Shorts, 6/30.

"'Power and freedom.' Coupled together, these two words are repeated three times in Vertigo." Chris Marker on Hitchcock's masterpiece - at 3quarksdaily, via wood s lot. Related: Richard Brody, briefly, in the New Yorker. And an online listening tip: more Hitchcock and Truffaut at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger... Earlier: "Vertigo @ 50."

For the Financial Times, Tobias Gray talks with David Cronenberg about working with composer Howard Shore, librettist David Henry Hwang and Los Angeles Opera musical director Placido Domingo on The Fly: The Opera. Via Movie City News.

Girish notes that less than seven percent of André Bazin's writings are in print. Then:

I've been doing a Bazin immersion the last few weeks, and I'm amazed especially by two things. First, his writings are not about developing a "theory of cinema" in an abstract and "systematic" manner. Instead, he puts in motion a process of continual exchange between film criticism and film theory. He begins with the films themselves, and their details - formal, stylistic, thematic, etc. His theoretical reflections then arise from a scrutiny of these details. Second, it's striking to see how he did all his theory and criticism work in full public view. As Bert Cardullo points out, Bazin's writings were produced for a range of publications that were variously aligned: liberal (L'Écran Francais); socialist (France-Observateur); left-wing Catholic (Esprit and Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, now Télérama); non-religious and state-run (L'Education Nationale); and conservative (Le Parisien libéré). In addition, of course, he co-founded and wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma. It's staggering to be reminded of how much he accomplished before he contracted leukemia at 36 and died at 40 in 1958.

"For centuries Countess Elizabeth Báthory was one of Europe's most notorious figures." With two "rival films" on the way, Julie Delpy's The Countess and Juraj Jakubisko's Bathory, Tony Thorne offers a little background in the Telegraph.

"Swedish cinema longs to crawl out from under the shadow of Bergman, even as it cannot afford to forget him," writes Michael Koresky in a dispatch to indieWIRE.

Fests and events:

• Rob Nelson talks with John Koch, who owns and runs the Twin Cities video store Cinema Revolution - and who's directed a film Je Ne Sais Quoi, shot by award-winning cinematographer Greg Yolen and screening at the Ritz Theater through Thursday.

• Rencontres Internationales, "a space of discovery and reflection between new cinema and contemporary art," runs Tuesday through Sunday in Berlin.

• Yair Raveh has the lineup for the Jerusalem Film Festival (July 10 through 19): "The first festival under the newly appointed manager Ilan De Vries will include some highlights of the 2008 Cannes Festival, before they head on to Toronto." Should Thierry Frémaux and Olivier Père start collecting finder's fees?

"Little did we imagine how many of those shooting stars would become unguided missiles." James Wolcott surveys the wreckage left behind by the Vanity Fair cover girls of 2003. "As for the class of 2008 pictured in these pages, they inhabit a far more predatory media-parasite environment, a Grand Theft Auto of 'gotcha,' which so far they're handling with aplomb. Easy to track, hard to trap, they belong to the iGeneration, for whom texting and Twittering are as natural as popping orange Tic Tacs, inhabiting and trailing invisible clouds of information wherever they go in the digital eco-system, where online and off-line, real life and Second Life, overlap. Boundaries dissolve everywhere they turn their pretty heads." This year's young ladies are: Amanda Seyfried, Emma Roberts, Blake Lively and Kristen Stewart. And there's an accompanying gallery.

In the Guardian, screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (24 Hour Party People, Millions) offers a few pointers: "This is not a description of how I write. It's more how I wish I'd written. A map of the rocks on which I perished."

Oliver Stone "is either the oddest person to chronicle the life of the current president or the most inspired," writes John Horn in a report on the making of W. "Whatever the verdict, the marriage of director and subject has left nearly as many people running for the sidelines as wanting to be a part of the director's undertaking."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas talks with Guido Santi and Tina Mascara about their documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story.

"What fascinates me about Los Muertos is that it explores the connection between form and content by taking all of the tropes of 'transcendental cinema' and staining them, by narrative means, with dread and violence," writes Darren Hughes.

"I mentioned in my review of Myna Joseph's Man that the influence of the Dardenne Brothers is becoming increasingly apparent in American cinema," writes David Lowery at Hammer to Nail. "Moreso than that film, a perfect example of this trend is The Execution of Solomon Harris, a grueling eight minute short film whose intensity is almost entirely related to the way the camera attaches itself to its subject. This form of subjectivity is a trademark of the Dardennes; they maintain such a steadfast attachment to their characters that the events around them almost - almost - seem peripheral. It's a fascinating way to get inside a character's head without relying on anything more than a camera and that character."

Michael Guillén talks with Eran Kolirin about The Band's Visit for movieScope.

David Lean "was a relentless womaniser." Geoffrey Macnab tells a few stories in the Independent.

"In an industry first, Sony Pictures' hoped-for blockbuster Hancock... hits theaters on Wednesday and will be available - after its theater run but before release on DVD - over the Internet, directly to viewers' television sets," reports Tim Arango in the New York Times. "That is, if they own a Sony Bravia TV with a Web connection. The announcement is significant in what it means for the future of movie watching, and for the future of Sony itself."

"The mere thought of an analytical book about Steven Seagal movies could provoke laughter, and yet I'm here to tell you that [Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal is] an essential read for any action movie fan, and a must-read for anyone who has enjoyed Seagal's works," writes Adam Ross. "Vern knows Seagal movies are not Oscar-worthy, but he also bristles at the notion that they're all the same, or that Seagal is just another action star."

Online viewing tip #1. For those who speak German and/or Japanese. Blake Ethridge posts video of a Q&A with Koji Wakamatsu that took place at this year's Berlinale. The film at hand is Secrets Behind the Wall.

Online viewing tip #2. Tony Kaye on Stanley Kubrick. Thanks, Jerry! For the Wendy Carlos interview, too.

Online viewing tip #3. A "Summer Movie Extravaganza" at Bloggingheads.tv featuring Ross Douthat and Dana Stevens. Thanks, Ed!

Online viewing tip #4. The story behind Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.

Online viewing tip #5. Phil Morehart launches a series: "Every day in July (hopefully), Facets Features will spotlight a warped, wild, weird, odd, unusual, unique trailer to pique (or melt) your brain."

Online viewing tip. #6. Twitch has the trailer for Quantum of Solace.

Tartan Films.

Filmbrain bids a fond farewell to Tartan Films: "Tartan head Hamish McAlpine liked to push people's buttons, referring to his company's releases as 'cultural hand grenades,' which explains acquisitions of controversial titles from Carlos Reygadas, Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé and Ulrich Seidl.... The question now is who, if anybody, will take their place? Is there another company willing to take similar chances, or are UK film-goers about to find themselves with a dearth of edgy, international fare?"

Updated through 7/4.

More from the Guardian's Andrew Pulver: "It wasn't entirely unexpected, but the sudden slide into administration of independent distributor Tartan Films is still a moment to give the British cinema world chills." Even if you're in a hurry, take a moment to look at the films he lists that Tartan brought to the UK.

Jason Gray passes along thoughts from Jaspar Sharp - "the biggest problem I had with Tartan was this whole 'Asian Extreme' thing" - and sparks a discussion.

Update, 7/4: "'It is so easy to bash iconoclastic entrepreneurs like Hamish,' says producer Don Boyd, who founded Tartan in 1984 with McAlpine and veteran Scottish distributor Alan Kean." Geoffrey Macnab offers a good, quick history of Tartan and carries on quoting Boyd, who "bemoans the public money that has been 'put into bureaucracy and shockingly bad British films' when that money could have been used 'much more intelligently to help out people like Tartan and perhaps encourage them to be more involved in European and British film production.'" And Macnab lists six landmark films for Tartan - and UK viewers.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army, round 1.

"In terms of sheer spectacle and visual invention, [Hellboy II: The Golden Army] is an absolute knockout, frames stuffed with bizarre creatures and mystic runes and arcane weaponry and wondrous design," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "And yet, Hellboy II has more than a little heart to it; it's scrappy and self-aware, and never out of touch with what it is. Adapting Mike Mignola's post-superhero retro-styled comic series Hellboy for the second time, writer-director Guillermo del Toro corrects some of the mistakes of the first Hellboy, makes a few mistakes of its own, picks itself up, keeps going. And, on the way, knocks the back of your eyeballs for a loop."

Updated through 7/6.

"Curmudgeonly, cantankerous, cigar-chomping Hellboy is a cross between a 40s noir detective and a burning fireplace, but he's also cool enough to make Hellboy II: The Golden Army the hipster's hit of the summer," writes John Anderson for Variety. "Yes, Catholic imagery has always run rampant through helmer Guillermo del Toro's movies, including Pan's Labyrinth, which he made in between the two "Hellboy" entries, but he's really an evangelist of fanboy excess: Given the right push by Universal, he'll be making fantasy-horror acolytes out of the heretofore unconverted."

"De Toro stays true to the B-movie tenets of his original, reuniting the sub-A-list cast of Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones and Jeffrey Tambor and maintaining a broad sense of humor," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen Daily. "There is no bombast or self-importance here a la Batman or The Incredible Hulk, just a great storyteller delivering a good time at the movies."

And Michael Rechtshaffen in the Hollywood Reporter: "With writer-director del Toro given free license to go where his singular vision takes him, Hellboy II plays like Guillermo's Greatest Hits with even hotter visual effects - Liz's engulfing flames have come a long way in four years - and a winking nod to The Wizard of Oz tossed into the crazy mix for good measure."

Updates: Anne Thompson listened to Del Toro as Hellboy II closed the Los Angeles Film Festival: It "comes from an exotic country inside my brain and my gonads. People think I do two types of movies: strange little Spanish films and big studio movies. This movie comes from a different place. It's the first of those big movies that belongs to the same world as Pan's Labyrinth. The imagination in it is unbridled."

What follows is precisely the same passage from Moriarty's AICN entry on both Hellboy II and The Dark Knight that Jason Morehead's snipped, but seems worth snipping again:

Bottom line: these are films that are built to last. When someone says to me, "It's just a comic book movie," these are the films that make that statement pointless. Nothing has to be "just" a comic book movie or "just" a video game movie or "just" a remake or "just" a sequel. Every single time you set out to make a film, you have a chance to say something, a chance to genuinely affect your viewer. You don't have to aim for "good enough." Ambition is important, but Hancock proves that's not enough. It's ambition plus inspiration plus creative chemistry plus a little bit of dumb fucking luck that all come together to make movies like these. But the only reason they accomplish anything is because Christopher Nolan and Guillermo Del Toro and all the remarkable madmen they collaborated with in bringing them to the screen... they all dared to drop the word "just" from their vocabulary. They aimed for art. They aimed for pure enduring cinema.

And, good god, we are richer for it.

Updates, 7/3: "Del Toro's baroquely bizarre imaginativeness has never been more mesmerizing than in Hellboy II, its cornucopia of extraordinary creatures (some beautifully melding flesh with metal) seemingly stolen from children's nightmares, and its preponderance of metal gears intrinsically linked to the saga's fascination with fate and free will." Nick Schager.

Update, 7/5: Dave Itzkoff introduces a series of images taken from Del Toro's sketchbook, accompanied by the director's comments.

Updates, 7/6: Michael Guillén has a good long talk with Doug Jones.

Choire Sicha talks with Selma Blair for the Los Angeles Times.

The Free Will.

"A character study of two people desperately fighting for a seemingly unattainable life, Matthias Glasner's The Free Will is rigorous and wrenching, and made all the more impressive by the fact that one of its protagonists is a relatively empathetic serial rapist," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Trying to elicit compassion for Theo (Jürgen Vogel, who co-wrote the script), who in the graphic opening scene beats and sexually assaults a bicyclist after being fired from his job, appears on the face of things like a bid for cheap sensationalism."

But as Steve Erickson argues in the City Paper, "Glasner isn't exploring this subject to shore up his credentials as a bad boy; he's genuinely fascinated by the process of a rapist seeking to free himself from his worst impulses." The Free Will is "one of the most interesting German movies of the past decade; along with promising directors such as Christian Petzold and Valeska Grisebach, it's a sign of life in the long-moribund German cinema."

Updated through 7/3.

"Hats off to Benten Films once again for having the guts to release a challenging film like this," writes Charlie Prince at Cinema Strikes Back. "If you can handle uncomfortable dramas, I can't recommend the film enough; it's one of the best films I've seen in the last 10 years."

Cinematical's Monika Bartyzel notes that "there is a commentary with Glasner and Vogel - a discussion that covers how they felt and approached the controversial opening, as well as further thoughts and production details for the whole of the film. It's a measured journey in subtitles, but worth the time if you're curious about their motivations. There is also a critical essay written by Time Out New York critic David Fear."

Updates, 6/30: In other Benten Films news, Paul Matwychuk talks with Todd Rohal about The Guatemalan Handshake and reviews Aaron Katz's Quiet City.

Jürgen Fauth, who translated the commentary track: "Matthias Glasner's unflinching look at uncontrollable desires and evil urges is shot, acted, and told with such an uncompromising sense of purpose it's almost impossible to endure (how's that for a blurb guaranteed to jack up sales?) The fearless plumbing of the abyss on display here recalls Kinski and Herzog's Woyzeck."

Update, 7/1: "Is there a thematic point to be made about compulsive sexual violence?" asks Michael Atkinson (IFC). "There is if you see the film as being a critique of a masculinized society, and Theo as being a walking metaphor for every man's inner ape. But I'm not sure... You get the feeling Glasner was lighting house fires for the sake of raising questions about motivation and viewer complicity and social responsibility, an agenda that could make him, with some seasoning, the next generation's Michael Haneke."

Update, 7/3: "The Free Will is not so much a critique of a sexualized society, as critic Ian Johnston suggests on the back cover of the gorgeous new DVD package from Benten Films, but instead a terrifyingly intimate glimpse onto the hardships of a convicted sexual predator's attempt to reconcile his profound need to meaningfully connect with women and the vile impulses that make his attempt to re-enter society after nine years away in prison so awfully difficult," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "One thing that characterizes Glasner's intelligent approach, an approach that hands over a huge parcel of trust to his audience, is the degree to which he is unwilling to sentimentalize Theo or his plight."

Interview. Catherine Breillat.

"The talkiness, the drawing-room intrigue, the frilly garments, and the slippery assignations might suggest all too much a Dangerous Liaisons redux," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "But [Catherine] Breillat is much too clever for that. What makes [The Last Mistress] so deliciously fun is the way she uses the narrative as a template for her own playful (and fever-ridden) ideas about the anarchy of passion and the disorder of decorum."

"Recovering from a dangerous brain hemorrhage at the end of 2004 that left her half paralyzed for several months, Breillat has returned to her artistry with a dazzling ferocity," writes Michael Guillén, introducing his interview. "The fire of trauma has lent her a searing voice of urgency."

"Their reputations precede them - Catherine Breillat, Asia Argento and their joint project, the courtesan Vellini in The Last Mistress - and always threaten to trap them, too," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Then you actually watch The Last Mistress and discover a patient film of novelistic subtlety and fine-tailored construction from screenplay up through rich cinematography."

"Having made her reputation as a sexual provocatrix with Romance, Breillat here tweaks the bourgeois from another, earlier perspective - namely that of the aristocracy," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "It was when French social distinctions blurred in the 1830s that dandyism emerged as an oppositional mode. If Louis-Philippe and his court endorsed the 'vulgar' bourgeois work ethic, the dandy - as embodied by Ryno [Fu'ad Aït Aattou] - embraced a program of ostentatious idleness and gratification."

"Ms Breillat's explorations of desire and pleasure are so far from the antiseptic world of most screen depictions as to seem far out," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "In truth she's just fearless, determined to show what others keep hidden - the good, the bad, the tumescent, the fluid - so she can keep puzzling through her ideas. The Last Mistress isn't as graphic as some of her other films, notably Romance, which features full-frontal and then some. The sex in this film is far from explicit, though it features geometric formations that may be better suited for Kama Sutra students, or at least the limber. What's explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh. It's terribly French."

"This is a movie whose over-the-top qualities sneak up from behind," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Breillat generally likes to go for the visceral response; The Last Mistress burns more slowly than her other pictures do, but it does so almost as intensely. It's more in league with Truffaut's The Story of Adele H, especially if you consider that in that movie, Isabelle Adjani's delicate-flower vulnerability is really a manifestation of raw romantic hunger."

"Taboos are indeed broken in this mature, masterful film that sets its sights on what might be the last holy commandment of our postmodern, capitalist world: that right and wrong is best defined by hardworking, upstanding, respectable middle-class society." Lauren Kaminsky in Reverse Shot.

"This 19th-century setting results, on the one hand, in something of a startling change of pace for Breillat, whose cinema has long been infused with a decidedly modern strain of provocation," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical. "And yet on the other hand, her preoccupation with love's thorny complications feels right at home in the drawing rooms and boudoirs of indolent 1835 Parisian aristocrats, whose public civility masks private conduct of a much more lascivious sort."

"Argento feels vaguely out of place in Breillat's film, a creature of the 21st century somehow transported to the 19th, but Breillat uses this incongruity to excellent effect," writes Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE. "Her defiant nonconformity confers upon the character the status of a perennial outsider, while making the film into an uncommonly playful star text."

"Though Argento's full-barreled performance hits some bum notes, her utter lack of reserve stands out as both reckless and courageous against the social rigors of Parisian high society," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "She's both relentless in pursuing Aattou and powerless to quell her self-destructive impulses; when she talks of the 'bottomless abyss' of their caresses, it's the perfect distillation of Breillat's feelings about relationships. For her, love opens the door to jealousy, humiliation, and bone-deep pain, and it isn't easy to close."

"Ms Breillat has forgone the anarchic force of her earlier forays into the still relatively underdeveloped realm of female sexuality," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "As a pioneer of sorts in her field, she has earned this temporary respite of classicism represented by The Last Mistress."

"Breillat may be brash and lewd, but she's a thinking bawd," writes Armond White in the New York Press. Still: "Not enough of Sex is Comedy's rigor is apparent in The Last Mistress."

"[I]t captures the absurd dimensions of romance with immediacy and unexpected compassion," writes Mark Holcomb in Time Out New York.

More interviews with Breillat: Fernando F Croce (Slant), Nick Dawson (Filmmaker), Sheri Linden (Los Angeles Times) and Martin Tsai (New York Sun).

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, the NYFF and the UK.

Shorts, 6/28.

"[H]e's Kierkegaardian without the leap of faith, or Sartrean without the existential ethics of action," suggests Lennard Davis in an essay on the education and philosophy of Woody Allen in the Common Review.

Also via Bookforum, David Riedel's odd criteria for choosing a film critic to trust. In the New York Review of Magazines.

"That Eloge de l'amour, roundly heralded as a contemporary Godard masterpiece, fetishizes Robert Brasillach while turning up its nose at the Liberation is certainly... um, provocative?" Glenn Kenny gets a conversation going at Some Came Running.

"Wong Kar-wai has been an incessant reviser of his work," writes David Bordwell, who's been gathering information on "a fugitive, somewhat hallucinatory cut" of Days of Being Wild.

Pedro Almodóvar snaps back at the Guardian: "It is deeply unfair, and also rather silly, to blame me for an absence of Spanish films at UK cinemas." Further down that same page, Catherine Shoard, editor of guardian.co.uk/film, responds, but Almodóvar is right to object to the needlessly sensationalistic hook of Paul Julian Smith's piece, "The curse of Almodóvar."

Meantime:

• Kira Cochrane's been watching rape-revenge movies lately, specifically, "those in which a woman wreaks revenge. These convey very mixed messages, particularly for a female audience: on the one hand, they often show multiple images of sexual assault, which can seem exploitative; on the other, they give female protagonists the chance to fight back. Are they empowering for women, or quite the opposite?"

• "Steve McQueen [Hunger] has been chosen as the artist who will represent Britain at the 2009 Venice Biennale - the most important combined festival, exhibition, tribal gathering and party in the international art world calendar, and an indicator of new developments in contemporary art." Charlotte Higgins: "He is the first artist working primarily in film selected to represent Britain for the event."

• Toby Rose has a brief preview of Antoine de Caunes's Coluche, "which lifts the lid on politically-engaged French comic Michel Colucci, better known as Coluche, a boulevardier with brio who made a run for the presidency in 1981."

• "What's the point of deleted scenes?" wonders Xan Brooks.

• John Patterson talks with Frank Darabont about The Mist.

• "The film historian John Barnes, who has died aged 87, was a leading authority on pre-cinema and early cinema, and co-founder - with his twin brother William - of the Barnes Museum of Cinematography, which opened in St Ives, Cornwall, in 1963," write Frank Gray and Stephen Herbert. "Their collection filled two whole floors of a house in Fore Street and, as one of the first film museums, it became a focal point for scholars worldwide."

Nick Dawson presents a lively history of "naughty cartoons" at FilmInFocus. Also: an excerpt from Schrader on Schrader, in which Kevin Jackson talks with Paul Schrader about Auto Focus, and Heather Chaplin on Grand Theft Auto IV as a "near-brilliant satire" on "American consumerist culture."

"Sometimes received ideas become reinforced and cemented by being brought up repeatedly as critical short-hand," writes Girish. "For example: Samuel Fuller's films are 'primitive'; Lang is all about fate; Ozu celebrates quiet resignation, and keeps his camera low and static; Chabrol makes Hitchcockian films that are bourgeois satires; Bresson is austere and minimalist; Peckinpah's films revel in ultraviolence, etc, etc. Now, these pronouncements aren't exactly false, but by no means are they the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The problem is that they 'fix' filmmakers too easily and quickly, thus constraining our thinking about them to certain pre-determined pathways."

At Bright Lights After Dark, C Jerry Kutner lists the AFI's "10 Top 10 Genre Omissions." Meanwhile, Glenn Kenny offers a "(weak) defense of Entertainment Weekly's 'The New Classics' lists." And Jim Emerson asks, "What's your definition of 'classic'? Record-breaking? Precedent-setting? Influential? Enduring?"

More lists? Ok:

• Flickipedia's got some end-of-the-school-year movies.

• Screengrab's "15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S."

• The SpoutBlog's "10 Most Critically Acclaimed Action Movies of the Past 10 Years." Also at the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell lists "10 Awful Matrix 'Bullet Time' Spoofs."

• And from Stephen Saito (IFC): "Rockin' the Reel: Musicians Turned Moviemakers."

In ShortEnd Magazine, Noralil Ryan Fores talks with Bret Wood (Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films, Psychopathia Sexualis) about screenwriting and many, many other things. Via Ray Privett.

John McElwee on Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle: "His comic pioneering seems all the more remote for old rags and hanks of hair that pass for surviving prints. Watch those ghostly figures steeple-jumping over splices and sections missing, then try convincing your doubtful audience that such things once delighted millions."

Dan Callahan's "5 for the Day" at the House Next Door revisits the work of another Hollywood figure perhaps not remembered as well as he should be: Lew Ayres.

Clara Bow gets Nathaniel R thinking: "It's easy to assume, perhaps cynically, that it's merely the unfamiliarity of their images that gives them so potent and so alien a life force on the screen: the black and white, the unnatural speed of the footage, the disintegration of the image. But I think it's more complicated than that. I think it's also the magic, as it has ever been between true stars and cameras, and the silence itself."

In the second edition of Best Pictures from the Outside In, Nick of Nick's Flick Picks, Nathaniel of the Film Experience and Mike of Goatdog's Movies discuss The Broadway Melody (1929) and The Departed.

Volker Briegleb at Twitch on Infernal Affairs director Andrew Lau's Hollywood debut, The Flock, starring Richard Gere and Claire Danes: "What a mess."

"Jamaa Fanaka is the creator of some of the maddest, baddest filmmaking ever to come from a black man rolling bones in a rigged white man's game." And Marc Savlov interviews him. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Spencer Parsons talks with Jeff Nichols about Shotgun Stories.

"Spending 80 minutes with Alby Cutrera (Matt McGrath), the insufferable protagonist of Full Grown Men, a serious road comedy about arrested development, is excruciating enough," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But it is hard to imagine why any sane woman would actually marry and have a child with this unemployed 35-year-old cartoonist, who has the emotional maturity of a 10-year-old." More from Ed Gonzalez in the Voice: "For better and for worse (at least for a story about a man struggling to behave like an adult), Full Grown Men feels and thinks with the heart and mind of a child." And more from Ashna Ali (New York Press) and Noel Murray (AV Club). IndieWIRE talks with director David Munro.

Also in the Voice:

• Nick Pinkerton on Gunnin' for That #1 Spot: "[T]he formulaic structure starts to wear." More from Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT), Brandon Harris, Mike Russell and Scott Tobias (AV Club). Interviews with director Adam Yauch: Madeleine Brand (NPR), Brandon Harris, Aaron Hillis (IFC) and Caitlin Shamberg (Salon).

• Aaron Hillis on Wicked Lake: "As tamely unerotic as a straight-to-video Misty Mundae softcore spoof (Play-Mate of the Apes!), director Zach Passero's worthless sexploitation horror is almost pretentious enough in its stilted slo-mo and superimposed fades to gain the same cheese-loving cult audience that drunkenly embraced last year's Lindsay Lohan flop, I Know Who Killed Me (the director of which co-wrote this trash - who knew?)" More from Laura Kern in the New York Times.

• And Red Roses and Petrol: "Tamar Simon Hoffs's bland-as-boiled-cabbage adaptation of Joseph O'Connor's play finally hobbles into theaters, reminding us every 15 seconds that just because it looks distinctly American and was shot in California, it's a fookin' Irish movie." More from Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on Chris & Don: "The subtitle of the film is A Love Story The picture makes the worn term fresh, moving." Kauffmann also notes that Isherwood's Prater Violet "stands with Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon in the front rank of fiction about film."

The Paper Will Be Blue "enfolds the audience in the dead of night during which most of the film takes place, adding a slightly surrealistic element to the absurdity of the actions," writes Marilyn Ferdinand. "But the daylight that eventually ends the film does not increase comprehension in this riot-torn city. If anything, it makes human actions seem more senseless than ever."

"Israeli protagonists in American film, I realize now, belong to two basic groups," writes Liel Leibovitz in a Nextbook piece on You Don't Mess With the Zohan:

The first - Paul Newman's Ari Ben Canaan, say, or Kirk Douglas's Mickey Marcus - consists of strong and silent men whose chiseled shoulders carried beautiful blondes, large guns, and the entire weight of Jewish history. The second - think of Richard Dreyfuss as a somber commando in Victory at Entebbe or of Avner, Eric Bana's character in Munich - consists of men who differ from their brethren in that they seem to prefer brunettes and follow up the killing with a debilitating shot of self-doubt, guilt, and shame.

Amazingly, Adam Sandler has just forced on Hollywood an entirely new category of Israeli hero, and in doing so he and his co-screenwriters, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow, along with director Dennis Dugan, may just have created the first film that strips the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of its distorting filters and instead presents the century-old battle in all its raw absurdity.

More from Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "Extensive critical analysis has revealed to me why Zohan succeeds where [Get Smart fails.... The secret is hummus, hacky sack, cheap electronics stores and the descending falsetto pentatonic denial ('No, no no no no'). In short, the secret (don't tell the spies) is specific intelligence about the characters and their world - including the verifiable information that a great many Israelis, like the expatriated Zohan, prefer to love their country from a good, safe distance."

"Three female detectives rummage around in their own lives as much as in the lives of others in Icíar Bollaín's Mataharis, the director's first film since her laurelled domestic abuse drama Te doy mis ojos (Take My Eyes)," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"A sustained encounter with a disturbed personality, Frownland is nothing like a conventional comedy," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "But funny moments are the engine of this extraordinary 16 mm film, capable of mounding observations together into something like an experience, of turning repulsion so far inside out that it starts to feel like empathy." Also: My Winnipeg, Fugitive Pieces and When Did You Last See Your Father?

"As a portrait of the justice system's penchant for embracing media-circus hype at the expense of performing its duty, and of journalists' preference for tabloid scandal rather than truth, [Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired] is reasonably damning," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Its indictment, though, ultimately feels like a secondary issue to Polanski's apparently incontrovertible guilt, which makes him - in this instance - still more victimizer than victim."

Alan Yentob talks with Werner Herzog for the London Times.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Andrew Bemis.

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Punch-Drunk Love.

Back in the NYT:

• Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl is set to open wide over the July 4 weekend, and if it's a hit, "there will be the usual expressions of surprise from some movie industry analysts and cultural commentators," predicts AO Scott. "This is always the reaction when a previously underserved segment of the population turns out in large numbers for a movie, whether it's African-Americans lining up for the latest Tyler Perry film, evangelical Christians flocking to The Passion of the Christ, or, just last month, women of various ages and backgrounds embracing Sex and the City." And high on the list of the underserved would be, of course, American girls.

• Dave Itzkoff talks with George Lucas about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, "which Warner Brothers will release on Aug 15 and which will introduce an animated television series with the same title that will have its debut on the Cartoon Network this fall.... [H]is enduring interest in Star Wars hints at a lesson that his filmmaking peers have already learned: that it is sometimes easier for them to make big movies than small ones. As his longtime friend and collaborator Steven Spielberg wrote in an e-mail message: 'All of us would like to make these little personal films that sneak into theaters under the radar. Sadly, for George and myself, and others who have enjoyed and endured great success - "under the radar" has become a no-fly zone.'"

• "Labor unrest continues to dominate the landscape in Hollywood, and the possibility of a strike by actors has large movie studios planning to shut down production after Monday and has television studios rushing to complete episodes of series scheduled to return in the fall or January." Edward Wyatt reports.

• Rome is hoping that Angels and Demons, Ron Howard's second adaptation of a Dan Brown bestseller, will revive a tourism industry hurt by the weak dollar, reports Elisabetta Povoledo.

For the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab profiles "some of the leading power brokers who keep the British film industry juggernaut in motion."

John Rogers plays the one-word game.

New blog on the block: The Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein's Big Picture.

Online viewing tip #1. The DVblog has the video for Grizzly Bear's "Knife."

Online viewing tip #2. Another excellent video essay from Matt Zoller Seitz, this one on Sharky's Machine. It'll make you want to track down this movie.

Online viewing tip #3. A doc (in German) on Fritz Lang. Many thanks, Jerry!

Online viewing tips. Michel Gondry's top 25 music videos at the Playlist.

Fests and events, 6/28.

Milos Forman: The Formative Years opens at Facets Cinematheque runs through Thursday; the Chicago Reader picks the highlights.

"Douglas Fairbanks caused a sensation in 1920 with The Mark of Zorro, the first in a series of costume spectacles that launched an entire genre and defined Fairbanks's contribution to popular American culture," writes David Jeffers at the Siffblog. Monday evening at Seattle's Paramount Theater.

"It was a rare find: a film version that had been shot in 1964 during rehearsals for the Broadway version of Shakespeare's play," reports Victoria Laurie in the Australian. "The New York theatre critics went wild about John Gielgud's modern-day staging, and [Richard] Burton in his role as Hamlet. The rare film will be shown for the first time in Australia, for one screening only at Perth's Astor cinema next month. Since its rediscovery, the film has only been screened three times in Britain and once in Los Angeles." There is, however, a DVD. Via Movie City News.

Dalí: Painting and Film arrives at MoMA and Roberta Smith finds it "a strangely piecemeal, open-ended and inspiring exhibition... The show tracks the traffic of images, themes and ideas between Dalí's films, both realized and not, and his more static efforts, including paintings, drawings, letters, illustrated notes, scenarios and other ephemera." Sunday through September 15.

More from Randy Kennedy: "'I'm in Hollywood,' Salvador Dalí wrote in a postcard to André Breton in 1937, 'where I've made contact with the three American surrealists, Harpo Marx, Disney and Cecil B DeMille.' Dalí's devious wit was legendary, but in this case it appears he was being sincere. The same year, in Harper's Bazaar, he sang Hollywood's praises as an ideal incubator of Surrealism whether Hollywood knew it or not."

Also in the New York Times, for Ken Johnson, Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement Three Installations, Two Films, at the Whitney through October 12, is "a smart, tightly focused study of the formal and conceptual underpinnings of Mr McCarthy's art: his work stripped to its bare, abstract yet still metaphorically resonant essentials."

Michael Buening in PopMatters on Film Forum's Tatsuya Nakadai retrospective, running through July 17: "In an interview in Joan Mellen's collection, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, the director Kobayashi says of Nakadai, 'I still feel he was one of a small group of actors who combined the traditional Shingeki background with the fresh innocence and energy of our postwar generation. He could thus effectively represent both pre- and postwar people.'... Few actors have worked such varied masters: Ichikawa, Naruse, Kobayashi, Kurosawa, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kihachi Okamoto."

Wim Wenders will chair the jury at this year's Venice Film Festival. Reuters reports.

Dan Sallitt looks ahead to NYC goings on in July.

Online viewing tip. For those in Austin, Slackerwood's Chris Holland has the Alamo Drafthouse's July highlight reel.

All in This Tea.

"All in This Tea dips effortlessly into a half-dozen modes - travelogue, biography, nature ode, business story, nerd profile - sustaining a flexibility of tone that allows for both keen insights into the rapidly evolving Chinese economy and drunken raptures on the ability, in one especially prized blend, 'to taste the mountain.'" Nathan Lee in the New York Times.

"Here partnered with filmmaker-editor Gina Leibrecht, [Les] Blank's first feature in over a decade (and his first to take advantage of the portability of DV) visually recalls [Burden of Dreams] in a couple ways." Aaron Hillis explains in the Voice.

IndieWIRE interviews Blank and Leibrecht.

Jonathan Marlow spoke at length with Blank last year (parts 1 and 2).

Online viewing tip. Bilge Ebiri - who also interviews Blank for Vulture - introduces a celebrated Les Blank short: "What emerges is a film about following your vision, and finding new and extreme ways to show how much you care. Also, did we mention Werner Herzog eats his fucking shoe?" I'm not sure it's all here, but what is is worth the viewing.

Finding Amanda.

"Clumsily mashing up Leaving Las Vegas and Hardcore, Finding Amanda follows TV show writer and alcoholic compulsive gambler Taylor (Matthew Broderick) as he travels to Sin City to track down his whoring niece Amanda (Brittany Snow)," writes Nick Schager in Slant. The film's "inability to find a consistent groove that might best utilize its appealing leads... is secondary to its overarching unimaginativeness."

And in the other corner, Ella Taylor in the Voice: "By keeping the tone light, the players human (Steve Coogan has a nice turn as a greasy casino host), and never, ever romanticizing the addict, Finding Amanda comes by its heartbreak honestly."

Updated through 6/29.

"Over the years, it's been both disconcerting and somehow satisfying to watch Matthew Broderick gradually morph from a lithe, cocky teen heartthrob to a pudgy, middle-aged sad sack," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. The transformation "began somewhere around Alexander Payne's superlative Election." Here, "Broderick puts on his best deluded-dork outfit and wanders precariously close to Chevy Chase territory." As for the film overall, "It's a litany of male fantasies and nightmares, posturing as a moralizing tract on values and the relativity of exploitation that even Broderick's dopey affability can't recoup."

Scott Tobias talks with Broderick for the AV Club.

"The more animated Mr Broderick becomes trying to fill Taylor's shoes, the less believable he is," argues S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "It probably doesn't help that Brittany Snow, as Taylor's titular niece, delivers one of the year's most vulnerable performances. The profoundly conflicted prostitute alternates between warm smiles and harsh tears, seeing prostitution as at once enabling and degrading. Once we find Amanda, the movie becomes a convincing study of a character at a crossroads. Taylor, though, comes across as more whiny than worldly."

"Blackly superficial, Amanda is pitched somewhere between a dark night of the soul and the pilot for one of those self-consciously edgy pay-cable shows that glory in the freedom of being able to show boobs, drugs, profanity and wanton bad behavior," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Broderick has an affecting speech late in the film once he rouses himself from his downward spiral and experiences a moment of clarity, but Finding Amanda mostly seems content to skate briskly along the surface, seldom mining Broderick and Snow's predicaments for anything more than snarky gags and bitter one-liners. It's amusing but facile, reasonably clever but hopelessly glib."

"Finding Amanda is an easy movie to reject because its microcosm of a society obsessed with commercial sex and fast money is so relentlessly, uncomfortably and casually dark," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The only comparably cynical recent film set in Las Vegas was Peter Berg's savage 1998 comedy, Very Bad Things, in which a bachelor party takes a tragic turn. That film wasn't as funny as Finding Amanda, because the dialogue, sharp as it was, lacked the absurdist razor edge of this curdled screwball comedy. Here the characters' outlandish utterances (especially Amanda's) will make you gasp."

"The Hollywood hack, full of vice, self-loathing and needing redemption, finds that an actual prostitute has more pride in herself and her work than he does," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. "Written with more bite, the premise might hold up, but as executed here by [Peter] Tolan, it is a soft-hearted, haphazard mess."

Michael Ordoña profiles Peter Facinelli for the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 6/29: Choire Sicha talks with Broderick for the Los Angeles Times.

Elsa & Fred.

First, James Van Maanen; a split jury follows.

In the genre of geriatric love stories, things don't get much better - or, let's be honest here, more predictable - than Elsa & Fred. No matter. If you are seeking a movie for which the proverbial "you'll laugh, you'll cry" couldn't be more apt, a movie that'll have you turning alternately giddy and cuddly (and, yes, I know that some of you are already running from the room), you may have found that rare, end-of-the-rainbow pot o' gold, caveats - and there are plenty of them - be damned. Featuring an award-winning cast of supporting actors (Blanca Portillo, Federico Luppi, José Ángel Egido, Carlos Álvarez Novoa), the film is blessed with two leads as close to perfect for their roles as any you can imagine: Manuel Alexandre and China Zorrilla.

Zorrilla, 83 when she made this movie, is a force of nature, as is the character she portrays. A big girl, who has probably only grown bigger with age, she literally dwarfs her leading man - which is all to the good. Quiet and courtly, he sneaks up on her (and on the viewer) and by the finale will have you chuckling though your tears (do take the entire box of tissue with you to the theater). His last line, a single word, combines all the reticence and charm, humor and delight that he has brought to his role. (Alexandre, now 90 and credited with some 226 film and TV performances, has a new film, Pretextos, currently in release in Spain. Go, Manuel!)

Elsa & Fred depends entirely on the chemistry and connection between its two stars, and, my, they do come through. Elsa brings Fred out of his shell, and through his eyes we begin to see the wonderful woman whom we'd initially imagined as some sort of harpy. The screenplay (credited to the director, Marcos Carnevale, and to Lily Ann Martin and Marcela Guerty) is probably the least of the film: nasty daughter, cute grandchild, and a leading lady who's always getting into a car wreck for comic effect. But the performances do much to mitigate the predictability, and the direction, simple but not obvious, does its job in workmanlike, pleasant fashion.

If I sound cavalier about Carnevale's achievement, this is only because his film lacks much surprise. Would I have missed it? Never. Just because you know what you're getting inside that brightly wrapped gift box doesn't mean that you're not going to love it.

-James Van Maanen

---

Not everyone agrees. Nick Schager, for example, writing in Slant: "Sweet November for the nursing-home set, Elsa and Fred is sentimental mush cooked up with extra syrup."

"Although too few movies take into account the rich lives of the elderly - unless those elderly are actors trying to pass as action heroes - that doesn't fully excuse a movie as cloying and predictable as Elsa & Fred," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"The problem isn't the acting; both actors are superb," writes Jean Oppenheimer in the Voice. "It's Elsa's character that is so difficult to take. Only the hopelessly romantic will be able to tolerate her."

"Elsa & Fred is best enjoyed as a sampling of Ms Zorrilla's combustible energy and still dazzling screen presence," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "There are also moments of credible intimacy, like the ease between Fred and his young doctor as they discuss the physical boundaries of the affair. In movies like this expect medication to deliver the most vital - and least celebrated - supporting performance."

"It's the kind of movie that looks effortless but undoubtedly wasn't," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "If the real attraction of Elsa & Fred lies in the offbeat, asymmetrical chemistry between its two elderly stars, Manuel Alexandre and China Zorrilla, playing a unlikely couple who find each other as twilight is closing in, it's Carnevale who has built a quietly enchanted space around them."

Wanted, round 2.

"As if in instant celebration of the Supreme Court's ruling on a citizen's right to bear arms - and of the newly articulated 'individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation' - the burly new fantasy Wanted reveals the magic that can blossom when you put a gun in the hand of a meek wage slave and tell him he was born to be a righteous killer," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "Directed at a pitch of gritty giddiness by the Kazakhstan-born Timur Bekmambetov, who did the DVD faves Night Watch and Day Watch, this hard-R splatter-fest about a team of sanctified assassins is also the summer's zazziest action movie."

Updated through 6/30.

When Slate's Dana Stevens first heard that Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy were being paired up in an action flick, "I believe my exact words were, 'She'll crush him like a bug.' 'Sounds pretty sexy to me,' said my interlocutor, giving me an unsolicited yet bracing glimpse into his fantasy life. He was right. For those whose fantasies include being crushed like bugs by Angelina Jolie (or beaten senseless by hulking Russian thugs, or forced to use dead pigs for target practice by Morgan Freeman), Wanted is a compendium of bedside erotica. I don't know when I've seen a mainstream movie that so explicitly caters to the S&M niche."

"There's no denying Bekmambetov's energy or enthusiasm: he blows people and stuff up with gusto," concedes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But all his visual ideas, or at least the memorable ones, are borrowed... Things happen in Wanted, but no one cares. You could call that nihilism, but even nihilism requires commitment of a kind and this, by contrast, is a movie built on indifference."

"In some ways, Wanted... is your garden-variety summer action picture, delivering an assortment of sick thrills along with the mind-bendy special effects we've come to expect in post-Matrix movies," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Wanted is fast-moving and bloody, enjoyable even within its unapologetically generic limits. But McAvoy is its real secret weapon: With his X-ray blue eyes and lips that look bitten with anxiety, he has the miraculous ability to fool us into thinking there's really something at stake here."

"[Graphic novelist Marc] Millar's key dystopian premise has been shelved, and with it, his supremely unattractive super-villains (including a Thing-like creature composed of serial-killer fecal matter), the use of random killings and rape as methods of empowerment, and rather too many sequences of peculiarly grotesque violence," writes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun. "Instead, moviegoers will be treated to a mildly enjoyable piece of hyperkinetic hokum. Innovative it is not."

"Wanted makes an unusually mean-spirited break from such relatively warmhearted comic book movies as Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. "Whereas those PG-13 films have provided fun for at least most of the whole family this summer, Wanted presents hard-R fare for viewers craving nonstop violence, foul language and the overcompensating symbolism of big guns, loud cars and fast trains. (As for the preponderance of rats, we'll leave that for Dr Freud to sort out.)"

"Objectively, I award it all honors for technical excellence," writes Roger Ebert. "Subjectively, I'd rather be watching Danny Kaye in the film version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

"Wanted is a queasily unapologetic power fantasy about becoming a better person through violence," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "As McAvoy learns to hurt, he heals a psyche wounded by the tiny emasculations of the 21st century. There's no humiliation, the film suggests, that can't be corrected with a well-placed bullet."

"Having pummeled us, Passion of the Christ-style, for an excruciatingly long haul, this exercise in ultraviolence then insults us by having a beaten, bloodied McAvoy inform viewers that he used to be a loser 'just like all of you,'" writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "Hey, Wanted, what did we ever do to deserve such punishment, except give you $12 and almost two hours of our wasted time?"

"Bekmambetov may commit grand larceny upon action flicks of yore, but it's hard to resist all the energy on display," writes Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger. "By the third act, however, as the story wheezes to a climax, all the visual lunacy grows tiresome."

"It is an in-yer-face blockbuster like nothing else this summer, and it's going to be enormous," predicts the Telegraph's Tim Robey.

"Wanted straddles the line between the delightfully absurd and the merely ridiculous," writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 6/28: "Wanted is a tonally aggressive, wildly expressionistic, extremely violent, rude, foul-mouthed, yet satisfying film, a sleekly machined action powerhouse, words I hardly expected to type this summer." Ray Pride at Movie City News.

"As for the gun issue, well, it is only a movie. Right?" Robert Cashill: "But I've seen this movie before, played out in workplaces and streets and campuses, and if someone takes this one's simplistic message to heart in our nervous times I will be ashamed to have given eight bucks to its cause."

Update, 6/29: "For all its crassness, the picture is rather surprisingly affectless; and for all its putatively adrenaline-pumping fast-slow-fast-slow breakneck-the-laws-of-physics action, rather no big deal, leaving the audience impressed with its bright shine and noisiness, but hardly stirred or stirred up," writes Glenn Kenny - after spotting a potential trend.

Updates, 6/30: "At one point, meek Wesley opines that, if the hot chick in the office just saw him for who he really was instead of the wage slave that he had become, she'd recognize the fierceness of his soul etc," writes Bryant Frazer. "Wanted never once delivers the reality check this douchebag so richly deserves - as a matter of fact, it rewards him, and gives you the finger for expecting anything different."

"Would I sound like too much of a moral scold if I said that WALL•E symbolizes every good impulse in Hollywood filmmaking, and Wanted every corrupt one?" asks Paul Matwychuk. "Or would I just sound like someone who can properly evaluate the evidence of his own eyeballs?"

Hal Ashby's Commingling Seventies.

Hal Ashby's status in film-critic circles as an underrated genius has become, by now, somewhat overstated," writes Sean Nelson in the Stranger:

If he was overlooked as film historians began the process of lionizing the great auteurs of the 1970s, books like Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution have gone a long way toward affirming him as one of the essential, unique and tragic filmmakers of that essential, unique and tragic decade. Still, it's about time. Now, Northwest Film Forum is joining the hallelujah chorus with its forthcoming series of the late director's incredible streak from 1970 to 1979 - The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979). This series includes two interesting novice works, two acknowledged minor classics that are actually major classics, two shatteringly great films that somehow no one seems to talk about, and one perfect diamond that everyone adores.

Updated.

"Along with Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese and the late Sydney Pollack, he shaped, for better or worse, the way I look at film (I was a child of the 70s)." A personal reverie from Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog.

Earlier: A big thumping Ashby roundup from Jennifer Wachtell in Good Magazine, featuring contributions from Wes Anderson, Judd Apatow, Alexander Payne, David O Russell and Jason Schwartzman.

The series runs from Tuesday through August 2.

Updates: "In 1970, The Landlord - Ashby's debut feature, a spacey ode to a rich white kid's radicalization by his black Park Slope tenants, a movie permeated with all sorts of intoxicants—impressed Paramount's Peter Bart enough to give the director Harold and Maude (1971), and with it the chance to establish a running theme that would survive a decade increasingly inhospitable to the message: Straight man gets bent." Rob Nelson reviews the career for Moving Image Source.

"Not surprisingly, Apatow and other auteurs in Wachtell's roundup politely avert their eyes from Asbhy's films of the 80s, which are widely viewed as disappointments of varying degrees," writes Joe Leydon. "But while it's true that most are undeniably dismissible - Let's Spend the Night Together has the rare distinction of being the most boring Rolling Stones rockumentary ever made - it should be noted that 8 Million Ways to Die, Ashby's final completed feature, is not without its admirers. Indeed, I remember once speaking with an Oscar-winning director (not one you'd expect) who only half-jokingly told me that he'd love to swipe one of the movie's more offbeat conceits..."

Satoshi Kon: Beyond Imagination.

Satoshi Kon: Beyond Imagination opens tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Tuesday. Following this evening's screening of Paprika, Kon will be on hand for an onstage conversation. Grady Hendrix's overview of the series in the New York Sun is so very fine it's tough to find a snippet to snip. So I won't; go read it all. And then follow up with his Kaiju Shakedown email back-n-forth with Kon.

At the House Next Door, Brendan Bouzard, John Lichman and Keith Uhlich have a good long conversation about the features and the TV series, Paranoia Agent.

Earlier: Simon Abrams in the New York Press.

Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World.

"Pixilated, magnified, morphed, torn, stretched, slowed, strobed, smeared and smashed, a 1903 Edison actuality of a fairground ride becomes celluloid putty in the hands of cine-magician and avant-garde legend Ken Jacobs, whose phantasmagoric reconfiguration of turn-of-the-century artifacts finds new and exhilarating expression in Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World, a Tom, Tom the Piper's Son for the digital age." Then Michael Joshua Rowin takes a deep breath and carries on in the L Magazine.

Updated through 6/30.

"An eye-popper and brain-boggler, Razzle Dazzle is also, remarkably, a thing to stir the soul, delivering in its final stretch an astonishing, unexpected political jolt that elevates what appeared to be a mere (if marvelous) formal triumph into a shattering confrontation," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "Arriving at this magic moment makes for one of the most striking imaginative and perceptual adventures since the advent of digital video cinema."

"In a sense, Razzle Dazzle is a continuous loop," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The amusement park merges with the film machine; these long-vanished children are riding the celluloid ribbon through the projector. Despite its defined ending, the piece projects an eternal Now as the artist ponders the infinite possibilities that photography (and re-photography) afford to reconstitute the moment. Razzle Dazzle feels endless - not a criticism - because it is."

Earlier: Amy Taubin in Artforum and Daniel Kasman.

At the Anthology Film Archives, today through July 3.

Update: "It looks like a screensaver from hell," writes David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook. "I think Jacobs thinks somewhat like I do, that very early silent film was a point of innocence - in content and form alike - to which we can never properly return." Razzle Dazzle "is bitter lament without a bit of celebration."

Update, 6/29: David at videoarcadia argues that Razzle Dazzle and WALL•E make for "the double feature of the year."

Update, 6/30: "Created under the auspices of a pro-imperialist patriotism," writes Andrew Schenker, "Razzle Dazzle shows the domestic flipside of the coin: the mindless leisure that Americans are free to enjoy at home and the attitude of effortless entitlement that constitutes the tainted legacy with which the United States hoped to stamp the rest of the world. Any resemblance to the country's current international situation is, needless to say, wholly intentional."

Film Quarterly. Summer 08.

James Naremore has put Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth at the top of his list of the best films of 2007. As "a sort of gesture of solidarity," Jonathan Rosenbaum is running his piece on Casa de Lava.

"We want to spark convivial debate and dissent," writes Rob White in the editorial opening the new issue of Film Quarterly. "In that spirit, Leo Braudy initiates the new 'Talking Point' column with a skeptical take on No Country for Old Men."

Also online are David E James on California Video: Artists and Histories and: "[A]ll roads now lead to China," argues Joshua Clover, and you may be surprised where he finds "the China of our dreams: half cheap, fast, and out-of-control hyper-capitalist production zone; half the last bastion of collective life."

Up-n-coming, 6/26.

Via Thomas Groh, Christoph Hochhäusler has the latest on Christian Petzold's Jericho, a "variation" on James M Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, previously adapted by Luchino Visconti, Tay Garnett and Bob Rafelson. Nina Hoss, who won a Berlinale Silver Bear for her performance in Petzold's Yella, gets to be the femme fatale; Benno Fürmann's the drifter. Bettina Böhler is currently overseeing the editing.

Margarethe von Trotta will finally begin shooting Hildegard von Bingen in the fall, with Barbara Sukowa playing the 12th century composer. The Berliner Morgenpost reports.

Johnnie To is planning to make his English-language debut with a remake of Le Cercle Rouge. At Twitch, Todd Brown has casting news.

"Roman Polanski has set Nicolas Cage, Tilda Swinton and Pierce Brosnan for his next film, The Ghost, an adaptation of the Robert Harris political thriller," reports Michael Fleming for Variety.

"The Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins is to play King Lear in a new film version of the Shakespeare tragedy," reports the Guardian. "The film will feature Gwyneth Paltrow, Naomi Watts and Keira Knightley as Lear's three daughters, with more big names to be revealed soon, according to the director, Joshua Michael Stern."

Michael Guillén talks with Elvis Mitchell about: TCM Presents Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence: "In each half-hour episode of this series, Mitchell invites special celebrity guests to sit down and talk about how classic film has influenced their lives." Starts July 7.

"MSNBC has picked up Dear Zachary," announces Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical. "The company is launching a documentary division called MSNBC Films, which will support docs through their theatrical release before screening them on television, and the company is starting with Kurt Kuenne's triumph."

Other fests, other events, 6/26.

"Now a quarter-century old, Born in Flames - screening Saturday night (7 pm) at the Walker's Queer Takes fest, and hailed by former Twin Cities programmer Jenni Olson as 'one of the most dynamic feminist films ever made' - also begins by proudly celebrating an anniversary: that of New York's Social-Democratic War of Liberation, which 10 years earlier had brought equality to all, even Trotskyite black lesbians." A preview from Rob Nelson.

Owen Land - New and In Person! happens Sunday evening. The LA Weekly's Scott Foundas meets "the artist formerly known as George Landow, whose densely constructed, impishly funny short films made in the 1960s and 70s established him as a major figure of the then-burgeoning American avant-garde cinema," and talks with him about his new work.

Updated.

In the Voice, J Hoberman previews The Films of Bahman Ghobadi, running today through July 7 at MoMA.

"From Perfect Blue to Paprika, [Satoshi] Kon has fleshed out a niche in the anime world that is as maddeningly creative as it is giddily strange," writes Simon Abrams in the New York Press. From tomorrow through July 1, "the Film Society at Lincoln Center screens all of Kon's feature-length films and his six-hour long TV mini-series, Paranoia Agent (screened in two three-hour installments). Together they form an oneiric tapestry of incandescent imaginary lives given meaning by dreams and movies."

"Coming as it does in between the city's two flagship festivals - April's behemoth Philadelphia Film Festival and July's ever-expanding Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival - the Independent Film Fest has to be looked at as David next to a pair of well-established Goliaths," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. "But by focusing on indies, the new kid on the block has a distinct advantage in differentiating itself from the marquee names and crowd-pleasers that increasingly fill PFF's catalog, and the niche programming of PIGLFF." Today through Sunday.

Mysterious Objects: The Short Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul was originally planned to screen as two programs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tonight and Sunday. There's been a delay in the delivery of the films, though, so they'll be screened on July 3 and 6; meantime, in their place - and for free - Syndromes and a Century. Matt Sussman in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Apichatpong shows more than he tells, and his camera often obscures rather than explicates the minute, alchemical operations taking place before it."

"The Times BFI London Film Festival announced that their 2008 edition will open on October 15 with the world premiere of Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon." Peter Knegt has more at indieWIRE. October 15 through 30.

Meantime, the BFI's David Lean retrospective rumbles on through July; Michael Wood surveys the oeuvre in the London Review of Books.

Quick update: Toronto's picked up a lot of this year's Cannes titles. Peter Knegt has more at indieWIRE. September 4 through 13.

NYAFF, week 2.

Picking up from the first week of the New York Asian Film Festival...

Takashi Miike's Like a Dragon is the rare film that is actually improved by its fundamental incoherence," writes David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back, where, on the same page, he also reviews Assembly. Plus, Charlie Prince on The Rebel and The Butcher.

Updated through 6/30.

At Twitch:

• Todd Brown on Always: Sunset On Third Street 2: "All of the ingredients that made the first film such a rousing success are also in full effect here and while the sequel might lose a little something simply due to the audience now knowing the formula and what to expect it more than makes that up in the pleasure of seeing our favorite characters continue to develop and grow. There is, after all, something to be said for a director that knows what his audience wants and then proceeds to give them exactly that." So what makes the first one so terrific? Todd'll tell you.

• "Kala isn't just a noir crime thriller," writes The Visitor. "It has elements of horror, fantasy and political intrigue. It's a nice mix, with gorgeous visuals and a creepy and disturbing atmosphere, but it also has a huge problem towards the end."

• Andrew Howitt talks with Tokyo Gore Police director Yoshihiro Nishimura.

• Rodney talks with Butcher director Kim Jin-Won.

"Lee Myung-se (Nowhere to Hide, Duelist) is, for better or for worse, building a reputation as being one of contemporary cinema's preeminent stylists," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "The successes and failures of the director's approach can be seen in his newest film, M."

Update, 6/27: Online listening tip. John Lichman and Vadim Rizov talk NYAFF with Grady Hendrix.

Updates, 6/28: At Twitch:

• "Dai Nipponjin is an absurdist treat, a sly parody of both day to day working class life and the Japanese television superheros of yore all played with a deliciously dry—almost arid—sense of humor," writes Todd Brown.

• Also: "Bright, brash, violent, and intentionally camp Sukiyaki Western Django is that rarest of things: an intentional cult film that succeeds on all fronts."

• Ardvark: "Accuracy of Death is by no means a masterpiece and will not floor you with new stunning insights into human nature, yet it still manages to be quite a pleasant little movie. Takeshi Kaneshiro steals the show and is worth the price of admission all by himself."

Updates, 6/29: Twitch's Todd Brown on Lee's M: "[T]he highly structured form obscures the emotional core of the story resulting in what is arguably his least accessible film thus far."

"Sasori, a remake of the classic Japanese surreal exploitation series, Female Convict Scorpion, is a throwback to the trashy Hong Kong films of yesteryear," writes David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back.

Updates, 6/30: "And slowly but surely a disturbing picture arises. That of a Japan in which a large group of people act polite but have nothing but a deeply ingrained disdain for anything which is non-Japanese." Ardvark at Twitch on Yasukuni.

Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on Shamo: "Believe it or not, Chinese genre director Cheang Pou-soi has miraculously dedicated an entire movie to the Kubrick Stare, with an unbridled, truly brilliant lead performance of desperation by Shawn Yue."

LAFF, week 2.

The Los Angeles Film Festival rolls on through Sunday. "[T]he Austin film community was out in force this year," notes Kyle Henry. In the Austin Chronicle, he specifically calls out Spencer Parsons's I'll Come Running (MySpace) and PJ Raval and Jay Hodges's Trinidad (site; exec-produced by Matt Dentler). "[I]n a few short years, LAFF has established itself as a viable launch alongside Sundance, SXSW, Toronto and Tribeca for North American features, and Austin filmmakers will now travel out each summer hoping to come away with a distribution deal or maybe some cash to begin their festival circuits."

Updated through 6/30.

IndieWIRE interviews Largo director Andrew van Baal, Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe director Harry Kim (site), Pressure Cooker directors Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker, Loot director Darius Marder (site) and Prince of Broadway director Sean Baker (site). Plus, a few words from a batch of "emerging filmmakers."

Karina Longworth has lots of pix and captions at the SpoutBlog.

More from Film Threat's Mark Bell.

And Matt Dentler.

Earlier: "LAFF, week 1."

Updates, 6/28: "Written and directed by Ben Rodkin, Big Heart City consciously evokes the 'beautiful loser' cinema of the 1970s, from the unrepentantly conflicted nature of Frank's character down to the presence of longtime John Cassavetes collaborator [Seymour] Cassel." James Rocchi at Cinematical.

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez listens to Sheila Nevins, president of HBO's documentary division, argue the case that docs belong on television.

Also, more interviews: Stefan Forbes (Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story), Sarah Friedland (Thing With No Name) and Morgan Dews (Must Read After My Death.

"Finishing Heaven, in its way, becomes a post-mortem on both romance and youthful romanticism, a bittersweet accounting of the havoc wrecked on fates by the passage of time," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

Online viewing tips. At Variety's Circuit, Guillermo del Toro talks about, among other things, Hellboy 2 and The Hobbit.

Updates, 6/29: At indieWIRE, Michael Lerman on Trinidad, Thing With No Name, Pressure Cooker, Loot and Boogie Man.

"Co-directed by Largo manager and co-owner Mark Flanagan and Andrew van Baal, Largo recreates the Largo experience; loose, smart, random and unique," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "Mixing concert musical performances with snippets of comedy, the final film makes you feel like you've been to Largo, even as the more elegant notes in the black-and-white composition and the vignettes of the club's rhythm and tempo between the acts make it abundantly clear you're watching a film that was constructed and not just a tape that was turned on."

Updates, 6/30: "Prince of Broadway [site], the latest feature by Sean Baker, won the Target Filmmaker Award, the top narrative feature prize at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival. Darius Marder's Loot [site] simultaneously won the Target Documentary Award as the Film Independent event came to a close in California on Sunday night." And indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has more award-winners.

Eric Campos wraps the festival for Film Threat.

"Sarah Friedland and Esy Casey's Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don't fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene. Meanwhile, Trinidad offers a portrait of the titular 'sex change capitol of the world,' a frontier town in Colorado where a male-to-female post-op transsexual rockstar surgeon named Marci is pioneering the art and science of genital reassignment surgery. In tone and content these films couldn't be more different, but they still constitute a sort of double feature of films about real people living lives impacted by scientific attempts to customize fate."

Stephen Saito rounds up a few highlights for the IFC.

"Captain Ahab [trailer] is lush and scenic," writes Doug Cummings of one of his LAFF favorites; "its measured pace, lyrical narration, and sense of irony (not to mention its misadventurous hero) could all be compared to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, but it’s a more intimate film, emphasizing the life of a boy who never truly knows a home as he’s traded from hand to hand."

Wrapping HRWIFF and Silverdocs.

Today's the last day of this year's New York edition of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, while Silverdocs wrapped a few days ago. David D'Arcy's got reviews of one film from each festival - and all related pointers will be gathered here, following entries on HRWIFF (1 and 2) and Silverdocs. Updated through 6/28.

Balzac once said that behind every fortune lies a crime. In this country, Norman Rockwell took a different approach in his 1959 painting, Family Tree, which traced a proper American family back to pirates and prostitutes, and through to a relationship between a drunken pioneer and an Indian squaw, then to what look like a gunslinger and a bar girl, and then eventually to the kind of "respectable" people who populated Rockwell's warmhearted scenes of American life. Don't look too closely, Rockwell seems to be telling us slyly, or you might see that your family's success might have come from people who made money the old-fashioned way - by stealing it, or sleeping with it.

As the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival closes, I wanted to take note of one film which examines a family fortune and is bound to make some viewers uncomfortable. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North [site; Thomas Norman DeWolf's Inheriting the Trade], looks at the DeWolf Family, heirs of Rhode Island entrepreneurs whose fortune came from the slave trade. The film is the debut feature of Katrina Browne and it premiered at Sundance, although I missed it there.

Information about the family business was not hard to find, the troubled descendants learned. Back in the 18th century, the DeWolfs packed goods on ships that went to Ghana and traded those goods for slaves, who were then sold in Cuba, where the ships carried other goods and some human cargo to Charleston, South Carolina, and then north to Rhode Island. Slaves were all over the North, the family is told, although not in such great numbers on the land of an individual family, as they were in the South. And when the slave trade was illegal, the DeWolfs found ways to get around that ban. With their earnings, they built the church in Bristol, Rhode Island that they attended. Katrina Browne reads to her chagrin that Mr De Wolf gave his wife two African children as a gift, and the family immortalized the child slaves with a nursery rhyme. This could be right out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would have appreciated the delicate darkness of the DeWolf's family secret.

It was bad enough for the educated and prosperous DeWolf heirs to learn that their proper ancestors were slavers, and that the unpaid labor of slaves subsidized factories and other enterprises in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the DeWolfs are Episcopalians, and their guilt is painful. Not satisfied to wring their hands, the DeWolfs research their history in Rhode Island and find to their chagrin that the economy there depended on slavery. They then journey to Ghana, where the locals don't all welcome the well-meaning travelers, and then travel to Cuba, where much of the slave trade moved once it was outlawed in the US. Then they take on the Episcopal Church, which of course has voted to condemn slavery and recognize its pernicious legacy. It's a little late.

Traces of the Trade edges into the debate over whether the descendants of slaves should receive reparations from the descendants of those who enjoyed the benefits of an economy based on slavery, but mostly it dwells on the piercing guilt felt by the DeWolf family. With most of the water under the bridge, and none of the family members responsible for the sufferings of those whom the family traded as property, they can confess their guilt as they dig up more and more troubling facts, and the film ends up bogged down as a series of meetings at which the DeWolfs tell each other how troubled they are, and then tell the same thing to their Episcopal brethren and sisters. Just doing the digging, however, is more than most white Americans are willing to do.

Katrina Browne can't seem to figure out how to end her movie, nor could lots of other people, if we are to judge by the number of funders and friends who are thanked in the credits. Perhaps that's getting it right. One family member looks at the camera and wonders what crimes we take for granted today, as slavery was back then by the church-going and church-building DeWolfs. What crimes will be deplored a few decades from now? Humans are no longer part of the triangulated trade that brought slaves to the New World, but illegal immigration that sustains the US economy, to the extent that anything sustains it these days, could be another place to look. Only a fraction of immigrants are actually bought and sold, but the DeWolfs, who wring their hands like troubled Protestants over yesterday's crimes that they can do nothing about, might do better to consider the peculiar institution of immigration.

Now over to Silverdocs. In Four Seasons Lodge [site], directed by Andrew Jacobs, another family is the subject. This "family" is a colony of Holocaust survivors who sought out each others' company in a group of bungalows in the Catskills. We meet several dozen of them, all veterans of concentrations camps, as we visit the colony in what is to be its last summer. We hear stories of childhood before the war and explanations of why they lived when the vast majority did not - and plenty of humor in Yiddish-ized English. A lot of marriages among survivors did not work out, one woman says, because people married whomever was left alive right after the war. "Hitler was the matchmaker," she says ominously. The survivors seek each other out, most of them say, because they can never satisfactorily explain what they went through, and only those who lived through what they endured could really know them. Their shared experience creates a community, but the community is based on the experience of seeing mass murder firsthand.

Jacobs's documentary is tender as it roams through the modest colony. We hear that there used to be more of these summer communities, but the survivors are dying out. It's surprising that we don't hear much that is specific about their experiences in the concentration camps. Indeed, they may not need to talk to each other about those horrors, but this documentary is not just made for Holocaust survivors who don't need to be told about Auschwitz. Oddly, in this film about people who were able to come to America and create new lives, we meet only one of their children. It's as if they went from concentration camp to holiday camp, and you know that couldn't have been the case.

Four Seasons Lodge builds its tension on what seems to be the end of the colony, which I won't give away. It's heartwarming to see women (and a few men) in their 80s who can still dance and curse and laugh among themselves. It's a shame that Andrew Jacobs could not get them to tell us more.

-David D'Arcy

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Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door on Letter to Anna (site; David D'Arcy): "Though dry and straightforward, even clunky in spots (especially when narrated in the English language version by Susan Sarandon, standing in for the filmmakers), the doc is a low-key, respectful summation of a life that resembled a tabloid-ready espionage thriller." More on from Rob Humanick at Slant.

Acquarello:

• "The specter of the Partition of Bengal in 1947 continues to haunt the modern day consciousness of a divided Kashmir in Senain Kheshgi and Geeta Patel's provocative and acutely observed Project Kashmir." Site.

• "Continuing in the vein of Justice, Maria Ramos's examination of the Brazilian justice system, Behave is an equally potent and sobering social inquiry into the state's juvenile re-socialization program."

• "Thoughtful and impassioned, Youth Producing Change is a diverse and intimate reflection into some of the issues and ideas that inspire young people worldwide into taking action."

Update: Online scrolling tip. AJ Schnack's Silverdocs Photo Booth.

Update, 6/28: For Acquarello, China's Stolen Children is a "thoughtful and remarkably comprehensive examination of modern day human trafficking." Also: Sari Soldiers.

Frameline, week 2.

Frameline32 has a few more days to go before wrapping on Sunday. Further dispatches and notes will be gathered here. For an overview of the fest so far, turn to Dennis Harvey at SF360 - where Max Goldberg reviews Derek (site), "a documentary tribute which does not seek to enlarge or complicate the filmmaker’s legacy so much as succor its loss."

"You'd never know it, but there was a time when British filmmakers, emboldened by punk culture, fueled by hatred for Thatcherite conservatism, and funded by the BFI and the new Channel Four, made outrageous, experimental, high culture vs. low culture collision movies, doped on structuralism and gender-bending and period-picture mockery," writes Michael Atkinson, reviewing the newly released Glitterbox for IFC. "[Derek] Jarman was the moment's jester prince; he never made a film you'd mistake for the work of another, or a film that doesn't manifest on the screen as an unpredictably impish riff on serious matters, Art-making and Sex and Death. Not to mention, Jarman's was a not-so-distant day when thanks to a small number of artists, but largely to Jarman, gay cinema had a chance to be regarded as pioneering art, and not just politics."

Updated through 6/30.

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Monica Peck follows up on her first and second dispatches:

San Francisco filmmaker Brynn Gelbard introduced Ruby Blue [site] last night in lieu of the film's writer/director Jan Dunn, who couldn't make the screening due to work on another film. Gelbard, who worked as an assistant to the director and producer for Ruby Blue, recalled first meeting Dunn when Gypo screened at Frameline two years ago.

"After the screening I met up with them at the Lexington and they were talking about the next film they wanted to make and that was Ruby Blue," Gelbard explained. "So there I was getting to go to Roundsgate in Kent, England.... It was amazing to get to work with Bob Hoskins. I told him that Mermaids changed my life, that when I saw that movie, Winona Ryder made me realize I'm a lesbian. He said, 'Me, too.'"

The film was screened in partnership with this year's Tranny March. Three organizers took the stage to invite "any and all genders" to join them for the show and march tomorrow: San Francisco's Dolores Park at 3 pm.

The film played to a packed house. Dunn's flawless pacing and comedic timing, combined with the energetic Frameline viewing audience, created a unique atmosphere of genuine participation in the unfolding of this timeless story.

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With Eleven Minutes (site), "[Michael] Selditch and [Rob] Tate have constructed a brisk and coherent fashion-industry procedural that expertly switches out the cultivated tension of Project Runway for its real-world counterpart," blogs Jason Shamai at Pixel Vision. "The film is an equally adept portrait of a designer who gracefully channels his fear of squandered momentum into the dry charm the filmmakers were probably banking on."

Updates, 6/27: Since the dominating presence of this entry so far is Derek Jarman's, this seems the right place to point to Sam Adams's assessment for Moving Image Source, where two upcoming series are also noted: Derek Jarman, at the Seoul Cinematheque from today through July 10, and Of Angels and Apocalypse: The Cinema of Derek Jarman, at the Northwest Film Center from July 11 through 31. Sam Adams: "Poet, prophet, and provocateur, Jarman made films that were polemical by their very existence, yet intensely, and occasionally inscrutably, personal in substance. Frankly homoerotic, they queered the history of Shakespeare, Caravaggio and Wittgenstein/a>, to say nothing of Saint Sebastian and Jesus Christ. As AIDS hysteria and homophobia mounted in the 1980s, Jarman sharpened his knives and strengthened his stance."

At the SpoutBlog, Lauren Wissot suggests five "Top Hot Pride Pics."

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Update, 6/29: Once again, Monica Peck...

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" veteran experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer told last night's Frameline32 audience at the Roxie Theater before the premier of her latest film A Horse Is Not a Metaphor. "Thank you! People are the most important thing - that's what I've learned!"

"I also want to thank my wife, Florrie Burke, who shot some of the cinematography for the film," Hammer announced. "We just got married yesterday!" Shouts of congratulations and resounding cheers filled the intimate venue.

Friday night's screening began with two of Hammer's earlier films, Vital Signs and Sanctus, both breathtakingly beautiful explorations of the body and death.

"My body is a performative structure, as well as sexual... as well as a person in skin with touch," Hammer explained. "The body is the mind as well; we mustn't forget that."

Hammer's recent battle with ovarian cancer provided the subject for A Horse Is Not A Metaphor. A deeply personal poetic map of the cancer experience, the film also aims to educate viewers about the symptoms and available treatments for ovarian cancer.

"Ovarian cancer has been called the 'silent killer,' so now we want to yell about it and make it not silent anymore," Hammer explained during the Q&A after the screening. "You literally are the first people to see this film. Only three others have ever seen this before, but now I want to write a distribution program so the film can go around to hospitals and clinics and get the message out there about ovarian cancer. Perhaps with a new Democratic president in office we can finally get the stem cell research to find that tumor marker so that the chemo can focus on the tumor, rather than having to flood the entire body cavity."

Beautifully constructed from a variety of visual media, including Hammer's own archival footage of the first All-Women Rodeo in 1962, as well as Florrie Burke's videos of chemotherapy treatments, the film also reflects Hammer's recent acquisition of Final Cut Pro and digital video within her process.

"This is the first film where I worked from the beginning to the end without stopping," she explained. "I'd heard of painters doing that with a large canvas, just starting at one corner and not stopping until it's finished - that's what making this film was like."

-Monica Peck

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Updates, 6/30: XXY (site) has won the Frameline32 Audience Award for Best Feature.

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And again, Monica Peck...

"I saw the gayest thing on my walk to the Castro Theater today," Michael Lumpkin spoke warmly to the Frameline 32 audience as a few giggles emanated from the crowd. "It was a pink plushy bear with a veil... That pretty much says it all for today," he laughed, referencing the hundreds of wedding celebrations happening on nearly every scenic stoop of San Francisco this month.

Lumpkin introduced Julie Blankenship from the non-profit Visual Aid, co-presenters of the afternoon's screening of Derek, a tribute to Derek Jarman. Visual Aid provides grants and materials to professional artists diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, such as HIV/AIDS.

The film, although a bit of a dud, will hopefully serve to foster greater interest in Jarman's films. Lumpkin said he wanted to screen some of Jarman's films at this year's festival, but no 35 mm prints were available.

This year's Frameline closed with the film Breakfast With Scot (site), from Canadian director Laurie Lynd, before attendees headed over to 1015 Folsom for the closing party celebration.

-Monica Peck

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Michael Guillén at Twitch on The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela (site): "Billed as a transsexual Cinderella story, this Berlinale Teddy winner is amazingly engaging for its heady blend of gritty vérité and whimsical fairy tale."

Zeitgeist and the zeitgeist.

Happy 20th anniversary, Zeitgeist Films. MoMA's celebrating with Zeitgeist: The Films of Our Time, opening tomorrow and running through July 23. In the Voice, Anthony Kaufman talks with co-Presidents Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo - and with Guy Maddin: "Zeitgeist has always had the most eclectic and discriminating catalog, and I've never been quite able to believe my good fortune in being part of it. Their company is by far the most personal, passionate, and character-driven of all the distributors."

"The MoMA screening schedule spans the life of the company, and will feature a number of special filmmaker appearances," notes indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez, who talks with Gerstman and Russo about the state of indies: "The duo repeatedly discussed that being an optimist is crucial in stomaching the ups and downs of distribution and despite the current storm clouds, expressed confidence about the future."

Updated through 6/30.

"Nobody in the film business questions that the current mode of distribution for independent film - in [Carrie] Rickey's article [in the Philadelphia Inquirer], Emerging Pictures CEO Ira Deutchman calls it the 'post-studio, pre-Internet era' - is somewhere between transitional and dysfunctional, and that some version of electronic home delivery is likely to dominate the marketplace within five to 15 years," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "But as God is my witness, we need gatekeepers! If anything, we need them in the digital era more than ever. At least in the short term, the current marketplace implosion is likely to have a highly undemocratic effect on both filmmakers and film lovers, delivering still more practical control over what we watch and when to a shrinking group of ever-larger entertainment conglomerates."

"Needless to say, media coverage of the Indie Film Crisis is entering crisis proportions itself." Variety's Anne Thompson gathers more related linkage.

Updates: In the wake of Mark Gill's LAFF keynote, indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez asks industry insiders and observers, "Is the Sky Really Falling?"

"Can the Internet Save Indie Film?" For Portfolio, Fred Schruers asks Matt Dentler.

Updates, 6/27: Online listening tip. Maddin, Gerstman and Russo are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"During the course of two tumultuous decades in independent film distribution, the company's track record demonstrates a remarkably astute sensitivity to the ebb and flow of public and critical tastes, both in the art house and the video store," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "'That is what "zeitgeist" means, isn't it?' Ms Russo said last week. 'It's the spirit of the times, and that is what we do. We have certainly been attracted to films that have political messages or philosophical messages or some kind of social messages' - 'And emotional messages,' Ms Gerstman interjected - 'that we thought audiences of that time would want to respond to.'"

Also, S James Snyder tells the story behind Maddin's The Heart of the World.

Updates, 6/28: Since this is just as much a zeitgeist entry (as it relates to the current shakeout among indie distributors) as a celebration of Zeitgeist, this would seem to be the place to note that, in the New York Times, Charles Lyons reports on why Alex Gibney - and others - are taking ThinkFilm to court.

Meanwhile, Anthony Kaufman reports that "Sundance sleeper hit Momma's Man, which may be this year's Old Joy, will not be handled in theaters by ThinkFilm, as I reported last week." It's going instead to Kino International.

AJ Schnack gathers commentary on all this and adds himself, "Sadness all around."

Update, 6/29: The Film Panel Notetaker was a work on Todd Haynes's night at the Zeitgeist series.

Update, 6/30: David Carr runs through Mark Gill's talking points for New York Times readers and calls up Mark Harris (Entertainment Weekly, Pictures at a Revolution), who tells him, "I think Mark said a brave thing. There are too many movies, and too many of them are terrible and dull. The overproduction is a breach of faith with the audience, and they have become skeptical. I know I have."

WALL·E.

"Many will attempt to describe WALL·E with a one-liner," begins Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "It's R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that's both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate—and, for a good long while, absolutely bereft of dialogue save the squeals, beeps, and chirps of a sweet, lonely robot who, aside from his cockroach pet, is the closest thing to the last living being on earth."

"[I]ts central theme owes plenty to Al Gore and the general proliferation of environmental awareness," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "WALL·E codifies the save-our-planet dictum by injecting it with charm - something no snazzy PowerPoint show could possibly accomplish.... The green initiative has hit pop culture, but at least it does so with feeling."

Updated through 7/1.

For Cinematical's Erik Davis, this is "a beautiful sci-fi tale complete with all the feel-good vibes and fantastic, cutting-edge visuals we've come to expect from a film wearing the Pixar name. Despite a few small bumps in the galaxy, WALL·E can easily claim a spot up top on a list featuring the best films of the year so far, and it will surely go down as one of Pixar's most memorable - because it's also one of their most personal."

"No one can accuse Pixar Animation of not taking big risks with its latest feature WALL·E, which tells a love story between two robots (who speak three words between them) against the backdrop of an Earth that's been destroyed by waste and consumerist overkill," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "While the film's most daring gambits pay off in full, the inclusion of a standard outwit-the-bad-guys storyline dulls the magic that WALL·E so often achieves."

For Variety's Todd McCarthy, this is "a simple yet deeply imagined piece of speculative fiction.... [H]ow many films, sci-fi or otherwise, have proposed a future human civilization populated by people so fat that they can't raise themselves from their mobile chairs, in which they sit connected to phones, screens and super-sized cups? One can't help but speculate about the perverse prospect of plus-sized multiplexers laughing at these genuinely funny scenes while digging into their popcorn and slurping their sodas."

Via Jeffrey Wells, Devin Faraci at CHUD: "Is WALL·E Environmental or Hypocritical?" And Jason Morehead asks, "Are conservatives going to be outraged by WALL·E?"

Tasha Robinson interviews director Andrew Stanton; Newsweek gets him to list his "Five Most Important Movies."

"Plenty of internet observers have noted the visual similarities between WALL·E and Short Circuit's Johnny 5, but the more trailers I watched for WALL·E, with the title character zipping around through a lonely, ruined world and sifting the wreckage of what's been left behind by humanity, the more I was remained of another film entirely, 1972's Silent Running," blogs James Rocchi.

In the Philadelphia Weekly, Matt Prigge lists "Six movies featuring robots as protagonists."

Online browsing tip. Via Coudal Partners, Eric Tan's WALL·E posters.

Earlier: Katrina Onstad's backgrounder in the New York Times (where Michael Hirshorn reviews The Pixar Touch) and Mark Feeney's profile of Stanton for the Boston Globe.

Updates: "Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, Wall•E gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"It's a masterpiece of its type," writes Jeffrey Wells. "It's going to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar. I understand the impulse on the part of director Andrew Stanton to call it a robot love story and leave it at that, but it's a lie, of course - a disinforming of pig-trough moviegoers who might think twice about going to a 'green' movie that satirizes their lie-around, fat-ass lifestyle."

"WALL•E uses our nostalgia for our youth to reconnect us with our essential goodwill—an appeal that's impossible to resist whenever you stare into WALL•E's peepers," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Messenger and messiah, he asks us to look into eyes that see much wear but can only be replaced so many times, reflecting back a future that is ours to either make or destroy. He'll clean up whatever we leave behind; just don't ask him to take any of the blame."

Updates, 6/27: "For over a dozen years now, the best name in American film has been Pixar. No movie star, no director, no writer, producer, or studio approaches its level of consistent excellence," declares the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "Even Pixar's weaker offerings (A Bug's Life, Cars, and - in my moderately heretical view - Finding Nemo) have exceptional depth and texture, moral as well as visual. And its best efforts (Toy Story, The Incredibles) are simply transcendent, rivaling the finest live-action films in sophistication and sentiment. Pixar's newest movie, WALL·E, is firmly in the latter tier, and quite possibly at the top of it. It is, in a word, a marvel, a film that recalls in equal measure Hollywood's most evocative future visions - Blade Runner and Brazil, E.T. and 2001 - and the silent intimacies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin."

"Although WALL•E ends with a very apt and moving nod to City Lights, it is in fact Pixar's answer to Modern Times - both a bravura summation of everything the studio is great at and a 'You ain't seen nothing yet!' statement of purpose," writes Glenn Kenny in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Not to mention that it's both a techno- and eco-fable, of course."

"[T]he genius of WALL•E... lies in its notion that creativity and self-destruction are sides of the same coin," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. Then: "Rather than turn a tale of environmental cataclysm into a scolding, self-satisfied lecture, Mr Stanton shows his awareness of the contradictions inherent in using the medium of popular cinema to advance a critique of corporate consumer culture."

"WALL•E pushes the purist aesthetic of Pixar animation to the borders of the avant-garde," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "WALL•E isn't quite as transcendent as last year's Ratatouille, but it's more formally innovative.... Despite the virtuosity of its technical execution, WALL•E never feels like a soulless, well-oiled entertainment machine. Rather, the movie resembles its resilient, square-shaped hero: a built-to-last contraption with a disproportionately big heart."

"Incredible. Not only is WALL•E the best Pixar movie yet (an immodest claim, I realize, though I can't imagine you'd disagree), but its entire plot is devoted to freaking its audience out about consumer culture," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "The creators of WALL•E are trying to get credit for the insurgency while profiting from the occupation. But all this seems pathologically cynical when you consider the film itself, a wonderfully insane and involving love story."

For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, "the picture feels weirdly, and disappointingly, disjointed, something that starts out as poetry and ends as product.... The gloss of preachiness that washes over WALL•E overwhelms the haunting, delicate spirit of its first 30 minutes. This clearly isn't a movie made by a robot; the drag is that it ends up feeling so programmed."

"[T]he difference between WALL•E and any other counterintuitive hero (say, a kung fu panda) is Pixar's capacity for fully imagined, painstakingly rendered worlds and a genuine feel for emotional gradations - not gimmicks," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "The first half-hour of WALL•E is effectively the best summer movie all by itself, and its charm and sense of transport carry the film through its energetically but more predictably conceived latter portions in outer space."

"It's Pixar's most daring experiment to date, but it still fits neatly into the studio's pantheon: Made with as much focus on heart as on visual quality, it's a sheer joy," writes Tasha Robinson. Also at the AV Club, from Donna Bowman and Noel Murray, a Pixar primer.

"So confident is the studio in its ability to charm audiences, it has made a futurist movie that's a lot like an old silent picture," writes Richard Corliss, who talks with some of Pixar's movers and shakers for Time.

"The plot of WALL·E may be about a steaming heap of garbage, but the film is a garden of unearthly delights," writes John Anderson in the Washington Post. "One of the summer's presumptive blockbuster-tentpole-hits-to-be, the Pixar film is clearly making co-producer/distributor Disney nervous. And it's not hard to see why. It's too good. Too smart. And, most importantly, too dark."

"WALL•E succeeds at being three things at once: an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story," writes Roger Ebert. "The movie draws on a tradition going back to the earliest days of Walt Disney, who reduced human expressions to their broadest components and found ways to translate them to animals, birds, bees, flowers, trains and everything else."

Online viewing tips. "What's the Best Pixar Movie of All Time?" A clip-sprinkled list from Vulture.

Updates, 6/28: For David Edelstein, this is "one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world... a sublime work of art."

"Where Cars erred on the side of trying to make 1950s style internal combustion engines into a thing of shiny love to dazzle the most prehensile of animation watchers, WALL•E's anthropo-dwarfism goes the opposite direction, toward an eco-fable that's more than majestic in its detailing while keeping its characters exceedingly small," writes Ray Pride.

Also at Movie City News, Michael Wilmington: "[T]his movie actually ignites our sense of play, and of wonder. Even if you're way past childhood's end, as an adult or in your mature years, the film has some of the dreamy intoxicating effect of the Disney feature cartoons of the late 30s through the mid 40s, that fantastic run from Snow White through Bambi, especially if you saw them as a child."

"There is something audacious, maybe hubristic, in Pixar's gamble to market a potential blockbuster — to families, no less — so out of step with the expectations of multiplex audiences weaned on a succession of Shreks with diminishing returns," writes Chris Wisniewski for Stop Smiling. "But WALL•E dazzles, particularly in its magnificent first half-hour, a post-apocalyptic love-story in miniature that serves as a graceful introduction to the intergalactic journey that follows."

Updates, 6/29: "About once every ten years Hollywood makes a movie that is so 'outside the box' that you wonder how it ever got a greenlight," writes Jon Taplin. "When the history of the first 100 years of animation is written, I'm pretty sure WALL•E will be right up there with the earliest Disney classics in the pantheon."

"In WALL•E, Pixar's best film to date, the joke is on us," writes Matt Dentler. "The film flies in the face of all that is expected and acceptable: corporate America has destroyed earth, heroes don't speak English, and an animated feature can pack more heart and ingenuity in 100 minutes than we've seen in American multiplexes this entire year so far."

Updates, 6/30: "A very funny, beautifully designed, unexpectedly affecting (I cried, okay? The walking trash compactor with the googly eyes fell in love and I cried. And I'd do it again.) animated fable, WALL•E deserves all the riches it will earn for its makers, which will probably only pile up faster and faster as people look for something to take the kids to see even as the remaining summer sure-shots, such as the new Batman and Hellboy films, turn weirder and darker," writes Phil Nugent at Screengrab. "In the meantime, some canny repertory theater programmers would be well advised to cash in on the movie's success by pulling Silent Running out of mothballs, toot sweet. Although WALL•E pays comic homage to 2001 and includes an in-joke for Alien fans by employing Sigourney Weaver as the Mothering voice of a spaceship's computer, its strongest debt, both visually and spiritually, is to the 1972 hippie sci-fi film that marked the directing debut of Douglas Trumbull, still best known for his work as a special effects wizard on such films as 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner."

"Would I sound like too much of a moral scold if I said that WALL•E symbolizes every good impulse in Hollywood filmmaking, and Wanted every corrupt one?" asks Paul Matwychuk. "Or would I just sound like someone who can properly evaluate the evidence of his own eyeballs?"

"The media is playing two pointless games of 'gotcha' with Pixar's wonderful WALL•E at the moment," begins Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "Eric Kohn addressed the first - conservative critics griping about the film's 'left-wing' message - over here. The other, best articulated in this post by CHUD's Devin Faraci and this mind-boggling missive from the New York Post's Kyle Smith, but also showing up in Todd McCarthy's Variety review, is that WALL•E's supposed anti-consumerist bent is 'hypocrisy' on account of it's released by Disney. I think that's a stupid and dishonest argument, and here's why."

Updates, 7/1: The LAT's Patrick Goldstein talks with "Pixar guru" John Lasseter about the studio's phenomenal success.

Blogging for the NYT, Damon Darlin spots to nods to Apple, while Chris Suellentrop notes that "already the right-wing backlash to the right-wing backlash against WALL•E is underway."

Online viewing tip. AO Scott on "Pixar's 4th Dimension."

Hancock, round 1.

"When this movie opens July 2, it will be eviscerated," predicts Variety's Anne Thompson. "It's a movie that tried to be smart and weird and interesting, with gifted filmmakers behind it: producers Michael Mann and Akiva Goldsman (who do cameos), edgy screenwriter Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) and director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom). They created a fascinating damaged, alcoholic, homeless superhero, well-played by Smith, but their attempts to mix and match smart character-based drama (Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman also star) with superhero action adventure (VFX by Sony Pictures Imageworks) is a Frankenstein's Monster."

Updated through 7/2.

"This misguided attempt to wring a novel twist on the superhero genre has a certain whiff of The Last Action Hero about it, with Will Smith playing an indestructible crime-buster in a pointedly real-world context," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Although it will inevitably open very large, this odd and perplexing aspiring tentpole will provide a real test of Smith's box office invincibility."

For Stephen Farber, writing in the Hollywood Reporter, the problems begin when Hancock "veers from comedy to romantic tragedy and introduces an elaborate backstory that never makes much sense."

"Outright baffling choices mark the last 30-35 minutes of the movie," agrees Brent Simon in Screen Daily. "Interesting narrative opportunities have been discarded in favour of a twist which creates needless confusion, and saps the film of its accrued goodwill."

"As superhero dramas go, I'd give it three capes," writes Rachel Abramowitz in the Los Angeles Times. "But the pure boom-boom factor of the genre made me feel bludgeoned. Again.... Author Peter Biskind, who's written books about movies and culture in the 50s, 70s, and 90s, assures me that superheroes return with bad times.... Janine Basinger, a film historian from Wesleyan University, has a slightly different take on it. 'We all want a daddy, don't we?'... While I believe in hope and change, I know some cynics (mostly die-hard Hillary Clinton supporters) who think Barack Obama taps into the same collective yearning... Obama-man has no past. Like all caped crusaders, he is a mysterious cipher, and yet a reassuring figure, like Superman or Spider-Man.... As screenwriter David Koepp (Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) notes: 'Hollywood is only obsessed with superheroes because audiences seem to be. As soon as audiences are not, Hollywood will scrape them off their shoe.'"

Meantime, as Lizo Mzimba reports for the BBC, Smith's more than happy to talk up Obama.

"It's a superhero movie that is not a superhero movie," writes David Poland. "It has complex ideas. It has quiet moments when most studio movies would be giving you zip. It pushes the funk harder than usually makes studios comfortable."

Chris Lee in the Los Angeles Times: "I won't spoil the surprise here, but let's just say Valkyrie-like South African Oscar-winner [Charlize] Theron has a much meatier part in the film than you might otherwise be led to believe by her marginal presence in various trailers, billboards and one-sheets for Hancock."

Updates, 6/27: "Will Smith memorably starred in sci-fi movies called things such as I, Robot and I Am Legend," notes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "This one could be called I, Asshole or I Am Asshole, or perhaps just Asshole.... I wondered what it might have been like with Snoop Dogg in the role, out of his head on skunk and habitually abusive. Well, he might have been awful in other ways: but he wouldn't have been as solemn."

"[F]or everything that doesn't work in Hancock, there's a sort of structural anarchy going that's refreshing - it rebels against even the adolescent formulae of rebellion to give us something more adult," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "It also has one quality that your average superhero flick never does: you haven't the faintest clue where it's going."

Update, 6/28: "Subversive tendencies would certainly be welcome amid all the cookie-cutter product being funneled into cineplexes by play-it-safe studios, yet aside from the fact that its crime fighter initially comes off as a boozy jerk, director Peter Berg's latest assumes a superficial deconstructionist attitude while strictly adhering to conventions - especially, and ineffectively, during its second half, when the story goes so far off the rails that its illogicality flirts with abstraction." Nick Schager in Slant.

Update, 6/29: Carole Cadwalladr profiles Charlize Theron for the Observer.

Update, 6/30: For David Denby, writing in the New Yorker, Hancock is "a surprisingly resonant spectacle that places three people with recognizable feelings in the middle of a wild fantasy.... Hancock suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop. It's by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer."

Updates, 7/1: "Hancock is just intriguing enough that I kept wishing it were better," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "But Berg doesn't have the subtle touch that this material needs.... It's Smith who seems truly lost. His two most recent performances - in the 2006 The Pursuit of Happyness and in last year's I Am Legend - were so astonishing that it's become hard not to expect miracles from him.... It's the sort of role Smith ought to be able to pull off easily. But even his superpowers apparently have their limits."

"There's something ugly and profoundly self-absorbed about the go-nowhere loser comedy Hancock, a superhero action blockbuster that arrives in theaters tomorrow almost as a big-screen equivalent of an US Weekly magazine," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "When not poking fun at its central celebrity when he's down on his luck, the film cashes in on the drama as he's shuttled off to rehab, then slaps together a redemptive coda without doing any of the heavy lifting. All things considered, reactions to the film will likely mimic those of gossip-rag readers: fleeting enchantment slowly replaced by indifference."

Updates, 7/2: "Although whatever teeth it had have mostly been pulled, Hancock makes for one unexpectedly satisfying and kinky addition to Hollywood's superhero chronicles," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "[W]hile it would be a stretch to say that this summertime amusement has much on its mind, it does have a little something percolating between its big bangs and gaudy effects. Most of that something isn't overtly political, despite the setup (Super Angry Black Man), a few winking asides and Mr Berg's downbeat tendencies."

"Hancock's so indefensibly enh during its first half-hour that it almost doesn't recover; like its hero, the movie comes off as a touch suicidal," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "But slowly, and clumsily, Hancock lurches toward greatness." Still, "It doesn't take itself as seriously as it should, and undercuts a final act that should have and so could have packed a mighty emotional wallop. Noted a colleague after a preview screening: 'Here's a superhero movie that could have used more pretension.'"

"Hancock is hardly the worst movie of the summer season," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "(That would probably be this or this.) But it is in some ways the most frustrating: a clumsy, half-hearted mishmash dropped carelessly into the holiday weekend with the clear assumption that Big Willie's superpowers will be enough to catch it and hold it aloft. I (like every moviegoer on Earth, if box office numbers are to be believed) consider myself a fan of Will Smith. But Hancock, even more than its protagonist, has deep-seated problems, and anyone who gives it money is only enabling its misbehavior."

"It's a movie with an identity crisis that seems to offer one gentle pleasure but instead offers a harsher experience by far," writes Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. "It's very, very strange."

The Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns also finds it "deeply strange" and offers a little background: "This kooky patchwork of a project was spun from a much heralded, notoriously unfilmable script called Tonight, He Comes, penned by first-timer Vincent Ngo, that surfaced sometime in the 90s. The double entendre title referred to our hero's struggle to keep a lid on his libido, a sort of extra-graphic riff on the great Mallrats gag in which Superman can't screw Lois Lane because his Kryptonian super-spooge will most likely rip her in half."

"The lunacy of the plot twist would be acceptable if it were given the appropriate loony-bin treatment," writes Sam Weisberg in the L Magazine. "Instead, the story shifts between trite slapstick and humorless exposition - if we are told, for instance, that Smith was scarred in a Constantine-era battle, why not show it?"

"A critique of Hancock is an essay in irrelevance," decides Time's Richard Corliss. "You'll go see it anyway." So he turns his attention to Will Smith, who "deserves that overused epithet 'the last movie star.' For more than a decade, he's been immune to moviegoers' fickle fashions."

"When we shell out to see a star vehicle, we are effectively paying insurance premiums which we get back in the form of more precious time with that chosen celebrity," blogs Ryan Gilbey for the Guardian. "What we're getting in Hancock is essentially a metaphor for the making of Will Smith."

Richard Vine talks with Berg for the Guardian. The director insists Smith is not a Scientologist, by the way, which, if true, would be, you know, a relief.

"[G]iven that the movie itself is a cynical, slapdash moneymaking machine - yes, that's Akiva Goldsman, screenwriter of Batman & Robin and coproducer of this film, glimpsed in the boardroom scene - it mainly succeeds in trashing the ideal of summer-movie entertainment," writes Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out New York.

"Smith's foray into superhero movies manages to entertain," shrugs Amber Humphrey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "For those keeping track, Hancock is no Men in Black (1997). Thankfully, though, it's no Wild Wild West (1999) either."

Trumbo.

"Revered screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905 - 1976) is the most famous of the Hollywood Ten - the Tinseltown scapegoats blacklisted in 1947 after refusing to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities - probably because his own life sounds like a movie he scripted," writes Benjamin Strong, reviewing Trumbo in the L Magazine.

"The readings of Dalton Trumbo's letters to family and friends are starkly rendered—famous faces (Michael Douglas, Nathan Lane, Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, so forth) recite rousing missives without the aid of sets or props of any kind save for Trumbo's own thunderous proclamations in defense of free speech," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice.

Updated through 6/27.

"Trumbo's trials are perfect for these actors to display some serious in-house outrage at the evils of Hollywood past, and Douglas and company seem more interested in being cinematically enshrined for their stance on events now ensconced in the hindsighted past than in giving sincere interpretations of Trumbo's outraged, bitter, and political voice," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. Even so: "Through interviews with biographers, family, and friends like Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas, Trumbo emerges as an unflappably strong-willed "contrarian" who took what the reactionary paranoia of his time dealt him and more than survived."

"Ultimately, Trumbo is well worth seeing for what it tells us about the age in which this irrepressible individualist lived, loved, suffered and finally triumphed," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Indeed, his hilarious letter to his son, Chris - in college at the time - on the pleasures, glories and guilts of masturbation is alone worth the price of admission. Whatever reservations I have about Trumbo can be attributed to my liberal anti-communist mind-set, which demands that the whole tangled story of the cold war be told."

"Trumbo is most focused when it lets the man and his peers testify directly; actress-writer Jean Rouverol, now past 90, is positively giddy in telling each impassioned war story, as of the night she turned two federal agents away from her door and then phoned her husband and collaborator to warn, 'Get on your horse,'" writes Bill Weber in Slant.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

Update, 6/26: "The real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society, which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic conformity," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Whether this was accidental or intentional, pursuing a highly unpopular minority provided authoritarian elements in this country with a test case: How far could constitutional rights and liberties be eroded by government-sponsored fear-mongering? The answer was pretty far, and would-be dictators from J Edgar Hoover to Dick Cheney have been renovating and repeating the pattern ever since, with a different half-imaginary enemy in the gunsight."

And then there's Armond White in the New York Press: "Myth and piety are the film's guiding principles - documenting truth isn't."

Updates, 6/27: "If the story of the Hollywood blacklist and the lives it destroyed has been told many times before, it still bears repeating, especially in the post-9/11 climate of fearmongering, of Guantánamo, of flag pins as gauges of patriotism," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Today few would dispute Trumbo's assessment of that very dark period: 'The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil.'"

"Trumbo clearly proves that, if nothing else, its subject endured the deprivations of the blacklist with more wit than any of the rest of the writers in the original Hollywood Ten," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "After watching Trumbo, one suspects that no matter when he was born, Trumbo's flair for agitprop and almost compulsive iconoclasm would have brought him into conflict with the prevailing politics of any era."

"Trumbo's ornery genius couldn't be contained by the screen or the pages of a book; it spilled into every aspect of his life," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Trumbo emerges as a son's bittersweet valentine to his old man, and a tribute to the senior Trumbo's resilience, wit, and outrage in the face of a national disgrace."

"Trumbo could be funny, as when he called Albert Ellis, the author of Sex Without Guilt, 'the greatest humanitarian since Mahatma Gandhi,'" writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "He could be an irascible pain in the neck, as when he excoriates his local phone company for its service. But being dull, or compromising what he believed, was never an option."

"Balancing the political and the personal is a smart idea, though the resulting togglethon ends up being the uneasiest of marriages," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

Online listening tip. Screenwriter Christopher Trumbo (Dalton's son) and director Peter Askin are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Edinburgh, week 2.

"At its halfway point, we have a clearer idea of whether the Edinburgh film festival can cope on its own, divorced from the supportive hubbub of the Fringe that brought so many people into the city," blogs the Guardian's Andrew Pulver. "I have to confess initially I was a bit of a sceptic, reasoning the film festival must surely get more out of Edinburgh's August maelstrom than it would gain by losing it. But having just nipped into town, it's interesting to see how the film festival's identity has already changed in quite subtle ways."

Neil Young's been indexing his coverage, most of it for the Hollywood Reporter:

Updated through 7/1.

• Christopher Doyle's Polish political thriller Warsaw Dark is a "classic example of style triumphing over substance." More from Allan Hunter in Screen Daily: "Elements of political conspiracy, shady underworld intrigue and romantic infatuation are executed with a measure of elegance but this is an idiosyncratic, unfathomable muddle that begins to resemble a jigsaw where all the pieces are present but the hapless viewer is clueless as to how they might fit together."

• "As an example of issue-driven community filmmaking, Trouble Sleeping, an ensemble drama "based on the experiences of members of Edinburgh's refugee community," is a respectable effort that almost transcends tight budgetary limitations."

• "East meets West with quietly droll results in We Went To Wonderland the second feature-length film by London-based Chinese filmmaker/novelist Xiaolu Guo. While her 2006 debut, How Is Your Fish Today?, spellblindingly combined documentary and fiction, this time she takes a more straightforwardly documentary approach to record her elderly parents' first visit to Europe."

• "An intense, downbeat psychological character study that feels infinitely closer to recent Austrian and German cinema than anything from its native Britain, Helen is a ponderously pretentious affair that wastes an intriguing premise not to mention Ole Birkeland's superlative cinematography." More from Allan Hunter in Screen Daily.

And still more from Allan Hunter in Screen Daily:

• "The move from kidulthood to Adulthood prompts some awkward growing pains for screenwriter/actor Noel Clarke as he also assumes the role of director for the first time and his film's polished, technical confidence is fatally undermined by overwrought melodrama and unconvincing performances."

• "Eight years after ivansxtc, director Bernard Rose and star Danny Huston are reunited on another digitally-shot, The Kreutzer Sonata is the lesser of the two films, transforming a tale of all-consuming sexual jealousy into a turgid journey through banal scenes from a Beverly Hills marriage."

• "A defining moment in the forging of Scottish nationalism is transformed into an Ealing-style comedy caper in Stone of Destiny, a sentimental rendition of the true theft - or liberation - of the ancient Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey."

The festival wraps on Sunday.

Earlier: "Edinburgh, week 1."

Update, 6/26: "Relationships between brothers can often provide fertile subject-matter for cinema, but overcooked family-drama Dummy is an undistinguished variation on the theme," writes Neil Young for the Hollywood Reporter. Also: "The family that slays together stays together in Mum & Dad, a nightmarish little Brit-horror that makes a virtue of micro-budget limitations."

Updates, 6/27: Online listening tip. Jason Solomons hosts the latest edition of Film Weekly from Edinburgh.

For the Telegraph, Tim Robey reviews The Wackness, Somers Town, A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, Donkey Punch, Red and Of Time and the City.

Updates, 6/28: From Charlie Olsky's indieWIRE dispatch: "Cinematographers certainly aren't left out of the Edinburgh love; the festival held a particularly anticipated conversation between two of this year's academy-award nominated cinematographers Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and Seamus McGarvey (Atonement). Longtime Wong Kar-Wai collaborator Chris Doyle held the world premiere of his film Warsaw Dark, about violent Mafioso and tragic prostitutes in the title city (which Doyle portrays as a hellhole). It's a disappointing film from one of the world's finest cinematographers, somehow managing to simultaneously look beautiful and be profoundly ugly, as doomed people live out bleak situations, cursing the horrors of capitalism."

Dummy director Matthew Thompson tells Guardian readers what it's like to have a film at the festival.

Update, 6/29: "The 62nd EIFF concluded with today's awards ceremony which saw Somers Town winning the Michael Powell Award, and Robert Carlyle walking away as best actor for his performance in Summer." Congrats to Shane Meadows; the site's got the full list of winners.

Update, 6/30: Sheila Johnston looks back on the highlights in the Telegraph.

Update, 7/1: Tim Hayes offers an overview in cinemattraction.

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.

"A true (and sometimes terrifying) original, [Louise] Bourgeois, now 96, is more than the sum of her parts," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "The uncommonly elegant and evocative portrait Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine reveals much about this haunting and haunted master while leaving intact what Georges Braque once wrote was the only thing that mattered in art: the thing you cannot explain."

"The stroke of genius in Marion Cajori (who died in 2006 while the film was still being edited) and Amei Wallach's documentary is filming Bourgeois's artworks in a way that conveys their imposing emotive presence," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. The film "gets at the heart of what makes Bourgeois a great artist (indeed, what makes anyone a great artist): her work reveals as much about her as our reactions to it reveal about us."

Updated through 6/27.

John Anderson looks back on the life of Marion Cajori, whose films include Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter and Chuck Close, and talks with her daughter about the many years devoted to this one: "Just as Louise has had the past with her all the time, my mother had cancer following her around, no health insurance, two kids—and I think, in a way, for both of them, art was a source of sanity. I think, for many years, making the film kept my mother alive."

Also in the Voice, Nick Pinkerton: "The filmmakers seem to have developed an unusual intimacy with their subject, and part of this film's pleasure is in the intergenerational frictions that come up in Bourgeois and Wallach's conversations, with the interviewer trying to coax her subject into mouthing explicitly feminist cant, and Bourgeois cannily demurring."

"Frequently roving around and taking awe at Bourgeois's massive artwork, the filmmakers may understand the artist as a woman and a living creature but they often treat her as if she herself were a museum piece," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

At Film Forum through July 8. On Friday, Louise Bourgeois, "a full-career retrospective," opens at the Guggenheim. Through September 28.

Update: "Although difficult to encapsulate," writes Lauren O'Neill-Butler for Artforum, "the best précis of Bourgeois's career is offered near the end of the film by Tate Modern curator Frances Morris, who notes, 'For me, the first encounters with Louise were really as a historic figure, a classic modern 20th-century artist. Subsequent encounters with her were as a contemporary artist.... She's the only figure in 20th-century art that I see in both these contexts.... As she's become physically older and, in a way, more ambitious, her work has become more universal.'... Never fully embraced by Dada, Surrealist, or Abstract Expressionist circles, she stopped showing her work in the early 50s, only to gain late-career success in the 80s, when 'Greenberg formalism was on the way out.'" That last quote, I believe, is Bourgeois's.

Update, 6/26: The filmmakers "depict the vulnerability and fortitude of the artist, qualities that are as much characteristics of her person as of her body of work," writes Nell Gluckman in the New York Sun.

Updates, 6/27: Holland Cotter in the NYT on the Guggenheim retrospective:

"There is one story and one story only that will prove worth your telling," says the poet. The trouble is, even the most intriguing story has its limits, its fixed set of characters and situations. And Ms Bourgeois's story - Robert Storr makes this point in the exhibition catalog - has been the sole lens through which her art is viewed, so faithfully and consistently that you would be very surprised to find any surprises in a retrospective.

But there are surprises, beginning with what the exhibition reveals about the shape of her long career, and specifically, its departure from the linear shape that "career" implies.

"Louise Bourgeois is neither linear nor narrative; it jumps around in ways that aren't always helpful, and assumes (or dismisses the importance of) some familiarity with Bourgeois' career history, her personal life, and her place in New York's artistic pantheon," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club. "But as a portrait of the artist and her work, it's endlessly striking, a catalog of visual accomplishments that speak for themselves."

DVDs, 6/24.

"Konrad Wolf's Solo Sunny was widely regarded at the time of its 1980 release as perhaps the best film to come out of the unhappy nation then known as East Germany, and with the passing of time the 'perhaps' might safely be removed," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "On its surface the film is a Socialist reinterpretation of the highly romanticized youth films that flooded America in the early 70s - its heroine, Sunny (Renate Krössner), is a wide-eyed waif from the industrial provinces who dreams of becoming a pop star in the big city. But it is at heart a devastating study in social determinism, in direct line with the realist Kammerspiele films of the late Weimar period."

"The rediscovery of Classe Tous Risques is, in a way, doubly special, as it leads us to reexamine the work of someone who is not an acknowledged master," writes Andrew Chan at the House Next Door. "[Claude] Sautet's career is notable for its lack of ostentation.... What anchored his films was not the nouvelle vague's cinephilia or ideology, but rather the ordinary human concerns he found at the center of big genre constructions like the criminal underworld or the comic ménage a trois. For him, even the fantasies of genre were subject to the cruel disappointments of real life."

"No matter how slick a plan is, no matter how well it's executed, it's always the unexpected events, the things that you can't plan for that ultimately trip up the murderer's scheme." Guy Savage on the Noir of the Week: Elevator to the Gallows.

Ed Howard reviews Le Gai Savoir, "Godard's attempt to 'return to zero' at the end of the 60s, an attempt to both erase and rethink the 17 features he'd made during the previous decade."

Online viewing tip. C Mason Wells on Truffaut's Two English Girls. See also: Kevin Lee's notes.

At Twitch, Blake Ethridge talks with Alex Proyas about the director's cut of Dark City.

Glenn Kenny's "Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report" this week features Hiroshi Shimizu Film Collection Volume One: Landscape: "The English language literature on Shimizu is sparse but growing, but film lovers won't need any of it to recognize a master; he's worth getting to know feet-first, as it were."

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker (MSN), Monika Bartyzel (Cinematical), Paul Clark (Screengrab), DVD Talk and Peter Martin (Cinematical).

Criterion's The Furies.

"Criterion's surprising, all-stops-out release of [Anthony] Mann's early western The Furies (1950) offers a valuable view of this director nearing the height of his powers, before his gifts had calcified; in many ways, it's his most exciting movie because it's also his most unresolved, opening up a Pandora's box of psychological issues that cannot be contained in any conventional conclusion," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door.

"In truth, The Furies, frontier setting notwithstanding, barely counts as a western," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times. "There are elements of film noir in both the plot and the look; many key scenes unfold under cover of darkness (Victor Milner earned an Oscar nomination for his moody cinematography). Above all, though, it plays like a Freudian melodrama, dissecting the hysterical and ultra-competitive love-hate relationship between widowed patriarch TC Jeffords (Walter Huston) and his headstrong daughter, Vance (Barbara Stanwyck)."

Updated through 6/26.

"Stanwyck's inward performance, one of her most brilliant - even the back of her head is somehow stunningly expressive - contrasts with Huston's gleefully over-the-top histrionics, which actors playing crazed patriarchs have strained to match ever since," writes Richard Brody in the New Yorker. "Mann emphasizes the characters' ambiguous blend of outsized evil and noble virtue, eliciting grand, tragic overtones from Charles Schnee's adaptation of the orotund novel by Niven Busch (included in the box)."

"Mann gives the action a metaphysical dimension that overwhelms easy psychoanalytic readings," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "As in his films noirs (Raw Deal, Desperate), he systematically composes his shots to create a sense of instability, using lines of perspective or boldly massed foregrounds to pull the images off balance. The titanic struggle between father and daughter has knocked the world off its axis."

"Anthony Mann was a director who knew his Aeschylus well enough to keep the story front and center, goading it with efficiency and brio, confining the poetry to visual effects that make the story memorable and, in two instances of sudden violence, awful - but in a good, Greek way," writes Gary Giddins, whose review for the New York Sun segues into the Mann films in James Stewart: The Western Collection.

"Traditionally, women have very specific roles in westerns, and Stanwyck dismantles them all," writes Jamie S Rich in DVD Talk.

Earlier: DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice.

Update, 6/26: "It's a marvelous, complex, perverse, horrifying - there are strong doses of mutilation and humiliation - and often touching movie that, for all the issues it fails to fully resolve, should be regarded as something very near greatness." Josef Braun and Brian Gibson in the Vue Weekly.

Frameline32 Dispatch. 2.

Monica Peck follows up on her first dispatch..

"Sex is political," insisted Maher Sabry, talking about the explicit sexuality of his film All My Life [site; trailer]. "We need to show more sex in order to tell people it's not wrong." The Victoria Theater erupted into cheers and applause.

A former burlesque hall, the historic Victoria was an appropriate venue for the world premier of All My Life, the first Egyptian movie to realistically depict the struggles of homosexuals under the country's dictatorial regime. Sabry was inspired to make the film by actual events in 2001, when police raided the Queen Boat, a gay club in Cairo, and proceeded to torture, imprison and fraudulently charge those arrested that night. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, the government is using laws against "debauchery" to entrap and imprison hundreds of men.

But Egypt wasn't always oppressive towards homosexuals. According to the report, persecutions began in the 1980s, coinciding with the rise of political conservatives in the government and an increased dependence on foreign aid, primarily military aid from the United States. "Of course, Egypt wasn't fighting a war with anyone, so you know how the aid was used - against the people," Sabry explained. "There is no law against homosexuality in the books, so they always fabricate charges of, say, prostitution, as I show in the film with the character Rami."

Actor Mazen Nassar, who stars as Rami in the film also made an appearance last night. "Making this film was amazing," he told the crowd. "It was three years of blood, sweat, and love." Shot with one video camera and minimal crew on half a shoestring, All My Life still manages to hit its mark. As an anonymous member of the audience told Sabry during the Q&A after the screening, "Thank you so much for this film. I had to leave Egypt for the same reasons as these characters. This is the first time I have seen my life on the big screen."

Although Sabry is exiled from Cairo, he expressed confidence that the film will be shown in underground venues there. "That won't pay my bills," he laughed, "but it will reach those I made it for."

-Monica Peck

---

David Khalili talks with Sabry for American Sexuality.

Shorts, 6/23.

Pruning the Grapevine "is an overwhelmingly sincere film, well-mannered and respectful, that takes its subject, the quest for genuine faith in God, absolutely seriously," writes Kyu Hyun Kim. "It rivals Secret Sunshine in its thorough immersion in the Christian Weltanschauung, so much so that non-Korean viewers who tend to think of, say, [Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring] festooned with the signs of chicly Orientalist, mock-Buddhist 'spirituality,' as representative of Korean cinema may well ask in befuddlement, 'What is Korean about this movie?'"

Also at Koreanfilm.org, Adam Hartzell on "the omnibus film The Camellia Project, three shorts about the lives of contemporary gay South Korean couples."

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) might have found a European acolyte in the surprising person of UK director Thomas Clay, who shot his second film Soi Cowboy on location in Thailand." A review from Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling" is the title of Film Department CEO Mark Gill's keynote address at the Los Angeles Film Festival and both Variety's Anne Thompson and indieWIRE have the full text: "I know I don't have to repeat all the ways that the independent film business is in trouble. But I'm going to do it anyway - because the accumulation of bad news is kind of awe-inspiring." 13 bits of bad news follow. Then, a survey of the majors' problems. All of it leading up to the argument that "the sky might fall further than we like, but it won't hit the ground."

Speaking of the majors, though, Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay points to a "good conversation going on at the always excellent blog of Jon Taplin. Entitled 'Who Will the Next Fool Be,' the short piece... critiques the recently announced deal in which India's Reliance may be financing Dreamworks." Heather Timmons has the latest on this particular potential deal in the New York Times.

Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger "will appear alongside the Bollywood stars Akshay Kumar and Kareena Kapoor in Incredible Love, the story of an Indian stuntman who takes Hollywood by storm but cannot find true love there," reports Dean Nelson for the London Times. "The film will be the first Indian production to be shot at Hollywood's Universal Studios and will have the highest budget in Bollywood history: more than £11m." Via Merrick at AICN.

"No, it's not your imagination. Ben Kingsley is everywhere." Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times, where Sheri Linden talks with Werner Herzog and Jason Matloff tells the story behind Beastie Boy Adam Yauch's basketball doc, Gunnin' for That #1 Spot. More on that one from Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook on Céline and Julie Go Boating: "L'amour fou and even Out 1 are the realistic ones (comparatively) because the worlds the characters create and destroy - and ultimately outgrow - are short-lived balms in face of a messy, mutable reality.... But the fantasy life becomes plausible (in all sorts of ways) in Céline and Julie, because the fantasies here, infinitely more petty, are not for order, but for subversion, not for stability, but for constant mutation and metamorphosis."

"[I]s Bonnie & Clyde a kind of Western?" In True West Magazine, Henry Cabot Beck directs this question - and many more, of course - to Arthur Penn himself. Via Joe Leydon.

Speaking of westerns, take a look at the Cinematheque Top 5, or rather, take a look at the many, many annotated ballots.

"She was feminine and androgynous, spontaneous and calculating, heavily made-up yet natural, at ease in period costume but most relaxed off-screen in flared trousers." The Observer's Philip French on Marlene Dietrich.

Garth Pearce talks with Robert De Niro for the London Times.

It's not just movies - increasingly, critics aren't being given previews of books, plays or TV shows, either. Mark Lawson looks into it. Also in the Guardian: "I love the Russians: they look hard for the soul and less for the cute little nose."Jethro Skinner, who plays the lead in Plyus odin (Plus One), has won a best actor award at Kinotavr, "Russia's biggest festival, the equivalent of Cannes," and blogs up the experience.

Emma Thompson takes on Vanity Fair's "Proust Questionnaire."

PopMatters has 20 questions for Alan Cumming.

Matt Riviera talks with Kimberly Peirce about Stop-Loss.

Online listening tip #1. At If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: Hitchcock and Truffaut discuss I Confess.

Online listening tip #2. The IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss the AFI's 10 top 10s.

Online viewing and/or uploading tip. "Frieze Film issues an open invitation to submit, appropriate and adapt material." Click to find out more about the project inspired by Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Online viewing tips. The AV Club lists "19 stellar cinematic one-scene wonders," cameos you'd better have some time for.

Fests and events, 6/23.

"Karlovy Vary, Central Europe's leading international film festival, announced a competition line up Monday for its 43rd edition rich in world and international premieres." Nick Holdsworth reports for Variety. July 4 through 12.

Tonight at 7 at Seattle's Paramount: The Goucho, with Douglas Fairbanks. David Jeffers has a preview at the Siffblog.

"Undressed, the New Zealand International Film Festivals cut a lean figure in 2008," writes the Lumière Reader's Tim Wong. "Whether or not you approve of the makeover, it's important to note the only real casualty of Telecom's desertion has been the luxurious souvenir tome, with the festival's capacity to import cinema - if ever there was any doubt - unhindered and at full strength." And then, a few reviews.

"The Bryant Park Summer Film Festival doesn't take people away from the skyscrapers, but instead lures them into the heart of Midtown, into a park that is encased within the steel and glass of the surrounding real estate," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "It is, perhaps, the most striking park space in all the city."

Andy Horbal rounds up goings on in Pittsburgh.

Brian Darr posts a big, big roundup of local goings on at Hell on Frisco Bay.

In Chicago? Do check in with the Cine-File.

Bizarro Days.

"It's Bizarro Days. Up is down. Right is wrong. Left is right. And I believe Lindsay Lohan should run for the Senate because we need more like her in office if we want to turn this ship around.

"Okay, you get the point."

Piper's hosting another round through Wednesday at Lazy Eye Theatre.

Drive-In Movies: A Primer

For all the talk these days of the eventual demise of theatrical distribution, you might be surprised to learn that drive-ins, that quintessentially American pop culture phenomenon, have not only survived but, in some areas of the country, are actually thriving.

Dennis Cozzalio's "Drive-In Movies" primer is many things: a personal love letter to the experience; a history of drive-ins; an annotated list of 13 directors who have shaped the idea of the "drive-in movie" as a genre; and a fun shortlist of drive-ins in the movies.

Frameline 32 Dispatch. 1.

Guru contributor Monica Peck on one film at Frameline32, running through Sunday; notes follow.

Writer Grant Cogswell introduced Cthulhu (site) last night alongside director Dan Gildark at the Castro Theater with news that the film, based on HP Lovecraft's short story "The Shadow over Innsmouth," is heading straight to the editors for a re-cut. "You are the last audience to see this, the original cut of the film, so if you feel like a scene is dragging, just remember, we're about to tighten it up." Gogswell went on to add that the film isn't "just a gay film." An odd comment to make to a Frameline 32 audience; yes, Grant, gay films are people films, too.

It was perhaps not surprising then that the protagonist Russ Marsh (Jason Cottle) has to cope with cliché familial homophobia from his purple-jumpsuit clad father, the Reverend Marsh (Dennis Kleinsmith), who snidely asks, "How's the gay life treating you?" About as well as that Tinky Winky outfit is treating you, we wanted Russ to retort.

Other unsophisticated attempts to explore nuances of gay sexuality also brought peals of laughter from the audience. Notably when Russ and his childhood buddy Mike (Scott Patrick Green) spend a night of passion, the audience is treated with shots of their hands in blue-tint pressed against the sheets in a rather unconvincing - and conservative - sexual montage.

Tori Spelling (Kiss the Bride, Scary Movie 2) plays Dannie's nympho pal Susan. Spelling's charisma does liven up the film, in spite of poor lighting and sound in many of her scenes. Still, one can't quite believe that her character, a vampish sexual predator who works "at the seal lion caves," is meant to be taken seriously.

The final destination for this not-just-a-gay-movie could well be cult status alongside The Evil Dead and Plan 9 From Outer Space, only perhaps with a smaller cult. Indeed, the film is not unremarkable, nor bland, though the look is often inconsistent, leaving one viewer wondering aloud, "Have they finished processing the film?" Perhaps one of the best - and most Ed Wood-ish - scenes has Russ driving the convenience store clerk home and an object very much like a ghostly tumbleweed floats in front of the car, inexplicably terrifying them both. When Russ goes out to investigate, the girl, out of nowhere, breaks into top-volume screaming hysterics. As the camera cuts in tight on her glam make-up, we catch an expression - not of terror or even fear, but of self-satisfaction, a sort of a flirtatious sideways glance - at us. Unfortunately, the editors will most likely try to find a serious horror flick in Cthulhu, rather than work to draw out its authentic camp.

- Monica Peck

---

Earlier: Grant Cogswell recently told the long, sad yet sadly entertaining tale of Cthulhu's making in the Stranger, where Annie Wagner checked in on the crew back in 2005.

KZA interviewed Cogswell and Gildark almost exactly one year ago.

George Carlin, 1937 - 2008.

George Carlin, the Grammy-Award winning standup comedian and actor who was hailed for his irreverent social commentary, poignant observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and groundbreaking routines like 'Seven Words You Can Never Use on Television,' died in Santa Monica, Calif, on Sunday, according to his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He was 71....

By the mid-70s, like his comic predecessor Lenny Bruce and the fast-rising Richard Pryor, Mr Carlin had emerged as a cultural renegade.... By 1977, when his first HBO comedy special, George Carlin at USC was aired, he was recognized as one of the era's most influential comedians.

Mel Watkins, New York Times.

See also: The site; Wikipedia.

Updated through 6/26.

Online viewing. Film Threat gathers routines and reflections.

Updates: "Not just aware of but steeped in the traditions of American populism - more William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Victor Debs than Bill Clinton or John Kerry - Carlin preached against the consolidation of wealth and power with a fire-and-brimstone rage that betrayed a deep moral sense that could never quite be cloaked with four-letter words," blogs John Nichols at the Nation. "Carlin did not want Americans to get involved with the system. He wanted citizens to get angry enough to remake the system.... There will, of course, be those who dismiss Carlin as a remnant of the 60s who introduced obscenity to the public discourse - just as there will be those who misread his critique of the American political and economic systems as little more than verbal nihilism. In fact, George Carlin was, like the radicals of an earlier age, an idealist - and a patriot - of a deeper sort than is encountered very often these days.

"George grew tougher and sharper over the years, putting more of himself, and his intellect, at the service of his always nimble, always adventurous comedy mind," writes Harry Shearer at the Huffington Post. "And, while his comedy was dark, his spirit with his peers was generous."

For Salon's King Kaufman, Carlin "was one of the best sports humorists around."

The AV Club gathers its two interviews (1999 and 2005) and Carlin's recent routine on death.

"By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it's hard to think of Carlin as one of America's most radical and courageous popular artists," writes Richard Zoglin, author of Comedy on the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America, for Time. "But he was."

Esquire pulls out Larry Getlen's talk with Carlin, the "What I've Learned" feature.

Ed Champion gathers a lot more video.

"Ironically, I first became aware of Carlin when he and Richard Pryor were conservatively dressed (i.e., coat and tie), ever-so-polite stand-up comics during their weekly stints on the 1966 Kraft Summer Music Hall hosted by - no, I’m not making this up - John Davidson." Joe Leydon.

Updates, 6/24: "In 2001, George did me a solid when he accepted the part of the orally fixated hitchhiker who knew exactly how to get a ride in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," recalls Kevin Smith in Newsweek. "When he wrapped his scene in that flick, I thanked him for making the time, and he said, 'Just do me a favor: Write me my dream role one day.' When I inquired what that'd be, he offered, 'I wanna play a priest who strangles children.'" Via Movie City News.

"Like all the great comics, Mr Carlin had a gift for saying - and thinking - things that other people wouldn't or couldn't," writes Charles McGrath in the NYT. "Especially in his later years, when, mostly bald but with a white beard and just a hint of a ponytail in back, he would bounce onstage in a black sweater, black pants and sneakers, his persona was warmer, cranky rather than angry. He was like your outrageous beatnik uncle."

Update, 6/26: For Slate, Joshua David Mann watches all 800 minutes of All My Stuff:

Carlin discusses his craft in more philosophical terms - his expertise, he says, lies in "reminding you of things you already know but forgot to laugh at the first time they happened." The bulk of the material in his early shows was concerned with such pedestrian acts as grocery shopping and, yes, walking. In one early performance, he constructs a bit around the phantom stair phenomenon, when we accidentally trick our legs into thinking a staircase has one more step than it actually does.

The stair bit works on an observational level because we have all experienced it. But Carlin also makes it work on a physical level, embellishing the joke through his wild gesticulations. Unlike Seinfeld, Carlin was also a gifted physical comic, and in his early performances, the influence of Carlin's idols - Buster Keaton, Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers - is particularly evident. He contorts his face into wrinkly malformations. He squats slightly and mimes masturbatory motions. He freezes onstage in strange postures, an American ambassador to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.

Interview. Eric Guirado.

"Director Eric Guirado's The Grocer's Son is a small, self-assured film that moves at its own pace, always staying one graceful step ahead of its reluctant protagonist," wrote Michelle Orange in the Village Voice earlier this month.

And - relatively speaking, of course - it's become a modest hit, now enjoying the third week of what was originally planned to be a one-week run in New York. And soon, it'll be expanding to several other US cities.

James Van Maanen talks with Guirado about this first two features and his plans for the next one.

Shorts, 6/21.

Stop Smiling presents online excerpts from its new "Gambling" issue, including a good chunk of John Buffalo Mailer's interview with Oliver Stone, recollections from California Split screenwriter Joseph Walsh, a bit of Annie Nocenti's talk with Deadwood creator David Milch and more from her interview with Jennifer Tilly. And online: José Teodoro on My Winnipeg.

This may be a first: breaking a story via a DVD extra. Well, not exactly, since the story is out and the DVD isn't yet. Regardless, Harry Knowles been given a preview listen to a 40-minute conversation between Enzo Castellari and Quentin Tarantino that'll be part of the package when Castellari's 1977 film Inglorious Bastards is released in late July. The news everyone's picking up on has to do with Tarantino's plans to split his Inglorious Bastards into two separately released parts, as he did, of course, with Kill Bill. But Harry has more, too, on why Tarantino's spent more than six years developing this project.

"At 72, having outgrown the smut-minded confines of the pink film, [Koji Wakamatsu] has made his most ambitious work, United Red Army, a 190-minute chronicle of the tumultuous rise and self-destructive collapse of the Japanese militant student groups of the 1960s and 70s," writes Dennis Lim in a profile for the New York Times. "An intensively researched docudrama, teeming with dates, names and events, it is also a personal reckoning with a familiar narrative of idealism and disappointment: Mr Wakamatsu and his regular screenwriter in the 1960s, Masao Adachi, were active members of the radical left."

Also in the NYT:

• "What's striking about David A Price's history of Pixar, the computer animation studio behind Toy Story, The Incredibles and other movies, is how provisional it all seemed in the moment, how key players at important junctures didn't really understand what they were doing even as they were doing it," writes Michael Hirschorn, reviewing The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. "But they kept working because of a sixth sense that something would eventually happen."

• And Katrina Onstad sets the stage for the next unveiling: "Last year's offering, Ratatouille, about a cartoon rat with Cordon Bleu aspirations, seemed like a hard sell. But Pixar may have outdone itself in the weird-premises department with Wall-E, a $180 million post-apocalyptic, near-silent robot love story inspired by Charlie Chaplin." Related: The Boston Globe's Mark Feeney profiles Wall-E director Andrew Stanton.

• "Fabulous real estate plays a lead role in these recollections." Indeed, Sarah Kerr's review of Eleanor Coppola's Notes on a Life begins with the story of the family's acquisition of "a grand old estate" in Napa Valley. Whenever I try to imagine what that place must be like, I begin with the kitchen at the center of that marvelous spread in Shoot the Moon.

• Sam Shepard is directing Stephen Rea in his newish play, Kicking a Dead Horse, opening on Wednesday at the Public Theater. Celia McGee talks with the players.

• Michael Cieply previews Comic-Con International, convening in San Diego July 24 through 27: "Rumbling into its 39th year, this loose-jointed, four-day fan gathering has become the single most important promotional stop on Hollywood's annual circuit of festivals, awards shows and star-studded selling opportunities. But that doesn't make it easy to love, particularly for the studios, stars and writers and directors compelled to come."

"The protagonist's goals are usually what shape the plot, so can one have a turning point without him or her knowing about it?" Kristin Thompson revisits some of the ideas she explored in Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. Related: Jim Emerson's latest, "Tell me a story... or don't."

"It is accepted now that Bill Douglas's trilogy of films - My Childhood [1971], My Ain Folk [1973] and My Way Home [1978] - are landmarks in British cinema," writes Mamoun Hassan, who was head of production at the British Film Institute at the time. Melanie McFadyean talks with Douglas about how he met the star of the trilogy, Stephen Archibald.

Also in the Guardian:

• "During the Depression, a movie ticket bought you a cartoon, a newsreel, a B feature and a marquee-topper - something like four hours of entertainment for a nickel (the price of a gallon of gas or a pack of smokes back then)," notes John Patterson. "It was hard to feel Greatly Depressed when Astaire and Rogers, Gary Cooper, the Marx Brothers or Eddie Cantor were living it up on screen.... In 1938, the movies competed only with such distractions as booze, sex, God, the radio or political agitation; there was no streaming online video, no computer games, no 60in plasma TVs, no home-movie market whatsoever. If the economy collapsed tomorrow, would seeing Transformers 2 alleviate your misery or simply compound it? Dear viewer, you have options!"

• Stuart Jeffries talks with Sophie Marceau "about her performance in Female Agents as a secret operative fighting the Nazis. It's an unexpected role for Marceau to take: it's tough stuff, but unintentionally hilarious. Were the women of the French Resistance so glamorous? Did they really fight in full makeup? Doesn't Marceau look hot as she takes aim with steam trains puffing and blowing all around her?" More from Deborah Ross in the Independent.

• Gwladys Fouché asks echt submariners about submarine movies.

• In case you were looking for reasons to dislike Will Smith - and you might be, since, as Variety's Anne Thompson points out, he's still in the "Fluke Zone," "a place where a movie star can do no wrong" - Pete Cashmore suggests more than a few. Spot the deal-breaker.

Larry Gross's 48 Hrs diaries carry on at Movie City News.

"The lovers in The Duchess of Langeais never consummate their love, but it consummates them," writes Roger Ebert.

In the Stranger: Paul Constant on Mongol, Charles Mudede on Bigger, Stronger, Faster* and Bradley Steinbacher on Savage Grace and The Children of Huaung Shi.

In the Boston Globe: Wesley Morris on Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra and Ty Burr on Nina Davenport's Operation Filmmaker.

Docs reviewed at the AV Club: Tasha Robinson on Up the Yangtze and Noel Murray on Chris & Don: A Love Story and Surfwise.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Craig Kennedy.

In the Independent, Guy Adams senses a "seismic shift" in Hollywood comedy from "subtle 'regular guy' hits" like Knocked Up and Juno to taboo-breakers like You Don't Mess With the Zohan and Tropic Thunder. Stretching, seems to me.

In the New York Sun, S James Snyder reports on "an entirely new brand of video camera, a state-of-the-art device that is poised to permanently alter the landscape of the movie industry. Already well-known to filmmakers - not to mention thousands of owners - the name of the device is the Red One."

Online listening tip. Movie Geeks United! revisit the Summer of 1983.

Fests and events, 6/21.

"Ho boy, are you ready for the nightmares?" asks the Bay Guardian's Kimberly Chun. "That's practically guaranteed this weekend as the Another Hole in the Head fest closes out with its final mow-down at Brava. Fans of arterial spray, extreme Japanese filmmaking, random acts of unkind dismemberment, and fatal flying guillotines will be able to get their geek on one last, but hella amazing time with the final Hole in the Head screening, a last-minute double feature of Japanese shock-and-argh at Brava, showcasing the other late add Tokyo Gore Police and crowd fave Machine Girl." Tomorrow night.

Fred Camper picks the highlights from the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival for the Chicago Reader. Through tomorrow.

Matt Riviera follows up his first two batches of reviews of films he's caught at the Sydney Film Festival (1, 2) with another ten.

Wanted, round 1.

"When Wanted [site] was announced as the opening night film for the Los Angeles Film Festival, there was a mild outbreak of head-scratching over the choice; why start a film festival loaded with independent and foreign film with a big-studio action movie?" writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "The fact is that the opening-night LAFF premiere of Wanted - directed by a Kazakh director who made his name in Russia, loosely based on a series of comics by a Glasgwegian Scot, starring America's most notable movie starlet opposite a Glasgow-born lead actor and shot with Prague standing in for Chicago - doesn't say much about the LAFF as a film festival and doesn't say a single thing about LA as a real city, but it says plenty about LA as a company town with a global span. Wanted's a corporate product, but, thankfully, it's an excellent one - the two-fisted, double-barreled high-octane guilty pleasure summer action movie you've been waiting for. Wanted is speedy and spiffy and shiny as a bullet, and it's got about as much actual weight when it stops moving."

Updated through 6/26.

(Sorry for quoting your entire opening paragraph, James, but it's awfully damn good.)

"Like it or not, Wanted pretty much slams you to the back of your chair from the outset and scarcely lets up for the duration," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

"[T]his over-the-top, ultraviolent, hyperkinetic action thriller pretty much has it all," writes Michael Rechtshaffen in the Hollywood Reporter. Director Timur Bekmambetov "has funneled the best of the Wachowski brothers, Quentin Tarantino and contemporary Hong Kong action movies through his own wry sensibility."

"The final scenes have the feel of a sequel set-up, though that may be optimistic thinking," notes John Hazelton in Screen Daily. Another note: "[Angelina] Jolie dominates the film's marketing artwork but gets considerably less screen time than [James] McAvoy."

Will Lawrence talks with McAvoy for the Telegraph.

Updates, 6/21: "McAvoy carries his third American-accented picture - sans dialogue coach," notes Variety's Anne Thompson. "He gives the movie a believable center. And yes, these people are playing actual characters. The movie breathes. And it delivers action on a Bourne or Matrix level."

But: "For me it was pure agony to sit through - another sledge-hammer rocket slam to the castle of Good Cinema," writes Jeffrey Wells.

Updates, 6/23: "What a ride on the cyber-whoosh rapids!" exclaims David Edelstein in New York. "It takes about an hour after it's over for the heart to slow, the brain to recalibrate, and the nonsensicalness of the thing to sink in: I fell for that??? By then, you'll have already babbled to a few dozen friends and strangers, 'You gotta see this movie!!!' It's like the bighearted urge to share your Ecstasy at a party."

In the New Yorker, Anthony Lane imagines Bekmambetov making a cup of coffee: "My best guess, based on the evidence of the film, is that he tosses a handful of beans toward the ceiling, shoots them individually into a fine powder, leaves it hanging in the air, runs downstairs, breaks open a fire hydrant with his head, carefully directs the jet of water through the window of his apartment, sets fire to the building, then stands patiently with his mug amid the blazing ruins to collect the precious percolated drops. Don't even think about a cappuccino."

"While it's clear that this movie borrows liberally from the Wachowski's action packed bullet time virtual reality revisionism, it also incorporates much of Fight Club's insignificant rebel in a crass corporate pond philosophizing," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Together, the combination adds up to a strangely unique experience. On the one hand, you easily recognize the various references. On the other, Russian director Timur Bekmambetov uses the homage as a means of manufacturing his own incredible vision."

Updates, 6/24: Mark Millar, who wrote the series of graphic novels the film is based on, likes the adaptation and posts, "Wanted 2 [is] already being planned and they've asked me how I can develop some of the other stuff from the book into the sequel. We'll see what box office is like at the weekend, but everyone knows this is going to make a lot of dough... Wall-E permitting. Fucking bastard of a wee robot." Via Elizabeth Rappe at Cinematical.

"Wanted is as stylish as it is foolish, but it's got one thing going for it: exploding rats." Jürgen Fauth.

Updates, 6/26: "Even with a well-deserved R rating - the Red Cross should develop funnels to catch all the zero-gravity splatter floating in the movie's screen space - Wanted is the most juvenile of the summer's superhero movies, and in some ways the most up-front about its stunted playground machismo (the source of Fight Club's irony)," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "This is a boy's, boy's world.... Women figure into the story as either obstacles or turncoats. The battle cry here is 'Grow a pair,' and there's no more blood-boiling insult than being called a pussy - which is bizarre, since the most lethal ass-kicker on call is a woman."

On that note: "It looks as if it has been written by a committee of 13-year-old boys for whom penetrative sex is still only a rumour, and the resulting movie plays like a party political broadcast on behalf of the misogynist party," grumbles the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. 1 star.

"Now this is how you start a summer movie," begins Nick Schager in Slant. "None of this season's action extravaganzas have yet to match this film's icebreaker, but then again, neither does anything else in this adaptation of Mark Millar and JG Jones's graphic novel. The hazard of early gratification is raised expectations, and though it never becomes a slog, the rest of Timur Bekmambetov's film can't muster a similar sustained high, instead delivering mildly satisfying awesomeness (of special note: a keyboard-to-the-face gag) in the course of a thoroughly clichéd story."

"Like Jolie's performance, Wanted is slick, sexy and ridiculous; if only the latest Indiana Jones adventure had been half as thrilling," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Wanted has everything that should be expected from a summer action movie - uncontrollable volume, gratuitous violence and sex, inane dialogue, plot holes, fast cars - and yet somehow still manages to sprinkle in animal cruelty and racism," writes Aly Semigran in the Philadelphia Weekly.

"Wanted is s a zit-riddled high-schooler's wet dream," writes Simon Abrams in the New York Press.

Ella Taylor talks with Bekmambetov for the LA Weekly.

"It's big and flashy, the ultimate example of style over substance and it's got a few car stunts and kills that I've certainly never seen before... big stupid fun, basically," writes Todd Brown at Twitch.

Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks with Bekmambetov for Cinematical.

Parallels.

Does this ring a bell:

Publishers Weekly, the industry standard magazine for reviews, recently made the shocking decision to cut freelancers' pay by exactly half - from $50 a piece to $25 - and newspapers across the country are cutting their book sections either drastically or entirely. To certain people this is a sign of the End Times, but it's really a kind of corrective measure. The book-reviewing community had allowed itself to shrink, lazily, into a boring, self-reflexive subindustry with little value to a general-interest reader. But good reviews, well-written ones, are published on blogs and websites and in other alternative news sources now more than ever.

These are places that, unlike newspaper book-review sections, actually treat book reviews like pieces of writing with value unto itself, more than just your standard buy-this/don't-buy-this gloss. Nevertheless, people in publishing point to what's happening in PW and major-market newspapers as yet another sign that the industry is about to disappear.

The passage comes from Paul Constant's very fine cover story in this week's Stranger, the one he's brought back from his trip to BookExpo America, which means there's another tie-in to the film world: BEA takes place in LA, so there are lots of celebrity cameos throughout. He's witness to more silliness as well (the IndieBound presentation will have you, if you'll pardon the expression, running for cover), but lo, the more numbers he sorts through, the more hardworking people who love their medium he meets, the more he does see light somewhere down the line:

This is the hour for these independent publishers to ascend. By fully embracing e-books, blogs, and a public that is dying to not be condescended to, any one of these independent presses could thrive in this year's market. The fact that bookstores are opening in huge numbers and that the independent bookselling industry appears healthy, especially in this economy, is a sign that everyone should be paying attention to. These small publishers should work with these new independent bookstores in ways that the arrogant major publishers never do, by promoting each other and by telling the world, in no uncertain terms, that books are alive and well and doing just fine, thank you very much.

The parallels to our own ecosystem - filmmakers, critics, fans - would be uncanny if it weren't for the fact that nearly identical forces are at work on both movies and publishing.

Tatsuya Nakadai in New York.

"From samurai showdowns to yearning melodramas, Akira Kurosawa to Masaki Kobayashi, the Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai has been, at his best, a chameleon of genre, mood, and directorial style," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Film Forum's long-planned multi-week series devoted to this versatile, handsome star, which begins Friday, harvests his 50-year career to yield a healthy portion of the most satisfying output from a reliable boom time in Japanese cinema."

"He was the gun-toting punk in Yojimbo (1961), the do-or-die warrior in Sanjuro (1962) and the determined police detective in High and Low (1963). You could also bring up the smitten bar owner in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960); the woodcutter in J-horror's Rosetta stone, Kwaidan (1964); or the Lear-like lion in winter of Ran (1985)." And David Fear talks with him for Time Out New York.

Updated through 6/24.

"The line-up features plenty of obscure and hard-to-find titles, like Kihachi Okamoto's Age of Assassins and Kon Ichikawa's I Am a Cat, an adaptation of the novel by the celebrated Natsume Soseki," notes Simon Abrams in the New York Press. "It also features canonical Nakadai performances, like Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another, Kurosawa's Kagemusha and Kobayashi's The Human Condition, the long unavailable nine-hour epic that propelled Nakadai to prominence."

Through July 17.

Earlier: Chris Fujiwara at Moving Image Source and Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times.

Update, 6/21: "A handsome, roguish fellow equally well suited for hero or villain roles, and best known for playing characters plagued by doubt or moral uncertainty, Nakadai has been called the Japanese equivalent of Marlon Brando or Steve McQueen," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "As that might suggest, Nakadai is identified with the massive social changes of postwar Japan, but calling him a rebel or bad boy isn't quite accurate or sufficient."

Updates, 6/24: "As a retrospective within a retrospective, Film Forum's ongoing tribute to the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai features five films directed by Japan's grand master of filmmaking, Akira Kurosawa." Bruce Bennett revisits them in the New York Sun.

Online listening tip. Get this: Nakadai is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Woman on the Beach in San Francisco.

"Woman on the Beach isn't as formally rigorous as Hong [Sang-soo]'s previous films, and it spells out matters that might have been implicit in an earlier work," writes Jonathan L Knapp in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "But this should only matter to hardcore Hong-heads. The biting observations remain, and they've never been funnier."

"Hong's films are full of come-hither gestures followed by bodies retreating once the fleeting desire is consummated, yet this consummation never brings satiation," writes Adam Hartzell in an overview of the oeuvre at SF360. "Hong's characters always wander away, as if slightly fearful or disgusted following attainment of what they thought they wanted. Those of us who appreciate Hong's films know not to expect resolution."

"Hong, who has made seven films in 12 years and has become respected around the world, has never had a film released in the United States before now," notes G Allen Johnson in the San Franciso Chronicle. "It is booked at the Kabuki for a week as part of the new partnership between the San Francisco Film Society and the Sundance Cinemas to play a festival favorite or other type of film that has not received conventional distribution. A film like this - unconventional, adventurous and by an important director - is the type that can benefit from such an arrangement."

Exte: Hair Extensions.

"As any J-horror aficionado will tell you, the long-haired, vengeful female ghost is one of the staples of the genre," writes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun. "But there's so much more to the not-so-aptly named Hair Extensions, which opens Friday at the ImaginAsian theater. It's actually a pastiche of serial-killer thriller, torture porn, domestic nightmare, and good old atmospheric J-horror."

"Director Sion Sono clicks channels between self-reflexive larks (Yuko and her roommate introduce each other with an absurdly on-the-nose mockery of expository dialogue), installation-piece imagery (a 'hair-clogged rooms' series), and sincere drama," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "Also: I would love to clean my apartment to that anonymous Nutrasweet pop song over the closing credits."

Couscous.

"If you crossed Ken Loach with Robert Guédiguian, added a pinch of wry comedy and handed it to a thoroughly committed ensemble of actors, the result would be something like Couscous," suggests Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

For the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, Abdellatif Kechiche's latest, La Graine et le Mulet, known elsewhere as The Secret of the Grain, is "a deeply involving tragicomedy, combining warmth with an unexpected level of complexity, and delivering a fiercely unsentimental commentary on the sexual politics of family and food. Some critics have complained that Kechiche's scenes of family life ramble on too long, yet for me they have the easygoing, directionless quality of real life; they radiate charm and authenticity. Without them, the drama would mean far less."

Updated through 6/22.

"The winner of three awards at the Venice film festival, it has attracted sizeable audiences and been hailed not only as a cinematic masterpiece, but as an important contribution to debates about the roles and visibility of immigrant communities in national life," notes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "[I]t conveys, in a manner that is sensual as well as documentary, a profound understanding of both the fragility and the ferocious will-to-endure that lies - that has to - at the heart of many ethnic communities."

"The performances, too, developed in extensive workshops, are superb, with two standouts," writes Wally Hammond in Time Out. "The first is [Habib] Boufares, who is particularly touching and impressive as a prideful man coping in his own way with dislocation, disappointment and redundancy. The other is Hafsia Herzi as his 'adopted' daughter, whose bolder, more street-wise manner belies an equal, if different, second-generation immigrant's vulnerability to the problems of cultural assimilation."

"This is an extraordinary mosaic of a certain aspect of French life - which probably mirrors part of British life, too," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "What happens to this Franco-Arabic family has both a particular and a universal significance. And it is put on the screen with care, humanity and a total lack of forced sentimentality."

Earlier: Ginette Vincendeau in Sight & Sound and reviews from Venice.

Update, 6/22: Philip French opens his review in the Observer with a brief overview of what a history of food in the cinema might look like. Then: "[T]his movie about exile, loneliness, the nature of families, self-respect and the pursuit of dreams encompasses comedy and tragedy with understanding, compassion and a total absence of sentimentality."

The Edge of Love.

""'I sleep with other women because I'm a poet, and a poet feeds off life!' The speaker is the super-sonorous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, played here by Matthew Rhys," notes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, "and the line's cringe-making awfulness is sadly typical of [The Edge of Love]: full of defiant bohemian giggling and exuberant artistic types drinking heavily, dancing together round tatty rooms to wind-up gramophones and plucking lit cigarettes out of each other's mouths: 'Gissa drag on that, boy!'"

Updated through 6/22.

"Fortunately for us, the film is much less about Thomas than it is about two women who were central to his life," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent. "[John] Maybury's camera catches the giddy energy of the friends' saloon-bar carousing, but he also finds a visual language for the crosscurrents of tension and jealousy that crackle between them.... I'm not sure [Keira] Knightley or [Sienna] Miller have ever been more beautifully photographed, and they reward the director with what are, by a long chalk, their best performances."

"[I]t's all very well bucking the biopic trend and shunting Dylan Thomas into the sidings, but there has to be something to take his place," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "But no amount of stylistic gusto can disguise the film's flimsiness, or its peculiar and off-putting inner tensions. For all the sniping against Dylan Thomas, it was presumably his name that got the film made in the first place. And it is Thomas's lines from 'In My Craft or Sullen Art' that chime out in the final moments, essentially giving him the last word over the women the film purports to defend."

"The reality of the Blitz is left to archive as Maybury keeps things personal, depicting alleyways at night, smoky pubs and cramped flats as an intense friendship builds between Caitlin and Vera," writes Dave Calhoun for Time Out. "Vera meets and marries William (Cillian Murphy), a straight-backed soldier who leaves for service overseas; and Caitlin and Vera buzz around Thomas like Jules et Jim after a sex change."

Knightley is "much better than might be imagined," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu, but: "The real star of The Edge of Love is Sienna Miller, whose Caitlin is dynamic, bawdy and fun... She lends drive and sparkle to a film that doesn't quite know what it's trying to do or say, but is darkly seductive and entertaining none the less."

"The Edge of Love is at least a partial success, having an excellent period atmosphere and performances from a quartet of stars who do a fair job on a screenplay that moves backwards and forwards from the banal to the truthful as the plot progresses," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard.

For the Guardian, Aida Edemariam talks with Maybury about, among many other things, Francis Bacon, Derek Jarman and Christopher Marlowe. "I come from an abusive background - alcoholic parents, abused by Jesuits when I was a kid. Every cliche in the book, basically."

Joan Walsh talks with Knightley for the Independent.

Murphy Williams profiles Miller for the Telegraph.

Earlier: Kate Stables in Sight & Sound and first impressions from Edinburgh.

Update, 6/21: "Tom and Viv, Ted and Sylvia, and now Dylan and Caitlin: there is something about poets and their spouses that fascinates filmmakers," writes Andrew Lycett in the Guardian. "The Edge of Love's romanticised storyline has Thomas whooping it up in London during the Blitz, working as a scriptwriter in the thriving wartime film propaganda industry.... I have a special interest in this aspect of Thomas's output since, when researching his biography at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, I came across The Art of Conversation, one of his wartime propaganda scripts, which had lain there, unknown and unpublished, for 40 years." Extracts follow, but the full version is here, as a PDF.

Update, 6/22: "This is a fascinating story, its chronology somewhat muddled and its dramatic thrust rather obscure," writes Philip French in the Observer.

Jean Delannoy, 1908 - 2008.

Jean Delannoy, a French director of lavish mid-20th-century film dramas whose career suffered after he was publicly reviled by proponents of the New Wave as the ultimate anti-auteur, died on Wednesday at his home in Guainville, France, west of Paris. He was 100....

He believed that a director's job was to realize the work of the scriptwriters; Truffaut considered that attitude contemptuous of film as an art form. Jean-Luc Godard shared Truffaut's opinion, once suggesting that when Mr Delannoy carried a briefcase to the studio, he might as well be going to an insurance office....

Mr Delannoy devoted much of his career to religious films, including La Symphonie Pastorale and Dieu A Besoin des Hommes, which Bosley Crowther, writing in the Times in 1951, called a "film of rare and simple beauty" that "goes boldly and squarely to the heart of the fundamental nature of religion in the best tradition of French intellect and art."

Anita Gates, New York Times.

Shorts, 6/19.

"In the 1970s, Hal Ashby made a series of films so brilliant and yet so utterly different from one another that if you didn't know who the director was, you might not think they were made by the same person.... It is not surprising that Ashby's films feel relevant at the moment, since our fragmented political climate isn't that different from the post-Vietnam-and-Watergate years in which they were made." Jennifer Wachtell introduces a feature at Good Magazine that includes Alexander Payne on The Landlord, Jason Schwartzman on Harold and Maude, Wes Anderson on The Last Detail, David O Russell on Shampoo and Judd Apatow on Being There.

Just up at Moving Image Source:

• Tom Charity: "Just as many of the most arresting 21st-century filmmakers (Jia Zhangke, Pedro Costa and Abbas Kiarostami, for starters) have taken a deliberate step back from the sensational overload of the late Hollywood commercial model and toward a more minimalist Lumièresque aesthetic (static camera, long takes, 'real time'), the critical anthology Defining Moments in Movies (Cassell Illustrated) attempts to extract singular insights from the flux of cinema history - to take a view, as it were, as all active spectators must."

• Mark Asch on Tomu Uchida: "He was skeptical about social hierarchies and sympathetic toward those on the low end, their marginalization often reaching a boiling point in climactic sequences of violence or amour fou."

• "Peter Lynch is the great wanderer of contemporary Canadian cinema, traversing wide swaths of physical and psychological terrain in search of what he calls the 'deeper myth,'" writes Adam Nayman. The series Weird Science: The Idiosyncratic Archaeology of Peter Lynch runs at the Cinematheque Ontario from June 20 through 28.

• Jonathan Rosenbaum on Marcel L'Herbier: "The founder of l'IDHEC (l'Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques), the most famous French film school, which he headed for over a quarter of a century (1943-1969), as well as a onetime director of the Cinémathèque Française (1941-1944), author of hundreds of articles, and a pioneer in French television who produced over 200 documentaries, he's still better known today as the writer-director of about 50 films, mostly features. Yet none of these is easily obtainable in the US."

"If you really want to go where this film thinks its ideas are, watch Stan Brakhage's The Wold-Shadow." Craig Keller on Shrooms and many other things.

Abé Mark Nornes's Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema offers "an expansive, insightful and thoroughly entertaining picture of how translation practices over the past hundred years have helped and hindered the global flow of moving images," writes Tom Mes at Midnight Eye.

"Vern's Seagalogy is the definitive statement of film writing by a member of my generation," declares Michael Tully. "Laugh if you want, but it's true."

Vadim Perelman tells Cinematical's Kim Voynar that he will not be directing the Angelina Jolie-starring adaptation of Atlas Shrugged after all.

By now you'll have heard...

• Sienna Miller will play Maid Marion to Russell Crowe's Sheriff in Ridley Scott's Nottingham; he Playlist has more.

• "Spike Lee will co-write and direct Time Traveler a feature adaptation of a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the nation's first African-Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics," reports Variety's Michael Fleming.

• "The black airmen whose lives will be the basis of a George Lucas movie know the picture will highlight their record of successfully escorting thousands of US bombers in World War II. They also feel it should tell of the trials they encountered stateside, like seeing German prisoners of war being treated better and afforded rights that were withheld from black American citizens." The AP reports on Red Tails, currently in preproduction. (That's about 40 words, by the way.) At Cinematical, Christopher Campbell assures us that Lucas won't be directing - he's an executive producer.

"Directing is a job I'm very new to," writes Chiwetel Ejiofor. "We're shooting the last sequence of a short film I wrote, called Slapper. Time is tight, it's just gone midnight, and we have plenty left to do. I pull off my headphones and walk over to the guys. 'Really good,' I say, 'it just needs ... more.'"

Also in the Guardian: "Kevin Spacey is delving into the personal turmoils of Hollywood's rich and famous in the drama Shrink," reports Gwladys Fouché. "The Oscar-winning star will play a pot-smoking psychoanalyst to Tinseltown stars who, unable to come to terms with a recent personal drama, believes he can no longer help his patients get better. Spacey will be joined by an array of Hollywood stars portraying his patients, including Robin Williams, Saffron Burrows, Jack Huston and Griffin Dunne, as well as the writer Gore Vidal."

"[W]hile Hou [Hsiao-hsien]'s name remains little known to the US public, among critics his renown has reached the point where one senses that he receives raves that are more automatic than considered, even if they reflect an understandable desire to educate audiences about an important filmmaker," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "That kind of knee-jerk acclaim, I'm afraid, explains the widely sympathetic, sometimes gushing reviews that Flight of the Red Balloon has received. Hou is a genius, it is said; therefore every film of his is a work of art. In this case, though I'm a longtime admirer and defender of the director, I must beg to differ. Hou's latest strikes me as a trifle, more perplexing than interesting, with inherent problems that are bound up with the fact that it's the first movie he has made outside of Asia."

David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook on Yôkihi: "[A]s a fairy tale, it's an Ugetsu companion piece: power and happiness may be mutually exclusive, but both are fleeting; love, as always in Mizoguchi, may make life worth living, but it also makes it a hell of a lot more tortuous."

Also, Glenn Kenny on why The Gang's All Here is "just small-s surreal" rather than full-blown Surreal: "[Busby] Berkeley's visions are, among other things, uniquely American, having more to do with the fantastic gigantism of Winsor McCay, expressed to the most eye-popping effect in popular comics series Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland, than the lonely, sometimes erotically charged landscapes of di Chirico and Ernst."

"[W]hat's most striking about The Third Part of the Night is how, in his very first film, [Andrzej] Zulawski's themes and aesthetics are already full-formed," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon on My Winnipeg and Encounters at the End of the World: "Both of these pictures are funny and mournful by turns, and both are episodic affairs, narrated in voice-over by their directors (that's nothing new for Herzog, but a first for Maddin), that make almost no effort to tell a conventional story. You can use critical buzzwords like 'distinctive' and 'visionary' to describe both of these guys, and I probably have. But that only serves to conceal how fundamentally different they are."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian: Dennis Harvey on Savage Grace and, briefly, Maria Komodore on Tuya's Marriage and Johnny Ray Huston on Mother of Tears.

"An outgrowth of street photography, inspired by Open City and The Bicycle Thief, New York Neo-Realism was the main independent tendency of the post–World War II decade," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Little Fugitive won a prize at the 1953 Venice Film Festival (and was generously credited by François Truffaut with inspiring the nouvelle vague), but [Morris] Engel would never repeat its success, either critically or aesthetically."

Acquarello: "The coronation of Queen Beatrix on the eve of May Day in 1980 provides a salient point of departure for Johan van der Keuken's The Way South, a cultural interrogation into the intertwined sociopolitical landscape of immigration, dislocation, underprivilege, and class division."

Revisiting To Die For: Marilyn Ferdinand and Ed Howard.

Brian Gibson in Vue Weekly on The Singing Revolution: "Once the film calms down and defers to the basic power of its subject matter, it offers some powerful archival footage and intriguing undercurrents."

"Film acting is the least skilled of all the performing arts and the one that needs least training," argues Ronald Bergan.

"Film preservation does not begin and end with the safeguarding of original materials." Brian Darr notes that, while none of the original archival prints were lost to the recent fire at Universal Studios, the "duplicates" will most certainly be missed. He sorts through the damage.

"Critically acclaimed films about provocative subjects struggle to make money all the time, but rarely have so many lauded documentaries consistently failed to connect at the box office," reports John Horn in the Los Angeles Times. "The recent nonfiction returns have been so bleak that several distributors are growing wary about taking on such highbrow works."

At the House Next Door, Elise Nakhnikian talks with Sara Taksler and Naomi Greenfield about cobbling together their own distribution package for their "balloonamentary," Twisted.

"It may be premature to change our hometown's name from Music City to Movie City, but there's little doubt that filmmaking has been on the rise here, aided by recent incentive programs the Tennessee Film, Entertainment & Music Commission (TFEMC) has introduced," writes Jack Silverman in the Nashville Scene. "Naturally, more filmmaking means more jobs—that is, if you have the requisite skills. To that end, Columbia State Community College has developed a 12-month film crew technology program, to be taught at the school's Franklin campus."

"Beyond the Rave is the first film co-released by Hammer in 20 years," and as John Lichman reports in Stream, this release is like no other in Hammer history. He talks with Lance Weiler, who's handling the Alternate Reality Game.

"As ThinkFilm's Cash Crunch Continues, Urman and Company Try to Keep Filmmakers, Creditors at Bay." Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE.

Lists:

• David Schwartz, chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, picks his top ten Criterion releases: "I decided to go with the pleasure principle - the great movies that would be the most fun to watch over and over."

• At Screengrab, the "Gay Pride Top Twenty," parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

• Flickipedia offers an Independence Day list in time for you to actually pick a movie or two and line up for the July 4 weekend.

• And, in that celebrate-America spirit, Christopher Campbell lists "15 Films That Offended Religious Groups" at the SpoutBlog.

New blog on the block: Film Industry Bloggers.

On or offline reading tip. With everyone pointing to the new (and highly appreciated) HD version of the trailer for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Jonathan McNicol is giving us a little something to do while we wait the half a year for the film itself: He's proofreading and reformatting the original short story by F Scott Fitzgerald and posting individual chapters. Beautiful. Via Jason Kottke.

Online scrolling tip. "A Visit to Naruse's Grave: Essay & photos by Bruce Goldstein, Director of Repertory Programming, Film Forum." Via Kevin Lee.

Online listening tip. Errol Morris is a guest on the Bat Segundo Show.

Online viewing tip. "Toe Jam." Brighton Port Authority, featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal, via popnutten.

Other fests, other events, 6/19.

"Unlike the standard festival circuit, the Media Matters Film Festival continues to play an active role in the lives of the films it supports, all the way up to a DVD collection that will be released later this year. The festival operates under leadership of Arts Engine founder Katy Chevigny, a documentarian whose latest feature, Election Day, hits cable and DVD on July 1." Eric Kohn talks with her at Stream.

"Security fences, punching bags, graveyards, beat-up cars: These are [Danny] Lyon's tropes," writes David Velasco for Artforum. "The journeys he charts (and sometimes facilitates) are those across borders, those into and out of prison, those, often, to nowhere in particular. It's the peculiarly American, desperate aimlessness of the underclass—our country, riven with roads, none of which take you where you want to go." Born to Film: The Cinema of Danny Lyon opens tomorrow at Anthology Film Archives; Lyon's photographs are on view at the Edwynn Houk Gallery.

"Ironically, it seems, one super-sized name can capsize a national film industry by monopolising international interest," writes Paul Julian Smith in the Guardian. "This is why the London Spanish Film Festival, which comes to an end this Friday [tomorrow!] at the Cine Lumiere, is important. Along with Manchester's longer established Viva festival, it gives a flavor of what lies beyond planet Pedro."

Jerzy Skolimowski: Inside/Outside runs at the International House tomorrow and Saturday; in the Philadelphia City Paper, Shaun Brady previews Identification Marks: None and Deep End.

For the MinnPost, Rob Nelson previews the Solstice Film Festival, opening tonight and running through Saturday.

"Kids as young as 13 and 14 years old, established filmmakers, film students, people who do it as a hobby." Matthew Halliday talks with 48 Hour Film Festival producer Sharon Murphy for the Vue Weekly. Saturday in Edmonton.

Mike Russell has details on this weekend's charity screenings of Serenity in Portland.

The Nashville Scene picks out a few highlights from the Belcourt's "Summer Doc Block," running through July 3.

Charlie Olsky rounds up New York goings on for indieWIRE.

The AfroPunk Film & Music Fest: July 5 through 13.

Accepting submissions through August 11: The Melbourne Underground Film Festival.

At Midnight Eye, jury member Tom Mes reports from "one of the best film festivals in Japan," the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, where he's also interviewed documentary filmmaker Kenji Murakami.

Silverdocs 08.

Silverdocs, already rolling for a few days now, runs on through Monday. A few impressions are coming in: "Leave it to me to get teary-eyed from a film about Iranians installing illegal Satellite TV dishes." Cynthia Rockwell reviews Head Wind, noting that "the film is not so simplistic as to claim that access to media will cure everything."

Updated through 6/24.

Also, Dust: "[D]espite the Godardian narration, which constantly brought to mind the coffee cup scene in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, unfortunately the film is rather heavy-handed at times, forcibly making and repeating its philosophical points and pounding some of the film's mystery - yes, I'll say it - into dust."

"[I]t was a total accident that I spent my first day at SilverDocs watching two consecutive films about the refugees of international atrocities struggling to form a community within resorts that have seen better days," writes Karina Longworth, reviewing Seaview (site; blog) and Four Seasons Lodge at the SpoutBlog.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Bird's Nest: Herzog & De Meuron in China.

Updates, 6/20: "You watch Kassim the Dream unsure whether you want to adopt Kassim or smack him upside the head," writes David Segal. "You're wowed by his achievements but worried about his future. Which is how [Kief] Davidson felt as he shot the movie."

Also in the Washington Post: Jen Chaney's "Five to Watch at Silverdocs" and Ellen McCarthy on All Together Now: "The documentary, which follows the drama-soaked creation of Love, a dazzling Cirque du Soleil show based on Beatles music, winds up looking, [director Adrian Wills] says, 'like we had all the access in the world.' In fact, 'what it is, is stolen moments.'"

The Film Panel Notetaker got to work following a screening of Milosevic on Trial.

"Where other festivals derive much of their appeal from a sense of discovery, Silverdocs feels more like an annual canonization of the documentary form, highlighting some of the best practitioners of the art while observing the bigger picture presented by the industry around them," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. "This year's festival, which launched its one-week run on Monday, found inspiration with two notable attendees: Alex Gibney, whose Afghanistan-based Taxi to the Dark Side won an Oscar in March, and Spike Lee, the legendary auteur equally compelling when working in narrative or non-fiction mode."

Both Karina Longworth and AJ Schnack found the session with Lee frustrating, but Karina did come away with news of an Obama doc in the works (not Lee's) and a basketball doc Lee's planning, having been inspired by Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.

As for Gibney, AJ passes along news (and an explanation) of the filmmaker's lawsuit against ThinkFilm - whose Mark Urman responds.

"This morning, I was on a panel with Karina Longworth, AJ Schnack, Anthony Kaufman and Sandy Mandelberger, moderated by former Washington Post film critic Desson Thomson," writes Scott Kirsner. "We were talking about the differences between reviews and film coverage in traditional media versus the blog world. I proposed one theory: that traditional media (radio, TV, print) and the blogosphere serve two very different purposes for filmmakers."

Update, 6/22: AJ Schnack has the award-winners.

Update, 6/23: "Hard Times at Douglas High [site] is a fly-on-the-wall work of activism documenting a year in the life of an all-black Baltimore high school, as teachers, students and administrators struggle to comply with No Child Left Behind," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, where she also goes on to review Going on 13 (site and blog).

Having seen Encounters at the End of the World (site), Cynthia Rockwell contrasts early and late Werner Herzog.

Scott Kirsner presents two-sentence reviews of three films.

Updates, 6/24: "If there's an aesthetic lesson conveyed by the premieres at AFI Silverdocs this year, it's that cinema verite continues to thrive - and the classical approach to documentary filmmaking hasn't frayed with age." An overview from Eric Kohn at indieWIRE.

Rose Vincelli has a roundup at Filmmaker.

Via Scott Kirsner, Dave Nuttycombe's notes on the "Distribution Now: Strategic Thinking for the Feature Doc" panel.

LAFF, week 1.

"It's purely coincidental, of course, that this year's Los Angeles Film Festival (June 19 - 29) opens for business as the aftershocks of several seismic events are still reverberating throughout the independent-film community," writes Scott Foundas, mentioning the shutting down of New Line, Warner Independent and Picturehouse, the shrinking of Paramount Vantage and the sluggish market at Cannes.

Updated through 6/24.

"For all the gems that programming director Rachel Rosen and senior programmer Doug Jones have plucked from the past 12 months of new world cinema (and there are many), the LAFF program also offers its share of reminders that documentaries, low-budget American indies and international art-house imports can be infected by the same depressing conformity that plagues mainstream Hollywood cinema.... So, the time may indeed be nigh for a certain pressing of the indie-film reset button, and there are ample indications at LAFF of which filmmakers might be the ones to do it."

Also in the LA Weekly is the "A to Y" guide to the festival, pages and pages of robust blurbage and critics' picks, plus:

• Christoph Huber previews the Shaw Sensation program.

• Ernest Hardy on the Eclectic Mix programs of music videos (1 and 2).

• Adam Nayman on Planet of the Apes and The Makioka Sisters.

• John Tottenham on Nothing But a Man.

• John Patterson: "The Los Angeles Film Festival's annual Films That Got Away sidebar, co-presented by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, this year features two directors who outwardly could not seem less alike: Robert Kramer, the radical socialist-activist and filmmaker who died in 1999; and Jerry Schatzberg, the 80-year-old former jet-set fashion photographer who directed The Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow."

In the Los Angeles Times, Lisa Rosen talks with "accidental movie star" Lori Petty about her directorial debut, The Poker House.

Updates, 6/20: "What the rarified realm of movie writers wants is a festival on the order of Cannes, Rotterdam or Toronto and using that yardstick disadvantages the LAFF (or the AFI Film Festival later in the year). In the immortal words of Mark Twain that scenario 'ain't gonna happen.'" Leonard Klady explains why at Movie City News.

"Coming on as a scruffy gadabout in order to mask a deceptively sophisticated structure, Baghead [site] mixes and matches the loose talk of indie comedy with the roundhouse scares of a horror film." Mark Olsen talks with Jay Duplass.

Update, 6/21: "[Seth] Packard, who calls himself a 'questioning Mormon,' freely admits he wrote his debut film, a giddy celebration of teenage nerd love, as a vehicle for his acting career." For the LAT, Michael Ordoña has a quick chat with the director and star of HottieBoombaLottie.

Updates, 6/22: "Following in the archival-confessional mold of such documentaries as Tarnation and Capturing the Friedmans, filmmaker Morgan Dews has created Must Read After My Death [site] - or, rather, assembled it, from decades of photographs and home movies and Dictaphone recordings found in his grandmother's home after her passing," writes James Rocchi. "These recordings - made in quiet contemplation or moments of anger, some heavy with things unsaid, some thick with the sounds of rage and desperation - are the aching heart and wounded soul of the film."

Also at Cinematical, a bit of online listening. James talks with Reeler founder and Defamer senior editor Stu VanAirsdale.

Updates, 6/23: "Watching Paper or Plastic? [site], the new documentary about the regional qualifiers and Las Vegas final of the 2007 National Grocery Bagging Competition, I was surprised to note the presence of something that's hard to come by in 2008: Sincerity." James Rocchi at Cinematical: "I don't mean just that Paper or Plastic? never mocks, knocks or condescends to the seven contestants from every corner of America the finale brings together - although it never does - but more that co-directors Alex D da Silva and Justine Jacob not only found an event to observe but also a spirit to celebrate."

In his dispatch from Los Angeles for indieWIRE, Michael Lerman emphasizes the "extremely diverse slate."

Updates, 6/24: "Largo the movie [site] is a lot like Largo the club. The lighting is low, its attention is 100% on the performers and it doesn't make things easy for its customers," writes Richard Cromelin in the LAT. "No texting, no electronics, no talking - [producer and co-director Mark] Flanagan runs a tight ship in service to the artists and an appreciative community of musicians and comedians - Aimee Mann, Jon Brion, Fiona Apple, Brad Mehldau, Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, et al - made the room a uniquely intimate and spontaneous laboratory for experimentation and expression."

"Boogie Man: The Story of Lee Atwater may seem like another exhumation of the recent political past, another laundry list of bygone wrongs for Democrats to fume about; it's much more than that, though, not only in its portrait of one man's journey from the streets of South Carolina to the halls of power, but also in its portrait of the consultant-driven, dirty-trick laden mess that modern politics has become," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical.

IndieWIRE interviews Paper or Plastic? co-directors Justine Jacob and Alex D da Silva.

Jeffrey Wells has pix from the fest - and captions.

HRWIFF 08, week 2.

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival rolls on in New York through June 26; the New York Press offers reviews of USA Vs Al-Arian, Project Kashmir and Letter to Anna.

Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door: "Wiseman-like in its patient stillness and no frills style, lacking in overbearing soundtrack or any other potentially distracting enhancements, Maria Ramos's Juizo (Behave) is a study of the Brazilian juvenile judicial system illuminated through both 'fact' (all the adults, from judges to lawyers to prison guards to parents, are the real thing, filmed during court hearings and on visits to the correctional facility in Rio de Janeiro) and 'fiction' (the accused involved in the cases are minors and cannot be filmed, thus Ramos ingeniously substitutes other children from the favelas to play their roles)."

Updated through 6/24.

Ed Gonzalez in Slant on the Youth Producing Change program: "In spite of their largely unsophisticated filmic sense, these shorts produced under the Youth Voices banner are all impassioned rallying calls."

Update, 6/20: Project Kashmir's "final lack of clarity - mirrored in the necessarily jerky camerawork - may be precisely the point, but in the end, it makes for a largely unsatisfying piece of cinema," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant.

Update, 6/21: "Katrina Browne exhumes long buried secrets in Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, a nonfiction portrait of her ancestors' forefront role in the US slave trade," writes Nick Schager at Slant. The doc premiere on PBS on Tuesday; see the POV Blog for more.

Updates, 6/23: "Possibly the most poignant, profound and artistically viable film you'll see at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival this year is Georgi Lazarevski's This Way Up, a portrait of a senior citizens' home for Palestinians just east of Jerusalem." Ed Gonzalez.

Also at Slant: "Critical Condition offers a salutary lesson in the difference in viewer response between the fiction and the nonfiction film," writes Andrew Schenker. "What we can comfortably deride as a self-conscious miserablism when it's mediated through the performances of well-paid actors is not so easy to dismiss when presented directly as the sufferings of real-life individuals."

Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door: "[T]here is limitless drama (the stories in Traces of the Trade could easily fill a PBS miniseries) with everyone involved in a perpetual soul-search - this is what makes cinema (and life) so interesting."

Update, 6/24: Lauren Wissot on USA vs Al-Arian at the House Next Door: "Like the slain journalist at the center of Eric Bergkraut's Letter to Anna, [Sami] Al-Arian learns that activist fame will not shield him in George W Bush's America any more than Anna Politkovskaya's high profile protected her in Putin's Russia. In fact, it can make things much, much worse." More from Bill Weber at Slant.

The French, 6/19.

"In a country known more for its frank portrayals of sex and meditations on philosophical ennui, an aesthetic of violence has emerged that, ironically, accomplishes what American auteurs have failed to do - recapture the grit, power, and above all, the danger of American horror in its 1970's heyday." Simon Augustine introduces his list of the "8 Most Disturbing Films of The New Wave of French Horror."

"Abdellatif Kechiche has started the casting and preparation for his fourth feature, which is scheduled to shoot in the first half of 2009," reports Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa. "[T]he director will depart from a contemporary setting for the first time and plunge viewers into the early 19th century, retracing the experiences of an African woman confronted with racism in Europe: Saartjie Baartman, known as the 'Hottentot Venus.'"

Shane Danielson, blogging for the Guardian. "Why do we accord French cinema such dogged affection? In part, because some of it is astonishingly good - but also, because we're starved for broader options."

"[F]rankly, the aura surrounding the Nouvelle Vague can be a bit too fawning and mythical," writes Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly. "At worst Dans Paris and Love Songs simply reinforce this trend, presenting a Disneyland version of the Wave: people reading books in bed, dizzying on-location Paris footage, playful opening titles, fourth-wall breaks—the works. The films of Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, etc, were trying to reinvent a medium; [Christophe] Honoré just wants you to think about the awesomeness of Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, etc. (And that reminds me: Go buy Richard Brody's excellent new Jean-Luc Godard biography Everything Is Cinema.)" More on Love Songs from Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper.

In the Guardian, Ronald Bergan remembers Jean Desailly, whose "most famous film portrayal, in which he displayed his discreet bourgeois charm, was in François Truffaut's La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin, 1964)," and whose on and off stage partnership with Simone Valère spanned six decades.

Expired.

"Despite Expired's many flaws, give writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi points for gamely tackling an almost unworkable conceit in her romantic-comedy debut: the awkward courtship of two thoroughly incompatible people," writes Tim Grierson in the Voice. "Homely, withdrawn Claire (doe-eyed Samantha Morton) leads a dull life as a Santa Monica meter maid, until she attracts the attention of Jay (Jason Patric), a fellow parking official whose two most notable features are his bushy mustache and his raging, paranoid misanthropy."

"A brutally funny and relentlessly squirm-inducing film about neuroses, loneliness, and love, Expired posits the traffic cop as the nadir of self-esteem and the constant recipient of abuse and disgust," writes Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE. "Miniucchi's direction of the film's tone is pitch-perfect - a strange, but deft mix of farcical and naturalistic."

Updated through 6/22.

"Morton is one of those tingly actresses whose skin barely covers her soul, and to watch her search for tender mercies in a crazy-hostile world is a gift," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The film is appallingly good."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Miniucchi "about her own experiences with parking attendants, the illustrious directors she has worked with, and fleeing a location after it was trashed by gang bangers."

Update: "Emotional investment in this unhealthy romance is aided rather than impeded by an intentional mood of off-center strangeness, which consistently blends heartfelt pathos and caustic humor," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "In a mesmerizing performance, Patric gets surprisingly robust mileage from his character's sentence-to-sentence vacillation between amorous warmth and unfiltered assholishness."

Update, 6/20: "The funny, sad, offbeat, sometimes off-the-beat romance Expired is one of those precariously balanced movies that might fall to pieces with a different cast," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It's possible that two actors other than Samantha Morton and Jason Patric might do justice to Cecilia Miniucchi's story... But it's hard to think of a better match for the stubborn idiosyncrasies of Ms Miniucchi's visual style and worldview than these two."

Update, 6/21: For the New York Times, John Anderson profiles an evidently lovable director: "The cast features Teri Garr and Illeana Douglas, and its credits include the couturière and installation artist Swinda Reichelt; the guitarist Andy Summers of the Police; 'special thanks' to the filmmakers Marc Forster, Jeremy Podeswa and Larry Gross; and, as producer, Fred Roos, who has The Godfather II and Apocalypse Now on his résumé and said he was attracted both by the strength of Ms Miniucchi's script 'and my affection for her.'" What's more, "It was [Lina] Wertmüller who drafted Ms Miniucchi into the world of Italian cinema, hiring her after a chance meeting on an elevator in Rome."

Update, 6/22: Choire Sicha chats with Illeana Douglas for the Los Angeles Times.

NYAFF, week 1.

The New York Asian Film Festival opens Friday and runs through July 6. "Subway Cinema's seventh annual extravaganza of demented pop curiosities both highbrow and low- returns with its largest lineup and juiciest cherry pickings yet," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, "one of the several Japanese titles to dominate this year's schedule, will be co-presented with the Japan Society's concurrent 'Japan Cuts' fest - and easily the finest of NYAFF's offerings exist within the programming overlap."

Updated through 6/24.

The L Magazine's Mark Asch offers seven capsule reviews.

Earlier: The Brooklyn Rail's big overview.

Updates, 6/19: "What makes the festival so terrific is that they provide a full movie-going package," writes Simon Abrams in the New Press. "While soulless disappointments like Iron Man and Indiana Jones continue to rake in box office booty, festival spokesman Grady Hendrix tirelessly cracks the audience up with breathless pre-show introductions and prize giveaways. They bring a personal touch to a wide array of films and make scuttling indoors on a sunny day a no-brainer."

"The most exciting film festival each year in New York is neither the prestigious New York Film Festival nor the Tribeca behemoth that explodes every May." You know the festival Daniel Kasman is thinking of in the Auteurs' Notebook. "A heady and potent hodgepodge of genre schlock, genre purity, blockbuster mainstream, art-house eccentricity, and flat out unclassifiable insanity (see last year's Funky Forest), one will rarely see such an invigorating mixture of contemporary cinema playing in New York at any other time."

At Cinema Strikes Back: Reviews and 3 out of 4 stars each for Mad Detective and Sukiyaki Western Django.

Twitch's Todd Brown on Sad Vacation: "With character and thematic links to Eureka, his breakthrough dramatic film, director Shinji Aoyama along with a stellar cast of Japan's best (Tadanobu Asano, Jo Odagiri, Aoi Miyazaki) here crafts a quiet, inward reflection of people living in the aftermath of extreme loss."

"[O]ne of the very best festivals in the world," declares Peter Martin, introducing a gallery at Cinematical.

Updates, 6/20: "Across the metropolitan galaxy of cinematic obsession, in a city that unspools a new film festival every week, there is nothing quite as giddily in love with the mad, marvelous insanity of movies as the New York Asian Film Festival," writes Nicolas Rapold, introducing his overview in the New York Sun. "It's not an excuse for a night out. It's more like a state of being, a way to live, a tao."

"Opening night kicks off with the world premiere of Then Summer Came, the Joe Odagiri/Yoshio Harada father-son marriage comedy directed by Japan's most respected playwright, Ryo Iwamatsu," note Marcy Dermansky and Jürgen Fauth.

"[T]he selection suggests an ongoing crisis in the region's cinema." Steve Erickson explains in his overview for Gay City News.

The Butcher boils "horror conventions down to a raw, wet core, and [uses] the agility of video to furiously rub the audience's face in it," writes Rodney at Twitch, where Todd Brown calls Adrift in Tokyo "a meandering, quirky and surprisingly beautiful piece of work that perfectly balances humor and emotion. Flawlessly written and shot by a man who seems to have figured out exactly what sort of film maker he is and where his strengths lie, Adrift In Tokyo makes it very clear that Miki Satoshi is no longer simply that goofy TV director mucking about on the big screen but that he has become one of the strongest voices in Japanese film. Yes, it's really that good."

"Generally, I'm inclined to be pretty forgiving of any movie that features zombies, and girls in bikinis, and girls in bikinis with swords fighting zombies, but Chanbara Beauty just didn't grab me," writes David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back.

Updates, 6/21: "Like Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers (2005), another epically sad post-68 portrait, United Red Army opens on a note of exhilaration before lingering on the painful hangover after the thwarted revolutionary moment," writes Dennis Lim in a profile of Koji Wakamatsu for the New York Times.

At Twitch:

• Ardvark on Kala: "[W]hat a pleasant surprise it is to find a genre movie from Indonesia which I can wholeheartedly recommend to... well, to everyone who would like a damn good mainstream movie!"

• "Call Johnnie To's Sparrow proof positive that the acclaimed director can do pretty much whatever he sets his mind to," writes Todd Brown.

• And: Johnny Nguyen's The Rebel "is a quality piece of work that bears none of the weaknesses that would label it a vanity project."

Updates, 6/22: "From the same team that created The Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police is quite likely the most aptly titled film ever made," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "The thing is positively saturated with blood, massive sprays of the stuff filling frame after frame of the film." But: "While Machine Girl plays out largely tongue in cheek, Tokyo Gore Police takes its world very seriously. There is no nodding and winking here, instead director Yoshihiro Nishimura sets out to create a sort of alternate future where these events, bizarre as they may be, actually make some sort of sense. The end result is a sort of nightmare fugue, a swirling hallucination that just plunges farther and farther into depravity as it proceeds."

"Yudai Yamaguchi's latest film, Tamami: The Baby's Curse or Akanbo Shojo belongs to the rarefied subgenre of monster baby films, for which, luckily, I have a soft spot," writes David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back. "Akanbo Shojo successfully mixes the gross-out oddity of imports like Devil Fetus with the more emotional horror of Larry Cohen's It's Alive, while adding a strand of jealous rivalry from sibling-based horror films like Basket Case (probably the most direct influence after It's Alive) and the Shaw's Siamese Twins. It's no masterpiece but it is pretty damn fun all the same."

Updates, 6/23: "Perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid to Feng Xiaogang's The Assembly, a film built around Communist Chinese military campaigns of the 40s and 50s, is that he has created a film that completely and utterly transcends politics," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Technically astounding, with battle sequences orchestrated by the team behind Korean hit Taegukgi - sequences that match or beat anything ever put on screen by big budget Hollywood, Saving Private Ryan included - the heart of the film never gets lost in the spectacle, the soul of the piece anchored in an astounding central performance from Zhang Hanyou."

Also: "Fine, Totally Fine is something quite different from the brightly colored hyper-kinetic cult flicks that we know [comic Yoshiyoshi] Arakawa from, something far more subtle and unique."

And also at Twitch, Simon Abrams talks with Ryo Iwamatsu about his film, Then Summer Came.

Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on Strawberry Shortcakes: "Believe it or not, the film often actually seems like a Japanese version of Sex in the City, only with significantly less handholding. But more importantly than that, director Yazaki Hitoshi and screenwriter Inukai Kyoko refuse to let their characters sink to the void of dejection that hovers so close beneath the surface of the American show and rears its head much more honestly in Strawberry Shortcakes."

Also, Sad Vacation: "Each change in style is as much a change in narrative, and possibly in character, and Aoyama seems to birth a new film at every moment - and it is a thrilling sensation."

Update, 6/24: "And the hot streak continues for Johnnie To," writes Todd Brown, reviewing Mad Detective at Twitch. "While the latest from the prolific action auteur lacks the blistering intensity of the Election films and the extreme high style of Exiled it reunites him with a pair of favored collaborators - screenwriter and co-director Wai Ka Fai and star Lau Ching Wan - and the result is an entertaining, surprising piece of work anchored by a powerhouse performance from Lau." More from Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl.

"For a G-rated film, [Kit Kittredge: An American Girl]'s profound insight into the breakdown of society and families during the Depression and the country's subsequent rebirth is surprising," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Kit Kittredge is remarkable for the social consciousness its young characters evince, but the whole thing would feel dubious if Kit and her friends didn't behave like real children."

"Based on several American Girl stories about a 1930s cub reporter in Cincinnati, this dull theatrical debut especially disappoints because I'm usually fond of square, sepia-toned, period-costumed kids' movies (like Fly Away Home) that go nowhere at the box office," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "This one could go somewhere: As the opening weekend of Sex and the City showed, gee whiz, there's a distaff market out there, so why not tap the little ones?"

Updated through 6/20.

"Director Patricia Rozema - who with films like Mansfield Park and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing has shown herself to be a brilliant chronicler of the lives of women with artistic ambitions - does a terrific job of capturing Kit's world and allowing audiences to experience the joys and sorrows of the 1930s from a child's perspective," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "From Kit's embarrassment at seeing her father at a soup kitchen to her triumph over mean schoolmates who mock the less fortunate, the first two-thirds of Kit Kittredge often resembles Spike Lee's underrated Crooklyn or even Fellini's Amarcord as a memory piece that mixes sentimentality and warmth with cruelty and heartbreak."

Online listening tip. The IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss child actors.

Updates, 6/20: "[T]his classy, heart-on-its-sleeve movie is packed with laudable life lessons and Depression-era trivia, including the fact that the hobo sign of fish bones means really good garbage (particularly useful on the Upper East Side)," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "But when you consider that a Kit doll, complete with book and accessories, will currently run you $105, the movie's insistence on the nobility of the indigent might be a tad more difficult to stomach."

"[I]n a climate where the TV shows of our childhood may be remembered with deep fondness, but old movies often get laughed at for being corny or overwrought - it's easy to forget that the past is a real place," notes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "What's remarkable about Kit Kittredge is the way it strives for emotional authenticity, and often achieves it. The picture manages to give a sense of what people's lives were like during the Depression, at least as far as those of us who didn't actually live through it can understand from the stories our parents told us."

"The movie has a surely unintended but inescapable current resonance in its tsunami of residential foreclosures," writes Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times. "Kittredge personalizes the Great Depression in terms simple enough for young audiences by showing how loving families can be torn apart by circumstances beyond their control. This can be strong stuff for kids, but the film's humanistic approach preaches tolerance and hope." Also: Jason Chow has a quick profile of Abigail Breslin.

"I expected so much less," admits Roger Ebert. "I was waiting for some kind of banal product placement, I suppose, and here is a movie that is just about perfect for its target audience, and more than that. It has a great look, engaging performances, real substance and even a few whispers of political ideas, all surrounding the freshness and charm of Abigail Breslin, who was 11 when it was filmed."

"With Julia Roberts executive-producing, Mattel executive Ellen Brothers on board, and Ann Peacock (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) providing the screenplay, the project boasts a cast of heavyweights before even taking the stars into account," notes Meghan Keane in the New York Sun. "And there are stars aplenty, including Chris O'Donnell, Julia Ormond, Joan Cusack, Stanley Tucci and Jane Krakowski, all of whom pull their own weight and seem to thoroughly enjoy their time on-screen.... Kit Kittredge: An American Girl will be a welcome reprieve for parents in search of child-appropriate yet non-brainless entertainment on the big screen - though they may not appreciate the sequels that are likely to follow in this franchise."

For the AV Club's Scott Tobias, "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl languishes in G-rated earnestness, content to promote decency while soft-pedaling the outside forces that challenge it. It's all message, no tension."

The Love Guru.

"Mike Myers, the star-producer–co-writer of The Love Guru, should seriously consider sending a muffin basket to the makers of Strange Wilderness, because without that hideous, barely-released film, Guru would be the hands-down worst comedy of 2008 so far," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "A movie endlessly amused with its own stupidity - to the point where Myers actually laughs at his own jokes, and shots of other characters breaking character to giggle are left in, as though this were a Carol Burnett Show sketch - The Love Guru is a soul-draining waste of 90-plus minutes."

"Jessica Alba romps adorably through a goofy Bollywood dance sequence," notes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Justin Timberlake gives his all to a sing-off with a Céline Dion impersonator. And Ben Kingsley, as a cross-eyed Zen master, hasn't been this funny since he swanned around in that outsized diaper in Gandhi. The rest is disposable."

Updated through 6/20.

"The Love Guru is so relentlessly juvenile as to merit a new twist on the PG-13 rating - one that strongly cautions not only those under 13 but anyone much above it, too," warns Brian Lowery in Variety.

The New York Post's Lou Lumenick notes that the first round of reviews in the trades and so forth are "harshly negative" across the board.

At Esquire: Mike Myers's 45 years in 45 sentences.

In the Philadelphia Weekly, Matt Prigge lists "Six films featuring Indian characters played by Western actors."

Updates, 6/19: "The Love Guru Happening," a cartoon by RJ Matson.

PopMatters' Bill Gibron addresses "a one-man campaign" against the movie waged by "self-proclaimed Indo-American leader Rajan Zed.... In the end, Zed shouldn't have bothered. Certainly, The Love Guru gives certain Indian stereotypes a tweaking or two.... Sadly, the only honest snickers will come from anyone who has read Zed's missives over the last few months. This does not defend The Love Guru - it's a god-awful anti-comedy, unfunny in unfathomable, almost heroic ways. But it should teach anyone who wants to openly complain about an upcoming project (and the supposedly negative depiction within) to get their facts straight before starting to complain."

Updates, 6/20: "To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word 'unfunny' surely applies to Mr Myers's obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "No, The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again."

Slate's Dana Stevens clears her throat: "There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they're good (though, strangely, not the reverse). And once in a while there is a movie so bad that it takes you to a place beyond good and evil and abandons you there, shivering and alone."

"[W]atching Myers in this particular guise is almost completely joyless," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "As an Indian stereotype - or even a faux-Indian stereotype - he's not nearly as funny as the Bollywood-via-Tennessee pharmacist Padma Perkesh, played by Tracey Ullman on her show, State of the Union. Ullman's Perkesh can turn a laundry list of Viagra side effects into a lavish yet compact two-minute musical extravaganza. Myers wastes a good 90 minutes trying to summon a transcendental boner."

"Pee-pee jokes are forever, but The Love Guru is a sign that Mr Myers is close to exhausting his brand," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun.

"Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents," writes Roger Ebert.

"Any time you review a film like this negatively, people ask 'Why can't you just enjoy a few laughs?'" notes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "And I can't give a simple answer to that, but I think it comes down to the fact that I can't just enjoy a few laughs if they're surrounded by a much larger chaotic mass of things that aren't funny."

"It's a pitiful assortment of bad ideas and gags that never work," writes the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "I don't know what else to call a movie that asks us to find Jessica Alba credible not only as the owner of the beleaguered Toronto Maple Leafs and a comedian, but as a woman attracted to a vulgar, hirsute Mike Myers. Oh, yes I do: Embarrassing."

"American comedy has wandered in some interesting directions over the last decade, from the irony-free stylings of Will Ferrell to the tender obscenities of the Apatow Empire, but Myers hasn't budged an inch," sighs the New Republic's Christopher Orr.

Indeed, "The Love Guru's prankster garb is cut from the same brash, developmentally stunted cloth as Wayne's World and the Austin Powers series," writes Jan Stuart in the Los Angeles Times. "But by this point, the threads are worse for wear."

"Guru nevertheless represents at least a tiny step up from Austin Powers in Goldmember, if only because it's blissfully short and Myers now has a new, slightly different set of stock bits and running gags to beat into the ground," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

For Time's Richard Corliss, it's not all that bad: "The Love Guru is a shambling, hit-or-miss thing, like an old Laurel and Hardy two-reeler. And like the situations those comics often got into, this movie is a fine mess."

"Myers knows the simple power of a well-played penis joke, but as a writer he still hasn't figured out how to make characters who aren't just funny variations of himself," writes Paul Schrodt in Slant.

Edinburgh, week 1.

"Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller are among the stars attending the opening night of the Edinburgh International Film Festival," reports the BBC. And they're there tonight because the "opening night gala features the World premiere of the Dylan Thomas biopic - The Edge of Love," recently reviewed by Kate Stables in Sight & Sound.

Updated through 6/20.

The London Times has a video interview with the two actresses, Kevin Maher's profile of Miller and Wendy Ide's review: "[W]hat soon becomes clear is that Thomas (played with a petulant sneer by Matthew Rhys [profile: Chris Ayres]) is not the focus. It's the enduring, turbulent friendship between the women, Thomas's wife Caitlin MacNamara (Sienna Miller) and his childhood sweetheart Vera Philips (Keira Knightley), that drives the movie."

The Scotsman finds that "the film remains peculiarly unmoving."

The Guardian's got a special section featuring Peter Bradshaw's "top 10 picks to whet the appetite."

Updates, 6/19: For Dina Iordanova, the festival's move from August to June makes sense.

Online listening tip. The Observer's Jason Solomons on opening night.

Update, 6/20: Ray Harryhausen will be discussing his life and work at the festival on Wednesday. Geoffrey Macnab profiles him for the Independent.

Taking Off.

"Bearing evidence of an outsider's inquisitive eyes, Czech director Milos Forman's first American feature took an even-handed, humorous look at the parents of the Me Generation," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "Addressing issues for youth and parents of the time, Taking Off is inseparable from its historical context, an eloquent time capsule for the movies and larger cultural trends on the threshold between the 60s and 70s."

"Even taking into account the ambitious biographical sweep of later projects like The People vs Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon, it remains his best film in and about America," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. "Whether Taking Off is caricature or dead-on is, presumably, all a matter of perspective and distance, and I can't resolve it - I wasn't even embryonic at the time. But it's definitely hilarious."

Updated through 6/20.

At MoMA, tonight through Monday.

Update, 6/20: Taking Off is "a satire about the generation gap (cowritten by playwright John Guare and Buñuel's scenarist, Jean-Claude Carrière) that put the squares and the groovies in the crosshairs," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "It's no wonder that Taking Off tanked; rake both sides of the cultural divide over the coals and you're left with no audience whatsoever. Seen today, however, Forman's career pivot point between Prague's film-school halls and the Oscars podium is still a prime example of the way a foreign director can apply an outsider's perspective to something like Nixon's Amerikkka and draw blood.

Best Pictures from the Outside In.

Nathaniel R introduces a fun new feature bringing together three favorite stalwarts of film blogdom: "Each week (or thereabouts) the Film Experience, Goatdog's Movies and Nick's Flick Picks will be looking at two Best Picture winners. We're pulling Oscar's favorites from the shelves from both ends, starting with the very first year of Oscar (Wings) and the most recent (No Country For Old Men). We'll work our way eventually to the 1960s, smack dab in the middle of Oscar's 80 years of back-patting."

Frameline32, week 1.

"After all the angst and hoopla, the first full day of same-sex marriage in California on Tuesday turned out to be almost placid, if you discounted the whoops of celebration or the courthouse crushes of brides and brides, and grooms and grooms," reports Barbara Davidson in the Los Angeles Times. "The weight of history, the sense that this was a signal moment in the decades-long battle for gay rights, was lightened by joy and relief as couples - some of whom had waited decades to marry - took their vows amid smiling friends, proud relatives and beaming government officials."

The mood at this year's Frameline, opening tomorrow and running through July 29, just might be a bit more festive than usual.

Updated through 6/24.

"So why appeal for terror?" asks Matt Sussman. "To put it simply, there is pleasure in being scared. And to put it more complicatedly, there can be empowerment in that pleasure.... Luckily for all the rainbow-colored Fangoria fans still bloodthirsty after catching local director Flynn Witmeyer's Imp of Satan earlier this year at Another Hole in the Head, late June is bearing an unexpected slasher crop of queer horror films. It includes Dead Channels' one-off presentation of Sean Abley's Socket (2007) and some scary fare at Frameline's SF International LGBT Film Festival."

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Frameline32 package: Maria Komodore and Jason Shamai both review Iranian director Tanaz Eshaghian's Be Like Others (site); Komodore on Barbara Hammer's A Horse Is Not a Metaphor and Johnny Ray Huston: "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell [site] is like an audiovisual kiss from Russell to those who loved him, and to a greater audience who has yet to discover him."

And at the SFBG's blog, Pixel Vision, you find a collection of "fast reviews" of nearly a dozen more Frameline32 offerings.

Earlier: Talks with retiring artistic director Michael Lumpkin: Michael Guillén and Marcus Hu.

Update, 6/19: "[T]he continued currency of 'New Argentine Cinema' stems from the Argentine film industry's tenacity as well as the uncompromising intelligence shown by so many of the directors who continued to get yoked under the banner. The term seems less a temporal designation than something whispered to ensure continued good fortune: If you say it, the films will keep coming." SF360 looks into this year's crop at Frameline.

Update, 6/24: Michael Guillén interviews Woman in Burka director Jonathan Lisecki at the Evening Class and Tongzhi in Love director Ruby Yang at SF360.

CineVegas Dispatch.

David D'Arcy on a handful of films he's caught at CineVegas. That first entry is still being updated, too.

Las Vegas is an unusual place, a city of appetites and rule-breaking where gambling is legal [see comments], but gay marriage is not. CineVegas, with its adventurous program, is an anomaly there, at the Palms Casino, just a few steps from the floor of slot machines. This year marks the festival's tenth anniversary.

What better place than Sin City for a film that takes us inside one of the three bastions of the Axis of Evil? In his mock-umentary, The Juche Idea, Jim Finn constructs a spoof on the official North Korean idolatry of Kim Jong-il that is so convincingly woven into the texture of communist dogmatism that it seems indistinguishable from the official propaganda that comes out of Pyongyang.

Built around a filmed "visit" to a North Korean agricultural site by a Russian journalist - those visits do take place - the film takes the audience through the workers' paradise, cutting in and out of actual North Korean films. The details get crazier and crazier, including a course in "Socialist English," in which a Korean teacher leads an earnest Russian pupil from base to superstructure, including directions to a toilet. Juche, by the way, is loosely translated as self-reliance, in case you didn't know.

All this inanity didn't keep the ardent revolutionaries at WBAI in New York from treating North Korea (which they called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK) with the proper reverence back in the 1980s, when I was on the air there.

There's a cosmology to The Juche Theory, which includes situating Kim Jung Il as the center of the universe. Not that the North Koreans hadn't done that already. Finn incorporates virtuoso parody and buffo elements into his satire - sometimes they are one and the same - but let's not forget that the truth brings in an eerie Dr Strangelove dimension to what otherwise would be as harmless as fantasies like Lost in Space or satires like Galaxy Quest. The same nation that starves its own population (led by a pudgy lover of cinema and fine Scotch) has a space program, or at least a missile program, and it has made those weapons available to countries like Libya, Syria, or Pakistan, which could do serious harm to the world if they decided to.

The same country that has isolated itself from the rest of world in the rigidity of its dynastic communism conducted a real English-language instruction program that involved kidnapping Westerners or luring them to North Korea, and then forcing them to breed Western-looking children, who were to be taught English and sent abroad as spies. It sounds like an idea for a terrible screenplay - or maybe a comedy with potential. The evidence in another documentary, Crossing the Line, by Daniel Gordon, shows that the would-be Manchurian candidates don't learn much, and the results are indeed an unintentional comedy about undercover strategies in the hands of incompetents. (Read about the history of American defectors and life as foreigners in the DPRK in the new memoir, The Reluctant Communist, by Charles Robert Jenkins.) Somehow the notion of incompetents with nuclear weapons in North Korea is not as funny. Bear in mind that the recent firings at the highest level at the US Air Force came after US bombers carrying nuclear weapons were found to have flown over the country for no apparent reason.

Another hybrid of documentary and fiction at CineVegas is Plot Point, a short by the Belgian filmmaker Nicholas Provost. Set in Times Square, where police are deployed en masse, the film is composed entirely of shots taken of people who happen to be on the street. Provost edits the street footage to make it seem as if something explosive is about to happen. His images have a staggering digital precision. Minimal dialogue is dubbed in, but the threatening storm gathers with music that builds dramatically, all ending with a convoy of police cars rolling down 42d Street. If the film has a script, it is the musical score, all borrowed from existing music.

This overture-as-film began as an idea for a documentary, in which Provost planned to ride around with NYPD officers and assemble a film from his footage. The cops themselves agreed to cooperate, but the city administration killed the project, according to Provost in a post-screening discussion at CineVegas. Now, during the festival, he's filming in Vegas, as part of what he calls an observation of happiness. Happiness? Sounds like he and I were at different crap tables.

A sidebar section at CineVegas looked at new Mexican films, four of them. My favorites were Cochochi, by Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán (interview), and Donde Estan Sus Historias? (Where Are Their Stories?) by Nicolas Pereda. (Mike Plante's informative interviews with the filmmakers can be found on the festival website.)

Each of the two films is a journey, each operates at low end of low-budget cinema, and each tells a simple story situated in a specific place that goes far beyond those circumstances. In Cochochi, which has already been on the festival circuit for a while, two young brothers in remote northwestern Mexico leave their town in search of what they think is a stolen horse. The boys, played by two brothers, set out in the way that rural Mexicans tend to travel - on foot, on horseback, or in the back of crowded trucks. The landscape is by turns spectacular and lifelessly banal, as the directors follow the boys in a way that reminds you of The Fast Runner - the logistics are at least as challenging, and these filmmakers make it look seamlessly easy. I won't give the outcome away, but there's no great crescendo. If fantasy is the domain of Guillermo del Toro, fatalism is the domain of films like these.

Donde Estan Sus Historias? follows the long march on foot to Mexico City of a rural young man who is contesting the potential sale of his ailing grandmother's hardscrabble land by a greedy uncle. The future, he is told, is somewhere else than the dirt-poor village where he was born, and that his mother has already abandoned. If this story about a young rural Mexican who struggles to avoid migrating sounds as iconic as a fable, it is. On the way, he stops by the home of a rich family, where his mother works as a maid, absenting herself from her family, as so many Mexicans do, to make a living. The sideshow becomes a story in itself, as the family suspects the young visitor of stealing from them, and the mother is approached by her same distrustful employers to conceive and carry the couple's child, for a fee. It's an odd droit du seigneur, the right of the master to sleep with his servant (usually the right to take a servant's virginity). In this case, the husband seeking to become a father is a large bald American. "You mean, you want me to have sexual relations with Mr Jim?" she asks, incredulously.

In neither film do the characters carry much money or drive cars, or enjoy any of the benefits of globalization. The economies in the rural places that bleed away immigrants to the US and to Mexican cities can barely sustain the populations that remain. You can find many of those who left now working in Las Vegas, which could not survive without the mass migration of gamblers as well as workers. Add these two films to a growing number of stories told from the perspective of the southern side of the border.

Brick Lane.

"Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane is the kind of movie a critic would just as soon let pass without comment," writes Elbert Ventura at indieWIRE. "Unchallenging and inoffensive, it gives little to work with, its soft-focus take on a rich novel less outrageous than enervating. The potential for a banalized transposition was always there. Monica Ali's bestseller approached issues of cultural dislocation and female empowerment with sensitivity and nuance, but faint whiffs of Lifetime wafted through at certain moments. In Gavron's hands, those shortcomings find their full flowering."

Updated through 6/20.

Ella Taylor, writing in the Voice, finds it "absorbing enough, moving enough, and visually attractive enough to provide a perfectly acceptable night out at the movies."

"If it weren't painful enough that Gavron deals entirely in cliché caricature..., her queasily romanticized style misrepresents the sad and sometimes perilous lives of her subjects," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "[E]ven when 9/11 is invoked the film doesn't so much suggest a melodrama of the heart and spirit as it does an explosion at a fabric store."

For Mary Block, writing in the L Magazine, "Brick Lane is beautifully made and told, captivating its audience within its tiny sphere."

Earlier: Reviews from the UK.

Updates: For the IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Gavron "about adapting Ali's book, her surprising experiences within the Bangladeshi community, and the sea change for women's filmmakers today."

"Brick Lane manages to be both textured and stunning yet loses the book's distinctive spirit and overall complexity," writes Nick Plowman. "A resonant effort of high quality and distinguishing beauty indeed, Brick Lane falters one too many times to be considered great."

Updates, 6/19: "In films, fat people often get the comedic roles, but in Brick Lane, Chanu, as played by veteran Indian actor-director Satish Kaushik, is unexpectedly heartbreaking, evoking the idiosyncratic spirit of a kind man drowning in a foreign land that has no use for his skills or intellect," writes Rachel Abramowitz, who profiles the actor for the Los Angeles Times.

"Brick Lane is one of those depressing movies in which you catch a glimpse of the tighter, leaner, stronger film that could have been," writes Mark Peikert in the New Press.

Updates, 6/20: "In a perceptive essay on Brick Lane, the literary critic James Wood noted that Ms Ali's novel brings some of the canonical concerns of 19th-century European fiction into a modern multicultural social setting," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "This fusion of an old style with a new reality gives the book its freshness and solidity, but it poses some problems for the film. Ms Gavron, working from a script by Abi Morgan and Laura Jones, veers between understatement and melodrama, and seems unable to convey the inner evolution that is the heart of the story."

"Brick Lane feels something like the Kramer Vs Kramer of Indian domestic issues," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club. "[I]t addresses sexual and social freedom rather than divorce and single parenting, but with the same feeling of slowly fumbling through the radical ideas that women are more than humble household servants, and men are more than simple stereotypes. Like Kramer, it can be insultingly timid about these ideas, and given that Indian writer-director Deepa Mehta (Fire, Earth, Water) has covered similar ground more boldly and beautifully, Brick Lane feels slight and late to the table. Still, its pretty musings about small-scale self-actualization can be seductive."

"Too many flashbacks and manufactured confrontations make you wonder whether Ali's book would have made for a better TV miniseries, a format that worked well for Zadie Smith's White Teeth," notes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York.

"Brick Lane has been whittled down from Monica Ali's expansive 2003 novel into a glossy but overly efficient drama that, like Nazneen's husband, is ultimately too ineffectual to make much of a dent," writes Jan Stuart in the Los Angeles Times.

"The real ace in the hole in Brick Lane is [Tannishtha] Chatterjee," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "On the screen or the soundtrack in nearly every scene, the actress navigates the occasionally strident and heavy-handed nature of Brick Lane with an alternately serene and anxious radiance that spreads into every shadowed corner in the present and nostalgically saturated landscape in the past."

Get Smart.

"So, the old turn-a-beloved-TV-show-into-a-hit-movie trick, eh?" David Carr talks with Get Smart's makers for the New York Times, notes that, "For every Mission: Impossible there is more than one Bewitched."

This one's a "pleasant surprise," declares the Voice's J Hoberman. "As directed by Peter Segal..., Get Smart redux is less a parody of a genre that had already passed into self-parody many moons before the TV show was in reruns, and more an all-purpose (and often quite funny) goofball action comedy in which ridiculous banter alternates with slapstick car chases and mid-air stunts."

Updated through 6/20.

Writing for Cinematical, Eric D Snider finds this "one of the better TV adaptations to come along in recent years. It's faithful to the original without being overly reverential, it modernizes the premise without mocking it, and you can fully enjoy it even if you've never seen the TV series. Oh, and best of all - it's funny."

But so far, these voices are the exceptions. "In this distressingly generic spy spoof, it's not Maxwell who's clueless, but the filmmakers," writes Newsweek's David Ansen.

"Since original series creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry are credited as 'consultants,' I like to envision them nodding noncommittally as they cashed their checks," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "No matter how many cute nods to the TV show they wedge in (the shoe phone, [Don] Adams's catchphrases, putting Hathaway in a bobbed wig that recalls the purring, witty 99 of Barbara Feldon), the makers of this Get Smart have essentially cranked out a dull slam-bang spectacle where laughs are tertiary. The reaction of a nostalgic Boomer who's witnessed a childhood favorite pissed on? Well, that's easy for you to say..."

"Yeah, TV show this, TV show that, but what use are the external signifiers without the sensibility that birthed them?" asks the L Magazine's Mark Asch.

At the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell lists "10 Movies That Made Get Smart Obsolete."

Lynda Gorov talks with Anne Hathaway for the Boston Globe.

Updates, 6/19: Robert Abele profiles Alan Arkin for the Los Angeles Times.

"At least [Steve] Carrell and Hathaway are well cast," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Get Smart tempts one toward the cynical thought that summer entertainment is deliberately meaningless. Should Hollywood ever grow up, Carrell and Hathaway would be ideal for another remake: God forbid it's TV's Moonlighting, but how about The Thin Man?"

James Rocchi talks with Arkin, too - for Cinematical.

Alonso Duralde has some advice for Carell: "Stay classy."

Updates, 6/20: "Reviewing a movie like Get Smart is pretty much like writing about the new packaging of a laundry detergent," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The box may be a brighter orange, the label a little louder (Improved! Kind Of!), but the stuff inside is pretty much the same as the stuff inside every box of detergent. And, in this case, the stuff inside consists of exactly what most Hollywood movies based on old sitcoms are made of, namely feeble and funny jokes, brand actors and enough special effects to give you some bang for your summertime buck."

"[T]he movie doesn't make the mistake of trying to re-create the show," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "[T]he picture, at its best, has an affable, easygoing glow, and features a number of silly, delightful sight gags... At its worst, though, Get Smart doesn't trust its audience to groove on comedy alone: It has to be an action movie, too, and the recurring explosions and chases feel forced and manic. The picture could have been streamlined into a swift, 90-minute comedy. Instead, it suffers from needless bloat. Get Smart tries to give its audience everything, and ends up delivering less."

"Seriously, comedy writers, what's wrong with an old-fashioned pratfall?" asks Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "Must every mishap cause severe trauma to Carell's gonads and soft tissue?" And as for those Bush jokes, "A lame duck in politics is a sitting duck for satire: If you held your fire until now, you don't deserve the laughs." Sing it.

"'Forget it, Jake, it's summertime,' a cynical voice whispers in my ear, and I know he's right," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "But Charlie Chaplin used to say that all he needed to make a comedy was a park, a policeman, a pretty girl and his divinely innocent self. Of course, he was touched by genius and the people who make movies like Get Smart are touched by no more than the unwise desire to spend someone else's money on special effects that are inherently antithetical to the antic."

James Rocchi poses a series of questions at Cinematical: "Does Carell and Hathaway's unexpectedly deft capacity for combining comedy and action make up for the fact that director Peter Segal (The Longest Yard, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps) seems to find fat people, or people in fat suits, the height of comedy? Does the smart plot idea for how to get desk-jockey Max out into the thick of things make up for the lazy reveal of the film's final twist, which not only comes out of nowhere but, worse, strikes with no force whatever? Does the presence and obvious strong efforts of motion picture veterans in behind-the-scenes positions like fight director James Lew (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Rush Hour 3), director of photography Dean Semler (The Road Warrior, Dances With Wolves) and editor Richard Pearson (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy) compensate for the times the script by sitcom veterans Tom J Astle and Matt Ember slumps into lazy jokes or meandering tedium?"

"A lot of things explode, but the movie never detonates," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

"As a reworking of one of the great 1960s TV comedies, you'd think being funny would be its main goal," writes Kenneth Turan. "But you would be wrong. Very, very wrong." Also in the Los Angeles Times, Denise Martin lists "10 things you may not know about Get Smart's Masi Oka."

"It's funny, exciting, preposterous, great to look at, and made with the same level of technical expertise we'd expect from a new Bond movie itself," writes Roger Ebert. "And all of that is very nice, but nicer still is the perfect pitch of the casting."

Carell "is indeed perfectly cast," notes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Unfortunately, Mr Carell's performance is frankly just about all that Get Smart has to recommend it."

"In updating a beloved TV show, the filmmakers have gone out of their way to excise everything that was fun about it," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"The comedy is only so-so, and the espionage action isn't much of a thrill either," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

Sight & Sound. July 08.

The online sample from Sight & Sound's Cannes package in the new issue comes from Nick James: "Instead of the flop romcoms and hopeless gangster films that were loudly boosted in the markets (having failed to be selected by the festival) of the dying 20th century, the British films being vaunted this year are all from genuine artistic talents - and were selected by Cannes. What's more, their producers and executives seem a more thoughtful breed than their forebears. And if it's a welcome anomaly that Steve McQueen's Hunger, Terence Davies's Of Time and the City, Duane Hopkins's Better Things and Thomas Clay's Soi Cowboy have talent, promise and quality to spare, then the warm reception given to most of them by French and American critics is almost unprecedented."

"The BFI, in partnership with Granada International and Studio Canal, has just completed an ambitious three-year £1 million programme to restore the first ten films directed by David Lean, from In Which We Serve (1942) to Hobson's Choice (1953)." A report from the BFI's Sonia Genaitay.

So Abdellatif Kechiche's third feature, La Graine et le Mulet, so far known as The Secret of the Grain on the festival circuit, is going to be known as Couscous in the UK. Ginette Vincendeau: "Against the familiar French divide between blockbuster comedies and auteur cinema - recently exacerbated by the runaway box-office success of films such as Les Bronzés 3 (2006) and Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks, 2008) - Couscous heralds the possibility (or illusion) of a return to the era of classical cinema, when French film-makers could supposedly combine artistic ambition with popular success."

"Though it received an 'A' certificate in Britain and a 'G' rating in America, [Jacques Demy's] The Pied Piper is a remarkably kindred work to Ken Russell's X-rated The Devils (1971), being in its own way an exposé of historical connivings between political Church and pious State, meant to resonate with the anti-establishment tenor of its times - which it still does," writes Tim Lucas.

For Kate Stables, The Edge of Love's "concentration on the Killicks' romance among the air-raid rubble rather than the Thomases' turbulent and more artistically complex coupling, seems a missed opportunity, one which again unbalances the movie and distances us from its cat's-cradle of relationships." This is the first review I've seen of Edge, the first in a series of forthcoming films involving Dylan Thomas in one way or another and, while expectations weren't high, it's still disheartening.

"Scattershot it might be, but My Winnipeg nudges at the heart of what it means to dream, and how our fantasies of who we are spring from the reality of where we are," writes Ryan Gilbey.

Cyd Charisse, 1922 - 2008.

Cyd Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russes as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday. She was 86....

Classically trained, she could dance anything, from a pas de deux in 1946's Ziegfeld Follies to the lowdown Mickey Spillane satire of 1956's The Band Wagon (with Astaire).

The AP.

See also: the Cyd Charisse Appreciation Page, Legs, Wikipedia and YouTube.

Updated through 6/19.

Updates, 6/18: "Ballet provided the backbone of her rock-solid technique, yet when she danced straight ballet on screen, something was missing; in trying to be overly correct for ballet dancing, Charisse looked too tall, too leggy," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door. "But give her something jazzy, something modern, something fifties, and she does things with her body that are hard to describe, let alone understand." And he revisits the "five essential Cyd Charisse films."

"Looking back on her work with Kelly and Astaire during a 2002 interview in the New York Times, Ms Charisse said that her husband, [Tony] Martin, always knew whom she had been dancing with," writes Robert Berkvist. "'If I was black and blue,' she said, 'it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn't have a scratch.' In a 1992 interview with the Times, she remembered dancing with Astaire to Michael Kidd's demanding choreography in Silk Stockings and said admiringly, 'Fred moved like glass.'"

"The turning point came with her mesmerizing, erotically charged performance in Singin' in the Rain's extended dance sequence, 'Broadway Melody,' in which she appeared as a long-stemmed speak-easy queen in three inch heels, bobbed hair and a fringe dress seducing Gene Kelly's dumbstruck hoofer," notes Josh R at Edward Copeland on Film.

"The impossibly leggy, mildly exotic, confident almost to the point of camp Charisse added counterpoint nuance to Kelly's weird barrel-chested blue-collar ballet," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It never felt like it was a perfect pairing, and that was maybe what was exciting about it: as a partner and as a choreographer, Kelly knew how to use and play off their incongruities."

"She was strong, lithe and 'drop-dead gorgeous to look at,' dance/film historian and author Larry Billman said of Charisse in her breakthrough performance," writes Mary Rourke in the Los Angeles Times. "After years when Hollywood's leading dancers were cute and fluffy, Cyd took dance to a more sensual realm in the 1950s,' Billman said in a September 2007 interview with the Times."

"When I think of Charisse, my heart usually leaps straight to Brigadoon," writes Nathaniel R. "It appears in my mind's eye far more often than its fairytale time table of once every 100 years."

"She was simply the greatest female screen dancer who ever lived," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

More from Robert Cashill.

"The rap on Cyd Charisse was that she was a far better dancer than an actress, but I don't care what you say," blogs the Boston Globe's Ty Burr: "The lady had presence."

"There were a lot of dancers who came up in the Hollywood system, but none were as elegant as Cyd Charisse," writes Marilyn Ferdinand. "Even when she sizzled, she reflected the refinement of her classical ballet training, and she was a model for dancers looking healthy instead of severely underfed."

Ronald Bergan opens his obit in the Guardian by noting that, in Singin' in the Rain, "In a few minutes, Charisse's film persona is encapsulated - at first cold and aloof, later melted by the love of the right man." And Band Wagon "featured two faces of Charisse, dark-haired and tough, or blonde and vulnerable. As Astaire says in the pastiche private-eye narration, 'She came to me in sections. She had more curves than a scenic railway.'"

"[T]he contrast between her usual lack of presence and the voltage she gave off as soon as she started throwing those legs around just made her seem that much more fascinating," writes Phil Nugent at Screengrab, "as if she were an ordinary mortal who had the ability, when her body heard the music, of communing with strange gods, from the hips down."

"[T]he Siren has a special place in her heart for Brigadoon for a number of reasons, but the greatest of these is undoubtedly that the movie was the first time she saw Cyd Charisse, the matchless dancer who died yesterday at age 86." And she's got a quote from David Shipman regarding that remarkable moment that appears in nearly every piece linked to in this entry:

If you were in an air-force cinema, circa 1952, you'll never forget the sound which greeted the appearance of Cyd Charisse halfway through the climactic ballet in Singin' in the Rain. The audience to a man greeted the sinuous leggy beauty with a loud and prolonged 'Ooooaah!' As she slithered round an understandably bewildered Gene Kelly, there was uproar in the cinema. Cyd Charisse didn't do more than dance in Singin' in the Rain and people remember her in it.

"The Siren leaves the final word to Astaire: 'That Cyd! When you've danced with her, you stay danced with.'"

Updates, 6/19: "It's impossible to imagine the Hollywood musical without her," writes Manohla Dargis. "Like the greatest American movie dancers, she showed how appearing on screen isn't just a matter of mouthing words, but also moving through and holding space. And she was a stunning physical specimen, at once lean and beautifully curved, with a wasp waist that seems to have been naturally designed for a man's hand to rest gently in its slope. She didn't do all that much with her face, though on occasion she let loose a deliciously evocative leer."

"And if I had to choose only one moment to remember Charisse by, it would be her silent duet with Astaire in The Band Wagon," writes Vera Klinkenborg, also in the New York Times. "The song is 'Dancing in the Dark,' the setting is Central Park, and, as usual, the overlapping illusions are nearly confounding. There they are - two professional dancers, carefully choreographed and rehearsed, playing two professional dancers dancing spontaneously on a soundstage that is meant to be Central Park, and all the while they are feigning an almost reproachful, amorous awareness of each other that conceals the hard-working awareness of two pros on the job. It was Cyd Charisse's remarkable gift to move through the hall of mirrors that is the American movie musical and never be caught glancing at herself."

Shorts, 6/17.

Raoul Walsh, eight of whose films will be featured on TCM throughout the summer, is "without doubt, the most neglected major figure in American movies," argues Allen Barra in the New York Sun.

"Sometimes when I'm grooving with cartoons, I'll say to myself, Why not just move into these and leave the rest alone?" Another fine entry from John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows.

"J Todd Anderson modestly describes himself as 'a guy who draws for the movies,' but because the movies include almost all of the Coen Brothers' renowned films - including No Country for Old Men, which won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Picture - his job as storyboard artist is considerably more prestigious than that." A profile from Linda S Price in American Artist, via Ted Zee.

"Throughout the course of the past twenty years, [Rakhshan] Bani-Etemad has achieved the kind of artistic success and popular appeal (at least domestically) that is not only unrivalled by any other Iranian female filmmaker but almost unparalleled by a contemporary female director working in any country," writes Stephen Snart at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "The Blue-veiled, her fifth feature-length film, is a beautiful tale of a suppressed love between a wealthy widower and a young factory worker."

"Years after the cycle of self-important, sentmimental 'hood' movies (anyone catch Straight Out of Brooklyn recently? Yikes. Matty Rich, wherever you are, please, keep it real) thankfully disappeared from American commercial movie screens, Pop Foul is the first to visit these themes with such unadorned pain, insidious intelligence and aesthetic grace," writes Brandon Harris at Hammer to Nail.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Sweet Smell of Success, FilmInFocus runs an extract from On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director in which Alexander Mackendrick recalls asking Clifford Odets to take a look at Ernest Lehman's first draft of the screenplay and do what "seemed a relatively simple job of story doctoring: polishing the dialogue and making some minor adjustments to the scene structure. We could not have been more wrong..."

Also, a new feature in the works: "Five travel writers on their favorite city films."

"P.O.V. is one of those occasional reminders that public broadcasting matters. Every year, like its complementary series Independent Lens, P.O.V. brings before national audiences the artists, perspectives and films that otherwise would find no home on television." In These Times senior editor Pat Aufderheide previews the series that begins on June 24.

Online scrolling tip. The Big Picture is the "best new blog of the year so far, hands down," says Jason Kottke, who, of course, would know.

Online viewing tip. "For a century, amateurs, collectors and archives have gathered films existing today only by miracle: bits of film eaten into by humidity or heat, decomposed or even in ashes, discovered right on time or just too late... These surviving images have withstood time..." Europa Film Treasures, via Dave Kehr.

DVDs, 6/17.

"Did Carmen Miranda invent performance art?" asks Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "From Cindy Sherman to Madonna, artists across the cultural spectrum have continued to build on her flamboyantly absurd representations of the feminine, now anthologized in a new box set from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.... No less than Jerry Lewis did a decade later, she brought an unpredictable anarchy to the staid business of studio filmmaking."

"Let's consider Danny Boyle's Sunshine as both a characteristically exaggerated response to environmental crisis and an extended visual pun on the term 'Enlightenment.'" And traxus4420 is off and running at culturemonkey.

The releasee of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days seems to have been delayed at the last minute, but even so, the film "may be the best of the Romanians, in part because, like [The Death of Mr Lazarescu], it constitutes a kind of state-of-the-art naturalism, down to the longueurs, underlighting, open-ended narrative and extraordinarily confident use of off-screen space," writes Michael Atkinson for the IFC. Also: "Here's why Diva was a global hit: it conjured a modern urban universe in which everyone is an impulsive, hell-or-high-water artiste, whether they're actually producing art or merely cluttering their rooms with wrecked cars and doing jigsaw puzzles. Everyone dallies and obsesses; aping Godard, [Jean-Jacques] Beineix sets up a suspenseful crime tale and then loiters in an apartment for a fat dose of flirting."

"By now, less pop-obsessive viewers probably have had their fill of films about the rise and fall of the music scene in Manchester, England, in the late 1970s and early 1980s - the post-punk era," writes Steve Dollar. But "Grant Gee's 2007 documentary [Joy Division] is a solid case of the best having been saved for last."

Also in the New York Sun: "The release of The Onion Movie might be an indicator of what is to come from the name that has consistently disrupted the comedy establishment," suggests S James Snyder.

Along with Movie Geeks United!, the House Next Door is revisiting the Summer of '83 and begins with a discussion of Krull: Steven Boone, Justine Elias, Annie Frisbie and John Lichman. Also: Sarah D Bunting and Joe Reid on Staying Alive.

Glenn Kenny presents his "High Definition DVD Consumer Guide #5: Please Put Out Better Movies Edition."

Online viewing tip. Chris Fujiwara, author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, comments on Night of the Demon (aka Curse of the Demon). Kevin Lee: "The film is perhaps never so unnerving as when it envisions evil in the simplest terms: a storm that descends with sudden implacable force on a children’s party; a slip of paper flapping relentlessly against a fire grate towards its own incineration; a man stumbling down railroad tracks, literally chasing after his life in vain."

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker (MSN), Paul Clark (Screengrab), DVD Talk and Peter Martin (Cinematical).

Fests and events, 6/17.

"Canadian filmmaker Paul Gross's Passchendaele will open the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival with its world premiere on September 4, 2008," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez.

"With Frameline Artistic Director Michael Lumpkin leaving his post after this year's San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, SF360.org felt it appropriate to ask an equally storied figure in LGBT film to help mark the occasion. Strand Releasing President Marcus Hu graciously agreed to speak with his old friend Lumpkin about Frameline, queer cinema and the future of this niche festival."

The festival opens Thursday and runs through June 29; at the Evening Class, Michael Hawley previews two docs, Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band and The Kinsey Sicks: Almost Infamous.

"It may not get the biggest audiences or hype amongst umpteen local film festivals, but Another Hole in the Head surely must have the most dedicated viewership of them all," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "To make a crass generalization: Either you're a horr