Interview. Courtney Hunt.

"When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt's Frozen River at this year's Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie 'put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,' my jaw went slack," recalls Ella Taylor in the Voice. "But Tarantino was raised by his mom, and if there's one thing this movie gets dead right, it's the desperation of impoverished single mothers trying to fend for their children. And if Frozen River finally gets the terrific actress Melissa Leo her place in the sun to boot, so much the better."

David D'Arcy talks with Hunt about the immigrant smuggling we rarely hear anything about: crossing the US-Canadian border.

Updated through 8/4.

"Frozen River isn't cinematically ambitious or formally adventurous, but it's built around powerful and nuanced performances by Leo, [Misty] Upham and Charlie McDermott," notes Andrew O'Hehir, introducing his interview with Hunt at Salon. "Furthermore, it showcases a confident director who uses her characters to fill out an engaging, well-constructed plot, and you can bet Hollywood execs are paying attention."

For the New York Times, Karen Durbin talks with Leo, who's been working on Veronika Decides to Die, based on Paulo Coelho's novel and also starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Thewlis.

Stephen Saito talks with Hunt, Leo and Upham for IFC.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Updates: For the New York Observer's Andrew Sarris, Frozen River "plays out as one of the strongest feminist statements I have ever seen onscreen.... Ms Leo and Ms Upham somehow project an aura of indestructibility around Ray and Lila that should prove thematically and spiritually invigorating for adult audiences with a feeling for the heroism of everyday life."

S James Snyder profiles Hunt for the L Magazine.

Updates, 7/31: "British filmmaker Mike Leigh, who has demonstrated some genuine feeling for underclass life (Hard Labour, Secrets and Lies, All or Nothing), told me he once reprimanded an art director who decorated the set of a poor family's home by 'dirtying up' the doorframes," recalls Armond White in the New York Press. "Leigh barked, 'Are your doorframes at home smudged? Then why would these be? These characters have self-respect.' A polite way of describing what's wrong with Frozen River, the new indie film about underclass life, would be to call it Smudged-Doorframe Cinema."

Interviews with Leo: Scott Tobias (AV Club) and Chuck Wilson (LA Weekly).

Updates, 8/1: "In many respects, Frozen River feels like a prototypical Sundance winner: It's plaintive and minor, small in scale and technical ambition, and concerned with issues affecting working mothers, the poor, Native Americans, and immigrants," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "What lends it distinction, if only mildly, are the engrossing particulars of the setting, with its uncommon glimpse into tribal law and reservation life, and Leo's performance, which brings overdue attention to a career spent laboring under the radar."

David Fear in Time Out New York: "That Hunt's thriller can't sustain tension suggests she still needs a few more films under her belt; the fact that Frozen River says the minimum about working-class life (it's hard) or modern Native Americans (they've been screwed) is less forgivable."

"Possibly the best thing about Frozen River is that the mechanics of its busy plot do not intrude awkwardly on the portrait it offers of harsh, pinched lives," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "In the end, you feel that Frozen River gives about as truthful a picture of American bleakness as it's possible for a movie to present. It is a movie that asks something of an audience, but it richly rewards our curiously rapt attention."

"Ms Leo's magnificent portrayal of a woman of indomitable grit and not an iota of self-pity makes Frozen River a compelling study of individual courage," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "She brings the same kind of gravity to the role that Patricia Neal did to Alma Brown in Hud 45 years ago."

"Melissa Leo owns Frozen River," agrees Meghan Keane in the New York Sun.

"At a time when films such as the blockbuster Sex and the City and the upcoming The Women present a female perspective based on consumerism, romance and the romance of consumption, Frozen River is a different kind of women's picture." Mark Olsen talks with Hunt for the Los Angeles Times.

Nathaniel Rogers talks with Leo and Hunt for Tribeca.

Brent Simon has a quick chat with Hunt for Vulture.

Update, 8/3: "With Frozen River, Hunt creates two remarkable roles and a fascinating situation," writes Marcy Dermansky. "With every passage over the frozen river, the relationship between the two women develops, as does our relationship with the characters. The suspense steadily builds."

Update, 8/4: "All in all, Frozen River is gripping stuff," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Except it's also rigged and cheaply manipulative. There's a turn near the end involving a young Pakistani couple - for some reason Ray decides they're terrorists - that's outlandish on every conceivable level. And the ending... Surely Hunt didn't mean to, but her testament to American gumption in the face of crushing poverty ends up affirming that crime pays, social consequences be damned."

Toronto 08. Docs lineup.

"One of the more passionate doc programmers, Toronto's Thom Powers, runs a good blog," notes Michael Jones. "He has the lineup here, with a tease that more is coming." And Michael picks out a few highlights.

Toronto runs from September 4 through 13.

DVDs, 7/29.

"Never hurrying, but never lingering, The Inglorious Bastards is a tribute to the kind of relaxed, professional B-list filmmaking that existed for decades before it was killed by television and rising production costs," writes Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun. "In [Enzo] Castellari's hands, a gang of naked, submachine-gun-wielding Nazi women comes off like just another surreal incident on the way to the Swiss border. In [Quentin] Tarantino's remake, it will probably be a breathless, glossy shot that reviewers will talk about for years. But while the remake will most likely have a Saving Private Ryan-size budget and A-list stars, it probably won't be able to recapture the original's sense of a professional team of men on a mission: to complete their movie against all odds."

"Yet another very good American movie that vanished from theaters in the blink of an eye but will be found enduring on on the DVD shelf is George A Romero's Diary of the Dead," writes Daniel Kasman. "The lean, but robust umpteenth entry in the director's decade-spanning zombie series, Diary of the Dead, on its modest scale, gets it all right: broad but brawny characterizations, stalwart, plucky survival, a healthy dose of social criticism, and uncomfortable, necessary violence." Related: Philippa Hawker's interview with Romero in the Age.

"Lucifer Rising exists as an intersection between two filmic ideas, and it is within this intersection that the film gains it's power," writes Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica: "more than any other film, Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising is about spectacle and hypnosis."

For Michael Atkinson, writing at IFC, Wholphin "might be the most relentlessly fascinating and inventive showcase for new short films in the country." Also: "The new Flicker Alley set, Perils of the New Land, is straight as an arrow, collecting pre-World War I silents that address, in of course outrageously pulpy and melodramatic and stereotypical ways, the issues facing turn-of-the-century immigrants in America (New York, precisely)."

Dave Kehr in the New York Times on Tyrone Power: "Though the source of his appeal is evident - his only rival for physical beauty on the Fox lot was his frequent costar, Loretta Young - the secret of his endurance is harder to pin down. Hollywood in the 1930s did not lack for strikingly handsome leading men, but while most of his chiseled brethren sooner or later fell by the wayside, Power continued to be a box office force until his premature death in 1958."

"I know of few films that reveal more of what 'life is about' than Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep." A review from J Robert Parks. Related: The Errata podcast.

"Dance Party, USA moves from a shocking, hilariously recognizable profane rant to the bloom of teen love, and it never misses a beat along the way," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. As for the other Aaron Katz film in Benten's box, "If Quiet City is annoying and fascinating in equal measure, it nonetheless offers another counter-argument to the supposedly monolithic nature of m*****core: it's the most gorgeous film out of the movement."

Peter Nellhaus: "The Free Will is ultimately about is the choices one makes in life, assuming that they are choices, the responsibility for the actions one takes, and that no matter what we do, we finally end up alone either in death or to face a future that can still offer unexpected possibilities." Also, Lee Kang-sheng's Help Me Eros.

Guy Savage has the Noir of the Week: Bob le flambeur.

Paul Matwychuk on Car Wash: "Even on my tiny iPod screen, the film was bursting with life, good humour, and a vivid sense of time and place."

Glenn Kenny's "Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" is now happening in the Auteurs' Notebook, and first up in the new locale is Budd Boetticher's Seminole, "an Eastern Western, as it were—it's set in Florida, and it star Rock Hudson as Lt Lance Caldwell, a West Point graduate with roots there, and connections to its peaceful Seminole tribe - a tribe that Caldwell's commanding officer, Major Harlan Degan (Richard Carlson), intends to drive out of the land.... The Optimum disc, alas, doesn’t do the film many favors."

Online viewing tip. Jim Emerson presents a "condensed version of David Fincher's 1999 comedy masterpiece, Fight Club, to accompany and expand on my personal/critical essay."

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker, DVD Talk, PopMatters and Slant.

Man on Wire, round 2.

Picking up from last week's entry, David D'Arcy's take, followed by more pointers.

Man on Wire, not only in theaters but also actually attracting sizable audiences, is about Philippe Petit's famous walk in the clouds on a cable stretched between the roofs of the two towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974, two days before Richard M Nixon resigned from the presidency. James Marsh's documentary begins as a parody of a caper movie, following the now-obligatory approach of using devices usually associated with fiction to to shape a documentary's narrative. This time, it works.

A group of Frenchmen and their American accomplices pile into a van - a la The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) or The French Connection - and sneak in workmen's clothes up to the roof of one of the WTC towers. Their plan is to suspend a wire from one of the towers to the other, to enable the high-wire performer to walk between the buildings.

Updated through 8/4.

Petit did it, as we all know, ending up in a jail for psychiatric cases (long enough for that to be part of his legend) and on the front pages of newspapers around the world, although the achievement of this elfin Marcel Marceau on a tightrope seemed to last all of 15 minutes, since Nixon fell so hard so soon afterwards. Nixon would be pardoned by his vice-president, Gerald Ford, and Petit worked out a deal to avoid any punishment for his very pardonable acts if he would put on a juggling and tightrope show for New York kids. Sounds surprisingly humane. That was a different New York.

Black and white imagery evokes that different city. Back then, the World Trade Center towers were already a kind of symbol for people outside the US that they never really were for Americans, or at least for New Yorkers who were used to tall buildings and knew that the builders of the towers had to go begging for tenants. The very existence of the towers made them something to conquer for Petit. We would see years later how that idea could be taken to a violent extreme. Bear in mind that a group of guys in rented vans were already trying to bring the towers down in 1993. Security wasn't much better then than it was when Petit and company snuck through in 1974.

Man on Wire makes extensive use of reenactment sequences, many of them ingenious, which will no doubt infuriate documentary purists. It's hard to know how Marsh could have told his story without them, since his location is - to put it carefully - no longer available. There are far more of these scenes than in Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, where the reenactments served more as billboards and bookends for scenes. They could still be trouble for the literal-minded (as was the case when SOP collided with the critics), but the lightness of the story and the verisimilitude of the action keep you going.

The music in the film about performance stirs up the mood effectively - generic ominous pacing from Michael Nyman (this movie's Philip Glass) during the plotting of the act as if clouds are gathering, fanfare of Vaughan Williams and Grieg as the team members motivate each other, and meditative solo piano by Eric Satie when Petit is finally alone on the wire. Obvious or not, the soundtrack builds the atmosphere. [That said, let's keep Godfrey Cheshire's reaction in mind as well - ed.]

Still, Marsh's documentary is a better reconstruction of the crime than of the time - I would have preferred a more generous flavoring of that era's New York - although the incredulity of one plotter on Petit's confinement, however short, in a psychiatric unit, shows an aspect of the gap between French and American culture: "We weren't crazy, we were stars," he says in outrage. And he was right.

The intrepid Petit was just as vulnerable to the temptations of celebrity as anyone, as you'll see in the film's sober ending. Part of the allure of being on top of the world was also being onstage alone, which seems a lot less dignified. But ambition doesn't always end up as a group thing. See this film, and then compare it to Werner Herzog's documentary from 1974, the same year as Petit's walk, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, an extraordinary look at a solitary young man defying heights and flying.

PS: Man on Wire achieved something extraordinary, earning more than $50,000 in its first weekend. If you don't think that's extraordinary, check Box Office Mojo for the numbers other docs have racked up. Of course, it's not the money (as they all say, with every drop of the sincerity of craven politicians), but maybe it really is too soon to write the obituary for the theatrical documentary just yet. Let's hope so.

- David D'Arcy

---

Chris Barsanti, writing at Filmcritic.com, finds this an "unaccountably thrilling story... One of the best things about Man on Wire is how little it tries to decipher Petit's actions, even with the copious amount of time it spends interviewing him and his accomplices."

Online listening tips. Petit and Marsh are guests on On Point; Ambrose Heron talks with Petit, too.

Updates, 7/30: Roger Ebert talks with Petit, too.

The Guardian's Ben Walters watches Petit perform now, on the street.

Update, 7/31: Online viewing tip. Brandon Harris with Marsh and Petit.

Updates, 8/1: And the film's opening in the UK: Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Trevor Johnston (Time Out) and Kevin Maher (London Times).

"Petit's girlfriend at the time, Annie Allix, offers some of the most moving testimonials, recalling how, as a shy young woman drawn by Petit's charisma, she gave up on her own dreams for years to help him follow his," notes Slate's Dana Stevens. "But the eloquent Allix is gallantly (and Gallically) accommodating. She speaks without bitterness or resentment of how she and Petit drifted apart in the wake of the event: 'It was beautiful that way.'"

Update, 8/4: "The best design movie of 2008 is not about a typeface. It's about a tightrope walker." Michael Beirut in Design Observer on "the timeless lesson of the power of a simple idea, beautifully realized."

Venice 08. Lineup.

As Wendy Mitchell reports for Screen, the Venice Film Festival has announced the lineup for its 65th edition. The fest opens on August 27 with Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading (screening Out of Competition) and runs through September 6.

Among the highlights reaped from a quick scan: New films by Darren Aronofsky, Hayao Miyazaki, Takeshi Kitano, Ferzan Ozpetek, Christian Petzold, Barbet Schroeder, Venice favorite Jia Zhangke, Abbas Kiarostami, Manoel de Oliveira, Agnès Varda, Ramin Bahrani, Lav Diaz and Ross McElwee.

Update, 7/30: For the Guardian, Jeremy Kay scans the lineup for signs of potential Oscar contenders.

Online viewing tip. "Let's Step Outside."

"The fight scene as it usually turns up in today's action spectacles - smeared, destabilized, fixated on chaos at the expense of clarity and precision - reflects the changing syntax, the all-around acceleration, of movies in general and Hollywood blockbusters in particular."

Taking widespread disgruntlement over the action sequences in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight as his cue, Dennis Lim introduces a series of clips, with notes on each, tracing the evolution of the fight scene at Slate: "The current vogue for chopped-up fights also raises the question: Are these hyperedited brawls any more successful than their more straightforward predecessors?"

Making The Wire.

On Wednesday, a symposium entitled Making The Wire will take place at the Museum of the Moving Image and Moving Image Source is gathering materials that even those far and away from Astoria, New York are going to want to read and watch.

For some time now, Kevin B Lee's video essays have been among the most exciting developments in film blogging, suggesting not an alternative but supplemental form of film criticism accessible to anyone online. Here, he and Matt Zoller Seitz have edited Andrew Dignan's analyses of The Wire's credit sequences (Season 1 and Season 2).

"The Wire is strikingly bereft of a central figure from whose perspective the story is told and whose voyage of self-awareness provides its raison d'etre," writes Dana Polen. Instead it suggests that in the complexly knit fabric that is the urban environment, any one figure is little more than a place-holder, a token that can always be replaced by someone else." Hence, the series is "like Balzac's fictional project, which aimed to offer a total physiognomy of the urban experience in which individual stories mattered only for their place in a larger context."

Related: Jürgen Fauth's Wire roundup.

Updates, 7/29: Nelson George explains why The Wire " is the best black TV show written mostly by white men."

And the video analyses of the credits for Seasons 3 and 4 are up.

Updates, 7/30: "The Wire is a show (like Twin Peaks or The Sopranos, Deadwood or Dexter) in whichthe music and montage are essential to bringing the viewer into the world of the show. Like a clearing of the mind as you go into meditation, these familiar (mantra-like) rituals help us leave our conscious surroundings behind and enter a different (but eventually quite familiar) imaginative terrain." Jim Emerson, too, on the credits sequences.

And the video for Season 5 is up.

Updates, 8/1: Vulture reports on the panel.

David Schwartz at the Source on a terrific scene (and the clip's there, too): "As engrossing as the chess scene is on first viewing, it gains in power on re-viewing, not only because we know the tragic fates of the three characters but also because we see how the chess lesson can be applied to much of the other action in the series. After all, in chess, the pieces don't control their own moves. And series creator David Simon's worldview is much closer to that of Greek tragedy - with its ambitious protagonists unaware that their fate is not entirely in their own hands - than to the more conventional view of most American literature, and television, where personality triumphs and good defeats evil."

Update, 8/14: Online listening tip. The full panel.

Interview. David Redmon.

In Mardi Gras: Made in China, David Redmon asks revelers in pre-Katrina New Orleans if they have any idea where the beads they're throwing in exchange for a glimpse of mammaries were made. In short, nope.

Laura Kern in the New York Times: "A startling look at both the effects of globalization and at a dramatic cultural divide, the film contrasts the lives of the Chinese, hard workers who are forced to make serious sacrifices at very young ages, with indulgent Americans intent on having a good time and seemingly at ease with their lack of awareness. With any luck, this film will manage to open a few closed eyes (or minds)."

James Van Maanen talks with Redmon about the many projects he's working on with producer Ashley Sabin and the many more they'll be distributing shortly.

Update, 7/29: At Hammer to Nail, Michael Tully finds Mardi Gras "an intelligent, thoughtful and entertaining exploration into the troubling effects of globalization."

Kubrick @ 80.

Via William Speruzzi comes a reminder that Stanley Kubrick would have turned 80 yesterday.

He also points to the Kubrick Site, where you find essays, discussion, reviews, interviews, a FAQ and other related resources.

Observer Film Quarterly. July 08.

Juliette Binoche graces the cover of the Observer's current Film Quarterly; the profile's by Hephzibah Anderson:

France's highest-paid actress is set to reveal several more unseen sides of herself this autumn, when a BFI Southbank retrospective, entitled Jubilations, will coincide with the premiere of In-I, a dance work co-created with her co-performer, London-born choreographer Akram Khan. Additionally, the BFI atrium will be showcasing Binoche's paintings of directors with whom she has worked and of herself in character.

As if that weren't achievement enough for one woman, a bilingual book will be published at the same time, composed not only of paintings, but also poems she has written about some of those same directors. And all of this after having just released five films in 10 months.

Related: Binoche's recent diary for the London Times.

"Cinematic new waves are announced with such frequency that it's hard to tell where one ends and the next begins," writes Ryan Gilbey. "But there is currently an unmistakable groundswell in British cinema, heralded by a clutch of directors who are chafing against the boundaries of narrative filmmaking, and in some cases dismantling them altogether." He talks with six: Matthew Thompson (Dummy), Joanna Hogg (Unrelated), Duane Hopkins (Better Things), Marianna Palka (Good Dick), Steve McQueen (Hunger) and Saul Dibb (The Duchess).

The London Film Festival will open on October 15 with the world premiere of Frost/Nixon. Jason Solomons considers the festival's "intent to become, instead of Venice or Toronto, the place for premieres" and to become, in general, "bigger and glitzier."

Solomons also gets Mel Brooks to recall hooking up with David Lynch for The Elephant Man: "I guess it was the outsider aspect that appealed to him. And that's where I think we met, mentally. My films, even if they're comic, they're about: 'Let's accept the bizarre. Let's learn more about these creatures, or these Jews.' I know the Elephant Man wasn't Jewish, but, to me, the story had all the aspects of anti-semitism and [Joseph] Merrick had all the traits of the classic wandering Jew."

"Kristin Scott Thomas gives an extraordinary performance, one of the best of her career, in I've Loved You So Long, which had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February," argues Killian Fox. Also, "Introducing... Michael Fassbender," star of Hunger and François Ozon's Angel.

And Fox asks novelist Siri Hustvedt about the films that have resonated in her life. And: Some big stars' modest debuts.

"Trilogies have been springing up all over, and choosing the top 10 is no longer an easy matter." Philip French gives it a go.

"These days, cannabis is popping up everywhere," notes Charles Gant. "Pineapple Express will be beaten into UK theatres by The Wackness, in which shrink Ben Kingsley dispenses therapy to teenage patient Josh Peck in exchange for little bags of weed. It will be followed this autumn by feature-length animation Free Jimmy, whose tagline, intriguingly, is: 'Four stoners, three gangsters and a million reasons to free one junkie elephant.' And recent weeks have seen two new announcements: the self-descriptive High School, from the producer of American Pie; and Shrink, another comedy about a psychiatrist pot-head, this time starring Kevin Spacey." A list of five best stoner comedies follows.

Guillermo del Toro takes another look into those famous sketchbooks.

"Elite Squad, released in the UK next month, proved to be one of the most explosive and controversial films in the history of Brazilian cinema." Tom Phillips reports.

A "blast from the past," as Film Comment calls them: novelist Howard Jacobson's 1993 interview with Spike Lee, conducted in the wake of the release of Malcolm X.

And there are brief previews of Ethan and Joel Coen's Burn After Reading, Steven Soderbergh's Che and Kevin MacDonald's State of Play.

Also in this week's Observer, though not in the Quarterly:

"Last year, US director Richard Shepard made the fictional The Hunting Party, inspired by an Esquire article in which a group of journalists set out to capture Radovan Karadzic in Bosnia." Killian Fox asks him, "How did you react to the arrest?"

"The crane cabbies of the world, the men (and now women) who climb 100 metres straight into the air every day to help build new concrete worlds, are an astonishing, serene, brave, contemplative lot, according to the graceful and revealing The Solitary Life of Cranes, winner of the FourDocs short film competion at last week's Britdoc Festival in Oxford." Euan Ferguson in the Observer.

Philip French considers Simone Signoret and reviews The Dark Knight, Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, Before the Rains, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, Paris, Baby Mama and Quiet City.

Mark Kermode's "DVD of the week": Funny Games US.

Youssef Chahine, 1926 - 2008.

Youssef Chahine, one of Egypt's most lauded movie directors whose films over nearly five decades often went on Fellini-esque flights of fancy and tackled social ills and Islamic fundamentalism, died Sunday in Cairo. He was 82 years old. His death comes about four weeks after he fell into a coma following a brain hemorrhage....

Chahine grew up speaking French and English better than Arabic, and many of his films were French co-productions, bringing criticism by some at home that he was not Arab - or Egyptian - enough. But his early films became classics of social realism, giving gritty depictions of the lowest in Egyptian society. In his 1958 Cairo Station, Chahine himself starred as Qenawi, a mentally retarded newspaper seller at Cairo's main railroad station, who becomes obsessed with a woman selling lemonade.

Updated through 7/30.

The Land in 1969, seen by some as his greatest film, told an epic story of peasant farmers and landowners struggling over land in the Nile Delta.

In his Alexandria Trilogy - Alexandria, Why?, An Egyptian Story, and Alexandria Again and Forever - Chahine turned autobiographical, recounting his childhood in his hometown, his love of Hollywood and his ambiguous feeling toward the United States, which he was drawn to but also saw as an overweening power.

Lee Keath, the AP.

See also: The site, Arab Media and Wikipedia.

Updates, 7/28: "Egyptian screen stars were among around 1,500 mourners who gathered at a Cairo church on Monday to bid farewell to Arab cinema's most celebrated director, Youssef Chahine, who died on Sunday aged 82," reports the AFP. "Hundreds of celebrities and officials were crammed into the Roman Catholic Church of the Resurrection, with hundreds more gathered outside as the controversial director's coffin was carried in, draped in the Egyptian flag."

"Chahine, notable for his large, thick-framed glasses, an impish face and elfin stature, was a warm, humorous man," recalls Sheila Whitaker in the Guardian:

His influences - Julien Duvivier's The Great Waltz, Busby Berkeley and Gene Kelly (to whom he dedicated Al-Yawm Al-Sadis, The Sixth Day, 1986) - plus his more Mediterranean than Muslim Alexandrian background and often non-linear filmmaking probably made him something of an outsider in the Arab world, while his adherence to Egyptian and Arab national, social and political concerns perhaps militated against wide acceptance in the west.

But his substantial achievements and courage are undeniable, and although his later films were, perhaps, less imaginative and innovative than in earlier days, notably in his use of song and dance, he ranks in any world pantheon.

"Mr Chahine, who directed his first feature film, Baba Amin, in 1950, was an eclectic and exuberant storyteller who could move easily across a range of styles and genres," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "In 28 movies - the last, Chaos, was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2007 - he shifted deftly from urban realism to florid melodrama, from historical allegory to musical comedy, from social criticism to autobiography. Whether his subject was the domestic struggles of poor and middle-class Cairenes, his own youth in Alexandria, the building of the Aswan Dam or the life of the medieval philosopher Averroes, Mr Chahine's films reflected his cosmopolitan, humanistic sensibility, as well as his deep interest in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history and society."

"He took on imperialism and fundamentalism alike, celebrated the liberty of body and soul, and offered himself warts and all as an emblem of his nation," blogs Nick Bradshaw for the Guardian. "Egypt's modern history is etched in his life's work."

"Jo, as he was known to almost everyone who crossed his path, was a warm, delightful individual and an endlessly inventive filmmaker, whose unpredictable mixture of styles and tones remains one of the best arguments I know for an anti-theoretical, 'impure' cinema," writes Dave Kehr.

Update, 7/29: "It's true he strove to dramatize the Arab condition; pushed back against the government's Islamist leanings; criticized President Hosni Mubarak; and founded, more or less, Egypt's film industry," blogs the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "But he was also born of a Greek mother and a Lebanese father in British-occupied Alexandria (the family spoke four languages), so in many ways his art was determined to try to look past those nationalistic boundaries to locate and illuminate the joy, ache, comedy, and cruelty of being alive."

Update, 7/30: "He was both a nationalist and an internationalist," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "He loved Hollywood movies - as a young man he went to Los Angeles, studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse - and he learned as much from their robust pace as he did from the gritty humanism of Italian neo-realist films and the romantic sweep of Indian cinema in its postwar Golden Age. He was both an art-house auteur and a director of popular hits, at least in the Arab crescent. He made political points, often different ones in different movies, but his didacticism was typically overwhelmed by his irrepressible urge to entertain."

Brooklyn Rail. July 08.

Amy Taubin has a fine, leisurely paced conversation with Harmony Korine in the new issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

"With his most recent theoretical construction, Eyes Upside Down, P Adams Sitney, author of Visionary Film, reveals an intricate matrix of aesthetic attributes with Ralph Waldo Emerson as its core source," writes Marcela Silva. "Sitney's power as a theoretician lies in his ability to translate the fluctuations of images into a language which is both as singular and poetic as the films they discuss."

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson "isn't a biographical picture in the strict sense - it is a vehicle to explore Thompson's insights as written and lived," writes Brian J Carreira. "Although covering the journalist's writing zenith from the mid-1960s through mid-70s, the documentary is not as much an exploration of that time as a meditation on this one. What happened then, through Thompson's aviator-framed eyes, serves as a springboard for discussion of what is happening now."

"The American Ruling Class is a self-proclaimed 'dramatic-documentary-musical' featuring ex-Harper's editor Lewis Lapham as guide on a voyage of discovery," writes Williams Cole, introducing his interview with director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros. "Part of the conceit involves following two Yale grads, one coming from a wealthy family and the other coming from more modest means, as they consider their career choices or 'inevitabilities.'... [O]ne memorable segment has Lapham bring the guys into a diner where, lo and behold, the immersion journalist Barbara Ehrenreich is waiting the tables, thus starting a musical number called 'Nickel and Dimed that various low-wage workers sing in their real places of employment.'"

David Wilentz reviews a few highlights of the recent Japan Cuts festival and looks back on the Tatsuya Nakadai Retrospective.

David N Meyer picks it up from there: "No character in the history of cinema suffers as much as Nakadai's Kaji in The Human Condition." Earlier: Last week's reviews.

Also: "Clearly derived from Italian Neo-Realist classics like Rome, Open City, John Cassavetes's groundbreaking Shadows (1959) and the Beat-influenced work of street photographers such as Gary Winogrand, [The Exiles'] power and flaws spring from the rigor of the filmmaker's naturalist approach."

Cyd Charisse "danced in three dimensions, sometimes appearing to torpedo from the screen toward the audience, others floating in the arms of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, both of whom treated her weightlessness as reverie," writes Sarahjane Blum. "Charisse might be regarded as the supernova that brought down the studio musical. As early as her premiere break out performance in Singing In the Rain it was clear that no one would dance on screen better than this transcendent beauty, whose ethereal calm made her seem to be from another planet. No one has even tried."

"[Bahman] Ghobadi creates an exchange," argues Camila de Onís. "He gives and takes; he makes Kurdish people real by presenting their lives in his own fashion. But his films transcend the ethnographic. They are humanist stories formed to make analogies between people and place, joy and despair, documentary and fiction. And they are funny. The situations are catastrophic, yet life goes on as it would and as it must."

"Savage Grace is, like its central characters, a pretty but poisonous piece of work," writes Tessa DeCarlo. "The film’s a disappointment in many respects, but it does offer the solace, sweet during these difficult economic times, of watching the sufferings and sins of people whose responsibility-sapping wealth hasn’t spared them from going deeply, horribly crazy. And [Julianne] Moore is terrific."

Mary Hanlon: "[I]n a nutshell The Happening is God-awful."

"The Wackness may be one of the best coming-of-age stories so far this decade," dares Makenna Goodman; "think Reality Bites meets Good Will Hunting. Which is to say, if there's only one film you see this summer, see The Wackness." Related: Jonathan Levine in MovieMaker on, yes, making the movie.

Fests and events, 7/23.

"The Venice Film Festival's Critics' Week has unveiled a promising lineup of nine first works, eight of which are world preems, with a prevalence of caustic comedies and pics taking the pulse of contempo life in cities such as Sarajevo, Kabul, Beijing, Olso and Istanbul." Nick Vivarelli reports for Variety. August 27 through September 6.

Toronto's unveiled titles for its programs Midnight Madness (Scott Weinberg picks out a few highlights at Cinematical), Sprockets Family Zone and Wavelengths. Bob Turnbull has begun making his to-see list and notes that TOFilmFest is tracking the overall lineup as it lines up, while First Thursday has reawakened with anticipation. September 4 through 13.

The Lumière Reader is still all over the New Zealand International Film Festivals.

Mark Bell presents Film Threat's Comic-Con preview. Tonight through Sunday.

"For five days, ballet lovers can feast on works like The Rediscovered Notebooks of Nina Vyroubova, from 1995; the 1997 film Serge Peretti, the Last Italian; and Violette et Mr B, made in 2001 and featuring the irrepressibly delightful Ms Verdy and George Balanchine." For the New York Times, Claudia La Rocco previews Dominique Delouche: Ballet Cinéaste, running at the Walter Reade from today through Sunday.

Previewing the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in the Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey focuses on the program "Italian Jews During Fascism." Also, Cheryl Eddy on Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Then: "Although I'm sure the program contains some fine narrative features, the eclectic selection of documentaries is what really grabbed my attention this year," writes Michael Hawley, who previews a dozen at the Evening Class. Tomorrow through August 11.

"On July 31 and August 1, [Profiles in History will] be auctioning off a ton of Hollywood props, costumes, and one-sheets, among other things, and just reading the catalog is enough to make a geek's mouth water," blogs Matt Blum for Wired. Via Coudal Partners.

For the Los Angeles Times, Susan King has a brief preview of Techno Chaplin: An Exploration of the Technology and Locations Used in Modern Times. Tomorrow evening at the Academy.

At the House Next Door, Ryland Walker Knight looks back on the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. So, too, does Girish.

Acquarello's reviews from At the Crossroads: Slovenian Cinema: Vesna, Valley of Peace, Spare Parts, Rooster's Breakfast, Raft of the Medusa and Dance in the Rain.

Tim Lucas had a grand time at Wonderfest and passes along photos snapped by Joe Busam.

"The Asian American International Film Festival concluded its 2008 edition here in NYC this past Saturday, and I wanted to draw H2N readers' attention to a couple of highlights," writes Nelson Kim.

DVDs, 7/23.

Let's start with lists because, as much as I try to keep the Daily not about me, to be asked to draw one up by Criterion is pretty damn exciting. The second list to mention is Simon Augustine's terrifically annotated "Most Spiritually Affecting Buddhist Movies" at the main site.

Now then: "The behemothic, almost impossible to see, hardcore-critic-exalted art film legends keep coming at us on DVD - will there be any Holy Grails left? - but it's likely that no movie has been awaited as intensely and with as high expectations as Béla Tarr's Satantango (1994)," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC. "Finally, after literally years of rumors and broken promises and restoration troubles, Facets has brought this cathedral of a movie to disc, and we can all explore its frontiers at will.... Films like Satantango may not necessarily change your life, but they cannot help but become a part of it once they are experienced." Updates, 7/24: Jason Anderson for Artforum: "It may sound absurd to say that a seven-hour movie has hardly a wasted moment - as famously insisted by Susan Sontag - but Tarr's minimalism has maximum impact, especially when the film's satiric nature becomes more prominent in the final hour." Armond White in the New York Press: "Out of the many words expended by journalists and scholars attempting to describe and catalog this epic-length art-film, the definitive assessment actually came from film critic Dennis Delrogh who astutely noted, 'It could be a great film if it was edited.'" Update, 7/26: Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine.

Also reviewed: Eagle Shooting Heroes, "a Hong Kong self-parody that's as utterly goofy and bubbly and schticky as any Keystone Kops two-reeler, but packed with ordinarily stoic stars (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Leslie Cheung, Jacky Cheung, Tony Leung Ka Fai, etc) making ridiculous hay of their screen personas and the entire wuxia pian genre."

"One of the (many) reasons I probably connect so strongly with David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) is that, by capturing clinical depression more accurately than any other movie I've ever seen (though Laurent Cantet's Time Out and Eric Steel's The Bridge delve mighty deep into that abyss), it helped shake me out of the grips of a depression that was sucking me down at the time." Jim Emerson: "I was the only person in the theater convulsed with laughter from beginning to end, because it was liberating, exhilarating, to see the truth of my own inner experience reflected back at me in its funhouse mirror."

With the American Film Theatre series re-released as a box set, Michael Barrett explains the concept behind the works produced between 1973 and 1975.

Michael W Phillips Jr enjoys Cecil B DeMille's Don't Change Your Husband, "generally a smooth, arch, enjoyable romp; the action moves quickly, there are real sparks between [Gloria] Swanson and [Lew] Cody, and the cross-cutting between [Elliot] Dexter's transformation from schlub to hunk and Swanson's realization that the grass is always greener is particularly good."

That Spaced set sounds like quite a package. It comes "complete with all the extra material created for the British special editions," notes Grady Hendrix. "Also included are new commentaries from fans of the series such as Quentin Tarantino; Matt Stone of South Park; Diablo Cody, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Juno, and director Kevin Smith. It's a dizzying display of talent lined up to worship at the altar of a half-hour sitcom about two loser roommates who pretend to be married in order to land an apartment." More from Noel Murray (AV Club) and Craig Phillips (Guru), while Alison Willmore rounds up more linkage.

Back in the New York Sun, Bret McCabe: "Think of Electroma as equal parts THX 1138 and Zabriskie Point - a meditation on the terrible vulnerability of being human and alone in this world, told entirely with robots. It might not be what Daft Punk's fans were expecting to see, but in its own powerful way, it's a minor masterpiece of personal filmmaking." More from Mike Plante in Filmmaker.

Bill Weber in Slant on André Téchiné: 4-Film Collector's Edition: "The bare-bones treatment doesn't make this representative selection from a major auteur's sober, elegiac vision of late 20th-century French life any less valuable."

"My Darling Clementine envisages the Western as the American answer to Shakespearean tragedy, and so culminates Ford's movement away from the democratic laughter-space of his earlier films," writes Billy Stevenson.

"Daisies is the kind of film that just sweeps one along in its antic merriment," writes Marilyn Ferdinand.

"If there's one film that epitomizes the power of environment over libido, it has to be Lawrence Kasdan's directorial debut, the totally-80s noir Body Heat, which takes place during a Florida heat wave (does it get any hotter than that?)." Lauren Wissot at the SpoutBlog.

"[W]atching Mad Men, my mind kept going back to one of my favorite Manhattan movies, 1957's Sweet Smell of Success," blogs James Rocchi; "like Mad Men, it takes place in New York's dog-eat-dog media world, and like Mad Men it's a celebration of good times and bad people - there's plenty of drinking, carousing and blunt behavior in it, and it gets plenty of mileage out of men in elegant suits doing inelegant things. Starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, I heartily recommend Sweet Smell of Success to anyone who's got the Mad Men bug... or, for that matter, for anyone who loves a great movie."

Beyond R1:

• "The greatest of Frank Borzage's silent films, The River (1929) gave Hollywood's foremost exponent of melodrama (I realize that I am slighting Griffith - I suspect that Borzage would not have approved of my disrespect) a hint of realism on which to hang his hat, as well as ample opportunity for abstraction and extremism." Dan Sallitt in the Auteurs' Notebook.

• The Siren fumes at studios for sitting on prints while foreign DVD distributors scramble to make what they can available on DVD: "What becomes of a great film if it is confined to highly expensive overseas orders, bootleg copies made by friends, a late-night Turner Classic Movies screening or the occasional festival screening? You might as well take the score for Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, stick it in a closet and bring it out once a decade. You're slowly killing the potential audience for the lesser-known movies, virtually guaranteeing that the broad taste for classics as something more than antique curios is fated to wither and die."

• Glenn Kenny's "Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report": "For its first hour or so, The Devil, Probably, Robert Bresson's 1977 film, seems like the most difficult of the inimitable master's works, for the most banal of reasons: that is, the viewer really just wants to give its putative protagonist a sharp smack in the chops."

Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee comments on GW Pabst's The Threepenny Opera, with a special emphasis on Lotte Lenya's Brechtian performance. Further notes.

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

CSNY: Déjà Vu.

"Directed by [Neil] Young (credited as Bernard Shakey), CSNY: Déjà Vu presents the foursome's summer of dove (though the hatchets buried between them seem to have shallow graves) as part tour documentary, part polemic for-and-by-the-people," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice.

When, at SF360, Dennis Harvey previewed a recent screening in San Francisco, he noted that Young's "message is likely to induce a whole lot more fist-pumping than cat-calling. Not so some of the audiences depicted in Déjà Vu, notably those in Atlanta, where the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion tour's unabashedly agitative content - one song performed is 'Let's Impeach the President' [video] and disillusioned Iraq war vets are interviewed - sparks some outrage by 'patriotic' attendees who didn't want anti-war protesting (at least not against the current war) getting in the way of those nostalgic songs and four-part harmonies."

Updated through 7/27.

At Slant, Andrew Schenker picks it up from there: "If the rest of Young's film rarely reaches the same level of intensity, it remains largely compelling in its consideration of the struggles of musicians to meld their art with a political message and present it to a largely indifferent public who just wants to rock out.... [A]s an inspiring call to arms for engaged artwork in a cultural climate that demands unthinking entertainment (even as the film acknowledges the ultimate inability of artists to effect real social change), CSNY: Déjà Vu can be rather heady indeed."

Ben Sisario talks with Young and the band for the New York Times.

Updates, 7/25: In the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger finds the doc "has some delicious moments, but you never quite shake the feeling that it's documenting a tempest in a teapot."

"Some of the new songs are genuinely touching, while others are a bit creaky; portraits of Iraq vets and their families deliver undeniable pathos," writes Stephen Garrett in Time Out New York. "The core of this self-congratulatory call to arms, though, is a portrait of a geezer protest group still singing sweet songs but desperate for a voice."

"Young's ambitious combination of rockumentary and war protest piece... is, true to form, a bit of a mess," writes Andrew Wright in the Stranger. "Unlike his albums, however, there's no spidery whammy-bar wizardry here to balance things out."

"Young intends to show a country divided, but the noise bleeds as if this was a cable-TV shoutfest. and the music isn't much of a relief either, mostly because Young keeps cutting away from the performances," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Tom Huddleston talks with Young for Time Out.

Update, 7/27: Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical on the Atlanta crowd: "One man suggests that we shouldn't criticize the government because 'they're smarter than us.' Another girl sums up Young's performance: 'It was too political.' One interviewer brings up the Dixie Chicks, to which a concertgoer responds: 'If it was the Dixie Chicks we wouldn't be here.' Both CSNY: Déjà vu and the 2006 Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing have that in common: that kind of hysterical, instantaneous mob mentality that disregards rhyme or reason."

Brideshead Revisited.

"The images from the 11-episode mini-series are still vivid, 27 years later," writes Sarah Lyall in the New York Times. "It is those lingering memories, even more than Evelyn Waugh's novel, that anyone attempting to turn Brideshead Revisited into a feature film for the first time naturally has to contend with. And so as not to contaminate his approach Julian Jarrold, the director, studiously avoided the mini-series - all that elegiac emotion, spread out over 659 languorous minutes - and returned to the book."

An accompanying slide show focuses on the work of costume designer Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh.

Updated through 7/25.

"[T]hough I can imagine Waugh rolling his eyes at the very idea of Brideshead Revisited as 'a heartbreaking romantic epic,' this remake is, often inadvertently, closer to the novel's spirit than the sepulchral television series, albeit still not half as waggishly Waugh-ish as Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's delightfully naughty interpretation of Vile Bodies," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"In the early 80s, you could still get away with telling a gay love story without daring to speak its name," notes Dan Callahan in Slant. "In 2008, there's no way to leave the Charles and Sebastian question open, which says a lot about social progress but also tells us why Waugh's story doesn't work anymore.... This new Brideshead takes a step in the right direction, but it's time some radical writer or filmmaker dared to leave out the dim Julia charade and let Charles and Sebastian play out their Isherwood/Auden Oxford love match to its full."

"Waugh, a Catholic convert, intended Brideshead to express his deep faith during a time of newly chic godlessness," notes Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly. "This Brideshead Revisited doesn't want to convert atheists into believers. Director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) and screenwriters Andrew Davies (the BBC's Pride and Prejudice) and Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland) even end their film one step sooner than the novel, which has Charles climactically kneeling down in a chapel, fully flip-flopped. Any adaptation ought to be its own thing, but the film's hesitation to follow its source to the end produces a confused, schizophrenic work."

"We pride ourselves in America on the absence of anything as rigid as the British class system Waugh depicts and dissects so brilliantly in Brideshead Revisited," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Still, I think we Americans have much to identify with in Mr Jarrold's insightful rendering of the material and spiritual aspirations in the life of an arriviste, no better, and no worse, than the great majority of our own young seekers after the American Dream. In this respect, Michael Gambon's death scene as a repentant Lord Marchmain encapsulates one of the most profound manifestations of the eternal struggle between faith and doubt it has ever been my privilege to witness."

"The new Brideshead Revisited had a turbulent production history." Tom Teodorczuk traces it in the New York Sun.

Update: "As The Dark Knight is comic-book nerd holy scripture, Brideshead Revisited serves the same purpose to fans of a genre I personally refer to as Fancy British People Sitting Around Staggeringly Huge Mansions Being Civilized," writes Dave White at MSNBC. "And Emma Thompson is that genre's Batman." Here, "Thompson's Lady Marchmain, the sternly rigid and suffocating Catholic matriarch of the titular ancestral home, is the drummer that keeps the slow, doomed beat of this remixed version." Sidebar: "Fancy British People Sitting Around Staggeringly Huge Mansions Being Civilized. I love movies about this sort of thing."

Updates, 7/25: "[T]edious, confused and banal," declares AO Scott. "It is not Mr Jarrold's fault that this landscape has been so heavily trodden over by others. But he and the screenwriters, Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, can be blamed for finding so little new or interesting to say about it, and for systematically stripping Waugh's novel of its telling nuances and provocative ideas."

Also in the New York Times, Ginia Bellafante revisits the 1981 series: "Brideshead Revisited was the sort of epic television event that gave rise to phrases like 'epic television event.' Among its legacies, it helped establish Jeremy Irons as a star.... Twenty-six years after its American broadcast, Brideshead Revisited, which was rereleased on DVD in 2006, is both pleasure and punishment, anachronism and forecast."

"Jarrold seems to believe that given the charged circumstances, little more than focusing on the apparel and furnishing is required," writes Leonard Klady at Movie City News. "His camera lingers and obsesses on accoutrements as if bored by the passions of the flesh and blood inhabitants of this antiquated realm. Thankfully the performers will have no truck with his bias and collectively comprise a viper's nest from which its protagonist will not emerge unbitten."

"To their credit, the filmmakers don't shy away from the novel's implication that Charles is in many ways a sort of human hand grenade that fate (or, per Waugh, grace) has rolled into a household full of blue bloods to hasten the job of self-destruction that they have already begun themselves," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Like many of the themes and tropes common to Waugh's novel and the Granada series, Charles's culpability is in the new Brideshead Revisited somewhere; one just has to find it during those rare moments when the film isn't busy making passionate love to the furniture."

"By focusing on Charles, Sebastian, and Julia, the film gives short shrift to some of the story's crucial historical context," argues Albert Williams in the Chicago Reader. "Waugh was writing about his own generation - people born in the first decade of a new century who keenly appreciated the legacy of Victoria's empire but foresaw its imminent decay. (And what a generation it was: Waugh's literary contemporaries included Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene, George Orwell, TH White, Nancy Mitford, Mary Renault, Anthony Powell and WH Auden.) Jarrold fails to capture the excitement of 1920s Oxford, a hotbed of intellectual and artistic exploration, and the screenplay reduces many of the novel's fascinating secondary characters to cameo roles... On the other hand, Jarrold does offer an intriguing take on an enduring literary mystery: the extent to which Charles and Sebastian's 'romantic friendship' is sexual."

"It lacks the visual pyrotechnics of Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, but Jarrold's movie is otherwise a kindred spirit, stripped of voiceover and other markers of literary bona fides," writes Sam Adams at the AV Club. "It's a movie of its own, not merely an attempt to cram as much of its source as possible within the confines of a theatrical feature."

Roger Ebert finds it "a good, sound example of the British period drama; mid-range Merchant-Ivory, you could say."

"[Ben] Whishaw makes a fantastic Sebastian, sympathetic yet untouchable in his headlong dash into alcoholism, but [Hayley] Atwell has exactly the wrong look for the part [of Julia]," argues Annie Wagner in the Stranger.

"Rather than emphasize Sebastian's larger-than-life campiness, Whishaw plays him as a tragic fading flower," notes Hank Sartin in Time Out New York. "Curiously, the changes heighten the drama, but make the film a more generic costumer about lovely country estates and British class issues."

Michael Ordoña profiles Matthew Goode for the Los Angeles Times.

"Brideshead Revisited is untaxing, pleasant enough to watch. But I'm still waiting to be seriously discomfited by it." Richard Schickel explains in Time.

"[D]o not, when attempting any course of reading aimed at appreciating Waugh's wit, give undue attention to Brideshead RevisitedTroy Patterson in Slate. "There's a comic novel in there, but it is not, as the common expression goes, struggling to get out. It's lodged there quite contentedly... 'Waugh wrote Brideshead with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence,' Martin Amis once remarked. 'Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise.'"

Erica Abeel talks with Jarrold for indieWIRE.

The Order of Myths.

"Margaret Brown's penetrating The Order of Myths... explores a potentially enraging subject - rigidly upheld racial segregation in the country's oldest Mardi Gras celebration, in Mobile, Alabama - but her touch is so unforced and her gaze so open that no one is bruised," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The situation is heartbreaking, the people... inured. Set. Following rituals passed down from evil times, too timid or unimaginative or, maybe, although it's well below the surface these days, racist to challenge them. You just don't know."

"Brown hasn't made agit-prop or a heavy-handed exposé of the obvious (viz., Southern racism is alive and well, just more genteel and better-disguised)," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. "Quietly shocking, The Order of Myths is a deft, engrossing cross-section of Mobile life, heavy on local color and insight."

Updated through 7/27.

"Easy enough for the cosmopolitan viewer to feel comfortably superior to Brown's misguided subjects (of both races) who are willing to accept such an embarrassing state of affairs, but the filmmaker does a good job of suggesting just how strong a pull tradition continues to exert on Southern culture and how that culture's unquestioned customs - having taken on the order of myths - tend to close off any discussion of potential change," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "So when the African-American king and queen attend the coronation ceremony of their white counterparts and are moved to tears by the warm reception they receive, it would be easy enough to scoff at the naïve pleasure they take in a vaguely condescending recognition, but when we take into account the cultural framework that makes their very attendance into something of a radical gesture, it becomes clear that the situation is fraught with unseen complexities that makes nonsense of such a hastily registered response. If, despite a rather too-abrupt ending and a somewhat indifferent visual conception, Brown's film can be termed a success, its principal achievement is in giving us some measure of these complexities."

"In his Variety review of the film, the progressively problematic John Anderson criticized Brown for essentially mocking her subjects, and while I think that's a misguided read, I can see where he gets it," notes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It's a personal doc in which the person gracefully bounces the spotlight on to others. To imply that this kind of subtle, displaced autobiography is exploitative, especially in contrast to some of the more self-indulgent works of non-fiction coming off the festival circuit, feels like a knee-jerk miscalculation."

"Even if [Brown] occasionally sidesteps potentially explosive subplots, as when Mobile's shameful legacy of modern lynching is left on the back burner, her Myths is an essential investigation of American mask and reality," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Update: For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Brown "about the challenges of filming secretive organizations, her mother's anticipated response to a burning cross in her yard, and the rule about when it's OK to leave your friend's bad movie."

Updates, 7/25: "More than most, Ms Brown knows that there's nothing black and white about race in America, and nothing specifically Southern about its calamities," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Or maybe she's just more honest. The extent of her sincerity doesn't become apparent until late in the proceedings, when she reveals a personal connection to Mobile that gives this very fine movie a bracing emotional kicker. In contrast to the cloistered, all-white Mardi Gras membership group (called a mystic society) that gives the movie its poetic and freighted title, Ms Brown has a beautiful grasp of gray."

"The tendency to skew toward a Rainbow Coalition vibe makes it feel like part of the story is MIA, yet this microcosmic look at race relations is a great reminder that, even in the year of Obama, we remain a nation divided between black and white," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

"[I]t is the kind of illuminating work that sends audiences stumbling home in a wide-eyed state of astonishment," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun.

At the AV Club, Noel Murray gives the doc a B+.

"The Order of Myths is not some Yankee carpetbagger's exposé on the lingering effects of Deep South white supremacy, although they are as inescapable as the Gulf Coast humidity," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Brown is a white Mobile native, with a personal connection to the city's Mardi Gras history that is revealed late in the film. She views Mardi Gras in Mobile - it's the oldest such tradition in America, because the city was founded before New Orleans - with a combination of ruthlessness and tenderness."

"[L]ike gently lifting a decaying flagstone with a twig, Brown has managed, in a fleet 75 minutes, to uncover quite a lot about (obviously) America's entrenched racism and (perhaps not so obviously) why our presumably modern sensibilities allow for its continuity," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE, who also notes, "This is highly sophisticated nonfiction filmmaking, and as lensed by Michael Simmonds, the cinematographer on Ramin Bahrani's lovely Chop Shop, made wonderfully vivid, especially in the final nighttime moments of the Carnival, popping with rich velvety purples and reds."

"The 'docs are dead' mantra... is perhaps most harmful in the way it compresses the varied modes of documentary practice into yet another genre to be compared and contrasted alongside 'blockbusters,' 'foreign films' and 'romantic comedies'; it makes it easier for audiences to forget the unlimited richness of documentary practice," writes Reverse Shot's Jeff Reichert. "The pundits hurt, but the filmmakers themselves have hurt matters worse.... [W]hy would people go to docs when the recipe so often boils down to little more than: Hot Button Issue + Sketchy 'Cultural Impact' of Said Issue + How Issue Affects My Family, Man + Gotcha! Exposé Moment –Attempts at Aesthetic Unity = Film. Thank goodness then for the bracing eye and refreshing candor of Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths."

IFC's Alison Willmore talks with Brown.

Update, 7/27: "The Order of Myths is less a vitriolic critique than a considerate, despairing depiction of the intractable sway exerted by long-held, unpleasant traditions," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical. "Accepted it unquestionably is. But as Brown's shrewd doc makes clear through tight editorial juxtapositions, telling snapshots, and refusal to belittle or disparage her sometimes-repugnant subjects, acceptable it most certainly is not."

Boy A.

"Adapted by Mark O'Rowe from Jonathan Trigell's novel, and directed by John Crowley, Boy A is a brutally soulful film that tells the tale of a young man trying to forge a new life and identity after serving time for a murder committed as a boy," writes Ernest Hardy. "The film's both smart and devastating as it unthreads interwoven questions about redemption, justice, and the pivotal role of history in shaping an individual and his actions." Also in the Voice: John Anderson talks with Crowley.

"In some ways Boy A is a throwback to the sooty kitchen-sink realism of early-60s British films by Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger, which portrayed a depressed, alienated working class teetering between rage and hopelessness in a stagnant economy," notes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

Updated through 7/25.

"Delightfully ambiguous mindgames and rapturously exquisite cinematography aside, this is an actor-driven narrative of an endearing shy guy winning over a surrogate father (Peter Mullan), a devoted girlfriend (Katie Lyons) and his co-workers," writes Benjamin Sutton in the L Magazine.

Andrew Garfield's performance as Jack, that is, Boy A, is "career-making" for the Playlist, while New York's David Edelstein finds it to be "an amazingly vivid performance that strikes me as wrong. He's a simpleton, an innocent - more childish in his affect than the kid (Alfie Owen) who plays him in flashbacks."

Back to the Playlist: "'For all its sensitivity, thoughtful sobriety, and sound performances, though, Boy A finally permits itself an excessive number of contrived and/or clichéd gestures,' writes Slant's Nick Schager and he's spot-on."

"Crowley's film is a compassionate antidote to the British (and global) ruling elite's 'law-and-order' mania - a socially regressive preoccupation with containing the population and desensitizing it in the process," argues Joanne Laurier at the WSWS. "Its appearance also reflects a shift in popular mood against this drive."

Howard Feinstein talks with Crowley for indieWIRE.

At Film Forum through August 5.

Updates: "For all the powerfully human sentiment on display here (particularly on the part of Garfield and Mullan), Boy A evinces a specifically tragic northern UK spirit that evokes the work of Shane Meadows or even Andrea Arnold's Scottish-set Red Road, and will make it a bitter pill for many to swallow," writes Chris Barsanti in Film Journal International. "The stabs of warmth that come through the institutional bleakness are intermittent and all the more powerfully felt once dissipated."

"If the possibility of exposure and rejection for bygone transgressions hums queasily under even the most blissful moments, such danger only intensifies Boy A's clear-eyed pathos: the potential for devastation all the more reason to embrace momentary happiness," writes Matt Connolly in Reverse Shot.

"Perfectly portraying Jack's awkward winsomeness, Garfield is precisely the halfway point between Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) and Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan), heartthrob and space cadet," writes Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. "Garfield had me from the first shot, but later, in a long sequence depicting his first night out with his new coworkers, his transition from wondering simpleton to spastic, drug-induced freak (his dance moves are the work of a true physical comedian) to mad heroic avenger, he found a place into a short list of actors I'm most excited about following (Garfield will next be seen alongside Heath Ledger and Boy A costar Katie Lyons in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus)."

Update, 7/24: Mark Olsen profiles Garfield for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 7/25: "Only time will tell whether Irish director John Crowley's Boy A can tap into the art-house audience that fell for John Carney's Once, and to a lesser extent for Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love and Shane Meadows's This Is England," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's arguably more old-fashioned than any of those movies, channeling a strain of dark British social realism that stretches back to the 1950s, but Boy A is a compelling, compact melodrama that packs an emotional wallop. It's my nominee for sleeper surprise of the summer, at least so far."

"The movie belongs... to Garfield," writes David Fear in Time Out New York: "Feral, paranoid and childlike, his Jack is a walking open wound. It's the type of vulnerable performance that turns an ordinary drama into something truly devastating."

Gary Goldstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times, hopes Garfield "will be remembered at this year's Independent Spirit Awards."

"Boy A is so excessively mannered that the story's human element (misunderstood youth, society's indifference) is lost," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Criterion's Vampyr.

"The relationship between the physical and the spiritual figures heavily in the climax of Vampyr, Dreyer's most thoroughgoing break with conventional realism, with the scariest sequence in this strangest of horror movies predicated on a vision of body and soul ripped asunder," writes Joshua Land at Moving Image Source. "It's only the most dramatic example of how Vampyr approaches many of the same basic questions as the more overtly philosophical later films, questions about the relationship between our systems of belief, religious and otherwise, and our means of knowing and experiencing the world. In Vampyr, the narrative becomes merely one more illusion to be peeled away in Dreyer's pursuit of inner realities."

Updated through 7/23.

The New York Times' Dave Kehr notes that this Criterion release is based on a restoration of the German version overseen by Martin Koerber: "The print is still not pristine, but the signs of age and wear that remain add to the film's mystique: it seems itself an ancient, arcane curio, the cinematic equivalent of the thick little book of vampire lore that falls into the hands of the film's passive hero. Seen today, Vampyr seems to belong less to a narrative tradition than to the avant-garde genre that the critic P Adams Sitney has defined as the 'trance film,' a form that extends from Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet (1930) through the work of Maya Deren, James Broughton and Gregory Markopoulos."

"I generally rank it not only as one of the four or five greatest horror films, but also as one of the greatest films ever made, regardless of genre," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at GC's Guru. "It's a masterpiece that still gives me the chills."

Don Kaye relishes the extras at Fangoria and notes that Vampyr is "a cornerstone of horror cinema, not just because it's so supremely unsettling, but because it proves than even a genre looked down upon by so many can be indisputably elevated into art."

"'[M]ust-own', 'essential' all seem understating the value," adds Gary W Tooze at DVD Beaver. "Along with ITV's Blu-ray of Black Narcissus this is my personal favorite DVD of the Year to date."

"It's a movie that viewers have to work at to understand, and screening this film isn't a passive event," notes John Sinnott at DVD Talk.

Update, 7/23: "Vampyr, like Murnau's Nosferatu, is a film that creates a unique and unreproducible atmosphere. It is a perfect melding of genius and available technology; it is one of the most vividly variegated visual works ever." Glenn Kenny thinks back to the day in 1980 that he saw it first.

Filmmaker. Summer 08.

The new issue of Filmmaker features the 10th annual survey of "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and, on the blog, Jason Guerrasio offers links to past roundups back to 2001, plus the names of those who made the grade from 1998 through 2000. And in a press release, Filmmaker announces "that five filmmakers from the list will participate in Nokia Productions' current film competition with director Spike Lee."

Three interviews from the Summer 08 issue are online: James Ponsoldt with Jay and Mark Duplass (Baghead), Damon Smith with James Marsh (Man on Wire), Mike Plante with Daft Punk (Electroma, "reminiscent of minimal yet powerful films from the 1970s explosion of studio funding meeting the artistic underground") and Nick Dawson with Alex Holdridge: "Sweet, sexy and sophisticated, In Search of a Midnight Kiss has been a huge crowd-pleaser at festivals worldwide and it seems inconceivable that, when the film is released here this summer through IFC, US audiences will not similarly fall in love with it."

"The future of the Internet, as with most aspects of our lives, is being determined behind our backs," warns David Rosen. "Awareness of the forces and issues driving these changes can help indie makers think through their relative position within the long-term development of the Internet."

"Today independent filmmakers find themselves in a wonderfully awkward position," writes Lance Weiler. "It is the best of times in terms of the ease of making work and the worst of times with regards to seeing profits from your efforts. This paradox creates an interesting opportunity for those willing to experiment with new models."

Making movies about real people raises a few legal challenges. Shelley H Surpin offers a quick guide to overcoming them.

"Some believe the key to 21st-century literacy will be something called 'systems thinking,' which is understanding how dynamic systems work, things like the eco-system and global warming - i.e. big systems made of interrelated parts that constantly change and affect one another. Like a videogame," writes Heather Chaplin. "And sure enough, games just may be the best way to teach people systems thinking."

Interview. Jay and Mark Duplass.

"A refreshingly high-concept low-budget outing, the Duplass Brothers' Baghead is an immensely likeable and surprisingly well-executed genre hybrid," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "The difficulty one finds in trying to categorize it is part of its charm, and this is not just whether one sees it as horror, comedy, or relationship roundelay but also how one defines and compartmentalizes its aesthetic: Baghead's makers and at least one of its stars may have crawled out from under the 'mumble'-corps, but its adherence to a somewhat conventional narrative framework successfully contorts and expands the boundaries of what that short-lived almost-collective of filmmakers were after. And furthermore, and of greater significance, it smartly proves that it only takes the slightest, smartest tweaks to temporarily revitalize an entire genre."

Sean Axmaker talks with Jay and Mark Duplass about how they've pulled this off.

Updated through 7/26.

"Think Hannah Gets Pushed Down the Stairs," suggests Henry Stewart in the L Magazine. "But Baghead succeeds where other genre fusion films fail because its horror emerges organically from its drama; expertly entwined, they pick up each other's slack."

"[I]t's very broad, but the satire - and its attendant babble - actually heightens the scares," writes David Edelstein in New York in New York. "The monstrous maniac with the bagged head is like an extension of the characters' own self-indulgence."

Kathy Fennessy talks with the brothers as well - at the Siffblog.

Earlier: Rob Nelson in Cinema Scope, "Baghead in Austin" and reviews from Sundance.

Updates: More interviews with the Duplasses! As noted above, James Ponsoldt talks with them for Filmmaker and at IFC, Aaron Hillis's first question is, "How do we destroy the word 'mumblecore'?"

Updates, 7/23: "The movie's better in its first half, when it pokes gentle fun at the film-festival circuit," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. But I would love to see the overwrought bit o' nonsense shown during the film's opening minute, when the foursome attend a film-fest screening of We Are Naked. Best joke in the picture."

Michael Guillén talks with the Duplass brothers.

Updates, 7/25: "I want to persuade you to see Baghead, but I don't want to overhype it, because in many ways it's a delicate construction best served as a surprise." Andrew O'Hehir introduces his interview with the Duplass brothers at Salon.

"The shallow, crabby characters... are uncomfortably recognizable," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Beyond chewing over their own insecurities, these smart, self-absorbed people have little to say.... The semi-improvised performances, which seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters, bring Baghead into the realm of group therapy observed through one-way glass."

"The real fun is how the Duplasses manage the horror movie business as if it's a poker hand, creating tension that magnifies the quirks and emotional prickliness of the characters, whose mutual neediness fluctuates with the love/hate dynamic of a reality TV competition (or college dorm room)," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "When all hell finally breaks loose, it's that much scarier and that much funnier, mostly because you're not sure whether to scream or laugh."

"The Duplasses are self-deprecating about their craft, but they're obviously skilled enough to incorporate a nerve-jangling variety of tones while keeping them all in balance," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"Baghead, despite its early sweetness, is actually a horror film, and, unfortunately, a failed one," argues Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

Online listening tip. Mark Duplass, Greta Gerwig and Ross Partridge are on the Leonard Lopate Show.

The Duplasses have "made a movie about trickery that neatly tricks its viewers into laughing, then screaming, then laughing again," writes Dana Stevens in Slate.

"For the Duplass's film about these talentless slackers to work - both as a comedy and then as a horror film - it's essential that we care about the characters," writes Marcy Dermansky. "I couldn't do it. Maybe if they had just one thing going for them."

Updates, 7/26: "Baghead is the first mumblecore movie to fail from thematic overambition rather than excessive modesty; for that alone it deserves some kind of prize," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "[L]ike the finale of Adaptation. and Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, its ending is so theoretical and arid that even as it makes all the right moves onscreen, it feels like a needless endgame. But the Duplass brothers are really onto something: they seem to be trying to build themselves back up to a mainstream narrative that'll fulfill all conventional expectations without making a single emotional false step."

Mark Olsen profiles Gerwig, "something of the accidental 'It' girl," for the Los Angeles Times.

Guardian. Culture.

The Guardian redefines "Unlimited": Catherine Shoard offers a day-by-day guide to what we can expect to see at the new film site week in, week out, while Alex Neeham explains the many ways the entire culture site's been revamped.

Taking a quick look around:

• Jonathan Jones argues that Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy is the "Last Great American Film."

• Laura Barnett chats with Mike Figgis.

• "Blockbusters have become a key battleground in the culture wars, an arena where left and right exchange biffs and kapows in the struggle for the American soul," writes Ben Walters.

• Andrew Pulver: "I've been a film journalist since leaving university in 1990, and I can't work out whether my increasingly ambiguous feelings towards the medium are a product of middle-aged ennui or a genuine paucity of compelling ideas out there." This leads to a bit of online viewing: "Saint Etienne as a band have their retro-fetish side, and this is writ large in their films."

That's just a few items that hit the eye first at this hour; looks like it's going to be a fairly constant stream.

Shorts, 7/21.

Craig Keller: "If we have to classify the films of Louis Feuillade - and we don't, because there are no rules in cinema or criticism (love or war) - ...we'd do well to stop deferring to the contemporary marketing that announced them as adventure serials, and start referring to these (un-/)determinedly recursive five-plus-hour sagas by what they really are, which are extended psychodramas - dangerous, occult, quasi-cathartic manipulations of the spectating psyche."

"Between about 1913 and 1920, the way movies looked changed, and we are still living with the results. What were the changes? What brought them about?" David Bordwell traces the "trail to continuity" and along the way points to an amazing database at CineMetrics.

"One of the more interesting challenges in viewing [Tex] Avery's vintage MGM work is learning how to process various aspects of their racism and sexism without overlooking their good-humored humanity or drowning in political correctness," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Though I've only sampled [Floriane] Place-Verghnes's [Tex Avery: A Unique Legacy, 1942 - 1955] so far, she appears to pull off this difficult task."

Gus Van Sant's Milk is slated to open in December; FilmInFocus is running Graham Fuller's 1993 interview, conducted "at his rented apartment near Castro Street in San Francisco in April 1993. Van Sant had located himself there in order to begin pre-production on The Mayor of Castro Street, a film adaptation of Randy Shilts's biography of Harvey Milk, the city supervisor whose 1978 assassination (alongside that of Mayor George Moscone) made him a martyr for gay rights. Shortly after we talked, Van Sant quietly withdrew from the project, unwilling to direct the version of the script that Oliver Stone and his fellow producers wished to make."

Scott MacDonald's Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor "fills a major gap in our knowledge of the history of avant-garde film," writes Malcolm Turvey for Artforum. "This history is determined not just by films that are made but by the extent to which those films are seen - and that, in turn, depends in major ways on distributors such as Canyon."

"As it has so often, commercial calculation finds a willing handmaiden in critical laziness, even (or perhaps especially) that evinced by those more intelligent and discerning writers who devote their efforts and talents towards designing elaborate intellectual justifications for films that neither require nor deserve them," writes Andrew Tracy in Reverse Shot. "By elevating the latest pop detritus to the level of godhead, by implicitly declaring the centrality of pop moviemaking (most often bad pop moviemaking) above all else, [critical discussion] only further occludes those films that don't have the advantage of being relentlessly drilled into our consciousness by the marketing machine.... All of which is a grand lead-up to the comparatively puny declaration that Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II is a lousy piece of moviemaking and a lousier work of imagination, its thunderous acclamation aside."

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea "is on course to become Miyazaki's, and the territory's, 2nd biggest hit ever," notes Jason Gray.

With The Spirit slated for a Christmas season opening, Andy Webster profiles Frank Miller, who, growing up, "supplemented his superhero diet with Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane and broke through in the 1980s with a gritty run on Marvel's Daredevil; DC's Ronin, which embraced Japanese and European influences; and the classic four-issue Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. He also created the graphic novel 300, about the battle of Thermopylae. All bore his feverish, testosterone-infused stamp."

Also in the New York Times:

• Richard Bernstein reports on China's Kung Fu Panda debate: "The main question being asked is: How could Western filmmakers have used Chinese themes to create such a brilliant animated movie with such widespread appeal to the Chinese themselves? Why, in other words, doesn't China itself seem to be able to use its rich traditions to such brilliant cinematic and commercial effect?"

• "Extracting a workable piece of entertainment from Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, three Beckett novels published in the early 1950s and generally grouped as a trilogy, might at first seem a dubious undertaking. Although they are considered by many to be masterpieces of modernism, these novels are forbiddingly dense works." Charles Isherwood on the Lincoln Center Festival's Beckett series, particularly I'll Go On, with Barry McGovern. More from Michael Gurewitsch. Earlier: Isherwood on Eh Joe, with Liam Neeson, directed by Atom Egoyan. And an accompanying, mesmerizing audio slide show.

• Patrick Healy profiles playwright Tracy Letts.

• Vivian S Toy reports on how some New Yorkers are faring when film and TV productions rent out their property to use as locations. They're faring very well, of course.

"In [The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I'll Kill You!], Lisa Dombrowski, associate professor of film studies at Wesleyan University, reveals a filmmaker who was first and foremost a writer." Rodger Jacobs at PopMatters.

"[Timothy] Treadwell [in Grizzly Man and Graham Dorrington in The White Diamond seem like two poles for Herzog now, mad outcast and mad scientist, with those in between them not proving interesting enough. In [Encounters at the End of the World], I get the sense that Herzog, like the old master that he is, is favoring the Dorrington side, that of the scientist, that of craft and virtuosity." That's Daniel Quiles in a note to Roger Ebert, who comments and passes along a reply from Herzog himself.

In the meantime, as Karina Longworth notes at the SpoutBlog, following Richard Roeper's exit, Ebert, too, "will no longer be associated" with At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper. Here's his statement; Shawn Levy, David Poland and Chuck Tryon comment.

"I recently caught a documentary called New York 77, which brilliantly captured that tumultuous year. While it's true that the city was an economic disaster, crime was running rampant (it was the summer of Sam to boot), and the city almost destroyed itself during the blackout, there was a vibrancy and immediacy that even this precocious 12 year-old was able to pick up on." So Filmbrain's been catching up with more films from the period and finds a passage worth dwelling on in Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities.

The exhibition Hadrian: Empire and Conflict opens at the British Museum on Thursday and will be on view through October 26 and Dan Snow's Hadrian has just aired on the BBC. But wait, there's more: "Later this summer filming will start in Morocco on a version of the emperor's story by British director John Boorman. Based on Marguérite Yourcenar's 1951 novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, Boorman's film casts Antonio Banderas in the lead role and Charlie Hunnam as Antinous, the Greek boy who became his lover and then drowned mysteriously in the Nile." Vanessa Thorpe on "The cult of Hadrian." Related online listening: Dan Snow on Start the Week.

Also in the Observer:

• After watching Eric Idle's Spamalot soar in Broadway and West End theatres, fellow Monty Python star John Cleese is rewriting his hit film comedy A Fish Called Wanda as a stage musical." Jason Solomons gets a quick word with him.

• A panel of crime writers attempts to explain the appeal of The Wire. Also: Hermione Hoby and Sarah Hughes present a "beginner's guide" to the series, while Hugh Montgomery offers a "brief history of crime and punishment on American TV" and Killian Fox talks with writer and novelist Dennis Lehane.

• Miranda Sawyer on Sex and the City, Mamma Mia! and so forth: "I'm very happy that more culture is being aimed specifically at women, that we have new excuses to get together in big groups and scream just because it's funny. I'd just like what's on offer to be, you know, better."

• Hephzibah Anderson talks with Greta Scacchi.

• Philip French on Dick Powell, Summer Hours and Puffball.

• Ruaridh Nicoll yearns for a time when films raised questions rather than force-feeding us answers.

Jason Sperb: "Five Forms of Cinematic Nostalgia (or everything I need to know about the films and the past I learned from the Star Trek Movies)."

Steve-O's Noir of the Week: The Guilty (1947).

Brannavan Gnanalingam talks with Adam Wingard about Pop Skull and the Lumière Reader; also: a talk with Yung Chang about Up the Yangzte.

At Stream, Eric Kohn profiles Open Source Cinema pioneer Brett Gaylor.

"Nearly three years since the creation of the Weinstein Co, the duo insist they've finally got all the elements in place to do justice to a full slate of films, some already shooting, others ready to go before the cameras." The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein talks with Bob and Harvey Weinstein: "Still, like everyone else in the indie film sector, the Weinsteins face a tightening credit market and a glut of films that have made scoring a hit ever harder. As a result, there are doubters who question how the Weinstein Co is financing its many projects."

New blog on the block: Lawrence Levi's Nothing Sacred at Nextbook.

Mihcael Guillén calls for a Kiyoshi Kurosawa Blog-a-Thon: Friday through August 1.

Online listening tip. Hitchcock and Truffaut talk about North By Northwest at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...

Online viewing tip. David Carr introduces Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own. Via Movie City News. Related: An excerpt in the NYT Magazine.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Pierre Huyghe at the DVblog.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Seth Rogen, James Franco and others talk comedy in the NYT's T Magazine. It's probably easier to access what you want to see here.

Online viewing tips, round 3. The Think Tank documentary series.

Fests and events, 7/21.

"The San Francisco Jewish Festival has never, in its 28 years, taken the path of least resistance," writes Michael Fox, introducing his interview with exec director Peter Stein and program director Nancy Fishman at SF360. "To cite the most obvious example, a hallmark of the annual program is the inclusion of several films critical of Israel. (That these movies are almost always produced by Israeli filmmakers, and financed by government grants, is irrelevant to the fest's critics.) This year's contrarian act is increasing the number of films and screenings in the face of a spiraling economy." Thursday through August 11.

As Anne Thompson notes, the Toronto lineup is shaping up nicely.

The Museum of the Moving Image has big plans: "By the time the new-and-improved museum opens in late 2009 (or early 2010), visitors will be greeted by a fully renovated first floor and a three-story addition - three new floors composed in part of a brand-new theater, a separate screening room, an array of galleries and a multi-classroom education center," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "But in the meantime, as construction has required a partial closing of the facilities in Queens, museum organizers have continued to move forward with an ambitious slate of online and off-site events - expanding the institution's footprint even as it must close off some of its physical space."

Jennifer MacMillan sends out an invitation to two summer screenings in New York.

Reminder: Twitch's reviews from Fantasia, which wraps today.

Man on Wire.

"On August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit went where no man had gone before, and where no one can ever go again," writes Nicolas Rapold, introducing his interview with Petit for the New York Sun. "Early that overcast morning, a quarter mile above the streets of New York, the French tightrope artiste crossed a high wire linking the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. When he crossed back over the wire, he lay down in the middle, then practically danced a jig as police waited at either end and crowds below gawked."

Updated through 7/27.

"It goes without saying - and, happily, Man on Wire doesn't say it - that all this happened in a more naïve time, that today the notion of foreigners with fake ID's slipping past security guards into the Twin Towers has a different meaning," writes David Edelstein in New York. "So does the prospect of falling from the sky. The most miraculous thing about Man on Wire is not the physical feat itself, 1,350 feet above the ground, but that as you watch it, the era gone, the World Trade Center gone, the movie feels as if it's in the present tense. That nutty existentialist acrobat pulled it off."

"The law caught up with him every time, but so did a flabbergasted public, who understood what he was doing may have been illegal but in no way wicked or mean - as one of Philippe's friends succinctly puts it," notes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "And it is with the same awe of those who were lucky enough to have seen Philippe walking on what looked like a cloud that morning that director James Marsh, in an aesthetic mode best described as Errol Morris meets vintage Spike Jonze."

"The narrative is a wonderfully edited and engaging mix of loquacious French aesthetes rhapsodizing over the poetic beauty and daring of the act, more monosyllabic Americans justifying their participation, and hilariously wacky re-enactments," writes Benjamin Sutton in the L Magazine. "'The coup' (as the group called the event during planning) happens in a cheesy 70s crime-saga aesthetic, with hideous broad-collared shirts, massively ugly suits and simply massive sideburns. Scenes of Petit's early acrobatics development, meanwhile, are rendered in the wacky silent film style of Buster Keaton movies. The influence of Guy Maddin's period-popping style is in there somewhere."

Earlier: Catherine Wheatley in Sight & Sound and reviews from Sundance.

Update: Howard Feinstein talks with Marsh for indieWIRE.

Update, 7/22: "Like the events it's based on, Man on Wire is the kind of film that's more inspiring to witness than it is to later think (or write) about, but let it be said that Marsh's adeptness at mounting his tale is undeniable, and what the film lacks in any sort of subtextual richness it more than makes up in narrative functionality and the clarity with which it reconstructs Petit's mission impossible," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE.

Updates, 7/23: Anthony Kaufman talks with New Yorkers and some of the film's major players about that August day in 1974. Also in the Voice, Jim Ridley: "Still lithe and trim, with a strangely well-muscled delicacy, the middle-aged Petit animates Man on Wire with his impish presence.... Ultimately, Man on Wire memorializes a New York of almost lackadaisical looseness - a place where security breaches end in magically fanciful outcomes; where even Petit's awestruck arresting officer refers to him as a 'tightrope dancer, because you couldn't call him a walker'; where the Port Authority bestows upon this daredevil scofflaw not a ticket to Gitmo, but a lifetime pass to the World Trade Center's observation deck. Marsh shows the pass, and you may feel a catch in your throat when you see the word hand-written in the corner: 'permanent.'"

At the House Next Door, Godfrey Cheshire explains why he walked out after 45 minutes: "As far as I can recall, this is the first, nominally serious movie to come along with a soundtrack that has been plundered not just from other movies, but from movies once celebrated for their distinctive collaboration between composer and director."

Updates, 7/25: AO Scott in the New York Times: "Why did they do it? Rather than risking banality by addressing this question head-on, Mr Marsh allows the answer to be at once self-evident and profoundly mysterious. A work of art is its own explanation, and Man on Wire leaves no doubt that Mr Petit's coup deserves to be called art."

"Marsh's film rattles one's nerves simply via the regular sight of Petit suspended over immense chasms, appearing, from a distance, like he's literally floating in air," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical. "There's a supernatural beauty to these stark images... and they lend the proceedings an almost quasi-religious atmosphere, as if what we're watching is the story of a man attempting to do something divine."

"All the components of a riveting heist film are here," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "There's a well-laid plan that runs afoul, conflicts among the criminals that blow up mid-heist, and unexpected complications that heighten the drama. The fact that it's all true only makes it more exciting - so exciting, in fact, that we almost forget the simple majesty of what Mr Petit set out do in the first place."

David Fear in Time Out New York: "Marsh has, in effect, created a real-life heist procedural (the black-and-white scenes of the ragtag bunch infiltrating the WTC might have been plucked from a Melville flick); one of the most compelling portraits of because-it's-there ideology ever captured on celluloid; and a ghost story."

"[T]his tale is as notable for its evocation of a prelapsarian New York as it is for Marsh's ability to sustain interest in a story with a known conclusion," writes Brian Sholis for Artforum.

"Marsh allows the high-wire man to yammer away and tell his own story: And, strangely enough, it works," finds Simon Abrams in New York Press.

"Marsh's film lacks a certain broader scope - or necessary contrast," argues Noel Murray at the AV Club.

David Jenkins talks with Marsh for Time Out.

Kevin Maher meets Petit for the London Times.

Update, 7/26: Andrew O'Hehir talks with Marsh and Petit for Salon; Damon Wise chats with Petit for the Guardian.

"One recurrent theme has to do with Europeans' perceptions of Americans - gentle bemusement mixed with a smidgen of distaste," notes Bryant Frazer. "Petit recalls that, after his arrest, news reporters bombarded him with the same query: why did you do it? For him, that's a particularly frustrating question because it betrays a failure of imagination, or perhaps just a misguided practicality."

Update, 7/27: Lauren Wissot talks with Marsh and Petit for the House Next Door.

American Teen.

"American Teen, which follows the senior year of five supposedly archetypal high school students in rural Indiana, is entertaining enough, but it's still 100 minutes of pure exploitation," argues Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "To give herself cover, [Nanette] Burstein repeatedly makes the point that this generation lives their lives in electronic media. But just because the subjects are willing to have their private horrors filmed doesn't mean that they should be."

"Maybe this will be the big crossover doc, the hit that’s a hit because it reinforces everything we knew going in," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The movie does get under your skin... but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by."

Updated through 7/25.

"What do Juno, Napoleon Dynamite and The Breakfast Club all have in common?" asks Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. Answer: They're all being used to sell a documentary; American Teen is "one of the summer's trickiest marketing challenges."

S James Snyder talks with Burstein for the New York Sun: "While the movie seems to unite many audiences, reviving memories about the cruelty of high school, it's also revealed the divide that exists between the parents on the screen and some of the parents in the audience. Some are living in very different worlds."

"I want to do a fiction film," Burstein tells Karen Durbin in the New York Times: "I've spent a lot of time taking real life and molding it into a narrative. Now I'd like to take a narrative and make it feel like real life."

Anne Thompson reports on a screening last week at which some of the American teens were on hand for the Q&A.

The AV Club lists "17 scare films about the teen menace."

Online listening tip. Cort and Fatboy.

Earlier: Brian Darr and more reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 7/23: Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times: "'I was really surprised actually and have been upset by it,' Burstein said of the level of pushback American Teen has generated. 'There's accusations that it's staged and scripted and that I went after the stereotypes, and it's just not true. I think it's unusual to have a very narrative documentary, so people aren't used to it,' she continued. 'I think people have a hard time believing teenagers are willing to be that intimate on camera. So sometimes I feel I'm being criticized for what the film's achievements are.'"

"It's no accident that most of the great teen movies - American Graffiti, Sixteen Candles, Fast Times at Ridgemont High spring to mind - were made decades ago, when adolescents were still thought of as a generation rather than a demographic," observes Ella Taylor in the Voice. Still: "Even when it's ripping off Juno and The Hills, American Teen is fascinating in the way of every good documentary—the more time you spend with anyone, the more they surprise you."

Eric Kohn talks with Burstein for indieWIRE; so does Scott Tobias, but for the AV Club.

Updates, 7/25: "It goes without saying that a documentary film that finds non-famous, non-adult people at an especially vulnerable crux in their lives is something of an ethical minefield," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Can a filmmaker investigate the sexual, emotional and family lives of innocent youngsters without slipping into exploitation? The easy answer, confirmed by American Teen, is no way. And why even try? In a project like this one, the line between sympathy and prurience is not so much thin as nonexistent. Once we know a little about how these kids think, interact and behave, we are caught between the hunger to know everything and the impulse to look away before we learn too much."

"It's probably impossible to expect anyone to come up with a documentary as powerful as Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines's Seventeen which in 1983 traced the lives of another group of Midwestern teens with risky, gut-punching social realism," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "The film, broadcast on PBS, is out of circulation but you can YouTube it here. Obscure as it is, Seventeen has, in retrospect, the advantage of being shot on the cusp of the MTV era (a big moment comes when the teenagers play Bob Seger's 'Against the Wind' as a eulogy for a pal who has been killed in a car accident). American Teen, for all its seeming 24/7 access, never feels terribly vérité. Its subjects sport their remote transmitters on their belts like the latest hip accessory. Yet that may be the most telling element of all."

"The kids' mistakes make you cringe - often with laughs of recognition - and, during the film's most involving moments, makes you long to comfort them through their trials and cheer on their triumphs," writes Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times. "If nothing else, American Teen reminds us that, though its charges aren't exactly Sudanese refugees, their pressures, joys and pains fill their worlds as much as anyone's do."

"In form, it's admittedly slick and packaged, with a commercial feel that owes as much to reality television as it does to Frederick Wiseman," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "But in content, it's easy for anyone who survived (or is surviving) high school to feel twinges of identification."

In the New York Press, Armond White describes an incident that he finds to be "a vile misuse of the intimate, verité and reportorial technique that the Maysles, Pennebaker and other doc pioneers worked so hard to justify."

The Dark Knight, round 3.

"Fevered fans pushed The Dark Knight the sixth of the Warner Brothers series of Batman movies, to record three-day ticket sales of $155.3 million over the weekend, shoring up what so far had been a wobbly year at the box office." Michael Cieply reports for the New York Times, while, at Movie City News, Leonard Klady sorts through the numbers and Variety's Pamela McClintock notes that the final tally has been revised - upwards.

"As happens only once every decade or so, the entire moviegoing population of America became welded into a single breathless entity, and the result was a pop event on the order of the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan," blogs the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "Go ahead and scoff at the analogy, boomers, but one of the kids [he's met] likened the opening of Dark Knight to the JFK assassination and the Challenger disaster as quintessential where-were-you defining moments of his generation. That says much, about both this movie and the callowness of smart young men - the correct analogy is to Titanic or the final installment of The Lord of the Rings - but a pop event has always created its own sense of necessary immensity."

Updated through 7/27.

"Now you see it, now you don't," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "That about encapsulates the depths of feeling and artistry in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan and company's sordid exercise in avert-your-eyes sadism, a work at best inelegant and at worst inept. The film would have us believe it's about dualities and polarities, the so-called Dark Knight of Gotham (Christian Bale as billionaire Bruce Wayne and vigilante alter-ego Batman) compared and contrasted with White Knight—soon-to-be literally two-faced—Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), both of them joined in messily chaotic battle with the facially-scarred villain known as The Joker, whose mid-film 'You complete me' declaration to Batman is less Jerry Maguire-jest than Matrix-like pseudo-philosophy." Since that went up on Saturday, a storm of comments has been battering the House.

"No formula exists to determine the greatest living American filmmaker," writes Mike D'Angelo for Esquire. "The thing about Christopher Nolan (who's as much British as American - but sue me, so was Hitchcock) is that he doesn't clonk you over the head with his genius."

"[Heath] Ledger, for my liking, doesn't quite have the ticcy, nervy danger on screen that would have made his Joker an outstanding piece of cinematic devilment," write the Observer's Jason Solomons.

Jesse Hassenger goes spoilerific at the L Magazine.

"If director Christopher Nolan's first Batman film, the origin story Batman Begins, took as its model the famously dark Frank Miller stories of the mid-80s, and especially Batman: Year One, this new installment takes off from Alan Moore's even nastier The Killing Joke," notes Ed Howard. "Miller's Batman may have launched the darker, grittier take on the bat-eared crimefighter, but Moore's slightly later short story considerably ups the ante, positing a Joker who only wants to prove that anyone can be driven to madness, and a Batman who exists as a moral flipside to this evil clown, only a few short steps from the same fate."

Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

Updates: "Part of the problem with The Dark Knight for the critical cast of mind is the fact that it is such a multifaceted film that criticisms and praise alike get swallowed up into its richly textured abundance of character, incident, politics, and pointed set design," writes DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "Though its two-and-a-half hours does make up a unified whole, with a couple of digressive longheurs along the way, the film does lend itself to atomization, creating handy parcel with which the critic may make salient points sometimes relevant to the whole. In fact, there are at least 11 The Dark Knights, each self-contained units lending themselves to in-depth treatment." A dozen are noted.

Via Matt Dentler, Variety's Phil Gallo talks with Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard about their score: "Batman gets two notes. The Joker, only one. It's a radical concept for a film score, a technique more likely to be found in a Wagner opera. Those notes do not sit alone or on top of a brash comicbook score either. This is a score inspired by minimalism, repeated motifs that echo the work of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and Philip Glass."

Updates, 7/22: "This is a summer tent-pole movie that plays to the masochistic instincts of cinemagoers fretting over their own futures," writes Geoffrey Macnab. "All the signs are that audiences are basking in that sinking feeling and sense of trepidation the film gleefully induces." Also in the Independent: Mark Hughes reports on last night's premiere in London; a FAQ on Batman's enduring appeal; John Walsh asks, "why did American comics differ so sharply from British ones?"; and Guy Adams wonders, "Would Batman still be a blockbuster if Heath Ledger had lived?"

"If you think this summer has been jammed with superhero movies, you ain't seen nothin' yet," warns the Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein.

"Dear Film Critics," begins Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "Really, everyone? Really? I know how this is going to come off to those of you who are still quivering under its dark, moody spell, but someone has to do it." The Dark Knight is "just as long-winded, shapeless, formulaic, and deadening as the most generic big-budget buffoonery out there. You can call me a snob if you want to, go right ahead. I'm simply calling the movie out for what it is: a glossy, pseudo-'deep' work of mass consumer-friendly torture porn."

"A catch-22: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight demands, in a mean, raspy voice, to be taken more seriously than your average comic book movie," writes Adam Nayman in Reverse Shot. "But when one endeavors to do just that - to analyze its loudly explicated themes of duality and ethical impasse; to parse the implications of having its villain be referred to and self-identify as a 'terrorist'; to consider the use of invasive surveillance technology as a post–Patriot Act plot point - one is reprimanded for bullying a defenseless Pop object. Hey, guys, why so serious?"

Updates, 7/23: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir points to the discussion going on at Dave Kehr's place, "an intriguing back-and-forth among defenders and detractors of The Dark Knight - as well as a fascinating discussion of the role and limits of film criticism - with nary a nasty epithet in sight. Is the picture, as one poster proposes, a complex tragedy 'about moral ambivalence and the impossibility of justice in America at this moment'? Or does it tell us we 'shouldn't question those who operate outside of what we consider acceptable codes of morality, but rather just shut up and trust the hero'?"

"What kind of world would this be had we taken Batman so seriously since 1939?" asks John McElwee. "Could we have won a World War with such conflicted role models as super-heroes have become?"

"Personally, I understand the hype that surrounds just about any big Hollywood release as being the work of masterful publicity machinations which seeps into the blood of those prepared to dig the scene - that's business as usual," offers Dennis Cozzalio. "But there's something different going on here, and fan reactions to dissenting views like Edelstein's and Uhlich's often seem more like Joker-esque dementia than protectiveness over a pet film."

Jürgen Fauth defends his nerd cred: "I now offer a comparison of George Lucas's tragically misunderstood pop masterpiece and the absurdly overpraised muddle for which Christopher Nolan is now treated as the second coming of Alfred Hitchcock." It's Revenge of the Sith vs The Dark Knight.

James Rocchi: "[A]fter sitting down with The Prestige, I think I get what [David] Fear was saying about Nolan's body of work as a whole; The Prestige suggests Nolan's capable of a lot more than the bat-clad, bomb-bursting bullet-filled action of The Dark Knight."

"Eckhart suddenly finds himself the flag-bearer for the UK release of this record-breaking blockbuster ($158m and counting), now that one of the movie's two stars is helping police with their enquiries, and the other one is reachable only by ouija board." Ryan Gilbey talks with him for the Guardian.

IFC's Matt Singer offers a "Visual History" of Gotham City.

Updates, 7/24: "I have a hunch, and perhaps a hope, that Iron Man, Hancock and Dark Knight together represent a peak, by which I mean not only a previously unattained level of quality and interest, but also the beginning of a decline," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "In their very different ways, these films discover the limits built into the superhero genre as it currently exists.... Is it just me, or is the strain starting to show?"

"Nolan reveals an ambition unseen not only in most comic book adaptations but in most movies, period," writes Andrew Bemis. "It feels like his entire career has been building to this, as he reveals himself to be one of the great cinematic storytellers, and The Dark Knight an unqualified masterpiece."

"[O]ne thing all The Dark Knight's fanatics have in common is profound enthusiasm," writes Ariel Leve in the Guardian. "I envy that. I wish I cared about something as much as they care about Batman."

Vue Weekly's David Berry and Josef Braun have a quick chat.

"However high Nolan might pile on the gravity, however long he might stretch out the agony, the comic-book iconography inevitably simplifies and trivializes the moral debate: Can you fight fair when you fight terrorism?" Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader: "Somehow bat ears and clown makeup ill become a crisis of conscience. The truth is that Nolan's lack of faith in the superhero of olden days - the White Knight - goes hand in glove with a larger lack of faith in the fairy-tale form. He can't trust it to convey its import (in spite of all the scholarly efforts of Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, et al) without an additive of grand-operatic bombast. His reformer's zeal amounts to just another aspect of his pretentiousness."

Updates, 7/25: The Dark Knight hits the UK: Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Dave Calhoun (Time Out), James Christopher (Times), Ryan Gilbey (New Statesman), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard), Anthony Quinn (Independent) and Sukhdev Sandhu (Telegraph).

The WSWS's David Walsh finds it "a good nor a serious film. It is ill-conceived and poorly done, overlong, confusing and emotionally muddy."

Gill Pringle profiles Maggie Gyllenhaal for the Independent.

Updates, 7/26: "It's time, I'm afraid, to let loose the dogs of apocalyptic cultural complaint, this time upon the throat of The Dark Knight, which I was coerced into finally seeing despite my official moratorium on voluntarily watching superhero movies, or any film in which someone puts on a mask or has 'special powers,' the latter of which is all by itself a dead giveaway, as a narrative device, to the film-culture mess we find ourselves in," sighs Michael Atkinson. "The Dark Knight epitomizes the problem specifically not by simply being a Caped Crusader trifle masquerading as Paradise Lost, but because it failed to do the simplest things movies have always done: tell a fucking story."

"The Dark Knight is middling as a summer blockbuster, zero as art, and more than a bit alarming as a phenomenon," argues Fernando F Croce.

At Vinyl Is Heavy, Jennifer Stewart and Ryland Walker Knight begin a longish conversation via email.

You'll have heard about this: here's William Triplett's take at Wilshire & Washington: "An op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal is either brilliant satire (New Yorker cover artists, take note) or the most breathtakingly silly form of wish-fulfillment one is ever likely to find in those otherwise august pages."

Update, 7/27: First thing Pacze Moj does is issue a warning: "The following post is long, messy, and full of overblown, half-baked ideas that I just felt like writing down. In other words, it's very much like the film it's describing."

Yerevan Dispatch.

David D'Arcy sends word from the capital of Armenia.

At the Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, Armenia, now marking its fifth year, international cinema is meeting the culture of this small nation whose diaspora reaches from the former Soviet Union to Paris, Santa Monica and Toronto. Armenia does not have much film production today, one to two features in a good year and those are made on low budgets (and then there are the documentaries, made with a lot of heart and even less money). But it did have its own active studio under the Soviet system, and its film culture runs deep.

Sergei Paradjanov (1924-90), an Armenian born in Georgia, is commemorated in the extraordinary museum that bears his name and reveals a restless vibrant imagination (and these are just his drawings and assemblages). Most of Paradjanov's work was banned in his lifetime for its transgression of rules mandating Socialist Realism, and he spent more than four years in prison. Paradjanov's objects range from wildly inventive satirical collages that combine the influences of Arcimboldo with a sensibility like that of Joseph Cornell and drawings, like his finely-rendered pictures of friends from prison, that convey emotional depth. The museum alone warrants a visit to Yerevan. The food and cognac, and the people, might keep you here for a while.

Paradjanov (or Paronian, as his name would be in Armenian) once said, "Beauty will save the world," before he died of lung cancer at the age of 66. Now Armenians in film from around the world have converged on the GAIFF this week, and there is much talk of co-productions and plans to shoot here. An American firm has bought the Soviet-Era Hyefilm (Armenian Film) Studio, and is committing funds to renovate it into a hub for production and location services. The Central Partnership, a Russian distribution and production house run by Armenians (as a number of them are in Moscow), has avoided much involvement in Armenia, but its new film, Mermaid (winner of Sundance's international feature competition last year) is the work of Anna Melikian, an Armenian woman living in Moscow. Relations between Russians and Armenians are far more friendly here than in neighboring Georgia, where Russia funds insurgencies in the North and bans the import of Georgian wine, a product that is so identified with Georgia that its patron saint is depicted holding a cross made of vine branches.

Still, though, Armenia lacks modern cinemas and there are none on the drawing board. So far, as the construction cranes all around town suggest, this cinematic renaissance is another work in progress.

New Armenian documentaries at the GAIFF were a mixed bag, often showing the austerity of their budgets on the screen. For an outsider, however, they were a revelation. Two films looked at the assassination in March 2007 of Hrant Dink, the journalist and editor of Agos, a newspaper in Istanbul that publishes in the Turkish language and pushes for Turkish recognition of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, improbably, as part of a effort to bring Armenian and Turks together, an ambitious and seemingly impossible task if there ever was one.

The documentaries, by performer and Gorky biographer Nouritza Matossian (Heart of Two Nations: Hrant Dink) and by Hrant Hakobyan (Eternal Flight: Hrant Dink) seem to assume that the audience is familiar with the factual detail of Dink's killing by Turkish nationalists, aided by the indifference or active collaboration of the Turkish military. Each depicts Dink as a prophet for peacemaking, a humanitarian who led open conversations about history in the face of threats to his life. Matossian is now seeking to remake her own documentary, sub-titled in English (with an English voice-over by the director), which began as a series of video-taped conversations in Armenian with the murdered journalist.

Even as Dink's killing points to enduringly acute Turkish opposition to any official recognition of the Genocide (just look at the intense lobbying in the US against Congressional resolutions marking the tragedy of 1915), there were Turkish jurors on two of the GAIFF juries, a deliberate step in the right direction.

The documentary Who is Monte, by Edward Badounts, takes up the story of Monte Melkonian, a California-born American killed in the Nagorno Karabach War after two years of commanding Armenian troops in the region that fought for its independence from neighboring Azerbaijan, and won it in 1994. (Only Armenia recognizes the new government there.) If Armenia were more of a draw at the box office, this story would have been made into a Hollywood feature years ago.

Monte (as everyone seems to have called the charismatic hero whom Armenia now honors) graduated from Berkeley, traveled the world, and by the late 1970s found his way into radical groups that practiced the kind of violent hostage-taking and assassinations which we associate with the more visible Red Army Faction, Irish Republican Army and Red Brigades of those years. The Beirut-based Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (or ASALA) tended toward shooting Turkish diplomats, although it was abandoned (some say sold out) by its former allies in the Palestine Liberation Organization and broke into violent factions in the early 1980s. Monte spent the years 1986 through 1989 in prison in France for traveling with false papers and carrying an illegal handgun. At the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was in Armenia, having taught himself the language. He soon became a participant in the war in Nagorno-Karabach, which then sought independence from Azerbaijan. Before long he was commanding unpaid and untrained troops.

The film, narrated by Monte's widow, Seta Kbranian, takes you in and out of Monte's military and personal lives. The saga of a war fought by citizens who became soldiers overnight calls to mind the early days of Israel and the images of mountain fighting could have been lifted from the Bosnian archives. The tone of the film is romantic, patriotic and motivational, but the young widow's voice is poignant, and leaves you wanting to know more about her husband and his journey from suburbia to a war halfway around the world.

Another documentary, Vandals of the 21st Century, shows that the war with Azerbaijan has taken its cultural toll. In Julfa, which is in the region of Nakichevan (an Armenian territory now controlled by Azerbaijan), a cemetery of thousands of Khachkars, massive gravestones with carved crucifixes, was hacked apart by soldiers from Azerbaijan's army with sledgehammers. The pieces of the 400-year old carvings were then put in trucks and dumped into a ravine. Much of the destruction was videotaped from a distance by Armenians, and the short documentary by Ashot Movsisyan follows the soldiers as they smash the irreplaceable objects.

The film quotes from a letter sent by the chief Islamic cleric of Azerbaijan, informing concerned Armenians who watched the video (which is more extensive than the sections shown in the documentary) that his government is taking measures to protect Armenian heritage there. It's rare that antiquities vandals are caught in such a flagrant act. As Donald Rumsfeld said when asked to explain why Iraq's National Museum could be looted while heavily armed US troops stood by, "Stuff happens." Here the troops were ordered to obliterate a graveyard, presumably to discourage Armenians from ever thinking of this territory as their home. It's hard to watch.

(To see a Khachkar, you can visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where one carving is currently on loan from Armenia.)

- David D'Arcy

Interview. Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber.

"This is part of the endless war machine. The war machine grinds on. They used to run Cold War simulations there. Now they run Iraq simulations there. They're beginning to evolve more into Afghan War simulations. For all I know, it'll be Iran in two years. They only have to re-jigger the actors and the sets, and the war continues."

That's Jesse Moss, talking about the National Training Center, which has built Medina Wazl, a fictional town out in the Mojave Desert, where soldiers train to fight the real war in Iraq. David D'Arcy talks with him and his filmmaking partner, Tony Gerber, about their documentary Full Battle Rattle, currently at Film Forum in New York through Tuesday.

Keep an eye on their blog for further screenings. Earlier: Reviews from the week of July 7.

Shorts, 7/19.

It's "David Lynch Day" at DC's.

Whether or not you plan to read Leigh Montville's The Mysterious Montague: A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf and Armed Robbery, do see Colman McCarthy's succinct telling of the tale in his review for the Washington Post.

"The uncut version, whether you call it Amanti d'oltretomba or Night of the Doomed, is an important title from the Italian Golden Age pantheon, and one of Barbara Steele's best star vehicles," writes Tim Lucas, reacting to news that an original negative has been found. "Not a notch on Black Sunday, of course, but it is significant as the only horror film for which Steele dubbed her own performance (one of her dual roles) - and the news about the discovery of the original negative element is wonderful. Just to know that people over there are looking for such things is wonderful."

Also, a review of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man: "[A]s music documentaries go, this is about as good as they come."

"There is nothing on this planet quite like The Room," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Character logic is primitive at best. Narrative flow? Pre-mammalian. All this could've meant deadly amateurish boredom if not for the pervasive, hypnotically strange imprint of auteur-star [Tommy] Wiseau. He might have made the ultimate performance art prank here - or he might unknowingly be it."

Disney "finds itself fending off a chorus of accusations of racial stereotyping in its forthcoming big-budget cartoon, The Princess and the Frog: An American Fairy Tale, which marks a return to hand-drawn animation," reports Arifa Akbar in the Independent.

Also: "It looked increasingly unlikely yesterday that cinema audiences in this world will get to see the planned film sequels in Philip Pullman's children's fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. Sources in the film industry said that plans for a sequel to The Golden Compass appeared to have been put on ice following the fervent Christian protests surrounding the first film, which led to boycotts and box office disappointment in the United States."

Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight) and screenwriter Jesse Wigutow are teaming up for a doc based on Frank Snepp's Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Free Speech. Christopher Campbell has more at Cinematical.

Having seen Tod Browning's The Unknown, Michael Guillén writes up a terrific appreciation of Lon Chaney.

"My Winnipeg is [Guy] Maddin's most hauntological film, as well as his most 'political,'" writes Steven Shaviro. "Maddin has always played off campy humor against abject affect; but in this film, these two dimensions of feeling are more indiscernible than ever before, fusing in a kind of all-embracing ghostliness."

"Faustus's Children uses its integration of political commentary with supernaturalism and a Baudrillardian aesthetic mission to reclaim pastiche as a form of political commentary from the 'blank parody' / 'dead language' paradigm identified by Frederic Jameson in his work on postmodernism," argues Dave McDougall in the Auteurs' Notebook. "By making these aesthetic parameters the primary 'characters' of the film, the film situates itself as an example of 'art practice' via the moving image; it's a fully realized conceptual work that lacks a human element, but in so doing brings its political subtext to the fore, exploring the artificial hopes of both cinema and contemporary leftist zeal - but leaving hope for a brighter morning to come."

Wise Kwai reports that Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been honored as a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.

In the Austin Chronicle, Kimberley Jones revisits WarGames, "the 1983 blockbuster that chilled to the bone anyone who had newly installed an Apple IIe in the family room." Related online viewing: "On Friday, May 30, Craig Silverstein hosted a panel and an exclusive screening at Google of the 1983 suspense film, WarGames, in honor of the 25th Anniversary DVD."

"There could be a motion to dismiss based on prosecutorial misconduct." That's Roman Polanski's lawyer, Douglas Dalton, talking to Michael Cieply about the tentative actions he's taking now that Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired has documented a questionable judicial process all those years ago. Related, and via Ray Pride, Heidi Atwal's interview with filmmaker Marina Zenovich.

Also in the New York Times:

• "Mara Manus, the Public Theater's top financial executive for the last six years, will take over as executive director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the society said Wednesday." Robin Pogrebin reports in the New York Times. And: "Describing it as a 'front porch' for Lincoln Center, the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have redesigned Harmony Atrium between West 62nd and 63rd Streets as a 'theatrical garden' featuring 20-foot-high walls of plants and rods of falling water."

• Bill Carter: "The nominations for television's biggest award, the Emmy, were released on Thursday morning, adding more fuel to the argument that much of the best creative work in the medium is now being done on cable, and to the perception that shows do not necessarily need big audiences to be celebrated by the television academy." The nominees in major categories; and the complete list. More from the NYT's TV Decoder.

• "A struggling anorexic and her physical opposite form an unlikely friendship in disFIGURED, a funny, awkward and often uncomfortable drama eager to confront the pain beneath the pounds," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. More from Matt Noller in Slant.

• Charles Isherwood on Eh Joe, directed by Atom Egoyan and starring Liam Neeson: "Although it lasts just half an hour, this staging of a Beckett piece originally written for television is one of the most wholly satisfying nights I've spent at the theater this year. Remarkably, Mr Neeson draws a transfixing portrait of a man on the edge of emotional collapse without speaking a single word."

• Patricia Cohen talks with Kay Ryan, the new US poet laureate. More from David Orr.

"When Al Gore presented Pittsboro, NC, filmmaker Michael O'Connell with the award for best documentary at this year's Nashville Film Festival, he didn't just rattle off a prepared speech and smile for the photo-op. The former vice president, once berated for his lack of visible emotion, nearly choked up onstage as he recalled the plight of Ed Wiley, the protagonist in Mountain Top Removal, O'Connell's film about a devastating method of coal mining in Southern Appalachia." Matt Saldaña profiles one of the winners of the Independent Weekly's Indies Arts Awards.

At FilmInFocus, Peter Bowen offers a brief history of watching movies outdoors; Scott Macaulay presents a list of the "Most Insane Movie Sequels"; and Mike Plante takes a look at the work of six animators who are bringing handiwork back to the art.

"Dark clouds have gathered over the whole of Hollywood's top tier," writes Phil Hoad. "'Star power is definitely waning,' says one producer at a major Hollywood production company. 'There's no mystique any more. The power of celebrity has been commodified, and that weakens people's willingness to go and see stars. I can see Tom Cruise on Perez Hilton; why should I go to the cinema?'" In a related piece, David Thomson writes, "You cannot grasp the age of stardom, or the failure of the stars' personal lives so often, without understanding the intensity with which they were loved by strangers. The great age did not last: oddly enough it was killed in part by the moment when the stars overthrew the studios." Meanwhile, in the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab offers a historical overview of the impact of the literal deaths of movie stars.

Also in or at or in very close vicinity to the Guardian:

• "John Lennon once said he wasn't one for doing autobiography, but a new film - from the Bafta-winning writer of the Ian Curtis biopic Control - will take up the challenge with a controversial retelling of his early life," reports Jo Adetunji.

• Alex von Tunzelmann launches a weekly column in which he'll be separating fact from fiction in the movies. He begins with The Scarlet Empress ("Entertainment grade: B; History grade: D-").

• Ronald Bergan offers a "history of creative sound in film (abridged)."

• "Even now, at 79, [Jean] Simmons is still startled at the freakishly easy way she became a movie star," writes Geoffrey Macnab. She now "describes herself as 'semi-retired'" and "has just finished shooting Shadows in the Sun, a new British film directed by David Rocksavage."

• John Patterson on the much-discussed indie crisis: "I still say, fear not. Relaaaaax."

• Andrew Purcell tells the story behind José Padilha's Elite Squad. Sheila Johnston talks with the director for the Telegraph.

• Sam Delaney talks with Dominic West.

• A news roundup: Justin Theroux will write the sequel to Iron Man; Diablo Cody will write a comedy for Dreamworks; and China okays The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

"An engaging, BBC-style documentary about Manchester, England's answer to Tony Soprano, A Very British Gangster is a must-view for casting agents," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "There haven't been this many slack-jawed mugs with crew cuts and bad teeth on-screen since Trainspotting." More from Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT), Andrew O'Hehir (Salon) and Julia Wallace (Voice).

Ray Pride talks with Catherine Breillat about The Last Mistress. "All the French writer-director's films are anatomies of hell, but this time she's courting provocations instead of simply imposing them," writes Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. More from Sam Adams (Philadelphia City Paper), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Jon Frosch (Stranger), Mick LaSalle (San Francisco Chronicle) and Matt Prigge (Philadelphia Weekly).

"[T]he babushka [Galina Vishnevskaya] we see at the beginning of [Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra] - riding a rattling train through the moonless night, being helped into a mean metal tank, dragging her banged-up roller bag toward the army base - is in fact a living ark of Russian art," writes Charles Mudede in the Stranger. "It is art that is visiting the army, the young captain, the bomb-damaged city. It is art (and not a mother) that soldiers admire and can't stop looking at. But art is no stranger here, in the miserable land of war. 'There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,' wrote Walter Benjamin. In Alexandra, art must confront this truth and be made sensitive to the suffering of humankind."

Also: "Because so many critics have failed to see the brilliance of Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, notably the one at the Village Voice, I must lead them by the hand, out of the cave and into the day of truth."

"It's easy to see the attraction that Kent Mackenzie's 1961 film The Exiles - a jazzy cinéma-vérité portrait of 14 hours in the life of a band of Native Americans living in a picturesquely downtrodden Los Angeles neighborhood - would have for Milestone, as it marries the socioeconomic concerns of their re-releases like Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba with a similar brand of bravura Southern California underground auteur style seen in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep," writes Chris Barsanti at Film Journal International. "Although Mackenzie's work will probably never attain the kind of totemic stature of those films - being not as stylistically driven or showy - it certainly deserves to stand alongside them as one of the great under-seen cinema gems of the 1960s." More from Richard Corliss in Time.

"Like Lee Chang-dong's 2007 Secret Sunshine, Charles Oliver's debut feature Take deals with the awkward moral quandaries of infanticide and the subsequent, touchy relations between a killer and his victim's mother," writes Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE. "That Lee's film remains unreleased in this country is no doubt due in part to the fact that his film, unlike Oliver's, did not star Minnie Driver (although it did win an award at Cannes for its actress, Jeon Do-yeon). But in spite of this star pedigree, Oliver's film manages to grapple with some knotty questions about justice, even if it is not quite as bold or ironic as Lee's." More from Steve Dollar (NY Sun), Ed Gonzalez (Voice), Joshua Land (Time Out New York), Nathan Lee (NYT) and Mark Peikert (New York Press).

"Feature-length elaborations on quirky, inspiring human-interest stories are generally to be avoided, but I'll make an exception for A Man Named Pearl," writes Vadim Rizov. More from Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT) and Andrew O'Hehir (Salon).

Also in the Voice:

• "Essentially a cautionary tale for pretty boys without criminal records, Felon gives everyone their tidy and expected due but outlines a realistic enough cycle of how a man's life can easily spiral out of his control," writes Ed Gonzalez. More from Matt Connolly (Reverse Shot), Stephen Holden (NYT) and Martin Tsai (NY Sun).

• In The Doorman, director Wayne Price "moves from disturbing believability to lame laugh grabs, setting his satirical agenda off-kilter," writes Michelle Orange. More from Ed Gonzalez (Slant), Nathan Lee (NYT) and Nick Schager (Cinematical).

• "'Dad, the whole movie's a rip-off!' Ah, they can't even sneak one past the pre-K crowd, which already saw this when it was called Space Wiggles. Robert Wilonsky on Space Chimps. More from Jeffrey M Anderson (Cinematical), Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Neil Genzlinger (NYT), Ed Gonzalez (Slant), Ben Kenigsberg (Time Out New York), Tasha Robinson (AV Club) and Andrew Stuttaford (NY Sun).

Simon Abrams talks with Satoshi Kon for Twitch.

Dave Calhoun in Time Out on Donkey Punch: "This bloody, waterborne horror doesn't exactly scream with originality, but the filmmakers make up for it with a strong atmosphere of sex and violence - both latent and unleashed - good performances and a mostly imaginative approach to genre." More from Xan Brooks (Guardian), James Christopher (London Times) and Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard).

Once Ryan Gilbey (New Statesman) started watching The Wire, " the pictures that I was seeing in my capacity as film critic began to look compromised and conventional. The show had spoiled me."

James Mottram profiles Penélope Cruz for the Independent, where Roger Clarke notes that one of the most famous lines from The Godfather was improvised.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Ibetolis.

The Film Experience launches the "Musical of the Month" on August 6 with Calamity Jane. You can join in, too.

Online listening tip. At the House Next Door, John Lichman and Vadim Rizov talk with Benten Films' Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis.

Online viewing tip #1. Seems odd that I haven't mentioned Joss Whedon's Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog yet. But I have now.

Online viewing tip #2. Martin Scorsese and Tina Fey in... an American Express ad. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #3. At the SpoutBlog, Lauren Wissot reminds us that L'Age d'Or is surreally sexy.

Online viewing tips. Half a dozen from the Guardian's Kate Stables.

Fests and events, 7/19.

First, what's coming: "Salivate and prepare to be completely blown away by the first half of the Sitges 2008 program!" yippies Blake Ethridge at Twitch. October 2 through 12.

"The homegrown but internationally lauded Fantastic Fest - ground zero for all things horror, sci-fi, fantasy, animé, and the catch-all 'cult' - announced [on Thursday] the first wave of its 2008 festival lineup." Kimberly Jones in the Austin Chronicle. September 18 through 25.

Derek Elley has the lineup for the Locarno Film Festival (August 6 through 16) in Variety.

"The Melbourne Film Festival's Romanian collection comes, perhaps, rather late in the Bucharest spring; and it is a pity that it only gives us half the sandwich." Still, it gives Stephanie Bunbury an opportunity to look back over the wave in the Age. The festival runs from July 25 through August 10.

The Chicago Reader's JR Jones previews the Silent Film Society of Chicago's Summer Festival, running Fridays through August 22.

The Philadelphia City Paper and the Philadelphia Weekly present their guides to the second week of the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

"Every year the Brick Theater in Williamsburg manages to come up with a snappy new theme to capture summer headlines amid the festival fray (last year's was the Pretentious Festival)," writes Alexis Clements in the L Magazine. "This year's [Film Festival: A Theater Festival] began a few weeks ago, but because of its success they've extended the run of many pieces until July 27." Kate Lowenstein has a bit more for Time Out New York.

Online listening tip. Erik Davis and James Rocchi preview ComicCon at Cinematical. July 24 through 27 in San Diego.

Now then; what's been:

Capsule reviews galore, from David Bordwell at the Brussels Film Festival, which wrapped a few weeks ago.

At Moving Image Source, Jonathan Rosenbaum looks back to Bologna and Il Cinema Ritrovato: "Throughout the festival, [Lev] Kuleshov and [Josef von] Sternberg proved to be rather strange bedfellows, offering an intriguing dialectic of what it meant to be pioneering mavericks in both Russian and Hollywood cinema of the silent and early sound periods and all the perils this might entail."

Bergman Week "has made me reassess my notions of what defines a film festival," blogs Criterion's Michael Koresky. "Rather than the usual community of film journalists and programmers fighting each other over screenings and proffering instantaneous responses to films once the lights came up, I was surrounded by what seemed like an equal number of local islanders and Bergman devotees who had traveled from far and wide, all of whom were enjoying being outside as much as in the darkened spaces of the theaters. Indeed, Bergman Week is as much about the setting as the artist."

"The 54th edition of the notorious Flaherty Film Seminar (June 21 - 27) kicked off with some steamy words from president Patti Bruck. 'We're not here to discuss film,' she insinuated; 'we're here to argue about film.'" A report from Jason Sanders for Filmmaker. Chi-hui Yang has a full report, too - for SF360.

"George Balanchine and Mikhail Baryshnikov called him one of the greatest dancers in history, while Gershwin and Irving Berlin preferred him over all other vocalists," writes Paula Marantz Cohen in the Times Literary Supplement. "[Fred] Astaire made art which, in the words of his character in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), seemed to be 'fun set to music.' Film scholars, English professors, dance and music historians, performers and plain enthusiasts gathered at Oriel College, Oxford, last month to pay homage to this achievement with semiotic analysis and singalongs."

Twitch's Todd Brown has the New York Asian Film Festival award-winners.

Sight & Sound. August 08.

"Who killed the double bill?" asks Jane Giles. "And when did our days or nights become so short that the very idea of going to the cinema to watch four to six hours of brilliantly compatible or creatively contrasting content became impossible?" A quick history of creative repertory programming in London follows as an introduction to the heart of the new issue of Sight & Sound, nine pages of fantasy "Dream Tickets," put together by 52 critics and programmers and downloadable as a PDF.

Also:

"Uruguayan cinema was all but unknown in Britain when Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll's wry, low-key Whisky (2004) broke out of the festival circuit to achieve a modest commercial release," writes Michael Brooke. "El baño del Papa (The Pope's Toilet) offers many of the same pleasures, but while the earlier film stuck rigorously to a Kaurismäkiesque minimalism in both dialogue and mise-en-scène, the newer film is more expansive and much closer in tone and content to Luis García Berlanga's Welcome, Mr Marshall! (1953), one of the acknowledged classics of Spanish-language cinema. If it plays like a more realistic spin on Berlanga's masterpiece, El baño del Papa's basis in fact (the Pope's 1988 visit to Uruguay) absolves it from the charge of slavish imitation." Earlier: Michael Guillén's take.

"Houdini was not your usual leading man material - short, woolly-haired, compactly built with an impressively large head and an intense, brow-knitted expression that almost never relaxed - yet he managed to overcome his odd appearance and mannerisms through sheer personal magnetism. You can't take your eyes off him." Tim Lucas on Kino's collection, Houdini: The Movie Star.

"James Marsh is known to British audiences for fashioning elegiac works from archive film (Wisconsin Death Trip) and interviews (The Burger and the King) alike," writes Catherine Wheatley; "more recently he has demonstrated a gift for crafting a tautly-strung thriller with his 2005 fictional turn The King. These elements resolve in his enthralling new documentary Man on Wire, a film that will surely elicit gasps of wonder from its audiences as it recounts the story behind Frenchman Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center on 7 August 1974."

"[W]ith so much about WALL•E presold before we even enter the cinema, it seems a bit much to expect reviewers to champion a film backed by a lucrative Hollywood brand," writes Andrew Osmond. "Annoyingly, WALL•E - from Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton, who previously had a less auteurist cachet than Ratatouille's Brad Bird - is exceptionally good. In fact it's one of Pixar's best films, ranking alongside Toy Story 2 (1999) and The Incredibles (2004)."

Mad Detective.

"Hong Kong genre-jumping auteur Johnnie To's films are invariably pretty and intelligent (though not always clear-headed and restrained), and his specific achievement here is in pushing neo-noir conventions (already a hyphenated set of narrative rules developed from Chinatown through Blade Runner, LA Confidential and beyond) into post-neo-noir territory," writes Benjamin Sutton in the L Magazine.

"Whereas Johnny To's gangster sagas are usually efficient, operatic and serious-minded, his frequent collaborations with co-writer and co-director Wai Ka-fai often come equipped with some goofy supernatural twist," notes Nick Schager in Slant. "In the duo's latest, Mad Detective, the conceit is that detective Bun (Lau Ching-wan) is an investigative ace as well as a complete loon who reenacts crimes in order to crack them and claims to be able to see people's 'inner personalities.'"

Updated through 7/21.

"Though some of the movie's charms are at times forced, Mad Detective has enough consummate film style to make many of the narrative bumps more or less irrelevant," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Among its most sustained pleasures is its clever attention-grabbing idea that Bun may actually be able to see the real personalities lurking inside other people. The filmmakers don't bother to plumb the depths of this revelation, poking about Bun's existential turmoil and whatnot. Instead, they just go as gloriously overboard as their detective at his best and sometimes worst, specifically by unleashing a dazzling riff on the funhouse climax of Orson Welles's Lady From Shanghai. It really has to be seen before it can be believed."

"Mad Detective is genre exercise through and through, humor and pathos enabled with supreme precision due to the psychic-tint on a traditional internal affairs plotline, which distracts from the conventions with the feats, pathetic and fantastic, of Lau's weary, optimistic/depressive schizo," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. And its "wacky distraction is playing a darker kind of game than one may think."

"Apart from its inventive depiction of the weaknesses that tough guys try to hide, Mad Detective is a slight work from the wildly prolific To," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "But as the directors amuse themselves in devising new ways to visualize schizophrenic dementia - casting a half-dozen different actors as the suspect's splintered psyche in a kind of psychotic entourage - the movie makes deadpan sport of its convolutions."

"Compared to the fire that drove the Election films and the pyrotechnics of Exiled the far more character oriented Mad Detective can feel much smaller than it really is," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "The emphasis here is not on style, camera tricks or action - though there is a healthy dose of that - but on the portrayal of a man lost in his own mind and taken on those terms Mad Detective is a resounding success."

Running on Karma "had romance, humor, kung fu, motorcycle chases, a Taoist plea for peace, time travel, Sikhs hiding in small tin cans and, most importantly, Andy Lau in a muscle suit," recalls Simon Abrams in the New York Press. "Four years later, Wai and To's Mad Detective continues to push the limits of their viewers' sanity with more brilliant images and ideas than you can process all in one sitting."

The AV Club's Noel Murray finds that "a certain baseline ludicrousness keeps it from being as effortlessly entertaining as To's best."

"It's a metaphysical mystery masquerading as a doodle," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson emails To to ask him "about genre, auterism and his reshaping of Hong Kong cinema."

R Emmet Sweeney talks with To for IFC.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice and Toronto.

Update: "The film's biggest surprise is how seriously it ultimately takes its premise," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Apart from its final reel, Mad Detective never seems completely sure of what it's doing, but there's something exciting about its refusal to settle into either a silly comedy or a hard-boiled thriller."

Update, 7/21: Peter Martin lives in Dallas and doubts Mad Detective will ever make it to a theater in Big D. So he tries out the VOD option: "For one thing, IFC in Theaters is only available in standard definition, so the picture looks only so-so, even on my 26-inch high-def monitor. On the other hand, the service allowed me to see a movie I very much wanted to see, without delay."

Wonderful Town.

"An affectionate love story that apes the studied art-drone minimalism of Tsai Ming-Liang and the haunted lushness of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the ironically titled Wonderful Town rewards more in its social-realist backdrop than its minor foreground drama," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

"Wonderful Town, by its third act, is a title drowning in irony," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "Wondrous, nevertheless, is Mr Assarat's sustained command as he guides his material into darker waters. It's no small feat to pull off as sweet and sensitive a romance as that between Na and Ton, and something rarer yet to suffuse such affections into a poem of wounded landscape."

Updated.

"In many ways, the debut feature from Bangkok-born, American-educated Aditya Assarat, Wonderful Town, has all the hallmarks of a workshopped Sundance indie," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "an eminently tasteful romance between two ingratiatingly sweet people burgeoning against a backdrop of recent tragedy, buoyed by delicate guitar score, bracketed by self-consciously lovely landscape shots. A detailing of the emotionally and physically ravaged coastal area of Takua Pa following the December 2004 tsunami that cost it more than 8,000 local lives, Wonderful Town means to use the event's aftereffects to evoke its characters' personal displacement. There's no doubt that Assarat has talent for situating people within gracefully framed environments, but in an overly studied manner that leaves no room for the sort of spontaneity in performance and composition that the film's subject matter warrants."

Assarat's "raw, poetic sensibility turns this posttraumatic parable into something both dreamy and oddly disturbing," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

"What clinches the film's downfall is the sucker punch of an ending, which puts a brutal, predictable cap on the menace hovering over the frowned-upon relationship," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "This is shortly followed by the cheap found poetry of two girls in tutus, which, again, feels like something rustled up from the Sundance rummage bin."

"The film is aesthetically captivating and both [Supphasit] Kansen and [Anchalee] Saisoontorn give impressively subtle, naturalistic performances, but one can't help feeling that a large part of Wonderful Town has been lost in translation," writes Mary Block in the L Magazine.

"Assarat is both a patient and a surprising director, alive to the most intimate details of everyday life - folding laundry, changing sheets, drinking coffee - and also to the dreams people hold closest to their hearts, the ones they can barely admit to themselves, let alone their lovers," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

Update: "Each shot is rendered with skill and consideration, has a light loveliness to it, but never seems fully earned, the expression said and said well, but not believed, not reaching past the surface of the characters," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "There is little richness beyond this lovely surface, but, at least until the awkwardly divergent ending, Assarat's film stands beautifully, movingly on its own, and points towards greatness to come."

Transsiberian.

"A suspenseful Hitchockian course is charted by Transsiberian, which concerns the murderous intrigue that envelops American tourists Roy (Woody Harrelson) and wife Jessie (Emily Mortimer) while making the famous week-long Transsiberian train trek from Beijing to Moscow," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Despite HD cinematography that can't quite capture the ominous grandeur of the vast landscape through which the train travels, director Brad Anderson establishes a suitably portentous mood through claustrophobic staging and an overarching air of linguistic and cultural isolation."

"At its queasy best - when absorbing the naturally phantasmagoric vibes of Siberia and surveying Jessie's grueling efforts to discard a backpack filled with unwanted goods - Transsiberian more subtly critiques our American sense of privilege than any of [Eli] Roth's Hostel pictures," writes Ed Gonzalez in the Voice. "But just as nasty as the titular mode of transport is the script's wanton declaration of theme and a cynical and fashionable belief in moral grayness that may complement the frosty setting but nonetheless feels easy."

Updated through 7/23.

"Ben Kingsley, seen briefly at the beginning of the movie before disappearing, only to re-emerge much later, plays Grinko, a duplicitous narcotics detective," notes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "A sophisticated embodiment of a cynical middle-aged Russian with a double vision of his country during and after Communism, he lends the movie a modern Dostoyevskian gloss.... 'In Russia, we have an expression,' he says, fixing his eyes on Jessie, who is frozen with panic. 'With lies you may go forward in the world, but you may never go back.' The cat-and-mouse game that ensues leads Transsiberian from tantalizing mystery into clanking melodrama."

"Though Harrelson's name is first in the cast list, Transsiberian belongs to Mortimer, who digs into a complicated character who seems decent and trustworthy, but often acts out of ruthless self-interest when the pressure's on," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "While it piles on the hair-raising twists, the film is ultimately a morality tale about the devastating consequences of people not taking responsibility for their actions."

"Mr Anderson, who first garnered attention with whimsical romantic comedies such as Next Stop Wonderland and Happy Accidents, has since made a credible transition to thrillers, with Session 9 and The Machinist," notes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun. "The captivating Transsiberian is another impressive addition to his filmography. It stays on point even when the screenplay, written by Mr Anderson and Will Conroy, becomes increasingly reliant on convenient coincidences."

"If you can look past the gimmick of Christian Bale's weight loss, you can see an unabashedly old-fashioned, noirish attitude in writer/director Brad Anderson's The Machinist (2004) that carries over into his latest film, Transsiberian," writes Simon Abrams in the New York Press. "Both are playfully subdued psychological thrillers that could just as easily have been B-films from John Frankenheimer's 1960s period save for the grisly violence that pervades The Machinist and (thankfully) only rears its head twice in Transsiberian."

"The action heroics aren't terrible, only disappointing given the ticket we've bought," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

The Film Panel Notetaker went to work at a recent advance screening.

Jeffrey M Anderson talks with Anderson for Cinematical.

Charles McGrath profiles Mortimer for the New York Times; Marnie Hanel talks with her for VF Daily.

Updates: "Even if you've seen lots of movies of this type and can figure out exactly what's going to happen, Anderson takes great pleasure in the pure form and execution of it," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "Best of all, before any of this starts, the film spends at least a reel on - get this - developing the characters!... Perhaps that's the reason Transsiberian works so well; the film's plot and suspense are all a matter of skill, but the characters continue to derail us."

"I was taking notes during the screening, but at a certain point I just wrote 'THEY'RE F*CKED,' and stopped writing," recalls Kevin Buist at the SpoutBlog. "It's one of those thrillers that does character development well enough that when the protagonists get in serious trouble you can feel your intestines twisting with anxiety."

Aaron Hillis talks with Anderson for IFC; bookmark it, then come back when you've seen Transsiberian, as there are spoilers in there.

Updates, 7/19: At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg notes that Anderson considering a few horror projects for his next step or two.

"Brad Anderson makes movies that are hard to look away from and movies that you can still see after they're over," writs Canfield at Twitch. "This is another way of saying that he makes vital movies, alive movies, movies that thrum with a pulse that sounds beyond the genres they inhabit. Transsiberian offers up equal measures of suspense, character development and story and ties it all together with gorgeous photography. The whole emerges as do almost all of Andersons films, as a telling morality play in which guilt figures heavily as a shaper of destiny."

Update, 7/23: "Harrelson can't wrestle a believable human out of this underwritten caricature named Roy, I am afraid, but Mortimer's Jessie, who at first seems a demure Christian from Middle America, is a delicate but ferocious construction, defined by urges and desires she battles but can't quite control," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "As recent patchwork-grade thrillers go, Transsiberian is a perfectly decent effort."

Mamma Mia!, round 2.

"Any film that asks us to imagine the comingled semens of Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth competing in the fallopian tubes of Meryl Streep ought to be at least slightly more compelling than this," notes Glenn Kenny - and 14 further points follow.

"For all its half-hearted stabs at catering to the transatlantic youth market (with a little gift tucked in for the stage show's voluminous gay following), Mamma Mia! is a (Shirley) valentine to fiftysomething, we're-not-done-yet broads," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "The three fiftysomething British broads - director Phyllida Lloyd, screenwriter Catherine Johnson, and co-producer Judy Craymer - who so successfully courted that wildly under-served demographic in the smash-hit stage version of Mamma Mia! came on board the movie with no prior film experience. They haven't a clue, and though their screw-it-all ineptitude lends the movie a sporadically infectious gaiety, basically it's a mess."

Updated through 7/23.

"Lloyd's background as an opera director in England might explain this uncinematic debut (despite many exterior scenes, everything's a mite stagy)," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "But it's even more baffling that the songs are performed as circusy tumbling and broad-faced burlesque.... Essayist Charles O'Brien once outlined musicological parallels between ABBA and Mozart, and he was right to do so. Mamma Mia!'s chirpy songs express many intricate emotional complications through balanced, egalitarian musical epiphanies. 'Gimme, Gimme, Gimme' and 'Does Your Mother Know' say as much about heterosexual affairs as about gay experience. That's why ABBA's catalog joined the disco revolution and eventually influenced the radical pop of Erasure. It's an all-purpose, celebratory template - a high point of modern expression."

"See that girl! Watch that scene! If you change your mind, I'm the first in line. Mamma Mia, here I go again." AO Scott in the New York Times: "Like me, you may have spent the last 30 years struggling to get lines like those out of your head - and wondering what they were doing there in the first place - but you might as well have been trying to compost Styrofoam. Those shimmery, layered arrangements, those lyrics in a language uncannily like English, those symmetrical Nordic voices - they all add up to something alarmingly permanent, a marshmallow monument on the cultural landscape. When our species dies out, leaving the planet to roaches and robots, the insects will beat their little wings to the tune of 'Waterloo' as Wall-E and Eve warble along."

"Loud, forced, occasionally crotch-grabbingly crude, Mamma Mia! is so fueled by the shrieking-banshee vibe of a drunken hen party that it makes the cafe confabs of Sex and the City girls look like a meeting of the Ms. editorial board," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. "With Lloyd resolving every scene by raising the pitch ever more hysterically, Mamma Mia! quickly goes from being a sun-splashed, slightly kitschy piece of escapist fluff to an all-out assault. Message: You will have fun. Or else."

"[I]ts employ and utilization of Abba is less accomplished when put alongside Muriel's Wedding," writes Leonard Klady at Movie City News. "That film managed to take the songs and the title character's devotion to them to a level that was funny, heartbreaking and honest."

"Even if the dictates of a profit-loving culture practically mandated the making of a film version of the über-popular stage musical that has been seen by 30 million people in 170 cities worldwide, did they have to turn it into Mamma Mia! The Movie with all the excessiveness that that title implies?" asks Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Mamma Mia! is a relentless happy-making machine calibrated to beat viewers into submission, and there are times when seems silly to try to fight it," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. That said: "The only showstopper is Meryl Streep's heartfelt rendition of 'The Winner Takes It All,' and not coincidentally, it's also the one time the film introduces a note of gravity to the proceedings. The rest of the time, Mamma Mia! force-feeds bliss."

"Streep has a sweet voice and knows how to use it (although she can't save a song as terrible as 'The Winner Takes It All'), but it's sad to watch a perfectionist remove part of her brain and try to convince us she's having a jolly time," sighs David Edelstein. Also in New York, a shot Brigitte Lacombe snapped on location.

"For a time, the unapologetic, inorganic cheesiness of Mamma Mia! is charming," concedes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine. "Unfortunately, that time is far shorter than 108 minutes - after 40, it feels a bit like scarfing an entire bag of Doritos."

"Streep's sunshine carries a lot of charm, although I will never be able to understand her final decision in the movie - not coming from such a sensible woman," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Never mind. Love has its way."

"This movie isn't just unapologetic fluff; it's aggressive, out-loud-and-proud fluff," writes Hank Sartin in Time Out New York. "Just like ABBA."

Aly Semigran recommends it in the Philadelphia Weekly, where you'll also find a review of the soundtrack.

Tina Daunt meets Firth for the Los Angeles Times.

Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss stage and screen cross-pollination.

Earlier: Round 1.

Updates: "There's something pleasing about the day-and-night clash in sensibilities between this weekend's two big movies," notes Dana Stevens at Slate. "In essence, they cancel each other out: the zero-sum, high-stakes, über-masculine gloom of The Dark Knight and the sunny, goofy gynotopia of Mamma Mia!. I admired The Dark Knight enough to return a few days later for a second viewing, but Mamma Mia! is one of the few movies in years that I could have sat through a second time right then."

"I don't normally think of Meryl Streep as the dominatrix type, but watching her and her two BFFs, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, grinning and giggling their way through Mamma Mia! I felt I was being thoroughly, and unenjoyably, punished," writes Stephanie Zacharek. Also in Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams: "What is it about this rather cheesy Scandinavian pop group that sticks in our hearts like hot chewing gum on a summertime pavement? How is it that a group that essentially disbanded in 1982 is still selling upward of 2 million albums a year?... Elisabeth Vincentelli, author of the 33 1/3 series book ABBA: ABBA Gold, says, via e-mail, 'The band has tons of fans among the kind of artists that usually get the kind of 'serious' critical recognition ABBA itself sometimes doesn't get (Elvis Costello, Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields, etc). The songs are incredibly melodic, and their sophistication hides behind apparent simplicity.'"

"I can see how Mamma Mia! might be a fun stage musical," writes Mike Russell. "As a movie musical, it's a train wreck."

"Sing-along versions of this will surely be popular for ages to come," notes Jette Kernion at Cinematical, adding, "Make sure you stay through the first half of the credits at least, or you'll miss one of the best over-the-top numbers in the entire movie, as well as more eye-popping costumes."

Alonso Duralde, writing at MSNBC, notes that "Phyllida Lloyd, the first-time feature filmmaker, constantly puts the camera in the wrong place so as to undercut the musical numbers; she makes the first half-hour all about people hugging and squealing; she sucks the energy out of almost every ABBA song being trounced about by the jukebox musical's cast; and she apparently lacked the wherewithal to stop cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos from shooting a dingy, washed-out movie set in one of the planet's most beautiful corners."

Update, 7/20: "Mamma Mia! may be terrible, but I've never seen a movie embrace its own terribleness as completely as this one does," observes Paul Matwychuk. "I even think it might be terrible by design."

Update, 7/21: "The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take Mamma Mia! to be a useful contribution to that debate," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "In a way, the whole film is a startling twist on the black art of rendition: ordinary citizens, often unaware of their own guilt, are spirited off to a secure environment in Eastern Europe, there to be forced into a humiliating and often painful confession of sins past."

Update, 7/23: "I know I am not supposed to say this, but Mamma Mia! has the exuberance you want out of a summer musical movie," blogs DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice.

Summer Hours in the UK.

Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours "is a quiet and lyrical movie that poses a pertinent question in a time where philanthropists like Eli Broad are wresting power from museums: if you are fortunate enough to inherit art, what should you do with it?" Laura Allsop, writing in Art Review, finds the film instructive.

The Guardian's Xan Brooks finds Summer Hours to be "an airy Chekhovian miniature in which Charles Berling and Juliette Binoche play bourgeois siblings parcelling up the estate of their dead mother and the great artist she shacked up with. In his unobtrusive fashion, Assayas poses telling questions about the ways we lay our past to rest."

"With a seemingly loose but meticulously assembled narrative in the style of his earlier ensemble piece Late August, Early September, it chronicles the interactions between the various characters with psychological subtlety and precision, even as it explores the changing roles played by art, property, work and blood-ties in an increasingly globalised world," writes Geoff Andrew in Time Out. "Perhaps the characters are finally a little too uniformly decent, but it would be churlish to bemoan the generosity of spirit in a film so beautifully performed, intelligently written and fluently directed."

"Assayas seems to flip-flop between jagged postmodernism and stately neo-classicism, and it makes him one of the most restless talents in current cinema," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "Summer Hours fits comfortably into the second bracket... It has Assayas's favourite themes - commerce, identity, globalisation - all over it, but more subtly than of late, and the film's elegant upholstering makes it his most enjoyable."

It "recalls the late great works of master miniaturist Claude Sautet," suggests Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

The Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm even finds it "reminds us gently and persuasively of the films of the great Renoir."

Online listening tip. The Observer's Jason Solomons talks with Assayas.

Earlier: Daniel Kasman (Auteurs' Notebook) and Karina Longworth (SpoutBlog).

Puffball.

"The release today of the movie Puffball is timed to honour the impending 80th birthday of its distinguished director, Nicolas Roeg," notes Mark Lawson in the Guardian. "But the screening date also marks another cinematic anniversary: it's exactly 35 years since Roeg's masterpiece, Don't Look Now, introduced what remains one of the most celebrated movie sex scenes: an extended, fragmented, ecstatic encounter between a naked Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.... But the journey between the two films shows the change in the relationship between moviegoers and erotic material."

"Puffball, sad to say, is a borderline disaster, a preposterous carnal burlesque that catches the one-time visionary looking woozy and exhausted, his pants metaphorically around his ankles," adds Xan Brooks.

"Time was when a new Nicolas Roeg film would have been a proper date for the diary," writes the Independent's Anthony Quinn. "Now it's about as welcome as a new Woody Allen."

"Roeg is a matchless director of mystery, but this gloomy psychodrama, adapted from a Fay Weldon novel by her son Dan, flirts dangerously with corn," writes James Christopher in the London Times.

"Roeg conjures reasonably lightly with Weldon's teasing feminist-inflected, ‘Wicker-Man'-lite allusions, blending a naturalistic, psychologically heightened shooting style with sexual frankness and gynaecological inserts," notes Wally Hammond in Time Out.

"No one could call this Roeg's best work but it still shows us a director who, though now 80, has a few tricks up his sleeve," offers Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "Donald Sutherland, almost a Roeg regular, has a couple of scenes as Liffey's visiting boss, but I'm not quite sure why."

With Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon and Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours set to open in September, Geoffrey Macnab notes that, yes, directors who carry on working well past 70 are indeed a historical rarity.

Earlier: Steve Rose's interview with Roeg.

The Human Condition.

"The three-part fuming World War II bummer The Human Condition (1959 - 61) - considered the magnum opus of socially critical Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri) - runs just shy of 10 hours and is an arduous watch in ways beyond its creator's intentions," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "Based on Jumpei Gomikawa's ambitious novel and seasoned with Kobayashi's own experiences, this overly melodramatic trilogy set in Japanese-occupied Manchuria depicts the dehumanizing brutality of war with on-the-nose pedantry, never subtext, and offers little richness to Western eyes already adjusted to the next half-century's deeper anti-war tales."

Updated through 7/21.

For the L Magazine's Mark Asch, this "is not 'the finest achievement yet made by the cinema,' per historian David Shipman's existing-to-be-pullquoted pullquote. (He also nominated it for a Nobel...) It is, though, a never less than engrossing field study of a belief system in contact with the world, composed by Kobayashi in classically delineated, high-contrast space that would make his peak 60s works self-contained worlds for thought-out consciousness."

At Film Forum from tomorrow through August 7.

Earlier: "Tatsuya Nakadai in New York."

Update, 7/18: "Kobayashi was one of the leading figures in postwar Japanese cinema, a peer of Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa, though his critical reputation abroad never quite matched theirs," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "He was also part of a broader humanist tendency in world cinema. The Human Condition was made at around the same time as Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy and Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, and like them it is a work of large-scale realism grounded in a thorough but undogmatic left-wing political sensibility.... The Human Condition can, in its speechifying moments, feel a bit creaky. But it is also, and more frequently, amazingly powerful in its emotional sweep and the depth of its historical insight."

"In the first chapter, No Greater Love, our hero is in a position of power," notes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "Next, in Road to Eternity, he is in a position of obedience. Then in the breathtaking A Soldier's Prayer, he has devolved to a position of abject desperation, at the mercy of a God who seems all but ignorant of his plight. From a factory to the army barracks to the mud and dirt of the open field, the central theme of The Human Condition involves man turning against his fellow man, using such devices as employment, rank, and nationality to rationalize the abuse."

"So many melodramatic ironies and such broad, sweeping indictments can produce a wearying effect, especially when Kobayashi's ambitious-to-a-fault attacks treats the message-mongering as a blunt instrument rather than a scalpel," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "It's Nakadai who makes this impressive yet flawed screed worth your time commitment. His transformation of Koji from idealist to leader, protector, killer and finally, a haggard ghost of man offers a powerful example of humanity being slowly, painfully stamped out."

"Nakadai's performance as a man of Christlike forbearance, who travels to the edge of human endurance in a doomed and lonely struggle against an evil society, is both moving and charismatic," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "That comparison is not frivolous, by the way; Kobayashi was profoundly influenced by Western philosophy, cinema and religion, to the point of being called 'anti-Japanese' by some of his countrymen. (I feel virtually certain that this movie was an influence on Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima.) Kobayashi's wide-screen landscapes (shot by Yoshio Miyajima), depicting the lonely human figure against a natural world that knows and cares nothing about him, combine wonder and mortal terror."

Update, 7/21: In Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin tries out a comparison with Fassbinder's Berliner Alexanderplatz: "[S]trangely, surprisingly, both projects share a haunted fascination with national and historical trauma that is almost entirely unique and unparalleled in cinema, the obsessive nature of their pursuits for answers about their nations' shameful descent into self-destruction fueling not only marathon runtimes but also torturous passion play narratives featuring stubborn protagonists whose education in the horrors and hypocrisies of the world unfold in relentless, punishing accretions of indignities. There's an instructional quality to Kobayashi's humanism as well as Fassbinder's theatricality: Kaji's encounters with bureaucratic fascism, militaristic brutality, sexual exploitation, and animalistic selfishness play out as stations on the road to personal and universal annihilation in the same manner in which Franz Biberkopf's run-ins with Nazis, gangsters, communists, and prostitutes gradually acquire profound significance and stand for a greater level of collective shame and guilt."

All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green.

The retrospective All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green opens tonight at BAM with Snow Angels and closes with a sneak preview of the stoner comedy Pineapple Express on July 24.

"Has David Gordon Green gone pop?" asks Nick Pinkerton in the Voice before revisiting George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow and Snow Angels. Pinkerton then looks ahead to Express, "the best movie (as opposed to an arrangement of scenes) to ever come from Camp Apatow," and, with Green, further on: "Upcoming is a remake of Suspiria ('The way that horror is going, I think we're losing sight of the artistry and the complexity and the kind of strange, surreal, emotional element'), a John Grisham true-crime adaptation, and 'a cartoon TV series.' ('That doesn't include all the weirdo projects— little, bizarre, personal, intimate portraits and things that I try to develop on the side.')"

Updated through 7/23.

Chris Lee, blogging for the Los Angeles Times, on Pineapple Express: "Turns out Green was an inspired if not altogether obvious choice. He more than capably pulls off the kind of improv-heavy, zeitgeisty, male bonding comedy for which Apatow productions have come to be known. At a screening packed with teenagers I attended earlier this summer, Pineapple Express' bong-hit humor and bloody, surrealistically funny action sequences were killing."

John Del Signore talks with DGG for Gothamist.

Earlier: Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun; and James Rocchi's March interview.

Update: Ed Howard on All the Real Girls: "Green finds a lot to love in these characters, approaching them and their stories on their own terms, and comes away with a small gem of a romance and a fine sophomore film."

Update, 7/18: David Lowery at Hammer to Nail on All the Real Girls: "Some of my best memories and all of my worst ones are set to music, and I think what Green was after here was to make a movie that might work the same way. I could tell you about the photography in the film and the actors in it and how they do what they do, but none of that would get at what they're all actually getting at."

Update, 7/23: Online listening tip. DGG on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Lou Reed's Berlin.

"What a beautiful and strange album Lou Reed gave us with Berlin, with its haunted and melancholic lyrics about a relationship being dragged down into the depths of despair, with a little bit of heroin and a little bit of suicide and a little bit of loathing and a section where the main character's children are taken away by social workers," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "And yet this tragic record achieved an intense, crystalline grace with the weight of its orchestral accompaniment, its choir of young voices and lyrics containing the specificity of romantic detail one remembers in the haze of reminiscence.... Some concert documentaries give one an impression of watching a show, and experiencing the performance in a secondhand way but still enjoying the vicarious experience. Others, such as Lou Reed's Berlin, seem like the movie experience gets in its own way."

Updated through 7/18.

"Yes, this may be Lou Reed's Berlin, but it's more a bygone New York experience than having a subway bum puke on your lap," writes Camille Dodero in the Voice. "For one, Reed and [director Julian] Schnabel are both such uniquely 800-pound New York gorillas, they belong in the Bronx Zoo. For two, Berlin was just a handy 'metaphor' - Reed told the Times he'd never been back then - and what better fractured-relationship trope than a Cold War locus with an impenetrable wall and an east/west divide?... Schnabel somehow magically makes the subdued hues of St Ann's Warehouse in 2006] feel like a grand loft space."

Henry Stewart in the L Magazine: "In contrast to, say, Shine a Light's big-screen verve, Berlin is YouTube-ready: visually banal, spiritlessly assembled. Its camera movements feel arbitrary, which suggests a reproachable lack of pre-production (or stoned camera operators)."

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

At Film Forum.

Updates: "There's a green-robed children's choir, two backup singers, a small orchestra and a rock ensemble, but it's mainly a chance for Schnabel to illustrate - as in Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - an artist's agony," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "For him, Berlin isn't glam-rock nostalgia; it's a still-relevant expression of the hell that he and Reed know people inflict on each other. Schnabel calls it 'Love's darker sisters: rage, jealousy, loss.'"

"Lou Reed's Berlin can't quite take its place in the pantheon of great concert films, because Schnabel's cameras rarely seem to be in a useful place, and his pointless lo-fi recreations of the album's story look cheap and intermittently pretentious," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But for Reed fans - for rock fans - the movie is an essential document of a noteworthy event."

Updates, 7/18: "Those songs are some of the most melodic and tender of Mr Reed's career," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The original record, produced by Bob Ezrin in the grand style of 70s concept albums, is Mr Reed's most operatic. For the concert, in addition to basic rock instrumentation, intensely dramatic arrangements with four horn and reed players, two violas and a cello were used. In the more contemplative passages, the music seems to hover as though holding its breath until the last second before a storm breaks. When it does, the guitars swell to a howling crescendo that evokes the passing of a tornado."

"The mixture of onstage valediction with vintage melodramatic lyrical degradation that makes up Lou Reed's Berlin is frankly an odd sensibility cocktail, and Mr Schnabel's filmic approach doesn't really make it go down any smoother," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Despite the director's dogged attempts (aided considerably by the excellent cinematographer Ellen Kuras) to avoid merely documenting the proceedings from front-row center, Lou Reed's Berlin remains a concert film, through and through. And, as is often the case with live rock and roll committed to film (the Stones's catastrophic performance at the Altamont Speedway in the Maysles brothers' Gimme Shelter notwithstanding), it's difficult to shake the impression that it would've been a lot more fun to have been there."

Lou Reed's Berlin "makes most other concert films look like what they are, wimpy and nonessential," argues Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "So intensely displeasurable is the album that you may end up loving it, and director Julian Schnabel is smart enough to stay out of the way of the music." Reed's is "one of the most fascinating performances of the year."

"As a concert film, Lou Reed's Berlin is a little closer to The Song Remains the Same than The Last Waltz, engaging in digressions and hallucinations of the album's protagonists, Caroline and Jim, as much as in the band's sometimes thunderous, sometimes chilling performance," writes Leo Goldsmith in Reverse Shot. There are also "newly shot dramatic sequences starring Emmanuelle Seigner as Caroline, and credited to Schnabel's daughter, Lola. The irony here is pungent, especially when Reed sings of those 'men of poor beginnings' who 'have no rich daddy to fall back on.' But while this bit of nepotism (and the press notes' revelation that Lola is a junior at Cooper Union) will be cause enough for many to dismiss her contribution, this is partly a work about parents and children, and Lola's work here still very much of a piece with her father's. More importantly, it fits with the retrospective angst of the entire project, conjuring Reed's own ersatz evocations of Brecht/Weill villainy in a canny succession of styles from New York's avant-garde cinema."

"One thing you should know," warns Christopher Campbell at Cinematical, "is that Lou Reed has personally instructed theaters to play the film at concert-level volume. That means it's really, really loud.... Perhaps Berlin was ahead of its time. Or maybe Reed just should have begun performing the album right away; with the kind of supporting talent he brought to St Ann's Warehouse that weekend in 2006. I'd like to meet the rock critic who could speak negatively of the grand execution of 'Caroline Says I.' I'd also like to meet the person who doesn't feel emotional during 'The Bed,' a song about suicide that, in the concert/film, prominently features a dozen, mostly female teens from the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who all appear to be on the verge of tears while singing backup."

Before I Forget.

"Before I Forget, the new feature by the French writer, actor and director Jacques Nolot, trains an unflinching spotlight on a species that, to judge from the movies, might as well be extinct: the aging homosexual." Dennis Lim in the New York Times: "Practically a lifetime removed from the buff heroes of the typical boy-meets-boy romances, Mr Nolot's Pierre is a 60ish writer and ex-gigolo who has been HIV-positive for 24 years.... 'I don't know if it's provocation, but there is a wicked pleasure to the film,' Mr Nolot said on a warm May evening at Le Select, the famous literary cafe in Montparnasse, not far from where he lives. 'I expose myself, and I show myself naked and sick. Here is how we are, how we live. People can take it or leave it.'"

Updated through 7/18.

"The catchwords for Before I Forget would seem to be direct, intimate, unsparing; yet, conversely, it also feels cavernous and, in its seeming brutal frankness, slippery and elusive," writes Michael Koresky for indieWIRE. The film "is enormously complex, a surveying of an entire life just past its midpoint via its practicalities and lost promises."

"This is the third semi-autobiographical feature made by Nolot, who collaborated on the scripts for several André Téchiné movies and may be best known to arthouse audiences as the husband who mysteriously disappears at the start of François Ozon's Under the Sand," notes Scott Foundas in the Voice. Here, "the central themes of the work - decay and loss - remain unwavering."

"Were Rainer Werner Fassbinder still with us, would his twilight films be anything like Jacques Nolot's?" wonders Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Roughly the same age as the late, great German wunderkind, Nolot displays little of Fassbinder's cinematic invention yet shares with him a tough, rigorously unsentimental eye for human intimacy and alienation, particularly when said eye is directed at his old queer self."

Earlier: Acquarello.

Updates: "Nolot's tough meditation on Pierre is elegant, tense and mournful, like Mahler's Third Symphony which accompanies Pierre's final crisis," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "A character study this spiritually obstinate lacks Téchiné's richness (Young Pierre discovered the life options Old Pierre rejects), but it no less than ranks with Scorsese's Raging Bull - especially when Pierre launches into an intellectual confession of his own stupidity: 'We see it in fervent hedonists whose orgasms serve to forget they are not happy.' This isn't gay self-hatred, but an authentic unnerving portrait; it dares to oppose cinema's false romanticism with ruthless honesty."

The AV Club's Noel Murray's take would be closer to Michael Guillén's (see comment): "Forty years ago, some members of the gay community took issue with the parade of self-pitying, self-hating queens in Mart Crowley's play (and subsequent film) The Boys in the Band, but is there really that much distance between Crowley's lonely New Yorkers and the network of Parisian hustlers and ex-hustlers in Jacques Nolot's more aesthetically respectable Before I Forget?"

Update, 7/18: "Mr Nolot's fictionalized self-portrait is proudly self-lacerating," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "While Pierre maintains an attitude of haughty independence, Mr Nolot goes out of his way to puncture any illusions he may have of being desirable to the boys he covets. As the camera studies Pierre from a distance in his dimly lighted apartment and slowly surveys the possessions on his shelves, you sense a man who has accepted the choices he has made."

"Nolot's portrait of senescence isn't about rainbow visions; his film, one of the most honest, courageous and witty of the year, instead looks at decay, insufferable loss and humiliation—all endured, particularly at the end as Mahler's Symphony No 3 blasts, with defiant, willful abjection," writes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York.

"This openness never becomes a clichéd tactic of plant-and-shoot voyeuristic stares," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "The film, like its protagonist, keeps a certain casual civility, a stance matched by the modestly neat cinematography by Josée Deshaies. Mr Nolot's restraint conveys the character's deeper weariness and barely diffused fears about holding on to who he is. His subtle performance rewards a close eye to tone and little shifts in line readings."

"Like the film, Pierre's surface is one of restraint, collection, and composure, but when he speaks Pierre does little but lament about a barely seen interior state of disarray, regretting past actions and missing old loves. This disconnect between exterior appearances and interior states makes Before I Forget one of the most unexpected surprises I've seen in some time," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"I hope - as I continually hope for that snowball's chance in Hell - that Before I Forget will find its way to movie lovers stateside, and not just the portion of moviegoers who would generally check out what are so euphemistically and blithely called 'gay-themed' pictures," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Before I Forget is, in the broad sense, 'gay-themed.' But it's also one of the loveliest, most direct and most devastating pictures about aging that I've ever seen."

"Only in retrospect is the simplicity and craft of Nolot's storytelling and visual style fully apparent," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Pierre is certainly prone to self-pity, including blithe talk about suicide. However, he maintains his dignity to the end, despite the difficulties his life has thrown at him and his masochistic tendencies that extend outside the bedroom. Nolot makes no pretense of judging his alter ego, and he seems to expect the same from his audience."

"[O]ne of the best things about Before I Forget, which was selected as one of last year's ten best films by Cahiers du Cinema [is that] it's the uncompromising work of an artist making a film for himself, rather than targeting a demographic," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical.

indieWIRE to SnagFilms.

"As you can read today on indieWIRE, we have some big news to share," announces editor Eugene Hernandez. "In the waning hours of our 12th anniversary on Tuesday, we signed a deal to sell iW to SnagFilms, a new company founded by Ted Leonsis and backed by Steve Case and Miles Gilburne."

Updated through 7/21.

Details and reflections follow, as well as pointers to pieces on the deal from Variety's Anne Thompson and the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein.

Updates: Eugene talks with Leonis about "Snag and the state of distribution today."

Via Scott Kirsner, the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg's take on SnagFilms and Jefferson Graham's story for USA Today. Meanwhile, a first impression from Anthony Kaufman.

Update, 7/18: Co-founder Michael Jones, currently with Variety: "The difficult truth about being independent is that it's mostly for the young. Few filmmakers can make a complete career of it. And yet sometimes the upside of 'selling out' is - if you do it right - your buyer understands that independent ingredient that makes you valuable."

Update, 7/21: "Hell, advocate for your subject to your heart's content, with my blessing (not that you'd need it). But - and this is just a theory, so be sure to treat it as such - if there was a downturn for docs last year, it might be argued that some art house audiences weren't interested in paying good money at theatres for taking their medicine." AJ Schnack comments on - and then raises "a cautious glass" to - the deal.

Shorts, 7/15.

"What can one say about Rudy Wurlitzer that doesn't suggest multitudes of overlapping worlds?... After several years in the New York literary and visual arts underground as a participant observer, Wurlitzer emerged with a series of one of a kind novels - Nog, Quake and Flats and the screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop in collaboration with Monte Hellman in the late 60s and early 70s. He has worked with Sam Peckinpah, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alex Cox, Bernardo Bertolucci and then some." So Lee Hill gets him talking for Vertigo.

"A humanist intellectual, whose layered studies of conflicting social forces and individual fates may have been too subtle for the culture surrounding them, [Helmut] Käutner qualifies as one of the pantheon directors of German cinema, possibly even the nation's finest major filmmaker of the sound era save, perhaps, Fassbinder," argues Christophe Huber.

Also at Moving Image Source: "Recycle It" is Ed Halter's brief but excellent history of the use of found footage from the silent era through Joseph Cornell and Bruce Conner to net.art and YouTube.

And David Cairns, too, makes a stab at reviving an under-appreciated oeuvre: "Celebrated in the 60s and 70s, [Shirley Clarke] seems to have been progressively erased from film history, just as the Eastmancolor sequence of Skyscraper (1959) has faded to pink. Stalinist revisionism or cultural amnesia?"

Jim Emerson sorts through the various colors of blood in the movies.

When DK Holm first read what may or may not be the screenplay for Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, he "hated it." Then he got to thinking, talking with friends and a second read-through: "I've come to the conclusion that Inglourious Basterds would be one hell of a movie, one of Tarantino's best; that its 'problem' is that the movie isn't as much on the page as his previous films; and that it is probably the best marriage of Samuel Fuller and the nouvelle vague since Pierrot le fou."

Meanwhile, Defamer runs "An Open Letter to Quentin Tarantino on the Occasion of His Latest Gross Overexposure" (via Movie City News) and the Playlist has a few casting ideas.

Speaking of Fuller, though: "As a director, Fuller delighted in rubbing America's face in its social and political failures, but he judiciously refused to align himself with any Utopian political movement," writes Chris Dumas in Nextbook. "Fuller's films are typified by a sense of moral urgency, the feeling that the stakes are too high to be polite. This is how he was the opposite of a director like Ernst Lubitsch: elegance of structure and fluidity of style were never his concern. This insolence, this brashness, is perhaps why Fuller has always been more popular with other directors than he has been with critics or film historians, and more celebrated by the French than by us."

Happy birthday, indieWIRE!

Mike Everleth launches the Underground Film Guide.

Dennis Cozzalio recalls the day he met John Belushi.

Netroots Nation, "a four-day event at the Austin Convention Center bringing together the brightest lights in liberal and progressive opinion and activism," as Wells Dunbar puts it in the Austin Chronicle, takes off this Friday. Alex Gibney will be there, so Marc Savlov talks with him: "I think I'm just going to give a little preview of a new film I've done. It's about Jack Abramoff, and it's called Casino Jack and the United States of Money, and it looks at the Abramoff scandal as a way to reckon with the pernicious influence that money has had in our political process." Meanwhile, blogging for the Guardian, Gibney tells the story behind Taxi to the Dark Side.

In text and audio, Guernica Mia Farrow talking about the ongoing, right now, as-I-blog-and-you-read genocide in Darfur. The presentation took place in April; just yesterday, as the Guardian reports, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has been charged by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court with genocide.

"Can Spike Jonze save Where the Wild Things Are?" Patrick Goldstein "just spoke to Warners chief Alan Horn, who offered, for the first time, his studio's side of the story." Goldstein also asks Bob Shaye about "why New Line was slammed with so many lawsuits about Lord of the Rings profits, how he desperately tried to save New Line and why he still thinks it was a good idea to go off and direct a movie as his company was struggling to survive."