Shorts, 8/31.

"A few weeks ago, a group of Los Angeles Times writers and editors sat down to celebrate our celluloid city by selecting the 25 films from the last 25 years that best speak to the essential DNA of the Southland," writes Geoff Boucher. "We started with two simple ground rules: The movie had to communicate some inherent truth about the LA experience, and only one film per director was allowed on the list, a guideline that kept City of Angels specialists such as Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson from dominating." So here's what they've come up with; you can follow along, too, via a map.

Rocket Video responds with a few alternatives and a list of the ten best LA docs.

Also in the LAT: Scott Martelle reviews Rick Wartzman's Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Vince Keenan's just enjoyed Vampyres of Hollywood: "The novel by Adrienne Barbeau (yes, that Adrienne Barbeau) and Michael Scott (no, not that Michael Scott) suggests that many of the movies' brightest lights are in fact the undead. Funny how easy that notion is to accept."

"I've mentioned from time to time the 'shot at a time' sessions I do at film festivals and universities, sifting through a film with the help of the audience," begins Roger Ebert. "Actually, it's something anyone can do, including you... I want to tell you how." Books and methods are recommended and then a slew of comments follows, with Ebert replying to several of them.

"The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is literally a Disneyfication (you wonder whether The Gas Chamber ride is being installed outside Paris)," writes Linda Grant. "How can we expect children to understand what we do not?" She's upfront about giving away the ending here, but I found the spoiler worth the read. Related: Mick Brown has a long talk with Vera Farmiga for the Telegraph.

Also in the Guardian:

• "François Ozon is the French director who made the masterly 5x2, and his career has had such fluency and adventure that anything he makes is of some interest," writes Peter Bradshaw, reviewing Angel. "But this really is a failure - an honourable failure, arguably, but a failure, and a pretty complete one at that." Ryan Gilbey and Jason Solomons talk with Ozon; he Independent's Anthony Quinn finds that Ozon "has taken Elizabeth Taylor's beadily satiric novel and transformed it into a droll and somewhat disturbing fantasia on the creative temperament." More from David Jenkins in Time Out and Jason Solomons in the Observer.

• Steven Poole, briefly, on The Studs Terkel Interviews:: Film and Theater: "And here is the man himself, or at least slices of his career-long masterclass. It stretches over four decades, from Truffaut and Buster Keaton, through Arthur Miller, James Cagney and Lotte Lenya, to Ian McKellen and Arnold Schwarzenegger ('I have emotions,' the latter announces, terrifyingly)."

• "In a plotline that couldn't have come straight out of one of his movies, Hollywood scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas has found God." Marina Hyde comments.

• Ryan Gilbey interviews Will Ferrell.

"Several historians would argue that 1913 marked the first major achievements of film as an artform," writes David Bordwell. "Two outstanding films of that annus mirabilis have recently been issued on US DVD. One is a striking accomplishment, the other a flat-out masterpiece. Both discs belong in the collections of everyone who's serious about cinema." And they are: Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley's Suspense and Victor Sjöström's Ingeborg Holm.

Michael Peterson at the House Next Door on Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0: You Are Not Alone: "[T]his new Evangelion varies between being a shot-by-shot remake in the Gus Van Sant Psycho vein (adjusted to widescreen), a Star Wars-like Special Edition with updated effects, and a full-on rework of the original series' plot fundamentals that, with each additional entry, promises to differ more and more from the original source. What I do feel immediately confident saying is that the film is a visual masterpiece."

"When Katrin Cartlidge died suddenly in September 2002, the world lost one of its most adventurous, erudite character actresses," writes Matt Mazur in PopMatters. "She specialized in creating noiseless women on the fringe, loners, drifters, working class women, professionals, low-lifes, women of distinction, and everything in between for a handful of the most visionary directors of our time, Lodge Kerrigan, Mike Leigh and Lars von Trier among them. She was the very definition of a 'working actress.'"

Mike Russell posts "one of the weirder pieces of 'celebrity journalism' I've ever stumbled across: [Lee] Marvin's beautifully written, ambivalent first-person account of hunting - and then sparing - a magnificent elk bull."

"Warners might well have dug out their [James] Dean files when Heath Ledger died suddenly last January, for what was this but corporate history repeating itself?" John McElwee looks back on how the company stoked the fires of "Dean-mania."

Nicholas Ray's 1956 film Bigger Than Life "attempted to take on a subject - the rise of psychopharmacology - that was as timely as it was confusing, and the whole movie visibly strains against the pressure of dramatizing the unfamiliar," writes Evan Kindley at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "It gives the impression of a world-changing scientific discovery explained by somebody who doesn't really understand it." Also, Andrew Schenker: "In Hot Blood, the film's Los Angeles gypsy community may be marked by insistent patriarchal attitudes, but they weren't counting on Jane Russell." Here, Ray is "concerned with staging a glorious Technicolor extravaganza, delighting in arranging his characters and their variegated costuming across the 'Scope screen and even staging several dance numbers. Still, if it's difficult to argue with the results from an aesthetic standpoint, this shift in focus on Ray's part nonetheless makes the question of constructing a coherent reading of the film somewhat problematic."

"It's amazing to think that Guy Ritchie is not quite 40 and already he's in the last chance saloon. After the two great follies, Swept Away and Revolver, his new film RocknRolla is make or break." Kaleem Aftab has seen it and, as he writes in the Independent, "There's nothing too wrong with RocknRolla per se, it's just that if you've watched [Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels] or Snatch then you've seen it all before - and done better." Also: Gaynor Flynn talks with Tilda Swinton.

"There is no denying that 'origin tales' are all the rage, and it's not just for superheroes anymore," writes Jessica Barnes at Cinematical. "In an interview with MTV Movie Blog, director Alex Proyas gave a few updates about what he has planned for Dracula Year Zero, and the word of the day is 'realism.' Proyas told MTV, the film will be 'sort of the origin tale that mixes [the historical] Prince Vlad of Transylvania with sort of [fictionalized] Bram Stoker [take]' - I guess if it helps, just think of it as Portrait of a Bloodsucker as a Young Man."

"Critics and moviegoers will decide how it stacks up against its 69-year-old inspiration, but we can tell you now: It definitely is different." Anita Gates introduces a graphic comparing The Women (1939) and The Women (2008).

Also in the New York Times:

• "An adult fable told with childlike simplicity, Year of the Fish updates an ancient Chinese version of the Cinderella story with imagination, charm and just the right amount of sweetness," finds Jeannette Catsoulis. More from S James Snyder in the New York Sun and Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail.

• Also: "Mellow as buttermilk and twice as nutritious, the music documentaries Youssou N'Dour: Return to Gorée and Maria Bethânia: Music Is Perfume trace influences and celebrate connections with tunes to make you tap and sway." More from Matt Noller in Slant.

• And: "Any comedy that can combine death, abortion, Jewish ritual and a mariachi band without curdling into complete lunacy deserves a modicum of respect. In the case of My Mexican Shivah, more would be pushing it." More from Martin Tsai in the New York Sun.

FilmInFocus profiles a blogger this time many of us have been curious about for a long time now: Tom Sutpen of If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.

David Denby is taking New Yorker readers' questions. Via the House Next Door.

For the Telegraph, Andrew Pettie talks with director Saul Dibb about The Duchess. Related: Sam Wollaston interviews Keira Knightley for the Guardian.

Amy Raphael talks with Steve Coogan for the Observer.

Things are looking up for the Norwegian film industry, reports Gunnar Rehlin for Variety.

Mexico is officially considering 11 films from which to choose one to send into the Oscar race. Nathaniel R has a linked-up list.

Online listening tip #1. New York Review of Books podcasts.

Online listening tip #2. "As the summer movie season finally draws - or rather, sputters - to a close, four AV Club writers measure 2008 against 2007, discuss the onset of blockbuster fatigue, and weigh in with their favorite and least favorite films of the last four months."

Online viewing tip #1. Matt Zoller Seitz's Requiem for Kong.

Online viewing tip #2. Lynn Hirschberg talks with Naomi Watts for the New York Times.

Online viewing tip #3. "Happy to see one of my favorite animated short films of all time, Mark Osborne's More, on YouTube's Screening Room (courtesy of Wholphin)," notes Matt Dentler.

Online viewing tips. "The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube," as selected by Ajesh Patalay for the Observer: "Joy Division's TV debut, readings by Jack Kerouac, a Marlene Dietrich screen test, Madonna's first performance... and much more."

Venice, 8/31.

"At least one great movie can be guaranteed to emerge from the premieres at this year's Venice film festival," writes John Hooper in the Guardian. "Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves may not be new, but the version screened yesterday at the Lido had never been seen before. It was the result of six months of painstaking restoration and digitisation, which have saved for future generations of moviegoers a masterpiece that was in danger of being lost."

Jean-Michel Frodon for Cahiers du cinéma on The Burning Plain and Jerichow: "In both films, you get the feeling of a lack of sincerity and spontaneity, you see TV fiction conformity which the screenplay tries to palliate by uselessly complicating the story, and the directing and acting are constantly overdone in each gesture, each emotion. We will refrain from attempting to draw a broader theory about this similarity, either regarding the contemporary world or current cinema." Also: "Zhang Ke Jia is present three-fold on the lagoon this year, even if he has no feature film in competition at Mostra."

"The challenging work of Paolo Benvenuti has never been so beautiful." For Cineuropa, Gabriele Barcaro reviews Puccini and the Young Girl, while Natasha Senjanovic reports on the screening of Landscape No 2: "Part historical intrigue, part thriller, part sexfest, in the film, which [Vinko] Möderndorfer adapted from his eponymous novel, electrical appliance repairman Polde (Janez Hočevar) and his young assistant Sergej (Marko Mandić) break into a house of a retired general (Janez Škof) to steal a painting of one the mass graves of the many massacres of Nazi collaborators that took place in Slovenia at the end of WWII."

"In Belgian director Patrice Toye's Nowhere Man, an apparently comfortably off and happily married man sees a raging house fire and on the spur of the moment walks into it in order to fake his death and disappear. The rest of film details the many ways he regrets that decision." Countering Ray Bennett's generally positive review in the Hollywood Reporter would be Eddie Cockrell's for Variety.

Arifa Akbar reports in the Independent on reactions to Valentino: The Last Emperor - from its subjects. More from Geoffrey Macnab (Guardian), David Gritten (Telegraph) and Alissa Simon (Variety).

Damon Wise and Nick James round up "Venice gossip" for the Observer.

The Guardian and the Telegraph have got special sections going.

Fests and events, 8/31.

"Anthology Film Archives in the East Village has rescued and preserved Chafed Elbows and two more of [Robert] Downey's riotous but equally endangered early works, Babo 73 (1964) and No More Excuses (1968), with the support of the Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation," writes Stuart Klawans in the New York Times. "These time capsules of another era - which like capsules of a different kind can act quickly on the nervous system - will be shown at Anthology in a weeklong series beginning Sept 18, along with one of Mr Downey's most personal films, the never-released Moment to Moment (1975).... Martin Scorsese, who is on the board of the Film Foundation, asked, 'How could we even think of not preserving these films?' Interviewed by e-mail, he described the pictures as 'an essential part of that moment when a truly independent American cinema was born.'"

"I am about to embark on seven straight weeks of cinematic discovery, an incredibly condensed period of time when I will sit through more films than most people see in a year. Toronto ends just as Independent Film Week begins, which overlaps with my beloved New York Film Festival, an event that ends just before the Hamptons International Film Festival kicks off.... How can you watch 100 films in seven weeks without going a little bit crazy? I wouldn't miss it for the world." Tom Hall previews "the films I am most looking forward to seeing (some for a second time) and writing about during my festival season."

Darren Hughes, who'll be covering Toronto for Senses of Cinema (and yes, I'll have an entry on the new issue as soon as I can), lays out his schedule.

"Respondents to our eighth annual Chasing the Buzz poll picked rebel opus Che as the movie they're most eager to see at the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from Thursday through Sept 13," notes the Toronto Star's Peter Howell. Via Jeffrey Wells.

At indieWIRE, Sylvain Verstricht files a dispatch from Montreal, where the World Film Festival runs through tomorrow.

In the New York Sun, Bruce Bennett previews Cinematic Atlas: The Triumphs of Charlton Heston, running through Thursday.

In the Auteurs' Notebook, David Phelps looks back on highlights from Japanese Screen Classics: In Honor of Madame Kawakita.

Online listening tip. At Cinematical, James Rocchi and Michael Lerman look ahead to Toronto.

The Red Shoes @ 60.

To mark the occasion, the New York Times has turned to its chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay: "Melodrama! Kitsch! Ham! Entirely undistinguished choreography!" To be fair, further in he adds, "Even so, The Red Shoes remains a classic."

The piece has infuriated the Siren no end:

The movie is about a commitment to art that drives an artist to her grave, and [Michael] Powell's dedication to showing the incredible preparation that must go into a single performance is part of the movie's realism.

I said realism and I meant it. The ultimate accomplishment of The Red Shoes is the way it combines the dream world of a ballet performance and the spiritual dedication to art, with the actual backbreaking work of the artist and the life sacrifices that ballet demands. Vicky's death scene is sneeringly described by Macaulay as "sheer Tosca" and "sheer Anna Karenina," as though either source is a hallmark of kitsch. Powell's memoirs, which Macaulay might greatly benefit from reading, remark on how the bloodiness of that scene struck the British critics as "bad taste." "The whole point of the scene," Powell countered, "was the conflict between romance and realism, between theatre and life." Indeed, that's the whole point of the movie.

Further exploration? The Wikipedia entry on the film will take you all sorts of places.

Telluride 08.

First, a couple of online viewing tips. The Auteurs present a "Tribute to 35 Years of the Telluride Film Festival," featuring, thanks, too, to Criterion, "a rotating selection of feature length films to watch in full screen and for free, as well as an exhibition of clips and trailers for all the films."

Meanwhile, Matt Langdon's been rounding up trailers for this year's offerings.

"While last year the festival showcased I'm Not There, Into the Wild, Juno and Margot at the Wedding, this year there are few to no American breakthroughs expected," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez. "Telluride's highly selective programmers typically screen the latest studio and Indiewood offerings, previewing some of the best autumnal roll outs, but the fact so many new American films didn't make the cut has insiders here anxious that new work in Toronto next week will be mediocre."

Updated through 9/5.

"Ah, the quick to judge are already in full force. The talk of the Telluride Film Festival right now is that the 20-minutes of footage shown from David Fincher's highly-anticipated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is decidedly underwhelming. Or at least that's how some are feeling. Keep in mind it wasn't a straight twenty minutes from the film, but rather various scenes and footage stitched together. At best reactions seem mixed." The Playlist rounds up linkage. The SpoutBlog's Karina Longworth objects: "I'm in Telluride, and I hadn't heard this bad buzz - the handful of people I've spoken to who saw the show reel either last night or this morning had generally positive things to day, aside from some general skepticism as to what the film's reported two and a half hour final cut will look and feel and play like."

More from Karina: "Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, who screened short films at Telluride in 2005 and 2006, brought their debut full-length work to the festival this morning. The 74-minute Helen was preceded by Joy, a 9-minute short featuring some of the same actors, settings and situations, which Lawlor described before the screening as 'a slightly more philosophical primer' for the feature. The filmmaking duo place both works within the context of their Civic Life series, 'community-based' films cast with local non-performers, in which the socio-economic issues relevant to modern England and Ireland are improbably but successfully folded into a pure cinema marked by long traveling takes, atmosphere in place of action, and a notable economy of speech."

Also in the SpoutBlog: Kevin Buist talks with Mike Leigh about Happy-Go-Lucky - more on the film from Ryland Walker Knight - and Paul Moore reviews O'Horten.

"The festival staff of nearly 750 includes 54 Bay Areas residents, amongst them filmmaker Barry Jenkins, whose first feature, Medicine for Melancholy, won the Audience Award at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival last spring," writes Hilary Hart at SF360. "For six years, Jenkins has worked in the trenches at TFF as a 'schlepper,' most recently overseeing the set up and operations of the concessions. This week, he's stocking popcorn, hot dogs and soda, and next week his film plays at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the top ten film festivals in the world. In the last year he's acquired an agent, received numerous awards and signed a distribution agreement with IFC Films, who will release Medicine for Melancholy nationwide in February. But as he said in the Telluride Daily Planet, 'There was no way I wasn't gong to Telluride. I love working (here).'"

Jeffrey Wells is hearing good things about Jeff Goldblum's performance in Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected. Kevin Buist talks with Goldblum about his "Media Diet" at the SpoutBlog.

"Telluride is celebrating a great talent coming out of Kazakhstan this year, Sergei Dvortsevoy," writes Paul Moore in the SpoutBlog. "Although he's here with only his first feature film (which, incidentally, took four years to make), there's a slate of documentaries he's brought that the festival directors tout as 'must sees.'" As for his first narrative feature, Tulpan, winner of the Prize of Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, "It's not just the performances that are enamoring, it's the sheer starkness of the environment."

"One of the best things about watching a lot of movies for a living is that occasional joyous thrill of sitting in a darkened theater being overwhelmed by a film, and knowing immediately that, without a doubt, you've just seen something that will absolutely end up on your top ten of the year," writes Cinematical's Kim Voynar. "When that film is written and directed by a first-time director, it's even better, because you know you've just been witness to the start of a film career that promises to be something special. French novelist-turned-director Philipe Claudel's much-talked about freshman effort, I've Loved You So Long, which has its North American premiere last night here at Telluride following an award-winning showing at Berlin and a hugely successful run in France, is one of those films."

And Cinematical's gathering its Telluride coverage under one link.

JJ of As Little as Possible has caught American Violet and a remastered 70mm print of Baraka.

Updates, 9/1: Let's start with Karina Longworth's report from a panel at the festival (and thanks for the mention, Karina), "Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking?": "At Telluride, Annette Insdorf (Columbia University), Michael Barker (Sony Classics), Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), Scott Foundas (LA Weekly), Jonathan Sehring (IFC Films), Paul Schrader (Adam Resurrected) and Anne Thompson (Variety) tackle the question of the day: will both films and film criticism as we know them soon cease to exist?"

Also at the SpoutBlog:

• "Irish filmmaker Cathal Black, known for making movies that fluidly mix fact and fiction, documentary tropes and dramatic technique, has maybe found his ultimate subject in Thomas Lynch," writes Karina. "Lynch, who describes himself in Black's Learning Gravity as 'a father, a husband, an undertaker,' is also a renowned poet and essayist whose writings inspired Alan Ball to create his HBO series, Six Feet Under."

• Also: "This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel's You Must Remember This - which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall - is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I've seen this year."

• Kevin Buist talks with Ken Burns about his "Media Diet and with Steve McQueen about Hunger.

"The Telluride Film Festival doesn't have the word 'international' in its title, but considering how few home-grown films are showing at this weekend's gathering, it wouldn't be a bad idea to add some sort of worldly adjective to the festival's official name," writes John Horn in the Los Angeles Times, where he also talks with producer-turned-director Marc Abraham about Flash of Genius.

Anne Thompson on Benjamin Button: "The movie could go either way - toward Oscar season glory or inflated noble failure. That's the risk everyone takes with an all-in bet like this. Certainly there's never been anything like it."

JJ has a quick-paced roundup at As Little as Possible.

"Three Things I Have Learned," from Eugene Novikov in Cinematical.

"Before the film festival started proper the town had already started showing films," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "The evening had in store some nice delirium, an outside screening of Jan Troell's solemn A Frozen Dream (1997) preceded by the unexpected programming choice of three eccentric animated shorts, one deadpan American indie, and an equally dead - this time braindead - movie highlight montage."

More from busy, busy Karina Longworth, who's got notes on The Great Sacrifice, presented at the festival by Slavoj Zizek: "Its maker and its message may have been despicable (and Zizek's post film lecture, summarized below, left no doubt that [Veit] Harlan made the film with Nazi ideals in mind), but there's no question that The Great Sacrifice is a breathtakingly visual film."

Anne Thompson is tracking awards buzz.

Updates, 9/3: To start this round with online viewing tips: Variety's Telluride videos, via Movie City News.

"Toronto has the size and clout to tolerate Telluride because it knows it has by far the bigger profile, and at the end of the day there are more press and camera crews and stars and red carpets and that's the name of the game if you're in the glamour business," writes Jeremy Kay in the Guardian. "Still, I'd still love to hear what the Canadians say about the Coloradoan festival behind closed doors because that whole world premiere business must sting a bit. Good for Telluride."

Flash of Genius is a conventional crowdpleaser but not, I'm pleased to report, a shameless one." Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. Also, a Telluride wrap-up.

"Directors David Fincher and Danny Boyle came to the Telluride Film Festival with very different motivations for their fundamentally dissimilar films," writes John Horn. "But both will leave the festival having accomplished pretty much exactly what they needed to do."

Larry Calloway has a big Telluride wrap-up that continues here.

Updates, 9/5: Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook:

I just realized something about film festivals: maybe I don't want to see the latest film by the hottest director on the block before anyone else, or even that random, obscure gem which will screen once in the dingiest cinema and never again emerge to the public eye, being swallowed up and passed over by armies of timid distributors. No; maybe what I want is simply smart, idiosyncratic individuals picking a slew of movies I either haven't seen, haven't heard of, or had never thought of putting together, for their own nefarious and individual purposes.

Telluride provides the proof: as they do every year, in 2008 they let a guest director program a selection of films, and this year that director was Slavoj Žižek. Spanning the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and regimes fascist, communist, and capitalist, Žižek's selection may have the obvious weight of historical context on its side, but that weight made his selection the punchiest, most vital films in the festival.

For Cinematical's Kim Voynar, Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments is "that rare cinematic experience that you settle back, bite into, and then savor as the subtle richness of the film cleanses the palate and fills the soul."

"Revanche had its North American premiere here at Telluride 2008 and was far and away one of the most exciting new films playing. It's a revenge thriller with cinema purist sensibilities from acclaimed Austrian director, Götz Spielmann," writes Paul Moore at the SpoutBlog. Also, I've Loved You So Long: "It's kind of a rhythm: Smoking, snapping, talking. Smoking, snapping, talking."

Cinematical indexes its coverage.

JJ wraps it up at As Little as Possible.

Telluride. Prodigal Sons.

"The other week, I saw a film I can't get out of my head," writes David Thomson, introducing Prodigal Sons to Guardian readers.

"I'm not sure that it's especially 'good' in the sense of being flawlessly made. But it's a film about inescapable flaws. Sometimes a movie does the simplest thing film has to offer: it shows us something we have never quite seen or felt before; it shows us something that shocks and alarms us - and that doesn't have to be an ingredient from a horror picture, or something capable of fictional redemption."

Updated through 9/2.

"Fact that the film was directed by a transsexual returning to her native Helena, Mont, two decades after having left as a star high school quarterback, seems almost commonplace compared to the circumstances of Kimberly Reed's adopted brother, who only recently discovered he is the hitherto unknown grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

"[U]ltimately she's less concerned with Marc's geneology than in his unlikely status as anti-social “other” in a family in which he's the only sibling without an LGBT identification," notes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog: "Prodigal Sons ultimately falls into the unfortunate trap of so many post-digital personal documentaries: it's an Everybody Has One movie. Everyone has one tragic/triumphant story that, if shaped correctly, could make sufficient fodder for a film - but that doesn't mean that everyone is a filmmaker."

"Reed tries to weave her story, her brother's story, and their dramatic family conflict into a coherent documentary, but in this case a more experienced filmmaker/outsider might have been better suited to shape this mother lode of material," agrees Variety's Anne Thompson.

Update, 9/2: JJ at As Little as Possible: "The Telluride experience magnified the film. The doc ended, I was exhilirated, and then the emcee pointed out that the entire featured family is sitting in the audience not two rows behind me. Having just seen their lives laid bare onscreen, it was a special privilege to see and thank them in person."

Chris Smith: American Original.

American Movie is Chris Smith "doing what he does best: approaching folks on their own terms and turf, with an eye for everyone's squelch-resistant kernel of independence," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "American Movie and the director's four other films will screen at the Museum of Modern Art in a retrospective titled Chris Smith: American Original. The series spans from Mr Smith's 1996 debut, American Job, to his latest, The Pool, a fictional feature set in India that begins its premiere American run Wednesday at Film Forum."

"The Pool... has a lyricism that is new to Smith's work," writes Amy Taubin for Artforum. "Shot with a handheld 35-mm camera that gives a fairy-tale radiance to the riot of colors on the city streets and in the lush gardens around the rich man's house, The Pool roots its fantasy in the details of daily life."

Updated through 9/5.

MoMA's series runs through Monday.

Update, 9/1: For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Smith "about the challenges of shooting in India, directing actors whose language you don't speak, and his love of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Updates, 9/2: "There is nothing quite like the subtle pleasure of close but seemingly casual observation in a medium that often forgets how much natural grace, levity, and melancholy exists in the spontaneous actions of human beings," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "The gentle, gradual unfolding of circumstances and characters in The Pool is a quietly stirring reminder of how it can be done."

Its "rhythm is soporific, with the rich man's pool easily understood as a metaphor for privilege and the Portuguese-inflected soundtrack hinting to the region's colonial past," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "The film's saving grace, though, is Smith's refusal to reduce Nana's pool entirely to a symbol of attainment."

Updates, 9/3: "In the manner of a Satyajit Ray film, The Pool avoids melodrama, the better to capture the texture of Venkatesh's vagabond life," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "At first The Pool suggests an inspirational fable in which a selfless older man rescues a youth from the streets. But just when you expect the film to turn into a predictable, rose-colored valentine to opportunity and hope, it goes to a deeper, more ambiguous place."

"Descriptions of The Pool will surely reference neorealism and Satyajit Ray, though Smith's aesthetic amounts to practical handheld master shots and modestly lush cinematography emphasizing verdant foliage and the dusty haze of city streets," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "It's a style that evokes an unromanticized naturalism compared to the tourist brochure photography of, say, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but it's also in the service of a fairly elementary fable that even at 98 minutes feels long."

More from Nick Pinkerton in the Voice, where John Anderson talks with Smith: "In hindsight, it seems like a fairly naïve idea to think we were going to go over and make the film in English..."

For IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Smith "about India, being classified as a documentarian, and what he thinks about Todd Solondz's on-screen condemnation of his best-known film."

"What makes The Pool so special is how it uses such a seemingly simple framework to speak so profoundly about many different elements of human nature," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "Without being forceful or pushy, Smith has produced a beautiful, tender film that thoughtfully addresses issues of adolescent yearning, universal poverty, and parental sorrow, without ever feeling like he's trying to speak so deeply. He lets these themes emerge from the inside-out, not the outside-in, using a direct, unadorned style to produce a work that is suffused with documentary-like realism and symbolic poetry at the exact same time. The Pool is a quiet marvel of a movie."

Update, 9/4: "The value of a film like Chris Smith's The Pool becomes more tangible when you begin to imagine what a lesser filmmaker might have wrought from the same material," writes Michael Koresky for indieWIRE. "The Pool is an unostentatiously crafted work about the daily travails and aspirations of an Indian teenager working at a hotel in the Goan capital of Panjim to help support his family, who live in an impoverished nearby rural village, and who dreams of something better by enviously staring at a nearby wealthy man's shimmering backyard pool from his tree perch. It could have been either mawkish or too self-consciously aping of a particularly neorealist style; instead Smith avoids both modes of address, using an expressive, incisive, and merely observant camera that rarely, if ever, calls attention to itself."

Update, 9/5: "The Pool doesn't seethe with class tension - or much tension at all, for that matter," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "It's a funny, sweet-natured humanist character piece that looks beyond such distinctions without entirely transcending them. Based on a short story by Randy Russell, who co-scripted with Smith, the film has a refreshing sense of proportion without seeming as determinedly minor or mannered as other indies. It's a vivid piece of sketchwork."

Venice. Shirin.

"Given the respect he enjoys as a modern auteur, Abbas Kiarostami's latest film is unlikely to be ignored but this outlandish work suggests that Kiarostami has abandoned narrative cinema for now, prefering instead to explore the more experimental extremes of cinematic language," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily.

"Here it's watching the audience watch."

Updated through 9/5.

"His latest, Shirin, wherein 112 Iranian actresses and Juliette Binoche are shot watching a 12th-century Persian play, with the play's performance itself kept entirely offscreen, is unlikely to pack 'em in," writes Ronnie Scheib in Variety. "Yet Shirin offers a feast for the bedazzled eye and a crash course in narrative obsession for the benumbed mind."

"This deceptively simple film is much closer to Kiarostami's experimental theater play Taize than to such features as A Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us," explains Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter:

In Taize, a traditional religious play is performed in costume while screens show films of an Iranian audience's emotional involvement with the story. Here the narration is taken from an 800-year-old Persian love story about Shirin, the princess of Armenia, and Khosrow, the prince of Persia. On screen, however, we see only the reactions of a female "audience" watching a film that only exists in the mind of the viewer.

In fact, Kiarostami has stated that the actresses are staring at three dots on a sheet of white cardboard off-screen, while imagining their own love stories; he chose the Shirin narration only later, after he finished filming.

"Does the device work?" asks the Guardian's Andrew Pulver. "Shirin might be happier sitting on a video monitor in the Pompidou Centre on 24-hour loop. But that may be doing this film a disservice. The powerful fable takes up much of the slack, and the visuals end up engendering otherwise unnoticeable subtleties, such as the threatening figures on seats in the rows behind."

Update, 8/31: "One can trace the same tendency back to the imaginary reverse angles of Kiarostami's last narrative features, Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us, which also might be described as audiovisual variations on the famous Kuleshov experiment," notes Jonathan Rosenbaum, responding to reports on Shirin that have appeared so far. "So regardless of whether or not Kiarostami is abandoning his arthouse audience, his commitment to fiction and fooling the audience clearly remains intact."

Update, 9/5: Shirin has Ronald Bergan looking back on the history of close-ups on women's faces in films from Dreyer through Godard.

Venice. Achilles and the Tortoise.

"It doesn't seem so long ago that Takeshi Kitano was one of the most revered figures in world cinema," writes Geoffrey Macnab for the Guardian.

"Sadly, Kitano has lost his way of late. His recent movies have become increasingly self-indulgent and fractured... Kitano's latest feature Achilles and the Tortoise..., is a partial return to form, but is still an immensely frustrating experience."

For Dan Fainaru, writing in Screen Daily, the film "at first appears to be less self-obsessed than his two previous efforts but soon follows the same repetitious pattern that restricted both Takeshis' and Glory to the Filmmaker to a small coterie of ardent admirers.... After deliberating on the conflicts within his artistic persona in the first instalment of the trilogy and wondering what kind of films he should make in the second, he now explores himself as an artist and his relationship to his art. Despite the glorious symphony of colours he unleashes on the screen and the wicked sense of humour in each character, his theories on what it means to be an artist are far from exhaustive and the form he gives them far too self-indulgent."

"[T]he film, the longest of the trio, doesn't justify its two hours with enough insights or simple entertainment, and becomes massively repetitive in its final laps," writes Derek Elley in Variety. "Wannabe comedy is further undercut by the pic's deep strain of self-loathing. Kitano, it seems, seriously doubts the value of art itself, and sees value simply in carrying on working, no matter what."

Earlier: Ronald Bergan.

Venice. The Burning Plain.

The first round of reviews is almost perfectly split: a rave and a pan from the trades and a rave and a pan from the British papers.

"His much-publicised falling out with director Alejandro González Iñárritu seems to have done Guillermo Arriaga the world of good," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily. "The Burning Plain, which the Mexican writer directed from his own script, is a powerful contemporary melodrama, more restrained but also much cleaner, in dramatic focus and emotional thrust, than the three films Arriaga penned for Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel)."

Updated through 9/5.

"Multicharacter head-scratcher, yo-yoing between New Mexico and Oregon, and back and forth in time, doesn't finally reveal much beneath the emperor's clothes to repay viewers' concentration during the first half," writes Derek Elley in Variety. "Despite an OK-to-good cast led by Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger, plus a handsome tech package, this remains an elaborate writing exercise with few emotional hooks."

"It isn't too early to suggest this film's the one to beat," writes the Telegraph's David Gritten. "Arriaga pulls together the strands of his narrative with great expertise. His job is made easier by great performances from three actresses: Theron and Basinger, who both look like racing certs for next year's awards season, and Jennifer Lawrence as Basinger's teenage daughter."

"It was absorbing in a soap-ish sort of way, but pretty much devoid of the high-powered visuals Arriaga's one-time collaborator, Alejandro González Iñárritu, brought to the party," writes Andrew Pulver in the Guardian, where Mark Brown looks back on the feud between the two Mexican filmmakers.

Earlier: Ronald Bergan.

Update, 8/31: "Some of the characters appear twice, in their younger and older versions, but Arriaga seems to hide this fact on several levels," notes Boyd van Hoeij in the Auteurs' Notebook: "there are no clear temporal markers in the visuals or the music, and one of the main characters uses a different name as an adult (the fact that different actors are used for the different ages only accentuates this divide). The effect is one of initial confusion more than mystery, and when it slowly becomes clear how everything fits together, it feels like a big reveal that takes away dramatic weight and momentum from the final, explosive explanation of the film’s very first scenes. In fact, the real reveal is almost like an afterthought, and, in hindsight, a not very clearly motivated one at that."

Update, 9/1: "One can hardly begrudge writers looking to protect the integrity of their scripts," writes Shane Danielsen at indieWIRE. "It's just a pity that, in this case, the result was so perfunctory."

Update, 9/5: "It's a solid film, less dependent on authorial whim than Arriaga's earlier scripts, and with the heat of the American West so palpable, it gives full meaning to the movie's title," writes Time's Richard Corliss.

Venice Dispatch. 1.

Ronald Bergan assesses the Competition so far.

Whenever I arrive in Venice by train and leave the station, I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz entering the land of Oz. Unfortunately, all the hacks at the Venice Film Festival are stuck on the Lido which, toute proportion gardée, is like Alcatraz for nearly two weeks from which we have no time to escape. Every day I look longingly over the water and see the buildings around the Piazza San Marco. As I'm on the International Critics' Jury (Fipresci), which has to judge the films in the main competition, I look just as longingly over at the other ostensibly more interesting sections - Horizons and the Critics Week.

Until now I have seen six out of the 21 films we are obliged to see, therefore it is rather too early to assess the quality of the competion films as a whole, but so far so bad. It's strange how many of the films start promisingly and then tail off disappointingly. This was most manifest in Takeshi Kitano's Achilles and the Tortoise which begins with a delightful animated illustration of Zeno's paradox of the title.

There follows an entrancing tale of a young boy fanatically obsessed by drawing and painting. He takes lessons from a master and befriends a simple-minded man with a tic, who can also not stop painting. Alas, just as I was placing it on a par with Im Kwon-Taek's Chihwaseon, this parable of artistic passion deteriorates into a broad comedy where the noble theme is degraded, echoing the phrase "Art is a hoax," expressed by a character at one stage. The painter in middle-age is played by Kitano with a self-amused air, and all the paintings, vividly realised and photographed, are by the director himself. There is a visual pleasure to be had from the paintings, whether original or pastiches of Picasso, Matisse, Miró or Warhol, so it is a pity that Kitano seems to be putting down both the character and the paintings.

Both Barbet Schroeder's Inju, la bete dans l'ombre and Nelson Yu Lik-Wai's Plastic City are about foreigners in an alien land, the former about a French novelist in Japan, the latter about Chinese gangsters in Brazil. The Schroeder film begins with an extract from a patently bad Japanese supernatural movie which is then discussed rather seriously by the French writer, an admirer of the reclusive Japanese novelist on which the film was based. Gradually, however, the film develops exactly into the sort of genre thriller it seemed to be taking off.

Former cinematographer Lik-Wai's Plastic City is grotesquely derivative of every Hong Kong and Taiwanese gangster movie over the last decades with added clichés from Brazilian gang warfare films set in the favelas. It is not only excessively violent but pretentious in that it feigns to making a point about the way greed is ruining the Brazilian rain forest. The best part of the film is a stunning credit sequence. If only it had ended there.

Up to now, the selection has been slightly redeemed by Christian Petzold's Jerichow, though the plot is rather too reminiscent of The Postman Always Rings Twice and its variations, and Guillermo Arriaga's The Burning Plain. This is a first feature by the Mexican Arriaga, who wrote Alejandro González Iñárritu's first three feature films: Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) and, like those films, especially the last two, it has an intriguingly multi-layered interrelated plot playing cryptically with time and space. In a way, due in part to Arriaga, this kind of screenplay has become rather a trend. Nicely photographed by Robert Elswit on the US-Mexican border, it is played rather solemnly on one note by a cast headed by Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.

Despite the straight-jacket imposed on me by the main competion films, I couldn't resist straying into Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin, which is showing out of competition and to which I'll return in my next dispatch. Radical both in style and content, it has been, for me at least, the highlight of the Venice Festival, besides seeing 99-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, three of whose short films are showing here, standing up and waving his white hat and stick in acknowledgment of a standing ovation.

- Ronald Bergan

How bad...?

Sometimes the worst movies bring out the best in critics, and this Labor Day weekend offers plenty of opportunities for a few to cut loose.

"Film critics never come home stinking of their honest labor, but the nearest equivalent is covering something like College, which leaves its stain on one's very humanity," writes Nick Pinkerton (Voice). More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Laura Kern (New York Times) and Nick Schager (Slant).

Nathan Lee (NYT): "Disaster Movie, the latest disposable parody of disposable Hollywood movies, has a shelf life of about five minutes, tops, which may be slightly longer than it took to come up with most of its gags." More from Jim Ridley (Voice): "[T]his carpet-fouling mongrel of a movie no more deserves release than do anthrax spores."

"Don't let the title fool you," warns Nathan Lee: "there's nothing generic about Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild! Written, directed and co-produced by Todd Stephens, this wretched gaysploitation number is, in fact, the worst gay sequel ever." More from Ed Gonzalez (Voice) and Eric Henderson (Slant).

"Just going by the poster and the trailer, you could probably recognize Babylon A.D. as a bloated big-budget science fiction film," writes James Rocchi (Cinematical). "But after viewing the film, and with a few facts to put the film in context - like the fact 20th Century Fox didn't screen Babylon A.D. for critics, like the fact director Mathieu Kassovitz has already disavowed the film, like the numb dumb clang of every line of dialogue in it - you realize that Babylon A.D. is a bad, bloated big-budget science fiction film that doesn't even have the distinction of being memorably horrible or bravely idiotic or fascinatingly inept; it's simply an inert mass, a lump of product, a failure too expensive to simply discard." More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Keith Phipps (AV Club), Nick Schager (Slant) and AO Scott (NYT).

"The BBFC has for the first time cleared the DVD release, with an 18 certificate, of the complete and uncut version of Caligula," sighs the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It certainly has archive value as a record of something fantastically terrible, a so-bad-it's-bad nightmare which could only have come from that era of stately art-porn."

Times and Winds in the UK.

"Times and Winds is a remarkable piece of work, conceived at the highest pitch of intelligence: it is a cinematic poem, replete with fear and rapture, and one of the best films of the year," declares the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

"Austerity is one of the qualities a viewer expects of any film set in a deprived Turkish mountain village where people are outnumbered by goats, life revolves around the imam's calls to prayer and a father expresses love for his son by beating him for five minutes rather than the customary ten," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "In this respect, and this respect alone, Times and Winds disappoints.... [T]his supremely confident picture from the Istanbul-born writer-director Reha Erdem breaks many of the usual art-house rules. It is poetic but also visually aggressive, and it runs on a punchy rhythm from the get-go."

"Reha Erdem adds his name to those of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Fatih Akin in the list of directors heading up the impressive recent revival of Turkish cinema," writes Wally Hammond in Time Out. "It's true that the conflicts of Turkey's poised situation - at a crossroads between Asia and Europe, tradition and modernity, secularism and religion - are reflected in the lives of its three pubescent protagonists - Omer, Yakup and Yildiz - as we experience the hardship and strictures of rural life through their variously troubled and subtly handled rites of passage. But Erdem's film is not essentially political, despite its pointed view of patriarchy - and sexism - shown in the plans, real and imaginary, of more than one of the boys to kill their respective fathers."

"It is, at a guess, about life's relentless march, about death, rebirth, and the hollow limits of religion in the face of overwhelming nature," writes Kevin Maher in the London Times. "You have to see it to get it, but when you've got it you've got it for good."

"[I]t's Erdem's unsentimental compassion towards his characters, his fidelity to the rhythms of their lives and the arcs of their imaginations, that gives this film its wondrous power and depth," finds the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu.

Earlier: Reviews from January.

Shorts, fests, etc, 8/28.

"[T]here are more than enough names to be going on with: Balanchine, Stravinsky, Koussevitsky, Toscanini, Stokowski, Kurt Weill and Rouben Mamoulian are only the most prominent," writes Clive James, reviewing Joseph Horowitz's Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts for the TLS. "Horowitz provides biographical sketches for them all, each sketch studded with quotable illustrations. (Otto Preminger, hearing a group of his fellow émigrés speaking Hungarian, said, 'Don't you people know you're in Hollywood? Speak German.') The result is a rich assembly, an unmasked ball teeming with famous names, but you always have to remember - and our author, to his credit, never forgets - that in too many cases their attendance was compulsory, a fact which can lend a sad note to the glamour."

Earlier reviews: Joscelyn Jurich (Bookforum), Phillip Lopate (New York Times) and the Economist.

Jean Renoir in 1952, in a piece that ran in Films in Review: "I didn't want to stay put. But my compass was out of order. I couldn't find my direction. I am very proud of this. It means that I haven't lost contact with the actual world, with this strange, unstable world of the mid-twentieth century.

Yesterday was Hollis Frampton day at DC's.

"According to Nicholas Rombes, editor of the book New Punk Cinema, the main feature that associates New Punk Cinema with punk music is these films' do-it-yourself ethos, which suggests to the audience that anybody can make a film," writes Halim Cillov in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Rombes states that beginning in the 1990s a series of films from around the world began to emerge and became highly popular among mainstream audiences, films that challenged and radically revised many of the narrative and aesthetic codes that governed Hollywood fare."

The Guardian's Ben Childs notes that Variety's Tatiana Siegel reports on the next film from Todd Solondz, "a companion piece, a 'quasi-sequel' as it were, to Happiness... The cast includes Demi Moore, Emma Thompson and Paul Reubens."

"Alongside compulsive dives into the deep end of the nostalgia pool, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of television series on DVD presents a rare opportunity to indulge in sociohistorical hindsight (to say nothing of scrutinizing and justifying personal obsessions)," writes Marc Holcomb at Moving Image Source. "From such a vantage point, the private-eye/police detective shows that flourished from the mid-1960s through the late 70s offer telling insights into an era of intense cultural flux. Chief among these is the jarring isolationism of the TV dick milieu, best exemplified by Mannix, Ironside and Hawaii Five-0. Combined with their blinkered portrayal of the fractious social and political movements of the time, this reclusiveness positions these shows as monuments to alienated white male power."

Fests and events:

• The Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival opens on Wednesday and runs through the following weekend. "[D]espite the festival's fundraising difficulties, the lineup of aGLIFF's 96 films is vibrant, idiosyncratic, and also a lot of fun." Clay Smith tells the story of a festival struggling - and surviving - for 21 years now. The Austin Chronicle's package is also chock full of previews and reviews.

• "Set to begin on Sept 4, the 33rd Toronto film festival has devoted some prime spots to movies that are not so much jockeying for position in the forthcoming Oscar race as fighting to be seen at all," writes Michael Cieply in the New York Times. "Even with strong credentials, several featured pictures have been sideswiped by corporate consolidation, a weak market for independent films and producers' wariness of an audience that has often shunned the difficult."

• In the LA Weekly, Courtney Fitzgerald rounds up local goings on.

• Online listening tip. Charlton Heston's daughter, Holly, and his producing partner, Walter Seltzer, discuss Cinematic Atlas: The Triumphs of Charlton Heston on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"Just in case you're not already freaked out enough about climate change, oil prices and that general, exhausted sort of end-of-the-world vibe that's been in the air for the past couple years, Irena Salina's outraged, deeply unsettling documentary Flow investigates another underreported impending disaster: the world water crisis." Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

In the New York Times, April Dembosky reports on the umpteen docs screening all but secretly in Manhattan to qualify for Oscar consideration.

"Even more than Calcutta, Singapore (Universal, John Brahm) carves out its own mini-genre of the orientalist noir," writes Chris Cagle. "It's an amalgam of Maltese Falcon (Curt Conway plays a Peter Lorre-like gay underworld figure, Thomas Gomez a low-rent Sydney Greenstreet), Casablanca (the romance flashback and voiceover narration), the Graham Greene novels (oblivious American tourists), and the RKO noirs (combination of expressionists visuals and low budget setups)."

Vulture's Dan Kois receives confirmation - from producer Scott Rudin, no less - that Aaron Sorkin's Facebook page is real and that, yes, Sorkin really is writing a "Facebook Movie." Related: At the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell lists "10 Other Websites That Need Their Own Movie."

From the wires: Barbie and Ken - voiced by Michael Keaton - join the crew in Toy Story 3, slated for a June 2010 release.

In Slate, Nathan Heller argues that in Trafic, "it's the automobile lust of the 50s [Jacques Tati] was reaching for amid the grim traffic of the disco era - the idea that seeing cars as objects of excitement, romance, and adventure would let us live more humanly among them."

In the Voice:

• "Year of the Fish is the kind of really bad movie it takes a lot of misplaced conviction to make," writes Vadim Rizov. More from Tasha Robinson (AV Club). For the New York Times, Jennifer 8 Lee talks with director David Kaplan about what Vadim calls the "uneven, mostly pointless rotoscoping." And for IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Ken Leung, who plays "Johnny, an accordion player who may also be the Prince Charming to disillusioned immigrant Ye Xian (An Nguyen). Notoriously shy, Leung graciously offered up a phone interview from Hawaii while preparing to shoot his next puzzling episode of Lost."

• "My Mexican Shivah kvetches its way through an insipid vision of cross-cultural conflict," writes Ed Gonzalez. "Armed with broad humor and scant insight, Alejandro Springall settles for shooting gefilte fish in a barrel, directing the persistent oy-ing and ay-ing of his characters with only half the charm of one of his country's telenovelas." More from Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

• Ruth McCann on the "moving, occasionally charming, and universally well-acted" The Sensation of Sight.

• Aaron Hillis on two docs screening at New York's Pioneer Theater, Maria Bethânia: Music is Perfume (more from Noller in Slant) and Youssou N'Dour: Return to Gorée.

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Lars von Trier's The Kingdom.

"Rebel Without a Cause transcends easy categorization and continues to resonate several decades later," writes Beth Gilligan at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Jonathan Rosenbaum once aptly described [Nicholas] Ray as 'a creature of both the 30s and 60s [who] was ahead of his time during both decades'; the enduring nature of the director's body of work suggests that he remains so."

Rob Nilsson interviews Rob Nilsson at SF360.

Dennis Cozzalio presents "Dr Zachary Smith's Lost in Space at the End of Summer Movie Quiz."

Lists: Sean Axmaker (MSN) with road movies and Christopher Campbell (SpoutBlog) with college movies.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Get Hit, an IFC series on "how to achieve viral video success or nearly die trying." The Hollywood Reporter's Andrew Wallenstein is pleasantly surprised by the show.

Online viewing tip. The "Top Coolest Commercials by Movie Directors," at Shiznit, via Ted Zee.

Venice, 8/28.

"Cold Lunch - which opened Critics' Week at the Venice Film Festival - is the remarkable feature debut by Norway's Eva Sørhaug," writes Camillo de Marco. "Seemingly harsh (no director has ever dared inflict such a horrible end on a newborn baby, attacked by fierce Hitchcock-like gulls) but tinged with human empathy, Cold Lunch closes with a final chapter entitled 'Paradise regained.' Perhaps it's possible to emerge from Hell but it's difficult to escape from loneliness. Northern European films thus continue to tackle social issues with flashes of paradox."

Also in Cineuropa, Gabriele Barcaro on PA-RA-DA, which has opened the Horizons sections and is "directed by Marco Pontecorvo (son of Gillo, legendary director of The Battle of Algiers), the acclaimed DoP known for his work with masters Francesco Rosi (The Truce) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Eros). Shot during nine weeks in Bucharest - with a spell in Paris, in the shadow of Beaubourg - the film retraces the human (and humanitarian) adventure of Franco-Algerian clown Miloud Oukili. In the early 1990s, the latter - who was 20 at the time - devoted himself to saving children and street urchins in the Romanian capital from a life of drugs and prostitution."

In Screen Daily:

• Lee Marshall on Valentino: The Last Emperor: "Vanity Fair journalist [Matt] Tyrnauer - who claims that he reached for the camera when he realised words did not do Valentino justice - may have begun with the idea of capturing the twilight years of an old-fashioned stylist in a world increasingly governed by market pressures. But somewhere along the way the film turns into an understated love story, charting the mutual dependency and tensions in Valentino's 45-year association with Giancarlo Giammetti, his sometime boyfriend and constant life and business partner."

• Also: "Immersed in the gritty multicultural realities and historical short-circuits of life in the northern suburb of Finsbury Park, [Sallie Aprahamian's debut feature] Broken Lines is one of the rare films that nails the odd flavour of contemporary London."

• Dan Fainaru is underwhelmed by Nowhere Man, "Patrice Toye's flawed update of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger."

"[T]hose who stay the full Venice course will be depending heavily on [festival director Marco] Mueller's judgement, for he has assembled a programme of films from all over the world by people that very few have ever heard of," writes Peter Popham in an overview for the Independent.

Jean-Michel Frodon in a first diary entry from Venice for Cahiers du cinéma: "Marco Müller, who has proven his capacity to radicalize programming demands at the head of a first-class festival over the previous years, seems to have gambled this time on the creation of a dynamic that travels the contemporary world of the cinema off the beaten path, on trails once known but now erased (the return of grand masters such as [Werner] Schroeter, [Amir] Naderi or [Haile] Gerima), the transferal of most of the confirmed auteurs to non-competition categories (Varda, Kiarostami, Claire Denis and others), as well as many newcomers or those accustomed to second ranks."

"Venice isn't sinking, but that hasn't stopped some Lido regulars from jumping ship," write Nick Vivarelli and Ali Jaafar in Variety. "A number of sales agents, PR companies and journos who would usually be seen on the hotel terraces of the Excelsior and Des Bains talking shop and drinking bellinis have given this year's fest a miss with many opting instead for a one-stop Toronto trek."

Venice. Jerichow.

"German director Christian Petzold continues his exploration of ambling lives a bankrupt society in the Venice Competition entry Jerichow, a strong film that further consolidates his reputation as one of Northern Europe's finest auteurs," writes Boyd van Hoeij in Cineuropa.

"The film is an organic extension of Petzold's oeuvre and reunites the director with Nina Hoss and Benno Fürmann, who also headlined his 2003 effort Wolfsburg. Like that film, Jerichow is named after the East German town where most of the events transpire."

Updated through 8/30.

"The story is fairly straightforward and often told: a woman torn between two men," writes Peter Zander in Die Welt. "Those who've found Petzold's recent films Yella and Ghosts too constructed, too heady and too crafted will discover him anew here. Very simply, and with very little dialogue, he allows the images and actors to speak for themselves and create an extraordinary tension."

"A Petzold film like a summing up of all Petzold films," finds the Tagesspiegel's Christina Tilmann: "The Berlin director has worked a number of elements from earlier films into a another hopeless story.... With a forceful consistency, Petzold continues his examination of the precarious and despondent conditions of life in (east) Germany, where existence is defined by money alone. 'You can't love if you've got no money,' says Nina Hoss once."

"Petzold stages a chamber piece of emotions under open skies, a charade at the edge of a forest, a suffocating picnic on a Baltic Sea beach - at times it comes close to open-heart surgery, as in Fassbinder, and then the film returns again to pure Petzold, as when Nina Hoss desperately calls names out into the dark woods and we don't know which of the two men will appear from the darkness." In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Michael Althen finds that Petzold "has achieved a fascinating step forward in his filmography, with inimitable landscapes, with quickly sketched moments of the real world and the everyday."

"The film is a German version of James M Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice," notes Wolfgang Höbel in Spiegel Online. "With Jerichow, and with more ferocity than ever before, Petzold shows himself to be an outstanding director."

Updates, 8/29: "A tightly constructed 'dramatic thriller' in which the tension comes as much from what the characters are thinking as from what they end up doing, Jerichow again confirms writer-helmer Christian Petzold (Yella, The State I Am In) as a world-class talent who remains underappreciated beyond Germany," writes Derek Elley in Variety. "From the opening Steadicam shot, following the back of the main character, Thomas (Benno Fürmann), at a funeral, it's clear for those who know the director's work that the pic could only have been made by Petzold. Hans Fromm's rich (but not ripe) lensing of the east German countryside, and the way in which the camera plunges the viewer straight into the psychological heart of the action, are instant trademarks as the film steers the viewer through a no-flab 91 minutes with absolute precision."

"Petzold's film succeeds most as a character study," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "The film's main problem is that its protagonists too often act out of character just to move the narrative forward.... Luckily Fürmann, Hoss and [Hilmi] Sozer give pitch-perfect performances. Sozer, in particular, gives his shrewd and course character a touch of poignancy."

"Sozer is especially persuasive as a rough-edged and crude but decent man who has made a success in business despite rampant prejudice against his Turkish heritage," agrees Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter. "It's the strength demonstrated in Sozer's character that is ultimately betrayed in the way Petzold ends his yarn, which had to end somewhere but didn't have to be so dissatisfying."

The Telegraph's David Gritten finds in Jerichow "a taut psychological thriller about sexual jealousy, money, national identity and betrayal."

Film-Zeit rounds up more reviews in the German press.

Update, 8/30: Peter Zander profiles Hoss for Die Welt (in German).

Telluride 08. Lineup.

"The 35th Telluride Film Festival has announced their lineup, and American helmers are tellingly absent." Variety's Michael Jones has the list and a few notes on films that aren't in and: "'Last year was one of the strongest for American film,' said co-director Tom Luddy. 'But this year I didn't get any calls from Warner Independent, Picturehouse, Vantage. They're gone.'... Though tight-lipped on this year's sneaks, Luddy characterizes them as 'medium to high profile.'"

Tomorrow through Monday. Below: That fun widget.

Sukiyaki Western Django.

"I guess the premise of Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django goes something like this," proposes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "Given that the Japanese samurai film and the American (and/or European) western are fundamentally the same genre, and that Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah were all drilling in the same well - and given that a lot of their movies were ripping off Shakespeare's plots in the first place, with less talking and more killing - why not boil up all those stories and elements and influences in the same pot and see what happens?"

"Whether it's score-settling culture theft, a fever dream of interlinked Wild West mythology, or simply a company casserole of way-cool cinema, this delirious spaghetti eastern could only have come from the boiling brain of Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese auteur whose spectacularly uneven films account for the lion's share of the past decade's most utterly batshit movie moments," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice.

Updated through 9/2.

Grady Hendrix in Slate:

Asian Westerns are hardly new. Korea's The Good, the Bad, and the Weird is playing Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival, and last year, Americans finally saw the release of Wisit Sasanatieng's Thai Western Tears of the Black Tiger. Japan's Nikkatsu Studios produced their own series of Westerns as far back as 1959, and the most popular movie ever made in Bollywood, Sholay, is a "curry Western." But the most influential international Westerns came from 1960s Europe when Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and Alejandro Jodorowsky took the Western movie from America, filched some style and story points from Japan, blasted the genre with hard radiation, then sent it back to the States, both smarter and stranger, where it influenced everyone from Sam Peckinpah to Walter Hill. There's no way to get from the square-jawed, clean-shirt-wearing cowboys of John Ford's 1946 My Darling Clementine to the stubble-jawed, morally compromised cowboys of Clint Eastwood's 1992 Unforgiven without going through Italy.

"This over-the-top Far East riff on over-the-top spoofs of already over-the-top Spaghetti Westerns succeeds only because Miike's superior realization saves what would have otherwise been another smug head lodged irretrievably up its own posterior," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "Backdrops of candy-colored sunsets and out-of-nowhere snow descending on a desolate graveyard impart a majesty only feigned at by lesser homages like Tears of the Black Tiger."

"It should come as no great surprise that the first person we see onscreen in Miike's new film is Quentin Tarantino, lounging in a patently phony Western sunset landscape complete with cardboard Mt Fuji and hawk-calls and mission bells on the soundtrack - it all has the flatness of a David Hockney painting," writes Leo Goldsmith in indieWIRE. "Soon, with an unlikely swiftness, the paunchy American director gymnastically blows away some menacing Japanese heavies (spraying the two-dimensional backdrop with stage blood), before whipping up the movie's titular dish with a snake egg. This prologue (and Tarantino's campy, barely watchable performance) is mercifully brief, but it establishes the mood of the film: loud, jolly, bloodthirsty, and painfully esoteric."

"[O]ccasional triumphs aside, Miike too often seems to be not so much reinventing the spaghetti western as simply contributing a middling entry to the genre," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "And even when it's going strong, Sukiyaki continually reminds us that it's nothing more than an occasionally clever bit of dispensable pastiche."

Blake Ethridge has pix, production notes and lots o' links.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice and Toronto.

Updates, 8/29: "For a while the weird color scheme and the tongue-in-cheek evocation of various traditions of popular cinema are amusing," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But long before the final blood bath arrives the movie has made its point, which is essentially that Mr Miike has a lot of energy and an extensive collection of DVDs."

"It's not just the pleasure in recognizing convention, as that is no pleasure at all (in fact, that's how nearly all mainstream cinema survives and self-propagates)," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Rather, Sukiyaki Western Django takes the cues we recognize and ratchets up our smug acknowledgment of those cinematic conventions to such an absurd, extreme degree that one must laugh."

"Mr Miike has chosen to burden his mostly Japanese-speaking cast with English dialogue pronounced phonetically," notes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "What begins as a bizarre artistic pothole becomes, over the course of 98 minutes, a conceptual impact crater of nearly unmeasurable depth."

"In spite of a string of nifty gunfights where bullets land with a sickening squelch, Sukiyaki Western loses some of its appeal once the novelty of Miike's conceptual shenanigans wears off," writes Sam Adams at the AV Club. "Even good jokes turn into shaggy-dog stories when they run too long."

"With probably just a little help from QT, Miike has managed the best Spaghetti Western knockoff in years," writes Jeffrey M Anderson in Cinematical.

Tarantino's "scenes are excruciating but brief," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "The film's bad aftertaste, however, will linger on indefinitely."

Update, 8/31: "[F]or all its hip posturing, there's something academic about it, as it runs through gestures whose coolness passed a decade ago," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "With its genre-bending pastiche and quotes from other films, it's a textbook example of postmodernism."

Updates, 9/2: "Whatever its demerits, Sukiyaki has a virtue I've never associated with Miike: consistency," writes Vadim Rizov. "Grantly, it's mostly the consistency of stupidity and fanboy geeking-out, but I'll take it."

Also at the House Next Door,John Lichman: "While it may prove Miike's visions are best handled with a stricter knife in the editing room, Sukiyaki Western Django is exactly the continuation you'd expect and desire from the guy who got famous by making 'Deeper, deeper, deeper...' the reason some people still uncontrollably flinch."

Online viewing tip. No End in Sight.

Charles Ferguson's Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight, winner of the Documentary Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2007, "is being made available free to the public to reveal the facts about the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq to voters concerned with the issues of national security and the adverse economic impact of the war when making decisions in this crucial election."

The doc's got its own YouTube channel where, again, it'll be viewable for free from Monday through November 5. Ray Pride's posted the full press release at Movie City Indie.

Earlier: Reviews from August 07.

Fests and events, 8/27.

"Of Time and the City is [Terence] Davies's first documentary, and it's a brooding, passionate, and often sardonic essay film that tributes the working class Liverpool of his childhood, and charts - with rueful adult hindsight - its cultural milieu," writes Doug Cummings. "Rather than tell the story of his family, he tells the story of his place, and the sights and sounds of Liverpool offer constant markers of his status as both insider and outsider: the devout, Irish Catholic schoolboy repressing his homosexual urges; the slum resident during the lavish coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; the devotee of passé love songs during the reign of the Beatles."

The film screens today and tomorrow as part of DocuWeek Los Angeles; next stop: Toronto. Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

"Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts' Envisioning Russia retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history — not only in its mainstream, but on its catapulting visionary fringes." A preview from Michael Atkinson in the Boston Phoenix. September 3 through October 23.

A Four-Pack of Carpenter runs Monday through Thursday next week at BAM. Scott Foundas: [T]here are two ways of seeing [John] Carpenter: as a proficient genre director or as a kind of blue-collar shaman, waking us up to the all-too-real horrors of the modern world and its many threats to individuality and consciousness. He is what the late Manny Farber deemed a termite artist, nibbling away at the borders with his seemingly innocuous, low-budget quickies, unnoticed by most - which is, after all, the best way to stage a revolution."

Also in the Voice: "Cinematic Atlas: The Triumphs of Charlton Heston, which runs Friday through September 4 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, is a decidedly apolitical survey of Heston's oeuvre," writes John Anderson. "'The last thing I wanted to do was something political,' says Josh Strauss, the Film Society's programmer for the series. 'The idea had come up about three weeks before he died [in April of this year], and the concept was a week-long series of Heston films with a cult edge - Omega Man, Soylent Green."

"Break out your go-go boots for this four-day flashback to Los Angeles' 1960s experience hosted by Dominic Priore, author of Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood." Dennis Harvey previews the series for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. At the Red Vic Movie House from tomorrow through Sunday.

Dennis Harvey also has a piece at SF360: "Days and Clouds by director Silvio Soldini (Bread and Tulips), which plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki starting August 29, is refreshing simply by virtue of approaching a subject common in the real world but too rare in fiction - that of downwardly mobile bourgeois - without condescension or melodrama. It's a quietly penetrating tale one could all too easily imagine happening to someone you know. Maybe it already has."

"Frank Borzage's masterful romance History Is Made at Night (1937) screens this evening at 8 PM at University of Chicago Doc Films," notes JR Jones in the Chicago Reader.

Toronto After Dark, running October 17 through 24, has announced its first eight titles and Mack's got 'em at Twitch.

Mike Everleth has the Atlanta Underground Film Festival award-winners.

"It's Sunday morning and Tilda Swinton is decked out in Clark Kent glasses, blue pyjamas and big fluffy slippers." For FilmInFocus, Alastair Harkness reports on the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams.

Screenwriting, 8/27.

In the run-up to Get Your Act(s) Together, the screenwriting workshop he'll be conducting in San Francisco on Saturdays, starting September 6, our own Craig Phillips has been posting screenwriting tips, which he's counting down here.

Meanwhile, at the House Next Door, Tom Stempel, author of several books on movies, moviegoing and writing for film and television, presents the third column in his series, "Understanding Screenwriting."

FilmInFocus runs an excerpt from The Making of The Big Lebowski in which William Preston Robertson's first question for Joel and Ethan Coen is, "What is the writing process like for you guys?"

Screenwriters who blog: John August, Will Dixon, Alex Epstein, Jane Espenson, Lee Goldberg, Jill Golick, Lisa Klink, Ken Levine, Craig Mazin and Ted Elliott, Denis McGrath and John Rogers.

Venice. Burn After Reading.

A first take from Ronald Bergan. Notes on other reviews will follow.

Burn After Filming, more likely. Opening the Venice Film Festival tonight is another attempt by the Coen Brothers to enter the mainstream, trying to live down the time when their films were more personal, quirky and less commercial. Here the starry cast does their one-dimensional turn: George Clooney is the skirt chaser, an uncharming Cary Grant, Brad Pitt plays a bubble head gum-chewing gym trainer, John Malkovich is his irascible self. The women come off worse. Tilda Swinton and Elizabeth Marvel play two coldly intellectual cheating wives, a doctor and a children's author respectively, and Frances McDormand, the most irritating character, is so dumb she doesn't know the Cold War is long over. It seems that the Coens had so little confidence in their own convoluted plot, involving the CIA, that they make fun of it when an agent tries to explain the intricacies of the happenings to his superior. Despite some attempts at contemporary relevance, it really is a very old-fashioned juvenile farce, with elements of the 70s paranoia films, which except for the stream of "fuck"s, could have been made a few decades ago.

Updated through 8/31.

Burn After Reading was preceded by an extract from soon-to-be centenarian Manoel de Oliveira's new work in progress, From Visible To Invisible, whose one joke is more amusing than any of the many feeble ones in the Coen Brothers movie. Deliciously, even at 7 minutes, Oliveira has time for two long shots of a street in Sao Paulo, in which nothing much happens but sets the tone.

- Ronald Bergan

---

The Guardian's Andrew Pulver offers an alternative take: "Clocking in at a crisp 95 minutes, Burn After Reading is a tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy that couldn't be in bigger contrast to the Coens' last film, the bloodsoaked, brooding No Country for Old Men. Burn, in comparison, is bit of a bantamweight: fast moving, lots of attitude, and uncorking a killer punch when it can."

Meanwhile, we've got a contest going on at the main site.

Updates: "[T]he Coen brothers revert to sophomoric snarky mode in Burn After Reading," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "A seriously talented cast has been asked to act like cartoon characters in this tale of desperation, mutual suspicion and vigorous musical beds, all in the name of laughs that only sporadically ensue. Everything here, from the thesps' heavy mugging to the uncustomarily overbearing score by Carter Burwell and the artificially augmented vulgarities in the dialogue, has been dialed up to an almost grotesquely exaggerated extent, making for a film that feels misjudged from the opening scene and thereafter only occasionally hits the right note."

"The first film in the Coen Brothers' two-picture pact with Focus Features and Working Title is a smart urban screwball comedy about the perils of idiocy that uses its all-star cast to dazzling and often hilarious effect," writes Lee Marshall for Screen Daily. "A beautifully produced mix of spy story, US zeitgeist satire and relationship drama, Burn After Reading cons the audience into seeing depths – and Fargo parallels - that don't really exist. The consumate, near-throwaway ending sets the record straight: it's a feelgood comedy so enjoy the ride and don't take it all so seriously."

In FilmInFocus, Nick Dawson looks back over the Coens' ouevre while David Parkinson examines Best Director Oscar followups in Academy history.

Shane Danielsen at indieWIRE: "A comedy set in the world of espionage, constructed around an interlocking set of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, it has something of the accumulative, shaggy-dog structure of The Big Lebowski, the one of their films it most closely resembles. More amusing than actually funny, it's briskly-paced and well acted - Brad Pitt, in particular, is superb. The dialogue is sharp; it moves briskly. Still, something is missing."

"This is the Coens' first self-penned original screenplay since The Man Who Wasn't There in 2001, and it has in common with some of their earlier pictures, specifically Raising Arizona and Fargo, a savagely comic taste for creative violence and a slightly mocking eye for detail," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times. "Carter Burwell's brilliant score is the most paranoid piece of film music since Quincy Jones's neurotic soundtrack for The Anderson Tapes - it's particularly well-judged as it brings a gravity to a collection of characters who we could otherwise dismiss as numbskulls and nincompoops. The attention to detail is impeccable: the Coens can even raise a laugh with something as simple as a well-placed photograph of Vladimir Putin... [W]hile the film carries the audience with its entertaining, if somewhat ludicrous, blend of high level espionage and ab-toning exercises, it would perhaps be more rewarding if we could like the characters as well as laugh at them."

"It takes a while to adjust to the rhythms and subversive humor of Burn because this is really an anti-spy thriller in which nothing is at stake, no one acts with intelligence and everything ends badly," writes Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter. "The key thing is that every actor is riffing on his or her screen persona. The guys who pulled off all those casino heists, the smart-cookie South Dakota police officer, the stars of many Sundance films - yep, they're all idiots."

"Burn After Reading is a terrific entertainment: fast-paced, inventive and relentlessly amusing," writes the Telegraph's David Gritten. "The Coens have taken a sledgehammmer to the notion, advanced in film after film, that espionage is a business pursued by grim-faced people blessed with total competence.... [I]t's far better than their most recent forays into comic terrain. In short, a fine, agreeable film to open a major festival."

Update, 8/30: "With its coldly satirical tone, stylized dialogue and broadly drawn characters, Burn will feel like familiar territory for longtime fans, a return to Coen Country for Odd Men," writes Bruce Headlam in a profile for the New York Times. "Is Burn a deliberate return to form, a step away from being Very Important Oscar-Winning Filmmakers? 'It was nothing like that,' Ethan said. 'To tell you the truth, we started writing down actors we wanted to work with.'"

Updates, 8/31: "The ultimate question, from this admirer of virtually all the brothers' work, from the early Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing to their previous Clooney collaborations O, Brother, Where Art Thou? and [Intolerable Cruelty], is a plaintive 'What the heck kind of film is this?'" Time's Richard Corliss: "As close to an answer as you'll get here is that Burn After Reading is an essay in the cocoon of ignorance most of us live in. It pushes the old form of movie comedy - smart people saying clever things - into collision with today's dominant model of slackers whose utterly unfounded egotism eventually worms its way into an audience's indulgence."

"In Fargo, the Coens found the perfect balance between comedy and pathos, real life and the absurd, but in Burn After Reading (like in Barton Fink), the opposing forces never quite strike a balance," writes Boyd van Hoeij in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Venice, 8/27.

The 65th Venice International Film Festival opens tonight with Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading. After that, as all the festival previews have noted, Hollywood's presence dries right up. Most blame - or credit, depending on their point of view - last year's writers' strike.

Updated.

"It can be argued that the dearth of studio pictures is a good thing," writes Stephanie Bunbury in the Age. Even so: "In recent years there has been a tectonic shift from Venice to the Toronto Film Festival, which starts a week later and overlaps by a few days. This shift has been particularly dramatic this year." Of the many factors at play, she decides, the crucial is "that while Venice is all about prestige, Toronto is about selling."

"With fewer Hollywood releases in competition, this year's lineup of Golden Lion hopefuls provides a perfect opportunity for European cinema to maximise its international exposure," suggests Gwladys Fouche in the Guardian.

Nick Vivarelli previews the festival for Variety, while Roderick Conway Morris has an overview of the Competition in the New York Times.

La Repubblica has a special section devoted to the festival. In Italian.

Earlier: "Venice 08. Lineup."

Updates: More special sections: The Guardian and the Telegraph.

The Guardian's Andrew Pulver considers the "sense of malaise" this year, at least "among the British contingent."

Day of Wrath.

"It's masterfully photographed and alive to the human complexity of its characters, but offers an unsparing view of their failures and their blindness. It's intensely erotic, although it depicts nothing more risqué than a young couple kissing. It brings a disturbing fragment of the distant past alive with vivid clarity, but also crackles with contemporary political relevance and ambiguous, symbolic depth. I'd be saving a spot for it near the top of my 10-best list if the movie hadn't been made 65 years ago." Andrew O'Hehir in Salon on the digitally restored edition of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath, opening for a week-long run at the IFC Center on Friday.

Updated through 8/29.

"A carefully composed movie of copious close-ups and silent-style performances, Day of Wrath unfolds not so much in a rural Danish village as in deepest Freudland," writes the Voice's J Hoberman before turning to a recent DVD release from Criterion: "The bridge between Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, Vampyr is Dreyer's most radical film - maybe one of my dozen favorite movies by any director.... Vampyr is uncanny not because of its subject matter, but because of its utter strangeness as film."

Nicolas Rapold on Day of Wrath in the L Magazine: "There are the seeds of Bergman, minus the strain, while Paul Schrader grouped Dreyer with Bresson in positing a 'transcendental' style. Though marking a tunnel-vision turn toward play adaptation, Day maintains cinematic bravura: a children's choir learning a hymn for the witch-burning, Anne peering through paned glass like the traveler of Vampyr, a slumped half-nude mass in a priestly torture chamber, Anne gliding across the room before her beloved. Like much of Dreyer, you keep returning to Day of Wrath in your mind and re-emerging."

The IMDb links to nearly 40 more reviews.

Earlier: "Criterion's Vampyr."

(An aside to readers in Germany: While Tage des Zorns, opening this weekend, may translate as Days of Wrath, and though this film, too, is Danish, it ain't Dreyer.)

Update: "Dreyer's non-traditional lighting schemes make the walls seem to glow, and the film's tonal juxtapositions - a forest-idyll scene includes wood for a witch's pyre; children sing as she burns at the stake - have an otherworldly quality," writes Darrell Hartman for Artforum. "'Abstraction allows the director to get outside the fence with which naturalism has surrounded his medium,' Dreyer once claimed. You could say that Day of Wrath is tailor-made for transcendence."

Update, 8/29: "In billowing fabrics and whispering winds, God or Satan or the dead menace the living, yet the way the light falls on suffering and ecstatic faces suggests a higher, more clement power," writes Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "But far more chilling than this spooky expressionism are the simple pans down scrolls invoking God's word and the state's judgments. It's as if Dreyer was at war with words, answering their punishing certainties and limitations with the humanism of light and shadow delicately applied. Dreyer invites you to find in his flesh and blood friezes something a lot closer to God than those murderous texts."

"Yes, Day of Wrath is available in a characteristically pristine DVD transfer from Criterion, but Dreyer's peculiar and timeless cinematic gifts need to be appreciated via projector, not monitor," argues Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "I can think of few other movies whose central creative voice is at once so modern and yet so archaic. Confining that voice in any way - including reducing it to living-room casualness via video - sells Dreyer's medieval modernist vision short."

"[T]he film comes off like an apocalyptic thriller, with faith, family, lust and ash swirling into a vortex," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "In 1943, most Danes saw their country's Nazi occupiers as the hypocritical witch-hunters, but Dreyer's work has proven detached from time, less about persecution than the preservation of dignity at great cost."

Traitor.

"Traitor, a somber, absorbing and only moderately preposterous new thriller written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, manages an impressive feat of economy, condensing a vast and sometimes contradictory compendium of post-9/11 fears and anxieties into 110 swift minutes," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"In one sense, Traitor is precisely the kind of movie about global terrorism that everyone feared two years ago," writes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun. "The movie serves up the hottest potatoes in world politics as if they were freezer-packed french fries, filling blanks in the espionage-thriller formula with touchy subjects. One can almost picture Nachmanoff at a meeting with studio executives, pitching the film as United 93 meets Syriana meets The Bourne Identity. Indeed, Traitor is as formulaic as they come, even if it serviceably measures up to all of these predecessors in terms of sheer entertainment value."

Updated through 8/30.

"[Don] Cheadle, in movies like Hotel Rwanda and Crash, has become the go-to guy for roles that require bringing deep-rooted internal moral conflicts to the surface, and it's remarkable that he can play these parts so frequently without making them feel tired or programmed," writes Stephanie Zacahrek in Salon. "Cheadle is deeply attuned to the cerebral and the emotional; in fact, he seems to make no distinction between them."

"Traitor is a movie about some of the most terrifying and inescapable facts of our times, and I walked out of it whistling and chewing gum," writes Steven Boone. "What's next? I could give you an intricate, sequence by sequence breakdown of why it is so forgettable despite its memorable performances and action cinematography, but I'm tired, man. Tired of writing the same review for each of Ho'wood's precision engineered attempts at serious fun."

Also at the House Next Door, Lauren Wissot finds "the story concept (originating with executive producer Steve Martin!) is as complex and interesting as the script is clichéd and tedious."

"To its credit, the movie moves swiftly and purposefully enough to briefly distract from its own hackneyed conventionality," writes Jonathan Kiefer. "But disappointments and doubts can't be held off for long."

"If the chess metaphor around which most of the story seems to have been constructed around weren't facile enough, the laughably explosive conclusion to a series of mass terrorist attacks within the borders of the United States pretty much confirms Traitor as an intellectual and philosophical lost cause," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

"The movie's first hour is well-done, but realism and insight go out the window as soon as Samir crosses the US border - oh so easily - to set in motion one last big terror plot, a plan that actually calls to mind the scheme from Don Siegel's far superior 1977 thriller Telefon, in which a rogue KGB agent travels across America activating deep-cover Russian agents," writes Chuck Wilson in the Voice. "Nachmanoff has devised a nifty last-minute twist to the concept, but he appears to take little pleasure in the telling—almost as if he's embarrassed to be having fun with a subject as serious as terror."

David Denby in the New Yorker: "The filmmakers, I think, got in over their heads and couldn't decide whether they were making an action thriller or a drama of conscience; they wound up flubbing both."

"Problems aside, this is a good, twisty, absorbing work," argues the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips.

"Today's global state of affairs has resulted in a handful of interesting films, ranging from the moving In the Valley of Elah and Stop-Loss to the satirical Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay to the metaphorical The Dark Knight," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "These are the exceptions, sadly, with most of the ripped-from-the-headlines movies being along the lines of the overwrought and dull Rendition and Lions for Lambs. Toss Traitor into the nice-try bin with these latter disappointments."

Cristy Lytal talks with Guy Pearce for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates: "Post-2001, the likes of TV's 24 and Sleeper Cell, and film's Jason Bourne franchise, have tapped into both our political climate and pop culture zeitgeist, into a globe-trotting, gun-toting fear of the here and there and always now," writes William Goss at Cinematical. "Jeffrey Nachmanoff's Traitor feels like the first film that has itself been directly spawned in the wake of those successes, as opposed to merely bolstered by it, and while it may overtake, say, Vantage Point in terms of plausible plotting and worldly knowledge, it remains a film that is good enough to grasp the bar and yet not quite enough to raise it."

"Traitor is essentially two films," writes Nathan Rabin. "One is a superbly acted, suspenseful character study about a man whose faith pulls him in antithetical directions. The other is a much more generic, forgettable cat-and-mouse yarn about dogged G-men pursuing elusive prey."

Annsley Chapman talks with Cheadle for Vulture.

"It's easy to see why Cheadle wanted to play Samir," notes the Oregonian's Mike Russell. "Cheadle's face is basically a perfect delivery system for woe, sadness and gut-wrenching internal conflict. And Samir - a deep-cover operative trying to infiltrate the highest ranks of that terrorist outfit - has to make brutal Sophie's Choices roughly three times a day."

Update, 8/28: Online listening tip. Cheadle's a guest on The Treatment.

Update, 8/29: "When watching Traitor, the viewer is overcome by the weirdest urge: You want to will the movie to become better than it really is," writes Paul Constant in the Stranger. "But the fact is that Traitor is just not a good movie, and all the Cheadle in the world can't save it."

Update, 8/30: "One of Traitor's tragic flaws is Hollywood's century old myopia, placing a shining minority citizen amidst a sea of his depraved brethren," writes Wajahat Ali in the Huffington Post. "The 'Good Darkie' then battles for the souls and minds of the 'Evil Darkies.' Cheadle's Samir is a devout Muslim whose religious discipline is displayed continuously and even admired by other characters. He prays five times a day; he fasts; he abstains from alcohol and so forth. Meanwhile, every other Muslim character seems transplanted from dated 80s action movies and True Lies."

DNC 08.

"So what, exactly, will be the role of celebrity during the week of the Democratic National Convention?" asks Ted Johnson for Variety. "The easy answer: Causes. In fact, outside the convention hall itself, it will be a veritable ComicCon of causes, as dozens upon dozens of events are slated throughout the week promoting everything from African poverty relief to the plight of war veterans to the world trade imbalance." Ted also blogs at Wilshire & Washington, the "intersection of entertainment and politics." Yesterday's question: "The industry is lining up behind Barack Obama, but one question seldom gets asked: Will he be 'good' for Hollywood?"

5280? The Denver magazine takes its name from the number of feet its city rises above sea level. And it'll be all over the Convention.

Updated through 8/31.

Michael Guillén previews the Impact Film Festival, running for three days starting today in Denver and then moving on to the Twin Cities for the Republican National Convention and running there September 1 through 4. Michael: "Discussions will include the national debt, fair trade, Hurricane Katrina, stem-cell research, homelessness, and global water politics. Films screening include Accidental Advocate, Battle in Seattle, The Black List, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, Flow, Freeheld, I.O.U.S.A., Kicking It, Robert Kennedy Remembered, Trouble the Water and 14 Women."

David Carr, aka the Carpetbagger, that is, the New York Times' Oscar blogger, will be poking around both parties' conventions, but first: "Denver is large and still growing and clearly wants the convention to be a hit, but people are not interested in knocking the metaphorical manure off their boots. Yes, there are abundant business, culinary and artistic amenities, but Denver is still cow-town proud."

David Leonhardt on "Obamanomics" in the NYT Magazine: "Depending on how you look at it, he is both more left-wing and more right-wing than many people realize."

In These Times senior editor David Moberg is struggling with that.

"Even after his breakout into national prominence, Obama has remained a largely unknown politician whose air of destiny can make him seem distant and opaque. Yet, by listening closely to his language, I think we can learn something about who he really is." In the New Republic, literary critic Andrew Delbanco reads Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope.

More DNC special coverage: The American Prospect (blogs), the Nation and the Guardian. And the Washington Post.

Online viewing tip. "The biographical film has become a key component of political conventions. It may be crucial for Barack Obama." Jim Rutenberg for the NYT. The film by Davis Guggenheim (Inconvenient Truth) debuts tonight Thursday night.

Online viewing tips. Lots and lots at Cinemocracy.

Updates: For the New Republic, Nicole Allan and Bess Kalb poll "12 of the nation's most influential political journalists" to determine the best coverage of the primary season in six categories.

"After traveling across the country to glean perspectives from artists and activists on the state of democracy, Creative Time's year-long program Democracy in America: The National Campaign will culminate in the "Convergence Center": a major exhibition in the historic rooms of New York City's landmark Park Avenue Armor with speeches on democracy by artists, political thinkers, community leaders, and activists throughout its run."

Online viewing tip. Michael Hogan's got one that makes everyone involved look very, very silly.

Updates, 8/26: IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez reports from the Impact Film Festival.

Speeches: Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama.

Andrew Sullivan gathers reactions to Michelle Obama's speech here (that one's an online viewing tip), here, here, here and here.

Online viewing tip. "John Harwood of the New York Times and CNBC looks back at Democratic conventions in the modern era." Great stuff.

Slate indexes its coverage.

"A short film salute to veterans produced by Steven Spielberg will be shown on Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention," reports Ted Johnson. "Spielberg endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primaries, but is now supporting Obama. He and his partners in DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, may throw a fund-raiser for the candidate in September."

Updates, 8/27: Hillary Clinton's speech. Reactions: Ryan Wu; and again, Andrew Sullivan gathers more.

Karina Longworth is in Denver, watching docs for the SpoutBlog.

Online viewing tip. Slate: "Fox vs MSNBC: Michelle's Speech."

Stefan Forbes's Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, "which caused such a ruckus at its premiere in June at the Los Angeles Film Festival, essentially functions as an ideological ink blot––people see what they want in it," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog. "It's possible (and, based on the director's comments after the film, probably preferred) to see Boogie Man as a vicious indictment of the political operative who mentored Karl Rove and George W Bush whilst helping the latter's father overcome the Iran Contra scandal to win the presidency, destroying Michael Dukakis's political career in the process. But Forbes, to his credit, also clearly explicates Atwater's appeal. You might need to put blinders on a bit, but it would be possible to walk away from this film cheering McCain to turn Obama into the new Dukakis."

Max Winter, poet and poetry editor for Fence, at the House Next Door:

When asked if there was room for cynicism at this election, [Bill Maher] managed to stump both Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews by replying, "Yes." He's not wrong about the Americans, really, and he's not really wrong about our right to look askance at events like this one. Poets William Butler Yeats and Delmore Schwartz tell us, "in dreams begin responsibilities," and this election year, we have quite a few dreams - with no lasting guarantee that the responsibilities will be carried out. It's all very well for the Democrats to congratulate themselves - what else is a convention for? But after the convention, what lies beyond that sort of self-congratulation?

Gabriel Shanks is rattled by a CNN moment: "It shocked me beyond anything I've ever experienced in politics, and I've been thinking about it all day. I can't shake it."

Online viewing tip. Three and a half minutes with New York Times staff photographer Damon Winter.

Updates, 8/28: "Alongside the thousands of journalists reporting on the Democratic National Convention here in Denver, teams of filmmakers have been fanning out across the city to tell stories that might otherwise be overlooked," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez. "AJ Schnack (Kurt Cobain About a Son) has tapped a cadre of acclaimed indie filmmakers to shoot a feature doc about the convention. Meanwhile, George Hickenlooper (The Mayor of Sunset Strip, Hearts of Darkness) is tracking his cousin, Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, while directors Amy Rice and Alicia Sams continue making their insider documentary about Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Today, indieWIRE visited Schnack and other indie filmmakers 'on set' at the convention, while also catching up with other DNC-related docs."

Speeches: Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and John Kerry. Chris Suellentrop (NYT) gathers reactions; more from Walter Shapiro in Salon.

The Guardian's Xan Brooks issues a casting call: Who should play Hillary, Bill or Joe?

"The film related-events surrounding the 2008 Democratic Convention reached their zenith on Wednesday with a pair of sessions devoted to The People Speak, Project Greenlight/Good Will Hunting producer Chris Moore's theatrical documentary inspired by the writings of Howard Zinn, which has its official premiere next week at the Toronto International Film Festival." Karina Longworth reports at the SpoutBlog.

Updates, 8/29: First and foremost, of course, Barack Obama. Reactions to the speech: John Dickerson (Slate), Charles Mudede (Stranger) and the New York Times.

Jon Taplin has Davis Guggenheim's ten-minute biographical introduction to the speech.

And Jeffrey Wells has another online viewing tip, noting that "MSNBC's Keith Olbermann compared aspects of [the speech] to Michael Douglas's speech (written by Aaron Sorkin) at the end of The American President. I just re-watched this finale; Olbermann isn't wrong."

The AP reports that more than 38 million people watched the speech on TV, more than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the American Idol finale or - and this is hardly a surprise - the Academy Awards.

Al Gore spoke, too.

A New York Times roundup: "Recollections from past Democratic conventions, from former presidential nominees, running mates, candidates and strategists."

The Stranger: "Slogging Toward 2008."

Claire Messud for Newsweek:

When I told people I'd be following the Obama campaign for a week, their envy was palpable, their curiosity intense - this in spite of, or perhaps because of, all the hype. Even my friend whose disappointment over Hillary is such that she has said she will not vote at all - even she got excited. McCain's campaign can mock Obama's celebrity - can make it, indeed, their principal complaint - precisely because he has become a celebrity, in a way simply impossible for John McCain.

[...]

For anyone to offer Americans a practicable alternative to the long, dark years of fear and shame that we have latterly endured ought to be enough to swing the election. If, for Obama, it still hangs in the balance, it's because his appeal is precisely, in Weber's terms, charismatic. That charisma creates his authority, an authority that does not exist without him; and authority is what he needs to win votes, rather than just attention. The trouble is, in our celebrity-obsessed culture, the charisma is what we focus on.

Jennifer Kabat traces the history of campaign buttons for Frieze.

Update, 8/31: Online viewing tip. Ok, this is funny. From Matt Dentler.

New York. Fall Preview.

The fall season's actually supposed to wait for Labor Day, but who's not ready to stow away the capes and get to it already? Good news: Venice opens on Wednesday, Telluride on Friday. And New York's looking beyond. Many of its "Fall Preview" entries are brief - but welcome.

"In the globe-trotting con-artist movie The Brothers Bloom, two lifelong grifters (Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo) devise double-crosses so fabulously complex that they begin to lose track of where real life ends and the bamboozle begins," writes Logan Hill; he talks with Rachel Weisz, who "steals the film right out from under the brothers' noses."

Updated through 8/30.

There's a quick profile of John Hillcoat, who's directed an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road; Hill's chat with Josh Brolin about playing George W Bush in Oliver Stone's W; a guide to the season's male duos; a few questions for Catherine Keener regarding Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York; an even quicker talk with Benicio Del Toro (Che); a glimpse at Beverly Hills Chihuahua; a chart ("Vulture's Fall Recommend-o-Matic: Movies") and a briefly annotated schedule of September, October and November releases.

"Last year gave us awards-quality glumfests like There Will Be Blood, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and In the Valley of Elah. It also gave us a severe case of clinical depression. Will we survive 2008? Or will this year's crop of movies be even more dour than last year's?" A prognostication from Dan Kois and Lane Brown in Vulture.

Updates: More fall previewing: At Screengrab, Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne and Scott Von Doviak each pick three movies they're looking forward to and three they'll try to avoid.

David Germain writes the AP's fall preview.

The Playlist is previewing, starting with September and October.

Update, 8/26: And the Playlist previews November and December.

Updates, 8/27: Johnny Ray Huston opens the San Francisco Bay Guardian's "Fall Arts Preview 2008" package and writes up a big list of "50 ways to rep film this fall." Cheryl Eddy makes note of "10 big-screen release dates to remember - for better and worse."

Noah Forrest previews September and October for Movie City News.

In the New York Observer, Sara Vilkomerson picks seven films to look out for in September.

Screengrab's Leonard Pierce picks three to look forward to, three to avoid and one wild card.

William Speruzzi's "Fall 2008 Radar."

Update, 8/30: The Washington Post presents its "Fall Books Preview 2008."

Catching up.

With summer about to skid into fall, you might find this roundup of longish reads and hours of online viewing as a way to pass the last leisurely hours of the year; or maybe it's brain training, a back-to-school workout. Up to you. Either way, the June issues of two film journals have appeared online relatively recently, and we can start with Scope, where Martin Barker asks, "[W]hat senses of identity and community are summoned up in the process of watching and then discussing [Being John Malkovich]? And what light might this throw on how we think about the concept of 'art-house' audiences?"

Dave Mann "analyses the crime series Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1954) which, though it has attracted considerable internet interest, has not yet achieved academic respectability."

Andrew Hageman examines "the prospects of reading Mulholland Drive ecologically as well as the prospects for uncanny cinema to reveal the ideological limits of our ability to think about and represent ecology."

Eric Dewberry argues that "Grizzly Man elicits the 'powers of the false,' blurring perceptions of reality and fiction and presenting multiple possibilities and channels for truth in its exclusive temporal form."

Then there's the bulk of the issue, the section that sets Scope apart: 20 book reviews. Five relatively recent films are reviewed, followed by five conference reports. Scope has also expanded its archive.

"After a long run of thematic issues Offscreen returns with a summer issue consisting of five essays covering an eclectic range of subjects spanning many National cinemas," announces editor Donato Totaro, whose own contribution puts forth the argument that The Happening, "while certainly flawed, is a return to form for Shyamalan, who uses an old horror/science-fiction theme - nature gone amok - to spin an entertaining double allegory: on the environment (which every critic has picked up on) and (less obviously) on the state of human communication in a society that is increasingly dependent on technologically mediated forms of communication."

Daniel Garrett offers a brief history of Turkish cinema before turning to several recent films from the country; he also has a piece on The Visitor.

The titles of Robert Robertson and Lindsey Rock's essay say it all; respectively, "Audiovisual Glass: Eisenstein and Frank Lloyd Wright on Light, Space and Music" and "From Cop Killer to Killer Cop: Black Masculinities in Jamaican Cinema."

I've fallen behind on Offscreen in general. The May issue is devoted to Legend Films, "a company known for its cutting edge developments in digital film restoration, digital colorization, and theatrical color effects, and has recently ventured into the area of DVD production," while April is given to westerns and March to the 2007 edition of Fantasia, Montreal's famed genre film festival.

New site on the block: Cult Media Studies, an "online community for the academic study of cult media."

Online viewing tips. I can't believe I'm only just now looking into the collection of interviews at FilmCatcher. Just watch and listen to all these people talking on camera: Stephen Frears, Isabel Coixet, Brad Anderson, Joachim Trier, Louis Garrel, Jeanne Balibar and on and on and on.

Films in Review.

Films in Review has relaunched its site: "For those of you just dropping in, we're the oldest film publication in the United States. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures was formed in 1909 as a reaction against censorship in the new visual medium, and to a lesser or greater extent we've always stood for that. The Board's magazine has taken many forms, and even several names, over the decades. Films in Review has been its moniker for the last fifty."

Recent items include Oren Shai's interview with Menahem Golan, nearing 80 now, as well as ongoing columns; the editors are also posting pieces from the "FIR Vault," such as Gene Ringgold's 1971 profile of Audrey Hepburn, James Robert Haspiel and Charles Herschberg's 1976 piece on "Jayne Mansfield's Starlet Days" and David Del Valle's 1996 talk with Curtis Harrington about James Whale.

Frieze. September 08.

"Two films literally changed my life. The first one made me decide to become a cinematographer and the desire to see the second one made me travel to New York, which became my home and where I later made my films." Babette Mangolte writes the "Life in Film" column for the new issue of Frieze. Her name may not be immediately familiar, but she's worked with Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer and: "Over the past three decades, she has directed several non-narrative experimental films, as well as a documentary about the making of Robert Bresson's 1959 film Pickpocket entitled Les Modèles de Pickpocket (2003)." Oh, and those two films? Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and Michael Snow's Wavelength.

"We live in an age of virtuality, a time in which, as Guy Debord ominously foresaw in the late 1960s, 'life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.'" Amelia Jones on recent work by Lynn Hershman Leeson: "In such an age nothing could be more important than a practice like that of LH←→RB, an ongoing range of works that acknowledge and enact the spectacularized virtuality of our 'real' in and through the body."

"In contrast to most projections - including [Bojan Sarcevic's] own early ones - Only After Dark comprises both films and mini-cinemas," writes Jennifer Allen. "Everything - the walls and the ceilings, the churning reels of the projector and the moving images glowing on the wall - becomes a surface."

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith on Steve McQueen and Hunger: "'The body as site of political warfare is becoming a more familiar phenomenon. It is the final act of desperation. Your own body is your last resource for protest. One uses what one has, rightly or wrongly.' If McQueen's quoted comments on the ethics of the Republican protest are understandably circumspect, his thoughts on its pragmatics are consistent with the tenor of previous work."

Shorts, 8/23.

"Sometimes the art and the criticism become inseparable," writes Jim Emerson:

As much as I have loved Buster Keaton since I first laid eyes on him, I don't think I fully experienced him until I read Walter Kerr's chapters in The Silent Clowns. One of the most magnificent films I know, Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho Dayu, is forever reverberating off Robin Wood's consideration of it and Ugetsu Monogatari, "The Ghost Princess and the Seaweed Gatherer." (Wood taught me how to see Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie, too.) The Shining is a greater movie because of Richard T Jameson's unforgettable Film Comment cover story. Of course, the movie is what it always was, but Jameson's piece is a masterful interpretation - the way a musician's interpretation of composition can explore it so deeply and resonantly so that the composer and the interpreter, working in concert, fuse and become co-authors of a particular performance."

"Johnnie To has reunited with Mad Detective actor Lau Ching-Wan on a picture titled Look, which To is obviously planning on sneaking through production before The Red Circle ramps up." Todd Brown has more at Twitch.

Jonathan Rosenbaum posts five letters from Jean-Luc Godard to Rob Tregenza concerning Inside/Out, which "tell a fairly coherent story of their own—-specifically the story of the multifaceted activity of Godard as producer of Tregenza's third feature, which was shot in rural Maryland and which includes two actors from For Ever Mozart in its cast, Frédéric Pierrot and Bérangère Allaux."

"It's tempting to call The Garden a story of innocence and experience, of evil corrupting paradise, but that would be doing a disservice to the fascinating complexities of a classic Los Angeles conflict and an excellent documentary that does them full justice," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Produced and directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy, The Garden takes us behind the scenes into one of the most incendiary LA situations of recent times. That would be the fierce battle over a 14-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda streets known as the South Central Farm, a dispute that turned so bitter and protracted it is still going on."

"A fundamental question facing serious filmmakers who want their movies to be seen is how unvarnished the reality contemplated by their films can be before audiences become alienated," suggests Stephen Holden, introducing "a checklist of 10 of the best art films in theaters this summer."

Also in the New York Times:

• Woody Allen, "Excerpts From the Spanish Diary": "Scarlett came to me today with one of those questions actors ask, 'What's my motivation?' I shot back, 'Your salary.' She said fine but that she needed a lot more motivation to continue. About triple. Otherwise she threatened to walk. I called her bluff and walked first. Then she walked. Now we were rather far apart and had to yell to be heard. Then she threatened to hop. I hopped too, and soon we were at an impasse. At the impasse I ran into friends, and we all drank, and of course I got stuck with the check." Related: José Teodoro in Stop Smiling on Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

• Danny and Oxide Pang's remake of their own Bangkok Dangerous opens on September 5. Terrence Rafferty: "There's something touching about the Pangs' dedication to purely visual storytelling, because their high-impact, music-video-like style has, in 2008, a whiff of quaintness about it. The quick cuts, the tight close-ups, the propulsive pace, the abrupt shifts to slow motion, the slightly dreamy, stoned air that seems to envelop every action - all their signature effects have a distinct late-80s feel to them."

• Realisms, the second part of The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, "showcases 19 artists who find fictions lurking behind every window, door and screen." Karen Rosenberg picks out some of the highlights.

• Holland Carter on "two [Dia:Beacon] installations that, in very different ways, quietly commemorate artists now gone whose names have a magic ring to contemporary ears," Tacita Dean's Merce Cunningham performs Stillness (in three movements) to John Cage's composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six Performances; six films) (through September 1) and Imi Knoebel's 24 Farben - für Blinky.

• "Leopoldo Serran, a screenwriter who adapted the novels of his Brazilian countryman Jorge Amado for the movies, and who worked with the directors Carlos Diegues and Bruno Barreto in bringing Brazilian films to the attention of American audiences, died on Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 66," writes Bruce Weber. "Mr Serran's best-known work was Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands), a 1976 film written with Mr Barreto and Eduardo Coutinho."

• "The lessons of the documentary Crossing Borders - and the film is not subtle about them - are so self-evident, you might think there's no need to convey them," writes Andy Webster. "But that would be a mistake. In 2007, the German filmmaker Arnd Wächter brought four college-age Americans to Morocco to join four Moroccans of similar age for a weeklong tour of their country."

• "All hail Anna Faris, fake bimbo par excellence, master of the birdbrained double take, our reigning queen of intelligent stupidity," writes Nathan Lee. "On the sneaker-clad heels of Smiley Face, an inspired stoner farce from 2007, come the plastic stiletto shenanigans of The House Bunny, a breezy, ditzy comedy about the misadventures of a Playboy bunny exiled from the chinchilla cocoon of Hugh Hefner's mansion." Also, John Anderson talks with Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, "a successful female writing team, one whose output (Legally Blonde, Ella Enchanted, She's the Man) has been frothily funny yet informed by female empowerment." More on the movie from Sean Axmaker (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), Erik Davis (Cinematical), Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Scott Foundas (Voice), Nick Schager (Slant), Dana Stevens (Slate), Scott Tobias (AV Club) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon). And R Emmet Sweeney's got "An Appreciation of Anna Faris" at IFC.

• "There's something to be said for a movie that knows exactly what it is and then whacks that knowledge home like a rusty pipe in the face." Again, Nathan Lee: "Case in point: Death Race, a delectable bit of B-movie savagery that actually does feature pipe melees, among much other kicky (and punchy and impaled-by-a-metal-spikey) ultraviolence." More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Aaron Hillis (Voice), Philip Kennicott (Washington Post), Michael Phillips (LAT, where Tom Roston talks with director Paul WS Anderson), Keith Phipps (AV Club), James Rocchi (Cinematical) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon).

• And Nathan Lee: "The small-town oddballs in The Sensation of Sight are weighted down by some obscure tragedy, but as this long, lugubrious weepie makes its way toward revelation and redemption, it becomes clear that the really oppressive thing here is the filmmaking itself."

• And Nathan Lee sums up the plot of The Longshots, and then: "What makes this one different? Absolutely nothing." More from Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Gary Goldstein (LAT), Jette Kernion (Cinematical), Joe Leydon (Variety) and Nathan Rabin (AV Club).

• Dave Itzkoff talks with JJ Abrams about Fringe, "an hourlong drama about an investigative team whose explorations lead to a shadowy world of science fiction and the seemingly supernatural." Debuts on Fox on September 9.

• "As an actor in films like Hustle & Flow, Crash and Iron Man, Terrence Howard has played characters whose calm demeanor conceals a suppressed rage that is the result of dreams deferred, denied or realized on only barely acceptable terms," writes Anthony DeCurtis. The debut album Shine Through It tends "toward a blend of orchestral jazz and upscale R&B, with lush textures of flutes, horns, strings, female backing vocals and keyboards accompanying Mr Howard, who plays delicate acoustic guitar."

• "In Bollywood the motion picture industry remains resolutely star struck, even as special effects have helped to reduce Hollywood's dependence on big-name actors," writes Anupama Chopra. "Five men dominate the business in Bollywood: Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan (the Khans are not related), Akshay Kumar and Hrithik Roshan. Each of these stars function almost as a one-man studio, with an in-house production company."

• Neil Genzlinger has some fun with roles a slew of actors played before playing the US president.

"The Chaser is the grittiest, snazziest and gutsiest Korean thriller in years and one of the best Korean films of 2008," writes Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org. Also, Seven Days is "really not as clever or poignant as its makers probably think it is, but it may make a surprisingly strong impression for ordinary fans of Korean cinema, and is, needless to say, a must for Kim Yun-jin fans."

Tim Lucas on Simon, King of the Witches: "Despite its scary title and the violent, druggy, sexist, black magic trappings of its original promo campaign, this isn't a horror film at all, nor a particularly exploitative one; it's actually part character study about a homeless, mostly likeable, cigar-smoking practitioner of White Magic who lives in a storm drain and a satire of the myriad cults arising from the ashes of psychedelicized Los Angeles of the early 1970s, informed to some extent by the gnostic legends of Simon Magus."

Badlands "is eloquent about the intersection of crime, romanticism and myth-making in America, and innovative in its use of colour, editing and voiceover. It's also a miracle that this mighty work could have emerged from such an apparently shambolic production." Ryan Gilbey tells the story.

Also in the Guardian:

• John Patterson: "No matter how much things improve, race always finds new ways to make us crazy. One line from Tropic Thunder sums up the whole demented parallel-universe of blackface: 'I know who I am!' says Lazarus. 'I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!'"

• "There are thousands of features and shorts stored in processing laboratories throughout Britain that have been deserted by their owners," writes Phelim O'Neill. "They just sit there, accumulating dust and fines, until they are slung out or burnt. There could be some real classics in there, although the quality of the films is irrelevant; all films, even the bad ones, deserve the chance to be seen if requested."

• Maddy Costa talks with Romola Garai about, among other things, Angel. Related: Kevin Maher interviews François Ozon for the London Times.

• David Thomson: "[Ben] Kingsley is 65, yet it's as if his wings are only now taking on their golden tip and their greatest power."

In PopMatters, Marco Lanzagorta examines "some of the most representative and appealing representations, real or metaphoric, of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, and transsexual monsters that have haunted the silver screen."

David Lowery's been thinking... "It all began when I noted to a friend a few weeks ago that my appetite for films these days is pretty squarely bifurcated between two vague categories: I either want to see something small and strange and unique, something that will get under my skin, or I want really great pop. There's a middle ground between Mr Lonely and Iron Man, and I don't think I'm too terribly interested in whatever occupies it."

"So here we are in the middle of a war about movie superheroes (see comments threads here and here)," sighs Pat Graham. "The word itself begs for judicious scare quotes - why 'super'? why 'heroic'? - but what predictably gets the blood boiling, at least among the die-hard fans, is anyone calling these wayward exotics 'childish.' How can you write off a whole genre, the argument goes, when it's never a one-dimensional, monolithic thing? And basically I agree.

Geoffrey Macnab profiles Joel and Ethan Coen for the Independent.

"John M Stahl's 1939 When Tomorrow Comes is handicapped by an undistinguished script and by the structural problems posed by the 'other woman' genre," writes Dan Sallitt. "And yet something about the concentrated quality of Stahl’s camera style lifts and unifies the project."

John Cassavetes's A Child is Waiting "combines Hollywood's Golden Age star Judy Garland with modern golden boy Burt Lancaster and several of Cassavetes's stock players from his independent work (his wife Gena Rowlands, John Marley and Paul Stewart) to tell a gloves-off story about the place of the mentally retarded in mainstream American society," writes Marilyn Ferdinand. "Garland would be less of a problem in telling this tale than the differing philosophies of its producer [Stanley Kramer] and director."

Annie Wagner on Tuya's Marriage: "The arid landscape, seen with a patriotic affection, is a stirring sight. More wonderful, though, is the story: unusual, understated, and sincere." Also: "Transsiberian is an entertaining film. Just don't expect finesse - and suffer the xenophobia in silence." And also in the Stranger, Charles Mudede on Godard's Vivre Sa Vie: "[T]he more I think about this movie, the more I'm convinced that the part of me that wants to read it in Marxist terms is absolutely right."

Will Lawrence talks with Guy Ritchie for the Telegraph.

Steve Erickson talks with David Gordon Green about the nuts and bolts of making Pineapple Express for Film & Video.

For indieWIRE, Eric Kohn talks with Alejandro Springall about My Mexican Shivah.

For Movie City News, Ray Pride talks with James Marsh about Man on Wire.

"[Y]ou are the readers I have dreamed of." Roger Ebert's "Confessions of a blogger."

Lists: "Top 20 Animated Feature Films" at Screengrab (parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) and "10 Underrated Songs by Fictional Music Groups (in Movies)," from Christopher Campbell at the SpoutBlog.

Online viewing tip #1. "Simon Pegg here, with an introduction to a series of video blogs, made last year on the set of the film How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, released on 3rd October and based on Toby Young's memoir about going to New York and making a tart of himself."

Online viewing tip #2. C Jerry Kutner in Bright Lights After Dark: "I offer this clip as follow-up to my post re The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (Guy Maddin 1995). It shows the degree to which Maddin's style and thematic concerns have evolved in the 12 years since the earlier film was made. Note the differences. Most obviously, Eye Like a Strange Balloon is a photographed dream. Spanky: To the Pier and Back is photographed real life."

Online viewing tip #3. Ted Zee's got the trailer for New York, I Love You, "the next city to fall in love with," from the producers of Paris, je t'aime, so you know what that means: lots of stars and star directors.

Online viewing tips. Eliza picks some "Great New Videos" for Creative Review.

Fests and events, 8/23.

The Chicago Reader previews 40 Years After: Filming the '68 Revolution, running through Thursday.

Related: "On a sweltering Chicago evening early this month, two 60s radicals - veterans of the '68 convention - gathered with a diverse crowd of journalists, progressive activists and students on the city's North Side to contemplate the past and future of the Democratic Party." For In These Times, Laura S Washington talks with Don Rose and Marilyn Katz: "Over dinner at Yoshi's Café, the two reflected on political lessons learned and previewed Obama's coronation in Denver." And, in the New York Times Book Review, Paul Berman: Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago "has just been republished with an admirably self-effacing preface by Frank Rich. I have read it anew, and it gives me the willies."

Update, 8/25: A miniseries of photos from Tom Sutpen.

BAM's Tribute to Richard Widmark runs Monday through Wednesday. Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun: "Like his contemporary, Robert Mitchum, Widmark had an easy way with the camera and did a lot with a little. But unlike Mitchum, Widmark's stock-in-trade characters personified the anxieties of leadership, love, lawlessness, masculinity, and the other boilerplate themes common to the genre pictures that both actors made. Mitchum was a cool, deep reservoir. Widmark was a riptide."

Also in the New York Sun: The New York Korean Film Festival, on through August 31, "is delivering the latest offerings from Asia's most vibrant movie industry while they're still hot," writes Martin Tsai. "Indeed, 11 of the 14 titles to be screened are making either their international, North American, or American premiere at the festival."

"Capturing the city as few other films could, LA Plays Itself (1972), [Fred] Halsted's first film, has come to be regarded as a classic within the genre of gay porn." William E Jones will be presenting the feature and the short Sex Garage (also 1972) at Light Industry in Brooklyn on Tuesday. For Artforum, he profiles the filmmaker.

"With the Slamdance Film Festival turning 15 in 2009, the fest has announced they will be having a series of special events to celebrate," notes Jason Guerrasio at Filmmaker. "The first will be next month as they screen Steven Soderbergh and Christopher Nolan's Slamdance-debuted films, Schizopolis and Following."

The Telegraph's David Gritten offers a quick preview of the Venice Film Festival. Wednesday through September 6.

Twitch's Toronto 08 category is hopping with previews. September 4 through 13.

"The 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival will be held from September 25 to October 10, 2008." A preview.

"Thirteen years after it first launched when mortars and sniping firing were still raining down on the besieged city, the Sarajevo Film Festival is reaching a synergy as both showcase and motor for regional film production." Nick Holdsworth in the Circuit.

Online viewing tips. Unnecessary Sequels!. The Austin Chronicle, which has last year's winner of the contest, explains. This year's winner will be announced on Sunday.

Books, 8/23.

Ronald Bergan is one of 3000 volunteers each reading a single page from Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as part of Veronique Aubouy's ongoing project, Le Baiser de la Matrice, which'll eventually be 170 hours long: "In all, Aubouy has filmed 742 people since 1993, and yet only three volumes have been completed.... In a way, this could be considered the most successful attempt to film Proust's novel of time, space and memory, a landmark in 20th-century literature. Previous films have been bleeding chunks by directors having only dared tackle one volume such as Volker Schlondorff's Swann in Love (1984), Raul Ruiz's Time Regained (1999) and Chantal Akerman's The Captive (2000). Various others have tried to bring the whole novel to the screen, only to end in tears."

Also in the Guardian: In his engaging review, Simon Callow writes that Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters "remarkably reveals a fascinating, original and in some ways haunted man in shockingly unmediated form." And Louise Dean reviews Linn Ullmann's novel, A Blessed Child.

Via Bookforum, Claudia Pummer on The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth: "One of the most refreshing aspects of this study is that [Brad] Prager avoids situating Herzog solely in the context of the New German Cinema, taking into account that the director has long established himself outside this outmoded historiographical and national category.... It is rather unfortunate, however, that Prager never reflects critically on [auteur theory], since it seems to challenge his major argument of defining Herzog's work as a mode that defies the very conventions of a unifying aesthetic principle."

"From the earliest days of cinema a fascination with Scottish historical themes fed the appetites of Hollywood." The Times of London runs an extract from Being a Scot by Sean Connery and Murray Grigor with a good swath on Alexander Mackendrick.

Online listening tip. On Point on "the last Victorian, proto-feminist classic, Anne of Green Gables, at one hundred."

The Black List, Vol 1.

"A minimalist film, without narration and with very little on the screen except people talking, The Black List (which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year) derives its considerable energy and elegance from its subjects," writes Felicia R Lee. "[Elvis] Mitchell, the host of the new TCM interview series Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence and a former film critic for the New York Times, is never on screen. Rather, Mr Mitchell said, he and [photographer Timothy] Greenfield-Sanders played their hands behind the scenes."

Updated through 8/25.

Lee's piece is accompanied by clip featuring Chris Rock and features lots of quotage from Mitchell: "'What you tend not to see are films on black people radiating in the pleasure of their success and telling their stories,' he said. 'You come to the point whenever you see a black person on television, it's either a comedy or some tragic issue being spoken to. You wouldn't think that black people could get through a competently managed day, let alone being successful at it.'"

You can suggest subjects for future volumes: Who's on Your Black List.

Updates, 8/25: "With clarity and elegance, The Black List: Volume One presents portraitures of nearly two-dozen notable African Americans who share their own personal views on how they transcended racism and other hardships to become major successes in their chosen professions," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "Taken together, these voices reflect the breadth and scope of the modern African American experience at its richest and most inspiring."

Steven Boone talks with Mitchell and Greenfield-Sanders for Time Out New York.

Dare Not Walk Alone.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same for disenfranchised African-Americans in the historic city of St Augustine, Florida," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "At least that's the argument persuasively, if haphazardly, put forth by director Jeremy Dean's documentary Dare Not Walk Alone, which casts one eye back to the city's not-insignificant role in the 1960s civil-rights movement while keeping the other fixed on the communities of local blacks still living in virtual third-world poverty."

In the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis finds Dean "makes a valiant attempt to juxtapose past and present, but his goal is consistently undermined by an execution so muddled it's almost unwatchable."

At the Pioneer in New York through Thursday.

Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon.

All weekend long, at the goatdogblog.

Your host will be Michael W Phillips Jr: "Entries are already pouring in, and I'm looking forward to a torrent of great posts on movies about the movie industry's favorite subject - itself."

Roberto Gavaldón.

Roberto Gavaldón's "work was enhanced by savvy choices of collaborators, including the novelists Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, and the mysterious writer B Traven (author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), whose stories inspired a trilogy of Gavaldón's films," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. Wounded Pride, Simmering Passion: Roberto Gavaldon, a series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center today through Thursday, "[rounds] up nine of Gavaldón's best films in a weeklong retrospective that is consistently eye-opening."

"Macario is a landmark in Mexican cinema; Lincoln Center says so, and so do I," announces Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "If I'm let down by the film's ending, it's because it retreats back to where it began: away from satire and back into the mystic, refusing to validate Macario's all-too-understandable impulses. It's like Ace in the Hole got garbled with a sincerely told folk tale, but the sheer audacity of the experiment makes it well worth attention."

Somers Town.

"What there is of Somers Town is mostly delightful," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "The picture originated as a promotional short by [Shane] Meadows for the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, which is why the original idea is credited to Mother Vision - not a nun with media ambitions, but the TV and film arm of the advertising agency Mother London. The short was then expanded by Meadows and the writer Paul Fraser, but its origins are easily discernible, like an old wallpaper pattern visible beneath a new coat of paint."

Updated through 8/25.

"It's a slight, gentle, sweet-natured comedy shot in black and white, and blessed with a lovely performance from Meadows's great find, Thomas Turgoose, the teenage star of his previous film This Is England," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Turgoose has a natural flair for laughs... [H]e's a true likely lad, like a young James Bolam, or perhaps the standup comics Ken Loach recruited to star in his excellent, underrated rail privatisation drama The Navigators, from 2001. Remarkably, he is still only 16: I could easily imagine Turgoose being a stand-up comedy star in his own right."

The Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu finds it "a work of integrity, a touching piece of dream-cinema, an almost unquantifiably delightful film that revives the spirit and good humour of Carol Reed's A Kid for Two Farthings (1955)." Meadows "has made his best film to date."

"What's striking about this Midlands storyteller is that he is able to explore the comic and tragic absurdities of small-town life in a populist, invigorating fashion, moving with swagger and ease from laughs to tears and back again," writes Dave Calhoun in Time Out. "He is good, too, at extracting performances from youngsters. Brotherly friendships are at the heart of his films, including this latest, which, owing to its slight knockabout feel and running time of barely more than an hour, should really be considered his fifth-and-a-half."

"It is a genuinely pleasant watch," finds Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "However, it is never quite tough enough to convince entirely."

"It's not the film's origins as a commercial that grate; indeed, aside from shots of the St Pancras spire and some on-train filming, Eurostar doesn't figure much," writes the Independent's Anthony Quinn. "What scuppers it is a dismal lack of drama."

"It aspires to the new wave of London immigration thrillers by Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things) and Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering)," writes James Christopher in the London Times. "But it's not cruel enough."

Online viewing tip. Xan Brooks's review for the Guardian.

Earlier: Mark Sinker in Sight & Sound and Neil Young's Somers Town page.

Update, 8/25: The Observer's Philip French on the Somers Town area: "A number of significant films have been set there over the years, most famously the great Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955). Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (1986) exploited the locality's reputation for sleaze. In High Hopes, the 1988 film with which Mike Leigh, a major influence on Meadows, returned to the cinema after a long absence, the hero's elderly mother lived in a backwater beside the old gasometers. Most recently, the district's bustling sense of change and renewal was the social dynamic for Anthony Minghella's final film, Breaking and Entering, the plot of which foreshawdaows the altogether slighter, more modest Somers Town." As for the Eurostar commission, "The phenomenon is not new. Ford paid for Karel Reisz's We Are the Lambeth Boys and Lindsay Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas, the Free Cinema films of the late 1950s that launched the British New Wave. It's better than Hollywood's current pursuit of lucrative 'product placement.'"

Shorts, 8/21.

"At the famous Cinecittà studios in Rome, shooting gets underway this week on 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (36 Views from the Pic Saint-Loup), the new feature by seasoned director Jacques Rivette," reports Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa. Jane Birkin and Sergio Castellitto headline the cast. Meantime, there's been a summertime update at Order of the Exile: Concerning the Films of Jacques Rivette; scroll down a tad for a guide to the five new additions.

"This has got to be one of the strangest press releases to hit my inbox in many a long day." Anne Thompson passes along the announcement that Lars von Trier is ready to start shooting Antichrist in Germany with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

From Jeff Sneider's link roundup for Variety: "Apparently, Kevin Smith has seen Zack Snyder's Watchmen and he thought it was 'fucking astounding.' I have a friend at Paramount who also saw the film about a month ago and he called the 3-hour cut 'fucking amazing.' At this rate, every two-word review of the 2009 tentpole will be 'fucking (insert ultra-positive adjective here).' I for one, can't fucking wait." Related: Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay watches the "Watchmen Studio Grudge Match."

The Canary Islands are eagerly anticipating the arrival of the cast and crew - and cash - for the remake of Papillon, reports Graham Keeley: "Robert Downey Jr has been tipped to take [Steve] McQueen's part as Papillon, while Philip Seymour Hoffman has been fancied to take Dustin Hoffman's role of Louis Dega, who plots with Papillon to escape."

Also in the Guardian: Peter Jackson will be co-writing the screenplay for The Hobbit with Guillermo del Toro, reports Ben Child.

"Skeptics unite: You only have to lose your inhibitions," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "That, in sum, is the underlying message of Bill Maher and Larry Charles's brilliant, incendiary Religulous, in which comedian/talkshow host Maher inquires of the religious faithful and finds them severely wanting.... [I]ts arrival shortly after the death of George Carlin - a profound influence on Maher's standup act and politics - suggests the kind of film Carlin might have made in his prime."

"There may be academic couples luckier than NC State University film professors Marsha and Devin Orgeron, but there probably aren't many." Gerry Canavan counts the ways and then turns to their new books: "Marsha's book, Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age, is a journey through the Hollywood of the early 20th century, exploring what it was that attracted such diverse celebrities as Wyatt Earp, Jack London and Gertrude Stein to seek additional fame and audiences on the silver screen. Devin's Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami is a book about exactly that: a look at cinema's attachment to the myth of the road from Jean-Luc Godard to David Lynch."

Also in the Independent Weekly, Grayson Currin talks with Brett Ingram about his company's new DVD release of Bruce Bickford's Prometheus' Garden and Neil Morris reviews Baghead, "well-made and genuine, yet also simplistic and unremarkable. That is just what its makers intended it to be."

"When Frederick Wiseman is asked about the inspirations of his panoramic body of work, he doesn't tend to talk about other documentaries, but often mentions literature and drama." Nicolas Rapold talks with him for Moving Image Source.

New from Film International:

• After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation and Intertextuality is "a readable and informative anthology that dares to present a different take on Hitchcock," writes Helle Kannik Haastrup; also in Film International, Deirdre Devers recommends The Savvy Screenwriter: How to Sell Your Screenplay (and Yourself) Without Selling Out!.

• Daria Kabanova reviews Yana Hashamova's "short, but engaging volume," Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film: "Hashamova follows Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, suggesting that 'when the distance between the subject and fantasy disappears, fantasy breaks down,' and therefore the fantasy of the West needed to be resurrected in some way to provide a renewed basis for identity formation. The stages of this resurrection are the subject of the volume's five chapters."

• Scott Jordan Harris on Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, "a classic of British wartime cinema and a perpetually re-watchable pleasure," Marlon Wallace on Michael Haneke's Funny Games US and Daniel O'Brien: "There are more frightening forces than ghosts at work in the Yeogo Goedam universe."

Tom Stempel, author of Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So-Good and Bad Screenplays, has a terrific second column up at the House Next Door, where the conversation is already rolling. Also: Godfrey Cheshire's coda to the lively back-and-forth with director James Marsh and others regarding Man on Wire and film music.

Ed Howard follows up on his critique of Stephanie Zacharek's review of Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard with a series of entries on late(r) Godard: British Sounds (1969), Numéro Deux (1975), Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991), Hélas pour moi (1993) and JLG/JLG (1995).

"I am sitting with [Alex] Holdridge and his two [In Search of a Midnight Kiss] leads, Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds, at Café Audrey in Hollywood, a strangely cheerless place that disappoints as both a coffee shop and an homage to Audrey Hepburn," writes Joe Donnelly. "The three have the easy manner of old friends about them, which they are, having worked together on Holdridge's Austin indies and having spent much of the past 18 months on the road, as their latest collaboration wound its way through festivals around the world, winning fans and distribution deals wherever it went. They also carry the newfound joie de vivre of having survived their Hollywood horror stories, which they can now relate with something like good humor."

Also in the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas on Falling: "Deliberately crude around the edges, with the grainy, hand-held images of an 80s-era grindhouse special, this open wound of a movie is at once [Richard] Dutcher's most accomplished and personal film to date - the one that feels like Dutcher made it for no one other than himself, because if he didn't get this off his chest, it might have eaten him alive."

Andrew Schenker: "For a film that spends so much time keeping its lovers apart, [The Romance of Astrée and Céladon] brims over with a joyousness at the prospect of an unspoiled romantic consummation, a concept that [Eric] Rohmer treats with dead seriousness and is unafraid to depict in lovingly sensuous terms."

"I've devoted a significant amount of my film watching lately to genre films of varying kinds, from action and horror to science fiction and anime, and I've become fascinated by genres and the ways in which they stagnate or evolve." MS Smith's also been reading Barry Langford's Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond and it informs his consideration of a batch of films by George Miller, John Carpenter, Neil Marshall and Danny Boyle.

Scott Marks on Vertigo: "Nothing will ever rival the day I received a call from a mole who, in whispers, informed me that the School of the Art Institute was screening a private collector's 35mm dye transfer print.... Nobody, not even Jerry Lewis, uses Technicolor quite like Hitchcock. You haven't lived until you've seen Kim Novak flare Technicolor red as she exits Ernie's." Related online viewing: Hitchcocked! (thanks, Jerry!) And related online scrolling: Films With Nobody in Them.

"Filmed during the transition from silent to sound, Vampyr also represents a creative transition for Carl Theodor Dreyer," writes Acquarello in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"Now I just noticed the DVD is out of print and selling for over $125." What's Erich Kuersten going on about at Bright Lights After Dark? Lady in Red, written by John Sayles, directed by Lewis Teague and starring Pamela Sue Martin, Robert Conrad and Louise Fletcher. "So, good lord, with so much talent and beauty and sexy camp flowing through this (great editing too), why isn't it recognized more widely as a cult classic?"

In the Austin Chronicle, Raoul Hernandez talks with Isabel Coixet about Elegy; Cindy Widner with Steven Sebring on Patti Smith: Dream of Life (more).

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Gremlins 2.

"In the 90s, Ice Cube and Limp Bizkit co-headlined the Family Values Tour as, respectively, a rap legend and the nadir of music up to that point," writes Vadim Rizov. "Cube and Bizkit frontman-cum-filmmaker Fred Durst reteam for The Longshots, canceling each other out into total mediocrity." More from Nick Schager in Slant. Also in the Voice, Ruth McCann on Bachna Ae Haseeno: "High points include a lavish wedding scene featuring beautiful Nehru jackets, plus some tongue-in-cheek rap in the sexed-up musical number 'Lucky Boy.'"

Via Bookforum, Giles Scott-Smith on Tony Shaw's Hollywood's Cold War.

SF360 editor Susan Gerhard explains the "transition of services" as what was once done via the Film Arts Foundation is now going to be done via the San Francisco Film Society.

Online browsing tip. 40 Years Ago: Prague Spring Crushed at Slate. November's election aside, it does look as if the biggest story of 2008 may well be 1968.

Online viewing tip #1. The trailer for Died Young Stayed Pretty, a doc about rock posters. Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tip #2. Vadim Rizov comments on Grey Gardens; see, too, Kevin Lee's extensive notes.

Online viewing tip #3. Kyle Patrick Alvarez vlogs the making of Easier With Practice.

Online viewing tip #4. A terrific montage from Matt Zoller Seitz, The Explanation.

Fests and events, 8/21.

Cinema Purgatorio announces dates and times for NYC screenings of the Flaming Lips' Christmas on Mars. In general, they're taking place during the second half of September.

Chicagoist Rob Christopher previews Facets' 40 Years After: Filming the '68 Revolution week-long series beginning tomorrow. Good city for it, too.

"Developed to give filmmakers an opportunity to qualify for Oscar consideration by providing the theatrical platform necessary to be considered for an Academy Award nomination, DocuWeek opens Friday and continues through Aug 28 at the ArcLight theaters in Hollywood and Sherman Oaks," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "25 films featured in previous DocuWeek programming have gone on to garner Oscar nominations, with six winning the Academy Award, including Alex Gibney's 2007 film, Taxi to the Dark Side." And she previews highlights of this year's edition.

"For The Circuit's first anniversary, we asked film festival vet Christian Gaines to ruminate on the State of Fests. In a two-part series, he looks at the unifying factor that makes them important and the different agendas that complicate them."

Ed Gonzalez on the New York Korean Film Festival, running tomorrow through August 31: "A Korean film festival without the belligerent aesthetics and sketchy moral plans of Kim Ki-duk and Park Chan-wook is practically a badge of honor; one without the plaintive romanticism of Hong Sang-soo and sly genre deconstructions of Bong Joon-ho is like a winter without snow."

Also in the Voice, Jim Ridley previews BAM's Tribute to Richard Widmark (Monday through Wednesday).

"New York City's Film Forum will be screening both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II during a special three week engagement beginning September 12," notes Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. "And yes, it's a big deal."

Brian Brooks sends a dispatch from Sarajevo into indieWIRE: "There was a mix of both well-estabished and emerging folks, including local director Aida Begic, whose debut feature, Snow opened the 14th Sarajevo Film Festival over the weekend with great fanfare. Also joining the discussion [lon naturalism vs artifice in film] was fellow local Danis Tanovic, whose 2001 feature No Man's Land won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, Man on Wire director James Marsh, Stranded director Gonzalo Arijon (Chile), Jar City director Baltasar Kormakur and Israeli-German director, Lior Shamriz (Japan Japan)."

With the Democratic National Convention less than a week away now, Peter Nellhaus has been running a series he calls "Cinematic Denver," while Anne Thompson notes that plenty of doc-makers are heading to the city that, as Kirk Johnson reports in the New York Times, "is hoping to declare its emerging artistic identity to the world next week." More on the docs from Mark Rabinowitz.

Variety's Nick Vivarelli reports on the first round of titles announced for this year's Rome Film Festival. October 22 through 31. Also: "The Pusan festival unveiled a slimmed-down, more Asian-centric selection for the 11th running of its Pusan Promotion Plan project market," reports Han Sunhee. October 2 through 10.

David Cox, back in London from Locarno, quite liked Kirill Serebrennikov's Yuri's Day, "a masterly treatment of the Moscow glitterati's hankering for the Russian soul that they've left behind in their country's primitive, frozen backwoods," but is otherwise rattled by "the more numerous specimens of Euro-arthouse endeavour that were grotesquely, unbelievably bad. No, actually a good bit worse than that."

Momma's Man.

"Considering that Azazel Jacobs, the director of Momma's Man, is the offspring of American avant-garde filmmaker extraordinaire Ken Jacobs, one would be forgiven for expecting his film to be more experimental and abstract than the seemingly conventional narrative that plays out," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Yet buried beneath the poignant clutter of this occasionally familiar stunted-youth-in-life-transition tale is a surprisingly complex, elegantly detailed meditation on creativity and artistic growth."

Updated through 8/22.

"Thirtyish guy - bit of a schlub but married, with a newborn baby - comes back from California to visit aging parents in New York and, overtaken by a mysterious lethargy, moves into his tiny childhood room. Momma's Man... is one of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote." So begins J Hoberman's review in the Voice, where, further in he notes, "Although my most vivid memories of Aza Jacobs are as the unnamed infant installed in a crib in a Johnson City apartment and called, for what seemed like a very long time, 'Mr Baby,' I've known his parents for nearly 40 years, going back to my undergraduate days at the State University of Binghamton, where Ken Jacobs impressed me as possibly the most brilliant film teacher in the world."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir introduces his interview with Jacobs: "It's the kiss of death for a critic to proclaim some young filmmaker the heart of a movement - 'mumblecore' seemed to evaporate as soon as it was named, and that's probably just as well - and that's not actually what I think about Jacobs. But he did graduate from the American Film Institute school with a cadre of peers devoted to low-budget filmmaking. Most notably these include Goran Dukic, who made Wristcutters: A Love Story, and Gerardo Naranjo, who co-wrote and starred in Jacobs' second film, The GoodTimesKid, before going on to make Drama/Mex and the forthcoming I'm Going to Explode, which will premiere at the Venice, Toronto and New York festivals next month. There isn't necessarily an aesthetic that ties those three filmmakers and their friends together, but arguably they're trying to follow the DIY maxim Jacobs applies to himself."

Aaron Hillis introduces his interview for IFC: "The reason for our meeting [in December] was mostly professional, as Benten Films (a DVD label I run with film blogger Andrew Grant) had fallen in love with Jacobs' previous film, The GoodTimesKid, starring his real-life girlfriend Sara Diaz, I'm Going to Explode writer/director Gerardo Naranjo, and himself. (Benten will release The GoodTimesKid in early 2009, so let the shilling stop here).... Back in New York for the premiere, Jacobs spoke to me by phone from his childhood home and makeshift movie set — though to avoid repeating other recent interviews, we talked mostly about the Clash."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Jacobs "about the intersection between truth and fiction in the film, not blinking for four months during post-production, and his childhood plan to save his family with pennies and magic rocks."

"The son of an experimentalist, Jacobs fils understands the power of the unexpected - which is why the most moving moments in this unspoken love story come courtesy a wind-up toy, a corny pop song, glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to a ceiling," writes the L Magazine's Mark Asch.

"Within its modest docudrama style, Momma's Man addresses universal experience as presumptuously as does a mainstream Pop epic," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

IndieWIRE interviews Jacobs, too.

Earlier: James Van Maanen's interview with Azazel Jacobs; and reviews from Sundance and David D'Arcy.

Updates, 8/22: "With its few locations, small cast and limited budget, Momma's Man looks deceptively humble. But Mr Jacobs has succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks given a director, which is to make a character come alive through the filmmaking, not exposition." In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis now finds the film "more complex than the valentine to Mom and Dad I originally had it pegged as when I first saw it at Sundance."

"The film doesn't indict society for turning a generation of males into oversize infants so much as dive headfirst into the confusion that causes such men to burrow into childhood 2.0," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "That you still walk away sympathizing with the pathetic Mikey is a testament to both Boren's close-to-the-bone performance and Jacobs; for a young filmmaker whose previous movie, The GoodTimesKid, suggested he was a precocious talent, this moody, pitch-perfect ode to immaturity ironically proves he's finally grown up."

"Indie films about arrested adolescence have practically become a genre, but the way Jacobs avoids pat explanations for Boren's behavior - or any kind of forced catharsis - is so refreshingly low-key that it's easy to feel like Jacobs has reinvented the wheel," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Honestly, he hasn't, but Momma's Man is a welcome change of pace regardless."

"Many months have passed since my first viewing of Jacobs's latest film, Momma's Man, yet I am more confident than ever in saying that no motion picture has ever pierced me so directly to my core." Michael Tully talks with Jacobs at Hammer to Nail.

"If the movie is initially confusing, and then disturbing, what ultimately lends it poignancy is the art-versus-reality tug-of-war playing out right on the surface," proposes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "As Mr Jacobs's camera makes its way through the cluttered chaos of the apartment he inhabited as a child, it seems the director himself wants not only to wrap his arms around a life that no longer exists, but to grasp a fading filmmaking community - one pioneered in part by Ken Jacobs - that wants to push aside the machinations of 21st-century Hollywood in a bid to resurrect the independent spirit of New York City circa 1965."

Online viewing tip. Tribeca talks with Ken Jacobs.

The Rocker.

"With a half-decent climax, the go-for-it parody The Rocker would have been pretty good bordering on good instead of just okay," writes David Edelstein in New York.

"Despite his performance's (and the story's) derivativeness, [Rainn] Wilson's idiot enthusiasm is so aggressive that it eventually wears down one's defenses, and a host of NBC (and, specifically, 30 Rock) comedians sturdily contribute to the shenanigans, none more amusingly than Jason Sudeikis as a one-liner-spouting record label stooge," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "A wealth of creative talent, though, can't alter the fact that Rocker is merely a passable goof-off, and one less challenging or fun than a night spent playing Rock Band."

Updated through 8/22.

"[I]f The Rocker, directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), has its witty moments, the movie is encrusted in rock lore and stale attitudinizing borrowed from This Is Spinal Tap and School of Rock, each of which it shamelessly cannibalizes," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Most disappointingly, the music is tepid, mediocre pop pastiche... In its portrayal of a rock culture that was once synonymous with liberating self-expression, everything is secondhand and done by rote. Hip has become rigidly, thuddingly square."

"Central to the film is the fallacy that yesterday's headbangers had a crazier (and therefore cooler) lifestyle than today's young musicians, and that the music was, if not better, more extroverted and vital," writes James Hannaham in Salon. "This concept facilely bumbles through the movie in a way that seems somewhat condescending to young audiences. Sure, collegiate twinks like Vampire Weekend have yet to crash their cars and OD on smack, but Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty's bad behavior, though of a different stripe, has kept the dream alive."

"The Rocker, like Gilmore Girls, takes place in an alternate universe where MTV and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are relevant, and where a generalist, genre-free "rock" spirit covers all musical tastes, ambitions, and song styles," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "This sort of lame non-take on an area of human endeavor that in real life is an inherently partisan subject to both its practitioners and its fans would be considerably easier to stomach if The Rocker were more than mildly funny."

"To those moviegoers who may have said they're sick of seeing Will Ferrell and Jack Black just keep doing what they do, well, OK then, here's somebody else doing it," notes Jonathan Kiefer.

"Like its protagonist, the movie is sweet but slow and a little out of date. Given that their collective résumé includes The Simpsons and The Larry Sanders Show, it's hard to believe writers Wallace Wolodarsky and Maya Forbes couldn't come up with more pungent pop-cultural targets than Titanic and U2," writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times, where Christy Gros talks with Teddy Geiger.

"A juvenile fairy tale that plays like the pilot for a Jonas Brothers sitcom on the Disney Channel, The Rocker comes off as something penned by an old dude who hasn't bought music since it was sold 'on records,' or ever met a music executive who wasn't a character in This Is Spinal Tap," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "This is sugary-sweet stuff—pop instead of rock."

Eric Kohn in the New York Press: "Slapstick should be the redeeming quality that sustains The Rocker through its weaker moments, but Wilson’s stunts never build to greatness; they suggest a good idea or two and then move right along."

"Sadly, nearly everyone's talents are wasted, or else used only in a couple of scenes," writes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "The exception is Sudeikis, who gets the film's best one-liners.... His delivery is impeccable, of course, but for some reason his character was written to be funnier than everyone else, too. He basically steals the show."

Interviews with Wilson: Sam Adams (Philadelphia City Paper), Eric Kohn (Cinematical), Nathan Rabin (AV Club) and Aly Semigran (Philadelphia Weekly).

Updates, 8/22: "It's a slave to formula, and it hits its marks satisfyingly enough to make for a pleasant time-passer, but Wilson and a loaded supporting cast are never as funny as they should be," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"The Rocker does not totally suck," Lindy West assures us in the Stranger. "Like most films devoted to the absurd kickassedness of rock, it's hopelessly derivative, but I've sat through worse moviegoing experiences than a secondhand Spinal Tap."

I.O.U.S.A.

"Both a handy election primer and a bowel-rattling cry of fiscal doom, I.O.U.S.A. is an Inconvenient Truth for the debt crisis, a plainly mapped and charted argument against our current economic course," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice.

But Robert Koehler, writing in the LA Weekly, isn't buying it: "Debt is not only not the evil Creadon's film depicts it to be, it's essential. Our current debts and deficits? No worries. One graphic that I.O.U.S.A. doesn't include is a national balance sheet of our assets and liabilities, which would illustrate that the former is more than double the latter. We're in the black, and a film this deep in the red isn't something to be scared of at all - or taken seriously."

Updated through 8/22.

"I.O.U.S.A. is surprisingly nonpartisan, blaming both sides for living beyond our means," writes Sal Cinquemani in Slant. "But as one interviewee states, the truth isn't liberal or conservative, and the reality of how the Bush administration has resurrected and compounded our nation's biggest bad habit is inescapable."

"[Patrick] Creadon aims for the bemused but stern tone of Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth but only succeeds in scaring the shit out of us, with few practical solutions apart from vague commands to 'Wake Up America' and 'Demand Responsible Budget Control' writ large," writes Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly. Still, "Every American should see I.O.U.S.A. - provided they can't get the same information, and then some, from more rigorous sources."

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 8/22: "Equal parts enlightening and alarming, I.O.U.S.A. highlights our unwise preference for short-term reward over long-term planning, a weakness not shared by the film's exemplary Chinese household, which saves more than half of its $10-a-day income," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "The movie's wrist-slapping tone, however, is softened by [former comptroller general David M] Walker's eloquence and [the Concord Coalition's Robert L] Bixby's rueful, self-deprecating charm as they trudge tirelessly from one town hall to another, urging Americans to save rather than spend. Good luck, boys: Suze Orman has been working on that for years."

"If anyone can make this kind of grim subject material palatable to a mass audience, it'd seemingly be Creadon, whose breezy, enjoyable crossword-puzzle documentary Wordplay was a sleeper hit," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Though the filmmaking is playful at times, the film is essentially 90 percent message, 10 percent movie. Then again, sometimes a message is important enough to make other considerations seem irrelevant."

NYC Vigilantes.

"[F]rom Minutemen to lynch mobs to Castle Doctrines to United 93, vigilantism retains a privileged place in the anarchic American imagination," writes Nick Pinkerton. "The Anthology Film Archives series NYC Vigilantes is blessed by ample specimens of a now-endangered screen species: the Great Northeastern City Dude, a battered, had-it-up-to-here guy whose natural musk of stale bodega coffee marks his biological difference from the stubbly prettyboy with tie askance."

For the New York Press, JR Taylor talks with William Lustig, whose Maniac Cop, Maniac Cop 2 and Vigilante will be screened in the series: "I always thought that when Vigilante and Death Wish played in Times Square, they were viewed differently than in suburbia. The audience had a different relationship to the people on the screen. These movies are Westerns, first and foremost. Back then, there was definitely a siege mentality for people living in urban environments. These were the gunslingers - Bronson, Robert Forster, Robert Ginty."

Updated through 8/25.

Tonight through Sunday; Cinema Strikes Back posts the program.

Update, 8/22: "Picking up a Magnum is as sacred a duty in these pictures as taking up the cross," writes Robert Cashill. "Dirty Harry had set the tone for urban Westerns; in Death Wish, the gun gifted to architect Bronson by good ol' boy Tucson client Stuart Margolin is a talisman of the Old West, passed religiously into the Wild East for the benediction of the vigilante-to-be. Abel Ferrara's creepy Ms 45 (1981)... has the deaf-mute heroine Thana (for Thanatos, the Greek god of death) never at ease in society ('she was abused and violated... it will never happen again!'), putting on a nun's habit to consecrate her vengeance at a costume party. These movie avengers ride with the angels."

Update, 8/25: Ms 45 "has an early Ed Koch era verisimilitude that is fascinating for New Yorkers and is built for maximum tonal dissonance - it puts movies like Neil Jordan's absurd, overly polished The Brave One to shame," writes Brandon Harris. "The iconoclastic director didn't disappoint when he finally surfaced after having skipped the intro Anthology expected him to do, delivering a nearly hour long Q&A following the 9:00 pm screening, during which, a grand total of three questions were asked - Mr Ferrara is his own material."

Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet.

Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet screens tonight and Tuesday, September 2, at New York's Film Forum.

Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun: "The film is nominally devoted to documenting the preparation and execution of The Matter of Time, a massive grouping of Mr Serra's signature steel walls, cones, and ellipses commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It is directed with enthusiastic remove by the German filmmaker Maria Anna Tappeiner, who exhibits the same kind of deference for space and emphasis on meticulous construction as the artist's well-known work."

Updated through 8/21.

"While it's true that Serra can expound at length and in formidable terms about the 'load-bearing, tectonic concerns' of his art, he's also the kind of guy who can't help going with 'directionality' when 'direction' would suffice," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. "Ironically, after a little background on Serra's working-class upbringing (he even took a job in a steel mill) and a testimonial from Philip Glass, it's when Serra himself takes over - with sophisticated color commentary on his Guggenheim Bilbao exhibit - that the film's portrait of the artist loses focus."

"Listening to Richard Serra talk about sculpture is like listening to Russell Crowe talk about acting: after a while you feel you're either in the presence of genius or the victim of an elaborate con," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Fortunately for both, their work speaks for itself."

Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "The film ends welcomingly with Serra stating that he creates artwork that positions the spectator as the subject, but for those suspicious of modern art, the film's focus on Serra's obsession with symbolic iconography, the lexicon of geometric spheres, articulating spatial problems, and creating forms that have never been seen before in nature mostly confirms how closely entwined more modern contemporary-art practices are with intellectual wankitude."

"Artists can sometimes ramble on a bit," concedes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York, "but Serra's process-centric comments are weirdly riveting. 'We start with the void,' he says, and you realize that his real subject is open space: the reshaping of the volume of a gallery and our movement through the tunnels his walls create."

Updates, 8/21: "Tappeiner's reverence for her subject... leaves one hungering for a more complex engagement with Serra's art and its legacy," writes Artforum's Brian Scholis.

"In sharp distinction from Louise Bourgeois, whose recent biopic at Film Forum was considerably more interesting than this film, Serra's art contains little of his own experience and therefore the omission of his personal life is somewhat justified," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "That said, it's this lack of a more candid connection in favor of modernist artspeak that keeps Thinking on Your Feet from transcending the category of DVD-bound artist documentaries into something more engaging."

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken.

"Daniel Mendelsohn brightens the dour New York Review of Books like few other contributors," writes David Haglund, reviewing How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken for the New York Observer. "This is partly thanks to his subject matter: neither Iraq nor climate change but literature, theater and the movies. It's also thanks to his - not style, exactly; Mr Mendelsohn's a gifted writer, but the prose of his essays is less lyrical than that of his books, The Lost (2006) and The Elusive Embrace (1999). What distinguishes his criticism, rather, is a willingness to address not just the arts but their reception. He writes reviews as cultural commentary, and he's more or less mastered the form."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Jason Shimai finds the book "excellent. But it lacks something I can't help wanting from the criticism I read, no matter how often some denunciation tries to shame the desire out of me. One of Mendelsohn's pieces even takes novelist and literary critic Dale Peck's 2005 review collection, Hatchet Jobs to task for indulging in the very thing I look for: bitchiness."

"He has stimulating things to say about Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde, Truman Capote, Pedro Almodóvar and Ted Hughes's adaptation of Euripides's Alcestis, among many others," writes Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times. "One of the strongest pieces disputes the universal judgment that Brokeback Mountain is about love in general, and not just gay love. Mendelsohn, gay himself, argues that on the contrary, it is precisely a gay tragedy. To believe that the 'normality' of the two main characters takes them beyond their gayness is to imply that gayness makes them something other than normal. Through all the variety, one theme recurs: the tendency of our interpreters to soften history and the art of the past by bending it to contemporary concerns."

"Mendelsohn often begins his essays with examples from the Greek classics - Homer, Aristotle, Aristophanes - that accessibly illuminate the virtues and flaws of contemporary art," notes Craig Morgan Teicher in Time Out New York. "From there, he eases into masterful takedowns of puffed-up novels (The Lovely Bones and Middlesex); ambitious but ultimately failed films (Marie Antoinette and Troy); and overvalued, overconfident or overplayed writers (Truman Capote, Dale Peck and Philip Roth, respectively)."

"This is an uncommon reader, on account of who and what he is and of what he knows," writes Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle. "To say Mendelsohn is steeped in the classic literatures of Greek and Latin is an understatement. He writes that he pursued his graduate studies in classics with 'an eye to a career in academia; instead I became a journalist.' It is a measure of our times that the academy, host to so much mediocrity, could have let such a genuinely inspired critic slip through its hands."

DVDs, 8/19.

First things first: Robin Wood selects his "Top Ten Criterions." Now that's a list!

Criterion's Eclipse label is releasing two films by Larisa Shepitko today and Dave Kehr's review in the New York Times is a must-read: "This was a generation that had turned its back not only on the great masters of Soviet montage (Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin) but also on the oppressive tradition of Socialist Realism that had been imposed by Stalin and that survived, with only a few exceptions, well into the 1960s. Shepitko and her colleagues preferred elaborate long takes and composition in depth over the rapid, associative editing of the montage theorists, and they were far less concerned with questions of proper Socialist citizenship than with personal conscience and the fluctuations of that ultimate anti-materialist concept, the soul."

Jonathan Rosenbaum addresses the "Potential Perils of the Director's Cut."

"[B]ased upon the set of features released by Kino, [Lech] Majewski may be one of the most pretentious filmmakers alive and working," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC. "Or is he a visionary? What separates the two quantities, except taste and argument? When does Majewski's brand of rampaging, overtly symbolic experimentalism dip below the line of transformative art and into nonsense?... I was far from convinced until The Garden of Earthly Delights (2004), which is not only a deeply felt and artfully conceived tragedy, but a film that adopts a faux-home-movie strategy that effectively eliminates the possibility of Majewski's more indulgent tendencies." Also reviewed is Brand Upon the Brain!, "now paraded down the aisle in a Criterion tuxedo [and] prototypically essential [Guy] Maddin."

A special two-disc collector's edition of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter has been postponed, but Doug Cummings offers a fascinating sneak peek at what might be included in that package when it eventually sees the light of day.

"Victor Sjöström was arguably the most important and influential Swedish director of his generation and The Outlaw and His Wife, a story of love and sacrifice at a devastating cost, is the director's masterpiece." Sean Axmaker for TCM. Meanwhile at the Parallax View, Sean gives us fair warning concerning the release of Orson Welles's Don Quixote.

John McElwee has been savoring Lost and Found: The Harry Langdon Collection: "Watch his handiwork (plus extensive extras) and you'll come away transformed (or not), for Langdon, like beer and asparagus, is a thing for which one either acquires a taste or resolutely doesn't. Enthusiasm comes not in half measure for Harry. It's all or nothing."

"Humphrey Bogart, compared with other 'icon' actors such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, gives the Siren the most consistent thrill of pleasure, again and again, even in a relatively bad movie. This was brought home to her when she saw Dead Reckoning." Related: The Observer's Philip French on Bogart.

Michael W Phillips finds The Cat and the Canary "so atmospheric and lively that it makes me doubly sad that its director, Paul Leni, made so few films - including The Man Who Laughs and The Last Warning - before he died in 1929 at the age of 45. Could his career have survived the talkie transition? It's tantalizing to wonder whether his version of Dracula, planned but never completed because of his untimely death and the return of his chosen star, Conrad Veidt, to Germany, would have been better than Tod Browning's stodgy, unimaginative potboiler, but after viewing this film, the answer is manifestly apparent - of course it would have been better."

"All things, good and bad, must come to an end, and now this dire truth includes one of the best shows on British television, Foyle's War," writes DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "The three discs of Foyle's War: Set 5 are a valediction and a celebration, as well as a long goodbye."

The latest additions to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Sonatine and Sexy Beast.

John Adair on Sátántangó: "[T]he location of the call in the chapel lends the message a divine authority (not unlike the lengthy Ezekiel quotation in [Béla] Tarr's earlier Damnation). Judgment is coming. The people have left their faith in disrepair. And there is nowhere in this bleak and barren countryside to hide."

Dina Iordanova on Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn: "This is yet another one of Sokurov's pensive and masterful documentaries that manage to come really close to the person that is being interviewed.... The film, commissioned by a Russian TV channel and shot in 1999 consists of two parts of about 90 minutes each, thus the total comes to slightly over three hours."

Raquelle has the Noir of the Week: The Dark Corner.

Online viewing tip #1. Karina Longworth at Shooting Down Pictures on Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract. This is a fun one, laced with clips from several sources besides Greenaway. See also Kevin Lee's extensive notes.

Online viewing tip #2. AO Scott on Frank Capra's State of the Union.

DVD roundups: Monika Bartyzel (Cinematical), Paul Clark (Screengrab), DVD Talk, Peter Martin (Cinematical), Noel Murray (Los Angeles Times) and Slant.

Toronto 08. Lineup.

"So here it is: The Full List," announces Darren Hughes at 1st Thursday, responding to news that the Toronto Film Festival has completed its marathon round of unveilings. The lineup for the festival running September 4 through 13 is now set.

Updated through 8/21.

"For me," Darren continues, "the biggest news is that Agnès Varda and Terence Davies will be participating in Dialogues.... I'm also happy to see Olivier Assayas, Kelly Reichardt, Samira Makhmalbaf and Ryan Fleck and Anne Boden among the last additions to the Contemporary World Cinema lineup."

"What world premieres should we look forward to in this year's selection?" asks Anthony Kaufman. "Here's some educated guesses."

Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog: "I've made some notes about films from this series of releases that I'm excited about - whether out of name brand obligation (the new Coen Brothers, for instance), word of mouth (such as a number of films I've missed at other festivals) or pure morbid curiosity (ie: the Paris Hilton documentary Paris, Not France)."

"With his first slate of programming as co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival announced this morning, Cameron Bailey can take a quick breather before the 33rd edition of the festival begins two weeks from Thursday." Peter Knegt talks with him for indieWIRE.

Girish sketches a first draft of his to-see list.

Updates, 8/21: Peter Knegt has a little fun with his "Pre-TIFF Oscar Predictions."

Going to TIFF? Darren Hughes and Larry McClelland have a map that may well come in handy.

The Baader Meinhof hoopla.

If a studio in the US knows it's got a stinker on its hands, it simply won't show it to critics before dumping it in theaters on a Friday evening. That used to be a rare, desperate measure, but as studios realize that audiences are now swayed more by marketing than reviews, it's become an increasingly common practice. But it only works for a certain kind of film, a non-event movie like a B-level horror flick or a romantic comedy with a poster showing Matthew McConaughey about to take his shirt off. If a cone of silence were to descend on a film as big as, say, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex hopes to be in Germany - produced by Bernd Eichinger (Downfall, Perfume) and starring the country's top of the line: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Bruno Ganz, Nadja Uhl, Johanna Wokalek, Hannah Herzsprung and on and on - audiences would smell a rat.

So Constantin Film and their PR agency, Just Publicity, are trying out a new tactic - and it's blown up in their faces.

Updated through 8/25.

In order to attend a preview screening this week of Baader Meinhof, journalists had to sign a contract with terms that, despite both companies' protestations, can only be described as unprecedented. The film opens on September 25; if a journalist writes about the movie or even speaksabout it with a third party - friends, colleagues, what have you - before September 17, a fine will be imposed: 100,000 euros, to be split between the journalist's employer and the journalist him/herself - personally. 50K each.

In an August with little else going on in the entertainment biz, this one false move has kicked up precisely the sort of coverage it was meant to dissuade, rousing a formal protest from the Deutscher Journalisten-Verband and stories from Franz Baden in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sonja Pohlmann in Der Tagesspiegel, Hanns-Georg Rodek in the Berliner Morgenpost and Die Welt and Volker Behrens in the Hamburger Abendblatt. Angriest of all is Rüdiger Suchsland, who writes in Telepolis (and I'm loosely translating on the fly here, so bear with me):

Obviously, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex is a botched film. There's no other explanation for Constantin's loss of control and hysterical behavior. There's a fear that word of the poor quality of the film will get out. Evidently, the film is so weak that it can be damaged by a bad review or even a falsely phrased rave. Film critics may take pleasure, though, in the unintended result of Constantin's actions: The studio flatters them by lending them a power they rarely claim for themselves.

In this light, then, film criticism is, after all, more than "spitting into the river from a bridge," as André Bazin once put it - a quote critics, with exaggerated modesty, are fond of referencing. These unloved journalists are clearly worth as much bounty as the RAF terrorists were once to the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA). The terrorists, too, were once worth 100,000 German marks - per head.

While some journalists have gone as far as to call for a boycott of coverage of Baader Meinhof - not likely to happen - Suchsland argues for more. Publications and broadcasters should focus on Constantin and Just Publicity's audacity, he argues, and, now more than ever, run reviews well in advance of September 17, with the authors' identities protected by pseudonyms. And that's just for starters. Suchsland is pissed off.

Update, 8/25: "[I]f Rüdiger Suchsland is right and the film proves to be a tank, then that's a shame for reasons other than the fortunes of the producers and PR functionaries," blogs the Guardian's Danny Leigh. "After all, despite their spectral hold over many imaginations - revenants of a time when a gaggle of petty criminals, magazine journalists and student cinematographers in crushed velvet and stolen BMWs could all but unhinge an entire liberal democracy - and various fragments of their story having appeared on screen before, the goal remains open for a definitive portrait on film more than 30 years after the disputed events at Stammheim Prison that left Andreas Baader and two of the gang's other principals dead."

Bresson, 8/19.

Tomorrow, New York's Film Forum screens Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, about which the New Yorker's David Denby writes, "our responses bypass the usual affective mechanics of identification and empathy, settling instead on the contemplation of a soul in isolation."

"Even by director Robert Bresson's exacting, idiosyncratic standards, his 1974 Lancelot du Lac is a peculiar film," writes Glenn Kenny in the Auteurs' Notebook. "[W]hat the film builds to is a fragmented, unforgettable battle scene that, combined with the narrative elisions and 'unestablished' spaces that preceded it, perhaps represents the apotheosis of what Kristin Thompson calls Bresson's 'sparse parametric' style. And a coda that's a thoroughly pessimistic as anything in film, or any other art for that matter."

Acquarello: "Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, White Nights, Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer may also be seen as a paradigm for José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia, capturing the romanticism of longing, the voyeurism inherent in an artist's gaze, and the creation of idealized memory."

Polanski @ 75.

Since Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired premiered at Sundance in January, then trickled in and out of a few theaters, hit a few more festivals and aired on HBO, debates on the tragedies, transgressions and triumphs in the life of Polanski have rumbled on all year long - and there isn't, really, a whole lot to add now.

Except, maybe: Happy Birthday?

Shorts, fests, etc, 8/18.

"[Kim] Novak was the top box office star three years running in the 50s," notes Stanley Fish. "Still, she is not usually mentioned in the same breath with the other major actresses of the period - [Elizabeth] Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner. She was not earthy like Gardner or icy like Kelly or Rubensesque like Monroe or raunchy like Jane Russell or perky like Doris Day. She was something that has gone out of fashion and even become suspect in an era of feminist strictures: she was the object of a voyeuristic male gaze." Earlier: Jonathan Rosenbaum.

"[A]udiences' ironic appropriation of [Douglas] Sirk - apart from being, like, so 1990s - thwarts the nonironic acceptance on which basis alone the films can work (as I believe they work ideally) as emotional melodramas that remain detached from the assumptions of the society they depict," argues Chris Fujiwara at Moving Image Source. "Ignoring the detachment makes Sirk an idiot. Denying the emotion makes him a cynical mass-culture satirist."

"For a couple of years now, I have resisted seeing Andrzej Zulawski's The Important Thing is to Love (L'important c'est l'aimer, 1975) a second time, because I was afraid that it wouldn't - couldn't possibly - live up to my recollection of it," writes Tim Lucas. But it's held up: "I like Zulawski's work more often than not, but this film I find the most spellbinding of them all, due in no small part to the central performance of Romy Schneider, without whose beauty at its core I suspect the entire zany, enraptured film might collapse like a house of cards."

"No maudlin Behind the Music - but tinged with drama of a different kind - a new series of films is chronicling the seminal multimedia series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, which took place in October 1966 at New York's 69th Regiment Armory," writes Michelle Kuo for Artforum. "Led by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver of Bell Laboratories, a group of artists and engineers banded together to collaborate on ten experimental performance pieces. They brainstormed, argued, and pulled all-nighters, producing an event that détourned existing technologies and aesthetic conventions. Critic Brian O'Doherty called it 'the major scandal, triumph, vision or nightmare of the season.'" Screens tonight and Wednesday as part of MoMA's Looking at Music series.

Variety's Anne Thompson points to Entertainment Weekly's "20 Fall Movies We Can't Wait to See," passes along an early word or two on David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and notes: "Now is the time that the various Oscar campaigners are lining up behind certain studios and movies." Related online listening: Matt Singer and Alison Willmore.

"Ricky Gervais has just finished writing the script for The Men at the Pru - a major feature film he describes as a cross between The Office and Mad Men." Arifa Akbar reports for the Independent.

"The popularity of the AMC series Mad Men, about Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, is renewing interest in previous efforts on television and in movies to portray the advertising business," notes ad industry columnist Stuart Elliott, introducing a list in the New York Times: "What follows is a look back at 10 of those shows and films - some serious, some silly, all worth watching again."

Paul Rennie traces the historical forces that led to a poster for Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA. Also in the Guardian: Charlotte Higgins blogs from the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams.

At Twitch, The Visitor has a quick talk with Woo Ming Jin about The Elephant and the Sea.

"Relaxed and genteel with a disarming smile and quick wit that strike you immediately upon meeting him, James Ponsoldt, the Athens, GA native who made a big impression at Sundance 06 with his tragically underseen Nick Nolte high school baseball umpire drama Off The Black, is a well-rounded guy." Brandon Harris talks with him about his "Media Diet" at the SpoutBlog.

Bit of good news (praise for his cameo in Tropic Thunder, mostly) and lots of bad news has rained down on Tom Cruise lately. The Los Angeles Times' Rachel Abramowitz surveys the wreckage.

"There were lessons to be learned this summer in terms of filmmaking, marketing, ticket sales, and film criticism." In the New York Sun, S James Snyder lists five he's "taking away from the summer of 2008."

Mike Everleth has the lineup for the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival: Friday at Midnight.

Nick Bradshaw's been blogging from Locarno for the Guardian. Roundups in the German-language papers: Peter Claus (Berliner Morgenpost), Daniel Kothenschulte (Frankfurter Rundschau), Isabella Reicher (taz), Christiane Tilmann (Tagesspiegel) and Martin Walder (Neue Zürcher Zeitung).

Offline viewing tip. Time art critic Richard Lacayo recommends Documenting the Face of America, tonight on PBS.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

Online viewing tips. "Rock & Roll & Film & Fishing & Tripping," a collection of clips from Ted Hope, via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Manny Farber, 1917 - 2008.

Word is beginning to get out that painter and film critic (and in that order, as he would have it) Manny Farber passed away last night at the age of 91.

Making the rounds for the Daily, hardly a day goes by without running across a quotation from or reference to Farber; today, it happens to be Evan Kindley, opening his piece on Nicholas Ray with a passage from the 1957 essay on "Underground Films."

So where to begin. In 1999, Framework ran a special issue on Farber; Noel King's contribution is online. Duncan Shepherd wrote a fine appreciation of his friend and mentor back in 2006. Edward Crouse spoke with him in 1999, Leah Ollman in 2004. Doug Cummings in 2003 on Negative Space: "Reading it generates a potpourri of cinematic images mediated through the unexpected twists and turns of Farber’s imaginative language." And Glenn Kenny has just posted an appreciation.

Before Girish offered his own thoughts on the landmark essay, "White Elephant Art vs Termite Art," in 2006, he noted, "Susan Sontag once said: 'Manny Farber is the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced... [his] mind and eye change the way you see,' and Dwight Macdonald called him 'an impossibly eccentric movie critic whose salvoes have a disturbing tendency to land on target. I often disagree with him but I always learn from him.' I'm beginning to see just what they were talking about."

"Farber's embrace of wise-cracking, tough-guy language and a scorn for the self-conscious 'pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing masterpiece' (so that the 'assemblage becomes a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into mannerism by the padding lechery, faking required to combine today; esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art') that almost borders on nihilism should not be mistaken for philistine thuggery," writes Phil Nugent at Screengrab. "Farber himself was a painter, often turning out canvasses inspired by his favorite films by Fassbinder and Sam Peckinpah."

Ray Pride:

From Negative Space: "Good work usually arises when the creators... seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or anything... It goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity."

Farber's work is so rich with a love of the artist's process - "process-mad," he says - of the yeasty, yawping potential of rhetoric and style that it seems cheap to point out that the values he champions in the work of others shines like a beacon from almost every sentence he's put to page.

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth has found some very valuable linkage. Do go take a look.

SF360 editor Susan Gerhard heard the news from Telluride co-director Tom Luddy; she's running Robert Polito's piece on Farber for the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival catalogue, in which he quotes J Hoberman and Pauline Kael before noting himself:

Farber once described his prose style as "a struggle to remain faithful to the transitory, multisuggestive complication of a movie image and/or negative space." His writing can appear to be composed exclusively of digressions from an absent center. There are rarely introductory overviews or concluding summaries, and transitions appear interchangeable with non-sequiturs. Puns, jokes, lists, slippery metaphors and webs of allusions supplant arguments. Farber wrenches nouns into verbs (Hawks, he writes, "landscapes action"), and sustains strings of divergent, perhaps irreconcilable adjectives such that praise can seem inseparable from censure, arriving at a kind of backdoor poetry: not lyrical, or routinely poetic, but original and startling.

"Farber wasn't like other critics. He didn't proselytize and he didn't create systems. Rather, he articulated his idiosyncratic perception, which is to say: He had a sensibility.... My mantra when I began reviewing for the Voice was WWMD - like, what would Manny do? And, in a sense, it still is." J Hoberman revisits a 1981 appreciation.

Jonathan Rosenbaum turns to a "very personal essay [that] was written in 1993" on "the greatest by far of all American film critics."

Updates, 8/19: Girish is right: David Phelps's collection of passages is well worth spending some time with.

"Farber established a tone, cleared a patch of cultural landscape, and filled it with more ideas, opinions, and attitude than a thousand reviewers and bloggers — not just in movies but in music, television, book, and art criticism too - will ever muster," blogs Ken Tucker for the Entertainment Weekly.

"[I]f [James] Agee was the first great stylist, Kael the liveliest writer and [Andrew] Sarris - with his promotion of the auteur theory of directorial vision - the most influential, Farber may have been the most thrillingly, cantankerously intellectual," blogs Stephen Whitty for the Star-Ledger.

"He was one of the last of the true nickle-plated originals whose rigor and resilience of character and sensibility was shaped by the Depression, a cussed individualism and intellectual independence that expressed itself in the sharp crack of his perceptions and convictions as they hit the page," writes James Wolcott.

Zach Campbell: "It's easy to 'dissolve boundaries' between the 'false dichotomies' of 'high and low.' But Farber understood that truly dissolving boundaries doesn't mean consuming anything and everything with abandon (anyone can do that with ease, and The System prefers you to do it that way) but rather approaching art with a set of practices, time-tested, to make sense of certain configurations of the cultural terrain."

"Film critic-turned-director Paul Schrader wrote for the LA Weekly Press starting in 1969. Although he was a self-avowed Paulette (he was literally mentored by Kael, who helped him get admission to the UCLA film school), Schrader was a longtime friend of Farber. In 1995, Schrader made a lovely short film, Untitled: New Blue, commissioned by the BBC, about a 1993 painting by Farber that Schrader owns and displays in his New York office." David Schwartz talks with Schrader for Moving Image Source.

Jim Emerson quotes a passage from "White Elephant Art vs Termite Art" and commments, "Farber framed his essay as a 'this vs that' equation in order to prod and provoke. Art doesn't really fall so neatly into one category or the other. (In that respect you could say his argument is of the White Elephant variety.) But he challenges the prevailing rules and rouses you from the habits of tradition, doesn't he?"

As Brian notes in the comments, Artforum has brought out Richard Flood's 1998 appreciation:

I first learned of Farber's criticism about twenty years ago, at the height of my enthusiasm for the films of the B-movie producer Val Lewton, who assembled a kind of atelier for writers, directors, cameramen, an actors to churn out low-budget horror movies of extraordinary beauty and, time permitting, intelligence (including The Seventh Victim, I Walked with a Zombie and The Curse of the Cat People). A friend gave me a copy of the 1971 edition of Farber's Negative Space, a collection of his reviews which contains a brief obituary consideration of Lewton, written in 1951 for The Nation, and I became an instant convert, as much to the energy of the writing as to the writer's opinions, which were singularly cantankerous.

"In Summer, 2005, the filmmaker Barbara Schock wrote a spirited piece for Filmmaker about studying film with critic and artist Manny Farber, who died on Tuesday," writes Scott Macaulay. "Mirroring Farber's rapid-fire thinking, Schock makes you feel like you're in his classroom as she writes about the man, his syllabus, and his teaching style." Schock: "Considered by many to have reinvented film criticism with his brilliant, electric prose, Manny had a similarly inventive - and tremendously entertaining - manner of speaking. In vivid, staccato sentences (sounding like a cerebral Edward G Robinson), he took a run at films. He was terse but rhapsodic; non-academic but deeply analytic. Drawing on a vast range of references to other art forms and with his keen grasp of the times, Manny always got at the guts of a film."

"I feel it's a good a time as any to remember Christopher Petit's 1999 essay film/meditation on Farber, itself titled Negative Space," writes Doug Cummings. "My hesitations about Petit's film... probably say more about what I wish it provided rather than what it does - in general, I did find it stimulating.... Through the film's juxtapositions and his own Marker-like, musing narration, Petit is also adept at emphasizing Farber's 'ambidextrous' background - carpenter, critic, painter, teacher - a wide ranging experience with creative construction that helped produce his brilliant sensitivity to the way films are assembled, the idiosyncratic way each of their varied pieces work (or don't work) together. For this reason, Farber remains a favorite critic for cinephiles; his writing digs beneath the widely regarded surfaces of plot, character, and theme to ruminate on details of form or unexpected moments of fleeting cinematic pleasure."

Updates, 8/20: "Farber's prose has a ruthlessness and precision that bespeaks hours bare-fist punching at the Royal portable and then slashing slivers with scissors and basting with paste an ever-more accomplished cut-up," writes Ray Pride in Newcity Chicago. "There may be leaves of Farber's uncollected work fluttering out there somewhere, but Negative Space remains rock-solid."

"Mr Farber, a quirky prose stylist with a barbed lance, responded to film viscerally," writes William Grimes in the New York Times: "'He was up there in the Clement Greenberg category as a critic, but operating on a wavelength so unusual that he was hard to peg, which is how he wanted it,' said Kent Jones, the associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. 'He understood film in a very immediate way - he could see the plasticity of it, the beauty of film in motion, in a way no one else could.'"

"He was, is, one of the supreme critics of the young film medium as well as a painter of wide, mysterious canvases, dispersed yet full of dense, messy detail: impossible, like Manny, to pull together," writes David Edelstein. "In the mid-90s, I would see him when he visited Pauline Kael, his friend of many decades. Their aesthetics diverged, but they adored each other anyway. They treasured each other's pugnacity, and they'd both found their voices in headier, more bohemian times - Pauline in San Francisco, Manny in Greenwich Village." Also, a 1994 profile, "A Painter, but Still a Critic."

The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris quotes passages on Preston Sturges and Werner Herzog.

Update, 8/21: Max Goldberg: "Paul Arthur and Manny Farber: we've lost two of our best."

Updates, 8/22: "For Farber, what makes movies great is the same thing that made jazz America's enduring contribution to 20th Century music - the swing, the personal virtuosity, the knockabout ease that is a democratic culture's answer to aristocratic savoir faire." John Powers on NPR.

Via James Wolcott, Carrie Rickey:

When he arrived in 1971 at the University of California, San Diego to teach a course called "A Hard Look at the Movies" he stunned students (I among the freshmen) with his idiosyncratic lectures, an in-the-moment form of performance art surreal and penetrating as a Warner Brothers cartoon. To make us look, really look, at the medium, he ran films backwards, forwards, with and without sound. Often as he deconstructed an individual frame, the projector lamp would burn and melt the celluloid. We were dry sponges soaking up the ocean of films by Kenji Mizoguchi, Preston Sturges, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Raoul Walsh.

Update, 8/23: "Like Lester Bangs, Farber was sui generis in a way that has since been brought into vivid relief by his imitators," writes Phil Nugent:

Both men produced writing with too strong an electric current not to inspire imitators, but the music writers who tried to emulate Bangs's free-form writing and contrarian tastes usually settled for making an ugly mess, with none of the simple humanity and complicated moral seriousness that did so much to set Bangs apart from the pack. Fewer critics have attempted anything like Farber's writing style - maybe because they were quicker to find out than Bangs's imitators that it took a lot of hard work - but many tried to appropriate his tough-guy-in-the-peanut-gallery taste for hard-wired action flicks and Chuck Jones cartoons without betraying any sense that they understood the painter's eye and genuine set of aesthetic priorities that his taste grew out of.

Continued here.

NCTATNY. Nicholas Ray.

"Architecture is the backbone of the arts, you know: if it is real architecture it encompasses every domain. The simple word 'architecture' can just as well apply to a play, a score of music, or a way of life."

That's Nicholas Ray, as quoted in Jenny Jediny's introduction to the latest special feature at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, which begins in earnest today with Evan Kindley's review of They Live by Night, "a film of cave-like hideouts, low angles and heavy shadows, alternating with frantic forward motion."

Updated through 8/24.

Update, 8/20: "A Woman's Secret (1949), Nicholas Ray's second film, is arguably one of the most maligned and ignored films of his career," argues Cullen Gallagher. Also, Knock on Any Door: "Ray is able to elicit startlingly expressive performances from his actors (more expressive than in many contemporaneous films) that challenge any easy judgments from the audience."

Update, 8/22: "Generally, Born to Be Bad has not been credited as a particularly noteworthy effort from Ray, except for the performance of actress Joan Fontaine as the femme fatale, a casting decision that was not even made by the director," writes Jenny Jediny. "However, Born to Be Bad is quite absorbing and entertaining as a mixture of noir and melodrama, the latter genre proving essential throughout nearly Ray's entire body of work."

Update, 8/23: Ian Johnston on On Dangerous Ground: "What starts out as a hard-edged crime thriller, centred on the violent personality of detective Jim Wilson (a superb performance by the ever—reliable Robert Ryan - why wasn't he ever a greater star?), turns into something gentler and more introspective, namely the theme of how a violent, self-loathing man can be redeemed."

Update, 8/24: "With such an enticing backdrop, it's hard to imagine that a film - particularly one co-directed by Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray - could be anything less than stylish and enthralling," writes Thomas Scalzo. "And yet, at nearly every turn, Macao lets us down."

Trouble the Water.

"There is by now a rich, although unheralded subgenre of independent films - shorts and features, ranging from avant-garde tone poem to vérité docudrama - dealing with Katrina and its aftermath," writes Dennis Lim, introducing an overview of that subgenre in the New York Times. "Trouble the Water, which won the grand jury prize for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and opens on Friday, is one of the best reviewed of these movies. It is also perhaps the one that most shrewdly navigates a problem that to some extent bedevils all filmmakers who take on this fraught subject: how to reconcile their outsider perspectives with the experiences of those who lived through the hurricane.... The decision to give pride of place to [Kimberly] Roberts's raw first-person footage and to grant the Robertses a guiding role in the documentary was both generous and astute, a way for [Carl] Deal and [Tia] Lessin to avoid telling too much of the story across the divides of race and class."

Updated through 8/23.

"[W]hat happened to Kimberly Roberts and her husband, Scott, and her drowned uncle and her hospitalized grandmother left to die is right there on the screen - always in the present tense," notes David Edelstein in New York. "The Robertses ruminate bitterly on a country that directs its vast resources elsewhere - to Iraq, for example - but always end their exchanges with praise for the soldiers’ good works and thanks to God.... Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving."

Related: Paul Tough's cover story for the NYT Magazine: "The city's disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood - many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform."

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance and Nick Schager in Slant.

Updates, 8/21: "Fresh as a slap, the outrage of Katrina's mishandling comes flooding back in Trouble the Water, a documentary account so starkly surreal that at times it seems wrought from another century's folklore," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

In many ways, I think Kim Roberts's authorship, not just of her amazing storm footage or her music but of her life, is the true subject of Trouble the Water. We can have a "national conversation about race" until we all turn blue and keel over from boredom - Did we have it already? If so, what did we say? - but people like Kim and Scott Roberts don't generally have their own voices, or any other kind of autonomy....

Watching Trouble the Water last January at Sundance, in a theater packed with white folks in upscale ski garb - other than the Robertses, the only black person I'm sure I saw there was Danny Glover - was a peculiar, cathartic, almost explosive ritual. Say whatever you want to about the privilege and liberal guilt of that gathering. It's all true. Say that watching a movie in a Utah resort town with a bunch of people flown in from the coasts is an inadequate way to confront the horrifying legacy of Katrina, and that's true too. But that's how it felt.

"Beyond the opening scene's shocking storm footage, Trouble the Water keeps its disaster voyeurism minimal..., focusing instead on its main characters' relentless optimism," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "Kim, Scott and another Katrina refugee, Brian, pack enough charm and personal redemption to make the shift entirely successful. Kim's discovery of her old rap EP and impromptu performance is a particularly eloquent scene, proving the survival of New Orleans' rich vernacular culture despite the indifferent city government's blind promotion of postcard-ready tourism as a means to top-down reconstruction. It's not the cathartic finale of your average monster movie, but it's about the happiest conclusion to be extracted from this never-ending disaster scenario."

Simon Abrams in the New York Press: "Essentials differences aside, Trouble the Water could just as easily be a disaster movie for all of its frighteningly unreal images of demolished buildings and scurrying military units ('This is like a movie, man,' Scott says as if on cue). It's not, however, because the film's real monster is the faceless, crippling inaction that settled in after Katrina. Filmmakers Deal and Lessin hit the streets to reveal the horrifying stagnation that turned New Orleans' Ninth Ward into a colossal fuck-up: one that, to this day, as the film's perfunctory but chilling afterword reminds us, remains a glaring open wound."

At indieWIRE, Michael Joshua Rowin admires the way the doc opens:

But even more vital is Water's second half, a portrait of Kimberly, friends, family, and neighbors literally building from the ruins on the road from New Orleans and, once settled back in the city, fighting against the lures of street life by standing up for themselves and their disenfranchised community. This, even as Katrina gives them every opportunity to permanently flee the "bottom of the barrel." One moment in particular poignantly imparts such life-affirming tenacity: Kimberly discovering the rap demo she recorded and feared lost in the flood, rapping to the accompaniment of her own voice an emotional song about enduring hardship. The song is called "Amazin'" - a fitting one-word description of Trouble the Water.

Updates, 8/22: "Ms Roberts, who often puts her faith in God but tends to take matters into her own capable hands, expresses little anger at the government," notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "She isn't especially at peace with her country, just resigned, so much so that she almost shrugs when she delivers the movie's most devastating line, saying it felt as if 'we lost our citizenship.'... Save for some righteous indignation at the close, Trouble the Water makes its points without didacticism, perhaps guided by the Robertses, who are interested in surviving, not grandstanding."

David Fear in Time Out New York: "Trouble the Water's political-made-personal power to invoke both Anderson Cooper levels of rage and the sense that hope springs eternal rests solely with its main subjects; if you don’t feel the latter when Kimberly defiantly raps about survival at the end, you have no heart."

"Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

Time's Richard Corliss finds it "an endlessly moving, artlessly magnificent tribute to people the government didn't think worth saving."

"Too much good cinema has sprung from Hurricane Katrina to label one of these works the definitive statement on the tragedy - When the Levees Broke, Kamp Katrina, Low and Behold, just to name a few - but after watching Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, it's hard not to place this film at the top of the list." Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail.

Update, 8/23: "Surviving the storm is only the first part - what follows is not much easier, a painful exodus from the ruined city, in and out of shelters to long lines at less than helpful FEMA headquarters, a relocation attempt to Memphis, and finally, for this one intrepid couple, a permanent return to New Orleans," writes Marcy Dermansky. "Through what seems like sheer strength of character, Kim and Scott are able to forge a hard-earned happy ending for themselves - and the film."

Hamlet 2.

"Hamlet 2 belongs firmly to Steve Coogan, which is fortunate since none of the film's supporting players prove to be the least bit memorable," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "And though it's rather difficult for a single talent to carry a successful comic enterprise, Coogan comes awfully close."

In the New York Times, Charles McGrath profiles Coogan, "regarded by many as a comic talent and innovator on a level with John Cleese or even Peter Sellers."

Updated through 8/25.

"I've always had a soft spot for [director] Andrew Fleming (Dick), whose rhythms are less pushy than other American comedy directors, sometimes winningly, sometimes to the point of flaccidity," writes David Edelstein in New York. "This one is on the limp side but gets points for weirdness. Coogan's mopiness is oddly riveting. And the inspirational climax, a musical extravaganza in which Hamlet goes through a portal in time and joins forces with Jesus, is so god-awful it is very nearly inspired."

At the main site, we're staging a little contest: "One (1) Grand Prize Winner will receive: a Sexy Jesus Doll and a Sexy Jesus Surfer Shirt; Five (5) First Prize Winners receive a Hamlet 2 Movie Poster and Bumper Stickers ('Rock Me Sexy Jesus' or 'Honk if You Love Sexy Jesus')."

Earlier: James Rocchi in Cinematical.

Updates: "Boasting a title more amusing than anything contained in its 90 minutes, Hamlet 2 concerns a failed actor-turned-high school drama teacher in Tucson, Arizona who, in order to save the school's theater program, stages the titular story," writes Nick Schager. "Coogan is given free reign to indulge in improvisatory buffoonery, and his pratfalling and verbal stupidity might have been brilliantly funny had Andrew Fleming's film (co-scripted by South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut scribe Pam Brady) found a way to suitably lay the groundwork for its premise."

Capone talks with Coogan for AICN.

Updates, 8/19: Paul Matwychuk talks with Coogan:

Q: Let's close on a short question. Is Jesus sexy?

SC: I'll take that as a loaded question. I mean, when you hear it in the film, it sounds like an error in judgment on Dana's part. But if you break it down and look at it, there will be people who will be offended by it - wrongly so. They will say you shouldn't apply that adjective to a religious figure. But that presupposes that "sexy" is an insulting, pejorative term, and I don't think it is. I would say that if you asked Michelangelo or Caravaggio if Jesus was sexy, he'd say He is. Is Jesus sexy? Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar seemed to take the attitude that he was. So I'd say, all in all, without being too controversial, in a certain way, probably yes.

Q: Wow. That's a much more thoughtful answer than that question deserved.

SC: You're very welcome.

"Hamlet 2 has lots more in common with Tropic Thunder than just an August release date," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "Both films feature the brilliantly funny Steve Coogan as a director who's in way over his head, and both films hit their comic targets with deadly precision, resulting in wall-to-wall laughs. Alas, both movies share the weakness of not giving us at least one character with whom an audience can empathize, and that's the little something extra that separates the comedy classics from the entertaining chuckle-fests. Still..."

Updates, 8/21: "Hamlet 2 is chock-full of overscaled comic notions that probably looked better on paper than they play on-screen," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "But the movie works best as a vehicle for Coogan's slow-dawning humiliation, providing a constant stream of circumstances in which his mile-wide oblivious smile can incrementally creep downward at the corners, his eyes drooping with the too-late realization of his own unwitting jackassery."

Josef Braun:

The residual damage of childhood sexual abuse is here rendered as grounds for hilarity! Racial phobias in the classroom aren't so much put to rest as capitalized as a launch pad for shamelessly exoticized teenage lust! Yet, curiously, Hamlet 2 is also one of the most deeply conventional movies you'll see this summer. No less than mainstream feel-good movies like Pride, The Great Debaters or Mr Holland's Opus, one of several movies it makes fun of, Hamlet 2 is a textbook go-for-it movie, as well as a let's-put-on-show movie, religiously observant of every last trope these subgenres imply, from the kids who learn to believe in themselves to the wildly implausible love interest to the even more implausible über-triumphant denouement. It's entirely possible that Fleming and Brady intentionally adhered to the conventional model as a way of emphasizing the film's seemingly incompatible let's-offend-everybody comic sensibility, but that doesn't make it any less tiresome to watch all the pegs fall all too neatly into place.

"There is an art to making an enjoyable lowbrow comedy, as bizarre as it may seem," writes Amber Humphrey. "It's the reason why deceptively dumb movies like Team America: World Police (2004) have achieved cult status and obscenely dumb movies like Hot Rod (2007) should never, under any circumstances be viewed - and incidentally, both were scripted (at least in part) by Hamlet 2 cowriter Pam Brady. There may be a fine line between stupid and clever, but the line that separates silly from moronic is just as - if not more - tenuous. Brady's good name is happily on the road to recovery, though, with this over-the-top farce. To quote Polonius from Hamlet 1, 'Though this be madness ... there is method in it.'" Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Kimberly Chun talks with Coogan.

"Coogan will do anything for a laugh, and given how little he has to work with, he must," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "It's impressive that he can fill the screen, though he's still regularly upstaged by Catherine Keener in her specialty role as castrating spouse, never more inspired than when playing a scene with a margarita as big as a birdbath."

"Tossing in Jesus, Einstein, Hillary Clinton and a gay men's chorus along with overblown production values, the play-within-a-movie offers a few silly chuckles where riotous laughter is called for, and gently trots out fish-in-a-barrel targets without actually daring to trample too many sensibilities," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. "Like the film as a whole, it's a hit-or-miss affair that's too often funnier to describe than it is to watch."

"[T]he movie is funny, but too nonchalant to satirize theatrical ambition, uptight administrators, or anything else," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine. "But eventually, in a move telegraphed early and then dropped for a bit, Hamlet 2 becomes a sly parody of inspirational teacher pictures, particularly their solipsistic sense of healing."

Armond White in the New York Press: "One of its best points - and one of the brightest movie moments of the year - is Elisabeth Shue's participation not just as herself but as a fortysomething Hollywood has-been. She redefines what 'celebrity' is worth and redeems herself."

Mark Olsen talks with Fleming and Brady for the Los Angeles Times.

Scott Tobias talks with Coogan for the AV Club.

At indieWIRE, Eric Kohn talks with the players behind the $10 million buy at Sundance in January.

Sean Axmaker talks with Coogan at the Parallax View.

"There's nothing remarkable, or witty, or particularly engaging about Hamlet 2, a ragged comedy about a failed actor who tries to mount a science-fiction musical sequel to Shakespeare's tragedy in a Tucson, Ariz, high school," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "But at the movie's damp little heart there is a poignant truth: all actors' desperate neediness to win the appreciation and approval of the audience, which is anyone they meet.... Hamlet 2 is as needy as its hero - because it wants not to be probing or profound or even witty but, above all else, to be loved."

FilmInFocus talks with Coogan.

Updates, 8/22: Andrew Wright in the Stranger: "[E]ven if the film's level of invention sputters here and there, its star is really something to see, creating a gurning, fearless portrayal of Americanus idiotus that even Chris Elliott might envy. (I can think of no higher praise.) I could try to explain why Coogan's split-second imitation of Groucho Marx is the funniest thing I've seen in, like, months, but plotzing is a real risk."

"Throughout Hamlet 2, there's a sense that Mr Fleming and Ms Brady hit upon their howler title and then counted on riffing and chortling their way to a strong finish," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Stuffed as it is with drama-class jokes (think Waiting for Guffman), that's not implausible. But Mr Coogan is better when he can work harder than this."

"Oh, how often in Hamlet 2 does a too too solid joke melt, thaw, and resolve itself into doodoo!" exclaims Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

"Hamlet 2 works so hard at being entertaining, in that quirky, Indie 101 sense, that it just grinds you down. It's the class you wish you could sleep through, taught by the guy who's convinced he's the students' best friend," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, where Andrew O'Hehir talks with Coogan.

"It all adds up to the kind of bad family entertainment likely to raise only a few eyebrows," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

Roger Ebert gives it three stars.

"[T]he structure is there and the fuzzy boundaries between the tried-and-true and the outrageous never fully coalesce," writes Leonard Klady for Movie City News. "It's a scatter gun approach that's fitfully amusing; getting along on the character's good nature and limited abilities when the premise begins to flag."

"Hamlet 2 is occasionally sloppy, with a finale so abrupt and incoherent that it feels like something is missing," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy. "But it's also pleasantly odd and truly funny, and it builds in strength as it goes along. Most of all, there's something queerly magnetic about Coogan, and he pulls us past the clumsiest stuff in the picture."

Update, 8/25: A guide from Peter Bowen at FilmInFocus: "High School Musicals 101."

Shorts, fests, etc, 8/17.

"What has enabled superhero comic-book movies to blast into a central spot in today's blockbuster economy?" asks David Bordwell. His first order of business is to brush aside the zeitgeist notion; for the many reasons he lists, it simply doesn't cut it. In its place, he offers several suggestions "based on my hunch that the genre has brought together several trends in contemporary Hollywood film. These trends, which can commingle, were around before 2000, but they seem to be developing in a way that has created a niche for the superhero film." A nice followup to Kristin Thompson's second report from Comic-Con.

Meantime, here come more superheroes. Ben Walters reports for the Independent.

In the Los Angeles Times, John Horn looks back on a visit to the set of The Road:

In adapting [Cormac] McCarthy's National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, [director John] Hillcoat and [screenwriter Joe] Penhall (as well as the actors and production team) toiled to weigh hopelessness against faith, the worst of humanity opposite the possibility of civilization. But for some, including one top distributor of specialized film who passed on the Nov 14 release, the cinematic version of The Road was ultimately still too bleak to appeal to moviegoers.

So even as the filmmakers were ratcheting up the story's danger and despair, they also were pushing to make the movie as uplifting as possible, emphasizing its intrinsic father-son love story and promoting the notion that the Boy embodies some sort of messiah. Along the way, movie version also became much less a story about a post-nuclear catastrophe and more a tale of climate change and a dying planet.

"47 after its premiere, Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961) has finally returned to its iconic setting of Los Angeles," celebrates Doug Cummings, noting that its run at UCLA (through Saturday) "is being used to promote at least one historical tour of Bunker Hill. Although the new print premiered in Marseilles and New York City, you'll have to pardon Angelenos like myself if we act proprietary about the movie, rebirthed in the wider cinephiliac consciousness by CalArt's Thom Andersen, whose Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) claims, 'better than any other movie, [The Exiles] proves that there was once a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.'"

"Mexican filmmaker Enrique Rivero on Saturday took home the top prize of Switzerland's Locarno Film Festival with his film Parque Vía, about a man who has put himself in voluntary seclusion," reports the AFP; here's the full list of award-winners.

At Twitch:

• Peter Martin: Nobuo Mizuta's Maiko Haaaan!!! "lives up to expectations as a 'crazy Japanese comedy,' but it actually has much more to offer."

• Rodney Perkins: "[I]t is somewhat difficult to see the appeal of [Hideo Nakata's] L: Change the World to anyone beyond young people, and hardcore fans of the original films and the manga upon which it is based."

• The Visitor on Ho Wi Ding's