Jamie Stuart's NYFF46, part 2.

NYFF Podcast. Film Criticism.

Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant begin this year's series of podcasts from the New York Film Festival by talking with a few of the participants in Saturday's panel, Film Criticism in Crisis?

I blather a bit, but things get interesting when Jonathan Rosenbaum and Film Comment editor (and panel moderator) Gavin Smith exchange views on the current state of things. For pix and quotes from all of the participants, see the filmlink blog's Amanda McCormick; for further reports, see James Van Maanen, Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door and indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez.

To download or listen to the podcast, click here.

Update, 10/3: "But is the Internet really the answer?" asks the L Magazine's Mark Asch.

Short shorts, 9/28.

"For this issue Offscreen casts its eyes on French cinema, both new and old." Featuring editor Donato Totaro on Inside (A l'intérieur) and a "Rebirth of French Horror"; Daniel Garrett on Jean Renoir: Interviews and The Rules of the Game, as well as Catherine Deneuve's diaries, Close Up and Personal and the collection, The Cinema of France; Jason Mark Scott on "Marital Discord and Film Making in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris"; and Simon Laperrièrie's homage to Alain Robbe-Grillet.

"How The New Truly Free Filmmaking Community Will Rise From Indie's Ashes": indieWIRE runs producer Ted Hope's keynote address at at Film Independent's Filmmaker Forum.

"Bruce was irascible and lovable. There were times when he drove me crazy, and I know I wasn't the only one. But Eve and I loved Bruce and we weren't about to be driven away." John Yau offers a personal tribute to Bruce Conner.

Also in the September issue of the Brooklyn Rail: Tim Bracy and Elizabeth Nelson on Lou Reed's Berlin; Makenna Goodman on Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Lu Chen on The Edge of Heaven; Camila de Onis on WALL•E; Mary Hanlon on VH1's I Love Money; David N Meyer on Classes tous risques, Help Me Eros and The Furies.

As luck would have it, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex opened in Germany on the day I left for New York, so it'll be a few more days before I get to see it for myself. In the meantime, Neal Ascherson, the Observer's correspondent in Germany in the 60s and 70s, presents a fine and succinct summation of the background story and reaction to the film so far. See, too, a few pieces from the archive: May and June 1972 and a 1987 assessment of the impact of the RAF (as well as a review of Stefan Aust's book, on which the film is based).

Related: "'Complicated' is the word I kept coming back to as I was trying to write this review of Everybody Talks About the Weather... We Don't: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof," writes Johannah Rodgers in the Brooklyn Rail. "Of course, it may very well be the applicability of that adjective to both the writings and biography of Meinhof that explains not only the recent publication of a selection of her writings in English, but - more than thirty years after her death - the attention she continues to attract as an icon of, contingent on your point of view, political activism or terrorism."

For the Los Angeles Times, Lewis Beale talks with screenwriters about how very tough it is to adapt a good book - and Chris Lee profiles Toby Young as How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, based on his memoir, approaches theaters.

"Why does this novel have such a tenacious hold on the imagination, even of people who have never been to England or never visited a country house?" Christopher Hitchens on Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Also in the Guardian: Nicholas Lezard on David Thomson's Have You Seen...? and a few interviews: Will Lawrence with Jeff Bridges and Rebecca Greenstreet with Julie Walters.

Dana Stevens (Slate on Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.

Charles McGrath profiles Kristin Scott Thomas for the New York Times.

Hannah Eaves (SF360) presents a guide to "free feature films on the web."

Local Sightings, "a film festival for the Northwest," runs October 3 through 8 in Seattle.

"In both an e-mail message and a telephone interview this week, [Sylvain] Chomet [The Triplets of Belleville] - who was fired as the director of [The Tale of Despereaux] more than two years ago - accused both the studio and the film's producers, Gary Ross and his wife, Allison Thomas, of using his designs and concepts in the movie without acknowledging his contribution. It is a claim the filmmakers strenuously dispute." Michael Cieply reports in the NYT.

Paul Newman, 1925 - 2008.

Paul Newman, the Academy-Award winning superstar who personified cool as an activist, race car driver, popcorn impresario, and the anti-hero of such films as Hud, Cool Hand Luke and The Color of Money, has died. He was 83....

Newman worked with some of the greatest directors of the past half century, from Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston to Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers. His co-stars included Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and, most famously, Robert Redford, his sidekick in Butch Cassidy and The Sting.

The AP.

Updated through 10/4.

If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless. Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into craggy, charismatic old age.

Aljean Harmetz, New York Times.

He sometimes teamed with his wife and fellow Oscar winner, Joanne Woodward, with whom he had one of Hollywood's rare long-term marriages. "I have steak at home, why go out for hamburger?" Newman told Playboy magazine when asked if he was tempted to stray. They wed in 1958, around the same time they both appeared in The Long Hot Summer, and Newman directed her in several films, including Rachel, Rachel and The Glass Menagerie.

With his strong, classically handsome face and piercing blue eyes, Newman was a heartthrob just as likely to play against his looks, becoming a favorite with critics for his convincing portrayals of rebels, tough guys and losers. "I was always a character actor," he once said. "I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood."

Newman had a soft spot for underdogs in real life, giving tens of millions to charities through his food company and setting up camps for severely ill children. Passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, and in favor of civil rights, he was so famously liberal that he ended up on President Nixon's "enemies list," one of the actor's proudest achievements, he liked to say.

Again, the AP.

See also: the Wikipedia entry and "Times Topics."

"If you're going to introduce a younger movie buff to the unique charisma of the Paul Newman – well, where do you begin?" Joe Leydon presents an annotated list of "movies to use while tutoring the uninitiated."

"Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair," writes Dahlia Lithwick in Slate, looking back on the founding of the Hole in the Wall Camp. "So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world - he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings - and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would."

Shawn Levy, whose biography of Newman will be published next fall, has a must-read appreciation in the Oregonian:

Fast Eddie Felson. Hud Bannon. Cool Hand Luke. Butch Cassidy. The guy in the race car. The guy on the salad dressing bottle. The blue-eyed dreamboat. The committed public citizen. The husband of a half-century. The father of six....

For a half-century, on screen and off, the actor Paul Newman embodied certain tendencies in the American male character: active and roguish and earnest and sly and determined and vulnerable and brave and humble and reliable and compassionate and fair. He was a man of his time, a part of his time, and that time ranged from World War II to the contemporary era of digitally animated feature films.... His career spanned eras, and he always seemed to be in step and in style.

"[B]eing a sex symbol and a great actor don't often exist within the same performer, but when they do, as in the case of Paul Newman, it's electric," writes Edward Copeland. "What's even more amazing about Newman, who has succumbed to cancer at 83, is that his sex appeal lasted well into his AARP years and his acting only seemed to get better as he aged."

"His performance in 1982's The Verdict is a rhapsody, the crown jewel of his career, and should be part of any acting school curriculum," argues JJ at As Little as Possible.

"Newman will live on forever in the movies. What an inarguably rich filmography he's left the audiences who loved him." Nathaniel R.

Esquire's running Scott Raab's May 2000 profile.

"For reasons I can't explain, Sweet Bird of Youth is the one movie starring Paul Newman that I've seen the most, along with Exodus." Peter Nellhaus.

Online listening tip. Beth Accomando on NPR.

Updates: "I don't think Mr Newman was ever as beautiful as he is in Hud," writes Manohla Dargis in the NYT: "His lean, hard-muscled body seems to slash against the widescreen landscape, evoking the oil derricks to come, and the black-and-white cinematography turns his famous baby blues an eerie shade of gray.... He's superb in The Color of Money, gracefully navigating its slick surfaces and periodically scratching beneath them, playing a variation on what had by then in movies like The Drowning Pool (1975), Slap Shot (1977) and The Verdict (1982) become a defining Paul Newman type: the guy on the hustle who seems to have nothing much left but keeps his motor running, just in case." And there's an audio slide show, too.

In Vanity Fair: Patricia Bosworth's collection of reminiscences for the September 08 issue; and a slide show.

"Instead of leading his talent in weird and wayward directions, like Brando, or smashing it to pieces on a California highway at 24, like Dean, he just kept getting better, more comfortable in his movie skin, more proficient at suggesting worlds of flinty pleasure or sour disillusion with a smile or a squint," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "Then Newman did something really remarkable: He sustained that early promise for five decades."

"What was the secret to Newman's longevity?" asks Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "The fact that he always took the work seriously without ever doing the same to himself probably helped. A quick scan of his notable quotes at Wikipedia reveals one hilariously self-deprecating proclamation after another, such as 'I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion. I was running away from the sporting goods business,' and 'The embarrassing thing is that my salad dressing is out-grossing my films.' Perhaps his side interests in directing theater and racing cars made him seem all the more like a screen legend - it's the ones who could leave the business at any time who seem to get the most respect."

"If ever there was a walking embodiment of liberalism at its best and in all its manifestations, it was Paul Newman," writes Bob Westal. "[H]e was as respectable a human being as the world of show business has seen. I'm an agnostic, but I'd still like like to think that, wherever Mr. Newman is, he'll get to watch the election returns. It seems a small reward."

"In a career studded with remarkable achievements, Newman's greatest work of art might simply have been his ability to lead a fulfilled life outside of the glamour of being an icon," writes Paul Harris in the Guardian, where Brian Baxter looks back over the career and Phil Hoad rounds up clips.

Ned Lamont, who ran unsuccessfully against Joe Leiberman in Connecticut in 06, recalls Newman's help. Via Movie City Indie.

"James Stewart once said that film actors give their audiences 'pieces of time,'" writes the Observer's Philip French. "While Newman's best pictures hang together as creative entities (there is a kind of perfection to The Hustler and to the western Hombre), as with other actors it is unforgettable moments and sequences that come to mind and revive memories of being moved to laughter, tears, reflection, self-examination."

"If I had to pick just one favorite Newman/Woodward film it would probably be Paris Blues," writes Kimberly Lindbergs. "Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier play American jazz musicians living in Paris whose lives are disrupted when two beautiful tourists (Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll) visit the city of lights for a two-week holiday..... [I]f you're interested in seeing Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward at their loveliest, I highly recommend seeking out the movie."

Robert Horton: "If anybody is near Port Townsend, Washington, Sunday afternoon and looking for a place to talk about Paul Newman, the Port Townsend Film Festival will be convening an impromptu panel on the subject - with Piper Laurie (Newman's Oscar-nominated co-star in The Hustler) and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne speaking on the subject; I will act as moderator. Time's 12:45, Sunday the 28th, at the PTFF Hospitality Tent."

AJ Schnack notes that two of the last films he worked on were docs (he narrated): The Price of Sugar and Dale.

"One of my earliest memories of Paul Newman outside of the movies was watching him on Phil Donahue debate nuclear proliferation with some Edward Teller type decrying Newman and anyone like him as wet noodle pinkos." Jonathan Lapper relates that memory.

Updates, 9/28: "I've interviewed hundreds of movie people during my journalism career, but rarely was I given the inside look that I got on those two racing weekends with Newman." And Jack Matthews would remain friends with him for years to come. Also at Movie City News, Leonard Klady: "Lightness doesn't quite get across what made him unique and calling him deft at his craft makes it sound much too facile. There may have been others that worked as hard at making it look like they were making it up as they went along, but offhand I can't think of anyone less studied and more committed to what they did."

"The actor was proudest, friends say, of his later Oscar-nominated roles in Absence of Malice, The Verdict and Nobody's Fool, in which he dug deep into the complex emotions of ordinary men struggling for dignity, justice or a sense of connection," reports Lynn Smith in the Los Angeles Times. "In 2003, he was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for his last feature film appearance, as a conflicted mob boss in Road to Perdition. Two years later, at 80, he won an Emmy for playing a meddlesome father in Empire Falls. 'He's a majestic figure in the world of acting,' said director Arthur Penn, who worked with him in his early career. 'He did everything and did it well.'"

Joe Leydon's December 06 profile for Cowboys & Indians.

"He is undoubtedly in the top 10 of all-time great movie stars," writes Barry Norman in the Independent. "Whereabouts I don't know, but he was undoubtedly a great star. Unlike many of the great stars, though, Newman was a very, very good actor."

"[F]ew remembered Mr Newman the way his friend and neighbor did in Westport, a Fairfield County town of about 26,000." Manny Fernandez talks with AE Hotchner for the NYT.

Updates, 10/2: Robert Redford in Time: "Both of us were fundamentally American actors, with the qualities and virtues that characterize American actors: irreverence, playing on the other's flaws for fun, one-upmanship - but always with an underlying affection. Those were also at the core of our relationship off the screen."

"He knew what a fortunate and wonderful life he had led, and he was very willing to admit that," recalls Sam Mendes, who directed Newman in Road to Perdition, for New York. "That really lent him an aura of a minor deity to me. He had sort of ascended already. He felt at peace, like he'd come to terms with what he'd done in his life and his own mortality. I think some of that must have stemmed - though he never spoke about it - from his son Scott's premature death. Once you've lived through that, I don't think anything else really gets as bad. Even your own death."

"The Newman performances that honestly made the greatest impression on me all came in movies that, to one degree or another, challenged my perceptions of Newman the star (unflappable, virile, righteous, self-righteous) and what those perceptions meant," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "They all depended greatly on the actor's considerable charm, of course, but they were almost always also willing to make it harder for audiences to accept that charismatic quality blindly—they didn't mask the characters' amorality behind those blue eyes but instead used them to investigate it. And each of the roles on my list made either overt or covert connections to that beer-drinking, blue-collar bravado that seemed, to some of us in the audience who never knew him personally, closest to Newman himself."

"The space he invited viewers into was a kind of hyperlife, a state of sharpened attention and heightened vibrancy; if Paul Newman was in it, it was a Paul Newman movie, regardless of the size of his role," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "His best roles were the ones that acknowledged that quality of being not superhuman, but somehow extra human."

The New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson talks with Robert Benton: "He was, I think, one the best human beings I've ever known... one of the most decent, the most honorable. He was extraordinary. Of course, he would be appalled if he could hear me calling him a saint. It would have ended our friendship."

"[T]he Siren is here to talk about Newman's acting, and to remind us that charm does not follow naturally from being handsome, nor does possessing that quality in life mean you can bring it to the screen. Consider Alain Delon, an excellent actor with looks so perfect they seem a cosmic joke, but resolutely uncharming in role after role. Think of George Brent, a well-loved man in Hollywood but often a limp screen figure. Look at Peter Sellers and Rex Harrison, despised by colleagues but the picture of charm in so many movies. Charm is a learned technique for an actor. Either you choose not to use it, as the Siren presumes Delon has chosen, or you can only bring it out when the stars align, like Brent, or you learn to project it despite your real personality. Newman seems to have been a wonderful man in real life, but that's irrelevant to his talent. The things he was able to bring to the screen came from his dedication to acting, not the Good Fairy Merryweather hovering over his cradle."

"He looked like something Donatello might have dreamed up, his eyes turned down just the slightest bit at the corners, his mouth perpetually ready for kissing," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Still, we all know that great-looking actors are a dime a dozen. The best of them are also informed by something that comes from inside, a mischievous spark, a sly sense of self-deprecation that suggests they don't take themselves all that seriously (even when they take their work very seriously). Newman had both the face and the spark, which may be why he grew into his beauty, not out of it."

"Great actors and great artists don't have to be role models in life to inspire you with their work," writes David Edelstein. "But when they are, they give a special kind of joy. The character of his life is everywhere in his work, in its lack of self-centeredness, in the way it radiated out. In sad days and sunny ones, Paul Newman bathed the world in blue."

From an impressive survey by Roderick Heath: "One of Newman's most perfectly relaxed and entertaining performances came in Mark Robson's Hitchockian romp The Prize (1963), in which he played party animal Andrew Craig, the youngest-ever Nobel laureate in literature whose challenging early works were commercial flops, forcing him to write trash and drink much."

Sheila O'Malley at the House Next Door: "I'm a bit overwhelmed right now, but I want to hone in on three specific roles (or moments) of Newman's because, first of all, they span his career (beginning, middle, end), and, second of all, they illuminate the Newman-ness of Paul Newman, that indefinable thing that makes a good actor specific, memorable, and alive under imaginary circumstances."

"At a moment when America feels angry and betrayed, when our leaders have forfeited our trust and jeopardized our future, we lost an American icon who stood for traits that have been in short supply in the Bush administration: shrewdness, humility, decency, generosity, class." Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

At Movie City News, Larry Gross recalls some of the great moments.

"While many of the recent tributes in his honor have contained their share of hyperbole and have perhaps made more out of Newman than was actually there, including assertions that the actor 'changed Hollywood,' these comments in themselves speak to the scarcity of such figures in the film industry today," writes Hiram Lee at the WSWS.

Online listening tip. Tom Ashbrook talks with Mark Harris (Pictures at a Revolution), Jeanine Basinger (The Star Machine) and Jack Beatty.

Update, 10/4: "He and I first met on my old daytime show, which he had discovered early and lent support to when people of his caliber didn't yet. He kept coming on through the years and was the ideal guest. He would be funny, Even silly. And, as easily, dead serious and even profound." And Dick Cavett's got video, too.

NYFF. 24 City.

"At a time when the other leading figures of Chinese-language cinema, including Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang, seem fully committed to (or, in a few cases, trapped by) the styles and themes that made them famous, with each new film [Jia Zhangke] is adding new tools to his art in order to renegotiate his relationship to realism, and to make the quest for personal and national truth ever-renewing rather than predictable and monolithic," writes Andrew Chan in Reverse Shot. "His latest, 24 City, is a blend of documentary and fiction that omits some of the main tropes we associate with those genres, aspiring to neither vérité nor conventional plotting.... [W]hat begins as a straightforward oral-history project results in a rocky marriage between seemingly irreconcilable impulses, and a disorienting provocation on the sacredness of truth in the documentary form."

Compare this with Michael Sicinski's take: "Like advanced modern music or poetry, the cinema of Jia has by this point started to develop into a closed set of maximal values and a continual reorganization of the constituents of that set. Or, at least that's the distinct impression I get from 24 City, a work beyond reproach in every way but an almost geometrically lateral move from Jia's masterpiece Still Life."

"[O]ne of this film's biggest problems is that the actors aren't nearly as compelling as the real people," writes Ed Champion. "Here are the problems with this postmodernist trick: (a) if one objects to it, one is assumed to not be “in on the joke” and therefore not hep to the larger game that the film purports to play, (b) if one chooses to believe in it, then one is duped and the sufferings of the real people are considered trivial, and (c) if one discards it, one dispenses with a part of Jia's elaborate puzzle."

Mark Asch in the L Magazine: "[I]f Jia manufactures history so too does his country's image-conscious authoritarian government; and not only has the Chinese government rewritten history but they're also its original authors, as revealed in 24 City's tales of citizens uprooted by assignments to study, live or work in new cities (and the more subtle migratory pressure, now, of economic necessity). 24 City is a telling bit of journalism and an affecting elegy, yes, but it's also a movie about the making and remaking and ways of making things."

Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on Jia's short, Cry Me a River: "The actors don't have much to work with and don't exactly work with it well..., but the way Jia constructs the world around them, the world they inhabit, and most importantly the world they travel through, really highlights why he is considered one of the world's best filmmakers."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and David D'Arcy.

Update, 10/3: "In its portrait of a culture on the verge of erasure with the advent of redevelopment and gentrification, Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City shares kinship with José Luis Guerín's En Construcción, reflecting the idea of a city built from the rubble of abandoned, forgotten histories," writes Acquarello.

Update, 10/4: Kevin B Lee in Slant: "What emerges in 24 City is a moving three-fold meditation: on the many stories of a bygone era, both epic and banal, that are bound to be left untold and forgotten; the many fictions woven - whether by the media, by our ancestors, or by ourselves - into our understanding of reality; and a dying ideology's legacy on how its people tell their stories."

Update, 10/8: Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video from the press conference.

Short shorts, 9/26.

"[T]he spirit of the last Depression truly hovers over us now and, as usual," writes John Patterson, "Michael Mann is ahead of the game in dredging its history and imagery for insights into our present pass. He has recently wrapped filming on Public Enemies, which promises to be the ultimate 1930s bandit epic, featuring the interlocking crime waves of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) and Barker Gang associate Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi) over 18 heady and hectic months in 1933 and 1934." Also: Setting Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies alongside Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma.

And also in the Guardian:

• "With Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) now being given an extended run at the BFI, it is perhaps time to look at the contribution each made to the extraordinary creative partnership." Take it away, Ronald Bergan.

• Tom Perrotta's mixed feelings as he revisits high school in the 80s, the way John Hughes told it.

• Dan Glaister on a new report detailing the ways tobacco companies ensured that smoking was depicted as glamorous on screen during the 30s and 40s.

• Toby Young on what he's learned in Hollywood. Related: Liz Hoggard in the Evening Standard on How To Lose Friends & Alienate People.

• Hadley Freeman meets Rainn Wilson.

Ryland Walker Knight (Auteurs' Notebook) on Jia Zhangke's Xiao Wu.

As for The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, see Sass Rogando: "An act of amazing proximity: Reflections on Olaf de Fleur Johannesson's Humanity Trilogy." Thanks, Peter!

"USC's School of Cinematic Arts, collaborating with Visions and Voices: The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative, is offering a three-day scholarly examination of the Duke titled John Wayne: Actor, Star, Icon, Trojan." Today through Sunday; a preview from Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

"Even though his retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMcinématek alludes to his 'mad obsessions,' Barbet Schroeder seems entirely measured and sensible." Steve Dollar talks with him for the New York Sun.

On Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell: Melissa Anderson (Time Out New York), Nathan Lee (New York Times) and Rosie Swash (Guardian).

On I've Loved You So Long, the movie that's got everyone buzzing about Kristin Scott Thomas's performance: Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Nina Caplan (Time Out), Ryan Gilbey (New Statesman), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard) and Anthony Quinn (Independent).

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Songs from the Second Floor.

Goings on in Chicago: CINE-FILE.

Online viewing tip. "Everything I know about economics I learned from the movies," confesses Jim Emerson. "So when times get tough, I consult Preston Sturges. Here, I have condensed the financial wisdom of a lifetime into less than five minutes - all of it distilled from 1937's Easy Living."

Online viewing tips. The London Times' Kevin Maher's got clips illustrating his list of the "20 greatest movie partnerships."

Short shorts, 9/25.

The "Just like I pictured it..." edition. Your Daily blogger has landed in New York City. Cinematical's Erik Davis has a large version of that poster, by the way. So blogging of some sort will carry on through the next several days, but in what form exactly? We'll play it by ear. Meantime...

David Schwartz (Moving Image Source) talks with Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell about Howard Hawks.

Girish and DK Holm (Vancouver Voice) on film criticism.

Josh Rosenblatt (Austin Chronicle) on Fahrenheit 451. Related: Carolyn Nikodym (Vue Weekly) on banned books.

Robert Davis (Daily Plastic on Nathaniel Dorsky's Devotional Cinema.

Glenn Kenny (Auteurs' Notebook) on the "lesser" Busby Berkeleys.

Doug Cummings on Take Out.

Alison Willmore talks with Wayne Coyne about Christmas on Mars.

Festival previews: German Currents: New Film From Germaany (FilmInFocus, through Sunday), Edmonton (Vue; tomorrow through October 4), Chicago (Chicagoist Rob Christopher; October 16 through 29), SF DocFest (SF360's Susan Gerhard; October 17 through November 6) and Virginia (October 30 through November 2).

Shorts, fests, etc, 9/24.

"A good critic is someone who not only has a gift for fashioning an impressionable sentence or phrase, but also the depth and breadth of experience as a viewer to approximately assess a new film's standing by using an internal historical slide rule that runs the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous," writes Tim Lucas. "I really don't care how many John Ford movies a critic has seen; it tells me more if he or she knows as much about the lower registi on the keyboard. It tells me even more if their idea of the lower register is my idea of the middle register. Even Dante had to visit the many levels of his Inferno before he could lend language to his Paradiso."

"Everyone has an agenda when it comes to reviewing movies." Darragh McManus presents a guide to several reviewers who "don't just admit they have an agenda, they positively scream it out."

Also at the Guardian, Ben Child notes that The Godfather tops Empire's readers poll of the "500 Greatest Movies of All Time."

"I thought I'd share some thoughts about two of my favorite Japanese monster movies made in 1968, 100 Monsters aka Yôkai hyaku monogatari and Yokai Monsters - Spook Warfare aka Yôkai daisensô." Kimberly Lindbergs: "Both films were released the same year and a third Yokai Monster film called Yokai Monsters - Along With Ghosts aka Tôkaidô obake dôchû was later released in 1969. All three films make up an extremely entertaining trilogy of fantasy films based on Japanese folklore and legends."

Max Goldberg presents a "five-point look at Kino21's five-part war doc series, How We Fight: Conscripts, Mercenaries, Terrorists, and Peacekeepers." Through November 23.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey previews Psychotic and Erotic: Rare Films by Tinto Brass, running tonight and Sunday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The AV Club presents its "Second Annual Guide To The Fall Prestige Movies," parts 1 and 2. Related: The New York Observer's "Fall Preview 2008."

"In each episode of the mammoth 'Best Pictures From the Outside In' project, Mike (Goatdog's Movies), Nick (Nick's Flick Picks) and I have been viewing two Oscar winners, one from either end of the Academy's 80 years timeline, moving forwards and backwards simultaneously," writes Nathaniel R. "Today's double feature happens to star two very famous and prolific writers. On our trip forward we hit 1937's The Life of Emile Zola, a biopic cum courtroom drama set in France where Zola continually rocked the boat with controversial novels and politically crusading letters. On our trip backwards in Oscar time we've reached 1998's Shakespeare in Love, a romantic comedy cum theatrical love letter set in England when Shakespeare was making his name."

"Audiences at the time thought of them simply as bad girls, but the UCLA Film & Television Archive is determined to salvage their reputations." Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "The archive's exceptionally interesting 12-film repertory series Cool Drinks of Water: Columbia's Noir Girls of the 40s and 50s shows that making their acquaintance is a pleasure for lots of reasons." Through October 26.

At Hollywood Bitchslap, Jason Whyte previews the Vancouver International Film Festival, opening tomorrow and running through October 10.

Andy Horbal rounds up goings on in Pittsburgh.

"This century, Ho'wood has traded in the cars for human flesh," writes Steven Boone at the SpoutBlog. "Now we watch people crash, burn and fall apart like flimsy chassis, still trying to pull something exhilarating out of something we can't fathom. The emphasis on 'improve, prosper, perfect' is all that matters, Americans."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Matt Wolf, director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, "bout his distinctive documentary approach, his plan to eat his way through Queens, and working in a gay coffee shop run by heroin addicts."

"The amazing truth about Queen Raquela is that she's constructed from clichés, infected by media-borne dictates of insipid faggotry that have, unfortunately, circled the globe and made near-insufferable creatures out of too many queers," writes Ernest Hardy, reviewing, of course, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela. "The not-quite-amazing truth about this 'documentary' is that it's actually mildly engrossing, building to a final-act clash between First and Third worlds that is riveting and highly uncomfortable to watch."

Also in the Voice:

• Aaron Hillis on Shoot on Sight: "Named for the London police's secretive 'Operation Kratos' anti-terrorist tactics, which led to the wrongful killing of Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes just after the July 7, 2005, tube bombings, director Jag Mundhra's suspense(-less) drama oversimplifies the controversy by fictionalizing the victim into an innocent Muslim citizen." Also, Unspooled: "What could've been a poignantly humbling portrait of passionate young hopefuls confronting the harsh, masochistic realities of filmmaking is instead a whiny, woe-is-us postmortem."

• Ella Taylor on Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story: "Just about everyone interviewed for Stefan Forbes's fascinating documentary about Lee Atwater - whether Democrat or Republican pols, African-American bluesmen or hardened reporters - ends anecdotes about the Republican strategist's dirty tricks with a titter that's either nervous or ambivalently appreciative."

• Tim Grierson: "Nights in Rodanthe works so strenuously to satisfy its target audience's every desire that it's a minor surprise that the filmmakers didn't provide cashmere blankets, a snuggly pair of slippers, and a warm cup of cocoa for everyone entering the theater." More from Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

• Michelle Orange: "Several ordinarily banal movies soldered into one amazingly bad one, Ripple Effect cannot be excused on the grounds of overweening ambition; its every contorted plot line and distended page of dialogue belie an averageness that glazes the cornea on contact."

• Nick Pinkerton on Forever Strong: "It should come as no surprise to find that this paean to clean living, which might have been co-scripted by Carrie Nation, was brought to you by the Salt Lake City film industry. Should play well to church groups and niche sports enthusiasts waiting on the great life-affirming film about curling."

Mike Everleth has the lineup for Saturday's New Haven Underground Film Festival.

The WSWS' David Walsh talks with Chus Gutiérrez about Return to Hansala. Also: More from Toronto.

Steve Dollar talks with Lance Hammer about Ballast for the New York Sun.

Ben Simington in the Auteurs' Notebook on the latest from Dario Argento: "'[D]espite flaws in The Mother of Tears, we are lucky to still bear witness to a maestro of horror who unmistakably thinks about perception of the world cinematically."

"Italian director Florestano Vancini, whose first film [Lunga Notte del '43] in 1960 won a Venice festival award, has died in Rome. He was 82." The AP reports. Via Movie City News.

The Film Panel Notetaker was all over Independent Film Week.

Online listening tip. Quite a party going on at the House Next Door.

Online viewing tip. Movies for the Masses interviews Panos Koutras and Joe Swanberg at the Athens International Film Festival, running through Sunday.

Online viewing tips. Eliza rounds up some "Great New Videos" for the CR Blog.

Back to Room 666.

An online viewing tip. V2 Cinema presents Gustavo Spolidoro's Back to Room 666: "What is the future of cinema? In 1982, in Cannes, Wim Wenders invited many moviemakers to answer this question. 26 years later, the question remains, but Wenders is now on the other side of the camera." So, too, is the ghost of Michelangelo Antonioni, and a few other wispy shadows as well.

Silent Light.

"The sun floods the wide sky in Silent Light like a beacon, spilling over the austere land and illuminating its pale, pale people as if from within," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "A fictional story about everyday rapture in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico - and performed by a cast of mostly Mennonite nonprofessionals - the film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith."

Updated through 9/26.

"Subject of a week-long retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas is part stuntmeister, part visionary - a post-Warhol impresario and trained diplomat who, flirting with fraudulence and often working without a screenplay, orchestrates conditions where nonprofessional actors are compelled to expose themselves, sometimes cruelly, on camera," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "As understated as it is, [Silent Light] is both deeply absurd and powerfully affecting."

"[I]nstead of the aggressive provocation of [Battle in Heaven] and debut feature Japón, Silent Light finds Reygadas meditating on sex, sin, absolution and the miraculous through a tender, even gentle portrait of impulsive human beings running up against society's unspoken prohibitions," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

Earlier: Reviews from last year's editions of the Cannes, Toronto and New York film festivals.

Updates, 9/26: "Richly individualistic movies still get made," writes Ray Pride. "They're out there. Rich history cannot but produce rich potential. Looking back and forward, as the British Film Institute turns 75, they asked seventy-five figures to comment on 'Visions for the Future'... Composer Michael Nyman advocates Carlos Reygadas's amazing Silent Light, which has begun a one-week run at MoMA in Manhattan, for being 'an extraordinary, transcendent meditation on love and religion.'"

"Silent Light provokes awe: not just for its sheer beauty but for the astounding leaps in seriousness and maturity that Carlos Reygadas has made since his previous film, Battle in Heaven, a noxious, chilly exercise in corpulent copulation," writes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York. "Opening and closing with majestic scenes of sunrise and sunset, Reygadas's third feature approaches grace."

Obscene.

"On Nov 19 [Barney] Rosset will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in honor of his many contributions to American publishing, especially his groundbreaking legal battles to print uncensored versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. He is also the subject of Obscene, a documentary by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor, which opens on Friday at Cinema Village." For the New York Times, Charles McGrath talks with the filmmakers - and Rosset.

"Barney Rosset is a tragic hero," writes Michelle Orange in Voice, as this "very fine documentary make unstintingly and yet wistfully clear."

Updated through 9/26.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto 07.

Updates, 9/26: "If you need another reminder that book publishing and New York City aren't what they used to be, you could do worse than to immerse yourself in Obscene." A recommendation from Andrew Hultkrans in Artforum.

"Obscene is a brief, pleasant time-killer that genially preaches to the choir yet, while it's always enjoyable, this review's readers should seek Grove books out first," argues Aaron Cutler in Slant.

"It's the story of a man who follows his own drummer - usually with rum and Coke in hand - and believes in 'nourishing the accidental,'" writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "We should all be grateful that he does."

The Lucky Ones.

"Three wounded US soldiers in The Lucky Ones, all traveling 'home' from Iraq, played by Michael Peña, Rachel McAdams and Tim Robbins, have almost nothing in common with one another except for their war service, yet they wind up getting entangled with one another for practical as well as existential reasons, sharing a rented car," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Such a story (which [Neil] Burger coscripted with Dirk Wittenborn) easily could have slid into some form of sentimentality. But this never happens because the three lead characters keep surprising us - both in their lack of power and in the various ways they can bring limited empowerment to one another."

Updated through 9/26.

"Saying The Lucky Ones is the best film about Iraq yet is the proverbial damning with faint praise," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. "It's a 'well-made' film: Explosive emotional confrontations are deferred, the ending is purposefully unresolved, the camera-work deliberately unshowy. Thank goodness for all that - and the fact that a hashed-over war debate gets less time than one character's ED problem - but it's finally all too familiar."

"Sometimes... empty, contrived fantasies are just empty, contrived fantasies, as is certainly the case with this embarrassingly phony cross between Grace Is Gone, Home of the Brave and - believe it or not - Twister," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"[D]espite its screenwriting contrivances (there's even a third-act hurricane), despite the predictability of its tonal shifts from comic to dramatic, despite director/co-writer Neil Burger's refusal to take any political stance on the war - despite all that, despite even the hurricane and the jaunty score and the scene where Robbins locks the keys in the car, it's actually pretty watchable," writes Paul Matwychuk.

"What elevates The Lucky Ones is a trio of memorable performances," finds Louis Peitzman in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Capone talks with Burger for AICN.

Updates, 9/26: "Maybe sometime in the next decade, the Iraq War will get its Platoon or its Full Metal Jacket, but for now, we'll have to keep waiting for a memorably incisive, dramatically successful cinematic treatment - at least, from a fiction film (documentaries are, happily, another story)." Chris Wisniewski, indieWIRE: "Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones makes no effort to fill that void. Instead, it seems calculated to correct another, related problem: the anemic box-office of Iraq-themed films."

"Whether Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones will break the jinx is anyone's guess, but as a story it's more convincing and substantial than Stop-Loss or Home of the Brave," argues JR Jones in the Chicago Reader.

More from Robert Davis (Daily Plastic), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Ben Kenigsberg (Time Out New York), Laura Kern (New York Times), Nathan Rabin (AV Club) and S James Snyder (New York Sun).

Sean Axmaker talks with Robbins for the Parallax View.

Glenn Kenny finds it "a lovely, engaging piece that's best appreciated as a road movie/fable, because that's really what it is."

Russian Film Week.

David D'Arcy on the series wrapping today in New York, while a related event carries on in London through Monday.

In Yuri's Day, which opened Russian Film Week last Friday at the Ziegfeld Theater, Liubov, an opera singer working in Vienna, drives to her hometown in rural Russia with her handsome peevish son in the back seat of her Mercedes Benz sedan. It's meant to be a reality check for the privileged young gentleman, yet there's not much with which to reconnect in the snow and fog. The cops barely do any work. Things unravel when the mother and son visit a vast monastery and young Andrei goes missing, and Yuri's Day becomes a mother's desperate search for the young man, taking us to the extremes of Russian rural life in its oft-caricatured harshness and brutality.

Yuri's Day and most of the films at Russian Film Week (there is a comparable series in London, with some of the same films, that runs through September 29) are not movies that are likely to see US distribution. They are well-attended by expatriate Russians, leading to the conclusion that the films play to Russian tastes, no matter how unusual these tastes might be.

You've seen much of Yuri's Day before, or read stories like it. The script couldn't be farther away from the blithe reflections of bored characters in plays by Chekhov. Director Kirill Serebrennikov takes a turn into sociopathology, as beautiful Liubov (Kseniya Rappaport), stranded in the provinces, takes refuge with a museum guard who is beaten bloody by a man every day - all represented as a logical part of small-town depravity. Liubov has deep roots here, we learn, and a criminal past of her own, which now has an operatic patina. Dressed in a fur wardrobe that deteriorates as the story unfolds, and singing from time to time in an alto voice that follows the movement of her lips, more or less, she ventures everywhere in this black hole of a town (a white hole in the snow, actually), which becomes a sociology primer for every urban Russia prejudice about provincial life. Ridiculed in a workingman's bar, scorned in a monastery where she thinks her son has fled, and surrounded by infected thugs in a prison for criminals with tuberculosis, she is accompanied on these rounds by a fatigued cynical detective. Once Liubov is in crisis, marked by predictable anguish, the little town becomes quite a metropolis of freaks, compellingly shot by Oleg Lukichyov.

Bear in mind that this isn't even the Gulag, but it's Everyman's Russia in vivid screen mythology. Add a mother's despair, a violent cocktail of alcohol and blood, and a cast of stock characters, and you have a picaresque melodrama - 137 minutes of it - that the Russian-speaking audience in the theater with me enjoyed.

Just as unlikely to come to a theater near you if you're in the United States is the bawdy farce Hitler Kaput! (something tells me that they would have used Springtime for Hitler if that hadn't already been taken), which propels political incorrectness to new heights, or lows, depending on your taste. It's understandable that every country would like to cash in on its own version of The Producers, and Russians suffered disproportionately during the dark years of Nazi occupation. Who better to make dark jokes about that period, if your goal is to exploit this tragic time for comedy?

Marius Veisberg's film opens as a Jewish concentration camp prisoner, with striped uniform and yellow star, is hauled by a gang of Nazi executioners to a courtyard where the soldiers stand him up against a wall. In borscht-belt style, with a dash of Woody Allen, he tells the death squad that his doctor has urged him to avoid "any execution-related activities." They shoot him, nonetheless, and... they miss - this is a farce after all - but the shots create a hole in the form of the prisoner's silhouette in the wall, which falls through, opening into a room where - in case you haven't guessed - a shapely woman is taking off her clothes. And those are just the first few minutes.

In Veisberg's farce - which, he cautioned the audience before the screening, is not a "festival film," i.e., a movie of merit or artistic quality - Pavel Derevyanko plays Shura Osechkin, a Russian spy known as Shurenberg, who greases corrupt Nazi palms for just about everything as the war is nearing an end. The story is a vaudeville parade of crazy anachronisms, from rap emanating from the car that Shurenberg drives around Berlin (the shameless film is also a shameless promotion for Russian pop bands) to a Hitler salute contest, in which judges give scores, Olympic-style, to gymnasts who finish elaborate somersaults with "Heil Hitler!" When Shurenberg crosses back to Russian lines, with a beautiful blonde whom he's just rescued, one of the guards says: "They're lucky they're not Muslim." The audience was gasping in disbelief when it wasn't laughing at jokes that remind us that Russian satire is a lot darker than its American equivalent. Can you top this? Mel Brooks certainly can't. I'm sure that another Russian director will try.

This being a Russian Film Week, there was gushing sentiment as well as black humor. A case in point was Heavy Sand, by Anton Barshchevsky, which saw its world premiere, excepting a screening in Israel, on Sunday night. The adaptation of the enormously popular epic novel by Anatoly Rybakov (Children of the Arbat), set in a Ukrainian town through the entire last century, is distilled from a series of even greater epic proportions that will run on Russian television. (The feature film runs from 1900 through the war years.) Once again, much of the action is seen through the eyes of an aggrieved woman, Rachel (Irina Lachina) a suffering Jewish mother, whose suffering just seems to worsen with the passage of time - not that this trajectory of pain isn't accurate. Cut down with choppy editing to almost three hours from a much longer series of episodes, it's pretty standard melodrama, just mercifully shorter than the TV saga.

- David D'Arcy

Cinema Scope. 36.

As editor Mark Peranson notes, the new issue of Cinema Scope is dedicated to Manny Farber, "the most important film critic of the 20th century," and features an appreciation by none other than Jean-Pierre Gorin.

Peranson's also recently completed, as in directed and produced, Waiting for Sancho, "a kind of experimental 'making of' the critically acclaimed El Cant dels Ocells (Birdsong/Le Chant des Oiseaux)," and the site's got a page with two paragraphs and a clip.

Other features: Jason Anderson on "Blindness and blindness" and Christoph Huber on "the melancholy mastery of Jean-Claude Van Damme."

Interviews: Violeta Kovacsics and Adam Nayman talk with Lisandro Alonso about Liverpool and Robert Koehler talks with Azazel Jacobs about Momma's Man.

Also: Scott Foundas on Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Quintin on Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles, Richard Porton on Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, another round of "Global Discoveries on DVD" from Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jim Finn on why some of "the best festivals for films that opened up new, contemporary ideas of what cinema could be" are dying.

Reverse Shot. 23.

"With the pleasures of the magnificent Flight of the Red Balloon still floating in our heads, we feel the time is right for a comprehensive look back at one of the best and most aesthetically important filmmakers of the past few decades: Hou Hsiao-hsien.... Wedding political filmmaking with a technique at once naturalistic and highly aestheticized, Hou has made films that wrestle, variously, and either directly or metaphorically, with personal and national histories, the struggles between Taiwan and Chinese nationalism, the encroachment of capital on an ever-evolving way of life, and, most recently, the legacy of cinema itself."

Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert introduce the new issue, "Hou Hsiao-hsien: In Search of Lost Time." I'd love to give this issue in particular the usual Daily sweep, but I'm in crunch mode at the moment as I get ready to cross the Atlantic. You dive in, though, and I look forward to joining you when I get back.

Shorts, fests, etc, 9/23.

"Despite his relative obscurity in the United States, Mauricio Kagel, who died in Germany last week at the age of 76, was one of the 20th century's great conceptual artists," writes Chris Dumas in Nextbook. "A composer whose assaultive music was categorized as 'classical' because record stores didn't know where else to put it, Kagel was an intellectual prankster and social provocateur on the grand, protean level of Marcel Duchamp - or Lenny Bruce.... In his short films (and one feature) for German television, he demonstrated a surrealist sense of dramatic illogic and a master's eye for visual form, coupling his propriety-shredding music with equally propriety-shredding images."

"Like a weird cinematic version of the Roll Chronicle of British kings, it sometimes seems that the GPO Film Unit stands at the head of the family tree of British film and television," writes Scott Anthony, introducing an "alphabetical introduction to an enduring, and highly unlikely, cultural legacy." The occasion: Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit, at BFI Southbank through October 2.

Also in the Guardian, Michael Billington remembers David Hugh Jones, "an immensely distinguished director in theatre, film and television. Although latterly based in New York, he was a pillar of the Royal Shakespeare Company in a golden decade from 1968 and had a long association with Harold Pinter that led, in 1978, to a memorable BBC Play of the Week, Langrishe, Go Down, and, in 1983, to a film of Betrayal."

And: Timur Bekmambetov "is to take charge of a modern day "graphic novel-style" adaptation of Herman Melville's classic of brooding obsession on the high seas, Moby Dick," notes Ben Child, picking up and mulling over Michael Fleming's report for Variety.

Keira Knightley might play Zelda Fitzgerald, reports the BBC.

As a Film Comment online exclusive, Rob Nelson talks with director Lance Hammer about Ballast.

Laszlo Kriston is having a grand time at the San Sebastian Film Festival. And, as he notes in a dispatch to indieWIRE, he's been watching films, too. Also, a roundup from Kim Adelmon: "What Was Hot This Summer at North America's Three Biggest Short Film Festivals."

More fests and events:

• Michael Guillén has been previewing a few of the Latin American entries at this year's Mill Valley Film Festival.

• "I'm helping to run a film society in my Brooklyn neighborhood, based out of Congregation Beth Elohim." From the House Next Door, Keith Uhlich sends an invitation to tonight's event.

• Dennis Harvey at SF360 on Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer: "Whether you dig jazz or not, O'Day's charisma and her story make this movie riveting." Starts Friday in San Francisco.

• "One of the valuable and particularly enjoyable aspects of this year's Sydney Film Festival," writes Richard Phillips at the WSWS, "was its Deborah Kerr eight-movie retrospective."

Ryland Walker Knight presents a "conjunction of quotations."

"Without a couple of recognizably fallible and ordinary men like Harvey Dent and Commissioner Gordon at its center, The Dark Knight would ultimately be nothing more than an exceptionally well-tooled and smartly-acted thriller," argues Chris Barsanti at PopMatters. More from John Adair.

"The way I see it, there are two main problems with distribution as it stands today: one, release windows, and two, online experience." Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo for Filmmaker.

"Two titans of the indie film world are in a heated disagreement over distribution plans for one of the fall's biggest releases - a film that might not turn out to be a fall release at all." Steven Zeitchik in the Hollywood Reporter: "The Weinstein Co chief Harvey Weinstein and uber-producer Scott Rudin are in an intense back-and-forth over whether to release the Weinstein Co war-crimes drama The Reader in 2008 or wait until next year." As a reminder, the film is Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's bestseller starring Kate Winslet.

"This week DreamWorks and parent Paramount Pictures will begin the thorny task of unwinding their business ties, specifically as it applies to more than 200 movie projects in development at DreamWorks that are owned by Paramount," blogs the Los Angeles Times' Claudia Eller. Those projects will be of particular interest to Steven Spielberg and his associate Stacey Snider because the new DreamWorks, backed by India's Reliance ADA Group, will essentially open its doors with a bare cupboard. Some of the hoped-for movies have been in the works at DreamWorks for years, and would provide a valuable jump-start for the new venture."

For the Independent, Caitlin Graham rounds up the ten best places to study documentary filmmaking.

Online listening tip. Milos Stehlik talks with Richard Brody about his book, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.

Online viewing tip #1. Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising. Brian Stelter talks with him about it in the New York Times. Catherine Shoard is collecting critical reactions for the Guardian, where Ben Walters finds it "a disappointment that will give ammunition to those who see Moore as a self-aggrandising propagandist while contributing little of substance to the present campaign - one that threatens to put both 2004 and 2000 in the shade when it comes to duplicitous, culturally divisive campaigning."

Online viewing tip #2. From C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark: "In celebration of having just received via mail a copy of Amid Amidi's marvelously illustrated book, Cartoon Modern, I am posting one of the defining classics of modernist animation, Flebus (1957), directed and scored by Ernest Pintoff for the Terrytoons studio under the supervision of genius animator/designer, Gene Deitch."

Online viewing tip #3. Mike Everleth has the trailer for the ATA Film & Video Festival, running October 4 through 4 in San Francisco.

Online viewing tips. Via Fimoculous: At the Daily Swarm: "The Death of the Music Critic?"... and at Wired, Jake Swearingen presents "Six New Directors Who Are Making Music Video Cool Again."

NYFF. The Class.

"The Class [site], a French high-school drama that emerged as the popular underdog winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, belongs to the largely inspirational tradition of the classroom movie," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times.

"Sometimes the films in this category are odes to youthful rebellion - Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct, Lindsay Anderson's If... - but more often (and certainly in the American iterations) they are celebrations of the charismatic, inventive pedagogue, as embodied by Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle, Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds or Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson. The Class simultaneously revives and undermines this longstanding genre." Downloadable from that same page in the New York Times is Manohla Dargis's interview with Laurent Cantet.

"Cantet's upward career trajectory has been odd enough," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door: "one of his major themes is negotiating capitalism while trying to maintain ethical integrity (which, admittedly, would probably be an easier sell right now, but still not all that sexy). It's strangely inevitable that Cantet would get around to a macrocosmic portrait of contemporary French society's startlingly diverse ethnic composition and try to report back on the state of the nation; he's nothing if not an earnestly liberal, political filmmaker. In that sense, The Class is his most ambitious film, even as it feels like one of his most modest."

"In 1999, Mr Cantet made Human Resources which parlayed a family scuffle into a labor dispute, with a white-collar son finding himself pitted against his blue-collar father. In 2001, with Time Out, Mr Cantet told the story of a man who neglects to inform his family that he has lost his job and slips down a spiral of fear, shame, and self-disgust. Four years later, Mr Cantet's Heading South examined the rift separating First World tourists and Third World sex workers, as white women of privilege traveled to Haiti and paid handsome men to be their sexual companions. Mr Cantet's films are piercing but also empathetic, reflective of a director intent on making a point but also open to the notion of loving his flawed characters." S James Snyder talks with him for the New York Sun.

"Because reflective of 2008 culture in more ways than one, The Class goes for documentary-realism by shooting with an unnecessarily shaky handheld camera zoomed in on a series of talking-head close-ups, but looks more like a glossy Apple commercial, with plastic white backgrounds, completely even lighting, and HD's well-detailed, flattened spaces (whereas last years NYFF sensation Silent Light owed less to Dreyer than to IKEA)." David Phelps in Slant: "As if Cantet and company could afford an expensive camera, but not a tripod? Formally worthless, The Class is, once again, just mediocre, pass-the-time TV; feel free to head to the toilet in the middle, read the comics, check your weight, grab a beer, and you won't miss a thing."

"What matters here is language. [Cantet] looks at how speech circulates and the relationship to power and authority, rather than a depiction of learning in the strict sense." For Dissidenz, Emmanuelle Mougne considers the film alongside Mariana Otero's La loi du collège (School Law).

The Class is Cineuropa's latest "Film Focus"; earlier, Fabien Lemercier noted that the film will represent France in the race for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 9/24: "[E]ven at its most scripted, Cantet's latest - boasting a clarity and consistency of vision that's as bracing as its naturalistic performances - is vigorous, incisive, immediate," writes Nick Schager.

"The Class ranks among the best classroom movies I have ever seen, and these include Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) and Alf Sjoberg's Torment (Hets), from a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "I mention these classic clashes between youth and authority because in a much subtler and more nuanced way, The Class is disturbingly contemporary in its reflection of a spreading anti-intellectualism among the youth around the world, and not just among the youth."

Updates, 9/26: "The Class isn't directly about civil unrest and French identity as a republican ideal, though these issues run through it like a powerful current, keeping the children and adults (and the filmmaking) on edge," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Rather, the director, Laurent Cantet - using a small team and three high-definition video cameras - keeps a steady eye on the children, these anxious, maddening little people flailing and sometimes stalling on the entryway to adulthood."

"It's a movie about the classroom not as a safe place isolated from the outside world, but as a place where disparate people from that outside world come together, with all the conflicts and revelations that that kind of messy mingling implies," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

"To date, I've gotten through roughly 71 percent of the Festival's main slate, and no film has affected me quite so deeply," writes John Magary at the Reeler.

"Realism is the mode du jour of international art cinema, so it's fitting that the New York Film Festival opens with Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or winner, "The Class," an exercise in naturalist mise-en-scene, improvisatory nonprofessional acting, and immediate handheld cinematography." Leo Goldsmith in indieWIRE: "These tropes should by now be familiar to audiences attending a festival that will also feature works by likeminded filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke and Kelly Reichardt (and hosted Hou Hsaio-hsien's and Lee Chang-dong's similar films last year). But Cantet's film impresses if even for the feat of credibly portraying the atmosphere of a classroom full of fourteen-year-old urban Parisians - with all of the adolescent storm and stress that such a petri dish would necessarily create."

"Quietly heartbreaking while maintaining both intimacy and reserve in its documentary aesthetic, The Class... is the most acomplished film about modern education since Frederick Wiseman's masterpiece High School," writes Brandon Harris at Hammer to Nail. "It is that all too rare movie that leaves our assumptions and prejudices thoroughly tested."

"The Class, while undeniably catering to middlebrow tastes, possesses reserves of humanity, especially in contrast to some of its patronizing brethren," argues Michael Joshua Rowin in Reverse Shot.

Update, 10/3: "If The Class were just meant as an antidote to the long course of ridiculous inspirational classroom movies, the shape it takes would be enough," writes Alison Willmore. "But Cantet's film is also resolutely evenhanded with the way its school's determinedly democratic processes can fail.... In the best way, it doesn't feel like a story at all."

Update, 10/4: "Complaining that a two-hour movie can't match the dizzying depth and cumulative force of an entire season of The Wire (see also Gomorrah) may seem unfair, but there's no denying that in its second half, as The Class's anecdotal nature gets overwhelmed by the question of whether certain problem students are worth 'saving,' the film moves into territory that David Simon and his crew handled with a great deal more complexity and finesse - in part because they didn't restrict themselves entirely to the school grounds." Mike D'Angelo at Filmcatcher, also featuring an a target="_blank" href="http://www.filmcatcher.com/interview_detail/110/520/">interview with Cantet.

Update, 10/25: "What The Class does extremely well (and with great subtlety) is to question the purpose and function of the education system, and the role it plays in the development (mental/social/etc.) of a child," writes Andrew Grant in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Though a work of fiction, The Class is a remarkably honest film, and one that portrays kids as neither precocious nor precious, nor as a mouthpiece for adult ideas and words. Though it (obviously) addresses issues about the French education system, there’s something surprisingly universal about it, and much of the film will resonate with any parent of a school-aged child."

DVDs, 9/23.

"Hey kids, let's put on a Marxist film collective!" Jonathan Kiefer: "That, more or less, was a founding principle of Cine Manifest, the seven-member strong (and sometimes less strong) assembly of San Francisco filmmakers working from 1972 through 1978 to make politically potent movies that regular people could tolerate. Judy Irola's breezy personal documentary Cine Manifest... brings a fond, proud and wistful recollection of the group's formation and probably inevitable dissolution."

Chuck Tryon finds it "a solid contribution to understanding not only the broader histories of independent filmmaking and 1970s politics but also the narrower personal reflections and reassessments of those histories."

"What's become known as 'the Bill Douglas trilogy' - a brace of short features/featurettes made between 1972 and 1978 - is one of those rarely seen, rarely exhibited, distributively cursed legends skulking around the borders of the modern canon, revered by the few but largely ignored, and sprouting from a swatch of time in its national cinema when there was little else worth noting," writes Michael Atkinson at Moving Image Source. "Taken together as a single film, the trilogy may be the most concentrated and merciless act of family vengeance in cinema history."

The Ken Russell at the BBC set is "indispensible," but Tim Lucas notes that one film is missing: "Months of anticipation wasted, and my day is ruined."

All three films collected in Aki Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy "are delightful, on some level," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door. "They all involve people who work at low-level jobs: garbage-men, factory workers of all kinds, shop girls. In the second film, Ariel (1988), the heroine (Susanna Haavisto) begins as a meter maid giving out tickets, then progresses to jobs where she always seems to be cutting up disgustingly large sides of beef. Yet these movies don't feel like drudgery, maybe because they aren't in any way realistic; they take place in a tightly controlled world of their own. I've never been to Finland, but I'd be surprised to find even a vestige of Kaurismäki's grim, deadpan cuteness."

"Kaurismäki is still busy - both The Man Without a Past (2002) and Lights in the Dusk (2006) made it onto US screens - but it's his bursting work of the late 80s and early 90s that will be remembered, and not merely for their faded hipness," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC. "As expert in dry comic timing as Keaton, Kaurismäki is a cunning intelligence interrogating the empathic rhythms of moviewatching by way of Job tragedy and comatose vaudeville. Still, your experience is never preordained: watching a Kaurismäki movie, you may guffaw when no one else on Earth would, and vice-versa." Also reviewed: Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Shadow, "a mysterious and rarely discussed work, a lurking examination of collaborationism and resistance as it's expressed in an investigation into the identity of a dead man."

Silver Jew is out today. Director Michael Tully: "I think the reason many Jewish film festivals ignored us after requesting a screener is because the film isn't about Judaism as much as it is about faith and connection in a universal sense. I think the reason many other festivals didn't respond to the film is because it didn't have a clear-cut agenda. I think the reason some music fans may have been disappointed is because we avoided providing a historical context for David and the band. These are the exact reasons why I'm so proud of the film."

"[E]pilogue aside, [The Last Laugh] can really best be understood as a horror story, the horror of a modernity that leaves behind the old and infirm and the horror of a world that places its greatest emphasis on outward tokens of significance, while everywhere effacing the importance of the individual," writes Andrew Schenker, reviewing Kino's "Deluxe Restored Edition" in Slant.

Cullen Gallagher at Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Häxen: "The religious power of the camera is commented on again in the final section of the film, in which [Benjamin] Christensen analogizes the supposed signs of witchcraft not only to symptoms of hysteria in contemporary medical practices, but also to star-crazed movie fandom."

Erich Keursten at Bright Lights After Dark on Moontide: "This is a great little piece of California neo-realist 'dream poetry' - something John Steinbeck might dream up after a night of opium smoking with his Cannery Row bum buddies."

Bill Hare has the Noir of the Week: The Third Man.

Glenn Kenny's "Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" at the Auteurs' Notebook is now the "Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report": "The Eureka!/Masters of Cinema series, an offshoot of the Masters of Cinema website, recently released a new version of Bruno Dumont's 1997 debut feature La Vie de Jesus on disc. In so doing, they issued a valuable corrective."

"Last Saturday, 9 to 5: The Musical opened in Los Angeles in preparation for its Broadway debut in April 2009," notes Megan Hustad in Slate. "Will a 30-year-old comedy about sexism in the workplace feel as period as Mad Men? Has consciousness raising turned into camp? The DVD of 9 to 5, released most recently in a 'Sexist, Egotistical, Lying, Hypocritical Bigot Edition,' offers a chance to see how far we have - and haven't - come."

Jen Chaney in the Washington Post on the High School Flashback Collection: "John Hughes saved my generation. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but to the kids who struggled with their own particular brand of adolescent angst in the 1980s, Hughes's coming-of-age films served as the best kind of cinematic comfort food. Collectively, they reminded teens that it's okay to be confused, jaded, occasionally depressed and completely comfortable with eating Cap'n Crunch and Pixy Stix sandwiches for lunch."

"I can appreciate disturbing material employed for a purpose, but Cannibal Holocaust says very little as loudly and obnoxiously as possible," grumbles Andrew Bemis.

"Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) and Martin Scorsese's non-profit film preservation organization, The Film Foundation, have teamed up to release onto DVD beloved titles from the Sony catalog that have been out of circulation for years." Douglas Polisin has a few details at MovieMaker. Via the SXSW News Reel.

Online viewing tip. The NYT's AO Scott on Do the Right Thing.

DVD roundups: Paul Clark (Screengrab), DVD Talk, PopMatters and Slant.

And as always, keep an eye on the Guru.

Jamie Stuart's NYFF46 series begins.

At Filmmaker, Jason Guerrasio introduces the online viewing tip we've been waiting for: "In Jamie Stuart's first episode in his series of shorts on the 46th New York Film Festival, he invites us into his wild imagination while sitting in on press conferences for directors Laurent Cantet and Kelly Reichardt."

Earlier: Karina Longworth's appreciation of Jamie Stuart's work.

The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration.

"The Godfather films remain the 20th-century answer to Shakespeare's plays of royal succession, with the twist that here Prince Hal grows up, not into Henry V, but Richard III." And in the New York Times, Dave Kehr has nothing but praise for the newly restored, "miraculously rejuvenated" versions of all three films, released today in Blu-ray and standard DVD editions as The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration. In a followup note at his site on Paramount's mistreatment of the original negatives, Dave Kehr also has "Before" and "After" screengrabs.

Ambrose Heron has put together quite an entry on the set. He's got clips from the extras and points to Bill Hunt's extensive backgrounder on the restoration in Digital Bits and to Stephanie Argy's piece in American Cinematographer.

Updated through 9/26.

As noted earlier, "The 'Coppola Restoration' Letters" that Glenn Kenny has posted are must-reads: Parts 1, 2 and 3; and a Postscript.

"Nearly all interiors are richer, more substantial. The blacks in such scenes are, if anything, blacker - certainly more solidly, less apologetically so." At DVD Beaver, Leonard Norwitz gets into the nitty gritty and posts a slew of screengrabs.

"The movie is back to its inky finest." Via Movie City News, Mike Snider tells a briefer version the story of the restoration in the USA Today, so if you're in a hurry: "A decade ago, Paramount stored all its Godfather film elements in a cold vault to help preserve them until a full digital makeover was possible.... Fast-forward to 2005: Coppola, looking to renew the preservation effort, wrote to Spielberg when DreamWorks was acquired by Paramount. Could Spielberg, who had been involved in restoring Lawrence of Arabia, spur on the project? It was an offer Spielberg could not refuse."

"[W]hat can I say? It's The Godfather." Jamie S Rich at DVD Talk: "Debates over the color palette aside, this restoration job cleans up the movies and makes them look brand new. Couple that with the fact that the already excellent extras now have a few new siblings to go with them, and this is, at last, the comprehensive Godfather collection cineastes have been clamoring for."

"Is it overkill to claim that The Godfather on Blu-ray is a sign of the format coming to maturity?" asks Sean Axmaker.

Screengrab presents a special Godfather edition of "That Guy!," their "sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous."

Updates: At NewTeeVee, Chris Albrecht reports that the trilogy will be available as a digital download. Probably not the restored version. "The press announcement was pretty slim on details," he adds. Via the SXSW News Reel.

At Screengrab, Sarah Clyne Sundberg and Phil Nugent debate Part III.

New York's Film Forum is screening the restored Parts I and II through October 2.

Update, 9/24: At the Guardian, Ben Child notes that The Godfather tops Empire's readers poll of the "500 Greatest Movies of All Time."

Update, 9/26: "Essential in the truest sense of the word," insists Matt Noller in Slant.

NYFF 08, 9/23.

Last week's New York Film Festival-in-general entry is about to fall off the front page, so I'll pick things up here. First, take a look at this: the Film Society of Lincoln Center has launched the filmlinc blog.

Updated through 9/27.

"Take your pick of rant: the fondness for returning to previously featured filmmakers; the Cannes-upon-the-Hudson bent that draws deeply from that pre-eminent French showcase; the simultaneously obligatory and myopic geographic spotlighting, or just the wariness of alienating viewers with too many adventurous movies in a given year." Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun: "Though often overblown (or of interest to a precious few), some of these concerns do crop up with this year's roster, along with the usual outwardly mysterious absence of certain lauded films. But, despite all that, this year marks some identifiable steps toward getting some new names onto the foldout festival calendar."

Update: "In Praise of the Walter Reade Theater," Nathan Lee at WNYC's ART.CULT.

Update, 9/24: "The NYFF has an understandable interest in showcasing the highlights of the big three international festivals but, to my mind, a greater mission in showcasing those movies yet to land US distribution - and this year, there are many." Selection committee member J Hoberman previews the batch in the Voice.

Updates, 9/26: "The 46th New York Film Festival includes a striking number of features - among them some of the strongest and freshest films likely to be shown on Manhattan screens this year - that might be called semi- or quasi- or crypto-documentaries." AO Scott in the New York Times.

"In programming relatively few features (28 this year) - most of them drawn from the major European festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Venice - and in insisting on a pre-pop-culture vision of cinema as an art form, festival director Richard Peña and his staff have, perversely enough, proven to be shrewd table-setters for the fall film marketplace." Andrew O'Hehir's big preview for Salon.

"It has a decidedly French twist," writes Howard Feinstein at indieWIRE. "For one thing, 18 of the 28 features in this edition of the New York Film Festival bowed in Cannes in May. Four 'fully' French movies and eight co-pros with French backing are being screened. Given the weight of place, of site, in this year's crop, the latter frequently translates into product placement, aka 'embedded marketing,' not of Converse or Nike but of France itself - more economic exchange than organic inclusion."

"It's still small," notes writes John Magary at the Reeler," "still gives no awards and appoints actual working critics (!) to its selection committee. With its bones thrown to the black-tie opera set, it's skewed a little fancy. And it is, after 46 years, still the very best. For the New York Film Festival gives what all the best festivals give: Reverence."

"[I]t's tempting to look upon what is, by the increasingly popular 'more is more' programming standards of Cannes, Toronto, Sundance, and Tribeca, a comparatively small slate of 28 contemporary features as a reliable bellwether of global cinematic trends." Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun.

"The 2008 New York Film Festival comes after eight months of international film festivals that generally left critics disappointed," notes Steve Erickson in Gay City News, pointing out that there are, of course, nevertheless films in the lineup well worth catching.

Update, 9/27: Benjamin Strong has an overview in Fanzine.

Romy Schneider @ 70.

The Sissi trilogy, a holiday season perennial on European television, is a happy if somewhat troubled marriage of the Heimat and history-as-pageant films of the postwar era in Mitteleuropan cinema. Romy Schneider would break with Vienna, then Hollywood, to become a Europudding icon - engaged to Alain Delon, working for the likes of Luchino Visconti - and then, the tragic end.

Little wonder Europeans love to hear the tale told over and again. Today, Schneider would have been 70 and, starting at least a week ago, tributes have appeared on TV and in magazines and the papers. For example: Andreas Conrad (Tagesspiegel), Lisa Feldmann (Welt), Regula Freuler (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), Cristina Fischer (Junge Welt), Claudia Lenssen (taz), Ralf Schenk (Berliner Zeitung), Christian Schröder (Tagesspiegel) and Werner Sudendorf (Welt).

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Michael Hanfeld reports from the Côte d'Azur - and the set of Romy, a biopic starring Jessica Schwarz.

An exhibition of portraits is on view at Opelvillen in Rüsselheim through December 28.

Update: Arbogast posts an appreciation.

NYFF. In the Realm of Oshima.

Come December, many lucky New Yorkers will likely look back on the New York Film Festival program In the Realm of Oshima as one of if not the major event of the year in film.

At Hammer to Nail, Nelson Kim offers a brief biography of the director known by most for a single film ("an excellent film, but something of a footnote to his major period: it's as if Godard were known only as the maker of Hail Mary") and previews seven of the 23 features:

Updated through 9/26.

These are the ones I'd consider essential viewing - but don't limit yourself to my picks: the retrospective is also showing several films that are nearly impossible to find in the US (including his first feature, A Town of Love and Hope). Nor should you stop at one or two and call it a day, convincing yourself that you've now "done" Oshima. Furiously self-reinventing, determined to avoid repeating himself or falling into cliché, he changed his style and mode of attack with each new film. As with the 60s films of Godard, to whom he's so often compared, the more you see, the more amazing the total achievement becomes. What's truly remarkable about his most fertile period isn't a single standout movie, or even two or three or four, but the body of work as a whole, considered as a continuous, restlessly innovative inquiry into the revolutionary potential of cinema.

As mentioned earlier, Film Comment is featuring online not only a piece on Oshima from its current issue but also three "online exclusives" taken from the archives. "Forty years ago Nagisa Oshima was one of the biggest names in world cinema, a brilliant modernist who made consistently electrifying films, each one radically different in form and style from the rest," writes Tony Rayns. "If he'd been French, he'd be as well known as Godard - and probably more influential.... [S]o the touring retrospective put together by James Quandt at the Cinematheque Ontario is an essential reassertion of his talent and importance."

The online exclusives: Rayns on In the Realm of the Senses, from the September/October 1976 issue, James Bouras on the censorship of that film (January/February 1977) and Chuck Stephens on Gohatto (November/December 2000).

Updates, 9/26: "With this once-towering figure almost in eclipse, it is hard to overstate the significance of In the Realm of Oshima, his first major retrospective in the United States in more than 20 years," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "The retrospective, which will travel to about a dozen other North American cities, is a labor of love for its curator, James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, who has worked on it for 10 years, tracking down obscure print sources and negotiating a tangle of rights problems. In the context of an amnesiac film culture, it is also a heroic intervention, a bid to safeguard a master's place in the canon."

David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook:

His films, which, in both senses of the term, "forge" just about any style, can be seen as formalist fuck-yous to society; they're often inquests into the failure of Japanese politics and history on even the most personal level, from Cruel Story of Youth's goon teen hooligans, Nick Ray's rebels given murderous cause, to The Ceremony's affected aristocrats, strung with all the hypocrisies of a ruling class pretending it's not dead. Politics inevitably infiltrates the private sphere, as characters seek an outlet for their wrath, itself the product of a society that has, so much of the time, betrayed its members politically and then demanded they closet their worst inhibitions. The outlet is sometimes rape and sometimes suicide, but always, needless to say, some form of exploitation that only leads to more betrayals; if Oshima's characters are so frequently betrayed by their own class, whatever class it is, it's all they can do to find people exactly like themselves to hurt. Like the characters of Tati or Antonioni or Resnais or Kubrick from the same period, Oshima's rebels really just rebel against anonymity—only to find doppelgangers everywhere.

More from Simon Abrams in the New York Press.

Chris Fujiwara at Moving Image Source on The Man Who Left His Will on Film: "With its images of stagnation that bewilder, bore, and vaguely frighten the on-screen viewers (the young members of the revolutionary film unit), the film-within-the-film provokes, and makes clear, a crisis of representation. In the nothing-to-see of these images is the premonition of a near future when there is nothing to do: when the adversary can be located only with difficulty, because it permeates all levels of the society, and when making revolution is no longer meaningful, because, like Hegel's slave, one has given up one's death."

Shorts, fests, etc, 9/22.

"It would be quite easy to go so far as to conclude that even though [Koji] Wakamatsu's filmography now includes several dozen accomplished works, United Red Army is without doubt his most complete, ambitious and overwhelming work to date," writes Rea Amit. "It was achieved only after a few years of flooding Tokyo with pamphlets requesting pledges of substantial sums of money to finance the project (signatories of these pamphlets included musician Jim O'Rourke, who composed the film's musical score, and film critic Inuhiko Yomota). In other words, we could say that the movie is a zenith in Wakamatsu's oeuvre, towards which he had been heading for a long time, far earlier even than the actual production process."

More new reviews at Midnight Eye:

• Keith Fancher: "Satoshi Miki's Adrift in Tokyo is a difficult film to categorize. Is it a road movie? A city film? A buddy movie? A comedy? A drama? The short answer is: yes."

• Bryan Hartzheim on Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones, "a wrecking ball to what can be considered the indulgencies of the seishun eiga genre, an exhibition of the horrors of uninhibited youth taken to its carnal extremes and matched by a visual accompaniment akin to the abstract and improvised style of a Miles Davis score."

• Again, Rea Amit: "Mandala is the mid part of [Akio] Jissoji's Buddhist trilogy which opened with This Transient Life (Mujo, 1970) and sealed with Poem (Uta, 1972). While each part shows a strong thematic commitment with several Buddhist ideas, each one is also cinematically and narratively unique in itself."

"Stephen Parr licenses film and video footage, and currently presents some of the best film screenings in town with his Oddball Films series.... Parr's work is currently being appreciated in the Bay Area Now 5 series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in a screening of Euphoria this coming Thursday." Sean Uyehara talks with him for SF360.

More fests and events:

• Mike Everleth has the lineup for this weekend's Coney Island Film Festival.

• For the New York Sun, S James Snyder talks with Thom Powers, documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival and organizer of Stranger Than Fiction, the series kicking off at the IFC Center tomorrow and running through November 25: "Having cultivated a loyal following of attendees and offered some filmmakers their entrée into the New York movie scene, Stranger Than Fiction is more than just a weekly film series; it's often a celebration of those unsung documentary films that Mr Powers wants to share with his friends and colleagues."

• "[T]here still exist a number of severely depressed and abandoned towns scattered just outside the county lines of California's largest metropolitan areas," notes Catherine Taft in Artforum. "These sites - former boomtowns established around specific industries and occupied by laborers - are the subject of Lee Anne Schmitt's haunting new film, California Company Town." Premieres tonight at REDCAT in Los Angeles.

• At the Evening Class, Michael Hawley previews the Mill Valley Film Festival, running October 2 through 12.

Acquarello: "Like Boris Lehman's autobiographical essay Looking for my Birthplace, Albert Solé's Bucharest, Memory Lost is a search for identity - the reconstruction of a past that has been lost in the shadows of turbulent history, exile, and parental silence."

"There is much to admire in José Luis Torres Leiva's The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain / El Cielo, la tierra, y la lluvia: the film's haptic Chilean landscapes, its textured aural compliments, a precise feeling for the region's unceasing winter precipitation and its metaphoric relation of class with the aforesaid deluge." Michael J Anderson finds fault but also "real filmmaking promise."

"With his fourth narrative feature Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique (The Sea Wall) boasting its world premiere at the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, Rithy Panh adapts the eponymously-entitled 1950 novel by Marguerite Duras - a classic work of French literature - to make a compelling, sumptuous, yet politically astute film about his native country." And Michael Guillén interviews him.

"Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping is virtually defined by its slow, swirling rhythms, but one of the first things that is apparent about Bill Forsyth's passionate, faithful film adapatation is that, as story telling, it starts out with a hop, skip, and jump; and although an idea of leisurely pacing is sustained throughout, the movie never dawdles, stalls, or grinds to a halt." Jonathan Rosenbaum posts his 1988 review.

In the Guardian, Paul Rennie offers historical context for the poster for Blow Up.

Vulture's got the complete list of Emmy winners. Nathaniel R live-blogged the evening. Commentary: Heather Havrilesky (Salon) and Alessandra Stanley (New York Times).

At the SpoutBlog, Brandon Harris asks Ry Russo-Young about her media diet.

Online listening tip. Vinyl Is Podcast #2: "Future calendar highlights, with Brian Darr."

Interview. Ferzan Ozpetek.

"If you're lucky enough to have ever been part of a band of deeply close friends, then add writer/director Ferzan Ozpetek's new film Saturn in Opposition (Saturno Contro) to your must-see list immediately," wrote James Van Maanen when he caught the film as part of this summers Open Roads series of new Italian Films at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York.

It was then, too, that he got a chance to talk with the director about his work - and more than a little, too, about what the current administrations in the US and Italy are really after. Meantime, with Saturn in Opposition now coming out on DVD, you can take James's advice, too.

NYFF. Wendy and Lucy.

"Much like her last film, Old Joy, Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy is another slice of minimalist indie-Americana that has been receiving rave reviews since its debut at Cannes, particularly for Michelle Williams's stirring lead performance," writes Filmbrain.

"That I wasn't completely bowled over by the film has left me with an intangible sense of disquiet... While there's certainly much to admire about the film, I can't help but cling to the notion that there's something missing, and that it (at times) employs conventional tactics that weaken the work."

"Reichardt's artistry outweighs (or at least sufficiently counterbalances) her ambition to Say Something About Amerika," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "Reichardt's style clears the mind: dialogue is minimal - not artificially, just leaving Williams on her own - framings elegant and magisterial. I didn't realize how much I liked it until 20 minutes after it was over. The world Reichardt explores - the flat parking lots so close to the woods - is one I recognize. Reichardt's political ideas are easy to translate into words, and not necessarily good ones; what makes her film haunting is mostly ineffable."

"Like a few of the other very few good, visible, working American filmmakers (Van Sant, Jacobs, Hutton, Benning, Malick, maybe Kerrigan, not to mention lessers like Haynes, Penn and Gianvito), Reichhardt, in an age of globalization and gentrification, Starbucks and Walmarts, is obsessed with recovering hints of Americana: trains and campfires and hobos, marginalized migrants, the people, pioneers or nomads or both, who, as Woody Guthrie put it (and trains do), keep on keeping on," writes David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Mythic folk figure or lonely dog-lover, Wendy is one of what, despite the absence of the new Dardennes film, looks to be a series of NYFF protagonists pacing constantly and tacitly, unable to communicate with a world and its rigid social order that're totally incompatible with their own private dreams and fears (see also, by all means: The Headless Woman, Tony Manero)."

"Absent any showy histrionics or mannerisms, [Williams's] performance makes painfully real Reichardt's depiction of everyday problems magnified by poverty into mini-calamities, exhibiting a measured grace that's matched by complementary beginning-middle-end tracking shots - of woman and dog playing fetch, of dog pound cages, and of dusk-dappled trees spied from a moving train - that encapsulate the film's emotional trajectory from contentment to sorrow to hopeful uncertainty." Nick Schager in Slant.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and Toronto.

Update, 10/4: Artforum's Brian Sholis interviews Reichardt.

Toronto and NYFF. Happy-Go-Lucky.

"On the outskirts of Mike Leigh's blissful Happy-Go-Lucky [site] lie child abusers, stalkers and supremacists, homeless, hairy troglodytes, school bullies, back problems, driving perils, and a series of crumbling relationships no amount of bourgeois BBQs and videogaming seem quite prepared to rectify (quite the reverse," writes David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"[S]tarry-eyed heroine, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), takes driving lessons with a trait-by-trait carbon copy of Travis Bickle (Eddie Marsan). What's funny, if it's funny, is people's ability to take it all for granted and move on. Like so many comedies, Happy-Go-Lucky shows us how to accept the world, if not destroy it, as a terrible, terrible place."

"As an equal fan of Leigh's bleak early television work and his delightful Life is Sweet and Topsy-Turvy, I had High Hopes for his new film," writes Ella Taylor. "But despite the elfin charm of Sally Hawkins, who plays an elementary schoolteacher with a sunny outlook that repels all adversity, Happy-Go-Lucky struck me as another form of condescension to the lower orders, only in primary colors."

"Leigh and Hawkins may have overly conceived this eccentric schoolteacher, but it should be noted that they're dealing within the realm of fantasy—trying to show how hard it is for people to retain their essential goodness in spite of the indignities small and large that subsume their lives," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. Without certain "striking, borderline frightening scenes that sketch the girl's selfless devotion to others, it would have been too easy to write Happy-Go-Lucky as a lark. With them, the film soars."

"[F]or all its surface innocuousness, Happy-Go-Lucky builds to a climax that's at once utterly predictable and deeply moving," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "It kind of ruined my day. It works because the outlines are banal but the performances are phenomenally lived-in."

"Perhaps it all simply would have worked better as a musical," suggests Pacze Moj.

Stephanie Zacharek talks with Leigh about for Salon.

Earlier: Reviews from the UK.

Update, 9/23: "[T]he synthesis of gags and melodrama seems strained in Happy-Go-Lucky: much of the narrative trajectory, slight as it is, appears recycled from earlier, better Leigh films," writes Richard Porton in Cinema Scope. "[S]ince Leigh appears to have more affinities with his gloomier protagonists than with inveterate optimist Poppy, Happy-Go-Lucky, is, good intentions notwithstanding, a rather fraudulent and half-hearted enterprise."

Update, 9/24: "Leigh's portrait sporadically flirts with mushiness, yet melodramatics are avoided thanks in part to the director's restraint as well as, more fundamentally, to Hawkins' marvelously unpretentious performance, which initially seems destined for corny shtick but is imbued with disarmingly genuine heart that's made complicated and authentic by her sporadic flashes of seriousness and sadness," writes Nick Schager.

Update, 9/26: The filmlinc blog has some online viewing: Leigh and Hawkins at their press conference.

Updates, 10/3: William Georgiades talks with Leigh for the Los Angeles Times.

Online listening and viewing tips. Ed Champion talks with Leigh; Filmcatcher interviews Hawkins and Leigh, while IFC has video from the press conference.

Choke.

"Adapted from a half-baked novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, Choke chronicles yet another anomic antihero/narrator (Sam Rockwell, at 39 about a decade too old for the part) struggling against anomie amid abandonment issues," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "Choke makes its source material's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink absurdism broader, less expressive and cheaply reductive."

"The self-described cultists can talk amongst themselves about this movie's omissions and distortions of its source, but there's no question of its basic fidelity to Palahniuk's pet themes - particularly that memory and imagination, especially where trauma is concerned, are subjective and selective." Jonathan Kiefer.

Updated through 9/24.

"What wisdom does Choke offer to he who endures?" asks Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "'Sometimes it's not important which way you jump - just that you jump.' So the dirty jokes hide a heart of platitudes. Choke should be flung into the dumpster of preening, 'edgy' pop nihilism somewhere under Dexter and Clerks 2, and immediately forgotten."

This "is the first movie chockablock with nude women I've ever fought to stay awake at," notes David Edelstein in New York.

"Palahniuk didn't just write Choke - to a degree, he lived it." A profile from Simon Abrams for the New York Press.

At BlackBook, Ben Barna chats with director Clark Gregg, Rockwell and Palahniuk. Sample question: "If you could live inside any single cartoon, which cartoon would you want to live inside for the rest of your life?"

Earlier: Ed Champion and reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 9/24: "Gregg knows better than to try matching Fincher's gaga aesthetic choices, so he heads a hundred miles in the opposite direction by aiming for grungy authenticity," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "[T]he choice undercuts this very funny film once Choke's storyline exits the realm of the rational."

"It took a long time, but Sam Rockwell has finally become Edward Norton." Josef Braun explains.

"Rockwell could probably play a disaffected ferret like Victor in his sleep, but that easy believability is key, especially when he's forced to reckon with his attraction to nurse Paige (Kelly Macdonald)," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine. "Their halting relationship is a highlight, a through-line that Gregg doesn't grasp with enough firmness. Instead, he celebrates Palahniuk's voice - something the author can do all by himself."

"What, then, is the appeal of Chuck Palahniuk's writing?" asks Paul Matwychuk. "The other day at the office, I wondered aloud who reads these books, to which my co-editor Fawnda Mithrush wearily replied, 'A whole lot of ex-boyfriends.'"

Mike Russell talks with Palahniuk for the Oregonian.

And Aaron Hillis talks with him for IFC.

"Palahniuk and Gregg, who has perhaps the film's funniest role as the theme park's strict taskmaster, both suffer the same flaw," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice: They explain and explain again the genesis of Victor's demons, to the point where the novel and movie play almost like parodies of novels and movies in which a character has to get in touch with his feelings in order to become a better man. Basically, Victor's gonna fuck himself crazy or fuck himself sane - yawn."

Another talk with Palahniuk: Lauren Wissot at the SpoutBlog.

Miracle at St Anna.

"Miracle at St Anna will doubtless be extolled by people who mistake [Spike] Lee's righteous clobbering for moral seriousness," writes David Edelstein in New York. "But compare any scene to Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes (stupidly retitled Days of Glory in the US), in which Algerians - French citizens - fight for a country that gives them no rights: The storytelling is measured, the encounters glancing but rich, the violence more devastating for its restraint. Compare the Taviani brothers' sublime Night of the Shooting Stars, in which comedy bleeds into tragedy and the characters have so much stature you can't believe they're killing one another so absurdly. Lee's climax is part punishing bloodbath, part florid religious uplift, and the coda is so maladroit it's hard to believe anyone on-set could keep a straight face."

Updated through 9/27.

Noel Murray at the AV Club: "This pains me to write, because I'm a lifelong fan of Spike Lee's, and I think his recent run of films (25th Hour, Inside Man, When The Levees Broke) has been downright inspiring, but Miracle at St Anna is a botch of the first order, a movie that telegraphs its leadenness in its first 10 minutes, and departs two-and-a-half hours later having left behind maybe two or three memorable scenes."

"Lee's noble attempt to create a World War II drama with African American soldiers fails to create a compelling narrative, marred as it is by forced melodrama and a shoddy screenplay that sounds like some kind of second rate pulp novel from the 50s," writes Eric Kohn at the Jaman Blog. "The director undoubtedly qualifies as one of the finest American filmmakers of the last 30 years, but he might work better on his home turf."

"There are moments here where the film does not work, where you can feel the sharp needle of disbelief or dislocation puncture the film mercilessly, and there are other moments that are not only willing but indeed eager to look at big, challenging, relevant issues of race and power, war and justice, faith and failure," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "These moments - and there are many of them - not only speak to Lee's unwavering skill and commitment as a filmmaker, but also to the singular nature of his talent and will. When Miracle at St Anna falters, it's in the moments that seem like they could have been crafted by any other filmmaker; when Miracle at St Anna succeeds, it's in the moments that could only have been crafted by Lee."

Nicolas Rapold talks with Lee for the New York Sun.

Updates, 9/24: "Whatever Miracle at St Anna was intended to be - suppressed history revealed, a studio-era trench ensemble throwback, a war movie patchwork borrowing heavily from the kid-in-war subgenre - it fails rather spectacularly," argues Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine.

"Mr Lee has stretched his material in so many different directions that one is left with unacceptable levels of religiosity and sentimentality in the overall context of the naked brutality we have witnessed," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"While the cast is uniformly excellent, it's worth highlighting [Matteo] Sciabordi's moving and underplayed turn - it's one of the best juvenile performances in recent memory," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "More's the pity, then, that those great moments are ultimately outweighed by the ones that don't work, all the way to the would-be tearjerking climax. Lee's creative passion is apparent throughout Miracle at St Anna, but the screenplay lets him, and the audience, down."

"[Y]ou may begin to wonder if Lee really initiated this project or if it only fell into his hands after Roberto Benigni proved unavailable." Scott Foundas in the Voice.

Quick updates, 9/26: "Spike Lee is awkwardly caught between nobility and pulp with his latest, Miracle at St Anna," writes Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot. "The film plays minute to minute like a Sam Fuller-esque two-fister, but those minutes add up, incongruously, to one hell of a ponderous super-sized epic, overflowing with unnecessary subplots and punched up to inglorious heights of excess."

"[S]etting the record straight after so many years and so many movies is not necessarily a simple undertaking, and this film sometimes stumbles under its heavy, self-imposed burden of historical significance," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

More from Jay Antani (Slant), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Brandon Fibbs (cinemattraction), Andy Klein (LA CityBeat), J Robert Parks (Daily Plastic) and Joshua Rothkopf (Time Out New York).

James Hannaham talks with Lee for Salon.

Updates, 9/27: "At two hours and 40 minutes, Miracle is as empty and hollow an 'epic' as they come." Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling.

"Spike Lee's Miracle at St Anna is an ambitious sprawl, a picture that's dramatically compelling in some places and plodding and didactic in others," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "It's also occasionally moving, even when it bends too close to sentimentality. Watching it, I got the sense that Lee had simply decided to pull out all the stops, to sink himself into one hell of a story - part World War II drama, part mystery, part meditation on what it means to fight for a country that might not give a damn about you - and see where it might lead him. Unfortunately, it leads him in circles. And yet there's enough vitality here to keep the picture going, even through the rough patches."

James Rocchi talks with Lee for Cinematical.

Shorts, fests, etc, 9/21.

Today's must-read: Jonathan Lethem has emerged from "the salt mine of a novel-in-progress" and finally caught up with the year's big movie. A single snippet won't do the piece justice, but here we go: "No wonder we crave an entertainment like The Dark Knight, where every topic we're unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion."

Also in the New York Times:

• David Foster Wallace "was the kind of literary figure whose career was emblematic of his age," writes AO Scott. "He may not have been the most famous novelist of his time, but more than anyone else, he exemplified and articulated the defining anxieties and attitudes of his generation." More from novelist Joshua Ferris in the Observer and Phil Nugent.

• Disney's about to relaunch the Muppets, reports Brooks Barnes: "Instead of the take-it-slow approach, this time the Muppets are getting the 'Hannah Montana' treatment, being blasted into every pop-culture nook and cranny that the company owns or can dream up."

• Terrence Rafferty talks with Fernando Meirelles about Blindness: "To make this movie in a spirit faithful to its source, a 1995 novel (of the same name) by the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Mr Meirelles had to resign himself to flying blind."

"[T]hese 'obit-defining' moments are the scariest part of our existence. No matter what we want to be noticed for, it's often something else entirely that defines our time on earth." Raymond de Felitta looks back on the life and work of his friend and mentor, Edward Dmytryk, who turned 100 on September 5. Why did that day go by "virtually unnoticed, unreported and un-cared about by even the hardest-core cinema buffs"? Raymond de Felitta is pretty sure he knows why.

For Artforum, Catherine Taft recently attended Taryn Simon's "Gagosian opening of An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, a project that painstakingly catalogues the hidden logistics of American culture during these 'violent times' (from avian-quarantine facilities and a US Customs contraband room to Braille editions of Playboy and the art collection at CIA headquarters). Surprisingly, the crowd of hip, affluent escapists didn't so much stand out against Simon's tell-all photographs as bring into stark focus a hunger for politicized images on (and about) the home front."

"Michael Winterbottom and Road to Guantanamo collaborator Mat Whitecross are working on documentary The Shock Doctrine," reports Screen Daily's Chris Evans. "The film is based on a book by Naomi Klein which aims to expose what she calls 'disaster capitalism.' The theory is that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance." Via Movie City News.

Oliver Stone's W. will open the Austin Film Festival (October 16 through 23). Jette Kernion has more. Speaking of Stone, Paul Kedrosky's got an amusing note on his recent chat with Alicia Mundy of the Wall Street Journal.

"Much like Michael Moore's Sicko, Critical Condition reminds us of the absurd choices people are forced to make in order to preserve their health," writes Chuck Tryon. "Get a paper divorce to reduce medical costs? Cross the border to get surgery at a significantly reduced cost? Take expensive pills or fall behind on your mortgage? While Critical Condition lacks the historical grounding that I found valuable in Moore's film (the history of HMOs, in particular), the film illustrates the degree to which so many health insurance organizations place profit over care, while also illustrating the fact that in the long run, we end paying more when people don't have adequate access to health care, not merely financially but morally as well." PBS, September 30.

For the Los Angeles Times, John Horn checks in with Diablo Cody to see how Jennifer's Body is coming along.

Alice Fischer talks with Matthew Goode for the Observer, where Philip French looks back on the career of Charles Laughton.

Online viewing tips. All from Jerry Lentz: Kenneth Tynan interviews Laurence Olivier; a BBC doc on The Third Man; and Cinema of Vengeance, a 1993 doc on martial arts in the movies.

Venice, Telluride and Toronto 08. Indexes.

So here's how things shook out around here during the summer-turns-to-autumn rush.

Venice:

• 35 Shots of Rum.
• Achilles and the Tortoise.
• Burn After Reading.
• The Burning Plain.
• Goodbye Solo.
• The Hurt Locker.
• Inju, the Beast in the Shadow.
• Jerichow.
• A Perfect Day.
• Plastic City.
• Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.
• Rachel Getting Married.
• Shirin.
• Vegas: Based on a True Story.
• Vinyan.
• The Wrestler.

Roundups: 8/28, 8/31 and 9/3.

Ronald Bergan sent an early dispatch and then wrapped his festival; then there were the Lions and wrap-up of sorts: "Venice vs Toronto."

Telluride: Most coverage of the coverage of Telluride is collected in this entry, but a few films did score entries of their own: Flame & Citron, Prodigal Sons and Slumdog Millionaire.

Toronto:

Contemporary World Cinema:

• Acné.
• Dernier Maquis.
• El Greco.
• Goodbye Solo.
• Jerichow.
• Laila's Birthday.
• Lost Song.
• O'Horten.
• Summer Hours.
• Treeless Mountain.
• Wendy and Lucy.

Discovery:

Zift.

Gala Presentations:

• The Duchess.
• Nothing But the Truth.
• Rachel Getting Married.

Masters:

• Adam Resurrected.
• Les Plages d'Agnès.

Mavericks:

• A Time to Stir.

Real to Reel:

• 7915 KM.
• The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World.
• Killing Kasztner.
• Witch Hunt.

Special Presentations:

• 35 Shots of Rum.
• Aide-toi le ciel t'aidera.
• The Brothers Bloom.
• Che.
• A Christmas Tale.
• Il Divo.
• Genova.
• The Hurt Locker.
• Last Stop 174.
• Me and Orson Welles.
• Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.
• RocknRolla.
• Slumdog Millionaire.
• Still Walking.
• The Wrestler.
• Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

Vanguard:

• Pontypool.

Visions:

• 24 City.
• Liverpool.
• Vinyan.

For openers, there was a guide on 9/4 to hubs of coverage.

Dispatches came in from Sean Axmaker (3 and 6), David D'Arcy (1, 5, 7 and 8) and Michael Sicinski (Wavelengths preview, 2, 4 and 9).

Many, many notes on many, many more films are gathered here.

Another entry's been "Wrapping Toronto."

Toronto 08. Mentions.

Anyone following the Daily last year may remember that coverage of the coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival got way out of hand. There were complaints, and those complaints were justified. This year, I concentrated on keeping the clutter to a minimum by trying to keep a cool head: not throwing up an entry every time a film I was excited to hear about was merely mentioned, but instead, waiting until it seemed that, for whatever combination of reasons, an entry for any particular film was well and truly warranted.

Below, then, is a collection of notes that might have eventually become entries - but didn't. They're arranged alphabetically, by program, though I should immediately add that all notes related to the Wavelengths program have been posted as updates to Michael Sicinski's excellent preview.

Contemporary World Cinema:

• At the SpoutBlog, Kevin Kelly talks with Bent Hamer about O'Horten.

• "Revanche [site] is the kind of taut, thinking-adult's drama that America stopped producing 30 years ago," writes Darren Hughes. "Highly recommended."

• "In a surprising turnabout from the Hollywood B-movie homage of Boarding Gate, Olivier Assayas offers up in L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours) a film that feels distinctly European, unquestionably French, imbued with refined, cultured nuance," writes Michael Guillén. "Assayas has rendered an evocative portrait of the turning of generations and the manner in which beautiful belongings return to the world." More from Noel Murray at the AV Club.

• "A radically different equine tale, Samira Makhmalbaf's punitive film is less horse opera than Dantean circle," writes Fernando F Croce, offering a first impression of Two-Legged Horse (site) at Slant.

Discovery:

• "Matthew Newton's drama 3 Blind Mice is a film about Australian marines en route to Iraq, but the war these boys are heading into could be anywhere and backed by any kind of ideology, so timeless are the film's ideas about camaraderie and duty," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It's essentially a modern redo ofOn the Town, with ample fist fights in place of fancy footwork, a much more cynical attitude towards the notion of patriotism, and a completely credible sense of verisimilitude."

• "Although the right influences are on display here (Tarr most of all but also a bit of Angelopoulos), although [Kornel Mandruczo] sustains an admirable formal rigor throughout the film, and although there are individual moments of knockout beauty, Delta is starving for a purpose," writes Darren Hughes.

• "A rainy Monday night saw the world premiere of Gigantic, the debut feature by director Matt Aselton, who co-wrote the film with Adam Nagata," notes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. "Starring Paul Dano and Zooey Deschanel, with supporting work by John Goodman, Ed Asner, Ian Roberts and Zach Galifianakis, the film puts an oddball spin on what could be a much more conventionally told tale about a young man finding himself (there's a girl involved and not one but two quirky families)."

• "I can't imagine a more apt title for Lovely, Still than the one it has," writes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "This sweet, surprising story about romance between senior citizens is uncommonly lovely, and a serene stillness rests over most of it. Of course, the title works the other way, too: The process of falling in love is lovely, still, even after all these years." IndieWIRE's Brian Brooks talks with producers Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy (Wild Tigers I Have Known and Old Joy), who are "clearly on a roll." In Filmmaker, Cinematographer Sean Kirby talks about shooting the film.

• IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez profiles Medicine for Melancholy director Barry Jenkins.

Gala Presentations:

• "The fragrant aroma of magnolias is undercut by the distinct smell of mothballs throughout The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (with Bryce Dallas Howard) an admirably earnest but curiously flat attempt to film a long-unproduced scenario by Tennessee Williams," writes Joe Leydon.

• Richard Eyre's The Other Man, with Liam Neeson, Antonio Banderas, Laura Linney and Romola Garai," is "just a twist-delivery machine, incapable of the emotion we humans call desire," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

• "There's a familiarity to Pride and Glory [site] that, depending on your perspective, could be either horrendously tiresome or part of the charm," writes Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "By all accounts it's a middling film, an overwrought and occasionally laughable corrupt cop drama that you've seen countless times. But for me, going back to this world of divided loyalties, broken oaths, outraged good guys, and 'we protect our own' machismo was like settling into a comfortable recliner. An extremely comfortable one, actually: Pride and Glory is moody, attractive and well-acted. I think director Gavin O'Connor intended it to be grim and upsetting, but at best it's pulpy entertainment, a highly watchable series of well-worn, well-executed clichés."

• Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times on Public Enemy Number One (Part 1): "[Vincent] Cassel gives an incredibly charismatic performance, full of sex appeal and swagger, while [director Jean-François] Richet handles the action with aplomb, delivering some wonderfully tension-filled bank robbery and prison escape scenes. But the movie is undone by its willingness to wallow in every violent chapter of [Jacques] Mesrine's career." More from Scott Foundas: "While it isn't quite as DOA as some other starry, high-profile premieres at Toronto this year, The Death Instinct turns out to be a surprisingly paint-by-bullets gangster movie that relates Mesrine's exploits in enervating, one-thing-after-another fashion."

• Who Do You Love "perfectly captures the essence of Leonard Chess," blogs the Los Angeles Times's Patrick Goldstein. "He was one of those great American entrepreneurs who discovered a new cultural form - urban blues - and did his best to both celebrate and exploit it to the hilt."

• The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris talks with Scott Campbell about the experience of seeing his novel, Aftermath, which has yet to find an American publisher, adapted as Im Winter ein Jahr (A Year Ago in Winter), directed by Caroline Link.

Midnight Madness:

• "Take a quick glance at the synopsis for Jon Hewitt's Acolytes [site] and you'll think you've got the film all figured out," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Abused teens stumble across evidence of a killer and rather than calling the police opt to blackmail the killer into taking out their abuser. Seems simple, yes? Think you know where it's going, yes? You don't."

• "I never thought I'd utter these words, but Jean-Claude Van Damme gives an exciting, impressive performance here, careening between action that leaves him breathless and comedy that leaves us laughing, revealing not only the timing and charisma that made him the action star we know him as but also a human side we probably had never imagined." James Rocchi at Cinematical on JCVD (site). More from Kevin Kelly at the SpoutBlog and Noel Murray and Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

• "Martyrs [site], for those festival-goers who stay up for the naughty midnight screenings, is already proving to be legendary," reports Joshua Rothkopf for Time Out New York. Is director Pascal Laugier "a new Cronenberg? We'll see." More from Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

• Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation (site) "offers some amusing and eye-opening tales about what happens to a film culture when government censorship relents and government grants are ripe for the plucking," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Suddenly an army of opportunists - some artists, some con men - grabs the money and runs.... Think of this as a vividly illustrated catalogue of astonishing smut."

Real to Reel:

• "American Swing is a documentary about Larry Levenson, a former wholesale brisket distributor who in 1977 started Plato's Retreat, the legendary New York City nightclub where - for a mere $35 membership fee - ordinary couples could meet other couples and have free, uninhibited, often very public sex," blogs the Los Angeles Times's Patrick Goldstein. "The hip celebrities of that era had Studio 54, the punk rockers had CBGB's, but the bridge-and-tunnel crowd from Jersey and Long Island had Plato's Retreat."

• "There will, one day, be an essential movie about Paris and her kind, a new La Dolce Vita," blogs Joshua Rothkopf for Time Out New York. "It will touch on everything: the lifestyle, the ravenous media hunger, the strange penchant for going commando. At root, it will analyze what Vanessa Grigoriadis called, in her Rolling Stone piece on Britney Spears, a 'disease created by fame, yet to be named.' Paris, Not France is not that movie." More from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, where she also talks with director Adria Petty, and Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

• "By far the most entertaining movie I've seen so far is Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's Soul Power [site], which captures James Brown, along with BB King, the Spinners, the Fania All-Stars and so many more, at a 1974 music festival in Zaire, now Congo," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Originally planned to coincide with the Ali-Foreman AO ScottRumble in the Jungle, the concert was, as Soul Power makes clear, a logistical nightmare and an artistic triumph." More from Bob Turnbull.

• Unmistaken Child "pulls back the curtain on the highly secretive process by which Tibetan Lamas are selected," notes curator Dave Filipi. "The film is visually stunning and is one of those rare films (not unlike Into Great Silence which we screened a couple of years ago) that truly exposes you to a culture or tradition you've never seen before."

Special Presentations:

• "Easy Virtue, an adaptation of an early Noël Coward play, is a droll and witty delight, a superb showcase for its cast, and a return to fine form for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert director Stephan Elliott, who last turned in the unsettling but incomprehensible Eye of the Beholder nearly 10 years ago," writes Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "Where most TIFF films seemed to glower at me from the screen, this one winked and smiled." More from the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik: "It's all an amazing exercise in creating something no one tries to create anymore. Still, one has to ask why there was a need for a movie like this when things like Netflix subscriptions exist or, for that matter, when a trip to the library would satisfy the cravings of even most ardent comedy-of-manners junkie."

• "Paris 36 [site] tries to do a dozen different things, and does none of them well," writes Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "But even that description may not be harsh enough, because it makes the film sound ambitious. It's not."

• "By far the most unclassifiable picture to emerge from the 2008 Toronto Film Festival, and no less fascinating for it, Plastic City nominally follows and is about a Chinese father (Anthony Wong) and his adopted Japanese son (Jô Odagiri) as they try and uphold a business of selling fake designerware in a huge city in Brazil," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "But this is if 'follows' and 'about' were conventionally executed by [Nelson Yu Lik-wai] - who has made two movies previously and is best known as Jia Zhangke's cinematographer - and his fellow screenwriters, Fendou Liu and Fernando Bonassi. But Plastic City is as far from conventional in execution as is completely generic in its nominal attributes of rival gangster-like businesses, men brooding over ethics, family lineage, and retaliation, a strip club with a hooker going straight and a madame/singer dating the boss, jail time and government threats, corrupt politicians and new forms of business and gang warfare. If this sounds normal rest assured the movie is not."

• "The only real blasphemies in Bill Maher's anti-religion documentary, Religulous [site] are that it's not terribly smart and only sporadically funny," writes Jim Emerson. More from Karina Longworth (SpoutBlog), Noel Murray AV Club) and Jeffrey Wells - and James Rocchi in Cinematical, where he also interviews Maher. In the Observer, Peter Beaumont reports that "Maher and director Larry Charles have been accused of misleading participants."

• "Rithy Panh is a Cambodian-born filmmaker who pretty much knocked me flat at Toronto five years ago with his documentary S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine," blogs Joshua Rothkopf for Time Out New York. "Panh is back with a new film, the far more conventional The Sea Wall, from a novel by Marguerite Duras starring the steely Isabelle Huppert as a French colonialist fighting the power. Wish I could say I liked it more than I did (it's loads better than Indochine), but it did put me in mind of Panh's S21 and the fest's occasional, appreciated role as a home for the shocking."

• The Playlist on A Woman in Berlin [site]: "Based on a banned and anonymous and shocking account of women who were mass-raped by the Russians that overtook Berlin in the spring of 1945, the controversial German film, that humanized these female Nazi supporters (and their Russian perpetrators), was a bleak and harrowing conclusion to TIFF, but a super powerful and piercing one."

Visions:

• "In Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool, the longing to remember and to be remembered is so intense it measures as body's grief, moreso than the body of desire," writes Michael Guillén. Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Have You Seen...?

"David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film has never received the acclaim it deserves," argues Geoff Dyer in the Observer. "Everyone knows it's a great book about film, but the more thoroughly one studies it the more those two words - 'about film' - rankle. It's a literary achievement of vast, even ludicrous, ambition, stylistic brio and creative daring" and "a vicarious autobiography and commentary on its own composition." These days, of course, Thomson is everywhere. "Would he write better if he wrote less? Impossible to say. Like a workhorse-star of the studio system, he keeps slogging away, partly for the dough and partly, one suspects, to keep some looming dread at bay. So it didn't take too much arm-twisting to get him to sign up for another half-million-word tome on his top thousand movies."

Updated through 9/26.

Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films "is crammed with insight and epigram ('The thing about Clint Eastwood's [Dirty Harry] is his tweed jacket') and, given that he has touched on much of this material before, it is remarkably free of recycling. Thomson is a jazz fan and he loves coming back to the standards, the classics of the medium, and improvising over them."

"Clearly designed as a book to be dipped into, most readers will find this singularly difficult to put down," writes Barry Forshaw in Crime Time.

Thomson will be discussing his new book at BFI Southbank tomorrow evening and at the Barbican to discuss Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be on Tuesday; he'll be at The Booksmith in San Francisco on November 12.

On a somewhat related note, there's a meme running around about films we have not seen. Sample entries: Joseph B, Bill (The Kind of Face You Hate), Dennis Cozzalio, Glenn Kenny and Bob Turnbull. Click on any of those names to see how the meme's spread so far.

Update, 9/26: Ambrose Heron talks with Thomson.

Ivanov.

"The perfect 10s for [Kenneth] Branagh's performance in the title role of Ivanov, a Chekhov play adapted by Tom Stoppard, prompted BBC2's Newsnight to ask whether Britain was entering a new golden age of theatre," reports David Smith. "Ivanov is the first show in a year-long season that the Donmar Warehouse is bringing to the Wyndham's Theatre, featuring Dame Judi Dench, Sir Derek Jacobi and Jude Law, who will play Hamlet under Branagh's direction. Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes are headlining at the National Theatre, Michael Gambon and David Walliams are about to open in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, and the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet, with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, is such a hot ticket that when London booking opened the box office was taking 2,000 calls every second."

"This is a turning point for London theatre," agrees Susannah Clapp. "Ivanov was a canny choice of Michael Grandage's, the Donmar's artistic director.... It is one of the best ever dramatic portrayals of depression.... It's one brilliance of Tom Stoppard's light-on-its feet, ingenious but not too pleased with itself translation that Ivanov's condition - the thing that has turned him from being an idealist to a no-hoping no-hoper - is everywhere described and nowhere diagnosed. It's a sack on the back, it's a sulk, it's a melancholy which women want to cure. The mystery becomes part of its torment; it is constantly escaping, changing shape, never treatable."

Also in the Observer, Tim Adams talks with Stoppard about Russians and Czechs.

"Ivanov, the earliest play by Chekhov to receive a production in Russia, is not often revived these days," writes Paul Taylor. "But the title role - of a landowner in the mother of all mid-life crises - is notable in this country for the way it has lured two British stars back from the screen to their illustrious starting point, the stage. A decade ago, Ralph Fiennes played the part for Jonathan Kent at the Almeida. And now, giving a performance of extraordinary perceptiveness and human breadth, Kenneth Branagh has an almighty crack at Ivanov.... This is great acting, no question."

Also in the Independent, Kate Bassett: "Tom Stoppard's new English version is vivacious. Cheeky modern colloquialisms rub along with the fin-de-siècle Russian setting.... Branagh does not persuasively convey the numb lethargy of depression... Nonetheless, his flashes of irritability and tender warmth are startling."

Branagh brings "articulate melancholy to Tom Stoppard's punchy, witty, if overfree translation," writes Benedict Nightingale in the London Times. "Michael Grandage bolsters his reputation as an actor's director by getting fine performances from the (variously) ebullient, malicious and wanly affable topers played by Lorcan Cranitch, Malcolm Sinclair and Kevin McNally, but he's equally successful at evoking a tiny, mean-spirited world where the diversions are playing cards, exchanging scandal and making antiSemitic remarks. And the sum effect is so glumly comic you're left wondering how Ivanov could ever have been dismissed as minor Chekhov."

Ivanov has long been regarded "as the runt in the litter compared with the four great plays of Chekhov's maturity," notes Charles Spencer in the Telegraph. "Even Michael Frayn, who has probably forgotten more about Chekhov than most people will ever know, has described the play as 'possibly the most lowering thing Chekhov ever wrote.'... Kenneth Branagh is in magnificent form.... His cruelty, his weariness and his self-disgust are all unsparingly caught and yet Branagh also suggests the blighted beauty in the character that makes two women love him."

1968 @ Britannica.

We've spent more than a little of 2008 marking 40th anniversaries - here at the Daily, too. See, for example, this, this, this, this, this and this. But wait, as they say: there's more. At the Britannica Blog, bestselling author Raymond Benson, a frequent contributor to Cinema Retro, the magazine dedicated to "Celebrating Films of the 1960s & 1970s," is going to spend two weeks counting down his personal top ten films of 1968. Starting with his #10 on Monday, he'll be considering one film each weekday through October 3.

A handful of bloggers - about two handfuls, actually - myself included, will be commenting on his choices (scroll down a tad), and we won't be alone. Comments are already stacking up, in part because if you guess Raymond Benson's #1 there may be a prize in it for you. I've made my guess plain enough; meantime here's a list few would've guessed up, I'll bet.

Update, 9/23: The choices so far: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (with Alan Arkin, #10) and Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (#9).

Shorts, 9/20.

"Ozu's name came up often last week at TIFF, most frequently in regard to Hirokazu Kore-eda's domestic drama, Still Walking, and Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum, which was directly inspired by Late Spring," writes Darren Hughes. "I watched Late Spring for the first time last night (yeah, I know) and had a grand time spotting the details that echo throughout Denis's film. Mostly, though, I was struck by just how strange a filmmaker Ozu really is, particularly in his cutting. It made me realize that I'm not so sure, exactly what we mean when we call a film 'Ozu-like.' (See Girish's 'Received Ideas in Cinema' post.)" Update, 9/22: Billy Stevenson.

David Bordwell considers "one of the most powerful weapons in the filmmaker's arsenal. A director can disarm our emotions through a single reaction shot."

"Sadly, the great Cuban film director Humberto Solás died from cancer on September 17th, aged 66," notes Catherine Grant. "There's a great and touching obituary by Latin-American film scholar and fellow filmmaker Michael Chanan in today's Guardian."

Luis Mandoki: "Brave truth-teller or cheap political shill? Los Angeles audiences will be able to judge for themselves when Fraude Mexico 2006 opens here theatrically Oct 10, following a sold-out screening this week at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival." Agustin Gurza talks with him for the Los Angeles Times. Also in the LAT, Jevon Phillips: "Loved Kung Fu Hustle, and Shaolin Soccer was an epic romp of martial arts fun, but now comes word that actor/director Stephen Chow will direct Seth Rogen and star opposite him as Kato in Columbia Pictures' The Green Hornet. for the Los Angeles Times.

"Oscilloscope Pictures has acquired North American rights to director Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son about His Father, which played at Slamdance and the SXSW Film Festival." The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Kilday, via the SXSW Newsreel.

"A rapidly escalating legal fight between Warner Brothers, which has already shot Watchmen, and 20th Century Fox, which claims to own rights to the graphic novel on which it is based, is headed for trial in federal court in Los Angeles next January," reports Michael Cieply. "That is just two months before Warner is scheduled to release the film in the United States, while Paramount Pictures distributes it abroad."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Taking Father Home, the debut feature of the Chinese director Ying Liang, is a poetic study of resolve and revenge," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "It is also a stunning introduction to a rare new talent." More from Cullen Gallagher at Hammer to Nail.

• "The release of All of Us, a documentary about HIV/AIDS and African-American women in New York, is well timed given recent headlines about the alarming persistence of the crisis," writes Nathan Lee. "But this powerful, conceptually sure film is relevant beyond the concerns of the moment as both a model of documentary method and compassionate social filmmaking." More from Andrew Schenker in Slant.

• "An Angolan word for encampment, 'quilombo' refers to the villages throughout Brazil originally founded by insurgent and fugitive slaves under desperate conditions," notes Laura Kern. "Leonard Abrams's documentary Quilombo Country is an up-close-and-personal look at the state of these villages today." Also: "Realistic performances and genuine emotions make Matthew Bonifacio's quiet charmer Amexicano much more than just another preachy treatise on illegal immigration." Related: indieWIRE talks with Bonifacio and writer Carmine Famiglietti.

• "In the Kingdom of Malaria, inky clouds obscure the sun and loony scientists are rewarded for diabolical inventions." Jeannette Catsoulis: "There's scant reward, though, for sitting through Igor, an animated twist on the Frankenstein story that never sparks to life." More from Robert Abele (Los Angeles Times), Jeffrey M Anderson (Cinematical), Tasha Robinson (AV Club), Nick Schager (Slant) and Megan Seling (Stranger).

• Laura Kern on My Best Friend's Girl: "Kate Hudson loosens her wholesome screen image a notch in her latest star vehicle, a racy comedy, which aims to be tasteless (it often is) and romantic (it mostly isn't)." More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC) and Eric D Snider Cinematical). And in the LAT, Josh Friedman argues that the movie got a load of free PR when co-star Dane Cook groused about the poster on his blog.

Australians are hoping that Baz Luhrmann's Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman - "described as an Antipodean Gone With the Wind - will help revive their flagging tourism industry, reawakening interest in the country and promoting its landscapes as effectively as the Lord of the Rings movies did for New Zealand," reports Kathy Marks. "So excited are tourism officials that they have commissioned Luhrmann to direct a $50m (£22m) series of advertisements, which will be shown in Europe, the United States and across Asia next month, in the lead-up to the film's November release." More from Jeff Dawson in the London Times.

Also in the Independent: "The little-explored subject of 'go-fasters' - drug-traffickers who zoom in almost ostentatious convoys of three or four cars from Spain to large French cities - will be examined in a thriller movie and an autobiographical book to be published soon." Edward Fortes reports on Go Fast.

"Full of clowns and foolery, signifying nothing, Burn After Reading is as deliberately self-canceling a story as you would expect from its title, or from its setting in an imaginary Washington where no one is the least bit interested in government," writes Stuart Klawans in the Nation. "So let the Coen brothers tell me that life is absurd, that the world is fallen, that God is illusory but Satan (or Javier Bardem) is emphatically real. I can take it. But when they call me an idiot for listening, I get a little impatient." More from Justin Stewart at Stop Smiling.

The documentary O Lucky Man! will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Tuesday; its maker is John Harris:

To understand the furies that threatened to define [Lindsay] Anderson's view of the world, the best place to begin is the last of the Mick Travis trilogy: Britannia Hospital, in which [Malcolm] McDowell turns in not much more than a cameo, and Anderson returns to the idea he used for If...: portraying an institution as a microcosm of British life, replete with its howling hypocrisies and air of post-imperial doom. Derek Jarman predicted the film "would finish Lindsay in the British film industry", and he wasn't far wrong: when it was shown at the 1982 Cannes film festival, the British delegation staged an organised walk-out.

Also in the Guardian: "[A]s much as I respond to the anti-religion of Luis Buñuel - i.e. Christ taking part in an orgy in L'Age d'Or (1930) - I can be enraptured by overtly Christian directors," writes Ronald Bergan. "Ordet (1955), directed by Carl Dreyer, who struggled for years in vain to make a 'Jesus film,' is an extraordinary expression of spiritual optimism and a testament to the absoluteness of faith.... But it took a homosexual Marxist to make the greatest screen version of 'the greatest story ever told' (or 'the greatest lie ever told' from an atheist's point of view). Applying neo-realist methods, Pier Paolo Pasolini takes Christ out of the opulent church and presents him as an outcast Italian peasant among real people in The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964)."

And Emma Brockes meets Bette Midler and Xan Brooks talks with Ben Stiller.

Screening in the UK:

• Wendy Ide in the London Times on The Wave: "It's an interesting and provocative idea somewhat marred by wretched performances from several of the kids and the same whiff of sanctimony and naivety that made The Edukators, another tiresomely right-on film from Germany, such a trial." More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Trevor Johnston (Time Out), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard) and Tim Robey (Telegraph).

• Tim Robey in the Telegraph on Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas's Linha de Passe: "The shame and terror of criminal enterprise hits with more force here than the high-octane machismo of other Brazilian hits." More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Wally Hammond (Time Out), Wendy Ide (Times) and Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard). Related: Ambrose Heron's interview with Salles. Online viewing tip: Salles at the Guardian. Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

• The Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm on The Chaser: "This stylish debut from South Korean director Na Hong-Jin, a huge success in its country of origin, never quite reaches the level of Memories of Murder, the best thriller from there in recent years. But it is still distinctive..." More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian). Reviews from Cannes.

• David Jenkins in on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time: "Superior animé caper comedy with wit, energy and mad invention to spare in which time travel is used to soothe the emotional ills of a dynamic, if slightly dizzy-headed, young schoolgirl named Makoto." More from Phelim O'Neill (Guardian)

Dan Sallitt shares a few notes on David Lean.

Cineuropa's new "Film Focus": Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Lorna's Silence.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has seen Patti Smith: Dream of Life and is a little thrown off by how "my favorite punk star... modulates from angry iconoclast to contented Detroit housewife and back again with scarcely a bump."

Bob Cashill at PopDose: "Ten Fall Movies You Should See (Then Tell Me About) Before You Die."

New blogs on the block:

• Seattle-based curator and author Robert Horton, who wrote our primer on East German Cinema, has launched The Crop Duster.

• Former Cinematical contributor Kim Voynar's Film Essent. AJ Schnack has background.

• The Kind of Face You Hate, via Glenn Kenny.

FilmInFocus goes "Behind the Blog": Sujewa Ekanayake.

Online listening tip. Jack White and Alicia Keys's theme for Quantum of Silence, "Another Way to Die."

Online viewing tip #1. Ray Pride has Ben Kingsley as Minor Threat's Ian MacKaye.

Online viewing tip #2. Via Al Young at Twitch, Grzegorz Jonkajtys's short, Ark.

Online viewing tips. "On September 30, The Mindscape of Alan Moore is released on DVD, featuring an in-depth look at one of the most brilliant comic writers... ever?" Nick Confalone introduces a clip at Vulture, where Bilge Ebiri's got an award-winning "sweet little film from Britain, Lions Are Green, about a young colorblind boy who draws a green lion in class and gets called out for it."

Fests and events, 9/20.

"The opportunity to view Chinese silent film, in theaters or on video, is extremely rare," notes David Jeffers at the Siffblog. "Seattle International Film Festival and SIFF Cinema will present, this Sunday for one night only, a rare surviving episode of the Chinese serial, Red Knight - Errant: Red Heroine (1929)." With live accompaniment from Devil Music.

Osamu Tezuka: Movies into Manga runs at the Barbican in London through Wednesday, so Andrew Osmond introduces the artist to Guardian readers: "Historians of [Japan's] often garish and cartoony pop culture see him as the prime mover behind Japan's vast comic and animation industries after 1945. Tezuka reportedly churned out 150,000 comic pages in his lifetime (10 a day, without fail). He also created dozens of TV cartoons and cinema films. His iconic characters include Astro Boy (a little-boy robot superhero), Princess Knight (a swashbuckling girl disguised as a boy) and Jungle Emperor Leo (the first cartoon lion king)."

"Rashomon was not only the film that brought director Akira Kurosawa (and star Toshiro Mifune) to attention outside of Asia, but the first work by any Japanese filmmaker to make an international splash after World War II," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "So it's fitting that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is kicking off its Kurosawa retrospective with a restored print of this 1950 classic." The series runs through October 4.

Variety folks are reporting from the San Sebastian Film Festival, running through September 27.

The Telegraph presents its fall preview; and Sheila Johnston picks ten to catch at the London Film Festival. October 15 through 30.

At SF360, Jonathan Marlow, now Executive Director of the San Francisco Cinematheque (bravo!), offers "a quick wrap-up of the three September festivals (Telluride, Toronto, Venice) and the best of what I was able to catch between meetings."

"The Corto Cortissimo competition at the 65th Venice Film Festival early this September showcased twenty shorts over three days - some from starting filmmakers with the breeding of prestigious film schools, others from self-taught music video directors and others who were everything in between." An overview from Nicole Olivier in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Mile Klindo turns in the fourth part of the WSWS's coverage of the Sydney Film Festival.

Fraülein.

"An intimate, elusive drama about the boundaries of friendship and nationality, Fräulein presents immigrant lives with significantly more empathy than detail," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "For some, though, the movie's narrative shorthand will be enough, its teasing snapshots of three disparate (and desperate) women difficult to shake off."

"[I]t seems disingenuous to call Fräulein a film when it's more like a glossy fashion magazine layout," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Like the upcoming Ballast, Fraulein almost entirely shuns backstory, coloring around the lives of its characters with ostentatious style (in this case, fuzzy-wuzzy visual vibes and music tailored to each character's generation) and hoping audiences won't mind filling in the blanks."

Andrea Staka "has previously written and directed one short and one documentary, and Fräulein, her first full-length narrative feature, is indeed short (barely 80 minutes, including credits) and most definitely has a documentary feel," notes James Van Maanen. "She understands the importance of brevity and gives us just enough information about her women to hook us and keep us on that hook. (Barbara Albert - Falling, Free Radicals - collaborated on the screenplay, along with Marie Kreutzer.)... The movie may not, finally, go where you'd prefer, but I doubt you'll be able to dispute its reality."

"The story of a free-spirited stranger warming the hardened heart of someone older and colder may be worn out... but Staka confidently breathes joie de vivre into the film's green-gray bleakness," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "Stylized with a recurring misty focus, the film's economically captured detail shots (gestures, expressions, caught moments) convey genuine sensitivity without the expected weepiness."

The Man from London.

"[I]t is a strange disappointment," finds Ed Gonzalez in the Voice, "that [Béla] Tarr follows up his grandiose Werckmeister Harmonies, a bleak but bold metaphysical idyll to pre-millennium tension, with The Man from London, the almost trifling story of one man's guilt filtered mechanically through a funereal noir prism - a regression of sorts for our most Olympian of film auteurs."

In the L Magazine, Michael Joshua Rowin anticipates that disappointment: "Only two-plus hours and containing a lean noir plot drawn from Georges Simenon's same-titled novel, London's 'minor' status virtually guarantees it won't receive the same kind of love given to prior Tarr. Which is too bad, since it's nothing less than a triumph."

Updated through 9/22.

But for David Fear, writing in Time Out New York, "the movie is a textbook example of what happens when an ill-fitting combination of an author's work and an art-house giant's aesthetic creates nothing but a void."

Earlier: Reviews from last year's festival round: Cannes, Toronto and New York; and Michael Guillén's interview with Tarr in September 07.

At MoMA Monday through September 28.

Update, 9/22: "The movie is really about a manner of looking at things, exploring space in unexpected ways, meditating on qualities of light and the surface of objects," argues Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "It's as an object that The Man From London is best approached.... Mr Tarr's chilly tour de force is to be understood as art all right. Bloated, formalist art."

Unrelated.

"As if from nowhere, a first-time British film-maker has appeared with a tremendously accomplished, subtle and supremely confident feature, authorially distinctive and positively dripping with technique." The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw on Unrelated: "Writer-director Joanna Hogg learned her trade in TV, and this may look like a chamber piece at first glance. Actually, it's ambitious, big-screen stuff. Hogg has genuine cinematic artistry, and she has effortlessly absorbed what appear to be personal contacts, non-professionals and family friends into an intelligent and utterly involving film."

"With its overlapping conversations and contemplative moods, it feels significantly different from the British mainstream, clogged with romantic comedies, mockney gangster flicks and period adaptations," writes the Independent's Anthony Quinn. "It is not only its setting that aligns it with European cinema; it has to do with the luminous sense of space and the stillness of the camera. If Hogg can render the travails of a bunch of middle-class British holidaymakers a subject of interest, there's reason to hope she has some career in the making."

"Family, class, mortality, ambition, desire: most of the biggies are present and correct." Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman: "You can only be thankful that politics and religion aren't on the list, because Unrelated has tension to spare as it is." Even so, "There is a strain of wry humour in the portrait of the wealthy at play that recalls the social comedies of Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco)."

"[T]his is easily one of the most accomplished and unmissable new releases of 2008: a simple, supremely well-observed story of ordinary human emotions, with performances and dialogue that are, from the first scene to the last, painfully accurate and convincing," writes Neil Young. "The second cause for celebration: Unrelated is the first movie to appear under the auspices of distribution company New Wave Films. Such organisations are crucial for the survival and exposure of non-mainstream cinema, and their slate includes the latest by the Dardenne brothers and Claire Denis."

"Unrelated, in its understated, eye-catching fashion, is as arresting as any British debut feature since Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher and Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu.

"The story at first seems slight, and you wonder how it is going to be sustained," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "This is a drama that amounts to much more than the sum of its parts and, without doubt, is one of the best, and most original, British films of the year."

"Hogg displays a welcome desire to draw on global film influences and ignore the unwritten rules of what British cinema should or should not seek to achieve, especially in the realm of films about the monied and unsympathetic," writes Dave Calhoun in Time Out.

Four out of five stars from James Christopher in the London Times.

Kamera's Antonio Pasolini interviews Hogg.

Jun Ichikawa, 1948 - 2008.

Japanese director Jun Ichikawa, 59, died after collapsing at lunch on Friday and being rushed to a nearby Tokyo hospital.... The morning of his death Ichikawa was editing his last film, buy a suit, which is skedded to preem on October 18 in the Japanese Eyes of the upcoming Tokyo International Film Festival.... His biggest prize winner... was Tony Takitani, a 2004 drama based on a Haruki Murakami short story about an introverted illustrator (Issei Ogata) with a fashion-crazed wife (Rie Miyazawa) that won the Special Jury Prize, Youth Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at the Locarno fest, as well as many honors elsewhere, including a nom for Best Foreign Film at the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards.

Mark Schilling, Variety.

Update, 9/24: "No assessment of Ichikawa's work can ignore the influence of Yasujiro Ozu, whom the younger director idolised," writes Ronald Bergan in the Guardian. "What Ichikawa shared with Ozu was the intimate scale, understated humanism, economy of shot composition, low camera placement, deliberate pace - and the dominance of the family as a theme."

Shorts, 9/18.

As part of a special issue of Oxford American on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast three years after Katrina (and of course, the issue arrives merely days after Ike), Derek Jenkins examines "a cinema of anger and indictment and senselessness but also beauty and humanity and even hope." In a category of its own would be When the Levees Broke. Spike Lee has "never made a more important film.... Countless films bob in the wake of this disaster, but future generations will likely find in the seven astonishing films featured here the most complete and useful records of that same harrowing story."

Allan Arkush (Rock 'n' Roll High School, NBC's Heroes) comments on his "Top Ten Criterions."

At Facets Features, Phil Morehart passes along all-time favorite films lists from Ken Loach and Fred Armisen.

Glenn Kenny: "The 'Coppola Restoration' Letters, Part Three; or, 'Friends of Italian Opera.'"

The film on the Siren's mind these says is Sweet Smell of Success and she "has spent all week with the low-down, lying snake that is Sid Falco":

And he really is a heel. But in his single-minded desire to get ahead, he is also a piece of almost any New Yorker, except maybe the saintliest ones. (And if they're saints, what are they doing here?) He's pure ambition, and by that sin fell the angels. But the fall of Sid and JJ doesn't mean there aren't plenty behind them, knife in hand. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. What the song doesn't mention is that afterward you may not like yourself....

People who lived through this era of New York City loved it and speak about the 1950s like a long-dead first love. This may well be the best movie ever made about New York, capturing the city's Golden Age while it shows you a lining of pure lead.

Proteus is one of Doug Cummings's favorite documentaries of 2004: "It's a fascinating look at the work of 19th century artist-naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919) that is experimental film, historical summary, and philosophical meditation all rolled into one. Laboriously assembled by David Lebrun over the course of 22 years, it's a montage of etchings, sketches, and paintings (rephotographed and animated with narration, music, and sound effects) that positions Haeckel as the meeting point between the dominant worldviews of his day: scientific rationalism and Romanticism."

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

At the House Next Door, Tom Stempel takes a looks at another round of films from the screenwriter's POV.

"By the time Moving Midway - this lithe, alluring documentary with its at-times Altmanesque dialogue - draws to a close, the ghosts have turned in excellent performances alongside the living, and the folks of the undead past may as well have tromped right in and signed Charlie and Dena's guest book in the front hall." Bland Simpson in the Independent Weekly. And H Scott Bayer talks with Godfrey Cheshire for the New York Press.

Also in the New York Press, Eric Kohn previews the fall season in local art houses. More from Mark Peikert. Also, Armond White on the new At the Movies: "Ben Manckiewicz from Turner Classic Movies and Ben Lyons from the E! Entertainment channel are not film critics but were selected to play critics on TV.... But the surprise is that the Bens are truly refreshing."

Online viewing tip. As noted all over, the trailer's out for Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

Fests and events, 9/18.

"It is likely no coincidence that Anthology Film Archives' Vojtech Jasný retrospective will screen as the 40th anniversary of 'Prague Spring' passes," writes Nick Pinkerton. "A lesser-known player among prominent Czech artist-dissidents (Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Miloš Forman, the Plastic People of the Universe), Jasný will forever be knotted up with the postwar history of his native land." Tomorrow through September 25. Update, 9/19: Nicolas Rapold (New York Sun).

Also at Moving Image Source: An excerpt from Richard Koszarski's Hollywood on the Hudson which tells the story behind and the critical reception of The Emperor Jones. MoMA's Hollywood on the Hudson: Filmmaking in New York, 1920 - 39 runs through October 19.

"Despite a sequence in which Daniel Okulitch, the talented singer playing the role of the overreaching Seth Brundle, gives the audience a full frontal, Howard Shore's opera The Fly, staged by David Cronenberg with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, is disconcertingly bland musical theater." Amy Taubin for Artforum.

In Screen, Jason Gray has an overview of the lineup for the Tokyo International Film Festival, running October 18 through 26.

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Ted V Mikels - "who with his waxed white mustache and barrel chest looks like a cross between Salvador Dali and a big-rig trucker - belongs to that pantheon of American independent filmmakers that includes Ed Wood, Russ Meyer, Doris Wishman, Ray Dennis Steckler and John Waters," writes Matt Sussman at SF360. "He is of that certain breed of filmmaker solely dedicated to committing their unique vision to the camera, regardless of the stylistic conventions and working conditions of 'the industry' or accepted notions of good taste.... It is only appropriate that Mikels's life and work is being honored this weekend at the distinctly American forum for cinema's lone wolves: the midnight movie. Landmark Theater's Midnights at the Clay series is bringing Mikels to town, with his muse and partner Shanti, to screen his cult classics Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (1972) and The Corpse Grinders (1972) as well as Kevin Sean Michaels's new, John Waters-narrated documentary, The Wild World of Ted V Mikels."

In the Chronicle, Rob D'Amico welcomes the Bicycle Film Festival to Austin.

Films in Review digs into its archives and finds Candor Rex's piece on the 1958 edition of Cannes.

Toronto and Fantastic Fest. Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

Following screenings in Toronto and Kevin Smith's appearance at Independent Film Week, Zack and Miri Make a Porno officially opens Fantastic Fest tonight in Austin. Time to fire up an entry.

"The romantic comedy elements of Zack and Miri are by-the-numbers, but the romance is touching," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club, "and the scene where the two leads shoot 'the scene' takes some interesting turns, going from hilarious to something else. Maybe it's a case of grading on a curve, or maybe it has to do with Smith's return to underdog status after a decade of being beat up by irascible critics like myself, but I found myself really rooting for this movie by the end, and leaving the theater satisfied."

Updated through 9/21.

"[I]s the whole adult-industry shtick a dig at archrival PT Anderson's Boogie Nights?" wonders Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Either way, Orgazmo was funnier."

Online listening tip. Stephanie Zacharek talks with Smith for Salon.

Online viewing tip. Variety's Anne Thompson talks with Smith, too.

Updates, 9/19: In some ways a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland 'let's put on a show!' movie with lightsaber dildos instead of a barn, Zack and Miri feels like a semi-autobiographical portrait of a nerd who figures out how to be somebody by turning on other nerds for a living," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "There are even patches of dialogue that seem like they could have been lifted from Smith's days preparing Clerks... their pornographic exploits opened them up to 'a world of possibilities, where plain old people like us could do something special.' Could there be a plainer reference to Smith's own charmed career path from suburban comic nerd to God of Suburban Comic Nerds?"

"In a way, Kevin Smith has something in common with Tyler Perry," suggests Scott Von Doviak at Screengrab. "It's doubtful that either one of them is ever going to progress as a filmmaker, but their loyal fans don't really care. If you like Kevin Smith movies, this is probably one of the better ones. If you don't, rest assured Zack and Miri is no quantum leap forward."

Updates, 9/21: "Zack and Miri may be, like many recent rom-coms, a film with characters who've seemed to have avoided self-examination all of their lives, but it's also guiltily, endearingly sweet despite all of the attempts to cut the syrup with anal sex jokes," writes IFC's Alison Willmore. "Smith, you big softy."

At the SpoutBlog, Kevin Kelly talks with Smith.

Fantastic Fest 08.

As of today, Fantastic Fest is off and running through next Thursday in Austin. The first item to mention is Jette Kernion's terrific guide to sources of "Last-Minute News and Info."

"The novice in search of enlightenment studies at the feet of the master," writes Joe O'Connell in the Austin Chronicle. "The wannabe horror filmmaker goes to Kim Henkel. That was exactly the path that led Austin's Duane Graves and Justin Meeks to make The Wild Man of the Navidad [site], a Texas bigfoot tale that arrives in Austin for Fantastic Fest, perhaps its perfect venue."

Updated through 9/24.

And again, Marc Savlov has your guide to the fest's films you can watch right now for free through Sunday, while last week's issue ran the big overall preview.

"Throughout Fantastic Fest, we programmers place little Easter Eggs of goodness and geeky joy." Harry Knowles tells a few secrets at AICN. Also: Massawyrm's must-sees.

Updates, 9/20: Twitch's Fantastic Fest 2008 category is picking up.

Wiley Wiggins is sending capsule reviews from his iPhone.

Updates, 9/21: "[I]ts standout quality remains that it's such a rowdy, jovial and mind-blowingly unceremonious good time, with filmmakers, talent and fans milling around the strip mall-centered headquarters, sipping pints of Shiner Bock during the screenings and taking off for excursions to eat BBQ and shoot skeet," writes IFC's Alison Willmore.

Matt Dentler's got pix.

The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov has a fun roundup of the highlights so far.

Updates, 9/22 "Paprika Steen, the Danish actress best known for her roles in Dogme films like Festen, The Idiots and Mifune, is to die for in Ole Bornedal's horror-comedy The Substitute," writes Alison Willmore. "Like, she eats someone whole."

"It would be an exaggeration to suggest that JT Petty's The Burrowers goes miles deeper than the hastily-dug graves that play a central role in its plot, but it's nonetheless one of the more pleasant surprises of Fantastic Fest thus far," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Beautifully shot and tightly scripted, it's the rare Hollywood genre film (bought and paid for by Lionsgate) that's more concerned with human relationships and behavior than the mysterious supernatural forces that sets the action in motion."

Updates, 9/23: "The ongoing Fantastic Fest has announced this year's winners. The Japanese sci-fi horror Tokyo Gore Police took home the top prize in the AMD Next Wave competition, while the Audience Award went to the much-heralded The Good The Bad and The Weird. Let the Right One In took home the honor of Best Horror Feature." Matthew Odam has the full list at the Austin Movie Blog.

Online listening tip. IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore report on "a rollicking good time."

"It's not hard for one to speculate the causes for Fantastic Fest's monumental amount of growth in the past year," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE. "Between the number of distributors that have opened up to releasing genre films and being noted publicly by Variety President Charles Koone as being one of the ten festivals that they love, Austin's premiere genre film expose, perhaps best known for world premiering last year's best picture nominee, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, has certainly broken out of the 'fanboy' shell and caught the attention of the outside world."

Ghost Town.

Ghost Town is "an occasionally effective mash-up of Ghost, The Sixth Sense and The Frighteners," notes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "If it sounds all so pale and predictable, it is."

It "doesn't do justice to the manifold gifts of Ricky Gervais," finds Slate's Dana Stevens. "Then again, giving Gervais the American star vehicle he deserves might be too much to ask. When he's performing his own material according to his own rules, Gervais is capable of comic sublimity.... Still, Ghost Town has inspired casting, a few memorable scenes, and enough laughs that mainstream US audiences may finally get the point of that doughy English guy with the pointy canine teeth and the high-pitched giggle."

Updated through 9/19.

"[I]f blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp's rom-com doesn't breach new territory, it finds small ways to revitalize familiar scenarios—specifically, by underplaying both its romance and its comedy, avoiding towering swells of sentimentality and attuning its tone to Ricky Gervais's snidely deadpan humor," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"[M]ild, amusing..." David Goldman in the L Magazine.

Joel Stein profiles Gervais for Time. There're a couple of minutes of video, too.

More interviews with Gervais: Rachel Abramowitz (Los Angeles Times) and Sara Carduce (New York).

Cinematical paid a visit to the set.

At the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell revisits a host of "Allegorical Ghosts."

Online viewing tip. Michael Hogan talks with Koepp.

Updates, 9/19: "A latter-day hybrid of Topper and Blithe Spirit and a visual ode to autumn in New York, Ghost Town is a screwball comedy with no big surprises or hidden metaphors," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But if you comb through the ranks of recent Hollywood comedies that have tried to conjure the same mood of airy amusement, most of what you'll find are strained, witless duds that get mired in sentimentality like flies in molasses. As it draws to a close, Ghost Town tiptoes to the edge of that sticky mess, but it doesn't get caught there."

Charles Mudede in the Stranger: "Ghost Town contains two decent comic sequences (both involving a misanthropic English dentist, Ricky Gervais, and both happening in the first 30 minutes), one decent performance (again, the English dentist), zero new ideas, and less than zero cinema."

"Ghost Town is a rarity, a contemporary romantic comedy that honors the traditions of the genre without checking them off some plasticized list," finds Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "The picture is breathing, and alive, every minute."

"More a man who could win a woman's heart by tickling her funny bone, Mr Gervais's characters need time to work their conversational mojo, lest the target of their affection catch sight of a striking extra," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "And that's why Ghost Town, though a competent comedy, ultimately fails in the romance department: It shortchanges the dialogue and leaves Mr Gervais vulnerable to the charge that he's just not an entirely believable leading man."

"It takes an awful lot of effort for a contemporary comedy to win an audience back after opening with yet another 'Holy crap, that guy just got hit by a bus!' scene, but Ghost Town perseveres, and eventually emerges as a likeable time-waster, albeit more sweet than funny," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

In the Los Angeles Times, Jan Stuart enjoys watching Gervais "defying his own formidable unkemptness to make the case for himself as a successor to the slob-Romeo mantle of Jack Black. If Black can go the distance with Kate Winslet (as he did so charmingly in The Holiday), why shouldn't Gervais have a shot at Téa Leoni?"

"Because both Gervais and [Greg] Kinnear seem so urgent in their desires, and because Tea Leoni has a seemingly effortless humor and grace, this material becomes for a while sort of enchanting," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Telegraph's John Hiscock talks with Gervais.

The Duchess.

"[F]or all its frisky high jinks, brocaded homes, and creamy bosoms, The Duchess is a tragedy about the terrifying vulnerability of even the richest women in a society that deprives them of property rights," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "As a tale of mature self-sacrifice, the movie would be almost unbearably moving were it not for [Keira] Knightley's insubstantial performance."

Updated through 9/19.

"Adapted from Amanda Foreman's biography [of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire], Saul Dibb's costume drama doesn't press too hard on the similarities between the heroine and her descendant Princess Diana, and for the most part avoids getting weighted down by the marble floors and golden chandeliers of 18th-century British courts," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Deprived of elements that might have given its powdered wig some darker roots, The Duchess feels rarefied next to Marie Antoinette, a more inventive chronicle of a young woman navigating personal freedom and historical determinism."

"In the hands of a filmmaker with an actual point of view - Sally Potter, say, or Mike Leigh - this could be a potentially inflammatory tale," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "But with British TV vet Saul Dibb (The Line of Beauty) at the helm, it's just a story about a woman who makes one mistake after another."

"Yes, she must choose between affection, fame and family - though it's impressive how Georgiana, like Sarah Palin, manages to be icon, political agent and supermom, without any visible help from a nanny - unlike The Duchess, which revels in the opulent lifestyles of the rich, famous and aristocratic, while bemoaning their repressive society too." Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

Sam Adams talks with Ralph Fiennes for the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: Reviews from the UK and Toronto.

Updates, 9/19: "Like most costume dramas of this distaff sort, The Duchess wants you to pity Georgiana while also indulging in every luscious detail of her captivity," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "She may have a pimp for a mother and a bore for a husband, but just look at those verdant landscapes dotted with grazing sheep (no grubbing peasants), the fabulously ornamented gowns, leaning towers of wigs, palatial digs and troops of silent servants. (It's period-lifestyle pornography.)"

"[T]he young duchess (Keira Knightley) speaks in the soft Sloane tones more typically associated with Lady Di in her early years than with the Georgian grandee she is meant to be playing," notes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun. "Meanwhile, Ralph Fiennes, in a subtle, show-stealing portrayal of the duchess's cold, buttoned-up, and older husband, manages to punctuate his performance with very specific hints of Prince Charles's lugubrious tics, mannerisms, and phraseology — hints that will make a British audience, at least, shudder or snigger, depending on mood."

"Only Fiennes comes out smelling like an English rose, turning the duke into one of his signature upper-crust reptiles," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "He deserves a sequel."

For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, Knightley "carries the weight of the movie around her effortlessly - and this is a rather slender girl to be bearing a historical parade float of this size."

"As directed by Saul Dibb (working from a script he co-wrote with the odd combination of Casanova's Jeffrey Hatcher and Anders Thomas Jensen of Denmark's marvelous After the Wedding), The Duchess is so handsomely done and so adroit at avoiding missteps that it's hard not to be content," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Knightley's brand of muted iconoclasm has always been well-suited to just these kind of coach-and-corset movies, and as a result, the story of her character's fall from idealism to practicality becomes fairly moving," notes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"As movies like this go — stately homes constantly arustle with the sound of lingerie falling gently to the parquet floors - it is quite a lively, and even occasionally a rather touching, piece," writes Richard Schickel in Time.

Elite Squad.

"As ambiguous in its accused fascist leanings as the original Dirty Harry - and yet as reflective of its homeland's domestic turmoil as America's cop dramas and Italy's poliziotteschi were in the 1970s - this latest pounding slice-of-thug-life thriller from Brazil packs the same cinematic firepower as City of God, only on the other side of the law," writes Jim Ridey in the Voice.

"Rather than interrogatory, Elite Squad is merely loud - it revels in its straw-man trustafarians, and lingers, in the guise of revelation, on underworld brutality and BOPE's badass full metal jacketed basic training," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine. "Neither particularly fascist nor conscientious, Elite Squad is simply an audition tape, its 'urgency' piggybacked on a nation's abjection."

Updated through 9/19.

"[I]t bears a resemblance to viscerally exciting 70s urban thrillers like The French Connection, in which only the fascists could do what needed to be done," notes David Edelstein in New York. "[Director José] Padilha builds in checks and balances, scenes in which BOPE's bloodshed is genuinely disgusting. But he reserves his true loathing for the lefty college kids who denounce cops while smoking (and dealing) dope - unconcerned with the blood shed for their high. This makes criticizing the film's politics harder, because you don't want to sound like the creeps."

"Eloquent takes on Brazilian crime don't get much better than last year's pitch-perfect documentary, Manda Bala, which does a sensational job of placing blame on the country's government (although it exclusively focuses on kidnapping)," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Less organized, Elite Squad nevertheless succeeds at putting the worst of the violent spectacles on screen, primarily through a series of nicely staged shootouts and torture sequences."

"[J]ust how realistic are these films' portrayal of life in the notorious Brazilian slums? Is it all gun-toting teenagers on glamorous hill-side backdrops?" A scorecard from David Tryhorn in the Guardian.

Updates, 9/19: "In classic exploitation flick fashion, Elite Squad, a relentlessly ugly, unpleasant, often incoherent assault on the senses from Brazil - and the baffling winner of this year's top prize at the Berlin Film Festival - wants to have its grinding violence and sanctimony too," writes Manohla Dargis, who summarizes the plot in the New York Times, before wrapping up with: "Bloody torture and bloodier death from cops and thugs ensue amid smeary, jittery camerawork and choppy edits that transform the visually disjointed, grim and dim spaces into confetti. Somewhere, Roger Corman is weeping."

"Though shot through with state-of-the-art, smash-and-grab camera pyrotechnics, pulsing music, and gangsta histrionics, Elite Squad is, at heart, a throwback to the kinds of cop-and-cowboy movies that American film producers seem to have given up on making in Hollywood," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Like Ricky Tognazzi's similarly lean and stealthily retro 1993 Sicilian cop drama La Scorta, Elite Squad moves on its characters' adrenaline, not on the dubious artificial energy of the digital explosions, close-ups of cell phones and computer screens, and gravity-defying action set pieces that continue to elicit yawns in most Yankee cop movies."

"Does it create a moral stalemate to provide a sociological context for such desperate draconian measures, while simultaneously turning torture tactics into rush-ready sensationalism?" asks David Fear in Time Out New York. "Once the secondhand high of watching these psychos protect and serve wears off, you won't be any closer to an answer, either."

"The film itself doesn't do the glorifying; it's those that the film depicts that do, those who do so in order to survive in an extremely harsh and forbidding environment," writes Nick Plowman. The film is "all brawn, little brain and audaciously entertaining on the most mediocre level there is."

Online viewing tip. Padilha @ Tribeca.

Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema.

"Variety chief film critic and occasional documentarian Todd McCarthy (Visions of Light) has called Pierre Rissient 'the least known, most massively influential person in international cinema,'" notes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Alongside the New York premiere of [Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema], MOMA is presenting a related series, From the Archives: A Pierre Rissient Selection, consisting of films championed by Rissient (including Ida Lupino's Never Fear and [Jane] Campion's The Piano), plus a rare theatrical screening of his own film, 1982's Cinq et la Peau."

Updated through 9/19.

In the L Magazine, Benjamin H Sutton finds the doc "particularly memorable for the amazing lineup of directors who weigh in on the titular movie buff's career. It's also a kind of wet dream for devout film fans everywhere: What movie buff wouldn't want to go from critic to art house programer to new director champion to Cannes emperor and Asian New Wave patron?"

"'He's like the yeast in the dough,' [Werner] Herzog says in Mr McCarthy's portrait," notes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "'He is a samurai warrior for the films that he loves,' enthuses Quentin Tarantino, whose Reservoir Dogs Mr Rissient championed at Cannes, setting the stage for Mr Tarantino's 1994 Palme d'Or win for his sophomore entry Pulp Fiction. [Clint] Eastwood simply dubs Mr Rissient, who has long championed the actor-turned-Oscar-winning-director, 'Mr Everywhere.' 'Clint always shows me his rough cut,' Mr Rissient said recently on the phone from Paris. 'Always. He called me three days ago. He wants to show me the first cut of his new film Gran Torino.'"

"From his beginnings as an influential distributor of movies in Paris to his roles as international fixer, consultant and editor, Mr Rissient is convincingly portrayed as a man who knows everything about every movie ever made; knows everybody, everywhere, who's doing anything of interest in the cinema; and whose taste is impeccable, influential and passionately defended." Nathan Lee in the New York Times, where, from that page, you can download AO Scott's interview with Rissient.

Earlier: A couple of reviews from Cannes.

Update, 9/19: "[I]t is likely he has had more influence on the world of good films in the last 60 years than anybody else," blogs Roger Ebert. "I tried to explain why in this article. Pierre says his role in many situations is to 'defend,' by which he means 'support,' the films and directors he approves. The Telluride Film Festival named one of its cinemas after him, and made T-shirts quoting him: 'It is not enough to like a film. One must like it for the right reasons.' That sounds like critical snobbery, but is profoundly true."

Shorts, fests, etc, 9/17.

Before J Hoberman's cover story for this week's Voice, "What We Learned about the Election in This Summer's Movies," boils down to a face-off between WALL•E and Heath Ledger's Joker, the fun stuff is all about the election of 1952.

At Row Three, Kurt Halfyard posts a PDF (scroll down): John S Nelson's "Noir and Forever - Politics as if Hollywood Were Everywhere."

Glenn Kenny's got more must-reading for us: "The 'Coppola Restoration' Letters, Part Two."

Tropic Thunder, Pineapple Express, Superbad, and before any of them, "Quentin Tarantino's cinematic consecration of the country's new racial geography," Pulp Fiction: "It could be argued that these comedies don't pretend to represent all of black culture, and that the strand of black culture they do represent - as well as the prism of white envy through which it's represented - has long been ripe for parody," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. ""And, if one wants to take up the art-as-mirror stance, such entitlement is in a sense reflective of a cross-pollinated society where white people daily adopt black culture while excusing themselves from doing so with a great, showy wink. The dilemma is that this is virtually all that is represented of black culture in films not aimed at black audiences, and that's what makes the modern minstrel show so pernicious."

"The Flower Thief kicks off Taylor Mead: A Clown Underground, a three-evening Joel Shepard-curated affair at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that moves on to the 1967 - 68 Andy Warhol mock western Lonesome Cowboys and concludes with William A Kirkley's 2005 documentary portrait Excavating Taylor Mead." Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "The first and last films are bookend - sort of - visions of a self-described 'National Treasure / If there were such a thing.' Mead is a great American movie star and poet whose stardom is a byproduct of his poetry and vice versa. Just as 2000's Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story reveals that Mead's rich-rebel-gone-Warhol-superstar peer Brigid Berlin is a master of monologue, Kirkley's documentary - and more directly, Mead's books - present a wilder-than-Wilde master of the aphorism."

More fests and events:

• Stranger Than Fiction, "an exclusive series of screenings for documentary film lovers" hosted by Thom Powers (the Real to Reel programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival), launches a new site with its new season: September 23 through November 25 in New York.

• At Row Three, Marina Antunes previews the Vancouver International Film Festival, running September 25 through October 16.

• Dina Iordanova reports in a recent Baltic Cinema Conference in Riga.

Annie Proulx is still being bombarded with letters from fans of Brokeback Mountain, reports Catherine Shoard in the Guardian. Proulx: "They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for 'fixing' the story. They certainly don't get the message that if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it." Related: The New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson on Proulx's new collection of stories, Fine Just the Way It Is, "which revisits the dusty prairie terrain of Wyoming and the flinty, hardened and somewhat desperate sorts who live there."

Back in the Voice:

• "From the rural Sichuan countryside to the city of Zigong, Xu Yun travels to find the father he hasn't seen in years, and the teenage boy's confrontations with locals plays as a kind of fish-out-of-water comedy," writes Ed Gonzalez. "This is an inadvertent effect imparted via Taking Father Home's clumsy acting and aloof, sub-protozoan video image, which cheapen Ying Liang's true intent to seriously call out a government's inhumane policies."

• "How effective are social-activist docs that don't entertain enough to captivate the non-converted?" asks Aaron Hillis. "Brooklyn filmmaker Emily Abt's well-meaning, pro-feminist doc offers little new insight in seeking to raise awareness that black women are disproportionately at high risk for HIV infection (the leading cause of death among those 25 to 34)." More on All of Us from Benjamin H Sutton (L Magazine) and Sara Vilkomerson in the New York Observer.

• Kristi Mitsuda on Amexicano: "In terms of storyline, think The Visitor - except with an embrace of the platitudinous pitfalls that Thomas McCarthy's summer sleeper hit deftly avoids."

• "With Quilombo Country, first-time filmmaker Leonard Abrams opens a window onto the distinctive Afro-Brazilian culture that developed 400 years ago, when African slaves were first brought to Brazil," writes Jean Oppenheimer.

Christopher Orr (New Republic) and Ryan Wu rank the Coen brothers' films. Related Daniel Kasman on Burn After Reading: "As social criticism, submerged slightly in off-beat and off-hand genre, it actually is brisk, neat, intelligent, and awfully funny, with an emphasis on the awful."

Sean Burns previews the fall season for the Philadelphia Weekly.

Josh Levin in Slate on the rise of the R-rated trailer: "[I]t's apparent that the studios are still adjusting to the red-band universe: The aesthetics of the R-rated trailer remain up for debate. Which naughty bits should be thrown on the screen as an enticement, and which should be held in reserve for paying customers?"

Online viewing tip #1. "Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy."

Online viewing tip #2. tank.tv.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

"For more than 25 years [Wayne] Wang, now 59, has reinvented himself time and again with apparent ease, zigzagging between America and Asia, big and small movies, safe bets and wild risks, insider and outsider status," writes Dennis Lim in a profile for the New York Times. In A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, "a Chinese widower arrives in an American suburb for an extended stay with his divorced daughter, who has lived in the States since college and who resents her father's intrusions into her private affairs. The Princess of Nebraska, which is being distributed free on the Web starting Oct 17 (youtube.com/ytscreeningroom), concerns a newer arrival, a young woman from Beijing attending a university in Omaha who has traveled to San Francisco to get an abortion. Both films are subtle updates of the immigrant story, revealing the complexities beyond the customary themes of alienation and assimilation."

Updated through 9/21.

Writing in the Voice, Aaron Hillis finds A Thousand Years "so buoyant and decidedly modest in tone and scale that you almost believe it might float away from the screen.... There's nothing earth-shattering going on here, but it's a film you'll want to befriend." Aaron also talks with Wang for IFC.

But Nick Schager, writing in Slant, finds it "so slender and unassuming that it registers only as a pleasantly forgettable triviality." What it's about: "Based on a short story by Yiyun Li (who wrote the screenplay) that has scarcely enough substance to warrant a feature adaptation, Wang's film explores the tense relationship between divorcé Yilan (Faye Yu) and her father, Mr Shi (Henry O), a former rocket scientist and communist 'true believer' who's visiting his daughter in America with the hope of helping her recover from her recent break-up.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Wang "about coming back to indie filmmaking, his attraction to making two movies back-to-back, and nearly choking watching Charlie Chaplin."

Update, 9/18: At indieWIRE, Leo Goldsmith looks back over Wang's career, and then: "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers thematically recalls the works of Ozu, though it's nowhere near as fastidious or formal as the Japanese director's work. Throughout the film, Wang's style is restrained to almost nil, but as in The Visitor (and, to an extent, Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers), it's refreshing to see a film so aesthetically chaste, one that always veers away from, rather than courts, the melodramatic, the emotionally pummeling, or even the socially urgent. Wang's new film is by no means for everyone - probably not even for this reviewer - but nor does it surrender to obvious fish-out-water laughs or heartstring manipulation."

Updates, 9/19: "There's a tonic simplicity to how it gets the job done, and if the film comes off as fairly conventional stuff, it nevertheless succeeds on its own modest, middlebrow terms," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times.

"How wonderful it is to see Wayne Wang in his element: the Chinese-American experience," writes Charles Mudede in the Stranger. "Wang is finally at home when he is directing a film about strangers in a strange land."

Online reading and/or listening and/or watching tip. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Wang.

Update, 9/21: Gary Goldstein talks with Wang for the Los Angeles Times.

Lakeview Terrace.

"At first glance, it may puzzle followers of dramatist and occasional filmmaker Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things) that the American stage's crown prince of psychosexual power plays and the post-coital mindfuck has opted to follow his universally mocked 2006 remake of The Wicker Man by working as a director-for-hire on a yuppies-in-peril thriller that seems about two decades past its freshness date," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "But peer beneath Lakeview Terrace's lurid, exploitation-movie surface and you will find a vintage LaBute proposition: a taut three-hander that explores the space between surface appearances and realities, between what people say and what they really think."

Updated through 9/19.

"Are we really supposed to stomach a thriller in which the root of all evil is intelligent black men in power who can't stomach, to the point of going full-on psychotic, the sight of a white man married to a black woman?" rages Nick Schager in Slant. "Apparently so..."

In the New Yorker, Anthony Lane muses on the star: "It comes as a shock to realize that, in three months' time, Samuel L Jackson will turn 60. We can't think of him growing old, just as we can't really imagine that he was ever young. He seemed to arrive on our screens full grown: ripe in mind and muscle, richly amused, and already in possession of his gifts."

"Jackson skirts the edge of going overboard with his portrayal, widening his eyes so much at times that you expect him to start foaming at the mouth and fulminating about 'race mixing' and 'miscegenation,'" notes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "If an actor this talented is going to slum it in hokey, over-the-top thrillers, I'd prefer he direct his anger at those mother-effing snakes on that mother-effing plane."

"When, with things on the verge of total disaster, the final secret is revealed, we realize that we have been masterfully manipulated, ostensibly for our own good," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "In these too often guileless days, even a little trickery can go a long way."

"The movie deserves credit for provoking discussion rather than simply inflaming racial paranoia à la Crash (2004), even if in the end it falters by reverting to the usual thriller clichés." Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

"The director's usual plot contrivances and false notes abound," sighs Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. Oh, and: "Labute's next project has already been announced: he will script a remake of a Truffaut film."

Mr Beaks talks with Jackson for AICN.

Updates, 9/18: "LaBute, like Jackson, isn't interested in brotherhood or understanding; he likes to irritate," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "This is LaBute's first time assaying black racism—a twist on his usual tweaking of misogyny, homophobia and generalized cruelty. That LaBute has nothing genuine to say about these social ills is what has won his acclaim; critics see their own fears and biases in LaBute's contrived theatrics."

"The first two-thirds of Lakeview Terrace feel like Marxist propaganda, the last third like capitalist propaganda, the whole thing like some sort of distinctly American nightmare, with some surprisingly curious politics and one hell of a dunderheaded narrative." Josef Braun.

Updates, 9/19: "Lakeview Terrace isn't literally about the [Los Angeles riots of 1992], but it's still one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down - much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis's hand-wringing Oscar winner Crash," argues JR Jones in the Chicago Reader. "Its masterstroke is reversing the racial polarity of the [Rodney] King beating, making the cop black and the victim of his abuse white. At first glance this might seem like the ultimate dodge, relieving white viewers of any lingering guilt and lending credence to the Rush Limbaughs of the world. But by scrambling the typical power relationship Lakeview Terrace focuses our attention on power itself, and by plunging into the subject of black bigotry, still relatively taboo in mainstream movies, it gets us closer to the truth of bigotry in all its forms than we're liable to get watching another pious exercise in white atonement."

"Even while making a superb thriller, LaBute makes the film more than that," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It deals with one of his themes, the difficult transition from prolonged adolescence to manhood, a journey Chris takes in the film."

"The hostility of a middle-age, middle-class African-American man toward a younger, more privileged, racially mixed couple is a potentially interesting subject, fraught with bitter history and complicated sexual politics," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But Bernie Mac did more with the topic in a few throwaway moments of the lamebrain comedy Guess Who than Mr Jackson manages in all of Lakeview Terrace.... Considered purely as a formal exercise, Lakeview Terrace is a passable piece of hackwork, with some adequately suspenseful passages and a few mild shocks near the end. But the psychological dimensions of the story are so risible, and its supposed insights into race and class so wrongheaded and ugly, that irritation trumps enjoyment."

"What more does Neil LaBute have to teach us about humanity that wasn't already apparent in his caustic 1997 debut feature, In The Company of Men?" asks Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "There's nothing wrong with a filmmaker having a misanthropic worldview, but LaBute's is an unusually narrow one, predicated on the notion that men are engaged in alpha-male one-upmanship and women are, if anything, even more diabolical.... So when LaBute pulls the grenade pin on racism and interracial relationships in Lakeview Terrace, viewers should know to duck and cover."

"However close to self-parody LaBute's output eventually became, the underlying venom at least set it apart from the norm," writes Andrew Wright in the Stranger, looking back on the oeuvre. "The new urban thriller Lakeview Terrace proves that—whatever the state of LaBute's once-blistering talents—he can now be counted on to make a studio picture more or less indistinguishable from anything else on the assembly line. (Um, yay?) It hangs together better than his last few, certainly, but don't call it a comeback just yet."

"Well shot but deliberately unstylish, with most of its characters briefly sketched instead of carefully painted, Lakeview Terrace is a platter serving up Mr Jackson's performance," writes Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun. "Considering the subject matter and his highly excitable character, he is given more than enough rope with which to hang himself. Instead, Mr Jackson delivers his most nuanced performance in nearly a decade, at least since 2000's Unbreakable."

"The upshot is that Jackson is in sync with the filmmakers' less inflammatory mission: working you up over an unhinged dude in a blue uniform rather than an angry guy with black skin." Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times.

Ben Kenigsberg in Time Out New York: "Neil LaBute didn't write this film, and it shows; the attempts to tweak racial stereotypes are undermined by the schematics of David Loughery and Howard Korder's screenplay - or perhaps the Hollywood committee-think imposed upon it."

Toronto. A Time to Stir.

"The most vital movie I ended up seeing at this year's Toronto International Film Festival didn't have its first screening until the festival's final day and is, in the words of its own creator, not a movie at all but rather a piece of 'visual history,'" writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "At more than four hours, it also isn't finished yet... But even in its current form, Paul Cronin's A Time to Stir strikes me as a major film about the American Left, its splintering and factionalizing, and its still-flickering embers.... Wherever it ends up, this is a film that demands to be seen."

For Ben Kenigsberg (Time Out Chicago), this "was one of the more compelling documentaries shown in Toronto."

Appaloosa.

"There are so few westerns being made these days - last year's mini-resurgence, consisting of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and 3:10 to Yuma, notwithstanding - that it's tempting to give any filmmaker credit for being attracted to the genre in the first place," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Appaloosa, directed by Ed Harris (and adapted, by Robert Knott, from Robert Parker's novel), is just good enough that I wish it were better."

Harris "and his collaborators are playing it straight with a timeless male fantasy - horse, hat, six-shooter - a traditional approach that will please moviegoers like my dad and yours: men who walked out of No Country for Old Men puzzled, feeling like they'd been cheated out of a climactic gun battle between lawman and villain," writes Chuck Wilson in the Voice. And by the way, Viggo Mortensen "steals this film by doing nothing much more than lean against doorways and bar counters."

Updated through 9/22.

"Unfortunately, the film quickly descends into a leaden panoply of squinting glares and cocked shotguns, not helped by Jeremy Irons's perfunctory bad guy or by corseted Renée Zellweger, who, as the perkiest frontier gal since Doris Day's Calamity Jane, is photographed to look considerably less fresh than such grizzled genre standbys as Lance Henriksen and James Gammon." Fernando F Croce at Slant.

The L Magazine's Mark Asch: "Stoic men hitch their dusty horses outside the saloons of frontier towns under big Western skies, while fiddle music plays - Appaloosa has the grammar of the Western down, making its ingrained sexism, racism and endorsement of macho unilateralism all the more potent reminders of why exactly we needed movies like There Will Be Blood or even The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."

"The Western since Peckinpah has been a director's genre - think The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs Miller, anything by Sergio Leone, Unforgiven, etc - and Harris doesn't have the chops," argues the AV Club's Scott Tobias.

Interviews with Harris: James Rocchi (Cinematical) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon).

Update, 9/18: "Harris's steely blues-with-no-love-in-them recall his performance in Alex Cox's Walker," notes Armond White in the New York Press. "And Appaloosa needs Cox's style and wit. Check out Cox's Searchers 2.0, a modern-day Western, and the year's best undistributed film."

Updates, 9/19: "Appaloosa works best as a cunning, understated sex comedy," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It's not a great western, and, as I've suggested, it doesn't really try to be. Some potentially interesting political themes - about what it means for a polity to privatize its apparatus of justice and security, about the relationship between righteousness and force - are left for other, more earnest pictures to explore. This one shows a square jaw and a steely gaze, but also a smile and a wink."

"[A]part from the pleasure of hearing Harris and Mortensen trade old-married-couple quips (like so many Westerns, it's really a love story between two men), there's little to distinguish Appaloosa from its legion of ancestors," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

"For a while, Appaloosa intrigues by not pressing hard on its various possibilities," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Eventually, though, this state of limbo leaves the movie stalled on the launching pad."

"Unfortunately, Appaloosa doesn't finish great, or even very strong," writes Michael Wilmington at Movie City News. "Yet it's still an honorable effort by a moviemaker who knows his stuff and loves his work - and who should probably take another crack at this particular genre some day."

"Though the Oscar-winning Zellweger has been excellent when she matches up well with the roles she plays, this is not a part she connects to at all," finds the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan.

Update, 9/20: Alonso Duralde at MSNBC: "It's not a revision or a rethinking or a reexamination of the classic Western, it's just a very watchable story about two strangers who clean up a dirty town. And if that's what you're looking for, that's exactly what you're gonna get."

Updates, 9/22: "The Western has been stirring to life in recent years, not only because it offers an escape from the modern world but also because it offers an escape from modern movie technology," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "From the opening scenes, we know that Appaloosa won't be a fantasia in which the performers get tossed around by digital salad forks. Harris and his cinematographer, Dean Semler, shot the film near Santa Fe, and they calmly lay out a vast terrain of gray-brown buttes and valleys, with endless blue sky above. Harris respects the genre's pictorial grandeur, its regard for honor, its solemn conventions; this movie is grounded."

"[I]n its fidelity to western verities, Appaloosa may seem radical to today's viewers," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "At a time when images in all visual media bombard the brain, the western - the one original American film form - moves at the pensive pace of a European art film."

Battle in Seattle.

"Flapping like a scarecrow in the wind, Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed in its characterizations to achieve pure tabloid hysteria," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "In that sense, it's true to the actual event. The impression that the movie leaves is less what the French activist Yves Frémion termed an 'orgasm of history' than a hiccup. The world held its breath and moved on."

"[F]or all its good intentions and its inspirational advocacy for freedom of speech and assembly, Battle in Seattle remains a difficult film to get up and shout about," writes Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE. "Approaching its subject with a neat idealism and packaging its political fervor in the most facile of forms, the film boasts a cast loaded with Hollywoods both new and old and wraps its message up with eye-rolling naivete."

Updated through 9/20.

Director Stuart Townsend's "refusal to frankly portray who the lead protesters were - namely, anti-government, anti-globalization, anti-capitalism activists - [leaves] the proceedings feeling whitewashed of any prickly elements that might interfere with the film's larger point that the WTO hurts more than helps the planet," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Even more than this lack of candor, however, Battle in Seattle is undone by unsubtle storytelling, its characters (earnestly embodied by the cast) devoid of dimension, and its creaky melodrama epitomized by a cheap attempt to manipulate through horrible tragedy."

In the Huffington Post, Brad Listi brings up an array of issues with Townsend.

Earlier: Sean Axmaker; and Andrew Hedden's interview with Townsend for Cineaste.

Updates, 9/18: As noted below, Jen Rogue with Andrew Hedden at Anarkismo: "Battle in Seattle lacks an awareness of a major theme of the protests, perhaps their most successful element: solidarity." Still, "For all its errors, Battle in Seattle provides a fun opportunity to return to the question of why the WTO protests represented such a massive victory, and what we as anarchists should focus on in our political work nearly ten years later."

Sean Axmaker talks with Townsend at the Parallax View.

Updates, 9/19: "Stylistically and polemically Battle in Seattle is a descendant of Haskell Wexler's much more complex 1969 movie, Medium Cool," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But a drama is only as convincing as its characters. The people awkwardly forced together in Battle in Seattle are rhetorical mouthpieces tied to the sketchy plotlines of a so-so Hollywood ensemble movie. As in the much better written but equally schematic Crash, you can hear the machinery grind and squeak as the scales are balanced."

For Andrew Stuttaford, writing in, well, the New York Sun, this is "a ham-fisted, sanctimonious blend of leftist agitprop, by-the-numbers melodrama, and excruciating self-righteousness... If you are currently taking orders from Rage Against the Machine, Michael Moore or Naomi Klein, go and see it; for anyone else, this is one Battle you're going to lose." For the antidote to this take, see the Stranger.

Sara Cardace chats with Townsend for Vulture.

"Though his film is not a documentary, Townsend does a good job outlining the consequences of the labor, environmental, agricultural and patent-law issues at stake in the WTO negotiations," notes Brian Cook in In These Times. On the other hand, Townsend also creates characters "who are impossibly good: intelligent, kind, committed, moral and eminently reasonable. The problem isn't that such characterizations are untrue; the above adjectives would certainly fit the direct-action activists I've met. But, at various times, so might a few others: neurotic, intense, immature, petty, self righteous.... Worse than a crime against verisimilitude, this one-dimensional characterization is a dramatic mistake."

Update, 9/20: "What does it take to create real and meaningful change in the 21st century?" asks Townsend himself at Alternet.