 40 years back."

Updates, 5/2: Kenji Fujishima on Pierrot le fou:

[T]he heart of this seminal Godard work lies not so much in its "last romantic couple," not in Raoul Coutard's eye-popping color cinematography (capturing both privilege and freedom in lush comic-book colors), not even in its many plot twists and tonal and genre shifts. All of these are certainly important to the film's being, of course, but its real heart and soul lies in its middle section: that lengthy passage set at the edge of civilization, in the south of France, as Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) - now liberated from the alienating clutches of his privileged life - strives to live out his dream of intellectual freedom, while the less introspectively inclined Marianne (Anna Karina) yearns to "go back to our detective novel, with fast cars and guns and nightclubs." This passage is perhaps the most personal and resonant in Pierrot le fou: no longer shackled by the chains of narrative and genre expectations (which of course Godard tries to undermine in his usual postmodern way), Godard himself, ever the intellectually searching mind, is free to give full rein to all the philosophical and political inquiries that are weighing on him.

Also at the House Next Door, Dan Callahan on Breathless: "The Hôtel de Suède sequence is the heart of the film, and Godard returned to and intensified it in Contempt, where Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot try to connect for at least a half hour. This man/woman battle is really completed, though, in Jacques Rivette's L'Amour Fou, which brings the struggle to it logical, May of 1968 destruction (it has been rumored that Rivette based his hotel nightmare with Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon on an actual incident between Godard and Karina toward the end of their relationship)."

While May 68 is being "vigorously commemorated" in France, any real debate "is confined mostly to the media and intellectual class," writes Patrice de Beer at openDemocracy. "The normally voluble President Nicolas Sarkozy (who said during the election campaign in 2007 that 'May 68's heritage must be liquidated once and for all') has since kept quiet. More important, the French 'people' themselves - in whose name so many of the 1968 protests were launched and speeches were delivered - appear uninterested."

Update, 5/4: "[W]hen we talk of Godard, certainly in terms of post-68 France, we're talking about a cinema not just politically engaged but transformed into a medium for political confrontation: filmic missives that refuse to cloak their agenda in tangential details like narrative or character," writes robbiefreeling at the Reverse Shot blog. "Godard's first film, then, was to always remain unlike any of those that followed; political only as it related to genre representation and the decimation of his beloved art form in the hopes of rebuilding something new in its place, Breathess was both a new beginning and a full stop."

Weekend shorts.

"[M]y adolescence happened while the state was utterly transforming the lives of each and every individual Chinese. In many ways it is still like this today - perhaps not as pronounced, but each political change, each policy shift has an immense influence on individual lives. And so when I began to make movies, this is where my attention turned." Jia Zhangke in what is, clearly, a highlight of Good Magazine's "China Issue; editor Jaime Wolf has been posting related blog entries in the meantime; for example, he presents a "Chinese Pop Primer" with an accompanying Muxtape.

"Jiang Rong's big-advance (well, for a Chinese title...) Wolf Totem has been getting an extraordinary amount of attention in the US and UK this spring, with a big build-up up to its publication, but from the looks of it Ma Jian's Beijing Coma is the far more interesting Chinese-novel-event of the season," notes the Literary Saloon, pointing to Chandrahas Choudhury's rave in last week's Observer and quoting from Tash Aw's in the Telegraph: "Once in a while - perhaps every ten years, or even a generation - a novel comes along that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction."

Cineuropa's Bénédicte Prot reports on Michael Haneke's next film, Das Weisse Band (The White Tape), his first in German since the original Funny Games: "The film - which once again explores the cruelty at the heart of the director's work, here in the form of ritual punishment - is set in a school in the German countryside in 1913, before the rise of Nazism. Haneke looks at the educational system that prepared the way for an entire generation's descent into fascist ideology, a subject and era that have not yet been tackled in film, as the director is keen to point out." He's aiming for a release about a year from now.

"Tilda Swinton will star in Italo helmer Luca Guadagnino's Io sono l'amore (I Am Love), a romantic drama in which she will play a foreign society matron in Milan who falls for a young chef," reports Nick Vivarelli for Variety.

"In a major step forward on The Hobbit, Guillermo del Toro has signed on to direct the New Line-MGM tentpole and its sequel." Dave McNary reports for Variety. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir argues: "It's not a good idea.... At least on the surface, it's a natural fit, and I hope my premonition is wrong. But this whole project smells to me of hubris, and indeed of something worse: It smells of George Lucas."

"The most bizarre thing about the new intelligent-design propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed isn't that former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein is being paid to extol a pseudoscience whose hypotheses can't be tested (everyone has a price), or that the film compares science with Nazism and Stalinism (though it does, repeatedly and remorselessly)," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "What's truly weird is that the filmmakers don't seem to understand the tenets of intelligent design." More from Steven Hyden (AV Club) and Andy Klein (LA CityBeat). And the Guardian's Danny Leigh rounds up more bloggish reactions.

"A would-be erotic thriller with no heat and zero chills, Deception has the kind of glassy, glossy sheen and risible story that mean to suggest Basic Instinct but instead invoke lesser laughers like Jade and Sliver," writes Manohla Dargis. More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Jim Emerson (RogerEbert.com), Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times), James Rocchi (Cinematical), Nick Schager (Slant), Bradley Steinbacher (The Stranger) and Scott Tobias (AV Club).

Also in the New York Times:

• "In Swaziland, one of Africa's smallest countries and its sole remaining absolute monarchy, the prevalence of AIDS and starvation ensures an average life expectancy of 31 years," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "But Without the King, Michael Skolnik's subtly perceptive documentary, avoids a tone of first-world outrage; leaning more toward understanding than blame, the film examines a country forced to choose between tradition and survival." More from Bruce Bennett (New York Sun) and Louis Proyect.

• "Bomb It isn't the first documentary to address the history and evolution of graffiti culture, and it probably won't be the last," writes Laura Kern. "But what distinguishes Jon Reiss's lively, sure-handed film from the rest is that it widens the spectrum by taking a comprehensively international viewpoint."

• "With the arrival of the comically exuberant action-adventure-romance Tashan in theaters on Friday, the Great Bollywood Bikini Question of 08 - will she or won't she wear one? - was finally answered," writes Rachel Saltz. "Readers, she did."

• Allen Salkin on the legal squabbling over The Secret.

• "Bebe Barron, who with her husband Louis composed the first electronic score for a feature film - the eerie gulps and burbles, echoes and weeeoooos that accentuated invisible monsters and robotic creatures in the 1956 science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet - died Sunday in Los Angeles," writes Dennis Hevesi. "She was 82."

• Also: "Iris Burton, a chorus girl in the 1940s and 50s who later started a talent agency that represented many of the top juvenile actors in Hollywood, including River and Joaquin Phoenix and Henry Thomas, the wide-eyed little boy in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, died on April 5 in Los Angeles. She was 77."

• An AP report: "Joy Page, the stepdaughter of Jack L Warner, a president of the Warner Brothers studio, who made her film debut as a Bulgarian newlywed in Casablanca, died on April 18 in Los Angeles. She was 83."

"Tough to even think this was an intended antidote to Altamont." Colin Fleming on Cocksucker Blues, where Bill Gibron revisits the career of Rod Serling: "Just like the decision to sell his interest in The Twilight Zone backfired when CBS parlayed the program into rerun gold, Serling's choice to not personally oversee Night Gallery would end up destroying his dream of a weekly series success."

"If you've ever been dumped, had your dreams crushed, had your very identity stripped inch-by-inch from you by unfeeling hands (that covers about all of you is my guess), then Substitute will resonate with you," writes Stuart Jeffries, who talks with soccer player and filmmaker Vikash Dhorasoo.

Also in the Guardian: Emily Barr floats a theory or two as to why there aren't any good, never mind great films for kids anymore; and John Patterson on the comeback of the American penis.

"Given the amount of big money involved in film, you'd think that the story of on-screen strikes has been one of wealthy producers trying to demonise non-compliant workers," writes Daniel Trilling in the New Statesman. "But from the cheery, singing factory girls led by Doris Day in The Pajama Game (1954) onwards, this hasn't been the case."

Ready to argue about which are the 100 best films again? The Telegraph is.

In the Tisch Film Review, Dene-Hern Chen isn't quite sure what to make of the "odd" doc, Belarusian Waltz.

"On the one hand, when faced with the end of the world, there is really nothing you can do except bear witness to it in some form, which here means documenting it with video," writes Steven Shaviro, reviewing Diary of the Dead. "On the other hand, even if the video is uploaded onto the Net, it is unclear whether there will be anyone left to watch it - the witness lacks an audience. Such is the antinomy on which the film ends, and I think that it is a profound one. We have moved from being a 'society of the spectacle' to being a society of participatory and interactive media."

"Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted - indeed, we have helped to articulate - such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment," proposes Michael Chabon in an essay the Los Angeles Times has excerpted from Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. "The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve."

"A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties is only partly about Dylan," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "[Suze] Rotolo has written a perceptive, entertaining and often touching book about a remarkable era in recent American cultural history, about a way of living, of making art, that couldn't have happened at any other time or in any other place."

At Cinemascope, Talia Lavie has a good talk with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus about working with Fassbinder and Scorsese, Nicholson and De Niro.

Gill Pringle talks with Christina Ricci for the Independent.

In the Los Angeles Times, Tina Daunt talks with Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro about Body of War.

Interviews in the London Times: Kevin Maher with Danny Glover and Janice Turner with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: "Call him Dylan, or Fletch, or even Dr Rosenpenis - but don't call him easily amused."

Nick Dawson in FilmInFocus: "As a way of making my blogging in this space a little more adventurous, I've decided to embark on a little experiment: For the foreseeable future (i.e. as long as I can sustain it), every daily blog entry will be in some way connected to the previous day's post." And recently, he's been smashing seemingly unrelated cultures up against each other. Also, a brief history of red band trailers.

Bruce Bennett's piece in the New York Sun on the state of shorts is actually tied into Tribeca, but doesn't need to be. He talks, for example, with Matthew Modine, "who grew up working in a drive-in theater owned by his family, compares moviemaking before and after the digital revolution with the defining creative threshold that separated black-and-white from Technicolor."

Online viewing tip #1. Twitch's Todd Brown has the trailer for Mamoru Oshii's Sky Crawlers.

Online viewing tip #2. With Julia Kots's Naturalized, Nextbook launches a series of online short films.

Online viewing tip #3. Via Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay, Very Independent Producers, with Ted Hope and Christine Vachon.

Weekend fests and events.

"My films rest - I won't say eventually but rather fundamentally - on memory, because it is through memory that we orient our actions, thoughts and feelings," Manoel de Oliveira tells Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira runs through tomorrow.

"Geoffrey Smith's The English Surgeon, which debuted last year at the Sheffield DocFest, took the top international prize at Hot Docs in Toronto on Friday night, winning the award for Best International Feature," notes AJ Schnack. "Tamar Yarom's To See If I'm Smiling, which previously has received awards at IDFA and Sarasota, received the Special Jury Prize." And AJ's got the full list of award-winners.

Related: Bob Turnbull on Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home and Monika Baryzel at Cinematical on Letter to Anna: The Story of Journalist Politkovskaya's Death and The Demons of Eden.

Todd Brown's still sending reviews into Twitch from Udine.

From Hollywood Bitchslap's Peter Sobczynski at Ebertfest: Entries 2, 3 and 4. More from Kim Voynar at Cinematical.

Rob Nelson has more Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival previews: Disconnected, Pond Hockey and Dean and Me: Roadshow of an American Primary. The fest runs through May 4.

Mike Everleth has the lineup for this year's PDX Film Festival. Wednesday through May 4 in Portland.

At Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin has a sneak peek "at a show opening at New York's Adam Baumgold Gallery on May 1 - Alphaville, by Scott Teplin, features meticulously rendered pen and ink and watercolor drawings inspired in part by Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film (which happens to be my favorite movie, ever, period)."

"Few things say serious art like a darkened gallery and multiple video screens, which makes Marian Goodman one of the most serious galleries in town," writes Roberta Smith in the New York Times. "In side-by-side solo shows through Wednesday, it is screening new work by two prominent artists in the cinematic medium, Chantal Akerman and Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Their combined efforts add up to more than the sum of their parts: a lesson in big budgets, ambition and making sense."

Nick Davis and Nathaniel R arrive in Indianapolis, where the festival carries on through May 3.

"At a time when most rep houses seem to be in hot water, Los Angeles' New Beverly packed 'em in [Tuesday] night for the finale of Dante's Inferno, two weeks of forgotten classics guest programmed by Joe Dante," writes Peter Debruge. "While many of the director's picks were obscure, none could compete with The Movie Orgy, a marathon 4½-hour clip show Dante first assembled in 1968 with Jon Davison, then put on ice for nearly four decades.... Over the years, the project has earned a borderline apocryphal reputation, called by some the 'Rosetta Stone' of Dante's career - a glimpse deep into the filmmaker's id - and it's a testament to the city's cult film scene that so many stayed for the entire show."

"The Movie Orgy isn't really a movie," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "It's more like a hallucinatory party for the certifiably movie mad. What began in 1968 as a lark instigated by two creative movie fans (Dante and his close friend, future producer Jon Davison) soon became an event, an explosion of movie geek love that morphed into a small cult phenomenon... Dante and Davison boldly and proudly mash up the sophisticated and the sophomoric. Their slice-and-dice aesthetic is hardly random though; the narrative lines of those sci-fi movies that provide what there is of the Orgy's spine are routinely violated by the intercutting of TV commercials, patches of industrial and sex education films and political speeches (1968 being the point of origin here, Nixon gets kicked around plenty)."

Nashville Film Festival announces its awards. On a related note, Joe Leydon: "Since I'm much too humble to report on how wonderful I was Tuesday evening while doing an on-stage Q&A with the great Patricia Neal when she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Nashville Film Festival... well, I'll just link to this scintillating report on the evening's festivities."

In the Telegraph, Sukhdev Sandhu previews All Power to the Imagination! 1968 and Its Legacies - and lists his "top ten films which encapsulate the spirit of May '68."

"It's a milestone year for the San Francisco Black Film Festival," notes Walter Addiego in the Chronicle. "Starting as a one-day event, this cultural celebration is about to mark its 10th year, running June 4 - 8 and 11 - 15."

And current entries on ongoing festivals have been updated recently: Boston, San Francisco and Tribeca.

Previewing Iron Man - and Summer 08.

"With its dusty Humvees, violent Afghan battlefields, and worries about the munitions business, the upcoming Iron Man is a film set firmly in 2008," writes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun. "That'll do, I suppose, but what was wrong with 1963? If there's any tale that deserves the chance to return to the sheen, swank, and soul of its Rat Pack, space-age, pay-any-price-bear-any-burden origins, it's Iron Man's."

"Finally, someone's found a sure-fire way to make money with a modern Middle East war movie," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Just send a Marvel superhero into the fray to kick some insurgent butt. The powerhouse comicbook-inspired actioner Iron Man isn't principally about this fantasy, but it won't hurt at least American audiences' enjoyment of this expansively entertaining special effects extravaganza." Also, Anne Thompson: "[I]f Iron Man delivers on the prognostications, the first summer blockbuster of 2008 will see several participants emerge with new cachet."

Updated through 5/2.

"You gotta love a middle-aged wreck as a superhero," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "Iron Man may not make the A-list of Marvel Comics' stable - home to Spider-Man, X-Men and the Hulk - but he may be the cinema superhero for the rest of us.... Iron Man, the first self-financed production from Marvel Studios, should catch boxoffice lightning in a bottle, thanks to hiring longtime Marvel Comics reader Jon Favreau as director and the supersmart casting of Robert Downey Jr as the conflicted protagonist."

Robert Downey Jr's "charismatic performance holds Jon Favreau's film together when it threatens to lose its way between the crash-bang set pieces," writes the Evening Standard's Nick Curtis.

But Time Out's David Jenkins finds the whole thing "little more than an elongated, episodic and sporadically charming introduction to the life of this mechanised millionaire superhero, light on both CGI and moral quandaries, and possessing neither the zip and sparkle of a Spider-Man nor the brooding existential subtexts of Batman Begins."

"For its first 60 minutes (of a total of 126) Iron Man manages to overcome quite a few obstacles to become a surprisingly chirpy comic-book action movie," writes Yair Raveh.

Rachel Abramowitz has a long profile of Downey in the Los Angeles Times, where Cristy Lytal has a shorter one of creature effects supervisor Shane Mahan.

Earlier: "2008: Robert Downey Jr's Year."

"The summer of 2008 will feature an unusually deep bench of comic-book characters," write Lauren AE Schuker and Peter Sanders in a preview for the Wall Street Journal that comes equipped with an interactive thingy.

Previewing this summer's movies, the Telegraph's David Gritten notes that never before has an entire season, not just individual titles, been promoted as heavily in Britain. A 60-second trailer, for example, featuring flashes from 28 forthcoming movies, is playing in British theaters this weekend. Moviegoers with longer attention spans can also pick up a 16-page magazine - for free. And Will Lawrence recalls visiting the set of Speed Racer.

Gabriel Shanks surveys the season and decides: "The Good News: May is going to rock. The Bad News: The rest of the summer I should mostly read."

Updates, 27: In the New York Times, Michael Cieply takes a look at the bad boys of summer: "Businesses and business people remain some of Hollywood's most reliable villains. But the next crop of corporate heavies appears to have something attractive in its villainy. Perhaps that means a long-overdue acceptance by movie makers that at least some of those who pump oil, sell stock, run airlines and build our increasingly fuel-efficient cars are not completely without value."

In the Observer, Chrissy Iley talks with Harrison Ford about Indiana Jones and things in general.

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy talks with Jeff Bridges about Iron Man and more.

Updates, 4/28: "Every age gets not the superhero it deserves but the superhero it needs to ease its anxieties," proposes David Edelstein in New York: "the midwestern farm boy who conquers metropolitan crime; the caped vigilante of the Gotham night; the tortured teen whose sticky excretions become a source of potency; the persecuted freaks whose differences empower them to save the normal folks. Now, in Iron Man, the first of the season's megabudget comic-book spectaculars, we get an American weapons mogul whose guilt over facilitating the deaths of US soldiers and Mideast civilians impels him to turn off the arms pipeline and rescue Afghans from marauding warlords.... I loved it."

"Downey, who completely dominates the whooshing junk pile that is Iron Man is on his own wavelength, and he turns the movie into a hundred-and-eighty-five-million-dollar put-on," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Downey has a star's confidence now, and, if the audience takes to him, he could probably do this insouciant acting turn again. But it would be a bad joke on him - his most unfortunate mishap - if he winds up clanking around in a metal suit forever."

Film Threat presents its "2008 Summer Preview."

PopMatters launches its week-long preview of the summer.

Via Brainiac Joshua Glenn, the winning designs from Project Rooftop's contest calling for redesigns of Iron Man's armor.

A list from Peter Hartlaub: "Best and worst superhero movies."

Update, 4/29: "The problem with Iron Man is the script... or the utter lack thereof," writes David Poland. "But the suit is really, really, really cool." Karina Longworth comments.

"It's all designed to a tee, and nothing feels particularly risky," writes The Visitor at Twitch. "That said, Iron Man is really The Robert Downey Jr Show. Without him, the movie would be just another typical superhero picture."

For the Independent, Stephen Applebaum talks with Terrence Howard (Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rhodes/War Machine in Iron Man).

Updates, 4/30: "Iron Man is the first Marvel Comics superhero movie I would willingly sit through a second time," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "This is the result not just of what the movie does, but what the movie doesn't do. One reason Iron Man doesn't suck as a Marvel adaptation is that it smartly sticks to the spirit of what made Marvel comics so entertaining during its 60s Golden Age."

"Forget about all the fantastic action," begins Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "Dismiss the disarmingly smart, wry screenplay, and ignore the phenomenal supporting cast. Feel free to overlook the dozen components that make Jon Favreau's Iron Man the most uniquely entertaining superhero movie in a long time... I've got the one main reason that this flick is worthy of your two hours and ten bucks right here, and that reason is named Robert Downey Jr."

As for summer movies in general, at Twitch, Colin Armstrong looks back at "a few lavish productions which not only bombed but took something of (in my mind’s eye, anyway) an unfair critical drubbing."

Updates, 5/2: "Though Favreau remains best known for writing and co-starring in 1996's hipster totem Swingers, he honed his directing chops with a couple of richly imaginative, resolutely low-fi kids' movies, Elf and Zathura," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "If the larger-scale, bigger-budget Iron Man never quite ascends to those heights of tinsel-and-string splendiferousness, it maintains Favreau's fondness for the handmade over the prefab, for Erector Sets over CRPGs. It's an exemplary comic book fantasia."

"Readers of movie reviews often think that critics hate the big Hollywood stuff and cherish only the little films about Romanian abortions or Iranian kids," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "But some of us, this one anyway, knows that there's an American style - best displayed in the big, smart, kid-friendly epic - that few other cinemas even aspire to, and none can touch. When it works, as it does here, it rekindles even a cynic's movie love. So cheers to Downey, Favreau and the Iron Man production company. They don't call it Marvel for nothing."

The New York Times' AO Scott finds Iron Man to be "an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least - since it certainly has its problems - a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways. The film benefits from a script (credited to Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway) that generally chooses clever dialogue over manufactured catchphrases and lumbering exposition, and also from a crackerjack cast that accepts the filmmakers' invitation to do some real acting rather than just flex and glower and shriek for a paycheck."

"It's difficult to imagine a better actor-character fit than that between Robert Downey Jr and Iron Man, the superhero who, out of all of comic book writer Stan Lee's creations, probably possesses the darkest of dark sides," writes the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday.

"We can win the war on terror, the movie suggests, with the force of Robert Downey Jr's personality alone," smiles Dana Stevens. More seriously, "The movie's central conflict, which is also Stark's internal one, has to do with the ambiguity inherent in waging war." Also in Slate, Grady Hendrix:

Even now, Iron Man represents Stan Lee's adolescent dog-eat-dog version of capitalism, the version that appeals to our "might makes right" monkey brains: Innovation is good; monopolies rock when we run them, suck when we don't; big corporations need CEOs rich enough to own space jets; and regulations should be a result of the CEOs' benevolence and wisdom, not imposed by outsiders. Tony Stark is a self-made man who believes that we can build ourselves out of trouble. He's one of America's romanticized lone inventors who, like Steve Jobs, solve problems by locking themselves away in secret workshops to emerge later with their paradigm-shifting inventions.

"[E]ven as Iron Man fulfills its genre obligations, it transcends them, thanks to lively direction by Favreau and, especially, the tour de force performance by Downey, who cements the comeback he's been building in such films as Zodiac, A Scanner Darkly, and (especially) as the bumbling hero of the criminally neglected Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. So "Stop Trying To Kill Robert Downey Jr!"

"There's chunkiness in the third act of Iron Man, and some of the characters are underwritten in Paramount's bid to make that all-important 126-minute mark," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "But even in its closing moments, there's something fascinating about the way Mr Favreau takes a few steps back from the likes of Transformers, Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand. The world of Tony Stark is not one steeped in far-fetched fantasy, but in the dirt and sweat of hard labor. Iron Man is not a hero because of his gadgets, nor his intellect, but because of his work ethic."

"The ace up Iron Man's sleeve, quite unexpectedly, is Gwyneth Paltrow, who brings both radiance and gentle intelligence to the role of a glorified housekeeper called Pepper Potts," writes Tim Robey in the Telegraph. "How she takes out the laundry in those heels is beyond me, but she's a great sport for doing it, and her dry chemistry with our hero is worth a dozen atomic warheads."

For the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, Iron Man is "a cheerful and unpretentious change to the current crop of war movies. At least at first. But I am sorry to say that it is guilty of the sneaky chauvinist trick of making the ultimate villain an American: a mannerism common to many Hollywood movies that cannot quite bring themselves to accord foreigners the status of effective enmity."

"If you're one of those literalists who has a hard time dealing with exploding planets, radioactive spiders or mutant genetics in your superhero movies, Iron Man may be right up your alley," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "While the big-screen debut of the armor-plated Marvel Comics hero may feature technology that's way ahead of reality, a very human heart beats within this souped-up action machine."

For the Independent's Robert Hanks, the film "is by the standard of superhero yarns unusually, even uniquely, thoughtful, witty and three-dimensional - a popcorn movie that has some of the satisfactions of a proper three-course meal."

"[T]here's simply not enough exhilarating slam-bang juice to the film, which bogs down in corporate intrigue when it should be putting its energy (and considerable budget) toward colossal clashes between Stark and his nemesis," argues Nick Schager in Slant.

Downey "gives his part of Tony Stark - the whiz inventor-mega-billionaire who converts himself into the clanking crusader Iron Man - a wit, passion, intensity and irony that light up the whole movie," writes Michael Wilmington at Movie City News.

"[A]lthough Downey spends a certain amount of screentime inside that suit, his face still carries the movie, giving it emotional weight," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

"Iron Man is the rare comic-book movie that makes the prospect of a sequel seem like a promise instead of a threat," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"Solid and funk-free, Iron Man lovingly tosses American ego about like a cat with string, mixing things up just enough to remind us that, when we get down to what's really important, there isn't that much separating traditional red state muscle from blue state radicalism (among other factors, least of which are the deceivers and thieves among us)," writes Rob Humanick. "All within the space of a traditional nuts-and-bolts studio summer picture, that is - the area in which Jon Favreau's very-capable Marvel adaptation succeeds most broadly, its barely-hidden subtext deliberately de-politicized in favor of more a more universally guided moral compass."

"The ultimate male power one-man-show, Iron Man is less successful as political allegory than as sexual fantasia," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

Then She Found Me.

"Then She Found Me, a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The directorial debut of Helen Hunt, who plays April Epner, an anxious 39-year-old kindergarten teacher in New York City, it has all the ingredients of a slick, commercial farce, which it emphatically is not."

"A movie about a woman in her late 30s who is desperate to have a baby is a hard sell in the male teen-oriented movie environment of today, or so the story goes in nearly every mainstream media outlet, including this one," notes the Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano. "[D]efying all laws of probability and presumed palatability, this week offers up two such movies - one a bright, broad comedy starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and another a narrower, flintier movie starring Helen Hunt and Bette Midler. Despite the appearance of Midler, Then She Found Me treats the subject more dramatically, likening the desire to have a child to hunger, thirst or the urge to relieve oneself - all three longings that will make anyone cranky, Hunt especially. The problem isn't so much the character of April as it is the way Hunt plays her - a little too whiny, a little too angry to be very sympathetic."

Updated through 4/28.

"Hunt and Midler are both underrated actresses, and though their conviction is obvious, their characters' propensity to blather is neither unique nor justified, simply psychotic - a transparent attempt on the filmmakers' parts to make this melodrama about motherhood and surrogacy seem less conventional and unspectacular than it really is," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

"It's a romantic comedy, it's a mother-daughter drama, and most importantly, it's an unpretentious, gentle, moving film," writes Marcy Dermansky.

"Hunt directs like she acts - straightforward and without humor, even when she's meant to be funny," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice.

"The anxieties and angst of middle-class, middle-aged women remain rich, underexplored cinematic territory, but Hunt's instantly forgettable film does little to make this deep vein of cultural experience seem vital or exciting," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"The story of a lonely woman confronted with the betrayal of her husband, her mother, and her God, Then She Found Me flirts with cinematic cliché but finds surprising rewards in its idiosyncratic story," writes Meghan Keane in the New York Sun.

Vulture Amy Preiser explains "How Helen Hunt Got Salman Rushdie to Give Her a Sonogram."

Lisa Rosen talks with Hunt for the Los Angeles Times.

Online listening tip. Michelle Norris talks with Hunt for NPR.

Update, 4/28: "What makes this small movie work is the filmmakers' curiosity about the many-sidedness of need - the way genuine benevolence, say, can be cloaked in blunt intrusiveness, or the way insults can be a reckless demand for love," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "We get the feeling that these people are far from completed as personalities, and that the movie's end, when it comes, is more like a pause. With any luck, Helen Hunt will continue to put complicated people on the screen."

Tribeca Dispatch. 2.

David D'Arcy on a doc about a monolithic figure of 20th century art and history. 

Portrait of Diego: The Revolutionary Gaze, by Gabriel Figueroa Flores and Diego López Rivera, is a composite picture - a walk through Diego Rivera's work, reminiscences from Rivera's children and grandchildren of the rotund muralist who reigned over Mexican art, and an introduction to footage from a never-completed documentary made by Rivera with the extraordinary photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo and the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (who shot Los Olvidados and other films with Luis Buñuel).

Rivera is the kind of cultural figure that doesn't exist in our times. After studying in Paris and passing through impressionism, cubism and other styles, he returned to Mexico to make Mexico his canvas, to paint so many of its walls - literally - that he would depict himself coyly as an architect in the vast murals that he made of Mexico's history and folklore. Rivera so dominated Mexican art during his lifetime - overshadowing his muralist peers David Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco and his dutiful mournful wife, Frida Kahlo - that our images of Mexico in the 20th century are more often than not drawn from some image that Diego Rivera made of fruit, flowers, Indians or conquistadors. In a country that called its political party the Institutional Party of the Revolution, Rivera was the institutional artist.

The new doc by Rivera's granbdson and Figueroa's son personalizes the man who looked like a cross between Buddha and a toad - and who painted himself unflatteringly as just that again and again. Rivera knew that his strength wasn't his appearance; it was his skill at creating inspirational evocative appearances that seduced (almost) an entire population - from a pampered cultured class that wanted to seem close to the "people," to ordinary Mexicans, mostly illiterate, who could view his grand paintings and read the imagery in the way that medieval European peasants could experience stained-glass windows.

In the doc from 50 years ago that snakes through the new doc like a twisted spine, Rivera is filmed sketching, like a portly Mexican Alfred Hitchcock with a notebook and a big hat. We've already seen pictures of Rivera the man. What he's looking at is what catches your eye - luminous scenes in which Indian women (dressed in the clothes that Frida Kahlo would later wear) are carrying the same white lilies that you see in Rivera's paintings. (Alvarez Bravo had already observed the Mexican landscape in black and white still photographs - some magical, some achingly severe.) Rivera, the star, ended up directing the movie, but died in 1957 before a final version was finished.

Rivera, it turns out, was fascinated by photography, even jealous of the new medium that Edward Weston used so effectively with nudes. You can imagine that a man of appetites like Rivera would envy the tactility of Weston's pictures. The muralist is quoted as saying that if the Spanish 17th century painter Diego Velásquez were working in the 20th century, he would be a photographer - quite a remark for a painter who never let himself be tied down to realism.

Given Rivera's stature in Mexican history, the doc tries to minimize Diego-worship, with mixed results. We are told that Orozco called him a "player piano," among other things, presumably for the volume of repetitive work that Rivera produced. And we see that Mexican art, especially film and photography, went beyond Rivera, into realism (which the government found hard to tolerate when it dealt with poverty) and surrealism (which explored the nightmarish side of Rivera's folkloric reveries.)

Let's not forget that Rivera and Kahlo were shameless Stalinists, which we hear nothing about in Portrait of Diego. But isn't that how Stalin wanted to be depicted, as an amiable grandfather?

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More on Tribeca here.

Lolas. Winners.

You wouldn't quite call it a sweep, but Auf der anderen Seite (Edge of Heaven) has fared very well tonight at the German Film Awards: Best Film (Gold), Best Director and Screenplay (Fatih Akin, on both accounts) and Best Editing Andrew Bird).

Doris Dörrie's Kirschblüten (Cherry Blossoms) picks up Lolas for Best Film (Silver), Best Actor (Elmar Wepper) and Best Costume Design (Sabine Greunig). More awards:

• Best Film (Bronze): Die Welle (The Wave, Dennis Gansel).

• Best Documentary: Prinzessinnenbad (Bettina Blümner).

• Best Children's and Youth Film: Leroy (Armin Völckers).

• Best Actress: Nina Hoss, for Yella.

• Best Supporting Actress: Christine Schorn, for Frei Nach Plan.

• Best Supporting Actor: Frederick Lau, for Die Welle.

• Best Cinematography: Benedict Neuenfels, for Liebesleben.

• Best Set Design: Erwin Prib, for Absurdistan.

• Best Film Music: Ali N Askin, for Leroy.

• Best Sound Design: Dirk Jacob, Dominik Schleier, Martin Steyer and Pawel Wdowczak, for Trade.

Boston Dispatch. 1.

The cinetrix gets this party started.

Greetings from the Independent Film Festival of Boston's epicenter, Somerville, Massachusetts, home of, among other things, marshmallow Fluff. There's no fluff to be seen on these screens, howevah.

It's day three, and the fest, now in its sixth year, is in full swing. Opening night saw former Brattle Theatre ticket-taker made good Brad Anderson come home to debut his latest feature, Transsiberian, with cast member Sir Ben Kingsley among those making the IFFB red-carpet scene.

On Thursday night, already the unofficial beginning of the weekend in this college-glutted town, the pace picked up noticeably as the cinematic choices multiplied. Lines snaked around the block for Medicine for Melancholy, My Effortless Brilliance and Natural Causes. The first shorts program unspooled. The Coolidge Corner Theatre came on line for the duration of the fest, hosting Potter-mad doc We Are Wizards and Alex Orr's twisted Blood Car, set in a futurist dystopia that turns the "no blood for oil" vow inside out.

The first film the cinetrix saw, Mister Lonely, drew a bona fide sellout crowd - filled to the brim with Harmony Korine devotees, as it turned out. This quickly became evident during the post-screening Q&A with the director, back with his first film since a "crisis of faith" he vaguely eluded to left him wondering if he'd ever make movies again. Earnest questions about Werner Herzog and sky-diving nuns were interrupted by an enthusiastic fellow strategically situated in the front row, who seemed to treat the encounter as a private audience with the bemused auteur. There's one in every crowd, and sometimes more than that.

A much smaller but no less enthusiastic audience convened later that evening for the world premiere of a film you must track down, Taylor Greeson's Meadowlark. This very personal documentary, set in Montana's Big Sky landscapes, revisits the filmmaker's twelfth summer. That year, he began his first sexual relationship - with an older man, an ordained a priest in the Mormon church - and his 15-year-old brother Charlie was stabbed to death. It's a stinging, painful examination of Greeson's past, and how that past has informed his own and his family's present.

Tomorrow, the Brattle Theatre's single screen joins the fray, complicating further the itineraries of eager cinephiles who want to see it all. It's a wonderful dilemma. Pretty much, there are as many ways to approach this festival as there are films. You can catch up on raves and faves from recent festivals, or reduce your carbon footprint and go local, exploring the films that make this fest not just independent but distinctly Boston-based. Or simply pick a venue and stick with it. The cinetrix will be trying to do all three - I'll let you know how it works out. And if you spot me on the red line or the 66, say hello.

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More from Boston here.

Tribeca Dispatch. 1.

With Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che biopic set to premiere in Cannes, David D'Arcy sends word on a doc tracing the origins and lasting impact of a single photograph.

You could call it the last stencil standing. Ernesto "Che" Guevara failed miserably to bring about world revolution. Yet he's outlasted even Mao Zedong in the battle of self-promotion, long after his death in a doomed revolutionary campaign in Bolivia in 1967.

Updated through 4/27.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, Chevolution, directed by Luis Lopez and Trisha Ziff, examines the persistence of Che's image through the Cuban Revolution (which eventually drove Guevara abroad) to the student movements of the late 1960s to Woodstock to the stores selling t-shirts and bikinis around the world, from Brazil to Baghdad. Guevara could never defeat communism, but his picture made some people rich.

The documentary takes a long time to make its point, establishing Guevara as a major figure in the Cuban Revolution, with plenty of archival imagery to document the triumph of bearded commandantes (bearded because they were hiding in the mountains) over the perfumed and tuxedoed corrupt US-supported Cuban dictatorship. As expected, Guevara emerges as a charismatic man of purity and courage, a martyr to dreams of turning the wretched of the earth into revolutionaries with beards and berets. It's straight out of the catechism.

A parallel story in the film is more of a revelation - we met Alberto Korda, the fashion photographer and boulevardier who documented the barbudos' rise to power, complete with photo-martyrologies of bloody demonstrations in Havana before Castro's defeat of the Batista regime. Photography would be a weapon in the propaganda war that accompanied Castro's guerrilla campaign. (We already saw this in the Spanish Civil War, when photographs of children killed in bombings were put on posters and on the front pages of newspapers by the Republicans who were under siege from fascist troops led by Francisco Franco.)

As Chevolution tells the story, Korda began as a Cuban Helmut Newton and transcended his beginnings in fashion. He discovered what Europeans and American already knew, that photography could be leveraged to achieve political ends. The folklore about his relationship with Guevara is that the Argentine commandante, who was camera-shy, insisted that Korda cut sugarcane for a week, which Korda did dutifully before Guevara agreed to a portrait. The photo that was eventually silk-screened around the world was taken by Korda in 1960, after La Coubre, a Belgian ship carrying munitions, exploded while being unloaded. The evidence pointed to official incompetence by Raul Castro in allowing the cargo to be unloaded so close to shore. The official version blames the CIA. The photo of a defiant Guevara was taken by Korda while Guevara and Castro presided over a huge rally commemorating the casualties of the explosion, which the Cubans denounced as an act of US terrorism. The mythic picture, cropped to show Guevara from below silhouetted against a solid background, was born at a mythic event.

The man who sent the picture into the global marketplace, after Guevara vanished for a year or two in the mid-1960s, was Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher, who went to Havana to buy two prints of the photo in 1967. Korda gave the picture to the Italian for nothing because he was "a friend of the revolution." Feltrinelli turned around and made posters which were all the rage in Europe. Guevara's Bolivian Diary, with Korda's photo on the cover, sold more than a million copies. Korda did not get a penny, and the image took off.

In exploring the way that the Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick turned the photograph into a psychedelic image in accordance with the consumer tastes of 1968, the documentary turns to Gerry Adams, the former IRA leader, who tells of Guevara's appeal to generations of desperate Catholics in Northern Ireland. "I wanted his image to breed like rabbits," Fitzpatrick said. Inexplicably, we're never told of a multiple-paneled colorized Guevara grid of photographs that were attributed in 1968 to Andy Warhol. In fact, the work was a forgery by Warhol hanger-on Gerard Malanga. When Warhol heard of the fake, he cynically certified it as his own work, ensuring that he would profit if it were reproduced. (For Cuban Pop Art inspired by the photograph, see the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, which is now hosting a huge exhibition of Cuban Art, much of it on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana.) And on the image went, to the dorm room walls and to a black hole of t-shirts.

Ultimately, the Korda family would hire lawyers to stop the use of the photograph to sell harmful products like liquor, tobacco and perfume. In a famous case, the family got $50,000 from Smirnoff Vodka, which used the picture without permission.

Plenty of Che-worship is on the screen, but there's more than that in this film, some of it even critical. We're reminded of Guevara's participation in violent retribution in the early days of the Revolution, a fact that you rarely hear about from well-meaning admirers, and we're also reminded that the government which Guevara helped install is an undemocratic military dictatorship. "If you like undemocratic governments, then you should wear this t-shirt," says one young man who is not practicing Che-nuflection.

We hear from Antonio Banderas (Che in Evita) and from Gael García Bernal (Che in The Motorcycle Diaries), and from the biographer Jon Lee Anderson, who seems determined to achieve a John Malkovich speaking style. (How about Malkovich as Che?) We don't hear from Omar Sharif, who played Che in Richard Fleischer's solemnly laughable Che! (1969), in which Jack Palance played Castro. To get an inside perspective on that film and the emerging myth just a few years after Che's death, find John Leonard's entertaining report of his visit to the set in the New York Times Magazine of December 8, 1968.

Besides Sharif, the documentary would also have benefited from the consumers who are buying the Che image. Are generations of romantic mindless youth who went to see Che as Jack Kerouac in The Motorcycle Diaries keeping Che-commerce going, or is it a case of Che being a perennial among images of Bob Marley, James Dean, Tupac Shakur, Jim Morrison, Elvis, Subcommandante Marcos or whoever else happens to be the rebel heart-throb of the week? Thank God that Che's beret has not been given lifetime fashion tenure, although the documentary does make the point that the Black Panthers adopted the beret thanks to Che's fashion leadership.

Another question left unasked and unanswered is why Che's image has a much broader global reach than Fidel Castro's. Was he just better looking? Or could it be that Che's reputation was saved by the fact that he never exercised power or that his admirers never bothered to learn too much about him? Bear in mind that the Che-mania isn't simply the case of the longevity of a handsome face and a seductive myth. It shows us how a logo can survive, long after its historical associations are forgotten, if they were ever known at all.

For more, listen my report about the persistence of the Che image that aired on NPR in October 2004. Check out, too, J Hoberman's "Ernesto Goes to the Movies" in the October 2004 American Prospect.

---

More from Tribeca here.

Updates, 4/26: For the IFC, Stephen Saito talks with Trisha Ziff.

Chevolution's "clean, tight narrative is both poignant and entertaining, and clearly benefits from Ziff's deep understanding of photography and Lopez's previous documentary work (The King of Kong, Shut Up & Sing)," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online.

Updates, 4/27: "Chevolution would be a stronger documentary if it included a meatier picture of who Che himself was and what he did and stood for," writes Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab. "One way or another, the movie does demonstrate that the Che image is now so cut off from actual history as to mean whatever the person who wears it thinks it ought to mean, which is one reason it's had a much longer shelf life than Che himself did."

"Just about all of it is engaging, making it less a dry history lesson and more of an examination of how pop culture and capitalism conspires to make Marxist revolutionaries into corporate logos," writes Joel Keller at Cinematical.

Interview. Yung Chang.

"Imagine the Grand Canyon turned into a lake," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "That image is summoned by Yung Chang, the Chinese-Canadian director and occasional narrator of Up the Yangtze, an astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China's economic miracle."

"With delicacy devoid of preachy grandstanding, Chang documents a landscape mutating not only literally but socially and economically as well, as flooding of countless cities and towns along the Yangtze's banks leads to displacement and, in turn, to an encounter between old and new worlders," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

James Van Maanen talks with the young director as Up the Yangtze opens at the IFC Center in New York.

Updated through 4/26.

Scott Foundas in the Voice: "By journey's end, Yung has found, in the Yangtze, a brilliant natural metaphor for upward mobility in modern China: Whether they hail from the lowlands or the urban centers, everyone here is scrambling to reach higher ground."

"In spite of the way-off-the-beaten-track subject, the film, co-produced by Montreal outfit EyeSteelFilm and the National Film Board of Canada, has become one of the more notable Canuck domestic hits in recent memory," notes Brendan Kelly in Variety. "In the first week of April, the film was the No. 2 domestic performer at the box office and the top non-French homegrown pic."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Yung Chang "about his experiences filming in China, the future of documentaries and the meaning of 'Chinese time.'"

Update, 4/26: "When an enormous lock creaks to life in the opening scene of Up the Yangtze, its hulking slabs of metal shifting like tectonic plates, it's almost as if the rapid transformation of China's powerhouse river is unfolding in geologic time," writes Darrell Hartman in the New York Sun. "It's an appropriate overture, as Yung Chang's lovely, unhurried documentary goes on to extract some timeless truths from China's latest great leap forward."

Reminder. DK Holm fundraiser.

It's this Sunday night at Portland's Cinema 21. All the info's here.

"When I finally got to know Holm, I was disappointed to find I actually liked him," writes David Walker in the Willamette Week. "And even though I often disagreed with his criticism, I've always thought he was a great writer. He has proven it time and time again in his various columns and his books, which include R Crumb: Conversations, Independent Cinema and Kill Bill: An Unofficial Casebook."

At Chud, Andre Dellamorte recalls meeting Doug at Powell's, hitting it off and getting invited to Doug's Thursday night gathering of local film critics. As for Doug's writing, "Some of my favorites include his essays on Klute, Boogie Nights (though I disagreed with him), and on the old men he was always a master, like this piece on Red Beard."

Update, 4/28: Shawn Levy has the full tale and plenty of pix from the night that was: "If Doug ever wondered where he stood in the hearts of his peers, friends, colleagues and fellow Portlanders, he knows for certain now."

Shorts, 4/24.

"Yasukuni, the new documentary on the controversial Tokyo shrine that stands as the symbolic heart of Japanese right wingers has been making headlines for the fact that it is not being shown," notes Hot Splice. "All of the Tokyo cinemas that had originally booked the film for an April 12 opening have cancelled screenings, bowing to right wing pressure and threats.... Director Li Ying knew his film would be controversial, but perhaps he never expected it get to this point." More from Rica Naylor in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"'You may think I am crazy,' Jonas Mekas wrote in one of his 1963 'Movie Journal' columns in the Village Voice, '[but] the day is close when the 8 mm home-movie footage will be collected and appreciated as folk art, like songs and the lyric poetry that was created by the people,'" recalls Ed Halter at Rhizome. "In the future, he predicted, we will come to appreciate 'travelogue footage, awkward footage that will suddenly sing with an unexpected rapture' since 'time is laying a veil of poetry over them.' History has borne out Mekas's prophecy."

Pacze Moj posts a piece by British filmmaker John Grierson on the documentary film from a 1946 issue of Hollywood Quarterly.

"In The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, David Whitley, a lecturer at Cambridge University, argues, in the overstuffed prose that launched a thousand academic careers, that the finely wrought imagery and emotional power of Disney movies like Bambi and Finding Nemo helped inspire generations of environmentalists." Patricia Cohen. Related: Brooks Barnes on Disneynature, a new production banner charged with releasing two nature docs a year.

Also in the New York Times, Michael Cieply asks United Artists' Paula Wagner about the latest flurry of predictions that Valkyrie, having had its release date bumped a couple times, will not fly. David Poland comments.

Spike Lee "is teaming up with Nokia, the cellphone maker, to direct a short film comprising YouTube-style videos created by teenagers and adults using their mobile phones," reports Laura M Holson.

"To date, BLDGBLOG has spoken with novelists, film editors, musicians, architects, photographers, historians, and urban theorists, among others, to see how architecture and the built environment has been used, understood, or completely reimagined from within those disciplines - but coverage of game design is something in which this site has fallen woefully short," writes . "So when I first saw Daniel Dociu's work I decided to get in touch with him, and to ask him some questions about architecture, landscape design, and the creation of detailed online environments for games."

Jürgen Fauth points to a few questions being raised at idrinkyourmilkshake.com:

• Who else could have played Daniel Plainview? Kinski?
• H.W.? H.M. Tilford? J. J. Carter? Where do all those initals come from?
• Graphological analysis of Daniel Plainview's handwriting
• What's with the hammers during the blowout?
• How evil is Plainview? Did you see his tear?

"While Tsai Ming-Liang's 2002 short The Skywalk is Gone provides a succinct narrative bridge between his previous feature What Time Is It There? and his most radical work, 2005's The Wayward Cloud, it also represents somewhat of a thematic and aesthetic holding pattern," writes Andrew Schenker at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "But if Tsai seems chiefly concerned with moving his characters into proper position for his next feature while deferring any further artistic explorations, he nonetheless presents his signature concerns with a compelling economy, reproducing earlier triumphs - both through repetitions of established aesthetic strategies and direct allusion - and neatly summing up his cinematic achievement to date."

"A cut above the average Quad-bound video agit-prop doc, Michael Skolnik's Without the King succeeds mostly through negative virtues." Vadim Rizov explains in the Voice.

Also, Brian Miller: "Though street satirists like Robbie Conal and Blek le Rat appear briefly to argue their case, along with guerrilla designers Marc Ecko and Shepard Fairey, Bomb It doesn't have the patience or the smarts for real analysis."

"It is depressingly easy to imagine the brainstorming process behind the film Three and Out," writes Patrick Barkham. "This week train drivers took the unusual step of protesting outside the movie's premiere and challenging its star, Mackenzie Crook, about the comic potential of suicide." Also in the Guardian, Chrissy Iley talks with Andrew Garfield.

"I guess you could call it retired. I haven't worked for four years now." So says Gene Hackman; Geoffrey Macnab comments in the Independent.

Matt Waller at the WSWS on Body of War: "Cinema does us all a service when it portrays the personal costs of war, especially in a climate where the vast numbers of US wounded from Iraq (currently at least 23,000) are willfully brushed under the rug by the media.... Unfortunately, this is only half the movie. Intercut with [Tomas] Young's story is a potted retelling of the Senate vote for the Iraq War Resolution in October of 2002. This section is a shameless glorification of the Democratic Party, or a section of it, that succeeds in torpedoing much of the anti-war potential the work might have had."

Also, Joanne Laurier on Under the Same Moon.

"Girls Rock!, a documentary about the weeklong Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls in Oregon, explores what happens when you arm young girls with the kind of encouragement, confidence and free-spirited aplomb usually reserved for their brothers," writes Tracy Moore in the Nashville Scene.

Mike Everleth enjoys the underground musical Bad Dog and Superhero.

From Seoul, Marc Raymond on Hong Sang-soo's The Power of Kangwon Province and The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.

"Now that I've outed myself as a cinema advocate, I'd better get around to promoting a couple of DVDs representing the best of the perpetually underappreciated cinema of Africa." Kevin Lee on Moolaadé and Bamako.

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: The Blair Witch Project.

At Twitch, Blake Ethridge talks with Sydney Tamila Poitier, mostly about Death Proof.

For Facets Features, Phil Morehart compiles a list of films in which the Earth strikes back - at us.

Cinematical: "Our Ten Most Anticipated Films of the Summer."

Kristin Thompson revisits the issue of fair use.

At indieWIRE, Jeremy Walker reflects on a career as an independent film publicist.

At VF Daily, Elizabeth Hurlbut and David Poland exchange a bit of light-hearted email, "Re: NOT Forgetting the Full Monty."

Online viewing tip. Via Alison Willmore, vodcasts on iTunes from Baz Luhrmann, talking about Australia.

Online viewing tip #2. Vulture presents "Five Hilarious Moments From W."

Online viewing tips. Jerry's found an amusing Vincent D'Onofrio talking at the Nashville Film Festival about working with Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick; and this has set him off on string of Kubrick clips: an autobiographical monologue; the story of impersonator Alan Conway and a bit on the FX and conceptual art of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Interview. Etgar Keret.

"Predicated on the spectacle of functionally depressed types stuck in mildly ridiculous situations not entirely of their own making, the Israeli ensemble comedy Jellyfish - which won the Caméra d'Or last May at Cannes and was among the highlights of this year's New Directors / New Films - has an emotional resonance beyond its controlled slapstick and deadpan sight gags," writes J. Hoberman in the Village Voice.

Jellyfish was written by Shira Geffen and co-directed with her husband, the popular writer, Etgar Keret - with whom David D'Arcy talks as the film opens in more US cities this weekend.

Update, 4/26: "Underlying Jellyfish's sense that the world is a more remarkable place than we may imagine is its willingness to embrace surrealism as a story element," writes Kenneth Turan. "Working with a remarkable sureness of touch, the film's directors understand that what's imaginary and what's real can be made to look exactly the same on film, and that what makes logical sense is less important than deeper emotional truth. Yes, Jellyfish says, it's a wonderful life, not in that old-fashioned style we've perhaps tired of but in a surprising new and magical way all its own."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Charles Taylor talks with Keret.

Critics, 4/24.

The New York Press turns 20, giving Armond White an opportunity to lash out at all those snake-hipped word-slingers once again. Only this time, at length: "There's more writing about movies these days than ever before. In print and online, it's never been worse - especially on the Internet where film buffs emulating the Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition are no longer isolated nerds but an opinionated throng, united in their sarcasm and intense pretense at intellectualizing what is basically a hobby." Movies that "should have rocked film culture" are ignored; instead, "critics' imprimatur" lands on "movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible." And there's a list, too, of "Ten Current Film Culture Fallacies."

Updated.

Kevin Lee not only wraps his coverage of the recent Moving Image Institute symposium on film criticism, he also comments on much of what's been blogged about it in the past couple of weeks. "Much has been made of the perceived antagonism between print institutions like the Times and the blog-barians storming their gates. As rousing as these posts and discussions have been, let's cut to the chase: in three years this isn't even going to be an issue. While I won't divulge any details of what was discussed at the Times meeting I think it's fair to say that they are as anxious as any blogger about securing their audience in a sea of competing critical voices."

Doug Cummings has been reading the Winter 2007 issue of Film International dedicated to André Bazin. Guest editor Jeffrey Crouse writes, "I look forward to the day when film analysis is conducted from an emphasis on love arrangements as Bazin conceived, rather than largely power ones [favored in academia], with the latter being a subset of the former. Imagine the expanded vocabulary and range of concepts one might draw upon so as to delve more precisely into the significance of so many film masterworks." Doug: "I submit that the French film, The Secret of the Grain, which deservedly swept the Césars a couple months ago and screened at the Los Angeles COLCOA festival last weekend, is a prime candidate for this kind of analysis."

The film screens, by the way, at Tribeca on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and May 4; and at the San Francisco International Film Festival on May 3, 5 and 8.

"Call it an aesthetic existential crisis, film-critic style," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "The key symptom: I came out of Flawless pondering the unanticipated but undeniable fact that I found it more enjoyable, absorbing, companionable and, in certain ways, cinematic, than I find about 99 percent of fictional films these days, including pretty much everything nominated for Academy Awards, all the big Hollywood summer and year-end spectaculars, plus most Amerindie and foreign auteur films of current renown."

Harry Tuttle revives his series on critical fallacies.

Updates: Glenn Kenny to Armond White: "You think you're applying some form of moral rigor to your work, but the fact is that you're a bully and a hypocrite, and I don't want to know you." Comments ensue.

"Armond's deeply confused screed makes me glad I quit the Press so that I don't have to attempt to explain to people out of professional courtesy what point he thought he was trying to make," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in a comment at the House Next Door. "My admiration for Armond's originality and the impact of his 1980s and 90s writing on my own have been detailed at length here many times, so I won't rehash it again. Cutting to the chase: It has become increasingly and sadly clear in recent years that Armond's as much the establishment as AO Scott, in that he derives much of his impact from the institutional weight of a print publication and from the insulated status that this one-way model of communication affords." There's more.

Jeffrey Wells and Karina Longworth also comment on the White piece; best of all is Karina's entry title, "How to Write Film Criticism? Stop Reading It." Which is inspired by a quote from Nathan Lee, which certainly strikes a chord with me and bears repeating all over again right here:

I find most film writing almost... unreadable. And the longer I write, the less of it I try to read. I think that keeps me a better writer. I'm reading all the time, but I can learn more about the movies I'm seeing this week from reading a great 19th century novel than I can from whatever XYZ critic has to say this week about whatever. I think another problem with movie writing is that it's insular, especially Internet writing. It's so narrow and insular and just about movies, and I think to be a really good writer and film critic you need a range. You need to know what's going on in painting, you need to know what's going on in music, you need to read books, and get laid, and go to restaurants, you know what I mean?

Since I spend the better part of most days feeding what Matt aptly calls "film writing's equivalent of a news ticker," or at least one among many, I do find that once I tear myself away from it, I'm starved for anything but more film news, film criticism - and on some days, even films themselves. A quick list of my own sanity-saving diversions of the moment: the US presidential campaign (no, really; someone said the other day that this would make for a great opera), Berlin's thriving art scene and Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

Other fests, other events, 4/23.

"The 10th Anniversary Ebertfest begins tonight in Urbana-Champaign. It is with some melancholy that I write these words on a legal pad in a hospital bed in Chicago. After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip." Get well, Roger Ebert!

Peter Sobczynski's blogging from the festival, running through Sunday, for Hollywood Bitchslap. Update, 4/24: Jim Emerson and Lisa Rosman are blogging the fest as well.

"Termed 'the longitudinal documentary' by Hot Docs Director of Programming Sean Farnel, films that follow a character or story over an extended period of time are increasingly problematic these days," writes Peter Knegt in indieWIRE. "Deals with distributors or television networks put pressure on the time a doc has to finish, often limiting the diachronic scope of the project. Three feature films screening at the 2008 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival: Jens Hoffman's 20 Seconds of Joy, Greg Kohs's Song Sung Blue and Nik Sheehan's Flicker, exemplfy this increasingly rare form in documentary filmmaking."

And AJ Schnack reviews At the Death House Door, To See If I'm Smiling and Song Sung Blue. Hot Docs runs through Sunday. Update, 4/24: Bob Turnbull on Jennifer Baichwal's 2002 portrait of photographer Shelby Lee Adams, The True Meaning of Pictures.

Attending the Minneapolis-St Paul International Film Festival? Rob Nelson's got some recommendations for you. And some more. Related online viewing: Chuck Olsen and Lori review five films they've caught at MSPIFF.

Chris Vognar has an overview of the USA Film Festival in the Dallas Morning News: "[A]s the grandfather of local fests, USA still has a way of bringing in master craftsmen with names that aren't as big as their talents and achievements." Through Sunday.

Dennis Cozzalio's looking forward to this weekend's kickoff of the Southern California Drive-In Movie Society's Drive-In Tailgate Party, celebrating 75 years of "this not-at-all dead, but instead resurging and uniquely American institution." Related online listening: Nancy Mullane on NPR.

Matt Dentler'll be painting Austin red before he departs for New York in June.

Matt Prigge rounds up local goings on in the Philadelphia Weekly.

Janine Armin files an entry in Artforum's diary on Milan's Salone del Mobile, "which opened last Wednesday to roaring crowds of shoppers and speculators.... This fantasia of beautiful things did not detract from auteur Peter Greenaway's multimedia extravaganza, Ultima Cena di Leonardo, which was shown at the Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale, one of historic Milan's most stunning buildings."

ST VanAirsdale to New Yorkers: "First up on Saturday afternoon, Sissy Spacek and executive producer Ed Pressman will visit IFC Center for a special screening and discussion of Terrence Malick's Badlands.... Later that night the Walter Reade Theater is hosting a benefit screening of Glory at Sea!, whose filmmaker recently incurred a few thousand bone fractures and many times more dollars' worth of medical bills in a car accident before Glory's premiere at SXSW."

"Celebrating and singing the scene it records, Walden is four years (1964 - 68) seen through the corybantic 16mm Bolex of Jonas Mekas," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. At Anthology Film Archives tomorrow through Wednesday.

Also, New Yorkers, you have about two weeks to do the must-do day Brian Scholis maps out for you.

Online viewing tip. The Quay Brothers' trailer for Kinoteka, London's 6th Polish Film Festival, running through May. Related: filmPolska opens today in Berlin and runs through April 30.

IFFB 08.

"Elusive animals, the mysteries of time past, family conflict, peer pressure, and, inevitably, Iraq dominate what we were able to screen from the robust sixth annual Independent Film Festival of Boston," writes Peter Keough, introducing another round of capsule reviews in the Phoenix. "What unifies them is their originality, their intensity, and their high quality, all of which confirm that the IFFB is now the top film festival in New England."

Not Coming to a Theater Near You is ready; and the festival, running through April 29, has got a blog going, too.

Updated through 4/29.

Also in Boston, but unrelated to the IFFB, the Phoenix's Gerald Peary has details on several screenings coming up in May tied to a book release. The background: "For peddling some not-for-sale DVDs to a dubious Internet customer, local critic Paul Sherman found himself in the middle of an FBI sting, removed from his reviewing posts at the Boston Herald and the Improper Bostonian, and under voluntary house arrest. Down but not out, Sherman spent his incarceration compiling the Beantown book of books, Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond. Self-published (Black Bars Publishing, May 1), this is an indispensable history/dictionary/catalogue/critique of local feature filmmaking through the years. Dramas. Documentaries. Hollywood features and many indies." The site's got excerpts galore.

Updates, 4/26: Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "I wanted, I think, to read Crawford as an optimistic film that celebrates America's ability to accommodate a variety of viewpoints, one that reminds us that there is dissent, and a potential for dialogue, even in a place like Crawford. But by the end I had realized that any film that sets out to capture a moment in time - particularly this moment in time - needs to be more bruising than that."

More from Andrew Osborne at ScreenGrab.

Update, 4/27: Goliath has Andrew Osborne at ScreenGrab thinking back to another Zellner Brothers' feature, Plastic Utopia, "one of the most brilliantly deranged independent films I’ve ever seen, a surrealistic cult classic that, sadly, has never inspired nearly the cult it deserves."

Update, 4/29: Once again, Andrew Osborne with a few more quick takes and a longer one on Turn the River.

Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay.

"American political cinema of the George W Bush era has come to assume a few familiar forms: the documentary indictment (Fahrenheit 9/11, No End in Sight), the sober memorial (World Trade Center, United 93), the angry or earnest Iraq drama (Redacted, Stop-Loss)," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "In this cheerless landscape Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay, the sequel to the 2004 cult favorite Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, creates its own category: the stoner protest film." And he talks with writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg.

Updated through 4/29.

"Who would have imagined that movie which begins with its heroes getting racially profiled at an airport, tossed into prison at Guantánamo Bay, threatened with rape at gunpoint by American soldiers (a practice that is depicted as so routine there's even a slang term for it), and questioned by a Homeland Security officer who literally wipes his ass with the Bill of Rights, would also turn out to contain the most sympathetic portrayal of George W Bush of any film in the last eight years?" asks Paul Matwychuk. "Welcome to the topsy-turvy politics of Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay."

"Unfortunately, nothing in Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo is funnier than its title," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. It's "a largely mind-numbing experience, but if I hadn't sat through it before seeing Standard Operating Procedure, I don't think I'd have appreciated how much the Abu Ghraib photos owe to dumb-ass frat humor, stupid pet tricks, and YouTube gross-outs."

Hurwitz and Schlossberg "boisterously tackle worthy targets like counterproductive counterterrorism efforts, cronyism and brashly ignorant leadership," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Tucked among the Epic Movie smorgasbord of rotely reversed stereotypes and fan-friendly Neil Patrick Harris escapades are barbs worthy of South Park's heyday."

Earlier Hurwitz/Schlossberg interviews: Shirley Halperin (EW) and Dave Itzkoff (Heeb).

Updates, 4/24: "A franchise that began as a half-assed, half-baked but quite natural Political Statement shrouded in pot smoke now strives too hard for relevance, and its satire this time around is rendered clunky and clownish," writes Robert Wilonsky in the LA Weekly.

"Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay may look like a wild comedy with some political teeth to it, but - a ha! - turns out it's really just dumb," writes Josef Braun in the Vue Weekly. "Real dumb. Okay, dumb with a few inspired little surprises that help wash down the pervading dearth of anything actually funny or clever happening."

For the Los Angeles Times, Mark Olsen talks with the writer-directors and the leads. Hurwitz: "When it really comes down to it, our priority at all times is to have a crazy, bonkers, out-there, outrageous, un-PC, insane comedy so you and your friends can go to the theater and have an incredible time. There's nothing that can ruin that kind of movie more than being preachy or having a strong political message. So for us, this film brings up what's going on and helps us all laugh at it. It's a form of therapy."

"[W]hile the comedy is as low-brow and outrageous as ever, this new movie actually scores more points off the nation’s paranoid and repressive post-9/11 mindset than all of Hollywood’s hand-wringing war-on-terror dramas put together," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"It's true that H&K2 tries a little too hard; it's a little too unsubtle in its fervent attempt to both humanize the protagonists and show them, like, growing emotionally and shit, man!" writes Jenni Miller for Premiere. "That said, the scenes from their college days are a-ma-zing, and I can't help but cheer when love interests hook up."

And in honor of tomorrow's release of H&K2, at the main site, Craig Phillips presents a list of "10 Sequels That Are Better Than the Original."

Updates, 4/26: "[P]recisely because their attitudes are so bluntly hedonistic and apolitical, Harold and Kumar manage to be fairly persuasive when they get around to criticizing the status quo, which the movie has the wit to acknowledge itself as part of," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun: "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is an act of pure genius - not because it's a great film, but because if it does well at the box office, its makers will be hailed as political satirists of the highest order who have provided a much-needed laugh break in the midst of the soul-deadening war on terror. And if it flops, they'll be box-office martyrs, misunderstood and underappreciated by nervous Americans with a case of the 'too soon!' jitters. Either way, they'll get far more respect than they deserve for this timid yuck-fest."

"Is it daring to portray Bush as overgrown frat boy drifting through a haze of marijuana smoke - or is it a tip-off that writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg actually have a fair bit in common with Bush's cocky disinterest in seriousness and sensitivity?" asks Mark Asch in Stop Smiling. "Probably the latter... Hurwitz and Sclossberg's frattish sensibility is inherently conservative, even when it's lip-servicing progressive sensibilities."

"Somebody needed to do a merciless sendup of Homeland Security bullshit, but are Harold and Kumar up to the task?" asks Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "Not quite."

"It betrays the spirit of the stoner comedy, which has traditionally been subversive - when it wasn't detailing the love affair between two marginally functional young men and their stash of sweet, sweet herb," argues Slate's Dana Stevens.

"Some gags are inspired in their extreme crudeness and toked-up surrealism, and others are simply lazy and base, targeted at the sniggering 14-year-old boys who snuck into the back row of the theater," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Yet the bad stretches in both [Harold & Kumar] movies are more easily forgiven and forgotten than they would be in other comedies, because John Cho's Harold and Kal Penn's Kumar make such amiable company."

Writing in Slant, Nick Schager finds "a slapdash laziness one expects from a stoner, not a stoner comedy."

Choire Sicha talks with Neil Patrick Harris for the Los Angeles Times.

Leonard Pierce lists five pot movies at ScreenGrab.

And finally for now, a moment of brilliance from C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark that I'm pointing to from this entry and from Baby Mama's.

Update, 4/29: "Dude, Harold and Kumar are back in a new movie, but I gotta warn you: it's a major buzzkill if you're queer or a woman." Marianna Martin in Reverse Shot.

Roman de Gare.

"The problem with Roman de Gare," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, "is that the tale grabs you more than the telling.... By the end - which, true to form, feels cheerful but insubstantial - the film is relying on the charms of its cast."

"Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman may be one of the silliest love songs in the canon of French fluff, but 42 years on, it gets a beguiling makeover in this new soufflé from the director, who seizes the day both to trade on and shake off his enduring reputation as France's reigning romantic airhead," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "[T]his goofy tale of self-emancipation, a love story made by a mature man wise to the possibilities of the improbable, is also a thriller with an unexpectedly dark edge."

Updated through 4/26.

"Lelouch has made a diverting but cool suspense puzzler whose payoff proves to be smaller and more mundane than its twisty, fluid setup," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

Andrew Sarris wants you to see the film before you read his review in the New York Observer. Then, he'll tell you why, "despite all my reservations, I think it is worth seeing, though I do not approve of all the trickery involved."

Dave Kehr has a fun talk with Lelouch for the New York Times.

Erica Abeel talks with Lelouch for indieWIRE.

Earlier: James Van Maanen's take when he caught it at Rendez-Vous With French Cinema in February.

Update, 4/24: "I can't say that I love all of Roman De Gare, but it is worth reporting that the first half of the film is nearly perfect," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Updates, 4/26: "[I]f Roman de Gare never quite lives up to the sheer delightful audacity of its mock-pastoral comic middle, it dispenses a few other pleasures en route to the talky, deflating revelations of its climax," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "One of these is Fanny Ardant."

SFIFF, Week 1.

"In the words of José-Luis Guerín, director of In the City of Sylvia, 'we should see cinema as a separate continent' - and we should be cheered by what we see." Johnny Ray Huston introduces the San Francisco Bay Guardian's preview of the San Francisco International Film Festival, opening tomorrow with Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress and closing with Alex Gibney's Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson on May 8.

Besides capsule reviews of films screening through Tuesday:

Updated through 4/29.

• Dennis Harvey talks with "San Francisco's collage king," Craig Baldwin, about Mock Up on Mu.

• Cheryl Eddy meets Dario and Asia Argento to talk about Mother of Tears - and more.

• La France is "a holy union of war movie and love story, consecrated in the same chapel of pop that houses tearful penitent Brian Wilson, radiant nun Anna Karina, and verse-scribbling choir boy Jacques Brel - and stage-set with the mist-swathed romanticism of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot," writes Kimberly Chun, who talks with director Serge Bozon.

• Profit motive and the whispering wind is "an hour-long pilgrimage to the graves, minor monuments, and commemorative plaques erected to honor America's freethinkers and radicals," writes Matt Sussman. "If [John] Gianvito's film is part eulogy and part rallying cry for America's radical left, then Hartmut Bitomsky's more conventionally structured documentary Dust (Staub) is a vanitas for late capitalism."

• J Hoberman is the recipient of this year's Mel Novikoff Award and Max Goldberg offers a fine appreciation and notes that "Hoberman's film selection for his special night is likely the most unabashedly sensuous movie not starring Asia Argento to play this year's festival." That would be In the City of Sylvia.

• "There are three Mexican films this year, all first features," notes Jason Shamai. "Though one manages to be an infield home run, the overall representation of the country is underwhelming and, we hope, less than representative."

• "[I]t's a pleasant and unexpected surprise that the San Francisco Film Society has chosen to showcase Shampoo while presenting [Robert] Towne with this year's Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting," writes Maria Komodore.

• And Johnny Ray Huston: "It's a mug's game determining the correct genre of John M Stahl's 1945 Leave Her to Heaven - especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains not one, but two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history."

"You can think of it as The Sound of Music meets Quest for Fire, or Jesus Christ Superstar rocks Land of the Lost. However you slice it, Evolution: the Musical! amounts to some pungent cross-breeding." For SF360, Robert Avila talks with filmmakers Andrew Bancroft and Kenny Taylor and actors Tonya Glanz and Jon Wolanske.

Earlier: Michael Hawley's preview for the Evening Class; and Brian Darr.

Update: Michael Hawley has another round of previews at the Evening Class.

Update, 4/24: Brian Darr reminds me that there are, in fact, other weeklies in the Bay Area besides the Guardian and of course does a fine job of parsing their coverage. He also points to Rob Davis's new entry: "It's a large festival - the first on this continent, actually - and although it suffered a bout of acute melancholia at the turn of the century, it seems to have been set aright by festival director Graham Leggat. It's the standard bearer for the city's culture of cinema. San Franciscans who care about movies guard it jealously." Rob then picks "Six Personal Favorites" and offers a list of "Decent Films" in the lineup.

Brian also notes that Lincoln Spector (specifically, here and here) and Tony An have previews.

Update, 4/26: The latest round in the Chronicle:

• Walter Addiego on Profit motive and the whispering wind.

• Reyhan Harmanci on Forbidden Lie$ and The Art of Negative Thinking.

• Leba Hertz on Stranded: I have come from a plane that crashed on the mountains.

• Joshua Kosman on Vasermil.

• Mick LaSalle on A Girl Cut in Two and In the City of Sylvia.

• Tamara Strauss on The Judge and the General.

• David Wiegand on Secret and Cochochi.

• Steven Winn on A Journey With Peter Sellars.

Brian Darr saw more than a handful of films in the SFIFF lineup at Sundance - and tells you about them in his latest entry at Hell on Frisco Bay.

For SF360, Jenn Preissel talks with Eddie Muller about The Grand Inquisitor, which "pays homage to the Dashiel Hammett-style detective story, but with a twist - the investigator is a dame."

Updates, 4/27: For SF360, Michael Fox talks with Barry Jenkins about Medicine for Melancholy.

Jeffrey M Anderson at Pixel Vision on Karl Boese and Paul Wegener's The Golem: "The screening boasted a live score by none other than Black Francis (once again going by his Pixies-era moniker, rather than Frank Black or Charles Thompson). The good news is that it was a great Black Francis show, but the bad news is that I'm not sure the songs actually synced up with or enhanced the movie in any way."

Updates, 4/29: At SF360, Jennifer Preissel talks with Katherin McInnis about Woodward's Gardens, screening in the experimental shorts program In A Lonely Place: New Experimental Cinema.

On Sunday, as noted above, J Hoberman received the Mel Novikoff Award; Kent Jones interviewed him onstage before a screening of In the City of Sylvia and, afterwards, an email conversation was struck up. To be read in order: Ryland Walker Knight, Jennifer Stewart and Kevin Lee.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston had a busy weekend, taking in Glas: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails, Carlos Saura's "magical" Fados, John Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven and Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon.

"The Last Mistress is the most enjoyable of the three Breillat films I've seen," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "It works on a gut level of sexual turmoil that her other films never approach, although I suspect that most of the film's success lies more with star Asia Argento than with Breillat." Also, The Golem.

Tribeca, Week 1.

The Tribeca Film Festival opens tonight with Baby Mama and closes on May 4 with Speed Racer, "but in between, there are some pretty outstanding finds that won't be enjoying a studio ad blitz any time soon," notes a collective Voice, laying out 13 picks and posting four warning signs.

Updated through 4/29.

Also, Vadim Rizov talks with John Gianvito about Profit motive and the whispering wind, "an avant-garde response to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, with static frames taking in the grave sites and memorials of left-wing heroes, labor strikes, et al."

And Michelle Orange: "Arranged as a kind of Middle Eastern tasting menu, several Tribeca offerings begin not only to complement but to converse with one another."

Plus: Aaron Hillis talks with Guy Maddin about his "time-out-of-mind "docu-fantasia" about his provincial hometown," My Winnipeg.

Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun: "By combining with Renew Media (which began as National Video Resources), the Tribeca Film Institute not only acquired deeper pockets for funding film, video, and new-media artists, but drafted a leader in [Brian] Newman who possesses a unique perspective on both the nonprofit and for-profit media playing fields."

The Film Panel Notetaker introduces an interview: "She Stares Longingly at What She Has Lost is the title of Phillip Van's segment of Little Minx, a new web film series produced by Rhea Scott and based on the French parlor game of the same name where the last line of the previous film's script starts the first line of the next film's script.... He also talks about his new feature-length screenplay Darkland that is in the Tribeca All-Access program at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival."

"Toby Dammit has always been a curiosity amongst Federico Fellini's already curious ouerve," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine.

Also, Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha is "a zany picaresque narrated on-camera by the 75-year-old [Melvin] van Peebles. As a storyteller, van Peebles seemingly invites the entire audience upon his colossal knee to hear the story of grandpa's life (though not necessarily his life) - from his childhood in Chicago to his first visit to New York City and around the world several times over - with all the juicy bits mom and dad wouldn't want you to hear told with extra gusto."

And S James Snyder talks with Harmony Korine about Mister Lonely.

Earlier: "The run-up to Tribeca."

Updates: IndieWIRE interviews An Omar Broadway Film co-director Douglas Tirola.

"[O]ver the last half-dozen years, as Tribeca grew into a glitzy stopover on the film festival circuit that includes Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Toronto and it's uptown neighbor, the New York Film Festival, the event has come to seem too small and too big at once, a perpetual kid," writes the New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson, who talks with the producers and programmers about where the festival's been, is and will be.

The Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik and Gregg Goldstein pick out a few highlights.

Brandon Harris talks with Waiting for Hockney director Julie Checkoway for Filmmaker. More from Stephen Saito for the IFC.

"After Film Geek, I made a mental note to follow what the filmmakers do next," writes Noah Forrest, introducing two interviews at Movie City News. "The director, James Westby, and the star, Melik Malkasian, have teamed up once again for a film called The Auteur which is playing at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. This is another movie about movies, but in this case it follows the 'world's greatest living porn director' named Arturo Domingo."

Jürgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky pick their top ten.

Another interview for Filmmaker from Brandon Harris: The Wackness director Jonathan Levine.

"Baghdad High combines the video diaries of four Iraqi teen boys during their 2006-07 senior year in the violence-fraught capital." Bill Weber in Slant.

VF Daily has lots of pix from the opening night gala.

Variety's got a special section going.

Brandon Harris, at it again, this time with Yonkers Joe director Robert Celestino.

More from VF Daily: parties!

Updates, 4/24: In the New York Times, David Carr talks with Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, about his new film, The Objective, "a military-horror-thriller-buddy movie set in Afghanistan that suggests that Osama bin Laden is not the only seemingly supernatural force haunting the mountains there."

"Tribeca's honchos have embarked on an extended quest to join Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Toronto at the top rank of destination festivals," notes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "I don't know about that, frankly. I don't know whether it's a goal worth pursuing and I don't know whether it's ever going to happen. But here's the good news: Tribeca has mellowed out, at least a little, in 2008." And he lists his picks.

Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks cover the opening at indieWIRE; also, interviews with Kief Davidson (Kassim the Dream) and Michael Christofersen (Milosevic on Trial).

The IFC opens its special section.

"[B]y blending obscure titles with the work of proven talent, Tribeca provides a resolutely solid collage of the film community's modern state," argues Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

"I can't really tell you about all the great movies, due to Tribeca's embargo on reviews of all world premieres before the films screen publicly for the first time," writes Michael Lerman at the SpoutBlog. "So, here we are now with nothing to cover but the program itself (and the embargo, of course). And instead of reviewing the quality of the films in the midnight program, I'm just gonna review the section as its own entity."

Cinematical's Erik Davis picks seven films he's looking forward to.

Aaron Dobbs: "I want to share with you a really special program that we're introducing this year at Tribeca - two actually that are a bit similar called Conversations in Cinema and Behind the Screens."

"Skeptics may continue to see the zanier surfaces of My Winnipeg as a sort of whimsy with an attitude, given its juxtapositions of rear projection and gauzy black and white with unhinged sight gags, nudity, and Canadian pop songs like 'Moody Manitoba Morning,'" writes Bill Weber in Slant. "But it has the feel of a personal accommodation, possibly one the real-life Guy Maddin has already made, with ambivalence and the way the march of time can seem married to the ascendancy of mediocrity."

VF Daily's recommendations for 4/24.

More indieWIRE interviews: Paul H-O and Tom Donahue (Guest of Cindy Sherman) and Gini Reticker (Pray the Devil Back to Hell).

Brandon Harris, Filmmaker: Justin Meeks (The Wild Man of the Navidad).

Via Shawn Levy, John Del Signore Gothamist interview with Bill Plympton (Idiots and Angels).

"Fermat's Room is sort of Saw for arithmetic dorks," writes the IFC's Matt Singer.

"It's a thrill to be able to see some of the titles in Tribeca's lineup, but I do think that, as always, some institutional accountability is in order before we delve into the individual movies themselves," begins Howard Feinstein at indieWIRE:

What keeps Tribeca from being merely a magnet for future productions and a random hodgepodge of films, some of which are connected to the founding fathers and mother professionally, are some of the programmers, who, in spite of the pablum that takes up a majority of the available slots, find some fabulous works, the kind of art that causes you to exit the cinema in a different state of mind than you were in upon entering....

These programmers are the people whose contributions and taste keep "festivalness" in the mix of this overproduced, Howard Rubensteinesque, well, vanity production. Spin is as cultivated and valorized as it is at Hillary headquarters, and some journalists are complicit in its transmission. (Just read last Friday's New York Times piece on the event for a, um, blow-by-blow.) No wonder so many of the small, low-budget Amerindie selections end up being represented by celebrity PR agencies like 42 West. Ethical boundaries are blurred. I was horrified to see the entry for one of Tribeca's films in the festival catalog signed by one of the selectors who is listed on the print as executive producer. Fine if it were merely a synopsis, but "a visually saturated and incendiary film" is a critical evaluation and just plain inappropriate. I do not think that would fly at the Film Society, Moma, BAM, or AMMI.

Updates, 4/26: "Tribeca has announced the winners of the All Access Creative Promise Awards, their program to bring together filmmakers with the industry." Michael Jones has the list. Also: "Check out our dynamic Tribeca schedule and rate the films - even if you've seen them before! Tell people what's good, what ain't good and why."

At Slant, Bill Weber on Baghead: "This second feature by the Duplass brothers, with co-writer/lead actor Jay from The Puffy Chair now sharing directing credit with Mark, soon becomes a kind of mumblecorish spin on The Blair Witch Project... As a hybrid, it's destined to disappoint horror fiends who take its predator-in-the-woods moves at face value, but it delivers on its premise that the shameless scheming of a friend can be a scarier phenomenon than a boogeyman with a knife." But a "lackadaisical focus eventually proves debilitating," argues Nick Schager, "with the end result of its myriad intentions – character study, relationship drama, scary movie, meta-scary movie – being that Baghead spreads itself thin to the point of flimsiness."

Back to Bill Weber, who's with Profit motive and the whispering wind right up until its "concluding misstep... Far less successful at going in one era and out the other is Hidden in Plain Sight, a quasi-diaristic attempt by New Yorker Mark Street to glean commonalities of life and distant history in his travels to Santiago, Dakar, Hanoi, and Marseille."

"Who better to sympathize with during the lonely alienation common to adolescence than the equally forlorn existence of a teenage vampire?" Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on Let the Right One In.

Phil Nugent at ScreenGrab on Savage Grace, The Secret of the Grain, Simple Things, Lou Reed's Berlin, Seven Days Sunday, War, Inc, Waiting for Hockney and Somers Town.

S James Snyder's latest in the New York Sun covers An Omar Broadway Film, Theater of War and The Zen of Bobby V. Also, Bruce Bennett's "12-film sampling culled from among Tribeca's nearly 80 short offerings."

At Cinematical: Erik Davis on Trucker and Bart Got a Room ("easily my personal favorite so far"); and Scott Weinberg on The Wild Man of the Navidad and The Objective.

At the SpoutBlog: Karina Longworth on The Wackness.

"Playing is composed entirely of interviews conducted on a bare stage, monologues of women's stories in tall type, of heartbreak, of faith, of children lost or estranged, of departed lovers, of missed parents and their stand-ins," writes Alison Willmore. "[Eduardo] Coutinho's twist is that half of the women we see aren't the owners of the stories they tell. They're actresses interpreting the accounts, some of whom, like Central Station's Marília Pêra, might be recognizable to audiences here."

Steve Erickson's overview in Gay City News: Lou Reed's Berlin, Baghdad High, Katyn and Man on Wire.

At Zoom In Online: Jim Rohner on Bigger, Stronger, Faster and Man on Wire.

For his own blog this time, Brandon Harris talks with Tom Kalin (Savage Grace. Then, for Filmmaker, Ivan O'Mahoney (Baghdad High).

More indieWIRE interviews: Huseyin Karabey (My Marlon and Brando), Dan Castle (Newcastle), Alfonso Pineda-Ulloa (Love, Pain & Vice Versa) and Mohamed Al-Daradji (War, Love, God & Madness).

Cinematical's Erik Davis talks with Bart Got a Room director Brian Hecker.

"Lana Veenker, the Portland casting director, reports in from New York City, where she attended last night's world premiere of James Westby's latest comedy, The Auteur."

Updates, 27: For the IFC, Stephen Saito talks with the legendary Robert Drew, now 84, about A President to Remember: In the Company of John F Kennedy - and about the current campaign: "From my standpoint, politics now are impossible to cover. That is, the network nightly news or CNN are about as good as you can get because none of the candidates have the confidence that Kennedy had to make their own decisions and let things happen. Everything is planned and plotted, and for somebody who wants to make candid films about what's really happening, that's impossible. You've got people looking over your shoulder when you shoot, people looking over your shoulder when you edit, and I would rather bow out than jump into it."

Michael Jones notes that Cindy Sherman has publicly and unequivocally disavowed Guest of Cindy Sherman.

"After her debut Demi-tarif, and even after the first 30 minutes of her second feature Charly, it wasn't clear to me that Isild Le Besco was going to find a way to integrate the sensual immediacy of her film style into a larger structure," writes Dan Sallitt. "But I think everything is going to be all right with her."

In the NYT, Anthony Ramirez reports on Tribeca Film Fellows: "The fellowship program, which began in 2004, is intended to start young people on careers in film through mentorships with filmmakers, workshops, panel discussions and the filming of a collaborative documentary titled CityScapes."

"Clocking in at a brisk 37 minutes, Toby Dammit, Fellini’s contribution to the 1968 omnibus film Spirits of the Dead, is a minor epic and a major source of cult and critical affection," writes Simon Abrams at Twitch.

Peter Knegt's not only enjoyed Squeezebox! but also the party afterwards "with extreme debauchery rampant and a slew of performers, including Mistress Formika, Justin Bond, John Cameron Mitchell, Karen Black and Debbie Harry. It was the most worth-it hangover I ever had."

While The Auteur "definitely sags just a bit in the middle section," notes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical, "it's really, really funny."

A "punchline with a sprinkling of gore do not a midnight movie classic make." Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab on The Objective.

"James Mottern's Trucker is a throwback, the kind of low-budget, low-impact drama about grubby, ordinary people that used to be as plentiful at film festivals as fleas on a sheepdog in summertime," writes Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab.

For Scott Weinberg, Eden is "one of the most honest, touching, and quietly insightful "people stories" I've seen in quite some time."

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez, Brian Brooks and Peter Knegt post another big roundup.

For Chelsea Now, Rania Richardson talks with Christina Clausen about making The Universe of Keith Haring.

"The eye-opening documentary Lioness, directed by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers, deals with one of the least-covered aspects of the Iraq war: the role of American women in combat." Phil Nugent, ScreenGrab.

"Savage Grace is only special for [Julianne] Moore's delicious performance, though this great actress does not settle for facile vamping, conveying a chilling combativeness and tragic sense of emotional resignation with nearly every gesture, whether she is exhaling a sinister plume of cigarette smoke or chomping on an olive, bringing glints of life to [director Tom] Kalin's comatose artistry," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

"Killer Movie is a well-acted, enjoyable popcorn movie," writes Joel Keller at Cinematical. "But its flaws sink it to the level of 'wait until it's on DVD.'"

Updates, 4/29: Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on Bill Plympton's Idiots and Angels: "[W]hile the action in conception treads ground that is uninspired, often unfunny, and sometimes awfully limited in generosity, Plympton's execution and imagination of the script is always exciting to behold."

More from Eric Kohn at Stream, where he also reviews Bart Got a Room, The Objective and Sita Sings the Blues (site), which "might be one of the most startlingly original feature-length explorations of familial discordance since Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation."

"I saw six films at Tribeca this weekend, and five of them were completely blown off the map by Somers Town, Shane Meadows's practically perfect follow-up to his 2007 triumph, This is England," announces Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

And Alison Willmore finds it "a scruffy and stupendously warm story of life in an unpretty part of the city with no lessons to teach or morals to impart."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir has longish takes on Man on Wire, Redbelt and Theater of War.

In the first entry in his "Critic's Notebook" for Premiere, Aaron Hillis recommends Profit motive and the whispering wind and The Secret of the Grain.

Howard Feinstein's second entry in his "Critics' Notebook" for indieWIRE focuses on docs. Also, Peter Knegt profiles Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg).

At Slant: Nick Schager on Before the Rains and The Wackness.

In the New York Sun, S James Snyder presents "a survey of 10 not-to-be-missed events scheduled for this week" and an overview of films made in and about New York City.

Fresh podcast at the IFC: Matt Singer and Alison Willmore. Also, Matt on Bigger, Stronger, Faster and Stephen Saito talks with Dori Berinstein about Gotta Dance.

At Cinematical:

• Scott Weinberg on 57,000 Kilometers Between Us, Terra, Dying Breed and Let the Right One In.

• Erik Davis on The Wackness.

• Joel Keller on War Inc. More on that one from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, where she declares it "a debacle," and from Lou Lumenick.

Jürgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky offer a quick roundup.

At ScreenGrab: Phil Nugent on Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, The Auteur and Sita Sings the Blues.

At Zoom In Online: Jim Rohner on The Wild Man of the Navidad and An Omar Broadway Film.

The Film Panel Notetaker attended a presentation of Lake City, where Sissy Spacek was on hand to discuss her latest.

More interviews from Brandon Harris at Filmmaker: Declan Recks (Eden and Paula Gaitan (Days in Sintra).

For New York, Bilge Ebiri talks with Bobby Valentine about The Zen of Bobby V.

More on Elite Squad: Phil Nugent (ScreenGrab) and Scott Weinberg (Cinematical).

More on Idiots and Angels: Jim Rohner at Zoom In Online.

Phil Nugent, ScreenGrab: Baghead.

IndieWIRE interviews Baghdad High co-directors Ivan O'Mahoney and Laura Winter.

Cannes. Lineup.

From Screen Daily this year, the Cannes lineup for 2008:

Competition:

• Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Three Monkeys.
• Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Le Silence De Lorna.
• Arnaud Desplechin: A Christmas Story.
• Clint Eastwood: Changeling.
• Atom Egoyan: Adoration.
• Ari Folman: Waltz With Bashir.
• Philippe Garrel: La Frontière de l'aube.
• Matteo Garrone: Gomorra.

Updated through 4/29.

• Charlie Kaufman: Synecdoche, New York.
• Eric Khoo: My Magic.
• Lucrecia Martel: La Mujer Sin Cabeza.
• Brillante Mendoza: Serbis.
• Kornél Mundruczó: Delta.
• Walter Salles: Linha De Passe.
• Paolo Sorrentino: Il Divo.
• Pablo Trapero: Leonera.
• Wim Wenders: The Palermo Shooting.
• Jia Zhangke: 24 City.
• Steven Soderbergh: Che (comprised of Guerrilla and The Argentine).

Out of Competition:

• Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
• Mark Osborne and John Stevenson: Kung Fu Panda.
• Ji-Woon Kim: The Good, The Bad, The Weird.
• Woody Allen: Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Special screenings:

• Marina Zenovich: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.
• Wong Kar-wai: Ashes of Time Redux.
• Daniel Leconte: C'Est Dur D'être Aimé Par Des Cons.
• Marco Tullio Giordana: Sangue pazzo.
• Terence Davies: Of Time and the City.

Midnight Screenings:

• Emir Kusturica: Maradona.
• Jennifer Lynch: Surveillance.
• Hong-Jin Na: The Chaser.

Special Jury President's Screening:

• Alison Thompson: The Third Wave.

Main Jury:

• Sean Penn, president.
• Sergio Castellitto.
• Natalie Portman.
• Alfonso Cuaron.
• Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
• Alexandra Maria Lara.
• Rachid Bouchareb.

And Barry Levinson's What Just Happened? will close the festival, which runs May 14 through 25.

Updates: The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw offers first impressions of the lineup.

Via Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa, the lineup for Un Certain Regard:

• Pierre Schöller: Versailles.
• Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire: Johnny Mad Dog.
• Raymond Depardon: La Vie moderne.
• Thomas Clay: Soi Cowboy.
• Andreas Dresen: Wolke 9.
• Bent Hamer: O'Horten.
• Rubin Ostlund: De Ofrivilliga.
• Bong Joon-ho, Michel Gondry and Leos Carax: Tokyo!
• Sergey Dvortsevoy: Tulpan.
• Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: I Want to See.
• Annemarie Jacir: Le sel de la mer.
• Amat Escalante: Los Bastardos.
• Matheus Nachtergaele: A festa da menina morta.
• Antonio Campos: Afterschool.
• Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Tokyo Sonata.
• Chung Mong-Hong: Ting Che.
• Liu Fendou: Yi ban Haishui, Yi ban huoyan.
• Kelly Reichardt: Wendy and Lucy.
• James Toback: Tyson.

How is that Che's in the lineup after so many reported it wouldn't be? "Some conspiracy theorists might not be wrong in smelling a hand behind the bait and switch," writes Michael Jones. Karina Longworth looks into it at the SpoutBlog.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir looks into a slew of titles that leap out at him.

Glenn Kenny's getting fired up, ready to go.

Nathaniel R pores over the lineup.

Updates, 4/24: "After its strong Latino flavor last year, Cannes sidebar Critics' Week largely focuses on European pics for its 47th edition," report John Hopewell and David Hayhurst for Variety, where they've got that lineup.

Once again, Variety's John Hopewell: "Vet Pole auteur Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback movie, Four Nights With Anna, will world preem as the opening film of the Cannes Film Festival's 40th Directors' Fortnight.... Directors' Fortnight's full program will be announced Friday. Speculation is running rife in Paris about which films will make the cut, given that the Directors' Fortnight will be the last Cannes section to be announced this year... There's a question mark over a clutch of films that were being talked up for Official Selection but as yet have to find a berth at the festival."

"Italy's robust presence at the upcoming 61st Cannes Film Festival was front page news Thursday in the country's top dailies, which are hailing the three Italian titles unspooling in the Official Selection as a sign of the local industry's new vitality." Nick Vivarelli reports in, yes, Variety.

Paul Clark at ScreenGrab: "Meet the Jury!"

Updates, 4/25: John Hopewell and David Hayhurst have the Directors' Fortnight lineup in Variety: "Twelve of the 22 films are either French pics or co-productions."

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell talks with Atom Egoyan: "His new drama Adoration, the sole Canadian contender for this year's Palme d'Or, is set in a Toronto high school. And for once, the city won't be pretending to be somewhere else." Via Movie City News.

Updates, 4/27: "During much of the Gilles Jacob era of Cannes, regions such as Latin America and Southeast Asia were usually ignored," writes Robert Koehler at filmjourney.org. "Now, it's Thierry Fremaux's Cannes - the 2008 edition will be his first in which he has full rein over all aspects of the program - and, as we've seen during recent Cannes festivals, programming seeks to reflect the reality that filmmaking is exploding on every continent." Still, "It may be Thierry's Cannes, but it's Olivier [Pere]'s Quinzaine," and "Olivier's Quinzaine, celebrating its 40th year as the Croisette upstart, looks to be a whole lot more interesting than Gilles' Cannes. Just look at some of the filmmakers in the roster, and you're looking at a window on the future of cinema: [Lisandro] Alonso and his Thierry del Fuego-set Liverpool, Albert Serra and his Three Wise Men odyssey El Cant dels ocells, Claire Simon's Les Bureaux de Dieu, Raya Martin and his five-hour Now Showing and the best Romanian you haven't heard of - Radu (The Paper Will Be Blue) Muntean and Boogie." As for Alonso, Serra and Martin, "Few younger filmmakers matter more than these three, and any program that contains all of them unveiling major new work is an event of the highest magnitude." He then sorts through the competition.

"There are six British films in Cannes this year," notes Agnès Poirier at the Guardian. "Yet, instead of making champagne corks fly, grumpy observers have been whining and sneering."

Anne Thompson's got a still from Synecdoche, New York and notes that Charlie Kaufman "plays the game of being very shy and press-averse, but he's actually just as canny about getting attention paid to him as most successful people on Hollywood."

Updates, 4/29: "The Cannes Film Festival has officially announced that Fernando Meirelles's Blindness (Miramax, 9.12) will open the festival," and Jeffrey Wells has news of other films that have been added to the slate as well: Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs and James Gray's Two Lovers in the competition lineup; Steve McQueen's Hunger will open Un Certain Regard; and Jeanne Balibar and Marjane Satrapi have joined the jury.

Andrew O'Hehir comments on the additions, including the confirmation that Barry Levinson's What Just Happened? will indeed close the festival.

"Being a subjective, not entirely well-informed, and hopefully not pre-judging bunch of observations on the pictures in competition at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival, May 14-25..." Glenn Kenny.

Stuff and Dough and more Romanians.

"[Cristi] Puiu's second feature, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, winner of the Prix un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2005, introduced many European and American critics to a new kind of tough, socially critical realist cinema blossoming in Romania," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Stuff and Dough, a 2002 film belatedly crossing the ocean in the wake of Lazarescu, is more modest in scope but no less impressive in its self-confidence, its candor and its stringent, undogmatic contemporary relevance."

Updated through 4/26.

"Where Lazarescu was old and long, Stuff and Dough is young and short," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "But both films are travelogues of a sort - one confined to the back of an ambulance, the other to a cargo van - in which you can sense Puiu, who moved to Switzerland shortly after the 1989 revolution and returned to Romania in the late 1990s, is sorting out his relationship to a country he doesn't fully recognize, while that country does the same."

"The film is all rhythm, with Puiu's camera jumping to and from anxious faces but sometimes landing on empty space," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Stuff and Dough suggests that time, like procedure, is of the essence in Romania, though it lacks Lazarescu's gravitas and poignancy."

"Like Jeff Nichols's excellent Shotgun Stories, a recent American film that told a revenge story without stooping to catharsis, Stuff and Dough recasts a road movie game of cat-and-mouse as a zero-affect shrug-a-thon," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "By the standards of Steven Spielberg's Duel, George Miller's Mad Max and other pumped-up, fleshed-out films of a similar circumstantial trajectory, Stuff and Dough is uneventful and anticlimactic to the extreme. That doesn't make the film's journey any less worthwhile, nor its ultimate lesson - that when traveling the economic frontiers of crime, there is no such thing as easy money or limited partnership - any less trenchant."

At Film Forum through May 6.

Meanwhile, Shining Through a Long, Dark Night: Romanian Cinema, Then and Now, the series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, carries on through Sunday and aquarello's posted half a dozen sharp and concise reviews so far.

Update: "[I]f this were an American film, it would most likely play out as a stoner-comedy variation on The Wages of Fear," writes Leo Goldsmith in Reverse Shot of Stuff and Dough. "But what keeps it refreshing and even, in its own way, gripping is that it resists glib characterizations, just as it avoids the conventional genre satisfactions of high-speed car-chases and deals gone wrong. As in Lazarescu, Puiu's tone isn't quite blackly comic - it doesn't simply cut its characters adrift and watch from a condescending remove as they scramble towards their fate."

Update, 4/26: "Stuff and Dough sometimes briefly turns into a slow-speed chase movie - think Bullitt filmed with stick-shift vans on Romanian back roads," writes Sam Adams at the AV Club. "But for the most part, the movie is as adrift as its post-teen characters, slogging through the muck of post-Communist Europe with eyes cast firmly downward.... There's no question of the mood Puiu means to capture, the sullen anomie of a rootless generation, but too often, he's just spinning his wheels."

Shorts, 4/22.

"Surprise winner The Girl by the Lake swept the David di Donatello awards, taking home 10 statuettes, including Best Film, Best Director and Best New Director for Andrea Molaioli (40), who beat out his two teachers, Nanni Moretti and Carlo Mazzacurati, for whom he previous worked as AD." Camillo de Marco reports for Cineuropa.

André Téchiné will soon begin shooting La fille du RER (The Girl on the Train) with Catherine Deneuve and Émilie Dequenne, reports Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net, where he's got news of other projects in the works as well.

"Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee is returning to the gay genre with a movie revolving around the Woodstock music festival." According to the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein, Taking Woodstock will be based on Elliot Tiber's Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life.

At Treehugger (happy Earth Day, by the way), Jeremy Elton Jacquot passes along word that Al Gore will indeed be making a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.

Slate has a transcript of Edward Norton's chat with Washington Post readers about the National Geographic TV series Strange Days on Planet Earth.

AICN is running a very, very early review - by one Gordon Shumway - of Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon.

Lou Lumenick passes along news that Elvis Mitchell has landed a regular show at TCM

Anne Powers profiles soldier turned antiwar activist Tomas Young, subject of Body of War.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Shaw talks with Doug Benson about Super High Me. Related online viewing: Mark Bell talks with Benson and director Michael Blieden.

"If Charlie Wilson's War (brand-new on DVD) is an entertaining mishmash, oddly less than the sum of its remarkable parts, the story it has to tell is one of the most fascinating, improbable and haunting yarns in recent world history." For Salon, Andrew O'Hehir talks with the real Charlie Wilson - not just about what went down in the 80s but also about what we should be doing in Afghanistan now.

"In 1984, the British Conservative government banned scores of horror films under the Video Recordings Act in response to a media orchestrated moral panic. They became known as Video Nasties. Good sense was gradually restored, and since the mid 1990s most of these films have become available again. There are 73 Video Nasties in all, and I aim to watch them all." Via Steve Bryant, Ben explains the Video Nasty Project.

Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook:

Jacques Rozier is a name few American fans of the French New Wave will recall, but the writers - and by then, filmmakers - of the Cahiers du cinema who literally defined the New Wave jumped all over Rozier's feature debut, the quite hard to see Adieu Phillipine (1962). Between that and Du côté d'Orouët (1973), the only two features of the director I've been able to see (the excellent 1964 documentary short on Brigitte Bardot, Paparazzi, is available on Criterion's DVD of Contempt), Rozier carves perhaps the most remarkable niche of all: a director jumping into the New Wave as if it was a natural means of expression. Featuring none of the zany energy, genre-hopping, American-film referencing, and formal assuredness of the more well-known members of the movement, Rozier in these two features embraces verité influences and a focus on young lives, culture, and sensibility to create veritable fictive documentaries on French urban youth.

In the Threepenny Review, Frederick Wiseman describes, step by step, his approach to editing a film: "The editing is finally finished when I go through the film and try to explain to myself why each shot and sequence is in the film. I have to express in words both my rational and non-rational decisions. Since I like talking to myself, this is the last pleasure of the editing process." Via Alison Willmore, who also Greil Marcus's piece in the new issue: "[W]e all have memories of things we did not experience: cultural memories that have taken up residence in our minds, built houses, filled them with furniture and appliances, and commanded that we live in them. These sorts of memories come from all sources, but especially from movies - and so, before I come back to the blank memory I started with, I'm going to talk about David Lynch's Blue Velvet."

"Films labeled melodrama are too often maligned, but have a fine pedigree in the American cinema." The Siren on what we talk about when we talk about melodrama.

"Hollywood has convinced itself, against considerable evidence, that audiences insist on happy endings," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "How, then, to account for two of the most popular movies ever: Titanic and Gone With the Wind, and, of course, the Godfather movies? Frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn if the ending is happy or sad, as long as it's right."

"Sometimes I think Anne Tyler is the greatest unacknowledged influence on the last two decades of American indie cinema - or at least that subset of indie cinema that tends to dominate Sundance. I'm thinking of those small-scale character comedy-dramas in which a repressed main character - sad, lonely, getting older, seemingly set in their ways - learns to embrace life again thanks to a chance encounter with a dynamic, 'exotic' new friend or lover." Paul Matwychuk finds a way into The Visitor, "Tom McCarthy's beautifully executed followup to his 2003 debut The Station Agent."

"There aren't that many pockets in our economy where the possibilities for pluralistic expression and communication are relatively unaffected by monetary considerations, but the blogosphere is one of them," writes Girish. "I find great promise in this flowering of generalism and its empowerment of non-professionals." And he asks: "Why do you blog?" Goodness, some of these comments that follow are mini-essays themselves.

FilmInFocus's latest "Behind the Blog" interview: Matt Zoller Seitz.

New blog on the block: August Ragone's The Good, the Bad, and Godzilla. Via Kimberly Lindbergs.

Welcome relaunch: Granta.

In the New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon talks with Isabella Rossellini: "It's not so hard to watch Casablanca, because I wasn't even born. But it's very difficult to see Autumn Sonata because that is the mother that I remember."

And at the site: "Well, there's life in that old dog yet," blogs Stanley Fish. "My editor thought that a column on French theory would elicit a small number of responses from readers interested in continental philosophy. More than 600 comments later, it is clear that terms like deconstruction and postmodernism still have the capacity to produce excitement and outrage."

Patrick Goldstein on Al Pacino and Robert De Niro: "The two icons of 70s New Hollywood, heroes to a generation of young actors and filmmakers, have become parodies of themselves, making payday movies and turning in performances that are hollow echoes of the electrically charged work they did in such films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King gets a quick chat with Shotgun Stories director Jeff Nichols.

Mark Mordue talks with Elmore Leonard for Stop Smiling.

"Alexander Payne's Election (based on the novel by Tom Perrotta) may, in fact, work even better now than it did when first released a few years ago," argues James Rocchi.

David Poland previews Hollywood's summer.

Michael Swaim for Cracked: "How To Make Your Own Judd Apatow Movie."

From Aaron Hillis in Spin: "Sound and Vision: 2008's Rock Movie Roundup."

Michael Guillén talks with Carl Martin of the Film on Film Foundation. From the mission statement: "We envision a vital film culture in which repertory screenings figure prominently on the cinematic landscape, and film - actual film - is not just an object of nostalgia but a living medium of expression."

Online gaze. At Shorpy, "Double Feature: 1939."

Online listening tip #1. The IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore present an "Indie Summer Movie Preview."

Online listening tip #2. "Harlan Ellison & Robin Williams Discuss LRH."

Online listening tip #3. Who would Hollywood cast as the three remaining presidential contenders? David Greene looks into it for NPR.

Online viewing tip #1. Via Fimoculous, "Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett."

Online viewing tip #2. La Constellation Jodorowsky. Thanks, Jerry!

Synoptique. 11.

"After a four year hiatus, Synoptique, a film journal written and published by graduate Film Studies students at Concordia University in Montreal, is back!" announces editor Amanda D'Aoust. Actually, she announced it over a month ago, but I'm just catching up with the new issue now.

Besides two pieces in French, you find, in English, Graeme Langdon on "Conceptions of Childhood in the American Avant-garde," Zoë Heyn-Jones on "how gender, genre and politics play out in Sally Potter's Orlando," Kate Rennebohm's "affective experience while watching David Lynch's Inland Empire" and Kina de Grasse's note on the design for this issue and on how she collaborated with artists in the deviantART community to create it.

If it's been a while, you might want to revisit the Synoptique Style Gallery and/or the archives.

DVDs, 4/22.

For James Wolcott, Daisy Kenyon "is a fascinating chamber drama shot in deep-volumed noirish black and white (every room looks like a cove), with dialogue that tears through sentimentality with sharp little teeth and a clutch of tough, wary, ultra-observant performances by Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews (even more prickly with postwar dissatisfaction than in The Best Years of Our Lives), and a deceptively easy-going Henry Fonda.... If you haven't seen Daisy Kenyon (and you probably haven't, being so buried under the backlog of all your Wire and Battlestar Galactica DVDs), you really must give it a dark whirl."

"As with pre-codes, a lot of smaller musicals along the lines of Born to Dance had to wait until the emergence of TCM before fans could really enjoy them again," writes John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows. "DVD release has done the rest. Warner's Classic Musicals From The Dream Factory series has been the fulfillment of dreams for fans who've waited lifetimes to see these favorites truly showcased as they deserve."

"Long before she was an ambassador in real life (to Ghana in 1974 and Czechoslovakia in 1989), [Shirley Temple] seemed, to Depression-era audiences, like an emissary from another world, one where ships were made of candy and there were no bread lines in sight." In the New York Times, Dave Kehr reviews the America's Sweetheart Collection, Volume 6.

Bill Hare, author of Hitchcock and the Methods of Suspense, on the Noir of the Week: "Strangers on a Train: Hitchcock's Rich Imagery Reigning Supreme."

"A social problem film par excellence, [Gentleman's Agreement] represents the directions of the postwar prestige film, particularly the house style of 20th-Fox," writes Chris Cagle.

The Observer's Philip French revisits the highlights of Anna Magnani's oeuvre.

"Though it may seem unfair at first, let's pick up Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs heft it in our grips for a moment, and then use it to beat this thing called 'mumblecore' to a pulp." And Michael Atkinson proceeds to go right at it for the IFC. Then: "[F]lowers do arise out of the sludge, and in Hannah Takes the Stairs, it's the title character, as conceived by Swanberg's ensemble and defined by Greta Gerwig's performance." Meanwhile, as Scott Macaulay notes at Filmmaker, the cover's drawn quite a bit of commentary.

"It's not often a film should be praised for its lack of originality, but The Orphanage is a satisfying horror movie in large part because it is also a veritable compendium of horror-movie conventions," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times. "[F]irst-time director Juan Antonio Bayona borrows heavily - and smartly - from the familiar repository of shock tactics and psychological anxieties that have sustained the genre for decades. A primary influence, no surprise, is his producer, Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, whose taste for melancholic ghost stories is readily apparent here."

A dissenting voice: Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

"In The Castle, surely the least well-known of [Michael] Haneke's early films, and one made for television to boot, we have what seems to me far and away the best of his Austrian films." Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

For Stream, Austin Bunn talks with Brent Hoff, creator of Wolphin, McSweeney's DVD magazine.

"The best news about the new Cloverfield DVD is that you can pause it whenever you want in case - ya know - halfway through you feel a little motion sickness," writes Erik Davis. "It's been touted as 'The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla' or 'a monster movie for the You Tube generation,' but when it was all said and done Cloverfield turned out to be an original, captivating piece of filmmaking that took risks where other films of the genre would've played it safe." Also at Cinematical: Monika Bartyzel on Charlie Wilson's War and Matt Bradshaw on Women's Prison Massacre.

In the New York Sun, Gary Giddins tells the story behind an upcoming release of Disney's Latin America-themed wartime animated musicals.

DVD roundups: The AV Club, Sean Axmaker (MSN), Paul Clark (ScreenGrab), DVD Talk, Bryant Frazer, Harry Knowles (AICN), Peter Martin (Cinematical), Noel Murray and Dennis Lim (Los Angeles Times) and Slant.

And as always, keep an eye on the Guru.

Baby Mama.

"Baby Mama may be Tina Fey's first starring big-screen role, but what it desperately needs more of isn't Fey the smart, self-deprecating comedian but Fey the sharp, witty writer, as this snoozer from Michael McCullers (scribe of all three Austin Powers movies) is as pedestrian and middling as they come," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"Forget the title, the target audience, and the taglines: what fuels Baby Mama is not the eternal quest for motherhood, or the topical conflict between parenting and careers, but an old-fashioned scuffle over class," writes David Denby in the New Yorker.

Updated through 4/26.

"Baby Mama keeps the laughs coming, mainly from the horror that Kate and Angie [Amy Poehler] experience over the other's excesses, but also through amusingly eccentric supporting characters like Steve Martin as Kate's kajillionaire tree-hugger boss and Greg Kinnear's independent smoothie maker with a hatred for Jamba Juice," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "Even when the movie gets bogged down in plot - Angie fakes being pregnant, but then it turns out that she is, but the baby may actually be Carl's - the zingers keep coming and the characters maintain a sense of being both cartoony and realistic."

S James Snyder, writing in the New York Sun, finds the film "sweeter and smarter than many will be expecting... The obvious rapport shared by Ms Fey and Ms Poehler makes for a feel-good formula, but not a lazy one."

"It can be difficult to determine where we are currently in the whole can-women-be-funny? debate other than to say there have been a spate of essays on the topic," writes Paul Brownfield in a Los Angeles Times piece before segueing into his meeting with Fey and Poehler. "The Times' movie critic Carina Chocano recently noted how 'the girl' and 'the hot girl' have merged into one abject role for women in studio comedies. Last year, Vanity Fair published agent provocateur Christopher Hitchens's essay 'Why Women Aren't Funny,' though the April magazine featured an essay by New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley going the other way, highlighting the bumper crop of women writing as well as performing their comedy, mostly on TV."

And the comedy will open Tribeca tomorrow.

Updates, 4/23: Julia Wallace talks with Poehler for the Voice.

"Baby Mama is less about conception-mania - or the stage that invariably follows it, baby obsession - than it is a romantic comedy, a picture about two people who fall into a kind of love with one another only to fall out, ultimately finding a deeper, or at least more realistic, connection after they've reckoned with each other's flaw," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "But even if the picture is softer than it needs to be, it still resists devolving into something warm and squishy."

Update, 4/24: "Baby Mama is the most disappointing movie of the year so far - which, granted, isn't saying a lot in mid-April," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. It's "a politely bland retread of women's-movie clichés a generation old: the driven businesswoman who puts off motherhood till the last minute, then pursues it with type-A zeal; the guy who flees a first date when babies are mentioned; the down-to-earth potential boyfriend (Greg Kinnear) who, by his very existence, reminds the overly ambitious heroine of what really matters in life. Look, I have fond enough memories of Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard in Baby Boom, but that was more than 20 years ago. Have our ideas about working, parenting, and the formation of alternative families really changed so little since 1987?"

Updates, 4/26: "The film never comes fully to term, as it were: the visual style is sitcom functional, and even the zippiest jokes fall flat because of poor timing," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But, much like the prickly, talented Ms Fey, it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean."

The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday notes that the movie "ambles along with such low-key, easygoing humor that it's almost a shock to the system: Where are the hamburger phones, the rat-a-tat pop culture references, the porn? All have been left behind in the service of what is a far more observant, if uneven, comedy of 21st-century manners."

The Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano finds the film "much too sweet-natured to be cruel, and much too cheerful to be angry. It probably could have pushed a few more buttons, but Baby Mama aims to please and succeeds."

"When a member of Judd Apatow's extended comedy troupe pops up on screen, the audience claps and laughs out of sheer anticipation," notes Ryan Stewart in Premiere. "When a member of Lorne Michaels's does so, it's tumbleweeds, which is symptomatic of the larger problems at work in Baby Mama, an exhausting 90 minutes of SNL-centric mediocrity that gives one the nagging feeling that Tina Fey's inability to cut the cord is going to quickly start to cool interest in her upcoming projects.... Cut the cord, Tina. Cut the cord."

"Memo to smart, funny TV stars in smart, funny TV shows: When you take similar wares to the big screen and expect me to pay full ticket price to follow you there, I'd better laugh at least as hard as I did at home," writes Mike Russell. "Baby Mama, I'm sad to say, is just sporadically funny, bland, talent-wasting junk."

"It's an Odd Coupling that, while conventional in conception, is exceptionally executed by Fey and Poehler, firmly in their respective comedic comfort zones of wry vulnerability and barely restrained derangement," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "Though Baby Mama is being billed as a gal-friendly counterpart to the male-centric lens of the Apatow Industry, it doesn't try as hard or scratch as deep as the latter's better efforts, in ways both good and bad."

Richard Corliss in Time: "Oscar and Felix; Kate and Angie. I'm not making claims that Baby Mama transcends the format's routine progressions - opposites not only attract, they learn from each other - only that, within these conventions, the movie is smart, funny and beguiling."

"[T]he upshot, and upside, of Baby Mama is that Ms Poehler and Ms Fey should pair up for another movie that gives freer rein to their talents," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun.

"Baby Mama doesn't have a plot so much as a series of contrivances that play out completely as expected. It's not without laughs - Poehler and Fey, as ever, have strong chemistry, and there's a truly bizarre scene in which Martin offers Fey a strange 'reward' for a job well done - but there's a lot of arid space between them," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"The movie is what it is, but I must confess that for all the by-the-numbers plotting and utterly conventional turns of the plot, there’s a dynamic between stars Amy Poehler and Tina Fey that both lifts the comedy and grounds the characters in ways that made the film better than it should be," writes Sean Axmaker.

And finally for now, a moment of brilliance from C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark that I'm pointing to from this entry and from Harold and Kumar's.

Charges against Steve Kurtz dropped.

It was almost exactly four years ago that artist Steve Kurtz woke up to a relentless, how-bad-can-it-get nightmare. His wife, Hope, a fellow member of the Critical Art Ensemble, had died in her sleep. When Kurtz called 911, the ambulance crew noticed the materials CAE was working with in preparation for an exhibit protesting US food policies. They called Homeland Security, who promptly arrested Kurtz and confiscated, well, everything.

Via David Pescovitz at Boing Boing comes welcome news that US District Judge Richard Arcara has dropped the charges. The AP: "'Obviously this is a weight off his back, but he still had to suffer through this for four years,' said Kurtz's attorney, Paul Cambria. 'The last thing this guy is is a bioterrorist.'"

You may recall that Lynn Hershman Leeson made a film based on the case, Strange Culture (site), featuring Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote and Thomas Jay Ryan. It screened at Sundance in 07 before David D'Arcy caught it in Berlin.

Filmmaker. Spring 08.

There's a new Filmmaker out and about and what's online are primarily interviews; Jason Guerrasio, for example, meets Christopher Zalla: "Since winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the search for distribution has been a frustrating one that has included a change of the title to Sangre de Mi Sangre (Blood of My Blood) from its original Padre Nuestro (Our Father). And even though IFC will release the film in May, as of press time the company says it doesn't plan to make a formal announcement of the title change. This was partly the cause of Zalla's frustration when we met for breakfast in New York City last month to talk about the film and the ever-shrinking distribution path for indies (especially foreign-language ones)."

Lisa Y Garibay talks with Tom Kalin and screenwriter Howard A Rodman about Savage Grace, screening at Tribeca before opening in May.

With Mother of Tears slated for a June release, Travis Crawford introduces an interview with Dario Argento: "Asia Argento stars as a woman whom the fate of Rome rests on as a group of witches enters the city and causes massive carnage and related depravity. Suspiria screenwriter and actress Daria Nicolodi - Dario's ex-wife and Asia's mother - co-stars in perhaps the most violent film of the director's career and one that summons up the nightmare logic and disquieting decadence of his best work."

Peter Bowen talks with Errol Morris about Standard Operating Procedure.

Howard Feinstein tells the story behind The Visitor.

The international market's getting tighter for American independent films, reports Anthony Kaufman: "Whether it's the result of a worldwide economic dip, a slowdown in moviegoing, widespread piracy or the rise of homegrown product, US-based indie producers and sales agents can no longer count on sweet deals from European TV stations or automatic sales to countries, far and wide."

The gaming industry is finally opening up to indie developers, reports Heather Chaplin. And "with gaming poised to be the dominant form of entertainment of the 21st century, this is good news for all of us."

And Roberto Quezada-Dardon has the latest on the Red One, a high-resolution digital camera that more than a few filmmakers have fallen hard for. Steven Soderbergh, for example, is quoted as saying, "I feel I should call up film and say, 'I've met somebody.'"

More on Stalags.

David D'Arcy has a quick recommendation; and here's the April 9 entry.

You have today and tomorrow at Film Forum in New York to see Stalags, the Israeli documentary that explores a phenomenon of the early 1960s that was all over Israeli news kiosks at the time, but is little-known today - a genre of pulp-porn "memoirs," called "Stalags," in which female Nazi SS officers preyed with whips and other instruments of sadomasochistic torture on Allied prisoners of war in concentration camps, and pretty Jewish female prisoners were forced to provide sexual services for the Wehrmacht soldiers and other members of the Master Race who were trucked into the camps for just that purpose. In the horror of industrialized killing, was there also industrialized sex?

According to the doc by the Israeli filmmaker and journalist Ari Libsker, at least one generation of Israeli youth grew up thinking so.

Updated through 4/26.

The books were presented to the public as translations from English of the "real-life" accounts of pilots who were shot down and found themselves in the clutches of insatiable female Nazis. Men who were young back in the early 60s read excerpts mockingly and remember that the "Stalags" had a role to play in their own sexual initiation. Holocaust survivors deplore the exploitation genre.

It turned out that the novels were written under pseudonyms in Hebrew by Israelis, who adapted easily to the formulaic narratives and the purple prose. Men who wrote "Stalags" talk about the experience - there was a demand for the porn war stories in the austere Israel of that time, they say, and it was a way to make a shekel.

The genre got a boost from testimony at the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, a pivotal event when Israel took it upon herself to punish those responsible for crimes against Jews. Testimony before the court from an author of his own Auschwitz memoirs - Yehiel Feiner De-Nur, who wrote under the nom de plume, K-Tzetnik, or concentration camp prisoner - recalled sexual abuse in the camps, which fueled a new rash of "Stalags." K-Tzetnik's books were received by many at the time as a new benchmark of truth-telling about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Literary critics in the documentary raise doubts about the accuracy of K-Tzetnik's stories - whether he invented them or just exaggerated is still a matter of debate - but the Eichmann trial witness still stands accused of violating the memory of the Shoah. Israelis still read K-Tzetrnik's books and, as the documentary shows, details from his accounts of camp life are repeated by guides today to students who tour Auschwitz.

In fact, back in the early 60s, the publishers of "Stalags" such as I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch were prosecuted for disseminating anti-Semitic propaganda. Eventually the "Stalags" were overtaken by other trends and by real legal pornography. Who knows? Maybe all this exposure will get the virulent neo-Nazi net to exhume it. They're not averse to digging up Nazi bodies.

Libsker's seductive tale is nothing if not a glimpse at forgotten forbidden fruit, even if the "Stalags" phenomenon is barely a titillating footnote in Israeli pop culture. Bear in mind that it didn't take much for filmmakers from Luchino Visconti to Mel Brooks to find rich material in the sexual peccadilloes of the Nazis. [And let's not forget Lina Wertmüller - Ed.]

Few young Israelis knew about these books, although now they certainly do, and it's hard to identify any influence that they had on Israeli society, other than aiding young boys in finding pleasure in solitary sex. Yet there are gaps in Ari Libsker's story that keep you wondering how these books fit into the official or dominant Israeli mythologies that are still works in progress today. Let's hope that more information comes out of the door that Libsker opened to help unravel the strands of memory, history and myth.

Update, 4/26: On the Media.

More on Standard Operating Procedure.

"In Standard Operating Procedure, [Errol] Morris has hold of a monster subject, one in which politics and art bleed together," writes New York's David Edelstein. "Using his own standard operating procedure - fixed camera, slow-motion reenactments, a hypnotic score - the director circles in on two points: that the men and women demoted or convicted for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib were doing as they'd been ordered by higher-ups who remain unpunished; and that the photos obscure larger and more complicated truths. I'm not sure Morris clinches his case, but I'm not sure he wants to: His aim is to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of our perception."

Updated through 4/27.

"A documentarian like no other, Morris, since The Thin Blue Line, has combined head-on interviews, recreations of the testimony with anonymous actors, churning scores (usually supplied by Philip Glass, here Danny Elfman), and an epistemologist's curiosity about image, memory, and human behavior," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "Casting the audience into the groupthink of young, inexperienced soldiers whose depraved antics during the fall of 2003 provoked a global uproar only because they were photographed, Morris has made one of his finest inquiries into corruptibility and violence."

The film "is remarkably cool, allowing the horror of the hundreds of photographs and the explanations by some of the soldiers who took them to play across the viewer's psyche like waking nightmares," writes Christopher Dickey in Newsweek. "The book, written by Philip Gourevitch in collaboration with Morris, is, by contrast, incandescent with righteous anger. The full context for the photographs is even more disturbing than the images themselves. When the case is laid out, when you have met the characters and learned their stories and understood what they suffered as well as the suffering they inflicted, it is hard not to want to scream."

"Standard Operating Procedure is a twisted investigative documentary that purposely doesn't add up," writes Chris Wisniewski in indieWIRE. "But the power of the film rests not in Morris's ability to create a coherent idea of Abu Ghraib... but rather in his ability to render such a master narrative impossible."

Brian Sholis has an extensive quote from WJT Mitchell's piece on the film in Harper's. The gist: "The referent of a photograph, the real object or event 'captured' by it, is not the same as the meaning it my acquire as a cultural icon."

Morris, in John Anderson's piece for the New York Times: "It is a mistake to confuse the pictures at Abu Ghraib with the crimes at Abu Ghraib.... One of the incredibly deep ironies is that the photographs could serve as both an exposé and as a cover-up. That they would encourage people not to look any further and make them think they had seen everything. And that is very interesting."

Steve Dollar talks with Morris for the New York Sun.

Online listening tip. Morris is a guest on the Bob Edwards Show. Via Chuck Tryon.

Earlier: Items posted April 1 through 4.

Updates: Morris's "well-argued point is that the real culprits behind the crimes committed weren't the grunts doing the actual dirty work but the higher ups who encouraged and sanctioned such behavior," writes Nick Schager. "Yet given the filmmaker's subject matter, it's exasperating (if, given his past history, not overly surprising) to find him distastefully fetishizing the images via a series of recreations shot with plenty of lavish, self-conscious attention to visual beauty."

The Playlist (following an entry on Robert Downey Jr): "Another long-ass profile we read this weekend (around 17 pages online), was another warts-and-all GQ article on the great documentarian Errol Morris... Morris has gotten many people to admit many a self-incriminating story on film and we loved that he calls his technique, the 'shut-the-fuck-up school of interviewing.' It's called listening and something more interviewers should try."

"[T]he film's narrow focus is both its point and its weakness," writes Jürgen Fauth, who recalls a somewhat rowdy press conference in Berlin.

Peter Bowen talks with Morris for Filmmaker.

Updates, 4/22: Nick Schager talks with Morris for the IFC.

Howard Feinstein talks with Morris for indieWIRE.

Updates, 4/23: "A description of dogs attacking naked prisoners is supplemented with close-ups of slavering hounds. This obtrusive mannerism is not only superfluous but, for a movie that aspires to be a critique of representation, bizarrely self-defeating," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Why so frantic? Does Morris fear that the faces, voices, and photographs he's assembled are insufficiently compelling to hold an audience? A vivid description of Fallujah's nauseating stink doesn't require smell-o-vision to register. Is he, like his subjects, compelled to amuse?"

"[M]aybe the most problematic reenactment is the movie's restaging of already hard-won insights about the commission of horrible acts during wartime," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Morris acts, and promotes himself, like a pioneer, which he is, primarily, in successfully restoring Abu Ghraib to the cognoscenti's lips where Taxi to the Dark Side didn't."

"[A]t about the fifteen minute mark, I was thinking, 'Does he really need all this artfulness?' The answer is, finally, yes," argues Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

Updates, 4/24: "Political posturing is the real subject of Morris's newest film," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Scott Tobias talks with Morris for the AV Club.

Online listening tip. Ed Champion talks with Morris.

Updates, 4/26: "The very scale of Standard Operating Procedure - evident in its costly-looking production values, special effects and elaborately choreographed re-enactments - suggests that Mr Morris has grown weary of working in the margins to which documentary filmmakers are still too often relegated," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Standard Operating Procedure is a big, provocative and - it goes without saying - disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style." And an analysis of that style follows: how the interviewees are framed, the nature of the Q&As and, of course, those reenactments.

Then there's this: "Mr Morris said this week that some of the lower-ranking soldiers who were convicted of tormenting inmates at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were paid for their time, in which they recount events at the prison in detail and describe a wayward environment that led to the excesses," report Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario. "Word of the payments drew conflicting reactions among those in the world of film documentaries, where show business values have been known to collide with the more austere standards of good journalism."

"If I believed that there was any public appetite for a movie like Standard Operating Procedure, I might also believe that it would spark a public conversation about responsibility for the crimes and abuses committed in our name - some we know about and a great many more, one suspects, that we don't," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Intentionally or not, Morris' interviews with these confused, vacuous and morally rudderless people felt to me like a sweeping indictment of those of us who are their fellow citizens and who share the culture that produced them." And you can read, listen to or watch clips of his interview with Morris.

"The movie affirms Morris's evolution into a political documentarian," writes Elbert Ventura in the New Republic. "He has admitted as much, saying that SOP grew out of his 'horror at current American foreign policy and the feeling that I should be doing something rather than nothing.' Despite the nobility of his intentions, the turn toward the political marks a regression for the filmmaker. Forget the consensus: The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure (which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are Morris's two worst movies."

"Morris takes an artist's view of the Abu Ghraib photographs and their inhabitants," argues Teddy Blanks in the Design Observer. "His interest in photography has led him to a set of iconic images that exposed a nation to its own worst behavior, and at the same time provided a cover for those most implicit in it to duck behind. He subjects them to a full circumstantial and aesthetic investigation, and uses them as the backdrop for his riskiest and most topical film to date. He will thus continue to be chided for straying from the self-congratulatory stoicism that characterizes the dirge of Iraq documentaries that are released each year - all more purely 'documentary' than his. But with luck, Errol Morris will transfer some of his own uneasiness about photography and its many possible interpretations to his audience, and we will think twice when confronted by the future images, horrific and bold, of this American war."

"By the end of the feature-length frustration that is Standard Operating Procedure, the maverick documentarian Errol Morris reminds you of the oblivious, tunnel-vision eccentrics from his past films," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Where other filmmakers and writers have looked at the infamous photos of the Abu Ghraib scandal and sought to chronicle the relevant events and policies, Mr Morris ties himself into knots by questioning photographic truth and by embellishing the events with luxuriant re-enactments in this misguided and ill-defined endeavor.... In a way, by limiting his focus to his one-on-one interviews with the participants, he unwittingly replicates the unwillingness of media coverage to explore the larger context, and perpetuates a myth of incomprehensibility that tends to obscure such events."

"Morris is obsessed with the impossibility of truthful storytelling, the way individual testimony is always strained through the filters of memory, perspective, and the speaker's need to present him- or herself in the best light possible," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "As abstract and intellectually distancing as this approach may sound, it's strangely well-suited to documenting the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which took place in a moral gray zone tacitly sanctioned by the administration's ongoing refusal to define exactly what torture or stress position or enemy combatant means."

Morris "likes to liven things up by bringing what Hollywood has always called 'production values' to his docs," writes Richard Schickel in Time. And he lists them. Then: "All of this seems to me at odds with the very sordid story Morris is trying to tell. It distracts from, even vitiates, the moral power inherent in the film."

"The film makes no attempt to exonerate the participants of wrongdoing, but it does add context to their actions and argues one very important point: these soldiers were not punished for torture; they were punished for being in embarrassing photographs," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online.

"With Standard Operating Procedure, the Iraq War finally has its Hearts and Minds," announces Scott Tobias at the AV Club, where he gives it an "A."

Film Panel Notetaker was at work at the Q&A with Morris at Tribeca. More from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

And more interviews with Morris: Steve Erickson (Film & Video), Brian D Johnson (Macleans) and Eric Kohn (Stream).

Update, 4/27: In the Los Angeles Times, Geoff Boucher asks Morris what's next: "I used to make funny movies and I think of myself as a funny person, so maybe I'll go in that direction."