Fests and events, 5/31.

The Boston Phoenix's Peter Keough previews Shaw Scope: A History of the Shaw Bros. Studios, at the Harvard Film Archive through June 7.

Works from the Chicago Film Archive are screening at New York's Anthology Film Archives this weekend. "Think of it as an archive road show - a special program of artifacts preserved by one of the nation's youngest archival institutions that sheds light on a city not typically embraced as a hotbed of experimental or avant-garde cinema," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun.

At indieWIRE, Peter Knegt has an overview of NYC goings on.

"Nuri Bilge Ceylan is to head the jury at this summer's Sarajevo Film Festival," reports Nick Holdsworth for Variety.

Boston, Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Rumsey Taylor on Severed Ways and both Katherine Follett and Victoria Large on Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie.

Online viewing tip. At the Suicide...

Back in March, Stuart Klawans wrote about David Cronenberg's At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World for Nextbook.

And now Nextbook has the four-minute film.

An open reply.

So many issues have been raised here and in other corners to Jonathan Marlow's entry that came to be known as "They didn't build their sales model for you" that he felt another entry might be in order. Opinions expressed, etc. Updated through 6/2:

We all see the world through our own prism of personal experience. In my "rant" (I'd characterize it as a "ramble" myself) from earlier this week, I attempted to make a case that filmmakers should not view the likely non-acquisition of their work from festival screenings as a failure. There are plenty of other distribution opportunities out there, although not many of them are particularly lucrative at this moment in time. Then again, it's not really about the money, is it? Only a fool makes a movie "on spec" with the notion of some future windfall.

Given all of the public and private support for my diatribe, there are always a few folks that get into a tizzy when confronted with reality. Reality, however, is debatable. Spout's Karina Longworth, for instance, described me as the film acquisitions fellow "for GreenCine's DVD-by-mail main site." That was true about a year ago. Tom Hall's thin-skinned piece (more about that in a moment) says that I don't "seem to know much about how film festivals work." I wager it would take about 20 seconds to discover that I have something of a familiarity with festivals. I attend about 40 such events every year and I've worked for about a dozen (either directly or in-directly). This is what passes for journalism these days? Little or no research? Meanwhile, Agnes Varnum writes, "Do people really not know this information?" Unfortunately, not as many folks are familiar with these talking points as I had hoped. I'd initially intended to write a compare-and-contrast piece about the Independent Film Festival of Boston, the Tribeca Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival - something of an embellishment on the already excellent coverage of these festivals on the Daily - from the relatively unique perspective of someone who attended all three. Yet, at each festival, I talked to numerous filmmakers with tales of pending acquisition just on the horizon. I've been talking these same points since my days at Amazon.com in the 1990s. It's slightly disappointing that these directors are still dreaming the dream.

To be clear, the piece was also not-so-subtly considered to be a bit of a challenge to the few theatrical acquisition establishments that are still standing. I'd be delighted to see Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy play at multiplexes across the country. Add to that about a hundred other features that I've seen over the last decade that sadly never went much of anywhere post-festival circuit. Prove me wrong! I'm still waiting.

Meanwhile, back to Tom and his response. I've never attended the Sarasota Film Festival although I've only heard great things about it. My only limited experience with Sarasota is their party at the Toronto Film Festival about two years ago. Admittedly, it's the only party that I've attended in Toronto that I have ever enjoyed. I figured, perhaps mistakenly, that if they could get that right, they probably know how to throw a good festival, too (and, for ten years, they've evidently been doing exactly that). A quick look at the programming for the most recent edition, for which Tom was largely (if not entirely) responsible, clearly demonstrates a solid event. Let's get something clear, though - "[O]ur festival featured over 220 films this year and I was proud to show each title among them." 220? You've made a decision to have a large festival and I can't argue with that choice. However, you can't expect me (or anyone) to believe that every film was good. Without calling them out, I see several dodgy ones in the list. I also see Woodpecker and the aforementioned Medicine for Melancholy. Tom's marks for independent street-cred are duly noted. Although Sarasota clearly isn't one of the festivals that exploit the filmmaker and their work, it's naïve to suggest that such festivals don't exist. In other words, I didn't have Tom and/or Sarasota in mind when I was scribbling this piece out on a flight (back from a festival, naturally). Nor True/False. Nor Ann Arbor. Nor TIE. All great events, from what I hear, that I have yet to attend.

Further along, Tom notes that "non-profit arts organizations are not structured as a replacement for traditional for-profit distribution models." I never suggested that they were. As a Board member of a non-profit arts organization that presents non-commercial films from around the world, I would never suggest anything of the sort. I believe, though, that I am largely to blame for this essential misunderstanding since the theme was picked up by Sujewa Ekanayake as well. It was not my goal to get festivals to pay filmmakers. While it is gradually becoming de rigueur for films with distribution in place to get a few dollars for the right to show these works, Tom has a vested interest to discourage such efforts. I don't blame him for that. In fact, the economics of such events don't warrant the proliferation of such a system at all (although if Sujewa can figure out how to make it happen, I'll definitely do what I can to support it).

"Each event stands alone and should be weighed on its individual merits, benefits and shortcomings." I thought that was what I was doing. "What film festivals share with distributors is that they both screen films in a theater. But does that make them the same thing?" Not at all, but therein is the crux of the issue. "Ersatz" was not a word chosen lightly. Film festivals have become an "artificial substitute" for the real thing only because the real thing has largely disappeared. Independent exhibitors are rapidly disappearing, too. The plea isn't for an end to film festivals or independent exhibitors. The plea is for every filmmaker that has shelved their work or hidden it away in a closet or basement to make it available for all to see. They should not be discouraged by the sorry state of affairs but should be, instead, encouraged by all of the new opportunities for their work to be seen - new opportunities that will ideally bring them a few dollars, Euros or Pesos as well (and perhaps, eventually, enough money to make another film if they're self-financing their own projects). Like any sensible person, I'd rather see a movie in a theater (either at a festival or in theatrical release). Like any reasonable person, I'll see a movie-of-interest any way possible. DVD? TV? On a set-top box? On a laptop? On a mobile phone? Although my Luddite side is not too fond of this last option, I'm ultimately format-agnostic.

As for "one of the most condescending ideas," I'll do you one better. About 20 years ago, David Thomas (frontman for the legendary Pere Ubu) suggested that there were far too many bands in the world. I think it's time to revive his appeal and apply it to the motion picture industry. There are far too many people making movies that have no business picking up a camera. I've said it on panels and now I'll put it in print - if you're a filmmaker and you suspect that you're not up for the challenge, please stop! We've had enough. The business of filmmaking, like the process of politics, often discourages our best and brightest. These days, the good ones generally give up on the Sisyphean hurdles and find some other practical line of work. Audiences are then regularly left with a particular personality type that continues to make films-about-nothing long after they should've stopped. If we can promote the former and deride the latter, we've done our part.

Of course, the odds of making a good movie are against us all. I've been involved in my share of mediocre efforts. For every Barry Jenkins there are a dozen Eric Schaeffers. If I can somehow contribute to an environment that makes it easier for Barry's current film to find distribution or his next to get produced, I've accomplished something. This is by no means a lofty goal. A modest proposal for the filmmaking (and film exhibiting) community? Perhaps.

- Jonathan Marlow

---

Update, 6/2:: Bob Alexander, President of IndiePix, argues "that the traditional models of distribution, which barely work for the major studios, do not work - at all - in some scaled down version for independent film." But "new technologies of the Internet era offer great new possibilities for the community of film fans.... Filmmakers and film-lovers alike should be excited about the evolution of our industry."

Israel @ 60. The Lemon Tree.

James Van Maanen on the opening of the series and The Lemon Tree; further notes on the series will go on appearing here.

Gorgeous, tasty cheese plates (catered by Zabar's!); good wines, red and white; happy people mixing and chatting. It was all quite delightful during Wednesday night's reception for the opening of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's week-long Israel @ 60 series, in collaboration with The Jewish Museum and the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. 15 films will be shown, generally twice each. Of course, the list is a fine one, and (of course) what was not included seems as pointed as what has been: Nothing by Eytan Fox (Yossi & Jagger, Walk on Water, The Bubble)? Why Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's interesting and thoughtful The Inner Tour rather than his amazing (and evidently, in some circles, quite anger-provoking) James' Journey to Jerusalem? Still, the series offers the great Late Marriage by Dover Koshashvili, Joseph Cedar's inquisitive Campfire, Karen Yedaya's difficult Or (My Treasure) and Giddi Dar's too-cute-for-my-taste Ushpizin, among others.

Maybe it's too easy for a non-Jew to ask the following question, but hasn't any celebration of Israel got to be a double-edged sword? There's so much to be thankful for and so much over which to despair. One of the things I love most about Israeli filmmakers is that they ask this question, too - each in his/her own way, over and over again. Instead of celebrating, they seem to pin their state to the wall and then question, question, question. Their films resound, and last night's American premier of Eran Riklis's The Lemon Tree continues the resonance.

Riklis himself was on hand to introduce the movie and for a Q&A afterwards. He made a splendid host: genuinely self-effacing, very easy to question and always quick and honest with his comebacks. He seemed, in fact, very similar to his movie: full of irony, love, sadness, anger, fear, joy - the works - and yet so low-key about it all. One of the first things Riklis told us was that he is often asked how films such as his, which are usually critical, or at least questioning of Israeli policies, are allowed to be made. The director made it clear that there is simply no film censorship in Israel. Period.

Audience questions about The Lemon Tree were many and interesting - everything from the process of collaboration (Riklis evidently directed and co-wrote), to the meaning of various moments in the film and how it was to work with the wonderful Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, whom he earlier used in his hit film The Syrian Bride. Due to be released theatrically later this year by the more-adventurous-than-most distributor IFC, the FSLC was granted this one-time, not-open-to-the-public screening of The Lemon Tree, as its post-reception attraction. A thoughtful, realistic and fair film, it proved a very good choice for the "celebration."

The Lemon Tree is based on an actual incident that happened in Israel not that long ago. It's been jiggered for effect, but not in the way that so many mainstream movies seem re-imagined to make "winners" of their protagonists (and losers of the audience). When the Israeli Defense Minister moves in next to a Palestinian widow, whose lemon grove, the minister's security forces decide, poses a threat, the grove must be destroyed. Legal battle stations are assumed, and the gears of "justice" begin to grind. But it is the personal side of things that prove most interesting: the widow (played by Abbass) and her lawyer (Ali Suliman from Syrian Bride and Paradise Now), the Minister (Doron Tavory) and his increasingly estranged wife (Rona Lipaz-Michael).

The movie shifts from Israel to America and back, from the law courts to the lemon grove, from soldiers on duty to reporters at work, always capturing the moment of interest in an understated manner. Even the one scene you might call overstated (a kiss during which the screen literally lights up) is so full of conflicting possibilities (Is this moment fantasy? Did the sun just come out?) that, oddly enough, it enriches the movie rather than detracts from it. And without overtly mentioning such hot-button terms such as "fundamentalism," "feminism" or "state power," the movie forces us to think about all of these, along with others we might prefer to forego.

When it was released in Israel this past March, the director explained, The Lemon Tree was a commercial failure. Thankfully, it has been more successful in Europe. It is not difficult to understand why: The film captures, about as well as possible, both sides of the circumstances of this tiny and relatively unimportant (in the whole scheme of things) event. And it offers but the smallest hope for either side. Not a crowd pleaser, certainly - but in its manner, truthful. I hold out not much greater hope for its American release. Yet the fact that it will appear here theatrically (and later, I expect, on DVD) is good news for all of us willing to keep wrestling with the Israel/Palestine problem and hoping against hope for progress via small increments. I'd call The Lemon Tree one of these.

Shorts, 5/30.

"It is a heady concept to be seized at gunpoint, and it's compounded when you feel responsible for the Nigerians who have trusted you - the ones in your notes and on your footage." Sandy Cioffi was in the Niger Delta filming Sweet Crude (trailer), a doc-in-progress about "the systematic theft of vast oil riches from under the feet of a population now living in abject poverty and environmental decimation," when the crew was detained by the military. "Once they Googled the film title and my name, we were held because the old-guard military in Nigeria does not want this story told. They were open about this. Had I been filming only militants in masks with guns - an image that supports the narrative the Nigerian government wants disseminated - I believe my crew and I would have walked."

An online viewing tip of sorts. In the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab has the trailers for Bernd Eichinger and Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex, "one of a growing number of terrorist-themed features and documentaries currently being made" (and with an all-star German cast), and for discusses Steven Soderbergh's Che. Other films warranting mention in the piece include Olivier Assayas's planned "action film" on Carlos the Jackal and Colombian director Victor Gaviria's Black Blood: The Hour of the Traitors, "based on a true story about a young Farc leader betrayed by his own family."

"It is impossible to hear the call for a conversation about race without thinking about Barack Obama's 'A More Perfect Union' speech," writes Chuck Tryon. "It is in this context that I viewed Katrina Browne's important new documentary, Traces of the Trade, which will be airing on the PBS series, P.O.V. on Tuesday, June 24. In Traces of the Trade, Browne makes use of her own physical and psychological journey to map out the history of the slave trade in North America and its continued implications in the present moment."

Andy Rector posts Charles Burnett's "Inner City Blues."

"In Marin Karmitz's 1972 Coup pour Coup (Blow for Blow), a film about a group of women mounting a successful strike at a textiles factory, the nature of work is clear: there is exploitation (long hours, sexual harassment, physical exertion and foremen and women whose job it is to prevent you from slacking off), there is a site (the factory itself, which becomes a fortress complete with ad hoc crèche, kitchen and sleeping quarters during the strike) and there is an enemy (the boss himself, who is later held hostage in his office and forbidden to use the toilet, as the women themselves had been)." infinite thØught: "The final scene, a freeze-frame of the workers united in struggle accompanied by a voice-over extolling the virtues of continued resistance, is formally paralleled by the last scene in Schrader's Blue Collar six years later, although the horizon of victory has now shrivelled to a bleak and relentless recognition of the divisive power of the bosses: 'They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.'"

"As if being Nobel Prize winner, vice-president, snookered-by-history presidential candidate, environmental scold, and Oscar-winning filmmaker weren't enough to flesh out his résumé, Al Gore is about to add another job title: opera librettist," notes Vulture's Justin Davidson. "La Scala, Milan's legendary but troubled opera house, has commissioned an opera based on An Inconvenient Truth, Gore's movingly righteous PowerPoint presentation about global warming." John Hooper's report for the Guardian and others make it clear that this is an "inspired by," not a "written by" sort of arrangement.

"In a lot of ways, one can really understand the lifestyle choice of the American hobo," writes Mike Everleth. "However, while trying to glamorize this carefree life, documentarian Alison Murray - who rode the rails herself for several months for [Train on the Brain] - really ends up de-glamorizing it."

In the Telegraph, Sheila Johnston talks with both Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) and Errol Morris (Standard Operating Procedure).

Ray Pride passes along news that Aki Kaurismäki has become Finland's youngest "Academician of Art."

"While Italian cinema is marked by various aesthetic shifts and experiments, its thematic preoccupations have remained, for the most part, consistent," writes Ricky D'Ambrose in the Tisch Film Review. "One can think of the nation's cinema as a collection of 'movements,' distinct in their manipulation of cinematic devices and techniques, given unification by a stock set of interests: the family, religion, labor, and class conflict."

Focusing on Nerdcore for Life more than Nerdcore Rising, Marcus O'Dair presents a guide to the scene.

Also in the Guardian:

• Ryan Gilbey meets Ben Affleck; in the Telegraph, Sheryl Garratt meets Casey Affleck. Gone Baby Gone, you see, is opening in the UK.

• Geoffrey McNab catches up with Bertil Guve, "10 years old when Ingmar Bergman recruited him to star in Fanny and Alexander."

• David Thomson on Ang Lee.

The Foot Fist Way is "an itsy-bitsy, ultra-indie, super-silly comedy packing huge laughs and unexpected heart," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. More from Keith Phipps (AV Club), S James Snyder (New York Sun), Armond White (New York Press), Patrick Walsh (Cinematical) and Robert Wilonsky (Voice).

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Chris Poggiali.

Online viewing tip. "I'd like to thank the folks at IFC Center for allowing me to interview theater patrons both before and after one of their midnight screenings of El Topo that took place in April." Kevin Lee; notes.

Online viewing tips, round 1, via Movie City News. The trailer for the Coen brothers' Burn Before Reading (with an all-star American cast) and the teaser for Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Karina Longworth's guide to Fred Astaire mashups.

The Strangers.

"The Strangers doesn't take many words to describe," notes Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "isolated vacation home. Masked tormenters. Helpless couple. And yet it's precisely the film's spare, disciplined, back-to-basics horror effects that lend it a sustaining chill."

"Claiming inspiration from true events, The Strangers builds tension with tiny details - a moved cellphone, a looping song on the record player - and empathy with victims whose intimacy is affectingly real," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Like Nimród Antal's recent Vacancy, this highly effective chiller suggests that a relationship in extremis is the most honest of all."

Updated through 6/4.

"Tight, intense, often legitimately frightening, and committed to its suburban-nightmare premise, The Strangers may not be gory, but I wouldn't wish it on too many kids under fifteen," writes Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "It's a classical, no-frills, 85-minute blast of cold air, a refreshing bit of professionalism in a genre whose mainstream, at least, has been plagued of late by lazy pandering and general shoddiness."

"When the lights came up at the end of The Strangers, a grim and depressingly hollow technical exercise from first-time writer/director Bryan Bertino, a colleague sighed: 'Just what we needed - a remake of Funny Games without the joy.'" Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

But Dennis Harvey, writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, finds that "The Strangers makes excellent use of eerie restraint and quiet in a long, tense buildup before most of the real mayhem happens. Too bad the last five minutes are as uninspired as the prior 80 are crafty."

And in the Voice, Ed Gonzalez finds that "Sometimes avoiding the synapse-raping bad habits of splat packers Eli Roth and Alexandre Aja is its own reward; doing so without also submitting to Michael Haneke-style hand-slapping is nearly monumental."

Mark Peikert sees the Funny Games parallel, too: "But Bryan Bertino... offers up no pseudo-intellectual bullshit. His movie, at a brisk pace and with little fanfare, terrifies us because of its ambiguity."

"The biggest problem is that all the pay-offs to the deliberate build-up are telegraphed well in advance of the action," writes Peter Martin at Twitch. "I saw this with a full house at an advance promotional screening, and there were big screams at the first scare - which I won't give away - but then each time that same trick was subsequently used, the returns were diminished. There is simply no suspense when you know what's coming."

"Bertino has the pretensions of an artist and the indelicacy of a hack," writes Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe. "He tries to get under our skin with a pile driver."

"[Liv] Tyler and [Scott] SpeedmanThe Strangers has them playing, essentially, meat puppets," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Starring in this movie isn't doing them any favors, and buying a ticket for it won't do you much good, either."

"Though at times predictable and overcalculated, The Strangers takes some sincere risks in fucking around with our expectations," writes Jonathan Busch in Vue Weekly. "And that makes me feel, well, appreciated."

The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov has a good talk with University of Texas alum Bertino.

Update, 5/31: ""Inspired by true events" may be the best thing to happen to horror movies since the invention of the chain saw," writes the Chicago Tribune's Jessica Reaves. But "Bertino's taut, spare thriller is plenty scary without relying on pseudo-historical context... [T]his is an enormously unsettling movie."

Update, 6/4: "If The Strangers has any real or lasting appeal (it made $21 million its opening weekend), it will of course be on DVD, where, as if in some kind of William Castle promotion, the viewer is seeing the film in a vulnerable context that replicates that in the film itself," notes DK Holm at the Vancouver Voice.

Stuck.

"If you've ever yearned to watch (as well as hear and practically feel) Academy Award nominee Stephen Rea writhe gorily in windshield glass for the better part of 85 minutes, Stuck is your movie," writes Justin Stewart in Reverse Shot. "[I]t's not hard to get high on its gamy fumes. It may not be the idea movie that [director Stuart] Gordon and [writer John] Strysik think it is, as evidenced by press-conference statements, but the notions it attempts to get across (the homeless are hopelessly marginalized, misdeeds matter) come from a good place."

"[A]n original, deadly serious, blackly-comic thriller," declares Peter Martin at Cinematical. "Gordon exercises superb sleight-of-hand with the material; we never know if the next moment will be funny, thoughtful, or stomach-churning, and his orchestration of a wide range of emotions makes watching Stuck an exhausting, exhilarating experience."

Updated through 5/31.

This is a "grim, expert little thriller," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Mr Gordon has enjoyed a cult following since his 1985 horror hit, Re-Animator. And Stuck, while not strictly a horror film, is steeped in gore and carries a seam of mocking gallows humor as relentless as that of Sweeney Todd."

"That Stuck is mostly based an actual event (one that happened in Texas, of course) is frightening, but ultimately irrelevant thanks to [Mena] Suvari's and Rea's nuanced performances," writes Mark Peikert in the New York Press.

"The callousness and casual disregard for human life displayed by Suvari and several other characters, major and minor, recalls Larry Clark's Bully, though Gordon's film is much more purposeful," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Though it takes a little time to find its groove - the hilarious opening-credits sequence notwithstanding - Stuck picks up a lot of comic momentum once the situation gets more desperate and absurd.... It's a righteously nasty piece of work, and a rare example of a movie that traffics in B-movie grime without a trace of Grindhouse-style self-consciousness."

"[I]t's an energetic B-movie with pulpy magnetism," writes Bryant Frazer. "Think of it as slapstick social realism."

"Don't get stuck watching this," warns David Goldman in the L Magazine.

Interviews with Gordon: Nick Dawson (Filmmaker) and Aaron Hillis (IFC).

Matthew DeBord talks with Suvari for the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto 07; and David D'Arcy.

Update, 5/31: "Grandiose claims have been made in some quarters for this nasty, economical little film, but it does what it sets out to do pretty well," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Is its tale of cruelty, selfishness and idiocy... a metaphor for the current state of American life, or maybe for the unchanging human condition? Only if you want it to be."

Wonders Are Many.

"Jon Else's Wonders Are Many closes in on the Trinity atomic test of July 1945, twinning it with the production of an opera based on those events called Doctor Atomic and offering the creative dilemma faced by both operations as common ground," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. "The historical narrative easily outpaces that of the opera, and at times, the difference between crying 'bomb' in a crowded theater and the New Mexico desert takes this otherwise engrossing film one juxtaposition too far."

There is a "third strand," notes Stephen Holden in the New York Times, "a history of atomic weaponry and the nuclear arms race between the United States and Germany and, later, the Soviet Union, related in a booming narrative voice-over. Devastating vintage film of German and Japanese cities going up in flames reminds you that even before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, millions of civilians died in saturation firebombing. The numbers of casualties cited are staggering. The three strands mesh into a profound and sorrowful meditation on warfare, the possibility of nuclear annihilation and how developing a doomsday weapon affected the lives of the scientists building it."

In the previous paragraph, Holden writes, "It is fascinating to observe [Peter] Sellars demonstrating to cast members the exact phrasing and emotional shading for conveying [John] Adams's austere but passionate score, and to watch the final touches being added to a facsimile of the original test weapon."

Earlier: Brian Darr spoke with Else in December.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster*.

"You can only make so many Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens jokes before the actual seriousness of steroid use rears its ugly head, and Christopher Bell's expansive, informative and sometimes unwieldy documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster* proves the issue to be a complex and embarrassing one to cut through," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

Writing in the Voice, Michelle Orange reveals why her reaction to this "scrappy, remarkably expansive, crazily watchable documentary" can't help but be personal.

Updated through 5/31.

"Without endorsing use of the drug, Bell, who's a bodybuilder himself, dives into the heated debates surrounding the maligned practice and finds something pretty damn close to an even-handed portrait, if not a fair and balanced one," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "But that's basically the point: Issuing a blanket decree for or against steroid use isn't exactly fair, because steroid users generally don't care about balance. To understand them, one must comprehend the weight of their ambitions."

In Film Journal International, Chris Barsanti notes that the doc "benefits greatly from his family-centric approach to the subject, without which it might have remained just another narrow-cast film trying to chip off a handful of converts from mainstream wisdom. Starting with his childhood reminiscences about heroes like Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Hulk Hogan (the first scenes are actually from a 1984 match in which Hogan 'defeated' that Iranian terror, the Iron Sheik), Bell first tracks his obsession with strength and size, before focusing on the nation's cult of unattainable perfection and coming up with some unexpected insights."

The doc "situates steroids as American an apple pie, an inevitable, 'natural' outgrowth of the masculine self-actualization of the Reagan-and-Rambo era," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "It's too simplified: are we really all just innocents victimized by a distinctly American striving for perfection? And how does class fit into all this? Ultimately, it's Bell's prerogative to put anabolic steroids on the same shelf as dietary supplements and weight-gaining powder, but by placing the blame on the culture rather than the individual, he leaves out a crucial piece of the puzzle."

"The lines between cheating and fair play, the movie suggests, are hazy to the point of being arbitrary," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The bottom line in the debate is the sprinter Ben Johnson's rationale for using steroids, which cost him his 1988 Olympic 100-meter title: Everybody does it."

"While the health risks of steroids remain somewhat open to debate (given the medical benefits they afford, such as for AIDS patients), Bell's film astutely and convincingly pinpoints the means by which issues of beauty, power, potential, ego and success all fuel our supplement-and-steroid-ingesting obsession," writes Nick Schager.

Noel Murray at the AV Club: "'I was born to attain greatness,' one of Bell's brothers insists. To which Bell shoots back, with all due fraternity: Why can't you be happy with who you are?"

IndieWIRE interviews Bell; so does Bilge Ebiri for New York.

Updates, 5/31: "Bell's family is the core of the documentary," writes Peter Martin at Cinematical, and they "may be the best reason to see Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (the asterisk, by the way, leads to the wonderfully apt sub-title: The Side Effects of Being American)."

The Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano finds the doc "turns out to be a surprisingly comprehensive and insightful look at a culture predicated on might and obsessed with achieving success at any cost. This, more than rampant steroid use among professional athletes, is what makes Bell's documentary so timely and ultimately so sobering." And Mark Olsen meets Bell.

Agnès Varda @ 80.

Let's not leave Johannes Bock dangling alone in the wind (or rather, the Tagesspiegel) with his congrats to Agnès Varda on her 80th today. We don't have to reach far back to find appreciations in English; in January, Criterion released its collection, 4 by Agnés Varda, and I collected reviews and interviews here.

Meantime, the site's a breezy browse, particularly the recherche thématique section.

UbuWeb has a bit of online viewing; YouTube, naturally, has much more.

Updates: Paul Harrill notes "that one of my favorite films of Varda's, Jacquot, is now available on (Region 2) DVD from her web store."

Craig Keller: "Une bonne soeur."

Interview. Giuseppe Tornatore.

"Giuseppe Tornatore's sleazy Hitchcockian thriller, The Unknown Woman, keeps you glued to the screen despite your increasingly nagging doubts about its integrity," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Just under two hours, sumptuously photographed in noirish shades and slathered in spine-tingling music by Ennio Morricone, it twists every which way to sustain suspense until the final frame."

Nick Dawson talks with Tornatore about "his all-consuming love of cinema, the strong female figures in his films, and his long-running working partnership with Ennio Morricone."

Updated through 5/31.

"If you remember Giuseppe Tornatore as the director of Cinema Paradiso, the 1988 ode to Il cinema that was immediately destined for those cheesy Academy Award montages, then the Italian director's new movie is not going to change anything," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Last seen putting Monica Bellucci (and slavering audiences) through paces in 2000's Malèna, Mr Tornatore now delivers a protracted, forgettable revenge thriller. The Unknown Woman, which opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center, turns the plight of an escapee from the sex trade into something preposterous."

In the Voice, Ella Taylor wonders "how this repellent piece of garbage managed to win no less than five Italian Oscars."

But Jeffrey M Anderson, writing at Cinematical, finds it to be "a restless, panicked, devastating emotional roller coaster, meticulously planned and executed like a razor.... [L]ike the violent crime (giallo) films of his countrymen Dario Argento and Mario Bava, Tornatore's The Unknown Woman gets by on sheer guts and style."

Martin Tsai talks with Tornatore for the New York Sun.

Earlier: James Van Maanen.

Update, 5/31: The Unknown Woman is "an exceptionally well-made example of the kind of delirious, semi-Gothic, overcooked melodrama filmmakers from the Boot have long specialized in," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Maybe this is a serious picture about sexual slavery and the exploitation of Eastern European women in Italy, and maybe it's an upscale remake of I Spit on Your Grave - and who am I to say it can't be both?"

Harvey Korman, 1927 - 2008.

Harvey Korman, the award-winning comedic actor who rose to fame playing second banana to Carol Burnett on her television variety series and who starred in hit movies like Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 81.

Bruce Lambert, New York Times.

Online viewing tip. Ray Pride has "The Pledge to Hedley Lamarr."

Updates: Robert Cashill, Edward Copeland, Dennis Cozzalio, Bill Gibron, Glenn Kenny, Phil Nugent, Scott Weinberg and Bob Westal.

"L'Origine de la tendresse" and Other Tales.

Before reviewing the collection, James Van Maanen interviews the programmer. A few notes follow. Updated through 5/30.

It's so rare that a program of short films opens commercially here in NYC that this alone makes the May 30 release of six French shorts newsworthy (not to mention watch-worthy: the program is a good one). Under the title "L'Origine de la tendresse" and Other Tales, the collection is the second theatrically released presentation from The World According to Shorts.

After watching the program (my impressions follow), I talked with Jonathan Howell - director, programmer and founder of The World According to Shorts - to get some background on him and his organization and to learn if there might be more movement and/or interest these days in the short film as art form.

Why shorts, Jonathan? When and how did your interest in this form begin?

It started when I was in the position of short film programmer at Ocularis in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where we would show a feature film preceded by a short every Sunday evening at Galapagos. The program actually began back in 1997, and I joined up in 1998. I found myself fulfilling a need because the group wanted to replace a programmer for short films who was leaving, so I started helping out. I was told about a very fine annual international festival devoted to short film in Clermont-Ferrand, France. So I went. And it was terrific; however, I could not program anything at Ocularis because we only had 16 mm facilities available. Everything at Clermont-Ferrand was 35. The Brooklyn Academy of Music's recently opened BAMcinématek then offered me a couple of days to program shorts, and this was the beginning.

Getting involved with shorts was matter of chance, mostly, but having stepped into this, I have discovered that the short format is neither superior nor inferior to the full-length. It's a matter of what the individual filmmaker brings to the project.

Do you think shorts are garnering more interest these days. And if so, why?

They are a little bit higher-profile, now that the Oscar-nominated films get a yearly theatrical and DVD release. There is more attention paid in that sense, and also now short films are available at the Apple iTunes store. There is just more availability, in part, because of things like these. People have been saying for years that the web is a perfect exhibition ground for short films. And we're getting closer to this. Now, with the ubiquity of broadband, this is even more feasible.

When was the World According to Shorts' first theatrical release?

We started releasing them theatrically via New Yorker Films in 2006. This new set is our second, though it's not through New Yorker this time - we're doing it on our own. It's not an annual thing, just whenever we can get a new project together.

Who is your biggest audience for a program like this?

I find the programs tend to skew more toward foreign film lovers than to short film lovers, perhaps because the films are not primarily O Henry-type stories with twist endings or calling card features.

I know that Film Movement always puts one short on each of its monthly DVD releases. And the Ironweed Film Club also sticks a short or two on its monthly release.

This past year, Film Movement actually used one of the films we premiered in New York in its compilation, Pauline Pinson's Aided Migration. We also had the New York premier of a film that was subsequently nominated for an Oscar: Samuel Tourneux's Even Pigeons Go to Heaven.

Great. We'll hope to sere more of this in the future. And we'll look forward to seeing the next World According to Shorts program, whenever that might be.

---

"L'Origine de la tendresse" and Other Tales offers six short films ranging from eight to 32 minutes in length, all in French with English subtitles. Pen-Pusher, the shortest of the six and directed by Guillaume Martinez, offers an original "meet cute" scenario on the Paris underground that is sweet but not cloying, coolly funny and makes a nice statement about how "writing" can bring us together.

Felipe Canales's My Mother is maybe my favorite of the bunch. In just 15 minutes, the director leads us through a story of an immigrant family, Algeria to France, centering on its women: three generations of them, though the meat of the movie involves the writer and her mother. The form is like a scrapbook of black-and-white photographs, with narration and (as I recall) music, all of which makes the story seem like a tale told from long ago that is somehow terrifically immediate and beautiful. I don't recall becoming so involved in someone else's story so quickly and strongly - and have it linger with such tenacity in my memory. Howell tells me that film, narrated by the woman who wrote the original autobiographical book/photo essay with the same title, was put together by the filmmaker on his computer. Talk about a wonderfully productive collaboration!

For the politically inclined, among whom I count myself, One Voice, One Vote, will be much appreciated. Here, in the run-up to the 2007 French Presidential campaign, Jeanne Paturle and Cécile Rousset combine the taped conversation of a politically active older woman and a political slacker of a young man with animation to give us a 13-minute lesson on why it might be a good idea to get involved. Their conversation is by turns charming, frank, funny and needling. But with the subtitles (at least for us non-French-speakers), I found the animation distracting and not all that helpful. I'd rather have had the man and woman photographed as they speak. You may feel differently.

Olivier Bourbeillon's The Last Day gives us just that - at the 1867 Schneider and Co power hammer No 125, which ceased operation at the former smithy of the Brest military harbor on the day in question. The three remaining workers spend their remaining hours on the job talking to the filmmaker and each other about the past and present. The film fascinates for a number of reasons: visually (I'd never before seen a machine like the one used here to create huge metals parts), social/political/economically (neither the men nor the filmmaker natter about it, but you can't help feel their pain, worry and wonder at what is to come next) and historically (we learn something of the type of business the men are engaged in, where it comes from and where it is going). This is one of those small films that you probably would not intentionally seek out but which, by its conclusion, you feel pleased - even privileged - to have witnessed.

The gem and wonder of the group is also the longest. I generally find that size does matter in short films. I've seen few five-, ten- or even 15-minute shorts in my life that had as much impact on me as (equally good) ones at the half-hour mark. Alain-Paul Mallard's L'Origine de la tendresse tracks the life of a relatively attractive, approaching middle-age museum attendant. It is beautifully observed and shot and possesses that reticence and philosophical bent that seems to appeal to the French (and to me, as well). This is a rich, thoughtful mix, wonderfully acted and, I think, worth just about anybody's time.

The program closes with a zinger: Alice Winocour's 15-minute Kitchen, starring Elina Löwensohn (Schindler's List, My Antonia, and various Hal Hartley movies), which alone makes it worth watching. Ms Löwensohn plays a little homemaker who has decided to cook for her hubby, who wants a lobster entree. Mistake. By turns funny, ugly, sad and unsettling, this is a very strange little short. Though my French is paltry, I believe that the end credits assure us that "no lobsters were harmed," etc. You could not prove this by me.

-James Van Maanen

---

Michael Guillén reviews each of the films as well.

"Carefully assembled so as to avoid the pitfalls that come from overreaching one's grasp, 'L'Origine de la Tendresse' and Other Tales proves a delectably satisfying round of hor'dourves, sampling various styles and subjects without attempting the contrivance of establishing a singular unifying theme," writes Rob Humanick in Slant.

"Good intentions aside, this installment doesn't work," argues Vadim Rizov in the Voice.

Updates, 5/30: Individually, each of these films "might prove diverting in the right place at the right time," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times, but "cumulatively," they "don't much make for a knockout night at the cinema."

In the New York Sun, Martin Tsai finds it "a mixed bag, but a couple of entries make the event well worth the time and price of admission."

Shorts, 5/29.

"[I]f I want to remind myself that the movies are capable of achieving a level of transcendence comparable to a painting by Rembrandt or Turner, or to a symphony by Mozart, I run a film by Renoir," writes Peter Bogdanovich in the New York Observer. And of course, he's got stories to tell:

Extremely taken with Boudu Saved From Drowning - the ironic and satirical saga of a bum floating down a river whom a middle-class family "saves" - I went right over to the Renoirs' beautiful Beverly Hills living room and raved about the film, quietly observed by the giant Renoir portrait of Jean at 15 with a rifle (now at the LA County Museum) and a few small Cézannes.

Jean smiled and looked delighted: "Oh, thank you so much! You are very kind." After more effusiveness, I asked what he himself thought of the picture. "Oh, well," he said with his strong French accent, "you know, we made it in the early days of sound, and sometimes the sound is not so good. Also, because we had no money, we had to buy the film stock as we went along, and some of it does not match, and sometimes the cutting is a little too fast, and sometimes it is too slow, and the music is not so well recorded, but I think, maybe, it is my best picture!"

Doug Cummings: "I'm always proud of the resources Trond Trondsen and I provide at Robert-Bresson.com, and our latest project - years in the making–is an exclusive online Bresson Bibliography that uses Jane SloanShmuel Ben-Gad's recent bibliographies as a starting point."

"A failed escape through transgression and transcendence - in body, spirit, and mind, respectively, and somewhat interchangeably - is the common ending of my favorite Rivette films: L'amour fou, Out 1 and Céline and Julie Go Boating." David Phelps.

"[M]y bedside reading during Cannes this year included I Peed On Fellini, a wonderful new memoir by the Australian film critic and former Sydney Film Festival director David Stratton," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "In one chapter, Stratton reminisces about his friendship with Variety's late, legendary Paris-based film critic Gene Moskowitz, who, in the 1960s and 70s would file reviews from Cannes by typing them on a manual typewriter and air-mailing them to New York, where, several weeks later, they would finally appear in print. Technologically speaking, we've come a long way since then, but I wonder if the movies - and movie criticism - are any better for it."

"Like William Faulkner and Alexander Dovzhenko, Jia [Zhangke] is a hick avant-gardist in the very best sense - someone whose outsider/minority status enhances both his humanity and his art," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Working in long, choreographed takes, and mixing realistic accounts of working-class life with diverse forms of cultural shock and fantasy ranging from animation to SF to rock, he already qualifies as a poetic prophet of the 21st century, and not only for China."

"[Alfred] Vohrer is a filmmaker whose mysterious life and career would probably reward a book-length examination," suggests Tim Lucas. "[W]hile Vohrer didn't launch the krimis, he was by far the most essential contributor to what the krimis became (especially in their uses of garish imagery and macabre humor), much as Mario Bava's approach to filming thrillers defined the giallo."

Jim Emerson sees the future present in Theodore Roszak's Flicker.

"Among avid consumers of serial television, there is no more hubristic claim than to say that you know Lost - know it in every convolution of its intentionally anarchic plot, know it in understanding the real meanings of all of its allusions to Philip K Dick or game theory, or the Gospel of John, or Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence," writes Ginia Bellefante in the New York Times. "To watch Lost is to feel like a high school grind, studying and analyzing and never making it to Yale.... It is an opiate, and like all opiates, it produces its own masochistic delirium."

"Bill Henson's photographs of a nude 12- and 13-year-old boy and girl had been due to be shown in an art gallery in Sydney last week, but were confiscated by police after complaints from a child protection campaigner," reports Barbara McMahon. Among those coming to his defense: Cate Blanchett (Adam Jasper comments for frieze). Also in the Guardian, Sarfraz Manzoor reports on "a new generation of British Asian Bollywood stars."

"This is music that drops jaws in any context," blogs Samuel Wigley: "Lest [Arvo] Pärt's sound begin to work in the opposite direction, jolting us from our involvement with a film as we recognise what a cliché its use has become, it is I think time to give it a rest."

Scott Foundas (LA Weekly) and Ray Pride (Movie City News) talk with Joachim Trier about Reprise.

Online eeeek! tip. Jordan Gray's winning poster from SpoutBlog's Zombie Photoshop Contest.

Online viewing tip #1. Matt Zoller Seitz reviews At the Death House Door. More from Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail.

Online viewing tip #2. Zach Campbell's got a long clip from Robert Gardner's phenomenal Forest of Bliss."

Online viewing tip #3. "Inspired by I Know Where The Summer Goes, an exhibition of celebrated photographer Ryan McGinley, who also contributed to the making of the video, Gobbledigook will take you on a place where innocence is still alive." No fat clips!!! has the clip and the tune and all you need to know, but for starters, the tune is from Sigur Rós and the photography's by Christopher Doyle. Via Bryant Fraser. NSFW.

Online viewing tip #4. Jonathan Lapper's Frames of Reference, "the idea being no chronological order, no genre order or preference, simply the language of film referencing itself."

Fests and events, 5/29.

Cheryl Eddy previews Hong Kong Nocturne: The Films of Johnnie To, opening tomorrow: "Even the PFA admits, in their notes on the series, this is a 'small sampling' of To's output. But if I had to pick nine To films - culled, as the PFA's are, from To's output under his own Milkyway Image banner, created in 1997 - my sampling would likely resemble what's on tap through June." Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Johnny Ray Huston offers a taste of Other Cinema's Saturday evening of "New Experimental Works."

"In 2005, a reporter asked Augie Garrido for his thoughts upon winning his second NCAA championship at the University of Texas and his fifth career title," notes Ashley Moreno in the Austin Chronicle. "He responded, 'We're lookin' for a shortstop for next year.' No wonder he carries the title of baseball's winningest coach ever and - as some of the participants in Richard Linklater's newest film, Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach, would argue - greatest coach ever." Linklater and Garrido will be on hand for a screening at the Paramount on Tuesday.

Also: Josh Rosenblatt previews the Austin Film Society's Essential Cinema series, "which - after months of bringing audiences films from the more dour end of the cinematic spectrum - will be presenting Making the World Laugh: Global Comedy this month, featuring slightly more lighthearted fare from around the world - from the salt mines of Germany to the streets of Thailand, the highways of Buenos Aires to the back lots of old Hollywood." Tuesday through July 29.

For Vue Weekly, David Berry previews the Dreamspeakers Film Festival, running June 4 through 7 in Edmonton.

Mike Everleth has the lineup for the Portland Underground Film Festival, running June 12 through 15.

"The 10th annual P'Town film festival runs from June 18 through 22, and the line-up has just been announced," notes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

Michael Guillén passes along word of the Impact Film Festival, to be staged twice, three days each, during the Democratic and Republican Conventions in Denver and Minneapolis.

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

At the House Next Door, NP Thompson files another dispatch from Seattle.

Back in Boston: For Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Rumsey Taylor on Medicine for Melancholy.

Joanne Laurier wraps the WSWS's coverage of San Francisco.

Cannes. Now Showing.

"Raya Martin's fourth feature Now Showing, which [premiered] at Cannes in the Director's Fortnight, deeply examines that void that possibly and probably happens when all the stars have died all at once," writes Francis Cruz. "The film, epic-like in length with a running time of four hours and forty minutes, can be divided into two parts, an episodic account of Rita's childhood and her present experience as an adult working for her aunt's pirated DVD stall, divided by an intriguing interlude composed of clips from one of the few surviving Filipino pre-war films, Octavio Silos's Tunay na Ina (Real Mother, 1939)."

"This film is probably better suited to gallery spaces than traditional cinemas," suggests Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "Purportedly scripted but giving off the impression of old home videos exhumed from an attic grave, Now Showing offered an extreme example of what could be considered Cannes 2008's defining trend: an aggressive blurring of whatever boundaries remain, in the YouTube/MySpace/Blair Witch era, between documentary and fiction."

Update, 6/1: Online viewing tip. Noel Vera points to clips in which Martin "talks about his filming and logistical methods, his scriptwriting style (for his first two features, he didn't have any), and how Indio Nacional, Autohystoria and Now Showing form not a trilogy, but the beginnings of three separate trilogies. Ah, youth! And more power to him, for his ambitions..."

Madeline Kahn. Day of Appreciation.

StinkyLulu has called for a "Day of Appreciation" in memory of one of his "most treasured supporting actresses," Madeline Kahn. And the appreciations are coming in.

Via Gabriel Shanks.

Shorts, 5/28.

In the London Review of Books, Michael Wood delves into Robert Bresson. For example, Lancelot du Lac:

An irreverent viewer is going to think of Monty Python every five minutes. And yet. The sheer anguished seriousness of the work, the sense that human beings might well be reduced to the bare essence of their distress, and that a camera could catch them in this condition, do offer one answer to my question. These people are interesting because they are unconvincing in mimetic terms: any attempt at richness of character would hopelessly compromise their poverty of spirit, which is all they have. Even the touch of ludicrousness helps; it is part of their penitence.

At Harper's, Wyatt Mason posts the opening paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and comments: "Here a style of writing can be understood as a style of seeing - a 'cold glaucoma' is metaphorically over the eye of the world; a metaphorical beast by a pool has eyes literally 'dead white.' Eyes teem, in fact, through the dark landscape of this fable about the blinding of the world, a world at which a reader is made to peer, through its language, for visions. Whatever else a film version of The Road may offer, that drama of seeing won't - can't - obtain. We'll see everything."

"We're in a Golden Age of documentary filmmaking right now," writes Steve James at the IFC (At the Death House Door makes its television debut on the IFC tomorrow). "Yet I don't see a commensurate growth in the number of 'longitudinal documentaries' - ones like Hoop Dreams or Stevie or Barbara Kopple's American Dream (which Peter [Gilbert] shot) that track people's lives and stories over several years. For me, longitudinal docs are the most deeply satisfying form."

"The Malaysian filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad tells deeply personal and intensely humanistic stories based largely on her own experiences," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "For her fourth film, Mukhsin, she revisits the loving and liberal family of her previous features, continuing her portrait of one woman's journey from childhood through adolescence and marriage." More from Mary Block in the L Magazine.

"A strange, bitter sensibility was stirring in even [the Zellners'] goofiest of outings, and it is this sense of anti-pathos that blooms into full blown bittersweet misanthropy in Goliath," writes David Lowery in Hammer to Nail. "Their observant style calls to mind the old cinematographers' adage about lens lengths: what's a tragedy in close-up becomes comedy in a wide shot. Suffice to say, this is a film with a lot of wide shots."

Fernando F Croce for Slant on American Teen: "The problem isn't so much with the subjects per se as it is with the film's insistently slick, reductive attempts to mold them into real-life counterparts to characters from some John Hughes comedy circa 1986."

In FilmInFocus: Kaleem Aftab on Spike Lee's passion for soccer.

"The critical consensus on [Scarlett] Johansson's voice is that it's flimsy and expressionless, and that it's buried deep beneath the record's cottony, somewhat synth-heavy production," writes Stephanie Zacharek, reviewing the new collection of Tom Waits covers, at Salon. "But I'm here to make a confession: I like Anywhere I Lay My Head, and if Johansson 'can't sing' - a claim that's debatable anyway - she is at the very least part of a long, proud tradition of actors who 'can't sing' and who have nonetheless made wonderful, or at least extremely enjoyable, records."

"At present she is knee-deep in preparation to play Condoleezza Rice in Oliver Stone's film W, about the Bush administration." Laura Barton interviews Thandie Newton. Also in the Guardian: Francesca Martin notes that Ben Whishaw is a very busy fellow.

Online listening tip. "Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese's excellent 1985 film After Hours - a significant portion of the movie's first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from 'Lies,' a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great LA-based radio artist who's gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet." Andrew Hearst has the monologue. Via Ed Champion.

Online viewing tips. "Trust Me, You're Going to Love This." Tim Lucas has some trailers for you.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

David D'Arcy; a few notes follow.

Why a heavy metal band in Baghdad? "Just look outside," says Faisal, the rhythm guitarist in Acrassicauda (the latin term for "black scorpion") as he points to bombed out streets where nobody's saying "mission accomplished" these days. Heavy Metal in Baghdad [site] tells us that there is only one metal band in Baghdad - or, at least, there was, before the band moved to Damascus. The band members are now in Turkey.

In Baghdad, where the members of the band approach the streets with all the comfort of entering a free-fire zone, this black scorpion - "the most dangerous spider in the desert," says the bassist, Faris - is just another endangered species.

They can't play gigs (with a few exceptions that we do see), they can't grow their hair long or even grow full beards for fear of being singled out as "American-ized" (don't underestimate how much these young guys are troubled by the restrictions on their personal appearance - what's a metal-head without hair?), they're denounced as Satan-worshippers (probably because someone heard the name Black Sabbath thrown around and then saw the goatees that they wear defiantly), and things are getting so bad, when we catch up with them in a Damascus basement at the end of the film, that their families are writing and warning them not to come back to Baghdad.

The screening of the film that I attended at the near-invisible Clearview theater on Broadway and 62d Street, just south of Lincoln Center, had an audience of about 30, and I'm sure that not all of them paid to get in. That's a shame, not just because yet another documentary seems to be going nowhere with its theatrical release, but because this film, which has been all up and down the festival circuit, deserves a broader audience for its walk into the lives of four would-be heavy metal musicians in country where you would think that nothing coming from their amplifiers could be as threatening as what they encounter when they walk out the door. Let's hope that it gets that audience on television, which seems to be its next stop.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad unfolds in the form of a video diary, directed by Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi, with deadpan narration from Moretti. We'll be seeing more of this approach, since it lends itself to gathering footage whenever it's available, and it's a cheap way to shoot. It's also a way that a journalist on a "legitimate" assignment can gather footage for a film, which is how this documentary began, with an article on the band by an MTV reporter, Gideon Yago, which ran in Vice magazine. Yago also shot crude video footage of the band and introduced us to their peculiar English, learned from films and metal songs, in which "fuck," "fucking" and "motherfucker" occur a few times in every sentence. Their stories are relentlessly grim, although far less grim than you'll find elsewhere in Iraq, so you're thankful for the unintentional humor. If you close your eyes, the four metalheads can sound like obscene versions of Adam Sandler in The Waterboy.

We enter the film in 2006, when the filmmakers Moretti and Alvi are in a Baghdad that's bristling with guns to visit the guys in Acrassicauda whom Yago filmed back in the "mission accomplished" days of 2003. They're about to play a gig, which has its own set of frustrations, not least of which is the intermittent electricity. (The band had been practicing using power from gas generators.)

As metal films go, this one has a special niche as testimony to the determination of four apolitical young men and the daily obstacles that they face before and after the US invasion. We see footage from 2002 of an official performance at a nightclub belonging to Saddam's son Uday, for which Acrassicauda was required to sing a song in support of the dictator, which they agree to do, rather than be punished - "following our leader, Saddam Hussein, we will make them fall, we will drive them insane." The lyrics are in English, of course. Better for the enemy to be made aware of his fate? Faris says in 2006 that "it's just a bunch of fucking lies and shit." Worse compromises were made during Saddam's tenure. Metal was already under suspicion in 2002, Faris notes in a twangy Englsih, because head-banging was thought to resemble the nodding motion that Jews make while praying. Heavy Metal as a Zionist plot? No surprise. Saddam blamed everything else on Israel. If being accused of "Fifth Column Zionist" spying weren't bad enough, before and after the US toppled Saddam, the beards were a red flag for the thought police.

In metal, as everywhere else, it takes more than a beard to make music. Musically, this is not a band that is ever going to revolutionize the metal universe. Most of the musicians are competent, except for the guitarist Tony, who plays wild licks over the crude rhythm section with quiet composure - quiet, in part, because he can't speak English as well as the others. While derivative, Acrassicauda does play original songs, with lyrics in English. But this is not really a film about music.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad is also not the warm-hearted chronicle of a band's lasting influence and economic failure that we see in the recent profile of the Canadian band Anvil. It's sadder. The Baghdad boys barely have the chance to practice, either in their home town, or in Damascus, where they work for slave wages and end up in basement rooms in suburban apartment blocks that look a lot like bunkers. Nor is this doc anything like Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, in which the multi-millionaire metal princes sit through anguished sessions with a tender soul of a therapist who seems to be modeled on Mr Rogers. Those are the kinds of problems that Acrassicauda would love to have.

"You got the troops and you got the terrorists outside, and we got stuck in the middle," says one of the band members when Moretti and Alvi visit them in Baghdad in 2006. "I'm like, fuck this democracy," says another. It's not an unusual reaction from any young man anywhere who, at this stage in his life, might be expected to hate everything. But these are secular young Iraqis, educated kids from the urban middle class. We never hear whether they are Shiite or Sunni. They don't say anything nasty about America or Israel. They come from the population that George W Bush wanted to save. These were the guys who were supposed to rebuild the kind of Iraq that the United States sought as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. They are now poster boys for the failure of that gambit.

You barely see an American soldier in Heavy Metal in Baghdad. In a better world, in which Americans and Iraqis actually made an effort to learn about each other's cultures, and circumstances were such that they didn't have to risk their lives to do so, Acrassicauda would have fans among the US soldiers. Remember Stuart Wilf, the guitarist in Gunner Palace? Here they don't risk being seen with Americans and being used for target practice as a consequence.

What you feel in this documentary is the separation of these four would-be metal stars from almost anyone but themselves. Eventually they end up in Damascus, having traveled there by bus for 18 hours. On the way, we're told, they were terrified of being robbed or worse, having seen entire busloads of fleeing Iraqis on the side of the road, who have lost everything to bandits, even their clothes. The boys say that they were robbed once already, by the organizers of the extortionately expensive bus trips through the desert. Once in Syria, where the Arab solidarity of official rhetoric is nowhere to be found, they work for the lowest wages, seven days a week, at whatever jobs they can find. Now, according to the film's website, they're in Turkey, still struggling.

Sound familiar? The metal-heads run into some of the same problems leaving Iraq as Latin Americans encounter as they try to enter the US - exploitation by traffickers, the fear of being gunned down in transit, and poverty wages if they even find jobs in their new home. The difference is that it is even harder for young men like the four members of Acrassicauda to get visas to enter the US than it is for Mexicans or Guatemalans. Fewer than 500 Iraqis have gotten visas since the war began.

So we've turned Iraq into an even more desperate dependent version of Latin America. What's next? Turning part of Latin American into another Iraq? Keep your eyes on Venezuela.

Also keep your eyes on Operation Filmmaker, a documentary by Nina Davenport on a survivor of the US invasion who decides that his way out of the deadly chaos there is through film, in Prague. As in Heavy Metal, collateral damage meets unintended consequences. It opens June 4.

-David D'Arcy

"Viewing an unwieldy topic through a narrow prism almost always yields greater insights than a sprawling overview, and prisms don't get much narrower than the slant of Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi's arresting doc," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. Heavy Metal in Baghdad "reclaims metal's appeal to the powerless as well as its threat = when you can get shot for wearing a Slipknot T-shirt (talk about 'Death, be not proud') or speaking the English you learned off Master of Puppets, raising those devil horns isn't an empty act of aggression."

""The filmmakers evidence a clear affection for the guys in Acrassicauda, a big-hearted and charming bunch who just want to play in peace," writes Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com. "In a particularly poignant moment, Moretti and Alvi manage to put together (after enough planning and security to organize a small war) an Acrassicauda concert for a few diehard loyalists. Though truncated, it's a few minutes of cathartic thrash bliss, pushing back the soul-crushing chaos of the streets outside.... In its later sections, Heavy Metal becomes a trickier sort of film to behold."

"Both a stirring testament to the plight of cultural expression in Baghdad and a striking report on the refugee scene in Syria, this rock-doc like no other electrifies its genre and redefines headbanging as an act of hard-core courage," writes Nathan Lee.

Also in the New York Times, Melena Ryzik talks with filmmakers and the band Says Moretti: "'It was life-changing, nothing short of.' In addition to helping the band, he said, 'the big ambition is to get people to change the discourse on the war a little bit, to get people started talking about, wanting to know about, the Iraqi refugee situation.'"

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

Savage Grace.

"Sizzling hot, swimming in high falutin' European locales and barely articulating thriller beats that intrigue and puzzle without doing much thrilling, I can't quite shake Tom Kalin's bizarro feature Savage Grace," writes Brandon Harris. "His first in 15 years, the long awaited follow up to his 1992 New Queer Cinema opening salvo Swoon, Savage Grace stays with you and is nothing if not unsettling (and watchable), but that doesn't mean its any good."

Writing in the Voice, Jim Ridley finds the film to be "a tawdry nighttime soap that marvels without insight at its characters' despicable behavior: It squanders a major performance by [Julianne] Moore."

Updated through 5/31.

"It's no coincidence that Savage Grace, which begins on the Upper East Side in 1946 and ends in Swinging London in 1972, announces every stop in its path with intertitles in the same typeface used by the New Yorker — that rag and this flick share a similarly gelid air of faux intellectualism and leisure-class entitlement," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

"Howard A Rodman's script has a lot of juice, and the rhythms are so pregnant that the air vibrates with something, even if you're not sure what," writes David Edelstein in New York.

Steve Dollar talks with Kalin for the New York Sun.

Scott Tobias talks with Moore for the AV Club.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes 07 and Sundance.

Update: "Distanced, opaque, and criminally lurid, Kalin's new film dares you to look beneath its prurient exterior: instead of a beating heart, you'll find a rotting hole," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "As in Swoon, these people are unknowable, here their lives an empty parade of glossy misery; nothing particularly new about that, but the defiance of the technique makes for fascinatingly disagreeable viewing."

Updates, 5/29: "Is Julianne Moore the queen of fraudulent gay cinema?" asks Armond White in the New York Press.

"Julianne Moore is some kind of great in Savage Grace, but the film? Not so much." Nick Schager in Cinematical.

Andrew O'Hehir talks with Moore for Salon.

"Savage Grace should have the force of Greek tragedy, but Kalin's chamber drama feels curiously stifling and flat, and Moore's volatile turn isn't enough to quicken its pulse," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Updates, 5/30: "There is a degree of pleasure to be found in watching a slow-moving spectacle of privileged decadence," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But your interest in the decline of the Baekelands as they wander down the path from sarcasm and social posturing to abandonment, incest and murder never rises above the level of prurience.... Bisexuality! Marijuana! Anal sex! A father who sleeps with his son's girlfriend! A son who sleeps with his mother's boyfriend! All of great intrinsic interest, to be sure, but Savage Grace doesn't seem quite sure of how to communicate its own fascination with such doings, whether to convey shock, envy, pity or bemusement."

"Were it not based in fact, the film could be derided as sensationalist pulp," writes Meghan Keane in the New York Sun. "As it stands, scenes degrading the film's star (including one particularly scarring sex scene) border on the abusive. But despite, or perhaps on account of, the indignities of her character, Ms Moore takes off running with the role."

Updates, 5/31: Peter Knegt profiles Kalin at indieWIRE.

"Eddie Redmayne, primarily known for his work on the British stage, plays Moore's sexually conflicted son Tony; he proves himself to be equally pale, wan and extraordinarily good looking as his famous on-screen mother - no small feat," writes Marcy Dermansky. "While both actors are a sumptuous treat to look at, as are many of the European locations, Savage Grace seems valuable more for its camp value than for its emotional truths."

Sex and the City - and Summer 08.

Previous entries on this summer's movies and the season in general: Iron Man, Speed Racer, Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

"[T]hough Sex and the City is every bit as busy as its HBO progenitor was, it's virtually plotless, not to mention pointless," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice, where Lynn Yaeger's got seven open questions for writer-director-producer Michael Patrick King.

"It's hard to feel halfway about these women and their unabashed materialism, overprivilege, and self-indulgence, their overdependence on and objectification of men," writes David Edelstein in New York. "But what a hoot it is to see babes, for once, doing the objectifying - and talking dirty and sleeping around and measuring their fantasies against the sobering truth of male emotional insufficiency. If the core friendship of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte is the biggest fantasy of all - they complement one another perfectly; they're never too competitive - it's a moving design for living: existential haute couture."

Updated through 6/1.

Both Edelstein and the New Yorker's David Denby catch up with Indy 4, while at Stream, Eric Kohn talks with Eric Zala about the already-legendary Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.

"Prince Caspian is all shallow iconography: a parade of portentous images just nondescript enough to have Narnia newbies like myself wondering what exactly the big deal is," writes Matt Connolly in Reverse Shot.

Back to the movie at hand: Alonso Duralde assures fans that "if you'd been looking forward to a Sex and the City movie but were carrying the slightest doubt that the feature film would deviate from the show's formula even a little, have no fear. And have another cosmo."

Amie Simon caught it last night and posts impressions on the Siffblog: "I liken the experience to seeing Snakes on a Plane, only instead of beer-fueled men yelling 'motherf**king snakes' every 5 minutes, it was cosmo-fueled women swooning, sighing, giggling uncontrollably, emitting shocked 'ohmygods' and oohing/ahhing over the parade of gowns, shoes and bags."

"I remember the moment when, as a senior in college, I decided that I could no longer in good conscience watch Sex and the City," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog. "It was, I think, the premiere of the first season to air after 9/11, and there was a scene where Carrie announced that she was going to help rebuild downtown by going shopping."

At Movie City News, Noah Forrest has a lot to say about his love-hate relationship with the series.

Blogging for the New York Times, Sewell Chan notes that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not at all happy that his scene has been left on the cutting room floor.

Earlier: "Sex and the City in... London?"

Updates, 5/29: So there's the cover of this week's New York Press. Pretty much sums it up, but if you're in for more: Armond White. Also: the summer's "Film Events."

"At its best - which admittedly was never a sure thing - Sex and the City was post-feminist Edith Wharton, a tour of the status anxiety of smart young women who could no longer count on a WASP hierarchy or a college admissions dean to preselect suitable mates," writes City Journal contributing editor Kay S Hymowitz. "The writers were forever undercutting the characters' illusions about their liberated lives; in the end, these high-achieving, independent thirtysomethings - even the ever-horny Samantha - were mostly in search of men worthy of their fabulous selves."

"Sex and the City was preferable on television, negating race on Sunday nights in much the same way as the superior Friends did on must-see Thursdays," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "On the movie screen, King's desperate attempt at 'racial balance' pathetically backfires but at least proves useful in putting the show's inherently materialistic and borderline-supremacist ethos into sharper focus."

"Under the levity, there's a core seriousness about presenting these women's lives, one emphasized by the willingness of Sex and the City to grow and mature along with its characters," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle.

By the way, notes Emily Anthes, citing research in Slate, "It's the country, rather than the city, where more of the sex is."

"In his wrapup to the half-hour groundbreaker of a sitcom that began on HBO a full ten years ago, writer/director Michael Patrick King takes about two or three season finales' worth of tears and OMG jawdroppers and whacks them together into a big, sloppy, gooey sundae of a film that is, for better or for worse, just like the show... only longer," writes Chris Barsanti at PopMatters.

Julia Turner in Slate on what - and who - they're wearing: "[T]here are fewer vintage pieces, fewer off-kilter touches, and the movie, with its emphasis on big-name designers, seems to ignore what the show got right about clothes: that dressing up is a way to invent different versions of yourself."

"[T]he film arrives shrouded in such a fog of expectation, preconception, anticipation and (now with more post-Hillary bite!) gender bias that it's hard to see - or write about - the movie for the trees," observes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Which is too bad, because Michael Patrick King... has done some brave, surprising things with it, mining territory that's been all but abandoned by Hollywood. It's hard, in fact, to think of any other recent examples of movies that explore the complicated emotional lives of characters comically without stooping to adolescent silliness or that are willing to go to such dark places while remaining a comedy in the Shakespearean sense - all's well that ends well."

"By Sunday, if the early buzz translates into huge ticket sales, Hollywood may have to consider a new truism: there's instant girl power at the movies," notes Time's Richard Corliss. "SATC spends too much time dawdling, but at the end it boils its theme down to 12 words. An estranged couple once communicated by reading love letters from famous people. Now, the longtime stud sends this email to his wounded partner: 'I know I screwed it up, but I will love you forever.'"

"It's been a nasty couple of weeks for New York's writing women, both real and imaginary," writes Rebecca Traister in Salon:

What provokes such fury, over Carrie Bradshaw, and - for a flash - over [Emily] Gould (barring a book deal and TV show that will turn her meanderings into cultural furniture) is that in a media landscape in which there are a severely limited number of spaces for women's writing voices, the ones that get tapped become necessarily, and deeply inaccurately, emblematic - of their gender, their generation, their profession. More annoying - and twisted - is that those meager spots for women are consistently filled by those willing to expose themselves, visually and emotionally. And not accidentally, by those willing to expose themselves in a way that is comfortable, and often alluring, to many of the men who control the media, and to many of the women who consume it.

Updates, 5/30: "A little Botox goes a long way in Sex and the City, but a little decent writing would have gone even further." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "The froufrou and the lunches are back, as are, kind of, Carrie's three girlfriends, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), all tricked out with their customary accessories (men, children, handbags)," and the movie "is the pits, a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow - and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong - addendum to a show that had, over the years, evolved and expanded in surprising ways."

Also, Timothy Williams and Annie Correal talk to fans in neighborhoods "that have about as much in common with the glimmering, candy-coated Manolo Blahnik world of Sex and the City as, say, East Texas."

"Looking back on the series, and on the way it could so often be both breezy and sharp, I can see it more clearly as a grandchild of the jazz age, a cocktail laced with the spirit of Anita Loos," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. But the movie is "a fat, misshapen valise that's a betrayal of the trim, elegant lines of the original show."

"The show's values are reprehensible, its view of gender relations cartoonish, its puns execrable," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "I honestly believe, as I wrote when the series finale aired in 2005, that Sex and the City is singlehandedly responsible for a measurable uptick in the number of materialistic twits in New York City and perhaps the world. And yet... and yet..."

"This is a movie so unbelievably girly, whirly and twirly that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like reading three Andy McNabs back to back, just to get my testosterone back up to metrosexual level," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It is all very trivial and disposable, and yet for all its contrivances, its brand-name silliness and its amplified problems afflicting the comfortably-off metropolitan classes, I can't help thinking this is still a cut above the sinister romcom slush that we are fed, week in, week out."

"What with one thing and another, dramatic developments cause the four women to join one another at a luxurious Mexican resort, where two scenes take place that left me polishing my pencils to write this review." And... I'll let Roger Ebert take it from there.

Ann Hornaday notes that "it slyly winks at its own ambiguous cultural impact, having spawned the decidedly dubious phenomenon of young women traveling in loud, high-heeled packs, trying way too hard to be just like the show's chic, sexually adventurous characters." Also in the Washington Post, Robin Givhan profiles costume designer Patricia Field.

"I'm not against product placement per se, but even the best-written heart-to-heart scene can only be undermined when you can tell it's choreographed to show everything from Pret a Manger sarnies to Manolo bloody Blahniks in the most flattering light," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "The film could have been witty about this, but its tone of gormless materialism remains as unironic as it is unwavering."

"You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

"King knows how to write smart one-liners and throwaway gags, but too often the film screeches to a standstill as it pimps more merchandise - one fashion-show sequence features Carrie breathily reciting a list of couture names that seems to last longer than the catalogue of ships in the Iliad," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

"In the end, the film functions more as a super-sized television episode than a fully fleshed-out movie, but it succeeds in ratcheting up all the series' best defining features," writes Genevieve Koski at the AV Club.

Tom Leonard talks with Cattrall for the Telegraph.

"The three biggest summer movies of the year, all more or less done at the box office before summer even arrives. So the question becomes: Now what?" S James Snyder previews the rest of the season for the New York Sun.

"Helena Andrews at The Root (spoiler alert) has a great piece on the hackneyed 'best black friend' character played by Jennifer Hudson of Dreamgirls fame," notes Dana Goldstein at the American Prospect.

Updates, 5/31: For VF Daily, Kate Ahlborn and Louisine Frelinghuysen list the products placed in Sex and the City. It's a long list.

"If Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull functions on the purest level as a nostalgia machine - a reminder of celluloid's dominance as the twentieth-century's most popular art form, of Spielberg's position at Hollywood's mountaintop, of film's very intrinsic pleasures - then it's also just as much an attempted confirmation of Harrison Ford's continued vitality," writes Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot.

Erinn Bucklan, Meghan O'Rourke, Dana Stevens and June Thomas discuss Sex and the City at Slate. Warning: "There are REALLY BIG SPOILERS ahead. GIGANTIC, ENORMOUS SPOILERS right in the VERY FIRST LINES. Read at your own risk."

Updates, 6/1: "The programme raised the bar or pushed the envelope of sexual frankness in American discourse and is a milestone in the journey from the typical Hollywood woman's movie to the chickflick, though it managed to retain the adolescent dream of slipping a foot into a glass slipper while banging a beautifully coiffed head against the glass ceiling," writes Philip French in the Observer. As for the movie: "What we never see is anyone working, responding to public events or expressing a view about anything except love, sex, money and clothes. The casting of Candice Bergen as Carrie's editor at Vogue reminds us of her screen debut as the intellectual Chicagoan Lakey in the 1966 film of Mary McCarthy's The Group and of a more serious time when women could be seen in a historical context. Everyone is fabulously wealthy, no one looks at the prices on menus or questions the cost of anything."

"[T]he fashion is jaw-droppingly fantastic." An assessment from Eric Wilson in the NYT.

The 60s, Godard.

Previous entries in an evolving thread: 1, 2 and 3.

"If The Little Soldier was something of a lost and rudely treated film, it bears attention as a thematic precursor to [Jean-Luc Godard's] genuinely anarchic Week-End," writes Roderick Heath. "Like all of Godard's films, there is lying at its core an infuriating conflict—the conflict between intellectual discourse and cinematic sensuality."

"Contrary to prevailing opinion, political films do not begin with Sergei Eisenstein and end with Ken Loach, and it is greatly unfair if not highly delusional to banish all political work of the arts to the doldrums," blogs Daniel Tapper from All Power to the Imagination: 1968 and Its Legacies. "Perhaps a sobering antidote to the reductionist opinions of such pseudo post-modernists would be the documentary Palms by Artur Aristakisyan."

Updated through 6/3.

"As if dared to articulate genre in the fewest shots and with the fewest possible tropes, Godard casually establishes in a matter of seconds that Alphaville is both a work of noir and of science fiction (as if conjoining the two was the most natural thing in the world)," blogs Reverse Shot's eshman.

Also: "Scorsese's on record as labeling Contempt as one of the best movies about moviemaking going, and it is that," writes clarencecarter. "But though the film's very first shot turns the/a camera literally on the audience, what's really at stake here is not movies, but romantic love. Or, more specifically: the idea of romantic love as it has been mediated by the complicity between audiences and the motion picture industry."

Nick Pinkerton in the Voice on Vivre sa Vie: "Star Anna Karina was in the brutal early rounds of marriage to her director, who was never more doting and egghead-condescending than in this showpiece."

Back to Reverse Shot and eshman, this time on Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One): "[A]nyone actually paying attention to what he'd been doing up to and during the period can't have expected a sober, unproblematized documentary recording. Furthermore, this was 1968, and there was simply too much going on outside to spend an entire film stuck inside a recording studio."

Godard's 60s runs at Film Forum in New York through June 5.

Updates, 5/29: "There are many strands to the annus mirabilis of 1968 - the Prague Spring, the Paris barricades, Flower Power - but all involved an uprising against a stifling postwar order," writes Roger Cohen in the New York Times. "In what the author Paul Berman has called 'an incoherent fraternity,' idealism provided what coherence there was.... It's not true that everything changes so that everything can stay the same. Not much emerged unchanged from 1968, even if protest never became revolution."

"Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou is a road movie, but one in which the characters move, not through any physical geography, but across the well-traveled terrain of Godard's own cinematic corpus, revisiting key themes and familiar scenarios from the nine feature films that Godard made in the five years preceding Pierrot." Ed Howard.

Updates, 5/30: David Fear in Time Out New York on Vivre sa Vie: "Most of the ingredients of his early period are present: pulp-fiction posturing, quotes from poets and philosophers, puckish formal innovations. The manner in which these elements are presented, however, is the first step toward the cohesive blend of intellectual savviness and emotional resonance Godard would perfect down the road."

Ronald Bergan channels Truffaut.

Updates, 5/31: For the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Rebecca Casati visits the set of Stefan Krohmer's Dutschke, a docudrama about German activist Rudi Dutschke.

"Even though Vivre sa vie may leave its heroine, Nana (Anna Karina), used and dead, crumpled in a heap in the streets, on the heels of forcing her into prostitution, it still may be an even more fitting filmic tribute to the actress behind the role's beauty than the lighter, more palatable A Woman Is a Woman or Band of Outsiders," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot.

Update, 6/1: In Artforum's new film section, Andrew Hultkrans reviews Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard: "What lingers is the realization that Godard, the ultimate auteur, whose oblique cinematic experiments pushed the medium forward and seemed aggressively, at times perversely, sui generis, is far more a receiver and conductor than a generator - a deeply, often insecurely impressionable man who allowed the women and political currents in his life to inspire and guide his every artistic move."

Updates, 6/3: At Cinematical, Christopher Campbell comments on Godard's decision to back out of attending the Tel-Aviv International Student Film Festival.

"Because 1968 was such a tumultuous moment there are a lot of 40th anniversaries this year," writes Time's Richard Lacayo. "The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the May uprisings in France, the street battles at the Democratic Convention in Chicago - all of it four decades ago. But I didn't want one other milestone to go by unremarked. It was 40 years ago today that Valerie Solanas walked into the Factory, the Andy Warhol studio in Manhattan, pulled out a gun and shot him." Related: Tom Sutpen.

Sundance Institute @ BAM.

"Now in its third year, the Brooklyn Academy of Music packages up some highlights from the 2008 [Sundance] festival, including 22 features (some still lacking distribution) and 36 shorts, plus live concerts, art installations, and miscellaneous diversions," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "As is the growing trend at festivals, the Sundance documentaries tend to be more potent than the narrative features overall, but who can tell the difference between the two these days?"

Updated through 6/4.

Dan Sallitt recommends Ballast: "The proof of [Lance] Hammer's artistic intuition is that he hinges the story's climax on a magical event that only a committed realist could get away with; the proof of his artistic commitment is that he lets the film's bleak setting and ominous imagery have their way with the potentially heartwarming ending."

Tomorrow through June 8.

Earlier: S James Snyder in the New York Sun.

Updates, 5/31: "Anvil! revolves around a band that, in all probability, will forever fail to attain Metallica or Megadeth-levels of popularity," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "But if fame and fortune elude them, their abiding, unadulterated love of shredding guitars, thunderous drums and growling vocals nonetheless exemplifies something just as vital: the fast, brutal, never-say-die essence of metal."

"[I]f American Teen doesn't at least get nominated for Best Documentary come Oscar time, then folks at the Academy should seriously re-think what, exactly, makes a film one of the best of the year," argues Erik Davis at Cinematical.

Reeler ST VanAirsdale talks with John Magary about The Second Line, screening tomorrow.

"Terry Gilliam captured slash-and-burn counterculture daredevil Hunter S Thompson in his first-rate film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but little of the vehement political creature was evident," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "It's this often overlooked side that makes Alex Gibney's Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson both an absorbing documentary and an apt follow-up to Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side."

Update, 6/3: "[T]he short films that screened yesterday... signified the most important aspect of the two-week event," argues Eric Kohn at Cinematical. "With few exceptions, the films on display received the kind of exposure that helped validate this frequently neglected format. While some of the titles are available on iTunes, many that were shown to a packed house finally got the long-delayed reception they deserved."

Update, 6/4: For the Vulture, Bilge Ebiri talks with Stacy Peralta about Made in America.

Israel @ 60, the series.

"Israeli cinema has enjoyed a banner year in 2008," writes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun. "In addition to the war drama Beaufort scoring an Academy Award nomination, The Band's Visit, Jellyfish and My Father My Lord have all made relatively successful commercial runs in the city. One would be hard-pressed to name another country with this many cinematic exports to America in the same six-month span. As various institutions around the city honor Israel's 60th anniversary, it's only fitting that the Film Society of Lincoln Center should recognize the nation's thriving film industry with a look back at some of its greatest achievements (such as Dover Koshashvili's Late Marriage, Radu Mihaileanu's Live and Become and Giddi Dar's Ushpizin) with its weeklong Israel @ 60 series, beginning today."

Dan Sallitt recommends Late Marriage and Keren Yedaya's "daringly stylized" Or (My Treasure): "To my mind, these are the two finest films that Israel has produced."

Through June 5.

Earlier: "Israel @ 60."

Ian Fleming @ 100.

"It's the big day: the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ian Fleming," announces Janet Maslin in the New York Times. "Without Fleming, who died in 1964 at 56, we would never have had the debonair company of James Bond, the creative sadism of Goldfinger and Dr No or the pet octopus named Octopussy. Without the benefit of Fleming, however, we've had Octopussy as a cinematic Bond Girl in 1983, part of a movie franchise that is miraculously resuscitated (most recently by Daniel Craig as Bond in Casino Royale) each time it falters, and a string of ersatz Bond books by fill-in writers. To this shaky bibliography we can now add Devil May Care."

Updated through 6/1.

But let's back up a moment: "A number of new books have been timed to the centenary... and London's Imperial War Museum is staging an exhibition, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, which explores the numerous connections between Bond and the author's real-life experiences, particularly those that occurred during his service with British Naval Intelligence in World War II," writes Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times:

All the Bond books - 12 novels and two collections of short stories - were written over a dozen years, beginning when Fleming was 44, and all were composed during his annual three-month sojourn at his beloved retreat on the Jamaican coast, Goldeneye. (The name was borrowed from a particularly ingenious intelligence operation Fleming conceived during the war.) There, each day, the author rose early, went for a swim in the cove below his home, then went to work on a portable Remington typewriter for three hours. Cocktails and lunch were served on the terrace with its spectacular views, followed by an hour more of work and the completion of each day's quota: 2000 words. The rest of the day and evening were spent in the glittering company of friends - Noel Coward, first among them, but also W Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Eden and a "Who's Who" of British literature and politics....

Coming to Fleming's utterly masterful Bond novels fresh after many years, one is surprised to find just how tough-minded and extraordinarily well written they are. (It's easy to see why John F Kennedy so admired them, a taste that was instrumental in winning Bond's first American audience.) Fleming was a taut and propulsive stylist with a deep gift for characterization. Perhaps because we now see Bond through the gauzy scrim of affable, slightly preposterous films with inevitable political and sexual happy endings, it's easy to forget that the Bond of Fleming's books was, in many cases, an unlovely character, often described as "cruel," his relations with women often aggressive and forthrightly exploitative.

That brings us to the latest in a long series of Bond novels by Fleming impersonators sanctioned by his estate. (The first, Colonel Sun, actually was written by Kingsley Amis under the pseudonym Robert Markham.) Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks is the 22nd such book and, though competently enough constructed, belongs more to the cinematic Bond tradition than to the one Fleming tapped out on his Remington.

The London Times runs an extract from Devil May Care, while Peter Kemp interviews Faulks.

Joseph Connolly collects first editions: "The jacket is all-important. That of Casino Royale is legendarily rare, and five years ago one fetched more than £13,000 at auction; that's just the jacket - there was no accompanying book. Caveat emptor, however: in the jargon of the book-collecting world, this was a 'first state' jacket."

Also in the Telegraph:

• Faulks on writing Devil May Care.

• Sam Leith's review: "He unrolls everything you want from Bond, thereafter, more or less by the numbers: a violent pre-credit sequence; a visit to M and a flirtatious exchange with Moneypenny; capture while snooping in the hangar holding the secret weapon; transportation to the Secret Base, where there is a monorail; having the villain confess his plans; then thwarting said plans."

• The "Ian Fleming map of Britain."

• Online browsing: Damien Noonan scours the web for the best 007 links."

• Online viewing: Making Quantum of Solace.

The Guardian challenges its readers: "give us the outline for a new, updated James Bond plot - but keep it snappy: 70 words max." Also: Charlie Higson's "top 10 Bond villains," a quiz, and John Grace takes note of the other authors that have preceded Faulks but followed Fleming: "Between 1981 and 1996, John Gardner wrote 14 Bond novels - equalling Fleming's output - and when he retired, the American, Raymond Benson, knocked out a further 12."

"[T]he Bond stories are catalysed by conflicts between individualism and authority, loyalty and betrayal, heterosexual desire and misogyny, and luxury and sacrifice, to name just the most overt, and the most enduring, of the themes," writes Sarah Churchwell. "But sex, snobbery, and sadism remain the bedrock of the Bond mystique." Also in the Independent: Faulks and Fleming, side by side.

Earlier: Penguin covers Bond; John F Burns (NYT) and Charlie Higson (Guardian) on the London exhibition; Joan Collins (Telegraph) on not being a Bond girl.

Update, 5/29: "Much of the nihilism and fatalism of the latter Bond books reflect Fleming's own failing health and confrontation with mortality," writes Jeffrey Hill at Edward Copeland on Film. "But the novels were also a conduit for Fleming to dwell on any matter that interested him. Cars, cards and gambling, food, drink and women... but also crime. After reading Fleming's travelogue that he wrote late in his life, Thrilling Cities, it becomes clear just how fascinated he was with gangsters and mob wars."

Update, 5/31: "Devil May Care is in many ways a stronger novel than any that Fleming wrote, both because it's better written and because it has all the Bond lore to draw upon," writes Charles McGrath in the NYT. "It's a satisfying thriller in its own right, set in the early 60s and beginning in Paris - very satisfactorily - with a man getting his tongue pulled out with pliers, then traveling to Iran and Russia. But it's also a fond and at times funny homage to all the other books in the series."

Updates, 6/1: "Faulks has indeed produced 295 pages, unfalteringly, as though he were Ian Fleming," writes ASH Smith at Stop Smiling. "Their styles are indistinguishable. What's more, Devil May Care is a good thriller on its own merits: a doubly masterful achievement."

More from Euan Ferguson in the Observer: "It's good. Which is to say it's better than it could have been. It is not, however, that good."

Shorts, 5/27.

"I've seen 2001 well in excess of 100 times (it is, without peer, the greatest motion picture ever made), in formats as disparate as 70mm, laser disk, VHS, broadcast TV, DVD and even the awful, scratched, discolored 35mm print, complete with a missed reel change, at Tribeca." Jamie Stuart in Stream on how "different formats play 2001 differently, as is true of all films."

David Bordwell presents "a tribute to cuts I admire. Warning: Superb as Eisenstein's, Ozu's and Hitchcock's cuts are, I'm deliberately leaving them out. Too obvious!"

"To my eye, the stylistic verve of directors like Welles, Wyler, Preminger, Hitchcock, Stevens and Ophuls - and Negulesco - relied on an aesthetics of exaggeration," writes Chris Cagle. "This exaggeration supplemented the invisible storytelling yet did not become outright expressionism."

Elizabeth Day introduces a conversation with Christina Crawford:

It was the first tell-all celebrity memoir, the first book to talk so openly or with such clarity about a childhood allegedly punctuated by psychological and physical abuse. It caused a sensation, left an indelible imprint on the cultural consciousness and stayed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 42 weeks. In the years that followed the children of Bette Davis and Bing Crosby wrote similarly excoriating parental memoirs, and the 1981 film adaptation starring Faye Dunaway became a cult hit. Joan Crawford's reputation took a battering so ferocious that it has never fully recovered....

Now, 30 years after publishing Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford is reissuing the book with a new introduction and afterword, supporting testimonies from contemporaries and more than 100 pages and photographs that were cut from the 1978 edition.

Also in the Observer:

• "The book-length interview with a film-maker is now an established form, and the most important series in English is the one started by Faber 20 years ago with Scorsese on Scorsese," writes Philip French. "Now comes Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, the 24th book of the series, and it is one of the longest and best of its kind."

• Roy Williams: "When I think back over the countless number of war films I have seen, and knowing what I know now - that there were black soldiers killed on the beaches of Normandy, there were West Indians serving in the RAF during the war (my own father included) - I have to ask myself, why aren't their stories on the big screen, whereas a tale about the white men who hoisted that flag on Iwo Jima is? Will black people's lives ever be as interesting as white people's?"

• Rafael Behr reviews Standard Operating Procedure, the book.

• A quick Q&A with Malcolm McDowell.

"Gianni Amelio will shoot a French-language adaptation of Albert Camus's autobiographical last novel The First Man with Claudia Cardinale attached to star," reports Nick Vivarelli for Variety. Via Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical.

Shooting has just wrapped on The Road, John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel. Charles McGrath talks with Hillcoat, special effects director Mark Forker and with Viggo Mortensen, mostly about Kodi Smit-McPhee, "an 11-year-old Australian who plays the son and bowled everyone over when he tested for the part, greatly reducing the anxiety filmmakers feel when casting a child. Some of the crew privately referred to him as the Alien because of the uncanny, almost freakish way that on a moment's notice he switched accents and turned himself from a child into a movie star."

Also in the New York Times: "Steve James and Peter Gilbert, the director and cinematographer of the 1994 high school basketball documentary Hoop Dreams, are the co-directors of At the Death House Door, which they hope will renew debate about the death penalty," reports Felicia R Lee. "'It's the kind of film we gravitate to, letting one person's story tell you about a much bigger issue,' Mr Gilbert said in an interview."

In the Los Angeles Times, Gina Piccalo tells the remarkable story behind Blindsight; Susan King talks with Zev Yaroslavsky, "one of the leading activists in the international movement to free Soviet Jews, who, for many decades, were essentially prisoners in their own country" and who "talks about his experiences in the movement in Laura Bialis's new documentary, Refusenik." Also: a quick chat with Arthur Dong about Hollywood Chinese.

Acquarello: "In a way, Robert Todd's Rising Tide represents a continuation on the themes of obsolescence and disposability that runs through Our Former Glory and In Loving Memory, a reverent, quietly observed collage on the changing face of manual labor that, like Johan van der Keuken's Springtime: Three Portraits, captures a way of life that is slowly becoming extinct in the face of technology, globalism, and mass production."

Also: "Adapted from the novel by postwar author Aya Koda (the daughter of Meiji-era novelist Koda Rohan) and filmed in the same year as the banning of prostitution in Japan, Mikio Naruse's Flowing is something of a corollary to Kenji Mizoguchi's Street of Shame, a complex and richly textured panorama capturing a transforming way of life within a community of women whose increasingly uncertain livelihood depended on the patronage of men."

In the Guardian, Ronald Bergan remembers Joy Page and Laura Barnett talks with Ashley Walters.

For the New York Sun, Gabrielle Birkner meets Agnès Troublé (agnès b..

Tasha Robinson talks with Joan Cusack for the AV Club.

Gwynne Watkins lists the "5 Kinds of Twist Endings."

Online browsing tip. "New Yorkers pride themselves on celebrity-sighting nonchalance. But if we happen to spot Clive Owen and Julia Roberts loitering about - in this case, shooting Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy's new spy thriller, Duplicity - our blasé front may just fall away." Sara Cardace introduces a New York slide show.

Online listening tip. "Susan Batson has been called the 'Oscar coach.' She takes big Hollywood actors and makes them better." And she's a guest on On Point.

Online viewing tip. YAB 3.

The third season of Joe Swanberg's Young American Bodies debuts today at the IFC, partnering with Nerve.

If you're new to the series, you can catch up with the first two seasons right there, too; my, but it's been a while since this. At some point, too, I have to get around to praising Nights and Weekends like I should.

Update, 5/28: Chicagoist Ali Trachta interviews Joe.

Fests and events, 5/27.

"What makes a novel great are often those qualities unique to the form: the ability to portray someone's interior life, to move fluidly between past, present and future, to render the ordinary magical through language," writes Stephanie Merritt in the Observer. "None of this can't be done on screen, but it is rarely achieved with the same subtlety.... [N]ow the ICA in London is giving book and film lovers the chance to debate the issue with its The Booker at the Movies season. Every Sunday in June it will screen the film of a Booker-winning or shortlisted novel, accompanied by a panel discussion from eminent screenwriters and novelists."

"As people arrived from all over the world to attend the opening weekend of the Reykjavik Arts Festival and participate in Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson's Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, the mood resembled a summer camp - albeit one attended by Björk, who was on my flight from London, and the country's president, Olafur Ragnar Grímsson." Among the other attendees: Jonas Mekas and Brian Eno. Cathryn Drake writes a diary entry for Artforum. Through June 5.

"Filmmaker Naomi Kawase has unveiled plans to launch the Nara International Film Festival." Jason Gray reports.

"What's wonderful about the third annual Sundance Institute at BAM, which begins its 10-day program of selections from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, is that its titles have already been run through a few major filters," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "Only 22 features and 36 shorts will make the trip eastward for the event - still too much to absorb in a week and a half, but the filtration process ensures any ticket to the series is a safe bet." Thursday through June 8.

Frameline32 runs June 19 through 29 and Michael Hawley's got a big preview at the Evening Class, where Michael Guillén talks with Diana Lee Inosanto (The Sensei).

"Rare is the film which deals with pre-pubescent sexuality and even rarer that which does it well." Matt Riviera on Let the Right One In, slated for the Sydney Film Festival, running June 4 through 22.

At Slant, Fernando F Croce takes a long look back at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Other DVDs, 5/27.

The Film of the Month Club is rolling along quite nicely now, with several entries on the first selection, Kenzo Okuzaki Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On.

"[Dario] Argento, reached by phone in Rome, took a few minutes to talk about the five films collected in The Dario Argento Box Set." Geoff Boucher in the Los Angeles Times: "He said that he never worries that modern audiences and their love of special effects will make his older works feel dated. 'The things that scare us never change. It's in your heart, not in your eyes. The special effects can help, but the things that touch us in the heart are what really frightens us.'"

Gary Giddins reviews the Columbia collection, Icons of Adventure: "These films were frequently censored and reviled for their violence and sexuality, inciting revulsion in England, where they were made. Here they were the stuff of Saturday matinees - not family films, like The Thief of Bagdad, but fare for adolescent boys who could scarcely believe (I bear witness) the sadism, the colors, and the bosomy extras."

Michael Atkinson at the IFC on Tony Palmer's 1976 pop music chronicle, All You Need Is Love: "This is Ken Burns before Ken Burns (if not quite as polished as Baseball or Jazz), comprised of interviews and archival footage both common and rare (including footage of a singing Woody Guthrie, and a woeful Roxy Music performance that nonetheless affords a glimpse of a synthesizer-playing Brian Eno), and unfurling the whole story, from Scott Joplin to Earl Hines to Bessie Smith to Benny Goodman to Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Jethro Tull. Palmer's 14-hour-plus odyssey is filthy with progressional details."

"Aging and betrayal will throw a wrench into any criminal career," writes Guy Savage at Noir of the Week. "While aging is inevitable, loyalty amongst thieves and establishing a network of reliable friends are crucial elements for survival. Touchez pas au grisbi (AKA Hands Off the Loot) a 1954 flawless French film noir from director Jacques Becker confronts the issues of aging and loyalty head-on through the life of world-weary, middle-aged gangster Max (Jean Gabin) - a seasoned criminal and Existentialist protagonist who faces a crisis."

"Perhaps because of this neutral perspective, the effect of this documentary is all the more shocking and maddening." Kevin Kelly on No End in Sight.

"The biggest reason why now is a good time to revisit the Indiana Jones is not necessarily that the new set is anything so impressive," writes Chris Barsanti at PopMatters. "[T]he real reason is ultimately that the half-decade since the series first appeared on DVD have been particularly abominable for adventure cinema."

"The thing that struck me most deeply about Blade Runner upon seeing it for the first time on the big screen is its profound sense of loneliness." Andrew Bemis.

For Tom Hall, writing at Hammer to Nail, Teeth "is a case study for the triumph of balance, a darkly comic story that strikes a primal chord in the most private of places."

Online viewing tip. Matt Zoller Seitz offers more terrific running commentary, this time on The Outlaw Josey Wales, which he finds "richer" and "more expansive" than Unforgiven. See also Kevin Lee's accompanying file.

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

And the Guru.

Cannes. JCVD.

"Van Damme is back!" yelps Rob Nelson in Variety. "Combined with recent news that the Muscles from Brussels will soon turn auteur with Full Love, Gaumont's JCVD, a French-language meta-movie parody par excellence, constitutes the headiest stretch of the beefy star's career since, well, ever. Playing 'himself,' i.e., an international action stud whose bruising child custody battle has him literally going postal, exec-producing Jean-Claude Van Damme reveals heretofore hidden third dimension to his monosyllabic persona."

"If the goal with the self-reflective JCVD was to recreate the public image of aging action star Jean Claude Van Damme, then you may consider that mission a success," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "If the goal was to announce to the world that sophomore feature director Mabrouk El Mechri is a truly world class talent, then you may also consider that mission a success. If the goal was to skewer celebrity obsessed culture while laying out the toll it takes on those on the receiving end of the idol worship, then - yep - that's another one in the success column."

Earlier: A clip and Cinematical has the trailer.

Eclipse's Delirious Fictions of William Klein.

"Like a missing-link hominid stepping out of the jungle, famous photographer William Klein emerges on 21st century DVD as the great bullgoose Art Film-era satirist we never knew we had," writes Michael Atkinson for the IFC. "The movies in the new Criterion Eclipse set are a revelation (arguably, they're the most astute left-wing mockeries of their day), but more than that, they appear to be timeless, and their blitzkrieg critiques are just as pertinent now as they were then."

"If the French New Wave had a Frank Tashlin equivalent, it was William Klein," counters Eric Henderson in Slant. "Erratic and undisciplined, the three films collected in Eclipse's box set reflect the director trying as hard as he can to be French, but never quite shedding his background as an American blowhard."

"I was always interested to see some of the 'cool' French crowd involved (like Serge Gainsbourg, Jean Rochefort and Philippe Noiret)," notes DVD Beaver Gary W Tooze.

Earlier: "William Klein @ 80."

Come Drink With Me.

King Hu's 1966 martial arts spectacle Come Drink With Me "turned the genre away from the supernatural vagaries and clanging swordplay that had dominated it and moved the action into the relatively realistic, hand-to-hand combat and clean, well-defined spaces of the contemporary kung fu movie," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times.

"After taking the reins, in 1965, of a World War II drama called Sons of the Good Earth, Hu infused his sophomore directorial outing, Come Drink With Me, with a personal vision that was absent from much of Shaw's assembly-line filmmaking," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "He had studied Chinese history and design, and his attention to period detail in costumes, settings, and lighting were a marvel. From the rough-hewn, Ming Dynasty-era rural tavern in which the first half of the film primarily takes place, to the set-bound fairy-tale wonder world in which it climaxes, Come Drink With Me is a visual feast."

"The film soars on a lyrical mix of scruffy singing heroes, cross-dressing heroines, narcissistic villains and fantastical action choreographed like dance," writes Sean Axmaker at MSN.

"In a word - WOW," exclaims DVD Beaver Gary W Tooze.

Related: "There have been rumours before, but this time it appears that the godfather of all ageing media moguls, 100-year-old Sir Run Run Shaw, may finally be parting with the last piece of his Asian media empire," reports the Economist.

Criterion's Thief of Bagdad.

"[F]or all of its implication in its historical moment, The Thief of Bagdad plays - in the newly remastered DVD from the Criterion Collection - like a timeless fantasy, a pure and naïve expression of, as Sabu puts it in his famous curtain line, the search for 'some fun and adventure, at last!'" writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times.

"Re-watching The Thief of Bagdad... is not unlike rereading Treasure Island," suggests Gary Giddins in the New York Sun. "Conceived to enchant children, they both requite the adult longing for formative influences that withstand disillusionment and fashion. Unlike Treasure Island, an exemplary display of English prose and plotting, with one of the finest first sentences in fiction, The Thief of Bagdad (1940) occasionally sputters, losing tempo and continuity; yet it, too, survives as a model of its kind, reveling in cinematic craftsmanship - not least the then-novel techniques of color and trick photography - and boasts one of the most magisterial opening shots in cinema."

Updated through 5/30.

At MSN, Sean Axmaker notes that the disc features two commentary tracks, "one by film directors/fans Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, the other by film historian Bruce Eder."

"I gained an immense amount of appreciation for the film through this Criterion package and the purity of the transfer presentation added to the fantasy element and amusement of the film," writes DVD Beaver Gary W Tooze. "Really, like Martin Scorsese says, 'a child-like - not childish - film' of adventures and grandiose events. I predict this package will get some much deserved votes in our year-end poll."

"This new, restored transfer still has a few problems, but is head and shoulders above anything we've seen and will hopefully introduce the film to a whole new generation aching for some real magic, as opposed to the pre-fab, CGI variety that so dots our current filmic landscape," writes Jeffrey Kaufman at DVD Talk.

Updates, 5/28: "Most of the children of today know this story as Disney's Aladdin, but one of the crucial differences here is that a jive-talking genie isn't the main attraction; it's Sabu, which gives a young audience a much greater point of identification," writes Scott Tobias in the AV Club.

Update, 5/28: Glenn Kenny compares screenshots of the MGM and Criterion versions: "I have to call advantage: Criterion."

Update, 5/30: "The nine-year-old within you should be uncritically enraptured by Thief of Bagdad, a genre landmark that's retained its thousand and one delights," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

Sydney Pollack, 1934 - 2008.

Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like The Way We Were, Tootsie and Out of Africa were among the most successful of the 1970s and 80s, died Monday at home here. He was 73....

Mr Pollack's career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the filmmakers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system. Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.

Michael Cieply, New York Times.

Updated through 6/1.

I first noticed him in 1969, the year I transitioned from high school senior to college freshman, when he directed two of my favorite movies from that period: The under-rated Castle Keep and the still-potent They Shoot Horses, Don't They? He got terrific performances from ensemble casts in both films....

As for his work on the other side of the camera - well, I wish Pollack had received more props, and maybe an Oscar nomination or two, for his first-rate performances in Husbands and Wives, Eyes Wide Shut, Changing Lanes and Michael Clayton. I wish he'd had time to produce more excellent films like The Quiet American, Searching for Bobby Fischer, Flesh and Bone and Sense and Sensibility. Of course, I also wish he were still alive. He'll be missed.

Jeo Leydon.

As a filmmaker, Pollack had a reputation for being a painstaking craftsman - "relentless and meticulous," screenwriter and friend Robert Towne once said.

"His films have a lyrical quality like great music, and the timing is impeccable," cinematographer Owen Roizman, who shot five films directed by Pollack, including Tootsie and Havana, said when it was announced that Pollack would receive the 2006 American Society of Cinematographers Board of Governors Award for his contributions to filmmaking.

"He is never satisfied.... His passion is contagious. It inspires everyone around him to dig a little deeper," Roizman said.

George Clooney, who starred with Pollack in Michael Clayton, said: "Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better. A tip of the hat to a class act. He'll be missed terribly."

Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times.

Ray Pride, who interviewed Pollack in 2006, has collected "10 interviews and 3 trailers."

Updates: A "Times Topics" page.

Pollack wrote two entries in the Guardian's film blog last year, one on Sketches of Frank Gehry, the other on the photography of Paul Robinson.

"A tall, handsome, immediately charismatic man, he was a director most actors loved to work with, because when he talked to them about acting he knew what he was talking about," writes Roger Ebert. "'I am not a visual innovator,' Pollack told me shortly before the release of his Out of Africa (1985), which won seven Oscars, including best picture and best director, and was nominated for four more. 'I haven't broken any new ground in the form of a film. My strength is with actors. I think I'm good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.'"

"Like Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, Pollack brought the dramatic intensity of his days in the theater and TV to the fledgling revolution occuring in film," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "His style could best be summed up by the brilliant social commentary They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Set within a Depression era dance-a-thon, and featuring fiery performances by Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, and Oscar Winner Gig Young, Pollack uncovered the simmering unease of the era, perfectly reflecting the film's contemporary 1969 mirror message. His movies were like that - quiet and subtle, selling their conceits in perfectly modulated performances and expertly helmed scenes. And like his fellow filmmakers of the era, Pollack wasn't afraid to try."

"A wry worrier, he once said to me that the responsibility for directing big budget studio pictures had begun to weigh on him, making him tense and anxious; he directed only about a half-dozen films in his last 20 years," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "He became a much more prolific producer, with the pictures he made through his Mirage company tending to be smaller in scale, more eccentric, more personal than his studio pictures had been and he enjoyed godfathering them. The individuality that films like Birthday Girl and Forty Shades of Blue flung in the face of increasingly conventionalized studio production appealed to his romantic side; the business of bringing them in on time, on budget, appealed to his realistic side. Those were the poles of his sensibility."

"His death signals the end of a bridge between two Hollywood eras," writes the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "Or, at the very least, he was a holdout that movies could be - should be - now as they once were: serious, glamorous, feeling, intelligent, and, above all, respectful of their audiences.... Tootsie gets better every single time it turns up on cable. Just last month, I was in a video store that happened to be playing Tootsie, and damn if I didn't stand there completely hooked as if I'd never seen it before. It doesn't even matter that Dave Grusin's score still makes you feel like you're stuck in a mall elevator. The movie itself would have worked just as well in 1942 as it did in 1982. In 2022, it'll still feel as vibrant. Tootsie still works as a kind of feminist critique, watch it with a certain indefatigable presidential candidate in mind. Your brain will explode."

"In a way, Pollack the actor was the visual correlative of the Sidney Lumet worldview: tough, East Coast-direct, politically progressive, trusting the individual far more than the group," writes the Globe's Ty Burr. "[B]ecause he was a smart filmmaker and a good friend to the reigning powers of his day, it's movies like Tootsie, The Way We Were, Out of Africa and Three Days of the Condor that you think of when you think of the good movies of the 70s and 80s. Not necessarily the great movies, but the good ones: intelligent, committed, well-acted films with a sweep that flattered both their subjects and their audiences. Three Days is possibly the best of the conspiracy thrillers that studded the 1970s, the one most rooted in a realistic sense of one individual (Robert Redford as a low-level CIA librarian, standing in for you and me) peering over the abyss into the evil deeds our government can do."

"He was a bustling, vigorous presence right to the end," blogs the Guardian's Xan Brooks. "It's tempting to write off Pollack's later career, though even here he found a way to confound us. At the same time as his films were turning blandly anonymous (The Firm, Sabrina, The Interpreter), he discovered a vibrant sideline as a character actor."

"Like Alan J Pakula, he apotheosized the intelligent mainstream of Hollywood moviemaking," writes Glenn Kenny.

"When I think of Pollack, two things immediately come to mind: the sense, in his directing and acting, that it's possible to be mature and almost unshockable without being cynical or unfeeling; and that marvelously expressive voice," writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. "He had one of the great voices in movies. I'm really going to miss hearing it."

"Regarding The Way We Were: I think it's one of the best romantic dramas Hollywood ever produced," writes Nathaniel R.

Producing partner Anthony Minghella's "death came up like a knife in the dark, unexpected, and forestalled him. It must have left a bleak loneliness," assumes David Thomson, blogging for the Guardian.

"He was one of those rare filmmakers who seemed genuinely interested in work other than his own," writes Dave Kehr, who relates a few stories. "He was one of our last remaining links to a time when movies were not made primarily for 13-year-old boys, and I for one will miss him tremendously."

"Being at odds with much mainstream filmmaking, it is probably no surprise that my favorite film by Sydney Pollack was also one of his least successful films commercially," writes Peter Nellhaus. "It is probably not coincidental that the authorship of The Yakuza is only less convoluted than that of what may be Pollack's best film, Tootsie.... The reputation of Pollack's film has grown to the point where a remake has been listed among future Warner Brothers productions."

Online browsing tip. Die Zeit's gallery.

Online listening tip. Fresh Air revives a 1990 interview.

Jon Taplin "was lucky enough to 'go to school' with him. I had had written a screenplay called Panama and he optioned it and then spent months with me and a writer named Jeff Fiskin crafting it into the kind of political thriller he made better than anyone of his generation. We never got the movie made, but it didn't matter, because I learned about the craft from a master."

In the LAT, Susan King takes "a look back at Pollack's work both behind and in front of the camera."

"A highlight of my currently non-thriving screenwriting career was working on a script for the delightful and neurotic Sydney Pollack, who died yesterday at the age of 73. My writing partner, Richard Taylor, and I had pitched Sydney a story about high-level corruption in Washington, which was just chum for Sydney, who was fascinated by Washington, and therefore fascinated by sleaze, greed and moral failure (see: Absence of Malice, Michael Clayton, etc.)" Jeffrey Goldberg tells his story.

C Jerry Kutner recalls an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "The Contest for Aaron Gold" - "because of the extraordinary natural performance by the actor who played the camp counselor. It was the late Sydney Pollack, and to see him in this episode is to wonder why he didn’t have the major acting career of a Hoffman or a De Niro."

FilmInFocus runs an excerpt from Helen De Winter's 2006 compendium What I Really Want To Do is Produce in which "Pollack describes how the producer's chair came to be an easier fit for him, and gives his own view on whether the prime years of his career - the 1970s - were also, as often argued, a 'golden age' in comparison to American film now."

"If he could be compared to a major figure from the Old Hollywood, it would not be to one of the great individualists like Howard Hawks or John Ford, who stamped their creative personalities onto every project, whatever the genre or the level of achievement," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Mr Pollack was more like William Wyler: highly competent, drawn to projects with a certain quality and prestige, and able above all to harness the charisma of movie stars to great emotional and dramatic effect.... His passing is a reminder that things have changed, that the kind of movie he made, which used to be the kind of movie everyone wanted to make (and to see), may be slipping into obsolescence."

"Pollack, in his performances and in many of the movies he made or produced, always had faith in what movies, and the people in them, could be," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "His legacy, dropped in our laps at a time when mainstream filmmaking is in trouble if not in crisis, is a challenge to us not to lose faith. And, at the very least, to silence our cellphones and pay attention to what's in front of us."

Gilbert Cruz talks with Redford about Pollack for Time.

Updates, 5/28: "Sydney Pollack's death at 73 has robbed our cinema of one of its finest... actors," blogs David Edelstein. "In later years, Pollack had more life in front of the camera than behind it."

"Look through his filmography and what leaps out is its diversity," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent.

"Hollywood loses its greatest mensch," writes Dana Stevens. "Slate's Bryan Curtis wasn't wrong, in a 2005 assessment, to call Pollack a 'journeyman' director; over a 40-plus-year career, he tried his hand at virtually every genre (with the notable exception of the special-effects blockbuster) and churned out his share of competent schlock (The Firm, The Interpreter, The Electric Horseman). But I can't agree with Curtis' contention that Pollack could 'take any scenario... and mold it into benign mush.' More often, he took mushy scripts and shaped them into films that were surprisingly sophisticated and adult."

"I was irked by his Oscar win for 1985's Out of Africa, just as I was ticked off that 1982's Tootsie, one of the great film comedies, went home with just one statuette," writes Robert Cashill. "Prizzi's Honor seemed the superior film in 1985. But Africa, with its magnificent Meryl Streep performance and typically excellent use of the hard-to-pin-down Robert Redford, has grown on me since then. It is that rare thoughtful epic, beautifully shot, edited, and scored (by the great John Barry). These kinds of pictures are difficult to make, and harder still to make well."

James Wolcott points to an appreciations of Pollack's performance in Husbands and Wives at the Sheila Variations and adds, "Husbands and Wives is a rarity in Woody Allenland in that it showcases two hot-wired performances, the other by Judy Davis as Pollack's estranged wife, who's like an escapee from a Philip Roth novel in her vertiginous fury." It goes on and needs reading.

Update, 5/29: The LA Weekly runs Scott Foundas's 2007 piece, now appearing for the first time in English, on Pollack's early television work.

Updates, 5/31: Online viewing tips. Pollack tells Harrison Ford what makes Harrison Ford Harrison Ford. Thanks, Jerry! And of course, there's more Pollack on Charlie Rose.

"In the 90s, I worked for Sydney Pollack as a story editor," blogs Trish Deitch at the New Yorker:

Finding the spine of a story like Out of Africa was important to Sydney for many reasons, the most important of which was that it led to what he called 'the ache.' The ache is self-explanatory if you've seen Sydney's films. It is the ache of having one chance at deep love in a lifetime of shallow loves, and losing it too early. It is the ache of perfect, private union destroyed by terrible, worldly circumstance. For Sydney, the ache was about the way that the things we hold most dear always elude us.

Via Michael Sippey.

Update, 6/1: "Sydney Pollack was one of the nicest, most congenial people I have ever known," writes Philip French in the Observer. "Much the same age, we met in 1986 when I was a member of the Cannes Festival jury over which he presided with quiet authority.... Most of his later film parts were unsympathetic, so, in 2006, he played a delightful version of himself, speaking both English and French as an American director in Paris in Orchestra Seats, directed by Danièle Thompson, another 1986 Cannes juror."

Wrapping Cannes 08.

Any entry gathering overviews of this year's just-wrapped Cannes Film Festival for the next week or so needs to begin with Manohla Dargis and AO Scott's in the New York Times. Just about all the angles are covered - critical evaluations, awards, sales and future prospects for the films on hand - and livened up with commentary and quotage.

Updated through 5/31.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw looks back on the highs and lows. Then, a bit more on the festival as an enduring brand from Toby Rose.

Karina Longworth indexes the SpoutBlog's coverage and lists her five favorite films.

Anthony Kaufman lists his "Cannes Top 11, and the Ones that Got Away."

"As always with Cannes, some of the most satisfying films were not found in the official competition," writes the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan.

ST VanAirsdale checks the status of the New York films that screened at Cannes.

Updates, 5/27: "The festival began smashingly and ended beautifully," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir presents a list of his "top 10 films from the 61st Festival de Cannes. First and foremost they're movies I liked, but they're also films that come out of here with some critical momentum, and that ought to show up on art-house-type screens all over the world in the coming year. I've tacked on a handful of more problematic films that didn't thrive here but deserve a second look, away from all the overcaffeinated, underslept craziness of Cannes."

IndieWIRE indexes its coverage.

Online listening tip. John Powers talks Cannes for half an hour on NPR.

Another online listening tip, another half an hour: the IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore.

Daniel Kasman indexes his reviews for the Auteurs' Notebook.

"Missing kids, dead kids, wayward kids - they haunted the frames, drove the plots, and without necessarily ever taking center stage at the 61st Cannes Film Festival, stood out as a recurrent presence at this year's prestigious world movie showcase: a collective symbol of lost innocence, perhaps, or a looming dread about the future of the human species." Anthony Kaufman at FilmCatcher.

Update, 5/28: Cinematical wraps it up.

Updates, 5/29: "And slowly, with 'les stars' and their entourages now gone, the Cannois began to re-emerge on the streets of their own city, blinking a little, as if seeing the place for the first time," writes Steven Erlanger in the New York Times. "Monday is the 'Day of the Cannois,' and as a gesture to the residents, who rarely venture out during the festival unless they work in service industries, the Palais shows the prize-winning film on Monday to all who can prove, with their electricity bill, that they live here. By Tuesday, the judgments were in. There was pride that a French film had won the Palme d'Or for the first time in 21 years. But..."

"[O]ne can reliably emerge from seeing a near masterpiece only to discover that everyone - or at least the influential industry trade newspapers - has declared the very same movie une catastrophe!... This is Cannes, after all, where dismissing movies out of hand and storming out of screenings before the end are points of professional pride for some festival vets - as if they had somewhere better to be." Scott Foundas turns a must-read overview into the LA Weekly.

"Throughout its 61st gathering, Cannes proved especially strong in the unexplored regions outside the main competition, particularly in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar, which celebrated its 40th year mainly by a having a solid program of independent cinema from around the world." Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Anne Thompson looks back on the "Best of the Fest." Topping that list: Il Divo.

A profile from Rob Nelson: "Minnesota-based filmmaker Aleshia Mueller is working the market at the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France. For her, that means putting up fliers - 'propaganda,' as she jokes - for her film Lady of the Woods, a 10-minute documentary portrait of octogenarian North Country cookbook author and botanist Alma Christensen."

Rob Nelson's got a list, too: "I can earnestly recommend the half-dozen below - all of which, with the exception of the potentially unmarketable Ché, seem likely to make it to our local artsyplex within the year."

"[A]fter 12-plus days of looking at a selection of tasteful, well-made and entirely bleak movies, society's rules were breaking down into sweaty anarchy," writes Matt Singer in his wrap-up at the IFC.

Andrew O'Hehir has an acquisitions update.

Update, 5/30: "It was 21 years ago when I filmed part of Let's Get Lost in Cannes, as well as screening my first documentary, Broken Noses, at the Jean Cocteau theatre and photographing for Per Lui," writes Bruce Weber in the Guardian. "Yes, there was a lot of confusion, but that was the best way for me to be with Chet, because if he didn't show up, we always had something else to do. But guess what? There he was, on time, hair slicked back, trumpet case in one hand and his girlfriend in the other."

Update, 5/31: Online listening tip. James Rocchi and Glenn Kenny discuss this year's edition.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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They didn't build their sales model for you.

Jonathan Marlow has a few words for independent filmmakers about the rapidly evolving distribution system. Updated through 5/27 with a couple of pointers below.

When Graham Leggat announced Barry Jenkins's remarkable Medicine for Melancholy as the Audience Award co-winner at the closing night of the San Francisco International Film Festival a few weeks back, he noted (to paraphrase) that MfM would likely be opening soon at a theater-near-you. While such a development is obviously the writer/director's desired outcome (and this is not speculation - I asked him that very question the night before), how likely will it come to pass? Since the beginning of the independent "common era" (circa 1989), the traditional Grail-quest of acquisition-derived-from-festival-screenings was a relative uncertainty. Now, nearly 30 years later, such good fortunes are approaching the level of impossibility.

The festival circuit has instead become an ersatz distribution system unto itself that, for the most part, keeps money away from the makers. The ten or 20 dollars you spend on a ticket (or the $50 to $500 you spend on a pass) rarely finds its way into the hands of the folks behind the camera. For all of those folks that were frustrated by the late-1990s business model of mere exposure-driven outcomes, these same folks generally have little complaint when festivals routinely screw them the same way. If you're going to prostitute yourself and your work, wouldn't you want to at least be treated with a little respect? To stretch the analogy, isn't the distance between "street-walker" and "call girl" really a matter perspective?

Whether you're a filmmaker or a filmgoer, I'll let you in on a little secret that might guide you. The enjoyment to be found at a film festival is generally counter-proportional to the number of films in the event. Take the Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I met the aforementioned Mr Jenkins - indeed, I had to travel to the opposite coast to be introduced to a fellow from my own neighborhood). Seven days of screenings (two of those evenings with only one film each) and yet more attention is given (and risks taken) with its programming than most longer-in-the-tooth festivals. Works such as the Zellners' Goliath and new documentaries (such as Nerdcore Rising and Wild Blue Yonder, a film about David Maysles by his daughter) screen alongside recent features by Werner Herzog and Guy Maddin. IFFB is rapidly becoming the SXSW of the East (itself, despite its full-week schedule, an essentially half-a-week affair). We'll see if a Dentler-less SX continues along its ascendant path. In the able hands of Janet Pierson, I would certainly presume that it will.

If you're still skeptical about this less-is-more notion, take Telluride - one of the shortest and most selective festivals in the world and arguably the greatest event of its kind in the Americas. Telluride is the festival against which all others should be judged. What these events share, overall, is a distinct love of cinema as opposed to the all-too-common alternative - a celebrity showcase.

The exception that proves the rule here is the Seattle International Film Festival. SIFF is merely so damn extensive and exhaustive that several dozen good (and occasionally a few great) films are bound to slip through. It also says something about the monoculture of Seattle that a three-and-a-half week/roughly 300-film festival could even work. Note the distinction here between regional festivals and market festivals - Sundance (which is unbearable by any standard), Berlin, Cannes, Toronto and the symbiotic relationship between AFM and the AFI Fest. They're all reasonable places to screen your work since acquisitions happen with some frequency at each, albeit less and less often these days. I have also intentionally failed to address the large events where the festival essentially takes over a city during its run. Rotterdam, Pordenone, Bologna, Morelia - less "regional events" than "specialty fests."

Regardless, I digress. We were talking about distribution.

These concerns, however, overlap. If the proverbial theatrical release is elusive and the video business is flat or in decline (depending on which statistic you tend to support), what else is there to expect out of the proverbial festival tour beyond the face-to-face that filmmakers get with their audience? The undercurrent of a point from these words is that if you're traveling to a festival, you might as well enjoy the experience when you get there. Any other expectation misguided at best.

If John Anderson and Laura Kim's I Wake Up Screening (a recommended text about the movie business) is to be believed, good films will naturally find their respective (and appreciative) audiences. Do they really? After a brief festival tour in 2006, The Fall was acquired by Roadside Attractions. If you happen to live in Los Angeles or New York (or, thanks to SIFF, Seattle, where it screened this weekend), you can catch this Wizard of Oz-by-way-of-Roald-Dahl (as if directed by a post-MTV-age Sergei Paradjanov) in the theater, where admittedly it shows off its best assets. If you live elsewhere, tough luck (at least for now - it expands to a few more cities next Friday). It isn't as if I blame Roadside for the limited release; quite the contrary. I'm delighted that they've released the film at all. Roadside's initial two-city launch plan is a reflection of reality (and, for so called "smaller" films, the norm). It is prohibitively expensive to open a movie wide these days and particularly difficult to break out a largely unknown title from the pack.

Then again, it's also difficult even with a known title. Ask the team at Warner Bros about their "sure thing," Speed Racer - there are no certainties in this business. It's tough to open just about any movie (unless it's a sequel to a franchise and, even then, there are no guarantees). After its first week of release, The Fall grossed $117K (on, I believe, nine screens). How much did the critically celebrated Mutual Appreciation gross, by comparison? $104K for its entire domestic run. How about Aaron Katz's latest, Quiet City, to which Medicine for Melancholy bears a passing resemblance (although, to be honest, their filmmaking sensibilities are less like each other and more resemble the efforts of late-1960s/early-1970s Eric Rohmer, Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat and François Truffaut)? No theatrical, except for a few isolated screenings here and there, for total Quiet City revenues of $16K over five weeks. Documentaries, on those rare occasions when they get a nation-wide theatrical release, are not immune to disenchanting results, either. Aaron Woolf's King Corn, distributed by Balcony Releasing, generated just under $100K at the box office. The Oscar®-nominated Iraq in Fragments? Roughly twice that figure. If these limited fortunes are the expected fate for best independent films being made and/or released in this country, what hope is there?

Under these circumstances, why are filmmakers still holding out for the legendary promise of a theatrical release? When the likelihood of success for films made on spec (that is, a film made with private money on the hopes of selling it to an established studio or distributor) approaches the same statistics as the chances of winning the lottery, why do so many filmmakers persist? Why do they essentially follow the same established patterns? Why, for instance, are otherwise intelligent people still playing by the studio rules? The whole (to oversimplify) festival-circuit-followed-by-theatrical-release-followed-by-video-debut-followed-by-television-sale - the notion of cascading windows of availability - was created to benefit the multiple-sales cycle of the studios, in essence carving out different periods of time to sell the same "product" again and again. Conversely, this process rarely benefits independent filmmakers at all. For just-starting-out directors, playing by these tired rules generally does more harm than good. Don't expect to hear this angle from the old hands of the business because they've often bought in to the basic storyline.

Take this simple hypothetical. Say you're fortunate enough to receive a positive review of your film in the New York Times (which is read by more people outside of New York than in it). If someone in Chicago or Austin or San Francisco or Dubuque reads this review, they might very well be compelled to see the film. But they can't. When (or, more likely, if) it finally rolls around to their neighborhood, how probable is it that they'll remember many months later that anecdotal review? They've moved on to something else.

Fortunately, there are a few companies working to bring these exceptional films to their potential audience(s). Benten Films has taken to releasing DVDs by the aforementioned Katz, Todd Rohal and others in beautiful packages. Heretic Films is doing the same with similar festival favorites (and, not coincidently, they've both released films by Joe Swanberg - LOL and Kissing on the Mouth, respectively). Microcinema International continues to locate forgotten gems for their remarkable catalogue of titles. Others have moved the notion of the film festival into the online landscape. IndieFlix's MyFestival and the forthcoming From Here to Awesome are doing their part to reach viewers with the latest-and-possibly-greatest. That stated, festivals and DVD releases are only one part of this process - these efforts absolutely have to be done in tandem with some form of digital distribution (of which all-of-the-above are involved).

Granted, I have my own bias about where this is all headed. There are fortunately several companies now distributing movies-that-have-skipped-the-prescribed-steps directly into the living room. If we can't find an audience in their own home, can we expect to find them anywhere?

Of course, the obstacles to making a good film are not quite Sisyphean. These obstacles are surmountable. Resolving (or at least making steps toward resolving) the distribution problem is similarly difficult but doable. I'll leave it to an expert in marketing to address the final piece to this puzzle - answering, "Why should I care about this movie?" Making the film is one thing. Getting it out there is another. Giving an audience a reason to watch? Something else altogether. It is definitely something that the filmmakers and distributors of today (and tomorrow) should be prepared to figure out.

-Jonathan Marlow

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Updates: A couple of related notes:

• Michael Guillén posts his piece for movieScope, "Reinventing the Reel: How the Global Film Initiative is changing the business of independent film."

• "We're going to make it our business to go to every portal, every mobile provider, every video-on-demand service and make the most aggressive deals we can." Brooks Barnes gets John Schloss to tell New York Times readers what Cinetic Media is up to.

Update, 5/27: "dGenerate Films is a venture spearheaded by my good friend and indie producer extraordinaire Karin Chien," announces Kevin Lee. "Last year through some resourceful linking among her extensive network of contacts, she was able to bring together an impressive group of collaborators, funders, filmmakers, resource providers and general supporters for a common goal: to bring the real life visions of contemporary independent and underground cinema from China into the spotlight. By partnering with the Tribeca Film Institute and Amazon.com's new digital delivery platform Reframe, dGenerate will distribute previously undistributed media from China via on-demand DVD and download. We are set to launch this summer with a dozen or so titles that we think represents the most aesthetically cutting edge and socially incisive work that American audiences have yet to see."

Seattle Dispatch. 2.

A round of reviews from Sean Axmaker at the Seattle International Film Festival.

SIFF welcomed the North American premiere of The Red Awn, the directorial debut of Cai Shangjun (screenwriter of Zhang Yang's films, including Shower), in its opening weekend. The film leaves the urban cultures of Zhang's drama for a rural story of a father returning, after five years away looking for work in the city, to his home village where his wife has passed away and his son has had him pronounced legally dead. Yongtao, now a teenager, simmers with rage and resentment toward his long absent dad, who has left a veritable orphan since his mother's death, and the grudge continues even as they head out together to harvest the wheat fields with a local man who owns a combine. Cai is more circumspect than Zhang, both as a director and a writer of his own material, leaving us to put together what the father's life has been like in the city and why he's so forgiving of his son's increasingly defiant and destructive actions.

Meanwhile, he shows us a culture in rapid transition, where the rural folk (especially the young) flee the farms for work in the city and small armies of independent combines fan out over the countryside and compete for work. There are no tidy scenes of forgiveness or explanation, only a father whose astounding tolerance and protection of his ferociously angry son is a measure of his guilt and sense of failure, and a son who slowly comes around to grasping the chance that his father offers him.

Jose Padilha's Elite Squad [site] is a companion piece to City of God, this one from the perspective of the officer of BOPE, an elite squad of cops more like Marines than patrolmen. The film is crammed with examples of police corruption (the Elite Squad was created as an antidote to unrestrained extortion and graft) and gang predations, which gives the film a Dirty Harry justification for the astoundingly violent tactics and aggressive neglect of civil rights of this unit. And Padilha's strategy is rather suspect when he makes every liberal voice either hopelessly naïve or glibly hypocritical (the young activists, all children of privilege, are just another link in the drug trade chains). It's a busy whirlwind of a film with a narration that drives it as much as the jumpy direction. And yet, for all the glorification of the mercenary methods of this elite squad, it's still a fascinating portrait of a nightmarish police and crime culture and a vivid narrative. It comes down to survival: the favelas (ghettos) of Rio de Janeiro are literally a war zone, each district under the control of a drug warlord. You don't have approve of its extreme message of vigilante justice to appreciate the vivid portrait of a culture mired in violence and predation and polarization. And the climax can be read as a troubling triumph of this vigilante justice; I see a man whose sense of justice has been whipped out of him by the very nature of life and death in the urban drug war zone.

Tarsem Singh's The Fall [site] is a lovely reminder that stories don't belong to the teller. They have a life of their own. They live in the hearts and minds of those who hear them, read them, see them, whose experiences ricochet and reverberate off the characters and narrative turns and story details, expanding and enriching them with their own personal meanings. Tarsem's second feature is a glorious embrace of narrative innocence directed as a deliciously, vividly visual phantasmagoria of an adventure fantasy. As an injured silent movie Hollywood stuntman (Lee Pace) with a broken heart spins his make-believe epic to little immigrant girl Alexandria, a child migrant worker in the orange orchards who broke her arm in a fall, their respective personal experiences and cultural references mix for a story that shifts with each new addition and adjustment. It's as if a Terry Gilliam film were actually directed by Zhang Yimou, based on a script concocted by a child. Shot all over the world, it's stunning to look at and a charge to see the travelers make their through a world where you can leap a continent just by crossing over the next rise. The story imagery and character identities are equal parts imagination and appropriation from the real world, and those connections, far from being deeply symbolic, are almost naively direct reflections of their respective emotional lives.

I wrote about Brillante Mendoza's Slingshot during the Vancouver festival and finally caught up with his other 2007 feature Foster Child. While not exactly a companion to the viscerally anxious and perpetually in motion Slingshot, it too is comprised of long handheld shots that take in the chaotic world of the slums, but Foster Child is a warmer portrait of family life in trying circumstances. The poverty and desperation is just as palpable, but where Slingshot showed the constant hustling and thieving (and not just from the poor) in a male-dominated culture, Foster Child is anchored by women, notably a wife and mother (Cherry Pie Picache) who brings in a little extra income as a longtime foster mother. She lives in a tin-roof place barely better than a hovel in a Manila slum, with her construction-worker husband and two sons, one of whom is just as attached to John-John. Mendoza carries us through the home life, the poverty of the area, the often neglectful foster mothers and families that the system relies on, and the sprawling families and pregnant young girls that fill the slums. But it's not an expose; it's an introduction to a social culture with a perspective defined by the sincere affection of a mother for her adorable little boy over the course of their last day together before giving him up to adoptive parents, an affluent Caucasian couple from San Francisco. Mendoza's new film, Serbis, played in competition at Cannes to disappointing reviews, but from the evidence of these earlier films, he's a filmmaker to watch (hey, SIFF - a plug for a future Emerging Master?)

Dario Argento's Mother of Tears [site] is his first film to get a theatrical release in years, but this long-awaited completion of his Three Mothers trilogy is dreadful. The problem isn't that it makes no sense (I defy anyone to explain to me what Inferno is about - or even what happens). It's that it's simply clumsy and graceless and, quite frankly, ugly. Even daughter Asia, as a wide-eyed archeology student who watches the release of evil bring witches from all over the world to Rome (actually Turin, which is an unconvincing stand-in) and swarm the streets like a gang of harpy thugs or like refugees from an 80s New Wave video, can't get through his lines with a modicum of conviction (Udo Kier doesn't even bother; he just goes nuts). Written from a compendium of B movie dialogue clichés and directed as if he'd never worked with actors before, Argento's film is a cheap production with little visual creativity and dull cinematography, produced to showcase familiar shocks and images rather than delving into the abstract beauty of his glory days of horror. Once a director of high style, with cameras that danced and floated through scenes of dynamic choreography and searing colors and stunning visions, the master of abstract ballets of blood and beauty has become a tired old man.

Cannes. Awards.

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks have been tracking the awards at the Cannes Film Festival as they've been announced this evening, and they've just topped the list: the Palme d'Or this year goes to Laurent Cantet's Entre Les Murs (The Class).

Further awards (and commentary as it comes in):

Updated through 5/27.

• Grand Prix (runner-up): Matteo Garrone's Gomorra.

• Prix de la Mise en Scene (best director): Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys.

• Prix du Scenario (best screenplay): Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne for Le Silence de Lorna.

• Camera d'Or (best first feature): Steve McQueen's Hunger. Special Mention: Valeria Gai Guermanika's Ils mourront tous sauf moi.

• Prix du Jury (jury prize): Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo.

• Prix d'interpretation feminine (best actress): Sandra Corveloni for Linha de Passe.

• Prix d'interpretation masculine (best actor): Benicio del Toro for Che.

• Prix de 61st Festival de Cannes: Catherine Deneuve (Un Conte de Noël) and Clint Eastwood (The Exchange, formerly known as Changeling).

• Palme d'Or (short film): Marian Crisan's Megatron. Special Mention: Julius Avery's Jerrycan.

Previously mentioned awards: Un Certain Regard, the full list, topped by Sergey Dvortsevoy's Tulpan.

As noted earlier today:

• Fabien Lemercier (Cineuropa) lists the Critics' Week award-winners.

• Camille De Marco (Cineuropa) has the list of FIPRESCHI awards.

• And Jay Stone (CanWest News Service) reports on the ecumenical jury prize for Atom Egoyan's Adoration.

Updates: "Immediately a cheer went up, as Cantet, his star Francois Begaudeau and the 24 kids in the movie swarmed onstage, beaming as if they'd all graduated summa cum laude," report Richard and Mary Corliss. "Suddenly, les enfants de Cannes were movie stars, reveling in their group closeup."

Because Che has won an award, I'm giving myself permission to rush a link here to Glenn Kenny's most excellent, and of course, most amusing entry on conservative bloggers' potshots taken at a movie they have, in fact, not seen.

Dave Kehr notes that this is the first Palme d'Or to go to a French film in 21 years: "It was Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan the last time, and I can still hear the booing and hissing that broke out in the Palais. 'If you don't like me,' said the ever diplomatic Pialat, 'Then allow me to say that I don't like you, either.'"

Updates, 5/26: Cineuropa collects quotes from the winners.

Andrew O'Hehir comments on each of the awards in Salon.

Updates, 5/27: "On Sunday night in Cannes, France left its Catholic angst behind to now firmly confront, perhaps even embrace, the 21st century," argues Agnès Poirier in the Guardian.

Glenn Kenny presents a delightfully subjective "User's Guide" to the award-winners.

Online browsing tip. A Guardian gallery of award-winners.

"This year, more than perhaps any other, it would be interesting to know what really went on in the jury deliberations, because the whole list of prizes seems like a series of compromises," writes Facets' Milos Stehlik.

"That Cantet's film, the last of the 21 movies shown in competition, was (per Penn) a unanimous choice suggests that the movie offered a welcome solution to a divided jury.... The best evidence of a divided jury was the special prize given jointly to Catherine Deneuve and Clint Eastwood." J Hoberman parses the list in the Voice.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes, 5/25.

With just hours to go before the Palme-winners are announced, a slew of organizations are scrambling to get their awards - and press releases - out. FIPRESCI, the international federation of film critics, has, in addition to declaring Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe the "Revelation of the Year," is honoring Hungarian Kornél Mundruczó's Competition entry, Delta; Steve McQueen's Un Certain Regard entry, Hunger; and presenting the the François Chalais Award to Marco Tullio Giordana's Sanguepazzo (a "Special Screening"). Camillo De Marco reports for Cineurpa.

Jay Stone of the CanWest News Service reports that Atom Egoyan's Adoration has won "the ecumenical jury prize - the award given for movies that celebrate spiritual values." Via Movie City News.

For Time, Mary Corliss sorts through the indicators and finds a wide open race for the Palmes.

A few big roundups: Ty Burr (Boston Globe), Emmanuel Burdeau (Cahiers du cinéma), Eric Kohn (Stream), Jonathan Romney (Independent), Jason Solomons (Observer; plus his "Trashes d'Or") and Anne Thompson (Variety).

"Cringiest press conference," "most candid quote" and so on: Arifa Akbar in the Independent on the stars behaving and misbehaving at Cannes.

Online viewing tip #1. The Guardian's Xan Brooks has an overview of a few of this year's high profile films.

Online viewing tip #2. Having just returned home from Cannes, filmmaker Raymond De Felitta "decided to look for some vintage Cannes material on YouTube hoping to see what resemblance, if any, the current festival has to its no doubt infinitely more sedate and appropriate earlier incarnation." And he's come up with one of "the absolutely silliest pieces of film I've yet found posted on the good and great thing called YouTube."

Dick Martin, 1922 - 2008.

Dick Martin, a veteran nightclub comic who with his partner, Dan Rowan, turned a midseason replacement slot at NBC in 1968 into a hit that redefined what could be done on television, died Saturday night... He was 86.

Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, the hyperactive, joke-packed show that Mr Martin and Mr Rowan rode to fame, made conventional television variety programs seem instantly passé and the sitcom brand of humor seem too meek for the times.

Neil Genzlinger, New York Times.

Updated through 5/26.

Update: "[F]or millions of middle-class Americans, outside the urban and cultural centers, Laugh-In was the means by which they came to assimilate and accept the mindset of the 1960s," blogs Mick LaSalle. "Watching the DVDs today, it's almost inconceivable, but in 1968 and 1969, there was nothing funnier on earth."

Update, 5/26: "If I viewed a rerun today, I quite possibly would find it more antiquated than edgy, and not nearly as audacious as a contemporary show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967 - 69)," concedes Joe Leydon. "On the other hand: For a variety of reasons, I can't imagine any broadcast TV network daring to air anything like Laugh-In in prime time right now. Yes, not even in an election year. Especially not in an election year."

Cannes. Snow.

"The prize list for the 47th Critics' Week is dominated by European films, including top winner Snow, the debut feature by Bosnian director Aida Begic." Fabien Lemercier has the full list.

Also in Cineuropa: "Begic has made a feature that looks at a familiar theme in Balkan cinema from a fresh point of view and with a raw energy that is especially noteworthy in the work of cinematographer Erol Zubcevic and actress Zana Marjanovic," writes Boyd van Hoeij.

"A polished but often tedious outing that may leave some auds cold, Snow depicts the daily hardships of a war-torn Bosnian village where all that remains are widows and their memories," writes Variety. "Debut feature by writer-helmer Aida Begic offers up female insights and a local point of view on the (literal) no man's land left by the mid-90s conflict. Yet strong performances and craftsmanship cannot save a paper-thin narrative that plays like heavy-handed Abbas Kiarostami without the Iranian auteur's poetic virtuosity."

"A fictionalized account of the plight of Muslim women in a mountain village two years after the 1995 Dayton Accords ended the ethnic cleansing of Muslims (and Croats) by their Bosnian Serb neighbours, Snow is a step up from director Aida Begic's experimental 2001 film First Death Experience," writes Howard Feinstein in Screen Daily. "Unobtrusively directed, this ensemble film successfully captures the special camaraderie among the survivors of such horror and the emotional and psychological toll it takes on the individuals."

Online viewing tips. Cineuropa talks with the players; the video's not subtitled, but there are notes on each interview in English.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Un Conte de Noël.

A quick word on a contender for the Palme d'Or from Ronald Bergan; the earlier entry, still being updated, is here.

In Un Conte de Noël, Arnaud Desplechin has tried to instill new life into the well-worn formula of the family reunion. In fact, there is an echo, surely unintentional, of TS Eliot's second play in which the dying mother is told, "Death will come to you as a mild surprise." Here, the dying mater familias is the Junoesque Catherine Deneuve, who plays a character called Junon, in a detached manner. Yet, despite the strong cast, the cautious avoidance of melodrama, the often wry Rohmeresque dialogue, the film remains as traditional as its title suggests. The director seems so careful to avoid the clichés of the genre, that he only draws attention to them. The convoluted screenplay with its skeletons rattling in the closet, the dysfunctional family made up of insecure odd balls, the redemptive theme with its religious undertones, are all there.

Desplechin's efforts to trick out the mise-en-scene with lite Godardian effects such as characters addressing the camera, voice over, and quotes from literature as well as using titles, shadow puppets, irises, an eclectic choice of music from classical to jazz, to Irish and Indian melodies, smack of a certain desperation.

Paradoxically, all these cinematic devices with vague nods towards La Nouvelle Vague, and a screenplay that acknowledges La Regle du Jeu and Ingmar Bergman's family dramas, plus inconsequential clips from films watched by the characters on television - Max Reinhardt's film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn's incidental music for the play is also often used on the soundtrack), Funny Face and DeMille's 1956 The Ten Commandments (curiously dubbed into French with French subtitles), Un Conte de Noël remains rooted in the theater. It is in the line of the above-mentioned A Family Reunion, but further back to Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra and its obvious antecedents and superficially to Chekhov.

It might have worked as a play, but as a film it is the kind of highly-wrought middle-of-the-road artifact - neither too commercial nor too avant-garde - that may gain a festival prize or two, if not the Palme d'Or, and a relatively large audience.

- Ronald Bergan

Interview. Lynn Shelton.

"Lynn Shelton's My Effortless Brilliance plays something like an overtly comic remake of Old Joy, with mountains swapped out for woods, and a third man wild card pushing the narrative along," wrote Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog when she caught the film's premiere at SXSW earlier this year. "It's not quite like nothing I've ever seen before, but it's a nicely rendered, novella-esque character study with some impressive naturalistic performances."

Now Shelton and her film come home, in a way; Brilliance is screening at the Seattle International Film Festival tonight and Monday night. Sean Axmaker talks with the determinedly independent filmmaker about learning to direct by editing and about the local Seattle film scene.

Cannes. Tulpan.

"Sergey Dvortsevoy's Tulpan won the Prize of Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival tonight in France, while Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Tokyo Sonata won the jury prize," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez, who lists winners of further UCR awards.

"Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoi," writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily. "The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story of the Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect."

Shorts, 5/24.

"Process art was alive and kicking last Sunday, when Regen Projects in Los Angeles had no trouble persuading over six hundred art-worlders to a baking-hot spot an hour south of town to be extras in the filming of Ren, the first of a series of unique performances to be staged by Matthew Barney and his longtime collaborator, composer Jonathan Bepler." Linda Yablonsky reports and snaps lots of pix for Artforum.

"I was saddened by the news first relayed by Wise Kwai that Tartan USA had closed down," writes Peter Nellhaus.

"It feels like the correct time to be reminded of an ancient tradition that has always served civilization well, that of the independent, truth-telling poet provocateur." That's Tilda Swinton in an email to Dennis Lim, who looks back on the work of Derek Jarman (Isaac Julien's Derek will screen at MoMA from June 9 through 16 and Zeitgeist will release a DVD box set on June 24): "His poetic sensibility owes a debt to the outlaw lyricism of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet. His taste for the baroque calls to mind British filmmakers like Michael Powell and Ken Russell (who hired him as a set designer). There are also kinships with the bad-boy iconoclasts he memorialized: Caravaggio, the painter who revolted against the refinement of the Renaissance, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher who regarded the academy with hostility."

Also in the New York Times:

• "In You Don't Mess With the Zohan (opening June 6), [Adam] Sandler plays an Israeli assassin who flees to the United States to become a hairdresser," writes Dave Itzkoff. "Trailers for the film promise plenty of broad farce, physical comedy and at least one lewd dance routine. What the ad campaign for Zohan does not emphasize is that the film also attempts to satirize the continuing tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and provide humorous commentary on one of the least funny topics of modern times with a comedian who is not exactly known for incisive political wit."

• "The Japanese obsession with cavorting ninjas, cunning hardware and comely young avengers in abbreviated plaid skirts reaches some kind of climax with The Machine Girl, a riotous blend of arterial spray and grindhouse glee," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. More from John Lichman at the House Next Door: "I promise you won't find a better splatter film for the next few months."

• Also: "A Hollywood weepie snuggled inside a humanitarian tribute, The Children of Huang Shi molds the true story of the English reporter George Hogg (played by the Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers) into a chaste love triangle given urgency by the Japanese invasion of China." More from Fernando F Croce (Slant), Grady Hendrix (New York Sun), Tasha Robinson (AV Club) and Nick Schager (Cinematical). Related online listening: Director Roger Spottiswoode is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"When François Truffaut's Jules et Jim was released in 1962, it was an instant hit with girls like me, francophile, penniless and non-monogamous," writes Germaine Greer. "Catherine seemed a woman after our own hearts, who followed her desires rather than the rules." Looking back now, though, she realizes Truffaut "would have been horrified to be told that he was in any way a misogynist. Yet all the women in Jules et Jim are grotesques."

Also in the Guardian: "[T]he political Oliver Stone has been on hiatus for a long while, and it'll be interesting - and probably infuriating and exasperating - to have him back," writes John Patterson. And Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case "exerts an awful grip," writes Peter Bradshaw. "It's certainly a wake-up call to those who believe that Russia is not as relevant in the 21st century."

"Regurgitating Mad Magazine, South Park and Borat into what he believes may be some sort of comedic super-barf, German fauxteur Uwe BollBloodRayne, Alone in the Dark, In the Name of the King, et al), yet manages to be as toothless as he is tasteless," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. More from Bill Gibron (PopMatters), Eric Kohn (New York Press), Nathan Lee (NYT), John Lichman (House Next Door), Martin Tsai (NY Sun) and Scott Weinberg (Cinematical).

Related: In the NYT, John Schwartz reports on the man "often referred to as the worst filmmaker in the world," talking, for example, with Dave Foley: "Boll is 'like a quintessential German intellectual artist who has almost taken film arbitrarily as the medium he's going to work in. The art form is, almost, in being hated,' Mr Foley said. Comparing him to the comedian Andy Kaufman, he added, 'It's his relationship with the audience that is his creation, his relationship with the critics, more than the movies.'" And Andy Klein talks with Boll for the LA CityBeat.

And Andy Klein also talks with Arthur Dong about Hollywood Chinese, while Brent Simon talks with Danny McBride about The Foot Fist Way.

"What Makes a Movie Sexist?" Lisa Kansas on Iron Man.

Kaleem Aftab profiles Ben Affleck in the Independent.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Marilyn Ferdinand.

Online listening tip. An On Point roundtable on Vertigo.

Online viewing tip #1. The trailer for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

Online viewing tip #2. Well, everyone's doing it, so here we go: Wheezer's "Pork and Beans."

Online viewing tips. DVblog has the trailer for and a clip from Andreas Troeger's Kill the Artist.

Fests and events, 5/24.

"Brooklyn Bridge marked the debut of the popular mythmaker and PBS stalwart Ken Burns," notes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "If something's American, and historical, and big, Mr Burns has 'done' it." Brooklyn Bridge screens at BAM this afternoon, the 125th anniversary of the NYC landmark. Related online browsing: Magnum photos of the Bridge at Slate.

"The ongoing decline of the Spike & Mike festivals, with their crappy computer animation and pointlessly scatological gags, has been offset by the growing excellence of Mike Judge's Animation Show, so successful that this year Judge has actually commissioned work from four artists," writes JR Jones in the Chicago Reader. At the Music Box through Thursday.

DK Holm previews another entry in his summertime festival, launching this coming Thursday: Dark of the Sun.

Mike Everleth has another lineup: "Presented by Video Inferno, the first ever H3R3TIC Film Festival in Amsterdam is a four-day celebration of alternative ways of thinking and living. Dedicated to Guy Debord, Robert Anton Wilson and Albert Hofmann, screenings will take place in nine different locations all over the city. Most of the films seem to be documentaries of extremely colorful characters, but there are some outré fictional films thrown into the mix." May 29 through June 1.

Seattle's off and running and the Siffblog springs to action.

At SF360, Robert Avila has an overview of the San Francisco Arts Festival, running through June 8.

"Well, there's the dance... the Madison. And there's the mad sprint through the Louvre... nine minutes, the new record. But for me there's no set piece in Band of Outsiders that can equal the dazzling effect that is Anna Karina's face." Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling. Godard's 60s runs through June 5.

Charles Boyer.

"The Film Society of Lincoln Center will begin a changing of the guard this weekend as its 11-day, two-sided program extolling Saints, Sinners, Obsession, and Seduction transitions from American leading lady Jennifer Jones to vintage French screen heartthrob Charles Boyer," writes Bruce Bennett. "Though only 35 when he appeared in Le Bonheur, Boyer had already perfected the fatalistic, world-weary Gallic equipoise that became his oft-caricatured stock-in-trade on both sides of the Atlantic."

Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door: "History Is Made at Night is my first encounter with [Frank] Borzage; my response, generally, is that it's easy enough to see why he has ardent admirers, but also why he'll never have more than a relative handful of those."

Updated through 5/27.

Charles Boyer and the Art of Seduction runs through Tuesday.

Update: "The First Legion is the high point of the driest period of Douglas Sirk's career, the stretch between his adventurous independent American films of the 40s and the full-bodied Universal melodramas upon which his reputation stands today," writes Dan Sallitt.

Update, 5/27: "No one in a Hollywood movie has cried in such agony as Charles Boyer does at the end of Frank Borzage's History is Made at Night (1937)," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Not until Tippi Hedren in The Birds, or perhaps Jimmy Stewart in some of his traumatic films with Anthony Mann do we find someone in Hollywood expressing so much pain. But that kind of agony is of a personal, inward driven pain - and perhaps something let loose after the Second World War - whereas Boyer in Borzage utters a cry of selfless pain.... Borzage, rightly, is the greatest romantic of the cinema."

Cannes. Palermo Shooting.

At Cinematical, James Rocchi first takes aim at the Cannes paparazzi, fires and scores a beaut. "So, yes, the idea of watching a Wim Wenders film about a photographer who's having a crisis of conscience about his profession seemed like a capital idea."

However: "Palermo Shooting goes fairly off the mark, or fires blanks, or has a damp fuse; I'm not sure about which firearm metaphor applies here, and if Wenders can't be bothered to have any cohesion to his signs and symbols, why should I? Palermo Shooting is hardly the worst film I've ever seen at Cannes - Southland Tales still takes the Palme d'Junk in my book - but it's still a little sad to see a major filmmaker make such a series of major mistakes in the name of a fairly minor film."

Further up in that review: "Films about people who have to choose between two different kinds of success are, by definition, boring. The second problem comes with the casting of Campino, who is certainly a well-made slab of Euro-flesh, but whose range of expressed emotional states ranges from hunky bewilderment to bewildered hunkiness."

"Wim Wenders muses on love, death and his perennial bugbear, the 'Crisis of the Image' in The Palermo Shooting, a metaphysical thriller cum philosophical essay that marks another step on the downwards slope for this once-vital filmmaker," writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily. "Unwisely cast, leadenly written and ultimately farcical in its earnestness, The Palermo Shooting is a glossy travelogue-thriller with metaphysical pretentions, and one of the low points of this year's Cannes Competition."

The Hollywood Reporter's Scott Roxborough talks with Wenders, who's now planning to shoot a horror movie.

For Variety, Ali Jaafar reports that Axiom Films has picked up UK rights.

Reviews in German.

Competing.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Chelsea on the Rocks.

"Abel Ferrara's new film, Chelsea on the Rocks, represents a kind of homecoming for the Bronx-born director and longtime chronicler of the New York City underbelly," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times.

"Chelsea on the Rocks, which had its premiere as a special presentation at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday night, is a documentary about the 125-year-old Chelsea Hotel, the spiritual home of Manhattan bohemia, where Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls and the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death. It's Ferrara's first proper New York movie since 2001's 'R Xmas."

"A skittery, rambling but often absorbing portrait of the Chelsea Hotel, pic shuffles together vintage archive footage, scrappy dramatic re-enactments of famous moments at the hotel, and original interview material in helmer's first go at docmaking in more than 30 years," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety.

Writing in Screen Daily, Allan Hunter finds the doc "more effective in its conventional talking heads material than some ill-advised dramatic recreations of key events in the establishment's illustrious past."

Update, 5/25: "Chelsea Hotel is commanding, and Ferrara remains a sick god, the ingenious hunchback of Notre Dame du Cinéma," writes Cahiers du cinéma's Emmanuel Burdeau. "This is how he appears to us, in a hallway, his shoulders hunched up to his ears, his pale head thrown backward in order for his hair to reach a woman's genitalia painted on the wall. The is the first time we see him in one of his films, his silhouette resembling Keith Richards's, with his cough and his winded feline's walk. The film is fairly nondescript, outside of a few shots of rooftops and a few palimpsests of images to which Ferrara holds the secret."

Update, 5/26: "It might be the boldfaced names that are going to sell the thing, but the best material here, the spots where Ferrara seems most comfortable, involve the usually drug-related shock-horror stories of relative nobodies," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog. On the other hand, "The reenactments cheapen what might otherwise have been a bittersweet document; as it is, it's an extraordinarily entertaining but not totally satisfying mess."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Weekend books.

Michael Atkinson, Stuart Klawans, Ed Halter, David Sterritt, B Kite, "and maybe Guy Maddin, if he's not exhausted," will be reading from Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood in Manhattan on June 11.

The new summer issue of Bookforum's up. Bilge Ebiri: "Whereas Brick Lane the four-hundred-plus-page novel was sprawling, spanning decades and even continents, Brick Lane the movie, running at just over a hundred minutes, is a model of focus and precision - a streamlined slice-of-life tale about a woman who finds herself faced with a difficult choice."

Also:

• "Because [Doris] Day is as much signifier as star, it's astonishing that few have tackled her work in relation to the mores of her time and ours," writes Marc Weingarten. "In Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door, David Kaufman has certainly made a nice run at it. His book is, in all senses of the word, exhaustive: It omits no detail of Day's life and career. But it fails to provide the sort of intellectual heft the subject warrants - the synoptic detail in Kaufman's narrative consistently crowds out context and analysis."

• Kera Bolonik interviews Ron Hansen, author of, among other novels, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

• And then, besides all the rest - any new issue is a highlight of the online reading season, however much or little it might have to do with cinema - there's a casual symposium on fiction and politics.

Congrats to Tim Lucas on his Independent Publisher Book Award for Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Night.

David Gordon Green has written the introduction to Vern's Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal and the Guardian's running an edited version: "Who wants to see Jean-Claude Van Damme in Death Warrant or Cyborg when you could witness the brutal human elegance of Seagal's Marked for Death or the astonishing Hard to Kill? His stretch of films that promoted themselves with three dramatic words was for me a trademark and a guarantee that I would be getting my money's worth."

"Brideshead Revisited has exerted a powerful hold on the British imagination for more than 60 years, although it's far from obvious why," writes John Walsh in the Independent. "Its structure is shockingly broken-backed. One of its most attractive characters disappears halfway through. An undercurrent of anti-egalitarian snobbery becomes a tidal wave. The central love story is treated by the author like a conveyancing contract. And the characters' preoccupation with Catholicism doesn't ring true. But Brideshead has Unassailable Classic status and, as the producers of a new film have found, one mucks about with it at one's peril."

New reviews of Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure: Raymond Bonner (NYT), Michael Byers (Guardian) and Michael S Roth (Los Angeles Times).

HBO's Recount.

"This is absolutely the perfect moment to revisit the 2000 election," writes Matthew Gilbert in the Boston Globe. "With the new movie Recount, HBO is either remarkably savvy or the beneficiary of happy coincidence.... Timeliness, though, does not equal drama or comedy, and Recount is a surprisingly enervated and enervating piece of work."

Updated through 5/25.

For the New York Times' Alessandra Stanley, this is "an astute and deliciously engrossing film" which "retells the tale of Florida in all its bizarre and inglorious moments, from haggling over the 'hanging chad' and 'butterfly ballots' to the ruckus between the Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, and the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board. Recount is not satire; it's a mordantly serious look at a moment when character, political influence and luck fatefully collided."

"The core problem with Recount lies in its being at once fatally cynical and touchingly naive about American democracy," counters Troy Patterson in Slate. "It grovels for the approval of political junkies while flaunting the shallowest interest in politics, and everything flows from there in the most silly fashion."

"If it's vaguely eerie that the film's premiere on 25 May coincides with current ado over popular, delegate, and electoral counts, it's also germane to the film's essential point," writes Cynthia Fuchs at PopMatters. "That is, the oft-repeated claim that 'the system works' is by definition duplicitous, ironic, and right, all at the same time. Indeed, when James Baker (Tom Wilkinson) makes that very declaration at the end of Recount, it's enough to send shivers down your spine. Though Recount doesn't press the case, it seems plain enough that the system remains infinitely gameable for those who know it, those in power who wish to remain in power."

Sara Cardace talks with screenwriter Danny Strong for the Vulture.

And now, I'm going to so something I never do... except now: Quote an entry in full. Comes from VF Daily:

Before you park yourself in front of Recount, HBO's critically acclaimed new dramatization of the 2000 chad-tastrophe, take a minute to read Evgenia Peretz's mind-boggling account of how the media totally screwed Al Gore and stuck us with the least popular president in the history of popularity - who, if Vincent Bugliosi is to be believed, basically deserves to be executed.

You might also check out Sally Bedell Smith's devastating account of how Bill and Hillary Clinton basically more or less hamstrung Gore's campaign. (Note to Barack Obama: read this before making any vice-presidential decisions!)

And if all that sounds like a lot of heavy reading for a Memorial Day weekend, you can always just look at these funny pictures of Washington people partying!

Earlier: Robert Abele (LA Weekly), Joshua Alston (Newsweek) and Edward Wyatt (NYT).

Online listening tip. Laura Dern, who plays Katherine Harris, is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Screens tomorrow and Monday nights.

Updates, 5/25: "Laced with dark humor and somehow making what amounts to a long chess game dramatically compelling, Recount is probably the best made-for-TV movie of the year, a distinction which would carry more weight if a) the various networks made more made-for-TV movies and b) it hadn't arrived at such a fortuitous moment, six days before the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws panel meets to decide what to do about Florida in yet another election-related brouhaha," writes Todd VanDerWerff at the House Next Door. "In another 20 years, Recount probably won't play as persuasively as it does right now, in this moment, when it largely stirs up feelings long dormant in an electorate that desires, at some primal level, a do-over. Largely unable to take the long view because of when it was made, Recount is definitely a chronicle of its time and place, but it can't find anything larger to say about the political process than, 'Wasn't it sad that Al Gore lost and we had to put up with this?'"

Choire Sicha talks with Danny Strong for the Los Angeles Times.

"Dern's performance is something special: hilarious, deadly serious, a master class in walking the line between going for a laugh and going for the jugular," writes JJ at As Little As Possible.

"[T]hough Recount is artless and not much worse than Charlie Wilson's War, Mike Nichols's film at least understood itself as a caricature, whereas Recount behaves as if it were the real deal," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Only interested in scoring cheap shots, Recount tells us that conservatives are bullies on a very fundamental level, but it's most effective at conveying the sense that Hollywood liberals are only interested in making movies that showcase how right they were all along. They were, of course, but that's no excuse for this movie's wholesale smugness."

The New Republic hosts Jonathan Chait, Jay Roach and Danny Strong's discussion of Recount.

"So just how (un)likely are these recount things anyway?" 538 does the math.

Cannes, 5/23.

"[O]n behalf of my own one-man jury, with scant compensation for the winners and in scandalous unfairness to those few movies yet to screen, I bestow the following awards," announces J Hoberman in the Voice. First up: "Le Gran Surprise du Festival to Che." Five more follow.

"Cannes is perhaps not the worst of places to reiterate one of the clear signs of our time: there is no more hierarchy in the cinema," declares Emmanuel Burdeau in his latest Cahiers du cinéma diary entry.

Meanwhile, the London Times' James Christopher and Wendy Ide write up a Cannes Top Ten. So far.

Turns out, Mark Peranson and Christoph Huber have been blogging all this while from Cannes at La lectora provisoria. Via Movie City News.

"Each year at some point here in Cannes, the question arises: is this festival all it's cracked up to be? Is Cannes what it was? Typically, the subject crops up about a week into the festival, as fatigue starts to set in," writes the Telegraph's David Gritten. "Yet I'd bet that nearly everyone here this year will return in 12 months' time. Everyone I talked to about the state of Cannes agreed: in its way, it's irreplaceable."

"Madonna the documentary-maker came, saw and conquered the world's biggest film festival yesterday with a powerful polemic on the effects of disease and poverty on Malawi [I Am Because We Are]," reports Mark Brown. "Next in her sights is the Israel-Palestine conflict."

"The Cannes Film Festival is looking back, sorting it all out, being realistic," writes William Booth in the Washington Post. This isn't about young, brash, new. This is the year of longing, of the nostalgia trip."

Cannes. Wendy and Lucy.

"When a film this small gets thrust under a spotlight this bright, you worry about that the movie itself will be overwhelmed," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, reacting to the splashy coverage of Michelle Williams's surprise appearance in Cannes.

"I do hope this unlikely attention helps Wendy and Lucy get seen, but coming in with high expectations ([Kelly Reichardt's] Old Joy was one of my favorite films of its year), I was a bit underwhelmed.... Wendy and Lucy has the bleak, but it never explores the light. It hits its single tone perfectly, but it's still a single tone."

"Reichardt is no pessimist and her compassion for Wendy and belief in the kindness of strangers make for an optimistic film which should serve to build her already strong US reputation on an international scale," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen Daily. "Williams is superb here, unbeautified and effortlessly natural as a woman driving a clapped out Honda from her homestate of Indiana to Alaska in search of lucrative work at a fish cannery."

Un Certain Regard.

Updates, 5/24: "Like Old Joy which tracks two friends on a short trip to the country, Wendy and Lucy is political to the bone but without any of the usual grandstanding," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "As of Thursday night's screening, though distributors were circling the room, this pitch-perfect triumph had yet to attract an American buyer. It will."

"I've seen films about genocide at this year's festival, I've seen films about corruption, about terrible crimes, about war and about murder, but nothing cut me to the quick like Wendy and Lucy, which is about a girl who loses her dog." For Alison Willmore, Reichardt has "created something of incredible emotional genuineness that's one of my favorites in the festival."

Updates, 5/27: "Because the film focuses entirely on Wendy and her relationship with her dog, Williams has to carry the film entirely, and she does so remarkably," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical.

"Wendy's self-sufficient routine has a introverted, bitter stability, but her deep reliance on Lucy as the sole discernible human, emotional, tender existence in her life predictably, but movingly brings Wendy to a frazzled crisis," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Will Oldham's childish, nostalgic, and lyrical hummed theme for Wendy and her dog neatly encapsulates the film, which attacks a simple, sad theme with an exemplary, but modest cast and crew, who bring a powerfully sympathetic approach. The sadness is natural, and therefore all the more sad, and it takes a patience, a kindness, and a calm to bring an inner life, however painful, to such a film."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Seattle Dispatch. 1.

Sean Axmaker launches his coverage of the marathon, the Seattle International Film Festival.

Stuart Townsend and four central cast members - Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez, Andre Benjamin and Charlize Theron - brought his independently produced Battle in Seattle [site] back to the city where it really happened. Whatever you think of the film, it may be the most apropos film in the history of SIFF to open the festival: never has an opening night film been so inextricably tied to the city. You might think that the hometown audience who lived through (and, in many cases, participated in) the WTO protests and the disastrous police response would be the film's toughest audience for a film about their experience directed by an Irish actor who wasn't even there. Not just because of our own immediate experiences but because of the use of fictional stories to structure the film (the fictional Seattle Mayor Jim Tobin, played by Ray Liotta, stands in for the real Paul Schell) and Vancouver, BC doubling for Seattle in principle production (there were a few days of Seattle shooting to get key landmarks, but sharp eyes will detect Canadian road signage throughout the film).

Some of the stories are frankly unconvincing (Connie Nielsen gives perhaps the least dimensional performance of her career as a superficial TV reporter transformed by the experience) and others slip into all-too-familiar ruts (the rocky romance between Martin Henderson's passionate protest organizer and the angry guerilla activist played by Michelle Rodriguez), and the literal gut-punch of the experience of bystander Charlize Theron and the turmoil of cop Woody Harrelson is a messy way to get an emotional reaction from the audience (it works, by the way). But the film pushed all the right buttons in this very liberal crowd, who responded to key scenes and speeches and (rather repetitive) defining lines with cheers and applause.

That sounds condescending, I admit, but I have to hand it to Townsend for not only showing how the protests caught the city by surprise and capturing the chaos within the loose organization of protesters (such as the outbreaks of vandalism that almost derailed the non-violent actions and captured the focus of media coverage for a few news cycles), but also for getting beyond slogans to explain what the WTO was doing and what the protesters stood for, at least to come extent. And his most interesting (though least developed) story takes us into the tensions inside the meeting, where another protest was brewing among the representatives of the Third World nations whose concerns were being ignored. Townsend doesn't try to create a causal link, just show the parallels between those working within the system and those working outside for the same thing, and the revelation of this story, lost in the media coverage of the more visible public protests.

Townsend's approach is a mix of the conventional - with personal stories of the protesters and the police and others to bring us into the various arenas of the drama - and the political, and Townsend believes in the politics and the passion of the protesters; he makes their concerns heard over the media noise focused on the spectacle of conflict. In his Q&A, Townsend cited Medium Cool as his primary inspiration among many, and he took his camera into the midst of the protest scenes to try to get the immediacy and the energy seen in so much of the documentary record from both amateur and professional camera operators during the event. Townsend's efforts to be honest to the spirit of the event are apparent and the cast's commitment helps carry the film through its rougher patches.

Keeping with the Seattle theme: My Effortless Brilliance [site], from local Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton, debuted at SXSW earlier this year before its local debut this weekend. Where her debut feature, We Go Way Back, was autobiographical and rather tightly structured, Brilliance shifts both style and subject matter. It's a study of male relationships, specifically the "break-up" of old friends and the desperation with which one man (played by Harvey Danger's Sean Nelson), a novelist struggling to repeat the success of his first book, attempts to reconnect. His motivations are less out of affection than ego - dude, he was dumped!

The film's reception has been mixed, which may have as much to do with the seeming lack of narrative drive and plotting (I know a few people who believe the film is shapeless and hopelessly misguided) and its undeniable similarities to Old Joy as with the discomforting portrait of male relationships. Yet I found the texture of the relationships and the sly humor winning and was impressed with the performances, especially Nelson's, a natural in the role, subtly establishing the sense of ego and vulnerability and self-aggrandizement in the character with brave intimacy. (In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that Nelson is an acquaintance of mine, but quite frankly I was ready to cringe at seeing him onscreen, so his triumph was a genuine - and happy - surprise.)

Cannes. O' Horten.

"The 'O' stands for Odd, which is a Norwegian male first name. And, in the most affectionate sense, this film is 'odd,'" writes Duane Byrge in the Hollywood Reporter. "It's also outstanding."

"Bent Hamer's unique blend of absurdist humour and aching melancholy has never worked better than in O' Horten [site]," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen Daily. "Hamer, who scored a minor international ripple with his first English language venture Factotum in 2005, is nevertheless more comfortable working in his native Norwegian and employing his wonderfully deadpan sense of comedy which is somewhere between Aki Kaurismäki and Monty Python. Central to O' Horten's success is Baard Owe, a veteran Norwegian actor based in Copenhagen who has worked with everyone from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Lars Von Trier (most memorably as Dr Bondo in The Kingdom series)."

"Although the bittersweet, episodic tale of an ultra-dedicated locomotive engineer uneasily transitioning into retirement lacks the fully developed characters and tightly constructed narrative of his more poignant and substantial Kitchen Stories, it nevertheless provides a warm and gently humorous divertissement that should be appreciated by niche arthouse auds worldwide," writes Alissa Simon in Variety.

The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan talks with Hamer.

Un Certain Regard.

Update, 5/29: James Rocchi at Cinematical: "Hamer's earlier films had a finely-tuned capacity for observation, perhaps best demonstrated in Eggs (1995) and Kitchen Stories (2003); Hamer's English-language debut, Factotum (2005), took the boozy, woozy prose of Charles Bukowski and put a little air and space in it, turning the alcohol-fueled anger of Bukowski's words which, on the page, hit like a shot of cheap whiskey and turning them into something smoother and finer with the smooth burn of regret going down. In O'Horten, Hamer's back in Norway, and still crafting careful, considered portraits of day to day life, but ones which nonetheless have a deadpan comedy to them, a careful and humane sense of the absurd."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. The Class.

"With the Official Competition having been widely regarded as generally decent but lacking in knock-out fare, the late showing of The Class (Entre les Murs) came as an extremely welcome surprise," writes Time Out's Geoff Andrew.

"Directed and co-written by Laurent Cantet (Human Resources, Time Out), the film is set in a school in the Parisian suburbs... The movie initially comes on like a documentary... Gradually, however, a narrative thread beings to emerge from the sometimes heated, sometimes cordial, always fertile dialogue between the teacher and his pupils."

"[E]ven though it takes place entirely 'entre les murs,' it offers a rich microcosm of today's multi-ethnic French population and fascinating insights into the complicated dilemmas and misunderstandings which teaching - and indeed learning - can entail," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen Daily. "The film demands that the viewer pay attention to long talkative sequences in the classroom which may be offputting to some, although the characters of the kids are so colourful as to render all these sequences humorous and lively."

Sales are brisk, reports Elsa Bertet in Variety.

Online viewing tip. Trailer (no subtitles).

Update, 5/24: "Mr Cantet is motivated above all by a passionate curiosity about the way people live, and he directs with such sensitivity and skill that his curiosity becomes contagious," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It is not enough to call him a realist, though he is surely at the forefront of the current wave of realism in European cinema. It's simpler to say that his movies tell the truth."

Update, 5/25: Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay points to Fest21.com's notes on the press conference and the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips:

It plays out with the ease and fluidity of a fine documentary. Cantet developed much of the material through improvisation, but he never pushes his young nonactors to act. Rather, he lets them simply be, and he trusts that the situation he creates will be enough to sustain us. It's more than enough. As Begaudeau asserts in the film's press materials, "Everyone is right in this story." He also notes that the film strove to avoid a kind of patness and elocutionary slickness, lest the result, in his words, end up "a left-wing Dead Poets' Society."

This Cannes highlight already has been sold to various international territories for distribution. American distribution seems very likely as well, which would be good news indeed.

"Begaudeau's interactions with his students are so nuanced and smart that it doesn't feel like the heavy hand of drama when various incidents and events escalate as the film progresses; they feel natural, lived in, human," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "Cantet's previous films - Heading South, Time Out, Human Resources - all explored the same sort of territory as The Class does, with the interactions between people in relationships defined by power as their prime concern. And, put like that, it makes Canet sound like a one-topic filmmaker; instead, though, his filmography has quietly, credibly taken on heft and power as he tackles tough questions and tells fascinating stories few filmmakers in France - or, for that matter the world - would have the skill or courage to depict so well."

Update, 5/27: "Entre les Murs is a tete-a-tete between France and its educational system," writes Agnès Poirier in the Guardian. "It may also be seen as the trial of France by its aspiring citizens":

This not Alan Bennett's The History Boys. No talk of preparing for Oxford or any grande école. Cantet's pupils are Rousseau's bons sauvages. Teaching them the past subjunctive becomes a herculean task and a confrontation between old and new France; helping them to express themselves becomes a struggle of Dantesque proportion in which the fear of revealing too much of one's roots leads to clashes with the teacher's authority; interesting them in literature turns into an olympian achievement. In the process, the question of identity comes back again and again.

Also in the Guardian: Lanie Goodman gets an interview with Cantet.

"The movie sharply points out the French pedagogical tendency of 'confrontation,' the intensely critical or questioning nature where nothing is out of bounds, like the teacher's sexual orientation," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling.

"Think Stand and Deliver or Dangerous Minds without the Hollywood formula, or Half Nelson without the drugs," suggests the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik.

Updates, 5/29: "Cantet returns to the contemporary social and work-related issues of his earlier features... Again an austere but acutely observed drama with a quasi-documentary style, Entre les murs impresses with its veracious tone and nuanced characterisations, though when late into the proceedings Cantet tries to impose a more rigid order on the until then Altmanesque portrait of banlieue-school dynamics, its narrow focus on a particular incident diminishes the force of the film as a whole," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"[T]here is much to be impressed by, including Cantet and veteran screenplay collaborator Robin Campillo's keen observations of class, race, the politics of language, the asserting of adolescent identity and the classroom as simulacrum of the outside world (which, in keeping with the film's French title, Between the Walls, we never see after the opening scene)," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "As the son of a public-school educator with some 40 years under her belt, I was moved."

FilmInFocus runs an extract from Peter Cowie's interview with Cantet in Projections 15: European Cinema (2007).

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Eldorado.

"A couple of genial idiots in a beat-up Chevy hit the Belgian blacktops in Bouli Lanners's funny and melancholy road picture Eldorado with widescreen images that suggest the American West and a soundtrack to match," writes Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter.

"Wacky rural humor and a yearning for country roads run smack into urban decay and city nightmares as Lanners puts his getaway trip into a hard u-turn in a story of ultimately frustrated generosity."

"This off-beat tragicomic road movie from Belgium is one of the sleeper hits of the festival," writes the London Times' Wendy Ide. "Screening in the Director's Fortnight sidebar, it's a far cry from the dour, grey perception of Belgian cinema fostered by the work of people like the Dardenne brothers.... The landscapes and soundtrack choices evoke American road movies of a bygone era; the sensibility is definitely European."

This is a "small but damn-near perfectly formed serio-comedy," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety. It "strikes a just-so balance between absurdist humor and sadness. Yet pic never puts a wrong foot forward in the direction of sentimentality or cliche."

Aurore Engelen talks with Lanners for Cineuropa.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Il Divo.

"The uncrowned king of post-war Italian politics, Giulo Andreotti, might be the subject of Paolo Sorrentino's nominal biopic Il divo, but it is as an incisive portrait of Italian politics in general that it impresses," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"Unlike Stephen Frears's The Queen, in which an icon of power became human through solid acting and a strong screenplay, Andreotti, a seven-time Prime Minister and senator for life, remains an impenetrable enigma in Sorrentino's film, hiding, like he does in real life, behind a barrage of funnily ironic remarks and a smoke screen carefully orchestrated by himself and his kowtowing entourage."

"Paolo Sorrentino's enjoyably original, lurid, sardonic political opera tries to anatomise the character and explain the longevity of a man who has been prime minister three times and has emerged unscathed from no less than 26 separate court cases on charges that include corruption and Mafia involvement," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily. "If the director never quite gets to the heart of the man, that's part of his point: Andreotti emerges from the film as a collection of fragments: a slippery strategist, a political opportunist, a purveyor of witty bon mots, a dutiful but opaque husband, a worldly Catholic.... Stagey lighting, direct camera eye matches, surreal set pieces reminiscent of Fellini's Roma and a quirky soundtrack stress the fact that this is political theatre, an operetta of power."

"The dialogue - which hails from the repertoire of Andreotti, a man with a ferocious sarcasm - and tragicomic situations flow rapidly, all the more contorted by an ingenious and mature director, and underscored by a good choice in rock music," writes Camillo de Marco at Cineuropa. "The urgent and farcical style recall Elio Petri of We Still Kill the Old Way, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (winners at Cannes in 1967 and 1970, respectively) and Todo modo. What emerges is a portrait of a grey man who is not particularly intelligent (according to his tender but strict wife Livia), and whose political career seems to have been dedicated to evil."

James Mackenzie, reporting for Reuters, has comments from Sorrentino - as well as Andreotti's reaction to the film: "I would have happily lived without it."

Online viewing tip. Trailer.

Update, 5/24: "I knew I was seeing something intensely audacious and stylistically exciting, but the political arena it depicts is so dry and complex and wholly-unto-itself that gradually the film makes you feel as if you're lying in an isolation tank," writes Jeffrey Wells.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Synecdoche, New York.

"[Charlie] Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure. But though the ideas that drive Synecdoche, New York are difficult and sometimes abstruse, the feelings it explores are clear and accessible."

This is "film of staggering imagination, more daring in content than form as it explores the unbearable fragility of human existence and the sad inevitability of death," writes Allan Hunter in Screen Daily. "Flashes of comic genius and melancholy insight into the human condition are woven into an increasingly elaborate canvas in which the boundaries between artifice and reality are slowly erased. Mainstream audiences are likely to find it simply too weird and unfathomable for their viewing pleasure but surely nobody expected Kaufman to make What Happens In Vegas?"

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has a photo and quotes from the press conference.

The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein talks with Kaufman.

Anne Thompson comments on Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and UTA's decision to screen the film earlier than originally planned.

Online viewing tips. Via Playlist, three clips.

Online viewing tip. The Circuit asks folks on the street to try to pronounce the title.

Competing.

Updates: "Like an anxious artist afraid he may not get another chance, Charlie Kaufman tries to Say It All in his directorial debut," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Unusually for a first film, the strangely titled opus feels more like a summation work, such as 8½ or especially All That Jazz as it centers on an artist who battles creeping infirmity and deathly portents by plunging into a grandiose project. On the most superficial level, many viewers will be nauseated by the many explicit manifestations of physical malfunction, bodily fluids, bleeding and deterioration. A larger issue will be the film's developing spin into realms that can most charitably be described as ambiguous and more derisively will be regarded as obscuritanist and incomprehensible."

"There are so many things going on in Synecdoche, New York - deadpan jokes and weird set design, perverse reversals and leaps in time, the strong possibility that our protagonist may not be living these events but dreaming them, or may not even be real, or alive - that one can feel curiously challenged to actually care," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "Synecdoche, New York is the kind of movie that inspires more intellectual comparisons - It's 8½ for our modern age! It's a post-Woody Woody Allen film! It's Jacob's Ladder for New Yorker subscribers! - than emotional responses."

"Collapsing in sodden self-reflexivity after a promising 40 minutes, Kaufman's arch, interminable phantasmagoria - with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Job-like theater director - retroactively improved all but the most miserablist movies I saw at Cannes," writes J Hoberman in the Voice.

"Is pretty much the whole film a dream of one of the characters, as another critic was making a (persuasive) case for in the lobby of the Lumiere screening room mere minutes after the picture ended?" wonders Glenn Kenny at indieWIRE in one of the most intriguingly descriptive reviews yet. "Shockingly despairing as Synecdoche, New York can be, it offers such an abundance of imaginative material that it could conceivably be telling us that arguing about stuff is its own reward, and possibly the only point of living, as love never solves any of the characters' quandaries here."

Updates, 5/24: Kaufman "could use a Spike Jonze (less so a Michel Gondry) to rein in his indulgences, but this is a funny, self-lacerating film," blogs Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out Chicago.

"Finally!" exclaims Richard Corliss in Time. "For nine days, the 61st Cannes Film festival had doddered along into a premature senility. What we got, mostly, were cautious reprises of top directors, earlier pictures... In 2006, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth showed up on the last day, to prove there was life in the old medium yet. This year the savior is Charlie Kaufman's demanding, rewarding Synecdoche, New York.... Kaufman has constructed a most devious puzzle, a labyrinth of an endangered mind. Yet it's one that - thanks in large part to a superb cast, led by Hoffman's unsparing, sympathetic, towering performance - should delight viewers who both work the movie out and surrender to its spell.... No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating. Coming on the next-to-last day of a mostly glum festival, Synecdoche, New York is like a surprise happy ending. This is a deus ex machina - a miracle movie."

Updates, 5/25: "It's not a dream, Kaufman says, but it has a dreamlike quality, and those won over by its otherworldly jigsaw puzzle of duplicated characters, multiple environments and shifting time frames will dissect it endlessly," writes Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter. "None of this is easy to follow, and it requires concentration to stay up with all the changing characters and the many abrupt moves in all directions, but such is Kaufman's confidence as a filmmaker and his wonderful ability to write memorable dialogue that the converted will follow him anywhere."

Adds Steven Zeitchik: "[T]he film is not at all the surrealist muddle early detractors had described - it's a work of profound ambition and artistry."

Update, 5/26: "The problem with [Kaufman's] film, which I loved in portions, understood the point of and was somewhat amused by in the early rounds, is the damn moroseness of it," writes Jeffrey Wells.

Update, 5/29: "When I interviewed Kaufman a few years ago, around the time of the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly, "he told me with palpable gravity that he feared he had run dry as a writer, and this deeply personal movie about the fear of death - creatively and physically. Kaufman lacks the peppy visual direction and snappy pacing of a Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry, but I nevertheless enjoyed Synecdoche, New York for its uniquely jaundiced view of the attempt to bring meaning to one's life through art, and I'd wager that the film will look even better a few months from now, seen apart from the hothouse atmosphere of the world's most prestigious (but also impatient) film festival."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Birdsong.

"Some stories are told so many times there is no longer any need for words. Albert Serra understands this," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"His digitalized, elliptical, nature-bound adaptation of Quixote, Honor de cavalleria, and now his story of the three wise men's visit to Jesus, El Cant dels ocells (Song of Birds [site]), leave storytelling behind and envision tales worn ragged until the pages the film adapts must have faded away, and all we are left with is minimal, uneventful human beauty."

"Patience was no doubt required of the Three Wise Men as they made their way toward Bethlehem, and the same will be required of auds who seek out Birdsong, Albert Serra's minimalist reinterpretation of the Magi's journey," writes Justin Chang in Variety. "Hushed, contemplative but often quite droll experiment offers beautifully sculpted images on a black-and-white canvas across its sometimes hypnotic, sometimes tedious runtime."

"Not too long ago Mark Peranson (of the Vancouver Film Festival and Cinema Scope magazine) got a cheery text from his friend, film producer Montse Triola: 'Albert would like U to perform Saint Joseph. What do U think? Fancy?'" Elizabeth Renzetti reports in the Globe and Mail. Via the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston.

Directors' Fortnight.

Update: Turns out, Peranson and Christoph Huber have been blogging all this while from Cannes at La lectora provisoria. Via Movie City News.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes, 5/22.

"It is easy to forget that the cinema is but light and shadow, and for such a simple admission, it takes someone like Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet to remind us of this vital fact," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Le Genou d'Artemide, to my knowledge Straub's first film directed by himself after Huillet passed away, is really nothing but the sound of wind in the air, and the look of moving light through trees....

"More cryptic than Le Genou d'Artemide is what seems to be the last film made by the husband and wife couple, Itinéraire de Jean Bricard, shot in severe, silvery, and restrained shades of black and white.... Commemorated now, even if only commemorating its passing, the filmmaker couple's last film becomes an ode to the evidence of a disappearing history—or the history of disappearance—just as their final project may become but the last surviving evidence of cinema's master artists."

"Latin America is supposed to be the success story at this year's Cannes." And yet, and yet... the Guardian's Xan Brooks enumerates all the reasons to celebrate - and to remain cautious. Also: "The Cannes marché is a babble of TV screens playing trailers for films you will never see.... I still love the marché and frequently get lost along its endless, green-carpeted rat runs. That said, it feels more sedate and conservative this year."

Quentin Tarantino gave a master class today and they were there, taking notes: Richard Corliss (Time), Karina Longworth (live-blogging for Spout) and Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times).

"Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours screened in the market without the Cannes Film Festival's official kiss on the cheek," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, "but even without that critical imprimatur, it's nonetheless one the finest features I've seen this year, a return to classicism of a sort for Assayas (in the press notes, he admits that he sought to return to the stylistic concerns and working method of his Late August, Early September era) and the kind of thoughtful French film designed for adults for which there seems to longer be a US market (IFC bought it anyway)." Earlier: Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"Dividing audiences, it seems, is what Cannes does best," notes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE.

Online listening tip. The Observer's Jason Solomons talks with Matteo Garrone (Gomorra), Bruce Weber (Let's Get Lost), Steve McQueen (Hunger) and Spike Lee.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Shorts, 5/22.

"Between 1998 and 2006, Hollywood studio films had combined production in Texas of more than $530 million, averaging eight or nine films a year, according to Texas Film Commission figures," writes Joe O'Connell in a cover story for the Austin Chronicle. "The entire year of 2007 eked out a mere $300,000 for the few days that A Mighty Heart landed in Austin." What's more, "Between 1998 and 2006, those Hollywood films produced more than 8,300 temporary crew jobs. In 2007, it was 20. Ouch." And: "It's no big surprise who the culprit is: States like neighboring New Mexico and Louisiana offer heftier incentives to entice Hollywood to come a-calling." Sidebar: "The Texas Film Commission crunched the numbers to compare what kind of incentives each state offers for a $20 million production. Of the country's filmmaking hubs, Texas came in dead last."

Also: Kimberley Jones on local filmmaker Brad Neely's new series for Adult Swim, China, IL, plus a brief on a bump in the road Monkey Wrench overcame when it set out to mark the 40th anniversary of May 68.

"Jonathan Demme has taken over from Martin Scorsese as director of an authorised documentary about Jamaican reggae icon Bob Marley." The BBC reports.

Larry Gross's 48 Hrs diaries, continued at Movie City News.

In the LA Weekly, Robert Abele reviews Recount, "a docudrama of the fierce post–Election Day fight in Florida that determined whether George W Bush or Al Gore would win the presidency of the United States. (Spoiler alert: The United States lost.) Written with an eye for telling detail by Danny Strong, and directed in surprisingly nimble fashion by blockbuster-comedy wrangler Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers movies and Meet the Parents fame), it has the peculiarly alchemic structure of a nail-biting tragi-farce." More from Chicagoist Rob Christopher. Airs Sunday on HBO.

"Loath though I am to carp about any director who's devoted chunks of his career to bringing the non-white world's suffering to Western attention, Roger Spottiswoode's The Children of Huang Shi - a drama based on the life of an Englishman who saved an orphanage full of boys from Japanese invaders and Chinese nationalists in the 1930s - is a tale as ploddingly familiar as it is good-looking and worth telling," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Personally, I'd rather have a bad movie that distracts Americans from their navels for a moment than none at all. But even by the tainted standards of subconsciously imperial storytelling, The Children of Huang Shi is weak." More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC) and Raphaela Weissman (New York Press).

Also in the Voice, Ed Gonzalez on Insidious: "Ostensibly about the efforts of a young man named Donny (James Schram) to finance the very movie we're watching, this unwieldy Manhattan murder mystery with lame-brained aspirations to meta-ness boasts the plot of a dozen Abel Ferrara movies and the style and gravitas of none." More from Nick Schager in Slant.

"Released in France last year to glowing reviews, Ceux Qui Restent (Those Who Remain) went on to be nominated for three Cesars, including best first film," notes Matt Riviera. "Though it hasn't yet made much of an impact on the international festival circuit, the film should play well at French film festivals everywhere: it's a confident and accomplished debut from veteran actress Anne Le Ny, taking on writing-directing duties here for the first time.... Along with the subtle chemistry between the great Vincent Lindon and Emmanuelle Devos (last paired up in the terrific La Moustache), this capacity to prefer realism over narrative conventions is the strength this sweet and strangely satisfying film."

"When director Dorota Kedzierzawska was born on June 1, 1957, actress Danuta Szaflarska was already 42 years old and had been performing in films for almost a decade," writes Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Over the next half-century they would each perfect their individual crafts - Szaflarska would quickly become a renowned actress while Kedzierzawska, on the eve of her 34th birthday, released her first feature film - until last year, when they joined together for Time to Die, an outwardly quaint and simplistic look at the last days of a 91-year-old Polish woman named Aniela."

Zach Campbell considers various treatments and context of the "close-up of female persecution."

Roaring along recently: A Film Canon.

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.

Dennis Cozzalio presents "Professor Brian O'Blivion's All-New Flesh for Memorial Day Film/TV Quiz."

"One of the things I most enjoyed about Texas Snow was [Aaron] Coffman's attention to the way that twentysomethings communicate, the late night confessions and revelations that usually take place several hours (and usually several beers) after most sane people have fallen asleep," writes Chuck Tryon.

Peter Capaldi (and a few others in the biz) have an amusing way of explaining the art of the pitch to Guardian readers.

At Movie City News, Noah Forrest talks with Michael Skolnik about Without the King.

Online browsing tip. The TimesMachine.

Online listening tip. Ed Champion talks with Ralph Bakshi.

Fests and events, 5/22.

From Jennifer McMillan comes word that P Adams Sitney will be giving a talk at Light Industry in New York on May 27. Three short films (by Marie Menken, Ernie Gehr and Stan Brakhage) will be screened; his talk will be based on the argument he presents in Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson.

"It's tempting to credit film curator Joel Shepard with a sorcerer's clairvoyance, because the Witchcraft Weekend he has programmed for the screening room at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is so damned prescient," writes Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

"The Paramount's Summer Film Series begins tonight with, as is traditional at the Paramount, Casablanca," notes Austin-based Jette Kernion. "This year, the film is paired with Key Largo for a Bogie double-feature."

Blogging for Reverse Shot, eshman on Godard's Le Gai savoir and Un Film comme les autres: "Both films seek a new language for film and for society in the months after May 68, and as such both succeeded in offering a wholly fresh, if frequently inscrutable discourse. That audiences were (and are) bound to disengage from that discourse would seem to reveal the folly of Godard's revolutionary project, but seeing these films out of the context of 68 - as hard as that is with such historically located texts - it's apparent that failure was part of the philosophical expectation." Godard's 60s continues at Film Forum through June 5.

Cannes. Adoration.

"Atom Egoyan's Adoration is a fascinating muddle," writes Justin Chang in Variety.

"Folding all sorts of post-9/11 questions - about the ethics of terrorism, the deceptiveness of outward appearances, the ways technology can enable dialogue yet hinder the truth - into a very Egoyanesque miasma of elegantly fractured chronology and provocative ideas, this ambitious think-piece ultimately smothers its good intentions in didactic revelations, earnest pleading and incessant violin music."

"Following the failed effort to cross over into conventional, commercially viable film-making with Where The Truth Lies (2005), Canadian auteur Egoyan returns to his signature style with Adoration," writes Howard Feinstein in Screen Daily. "The camera glides at a near-perfect leisurely pace. He blends a rich soundtrack (an excellent, mournful score by Mychael Danna) with elegant sound bridges and sharp, clipped dialogue. And he once again moves gracefully between assorted plotlines. Unfortunately, the stories here are thin, unnecessarily complicated and glibly cryptic; some sections are difficult to follow, even annoying in their self-consciousness."

"Shot on beautifully utilized film but employing images vividly from the Internet and mobile phones, it's an examination of the power that false ideas may have on people's imagination and beliefs when they are repeated over and over," writes Ray Bennett, who goes on to praise the screenplay - and the score.

Competing.

Updates, 5/23: "What's familiar in his 11th feature film (and eighth invited to Cannes) is a kind of storytelling that characterized his films from the mid-90s, such as Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, which feature a group of people in a kind of post-traumatic state," writes Liam Lacey in the Globe and Mail. "Eventually, through the progression of the narrative and flashbacks, we uncover the web of connections between them.... What's unexpected is a streak of crazy black humour in Adoration." Via Movie City News.

"[T]he topics are life fictions, disemmination of information on the internet (this is in a sense the longest MacBook commercial ever), cultural difference, bigotry, and terrorism," writes Glenn Kenny. "At the heart of the picture, though, is a simpering sanctimony that could well bring out the neo-con you never knew you had in you."

Update, 5/24: "Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective nature of reality and identity in a technological age," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "In a world where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person - or even ourselves?"

Update, 5/25: Jay Stone of the CanWest News Service reports that Adoration has won "the ecumenical jury prize - the award given for movies that celebrate spiritual values." Via Movie City News.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Frontier of Dawn.

Philippe Garrel's Competition entry, Frontier of Dawn, is "a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I've seen, it's still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

Following a compare-n-contrast with James Gray's Two Lovers, she adds, "There are shots in this film's second half that are scarier than anything I've seen in a horror film in recent years... and simultaneously, incredibly moving in their invocation of a love that won't die. Or, at the very least, refuses to abide by traditional boundaries of love and death."

"Frontier of Dawn - the 28th feature by traditionalist director Philippe Garrel - met with tumultuous applause and whistles following its competition screening," reports Fabien Lemercier for Cineuropa. "Lauded on several occasions at the Venice Film Festival, the 60-year-old filmmaker is in official competition at Cannes for the first time, with a work characteristic of an oeuvre that could be described as timeless and anachronistic, or even suggestive and ephemeral, depending on one's point of view."

"Earnest, inherently divisive effort, lusciously photographed in black and white, is one of the weaker recent entries in Philippe Garrel's four decade career of bravely iconoclastic art films," writes Lisa Nesselson in Screen Daily. "Garrel's son Louis continues to embody his generation, projecting an appealing blend of mop-topped insouciance with doubt and anguish on tap. But his presence in this episodic love story with supernatural overtones is insufficient to overcome the film's endearing but awkward retrograde aura."

"Having been recently canonized by some critics and auds for his May 68-set slacker story Regular Lovers, helmer Philippe Garrel may now face excommunication by a goodly chunk of his erstwhile supporters for Frontier of Dawn," warns Leslie Felperin in Variety. "A risible slice of pretentious hokum, this love triangle plot with a supernatural angle peddles that covertly misogynist and sadistic old chestnut, that the hottest, most desirable women are self-harming loonies."

Update, 5/23: "The more some folks ostentatiously laughed at the introduction of a supernatural angle into the plot (achieved via effects that date back to Cocteau if not Melies), the more I loved the film," writes Glenn Kenny.

Update, 5/24: "On the face of it, Frontier of Dawn comes across like a familiar if peculiarly French love story, though one tinged with madness," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But few other filmmakers can - through purely visual terms, through shades of gray, meticulous framing and harmoniously balanced bodies - convey the mysterious transformation by which ordinary men and women become the adored."

Update, 5/27: "Philippe Garrel's cinema - which tends towards the suicidal - questions whether everything in the present can truly mean something in the moment," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Time and time again, the highs and lows of the moment calcify in the past and turn into a brooding regret, remorse, and romanticization. Frontier of Dawn, Garrel's smaller love tale following the epic-intimate May 68 opus Regular Lovers, asks the filmmaker's perennial question: how do you reconcile the unchangeable fate of the past with the quotidian sorrows and joy of the present? The answer is impossible, but the way Frontier of Dawn poses the question is frustrating but utterly effective."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Surveillance.

"Fifteen years after the career-killing debacle of Boxing Helena, Jennifer Lynch dares to raise her head above the parapet once more," writes Allan Hunter in Screen Daily.

"Eccentric thriller Surveillance shows no signs of any lasting impact on her self-confidence as it mixes together a lurid cocktail of jet black humour and bloodshed with a startling, left field plot twist."

Updated through 5/23.

"Think Rashomon meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Twin Peaks, and give lots of leeway for the gooniest improv overacting, and you may get on the warped wavelength of this semi-comic parable of social anarchy," writes Time's Richard Corliss.

"A twisty thriller with an unabashedly nasty streak and an almost theatrical taste for excess, the movie stars Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond as FBI agents investigating a massacre in the flatlands of Nebraska, where they must contend with the dim local cops and a host of highly unreliable witnesses." For the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim lunches with Lynch and notes that "Magnet Releasing, which acquired the film just before Cannes, is set to open it later this year."

"With a high splatter quotient and many scenes of deviant humiliation, the film will have its fans even if the eventual twist hardly comes as a surprise and probably isn't meant to," writes Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter.

Screening Out of Competition.

Update: Ben Kenigsberg, blogging for Time Out Chicago, finds Surveillance "just as unwatchable as Boxing Helena, albeit lacking in the gender-warfare pathology that made that film marginally interesting."

Update, 5/23: "Ooh, this one is a real dud," declares Charlie Prince at Cinema Strikes Back.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Stranger. SIFF Notes 08.

"Holy shit, SIFF has shrunk!" exclaims Annie Wagner, SIFF being the Seattle International Film Festival, of course, opening tonight and running through June 15. The exclamation's a perfect opener to the Stranger's SIFF Notes, now a blog and a database: "Over 150 real reviews and zero publicist bullshit."

The gist, of Annie Wagner's intro, though is that "the biggest film festival in North America is actually scaling back" and "is more manageable than it's been in some time." What's more, "as far as it's possible to analyze the broad programming decisions in a 25-day festival, this year's SIFF is looking unusually strong."

The Seattle Weekly's got a special section, too, but, you know, it's not the Stranger. More previews and roundups: Gillain G Garr (Siffblog) and NP Thompson (House Next Door; more).

Cannes. Che.

"Che benefits greatly from certain Soderberghian qualities that don't always serve his other films well, e.g., detachment, formalism, and intellectual curiosity," writes Glenn Kenny at indieWIRE.

"The two parts of Che treat two discrete periods in Ernesto Guevara's life: his participation in the Cuban revolution of 1957 - 59, wherein he was Fidel Castro's second in overthrowing the tyrannical Batista regime is depicted in Guerilla; his dreadfully abortive attempt to spread Latin American revolution in Bolivia from 1966 to 1967 in the subject of The Argentine. This structure very conveniently elides the period wherein Che, as effective co-head of Castro's Cuban government, presided over mass executions, the persecution of homosexuals, the ruination of the island's economy, the ill-fated alliance with the Soviet Union, and so on."

"There will be arguments about the politics of the films; there will be discussions of whether or not the films have any emotional center," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "There will be talk of if Benicio Del Toro deserves a Best Actor nomination for his work as Guevara, or if Soderbergh's portrait of Che is too flat to engage us; I can easily imagine discussions of the look and feel of the film, shot in high-resolution digital with all the craft and care Soderbergh usually brings to shooting on film. I can't predict how all of these questions and possibilities will play out, but I can say - and will say - what a rare pleasure it is to have a film (or films) that, in our box-office obsessed, event-movie, Oscar-craving age, is actually worth talking about on so many levels."

"In the 20 years since he won the Palme D'Or for sex, lies and videotape, Steven Soderbergh has travelled along some unexpected paths from the demented experimentation of Schizopolis and the sterile 1940s homage of The Good German to several helpings of Danny Ocean and his merry men to top up his commercial credibility," writes Allan Hunter in Screen Daily. "It is hard to imagine another American director of his generation with the clout or all-round ability to pull off a two-film, five-hour portrait of revolutionary icon Ernesto Che Guevara. His measured approach eschews grand, crowd-pleasing gestures or any temptation to adopt the sweep of a David Lean-style epic. Instead, he has created an absorbing, thoughtful marathon in which the focus is firmly on the personalities and the political arguments that forged the revolutionary ideals of the 1950s and 1960s.... This is very much a film of ideas."

"If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he's portrayed here," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Che is too big a roll of the dice to pass off as an experiment, as it's got to meet high standards both commercially and artistically. The demanding running time also forces comparison to such rare works as Lawrence of Arabia, Reds and other biohistorical epics. Unfortunately, Che doesn't feel epic - just long."

Updates: "What does it say about people who see a film like this and go 'meh'? asks Jeffrey Wells. "You can't watch a live-wire film like Che and say 'give me more.' It is what it is, and it gives you plenty. Take no notice of anyone who says it doesn't."

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez and Variety's Anne Thompson have pix and quotes from the press conference.

For the Los Angeles Times, Pete Hammond describes the ordeal of waiting to get into the screening - only to see crowds thin considerably in the intermission. At any rate, he has an idea for the marketing people.

"The Cannes film festival now has a serious contender for the Palme d'or," announces the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, for whom Che is "virile, muscular film-making, with an effortlessly charismatic performance by Benicio del Toro in the lead role. Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director's flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured - the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first - and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che's interior world. We see only Che the public man, the legendary comandante, defiant to the last."

"Whether it's one movie or two, Che clearly isn't finished," blogs Salon's Andrew O'Hehir:

It was shown here with no opening or closing credits, only a few crude digital intertitles ("NEW YORK 1964") that looked as if they'd been slapped on an hour earlier. As with seemingly every movie in this Year of Mixed Emotions at Cannes, reactions to the screening were all over the map; nobody in the group of critics I ate dinner with was entirely sure what he or she thought.

The Cannes Che, probably a film no one will see again, is a big, sprawling, ambitious mess. It's less a grand-opera mess than a beautifully constructed machine whose parts don't all quite work together. I was never bored, in four hours-plus. Whether or not it ends up becoming a great film (or films), this is miles and miles beyond anything I thought Soderbergh could create from this material.

"There's a lot more struggle and tension in Che 2, which gives the film more narrative thrust, and also more political context so you're not locked into the claustrophobia of the Bolivian jungle," blogs the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik. "Still, the film is difficult, episodic and willfully disgregarding of what the director calls 'movie moments.'"

"It's not only an entirely serious and adult film - indeed, it is best regarded as an art movie - but it's also an extraordinary movie from an American director," writes Geoff Andrew for Time Out. "This, in the end, is a film about the Revolution as work, as process, as struggle, rather than a sentimental celebration of one individual."

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"For all of its length and action, the film is strangely under-dramatized, and you don't know that much more about Che coming out of the film than going into it," writes Facets' Milos Stehlik.

"This is Soderbergh's most avant-garde picture, and although there are already calls for re-editing - the first half, in particular, throws an enormous amount of nonchronological information in the audience's lap - the Cannes version deserves to be preserved; to cut the movie would diminish the sense of Soderbergh's sheer obsession with the material," blogs Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out Chicago. "It is a fair criticism that the movie unduly elides, among other things, the brutal injustices that Che committed in Castro's government, even if they aren't in a period covered by the film. The source of Soderbergh's interest appears to be exclusively in the nuts and bolts of guerrilla revolution - educating civilians, recruiting soldiers, finding food, cooking a pig and so on. If focusing so relentlessly on apparent minutiae can sometimes be alienating, it's also what makes the movie such an attention-grabber."

"The impulse is unimpeachably admirable; the result is heartbreakingly misguided," writes Stephen Garrett for Esquire. "Why try to avoid passing judgment? Why pretend that you haven't anyway?... There's no need for character assassination here. But the absence of darker, more contradictory revelations of his nature leaves Che bereft of complexity. All that remains is a South American superman: uncomplex, pure of heart, defiantly pious and boring."

"[T]he running time is not the problem of this honorable, doomed effort; it's that so many scenes are repetitions of earlier ones," argues Time's Richard Corliss. "But the major burden falls on its star, who as one of the producers has nurtured the project for almost a decade. And Del Toro - whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof - is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here. Except for one thrilling confrontation at the UN between Guevara and ambassadors from other Latin American countries, Che is defined less by his rigorous fighting skills and seductive intellect than by his asthma."

For the New York Times' AO Scott, the film has "some big problems as well as major virtues." It's "interesting, partly because it has the power to provoke some serious argument - about its own tactics and methods, as well as those of its subject. Whether American audiences will have a chance to participate in that argument is, for the moment, an open question."

Updates, 5/23: "Che is a highly impressive achievement," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "It delivers on several different levels, frequently subverting classical drama or storytelling. It relates only fragments of a complicated life, but the director expertly collates these incidents and dramatic episodes in connoting a larger portrait. Soderbergh produced Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan work, I'm Not There, and both filmmakers express an obstinate refusal in going against the grain. Like I'm Not There, Che is a fundamentally expressive and elective piece on subjective forms and contentious lives."

"The battle sequences, like the rest of the film shot by Soderbergh himself on the new digital RED camera, are exhilarating; the brothers-at-arms camaraderie is engaging," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times. "But it’s a very uncritical portrait of Guevara who presides, Solomon-like, over the petty squabbles and misbehaviour of guerrillas who shuffle like guilty schoolboys in his presence."

Che "may well be the most fastidious and exhaustive anatomy of revolutionary politics since The Battle of Algiers," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "Neither hagiography nor lightweight biopic, Che is a brave and gorgeously photographed film whose seriousness and captivating story offer a cinematic experience beyond the extraordinary."

"[T]he latter half is really where it's at," writes Alison Willmore. The Argentine may be "ust an exceptionally long, background-laden prologue to "Guerrilla," which is linear, less efficient, more poetic and unhappy."

"Regardless of your political views, I bet most people will be disappointed to find that Soderbergh hasn't put together a more balanced view of the controversial leader," writes Charlie Prince at Cinema Strikes Back. "And with a 4.5 hour running time, the director certainly can't complain that he didn't have enough time to do it."

Che "may be a great movie, but it is also something just as rare - a magnificently uncommercial folly," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "This skillfully didactic, nervily dialectical, feel-good, feel-bad combat film has less in common with The Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins's La Commune (Paris, 1871) or even a structuralist extravaganza like Michael Snow's La Région Centrale. Che is a thing to be experienced."

Update, 5/29: "Simply put, Che is a movie - or two movies - after Guevara's own heart, in which the rebel leader often recedes into the jungle scape, one more proletariat cog in the Marxist wheel, while the greater cause (represented by long scenes of ideological debate and battlefield strategy) comes to the fore," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "One part ends in conditional triumph, the other in tragedy; in both, Soderbergh, per Che's prophetic words, suggests that a revolution succeeds or fails by the will of the people."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Classics and more movies about festivals and film.

"Few experiences are richer than to be able to see a film again, ten years after the first time, while remembering the reception it got fifty years earlier," writes Emmanuel Burdeau in the Cahiers du cinéma Cannes diary.

"One must count the years; hold several scoring boards at the same time. This suits Lola Montès, which is in many ways a story of calculation. Higher, Lola, higher, repeats Ustinov to her constantly. Higher than what?"

Updated.

Related: In the Guardian, Agnes Poirier reports on what Marcel Ophüls remembers of the premiere in Cannes of his father's film in 1955.

Mary Corliss for Time on David Lean's The Passionate Friends: "It's not one of the great director's masterpieces, but it had an emotional gravity that locates the difference between love and being in love, and it fulfilled the basic dictum of Golden Age movies: beautiful people with difficult problems, in radiant black-and-white."

Further down that same page, Richard Corliss reports on a sprightly appearance by Manoel De Oliveira as he collected an honorary Palme d'Or and saw his first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial (Working on Douro River, 1931), screened to an audience that included "Cannes Jury President Sean Penn, Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis and a young pup named Clint Eastwood, who will be 78 at the end of the month and who was a year old when Working on the Douro River opened in Portuguese theaters."

Related: Why do some directors carry on working into their 70s, 80s and 90s, a few of them quite well, too, while others seem to dry up and blow away, wonders Ronald Bergan at the Guardian.

"The often stormy, sometimes downright crazy, history of what the Cannes Film Festival still refers to as a 'parallel section' rather than by its actual name gets a warm 40th anni pat on the back from a battalion of big names in docu [40X15: Forty Years of the Directors' Fortnight]," writes Derek Elley in Variety. "Anchored by an in-depth interview with the wry Pierre-Henri Deleau, head of the Directors' Fortnight for its first 30 years, this makes required viewing for movie aficionados, especially with some trimming of its more discursive second half." In the Hollywood Reporter, Duane Byrge finds it "a comprehensive, affectionate look at the 40 years of the Cannes sidebar that began in the wake of the protest tumults of 1968."

Derek Elley on a "once-over-lightly look at the man, the movie and director David Lean," Once Upon a Time... Lawrence of Arabia: "Most entertaining, and occasionally perceptive, about the movie and Lean himself is Omar Sharif, who relates the story of the helmer asking his cast each day for ideas on how to shoot a scene."

Update: "Longtime documentarian and Time film critic Richard Schickel brings both privileged access and humble cinephilia into Warner Bros' vaults for five-hour You Must Remember This, the first 116 minutes of which were shown at Cannes in advance of full version's three-part PBS broadcast - and tie-in book's release - in September," writes Rob Nelson in Variety. "Celebrating the studio's 85th anniversary, docu - judging from the footage shown at Cannes, spanning WB's first quarter-century - is clip-heavy almost to a fault. But Schickel's unsurprisingly smart assemblage of talking heads gives it a valuable measure of critical and scholarly sensibility."

Cannes. Johnny Mad Dog.

"The brutal French-Belgian-Liberian movie Johnny Mad Dog, an assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers made with boys and girls who actually fought in that country's recent war, left me wrung out - furious, confused, deep in thought," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"One of a gang of lost children who call themselves 'the death dealers,' Mad Dog roams the wastelands of his country, spreading machine-gun terror and death - to men, women and other children - in the name of the revolution. Whose revolution? The movie doesn't say.... Without context, information or explanation, the movie plunges you into horror - yet, to what end?"

"Cinema is forever inventing new ways to tell us that war is hell, but few recent films have explored the extremes of that hell as vividly or intrepidly as Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's African drama Johnny Mad Dog," writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily. "Shattering performances by unknowns, many of them actually former child soldiers, plus a confrontational directing style make this one of the most striking recent French fiction debuts.... There's a certain Lord of the Flies horror in the suggestion that these are still children at play in the most murderous way, their battle garb suggestive of a nightmarish carnival."

"Kidnapping takes its vilest form as armed children in Liberia commandeer other kids to join their marauding troop," writes Duane Byrge in the Hollywood Reporter. "Fiction based on unbelievable fact, Johnny Mad Dog chronicles the atrocities of the ongoing civil war in that West African nation. Although hard to watch, it's an important document that should scorch sensibilities on the festival circuit."

Un Certain Regard.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Delta.

"'A typical festival art film.' That was the judgment of a friend of mine after the Tuesday press screening of Delta, a competition entry from the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"The festival film - slow, difficult, formally austere - can be a welcome antidote to the fast-moving, accessible movies that thrive in the sphere of commercial cinema. But it is also worth remembering - and Delta is hardly the only film here to remind me - that art movies, too, are susceptible to formula and cliché."

"Five years after launching the project and 18 months after starting to shoot it, with one tragic accident in the middle which almost sunk the entire production (the death of lead actor, Lajos Bertok, to whom the film is dedicated), Kornel Mundruczo is back on his feet with his best rounded and most mature work to date," announces Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "The themes he has been associated with in the past are now integrated in a perfectly coherent world and it seems as if he has found his own individual voice and a style he is most comfortable with, facts attested by the Best Film Award and the Gene Moskovitz prize offered by the foreign press, which he collected at the Hungarian Film Week."

"A classic structure, lots of the Hungarian peasant faces we know from Béla Tarr's films, a lyrical touch," writes Facets' Milos Stehlik.

"Staggeringly beautiful from an aesthetic perspective, the film manages to captivate viewers despite its minimalist plot and dialogues," writes Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa - which also has the trailer.

Fest21.com has notes from the press conference.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes, 5/21.

"Watching a stolid horde of blue-clad factory workers trudge obediently up an institutional staircase in Jia Zhangke's 24 City as though to the next movie, the colleague beside me murmured: 'It's Cannes!'" A roundup from J Hoberman in the Voice: "Midway through the madness, it's been a good but not yet great festival."

"Screening at the Cannes sales market on Thursday and Friday, Nick Nolte: No Exit is an almost existential documentary, part self-celebratory profile, part surreal question-and-answer session," writes John Horn in the Los Angeles Times. "While the film does include a range of friends and collaborators talking about the Affliction and Prince of Tides star's acting - Ben Stiller and Jacqueline Bisset among them - its center focuses on Nolte asking himself (and usually answering) his own queries."

"Though this has been a good festival, with some tremendous films, the emphasis has been on tragedy and unrelenting grimness," and the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw wonders why.

Xan Brooks and Mary Corliss, blogging for the Guardian and Time respectively, catch up with Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

"[Josh] Safdie's work reflects a certain youthful ingenuity, and a great example of the way a low budget can actually enhance the final product." At Stream, Eric Kohn tells the story behind The Pleasure of Being Robbed, closing this year's Directors' Fortnight.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Frameline32. Lineup.

"The historically rich Castro Theatre - with its marquee recently revamped for the Milk biopic shoot - hosted Frameline's announcements of its program for the annual San Francisco International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Film Festival Tuesday morning," notes Susan Gerhard at SF360.

"In its 32nd year, the festival runs June 19 - 29 at the Castro, Roxie and Victoria theaters in San Francisco, and the Elmwood in Berkeley. It opens with Affinity, based on Sarah Waters's 1999 novel, a film Festival Artistic Director Michael Lumpkin described as a 'same-sex bodice ripper.' Its closing night film, the Canadian Breakfast with Scot, mixes homosexuality and hockey a story about raising a child."

Michael Guillén previews two entries: Saturno Contro and Ruby Blue.

NYAFF. Lineup.

"The New York Asian Film Festival is back like a bad dream, ready to cleanse the dirt from your soul with a barrage of sparkling, super-powered movies straight out of Asia. It's a seventeen day orgy of new films from Takashi Miike, Johnnie To, Hur Jin-Ho, Koji Wakamatsu and Shinji Aoyama. Plus, our first-ever documentary (Yasukuni) and our first movies from Indonesia (Kala) and Vietnam (The Rebel)."

The lineup's up. June 20 through July 6.

Via Todd Brown at Twitch.

Update: Jason Gray has notes on the Japanese films in the lineup.

Production Design Blog-a-Thon.

"With a little effort, it isn't difficult to think of films where we have been delighted by the product of production designers' labor and aesthetic, but they have nevertheless received a saddening lack of sustained appreciation, even from the most attentive of critics."

So Jeremy Bushnell's hosting the Production Design Blog-a-Thon, running through Sunday. Via the House Next Door.

War, Inc.

"War, Inc, a new political satire co-written by and starring John Cusack, reminds us that it's possible to agree with a movie's agenda while simultaneously despising the movie itself," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "A thuddingly heavy-handed comedy about corporations profiting both from wars and from their aftermath, the film contains not one honest-to-goodness laugh."

"Over these years of war and occupation, Cusack has become one of the most insightful commentators on a far too seldom discussed aspect of the occupation: the corporate dominance of the US war machine," writes Jeremy Scahill for the Nation. "Cusack is no parachute humanitarian. While he continues to do the Hollywood thing with big-budget movies, he is simultaneously a fierce, un-embedded actor/filmmaker who has been at the center of two of the best films to date dealing with the madness of the Iraq War [Grace Is Gone and War, Inc]. Without big-money sponsors and the backing of powerful production companies, Cusack has spent a lot of his own money on these projects."

Updated through 5/24.

At Movie City News, Noah Forrest, a serious fan of Cusack's since Grosse Pointe Blank, finds this one "a colossal failure that really does not work on any level. It's really hard for me to say that because I went into this film wanting so much to love the film and every time I felt the film about to pick up, it just shoots itself in the foot. What makes it especially difficult is that it is clear from the writing of the film that there are intelligent and creative people behind the project."

"This must be the pandering liberal Hollywood circle-jerk studio execs wanted when they poured millions into Southland Tales," sighs Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine.

For the New York Times' David Carr, this is "a satire that goes over the top and stays there." He calls up Cusack, who's in London, "where he is filming Shanghai, about an American expat visiting that city right before Pearl Harbor," and adds, "Those who suggest that the [War, Inc's] core premise - war as a profit engine - is so five years ago are right in a way. Mr Cusack and his co-writers, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, have been grinding away almost since the start of the very long war it takes aim at."

Joshua Holland talks with Cusack for Alternet.

Meantime, Tatiana Siegel reports in Variety that Cusack has signed on for Roland Emmerich's "apocalyptic thriller" 2012.

Updates, 5/22: Mary Lyn Maiscott talks with Cusack for VF Daily.

"It's certainly more audacious than your typical Cusack vehicle, which might've been fine if Naomi Klein's ideas on disaster capitalism - a major inspiration for the project - hadn't been filtered through an atonal jumble of quasi-Strangelovean histrionics, absurdist slapstick, sudden melodrama and violent action, and then still offered as pointed or relevant criticism," writes Aaron Hillis in the LA Weekly. "Antiwar, anti-Bush, anti-corporate, yet neither as progressive nor half as funny as the Harold and Kumar sequel, War, Inc squanders some top-tier talent (Marisa Tomei, Sir Ben Kingsley) as well as our patience."

"Joshua Seftel's satire War, Inc might not be as non-stop laugh-out-loud funny as intended, but somehow I didn't care," writes Marcy Dermansky.

Aaron Hillis talks with Leynor for the IFC.

"Even less funny than Southland Tales and not nearly as adventurous, War, Inc brings new levels of desperation and botched satire to the anti-Bush, Strangelove-wannabe genre," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

Updates, 5/23: "[I]t is a zany, nihilistic free-for-all that goes soft," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "What bracing misanthropy War, Inc is able to conjure in its early scenes is sabotaged by the presence of the film's prime mover, John Cusack, an actor who even when playing the ultimate cynic can't keep from coming across as a misguided nice guy on the verge of seeing the light."

... to Andy Klein.

"[I]f it isn't a bomb, the film's about as messy as our own current situation in the Middle East," writes Craig Phillips.

"Somehow, what starts as a series of cheap shots in a barrel develops into something more, thanks largely to warm, engaging performances by Cusack and Tomei," writes Carina Chocano. "War, Inc is both right-on and somehow off, but it gets points for trying." Also in the Los Angeles Times, Tina Daunt meets Cusack.

For Nicolas Rapold, writing in the New York Sun, finds War, Inc "neither as bad nor as brave as advance press in various quarters has suggested. It's essentially a riff on Mike Judge's 2006 dystopian comedy Idiocracy, transposed to an anonymous Eurasian locale, with Mr Cusack reprising his conflicted hangdog hit man from Grosse Pointe Blank. After hitting some early polemical points in a freewheeling blaze of mordant absurdity, the film putters through incongruously conventional romantic-comedy intrigue and self-defeating Borat-ism."

"It's too soon to laugh about Iraq, and it'll never be time to laugh about it with this kind of maladroit humor," argues Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Cusack, too.

Update, 5/24: Another Cusack interview: Amy Goodman.

Cannes. The Bastards.

"Much like his debut Sangre, Los Bastardos is another protest film from Mexico's Amat Escalante, which points the finger at the industrialised world, in particular the US, for its treatment of illegal immigrants, and the tragedy that inevitably ensues," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "Escalante's arguments are valid and the film's horrific climax will shock the audience out of its complacency but the film's style - with its static first shot to a drawn-out ending - places this firmly in the art house niche."

"A nihilistic high-art film marked by fashionable static takes, banal minimalist dialogue, glacial pacing and ultra-violence, The Bastards will attract support from the usual suspects in the critical community," grumbles Variety's Todd McCarthy. "From the bold opening credits, the simplicity of his conceptions, the stripped-down refinement of his widescreen framing and the rich sound mix, it's clear Escalante possess a strong talent. What he does with it is another matter."

Updated through 5/23.

As Escalante "subtly sketches the daily frustrations of these impoverished, uneducated men far from their families, along with the backbreaking but badly-paid work they perform and the ethnic taunts they endure, a sense of hope slowly arises in the viewer that this is going to be a very special film," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. "Alas, Escalante perversely chooses to dash that hope by suddenly changing gears in the direction of a half-baked plot twist."

Un Certain Regard.

Meantime, according to Charles Masters in the Hollywood Reporter, actor Ruben Sosa was stopped at the border as he tried to get into France to catch Monday's screening. Seems the police couldn't believe he was actually in a movie. "'He was dragged off like a dog, they rummaged through his luggage three times, then he was stripped to his underpants in front of everyone,' said Francois Guerrar, the film's French publicist. 'They didn't believe he was an actor in a film, and Sosa didn't understand what was going on.' Sosa, who was traveling alone from Mexico, was eventually allowed to get into the Mercedes sent to meet him by sales company Le Pacte. The driver said that a police car then followed them all the way to Cannes to confirm the actor's story."

Welcome to Europe!

Update, 5/22: "Los Bastardos really is lovably obnoxious," writes Charlie Prince at Cinema Strikes Back. "Intentionally discordant and uncomfortable, even the opening scene comes off as a shot across the bow - literally for several minutes we watch as two men (who will be the stars of the film) start hundreds of feet away as little dots, and slowly walk towards us down a long stretch of abandoned cement in near silence. At first you can't even see the two guys. It is an astoundingly dull way to start a movie. Most films try to hook the audience in the first few minutes, but Los Bastardos goes to considerable effort to send a different message: 'we're going to do this our way - deal with it.'"

Update, 5/23: "Escalante's political objectives in drawing attention to the way that the US economic system degrades those at the bottom of the heap are ill-served by his confrontational tactics - evoking Michael Haneke's Funny Games and Gaspar Noé's I Stand Alone - that are blunt and over-familiar," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Wired @ 15.

Congrats to Wired on its 15th. Like Rolling Stone and Artforum, which also eventually defected to New York, Wired was at its provocative best in its rambunctious San Franciscan youth. For a taste of the times, see founding Louis Rossetto's open letter to his kids, outlining a few things Wired got wrong and a few things Wired got right in the years stretching from Mosaic to Facebook. There's a video interview, too, plus another with former editor Kevin Kelly; there's even a map: "How the Ideas and Events of 1993 Created the World We Live in Today."

Also: Steven Leckart talks with Brian Eno about the ideas he raised in a 1995 cover story and Lucas Graves revisits Kevin Kelly's 1997 "New Rules for the New Economy."

Now then, a few items in the current issue of likely interest to cinefolk: "Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie (Dark Horse Books) offers a sneak peek at the menagerie of mutants primed to swarm the world-weary demonoid, portrayed again by the heavy-browed Ron Perlman," reports Hugh Hart; do take a look at the accompanying illustrations.

More nifty imagery comes with Jennifer Hillner's brief item on how a few of the gadgets on "some of those dopey spy shows of the 60s," e.g., The Man From U.N.C.L.E., were eventually realized.

Adam Rogers talks with Ron Moore about re-imagining Battlestar Galactica; he's also got details on the ways a few movies rides get pimped.

"Over the past century, dozens of apocalyptic plotlines have risen from the enigmatic ashes of the charred Tunguska pines," writes David S Hirschman. "These four win for creativity."

"[I]'s a bit surprising to learn that for his first venture as a videogame creative director, the man behind Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park is making not a photorealistic shooter but a cross between Tetris and Jenga." Chris Kohler previews Steven Spielberg's Boom Blox.

Cannes. The Headless Woman.

"Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel is nothing if not subtle," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter.

"She is also a master of visual and aural technique, which is on full and splendid display in La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman), her third feature. The problem is that, as with La Cienaga and La Nina Santa, her narratives can be maddeningly slight, causing the viewer to struggle to comprehend even basic character relationships or motivations. It's difficult to invest much emotion if you have little idea who's who."

"It's a minor but effective Blow-Up about an upper-class Argentine woman (Maria Onetto) whose life becomes unmoored after she possibly kills a young boy while driving on a country road," blogs the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "Onetto's quite special as bourgeoisette who drifts into and then out of a state of heightened clarity, and you can feel the anger burning away under the movie's cool glass surface. Perhaps Martel should have let more of it erupt onto the screen. There may be a cultural disconnect on my part, since the Argentine guys I sat next to during the screening roundly booed it. But movies are a blood sport here; that's part of the sadistic fun."

"Throughout, Martel places the character in shallow focus widescreen close-ups; therein, those people in her periphery—generally servants, workers, and so on—are diffused, hazy," writes Glenn Kenny. "It's an oblique way of reflecting on contemporary class relations, but it's apt, and in point of fact this is one of the few films in the largely-socially-conscious Competition that reflects on class relations as such."

"Lucrecia Martel asks way too much of the viewer in her third feature, a dour tale of moral and social paralysis centring on a hit-and-run incident in an Argentinian rural backwater and its effects on the woman at the wheel," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily. "At first the Latin American auteur's long-awaited new film looks like it is about to build the same edgy mix of family drama, visual symbolism, social critique and menacing atmosphere that distinguished her first two features, La Cienaga and The Holy Girl. But in The Headless Woman, Martel lets the miasma blur the drama and stifle the story. The result is a 'plotless film' that, in its Cannes press screening, prompted walkouts and boos, although many still maintain that the film's advanced symbolic and narrative sudoku is worth puzzling out."

Updates: "Pic's denouement is chilling, but doesn't provide the same kind of enigmatic kicker that graced The Holy Girl," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety. "Despite the guilt theme, thesp Onetto keeps Vero's signs of anxiety so subtle she almost doesn't seem all that bothered. Maybe she's not, and maybe that's the point, but if this is a work of social criticism, indicting the callousness of the rich, it's pretty mild stuff."

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"As with Three Monkeys, the plot of this Argentine non-drama makes it sound more interesting than it is," writes Mary Corliss for Time. "The film is inert, visually tiring, utterly lacking in suspense; nothing changes except Onetto's hair color."

Update, 5/22: "Few filmmakers use focus as effectively and incisively as Martel," notes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "Inspired by Martel's dreams and nightmares, The Headless Woman is moody, mysterious and suffused with ominous portents and subtle critiques of the bourgeoisie."

Update, 5/23: For J Hoberman, writing in the Voice, this is "the Best Film in Competition Least Likely to Win a Prize."

Updates, 5/25: Daniel Kasman, writing in the Auteurs' Notebook, finds Martel "refining her utterly precise sense of visual and aural exploration of psychology while keeping the scale of her film smaller than anything else she has done. If the eerie sense of off-screen space and subtle, active sound design in The Holy Girl suggested a director who could make a truly disturbing horror picture, Martel goes halfway to embrace a ghost story."

Andrew O'Hehir talks with Martel for Salon.

Update, 5/29: The Headless Woman is "one of the strongest of a very strong festival," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "Shooting for the first time in wide screen, Martel effects a sense of spatial and temporal dislocation that is close to the phantasmagoric subconsciousness of a David Lynch or Luis Buñuel. As she films her saucer-eyed, peroxide-blond leading lady (Maria Onetto) from a distance, in and out of focus, reflected in glass, we too begin to feel that we aren't quite ourselves, that we are sharing in Veronica's dark, private, waking dream. Most critics, though, were too busy complaining about being confused by the film to realize that this was exactly the point."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Cannes. Maradona By Kusturica.

"As a twice-over Palme d'Or winner, Emir Kusturica might justifiably feel that he too, like Diego Maradona, has been touched by the hand of God," suggests Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily. "But his loosely-structured documentary portrait of the beleaguered football legend bears out the suspicions suggested by its title: Maradona By Kusturica is indeed practically a large order of Kusturica with a side salad of Maradona."

"Kusturica deserves credit for revealing Maradona to be more articulate and thoughtful than he usually appears, but what a strange, blustering, macho film this is," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It is pure penis-envy cinema. Kusturica has no obvious affinity with the cinematic possibilities of football; his clips of Maradona's goals are unimaginatively chosen and presented, and often repeated to pad out the film."

Update, 5/23.

"It's the director's good fortune that everything about Maradona rags-to-riches tale of a fallen anti-hero is classic Hollywood material," notes Kaleem Aftab in the Independent. Even so: "The director is not a good journalist. There is much that Kusturica chooses not to discuss with the man he idolises. Maradona doesn't talk about his illegitimate son, his relationship with the Neapolitan mafia or anything about his career in Barcelona. It also pays to have some knowledge of the midfield maestro when montage sequences of Maradona on the football field are shown. The most preposterous moment is when Kusturica in all seriousness says that analysing Maradona play football could be as valuable for understanding the human condition as the works of Freud and Jung."

"In thrall to the iconic soccer wizard, the director makes the film as much about his simplistic politics and idolizing fans as about his playing career," writes Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter. "Kusturica gets Maradona talking about his rags-to-riches rise to fame and the cocaine addiction that he says prevented him from being an even greater player, and shows him in the cocoon of a loving family. But the director puts himself in the film quite a bit and it leaves the impression that, as many men would, he just wanted to hang out with one of his sporting heroes and brag about it."

Screening Out of Competition. Update: "Snarky detractors might muse that both men, monumental egotists on the evidence here alone, demonstrated spectacular ability in their early careers only to eventually disappoint," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety. "More generous souls will find in this an original perspective brought to bear on a complex figure with a fascinatingly chequered career."

Update, 5/22: "The movie - and by that we mean YouTube collection of footage - is the most absurdly self-indulent hodgepodge of a picture we've ever seen (and we've been to Tribeca)," blogs the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik.

Update, 5/23: "Unexpectedly, much of the film is about politics," notes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "Maradona says he would die for Castro, appears on platforms with Hugo Chávez, and describes Bush as a 'piece of human garbage.'"

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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A Jihad for Love.

"Six years after un-closeting the Orthodox Jewish homosexual community in Trembling Before G-d, filmmaker Sandi Dubowski brings his documentary mensch sensibility to open another dialogue on faith and tolerance, this time on behalf of Muslim gays and lesbians around the world," writes Kevin B Lee in Slant. "Jihad for Love, by first-time feature director Parvez Sharma [blog], follows the globetrotting, multi-character arc of Dubowski's film; by establishing the worldwide ubiquity of homosexuality among many believers as a structural lynchpin of their rhetorical argument for tolerance, Sharma and producer Dubowski opt for breadth over depth."

Updated.

"Mr Sharma's film emphasizes testimony over context to such a degree that it feels at first of little use to anyone except gay Muslims who might take comfort in knowing they're not alone," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "But the documentary gains depth of feeling as it goes and even develops something of a nail-biting narrative as it follows a clique of Iranian men who flee to central Turkey in hopes of applying for political asylum in Canada."

"[A]s in Trembling Before G_d, the movie leaves open a provocative question: If you pick and choose which tenets of a religion apply to you, is it still a religion?" Jim Ridley in the Voice.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Sharma "about the difficulties involved in making the film, reclaiming the word 'jihad,' and designing his own Bollywood film posters as a child."

Updates: "From the outset, Mr Sharma's A Jihad for Love, which opens today at IFC Center, makes one thing clear," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun:

It is not, as some might expect, a story of alienation. Unlike other recent documentaries that have tackled religious and moralistic themes - such as Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, which lent a soapbox to every side of the abortion debate - A Jihad for Love is not about irreconcilable differences or two groups that regard each other with disdain.

Mostly, the film presents men and women who are passionate about their faith, who have tried to live life as prescribed by their parents and spiritual leaders, but who cannot ignore the fact that their source of love and comfort, of lust and consolation, is a person of the same sex. Their story is not one of alienation, but of determined reconciliation.

"Sharma, a gay writer, reporter, and filmmaker born in India, is himself a Muslim, and his lack of condescension toward the religious communities he captures on film is A Jihad for Love's greatest strength," writes Michael Koresky in indieWIRE. "Sharma excels at depicting the effects of repressive regimes on individuals in a matter-of-fact manner, without the aid of overly cute populist doc tricks or direct audience appeals; one comes away with the sense that Islamic governmental law based on religion isn't so different from nonsecular Westernized rationalizations for discrimination."

James Stewart @ 100.

By the way: Happy birthday, James Stewart.

Salutes in the German papers: Gerhard Midding (Frankfurter Rundschau) and Bert Rebahndl (Berliner Zeitung).

Updated through 5/22.

Updates, 5/21: "As someone with a serious critical interest in film the Siren knows her obligations. She's supposed to prefer late-period Stewart to early.... But, to quote Woody Allen's most infamous line, the heart wants what it wants and what the Siren wants is The Shop Around the Corner. After that she wants The Philadelphia Story, Vivacious Lady, Made for Each Other, The Mortal Storm and The Shopworn Angel. In short, she wants Stewart the romantic and ideally she wants Margaret Sullavan in there somewhere too."

"1939 is often cited as the greatest year in the history of motion pictures, producing a bumper crop of classics," writes Josh R at Edward Copeland on Film. "Certainly, no actor reaped more of the benefit of that yield than Stewart - he appeared in no less than five films, two of which would proove to be among his very best."

"James Stewart probably came closest to playing the classic American better than anyone," writes moirafinnie6 at Movie Morlocks.

Update, 5/22: "He was, as one writer then put it, 'unusually usual,'" writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "[T]he lingering impression will always be of the small-town blunderbuss who, as Stewart put it himself, was "the inarticulate man who tries. I don’t really have all the answers, but for some reason, somehow, I make it.... I suppose people can relate to being me, while they dream about being John Wayne." Well, maybe in a shootout - but in everyday life, probably most folks would rather the gent next door be Jimmy Stewart."

Cannes, 5/20.

"The festival organizers have to feel pleased," assumes Patrick Z McGavin in Stop Smiling. "In past years, they appeared under constant institutional attack by the media for their programming choices. Right now, they are benefitting from a deep and strong lineup, while very few complaints have emerged."

On the other hand, Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE:

"Good, but not great. Accomplished, but not amazing. A consistent thread is emerging within this year's Cannes selection: Name directors are showing up with solid work that displays their talents, but doesn't transcend them or spin them into new, novel directions."

And according to Time's Richard Corliss, there's a "consensus that this session of Cannes, where more than half the competing films have already been shown, is a relatively weak one."

Must depend on who you bump into between screenings.

Regardless: "To celebrate the 61st Cannes Film Festival, Granta.com is revisiting some of its favourite writing on film."

"[S]peaking as one who has lately been wondering what [Spike] Lee has been up to this election year, I think now I know," blogs Rob Nelson, who's just seen a clip reel of Miracle at St Anna. "And, as they say in election years, I approve this message."

"What happened to me? How did I become such an arsehole?" But of course Toby Young's having a grand time in Cannes, promoting How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and knocking back a few with Simon Pegg.

Also in the Guardian:

• Xan Brooks: "Spare a thought for the ghosts of Cannes, the Palme d'Or winners of yesteryear. When Roland Joffé won for The Mission in 1986, he was hailed as the poster-boy for classy British cinema. Now he is back with his latest opus: a low-budget romance about two girls who fall in love at a t.A.T.u. gig. Suffice to say it is not in competition."

• "Jude Law yesterday swept into the Cannes film festival to explain why he was helping a documentary-maker who for the last 10 years has campaigned for an official day of ceasefire and non-violence." As Mark Brown reports, Jeremy Gilley's been working on the project, "and the result is the documentary The Day After Peace, which had its world premiere in Cannes last night."

• Geoffrey Macnab: "There was a comical moment when Tommy Lee Jones met distributors in Cannes this week to talk about his new project, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel Islands in the Stream. Jones is writing, producing, and directing the film; he will also star."

How bad is the economy this year? Scott Macaulay notes that the definitive indicator just might